BYOD: Advice from Michigan teacher of the year, Gary Abud

This past weekend, I had the privilege of attending the Metropolitan Detroit Science Teachers Association (MDSTA) conference. I went to some cool sessions, including one led by a MACer from two years ago, but I think my favorite was the one called "All aboard the BYOD express!" It was run by a delightful man named Gary Abud, who just so happens to be the Michigan teacher of the year. He has taught chemistry, biology, and physics, but currently serves as an instructional coach for the Grosse Pointe school system. I got the chance to talk to him one on one earlier in the day and he's a really great guy, approachable and fun, and I'm very glad to have made that connection. His session turned out to be as enjoyable - and informative! - as I hoped.

Gary began with a very interesting point about BYOD as a concept. He said that we often tell students to put their devices away because we don't want them to look up the answers. His counterpoint was simple and powerful: if a student can Google their way through your class, you have some serious rethinking to do. And he's absolutely right. If a phone can do all the thinking for a student in your class, then you're not asking for any higher order thinking and that's a problem. Gary also addressed another common worry about BYOD by saying that not every student in your room has to have a device because it's easy to do grouping activities and have students share.

Gary spent most of his presentation doing in depth demonstrations of three tools: GoSoapbox, InfuseLearning, and Socrative. We have heard of the last two in 504, but I really enjoyed seeing the tools in action with a room full of 40 people. Also, GoSoapbox was new to me, and it was Gary's favorite. As his presentation demonstrated clearly, each of these tools has its own strengths and weaknesses, and choosing between them really depends on what you want for your classroom.

I'll summarize some of the highlights of these three tools here. At the bottom of the post you'll find a video Gary made about various tech tools in the classroom - start around 8:30 for the specific discussion around these "total participation" tools.

GoSoapbox

With this tool, a teacher creates an "event" that students use a code to enter. Once in the event, students can navigate between three types of objects: polls, questions, and discussions. The teacher can pre-load polls and questions, keep them invisible, then switch them to visible at the appropriate moment during class. The discussion section is more open; students can ask each other questions and have conversations about the class. Students can see poll results on their own device if the teacher has that option selected, but the responses are anonymous.

Pros: Students can explore all the pieces of the "event" whenever they want - revisit past polls, see other answers to questions, respond to peer questions. This event remains open beyond class time, allowing flexibility for its use beyond the hours of the school day.

Cons: Teacher has no way of knowing whether all of the students have replied without scanning through the names and seeing if someone's missing. Students could get distracted by the flexible format.

InfuseLearning

With this tool, the teacher does not load in specific questions. Instead, she clicks on a certain type of response (true/false, multiple choice, free response) and students see a prompt to reply. The specific question itself must be delivered by the teacher verbally or on the board. The teacher sees a list of students and each student gets greyed out as they submit a response, so she can ask any missing students specifically to respond. The teacher also has the option of saving results for later analysis. One really cool function of InfuseLearning is the possibility of submitting a drawn picture as a response. This could be very useful in a science or math classroom. Ask students to sketch a graph or balance an equation, then scroll through and discuss everyone's responses projected up on the screen. I think this is a really cool way to get a snapshot of the whole room's thinking. It also makes student work the subject of conversation rather than the teacher always writing things on the board. Another useful feature of InfuseLearning is the quiz function. You can load in a complete quiz beforehand, then start the quiz and have students complete it during class. The results are saved and any multiple choice questions are graded automatically.

Pros: Teacher can check for 100% response rate and know exactly who is missing. Draw response function. Saving results (polls become a csv file, drawings become a PDF). Easy quiz execution and grading.

Cons: Inability to pre-load questions into the event for formative assessments during class. Students can't see anything except the currently active prompt - they don't see results or past questions. Results have to be shown from the teacher's device.

Socrative

Socrative is kind of a blend of the two above tools with its own quirks. Socrative allows for one device to submit multiple assessments which can really help if not all students have a compatible device. We didn't get as complete of a demonstration of Socrative, but Gary did get a chance to show us his favorite feature of Socrative. Like the other tools, students can submit a free response answer to a question. After these responses are gathered, students can then vote on the one that they feel is most correct. This is very useful for promoting reflection and developing a class consensus around an idea.

Pros: Multiple responses, voting on free response answers.

Cons: No drawing feature. Students cannot see anything except the currently active prompt.

These summaries are by no means complete, and each of these tools is a rich resource in its own right. I personally am most attracted to InfuseLearning - I love the ability to save results and use them as part of my evaluation of class progress on the individual and whole hour levels. The drawing feature would be incredibly useful to get a quick sense of where students are on a topic. There's something so much more authentic about a hand drawing (even if it's on a digital tool) than typing in an answer. I also like that students can't click around idly while I'm trying to keep them focused; the tool enters the conversation only when I want it to. The prospect of auto-graded quizzes is also very attractive.

The more I learn about these tools, the more convinced I am that I want to make them part of my teaching. There's potential here to bridge the generation gap and reach students where they are as incredibly proficient users of advanced technology. As a young teacher who has grown up with technology (well, I got my first laptop at 14 and my first phone at 18... but I caught on quick!) and is also very proficient in it, I feel that I am well-placed to leverage these tools in my classroom. I loved learning about them in such a fun, interactive environment. I recommend checking out teacher conferences when you get a chance!

Here is Gary's video about BYOD:

"Standards-based grading," or, reaching out to an edublogger

For one of my responses to an edublogger, I revisited the blog that I wrote about over the summer, Science Education on the Edge by Chris Ludwig. There have only been two new posts - I imagine he's been rather busy getting the school year rolling! - but they were both candid and informative, as all of his posts are.

