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So, have there been any “Divisional Events” at school lately? What are “Divisional Events” anyway?

Simply put, they are events that divide staff, staff and administration, staff and support personnel, staff and students,  staff and parents, and etc. Who would do something like that? Well, in some ways, we all do — however, some do on purpose, others do it thinking it will have the opposite effect.

I have had administrators in the past that kept the staff in an uproar, purposely creating an environment where no one was to be trusted. It was their management style, if the enemy, (the teaching staff), was divided, they couldn’t unite against the administration. End result, the administration could do anything and no one complained.

Of course, not all administrators are like that, most fall into the category of being unwilling divisional experts. This all starts off with good intentions, but the effect can be chilling to staff morale. Administration, (and wrongly constructed teams of teachers), start things off simply by having a Teacher of the Month and/or Employee of the Month award that is chosen by a voting contest. So, how does one chose someone, hair style, a smile, something else? After all, most staff have not been able to observe them in the classroom, watch them sweep the halls/prepare food, etc. So, essentially, this becomes a popularity contest. Unfortunately, some really good staff members never win. I hate voting, chosing between teachers who I really admire and then realizing, it doesn’t matter.

So, have some ideas about what direction I am heading? Here is a short list of things that divide staff/employees without meaning to:

• Teacher of the Year
• Awards for doing what are standard duties
• Awards given to teachers when it was the students that did the work

Is there anything to be added to the list? How about merit pay? Isn’t that an award given for what the person should have been doing anyway. Who gets merit pay? Math and Science teachers? Talk about splittng the staff!

 What does this have to do with quality?

Getting Going With Scratch

Would anyone like to collaborate with me and develop a reusable 9 week programming unit for the Scratch programming language.

How can we make sure that students learn fundamentals of programming while having fun?

How about connecting with me, (I have 7th/8th graders), I would be glad to set up a Moodle classroom so that students can work with each other or we can run the whole thing on the Scratch website and document successes and failures.

Would also be open to having HS and Univ. instructors working with group.

Any takers out there.

Carl

After being interviewed by the school administration, the prospective teacher said:   “Let me see if I’ve got this right.

You want me to go into that room with all those kids, correct their disruptive behavior, breakup fights, observe them for signs of abuse, monitor their dress habits, censor their T-shirt messages, and instill in them a love for learning.

You want me to check their backpacks for weapons, wage war on drugs and sexually transmitted diseases, and raise their sense of self esteem and personal pride.

You want me to teach them patriotism and good citizenship, sportsmanship and fair play, and how to register to vote, balance a checkbook, and apply for a job.

You want me to check their heads for lice, recognize signs of antisocial behavior, monitor web surfing, and make sure that they all pass the NCLB testing.

You also want me to provide them with an equal education regardless of their handicaps, and communicate regularly with their parents in English, Spanish or any other language, by letter, telephone, newsletter, email, Twitter, blogs, personal websites, and report card.

You want me to do all this with a piece of chalk, a blackboard, a bulletin board, a few books, a computer that is three generations out of date, a big smile, and a starting salary that qualifies me for food stamps.

You want me to do all this and then you tell me. . . I CAN’T PRAY!!”

I can’t take credit for this, I have only modified it a little to update it for this time in history. I can only look at what is demanded of teachers and how we are all setup for failure in our society.

My title needs some clarification, I didn’t go to Canada yesterday. My wife and I took a day trip to one of our favorite haunts, the mountain community where I graduated from high school many moons ago.

We enjoyed the scenery of Ruidoso, NM and the surrounding area and included a drive to the ski run. Drive is beautiful, lots of scenic views, aspen trees, lakes, and a road with twists and turns, (one switch-back is named Axle Bend). The weather was spectacular, cool with numerous showers cascading the mountain ranges so it was a relief from the desert heat.

We spent time in town walking and  shopping. Went into an interesting book store that had an eclectic collection, ranging from cowboy poetry to alien lore, (Roswell is only 70 miles away).

As we exited the store, I noticed a fellow on a bench outside reading a book that had a faded blue cover, curiosity got the better of me and I took a closer look to see what he might be reading.  To my surprise, it wasn’t a book cover, it was a custom made cover for his Kindle.  This was my first view of one and now has me thinking more about textbooks and their future. Will there be a color Kindle?

In response to a question on Twitter, I decided to post the names/links to free and/or open source programs I use in my lab. I have not had a budget for programs in over 10 years, so I have to use what I can find. The programs listed below are what I have found to work for me.

