Wednesday, December 10, 2014

Change, Resistance, GAFE, and I don't have all the answers

Early today a colleague at another school asked about how I dealt with fellow teachers in my school who were resistant to change. Particularly the adoption of Google Apps for Education. (GAFE)

This touched a nerve and I found myself writing a lot. While this blog post specifically references the change to GAFE, the ideas suggested here have a much wider application.

I wish I could say that I had all the answers, but I don't. Here are a few thoughts on the topic based on my experience:

  • You, the IT leader, must make the conversion first. You need to spend a full year using the tool exclusively. You may not use Word or Excel. You cannot ask people to go where you have not yet gone.
  • Once you have used it for a year you need to recruit one or two other staff, ideally informal leaders in your community, to make the conversion to only using the tool.
  • Start small. Find a place where the tool will most definitely be superior to what already exists. Then make it as easy as possible to adopt. And make it indispensable. Be prepared to spend years at it.
    • Here’s an example:
    • For years we had a sign up book in the photocopy room where you could go to sign up for extra periods in the computer lab, Gym or other shared resource. The rule was that you couldn’t use the resource if you hadn’t signed up for it. But our school was getting bigger physically, we had portables, we had more part time teachers, we had staff who wanted to plan at home. All in all an ideal first place to deploy the tool.
    • So I created a series of shared calendars in Google Calendars that would serve the same purpose. I shared them with everyone. Ran training sessions during staff meetings, provided video tutorials. And then I destroyed the paper book. Whenever two classes showed up at the lab, or gym, or whatever at the same time we would insist on pulling out the digital calendar and whoever had actually signed up on the calendar got it. When a staff member re-made the paper book. I destroyed it. When it was re-made for a third time I destroyed that one too. Eventually it became part of our culture. (Not everyone likes it, but it’s there.)
    • Another example:
    • Our principal always used to hand out a memo on paper each Friday for staff to read. It contained important information. If you didn’t read it you would be lost the next week. It took me a few years, but I finally convinced our principal to type it as a google doc which was put in a shared folder in Drive. The only way to read this really important document was to log on to Google and check it. That first year there were a number of frustrated staff who kept on being in the dark about things because they wouldn’t login to read the memo. That stopped pretty fast as they realized they had no choice. Now everyone knows to check the memo.
    • A third example:
    • This past summer I converted all the IEPs in our school to google format. (A pain in the neck, but it got done.) I took all the old Word documents and set them to Read only format. The only way to edit/work on/complete/read an up to date IEP is now to use Google. 
Have we arrived? Most certainly not, but I can say that Google has become part of the air we breathe at my school. Each day, each week, each month we take a step closer to where the transition will be complete. 

Friday, December 5, 2014

I killed the Technology Scope and Sequence.

When I first took on the role of IT coordinator at my school we had a beautiful, well developed, thorough, and complete scope and sequence for technology skills. It was laid out in an amazing document, with cross-indexes, tabs, and even colour. It was also useless.

It described exactly what skills were to be introduced, reinforced, and mastered in each grade level. It covered dozens of topics and hundreds of skills. It was the most comprehensive document of its kind I had ever seen. But teachers couldn't use it. It had so many skills they couldn't possibly cover them all, even assuming the teacher knew how to do it in the first place. What's more the document would be out of date within a year and would require constant updating.

So one of my first jobs was to make this document more relevant.

So for a year we sat down as an entire staff and tackled this beast. Using a single statement to guide us we cut and chopped and moved and edited. Each time we looked at a new topic or skill we referred back to that statement. If it didn't match we got rid of it. Many meetings and countless hours later we had a new, smaller, streamlined, and equally useless document.

I still have that document. It too is out of date and irrelevant.

So what's left?

The statement that guided us.

"Teachers should teach the technology skills they need to accomplish their educational goals."

That's it. No more, no less. No worrying about what they need when the graduate, or what they need for the next grade level. It all changes too fast anyway. Teach only what your students need in your classroom today. Tomorrow will be different anyway.

Thursday, November 6, 2014

A tech agnostic no more: Google wins

I've never understood the hardware wars between Microsoft and Apple. While I happen to be most comfortable in an MS windows environment, I've never been fanatical about it. I grew up with a TRS-80, then a Commodore 64, followed by MS-Dos based machines. Now my laptop runs Windows 7, I have an iPhone, I'm comfortable experimenting with Edubuntu, and I use Google for most of my apps.

