Thoughts on Teacher Appreciation

Posted on May 7, 2011
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When a musician finishes a great performance, the audience applauses. When an outfielder makes a great catch, the audience cheers. What happens when a teacher finishes a great lecture, or introduces a well designed assignment?  Usually not applause or cheering.

I would venture to say that the majority of teachers feel unappreciated, or at least under appreciated at their school sites and with their students and parents.

In a conversation with a frustrated teacher the other day the comment was made, “the parents don’t know half of what I’ve done for their kids.”  This got me to thinking, why don’t more parents know the extent to which we go for their kids?

The answer is, because we don’t tell them.

How can a parent be appreciative of something that they don’t know is happening?

So then, the question for myself and others is, what steps can we take to ensure that parents know what it is that we are doing for their kids? Certainly if nothing else, this discussion reinforces the importance of clear communication between the classroom and the home.

In making my own classroom communication plans I’m thinking of things like class website, monthly calendar or newsletter, weekly or daily summary/ review podcasts.

What forms of communication are others using to ensure that parents know what’s happening in the classroom?  Any teachers have parents follow them on Twitter or Facebook?

As a parent myself it is very easy to be thankful and appreciative of the work that I know my son’s teacher does for him, but impossible to be appreciative for things she does that I never hear about.  Not feeling appreciated yourself for the work that you do?  First make sure that others actually know what it is that you’re doing.

Video vs. Still Slides

Posted on March 24, 2011
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Hi All,

I’m looking for some honest feedback on this.

Bill and I attended a session at CUE that suggested that online instruction might be more efficient and less distracting using still graphics rather than screencast video.

So I’m trying to put the idea to the test.   Here I have two links for a 1:25 video on using the dropbox public folder.  The first is a straightforward screencast and the second uses just still frames with transitions and a little graphics.

Basic Screencast

Video with Still Slides and Graphics

Question is..
1. is one more effective or more efficient than another?
2. if so which and why?
3. if you thought the still w/ graphics video was better, was it enough better to be worth an extra 30 min of post production.  As compared to just record and post.

Thanks for your help on my never ending quest to learn to teach!

Tim

Routines

Posted on January 22, 2011
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I’m currently living in a small town in Ukraine called Zhovti Vody as part of a long process to adopt my son.  My wife and I have been living in a single hotel room for about a month and a half now and have about another month to go before we are able to return home as a family.

This post is not necessarily about my experience here, but about an observation that was made clearer to me in my current circumstances.  In a place where I have little to do but wait and think, where factual information is a foreign notion, and where anything you’re told (even by the head judge of the court) can change at a moment’s notice I find myself taking comfort is small daily routines like making coffee, making the bed, even showing and shaving.  When the big things in life are full of uncertainty it is refreshing that in some things, regardless of size and importance, you can have confidence and be certain of.

It then occurred to me that the same is true of students as well, especially those in the younger grades, but probably to a lesser degree to adults as well.  When the content, tools, and concepts that are being taught and discussed in class are new and uncertain, students also can take comfort in procedures and routines that they can count on, even when necessary in the area of discipline. If I’m finding significance in the small daily routines of my strange existence here in Zhovti Vody, how much greater a value will regular classroom routines have for a middle school students making the transition from childhood to young adults.

Of course this idea is not news to anyone reading this, but it’s amazing to me even now in my tenth year of teaching how often I realize things that I’d already known to be true. So I thought I’d share.

I wonder:

What routines and procedures would bring stability to my students in a middle school computers class?

What routines and procedures would benefit adult learners just learning to integrate technology into their classrooms?

Quantity vs. Quality – really?

Posted on November 11, 2010
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Antique Water PotI see that I haven’t written in a while, but I am inspired to write today after learning about National Novel Writing Month or NANOWRIMO (pronounced nano-rhyme-o) during which participants are challenged to write a 50,000 word novel during the month of November. The interesting part is that the primary challenge is not the quality of the work being completed, but simply to meet the word count goal. Participants even post their word counts daily to track and compare their progress.

Quality vs. Quantity is one of the debates that continues to haunt the education community. Most educators I talk to tend to come down on the side of quality, stating that if the quality is poor then it doesn’t matter how much work is done. Which seems very true.  But lately I’ve begun to disagree with the idea that we need to settle for one or the other.

This story from the book Art & Fear: Observations on the Perils (and Rewards) of Artmaking by David Bayles, and Ted Orland illustrates the idea that I am currently in agreement with:

“The ceramics teacher announced on opening day that he was dividing the class into two groups. All those on the left side of the studio, he said, would be graded solely on the quantity of work they produced, all those on the right solely on its quality. His procedure was simple: on the final day of class he would bring in his bathroom scales and weigh the work of the “quantity” group: fifty pound of pots rated an “A”, forty pounds a “B”, and so on. Those being graded on “quality”, however, needed to produce only one pot -albeit a perfect one – to get an “A”. Well, came grading time and a curious fact emerged: the works of highest quality were all produced by the group being graded for quantity. It seems that while the “quantity” group was busily churning out piles of work – and learning from their mistakes – the “quality” group had sat theorizing about perfection, and in the end had little more to show for their efforts than grandiose theories and a pile of dead clay.”

More and more I am agreeing with the correlation of quantity and quality. Howard Garner’s book on creativity illustrates that historically individual’s creative breakthroughs come on roughly a ten year cycle.   Malcom Gladwell talks about 10,000 hours of practice required for the mastery of any skill. We all know that we learn from our mistakes, so maybe as educators we need to focus more on providing an environment for students to practice and make mistakes, and therefore learn from them in the process.

Even if you do believe in SturgeonsLaw which states that “90% of everything is junk,” it doesn’t take much more than basic math skills to realize that the more work you do, writing, pottery, or other, the bigger your valuable output will become. So while I have always been an advocate of outlining, brainstorming, and planning, it’s good to remember that at the end of the day the goal is to get something done, or as Andy Ihnatko says, the exercise of “generally trying to move the cursor to the right.”

References:

http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/187633.Art_Fear

Http://www.cwob.com

http://www.nanowhimo.org

Virtually Face to Face

Posted on April 12, 2010
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Teaching online in real time

Background

While I was working on my MA I had the oportunity to take a couple of completely online courses. One being an incredible experience and the others being extremely poor. This got me to thinking about the difference between the two classes and what elements made one more effective and the others so poor. The conclusion that I came to was that for me the difference came from the amount of interaction that I experienced between the student and the professor. As I continued to learn more about current web technologies I realized that we would soon be approaching the time that online education did not have to be like the old correspondence course or even like the current asynchronous online classes. This has lead me on the path of developing my “virtually face to face” classes, working to provide the optimum learning experience by combining the best features of face to face and asynchronous online classes in an online environment. Below I will describe some of the systems and that I have used in my efforts to achieve what should be the optimal online learning environment.

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