Technology and Hope

We all struggle at times, whether it's work, family, school, friends, relationships, money, or some unholy combination of them and everyone has their own way of coping with the stress and the chaos.  Some are more healthy than others, and today I want to talk about one of the ways I am reminded of all the awesome things the world has in store for me and others, even when I'm struggling.

I like to research cool things about space, and everything to do with it.  It's a mind boggling concept, that we are an insignificantly small bag of molecules on a large rock orbiting a star that is one of about 400 billion stars in our galaxy out of about 500 billion other galaxies.  We are also the only thing on the planet with the cognitive ability to comprehend those numbers.  Our mental complexity is what enables us to think about our own insignificance, which I for one find humorous.

Anyway, space is cool, and I'll hurry up and get to the thing I found out about this week that has made me excited about the future.  Ion engines exist, and have been used on spacecraft.

Now you may be thinking, big whoop.  So they came up with some fancy new engine, they are doing stuff like that all the time.  If this is the case, you may need to hand in any sci-fi cred you claim to possess, because ion engines are one of the core pieces of sci-fi spaceships.

For example the TIE fighter from Star Wars.  If you weren't already aware, TIE stands for Twin Ion Engine.

So you may say that it's just some new crazy engine that is only useful for silly space stuff, but to me, it means we are one step closer to exploring the galaxy, and one step closer to me being able to fly a TIE fighter in space.

Not Getting Caught Up in Tech

I want to jot down a short reflection on a recent project that reminded me of something.

This week was an eventful one for my students and me, we completed our first exhibition together and it was a pretty big success.  The project itself was something that my cooperating teacher had done in years past and I was pretty nervous about the whole thing.  One of the main reasons I was nervous was due to its almost completely technology-less format.  The students would be getting large player's guides that resembled a page of worksheets, using physical materials throughout the project and exhibition, and overall an absence of technology that left me feeling a bit exposed.

There were a few technology bits, I shared resources and materials with the students via Drive and they had to do some research using class computers but it was quite a bit less than I was used to.

Ultimately the success of the project was an abrupt reminder that despite the awesome and rapidly expanding abilities of technology it is merely one medium through which students can learn, not an all important panacea for all the difficulties teachers are faced with.

Also, how much I missed the convenience that advances in technology have afforded me and how much I appreciate all the work my own teachers did without it.

Not time to throw out the computer yet.

A Reflection on a Michael Welsh TED Talk

Learning in New Media Environments



Mike starts off talking about his experience in a remote village in Indonesia that had little contact with the outside world, and the substantial changes that occurred when a new media was introduced.  From here he launches into the main point of his argument that the current structure of university classrooms breeds common issues that teach students to ask the wrong questions.  His goal is to move students from learning discrete content knowledge to learning skills that are usable across subjects and media and gives a few examples of how he has used media to move in that direction, focusing on a project that involves student making simulations of world history and trying to solve the problems that come up.  Students are rarely completely successful at the project but they leave the class with lots of the right questions.

It's an interesting video to watch as someone who is still taking university courses.  On the one hand I have lead a rather accomplished academic career and consider myself a "knowledge-able" learner as he terms it, and I achieved this is the same system he is critiquing.  His talk definitely made me think about how much more entertaining and fulfilling the path could have been should I have had a majority of the instruction from teachers like him.  The courses I am currently in are a blend of the old and the new models, and both still seem to serve the students well for their intended purposes.

Since I am in a graduate school of education with a well respected staff, I can assume that the majority of professors have seen this video or one like it that espouses the same educational ideals.  Assuming that they all agree that the old model needs fixing, the fact that not all of them have shifted away from it speaks to the difficulty of the task.  Either due to some innate difficulty or that we have been steeped for so long in the old model, or some hybrid of the two, it is apparent that is not a proverbial flick of the switch.

For my own teaching this means that I must reflect purposefully on all my methods and how they are helping students become "knowledge-able" and guiding them towards the right kinds of questions.

A Reflection on “Why You Need to Fail” by Derek Sivers

This was an interesting video to watch with a critical eye.  There is a lot of common sense advice embedded in this video, mixed with a variety of analogies that are at times amusing.  His three main responses to his title are:  if you’re not failing you’re not learning, growth mindset, and experiments.  

The first section covers the ideas of “no pain no gain” and muscle building, where the investment in or cost of learning is measured by the amount of failed or imperfect attempts.  His central ideas here are that mistakes teach better than preparation and doing what you know is fun, but it doesn’t improve you.  

