Day two started off with Richard DeVaul, who works with Google's Project X (their secret projects)! He gave us some insight into the idea of Moonshot - making the impossible, possible. The idea in education right now is to try and fix things, make it better, but DeVaul's idea is to tear it down and start over. Our system is not working and "fixing" it isn't going to work because we are on the wrong track. We look at the world as having problems that are too big to fix, but that is because we are looking at it all wrong. We need to look at everything as having a solution, even if it seems impossible. In school it is bad if a student fails at something, but that is the wrong attitude. Failure is a learning process, you get data from it. As long as you fail quickly, repeatedly, and efficiently, you are doing trial and error. You are learning what doesn't work. It reminded me of Thomas Edison finding so many ways to not to build a light bulb. Each time he learned something new about what doesn't work, so you can come up with another way that might work. If you fail the right way, you generate new results and support learning. The most important thing about failure though, is that you keep trying. By continuing to try after failing you are learning the most important lesson - persistence. As a system, we have taught students the opposite of this, so we need to model this. We need to model failure! I think I do this well, especially since I've gotten the Chromebooks. When a lesson goes south I apologize to the students and we make adjustments and try again. I tell the students I make mistakes and it's not bad if we learn from them. An entire classroom full of Moonshot Thinkers may not be possible right now, but he challenged us to try to create 10 per year. I think that is a possible goal.
Since I have the Chromebooks now I want to go paperless next year, or as close to it as I can get. The main idea with this is to stay organized, figure out a system of folders through Drive. You can have students peer review through comments on Docs and there is even a way for teachers to add voice comments. When something is finish if you "publish" it it takes out all the comments and makes it look pretty. The idea was shared that if a student did not get an A, they were required to fix it and then their score was averaged. In Drive some nice features are that you can see when a student was working on the paper (did they wait til the night before to start?) and you can use some scripts like Doctopus to "embargo" or take rights away when assignments are due so they can't work on it anymore.
I made a Google Voice number! I am excited to be more available to parents and students in their level, being able to text when necessary and at times more convenient for them, even if I'm not in my classroom. A bonus is that everything is logged into the account online so you can go back into it and review conversations if necessary. I can imagine this being a way of showing evidence of parent contact as well. With this number you can call, text, and email to and/or from the number.
The presentation on 20% time turned into a mix of that and student blogging. The 20% time was pretty basic of what it is, but I was thinking of the idea of an "I wonder" project where at the beginning of a unit students come up with a question about the unit based on the introduction activity. They can use Preferred Activity Time and outside time to find the answer if needed. Students will need to make a presentation explaining their question, the answer, and how they got to that answer. This is still an idea in the works, but it is something.
With the blogging there was some discussion over open blogging and kidblogger to make it closed from the public. The key to it is when you start you start small. In 5 minutes, they should have 3 sentences, then up to a paragraph and so on. I can see this being a way for student to reflect on their work, talk from the perspective of someone from the time period we are currently discussing.
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