This post is a response to the Teacher Leadership Challenge 2014 being coordinated by Michigan Educator of the Year, Gary Abud. Weekly prompts for the challenge can be found on his blog. All educators are welcome to participate and share their thoughts using the #tlc2014 hash on Twitter, or submit thoughts via their own blog, vlog, or comments on Gary’s blog.   Who is the "the learner" and who is "the teacher"? It would be fashionable of me to claim the old roles of "teacher and learner" are giving way to trendy and far less didactic roles of "facilitator and collaborator", but I suspect that in effective classrooms the roles have been intertwined for decades, if not centuries. The Socratic Method has been applied to learning environments for several millennia, the dialectic it creates forming an essential cornerstone of many effective group learning situations. That is to say, conversation and collaboration among both teachers and learners as equal partners in the learning process is not a new concept. For the sake of this reflection, let’s assume (and perhaps safely) that in many school systems the roles of teachers and learners are still what we would consider to be traditional roles of "master and apprentice". In other words, the teacher is a knowledgeable veteran, well experienced in the ways of both educating minds and imparting knowledge through lecture, work, projects, etc. The learners in this scenario are seen as inexperienced, in need of tutelage, and often are given tasks to prove how much, or how little, they have learned from their teacher. In these roles, the teacher serves as an unquestionable authority, and in many ways is the living embodiment that the learners are trying to emulate. Looking at the evolving roles of teachers and learners, the current trend appears to be one in which the teacher role is seen as a guide or facilitator. Teachers still set early learning goals, but are increasingly aware and encouraging of learners setting and achieving their own goals. Learners are seen more as equals in the sense that each and every learner has the potential to be a teacher or leader, and must be presented with the right tools, or engaged with appropriate materials and experiences, so that each and every learner can discover how much they have to learn from themselves. Both learners and teachers are encouraged to see the world as problems or puzzles to be solved together, each playing an important role in the solution. Where does this leave me and my thoughts then? As mentioned, it would be popular of me to agree with current ideology regarding the roles of teachers and learners. But it doesn’t capture how I feel completely. Nor does the more traditional description of master and apprentice. Not to have it both ways, but my thoughts linger on the idea of teachers and learners as partners, almost friends; individuals tied together with common goals and ambitions, yet experienced in ways that compliment the problem-solving tasks they will encounter together. Teachers however, will still have times when they are expected to lead based on the knowledge gained from their life’s experiences. Learners should still have experiences in which they are tested. However, more opportunities should occur for both to switch roles, or take on shared responsibilities (setting learning goals, creating individualized assessments, etc.) in which they are dependent on one another. Not quite friends, but more than colleagues.        

I recognize that this isn’t a terribly scintillating topic for many advanced iOS users, but I’m helping to support a school full of teachers with brand new iPads this year. I’ve found it a bit trying to facilitate teacher-management of the devices, oversee the Volume Purchase Program for Apps, and attend to the other duties I’m responsible for throughout the rest of the district. This is the busiest start to the school year yet in my role as an instructional technology coordinator, so in an attempt to stay ahead of at least a few things, I’m making new "how to" videos for the iPads each Monday in hopes that I can answer questions before they arise, and have a ready made stock of video answers for when teachers do come asking. One question that I’m anticipating is importing videos and pictures from the camera roll of the iPads to teacher’s laptops. I’ll be encouraging teachers to use the iPads for as many student-created media projects as possible, and foresee that the camera rolls on the shared devices (each classroom only has 5 iPads) will fill up fast. While teachers can use a host of options to import media from the iPads (Photostream, e-mail, sync with iPhoto), I’ve loved using Image Capture on our school Macs to quickly pull images and videos from iOS devices to multiple Mac laptops throughout the district. You can view the video below, or click through to watch via Youtube. For those that have Macs, Image Capture is a great little application that can be used with any digital camera, and works very well for iOS devices that you want to import media from, but don’t want to have to worry about syncing or cluttering up your iPhoto library with images and videos you just need to get on your machine to then upload or share to other places.

