A Teachable Moment: Helping Students to Understand Permanence of the Digital Age

Surprised parents and staff members have been emailing me this week with a concern.  Googling the keywords of our school district's name provides some information about the district along with an image that represents members of our student body, but not in the positive or academic light most of us might hope.

While there is a larger issue here of the district being improperly and unfairly represented in the public eye (we are presently working on a solution to this issue as we want the district positively and accurately represented for the meaningful teaching and learning that happens here), there is something we can use in this event to assist in a meaningful conversation with students and families.

With services like SnapChat and Instagram, Twitter, Tumblr, and Facebook, sharing with the world is easier than ever before.  Especially with some of these services, but true for all, users often confuse the ability to instantaneously share with the world with the appropriateness of doing so.  Add to that the sense of anonymity, the tidal wave of information that is being shared worldwide (as in "everybody is doing it"), and the false "promise" of the information existing only in the short term (services like InstaGram allow users to post to the world, but in very short intervals, as in 10-15 seconds, before the post is removed).

However, as so many of us are aware of, the truth is that once data is captured and posted in a public forum (and the Internet is a public forum), even if only for a few seconds, the potential exists for that data to live forever.

This is exactly how the image that presently represents our district in a Google search (not a decision consciously made by anybody in the district, by Google itself, but simply a result of an algorithm written and a change in the way Google presents information for ease of viewing), an image of some young people captured in a dance position while at a school dance that may have made them blush had their parents been present, came to be.  It seems to have been captured and shared online, likely by a student interested in updating others on the fun of the evening.  It probably didn't get much attention immediately.  However, it was picked up in a story by a local news outlet about the appropriateness of student behavior at dances (not just our students...students across the area).  That seems to have gained some traction with viewers, and the image has been viewed many times by many people.  That moved the status of the image up in Google's search rankings.  When the Google Knowledge Graph was created and launched publicly, the ranking of that image, coupled with the search term of our school's name, resulted in the "marriage" of the district's online reputation with a student's behavior at a moment in time.  Something the students likely had not considered or even imagined in that moment.

As unfortunate as any of this may be, there is a teachable moment in this.  In a digital world, our actions (both online and in real life) do not have the promise of privacy.  While we may (or may not) disagree with this reality, it is still, in fact, a reality.  This week's headlines about the availability of private digital data possibly available to government entities supports this reality.

Students need to hear that message -- in a digital world, our actions (both online and in real life) do not have the promise of privacy.  They need to be engaged in the conversation.  They need to consider how that information may positively or negatively impact them in the present and in the future.  These are all meaningful discussions that we, as educators, cannot be afraid to engage in.  Even if we are not technically savvy enough to know all of the latest digital tools, sites, trends, and methods.  We have life experience enough to talk about the value of students holding themselves to a standard that they (and their families and communities) deem appropriate.  We have life experience enough to talk about how decisions made in a weak moment today can forever impact our futures.  This doesn't require knowledge about technology -- let the kids bring that knowledge and experience to the conversation.  Instead, it takes us actively talking with kids and caring about their lives today, and in the future.  And we do care!

That is the teachable moment in this.

Non-Educators Supportive of 1:1 Program

In our district we are in the very earliest stages of a three year rollout of a personalized learning movement that includes providing an iPad for each student (K-12).  That's about 13,500 iPads across our district, including staff members.

At the launch, I was pretty sure this would be an uphill battle the whole way.  For years I have been reading about schools d to convince their community members, parents, and even staff that putting 1:1 devices in the classroom was the right move.  All of that reading and research convinced me that the general public was  gainst the idea of giving kids access to devices, and that schools interested in launching something of this magnitude would really need to educate the public to get them to see the benefits.

What I find to be the most interesting about our launch thus far has been the support of the program from the general public.  Without question, there are concerns.  Without doubt, we have folks who do not agree with this decision.  That will always be the case, no matter what we engage in or what decision we make.  I can certainly accept that.  However, we are hearing many people who seem to think it is a good idea -- that it is logical and makes sense to provide these opportunities and this access to students.

