Poetcast

Because we were talking about poetry yesterday, here's a fantastic use of poetry-related technology: Poetcast from the Academy of American Poets.

This is a podcast of all things poetry including live readings from the Academy's archive dating back to John Berryman's first public reading of Dream Songs on Halloween night, 1963. Perfect for giving students a real sense of the 'life' ingrained in poetry.

Gaming in Education

Cool study on educational gaming called 'Moving Learning Games Forward' linked to and dicussed at Digital Ed.

I am such a sucker for games... whether checkers or World of Warcraft. It's my grandfather's fault: he used to play games with me constantly!

One thing to keep in mind, particularly in using computer games in education: don't pit one student against one computer. Those days are long gone. Now, through MMOGs (Massively Multiplayer Online Games), players can enter a virtual environment full of real-time decision making, collaborative quests, and everything from virtual economics to virtual libraries full of potential research-oriented projects.

On Big Ideas

Scott Marion from Center for Assessment in response to a question I posed during an Education Sector discussion on the 'Beyond the Bubble' report. My question concerned the wisdom in focusing our ed tech energies on creating assessments that focused on current content and assessment achievement rather than using the more holistic and community focused methods offered by Web 2.0 assessment to prepare students better for an unsure future.

There is no question that we need to prepare students for things for which we don't even know about yet. But we can't do that by guessing at the content that is coming in the future. Rather, we need to ensure that our current educational approaches focus on the big ideas of the disciplines (because these big ideas do not change that fast!) and on the process by which students develop expertise in these disciplines as well as the skills to continuing their learning when faced with novel situations.

While I totally agree that it is illogical to 'guess at content' coming in the future, it is by no less means ill-advised to think that 'big ideas do not change that fast'. The argument hinges on what type of ideas we consider.

Take for instance Latin. Latin admittedly hasn't changed much in a while. But the way in which Latin literature is thought about has changed in the most drastic way over the last few years.

Consider: it was the critical practice of Structuralism that had one of the most profound effects on the way that we think about 'close reading' no matter what discipline we teach. In Latin, 'close reading' means taking a single detail -- an image, a word, a manner of speech -- and tracing its use throughout the corpus of either a single work, the work of a single author, a school of authors, or with regard to all of extant Latin literature. A great example is in this essay by Barbara Gold on the issue of the image of the rose and how it relates to time and nature in Horace's poetry. To make a long story short (and with apologies) Gold tracks each time Horace uses 'rose' imagery in his poetry. She then looks for patterns in that usage, finding that his mentions of roses usually accompany thoughts concerning time and nature. And she makes her case for why the poet does this. This is a model close reading and each year I present it as an example of such to my students.

While I will not attempt to make any assumption as to the way in which Prof. Gold goes about her close reading, a technological marvel born at Tufts University makes this whole way of working a whole lot more accessible than back in the 1950's and 60's of Structuralism's beginnings.

That device is The Perseus Project.

Wide-ranging in scale, the interesting aspect of the project for me as a Latin teacher is the section dedicated to hyperlinked Latin texts. From Ovid to Tacitus, each text is chunked into small bits. Each word of each text is then hyperlinked to an online Latin/English dictionary and morphology/grammar tool. From a Latin I perspective, this gives students that ability to work through much more difficult passages of authentic Latin than they ever would be wont to otherwise. For the upper-level students, it presents a unique opportunity to take on scholar-level philological work.

How does it work? Well, say I give the students the word 'ignis' meaning 'fire' and tell them to look up each time the word appeared in the Aeneid. Within seconds, following easy directions which link the hyperlinked words in the dictionary to every use of the word in not only the text at hand, but also to every use of the word in the individual author's work as well as in the whole corpus of Latin literature, the student now has a complete list of every use of the individual word. This used to take WEEKS to do. Now it takes seconds. So the student can focus on finding the patterns, making connections, and analyzing the variety of 'meanings' the poem offers rather than the mind-numbing task of going on a word-search.

