edchat – iLearn Technology

StackUp: Get professional development credit for Twitter edchats

November 13, 2014November 13, 2014Kelly Tenkely1 Comment13024 views

What it is: StackUp is a really neat new web app that automatically scores online reading and learning. As you work online, StackUp captures data through the free web app and plugin which can be used on Mac and Windows (iOS and Android coming soon). When active, StackUp captures and attributes a score time that is spent anywhere online. It then categorizes it into 60 different subject areas including: news, finance, engineering, fashion, technology, sports, and online classes. StackUp is a metric that can offer insight into the commitment and study of a certain field.

How to integrate StackUp into the classroom: In the increasing digital landscape of the world (and classrooms) it is important to offer the opportunity for students to research and direct their own learning. StackUp offers students a way to share the commitment of learning with teachers and other stake holders. So often, we think about time spent online as “wasted” because, let’s face it, there can be lots of moments of wasted time online. But, the Internet is also a rich landscape for learning and continued learning in areas of passion. StackUp is a way for students to offer proof of this time spent learning so that teachers can appreciate and offer credit for that learning. Often classrooms have certain parameters and reading expectations for students. What if instead, we offered kids the ability to spend time researching, reading, and exploring things that they are passionate about…and then offer credit for it! StackUp could be the catalyst for more independent learning opportunities and studies within areas of passion. One of the things that I find holds teachers back from allowing this type of reading, is the inability to measure whether a student has really spent time on task.

I’ve often lamented about how I wish that the time spent in online education chats and reading educational blogs, articles, and whitepapers counted as professional development and credit hours. Seriously, I rack up the hours and it is always time well spent. As an administrator, I would happily accept a StackUp record of the time that my teachers engage in online material and offer credit and professional development hours for that time. I’ve gotten more out of the connections, chats, and learning that I’ve done with all of you online, than most of the required professional development. This could be transformational for helping tell the story of the learning that we do independently.

Imagine “Stacking” up the learning from a young age in areas of passion, and continue throughout their lifetime giving students another way to distinguish themselves. Tools like StackUp could start to change the landscape of learning and how we decide who the “experts” are. Hint: it isn’t always the person with the most letters behind their name.

Tips: Worried that one of your students might be able to cheat the system and simply open a webpage and walk away? No need to worry! StackUp is built on a patent-pending software system that can detect the difference between a student who just opens a webpage versus the student who is actually engaged.

StackUp doesn’t always have to run in the background and record every single move you or your students make online, it allows users to turn it on or off at any time and delete time spent on a website or in any category…you know, for those of us who spend an embarrassing amount of time on Pinterest. 🙂

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Free Twitter Posters For Your Classroom

September 17, 2013Kelly Tenkely8 Comments19948 views

Sometimes I forget all of the work I’ve done over the years. Tonight, I was cleaning up my computer…it may not be spring, but it was definitely time! Cleaning up always tends to be a trip down memory lane. I’ve forgotten the sheer AMOUNT of things I’ve created. It really is impressive when you look at 10 years of creation in an hour, it makes you feel like you’ve accomplished something and maybe like you could take over the whole education world if you wanted to. That, right there, is reason enough to do some file clean up!

Tonight the #edchat topic on Twitter was all about connected educators. Being connected has transformed my life. I mean, I started a school you guys! This was largely due to my personal learning network helping me hone my craft, challenge my thinking and cheer me on. As I was rifling through files, I came across a set of Twitter posters that I created for teachers new to Twitter and for teachers using Twitter in their classroom. In light of the conversation tonight, I thought they were worth sharing again. Feel free to download, share with some friends and use!

Download here!

Paper Tweeting: Social Media in the Classroom

March 28, 2011March 28, 2011Kelly Tenkely17 Comments4710 views

I’m currently working with an elementary and middle school to roll out a school wide social media campaign. I have had a lot of questions about this so I thought I would make a video sharing how that decision was made and how we are approaching it. Yes, I did film this video today…although the calendar says spring, Colorado woke up to SNOW this morning-hence the furry hooded sweater. 🙂

If you don’t have time to watch the video, here are the highlights:

