Please understand I don’t mean everyone when I say this, but don’t you think high school would be a more awesome experience if the communication and caring was as intense and often the whole year as it is these last two weeks.

Students suddenly care about their grades. They are emailing, stopping by, caring, complaining, try to beg for make ups and extra credit. Parents are calling, emailing and going to administration to get this grade changed, that concern heard, etc… As I said, it’s not everyone (and it’s not all bad) but we teachers wish the communication was there all year. Sure, some of us (and I’m no angel) don’t call and email as much as we could, too, but suddenly we’re so busy about grades, behaviors, etc… I have meetings Friday, Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday after school next week. I have a parent who will probably want to meet Monday so we can tell him what we’ve already said three times via email.

Our school is a family, a community, sure but why don’t we all take a page from this playbook and make grades matter, make parents part of the equation (and make parents want to be part of the equation), make kids turn in work on time, realize the importance of their grades/classes, and actually care (other than just when grades are due or athletic eligibility). If we can all learn from this, will there be a chance? Now, if you’ll excuse me I gotta run and grade these essays.

cc licensed flickr photo shared by ragesoss

This began rockily as they didn’t think to use them for research, but we began using phrases like “Use your technology to…” or by modeling on my own mobile phone use. I would say safer several weeks the students began replying to problems that emerge in classes in new ways, and I suddenly realized these questions were coming from further online research by the students at their desks. I’d be discussing something and wouldn’t be able to answer a question, but then suddenly one of their peers would raise his or her hand and explain to the peer what they hoped to know. By doing so, he or she is now teaching others (which has a 90% retention of information rate).

I continued this exciting usage in class through out the fall semester. At the beginning of the spring semester I asked the students to procure a copy of Twelfth Night and mentioned the full text could be found online, and then I told them when the text was due. The next week when books were due, several people were sitting at their desks with just BlackBerries, iTouches or iPhones. I was disappointed that they did not bring their materials to class and began to call role and ask for their plays. When I hit the first students without a paper book in front of them and asked where his play was, he held up his mobile device: “right here, Mr. Adams”. He flashed his screen at me, and I quickly went over to his desk and there was Twelfth Night open on an ereader app on his device. Oooops. My fault.

This kids took what I’d been teaching them and flipped it to a need from their own, but I didn’t realize it because I hadn’t thought that way yet. As I went around they all had their play, and I would say more than 30% of them did not have any paper copy at all. Two students had laptops, one had a netbook, and the others had mobile devices. And not every device was expensive. Some people had basic phones where they could save “notes”. Here they had note #1 which was Act I. Note #2 was Act II. And so forth. (My question still revolves around annotating these files!)

Last week my students were finishing up this Twelfth Night unit and building a poster (yes, yes, paper and markers). Many students had out their mobile devices and frankly there were probably a few people responding to questions of when work will be over or when the peer groups for Mr. X’s class will be meeting. Looking over one girl’s shoulder, she was looking up the use of the literary device “place” in the play so she could use that on her poster.

While this activity was occurring, I was observed by a district evaluator. In part, the comments on the informal write up were “why are so many students texting during your class when they should be learning”?

cc licensed flickr photo shared by The Pylon

I felt the need to explain my pedagogical processes (especially since these evaluations are worth $6k+), so I wrote a response that I sent over to district. Hours later I was called to my administrator’s office. She had the email I’d sent to district in front of her and wanted to know what I was doing in my classes.

I explained about the pedagogical approach to mobile technologies in my classes, how the students synthesize the materials, teach each other supplementary information learned online, and present that information to the class and students. I discussed how there will always been people who abuse the situation and when it’s reflected in grades, that discussion is between me and the student separate from the classroom. She seemed relatively interested but hesitant; I then mentioned briefly that it was in my management planned approved last July. She relaxed a bit, turned, picked up my plan, and asked me to locate that section. I showed her the paragraph disclaimer that delineated my classroom objectives for mobile pedagogy. She smiled widely and, I think, was relieved it was there.

She said she was eager to hear what I find but even being called in and even getting the evaluation in the first place, really shows how far we need to go and change the philosophies of schools’ administrations.

cc licensed flickr photo shared by jk5854

“Kelsey Texting” found on Flickr by searching Creative Commons using keyterms “texting” and “school”.

Academia may whine that these new forms of writing aren’t good, but Lunsford points out that today’s students and the “modern world of online writing, particularly in chat and on discussion threads, is conversational and public, which makes it closer to the Greek tradition of argument than the asynchronous letter and essay writing of 50 years ago.” I found this argument telling, and push my students to encourage any and all writing. Parents sometimes believe twittering is for teens and wierdos and others are only on Facebook to watch their own children, and I get the sideways glance when I run Twitter & Facebook workshops for the Boomer Generations but ladies and gentleman, I am a rhetorician, a compositon teacher, and a love of language. All language.

