📝 Do you teach with a paper-based mindset? 📝

Paper was invented around 100 BC in China.

Google Docs was developed in 2005 by Sam Schillace.

While Google Docs is designed to look like paper, It isn't an improved version of paper - it's something different entirely. The opportunity to collaborate in real-time through an interconnected, device flexible platform creates entirely new possibilities. For those of us in the classroom, these new tools offer new potential and un-explored opportunity.

So here is the big question: Are you approaching the tech in your classroom with a paper-based mindset?

Before we begin, I want to clearly say that I am NOT against the use of paper in school (being anti-paper is silly). There is nothing wrong with paper. It has a very important role in the classroom. If paper is the best tool for the job USE IT!

Technology like Google Drive, WeVideo, Pear Deck and Google Classroom are fundamentally different than "analog" tools. We must approach them with a new perspective.

Here are six questions to ask yourself as you consider how you use technology:

🔳 Do you require students to work within "the box"? 🔳

There are many digital tools that “feel” like paper (i.e. Google Docs). There is no reason to limit yourself to an 8.5 x 11 inch rectangle. Would your next assignments work better as a Google Drawing, Presentation, website or video? A digital canvas is infinite and can grow and stretch as your ideas grow and take shape. You may feel more comfortable working with paper, but don't limit your students to the rectangle.

How to break out of "the box" in your classroom:

• Use tools that don’t feel like paper (Video, Prezi, Google Drawing)
• Transform your paper worksheets using tools like Blendspace, EdPuzzle, or Quizlet
• If you use Google Docs, remember that you can change the size and color of your document to fit the project. There’s nothing special about 8.5 x 11.
• Are you over-emphasizing length, words, or pages to your students rather than focusing on the quality of the content?
• Stop using PDF files

🌐 Do you “flatten” student work? 🌐

When you add ideas to paper, it takes a uniform, flat appearance. Digital creation can have multiple layers of information. Google Docs is a great example. Not only do you have the text on the “page”, you can also have comments, hyperlinks, and a history of revisions. There is depth in digital communication. Digital communication is multidimensional.

How to encourage multi-dimensional work in your classroom:

• Ask students to include links, video, and images in their assignments.
• Allow students to use tools which support video, audio and images
• Encourage students to share their work with classmates, the school, and the world
• Encourage students to link to work from their classmates

💬 Are you limiting collaboration? 💬

Have you ever watched two students write on the same piece of paper at the same time? It’s not easy! Working on paper assumes contribution by one person at a time. With digital tools, several individuals can contribute simultaneously. While collaboration is easier with digital tools, you must design for collaboration. Most paper worksheets were not designed for students to work collaboratively.

How to encourage collaboration in your classroom:

• Build collaboration into your next assignment
• Encouraging peer review
• Ask questions for which there is more than one possible answer
• Address the difference between cheating and collaboration with your students

✍️ Do you discourage mistakes? ✍️

Have you ever suffered from “blank page syndrome?” It’s the inability to get started because of the fear that it won’t be good enough. Making a mistake on paper is discouraging because it is so difficult to revise your work (remember white-out?). Digital mediums encourage constant adaptation, revision, and improvement. There are no penalties for errors and omissions. Simply revise and continue.

How to encourage revision and adaptation in your classroom:

• Providing frequent, meaningful feedback
• Give students an opportunity to reflect on the improvements they have made
• Give students an opportunity to learn from one another.
• Assess for growth, not completion.

🏫 Do you venture outside the 4 walls of your classroom? 🏫

A sheet of paper can only exist in one place at a time. Digital content is not limited by time or space - it can existing in many or “all” the places at the same time. This improves organization, sharing, and collaboration.

How to open up your classroom:

• Allow students to collaborate across class period.
• Look for cross-curricular opportunities
• Seek out opportunities to collaborate with experts outside of your school

⚰️ Is your classroom full of “dead” paper? ⚰️

Once distributed, paper becomes a static source of information. Paper is dead. Digital content can be updated, added to and revised on-demand. It’s alive!

How to build living resources in your classroom:

• Select a single place where students submit work and receive feedback.
• Create a class website that you can easily update on a daily basis,
• Design a system to save new ideas and resources when you find them
• Link classroom resources so that they can be easily updated and adapted
• Have a plan for updating parents and students about changes to due dates and scheduling

There is absolutely nothing wrong with using paper in your classroom. But don’t restrain your use of technology to the limits of paper and pencil.

If this is something you have embraced in your classroom, I would love to hear about it! Leave me a reply and tell me how you have discarded the "paper based mindset."

Interested in learning how to actually implement these ideas into your classroom? Sign up for one of my online courses! We'll be exploring these ideas in greater depth and I will be sharing some practical ideas to help you get started.

