CUE14: Finally Some Words

So annual CUE was like two and a half weeks ago. I haven't blogged about it. Still. In fact, I haven't written anything on my blog since February 19th. For shame!

Did the wifi suck? Yes. Royally. Were there like one million awesome people there? Yes. There were.

Highlights? Too many to list. Two stand out.

Getting to present with friends was TREMENDOUS. Thanks for including me Diane, John, Victoria, Lisa, JR, Megan, and Joe. It was an honor. (Presentation resources are here.)

Best conversation? Thanks for skipping that session with me Saturday, Moss and Kristen. The discussion about how to hack a conference, about how to make conference sessions more interactive was pure gold. It has given me a ton to think about moving forward.

As I read over other CUE blog posts, I was wondering what I had to say. On the plane home from spring break Sunday night, I was flipping through my photos and I figured out my CUE blog post. So here's my #CUE14 post: a collection of pictures.

Sam Patterson and Cheryl Morris in the registration line on Thursday morning. Yeah, that's Ellen Kraska too!

A Voxer channel I was in hatched the idea for #SelfiesWithSelak. This idea reached its apex when Bill got called onto stage to take a selfie with CUE director Mike Lawrence and keynote speaker LeVar Burton. Which was awesome. Here is my contribution.

My ninja buddy - and my edtech mentor - Diane Main and I being ridiculous. Because why not?

After separately meeting the elementary teacher wonder twins Elizabeth and Christina, I was struck by their energy for education and all things awesome. And they got to meet face to face at CUE!

The crew I was with decided to skip Dan Meyer's keynote to watch LeVar Burton get interviewed for the ITM show. There were about ten of us watching. It was awesome! Here Mark Hammons and Chris Fitz Walsh prep for the interview.

Victoria, Elizabeth, and Sara with LeVar. Homemade shark hoodie: yeah Sara!

My favorite shirt I got to sport at CUE - no one else had a #kyedchat shirt. Thanks Donnie!

The RockStar Manhattan Beach team: it's gonna be rad! Note: this was before we added Nancy Minicozzi to the staff. Need to photoshop her in!

Because when Jon Samuelson rolls into the session you're in, you've gotta take a photo! At least Jo-Ann Fox is dutifully taking notes, right?

I got to film a West Coast Beercast with Bill Selak featuring homebrew from Mark Hammons and myself. Good times were had by all. Here's my view from the taping: the peanut gallery.

The awesome folks I got to do a Google slam with. If you've got to present Saturday morning at 8:30, do it with JR, Lisa, Joe, Megan, and Diane. It was sooooo much fun.

I like this picture JR took from the Google slam. Thanks buddy!

Sherman's Deli - right next to the convention center in Palm Springs - has legendary slices of cake. This slice of coconut cake made the rounds at our table. Good friends and food: a CUE win for sure.

From Diane's Google drawing session. Comparative uses of Google drawings: annotating a picture of the Renaissance pool and creating a river map of British Columbia. Participants shall remain nameless.

Another Voxer channel united for Mexican food. I'll repeat myself: food and awesome educators - what's the downside?

My favorite pic from CUE. At the #caedchat meet-up, we gathered everyone who was there who was an edcamp organizer. (Yes, I love edcamp. This is well documented.) This is an awesome group of people. I'm honored to know them. 

Sunset from the last night I spent in Palm Springs.

To everyone I met or hung out with there: thanks. My first annual CUE conference was awesome. 

Now let's fix that wifi...

The Suck and #20time in My Class

I absolutely stole the concept of The Suck from Jon Corippo. Essentially, The Suck talks about productivity on longer term projects. When group projects start, productivity is high. Planning and delegation happens. And then productivity decreases. The deadline is far off and the urgency to get work done - no matter the size of the task - drops. That’s The Suck: this drop in productivity.

#ObiWanCorippo has a couple solutions to The Suck. First, you’ve got to label it. Kids need to know what The Suck is. The need to be able to recognize when they get stuck in The Suck. I’ve seen the power in labeling The Suck this year: students use it in class to call themselves or their groups out for unproductive times.

Another tack that Jon suggests is creating a deadline that doesn’t allow for The Suck. Give kids big tasks with quick deadlines and give them lots of repetitions on the task. They get better at the task and they don’t have time to waste because of the imminent deadline.

I’ve messed with both of these and seen success. As always, Corippo knows things…

So. #20time. True to the nature of The Suck, my kids were super productive at the beginning of their work on their year-long #20time projects, which we work on every Friday in my class. However, as last semester wore on - and the project wasn’t due to be completed until the end of the school year - groups started to fall into The Suck. The deadline was too far away. Daily reflections about what students accomplished in class weren’t defeating The Suck.

