MACUL and More: Greetings from Grand Rapids

Learning: Ignite It!

A week ago, I made the sojourn to sweet and sunny Grand Rapids, Michigan to attend the final day of the 2014 conference for the Michigan Association of Computer Users in Learning. I attended two presentations, each of which were highly relevant to my English Language Arts pedagogy. I also had the good fortune of attending an hour-long session of five-minute lightning talks, some of which were no less than inspiring. I don't use this adjective lightly. What made the entire experience even more valuable to me was that I had the chance to share ideas, laughter, and excitement with some of the most talented and fun-loving professionals whom I've ever had the privilege to meet.

The first session I attended was presented by Andy Schoenborn, an ELA teacher dedicated to providing authentic feedback to his students in a digital format. He examined differences between feedback that treats and inquires about features of student writing at the level of the paragraph and the whole piece as opposed to sentence-level "corrections." In doing so, he asked us to recall memorable experiences with a teachers' feedback. In my quick-write, I wrote this:

The first experience with a teacher's feedback that I remember happened in 7th grade, when my ELA teacher noticed a poem that I was writing, asked to read it, and then took it away to spend some time with it. After, she wrote me a short thank-you card that thanked me honestly for having shared my writing with her. I think this was a huge part of my formative experience as a creative writer; I sometimes wonder if I would have written poetry so much or had such success in the art if this teacher were never to take notice of what I was writing and for asking to see it. 

I don't remember much of exactly what my teachers said, but I do remember that the most important feedback that I would receive would be a brief little blend of positive commentary and goals for improvement, including honest criticism as to what wasn't quite working and why not. I favored less those teachers who would slap a grade on an essay, copy-edit the draft, and then release it back to me. I favored large-order change-making; those teachers who told me about large-scale changes to make were most effective. I suspect that my students have similar feelings.

Among other recommendations that Schoenborn made were to also provide students with the opportunity to provide authentic feedback on each other's Google-Drive-based drafts, to understand and appreciate students' intentions and "stay in touch with what is good" about the essay, and to assign students the regular task of writing metacognitive blog posts about how their thinking is changing. I plan on applying many of these practices in my own classroom.

The second session I attended, called "Friday Night Lights" and delivered by David Theune, was characterized by the authenticity and gregariousness of its presenter. Theune (pronounced "Toony") began the presentation by providing his audience with little cups of seltzer water and then asked the room to make a toast to "progressive failure," the idea that mistakes are healthy because they lead to significant learning. Theune went on to denote the importance of providing our students with authentic audiences rather than settling for the sole audience of the teacher-examiner. Among the authentic audiences he mentioned and elaborated on were parents, fellow peers, the world (via the internet), younger in-district peers, and non-profit organizations. Theune is dedicated to putting students in communication with such audiences because it gives students' work a sense of real, authentic meaning. Theune demonstrated the potential of this strategy to result in beautifully meaningful products by showing us one result of a video narrative assignment that he gave to his students. His student's poignant and heart-breaking account of a bully on a bus spoke for itself and revealed how much our students are capable of, provided that we give them an avenue for sincere expression.

The day's final session, an hour-long cluster of five-minute lightning talks, featured ten different speakers, including a reprise by Theune that examined the importance of developing students' ability to empathize with others. Mike Kaechele delivered a solid speech on how standardization is, really, about comparing schools and encouraging conformity. He described skills that he (and I as well) would rather be given attention to in our curricula, such as caring, acceptance, relationships, collaboration, problem-solving, tinkering, citizenship, killing stereotypes, passions, love, originality, and personalization. His refrain, "Standardize that," will remain in my memory for a long time. And I can't exclude mention of Trevor Muir's incredibly moving spoken-word piece about how our actions and words as educators will stick with students for years. My follicles were on end for the duration of his talk.

Listening to such caring and talented educators' philosophies and practices was a richly rewarding experience, but I think it also merits mention that my favorite aspect of the day was sharing in these ideas with some of my favorite people. As of late, teaching has become a little lonely. We began our journey toward becoming teachers by taking coursework and engaging in a practicum together; we spent more than 40 hours a week learning, laughing, and sweating it out together. As of late, our increased time spent in the classroom has meant seeing less of each other. While this is necessary and an educational experience in itself, it means that we've had less opportunity to explore theory and practice and to simply benefit from participating in our tight-knit support network. Our day at MACUL provided a respite from the daily 14-hour grind we've become accustomed to. We gave our fellow student teachers fun nicknames, listened to cheesy pop playlists, and busted it out to Whitney Houston on the two-hour trip back to Ann Arbor. We had a brilliant lunch at Founders Brewing Co. marked by, again, more laughter. We had fun. Such is the reason why March 14 will be present in my mental reel of highlights from this year. It was, in the immortal words of Ice Cube, a "good day". 

Many thanks are due to our educational technology instructors, Jeff Stanzler and Rory Hughes, for securing for us the opportunity to visit this year's MACUL conference. I hope to see them both there in 2015. 

