When it rains, it pours

29. November 2011 · 2 comments · Categories: Uncategorized

I just finished up grades–50-something comments of at least a few sentences.  I got less and less creative toward the end.  Sigh.  I also submitted a grant proposal this morning.  Tomorrow night, we have a special evening for 8th graders showcasing the upper school courses and programs.  Next week is Computer Science Education Week, for which I have several activities planned.  This weekend and next weekend, my middle school students will be participating in robotics competitions.  I think I’m going to be ready for winter break when it comes in a couple of weeks.

 

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Some thoughts on gender and robotics

20. November 2011 · 5 comments · Categories: Uncategorized · Tags: , , ,

This weekend, I participated in a robotics competition.  Like last year, I have a handful of high school girls (5) working with the boys high school down the street.  There’s one returning student, two students who have some experience from previous types of competitions and two who are new to the whole thing.  I also brought some middle schoolers, who ended up helping by resetting the field between matches.  There were 5 of them.  If you count my middle schoolers, there were 12 girls total at the competition doing something besides just watching.  That’s out of maybe 75-100 total people.  Not a good percentage.

The show is run by some well-meaning folks–a couple of middle aged engineers (both men), several college students (all men)–but I’m not sure they appreciate how few women there really are, and why there might not be more.  The organizers had a hard time accepting me as someone who could actually help.  They needed extra hands to get teams to the fields on time, but one guy said while I’m standing right next to him, “Does she know how?”  Wouldn’t ask me directly, and didn’t think I could do a pretty simple task.  Kind of annoying.

Mr. Geeky came for a while and mentioned that he thought the girls weren’t being allowed to participate very much by the boys on the team.  I didn’t see any of this because I was busy doing the task that the guys thought I couldn’t do.  I plan on talking to them about it on Monday and see if they felt left out.  He thinks I should boycott the whole thing or thinks I should encourage rules that require gender and racial diversity on teams.  I think boycotting deprives interested girls a much-needed opportunity and they might just shrug us off.  But I also am not above thinking that we should at least be having more thoughtful conversations about this issue within this particular organization.

I would also love to see some more research on whether robotics competitions are the best pathway for getting girls interested in computer science.  There are lots of good things about this whole thing, but it takes a lot of energy (and money), energy that might be better spent doing other things that increase girls’ participation in CS.

Sharing

17. November 2011 · Write a comment · Categories: Uncategorized · Tags: , , ,

Today was my last day with my 6th graders.  I have them build web sites using Google Sites.  We learn a little HTML and a little CSS to see how these things really work, and then I set them loose.  One of my students’ mothers works at the school and she emailed me to ask how her daughter could share her site with family members.  I changed a setting and voila, she was able to share it with aunts and uncles.  I thought it was pretty cool that she would even want to.

I missed the last day of my 8th graders, but they, too, have shared their work on the Scratch web site.

My 7th graders, whom I will see one more time, created podcasts and videos, which were posted to the school’s web site.  We created QR codes for them, and we hope that admissions will pick a few to use during tours and open houses.

My Upper School CS class is working on some very cool robot projects, which they are going to demo for a 1st grade science class.

I like having my students share their work.  Yes, it’s a challenge sometimes to coordinate, get people online, and there are the inevitable technical difficulties.  But I think it’s worth it.  The kids like sharing, showing off what they’ve done, and they get excited if people comment on their work.  And I think getting them used to the idea that their work might mean something to someone else is important.

Technology as separate or integrated

14. November 2011 · Write a comment · Categories: Uncategorized · Tags: , ,

Last week I participate in an #isedchat about whether “technology” classes should be taught separately or if tech should be more fully integrated into the work that students do within their academic classes.  The consensus seemed to be that technology should be integrated into the academic classes themselves.  But then there was the problem of how, exactly, that was supposed to happen.  What do you do with the teachers who aren’t particularly tech savvy?  How do you decide on what kind of technology gets incorporated?  These are tough questions that I see many schools wrestle with.

I can think of some things that I think every student should know, technology-wise, but many of these are basic.  File–>Save, for example.  There are standards out there, but they’re pretty vague.  The ones I see most teachers and students really struggling with are these:

6. Technology Operations and Concepts
Students demonstrate a sound understanding of technology concepts, systems, and operations. Students:
a. understand and use technology systems.
b. select and use applications effectively and productively.
c. troubleshoot systems and applications.
d. transfer current knowledge to learning of new technologies.

 

These are, of course, fairly vague as well.  What systems are we talking about here?  In this case, though, I kind of like the vagueness, because one thing I can’t stand is someone who can only use a particular product–be it Microsoft or Apple or Google or even Linux.  It’s okay to like or feel more comfortable with any of these, but when you find yourself in front of a different system, you are not allowed to throw up your hands (see 6d. above).  These are all things I explicitly try to do in my tech classes.  But I could see these things being incorporated elsewhere.  How does one do this?

There are lots of ways, but mainly, assign things that involve the use of said systems, and don’t be crazy specific about which systems the students use.  Take writing a paper, for example.  Let them use Google Docs or Word or LaTex or a basic text editor, but you can require it be formatted a certain way and that it be a pdf file in its final format (to save you from converting files yourself).  And then the students need to figure that out and in the process, will learn a little about file formats.  Have them include a picture or a graph.  File formats, file resizing, and a little bit of spreadsheet calculation will be absorbed this way.

Assign a podcast or an animated slideshow or a documentary.  Now we’re talking–all kinds of systems!  All kinds of file types.  How do you get that YouTube video downloaded and into your remixed version?  They will figure it out.  There’s this thing called Google (or Bing, whatever).

