Category Archives: Project Based

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How To Spread The Word? – Use The Media, Doesn’t Everybody Else?

Us edtech / project-based, folk have lamented for a long time how slow others have been to adopt the new tools and methods of the 21st century (although many of these methods are not new at all). We have talked about creating a buzz, an excitement about these methods that will overcome the reluctance of so many to engage.

One way to accomplish this is to use the media. Certainly using the media to help promote education and children is more righteous than pushing a product or a politician. And I’ve found most media are more than willing to cover positive education stories – especially new ideas or projects. So the next time your class (or someone else you know) completes a project or is involved in an activity –  (or even if they just started) contact the local media. And now it’s easy to do. Send an email – how hard is that? What’s the worst that can happen? They don’t get back to you – you lost 5 minutes writing an email. But what if they do come? – A great experience for your students. They get to see how the media works, some get interviewed, they’re excited – do you think you might get them to write about the experience? I’ve even had reporters and camera operators allow kids to turn the tables and interview them about what they do and why they decided to cover this story.

Students can take photos and video of the goings on – and there is another possible writing project (blog, story, letter home, etc.) And the next thing you know you’ve created a buzz about using tech and project-based learning. A buzz with your students, their families, your teachers, others’ students, the community – just what we’re trying to do – and its free!

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Why Go To NECC When You Can Just Skype It!?

OK so nothing is like really being there … but this was pretty good. Wes Fryer set up an international Skypecast to share what was learned at NECC 2006 – thanks for laying the groundwork Wes!

Here’s a link to his podcast of our Skypecast.


So what is a Skypecast? A free (as the old saying goes, “Free is a good price!”) conference call basically … only better. When I saw Wes’s request for participants I went to Skype’s web site and downloaded the free software … which was a breeze by the way, then answered a few questions like login name and password and maybe 1 or 2 others – 5 minutes tops and probably less than that. Wes had a link on his blog to the exact Skypecast, when you get there it tells you the name of the Skypecast and what time it is scheduled for. At the correct time I opened Skype, went to Wes’s Skype page, clicked on the link that said something like “Join This Skypecast” and I could hear voices. A window opens that shows the screen names of everyone attending and that was that.

We had a great conversation that lasted for over 2 hours. And get this … not one of us had attended NECC 2006 – but we had all participated virtually through all the various blog entries, podcasts, vidcasts, and so on offered by the convention and individuals. So we disussed an event none of us physically attended but still participated in at a certain level and shared our thinking about it. One of the coolest things was that several people joined in the Skypecast that were not teachers or edtech people and they added seamlessly to the conversation and had great insights because they weren’t educators or edtech people. Some of us stayed until the end and others came and went. A few popped up and listened in, decided this was not for them and went away. Imagine using this to connect teachers, students, experts …. you get the picture.

One way this is different than a phone call is that because you are already using your computer to make the connection, your computer is right there to make notes on, look up web pages that others are discussing, Wes even downloaded software to record the conversation during the Skypecast, left for about 2 minutes to install it, came back on and recorded the rest for his podcast – but I should not steal Wes’s thunder – you can hear it all for yourself, Wes has notes and links for you, but most important I encourage you to join in on future Skypecasts and keep the conversation going!

Learning is messy!

Update: David Warlick just posted about reveling in the conversations at NECC 2006, but also lamenting those that he missed. Dave this post is about a way to help keep those conversations going and maybe even having those that you missed!

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Let’s Make A Push At Change … but … Who Has The Time???

The newest teachers coming out of college that show up teaching in my school district are exposed to little tech as a tool, are required to use very little tech in their own studies – and in their methods classes the NCLB-data-driven-programs-of-the-year are what is promoted pretty much to the exclusion of anything else. And I can tell you sitting on my share of interview teams for new teachers – the pre-determined questions are all about which Reading and Math programs you’re trained in (or have even heard of), your experience with them, how willing are you to get more training and have a mentor to help you be your best at doing those programs? Why would anyone get the idea that technology or project-based, problem-based teaching and learning are something to embrace?

So how do we make the change happen more quickly? Make it ring with teachers, business, general public? Has this subject ever been blogged about before? : ]

We have to tell and show and prove that using the tools of technology to do project-based, problem-based learning IS the way to go. I’ve said before that there is a crack that we can enter through to get our message out there. The crack is the disconnect I catch business people and parents in fairly regularly. I’ve sat in meetings where people moan about the static state of education and then when ideas start to flow about changing things they quickly retreat to the status quo of what they did in school … just more accountability. When you point that out to them they usually become very pensive and you can drive home your point about things needing to change – but it will take more than that one time and it will also take proven results. Telling people you think this is the way to go is one thing – being able to point to numerous, ongoing examples that truly are getting results – reproducible results – is what is going to get people off the dime.

