Steve Kinney

Education Innovation turned me on to a post by Jonathan Rosenberg, a senior vice president at Google. The post is addressed to college students interested in working with students after graduation, but I think that the general message can be applied to all students from K-12 who want to compete in the 21st century job market. Rosenberg argues, “The challenge for the up-and-coming generation is how to acquire them. It’s easy to educate for the routine, and hard to educate for the novel.”

So what does Google look for in recent graduates?

… analytical reasoning. Google is a data-driven, analytic company. When an issue arises or a decision needs to be made, we start with data. That means we can talk about what we know, instead of what we think we know.

… communication skills. Marshalling and understanding the available evidence isn’t useful unless you can effectively communicate your conclusions.

… a willingness to experiment. Non-routine problems call for non-routine solutions and there is no formula for success. A well-designed experiment calls for a range of treatments, explicit control groups, and careful post-treatment analysis. Sometimes an experiment kills off a pet theory, so you need a willingness to accept the evidence even if you don’t like it.

… team players. Virtually every project at Google is run by a small team. People need to work well together and perform up to the team’s expectations.

… passion and leadership. This could be professional or in other life experiences: learning languages or saving forests, for example. The main thing, to paraphrase Mr. Drucker, is to be motivated by a sense of importance about what you do.

For more, please visit Education Innovation and the Official Google Blog.

As teachers, we carry a lot of baggage. Not just the baggage acquired from our professional careers, but also the 12 or more years we spent as students. How many of the maxims in our teaching philosophy don’t contribute to our overall goals as educators? Even as a relatively young teacher, I may not have built of too many of my own, but I certainly have a lot of work to do when it comes to evaluating all of the maxims I’ve learned through the course of my educational career as a student.

Jonathan Fields brings it up in a business context:

How many rules do we follow that have outlasted their original intent?

They’re all around us. How many people work 9 to 5 (7 to 7 in NYC), when they know their most productive, creative hours are 4 to midnight? How many people pour the coffee first, then add milk and sugar second, when pouring the coffee last avoids the need to stir? How many scrub the dishes before putting them in a dishwasher that’s been good enough to clean them for decades? How many top off the gas tank to avoid waiting for change, even when paying by credit card?

In more of an educational context, some of the maxims that persisted during my education that I’ve had to rethink:

• Is a quiet and orderly classroom necessarily a productive classroom?
• Why must math be done in pencil at all times?
• Why should students produce a written draft before typing?

There are many more, but I think it is far more important that it be a personal quest to seek out these maxims and challenge them. If any come to mind, do not hesitate to share them in the comments section.

The title isn’t a typo, I promise. I argue that there is an unsung profession that is going to make a huge comeback in the next few decades: historians – and it has everything to do with the present. With the rise of social media, people are documenting everything in sight through blogs, Flickr, YouTube, and Twitter. People are documenting everything and dying to publicize it. The sheer mass of primary source accounts of the present with present an arduous task for the historians of the future (can I coin that?) and it will take a lot of them to sort everything out. People have always kept journals, but this is the first time in history that everyone has been so intent on making their every thought and observation public.

During the South By Southwest (SXSW) conference, Guy Kawasaki (can you tell I’m on a kick lately?) moderated a panel titled “True Stories from Social Media.” During the discussion, Aaron Mentele (partner at one of my favorite web development houses, Electric Pulp), noticed the shift in shift in social media from “Moderate, moderate, moderate” to site owners letting go of the reigns a bit and letting the community take control. The other panelists concurred that a big part of their sites’ success has been in encouraging open and free communication.

I teach in a middle school. Middle school students are not known for their eloquence when it comes to discussing the virtues and pitfalls of their teachers as evident by the writing in the bathroom – I’ve never been the topic of conversation on the bathroom walls, which may either be a good or bad thing.

During the final days of the school year, my co-teacher and I invited students to whip out a piece of paper and tell us what they think of us. We told them not to include their names, but they chose to anyway (or weren’t listening to the instructions – not uncommon). It wasn’t my idea and I was prepared for the worst, but I was blown away by the response. Our students responded with thoughtful and reflective responses, some of which may have been their best prose to date. They were open and honest in their appreciation for the work we had done and respectful in their criticism.