Is technology making school too easy?

I was recently asked if it was possible to disable automatic spell check on a Chromebook. The person who was asking is a great teacher and a leader at her school. It wasn't really her question, it was a question that she was tasked to research. 

I am sometimes quite dismayed by teachers who want to limit students from using readily available technology to complete their school work. These are tools that we (adults) use EVERY DAY. 

What would YOU do if your boss told you that you were no longer allowed to use:

• Automatic spell check 
• A calculator
• Voice dictation software 
• The internet

Let's just say that there would probably be another march on Washington...

My goal is to provide helpful, real-world solutions. While I have [lots] of opinions, I don't want to be dogmatic in my approach toward the use of technology in the classroom. So I provided two responses and let her decide which one to use:

The Snarky Response: Why would we not allow students to use readily available technology to help them with spelling. I use spell check EVERYDAY. Without it I would be in trouble. Students should still be held accountable for spelling errors and mistakes in their work, but are free to use all available tools.

The Judicious Response: Automatic spell checking can be disabled through the Google admin console. This will not, however, impact other tools and services which can also check spelling (Drive spell check, add-ons, etc). The only absolute way to eliminate such services is to return to pencil and paper. You can turn off spell check from the Google admin console: Device Management > Chrome > User Settings > User Experience. 

What do YOU think? Is using spell check, calculator, etc, preventing our students from developing critical, basic skills? How do YOU respond when someone complains that technology is making things too easy?

The importance of support

For the past few months I have been recording interviews for the Chromebook Classroom Podcast. Each episode features a conversation with a teacher, tech director, librarian, tech coach, etc. While each conversation is unique, as I was re-listening to each episode to develop the show notes, there was a common element that appeared in nearly every conversation - the importance of support for teachers. 

Each of the teachers that I interviewed spoke highly of their administration, tech department, and tech coach. This support was an essential element of their success in the classroom. Several of the teachers that I spoke with would not consider themselves "techy" but the support provided by their district gave them the confidence to step out and try something new:

Support from the IT department insures that school infrastructure optimized for learning. 

School administrators can support teachers by working to secure funding for technology and school improvement and ensuring that school policies support classroom teachers. 

Tech coaches serve on the front lines, providing just-in-time support for teachers looking for new tools and strategies to engage and challenge their students. 

Teachers are not reluctant to try new things...
Teachers don't avoid technology.... As long as they are supported

When teachers are supported, they can do amazing things! 

Have you Selected an Anchor Technology?

Earlier this week I was sent to the grocery store by my wife to get some butter. A simple task; or so I thought. Do you have any idea how many different types and styles of butter you can purchase? Completely overwhelming. And no, I did not get the right one!

When it comes to Educational Technology, it can feel a little bit like trying to pick from the butter isle.

Want to incorporate formative assessment into your classroom? There are about 100 options!

Interested in using a learning management system? Another 100+ options!

Choice if usually heralded as a good thing. But if there are too many options, two things can happen:

• Some people get overwhelmed and choose nothing. 
• Some people get excited and try everything

Both responses are bad and will not lead to lasting change and impact that we are seeking. 

If you plan on using technology in your classroom, you need to pick an anchor technology. This is the tool or platform that will serve as the foundation for your classroom and will help guide future decisions. 

Here are some popular technology anchors: 

• Google Apps for Education (now called G Suite for Education)
• Office 365 from Microsoft
• iOS from Apple
• Moodle

This is NOT an exhaustive list; just a few representative tools.

Google Apps for Education is my anchor technology. Anytime I am looking to solve a classroom problem I first look to see if there is solution within the core products of Google Apps (Gmail, Drive, Calendar, Sites, Etc). If not, I look for external products that integrate with Google Apps. I rarely use a product that does not somehow integrate with Google Apps.

Don't wander around the web looking for the next big thing or get distracted by something new and shiny. Figure out what works for you and use that as the filter for future technology decision.

What's your technology anchor?

3 Attributes of a Dynamic Classroom

1. The modern classroom is agile

Teaching is less like a marathon and more like an obstacle course. Each year, group of students and class presents new and unique challenges. One of the most important competencies you can develop is the ability to adjust and adapt to the unique needs and situations of your students.

The increased availability of technology in the classroom has made it easier for us to make quick adjustments to content, teaching methods and style with ease that has not previously been possible.
The typewriter, laserdisc, mimeograph, and scantron were not designed for agility. Google Drive, Pear Deck, Remind, and Google Classroom allow us to make agile adjustments.

A major detriment to agile teaching is over scheduling and planning. I am a type-a person who regularly plans twice as much content as I need for a lesson. Such planning limits the spontaneous discussion, questions, and think time that is needed for student engagement.