The bigger surprise has been the ease with which people who have questions or doubts are pacified.  I don't mean to say that they simply lack the conviction to stick with their arguments, nor do I want to imply that we are doing a miraculous job of "selling" the program.  More simply stated, the idea is becoming less foreign to them.  In a way, even with their doubts, they seem to understand that it is an unavoidable reality of the times in which we live. They seem to get that if we do not give students an opportunity to use these devices productively in a "safe to fail" environment today, we cannot expect them to use these devices productively in environments that are far less safe and forgiving.  For many of those who raise concerns, it isn't that they are dead set against the idea.  It seems as if they just want to hear that we, too, have some of the same concerns, or that we have thought through it and have determined ways to deal with that issue (or are willing to think about it and develop a way to tackle it).  

It is pretty apparent that the onward march of technology in our society as a whole is to credit.  The majority of our parents, guardians, and community members have been so significantly impacted by the adoption of technology (both positively and negatively) that it seems they truly realize that education is not immune from this same adoption.  

What I hope, though, is that people believe that putting these tools in the hands of students in an educational setting will begin to steer them in a direciton of meaningful, productive use of these tools in positive, interesting, and innovative ways.  My gut feeling on that, though, is that we don't have the faith of the community yet in that regard.  Give educators a few years.  I know they will prove to the community at large that providing access to the tools was not only inevitable, but also invaluable!  That is where the work of educating our students, staff, and community comes into play, and that is a challenge worthy of taking on.

Stop Overwhelming Educators: Tech Coaches Need to Slow Their Roll

In the lightspeed paced world of educational technology, I appreciate the need for finding fresh ideas, presenting unique content, and reviewing new tools.  I work to maintain two blogs, keep a Twitter and Google+ feed that is somewhat relevant, and stay on top of my game as I talk with teachers each day.  It's a challenge anybody who is actively publishing for and working with an audience deals with daily.

What I worry about is the bubble of separation that clearly exists between those of us who love, live, and breathe technology's role in education, and those practitioners we work with daily who don't share our passion and commitment to keeping pace with new ed tech tools.  If our goal as Tech Coaches is the pursuit of improving the educational experience of our students, not just finding the latest and greatest web tools and funky apps, then we need to confront the gap between where we live in our passion for educational technology, and where the rest of the world lives, and then determine the best way to meet our staff where they are and to provide them with the information and tools that they need to be successful.  

One of the first places to start, then, is the promotion of new tools and services.  We've all read the blogs, heard the podcasts, and seen the tweets that offer a cursory look at some "amazing" new tool that the promoter has yet to really test, use, or meaningfully evaluate.  I wish this was just a once in a while occurrence.  Sadly, it isn't.  In the excitement of newness and possibility, there is no shortage of people recommending services and apps that they have yet to put through the paces.  It is apparent in their commentary, their shallow number of practical examples, and their failure to present th cons of that tool.  I have yet to find a tool that does everything that it is asked to do -- it's just the reality that these tools cannot be everything to everybody.  Yet, in these reviews, the "downside" of the tool is rarely reported. 

While this race to promote new tools isn't that big of a deal on the surface, it points to some larger issues.  

The first is that the promotion of these tools without meaningful testing and evaluation is just poor practice. Many tech coaches have advocated for meaningful planning and testing before using any tool with students in the classroom.  Perhaps we have to swallow a bit of our own medicine and withhold recommendation of any tool until we have put it through the paces ourselves.

The second point is that we have more important work to focus on than just announcing the newest tools.  The meaningful work of coaching is in finding innovative and powerful uses of these tools in the classroom with real students.  This is not to say that these stories aren't making their way to publicaion -- they are.  It is simply to say that examples of practical uses of tools are the blog posts and tweets that will most meaningfully inform practice.  I think of one of my favorite software applications -- Microsoft's Photo Story.  With one incredibly easy to use application, I saw more powerful, significant demonstrations of learning come from a wider mix of secondary and elementary classrooms than almost any other software application I can think of.  That was Photo Story's #Eduwin, long before Twitter came to existence.  That's an example of the important work Tech Coaches must focus on -- finding the innovative, inspiring, unique uses of the core tools we have available to us.