This private school decided to roll out a social media campaign to let the local community learn more about the school in hopes of increasing enrollment numbers. I let the superintendent know that Twitter was not a marketing tool, people won’t follow accounts that are constantly broadcasting information. That being said, stories are compelling and people will follow accounts that tell a compelling story, and that invite conversation.
The most compelling story in a school comes from the students. Letting students be the voice of the school does a few things: 1. It gives students a place to reflect on their learning. 2. It gives the community and parents an authentic look at what is happening in the classroom. 3. It allows us to model proper use of social media as we use Twitter WITH students. 4. It gives students a sense of pride in their school and a sense of ownership over what they do there.
Because this campaign is being rolled out with elementary students, there are some special considerations. Twitter clearly states in its terms of use that users must be 13 years old or older. Students don’t have an individual Twitter account; instead, each classroom has an account. Classes will Tweet using the interactive whiteboard as a class.
The administration wanted to make this process as simple as possible for teachers. They asked me to create a Twitter account for every classroom, specialist, and administrator in the building.
The administration made this campaign optional for teachers. This was HUGE, instead of it feeling like one more thing added to the teacher’s already full plates, they got to make the decision to opt in. Out of 30 elementary teachers 20 are attending our Tweetup tomorrow!
The communications manager of the school is running the main School account. She will be following a list of all of the classrooms tweeting and re-tweet the best of the best. The main school account will be the “face” of the school on the Internet.
The administration is Tweeting as well, they have a unique and different view of the school than the classroom teachers and students do.
I created several lists for teachers to follow, there is a list for every discipline and age group as well as a list of other classes and student authors that tweet.
I linked every Twitter account with a Facebook Fan page for the classroom. I turned off all commenting features so that (for now) teachers don’t have to keep track of both platforms. The Facebook Fan Page will most likely be accessed by parents who do not use Twitter so that they can still receive class updates.

Tomorrow I am holding a Tweetup. I BEGGED that this not look like typical tech training. You know the kind…tired teachers crammed in the computer lab at the end of the day to learn a new tool. Been there, done that. Unless you are a mega tech geek like me, you just really don’t appreciate those kind of trainings! I was afraid if we approached this training the way we approach all other trainings, teachers would instantly have to get past that barrier. Instead, we are meeting at a local coffee shop after school. I sent out fun invitations and made sure teachers knew that this was a SOCIAL event. After all, we are talking social media!

Because I know this staff well (I worked with them for 7 years, these are my friends!), I also have the benefit of knowing how comfortable they are with technology. I suspect that they are pretty typical of school staffs everywhere. There are some who are very comfortable with new technologies, and some who have trouble filling out a login form on their own. I didn’t want technology to be a barrier for those who aren’t comfortable with it, so I decided to steal an idea from my friend @mcteach. She does a paper blogging project with her students where they learn to blog and comment using paper before technology even enters the picture. I LOVED the idea and thought it could be adapted for my Twitter Tweetup. I made a video describing my paper tweeting method below.

Again, if you don’t have time for the video, here are the highlights:

I created a paper Twitter wall on chart paper that looks pretty similar to the actual Twitter wall (if I do say so myself). This will be up on the wall at the coffee shop during our tweetup. The Twitter wall is blank, ready for teacher tweets to fill it up.
I made a name tag for each teacher with their @username. You know those “hello my name is”? Yeah, it is that with their twitter handle. Rule of the day, if you are mentioning someone by name, there must be an @ preceding it 🙂
I have a stack of 10 sticky notes for each teacher with their twitter handle and “picture” at the top of the note and “140” at the bottom. This is where teachers will compose their tweets. The sticky note messages get stuck to the Twitter wall chart I created. My hope is that teachers will begin to understand the public nature of Twitter in a concrete way.
I have regular envelopes that I have written DM on. Teachers can use these to deliver DM’s to a friend. Again, I wanted a concrete way of understanding the difference between a DM (Direct Message) and an @ reply.
Since tomorrow is #edchat, I’ll be prompting discussion for our paper tweetup with the #edchat topic tomorrow. This will give me the opportunity to talk about RT (retweets) and hashtags.
In addition to #edchat discussion, I’ll ask teachers to share something that happened in their classrooms today as a tweet, helping them begin thinking about how to use Twitter in their classrooms.
I’ll encourage teachers to try a paper tweetup with their students so that they understand Twitter before using the technology.
After our paper tweeting session, I’ll let teachers hop on to Twitter and try it out while I am there to answer questions and help with any technical difficulties. I really don’t want to focus on the tool, but on the connections and conversations that Twitter enables. Twitter makes it easy to do this because the platform is so simple to use.

I think tomorrow will be fun, I’ll be sure to take some pictures and share them! If you missed them the first time around, here is a link to the Twitter posters that I created for the classrooms.

The Goal of Education

July 20, 2010Kelly Tenkely26 Comments10647 views

Tonight’s #edchat topic on Twitter was: Can we agree on a common goal of education?

My response:

The goal of education is to provide the conditions for learning. I think that it is a broad enough goal for everything else to fall into place. I engaged in some discussion about how current conditions keep us from that goal. While I agree to some extent, I think that excuses are an easy way to stay where we are. We can create conditions for learning without administrative support, without funding for technology, without the best conditions. How do I know this? Because I had teachers who did it for me. They used what they had, within the system they were in, to provide us with the conditions for learning. And guess what? We learned.