Just to be clear, there were significant portions of all my classes that had been very productive with their #20time. But this wasn’t the case with all students.

I needed to intervene.

Time to think. And regroup. That’s what winter break is for, right?

Doctopus: The Document Octopus!

So today, the battle against The Suck commenced in earnest. I used Doctopus to push this document to all my students. After consulting their year long #20time schedules that students created in September and reflecting on where they were and what they needed to accomplish by the end of April (when this project concludes), students created their own rubric to assess themselves on what they could accomplish in January. They will reflect at the end of each Friday #20time period on what they got done, then assess themselves on the rubric that they created at the end of the month.

(No, I’m not grading them based on where they place themselves on the rubric. Just on if they complete the reflection.)

I am hopeful that by making students divide up their remaining #20time into four month-long sections and by having them name what they will accomplish in each month, a sense of urgency will be created. And The Suck will die.

Time will tell. The battle against The Suck in #20time has begun though!

Phish and the Classroom

Phish in San Francisco this summer. My photo

I have a confession to make. I like Phish. The band. A lot. Like they’re my favorite band. Like so much my favorite band that I’m not sure who my second favorite band is.

No, I’m not a hippie. I shower. No patchouli. No drugs. I have a job. That I love. But why am I writing about Phish? Good question.

I have a couple good friends who don’t really like Phish (Cheryl) or jam bands at all (Andrew). And while their musical taste is not something I'm interested in changing, there is a beauty to Phish that I think closely mirrors the beauty of the three of our classrooms on our best days. We share remarkably similar visions for what we want our classrooms to be: in four words, student-centered and collaborative.

This past summer I was lucky enough to go on a spectacular vacation in the US and Canadian Rockies and had a 23 hour solo drive home from Glacier National Park to the Bay Area. (Yes, I listened to a ton of Phish.) But I realized on that drive that Cheryl and Andrew - wait for it - want their classrooms to be like Phish. Yeah, that’s right. Then, I wrote and rewrote and sat on this post for like ever. The post isn’t what I want it to be, but it needs to get published and get out of my head.

I don’t want to get into the long version - or even the short version - of the history of Phish. I want to talk about why I love Phish. About why I spent a ridiculous amount of money to see them for two nights in San Francisco at the end of the summer. About why I drove to Washington in early August to go see two Phish concerts at a venue that is 800 miles from where I live.

I just had a friend listen to Phish for the first time. Their response: "Why don't their songs have words?" Good question. And relevant to why we want our classrooms to be like Phish.

Without getting into too much of the minutiae... This year is Phish's thirtieth anniversary. They've taken a couple hiatuses over their thirty years but are making arguably (and this would spark an intense argument in some people) the best music of their career right now. In year thirty.

What makes Phish great isn't the lyrics. It's not their albums. It's their live shows. That moment can come at any time when all of a sudden one song slowly and beautifully drips into another one. A thing done so well that it almost hurts to hear it's so good.

Get back to the classroom. Yes. Okay. Phish is great this year because they listen to each other. No one dominates jams. Their communication within jams is spectacular. The music just flows.

What happens on the best days in my class? I get out of the way. My kids talk. They listen. They make meaning and create beautiful products together. They create things that they couldn't have created alone. The epitome of #BetterTogether.

These are exactly the things that make Phish great: collaboration, really hearing each other, and spontaneously creating pieces of intense beauty. Pieces that bring me joy as a fan. Or as a teacher.

Intrigued? Got 36 minutes? (Yes, 36 minutes.) Check out this version of the song Tweezer that Phish played at one of their shows at Lake Tahoe this year. This is (in my opinion) the most beautiful piece of music they have ever created.

20% Time GHO

I got to do a GHO with Kevin Brookhouser and Chris Cooper tonight about 20% time. We chatted about starting 20% time, reluctant learners, and the Bad Idea Factory. Among other things. Plus, we conned Chris into getting back onto Twitter. Sounds like this might become a regular thing, which would be really exciting. The conversation is embedded below.

History #flipclass Teachers Unite (Again)

It had been about a month. It was time for the batsignal. We needed a #flipclass history teachers hangout. Luckily, Kaelyn Bullock started asking good questions about what a flipped inquiry history class would look like. And just like that, the batsignal was sent. The conversation is embedded below.

#20Time, Day 2: Some Structure

I started off 20% time in my class two weeks ago with the Bad Idea Factory - more on that here. Well, last Friday came along and it was time for week 2 (day 2?) of 20% time. But I took off from school a little early to head down to the first ever edcamp in Palm Springs, CA. And then flew back on Sunday. And collapsed for an epic nap upon returning home. Hence the lateness of this post.