We have to take this to business. Teachers seem to have very little say in HOW things are done (have you noticed?) – so while getting teachers onboard is crucial, we go nowhere without the support of the general public, and winning over business just might accomplish both. I’ve commented on several business peoples’ blogs – however I’m not sure how large a readership they had and I’ve never generated any response from them – so one tactic is to start seeking out more blogs to comment on and spread the message and have some conversation that way.

It would be great to attend some conventions/conferences and present to business people on their own territory – but also rather pricey and time consuming and just a bit intimidating – and I don’t know about you, but I don’t get much info on upcoming business conferences (at least not like I do education conferences) and I’m not sure how receptive they would be to a session or keynote on education reform during their conference on “Widget” production or marketing or whatever … is there any tie-in here between education and business? HMMM … maybe they would be receptive? Maybe now is the time.

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What Would You Say To Margaret Spellings?

In the July/August edition of Edutopia’s “Sage Advice” section they ask the question: You’re sitting next to U.S. education secretary Margaret Spellings at a dinner party. What do you say to her?

My response – Ms. Spellings in a speech to over 300 educators you said: “We must treat our teachers like the professionals they are.” 

With that in mind:

Really provide us all the tools we need. Really provide us the infrastructure we need. Really provide us the training we need. Really provide us the time we need for planning and assessment. Really provide us the support services and personnel we need. Then get out of our way.

Any other ideas?

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Have Too Many Lost The Passion?

in this day of testing, programmed/scripted teaching what we are missing is the passion. How do you consistently get students revved-up if you are not excited about what you are teaching? When you think back at your own school experience and recall your favorite teachers, do you think about the ones that used the scripted, or practically scripted, math and reading programs especially well? Or do you recall teachers that were passionate about teaching and learning and did their best to make you passionate about it too?

I miss more and more going into teachers classrooms and sharing about what we were doing in our classes and leaving with new ideas to try and tweak and mull over – it fed my fervor both in what I heard that teacher share and in their excitement in what I was doing. When everyone is “doing” the math program that you must teach in-order and not skip any lessons because you’ll break the spiraling aspect – which is the programs strength – there’s not a lot to get passionate about. Not like when you are sharing students struggle with finding all the consecutive sums up to 25 and then noting the patterns that appear.

In my school district we now have a math program and a reading program that basically follow this scenario and they take-up the bulk of the day. I go into classrooms and teachers are prepping the lessons for the next day that aren’t their lessons, they are the programs lessons. It is very difficult to incorporate technology, projects/problems into a school day that is taken up by so much pre-planned time.

Mark Ahlness ranted awhile back about edbloggers that aren’t teachers and how frustrated he was with trying to get to all the newest apps and tools they were promoting in their blogs and presentations. I think (and Mark feel free to correct me on this) that his real frustration was with the fact that just getting his students to blog consistently – just that – was frustratingly difficult under the constraints of time a classroom teacher is subjected to. Then it is easy (although no one really says this) to imply that I’m supposed to be Skypeing, Flickring, podcasting, and whatever great new free app some blogger just found that you just have to use with your students and by the way see you at the _________ convention next week!

This lack of passion means teachers are having fewer discussions about teaching and learning – and the programs so many of us have to follow leave zero time and resources to promote the kind of teaching we would like to be doing so sharing the new teaching tools becomes irrelevant to all but the few.

Let’s hope this programmed teaching begins to wane (I see some cracks – do you?) so that the passion can return and that might lead to an embracing of 21st century tools and a renewed dialog about what teaching is and could be.

Learning is messy!

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Your Child’s Dream Best School Day – What Does It Look Like? What Should It Be?

There is much rumination in the edblogosphere about what education and schools should look like in this way or that. Kids should be blogging, using web 2.0 applications (Wikis, podcasts, Flickr, the flavor-of-the-week app), in conjuction with project-based, problem-based learning. The reality in the elementary classroom however is not a blank slate that you can manipulate any way you want.

But let’s say it was a blank slate – and not only is it a blank slate, but YOUR child is in this class. What would you want your child to be doing in this classroom? They can’t just sit and blog all day. This is an elementary school classroom – what things would you want to hear your child saying they were doing in that classroom? Remember, there are usually mandatory minutes that must be spent on reading, language and math (and yes the other subjects too, but take my word, somehow the minutes of science, social studies, art, PE, etc. are not watched over in quite the same way).

So, what’s your child’s (or grandcild’s) ultimate learning day look like? I’d love to hear your ideas. If you are reading this you probably have some opinions, probably strong opinions about this, but have you ever thought about or planned a whole “typical” day? Here’s your challenge. Take your thoughts and biases and ideas and opinions and learning and experience and conversations and put them all together. Make it a comment here, or make it a post on your blog.

