Category: Uncategorized

You can imagine my surprise at the coincidence that took place this morning when my Google Reader feed displayed the following from Frank Lloyd Wright as one of my quotes of the day:

Turn the world on its side and everything loose will land in Los Angeles.

I’m sitting in the Tampa International Airport waiting to depart for Los Angeles. I take off at 6:55 and get in at 9:17. With the time difference, that’s what, a 9-hour flight?

I’m off to Long Beach, CA again for a meet up with my fellow Freedom Writers Teachers. I know I went almost 26 years without meeting many of these people. Still, waiting from October until now to see everyone again seems like much too long. I can’t wiat to hear what everyone has been doing with their students this year. The successes will be amazing, I’m sure.

What’s interesting to contemplate is the difference in my mood this go ’round. My first trip was filled with excitement about meeting Erin and the Freedom Writers. While I’m still incredibly excited this time. I think that excitement is incredibly rivaled by the anticipation of seeing friends.

All right, the lady is starting the boarding process. I suppose I should post and get ready to take off.

I wonder what the movie will be.

More later.

technorati tags:gruwell, freedomwriters, phoenixacad, teaching, english, LongBeach

This past weekend was an interesting one.
My little sister Rachel was in town for her spring break. Always trying to be the cool big brother, I was able to get tickets to the Opening Night Gala for the Sarasota Film Festival. As parties, nay, events go in Sarasota, this one’s a biggie.
One might imagine that, for a young lady of 17, the food, the people, the music, the fancy clothes would all be the memorable parts of the evening. Not so.
In fact, they were not the memorable parts of the evening for me either.
One unassuming man in a full tuxedo made the night.
His name is Edgar Mitchell. Sadly, it was not a name I knew before Friday night.
He is one of 12 men in the history of our planet to walk on the surface of the moon. 1 of 12!
For those of you familiar with film or photos of an astronaut throwing a javelin on the surface of the moon, that was Mitchell.
Now, here’s the thing, the thing that really stuck – he gets it.
Listening to Mitchell speak to some VIPs at the party, I heard him mention the need to improve education in America. The mention of such a topic by anyone will catch my ear, much to my friends’ chagrin.
When the VIPs moved on, I leaned in to Mitchell and said, “Do you mind if I ask you a question that doesn’t have to do with the moon?”
“Not at all,” he replied.
“I heard you say you thought more needed to be done with education. Can you explain that a little?”
Well, we were off. He gets it. He really does. Not often do I meet anyone outside of education who truly understands the need to change the way we do business. Mitchell did. “What we’re doing, the way we’re teaching these kids, it’s criminal. And you know I’m right.”
He is right.
Our time together was Swiss cheesy due to Mitchell’s frequent calls to be interviewed or meet VIPs, but here’s the short list of where we need to be looking:

• creativity
• problem solving
• throwing away the old model
• science

I made sure to get his card and will certainly be following up on our discussion in hopes of having this actual American pioneer come and share his experiences and thoughts with our teachers and students.
Let’s hope it doesn’t take the same kind of perspective to which Mitchell was privy before other outsiders start to see what’s important in education.

My weekly e-blast from the National Council of Teachers of English included this link to a story appearing in the Sacramento Bee detailing the use of technologies in high school English classrooms.

Dylon Holcomb, the teacher on whom the article centers is what Doug Reeves would call a “node” perhaps a “super node.” He’s a go-to guy in his district because it sounds as though he’s learning these technologies as he goes and collecting the ones he needs most.

Again, this is an open source approach to education. Holcomb is using the tools he needs to augment learning in his classroom and make material more accessible.

…[U]sing the Internet in the classroom should be done in moderation and not replace traditional reading from books or writing short essays by hand, Holcomb said.

“It’s a double-edged sword because I believe in the old-fashioned way, too,” he said.

This is where Holcomb and I diverge slightly. While I’m nowhere near the point where I feel comfortable throwing out all printed literature, I do look forward to the day when all of my students’ writing is electronic. The fact that my classroom and Holcomb’s classroom are not in complete pedagogical syncopation does not mean that his or mine is any the lesser for it.

This is an initial frustration when introducing educators to new collaborative tools and Web 2.0. Many teachers, veteran or not, are apprehensive toward adopting an entire Web 2.0 cadre of tools. In talking with Mr. Francis and Ms. Holliman about adopting some new resources for their classroom, I was met with initial resistance. They thought they would have to eat the entire elephant in one bite.

That’s not how you eat an elephant.

