The Geeky Teacher

That’s adorable...

Mon, 08 Apr 2013 06:29:51 -0400

That’s adorable :)

sweetnekoseme:

thefrogman:

Protracturtle by Katrina Constantine [tumblr]

I would have enjoyed math so much more

Crap, I’m sorry I didn’t invent this sooner.

This made me smile this week.

Fri, 05 Apr 2013 22:25:34 -0400

This made me smile this week.

It’s football. And statistics!

Mon, 04 Feb 2013 17:49:00 -0500

It’s football. And statistics!

This may have something to do with education.

Thu, 31 Jan 2013 09:32:01 -0500

This may have something to do with education.

Inspiration, Part 2

Wed, 10 Oct 2012 20:32:19 -0400

Inspiration, Part 2

Inspiration, Part 1

Tue, 25 Sep 2012 19:50:35 -0400

Inspiration, Part 1

On Interactive Whiteboards

Sat, 22 Sep 2012 22:32:24 -0400

A few days ago, I posted to my Twitter feed that my district had abandoned our plans to purchase 40 new Promethean ActivBoards, instead opting to connect Apple TVs and iPads to existing projectors and use AirPlay. I was contacted by a parent advocacy group in Maryland who indicated that their district had recently just ordered 2,000 ActivBoards (which I’d imagine would have cost the district mega-megabucks), and was looking for information on alternatives. They were asking about the rationale behind our decision. I’ve posted the bulk of the email (minus the introduction, because you don’t care about those anyway) here. What did I miss?

I wanted to start with a little background. Our district is located in rural Northeastern North Carolina. We have approximately 2,800 students, about 90% of which qualify for free or reduced price meals. Through a grant, we were able to install Promethean boards in all of our elementary school classrooms approximately five years ago. Our middle school principal was looking to expand the use of ActivBoards and other interactive technologies in his school, but outfitting his school with boards would cost well over $100,000. This simply wasn’t feasible in a district our size. In addition, some of the projectors and boards already in place have started to fail. Absent any new grant funding or initiatives, each ActivBoard that needs to be replaced (at an approximate cost of $5,500) represents about 8% of the total IT budget this year, and if funding cuts hold, would represent about $35% next year. It’s simply not feasible to replace even one of these boards when they break. In addition, the projector mounts are proprietary - we must purchase a Promethean short-throw projector should a projector fail. These projectors cost about $1,000 more than a lower-end short-throw projector, and about $1,500 less than a regular ceiling-mount or cart-use LCD projector. Finally, all of our classrooms have standalone LCD projectors, many of which are relatively new.

In addition to the equipment initial cost, we looked at the total cost of ownership. The short-throw projector bulbs that are used by most IWB vendors are very expensive, to the tune of about $300-350 each. Typically, they need to be replaced one per year. I have no data to back this up, but it seems they need replacement more frequently than other projectors. The only thing I have to prove this is my own observation, and there are many other factors that could lead to that. Most newer cheaper projectors have cheaper bulbs.

The two other things that we looked at were usage/pedagogy, and the evolution of the technology. While all elementary teachers have IWBs in their classrooms, most teachers use them most of the time simply as projector screens, and not the interactive capability. In every classroom I ever taught in, I had an IWB as well. Again, much of the time, I used them to project, but usually abandoned the use of the whiteboard in favor of the document camera, again making the board a very expensive projector screen. Also, the board still favors a teacher-centered classroom, and limits interaction to the teacher, or a single student or two. In short, while the IWB definitely has a value-add in the classroom, the cost of the equipment still (in my opinion) isn’t worth the return for the percentage of time the boards are used for their interactive capability.

Also, while there have been incremental improvements, IWB technology is almost a decade old. While the IWB has stayed relatively consistent, a whole new generation of technology has emerged in human-computer interaction. Whereas a touch interface was revolutionary ten years ago, it’s now commonplace, almost to the point of expectation. Purchasing a whole-system solution like a Promethan Board locks us in such that we can’t try new things as easily as technology changes. While the IWB is the most mature technology, Microsoft is bringing the Kinect to education markets (http://www.microsoft.com/education/en-us/products/Pages/kinect.aspx), a device by a company called LeapMotion is poised to make a huge impact on the human-computer interaction market (http://www.leapmotion.com/), a company called SmallLab learning is bringing a movement-based system to the classroom (http://www.smallablearning.com/) and Windows 8 is going to be designed around touch interfaces, which means that we will be seeing many, many more touchscreen devices in the months ahead.

