Most Wonderful Time of the Year? Nay, Most Stessful is more like it.

So we're into the holiday season. I'm also currently finishing the last week of trimester I and gearing up to start trimester II. Needless to say, I'm stressed.

As I was trying to relax the other night, I picked up my most recent copy of Glamour magazine and stumbled upon an article about the negative effects consistently high levels of stress can have on a person's health. The article described a variety of factors that contribute to high levels of stress, and one thing that was mentioned was people's reliance on, nay addiction to, technology. Women interviewed for the article told how they got antsy when they were forced to be away from the pinging chimes of their email inboxes and the dinging rings of their cellphones.

This got me thinking about an earlier blog post I wrote about everything being "better, faster, stronger" and wondering if that was a good thing. I'm coming back to that again. Is "better, faster, stronger" really that, or is it crazy, too fast, and stretching us beyond a point we can handle?

I have been emailing back and forth with a parent about her child's performance in my class. At one point, she suggested that a solution to her child's failing grade in my class would be that I should email her her child's upcoming assignments for my class every Friday. Fortunately, when we sat down face-to-face to conference, the counselor very tactfully suggested that that was an unrealistic expectation and the parent agreed. Do we assume that because a person has technology at their fingertips--email, an online Gradebook, whatever--that all of that person's work should/will get done faster? Because that forgets the most important part of the equation: the human doing the work. I may have tech tools, but I am still a human who has to do much of the data input, and I, like everyone else, only have 24 hours in a day.

I guess all I'm asking for is room to breathe. A little bit of let-up and a scaling down of the expectations of perfection and instant feedback. I am only human.

A thought and an exclamation...

The exclamation first:

I HATE WINDOWS MOVIE MAKER!

There. I said it. I'm done.

Thought: I just read a blog post on the National Council of Teachers of English (NCTE) website about teachers using social networking sites to connect with their colleagues and students. As a young teacher who has been worried about having a Facebook profile, that was a little reassuring. After reading the blog, I also went and joined the NCTE group on Facebook. :) More to the point, though, I'm using Facebook to keep in touch with students who have graduated. However, I don't accept students as "friends" until after they've graduated. Facebook, for me, is a personal space, separate from school. It is a representation of my life as NOT a teacher, as a free-wheeling, social person. It's not like I post pictures of myself naked in a group orgy-animal sacrifice-drug haven environment. Heck, I don't even do any of those things, much less would I be brazen enough to post pictures in a public forum of all that. My point is, I feel like the moment I begin allowing current students as friends is the moment that I begin censoring myself to a degree that I'm not comfortable with outside the classroom. I need to be me.

As I think about this, it raises interesting ideas about what exactly, in a personal sense, we expect from teachers. The possibility of everyone's lives and personal traits being available for public critique online throws into sharp relief our assumptions about how teachers are supposed to behave--inside AND OUTSIDE of the classroom.

Is it safe to say that there's a mostly unspoken assumption that teachers are supposed to be morally superior or morally correct all of the time? Where does this come from? Can this change? Would our entire concept and construction of "teacher" be required to change in order to accept the fact that teachers aren't always pillars of morality in the community?

I don't know, but I'd love to know what you think. :) And I still hate Movie Maker.

Till next time...

What's mine is yours and what's yours is... everyone's.

I really enjoyed that article! Jenkins brought up a lot of the ideas and problems that we have been discussing in class and explained in ways that I hadn't thought about.

I guess what stuck out to me most as something that could/should have an impact on my instruction is the skill of transmedia navigation, being able to follow and create stories and information across an array of modalities. To begin with, this sounds so much like my students. I especially identified with his description of the kids who struggle to understand why Spiderman doesn't appear the same in the comics, cartoons, films, and figurines. It goes to the idea, in a way, of judgment and being able to examine the perspectives and influences of the authors/creators of the varied images of Spidey. Using popular culture to help students begin the process of analyzing for perspective and purpose seems like it could be very powerful and could be a great scaffolding activity to get them into talking about identifying and analyzing images in advertising or news for perspective, bias, and purpose.