The Perseus Project has not changed Latin. But it has changed the way in which Latin is studied and analyzed. In this case the 'big idea' is the idea of 'critique' itself. Kant spent quite a while working on that one. So did Barthes. And Derrida. I don't mind my students working amongst that august company.

Ideas will change quickly. They are changing quickly. It's just that it's not always either the 'idea' or the 'change' that we expect. That's more and more the nature of a world where so many people with so many individual brains are working together at the same time all the while connected by the Net.

We need to teach kids how to think about how big ideas DO change and often change quickly. And that kind of meta-thinking -- which is ever evolving and will never come to a fixed 'conclusion' -- is best supported by the types of tools available in changeable, customizable, flexible, and holistic Web 2.0 apps and interactive Internet media as well as the types of tools good teachers have always used: Socratic Method, conversation, and compassion.

One last thing... this Perseus Project method is just one lesson. It teaches the kids a certain way to look at literature. Over the course of the four years I have most of my Latin students, we look at a wide range of critical styles and to practice each of them, we look at a broad range of content. Breadth of content and methods of analysis and understanding need not be at odds with one another, just as liberal arts and technology need not be at odds with one another. The sooner we realize this, the sooner we can get to worthwhile teaching.

Let's Talk Poetry: Part Four

Ok. So, if you've gotten this far in my admittedly scatterbrained four-part series, you might have asked yourself: what in the heck has this got to do with running a paperless classroom?

Well, you got me. It's not got that much to do with running a paperless classroom. Except in this way: in thinking out loud about my experiences with the Web, I've begun to think about how those experiences led me to go paperless and also to think about why in some quarters what I'm doing seems either a) so weird b) so useless or c) so soapbox-ish.

Concerning the former: guilty as charged. A paperless classroom is weird. I've taught in public school, I've taught in private school, I've done observations of charter schools and GT youth centers, and of course I went through school myself. And yes, the paperless classroom is totally weird. But not in the novelty sort of way. Rather, in that it's so effortless. Naysayers often accuse me of being a tech-head, but in fact, despite the fact that the structure of my classes remains entirely technological, the content and discussion that arises in those classes is as entirely humanistic and liberal-arts-minded as the best classes of my own experience as a student ever were. In fact, the technology -- if anything -- only gives us more time for my students and I to actually talk to one another rather than sit through mind-numbing lectures. Weird, yeah.

Second, technology is only as useful or useless as you want it to be. Hammers aren't very useful when you need to screw something in. That said, to live one's life refusing to ever pick up a hammer means a lot of loose nails.

Finally, I admit (and it should be obvious to any of the regular readers here) that I'm more than a bit wordy. I chalk that up to those early reading experiences and the over-indulgence in Kerouac as a kid. But if I do occasionally sound like I'm up on a soapbox, it's only because I really do care about what's happening with educational technology. And I don't want us to lose sight of the 'educational' part of 'educational technology'. We can teach kids to use blogs til the cows come home, but if we don't give them the critical and creative skills they need to use their minds to produce content and analysis, well then we're just gonna be stuck with a bunch of mindless drones anyway. If however, we denigrate the 'technology' part of 'educational technology' we do so at great peril. Because if we let them out into the world of the 21st century without 21st century skills, it's like letting 'em loose on the highway without drivers' ed. It'll be a bloodbath.

Back to poetry.

Phil and I, over far too many cups of coffee in the basement of Dudley House, decided to call our online multilingual poetry journal 'Annetna Nepo', or 'Open Antenna' in reverse. The idea was that we'd create a space on the Web that was for poetry the equivalent of a busy European train-station. Nothing but flashes and fleeting glimpses of a host of languages flittering through passing conversation, strident over loudspeakers, missed in the hushed whispers of a mother to her children. We put out two issues and in the course of a few months we met poets of the most amazing caliber from Wales to Eritrea and back again. Within days of opening shop, we had a team of translators from California to England who wanted to help us understand the mixed language soup we were compiling.

