Monthly Archives: August 2012

Opening the Gates

Education reform, Hardware, Security

Opening the Gates

2012-08-24

by Richard White

It’s a new school year! I don’t see my students for another few days, but many of the teachers are already back at work, greeting colleagues, cleaning classrooms, prepping calendars and websites, and a hundred and one other things that go into starting things up again.

It’s a special year for the science teachers and math teachers at my school. After a hard year’s worth of new construction, our brand new Math/Science/Library building is ready to go. The number of science classrooms has increased, our facilities have improved drastically, and we now have 10 ThinkPads installed in each of our two physics classrooms, with everything from Vernier’s Logger Pro to Microsoft’s Office to the University of Colorado’s excellent PhET Simulations installed. Having a set of computers installed in the 9th and 12th grade physics classrooms is going to revolutionize the way we teach physics at our school. I can’t wait to tell you about it.

But there is nothing more revolutionary than this simple fact:

Our school is opening up access to the Internet.

Teachers at our school have had mostly unfiltered access to the Internet for at least ten years, but students, until recently, have only had highly filtered access, and then only on school computers. This was presumably out of fear for their online safety, although students have access to literally anything they want on the Internet via their cell phones.

That all changed over the course of the summer, however, thanks in part to ongoing discussion in our Educational Technology Committee. Our IT Director, however, was almost certainly the one who did a little last-minute verbal judo to help encourage the decision. Regardless of how it came about, my school has now joined an increasing number of high school campuses that provide students with effectively free access to the World Wide Web.

Although my school is occasionally guilty of moving a little slowly on some of these things—I’m occasionally the one issuing this charge!—here, we’ve made the right move.

A friend forwarded an article to me earlier this evening, however. It contains a long series of Internet Safety Talking Points, and is a telling reminder that some schools still suffer from a “culture of fear.” I know all too well how hard it can be to be patient in the face of what appear unyielding barriers to the kind of technology-based policies and progress that are vital for educating our young people.

But the right conversation, at the right time, can make all the difference.

Keep the faith.

Back to School Route Map

Teaching, Workflow

BACK TO SCHOOL ROUTE MAP
2012-08-21
by Richard White

It’s August, and most of the teachers I know are easing out of the summer vacation and into getting ready for the new school year. If you haven’t busted out your planner (or perhaps you’re using a spreadsheet, or a Google calendar, for your planning?), you’d better get on it. Labor Day is just around the corner!

There’s a whole lot of insanity that happens during the school year, and it seems like we’re often living day-to-day, with the grading, and the writing emails to parents, and the meetings. Often, there just doesn’t seem to be time to step back and take a look at the Big Picture of the school year. There’s a lot to be said for bringing a scrappy, seat-of-your-pants renegade enthusiasm to your work—Middle School teachers practically thrive under those conditions, God bless ’em—but it’s valuable to be able to maintain some sort of overview of things, even in the midst of the trauma of daily life.

Have you considered a route map?

I had the good fortune to do a 3-day rockclimb up the sheer face of Washington Column, a “big wall” that faces Half Dome in Yosemite National Park. This is one of those climbs that you hear about on National Geographic Explorer, with the loads of gear, and the sleeping on hammocks, and cracked lips and blistered fingers. A former student of mine led me up “The Prow,” and it was awesome.

We had a route map for the climb, a copy for each of us, laminated and clipped to our harnesses where we could access it at a moment’s notice. It wasn’t a step-by-step guide or anything. We had 1100 feet of vertical climbing to do, and there was no way the little map could give us enough information—we ascended the rock with shoes and handjams, ropes and camming units—but as a small-scale guide to significant features, landmarks, and ledges, it was invaluable.

Many textbooks provide students with a route map for their course of study. Chapters and sections are where the work gets done, but we all agree that an overview of the year gives students a valuable context into which they can place their learning.