Where Environmental Psychology Meets Teaching: Creating Preferred Classroom Environments

Who among us has never taken a course that, despite its instructor's best efforts, creates deep stress for the student not because the content is inherently difficult but rather because the student expends an inordinate amount of effort on determining what the instructor expects? Unclear assignments, secret due dates, and class time that lacks apparent structure cause students to become antsy at best and hostile in the worst cases. When viewed through the lens of how humans evolved to survive 'n thrive, this makes absolute sense. We humans evolved to process and participate in spatial environments. Long before the concept of zero or the social contract arose, humans depended on their way-finding abilities to establish territory, venture off on the hunt, and return home without becoming distracted from scanning for dangers. We came to prefer environments that are easily navigable and allow for fast, distraction-free information processing.

For the most part, the hunt is over, and the threats have abated. We can afford to get distracted once in a while without fearing a wolf attack. Nevertheless, our brain has kept intact its need for environments that allow for distraction-free navigability. This is one of the reasons why students have such unfavorable reactions to disorganized and inefficient classes; the instinct for self-preservation kicks in when a feeling of being "lost" does. To the subconscious, not knowing when that final paper is due or what it's supposed to be about is highly similar to being stranded in a shadowy, unknown physical environment that may or may not harbor angry tigers in the shade. 

In With People in Mind: Design and Management of Everyday Nature, environmental psychologists Rachel Kaplan, Stephen Kaplan, and Robert L. Ryan offer the argument that humans, as information processors, are at their most effective in environments that allow for understanding and exploration, both in the present and in the future. Their Environmental Preference Matrix enables a user to analyze how preferable a physical environment is based on four qualities: its coherence, its legibility, its complexity, and its mystery.

Environmental Preference Matrix:

	Understanding	Exploration
2-D (The Present)	Coherence	Complexity
3-D (The Future)	Legibility	Mystery

Here are some brief definitions of each element that constitutes a preferred environment:

• Coherence: When the environment is organized and ordered from a person's stationary perspective, it is coherent. Regions, areas, and objects are distinct and allow for rapid understanding of the immediate physical environment.
• Legibility: An environment is legible when a person moving through the environment can easily orient himself or herself in terms of place by way of the presence of landmarks or other defining features of the landscape. 
• Complexity: An environment is complex if it is rich in information from a stationary perspective. One example of a complex environment is a city thoroughfare; there is much information to take in and much to explore. An example of a non-complex environment is an open field or a homogeneous forest. Exploration in these environments is less appealing because, said simply, there's less to explore.
• Mystery: An environment has a quality of mystery when it promises its navigator more information if he or she should continue to move throughout the environment. A curving path is a quality example of an environmental component that promises such further information as would come with exploration. Notably, when the potential for further information is completely obscured, there is no quality of mystery. Kaplan, Kaplan & Ryan (1998) emphasize the notion that mystery is a "particularly effective factor in making a scene highly favored" (p. 16). 

To illustrate, here's an example of a preferred environment:

The environment pictured is coherent (organized), legible (navigable), complex (information-rich), and a little mysterious (what's behind that crest of trees? What's at the top of those mountains?)

And here's an example of a non-preferred environment:

What a mess. The only thing this environment has by way of criteria for preference is complexity.

This is all well and good and makes much sense as a method of organizing the general factors that cause humans to prefer some environments over others. In addition, I see an immense applicability of these principles to the design of effective courses and daily instruction.

Consider an implication for each component of a highly preferred environment:

• Coherence: Students who can understand the current topic of learning and where it stands in context with a larger subject area will fare better than those who cannot. Likewise, students who understand what the teacher's current expectation of their action is feel more secure in their ability to complete that action.
• Legibility: Students who understand what's coming in both the rest of the day and the rest of the course as a whole will exert less effort in trying to understand such progressions than those who do not. The presence of daily agendas and well organized course syllabi create environments that are legible to students.
• Complexity: We've learned from Vygotsky's concept of the Zone of Proximal Development that students who are confronted with information that's too simple and boring will feel little or no motivation to explore it. The topics, questions, and assignments that we teachers give to students must be rich in information for students to want to explore it.
• Mystery: We can provide students with the promise of further information given that there is further exploration by creating essential questions and course aims of deep substance and relevance. Students to whom these questions and aims appeal will feel comfortable in doing the digging required for further elucidation of them.

These four components of preferred environments apply to physical environments and seem to apply to conceptual environments as well. The applicability of the Environmental Preference Matrix is seemingly limitless; one can imagine its use in evaluating texts and their considerateness, physical classroom environments, and complex assignments.

As teachers, we are charged with creating environments that should maximize students' comfort and ability to learn. Understanding and applying some of the theory underlying why humans prefer some environments over others can help us to ensure that our classes and classrooms work in ways that encourage an individual's ability to process information.

Loggin' Some Bloggin'

One of our recent responsibilities for our EDUC 504: Teaching with Technology course was to engage in some discourse with established edubloggers by way of commenting on a post of theirs. I found this to be, on one hand, a simple matter; we SecMACers have been talking in similar ways with our classmates through each others' own blogs. In this way, I felt prepared. On the other hand, I found this task to be a little daunting, primarily for the reason that I feel as though I'm less qualified than I want to be for the purpose of striking up conversation with those who are established in the field. That being said, I can see the immense value of this assignment. Not only was it a great opportunity to offer our own thoughts to the blogosphere -- it was also a terrific learning opportunity.

