Reflections on Teaching

Is it he hottest tech tool to come out in the last decade, or is it just a less functional and more expensive net book with multi-touch? It depends…

Lots of talk amongst both the general public, and educators, about whether or not the iPad is a “game changer”. I will admit to being an Apple skeptic, and do not own any of their devices, as I’m too cheap, and am willing to tinker with my digital devices and live with a non-intuitive UI (more on that later). My initial impression is that it will not be a device for me, my family, or my computer lab, but even if  that turns out to be true, it may not be the case for everyone.

Flash vs. Apps

A lot of the critique for Apple mobile devices centers around the fact that so many edu-games rely on flash, which won’t run on those devices. Tom Hoffman opines that it may be more critical for kids because they love their flash-based online games.  An analyst on Marketplace discusses why it is such a PITA for website developers to design content as the viewing audience splinters based on their device/platform. But, Leo Laporte points out on TWiT that this is all short-term pain, as Flash is replaced by HTML5, which YouTube is already getting ready for. My thoughts:

• Flash doesn’t matter as much for the general public now, because you just get an app. My son has acquired my old mobile (not from Apple), and is content with the handful of games I’ve given him from Verizon.
• It does matter for education. The best online activity sites for elementary, Starfall and PBS Kids, either don’t currently have apps, or have paid apps. The apps available don’t compare to Starfall, et. al. in terms of what they do, or how well they do it. Picture having a class set of these, can your school afford to plunk an extra $2-$5 per app for each iPad? Even as a center, that would add up.  The beauty of apps is that the price point is great, unless you’re buying in bulk. The apps are…apps, not full websites, so you aren’t getting as much, and it costs, while the real Internet version is free.

Creation vs. Consumption

But playing internet games is not the only thing you can do with the iPad or any computer. This would mean that it isn’t a replacement for your computer, merely an adjunct to it (which I think takes it out of the game-changing category, but keeps it from being useless).

• You could keep your computer center/netbooks, and use iPads in other ways in the classroom.  You could have kids review slideshows with visuals to do vocabulary development (folks are already doing this with Touches, and doing audio and text lessons with Nanos)
• You can have kids create podcasts. You could do this with other tools that are cheaper, open, etc.

The TWiT show had an interesting point about the iPad vs. a net book, that the iPad is more of a content consumption devices than a content creation one. The touch keyboard (although they mentioned a plug in for a keyboard), the lack of a camera all limit what you (and your students) can create with these tools. I’m assuming that you can do audio recording for making podcasts, as those can be done on the Touch and iPhone. Once again, it means that it won’t be a replacement tool for you computer with webcam, or a stand along digital/video camera.

If most or all you are using it for is typing/writing, maybe the touch keyboard will not prove as big an impediment to students as it seems to be to we adults, but you can get NEOs for $150 these days as the price point moves down for all devices. Frankly, $500 may be a deal for an Apple, but compared to what you get from the competition, it isn’t.

Never underestimate an intuitive user interface…

• The interface of all the Apple mobile devices is a heck of a lot more intuitive for primary students to use, and will be more “friendly” for non-techie teachers to deal with

• They are a bit delicate to leave in the hands of six year olds unsupervised doing center activities. They clearly flunk the “Tonka” standard of durability that most listening center equipment (Califone anyone?) for education tries for.

I leave it to readers to figure out where they come out on the UI vs. durability debate.

I was having a discussion with an ed tech integration expert from another local district. I shared my thought that with the exception of  a “tactile” interface, everything I’ve been able to do on my SMART Board can be done with projector and laptop. His response was, yes Alice, you and I can figure out how to do those things, but IWBs are an entry tool for the non-technically adept. Teachers who will not use tech in their teaching will use an IWB, and so it’s a way to transform their teacher that could be done without technology, or the IWB. Essentially, it sugar coats transforming education. I’m also trying to figure out if the tactile does offer a significant advantage in terms of engagement with kids, especially primary, and special education ones.

