Author Archives: Mark

“Happy Black Friday!” and Other Title One Holidays

“Happy Black Friday!” one hears repeatedly around Thanksgiving from the newly minted residents of the USA which make up the bulk of our Title-One students.

One hears it on the playground, in the hallways, the cafeteria and art room, “Happy Black Friday!” for the weeks leading up to our November break.

It’s apparently a national holiday, clearly, and these folks just want to fit in.

It’s not their fault.  They are using the information provided … in the media.  Searching the past week’s Washington Post Online, there are 65 articles about Thanksgiving, and 69 about Black Friday.

Stories about Thanksgiving are recipes and the other fluff journalism. Black Friday is about our national economic health.    Thanksgiving is relegated to inserts and the last 2 minutes of local newscasts.  Black Friday are headlines and top stories.

A recent CBS MoneyWatch piece, “Black Friday shopping: 5 reasons to stay home” did not mention Thanksgiving, which, in my book, is the main reason to stay home.

So what do the kids see as most important when processing their limited-English-proficiency-media-gestalt?

It’s all about Black Friday and how fast we can get through the fourth Thursday in November so retailers can start putting up (if they haven’t already) Christmas decorations.

Black Friday (not Thanksgiving) gets the media-hype building in the weeks before our November Holiday Break.  You know, the break for Black Friday.

So “Happy Black Friday!” everyone, and don’t eat too much so you’re in shape to head out to the stores at midnight, Thanksgiving night.

Thanksgiving, you know, “It’s the day before Black Friday.”

 

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Managing Change

I’ve been managing change quietly under the radar so few have noticed the tremendous technical transformation our small Title One elementary schools has undergone in just a few years.

We’ve gone from people only doing email and most nothing with their class, to being on the forefront of technology — and our teaching staff is still at the frustration level.

It was in the Matrix when Agent Smith said none of the participants believed reality when it wasn’t a struggle.  And struggle we do.

This week three of our teachers were perplexed, and a bit outraged, that Voicethread had no methodology for dealing with multiple years of classes in a single teacher account.  For the past three to five years, many of these teachers have used Voicethread, and when they add students, the student go to the bottom of the queue.  So this year’s students have to scroll down through 90 users to find their icon and make a comment.

They don’t want to delete past year students, because they are building on the previous contribution and using it for models.   When they delete prior year’s students, all the students’ comments disappear.

They contacted Voicethread independent of me, and worked through the issue.  Voicethread, as a young company, hadn’t come across this issue (probably because they don’t have many other teachers who have been using it for that long) and didn’t have a work around.

The teachers then came to me and complained.  I didn’t have an answer, because our county has recently purchased Voicethread but truncated the feature set.  And reading over the correspondance with Voicethread, all the bases had already been covered.

My teachers were outraged.  “Ridiculous!” was what one said (and only because it was the most outrageous she was willing to get in email).

Of course, what most of the teachers in my building don’t know is they are alone.  Most of the teachers in the county don’t know what Voicethread is, don’t have WordPress or many of the other things with which my colleagues are wrestling.

So as I said in Twitter this past weekend.  Thanks

 

Learning Microsoft Office in K-5 is Like Taking Latin

Microsoft Office Word 2007
Image via Wikipedia

There’s a small debate going on to decide if kids in grade school will be using QWERTY keyboards in the future. My bet, and the bet of most science fiction writers, is yes it will be a required skill.

If we’ve kept it until now – even though it was designed to keep the swinging mechanical arms of a manual typewriter from sticking together – we’ll probably use it into the future.

MSWord, PowerPoint, Excel are probably not going to be used.

They are already being usurped by wikis, blogs, google docs, WordPress, google wave-like things, all of which provide the basic functionality, but allow multiple people to edit a document simultaneously and keeping only one copy prevents the ridiculous organizational head-ache of making sure everyone edits the latest copy.

And the basic functionality of these options is getting more and more like Word, PowerPoint and Excel every day.

