Obviously I have not been blogging here, but I have not disappeared. Since January 2014 I have been a Stanford FabLearn Fellow, and I have been contributing to the group blog here.
So as Super Awesome Sylvia says, go out there and make something. Or feel free to head over to the FabLearn Fellows blog and read about all the cool things we have been making and doing in the classroom.
Rachel has left for a new job, so in some ways the Castilleja 23 Things challenge is over, but #23 was to try something new, and I thought I would share some reflections on one new thing I did try this summer: Scratch. I have been impressed in the past with the project my 7th grade collegue does with her history class in Scratch. The students work in pairs to create an interactive exhibit on one of the European explorers, their voyages, and the artifacts they found. It is a great project. When the students get to me in 8th grade, they seem proud of their projects, but not particularly interested in doing more with Scratch. It is time for them to move on to something new, and in math they do some programing in Python.
I may join them for some of the Python lessons in Flex this year, so I thought I should know a little bit about Scratch. At the end of CMK, after I had finished my telegraph, I had some time so I played around building a game from a tutorial, and then starting to design my own new game. The tutorial was easy, the implementation of my own game design not so much. My idea was a presidential elections game, where the heads of the two candidates would fall from the top of the screen, and the goal would be to shoot the loser. Each correct shot would get a point. And I think I know how to do it, but I did not get far enough even to have a prototype few screens. What struck me is how much work goes into game creation before the point of writing the code. I needed small photos of each of the presidents (not hard, just time consuming), and of each of the losing candidates (very hard, and time consuming). And then I needed to figure out the best way to code it. It is still on my list of things to do, and I would like to be able to complete it at least for the 20th century (much easier to find images of the losing candidates).
I look at some of the games I play now and think about all the design work that went into the game before it would work. And I appreciate that work more.
21) Try out some digital workflow tools
It is perhaps not surprising that the problems of digital workflow has not really been solved, since the problems of paper workflow are still with us, and we have been using paper for a long time. I have been through different versions of solutions (del.icio.us anyone?) and I certainly remember the days when the worst part about upgrading a computer was losing my bookmarks file. So I tried out Pocket, and I think there is potential there, at least for saving things that I know I want to read, but I don’t want to keep for longer than that. I don’t yet have the habit of using it, but I have it on my ipad and my computer, and I will keep trying. I also need to develop the habit of going there and then deciding what to do with the links I put there. Sometimes I read them and delete, and other times I move them over to Pintrest (in the case of some sewing patterns) or leave them in Pocket for later use on my class Portal or something else.
22) Share a workflow
I don’t know if other people would find it useful, but one of the few digital workflows I have developed that I really like is for grading papers. It does not matter how the students turn them in (right now I am using the portal, before that I used Moodle, before that email), but I end up with student work (text files) in folders by section on my hardrive. They have turned them in in Word, Pages, and sometimes also .txt, .rtf, or .odt. I open them all in Word (for Pages this means opening in Pages and exporting, but it is quick, and worth it). In Word, I turn on Track Changes, and I do all my comments and feedback there.
Then, when I am done, I save the Word file (in case I need to go back and add something) and then also save as a PDF, which I return to the student on the Portal (or Moodle, or email, or whatever). The PDF format can be read by every student, so it does not matter if their copy of Word is the same as mine, or if they like Pages better, they just need to view my comments. If they want to make the suggested changes, they go back to their original document in whatever their favorite word processing program is.
The one thing students don’t like is that I won’t take papers turned in as Google Docs. I just don’t have a good workflow for that, and I don’t really want one. But this question does sometimes require me to teach them about exporting from Google Docs as .rtf, a format most of them have not heard of. Often they can download as a Word doc, but when that does not work .rtf is the next best choice.
19) Try a new video conferencing tool
I did not try a new one this summer, but as a Fablearn Fellow this year I have had plenty of new experiences, some positive, with several of these tools. The fellows meet monthly via video conference, sometimes as many as 18 people. Our first attempt, in January, was with WebEx, and it was not great. Not too bad, but the sound quality was bad unless all but one person were on mute, there was a great deal of feedback, and it was a bit hard to manage the chat window and the conference window. We have done several of our other monthly meetings in Zoom, which is better, but still a bit hard to get used to. The chat window and the main window and the views of the individuals are difficult to see if someone is sharing their screen. And the sound is still better with most people on mute. Headphones also really help (and don’t we all look cute in them?). We have also held several smaller meetings with Google Hangout (limited to 10 people I think). It is great for a very small group.
20) Try out a backchannel tool
It is interesting how people respond to having a backchannel. I remember coming out of the global week experience thinking that the tool was not ready for this many people, or maybe our wifi couldn’t handle it. Some people found it frustrating and so distracting they could not look at the backchannel. I remember that happening when we had one in a faculty meeting (back when Matt M. was at Casti, I think). I actually quite liked it, because I felt that I could make some points in the backchannel and I did not need to make them in the discussion. I think with students it would be very interesting to try it out in the smaller setting of a single classroom. I was at a conference this summer where twitter was encouraged as a backchannel, and I did find myself tweeting back and forth at one point during a lecture with the woman sitting next to me. We were having fun with it, but I am not sure it made us great listeners.
