Why Educators Should Blog

Edubabbling for the Masses! features K-12 Teaching Resources for teachers, students, and parents. In the blog, created by an educator from Canada, you’ll find ideas to motivate yourself and your students, current events, opinions, and resources. Some of the latest blog entries include reasons why you should get involved in blogging, ELL instructional strategies, information on whether bullying prevention programs are working, and four of the top trends in Education for 2013-2014. 

So, what does Edubabbling consider the emerging trends? Answer: virtual learning, personalized learning, early childhood education, and environmental/outdoor education. How about you? What do you think are the top trends for this school year?

Twitter Educational Hashtag Help

For guidance in educational Twitter resources, check Jeff Dunn’s A-Z Dictionary of Educational Twitter Hashtags. You’ll find the following lists: Most Popular Hashtags (global, teaching, kindergarten, etc.; Technology (apps, mobile learning, game-based, etc.); Subject Specific (math music, arts, history, etc.); Specific Areas/Roles (bullying, chat, homeschool, play, etc.); and full list (nearly all educational hashtags). According to Dunn, the educational hashtags on the list were curated by Cybraryman and the Creative Education blog, tweetsmarter.com, and hashtags.org.

Lighthouse Coalition

The Coalition of Lighthouse Schools is a group of educators, school administrators, and IT professionals who are working together to implement one-to-one digital learning in their schools. Coalition members, mostly from charter and independent schools, are integrating Apple mobile devices into their school curricula and are eager to collaborate with others who are also integrating 1-1 programs in their schools.  The networked educators work with Apple Computer representatives in order to better prepare their students for the future. The group is hosting its iSummit, July 24-25, in Atlanta.

Help Cisco with Direction

If your school is using Cisco products to keep your computer systems working, you may want to join Cisco’s Product Advisory Teams. Being part of the team is free to organizations using a number of Cisco solutions.  Team members will be part of discussion forums and advisory groups working on solution concepts and design. They will receive early product trials, monthly briefings, and early product news announcements. Interaction with team members and Cisco leaders offer valuable networking opportunities.  Sign on to get involved in beta product trials for Jabber for iPad, Jabber Voice and Video, and Jabber for Windows.

Creating Comic Storyboards

ISTE (International Society for Technology in Education) has announced the upcoming publication of Serious Comix: Engaging Students with Storyboards by Eydie Wilson. The book ($31.95, $19.95 members), which will be available this month (March 2013), features cross-curricular learning that strengthens language arts, critical thinking, and creative skills. With Wilson’s guidance, you can add the motivation of comic creation to any subject area. If you are interested in using comic creations in your lessons, you should also take a look at Plasq’s Comic Life 2, a super way to bring student’s comics to life through technology.  The Plasq software is available for Mac and Windows for less than  $30.

Testing Burnout Cure

We complain about the time it takes for standardized testing and to prepare students for testing.  The Edutopia article, Handling Teacher and Student Testing Burnout, suggests that our emphasis in the classroom should not be on having students pass minimum standards, but instead, maximum standards. High School principal Ben Johnson, author of Teaching Students to Dig Deeper, says that active learning including collaboration, role playing, projects, and experimentation sometimes doesn’t happen because teachers are too busy preparing students for minimum standards.  According to Johnson, deep learning is the way to send short-term memories into long-term memory. One of his teachers says that technology is the way to avoid testing burnout, for it energizes lessons, which results in “higher interest and engagement.”

Okay, Let’s Redesign Our Schools

As long as I’ve been in education, and that’s been a very long time, I’ve heard educational leaders talk of reform. There was new math, schools without walls, stations, core curriculum, carpet curriculum—you name it. We talked about reform with the emergence of desktop computers in the classroom, and then with interactive whiteboards, and now with mobile digital devices. The educational potential of mobile devices and the trend for young people to attach themselves to them (although not always for what we might call educational endeavors), appears to offer a greater opportunity for us to finally make some changes. We can’t, however, see iPads and other devices as the answer unless we consider why we adhere to methods, curricula, assessments, and classroom and school organizations, which don’t work for all of our students.

Glenn Kleiman, Executive Director for Educational Innovation and Professor, NC State University College of Education offers some excellent ideas about what we need to consider in order to meet the needs of our students. His eight Essential Elements close with the reminder: “No matter how powerful our technologies become, they will never resolve the difficult, classical issues of education. . . .”

Tomorrow’s Innovators Through Personalized Learning

Project Tomorrow’s research study, Mapping a Personalized Learning Journey: K-12 Students and Parents Connect the Dots with Digital Learning, found that students are already moving forward to personalized learning outside of school. Many, the report says, have become Agent-Free Learners, “students who do not feel that they need to be tethered to traditional education institutions and have confidence in their ability to drive their own educational destiny.” Their use of mobile devices has provided them with what could be called equal opportunity to self-directed learning. Many students said that they were hampered in using technologies at school because Websites are blocked, teachers limit how they can use technology, and students are not allowed to use mobile devices, go to social networking sites, and use their communication tools. Students suggested that schools could personalize learning through use of mobile devices for researching information, communicating, using online texts, sending reminders and alerts, collaborating, and using video review lessons. The Project Tomorrow report gives many other examples of how schools might connect the dots that will lead to greater personalization of learning through technology.

Digital Tools Support Writing

Julie D. Ramsay’s Can We Skip Lunch and Keep Writing? (Stenhouse Publishers) offers ideas for collaborating in class and online for Grades 3-8. It’s available as an ebook for $18 and paperback for $20 plus $5 shipping. The activities in the book, including publishing podcasts and writing digital stories, target getting students “fired up for writing” through the use of communication and digital tools. Ramsey suggests picking the tool or tools that work best for you and your students and then putting your students to work collaborating with others around the world and publishing their own work.  Why not check out an online preview of the book?

Being a Principal Is Not an Easy Job

If you look at school from a principal’s viewpoint, especially those who are relatively new to the job, you might find that putting out “small fires” and sometimes “big fires” take a great deal of their time. Even if principals come to the job with special administrative training, it’s difficult for them to think ahead about curriculum, teaching, and moving forward with technologies when their days are filled up with administrative tasks and problems that cannot be handled by another on the staff. Education Week reports (in Samuel’s Principal Turnover Bodes Poorly for Schools) that many principals (about 20%) leave their job within one to two years and only about 50% are still at their schools after five years even though it takes about three years for principals to “get the lay of the land” at a school in order to make a difference. They leave for a variety of reasons, including the inability to raise test scores quickly.  So what do we need to provide schools with the best principals?  We need to engage educators who will be effective leaders in specialized training for their jobs, we need to encourage principals to continue on at their schools even though the first few years may be difficult, and we need to encourage principals to learn to appreciate the culture within a school and use this knowledge plus collaboration with staff to bring about change.

Education Week also provides a PDF download ($4.95) called Spotlight on Principals, which features nine articles on topics such as training and evaluation, recruiting effective school leaders, secrets of success, and principal turnover.