Fringe Benefit

This week I spoke to a group of Ed students about how I use tech in my classroom, plus the challenges that go along with it. It was neat, since I was taking I4ED just last year. I've been reflecting on it and have thought of one more thing I would have liked to share.

Tech knowledge and experience does more than just engage students: it can help you become part of your school community. Things that are second nature to me, like hooking up a projector, are mysteries to others. Also, when things go wrong, and they always do, it can be incredibly frustrating. Keep an eye out and help out wherever you can. The hallmark of a good team is working together. If you can download an alternative media player for someone when Windows Media Player crashes, switch from extended display to cloned, or set up speakers, don't hesitate to help someone with it. It'll make you fast friends and one of the most important things I'm learning, as a first year teacher, is that the advice of friends who've already survived their first year is invaluable.

Reflecting on Reflection

Last month I tweeted a little pun:

Why do educators spend so much time on reflection, yet ignore refraction and diffraction? #physicsteacherproblems
— Tyler Letkeman (@Tyler_JL) June 27, 2013

However, it got me thinking of how these three wave phenomena actually describe reflective practice pretty well.

In physics the white areas represent a medium, be it air, water, diamond, vacuum, &c., the grey areas represent a new medium that has a different density compared to the original one. The red lines are wave rays, which represent the direction of travel of a wave, be it sound, water, light, electron, &c.
In terms of reflective practice white areas on top represent ourselves as individual teachers. The grey areas are other individuals, like colleagues, family and friends. The red wave rays represent our practice, what we think about our practice, teaching philosophy, ideas and more.

Reflection: When we reflect on something the metaphor is pretty straight forward. With waves the angle of incidence is equal to the angle of reflection so we should be seeing what is reflected exactly as it is. This allows us to critique our practice and always work to improve. The one draw back of reflection is that it is solitary. However much and however well I reflect my practices, ideas, and philosophies stay with me.

Refraction: Waves bend at the boundary between two media and similarly our ideas and practices change when we share them with others. People can see things in ways we'd never imagine. This can help us catch flaws or turn ho-hum activities into show-stoppers. In reflection the angles don't change, but the incident and reflected angles in refraction are different, though related by Snell's Law. Relating this to reflective practice shows that when we share ideas or practices they no longer are ours. The sharing of them fundamentally alters them. They become someone else's understanding/interpretation of our idea. They experience it in a way we cannot.
The plus side is that partial reflection also occurs during refraction. Some of the wave bounces off the boundary between media. Seeing how other people react to, understand, or build upon our ideas allows us to learn things a teachers that we could never learn alone.

Diffraction: Waves bend around openings. (Try bouncing a laser off the shiny side of a CD!) Diffraction allows educators to bring their ideas to the world. Traditionally the openings allowing our ideas to bend and spread have been journals and conferences, but with the advent of the internet the opportunities for diffracting have exploded: blogging, twitter, facebook, youtube, slideshare and so many others. Making our ideas, practices and philosophies public allows for greater growth. Through feedback and interaction we get a much broader view. Tens, hundreds, or thousands of others can engage in refraction with us and show us what our ideas can become. They in turn get a new idea to reflect upon and integrate into their practice. Many people talk about bringing the world into their classroom, but we can also bring the world into our reflective practice and reap the many benefits.

I'm committed to being a reflective, refractive and diffractive educator.

Smarter or Dumberer

To the ancients these would represent the four elements: Earth, Water, Wind and Fire.
To me they also represent the four states of matter: Solid, Liquid, Gas and Plasma.
The ancients classified all things by their elements and we can do likewise with the states of matter. Often there is the thought that we are more advanced and more intelligent than those in antiquity. We scoff at the things they believed, their theories of the world, because we know so much better.
I don't think that's the case. Our brains aren't much different than they've ever been, so our potential for creativity and intelligence aren't any greater than the ancients'. I think the difference is our access to shared knowledge. We've never relied on just our own brains to retain all the information necessary to our lives.

We started sharing knowledge with other people: elders, physicians, butchers, etc. We didn't have to know how to set bones or dismember a cow to survive any more. We didn't get dumber. We just turned our minds to new pursuits. Then came text: scrolls, books, the printing press. Our new knowledge could be collected, stored and referenced when needed. And we didn't get dumber. Now technology and the internet has increased the amount of, and our access to, shared knowledge exponentially. We won't get dumber. Our brains are adaptable and creative. Intelligence may look different after the internet revolution, but it will not decrease.

