What Students Do With All Their Photos

I just read a blog post by @shareski What Are You Doing With All Your Photos? and it got me thinking.  I am teaching a 7th/8th grade Beginning Photography class this year for the first time.  According to some, it will be really easy.  Have the students take a bunch of pictures with their phones, upload them to Instragram, add some formatting, and Voilà, done with planning for the year!  

That sounded pretty good, but I decided to come up with a few other activities to do just in case I needed some backup.  One of the lessons I am doing with my students is similar to what Dean mentioned in his blog.  My students are going to take a picture a day, with one wrinkle, it needs to be a self-portrait.  It can be anywhere, at anytime, with anyone or anything.  The only requirement is that they take the picture.

Each week, students will choose one of the pictures they took and write about it. Students can write about whatever they would like.  Some of the prompts could be:

• What they were doing?
• What they were thinking?
• How they were feeling?
• A story about the person, place, or thing in their picture.
• Or anything else they want to write about.

At the end of the year, they will choose one picture from each week, and create a collage, slideshow, video, etc. using the pictures.  This creation will serve as a photographic timeline of their year!

So Much to Learn...So Little Time

During the past month, I have attended #ISTE12 and started professional development training through a Verizon grant.  Needless to say my head is swimming with new ideas for my classroom this year.  Here are a few of the things that I have heard about that I am interested in learning more about:

• Flipped classroom
• Inquiry 
• Evernote
• PollEverywhere
• Voicethread
• Twitter
• Diigo
• Camtasia
• Blogging
• Scratch
• And more

Now there is no way any sane (not that I am completely) educator (trying to be completely) would try to incorporate half of these into their classroom at the same time.  One might argue that you would be doing well if you tried a couple.  I love to learn.  I especially love to learn about new technology, pedagogy, lessons, etc. that will help to make me a better, more complete teacher.  But if I want to truly learn and understand any of the above items well enough to use them with my students, I need to choose one or two and, watch tutorials, practice with them, read how others have used them, discuss with colleagues that may know about them, and put in a good amount of time doing so.  These are things I WANT to learn more about, that I’m EXCITED to learn about, and I am still feeling a bit overwhelmed.


Now think about our students?  Do they have a say in what they learn, how they learn it, and how much time they have to spend learning it?


I know the answers to these questions as they have pertained to my classroom, and I don’t like them!

An Educational Tale

I just finished watching a movie with my family that I have seen a hundred times.  It’s called Dolphin Tale and if you haven’t seen it, see it.  And if you have seen it, watch it again.  The story is about a dolphin that loses its tail and a boy who befriends him.  But watching it tonight, the story took on a whole new, and even better, meaning for me.  This is a story of inquiry learning.

You see, I had the privilege of going to #ISTE12 this summer.  There were many major themes that wove themselves throughout the conference.  I sat in sessions that helped me understand how to flip my classroom and learn new ways to use Twitter and Diigo with my students. However, the session that had the most impact on my teaching was entitled Using Technology To Build a Culture of Inquiry by Chris Lehmann of the Science Leadership Academy (SLA).

Chris shared the model they use at SLA and how they motivate students to take ownership of their learning.  He spoke about personalization and giving the students a choice.  Learning has to be meaningful for those doing it or it's really not learning, but regurgitating.  Students need to be empowered so they don’t just sit and listen, but actually doing something with it in the end.  Chris also shared, in my opinion, the most powerful question teachers can ask their students...What do you think?  Ask the kids and then take shared action.

I was excited to learn more about how the Science Leadership Academy gets students to take ownership of their learning.  I watched a TEDTalk by Chris Lehmann Education is Broken that discussed the importance of teaching to interest and passion instead of berating students with a lot of useless knowledge that most may never use.  I also watched as Diana Laufenberg Embrace Failure spoke about authentic experiences and posing problems for students to solve rather than giving them the answers and asking them to repeat it.  The other day I read a blog post Homework that Motivates by Scott Carr.  He used words like ownership, autonomy, open-ended experiences, and creating connections.

All of these have the same message.  Let’s teach kids how to learn with authentic problems that they are interested and passionate about.  Let’s make the students the center of their learning and switch the focus away from the teacher.  Teach them that it’s okay to make mistakes,  learn from those mistakes, and keep striving toward their goal.  With all the information available to us at our fingertips, we no longer have to bog our students down with memorizing trivia and information they may never use.

The message I took away from the movie tonight was one of hope.  Not only for the dolphin, but for the boy.  The boy was fatherless and failing school.  Instead of sitting through summer school to learn about all the things he wasn’t interested in learning before, he instead learns how dolphins communicate,  befriends and learns from doctors, then organizes a campaign complete with website, webcam, and festival.  Now I know that this is Hollywood and most of Hollywood is fictional, but I also know that if we give students a voice and give them authentic learning experiences, great things can happen.

This upcoming school year, I am challenging myself to make learning more authentic for the students I teach.  Maybe you can do the same.

