A Sublime Disruption

This is a short story about openness. And connections.

Our Biology students were working on a project related to ecology. The niece of one of our Biology teachers, who's currently a senior at the University of Virginia, posted a video to her Facebook page and suggested people watch it - it's called A Sublime Disruption (original link on Vimeo, we used the YouTube version because Vimeo is blocked by our filter, YouTube is not blocked anymore). Her aunt did, and thought it would be a good accompaniment to the ecology unit they had just started.


Our Biology team decided to show the video to our students and have them blog their reactions. Mr. Craig's class was up first - here's their blog post (Ms. Dinmore's - the aunt's - blog post came a little later).

Here's what happened next in the words of Mr. Craig (part of an email he sent out to parents of his Biology students):

Last weekend I received an e-mail from a 2006 graduate of Arapahoe that had been reading my Biology students' blog comments. She was impressed to say the least! She also had a coincidental connection to the video. She currently lives in Dublin Ireland and her boyfriend happens to be the brother of the individual that made the video "A Sublime Disruption." His name is Gareth Nolan, a film-maker who lives in Dublin as well. Gareth was also very impressed by the students comments and sent me an email thanking the students for their insight into his video. He mentioned that they found connections in his video to this planet that he never thought of.

We sent him a couple of questions: 1. Why did he take the trip? 2. What was one of the biggest environmental issues he saw while traveling the world? (This is of course what our Biology students are currently researching) His response is listed below:

1. I am from Dublin, Ireland where I currently live and work. I've lived in a few different places in my life, including Italy, Norway, London, and a brief time living in New York City. I currently work as a film maker and editor. In 2009, my mother passed away and left me a sum of money. She had multiple sclerosis and had a very difficult life. The journey was something I always wanted to do, but for family responsibilities I never got round to doing. I used the journey as a way of resetting my life and gaining a fresh start and perspective. It was largely unplanned other than a dream I'd always had to take the Transsiberian railway to China. Everything after that I made up as I went along, depending on who I met or what next took my fancy. In short it was life changing, and most importantly life reaffirming. Believe it or not the film was an after thought. I had camera with me that had a video function and I used it from time to time, but it was only when I got back that I decided to edit it together into what you see today. 

2. I'm certainly no expert on ecology or environmental issues, but I'd have a layman's grounding in either - and am more than happy to talk to your students about what I saw. I have to say, one of the most pressing issues I saw was deforestation - especially on the island of Borneo. Borneo is the third largest island in the world and is a hotspot of biodiversity akin to the Amazon. It is divided between three countries - Malaysia, Indonesia and Brunei. I was once on a plane there flying over palm oil plantations which stretched as far as the eye could see - this would have amounted to 100 miles or more - in any direction. Sometimes the cities there are declared disaster zones because there is so much smoke in the air due to the slashing and burning happening in the forests beyond. These forests are home to species of rhino, elephants, leopards and the iconic Orang Utan, not to mention thousands of plant and animal species - some of which are just mind blowing - giant bats, spiders, moths, frogs, flying lizards and the Rafflesia which is the world's biggest flower. I was lucky enough to spend time in forests in both the Peruvian and Bolivian Amazon, and nothing felt as exotic as Borneo. Frankly, seeing the destruction was heart breaking and brought home to me a complex issue which I never fully appreciated before.

How cool!!! Your student is impacting people from across the world. I think my students were amazed that others were reading what they wrote! Yet another example of the powers of extending the walls of our classroom! 

Now that Ms. Dinmore's class is also blogging, she's been in contact with Gareth and he's going to respond to some of the questions her class had.

What opportunities are available for your students if you become both more open and more connected?

Just Write Poorly. In Public. Every Day.

Seth Godin has some advice about writing:

The reason we don't get talker's block is that we're in the habit of talking without a lot of concern for whether or not our inane blather will come back to haunt us. Talk is cheap. Talk is ephemeral. Talk can be easily denied.

