07.11.08
Posted in Learning at 11:46 am by Chris Champion
Well its been a week since I got back from NECC. Last night was the first night I fell asleep before 1 a.m., so I guess I’m officially “recovered”. I promised/wanted to reflect on my experiences at NECC and now that I have had some time to think about it all, here it is:
First: I feel like an Academy Award recipient but I can’t help but acknowledge the Pennsylvania Bureau of Career & Technical Education. They, along with the “Tech Prep” people at Harrisburg Community College, had the foresight to see that a conference like NECC could actually be beneficial to a teacher in a vocational-technical school. Thanks to Joanna Stoms at that college for pitching not only to reimburse my conference and hotel, but to also convince the Department of Education to pay for airfare, excepting their rule of “no out of state conferences”.
Highlights of NECC: I must admit, Saturday’s EduBloggerCon was everything I expected. Props to Adam from Wikispaces to upgrading the EBC wiki to “Super” status. Having a dynamic schedule that was voted on by way of PollEverywhere was way too cool. I know some people didn’t like the format – not enough time. If you were in the “Web 2.0 In Teacher Education” session, you found out that you could break the rules, go into a “work” session, and extend the talk time a bit. Sure, we could have spent the whole conference talking about the role of Web 2.0 in preservice teacher education. By the way, you probably DIDN’T attend that session because you were in the Web 2.0 Smackdown. Boo. You missed a great session facilitated by David Warlick – who only asked questions and didn’t steer the conversation, instead allowing all of the attendees to debate and discuss just what new teachers should apply in their classrooms. Thank you David, for that. I’ve listened to you speak and frankly you do a much better job questioning people’s beliefs than to try to change them via lecture. I know its tough to do that in a room of 1000.
I think the most significant thing about EduBloggerCon was the fact that EVERYONE felt that someone’s opinion, comments, and ideas were valid. They are. But sometimes a classroom teacher like myself feels like he has nothing to add to the conversation. EBC reminded me that I DO have a lot to add.
As far as the general sessions at NECC were concerned, I felt like I was chasing something that just wasn’t meant to be. Either I got into a session where I heard rhetoric that I’d heard before (granted many people need to hear it), or I walked into a session that was overfull, and the San Antonio Fire Department had dictated no standing audience members. Sorry Cliff, I really wanted to see the manipulatives session that you and one of your colleagues were teaching.
So time and again I ended up at the Blogger Cafe – partially because I had a poisoned IP address at the convention center (there were 253 addresses that were not getting off the local network). But partially because there were people there I had never met. Christine Southard, a Special Education teacher from Long Island, was fascinating to talk to. I’d “virtually” met her cooperative teacher in a inclusive classroom (Lisa Parisi) but Christine was interesting to talk to. First of all, she drives 80 minutes ONE WAY to work – across two bridges (she spends $10 a day just on bridge tolls). Now that’s a dedicated teacher. I also talked to several people from other state ISTE affiliates. All in all, the “meeting and talking” was much more rewarding than sitting and listening to presentations.
That’s not to say that some of the sessions weren’t really neat. I attended a session titled “The Walls Came Down” about how professional development has transported itself from programmed to “just in time”. I knew several of the people on the panel, had heard from nearly everyone else, but had not seen the neat things they are doing until then. I logged back into Second Life for the first time in over a year as a result of that session.
Steve Dembo posted a discussion that he and I had about “meeting people that you didn’t already know”. I’ve posted my reply to his post here:
Steve:
I think part of my “I want to meet different people” mantra came out of David Jakes’ post after EduCon2.0 in Philadelphia titled “Tragedy of the Commons” where he noted that many of the attendees spent time in the school’s library talking with people they’ve met digitally but not
personally – when they could (should?) have been spending time talking to the students and teachers at that school. I’ll be honest, I felt like I was interrupting the teachers and students, but I relished the opportunity to talk with the students and teachers – maybe because I’m still just a “lowly teacher” and I really wanted to hear from the mouths of babes what worked and what didn’t.
So I started NECC off seeking out people that I had little contact with – I didn’t care if they were FB’s or even whether other people regarded them with respect or contempt. I was looking for ways to improve my craft, to see how other people are doing things that I didn’t already know about. I met people often without asking their names, because what they had to say was valid and interesting. I helped a very nice woman with her laptop. I talked with someone from the
University of Oregon about how we can effectively measure technology use in the classroom. I talked with other state affiliate members about how to foster educational leadership in our state (Pennsylvania).