I commented on two bloggers' posts. The first post was from Bill Ferriter on his blog The Tempered Radical, which is hosted by the Center for Teaching Quality. In "New Slide: Being Responsible for Teaching the Bored", Ferriter laments the lack of curricular time available for differentiating instruction to appeal to students' passions and interests. The persistence required of students to succeed, he says, is a "whole heck of a lot easier for people who are pursuing things that they are passionate about." He asks the question of whether teachers who are restricted by standards and other curricular demands are totally out of luck if they want to bring interesting, relevant instruction to their students. I responded to this question that I don't think teachers of many subjects are unable to teach this material in a way that brings metacognitive clarity and a new-found perspective. I did recognize the fact that, as a teacher of English, I'm especially (guiltily) lucky to be able to integrate meaningful questions into my subject's curriculum. In his response to me, Ferriter argued that his subject was, indeed, not like English in that it wasn't skills-based but rather facts-based, and that the standardized tests on it reflect this. I agreed and offered support for his recommendation that skills-based curricula for all subjects should be the norm.

The second blog post I responded to was on Dr. Frank LaBanca's blog, In Search of Scientific Creativity. In "Technology changes 'note taking'", Dr. LaBanca admits his puzzlement with teachers who institute no-tolerance bans on students' cell phone use in class. He himself has seen his graduate students use tablets and cell phones to take pictures of material on the SmartBoard. His stance reflects a healthy balance toward technology use in the classroom: "I think the important consideration is that when technology is used to ENHANCE learning, that’s a good thing, but when technology DISTRACTS you from learning, that’s the bad thing." I commented on his blog that I agreed completely, saying that "banning mobile devices outright does our students a disservice if they graduate and move on to a college or employer who doesn’t have such explicitly stated policies. If our students don’t understand why succumbing to the temptation of a text is not an optimal strategy for learning, working, or general self-betterment, then they’re not on the best path." Another commenter, Ray, later agreed with us both: 'Right on Mike and Matt! My school is a “technology free zone” as by district policy. It needs to go. It does nothing but hamper learning for digital natives and increase the digital divide for some of the most needy learners.' Participating in this conversation was very affirming.

The learning experience that this assignment offered was personal and significant. From Bill Ferriter I gained a new sense of some key traits of skills-based education; I find that a recommendation for skills-based curricula falls strongly in line with my belief that, given the newly instantaneous trove of data widely available via the internet, we owe it to our students to teach them not the data itself but how to find it, read it, apply it, evaluate it, and create it. From Dr. Frank LaBanca, I developed a more pointed opinion on how teachers should support students' use of cell phones for the purpose of learning. From them both, I learned that, on the internet, the only qualifications one needs to have an effective, horizon-broadening professional discussion are an ability to offer opinions respectfully and thoughtfully, and a willingness to learn from those who have been furthering their craft for years.

Technology in My Placement: a Handful of Reflections

For our EDUC 504: Teaching with Technology course, our professors recently tasked us with submitting a survey about our placement schools' array of computer and multimedia technology available for students' and teachers' use. The options included in-classroom items such as laptops, a desktop computer, digital photo and video cameras, smartboards, LCD projector, and more. The survey also inquired as to whether these types of equipment could be reserved for use during class time.

Before filling out this survey, I was fairly convinced that my placement school had it pretty well set in terms of being well equipped, technologically speaking. But out of all of the options under the question "What technology is available in your classroom?" only one applied to my placement school: the LCD projector. This is the case for all of our school district's classrooms, as far as I'm aware, and the installation of these projectors took place only very recently. As for the question of what equipment is available for reservation during class time, I responded that our school does have a few laptop carts available for rental.

Our in-class discussion on the similarities and differences among each of our placement schools was both illuminating and frustrating. Other members of my cohort who were in other school districts reported vastly different scenarios. One fellow intern, placed in a suburban school district with a median income higher than that of the city I'm placed in, reported a much higher presence of in-class tools available for use. Another intern, whose placement school is located in a neighboring city with a much lower median income, reported that her school had almost none of the technology mentioned in the survey.

It's a shame. We've been talking so much about the implications of bring-your-own-device policies as those which, at the level of the individual student, have the potential to contribute to the achievement gap a la the Matthew effect (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Matthew_effect), but we haven't given much conversation to the idea that this phenomenon occurs on the level of the school district and its neighboring districts. By how much is the economic vitality of affluent communities increasing each year because students who have had the benefit of advanced learning tools graduate and begin contributing in meaningful ways to their community? And by how much is the economic vitality of not-so-affluent communities decreasing each year by the inverse principle? I feel that such an inequality can only be remedied by funding at the national level or from private sponsors. How else can we change things? The disparity in school technology among different cities and towns is one of the smaller pieces in this country's growing puzzle of inequalities, but this puzzle -- like all jigsaws -- needs every piece in order to be complete.

Thoughts are welcome.

Podcast & Co.

