Book vs. Movie

**This is a cross-post with our 4th Grade Reading Blog. Please visit and comment on our kid’s blogs!!**

I love reading and I love the movies, so I get very excited when books are turned into movies. It is always interesting to me to see how the books and movies differ from one another. I often wonder what the original author must think of movie interpretations of their works. Currently, I am reading a book called Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close by Jonathan Safran Foer.  I chose to read this book because I have seen the trailers for the film and they look intriguing. I am a stickler for reading the book first.  Other book-movie combos that I have read-seen include The Help, TheHarry Potter series of films, The Reader, Glory (non-fiction), Pride and Prejudice, The Babysitter’s Club, The Birds, The Firm, The Client, The DaVinci Code, and Angels and Demons. I am particularly excited about the upcoming film interpretation of The Hunger Games as I became engrossed in reading the trilogy this past fall.

The trick when reading then watching is to allow oneself to become immersed in the medium at hand and try not to analyze during the process. When one watches the film after the book, I find it really important to focus on the movie’s telling of the tale without comparison. Comparison can come later. This becomes particularly challenging when films are produced in a series such asHarry Potter. I had read the first four books of HP before the first film came out. I found myself making glorious images of the characters in my head and pronouncing the names in my own fashion (HERM-ee-Oh-Ne instead of Her-MY-oh-Nee). However, once the films were introduced the character images of my own design ceased to exist and as I read the final three books, I saw the images of Daniel Radcliffe, Rupert Grint, Emma Watson, Gary Oldman, Ralph Fiennes, Maggie Smith, Alan Rickman, etc. instead. This is not entirely a bad thing, my desire to read the remaining books did not diminish but it made me curious as to the effect on young readers as they experience images before reading the books. When we see classical literature portrayed on-screen such as in Pride and Prejudice or The Scarlet Letter before we read the book have we robbed ourselves of the experience of making our own visualizations and allowing our own imaginations to take flight?

My suggestion for this predicament…read the book first! As educators and parents, we can take an active role in guiding our students and children to read widely and actively before watching the films. To respond to their writing through blogging, journaling, drawing, or conversation. The more you read, the more you know.

Seeing Another Perspective-A Metaphor

I returned back from a lovely Christmas break last week to find a box in my coffee mug. This small box contained a Starbucks gift card!! Yea!

As an avid coffee drinker, I was thrilled and pleased to find this lovely gift. However, what I could not find was the name of the giver of said gift…I had opened the box in this manner.

This seemed to me to be the logical way of opening said box. It had two fold-over flaps on each end and that was how the gift card was delivered to my hand. Feeling frustrated at the secret gift, I pondered sending a blanket thank you to the faculty but then got side tracked…

About an hourish later, my sidekick and I were chatting in the lab and I mentioned that I had received said gift, “but it had no name!”, I decried. He said, “yes it did….” I said, “huh? it’s from you?! Thanks!!” He then proceeded to show me the hidden to/from flap.

“Ah,” I said, “that is clever!” But so interesting that I never would have seen that had he not presented me with the new perspective on how to solve the mystery of the gift card giver.

This has become such a great metaphor for how we view any form of problem or challenge. When we work to collaborative solve problems, we gain new perspectives. When we increase our intellectual capacity by adding extra brains, our solutions come easier. As we approach 21st Century learning experiences, we must be considering the role of collaboration in our teaching and learning. Creating authentic problem solving tasks and helping students build the capacity to collaborate to solve them. For when they gain the experience of viewing new perspectives, oh how they will grow!

(Now it’s time to write my thank you note!)

Exactly!

