Un-professional Development

The powerpoint presentation that I gave on animations can be found here.

As we approach the halfway point of the school year, and the end of the first semester, I am watching my teenage daughters prepare for final exams. I read the blog post Finals Fever and agree with the statement that there needs to be “a better way to end a semester” than with final exams. There is likely very little movement in grades on a final exam. An “A” student will very likely get a good grade on a final while a student who is struggling to pass the class is likely to get a mark that will either achieve a pass or a fail, but not by much either way.

I personally went to a high school that did not have final exams. When I got to University, I had zero experience with finals. Everyone said I was at a great disadvantage because I didn’t have any test taking experience. Well guess what? It didn’t matter. All test questions are easy if you know the answer, or know how to find the answer. So if I LEARNED something during the semester, I did well enough on the finals.

I think that is why teachers come up with “trick” questions, because they know they have to make something “hard” for the students who learned during the semester.  There is a notion that “hard” equals “good”.

Mr. Moses recently responded to another teachers blog with the following advice I think we should all be going by.

1. You will not use the grade book as a weapon against your students. In fact you may want to commit to not using your grade book at all. You may need to keep one to fool the administration, but under no circumstances should it reflect what you report to the office at the end of a grading period.
2. Commit, right now, to not failing a single student. No matter what. If you do this it will completely change how you work with young people.
3. Never forget that you are there to help kids. Nothing else matters. Not even a little.

We are not here to “trick” kids, or make things “hard”. We are here to help kids be successful. If a teacher can make these commitments, and spend time teaching and assessing students all year long, the final exam  questions should all be “easy”.

Millions of peole watched the recent episode of Oprah where she had Professor Randy Pausch give part of the lecture entitled “Really Achieving Your Childhood Dreams”  he gave at Carnegie Mellon University on September 18, 2007. What made the story special is that the man is dying of Pancreatic cancer, and is given just a few months to live. (I only knew it was on Oprah because my wife and daughters were watching…honest!)

For the people who think YouTube and Google video have no educational value and have no place in our schools, the entire lecture (not the 10 minute version as seen on Oprah) has been available to the everyone on Google Video and YouTube since the day after the lecture was given to the live audience. Everyone with internet access can view the video at their convenience.

Dean Shareski brought this video to my attention in one of his posts. When I started watching it I immediately thought about teaching and learning styles and how the professors I had at university would lecture about how bad lecturing is for students. As I continued to watch and be drawn in by the lecture, I realized that lecture CAN BE A POWERFUL TEACHING METHOD as this is an amazing story.

 If this  isn’t educational, I don’t know what is. 

Download Video: Posted by g_morris at TeacherTube.com.

Today’s assignment….Can you point out his mistakes?? In groups of three, find the errors made in this clip, and explain WHY HE IS WRONG.  Be prepared to make a presentation to the other groups!

What would you say if you were placed in a school where there were no grades and you moved through different “levels”based on what you have learned. It would be a little bit like swimming lessons, when you can tread water for 60 seconds and swim 2 lengths of the pool on your back you can move to the next level. The only difference would be that the levels would be in reading and math.There is such a place!

“There are no grade levels in the rural Chugach School District, which is based in Anchorage and serves tiny villages scattered throughout 22,000 square miles of remote areas of south central Alaska. Instead, each of its few hundred students tote around report cards as thick as history texts. Each packet details the individual student’s progress through the district’s more than 1,000 learning standards as they move from kindergarten to high school graduation.

Ask any secondary school student, and he or she can tell you, for example, “I’m at level five in math, level seven in reading, level six in career development.” Students mark up the packets to track how far they’ve come, turning each page into a hodgepodge of multicolored highlights and scribbles. Take a snapshot of all the students’ report cards at any point,and each one will look different.

At the core of the Chugach model is this rule: To move to the next level, you must master the one that precedes it. There is no sitting in the back row and skating by. Every child must learn every subject at every level, passing with proficiency equivalent to at least 80 percent — essentially, a B minus. And when they’re done, they’re done, whether that means they finish when they’re sixteen or twenty-one.”

The full article can be found here.  

Answer the following based on what you have just read.

1) What do you think would be good about this system?

2) What would be bad about this system?

3) What do you think your parents would say about this system? Why would they think that?

4) What do YOU think about this idea of a school with no grades?

5) What questions does it make you think about?