On October 3, a night that already feels like it happened four weeks ago, four of my teaching-intern colleagues gave a presentation and mini-lesson on using audio-related tools for student learning. Podcasting was the talk's central focus, and the group provided valuable insight as to what teachers of various disciplines are incorporating into their 'casts, as well as the tools and methods that these teachers use to create their aural, mp3-able learning shows. One of these tools, Vocaroo (http://vocaroo.com/), allows any user to record a sound clip via a computer's or mobile's microphone, save it to a permalink, and then share that file via the permalink itself, email, Facebook, or Twitter. Heck of a tool, right?

Absolutely right. It's quick, simple, accessible, and anonymous, provided that students and teachers are careful to not record confidential information. There is no login required, so neither students nor teachers are tasked with signing up or registering a throw-away email address in order to do so. The design is refreshing, too (look at that cute little robot!) and simple enough that even those without opposable thumbs can use it.

My cat has started blogging recently, so this will be welcome news to her.

Beyond the obvious, this tool has incredibly valuable uses for students and teachers. Here are a couple that recently came to mind:

• Vocaroo is useful for formative reading assessments. Such assessments are key to consider at the beginning of the year, when teachers are getting to know their students and their strengths for the first time. Hitherto, our ability to assess our students' oral reading has been severely impacted by the fact that there are only so many hours and minutes in the school day. But for assessments that require little more than the student reading a given passage out loud, students can use Vocaroo at any time and share the resulting clip with the assessing teacher to review privately and at a convenient time. While coding and reviewing these clips is still a bit time-consuming, it's much less taxing than arranging a quiet time for reading assessment for thirty young folks who have busy schedules of their own.
• Vocaroo is useful as a method of collecting small homework assignments. True, we could ask students to read chapters four and five and then write a paragraph about what they've read, but chances are excellent that the substance of their response (and their opinion of the assignment) will be moreso if the teacher asks instead that they record thirty quality seconds of summary of and response to the reading. I don't propose that aural clips should subsume the role of regular written assignments, of course -- we need to require that our kids write and write often. But let's not forget those standards of learning that deal with speaking, which is just as important a skill as putting pen to paper. In this way, Vocaroo can be a solution to teaching students how to speak clearly, consistently, and fluently about ideas they have interacted with.

Vocaroo is terrific for these reasons and more as a way of generating quick, continuous takes of sound. 

Another tool that our audio-tool presenters spoke of was Audacity, a free, lightweight recording suite that allows for more substantial files and some basic sound editing. One saliently useful aspect of a tool like Audacity is that it can generate responses to more substantial summative assessments. Many students might enjoy this type of assessment, but it's especially valuable to students who have a writing disability. Aural assessment, rather than written, can give such students a way to interact with concepts and ideas in a way that is substantially more comfortable to them. Rather than sweating the mechanics of crafting prose, these students can get at the heart of the matter and generate ideas more fluently. This, again, is also valuable for assessing and critiquing students' speaking skills in a fashion that won't put shy or socially anxious teens in public-speaking situations of great distress. 

We have the tools, folks -- let's use them to help our kids become adults who can share their ideas fluently, critically, and soundly.

Google Drive and a Fair Society: Pluses and Problems

I had first heard Peter Pasque's presentation on student-organized and -curated digital learning portfolios during our school district's opening week for staff development and training. Even then I was deeply impressed; I had envisioned a similar (though less fleshed-out) system for my own classroom, but I had no idea before that point that an entire high school was piloting such a complete undertaking of technology integration. Such a revelation has caused me to be even more excited and optimistic about students' success in using new technologies to create ideas, mentor others, and establish themselves in a society that demands track records of work accomplished and comfort with digital platforms.

Some take-away messages from Peter Pasque's presentation:

Full Tech Integration Helps Students Learn from Others and Market Themselves

Google Drive is a truly collaborative platform. This, along with its preservation of documents in the cloud, is its chief positive attribute. It turns out that our teachers weren't lying when they told us that knowing how to plan and execute projects with other people would be valuable for our post-secondary and post-college lives. We are responsible for teaching our students how to work well with others, both for their own sake (that is, the intrinsic value of becoming better, more learned people by speaking and listening with others) and for the sake of the society they are beginning to take full part in. Google Drive allows students the ability to create team-built documents in real time; it also allows students the ability to gain direct, written feedback from their peers via commenting interfaces. Tech integration, if used effectively, has the capacity to help students become better people and improve their community through collaboration with others.

Full tech integration can also help students market themselves to future employers or colleges. I don't naturally like the term ("market") because it reduces a living, breathing person to a commodity; it's the same reason why I'm instantly repelled by the phrase "human resources". But the reality is that there are folks who have the power to make agreements by which we exert work for the monetary compensation required for food, shelter, and fun. These folks want to see proof that their investments will pay off, and students' digital portfolios can function as such proof. A strong digital portfolio can give a potential employer valuable information about a person's work ethic and specific skills far more accurately than a resume can. And in this way, digital portfolios can level the playing field for students whose personal circumstances may not provide as much by way of special training in resume creation, standardized test-taking, or college application coaching. In a truly meritocratic society, we must move toward evaluation based on what a person has done and not on what a test estimates they might do. And grades, like any other measurement, provide only partial information. Direct observation of subject mastery is (or should be) the future of evaluation for purposes of employment or post-secondary admission.