Don't plan out every minute of your lesson. Provide time for students to think, ponder, and explore on their own. "Boredom" is not a bad thing. In fact, many important observations and inferences are discovered when the mind wanders.

Learning is a process, not a destination. Like any good road trip, there are likely to be unplanned detours along the way. Structure your classroom to anticipate these detours and building on top of flexible tools allows a teacher to take the detour without derailing an entire semester of learning.

Here are some tips on making sure that your classroom is agile:

• Collect actionable data (formative assessment)
• Respond to the needs and interests of your students (i.e. PokemonGo, MineCraft, etc.)
• Build margin into your classroom

2. The modern classroom is individual

If you have read the history of the educational system of the United States, you may have come across the idea that it was designed on a factory model. While factories are great for building cars and iPhones, they aren't the best for educating students for the diverse needs of the 21st century. Students are not widgets and you are not a welding robot that slaps on the next component in a long assembly line of teachers, classes, grades, and courses.

Students have different learning styles, aptitudes, interests and motivational factors. Like a good coach, your job is to push the right buttons for each of your students in order to help them achieve their maximum potential. Technology, once again, provides us the ability to provide choice differentiation to students without going crazy.

Educational curriculum and standards can be good or bad, depending on how they are used.

If you use your curriculum and standards as a measuring stick to determine what your students know and need to know, you have adopted a factory model to education; "here's the standard, let's see how you measure up."

If you view curriculum and standards as the recipe within which there is room for adaptation and creativity, you have adopted a student-centered approach to instruction; "we know what dish we're making, but we can substitute this ingredient for a bit more of this and end up at the same place"

Here are some suggestions to help you individualize your instruction:

• Incorporate project based learning
• Ask BIG questions not standards-based questions
• Allow students to explore interests
• Build choice into your classroom
• Create a culture and have a personality

3. The modern classroom is a safe place

Sadly, too many students view school as a place of rules and punishment rather than a place of exploration and investigation. Students are naturally curious and interested in the world around them. Just look at the popularity of tools like Minecraft and Pokemon Go - both of which require a tremendous amount of exploration, creativity, and trial and error.

The modern classroom is a safe place that allows students to explore, investigate, and fail. Failure is looked upon in education as a negative result, however failure is frequently required before success can be discovered.

The modern classroom should emphasize iterative work where students are constantly striving to improve their work rather than expecting them to be perfect the first time. Rubric and standards-based grading are a great way to assess this style of learning.

The modern classroom should be free from judgement, criticism, and negativity. We must carefully build and monitor the culture of our classroom to ensure that it is inclusive, open, and free from judgement.

The safe classroom also reminds us that we need to make cheating and dishonest as difficult as possible. Such behaviour should not be tolerated. Sadly, there are always ways to cheat. We should never focus so much on the cheaters that we negatively impact the honest students by limiting their choice and freedom (see #2 above). Ultimately, cheaters hurt themselves. The culture that we cultivate should make that clear.

The easiest way to reduce cheating and academic dishonesty to is include a good mix of objective and subjective work and to ask Google Proof questions.

Here are some ideas for create a safe classroom environment:

• Make your students WANT to learn
• Explore rubric or standards-based grading
• Give students time to explore
• Include objective and subjective work
• Ask “google-proof” questions
• Make it hard to cheat
• Don’t focus your class on the students who want to cheat.

Is your classroom agile, individual, and safe? Are these values that you support? 

Technology without the Tech

Image: Flicker via Worcester Academy

It's very easy for a school to argue that its technology implementation/integration is one of its strengths. The typical campaign goes something like this:

[School Name] is a leader in educational technology. Each classroom is equipped with a digital projector and interactive whiteboard. In the high school there is a 1:1 laptop program designed to teach students the importance of collaboration and 21st century skills. 

This is the wrong way to approach technology in education. The above statement focuses primarily on technology hardware, not application. The measure of a schools success with technology should focus on how the technology is being used to enhance student learning:

[School Name] uses technology to provide students with meaningful learning opportunities. Each faculty member is skilled in leveraging hardware and web resources to challenge students with formative and rewarding learning opportunities that go beyond the walls of the classroom. 

If this is the metric that schools were measured against, far fewer of them would be able to list "technology integration" as one of their core strengths.

Time, Attention, and Clear Thinking

In years gone-bye, information was a critical resource that determined success. Today, information is cheap and easily accessible by anyone with a web-enabled computer or mobile device. Access to information is no longer a distinguishing factor. The critical skills that determine success today are time, attention, and clear thinking.

