The Power Of I Don’t Know by Terry Heick At TeachThought, nothing interests us more than students, as human beings. What they know, might know, should know, and do with what they know. A driving strategy that serves students-whether pursuing self-knowledge or academic content-is questioning. Questioning is useful as an assessment strategy, catalyst for inquiry, or "getting unstuck" tool. It can drive entire unit of instruction as an essential question. In other words, questions transcend content, floating somewhere between the students and their context. Questions are more important than the answers they seem designed to elicit. The answer is residual-requires the student to package their content to please the question-maker, which moves the center of gravity from the student’s belly to the educator’s marking pen. In that light, I was interested when I found the visual above. It’s okay to say "I don’t know." Teach your students how to develop questions (because) it helps conquer their own confusion. Rebeca Zuniga was inspired to create the above visual by the wonderful Heather Wolpert-Gawron (from the equally wonderful edutopia, and also her own site, tweenteacher). The whole graphic is wonderful, but it’s that I don’t know that really resonated with me. Traditionally, this phrase is seen as a hole rather than a hill. I don’t know means I’m missing information that I’m supposed to have. The implication of a question is that the student should have (some kind of answer). See that-what’s happening there? The teacher’s whispering, "I know the answer. You should, too. Answer my question and you’ll have the answer." And? Whoopty do. The value (of an answer) was granted by the teacher. It’s teacher-currency. There is value in answers as knowledge, but there is lasting power in inquiry because it’s a student-centered and self-sustaining process. In part, this is because returns the center of gravity back to the student, where it belongs. It short-circuits that dog-and-pony show of classroom teaching, and makes it something shaped like the student’s mind. I don’t know, then, isn’t just a starting point for finding an answer, or a ready-made template for some academic essential question. Rather, it returns the learning to the student, and restores the scale of understanding to a universe of knowledge. Teacher: What form of government is most likely to encourage innovation? Student: A democracy? Teacher: Why? Student: Because there is a lot of innovation in the United States, and we’re a democracy? Teacher: Is that innovation occurring because of or in lieu of that form of government? Student: Because of. Teacher: Why do you think that? Student: I don’t know. Here, there’s a shift. It’s no longer a cat-and-mouse game. Now there’s emotion involved. The gravity is with the student. The burden is in her lap, but since there is no clear path forward, the scale of things-the context-moves from beyond an interaction between a teacher and student to everything else but the interaction between the teacher and the student. The answer isn’t here. It’s out there. Out there is where I need to be. The learning has left the classroom; now it can grow. The Power Of I Don’t Know; image attribution flickr user Rebecca Zuniga The post The Power Of I Don’t Know appeared first on TeachThought.

One Teacher In Ten: My Experience As An LGBT Educator by Brett Bigham When I wrote my essay for One Teacher in Ten in the New Millennium I was at a crossroads in my life and career. I was six months into being Oregon’s Teacher of the Year and I was under order from my supervisor not to say I was gay in public. I had been informed that I was no longer allowed to write or speak unless the district had approved my words in advance. To write my essay for One Teacher in Ten in the New Millennium was insubordination. To email it in to Kevin Jennings, the editor, was a firing offense according to my district.   I submitted my essay anyway. As one of the first openly gay Teachers of the Year in the entire country, I was a voice for many gay teachers. I was an example that you can be out and still rise to the top of the profession. And as an American, I felt I had the right to speak my own words without a superintendent deciding what my words would be. In September last year I filed a grievance with my Union. My district retaliated quickly. I was told to cancel all appearances as Teacher of the Year and that I now must submit a request to my supervisor listing who I was going to be permitted to speak to. The first three events I was told I could not attend were meeting with the local high school Gay Student Alliance (GSA), I was told I could not introduce the GSA Choir at a concert in the city square (on a Sunday) and I was told I could not meet with the Oregon Safe Schools Community Coalition, the group trying to end the bullying of LGBT youth in schools. I was told meeting with "those" groups "were of no value to the district." This was heartbreaking to me. When I was 15 my best friend killed himself after telling me he was no longer into girls. You cannot go back in time and undo a suicide, but I knew by being openly gay and Teacher of the Year would show those gay youth, teetering on the edge of ending their lives, that they had a future ahead of them. My district said those kids had "no value." I filed state and federal complaints against my district and was fired. But something amazing came from that. The London Daily Mail had a full page about my situation and that article was picked up all over the world. The Nigeria Times and papers in Ghana and Singapore were running pictures of my husband and me in the Rose Festival Parade and at our wedding. When was the last time the news in Nigeria carried a story showing pictures of gay people being married or celebrated in a parade? (The Daily Mail spelled my name "Bingham" if you are trying to Google it).  And I realized that every time my district did something worse more people were hearing the story. When the district was forced to hire me back it made news again, and their announcement they were firing me again only made it grow. By the time the state investigation showed discrimination and retaliation, my story had been featured on CNN, the Washington Post, and USA Today. My Facebook was inundated with messages from all over the world, many from countries where they are frightened to be gay. The essay I wrote for One Teacher in Ten in the New Millennium was written last May. I was Oregon Teacher of the Year. I had been married for a week. I had just met the President of the United States and then Secretary Clinton. Within months I would be threatened, bullied, harassed, fired, unfired, and publicly threatened with punishment unless I took back my complaints against the district. I refuse to be silenced. When you are a spokesperson for a group of people, silence feels like betrayal.   That is why I wrote my essay. And that is why I feel it is worth reading. Ed note: You can check the book out on Amazon at the following link. If you buy the book from there, we’ll get an indefensibly small percentage of the sale, but what can you do? These servers don’t pay for themselves. One Teacher In Ten: My Experience As An LGBT Educator The post One Teacher In Ten: My Experience As An LGBT Educator appeared first on TeachThought.

Education App Spotlight: Contraption Maker by TeachThought Staff Features Use Rube Goldberg machines to solve puzzles and create your own inventions JavaScript mod capabilities Teacher Dashboard to create student accounts and track progress Curriculum available, including lessons for NGSS and Common Core standards Other Details Grade level range: Grade 3-10 Content areas: science & experimentation, physics, engineering, design, programming The app is free for schools, after school programs and other educational initativies to use on institution-owned devices. (Read more.) This game is a revival of The Incredible Machine, a popular educational game made in the 1990s. The original game designer and programmer are working on this project. The Big Idea Contraption Maker provides a set of puzzles that are reminiscent of Rube Goldberg cartoons. Children use hundreds of parts like hamster motors, balls, and conveyor belts to fix broken contraptions. Moving down our knowledge funnel, kids can create their own contraptions and share them with the world. It’s a digital sandbox that promotes creativity by experimenting with logical cause and effect consequences. A key component of excelling in a STEM career is learning via experimentation, which often means testing an idea, failing, reviewing the idea, and trying a new idea. Traditional teaching methods don’t often have the latitude to encourage failure. However, experimentation and failure are key components in Contraption Maker. You learn by "failing" and testing new theories, and it is meant to be fun, not discouraging. Related Apps Minecraft Casey’s Contraptions Other building games 3 Ideas How It Might Be Used For Learning Learn about physics in Contraption Maker, then test out your theory in the real world.  Based on Next Generation Science Standards. (Read more.) Design complex machines based on a design objective.  Use your knowledge of simple machines and physics to create complex interactions. (Read more.) Blend language arts and science by having one student build a machine, write up a description of how it works, then have a partner build a machine based on your description.  Compare the two contraptions and discuss the similarities and differences. (Read more.) System Requirements Operating system, file size, etc. Windows PC minimum specifications: OS: Windows Vista Processor: 1.7Ghz or Higher Memory: 2 GB RAM Graphics: 512MB VRAM, Pixel Shader 2.0 or higher DirectX: Version 9.0c Hard Drive: 300 MB available space Mac minimum specifications: OS: OS/X 10.7 Processor: 1.7Ghz or Higher Memory: 2 GB RAM Graphics: 512MB VRAM, Pixel Shader 2.0 or higher Hard Drive: 300 MB available space *The following app submission was prepared by Deborah Fike, Director of Educational Outreach for Spotkin. Spotkin is the developer behind Contraption Maker; Contraption Maker The post Education App Spotlight: Contraption Maker appeared first on TeachThought.

