Some Reflections on Using Tech in a 5th Grade Classroom

Last year, we received a really exciting email.  It contained a Google form that was an application to apply for a 1:1 technology pilot in our classroom.  OMG.  How AWESOME would that be?  Imagine all of the amazing things I could do if each of my students had their own device all day!?!  My daydreams were becoming more and more elaborate, the more I thought about it.  (They started to get a little silly, but I was convinced that with a bunch of laptops, my students and I could take on all of the world's problems, maybe be invited to the White House to be presented with our award, you know, super cool stuff like that).

Well, come to find out that the process to get everything approved was going to take a lot longer than I expected.  Instead of possibly having 1:1 in my classroom this year, the people who get chosen for the pilots will likely (hopefully) see devices in the hands of students next year.

This was an awful setback for me.  Once I get my mind set on something, I have a very difficult time waiting.  Patience is not one of my virtues.  I was the kid that sneaked around looking for Christmas presents every year.  I literally opened them carefully with scissors or a knife and then taped them back up so you couldn't tell I had peeked.  If I'm watching a show on Netflix, I'll usually google what happens at the end of the series, when I'm in episode two or three.  I just don't like to wait.  So, once there was even the smallest possibility planted in my brain that I could have a 1:1 classroom, I wanted it.  Immediately.

I decided this year that even though I don't necessarily have the devices that I want, I would do my best to incorporate as many aspects of a 1:1 environment as I could.  We have a laptop cart available to be shared with four 5th grade classrooms, but fortunately for me, it's not in very high demand.  The laptops are super old, they take about 15 to boot up, and the battery life is terrible (so we definitely can't use them all day), but we are trying to make them work.  Between those and my three student desktops, we've actually been pretty successful in using tech.

I know that many of my students don't have access to the internet or a computer at home, so what I've been doing is trying to offer technology-based options to students, as well as the traditional paper and pencil assignments.  Using a course management system, my students can complete and submit their homework online.  For students that like to do so, and are able to, it's an option.  At this point, I will always make something available to be turned in as a hard copy (unless I give them class time to do technology assignments).

Being as immersed in technology as I'm able to make us given our resources, I'd like to share some of my successes, or celebrations!

• My students are much more engaged - I can see their interest piqued whenever we're using tech.
• My students are collaborating more than ever; they're having discussions with each other on discussion boards about our weekly themes; they're sharing documents with each other; they're making plans to work together electronically on homework outside of school; they are helping each other all of the time in class.
• One student that has very low homework completion rates came up to me to tell me that him and another students had a plan to meet online at 4:00 on a Friday after school to work together on an assignment; they shared it, collaborated, and then emailed me when it was done (it wasn't a partner activity, but hey, I'd rather see him engaged and working with another person than not do it at all!)
• I'm able to keep up to date with what my students are doing - they share their assignments with me so I can see their progress as they work; they email things to check for them so I always know what's going on.
• Students are working on things that aren't due yet all of the time!  Normally, our Daily 5 is worked on during the day from Monday through Friday.  If they don't finish, they can work on it over the weekend and turn it in the following Monday.  I get notifications every day of the week that students are posting things, working on assignments, and communicating with each other all throughout the week.  They're so dedicated and motivated that they don't want to wait for class to work on it and they're doing it early!  Many students are even asking me to stay in during recess to work extra on projects that they're doing online.
• I'm much more organized using a course management system.  Everything is in one place!
• Students are getting immediate feedback on tests and quizzes that I create - no more waiting for me to find time to grade assignments that they don't look at when they're returned days later.  They're analyzing their progress right away and realizing their strengths and weaknesses.
• Parents are involved.  They have access to so much more information about how their students are doing and what's going on in our classroom or school.  It's just more avenues to open communication with families.
• Students are emailing or messaging me frequently to ask for help on homework. I know some teachers might not want to work with students after leaving school.  I love it.  If students are asking me questions, I know that they're thinking and involved with their work.  It hardly takes me any time to respond to their questions, and I think that just the option of being able to message me makes them more willing to ask for help.  When a student forgot something at home, he emailed me to ask if I could send him a copy.  I sent him a PDF copy of it that he printed and completed at home and was able to turn in the next day.  Work completion!
• I find that when I grade things online, I'm giving MUCH more specific and detailed feedback when I can type it than when I have to write things by hand.
• It's so much easier to read students' responses when I don't have to try to read their messy handwriting.
• I'm learning more about my students' personal lives.  They're sharing things with me through our course management system that they might not have had time to share during class.  One of my students just posted a mix that he made to our classroom site.  Apparently, he has a DJ name and does music editing.  It was a really good cumbia mix.  And he's in 5th grade.  I never would have known about this hobby of his otherwise.  And the more teachers know students personally, the more that their motivation and engagement is said to increase.
• It's such a great way to differentiate.  I think that technology pretty much the ultimate differentiation!
• Students are getting better at typing.
• Data collection and analysis is so much easier and effective.  Which makes that data more useful in planning for instruction.