Don’t make this a minute by minute, long, drawn out thing (unless you want to), just a rough outline of what a great learning day would include.

I think this would help many people get a handle on what is being advocated on ed blogs, and give us all a chance to put our plan where our advocacy is. Any takers?
Learning is messy!

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Messy Learning Examples

I mentioned in an earlier post that some of the most important learning that happens isn’t part of your lesson plan because you can’t account for everything that MIGHT happen during a project. Here are some recent examples from our most recent video project.

One group needed some pictures of what living stickleback fish look like (the fossils we found were of extinct fish). The group searched the net and found some good examples and were just going to use them. From that a copyright discussion ensued – so we ended up emailing photographers to get permission. Since the pictures the students wanted to use were all from university web sites that got the professors interested in what the students were doing and they want copies of the video.

At one point the transition scenes with titles had no sound associated with them, and the students felt that was fine. They thought it was fine until about the third time they watched it – then it was boring and they decided they needed to do voiceovers on at least some of them – so we did.

Of course in their excitement to have a video on the internet each group wanted their scene to be as long as possible – but 5 out of 7 groups ended up deciding to edit their scenes considerably to make them more understandable and less boring.

Students were very reluctant to do the voiceover work (with a few exceptions, there are hams in every group) it was embarrassing or scary… and you might make a mistake… oh my gosh! After a few brave souls did theirs … and made mistakes … and they weren’t laughing stocks, it became more and more acceptable. In fact my students with the least English experience were some of the most likely to “volunteer” from their group. This is great because then the whole group gets involved helping them learn to pronounce the words correctly and clearly.

One of the “messy” learning pieces that came out was students wanting to re-write script pieces because “the wording is so important.” They would come to this on their own, especially when they would do final practicing before doing a voiceover. Is it OK if we re-write this part Mr. Crosby, we think we can make it better.” Great stuff! Like you’re going to say “No guys – don’t want you to think about improving your work on your own – let’s just use it as is.”

Learning is messy!

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No Time For… _________________ ?

Wes Fryer’s post “No Time For Technology In High Schools” follows up other tirades he has made about no time for recess and other areas now deemed “less important.” He states:

NO TIME. No time for projects, no time for fun activities, no time for in-depth learning because there is too much curriculum to cover.

He goes on to say that the major problem is the quantity of standards needing to be met.

I vehemently agree. So how did we get there?

If Wes was having this conversation with a supporter of NCLB he would be told rather abruptly that teachers and administrators were involved in writing and adopting the standards at each state – so go cry to them. And they would be right… sort of. Teachers were involved – but which teachers and how and why did they make the decisions they made? I know at the elementary level in my state the teachers that were picked for each subject were teachers that were award winning teachers for the subject they were chosen to work on. But ask those teachers about their typical classroom day and here is what you will generally find. They give more time to that subject.

I took over a class from an award winning elementary teacher who was a great math teacher – she told me that she was glad I was getting her class because I was stronger at language arts than she was. She was wrong. When I talked to the students she had them doing great language arts activities – but the typical day they described had a constant math focus.

They started the day with a math problem “sponge” activity, then corrected math homework and did a quick review for students that didn’t do well, while others did math explorations. But that wasn’t math class – that came later in the day. She also would do oral math drill during transition times during the day, and would spend more time occasionally doing large math explorations as a project outside of their usual math time. Now this is great math teaching and I don’t fault her for it except – guess what the great elementary language arts teachers do? Science teachers? – get it? Pretty much all of them give that subject extra time and attention. So they can get through more curriculum and they are more successful at covering more material. Math (or whichever subject) is their life so they don’t see a standard they don’t think is important.

Now I’m generalizing here a bit, but that is one way we get over exuberant standards. Then how do you argue with those standards without being labeled as someone who wants to “dumb down” the standards? I constantly hear parents question why their son or daughter needs to know how to do this or that, but they won’t question the standards for various reasons.

I agree with Wes, we need to revisit the standards. Not to “dumb them down,” but to make them relevant and meaningful. Then we might have time for the important things.

Learning is messy!

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Some of the Messy Parts of learning – Or What We Did After Testing

ground.bmp Diatoms, 3500x magnification, taken with scanning electron microscope, University of Nevada, Reno – by John Kevin McCormack

When I was first exposed to the idea of having students do project work, I remember the presenters saying that it was the process that was important, not the product. I agree, the process is huge to what students get from learning through doing. It’s so huge that your plan for the project can’t hold, can’t hope to preconceive all the kinds of learning that will happen. In fact when you get to the end of a project the more learning that happened in ways you didn’t expect the more jazzed and fulfilled the students and you are. I call it “The Glow.” When you step back from doing or making something that comes out particularly well and you are beaming and can feel your face kind of heat up – that’s “The Glow.”

