Eduholic

The fan is whirring in my trailer, the grit of chocolate-covered espresso beans coats my teeth, and our sort of new puppy, Bee, rests at my feet.

Doesn’t quite feel like school, yet here I am a full week earlier than most of my colleagues, sifting through text books and syllabi in order to get ready for the first day. Turns out, National Board had me so twisted last year that I agreed all the way back in January to a beach week with the wife’s family for this upcoming week before school.

Before that fan has things hit it, this not lonely for long learning cottage seems a good place to take stock of things. So here’s what’s on my horizon for the upcoming school year.

1. I could write a book. I met with the good folks at ASCD this summer to talk about some ideas, and they encouraged me to submit a proposal. Now all I have to do is rough out a table of contents and write a few sample chapters. I’ve cleared the fall schedule (no night school, anyway), and you should see me working that material out here in the coming months, as I explore the principle that “School should not be a place where kids go to watch teachers work hard.”

2. The Truth Window. Here’s a sneak peek: I’m considering a career move, specifically, trying to become the head of a small independent school. I’ve found one that seems promising, and have sent materials to the search firm. The school has a new green building, and there’s a window in the lobby that shows the hay bales inside its 20-inch thick stucco walls. I have a zillion thoughts about this new direction, but for a number of reasons, for now I think I'll just sit with it.

3. Tech mojo. It’s time to 2.0, as I wrote last post. At least, time to take another few baby steps towards integrating the best of today’s technology into my teaching repertoire. While I’m confident that writing well won’t become obsolete, I can’t in good conscience continue to teach digital natives without employing tools that are the most effective available. To this end, I plan to renew my goal of incorporating blogs and wikis in the class in a meaningful way. The fact that blackboard now offers these tools as course options should help.

4. Mo’ better... man, dad, husband. The perennial desire to be mindful of all my mitzvot and do them, as best I can, in this imperfect world. Say sorry more, don’t lose my temper, and generally guide my little ship through the rough seas of life in such a way that I can look in the mirror every morning without disgust.

Pardon my waxing philosophical. Next time I write, it will be from the eye of the storm. As for now, I'm off to OBX. I'll try to get over my guilt at missing the pre-school meetings. Should pangs arise at the beach, I’ll dig my toes into the sand and reach for a sweating Corona until they pass.

Posted by Emmet Rosenfeld at 1:02 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

I got a perky email from Emily, a colleague who just finished the NVWP summer institute and felt jazzed about a presentation on tech-infused 21st century teaching by Teacher/Consultant Eric Hoeffler.

I felt the same way last year when I heard Eric, and wrote then about my plans to use a wiki in my classroom (Starting from Scratch July 23, 2006) It turned into a student-curated website, which was fantastic but let me off the hook in terms of learning new tricks.

I may be tech challenged but I know some people who aren’t. Members of the Teacher Leader’s Network have been sharing ideas lately about how to hang ten on the 2.0 wave. Since dissemination is today’s highest form of flattery, I hereby present stuff culled from a current thread. I don’t think these accomplished and dynamic educators mind my sharing, especially if you check out their work and leave comments. I have lightly edited their comments (presented below in italics).

Emily Vickery of Montgomery, Alabama suggests viewing this clip called “Have You Been Paying Attention?” that poses a question in the description tagthat I've got to admit has been nagging me regarding my own practice: "Since most of today's students can appropriately be labeled as "Digital Learners", why do so many teachers refuse to enter the digital age with their teaching practices? "

Sheryl Nusbaum-Beach, a big wave pioneer in 21st century stuff, graciously shares resources from a recent workshop she did in NY: Look at agendas and resources. and here from an online course for science and math profs- lots of clips and such...

Sheryl also provides information on how to use a feed reader to aggregate blogs and wikis you want to read, along with some of her course material. She says: Watch this RSS made simple very short clip... and, Here is some info I put together for folks in a recent course I taught on RSS. Hope it helps. Just scroll a little on the page until you get to section called: RSS: Finding, Reading, Editing

Bill Ferriter, a superteacher with a blog called “The Tempered Radical,” writes: RSS Feed readers are incredible---I don't know how I ever lived without mine, to tell the truth!... I started teaching my kids about feed readers last year and created an entry on our classroom blog designed to teach them about how they work. It includes a few screencasts and a PDF document that can be used for info...

Ellen Berg provides a down-to-earth explanation of what RSS is and how to subscribe...

Ellen Holmes from Maine sends along a really good search for 21st Century Lessons. It is a collaboration between GEM and NEA...maybe some others too. Ellen continues, Another good one is the Partnership for 21st Century Skills website. It is not necessarily good at the lesson planning level, but it is full of good resources for change agents.

And here’s a blog about using writing in the teaching of math, recommended by TLNer Susie, off an interesting site called Future of Math.