And you know what, as I’ve posted in my blog, the conversations were again so much more valid than the presentations I saw. And of the few “official” NECC presentations I did attend, the ones that included input from the audience were more genuine and interesting than ones where I was spoken to.
I think that sums my thoughts up rather well. And with that, I look forward to meeting everyone again next year. My conference reimbursement for NECC 2009 has already been approved. ![:-)]()
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07.01.08
Posted in Learning at 11:45 am by Chris Champion
Two days into NECC and I’m finding that many of the “sessions” presented fall short of my expectations. Perhaps EduBloggerCon ruined NECC for me? It seemed like EBC was about examining, discussing, and debating the problems and issues that surround educational technology. It was an exchange of ideas – and in the spirit of NECC Keynoter James Surowiecki’s concept of The Wisdom of Crowds, the input that a diverse group of teachers, teacher educators, technologists, and otherwise-employed bloggers could give meant that there was more than experts with obvious answers to problems.
So as I listen to experts speak this week, I’m starting to crave the dialog and perhaps even conflict that would come about by a discussion rather than a presentation.
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05.30.08
Posted in Learning at 11:43 am by Chris Champion
Well today was the final day for my students to present their programming projects. I’ve been keeping two wikis for my two sections:
http://cpavts.wikispaces.com/ - Juniors/Seniors pick their own topics
http://learningbasic.wikispaces.com/ - Sophomores work in teams towards the same project specifications
So my reflection:
“How you are going to be graded” can NOT be said enough. I went over it with my students at week one (of five), but when I went over the project specifications with them again (which remained the same on the website over the five week period) at week four nearly all of the students panicked because they didn’t realize the scope of the project. Next time: have a meeting each week re-addressing the “Project Specification”.
“I’m done” means I’m stuck but I’m too embarrassed to admit it. Especially when students work in teams – I found that there were leaders and followers, and when the leader didn’t get it, they didn’t want to look “dumb” in front of their peers. Next time: in the weekly meetings have teams show off their work thus far.
There CAN be misunderstanding in a rubric. Some of my students skipped things in the “Project Specification” because the rubric didn’t specifically mention them. Next time: write the rubric at the same time as the project specification. Because this was the first time, I wanted to be fluid and I tweaked the project as we went along, writing the rubric at week three. I just forgot to say “and yes you also must do x”.
All in all, my students had a great experience. I had some real flubs, and I had some particularly amazing results. One student admitted that he spent about 50 hours out of class (10 hours per week for 5 weeks) writing the code for his project, and he even played sick one day to stay home because he wanted to dedicate the whole day to catch up on his personal computer. I was very impressed with his work. His mom is a SysAdmin/dbAdmin (computer nerd) so the apple does not fall far from the tree.
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02.19.08
Posted in Learning at 11:42 am by Chris Champion
OK…. so I think I’m going to come out sounding like an old grandpa or something. One of my business world idols, Lee Iacocca (a native of the Allentown/Bethlehem area in PA, by the way) has me standing up and wondering who the heck is going to change this world. All I can say is, I’m not willing to stand by and let the state of education turn into something that will get us NOWHERE. Here’s a quote from his book, which I’m going to the library to borrow ASAP:![]()
Am I the only guy in this country who’s fed up with what’s happening? Where the hell is our outrage? We should be screaming bloody murder. We’ve got a gang of clueless bozos steering our ship of state right over a cliff, we’ve got corporate gangsters stealing us blind, and we can’t even clean up after a hurricane much less build a hybrid car. But instead of getting mad, everyone sits around and nods their heads when the politicians say, “Stay the course.”
Stay the course? You’ve got to be kidding. This is America, not the damned Titanic. I’ll give you a sound bite: Throw the bums out!
I have read this quote in many places. I credit Leadership Now for a great excerpt.
I am getting just as mad. I don’t think there’s any one party to blame, either. I’ve met inspired teachers, principals, superintendents. I’ve even spent a day at the Science Leadership Academy in Philadelphia where I think Iacocca would pat each and every student and teacher (and administrator, Chris) on the back. So who are the “bums” as he calls it? Let me quote John Mayer, a contemporary singer now:
Me and all my friends
We’re all misunderstood
They say we stand for nothing and
There’s no way we ever could
Now we see everything that’s going wrong
With the world and those who lead it
We just feel like we don’t have the means
To rise above and beat it
So we keep waiting
Waiting on the world to change
We keep on waiting
Waiting on the world to change
It’s hard to beat the system
When we’re standing at a distance
So we keep waiting
Waiting on the world to change
Am I the only person who sees this not as a sugary pop song but a sad commentary of modern American society? What are we waiting for? Do we think that its someone else’s responsibility to start the ball rolling? I certainly don’t.
