Practice What You Preach

One of the big buzz words for education lately has been collaboration. We want students to work together. The 21^ST century worker won't be plugging along by themselves at a workstation, they will be working with a team to accomplish a goal or solve a problem. So we need to train our students to work together.

The irony is we don't practice what we preach. Teachers are very territorial when it comes to their teaching methods. “Don't come in my room, and don't copy my lesson plan.” It makes no sense. You don't get paid any less or any more for sharing. You don't look bad if someone else uses your work. If anything, your work inspired others. If we truly are doing all we can for the kids, then we would be doing everything possible to better ourselves and everyone around us, and that means sharing.

So I'm putting my money where my mouth is. Here's my OneNote Technology Curriculum Notebook. It has all my lessons, and links to online resources for anything you need. I've built these lessons from teachers who were generous enough to share them with the world, so I'm paying it forward.

Use anything you want from it. Enjoy.

4 Steps to make your profile pic look really professional

When I first added logos to my profile picture, I just simply did it in Preview on a mac. It was effortless. Once people saw my profile sporting my nifty badges to show off my accomplishments, everyone wanted to know how to do this and I wanted to help. Here how it’s done through Paint. Yes, lowly little Paint.

Step 1:  Open your photo in the program.

Step 2: Open your logo in another window and “Select All” and then choose “Copy.”

Step 3: Go back to your photo and “Paste” the logo. Keep it selected or it becomes stuck in the photo. Resize it, move it, whatever you need. 

Keep the other images small, you don’t want to turn into a scrapbook page.

Step 4:  After you’re happy with everything, save the file. Voila, you’re branded! Here’s what my finished profile picture looks like on Twitter.

You can stop reading now and go play with it. You too can turn your profile picture into a mini resume. A picture can say a thousand words and a branded one can help you make sure they’re the right ones for your image.

My first ISTE

The last day of school was Friday, June 25. I was on my way to Philadelphia at 6am Saturday morning. So my head was already spinning before I even got there. ISTE is the major educational technology trade show that everyone talks about all year, and this was my first trip there. Microsoft paid for my hotel and travel expenses because I became certified in Microsoft Education, which was very cool. My head continued to spin for the next three days. It was great.
I took a lot away with me from the experience. There are many people doing incredible things with technology, and I want to know it all. I found that this is impossible, but I can get closer to that goal by at least being around them.
I advanced what I know about coding and I learned entirely new things. I want to do more programming with my students so I went to the presentation that a group in New Jersey have developed to teach girls how to code. I'm thinking about adding Minecraft to my curriculum, so I saw an amazing teacher from Hawaii show us the things he's doing with his students with it.
Graphite is a great resource, and they sponsored a bowling party where I hung around with other teachers and we couldn't talk fast enough about all the things we do in our classrooms.
The three days flew by and I was exhausted but thrilled. I was inspired by what I saw, and overwhelmed by it all. I can't wait to go again next year.

Sitting in my own classroom

If I was a student of mine, I would drive me crazy.
I took a PD class last week and I was the one being taught something on the computer. I tried to stay on task, but I sometimes got distracted, or bored and went off to look at something else, and I got lost. I needed to ask for help from the person sitting next to me, I even needed help from one of the facilitators of the program at one point. I was a nightmare.
It made me think long and hard about my own classroom. While I can't prevent students from getting distracted or lost, how can I help them get back on track and stay there? To be fair, the workshop was moving pretty quick because they assumed that teachers who are proficient on computers didn't need a lot of help. The problem is the lesson could have been differentiated. All the teachers had different levels of expertise, which made for some problems with the speed of the class. They assumed we could follow along easily, which wasn't always the case. When they had to stop and help too many people, the ones who were ready got bored and wondered off (me.)
It's an inherent problem with computer class; some lessons need specific directions to acquire the skill being taught. Everyone needs to follow step by step, but they might not go at the same speed, so it can be frustrating. I need to better address this problem in my classroom.
I think I will start developing more visual clues for students to help them with the steps they should follow. I will check for understanding even more, if that's possible, and I will move slower, much slower. I will repeat directions five more times than I do right now.
Some kids don't have problems in my class, so I think things are fine. I need to think about the struggling kid, the kid who counts on the person sitting next to them to know what to do.
I learned a lot from the PD class, only half of which was what they were trying to teach me. The rest was what I needed to learn about myself as a teacher.

BYOD from the NYCDOE

The NYC Board of Education is lifting it's cell phone ban for all students, which is great news if it happened ten years ago. Students have had their phones with them everyday, unless there's a metal detector at the door. In that case there's a van parked across the street from the school that stores the students phones for them everyday for a fee.
My children have carried their cell phones with them. After some natural and unnatural disasters that affected my family (9/11 cut off access to my home that day, flight 587 crashed a mile away from us, and Hurricane Sandy left us homeless for a while) I believed it was important to be able to get in touch with my children in an emergency, so I ignored the rule. They went to school with their phones, but were instructed not to take them out or use them.
The conversations I'm hearing now are how the children will be on their phones all day and not listen to the teacher, or that they'll record video in the classroom that will be a privacy violation of the teacher and other students. Guess what, that's already happening. What we need to do is not ignore reality, but embrace it and make it work to our advantage. Use the medium the students are permanently attached to and reach them where they are right now. We need to stop trying to maintain the classroom from 20 years ago. It's gone. We are constantly playing catch-up in the world that children live in today. It's hard to effectively teach when they know more than we do. Social media is not going away, it's taking over more and more of our lives, and that is not always a bad thing. They can be connected to their teachers all the time, not just 45 minutes each day. They can find other students interested in similar causes and make real change. Focus on the good of this situation, and make it work for you. That's a lesson that children can learn from us too.