A Project-Based Learning Spectrum: 25 Questions To Guide Your PBL Planning by Terry Heick I’ve been talking with a friend recently about project-based learning, which is leading to a TeachThought Project-Based Learning framework hopefully sometime next week. (Or whenever I finally get this TeachThought podcast off the ground-maybe Tuesday? Ish?) In the meantime-and in pursuit-I’ve been thinking of the kinds of questions I consider when planning a project-or planning a unit when students plan a project on their own. There’s a lot to consider here-so much so that 12 isn’t even close to enough, but that’s because I tends to over-complicate things (my 14 year-old daughter tells me). I"ll stick to a "primary" set for the first dozen, and then add a secondary set you can take a gander at below. I’ve more or less organized them into a kind of spectrum, from the simplest questions to consider, to the most complex. I focused more on creating compelling and student-centered projects, rather than creating a list of questions to use as a checklist for pure academic planning. For related reading, you might check out the difference between doing projects and project-based learning, as well as our project-based learning cheat sheet that provides some examples to jumpstart your thinking. A Project-Based Learning Spectrum: 25 Questions To Guide Your PBL Planning SIMPLE What role is the learner assuming? Designer? Engineer? Brother? Artist? Cultural Critic? Naturalist? What is their purpose? What are they doing, and what should the project itself "do"? Who is their audience? Who is the audience of the project’s design, impact, or effect? How can different learning spaces (e.g., classroom, home, digital) work together? To promote meaningful interaction? An authentic audience? Personalized "workflow" to meet each student’s needs? What kind of support does each student need individually? Who can provide it? How much structure is enough for that student? (Scoring Guide, Teacher-Provided Tools, Rubric, etc.) What’s the "need to know"? Is there one? Where did it come from? Is it authentic? Teacher-based, school-based, curriculum-based, or student-based? What are the consequences of each? Which academic standards are the focus of the unit? How will data from formative assessment (that target these standards) help teachers and students respond within the project? Who will provide learning feedback? When? How? And feedback for what-the quality of the project? Progress towards mastery of academic standards? Will it be "graded" with letters, numbers, as a matter of standards-mastery, or some other way? Which way best supports student understanding? How should the product be paced to maintain student momentum? What "check-in with the teacher" markers make sense? How can assessment, iteration, and metacognition improve student understanding? How can the student bring themselves (affections, experience, voice, choice, talent, curiosity) to the project? Also, what is the teacher’s role in the process? Is it the same for every student? What sort of quality criteria make sense? How will we know if the project "works"? Was effective? Performed? Who designs this quality criteria? What kind of project would the student never forget?  What’s most critical to the success of the project? Creativity? Critical thinking? Organization? Grit? All may apply, but how might the project be designed to focus on the factors you or the student value most? How can students work within their local community to solve authentic problems, or celebrate meaningful opportunities? Is technology use distracting, useful, or critical to the success of the project? Does it make sense for the project to also be Inquiry-focused? Problem-based? How can students build on their unique schema and background knowledge to produce something special? What role might iteration play in the project? Is the project research-based? Product-based? Service-based?  Can mindfulness be embedded into the project to help students see their own thinking, identify barriers and opportunities, and respond in a self-directed way? What filtered (e.g., a teacher-selected book, an encyclopedia) and unfiltered information sources (e.g., a Google search, a social media stream) might they use cooperatively? What learning taxonomies or cognitive actions might guide students to think best? We covered some of these in a recent post, many of which are shown in the graphic below. What scale makes the most sense for the student to work best? Is the project designed to build on student strengths (rather than trying to "correct deficiencies")? COMPLEX A Project-Based Learning Spectrum: 25 Questions To Guide Your PBL Planning; image attribution wikimedia commons (the spectrum to the right) The post A Project-Based Learning Spectrum: 25 Questions To Guide Your PBL Planning appeared first on TeachThought.

T-Shirts For Progressive Teachers: Wear Your Pedagogy by TeachThought Staff Being the critics of the unchecked Capitalism, greed, consumerism, and bad work that can ruin lives and manufacture grotesque social inequity that we are, the idea of selling any kind of widget at all seemed at best, clumsy, and at worst, wrong-headed. But we launched our first campaign a few months ago and it went relatively wel; But more critically, we heard personally from several teachers how proud they were to wear the shirts-one explained that they were able to "wear their pedagogy," and their beliefs about teaching and learning. And that was cool. Further, we realize that we live in a world where anyone can create anything. This is how people make a living, and how businesses survive. One projects funds another. A successful t-shirt campaign today can become a curriculum project tomorrow. So we’re going to push past our initial ‘alpha’ design into more of a ‘beta’ of what TeachThought Apparel might begin to look like. We’re essentially trying out approaches to see what you want to wear. Our guiding questions? How can a t-shirt promote progressive pedagogy?’ How can we use t-shirts to help teachers express their beliefs about education? How can apparel make pedagogy cool? The above is our ‘beta’ version of this idea. As we collect more data (i.e., see what you buy and what you don’t), we’ll try some other ideas we have as well. Have an idea? Let us know. If we use the idea, we’ll send you the shirt for free. You can find the shirts over at teespring. We’ll be introducing each one individually here as well. If they do well, we’ll do something a bit more ambitious. If you hate them, we’ll keep moving. T-Shirts For Progressive Teachers: Wear Your Pedagogy The post T-Shirts For Progressive Teachers: Wear Your Pedagogy appeared first on TeachThought.

10 Lessons For The Digital Teacher by TeachThought Staff If you’re a teacher, and you’re in any way digital (and you presumably are if you’re reading this), there are some strategies you might consider to lubricate the interaction between the two. And that’s where Lessons Learned from Lecturing from Laura Pasquini, Ph.D., comes in. In this fairly short presentation, Dr. Pasquini (whose blog you can find here) offers 10 lessons for the digital teacher. The strength in these tips is in the practical and flexible value each idea represents. Time management, metrics for success, find purpose (indicated in the graphic above), growing a PLN (here are 20 ways to help grow your professional learning network), reflection, and mentoring are valuable for any educator in any space at any grade level, or content area. They also apply equally to new and experienced teachers, K-12 or higher ed, and so on. Give them a look below, and give Dr. Pasquini a follow on twitter. 10 Lessons For The Digital Teacher Manage your time Be organized in your teaching Measure success Be purposeful Find a mentor Always be learning Reflect on your teaching Grow a personal learning network Create teaching files Be open Lessons Learned from Lecturing from Laura Pasquini, Ph.D. The post 10 Lessons For The Digital Teacher appeared first on TeachThought.

TeachThought Apparel: Teacher Life by TeachThought Staff Started from the bottom. Now? Paperwork. Standards. The cloud. Flipped classrooms. Mobile learning. Data. But you represent. You stay about it. It’s the TEACHER LIFE. Pedagogical agents unite. The struggle is real; Keep it hood. You can find the back story here. You can find the TEACHER LIFE t-shirt here. The post TeachThought Apparel: ‘TEACHER LIFE’ appeared first on TeachThought.