Phil's since gone on to a university professorship and I've obviously gone on to do my own things. But, when I read over my students' blogs; when I see the connections they are making and the 'places' they have visited; I can't help but think back to those days of editing that poetry magazine. I can't help but think about the connections and networks that I developed through poetry, art, and the Web. And I feel the full thrust of what technology and the liberal arts can do when they realize a synergy of elements rather than dwell on their differences.

Let's Talk Poetry: Part Three

The Internet was different back then.

First of all, things didn't look as glitzy as they do now. Often when people did try to spice up their pages with graphics, the results were schmaltzy at best.

Second was that there was still this underground network vibe that was a hold-over of the old BBS days. I sort of feel like the BBS posters were the Ham Radio operators of the Digital Age. But, they were the ones who laid the foundation for what we now call the Blogosphere.

So, devoid of all the commercialism and crap that's all over the Internet today, those stoic early days were actually pretty cool.

Because I was trying to place my lousy poems with various online sources, I started running into like-minded folks in other areas of the arts. One of the biggest influences on my thinking to this day was my encounter with the Mail Art Network. Having begun following the Fluxus and Happening Scenes of the 1960's and inspired initially by the work of artist Ray Johnson, Mail Art was (and is) an informal network of artists who share and collaborate via sending small pieces of art to one another via the postal service. A spirit of collaboration and freedom exists within the network which is by turns kitsch and naive on one day, and profound on the next; much of this is fostered by a tradition of collaborative art exchanges and unjuried exhibitions. Things may have changed, but at least back then there was no money in it and the focus was often on the network itself.

While there were certainly more than a fair share of vanity projects, occasionally a truly inspired show would pop up such as an anti-death-penalty exhibition in an old Spanish castle that brought together work by hundreds of artists across the globe or such as a simple postcard show in 1999 at Chicago's Peace Museum that asked the simple question: What are your thoughts going into the new millennium?

Behind all of this -- for better or worse -- was a spirit of networking. Not in this case for the purpose of getting a better job or making more money, but just for the sake of being a creative outlet.

I remember in those days that many people involved in the network were teachers. I sent a small piece in to an exhibition that took place in a school in France; the kids organized and curated the show; I can only imagine the kinds of backflips proponents of Project Based Learning would do to have kids organize an international art exhibition as a class project.

I say all of this for one purpose. And that's to bring up the notion of 'network' and what that means.

There's been a lot of talk lately about '21st Century Skills' and whether or not this is some ploy by software companies or computer geeks to take over the minds of our youths. Well, as I see it, the most important 21st Century Skill is the ability to navigate in a connected global network. This is something that I learned as a guy back in the '90s just trying to get his poetry published and it's something that I see every single day in my students' blogging activities.

Yesterday, I posted a sort of manifesto/philosophy/quasi-policy thing. But, I'm not philosopher. I'm no policy wonk. I'm just a guy in a classroom. A guy in a classroom who's been engaged in that global network in both the most ridiculous as well as occasionally sublime ways for well over a decade now.

Yet I don't consider myself a Digital Native. Digital Natives are kids who were born after 1990. Us folks who were born between 1970 and 1990 are more like Digital Slackers. We used the stuff for what we needed to, but we didn't really see how it would be the prime source of our 'intellegence gathering operations' ;)

We grew up with LPs and then cassette tapes and then CDs. Technology was a blur, but it was a physical thing. You could break an LP. Or a cassette. Or a CD.

Try breaking an MP3.

What I'm getting at is that Y2K marked a shift away from the Analog Age into the Digital Age. And even though I was unwittingly taking part in that shift, it didn't really hit me until blogs and RSS technology and Web 2.0 came along. It didn't make sense until the power of technology caught up with the power of human networking. I considered technology with a healthy dose of skepticism. While friends were signing up for MySpace, I was working in an old bookstore. For me, the networking aspect of the Web and the conversational aspect of real life were the same thing. But, what I didn't realize and what many folks didn't realize was that this fusion of self-publishing, instant communication, and networking was in fact laying the foundation of what would be the 21st century's true break from the 20th.

