I might have the very best group of kids I have ever had in my life this year.  They are totally putting up with me trying to re-write my teaching book and figure out how to integrate technology into our lessons as we create, communicate, and collaborate with folks from around the world–and try to adjust to block scheduling.  What has really blown me away is how they have taken ownership of their blogs and simply become the best middle school bloggers in the world.  I can give then that award right?  I had them fill out a very simple survey made with a google form embedded into our wiki.  At this point in the year they probably have had 16-20 posts that were “official” class assignments.  What follows are the results from two questions from the first 25 responses so far–keep in mind they have had these blogs for just over two months:

I know, I know.  There is more to blogging than just the number of posts and the number of comments you get.  And I know that there is a group of kids who only do the minimum requirements on the or blogs….but still…

I also wished I had asked them to take out the comments from kids on our own team.  I bet that at least 75% of the comments they receive are from kids and adults from other states and countries.  I just checked and after I started blogging last October it took me 5 months to get a comment from someone other than my students.

As we move into our second quarter I had planned to start to be more critical of the writing on their blogs.  Try to push them to write a bit more, be a bit more insightful, and add a few things to each post to make them more engaging.  I do hesitate now after reflecting on some of their stats from the first quarter.  I feel as though in many ways, they are better bloggers than myself.  They certainly have more readers, more comments, and take the time to keep their blogs updated.  I am considering just hanging back and seeing what happens.  Even if nothing changes from now until the end of the year, I still think they are the best middle school bloggers in the world-do I want to mess with that?

“Don’t try to fix the students, fix ourselves first.  The good teacher makes the poor student good and the good student superior.  When our students fail, we, as teachers, too, have failed.”  ~ Marva Collins

About seven or eight years ago I stopped giving traditional tests. I used to be very good at giving tests. They used to last two days. One day for the short answer stuff and one day for the long answer stuff. I was very good at getting kids to remember the information they needed to know for the test. Then one year my district implemented a district-wide social studies test. I quickly realized while reviewing for the test at the end of the year that my kids did not remember many of the facts that they had been able to recite for all the previous tests. <<<Lightbulb>>> Ironically it was the mother of all tests that made me stop giving tests.

I am currently reading the book Disrupting Class by Clayton Christensen and read a paragraph that jarred that memory.

In the past, testing has been used to do two jobs for students, teachers, and administrators. The first has been to determine the extent to which students have mastered a body of material and are ready to progress…The conventional teacher-administrator examination doesn’t do the first job well. Regardless of whether students have mastered the material in a unit, they all move on. Teachers don’t find out what students actually learned until an exam is administered and graded, which tends to be some time after the unit of class is already complete. If students haven’t mastered all the material but know it well enough to get a passing grade, students must still move on. And even if they fail an exam, the students typically move on, because moving on is inherent in the model of monolithic instruction. This teacher-administered examination tells teachers and administrators only what percentage of the students has demonstrated mastery of what percentage of the material. The amount of time in which to learn the material is fixed, but the amount of learning varies significantly.

I know there are plenty of folks who will read this and I will never change your mind—but how about if you just stop for a second and consider the type of questions that you give. If your kids have to study for the test then they did not learn the material when you taught it, or they had it in short term memory, maybe even re-memorized it for the quiz, and then forgot it again. If they study it and try to remember it for the test they automatically put it into short-term memory and 72 hours later it begins to fade fast. So basically you are testing how well they can memorize and how long they can hang onto their short-term memory. If you really want to give a test, and you really want to see how much your kids will retain, and how well you did with your lesson plans, give them the test without anytime for them to prepare for it…or better yet…O’ you are not going to like this one…give them the test unannounced a month after you finish the unit. Wouldn’t that be the true test of how well the students are doing? How well you are doing? I have done it before and I can almost promise you it will change the way you teach, it will change the way you present information, it will change the structure of your lesson plans. When you see what they remember after a month and you match the info with the lesson in which it was presented, you end up designing more lessons like the one they retained the info from.

My students just finished letters to President-elect Obama.  We are actually going to put them in the mail and send them to Washington, DC.  This is our very first project that the kids are handing in on paper!  One letter that I started reading I honestly did not have high hopes for.  It was wrinkled.  It was addressed wrong.  It was one ginormous paragraph.  I almost handed it right back.  The issue that the student told Obama he should deal with first is education, specifically infusing technology into education.  I found myself reading sentences twice–because they were that good.  There were some sentences that I had to stop at the end of before going onto the next one because I needed to reflect on what she wrote. It was a great letter with a great point, but one sentence stood out in particular:

What is more important, knowing how many square miles in Canada, or knowing how to set-up a video conference with someone in Canada?

Kind of just made me stop and go hmmmmm.  She gets its.  Great job Katie!

“The nation’s foremost academic researchers on child online safety presented their research and answered questions over a luncheon panel on May 3, 2007.”

Here is one thing they said that about the connection between being online and their risk for being a victim from internet violence:

“Our research, actually looking at what puts kids at risk for receiving
the most serious kinds of sexual solicitation online, suggests that it’s
not giving out personal information that puts kid at risk. It’s not
having a blog or a personal website that does that either. What puts
kids in danger is being willing to talk about sex online with
strangers or having a pattern of multiple risky activities on the web
like going to sex sites and chat rooms, meeting lots of people there,
kind of behaving in what we call like an internet daredevil.”