So I've been a little startled to find myself becoming increasingly convinced that one platform is superior to the others out there.

I've been struggling with how to explain why Google has become my go to tool for almost everything. This has become a challenge because so many of my co-workers and fellow teachers are more comfortable with Microsoft Office.

Thanks to a conversation I had while ago visiting another school to talk technology, I think I finally have the words to explain it.

I'm going to use the analogy of tools.

Let's say that Microsoft Office is a set of screwdrivers like these:

This is a very dependable set of screwdrivers. It will put in all of the standard types of screws very well. (Office, Excel, Powerpoint, etc...) I'd even go as far to say that there are no better screwdrivers than these.

Google's version of these tools is like this screwdriver:

Again, it will put in all the standard screw types. (Docs, Spreadsheet, slideshow, etc...) But it actually isn't quite as good. Sometimes the bits fall out, sometimes they get stuck. It does the job, but not quite as well.

If we were to simply do a comparison of these two sets of tools based on how well they put screws in then Microsoft wins hands down. The MS Office set of tools is better when it comes to making documents, spreadsheets, and slideshows.

Why then even consider Google?

Because you aren't limited to the standard set of screws. You can take those bits out and replace them with all sorts of other tools.


In my school we've recently added Read and Write for Google, we make use of TypingClub, and we are continuing to explore more and more of these additional tools that synchronize effortlessly with Google. If we want video calls we can use Google Hangouts. If we want to create blogs we use Blogger, when we want a system to share documents with students easily we can use Google Classroom, and the list goes on.

We haven't even covered how easy it is to share and collaborate in Google, which is one of its greatest strengths.

What's more I think that more and more tools will become available inside the Google environment. Google seems to be working with more of an open box environment which allows third party developers to easily bring their tools inside the Google cloud based structure.

For all these reasons I have become convinced that Google is the tool and platform that schools should be selecting now.

Of course, I might be wrong. Perhaps Microsoft will figure out what it's missing and manage to catch up. It's done it before. But today, right now, Microsoft cannot deliver what Google can.


Tuesday, October 7, 2014

The day I almost killed my sister

I was 17 years old. I had just gotten my license and, of course, I was driving the family car too fast. Heading to school in the rain, with my sister in the car, I came over a hill just as the light ahead of me turned red. Being inexperienced, I slammed on the brakes too hard. As the car spun out of control I remember seeing the intersection ahead of us full of traffic. Fortunately, the car slammed into the concrete median and came to a stop facing into on-coming traffic. While the front wheels were bent, the car drove just enough for me to get it off the road and into a nearby car dealership. I went inside to borrow a phone and call my Dad.

It's at this point in sharing the story with my students that I stop. I ask them what they think happened next as I called my Dad. I get a whole series of responses in this general flavour:

  • You got grounded for life!
  • He screamed at you.
  • You didn't get to drive the car for a year.
  • Boy was he mad.
Then I tell them what really happened.

My Dad didn't say much on the phone other than to check if I and my sister were ok. A short time later he arrived with the second car. I don't remember much about our conversation. I suspect I was doing most of the talking. What I do remember is this: My Dad handing me the keys to our second car and telling me to take my sister to school. There might also have been something about getting back up on the horse.

There were no punishments and no yelling. When the bill for the repairs arrived I paid for it. That was it.

It's at this point in sharing the story with my students that I stop and ask, "What did I have to do as a child in order to get my parents to trust me so much that they would willingly give me the second car right after I finished smashing up the first?"

I use this story to illustrate to my students the idea that we have relationships with people that take time and investment to build. The relationship with my parents wasn't built in one day. It was created over years. When they asked me to clean my room I did. When there was homework or chores to be done I did them. When I had to be home at a certain time I was. Not perfectly of course, as none of us is perfect this side of glory, but in general when my parents asked me to do something I did it. Each one of these interactions over many years was a small deposit in the relationship with my parents. So when the day came to make a gigantic withdrawal, my account with my parents was so full that it could handle a car crash.

I love telling this story to my students and I hope and pray that the message gets through to them.

Friday, September 12, 2014

Technology is not a magic bullet

I love the story of Barbara Arrowsmith Young. A woman faced with a bevy of Learning Disabilities takes them on and overcomes them through hard work and determination.

