think:lab

Do Non-U.S. Celebs Give Me More Cred? (wink)

3D Stars-n-Stripes Glasses

Anyone who spends even a little bit of time in the edu-blogosphere eventually begins to realize that we Yanks tend to assume that the world of education must revolve around the planet of American. 

Ain't This Good Enough?

Sure, we love our "global" projects and love to spout off about how we have colleagues in our digital Rolodex from all parts of the globe.

But we tend to be -- well -- just a bit US-centric in our thinking. 

Perhaps we oughta stretch our lens a bit further into the known universe and agree to let the rest of the world shine a bit, too. (wink)

Just a Teaser

Backstory

Essentially, UK celebs are invited into a classroom setting to talk about their memories of being students.  Accents aside, the stories are truly universal. 

While there is no one way of pulling this off, I'm gonna toss into the mix a quick episode -- regarding exams -- from Channel 4's The Law of the Playground, now one of my favorite edu-candy discoveries of the summer. 

Disclaimer

Some course language in a few of the episodes, but I'm sure all of us are big boys/gals and can filter out such things in the spirit of broadening our minds.

Getting Our Head Back in the Box

Prowling for My Benefit

Man, do I love having a cool design cat like Ethan prowling around the planet's hidden gem alleyways for visual-wonders...that I can cherry-pick on occasion.

The Fella Has Mad Game

Sure, I'd like to be as savvy as he is re: noticing design everywhere he turns, but in the meantime I'll just continue to pimp his Flickr stream (not to mention his web site, his Grab Bag (art) book to be published next year, and whatever else he's got in the works now that his 1st year of college is about ready to launch).

Head in the Box

See, if a fella can't find the future of education metaphor in this shot he took up at Mass MoCA not so long ago, he ain't ready for playing hard ball in the Bigs. 

Or he's just really too literal (for my taste) in his vision.

A Guy Can Dream, Right?

As a father of a kiddo who's on the verge of shifting from toddlerville to boytown, I want 2 crazy vital things to be guaranteed:

First:  A cool ol' nature in a box contraption like this in his room.

Gotta be easy to DIY if a guy (ironically) uses 'fake' plants.

Maybe the Maker Faire (Made magazine) folks can show a papa how to pull it off?

Second (and most importantly): The metaphor being embraced by EVERY teacher he ever has. 

Period.  For reals.

P.S.

From the Mass MoCA web site re: the cool ol' nature in a box contraption:

Vaughn Bell’s Personal Biospheres which give gallery visitors their own miniature landscapes to experience by popping their head into Plexiglas domes filled with small working ecosystems.

Bell’s new custom biospheres for Badlands will be based on the landscape of North Adams (Mass).

CoverItLive Goes Big in Video Land

Pssst: Video-Head Alert!

Did you hear what the CoverItLive (real time blogging) just announced?

Our users can now integrate LIVE video from Qik, Mogulus and uStream directly into their CoveritLive live blogs. 

It is an extremely simple process (much like our existing YouTube integration) that lets our users quickly add live video content without the need to send their readers to another site or blog.  Our Support Center has a short flash movie to demonstrate how to put this exciting new feature to use: Demo for IE users, Demo for Firefox users

Oh, My.

Or, at least, holy digital integration, Batman!

Get a load of this, sportsfans:

The video feeds can be turned on and off with a click of your mouse.  Imagine a breaking news story where one of your readers writes in, "Have you seen the video on Mogulus right now?".

With a few clicks, you incorporate that live feed directly into your live blog. 

Or how about sending a contributor to an event with a Qik enabled phone?  They write in to your live blog that they are about to interview someone...click...the video interview is directly inserted into your live blog coverage.

I can just see the edu-blogger wheels under the BLC tent turning now.  (wink)

To My Backchannel Homeboys:

I only have 1 month until my students begin using CoverItLive to expand our in-class discussions across all my sections (so much cooler than globally 'flat' classrooms, if you ask little ol' me) given the new wireless laptop cart that showed up in my room this summer...

...so let's get movin with some educational proof of concept on this CIL video embedding business, fellas!