Assign some data analysis and visualization.  Let them figure out how to do this.  (Yep, Google, again.)

And I’m not saying you might not make suggestions about what works or provide support as they struggle, but instead of defining the process so specifically, why not define the goal and let them figure out the process.

Because I’m telling you, a student who doesn’t know that File–>Save exists in almost every program or that ctrl-c is copy and ctrl-v is paste (cmd-c or cmd-v) or who can’t search for the answers to their questions isn’t going to survive the 21st century.  And a single “tech” class where these things are taught (out of context) and never again used, probably isn’t going to cut it.

I’m happy to teach those classes.  They’re fun, but even more fun is when what you teach gets incorporated into many classes.  It makes it a much more worthwhile endeavor.  And it might make it an obsolete endeavor, which, honestly, is a good thing.

Learning from the Hacker Movement

08. November 2011 · Write a comment · Categories: Uncategorized · Tags: , ,

Last year, I ran a little mini-course for middle school that drew from the Hacker/Maker movement.  Don’t know what that it?  It’s when people take some parts, material that they have lying around or can buy from places like Radio Shack, JoAnn Fabrics, the local hardware store, and they build something cool.  My course involved making fabric-base things that had lights and wiring in them, something that developed out of this movement, but which has now gone somewhat mainstream.  If you saw the Black-Eyed Peas outfits during the Super Bowl, well, that’s the same concept.

Honestly, it’s those ideas that fire me up, and make me think, “Hey, that might get kids excited.”  Recently, I started following a blog where a woman posts videos, pictures and posts of her homemade robots, which are based on the Arduino platform, an open-source board that’s been used in many cool applications–including sewing the LilyPad version into fabric!  Through that site, I found this site that has Mac-based apps for working with Arduino–so cool.

Honestly, I’d love to teach a course that’s basically a Make course.  Each student would plan a project, design it, program it, and maybe head to a Maker Faire to show it off.  Standard educational practice doesn’t quite allow for this, but hey, I might be crazy enough to try it.  I smell a senior project!

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College Advice

07. November 2011 · Write a comment · Categories: Uncategorized · Tags:
Rhodes College

Image via Wikipedia

There’s been a really interesting conversation going on over at Laura’s virtual Apt. 11D.  She posted several pieces of advice she’d give to students about to enter college.  She got poked at a bit for being “elitist” and “NE Centric”, but I don’t think that’s entirely fair.  I think the whole thing boils down to individual choices.  I have a very weird perspective being the teacher of students who are all likely to go to Ivies or at least to exclusive schools.  I have a student who’s choosing between MIT and Princeton.  UPenn is almost a fallback school.  My son, on the other hand, is likely going to end up at a state school or something like it out of state.  It’s a weird perspective to be in.  For my son, I want to maximize what he gets out of college for what we can afford.  It means getting a good financial aid package or going to a state school, perhaps also with a solid financial aid package.  He’s not a straight A student, but he’s smart and capable.  I think he’d be better off in a smaller environment, but he thinks a larger place would be better.  Hard to know.

While I think there’s some general advice about being as selective as possible when choosing a college, sometimes the choice is very individual.  It depends on where your student can get in, what you can afford, where you live, etc.

One might start by looking at this list of colleges that change lives.  My school, Rhodes College,is on the list.  Some of these are exclusive, but not all.  They are all interesting.  I chose my school after going to a summer program and because my parents went there.  I got damn lucky.  I’m grateful every day for my education, even if not everyone has heard of my school.

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Getting Students to Do Their Best

02. November 2011 · 2 comments · Categories: Uncategorized · Tags: , ,

After my classes today, I started thinking about this issue, of how to encourage students to not just do the bare minimum, but to go beyond that and to do their very best on any given task.  In theory, grades should do that, I guess, but I don’t think it always does, and in classes like my middle school ones, where I have a set of minimum standards, most kids get A’s pretty easily. 

An example.  My 6th graders are using Google Sites to create web sites.  Over the last few weeks, we’ve gathered some of the artifacts, written paragraphs, even conducted surveys for graphs to include.  We are now in the process of putting it all together into a cohesive web site.  We have just a couple of class periods left, but it’s actually a fair amount of time.  I had a couple of students say, halfway through today’s class, “I’m done.”  Yes, they have most of the elements I asked for, but they only just have them.  Meanwhile other students are exploring gadgets, and including multiple pages, and finding links and are clearly going to work up until the very last second.  This isn’t the only class where this kind of thing happens.  I’m trying to figure out how I can get the “early finishers” to appreciate that putting more effort into something and working during the alloted time (instead of playing a game) is a good idea.

I think this is related somewhat to something Mark Guzdial pointed out in his blog today about teaching students “grit.”  He was referring to a NY Times article that explores the character traits of students who are successful.  It turns out that it’s not the straight A students, always, who succeed:

 the students who persisted in college were not necessarily the ones who had excelled academically at KIPP; they were the ones with exceptional character strengths, like optimism and persistence and social intelligence

For some reason, I think that the students in my classes who push themselves, and who explore areas beyond what I’ve explained are the ones who fall into this category.  There’s something about their willingness to take risks, to mess up, and to learn from that in order to get their best work done.  I don’t think all of my “early finishers” are necessarily lazy.  They simply do what they’re told and no more.  I’m pretty sure I remember doing that myself sometimes.

What I’m talking about is not the high-pressure, jump through all the hoops kind of process that many students participate in, but a kind of pride in their work, whether it gets an A or not.  Because there are no grades in life, and I want my students (and my own kids, of course) to focus on doing their best not on some arbitrary grade.