His latest post, Zero Points Were Given (which, by the way, is a play on a popular (and profane!) internet saying that I will not repeat here, which says to me that this guy is very plugged in, much like myself), is a provocative screed against traditional points-based grading system followed by his thoughts about an alternative. His alternative could be broadly termed "standards-based grading," but Chris prefers to frame his approach as asking "'what do you want students to know and be able to do?' and 'what will you be looking for in their performances of learning?'". He replaces assignments with content and skill goals that he wants his students to be able to attain. He provides them with concrete feedback about how to improve, then allows them to respond to his feedback by, you know, improving! He uses a system called BlueHarvest that I blogged a bit about in my last post to keep track of this narrative feedback (and responses by students). As for converting this type of feedback into numerical grades, as required for most schools and college applications, he provides some advice about establishing a consistent method of doing this. He concludes this advice with a pretty powerful insight: "It will be subjective. But so is everything about teaching if you are doing it right and responding to different student needs and abilities." I gotta say I agree with him. From what I've seen so far, trying to stick to some "objective" grading standard is not only impossible, it's irresponsible. By making the subjective system something that also helps students to improve, it seems like Chris is significantly improving the experience of his students. The final piece of his system is to have students make a weekly check-in in which they argue for a certain grade they have earned that week, and they have to use evidence of their work to support their argument. Perhaps as a happy accident, this also lets students practice one of the 8 scientific practices in the new standards: arguing from evidence!

While I enjoyed his post very much and like the sound of his classroom, I couldn't help but puzzle over exactly how such a system could get up and rolling in my classroom (and any high needs classroom I might find myself in). It seems like it requires significant student independence. So I made the following comment on the post:

As a pre-service teacher trying to figure out my “own” approach to teaching (which will inevitably be a pastiche of other peoples’ ideas until I really get my legs under me), your blog is fascinating because it presents a perspective I haven’t heard yet. I appreciate your candor and detail because it helps me to envision how these things can work in a classroom.

I am intrigued by your critique of points-based grading and the alternative you have developed. I was a kid (still am, kind of, in my masters program…) who was excellent at playing the game and got As across the board pretty much throughout my educational experience. As I’ve grown older and realized that the world doesn’t give you an A simply for following directions, I’ve begun to worry that what earned me the label of “brilliant” in school is not terribly useful in the real world. This makes me think hard about what I want to communicate to my own students. Does the ability to successfully complete a multiple choice test about atomic structure correlate to any real world ability? I’m not sure it does. I am searching avidly for ways to make learning chemistry relevant and enriching. I’m wondering if your approach could be part of the key to that.

What I struggle with, however, is figuring out how to earn enough buy in to this system to get it to work. I am currently student teaching in an urban arts school. My students, by and large, have a dismissive attitude towards science, and the ones that try do so mostly because they need to pass chemistry to graduate. Many of my 11th graders are at a middle school or lower level in math and/or reading. I struggle with how I could inspire and foster the kind of independence and motivation it seems like such a system needs in order to function. I have a vision of students excitedly investigating questions related to chemistry of their own volition, but then I think about how many of my students need extensive one-on-one scaffolding to carry out unit conversions and I hit a mental roadblock about how to translate one into the other.

That said, right now my mentor and I have students who have a grade of literally 4%, students that I know are sweet kids and don’t want to fail. I want to help them. And I think stepping away from empty number grades would be one way to do that.

I would appreciate any advice on how to kickstart such an effort – maybe some baby steps toward the full fledged model. Where do I even begin?

Only hours later, Chris responded with a generous comment filled with advice:

Anne,
Thanks so much for the comment and for being willing to tell us about your situation! As a chemistry teacher for ~15 years now, I have yet to really hit on the magic formula that will make it appealing to everyone. I have some small victories at times, but often it feels like I’m losing the battle to get kids to really understand chemistry at the level that I think they should. With that said, some things work better than others to get chemistry students involved in class:
-Labs seem to work really well at engaging students, although they sometimes seem to come away with a more superficial understanding than I would like because they lack some of the background knowledge about underlying principles.
-Drill and kill worksheets only help a small percentage of students, and while I might think they are necessary, students don’t often agree.
-The best assignments in chemistry are those that respond to student interests. This is tricky, since not every student’s interest can be sparked easily, but I bet your arts students might find some interest in the science behind paint pigments, for example, and maybe the tie-dye lab.

The real trick is to set up a system that can help students realize even small gains in skills and content knowledge in your class. We should reward students with some helpful suggestions rather than having to come up with a number to represent how many points we think they are worth that day. They might be way below where I would like them to be, but if they are willing to work with me at all and follow my advice, I can usually get them on track.

One last piece of advice: allow students multiple ways to show you what they know. That way they’ve taken some ownership of what works best for them, even if it doesn’t always conform to what we think chemistry class really ought to look like. 

You have the right attitude about stealing other people’s ideas, and I look forward to stealing some ideas from you in the future.

I very much appreciate Chris's quick reply, his kind comments, and his honest advice. He doesn't try to sugar coat for the newbie but rather responds candidly and specifically to my thoughts. That said, I have to be honest in turn and say that I'm slightly dismayed by these insights from an expert. His concern about labs and students taking away a superficial understanding is definitely one of my biggest concerns for teaching chemistry. Seeing chemistry in action is one thing; really understanding the underlying explanation, and transferring that to other contexts, is a whole other ballgame. I'm also concerned about his lack of regard for "drill and kill" sheets; I think there are some skills (converting between units, naming compounds, balancing equations) that can only really be nailed down with repeated practice. Does he remove emphasis from such skills in his classroom? It seems as though most higher level chemistry applications are absolutely predicated on having such skills in one's mental toolbox. Since my students have significant difficulties with math, I fear I will leave them behind if I try to jump into the more "solid" stuff without spending time trying to master the "basics" first. I may have to leave a follow up question asking him to clarify this point. Our students do a lot of worksheets right now, but I would be hard pressed to think of an alternative method to learn the skills we're targeting right now.

