The Good Teaching Blog

First of all, thank you, Page and Ray, for the great workshops!  I’ve taken workshops on iMovie, Garage Band, blogs & wikis, etc. before, but each time I do I learn more.  On a personal level, I particularly enjoyed the online collaboration workshop.  With family spread all over the country, Facebook, Twitter, and Skype are a wonderful way to keep in touch.  Professionally, Google docs will be particularly helpful for records management.  In the library I use Office a lot, and I do save those files on waynsnap, but I often have trouble accessing it from home, so when I know I’m going to need a file in the evening or on the weekend I usually email it to myself.  If I don’t remember to do that, however, I end up having to go into school to work.  Google docs will make it so easy to work from home - yippee!

I’d also like to use a blog to post book reviews for students.  Yes Page, I did say that after last year’s workshop on blogs, but I’m embarrassed to say I never followed up.  It’s now one of my goals for the coming year, and I feel much more confident about it now.

Well, I must say, I was impressed with the updated school web page, and will be using more features for organization, informing student, and posting photos.

I also really think Google Docs. is going to be helpful for middle school.  So, I’ll be teaching kids how to use that for writing assignments.

I have already taken to iGoogle page and check it regularly.  I like to check things all in one place.

Blogs???? I’m not a big blog reader.  I get a little annoyed with them.  Professional blogs - maybe.

I was impressed with many of the sites and ways to use the internet.  It is crazy how interconnected it all can be.  However, I find myself not interested in some of the applications or they are just not something I need.   I was also not able to come up with a reasonable use for some of the applications.  Some subject matter lends itself better to the imove, and the like.  But I’ll keep thinking about it.  For now I’ll stick with what is manageable.

I’m planning to use the class page along the lines that Alice did. I’m teaching an elective on the Cuban Revolution and thought it would be a good way to get discussion going before class and then we can build on it during class. I’ll start the discussion with a question or questions related to the theme of the day’s readings and let the students take it from there. I’m a bit nervous about it and will need to stay flexible and build on the parts that are going well and make adjustments to the parts that are not. I’m looking forward to it and am open to any and all advice and suggestions anyone has. Thanks.

So, aside from Facebook fun and iGoogle apps and other great time-wasters…

First, I think I’ll try to use our Waynflete Class page a lot more (er…some). It just seems like the logical place for newsletters and info for parents, as well as pics and video of kids in action. Why send parents and faculty to some other wiki page when we have our own secure, tidy one-stop-shopping, right? This could save some paper too. Will have to check on those kids whose parents didn’t agree to use photos, but if it’s in-house that should be ok I think. I’m pretty excited to use what I learned about iMovie (Thanks Ray!) and put together some flashy documentation too. Are there any space limitations when we get into pics, video, etc.? Will we need to remove older stuff before adding new? Maybe somebody can refresh my memory. (Thanks, Page!)

“Waynflete Website - Class Pages

Every class has a webpage that is accessible to the teacher, students, and the students’ parents. It’s template, not very pretty, but very easy to use.

Content that you can include -

• Syllabus/Expectations
• Homework
• Photos
• Links (live/clickable)
• Upload Word, Excel, Powerpoint, movies, mp3

Access it through http://www.waynflete.org/podium/“

I’ll also use some of my advanced Google search skills (Thanks Emily!) in researching aspects of our new ecoliteracy effort in K-1. Also some of the educational blog sites may help us connect with other teachers doing ecology with younger kids.

Thanks again,

Jeff

Looks like I’m the first one in the summer group to post… here it goes!

