The App Generation

In reading The App Generation and thinking mainly about my students (all ages 10-12), I kept coming back to the idea that each generation "pioneers" something and the pioneers are the ones that find out what works and what doesn't. We are pioneers of adding technology to what we grew up with - landlines, dial-up-internet. My students are pioneers of (they are the first generation to experience) to grow up totally online.

Today's adults did stupid stuff, but as someone in class mentioned this week, those embarrassing naked baby pictures and other proofs are hidden away in Mom's attic. My students don't know what it's like to not have control over photographs and videos of themselves because we don't really know what it's like to grow up like that. Sure, people have gotten in trouble for sending inappropriate snapchats or posting pictures on Facebook with alcohol. But I feel like a 10 year old doesn't quite grasp how big of a deal it is to portray yourself in a certain manner online.

One of my students needs a little extra guidance in life and often comes to eat lunch with me. The other day he asked me if I ever lie. I told him the truth, yes, but we had a good talk about the consequences. It had nothing to do with the internet, but it was a big reminder that my students need as much guidance as they can when it comes to doing the right thing. I think of them as "big kids" because they are the oldest in the school, but they haven't necessarily had enough experiences to understand the consequences of their actions.

This was a very rambly post and I hope it made sense. The main point is that apps are here, whether we like it or not, and it's our job as reasonable people to guide our students and remind them of how important their choices are.

Black Mirror

Hello all! I've already made a post on NetSmart for this week, but a quote from Zack's blog reminded me of something and it would have been too long to post as a comment.

Zack mentioned how people say things like, "get ready, because soon technology will be all around us." Netflix has an original series titled Black Mirror (they recently released the third season!) It's an incredibly morbid yet addicting show about how technology affects peoples' lives, usually negatively.

Each episode is it's own story, and some of them hit terrifyingly close to home. In the newest season one of the characters says, "I didn't realize I was living in the future." We always think of the future as flying cars and teleportation, but we're there now. 3D printing and virtual reality and phones that we can video chat on anywhere we want!

More realistically, we're all in different places in the future. My mom had to call me at school because she couldn't find the Windows button on the computer. I still have to have physical papers and CDs because I don't entirely trust in the concept of "the cloud". And my students have never had to endure the stress that was calling your friend on their house phone and her parents answering. I'm content with how I'm in the middle of this technology boom - I don't feel overwhelmed but I can survive without constant internet connection.

Just some extra thoughts. Black Mirror is an fantastically creative show - the first episode is a little much but the rest I could watch over and over!

Net Smart

After reading (aka skipping every few pages to get the gist of each chunk) NetSmart I felt okay about my internet habits. I honestly don’t do that much research on stuff. Most of the resources for my classroom I get are from coworkers. I try to stay away from the news sources because I am a hermit and all politics annoy me J

My students are much different, as the resources they get from their peers are obnoxious videos of people in ridiculous outfits singing really dumb songs. My inner monologue has been going back and forth since last class – to put things simply, whose job is it to teach our students how to be net smart? I see my kids 45 minutes once a week to frantically try to put together a concert. There aren’t computers or research projects, and the only homework is to practice their instrument.

I think it’s one of those ‘it’s everyone’s job and also nobody’s job.’ Parents need to be involved with what their kids are doing online, but I know that’s not always happening. Classroom teachers use research, but also have way too many subjects to squish into their days. Specialists either use a lot or don’t use any researching. Does it actually say in any teacher’s program of studies that there is a unit on showing kids how to be net smart? Or is it just something we assume everyone else is doing?

Copyright Clarity

This week was all about copyright! I expected it to be mega boring and technical, but I was actually pretty engaged. Hobbs’ book talked about copyright in a very relatable way that wasn’t too boring or over my head.

I tend to be the type of teacher that just copies everything a lot. My kids tend to lose papers, or leave them at home, and there’s not way I’m giving them the original copies to write all over. I never really considered it to be ‘breaking the rules’ – my school owns the full pieces of music; I just don’t trust 10 year olds to return all original copies with no markings on them.

I like the way that Hobbs talks about fair use. It made me feel better about all the copies I do make! She says to think about it like: is the way I’m using this preventing the author from making money? As long as the answer to that is no, then you’re probably fine. Are you changing the integrity of the original work in terms of things like audience, purpose, and amount? As long as that answer is yes, then you’re still probably fine.

Copyright seems like just a really big gray area. Fair Use is up to interpretation, so there’s no set of rules that we can put up on a poster on a wall for everyone to follow.

The Information Diet

The Information Diet was stressful for me to read. For so much of it I was thinking, “well of course” and the rest I was thinking, “no don’t tell me this!” Especially that since as I type this, the sensor in my classroom noticed a lack of motion so it shut the lights off on me. I’ve been sitting for too long and it’s apparently killing me.

It’s like when I’m hungry and lazy and I just want to eat some Lucky Charms. Don’t tell me how many calories are in it or how it’s 95% sugar. I’m going to eat it anyway, but now I’m going to feel terrible about eating it. That’s how my information consumption is. You can tell me that watching Mad Max for the 17^th time is not a productive use of my day, but I’m going to watch it anyway.

