parents – Clairvoy, LLC

Online Work-Flow For School Newspaper Defined

The Challenge:
Our 4th and 5th grades (12 classrooms, 230+ some students and 17+ teachers and specialists) want to start a single school newspaper. They are requesting an online work-flow allowing students to write but not publish, teachers to approve and publish. The look and feel should be of a newspaper, not a blog. They at first want to print the paper to distribute to students and families, rather than it being an online publication.

Draft Solution:
We can use the work flow process provided by the blogging software WordPress. Students would be given the role of “contributors” and 20 teachers and specialists “editors” or “administrators.” We could use a newspaper looking theme (14 different options can be perused here.) The newspaper could be viewed online or printed out and distributed.

To Publish Online or Not Online:
The 5th grade does a long-form research and publishing project each year which employs all sorts of social and publishing mediums such as blogs and wikis.

We have an Internet Security Protocol which has three components:

1)Don’t provide any personal details (name, school, county, state, country).
2)Don’t allow any incoming communication channels (no comments or text surveys) the only exception being radio button surveys.
3)And we tell students, “Never meet anyone in real life you only met online.”

Thus having students work in a “live” online environment is not a stretch. Research two years ago found a majority of 4th grade students were actively publishing online (Facebook, MySpace) on their non-school time and equipment.

However, most of the teachers engaged in this project are viewing this as a traditional printed newspaper. They seek to print the document and distribute a printed version. This provides another layer of security because nothing will go out unless it is printed and copied multiple times.

Solution	Pro/Con	Considerations
Blackboard	Pros	Blackboard is relatively un-hackable from outside the school system, could be used to assemble newspaper for printing, available via home both for student editorial work and family viewing, it is completely backed up.
Blackboard	Cons	Blackboard provides no workflow for assembling such a large newspaper publishing venture, it is cumbersome and clunky to use, most families have a hard time navigating into blackboard, multimedia and publishing features limited. Blogging and Wiki features disabled for family viewing.
WordPress Inside Firewall	Pros	WordPress provides solid online work-flow for supporting large newspaper publishing venture. Behind the firewall it would not be viewable to anyone allowing students to write freely using their names, school name and other identifying information.
WordPress Inside Firewall	Cons	WordPress behind the firewall, students could NOT access from home to add items, if in the future the requirements change this installation would never be able to be seen outside the firewall, backups would be dodgy. Initial investment would include a high-end desktop and backup system.
WordPress Outside the Firewall	Pros	The service would be fully redundant and backed up on a nightly basis, it would provide robust work-flow and be accessible online for student editing and family viewing. Newspaper could be both printed and seen online. No setup or ongoing maintenance costs.
WordPress Outside the Firewall	Cons	The online newspaper would be viewable to everyone requiring use of Internet Safety publishing protocol like the 5th grade uses for other publishing.

Summary:
1)Blackboard is difficult to use and has none of the work-flow needed for this large-scale project. Blackboard forces students to have their name or student id number on everything they publish (which in violation of our safety practices). The blog and wiki elements of Blackboard are not viewable by families.

2)Wordpress is a solid solution from a work-flow standpoint and allows teacher and different groups of students to have different roles in the editorial process.

3)Installing WordPress inside the firewall will make it more secure in the short-term to make sure nothing is published without being scrutinized by a teacher. It gives teachers, especially those with no blogging experience, more comfort to know nothing will go out that is not printed first.

4)However WordPress inside the firewall is not future proof. It doesn’t allow for a change of heart which would allow for the paper to be published online. This option of online publishing is one all real newspapers are now engaged. The backup of data on an internally running installation of WordPress would be dodgy.

5)Wordpress outside the firewall has all the benefits of WordPress inside the firewall and allows for future proofing in several ways:

a)It allows students to access the newspaper’s editorial features from anywhere.

b)It allows the published items to be viewed by anyone anywhere.

c)It requires students adhere to online safety publishing guidelines listed above. Students could use pen names and the school’s nickname could be used in lieu of the school name. Everything else could be open.

We will be thinking on this over the next few weeks with the teams in question.

21 Things That Will Be Obsolete in 2020? Try 2010.

21 Things That Will Become Obsolete in Education by 2020 is a post in Teach Paperless, a blog by Shelly Blake-Plock. It’s a great blog about teaching. I love how this guy thinks.

I’m reading this post in teachpaperless and I’m thinking, “Why write about it, just do it.” (I know, to share, to share …)

Here’s the list from Teachpaperless of 21 things that will be obsolete over the next 10 years, and what we (at a Title One elementary school outside Washington, D.C.) are doing about them today.