The second section covers what he calls a growth mindset as opposed to a fixed mindset, which have been linked to an educational distinction in students, a mastery oriented student (growth) or a goal oriented student (fixed).  The mastery oriented student completes tasks with the idea of mastering the content or skills while the goal oriented student completes tasks for the sake of a goal, often a grade.  Mastery oriented students are driven by intrinsic motivation, ideal for learning, and goal oriented students are driven by extrinsic motivation, less ideal.  Mr. Sivers discusses how students who are praised for their hard work tend towards a growth mindset and those who are praised for their innate talent tend towards a fixed mindset.  

The third section discusses the value of experiments and how when presented with a choice we have a selection of options to choose from, and argues that because we choose one option we are choosing to experiment with the results of that choice.  He follows this with the reasoning that since everything is an experiment, there are no failures (would be interesting to apply this philosophy to grading).

This video is an excellent one to watch, especially for teachers.  Not only does it make some great points about how to praise students but it’s a great reminder as to why teaching is a reiterative process.  Teachers can be effective and still “fail”, but that’s not the point, the point is that we learn from each failure  and move on to improving it or finding something better.

Which is a great point to segue into my disagreements with the video.  First and foremost his use of the word “fail.”  The word has a finality built into its meaning that does an injustice to the important topic being discussed in the video.  Failure is an absolute state, either one has failed or one has not, and as I mentioned above one can try at the same thing and improve it every single time.  This does not make each and every non-optimal attempt a failure, because they are not absolute states of failure.  A more accurate title would be “Why You Need to Make Mistakes.”  Mistakes are the key, and one can make mistakes without failing, one can learn from mistakes and seek to eliminate them, which is an important part of the experimental process he mentions.  Experimentation, above all else, is an iterative process and a key component of effective teaching.  While failure certainly includes mistakes, it is not a necessary part of learning, and can be very detrimental.  Instead it serves one better to aim to do as well as possible and make note of mistakes, and then seek to fix them.

Publishing Research Online

So this isn't directly about using ed tech in the classroom but it's been on my mind, so I'm going to talk it out. For our Action Research we are publishing it on a website, specifically our weebly site that we created as part of our program earlier in the year.

This poses an interesting dilemma for me because I have a rather in depth knowledge of how most people browse the internet and I can say with a fair amount of certainty that one of the most common traits of the average internet browser is a desire for small pieces of digestible content that they can get through relatively quickly.  As one would imagine this is not easily compatible with the idea of publishing research online, which is by nature rather lengthy and involved.


Now I've brainstormed various methods to combat this, chunking information into smaller pieces, presenting as much data as I can in a visual format, keeping all the less-important parts brief to allow room for expanding on the more important parts, and in general doing whatever I can to cater to the internet browsing patterns of the average person.

I don't have a resolution for this issue yet, but perhaps it's a problem someone else has successfully solved.

Integrating Technology Into Projects

My students recently completed a project called "Selling Science."  They had a lot of fun with the interdisciplinary part, they researched scientific issues or phenomenon in Chemistry and created chemistry demos to showcase their issue.  In Humanities they created podcasts that showcased the issue and found experts in fields related to their topic to interview for sound bytes.  While they weren't too thrilled with the extensive revision process and vetting of scripts, they were intent on doing well in the NPR student competition they were submitting their podcasts to.  Exhibition was a success for the most part, and they incorporated technology through a projector displaying the voting results for best podcasts, and parents and visitors could vote through PollEverywhere and everyone got to see the competition for votes.

However I was somewhat concerned that the students were sending off their podcasts to NPR and likely never interact with them again.  So I helped them and my cooperating teacher create a QR code sheet that could be emailed out to the school and displayed on their Digital Portfolios to at the very least archive their efforts for whatever future use they may have for it but hopefully create a real audience and inspire other teachers to incorporate similar practices in their teaching.

PLN Reflection

A short reflection on my developing educational technology and networking skills.

Into the Wild

I spent the last two weeks almost completely removed from technology, first on a week long "Immersion Week" trip with two other teachers and thirty students to Catalina Island and then ten days up in the Yosemite area hiking and gallivanting in the wilderness.  It was interesting to have so little access to technology for such an extended period, as the less than 24 hours I had between the two trips allowed me little more than a brief glance at the daunting list of emails piling up.

One of the local cats at our camping area in Catalina was particularly fond of me.