What I didn’t really like was that the farther I got through it, the more I felt like I was being scolded for my use of media. I know I spend too much time scrolling through Facebook throughout the day, but I get all my work done regardless. Trashy TV is not at all making me smarter or more informed, but it’s an entertaining way to de-stress and I don’t have to expend a lot of energy or mental focus.

That being said, the book had so many great things to say. The way it was written was funny and lighthearted, and once again reminded me that if we can’t laugh at ourselves then life is going to be pretty rough. The Information Diet should be standard reading material for every adult out there – most people I know could use a refresher on how to review their information that they get so worked up about.

Students as Designers!

This last design principle brings together all of the previous ones.

The Teachers as Designers Principle is exactly the Students as Designers Principle: It is our job to design a solution to a problem (how do we engage students in learning content), just as is it the students job to design a solution to the problem given to them.

The Ends Principle (PICKLE) talks to meaningful outcomes. How can we prepare our students to meet community needs? These community needs ARE the meaningful outcomes that our students will experience.

The Knowledge Principle is all about using tools. This related to each students’ abilities, and our job as teachers is to help them use known tools and discover new ones. We do this by scaffolding, and also guiding and fading once our help is not needed.

The Learning Principle is all about play. Engaging students can sometimes be the hardest part of teaching. We can’t force students to learn anything, no matter how much we talk and shove information at them. They have to want to for themselves.

The Means Principle talks about choosing the most useful technologies (through affordance analysis) to best help students accomplish a task. These technologies, if chosen appropriately, will help students be independent so they need less teacher intervention. A new technology will require teacher help, but the more the students explore and understand, the less they will need the teacher.

This leaves the Students as Designers principle! It’s very Inception-like. We are teachers who are now students learning how to be better teachers for our students. We get to have both roles!

Affordance Analysis

After reading the article, I thought I had a good grasp on what affordance analysis was. I wrote mine about Twitter (I think I meant Facebook or social media in general; I don’t even know my Twitter account name anymore). About the possibilities for communication and any pitfalls one might encounter.

An actual analysis requires two things:

1.   What is your learning goal?

2.   What are the available technologies that might help you reach that goal, and which one has the most pros and the least cons?

So I did half of an affordance analysis. I was thinking of how the high school band that I work with uses Twitter and Facebook to communicate dates, encourage each other (both student-to-student and director-to-student). During the big snowstorm last year, kids were posting pictures of themselves practicing in the snow in their pajamas – it sparked a huge competition of who could practice the most ridiculously. Goofy, but it got them practicing and having fun. It helps the kids relate to their director and their student leaders in a way other than “I am in charge, you have to do what I say” while still keeping the teacher’s personal life private.

The whole purpose of an affordance analysis is to pick the RIGHT technology for the job you are trying to accomplish. There’s an infinite number of possibilities out there. I wanted a way to have my students write out the counts to various rhythms. I looked at apps and games and worksheets, but in the end I decided just to give them whiteboards. It’s easy, doesn’t take a lot of time, doesn’t waste paper, they can work alone or with a buddy, doesn’t require all students to have internet access or a device at home, and the kids enjoy it! Picking the right technology doesn’t mean picking the most expensive or advanced piece of equipment – it means picking what will work best in your particular situation.

The Telegraph!

Especially after Vygotsky, The Victorian Internet was a welcome, fun book to read. I expected the book to talk about things like how the telegraph came to be, important people in its development, and how it progressed. What I didn’t expect was the humor, and how they talked about all sorts of other effects it had. We usually think about ‘effects of technology’ in terms of financial, political, geographical, etc, but not usually in terms of how it affected individuals. The heartwarming chapters on romantic relationships and friendships, but also the chapters on individuals becoming obsolete made me more emotionally invested in the development of the telegraph. For whatever reason I didn’t connect with the TV show as much.

It’s like Will mentioned in class – what are the chances that he would have met his wife if it weren’t for the technology of online dating? My brother and numerous friends met their significant others through the internet; I almost feel like that’s more normal than meeting someone throughout our daily lives.

But I like that last week we talked a lot about the individual. I feel like most of our classes have been talking about society as a whole, or the teaching community, but its individual teachers and students that we should always bring the focus back to.

Design Principal Four: Learning

Good learning designs engage students in “playful” activities at the edge of their knowledge and understanding using symbolic tools to develop and internalize meaningful thought.

I love this principal because out of the ones we’ve studied, it just makes the most sense on its own.

It goes back to our needs for society: we need people to do what society needs, but also people who have the will and ability to do so. I think the will is the more important part. Almost anyone can learn how to do anything. I could study to be a great historian and write lots of books, but I don’t have the will to make writing my career. I could learn to tie balloon animals and become a clown, but I am terrified of clowns so I have no will to become one.

The focus of the fourth design principal is play. At first I thought it meant we had to trick students into learning by disguising a lesson as a game, but that’s not really the case. We’re tricking teachers into creating lessons that are useful and actually make sense for what students are trying to learn.