Maybe that is the bottom line with the iPad, it will make it easy for students and for non-techie teachers, making them more likely to successfully bring digital tools into their classrooms (this same point is made about the target audience for the iPad here). I may never use these overpriced gadgets in my lab/classroom, but then maybe it wasn’t meant for me in the first place. I’ll leave you with that final thought and let you come to your own conclusions.

• I Education Apps Review – I Education Apps Review – Poddio – Podcasting Studio reviewed by TheAppPodcast.com
  
• I Education Apps Review – I Education Apps Review
  
• The iPad…Why Teachers Should Care « Creating Lifelong Learners
  
• The TWiT Netcast Network with Leo Laporte
  
• northtemple – On iPads, Grandmas and Game-changing
  
• Woot : Acer Aspire One 10.1” Netbook
  
• Prepare for the age of the Splinternet | Marketplace From American Public Media
  
• Apple, Flash (OLPC)
  

Photo Credit: Apple iPad on flickr

I first heard that line from Bill Raspberry opining on Ross Perot as the answer to our presidential needs, but it seems to fit so many situations. In my prior post I talked about Urban Redevelopment and some of the less desirable consequences that resulted from it. Claus von Zutrow, in a comment on Larry Ferlazzo’s post that got this all rolling, points out that redevelopment schemes did not happen in a vacuum, they reflected a government response to a real problem in his locale. I would still contend that many redevelopment schemes start with if not outright lies, very creative exaggerations of the problem, and just about everybody agrees in redevelopment that the actual outcomes, did not match the goals. How about education? Let’s review the 5 pillars of poorly done redevelopment schemes, and think about how they resemble many of the “nuclear” options being offered by school reformers:

1. The need for change is predicated on a lie, or exaggeration;
2. Anything new is better than old;
3. It’s for their own good;
4. Resistance is not futile, but won’t change the larger forces against you;
5. It may get you something new and shiny, but it won’t help the people affected, and it will tear apart the social fabric of a community.

Larry’s post mentioned some school districts being held up as “examples” of how well this works. One was New Orleans, but Oakland, CA came up as well. Since I started my teaching career there, I’m going to share some insider nuggets just to show the Kabuki dance of self-justification and mendacity that goes on before and after a “reform” to paint it as necessary, and successful and show how the same paradigm that was used in redeveloped is being employed in education reform.

Background

After leaving a career in banking, I wanted to explore teaching as a career. I started as a 30-day emergency credentialed substitute for Oakland Unified School District. This was not my first exposure to the district.

It’s for their own good; and the good of my career!

My husband, while he was in law school, had worked for a state assembly member looking at the district as  a platform for running for local office, which he did successfully winning the mayorship of Oakland. In this effort were the two elements of all subsequent reform efforts: political ambition, and the essential truth that the district was really dysfunctional and had problems (lots of disappearing money, items being lifted from the district warehouse by employees for personal use, etc.).

Shortly before this, the Ebonics controversy exploded, securing the school district’s image as not just a local, but a national joke.

Anything new is better than old; and this superintendent is not “new” enough

The next mayor, Jerry Brown, was much more vocal about what he thought the schools (and the district should be doing). By this time, I had left Oakland, but we kept track of what was going as my husband was active in a local political club there. At the time, there was a new “reform” minded Superintendent in place. There was a re-vamp of curriculum, money was flowing into the district, and voters had even approved a parcel tax for education (very difficult at that point as it took a 2/3rds vote). There were good, and bad points, to that administration, but change was in place. At some point, someone at the district had gotten the bright idea of  “volunteering” schools for a new monitoring program called II-USP (Immediate Intervention for Underperforming Schools Program) which the state had rolled out. This was pre-NCLB, but coincided with the new state testing program. Schools in the program would have to meet certain growth goals, or be taken over. Needless to say, some of the schools were reconstituted. The school I finished my teaching career in Oakland at was one of them. The school my husband spent the most time working in as an AmeriCorps volunteer supervisor was another. The staffs were changed. Strangely the principals stayed in place, but since both of them were pretty good it at least showed some sense on the evaluators part.