Once we moved past the idea that the way they use these new tools and tactics in their classrooms had to be the same as the way I use them in my classroom, comfort began to set in.

I return to my argument for open source education. The mindset cannot be one of adopting a tool and doing what someone else did with it only in a different way. To truly utilize these resources, teachers have to acknowledge what came before and then realize the ownership involved.

We’re not talking about a 2.0 version of a textbook. We’re talking about a blank book in which information, communication and collaboration can be adapted, adopted and adjusted as learning progresses.

If we’re trying to push learning in a new direction and toward a new platform (and I truly feel that we are) we’ve got to leave old ways of thinking  behind.

technorati tags:education2.0, Holcomb, blogging, google, web2.0, classroom2.0, school2.0, opensource

School is full of frantic energy as of late. My brain’s certainly moving in every direction at once.

To top that all off, I’ve been keeping up with my feeds fairly fiendishly. This does not do much to calm the multi-directional thinking. One post from Dean Shareski that stuck in my head was actually about another post on Will Richardson’s blog.

Dean picked up on a phrase I’ve noticed Will using a few times since I began reading his blog “pushed me to think.” It’s a phrase, ironically, I hadn’t consciously used before picking it up from Will. The past two years, though, I’ve caught myself using the phrase in discussions with colleagues, when encouraging my students to find a new way around a problem and even when talking to my dad about the craziness intertwined in parenting my little brother.

Now, I’ve been pushing and pushed to think for as long as I can remember, but I cannot think of a time when I was as aware of my thinking, as reflective on my thinking as I am when interacting with texts and video and resources afforded me through web 2.0.

I say this all because I’ll be starting my Master’s work this June. It’s my first real formal return to studenthood since graduating.

This year, I’ve been learning in the manner I want my students to learn – I’ve been exploring, problem solving, information sharing, researching, and discussing. The worry is that entering an atmosphere where my learning is directed by a teacher, where I am not directing my field of inquiry will prove a frustrating task.

I did well in my first 18-year run at studenthood. A game existed in the traditional classroom which I was well-suited to play. I cannot say I learned as much as I should have, but I can definitely attest to succeeding in school. Success and learning were not necessarily closely linked. Success and completion, certainly.

My performance was aligned with expectations and that led to increased opportunities. I was rarely truly engaged, my studies rarely as rigorous as I could handle.

Since then, this past year especially, I’ve been directing my learning in the direction directions most interesting and important to me. I’ve been creating my own classroom 2.0. I worry that I won’t be able to revert to the earlier version. Imagine running Windows 3.1 after you’ve been working on XP.

Maybe, though, my resistence isn’t toward moving backwards, but to moving to any set structure. The learning I practice online, in Web 2.0 isn’t really XP, it’s open source. Through blogging and podcasting and the like the thoughts of people like David Warlick, Karl Fisch, and Paul Wikinson are open to me. I can pull from them the pieces that most motivate and intrigue me and then add my own pieces while crediting their sources.

I find the patches I need to bring continuity to my thinking and help my pedagogy run more smoothly.

This is the resistance I’ve felt to what is symbolized by the monikers of Web 2.0, School 2.0 and Classroom 2.0. My learning – the learning I want to engender in my students – is learning that is meshed together from what they need and seek and offer up.

The classroom in which I want to learn and teach is one undergoing constant upgrades and bound by no particular version. No proprietary rights exist to its content, but all educators are fairly acknowledged and credited for their contributions.

technorati tags:web2.0, opensource, warlick, classroom2.0, education, teaching

So, this trip has been a smathering of firsts where travel is concerned. For the first time, my luggage was lost and for the first time, I missed my flight.

It was an honest mistake, really. All week, I’ve been thinking that my first flight out of Springfield left around “noonish” (it’s a time). Turns out, that flight left around 8:19. I woke up and checked my itinerary around 7:50. My entire day’s been a game of catch up.

Luckily, I’m well into Wikinomics by Don Tapscott and Anthony Williams. The book appeals to me because it picks up where Convergence Culture left off, delving more deeply into the what Youtube and Myspace and Flickr and RSS and Wikipedia and and and…all mean.

I read the first chapter with this post from David Warlick in mind. I commented on the post and am coming to realize I’ve got more to say. I have to collect my thoughts first. I’ve had a nasty headache since Chicago, so thinking’s not going so well.

You’d think that would stop me from reading. Turns out it’s the falling asleep that stops me.

More later.

technorati tags:wikinomics, warlick, phoenixacad

There’s no television here at the homestead. Now, I’m fine with that. Still, to get a quick fix, I started watching clips of The Daily Show. Now, don’t get me wrong, I watch other shows and get my news from other sources. Still, I like to laugh. The movie above ties nicely to Ishmael Beah’s A Long Way Gone which I finished last night.

