Get On That Technology Bandwagon!

This morning the always relevant Scott Mcleod had some great links, including this great one from Wesley Fryer.  Hilarious but sad.  It goes right along with what we've been discussing in our Information Technology class.  Remember the article we had to read for this class?  It describes a county that went whole hog buying SMART Boards for every classroom and are having a hard time keeping them up and getting people trained.  You just know some of those $3000 puppies are collecing dust or are being used as nothing more than fancy overheads.

I don't know what the answer is, but I think it might involve presenting the new technology, trying to get some teacher buy-in, then giving them a choice of technologies.  Some will lead the charge with the new interactive whiteboards and get others onboard.  Others could settle for $700 LCD projectors.  If the district leaders still have money burning a hole in their collective pocket, still others could buy some colorful and interactive, you know, books.  Just imagine $3000 for your classroom library.  

That Kid

I don't have advice for Tracy's friend.  I like what she said about connecting with just one of those kids and working from there.  I have That Kid in one of my groups.  He's the one that I expect any day to be gone because he must be about to be transferred into special ed., right?  I mean there's no way you can be that hair-triggered and disruptive, that button pushing and not have something wrong with you.  I always have to keep my thumb on him.  I've been trying to think of a way to connect with him and have come up empty-handed.

Yesterday that class was cancelled due to the never-ending testing.  He came to my room anyway.  "No class today," I said, not even looking up.

"Oh.  Sorry," he said.  "Hey, look at this."

I looked up and he was holding up one of the little paper citizenship awards we pass out for good behavior.  I tried not to sound too surprised when I asked, "What did you do?"

 

Another student had gotten hurt on the playground.  Our beefy friend here had given the kid a piggy back ride all the way to the clinic in the front of the building.  I got a chance to say something positive and wish him a good week.  Connection made! (I hope).

Info. Tech and Learning: What's the Connection?

That's the topic for the next two weeks in one of my grad. classes. We're to read this news article and interview our Media and Tech folks and observe what's going on with technology in the Media Center.

I find the article depressing because these people are blowing a ton of money on stuff they'll have trouble keeping up to date and I seriously doubt all of it is even being put to good use. I hope I'm wrong about that.

I would also like to see some rigorous studies that prove this is even a good thing. There are many many studies that prove more books and more access to books improves student achievement. Are there any solid studies showing the same thing for the technology? I do know that when I lived in the county referred to in the article, the graduation rate was hovering around 50%. Has it improved since this infusion of technology (assuming that's the only big change)?

Are we throwing good money after bad?

$1.6 million for tech. That's equivalent to 80,000 $20 books.

I'm just sayin'.

Crushed, Spread Thin, and Shifted

What do you believe is the connection between information technology and learning?

What do you think is the disconnect between information technology and learning?

These are the questions I'm focusing on in my Information Technology class this week.  We've read Chris Dede, Mark Prensky and Jenny Levine (The Shifted Librarian).   Just to be contrary I'll be bringing up Todd Oppenheimer who expanded this article into the book The Flickering Mind.

I love talking and writing about this stuff so I know this library thing is going to be awesome, but my teaching job is killing me this year, I'm missing my family and my other class is just as fascinating in a, "when m I going to find the time to read all of that?" kind of a way.  I want to be awesome at all of it, but something's got to give.  I'm trying very hard to not let it be my teaching, but just having to try so hard is making me realize that this is not turning out to be my best year ever.

Oh, waa.  Tell me to quit crying.  And let me know what thoughts you have on the questions above.  (Don't worry, I've already done my homework).

The Intenational Year of Astronomy

At the Skeptrack at Dragon*Con after hearing Phil Plait's talk and wandering through the vast event, I came across a table dedicated to The International Year of Astronomy.  Check out their site.  They want to impress upon us the advantages we have gained by studying astronomy and one of their big goals is to get everyone to just look at something out there through a telescope in 2009.  A fun and worthy idea!

Of course hanging around the table had nothing to do with it being manned by Phil Plait himself!  Noooo.

Of course it did!  I asked him about his recent promotion to President of the JREF.  I'd heard he and James Randi interviewed about it and one of his ideas is to get more involved with curriculum development in the schools to teach science, skepticism and critical thinking.  He's a great guy, so friendly and open and affable.  It was an honor to meet him, let alone his taking the time to lay out some of his plans.  Be on the lookout on the JREF site in the next year or two. He'll be wanting input from educators!

Open Wide, Look Inside

These folks are awesome. Here I am, home again with my sick daughter, thinking I better start on next week's plans. I introduced the five senses but what should we do next?