How do we encourage good "netiquette" among our students? I use that term as it pertains specifically to conversation that takes place online, but in truth encouraging positive, constructive discourse and conversation among learners is essential in all environments. I try to look past the distinction between commenting on a blog, and having a face to face conversation around a table, but there is a difference. The medium (blogs) are seen as cousins of typically more terse electronic modes of conversation; texts, messages, snapchats all encourage short, punctuated quips. Face to face conversation in a classroom is expected to be the opposite of that. So it was with great pleasure that I sat in the back of one of Melinda Boydston’s Tech Literacy classes at our middle school today. I try to make it a point to plant myself in a classroom and observe  a few times a week to gather my thoughts, and see how students are interacting with technology. More importantly, it’s a good way for me to build some small, yet crucial connections with teachers and learners. I find myself asking questions along with the students, and getting some great tips and tricks for instructional practice. Sometimes the smallest of boxes are the hardest to fill up. In today’s case, Mrs. Boydston was helping students work on their commenting skills among their fledgling blogs that they’ve started on Kidblog. They had a brief discussion about etiquette in various social situations; around the dinner table, at school, in the hallways, etc. A few students shot a few snarky remarks her way, trying to throw her off her game, most of the comments being along the lines of "but what if I want to tell someone that his blog post was swag?!" Most students understand what Mrs. Boydston was talking about, and they all sort of agreed about how their "netiquette", or how they behaved in their online learning environments, was very much akin to their "real world" learning environment. She wrapped up the conversation about commenting, and kept it simple; she wanted more than the "one word comment", something that went beyond "awesome". Which got me thinking. When you’re trying to combat the already anemic length and depth of electronic communications sent among students each day, what sort of questions and criteria do you give students to encourage them to go beyond awesome in their blog comments? William Chamberlain goes for the "blitzkrieg" approach, rallying his thousands of teacher and student Twitter followers to help add comments to freshly minted student blogs posts. With that many commentators, there’s bound to be plenty of comment gems among the rough. An older post from Meredith Stewart encourages groups of students to brainstorm "less useful" and "more useful" types of comments before clicking away at their keyboards. Although the digital remains are no longer found on the web, I used to require my 6th graders to ask 3 questions about what their peers were thinking about while writing their blog posts. You could even go old school, and diagram what makes a good comment with pencil and paper like Mrs. Yollis does (another oldie, but goodie blog post I keep bookmarked). With the rapid transition of student writing from notebooks to Google Docs and blogs within my district, I found myself incredibly curious today, wondering how well teachers’ traditional methods of getting students to craft well written comments are translating to digital writings. I’m going to make a mission out of gathering and culling together the most effective methods that teachers in my district have devised for helping students go beyond awesome with peer feedback, and will report back here in a few weeks. In the meantime, if anyone else out there has thoughts, links, or methods they find particularly useful at fostering good commenting skills in learners, please share.   photo credit - "add your comment" - http://www.flickr.com/photos/dharmasphere/20993325

Alright, so the promotional coupons known as Kohl’s Cash aren’t really stealing, but it sure felt like it this last weekend. I had spent a tidy sum on back to school clothes for the family over Labor Day weekend, and was rewarded for my good consumerism with promotional coupons worth $80 of merchandise at the Kohl’s chain department store. For those not in the know, Kohl’s is one of those large discount department store chains based out of Wisconsin. One of their signature hallmarks are the seemingly magical discount racks found throughout the store; %60-%80 off clothing racks are present in almost every department, and through some retail wizardry, clothes that would normally cost close to $100 are a mere fraction after further discounts and promotions. It’s almost enough to make you question the authenticity of the "original price" stickers and signs. Regardless of whether Kohl’s and other retailers are pulling a fast one on me, it feels great to be able to walk out of a store having spent $5.28 for over $100 worth of merchandise! Call me easily manipulated (as I had to spend a fair amount to get the discounts in the first place), I at least put the experience to some good use, and created the following video story problem using some simple Algebra to question whether I could have walked out of the store with my purchases without spending a single dollar of my own money. I know that it’s a rather simple answer, and might not play well in an advanced Algebra class, but the important part is the engagement and connection to a real world setting. I’ve harped about this in a number of blog posts and presentations now for almost a year and a half, but it bears repeating again. We have the tools to bring the world into our classrooms, so why don’t we? Rather than try to create a facsimile of real world problems, why not capture the moments when we feel like we’re "getting a deal too good to be true" or run across some genuinely curious event? Why not encourage our students to do the same, and do away completely with the "when will I ever use this?!" whine heard in many secondary math classrooms. There’s a wealth of experience for us to tap into; if I could find a simple problem like this in purchasing pants, a pancake griddle, and a shower curtain, I shudder with glee at the thought of what an actual math teacher might be able to make of it.   P.S. You should check out the nerdy, yet great, WeUseMath website from BYU.