Full Tech Integration Helps Teachers Know Their Students

Among other points, I feel that there are two here that really hit home.

Firstly, I believe that digital portfolios of student work, if they are created every school year from an early age, can give teachers extremely useful information about the students they teach. Over our brief break in August, I traveled back to New Hampshire to see my family and relax as much as possible. While there, I happened across a box of old papers, projects, and pictures that my parents had kept from my middle school years. Given that we teaching interns had just worked with students of the same age group, I had an incredibly fascinating perspective toward my seventh-grade self. I was in the middle of reading my response to the question "If there was one thing you would change about school, what would it be?" (my answer: "I think school is a little too much like the military ...") when I thought how illuminating it would be for teachers to be able to view a student's complete history of academic progress and demonstration of subject mastery. With a better understanding of our students' skills and interests, teachers can plan lessons and curricula to really fit with their classes before the school year ever begins. Knowing our students' skills and passions is crucial to good, student-centered teaching; having some of these understandings well in advance of the school year equates to hours of gained instructional time and more strategic lessons.

Secondly, in the same way that Google Drive is a collaborative platform for students, it is collaborative for teachers. Departments can better coordinate curriculum planning and text selection. Teachers can share responsibilities of lesson creation and planning with other teachers who will edit, refine, and provide feedback. I don't think it's a far-fetched claim that teachers should be building portfolios of lesson plans, course materials, and artifacts in the same way that students do; such portfolios could increase accountability in a far better way than relying on students' test scores, and such portfolios would allow department heads and administrators to give more valuable feedback to teachers (and beginning teachers, especially).

Another awesome facet of full tech integration that I think deserves mention is that it is far more environmentally friendly than traditional systems. Whenever I say something is a plus for the planet, I feel like I need to qualify the statement with a firm attestation that I'm not an eco-nut, tree-hugger (though I do love the texture of bark on skin), or hippie -- but the truth is (i.e., much research indicates) that our society's incredibly massive dependence on fossil fuels and other natural resources (the trees!) has led us into the requirement that we cut back severely. It is an inexorable truth that oil will run out (see: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peak_oil) and that trees cannot keep up with our demand for paper. How many ten-page papers have we passed in so that a teacher can throw them into the ground or, at best, into a consumptive process of re-use that has diminishing returns? Requiring that students create and submit information in a way that uses only time and marginal amounts of electricity is one small step on the path to creating sustainable schools and citizens mindful of sustainable practices.

The power is YOURS.

The biggest problem I keep running up against is that full tech integration is problematic for student populations for whom internet access at home isn't a certainty. This is yet another area in which those who don't have equal resources are at a disadvantage. For one-to-one schools, whole-school tech integration is a no-brainer, but until every school is one-to-one (and I wish this were a reality), I can't feel 100% comfortable with full tech integration. This isn't to say that I wouldn't institute it and plan carefully with students who don't have internet access at home; most students do have internet access at home, and we owe it to them to teach them how to create, organize, and maintain their digital work. The good news here, I think, is that we are quickly approaching an age when one-to-one schools will become the norm rather than the minority because of falling equipment prices. We can serve our students best by anticipating this and, like Peter Pasque's school has done, pilot effective programs for the purpose of improving future students' learning.

Puzzles and Perspectives

During the last minutes of our Wednesday EDUC 504: Teaching with Technology session, Jeff and Rory pitched a fresh game to us. The structure: four folks sit, in pairs, at two tables, and these pairs face away from each other. The pairs' goal is to assemble a 16-piece puzzle together. The remaining players in the room, with no limit to the number, act as "journalists," recording the activities of the puzzlers. The catch: each pair has only eight pieces, and they can't view each others' progress. They must rely on communication to determine placement of the pieces relative to each other and within the 16-space puzzle grid.

In our performance of this game, I was a journalist. Among the observations I recorded:

• Pair 1 began the game asking many questions of Pair 2; over the course of the game, this exclusive distribution of questions shifted such that Pair 2 was asking Pair 1 the questions.
• Many questions asked were questions of confirmation (e.g., "Do you...", "Did you...", "Are your...", etc.)
• Statements and questions made at the beginning of the game were primarily concerned with the content of the puzzle pieces (e.g., "We have three pieces with sky in them," "These pieces have dirt," "These pieces have a house," etc.)
• Statements and questions toward the end of the game were primarily concerned with the placement of the pieces relative to one another, and at the very end of the game, an agreed-upon placement identification system of rows and columns (think Battleship) emerged more or less organically.

1. Look at how much fun the horrors of naval warfare can be!

2. Look at how incredibly sexist this image is!

When the game was finished, Jeff asked us, "What is this game about?" The answer that came to mind was that of perspective: the perspective of each individual journalist and the perspective of each individual puzzler. I think it's important that not one person in the room had the same impression of the events that transpired while the puzzlers solved their task. Even their visual and auditory perspectives were different. The entire activity seemed to bring this to the forefront of thought, perhaps because most of the people in the room were asked to construct their own reality about what happened with the puzzlers. 