Day 2 of 20% time was all about structure. Not structure in a ‘you’ve got to do all this’ way, but an attempt to provide some form to the crazy - and awesome - brainstorm that came out of the Bad Idea Factory. Students left the excited had left excited, but without any real idea what the project entailed. Day 2 was channeling of that excitement.

So, what is that structure? Like most things I’m doing with 20% time, these structures are heavily borrowed from Kevin Brookhouser and Kate Petty. Students can work alone or in groups of up to 4. Their work for the year of 20% time should be something they normally don’t get to do at school. Failure is absolutely an option - the final product is not graded, so dream big! Some sort of a product must be created - I don’t want a list of ideas at the end of the year. And finally, their 20% project must positively impact a community or group of people in some way.

So if the final product isn’t graded, what is? Good question! Their daily reflections - document linked here - will be graded. Both Kevin and Kate have their students blog their reflections. That would be one more layer of stuff for me - I get the power of public reflections, but this year they’re going to Google doc their reflections. One less thing. My student’s project proposal - linked here, heavily borrowed from Kevin - is graded. The outside interview my students must do with the community they will impact is graded pass/no pass with revisions available for those who struggle with this section. In December, students will give a two minute ‘what I’ve done so far, where I’m going’ presentation about how they’ve used their time during the fall semester. This will be graded pass/no pass, but shouldn’t be overly burdensome. Finally, my students will give a TED-style presentation in May that encapsulates their year of learning that will be graded. This speech is going to be big and awesome.

We went over these guidelines and graded/ungraded sections, then I returned my students to their initial brainstorms. Given the increased schema that they now had about their 20% time, planning restarted anew. Some groups and individuals started filling out their project proposals while others wrestled with the content of projects.

This Friday we’re going to talk backwards planning then return to planning the project. I’m hopeful to have a handful of project proposals to review by the end of the period!

Postscript: I attended Kate’s 20% time presentation at edcampPS. It was cool to see the amount of interest that folks down in SoCal had for doing 20% time in their classrooms!

Postscript #2: I’m building the 20% time section of my class website as I go - feel free to check that out here.

A Few edcampPS Thoughts

Holly, Wokka, and Sam as edcampPS got rolling

So back in May when the first edcamp Palm Springs was announced, clearly I was intrigued. I love edcamps - I think the structure and organic nature of edcamps, but also the kind of teachers they attract, make the edcamp experience unique among educational professional development opportunities. Plus, they’re free. So I wanted to go. But I live in the Bay Area. Palm Springs is a long way away.

Enter John Stevens, one of the edcampPS organizers. He solved part of the issue: “Just fly down here and stay with me and my family.” Well then. Lacking an excuse not to go, I bought a plane ticket. Great decision. (Also, enormous props to John for putting me up for the weekend!)

I don’t want to talk about everything that happened at edcampPS, but there were some definite highlights. First, most of the #caedchat team was there. Given that the majority of the team - everyone but Sam Patterson and I - are SoCal folks, it was great to spend the day with this awesome group of educators who I had spent so much time planning chats with. Jo-Ann Fox brought irrepressible energy, Holly Clark asked tough questions all day, Ryan Archer provided some fascinating tidbits about his transformation as a teacher, Sam Patterson had the irreverent humor on point all day, and John Stevens and Jessica Pack, well, they helped organized the day. Some highlights:

The #caedchat crew  teamed up and facilitated a session on Twitter in the morning. As an absolute Twitter evangelist, I LOVE talking with other educators about Twitter. I also get eye rolls when I bring up Twitter on my staff, so having a room full of teachers that wanted to talk about and learn to better use Twitter is absolutely a blast to me.

Kate Petty’s 20% Time session offered a couple important reminders for educators. First, we sometimes need to remember to emphasize the process over the product in our classrooms. This is obviously true for something like 20% Time, where final products of this project are not graded. This emphasis on process can help move our students away from their obsession with points and grades. Second, and building on moving students away from their obsession with grades and points, Kate discussed that it was important to give students the chance to fail in their 20% projects. Being open and honest about this with students - you’re welcome to fail on this project - is so needed in an educational system that doesn’t allow students anywhere near enough opportunities to fail and learn from those failures.

