Leading From The Heart

I had a very interesting conversation with a colleague the other day. She is a teacher in adult education with upwards of 35 years in the classroom and she said to me that the model we recently used in her class and others, with me going directly into the classroom and working with students, makes sense to her.

I love this drawing of a classroom. It was done by Todd Berman, a substitute teacher in San Francisco. Click it to go to his website.

She said (and these are her words) that she will never know enough about tech to be able to teach her students anything new about tech. She said that it is a waste of time to send her off to do workshops to learn a new technology in the hopes that she would then teach it to her students, and that it is best to show the tech to the students so they can use it within the context of her curriculum and that, if anything, they should be the ones showing her how to use it.

This model
a) keeps teachers in the classroom as opposed to sending them out of the classroom for PD.
b) allows teachers to focus on their curriculum while offering different pathways to students to get through it
c) allows for professional collaboration between teachers and consultants
d) fosters student leadership as they learn new tools from a consultant and can show it to each other and their teachers.

We went on to talk about how the big work is in creating teachers like her who are willing to let something like that happen in their classrooms.

I like that idea – the idea of classroom as a site of professional learning.

I’m teaching a class on creating a radio show and podcasting. I’m working with 11 enthusiastic and interested adult learners and I’m quite excited about it myself. Yesterday was our 2nd meeting.

Let me tell you a little story about teaching and technology…

My plan was 3-fold:

Talk about commitment to the course
Each person to choose which part of the show they would be working on (basically create work groups)
Begin some research

The first two parts were easy, the components were me and them. It was the last section that proved…challenging. And guess what? That last section involved a 10 minute presentation. It required technology. And the technology wasn’t cooperating. I realized it wasn’t cooperating an hour before the course so I did have time to place the presentation on individual laptops for students to view at their tables. The thing was, I wasn’t planning on needing headsets. There was audio. At one point in the presentation I say, “You must be fed up of hearing my voice by now …” When I heard it an asynchronous 6 times I laughed out loud and so did the students. It’s a good thing they have a sense of humour!

Other little things… laptops kept logging out (need to remember to shut off the logout feature) during the class, some of them decided to do the Windows update thing and re-started mid lesson.

Like I said, at least we all had a sense of humour and I knew what was going on nevertheless it was still very frustrating. I had spent a week preparing for this class, not a week straight but on and off for a week. I had an idea of what I wanted to do and it really should have gone off without a hitch but it didn’t.

And. Capital A ‘And’ here… I am a technology consultant. I understand that things sometimes don’t work and the majority of the time I can work around that And still, I was met with this frustration.

When teachers tell me their own stories of how technology trumped their lessons I know that they are less and less willing to try it again. It is frustrating to put so much time into something to have it fall apart because a wire is missing, a network is down, a button they don’t know about needs to be pushed, an ActiveX control needs to be allowed to run, a program needs to be updated, a this, a that.

So where do we go from here?

Is it about teaching teachers how to troubleshoot all of that? It would be nice if everyone knew how but I’m not sure if that is a very practical answer.

The largest protest I hear from teachers about their day is that there is not enough time to do anything. We know that there isn’t. Teachers have so many responsibilities, a mere fraction of which is the hours of time where they are physically tied to their classrooms and the rest generally gets done on their own time. We know that. So throwing more training at them that requires them to use their precious out of class time in order to learn how to troubleshoot technology that they perhaps do not even want to use well…I think that is problematic.

So again. Where do we go from here?

For myself, I am in the process of creating a webpage for the course where I will drop any resources. I’ll be expecting the learners in the course to access any presentations there. It’s something they can do during class time, at home if they have computers, on their phones, whatever their preference or requirement. This way the theory won’t be trumped by the tech. As well, the class time will be reserved for collaboration, creation, and questions.

But that is me. I teach one little course a week. And I am a technology consultant.

Where do we go from here when it comes to working with educators and supporting them with not only the opportunities but the challenges of using technology in the classroom?

I know what makes a boring, didactically challenged video. I even spent some time not two weeks ago talking about this, analyzing this with other educators.

And yet, today I struggled with creating a video (multimedia presentation…actually glorified powerpoint, whatever) that didn’t fall into that description. The presentation is just a little thing but I still feel there is too much text, that it’s not dynamic enough, that it is just…dull.

And it took me more than a few minutes to create. Many more.

So if I had such difficulty and I am aware of what not to do. And I have a desire to create the video. And I have some time in which to do so as part of my job…imagine how daunting the task of creating relevant, didactically charged video would be for educators who don’t have those luxuries.

Scarier thought…wonder what their classrooms look like unplugged, so to speak.