In thinking about how to modify this game for use in an English classroom, the opportunities for an effective lesson are plentiful. A teacher's lesson may require that students assemble their own narratives of the experience to illustrate the demands and versatility of narrational perspective; it'd be a meaningful experience, I think, for the class to hear in a creatively coherent form how each student has interpreted and organized the game's events. It might also be illuminating for the students at the center of attention to be charged with assembling the lines of a poem into a coherent whole (whether pre-determined or non-predetermined depends on the teacher's decision). The use of this game could also make for a dynamic, interesting class transition.

Thinky? Sticky? The Thinking Stick

Not to be confused with The Thicking Stink, Jeff Utecht's The Thinking Stick (http://www.thethinkingstick.com/) offers terrifically relevant insight into what roles technology should play in our classrooms. The blog does so through balanced evaluations of web tools, life-based demonstrations of how students have incorporated technology into their acts of learning, and philosophical wax-ations on how we, as teachers, can balance and strengthen our craft within the one climate that Utecht identifies as a constant: that of change.

I think I used to own this same shirt. The wonders of vertical stripes -- amirite?

I find Utecht's blog valuable because ...

It asks questions. Not just rhetorical ones or afterthoughts, and not just the type that artificially serve as a starting point for some discussion that may never happen. These are big questions that we should keep in mind constantly when we think about what our teaching is and how to improve it. Utecht blew the lid off early in the game, back in January of 2008, when he penned "Evaluating Technology Use in the Classroom" (http://www.thethinkingstick.com/evaluating-technology-use-in-the-classroom/). He adapted Marc Prensky's typical course of technology adoption to form four core questions that we should think about as we integrate tech into our curricula:

• Is the technology being used “Just because it’s there”?
• Is the technology allowing the teacher/students to do Old things in Old ways?
• Is the technology allowing the teacher/students to do Old things in New ways?
• Is the technology creating new and different learning experiences for the students?

In our evaluation of tech use in relation to the fourth question, he asks:

• Does the technology allow students to learn from people they never would have been able to without it?
• Does the technology allow students to interact with information in a way that is meaningful and could not have happened otherwise?
• Does the technology allow students to create and share their knowledge with an audience they never would have had access to without technology?

Talk about being ahead of the pack. These questions have as much relevance today as they did five years ago, and I think even this in itself says something that educators should take note of: as teachers, we should create lasting, relevant questions that will be able to shape our students' Big Capital-T Thoughts for a long time to come. Even if the answers change (and they definitely will!), the questions should remain evocative and relevant.

It's Clean and Quick. Just like a solid car wash or a good children's song. Utecht writes concisely and thoughtfully, and he does so in a way that's respectful of web readers' eyes and attention spans. His post "10 Reasons to Trash Word for Google Docs" (http://www.thethinkingstick.com/10-reasons-to-trash-word-for-google-docs/) provides 10 excellent reasons for adopting the cloud-based word-processing suite. Each is well reasoned and doesn't exceed four lines. The content's good, too -- he evaluates Gdocs based on accessibility, user-friendliness, looking-forwardness, and functionality. And he's down with the Cloud. Color me convinced.

He Keeps His Students' Interests in Mind. Utecht understands that life exists beyond high school, and he seems to believe that we should give our students what they need to succeed and enjoy it. His recent post "Millennials and the Job Market" (http://www.thethinkingstick.com/millennials-and-the-job-market/) calls for more explicit training in online portfolio-building so that students will have the knowledge and the electronic track record to qualify for jobs that simply didn't exist ten years ago (he provides the examples of social media producer, social media specialist, and digital marketing intern). We need to keep our kids' futures in mind and devote instructional time to the incorporation of skills and projects that will directly contribute to our students' fit to the types of jobs that are being created.

He Thinks About the Future Through the Past. Utecht compares the role of programmer (coder) to that of the medieval scribe in "Are Coders the Scribes of our Time?" (http://www.thethinkingstick.com/are-coders-the-scribes-of-our-time/). By doing so, he comes to a fantastic question: Just like almost everyone can now practice a skill (writing) that, long ago, very few people were able to practice, will almost everyone someday be able to code? Will coding ability someday be considered rudimentary literacy? This strikes me as an amazing question and as one that has truth to it. So much can change in a century, and as people who will be uniquely qualified to prepare young people for lives that will span decades of change, we must look to the past to see how things have changed over similar time frames so that we can anticipate what skills will have value in the future. Let's aim not for where the target is, but where it will be. We owe our students nothing less.

Play On: Game and Choice in English Classes

At the end of our Teaching with Technology class yesterday, Rory pitched a thinking point to us: "How can we revise our high-school classes to act as games?" That is to say, how can we make our classrooms fun, marked by continuing achievements, and motivating? As James Paul Gee says, "A science like biology is not a set of facts. In reality, it is a “game” certain types of people “play”. These people engage in characteristic sorts of activities, use characteristic sorts of tools and language, and hold certain values; that is, they play by a certain set of “rules”. They do biology. Of course, they learn, use, and retain lots and lots of facts—even produce them—but the facts come from and with the doing." In other words, just like games, academic disciplines consist of goals to be achieved by a player within a given, steady set of parameters; they are complex, difficult, and, optimally, fun.