The Congressional Internet Caucus Advisory Committee

I thought long and hard about who I voted for in the 2008 Presidential Election.  I am a social studies teacher and spent about three weeks on election activities so I knew quite a bit about the big two and more about third party candidates.  I was undecided right up until the night before the election when I made my choice.  I strutted into the town hall with my daughters at my side and with great enthusiasm filled out my ballot. Yep, that’s my ballot below–click on it for a better view.

I did an entire slide show of me going through the voting process to show my class.  They were VERY eager to find out who I was voting for.  I tried my best to remain unbiased in the weeks leading up to the election and told them I would reveal who I voted for the day after.  Within minutes of putting this image up, a student stated that it was too bad my vote didn’t count.  Yea, very funny wise guy.  Then I felt myself start sweating as I realized he was correct.  I even called the town registrar today who verified my students observation.  Two classes later another student pointed out that all my other votes probably didn’t count either.  I am not telling you why they don’t count, you’ll have to figure it out on your own.

Big ol’ smarty pants me with how many college degrees and years of teaching kids couldn’t even follow some simple directions on this O’ so important day.  Instead of an optical scanner, it might have as well been a shredder.

One thing I know for sure is that the next time a kid in my class forgets to follow the directions it sure won’t bother me.

If you are one of the few, proud, mighty might readers of Blogush you might recall that October was “Positive Posting” month for me, and I was able to jam out exactly 2, count them two, posts. It’s not that I didn’t try. I have been writing a post for about three weeks now based on my video for the Google Teacher Academy application that is being held in a few weeks at Google Headquarters in  New York City. After spending another twenty minutes or so on it, I decided to table it and just post my video—and why not all the questions and answers on the application too.

First the story behind the application—hey don’t skip to the questions and answers, it’s a good story. I was excited to find out through a Plurk that the Google Teacher Academy (GTA) was going to be held in New York City this year. I think there have only been six and so there are less than 300 Google Certified Teachers in the world! From what I read, and seeing who had been accepted in the past, I became a bit intimidated—there are some real rock stars that have gone through the academy. I put it off and put it off. Finally it was the night it was due and for some reason I decided to go for it. I decided to do the video first. Problem was, there was no time to storyboard, film, edited, etc, a classy movie. I also spent some time looking at other folks videos—geez, some teachers have access to some incredible software and equipment. I decided to go to the other extreme—make a video as simply as possible on using technology the opposite way that many people are using it. No on screen captions, no fancy quotes, no backing music, just my face, my voice, my words-oh, and I had to film it outside since it was impossible to ask two little kids to stay quiet for 60 seconds before bedtime!! My first full take was 62 seconds long—it can only be 60—so I slowly shaved a little bit off each end until it was 60 secs. No time for a second take! On to the questions. I pounded out some answers—grrrrr….not my best work, downloaded the video to youtube and shipped it off to google. Below is basically what I sent to GTA. I did change a few sentences in each section to make it more powerful once I cut and pasted to the application, but the gist of each answer remains.

Why should we select you to be a Google Certified Teacher? And what do you hope to get out of the Google Teacher Academy?

Someone once told me that if you plan on using technology in a lesson and the technology fails but the lesson can still continue, then you really haven’t fully integrated technology into the lesson. If we lost our internet connection our 8th grade Social Studies classes would not be able to continue as planned.   We are one of the heaviest users of blogs, wikis, podcasts, and other web 2.0 tools in the country. Almost every unit we do is in some way done in collaboration with a class somewhere in the world with web 2.0 tools.  The internet is the backbone of my classroom. Our biggest problem is that the tools we use are spread over many different sites and companies which lead to projects that become disorganized and lack depth.  Google Academy would give our creativity, collaboration, and passion a focus and depth that we have not been able to attain.

Describe one of your favorite teaching moments. What made it so special for you and your students?

It was last fall when our podcast team landed an interview with one of the leaders of an internet video site (a google competitor that will remain nameless!). Our school had just opened up our internet filter to allow us to communicate with the outside world with Skype. This one call knocked down our four walls. From that moment on, the kids stopped thinking that learning and information could only come from within our classroom. They used web 2.0 tools to create and collaborate with people from around the world. They started to use the web not just to get information, but to produce products for authentic audiences around the world.

Describe your role as a Professional Developer.

As a regular classroom teacher, my role as a Professional Developer is more of being the web 2.0 evangelist in my building. I try to speak to the benefits of integrating technology into the curriculum with any teacher that I am with, and have done formal presentations for both my team and curriculum area. I am also a mentor teacher and have either a student teacher or intern every semester. I find that in this 1:1 atmosphere professional development is truly meaningful. We don’t just talk about integrating technology into a lesson, but practice it, reflect together, and learn what the strengths and weaknesses of the lesson were, and try it again.

Describe an obstacle you encountered in your professional life and how you overcame it.

I am about as far from a traditional teacher as one can be. My staff thinks I am crazy doing authentic child centered Project Based Learning units that are infused with technology and are done in collaboration with schools across the world. I became professionally lonely and was growing stagnant as a teacher. There was no one I knew that I could learn from, no one to pass ideas by. After the recommendation of one of the teacher’s I was collaborating with I jumped into Twitter, then I began to seriously blog and read other’s blogs, and now I Plurk. My PLN has grown incredibly and now I have so many people to learn from. I can see how this might not necessarily be seen as a major obstacle, but a static teacher is a dead teacher, and I was on life support before I developed my PLN.

60 Second Video on “Learning and Motivation”