While all of these products are in the developmental phases, Apple has moved forward with their new solution called “AirPlay” (http://www.apple.com/ipad/features/airplay/?cid=wwa-us-kwg-features-00001&siclientid=6381&sessguid=18279e0f-07d9-4d81-a633-0bf8a006fd7a&userguid=18279e0f-07d9-4d81-a633-0bf8a006fd7a&permguid=18279e0f-07d9-4d81-a633-0bf8a006fd7a). By purchasing an iPad and connecting an AppleTV device to our existing projectors, we could wirelessly stream the display of an iPad to the projector. Because we already had the projectors that we could reuse, the total cost for the iPad, Apple TV, and adapter for the projector runs about $700, instead of the $5,000 that the Promethean boards would have cost. There are Apps available for the iPad that allow for you to write on the iPad screen, annotate documents and web pages, display websites, and play videos. These were the major functions that teachers were using the IWB functionality for. Additionally, because the iPad could be streamed wirelessly, teachers could walk around the classroom and use the iPad from anywhere in the room. In classrooms with multiple iPads, multiple students can take turns streaming their devices to the projector for other students to see. So in addition to being a significantly cheaper option, it provided the teacher with much more flexibility. They can also use the camera in the iPad as a portable document camera, even though they already have document cameras in their rooms. Of course, they still have their laptops and document cameras that they can also connect to the projectors. However, many of the teachers who have tried this haven’t needed to connect them for anything - they’ve done everything from the iPad. If you don’t have any projectors in the rooms yet, the total cost to get started would be around $2,500 - still around half the cost of an IWB solution. This would give every teacher a ceiling mounted projector with audio, a document camera, an Apple TV and an iPad, with all of the connectors. The reason it’s so cheap is that now each individual component (with exception of the Apple equipment) can be bid separately, and given to the lowest bidder, because each piece is modular. Also, when it comes time to replace equipment, there is no vendor lock-in.

The teachers who have been using this solution so far are loving it, because they can move around their classroom, they get to use iPads, they don’t have to calibrate the boards, or do much more than plug and play. There is a disadvantage in that a lot of the pre-made educational materials that Promethean and SMART provide aren’t available. There is also a dependance on several different Apps, instead of a “one stop shop”. However, these factors aside, this has been a much more cost-effective solution that has provided a much greater benefit to our teachers.

Grading, Penalties, and a Tale of Two Cell Phone Companies

Thu, 02 Aug 2012 10:51:44 -0400

I’m spending this week doing a Project-Based Learning workshop for some of the teachers in our district. Yesterday afternoon began our discussion on rubric design. I started with a question “why do we grade?” I received the typical “to assign a value to the work”, etc as responses. The idea of providing feedback, and as a tool for growth wasn’t mentioned, which was perfect for the purposes of our discussions. So, we moved on to the idea of why we enact a penalty for late submissions. The response was, again, as you would expect - we enact the penalties because it’s the only leverage we have to hold students accountable to turn in their work.

When I first learned about rubric design, one of the things that I was told was to have a rubric (or a line in a rubric) specifically addressing “Professionalism” - does the student do what you expect them to do? By meeting behavioral expectations, students earned points added to their grades. The understanding of behavioral psychology here (rewarding people for good behavior) isn’t new, and brings us to our story for today:

Verizon Wireless is the largest cellular telephone provider in the United States. In an attempt to convince people to switch to having their bills paid automatically each month by bank draft, Verizon attempted to institute a $2 “convenience fee” for any one-time payment made. In other words, if you didn’t behave in the way Verizon wanted, there would be a penalty of $2. There was immediate and extreme backlash, and Verizon ultimately axed the plan.

U.S. Cellular is a small, regional carrier that most of you have probably never heard of. They exist exclusively in the midwest (Chicago) and rural Northeastern North Carolina. US Cellular provides customers who use automatic payments a 3% discount. If you have automatic payments by checking account, you get a 5% discount. By engaging in the desired behavior, US Cellular rewards you.

But really, what does this mean? On a $100 phone bill, Verizon would charge you an additional $2, and US Cellular would discount your bill $3. However, that’s a $3 penalty for not enrolling in the automatic payments. US Cellular and Verizon are essentially engaging in the same action - providing disincentive for engaging in the undesired behavior. In fact, US Cellular’s disincentive is greater than Verizon’s. However, because they identify it as a reward and not a penalty, people look past it and are actually more likely to behave “correctly”. Certainly there is less pushback and outcry.