However, as you are all here to read about the educational technology aspects of my career in education I'll focus on what I did after the trips that I'm a little proud of.  The main technology present on the Catalina trip were cameras, and the students spent a lot of time and effort happily clicking away at everything from inane rocks to memorable shots of breeding sharks and group photos.  But since everyone was using their own (sometimes two of their own, camera and phone) I was a little bummed that people might be in awesome pictures that they would never see and that in general I wished everyone had access to everyone else's photos from the trip to help us all remember the awesome time we had.

My solution was to make a group image hosting page for all of our students, myself, the other teachers, and even some of the employees who had taken pictures to upload all of the pictures to.  Some of the students had first suggested a Facebook page, but that had several issues with it: it's public*, it often downgrades the quality of the original pictures, some students might not use Facebook, and I and the other teachers did not want students finding us on the site.  So instead I used http://imgur.com/ to make a private uploading site for everyone to put the pictures on.  It's worked out quite well, there are several hundred pictures and counting on our page.

I picked imgur because of how easy it is to use.  The process for making the group page was simple, create a new account that uses a username and password for the group, set the account to private, and then email the username and password to everyone you want to have the ability to upload pictures.  It's not perfect however, since everyone has the username and password they have all the abilities to create mischief which that entails, but for this group of students it worked out well.

Pre-Existing Tech Knowledge

I have spent a fair amount of time mastering technology skills that are not necessarily related to education, but I figured I'd share what I already know as much of it improves the general internet users quality of life.

This blog will focus on internet browser extensions, specifically for Google Chrome though many (or their equivalents) can be found for the other browsers.

HoverZoom
The best Chrome extension ever.  All those pictures that constantly need to be opened?  Now you can just hover over the link or thumbnail with your cursor and the image pops up to full size on your screen.

YouTube Options
For the internet user who uses YouTube for a variety of things, including showing videos to students, this extension offers a broad variety of options such as disabling comments, disabling autoplay, and in general disabling a bunch of other annoying aspects of YouTube as well as other customization options.

Readability
This extension lets you reformat online articles and other things in a much simpler format as well as letting you save them for reading at a further date.  This one I have used for teaching, as it is a great first step to take when preparing an online article for students.

Visitors and Residents

The central idea in the video we watched was this dichotomy of people, residents who use the internet with a comfort level that allow them to approach current and new content at a higher level than visitors who are at a point where they value privacy and security in ways that limit their usage of online tools such as social media.

The video made some interesting points regarding both sides, some that I agreed with and some that I didn't. Some ideas that I agreed with are the communal aspect of residents and their ability to interact with others in an online format as well as the characterization of visitors as those who approach technology neither unable nor unwilling to use technology but instead with a different mindset about how and why to use it.  One of my main issues with the video was that it seemed to treat the internet and all of its various areas and tools as a single level of difficulty for residents to incorporate at will into their available skill sets.  I consider myself a resident in this divide and there are very many areas of the internet I am comfortable using to their full extent, capitalizing on educational tools and personal tools offered by various services and companies.  However there are many others that due to a number of factors such as design flaws, layout differences, unusual user interfaces, quality of use issues, and more become difficult to incorporate into my online tool set.

Overall the video makes some excellent points and sets up a new way of looking at those who use the internet and other technology not as those with skills and those without, but instead differentiates them by their mindset and approach to using those tools.  It's description of the two beyond this point falls short of a convincing argument however, and oversimplifies the qualities of these two groups.

What am I passionate about?

Where to begin?  Perhaps a simpler approach would be to ask "What am I not passionate about?"  A much shorter list to be sure.  In fact my students have dubbed my superhero identity as "Willipedia" which I hope is a fond acknowledgement of idiosyncrasies revolving around my thirst for knowledge rather than a mocking salute.  The issue remains however, that even within the realm of education I am passionate about a great many things.

On to the task of narrowing it down.  Technology?  History?  Innovative teaching methods?  All of these are near and dear to my heart, as are many others.  Perhaps they can be unified in some way, a central theme or greater goal that encompasses all of these methods and interests.  Focusing on my first and foremost passion, history, I look to what I hope to do with the subject.  Since coaching a love of history into each and every student is beyond even my ability, my central goal is instead to teach every student how to use history to make sense of the world in which they live and to help create their own personal success.

An expansive and perhaps impossible goal, yet that does not make it any less important to aim for as an educator.  If I condense this goal into "I want my students to leave my classroom with new tools and new understandings of previous tools that will help them create their own success" it becomes somewhat more manageable, if still a bit nebulous.  One further revision leads to the goal "My students will leave my classroom with new and improved tools to create their own success." Aha!  I like it.  Now does it encompass all of my educational passions and interests?  Indeed I think it does, this is the central core of what I hope to do as a teacher.