The bigger thing for me though, as an English teacher, was the concept of creating stories across modalities. Jenkins quotes Kress as "[advocating] moving beyond teaching written composition to teaching design literacy as the basic expressive competency of the modern era" (Jenkins 47). As someone who is currently staring down a stack of 150 sophomore narrative essays that need grading, the idea of the students creating a story that's a combination of film, sound, and other mediums sounds very appealing. :) It certainly would appeal to the students' strengths and interests, and it seems very constructivist in nature. The students would really have to understand what they were trying to communicate in order to get the message across accurately and meaningfully through a variety of media. There is a concern though about what kinds of materials and images the students appropriate for their creations. And I'm not just talking about copyrights and plagiarism. What happens when a student uses an image or video or soundbite that enforces negative, harmful stereotypes or assumptions? How do we engage with them about it? How do we read that use of that image/video/soundbite in the first place?

Another idea that appealed to me was the idea of collective intelligence. I especially noted the quote about how schools teach kids to work as autonomous problem-solvers, not as a community of collaborators. Again, looking at this from the practical side, having students work collaboratively in groups to complete projects and tasks could cut my grading load in half. :) It would require a huge shift away from the idea that students have to produce individually to be successful. And there would certainly be concerns that some students will simply try to sail through on the coat tails of their more productive team mates. We've all been there and felt that and it's frustrating as all get out. Is there some way to measure individual involvement to guarantee that all group members are participating or does that go against the very principle of collaboration and collective intelligence in the first place?

I think that's about it for now. Until next week...

"Better, Faster, Stronger"

I'm going to apologize in advance. I'm not going to talk about a Web 2.0 technology I could use in my classroom. Every sector of my being is exhausted, stretched to the limit, and beaten. I'm in a little bit of a wider ranging, philosophical mood tonight.

We have all this technology and yes, it's fantastic. We can do things we've never done, see places we've never seen, meet people we might have never met, and interact in ways we never thought we could interact. When we're using it constructively in our classrooms, we're giving students a tool to expand on and extend their cognitive capacities. They are engaging in topics and problem solving in new and meaningful ways. Fantastic. Three cheers for technology! Everything is, to borrow from a Daft Punk song currently sampled in a Kanye West song (how's that for Web 2.0?), "better, faster, stronger."

Is "better, faster, stronger" always a good thing? Is it something to which we should aspire?

An underlying assumption about wanting to do something faster is that however long it's currently taking is taking away time from something else a person could be doing. So we get things to go faster. Things move faster and we find ourselves with more free time to enjoy the things we didn't have time for before. What happens now? For many people, they start filling that free time with new things. Once they fill that time, they begin to fill harried again and look for ways to make stuff "faster." See the cycle? What are we filling that free time with? Better stuff? Is the stuff that has gotten faster better too? Do we just keep pushing ourselves until we give out?

I don't know if much of this is making any sense, but I needed a release this week. I know that there are holes you could drive a space shuttle through in my explanations and logic. This was kind of a dumping of thoughts. I may come back to this next week, when I will, with luck and divine intervention, be calmer, saner, and more well-rested. I might not. Probably not.

So thank you for your patience with me this evening. You've been a great help, whether you realize it or not.

Until next week...

Thinking about technology and parents...

I just finished the first round of conferences last week and I think I'm still tired. Conferenences have actually gotten a bit more pleasant since I started here two years ago.

During my second year at "The Grove," parents were encouraged to sign up for ParentView access to my online Gradebook. At first, I was really quite nervous about this whole situation. Was I oing to have parents emailing me day and night, wondering I hadn't posted the scores of the tests I'd given that morning? Was I going to get angry emails and phone calls if I didn't update grades in a timely manner? These fears were shared by many in the building.

ParentView was implemented and although I did get a few of those emails from die hard "helicopter parents," it was mostly business as usual. The place where I've felt the greatest impact is in conferences. I no longer feel like I'm ambushing parents with their students' grades. Most parents walk in with a copy of the ParentView printout, prepared to hear what I have to say and more interested in talking about what the student needs to do to improve than yelling at me. Conferences have become more productive as well as pleasant.

I started thinking about this during Dr. Lopez's lecture last week in class. I thought how useful Web 2.0 tools like websites, social bookmarking sites, and blogs would be for communicating with parents. I think this could also serve to improve student learning by making sure that they're getting support, encouragement , and sometimes a well-needed kick in the rear at home as well as at school.