So, this may have something to do with grading. A 10-point penalty for late work, or a 20 points earned simply for turning work in on time. Which is more likely to work? You can see my opinion.

Engagement: It's Not Just For Students, Anymore

Sun, 24 Jun 2012 13:37:16 -0400

Yeah, I know I’ve been horrible about blogging recently. Well, not recently, actually. I’ve actually always been horrible at blogging. You’ll know this for no other reason that I start most blog posts this way. But I guess I need to get to a point. Or maybe a better strategy is to say that this blog will only be updated twice yearly. Oh well, I’ll deal with that later.

I’m sitting in a workshop this week where teachers in my district are developing curriculum maps. Good curriculum maps are quite the challenge, and they require a lot of thought about content, pedagogy, and the scope of their learning. The Common Core and Essential Standards make this process that much more difficult, as teachers are required to do all of the work on the “big picture” right after they have taken the new frame out of the box. We’ve talked a lot this week about essential questions and big ideas, and we’ve started looking at creating them for our content. To me, as the geek that I am, it’s fascinating to me to look at the standards, imagine the possibilities, think about the options, find the links and the applications and the activities. But then, I realize I’m not in the classroom anymore, and I’m not going to get to do any of the cool stuff that I’m dreaming up. Possibly at this point, I may shed a single, sad tear, which will fade momentarily.

All of the teachers here are “engaged” in the task. However, I noticed that teachers are engaged in this task the same way that many students are engaged in the classroom. Many are here to sieze the challenge, to create something new and amazing, completely unrestricted. This year is unique, because of the fact that we have both a completely new curriculum, and completely new testing standards. There is no “the way we’ve always done things”, because it’s a new curriculum. There is no “testing fear” because there is no hint at what the test will be, and scores won’t be back for six months after the students take the test. It’s an opportunity to, in the words of a dear friend, “teach, dammit, teach”.

However, there’s another group of teachers here. They are engaged in the task, in that they are doing the things asked of them. We have asked them to have some conversations, and put some documents together. And they are doing it, and by all measures, doing a pretty good job. But there’s a lack of excitement about it. The thrill of looking at content in new ways isn’t there for everyone. So, where is it?

Now, I realize I’m walking a fine line here. This is not to suggest, for a moment, in any way, that these people are bad teachers. Because they aren’t. However, they aren’t engaged in their content. The same way good students can not be engaged in their learning.

I would argue that a lot of what we call “education reform” disengages teachers. They are doing what they are told, and they are getting results. But that’s compliance. It’s not engagement. Same as with students. Pacing guides, pre-made lesson plans, endless cycles of benchmarking and remediation, have made the content a means to an end (a way to assign students a number), rather than a destination by itself.

The idea of teacher engagement is still rolling around in my head a little. Expect future posts later. In the meantime, I feel we need to give teacher engagement a second look. The time hasn’t ever been better to encourage teachers to be creative and innovative. So, why are we so afraid of it?

It’s math and Christmas :)

Sat, 07 Jan 2012 22:44:51 -0500

It’s math and Christmas :)

This may have something to do with teaching.

Fri, 06 Jan 2012 10:14:20 -0500

This may have something to do with teaching.

TED Talks in a Google Doc

Sun, 01 Jan 2012 20:06:07 -0500

TED Talks in a Google Doc:

Anyone who knows me knows that I’m a HUGE fan of TED Talks. It’s my daily source for thought and inspiration. And there are practical, constant applications to education. This is a searchable Google Doc that contains all of the TED Talks that are out there.

What can we learn from this? Does education do a good job of...

Fri, 30 Dec 2011 16:36:49 -0500

What can we learn from this? Does education do a good job of admitting failure? See www.admittingfailure.com

The Unhelpful High School Teacher

Wed, 28 Dec 2011 21:46:00 -0500

The Unhelpful High School Teacher

Education Reform Doesn't "Sweat the Small Stuff"

Mon, 26 Dec 2011 21:30:00 -0500

One of my favorite things to do to pass time is to watch TED Talks. So, I usually include them as a starting point for discussion. Here’s one by Rory Sutherland, entitled “Sweat the Small Stuff”.