O___O

2nd day of a 2-day workshop facilitated by Avi and Marc-Andre around the concept of flipping the classroom. Here are my notes from Day 1.

Don’t you hate being late? I do…this morning I ran in late…didn`t know how to connect to the internet so began writing on a notepad and am now pasting in, to be added to. I hate being late. Somehow I ended up on a long, windy road by the water to get here. And once I got here I could see the autoroute close by so there has to be a quicker method. Ah well. then couldn`t find parking and was lost looking for the entrance to the building…

en tous cas…here I am. Once again, these are my notes. I’ve highlighted certain key ideas that interest me in particular.

Talking around how to intro this to teachers
- do we show teachers how to use this even if they are not teaching program?
Or should we say you need to be teaching program to work with me?

(program being current and / or reformed curriculum…)

Pushing Hands

as consultants we are working at different levels with different teachers
important nuance between meeting educators where they are and guiding them to a brighter future ( within their own goals, a bit past their comfort zone )– reminds me of pushing hands exercise

Pushing hands works to undo a person’s natural instinct to resist force with force, teaching the body to yield to force and redirect it.

With pushing hands, the two participants end up looking together in the same direction. I like this and use this as a model for the work I do with teachers. Important to note that the direction is not always the one I envisioned.

my goals for today – learning and finessing my technical skills

My experience can become a model for the work I do with educators.

(did not really happen. I learned a few new tools, but spent the majority of my time thinking, talking, planning…)

 
In making videos…Educators often recreate a traditional classroom lecture (standing in front of white board, lecturing)

(Question asked to the group from Avi) How would we approach working with teachers to avoid this? (our answers, below)

• Stay out of the classroom – if you are in the classroom there needs to be action (using the SMARTboard, demonstrating…)
• maybe no face shots
• maybe recording a sentence at a time
• structuring the process – creating a guideline (mindmap…structure of some sort)
• script

Task today – produce a capsule on something that we want, that will be useful in our practice

We were asked – what would we prefer, get little intros to different tools first and then start to create or start the creation process 1st (planning the concept) …

I think we informally decided to look at diff`t tools first…yes, it was informal and then formalized.

We said we need to see tools to help form the content and suggested that at the end of the 1st day or section of this atelier they should provide a quicky – maybe 10-15 minutes of introducing tools – 10 tools in 10 minutes kind of thing.

(I`m taking notes only on what interests me, what is available to me with the tools I have or are available at the centres where I work.)

Explain Everything (iPad app) – like educreations or show me but in slides and seems more editable. Can be exported to mp4, which can then be manipulated with sound or other editing…

Jing – remember Jing? I think I used it a few times a couple of years ago…is this possible? Yes, it is. I explored it then gave it up because it is not linux friendly.

PowerPoint – we (I) am so quick to dismiss powerpoint because it seems to have been used to death but it’s the boring, one-dimensional side of PowerPoint that has been used to death. The reality is that it is available to all of our teachers. And there are many things that can be done with it. I need to explore this further…

I started to think about my task – created a popplet once again. Not sure how much I love popplets BUT they are so easy to do.

Discussion around the 90/10 idea – the reality might be 99/1… (teachers who flip their classrooms to use 90% found video/resources and 10% self-created)

Criticism of flipped classroom

Lisa Nielson: Five Reasons I`m Not Flipping over Flipped Classroom

Personal reaction – I felt her 5 reasons were based on an assumption that flipping the classroom is 1 thing – homework in class, lecture at home. I see flipping to be very different. Anything that gets us away from using our valuable face time with students in a way that promotes passivity in learning is part of a flipped process.

In other words – if I am allowing students to access theoretical material (the lecture, the bits of knowledge) from a place other than me, either at home the night before or in class via computers or even their own phones or whatever other sources work, and then using our face time to apply, create, collaborate, etc.. then I am ‘flipping’.

In that case, I’ve been flipping for a while…I used to say it was because I was a lazy teacher and didn’t want to prepare a lecture but really it was because I didn’t want to waste my time reinventing the wheel. I wanted to work with my students.

Biggest Takeaway for me

Seems to be in the area of how can I use this in Professional Development? I see this concept as being a wonderful, powerful way to make PD more meaningful, more relevant. I’ve started to look at this more on a separate page on this blog, Resources for Flipped PD. Not sure if that is where it will stay but that is where it lives for now.

I’m in the middle of a 2-day workshop on Flipping the Classroom for educational consultants and lead teachers. Since this post is really about my notes as I experience the day, a lot of it will be in note form. (makes sense, eh? :) )

The workshop took place bilingually, mainly in English, but everyone just spoke in the language they were most comfortable in and people jumped in to translate when someone needed explanation. Loved it.

