Content Is King

30. January 2007 · 1 comment · Categories: Education, Leadership, Technology

Thanks in no small part to my participation in this community, I have been giving a lot of thought to student engagement and even working on a project with a pair of science teachers that we hope will hook some kids into learning about the ocean.  We met yesterday to hash out some more ideas and to determine the best ways for me to lend my support.

At this point, the science teachers have decided that they are going to divide the students into groups of 3 or 4 and pose to each of them a question or problem related to the ocean: Global warming, over-fishing, drilling in protected waters, etc.  The teachers will start a wiki page with some rough framework and some basic resources to get them started, and the kids will take it from there. 

For those who may need a little more structure, we talked about differentiating instruction by having some students pull pictures of ocean life down from Flickr Creative Commons and create a digital story using BubbleShare.  Those that are more "techno-savvy" can do whatever they feel will best communicate what they learned.

The young man I’m working with brings the energy.  He is chomping at the bit and ready to turn the kids loose on the Internet.  I never rain on his parade, but rather continue to ask questions that will keep the group focused on our endgame: Allowing the students to collaborate on the project without having the technology itself become the project.  I’m sure we’ve all seen the results of turning our students loose on PowerPoint for the first time.  I got on average 27 slides of sound effects along with every whiz-bang transition that Microsoft dreamed up.  But precious little content.

As we are "trailblazers" at our school with this project, it was important to me to keep bringing the conversation back to the most important point: Content is king. 
 

We discussed creating a rubric that would clearly indicate that the emphasis of the project was on researching the ocean and developing a usable resource on the Web that could be tapped by future classes at our school or anywhere else. 

Our question for the next meeting:  How can we help the students understand that bells and whistles might cause people to come and look and maybe even say, "Hey – that’s pretty cool!" but it won’t make them stay?

I continue to think of these tools in light of the coffee cup analogy I’ve used before: Are you enjoying the coffee, or thinking too much about the cup?

Blogging with Common Sense

29. January 2007 · Write a comment · Categories: blogging, Education, Leadership

For the last week or so I’ve seen the PSEA Legal Division’s Blogging 101 document floating around the edu-blogosphere.  While there are definitely some good points in the document, I can’t help but be bothered by the subtext that seems to permeate the entire document:

Go ahead and blog if you really, really want to, but don’t say we didn’t warn you.

As one who is relatively new to the blogging scene, I found Doug Johnson‘s recent post on Blogging and a little common sense to be a great read.  He’s right, of course, in that most of what he suggests is pretty common sense, it’s just good to confirm once in a while that my version of common sense is, indeed, common.

Among Doug’s suggestions:

  • Write assuming your boss is reading.
  • Gripe globally; praise locally.

Click over to The Blue Skunk Blog to read the rest of his post.

Web 2.0 Tool: bubbl.us

29. January 2007 · Write a comment · Categories: Productivity, Software, Technology, Tools, Web 2.0

If you need some very basic (and free!) mind-mapping functionality, check out bubbl.us.  My mind is already spinning with ways this could be incorporated into the classroom.

As seen on: Lifehacker & The Cranking Widgets Blog

My viral marketing campaign continues…

26. January 2007 · Write a comment · Categories: Communication, Education, Leadership, Technology, Tools, Web 2.0

I wrote earlier in the week about a wiki project I am embarking on with a couple of our science teachers.  This afternoon over lunch, one of our outstanding English faculty who heard about what we were working on approached me and asked about the limits and possibilities of using Google Notebook as a research tool for our IB students who are working on their extended essays. 

It appears that without really intending to, I have started my own little viral marketing campaign for some of these Web 2.0 tools and have sparked interest in some of our more inquisitive faculty members.  She arranged for me to come in and speak to her students to get them up and running on Google Notebook in a couple of weeks so I plan to put together something of a tutorial starting with some of the information that Wes Fryer has so generously shared with the community.

My short-term goal is to hook enough teachers into these simple but powerful technologies that they end up becoming the critical mass in our building who will pull others along.

Engaged Teacher Count: 4 as of lunch today

"Do We Have to Take Notes on This?"

25. January 2007 · 2 comments · Categories: Education, Leadership, Productivity

When I started this blog way back – well – last week, I thought I’d be posting a lot on technology and educational leadership.  But here I am again posting about "Lo-Fi" note taking.

A recent post on Lifehack.org pointed me to an older blog post by Michael Hyatt of Working Smart regarding the "lost art" of note taking.  I couldn’t help but think of our students when I read item number 1 on his list:

Note-taking enables you to stay engaged. The real benefit is not what happens after the meeting but during the meeting itself. If I don’t take notes, my mind wanders. I daydream. As they say, “the lights are on, but no one is home.” However, when I take notes, I find that I stay more alert, focused, and actively involved. My contribution to the meeting is thus more likely to add value to the topic under discussion. This is why I take notes even if someone is officially taking minutes.

Wow.  Note-taking to stay engaged.  What immediately struck me was how many of our kids are disengaged precisely because they are "taking notes."  There’s a reason for the quotes.  To many of our kids, the "note-taking" they do in school does little to prepare them for the real world precisely because most of them have had little or no preparation in how to take notes.

Copying text from an overhead is what many of our students have been trained to think of as "note-taking."  As I see it, it is an exercise in anxiety for the student who writes slowly and is in a panic that the teacher will move the transparency before he or she is finished copying.  And it is an exercise in boredom for everyone else.  How authentically engaged can that student be with the content?  Some kids are 100% engaged in writing as quickly as possible.  The rest are sitting and figuring out how to pass the time before the teacher slides down the piece of paper they’re using to cover the rest of the notes in order to keep students from "getting ahead."

One of the student teachers in our building this semester was talking to me on Tuesday about a PowerPoint presentation he had used when teaching a social studies class last week.  He was concerned because the students seemed a little confused by exactly what they were supposed to be doing.  Reflecting on the lesson, he arrived at the conclusion that a certain proportion of the students sat and watched as if they were watching a television show or a movie at the theater, while another group treated PowerPoint slides as high-tech overhead transparencies and spent the entire time trying to copy the slides word-for-word.

It comes back to teaching our kids to be consumers of information.  How and when did they get the idea that note-taking meant to copy down everything verbatim?  Our kids need to be able to engage in the lesson instead of being anxiously engaged in trying to capture everything.

Teaching them to critically process and assess all the information they receive through lecture, video, PowerPoint slides, the Internet, and yes, even the occasional overhead transparency, will move them toward becoming intelligent consumers of information.  And before we know it, they will be taking notes to stay engaged.

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