Our ancestors were smart - We are smart - Our descendants will be smart

The Future

Some people think the future will look like this:

or like this:


I'm a little bit more conservative on my outlook. Our imagined future always out paces what actually comes. We should have had flying cars ten years ago, but we're still struggling to break away from fossil fuels.
I browsed through last year's NMC Horizon K12 Report, a project that looks at emerging technologies and predicts when they will be used in education. It predicted cloud computing, collaborative environments, mobiles and apps, and tablet computing would be in use within the year. From what I've seen in schools, and in this class, they were right.

Click here to see what topics are being discussed for this year's report.

It's a neat exercise, so I'm going to try my hand at it.

• 3D printing is going to become wildly popular. First in design classes like shops and drafting, then in science courses where design is part of the curriculum. I feel it just may even the playing field for sciences fairs too. Students just have to book time on the school's 3D printer and can make anything they dream up to test their question, instead of relying on materials they have access to at home.
• I want apps to evolve. They're good and all, but I feel like they are compartmentalizing our digital experience. There's an app for this thing and an app for that thing, but you have to download each individually and they run in isolation. As we use the internet to collaborate with each other more and more, I'd like apps to multi-task and collaborate.
• I want virtual science labs to stop. Virtual disections, CGI chemical reactions and gravity simulators are great ways to supplement labs and demonstrations, but should not replace hands on science. The scientific attitude is about questioning and testing for yourself. I realize that some schools just don't have the budget for labs, but I want to see skype, or programs like adobe connect or blackboard collaborate, step in here. Universities could partner with high schools and conduct labs over skype. Audio, video, and even data could be streamed. This way students get to see science in action instead of programming in action.

Even From Here

Clarence Fisher { @glassbeed | http://www.evenfromhere.org/ } who teaches in Snow Lake, Manitoba shared with my class over skype.

A chat with Clarence Fisher from Tyler_JL

Personality, Learning and Digital Identity

George Couros { @gcouros | www.georgecouros.ca } skyped in to share with our class this week. George is now, as I understand it, a principal of principals and advocates for connected and collaborating educators at all levels.
Some of us were Tweeting George in advance and George used this to talk about how people are more willing to connect with all levels of educators now. New teachers used to be wary, perhaps afraid, of reaching out to the big, scary principal, but the internet and our connected culture has flattened the hierarchy.
George shared two things with us: the qualities he looks for in a teacher and what we can do to make ourselves more employable.

Teacher Qualities

• Make use of our unprecedented opportunity to tap into the experience of others. Connect, connect, connect and never be afraid to ask for help if we're struggling.
• Do what we love and share it with our students. We connected with our favourite teachers on a level outside of academia. 
• Be yourself! We used to be advised to separate our professional and personal selves, but students know when we are being disingenuous. George advises merging our professional and personal selves and we should. I've already met students at the mall and at the movies. When they see me, they see their teacher. If I'm a different person in these circumstances it affects my credibility in the classroom. We need to bring ourselves into our classrooms (I like to wear my geeky ties, shirts and belt buckles) and we need to keep our professionalism outside the classroom. Perhaps we should start calling teaching a perfession and refer to ourselves as prosons?
• Curriculum follows Connection. Building connections with our students is most important. We don't teach the curriculum. The curriculum is a book. It can't learn anything. We teach kids and kids thrive on relationship.
• Develop a love of learning.
• Embody it! Be a life-long learner, even if it is difficult, because if we give up on learning something, we model that for our students. 
• We need to take feedback and try to improve.
• Show our learning in our portfolio, not just our work.
• Don't just teach kids school, help them learn to love to learn.
• Use learning goals over performance goals. No grades, no awards. George recommended Drive by Daniel H. Pink to our class to learn about motivation.
• Digital Leadership - use social media, technology to better the lives of others.
• Be passionate about what we teach. Passion is a virus and is highly contagious.