The basics

There's a new website everyday that will change your life, and that's great, but I think we're forgetting about the basics.
If you don't know how to use the tab key correctly to line up data in a table, you're always going to struggle. 
I teach my students how to create their heading using flush left alignment and a flush right tab. If you don't know what I'm talking about, keep moving. This is not for you.
I'm a firm believer in everyone knowing how to use Microsoft Word, Excel, and PowerPoint. It's this generation's looseleaf. If you can't use these programs easily, you will never be able to focus on your thoughts, you will always spend too much time trying to figure out how to present your thoughts.
While these tools have gotten infinitely easier to use, they still need some understanding. I try to make the lessons interesting-we bullet their favorite foods, use page numbers, and find and replace words through a long document. Not glamorous, but essential, and they will thank me someday when they're up at midnight trying to finish their term paper.
Using these programs should be effortless for our students because they will need to use them for the rest of their lives. Struggling to learn a musical instrument is necessary if you ever want it to sound like music. Our students need to learn how to play these programs well.

I'm just trying to keep up.

Sometimes it's hard to be a technology teacher.
Students don't know more about math than the math teacher. They certainly don't know more about science or history. That's not the case with technology. In some cases, they know more than us and we are assigned to teach them something.
What we mostly do is find out where they are, and try to keep up. We think we're so groovy because we're on Facebook. Well guess what? If you haven't noticed, they're not even on there anymore. They've moved onto Instagram and Snapchat. By the time we join those sites, they will leave us in the dust.
What we can do is address the bigger picture. Yes, they are all over the internet, but doing what? What kind of content are they adding? What type of footprint are they leaving behind? We need to use social media guidelines to enlighten them on future issues they aren't thinking about now.
What I think is being ignored is mastering basic office skills, even adults don't know how to set up tabs, and forget about editing a master slide.

Mostly we learn together, finding new things to explore everyday. I am constantly trying to keep my curriculum interesting and relevant, and teach them something they don't know already. That becomes more of a challenge everyday because I don't know it yet either.

Our job may be more fun but our curriculum has to change constantly, and keeping up is hard work.

Don't do it Microsoft!

Microsoft just announced that it will discontinue clip art in it's products and I'm in mourning. Those trusty graphics have always been a simple and lovely way to brighten up any page, slide, or spreadsheet. Now you will be sent to Bing to search online for graphics. I have three big problems with this.

1. When little people are using these programs at first, having a simple way to insert art is not as overwhelming as searching online for appropriate artwork. Young children need some guidelines, and releasing them into the big bad internet to find artwork will create a time-wasting experience for them.
2. You're encouraging copyright infringement. Students will not concern themselves with where they got the artwork, and that's not the way to teach responsible digital citizenship. 
3. When your internet is down, you're out of luck. My students don't always have internet access, through no fault of their own. Providing a feature and then taking it away is not cool-period.

Technology develops by providing more features, not less. I have to go now, I need to start hoarding all the clipart before it disappears forever.

http://www.techtimes.com/articles/21330/20141203/microsoft-announces-death-of-clip-art-say-hello-to-bing-image-search.htm

Hour of Code

I received some mail about the Hour of Code last year around this time. I had no idea what it was and I was barely interested in it, but I looked through it because I'm always looking for new things to add to my technology curriculum. I went to the website and watched the intro videos and started working through the activities. It took a few minutes, but I was hooked and I knew my students would be too. The Hour of Code introduces students to a skill they might not know they have; the extended linear thinking necessary to work through a problem.

I worked through the first hour and set up classes to use in my classroom immediately. I didn't know much about coding yet, but I knew more than them, and that's all I needed.

What was amazing when my students started working on it was the variety of students who took to it. I knew the bright kids would do fine, but even some of the students that, shall we say, "struggle" were able to grasp the concepts and really excel at this task. Since they so rarely get to be good at something in school, they embraced it all the more. It made me so happy to see them excel. A student that is often suspended was one of my assistants who I would ask to help others when they ran into trouble. I didn't have much to do with it, but I know that particular student felt really good in my classroom.

The big push with Hour of Code is coming up again next month, during Computer Science Education Week, which this year is December 8-14. They have expanded the website to include lots of activities that go deeper than the Hour of Code. They even have differentiated it for younger kids, with limited amount of reading necessary to include the tasks.

It's a year later, and I have now included a lot of programming lessons in my curriculum, and I think the kids love it. They see how this will be a skill they could actually use. I learned a lot, but I have so much more to learn. I presented my lessons at a few conferences, and the feedback has been very positive. I recommend any and every one to try it. It sounds scary, but trust me, it's actually fun. Being a geek can be cool.