The Next Step

Schools are full of teachers and staff who work there for a variety of reasons.  I do not want to spend a lot of time listing all the motivations of people employed at a school but we know not all of us are here for the purest of reasons.

At the core of a great school, I would hope that most teachers are there as both a facilitator of learning but also, and arguably more importantly, as an advocate for kids.

It is so easy to get frustrated with the system, mad at administration and upset with despondent kids but its way too hard to operate that way.  It will just lead to burning out or taking that frustration out on the people who need our help the most, our students.

At the end of the semester there is always a lot of talk about gradebooks, and what kids deserve.  Do I round up to a D if they have a 57% or do I round up to an A if they have an 89.5%?   I know everybody has different philosophies about their gradebook and I respect that. Some people round up, some do not, some grade on more than just the points at the end of the semester, some only look at the raw data.

Kids make mistakes and aren’t always looking at their future.  One of our roles as an educator is to help them do that even when they don’t want to.  I think about that when I am bubbling in the scantron grades.

What can make our jobs even harder is that sometimes we have to advocate on behalf of students but at the detriment to our personal relationships with other teachers.  It is a very difficult aspect of our jobs, but then again, how much of this is ever very easy?

I am building several online courses on Web 2.0 tools for the state of Idaho’s teacher professional development program.  The first is a Blog101 workshop.  I would like to discuss PLN’s throughout the class, and I thought an interesting way to lead that discussion is if I could get some PLN participation with resources for the course.

These courses focus on teachers/students who have little to no experience with blogs, wiki’s, podcasts and 2nd Life.  As for right now, I want to send a call out for materials that only have to do with blogging.

Do you have links to favorite videos, pics, articles, research or blogs that you want to share?

Do you have screencasts, reviews of blogs, quizzes about blogs or other content that you would put in a blog unit if you were teaching one?

Please share by including the URL in the comments below or just tweet it to me.  @mrplough07

If you didn’t have to put A’s and F’s into your gradebook on a regular basis, what would you put in there instead?

Considering that I am pretty active in a Personal Learning Network that is based in Twitter and prides itself on education reform ideals, that my primary job is in a charter school which many associate with reform, and I work in a variety of online programs across the country which is a major face in the changing landscape of education, I often hear people talk about throwing out the gradebook…….but I haven’t really heard too many people talk about what would replace it.

One possibility I can imagine is a school with smaller class sizes where students are graded subjectively on projects or authentic assessment followed up with one-on-one discussions that would help the teacher assess learning as a way of getting rid of letter grades. However, what would we turn into the state or district auditors? Would I just not put in weekly grades and then add in a letter grade at the end of the quarter or semester to give to the powers that be? There are definitely ways around it but in every program I’ve ever worked in, we have to provide a grade based on the same exact A-F scale.

So, if we didn’t have to do that, what would your gradebook look like?

Can you imagine any foreseeable future where we don’t have letter grades that go to our departments, districts, or states?

Lets hear your vision of a gradebook.

Crossposted at TeacherStream, an online learning blog.

I recently responded to a prompt that asked why I decided to teach my subject area (Social Studies), and what I do to stay interested in the topic.  As I was contemplating an answer, I realized that most of my love for my content area comes from the new ways that I learn to teach it. My passion comes from finding new methods to reach kids and my vehicle is the content while using technology might be the spoiler, new rims and the cherry bomb muffler that I add on after market. I get to keep that interest fresh by building new online courses, revamping old ones, and reviewing those of others.  Out of that desire to engage kids came new passions like using Web 2.0 and best practices in online teaching that I now teach about as well, but the prompt explores my original content area only.

Below is my full response to the prompt, but what I’m really wondering is did you ever love your content and if so, how do you stay drawn to it?  If not, how do you stay motivated to teach it?

I was initially drawn to the field of Social Studies and specifically to the area of History because it helped me find my answer to “why?”  When I studied Math and Science in high school, it told me why certain things happened at biological and structural levels.  English helped me to better understand myself and better communicate that knowledge.  However, history and government courses were the only subjects that ever told me why people fought in wars, why religion was so dominant throughout the world,  why the national news broadcast the stories it did and why governments made decisions a certain way.  I have always been interested in the human side of the underrepresented, and social studies courses helped me learn more about humankind.

After years of struggling just to get to college, I finally pursued my dream of higher education and specifically teaching kids about the topics I cared most about, history and people.  A professor took me under his wing and mentored me for years and showed me how to dig deeper, ask harder questions, and gave me a true love of sharing information.  He also modeled what mentoring and working with at-risk youth looked like.  I did not get into education to talk about history but to help kids get through a terribly difficult time in their lives and pursue the one thing that can truly give us equal opportunity in this society, learning.  That professor helped me reach a new level of knowledge that I took with me to my first job, working at a blended learning high school with at-risk students.

About three years into teaching, I became quite enamored with education reform, best practices in online teaching, and building stronger relationships with my distance education students.  I began looking at social networking and education technology as tools to help me motivate and engage my students as well as to reach them at their level and in places they liked online.  As a result, I became heavily involved with Web 2.0 and education based social networks throughout the country.  That drive to make my courses better led to me constantly revamping my existing courses as well as developing new courses for my primary online high school.  With each revision and new course comes diving deeper into my content area in order to find better angles to hook students and incorporate what I was learning in my education communities.  As I fell more in love with this newer version of course development and facilitation, I expanded my passion for the study of people, which is all social studies is to me.  I went on to complete my Masters of Educational Technology and to teach for many different programs with kids and adults from around the country and with each new day in my jobs comes new ideas for my courses formed from my own deep love of learning.

Creative Commons image courtesy of Flickr user  doozzle

Getting Started with Twitter

5 Easy Steps

Twitter is a microblog in which you post status messages, links to research, websites or whatever you think is interesting with people in your own personal network. My Personal Learning Network (pln) is made up of edtech and online teachers from around the world.  It has been my greatest source of learning in the last two-plus years.  You can also use twitter to find out whats going on in places.  Take the Iran Election for example.  Average people will post real time messages about what is happening in Iran that you can track if you follow that person on Twitter or simply search #iranelection (all one word and include hashtag).  You can use Twitter to communicate with friends, family, or follow celebrities if that’s your thing.  Its amazing how much information you come across in a day that you will want to share if you know people are listening.

1.  Go to Twitter.com and sign up.  Fill out your profile and make sure you add a clear headline/description and picture.  Click here for an excellent blog post that will highlight the importance of getting off to a good start.

2.  Then go to Find People up on the top bar.  Search mrplough07 and when the results pop up click Follow next to my name.  You will notice I follow about 290 people or so.  Each of them is in the edtech field except for an occasional reporter or website owner.

3.  To begin building a list of people with edtech interests, go through some of the people I follow.  Click on their name and look at their profile page.  I always look to the short bio at the top right which is their personal description.  If they are edtech-change agent-type people, I follow them.

4.  After you click on a few people and follow them, then go to Home and watch your Twitter stream.  Messages that the people you follow will come on the page.  The more you follow the more messages and the faster they will pop up.  Click on links and begin learning.

5.  Let me know if you have any questions.  When you sign up to follow me I will get a notice.  Please send me an email (or direct message in Twitter) with your username so that I can tell my edtech friends to welcome you to the community.

note:  I originally wrote this in a lesson for my grad school class but decided to put up here in case anyone else could use it.

Twitter Avatar, Colored Green to Support People of Iran in their Fight for Democracy, for pics click here