• Be school teachers instead of classroom teachers. Many people just work with their group of students and don't interact with any other students in the school. Be part of the community. Treat all the students in the school as if they were in your classroom. Look at duty as a way connect with more students.
• Strong communication skills. Don't email angry! George shared how he would handle students who came to him for discipline. He'd get them to tell him why they were there and get them to suggest appropriate consequences. He also phoned parents with the student present, which prevented students from giving another story to parents once they went home. 

Helping Ourselves

• What is out there? Be aware of our digital footprint. Our tweets are public and we will be googled, yahooed, and binged every which way be prospective employers. Who we are online can make or break us. In George's schools students were starting digital portfolios in kindergarten.
• What am I saying about myself? Proofread my resume and never exagerate or hyperbolize.
• Put my website, blog, twitter account, etc. inside my resume. Providing my online presence right away shows that we are confident in our digital selves and prevents any misunderstandings over namesakes who may be doing unprofessional, or even illegal, things online.

Awesome thought - Move from problem solvers to problem finders. Don't give "real world" problems but get students to find problems in the world and then work to solve them.

What If Isaac Newton Didn't See That Apple

Newton was a very bright man and wrote on a wide variety of subjects. Suppose on that fateful day something else caught his eye as he lounged in an orchard. Not an apple, but a book. Perhaps dropped by a worker in the orchard. Newton examines it, enthralled. A wind blows through the orchard loosing many apples. Thud, thud, thud, but he takes no notice. The book is a diary and chronicles the orchard man's daily life: work, family, hopes, dreams, failures, successes. Newton, captivated, wonders what laws govern writing and turns his scientific mind to the task.
He thinks, experiments, revises, and experiments again. Someone else is left to describe the laws of motion, but Newton gives the world:

The Three Laws of Writing

1. A pen in motion tends to stay in motion, while a pen at rest tends to stay at rest.
2. A final piece is the product of inspiration and perseverance.
3. Any energy a writer puts into a piece is met by equal and individual energy from the reader.

My ELA Identity

We had an assignment in my senior years ELA course to think about who we are and what that means as future teachers of English. It was a great way to reflect on the fact that who I am influences my teaching. I need to make the best of my strengths and focus on my weaknesses to reach all students across all learning styles/preferences. So, this is where ELA and I intersect.
 

Meta-blogging

I currently write four blogs.

• ICTyler (this one) about explorations in the world of ICT and education.
• The KT Adventures - Personal things like travel pictures, stories, thoughts and such.
• Tried It! - a chronicle of my attempt to overcome pickiness and food in general.
• Poetic Times - a multi-author blog where we create found poetry from current events to use a resource in the classroom.

I started blogging in high school on Teen Open Diary. As for purpose I'd say a lot of it was that other people were and that I wanted to articulate my thoughts for an audience, plus I love being silly.

There are as many reasons to blog as there are people. As an individual, I use blogging as a creative outlet, a way to connect with family and friends while travelling, a way to organize and sort through my thoughts. As an educator, I use blogging for building connections, sharing resources and seeing new ideas and perspectives.

Blogging is an amazing reflective tool. To sit and think what you want to say on a topic/experience makes you sort through it. You re-engage with things.

Going back to Teen Open Diary. The concept of an open diary is a great way to think of a blog. It is your personal opinions, thoughts, experiences, but left open for any interested passerby to read through AND comment on. Comments can be inane, advertisements, vitriolic, or instructive, insightful and helpful.

Evolution of the Cell Phone

Where's it going?

More than its Summative parts

This blog was started as a summative project for my ICT in education course at Brandon University. I came into the course a technophile and it has been great for sharpening my skills and showing me new programs, sites, and technologies.
For me, however, the most important aspect of the course lies elsewhere. Professor (soon to be doctor) Nantais has encouraged me to think critically and reflectively on the role of ICT in education, both in a broad sense and what it means for our future, individual classrooms. He introduced me to the Literacy with ICT continuum and its importance in all areas of education.
Leaving this course I am committed to using technology in a new way: to foster creativity, critical thinking and the development of responsibility in my future students.


While this has been a project, I love blogging, technology and feel that sharing and collaboration make for great educators. So, I'm going to continue chronicling my educational experience with ICT (and probably regular experiences too). So follow along as ICTyler is going to be so much more that its summative parts.

