Just feeling ornery

Rainy day and just feeling ornery.

From "The Other Side of Plagiarism"... 

Here I am! Lil’ Debbie, a senior at Big Kahuna High. I may be a little over-committed. I’m taking a full load of college-prep courses; I’m on the varsity surfing team; I’m president of the Future Teachers of America Club; I’m class treasurer; and I do volunteer work on the weekends, including teaching Sunday school to little blind children in their native Hmong language. Oh yeah, I work at Mickey D’s a few hours a week because I have these unreasonable parents who expect me to pay for my car insurance, save for college, and even buy my own tongue studs. Plus there is this really cute guy in my AP Trig class on whom I’d sure like to get a better angle.

So I come home Thursday night at seven, tired from a rugged surfing practice session and I’ve got about 4 hours before I need to crash. I have some choices about how to use this time. Let’s see I can…

• Spend hours researching and paraphrasing to write this paper assigned by Mr. Fuddy-Duddy on the causes of the Crimean War. (Wasn’t this like way back with Vietnam and Desert Storm?)
• Work on the assignments in my other 5 classes which are way more interesting and valuable.
• Revise my lesson for FTA on “How to Say the Pledge of Allegiance in a Really, Really Heartfelt Way.”
• Give that cute guy in Trig a call to see if he can explain the difference between a sine and cosine to me.
• Fill in at work for my best friend who needs the night of to help her mother who is just came home from the hospital.

One time at lunch, my g-friends and I were discussing some websites that let a person, just download term papers. Just log on, search, download and reformat. On some sites I can even say how good a writer I am so the paper doesn’t look too good for my writing abilities. I’m thinking this “short cut” on Fuddy-Duddy’s paper would allow me to do some things that actually, like, have meaning and value?

I know I do a better job on things that have relevance and when I know why they are important. 

If I'm not having fun...

I figure if I'm not having fun as a teacher, no one else is having fun either. - Doug

I was delighted to read the article "The Neuroscience of Joyful Education" by Judy Willis in the summer online edition of Educational Leadership. This is basically the science behind what good teachers already know - kids learn better when they are having fun, are involved, are motivated and the topic is relevant. You read the article, but one bit stood out for me:

When stress in the classroom is getting high, it is often because a lesson is overly abstract or seems irrelevant to students. Teachers can reduce this type of stress by making the lesson more personally interesting and motivating. Ideally, students should be able to answer the question, “Why are we learning about this?” at any point in a lesson.

Teachers can find valuable background materials and human interest connections in textbooks published in the 1990s, before many publishers dropped such information to make room for practice test questions. (Bold is mine - Doug.)

Is this sad or what?

One of the operative words at NECC this year seemed to be "fun." For all of Second Life's pedagogical possibilities of being the ultimate constructivist environment, what attracts me to it is that it is fun. Maybe that is what attracts me to educational technology and to libraries in the first place - both can and should be fun.

Have some fun this weekend.

7 Imps

Seven mental imps of information/technology integration

I've been asked to give a 20 minute talk tomorrow about "integrating information literacy and technology skills good" in schools. I am a little hesitant to do so.

While our district has done more than many to make this happen and we have been working on this for a very long time,  we still have a long way to go before I would say we have anything approaching an exemplary implementation.

So I think I will use my 20 minutes to visit about some impish mindsets I've seen working against schools trying to make sure students have good IT/IL skills. Here are some of the detrimental ones I've encountered: 

1. IMperial. IT/IL skills are only for necessary for kids going on to college or for "gifted and talented" students. Take a look at today's jobs. Everybody needs "to be able to use information and technology in order to solve problems and answer questions."  And ironically, activities that teach IT/IL skills tend to be hands-on and appeal to those kids with less than a purely academic bent.

A corollary is that IT/IL skills are only about traditional research methods - footnotes, secondary sources, bibliographies, margins, footnotes. Yes, some kids need to know how to do this, but everyone needs to answer the pragmatic everyday sorts of questions.

2. IMPosing. IT/IL curriculum and the activities that teach it must be big and complex. Oh, and we should be extra fussy about what we call them. This may be the biggest mistake we make. Having good IL skills basically boils down to being able to competently answer these questions:

• What is my question or problem?
• Where do I get reliable information in order to answer it?
• How do I communicate my findings to others?
• How do I know I've been successful?

And students need to know the technology skills which will help them answer these questions.

Oh, the Super3 simplifies even further: Plan, Do, Review. Or look at Alice Yucht's Flip-It model. This does not need to be rocket surgery.

And problem-solving needs to be an everyday occurrence - not something done in huge blocks of time, once or twice a year. It's also easy to get hung up on names - Information Literacy, Technology Literacy, Information Fluency, Computer Skills, Information Problem-Solving, Research Skills, etc.. Yes, it probably is important symbolically, but not to the teachers who need to teach the skills.

3. IMPediment. Teachers may choose whether to teach IT/IL skills. As Bernajean Porter likes to say, "When something is optional, some people will choose NOT to do it." To keep these skills from being "optional," we need state-mandated standards and state-required assessments. Federal would even be better.

Oh, and to think the librarians and technologist alone can teach these skills is a big mistake.

4. IMPosition. Teaching IT/IL skills are viewed as an imposition, not improvement, to the curriculum. Here's a simple suggestion: Integrate IT/IL projects and activities into the least successful units of the curriculum, not the best. Think about it.

5. IMProbable. Teaching IT/IL skills can be done without resources.  Yes, kids do better when there are adequate print and electronic resources. (And this means more than just the "free" Internet.)

Probably the most important resource teachers and students need access to, however, is an information/technology professional - a great librarian - with whom they can partner. 

6. IMPossible. The IT/IL skill curriculum is so complicated that it is impossible to implement. Stages and planning are requires - as is determination and stamina. Our district (see A Curriculum Built Not to Last) took two years to build the framework, revises every year, and does a formal review of the standards and benchmarks about every five years. It is a big task, but it can be done if there is a will. How do we revise now to look at Pink's right brain skills?

7. IMPasse. Standardized tests are the only measure of a student's (and school's) performance. This probably the biggest barrier to the implementing good IL/IT curriculum at present. Yup, readin' and 'rithmatic' are important - but this is truly the 4th 'R that everyone needs. I believe our parents and community know this - it's just Feds that don't seem to get it. Perhaps for sinister reasons. We need to show the courage of our convictions and provide every child a full education - despite the DOE. Too bad it can't be with its help. Inform your parents that schools are more than the some of their scores.

 There are some other "imps" at work here as well. The task of integrating information and technology skills across the curriculum in every school is also IMPerative, IMPortant, and will IMProve education. If we don't, we are IMProvident.

 Any Imps to add to this IMPressive list?  ;-)