This week I am away on an offline vacation. Rather than let the blog be dormant or rerunning old posts I decided to give some other people a chance to share their experiences and ideas with you. I hope you enjoy the posts.
It’s
terrifying how much education policy is made with little to no teacher
input. There are millions of teachers around the world, but the impact
of our voices does not match those massive numbers. How can we fix this? How can we, the educators, amplify our power? The answer is online unity.
As a Boston Public Schools teacher who runs a travel blog and a Global Education site,
I straddle the travel blogger and education blogger worlds. What many
educators don’t realize is that travel bloggers have accomplished
something remarkable that can be replicated by teachers. Through online
unity, travel bloggers have changed how travel is done, and who profits
from it.
It
used to be that big travel companies had all the power in travel and
got all the business, but nowadays if you Google a phrase like
“Traveling for Teachers” you are more likely to get an independently run
website than a corporate mammoth. (Try it and see!) Because the online
traffic now goes to the little guys, this has caused seismic changes in
how the travel industry runs.
I just returned from the 800-person TBEX Travel Blogger conference (which
was packed with travel companies jostling to work with bloggers) at
which the CEO of Blogworld declared: “You bloggers deserve a
professional conference, because you have proven that you are professionals. Travel bloggers have changed the travel industry forever.”
Wouldn’t it be nice to hear someone say that to teachers, with regards to education?
Learning from the triumphs of the travel blogger community, here is what we as educators can do to amplify our voices and impact through online unity:
• Create a blog, and/or guest post on education sites. As
educators, we have vitally important words to share about what is going
on in education, and we must write for readers beyond our own schools.
It is YOU who needs to be heard by the world. Yes, you. Please write.
• Embrace social media. Once you’ve created a blog or article, get it read. Do this by cooperation with others via social media. Join the Education Bloggers Facebook Group and Twitter Chat,
and find mentor bloggers who can teach you tricks of getting traffic
through Facebook, Twitter, StumbleUpon, Google Plus, Pinterest, SEO, and
more. Travel bloggers have been doing this for years, and their
collaboration has paid off immensely.
• Go to conferences. In-person networking is vital to forming powerful online partnerships. For example, it was at the wonderful EdCamp Boston Conference that a group of us came up with the idea for the Education Bloggers Facebook Group.
• Do not feel guilty about becoming a successful education blogger or “Teacherpreneur.” People
try to silence teacher voices, making us fear being heard. Teachers are
discouraged from being outspoken, business savvy, or compensated for
work we do beyond traditional teaching within the classroom. To that I
say, “Pshaw!” I am proud to be both a teacher and a hard-working entrepreneur. Because...
• Having a powerful online presence with a global audience makes you a better teacher. “Oh my gosh, Miss Marshall--” one of my 7th grade students squealed last week, “I can’t believe you have almost 4,000 Twitter followers and were published in the Huffington Post!”
“Indeed,”
I replied with a smile. “That’s why I’m so strict on all of you with
grammar lessons. I want you to write for world audiences, too, and when
you do, your writing needs to be fabulous!”
Lillie Marshall (@WorldLillie) is a teacher in Boston Public Schools who runs the Education Bloggers group and chat, along with two GlobalEd websites, AroundTheWorldL.com and TeachingTraveling.com. You can also find her on Google Plus.
This week I am away on an offline vacation. Rather than let the blog be dormant or rerunning old posts I decided to give some other people a chance to share their experiences and ideas with you. I hope you enjoy the posts.
Formative assessment has been stuck in a rut
for years but tablets and Smartphones have the potential for increasing
the amount of formative data that teachers collect and use on a daily
basis. The
combination of touch screen devices and cloud storage allows teachers
to create a manageable flow of connected data, collected on the fly
using mobile platforms, but ultimately available for reflection and
action steps on any device with Web access.Unfortunately,
not enough teachers know about the power of their own personal handheld
devices. EdTech buzz is usually focused on tools that require one-to-one
or at least a large amount of classroom computer availability, but so
much can be done with one handheld device and access to the cloud. Student facing assessment platforms like Compass get a lot of attention along with student response systems like Socrative, but both require students to have their own devices they can use to beam back formative information directly to the teacher. These
apps are great if teachers have the devices, but in order to increase
the actual numbers of teachers who are using these tools to personalize
instruction we need to shift our national focus toward how these tools
can be used when a teacher has a personal tablet or Smartphone at their
disposal. The Highlander Institute
has been working with teachers on a three app system that collects all
of the ongoing formative data a teacher might need in order to more
efficiently and effectively group students for differentiated instruction. There
are many formative assessment applications on the market, but each one
has its limitations. We’ve chosen the following three because they are
cloud based, free, and they compliment each other’s weaknesses.
Evernote:
(E-portfolio Formative Assessment) Set up one folder for general
classroom observations, then make a dedicated folder for each student in
your class. Instantly your phone or tablet becomes your eyes, ears and
brain. Collect visual data, record audio, and add notes as you have
time. Later, process all you collected and decide who achieved mastery
and who you need to meet with the next day. Read more…
Metryx:
Missing from the current app market is the ability to track a
percentile score in a flexible and ongoing basis. Teachers using exit
tickets, online activities, pop quizzes, problems at the board, or just
oral questioning need a way to document their students’ correct or
incorrect responses in one centralized location. Metryx is the
on-the-fly, flexible formative tracker that allows teachers to choose a
skill, choose a student and take in quantitative or qualitative data.
Metryx also analyzes and graphs the data automatically and separates
students into groups based on how close they are to achieving mastery.
(Currently in beta with Version 1 ready for the fall).
Educreations:
Sometimes a yes or no answer is not enough. You need a way to sit with
that student and observe the ways they attack a problem. Place a tablet
with Educreations between yourself and the student and hit record.
Everything they write, everything they say, and their step-by-step
process will be recorded on the screen for you to review later, share
with colleagues or parents.
There are other formative assessment apps we like for specific and targeted tasks, like PickMe for randomizing classroom student responses or ClassDojo
for tracking positive and negative behaviors over time, but the three
app system described above is a great entry point for teachers with
limited hardware, but a strong desire to use more formative assessment.
* (Disclosure notice: the author is also the CEO of Metryx)
Shawn Rubin is the Director of Technology Integration at the Highlander Institute