I can’t get my head around this: I have a very supportive administration, and many of the teachers are extremely talented. We make mountains move at my school. But it still feels like no one is stepping forward anywhere and pointing out all of the problems… and offering suggestions. So I’m going to do so myself.
Teacher: do you find it tough to keep up with the kids? There’s no shame in admitting it. Take a good kid aside and talk to him or her. Ask the student what you could do to make your classroom more interesting, more engaging. Maybe it won’t be as tough as you think. Boredom is an emotion that can’t be argued with… but its not too late to do something about it.
Principal: do you wish your teachers were motivated to change their ways? Maybe they feel already overwhelmed. Offer to put someone in their classroom to help them who does get it. If you, yourself, gets it, team teach with the teacher. This is no time to observe and criticize. We don’t do that with our students (or at least I hope we don’t). You are a principal because you have not only shown good teaching skills but leadership skills.
Superintendent: are you still talking with students? Remember, you don’t work for the school board, we ALL work for the students. Involve more students in the hiring process of teachers, of administrators. And don’t just ask the honors kids and the student council. Ask the students that are identified as “likely to drop out”. What don’t they like? What suggestions do they have to fix things?
I’m going to do something about my school. I’m going to keep going to teachers with ideas on how to make their kids more engaged. It isn’t always about technology – and I’m not going to cram some new CMS or SmartBoard tool down their throats. With everything else that is crammed down, I’d just be yet another thorn in their side. But we have to do something and quickly. We have to speak up when that “seasoned” teacher complains about students sleeping, talking back, or dropping. What does that student want? Is there a way we can get there and still teach the important things? My school is pushing “Essential Questions” and perhaps we need to focus more on questioning and less on pages 344-357.
I’m also going to do something about education in general. A while back I followed a discussion about changing from within versus changing from the outside in… I’m going to change it here first, and push on to a place where I have more authority to make changes. That probably means spending less time with my own students so I can change an entire school’s if not an entire district’s.
One last quote from the 1976 movie Network:
I’m mad as hell and I’m not going to take it anymore.
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01.28.08
Posted in Learning at 11:40 am by Chris Champion
I wrote a letter to my principal and director who could not come to EduCon… its a bit “stream of consciousness” but I wanted to get it down now and formulate what I’m planning on doing about it later:
This weekend was really fantastic. I am grateful for having the opportunity to spend the day in an inspired school on Friday – sitting in classes, talking to teachers and students. I think that they and we have a lot in common – the students choose to come there and the teachers are all experts in their fields. Of course, they can eject (return to home school) students for fighting or poor attendance and grades… why can’t we do that again? ![:-)]()
Anyway, I’d like to just summarize some ideas/thoughts/things I learned from the weekend. There were many principals and superintendents there to see how SLA does what they do to try to reproduce it somewhere else.
* When students say they’re bored – that means that the way the subject is being presented is boring. Boredom is a feeling you can’t argue YES or NO with. If you don’t want your students to be bored, you need to change the way you’re teaching…. not “admire the problem” by talking about why kids aren’t the same today.
* People commit to an idea better when they are the origin of it. Asking students to be the origin of information rather than be pawns (deCharms) gives them ownership and investment in what they are learning. Traditionally, the teacher is the origin, students the pawns. We need to change that.
* Collaboration is key at SLA. Students work in teams. I asked one student: what if one of your partners doesn’t want to do any more than 1/x of the work? Answer: they kick the student out into his own group, with the permission of the teacher, and that student is told to do the entire assignment on his/her own. It only happens a few times before that student realizes that he is creating more work.
* One of the sessions I was in talked about someone that did experiments with dogs. They starved the dogs but put food on the other side of a fence. after 5 days the fence was removed but the dogs continued to starve themselves because they no longer considered the food an acheiveable goal. This parallel can be applied to school – if a student is allowed for years to do only what is expected and never pushed to do his best, he doesn’t even know that he can do better.
* Students don’t feel like their voice counts. One 15-year old presenter, Arthus Erea (author of the blog “Newly Ancient”) said that the problem is that adults give students token voice or false voice, but no one really listens. Another student there said it well: “Students don’t need to be given voices, adults need to listen” when it came to how they learn best, how they want to approach the subject matter. Arthus actually was a presenter – his topic was “Learn-Teach: We’re all the Student Teachers”. His discussion was fantastic (the notes are at http://learn-teach.wikispaces.com/ ).