The third point is that one of our primary roles is to help focus those colleagues who are less interested in the latest and greatest tools -- to provide them with a tool set that is agile, adaptable, dependable, and easy to utilize.  Most Technology Coaches already have a base toolset that we recommend and default to whenever we work with staff.  It is apparent that one of our core responsibilitiesis to keep an eye on the horizon, always searching for new and better tools.  What we need to guard against, though, is prematurely recommending tools to others that haven't found their way into our toolset on some level.  We need to provide the BEST tools to our students and staff, not just the newest.  In doing so, we may beset serve our colleagues by being the barrier between what's new and what works.  That's a careful line of distinction that we can both define and influence.  However, there is a professional responsibility in helping to define that line.  That's where we have to be just a bit more careful in too quickly recommending or promoting the latest and greatest.

Remember that our target audience is our staff, most of which could care less whether Google or Apple introduced some new feature or app in the last hour. Many of them are already swimming in the bombardment of new tools, terms, passwords, and techniques.  Many are overwhelmed by the changing face of professional evaluation, accountability, teaching techniques, the introduction of the Common Core standards, and all of the other changes taking place in education today.  While educators are certainly professional enough to handle the pace of change in educational technology, with both our passion and knowledge of what to look for in these tools, it is our professional responsibility as Tech Coaches to assist our colleagues in sorting through the latest and greatest tools to find and promote only those tools that will make the educational experiences of our students the best that they can be.  That's why we need to slow our roll and stop recommending things just because it made the company's new blog post, and instead put those new tools through some appropriate testing b

efore publishing them to our larger audience.

This seems to be the real work -- the meaningful work -- of being a Tech Coach.

Bring Your Own Technology - What does it all mean?

On Wednesday, March 27th, Brian will be presenting to the Parents United Consortium in Waukesha, WI. This group is focused on providing educationally relevant information to parents in a consortium of local districts on a wide variety of educational topics.

The presentation will be focused generally on one question -- "Why do schools feel compelled to introduce a Bring Your Own Technology or 1:1 Technology initiative into the educational environment?"

I'm sharing my presentation here for those of you who have the same questions for your school administrators.

The presentation emphasizes five key areas:

1. The World Has Changed...Schools Need to Change to Prepare Students for It (Academic Achievement is No Longer Enough)
2. Schools Have to Provide Greater Digital Access -- Which models exist (Labs, Bring Your Own, or 1:1) and which is right for your school/student?
3. The Great Device Debate - While we can get hung up on device selection, understand that we want to find the tool that can do the most, works best in our environment, and supports our educational needs.
4. Cloud Services and Open Educational Resources - These are tools that change the opportunities for learning for students and teachers, and can be used for meaningful redefinition of what constitues education/learning.
5. Changing Roles of Educators - The traditional vision of a teacher that controls the flow and depth of the lesson is quickly becoming outdated.  Many teachers realize this, but we have to give them room to grow into the new model of what a teacher can become.

I'm eager to share the presentation with those of you who are interested in viewing.  If you choose to use it with others, attribution is requested.

Please feel free to answer the polls and offer your thoughts!  

Here is a link to the presentation: http://portal.sliderocket.com/BNPBJ/BRING-YOUR-OWN-TECH

Survey Says Freshmen Find Blackboard Resources Helpful

Growing use of Blackboard, the district's Learning Management System (LMS) has sparked conversations about the actual value Blackboard can add to the teaching and learning experience.  Nicole Land, an English Teacher at West High School, has provided some insight on the topic, asking her students how they feel about using Blackboard.