I’ve put the items teach paperless stated would be obsolete in bold. I agree with all of them, save two (numbers 8 & 9).

The following is not bragging, I’m just stating the facts about the school at which I’m lucky enough to work:

1. Desks: A 5th grade teacher here removed all desks from her room two years ago. She did a research project to track data on student performance. She has not asked for the furniture back.

2. Language Labs: Hah! Forget ESOL, try finding an ETMT student (English as Their Mother Tongue). This whole school is a language lab, and if the demographers are correct so will be most U.S. schools in the future. We don’t have a separate language lab as a result.

3. Computers: The majority of our computers are laptops, and going forward we are trying the netbooks and the next step. School-system finances and classroom real estate both being at a premium, small and mobile is where everything is going, not just computing.

4. Homework: We’re going 24/7 using Blackboard (2 & 3) in the lower grades and wordpress/blogspot & wikispaces in the upper grades (3, 4 & 5). Students are doing work at home without being asked. That’s the real power of social media. A 5th grade teacher is currently doing educational research on best practices for homework, which is NOT the way it used to be done, more along the line of teachpaperless.

5. Standardized Tests: This is a hot topic, the details of which I will cover in an upcoming post. But we are very much moving toward portfolios as a large percentage of our students (compared with other schools) do a portfolio replacement test for the standardized tests.

6. Differentiated Instruction as Unique: We’re already far beyond this and our teachers differentiate due to language, learning styles and/or special needs. We have an inclusive model which requires real and meaningful differentiation as a fundamental baseline to everything happening in a classroom or other part of the school, rather than an afterthought or “something the special ed teacher do” (which unfortunately is what many teachers around the world think).

7. Fear of Wikipedia: We use it as a method to teach critical reading skills. And by “critical” we mean “with a discerning eye.”

*8. Paperbacks: Here is the one thing with which I don’t agree. Radio was to be the end of newspapers, and radio theater the end of paperbacks. Television was to be the end of Radio, and Computers the end of everything that came before. People will consume information in a way that is most useful and although the percentage of market share changes we have a ways to go before books go the way of papyrus scrolls.

*9. Attendance Offices: Bio scans are great, but there will still be a frazzled office person handing out tardy slips and calling home to confirm children’s whereabouts.

10. Lockers: Well, didn’t need them anyway.

11. IT Departments: According to TeachPaperless, IT Departments will have more time to innovate as they give up control and budget-line to shared-open solutions. A lovely sentiment, and clear-headed if one remembers fondly how there didn’t really seem to be anyone in charge of IT on the Star Ship Enterprise. But the thought of the obsessive, slightly asburger-y engineers (the norm in most IT departments) being “innovative”, well, let’s not be silly now.

12. Centralized Institutions: He’s right on the mark. He’s talking about school buildings being like a factory where students show up for a shift. I would also include decentralizing central offices. “Employees who do not spend at least 10 hours a week with student should be sacked,” is a budget solution suggested by one of the teachers at my school. All “central office” types should be housed in schools. That way they might accidentally run into a student every now and then. At our school we house central office types, and it helps them understand the school and students, and helps us by having them more accessible.

13. Organization of Educational Service by Grade: We’re already doing this by necessity, because when one successfully differentiates, it’s done.

14. Education School Classes that Fail to Integrate Social Technology: I agree, but would reword this to say the following will be obsolete in two years, “Education School Classes that Can Successfully Continue to Keep Social Technology Out.” (I mean MiFi kind of screws up all the “firewall technology” on which we are currently spending money.)

15. Paid/Outsourced Professional Development: Our school has a specific model which is co-teaching, coaching and inclusive. One can walk into any room at any time and nobody bats an eyelash. The kids and teachers are used to constant traffic. This raises the bar, because no one can go into their room, shut the door and come out in June. Professional accountability which includes an AP coming in twice a year is ridiculous. Constant feedback on everything at all times is what professional development is now and going forward. Implementing it is the hard part. We have. There’s still a place for Paid/Outsourced PD, but the guts of our PD is inhouse PLC, and it works.

16. Current Curricular Norms: We’re doing this, but it is easier in a K-5 environment. Differentiation demands it.

17. Parent-Teacher Conference Night: More and more classroom blogs are cropping up at my school. These keep the parents in the loop in an ongoing way. One instance (not at this school) is an individual blog being used for a special needs student instead of a journal they take from home to school and back. The dialog is deep and meaningful and discrete. A reality to which I think Blake-Plock is alluding.