I'm countin' on you.

And so are my kiddos!

It's Willy Wonka's World; I Just Teach There

A colleague of mine called me recently:

"Dude, did you know that all of the furniture in your classroom is out in the hallway?"

Result: a temporary gulping on my part, followed by his telling me the maintenance team had done a monster carpet cleaning for me. Ah!

As I pulled the chair/desk bad boys back into my CR, figuring out how to reinstate the right 'fan' row configuration so the kids can simultaneously face forward and make eye contact with everyone, I began to marvel at the serendipitous art displays found on the underbelly of every desk.  Gum -- one of the great no-no's of CRs with carpet -- has a funny way of making it past candy security gates no matter how hard we kabash our students' efforts:

Note:

While it most likely goes without saying, there isn't a school desk in the US (perhaps beyond) that doesn't have gum underneath it.  This is hardly a reflection re: any single school, let alone mine.

While I'm far from a prison guard about its existence, I dig why no-gum rules exist, even as another part of me adores the Willy Wonka-like artistic result.  Makes me wonder if a coffee table book of similar student artifacts would sell.

Yesterday, my school's headmaster, assistant upper school director, and middle school director swung by my classroom to say hello, ask about my summer, and inquire as to why I have a vintage WWF wrestler action figure standing inside an antique bird cage near one of my bookshelves.  I told them, "The students will be given the entire school year to solve that riddle. Extra credit will go to the kid who figures it out, so I can't tell you."

Given that I only just recently inherited a classroom of my own, much of my non-travel time this summer has been spent trying to design a better-than-average physical learning environment while simultaneously adding my own quirky stamp of personality to give my kids a quasi-intellectual scavenger hunt throughout the year as they look around. 

Everything -- no matter how odd or unexpected (as far as teacher rooms go) -- will be an intentionally positioned double entendre or offer a hidden message related to the work we'll investigate and my challenge to them as learners/human beings.

Even more important: 

I'm going to challenge my kids to seek the unexpected literary connection or metaphor in the real world.  And any artifact they bring in, I'll proudly display in my classroom funhouse of tangential design selections.

Right next to the classic "Hang in there" cat-claw in the tree branch poster.

(wink)

***

Note:

I'm serious on the wrestling action figure in bird cage riddle, the joyful opportunity for EC, and the need for me to keep the solution it hush-hush now, BTW. 

A photo of the contraption will go up in the coming days/weeks, along with snapshots of other classroom space vignettes, too.

Oh, and it appears I'm not the only teacher type exploring space from a what can I craft in a DIY fashion (as opposed to my previous school planner/architectural career examples).  A certain middle school history teacher/podcaster extraordinaire, and current Missouri Teacher of the Year,  just emailed me about his own plans to share photos/videos of his classroom space. 

Can we sense a innovative DIY classroom space Flickr meme in the not so distant future, sportsfans?  If so, I want all the glory in terms of blame if it goes viral. 

(wink, again)

"Do You Know Who I Am?" (Chomp, Chomp)

The joy of networks, tight and loose?

Hadn't spoken with fellow blogger Harold Jarche in a long, long time.  Months.  Maybe a year? 

Not sure why.  Always enjoyed his writing and ideas.  But time is a wry critter.

In any event, his name suddenly pops up in a comment on my blog this afternoon.  I then notice -- 2 min later -- that he's in my Skype contact list.  Send him a quick thank you.  He replies seconds later. 

And then he sends me this video gem called "How To Cheat on an Exam". 

Sure, it's a cheeky title.  But the final take-away in the closing seconds of the short video is classic.  Especially the apple bite.

Think you'll like it, regardless of what side of the apple-on-the-desk you claim.

BTW: The video code is found at "5 Min - Life Videopedia", a great little site that is built on the premise of people submitting up-to-5min-long videos for "practical questions" and for people to "share their knowledge".

Their goal:

"Our goal is to create the first communal Life Videopedia allowing users from all over the globe to contribute their knowledge by sharing visual guides."

Now that's cool.  Worth-checking-out cool!