During my first year of teaching, way back in ‘87, there was a small box (with an apple on it!) available in the teacher’s room. I had only used typewriters and - what I thought was the latest technology- word processors. Being the organized type, I loved this little machine that could save every quiz, test and comment I wrote, but I had no idea how fast the technology would advance. I had always loved gadgets - and this one seemed so useful - so I embraced it and managed to stay (fairly) up-to-speed with the changes over the years. I became very interested in teaching Spanish using technology in the early nineties and met a “techie” who loved languages (and macs!). He was an enthusiastic teacher who invited me to work with him to teach others how to use some really cool templates that helped FL teachers save time and self design lessons. I also experimented on my own with HyperCard (now totally outdated-it was kind of like PowerPoint, but you got to do all of the scripting yourself-really fun!) designing and sharing lessons with students and FL teachers on the East Coast. Later, I was lucky enough to have access to a FL teacher’s dream language lab (we had our own tech person to help us create lessons and manage the space-it was awesome!). I have learned that young students have no fear and that they are very quick to manipulate the latest technology; they often help me navigate (the more complicated or maybe not so complicated) and we learn together. However, in embracing the use of technology in the classroom, I have also felt so overwhelmed by the enormous amount of stuff out there and often frustrated when my hard work and creativity become outdated by the lightning speed at which technology moves forward; yesterday’s shiny new instructional tool can become tomorrow’s dull dinosaur way too quickly! I have also had major concerns about the amount of time it takes not only to learn, but to become an expert in the technology I am trying to use. I still ask myself every time I am incorporating the latest in FL software/shareware, “what can this do that I am not already doing, and how much time will it take to learn/implement?” Here are three important lessons I have learned about technology in the FL classroom: a. there is a lot of very cool stuff out there, I cannot possibly use it all, so I find one or two sites or useful pieces of software/shareware each year and I learn to use them well (this way I can feel comfortable using them as a tool and share them with students and teachers), b. technology is a tool - it does not replace me or other traditional methods - it can be a (very) useful supplement, and c. network with others and talk about how and why you are using the technology in your classrooms (departments, fiends and colleagues, list-serves, etc…).

Next year, my goal in the classroom is to try to use the new ceiling mounted projector and screen efficiently to do podcasting with Notes in Spanish (excellent oral/aural practice!) , show culturally relevant films, share student/teacher made imovies and powerpoint presentations, and navigate our web based pages (Quizlet.com and Quia.com). After taking this summer’s workshops, next year I would like to learn to use wikispaces to do a class project. I also like the idea of journaling in Spanish on wordpress.com. Will I find the time to incorporate this into the curriculum? I will try, but my first goal will be to use what I already have more efficiently!

I thought I would share a PowerPoint project the Spanish 8 class did in May. It was a first for me and for them, but it turned ok. Please take a look and let me know what you might do differently. Thanks!

México- Spanihs 8 - 2008

Yeah.  Stupid pun.

Not everything technological is necessarily good or evil.  Some are just, well, ridiculous.

I have enjoyed using blogs this year in my classes and also hated it.  I used to make students email me their drafts for the autobiography project, but this year I had them hand them in to me in paper form.  It was a relief for them (and for me).  I love being able to edit text on screen, but there was something so great about having the paper and talking about the paper and never once going to a computer.  The kids were calmer, I was calmer, and I never had to reboot anything.

Maybe I will move to a cabin in the woods and eat off the land…

As long as I can bring my iPod.

I just completed a new project for seminar- working with a RAPS student to design a student-led online safety class as a final chapter in the sexuality education curriculum.  It was fascinating…the student teacher wrote an online cyber-bullying conversation between two screen names.  The students then identified all the potential red flags in the conversation and decision points where the students made unsafe or risky communication decisions.  Students shared many stories and lessons learned about risks to avoid in on-line conversations.  I found it was an interesting way to engage conversation between students with a wide variety of online comfort levels.  We also watched the online video about Facebook’s licensing agreement which prompted some students to contemplate shutting down their accounts while others engaged the social cost/benefit analysis of using the site.  Overall, I came away with the realization that we cannot make assumptions about what students know pertaining to risks/etiquette/ strategy of using technological communication.  Engaging them in discussions of tools they actually use (e.g. Facebook) allowed for a more nuanced conversation that hopefully prompted another level of “filter” to develop when it comes to smart use of technology.

