Would You Please Un-block?

The argument for controlling and censoring web content in schools goes something like this: we need to keep students safe; we need to keep predators out of our system; we need to keep students on task; we need to limit distractions. We need to limit students's access to sites on the web in order to protect them from pornographic or other inappropriate content. We need to control what our people can and can not do on the Internet from schools.

Why? Why not teach students (and teachers for that matter) what is appropriate? Why not teach folks how to be good digital citizens? I want students to feel empowered to learn, electrified by ideas, and enabled to succeed. I can't foster those creative and capable habits of mind if students are stuck in the web sandbox.

Today, I'm at the district headquarters learning about Moodle and am reminded of Dean Shareski's post, "Control is a Worthless Pursuit." He also wrote about filtering here. Like Shareski, I am not averse to district tools. I enjoy using them and am grateful for them. However, in my--probably adolescent mind--I feel a disconnect between what happens at the district, or what's allowed, and what happens at schools or what is allowed in our schools. There is a"do as I say not as I do" at work here. That whole "do as I say thing" vexed the teenaged me.

My thinking began with a discussion about messaging within the Moodle system.

A teacher asked, "Can students send messages to each other?"

The facilitator, who is all for giving students free reign inside the Moodle system, answered, "Well, I'm going to say that we sure wouldn't be working in a collaboratative environment if we could not send messages to each other." He continued with the idea that kid's messaging each other while on a Moodle site is a managment problem, not a system or a Moodle problem. He will not block students or block the messaging function.

Yes! One for the students.

Interesting. Why? Because the district is controlling when it comes to blocking and filtering out-of-system sites at schools. Outside of Moodle, students cannot access email at school-- personal email accounts; there are currently no district wide email accounts for students even though we have access and approval for two systems (ePals and Gaggle). Outside of Moodle, discussions or chats or blogging is discouraged: flat out blocked at school sites.

Within, Moodle, however, teachers can create online course content using Moodle which is approved by our district for use with students. We can email within the Moodle system. We can message within the system. It's as if the district must always be in control of the web environment in which students work. As a parent of an 8 year old, I can see the benefits of that, but as a 21st century learner, I resent it.

At the district, however, it seems that you can access anything. I can access all of my Nings, my blogs, twitter and who knows, I may even be able to dip into Facebook from here (I can. I checked.). Should I? If it's not instructionally relevant, no, I shouldn't. But should I be allowed to collaborate via the web with other educators? How can a district that pushes collaboration bind teachers to building-only resources? I learn a lot from my PLN--after hours, of course, when I should be grading papers.

Why can't I do some of these things from school? Any url with blog in the address is blocked. Twitter is blocked. Nings are blocked. Blocked, blocked, blocked. Firewalls are high and mighty in our schools.

There's a disconnect between what is available and allowed for administrators and what is available and allowed for teachers and students. Why? Is it that way everywhere?

Sometimes I wish I had the problem Bud Hunt wrote about in his post, "Would You Please Block This?" Instead of asking for sites to be blocked, it seems teachers in my district are asking for sites to be un-blocked.

I teach in the 12th largest school district in the nation. We have more than 5,000 teachers. One, unfortunate soul gets all of the "please un-block" emails. I've heard they are deleted as they arrive. We don't even get a canned response for our un-block requests, but that's another issue isn't it?

I want to empower students and teachers to learn. Everyone learns. What are we learning now? How can we empower learners when we keep them contained? What do you think about this issue? What happens in your district?

Image credit: Badjonni. "Neutron Man Presents."

I Want a Teacher

Yesterday I met up with my A.P. Language & Composition friends. We spent a few hours at Barnes & Noble talking about lesson plans and what students need to learn. We read "I Want a Wife" by Judy Brady and got to thinking about having students write their own satirical definition essays. We thought about writing our own version too. I would write about teaching. I might start my essay just as Brady did:

I belong to that classification of people known as teachers. I am A Teacher. And not altogether incidentally, I am an English teacher.

Recently, a friend fresh from a two-week vacation met me for lunch. Bemoaning Monday's approach, she marveled at my luck. She wished she had summers off. She wished she didn't have to work on the weekends. Oh, to be a teacher, she'd love to have my schedule.

I'm still thinking about writing the essay this morning. Especially after reading Lee Kolbert's post. Kolbert's frustrated.

Back in the classroom fresh from a technology specialist position, she sees that not much has changed. The change we've all been preaching about or reading about or watching unfold online hasn't arrived in most classrooms. She wonders, why couldn't we create our own school? A school made up of our personal learning networks. What would a PLN school look like?