At West High School,  each teacher is maintaining a Blackboard course for each face-to-face course taught.  Within the course the instructors provide students (and their parent(s)/guardian(s)) access to a  course-focused Google Calendar, access to resources and assignments for the course, and possibly even some multimedia content related to the course.    While the implementation is in its earliest stages at West, students are already adapting and responding to the availability of the resources digitally.

Land recently asked 40 of her Grade 9 students enrolled in the West House (a pilot of a traditional "house" structure where teachers co-plan, co-teach, and converse about student progress with a cross-curricular emphasis) how they are using and feeling about the Blackboard course she maintains. There responses add some clarity to the question of how a resource like Blackboard can impact the learning experience for students.

Reviewing the Responses

Question:  What do like about the Blackboard 9 English site?
Points to consider:

• 40 % said they like the calendar, indicating that these students appreciate clarity about what is planned for and expected of them
• 38% of the student indicated that they like that they like how the site is organized (25%) or say that it helps them with homework (13% -- orange)
• Only 5% of the students said "Nothing", although it was an available survey option

Question:  How often do you use the calendar?
Points to consider:

• 61% of students said that they use the course calendar "Sometimes" (23%) or "Frequently" (38%) -- an indicator that students are engaging with the course calendar even though it is not required
• 10% of students report using the calendar if absent, a sign that students take responsibility for missed coursework if required to

Question:  What would you like to see improve (or more of) on the Blackboard 9 English course?

Points to consider:

• 22% of students asked for more videos to be available -- a possible sign that some students prefer instruction delivered in a "flipped," on-demand model
• Only 3% of students asked for "Clearer Directions" on the course, suggesting that students have sense of what they are asked to do when engaging with Blackboard content
• 42% of the students surveyed were seemingly content with the organization of Blackboard, as they suggested nothing needed to be improved at this time

Question:  How often do you use the Blackboard 9 course for English?

Points to consider:

• The results suggest that students are not presently accessing Blackboard consistently as a critical source for interacting with instructional content
• The data may speak to the lack of consistently accessible technology for students to access a Blackboard course in as needed in the classroom

While the data collected may not be earth-shaking or surprising, it lends some evidence that students find value in resources that are made available to them in an on-demand, digital outlet such as Blackboard.  With the ever-present societal suggestion looming that young adults today are disengaged and lack educational commitment, embedded within Land's students' responses is an dissenting opinion -- one that suggests making learning resources available to students in alternate ways is accepted and valued by students.

As momentum for Waukesha One, a personalized learning platform being investigated in the School District of Waukesha, grows, teachers, like Land, who are investing significant time and energy into developing their coursework in Blackboard 9 will be rewarded as more students come "online" with more access to resources daily.  Fortunately for Land, by listening to what her students have to say about the experience they are having in the online course today, she'll be in a stronger position to develop an even better online experience for her students in the future.

Social Research Project - Project from a STEM School

One of our favorite things to do is to demonstrate the real work of our staff and students to provide an outlet for student publishing, but also to serve as a model for reflection related to the skills demonstrated and the learning opportunities presented.

In this post, we have some special guest posters for this blog.  Special thanks to Mikayla P. and Jayden R., 7th grade students for their work and reflection, and to their teacher, Tina K. for providing the opportunity for students.

Project background from the teacher:

This project is called the Facebook Page Design Brief.  Students, paired in groups of two or three, are to choose one of the candidates (president or vice-president) to create a Facebook page for.  The page must encompass who they are. This is a project with specific criteria to follow, and a template formula is provided to jump start research and the project framing properly.

See the Students' Submitted Project:

https://docs.google.com/a/waukesha.k12.wi.us/presentation/d/1W-lpilbpE_0DhWbrCIUlwmW-53fIPT8sdwVyNlYkdyw/present#slide=id.p14

Student Reflection on the Work (in the students' words):

What did you learn? (Social studies, writing, & 21st century skills)

"We learned about the candidates and their lifestyle around politics. The facts we
found about the different candidates were very intriguing. It was interesting to learn that
they do things just like “normal citizens” do in their life. As writers, we learned how to
combine several facts into organized paragraphs and sections of the project. We looked
at several websites, and learned that one resource is not always the best way to go.
Jayden and I made sure to find the most reliable sources and base our information off of
those. As twenty first century students, we learned to problem solve along the way, and
the first idea doesn’t always work out."