Within this goal I can incorporate new material, new methods, and new technology with a focused point of helping my students develop physical and mental skills that will help them on whatever path they choose.

Communities of Practice

The theory behind Communities of Practice is that applying the apprentice learning style to a context in which the apprentice is not learning from only one master craftsman, but from a community of craftsmen who are at the same time learning from him and each other.  Instead of a traditional tiered approach in which one entity who is assumed to have mastered a set of skills teaches them to a person who has not mastered them, a community of practice learning format puts mastery out of reach, constantly improving as those who are attempting to reach it continue to improve.  Within this you get a network of support in which resources and learning flow freely between people on the same level, all working towards continual improvement with no final goal capping their potential.

The domain of this class and more broadly that of educators is that of the specific skill of teaching and the broader goal of global improvement through gradual change.  A more educated populace has been a marker of advanced civilization throughout history, and there is no such thing as a population that is too educated.  Therefore by committing ourselves to this domain we are committing ourselves to a group that has the goal of improvement, unlimited in area and potential.

The community becomes more specific, where indeed should and do educators interact communally to make progress towards the goals of the domain?  The answer more and more seems to be online, where ideas are less limited by the physical restrictions required of a highly demanding and time intensive career.  Twitter, blogs, video chat, online databases, and more are all tools that enable teachers to practice their skills within this community.  This practice allows them to use the resources and support within the network to get closer to the communal goal of the domain.

A Whole New Mind Part 1

1. What is L-Directed and R-Directed Thinking? Does my subject require more of one than the other? How could I try and reach a balance?

R-Directed Thinking is “simultaneous, metaphorical, aesthetic, contextual, and synthetic.”  L-Directed Thinking is “sequential, literal, functional, textual and analytic.”  As a single subject Humanities teacher parts of both these areas are covered in my classroom, though not evenly.  The areas I'll be covering in my classroom that require more L-Directed Thinking are reading in terms of the alphabetic principle, decoding and literal comprehension, and grammar.  The ones that require more R-Directed Thinking are Creative Writing; History; Social Studies; and Reading in terms of inferential and evaluative comprehension.  The balance is somewhat skewed in favor of R-directed thinking, but in the PBL curriculum I currently work in collaborative projects between subject areas are common, and I'm excited to explore joint projects with science and other subject area teachers to reinforce well-rounded thinking in my students.

2. How do Abundance, Asia, and Automation affect the dominance of L-Directed thinking in business and schools?

The three A's have a negative impact on L-Directed thinking by tilting the balance towards R-Directed thinking .  Due to Abundance, Asia, and Automation, L-Directed thinking is now not enough to get by on.  The abundance in society has created a higher standard for products that must face stiff competition from a variety of sources, which allows consumers to be pickier when choosing what to buy and forcing products to find new ways to outperform competition.  Asia refers to the ability of other countries, particularly in Asia, to produce knowledge based employees at a significantly lower cost of resources. These workers will now perform similarly to American workers for less pay, driving down the wages and worth of Americans in competing jobs.  Automation is the increasing mechanization and computerization of previously human-powered tasks, for which companies and industries no longer have to pay workers for, creating a lack of jobs in an skill area.

3. What is High Concept and High Touch. What is the impact of this on my teaching?

Abilities that require high levels of creativity are High Concept. Abilities that are centered in social adeptness and people skills are High Touch.  The High Touch abilities that are so commonly praised throughout the education sphere are important, but without complimentary High Concept skills my students will struggle in a rapidly evolving world that will require those skills for success.  Developing these skills is restricted in many ways by a traditional classroom which adheres to content standards and is chained to the results of standardized tests that do not test student understanding of these skills.  One of the greatest challenges and opportunities of my career in education will be how to teach skills such as these based within a content framework that is also important to my students.

4. What are the flaws of an education system that only values IQ? Is there also a role for EQ in education?

A major flaw in an education system that only values IQ is that it is testing and preparing students for a limited kind of success that not all students can achieve.  If we make the ultimate goal of our teaching to give students the tools to build a successful life of their own definition, we must first prepare them to be able to define their personal meaning of success.  If the only definition of success students are exposed to is one based on IQ, then we are limiting their ability to achieve it.  EQ is a start in broadening our definition of success, but it is only the beginning.  We must acknowledge and embrace all the various ways our students might achieve their personal success to help students realize all of the directions in which they can choose to be successful.