A little teacher humor as we prepare to return to work.

Over Spring Break of this year, the boy, John, asked me to edit his college essay. He was ready to go to college: Berkeley. One of the best liberal colleges in the west. He wants to be a rhetorician, and people like me know what that means. I edited his letter. Same week Alexis contacts me. She applied for study abroad during her junior year of Smith. She is studying British Lit (which happens to be my undergrad, too), and she was just accepted to Oxford University! John emails me the next day, the essay I helped edit got him into Berkeley on a full ride! These kids make me so proud, and I get the warm and fuzzies when they blame me for their accomplishments. Yes, I write letters. Yes, I push them more than almost anyone. Yes, I CARE. But they have to want it, too.

A few days later, I got a package from Wine.com. Inside are two bottles of wine (the second is for his “other favorite English teacher”, Liza, who also edited his essay). He sent these from Napa for us. It’s nice when we’re appreciated. Another boy Facebooked (yes, I made it a verb) today and told me that I am a great teacher, that he learned more in my class a few years ago than in any other, and that he was sorry he didn’t live up to his potential then. He also told me he was recently hired by NBC to work on the HEROES television show. Go figure.

Here’s some shots of the wine from Napa. Cheers.

Did Google Doc fail today, or did a link path break?

Now, I think I have a solution. Too many people don’t realize that there are so many EASY ways to get to certain Google places. Want mail? Try google.com/mail. Want calendar? Try google.com/calendar. Want scholar? Try google.com/scholar. Want voice? Try google.com/voice. Want docs? Try… you betcha… google.com/docs. Now when I try this, I am in like slim. The file is up on my machine in nanoseconds. Kiddies are going to gmail, click on email that notifies them that I shared something with them (cause, they won’t look if I don’t tell them it’s there!), and then the path is messed up. Bummer. So yes, something is messed up today, but in the grand scheme of things, it’s a very little error for such a ginormous company that does a pretty good job of running the world.

My response is 1) you shoulda not procrastinated. Your procrastination does not constitute a problem in my life. 2) there are 90 kids in my AP and several sections of Crabtree’s. I bet one of the over achievers downloaded the file weeks ago. This is what Google Groups is for (and I bet you know the URL for that one). Ask away. 3) be creative and try to figure it out. And by the way, in case it does work, here’s the BHS direct URL to the assignment.

Update two hours later…: Here’s an update after two hours of talking to students, colleagues, and researching online (just what I want to do on a Sunday!). The problem is NOT Google. It IS Microsoft. No one who has been using Firefox has any problem whatsoever. Every single person using IE cannot get to Google Docs. Microsoft sucks. Not Google.

So your solution is: Install a real browser like Firefox and proceed.

As a college professor and high school instructor, I tend to agree with these assertions. You know the kid. He’s the one who fights you for every point. She’s the one who checks his or her grade on the internet every chance they get. He’s one who asks when a new grade will be posted for an essay turned in 30 minutes beforehand. Students these days, according to Marshall Grossman from the University of Michigan, believe that the their default grade is an A. I see this all of the time. They want to begin with an A, and, as they fail to complete objectives, they expect to be penalized. They don’t like when we begin with a C as the average grade and then reward for going above and beyond. They think as long as they do the minimum, then they are entitled to an A or B.

When my students write essays, a score of 5 (which, for me, equates to a 75%) is the average. I reward them as their prose is more effective, their syntax is more mature, etc… I lower their earned grade when they do not meet the objectives. The students who get a 75% or an 80% and come to me asking, “what did I do wrong?” are incredulous. I tell them they did nothing wrong. They got an average grade, but they don’t want to be average. In an increasingly flat world (ala Friedman), they want to be perfect and blame us when they aren’t. I tell them they earn the grade, and I am just the score keeper. I record the score. I do not “give” grades.

Today’s students have a sense of entitlement that is seen across the country from universities like Vanderbuilt, U Vermont, and the other aforementioned schools, according to Roosevelt. I see it less as a community college instructor since class does play into my experiences there, but at the middle-class, relatively Caucasian high school I see this all of the time. Sure when it comes to objective tests, then it’s more black and white, but as they begin to write and I assess more subjectively, they begin to fight more and more.