Look at the www.beatbullying.org website, developed in the UK to confront the issue of bullying, be it cyber or otherwise.   Beatbullying chief executive Emma-Jane Cross says calls for sites such as YouTube to be shut down are as intelligent as calls for schools to be closed because of bullying. The organization, a non-profit, seeks to offer specific strategies for adults and children as they deal with the international problem of bullying.

Here is an excerpt from their webpage:

What we do

We provide children and young people and professionals those all important opportunities to make positive and lasting changes to their lives and outlook, in particular, those so deeply affected by bullying that they can barely face going to school that next morning. We work tirelessly to affect that attitudinal change in those that bully, working with them on taking responsibility and a sense of ownership over their actions, building those foundations for change and improvement in chances and opportunities.

We have recruited talented and dedicated people along the way and have been evolving the programmes we are able to offer, ranging from music as a tool to beat bullying, community cohesion and interfaith bullying, to sport and migrating mentoring online, in response to need and in close consultation with our stakeholders.

Beatbullying ensures that the portfolio of programmes on offer, assist whole communities and work seamlessly across local authorities by embedding and sustaining the work, building strong local, regional and national partnerships along the way.

You can expect to find in all of our programmes, the following crucial ingredients:

1. Partnership building across communities, including schools, community groups, local businesses, library services, health and other providers of crucial children’s services and intervention programmes
2. Engaging with the whole school and ensuring we are able to assess the needs in partnership with a school, of their student population.
3. The Programme: Training of the young people begins by building the following skills:

Peer Listening
Peer Mentoring
BB Cybermentoring   
BB Peer Activism

1. Whole school engagement and disseminating the work widely and effectively
2. Sustaining the programme, offline and online, and working across communities to make sure this happens

Teachers who co-opt Web tools for class have the best of both worlds.

from the May 13, 2008 edition, Christian Science Monitor

Boston - Parents who have struggled to tear a teenager away from Facebook or detach one from texting know that teens increasingly communicate through writing. But how can educators help students carry that motivation for writing from a social world into motivation for writing that will serve them in the classroom? The answer is for teachers to venture into the digital world of “screenagers” and find productive ways to bring social media into the classroom.

The potential of bridging these realms is supported by a new report on teens, technology, and writing by the Pew Internet & American Life Project and the College Board. Researchers found that informal writing is an integral part of youth culture: 85 percent of teens communicate through digital writing. Teenagers also overwhelmingly understand the importance of good writing: 86 percent of teens consider formal writing skills essential to future success.

What’s exciting is that many teachers have already begun to venture to the far shore in order to build bridges with their students. They are using interactive Web tools such as blogs, podcasts, and wikis in an attempt to mirror the online social networks of youth culture. These teachers are finding that students respond enthusiastically to the opportunity to collaborate, the challenge of publishing for an audience, and the chance to contribute to a learning community, rather than just write for a teacher’s binder. (The website Edublogawards.com showcases the best of these learning environments.)

For example, I’ve had great success occasionally using instant message conversations as a critical inquiry tool in the classroom. My students love the chance to use their social milieu as a space for learning.

Imagine 20 students in invisible groups of three, all silently, furiously typing and reading, immersed in conversations about the dialogues of Socrates or the teachings of Confucius. That classroom time is incredibly intellectually productive: all 20 students are simultaneously sharpening their arguments, supporting them with evidence, and questioning their colleagues.

My students know that they must practice these analytical conversation skills, which are easily transferred to the realm of formal writing, since I’ll be reading and grading a copy of their transcript.

Students who use interactive Web tools in the classroom learn that certain features of effective communication transcend media. Strong arguments; compelling evidence; and clear, concise language are prominent features of analytical writing on the Lincoln-Douglas debates, in those oral debates themselves, or on a blog post persuading friends to support a current presidential candidate.

It would be nice if all students wrote essays in their spare time, but Pew tells us that only 8 percent do. Nearly all of them, however, use text and instant messaging, so if the far shore turns out to be a chat room, then we should start teaching critical thinking skills in chat rooms.

One of the remarkable findings of the Pew Internet research is that intellectual stereotypes based on race and class do not hold up under scrutiny. Black and Hispanic teens are more likely than their white peers to write outside school, and 47 percent of black teens keep a journal.

