Battle Scars or What Being Connected Means to Me

It is October, which (to me) is traditionally a month of burnout.

In three days, I have inventoried 1110 chromebooks by hand. Thankfully, there was a scanner and most of the barcodes were read by the scanner. And thankfully, I only had to inventory about 400 by myself. Over 700 of those chromebooks were inventoried in a tag-team effort with our elementary math specialist, Ruth.

She really is dear to me. Ruth will be retiring November 1. I have worked in the same department with her for over a year. She has been teaching longer than I have been alive. While scanning the chromebooks at two of our schools, we talked about life, education, and everything in between. She loves her grandkids. She is looking forward to retirement. She shared stories of when she first started teaching. We both enjoyed meeting the teachers and seeing the students during the inventory process. Being in the schools reminds us why we're doing what we're doing and why we love doing what we're doing.

Let me just tell you that 700 chromebooks plugged in carts with zip ties can wage war on your arms. Ruth and I both have scratches from inventorying the chromebooks. We put our blood, sweat and tears into those fixed assets. I am still applying Neosporin.

As educators, we lose blood, sweat and tears every day on the battlefield of education. It is a battle. Most everything in life is. Some days you advance. Some days you retreat. Many days you might not be able to tell where you stand. Yet you are still standing.

A talk I was listening to described having two methods of attack in strategic planning - an air war and a ground war. For me, twitter is my air war. I can send for help, ask questions, make funny comments, and encourage others via twitter. My ground war is waged by my network of colleagues and coworkers in my city, state and region. I view my role as encouraging other people in this battle as well as equipping them as I can.

For example, in a battle on Wednesday, I was able to discuss a tech problem with three colleagues in an office while simultaneously tweeting with three others in Texas, Idaho, and Pennsylvania for help. Together, via twitter and in person, we were able to solve the problem in ten minutes. That's what being connected means to me - having a network of like-minded people who will fight with me.

This month is Connected Educator Month. Being connected to me is about your allies in battle, whether on the air or on the ground. The end result of our battle is the betterment of learning. Don't ever lose sight of that.

So call in reinforcements. Request assistance. Celebrate victories. Bear those scars proudly. The scars reflect what we've been through, how we've grown and where we've been. And share the war stories. We want to hear them. We must share them. We grow from listening to them and talking through them.

In conclusion, I leave you with one of the four best motivational speeches before a great battle. Here's President Thomas J. Whitmore to fire you up for the battle at hand!

Melinda Sears is the Title I Instructional Technology Coordinator for the Tuscaloosa City Schools.  Check out her website or connect with her via Twitter.  

TCS Tweet-In

Last night a group of TCS teachers met at the central office for a face-to-face discussion of Twitter and participation in the evening's scheduled #edchat, a discussion that takes place via Twitter twice every Tuesday and brings together educators from all over.

It seemed appropriate that the night's chat topic was the popularity of Edcamps, grassroots professional development gatherings that offer an alternative to traditional professional development.  Both allow participants to re-think how their professional learning can and should look.

The best part of the evening was the conversation among participants as the chat wound down.  Moving forward from a nuts-and-bolts how-to of Twitter, we dug into the why.  And, more broadly, we discussed what it takes for PD experiences to be truly meaningful for educators.  Some of the best nuggets of the night are these:

• We are learners first.  We have to serve as models in that capacity for our kids.
• Everyone brings to the table different experiences with tech and with teaching.  In our conversations and our professional learning, we must value the perspectives that all participants have to offer.
• We can be catalysts for powerful, positive change in our schools.  It's never been easier to share what we know.

Considering the evening's festivities were in celebration of Connected Educator Month, I think those take-aways are evidence of time well-spent.

Laren Hammonds is an 8th grade English teacher at Rock Quarry Middle School.  She's @_clayr_ on Twitter and blogs about her classroom experiences at Game to Learn. 

Weekend Links

In celebration of Connected Educator Month, we're kicking off a new feature on the blog.  Each weekend we'll post a set of links, bringing some of our favorite ideas, handiest resources, and most thought-provoking discussions straight to you.

There are tons of excellent blogs out there, which can be both awesome and overwhelming.  Check in here each week for a thoughtfully curated list that brings you the best of the best.

Like what you see when you visit a link?  Leave the blogger a comment sharing your thoughts, connect with them on Twitter, or subscribe to their site using a news reader like Feedly.

The Digital Networked Textbook: Is It Any Different by Dan Meyer

Ignore the Advice by John Spencer

United Streaming and Opposing Views via iPaddiction

Ideas to Strengthen Your Readers Workshop by Pernille Ripp

Automate All the Things: How to Get Started with IFTTT by Taylor Hatmaker for ReadWriteWeb

Laren Hammonds is an 8th grade English teacher at Rock Quarry Middle School.  She's @_clayr_ on Twitter and blogs about her classroom experiences at Game to Learn. 

Use Online Curators to Find Great Content

When choosing content for my class to read, watch, and listen to, I've found it useful to think of myself as a curator. A great curator finds the most interesting and relevant material for a specific event and works to present it in a way that engages an audience. As teachers, we effectively curate multiple events for unique audiences five days a week for an entire school year. Textbooks are crucial, but we need more.