Each August for the past decade, as faculty prepare for the academic year, Beloit College in Wisconsin has released the Beloit College Mindset List. Its 70 items provide a look at the cultural touchstones that have shaped the lives of today’s first-year college students. Here is this year’s list, representing the cultural changes since 1989.

1.What Berlin wall?

2.Humvees, minus the artillery, have always been available to the public.

3.Rush Limbaugh and the “Dittoheads” have always been lambasting liberals.

4.They never “rolled down” a car window.

5.Michael Moore has always been angry and funny.

6.They may confuse the Keating Five with a rock group.

7.They have grown up with bottled water.

8.General Motors has always been working on an electric car.

9.Nelson Mandela has always been free and a force in South Africa.

10.Pete Rose has never played baseball.

11.Rap music has always been mainstream.

12.Religious leaders have always been telling politicians what to do, or else!

13.“Off the hook” has never had anything to do with a telephone.

14.Music has always been “unplugged.”

15.Russia has always had a multi-party political system.

16.Women have always been police chiefs in major cities.

17.They were born the year Harvard Law Review Editor Barack Obama announced he might run for office some day.

18.The NBA season has always gone on and on and on and on.

19.Classmates could include Michelle Wie, Jordin Sparks, and Bart Simpson.

20.Half of them may have been members of the Baby-sitters Club.

21.Eastern Airlines has never “earned their wings” in their lifetime.

22.No one has ever been able to sit down comfortably to a meal of “liver with some fava beans and a nice Chianti.”

23.Wal-Mart has always been a larger retailer than Sears and has always employed more workers than GM.

24.Being “lame” has to do with being dumb or inarticulate, not disabled.

25.Wolf Blitzer has always been serving up the news on CNN.

26.Katie Couric has always had screen cred.

27.Al Gore has always been running for president or thinking about it.

28.They never found a prize in a Coca-Cola “MagiCan.”

29.They were too young to understand Judas Priest’s subliminal messages.

30.When all else fails, the Prozac defense has always been a possibility.

31.Multigrain chips have always provided healthful junk food.

32.They grew up in Wayne’s World.

33.U2 has always been more than a spy plane.

34.They were introduced to Jack Nicholson as “The Joker.”

35.Stadiums, rock tours and sporting events have always had corporate names.

36.American rock groups have always appeared in Moscow.

37.Commercial product placements have been the norm in films and on TV.

38.On Parents’ Day on campus, their folks could be mixing it up with Lisa Bonet and Lenny Kravitz with daughter Zöe, or Kathie Lee and Frank Gifford with son Cody.

39.Fox has always been a major network.

40.They drove their parents crazy with the Beavis and Butt-Head laugh.

41.The “Blue Man Group” has always been everywhere.

42.Women’s studies majors have always been offered on campus.

43.Being a latchkey kid has never been a big deal.

44.Thanks to MySpace and Facebook, autobiography can happen in real time.

45.They learned about JFK from Oliver Stone and Malcolm X from Spike Lee.

46.Most phone calls have never been private.

47.High definition television has always been available.

48.Microbreweries have always been ubiquitous.

49.Virtual reality has always been available when the real thing failed.

50.Smoking has never been allowed in public spaces in France.

51.China has always been more interested in making money than in reeducation.

52.Time has always worked with Warner.

53. Tiananmen Square is a 2008 Olympics venue, not the scene of a massacre.

54. The purchase of ivory has always been banned.

55.MTV has never featured music videos.

56.The space program has never really caught their attention except in disasters.

57.Jerry Springer has always been lowering the level of discourse on TV.

58.They get much more information from Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert than from the newspaper.

59.They’re always texting 1 n other.

60.They will encounter roughly equal numbers of female and male professors in the classroom.

61.They never saw Johnny Carson live on television.

62.They have no idea who Rusty Jones was or why he said “goodbye to rusty cars.”

63.Avatars have nothing to do with Hindu deities.

64.Chavez has nothing to do with iceberg lettuce and everything to do with oil.

65.Illinois has been trying to ban smoking since the year they were born.

66.The World Wide Web has been an online tool since they were born.

67.Chronic fatigue syndrome has always been debilitating and controversial.

68.Burma has always been Myanmar.

69.Dilbert has always been ridiculing cubicle culture.

70.Food packaging has always included nutritional labeling.

There are two very different points of view on one to one computing for students. Two articles, opposite points of view.