Found my answer, to be sure.

Everything Is Coming Up Elitism!

Fellow Elitist Bastards!

Has it only been a month since my last post for the Carnival of Elitist Bastards? How time does fly. Elitism has been flourishing, mateys! Its even proving the progress in race relations in our country. Everywhere I poke around on the web these days, I find fellow elitists! From Merlin Mann at 43folders: "Embrace the disingenuous charge of elitism (or, as I prefer to call it, maturity) by not pretending that everyone is equally 'special' to you. Remind the people who matter to you that you’re always available for them, then tell them how to do that, including specific instructions (n.b. this is important for relatives who think the internet is just eBay, urban myths, and Joel Osteen). Get a friends-only email address. Get a friends-only GrandCentral number. Do whatever it takes to provide a backchannel for your super-secret network."

Thanks Merlin! (And what elitists your parents must have been to give you such a funny name!)

The election, of course, is elitist central. We have an old white millionaire who doesn't know how many houses he owns and a Harvard-educated smoothie duking it out. Roger Cohen from the NYT has some more on this: Obama's from Main St., Ain't He? Even Phil Plait, the Bad Astronomer gets into the elitist act on this subject. (He's probably just trying to catch up with PZ, though.) Bastard.

But it's education I'm interested in, being an elitist teacher and all. Jane Artabasy at the Teaching Excellence Network agrees: "Teachers are inherently a skeptical lot, not a natural base for the Kool-Aid culture of 21st century electioneering, with its cynical, smarmy manipulation of language. As a start, how about the most recent 'word du jour:' elitism? Only an intellectually bankrupt political system would dare to twist such a perfectly good noun into a pejorative, a negative, a mortal stigma. Webster’s defines elite as 'the choice or most carefully selected part of a group...' Sounds to me like the perfect baseline description of a president."

Thank you! She links to this post by a teacher of gifted students who tells us why gifted students hate school:

"Here it is, in brief: Gifted students hate school because school is a sucking quagmire of mediocrity."

and continues with:

"Okay, I know this hardly qualifies as an original thought, but perhaps my personal experiences can enlighten the issue a little bit: the mediocrity begins in society, but it seems to be concentrated, like B.O. in a cabbie’s upholstery, in schools of education."

But she sees teachers a bit differently than Ms. Artabasy: "The influential 1983 report A Nation at Risk, whose findings have not substantially changed since its publication, found that too many teachers are 'drawn from the bottom quarter of graduating high school and college students.' Those same students become teachers, so rather than your kids or my kids being taught by the best and brightest (or at least the solidly competent), they’re being taught in too many cases by people who essentially weren’t very good at school." Yes, she says, there are indeed smart, skeptical, inspiring teachers (like Ms. Artabasy), but unfortunately they can tend to be the exception and not the rule. What to do about this?

See you in a month. I'm sure the election mania will be at a fever pitch. Keep using your critical thinking faculties, my fellow elitist bastards, and perhaps we can begin working on turning the tide of this ingrained mediocrity. I'm open to suggestions. (I know, not very bastardly of me, but we need to start somewhere.)

Classes Begin!

Saturday was my first graduate classes in my journey to become a media specialist and today has been my first day with students. As an ESOL teacher, I have to spend the first two weeks of school testing new students and working out a schedule. So while the kids have been here for two weeks, today was the first day of school in my classroom.

Both the grown up and kid classes went relatively smoothly. They were both a bit more teacher centered than I like, but that's to be expected on the first day. Now if we can just keep the momentum rolling through the year.

I have one more group before the end of the day and I feel good. How I'm going to keep up with planning for six or seven classes and get all my grad school work done and continue being a good husband and father and tossing out the occasional blog post I don't know, but I'll try to keep you in the loop.

For now, check out a new post on Too Much Information from Tim at Assorted Stuff and one way to deal with it, or keep your Poop In A Pile by the Science Goddess. I need me one of those "bleachers!"

First Six Weeks of School

This is the book to get to help you have a great new year whether you are new to teaching or not. It tells a lot more than just seating and greeting. It has great ideas for getting into the curriculum, for student interaction, even for handling the lunch room and recess. This will make you a teacher ninja. Not this drivel. You know which other book I mean. Don't get the wong book.

Being a Great Explainer

You listen to NPRs This American Life, right? It's a great radio show/podcast. I am always behind in listening (I always have a half-dozen or so on my iPod) so didn't get to this amazing episode until late in the summer. It's called "The Giant Pool of Money" and it explains, so that even an elementary teacher can understand, the whole sub prime mortgage lending debacle. It's fantastic and I'm clearly not the only one to think so. Norm linked to this today and it led me to this great dissection of why it's so great by Jay Rosen. He's writing for journalists but I think there's something there for my fellow educators and skeptics alike: people who want to truly explain things, give them context and engage critical thinking. That's us, right?