Back to poetry.

In 2003, my buddy Phil and I started a short-lived online poetry journal. There were millions of these e-zines hovering out there in the cloud, but we were doing something different.

We were going to take this global network thing and this bookworm thing and bring them together in a way that would be unintelligible even to us. He was a French scholar. I was a Latin and Greek geek.

We were going to start a multilingual poetry review devoid of translations.

...to be continued...

Let's Talk Poetry: Part Two

I read Ford Maddox Ford's list of 'books one must read' and found it to be a bit lacking, so I went about creating my own list. Poetry books quickly found their way to the top of the list.

Pound's Cantos
William Carlos Williams' Selected Poems published by New Directions
Baudelaire in the original French
Lowell's Life Studies and Berryman's Dream Songs
Ginsberg's Fall of America
Anything by Susan Howe
Kenneth Patchen's Journal of Albion Moonlight
Everything I could find by Robert Creeley
Rilke's Duino Elegies

I read constantly and I start to write. I've recently read some of my early poems and they look at best like something bearing more resemblance to rock-n-roll lyrics than to Modern poesy. (Not that there's anything wrong with that! But it bears mentioning...)

I continued writing, occasionally publishing a few things here and there in little local zines and college papers. It wasn't until around 1997 and owning my first real computer that I really started taking my own writing of poetry as seriously as my reading of it.

For one thing, I'd always preferred typing to handwriting, so the computer made sense to me as a tool. Secondly, I am notoriously disorganized. So a simple system of filing poems on the computer was an enormous help and, before long, each of those folders had grown to a book's length collection of poems. Although none of this work was up-to-snuff when I compared it to my heroes, at least seeing the folders grow -- and hence my output becoming sort of a personal library -- was motivational to me in a way that coffee-stained stacks of paper never were.

The owning of that computer coincided with my first real introduction to the Internet. And within days of first getting online, I was meeting online poets and publishers and placing my own work.

This is not to say that those poets and publishers were necessarily legit, nor is it to say that my own work was any good. In fact, like all old poetry, it sort of makes me cringe to see it now. Nonetheless, I can say that it was the responsiveness in those heady early days of the Internet (at least as far as I was concerned) that got me thinking again about publishing houses -- just as I did back in the library when I was a boy.

I began thinking about publishing houses because that's how I'd come to know poetry in the first place. And here I was online encountering poetry -- some good, most very very bad -- in a different way.

...to be continued...

Let's Talk Poetry: Part One

'Round about 1994 or so, I sat in a crowd of students and seekers at the feet of Allen Ginsberg. This was at a gathering on the southern shores of Maryland and my first and only time seeing Ginsberg in the flesh. He had already had his stroke, and so his body was a bit frail and his eyes and mouth made a strange and wonderful sight as he rocked back and forth singing the verses of 'O, Father Death' along to the accompaniment of his little squeeze-box.

I had been an early reader. By kindergarten, I was on an eighth grade level. I remember the kindergarten teachers taking me up to the eighth grade classrooms like I was some sort of strange alien to be marveled at. Even then, I remember the whole thing being kinda creepy.

I remember reading 'The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn' at age six or seven. I read most of it aloud to my grandfather who had given me a copy and said, "I've never read this. Why don't you read it to me?" I consider him to have been a great reading teacher. He also taught me how to master the Rubic's Cube and how to use the dampers on the piano (though I couldn't reach them).

I read a lot throughout my school days. But not a whole lot of what I was supposed to. In lieu of doing homework, I'd hang out at the library and read as much as I could -- and not by particular author or genre, but by publisher. I quickly got hooked to all the great novels published by Vintage Classics as well as the noir mysteries put out by their mystery subsidiary a bit later on. One day, I think in eighth grade, I happened upon an Evergreen copy of Kerouac's 'The Subterraneans'. By the end of that day, I'd finished that book and gotten three-quarters of the way through 'On the Road'.