Over half of teenagers from all races and income levels have social networking profiles, like on MySpace or Facebook. This flourishing of creativity and expressiveness should be harnessed in all schools.

Unfortunately, equity in MySpace is not the same as equity in digital educational environments guided by adult educators, and anecdotal evidence suggests that online learning networks are far more common in affluent, white, suburban schools than in hypersegregated, urban schools. Closing the digital divide is not just a matter of plugging in classrooms, but of providing teachers in low-resource schools with the training, prep time, and support to nurture this blossoming of student writing through online learning communities.

Our student bloggers and digital writers of all backgrounds are part of a journaling culture which America has not seen since the great age of diarists during the Transcendental movement, when Thoreau and Emerson recorded their daily lives for eventual public consumption.

Failure to harness that potential energy would prove a terrible misstep at this junction in American education. As educators, we face two choices. We can scorn youth for their emoticons (☺), condemn their abbreviations (Th. Jefferson would have disapproved), and lament the time students spend writing in ways adults do not understand. Or, we can embrace the writing that students do every day, help them learn to use their social networking tools to create learning networks, and ultimately show them how the best elements of their informal communication can lead them to success in their formal writing.

My experience, bolstered by the Pew report, suggests that the most productive option is to listen to our teenagers, bridge the gap between their social and academic worlds, and choose the latter.

Justin Reich is a doctoral student at the Harvard Graduate School of Education and a codirector of the Center for Teaching History with Technology.

As we continue to make greater use of the class web pages - and I love being able to  post class discussions and assignments - I am concerned that if we become like the schools noted below, we will lose the “special relationship” that we currently enjoy among students, parents, faculty, and advisors:

New York Times
May 4, 2008
I Know What You Did Last Math Class
By JAN HOFFMAN

ON school days at 2 p.m., Nicole Dobbins walks into her home office in Alpharetta, Ga., logs on to ParentConnect, and reads updated reports on her three children. Then she rushes up the block to meet the fourth and sixth graders’ buses.

But in the thump and tumble of backpacks and the gobbling of snacks, Mrs. Dobbins refrains from the traditional after-school interrogation: Did you cut math class? What did you get on your language arts test?

Thanks to ParentConnect, she already knows the answers. And her children know she knows. So she cuts to the chase: “Tell me about this grade,” she will say.

When her ninth grader gets home at 6 p.m., there may well be ParentConnect printouts on his bedroom desk with poor grades highlighted in yellow by his mother. She will expect an explanation. He will be braced for a punishment.

“He knows I’m going to look at ParentConnect every day and we will address it,” Mrs. Dobbins said.

A profusion of online programs that can track a student’s daily progress, including class attendance, missed assignments and grades on homework, quizzes and tests, is changing the nature of communication between parents and children, families and teachers. With names like Edline, ParentConnect, Pinnacle Internet Viewer and PowerSchool, the software is used by thousands of schools, kindergarten through 12th grade. PowerSchool alone is used by 10,100 schools in 49 states.

Although a few programs have been available for a decade, schools have been using them more in recent years as federal reporting requirements have expanded and home computers have become more common. Citing studies showing that parental involvement can have a positive effect on a child’s academic performance, educators praise the programs’ capacity to engage parents.

In rural, urban and suburban districts, they have become a new fact of life for thousands of families. At best, the programs can be the Internet’s bright light into the bottomless backpack, an antidote for freshman forgetfulness, an early warning system and a lie detector.

But sometimes there is collateral damage: exacerbated stress about daily grades and increased family tension.

“The good is very good,” said Nancy Larsen, headmaster of Fairfield Ludlowe High School in Connecticut, which uses Edline. “And the bad can become very ugly.”

At an age when teenagers increasingly want to manage their own lives, many parents use these programs to tighten the grip. College admission is so devastatingly competitive, parents say, they feel compelled to check online grades frequently. Parents hope to transform even modest dips before a child’s record is irrevocably scarred.