Student/Teacher

I learned a great deal while student teaching from my cooperating teacher through observation, feedback and conversation. I also learned a lot from first-hand experience leading lessons and reflecting on them. In this regard I was a student.
I was prepared to try my best to be a teacher in my interactions with students. I feel I increased in proficiency and skill in this regard as my placement went along. What I didn't expect was how much I would end up teaching my cooperating teacher in regards to ICT. She was not very confident on computers or the internet. When I lead introductory lessons on new programs she would follow along with the students doing the activity and taking notes as well. We downloaded blurb booksmart on the students' profiles for a bookmaking project. In case she wanted to download it for more students in the future, we went through the process together and I  made sure I left her detailed instructions as well.
I truly felt like a student/teacher and was happy to give some information back to a person how shared so much with me.

Literacy with ICT

Literacy with ICT is a developmental continuum for integrating ICT into classrooms throughout the public education system. It also focuses on teaching responsible digital citizenship, whereas past ICT programs have focused on technical skills.

The outcomes of the continuum are split into two domains: cognitive and affective. The cognitive domain focuses increasing analytical and creative thought while using ICT, while the affective domain focuses on responsible, moral ICT use.

As this is an important initiative for teachers of all subjects, at all levels, I started implementing it in my student teaching. Any lesson I did integrating ICT I instructed students as to how to approach the task responsibly. For collages or any other project that required pictures I had students follow along with these steps to practice responsible image searching:

• go to images.google.ca
• click on advanced image search.
• scroll down and click on “Only images labeled for reuse.”
• fill in your search term (e.g. snowflake) and scroll down and click “Search images”.
• double check the licencing of the specific image you want. Follow all restrictions.

With technology fully integrated into our lives outside of the school it only makes sense that we teach our students how to navigate this digital age responsibly and creatively.

Google

In late September Google celebrated its 13th birthday! It's hard to believe. I remember when there were five or more major search engines, plus many minor ones. Yahoo, Metacrawler, Altavista, Ask Jeeves, Lycos, Dogpile and many more¹.

Now Google IS searching. So much so that we no longer look things up or do a web search, we google it.

That is a very successful 13 years.

1 - Thanks to Barry Schwartz @ http://searchengineland.com/a-look-back-at-the-old-search-engines-25766 for jogging my memory on some old search engines.

web 2.0

I'd heard of web 2.0 before, but that was really it. I did not pay much attention to the term.

Now I know that web 2.0 describes the shift in the web from text based, consumer content to multimedia based, interactive/collaborative content.

I think two things are responsible for the shift to 2.0 - computer capabilities and the ubiquitous world wide web. When I first got the internet and had to suffer through all the electronic screeches and howls of the modem connecting I would curse a website that included a picture. It would triple to octuple the load time! Now that modem speeds are approaching c and computers can process things even faster the shift to 2.0 makes sense. It's almost impossible to find a site without an image now.

The fact that the internet is pretty much everywhere, even on our phones, in addition to improved computer capabilities makes collaboration possible. In my lifetime I started with only opening one window at a time and had a click-and-wait mentality. If I went too fast or opened too much I was just asking for a crash. (Mind you I've never owned a Mac, perhaps I'd have a different perspective if I had.) Now, I can have seven tabs open in my browser, have desktop gadgets and skype running in the background and still be working on a document that 10 other people are editing simultaneously. The web has come a long way.

I don't think I can do justice to just how pervasive web 2.0 is. Luckily there are many other sites that have attempted to do just that. Go 2 web 2.0 is just one example. The screen shot I've provided shows just a fraction of one of the seventy-two pages of web 2.0 applications the site links to!

Flickr, Google Docs, Facebook and Twitter are all major 2.0 applications I use on a regular basis.

Web 2.0 Info and Resources

Looking at web 2.0 with web 2.0

Are we speaking the right language?

The idea for this cartoon came relatively early into the class when I really started thinking about what ICT has been and should be in Education.

On the Way to School

Lately, I've been contemplating how physical geography has been eclipsed by human geography. It seems we can't go anywhere anymore that is natural. There's always a power line or something in the way. (I guess I've gone through a lot of travel photos in the last few years.) I've been trying to figure out how I would represent this in art. So, I include it when I doodle. I drew a tree, but put electrical cables from a power line in front of it and had a bird sitting on the cable instead of the tree.
Anyway, I feel this picture brings out the beauty of a landscape no longer characterized by physical geography, but now by human geography.