A Brilliant Resource For Students Who Think They Hate Writing By Ken Haynes, BoomWriter Co-founder and Chief Operating Officer Ed note: The title is ours, not Ken’s. We used BoomWriter with students here at TeachThought and loved it, and reached out to Ken Hayes to write a guest post explaining how it works. For hesitant writers, or budding Wendell Berrys, it’s a great resource. As teachers and parents bemoan - and studies affirm - more technology has not necessarily translated into improved writing skills for most students. In fact, the negative effects of excess screen time and shorter attention spans due to social media are corroborated by recent studies that show only a quarter of American high school students are proficient in writing assessments, and one out of five have "below basic" writing skills. But teachers must stick to the curriculum, and with all that they have on their plates to address the ever-evolving standards of learning, there is very little extra time in the school day to devote to improving students’ writing. As a former teacher, assistant principal and writing program director, I know firsthand that helping students improve their writing skills requires a solution that’s engaging, easy to use and academically effective. That’s why I left the classroom to help develop a solution: BoomWriter, a free, interactive, web-based platform for group writing that engages students in writing projects for all subject areas to help them improve their vocabulary and develop their nonfiction writing and storytelling skills. Teachers are realizing the benefits of BoomWriter in more than 25,000 classrooms in 60 countries, along with the poetic justice of using technology to undo some of the negative effects of technology on their students. What Is BoomWriter? Improving Students’ Writing With Interactive Technology Developed by teachers for teachers, BoomWriter is easy to use for students and teachers alike. Teachers appreciate BoomWriter’s flexibility, as it easily integrates into their existing curriculum. In a survey of Chicago and Boston-area teachers using BoomWriter, 95 percent agreed that BoomWriter was "very easy" to set-up and use with success. BoomWriter is ideal for students in grades 2-12, is Common Core aligned, and works seamlessly for a variety of subject areas, including History, Social Studies, Science, English Language Arts, and more. A closed digital environment, BoomWriter’s tools are kidSAFE-certified, and entirely web-based. They are easily accessible on any computer, tablet, or mobile device, providing a curriculum solution for schools’ varying access to technology.   After a teacher signs up for free, here’s how BoomWriter works. Teachers provide a prompt, story start, problem to solve, or single directive for all their students to read and respond to. Each student writes and submits his/her entry for review and feedback from the teacher.   Once all entries are approved, all students then assess up to four of their classmates’ entries at a time, and anonymously cast their vote for the best version. This process of reading, writing and voting continues until the project or story is complete! This approach to "collaborative creativity" effectively engages every student in the writing process. All students also have their own personal Boomer Avatar that they can customize with Boomer Bucks earned from participation. This bit of gamification is another key to its success. In fact, teachers have discovered that the process of completing writing projects collaboratively challenges strong students to produce their best work, and reluctant writers to exceed their normal output levels as they become more invested and strive to present their best work to their peers. Writing Tools to Fit Your Classroom’s Needs BoomWriter offers three group-writing tools, all of which use the same collaborative writing and voting process. Teachers simply select the tool that best suits their classroom and curriculum needs. WordWriter - Provides teachers with an interactive, yet simple, application for assessing and enhancing students’ understanding of key terms, figures, phrases, and dates.  WordWriter also features Trending Words, which allows teachers to select from top trending vocabulary used by other BoomWriter teachers with their students and displays the most popular words being taught for that month, in real-time, on a grade-by-grade basis. StoryWriter - Conducts writing activities as a class that result in a published book!  Students develop their understanding of key literary elements and storytelling devices, and when finished, the class’s story becomes a real, published book with every student’s name listed as an author. This tool is ideal for ELA, creative writing and literature studies. ProjectWriter - Fosters students’ understanding of key concepts and terms within a subject by dissecting whole units of study into smaller sections. ProjectWriter enables all types of nonfiction writing-expository, argument/opinion, scientific-and is ideal for use in History/Social Studies, Science or ELA classrooms. In addition to these tools, BoomWriter is a Google for Education Partner, specializing in Chrome products. Through its Chrome Web Store App, BoomWriter can be added to any Chromebook, providing students with fast and easy single sign-on to their BoomWriter account. To learn more about BoomWriter, please visit www.boomwriter.com, and follow BoomWriter on Facebook at https://www.facebook.com/BoomWriter. A Brilliant Resource For Students Who Think They Hate Writing The post A Brilliant Resource For Students Who Think They Hate Writing appeared first on TeachThought.

"A brain may seek to produce an output, but a mind wants to play." by Terry Heick I. Education is both industrial and fundamental; it is the mutual product of both engineering and affection. II. This makes it a human process, full of incredible complexity that mirrors that complexity inside each of us. This, in turn, requires a response that is equally complex and decidedly clever. III. In our first century of an increasingly global movement to provide public education, we have turned to our own rationality, and established systems. IV. These systems parallel similar transitions from small farms to commercial agriculture, small shops into mega-stores, and inter-personal storytelling to seeking our "stories" from Hollywood and social media, all increasingly drive by technology. V. Evaluated with a rational mind, this is neither good nor bad but only change-or even "progress." Education’s progression has led us to our current system. This system is designed to publish common goals that drive our common actions and performance. Within this system there are (at least) 4 subsystems: Standards (for performance) Policies (to govern professional behavior) Content (to clarify what’s to be studied) Infrastructure (to physically realize these abstractions) Energizing the above subsystems are four catalysts: Strategies (to design and plan for learning experiences) Assessment (to measure the effectiveness of those experiences, and thus the planning and design) Data (to quantify progress and deficiency to inform necessary revisions) Collaboration (to both share and homogenize the entire effort) These four subsystems and catalysts provides us with an outcomes-based, data-driven, top-down system of education that depends on the observation, measurement, and refinement of the human mind. In the case of most schools, this translates to hundreds and even thousands of minds, each with their own stories, interests, insecurities, and needs. Thousands of spectacular complexities. The word "mind" suggests something different than the current subsystems and catalysts provide. A brain may seek an input to produce an output, but a mind is curious and wants to play. Performance on an assessment can be measured, but understanding cannot, and both fail to see the bigger picture: How can we help students see for themselves what’s worth understanding? Our curious solution so far has been to simply hand it to them endlessly until they leave for "jobs." An outcomes-based system of education seeks only to produce outcomes. Its self-correcting systems, which glean their corrections from those strategies, data, and collaboration above, test and probe—with perfect rationality—what works and what doesn’t so that we can do less of the latter and more of the former until the latter is all gone. It is plain to see, however, that this is not what happens. The outcomes we seek to cause are first industrial—acquisition of catalogued knowledge parsed into content areas. Presumably, the hope is that once students have mastered this content, this kind of proficiency will lead to citizenship, affection, good work, happiness, and after a lifetime of humanizing it all, wisdom. These ideas—citizenship, affection, good work, happiness, and wisdom-are purely irrational—abstractions that counter-balance systems-thinking and scientific approaches. This means that we have designed a system of education that both marginalizes and patronizes the abstractions it hopes to produce. And its inherent rational subsystems—especially assessment and data—are impotent to respond to that which is irrational. This is neither clever, nor our best thinking. This cleaving of the rational and the irrational—of art and science—disrupts our collective complexity as human beings. It produces teachers that feel like pieces and students that feel like products. Curriculum is treated like machinery, and local communities like storefronts to peddle the end result to businesses. The result is a system of education that seems to chase itself endless in circles. This suggests one of two responses: The identification of a different set of outcomes (i.e., goals of education), with subsystems (e.g., standards and curriculum) and catalysts (e.g., gamification, as it is) that can communicate with and respond to one another seamlessly. A humbler scale of teaching and learning that places people-and their human needs and affections-at the center. We’ll know we’ve succeeded when learning spaces are filled with curious minds poking at concepts and possibilities. These minds will want to, above all else, play. A mind and soul at ease will sing. "A brain may seek an input to produce an output, but a mind is curious and wants to play."; image attribution flickr user mattcantonese The post "A brain may seek to produce an output, but a mind wants to play." appeared first on TeachThought.

10 Principles Of Proficiency-Based Learning by Chris Sturgis 10 Principles Of Proficiency-Based Learning" by Chris Sturgis was originally published on CompetencyWorks. Great Schools Partnership continues to produce great resources to support states and districts converting to competency education. They have drawn from what districts are doing in New England and have created Proficiency-based Learning Simplified resources. They are a good resource for states, districts and schools to start the conversation about the new policies and practices that need to be put in place. We know that we are on a journey, and its a creative one, so don’t be surprised if you find that you want to take these ideas further or that you come up with other ways to address the policy and practice elements. No matter what, these resources will save you time in getting started and structuring the conversations needed to build clarity and consensus. Here are GSP’s 10 principles of proficiency-based learning. In practice, proficiency-based learning can take a wide variety of forms from state to state or school to school—there is no universal approach. To help schools establish a philosophical and pedagogical foundation for their work, the Great Schools Partnership created the following "Ten Principles of Proficiency-Based Learning," which describe the common features found in the most effective proficiency-based systems. 10 Principles Of Proficiency-Based Learning All learning expectations are clearly and consistently communicated to students and families, including long-term expectations (such as graduation requirements and graduation standards), short-term expectations (such as the learning objectives for a specific lesson), and general expectations (such as the performance levels used in the school’s grading and reporting system). Student achievement is evaluated against common learning standards and performance expectations that are consistently applied to all students, regardless of whether they are enrolled in traditional courses, pursuing alternative learning pathways or receiving academic support. All forms of assessment are standards-based and criterion-referenced, and success is defined by the achievement of expected standards, not relative measures of performance or student-to-student comparisons. Formative assessments evaluate learning progress during the instructional process and are not graded; formative-assessment information is used to inform instructional adjustments, practices, and support. Summative assessments evaluate learning achievement and are graded; summative-assessment scores record a student’s level of proficiency at a specific point in time. Grades are used to communicate learning progress and achievement to students and families; grades are not used as forms of punishment or control. Academic progress and achievement is monitored and reported separately from work habits, character traits, and behaviors such as attendance and class participation. Students are given multiple opportunities to retake assessments or improve their work when they fail to meet expected standards. Students can demonstrate learning progress and achievement in multiple ways through differentiated assessments, personalized-learning options, or alternative learning pathways. Students are given opportunities to make important decisions about their learning, which includes contributing to the design of learning experiences and personalized learning pathways. 10 Principles of Proficiency-Based Learning The post 10 Principles Of Proficiency-Based Learning appeared first on TeachThought.