Which led me directly to Ginsberg.

I still remember the first time I read 'Howl'. I couldn't help but read it aloud. There I was, thirteen or fourteen years old, jumping around my room blurting out phrases like:

yacketayakking screaming vomiting whispering facts
and memories and anecdotes and eyeball kicks
and shocks of hospitals and jails and wars,
whole intellects disgorged in total recall for seven days
and nights with brilliant eyes, meat for the
Synagogue cast on the pavement...

I was a Catholic-school boy from Baltimore. My mother was a florist. So much as I'd remembered, with the exception of a trip to Disney World, I'd never traveled farther in the universe than Philadelphia. What in the heck were 'eyeball kicks'?!?

But it made sense to me. It made sense because more than anything else I was a READER. Reading was the one constant in my life. It was the one thing that really lifted me out of the shell of a rather mundane existence. And now I had discovered poetry. And I was hooked.

...to be continued...

The Times They Are A-Changin' (Apologies to Patton)

He calls the Xerox a mimeograph machine. He writes in 'Scantron' on the sheet passed around during the faculty meeting about new technology in the classroom. He might even refer to the Internet in the plural.

But he is a teacher. Maybe a great one. And we need him on our side.

Regarding how the Stimulus should be spent in Ed Tech, reader Ms. Chow writes:

The reality is that school faculties consist of a diverse group of people. For the sake of this argument, they will be the divided into the tech-fearful and the tech-savvy. Billions of dollars spent, thousands of hours of man-power/training/logic utilized, and we will still be left with these two groups.

Ms. Chow, thank you for the honest insight. And Mimeograph Man -- prepare yourself -- 'cause this one's for you.

Teachers are on the front-line. We as teachers know that. Whether you teach in a public school or a private school; in the city or in the farmland; in packed classrooms in over-crowded suburbs or as a home-schooler in your own kitchen, we know the front-line.

It is the future. And it is ever closer. Either we approach it or it approaches us. But it is ever closer.

In light of this, we as educators have to make a few things public with regard to the future and with regard to the role of technology in our classrooms.

First: We have to state to ourselves and to the public that the point of educational technology is not to facilitate the use of technology but to use technology to facilitate education. Why do we need to do it via technology? Because that's where the world is. And that's the world our kids need to be prepared to engage.

Second: Long have we striven for 'authentic learning experiences and assessments'; well, in the context of the Digital Age which is upon us, it is inexcusable to ignore the authenticity of technology in the experience of our culture -- whether or not our students themselves are able currently to afford technology or access.

Third: We need to petition our government: Internet Access is a matter of civil rights; nothing produces democracy and growth like the transparent spread of information -- and especially as educators we need to see to it that all of our school-aged children have equal access to a free and independent Internet.

Fourth: We, as teachers, no longer have the luxury of being 'tech-fearful'. I know that there are people on your faculty like Mimeograph Man who swear they are 'against' technology. While I admire their perseverance, and I respect many of them and see that they possess a wealth of experience and have often delivered excellent educations to countless children, I dare say that they do not realize the precipice we stand upon with regard to preparing our next generation of children for a digital future.

The future of the Internet is going to make paper look like the manuscript codex which made papyrus look like wax and clay tablets which were a minor improvement on a stick and wet sand. There are few instances in the history of communication that produce times as important as this: it is a time to either acclimate to the new paradigm or be left disheveled and confused at how the rest of the world passed us by.

This isn't about our 'comfort-level' with technology. This is about the Digital Age being a cruel reality. Things have changed. Our children need us to buck up, come to terms with and learn how to use the new technology, and help them navigate the digital world.

Please understand, I'm talking not from the point-of-view of a tech guy. I'm not some computer whiz. I'm a high school Latin teacher. And I also teach Art History and dally in the art department to the occasional chagrin of my chairman.

I spent most of my time in college translating Plato and Homer and reading about archaeological digs.

I am a firm proponent of the Liberal Arts.