Olivia Judson On Evolution

Olivia Judson has an thoughtful piece in the NYT on the optimism of evolution. Why we need to teach and learn about it to understand not only the past but what's happening in our environment all around, right now.

"But for me, the most important thing about studying evolution is something less tangible. It’s that the endeavor contains a profound optimism. It means that when we encounter something in nature that is complicated or mysterious, such as the flagellum of a bacteria or the light made by a firefly, we don’t have to shrug our shoulders in bewilderment."

Science for English Language Learners

Subtitled K-12 Classroom Strategies this excellent professional
resource is put out by the NSTA Press. Edited by Ann Fathman ans David Crowther, it's actually written by many top educators. It's short and easy to read with just the right combination of theory and nitty-gritty classroom techniques.


They get right to the point in Chapter One and this goes for more than just ELLs: "The science process skills--including observing, predicting, communicating, classifying, and analyzing--are almost the same as language learning skills--seeking information,
comparing, ordering, synthesizing, and evaluating."


ELLs are often denied content area instruction and there should be no real reason for this. If
you use an inquiry-based style of science teaching with a lot of hands on experiences and problem solving, then students at every level should be engaged and have something to contribute.

The book is packed with great references and links. If you teach science at all to any grade this book will be helpful, even if you don't have ELLs. I mean, be honest, aren't they all English Language Learners? Just for the methods on differentiating instruction in a content area with a lot of content are language, this book would be valuable for any teacher's professional library.
Highly recommended.

Standing Ovation

There's a woman who has worked at a school called Wilkinson Elementary for the past five years. It's down in south Florida. Its not the only school she's worked in to be sure. She's taught in almost every grade for about 112 years but mostly elementary. Now she does some quasi-administrative job staffing Special Ed. and ESOL students. She's small but tough and loves every student she works with and talks to the parents straight. She rarely offers unsolicited advice but finds herself asked for it almost always from teachers and administrators alike.

Yesterday was Wilkinson's first day back for the staff pre-planning week and they kicked it off with the obligatory rah-rah stuff to motivate everyone, including giving out some awards to people who have been helpful. Names were called, applause was given.

Then they called this particular woman's name and, not being in the classroom, found herself a bit surprised to hear her name called. She stood to accept the award but, knowing her, she was shaking her head in a self-deprecating kind of way. She doesn't relish this kind of attention. She is to the profession what Michael Phelps is to swimming but she would never see it that way.

The clapping was by far louder for her that it had been for the others which embarrassed her. She turned around and was nearly knocked over to see the entire staff on their feet giving her a standing ovation.

She cried while telling me this story on the phone last night. She really couldn't believe it. What she doesn't get is that is what makes her so great. Oh, and she's a pretty awesome Mom too.

P.S. In that same conversation she asked about her granddaughter's first day of school (see previous post). Well, she enjoyed that candy but it wasn't enough of a breakfast. She had a snack time, but that didn't do the trick. For some unimaginable reason her lunch time is at nearly 2pm. The poor kid was pouty all day because she was starving. After lunch she was apparently much happier and engaged but that was the last hour of the day! So trust me, she had a big breakfast today and her mom packed her extra snacks. It wasn't the greatest kick off to an academic career, but I think she'll be fine.

Tell Me A Story

That's the title of this amazing commencement speech. I know, I know, I already deemed this one the best ever. Well, now there are two. This one is from Radiolab's Robert Krulwitch. You've heard the awesomeness that is the Radiolab podcast, right?

Better Grading

I wanted to point out two thought-provoking posts that came across the transom about grading. The always-wonderful MS Teacher found a great video clip of a Dr. Reeves telling us why we should just stop giving zeroes.

Over at the lovely What's It Like On the Inside, we have a good rundown on ways to Advance the Gradebook. Use Exel and other options to graphically represent your student data and student achievement can apparently rise 26%.

see also: Just Give Them the Answers

Proud Bastard

My first entry into the waters of ye Carnival of Elitist Bastards was this post on being a proud elite.

Now I'm proud to be a bastard. My Lovely Spouse was dismayed when I first joined this particular Carnival because of the name. I'd made a promise as an educator not to put anything too nutty in my blog so I didn't get fired or freak out my student's parents or what not. So signing up to proclaim myself an elitist bastard seemed a bit against that grain.