We talk poorly and then, eventually (or sometimes), we talk smart. We get better at talking precisely because we talk. We see what works and what doesn't, and if we're insightful, do more of what works. How can one get talker's block after all this practice?

Writer's block isn't hard to cure.

Just write poorly. Continue to write poorly, in public, until you can write better.

I believe that everyone should write in public. Get a blog. Or use Squidoo or Tumblr or a microblogging site. Use an alias if you like. Turn off comments, certainly--you don't need more criticism, you need more writing.

Do it every day. Every single day. Not a diary, not fiction, but analysis. Clear, crisp, honest writing about what you see in the world. Or want to see. Or teach (in writing). Tell us how to do something.

So, are you having your students write every day? In public? I know I'm not (although I'm starting to have them write a bit).

I think we're often overly concerned about the quality of our students' writing, and whether it's "good enough" to share. Now, to be clear, I think our students should be concerned with the quality of their writing, and should strive to get better at communicating their thoughts. But if we let the worry about what others will think get in the way of having our students write more, and for a larger audience, then we're doing them a disservice out of fear.

This begs the question, of course, about how much our teachers are writing. Particularly our Language Arts teachers, but really all of our teachers. If it's so important for our students to write, how come we're not modeling it?

Do you write every day? In public? Why or why not?

Reflective Blogs in Algebra

I gave my students their first writing/blogging assignment in Algebra last week, here was the prompt (scroll down a bit):

Looking back at your first week plus in Algebra (and, for some of you, your first week plus at AHS), how are you feeling? What's going well or you're excited about? What's challenging or are you concerned about?

Then I want you to set three goals for yourself for this semester. One goal specifically related to Algebra, one goal related to AHS in general (can be related to classwork, sports, activities, or something else at AHS), and one goal outside of AHS. Make these goals fairly specific, not just "I want to get a good grade." I'll be asking you to revisit these goals toward the end of the semester and evaluate how well you're doing on them, so make them be worthwhile and achievable.

While not all of them have completed their post yet, it would be great if some of you could take a look and perhaps leave an encouraging comment or question for them.

Ustreaming and Live Blogging Daniel Pink Video Conference

Update 2-28-08: Well, it looks like we pulled it off. I'll reflect on it in another post eventually, but a few quick links. First, the CoverItLive live blog is archived below. Second, thanks to Kristin Hokanson the Ustream chat is also archived. Third, the Ustream archive is in four parts, available on Ustream or on the wiki. I haven't watched through them, but I think they're all there.
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Well, I’m a little worried that we’ll look back at this and say, “We should’ve quit while we’re ahead,” but we’re going to give it a shot anyway. This Thursday is our students’ live video conference with Daniel Pink. They’ve finished A Whole New Mind and this is their chance to ask Mr. Pink some questions directly, as well as further discuss the book with their classmates. We’ll have all four classes of students (about 110 or so) in our Forum and will conduct a video Skype call with Mr. Pink. (One tech concern there – feedback. We’re asking him to wear headphones on his end, but on our end we have to broadcast the audio to the whole room, so we’re worried he’ll get a lot of feedback of his own voice when he speaks. In limited testing in-house, Skype does a fairly good job, but if anyone has any ideas we would appreciate it. Because we hope it will be conversational, it's tough to mute and unmute the microphones.)

Students will come up to the microphone one at a time and ask a question of Mr. Pink. He’ll respond and the student will have the opportunity to ask a clarifying or follow-up question if necessary. If not, then the fishbowl inner circle will have the opportunity to discuss the question if they have anything to add, with Mr. Pink a virtual participant in that inner circle. We’re hoping to get through about twenty questions or so in about ninety minutes, and then leave Mr. Pink time to reflect on this experience with the students.