In fact, I think a Liberal Arts education should be the first qualification for any content teacher in America.

Furthermore, I understand and appreciate Ed Schools -- even when I criticize them. I am the product of an M.S.Ed. program and the tutelage of some excellent professors in GT and Reading certificate programs.

I'm not trying to beat your brains in about this Ed Tech stuff because I'm some geeky square with a chip on my shoulder or a means to capitalize on this stuff; I'm trying to express to you my experience and my admittedly limited insights because I really see this as something that is going to have a direct impact on the future of our children. And that's why I became a teacher to begin with.

So help us out, or get out of the way. But don't just stand there over-analyzing and complaining and pretending this Digital Age is not happening. No one is taking away your paper and pencils; no one is gonna force you to learn HTML. We just want to help you get up to speed and we want you to continue helping our kids. Because the future for my children and your children and all of our children depends upon us doing the right thing in this moment.

Lastly, as I've said before: educational technology is not one of the various useless educational theories that have been recycled again and again in endless classrooms and faculty development meetings over the last thirty-odd years. Rather, educational technology is the way in which the education experience will exist within the broader context of the Digital Age. That age is upon us. We don't have a choice in the matter.

So, Mimeograph Man, think about it this way: when your grandchildren sit on your knee and ask you what you did to help your students during the Great Digital Revolution, you won't have to tell them you were busy complaining in the faculty lounge.

More on Access and Connectivity

Reader Ann helping us keep our eye on the ball:

What about the kids who have to sell all they own to buy food? Who can't wander the neighborhood or hike to the library because they work all day or take care of relatives? Some kids have the motivation, but their first allegiance is to the immediate needs of their families. Spending all day at the library or internet cafe is a luxury. The digital divide goes into the root of what we believe about the responsibilities of our society. It isn't just about giving everyone laptops (although I would take that, too!) but looking at quality of life issues. Maslow's hierarchy...we want students to be thoughtful and innovative, lets make sure they have sufficient health care and real living wages...

Authentic Learning

A high-school Freshman writes:

I'm a little excited, because today I just requested from the Pixton guy that he make a marble column, because it would help our class with Latin, and he did it. He sent me a confirmation and there is now a column object that we can use! That will help make it look more like Rome!

Communication. Responsiveness. Vision. Creating the future. Filling the needs of the present. Community. This is authentic learning in the 21st century.

More on connectivity / access...

A reader writes:

As we are planning on going one-to-one this year, we have discussed this issue as not all of our students have internet access. Students should have the opportunity in class to download the information they need and use the laptops at home for the applications and working with the information. As I am very close to paperless right now and my students cannot yet take their laptops home, sometimes you just need to be really flexible.

Grants vs. Rights

Concerning my post on the failure of the Stim to effectively address Ed Tech, a reader writes:

More than likely, the money is not set to be a small lump sum to each school; rather, the money will likely be set up to fund grants. Hopefully the challenge grants fund some nice proposals that can help to improve schools all around the country.

Let's talk reality: the Ed Tech budget was slashed. Had the originally proposed budget been accepted on Capitol Hill, we might have been able to put Web 2.0 technology in almost every seat in every classroom in almost every public school in this country.

Mobile Wi-Fi PDAs for each kid hooked into desktop monitors. Each preloaded with educational Web 2.0 apps. Every public school kid in this country connected to the Web. Internet access as a civil right. That's what we've missed out on.

With all due respect for the reader's position, I don't want 'nice proposals for challenge grants'. I want access for all. Internet access as a civil right. Now.

Good luck with the grant writing.

Access and Community

Reader Knaus on Snow Days:

Great cartoon. Raises lots of questions though. Do all your students have computer and internet access at home?

We're a 1:1 computing school, so I do have the benefit of knowing that at least all of my students have a computer.

With regard to access, I see this as no different than when I was a kid growing up in Baltimore and our teacher gave us a 'video-project'. My family certainly didn't have a video camera and neither did many of my friends. But, there were always a few kids in each class whose families owned one, and so we'd get together and do projects together. Making the best of what you have goes a long way.