Blog, Blog, Blog

The title of this post sounds like something my daughters would say after I’d ask them to empty the dishwasher for the 3rd time.  However, it is in fact, what I hope to do a lot more this year.  I started blogging a year ago and turned out two of the most wonderfully intense, thought provoking blogs I have ever written.  I wrote, edited, rewrote, edited some more, and after what seemed like a month and a half, I had a 3 paragraph blog I finally felt good about posting.  My excitement about blogging waned and, up to the point where I hit the Publish button for this blog, those remained my only two (but wonderfully thought provoking) blogs to date.

I just returned from ISTE12 and feel rejuvenated and excited about blogging once again.  I hope that this time will be different.  I went to several sessions where educational bloggers discussed their first blog posts and the importance of just getting your thoughts down for no one else but yourself.  They don’t have to be long, serious, or even intensely thought provoking.  In fact, they don’t even have to be about education, however, I don’t think I will try this anytime soon.  One prominent edublogger discussed having a humorous thread running through his blogs. .On the ride home from San Diego to Phoenix with my good friend and colleague, we discussed blogging about day to day events that happen in the classroom.

Now I don’t think that a year from now I will have 367 blog posts to my credit, but I do hope to have more than 3!

Teaching 2.0

I have been using the Internet in some capacity for the past twenty years.  However, I have learned more in the last year than the previous nineteen put together, or at least that’s the way it seems.  With the advent of Web 2.0, the Internet has become more dynamic, interactive, and fluid.  It’s not like the old web where you went to a website, read the information provided, and then moved on to another site to read more information.  I’m not saying it was necessarily a bad thing, it was just lower on Bloom’s Taxonomy.  I still learned a great deal, but not to the extent I could have.

To me, it sounds a lot like education.  The old way of educating (not to date myself too much) included a lot of lectures, note taking, and written tests, with the occasional reel-to-reel movie thrown in for good measure.  I don’t know how much of this still goes on today, but I know of at least one teacher who recently retired that had been using the same binder, notes, and podium for the last 25 years.  I am hoping he was the exception and not the rule, but I’m not naive enough to think he was the last of his kind.

Thinking of the adjectives that are used to describe Web 2.0; dynamic, interactive, fluid, engaging.  Aren’t these the same adjectives that we would like to use to describe education?  I know there are those who would use these words to describe their teaching, but why aren’t we all.  This is an exciting time for education.  All the tools we have at our disposal should make it easier to interact, engage, and differentiate for each and every student.  With Twitter, students and teachers can share links and ideas whether at school, at home, or any where they have a cell phone and a signal.  With Google Docs, students can collaborate with classmates or others around the world day or night.  With Screenr and Youtube, teachers and students alike can post tutorials to enhance what has been learned, or to remediate those in need.

We need to give our students more freedom and access to the tools available, and teach them how to use those tools properly and respectfully.  We, and by that I mean I, need to not be afraid that our students are going to out learn us.  Instead, we should jump in and learn right beside them, blurring the line between teaching and learning.  Our students are growing up in an instant access world and we have the tools to provide instant access education.  As we continue to explore the resources available to us, we can better tap into the resources that walk into our classrooms every day.

Just Try It!

I was extremely nervous to start a blog.  Will people want to read what I have to say?  How many times do I need to post in a week, month, year?  What if I am a complete failure as a blogger?  All these things have been going through my head and maybe, in the not so distant past, I would have waited until the perfect time to start writing a blog… and maybe you would have been reading my first blog post in the year 2040!

I teach technology at a Jr. High School in Arizona and, as my title suggests, I feel many times throughout the year like I am just barely keeping my head above water.  Trying to balance learning new technology, preparing for my classes each day, and spending time with my family is a full time job and then some.  I had the opportunity to go to the CUE conference in Palm Springs last year.  While I enjoyed it immensely, my head was spinning with all the new programs and possibilities.   I felt a little inadequate.   As a technology teacher, I thought I should have already known about all the new programs and ideas that were being circulated.  How to integrate with Google Docs?   What is this Edmodo thing?   My students already know how to use PowerPoint, do they really need how to use Prezi too?  How am I going to use Animoto in the classroom?  And, most importantly, how am I going to learn everything I need to know before I introduce it to the students?!

It was exciting and overwhelming at the same time.  Soon after we returned to school, I found myself talking with my assistant principal. We were discussing Edmodo and how I wanted to use it with my classes, but I hadn’t had a chance to really looked at it completely and find out all the things it could do.  He looked at me and said, “Just try it.”   “If we wait around for the perfect time to try something new in education, nothing will ever get done.”   That was my epiphany!  It was like someone had given me the keys to a sports car I didn’t know how to drive and said, ‘Here, take her a spin and see what happens!”  Since that moment, all my classes have  participated in Edmodo, I have a twitter account, I use Google Docs instead of a word processor, I created a Prezi and QR code for my curriculum night, and have written my first Blog.  There is a lot more to get to, and it’s still overwhelming.  It might not go exactly the way I had planned, in fact, I might turn out to be a total disaster, but if I don’t “Just try it,”  I will never know.