John Norton, prolific curator of TLN, pulls ideas together. He writes: Emily mentioned the digital photography site at Spain Park HS in Birmingham. Students post a photo, describe the what and why, and other students and the teacher comment.
Applicable to visual arts in other areas. Performing arts -- hmmm -- embedded video? One problem many schools have is getting server space and/or accessing space outside the district firewall. There are likely many things going on INSIDE firewalls that we can't see, due to strict policies about posting student images, etc. The photography teacher at Spain Park is still experimenting, but one idea he had was to find other high schools with photog. programs and have students at the schools each start a school blog and have students at one school post their work for students at the other school to comment upon. This could be pretty powerful if it gets off the ground. It might actually work better in a social networking space like NING, where there are a variety of networking options. Here's a webpage created by a middle grades tech teacher where students express their creativity with programs like PhotoShop and Dreamweaver... some funny stuff... might spark some ideas! Obviously still plenty of room...to blaze some trails! I think we're just beginning to see the emergence of truly web-based projects and products. I would expect that we'll see more and more products appearing on TeacherTube, for example.

John Norton adds:
Good general resource
One of the "inventors" of the scribe method...
Basics of blogging - from conference Sheryl helped organize
Third grade teacher...
Research article: Critical Thinking Through Online Discussions
Also check this out....

Posted by Emmet Rosenfeld at 10:08 AM | Permalink | Comments (6)

When I finish teaching a class I ask the students what they’ve learned. Often this relates to what I’ve taught.

The way that I ask students to demonstrate what they’ve learned is not by a multiple choice test, which would be helpful in determining what I thought they should have learned, but rather through an essay or a letter. I choose this open-ended form for a couple reasons.

First, it supports differentiation of instruction. In the same way that all first graders don’t come to reading at the same time, learners at any level don’t gain skills in lock step. Knowing this doesn’t defeat me from presenting a particular curriculum. But it does disabuse me of the notion that everyone’s going to get it all now.

The second reason I like an end of course “position paper” instead of a final exam is because writing is thinking. Here’s one more chance for each student to solidify the most important things they’ll take away from the class.

This week, the course that is ending is freshman composition at the local community college, and the curriculum is essentially “How to do a college research paper.” As is typical in a community college, the population of students consists of adult learners who need extra help in writing before they tackle other college classes. Many are immigrants, some with university or professional experience in another country and some without. Some students have jobs in the military, government or the private sector, with a few of traditional college age.

I had a lot of A students this time around: Abebe, Abrham, Azene, Ali, Ashemi, Aziz… The topics they researched mirror today’s headlines: HIV/AIDS among women in Zimbabwe; eating disorders among American teenagers; stem cell research; breast implants; music file-sharing and illegal downloading; immigration reform…

One of the appeals of teaching this group, unlike my normal diet of high school kids, is that they are mature adults concerned with the same weighty issues of the day as I am. The greatest challenge, conversely, is that their language skills may be inadequate to penetrate an op-ed piece, at least without a frustrating degree of effort.

What follows are excerpts (unedited by me) from several end-of-course letters about a range of topics addressed in the course.

Hao, a Taiwanese engineer who regularly walked me to my car after class to continue the night’s lessons, described the stages of the writing process:
To become a good writer, one must think and have a mind of his or her own. In the class we are given an article about writing process…At the architect stage, we organize the preliminaries to lay out the structure of the argument so that we can get a big picture of what we want to present. Then we go into more details by refining and sharpening each paragraph to make our objective concrete. Finally, at the Judge stage, we apply critical thinking to look at the piece we are writing in a more intellectual and argumentative way so as to fortify the ground where our view points stand.

Farhan, also my student nearly a decade ago in a ninth grade ESL class, wrote about showing versus telling:
In the process of writing… we wanted to get the audience’s attention by using sensory imagery by showing or drawing a picture to let the reader know what we are trying to tell them without really telling them. This was done by using snapshots to have a reader understand the moment.

JR, a submariner built like a fireplug, tells how he learned to skim sources:
Next bit of knowledge which I have ingested is the ability to helicopter over a source. I have long had a problem in my research with attempting to read an entire document line by line as if I were reading my favorite fiction book. Amazingly I can now skim over a source and capture the thought being expressed.

Konjit, a middle-aged Ethiopian mom, records what she learned about making in-text citations:
In my summer class, I also learned how to write MLA in-text citations. Those is made with a combination of signal phrases and parenthetical referenced. A signal phrase indicted that something taken from a source (a quotation, summary, paraphrase or facts) is about to be used; usually the signal phrase includes the authors name after the cited material, normally includes at least a page number. It is very helpful if the reader decided to consult the sourced, the page number will take them straight to the passage that has been cited.

Posted by Emmet Rosenfeld at 12:02 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)