Dismantling the Nest

One of the most frustrating things for me is when I notice that I have a problem, but I don't know how to fix it (or, in the case of my last blog entry, I find that I am unmotivated to learn how to fix it). The first step to solving the problem is identifying it, but sometimes I don't even know how to do that...until I find out that someone else has the same problem and has started to work on it, too.

Although Twitter can sometimes be a complete trash fire, I stand by my assertion that it is also the best free professional development that I have ever experienced. Almost exactly 48 hours ago, I came across the following tweet (included with permission):



This is solid advice across the board, of course, and I'm sure that it is especially encouraging to new teachers to know that not everything needs to be perfect or even finished before students arrive. It is incredibly important for students to have a hand in creating and decorating the space you all will share.

However, the part that really intrigued me was the second piece of advice about the "nest" since I suspected that I was a true offender of "nesting" before I even read the clarification of what it was. I've read about teachers (and I work with some who have done it) giving up their teacher desks to make more room for student workspaces. I have admired the idea of that, but I'm not there yet; I still need a space where I can put stuff and know that students will not (or at least are not supposed to!) bother it and it will be exactly where I left it for later work time.

I am 100% a hoarder, both at school and at home. Not of garbage or animals or anything that would be a health hazard, but I am queen of "I could find a use for this!" Of course, this leads to clutter everywhere. I have become used to piles of books and papers and every available surface covered with mail and boxes and needing to clear a space on my dining room table to eat dinner. It just doesn't bother me...but it probably bothers some of my students, and it makes me, an already not-very-efficient person, even less efficient.



Every year, I do a little bit of a better job putting some systems of organization in place, and a few even last all year. But it's not good enough. It's never good enough when I have exactly what Traci Tousant describes above taking up valuable space that students could be using to store their supplies, use as a workspace, or just have empty until its purpose is revealed to us.

I went into my classroom today with the express purpose of eliminating spaces that could become nest-friendly. I changed the location of almost all of my pieces of furniture, including my desk to take up much less space; I emptied drawers of outdated, unorganized handouts and made them into student-accessible craft storage; I broke down the boxes that I had stored my books in so I wouldn't be tempted to use them as catch-alls.

Recognizing and naming the problem is the first step in the problem-solving process. It seems simple and obvious, but I have learned that nothing - except "First do no harm" - is simple or obvious in teaching. I don't need a perfect or a themed classroom, but I do need one where all of my students and I can learn together and an environment that supports that.

My 14th year of teaching starts in two weeks, and thanks to these wise words, I pledge to live a nest-free life (at least in the classroom!) from now on. 

Graphic from https://thecornerstoneforteachers.com/truth-for-teachers-podcast/classroom-clutter-keep-toss/

K-12 Online Conference: PD in Your PJs (Thing 29)

Anyone who knows me knows that I'm a fan of anything that meets the following two conditions: 

1. It does not required me to get dressed in "real clothes."

2. It is free.

This week's "thing" met both of those requirements, and I also think it was a helpful resource that I will return to in the future. The K-12 Online Conference is a wealth of information, almost to the point of being overwhelming, but it's organized really easily and intuitively, and it was easy to find sessions that appealed to me. The summaries of each session and the supporting materials were helpful in choosing the sessions, and I like how each of them are sub-categorized into larger groups like "Overcoming Obstacles" and "Stories of Connection."

My first session was titled "Social Annotations: Collaborative Online Reading" from the 2015 "Stories of Connection" category. Here is the link to that page. A lot of things about just the title appealed to me. I want to continue to find ways to make my curriculum more social and inclusive; I have to teach annotation, but I don't want the notes to just live in the book; I like the idea of moving at least some of the reading online; I want my students to work together and with a larger audience. 

This PD session included three online annotation tools: Hypothes.is, NowComment, and LitGenius/BetaGenius. Paul Allison (@paulallison), the presenter, took the audience through the use of each of these tools, and I have to say that I am inspired to try at least one of them. I think NowComment might be the easiest to implement right away because it has several features that we try to incorporate into annotation already: clicking on the comment takes you right to the section that is being annotated; comments can be threaded so discussions are organic and each comment follows logically from the next; and you can sort comments by type (usually length - a sentence or a paragraph, for example). This is not to say that the other annotation tools didn't have these or similar things, just that NowComment seemed the most useable. 

