This week we had a much energized #Edchat. #Edchat is an online discussion involving over 1,000 educators on a specific topic each week. This week’s Topic dealt with Professional Development being relevant for educators. This seems to be one subject that rivals in popularity the opposition to standardized, high-stakes testing. It seems that most educators have an opinion on PD. There are so many aspects of this subject that one post will not cover it all. It may however, be able to at least frame a discussion.

The best first change for Professional Development would be to rename it. PD has become a hot button issue amongst many educators. Since each district develops its own policy, there are some districts that do a fine job. Based on comments by many educators on social media sites however, these districts seem to be few, and far between. In addition to district mandates, there are also different PD requirements enforced by individual states. Before the movement to change the name takes hold, let’s talk about PD as we know it today.

Read the rest @ My Island View

I frequently conduct large-group workshops for an entire school or district. I use a variety of methods (like audience response systems) to create engaging events that model the practices I am promoting. The workshops resonate well with teachers and I am often asked to come back and “do some more.”

My reply is typically something like, “I’m done talking … it’s time to take this training into the classroom – that’s where the teaching is going on. Besides, you need to build your local capacity.” Over the last 3 years I have developed a classroom walk through (CWT) approach that works. When I return to a school my goal is to serve as a catalyst for dialogue that can be self-sustaining (read – no consultant required).

During my return visit I typically lead groups of teachers on brief CWTs in an effort to try to identify the instructional elements that we addressed in our large-group session. For example, if my large group session was on fostering higher-level thinking skills, then our CWT focuses on trying to see if the CWT visitors can answer the question, “What kinds of thinking did student need to use in the lesson segment we just saw?” If the large group session addressed fostering student engagement, then my walk-through reflection might be “What choice did students (appear to) have in making decisions about the product, process or evaluation of the learning?”

If the large group is “the lecture,” the CWT is the “lab.”

Read the rest @ Copy/Paste

On Monday, our faculty participated in a technology in-service, and while I had been reconsidering my writing and literary pedagogy for a while, one sentence struck me as more indispensable than any other in the day’s ideas:  “You cannot opt out of technology.”  Mike Wesch, the brilliant cultural anthropologist from Kansas State, spoke these words while giving a talk at TEDxNYED in April 2010.  If you have not seen his talk, take sixteen minutes and watch it; it is quite thought-provoking.  Ultimately, Wesch argues that once technology is introduced, it changes us; yes, we ‘act’ on it, but it ‘acts’ on us as well. I believe that in teaching, to use a somewhat ironic metaphor given the character and focus of the Borg, ‘resistance is futile.’

As educators, though, many of us do resist.  This is often particularly true in the fields of English and writing, where so many of us become teachers because we love books, words, and writing, as well as the joy of learning from the interplay between them.  Our books are sacred.  The written word, its meanings, and its proper uses are sacrosanct.  And, for some, traditional models of writing are venerated.  I must admit that I fall prey to these feelings; I have found myself nostalgic for the days when reading a ‘real’ book was something that students wanted to do, or when the act of reading was not merely cursory, but deeply committed, for students wanted to know what the authors meant, not simply what they wrote, and who the characters were beneath the surface descriptions, not simply the who, what, when, where that would get them an ‘A’ on a formal assessment. I have read student papers and longed for the time when knowing grammar rules was common, when students understood that an argument has a foundation that must be articulated before it can be sound, and that evidence is not simply the first website that pops up, but the result of source perusal, assessment, and selection on the basis of merit.  We have all been there.

Read the rest @ Education in My Mind’s Eye

Review of The Shallows from the London Review of Books:

There are two ways that computers might add to our wellbeing. First, they could do so indirectly, by increasing our ability to produce other goods and services. In this they have proved something of a disappointment. In the early 1970s, American businesses began to invest heavily in computer hardware and software, but for decades this enormous investment seemed to pay no dividends. As the economist Robert Solow put it in 1987, ‘You can see the computer age everywhere but in the productivity statistics.’ Perhaps too much time was wasted in training employees to use computers; perhaps the sorts of activity that computers make more efficient, like word processing, don’t really add all that much to productivity; perhaps information becomes less valuable when it’s more widely available. Whatever the case, it wasn’t until the late 1990s that some of the productivity gains promised by the computer-driven ‘new economy’ began to show up – in the United States, at any rate. So far, Europe appears to have missed out on them.