One of the absolute highlights of the day for me was a post-lunch session facilitated by Moss Pike and Chris Long. Their session was titled ‘Check Your Ego at the Door’ and dealt with control and choice in the classroom. First, the session started with us rearranging the room and getting the chairs into circle so we could have a discussion. YES. This is what edcamp is supposed to look like. But the conversation was a deep one. Free flowing and touching on student choice, rules in the classroom, and making change at our sites and in education (to name a few of the light topics we discussed), it was everything an edcamp session is supposed to be. The body language of the participants reflected this as well - people were actively engaged in conversation and showed this whether they were speaking or not. Plus, props to Ryan Archer for one of the lines of the day with his realization that as teachers at edcamp, “We’re finally part of the one percent!!!”

'Things That Suck'

I got to facilitate ‘Things That Suck’ in the final session of the day with Matt Vaudrey. First, if you haven’t met Matt and gotten a chance to talk to him, do it at the next conference you are at: the dude is absolutely hilarious. Even on the 6:30am drive to edcampPS. Anyhow… Always a rolicking session with lots of voices and opinions, this version of Things That Suck was highly enjoyable. It even included a kindergarten teacher - who shall remain nameless - who had to put herself on timeout because she wanted to discuss everything!

Ah, what the heck - I’m outing you for that, Elizabeth Goold - your passion made Things That Suck even more fun!

iPad, photo by DianeDarrow

And while edcampPS was fun - I won an iPad mini in the swag drawing at the end of the day!!! - it was really the relationships and conversations - some new, others old - that are what edcamp is all about. Hearing a teacher’s visceral frustration with their prescribed curriculum, and how they are trying to deal with a complete lack of autonomy in their classroom. Excited teachers thinking about turning their students loose on 20% Time. Another teacher who can’t wait to get out of the classroom and into their TOSA position. The relationships, the people, the conversations - that’s what made edcampPS special.

Hats off to John, Jessica, Eduardo Rivera, and the rest of the team edcampPS team - the inaugural version rocked! Thanks for all your hard work - y’all delivered a great learning experience!

And the experience was capped by a late Saturday evening beer with Alice Chen, who couldn’t make it edcampPS! Well, Alice had desert not a beer, but regardless is was a nice way to end the weekend.

As I sit and type this in the Las Vegas airport, I’m left with a couple thoughts. We NEED to get more administrators to edcamps. They have a unique perspective on education that is so valuable in a room full of teachers,. Also, though, hopefully getting to see such a dedicated group of teachers would allow these education leaders to free up teachers to take risks in their classroom: to go out and try something, then support them if they fail. I’d love to say I knew how to do that.

Second? Get yourself to an edcamp. Even if it means some travel. Do it. You won’t regret it.

#20Time, Day 1: Bad Idea Factory

I tried a version of Google’s 20% time last year. It didn’t go well for a lot of reasons. I was mixing 20% time (it was slated to be about 12% time, but the idea was there) with a self-paced class. Dead space that I built in between curricular units was supposed to be used for 20% time. Work from the units expanded and students didn’t have the time to work on their projects. And those projects - I didn’t do a great job of scaffolding them. There weren’t check-ins throughout the semester to talk about progress. There wasn’t a lot of choice in the product as the projects were research-based. I also graded the final products. So there you have it - I made pretty much all of the mistakes possible.

I spent a chunk of my summer researching 20% time. I did Google hangouts with a bunch of folks in my PLN to figure out a way to get the tension between self-paced work and 20% time to even out. When I went to the Google Apps for Education Summit this summer in the Bay Area, I intentionally checked out a couple workshops - by Kevin Brookhouser and Kate Petty - about 20% time.

I owned those failures to my students on the first day of school (I loop with my students, so the 9th graders I had last year are the same kids I have this year) and explained that we were getting rid of that project from last year. They were glad to hear it.

Today was the fruition of that promise: Day 1 of 20% time for the 2013-2014 year. I was a bit apprehensive about today - my students’ distaste for my failed 20% time last year worried me. However, my kids left class today jacked for the project. How did the day go down? By combining resources I ‘borrowed’ from Kate and Kevin.

I started class using the ninja Google script Doctopus on my kids to push out their individual brainstorming document to them. This doc was modified off of something I found on Kate’s great 20% time in education website. After about 15 minutes of brainstorming, I gave a brief description of the project. Like super brief: we’ll spend every Friday working on this, it will be based on your interests (and not history-related topics), and the final product wouldn’t be graded but there would be some small steps along the way that would be: a project proposal, a check-in speech at the semester break, and a final reflective TED-style talk about how you used your year of 20% time. Then, it was on to the Bad Idea Factory.

The Bad Idea Factory idea was also ‘borrowed,’ this time from Kevin. Students worked in groups to come up with ideas - some good, some bad, some really bad (phrasing stolen directly from Kevin’s excellent blog post about the Bad Idea Factory) - and recorded all ideas on binder paper. Yes, even the really bad ones. I passed out dry erase markers to kids and had them record ideas on the board. Varying levels of chaos ensued - you can see the results of the brainstorming of three of my four classes below. (Didn’t realize I should take a panoramic photo of the board until second period...)

