Managing Distractions over Turkey

I embrace 21 century learning.  I embrace all the comforts technology has brought to my life.  I embrace my Blackberry and web 2.0.  But honestly, things are getting out of hand.  Being overseas is amazing for more reasons than I care to list or you care to read, but the holidays are tough.  When I first came to Thailand 3 1/2 years ago, a neighbor told me Christmas in Thailand was beautiful and would top any other Christmas I could imagine.  The first year overseas I cried literary every day from Thanksgiving until Christmas.  Not sobbing uncontrollably or anything (I'm not quite that crazy), but tears would well up in my eyes as I would grocery shop at Villa and hear "Home" by Michael Buble.  My search for the perfect Christmas tree lead me to Carrefour where Dr. Seuss may have personally come and thrown up on Christmas.  The artificial trees come in a variety of colors such as hot pink, yellow, blue and day glow green.  The color evergreen was hard to find to say the least (in case you are wondering, it has since become more widely available).  Being away from family, friends, aromas and sounds may be the hardest part about being overseas during the holidays; therefore, holidays have become that much more important to me. 

Thanksgiving is full of wonderful memories, great conversations, and a true feeling of togetherness . . .then came this year.  My husband made a lovely meal with all the trimmings you can imagine.  The stage was set for a fabulous evening, except for one tiny detail that continues to really eat at me.  A guest at my house spent the better half of the evening texting underneath the table.  Honestly, I was so appalled that I did nothing except stew about it for the last three days.  When did this become acceptable in our society?  I don't think it is.  If the person at the other end of the text is more important and interesting than the people present at the table, then have dinner with them not me. 

I am constantly amazed at the audacity of people when it comes to technology.  Just because the world became smaller does not entitle the rest of the us to have to endure random cell phone ringing at a movie or play, obnoxious ring tones at inappropriate times, texting while talking to someone else, or emailing/twittering/facebooking during meetings at work.  Etiquette seems to be out the window.   If we can't teach adults proper etiquette, how can we teach our students?  Is there a best practice when technology gets in the way of human relationships?  I am still searching for better ways to manage the influx of outside tools in my classroom.  Now when I hand back an essay in class, my students jump on their cell phones to check their averages on PowerSchool.   When we are working on creative writing, my students are encouraged to listen to their iPods.  But texting at the Thanksgiving dinner table, I'm not ready for that world yet.  Are you?

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Jargon Overload?

When I look over the National Education Technology Standards from ISTE and AASL I see some redundancy to what educators strive for on a fairly regular basis.  If you look at the language used in Bloom's Taxonomy of Learning -knowledge, comprehension, application, analysis, synthesis and evaluation or better yet, Bloom's Digital Taxonomy of Learning - creating, evaluating, analyzing, applying, understanding, and remembering,  the language basically covers what we are already doing when it comes to student learning.  Is it a new job for anyone to teach these standards, if we have been doing this all along?

As an educator, I get worried when we try to justify our jobs by creating new ways to talk about what we do and why we do it.  I am a teacher and 100% proud of that title.  Lately I have felt swamped by more jargon in education than ever.  In a recent discussion with a colleague of mine, he advised me that when I am discussing education on a professional level, I should refer to the learning, not the teaching.  I understand the switch in terminology but does that make someone that uses the key phrases every other minute a better teacher than me?  I know so many people that can talk the talk but they can't walk the walk.  Can you make your subject leap off the page and become a passion within your students?  That is the question that needs to be asked in an interview.  And that should be followed by how.  The rest mostly seems to be a reinvention of a wheel that already exists. 

That being said, I will continue to talk the talk because it allows me walk in a place that I love . . . education.

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ePortfolios in the High School

My colleague, Jim Fitzgerald, and I have decided to embark on something a little more than we may have originally intended.  We are both committed to using ePortfolios in our classrooms, and attempting to implement them school-wide at some point in the near future.  Although this is something I have spent the last few months pursuing, I have yet to be able to complete the entire process.  But essentially, isn't that what an ePortfolio really is all about.  It is a constant process of growth and every time you learn something new, you realize how much more there is to learn.  Here's where I am currently in the process:

I began by using Word Press as the basis of their ePortfolios.  At first, it was a little cumbersome to get off the ground.  Each student was assigned a student blog through http://blogs.isb.ac.th/.  For some of the students the process was like second nature.  For others, I still feel as if I am speaking a second language to them.  Hopefully tomorrow's use of flextime after school should clear up the last of the glitches.  This past week I posted an ePortfolio grade in PowerSchool to put a little fire under their belts.   Then we looked at numerous examples of ePortfolios on the SmartBoard from various students, educators, and celebrities to illustrate how students can begin to showcase their best selves to the world.  

When their interest was peaked, we looked at statistics and a few blog posts from admission directors at prominent universities to see how they screen their applicants.  One that really made them start to think about their online presence was Shaun McElroy's blog entry: Guess Who's Looking at Your Facebook.  After that, I had each student Google their name.  This seemed to be enough of a motivator for many of my students to begin uploading their school work to showcase their academic lives.  In addition, we just completed the poetry unit in Grade 10, and many of my students chose to include a few of their autobiographical poems on their ePortfolios.  From there I suggested a few ways they could continue to take ownership of their ePortfolio.

Ten new things to do on your ePortfolio:

1. Create a cool name for your portfolio
2. Use a theme layout that makes sense to you
3. Create a header for your portfolio that represents you as an individual
4. Delete the "Hello World" post
5. Post one or all of your poetry
6. Create some categories: English, Social Studies, Art, Math, Science, Creative Writing, Community Service, Athletics, Travel – whatever works for you
7. Add these widgets: tag cloud, categories, links, clustr maps (you can add more if you like, this is just a start).
8. Link to "D Watts" (inside.isb.ac.th/dwatts10)
9. Replace "Another ISB weblog” with your own words.
10. Add/Edit the about page - include your first name (no last name) and a bit about you and point of your blog site.

From here I created a NetVibes page which took far more time than I originally planned.  I currently have almost 100 students.  For each student I had to enter their address into the "add content" section of NetVibes.  Although my students had their blogs already set-up for them from the Ed Tech Department at my school, many of their blog addresses do not match their names exactly due to the length of their name.  For example my student Yonathan Tadesse: the address for his blog is http://blogs.isb.ac.th/yonathat; only the first seven letters of his name are used and the last letter is missing from his blog address due to the length of his name.  In the end, the trials and errors of finding all of my students was well worth it.  Now I have one page to enable me to read each of their ePortfolios and see any recent contributions.  It makes grading a snap.

Now the hard part begins, or so I think.  Jim and I have create a GoogleDoc of all of the items we wish to accomplish over the next few months.  I have started to create a rubric for ePortfolios to enable students to see how they are being graded.   I have joined various organizations that are exploring all the facets of ePortfolios in the classroom, and attended the ISTE conference in DC this summer to expand my knowledge base and contacts worldwide in the field of ePortfolios.  But as I stated earlier, the more I learn, the more I know I need to know. 

Once we gather everything we need, we intend to create an iMovie that illustrates all the benefits of using ePortfolios in the classroom.  We hope that our presentation will enable students and teachers alike to embrace the concept of ePortfolios so they become a school-wide initiative, not just an English Department requirement.  We aren't there yet, but keep watching.  It will be here when all the chips are ready.  Stay tuned for more. . .

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