I must preface this post with a brief disclaimer. I do not swear on this blog, nor do I swear in my professional duties while working with students. I don’t advocate swearing in the classroom, but one of the most entertaining videos I’ve found that helps explain Joseph Campbell’s "Monomyth" uses the "S" word twice, although it is censored with "bleeps" in both occasions. Mario and Fafa are puppets; highly entertaining puppets created by Damien Eckhardt-Jacobi and Vincent Bova. Mostly they star in comedic videos referencing pop culture, but every so often the furry groundhog and his red friend present us with a humorous attempt to educate their audience about important cultural touchstones. In doing so they create marvelous pieces of video that fit someplace between "The Muppet Show" and "PBS". The only problem (for almost all K-12 schools) is the occasional use of off-color language. And while the two instances of the "S" word in this quick-witted explanation of the "Hero’s Journey" are both bleeped out, I still find myself hesitant to share what would otherwise be a rather engaging, and lighthearted, look at a topic that can typically be quiet dry in its introduction to students. Feel free to watch the video below and ask yourself what teenager wouldn’t get a kick out of two furry puppets explaining one of literature’s most infamous narrative patterns by referencing Star Wars, Adam Sandler, Indiana Jones, The Hobbit, Pirates of the Caribbean, and Harry Potter. And thus I leave you with these questions. Is content this captivating worth the risk of introducing the censored language that it uses? What role, if any, would language like this have in any K-12 classroom? Certainly content like this would pass muster at the post-secondary level (although last year Arizona law-makers thought differently). Am I barking up the wrong tree, and trying to push material like this where it wouldn’t be appropriate? Or would some desperate language arts’ teachers out there share something like this outside of class time, or through social media channels, to avoid any direct accusations of encouraging indecent language? How are teachers handling an increasingly connected, and blended teaching environment in which media streams in from all corners of the internet? How should we "vet" content like this, and how do you make a call on what is "safe" or not for your classroom?

Web clips are an often under-utilized feature of all iOS devices. The ability to add direct links to websites on your device’s home screen is often overlooked in favor of native apps that don’t always need access to the internet in order to function. However, giving students a "one-click" button to a popular web service used in your classroom makes navigating the device a bit easier, and allows them to then quickly jump quickly between multiple tabs and websites while they’re in mobile Safari, rather than dive into a single purpose app. Many popular websites, like CNN, provide nice custom icons for the web clips you add to your home screen. However, many popular learning sites (like Spelling City), don’t always provide those nice icons, instead creating a screen shot of the entire webpage, which gives you a less than spectacular visual result. Here’s a brief video that I hope will help teachers create "prettier" web clips so it’s easier for younger learners to navigate visually if their literacy skills are quite ready for them to be using text search. It’s not a terribly creative or "game changing" feature as far as using your learning devices to improve your instructional practice, but it is a nice way to manage your iOS device so all learners have an easier time navigating the environment.

Please finish the analogy for me if you have a moment. Many districts around us are starting to talk about Edgenuity’s signature elearning platform, and before people in my district start mentioning it, I’d love any and all candid, honest, thoughtful responses. My district is one of the largest consumers of MVU courses in Michigan, and we’re starting to look at additional providers to make our online offerings more robust. I’ve heard many stories particularly about e2020, and I’ll be doing some thorough research, but I wanted to get some gut reactions first. So I thought we’d have some fun with it, and turn it into an analogy. Face-to-Face learning is to e2020 as ____________ is to _______________. Leave your responses in the comments below.