There was a lot that I glossed over in the introduction to this post. The moral of Aaron’s story was that controversy causes spikes in site in traffic – this isn’t the goal for most educators. My moral is slightly different. If we let go of the reigns and stop moderating with an iron fist, we may be surprised with the result. Integrating social media into the classroom is scary and requires a giant leap of faith (or reckless abandon, in my case) but it just might be worth it in the long run.

When students write for social media. They write for audience that isn’t just the teacher. As a result, they need to be more thoughtful in their writing. At the same time, in my experience, they tend to also be more thoughtful in the way they respond to each other’s work.

The result of the student surveys? I’m a caring, dedicated teacher who needs to lighten up on the sarcasm.

By the way, this post was inspired by a post over at Creating Knowledge with Technology as well as Guy Kawasaki, Aaron Mentele, and friends.

This post is a follow-up to a post I wrote last week about using Web 2.0 strategies to encourage collaborative student learning. Web 2.0 is all about sharing and collaboration and with any luck, so is your classroom. The trick is finding new and innovative ways for Web 2.0 and your classroom to get along.

In the article, I talked about using wikis as a tool to empower students to collaborate on outlines and other documents. This time, let’s take a different approach: taking the general idea of Digg applying it in the classroom. If you’ve never been to Digg, I highly recommend that you stop on over (after you finish reading this post, of course). Digg is like a news website – albeit a bit more irreverent – with one major difference: There are no moderators or editors. Interesting stories are selected by the Digg community and appear on the front page of Digg. When a user comes across a story on Digg, they can choose to digg it. As a article earn more diggs, it ascends in the rankings until it finally reaches the front page.

Incredibly, this user interaction is what makes Digg so addictive for its users. Peers tend to pick stories that the mainstream press, but submitters to Digg also scour the internet looking for the most interesting content in order to increase their chances of being dugg. Allow me to rephrase, users – without any compensation whatsoever – are investing large amounts of time and effort seeking out content. Doesn’t this sound like something you should have in your classroom (hint: yes)?

There are a few caveats of course – you don’t want just any content; you want relevant content. Some teachers may scoff at the arduous task of training their students to use the internet responsibly. I argue that such skills are essential in the Internet Age (or the Information Age or the Ingenuity Age) and that it’s unfair to pass this responsibility off to someone else (or likely no one else). As teachers, we’ve accomplished much more difficult tasks in the past.

There are a few ways you can use a Digg model in your classroom. First, you can allow students to writing prompts and topic ideas. The class decide which subjects are the most interesting – this sure beats you giving yourself a headache on Sunday night trying to think of something. Students could share and comment on eachother’s drafts during writing process, eliciting instant feedback from their peers. In math and science, students could submit proposed answers and digg solutions that seem correct or comment on a peers approach.

All of these techniques remove you as the sole source of knowledge. They encourage students to collaborate, share, discuss, and critically think about ideas. This, in turn, increases their investment in whatever you’re teaching and makes the lesson more sticky. On top of that, you’re reinforcing accountable talk and the social skills necessary to succeed in today’s collaboration based workforce.

So, how do you incorporate your own home-grown version of Digg? Pligg is a free alternative (clever name, I know). It does take a hosting of some sort and a little bit of customization to get it up and running. I believe that it is well worth the investment. Someone should write a tutorial on how to implement Pligg (instead of just musing on its potential uses). My web host, Dreamhost, allows for one-click installation of Pligg – very convenient. Technology coordinators, check out Pligg at your earliest convenience.

Web applications that do everything your favorite desktop applications ever did and more are springing up all over the place. Are they worth integrating into your classroom?

They’re updated much more frequently.

Microsoft releases a major update to their Office suite about every three to four years, which is short compared to how long it takes them to release an operating system. Apple is on a two-year time table (although with only two incarnations of iWork so far, that may not be the case in the future). In comparison Google Documents has been serviced with a number of minor tweaks, a few major upgrades, and one complete overhaul within the past few months. Bugs and quirks get worked out much faster.

The updates are instantaneously installed on the client side.

There is no need to spend the better part of a week (or longer) updating every computer in your classroom (or school); updates to web applications are instantaneous and require no work on your part. Just log on, fire up your favorite browser, and pull up the site. Not having to worry about installing upgrades, bug fixes, and security patches allows you to focus on the more important aspects of your job – e.g. thinking of new, interesting, and effective ways for your students to engage the curriculum. Read the rest of this entry »

Is it a good idea to pay students for their academic success? We’re not talking about a boost in allowance, but a institutionalized check cut by the government. One of the biggest proponents of providing incentives for student achievement has been the acclaimed Harvard economist, Roland G. Fryer – whom I am a big fan of. The idea involves giving low-income students an incentive to succeed over a long period of time assessed regularly (as opposed to high-stakes testing).