My students use Paint.net to draw avatars and learn to edit pics. It is a program with a lot of features and is updated regularily. The only disavantages are its only for PC and .net has to be installed, (a download from Microsoft, easily done through the update process). I prefer it to GIMP as teaching students to use it seems to take less time.

When we work on personal web pages for our VPN, we use Kompozer. This is an WYSIWYG web page editor, the latest beta version just came out and is more stable than the last release. It is well featured, has CSS support, but has no spell checker, so I reminded students to open their word processor to check spelling. Kompozer is multi-platform and will run on a memory stick, (at least on a PC), so its easy to give students to take home.

My school also uses Moodle, an online classroom management system. We are starting to see an increase of classroom use of this tool, I use it to post instructions, links, and other resources when I teach a blended lesson. Install of Moodle is somewhat tricky, but there are lots of places to go for help, besides, if I can learn to install it at my age, you can too! In some ways I prefer Moodle to some of the Web 2.0 applications as its more secure for our students. We have 550+ students enrolled on Moodle.

We also use LunarPages for our Moodle and web host. They offer free space for public schools in the U.S.. I have found, especially considering its free, the support to be very good. If there is no response to email, the phone support is available 24/7.

StarLogo TNG is part of a PBL session to introduce programming to my students. 3D characters and a 3D environment make learning to use this a challenge. Our after school STEM program, Project GUTS uses TNG and NetLogo.  We also learn to use Scratch, which is similar in method of programming, but much easier as its 2D, it has an extensive online community and projects can be embedded in a web page.

Our final PBL is movie making, (vodcasting). Since we are a PC Lab, we use Windows Movie Maker. This is an easy tool to learn to use and is fairly flexible. Longer movies require more than 512KB of ram, however, if it crashes, it restores to the last point of edit. There is an updated version available for Vista and System 7. This year we will be posting these on our School Tube account, should be interesting.

Audacity is used to edit the sound tracks for the movies, making podcasts, and numerous other explorations of sound/music overlays. This is a well featured tool that is easy to teach, but will take a while to learn completely.

Pivot Stick Figure is a stick figure animation program that I only introduce to the students. They spend spare time playing with it and by the end of the year, some of them are pretty good. The animations can be exported as animated .gifs and can be imported into Movie Maker. Two years ago, I had three cheerleaders animate all of the cheers they had learned, they put it in Movie Maker to music, it was pretty cute.

My final tool is CCleaner, I use this to cleanup the browser history, cookies, and to correct registry errors. It works quickly and makes our computers run much more efficiently.  I defrag twice a year, usually use CCleaner first then defrag.

So, there you have it, a list of programs and tools that are free.

This post is a little delayed, I got caught up in the beginning of school with in-services, etc. So, I hope all following along will forgive me.

On Wednesday, campers gathered around our meeting table where they were led into discussing what questions they should ask during their interview. The campers were grouped according to their career choices determined by a survey done on Day 1 and they had decided roles for the filming. Each group had an interviewer, a camera person, and a director.  There were five college students, each from a specific college at NMSU, that had agreed to be filmed as part of our project.

Determining the questions to be asked, rephrasing and reordering them took the better part of an hour. By then, the interviewees had arrived and off they went with the campers and their Flip Cams. As part of the interview, each group was given a tour of the particular college by the interviewee.

When our campers came back, they began converting their video into a format usable by Windows Movie Maker. After a break for lunch, the rest of the day was spent editing video, adding sound for the title and to finish off the credits.

By the end of the following day, all had finished and the videos were given to one of the school district’s tech reps, (there were two who had come with students on the bus as chaperons all week). He burned all of the videos on DVD for school and student use.  Students that had finished early went to Blackboard and polished up their wiki/blog entries and commented on fellow campers entries. We ended w/gifts from the campus bookstore for all the campers.

Friday was a quite different. Campers went on a tour of NMSU’s Creative Media Institute. They were shown the script lab, animation lab, (they really liked that), and sound rooms that were used to develop tracks for animations and films. After that, it was upstairs to the theater. Animation projects, done by university students, were shown while we waited for parents who decided to join our presentation of the interviews. Eventually all arrived and all videos were shown on the big screen. Quite interesting, one of the campers had a knack for composing excellent questions on the fly, and one of the group’s videos was humorous, blooper section and all.

After a nice lunch, we went back to the lab. Campers had a few things to take care of.. some edited their blogs/wiki entries again and all had an end of camp survey to take. We gathered them together and discussed their roles as mentors at each school for the Flip Cams, blogs, wikis, and Blackboard. To close off the final day, each camper was given an iPod Nano for all the work they had done. We bid them goodbye, cleaned up our area and discussed what had worked and where we stumbled as camp counselors. We all agreed that the week had been lots of fun and that the campers had really learned a lot.