I do quite like his suggestion that chemistry teaching try to draw from and respond to student interests. I think there's a lot we could do with our students' passions and talents at DSA. I'd love to hear them come up with a chemistry song, for example, or do an interpretive dance of covalent bonding. Such ideas might be something I would consider going into the second semester, when I have more autonomy.

The central piece of his thinking, which he highlights in his comment, is to give students something real to build off of, a blueprint for their own improvement. I think this is a valuable insight. Right now, my mentor teacher generally gives numerical grades with little substantive feedback. On the other hand, what we're grading is often problems with clear cut answers, and it would take ages to explicitly write out responses and corrections for every student's work. Chris's use of BlueHarvest is crucial in supporting him in this endeavor to provide substantive individualized feedback and I think I will seriously consider using this system, if not next semester, then when I begin my own teaching practice. 

On a more meta level, it was great to get such a substantial response in such a short time. I will definitely be keeping track of Chris's work and probably drawing on him as a resource again in the future.

Student podcasting

A few weeks ago in Ed Tech, we were treated to a truly excellent "Tech Tools in Use" presentation by the podcasting folks. I was quite skeptical going in because podcasts are something I struggle with personally a lot. There's only one particular type of situation in which I can fully focus on and enjoy a podcast: when my eyes are occupied in a fairly mindless task. The best example is when I'm driving. Driving is automatic enough that I can process the information in a podcast, but it requires my full visual attention so I don't let my attention wander. Another way I can listen to podcasts is by playing a fairly automatic game (Bejeweled is a favorite). But the fact is that podcasts are just not a very efficient or appealing way for me to gather information.

That said, I wish I did like podcasts more, because they can be really amazing! A series that I have particularly enjoyed is called the Naked Scientists, where some charming narrators (with delightful British accents) break down the latest science news by going straight to the source: journal articles and scientists. They talk about the actual data in the papers, and they often interview scientists directly about the work. This is aimed at a perfect level for me - I get the big picture without the horrible reductionism and hyperbole that goes into much of popular science media.

So that's the perspective on podcasts that I brought to this presentation: not the biggest fan of the medium itself, but really impressed by the ways it's been used. And I was immediately impressed as well by the creative ways the presenters chose to make example podcasts that could be used in the classroom. It was even more impressive that they had all just taught themselves the tools and created these polished, professional sounding productions. I can see easily how podcasts could be a really interesting tool in classes like history or English, where spoken narratives can be so powerful.

I do have to stretch a little more to think about how the tool could be used in a science classroom, but I think it's possible. I probably wouldn't go for making podcasts of lectures, just because so much of science (and math, my minor) is visual and needs to be seen while being described. But an application that I think could be potentially quite powerful is having students create their own podcasts. This could be a group project where students are assigned some topic and they need to create a podcast to teach their peers about the topic. This podcast could be played to the class and used to prompt a discussion in which material provided by students is the catalyst. Students love to talk and I think this could be a really cool way to harness that particular teenage impulse. It would also let those who are so inclined to tap into their creative sides and really get into the spirit of making a mock radio show or including sound effects. Given that I have students who are actually Radio/TV majors at Detroit School of the Arts, it would give them a chance to shine and perhaps engage enthusiastically with the material of chemistry. It also takes away the pressures of something like a class presentation; students have the opportunity to think carefully about what they want to say and then re-record if they mess up in some way. From a teacher's perspective, having a record to listen and re-listen to in order to closely and carefully evaluate their thinking could be quite valuable.

So thank you to Rachel, Griffin, Steve, and Mike for an engaging, entertaining presentation. You've given me some real food for thought!

"Class, take out your cell phones!"

A couple weeks ago (has it been that long? Boy time flies when you're getting no sleep and working all the time!) we had a great presentation by guest speaker Liz Kolb. Her enthusiasm is infectious and, despite the frustration I expressed in my previous post, I found myself able to start to think about ways technology can be useful in ANY classroom, even one faced with tough issues of access.

Cell phones - and, in particular, smart phones - are an incredible resource. Sometimes I just have to stop and boggle at the fact that I carry what is, effectively, a mini computer around with me in my pocket at all times. I can do almost anything on my phone that I can with a laptop, especially anything that involves communicating with the outside world. (And let's stop for a moment to appreciate the magic of laptops too. I'm old enough to remember when having a family desktop was a Big Deal. And I'm not very old.) Teenagers love their smartphones. They spend every possible second communicating - texting, snapchatting, instagramming, whatever kids are up to these days, it always revolves around sharing some piece of themselves with the world. As teachers, we need to be aware of this reality, and instead of fighting it, it seems like a pretty darn good idea to try to make it work in our favor.

Liz's talk helped me to see this idea as a genuine resource for the classroom with a lot of potential. She also struck a bit of a nerve with the whole "we can only imagine the classrooms we've been in" idea. I used a laptop a lot in high school (my school was a bit ahead of the curve and required all freshmen to bring a laptop) but it was pretty much only to take notes or write papers. The interactive piece wasn't really there yet. Unless you count emailing with the guy sitting right next to me during English class... but that brings me right back to my point. High schoolers ALWAYS want to be talking to each other. That's why one of the biggest challenges of classroom management is to get them to just stop talking for a while. But why is that the goal? Aren't their voices equally as valuable as the teacher's? If there's one thing that's really sunk in in my time in the MAC program, it's that people don't learn passively. It's the rare, dedicated bookworm that can learn well from lectures (*raises hand*). And because I do learn well in that style, it's required some stretching of my mental boundaries to fully realize that this is not at all the case for everyone, and that if I hope to be a truly successful teacher, I'm going to need to shift away from the mentality of "telling as teaching".