18.Typical Cafeteria Food: We’ve made no great inroads here, but one can only hope.

19. Outsourced Graphic Design and Webmastering: Here again is a tension between the creative flow in a school and the need of many DIT departments to assert control claiming “Internet Security” as the cover. In the future, with social media becoming a utility, and technology becoming ubiquitous, “Internet Security” emanating from within a technology department as a firewall or other technology will not be possible. “Internet Security” will principally be achieved through behavior management by education of students from Kindergarten forward. Our 3rd and 4th graders are doing MySpace and Facebook pages at home already. They are doing google pages, blogspot and wordpress at school. Given the tools, they could do what Blake-Plock is suggesting next week, but current technology setup of our formal graphic design and webmastering prevents this.

20. High School Algebra I: OK, well, N/A for this K-5 school.

21. Paper: In the last three years, we have moved from a deskjet at every teacher’s desk to a small set of networked centralized printers. Paper use (and toner) has declined exponentially.

Thanks to Blake-Plock and TeachPaperless.blogspot.com for everything they are doing to support the mission.

Second Life

As a teacher and Dad of a 12 year old boy (who doesn’t attend the Title One school where I teach) I donate the clothing my son outgrows to our Parent Center and it gets given to the families with kids attending my school. Sounds great, right?

So I find I have a strange emotive reaction when I see one of my son’s shirts walking down the hall.

This is a shirt I’ve hugged, a shirt that was always happy to see me, a shirt that I’ve comforted when it was crying or scraped a knee. This is a shirt I’ve taught life’s lessons. A shirt I’ve been willing to give up my life to protect.

Here it is, floating by, like a detached spirit, not knowing its rightful place, not recognizing its surroundings. Then it goes by and I realize it is just a kid, with a good shirt, having a second life.

I know, weird. But I do now limit the amount of clothing I bring in at any one time. Five spirits in one hallway, well, that was too much.

Best Tracking of Student Data (for Behavior Plans or Anything) for the Busy Teacher

Graphic of Google forms for data collection

This is a way to use Google Docs and an iPhone or any hand-held device that can hit the web to track student data.

Remember in Educational Research, APA ethical guidelines require no information be used which could be employed to identify the student.

1)In Google docs, open a new Spreadsheet.

2)Name columns with the items you are tracking; Disrupting Teacher; Disrupting Students; Absence of Bad Behavior for 30 minutes, for example. This will be determined by the student’s Behavior Intervention Plan or whatever research question you are tracking. Each entry you make will automatically be stamped with the time and date, so you don’t have to worry about that column.

3)On the “Form” menu of the same spreadsheet click on “Create form.” Name the form something you can remember, but not the name of the student. Then on the Form menu choose “Go to live form” which opens your form as a webpage. Along the bottom of that window is the “You can view the published form here: url” which is the web address of your live form. Make a shortcut to the live form and put that on your iPhone or whatever you want to use to enter data.

From that point on, everything you enter into the live form and save, will be entered into your spreadsheet as a row and saved for your later analysis.

On the way out, remember to Save your form, and choose File and Save your spreadsheet.Too Easy!

For extra credit, on the forms creation page, you can edit the questions and make them multiple choice or check boxes to make data entry even easier!

Language Barriers and Parent Involvement

I have a diversely populated class. Many of my students’ parents speak little or no English at home. I can see they are interested in their student’s progress and would provide more support for their child if language were not a barrier. What are some options for enlisting their help with their student or in the classroom?

A: Some options:
• Find a “parent buddy” who is fairly fluent in English, is comfortable helping an adult, and speaks the same language to serve as a resource. They do not have to have children in the same grade. This person could help acclimate your parent to homework and school routines, translate or even volunteering in the classroom.
• Meet the parent with a translator to “break the ice”. Maybe your student or an older student in the school could help translate if an adult isn’t available. You would want to be sure you aren’t discussing anything confidential about the student. Limit this ice-breaker to small talk. This first meeting could be a great investment in the rest of the year
• Using a “buddy parent” or the student to help with language you could have a parent training demonstration for parents who would be willing to file informational flyers that get sent home from the school, copy materials, create folders, file books, etc.
• Find a way to have your Back to School Night materials translated in your major languages. Keep the text simple. A college or high school student may be able to do this as a service project at no cost to you. Your city, county, or library may also be good resources for translation services.
• Remind parents that their first language is important to maintain at home. Students who can speak, read, and write in more than one language have great educational and employment opportunities as adults.
• Good luck!