Be of Use

Doug Johnson let me hook myself to his star as we collaborated on a Danielson style rubric for technology integration. Like in her framework, the highest levels of instruction have the students leading the way and doing the heavy intellectual lifting. Same applies here - when students are actively engaged with using the technology for deep learning you're meeting the distinguished mark.  Doug's column on it is published in this month's issue of Educational Leadership, with a link to the rubric we worked on. Take a look. Please, feel free to use! Article is here http://www.ascd.org/publications/educational-leadership/mar13/vol70/num06/Technology-Skills-Every-Teacher-Needs.aspx Rubric is here http://www.ascd.org/ASCD/pdf/journals/ed_lead/el201303_johnson_rubric.pdf

A few things came together today to make me think about the term hacker . The book of Steve Jobs by Walter Isaacson, David Warlick's post Learner as Hacker  and an email from a colleague all caused me to reflect on the term, that to your average person views as a negative thing. The colleague was asking about a friend's email being hacked - just wondering if she had to worry about anything. I didn't think much of it until I came across Warlick's post on "learning as the practice of hacking." Excellent stuff, with a great deal of quotable lines on the parallels between hacking and how we need to prepare students today for life-long learning. When Woz was putting together boards with the Homebrew Computer Club , he thought of himself as a hacker, but then there was no negative conotation with the term. In his letter to prospective shareholders  a new generation of hacker, Mark Zuckerberg writes about the bad rap: The word "hacker" has an unfairl...

I strongly believe in instructional visions that put the teachers on the sideline facilitating learning instead of leading it. Be it the flipped classroom or Clayton Christensen's vision of learning programs and games taking the lead in personalizing instruction, I think we need to embrace this developing role. The teacher is by no means marginalized with these models, simply more of a coach or counselor. In the world of easy access to information personal relationships development trumps content expertise. For those of us working in technology, we've known for a long time that its okay to tell someone "I don't know, but will look into it" (I think that's a Doug Johnson line...). All of us in education need to be okay with that, from the superintendent on down. Content expertise is great, but I think humility is more important. I get it that it's a tough pill to swallow for some, but I feel I've been both happier and more effective in my job since I...

I always appreciate it when teachers and administrators ask me "what should we buy" when it comes to instructional technologies. It's flattering to feel that your opinion matters, but it's almost always the wrong question. Here's an example. I'm presenting to a staff on interactive whiteboards per the principal's request. At the end the principal asks, "we have X dollars, should we be buying these boards?" My response was "what are your goals? How can the boards help meet those goals?" He didn't appreciate my response, even though it was the right question to ask. I feel like over my career a lot of money has been tossed around based on what's latest/greatest or there's money burning a hole in our pocket. Over the last few years there's finally been a change in a focus toward training to go along with major purchases, but that's only part of the problem. Even if you know all the ins and outs of an iPad, it isn...

Whenever someone thanks me for helping them, the line I often give them is stolen/paraphrased from John Irving's novel  The Cider House Rules... "we all must be of use." Since I graduated from high school 15ish years ago, I've been trying to figure out how I can best be of use to this world. I know I'm still working on this journey. My first attempt to be useful was in journalism, writing for the hometown newspaper, then the student newspaper at UW-Oshkosh the Advance Titan . I didn't see it as a career, so I moved onto the School of Education to be a social studies teacher. I never fell in love with that, but knew I my career path lay in schools. After graduation it was off to grad school to get my library media license, where I found a career that was a fit for me. Or at least for a while. As a library media specialist I loved interacting with all the district's students, staff members and families. I was working on information skills with high schoo...