What process did you go through as a learner? (21st century skills)

"We went through many steps through our few days of working on this project. The
first step we went through was collaborating among ourselves to come up with initial
ideas on how to put our page together. The next step in our process was to split the
work load up between the two of us. For example, one person found facts for one
section, and the other found pictures for that part of the project. Next, was to actually
find the information. For some facts and information, we found that as researchers,
we had to dig deeper to find information. Most of it wasn’t just on the first link when
we searched on Google. After we found the facts, we jotted main ideas down in our
notes, instead of long sentences. Next, we had to piece all of the information together
to form paragraphs. Instead of just plopping random facts on the project, we wanted to
make sure the sentences flowed easily and the information was organized. Finally, after
organizing the paragraphs on the page, we revised each part of the project. We wanted
to make sure the project looked neat, and not just random pictures and paragraphs
randomly put on the project."

Should school challenge you in this way?

"Both of us think that school should challenge you to dig deeper when displaying
your information. Instead of just writing down notes and answering questions, we think
school should encourage you to display your knowledge in an interesting, fun way. We
know that when we finish a project, we feel proud about our project, and what we did. It
is a fun way to share what you know. Projects also are more intriguing to the audience
instead of just facts."

Some Final Thoughts to Consider:

At first blush, this project may not present itself as academically equivalent to longer, more complex research and writing tasks students traditionally assigned to students.  However, evaluating the demonstrated skills more carefully, there are some very advanced skill sets, some application of knowledge, and some design principles in place within this sample of work.  Solely in the ability of the students to pare down big ideas into quick, easy-to-understand postings in common language demonstrate that the culminating work reflects deeper research and authentic engagement with the work.  Further, to quote the girls, "School should encourage you to display your knowledge in an interesting, fun way."  The assumption that school work can be fun and that students do take pride when partaking in meaningful (yet challenging) work, is important to acknowledge as we plan our way forward in re-thinking teaching and learning.

Reaction to Karl Fisch's "Things I Want My Future Principal to Read"

For those of you who want to get down to business, here is the link:  

Things I Want My Future Principal to Read: 1472 and 2012

As a former English teacher, I've read some pretty deep stuff!  I've had my world turned and my eyes opened to new possibilities a number of times by great literature.  As I've told my former students many times, sometimes you have to wade through some pretty deep stuff to be transformed.  After reading this piece (which will at first feel a little deep and overly philosophical), something in me changed.

The article the link will take you to, written by Karl Fisch, references two works that have shaken him lately.  For me, this piece gave voice to my overwhelming feeling that, with the explosion of technology in the past 15-20 years, we are standing on the glacier of change that is entirely transforming the landscape, serving as the dividing line between what is to come from this point forward and what has come before it.  As Pesce and Turek put it in their article, this dividing line will serve as the marker "before which the ‘dumb’ and disconnected generations of humanity will seem incomprehensible and inhuman."  We are fortunate enough to be standing at that point in time.

If this is true, the question that is begged is clear: "How do you educate people to function, participate, thrive, produce, and succeed in a world that we simply cannot imagine or predict?"

The charge is essential, the answers are varied and highly debatable, but it is SO CLEAR TO ME that there is one suggestion that will NOT suffice -- continue to do what you have always done.

Hopefully the piece, specifically the concepts and images presented in the piece (I just love the image of people being polled about the impact of Gutenberg's printing press and them chuckling to think that anything could have that kind of impact), gives credence to the idea that maintaining a stationary position (specifically in education) during a time of such prodigious change is unethical and unwise.

Just had to share and needed to share with others who might appreciate the thought!