Now, this is not to say that the goal wouldn’t be more attainable if we weren’t mired in a system that is run by testing and policies. It is better to have ubiquitous use of technology and freedom within our classrooms. I believe that those things will come. But right now we are working within this system. For now we can create conditions of learning for our students using what we have available to us. Is it ideal? No. Is it possible? Of course. All it takes is some creativity.

I want to be clear, creating conditions for learning does not mean that every classroom looks the same. It means that the conditions created match that unique student population. The conditions that I learn best in may look different from the conditions that you learn best in. This means that teachers have to know and understand the needs of their students. The conditions of learning may change every year, every month, every day, and even every hour. We are human, our needs are constantly changing.

Someone mentioned during the #edchat, that it would be great to see how students answered this question. I actually know how my students answered this question, because I asked my 3rd-5th grade students to answer it last year. My students answered something like this: the goal of education is to get good grades and pass tests so you can go to college. Not the answer most of us would like to hear but there it is. Did we really expect differently? This is what our school system breaths. This is the current goal of education, to move students through so that they graduate and go to college.

Being the computer teacher has some major advantages, one of which is that there is no curriculum to follow. I write my own curriculum every year. I have a scope and sequence of skills that I want my students to gain and I use a different path to get there each and every year. I didn’t originally intend for this to be a year-long project, but that is what it became because it made my students think differently, creatively. It made them question, discuss, and debate. It was brilliant.

We had just finished learning the Internet safety rules, and were practicing netiquette. I wanted my students to have an authentic place to practice their newly acquired skills so I sent them on their way to write their first blog entry. The topic: Write about your dream school. If you could make a school look like whatever you wanted it to, what would it look like? How would learning happen there?

After the students had a chance to blog their dreams, I asked them to pick their favorite idea and add it to our class Wallwisher. I cannot tell you how disappointed I was with the answers. They were the most unimaginative answers I had ever seen. I’m talking zero in the creativity department. It was as if they were writing what they thought I wanted to hear. Then it hit me, they were writing what they thought I wanted to hear. Isn’t that what their education has primed them for? Guess what the teacher is thinking. There is only one right answer and then we move on to the next thing.

Not willing to let the project go, the next week I sat all of my students down and asked them again what their dream schools would look like. They hadn’t gotten more creative with their answers in the week they had to think about them. The look of utter confusion on their faces was obvious. They couldn’t figure out what the right answer was, the one that I wanted to hear that would move us on to the next topic. I showed my students pictures of the inside of Googleplex and Pixar. You have never heard so many “oohs” and “awwws”. By the end of the slide show, every kid was declaring that they were going to work at Google or Pixar some day. I asked them why they would want to work there?

“Because it is SO cool!”

“Did you see the Lego room?”

“They get to play all day!”

“It is so colorful.”

“It looks like a playground.”

“They have a chef that cooks lunch for them.”

We talked about why Googleplex and Pixar look the way they do and the philosophy that each company has. We talked about what it means to be creative and the things that help us get in that creative element. Then I showed them some pictures of schools, one had a slide in the building, another had students singing and dancing on top of desks, another of students sitting on exercise balls instead of chairs. The common phrase uttered was “they are so lucky!” I also showed them the YouTube video of the piano stairs.

I asked them to go back to their seats and blog about their dream school again. I told them that there was no right answer. The right answer was their answer. The sky was the limit. This time the ideas were infinitely more exciting. Some students still played it safe and stuck to what was possible in the confines of the school system they knew. Others wanted anti-gravity classrooms. There were common threads in every one of my students blog posts: they all wanted flexible learning spaces, they all wanted more hands on/active learning, they wanted school to feel like play, and they all wanted animals to be involved in some fashion.

You can see some of their answers on these Wallwishers:

My students got so excited about this little blogging activity that they continued to post about what their dream schools would look like (even though I hadn’t assigned it). I had students stop by my classroom and tell me another idea they had for a dream school. Then I had students start asking if I would ask the administration to make our school a dream school. I can only imagine how that would go, so instead I expanded the project.

I asked my students to imagine that they actually got the go ahead for their school, and now they had to advertise for it. They had to convince me to send my imaginary children to their imaginary school. They had to make a convincing case for why their school made the best place to learn. Each student made a brochure advertising their school. They highlighted the features of their school, promised amazing things, and sold it! I am telling you, I have never seen such amazing work out of my students! I would have sent my imaginary kids to any one of their schools. Boy did they sell it! The brochures looked amazing. I brought them into the teacher’s lounge to pass around. The teachers couldn’t believe what their students were capable of. It was great! A few of the kids brought the brochure they created to the administration to show off.