And certainly -- all things lead back to the "future of learning" premise -- a fun side project for a teacher to assign to a group of public speaking students, those trying out a science experiment, poetry reciting fans, and just about any other subject-based project known to mankind that can be explained (or at least hinted at) visually in under 5 minutes.

Sure as heck can imagine seeing a dy/dan (meyer) "graphing (math) stories" channel there, but maybe that's just lil' ol' English teacher me who still digs the potential of this 2.0 business having a reasonably positive impact on how schools might 'deliver' education down the road. 

Might take a certain "digital native" intern to get the ball rollin' out there in Cali, but I'm semantically optimistic that way.  Must be the non-linear, right-side-of-the-brain Kool-Aid I'm drinkin'.  (he smiles)

Mouth of Babes and All That

Been teasing the 'school of the future' tech questions with my students lately.

One of my Honors Eng II students said the following via a blog response today:

"I am absolutely all for technology, yet I still think that there could be a point when it stops enhancing and starts replacing."

Can't seem to get that out of my head as I head towards the school exit.

Thank goodness it is the beginning of the weekend so I can chew on it for a bit.

Perhaps My Fav Classroom Story As of Late

While I'm still chucklin' a bit after reading Dan Meyer's email to me (upon the heels of his early morning Twitter question tipping my head that way) telling me that some spammers had hijacked my blog's RSS feed last night, adding a bit of Paris Hilton and a bit of Britney/K-Fed and a bit of Mickey Ate Walt's Head stories into the mix, what is really getting my attention today is...

...maybe my favorite classroom anecdote in a long, long, long, long, long time.

[psst. you. just. know. the. 2.0types. are. gonna. yell. "skype. and. liveblog. and. ustream. the. call. next. time. or. it. ain't. real. 21c. learnin'!"]

I was a silent fan of this other guy's education blogging for quite some time.

Now this other guy has me wearing his concert t-shirts to faculty meetings.

Oh, and dying to have my mom call my students in the middle of English class.

Starting When It Ends

While driving over to the school on a Sunday afternoon to see the students' annual spring musical, I was listening to a segment on NPR about a filmmaker -- Philip Groning -- discussing his film, "The Great Silence", a documentary that explored

"a spiritual voyage into the inner meaning and experience of monastic life" at "the Grande Chartreuse monastery, the head monastery of the Carthusian order, high in the French Alps between Grenoble and Chambery."

Subject aside, what really interested me was a comment made by Groning as he tried to explain exactly why he wanted to make a film about silence.

Paraphrased (since I can't find the transcript of the radio show):

"Great films begin when they end."

In other words, he was more interested in a film that sparked dialogue after the film ended, then in one that merely 'entertained' or gave out information' during the viewing process.

Seems to me that if I were a young teacher-to-be, repositioning that statement a bit would be a pretty powerful reminder to me of what will matter most over the longevity of my career...and more importantly, to my students over the longevity of their lives:

"Great [classes] begin when they end."

What matters more when you really do a gut-check as to what drives you:

• Spending more and more time trying to demonstrate to the kids as to what you can do 'inside' the classroom? 

• Or making damn sure that whatever we do is only the beginning of what our students will do from the closing bell forward?

Note: Bias intended.  Zero apologies.

An Ever-Shifting Dewey Decimal System

So often these days I feel like one of them carnival of voices roaming like curious hyenas around Sybil's head.  So many thoughts, so many directions, so many voices, so many disconnects, so many questions, so many opportunities.

During a calm moment this afternoon, my mind craving a swinging hammock as the school week drew to a close, I found myself staring off into space.  A lovely daydreaming sequence was in full effect.  Most of the school was quiet.  Hardly a kid's voice anywhere to be heard.  Half-day Friday's mean the place empties out pretty quick and the cerebellum drifts easily. 

Found my eyes tracking upwards.  Scanning binding after another.  Pieces to different puzzles.  An odd assortment.  A bit of unresolved conflict, too. 

Wondering what future archeologists will one day make of the potential idea relationships found in my school desk book stack.  And taking solo bets as to when these various idea threads and the edu-voice cacophony in my head will all come together in one happy dance once, and for all.