In the same way, having a route map for your school year is a great way to maintain an overview of where you are and where you’re going this school year. A piece of paper with some goals or deadlines or milestones is a nice way of keeping your perspective, even as the day-to-day grind grabs most of your attention.

It doesn’t even have to be a separate document, although that can be a nice way of keeping the route map from getting lost. You can mark milestones on a daily calendar if you like, although again, those items risk getting lost in the large-scale of a daily schedule. Some people use Project Planning software, although that seems to involve levels of infrastructure that fall far beyond the needs of most classroom teachers I know.

Some of the items I include on my own School Year Route Map:
* August – Order lab materials for new school year.
* August – Get course website up and running one week before school starts.
* September – Welcome email to all students and parents, with online grade info
* September – Photos and assignments ready for Back-to-School night.
* November – Write comments for First Quarter grades.
* December – Create/post first semester Extra Credit assignment.
* January – Materials prepped for second semester elective
* January – All grades completed ahead of semester end
* January – Server available for second semester programming class?
* January – Classroom workstations available for second semester programming class.
* January – Meet w/ school director to coordinate second semester field trip

Again, it’s not like any of these are a surprise to me when I sit down to think about it. But the route map keeps me oriented, and reminds me that I need to take care of these items—they will all, at some point or another, find their way onto my daily schedule.

Best wishes for the coming school year!

Bee Venom & Training Devices

Education reform, Teaching

Bee Venom & Training Devices
2012-08-18
by Richard White

I’m allergic to bee venom.

It wasn’t always that way. Growing up, I got stung by my share of bees, and hornets, and yellowjackets. I recall one particular time when I was riding down the road on my motorcycle when I happened to catch a bee in the neck of my t-shirt, and a sudden sharp sting on my back. I pulled over at a rest area, went in to the bathroom, and took off my shirt to see in the mirror the bee’s barb, and the little venom sac dangling at the end of it. I’d been stung, but it wasn’t more than a slight, painful swelling.

I’m not sure when I developed an allergy–I’m told that repeated exposures to venom can precipitate this–but when a bee sting, over the course of a couple of hours, turned my hand into a big round softball, I knew something had happened. I walked away from the emergency room with a shot of antihistamine and a prescription for an epi-pen, which one can use to administer a quick dose of epinephrine in the event of a sting.

Cool.

You have to get a new epi-pen every couple of years. This last time there was an extra pen in the pack, which turned out NOT be a “limited time, two-for-one” offer, but rather a “training device.”

This thing is amazing. It looks just like a real epi-pen, from the shape and coloring to the little blue cap you have to pull off before jamming the thing into your thigh. Now I’ve actually used an epi-pen before, and it’s not hard to do, but it’s true, there’s a little bit of trepidation going in the first time you try it. Part of it’s the idea of a needle going in to your body—”that’s not going to be fun,” you think—but a good part of is more of a general anxiety: “Am I doing this right?” How hard should you swing the pen so that it works right? I mean, I saw Pulp Fiction, and everybody knows you have to swing pretty hard to pierce that area over the heart, right?

So this training device is a little bit of genius. It gives you a way to practice administering the injection in a non-threatening context, and lets you get used to the idea of this thing that otherwise might be kind of scary. That’s awesome.

You probably already know where we’re going with this, right? Just as the Training Device acts as a model for that Authentic Assessment that shows up in the form of a bee sting, it’s important for us to provide Training and Models for our students.

In particular, technology-based delivery of materials can be of enormous benefit to kids who are desperately trying to figure out just exactly what it is that we’re asking of them.

Whether its a rubric that lets kids know how they’re going to be evaluated, or a practice test [PDF download] that gives them an idea of the format of questions, examples of acceptable work from previous students, or a quiz that gives them a low-grade stress situation that they need to manage, Practice Makes Perfect. It’s our job as teachers to provide students with opportunities to practice, as well as giving them ridiculously clear instructions on what our expectations are for an assignment.

Otherwise, how are they to know?