The new media is easier, cheaper, faster and has additional functionality like instant publishing and collaboration.

The kids in K-5 for the past five years have been Myspace- (at first) and now Facebook-ready. That’s their baseline. Learning Word and PowerPoint is extra, not a starting place.

Three years ago I was called down to a 4th grade classroom, because the kids were writing reports and “Didn’t know how to use Word.”

Upon arriving, I found the kids had inserted audio files in their word documents and were perplexed by the teacher who was demanding they “print their reports.”

They were making myspace pages about their reports using Word documents. They were using MSWord because the assignment had dictated which software to be used.

These kids were already multimedia. They are highly self-motivated by this new media, and that’s proved out by the hours and hours a day they spend publishing at home, after school, unassigned.

I asked the 4th grade teacher in the future to provide a rubric as to what media the students were not allowed to do with Word–problem solved.

Another teacher forces her students to do reports in PowerPoint. She’s aghast they don’t know how to use it. Why should they? They have Google Sites which allows multiple team members to edit a webpage with almost the same functionality as PowerPoint, and it is published and can allow (though we don’t allow this) for comments and global interaction. WordPress also allows for the same presentation as PowerPoint but with added functionality.

In that type of world, what’s the point of PowerPoint?

I realized this morning teaching Microsoft Office to K-5 students is like teaching Latin–something else that’s dead. They get certain skills, such as booting up, launching software, font and media placement. They learn to insert pictures and audio. All these skills learned using PowerPoint can be transferred onto the newer Internet-based media they work with 7 hours a day at home.

So, yeah, I guess there’s some benefit, but of course they learn those skills at home by 3rd grade without any intervention.

Seth Golden wrote, “Too often, we look at the new thing and demand to know how it supports the old thing.”

Perhaps that’s why Educational Management is having such a hard time adopting new technology.

So here’s the answer to that question:

All the skills students need to use the Microsoft Office Suite are learned in the K-5 environment using new media. They can easily pick up Word, PowerPoint and Excel in highschool if the workforce is still wedded to those stand-alone software options 15 years from now.

So, for now, let’s use the better, cheaper, faster technology they are motivated to use.

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Wisdom from Meghan S.

I’ve had one teacher say their goal for this quarter was to not drive home crying every day.

And another say their goal was to not drive to work crying every day.

But it was my bedrock friend Meghan S. who said, “I’m just going to help as much as I can, and not let what I can’t get done drive me crazy.”

It’s a hard year this year.  We are working 56% over capacity.  We are implementing new teaming initiatives.  We are implementing online testing.  We are working out of enough trailers we seem like a refugee camp.

 

 

A Note To Staff About K-5 Social Media Use

Folks,

Please don’t be shocked when you find out during my Internet Safety class that all or most of your students have personal Facebook accounts.

Your class is not alone.

We want to foster conversation about how to stay safe online.  Admonishing your students that they must be 14 to have a Facebook account simply stops the conversation.  We need to have an open dialog about how to stay safe online.

Telling them not to use Facebook or Twitter simply doesn’t work.  Pointing out they lied to get an account doesn’t help during the lesson.  It’s something to point out later.

Over the past five years I’ve asked classes at all our grade levels what they do online.

There has been a general progression down through the grade levels of social media use.

Five years ago, the numbers looked like this:

5th Grade:  90%+ used Facebook or other social media

4th Grade:  40% used Facebook or other social media

3rd Grade:  One or Two students per class had myspace or facebook.

 

Last year:

5th & 4th Grade:  90%

3rd Grade:  55%

2nd Grade:  One or Two students per class

 

This year, preliminary results find nearly 45% of 2nd graders have personal Facebook accounts.  I’m doing my first 3rd Grade class this afternoon, but if the progression holds they should be above 90%.

We need to make sure teachers don’t react negatively.  When students feel they are doing something wrong, they won’t talk about it or get the help they need.

Thanks,