Category: Technology In The Classroom

Screen time this summer

6/13/2016

I spent this last weekend on a soccer field for my daughter’s last tournament of the season. Because the tournament was in Mission Viejo, the families opted to stay near the fields for the four hours between games on both Saturday and Sunday, rather than drive all the way home and then have to turn right back around to return to the field. In the end, I calculated that between the games and the waiting, we had over 20 hours to bond. This left lots of time to discuss lots of topics, but the one that stuck with me this weekend was our discussion about filling the summer now that we are only days away.

“What are you guys doing this summer?” was the question of the weekend. Of course, we discussed everyone’s family vacation plans, the end-of-season soccer party, summer sports camps, and visits to Knott’s Berry Farm. It was the hours of free time the kids are going to have between these planned activities that triggered our most thoughtful discussions, though. How are we going to help fill the kids’ free time with activities and play that eliminate the need for electronics without intruding too much on their time to “be a kid”?

How is that done? Is going completely “black” the answer? Is one hour too little time? Too much? Do they need any? How will they contact their friends? What if I want them to have their phone, so I can get in touch with them? How can I both set a boundary and set a good example at the same time when staying off my phone is just as hard for me as staying off of theirs is for them?

These are tough questions and the questions that got me into trouble last summer when I gave into my kids’ demands only 10 days into the summer. A “blackout” is hard -- for everyone!

This week I thought I’d share a great idea I saw one afternoon (while wasting time on Facebook). Because we’re all so attached to our screens, this proposed solution felt like a great compromise for my family. My kids are in middle and high school, so my rules may be more or less lenient than you’d like, but, nevertheless, this tip helped me envision what I wanted to accomplish and empowered me to create my own set of “Summer Rules.”

My rules are modified from those that I saw that one afternoon, but the brevity, simplicity and direct approach from the sample was what I worked to emulate. I organized my categories by what I want from my own kids, knowing their challenges and propensities, and I encourage you to organize yours by your needs. I’ll share just a taste of our family rules, but know that the full rules have been shared with our kids, printed and posted on the refrigerator.

My hope is that something similar ends up on yours if you’re so inspired. Here goes.

“Summer Rules for Screen Time”

You may earn up to two hours on the computer, your phone/iPad, or TV, as long as all of these requirements have been completed to parental satisfaction. Once completed, you are free to manage your screen time as you see fit.

Health and Hygiene: (1) make your bed, (2) brush your teeth, (3) take a shower, (4) make and eat a healthy breakfast

Academics: (1) read for 45 minutes from a book of your choice

Creativity: (1) make or build something -- Erector set, write a letter to grandparent, bake, woodwork, paint/color, do a puzzle, tinker in the garage, etc

Contribution to the Family: (1) clean one assigned room, (2) ask to help someone with a task, (3) take care of one dog duty

Playtime Outside: (1) ride your bike to the park, take a short run, play with a friend, swim in the pool, play at the beach, go surfing, etc

Note: All electronics are turned in to mom or dad before going to bed.

My hope is for you to enjoy your summer in an old-fashioned way. My hope for you is to be active and nurture friendships. My hope for you is to build memories.

This summer you are not going to spend all your time watching someone else’s life. You’re going to create your own.

God, help us all.

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The Future of Education

5/2/2016

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If I were to ask you to list the conditions for powerful learning, I’ll bet you would come away with a list very similar to mine, including: safe environment, personal investment, real world application, fun, relevance to students’ lives, social, interesting questions, positive environment, real audience, passion, autonomy, challenging, not time constrained.

I’ll also bet that in a room of 100 adults, not one of them would say that powerful learning comes with sitting in rows, one-sized curriculum, teacher controlled, standardized tests, emphasis on grades, no choice, lack of relevance, no real world application.

So why do we continue to run our schools the same way they’ve been run for over 100 years? Why do we continue to test, emphasize grades, restrict learning to the textbook, expect all kids to learn at the same rate and ability, and isolate content in 50-minute blocks?

I read an article this week published in the summer of 2014 by the Hawken Review written by the Head of Hawken School, D. Scott Looney. He spoke of the future of education -- the scary, daunting, exciting time in education where “we are now at a point where we must educate our children in what no one knew yesterday, and prepare our schools for what no one knows yet.”

We live in an extraordinary time in human history. We are witness to unprecedented economic, environmental, and political instability. At the same time, we are witness to incredible advances in technology, medicine, and communication. This paradox of fear and excitement poses a challenge to us all, young and old. And yet we continue to teach our children in an antiquated system of sameness, as if we need all our children learning ubiquitous content, at the same time, at the same rate, in isolation. Where is the power in this model?

I was thinking this week about the interviews we see on TV every year wherein some host stops random people on the street to ask them questions about some factoid we all “learned” in elementary, middle or high school. We laugh collectively as we watch the interviewee hem and haw before answering incorrectly. Do we laugh because we know, or do we laugh because we, ourselves, would answer incorrectly, as well?