That's why I get frustrated whenever I read yet another psycho-educational report from another psychologist who throws technology at a student as if it will make their learning disability go away.

Imagine the 7 year old child who is handed a tablet in class and told to use it. If they were distracted in class already, this is supposed to be less distracting?

I hear time and time again this assumption that kids "just get technology". As if just handing them a device is all we have to do.

Students with learning disabilities will struggle to learn the technology well and may even be more distracted by the tool than mainstream students.

Do I mean to say that there is no place for these tools at all? Certainly not. But we need to be giving more thought to how and why they are deployed and we need to make sure there are the necessary supports in place for students to succeed.

We also need to manage parent expectations. These tools and devices will not make the learning disability go away.

Tuesday, September 9, 2014

A Culture of Fear

Whenever we have a few minutes to spare in class I like to do word puzzles with my students. Like these ones:



I was saddened today as I watched fear spread across my classroom. Students would not attempt to answer because they were afraid of being wrong. I could feel the change in climate. Only those students who don't have strong social skills would answer as they couldn't sense the change. It reached the point that I had no one willing to guess.

How do you fight against a culture that believes that only right answers matter?

How do we encourage kids to see that being wrong is how we learn?

Monday, September 1, 2014

I'm scared. It's the first day of school.

I wonder if the students know that I am as scared as they are?

I've been teaching for 14 years and yet I still am sick to my stomach about tomorrow.

Will I be able to connect with every student?

Will I understand what they are going through and be able to help them?

When the bullying comes, because it will, will my efforts to help work?

Will all the brilliant and clever lessons I have prepared actually work?

Will I not be boring?

Will I teach what these students need?

The worst part of all, is that I already know the answer to these questions.

It's "no".

Not every day, not every time, and not for every student.

But, through God's grace, sometimes, perhaps even most of the time, I will.

And so tonight I will pray, like I do every night, that tomorrow I will have what I need to be a good teacher and that God will fill in the gaps where I don't.

Sunday, August 17, 2014

How I got fired

I've been fired twice in my life. One was more difficult than the other.

I've been working as the technology coordinator at my school for about 8 years now. When I got the position it was a breath of fresh air to my career. I was no longer a square peg being forced into a round hole.

At first my job was far more the role of cheerleader and salesperson. My job was to demonstrate, prove, and convince that technology had a role in education. I wrote proposals, did demos, fought for more budget, helped create curriculum, selected software and more.

As I succeeded at my job of cheerleading I began to spend more and more time maintaining and installing hardware and software. I enjoyed this part of my job too. I enjoyed solving puzzles and getting to that moment when everything worked for a teacher who needed it.

Eventually the cheerleading side of my job almost disappeared as technology became part of the lifeblood of my school. I was still enjoying my job, but difficulties were beginning to arise. I was blessed to have the assistance of a skilled technician throughout all of this time period, but I began to need his assistance more and more. He was only part time and just couldn't give it. I still enjoyed pulling computers apart, finding solutions, installing projectors, and all the other parts of my job. The problem was that the two of us could not keep up with the amount of work that needed to be done.

As the technology coordinator it was and is my duty to look at the overall health of IT in my school. I could see the difficulties we were having and it was my responsibility to look for the source. After lots of research, thinking, and experimenting I came to a difficult realization.

The problem was me.

I am a professional and skilled classroom teacher, but I am an amateur technician. Despite how much I enjoyed fixing computers, I wasn't that experienced at it. Something that would take a highly trained technician an hour to fix would take me 3 times as long. I didn't know enough about the many many options out there to find the most cost effective and efficient maintenance solutions. Nor did I have the time or inclination to learn. I am passionate about education, not technology.

I had to make one of the more difficult decisions of my career.

I fired myself.

So let me ask this question of you. Is there something you need to fire yourself from?

Thursday, August 7, 2014

Paint and Grace

As I stood in that room that I had worked so hard to finish painting, I surveyed the walls.

In my mind I cataloged the many mistakes I had made. I could see every mistake, every slip. I could remember every spot I messed up. I knew that my work was far from perfect.

Then my wife walked in.

“It's beautiful!” she said.

That's grace.

Despite our brokenness, our mistakes and struggles God loves us anyway.

Our best efforts, our greatest triumphs, our most amazing feats will never be perfect.

But God loves us anyway.

I want my students to see that.

Monday, August 4, 2014

Paint and Sin

I stood in our bedroom surverying the beautiful walls in which I had strived for excellence.

