Using MyMaps.

Check out this most amazing padlet by Karly Moura about using MyMaps by Google. Great use of Padlet too. So impressive. I really, really like everything from Matt Miller's Ditch That Textbook and Alice Keeler who seems to know more about GAFE than anyone. These are awesome resources.

Rubrics

I have mixed feelings about rubrics.

Plusses- 

• They delineate what is poor, fair, good, and great by giving (somewhat) objective standards.
• They can help clarify student thinking and guide student work if you share the rubric with the students in advance. (Hint: you should)
• They are efficient and easy to use.

Minuses

• There is such a thing as rubricitis. If not careful, we can splinter instruction into too many pieces. 
• Customarily, a rubric breaks the learning down into co-equal pieces. Thus in a project, content and neatness may get the same score. Understanding of content should always be the primary focus. This is easily fixed by weighting each section of the rubric differently. 

Single point rubrics.

I've come to appreciate single point rubrics. One doesn't have to get as "granular". And it leaves space for real teacher feedback. Below is one I made last year for a podcast project. 

It is always about the Learning (or On Grecian Urns)

Don't Use Tech for Its Own Sake.... just as you wouldn't do pretty much anything else for its own sake. Jennifer Gonzalez totally nails it in this recent post entitled Is Your Lesson a Grecian Urn?. She points out that some seemingly good lessons are actually quite devoid of learning. 

I was reminded of the dioramas of my childhood while reading her blog post. I was so proud of them. Yet, all that they demanded was that I know some of the main characters of the book. How many projects using tech or the art supplies advance learning? What are the 21st century equivalents of diorama making?

Quoting Jay McTigue, she writes:

“The activities, though fun and engaging, do not lead anywhere intellectually. (They) lack an explicit focus on important ideas and appropriate evidence of learning.”

It is easy to fool oneself into thinking one is doing a good job. The kids are busy and having fun. Tech is integrated. Multi-disciplinary teaching is going on. But what is learned? It's a great post. Seriously. Go read it.

I Hate Elections.

In my 40's, I've finally learned some ways to check my thoughts. I could and can get totally caught up by my own thinking. I also have the ability to catastrophize. A wise old women I knew put it best when she said, "I worried about 100 things. 99 of them didn't happen and one almost did." Like my friend Marian, I did this all the time.  Election season bring back some of these bad habits. I can be a politics junkie if I am not careful.

Prayer, breathing, meditation, mindfulness and self-awareness have give me a tool-kit to get out of my own head and out of my own way. This election season in particular has tested this ability. I checked Nate Silver's 538 about 8 times a day until about a week ago when I just had to stop making myself worried.

I canvassed today for my preferred candidate. I'll vote. But I have to realize that I can do very little to change the outcome. My vote is statistically insignificant.  One of millions. I convinced one unlikely voter to vote today while canvassing. Or maybe this woman was just being polite.

My son failed his first 4 driving tests. (In his defense, I blame his second failure fully on the test-giver) With each failure, future failure become more likely. His anxiety rose. On the sad car ride back from the testing site after the 4th failure, I talked to him about some of the tools I now use to calm myself and relax. Maybe this helped him as he took his 5th test, because he passed it. I asked him if he used some of the tools. He said they really helped.

For me, these tools are spiritual in nature because that's the vocabulary that makes the most sense to me. These tools can have a secular vocabulary. I convinced the mindfulness movement is getting at some of the same things  Buddhists have been doing for millennia. Many Recovery programs are also based on teaching this self-awareness and teach "letting go". As someone raised in the Catholic tradition, I am most comfortable using Christian language to do this.

I teach 12th graders who are freaking out about college. Wouldn't it be great if they had a toolkit to help them navigate this year?  These aren't intellectual tools; they are self-awareness tools.

I took a step in this direction this week by playing for my students David Foster Wallace's This is Water speech to help them understand that they construct their own realities and can control how they perceive and react to the world. (I embedded the lesson in a broader International Relations lesson on how nations and peoples can construct collective realities. Germans have a word for this spirit of an age, zeitgeist. )

Teaching always calls me to my best self. I am my least petty, most generous, most understanding and most open when I am working with students. I expect most good teachers are. I think this lesson for the students was at some level really a reminder to myself to get out of my own head. When I'm not self-absorbed and wrapped up in my own head, I'm clearly a better, happier person.

While writing the paragraph above, I realized something that should be so obvious but hitherto I have never thought of- while teaching, I go outside of myself thereby letting me be my best self. That's probably why teaching has always made me so happy.