The need for change is predicated on a lie, or exaggeration; the district is “bankrupt” and needs new leadership.

At this point two events intersected. The district, which had the most Dickensian accounting department I had ever seen, upgraded to a new system. When the new system was put in place, they discovered a structural deficit that likely had been in place for years, if not a decade. It was definitely from a period before the superintendent at that time’s tenure.

Resistance is not futile, but won’t change the larger forces against you; Nobody messes with Don Perata and he will put YOU in the corner.

At the same time, two local politicos, the Mayor Jerry Brown, and the head of the State Senate Don Perata, were engaged in a pissing contest about who was more serious about education reform. The superintendent, who had been favored by Perata when he started his tenure, was thrown out by the state (essentially, Sen. Perata) and the state took over in a bid for control by Perata. The legislature found that the district was “bankrupt” to justify this, but it wasn’t and likely could have gotten out of fiscal trouble if given time. They definitely needed scrutiny, but a full-on take-over was overkill engineered for political ends, and not to help the district.

Reform may get you something new and shiny, but it won’t help the people affected, and it will tear apart the social fabric of a community.

During the state take-over, input from the community (via the locally elected school board) was a non-issue. Decisions were made outside the context of the communities affected.

Now “reform” folks point to Oakland as an example of “what works”, and the benefits of take-overs and reconstitution. Meanwhile the district is still faces many of the same problems that were there in my day, and my old school, deep in Program Improvement, is wondering if they will be reconstituted, AGAIN.

So I ask you, dear reader, to consider, how many time do you reconstitute a school and reform a district before you get it right?

My friend and fellow Sac City teacher, Larry Ferlazzo, sent me an email the other night saying he was angry about something and wanted to do a post. Larry has a strong sense of justice, but let’s put it this way, he is not one to get hot under the collar quickly (unlike yours truly who can claim one natural red-head as an progenitor and has inherited the temper that went along with the hair color).

Larry’s done a really wonderful post at Are Some School Reform Technocrats Using Failed Urban Renewal Projects As Their Blueprint? It has a wonderful analogy between what was done to “redeveloped” poor neighborhoods in the 1940s-60s and what is being done now to reform schools for the poor, and the failures of both policy initiatives. I’d like to add a bit to that discussion.

Larry and I both come from the San Francisco Bay Area. He worked as an organizer, and dealt with the aftermath of redevelopment programs. Also earlier followers of his mentor, Saul Alinsky, had been very involved in fighting redevelopment efforts in San Francisco. I did my undergraduate and teacher credentialing program at San Francisco, which included classes in Urban Studies and community organizing efforts around this. So, when Larry and I talk about this, we have a background that makes it really clear what the parallels are to recent school reform schemes. I don’t know if the video that Larry pointed to about redevelopment made it clear enough about how it was carried out and why it looks just like deja vu all over again for Larry and for me.

Urban Renewal

This is a nice backgrounder on how redevelopment was carried out in San Francisco’s Fillmore and Western Addition, a largely African American neighborhood. The salient points (including stuff I’ve picked up over the years):