Fortunately, the vast amount of free educational material available on the Internet has made classroom curation much easier. Unfortunately, however, the sheer amount of content available can feel so overwhelming that you just might miss that one clip, infographic, chart, or lecture that will both engage your students and meet their specific educational needs.

This is where online education curators come in, and among them Open Culture reigns supreme. Open Culture touts itself as "The best free cultural & educational media on the web," and the claim is not far off. The first time you visit the site, look at the "Essentials" section in the upper right and spend a while exploring. Regardless of what you teach, chances are that the diligent, thoughtful folks at Open Culture have at some point found one or more free online resources that can take your lessons to the next level. Once you manage to pull yourself away from the Essential collections, check the post tags further down the page to narrow your search (I recommend the iPad tag, which I have only scratched the surface on.)

So the next time you fire up your browser to search for a video explaining how people spoke in Shakespeare's time, an infographic about relationships between scientific processes, an interactive timeline for understanding important historical events, or examples of how innovators use math to change the world every single day, don't go it alone; check out a curator!

Christopher Watson teaches 8th grade language arts at Eastwood Middle School.  Connect with him on Twitter, where he goes by @schoolpivot, or check out his blog.

I've Got a Cart Full of Chromebooks, Part 3: Sharing & Collaborating with Google Drive

At this year's parent open house, lots of moms and dads asked me questions about supplies and notebook setup: Does my son need a 3-ring binder?  How many inches?  What tab labels should my daughter write on her dividers?

The truth is, once we're fully running with our Google accounts and have daily access to our Chromebooks, there might not be enough paper floating around in our classrooms to warrant much fuss about these issues.  Instead, we can set up digital notebooks in Google Drive for organizing all (or almost all) of the work students do each day.

Why Google Drive?
Let's check out the SAMR model for the bigger picture of what we want to do with tech in our classrooms.

If we are to take advantage of what a digital transformation has to offer, then we must move beyond doing traditional work in a digital format.  Additionally, we must offer a more substantial rationale for our tech choices than "It's more fun/engaging for the kids."  The key word is transformation: What learning experiences can we offer our students that we could never pull off without the tech?

I am not suggesting here that everything we do must hit the Redefinition level.  However, we should strive to keep the image above in mind and push ourselves to develop lessons that leverage technology to arm our students with the critical thinking and collaboration skills that members of an active, thoughtful citizenry need.

For that reason, Google Drive is the workhorse of my classroom.  It allows my students to collaborate with one another asynchronously and in real-time, and it gives them a space for working efficiently with collaborators throughout the world, as well.  Drive makes for easy and constant revision and iteration, and I can provide more timely, more human feedback via text and voice comments.  Apps that hook into Drive offer opportunities for multimedia projects, remixes, and mash-ups, and housing their products in a digital space makes the jump to publication much more manageable.

But what about Edmodo?
When I decided to make the switch to housing most of my students' work in Drive, one of the biggest questions I wanted to answer for myself was "What does this offer that Edmodo doesn't?"  The kids know Edmodo and tend to be proficient in using it.  Widespread use throughout our school and system has made parents comfortable with it, as well.  However, Edmodo doesn't offer much to support student collaboration, nor does it play well with other tools.  So while I do use Edmodo still for quick notifications and occasional posting of resources, Drive tends to meet our current needs in ways that Edmodo does not.

How do you set it up?
For our general purposes, I start my students out with two folders:

• a personal class folder they can edit, in which they create their assignments (in our class, we call it their writer's notebook) - each student shares this with me so that we can communicate about their work throughout the year
• a  view-only folder in which I'll place documents they need for their work - students have access to this folder but cannot make changes to documents in it

Step 1 is to make that view-only folder, which I create myself, naming it "[Class Name] Handouts" or some other informative label.  Then I share it with students using the Can View setting.  Students will be able to view all documents I place in this folder but will not be able to change or move them, making it an easy place to deliver electronic handouts.  

See the video below created by the ed tech facilitator for Norfolk Public Schools to guide you through this process with both teacher and student views.  The video also demonstrates how students can make a copy of a document if they do need to place it in their own folder and edit it (i.e.lab reports, templates, etc).

Step 2 requires the students to create the class folders that will house their work for the year.  They make these, naming them using criteria I specify, then they share it with me at my email address, giving me Can Edit rights.  Once they've completed this step, I'll have access to every document they place in the folder.  I can drop in digitally as they work and offer feedback or assess a class's progress without lugging around stacks of notebooks.

Here's a video walk-through of Step 2 from the student perspective.  Please note that, for consistency's sake, you may want to develop folder naming protocol at the school-, grade-, or team-level.

For those who are a little more comfortable with Google tools, there are ways to automate folder setup using Google templates and scripts.  If you're interested in learning more, check out the instructions here.  

Once your folders are up and running, you've got a powerful system for managing student work and a space in which students can collaborate with others both within your building and beyond.  What ideas do you have for using shared folders in Google Drive?  Please share your thoughts in the comments below. 

