1:1--A Semester In

Back in September, I wrote a blog post about my students' initial impressions of their 1:1 experience with the Chromebooks.  At the end of the semester, I asked them to consider how beneficial the Chromebook has been.  The views are very much the same as they were at Day 10.  Some specific comments:

     Writing papers on the chrome book is awesome because I can have my teacher comment on it. Also, I like being able to make a copy and annotate all over it.

     I have used my chromebook in this class every single day and I have been able to take notes and participate very well by using it.

I think it's hard for everyone to pay attention in a class when we are on our laptops. However, I do think it's easier to share ideas and do interesting projects with this kind of access to technology.

These three comments mirror my own experience of working with students. For most of them, it has become second nature to take out their Chromebooks once they are in their desks. Typically, by the time I have the weekly schedule projected onto the screen, most students have already logged onto it via Google Drive. The same goes for any docs I have shared in the Drive folder. Most often I try to have docs hyperlinked on the daily schedule; however, sometimes I forget. However, if they see the name of a doc listed on the schedule, they will go find it in our shared English folder. It's always a bit surprising to find people already logged in--like getting home and already finding guests milling about.  

As for "paying attention," that's the big question with which every teacher struggles.

When the devices are open, how do we keep students corralled? How do we know when they have wandered away from the ranch? Some schools have dealt with the attention/distraction issue by employing an LMS that gives teachers an omniscience and omnipotence over the devices in the room. Stray doggies grazing on their own pastures? Rope em and bring em back home.  

Theoretically, this may sound great. But it raises some questions: are we teaching students to be responsible users of technology?; are we instilling a sense of mindfulness when it comes to using devices; are we helping students to create a digital routine that allows them to leverage their devices in beneficial ways? Unfortunately, the answer to all of these questions is "no."

But here are two more comments that raise a different question for schools going 1:1:

English is basically the only class that I use my chromebook in, other than when we work on webassigns in physics.

I've really only used the chromebook in this class. It's been useful in here though.

Other English teachers and I have heard similar statements from many of our students. So, the question is this--should teachers be expected to make some minimum amount of use of the devices? There will always be teachers and classes that integrate technology more fully into their curriculum, with positive and negative results. But should there be a required baseline? If students used their devices more readily in all classes, would it help them to become more responsible and mindful?

1:1: How To Use Our Time

Two things have been on my mind lately: how incorporating devices into my classroom will affect the the way that my students and I learn together; and how to navigate some of the pitfalls that inevitably come with this environment.  The former fills me with excitement and hope.  The latter makes me anxious and uncertain, especially as I think about my goal of going paperless.

Here's my concern: I plan on making a good deal of what we read available as Google Docs, like excerpts from Emerson's "Self-Reliance."  If we are going to talk about these in class and I want them to take some notes on what he says, their Chromebooks will have to be open.  Once those Chromebooks are open, however, the internet with its multitude of choices and distractions, is a click away.  Of course, I understand that distractions have always abounded, even when students sat with hard copies in front of them. Just because they have a book or packet on their desks did not guarantee their attention, let alone thinking.  But the access to the internet represents a different kind of temptation.

So what can I do?  Here's a few possibilities:

Talk honestly with the kids about an online routine centered on mindfulness and responsibility.
Absolutely I plan on doing this and on describing my own efforts at using digital tools in useful ways. I've reflected on my routine on a Google doc here, which I will share.  When I've talked to students about a establishing a routine, they have responded positively. Still, they tend to see the choice to pay attention or not, whether online or off, as a personal one the student makes, over which the teacher has little control. Typically they are quick to point out that the student must deal with the consequences of deciding to not pay attention.  But their is a resigned tone to these conversations regarding how much a teacher can affect students' choices.  So I think I will need a something more proactive on my part.

One option would be to only allow a certain number of computers to be open at a time.  I've used this to varying to degrees of success.  On the positive side, it does make them aware of how they use their devices and instills a sense of shared responsibility.  The drawback, however, is that a student might want to access an article to contribute to the conversation, but be unable to because of a glut of users. Perhaps a way around this would be to have a revolving supervisory position responsible for noting which students wish to use devices to access articles and notes and can keep track of people's time spent online.  This would not be an "enforcement" position because I would not want students to feel that they need to police their peers.  Instead, the role could function almost like front of the house staff at a restaurant, noting reservations and moving people along.  Another problem might be that the person in this role would not be able to pay as much attention to the discussion or could miss some important points because the micromanagement of the class would probably demand quite a bit of attention.  Allowing people to share notes or ideas at the end of class could also help allay some students fears that they might have missed something due to not taking notes.

Another idea relates to 20% time.  Like many other educators, I find these methods very attractive for bringing genuine, self-directed learning into the classroom.  Thinking about how to integrate it, I am reminded of Stefan Sagmeister's Ted talk, "The Power of Time Off."  In the midst of explaining why he closes his design firm and embraces semi-annual sabbaticals, Sagmeister showed this graphic:

His point is that by the time we are done learning and working, we have little time and energy left to pursue our passions.  Instead of this common way of breaking up the stages of one's life, he proposes that we take this approach:

Sagmeister argues that we should break up the chunk of time typically saved for the end of one's life and integrate it throughout our most productive years.  He believes that this keeps one enthusiastic, engaged, and creative.  