• The redevelopment was predicated on the lie that housing in the area was old and substandard. A PR campaign was started in the papers about rats and other infestations in buildings, and the Health Department went around “looking” for conditions to write up. When one house was found, that wasn’t enough, so they said the whole area was the problem (even when it wasn’t), making it easier to claim eminent domain under health and safety laws.
• New was better than old, who needs those rickety old Victorians? Modern housing is better! There was no respect for culture (the Fillmore was a center of black cultural life) or history.
• This is for their own good. They never had a really good plan for what to do with the residents who were living there.  There was precedent for mass evictions as the area had become largely African American during WWII, when the Japanese Americans living there were interned, and new black workers coming for jobs in the war industry moved in (one of my husband’s law school professors was working with the Friends Service Committee among the Japanese in that area at the time).
• The neighborhood, and others sympathetic to their plight, resisted and won what few concessions they could from the process (there are some moderate and low-income developments owned by some of the African American churches that had been in the area), but the black commercial and cultural life never returned. Japantown, a “concession” to the Japanese American Community never coalesced as returning internees disappeared and integrated as quickly as possible into the suburbs that was, in the opinion of many, a reaction to their being singled out and interned.
• The results, even if the neighborhood improves, is that it usually just moves the residents to a new poor neighborhood, and takes the heart out of a community. As an example, when I was at NECC in Washington, D.C. it was clear that the Convention Center had been part of a redevelopment project that probably took out part of a residential neighborhood. I wandered around the center in search of an after party and stumbled on a low-moderate income housing development that was much older than the surrounding shop/restaurant/convention development. Folks there still looked poor, and the new restaurants/shops were catering not to the residents, but to convention tourists.

So let’s review the main ideas behind most urban redevelopment schemes:

1. The need for change is predicated on a lie, or gross exaggeration of the problems being faced;
2. Anything new is better than old;
3. It’s for their own good;
4. Resistance is not futile, but won’t change the larger forces against you;
5. It may get you something new and shiny, but it won’t help the people affected, and it will tear apart the social fabric of a community.

If this doesn’t remind you of school reform schemes of the recent past, my next post will make the connection clearer.

I’ve discovered a new local blog that is focused on my school district, SCUSD Observer, and it is fast becoming my go-to resources for the latest happenings (thank you Larry Ferlazzo for this find). It’s one of the few Blogger blogs not blocked by the district, hmmm.

A recent piece on an application by a charter school was just precious. Really short and sweet, and letting the “facts” speak for themselves. By just pointing folks to the executive summary, you find out all you need to know.

Here are the pertinent points  that they missed out in their petition [I left this out earlier]:

1. The petitioners are demonstrably unlikely to successfully implement the program set forth in the petition.
2. The charter school presents an unsound educational program for the students to be enrolled in the charter school.

As we think about RttT, and it’s requirements to make it easier for charters to open, we need to keep in mind that some charter applications are going to be like this one, not ready for prime time. In our quest for “innovation” we need to make sure we aren’t allowing for the educational equivalent of a train wreck.  Districts need to be able to call “baloney sandwiches” on schools, because if they don’t, someone will not be getting an education. Contrary to a lot of public opinion, there can be alternatives that are worse than your local comprehensive public  high school.

Disclosure: My son attends a locally based independent charter, I have no blanket opposition to charters. There are many good charters, but not all are good, and being a charter does not automatically make you superior to a public school.

Well, I got through a week (albeit at 4 day one) with nary a sick day (yippee). I’m still not at 100%, and since it was a short week, the periods were shortened so I have less going on. Here are highlights:

1. Spreading the tech joy: All teachers at my site have–finally–document cameras and digital projectors. This has been a two-year odyssey, and we’re all pleased it’s come to fruition, but I’m not seeing it as the end of the journey. Prior attempts to do this purchase did not yield doc cameras or projectors, BUT we did end up with some really nice media carts, and nothing to put on them. They now hold the new doc cameras and projectors, but they offer another possibility that I shared with teachers. Before this week’s staff meeting, I showed teachers how to hook-up a CPU with mouse and keyboard to the projector, and voila, they add computers and internet to the mix. This was my first step into ed tech, so I’m hoping it will help others on the path to integrating technology.

2. Given the short periods, and the fact that I cannibalized the CPU I had been using for the SMART board for the project listed under number 1, I did not do much with the SMART board, but I plan on asking a first grade teacher to show me how she uses “Judy” clocks to figure out how to best implement an interactive activity on the SMART Notebook.