Letting Curiosity Take Center Stage: #ReflectiveTeacher October 2015 by Beth Leidolf "The important thing is not to stop questioning. Curiosity has its own reason for existing." ― Albert Einstein We all have a curious side, each of us with an inner voice that calls us to investigate, probe, poke around, and examine things from all angles in order to make sense of it. Discovery,  inquiry, wonder and play were all central to our lives as children. Why then as teachers does curiosity and play fall away from our instruction and the learning taking place in the lessons and activities? Your students are curious as well, and love to discover and investigate the world around themselves through play/interaction with materials and manipulatives. Play in the classroom gives students opportunities to deepen and expand their thinking skills, improve their social/emotional skills as well as collaborative and problem solving abilities. This month #reflectiveteacher blogs about the following prompt: Play and student self-direction place students in the center of their own learning. How do you create and foster an environment in your classroom or school where curiosity and inquiry take center stage? How To Participate In #ReflectiveTeacher  Write at least one (or a series of) post(s) on the given monthly prompt Share it on twitter with the hashtag #ReflectiveTeacher, and tag @teachthought in the tweet as well Interact with other posts you see with the #ReflectiveTeacher hashtag-RT, fav, ask questions, and otherwise support and interact with other reflective teachers! Letting Curiosity Take Center Stage: #ReflectiveTeacher October 2015 The post Letting Curiosity Take Center Stage: #ReflectiveTeacher October 2015 appeared first on TeachThought.

How To Use Infographics As Multimodal Learning Tools by Sara McGuire, venngage.com People don’t all learn the same way. Teachers know this, and that’s why multimodal learning methods are an essential part of any teacher’s toolkit. Responding to the changing linguistic landscape caused by digital media and communication, many teachers are leveraging the multimodal learning opportunities offered by mixed media in the classroom. Infographics  combine both text and image, making them tools able to engage both verbal and visual learning styles. The combination of verbal and visual learning styles has been shown to ultimately increase students’ retention of basic skills by 21% and higher order skills by 20%. Having students research, conceptualize and create infographics in groups also addresses verbal and participatory approaches.    With that in mind, here are seven ways to use infographics as multimodal learning tools in the classroom 7 Ways To Use Infographics As Multimodal Learning Tools Have students conduct multimodal research Have students research a topic. Encourage them to draw from a variety of multimedia sources including videos, articles, and statistical reports, as well as compiling their own data. What conclusions can they draw from their data? Have students evaluate ideal layouts Provide students with some examples of different infographic templates and ask them which would work best for their research. To present data, what would work best—a statistical layout a comparison layout, a survey layout? How about information on a historical event—a timeline layout or an informational layout? Have students make a rough draft Get them thinking about the functionality of their design—what path do they want the reader’s eyes to follow? How will they relate images and text together? Have them exchange their designs with a classmate for critique—is their layout easy to understand? Is it visually interesting? Get students thinking about design Introduce them to themes and color schemes. How will the form of their infographic reflect the content? Have them choose a colour scheme that reflects the tone of the information they are presenting. What kinds of graphs and charts work best? How can they make their infographic fun and interesting? Encourage students to use interactive elements Show students how they can integrate and embed polls, videos, links, and hover charts into their infographics. This will show them how to make their presentation fun and interesting, and will point to further research questions. Have students analyze their process What were challenges they encountered while creating their infographics? What hidden information was revealed through the process? How did they decide what information to include and what to leave out? Have students critically analyze their infographics What information is the infographic showing them? What makes their infographic interesting? What works on their infographic? What ideas could they use from other students? How would those changes impact the success of their own design? It’s important to promote multimodal thinking, rather than judging the infographic as a whole. Colors, shapes, text, font, white space, depth, layers, images, diagramming, and more all comprise the "modes" of an infographic. Model that kind of analysis for students, and you can help them begin to think analytically about how they express their ideas.   How To Use Infographics As Multimodal Learning Tools The post How To Use Infographics As Multimodal Learning Tools appeared first on TeachThought.

A New Definition For Equity In Education by Terry Heick In a profession increasingly full of angst and positioning and corrective policy, there are few ideas as easy to get behind as equity. Equal. Equality. Equity. Equilibrium. Equate. These are all fine ideas—each tidy and whole, implying their own kind of justice while connotating the precision of mathematics. Level. Same. Twin.  Each word has its own nuance, but one characteristic they share in common is access—a level, shared area with open pathways that are equidistant to mutually agreed-upon currencies. When discussing equity, there are so many convenient handles-race, gender, language, poverty, access to technology, but there may be a larger view that we’re missing when we do so. The Scale of Equity There isn’t a more global issue—equity being perhaps the global issue of our time. United Nation statistics published last year in The The Economist put it plainly. While progress is being made in sub-Saharan Africa in primary education, gender inequality is in fact widening among older children. The ratio of girls enrolled in primary school rose from 85 to 93 per 100 boys between 1999 and 2010, whereas it fell from 83 to 82 and from 67 to 63 at the secondary and tertiary levels. And elsewhere, in Chad and the Central African Republic, there is a flat-rate of less than 70 girls for every 100 boys." This is a starkly different conversation about equity than the one we might have in the United States, the UK, Canada, or Australia. We have the luxury of becoming choosier, and harsher on ourselves, as progress is made, i.e., let’s first make sure there are free, quality schools everywhere, and that children can all read and write, and then at some point down the line we can concern ourselves with iPads vs Androids, or the broadband access in our poorest communities. It’s easy to miss the scale of this as an "issue" because unlike assessment, curriculum, teacher pay, class sizes, educational technology, or any other persistently evergreen edu-choke point, equity never stops affecting. It’s both the center and periphery of everything because we’re always who we are, where we are. The Cultural Effect As a species, we express ourselves through difference. What makes "culture" interesting is how it both recognizes the individual while simultaneously allowing them to disappear into the whole again. In culture there is both identity and anonymity. There is a constant self->group transaction that is based on both affection (inward expression) and image (outward expression). This transaction is then repeated across cultures, with completely different functions. Differences within and across cultures are differences nonetheless, but the individual can think while groups simply gather. So this is a brutally narrow take on how people gather and cohort and manifest their vision of what it means to be human, but the point remains: As educators, we suffer that same reductionism when we see the masses the same way Nielsen does television ratings. Students aren’t demographics, and it’s murky at best to see how treating them that way has improved their lot, or our shared progress. While squinting and trying to narrow gaps, it’s too easy to lose the scale and product of our work. The segmenting of Mackenzie and Andrew into a group, and that group into a subgroup, and their understanding into data, and the knowledge we hope they come away with into standards we can teach with—this all becomes a tone—a posture dictates the terms of teaching and learning. Equity in the classroom is different than in the job market. A subcorollary is that we all share equity and inequity, both in possession and effect. In "The Hidden Wound," Wendell Berry writes, "It may be the most significant irony in our history that racism, by dividing the two races, has made them not separate but in a fundamental way inseparable, not independent but dependent on each other, incomplete without each other, each needing desperately to understand and make use of the experience of the other…. we are one body, and the division between us is the disease of one body, not of two." This is both abstract and practical. We share both living space and social membership. Somehow, though, public education, more so than any other industry or profession, is expected to aggregate these inherent disparities while transcending them. Our task? Create a curriculum that provides a common language for knowledge without homogenizing the nuance of that knowledge Design learning models that are inherently inclusive regardless of access to technology Establish authentic functions for family members and communities who may speak a completely different language As individuals, we work to separate ourselves—as children, often based on image, and as adults, often based on income, where we choose to live, what we drive, the smartphone we carry, and what we choose to do "for a living." But each of these expressions of who we are-gender, native language, race, sexuality, socioeconomic level, and so many others-are also opportunities for disparity all work to undermine the function of education. It’s easy to see equity in education as a matter of fairness, access, and inclusion, but that’s only the case if what’s being fairly accessed is a system of teaching and learning that is able to meet the needs of an increasingly global population—that means fluid, responsive, dynamic, neutral, and alive. For an industry that struggles to get every student reading on grade level, this may be a bit much. My gut reaction, then, is that this can only occur through the affectionate expression of the local—this student in this home in this community, with the school functioning as an extraordinary support system. The equity is at the student level rather than the demographic level because demographics only exist in paperwork. For every student, there is commonness and there is difference; there is what’s shared (i.e., student needing knowledge), and there is distinction (e.g., poor, rural, white, black, male, female). This never stops. We can revise our schools, curriculum, pedagogy, and technology until it is inclusive, fair, and accessible to every student, but that’s been an ongoing effort that may represent a kind of basement for our goals. But why not consider something more ambitious? New thinking about the terms and definitions of gender emphasize both the characteristics and the fluidity of any culture. If we insist on standardizing content, maybe we can avoid standardizing education. How many different answers are there to, "Why learn?" Fantastic! Let’s iterate ourselves until we can honor that. The work before us, then, may not be to level an academic playing field for which there is no straight, but rather to create new terms for why we learn, how, and where—and then change the expectation for what we do with what we know. Simply guaranteeing access and inclusion into a body of content-based is no longer sufficient if our goals stretch beyond academic. A modern definition for equity in education may be less about equal, fair, or even, and more about personalization-a body of knowledge, habits, and networks that help each student realize their own perfectly unique potential. As for a definition for equity in education? How about, "eye-level access to curriculum, education models, and learning spaces that depend entirely on the native interests, knowledge demands, and human affections of learners individually." Or more briefly, "a fully-realized system of learning that starts and ends with the humanity of each student." A New Definition For Equity In Education; adapted image attribution flickr user helpingting and skotit; The post A New Definition For Equity In Education appeared first on TeachThought.