Taking this as a cue, I wonder how students would respond to knowing that in each class period they would have a certain amount of free time to play on the Chromebook.  And by free time, I mean free time. They could use it to check in with  friends, explore some personally relevant idea or question, hit a website or two that they like, maybe even play a quick game: it would be their time.  The hope is that if they know they will have time for themselves, this could sharpen their focus and motivation during the time that I want them engaged on the curriculum.  When I think about how I work, I know there are times when I need short mental respites in between more intensive rounds of reading, writing, and thinking.  So instead of leaving these breaks for the end of class, they can look forward to them periodically during class.

Quite possibly I am delusional to think that providing this independent time will dissuade them from surfing when they should be otherwise engaged.  Then again, a conversation regarding all of these possibilities is worth having with the students.  Perhaps they have some suggestions that I have not considered.  That would be the best potentiality, for it would give us all a stake in negotiating how to make the classroom function as the powerful learning space I hope it can be.

Being Present: Tweeting the Talk

Recently I attended the Leyden 1:1 Symposium.  On two consecutive mornings I was fortunate enough to hear timely, thought-provoking keynotes: first by Chris Lehmann and then by George Couros. See:

@chrislehmann First Dewey and now Neil Postman: technology is transformative and schools should be so as well. #LHS1to1
— scott glass (@sglass771) August 1, 2013

@gcouros echoing @chrislehmann: schools that don't leverage creative possibilities of tech are irrelevant in Ss lives. #lhs1to1
— scott glass (@sglass771) August 2, 2013

That's right. During these engaging addresses, I was tweeting.  But not only that.  I was also recording ideas and questions in Evernote.  Is all of this really necessary?  Wouldn't it be better to have my device closed and give my uninterrupted attention to the person speaking?

These are questions that I must address because, as my school moves to a 1:1 environment with Chromebooks, the same behavior that I exhibited will be duplicated by my students. And I do not want to feel impulsive in my classroom management decisions, or like a hypocrite.

Some of my "Evernotes" while listening to Chris Lehmann 

I think explaining why Evernote is important is easier than defending my twitter use.  After all, with Evernote I was making sure to document ideas that I wanted to employ in my own classroom and questions I wanted to consider after the presentation.  Most teachers I know encourage and even require note-taking by students during presentations, whether by the teacher or peers.  I think this would fall under the category of "active listening."

So what about twitter?  I tweeted 9 times while listening to Lehmann, 4 of which were retweets. During George Couros's talk the following morning, I tweeted another 9 times, including 3 retweets. When wondering if this is necessary, I know there are people who would answer with an emphatic "No!"

I imagine one criticism running like this: chances are most of the people citing a particular twitter handle (@chrislehmann) and hashtag (#LHS1to1) at a specific time are doing so because they are all participating in a conference, presentation, or workshop together.  Since these people have their twitter streams open, they will be privy to a lot of the same tweets bouncing back and forth, like light off of a mirror.  So how does it benefit somebody in the audience to reread a dozen tweets restating what the speaker just said, only in a more concise (less powerful?) rendition?

Actually, I think there might be something to this.

As I tweeted and read tweets during the presentations, I was struck by the repetitive nature of many of the tweets.  It was also interesting to see the flurry of activity when Lehmann or Couros would say something perfectly packaged for twitter consumption.  Suddenly fingers all around me would be busy.

Perhaps it would be preferable to just listen.

What's more, some people might add, is that part of the reason one tweets is to see how others respond--to see how many times others will retweet and favorite one's work.  In this way, there is a kind of narcissism to tweeting in general, and during a talk in particular.  It's like a bunch of people continuously reminding other audience members that, "yes, this speaker is good, but I'm also here and I'm special, too."  Ok.  So maybe twitter skeptics wouldn't argue this.  (Although I think some would.) But, being relatively new to twitter, I know I have wondered if this drives my tweeting.

So as I offer some reasons for why I added twitter to my listening repertoire, let me start by owning that last reason.  There is a part of me that feels good about others embracing my thoughts about what we are hearing, just as I'm sure others feel good when they see me retweet and favorite their tweets.  Is this a bad thing?  To the degree that it does not become the sole reason for tweeting, I don't really think so.

But the important reasons that I tweet during a presentation, and would like to offer my students the opportunity, are as follows:

1. Working the 140.  Wow it can be exacting, especially when I know I need to save 8-15 of those characters for a handle and hashtag.  But I find the discipline required an invigorating challenge. As teachers, we are all concerned with our students' ability to be concise and clear.  Twitter communication demands these qualities.