I really enjoyed Dr. Lopez's lecture last week and I feel like I learned a lot about these newer Web 2.0 developments. I'm starting to think about how I could use a social bookmarking site to help students with their writing or provide them with resources for a project or samples of a certain kind of writing or genre. Another neat idea would be to have kids create a fake Facebook or Myspace page for a character from a book. Filling out the sections like interests, place of employment, and so on would encourage them to really know a character. Then, they could role play conversations through postings on each other's Walls. Wow! That idea came to me just now and I really kind of want to use it for my next novel. :)

At any rate, I think there are a lot of possibilities for using Web 2.0technologies in the classroom. I have notihng left to say about them right now though, as I'm pretty exhausted.

Until I post again...

Moving Closer to Surrender...

So here we are, week number whatever, and I'm still struggling with constructivism. So what else is new? What is new is that I think I'm getting closer to that point of surrender when I stop being so critical and start just embracing the ideas and concepts wholeheartedly. I really do think that constructivist classrooms are the way to go. When students can see the immediate implications of what they're doing, their interest, involvement, and motivation skyrocket. And who doesn't want that? The thought of crafting authentic learning experiences, while still daunting, is also beginning to seem more exciting and definitely more worthwhile.

The point that I continue to wrestle with is what my classroom would look and act like in a constructivist model. I think Sprague and Dede did a nice job in the article of showing the differences between the instructive and constructive models. I really liked that the classroom in question was a middle school classroom, as so often examples of these ideas seem to come only from elementary classrooms. But now I want to know the nuts and bolts. How much time did the constructivist teacher have with her students? How many days a week did she see them? What does her classroom management plan look like?
I guess what I really want is a blow-by-blow manual of the preparation and process for implementing this in a classroom. I realize though that there probably isn't an article out there that does that. (If there is, let me know! :) ) I'm beginning to believe that creating a constructivist classroom is a constructivist act in itself. You just dive in and muck around and figure it out and create understanding as you go.

I guess what I'd like to hear from people about is what they think the "nuts'n'bolts" of constructive classrooms are. How does a constructive classroom operate? What does the classroom management plan look like? What groundwork needs to be done to establish the conditions in the classroom and in students that allow this concept to fly rather than crash and burn? I don't necessarily expect that any of you will understand this any better than I do, but it might be beneficial just to bounce ideas and share.

That's it for me tonight. I won't be in class on Thursday as I have conferences (boo!) and then I'm going to see Ian McKellan play King Lear at the Guthrie.... yeah, you're drooling a little now, aren't you? Full report on Gandalf as Lear next week! Take care! :)

Abstract is Constructivism Random

I've been doing some thinking about constructivism and constructivist teaching. I've also been doing some talking with classmates. I've been doing this because constructivist teaching still confuses me... the topic and the practice. I think, perhaps, that I am a bit more concrete-sequential than I originally thought. I don't think I was always that way, but I think I've gradually moved a little in that direction. Let me explain.

I've been rolling over the Power Point assignment in my mind for a week now. I "get" the assignment on a basic level. I struggle, though, with the non-linear requirement. As someone who has never used Power Point in that manner, it is difficult to conceptualize. I realize that the assignment was designed that way purposely. I'm going to have to get in there and muck around with Power Point to figure out technically how to do that. I have no problem with that. I love mucking around in something. What is making me, I confess, a little nervous is the organization of the information. As in any true constructivist experience, I've really got to know and understand my subject matter to create a non-linear presentation/construction of it. The idea that there is no one there saying, "first do this, next do this," etc is more than a little scary. I have relied for so long on others feeding me info and steps, I realize that I've stopped thinking. Starting to think again is exciting but also unnerving. What if I'm bad at this? What if I don't know as much as I think? This could be very daunting for students, especially those who are concrete-sequential processors. Constructivism seems, almost by nature, to be a very abstract-random process.

I guess I'm wondering how other people see it. Is constructivism more concrete-sequential or abstract-random? Does that distinction change how we think about it? If so, how does the thinking change?

I'm still not sure about this, so I'm going to take this up this week as well and will be back next week with hopefully deeper understanding.

Til then....

Musings on random stuff from week 3...

Week three has come and gone. Nothing terribly earth-shattering this week; there were just a few things that stuck out to me this week.