All of which is to say: Liz convinced me that cell phones can be a fantastic tool for making all student voices heard. One challenge I have encountered in my first stumbling forays into teaching is the difficulty of making on-the-fly assessments of the whole class. If I ask a question of the whole class and get a correct answer, well, I know that student understands, but chances are they are the same student who answers questions every day. This type of evaluation doesn't tell me the really valuable information: who DOESN'T get it.

Enter cell phones. I am envisioning a class in which we have some sort of collaboration tool set up and projected on the wall (Celly, Poll Everywhere, etc.) Students have their phones out, ready to answer any questions. At particular moments in the class, I solicit the whole class's ideas. Students use their phones to submit answers. If any student doesn't have a phone, or if the activity requires a smartphone, students can share in pairs and just pass off the phone for the other to submit their answer. The whole class's ideas come up on the screen - anonymously - and I can quickly get an idea of where the class is, and they in turn can see where their response stands in relation to their peers'. The conversation continues, enriched and shaped by both correct and incorrect answers, or just a variety of ideas, contributed by the students.

Liz helped me see that this model could really work. It's all about reaching students where they are. Students at my placement have their phones out all the time. They're not bad kids - they're just bored and itching for that sense of contact. If I could provide that contact to them in the form of a legitimate classroom activity, I think the buy in could be very high. Students would have greater ownership over the class conversation and even the quiet ones would have their ideas heard. Another benefit is that silence would no longer be a requirement - I could see all student answers even while there was a general level of chatter in the room (which is almost always in our class, I'm afraid).

The important thing is I can actually see this happening in a classroom now. There's a lot of details to think about, but I might even try to launch it as part of the "January restart". I am grateful to Liz to helping me to open my eyes to a whole new world of possibilities. And when I teach, I'll be sure to always ask my kids: "What do you like to do?"

Issues of access

As Ed Tech has been getting back into full swing for the fall, I have also been getting settled into my placement at Detroit School of the Arts. And as we have been discussing ways of using technology in the classroom, one major issue keeps coming up for me again and again: access.

I loved Rory's presentation about a fun way to get to know your students and for them to express themselves. It sounds like a great tool that creates classroom community and produces valuable information for the teacher. But I couldn't help but think about how it would be all by impossible at my placement. We have a laptop cart, sure, but when we tried to turn them on with our mentor, something like 6 out of 25-30 turned on successfully, and we couldn't log in to half of those. Even if we could get all 30 on, how would that work with our class of 40? (Never mind that we had 50-60 for the first three weeks of school.)

So I can't help but be a little frustrated. I wish I could think about fun ways to use technology with my whole classroom, but the resources simply aren't there. And the sad fact is that this is true at many, many schools. Additionally, based on student surveys we administered as an assignment for our Methods course, several of our students don't have a computer and/or internet access at home, and some don't have a smartphone. These challenges are reality. And the fact that it's a minority of students doesn't matter - for any strategy to be equitable, it must be accessible to all my students, and if even one student can't participate, I can't use the strategy. There are many computer labs at our school, but since the students don't have any free periods during the day, and are often busy with extracurriculars after school (or need to get a ride or bus home immediately - our students live scattered around Detroit, so they can't walk home), I feel I can't assign any work that requires computer use outside of the classroom. It's a conundrum.

Of course, in the future, an important and accessible answer to this problem is to seek funding for resources for my classroom. A set of Chromebooks, a document projector, iPads, etc. That is certainly a route I will pursue in the future, especially after seeing what having technological resources for my whole class can do. But this solution doesn't work for my current situation, and I admit to feeling some frustration. That said, I appreciate having the experience of teaching in a high needs environment (relatively speaking - DSA is quite well off as far as Detroit schools god) while my peers experience very different settings because I am learning in a very concrete way what differences in resources and opportunity mean for the learning of students.

The Next Big Thing(TM)(R)(C)

I knew that the education field was prone to fads, but it seems all this standardized testing malarkey (great word, non?) just makes the situation worse. There's always someone trying to throw their hat in the ring, to establish new standards that are somehow better than those that came before. Then comes the new tests. It's exhausting and I haven't even been in the middle of it yet.

I'm suspicious of the whole Common Core/Smarter Balanced Assessment thingamajig (cool words is the theme of this post, I think). I do appreciate Rory bringing this to our attention - particularly to the SBA - because my initial response when he asked us to jot down what we knew about it was "No idea." And Rory has convinced me that that was a problem - that we definitely should know that this is coming down the turnpike and we should be braced for impact. Perhaps a violent metaphor... but then I think the obsession with standardization is violence being done to our education system.

I might have strong opinions on the matter.

Anyway! I appreciate being forewarned about the disaster so we can at least think ahead and prepare as well as we can. The brainstorming we did in class may turn out to be incredibly valuable in the not so distant future. So I thank Rory and Jeff for making space for that conversation in their classroom.

We also had another, much more splendiferous, conversation about different ways to apply the game that was demonstrated in our different content areas. I love that the notion of games is branching away from pure video games and into thinking about how the thought processes and teamwork involved in game play and puzzle solving can be brought into classrooms in many creative ways. I know I will be alert to such possibilities in the future.