Yesterday I had the pleasure of doing exactly what I am supposed to do in the job laid out for me. A third grade teacher and I collaborated to have the students produce a project while integrating their social studies and their technology skills acquisition simultaneously. How’s that for a run-on sentence! Their task was to find pictures from an online collection, save them, insert them into Word, and create captions…not brain surgery or web 2.0ish but critical skills and most importantly, connected to their curriculum on Native Americans. In the perfect world, we would have had three days to complete the project. We had 40 minutes that we pushed to 50 by skipping snack. The kids were outstanding. They paid close attention and worked swiftly. They were led through the task one step at a time and then set to their own devises for the second time through to complete the steps again. I marveled at how quickly some of them picked up the steps and counseled those who did not. But all complaints about time aside, this is the kind of collaboration for which we hope. It is my (our) sincere desire to build learning experiences for kids that allow them to put their core content learning into the context of technology rather than working on technology within a vacuum. At the end of the day and a de-brief with the gung-ho teacher, I found myself with a few lingering questions…

How do we articulate the value of basic skills in technology when our digital natives are all about games and fun? Is there still value in working on tasks in Microsoft Office (for example) when these tools may be obsolete by the time these children reach the workforce or even high school? How do we help teachers see that collaboration is necessary for student success AND debunk our assumptions that d.n.’s already know how to use all of these tools?

These questions I leave for another post on another day; I will allow myself a few more hours to bask in the glow of victory in the form of integration bliss.

Overdue Reflections

I am long overdue my reflections from two very different professional development opportunities I experienced in the month of October. My only major excuse is that I got a new dog and have lost all perspective of personal reflection while I make trips to the dog park and enjoy some good snuggles. Please meet Parker, to your left… (I think he is a great excuse not to blog…)

Experience #1: Edscape Conference, New Milford HS

I am so glad that my colleague and I attended this conference run by the coolest school leader since Horace Mann, Eric Sheninger. The best part of the day was the change in keynote. Chris Lehmann had been delayed and was unable to attend so he was replaced by his amazing colleague of TED Talk fame, Diana Laufenberg. She inspired the audience to think beyond technology for technology’s sake and to speak the language of our digital age students by integrating technology into problem-based learning. She encouraged us to build learning experiences for kids where they would be challenged to be critical in their work and learn from mistakes. What an amazing start to the day.

I found myself floating between sessions feeling unsatisfied by what I was hearing from presenters. It wasn’t new, it was stuff that someone with an active PLN should already know. I really wanted this question answered: “how do we move teachers who don’t engage in professional development and struggle with the pedagogical shifts of the 21st century forward in a way that allows us to best serve kids?” Any easy question right? Where is the divide between encouragement/coaching and evaluation/mandate? These questions were not answered on this day but I did have light at the end of the tunnel when this quote was presented in my last session.

Aha! Yes. This was the reality check that I think I needed to hear (see) someone else say out loud. We are past the point of excuses and must move forward….but again…how?

I’m glad I attended Edscape and connected with a few new PLN folks as well as meeting some of my tweeps in the flesh. My attendance also afforded me the invitation to participate in the Dell Edu Think Tank the following weekend in NYC.

Experience #2: Dell Education Think Tank, NYC

It is not every day you hear my name and the words “Think Tank” in the same sentence. It was an incredible experience to sit among 20 0ther education professionals and the education leaders at Dell  to discuss the shifting paradigms of education. We greeted each other, some known, some unknown, at the headquarters of Scholastic and our conversation, also live-streamed, began. Our moderator, once again the forward-thinking Eric Sheninger, culled our open thoughts and synthesized them into five main topics:

• Topic 01:How can tech serve and transform teaching, learning?
• Topic 02: How do we increase access to technology?
• Topic 03: Personalized Learning
•  Topic 04: Social Media in the Classroom
• Topic 05: How can administrators help support innovation?

All day, we participated in dialogue, debate, reflection on these five topics, as amazing art was being created to aggregate and illustrate our conversation. As an independent school educator, I found myself intrigued by the contrast of our struggles for implementation as compared to those within public frameworks. For my school, resources are blessedly not a hurdle and we are not bound to standardized curriculum and testing requirements or ridiculous evaluation systems that stifle all creativity. We face a challenge of autonomy. This may not seem a challenge to those who face such great hurdles of resource, access, and curricular lock-down, but it is very real. Autonomy in educational practice is a great gift, but it has the potential for abuse and acceptable complacency.