2. Making it stick.  As a teacher, I know that one surefire way to understand something is to teach it. No other activity insures that one gets to know a subject inside and out.  While tweeting what somebody else stated is not exactly like teaching it, there is value, nevertheless, in crafting a tweet that captures and articulates an idea.  In those moments when shaping a tweet, I find myself thinking more deeply about the idea and the perfect wording.  Contrary to the criticisms that tweeting reinforces superficiality, it provides me with spurts of hyper-attention and mindfulness, even if these can be brief, which, hopefully, help in the process of moving the information beyond the short-term memory.  And even if the idea does not make it into more stable memory, it has been recorded and can be revisited.


3. Joining the conversation.  Yes, that phrase is probably cliche by now.  Yet, widespread use does not make it untrue.  In the midst of tweeting about Lehmann and Couros's keynotes, I had individuals agreeing with my tweets, refining my tweets, and raising questions and sharing links based on my tweets.  As I stated in #2, tweeting is not mired in superficiality.  But neither does it encourage passivity.  As with Evernote, tweeting requires me to be actively engaged and evaluating what I'm hearing.  Unlike Evernote, however, tweeting also allows good ideas to spread because


4. Tweeting is sharing.  In the hypothetical counter-argument above, I imagined that a talk's physical audience also represented the majority of the people reading the tweets about the talk. Maybe. However, I know from experience that people absent from the Leyden Symposium commented on and retweeted my tweets.  These fellow educators deserve to hear what leaders in the field have to say.  It reminds me of this tweet, from an educator I connected with at the Leyden Symposium

If you have an awesome lesson that no one else knows about, you aren't fulfilling your obligation to education. #lhs1to1 #moedchat
— Bob Dillon (@ideaguy42) August 2, 2013

Given these reasons for why I tweet during presentations, I cannot fathom withholding the experience from my students.  Even if it means there will be times when I or somebody else is speaking, and the class looks like this:

It's About Individual Vision

What do the following have in common: curating an online presence regarding a particular topic or question, using creative commons footage to craft a video in YouTube Editor, or considering how best to employ digital technology to explain to others why a question is important?  Besides the fact that students in my classes currently are engaged in one of these activities, all three pursuits require people to be active producers of content and exercise their voices.

Take for example the work students are completing with YouTube Editor.  As a class, they decided to each film at least three clips during a typical school day, upload the footage to their YouTube channels with the title DITL (Day in the Life), and designate them with creative commons attribution.  With 40+ clips uploaded, they then searched for each other's clips and used this raw footage to each construct their own 2 minute movie of a day at Glenbrook South High School.

Of course, the trick is to take some really disparate footage and make it work like a narrative so that somebody watching the movie understands that there is more going on then random shots of teenagers at school.

One student, for example, wanted to show his weariness as a 4th quarter senior.  As he said in a reflection, he "doesn't hate school."  He just feels done after four years.  To convey this, he decided to repeat certain clips--students listening to a teacher lecture, students walking in the building. He also decided that he did not want to add audio, but, instead, wanted to retain the natural sounds captured in the clips.  This way, he could provide a truer version of the atmosphere that contributes to his apathy.  Another senior wanted to focus on how random the school day is, even though most people have the opposite view.  With this in mind, she decided on the first and last clips, but then let chance guide her decisions for the intervening material and the order in which it would appear.

To achieve these narratives, the students had many decisions to make: which clips work best?; from these clips, what five seconds are most powerful (a limitation decided on by the class)?; what order best expresses a story?; if transitions are used, which ones should they be and why (same with filters)?; what kind of audio should be included?  Navigating these possibilities requires students to maintain a focus on what they are trying to achieve and how best to get there.

Regardless of how well these movie turns out, and they are, of course, amateur creations, one might ask, "what's the point?"  After all, the amount of content uploaded to YouTube is staggering, so chances are slim that these movies will be viewed by people outside of the class.  This criticism, however, misses the point of the activity.  "Will anybody see this?" It doesn't really matter. And it's the wrong question to ask.  The right question is "how important is the creative act for the individual's sense of self?"

As I catalogued above, these students are deeply involved in every decision regarding how this film is constructed.  It should be obvious that this kind of control breeds a sense of ownership.  Once one feels ownership, there is a greater probability that one wants to make something worthy of the time spent.  And this sense of worthiness most likely fosters a feeling of pride in making something that never
before existed in this particular way.

I can't stress this last point enough.  Amateur or not, when an individual creates, even if he or she is remixing or appropriating from other sources, the process and product can only come to life in relation to the autonomy and dedication of the individual. True, there is a collaborative aspect to this YouTube assignment: students in the class are all working from the same collection of raw footage, so there are bound to be certain clips that show up in multiple films.  But in the midst of the creative process, students do not consider themselves as part of a group making a movie.

Creating, whether one is an amateur or profesional, is an act of idiosyncratic expression.  In this respect, it is the opposite of a standardized approach to education.  There is no objective test and the right answer does not appear on a form.  Instead, the right answer is the one that makes students feel they have presented their vision in the most powerful, articulate way possible.