This post is a response to the Teacher Leadership Challenge 2014 being coordinated by Michigan Educator of the Year, Gary Abud. Weekly prompts for the challenge can be found on his blog. All educators are welcome to participate and share their thoughts using the #tlc2014 hash on Twitter, or submit thoughts via their own blog, vlog, or comments on Gary’s blog. The Wrong Homework Argument Our default "mode" for viewing the world comes from our own egocentric view of reality. It’s why we’re shocked when students we work with everyday still can’t grasp a difficult concept. It’s why our close friends and loved ones surprise us with radically different political viewpoints. It’s why we still struggle with judging "rightness" through the application of absolute principles rather than our own experiences and feelings. Our individual experiences shape who we are. If we can accept as a natural truth (or at least a strong assumption) that each of us is unique, we can shift the conversation about homework. We can talk about the value of homework not as a polarizing dichotomy, but as an encompassing plurality.   My wife, the art teacher, agrees with this one. Homework is Unnecessary Josh Stumpenhorst,  a former Illinois Teacher of the Year, insists that homework is really only stealing time away from students that they could be using to be kids. Josh considers that the differences in home life between his "have" and "have not" students means that most traditional homework would be unfair as some students would be met with too many obstacles (lack of safe environment, quiet space, computer access). In short, Josh doesn’t want his students to "burnout" on learning. Alfie Kohn would probably agree.   Who’s to say that something incredible won’t happen through homework? Homework is Necessary The research in support of homework is far less sexy  a tale as Josh’s stance against it. The supporting evidence focuses on the direct impact homework has on percentile scores, emphasizing the nature of short term gains many schools are under pressure to produce. Even Alfie Kohn acknowledges that despite overwhelming evidence against it (research evidence as early as 1897 suggests homework produces no discernible effect on learning), homework still exists as something that is just accepted as part of our culture in the United States.   My Take I’m not going to take sides on this one. Whether it’s from a stance of "repetition makes perfect" or "homework kills learning," the redefinition of homework thanks to virtual schools, online classes, and the internet makes that choice moot. Almost all work completed in an online course could be considered "homework". Students in more traditional learning environments that want to explore interests and curiosities from their daily lessons have access to many "homework like" activities online. MOOC participants will create homework for themselves on occasion. The question for me then isn’t one of assigning homework or not, but helping students determine how to make work and learning that happens outside of the classroom meaningful. Give learners choice in what they want to complete, similar to the DS106 Assignment Bank. Give them the agency and flexibility to alter or remix classwork to better suit individual needs or curiosities. Brainstorm some creative alternatives for those students who need a little more. If homework is a necessity, make sure you provide as much time in class to work, digest concepts, and produce new understandings as students are given at home. Because leaving students to fend for themselves can quite often produce less than desirable results: images: I liked homework better when it was called coloring - http://www.flickr.com/photos/busyprinting/4225224298/ sagan quote - http://www.flickr.com/photos/limadean/5238649892/

These tips are nothing new for veteran iPad users. However, I’m supporting more than 30 teachers with brand new iPads in their classrooms this year, so I’m trying to stay ahead of requests, questions, and troubleshooting by building up a number of "How To" videos for them. I’m usually available to meet with teachers face-to-face at the beginning of the school year, but as my schedule gets filled up with other job duties, it’s nice to have a quick video to fire off if I can’t help them out immediately. If you happen to be an iPad user that dreads the low battery warning on your device, here are the top 5 ways that I manage my iPad’s battery without seriously affecting the useability of the device. Keep in mind, your mileage may vary, especially if you depend on location services or a connected bluetooth device. For those users who have recently upgraded to iOS7, the background app refresh is a new feature that might be a trouble spot for those watching the battery closely. And if these tips aren’t enough, Apple has a whole lot more on their website.

Yes, the image is me, and one of my favorite apps on my iOS devices; the NASA app provided by the U.S. government’s National Aeronautics and Space Administration. And yes, that’s a lovely  "Network Error" you see in the middle of the app. It’s been that way since yesterday. Many of NASA’s other media outlets, including their main website, are also down or severely hampered during the federal government shutdown. How am I supposed to get my daily fix of gorgeous space imagery? How can I get my geek on by watching NASA TV? Alright, so there are other ways, but come on Congress, think of the kids! I wonder how much learning is being disrupted in science classrooms across the globe because teachers suddenly found themselves without their resources this week. As someone who advocates using free and open resources, such as those supported by the U.S. government, this is a real blow to my way of doing things; "Hey everyone, come check out these awesome resources that I just found, you can….oh wait, sorry, the politicians are being childish right now." Although the mainstream media isn’t likely to pick up on small issues like this (and who can blame them), it makes me curious how many other small (or large) disruptions like this will be occurring this week in classrooms.