But man, that energy though. In three of the four classes, it was just contagious. The volume went up, kids were hopping back and forth between their seats and the board. This feeling was especially present during my second period class - the 25 minutes we spent doing the Bad Idea Factory were 25 of the most fun minutes I’ve had in the classroom.

Next Friday I’m going to lay out the structure that my students 20% projects will exist in and they will do some more focused brainstorming. Perhaps some will even get to their project proposals. More next Friday on what day two of 20% time looked like!

Bad Idea Factory, period 2

Bad Idea Factory, period 3

Bad Idea Factory, period 5

California Google Apps for Education Summit

Just found this post on my Google doc I write my blog posts on. It's from July. Whoops... Without further ado:

I had the good fortune to go to the California Google Apps for Education (GAfE) summit last weekend in Redwood City, CA. Without overselling how things went, I had an absolute blast. Why? Thanks for asking.

In a generally chronological order:

I opened the conference with a presentation by Rushton Hurley. If you haven’t had the honor of watching Rushton present at a conference, fix that. Soon. I left Rushton’s session completely energized - ready to run through about five walls to make a difference in the lives of my students.

The next day, I arrived at the conference and immediately bumped into Rushton. He was as excited as I’ve ever seen him about the upcoming keynote that morning, to be given by Richard DeVaul. Umm, wow. I didn’t know what Google[X] was before the keynote. Yes, now I want to go work for Richard!

The main message I got out of the keynote was the idea of Moonshot Thinking. In a poor approximation of its definition, moonshot thinking asks people to be bothered by the idea that they can’t do something. Think about that for a second: choose to be bothered that you perceive something to be impossible. How powerful is that? Richard’s push to fail publicly - and often - in the classroom and then to iterate really resonated with me. I will fail forward this year in my classroom, but also importantly model and be transparent about my failures with my students.

One of my biggest failures last year was my attempt to implement 20% time. I made a serious attempt to rectify those failings by attending sessions be Kevin Brookhouser and Kate Petty about 20% time. Kevin did a great job in his presentation demonstrating the need for 20% time in education today, then walking us through the steps he takes when implementing 20% time in his class. These sessions were exactly what I needed to more successfully do 20% time this year.

I also had the privilege of attending a couple of Donnie Piercey’s sessions Sunday as well. The most important takeaway for my classroom will be Google Newspapers. Umm, archived and searchable newspapers going back several hundred years? Yes please. From all over the world? Done and done. Wow. The possibilities in a social studies class...

I also attended Donnie’s session on Chrome extensions. A couple of my favorites? One Tab and goo.gl URL shortener (I’ve used the goo.gl website to do this in the past - this saves a couple steps).

The summit ended with a great closing keynote by Jim Sill, who struck the perfect mix of humor and intelligence.

Will I attend the California GAfE summit next year? Yes, most certainly. I am looking forward to this conference already - top notch presenters and killer keynotes.

But really, though, this conference was all about meeting people I had learned with online for a long time. I got to have hilarious Twitter conversations within sessions with Catina Haugen, Tracy Walker, and Harmony Hayes, three people I have followed on Twitter for a long time.

“Are you in this session? I think I see you.”

“I’m sitting near the door wearing a white sweater.”

“I totally see you. Let’s talk after the session.”

I absolutely love getting to meet people I follow on Twitter. It is so nice to get to place a name with a face. And with the growth of #caedchat, I feel like every time I show up at a conference I am going to see someone that I know. And by someone, I really mean someones.

I don’t want to sit here and list all the awesome people I got to hang out with at the GAfE summit. But it wasn’t a small group of people. Confession: one of my biggest fears is walking into a room where I don’t know anyone. Like it is on the list of things I fear the most, right along with heights. I wondered if this fear would be realized last weekend. Nope - couldn’t be further from the truth. I bumped into Edward Hilton - someone I’ve had numerous conversations with on Twitter - just walking into the opening keynote. This was a harbinger of things to come, and a definite #caedchat #EduWin!

And really, that’s what I was left with after the GAfE summit: a renewed sense that I am not the only one pushing this boulder up the hill. Whether it was the conversation with Lisa H and Karen on my way out of the summit Sunday afternoon or the chat with Lisa N before we started the festivities Saturday morning, I had a blast hanging out with my PLN in person.

And that, more than anything else, is what I took away from the California Google Apps for Education summit: being a connected educator is a whole lot of fun.