Designing and Implementing a Problem-Solving Environment for the Classroom

In the fall of 2016, I took a course on Inquiry and Technology. In that course I experimented with using a Google site as a tool to guide and manage student work for an inquiry-based learning experience. 

Since then I have used those skills to create several other inquiry-based projects. Students only have 30 minutes of learning time in the library every week, so the simpler and clearer a system I design, the less time I have to spend teaching students to use the tools--and the more time they then have to learn, share, and reflect on their learning. The screenshots below are of a short research project where students explore the question "How will climate change affect life in one region of the United States?" I used a combination of Google Classroom and a Google site to share this project with students. They used a standard note-taking form (I use the same one in all library classes and collaborative projects, I hope soon we have a standard form across the upper grades at Neshobe), and share the information they find through a single Google slide.

In the future, I think the Google site is one step too many---I would like to link all the resources from the Google Classroom page. I would also like to revise this project to provide choice in how students can show their learning. I would give the choice of creating a slide, a poster, a video or some other type of project. I am satisfied with the use of learning targets and surveys as both exit tickets and reflection on the project as a whole. I actually got a lot of useful feedback from students on the reflection survey, they felt overall that it was an enjoyable project (65% yes, 28% sort of), and suggested having more choice to make it better in the future.

I definitely will use environments like this to facilitate student learning in the future, and I will be sure to continue documenting my work and sharing ideas about how to best take advantage of Google Classroom and Sites.

Collaborative Troubleshooting

During EDCI 325: Leadership and Technology, we have been working on many documents that are collaborative both within our class and across the years that this course has been offered. This is one such example---each student has identified at least 4 common hardware/software issues in their organization, and found solutions to their problems. The spreadsheet below provides a description of each issue as well as a link to a resource that can help resolve the issue.

For my part, this assignment encouraged me to look into a solution for pop-ups (and other issues) as a result of students leaving their profiles logged into the Chrome browser on our Lab computers. I found an extension that you can add to Chrome which will automatically log you out of all account upon closing the window! I hope this will result in a marked improvement on students' (and teachers, who are trying to resolve issues for 20 students at a time) experience in the Neshobe computer lab.

Is Innovation Good or Bad?

I can't believe I've been working in education for four years, and interested in technology and learning for even longer, and tonight is the first time I've encountered the work of Audrey Watters. I'm still processing a lot of her thoughts, and as I was reading her series on The Stories We're Told in Education I kept stopping to read shocking facts and connections out loud to my husband. Overall I'd say I agree in large part with her general premise---that we need to look deeply and critically at not just the functionality of the technology tools we use in education but where they come from, who is selling them to us, and why they are so cheap. I will definitely follow Watters's writing in the future, because informed, critical voices that provide context are often hard to find.

I'm currently taking EDCI 325: Leadership and Technology at UVM, and I was struck by how differently Watters talks about the concept of innovation in education (and more specifically in edtech) than how I have encountered it thus far in my course. I mean, we read a text and participated in a MOOC for this class called The Innovator's Mindset. Innovation, to me, until tonight, has been as George Couros describes it: working to create something new and better, a positive goal, something to strive for as an educator.

From what I understood in my reading, Watters conception and criticism of "innovation" comes primarily from the tech world. I get the sense, reading her work, that it is an over-used buzz word among the Silicon Valley crowd. It's funny that I feel disconnected from that place and the work that happens there, but the work they do has an outsize impact on my life (checking my iPhone, using Google products, posting on Instagram, etc.). I'm surprised I didn't already have the sense that innovation was a buzz word. Prior to reading Watters's work, I didn't realize, for example, that Betsy DeVos characterizes many of her proposals for changing (privatizing?) public education as "innovation." That it is a thing for schools to aspire to run more like businesses. Watters's writes:

"It’s never so much that educators or others are against “innovation” per se...It’s that “innovation” has come to mean a specific set of practices – political practices, financial practices, and ecclesiastical ones."

Who gets to decide what a word means? And when is a word over-used to the point that it becomes imbued with so much meaning from those many many other uses that they negate your intentions? Is it naive to think it could ever be an unqualified good thing to see yourself as an innovator, when "innovation", as Watters says, implies a complex web of less than fair, just, or moral practices?

Reading Watters, I'm wondering if Couros's thinking about innovation, education, and technology is naive, or at the very least uncritical. Or are they just two sides of a coin---one an optimist, inclined to trust, one a pessimist, inclined to doubt, but both believing in the potential of our educational undertaking?

I think my next step will be to read more of Watters writing on innovation, and to revisit The Innovator's Mindset with a more critical minset, so I can try to figure out where I stand on innovation.

Change Pitch

In UVM's EDCI 325: Leadership and Technology, we read Switch: How To Change Things When Change Is Hard by Chip and Dan Heath. Their framework for thinking through and creating change has deeply influenced my thinking, as a person who aspires to change quite a few things in the world.

Here's a brief summary of their framework (but you really should read the book!):

After reading that book, I created the following video to pitch a significant change to my colleagues at school. How'd I do at hitting the Heath brothers three key parts of a switch?

Green Screening in the Neshobe School Library

Last summer I painted a wall green in my school library. Since then, we've been experimenting with color-keying in videos with students across the grades. The video below is a short creation, made while Amy Noyes from Vermont Public Radio's Dorothy's List was visiting Neshobe to record an episode of her podcast on the Dorothy Canfield Fisher nominees. My students had just finished reading The Inquisitor's Tale by Adam Gidwitz, and we used our green wall to put ourselves into settings from the book. Enjoy!

#IMMOOC Week 5: Moving On

#IMMOOC and #InnovatorsMindset have had a major impact on my thinking in several ways. One is that I am finally convinced of the importance of blogging, even though (or perhaps especially because) I find it stressful to write for an audience. Keeping up a blog as a place to process and share your work and your thinking creates an incredible way to show your learning over time, and allows you to connect with others. Moving forward, I commit to writing on this blog, even when it is no longer an assignment for a class I'm taking. I commit to using blogs with more of my students, and I aspire to find a way to allow them to maintain their blogs over several years so that they too can have the experience of seeing their own growth and learning through reflective writing.

Another major change in my thinking that has registered as a result of this MOOC is that I now understand how Twitter can be deeply beneficial for me as a learner, and I can engage with a wider community as part of a PLN. I will be more likely to both hear about and take advantage of opportunities like this MOOC as a more connected educator. The more I speak up, the less afraid I am of being an illegitimate or uninformed voice---and community is only created when members contribute. In the future I will be a better community member as a part of the world of librarians online.