Facilitators: Avi and Marc-Andre

Pre-workshop learning – Avi and Marc-Andre sent us these resources to view:

The Flipped Classroom, by Aaron Sams (2m15s):
http://tinyurl.com/aaronflipped

The Flipped Classroom, by Jonathan Bergman (1m59s):
http://tinyurl.com/jonathanflipped

 Salman Khan: Let's use video to reinvent education:
http://tinyurl.com/salmanflipped

The Flipping Classroom Infographic:
Link <http://www.knewton.com/flipped-classroom/>

Morning Notes
We are here to give our honest feedback – as guinea pigs for future teacher workshops. `We` are a collection of consultants and lead teachers in tech at our centres / board. Mainly from the Adult Education sector but at least one person from the youth sector as well.

Their desired outcome — teachers get better at didactics

Word Swatch activity:
Discussion around difference and hierarchy of illustrate – show – explain

and…if one is done maladroitment … what is the impact?

Idea given by Marc-Andre that consulting could be flipped, too.

Asking us to watch videos and to create a rubric re: communication and concept (form and content) about these videos.

1 – form — hard to hear, whiteboard teaching about English concept … dry. Video equivalent of pedantic drivel. Long winded explanation. Even more painful on video than in real life.

2 – brought about convo around being cognizant of not making boring videos for students to watch at home
“no amount of rewinding can make up for weak pedagogy“ – Marc-Andre

talking about how teachers may need to go through the process of making `bad` videos in order to realize what is needed. Il faut trouver la bonne balance entre laisser les apprenants suivre leur processus et de jumping in and guiding them towards what works best. –> Facilitation – the dance between what people want and where we/they/their teaching practice needs to go (like in recent conversation around change models on HSI net…I may write more about this in another post)

3 – Conversation around what is a good and bad video = revealed that it is somewhat subjective. And sometimes our judgment of a video is coming from where we are at and not necessarily where a learner is at.

A big criticism of some of the videos (in particular the Kahn video) is that there is no reason for watching the video given. There is no context, no `why`. —> Creating the why, so very important in all learning situations, especially for adults? perhaps…

Importance of being cognizant of audience – and the why they are watching this. I see that this is no big difference between this and good teaching in general….

Conversation around teachers finding time to create presentations like this

• teachers should be paid to be trained (Marc-Andre says centres have money for this…)
• Avi talks about 90/10 – to start, 90% can be found videos and maybe 10% can be self-created

idea of judgment came up…Flipping the classroom in more ways than one

• - teaching happens at home, homework in class
• - teacher performs and is open to evaluation through existence of video evidence

If you are offering the idea to flip the classroom you have to be ready to receive constructive criticism
— fear for teachers? – when making video, we are more open to criticism and judgment. We can no longer close our doors and feel “safe“, in a sense.

Again – no matter the delivery, love of your students and of your subject shines through

(Paul offers – Barry Bennett (beyond Monet) has videos of good / bad teaching.)

Afternoon Notes
Looking at criteria for a `good` video

• Speaker – speed, formal/informal consistency, humour, recording quality, vocabulary, tone…
• Visuals and Audio – dynamic, music, speaker seen or not?,
• content – what, how, why,

Our first task:

First capsule – Audio Only (why? forces us to focus on explanation without relying on visual)

—> Explain how to determine the tip for a meal at a restaurant

Here is mine – I organized my ideas with popplet , a mind-mapping program that Avi showed us.

And then I started to talk and realized I needed a script, so wrote a script, then recorded it with audacity
leaveatip
And THEN, when I thought it was all done I found out that after I left the room to start working on my little mp3 the question was CHANGED. So my audio didn`t really answer the task per se but it does go into the idea of how to explain a concept. I used narrative, story-telling as my starting point. Others used role-play, others were more didactic.

Looking forward to tomorrow! Well, now it is today, so looking forward to later today when we continue :)

Let me tell you a story…

When I was 5 years old I changed my name to Harmonica Goldfish. The motivation behind that is still a bit unclear but the context was that my family had just moved to Manhattan and I spontaneously told the new children I met at the park in front of our apartment building that my name was Harmonica Goldfish.

Once the laughter subsided as children started knocking on our door asking for Harmonica Goldfish, my mother convinced me I should change my name to Patricia instead, since that was actually (and still is actually) my full name. That my new teachers would call me that but may not call me Harmonica Goldfish. I accepted that and was known as Patricia when I started school.