My closing thoughts:

1. Limit interview length to 5 minutes, they can shoot more, but have to edit and pick out best questions/answers.

2. Make sure all software for camp is loaded on all computers.

3. Try to make sure that a certain standard for posting on blogs and wikis are kept.

4. Make sure that all camp counselors follow the hands off rule. If helping a camper with the computer, hands off the mouse and keyboard.

So, want to watch some video? See Chaparral Middle School.

My thanks go to GISD Superintendent, Cynthia Nava and RETA’s Director, Susie Bussman for making this possible. Susie and camp counselors Sandy Johnson and Cynthia Mediana did the planning for the event. RETA’s employees were great at keeping the camp supplied w/snacks and drinks.

PS: This camp was a blast for me as a teacher!

Carl

Today was a pressure cooker for instructors, (and possibly, students). We started of the day by showing everyone how to edit pictures in Picassa, they took their homework pics and created a folder on their USB drive. Then they all registered for a free Animoto account, (which is limited to 30 seconds of video). After that, students uploaded the photos they brought from home, (was their homework), and spent a lot of time working on their music choice. Animoto ground away making their first video – eventually they were finished so the students could preview them. Most of the students wanted to change the music, so we allowed more time for recompiling the video.

From there, students went to the IDEAL-NM Blackboard portal and linked their movie into the personal bio page. Then we began working through learning Audacity, recording a spoken bio and then adding open source music to it. Audacity is a pretty powerful editor, so some time was taken to show students how to trim and move files. We all helped each other, I even learned a few tricks from the students.

We took a lunch break in NMSU’s cafeteria, much improved since when I attended many years ago.

Two students had used Audacity last year, so they were through with their projects first. After that, students made a much longer Animoto by logging on to RETA’s account. This took longer as we were all sharing one account. Several of the students tried making the movies at the same time with interesting results, sound from one student was on another students pictures, etc. Pretty funny to me.

Then we wrapped up the day reviewing what had been accomplished, had a drawing for a prize, and sent the campers off home.

Not a tent was pitched, no hot dogs roasted, nor were there any mosquito bites, but today was a great day. Five middle students, from each middle school in my district, (total of 15), came to NMSU’s RETA to learn some skills so they can be mentors for their peers and teachers. Students came with the district’s library tech and a district tech person as chaperons – they also helped during the day.

After registration, we started off with introduction of the camp counselors and then a fun icebreaker to introduce all of us to each other. Then they did a career survey that will be used to match them w/college students for an interview later in the week as part of  learning how to vodcast.

Next, students learned how to log on to IDEAL-NM, our state’s online learning community for K-20+. I am fairly sure that New Mexico is the first state to adopt a state-wide LMS. More details are available on the IDEAL website.  These students are among the first middle school students in the state to use Blackboard and Wimba.

The first assignment was to take a pre-survey, an introduction to the activities and ground rules, then to help them get used to posting online, they were introduced to discussion boards by using another “getting to know me” exercise. Only two of the students had any experience with an online learning environment, (they were Moodlers from my room last year), but everyone soon learned how to submit their assignment.

After that, students went to the agenda for the week and watched instructional screen casts for using their learning environment. As part of the assignment, they then had to blog about what they had learned and giving answers to questions posted about their agenda. After that, they went to learn about netiquette and online safety. To respond to posted questions, they had to edit and create an “about me” wiki and post three things they learned about netiquette/online safety.

After a break for lunch, participants came back to the lab and proceeded to get their computers ready for the Wimba conference with IDEAL-NM Representatives Virginia Padilla Vigill and Carol Roberts. There were, of course, problems with connecting to the conference room, (I viewed that as a learning exercise also), but soon all were in. A short introduction to conference tools was given, and the presenters showed up. Students participated either by typing questions in the chat area or raising virtual hands. All quite interesting, students were very focused.

After the conference, the counselor of the day gave the students an online tour of the New Mexico History course that all of the district’s middle schoolers are supposed to take this coming year. They completed the tour by completing a hard copy questionnaire about the course.

At the end of the day, students were given their homework. Tomorrow they will be working with family pictures as part of learning how to use Animoto. After getting snacks and drinks, (some will be on non-air conditioned buses for 1+hrs), they said good bye to us and left.

In one day, students were introduced to Blackboard/Wimba, discussion boards, blogs, and wikis. They learned to do trouble shooting while preparing for an online conference. Tomorrow should be another great day.

Recently, I was asked for what I would want the NMSBA, (New Mexico School Board Association), to know about teaching and learning in New Mexico. After doing some thinking about this I have decided to express some of my ideas.

