Tim Childers’ Blog

In China, middle school students line up after class to ask the teacher for more homework.  No, this is not a teacher’s dream sequence.  It is an actual happening witnessed by Alan November when he visited China recently.  Can you imagine this happening at your school?  Neither can I.

But the truth is, according to November, kids will rise to any challenge you give them provided the challenge makes sense in their world.  What is their world?  Well, it is social.  So kids want to do something that is seen by others (yes, that’s one reason why so many misbehave).  Their world is also digital.  Pencil and paper will often freeze them up.  Their world is filled with online gaming.  Yes, this is the freeze tag and hide-and-seek of my generation.  Think how you felt in elementary school  when recess was cancelled.  That’s how these kids feel when their favorite website is blocked at school.

So here’s another tidbit from Alan November about how to get kids, especially boys, to open up and write in class.  Have them play their favorite online game.  Yes, even the one you thought you should keep them from because it seemed so inappropriate.  If your state or district hasn’t blocked it yet, it must be okay, right? (OK, that was me, not Alan).  Then, put them on a blog and have them write about their strategies to win the game.  They are writing, right?

Next, have them read the blog posts of other students.  They will undoubtedly be drawn to write comments about others’ strategies.  They won’t all be playing the same game, but they will probably be blogging about games they all know.  They all have opinions.  Let them write.  They won’t even know they are practicing literacy skills!

Don’t know where to start with blogging?  Ask how many of your kids blog on their MySpace account.  They know how to blog.  Remember, it isn’t important that you know how.  It is just important that you know why and when.  You can set up a free blog account at Blogmeister, and educational blog site established by David Warlick.

Now go play some games!

Teachers are the bottleneck that prevents us from using technology in the classroom. Although not a direct quote, this is the sentiment outlined by Alan November at our NMSA session earlier today. He couldn’t be more right.

There were over 100 people in attendance at Alan’s talk. Out of those, I was the only one in the crowd who had ever seen a TED Talk video. Less than a dozen had a Skype account. Barely a dozen had heard of Audacity. For me, this explained why the crowd was so thin. Middle school teachers are not current when it comes to technology. Many of us have not even immigrated to the web, so “Digital Immigrants” does not apply to everyone.

Here’s a gem from today’s conference: If you want to learn to podcast, take a couple of 12 year olds to your training session. You can grade a lot of papers and let the kids learn how to podcast. They’ll pick it up in a heartbeat. It isn’t necessary for teachers to know how, according to November. It is only important that we know why and when. The kids will do the rest.

Class 208 has a podcast on iTunes. This is a group of 2nd graders who podcast every week to explain what they learned the previous week. The teacher is pretty much hands-off. The kids organize it, write it, record it, and upload it.

Look for more information from Alan’s session in a later post. I can’t stop talking about how exciting some of these things were to witness at NMSA!

McDuggal-Littel brought Alan November to NMSA to discuss technology.  It is one of the most exciting and fun sessions I have ever been to.  I’m blogging here from the NMSA email kiosk with people waiting, so I can’t finish this now.  I’ve taken nearly an entire page of hen-scratched notes and will upload them tonight with some photos.

Great stuff!

I found a really cool tool at Freshi Flix.  Turnkey movie making with curriculum, and equipment for $750 (includes 2 cameras).  Kids can copyright their movies, add their own original mp3 track, and update it to their website for a safe kids environment.  Some kids have sold their videos for up to $75,000 to National Geographic!

Check it out here.

Continental Breakfast…$12.00

Internet Connection In Room per day….$9.95

Cup of Coffee in the Hotel Lobby….$2.50

Bottled Water Found in Hotel Room….$5.50

Going through the NMSA Exhibit Hall….Priceless

Exhibits open in 30 minutes.  I’ll let you know later in the day about some of the neat things I’m sure to find here.  And, of course, the great Discovery Booth is on my list!

The flight on the Continental puddle jumper was terrific.  Although small, the plane had a very smooth ride.  I knew it was really small when they started boarding the back of the plane first and began with row 9!

The Hilton of the Americas in Houston is fantastically beautiful.  Our room is spacious and comfortable.  Check in for the conference took all of 2 minutes.

Our party walked about two blocks to Josephine’s Italian restaurant for dinner.  Although the service was slow (the place was packed), the food was excellent.  From appetizer to dessert, I can highly recommend it.

Tomorrow (Thursday) I’ll spend the morning walking the exhibit hall and checking on the Discovery booth.  Sessions begin tomorrow afternoon.

Good night.