This room was my act of worship to glorify my God.

But it was not truly perfect.

I could take you on a tour of the room and show you where my brush slipped and hit the ceiling. I tried to wipe it up, but I can still find it. I can show you the spot where I could have taken more time with drywall compound and sander to make it smoother. Or the spot where paint dripped from my brush and I didn't notice. or...or....or

I could blame it on the fact that I've never been trained. I don't have much practice, or skill. I could blame it on the contractor who was sloppy with the drywall. I could point out how I was running out of time and had to rush. I could make excuses.

It doesn't matter. Despite my best efforts it isn't perfect.

Even if I took more time, got more experience, got more training, found another contractor to redo the drywall, took the razorblade to the floor to remove the remnants of paint from the last painter, it would never be perfect.

Somewhere the brush would slip and it wouldn't be perfect.

It is the same for us, in all things.

I wish my students to learn the same thing.

Monday, July 28, 2014

Paint and Worship

There's a word use that I hear in Christian circles a lot these days that bothers me.

“The worship was really good in church today.”

“Did you hear the worship on Sunday?”

In each of these cases they are talking about singing.

Worship is far more than singing.

As I spent my four days slowly and carefully attempting to achieve excellence in my painting in our bedroom a few weeks ago I worshiped.

Each paint stroke was an act of worship. I strove for excellence in that room for the glory of God. I spent hours honouring God through my work. That was my worship.

This is the third reason I believe in excellence, even excellence in corners that no one else can see. Every moment of our day is, or should be, an act of worship. Those acts of worship should be the very best that I can do for God.

I want my students to understand that everything we do, great and small, seen or unseen, should be this kind of worship.

Just singing on Sunday isn't good enough.

Sunday, July 20, 2014

Paint and Excellence

Steve Jobs got a lot of things right.

Now, I'm not a fan of his management style but I do quite like his insistence that even the inside or backside of his products be beautiful, even if the only person who might see it was the repairman.

This is why I was being driven crazy while I was painting our bedroom this summer.

You see, whoever painted the room before me was sloppy and messy. It looked like they didn't even try to protect the floor as there were paint splatters all over the room.

Then there's the person who did the drywall which is uneven and not sanded well at all.

And that's just in the room itself!

Now we come to the closet. Crooked walls, brush strokes on the floor and ceiling. Clearly both the person who built the room and the person who painted it were not striving for excellence.

I did.

There I was on the floor of the closet painting as carefully as I could.

Someone might say, "But who's ever going to see that back corner that's going to be hidden by boxes and clothes?"

To that question I have three responses:

  1. I saw it. 
  2. I have to live in that room every day knowing the work I put into it. Even if it wasn't my room and just a job I did, I would have to walk around knowing whether I did my best or not.
  3. And one more reason I'll get to a little later.

Tuesday, June 24, 2014

An Inch Deep and a Mile Wide

For the first ten years in my math class 30% of my students would fail my algebra unit test. Every year.

And what did I do after?

I taught the next unit. Where algebra was necessary. Which meant that the same students would fail that unit too.

I didn't know what else to do.

I would race through the year trying to "cover" the curriculum. I wasn't so much teaching as throwing things at students and hoping stuff would stick. If students were ready it would work. If they weren't they were out of luck.

Fortunately, the school I work at has been challenging us to think differently.
A few years ago I started experimenting with the "Flipped Classroom" format. I've blogged about this here and here.

So now I spend my days teaching like this:

We get a lot less "work" done. In fact, many of my students walk out of my classroom having only "covered" half of the official math curriculum. Which does lead to some potential problems and questions.

  • What if the next year's teacher doesn't follow the same philosophy?
  • What happens when the student leaves our school and goes to another school?
  • Some of these students need more than a year to actually learn all the material, how do we make that happen given that no one fails?
Despite all these questions and challenges, for which I do not have answers, I will not switch back.

You see, no one has failed my algebra unit test for the past three years. 

Monday, June 2, 2014

What kind of teacher do you want to be?

There are two teachers that I look back on in high school as an example of the kind of teacher I want to be.

First, Mr. Afari.

Mr. Afari came from Nigeria to teach us Calculus.

I always got A's in math class without even trying. Oh, I often made little mistakes here and there, but the teachers would only take off a single point and re-work the rest of the problem to see if I got the idea right. I always got the idea, so I could easily get an almost perfect score without any effort.