3. I had the fifth graders start to go to other class blogs. I’m hoping to have students start to comment and build relationships with some of these classes. It’s a start, and long overdue. I was stymied in past attempts to do this by my district blocking sites like blogger (makes some sense), and classblogmeister (brain-dead, I know). I’m sticking to edublog based sites for now to avoid any of those problems.

4. I’m starting to attend weekly grade level collaboration meetings that are held at the end of the day on Wednesdays. They aren’t really for just one grade level (K-2, 3-4, 5-6), and each group rotates, so they meet once every three weeks or so. This is really getting me a chance to work with my peers. It lets me see what their “priorities” are and support those academic goals more effectively.  One of the first projects is a Reading Buddy program between upper and primary grade classes. I’m having students do a VoiceThread on it. One of the things I learned was that some classes were a lot further along in implementing this program, which is good feedback.

5. Looking forward, next week is benchmark testing. These are standards-based tests developed by the district to see how kids are doing before state testing, but I’m really scratching my head about what it’s evolved to. We are pretty far into Program Improvement (Year 5?), and are getting enormous pressure to get scores on these tests up. The only problem? They are not aligned to our new Math curricula. Students in the last test were given numerous questions on concepts not yet taught, and the same is true for next week’s test. Central office types say it’s aligned, but obviously have no idea what is going on. This is making the staff deviate from the text (which I don’t have a lot issues with myself), and teach to the test (I’m not so crazy about that, but it’s a no-win situation).

I’m trying to get the fifth and sixth grade students to finish up work on some poetry projects (fifth on their heritage, sixth on Rosa Parks and Jim Crow in transportation for a local transit agency. Once the testing is over, I’ll be able to ask teachers to help with the editing process on this more.

I have not been blogging regularly, and I hope you will excuse me for this, but I’ve been sick on and off since before Winter Break. It’s sapped my will to write and some of my creative juices, so I just don’t have much to say. Here is a short update on what little I’ve done:

SMART Board activities from A Mercer on Vimeo.

January is a time for new beginnings, and to start off this year, I’ve gotten the loan of a SMART interactive whiteboard. I’ve had it in the lab for the week. I got the board because a district middle school has gotten a number of them a few years back and want some more support on using them, which I might be doing.

There have been a lot of critiques about how “interactive” these tools really are for students, and whether or not similar tasks could be done with other, cheaper tools (here is a recent thread on this). The biggest complaint seems to center around teachers using it largely for direct and whole class instruction. With this in mind I’ve been using the it as a “center” where I pull back small groups of students, rather than using it for whole class instruction. I model the activity quickly, and then let the kids do it. I’ve also tried to have the kids explain the how-to to the next group. I have no big conclusions at this point.

As happens in the run up to Winter Break, time takes on some very strange and elastic properties. While days once dragged on endlessly, they are now short. Or time is endless, but your students’ attention span is not. What I find happening with classes in my school is that as time winds down to the break, the ability for classes to complete research reports planned in the hope and optimism of October/November disappears. What options do you have beyond having students cram in a low-quality writing assignment in the time remaining and handing out coloring sheets? How about gathering together what the kids have learned and putting it on a VoiceThread. Since this scenario happened with the fifth graders I see, I’m going to share how I think this could work in a regular classroom with only a few computers (let’s say 2-6).

Requirements:

Knowledge of how to create a VoiceThread. This is not a very high barrier. If you haven’t done it yet, get out some of those holiday pics you’ve taken in digital form and go to this page for how-tos, then create a VoiceThread on your own. Once you’ve done one, you’re ready to do it with your class. I’ll try to hit on some of the management aspects in my instructions. You’ll need at least one computer with an Internet hookup. A digital projector to share the results with the class would also be nice.