Last week a student asked “how many points are we getting on this?”, as I assigned a homework assignment. I just looked at her and said that I didn’t know, and that it didn’t matter. What does matter is did you learn something? If you did, then you pass, and if you did not I fail. Our goal is to creative global, critical thinkers who are able to make meaning and connections between the curriculum and schooling, and too many of them are too worried about the points to really see the learning beyond just “doing school”.

Kylene Beers, the NCTE president, invited several of these digital natives to introduce Marc Prensky. The kids on the stage were from San Antonio Communications & Arts high school and discussed briefly who they are from graphic designer to web designer to photographer, and all finished by stating “I am a digital native”. Prensky asked them to stay on stage with him and be his “ground truth”–essentially agree or disagree with what he said based on their own experiences. Prensky gave his own background, and then introduced his most recent book on video games and how students learn.

Prensky said that all of the current Web 2.0 tools will be replaced within five years, and we as teachers should be afraid because the shifting changes of these tools are too quick for a large number of us. A recent title in The Chronicle of HIgher Education is that “Email is for Old People”. These tools become outdated, and we need to use the emerging technologies to better engage students. They are no longer engaged in the old ways anymore. The tasks of DOING, or game-playing, multi-tasking bring up all forts of new abilities that many of us, the digital immigrants, do not have. Our capabilities, mindsets, and activities need to change because technology evolves daily.

Some of the top reasons Prensky shared on why we DO NOT use technology included:

We don’t have time.
It produces poor work.
Where’s the evidence it works?
We don’t have computers.
It doesn’t help students pass the test.
Kids will cheat.

The last one was the most profound because we need to teach more about HOW to find knowledge and information rather than worrying about how they find that knowledge. Prensky said that he’s seen programs where students are giving “open phone” tests. He advocates for these”open phone” tests because it is not cheating if you redefine how to seek out and find information. . “Most of tests are open phone tests – you [teachers] just don’t know it”, one student was overheard stating.

Young people are not just using technology differently, they are reshaping their entire lives with technology. Students have online ways of communicating, sharing, buying/selling. exchangings, learning, meeting, gameing, coordinating, evaluations, collecting, creating, evolving, searching, analyzing, reporting, programing, etc…. No longer are our digital natives “little US’s” anymore. We, as teachers, use to be able to use our own younger experiences to relate to our students, but this generation is different. We can’t do that now.

Marc Prensky

By the age of 21, todays’ digital natives have spent between 5-10,000 hrs on video games, sent 250,000 emails & IMs, have spent 10,000 hours on cell phones, 20,000 hours on TV and YouTube (most on YouTube), and have viewed 500,000 commercials. BUT they’ve read less than 5,000 paper books. Each year these same digital natives have downloaded 2 billion ringtones per year and downloaded 2 billion songs per month. They’ve also sent 6 billion text messages each day. (Prensky jokingly added “most of them from our classrooms”.) He wrote an article called “Engage Me or Enrage Me”, engagement is changing. There’s a gap emerging between the way teachers think and they way students think are completely changing. The difference between the way we, the native immigrants work, and the way the digital natives are different from us include: they work at twitch speed (how fast their fingers move on cell phones or gaming joysticks, they randomly access information instead of linearily, they parallel process data, they read graphics first, and they are just truly more connected.

Marc’s 3 1/2 year old son Sky is the same age as my own daughter, Claire. He showed information on how Sky uses digital books, handheld games, music, and a Nintendo DS (I never bought my kid a Nintendo DS so I feel like I am a terrible dad right now!)

What makes a kid a digital native? Knowledge? Capabilities? NO Attitude? YES Comfort Level? YES. While digital immigrants always keep a foot in the past, like the people who print emails. Digital immigrants don’t instinctively go to the Internet FIRST. Immigrants do not share naturally, we think “Knowledge is Power”. We assume real life only happens offline, and we think the way WE learning to do things is the right (worse) way.

Our kids are metaphoric rockets; they go at hide speed, they’re volatile, they’re headed places unknown, they need good programming and good payload, they may require mid course corrections, and they have an enormous potential payoff.

Prensky said it’s time to replace these terms of digital immigrants/digital natives. We can call this person (who requires digital tools to work) homosapien digital or the digital wise person. Digital Wise Person, the future of “wisdom” and what it means to be human are enhanced by the digital when the brain and digital tools are combined. Technology enhances our physical capacities, our understanding, our wisdom.