The Bare Minimum Of Learning Technology by TeachThought Staff What is the bare minimum of learning technology integration in a classroom? Does it depend on nation, grade level, or content area? Socioeconomic status? Culture? Prevailing local technology use? Though many teachers remain against reckless #edtech integration, the conversation is clearly shifting from should technology play a central role in the learning process to how should technology be used to promote learning? Inspired by a list she saw from @austin_gagnier8, @sylviaduckworth set out to itemize 15 things every teacher should try this year. Working her graphics magic, the above image is the result. But while the original title of the image (and the collection of ideas it illustrate) works well, looking at it more closely, it was dominated by technology use-less about planning and learning models and teaching strategies and grouping activities or unit planning templates, and more about technology. In that light, we felt like it represented another kind of idea-a bare minimum of technology integration in an average classroom. What might be considered a kind of basic standard for education technology in 2016? In theory, it’s not necessary to have any degree of education technology at all, though even that depends on your content area’s academic standards. (Here is exactly what the Common Core standards say about technology, for example.) And though numbers 5, 9, and 10 don’t absolutely require learning technology, they’d be all the better with its (strategic) integration. But in 2016, it’s becoming more and more difficult to (rationally) avoid its application. 15 Examples Of What Could Be Considered The Bare Minimum Of Learning Technology Create a class website Create a class YouTube Channel Create a class twitter account and make international accounts Get your students blogging Find other classes to collaborate with on projects Do mystery Skypes/Google Hangouts Invite expert guests via live video conferencing Code with your students Do Genius Hour with your students Gamify your classroom Strive for a paperless classroom (here are 26 iPad apps for a paperless classroom) Create digital portfolios Automate quizzes with Google Forms Use Google Forms for student check-in and exit slips Let students use their device in class 15 Examples Of What Could Be Considered The Bare Minimum Of Learning Technology; 15 Things Every Teacher Should Try This Year; image attribution flickr user sylviaduckworth The post The Bare Minimum Of Technology Integration appeared first on TeachThought.

Teacher Wish Lists: Because School Supply Shopping Goes Year-Round by Tim Sullivan, TeacherLists.com The New York Times recently published a story about back-to-school spending in 2015 with a simple irony at its core: While parents are spending less overall on the necessary supplies, back-to-school lists sent home every year keep getting longer. Items on a basic back-to-school list don’t change that much each year, so why are school supply lists getting longer? What millions of parents are seeing is the addition of items used by the entire classroom. While pencils, paper and a good old-fashioned calculator are still common back-to-school hallmarks, increasingly these lists are populated with paper towels, tissues, hand sanitizer and art supplies, as well as requests for extra pencils, pens, markers and crayons so that students lacking these items still can participate in classroom activities. It’s not just parents feeling the burden. A study published last year showed that teachers are spending an average of $400 out-of-pocket on extra supplies as well. Many teachers are parents themselves, meaning they can end up footing a $400 bill for their classrooms in addition to the estimated $600 a typical family spends on school supplies, backpacks and clothing. The good news is that the beneficiaries of longer school supply lists are always children. In some cases, particularly in large metropolitan areas, those supplies are used by students who are homeless or living in extreme poverty to give them the same quality of education their classmates receive. Parents grumble when asked to provide extra pencils and sanitary wipes every year, but most understand it’s because increasing student needs run simultaneously with decreased classroom funding. It’s a shared burden, but it still begs the question: What’s the solution? The Times piece stops short of providing one, and with good reason. Any school funding discussion inevitably becomes political, and unfortunately, there are very few in the education industry creating solutions and contingency plans in the face of limited resources. The need for a contingency plan is what inspired us to develop the Wish Lists function at TeacherLists. Though we already host over 1,000,000 school supply lists, which can be updated, sent and accessed anytime online, we’re very much in touch with what both teachers and parents go through during the back-to-school season. Instead of asking for a major investment up front, we’re helping both teachers and parents pace themselves. Wish Lists are free to use, and allow teachers to organize those extra supply requests into a separate list that can be updated anytime year-round. If a classroom is running low on art supplies or sanitary items in, say, November, teachers create a Wish List that sends an email to parents asking them to pitch in instead of just sticking them with a one-time burden (and bill) every August. It’s important to remember that as parents, educators or both, we are in the business of putting students first. To use a sports analogy, "we’re all on the same team." How can you help ensure that every student receives the same educational opportunities despite the challenges in our industry? How can you help a teammate today? Pick up a box of tissues when you get a Wish List request in November instead of buying 10 in late August. That isn’t just a start — it’s a solution. Tim Sullivan is the founder and president of TeacherLists- the first and only digital platform modernizing the school supply list process for all schools, all teachers and all parents. Completely free-of-charge for schools, the TeacherLists platform ends the days of mailing paper lists, endless and ineffective photocopies in plastic bins in store aisles and never-ending phone calls to the school office about lost lists; Teacher Wish Lists: Because School Supply Shopping Goes Year-Round The post Teacher Wish Lists: Because School Supply Shopping Goes Year-Round appeared first on TeachThought.

2,589 Classic MS-DOS Video Games You Can Play From Your Browser by TeachThought Staff If you’re of the correct vintage, you probably remember a game called Oregon Trail. It was a video game that let you drown, starve to death, and suffer from dysentery while depending on a wagon with wheels apparently made of glass. It made Social Studies teachers feel good about video games (how could it not?), and instantly became a kind of early icon for what could be considered a learning simulation. Before Windows (and to a degree, Macintosh) became the standard for desktop computer user interfaces, there was DOS and its command line that refused to do anything it wasn’t scripted to do by the user. And before the original Nintendo (released in the United States in 1985), there were MS-DOS Games. Scores of the game of widely varying degrees of quality, tone, and execution. Drug Wars or Donkey Kong, it was all there. And the MS DOS-game era (as it was) continued for much longer than you might’ve thought. The presciently-named Beneath Apple Manor was published in 1978, but MS-DOS releases within the archive continued until 1999, even as console systems from Sega, Sony, Microsoft, and more found mass appeal. SimCity. Wolfenstein. Paperboy 2, Joust. Ghosts N’ Goblins. Master of Orion. Civil War. Where in the World Is Carmen Sandiego Deluxe?. All available, with scores of others you’ve never heard of. And all available to play right from a web browser through the miracle of software emulation. This is the Internet Archives collection for MS-DOS video games. "Software for MS-DOS machines that represent entertainment and games. The collection includes action, strategy, adventure and other unique genres of game and entertainment software. Through the use of the EM-DOSBOX in-browser emulator, these programs are bootable and playable. Please be aware this browser-based emulation is still in beta - contact Jason Scott, Software Curator, if there are issues or questions. Thanks to eXo for contributions and assistance with this archive." You can also find a curated version of the same collection-the Showcase-here. For that matter, the idea and execution behind the Internet Archives in general is worth a look. Doom-The Roguelike! Swoon! MS-DOS Games: A Stunning Classic Video Game Library; 2,589 Classic MS-DOS Video Games You Can Play From Your Browser The post 2,589 Classic MS-DOS Video Games You Can Play From Your Browser appeared first on TeachThought.