Edublogger: Science Education on the Edge

After poking around the interwebs for a little while, I was sucked into a blog by a science (Biology and Chemistry, with occasional Physics) teacher named Chris Ludwig. His blog is called "Science Education on the Edge: Experimenting with Student-Centered Science Education". Mr. Ludwig's writing style is engaging and personable, and even more importantly, I learned several new things just by reading his first page of posts. It seems his blog has been going for three years, so there's a lot of material for me to sink my teeth into when I have the time.

One thing that attracted me immediately to the blog was the tone. Mr. Ludwig is clearly frustrated by standardized testing and standards-based education, but he doesn't rant about these topics, instead posing level-headed (though sometimes sarcastic) critiques of a damaged system. His frankness is particularly notable given that his blog is hosted on his school's servers. I particularly liked a post in which he mused about a girl whom he had observed come in for state testing, listen to the instructions, then close her booklet and sit quietly while all her peers took the test. She did this four days in a row - 24 hours total of silence. He was thoroughly impressed by this display (as was I!) and mused about its possible motivations. Alas, when he showed her his blog post wondering about her behavior (in lieu of asking her directly, for fear of getting her in trouble, I think) she just smiled enigmatically and went back to talking to her friends. Most intriguing! Mr. Ludwig takes this anecdote as an opportunity to wonder what would happen if a large number of students engaged in such peaceful protest. Food for thought...

Mr. Ludwig also blogs extensively about his own classroom techniques, which, it appears, have evolved significantly over the last three years. He's not kidding about having a student-centered approach. One post discusses using portfolios as a way of demonstrating "student achievement." He linked to some exemplar portfolios from his own high schoolers and I had fun clicking through them a bit. He seems to favor creativity and collaboration, as well as activities like blogging, as a means of helping his students learn. At the same time, his teaching (and the portfolios themselves) are carefully aligned to a set of standards. While this last makes me a little uncomfortable (probably because it looks so foreign - as a private school student, no such thing as a standard darkened our doorstep, and I recognize how lucky I am in that), it is a demonstration that it is possible to have a fun, engaging classroom that still adheres to the externally imposed standards we must answer to.

He also blogged about what seems to be an excellent tool for teachers to give feedback to their students and keep track of how students are doing in all of their classes. It's called BlueHarvest and I recommend reading his post about it, which serves as a nice introductory tutorial about its capabilities. Basically, you create courses and student profiles within those courses, then give each student the login info for their own profile. When a student produces something needing feedback, the teacher goes in and leaves feedback on the corresponding standard. The student receives an email that feedback was received, and they can respond in turn. This is an excellent alternative to keeping student records on your own computer, partly because it's better organized, and partly because students can keep track of their own progress at the same time. They could even show their progress to their parents. The only thing I wonder is if the site has a space for the teacher to record comments/observations that they don't want to share with their students. Regardless, it seems like a great tool!

I've only touched on three of Mr. Ludwig's posts, and you can see how diverse and engaging the topics are. There's a lot of practical advice to be found, as well as lots of sound thinking. This is definitely a blog I will be exploring further in the future.

Leveling up in the classroom

Right at the end of class on Monday, Rory asked a heck of a question: how can we use students' love of video games to design a more engaging classroom environment?

I think anyone who found a successful answer to this question would become a billionaire. Most attempts to make concrete use of students' interests in the classroom crash and burn, specifically because the school environment killed any student enthusiasm. It's quite a Catch-22 for us teachers.

That said, I'd like to take a stab at the idea. I wonder if you could incorporate the idea of "leveling up" in the classroom. Basically, students would earn points (or gold coins, as Destiney suggested) for fulfilling various tasks - doing homework on time, scoring well on quizzes, etc. It would take some thought to set up a points system - how detailed do you want to get? A more detailed system could easily get overwhelmingly complex, superseding all other considerations in the classroom. Leveling up would have to be linked to some kind of reward system in order to provide the value necessary to foster motivation. There's also the problem of competition - would you make the "levels" public? Would the kids moving slowly feel embarrassed and then shut down, or would they work harder to catch up to their peers?

I think someone else (during or maybe after class) mentioned that a classroom set up we heard about in ED649 has some of the qualities of a game. In that classroom, students did their learning and work on a computer system in which they moved through units at their own pace, watching their progress in completing lessons on a chart on the wall of the classroom. Some students thrived in this system, progressing rapidly and learning a lot. However, the major problem with this setup was the massive attrition rate - by the end of the school year, only 25% of the original students were showing up regularly. This suggests to me that setting up school as a self-motivated series of tasks with tracked progression serves to motivate some kids but will completely disenfranchise others. Maybe it isn't such a good idea to set up a classroom like a video game after all.

That said, there's one key principle to be derived from video games: one of the reasons they're so fun is because they hit our sweet spot in terms of challenges that are "pleasantly frustrating". This concept is discussed by cognitive psychologist Dan Willingham in his book "Why Don't Students Like School?" (which we're reading for ED606). He says that thinking is fundamentally difficult for humans, but we enjoy learning - so long as we feel we have to work to solve a problem, but that that work has a reasonable chance of success and the pleasure associated with a problem well-solved. Games come at a variety of levels, and the games that kids latch on to as their favorites hit their own difficult-but-doable sweet spots. They glean the most satisfaction possible from solving these problems. In our classrooms, we need to do as much as we can to find that (elusive) sweet spot for as many of our students as possible. We must avoid crushingly difficult tasks, but we also must avoid anything too easy and unrewarding. This requires careful attention paid to our students, their prior knowledge and capabilities. Doing the work to learn these things about our students and then carefully designing tasks/assessments accordingly is difficult but ultimately necessary to foster success and engagement in our classrooms.