Everything so far was in the original plan, but after some reasonable success with Ustream and CoverItLive last weekend for Learning 2.0: A Colorado Conversation, we’ve decided to push our luck a little bit. So, we’re going to attempt to Ustream the whole thing. We’ll point a camcorder and a microphone at the inner circle discussion and the big screen, so hopefully Ustream viewers will be able to hear the questions the students ask, Mr. Pink's response, and the inner circle discussion. We are doing this primarily so that the students’ parents can watch and listen in, but of course it will be open to all of you. Here’s the Ustream channel we will be using and we'll be broadcasting from approximately 8:30 am MST through about 10:15 am MST on Thursday, February 28th.

While we’ve attempted to allow the Ustream chat through our firewall, sometimes we get it and sometimes we don’t, so we won’t be using or monitoring the Ustream chat. Instead, some of our students will be live blogging the fishbowl discussion using CoverItLive. I will be chat-jockeying the CoverItLive blogging (embedded below) and approximately thirty of the students who aren’t in the inner circle or asking one of the twenty or so questions will be commenting. I’ll be approving the comments as fast as I can and we’ll also hopefully have the live blog up on the big screen next to the Skype window so that all the students in the Forum can see the live blog if they wish. Again, this is primarily for our students to live blog, but other folks can choose to participate if they wish – we just ask you to not dominate the discussion and to make sure you attach your name to each of your comments. (If you haven’t used CoverItLive before, there’s a line for your name and then a box for the body of your comment. Once you comment once, it seems to remember your name.)

Now, a few caveats. Our primary goal is to simply get the Skype video conference and discussion with Mr. Pink to work. If the Ustream and/or CoverItLive don’t work, I’ll briefly troubleshoot those but then let it go and simply focus on the rest. And, again, the primary purpose of the Ustream is for the students’ parents to be able to observe, and the live blog is for the students to use to discuss (and for the parents to be able to virtually watch the blog discussion). So, while we’re inviting the network in, we’re also asking the network to play nice.

So, wish us luck, and here’s the CoverItLive blog (if things go swimmingly, it will go live at about 8:30 am MST on Thursday).

Not Your Parents’ Parent-Teacher Conferences

At Arapahoe, we hold parent-teacher conferences in both the fall (two nights) and the spring (one night). Teachers are available from 4:00 until 7:30 each night for 5-7 minute conversations with parents. Parents are strongly encouraged to attend, but it is optional.

Many teachers at Arapahoe have been frustrated by how often those conferences tend to focus on grades, with parents wanting to know what students need to do to get their C to a B, or their B to an A. We are asking our students to really focus on the learning, not the grade, so it’s frustrating when this opportunity to talk with parents so often focuses on the grade (especially because they have real-time access to teachers’ gradebooks through our Infinite Campus Parent Portal).

This year Anne Smith was one teacher that decided to try something different.

Instead of concentrating on my students' progress via their grades in class, I conducted conferences with their learning as the focus. I asked my students to reflect on their learning based on the following questions:

• Assess your learning in class so far this semester. Look at your participation, growth in writing, comprehension, etc..
  
• Where, in terms of your learning, do you want to be at the end of the semester?
  
• How are you going to get there?
  
• What can I do to help?
  
• Write a message to your parents.

The students then were asked to bring home a copy of their learning assessment for their parents to read before conferences as well as place a copy in my class drop box for me to access at conferences.

It seemed to work well.

What was difficult about this whole process was that 5 minutes for conferences was definitely not long enough. I had actual conversations with parents about their child and feel like I took away more from them about how their child is growing as a learner, or how their child needs to grow as a learner. I felt like I listened as much as I talked which is a huge change from the way I participated in conferences before. I was the one relaying all my information to the parent rather than allowing them to give me insight into their child and react to what their child had written.

Click through to her post to read samples of what some students’ wrote, and also read the 47 comments (as of this writing) from both students and parents. Because Anne took it a step farther,

I am going to ask my students and hopefully their parents to comment on this process as well. Yep, that's right I want the parents to create blogger accounts as well so they can participate in the conversation. After all, that was my goal all around to create a conversation about learning.