My classes are loud and full of nonsense and mistakes, but it’s totally worth it to see the lightbulbs go off. Their joy, combined with my relief that yes we can play Hot Cross Buns and it sounds relatively recognizable, is why I love teaching. To them, they just learned something super cool that only 15 people in the school can do. To me, they did that but also learned how to control the muscles in their lips and coordinate that with moving their fingers and regulating their air. We do note-reading activities and breathing exercises, but alone those are boring and seemingly pointless. Only when you put it together with actually playing music that the kids understand WHY those skills are useful.

"Duh" moments

The third design principle (the knowledge principal) talks about using tools not just how the manual says we should, but experiencing them first-hand in the context they are meant for. I particularly like the last chunk of the quote – “analyze content for generalizable knowledge.” This is what we did when we created our Kahoots and what we should be doing as we do all of our readings. I am still working through Mind in Society and I have no idea who the researchers are or who came up with which conclusion. But do I really need to? I hope not or else I’m in trouble.

I keep trying to force myself to think of things in terms of my classrooms. Personally, I don’t really care if my students can sight-read the music I give them. I don’t care if they write the note names in, or label the notes with which fingers should be pressed down. I want them to play the right stuff at the right time so that we create music. VA says I have to care if they can read their clef, so of course I make sure that’s a part of what we learn.

When I took out my articles to think about what I wanted to write for this blog, I came across the Discriminatory Design article we received on our way out of class. I read this and again compared it to my classroom, and had a massive duh moment. I put students in chairs in rows, and then get upset when they drop all seven parts of their clarinet on the floor. Just sit on the damn floor in a circle! It’s such a simple concept – make things easy for students (and for me). Maybe I should consider a career in woolly-horse-clubbing.

Unrelated, I had been struggling to grasp the concept of the open-ended lesson designs. Some of our readings say “make the final outcome anything the students want!” and then the next paragraph say “make a clear product.” The AeCTS design article described it in a very helpful way. Make clear requirements that need to be included, but don’t specifically tell students exactly what to create. Another duh moment; I’m just getting too focused on individual sentences when reading these articles.  

Topic 2!

The first bit of Saber-Tooth Curriculum slightly annoyed me. I was expecting a textbook lesson on curriculum and couldn’t decide if I liked what the book actually was or not. Once I hit the part where the gentleman points out that it really doesn’t matter if it’s the longest bar or not (that’s not what’s important), then I thought “okay, this is going to keep me engaged and thinking!”

The rest of the book frustrated me – I wanted to yell at the cavemen how obviously stupid they are, and how they’re wasting their time and going to fail. When they finally did, I was satisfied and had a bit of “told you so!” attitude going on. Yet the education system he was talking about is our own. We waste so much time and energy on wanting the most credit, or putting up the front that one discipline is harder than another. Who cares?

I teach band. I am very much aware that not all 150 students I teach will go on to become professional musicians, or even continue on in middle school. That’s not the point of my job, just like the point of the bar is if it’s really the longest or not. The world doesn’t need that many professional musicians. The students just need somewhere where they can take a break from their homeroom (a place lots of them struggle to do well) and their home (an overwhelming majority of my kiddos do not have supportive homes to return to).

They get to pick an instrument – to choose what they WANT to learn. They start something brand new and totally foreign to their bodies, and week by week can see and hear the progress they make. They have the opportunity to show off how awesome they are with concerts, hallway performances, and even just coming to class.

Ideally this drive to achieve something will transfer to other areas, and it's my job to help that happen. Once students realize they can do something that not everyone else in their class can do, they get this air of “well of course I am a superior student”. Not quite arrogance, but the “hey everyone, look what I can do that you can’t!” attitude.

What I Learned: Day 1

I learned that while “digital learning” is a fairly straightforward concept, the “design” part has many definitions and interpretations. Designing is different than planning, arranging, building, or reconstructing. I just assumed in this class “technology” meant computers and such, but technology can be a wide range of things and focuses on communication.

I learned that I already know a ton of things and how to use them, which is heartening. I will learn to embrace new possibilities while accepting restraints.

I learned about the four Ps: Principles, Processes, Patterns, and Paraphernalia. If you have an L-shaped kitchen, you need a scalene triangle arrangement for your fridge, sink, and stove. Granite countertops are a lifelong investment, unless you want to tear out your cabinets to replace your counter.

This means that I will need to keep an open mind and give things a try – I like lists and rules and schedules, but I can’t reject any new ideas just because I like how things are. Designing is a lengthy process that needs to be done BEFORE the teaching, not as I’m going along.

In order to execute whatever new design I end up having, I need to plan ahead. My subject area is very lax when it comes to lesson planning, because I have 18 classes that I see once a week each. They are different sizes and have different instrumentations, so they will progress and recall things at very different rates. Wherever we left off last week is where we start again, so it makes planning ahead multiple weeks tough. On the bright side, this gives me 18 groups to try out new ideas on to see what works and what doesn't!