That's not how Mr. Afari marked. One single mistake meant a zero. The answer was wrong. Therefore you got no points. At midterm I had a D!

Second, Ms. Iwonttellyouhername.

She taught exactly what was in the textbook word for word. The only thing I remember about her teaching is that if I sat down the night before the test and read the chapter I would get perfect. There are other things about her class I remember, but I'm too embarrassed to tell you them here. I got an A.

What were the results of these two teachers? I stopped going to Ms. Whatshername's class. I just showed up for the tests and still got an A. In Mr. Afari's class? I earned a B-. You see, after that midterm I never made another mistake. Not one. I checked everything twice, or three times. That was the only way I could earn a B-. I had to get perfect scores to average out all the terrible ones from the first half of the term.

If I have to choose what kind of teacher I will be I choose Mr. Afari.

And Mr. Afari, wherever you are, thank you. I still check everything two or three times.

Tuesday, May 27, 2014

Too Much of a Good Thing?

I've been putting a lot of effort into "flipping" my classroom. More and more of my lessons are being recorded on video. In fact, it's become my default teaching method. When preparing a new lesson or activity I automatically begin thinking about how I'm going to record my instructions in a video format.

Here are a few reasons why:

  1. I get to spend more time one-on-one with students. For example, in my recent lessons on Osmosis I got to spend lots of time working with individual students who didn't understand the topic despite using three different videos from other teachers to explain it.
  2. I have more time to check up on student understanding. Instead of standing at the front of the room talking I am able to assess students by walking around the room, looking over their shoulders, and taking up the short quizzes I give them.
  3. The videos are actually shorter than if I gave the lecture live since there are no disruptions and I can work to make them as efficient as possible.
  4. I don't forget things. In a regular lesson with me at the front, I might forget to include something while teaching live. If I'm thorough with my videos I can avoid this.
  5. When I'm absent, or students are absent the class can keep moving and the absent students can catch up.
  6. Students that need more time can have it, since they aren't bound by the speed of the class.
  7. It doesn't take me any longer to plan a lesson. Instead of just thinking about my lesson and writing notes, I record my planning session and I'm done.
  8. If I get the chance to teach the same things again, I have everything ready to go.
All this is well and good, but I do wonder if I'm using it too often. Here are some negatives I'm experiencing.

  1. Using the same teaching style all the time is not a good thing.
  2. It is much harder to organize some of the fun and interesting whole class lessons because every student is in a different place. For example, just yesterday I had a student say that it would have been much more interesting to read a story out loud with students taking different parts instead of reading it themselves. They were right!
  3. Too much time staring at a screen.
  4. If your network goes down you are in big trouble.
  5. Some students complete all the work ahead of time and have nothing to do. (Clearly they need a challenge and now I need to work on providing that. So maybe this isn't all negative.)

Using video to teach is very powerful and has enormous advantages. But it is always important to be critical and look for best practices. 

Saturday, May 3, 2014

The Dark Side of Project Based Learning

My school, along with the family of schools we are part of, has been looking seriously at Project Based Learning (PBL).

A few weeks ago our district of schools had a PD day on the topic.

It just so happens that we were in the middle of preparing for our spring musical. We had wanted to make use of Matthew West's excellent song Do Something to conclude the program. Then someone suggested that we make our own.

Foolishly I volunteered to take the project on using my grade 7 class. We had a little more than two weeks to complete the entire project on time.

Here's what they created.