So whether it's everybody going over to Billy's house one afternoon to do a school project online, or whether it's meeting up at the public library to use the Internet, the means are there.

The rest is motivation. And I see, through ongoing and authentic use of the Internet in the classroom, something related to that coming through: more of a sense of community among the members of the class.

And that is why I see blogs as having such potential for great change in education: because they make the students responsible both to themselves and to the community. They put the student in a place where his or her work can be seen by whomever you give access to (including parents, administrators, other students, fellow teachers of the student...) and, more importantly, they create a situation where the community only benefits through the sustained participation of each individual in the class. Motivated by a skillful teacher, the student develops a real sense of responsibility towards their blog. It becomes a public face of their educational experience. It becomes an identity thing.

By and large, I see students willing to step up to this challenge. And they will meet together to overcome individual technological deficiencies. They will rendezvous at the library to sustain their part in this community. They will take responsibility for their work if they believe that it actually means something to the larger community.

Sounds like I'm getting ready to throw down some ideas combining blogging with project-based-learning, doesn't it? (All in due time...)

With regard to their own educations, the sense of personal responsibility and self-direction is what is fundamentally at the heart of a sustained and motivational community. It all feeds itself. It's the best of the 'Net in microcosm. And I'd argue it's the way in which individuals and communities will grow in the 21st century.

Big Brother in Class

Reader Ann on Big Brother in the Classroom:

I also use a big brother program-that is what I call it in class. I was so excited when I got it that I had a lot of fun taking over student's computers and sending them funny notes. Now it is a big joke in class. I made it clear to everyone that I could see what they were doing and keep track of it, and this became part of the larger conversation about the internet and privacy. I have many students that use myspace and youtube and don't think about what material they are putting out there to the public, so it becomes very valuable to discuss the idea of "time and place".

My students use email to turn in work and access their google accounts, so they are on it. That is okay with me. I feel the same way about cell phones--I am not going to put the effort into banning them because I know it is futile, and that doesn't help students navigate the rest of the world. So I focus on etiquette and responsibility. I don't want to police my students, I want them to think about what they are doing and make wise choices. So far, so good. I have more problems of kids shopping for shoes during class then inappropriate emails.

This really does turn into a life-lesson about privacy on the net. In myriad ways, everything we do -- particularly with Web 2.0 apps -- becomes an issue of privacy. In a way, though, I think the Internet may be forcing us into a broader analysis of just what 'privacy' means; and I think -- in the sense that this conversation can direct the future of Internet culture -- that this is good for culture in general.

TeachPaperless: Snow Days

It is time...

...for you to join Classroom 2.0!

It's a great social networking site dedicated to teachers who are using Web 2.0 and collaborative technologies in the classroom.

Drop by my page when you get there and leave a comment!

Keeping on top of Stimulus / Education News

Keep on top of the ways in which the Stim will effect your school at: Schools and the Stimulus from Ed Week.

Thinking about the 'Doomed Pedagogical Fad'

Ken Kay is on the ASCD blog today, so inevitably, a topic of discussion is Jay Mathews' January Washington Post piece on the 'doomed fad' of teaching 21st century skills.

Webblog-ed had an eloquent response to the column back when it came out. I don't think I can add much to his critique. Though I've found it sort of astounding over the last two months -- as the original piece has made the rounds on the web -- that Mathews would never have considered the irony in writing an article critical of 21st century skills that requires those same skills to deconstruct it.

Hundreds of comments have been filed on this piece. Is Mr. Mathews really still wondering if people understand how to use the Internet?

When Mathews nearly brags concerning his own short-career as a student in a college science class that:

My final exam would be applauded today by promoters of 21st-century skills. We had to plot a course on a Boston Harbor cruise ship, strategizing, analyzing, collaborating. I don't recall understanding any of what was going on, but I turned something in. As I expected, I got a good grade and a bachelor's degree, despite learning no science.