As I watched it, I started thinking about the implications for education. Sutherland argues that the “devil is in the details” - that large changes in behavior can be created by doing small things. In all of the talk of “educational reform”, it’s rare that I hear about things like “school culture”, and what’s happening in the individual classrooms. Most of the work of educational reform is focused on large-scale solutions: new instructional models, new curricula, new standards and testing. However, have we ever stopped to look at the “small stuff”? Do we look at school culture? Do we look at how teachers interact with students? Do we look at whether students are eager about learning, engaged in the process, excited about being at school? Usually, not.

So, in the effort to reform education, it feels like we’ve totally missed the boat on the “small stuff”. A lot of the “small stuff” is kind of “squishy”, meaning it’s not readily definable, nor is it something that is obvious to fix. It’s also one of the things that we do that doesn’t seem to impact test scores, because after all, measuring happiness can’t really show you direct gains in test scores. However, I would argue that these are the things that make the biggest difference. And it’s all about social engineering. Keeping teachers and students happy is simply good customer service. And one of the basic rules of customer service is that customers who are happy will come back. Why, in education, do we miss the basic marketing principles?

This may have something to do with formative assessment.

Sun, 25 Dec 2011 22:33:00 -0500

This may have something to do with formative assessment.

The Decade According to Nine Year Olds

Sat, 24 Dec 2011 16:22:23 -0500

This is a post I originally wrote two years ago. I was hoping to create some original content, but this is time-appropriate, being around New Years Day.

The decade according to 9-year-olds from allison louie-garcia on Vimeo.

I know I’m supposed to be providing cool tools for you to use after Christmas, but I couldn’t resist posting this. I’ve seen a lot of decade in review stuff over the past few weeks. I think it finally dawned on people that “hey, the 2000s are over in a few weeks”. It’s fitting that I found this video referenced on Gizmodo, and I think it underscores the need to change the way we teach. We can look at the big news things from ten years ago:

Nobody had ever heard of Al-Quieda, and nobody in the United States gave terrorism a second thought.
We were not at war.
We were in a time of economic prosperity.

But, what I find more amazing is the way communication in society has changed in the last ten years. Ten years ago:

There was no iPod (was introduced in 2001). Now, over 220 million have been sold, along with countless other devices. Ten years ago, people were making mix CDs - CDs with only the songs individuals wanted to listen to. Now, people load their iPods with the songs they want, and nobody carries around a portable CD player.
Google is only 2 years old. Nobody had ever heard of it, but it was just starting to catch on. They only had 8 employees.
There was no Wikipedia, that wouldn’t come until 2001. Now, Wikipedia has over 14 million articles in 240 languages. Google and Wikipedia are where students tend to start when looking something up. And it didn’t exist when these 9-year-olds were born.
There was no Facebook (not until 2004). It started with one college, then spread to more and more colleges, then high school, and the world. Facebook now has more than 350 million active users.
There was no Twitter (not until 2007). Now, there are over 16 million unique tweets EVERY DAY.
Cell phones could only *gasp* make telephone calls. If you were lucky, you got one when you started driving, but you couldn’t use it any other time, because it was too expensive. You had, if you were wealthy, 300 minutes per month, no unlimited night and weekends (or unlimited anything), you paid several dollars per minute if you left your hometown, and cell phones were either Analog or Digital/Analog combinations. Intercarrier text messaging (sending messages to people regardless of their carrier) was becoming increasingly popular. In 2000, 17 billion (just shy of 3 per person on Earth) text messages were sent the entire year. By the end of 2008, that number had jumped to over 1 trillion (for those keeping score, 149.43 per everyone on the planet). Almost all of that usage in the US is by people under age 35, with a majority of that being teenagers.
Wifi was new. The first Wifi network was created at Carnegie Mellon in 1994. The Wifi Alliance, which created the standards that we now use today, was created in 1999. Places with wireless were on the bleeding edge in 1999, and wireless cards were available only as add-on cards to laptops. Now, wireless is commonplace, almost ubiquitous. Almost all new laptops are Wifi capable, and even the Fast Food places have Wifi available to their customers.