Definitely not your parents’ parent-teacher conferences.

From talking with Anne I think this worked very well, but I agree with her that 5-7 minutes is not enough for these important conversations (it was usually more than enough to talk about grades.) I also think we should have students at these conferences, although what Anne did was the next best thing. The more we can have students, parents, and teachers involved in conversations centered around learning, not simply grades, the better.

Creating Personal Learning Networks: Part 1

One of the things we really want to explore this year is the idea of both students and staff creating personal learning networks. (Note: Clarence Fisher has a much better handle on this than we do, we're just getting started here, so you may go want to read his blog to get a more advanced education). For this post, I want to focus on the students. I have at least one teacher (Anne Smith) that’s ready to do this with some of her freshmen in their Language Arts class. I’m sure this will evolve (in fact, partially why I’m writing this is to get more ideas), but at the moment here’s what we’re thinking.

She’s going to help them set up an aggregator (more on the tool question below) and we’re going to seed them with a few feeds to get them started (suggested feeds in the comments, please). Then, once they're comfortable with that, Anne’s going to ask them to find some feeds of their own, on any topic they are passionate about (school appropriate but not necessarily school-related, if that makes any sense). At this point I’m thinking that’s plenty to get started with. From my own experience, it’s very easy to get overwhelmed, so while we won’t limit them, I think we will highly recommend they don’t subscribe to too many feeds.

They will then be responsible for reading their feeds each week, thinking about them, and then reflecting on them in their personal blogs. They will get some class time to do this, but will also be expected to do this outside of class. They will also be responsible for presenting interesting articles/themes to the rest of the class, probably twice each semester. After each student presents, the class will then react to that presentation by commenting on that student’s personal blog.

Anne’s written a first draft (Word, PDF) of what she’s going to distribute to students in a week or two (including the seed feeds that we have so far for students to choose from). Please take a look and we’d love to hear your constructive comments.

Our goals are two-fold. First, these are students in a Language Arts class, and they will be reading, thinking, writing and presenting on information that they find personally interesting and relevant. Critical thinking skills, information literacy skills, reading, writing, presenting skills – all fit well in our Language Arts curriculum.

Second, we hope to help them to begin to build their own personal learning network. To help them find trusted sources (and how to evaluate them in the first place to figure out if they trust them). To help them find multiple sources on the same topic, to help them compare and contrast and try to get multiple viewpoints on issues. To help them construct their own knowledge, to learn not just because it’s an assignment for school, but because it’s just too darn interesting, meaningful, and fun not to.

And this is a two-way street. They should not only be constructing their own personal learning network, but they should be learning how to be part of someone else’s learning network. How to provide relevant and meaningful information and analysis to others. We have a sign in our cafeteria that says, “Add to the sum total of the world’s knowledge.” While I don’t particularly like the way it’s phrased (the idea that knowledge is this huge collection of stuff that can be counted and summed), I do agree with the intent: they should be contributors and producers, not just consumers and users. Or, as Kurt Hahn said, “We are crew, not passengers.”

I’ve really struggled writing this post for two reasons. One, I’m insanely overwhelmed at the moment and haven’t had any time to read or think myself, and I can’t seem to get the ideas in my head onto the screen in any way that resembles the original brilliant thoughts.