I'll preface the following thoughts with two reservations. Firstly, I don't like gimmicks in the classroom, and I especially despise them if they aren't well executed. Students can see right through them. At best, they're lame. At worst, they can be downright condescending; the implication seems to be one that says to the student "Yeah, I understand that this subject is inherently lame, and you're not motivated enough to participate in this lame subject, so I'm going to do my best to spice it up. Please enjoy this rap rendition of 'The Raven.' Your essays are due Friday." My second reservation is that I want to be as cautious as possible in my approach to extrinsic motivators. Some fantastically successful video games rely on these heavily; you can earn in-game currency, medals, promotions of rank, etc. We're currently learning how damaging extrinsic motivators can be to a student's sense of self-achievement, so I'm going to try my best to recommend ways in which awards don't have to be the norm, and I'd like to recommend a structure that incorporates extrinsic motivators in short bursts only.

With that, here are some general concepts one could employ to frame a high-school English class as a player's game:

Incorporate Choice
Stephen Totilo writes at Kotaku that "A good video game presents a series of interesting choices for players to make" (http://kotaku.com/5924387/the-difference-between-a-good-video-game-and-a-bad-one). I believe this to be true, and many good video games incorporate choice right from the get-go. Can you imagine a racing game where you couldn't choose your car (the model, the rims, the paint job, the engine)? Do you think World of Warcraft would have been as massively successful if players couldn't choose their character type? What if Starcraft only had the Terran race? Boring. Shoot, even simpler set-ups let you pick the identity with which you engage in the game's universe. Counter-Strike is a terrific example (I used to judge people harshly for being on the "Terrorist" team. Morality something blah blah.)

This lil' guy wouldn't be the Guitar Hero if he couldn't choose "All the Small Things" by Blink-182, now would he?

Similarly, we need to provide students with the choice of identity in the classroom. Even without the framework of a "video game," this is a truth. High school and middle school are so difficult for so many students because there is a fundamental and massive lack of choice; students are required to go to these classes at these times, to do assignments assigned by this teacher. They have no say in the matter if they want to get good grades and the regard of their teachers. I see it as no wonder why so many resist it. For an institution that should teach for self-agency and empowerment, the typical school sure does have a lot of rules.

Within the English class, we can give students choice of identity from the start. It could go something like this:

Each student will choose one of four identities: The Poet, the Prose Artist, the Playwright, and the Literary Critic. Each character type will be required to complete competency achievements of all types, those being creative writing (poetry, fiction, drama, creative essay), professional writing (expository essay, letter, cover letter), and literary criticism (critical essay), but depending on which identity the student chooses, they will be able to specialize in their preferred discipline subset. This is similar to a concentration within a college major. Such character selection allows for the empowerment that comes with choice as well as a method of instructional differentiation. 

Keeping Score
In most video games where score counts as an extrinsic motivator for player achievement, it begins from 0 and rises with each desired action. This seems quite different from the academic grading system, which most students seem to interpret as starting from 100 and decreasing with each undesired action. For this reason, we should stop treating grading as a docking system and treat it as a system in which players earn points instead of having them taken away.

On individual assignments, we should quit setting a maximum point value; students will always compare the grade they receive to what they could have received. Instead, teachers should award points for desired actions (you spelled a difficult word correctly, +1 point; you provided evidence for your argument, +3 points; you used a weekly vocabulary word effectively, +2 points, etc.). Assignments should be returned with a legend that includes ranges of scores in which the student can find their own, and these should be labeled creatively and meaningfully.

For the course as a whole, we do not have the luxury of doing away with As, Bs, Cs, and the like. But we can assemble a system in which earning an A, B, or C depends on the player's performance and effort on individual assignments but does not represent a blind average of scores. Grades should be statistically valid and reliable, but that doesn't automatically mean that we as teachers should be content with plugging numbers into a calculator, pressing average, and mindlessly entering the result into the final report. By looking at students' performance on past assignments, we can assign grades in a more holistic manner that can account for strengths, weaknesses, effort, and -- most importantly -- growth. (Caveat: I don't know how different schools require grades to be calculated; all I do know is that, as important as they are, grades account for shockingly little information about real student performance.)

We should also use principles of video game scoring to create higher levels of transparency in the classroom. For many students, cumulative grades are an abstract concept. They got an A here, a C here, another A here, and a B here, so they figure they must have a B+ or close to it floating around in the big, fluffy cloud of grades. Instead, we should provide students with regular (weekly) reports of cumulative grades, achievements met, progress on competencies, and "Player Tips" for improvement. These reports should be framed in a way that displays scoring and achievement in a positive light.

Reinforce Choice-Making by Using Power-Ups
Incorporate power-ups into the class structure, and let students know that it is entirely their choice when to employ them. The use of these power-ups should be rare (limited to once or twice per year). Here are some examples:

• Double The Fun: Student can choose any assignment except for major ones (long essays, major creative pieces, tests) to count twice in the Final Score. Let students make the choice to double their best score.
• Reboot: Student can choose to retake any quiz besides the mid-term or final exam for a better grade (not to be used on essays, as I feel that students should always have the chance to revise these).
• Freedom Strawberry: Student can choose to opt out of regular journal-writing homework for one night.
• Cloak of Silence: Student can activate the cloak before class for invincibility to cold-calling for the entire class period.
• Turtle of Whitman: Student must clear use of the Turtle of Whitman with the teacher on the day preceding its application; on the following day, the student has 2-3 minutes of devoted floor time to deliver a poem (slam encouraged), short speech, or monologue.
• The Mark of Twain: Like the Turtle of Whitman, The Mark of Twain is cleared with the teacher before class (can be prior to class on the same day). Student will be given 30 seconds at the end of class in which to tell a (classroom-appropriate) joke of their choice.