Space Racer X: A fun way to "drill"

One of the things we've learned in Rachel Wannarka's Ed Psych class that's really stuck with me is that facility with the basics is crucial to competence with more advanced material. This is most concretely observable in mathematics - if you know your times tables down to automaticity, you can better tackle algebra or calculus problems.

I think that games can play an important role in building such automaticity. Flash cards are pretty boring, especially doing them by yourself. But a game can accomplish the same task in a much more fun environment. One of the beauties of computers and video games is that they respond to input you provide with new tasks, challenges, or information. It's a constantly evolving interaction that you are crucial to but that you cannot predict.

All of these features are why Dr. Brain was such a great way for me to learn the element symbols. Rather than simply having to come up with symbols, I was forced to think of them and then use them for a purpose, a more involved cognitive process that probably helped to ingrain the material in my memory far more effectively than simple flash cards. Unfortunately, in my search I was unable to find a chemistry game that was similarly engaging and educational. They probably exist, but they're not easy to find! So since I am also getting certified in math, I turned to an area I've actually realized I lack automaticity in - times tables. Honestly, my eighth graders at Scarlett often can outstrip me when we play "speed" with multiplication facts. How embarrassing!

The game I found that might be able to help me out is called Space Racer X. It was the first game I found that was both fun and challenging. The idea is simple. You're a spaceship at the bottom of the screen, and asteroids move towards you. In order to move left or right, you have to solve one of two multiplication problems. Try to go as far as you can without hitting an asteroid!

I like this game's design for several reasons:

• You have to generate the answer yourself, rather than selecting from a few options as in some other games I tried.
• There are two problems, and you can't just automatically solve one of them - you have to decide which you need to avoid the asteroids, then solve the right one. This requires similar double-layered thinking as I described in the Dr. Brain example above.
• The speed is fast enough to be challenging (I exploded several times before getting the hang of it) but not so fast as to be frustrating. It also increases with time so if you find the beginning easy, it will eventually become quite challenging to anyone at any skill level. This provides room for continual improvement rather than stagnation.
• The problems range nicely in difficulty, spanning the times tables from 1 to 9
• It's possible to develop strategies to get better at the game, but not to completely ruin the game's challenge. For example, you can learn that always trying to be in the middle while you're waiting for asteroids is much more likely to lead to success. Psst - this means you're actually solving more multiplication problems! Everyone wins!
• The graphics are pleasing without being distracting.

In fact, in playing this game, I realized I could use some serious multiplication practice. So if you ever see me playing a game in class, know that I am actually learning! (Just kidding - I would never do that!)

I could see this game being quite handy in a high school math class, especially 9th or 10th grade, if you notice your kids are having trouble with their multiplication fluidity. It could be an in class activity or a homework assignment, in which the kids have to screenshot their best score and show it to you. You could even recommend it specifically to a certain kid who seems to struggle with this skill, and ally with him or her in aiming for higher scores. Have him bring his best score to you each week, keep a record of it, and praise him for his progress.

Sometimes, when it comes to learning from games, there's beauty in simplicity!

20 questions... and a lie?

I thought the 20 questions game that we did in class was intriguing, but I was a bit thrown and didn't immediately grasp why we were doing it in a class about technology. It certainly put a unique spin on an old favorite, and I enjoyed discussing strategy with a room of people who have highly developed reasoning skills. Then, the point made by Jeff at the end - that no one ever taught us to play 20 questions, but somehow we all have the appropriate mental skills to bring to the table - brought it all together. Games are a way to exercise certain abstract, translatable mental skills, and can even be a way to develop those skills in the first place.

Therefore, I suspect this activity is going to segue into the next topic - using games for educational purposes - so I'll muse for a bit on what value I think games can bring to the classroom and see how that ends up jiving with our class next Monday.

When I think of games in the school context, I immediately think of Dr. Brain. This was a computer game I played in school around fourth grade. It was a suite of activities led by "Dr. Brain," who for some reason was an old mouse with a weird, creaky voice. I don't remember what all the activities are, but I know precisely what two of them were. One was logic puzzles, the kind where you're provided a situation and a set of clues, and you have to figure out how various variables match up using logical deductions. I LOVED these puzzles. I devoured them like candy. I still do them for fun sometimes, and I don't think I was doing particularly easy ones back then (I'm pretty sure there were examples with three categories and five elements per category, which I still find marvelously fun to this day), but when the knowledge needed is logical, not factual, there isn't really an age limit. I'm sure the hours I spent doing those puzzles gave me all kinds of mental skills.

Another part of Dr. Brain that left an indelible mark on me was a matching game involving the symbols of elements. The creaky old mouse would say "Molybdenum!" or "Tungsten!" and you would have to think of the corresponding symbol (Mo or W, respectively), see if you had it on the board, and place the same symbols side by side to match them up and move them off the board. For some reason I absolutely loved this game. I leveraged my status as a "faculty kid" (my dad taught fifth grade at the time) to get a copy of the CD to play on our home computer. (Can you tell I was an über nerd from the very beginning?) Incredibly, when I think of some elements, particularly some obscure ones (Actinium!) I still hear Dr. Brain's voice in my head! There are some element symbols I know cold entirely thanks to Dr. Brain. I played that game 17+ years ago! But gosh, I played it a lot.

All of this is to say I think games, when designed well, have enormous potential as educational tools. I think Dr. Brain was a spectacularly designed game. Now that I look at the screenshots, I remember that I liked playing pretty much all of the types of puzzles, and I spent hours happily enriching my own brain. Doesn't that sound preferable to kids endlessly flinging birds at pigs or babbling to each other on social media? I think so! It's certainly one very exciting application of technology. It has a high chance of buy in, and a high chance for rich payoffs.