Check out the first two posts in this series:
Part 1: I've Got a Cart Full of Chromebooks. Now What?
Part 2: HP Pavilion 14 Tour

Laren Hammonds is an 8th grade English teacher at Rock Quarry Middle School.  She's @_clayr_ on Twitter and blogs about her classroom experiences at Game to Learn. 

Work Orders and You

When you come across a computer problem and you need some help, what’s the first thing you do? No, I mean after you swear at it and sigh in disgust. Right, you put in a work order! That’s the signal flare in the sky that tells us you need us to come and take a look at something that isn’t working.

It’s really more than that, though.

Work orders are the way that you can communicate with us about problems that you’re having. When you put in a work order, the more you can tell us, the faster we can get it fixed. I’ve had some experience in elementary schools being referred to as “the computer doctor,” and that’s actually a really good way to look at it.

When you go to the doctor and they ask you what’s wrong, you don’t just say “It hurts.” You tell them what hurts, when it started, what aggravates it, what you’ve done on your own to try to alleviate the pain, any history you may have… all manner of things, right? So sticking with the medical metaphor, let me give you an example.

“I can’t log in.”

Okay, to what? What error message are you getting? Are you on a desktop, laptop, tablet, phone, Chromebook? Novell? iNow? Groupwise? Those are all important details that could help us get you back up and running much faster if we had them.

“I can’t log in to Groupwise. It’s prompting me for a password, but I’ve never had to enter one at school before. None of the passwords I know will work.”

Just from those three sentences, I know that you’re logged in “Computer Only” and that nothing’s going to work quite right for you. That little bit of extra info was all I needed to diagnose exactly what your problem is, and I can immediately respond in the work order and tell you how to fix it, which, for the record, is to log out, click on the “Log in to Novell Network” link, and log back in.

Don’t be afraid to put too much in there. There’s no character limit, and everything helps. Something that you might not think matters might be the exact thing we need to diagnose the problem and get you fixed. Like they used to say on those GI Joe PSAs that ran when I was a kid, “Knowing is half the battle!”

Erik Hammonds is a computer tech for the Tuscaloosa City Schools.

Using Aurasma to illustrate IB learning skills

Our school has launched a Design/Technology course for all students in grades 6-8 this semester in order to meet the requirements for our IB authorization visit, which is approaching quickly (on October 7th and 8th, to be exact).  After learning just a tiny bit about augmented reality and the application, Aurasma, from Robert Mayben this summer at the Tuscaloosa Tech Meet, I discussed using this tool for our authorization visit with the faculty at TMS-M.  I made my own simple aura on my iPhone,  and taped the trigger picture up on the wall. I also used Robert Mayben's trigger pictures/auras to demonstrate the app's potential as a learning tool for our students.  Then, I asked the teachers to download Aurasma on their devices and to follow my channel, TMSM and Robert Mayben's channel.  They walked around the faculty meeting area and hallway, pointing their devices at my makeshift aura "gallery," oohing and ahhhing.... Remember the first time you experienced Aurasma?  As you can imagine, the faculty went nuts, thinking of all the possibilities for the projects that they already do in their classrooms.

At first glance, Aurasma appears to be a super-cool, nifty way to engage students in any subject matter -- and it is.  But educators must be mindful of the extent of the planning and design of their projects when they implement Aurasma as a tech tool. As a previous post on this blog cautions, we must think of the learning outcomes first before we sling a new application at the students and tell them to just "do it" and make it look nice.  What is it, really, that we want the students to come away with at the end of the tech-embedded project?  That's why I was encouraged when the veteran faculty members began to brainstorm ways that Aurasma could enhance the content and learning objectives of their successful projects from years before.  I was also encouraged when the conversation steered in the direction of how we could use the app for the approaching authorization visit from the IB team.  "Why don't we use Aurasma as a touring tool," they asked, "to show what the kids know about IB learning skills?" GREAT IDEA. And so, our first purposeful project in the new Design/Technology class was born.

Lucky for us, the IB course in technology employs the design cycle as the guiding set of objectives and assessment criteria for every project we do.  Let me explain.  The design cycle has six components: investigate, design, plan, create, evaluate, and attitudes in technology.  If executed to fidelity, working with students in guiding them through all six of these components will produce a sound, cohesive product.  For more information on our course, please visit the IB Programme page on the TMSM website.  The Technology Course item is listed on the right side of the IB page.  Our course is also listed on Moodle.  The subject matter/content of our auras, the IB Approaches to Learning skills, are posted on our website and on Moodle as well.  When we are finished with our learning skills auras, they will be posted on our hallway for all visitors to enjoy.

Our purpose and main goal?  If students are given the opportunity to create something by doing (planning, scripting, staging, recording, editing the trigger pictures and overlays), they will view these learning skills as skills for life success. We hope to have them completed by October 4th, so feel free to stop by the Magnet and view our efforts!


Lavanda Wagenheim is the IB Coordinator for the Tuscaloosa Magnet School - Middle.  Connect with her on Twitter, where her handle is @ELavanda.