Every three weeks students are tested and if they improve they are paid on the order of $20.  Control groups are also tested.  Early results are very encouraging.  No other reform has anywhere near the bang for the buck as paying the students. As Fryer said to me, ‘for years white parents have been giving their kids money for As, now we are trying the same system for black kids’ (from The Marginal Revolution).

Consider the other side of the coin: What if the funding dries up? What effect will it have on students who have been receiving incentives if they are suddenly cut off? This is something to seriously consider as we enter an era of budget cuts and scale backs.

Schools, under pressure to boost student achievement, are offering incentives — field trips and cash, for example — to motivate students. Some educators praise the idea as a way to motivate poor learners, but others worry it could wind up leaving students with less incentive to learn if the money for such programs dries up (from The Herald-Tribune).

I have been back and forth on this issue for a while now. I see both sides of the argument. A similar program in Mexico, called Progresa, has yielded positive results through giving students incentives to improve academically. Other thinkers, such as Alfie Kohn, suggest that tangible rewards may undermine intrinsic motivation – thereby sacrificing a long-term goal for a pyrrhic victory in the short run.

I don’t envy anyone trying to integrate technology in their classrooms; it’s difficult. Aside from the maintenance and upkeep required keep everything running smoothly (if it doesn’t work well, then teacher’s won’t even bother), instructional technology requires a total shift in our thinking about education.

We’ve all been there: “Rather than give them a reading, I’ll fire up a website on.”

There is no point in employing traditional methods on a glowing screen. There’s nothing wrong with the traditional methods, but books, paper, and scripting tools (pens and pencils) have been around for thousands of years and they’re relatively good at what they do. The computer is not going to beat them at their own game – and that’s okay. The web is a different game and you need to play by different rules to get the most from it.

If I’ve said it once, I’ve said it a thousand times (and I’ve said it at least a dozen times): the web is about collaboration. The web is about interaction. If you put your pen and paper lessons on the computer, you’ll be sorely disappointed. If you embrace the nature of the web and design new lessons around these principals, then the sky is the limit.

With the Web 2.0, collaboration is the name of the game – but it’s about more than that. We’ve regretfully moved past the era of the armchair philosopher. While this will indefinitely put the kibosh on my career aspirations, it will provide an exciting landscape for those entering and moving about the workforce over the course of the next hundred years or so. Dare to give collaboration a try in your classroom. I guarantee that you’ll be pleasantly surprised. As I’ve mentioned, Web 2.0 is all about collaboration.

Allow students to collaborate on study guides for their guided reading books, textbooks, or any other content that could use some further digestion. Encourage conversation and initiate dialogue. This collaboration can be done using Google Documents, but it can also be accomplished, quite easily, using a wiki (such as WikiSpaces).

Through collaboration, students will have taken on the role of differentiating the content in question for those who may struggle with it in its previous incarnation. If you are concerned that everyone is pulling their weight (I choose to concern myself with whether or not the students are learning – by whatever means necessary), you can track collaboration from the administrator’s page; but why not instead focus your efforts on making the experience more engaging so that student’s want to participate?

Empower your students to create videos, podcasts, slide shows, or artwork on the topic in question. Encourage them to scour the internet, researching supplementary resources such as video clips, relevant websites, or BrainPOP lessons.

You’ve faced this situation before. Your students are ready to begin the research segment of their project. You’ve decided to allow students to go online to conduct their research. You’ve scoped out the scene before hand and found some great sites amongst the chaos in Google.

Now what? You don’t know how to create a page using HTML - and even if you did, you don’t have any hosting. What is a poor teacher to do? You could create a Squidoo lens; this is an example of one.

It gets better. You can put polls, pictures, and other announcements. There are hundreds of modules. Even if you don’t have a particularly good reason, go out and make a lens. Worst case scenario, you’ll raise a few cents for charity.

I created my first lens on Squidoo as an experiment. I wanted to learn about how Squidoo worked and needed a subject I knew well enough to consider myself an expert on. What better topic than myself - albeit a little self-righteous.