...he demonstrates that he has no idea of what 21st century skills are.

Plotting a course on a cruise ship via pen and paper back in the Dark Ages when Mr. Mathews was in college doesn't qualify as a '21st century skill'. Mathews' admission that he 'didn't recall any of what was going on, yet turned something in anyway' seems more representative of the filing of this piece of reactive schlock in the Washington Post than it does of a bygone take-home test.

I guess Mr. Mathews did learn something in that class.

Mathews says that he's 'nervous whenever I hear of some brilliant new teaching method that is going to sweep our students into a new century'. Well, Jay, it's not the teaching method that's sweeping our students into a new century -- it's our teaching methods that are now playing catch-up to where our new century has already swept our students.

To top it all off, Mathews ends with the tired trope that:

In our poorest neighborhoods, we still have some of our weakest teachers, either too inexperienced to handle methods like modeling instruction or too cynical to consider 21st-century skills anything more than another doomed fad. There might be a way to turn them around, but if there isn't, instead of engaged and inspired students, we will have just one more big waste of time.

All the more reason to get authentic 21st century learning into our classrooms. Because it's not gonna be Jay Mathews who saves those poor neighborhoods, it's gonna be the best and brightest of our creatively skilled and locally/globally connected 21st century students.

And they're gonna need skills.

Practical Advice on Limiting Emailing/IMs During Class

A reader recently emailed me concerning a situation regarding a student caught emailing during class. Turns out the student and several others were engaged in a rather, um, volatile discussion concerning a few other students; there was much crudity and what's to be expected in such teenaged converbalizations. In short, the teacher who wrote to me was distressed and feels taken advantage of by the students.

A similar thing happened in one of my classes early in my paperless days. I would say that it's probably the most common problem a paperless teacher will face. So here's some first-hand advice based on my experience.

First things first: you have to stop the behavior. I collected the offending emails in my class via a tried and true method: SynchronEyes and a friendly in-house IT guy. Then, one morning, without announcing what I was going to do, I projected the offensive emails (names blocked out) onto my wall. When the students arrived, I was nowhere to be found and my students entered a dark room lit only by the glow of the vitriolic digital dispatches.

By the time I decided to enter, the room had fallen into complete silence. And, not saying a word about it, I flipped the screen to the day's lesson and began.

And I've not had a problem since.

Second, in terms of prevention, SynchronEyes doesn't lie. In the same way that you are liable to be at your best behavior in a court of law, likewise watcher-programs like SynchronEyes tend to keep folks on a short digital leash. That said, one of the downsides of the program is that it may bear too much of a 'Big Brother' feel unto your class. There are times when -- if you are really going to get the students to think outside the box -- you are going to have to allow them the courtesy of unmonitored access. I really believe this. But unmonitored access is something earned; it is not an assumption in my classroom.

And this comes down to a matter of respect and responsibility both on behalf of the student and the teacher. I tend to run my classroom on the basis of earned respect; that doesn't change just because we're online.

So, in general, I prefer the time-honored tradition of "hands-up". In the same way that this has worked for countless generations of teachers, probably going back to Plato catching Aristotle passing notes, it works for 1:1 computing teachers as well.

You are going to have to find out what works for you. And trust goes a long way -- perhaps even further should it be broken. But don't be disheartened; rather, this sort of thing is just one more aspect of teaching students how to live in the 21st century.

Perhaps my kids are not the only ones...

... addicted to Pixton.

A reader writes:

I find Pixton to be, not a substitute for drawing, but a complement to it. To a serious artist, it is a quick way to try out scenes and poses (and color combinations), and it stimulates creativity. I have not yet found Pixton's limits.

I like the idea here that it "stimulates creativity". In other words, although it could be, Pixton is not in and of itself necessarily the end-product. Like the best aspects of Web 2.0 technology -- as well as the best practices for the classroom -- it is open, flexible, and ongoing. It's an ideal brainstorming tool; and in a sense, to use it is to take part in a visual brainstorming exercise.