I learned a few hard lessons during this project.
  1. It is messy
    • My classroom was a mess throughout this project, so was the room down the hall we turned into our photo studio
    • The schedule in my room went out the window. Regular Bible, math, science, and any other subject was ignored in order to meet the deadline. This was particularly difficult to make work with the Arrowsmith students in my room who have very strict schedules.
  2. Some students really didn't like it
    • For those students who had figure out the rules of school, who knew what they had to do to earn an "A", who know how to give the answers the teacher wants, this project was very hard. These students were pushed outside their comfort zone.  
  3. Parents don't necessarily understand it
    • A project like this is not school as normal. For some parents this is uncomfortable. 
  4. It's not in the "official" curriculum
    • If I had to align this with the "official" curriculum I'd have to get creative to fit it in somewhere. (I could do it though!)
    • It has it's own curriculum. Things like productivity, collaboration, creativity, meeting deadlines, and more.
  5. The project revealed that students and I didn't really know how to do this.
    • My students struggled to be productive. In one case I assigned a small task that should have taken 20 to 30 minutes to complete, 3 days later I noticed they were still working on it! They just didn't have any practice at really buckling down and getting to work.
    • There were far too many of them who wanted to be the General in the army and not enough who knew how to be Soldiers and take orders. I'd walk into the photo studio and there would be 3 or 4 people in there, who weren't supposed to be, telling people what to do and no one actually doing the work!
  6. I threw student work away because it wasn't acceptable.
    • The work had to be excellent. Early on I had to throw away 1/3 of the posers they made for the video because they were sloppy, messy, and not well done.
    • Students were not used to working with the expectation that their work had to be good.
    • We ended up redoing some of the video segments 4 times before they were acceptable. (Some of the ones in the video we still would have liked to redo, but we ran out of time.)
  7. It consumed me as a teacher
    • Any other project, task, or assignment I had got put on the back burner. I marked next to nothing, and fell behind in a few other projects as I spent every minute working on this.
    • I spent more time at school working on this than normal and I already work a lot. This had a cost with my family.
So my experience with this PBL project was messy, uncomfortable, off the beaten path, chaotic, stressful, and tiring.


And I loved it.

Monday, March 31, 2014

One Reason I love GoogleApps for Education

On Thursday this week my students have a major science project due. (You can read all about it here on the website I built using Google Sites, with videos in Google's youtube, and docs made and shared using GoogleApps.)

Today I went and checked to see how they were doing.

I opened up my Google Drive and went into the folder to look at their projects. I opened each one and looked at all their work. I left notes inside some of them for the students to read, contacted parents about others (using gmail), and made a list of students that I need to talk to in class. Then based on what I saw in their work I changed the next science lesson to provide more information about how to do the work.

Not once did I have to ask students to hand anything in, or go looking through their desks, backpacks or anywhere else. (Ok, except for one student who hadn't properly shared his doc with me.)

I have complete and total access to all of the student work all the time. Even though it isn't due yet.

On the due date, I don't ask anyone to hand anything in. I already have it all. No chasing students, no hunting for missing work.

GoogleApps give me the ability to give more feedback to students, and reduces my workload.

Tuesday, March 18, 2014

I teach Sex Ed

When I teach algebra, or how to properly punctuate dialogue in a story I know that at least half my students will only use it to graduate from high school. After that they will never need it again.

But when I teach Sex Ed I know that every student needs it.

God has given us this great gift of sexuality. But then Satan has twisted it. Our world has a terribly unhealthy view of what sex is and how we are to use this gift. Quite frankly, I think that the current generation has a far greater challenge of dealing with this than I did or the generations before me. They don't need less Sex Ed from a Christian perspective, they need more of it.

And yet I have had more parent complaints and problems with my Sex Ed classes than any other. I was even dismayed to hear that some Christian High schools have stopped tackling the topic because of the controversy it generates.

What we believe about sex as Christians runs counter to what the world believes. Which makes it all the more important for us to teach.

No matter how embarrassing it is for me and my students when I have to lead the class.

Thursday, March 6, 2014

Disillusionment with BYOD ...... and yet

I have been teaching in a 1-1 classroom for almost 2 years now. Every student has access to a device every day all the time.

We managed to do this by simply asking students to bring whatever they already had. (Bring Your Own Device or BYOD) Some brought old machines and some parents bought new machines. Some families couldn't bring anything, but our school had enough netbooks that we could give every child one who didn't have one.

This has had a huge impact on my teaching. I have the opportunity to try and experiment with many new tools and ways of teaching. Some have been amazingly successful, some not so much. Either way it has now reached the point in my classroom that I could not teach if my students did not each have their own device.