I’ve found that educators that embrace project-based, problem-based learning the first time they see it – get it because they see the learning and the implications for learning right away. Those that have to be sold repeatedly on its merits don’t see all the pieces without a guide.

To make our recent science video (Stickleback Fossils) there were many, many pieces.

How much background information about fossils do you teach directly, and how much do you leave for discovery? I would much rather students discover, but discovery often takes more time, and time was not what we had. It took seven months to make our video according to the calendar, but that was because we were “On-hold” much of the time to do the “mandatory” pieces we are required to do. Thankfully we do seem to be moving away slightly from the reading groups and math groups all-the-time approach, so next year I’m hoping to get to project work on a more consistent basis. So we did some intense book learning for several days about the “Who, what, where, when, and why,” of fossils.

Next we brainstormed and discussed what the important parts that should be in our video if the goal was that it teach others about fossils, but also specifically about the fossils we found. After that we broke down our thinking into 7 scenes that needed to be produced, and brainstormed ideas as individuals, groups and whole class on what each scene could look like – I do this because students seem to buy into the project better if they have a “feel” for how the whole thing will look AND it exposes them to thinking about what they are supposed to be learning about in one more way – and it gives you another chance as a teacher to observe and fill-in, correct and expand on student thinking and understanding of the content.

I randomly assigned each group of students in class a scene and gave them the class brainstorm on chart paper. They can choose to use one of the ideas the class came up with or come up with a new idea if they’d like to – what I find is they usually use one of the ideas or tweak one of the ideas already generated. Now they do the research, storyboarding, script writing, prop gathering and making, location scouting and everything else required for their scene. While this is happening I wander around the room observing and listening and answering questions and clarifying and keeping a few on track. In a case like this where we had to fast-track things a bit I did jump in more than I like to and helped some groups pick suitable materials for making something instead of having them do the trial and error part – which is too bad – that’s one of the great messy parts of this kind of learning.

Now I want to come back to my first sentence about the process being important and not the product. I’m going to disagree with that statement. The process is very important and can be worthwhile learning on its own. But to me the quality of the final product, the polish, the struggle to get the product as close to its highest potential as possible is also very important. What message are we giving to students if their process is great but we always walk away with an attitude that teaches that the product would have been great, but we don’t have the time to get it there. I disagree – lots of times getting there finds the problems and is the greatest challenge to overcome. The sound on our video is sub-par. We knew it and I would have loved to have the students help figure out how to get it more consistent. We tweaked it well enough in the short time we had (we recorded over half the voiceovers the last three days of school). The transitions between scenes aren’t terrible, but they could be better. If my students were back this week we would be looking at those things and figuring them out. Isn’t that “Real World” production? That’s polish and making something as good as it can be, or as good as it can be with your current resources and knowledge and it’s a step I believe we too often leave out.

In the end though I believe the students met their major goal of producing a video that would become a resource for them and others around the world to learn about fossils and geologic processes. Watch it and let me know what you think.

Learning is messy!

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Stickleback Fossil Video

sticklebackfossil1.jpeg

My class finished our latest video project on the last day of school (Wednesday). We were under such a time crunch that groups were literally doing voiceover work the last day as we also moved my stuff to the room I’ll be in next year. We started the project in November, so I guess you could say it took seven months to do – but actual class time was probably 3 weeks of 1 to 2 hours each day.

I like the entire class to be involved in projects like this and one way to do that is to divide the video up into the different scenes that are required and then assign each group in your class a different scene they are responsible for – like doing a “jigsaw” activity. This way each group “specializes” in their scene, but when the whole thing comes together everyone learns from everyone else’s pieces. We all see each others’ parts many times to critique or check for word pronouciation (over half my students speak another language so word pronounciation is difficult and practiced a ton)  so we really learn the content material well.

A little background information:

The stickleback fish fossils we found are 9 to 15 million years old – we took 90 students on the trip and every student found multiple fossils (some students had 15 or 20 and we only “fished” for the fossils for a little over an hour). We researched on the net and asked questions and got permission to use photos from experts at Stanford, the Universities of Wisconsin – Whitewater and Nevada – Reno. Watch for the cool props students made from plaster, clay, fish bones and other materials.

I’ll discuss the “Messy” and not so messy parts of this project in future posts and why this is important work for students to be involved in. They worked hard and were really impressed that their work won’t just be thrown away or sit in a drawer somewhere, but will be available for people all over the world to see and learn from. What an exciting time we live in.

Learning is messy!