1. In regards to the constructivist ideas we read about last week, I'm currently debating something related to that. I'm preparing to teach the narrative essay in my sophomore classes, and I'm looking at the collection of materials I've accumulated over the past two years, and the usual fret and worry appeared in their usual form: the question "What am I even doing? This time though, the meaning of the question had changed; the question carried more weight. In the past, it meant "what activities and strategies am I going to use to teach this/fill time?" This time it morphed into "What is the purpose of what I'm doing?" That is, what is the purpose of teaching writing in schools? What is my purpose in teaching the narrative essay? Is it merely a tool to accomplish something else, like understanding and applying conventions, or is it for the content, giving students the opportunity to write about an event so as to "construct " their own understanding of the event.? I'm not sure yet, but I put the question to my fellow sophomore teachers and I hope we'll discuss it.

2. I found the article of teachers using machines to be very insightful. I sometimes get frustrated, as a practicing teacher, with non-educators recommending ways of doing things because they so often seem to lack a sense of reality. This author was the opposite. He put forth some cool, interesting ideas, but he didn't do it at the expense of reality and taking into account the systems and structures that exist and how they influence our practices. I enjoyed his article a great deal.

3. In our staff meeting today, our principal demonstrated a new technology that's like a quiz game, kind of. Everyone has a remote with letter/number buttons. Questions are put up on the screen via Power Point and you answer the question by pressing the corresponding button on your remote. The votes are tallied on the screen and you can even see how many people chose each response. Our principal described it as a great way to check for understanding quickly during a lesson. It seems pretty cool, and we as a staff had fun with it, but I'll be interested to hear how my colleagues use in their classrooms once that happens.

That's it for this week. More to come next week....

Musings on tools and construction...

Week 2 is down and I have spent the evening reading our required articles for class on Thursday. For the most part, I really got a lot out of the articles and the points the authors made. The biggest shift in thinking for me occured with the concept of constructivist learning and thinking about programs and features as more effective when they act as tools for organizing and analyzing information rather than information-distributors.

I think the constructivist model was and will continue to be such a shift for me because, like pretty much everyone else, I as a teacher am a product of how I was taught as a learner. It is easy to see why teachers rely on instructive strategies rather than constructive: the district gives you a set list of outcomes that the students must achieve, your grade-level or departmental team decides what skills/information must be attained, there is pressure from parents and administrators, and there is always the ever-looming presence of standardized tests. It seems much easier to just tell the kids what they need to know rather than allow them to construct the knowledge on their own. Also, many teachers become teachers because they were successful in school; that is, the instructive strategies used by their instructors worked for them. Thus, teachers think, "If it worked for me as a student, it should work for my students now." The idea of constructing knowledge seems much more powerful though. As the authors stated, it isn't just memorizing facts or regurgitating what the the student thinks the teacher wants to hear; it is a process where students engage in the material and assign it meaning based on their personal experiences and come to a deeper, more complex understanding of a concept or idea. I think my struggle will be with understanding how I can create a constructivist environment in my classroom while still adhering to guidelines and expectations set out by my district and building, especially when I don't have a lot of experience in constructivist classrooms.

I also really liked the idea of computer programs and features as tools for demonstrating and constructing knowledge rather than as distributors of pre-determined knowledge. The idea of students using a Hyper-Media Authoring System to demonstrate their knowledge and understanding of a topic sounds very valuable, very useful, and very likely to rouse and sustain my students' interest. I need to finish reading this yet, but I'll probably comment more in the discussion area when I'm done.

That being said, I think I'm "thought out" for tonight. Till next week...

Musings from the first day of class

This is actually very exciting. I like the idea of using blogs to discuss stuff in class, but I must admit, I find the idea of blogging about daily life a little self-involved. My thinking on that might and probably will change though as I work through this. :)

I'm excited about what we're going to learn because it's going to have a huge effect on how my students are learning and achieving success in my classroom. I think my students learn very differently than I did because they have grown up using these technologies, and that has shaped their learning styles. I think that using modes of communication that they are already somewhat literate in will allow them to engage more in the learning process.

That all being said, while my students are a little more technologically literate than I am, I can't call them completely literate because I think that part of literacy involves analyzing and evaluating. From my experience, students have great difficulty analyzing the text and sounds and images that fly at them on a daily basis for meaning, purpose, and intent, and they struggle to evaluate the validity and credibility of information they find on sites. The recent focus on Wikipedia as a credible source demonstrates this nicely enough. I'm eager to find ways to help my students learn how to effectively analyze and evaluate content they find on the Web.

I guess maybe that's it today. :)