Time

Photo by canardo via Flickr

Everyone has the same number of hours in the day. It doesn't matter if your are Warren Buffet or someone living in a third-world country. You have the same amount of time. What differentiates successful and not-so-successful people is their ability to use their time effectively. Technology makes it possible to leverage the time that we are given to achieve more than was previously possible. Technology also allows us to create and sell products that are independent of time. Consider the story of this independent French developer who is pulling in $200k/year on the development of several games he developed for iOS devices. The time that he spent developing these Apps has was leveraged through the Web economy.



Attention

Photo by Lulu Hoeller via Flickr 

While brain capacity varies from person to person, we all have the ability to concentrate our available mental ability on a difficult problem or question that can add potential value to ourselves or other people. The old saying that "if it was easy someone else would have done it by now" is very appropriate. While technology has solved some challenges, it has created many others.

There are many prizes, competitions, and contests which reward focused attention on a difficult problem or idea:

• The Netflix Prize: a quest to improve the Netflix recommendation algorithm. Hundreds of teams worked for over two years for a $1 million dollar award which was presented in 2009. 
• "Project 10 to the 100": a challenge sponsored by Google to come up with solutions to some of the world's most challenging problems (energy, education, housing, environment, health, etc). 16 ideas were chosen and the public voted for the top five ideas, each of which received $2 million to implement the idea. 
• TED Prize: the core goal of TED is to award creative thinkers and innovators for their work in solving difficult problems or improving life around the world. Each winner is awarded $100,000 and allowed to make one wish, which the well-connected TED attendees excitedly make a reality. 

The ability to stay focused and committed to finding a solution to a problem is one thing that separates the good from the great. When solutions are not obvious and require effort to discover, most give up. 

Clear Thinking

The Shallows, by Nicholas Carr, is a book about how technology is changing the way that we think, and not for the better.

"When we go online, we enter an environment that promotes cursory reading, hurried and distracted thinking, and superficial learning...The Net's cacophony of stimuli short-circuits both conscious and unconscious thought, preventing our minds from thinking either deeply or creatively." 

Information is no longer a limiting resources. We all have access to far more information than we will ever need. It is very easy to continue the accumulation of information without ever acting on that information in a useful way. If unchecked, the accumulation of information can lead to confusion, information paralysis, and procrastination. No amount of information will lead us to make the perfect decision. Eventually, we must make a decision and move forward.

Having the discipline to turn off the flow of information and think clearly and deeply about the problem at hand in light of available information is the mark of a leader.

*********

I write these things because I struggle with them:

• I never have enough time in the day to act on the ideas that I generate. 
• My mind races from task to task, idea to idea, like a crazed internet surfer clicking on hyperlinks.
• I am an information junky and have trouble turning off the tap. 

Capacity. Are you Over it?

As a die-hard Internet user I live and die by the bandwidth of the network that I am using. The capacity of the network determines what I am able to accomplish.

The principle of capacity applies to other areas of life as well:

You can only serve someone else if you aren't overextended.

You can only demonstrate love to someone else if you aren't emotionally drained.

You can only help comfort someone who is overwhelmed if you aren't overwhelmed.

Over Capacity!

One of the reasons I have been thinking so much about my capacity is because I am a person who would prefer to be stretched to the max. I like to test my limits; to see how far I can go. It's the American way after all-- work hard, play hard, leave nothing on the field.

The true ability of a person might be better measured not by the time energy and emotion they expend, but by how much time, energy, and emotion they have left after they accomplish their assigned duties. The person that has something left in the tank has the opportunity to truly impact other peopled who are over capacity.

What I'm suggesting is somewhat heretical because there is an unspoken assumption that if you have extra time energy and emotion left over, you are lazy and should be doing something else. That's typically how I feel. In the end it all depends on how you use your extra capacity. If it's spent in front of the TV or at the bar by yourself, then you probably should be doing more. If you take the opportunity to help and impact someone else, I think that's time well spent.

Are you over capacity?

The Search for the Killer App

Everywhere I turn people are recommending and looking for the "killer app" that will make their mobile device more productive, fun, useful, and efficient.

Educators are also looking for the "killer app" that will enable their students to communicate, collaborate, and connect with one another

The search for the "killer app" is like a debate over the greatest athlete or movie; it will always continue, but without any consensus.

At last week's MACUL conference I appreciated this advice from Steve Dembo:

"Instead of looking for the killer app, educators should be asking, what do we want our students be be able to do with their mobile devices. Once you answer that question, you'll know what apps you're looking for." 

Here's my short list of things students should be able to do with their mobile devices:

1. Communicate with their teachers. 
2. Collaborate with other students.
3. Create things to demonstrate their learning. 
4. Find information

There are a lot of apps that enable these activities. Now that I've got my end goal in mind, I can begin selecting the apps that will best meet these needs.