Maybe I'm being optimistic. I was, after all, the kind of kid who thought learning itself was fun, no matter the context (thanks Dad!). But I think, when applied judiciously, games can be an enriching and positive force in the classroom. I look forward to hearing what others think next week!

Evernote: basic, in a good way

I was assigned Evernote to explain to my group. I had a bit of an unfair advantage as I have been teaching myself to use Evernote for the last month as part of my attempt to get organized for the MAC program. My investigation did uncover some aspects of Evernote that I was not previously familiar with, particularly the suite of smart phone apps they have to enhance the functionality of basic Evernote.

For my handout, I chose to provide a broad description of what Evernote is capable of, then specific instructions to achieve installation of the app and the two central functions of Evernote: creating notes and notebooks. I provided representative screencaps to illustrate what Evernote looks like in its most common usage. When one understands how to do these two things in Evernote, the possibilities are pretty much endless.

When I looked into how teachers have recommended using Evernote, I expected to find some sophisticated and unexpected uses for the program. Instead, I mainly found lists of things that you could store in Evernote – lesson plans, short term to do lists, notes from meetings, and so on. And in fact, now that I think about it, it is this flexibility that is Evernote’s strength. It can become anything you need it to be. With a premium account, it can also be a collaborative platform (although I think Google docs is more well-suited for this particular application). Evernote simply helps you to organize your life in any way you see fit – and couldn’t we all use a little more organization in our lives?

Voices unheard

In class on Monday, we extensively discussed Dewey's "My Pedagogical Creed" (1897) and drew connections to how we think about the role of technology in the classroom. Dewey has arisen in some of our other classes, and certainly many of the themes that came out of our discussion about his perspective resonate strongly with our work in general. I would like to pull out a particular aspect of Dewey's work and draw a connection that keeps shouting in my mind but which I haven't gotten the chance to work into a class discussion (yet). Dewey's central idea is that schools are part of social life, not simply preparation for it. In the course of our discussion, as an expansion on this idea, someone commentedthat "school performs a parental function". What might this mean? And does it ever actually happen? 

This phrase immediately brought to mind a passing (but powerful) assertion made by Nel Noddings in Education and Democracy in the 21st Century:

"In the complex 21st century world, there should be a healthy recognition for interdependence at every level. Recognizing that all of us need a caregiver at some stage of our lives, we should encourage greater appreciation of those who provide that caregiving (Fineman, 2004). ... In Chapter 6, I will discuss ways in which we might profitably expand the curriculum by drawing on women's experience - experience that, historically, has been rich in caregiving." (Noddings, 2013, p. 10-11)

I very much look forward to reading Chapter 6, because this idea is incredibly compelling to me. By "this idea" I mean the thought that school and curriculum was originally designed in America by men, for men, and the feminine perspective is absent, yet has something quite valuable to add. Perhaps one of the valuable things this perspective could bring is a sense of the "parental," or more specifically, "maternal". Perhaps schools could "care" more by taking on more characteristics of "caregivers," while at the same time instilling in students themselves the qualities of caregivers. If the feminine perspective was brought into the design of curriculum and of school structure more broadly, maybe then schools could more closely resemble home life in the sense that students would be provided a safe environment in which they feel comfortable and even loved - that is, cared for. Perhaps the result of this expansion would be realization of some of Dewey's ideals, which remain elusive to this day.

Just as my last post was Dewey filtered through the eyes of a chemist, this one is Dewey filtered through the eyes of a feminist. I think the female voice is valuable and all too often squashed. Somehow Noddings, by obliquely suggesting that our education system is, at its core, male in origins and aims, spurred an "Aha!" moment in me. I do believe that appreciation of the female voice could help achieve some of the goals Dewey had for education. I am unsure of whether Dewey would agree with me - after all, he lived at a time when women's voices weren't exactly prioritized - but I think that if his vision is to be realized in the modern world, this is one dimension that can't be ignored.

We are all chemists

"In reality, science is of value because it gives the ability to interpret and control the experience already had. It should be introduced, not as so much new subject-matter, but as showing the factors already involved in previous experience and as furnishing tools by which that experience can be more easily and effectively regulated." - John Dewey, 1897, p. 7

I have already read Dewey's "My Pedagogic Creed" before, in my one education course before starting this program. Dewey's name has also come up many times in the course of the several classes we are taking in the MAC program. With that in mind, I found myself pondering, upon revisiting this piece, how unfamiliar his vision of a school is. Despite our continued admiration for his work, it seems little has been done to incorporate his ideas into the day to day reality of school life.

Then again, what would reality look like, if based completely on Dewey's creed? Might there be sewing classes that expand into lessons on mathematics and material science and culture? Could there be a class on cooking that opened a window into chemistry, history, and language? How would school be organized? Who would teach what and to whom? What role would student choice play in the design of their coursework or activities?

I'm sure Dewey attempted to answer such questions in his prolific writing, but so far all I have been able to derive about Dewey is that he espoused a way of thinking about education that many admire, but no one seems to really know how to implement. Certainly principles of experiential learning have worked their way into classrooms - labs, for example, are a crucial element of any science course. But to what extent do these labs fulfill Dewey's vision of "furnishing tools by which [previous] experience can be more easily and effectively regulated"? Have we managed to frame science education within the experiences of the students?

