Taking a Cue from Snidely Whiplash, "Curses! Foiled Again!"

The best laid plans of a tech-happy teacher, foiled by incompatibility issues. Turns out my new laptop, decked out with Windows 7, is not compatible with the wireless available at the NCTE conference. According to Amy Sass, the incredibly patient, kind, and helpful tech support person hanging out in the Tech Zone, this seems to be a common problem with Windows 7. Which means that my plans to live stream today's sessions (or even Twitter about them) were foiled.

But have no fear! I'm going old school at tomorrow's sessions. I'll bring my 25 pound laptop (only slight hyperbole there) and a detachable webcam and see if Windows 98 might do a better job. My guess is, it will.

Needless to say, my opinion of Windows 7 has sunk to about the same level as my opinion of standardized tests.

Watch This Space! Live Streaming from NCTE

Live Videos by Ustream

I'm new to UStream, a live streaming video site. I just started using it in September to broadcast and record my 10th grade English classes. I can already hear it. The audible gasp I inevitable get whenever someone hears me say that I live broadcast my high school classes. However, UStream is unique in that you can password protect your "channels." My classroom site is set up so that only the selected parents, students, and teachers that I've shared the password with can view our site. And I have to say, it has been an amazing tool! Whenever a student is absent, I send them to our site to watch the class they missed. Parents have joined us virtually to watch student speeches and presentations, and using the chat function in UStream, parents have given some wonderfully supportive feedback to my students.

That is not to say that every day I have parents and students watching our class live. In fact, most days, no one watches. But even if no one watched, it would still be an amazing resource for me as a teacher. I have a recording of how I teach. I can see how much I move about the room, where my blind spots are, who I talk to and who I need to include more. It has helped me grow as a teacher. I can look back and reflect on how a discussion evolved, what worked, and what didn't. And I have this tool because I saw someone use it at another conference.

So, now I'm sharing the tool with you! For the next few days I'll be participating in the annual conference for the National Council for Teachers of English (NCTE). Whenever possible, I'll live stream out the sessions so those who are not able to attend this year can still join the conversations and collaborations that come out of the NCTE conference. Additionally, I'll be blogging my reflections and notes on the various sessions. I hope that this is will not just be a record of what I see at NCTE, but a way to continue the conversations that merely begin there.

Integrating Technology

Many of the sessions at this past week’s annual National Council for Teachers of English conference dealt with the integration of technology into the classroom. It was wonderful to hear how educators grappled with the question of when and how to use technology to promote critical engagement with their content. English teachers around the nation are finding creative ways to use technology to not only educate their students on new applications, but more importantly, to teach students problem-solving and critical thinking skills.

I learned about a number of new resources at a wonderful presentation on summer reading. Check out these great free resources:

For Wiki pages:

pbwiki.com is a free and easy site to use. It utilizes the basic format of Wikipedia and is very easy to navigate.

www.wikispaces.com is more robust than pbwiki. Also free, you have more control over design elements using Wikispaces.

For social bookmarking pages:

del.cio.us is a free social bookmarking page. What the heck is a social bookmark? The idea is that instead of saving all your bookmarked websites to one local computer, you save them to the del.cio.us web page. Doing so allows you (or any one that you give your del.cio.us web address to) access to your bookmarks from any computer that has web access. This is great tool as it allows educators to create a list of bookmarks for a particular assignment and have our students access the linked web pages in one location.

www.diigo.com takes the idea of social bookmarking one step further. This free site not only lets you save all your bookmarks to the web, it also allow you to leave "sticky notes" (a pop up page on the website you've bookmarked where you leave notes to yourself) that you or your students can access. It allows you to leave directions or notes for your students on the web pages that you want them to access.

For instant messaging:

www.meebo.com is an online interface that allows users to connect all IM applications. So whether a user is on Yahoo! IM or AIM, Meebo connects all instant message applications. I even learned about a school that was using IM for a summer reading assignment!

For video assignments:

The Flip digital video camera is new on the market. It is a video camera that can film up to 60 minutes of footage. But instead of fumbling with a million cords and software disks to upload movies to your computer, the Flip camera is equipped with a USB plug and the software already loaded to the camera. You can upload your video to any computer without having to install any extra applications, making video projects super easy.

For even more information, check out the presenters’ Wikipages at summerreadinncte.pbwiki.org/Technology.

Instruction vs. Instructions

That’s it. I’m moving to Canada - British Columbia to be exact. Listening to an engaging presentation by a group of teachers from Richmond, British Columbia, at today’s NCTE pre-conference sessions in New York, I’ve become convinced that British Columbia’s got the answer. Not only do teachers there have clear and specific standards guiding their curriculum, but they also have a province-wide testing program that is rooted in formative assessment. Teachers in British Columbia are encouraged to utilize assessment as a way to guide what and how they teach, instead of assessment being used against them based on how well their students perform (or don’t). Assessment is seen as a tool rather than a result. In fact, the presenters I heard today described a progressive grade reporting system in which their first quarter grades are descriptive (literal descriptions of student progress rather than letter grades) in order to give teachers an opportunity to get to know their students’ strengths and struggles and give students an opportunity to practice skills before receiving a mark. It is a system where students are given an opportunity to master concepts and skills and not simply manage them and move on. Students are encouraged to reflect on their learning, set goals, and practice concepts before they ever receive an official mark. What an idea! We measure what students learn instead of penalize them for what they haven’t.

In actuality, today’s session reinforced a great deal of what I’m already trying in my own classroom – giving students an opportunity to receive peer and teacher feedback on their writing before turning it in for a grade, encouraging students to identify their strengths and struggles in order to set goals, and providing opportunities to retake assessments as a way to show mastery. Teaching in this way, we as teachers give up ownership of the classroom and turn it back over to the students. Such a change in focus encourages student reflection on learning, thereby engaging the individual student in his or her educational process.

As a way to highlight this, the presenters displayed a wonderful quote from Kylene Beers’ book Why Kids Can’t Read which posed the question of whether we as teachers are spending our time on instruction or instructions. Do we spend our time as coaches and mentors, modeling instruction, or do we instead spend our time giving detailed instructions, hoping that the more we give, the more they’ll get it?

For all that the presentation helped to reinforce, it also has me questioning the usefulness of some of what I do. I value formative assessment, using assessment as a tool for learning rather than simply an assessment of leaning; however, I’m guilty of giving instructions rather than being a tool for instruction. My students and I joke that I explain too much. I think of the overhead I left for my substitute today, loaded down with instructions. So while I firmly believe that formative assessment and teaching for mastery are crucial to student development and learning, I apparently still have a long way to go. So, since I have more to learn, maybe I should stick around before packing my bags and moving north. I guess Canada will have to wait.