My literacy friends and I used to dream of our own school too. If Nancie Atwell can found a school based on her workshop principals, couldn't we? What would it look like? How could we fund it? Who would teach with us? Stop by Lee Kolbert's blog. Think about your PLN school and leave her a comment. Then take that conversation to your lunch table--what's stopping us? What's stopping us from doing as Ghandi says? From being "the change we wish to see" in our world?

Those A.P. teachers I met with? We were gathering essays for students to read and annotate. We were planning common lessons and coordinating the copies we would need to make. Kolbert notes, "Every day I pass the same teachers making oodles of copies of worksheets at the copiers. (They haven't even planned their lessons yet, but they've got tons of pages copied from their resource books.)" Nancie Atwell used to deem these types of people creationists; if the teachers are the creationists or the workers in a class then it is the teachers who are learning, not the students. Atwell started as a creationist herself:

I confess, I started out as a creationist. The first days of every school year I created, and for the next thirtysix weeks, I maintained the creation: my curriculum. From behind my big desk I set it in motion; then Imanaged and maintained it until June. I wanted to be a great teacher—systematic, purposeful, in control. I wanted great results from my great practices. And I wanted to convince other teachers that this creationwas superior stuff. So I studied my curriculum, conducting research designed to show its wonders. I didn’t learn in my classroom. I tended my creation. Today, I learn in my classroom. What happens there has changed, and it continues to change. I’ve become an evolutionist. (1998)

We need resources. I would love to give my students their reading assignments online. I would love to create a portal or a web page or a wiki of course readings to which they could responsd. I would love students to use Diigo to annotate or Delicious to note connections as they read. All of that would get me away from the copier. All of that I can and could do. If only my students had access to the Internet. If only my students could have reliable access to a computer 24/7. But they don't. So what do I do?

I do both. I show students how to build knowledge online with digital tools. I maintain a virtual classroom, a wiki, the occasional portal-o-links. I create help videos, screen-casts, to support their digital learning outside of the classroom. I use my LCD project and ELMO and digital camera and tool-box of web 2.0 tools everyday. But do the students? I am the digital creationist in my room. I do it more than students. At my school we get 2 days a quarter in a working computer lab. That is 8 days a year not to be scheduled consecutively. There is one C.O.W. for the reading teachers (a wonderful thing!). I have computers in my classroom but they are not reliable. Would you wait 5 minutes for a page to load? How much would you accomplish if Google Docs froze each time you tried to create a presentation? What if you couldn't access email?

We work around issues as much as possible. I maintain a can-do spirit. Sure, I can do it. But can kids?

How do I become an evolutionist? How can I do it without equpiment? Without a change in the zero-tolerance policies? How can I tap into resources we already have? Cell phones, unused desktops? How can I do it tomorrow? Because I haven't found the time to manage writing a grant that would either buy equipment or an alarm system to secure my portable classroom. I haven't figured out how to tap into untapped or unused district or community resources. Surely they are out there and boy do we want to use them! Couldn't we allow students to break the computers out of their pockets and get going? How can I become an evolutionists so that students are the ones creating?

If you've got ideas, I'm listening.

____________________________________

Atwell, Nancie. In the Middle: New Understandings About Writing, Reading and Learning. 2. Portsmouth: Boyton Cook, 1998. Print.

image: The Hunger Games summer reading collage created by Lee Ann Spillane

Lunch

Who do you spend your lunch time with? Lunch at my school is only about 20 minutes long not counting the 6 minutes of passing time that kicks it off. A group of portable teachers --we all have classrooms in the portables out behind the main campus eat together. We leave the outback and travel in to the main buildings.We meet in a room behind our media center. Part office, part multi-purpose training and teaching room. E102 has been our lunch hot-spot.

Do you eat lunch with others? Or do you hole-up in your room and work through lunch?

It's easy to isolate yourself. There are many days when I'd prefer to work through lunch or to stay in my own classroom and enjoy the lunch peace and quiet alone. But you know what? I don't. Well, I don't do it too often. Every once and a while I miss lunch. I miss it because a student stops by with a question and I can't get out of the door fast enough or a parent or a teacher calls--occaisionally I get hung up and can't make it to lunch with the group. When I first came to Cypress Creek and missed a lunch in the opening weeks of school, my friend Lee called me to make sure I was okay. Not overwhelmed by the new school, new schedule, new everything. I loved that she checked and I laughed when she said "Lunch is not optional."

I've thought about it since. What's important about lunch? Not the eating--the meeting. Getting together with other teachers during the school day is what's important. Lunch to us is like executives golfing, I imagine. We bargain. We collaborate. We share. Ultimately we lift each other up. During especially stressful times, we bake.

