One tool that we use in lots of different ways is LessonPaths (formerly MentorMob, now found at lessonpaths.com).  It allows you to create and organise content into playlists that go in a fixed order.  We have been using it for the last few years to archive all the work in a particular unit so students can easily find assignments they missed or need to revise.  This is the playlist from our first unit last year, and here is the one from Gatsby.

However, there are two WAY cooler functions that make it one of the most useful tools in our edtech toolbelt.

When you create a playlist, you can either make it privately or publicly editable.  We usually use the private setting for our course content, but we use the latter option a lot in Desktop Publishing.  I will create an empty playlist and is publicly editable and give students a bitly link to it so they can add work they have created around a common theme or topic.  We have done a publicly editable playlist to facilitate students’ sharing major projects with one another, as we did with The Crucible.  But there is an even better use with a more real-world audience.

We’re only a couple days into the school year, but I’m beginning the process of training the kids how to be tech trainers themselves, so they can help their own teachers when the teachers are struggling. So I’m having the students make walkthroughs--like, “here’s how you make a Google Form” or “Here’s how you make a slideshow that isn’t ugly.” I then have students load all of their individual walkthroughs on a playlist.

The benefits there are multiple. First, everyone can see everyone else’s work, which tends to increase the level of work right off the bat. Second, it allows me to say things like, “OK, friends, click through the steps on this list and tell me which one(s) are the most helpful.”  Most importantly, it lets me do what I just did this afternoon, which is send out a link to the Google Form walkthrough playlist to a dozen teachers at my school who wanted to learn how to use Forms. They can now actually test the walkthroughs--try to follow the directions, and then give feedback to students about where theirs fell short. And the more real-world audiences students can get, the better they get, and the faster they get there.

We also use LP to have students make playlists that function as portfolios of all their work for class. Every time they submit something to us digitally, we have them add the assignment to an individual playlist. That way, all of their assignments end up together, and it becomes really easy to track their growth over the course of a semester.

One more super useful function is that you can organise presentations in the order in which they present.  This is particularly helpful when you have lots of groups to present and not much time.  Having all the slide decks in a playlist makes it easy to move from group to group without too much down time.

Another big selling point for us is that you don’t need a separate login - you can use your google login.  That alone makes it better than an LMS, because trying to have students remember a bunch of different login information is difficult at best.

Are there any other ways you use LP in your classroom?  We would obviously love to steal them from you.

Note: this is a sister post to Cheryl's edtech post on ShowMe. 

It’s almost time for bootcamp, and I’m feeling less like the drill sergeant and more the under-motivated recruit.

We start the year with activities that teach students how to be students in a class that is radically unlike anything they have ever experienced before.  The skills aren’t groundbreaking or new - taking good notes, watching videos like a scholar, sustained journaling, listening well, etc.

However, none of those are really the point.  The skills are important, but they don’t speak to what is at the heart of the kind of classroom we build.  In fact, the most important bootcamp goal is creating a classroom community.  It’s also the one where the goalpost keeps moving, and every year, starts in a different stadium.

Certainly, you, and we, want a community that respects the teacher and respects each other.  However, there’s a big difference between “I can tolerate these people” and “I have created an actual, functioning learning team.”  The difference between those two is the same as the distance between an old-fashioned lecture hall with a talking head and a self-paced flipped mastery classroom.  One is easy.  And one is almost impossible, or at least, takes a whole lot more skill than standing up and talking for an hour every day.

I realized early on in my teaching career, when talking to colleagues, that the way I viewed English class (as a Creative Writing major) was vastly different than most other English teachers. And that’s one of the ways Cheryl and I connected as teachers first-- both of us thought of English class as about writing first, and we wanted to teach writing and structure and argument as a vehicle to being good readers. If you can pick apart your own writing, and you can explain why you wrote that word there and structured that sentence like that, then it becomes vastly easier to see how other authors have done the same thing. 

This, of course, is completely the opposite of how most English classes work. And to be perfectly clear, the other way isn’t wrong; we’re arguing that you need to teach both ways. Students should be able to pick apart a text as a reader--they should be able to parse meaning and understand content, even in tricky texts. But students should also be able to read as writers; that is, they should be able to see what the author is doing to them and how she is doing it via her structure and diction. 

One of the areas I have spent the most time arguing with other teachers about is the efficacy of (and the necessity for) writing conferences. It’s how I learned to write well, and I think conferencing with students about their writing is absolutely critical. But many other teachers don’t see them that way-- even if they think conferences can be marginally helpful, they don’t think that the time expenditure is worth the learning payoff.

But they’re wrong.

