Teaching to reach every single student

This is a brief update on what I have been working on for the past week in my school.

After some time sharing with other teachers in my building about blogs and what has been happening to and with my students since I began my (science) class blog back in October, some things (meaning blogs) have really started to happen.

Last week, I set up edublogs for two of our English teachers, one in 8th grade; the other in 6th. One of the best parts about the whole process was demonstrating that it takes minutes to set up a blog and BAM!! you now have a brand new tool to use with your students.

As many of us have discovered, a blog is not just one thing. I imagine this is particularly true in an educational setting. (Note to self — look for articles about this).

The point is this, these two teachers are now thinking actively about what this tool will allow them to do with their students.

Then, on Monday, I was helping one of our Spanish teachers record some dialogue podcasts (the whole language/dialogue thing seems perfect for podcasts to me). In figuring out how and where to post them, I arrived at the solution that she could post them on the blog she didn’t yet have. BAM!! Now she does.

Right now I am really charged up on the idea that we build it (the blog) and they (the amazing instructional moments) will come.

Earlier, I wrote about presenting at a technology conference for educators in New York. I had the chance to speak about using podcasting as a instructional tool (and a powerful one) in my 7th and 8th grade science classroom.

Here is a video podcast of that presentation.

Enjoy!

Recently, I have been having conversations (both with myself and others) about what would it be like to decentralize the (traditional) information flow in school (starting with my classroom) from teacher-centric to student-centric.

I have been thinking about it mostly in terms of grades, since my third marking period grades will be do so and there will be the usual scramble to follow up with students who are missing work and coordinating getting all of that in, etc. etc.

One of the biggest stopgaps is me. I am the holder of all of this information and it is (so the story goes) my job to manage this information and report it out to students and their parents. So I have been wondering about how to decentralize this information.

Then, I saw this piece on Will Richardson’s blog. He was reporting on having listened to a two-year old talk TED presentation by Charles Leadbetter on organizing organizations. He was the part that knocked me out:

He finished with a great
point: Imagine you took all the children currently in school and had
one percent acting as co-developers of education, creating and
publishing materials. What would that do to our educational system?
Imagine the potential in that. Weblogg-ed

So, I am trying to imagine this.

And, in my imagining, I see all the things we have been talking about, like blogs, wikis, and podcasts. I see students becoming, like Hall Davidson says, citizen-journalists, not just observing their world (or worse the already proscribed world of adults) but rather participating and connecting with it in ways that were impossible until recently.

I think the imagining is really worth it. Will you join me?

Blogged with Flock

I had the pleasure to spend the day at the Tech Expo 2007 Conference hosted by the Lower Hudson RIC (Westchester County, New York).

While I have been a part of the Web 2.0/Read-Write web community for most of the last year and have greatly benefitted by blogging and being blogged (so to speak), it was very exciting to be with a group of educators actually dealing with bringing ourselves and our students into a new world.

And I saw and heard some amazing things from other teachers. There was a Middle School Spanish teacher, Faith Braut who is doing some really great things with podcasts with both her Spanish and ESL students. She even does testing via iPods. Check it out! There was a High School teacher, Geoff Curtis who is using podcasting to engage students in Current Issues in Education.

One of the keynote speakers, Hall Davidson, whose enthusiasm was completely infectious, challenged us to work with our students using the tools already in their pockets - cell phones and iPods especially. He carried the flag for empowering them to be citizen journalists and using their cell phones to record podcasts (via Gcast), take photos (via flickr and others), and shoot video (via youtube and others). He even did a nifty live demonstration of gcast, having an audience member call and create a podcast. All in about a minute or two. Literally.

The other keynote speaker, David Jakes, talked about what makes a new technology “sticky.” What was particularly impressive to me was that he had his presentation already posted to his wiki, so I could follow along on my laptop, checking out links and other ideas as he spoke.

The bottom line for me was finding myself inspired by great teaching. People, educators bringing themselves fully to their students. People just like me. A community.

Like I said, inspiring.

Blogged with Flock

This Thursday, March 15th, I will be giving a presentation on using podcasts in my middle school science classroom.

The basic point I am going to make is that podcasting is a way of involving every student in a way that allows them to make choices (what material, which format of podcast) and to do something (unlike many school assignments) that have permanence.

I hope to see some of you there. (Here’s the information on the conference).

And here is a link to some of my students’ podcasts.

It has been a long time since my last update. Nevertheless, lots has been happening in my classes and with my students.

I have continued to have all of my 7th and 8th grade science students (all 100 of them) post weekly assignments to my class blog. Typically  this means that they read an article that is related to science, then prepare a brief summary and (more importantly) a reflection expressing their reaction(s) to the article. The second part of this typical assignment is for the students to post comments on the work of 3 other students. (This blog work is all done anonymously to give the students the freedom to be themselves as well as some protection from the outside world.)

This has been good for a number of reasons. As I have been told by other teachers using blogs, this public forum tends to have the effect of improving the work of all students. This has definitely happened. I can say without flinching that the work fo each of my students has improved over the past 15 or so weeks. Frankly, I cannot think of many other things I could do (or do do) to produce that kind of result.

But there are other reasons why this blogwork has been valuable. The place of learning has extended beyond the classroom and school walls, and the students are engaged in a weekly discussion on their own. This work has some permanence. I can have the students (and I have done this) look back over the blog postings to and reflect on their progress. And the learning is taking place in public. Now I have about 1500 samples of student work, from a heterogeneous group of students across most of a school year. At any point, I can refer them to other students’ work as exemplars of some discussion or another.

I look forward to what is coming next.