Education Unfiltered

TOPIC: Innovation

In this episode, Hernesto and Danny talk about innovation in education and how this doesn’t necessarily spell T-E-C-H-N-O-L-O-G-Y. Innovation is when truly new ideas are tried out in the classroom (although you may often find that you are reinventing the wheel and calling it innovation).

Picture of Danny’s Hashtag Experiment

Slate Article: How can teacher with a chalkboard and algebra that are 40 to 50 years old? Are smart boards actually smart?

Nolan Bushnell (founder of Atari) Interview on Education.

Gruber’s Post on Apple v. Google

Commander Keen

What is a modem?

Goggle I/O

Google Play for Education

Danny could not find any reputable source for the “no chipped ponies” analogy.

We should always leave room for creativity, but we also need to help lead them towards the paths of creativity. As noted in A Wrinkle in Time, “Life, with its rules, its obligations, and its freedoms, is like a sonnet: You’re given the form, but you have to write the sonnet yourself. - Mrs. Whatsit” ― Madeleine L’Engle, A Wrinkle in Time” HT: The Incomparable

This quote from Nolan Bushnell’s book How to find the Next Steve Jobs? also seems to contradict his thoughts of Apple:

Around this time, Steve had started to regard the computer as the equivalent of a bicycle for our minds. “If you look at the fastest animals, human beings aren’t among them,” he said, “unless you give them a bicycle, and then they can win the race.” The city’s architecture fascinated him as well: He saw a simplicity and uniformity of design in the buildings— so many of them seven

Stone, Gene; Bushnell, Nolan. Finding the Next Steve Jobs: How to Find, Hire, Keep and Nurture Creative Talent (Kindle Locations 138–141). Net Minds Corporation. Kindle Edition.

Jeff Bliss Video

Socrative

Super Nintendo Entertainment System

Donkey Kong Country

The three questions of 1996:

Do you know how many times I failed at that game?

Do you know how many hours I played that game?

Do you know how much I invested in that game?

The three questions of education:

How do we get students to fail and still want to come back and play the game of education?

How do we get students to devote countless hours to our classes and look back on them fondly (the same way that I look back at that game) and not as some dreaded chore?

How do we get students to invest in the game?

Khan Academy

Flipped Classroom

Digital Aristotle

ASCD Article

Create ongoing projects

Integrate Technology

Replace homework with engaging activities

Eliminate rules and consequences

Involve students in evaluation

I later looked up the author and this is his model for education: “Results-only learning is a system that eliminates most methods teachers currently use. It involves embracing the final result of learning rather than focusing on traditional practices, such as homework, worksheets, tests, and grades.”"

Barnes, Mark. Role Reversal: Achieving Uncommonly Excellent Results in the Student-Centered Classroom (Kindle Locations 134–136). Association for Supervision & Curriculum Development. Kindle Edition. Link to book

Why Managing Sucks and How to Fix It

TOPIC: Critical thinking

In this podcast, Sarah Kam-Gordon and Danny Kam-Gordon discuss critical thinking as a general phenomenon and how it might be (or not be) used in schools. Is asking students to think critically worthwhile? Why or why not? They start with a general discussion of critical thinking and definitions and move into more concrete examples that have to do with education.

Sarah is currently pursuing her masters degree in history at California State University Northridge.

Link to Video of Spoken Word Criticism of Education

Sarah and Danny spend some time discussing the merits of this video. While he does make some good points, Sarah and Danny wonder if the questions he asks are fair or relevant to educators.

Also discussed are issues of motivation and how to ask students to think critically.

Followup From the Last Episode

Danny introduced students to Class Dojo. Class Dojo can have the unintended consequence of riling students up and students who have difficulty understanding probability or who are impatient may say, “The randomizer never picks me.”

Memory Strategies

We all know that students with special needs struggle with memory issues. Not just students identified with an IEP, but all students have trouble remembering all the things they need to know. We are not just talking about academic tasks. Students need memory strategies for how to remember important things in their lives as well. What are some memory strategies you use with your students.