We now need to think of technology not in terms of nouns (PowerPoint, Email, Wikipedia) but now we need to think in terms of verbs (Presenting, Communicating, Learning) because the nouns change rapidly while the verbs do not. I found this relatively profound because we cannot keep up with the nouns, but we can find ways to make the verbs happen in our classes, learning, and teaching. Although, using digital technology doesn’t automatically lead to wisdom; digital natives need to find ways to learn rather than just learn. Teachers can no longer teach; we need to guide them in their own learning. This is a more engaging way to do it. Prensky calls this “partnering” (and is writing a book on it). 21st century pedagogy is a move from Lecture/Controller to Guide/Partner relationships. Einstein said we don’t try to teach anything, but instead we create the environment where they can learn. Moreover, peer to peer teaching is really important. How do we encourage it in our classes?

Another thing Prensky mentioned when talking about where these students learn and also teach each other is in YouTube, which he says is amazingly important because it’s changed the way the world communicates because of: volume, range, direction (textual and visual feedback), and reach. Many of the problems I hear about over and over again is the filters that exists at our own schools to block sites like YouTube. There are thousands (if not millions) of teachers who are completely frustrated with the filters, so why aren’t we speaking up? Why aren’t we railing against the administrators and showing them how the are cutting on 21st century technology at the knees? What can we do? Tell me, and we can try to do it.

The role of technology is suppose to create a new paradigm of students learning on their own. Technology CANNOT support old, undifferentiated curriculum. And teachers themselves are a technology. We need to help students learn HOW to solve future problems. Before technology can help us, we need to move to a new paradigm. We need to change the way we teach. The new paradigm can set us free, change the paradigm and then use the technology to take off. To use the technology, we need to share the work. Let students do what they do well, and we evaluate the quality because we know how to. We cannot stand up in front of our students and use the cool new technologies; we need to give the technology to the students to use for themselves and help them learn how to use the technologies.

Now longer can a dichotomy exist where students learn the old, static, locked down, unchanging ways of pedagogy until the 3PM bell rings, and then they’re released to move outside of our bordered, walled classes to the borderless, UNFILTERED “classroom” where they pull out their cell phones, boot their wireless laptops in the world of free wireless and information at their fingertips.

As an instructor in both highschool and college, I know how pedagogically inexperienced many (NOT
ALL) of my colleagues are at the colleges, but on the other hand I know how content weak some of my colleagues are here. The difference for me is that the high schools are a tighter community (many colleges have over 1,000 adjuncts!). We, who are stronger in content, can go to those teachers who may have a fantastic rapport with kids and can do the effective dog and pony show (I mean that positively here) and help them infuse that with content. A colleague mentioned the depth of curriculum, and we’re aware of the various points of view on things like History. How do we cover it all? Who knows, but I do know those of us who teach at the college too, see both sides of these things and do stay more on the cutting edge (I am Not trying to make myself look cool here, but bear with me…). I spend my time reading the current research (got a book the other day on Digital Natives that was published the day I bought it), I blog about it, I talk about it, I present 4-6 times a year outside of CUSD, I have two articles being published this month, BUT this isn’t about me. I am not out there trying to further myself and then drag the kids along. In one world I like making sure the kids know what I do, not because I am all about ME, but because it shows them what THEY CAN DO. Why do I work hard? I don’t know. In a perfect world we would, as high school educators, have time & resources to do it ALL, BUT
we don’t. And frankly many of us don’t want to. Even the good ones. We want to be with our families and we don’t want to do work for which we’re not paid, albeit some of continue to press forward for the mere love of learning.

I’ve got a friend and colleague who teaches AP Lit and South HS in PHX, and she doesn’t bother with the AP test. What she does is teach the kids to be strong, effective citizens who strive for communicative
intelligence. She infuses the literature of the class with real world, current MEANING. Instead of teaching to the test, she teaches them about life, and through the strategies she uses, the students learn HOW to test. Instead of teaching to the test, and yes, we DO teach to the test, and perhaps when we’re all sitting here having this discussion in another 25 years (she’s been at South since God was a boy) then maybe we too can teach that way.

And what about CIVICS? I took is Freshman year in 1989 (my history teacher friend’s favorite year!), and we don’t teach that class anymore, and frankly, the reason depends on your political inclinations, which is not for here, but might be for there. I took that class Freshman year, then World History in
10th (there was an AP European option!), then AP US Hist, and Gov’t in 12th. Where’s all of this going? I don’t know, but the political & sociological shifts in the USA directly correlates to programs that are
funded and programs that are cut. Now what do we do?

We find MEANING. The kids don’t hate the content. They do not hate reading about the world’s canonized protagonists, they don’t hate learning about Washington’s involvement in the French & Indian War along side Braddock and how that experience directly correlated to his successes in the Revolution. What they hate is busy work. They hate work that doesn’t have meaning. They want work to mean something. Why do we study this they ask? Why do we study that? If YOU can’t answer that, then you need to sit down and think about it (I DO ALL of the time).