And two, I’ve been struck with “tool paralysis.” I kept hoping that I would have the time to really evaluate Bloglines and Google Reader, Pageflakes and Netvibes and iGoogle, all from the perspective of a student, not for myself. But I can’t find the time to do it. And while I know the tool is not the important thing, I did want to pick the “best” tool available to help them be successful at this. But since I don’t have the time I’m thinking we may just go with Google Reader and ultimately iGoogle. I think Pageflakes and Netvibes may actually be better, but iGoogle has the G.A. (Google Advantage – trademark pending). Our students use Blogger, so they already have a Google Account. Google Reader is a nice aggregator. We are beginning to use Google Docs a lot more. If I ever find time to play with it, I think we’ll use Google Notebook. If they don’t have web-based email, Gmail is a great choice. And on and on. This can all come together with one login and in one place on iGoogle and maybe, just maybe, might be simple enough that the technology doesn’t get in the way of the learning (which is a big fear of mine right now). Finally, I think I may pick it for the same reason we picked Blogger a couple of years ago – I don’t think Google is going away anytime soon. I hope Netvibes and Pageflakes don’t either, but I think Google is the safest bet. Now, I know there are a lot of Netvibes and Pageflakes fans out there (and probably fans of other tools as well), so feel free to chime in on the comments. But I’m betting we’ll stick with Google Reader/iGoogle for the G.A.

So, I feel like this post is somewhat half-baked, as I can’t completely get my head around this idea or get my ideas out, so that’s why it’s titled Part 1. I’m really, really, really hoping my personal learning network will chime in with some wonderful comments that I’ll then feel compelled to pull out into a separate – and much better – post in a week or two. Also, I would love it if folks would submit suggested feeds that are of general interest to high school students that we could include in our seed list that they’ll be choosing from.

So, help me out here. Submit your comments and help me write an amazing Creating Personal Learning Networks: Part 2 post in a few weeks.

Blogging: In Their Own Words

At the end of the school year we were asked to try to get a video together about blogging to show at a conference for administrators in our state. The idea was that we were going to introduce them to live blogging and then actually have some folks in the audience live blog the keynote, with the keynote speaker being occasionally fed questions/thoughts/ideas from the blog. The details were a little fuzzy but, nice guys that we are, we scrambled to try to get something together.

So, about two days before finals, we hurriedly videotaped some students and teachers talking about blogging and then tried to figure out when we'd have time to put this together before June 13th (the first day of the conference), not to mention how to setup the live blogging, make sure they had enough info for it to work smoothly, get the wireless working, etc.

As it turns out, they decided to not go with this idea, which I think was a good thing given the compressed timeline - I think there's a good chance it would've been a disaster. They are considering doing it again for their next conference in August, which would be cool since the keynote speaker is supposed to be Daniel Pink, although I still worry about all the setup issues.

In any event, we had all this footage sitting around and I wanted to do something with it. I spent a little time editing and came up with the following. Please keep in mind a few things. As I mentioned, we hurriedly filmed about two days before finals, so we were only able to grab kids from a couple of classes and a few teachers that were available. So we don't have as wide of a selection of folks as I would like, and the quality of some of the video/audio isn't the best. (We had a wireless lapel microphone, but it didn't always work - meaning a good portion of the audio was just from the built-in camcorder microphone. You may have to manually raise and lower the volume sometimes to hear.) Obviously, I decided to post it anyway, so I guess it comes under the category of "good enough to criticize." I hope that - despite some of its shortcomings - some of you might find it useful.

Also, keep in mind that we've only been blogging for about a year and a half in my school, and many folks really only in the past six months or so, so we're still learning. We're pretty much still in the stage of moving and extending traditional classroom activities online, which I think can add value and enhance the learning when done well, but our next step is really to help our students develop their own personal learning networks through blogs and various other Web 2.0 tools. I hope that we will make some progress with that next school year.

I'm posting two versions, the long version, which is 15:30 (I have a hard time cutting students when they say such thoughtful things), and a shorter version (where I slashed - it was painful for me). I'm embedding the Google Video versions below, but you can also download Quicktime versions of both of them (320 by 240).

Long Version (Quicktime, 15:30, 67.3 MB)
Short Version (Quicktime, 8:16, 38.1 MB)

Part of the video talks about the fishbowl discussion technique (no relation to me!) used in conjunction with live blogging, you can learn more at these posts (1, 2 and 3).

Google Video Long Version (15:30)




Google Video Short Version (8:16)