Preparing Students For A Modern Economy  by Terry Heick Doing some reading (and listening) on competency-based education recently, I was both intrigued and concerned. The concern came recently after listening to a higher ed chancellor celebrate the source of his university’s curriculum. It was during a panel discussion on Competency Based Learning, where he explained the research for the prioritized competencies began with "federal skills databases." This sounds innocent enough. Even efficient. Among the benefits of this approach? Less "educational waste." Learn the skills that companies want you to have. Produce more "hire-able" graduates. Slow the production of "employees" with $60,000 in debt while working retail and fast food and drowning in debt. It’s difficult to argue against precise curriculum that produces graduates that can better support themselves in a modern economy. The difficulty lies in the terms-who creates them, and the language used as their description. The Characteristics Of Competency-Based Education Competency-based education is individualized-or should be. The focus is on students mastering given competencies. It’s clear, adjustable for unique student needs, and efficient. Characteristics of competency-based education include: Competency-based education is no longer time-bound: Focus on mastery rather than time; asynchronous Competency-based education makes it simpler to prioritize specific content. Competency-based education reduces "curriculum clutter." Competency-based education values performance-based assessments over more academic forms (e.g., multiple choice exams). Mastery is valued over grades (which is hard to argue against) Deb Everhart at Blackboard explains. "The pressure to make higher education more accessible and affordable also comes at a time when there is a huge mismatch between what employers need and what traditional education is providing. A recent Lumina Foundation/Gallup study yielded this startling finding: 96% of chief academic officers rate their institutions as effective in preparing students for the world of work, while only 14% of Americans agree, and only 11% of business leaders agree that graduates have the skills and competencies their businesses need. And it’s not just a difference of opinion. Even in this time of stubborn unemployment, 40% of U.S. employers report difficulty in filling jobs due to a lack of applicants with appropriate skills, with the talent shortage most acute in skilled trades. More than half of employers state that this gap has a significant impact on their businesses." The American Enterprise Institute is even more direct, advising that "Institutions offering CBE programs should partner closely with employers to help students attain the general and specific skills they need to succeed in the labor market." And I get it. When universities graduate students with "non-marketable skills," that’s a problem. The caricature here is the Humanities graduate working retail or fast food (maybe both), while the MBAs run the world. The goal of K-12 can’t be "career prep." But what about college? Isn’t that the point of college-to hone generalized knowledge into something "useful"? Errr, kind of. There is some frustration, and even loss, in gathering seemingly loosely connected skills and understandings (from the various classes in a traditional undergraduate program) into a credible, hire-able aesthetic employers will respond to when the students become employees. Yes, you could have Apple, Uber, Amazon, and Ford "collaborate" on a "curriculum" that would produce-like a widget-filled conveyor belt-employees ready to make those companies some dough. But schools don’t graduate employees, they graduate human beings. And just as universities haven’t been "job training facilities," more immediately, neither has K-12. The rub comes when universities seek to revise themselves. The more connected K-12 is to university goals and aspirations, the more K-12 is on the hook here as well to "tighten the curriculum" to make it "more efficient." To straighten and shorten the path from student to "job." Jobs Are Gross; Work Is Love A job is to work as a single instrument is to a symphony. A job is a single episode of Seinfeld in a 9 year run. A job is a mold that a person either fits or does not. A job is granular; one’s life’s work is whole. The "loss" embedded within a Humanities or Engineering degree is only a loss judged by the mold itself. The person entering the mold will likely leave it again, and that previous loss can be re-evaluated. Jobs are gross-at times necessary, but mostly molds created by industry that dehumanize people while doing untold damage to communities, ecologies, and fundamental human aspiration. They stunt the vision a person might have to create a life, and make their work a part of it. Their episodic nature stifles intellectual momentum, and a sense of self. Work is different. Work is what a person bears upon the world with their own hands, with creativity, vision, and affection. Work is love-natural extensions of the person in their native place. Education should, at least in part, prepare students for that. But in thinking like this, we’re lowering our sights from person and place to job and market. When we seek to train students, we have to ask ourselves what we’re training them for, and make sure we can live with the consequences. Competency-based education doesn’t demand narrow job training, but it is absolutely a shift from people to companies. So where’s the light here? Consider a different scale; the best education will transcend notions of job and career and profession and work; it will prepare students for any of these scenarios and more, while requiring none to inform their design. Preparing students for the modern economy isn’t about streamlining job-training, especially for jobs that will not only change often, but disappear more quickly than any generation in history. Skills matter, but preparing students for the modern economy is more about a state of mind-one that can, among other tendencies, think critically, understand scale, meaningfully respond to change, prioritize ideas, manage digital identity, and work with reverence in a local place while being keenly aware of one’s own participation in a newfound global society. The post Preparing Students For A Modern Economy appeared first on TeachThought.

60 Things Students Can Create To Demonstrate What They Know  by Ryan Schaaf, Notre Dame of Maryland University When I was a high school student, I had the privilege of having a wonderful English teacher. She was kind, often helped her students, and created a wonderful classroom environment that was rare in my high school experience. To this day, I regard her as a great educator; one of the very best. Due to her help, I improved my writing abilities to the point I moved ahead to an Honors course the very next year. As I now reflect upon her and my learning experiences fondly, I had only one criticism - I did the same type of work day in and day out. Although repetition is a tried and true method for learning, performing the same academic exercises over and over again really left a great deal to be desired. I wanted to express myself in new and different ways. After all, variety is the spice of life. Nowadays, many educators use the same methods over and over again in their lessons for students to express themselves and demonstrate their new knowledge. Today’s students want to express themselves in a variety of different ways. They want their academic work to be relevant, engaging and fun. Below is a diverse list adapted from resources found at fortheteachers.org of potential student products or activities learners can use to demonstrate their mastery of lesson content. The list also offers several digital tools for students to consider using in a technology-enriched learning environment. 60 Things Students Can Create To Demonstrate What They Know Audio Recording (try Vocaroo) Acceptance Speech Advertisement Avatar (try Voki) Blog (try Edublogs) Book Jacket Brochure Bulletin Board Cartoon Class Book Collage (digital and non-digital) Comedy Comic Strip (try BitStrip) Commercial Dance Debate Demonstration Discussion (try Voicethread) Diorama Drawing Experiment Flow Chart Games (digital and non-digital) Google Earth Tour Graph Graphic Organizer Infomerical Interview Photo Portfolio (try Evernote) Puppet Show Learning Log Literature Circle Magazine Maps Mind Map (try bubbl.us) Mural Music News Report (try Fodey) Poetry Reenactment Role Play Scavenger Hunt (try QR codes) Scrapbook Sculpture Show & Tell Simulation (digital and non-digital) Slideshow Socratic Discussion Song Story Map Speech Tag Cloud (try Wordle) Theatrical Play Timeline (try Timegrinder) Video Webpage (try Weebly) Word Splash Word Wall Wiki (try Wikispaces) 60 Things Students Can Create To Demonstrate Understanding The post 60 Things Students Can Create To Demonstrate What They Know appeared first on TeachThought.