"I Met a Traveler from an Antique Land..."

Scene:

Yesterday afternoon, my office, student ("P") on his way out the door after having successfully completed -- after 6+ weeks of it hanging like an albatross around his "Ancient Mariner" neck -- his "Ozymandias" poem memorization project.

Mr. Long: 

"Nicely done.  Pleased that your parents and I can finally celebrate your quarter grade the next time we're on the phone together.  And I have to believe there's a bit of a weight off your shoulders now that you'll pulled off this assignment."

Student "P":

"Definitely feels good.  And you know what?  I actually ended up liking this poem once I memorized it.  Crazy, that."

***

Backstory: Every one of my 10th graders -- 4 sections worth (the entire 10th grade for our school, actually) -- were given the following non-negotiable challenge the first week of this 3rd quarter:

Each of you has been assigned the challenge to memorize Percy Shelley's "Ozymandias," a 14-line poem centered on the historical fragments of one leader's "cold command" that lies "half sunk" in sand long after his proclamation of greatness was supposed to inspire "[d]espair" in those standing before him.

You are to write out the full poem -- word for word, punctuation mark for punctuation mark -- without making a single mistake of any type.  Not even a single comma out of place or a missing moment of capitalization.  Perfection, in other words.

There are 2 possible grades:  "zero" or "A+".  Nothing in between.  Until you ace it, you'll have a "big fat zero" in the gradebook for an assignment that is the equivalent of a major essay. 

Granted, you can re-take the challenge over and over again (outside of class) anytime this quarter until you ace it...but don't be tempted to wait too long to get it done.  Trust me.  You do not want to be trying to 're-memorize' it weeks from now after forgetting about the assignment as the rest of the syllabus takes over. 

That being said, this will be a real test for many of you.  And it'll be a great warm-up as we prime our brains/imaginations for doing similar work -- on paper and in front of an 'audience' -- once Shakespeare comes knocking on the classroom door later this semester.

***

Funny.  A few weeks later, I was in Philly for EduCon 2.0.  Mentioned this assignment/challenge to a few new colleagues during one of the breakout workshops centered on 'authentic' assignments.  Still struck by one of the very well-intentioned educators who immediately responded:

"What?  You're really going to make every one of your students memorize the entire poem without even a single mistake?  Can they really do this?  I don't think they can.  Personally, I think it's a mistake."

Wow.  A Mistake. And she wasn't kidding. 

Even funnier?

As of yesterday, I'm only 4 kids away -- out of the ENTIRE 10th grade -- from having 100% success with this project.  This includes the natural actors; it also includes the ESL and alternative-learning-modality kiddos, too.  No exceptions. 

None.

Even funnier?

To get there, we didn't even use a blog or Twitter-tweets or wiki-up our thoughts.  Nope.  Used pretty antiquated tools, to be honest.  Just time, brains, paper, a book, and zero apologies.  Even a blackboard (the dry erase type with no 'smart' nuttin' plugged in).

In spite of all the hyper-attention given to bleeding-edge technologies and ramped-up global collaboration these days, sometimes the really epic 'teaching/learning' moments happen when you put a non-negotiable line in the sand for EVERY kid that demands an all-or-nothing approach with zero apologies for having done so.  Amazing what happens when something that challenges even your best-n-brightest is something the not-so-strong kiddos pull off also.  Pretty much levels the playing field for the rest of the year so we can get down to the business of really pushing hard on ideas in class.

Even funnier?

These kids will never forget this poem.  Never.  Heck, I still remembered after 21 years because my own 11th grade English teacher pulled this crazy business on us, too. And a few just like "P" -- kids who normally 'tread water' through their English class -- discovered that through 'authentic' old-skool challenge, a real passion for something 'academic' happened beyond their control.

See below for the link to read the full poem. 

Maybe you'll even take on the challenge of memorizing it yourself.  Spring Break is coming up.  Might be a nice change from mowing the lawn or hanging out on the beach.

 

Photo link.