In class, I am thinking of something a bit more contained, either a Google doc or a discussion in the class portal, for an online discussion to go with classroom activities. It might also be good to have some kind of backchannel discussion for certain types of project and homework. I might have to give some more thought to how that could be helpful for some students, but not too distracting for others.
I guess I was not paying attention, I skipped Week 5: Wiki Wiki
16) Try a Wiki and share your thoughts.
This item makes me think it might be time to update the 23 things list. When the ability to create a class wiki or other group wiki space was new, it was a great addition to the classroom collaboration toolkit. But at this point the idea that students will like a wiki because it is cool, or fun is not really worth discussing. What is important in the classroom in terms of what a wiki can do can also be done with tools like Google Docs, or web authoring tools like Weebly. That does not mean some of the things that can be done with a wiki: a course long review space, a student created survey of research, etc. are not good goals, but it is not clear to me that you need a wiki space to create that kind of student writing collaboration.
Wikipedia, however, does need to be part of the classroom. I know that might sound crazy, I know there are plenty of teachers who tell their students never to use Wikipedia. And there are good reasons to have concerns about the information students find there. Saying not to use it, however, misses the chance to have students learn something important. And it is hypocritical. When I need some small basic bit of information, I go right to google, and often the first hit is Wikipedia, I find what I need, and I move on. Why shouldn't I teach students about it? Because the important point is not that I can find many useful things in Wikipedia, but that I have to evaluate what I find, and for any serious research Wikipedia, like ANY encyclopedia, is a starting point. So if I want to know who won the World Series in 1908, I can go to Wikipedia (that answer is the Chicago Cubs) and be done. If I want to explore the role of baseball in American history in the Progressive Era I might find some basic information in Wikipedia, but the most useful part of the article will be the links in the references at the end. This type of analysis is important for students, and should include discussion of other encyclopedias and database sources as well.
The other part of teaching about Wikipedia is authorship. Students need to know people edit the articles, and how the company and other users can express concerns, make changes, revert to older versions, etc. So some exploration of the discussion pages, the ratings, and other clues to help students decide if they want to trust the information is part of any good discussion about research online.
17) Make a screencast or try out a flipped classroom tool
I used Explain Everything to make this video lesson on setting up a new project in Book Creator.
18) Share your thoughts on flipped learning
I think the idea of “flipping” some kinds of lessons is a great way to challenge our thinking about what types of learning can take place best in the classroom with the teacher and students together, and which types of learning are better done by the student alone. In the most simplistic model, the “flip” is great. If the previous method of instruction was for the teacher to talk at the students in class, and then for the students to do some kind of independent work (problem sets, answering questions, document analysis) for homework, then the flip makes perfect sense. But I don’t know any classroom at Castilleja that has been like that in decades (certainly not when I was a student, and not now). There are certain parts of many classrooms that might seem to follow that model, but even when a teacher lectures, that experience of being in the classroom is a HUGE part of it. Direct instruction (let’s get rid of the word lecture for what happens in any small classroom), when done thoughtfully, it a very interactive experience. If it is not, then by all means, there is a situation where the flip metaphor works. So back to my first point, the challenge posed by the idea of flipping the classroom is an important one. And they type of instruction I did the short screencast about, how to set up a document in a particular software and follow naming conventions, is certainly something that students could be doing outside of the precious time the teacher has together with students.
But the experience of making the screencast also made me think of two other things. It took a long time to make this short (2 min) screencast (I am sure I would get faster if I made more of them) and when I was looking for instructions myself, I wanted to read text, not watch video! For basic technology things, this method is not particularly efficient. For something more complex, something students might want to watch several times, there would be more value here.
13) What is Creative Commons?
An important topic, and one that we could talk about for ages, but I think in this world of people ignoring copyright, and others being so concerned that they think they can’t use anything, one that we could discuss more often. I use the non-commercial Creative Commons designation when I post on Flickr, and it seems to be a good system. But I have not pushed its use with students, since most of our classwork falls within the fair use designation, and I am more concerned with issues of citation (and with making sure students understand that just because you have the right to use an item, for example under a Creative Commons license, does not mean you don’t have to cite that item to give credit in your academic work.
14) Finding Creative Commons and other copyright free content
I like the Creative Commons search for images, it seems less useful for other formats. Flickr is great for searching, although sometimes the tagging is really strange. I liked browsing Viintage, a site that was new to me, but the search function did not seem to work well at all, and most of the high resolution content requires a premium membership.