One of the participants in this session also mentioned that he had used online annotation to start a conversation the next day about the reading. I liked this idea a lot because it showed that the online annotation wasn't meant to replace real-time discussion, just supplement it, and I'll definitely use it this year. When kids participate in this online annotation, it means that when they enter the classroom, they have already read the material AND thought about it enough to offer comments. This means they are coming into the discussion with at least partially developed ideas, and perhaps even having responded to a peer's comment, which should mean that they will feel more comfortable voicing those ideas in a discussion.

Another participant mentioned that we should remember that all of us, at some level, are still learning to read. This is a wonderful reminder for me! Given difficult enough material, everyone is a struggling reader, and he reminded me to remind my students that the difficulty and confusion should be seen as productive rather than something to be feared. I love this.

Paul ended by reminding us to "invite students to respond to the voices in their heads as well as the author's and generate a dialogue between these" and that students need to "learn to respond in ways that invited possible future readers to engage with them." He "keeps grounded in the pedagogy of annotation but uses multimodal tools (images, video, voice, hyperlinks) as well as writing." This session was a great one for me to view because it built on the things I learned at the Scholastic Reading Summit about independent reading being an avenue to teach some of the skills we are required to include. The availability of different texts at varying levels of content and complexity and the online tools are a great combination for teaching reading.

The second session that I chose was not as helpful to me but still had some good points. It was called "Meeting Parents and Students Where They Are" from the 2015 "Overcoming Obstacles" category. Here is a link to that page. I chose this session because I would like to make more of an effort to include parents in things going on in class beyond just emailing updates a few times a month (or trimester). 

   

This PD session was about using Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and Flipboard to communicate with parents and students. There were a few things that I found helpful, such as the idea to make a class page or closed group on Facebook for parents to join and how to create your own Flipboard as an online magazine, but overall, there was not much new here. Perhaps I could have chosen better since I'm familiar with most of these social networking tools, but it was a good reminder for me to review the district's policy on what we can and cannot post regarding students online. I would love to have a class Instagram or Twitter, but they sometimes are less interesting without pictures. I've always assumed that we weren't allowed to post pictures of the students, so I should look into that. 

Josh Allen (@j_allen), the presenter, ended by talking about If This, Then That (IFTTT) and the "recipes" you can create in it to post to multiple social media accounts easily. That was really cool - I know it's been one of the "stretch" activities for this course before, but I never really looked into it. It seemed a natural part of this session, and if I can get more than one class account up and running, it will be very helpful.

Overall, I liked the fact that I could choose the sessions based on what I thought would work well in my own classroom. I loved that I could do it at home at my own pace, and I like that everything from every past conference is stored online. I'll definitely try to attend this year's conference!

P.S. I saw this session and decided against watching it because I think there will be a lot of crossover from this course to Dr. Rodgers' session, but I'm including it here because I think it will be a good reference and I'd like to revisit it.

   

Twitter (Thing 9)

Ah, Twitter. I have loved Twitter since 2013 when it enabled me to connect directly with educators from around the world in my International Education graduate seminar. I had the privilege of learning from Pasi Sahlberg, Finnish educator and author of Finnish Lessons. (You can follow him on Twitter at @pasi_sahlberg.) 

In this TedxEast talk, he makes a lot of really great points and also opens with a joke that he told in class and I've been laughing about ever since.

Using a hashtag with our class course number, we had weekly discussions with prime ministers, ministers of education, global educators, professors at other universities, and countless other leaders in our field. This would have been impossible without social media in general and Twitter in particular. I would argue that it is the single most important connectivity tool that we have right now: it's easy to use, provides an instant connection, and allows you to learn from others with a single "follow" click.

Before taking that class, I wasn't really interested in using social media to learn. I had a personal Twitter but didn't use it that much - I mostly tweeted about reality TV and new restaurants. I didn't have that many followers, and almost no one that I knew in real life was on Twitter. But when I went back to school, a lot of things changed. I was able to be immersed full time in a community that supported and provided opportunities for continual learning, growth, and reflection, and Twitter seemed a natural outgrowth of that. It is one of the rare cases in my life where technology made everything better instantly and easily. We were encouraged to tweet in during class time using the class hashtag, and Pasi kept our hashtag live feed on a screen projected in the front so we could refer to it during our discussions. It provided a way for us to respond to the material in a timely way even if we didn't want to raise our hands or if the discussion had moved on before we got a chance to share. It also provided a way for other educators to join in our discussions even if they couldn't be there in person. We were able to talk about educational reform with world leaders without ever leaving our classroom. This was amazing to me!