Transgender Teacher? That’s Me by Sophie E. Gilbert I heard about One Teacher in Ten in the New Millennium through a Facebook group for transgender professionals. It was the summer of 2014 and I was fully transitioned in my personal life, with my workplace transition still to come. I wrote my essay "There is Uncertainty, but There is Also Hope" about the concern I had that the rural high school where I worked might reject me for being transgender. A couple of months later, I revealed my plan to transition to my principal. He seemed somewhat amused at first, but he quickly assured me of his support. Within a few days, the superintendent informed the school board of my plan in closed session, and then he held meetings to create a plan of action. During the week before Thanksgiving. I was to tell teachers and staff in a meeting after school that Monday, with a letter informing parents mailed out the following day. On Friday I was to say a few words to my students in my classes. After Thanksgiving, I would show up to school as my true self.   I began the week of the big revelation by speaking of the urgency I felt in making this transition as I watched my colleagues’ solemn faces. After the meeting, many came over to offer their support. By Wednesday, the entire school knew. As the mail came to the homes of my students, parents began texting their kids. My principal said he could see the message spread across the school commons during lunch, one kid getting a text and then telling others, who then told even more. He peeked into my afternoon classes to make sure I was okay. If my students knew, they showed no sign of it. Since we assumed the students already knew, I felt it was best to have my talk with them on Thursday. The superintendent wanted to wait until every single parent had the letter, but he reluctantly allowed me to move forward. I was to wait until near the end of each class period. The principal would enter and make opening remarks on the subject. Then, I was to tell a greatly abbreviated version of the speech I gave the faculty. Afterwards, the biggest concern that students expressed to me was that I might not be their teacher anymore. I assured them that I would be their teacher at least for the rest of the school year. I kept that promise. That evening, the principal informed me that a parent had sent the letter to a local news station, which was sending a crew out the next day. Initially I refused to be interviewed or filmed, but I relented when I realized that they were going to out me on television with or without me. I told my story to the entire county on my last day as the gender I was assigned at birth. When I saw the news story later that evening, I wondered if it had been the district that alerted the media. It was too neat. The piece cast the best possible light on the district’s handling of my transition. In my first week as a female teacher, parents expressed concerns that I was going to use the girl’s restroom, that the students would be too distracted by my appearance, that I was doing this to indoctrinate my students with liberal views. Two families pulled their children from my class. Both students sat in the office to complete assignments that I sent for them. Since I was to have no direct contact with either student, I was unable to monitor them and check for understanding. Both students had not turned in work I sent for them. When I submitted final grades for the first semester, the principal pulled me into his office to question me on why the grades of both students dropped after they left my class. After winter break, the superintendent insisted that he examine all of my students’ papers to satisfy the families of the two students. They were claiming that I was biased against them for taking the students from my class. Of course, they had no problem showing bias against me by pulling those students in the first place. I was pressured about every instructional choice I made after that, until they informed me that they intended to non re-elect me. After it was official that I was not coming back, the administration ignored me for the remainder of the school year. In the previous year, the same principal expressed how pleased he was with my teaching, and how thankful he was that I signed my letter of intent to return. In my fifteen prior years as a teacher, I never had a bad evaluation. Ever. After numerous interviews this past summer, I accepted an offer to teach at a continuation school in San Jose. My new students are good kids who have been through many trials in their young lives, and my recent struggle only makes me better able to relate to them. I feel completely accepted on campus. If I had somehow survived at my previous school, I doubt I would have ever felt the acceptance I now feel. I am a teacher who happens to be transgender, and I will continue to teach for as long as I choose. There will always be uncertainty in life, but now I know that hope can lead me through darkness and help me find the light. Transgender Teacher? That’s Me The post Transgender Teacher? That’s Me appeared first on TeachThought.

Blog Your Way To Connected Professional Development by Mike Fisher Professional learning, even 15 years into the 21st Century, still tends to lean toward a "one size fits all" model. Educators go to workshops, participate in local PD, or read professional books. While the information gained may be valuable, it isn’t always completely relevant to contemporary teachers who need solutions and actions that are just in time rather than just in case. One way to approach just in time professional learning and to get connected to other educators that care about the same issues you care about is to start reading and writing blogs. Blogs represent an opportunity for educators to not only connect to others and but also to personalize their professional development based on what is relevant and specific to their instructional practices and professional needs. Blogging represents opportunities to start conversations, share professional stories, share new ideas, take a stand on an issue, or carve out a professional niche. When you write blogs, you share unique perspectives on your experiences. When you read blogs, you discover unique ways to improve your professional practice. When you respond to blogs you’ve read or interact with respondents on blogs you wrote, you open up a whole new world of professional communication and collaboration opportunities. Reading, Writing, and Responding to blogs leads to conversations, other writings and professional resources, and sometimes, even real life meetings. This level of connectivity isn’t dependent on anything external that one might have to wait on: published books, future scheduled workshops, year-end assessment data, etc. You only need a little bit of time and a device to plug into this already available network. If you’re looking to get started with professional learning through reading blogs that are relevant to your interests or subject areas, look to ASCD EDge, Jerry Blumengarten’s CybraryMan Resources, Smartblogs on Education, TeachThought, Teach100, and Curriculum 21’s Clearinghouse. You could also consider writing your own blog using a variety of services: Blogger, WordPress, Edublogs, or ASCD EDge. Reading and writing blogs gives educators fresh opportunities for relevant information and connections to other professionals who have similar interests. As we begin Connected Educator Month, blogs are a wonderful way to connect, interact, learn, and share as a Networked Contemporary Educator. Download a free copy of Mike Fisher’s book, Digital Learning Strategies: How do I assign and assess 21st century work?, courtesy of Mike and ASCD as a limited-time offer for Connected Educator Month (CEM) 2015. ASCD is leading the CEM theme, "Innovations in Professional Learning," and will be sharing free and discounted resources all month. Mike Fisher is a former teacher who is now a full-time author, consultant, and instructional coach. He is the author of Digital Learning Strategies: How do I assign and assess 21st Century Work? and the co-author of Upgrade Your Curriculum: Practical Ways to Transform Units and Engage Students, both published by ASCD. He works with schools around the country, helping to sustain curriculum upgrades, design curriculum, and modernize instruction in immersive technology. His website is The Digigogy Collaborative and he can also be found on Twitter as @fisher1000 Blog Your Way To Connected Professional Development; Image attribution flickr user vancouverfilmschool The post Blog Your Way To Connected Professional Development appeared first on TeachThought.

by TeachThought Staff Want to hear an amazing story involving 3D printers, hikers, the atmosphere, and more than a little bit of luck? From the original reddit post: The whole project took myself and four friends a couple months of planning. We almost canceled the whole thing because helium cost 4x more than we were budgeting. As for the communications and attempted recovery (warning, about to get technical): We used GPS on a smartphone to continuously log the phone’s location on its memory card. The standard GPS receiver these days can track your phone well above 100,000 ft - there used to be a limitation of 60,000 ft but that was recently lifted. The harder issue was to figure out how the phone can communicate to us. We used an app (myTracks or something similar, I forgot) to have the phone text us its GPS location once it got signal as it was returning to Earth (about ~3000 ft altitude). We planned our June 2013 launch at a specific time and place such that the phone was projected to land in an area with cell coverage. The problem was that the cell service coverage maps we were relying on were not accurate, so the phone never got signal as it came back to Earth, and we never heard from it. We didn’t know this was the problem at the time - we thought our trajectory model was far off and it landed in a signal dead zone (turns out the model was actually quite accurate). The phone landed ~50 miles away from the launch point, from what I recall. It’s a really far distance considering there’s hardly any roads over there! TWO YEARS LATER, in a twist of ironic fate, a woman who works at AT&T was on a hike one day and spotted our phone in the barren desert. She brings it to an AT&T store, and they identify my friend’s SIM card. We got the footage and data a few weeks later! And a few more tidbits from their YouTube video description, In June 2013, a group of friends launched a weather balloon a few miles from Tuba City, Arizona. The amazing footage was found two years later by an Arizona hiker. Enjoy the video of our launch preparations, video footage, and some data analysis of the flight. Max altitude: 98,664 ft (30.1 km) Time of flight: 1 hour, 38 minutes Payload: GoPro Hero3, Sony Camcorder, Samsung Galaxy Note II phone. The GoPro and camcorder were recording video footage, while the phone was taking still images. More photos to come, shortly! Team members: Bryan Chan, Ved Chirayath, Ashish Goel, Tyler Reid, Paul Tarantino Special thanks to Broadcom Find more about the science here: High altitude GPS: http://www.stanford.edu/~tyreid/balloons Fluid Lensing: http://www.vedphoto.com/balloon Amazing! The post They Put A GoPro On A Balloon That Went To The Stratosphere appeared first on TeachThought.