But I am growing increasingly unhappy with BYOD. Here are a few reasons:


  1. Not every device works perfectly with the tools I'm using. We are a GoogleApps school which means every student can access all their work no matter what device they are using. But we have run into trouble with iPads. They just don't handle some of the elements of GoogleApps well. (Charts and images inside documents give problems.)
  2. I can't help students with their devices when they don't work. For example, I have not had the chance to learn Windows 8 yet and I've got a few Windows 8 devices. When something goes wrong I can't help them. Nor have I ever used a Mac.
  3. I get frequent requests to help repair personal devices, which I cannot afford the time to do. 
  4. Some students have such bad browsing habits online that their devices have become clogged with malware and have become essentially useless.
  5. So far this year we have had 3 personal devices broken at school. Because they are personal devices the question of who's responsible for repairs gets a little murky.
  6. Because they are personal devices the students customize them in all kinds of ways. This becomes a distraction in class when they spend more time choosing the desktop background than actually doing work, or playing games or using other apps that they've installed. (Although there is a skill here that they should learn, perhaps a topic for another blog post.)
So, when push comes to shove if I had a choice I would provide a device to every student that was managed by the school. At the moment my device of choice would probably be a Google Chromebook.

And yet.....
This is the only way we can afford to get to 1-1 for every child. We don't have the budget to buy a device for every student. And so  I am willing to suffer through the difficulty and trials because the devices are changing the way I teach.

Which is what it's all about.

Monday, January 27, 2014

Digital Pictures in my classroom

I am fascinated by the impact of technology on the classroom. Especially digital cameras.

Two interesting places I'm seeing their impact.

One:
Today I just finished marking a science project that my students do. I send them home with a package of science experiments to complete at home to explore the wonder of God's amazing world.

I've been teaching this unit for years, but this year's results were very different from what I've had in the past.

You see, I included in my assessment tool, which the students received before they started, the fact that they could earn extra credit if they included pictures of their experiments.

Since they had to submit their logbook of experiments digitally it was fairly trivial for them to upload pictures into the document.

I think that next time I would like to make the pictures mandatory. The quality of their reports was light years better because they had pictures and I gained a better sense of what they had done because of them.

Two:
I'm teaching students how to use microscopes right now.

In the past I taught them how to make field of view drawings and tried to get them to put in better pictures than this:


A couple of years ago one of my students took his iPod and did this:



So this year I told my students that instead of drawing them they could use their iPods if they wanted. I also gave them a tutorial video on how edit their pictures in GoogleApps so that they could add the labels we would need.

Not one student has opted to draw them by hand.

Here's why:

The wing of a fly taken with my iPhone 4 camera.

Tuesday, January 21, 2014

A New Way of Teaching!

Except.....that it isn't.

So, if it's the same lessons and the same assignments I've always taught why did I just spend the last two months busting my behind digitizing my second science unit of the year?

So now it's entirely paperless and all the direct instruction is recorded on video. So what? It's the same things I would have had them do on paper, and the same things I would have said out loud in class. It's all the same, so where's the benefit?

Why spend all that time and effort, hours and hours of it, trying to do this?

Here are a few reasons:


  1. Students can't misplace their paper. Their assignments are available to them anywhere and anywhen they have an internet connection.
  2. When a student is missing it's a lot easier to catch them up. Not easy, just easier. (I've got one student from the last unit who missed way too many days and is having a hard time catching up.)
  3. When I'm not sick, or not feeling well the lessons don't degenerate. The teaching quality remains the same.
  4. The lessons are closer to the student. I always put the camera in the perspective of the student. So now, when I'm talking about the parts of the microscope, instead of me standing way up at the front of the classroom pointing at some small part of the microscope, I have the camera up close and can even zoom in so that students can actually see what I'm talking about.
And I've got a few more, but none of those reasons are really enough to justify the effort.

Here's what is.

I am no longer tied to the front. Instead of standing at the front trying to keep everyone's attention, trying to remember what I say next I am free to observe and interact with students. I can actually observe what the students are learning, or not. I can see where students are struggling and look to improve things.

This is where the value really appears. I can now reflect on my teaching and start thinking about how to change things.

It's what happens next when things really get interesting. I can hardly wait to find out!

Monday, January 13, 2014

A broken classroom.

I've come to believe that the classroom as we know it is broken.

I want to push the limits, explore what is possible, to build a classroom that serves every child who walks through the door.

I'm busy jumping off cliffs, trying new things, failing, getting up and trying again.

I'd like to get my fellow teachers to do the same thing.

I'd like to see them give up on their years of expertise, the craft they've honed so carefully, the classroom they love and are comfortable in.

Give it all up so they can go back and be a first year teacher again. Clumsy, stumbling, making mistakes, feeling foolish, having to struggle to find the way forward.

I have no idea how to convince them to do that.

I'm just going to keep plugging away in my room trying things. Some of them even work.

Maybe they'll follow.