I mean, sure, bad writing conferences can be harmful to a kid’s confidence, and at best, bad writing conferences are a waste of everyone’s time. Done well, however, writing conferences are transformative. They are also the most efficient way to improve student writing.

Why are writing conferences the best way? Isn’t it just about reading a lot? Or repetitions?

No - the reason writing conferences are VITAL is that they come as part of the composition process and deal with pieces in-progress, rather than pieces that are finished (at least in the mind of the writer).  And no one can improve writing if they don’t have someone who is good at writing, or at least good at analyzing writing, to sit with them and workshop.

It’s also about relationship - lots of information comes out during a writing conference, but most of that is under the surface.  You see the perfectionists.  You see the half-assers.  You see the ones on the verge of a psychological meltdown.  You see the ones who really just want the A and are looking for the checklist.  

And certainly it is possible to inject too much of yourself and your perspective into the students’ piece and try and force something that isn’t there because that’s how you would do it.  But part of being a good teacher of writing is to get out the way and humble yourself.  A good teacher of writing is invisible and allows the text to speak, and when the text can’t speak, gives the author room to speak and then take those words and give them life on the page.

That’s the beauty of a writing conference, when it’s well done: it is alchemy.  It takes dross - a student whose shortcomings and insecurities are laid bare and a teacher who is more used to telling than asking and has his or her own insecurities - and transforms that into gold - a piece of writing that does so much more than the first draft indicated was possible, and a relationship that is strengthened by the transparency required to discuss failure and insecurity.  That is not something to take lightly.  It is a kind of magic, and one that has been a profoundly transformative experience for us as teachers.  

In a way, writing conferences are selfish: they make US better writers too.  In asking good questions and listening to the student’s voice, we become part of their world and part of their schema.  It’s not exactly like channeling, but it is the obliteration of the self.  That, as many writers would tell you, is something beautiful and fleeting and worth pursuing actively and frequently.

And therein lies the problem for many teachers: it’s scary to be that exposed, especially in front of a student.  For those of us constantly worried about how other people will see us or how someone will misinterpret what we say, this kind of process is dangerous.  A bad writing conference can cripple the teacher, in the same way getting a paper full of red ink cripples a student.  In fact, writing conferences are a form of feedback for the teacher on how well they are doing as a teacher of writing.  

Feedback is scary.

But so is life.  And everything worth having takes risking something.

It’s a risk that is absolutely worth it.

There are years when I would have written something extravagant, or flip and pithy in this space. This year is different. 

This year, my (now 5-year-old) daughter is starting kindergarten. And that puts a Whole New Spin on what I think is important in classrooms, including my own. 

The fact that I will be entrusting her education to the same system I work in serves to remind me that the kids about to sit in front of me in a couple weeks are someone's children, too. It emphasizes the importance of the first fundamental educational principle I hold: 

My daughter's teacher, like pretty much all kindergarten teachers everywhere, is a kind, generous soul who loves kids and will be excellent. But man, when your skin, and the skin of your own kids is in the game-- that's a whole different world. 

I feel a shift because of that. The Golden Rule changes from Treat your students like you'd want to be treated to Treat your students the way you want your daughter's teacher to treat her. 

So that's the advice I'd give all of you as you start new school years: treat your students with dignity and respect, no matter how angry you are, or how frustrated you get. Apologize when you screw up, even if they'd never apologize to you. 

Treat your students like people, not just with respect, but like they are valuable contributors, and like their ideas have merit, regardless of how silly you think they are. Listen to them. Talk to them. 

Because my child, and children just like her, are coming to your rooms soon (if they haven't already). Be kind. Be generous. Be human. 

So, English teachers in particular tend to be obsessed with the idea of attribution--giving credit to the creator of a work.  There are a couple threads I want to explore here.  The first is that it's really important to cite your teaching sources. Don't steal. At least, don't steal without attribution. 

Cheryl and I are vehemently open-source. We share pretty much everything we create, and share it freely. However, we do get a little upset when we see things we have created out in the Internetz, attributed to someone else. And we've dealt more than once over the past couple years with very close friends who have had their work outright stolen by bands of Miniature Internet Hooligans, who have posted direct copies of our friends' work, changed the names/schools, passed it off as theirs without any attribution, and then given said friend the Who, Me? face when called out on it. 

That is shady. And we don't deal in Shady in our group of friends. Don't be that guy. 

If someone (like us) says "please steal this," then feel free to take it and use it for free. We (and our friends) aren't looking to get paid for these ideas.  But just add a little note-- "we took this idea from..." and all will be good. And as a corollary, if you see someone unknowingly attributing some piece of work to you that you know you took from someone else, it's not a bad idea to send back a tweet saying, "actually, this was ...'s idea." That's not necessary, but it is good Teacher-Style Internet Manners. 