The kids hadn’t had enough, they wanted to explore the idea further. I had them create commercials for their school. I showed them the Kaplan University commercials and told them they could be inspiring like Kaplan, factual, funny, or any combination of the three. They set to work using their method of choice. Some used Keynote, others recorded in Photobooth and edited in iMovie, some used Xtranormal, some GoAnimate, and others used the ZimmerTwins. The commercials were fabulous.

Toward the end of the year I had the kids create websites for their imaginary dream schools. They used Weebly to create the websites. I cannot tell you how impressed I was with the level of creativity, innovation, and fun that showed up on those sites. The kids were convincing, but more than that, they were right. They may have started with every student having a laptop, pony, and anti-gravity rooms, but where they ended was with rich learning experiences. At the core what our students want is an opportunity to discover, play, and experiment with their learning. They want to feel safe. They want to be active. I wish I could share the finished sites and commercials with you, I can’t because they contain pictures of students and other identifying information.

I learned a lot from my students as a result of the project, at the heart of it is this: provide conditions where we can learn.

TED Talk Tuesday: Bring on the Learning Revolution

June 8, 2010Kelly Tenkely13 Comments3349 views

Since I won’t be with the CHC staff hosting Webspiration Wednesday lunches, I thought I would institute TED Talk Tuesday and share an inspiring TED Talk each Tuesday with all of you. TED has a great tag line “ideas worth spreading”. This non-profit brings together people from Technology, Entertainment, and Design. (The scope of the talks is actually much, much wider.) TED.com is a free collection of the very best talks with new talks are being added all the time. TED believes “passionately in the power of ideas to change attitudes, lives and ultimately, the world.”

Todays TED Talk Tuesday is dedicated to Sir Ken Robinson. You may remember this Webspiration Wednesday sharing of Sir Ken’s Schools Kill Creativity. This is Sir Ken Robinson’s newest TED Talk, Bring on the Learning Revolution.

Sir Ken Robinson has such a way with words, the message he shares is profound. I agree with the summation that reform is of no use, the evolution of a broken model isn’t going to get us where we need to go. We need a revolution where education is transformed into something else entirely. I have watched this video several times since its release, about a month ago, and each time I am struck by something new. This time what stood out most for me was the talk about innovation. Innovation is hard because it means doing something that is challenging, it isn’t the easy or obvious solution. It challenges what we take for granted, things that seem obvious. Just before beginning this post, I read an excellent article by Blogging Alliance member Chris at EdTechSwami. He writes: What Educators Can Learn From Steve Jobs. I think Chris makes some excellent points in his post, it all comes back to innovation. Apple doesn’t usually do the expected, in fact sometimes they purposefully step away from what is expected and what seems logical. The reason is that they are finding new solutions and even creating new problems. They are looking to the future and anticipating what is coming next. Sir Ken helps us to see that innovation is difficult because there are so many things in this life that we take for granted. We don’t even think about them any more because they are the way that we expect them to be. It is only when someone comes along and points out a new way of doing something that we realize we have been taking it for granted. In schools we take for granted that there is a linearity to education. We start in kindergarten and move through until we reach the 12th grade, at which point we are encouraged to attend college. What else do we take for granted in education? Classrooms, grades, tests, desks, handwriting, curriculum, blackboards (IWB’s), policy makers, NCLB…

Today I was able to join in on the midday Twitter #edchat discussion. The topic was reform in education and how teachers could be a louder voice. The discussion was a great one with a number of good ideas. I wonder if we are approaching the topic in an innovative enough way? We tend to frame our answers with what we think might be possible. We frame our answers so as to play nice in the policy makers game. What if we didn’t do things their way? What if we came up with a new way? What if we taught kids how to be advocates for their education and learning and gave them a voice? I threw this out there during the #edchat and @bliarteach reminded me of the big push there was for learning about recycling in school. Kids became passionate about recycling and saving the earth, they took it home with them. Soon families were recycling and changing their garbage habits. This worked. I was one of those kids who made my mom wash every piece of aluminum foil so that I could bring it to school and add it to our big ball of recycled foil. I was the kid who was adamant about separating plastic, glass, and paper. I became the adult who still does this. Involving kids in advocating for their own education and learning has the added benefit of helping them to realize the importance of their education. Suddenly they aren’t learning because we tell them to, they are learning because they believe in learning. They have a pride and ownership in their own education. The great thing about involving kids in the discussion is that they don’t take so much for granted. They ask questions and challenge the way that we think.

So, lets figure out all the things we take for granted in education. When we have a clear picture of those things, lets work together to find new solutions. Lets revolutionize education together, lets make the revolution viral. If you can think of something that we take for granted, leave it in the comments below.

(Raise of hands, how many of you are wearing a wrist watch?) 🙂 Yeah, me too.