I’m not sure whether I can change the world… but I can change my classroom, and my students. And maybe as I do that my colleagues will see something in what I’m doing and learning and try to listen, try to make learners instead of do’ers.
Today I gave my kids some options, I told them that I wanted to listen to them – after all, its their class. I told them that I hate boring classes just as much as they do… call me on it if you think I’m getting boring. If you want to steer the class in a direction and we can still learn the “content”, SPEAK UP. From what I got at the end of class, some of my students are so used to hitting a “mark” halfway towards impossible that they don’t know that they can reach higher. I did have some students that preferred to just do the exercises at the end of the chapter… but was it because they preferred it, or more likely that they just didn’t know how to find some more interesting way to get there? I guess both the students and I need to figure out how we can change this classroom so it becomes collaborative, becomes engaging. Because frankly, I thought the work they turned in was really boring. And I don’t like that reflection on myself.
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01.04.08
Posted in Learning at 11:36 am by Chris Champion
Perhaps you don’t know, but one of my “life list” dreams is to become a pilot. I’ve been spending “fun money” on plane rides and “introductory pilot lessons” since I was sixteen. I’m at a point in my life where I’ve laid it down: I want to be flying before my 40th birthday, a little more than a year away. So that makes me look not just at education blogs and trends, but also into aircraft. Without spending too much of your time, you might be interested in the fact that the FAA a few years ago opened up a new certification of aircraft that specify small, light, and potentially affordable airplanes. It’s called “Light Sport Aircraft”, and if you’re interested, click to check it all out. Namely, we’re talking about small (2 person), inexpensive airplanes that are safer than “ultralights”.
Now even if you don’t know about airplanes, I’m guessing that you know about Cessna. In non-airplane circles, the word “Cessna” is used as a descriptor for small airplanes like “Xerox” is used to describe the act of photocopying images to paper. Well Cessna has decided to re-energize their business by entering the Light Sport market – and has announced a plane, the Skycatcher, that costs around $100,000 – which by aviation standards is pretty darn cheap. Consider that many planes last 30 or more years and the cost of this airplane is very low.
Cessna is actually a pretty progressive company. The Skycatcher website is actually an RSS-fed Blog. This means that they can communicate with their user- and customer-base rapidly. But being “progressive” also means that they are globally competitive. You see… Cessna has decided that the only way to compete in today’s global aerospace industry is to outsource the production of the new aircraft. So that means that Cessna went out and asked various firms to bid on a serious (700+ aircraft per year) commitment, including a complete re-tooling of a factory. Who could do it to exacting standards AND be competitive? Why Shenyang Aircraft Company, of course. A Chinese aerospace firm with contracts with Boeing and Airbus to mention a few.
It may come as a surprise to some that the regular readers of Cessna’s blog completely FREAKED OUT. You can read Cessna’s blog entry, titled: Making the Case for Building the Skycatcher in China. The comments are overwhelmingly negative, “you’ve lost me as a customer”. As I’m reading all of these negative comments, I can’t help but question: where do these people buy their electronics? I haven’t seen a TV made in the US in a long time. How about their car? Even if it IS assembled in the US, how many of the parts weren’t?
Here’s the thing: Cessna hasn’t shipped skilled jobs overseas – they’re keeping the engineers and quality service people. They’re just sending laborer positions to China. In fact, Cessna employees will be moved to China to oversee the assembly. The skilled, CREATIVE jobs stay with US employees. The “part A goes in slot B” job goes to China. While my description might seem crass, it is not new – read The World is Flat or A Whole New Mind - we are living in a global economy – if we expect to compete, we can’t continue to teach our students to become assemblers.
Superintendents/Guidance Counselors/Curriculum Advisers: take note to what Cessna has done. Airplane design IS about Mathematics, but it is also about style, about form, and about design. What is content without creativity? 01101110011011110111010001101000011010010110111001100111
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12.20.07
Posted in Learning at 11:35 am by Chris Champion
I read Kristin Hokanson’s post titled “Students Speak are you listening?” In it students share their perspective of what they think the “real world” will be like. Since I’ve actually been “out there” before coming to teaching, I can tell you that these students are pretty well on the mark.
This past Summer I attended training on web design – it wasn’t targeted to teachers but rather web admins (I maintain our school’s website). The content of the training is irrelevant – it was my observation of one of the company’s employees, a web programmer, that kept me watching each day of the three I was there for training.