The answer is, in my opinion, not entirely. Efforts certainly are made, to differing degrees by different teachers, to draw connections with students' prior experiences. This is more easily done with some subjects than others. For example, biology comes with a host of obvious connections to the students - they are themselves biological entities, and they have interacted with many living things throughout their lives. But I think we have fallen down on the job a bit with chemistry, the subject which I am to teach. Certainly we do lab experiments, but how relevant are these labs to the lives of students? The high school lab I described in my previous post, about the exploding purple nitrogen triiodide, was only helpful in a very specific context later on - specifically, another chemistry lab. That experience would have had no bearing on my life had I not chosen to remain in the chemistry field.

So how can we make chemistry relevant? There are an almost overwhelming number of ways to answer this. We are all chemists, whether we like it or not. There are chemical reactions going on in our bodies every day, reactions which allow us to remain alive. We depend on the forces between molecules to stand upright, to walk and talk and see and think. We are composed of chemicals, as is everything around us. That chair you're sitting on is made up of chemicals, arranged in such a way that you can sit on the chair without it bending or falling apart. Chemicals aren't just oddly colored liquids in weirdly shaped beakers. Chemicals are everything. If, while teaching students about the structure of the atom, we emphasized that these atoms make up everything, that the table their notebooks are sitting on is mostly empty space, just like the individual atoms that compose it, perhaps they would approach the subject with more interest. Chemistry is scary, and many kids assume they can't do it. In my teaching, I hope to implement the Deweyan idea of science as "the materials and processes which make social life what it is" (p. 7) in order to show kids that they already are chemists, and that they can indeed master this fundamental and exciting discipline.

Conversations

It's been a long time since I've regularly kept a blog, but it was once my primary hobby. I started a personal blog in my last semester of high school and over the course of the next five years proceeded to pour my heart out to the internet on a near-daily basis. Some statistics about that blog:

Blog entries: 2,537

Comments posted: 36,507

Comments received: 25,860

I think it's fair to say I've had some practice.

Most striking, in my opinion, is that I spent most of that "blogging" time actually commenting - that is, having conversations. Conversations about anything, from The X-Files (Mulder and Scully 4eva!) to existential teenage angst to Obama's first election to "boys are stupid!" You know, typical girl stuff. But through those conversations I found a whole network of friends, stretching across the country and, indeed, the globe, some of whom would come to feel like family. Reading those conversations now is like taking a trip in the Tardis (beware, there be geekery in this blog) and watching my young self fumble her way through adolescence and young adulthood. It's also seeing those who helped her along that stumbling path and gradually made her steps more sure. They were, in many ways, some of my best teachers.

Which brings me to a comment our illustrious instructor, Rory, made on the first day of class:

“Teaching is relationships. If you don’t have relationships, you don’t have anything.”

This idea, or some version of it, has been on my mind since I made the decision to pursue a career in teaching. One of the reasons I think (hope) (really really hope) that I might be a good high school teacher is that I feel I can make connections with young people. My own emotionally torturous high school experience, and the memories of who helped me through it (my actual HS teachers are high on the list), gives me a sense that I might be able to understand, or at least empathize with, kids who are drowning in the mire of hormones and uncertainty that characterizes adolescence. And I know, from first-hand experience, what serves as the best lifeline in those times: relationships. Conversations. Anything that makes you realize that someone cares, that someone has noticed you. Rachel's speech about this very topic in Ed Psych today brought me to the edge of tears. I know what it's like to feel completely alone, and I know what it feels like when someone turns on a light and says "I see you."

I was lucky enough that many people turned on that light for me. And those people mostly fell into two categories: my teachers, and my friends from that mysterious World Wide Web. Therefore, the intersection of technology and teaching is an extremely intriguing space for me. I see the enormous potential of the internet to start conversations that stretch far beyond the classroom. Perhaps I could connect my chemistry class with another one that has different resources from mine, and they could communicate about experiments and projects. Perhaps I could invite scientists into my classroom via video chat, providing my students with a glimpse into the real world of science. The possibilities are endless.

I understand the concern that "plugging in" a classroom could be harmful to the teacher-student relationship, or open a Pandora's box of distractions. But I also see the potential for technology, particularly the internet, to serve as another way to emphasize relationships. I would of course take care to cultivate my own relationships with my students, but I feel that opening the door to even more could be a wonderful boon. Maybe they could start their own blogs and find friends, like I did, in the most unexpected places.



A couple notes about my blog title and URL:

• I have chosen to honor my many years of bloggery by taking up my old habit of using song lyrics as my blog title. Currently (and subject to change), I am using "This whole world inside" from the song All Good Things by Mandy Moore (she's done a couple amazing albums in the last few years, nothing like the bubblegum Britney-clone pop she became famous for!).
• "Purplegoboom" is a reference to the time that my high school chemistry memories came in very handy in a real chemistry lab. Some of you may remember a demonstration commonly done in high school in which you make nitrogen triiodide by mixing ammonia and iodine. Nitrogen triiodide is a dark purple compound that is stable when wet, but as soon as it dries out, it is an extremely sensitive contact explosive. You let a small sample dry on filter paper, stand as far away as you can, then tap it gently with the end of a meter stick, and it goes BOOM! A few years later, I was working in an organic chemistry lab in college and one of my reactions included both ammonia and iodine. I noticed that instead of producing a white solid as it should, the reaction turned dark purple. The dots connected in my head and I thought "Uh oh. Boom!" I ran to my advisor and told him what had happened, and asked how to deal with it. He said "Oh dear... I don't know! Look it up!" Luckily, the omniscient Google told me that I could quench the compound with ethanol, then pour it down the drain. The point of the story is that high school chemistry saved me from a potentially nasty surprise if I had attempted to dry down the strange purple product, as is standard practice after running a reaction. Huzzah for high school chemistry!

Idealism

My "Ideal Classroom"!