A teacher was in our room earlier during plan time, and my students were all on the computers.  She asked what we were doing, and we showed her.  I asked my students if they liked using this technology and how it helps, and they had all sorts of feedback about how much they love it and how it's helping them to be better learners.

Now, I just need to wait until (sigh) we actually go 1:1, so my students and I can get started saving the world, already.

Whose Responsibility is PD, Anyway?

I recently attended a 1:1 technology summit on a Saturday morning.  It was one of the best conference-type events I've been to in a while - very specialized and specific, with teachers as presenters that were experts on using this technology in education.  Because they're actually in the classroom, they were able to talk to their success and failures and make the training sessions very real and applicable.

Being on a Professional Development sub-committee (as part of our technology committee) I went to a session about making PD work in 1:1 districts.  It wasn't what I expected.  We talked a little bit about what we do in our own school districts for professional development - what seems to work, what the challenges are, etc., but most of the hour-long session was dedicated to talking about how to build your PLN, or your personal learning network.  Most of the information that was presented wasn't all that new to me.  I'm familiar with building a PLN and have been really focused on my own PLN since this past summer.  I feel like I've really grown as an educator through my own explorations and connections with other educators by developing my own PLN.  Even though I was familiar with a lot of the tools, strategies, and applications, the session left me with kind of an epiphany moment for how I think we should be approaching PD in our own school district.

Here's when the moment happened:  Halfway through the session, a woman, in charge of the tech PD in her whole district, raised her hand and said, "this is all great, but it's so frustrating when I prepare videos of trainings and spend so much time training staff how to use things, and then technology changes and it's all basically obsolete.  I just did a bunch of training over the summer for both staff and students and created my own training videos, and then iOS7 was released and all that work I did was pretty much for nothing."

I think that if you have that viewpoint on educating your staff, you're inevitably going to run into problems.  If you always focus on the device, or the app, you'll never be able to keep up.  There is just way too much out there and it changes so rapidly that it's impossible to train everyone on everything available all the time.  In our journey towards becoming 1:1, I've heard a lot of negativity.  I've heard from a lot of teachers that are nervous about having to learn all of that technology.  In trainings that I've gone to, teachers want someone to show them every click and how to "work" a website, app, or device, rather than focus on how to use it in education.  For many, if they aren't shown explicitly how to do something, they won't do it, or are afraid to try to experiment and learn it.

Instead of trying to teach our staff how to navigate through the more technical aspect of technology, wouldn't our time be better spent focusing on teaching staff how to develop their own PLNs?  If educators learned how to use Twitter and Feedly, combined with a social bookmarking site like Diigo, they would be exposed to so much information that would directly benefit them in their teaching.  And that's just a couple of apps. The "P" in PLN stands for "personalized" - I use my PLN to garner information about things that I am interested in, and things that I want to learn more about.  Used the right way, it allows educators to really connect with each other, collaborate, support, give ideas, and help each other out.  The online community of teachers that actively participate in these communities is incredibly supportive and motivated.

There's not a whole that I could teach others in an hour-long session that isn't out there on the internet somewhere.  I know that some do better with face-to-face interaction, or that some may have difficulty navigating the immense wealth of information available on the net.  However, if we wait for our couple of institute days a year to go to a district-provided and mandatory tech training, are we really going to be able to keep up with technology and it's ever-changing landscape?  Will we be able to keep up with the students, who use it every day?  I know that teachers have a lot to do and time can be a constraint.  I've come to realize, though, that while learning technology may initially take some time, it always ends up saving me time in the long run.  About the woman that I mentioned earlier:  if she had focused on building PLNs for her staff, and told them how to get connected in the right places to be notified when updates happen, or where to go for good resources on navigating things when our tech changes, her staff may have felt a little more prepared.  Technology will change no matter what.  We need to teach our teachers how to stay involved and to learn about it themselves, rather than try to train them on every new thing that comes out.  That's just not feasible or practical in today's world.

Don't get me wrong.  I think that doing trainings on specific tools is fine.  I just think that it can't be the ONLY training we do.  We have to help train people to be able to help themselves, not just to rely on someone else giving them the information necessary to do their jobs.

What do you think?  Is this just "one more thing" that teachers have to learn and do?  Should teachers be expected to be proficient in technology to be an educator in today's society?  Should teachers be expected to learn these things outside of the school day, or only if provided a training?

"To all the boys who've had to learn to play by different rules."