Most people call me Tracy now so sometime between 1973 and now I reverted back to Tracy. I imagine things gradually shifted back towards Tracy during the year…or at least when we moved back to Montreal the following year, when the reason for our year in New York – my father’s fellowship with Cornell University – had come to an end.

At one point in my 30s I worked at a school where everyone called me Patricia for about 5 years. Don’t quite remember how that happened. Towards the end of that same period I began and completed a Masters program, where people called me Patricia. Gradually, by the end of the 2-year program, I think I began to be known as Tracy again.

This little story of my changing name makes me think of the line, “no matter where you go, there you are.” I could try to mark a new start somewhere with the changing of a name but when it comes down to it, I am Tracy. I am me. And with that comes all of the qualities that brought me to where I am now – mainly a strong desire to create hope for the future through education. A tenacity when it comes to an idea that I believe fosters that hope.

I’m good with that.

I gave this blog a little facelift, using a modified template I’m using over at Camping Out that I like. I think it looks nice and fresh, just like the gorgeous day I’m having today on my day off this week :) (I work 4 days/week). At the same time I changed the quote I use in my byline to

Teaching is the greatest act of optimism.

It’s attributed to Colleen Wilcox and rings true for me.

I’m wondering what it stirs in others? I invite you to reflect on it. Does it ring true to you as well? Why?

**cross-posted at AdultEd.TracyRosen.Com**

The idea of advertisement is in constant evolution. It is becoming more and more personal. Google’s ads are streamlined to reflect our search queries and sites like facebook do the same thing.

Test it out. Do a search for something specific on Google. Like a particular kind of shoe or boot. Then log into facebook and lo and behold, the ads will suddenly be geared to just those shoes you were looking for!

Just the other day, I heard about an app called Aurasma that brings static advertisements to life with your SMART phone. Someone with a SMART phone can not only view these ads but can create their own as well. More and more, companies rely on us for their advertising. If I talk about how much I love my new x, y, or z on facebook or twitter, I am helping out the company by effectively advertising to all of my contacts.

If advertising is so much more than the print, radio, or tv ads of yore, how do we teach about it?

I’d say it’s essential to read about how it is changing. And to bring that into our classrooms.

Adweek.com is a good place, with a lot of content about the latest trends in advertising.

Facebook’s New, Entirely Social Ads Will Recreate Marketing by E.B. Boyd at Fast Company, a company with, “… a focus on innovation in technology, ethonomics (ethical economics), leadership, and design. Written for, by, and about the most progressive business leaders…”

AllTop Advertising – a collection of the top read advertising articles from across the Web.

Another thought. How could these changes be reflected in the assignments we give our Economics students? Do you have any ideas? Do you know of anyone who is already integrating new advertising techniques into their class assignments?

Guest Post – an educational consultant and staff leader reflects on using an iPad for the first time. This post is cross-posted at Maria’s iPad Blog.

The iPad came out of its box looking simple, unassuming and seemingly without controls – using this, I was promised, would become a “paradigm shift” for me: it would simplify my computer tasks when away from the office. I was dubious at best and not a little bewildered — you see, I was one of those (few?) who made it a point not to use a computer when not at work – yes, I’m a 50 something technical neophyte who uses a computer because I have to in my work as an educational consultant and staff leader in the Adult General Education programme at our centre. It was becoming obvious, though, that I needed another tool to help me easily access the ever-growing mass of documents and information overload when away from my desk — a different kind of laptop? I wondered (I envisioned myself easily clicking away on a slimmer, lighter version…). My director, however, convinced me to try a tablet instead…tablet? As in Moses and the tablets? Gaming tablets? (I felt like Moses!) So I did a bit of research and discovered that a tablet “combines the features and portability of a smartphone” (I have a cell phone, but it’s not one of the smart ones) “with the power of a laptop – the best of both worlds in one sleek device” — so there it was in front of me, a sleek device that I wasn’t sure what to do with.

Image from Contracast, click for source.

