I’ve been thinking about learning spaces recently. The environments in which our students learn are directly related to the kind of learning that happens. Looking at a classroom, you can see what types of activities take place in that room. Is the space designed for one person to impart knowledge to a group of learners? Is it designed for the students to talk to each … Continue reading Online Watering Holes
As we work through the tenth month of the pandemic, we’re starting to talk about schools returning to normal. I have to be careful here. The school that I work in hasn’t been remote (or even hybrid) since the start of the school year. Procedures have changed. Schedules are different. We spend a LOT of time dealing with the pandemic. But we’re much closer to … Continue reading The Race to Normal
I can’t believe how far we’ve come. To say that 2020 has been challenging is certainly an understatement. We’ve seen our world upended to an extent that was unfathomable a year ago. I remember that we couldn’t wait to get out of 2019, and there were a lot of online jokes and memes about “2020 vision.” But I can’t remember what was so bad about … Continue reading Impossible
I’m struggling with the idea that the best place for kids is in school. Maybe it’s because my most robust, most meaningful, most memorable learning experiences didn’t happen in school. I’ve written in the past about my experience with personal learning networks, and how the concept of meaningful professional growth seems to contradict the credentialing process. You can learn valuable things, or you can get … Continue reading Introverting the classroom
Steve Sasson had a brilliant idea. He started with a movie camera lens. He added an array of capacitors, a basic processor, and a cassette tape recorder. After hooking up some batteries, he had the first “portable” digital camera. Sure, by today’s standards, it wasn’t even usable. It’s resolution was 100×100 pixels, it was black and white, it weighed eight pounds, and it took 23 … Continue reading Our Kodak Moment
For years, we’ve been struggling with the idea of grades. If a student gets a “B” in seventh grade science, what does that mean? When I was teaching (back in the dark ages) most teachers used a point system. Bringing in a box of Kleenex is 5 points. Homework is 10 points. A quiz is 25 points. A unit test is 100 points. That big … Continue reading Grading and Attendance
It’s time to face reality: school is not going back to “normal” any time soon. There are a lot of factors at play here. But looking at the reality of the pandemic, anyone who is advocating for “business as usual” is not putting public safety at the top of the priority list. At the state level, we did really well in Ohio this spring. We … Continue reading We’re Not Going Back
My wife and I have been doing jigsaw puzzles lately. In April, we finished a puzzle that had been languishing in its barely-started state for years. Then, we moved on to others, and have just completed our third puzzle. We have a lot of strategies that we use to fit the pieces together. We group pieces by color or texture. I’ll take a group of … Continue reading Puzzle Pieces
Schools are trying to figure out what fall looks like. Are we going to be back in the classroom like we were last fall? That seems very unlikely. Will we still be completely online like we’ve been for the last two months? That’s possible, but it’s more likely that we’re going to try to get teachers and students back in our buildings this fall. Most … Continue reading Designing Hybrid Learning
As I was writing the first part of this, I got to the section on keeping instruction brief and realized I wasn’t doing a very good job of that. So we took a little break. We were talking about how all schools are probably going to be blended to some extent. We need to easily be able to move back and forth between online learning … Continue reading How to Teach Online, Part 2
Years ago, I asked one of my high school teachers if he would consider teaching a course online. “Why would I want to do that?” he asked. “I come to work because I love being around kids. Online classes would keep all of the annoying parts of the job and get rid of the fun part.” Point taken. Educators are not really drawn to the … Continue reading How to Teach Online, Part 1
I’ve been thinking a lot lately about what fall looks like. When we started this adventure six weeks ago, we told ourselves that it was temporary. We’re going to stay home for a couple weeks. That might drag into a month or so, but we’ll definitely be back. We needed to tell ourselves that. On a difficult journey, you have to focus on one step … Continue reading Next Steps
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