Aristotle and Dante Discover the Secrets of the Universe

by Benjamin Alire Sáenz

I read this book earlier this year, after it had come out as an award winner at the beginning of the year (Lambda Literary Award, Stonewall for LGBT fiction, Pura Belpré for Latino author, and Printz honor book for YA fiction).  I love, love, loved it!  By the end of the book, I had tears streaming down my face, and I just wanted to immediately turn back to page one and start reading all over again.  (I didn't, because I thought I'd enjoy the book much more if I saved a reread for a later time).

It's a coming-of-age story about two Mexican-American boys growing up during the 1980's.  Ari is our hot-tempered, introverted narrator that has an emotionally distant father, an incarcerated brother, a loving but secret-keeping mother, and a difficulty with understanding his own emotions.  He becomes friends with Dante, an outspoken, too-clever-for-his-own-good boy that loves poetry, art, and doing things his own way.  

Just look at the cover and you can tell that the story is going to be beautiful.  Saenz doesn't write overly complex or convoluted sentences, but his simple dialogue is very meaningful, lyrical.  The relationship that builds between the two boys is beautiful.  They have wonderful, supportive families, even if they're not what you'd think of as typical families.  You see how two very different people can find so much in common to love and appreciate in a world that is confusing and frustrating.  You get to see these two characters go through so much and change throughout their difficulties that I found myself really missing them for several days after I had finished the book.

But don't just take my word for it - go read the book for yourself.  I don't read a lot of realistic fiction, but this is definitely one of my top books of the year.  I'll leave you with a quote:  

"The problem with my life is that it was someone else's idea."

I Wasn't Trans Enough to Wear That Shirt

Recently, I spent a weekend in Chicago.  My husband's band was playing a couple of shows with some good bands, so we stayed out there all weekend.

Saturday night, he played with a punk band from Boston that I had seen another time when they were on tour through Chicago.  I really liked them so I was looking forward to the show.  They're a pretty political band that writes songs mostly about issues of gender equality and equal rights for LGBTQ.  For the most part, I like hearing what they have to say and agree with their message.  However, there were a couple of comments made during their set that I didn't feel comfortable about, that made me really think, and reflect on how that relates to teaching (more on that later).

They told a story about how just a couple of days ago, there was a comedian at a place where they were playing a show.  He made a "joke" about Anderson Cooper being a faggot, and one of the band members threw something at him and then got up on stage and started a fight with him.  Another song was about getting harassed on the street by people - a comment was made that we should kill those people.  Another song of those is about how being transgender led to feelings of suicide for the band member, but then he realized that those feelings need to be directed at others instead of himself.  Looking at their merch table later, I bought an album, and was looking at the shirts.  One of the shirts showed a beautiful woman, standing on a pile of dead people, holding a gun in the air.  She was lifting her skirt to reveal a penis and was peeing on the pile of people.  The text on the shirt said:  "US VS THEM / UNTIL THE VERY END."  I couldn't help but feel like even though I was a supporter of LGBTQ equality, that shirt seemed to want to separate, rather than bring people together.  Because I'm not transgender, I didn't feel like I was even welcome to buy a shirt for their band.

In contrast, the show that I was at the next night had a completely different vibe to it.  There was a message of positivity in everything that they did.  They talked about not letting anyone ever make you feel like you can't do something that you want to do.  Don't let people make you feel like you're not punk enough, or trans enough, or anything else enough, because you're all beautiful, each and every one.  I felt so much more a part of the scene, the music, and what was going on.  I felt like I could support that band and that they valued me, whether or not I was heterosexual, homosexual, transexual, or anything else.

So, how does this relate to teaching?

Afterwards, I couldn't help but thinking about the different approaches to an issue, and how we get there.  The first band I saw used violence, separation, isolation, and talked of killing people that had harassed them and made their lives miserable.  I wondered how they got to that point, and what we, as teachers, can do to change this.

If you talk to most teachers (at least at the elementary level that I know of), they will probably tell you that they avoid talking about anything that has to do with issues relating to people that are gay or transgender.  Kids just don't understand it.  Or it's an awkward thing to talk about.  Or they're too young to hear about that.  Or it's just weird.  Or teachers don't know how to explain it.  But I think that we need to talk about it.  We discuss these types of issues in my 5th grade classroom, and my students have always been more than able to handle it very maturely.  I feel strongly that you can talk about these things with younger children, too.