The other way computers could benefit us is more direct. They might make us smarter, or even happier. They promise to bring us such primary goods as pleasure, friendship, sex and knowledge. If some lotus-eating visionaries are to be believed, computers may even have a spiritual dimension: as they grow ever more powerful, they have the potential to become our ‘mind children’. At some point – the ‘singularity’ – in the not-so-distant future, we humans will merge with these silicon creatures, thereby transcending our biology and achieving immortality. It is all of this that Woody Allen is missing out on.

Read the rest at London Review of Books

Compare and contrast: using computers to improve math education.

IN a speech last week, President Obama said it was unacceptable that “as many as a quarter of American students are not finishing high school.” But our current educational approach doesn’t just fail to prepare teenagers for graduation or for college academics; it fails to prepare them, in a profound way, for adult life.

We want young people to become independent and capable, yet we structure their days to the minute and give them few opportunities to do anything but answer multiple-choice questions, follow instructions and memorize information. We cast social interaction as an impediment to learning, yet all evidence points to the huge role it plays in their psychological development.

That’s why we need to rethink the very nature of high school itself.

I recently followed a group of eight public high school students, aged 15 to 17, in western Massachusetts as they designed and ran their own school within a school. They represented the usual range: two were close to dropping out before they started the project, while others were honors students. They named their school the Independent Project.

Read the rest at NYTimes.com

When the story of Natalie Monroe, the “Teacher Blogger” broke earlier this year, it rustled a lot of feathers. There were those that stood in firm support of her 1st Amendment rights, there were those that called for her to be fired immediately, and there were those that denounced the idea that teachers should be blogging at all. My opinion was pretty much in line with that of Principal Chris Lehmann here in Philly.

So when I received a call from the Philadelphia Inquirer asking me my opinion, I was elated.  You can read the article here.

But this post isn’t about the article at all. Well, it’s not about the content of the article. What struck me was the comment area. Now, comment areas are renowned for being minefields for expressing everything from well thought out replies to anonymous rants and attacks. What was new for me was that this rarely happens on my blog or on those of my 25+ good friends who blog. When it does, the blogger attempts to keep the discussion civil, and if unsuccessful, thanks the person for their opinions and ends it there.

When I read some of the comments on the article, I couldn’t help but think that they are a perfect example of why social media and blogging should be taught in schools!

Read the rest at Philly Teacher

In a recent post on her blog, Duke’s Cathy Davidson responds to a New York Times article on the increasing popularity of iPads in schools, arguing that iPads, or any technology, aren’t a panacea for education.  To support her point, Davidson tells the story of how, when she was a Vice Provost at Duke, she helped create a program that gave iPods to incoming freshman.  However, she points out that these students weren’t simply given the new music player and expected to carry on as if everything were the same — that is, as if they were given a textbook or pencil — but were instead asked to become educational innovators themselves.  Davidson and her colleagues wanted the students to play with these new iPods and, through this play, to show how the educational experience could be transformed by using this new technology.

Read the rest at DML Central

Publishers, Participants All
Will Richardson
The “publish” button isn’t the end of the process. Now it’s time to talk to—and learn from—strangers.

I remember way back in high school, when we still used typewriters, writing up my résumé of experiences and hoping that college admissions officers or local employers might find them compelling enough to consider me. My résumé glowed with initiative and industriousness: newspaper deliverer when I was 12, local church locker-upper when I was 14, food runner at the hospital when I was 17, and more. I tried really hard to make myself sound impressive; dare to say, I might even have fudged a few lines here and there in the effort. I mean, who was going to check, right?

Well, today everyone checks. This is a world in which public is the new default. Thought leader Michael Schrage (2010) notes that “the traditional two-page résumé has been turned into a ‘personal productivity portal’ that empowers prospective employers to quite literally interact with their candidate’s work.” The rules for building your personal brand are changing at light speed. It’s not enough to suggest that we have those admirable skills of creativity, initiative, and entrepreneurship; now we have to show them in action online.

In short, our résumé is becoming a Google search result, one that we build with the help of others and that requires our participation. Most students are beginning to face this reality without much assistance from the schools charged with preparing them for the world beyond school. That has to change. We need to help students understand more than just the safety and ethics of participating online; we also have to give them opportunities throughout the curriculum to find and follow their passions and publish meaningful, quality work for real global audiences to interact with.

Read the rest at ASCD.org