I still hate elections.

What is the point of a grade?

I return to this topic again and again. It is report card time at my school. So grades are on my mind.

I loathe grades. Too often, they get in the way of learning and they don't give much in the way of information. They imply an objectivity that rarely and perhaps can never  exist. Some suggest that grades serve to motivate students. In some cases that is true. However, I taught for 23 years without giving grades and my students were motivated. In the video below, Alfie Kohn explains far more eloquently than me why grades don't work.

Yet in most schools...

sadly...

we are stuck with grades. And so, I find myself keenly attuned to grading and testing practices. If we agreed that grades should be no more and no less than a shorthand "snapshot" of a student's learning, then I'd be okay with them. I wouldn't like them, but I would tolerate them. But we don't use grades that way, even if though we say we do.

For instance, I have had advisees, who not knowing tests had a second side to them, score D's on tests in which they answered correctly every question they attempted. While yes, the students should have looked to turn the page over to find more questions, the "D" tells the student, and the student's parents, and potential colleges next to nothing about the students' learning. Everyone involved, including the teacher, knows this "D" is not indicative of learning. So why give false information? 

 I also wonder about the role of extra credit. I know there are students who score 106% on tests. That is impossible! One cannot know more than all the material. It also reinforces the notion that tests are about the points, and not the learning. 

Yet, here is my real point today. I'm resigned to giving grades in my new role. What I want to know is when did we decide in American education that an average was the best way to determine student understanding?

Imagine a foreign language class.

Student A scores

80, 80, 85, 80, 84= 81.8 average

Student B scores

55, 70, 75, 90, 100 = 78

Who has learned more? Who is the more proficient student of the foreign language. Hasn't student B learned far more and by course's end,  know more? This is an unlikely example (though it is one that any long-time teacher has seen), but it does prove the point that averages can deceive. In terms of weather, the average temperature in Dublin and Philadelphia is largely the same. The average tells us nothing about the weather in Philadelphia and Dublin. I've spent a good amount of time in Dublin. It isn't like the weather in my hometown of Philadelphia, PA. 

A colleague of mine pointed out that for one's golf handicap, the highest and lowest scores are dropped. Makes sense. Outliers are just that, outliers. 

Some schools are rethinking assessment and grades. Some have dropped grades. Others have become very intentional and specific in what they say the role of grades are. 

If you give grades, please remember the point of a grade is to quickly show student learning. Do yours? And pointing the mirror back to me, do mine? 

The World's Most Expensive Potato Chip

$11 for 5 chips. Comes in its own box. Made with truffled seaweed found near the St. Faroe Islands.

http://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2016/10/luxury-potato-chip-markets-everything.html

RSA Style Animations

I love RSA animations. They remind me of illustrated books I loved as a kid. They also remind me of the vintage cartoons I also loved. The first RSA I believe I ever saw was the now famous Ken Robinson talk.

I've been looking on and off for awhile for RSA animators that I could use for my teaching and for my students to use as they make reports.

I've found two that I will review here.

1. Mysimpleshow. I found Mysimpleshow from reading Jennifer Gonzalez's Cult of Pedagogy blog. Mysimpleshow is slow! At least it was slow for me. It took quite awhile for it to upload and it also had loading errors when I tried to go back to previous steps in the creation process. This, unlike the video I make below, was a serious effort. I wrote a script. The content matter is about Samuel Huntington's Class of Civilization thesis.

plusses- it is web-based. You can take a powerpoint, which I did, and modify it to make it the basis of your video. This is a terrific feature. Also, if you'd rather not record your voice, there is a auto-narration feature. Finally, unlike VideoScribe, it is FREE!

Minuses- OMG it is slow. In fact, it took hours to upload once complete.
Here is my serious effort at a mysimpleshow.

2. The other tool I'm checked out is VideoScribe. It is super easy to use. It does not let one start with a preexisting powerpoint. Did I say that it is quick and super easy to use? It is web-based and doesn't require a full browser as I made it on my iPad. It took me all of 15 minutes to make something decent looking. It is unscripted and hardly a best effort, unlike my legitimate attempt at mysimpleshow. Still, I think I like videoscribe better. Also, the pictures are "drawn" not just placed as they are in mysimpleshow. This makes it more visually appealing.

The downside, it isn't cheap. In fact, it is expensive. I made this with my free 30 day trial. It is $144! for a year and even more if you want to only buy a month, $29!

Click here to see my example.