This week has been cookie week. With lay offs or teacher transfers due to less than expected enrollment we've all been a little stressed. So we bake and we bring in treats to share. We comfort and care for one another during our little lunch break. What's more important than that?

Mark it Up!

"Some books are meant to be tasted, others to be swallowed, and some few to be chewed and digested; That is, some booksare to be read only in parts; Others to be read, but not curiously;And some few to be read wholly, and with dilligence and attention."

-Francis Bacon, Of Studies

So, what are you reading? How are you reading it? I'm teaching an A.P. Language course and that question is following us this year..Today we're going to talk about annotation: what is it? how do you do it? what does it look like? Students annotated the books they read for summer reading. Most of their summer annotations were personal responses--students talking back to the author, to the book.

Certainly annotations, effective annotations, are that, but they are also much more. I'm thinking about the codes I use in the margins of the professional books I read: Q for quotes, ? for questions, <-> for connections, L.U. for look up and a lightbulb for ideas.

Today, we're going to read and annotate Mortimer Adler's "How to Mark a Book." Yesterday I annotated Adler's article using Diigo, but then when I went to review my annotations last night, they were gone! Yikes! Little did I realize that I had to access the page I'd bookmarked from Diigo using the Recent Bookmarks choice from the Diigo menu selection (see picture). Now if I could just figure out how to make the annotations public, or how to include them in a group meant for my A.P. class. That's my next technoventure.

I want students to see that annotations help you organize and remember information. They can be created with more than just pen and paper. They also live and can work on the web. Social bookmarking annotations, tags, all of these contribute to the folksonomy of information on the web. That will be the hook for this lesson. I'd better get going, so that I can get it all together! It's going to be a great day.

Friday 5

Lucy Gray started a Friday 5 tradition on her blog, High Techpectations, posting 5 or more web links organized by theme. She's now cross posting with Lucie deLaBruere on the Infinite Thinking Machine. LaBruere says "in a world where we are overwhelmed by choice, "more" is not always better." Definitely. When it comes to the web, narrowing the field, counter-intuitive as it may sound, hones us in. One of my favorite list-o-links covers cell phones and includes the must-read 2009 Horizon Report.

If you'd rather have your Friday 5 delivered, join the Google Group (think list-serv) and get the email digest. I don't know that I could keep up with a weekly 5; though a 2 for Tuesday kind of thing might be fun to try.

Out With the Old

Have you ever changed schools? Last year I changed schools. I’d been teaching 10 years at University High when I decided it was time for a change. Five years as an English teacher , 5 years running a Reading Writing Center, 10 years as a total pack rat.

How many books would you accumulate in 10 years? How many files? How many notebooks? How many pens and pencils? And I’m not even counting the stuff I hadn’t thrown away since my last move. My Mom and my friend, Lee Corey, helped me pack up.

“Do you really need this? These files look pre-Internet!” Lee commented as we started on the first of 4 full filing cabinets.

“Well, I might teach British Lit. one day," I said eyeing the thick Canterbury Tales folder in Lee's hand, "I don’t know. I might need that!” I argued back knowing full well she was trying to get me to throw stuff away.

“Lee Ann Spillane, you do not need that!” Mom chimed in.

“What if I do?”

“I’m telling you—whatever you think you need you can print off of the Internet. Honestly,” replied Lee.

“Okay, okay, I give up. I’ll throw it out. I’ll purge. I’ll turn over a new leaf. If I haven’t used it in 2 years, I’ll think about tossing it.”

“Two years?”

“Well…”

“How about 1 year and you toss it—don’t just think about it.”

“Fine. Don’t let me look. Let’s just pitch it.”

And we did. I borrowed a flat bed hand truck from the janitors. It took 3 loads to the dumpster to get rid of things I’d collected but not used in a long time. I took pictures as we hauled one of the loads—thinking it would remind me not to collect so much stuff. But you know what?

At first all I could think when I looked at that picture was “Dang… I threw that away!” After cleaning up my classroom for this past week, getting ready for students on Monday, I realize that I've probably got at least another filing cabinet full of files I can purge! When was the last time you went through your files?

Ta Da: Prezi !

Teachers come back to school, officially, on Monday. The "houses" or small learning communities at my school are hosting 2 day institutes for their teachers on Monday and Tuesday. I am facilitating 2 workshop sessions for teachers. One on the AVID binder and one on Google tools. I wanted to try something different for these workshops, so I turned to Prezi.

Prezi is an online presentation tool. Users upload content, arrange it in a presentation space and go. Free-form, intuitively zooming, clean lines... very cool. I had a lot of fun playing with it to create the AVID binder workshop. Now, we'll see how it works when I use it to present! Click below or here to see the AVID binder prezi I put together.

from prezi.com