It turns out that “just in case” the trainers needed support, they wanted the web programmers right there in the conference center (the company hosted the training at a hotel’s conference center). So the programmers packed up and plugged their laptops into the Raddison instead of the company LAN. Point one: work can happen anywhere. It just so happens that I was assigned a seat next to one of the programmers, a Chinese-American woman about 25 years old. What I watched as she worked was not short of incredible. This woman was working on a client’s website, tweaking CSS and PHP code. Her skills appeared to be very good, but what was most interesting was that she had no fewer than 4 Yahoo! Instant Messenger windows open. Of those four, only one was displaying the chat in English. The others were in Chinese symbols – I believe she was typing in Pinyin. The thing is, I’d watch her fiddle with code, then she’d IM a friend, then she’d copy/paste their reply into her code editor and viola! the code would work. It occurred to me (point two) this company hadn’t hired just her, they had hired her social network. This was really significant to me as I sat there – she was REALLY EFFICIENT. She’d jump from one project to another – applying what she had learned not just to the one case she had asked about, but to other websites she was working on. Point three: what some of us consider hyperactive she considered her forte. She naturally switched between applications and projects in a nonlinear fashion.
So now I reflect on traditional education as the students did in Kristin’s post. Working on multiple projects/subjects at once is rarely considered in school. Partly because it is really REALLY tough to manage a student who is working on multiple assignments, partly because not every student can do this. Perhaps courses on project management are as appropriate for K-12 than they are for Business majors in college.
In traditional education, social connections are not considered to be part of instruction – sure, maybe collaborative projects and “pods” are used, but what about extensions beyond the classroom walls? Are we teaching our students how to link to people outside their circle for help?
I don’t know whether the laggards of education will ever “get it” – and perhaps we don’t need to teach students how to form a social network, but perhaps we can guide them on selecting people based on their skillset – again “Business Major” topics.
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11.27.07
Posted in Learning at 11:34 am by Chris Champion
I’m sure nearly everyone who reads blogs knows about the strategy for filtering spam from blog comments by asking users to type the text in a picture.
I’m not sure everyone knows about Project Gutenberg – the project to digitize all of our world’s classical literature… basically old books are fed into computers who digitize the text and then try to convert it to words. The problem is that much of the text is old, and the computer can’t always figure it out:
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image credit: reCAPTCHA (see below)
So… I don’t remember where I read it first… but there are organizations that are working to help decipher the text. I’m sure everyone who can read English can reasonably decipher the text above – so why not have people help decipher the scans?
I’ve just installed a WordPress plugin called reCAPTCHA – whenever you comment on this blog, you’ll be asked to verify someone’s interpretation of the scanned text. Pretty cool, huh?
Learn more about reCAPTCHA and the OCR/literature movement here.
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11.19.07
Posted in Learning at 12:00 pm by Chris Champion
That last comment about cake was not just some incomparable post. I didn’t say to myself, “self, you can’t go more than that”. But after reading a post from Will Richardson on his blog, I realized that I’ve been following the read-write “web”… its just not been so much “web” and more like “social network”. In fact, I feel like I’ve been living in a line by line play in Web 2.0 fashion… on Twitter.
I’m sure I’ll have something critical to say… but for now:
http://twitter.com/chrischampion
And its RSS fed, so feel free to indulge… or if you read this and you don’t subscribe to my Twitter feed, please do.
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10.16.07
Posted in Learning at 11:31 am by Chris Champion
I’m working through just how I can change my entire teaching philosophy from “I know all of this and its my job to teach you it” to “you need to find all of this – I’ll help”. One way I found of doing it is to pair- or triple-up my students and ask them to decipher sections of our textbook (its written at a 14th grade level). They can use any other source (usually online) to try to better explain what the book says. It has been really useful.
Then I ask them to present their findings to the class, in a “round table” format – with a computer LCD projector/screen at the end of the table. And I make sure that they DON’T use PowerPoint. It seems that every HS kid learns all of the schnazzy features of PowerPoint – animated text, cool noises, contrasting text/backgrounds. When it comes time to present their information, though… well you know. Drivel.
I mentioned my “No PowerPoint” policy to a new group of students today, explaining that I often get lots of fluff and not much substance. And one kid came up with the quote of the year (and the inspiration for the title of this post):
Oops. I made the icing but I forgot to make the cake!
How many times have students turned in lovely icing, with flowers and leaves and wonderful color… but they forgot to make the cake? So I encourage everyone: let’s get away from icing – let’s get our kids to make fantastic cake. Once they learn how to do that, perhaps a little icing would finish it off nicely. But not until they’ve mastered cakemaking.
Picture source: Flickr user PinkCakeBox (Fall Wedding Cake) – Creative Commons BY-NC-ND 2.0 license
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