“There are three components of memory: sensory memory, short-term memory, and long-term memory. Sensory memory (SM) holds information for about 20–30 seconds, after which time it is lost unless it is stored in short-term memory; icons and echoes are common forms of short-term sensory storage. Short-term memory (STM) holds information temporarily. Long-term memory (LTM) involves permanent storage of information.” Muskingum College

Attention as a Major Issue

Attention is the ability to concentrate mentally and observe carefully. Listening refers to applying oneself to hearing something. One must pay attention in order to listen effectively, but attending is also important when doing other tasks like reading, writing, taking tests, and reviewing information. Attention: Muskingham College

Our students attention is often so encapsulated with other social aspects of the high school experience. Many students are worried about how they look to others / how their actions will be perceived. Teaching does not take place in a vacuum. How do we get students to concentrate on the right thing for the right amount of time and retain information that they believe sometimes does not apply to them?

Possible Solutions:

Small groups where students demonstrate evidence of learning at different points throughout the lesson.

Backwards planning, so that YOU know where you are going in the end.

Using images or hashtags to remind students of the main ideas.

Knowledge vs. Critical Thinking

There are two main camps: Core knowledge vs. critical thinking. Is it more important for students to know facts or for students do critical thinking. Danny falls more on the side of core knowledge because of what he is teaching and Hernesto makes the argument for core knowledge. They also discuss how teaching will change with implementation of the common core.

Homework

Next episode, Hernesto and Danny will discuss how their hashtag idea worked out.

LifeHacks for Grading:

Should you use your built in district grading system or use one of the gradebooks below?

EasyGradePro: This gradebook is great if you want lightning fast grade input. CON: You cannot post grades to the internet.

Engrade: This gradebook is platform agnostic and all online. You can do a lot with posting student work to the site with TINY URLs. CON: Can be blocked by districts / privacy policies, etc.

Thinkwave: I used to use this program when I first started, but I haven’t used it in a while.

Quia: A great website for creating student tests and quizzes to give online.

LifeHacks for Student Behavior:

Danny’s Example of Positive Behavior Support: We really need to try and make good positive behavior supports for our students. Sometimes they really need explicit teaching on what socially appropriate behavior is. Below is an example you can use to give students points when they act the way you want them to act.

Class Dojo: Brian mentioned this app in regards to classroom management.

LifeHacks for Saving Time (Apps or other things that save time)

Doceri: Easy way to annotate text on your mac from your iPad. Wacom Tablets: A grade writing utility for those who don’t have the dough for an iPad.

Active Inspire: Great for writing and creating student lessons to be used with a wacom tablet.

Smart Notebooks: Another great tool for writing and creating student lesson plans. This can be used in conjunction with s SMARTboard.

Launchbar: A great timesaver for the mac if you really like using your keyboard instead of always using the mouse.

Alfred: Another great task launcher, but with workflow support.

Fantastical: A great replacement for quick filling of a calendar appointment.

Setting up Custom URLs for Alfred: Danny’s tutorial on how to setup custom URLs for using Alfred.

Hazel: This app is crazy good. Mac Power Users have a particularly good workflow on how to use it here.

Lifehacks for Student Motivation

Socrative: A learning response system for students. You can get a response from students instantly from their smartphones or computers. Students can vote on best responses and create quizzes on it for things like an exit ticket. Socrative breaks down your student data in an easy-to-read excel file.

Alphasmarts: Another learning response system if your students cannot use smartphones in class.

LifeHacks for Faculty Collaboration:

Google Docs

Dropbox

LifeHacks For Storage

Carbon Copy Cloner

SuperDuper

Time Machine

TOPIC: Scaffolding.

We want to break things down for students, but when the building is done, we also want students to be able to do the work. In this episode, Danny and Hernesto deal with the difficult topic of walking the line between helping students get through their work and having students do work independently. Discussion includes how to scaffold, how to create workflows for students, and how students should manage their time.

Example of Math Workflow

In which Danny and Hernesto talk about managing expectations in schools where expectations are varied and sometimes contradictory. We all have bosses and we also have expectations for ourselves and for our students. Do we think about the expectations that our students have for us and the expectations our bosses have for us? How do we manage those expectations to decide what we should do next?

How do we manage student expectations when we ourselves are sometimes trying to stay afloat with the amount of work we have to do?

Charter School Article: Do Charters Fare Better than Public Schools?

Do Bachelor Degrees Matter or are certifications enough?

The Box Analogy (definitely stolen from Merlin Mann)