Which leads me back to my question from Edscape: ”how do we move teachers who don’t engage in professional development and struggle with the pedagogical shifts of the 21st century forward in a way that allows us to best serve kids?”  I have drank heartily from the web 2.0 kool-aid. I am an evangelist for balanced use of technology within the curriculum. I am a profound proponent of professional development. But I struggle when the answer to my question is, “Time and Patience”. I have buckets of patience in my ageing years. I don’t have time; neither do you. We cannot miss an entire generation of kids because our fears and comfort levels can’t be challenged.

So while I continue to seek an answer, let us begin small, using technological tools to support global connections in the primary levels. Let us, as the educators, use technology to promote greater communication and collaboration within our own professional practice.  Hopefully time will move slow while we lead the way.

Why We Should Not Hyper-Edit

**Our 4th grade readers have begun blogging. Their blogs are currently only public to themselves and their parents. I look forward to helping them release them to the world at some point. I’m sharing my post from our kid-blog today regarding why we as teachers should not hyper-edit our students.**

As teachers, we always want the very best from our students. We want them to learn and grow as readers and writers (as well as artists, math wizards, athletes, musicians, historians, and citizens) but we also need to create boundaries for them to make their own mistakes and realize them. When we have students blog it is very important for us as teachers to step back from the process at some point. We allow them to form their posts, edit them collaboratively, encourage the use of spell check, promote diverse word choice, and emphasize excellent grammar. However, there are times when our instruction may not be heeded and it is very important in that moment to allow the child to make the choice to publish or save as draft. If they publish a minor mistake or we don’t love every aspect of their content, we must refrain from editing their work. Their blogs are their own. They must take ownership of their work and we, confidently knowing we have done all we can to help shape their work, must allow them to take this ownership. This is not always the easiest task, to let our birds fly from the nest and occasionally make mistakes, but we will be better teachers, and they, better students for allowing them to do so.

Kerpoof!

The students of grade 2 are finishing up their units on Maps in Social Studies. In this unit they paid two visits to the lab, once to explore the wonders of Google Earth (navigating to both their school and home) and once, to create a digital map of their own bedroom. The Google Earth lesson was interesting for some (who learned how to use street view and could spin 360 in their drive way) and frustrating for others (whose homes are not yet in street view). Either way, they enjoyed the adventure and liked how they could manipulate the views in ways that no paper map could accomplish.

For their digital creation, we used the online drawing tool found on Kerpoof. This website, which is owned by Disney, allows students to use digital drawing tools to make their creations. I chose this tool over MS Paint because it had fewer choices for editing. I don’t typically like to limit my students but I found that by having limited options for drawing choices, the children were actually given more freedom to create with what they had in front of them. I also like the auto-correcting shape tool in Kerpoof. It allows corrections for circles, squares, and rectangles for those of us with less than perfect drawing hands.

As I have a teacher account for the site, we saved their creations in my account, to avoid having to go through the file server (lots of extra steps for a 7 year old) and then I was able to print the creations out for them to take home or hang in our “map gallery” outside the lab.

This activity was a challenge in several ways for students. Some were not satisfied until their beds or dressers were perfectly shaped and so they spent a lot of time with their eraser function. Some thrived in the creative realm and created maps complete with stuffed animals and doorknob adornments. The project encouraged the students to visualize their rooms in “satellite view” (from their Google Earth experience) and they had to grapple with spatial awareness and creativity.

All in all they walked away with experience in a new tool and a personal connection to cartography. These connections are priceless.

Patience, Grasshopper

SOURCE: Messiah Kahn

As is quite common when working in an environment with a vast number of resources on a network and simultaneously experiencing on-campus lightning strikes this morning, our machines and network are a bit slow to recover. This is normal, not common, but given the circumstances, it is to be expected. This provides an amazing teachable moment for students.