I found the book compelling and difficult to tear myself away from when other tasks required my attention. I think more to its credit was the fact that I also had to make a conscious decision to pick the book back up again after I’d been away from it for any time. Once, as I was sitting down to begin a new chapter, I actually said aloud to myself, “All right, I’m going to enter this world again.”

It speaks to Beah’s translation of the pain and inhuman acts he and other boy soldiers in Sierra Leon suffered during that country’s civil war. To pick up the book was to admit you were entering a world no one in reality would choose.

Interestingly, Michael Vasquez and Elizabeth Rubin have been writing back and forth on the book over at Slate. Their conversation has planted some interesting thoughts. I’m not sure what they’ll grow to become. Still, they germinate. I’m not sure where all of this is going except to say that I feel the need to do more, to educate more, to do more.

Karl Fisch posted today about the birth of a plan to move his Did You Know? presentation from viral pacivity to something that got the ball rolling toward moving the conversation of School 2.0 from minority to majority and perhaps to something beyond simply a conversation about pockets of success.

I’m all for it. Beyond that, though, is Karl’s post about how to effectively roll out the soon-to-be polished version of the presentation. It’s a planned convergence – consumers using producer tactics (let’s all acknowledge my active processing of Henry Jenkins and move on).

My thinking then becomes intertwined. While I agree the conversation about how learning and educating should be changing, more important global applications of these tactics are waiting in the wings. Imagine a similar approach to the one Karl suggests – only it’s applied to poverty or Darfur or hunger or joblessness.

How do you motivate? A stake, right? The thing is, there is everyday folk do have a stake in solving these problems, but they don’t have an urgency behind them. Imagine the Gates Foundation opening a challenge to the globe where they placed all of the important data and resources about a given global or national crisis on a page or wiki or whatever and then facilitated an open forum engaging experts and invested amatuers in solving the problem.

Think of the educational implications of such a challenge. A civics class selects a chunk of data and works collaboratively to analyze and contribute to the cause, an English class utilizes the information to write to governments and other non-civilian change catalysts urging their investigation or – better yet – asking what they can do to help.

Am I thinking too big? Have I said too much? I should pull back? Someone tell me they can see the vision.

More later.

technorati tags:DailyShow, SocialAction, SierraLeon, KarlFisch, Slate, convergence, School2.0, Gates, phoenixacad

I finished Henry Jenkins’ Convergence Culture while up in Chicago, and my brain is still cataloging the information. As usual, I read the book with pen in hand. The margins are full of notes and brackets. Lines and passages are underlined. Good stuff.

The biggest praise I have for the book is the fact I’ve had the chance to reference it in conversation at least 5 times since Gmail – Inboxfinishing it two days ago. It’s not that all of Jenkins’ ideas are necesarily unique. I found myself dazing through a few passages containing thoughts and notions with which I am already familiar or putting into practice. No, what struck me about the book was the way it, itself, acted a conduit for convergence of the ideas and examples Jenkins writes about.

In reading about the interweaving of storylines across media in the Matrix universe, I found myself hopping online mid-paragraph to download referenced movies and read more about storylines that had been missed. I couldn’t even read the book in isolation. Were it an e-Book on a PDA or the like, I would have been set.

One downfall of the tome is it’s lack of or passing attention paid to Myspace, Youtube and Wikipedia. This is not to mention RSS feeds and Skype. Were these tools not as priminant when Jenkins was writing in ’05-’06? The other possibility, of course, is that Jenkins chose not to include them for fear that they might overload what is a user-friendly introduction to the ideas of convergence and web 2.0.

Whatever the reason, Convergence Culture is a worthwhile read I’m sure to be talking and posting about for quite some time. I should give a shout out of thanks to Will Richardson for mentioning this book over the summer at the Building Learning Communities ’06 conference. It’s been on my shelf since I got back to Sarasota from Boston (I think I ordered it on Amazon just after his break-out session), but I haven’t had a chance to sit down and read until spring break.

I’m working on A Long Way Gone: Memoirs of a Boy Soldier by Ishmael Beah now. Wow, compelling reading. Truly. I heard about the book when Beah was on The Daily Show. Unfortunately, Beah’s account closely mirrors Dave Eggers’ fictionalized refugee of one of the Lot Boys of Sudan in What is the What? I say unfortunately because it shows how such similar atrocities took place while the world stood watching. I’m not claiming to have any solution or to know what we could have done, but something. Something. All right.