You don't need to talk about sex to talk about sexuality; you can make the conversation appropriate for the age that you are dealing with.  Kids understand that adults have relationships.  They have parents and we talk about that.  Many female teachers I know will talk about their husbands.  If we're teaching about government, we have no problem talking about Barack Obama and his wife, Michelle.  So why can't we talk about two women, or two men being together?  Or about a girl that decided to become a man?  You don't need to go into all of the details about what or how that happens.  Handle it just like you would a question about how babies are made - give them an age- and developmentally-appropriate answer that gives them enough information for what they need to know.  What we do need to do, though, is acknowledge it, and model respect for ALL people.  If we pride ourselves on really teaching our students about diversity, and respecting and accepting people of all types, we can't only limit that to race and disabilities.

Guess what?  Our students have gay parents, our students have transgender aunts or uncles, our students might even be realizing that they are questioning their own sexuality.  I've talked to several adults that told me they had "known" since they were in elementary school.  We have to acknowledge, accept, and affirm these views.  If we continue to ignore it, pretend like it doesn't exist, or like it's something wrong and dirty, we are only encouraging students to grow up with the thinking that it's unfamiliar and wrong, and to do the types of things that cause people in the band that I saw to want to kill themselves and others for feeling like they'll never belong in this world.   2011 saw the highest number of anti-gay murders to date.  Go do a Google search for hate crimes against LGBTQ; you'll probably want to throw up while reading it.  I did.  We need to let our students know that this is wrong.  They may be hearing one message at home, but I feel that it's our duty as teachers to help these students become outstanding citizens, and that includes showing respect for all people, all of the time.

Even if you yourself don't understand it, or agree with it, you have to agree that it's wrong to bully, harass, attack, or kill someone for their sexual orientation, right?  So help our students realize that, too.  Make them see that we're all people.  You can't keep LGBTQ out of our world (not that I'd want to), even if there are kids in our classrooms.  So we might as well talk about it with our kids.  And maybe we'll have kids that grow up that feel like they can work together, even if they're different, rather than having to be isolated on one side or the other.

I'd welcome comments and discussion!

ps.  I know I haven't written in forever.  This started as just a homework assignment, but I think I'll make it a goal to post weekly or biweekly from now on.

My Teacher Made Me Do It

Whelp, I've created a blog.  I've thought about doing it for a while, and have always thought to myself, "who would want to listen to what I have to say?" and "what would I even write about?" even though I've had this nagging feeling telling me that I should do it, I finally started one because, yes, I had a homework assignment for a class in my Digital Teaching and Learning certificate that required me to start one.  So here it is.  How do you even get people to read these things...??

I figured I'd start with a book that I just finished very recently, Anna Dressed in Blood by Kendare Blake.

 

It's nice having a good relationship with your school librarian - I got a phone call one day that the "book I ordered" was in and ready to be picked up.  She had read it and recommended it, so she just inter-library loaned it for me :) Always a nice surprise to see what I'll be reading next.  I'll probably give away some minor spoilers here, but I'll try to not give any major plot points away.

Anna is about a boy named Cas who is a ghost hunter/killer.  He travels around with his mom, transferring high schools all the time, searching out ghosts that are stuck here in our world and killing innocents with their never ending rage and fury at how they unfairly came to an early demise.  He meets a ghost that he can't kill and begins to have a relationship with.  There's also another subplot that has to do with the death of his father (also a ghost hunter) several years before.  So Cas is kind of like a ghost buster, but he doesn't like to be called that.  I haven't rated it yet on GoodReads because I still can't figure out if I loved it or liked it.  So I figure I'll list out things I liked and things I didn't like, and maybe that'll help me come to a conclusion.

Things I liked about Anna:

• Cas is funny - even though it's a ghost story, he adds quite a bit of humor into the mix
• There's a cat in the story
• Overall, most of the characters are pretty likeable
• It's an engaging read - I didn't have any of those chapters that you just have to "get through" and I finished the book very quickly
• There were some pretty spooky parts in the book
• Even though there's a sequel, it can be read as a stand-alone (no cliff hangers at the end where you feel like you're going to die if you can't read the next one right away)
• Adult and female characters in the book are portrayed in a positive light

Things I didn't like about Anna

• It was hard to buy the love story - I need more reason for two beings to fall so in love with each other and make it believable
• Mike was too much of a stereotypical jock/jerk character
• I wanted more background on the voodoo and other magic parts of the story
• I found it hard to imagine Anna as a ghost, solid, and walking around in plain sight of everyone; she seemed less of a ghost and more of a girl with superhuman strength
• Why weren't the cops doing more investigating of the deaths of teens in the area?   

I think I'll go with "liked it," but borderline "love it."  Amazon says it's recommended for 12 and up, which would probably be OK.  There is some gore and some language, but nothing that I think is too terrible for that age group.  I will definitely be reading the sequel to it sometime soon.  Maybe I'll post about it when I read it.

Thanks for tuning in!

-Mrs. Fausett