I’m sure there is more, if you can think of any, leave them in the comments. We’ve all seen the Did You Know videos, but when you think of the ten-year span that we have just ended, the videos don’t really do it justice. I hear in workshops all the time that kids today don’t live in the same world as we did when we were kids. Forget that. These kids don’t live in the same world as they did when THEY were BORN! It’s my job to try to keep up with all of this, but I still have trouble. I hear my students talk - something happens, the first thing they do is record it and put it on YouTube. I am fully capable of recording something with my cell phone and putting it on YouTube, but even still, it doesn’t occur to me to do that. With our students, it’s the first thing they think of. When they are trying to do something, like bake a cake, I search on Google for cake recipes. They go to YouTube for step-by-step with video. These are high school students, aged 15. Back in 1994, when they were born - there was no YouTube, or high speed internet, or Google, or anything else. So, it’s not even fair to say that they have grown up with it. It has grown up with them. It has evolved and changed and matured alongside them. As they are ready to explore new technologies, new technologies are being developed for them to explore. I was at Thanksgiving a few weeks ago with some family friends. Their kids are all aged six and under. I had my digital camera, and was taking pictures (which I did upload to Facebook). As soon as I took the picture, one of the three-year-olds walked up to me and said “Can I see the picture?”. Looking at a picture on a digital camera immediately is commonplace to me, and to many of us. However, this struck me for some reason. This three year old is growing up with an immediacy of access to information that nobody EVER has before. Even the nine year olds. Any information, digital media, recipe for cake is at her fingertips. It’s immediate. I often think about the difference between the two major terrorist attacks of the 2000s - 9/11 and the London subway bombings. After the London bombings, we saw immediately cell phone pictures of the death and destruction. It was horrific, because we saw what they saw, exactly. It was like we were there, and we could see events unfold in all of it’s terrible glory. During 9/11, there was none of that. How much worse would it have been if people had seen first hand inside the buildings, if the activities on the planes had been recorded, if we could see individual first hand accounts, lots of them? How would that have changed our perceptions of the events that unfolded, our reactions and thoughts? How would these kids, who remember 9/11 only by stories told to them by their parents, and books in the library, how would they see 9/11 differently? I don’t know, but it is most certainly food for thought. So, I’m supposed to be talking about teaching, so I ask the question - what does all of this mean for teachers? First of all, how can teachers possibly keep up with the way students communicate when the way students communicate changes between primary school and high school? We are entering an age where students have access to all of the knowledge of the human race, instantly, and immediately. It is important that we make sure that they can sort through these facts, make judgments, and assimilate new information (yes, it remains important for kids to KNOW things in their memories). Just as the retrieval of information is faster, the dissemination of information will be faster too. We will be required to teach students more information, faster, and earlier than ever before. What used to be high school math is now taught in fifth grade, and that’s only the beginning. But at the same time, we will be dealing with a group of students who can process information faster, if for no other reason than they will have to in order to survive. If you think it’s hard for us to keep up - imagine what it must be like for them - they have to keep up, and usually a few steps ahead of us, just to maintain the status quo for their age group. It also means that we are going to have to change the way we teach. Yes, I know we have all heard this before, integrating technology, less lecture, blah, blah, blah. But it’s not that. We can still lecture, and good lessons are never overrun by technology. However, our lectures must be purposeful and thought provoking. Our use of technology must be purposeful and a means to an end. We have to deliver the information faster, more efficiently, and on their terms. Students can memorize information. They can analyze, process, synthesize and evaluate. But this is a generation of students who do information on their terms - we need to accommodate this, not because we need to conform to our students, but because this is now life, and we need to prepare them for it. We need to teach them how to take in information, process it, extract the relevant bits, and come up with a conclusion. Never before has that been the primary goal of education. But here we are, the information is there - now we need to teach them the next steps. Sorry if that went a little long. This post is intended as a discussion starter. Please! post in the comments.

Welcome to the show that will probably end soon...

Fri, 23 Dec 2011 22:32:16 -0500

If I go back through my storied social networking past, I can see a variety of posts along the lines of “Welcome to my new blog”, or “I’m back to blogging”, or “I’m going to keep this blog up this time”. Guess what never happens…..

It’s not that I don’t have anything to say, because anyone who knows me knows that I never run out of things to say. It comes down to time. The phrase “I’ll post later” is usually used, along with “gee, I haven’t posted in a while, I probably should do that”. The final stage is “well, I guess starting to blog again would just be weird”.

So, I make no pretense that I’m going to keep this up long term. Heck, I make no pretense that I’m going to keep this up past this entry. But, like always, I’m going to try. And one day soon, I may actually succeed.

I’ve chosen Tumblr this time as the platform. I don’t actually understand the appeal of Tumblr. It seems to be a blogging program, which really has simply turned into a meme distribution center. I liken it to MySpace, which went from a place for bands to have a website into whatever MySpace became before it became irrelevant. Tumblr has changed into something that it probably wasn’t intended to be, we’ll see what happens later.

The nice thing about all these old blogs is I’ll be able to recycle some entries.