The second is that it's often hard to remember where you got an idea. We know many ideas are amalgamations of #BetterTogether-style collaboration and "that one thing I might have partially adapted from that one lady at that one conference five years ago..."  Sometimes, the antecedent of an idea escapes us, and that's fine. But we would definitely recommend saying something like "I took parts of this from..." or "I know I got this from some conference years ago, but I don't really remember..." 

One of the greatest parts of Twitter (and Pinterest, and the Internet in general) is the free and open exchange of ideas. And it's totally human to get mad when someone tries to take credit for some of the hard work you've done. So, as we start finding ideas for the new year, let's be super-conscious about giving credit where credit's due. 

(I took this idea from conversations with Cheryl, Karl LS, and John Stevens. If you have any questions about open-source, free-sharing resources, ask any of the three of them--they are the experts.) 

Confession: we both love writing. It brings us joy on a personal level, and it’s kind of one of our special missions to bring that love (or at least fluency) to our students as well.

But the way we teach writing is probably pretty different than how you were taught, and probably pretty different from the way it is being taught in your school right now. This process is an amalgamation of many of the ways we learned to write (1:1 conferences, intensive feedback) and methods we’ve found to help students along the Writing Path.

For most students, the Five Paragraph Essay (FPE) has loomed as the dominant force in their experience with writing.  You can argue that is a bad thing or a good thing, but it is a thing; and for our students, it is a thing that we try to push beyond.  Whether you love it or you hate it, students who rely on the formula for the FPE end up writing something that is 90% structure and 10% content.  And often, that 10% content is parroted back from whatever the teacher has said about the issue or text in class.  And yet, students leave high school believing they are good writers, only to have their first college professor or employer disabuse them of that notion pretty quickly.

Clearly, the way we teach writing has to change.  

Like any buzzword, "student-centred pedagogy" is easy to throw around and more difficult to actually define.  Since we use the term a lot, here is the way Cheryl & I think about being student-centred:

A student-centred classroom is one in which students have authentic voice and choice over what and how they learn.  Instructional decisions are made by the teacher until students are ready in a gradual release of responsibility model; once students are prepared for that responsibility, they are allowed far greater freedom to shape their education in collaboration with their peers and their teacher.

You'll notice the definition has two parts; this is something we learned the hard way.

We get asked about our classroom workflow and technology a lot, and since the last posts I've done about technology are out of date (for example, we no longer use any LMS whatsoever), I thought I'd try again.

So I have occasional access to class sets of Chromebooks (last year I ended up with 3-4 days a week, actually), but no open BYOD network for students.  Cheryl is moving from a school with a barely-functional BYOD network (and a paucity of decent student devices) to a school where they are 1:1 with MacBooks and many (if not most) students will also have their own smartphones that can be used on the school wifi.  

However, none of that is going to change the basics for us.  Before I go into the tools we use, here are a few of the principles we operate under:

• Everything should play nice with Google sign-ins.  We are both at GAFE schools, but have had students use outside accounts to bypass the ownership/sharing issues with GAFE.
• There should be as few tools as possible. Keep it simple.
• It's okay if we're not experts on the tool or tech.  It's good to admit to students that you're learning alongside them.
• Everything we use should be as functional for the students as it is for organising course content.  

I have an idea I've been floating around for awhile, and I'd like to formalize it. 

The #flipclass chat has been about learning and building community for a long time now, and I am so proud of the community we've built. But because the hectic day-to-day grind of teaching, we can lose track of people who came by to talk and kind of have drifted away in the past few months/years. This is not really any different than losing track of friends from high school or college, and I'm sure people get busy and forget, but I get concerned for teachers who disappear down the Not Being Around On Twitter rabbit hole.  

I know how critical this community has been for my teaching health, and I also know that I tend to get into the "go-go-go" mindset during the school year. I have the tendency to withdraw and cut myself off from the group of people who bring life to my practice. And if that's my personal tendency, I'm sure it's the case for others as well. 

So I'd like to propose taking one day a week (I'm choosing Fridays arbitrarily, mostly because today is Friday, and because Follow Friday is already a thing) for all of us to send out a few tweets to people we haven't seen around in awhile, just checking in with them. 

Maybe this will become a thing; maybe not. Maybe it will make a difference to a few educators. I hope so. I know that this is what people in intentional community do-- they check in with each other, see how their friends/colleagues are doing, and maybe even bring them a piece of blueberry cake or something. 

So let's knock on some Twitter Doors and bring over some snacks. I think we'll all be better off for it.