More later.

technorati tags:sudan, convergence, henryjenkins, wikipedia, web2.0, sierraleon, Beah

So, the guy who processed my claim of lost luggage after my 3-legged journey home last night told me Chicago (where I’d just been) was a mess after three days of poor visibility and subsequent delays.

Turns out that translates to mean, “Your bag’s with thousands of others and we’re not sure when we’re going to get it all sorted out.”

As I was heading to my mom’s, I wasn’t worried. I’ve remnants of clothes from as far back as high school stocked away in my closet. Nothing I ever planned to wear again, but no polyester leisure suits either.

The interesting part, the part that truly signals my nerd-dom is that I have been in my Christmas PJs the entire day. They were the first things I found when I opened the closet door and they suited me just fine. They also put me in the mindset to stay in bed and read all day – ALL DAY.

It’s been wonderful. As predicted, I finished The New Brain on my second flight and am not mid-way through Henry Jenkins’ Convergence Culture. Interesting stuff, I’m bracketing, underlining and annotating my way through it. I’ll have a more thoughtful post when I finish it tomorrow.

This is really not a thinking type post, but I didn’t want to get out of the habit. Now the world knows my luggage’s lost. Finally, empathy.

More later.

technorati tags:luggage, chicago, springbreak, Convergence

I’ve just touched down, completing leg 1 of 3 necessary to get me to my final spring break destination. The time on the plane from SRQ to Charlotte was spent re-immersing myself in The New Brain by Richard Restak. Nevermind the fact that I first started the book two years ago which likely means it’s no longer the new brain. (Brain fashions are so hard to follow, and I’ve never been very trendy.

I picked up the book after attending a professional development seminar offered by the district. The focus was on occupational therapy and incorporating brain science into pedagogy and classroom environment. It was one of those awakenings in teaching where I was struck by how little of what we do as teachers has to do with what scientists tell us about how the brain works.

A piece of the book talks about ADD and ADHD. Restak contends that we should stop looking at ADD and ADHD as disorders and begin thinking about them as new adaptive ways of brain functioning. While I can get on board with the thinking, I’m not sure how comfortable I am with referring to AD and ADH.

Restak also talks about the fallacy of multi-tasking. I know this isn’t new stuff at this point and that our brains are truly switching quickly between tasks. I get that. What Restak writes that interests me is the decline in efficiancy when the brain is asked to switch between these multiple tasks. We’re doing more, but not necessarily doing better. I’ve about 60 pages to go. I’m hoping to be on my next book by the end of leg 2. This is what spring break is all about…for teachers.

More later.

technorati tags:srq, charlotte, phoenixacad, restak, ADD, ADHD, springbreak

The bell ringing at the end of the day today marked the beginning of our spring break. I’ve got travel plans as usual and will board a plane tomorrow afternoon to start a much-needed vacation.
Still, I’ll miss my kids and my colleagues. I feel like I’m in a good place right now. As I last posted, that doesn’t happen much this time of year. It’s that golden quarter where you get to be a real teacher and not have to worry about whether or not what you’re teaching is preparing your students for a standardized test.
In fact, the social action unit I started this past week is one I’m convinced is preparing my students for a more important test – when faced with a chance to act on a social issue about which they feel strongly, will they participate?
First period was interesting today.
A reporter came to speak with 6 of my kids who have been participating in a pilot young screenwriters program through the Sarasota Film Festival. Beginning in January, these students have shown up Tuesday and Thursdays after school and crafted their ideas in to real and true screenplays.
What’s funny is the fact this group does not follow the traditional 20%/80% rule where 20% of your students account for 80% of your school organization membership. This is a cross of students with stories to tell.
Screenplays complete and the festival fast approaching, these students will soon be recognized for their work.
Today was a taste of that. They sat in my classroom and were asked questions about their creative process and whether or not they wanted to write another screenplay. The thing is – in the course of participating in this program – three of them have decided to write books. One of them has decided he would like to produce his screenplay as well as star in it.
It’s a connection that could not have been made in a traditional test-prep classroom. No 5-paragraph essay would fit these students’ visions. They worked without complaint, some taking their journals home to sculpt their ideas on their own time.
This is the spirit of learning I hope to foster and cultivate in all of my students in the Golden Quarter. I feel we’re well on our way.
Any week where you get to begin to explain communism to 8th graders, examine the meaning, causes and effects of bigotry, and hear students point out the much stronger case for non-violent vs. violent social action, it’s a good week to be a teacher.
More later.