In our 24/7 connected world, the art and virtue of patience dwindles by the minute. I am completely guilty of having my iPhone strapped at my side constantly almost as if it is my third appendage. But the value of patience and flexibility in the midst of challenges (real or perceived) is incredibly important. This morning, network issues led to a need for flexibility of computer use and space choice. It led to mixed success with log-in’s and typing test completion. But it also provided a great moment for students to exercise their patience and perseverance. My most flowery compliments this morning were bestowed on those who had to fight their desire to throw the tablet computer across the room (perhaps this is a slight exaggeration or a projection on my part) and keep trying or waiting. A further discussion about reclaiming found time to breath could also be related to moment, but alas, time pressed on and logging off ensued.

I am grateful for these teachable moments for life lessons even in the middle of frustration and chaos. Deep breaths Grasshopper.

Webpages, Bookmarks, Wiki’s, Oh My!

The world of web 2.0 has so many choices for sharing information. Online bookmarks, wikis, blogs, tweets, webpages with hyperlinks… Then there is the traditional choice of desktop shortcuts and folders. Or the in between of a teacher-student management  device such as Smart Sync. As my position is new to the Lower School, we are still in the process of figuring out the “best way” to manage and share the amazing resources that we can use to work with our students. After adding several links to a start button folder to 20 different machines in the last two weeks, I needed something more efficient.

We are going to pilot Smart Sync in our lab, which is wonderful. I used this program in my “old school”; we used Synchroneyes-the version prior to its purchase by SMART. I love the way this program allows classroom management of multiple machines and allows the teacher to push a URL directly to the students. When your students are still building their literacy, asking them to type a URL or even make 6-7 clicks to find a link is not an efficient use of time.

Also, after beginning to maintain both Symbaloo pages and my old wiki, I created a new school specific wiki to serve as a landing pad for resources. It took less than an hour to move some of my old wiki parts to the new wiki. I was able to reach out to teachers to ask for their favorite resources, which I can then add to the site. If teachers make the page a “favorite”, they will have so much less searching to do and a lot more surfing.

These are both small options on the web 2.0 totem pole, but I’m happy to be carving out a clearer niche as my journey continues as a tech facilitator.

Do you have a resource that you LOVE that you think I MUST have on my wiki? Tweet me and I’ll check it out!

First Prezi @ NS

I’ll be giving my first Prezi at my new school tomorrow. I will give it 6 times to 3rd and 4th grade students and I’m super excited to share this tool with them. I’m fairly certain that they haven’t seen a presentation in this way. I wish I could embed the HTML code directly onto this post, but alas, it comes up as gobbledy-gook! Instead, I share the “Intro to Tablets” presentation with you.

After a week of administering computer based reading tests, I’m so excited to work with kids this week that is truly hands-on.

Enjoy!

Leadership Day 2011: You don’t have time not to…

Today is Leadership Day 2011 and there are so many topics within Ed Leadership that I would love to tackle. But I’m going to go with this one: “You don’t have time NOT to”

In ten years in education I have heard so many people say to me, “I don’t have time for that”. It has ranged from baking cookies for the faculty meeting to meeting with parents to lunch duty to learning new technologies. I respect this protection of time, truly I do. We must know ourselves as educators and humans to know our limits, particularly of time.

In the area of educational technology there are so many factors that cause fear and trepidation for implementation. Many of these are personal, rational thoughts of highly capable, intelligent education professionals. We often interpret this fear as a lack of time. Technology can be a scary river to wade. But we know that there are so many benefits to curriculum, instruction, assessment, and organization found through the integration of technology. By letting fear win over innovation, it is our kids who lose.

This leaves our school leaders with the uphill task of encouraging their faculty and/or peers to break through fear and the ever present struggle with time. If leadership approaches this predicament by encouraging their teachers to see beyond the initial onset of lost time and look to the long-term benefits, we can move a step towards positive integration. Likewise, if we work with our students from the framework malleable intelligence then we must promote that among our teachers as well.  The “ROI” from time spent learning about technology integration and engaging students in collaborative, engaging, technologically-rich lessons may not be evident when we look at the factor of time. Nevertheless, we don’t have time NOT to move our classrooms and schools forward. The time is now.