1. Research and writing: Likely you will have already done some of this, just not enough for each student to come up with a one, two, or five page report.  The idea at this point is to gather what knowledge they have gained.
Lab version: I had them in the lab, so they read on the Internet. The topic was Astronomy. I had them go to sites with information about the topic. NASA Kids has a whole encyclopedia of information on astronomy topics they can search. I’m more concerned with the lexile level at Wikipedia, than the quality of information (since science sections are pretty well-maintained, they can be more up-to-date than encyclopedias). WikiJunior has an astronomy section as well at a more accessible reading level for elementary students. I had the students write short blog posts summarizing a paragraph they read. I could have had the kids correct each other online by replying to each others comments with editing suggestions.
Class Version: If the class is doing a thematic unit they should be reading on paper as well as the Internet. Have take turns in pairs on computer looking up the online topics, and then have them look through books in the classroom as well. Have them do quick writes (a couple sentences) paraphrasing what they learned. You could have them pass the quick writes around for a “buddy” edit.

2. Getting photos: Visuals will make this more engaging for the kids and give them something to speak to.
The NASA site has a number of excellent pictures if astronomy is your topic. Flickr Commons is also good for other topics. VoiceThread will let you use creative commons photos on Flickr by using the Media Sources button when you are adding photos/video to your VoiceThread. You may want to “pick out” photos by searching Flickr in advance, as the VoiceThread tool is really great, but the search facility is not as strong as Flickr’s. A tip for looking for astronomy pics, add NASA as a search term (all government photos are public domain and can be used) to get the best photos of planets, etc. Pull one or two of the kids back at a time to pick out photos to use.

3. Add students’ voices: This is where the small parts they have learned will be gathered together and hopefully make something of more depth.
Have the students come with their quickwrites (or if you’re in the lab, pull up their comments on the blog), and have them read what they wrote as a comment on an appropriate picture. Ask them a follow-up question to see if they have picked up knowledge beyond the recall level. You can also have them come up in pairs or trios. Since you’re recording, you’ll want it quiet (although I never get it “silent” and you shouldn’t worry about that). Make sure the other students know to give you silent signals, etc. at this time. You might want to consider a small coloring/drawing project to keep the other students engaged, then you can scan or take a picture of the best ones to put up on the VoiceThread.

4. Listen and learn: Play the VoiceThread for the class via projector, or have them go up in small groups and listen. Ask them to share something they learned from others. If time permits, you can have them leave comments.

Is this as good as a research report? Is this going to have a lot of higher order thinking? Maybe, maybe not, but it will make the work they’ve done more useful and long-lived than just stopping abruptly, and not completing the reports. It will also give you and the students some closure on the thematic unit.

Here are the results I got:

During our recent travels, I was listening to a track off the new Bob Dylan Christmas cd on a podcast, which is so incredibly bad I’m not going to link to it (sorry to all those Dylan fans out there). It was like polka-punk, only not as well executed as Polkacide or Gogol Bordello. So I turned to my husband to and said, “Did you know I took accordion lessons for a brief time?” Now, we’ve been married for 24 years, and have been together for two more than that, so I don’t get to spring something like that on him often. His response struck a cord with me, “Why accordion?” It was delivered with a clear tone of what the heck were you, or the adults in charge, thinking, and I think it fits a number of instances where a tool (like the accordion), is used for a task it was clearly not well suited for (a scary Bob Dylan Christmas song?). The tool may be appropriate in it’s place (accordion for Tango music, or Jazz in the hand of someone who knows what they are doing, etc.) but is not an all-purpose tool for all purposes. In my case, my mother, who already played piano at a proficient amateur-level, thought that it would be easier to do keying on the accordion for my 8 year old hands, ignoring that the weight of the accordion and the complexity of operating the instrument easily outstripped that advantage. Oh, and my hands have always been oversized. By the time I finally was allowed on the piano at about 9, I almost had an octave reach. I bring this up not to gripe about my mother’s parenting decisions in public (sorry Mom), but as a further illustration of this metaphor. You see, students are sometimes offered a particular flavor of technology just because, and it’s either not suited to their needs or not suited to the task, and you have to ask about the tools being pushed so adamantly, “Why accordion?” and why not what they need instead?