“I tell my son, ‘What you do as a freshman will matter to you as a senior,’ ” Mrs. Dobbins said. “ ‘It will haunt you or applaud you.’ ”

Depending on the software, parents can check pending assignments; incomplete assignments; whether a child has been late to class; discipline notices; and grades on homework, quizzes and tests as soon as they are posted. They can also receive e-mail alerts on their cellphones.

With some programs, not only is a student’s grade recalculated with every quiz, but parents can monitor the daily fluctuations of their child’s class ranking. The availability of so much up-to-the-minute information about a naturally evasive teenager can be intoxicating: one Kansas parent compared watching PowerSchool to tracking the stock market.

Kathleen DeBuys, a mother of four in Roswell, Ga., used to check her e-mail first thing in the morning: the ParentConnect alerts would fly in by 6 a.m. The subject line might read, “Claire has received a failing grade. …”

“And I’d freak out,” said Mrs. DeBuys, speaking of her oldest child, then a high school freshman. “I’d be waking her up, shouting: ‘Claire! What did you fail? What is wrong with you?’ She’d pull the pillow over her head and say, ‘Leave me alone!’ ”

Usually the explanation was benign: there was an inputting error, or Claire had missed the class because she had been sick or pulled out for a gifted-and-talented program. But the family’s morning was already flayed.

“It was horrible,” Mrs. DeBuys said.

Many students, in fact, like the programs, which let them monitor their records. Their biggest complaint is their parents’ unfettered access. “I don’t think kids have privacy,” said Emily Tarantino, 13, a middle-school student from Farmingdale, N.Y. “It’s not like anyone asked our opinion before they gave parents the passwords.”

In thousands of Facebook postings about the programs, teenagers bitterly denounce parental access as snooping. Emily Cochran, 18, a Pittsburgh senior, writes on Facebook about Edline, “It’s like having our parents or guardians stand over us and watch us all day at school, waiting for us to slip up.”

When teachers post scores before they return tests, parents may even see the grade before the students. On Facebook, in typical Internet shorthand, a teenager writes: “I walk into my house and I don’t even get a ‘hello son, howd your day go?’ I get yelled at bcuz I failed a test.”

Paradoxically, many parents who regularly check their children’s grades online fondly recall that during their own adolescence, subterfuge was a given. “I’ll admit it,” said Chris Tarantino, Emily’s mother. “I got satisfaction in fooling my parents.”

Programs like Edline do away with that sly pleasure. But Mrs. Tarantino, a PowerSchool fan, said the stakes had changed drastically. Academic pressure a generation ago was not nearly as all-consuming.

It is difficult to demonstrate conclusively what impact these programs have on school performance, because of all the variables. Anecdotally, principals report that the programs have motivated otherwise hard-to-reach parents and students. They have helped some middle-school boys, in particular, become better organized.

“Edline opens up communication between parents and teachers,” said Ron Jones, the principal at Huth Middle School, which has a 90 percent minority student population, in Matteson, Ill., a middle-class Chicago suburb. “It helps keep the children minding their p’s and q’s.”

The software can certainly be a boon to working parents. And divorced parents can log on without having to contact each other. A few years ago, India Harris, then a single mother and an Army staff sergeant from Omaha, monitored her son’s math grades while on duty in Iraq, and got him extra help.

In Noblesville, Ind., after a survey indicated that parents felt sufficiently informed by PowerSchool and subsequent e-mail exchanges with teachers, the middle-school principal canceled parent-teacher conferences this spring and gave the time back to classes.

Districts have different rules about who has access to which information. Parents then decide how much they want to know. Katie Mazzuckelli, a mother of twin seventh graders in Alpharetta, Ga., checks ParentConnect daily. “There are two types of parents,” she said. “They either do what I do and embrace it, or they say: ‘They’re in middle school and beyond, and they need to be independent. This is an invasion of their privacy.’ ”

Mrs. Dobbins of Alpharetta, a comfortable Atlanta suburb, checks ParentConnect even on weekends. Although there is only modest data on her fourth grader, she goes through the exercise to prepare the child for the scrutiny that her older children receive. She asks the sixth grader close questions about coming assignments.