These are just some starting points. On a final note: it's much less important that we transform a class into a "game" or "video game" than it is that we incorporate elements of great games into coursework. I would argue that choice within a system is the most important of these and, within the context of a school where choice is necessarily constrained by practical considerations, is the element that students will value most.

Free the Rice!

Besides the other 97, I have two problems:

1. There are students whose vocabulary isn't as strong or numerous as it can be. We live in a society that places value on how well a person can express their inner propositions via the written and spoken word. Some part of this skill of expression relies on a solid pool from which to draw the most lively and appropriate words for a given situation. Knowing this, there are students who will be at a disadvantage in their relationships with others and in the job search without a better vocabulary. This is deeply problematic, especially when you consider that this problem can stretch across generations. The more exposure to more words a child has, including those of his or her parents, the better their vocabulary will be, and the better their children's vocabulary will be, and so on. The study of vocabulary may sometimes be considered overly mechanical or may cross the line into pedantry, but I believe that vocabulary is a critical component in human interaction.
2. There are too many people in the world who aren't able to buy this every day: 

It's cheap. For us.

In Michigan, we worry about our children developing moral integrity, a critical intellect, and social and emotional maturity -- but in many other places, people worry about themselves and their children eating enough to survive.

Enter http://freerice.com. 

Free Rice is (by default) an English vocabulary quizzing game in which the user is faced with a multiple-choice vocabulary question. If she gets it right, she gets to answer a harder question; if she gets it wrong, she must answer an easier question. And so on. The questions feature words that are a part of everyday language; "cloth," "last," "pharmacy," "assistant," "worker," "spine" ... and with every correct answer, 10 grains of rice are donated to the World Food Programme. Much of the elegance of this game lies in its simplicity. It requires no engine other than a web browser, and it requires no controller other than a pointer. It is playable on both computers and mobile devices. Its real brilliance lies in its addictiveness. Because the game automatically matches its difficulty the level of the user's skill, it is always a fair match, and it has the ability to grow as the user's skill grows. Its levels range dynamically from 1 to 60, and every student from the beginning reader to the student rounding home on her second Ph.D. will be able to find a challenge here. 

Another thing that makes Free Rice such a great tool is its versatility in quizzing on other subjects (http://freerice.com/category). The game offers subjects that range from other languages (German, French, Spanish, Italian, and Latin) to basic math to chemistry to famous paintings and quotations. Some categories are extremely knowledge-based (Literature, for example), but I believe that to be because the game was created originally for English vocabulary, which is primarily knowledge-based. I found the module on flags of the world to be particularly fun.

There are a few other games (in no particular order) that are also fun and somewhat related to English language arts:

Words With Friends (http://wordswithfriends.com/)

I believe that, as chess is to those who favor competitions of logic and spatial dexterity, Words With Friends (and Scrabble, of course) is the absolute monarch of multiplayer games to those who favor competitions of linguistic familiarity with English in addition to those involving logic and spatial dexterity. Granted, playing a word in WWF doesn't indicate that a player knows how to use this word, but long-term players of the game develop a better understanding of which words exist and how they work at the level of the morpheme. With the creative incorporation of required look-ups for unknown words, a language teacher (English, French, Spanish, etc.) could employ Words With Friends as a powerful and fun vocabulary-learning tool. For teachers who which to de-emphasize the competitive aspect of the game, take a look at this quick description of cooperative Scrabble (http://www.ehow.com/facts_7588017_cooperative-vs-competitive-scrabble.html). See more about the potential benefits of multi-player competitive crossword games here: http://www2.scrabble-assoc.com/Images/Images/ourword07.pdf (NB: read this critically, as its claims are broad and not cited).

Word Ruffle (http://www.wordgames.com/word-ruffle.html)

Sounds like a weird chip. But really, it's a simple (and addictive) version of the sort of game where you have a finite number of letters (5-7, here) and you make as many words out of them as you can within the allotted time for each round (three minutes, here). This game likely assists with word recognition. At worst, it's fun, cognitively engaging, challenging, and both requires and develops skills that are likely to transfer well to Words With Friends or Scrabble.

Semantic Wars (http://www.wordgames.com/semantic-wars.html)

Think fast-paced hangman. Weirdo little creatures attack your castle; defeat them by solving Wheel-of-Fortune/hangman-style puzzles in various categories. This game doesn't really get at vocabulary development as well as the above games might, but it's an engaging, fun little number, and those who have sufficient trivia knowledge may find that it helps with spelling skills.

These are just a few; there are many more word games available at http://www.wordgames.com.

For those kind enough to read this post: What's your favorite word game or literature game? Why do you like it? How might it be helpful to teachers?