I beg to differ.

The whole point of our public education system is not to get good test scores. It is not so that our students can go out and get good jobs. It's not even to "create life-long learners," even though that's a big part of it.

The point of our public education system is to make better citizens.

The fight against anti-intellectualism is a big part of that and it's worth being a bastard about. Susan Jacoby gives the example of a questioner not caring about whether or not his mechanic can locate Iraq on a map. He just want the mechanic to be able to fix his car. What the questioner fails to realize is that the mechanic is also a voter. All voters ought to be able to find Iraq on a map, among other things.

We all, each one of us, need to fight against this anti-intellectualism which is the real elitism. What we are fighting for is different.

As PZ Myers said in a recent bloggingheads interview: "We can be accused of being elitist but I think when you get right down to it we're the opposite of elitist because we're saying there are all these good kids...that we shouldn't write off. We want them [children of creationists] to be members of our society--contributing members of our scientific community."

That's why we have to fight against the creationists and anti-evolutionists and for the First amendment and our Bill of Rights.

During the evolution/creation trial in Dover, Pennsylvania there was a moment that was important. Allow me to quote it at length:

"Q. Let's go to our final line of questions. Mr. Callahan, do you feel that, as a Plaintiff in this case, you've been harmed by the actions of the Dover Area School District and its Board of Directors?

A. Yes.

Q. And can you tell us how you've been harmed?

A. I think it goes to the heart of the complaint. It's a constitutional issue. I'm a tax payer in Dover. I'm a citizen of Dover. I'm a citizen of this country. I think the heart of my complaint, my wife's complaint, is that, this is just thinly veiled religion. There's no question about that in our minds.

If you were to substitute where it says, intelligent design, the word, creationism, which, in my mind, it is, there would be no question that this would be a violation of the First Amendment. I've come to accept the fact that we're in the minority view on this.

You know, I've read the polls. I think, you know, a lot of people feel that this should be, that this should be in, that it doesn't cross the line. There are a lot of people that don't care. But I do care. It crosses my line.

And, you know, I've been -- there have been letters written about the Plaintiffs. We've been called atheists, which we're not. I don't think that matters to the Court, but we're not. We're said to be intolerant of other views.

Well, what am I supposed to tolerate? A small encroachment on my First Amendment rights? Well, I'm not going to. I think this is clear what these people have done. And it outrages me."

I'm not going to. That outrage is justifiable.

In our schools we need to value questions and different points of view. We need to value different intelligences and ways of learning and allow deep, thoughtful study of subjects. We need to teach our students Faulkner's advice to "Read, read, read. Read everything."

We need to do these things because citizenship is our goal and we can't afford to be lazy. We need to stand up for what we believe in and go ahead and be bastards if needed.

Carnival of Elitist Bastards Is Up!

Go check it out and support the fight against anti-intellectualism! I mean, that's kinda the whole point of teaching isn't it?

Well, isn't it?

Anyway, Teacherninja is mentioned because of this post.

Phil Plait, the Bad Astronomer

He's actually a good astronomer, he just likes to rail against Bad Astronomy. He's especially good at pointing out the scientific mistakes in moves that make you learn more and more about the universe every time you read him.

He's also very excited about science and teaching. Here is his introductory statement on his blog about his mission, as he says, "devoted to airing out myths and misconceptions in astronomy and related topics."

His excitement is infectious as this video shows. As Dale, at The Meming of Life says, "Next time someone starts into the drone about the cold, passionless world of science, show them this:"



It's the infectious passion that comes through and makes you laugh and makes you want to learn more. That's teaching. I got the same vibe from Carl Sagan back in the day. It's a great feeling.

Blue Skunk Blog

In my new theme of promoting blogs that have something to teach (like I did here and here), I'd like to mention my favorite School Library Media blog, Doug Johnson's Blue Skunk Blog.

As you may know, I'll be starting work on my own SLM degree and plugging away at that for the next couple of years, then doing my part for media specialty.

Doug has been doing it for, well, a blue skunk's age and has quite a lot to show for it. I bought my first textbook, Information Power, which is apparently the book. A dry read due to being written by committee, I was very pleased to see Doug's name on the roster of contributors.

As for the blog and it's teach worthy credentials, you won't have to dig deep. His recent posts on effective technology trainers and how to better judge the value of schools are the kind of impassioned and uber-knowledgeable work that will hook you and keep you reading for a long time to come.

Do check him out.

Science Is Life

It really is. Enjoy this magnificent meditation by the physicist Brian Greene on how we could do better to bring science to our student's lives.



(photo by grain edit)