These interviews simply reflect the truth that we forget most of what we “learn” in school. So why do we continue to teach and test content knowledge like this?

Powerful learning, the knowledge we remember, comes from moments in which we were completely immersed and engaged. True learning requires a personal interest in what’s being learned. The process of learning for the sake of a test just isn’t effective or purposeful. In fact, I argue that kids with access to the internet and technology are “learning” more outside of school than they are inside of school.

So what should schools be doing?

We need to be teaching kids how to USE content. Teaching kids how to think, collaborate, wonder. Teaching kids how to navigate ambiguity, complexity and interconnectedness.

Our kids need to find a passion that pushes them to “learn” what matters to them, so their learning can solve problems and impact the world -- or at least their own small corner of the world.

It’s time to rethink what we do on a school’s campus and why we do it.

The future of education? It’s going to require we ignite students’ curiosity and interests -- or we aren’t going to have much of a future at all.

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A New Approach for Sick Days

1/25/2016

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It is flu season. And with flu season, for a teacher, comes the endless parade of students into the classroom asking for make-up work for instructional days they’ve missed.

As a parent, a sick day is just as frustrating. Miss a day or two from school and your child’s grades can plummet. Whether this is from gaps in instruction, missing assignments or untaken tests, the frustration is real. It is palpable.
This past weekend, ironically while sick in bed myself, I had plenty of time to think about sick days. I came away with a few ah-ha’s.

Technology is great. With Google and email and Twitter reminders, teachers can connect with students and families at any time on any day. In fact, technology is so advanced, and some teachers so technically savvy, classroom lessons can even be videotaped and uploaded to YouTube. So when students get sick and miss a day or two of class, we all have a tendency to want to look to technology to fill in the gaps for them: watch the video lesson, download the handouts, read the posted notes, review the PowerPoint or chat with a classmate. This way they can finish the missed work before they even return. Sounds ideal.

But is it?

I haven’t been bed-ridden with a cold in years, so I admit I haven’t really thought about sick days for a while. Turns out that when you’re home sick, it’s because you feel horrible! I can’t imagine, this past weekend, having watched anything academic or completed any worksheets or talked coherently with any friend. I just wanted to sleep. And even when I returned to work on Monday -- without having missed an actual day of school -- I was ineffectual. I mustered my way through the day, but it was rough.

This left me thinking about our expectations of students.

A student determines that he is too sick to attend school. Whatever his symptoms, he decides to stay home and recuperate. One day. Two days. Whatever it takes to finally feel better and join the land of the living again. He returns to school, let’s say after having missed two days, and he is expected to be performing up-to-speed immediately. I do this all the time in the classroom. I know a student has been absent, but I continue on with the day’s lesson or give the day’s quiz or ask for a written response to something we reviewed the day before, as if no one has missed a beat. Hence the plummeting grades, frustrated students, and often-reoccurring sicknesses.

As I rolled around in bed this weekend, I promised myself to be more proactive. More understanding. More student-centered. I also realized that I need to be more mindful of the work that actually needs to be “made up” when a student misses class -- whether for sickness, family emergency, field trip or extracurricular activity.

Here is what this means for me. My instruction is driven by a target. This means I know exactly what I want students to know at the end of a unit. Popham, in” Transformative Assessment in Action,” calls this the “target curricular aim.” What I like about this approach to teaching is the freedom in being able to decide what building blocks are necessary for students to obtain mastery of that target. For example, in the course of a unit, I may assign twenty activities to get my students to the final target. But not all twenty of those are necessarily key to mastery; maybe only five of them are critical and the others are simply additional support or reinforcement.

I’ve always run my classroom this way, but haven’t always handled absences with this in mind. After this weekend, I am changing things up.

When a student misses class, I need to ask myself, “Is this a significant building block?” If it is, then I need to take the time to help that student get caught up. That may even mean the lesson on his first day back can be dismissed. But if the missed assignment from the sick day isn’t a significant building block, then maybe that’s the one I need to excuse. I never again want a student to return after an excused absence and have not only make-up work, but daily work, too. This just seems excessively harsh when trying to also get healthy at the same time.

Students who parade into my classroom this week after having missed a day or two of school will find a more compassionate, less rigid teacher who will work diligently to alleviate their re-entry stress.

I hope my own kids’ teachers will revisit their approach to sick days, as well, because we are all in the same business -- the “well”-being of our children.

Here’s to a healthy 2016.

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Is technology substituting or redefining?

12/14/2015

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I and a small group of teachers from my school had an opportunity this past week to spend one day visiting a high school in San Diego County. As a teacher, being given an opportunity to visit another campus is a learning experience that forces me to rethink my practice, potentially transforming the learning and teaching in my classroom. What came out of this last visit for me was a question about my use of technology -- does it simply substitute what can be done with paper and pencil or does it redefine my classroom, allowing for teaching and learning inconceivable in a traditional model?