15) Remix something
Did not really get to this one in week 4, since I spent the week at Constructing Modern Knowledge, which in some ways was all about certain types of remixing. (I will post more about CMK later.) I spent some of the time learning some more about Scratch, which is all about learning how to code by using other people's code. The community online is all about sharing code, and helping other coders get stuff done.
Opps, I thought I had posted this at the end of last week, but here it was, sitting alone in my drafts folder.
9) Try out the Google Product of your Choice
As part of my work as a FabLearn fellow this year I have participated in both Google Groups and Google Hangouts. While there are some limits of the technology, both seem to work well for communication among a small group, and Google groups is a good compromise between email and social media groups, since members of the group can decide what works best for them, getting stuff all in email or visiting the group page. For the group that is important to me, and can include timely messages, I get emails, for the other one I go visit the page every few days.
10) Customize your Google Calendar
I like the idea of customizing my calendar, and I do play with the display options. I have also added holidays, and of course added all the various calendars I need, such as my daughter’s softball calendar. But I would be more excited to do this if I could get the various calendars to load with any consistency on my other devices. On my laptop everything works well, but the versions that are supposed to sync with my phone and my iPad are less than functional.
11) Try out some Gmail Shortcuts
I use a few of the standard Apple shortcuts, but I could not find any new ones that represent actions I do often enough to remember the shortcut.
12) Check out the new Google Sheets and Google Docs for iPad
I have downloaded the new apps, but I have not had time to do much with them.
I know, we are at the beginning of week 3, but I was trying to complete #6 before posting this. Oh well.
5) Download a free ebook or audiobook
I am a big fan of ebooks, and paper books, and audio books, in fact, I am tired of people saying one is better, or that ebooks will kill reading, or that audio books are not real. I would like to take a moment to celebrate books, all kinds of books, and maybe even agree that all of these formats are here to stay?
I like the long list of suggested places to find free ebooks, and I have used several of them. I found a new one this week, Baen, publishers of mostly science fiction and fantasy books, has a free ebook library https://www.baenebooks.com/c-1-free-library.aspx Many of these books are from their backlist, and I enjoyed looking at some old favorites.
6) Checkout an ebook from your local library.
Still working on this, the tech is not hard, but I seem to have misplaced my library card. New to do item on my list: find library card or get a replacement.
7)iBooks Author
I have been working in iBooks author for two years, writing the History 8 textbook and delivering it to students one unit at a time. When you look at the free books on the iTunes Store, you will start to recognize the templates in iBooks Author – they are lovely, but it might be time for Apple to develop a few more! iBooks Author is a powerful publishing tool, but the best advice came from one of the workshops I went to several years ago (sorry, I don’t remember the name of the presenter). He said that the key to creating a great ebook in iBooks Author was having great content all written and collected before you start. iBooks Author is a publishing tool, not a writing tool, so just like Adobe InDesign or any other layout tool, the content comes first, and this is the place to put it all together and make it look awesome.
8)Try out Book Creator on your iPad
We have been using Book Creator in 8th grade for DC Journals and a few other things. I like it, but it has a few quirks. The most annoying one is that every new books defaults to the title “A New Book” and the author “A. N. Author.” Which is cute the first time you see it, but when more than half of your students send you A New Book by A.N. Author, your list of books gets unusable very fast!
Of course students should remember to rename their file, but Book Creator goes out of its way to make this hard to find, rather than making it part of the setup screens where you select the size and orientation of the book. Bad coding choice!
I guess like challenges, so I am introducing a new thread: 23 Things. Castilleja tech is sponsoring a version of 23 things, to try to encourage us all to try new things in ed tech. Looking at the list of things for week 1, I am not seeing much that is new, but maybe I have been to too many ed tech workshops.
#1) Set up a blog: I decided not to set up a new blog, but to use this challenge to blog here, because I have several old abandoned blogs from various workshops and I did not need another one.
#2) Check out some ed tech blogs, hmm, I probably do too much of that already. I have several that I quite like. One of my favorates is Geeky Mom. I have been reading this blog on and off for years. The author is a CS teacher at a private school, and she does great projects with her students, and shares a great deal about how she manages the life of teaching as well as the content.
#3) Try an RSS reader. No thanks, not again. I have, in the past, tried to use RSS to manage my information flow, and I am just not convinced. I am sure I miss stuff, but I think by going to blogs, following friends' links on twitter, and reading several news sources, I am getting what I want, it a way that I enjoy.
#4) I have a twitter account, and I sometimes post to it. I am @heatherpang on twitter. I follow all kinds of interesting people, but for professional development the most active bunch are maker ed people, such as Andrew Carle @tieandjeans, Christa Flores @sciteach212, jaymesdec @jaymesdec, Sylvia LibowMartinez @smartinez, Gary Stager, Ph.D. @garystager, and Laura Blankenship @lblanken (see Geeky Mom in #2.
I study how people and technologies shape each other.
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