Bags packed?  Check.  Batteries charged? Check.  Toothbrush?  Check.  Laptop? Well…not quite.  Still writing this blog.

Nine teachers and administrators from Lake Forest Middle School in Cleveland, TN will board a Continental flight in Chattanooga today and arrive this evening in Houston, TX for the National Middle Schools Association national conference.  We are pumped!

As middle school teachers, it doesn’t get any better than this.  Nearly 10,000 attendees make this quite a show.  Hundreds of workshops covering nearly the entire spectrum of instruction.  I took a peek at the sessions on technology, and the DEN will be proud of some of the things being presented.  Photo Story is there.  Digital Storytelling is represented.  “Lights, Camera, Action” has a session.  Pretty cool stuff.

I found out too late that Discovery is looking for worker bees for their booth.  I plan to help some, but I can’t help as much as I’d like.  However (and get this!), when I mentioned it to my principal he told me that next year he would encourage all our attendees to sign up and work the Discovery booth!  Talk about pumped!  That made my day.

I will be blogging from the conference, as well as updating my friends on twitter (user name tchilders).  It should be an exciting time.  Check back often this week.

Okay, about to check laptop.

I’ve been asking myself for quite some time, “Tim, why do you do two blogs on the Discovery site?” After all, I do the TN Leadership Council blog. Couldn’t I just say what I wanted to say in that one post?

Well….no.

Today I found the purpose of my personal blog here on the Discovery Educator site. I’m going to use it to offer bits and pieces of simple technology training. So, if you are already an expert in all things tech, this blog may not be useful to you. But, if you are still feeling your way around this whole Internet-Web-2.0-Blog-Wiki-YouTube-Flickr-Del.icio.us thing, then may this blog’s for you.

But, how do you get back here every day to get that information? Today, I’ll give you the easiest answer. Later, we’ll go over a better answer.

See the URL at the top of this blog? It says:

http://blog.discoveryeducation.com/lisashusband/2007/11/01/
this-blogs-for-you/

Man! That’s a lot of letters and stuff to remember. And we don’t want to just mark this post, we want to save this blog. (More on that later). Follow these simple steps and you can get back to this blog anytime you want. (These instructions are for PC users, by the way). You might want to write them down, because at some point this post may disappear!

1. Go up to that URL and shorten it to this: http://blog.discoveryeducation.com/lisashusband/

2. Click enter

3. When the new page comes up, right click it with your mouse and click “Create Shortcut” in the box that pops up. This will put an icon on your desktop. Anytime you click it, this blog will open and you will see the latest posts.

Now, I said that was the easiest, but it is not the best way to save this blog. More on that in another post.

Today, listening to NPR, I was intrigued to find that a university professor has banished laptops from his classroom.  In a discussion with Michelle Norris,

Daniel Coyne, a law professor at the Chicago-Kent College of Law, says laptops distract students from class discussion and cause them to repeat questions, rather than helping them multitask.

He says he’s observed students in class watching ball games, planning weddings, and chatting online rather than taking notes.

Later, he mentioned that even students taking notes on a legal pad have their laptops open and online.  I had to think about that for a few minutes.  I’m not sure how I feel about his decision, but it made me contemplate the way kids today learn.

On the KnowledgeWorks website, they put a pretty cool interactive map up that illustrates future trends impacting education.  This little quote was found there:

Fragmenting Preferences

People make their own worlds.  Extending the trend toward choice and customization in everything from media and appliances to food, health, and education, people are becoming more active participants in creating their own worlds, whether it means do-it-yourself home projects, peer-to-peer media exchanges, or open-source collaboration. The result: a much more personalized world.

These students need constant sensory stimulation or they become “bored.”  I cannot tell you how many times my kids (both natural and in class) have made that annoying statement to me: “I’m bored!”  Students in the computer labs are the most quiet when they are on websites that are greatly interactive (which being interpreted means online gaming).  No wonder they have difficulty concentrating when all they have before them is a PowerPoint slide and a lecturing adult.  Thank goodness for unitedstreaming video clips!  The shorter they are, the more impact they have.

In order to have an impact on Generation Z, the important word is “personalized.”  Isn’t that what Web 2.0 is all about?

So, what do you think about these students and their toys in the classroom?

We’ve been offline for a while now, but the new website is up and operational (and I think I’ve figured out how to blog again) so we’re back with a vengence!  Look for new and cool ways to incorporate technology into your classroom, teacher-created resources, and new DEN events in the TN region.  They will all be right here on the new and improved TN blog!