What I learned this week from my PLN

This week was the last week of school for many of those teachers in my PLN. Gleanings from their blogs tell me that, like me, they were concerned with finalizing grades, classroom inventories, purchase orders for next year, and awards assemblies. Next week we will start thinking about what we want to change for next year.

I've learned from Shannon that "Its a good day if no chairs were thrown!". My tenth, eleventh, and twelfth graders don't struggle to learn that, but her first graders do. I've been reminded that a little encouragement helps one struggling student just finish her assignments and at least pass math class, and gives another hope to finish biology and thus graduate. The little extra time (ok, several hours over the course of a week of the summer) that I spend with these girls is something that I don't get paid for, but really is the reason I teach.

I learned from Dave Topham, my high school biology teacher (1974) that he considers my mom one of his mentors - how cool is that? He shared an LA Times article about a homeless girl who has headed to Harvard for university. He reminded me that we teach to make a difference.

What I didn't learn this week - how to post a link to that article in this blog!

Musings from the other side of 50

Today is my birthday. I'm 51, and proud of it. I grew up in a foreign service family, and am incredibly proud of the work my parents did working for USAID and teaching in countries around the world. I appreciated the chance to travel, to meet new people, and to understand the world from other points of view. I chose a different life as an adult. My husband and I settled in Kelowna in 1986, moved into the Joe Rich valley in 1989, and have lived here ever since. My children grew up next door to Grandma, had aunts, uncles,and cousins around the corner, and knew they were loved and cared for by people they saw daily. My students have been friends, neighbors and church family. My husband's patients have been parents, grandparents and extended family of my students. I was delighted to hear from neighbors that "I followed your son home from town today, he is a great driver", "Your daughter did a great job on her 'Night' essay" or "Today Iwatched your son deal with a 911 call - he is a great paramedic!". I even appreciated the "Did you know that your son, daughter, and nephew (ages 14, 12, and 12) are out joyriding around Huckleberry?". My town of 100,000 feels alot smaller because of our connections.

On a professional level, I learn best from those I admire and respect, from those I know. The MSSE program has broadened my world, but those from whom I learn are still part of a very small group that I get to know over the course of a semester. I learn best from teachers whose work I observe, not from those who tweet or blog from some far away place.

My personal learning network includes Edra Van Doren, a gifted middle school humanities and music teacher; Shannon Gerber, an outstanding young primary school teacher; Lisa Rasmussen, another gifted humanities teacher; Lawrence McMullen, a math, science, technology, PE teacher, and coach with a gift for listening and occasionally saying something wise; Larry McCarty, "the guy next door" who lets me listen in on his Chemistry and Physics classes; and Rhonda Rogers, an inspiring humanities/middle school teacher who was also a classmate in our professional teacher certification program. I have tried ideas and lesson plans from The Science Teacher and The Mathematics Teacher with great success. I listen to what my students say about what was most helpful to them, and what I should contine to use with the next day's or next year's classes. I ask former students to tell me what they wish they had known before they started their university courses. These students are also part of my PLN.

So why am I even trying to form an online PLN? Why do I care what someone who I have not met, who I do not know, says about great teaching ideas? I don't. I need more than a great blurb, I need context before I can decide how what seems like a great idea to someone else will work for me. If I thought that the rest of "Web Tools for Teachers" was going to be like the last two weeks, I would probably not finish - tuition be hanged. Instead I will keep trying and hoping that something we cover will actually be something that I can use in my classroom or personal life.

Blogs for class?

I must admit that I'm a sceptic - I don't think I'll ever require blogs in any classes I teach. I've looked at several teacher's blogs, and I'm simply not impressed enough to want to go back. I think websites are useful, but the way posts, comments on the posts, and links to other sites are arranged simply doesn't appeal to me. The blogs I skimmed simply don't met my "guiding principles". That is, they don't help me in an organized way, won't help my students because they would be inaccessible during much of the day, and aren't thought provoking enough to be worth checking regularly. I would rather read "The Science Teacher" and "The Mathematics teacher" and check on those websites regularly.

I have found several blogs on Discover Blogs and ScienceBlogs to be quite useful. I've used content from several of these in my Biology, Chemistry and Math classes. Mostly I use the postings as discussion starters, or ways to interest students in a new topic.

I also think that blogging as a way to interact with other teachers has real potential. I very much enjoy following blogs of several friends who teach in a variety of school settings around the province. I can empathize with their struggles, laugh at the comic mishaps which inevitably occur in classrooms, rejoice when one of their students "get it", and mourn for the occasional tragedy. I need that social interaction, which is very difficult to arrange in real time.

My Guiding Principles for Technology Use

Sometimes I wish I was the sort of person who could formulate profound statements on various topics with very little editing, but I'm not. Instead I work to articulate what might seem obvious to others, but which helps me clarify my own thinking.
My guiding principles for technology are very similar to my guiding principles for a lot of what I do in my life.
1) Will this help me? If I invest time or money in learning to use this will I be better off, or will this gadget simply sit in my closet until I give it to Goodwill? My graphing calculator is a great example of a technology I actually use regularly. The ease of use means that I can spend time looking at relationships between changes to equations and changes to the graph of those equations.
2) Will this help my students? If not, why would I ask them to learn how to use it? I require my Foods 12 students to search for recipes online simply because many of them will be living away from home next year, won't have a library of recipe books, but will have internet access. They need to learn how to scale recipes realistically, so I give them practice.
3) Can this be implemented without tears on a zero budget? If not, am I willing to pay for the privilege of using it professionally? A great example of something I'm willing to pay to use is my laptop. It is worth it to me to be able to type up my notes, find illustrations, and format tests at home instead of at school.
4) Are students motivated to use this technology? Can I use their motivation to encourage them to learn what I want them to learn? This spring I wanted my students to research one habitat we studied during our ecology field trips. I really didn't want to assess their learning using a traditional test or research paper. Many of the students signed up to take a digital media course, so I used their interest in that topic to allow them to present information about "their" habitat in the format of their choice.
5) Is this technology transferable to other courses? Temperature, pH and turbidity meters/probes might be really nice to have for my biology course, but no one else in my school will be able to use them.
6) Does the administration support the use of this particular technology? Will the safety guards be more trouble than they are worth? Our school does not allow the access of most blog pages, youtube, or social networking sites from school computers. If I wanted to base course content on these I would spend a lot of time setting up parameters for their use from home. The benefits would have to be great before I would want to spend time in meetings convincing administration to change school policy.

This might be my favorite Saturday morning song.

Year End Woes

How does a student who didn't want to take Math 12 last fall with a class of students think she will be able to finish a provincially examinable course in 3 weeks? Why would I even let her? How does 3/20 on a chapter test encourage her to finish the course?
If she passes, why wouldn't other students want the 3 week crash course instead of the 19 or 20 week semester?
My classes are already small, so now (of course, I used to homeschool) feel the need to individualize.
All this and starting new courses this week.
My timing stinks.

Update: She passed the course - with 4% to spare! It is amazing what motivation to start a summer job does for a student.