I’m guessing this question will percolate with me over the course of the next semester and find its way into the design of my upcoming lessons, but what does this mean for us as parents? How do we know our kids are getting the most from the technology in their classrooms? I don’t know about you, but with every school year, my own kids talk about all their new classroom gadgets, including Chromebooks and iPads and tablets. It sounds great, but what are the kids actually doing with all these tools?

I thought I’d introduce you to the SAMR model, developed by Dr. Ruben Puentedura, which provides a way for us to talk intelligently about technology implementation. The SAMR model outlines the increasing degrees of adoption, allowing for more meaningful uses of technology in teaching in order to move away from simply using technology for technology’s sake.

I hope this inspires us all to ask better questions of our educators, in turn, inspiring educators to want to experiment with technology and ask more of our kids.

S. Substitution. At its most basic level of implementation, technology is being used in the classroom as a direct tool substitute with no functional change in content, knowledge or instruction. In this level of adoption, if you walked into a classroom, you might see kids crafting an essay in a word processing program or students taking a multiple choice test by clicking a radio button in a testing program that displays the same test as the one being given in the classroom next door on a traditional bubble Scantron. Both of these tasks can be done the old-fashioned way -- the technology doesn’t add anything. It’s just a substitute.

A. Augmentation. The next level of technology sophistication acts as a direct tool substitute, but it also offers some functional improvement. Let’s take a look at those same two tasks: the essay and the test. With technology being used to augment, the student writing the essay could use the Internet to research MLA style, uncover evidence from current events, or even find textual support from online novels not available in hardcopy at the school. And for the exam, the students may take the multiple choice exam online, but be allowed two or three opportunities to get the right answer, providing immediate feedback, and a learning opportunity, for the students.

M. Modification. Now things start getting interesting. With modification, kids are learning from teachers who have significantly redesigned the tasks. When walking into this classroom, you will see the essay being written, designed and revised through online collaboration, blogs, discussion boards and video conferencing. And the exams will be more project based -- demonstrations and applications of learned content. Rather than selecting A, B or C as a right answer, the technology will be used to build a virtual model of DNA, a chemical reaction, a computer program, or a 3D sculpture.

R. Redefinition. This is the classroom I want my kids to experience -- the one that allows for the creation of new tasks previously inconceivable in the traditional classroom. Herein lies the power of technology. The students in this classroom potentially work collaboratively with students from other parts of the world to research global challenges, get creative to present findings of their research via video that they’ve filmed and edited, and think critically about the impact of this issue on the local community, building partnerships, designing new clubs, developing their strengths, and networking for internships. This classroom no longer looks like “the essay and the test” as we’ve seen in the others. The learning, rather, is applicable to real world, designed to connect content from all their classes, and built to be relevant beyond the classroom.

A classroom redesigned by technology is the one that exposes our kids to the interconnectedness of knowledge. This is technology in the real world.

This is education redefined.

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What does a 21st century classroom look like?

8/28/2014

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Did you know:

We are currently preparing students for jobs that don’t yet exist,
using technologies that haven’t yet been invented,
in order to solve problems we don’t even know are problems yet.

We are inundated with news and articles about the 21st century classroom. But what does that mean exactly? A 21st century classroom is as simple and as complex as using the classroom as a tool to ensure our students are and enable our students to be successful. However, our technology and data-driven society is evolving every day, so how do we do this? We need students are adept at:

collaboration
creativity
critical thinking
communication

Information is everywhere. In fact, teaching is very different today than it was when we were in school. When we all went through school, the teachers were the stewards of information. We looked to them for content, knowledge, facts and expertise. They knew their stuff, and we looked to them as the experts. This traditional role of the teacher no longer exists, because information, content, knowledge and facts are readily available. We can Google anything and get answers today. Teachers no longer “own” information; therefore, our "teacher experts" need to experts in their fields in new ways. They need to embrace the 21st century classroom and teach this next generation how to:

manage content
discern bias and credibility
synthesize information being collected and published at a lightning-speed pace
work in our global society

I want to see our Los Alamitos teachers learn to be the best the teaching profession has to offer, so that our students are ready for the 21st century world. I want our teachers to facilitate learning, use inquiry-based instruction, integrate technology, utilize evidence-based research as a teaching tool, teach using project-based learning and embed cross-curricular skills and strategies.

This means training, teacher coaches, administrative support and board leadership.

That’s where I come in.

Let me help lead our district into the 21st century.

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Screen time this summer

The Future of Education

A New Approach for Sick Days

Is technology substituting or redefining?

What does a 21st century classroom look like?

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Screen time this summer

T﻿he Future of Education

A New Approach for Sick Days

Is technology substituting or redefining?

What does a 21st century classroom look like?

Get Notified of New Blog Posts

Archives

Categories

The Future of Education