The first one is from the New York Times. To summarize, the article explains how some schools are removing laptop computers and reducing computer access for students because there is little or no data supporting that use of computers in school helps student meet or imrove on State Standard Exams. Many teachers are finding that the computers are “in the way” and that they are used for cheating on tests and instant messaging with their friends. Some teachers believe they cover more content without the computers. Other factors influencing the decision to remove computer access is the technical difficulties and the extremely high cost. These scchools aren;t feeling like they are getting much “bang for the buck”

The Second article is from eschoolnews.com that highlights how technology really does work in schools. It debunks some myths about technology and gives examples of how some schools are moving forward and doing amazing work with technology as a learning tool.  Consider the following:

“Among the projects that the Star City students have undertaken are an awareness seminar on the opportunities for women in high-tech fields; a comprehensive, anti-drunk-driving program, which has led to collaboration with the Arkansas State Police on a statewide video campaign; and a seminar titled “Enough is Enough,” involving local self-defense instructors and the Arkansas Attorney General’s office, that aims to raise awareness of the issues of child abuse and abduction. Any of these seminars would be worthwhile for local teens to attend, but the Star City students are actually coordinating and developing these activities. They are taking charge of their education in a way that benefits their whole community.”

The report goes on to say:

But that’s not all the students from Star City are doing. They have developed and hosted a senior adult technology training program that teaches basic technology skills to the elderly in the community… They have collected oral history of the wartime experiences of local veterans…”

It may not meet “State Standards” but does it sound like the kids are working and learning something? I think it does.

Kids today are digital kids. They don’t know what it is like to cross the room to change the channel, or to go outside because there is nothing on CBC or CTV. They are immersed in technology from the time they are infants. They are wired differently than we are. They learn differently than we did. A computer, no matter how powerful, cannot replace a teacher as there are skills that needs to be taught and there is NO substitute for qualilty classroom mangement, supervision and good planning. The content can be learned in many  different ways.

We can “cover” the material, or we can let kids experience it, work with it, mould it, and learn from it.

This is a little dark, and the language isn't english, but it is still funny! (At least I think it is....) 

This video has been kicking around the educational technology world for the last couple of months posted to several “geeky” websites. It’s not even that much of a video, just written words and some background music. The point the video is making is quite clear…it’s a changing world, and are we preparing our students for the future? 

Its eight minutes. (Which with the help of technology I figured out works out to 0.56% of your day)

I plucked this from an article the edutopia website . I think it is a brilliant analogy as to where we need to be going in schools…

“In discussing the need for hands-on science learning, Nichols asked us to imagine parents at the dinner table asking their young son or daughter that age-old question “What did you learn in school today?” The child shrugs, as children often do, and says, “We learned to play basketball.” The parents then ask, “How did you do that?” The child answers, “Well, we sat in the gym and the teacher passed out these books, and we turned to chapter one, about passing the basketball, and we learned there are three types of passes: the bounce pass, the chest pass, and the one-handed pass.”

“OK,” parents would say, wanting to know more, “what happened next?” The child continues, “We read the next chapter about dribbling. And another chapter on shooting. We learned there’s the set shot, the bank shot, and the jump shot.” After a few minutes of this recitation, the parents, increasingly exasperated, challenge their child: “But did the teacher ever give you a basketball and let you go on the court and play?” “No,” the child says with a sigh. “We just read the book until the bell rang.”

Nichols said that no parent in America would stand for this, for sports to be taught to their children only through reading and through memorizing basketball terminology. Sports require observing oneself performing and watching others perform. Coaches and athletes routinely make use of videotape analysis of games to improve performance. Yet millions of parents settle for science, mathematics, history, and many other subjects taught through rote memorization of vocabulary from textbooks, and students never get a chance to actively perform real science or conduct authentic historical study.”

By Milton Chen, executive director of The George Lucas Educational Foundation..”…

It got me to think about other subjects such as Drama,  Art and Computers, and how students create or re-create a performance for feedback, analysis, and personal gratification. I think about students attitude towards these subjects and the effort they put into them and how they never fail to remind me that it is time to go to the lab, or its time to do art. And why is it that if a student isn’t very good at playing an instrument or at drawing and colouring we just chalk it up to “oh well, that kid is never going to be an artist!”  But if someone struggles in Algebra or Geometry or Grammar we worry beyond belief, have in-service days on improving our assessment and evaluation, and say things like “we need to get back to basics”. I think some serious adjustments need to made to the organization and structure of the school in order to prepare our students for the future.