Blogging Your Way To Connected Professional Development by Mike Fisher Professional learning, even 15 years into the 21st Century, still tends to lean toward a "one size fits all" model. Educators go to workshops, participate in local PD, or read professional books. While the information gained may be valuable, it isn’t always completely relevant to contemporary teachers who need solutions and actions that are just in time rather than just in case. One way to approach just in time professional learning and to get connected to other educators that care about the same issues you care about is to start reading and writing blogs. Blogs represent an opportunity for educators to not only connect to others and but also to personalize their professional development based on what is relevant and specific to their instructional practices and professional needs. Blogging represents opportunities to start conversations, share professional stories, share new ideas, take a stand on an issue, or carve out a professional niche. When you write blogs, you share unique perspectives on your experiences. When you read blogs, you discover unique ways to improve your professional practice. When you respond to blogs you’ve read or interact with respondents on blogs you wrote, you open up a whole new world of professional communication and collaboration opportunities. Reading, Writing, and Responding to blogs leads to conversations, other writings and professional resources, and sometimes, even real life meetings. This level of connectivity isn’t dependent on anything external that one might have to wait on: published books, future scheduled workshops, year-end assessment data, etc. You only need a little bit of time and a device to plug into this already available network. If you’re looking to get started with professional learning through reading blogs that are relevant to your interests or subject areas, look to ASCD EDge, Jerry Blumengarten’s CybraryMan Resources, Smartblogs on Education, TeachThought, Teach100, and Curriculum 21’s Clearinghouse. You could also consider writing your own blog using a variety of services: Blogger, WordPress, Edublogs, or ASCD EDge. Reading and writing blogs gives educators fresh opportunities for relevant information and connections to other professionals who have similar interests. As we begin Connected Educator Month, blogs are a wonderful way to connect, interact, learn, and share as a Networked Contemporary Educator. Download a free copy of Mike Fisher’s book, Digital Learning Strategies: How do I assign and assess 21st century work?, courtesy of Mike and ASCD as a limited-time offer for Connected Educator Month (CEM) 2015. ASCD is leading the CEM theme, "Innovations in Professional Learning," and will be sharing free and discounted resources all month. Mike Fisher is a former teacher who is now a full-time author, consultant, and instructional coach. He is the author of Digital Learning Strategies: How do I assign and assess 21st Century Work? and the co-author of Upgrade Your Curriculum: Practical Ways to Transform Units and Engage Students, both published by ASCD. He works with schools around the country, helping to sustain curriculum upgrades, design curriculum, and modernize instruction in immersive technology. His website is The Digigogy Collaborative and he can also be found on Twitter as @fisher1000 The post Blogging Your Way To Connected Professional Development appeared first on TeachThought.

They Put A GoPro On A Balloon That Went To The Stratosphere by TeachThought Staff Want to hear an amazing story involving 3D printers, hikers, the atmosphere, and more than a little bit of luck? From the original reddit post: "The whole project took myself and four friends a couple months of planning. We almost canceled the whole thing because helium cost 4x more than we were budgeting. As for the communications and attempted recovery (warning, about to get technical): We used GPS on a smartphone to continuously log the phone’s location on its memory card. The standard GPS receiver these days can track your phone well above 100,000 ft - there used to be a limitation of 60,000 ft but that was recently lifted. The harder issue was to figure out how the phone can communicate to us. We used an app (myTracks or something similar, I forgot) to have the phone text us its GPS location once it got signal as it was returning to Earth (about ~3000 ft altitude). We planned our June 2013 launch at a specific time and place such that the phone was projected to land in an area with cell coverage. The problem was that the cell service coverage maps we were relying on were not accurate, so the phone never got signal as it came back to Earth, and we never heard from it. We didn’t know this was the problem at the time - we thought our trajectory model was far off and it landed in a signal dead zone (turns out the model was actually quite accurate). The phone landed ~50 miles away from the launch point, from what I recall. It’s a really far distance considering there’s hardly any roads over there! TWO YEARS LATER, in a twist of ironic fate, a woman who works at AT&T was on a hike one day and spotted our phone in the barren desert. She brings it to an AT&T store, and they identify my friend’s SIM card. We got the footage and data a few weeks later!" And a few more tidbits from their YouTube video description, In June 2013, a group of friends launched a weather balloon a few miles from Tuba City, Arizona. The amazing footage was found two years later by an Arizona hiker. Enjoy the video of our launch preparations, video footage, and some data analysis of the flight. Max altitude: 98,664 ft (30.1 km) Time of flight: 1 hour, 38 minutes Payload: GoPro Hero3, Sony Camcorder, Samsung Galaxy Note II phone. The GoPro and camcorder were recording video footage, while the phone was taking still images. More photos to come, shortly! Team members: Bryan Chan, Ved Chirayath, Ashish Goel, Tyler Reid, Paul Tarantino Special thanks to Broadcom Find more about the science here: High altitude GPS: http://www.stanford.edu/~tyreid/balloons Fluid Lensing: http://www.vedphoto.com/balloon Amazing! They Put A GoPro On A Balloon That Went To The Stratosphere The post They Put A GoPro On A Balloon That Went To The Stratosphere appeared first on TeachThought.

What Happens When Teachers Connect by Terry Heick Digital and social media have replaced the landscape for education. This isn’t a case of mere impact or transformation-it’s all different now. Everything-the tools, the audiences, the access to content, the data, the opportunity. And this is a displacing and replacing that will only accelerate as re-conceptualizing of the craft of teaching in light of emerging technologies and global distinctions increases. This doesn’t mean that every classroom and school and district is suddenly forward-thinking, but rather that education-and most critically, it’s students-have already changed, forever altering the tone and context for that education. Eventually, the systems of education will catch up to this shift-will realize the world’s already changed and that no matter how iconic "School" is, nothing waits for change, It’s kind of like an old Looney Tunes episode, where Wile E. Coyote runs off the cliff and keeps running until he looks down and realizes that he’s running on air and the ground is no longer beneath his feet. Full of enthusiasm, he’s lighter than air; his realization makes him fall. Teachers As Drivers Of Change One of the primary movers in the new context for education is technology, and the human element behind the technology that’s behind the new context? Teachers. When teachers connect, a lot happens, subtle and overt. New pressures. New enthusiasm. New workflows. New challenges. In physics, one thing affects another. When one thing connects with another thing, something happens. In chemistry, this can be even more spectacular. Baking soda and vinegar. Fizz. When people connect, there are also effects, and though they’re not always positive, they make the alternative-not connecting-seem like a ridiculous possibility. What Happens When Teachers Connect They consider new ideas. What is that teacher doing? What are they using? Why do they believe this? Why do they use that? What can I learn from there? What can they learn from me? What do we share in common? They have to understand. When they meet another teacher, their brain can’t help but make sense of this person and their approach and their tools and their ways of thinking. These artifacts may or may not make their way into their own teaching, but the observation and analysis are foregone conclusions. Further, connecting with other teachers also keeps you honest. You may be able to fool a few teachers that your students practice digital citizenship, or self-direct their own learning, or are doing amazing projects in the community. But you can’t fool them. A connected teacher has to understand-has to walk the walk, or be really good at faking it. They’re forced to confront the limits of their own knowledge. A teacher might think they understand project-based learning, but a single tweet or 3 minute YouTube video might help them to see that "doing projects" and learning through projects are two different things entirely. When teachers practice in isolation, this kind of self-criticism is rarely necessary. They can learn from people with specialized knowledge. You may be the expert on mobile technology or inquiry-based learning in your building, but then you meet Jamie Casap or realize you know less than you thought you did. Which is good. Now you can grow. They can choose the terms of the connection. Is it permanent? Online only? Friendly? Dialogic? Self-serving? Whimsical? When teachers connect, it makes sense that they can control the terms of nature of that connection. They can practice empathy. Connected teachers can benefit from empathy for the same reasons students can-making sense of another human being can only happen when you surrender your own agenda, and feel alongside and through another person and their thinking. They can give back. Ideally, connections go both ways; they distribute and accept. A connected teacher can give back-and the more powerful their connections and networks, the more powerful their ability to help other teachers. They have less of an excuse to not change. A connected teacher can’t say they "didn’t know" or "weren’t aware of" a trend, tool, or idea. (If they do, they may need to re-evaluate the quality of their connectivity.) They may or may not be more willing to rethink their own practice, but ignorance is harder to come by. They have new knowledge demands. When teachers connect, their ability to survey, evaluate, curate, and use that information is tested. Their ability to establish an online identity is centered. The tools and practices necessary to establish and grow their professional learning network are suddenly as important as making phone calls to parents or grading parents. They learn to socialize their thinking. Or at least see and hear others do so. Connected teachers have an immediate need to socialize their thinking for different audiences for different reasons. Interactions become less about talking your department members into a new idea for improving digital literacy, and more about joining an ongoing conversation that never ends. They’ll have their thinking pushed. They may experience peer pressure-to adapt their thinking to "the status quo." This is neither good nor bad in and of itself (depends on what they’re thinking was, and how the "status quo" impacts it). But this is a kind of ideological peer pressure, where it nothing else, teachers have to think carefully about what they believe and why they believe it. They adapt, assimilate, reject, or absorb a constant flow of perceptions and possibilities. Their classrooms can become learning laboratories. Where else do all these new ideas go? What Happens When Teachers Connect; image attribution flickr user woodleywonderworks The post What Happens When Teachers Connect appeared first on TeachThought.