The first thing that really impressed me was how quickly my iPad turned on: a light press of the side button and a “slide to unlock” (though at first, being left-handed I tried to slide left…) revealed a screen full of intriguing “apps” (I had heard about those) such as “Notes,” “Calendar,” “Reminders,” “Camera,” and “Safari” – I started feeling optimistic…these sounded like promising allies in my technical adventure. I had been instructed to go to “Settings” and enter my password in order to access wireless internet at home and I was nervous about that…what if it didn’t work? But it did – the indicators were clear and simple. I was also encouraged to start exploring on my own, so I cautiously began: what better app to start with, I thought, than “Safari” — a light touch of the compass symbol and I was immediately brought to a screen that offered a Google search. Okay, then – what to look up first? I had just been talking to my husband, Gerry, at our kitchen table about how communication technology was changing so quickly (social networking and Twitter), and he expressed his view that even someone like F. Scott Fitzgerald (one of my favorite writers) had been kind of “tweeting” almost a century ago, as evidenced in his notebooks. Notebooks? I had read all of his novels and short stories – how could I have missed his notebooks! So I typed in “Fitzgerald notebooks” and got a list of several options: I touched the entry “The Notebooks of F. Scott Fitzgerald” and was rewarded (at our kitchen table) with the complete text of this work! Also, I was able to manipulate the size of the print by touching the screen with two fingers and spreading or narrowing the distance between. Gerry had made an interesting point: Fitzgerald’s entries in his “Notebooks” were similar in nature to what you could find on Twitter today – reflections, comments, observations – imagine, I added, what he could have done with a tablet…

postscript – the author tells me this post was written using Evernote on her iPad.

I wrote about how much I like(d) using Pinterest just last week in Pinterest for Teaching. About how excited I was about its potential for sharing resources and even professional development, of a sorts. It’s so exciting, it’s almost addictive.

And then 2 things happened, maybe 3.

1. I had a conversation with some people at work.
2. I read this article.
3. I realized how clumsy the service is.

1. I recently started working as a tech integration consultant at a school board with two adult education centres and one of the things I did in preparing myself to begin last week was to start collecting resources about adult learning. I began a little blog (soon to be moved to the school board’s servers) and I started pinning, inspired by other educators who were pinning collections of resources on their own pinterest accounts.

   I told our technology director about this and his reaction to it all was that was all fine and good BUT. And the but had to do with preservation of information.

   Pinterest is a neat way of collecting resources, there’s no getting around that. It harkens back to my high school bedroom wall, which was covered in pictures torn out of magazines, quotes I loved from the books I read, and posters from the albums I listened to. That bedroom wall was my private sanctuary and pinterest is about sharing those things – at a rapid speed.

   The other night pinterest was down, just as I was writing that post I referred to at the top of this one. A major concern that was outlined in this conversation I had with our technology director had to with saving resources on an outside server. What happens when/if they decide to shut it all down, or something horrible happens and their servers crash in a major way. Or. Or. Or.

   Part of my job is to share and organize resources for the people at our centre. They need to be able to have access to them without the worries that they may one day disappear. I get that. And when I am putting a lot of energy into a search for resources I want to make sure they are somewhere that can be found in the future.

   (one could argue about the transient nature of web-based resources to begin with, that they are all renewable in the sense that they change at a propulsive rate. And that the web search itself is a thinking tool so a collection of resources may not be the holy grail that people are looking for…)

2. In The Reason I Just Deleted my Pinterest Account, Jeff Dunn talks about copyright issues and how Pinterest is saving its butt by pushing all consequences to the user. Now, I think this actually makes sense. Pinterest is just a vehicle and users should be aware of stealing images from others but many users aren’t. And no one reads the terms and conditions of registering for online services. They just don’t. So I’m wondering how many people know that they could get sued by Pinterest if anyone comes after Pinterest with a copyright infringement lawsuit.

   Even though I think it makes sense, at the same time the very nature of the service Pinterest offers encourages copyright infringement. And that makes this all pretty shifty to me.

   (once again, one could argue about copyright and copywrong, about who information really belongs to once it makes its way out of our heads and into the world but in the meantime, copyright infringement lawsuits are very real and costly things.)

3. Again, when I was putting together that post I reference at the top of this one about using Pinterest in education I lost a resource and just couldn’t find it again. I had done a search for boards on education, fsl, math, science, literacy, adult ed, learning, etc… and had found one great board of quotes that play with the English language. For some reason I had forgotten to link the reference in my blog post. I had the pinner’s username and I had the name of the board but could not find it by searching on Pinterest. In fact, I had two such cases. One I was able to find with the help of a Google search but the other is still lost in the pinterverse.

   That is what I mean about it being a clumsy service. Even if you know exactly where something is you can’t necessarily find it. I guess the secret to that would be to pin and like everything that you think you may want to see again in the future but you don’t always know, do you?

So. Back to the question – to pin or not to pin? I’m starting to lean to the not. Though I really do like the essence of this service, there is starting to be too much that gets in the way of my using it comfortably. At the least, I’m going to begin double saving the education resources I pin. That may become cumbersome in the long run though, however for now I do like the idea of sharing the resources I find with other educators and looking through the ones that they have already found.

What do you think? Do you pin?