And she reminds her high school freshman, whom she describes as a bright student with a tendency to coast, “ ‘My personal philosophy is that you need to be on your own, but if you fail to do your job, I will know about it,’ ” Mrs. Dobbins said.

When he does not turn in his homework, she makes sure it is done that night even if it is too late to get credit for it. “And through ParentConnect,” she said, “I’ll e-mail the teacher, ‘Please let me know if you don’t get it within the next day because that’s part of his punishment.’ ”

MRS. DOBBINS is unapologetic about her monitoring of her children’s schoolwork. “I know,” she said, “I’m the mom with big horns. But it’s been a fabulous parenting tool. I think every school should implement it, especially in high school, when kids don’t talk to parents and parents can’t talk to each teacher.”

The software, some educators say, can be misused as a surrogate for meaningful connection between families and schools. “Some teachers love it because it takes the burden of communication off them,” said Diana Brown, a high school English literature teacher in Georgia who still sends home the occasional handwritten note. “Their attitude is: ‘The parents should know what the kid’s grade is. It’s not my job to contact them.’ ”

Many parents may be confused by the complexity of scoring. Some bemoan that few teachers include comments or context. “There’s nothing telling you that your kid loves the class but isn’t a good test taker,” said Mary Kay Flett, a mother in Roswell, Ga.

Many districts do not educate parents about how to use the programs in a measured, judicious fashion with their children. That lapse is implicit in the angry, humorous and poignant Facebook postings. “My dad checks powerschool like 3 or 4 times a day,” writes one teenager. “Yeah he even came to my school once to tell me about it.”

From another teenager: “Before, the screaming and disappointment only had to be endured four times a year. Now it can happen every night.”

And this: “ive been grounded twice for the same grade … once when my mom found it on edline and again when I actually got the grade a week later.”

Some parents refuse to use the software, but many students check their grades to the point of obsession. Denise Pope, a Stanford lecturer who consults with secondary schools, worries that these programs can aggravate student anxiety. “When the focus is on the grade so much, you’re saying to kids, ‘It’s more important to get the grade, by hook or by crook, than learn the material,’ ” she said. “And that leads to the rise in rampant cheating.”

Some school districts are experimenting with restricting what information can be seen by parents of high school students. Other districts only post grades three weeks before the end of a marking period, to give students time to turn things around.

For many districts, the grade and attendance software is but a thread in a tapestry of programs, both online and off, to engage students as well as parents. Many teachers provide lively, interactive Web sites and online hours for help with homework.

The success of the online grading programs also depends on the willingness of teachers to update them accurately and to devote time to follow-up e-mail messages. “I’ve had teachers e-mail me, ‘There’s a test coming up, make sure they study certain things, make sure they have breakfast,’ ” Mrs. Tarantino said.

“Family involvement is not about serving parents,” said Joyce Epstein, director of the National Network of Partnership Schools. “It’s about mobilizing all the resources that support student success. These technologies can hurt or help, depending on how they are done. But the interpersonal connections of teachers, parents, students and counselors really are necessary to go beyond the impersonal technologies.”

One challenge she raises is equity. “Some parents do not have access to high-tech services,” said Dr. Epstein, a professor at Johns Hopkins. “Saying that those parents can use the computers at a local library is not equitable.”

These days, Mrs. DeBuys, the mother of Claire, now a graduating senior in Roswell, calls herself a “reformed ParentConnect parent.”

It took her several years to figure out how best to use the program. “You have to connect to it on your terms,” she said.

It can be hard to resist, she said. “It speaks to all your neuroses as a parent, all this need to control, that pressure to make sure everything is perfect,” she said. “How are these kids going to learn to be responsible adults?”

She has since turned off the reminders and the alerts. But she still checks ParentConnect a few times a week. To her freshman son she may say, “ ‘I notice you have three zeros for homework grades, so you need to talk to your teacher.’ ”

She laughed. “And in a perfect world, ” she added, “he would.”