First of all, I would like to ask the boards to encourage superintendents to not ignore their own experts. Within the teaching community of each district, are people who are experts in many different fields, those who have developed skills using mostly their own time and sometimes, considerable money. If the district needs professional development, work on websites, networks, developing policies, etc., look to them first and pay them an stipend to train staff and develop materials. What is paid will be small compared to contracting with an outside source for training, etc. That outside source will not be as familiar with the district’s needs and will have a learning curve before progress is made.

Encourage networking with neighboring districts and universities, this will help districts share resources, ideas, and maybe even get an “expert” from a neighboring district if one is not found on staff. This type of networking helps each district even out the demand for resources and will benefit teaching staff and students. What comes to my mind is the Boot Heel Consortium, a networking of resources on and off online that benefited teaching and learning in the southwest corner of our state.

Next, I would like to ask that school boards keep track with the changes that our society is undergoing and encourage schools to adapt changes and be willing to be aware of huge benefits to teaching and learning by moving to 21st century practices, (ASCD/ISTE makes its “School 2.0 & Understanding by Design” ). When there is no local expert. instead of sending staff off to conferences/training or importing a trainer/lecturer, consider video conferencing, webinars, and other technology for communication of ideas/training. At the classroom level, teachers should be able to connect with other classrooms around the state or elsewhere in the world for information and collaborative learning. (Students want more online classes) In many districts, this will require a serious rewrite of AUP and delegation of authority at the school level instead of centralized control.

Finally, I would ask that school boards begin the process towards encouraging quality management that will help retain staff, improve instruction, and allocate resources for the benefit of the learner and taxpayer. Superintendents need to delegate authority to the schools and mandate real teamwork between principals and staff where staff is allowed to team w/decision making and responsibility for change, (including allocation of resources), as part of what they do. By teams, I mean teams, not committees. Teams have authority to make decisions and carry them out, committees are just assigned work. Resources: ASQ’s Learning Center “The task of the leader is to get his people from where they are to where they have not been.” – Henry Kissinger

So, members of NMSBA, where are schools going?

Recently, as a member, I received an urgent email from CSTA, (Computer Science Teachers Association). In this mail was a plea to review “A Model Curriculum for K–12 Computer Science” which included a link to the 46 page document, (you can review the document also, there is a link to it on the Association’s home page and here). For the sake of brevity, I will refer to Computer Science as CS in this post.

The document outlines what is to be expected at each level, divided by grade levels, K-2, 3-5, 6-8. Topics, (there are 12 of them), are given, then items to be learned from each topic are stated as objectives, then focus areas and activities are suggested for each objective. Although the title of the document says K-12, apparently this is the first section with the high school’s section to follow.

The document is well organized and thought out. Most of the suggested activities are reasonable and aimed at the appropriate age level. Although this is the draft, but not much would be left to polish and complete the document in my opinion.

However, I don’t think the document will be used in very many states, much less districts and their schools. Simply stated, there are not enough teachers with any CS understanding, at the K-8th level, that would feel comfortable using the curriculum. I know of no teachers with any programming, technical knowledge, or other CS skills teaching at any of the three elementary schools feeding our middle school. I have a feeling this is the norm for most school districts in the U.S..

Our elementary schools have computer labs that students are sent to several times a week, however, the lab monitors are just that. They give some instruction to students, but basically students come to me with only a minimum of knowledge about the computers they use, (mostly PowerPoint).

My school is small, but I can still only teach about 50% of the 8th grade students. We learn to keyboard, uses of office applications, introduction to web page creation, programming with StarLogo TNG/Scratch, and a basic introduction to video production. Incorporated in all of this is an online component, Moodle, email/online ethics and basics of computer hardware. I have a very small percentage of “Digital Natives” even though a lot of students have a My Space page, (they have the page, but do not know enough about web pages to add many of the widgets). There is an after school enrichment program called Project Guts, that a science teacher and I run for students that are interested.

So, what happens to the students that discover that they really like programming? From our school, they go into a new high school, guess what, no CS teachers there. In reality, their only option is to take an introduction to programming C which is offered as an AP course online. That’s it. As juniors and sophomores, they can take community college courses for dual credit, but I am not sure if CS is an option as all of this is new.

Some time ago, there were CS instructors and Cisco certified instructors at many of the high schools in New Mexico, but they have dwindled down to a handful. To me, its a shame, as there is a growing job market that demands either a CS degree or other technical training in CS fields. Its not being addressed at the K-12 level, and I am not sure what can be done to change this.

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