Also, (more in hopes of having a reason to post it here than anything) I was thinking of this picture in the context of education and ICT in education specifically. I think as teachers, especially with ICT, we often act as trains. We simply bring the students to where we want them to be. I feel our purpose should be more to light the tracks. To show them what the goal is and how to get there and most importantly that the tracks keep going beyond the classroom station.

An Experiment

In my first degree I used a laptop for my notes. I even struggled through calculus and higher level physics and all the keyboard-unfriendly symbols. I had Microsoft Onenote, which saved automatically, and had a much looser format. You could click anywhere and begin typing and it would be a separate, manipulable block of text. It even had an easy draw feature, plus a search feature so you could find whatever you wanted without having to remember exactly where you made. Oh, and an awesome folder/notebook structure that let you easily get to any of your notes.
The one drawback was easy distraction while in boring, easy, uninteresting classes. I became a bejeweled expert.
I now have Onenote again and am going to start taking notes with it in my Ed classes. While none of them are uninteresting, the potential for distraction still remains. Let's see if I've grown out of it, or if it's a constant for me.

ICT in action

I am now two weeks into student teaching and have been able to put some theory into practice. I have worries about a technology gap and a disconnect between the computer lab and the classroom. Every child does not have equal access to technology and I feel trekking a class to the lab is not an integration of technology into the classroom; however, I have been very lucky in my placement.
My school has about 50 netbooks that can be reserved and used in classrooms. They aren't always available and the network and servers sometimes have issues, but they enable teachers to fully integrate technology and the internet into the classroom.
I've helped develop and teach a grade 9 vocabulary unit and have used wordle as a tool to display students' growing proficiency with root words, suffixes and prefixes. Classes use them to research essay topics. Don't want to type up a book review? Get a netbook and make a collage or powerpoint to summarize.
I've been able to model responsible image searching on google and have the entire class follow along step-by-step on their netbooks and then search on their own. I'm going to use the same process to give an introductory movie editing lesson in Movie Maker this week.
It's awesome. I can do anything I want due to the total integration of this technology into the classroom. I've started a character study that is also a technological translation project. One of my classes is reading Macbeth. The students chose a main character and have to pay close attention to the character throughout the play, for the end goal is to create a facebook profile for your character that actually matches your character's character. The students have to understand and extract information from the traditional literary form and translate it into a digital literary form. It is a long term project and I wouldn't have had the confidence to attempt it if I didn't have a completely integrated classroom.

Striking & iGoogle

So, the faculty is on strike and now I have some time on my hands. I've decided that instead of spend it worrying about what will happen with my student teaching I'll try to use it in a productive manner. After all this is meant to be a summative reflection on the year.

I've just been zoning out on iGoogle. This is another second discovery for me in this class. I found it first when I was in New Brunswick working in a French school. If I was caught up on my prep for the day I would quite often find myself wandering there. I'd prettied up each page with appropriate backgrounds and themes. The best was the Legend of Zelda theme for my games page. I can see how the idea of having all of your favourite sites and important information on one page would be beneficial.

No Picture? http://sha3teely.com/?cat=8&paged=2

However, iGoogle has never been more than a passing interest for me. I could be writing this post in my blogger gadget on my page, but here I am in blogger typing away because I find a lot of the features of gadgets are pared down. I can't attach files in the blogger gadget, nor the gmail gadget either. I'm not always going to want to put a picture into a blog post, or attach something in an email, but since I often do, I go to the actual site automatically. Why get halfway through something only to have to switch to finish it how I want?
I'm running Windows 7 on my laptop and have many gadgets running as part of my desktop display. Why open iGoogle and check the weather when it is already being displayed on my desktop?
One thing that does hook me is games. I can search through and add games I like and then just have them together on one page always. I don't have to go to popcap for one game and shockwave for another. As a result I spend hours going from one game to another being quite unproductive.
In the end, I believe I don't stick with iGoogle because I'm an inomad. I like to wander from site to site, to have many tabs open. I like typing in URLs or following link trails. When iGoogle brings everything to me I feel like I go nowhere. I want to be up and moving, to be dynamic, digitally fit one could say.