Atomic Learning (Thing 32)

I have never used Atomic Learning before, so I have no other experiences with which to compare this one. However, I will say that starting my experience with Atomic Learning with that 21st Century Skills Assessment was not very pleasant. It was a moderately long quiz, but it seemed so much longer than 40 questions because there was no progress bar on it, so I had no idea how quickly (or slowly) I was going through it! For me, knowing how long something is going to take me or how many questions I'll have to answer is an important part of pacing myself. Also, while the results at the end of the quiz told me my overall score, how it broke down into percentages, and which questions I missed, it did not tell me the correct answers to the questions I answered incorrectly. I was disappointed by this because I don't think it's a good model of one of the standards (reflection and re-assessment). I would have liked to know what the right answer was and why. I did look for topics that would help me with my worst categories, but without knowing which answers I selected and which were incorrect (I definitely didn't remember what I put), they were not very useful.

As with most of the websites, programs, and apps we have worked with during this course, there are helpful resources here if you know where to look. When I selected my top three areas of interest, there were a lot of courses that I had to sift through before I got to any that were helpful. When I filtered by issue in the second task, though, that brought me some good information. I chose "Increasing Student Engagement" and found the "YouMatter: Mattering IS the Agenda" course. The only part of it that was unlocked was the introductory video, but that part was interesting. On one hand, it seems kind of unbelievable that teachers wouldn't know about reaching the students emotionally and paying attention to them before trying to teach the material, and some of the video was sort of cheesy. On the other hand, it's an important reminder to us that we are teaching the students, not the material, and I really liked the idea of starting with the staff before asking them to do it with the students. More and more often, I think teachers find themselves unappreciated, and it wouldn't take long to start to remedy that. After all, we can't take care of the kids if we can't take care of ourselves.

In the third task, I searched for reading, writing, and vocabulary. I found this course on collaborative writing with Google Docs that I really liked because it addressed both how to use Google Docs AND parts of the writing process. It is essential to me that any integration of technology into the classroom does not overshadow the skills I need to teach. In other words, the focus of the lesson should be on the writing process and collaboration, not on how Google Docs works. Of course, teaching how Google Docs works is important for online collaboration, but if it overshadows the teaching of how writing works, it's not worth it.

The other courses I found were about challenging advanced readers and using Snapchat in education. The first came up when I searched "reading," which made sense to me, but the second came up when I searched "vocabulary." I was intrigued. Snapchat has only ever caused problems for me as a teacher, so I have never thought of incorporating it into the classroom. I'm skeptical about answering questions "in real time" as described in the video because I think it's another thing that I would have to remember to do outside of school hours (not to mention the complication of having to have my school iPad with me at all times since I wouldn't use it on my phone), and I don't know how many of the kids would actually use it. But I LOVED the idea of the kids taking snaps of objects and labeling them with their Spanish names (the vocabulary connection). 

I can definitely see assigning that Google Docs collaborative writing resource to the kids before we start using Docs in our writing - that would be super helpful. The other courses I viewed were geared toward teachers, so obviously I wouldn't use those. I'll come back to this resource and see what other student-geared courses I could use in my classroom. I'm not sure how teachers would feel about having Atomic Learning assignments tailored to assessment results. If you mean standardized assessments that we have not written, I don't think it would go over well. In my mind, it would be one more step toward the computerization of learning. After all, if you have courses the students watch individually, tests they take individually, and then assignments that a computer generates that they work on individually, where is the teacher's role? 

I understand that we should be working to use technology to streamline the parts of learning that students can and should do on their own, but I don't think that making everything automated is the answer. Students need to collaborate, bounce ideas off of each other, receive feedback from a real person...I'm uncomfortable with the idea of the automatic, online loop. If the assignments come as a result of assessments that we wrote and feel were implemented with fidelity, then I think there's potential for that. It could save time and differentiate the assignments so there would be more time for teachers to work with students individually or in smaller groups. To my mind, that is the goal of educational technology: to help make individualized learning more possible. 

Responding to "Blogging as Reflective Practice" (Thing 3 Stretch)

In her post "Blogging as Reflective Practice", Gina Minks explains how she uses blogging as a way to reflect on and better her job performance as well as how it can create communities. I happen to agree with this on a deep level since it was blogging (in large part) that sustained my connection to my teaching practice when I took a year off to go to graduate school literally 1,000 miles away from the school where I teach.

Ms. Minks mentions that people seem to think bloggers have too much time on their hands or that blogging is superficial. While it can be a great time-waster, it can also be deeply reflective and time-consuming. She links in her blog to a 2007 study out of the University of Birmingham in the United Kingdom that concluded that blogging benefited students and encouraged reflection as well as linked the students' lives outside of the classroom to the activities that they completed inside of it. The very idea that educational blogging has occupied a prominent enough position to be the subject of an academic study says to me that we cannot dismiss it as something that bored teenagers do when they feel like no one is listening to them.  

Putting ideas into words has always helped me solidify my feelings on a subject and exposed when I do and do not understand something fully. If I can't summarize it, then I didn't get it. Both my undergraduate and graduate institutions placed a very high emphasis on reflection, and although it doesn't much matter to me whether I do that reflection on a piece of paper or online, there is no doubt that that early practice has stayed with me into my almost ten-year teaching career. I still take the time to jot a few notes after almost every lesson, and when I can take a moment to blog about them, I do it. I haven't done it much lately, but perhaps this will help jumpstart me back into the habit.

The one major benefit that blogging has over private journaling is that you can, if you so choose, open up your blog to the whole world. It is because of this access that I have confined my blogging to the professional domain; after all, I'm not sure that anyone really wants to hear my thoughts about "The Bachelor" or the latest Adele album (although I do have a lot of thoughts about both of those!). The great thing about blogging about teaching is that it immediately invites thousands of other teachers right into your classroom - if something went poorly, all of those other sets of (mostly supportive, because who really reads teacher blogs to fling mud?) experienced eyes can tell me exactly where I went wrong and how to fix it. One of the best and most fulfilling teaching experiences I have had is co-teaching. I know that some people don't like the idea of more adults in their classrooms, but I have always found that having another teacher in my room immediately lifts the caliber of my teacher. Not because I'm trying to show off, but because I have another professional whom I trust implicitly there to give me timely and specific feedback on my practice. Blogging about teaching is like having thousands of co-teachers available to me at a moment's notice.

Blogging is also one of the best practices in revision that I, as a writer and a teacher of writing, have ever experienced. Because my audience is potentially so large (not that my blogs have ever garnered a ton of attention, let's be clear about that), I'm much more careful about what I write and how I write it because I don't want to be misconstrued. I fact-check once, twice, and on the more controversial topics, three and four more times because I want to be absolutely sure I'm right. Isn't this what we want our students to do? I realized this was one of the best real-world writing exercises I could give my students as I was writing that last sentence and will now try to incorporate this into my teaching next year. We do online discussions fairly regularly, but I have never tried to use blogs because of the privacy issues. We'll see if I can make it work.

So...reflective practice in action. It was literally as I was typing those words that I realized I could make the revision point to my students with this example better than I ever could if their audience was just going to be their classmates and me. Because for better or for worse, sometimes kids in this generation care more about what the internet thinks than what I think. Why not use that to sneakily get them to use the right there/their/they're?  

Teaching Writing in the 21st Century (Thing 2)

I looked for a video that had to do with writing because that's the bulk of what I teach, and I feel like a lot of the "21st century learning" around writing is just about the new publishing apps. I like this video a lot because it acknowledges that importance of face-to-face collaboration and handwriting along with typing and online editing/revision.