Upon my reentry into teaching, I found almost immediately that it was impossible to maintain the energy and motivation to learn new things that I had rediscovered in grad school. There simply was not enough time to plan lessons, grade papers, attend meetings, continue my professional development, have an actual life, AND spend time on Twitter or other online teaching communities to keep up with what everyone else was doing. It was a rough welcome back, and I felt incredibly guilty that I was not giving my best to my students, colleagues, family, and friends. 

Once I readjusted, I realized that I could still maintain my Twitter learning, but it would be different from when I was a student. I had more responsibility again, and my continuing education would have to look different. I started by trying to make lists and categorize the people I followed, but I didn't really like that (I'll try it again, but the organization didn't really help me much). Then I tried to only follow people I knew would tweet about education, but I also wanted news and other information. The thing that really helped me organize my Twitter experience was hashtags and Twitter chats. Scholastic recently began their Summer Reading Summit conferences, and I have followed along from afar with the hashtag #readingsummit, gaining new resources and people to follow with every tweet.

The great thing about the hashtags is that the feed will show you all the activity from people using it: who followed whom, who retweeted what, etc. This gives me even more information and inspiration.

I also followed along with #ISTE2016 since several of my colleagues were there along with many of the educational gurus that I follow on Twitter: Jennie Magiera (@MsMagiera), Pernille Ripp (@pernilleripp), and Sylvia Duckworth (@sylviaduckworth), just to name a few. Even though I couldn't be in Colorado with them, I benefited from their learning because they would tweet out pictures, links, resources, and notes from their experience. All of this FOR FREE and FOR MY CLASSROOM USE! Amazing.

Finally, I learned about Teachers Write (#teacherswrite) this year from a retweet that led me to Aliza Werner (@alizateach), who is now one of my favorite people on Twitter. She is a prolific tweeter of excellent material - we first got into a conversation about book choice and how important it is for students - and through talking with her, I also got to connect with Donalyn Miller (@donalynbooks), author of The Book Whisperer, one of the best books I've ever read about matching students with books. This is an incredible personal and professional development opportunity for me as a writer and teacher of writing, and I've enjoyed the first week and am looking forward to more. Truthfully, I'm a little behind, but this has made me much more accountable for my own writing!

Over the past few weeks, I've followed many more people than I usually do because of my activity on Twitter. I've learned that you only get out of it what you put into it (like with most things) and so I've made a conscious effort to do more than scroll mindlessly. I followed Donalyn, Aliza, and Sylvia (usernames above) as well as Kate Messner (@KateMessner), an author who founded Teachers Write, Susan Cain (@susancain), the author of Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World that Can't Stop Talking (a book I loved and that changed my whole approach to teaching, especially since I am an extrovert), and Silvia Tolisano (@langwitches) who wrote this article from this week that I really liked. Craig Kemp (@mrkempnz) was in one of the related articles this week, and I saw that he did a lot of discussing specific issues with other teachers via hashtags, so I followed him too. There are many more, but you can go to my "following" list and check them out if you're really interested!

Here's Susan Cain's Ted Talk in case you haven't seen it (which I know is unrelated to this "thing" but I think everyone should see it):

I'm currently at 136 followers, which is definitely on the low end, but certainly better than when I started; a friend of mine from grad school who has his own educational consulting company is currently at 3,450 followers (Simon Townley, @The_Gorilla_LC) and used to say that when I retweeted him it was like "shouting into an empty room." The truth hurts sometimes.  :) I have picked up more followers pretty steadily - a few a week, usually - from following more people, tweeting more focused information and ideas about education, and participating in the Twitter chats. I can see how if I wanted to dedicate more time to this, I could "build my brand" on Twitter and other social media. I'm not into that for now - I'm just in it to learn more and connect with people I wouldn't otherwise get a chance to talk to. I also tried Hootsuite and Tweetdeck; I can see how they would be useful for that brand building, but for now, they're just fun to look at and see Twitter in a new way. They make it easier to see my interactions with people, and that's cool.

I could say a ton more about Twitter and how much it has helped me in my professional development, but this is probably long enough as it is. I'll say, in closing, that the program Elluminate came up in several articles and is probably worth exploring, and that this article about hashtag PD was very interesting. There's so much good stuff out there that will literally come to you if you let it!

P.S. I'm @_maggie_coyne_. Let's chat!

P.P.S. I forgot to mention that I liked learning about the link shorteners like Bitly because I often run out of characters when I'm tweeting and I refuse to shorten my words into textspeak like 2 or ur, but it's SO frustrating to have those shortened links blocked at school! Often, I'll try to click on an article that is related to what I'm teaching only to find that I can't get to the resource because it uses a link shortener. Is there any way around this?