Learning is life. - Russ Goerend

Summer of Digital Sanity

Mon, 06 Jun 2016 21:00:11 -0500

Here are a couple of ways I’ve created a Summer of [Digital] Sanity:

A. I turned off all non-essential notifications on my iPhone.

Here’s all that’s left:
- iMessage/SMS/Google Hangouts/Phone/FaceTime: I’ve created an expectation with friends and family that these are my synchronous communication tools. In other words, if you message me here and I have my phone on me, I’ll see it and respond quickly.

Fantastical: I get my event and reminder notifications here.
Circle: We use this device to set Internet time limits for our kids’ devices. I get a notification when they’ve hit their limit.
Google Maps: It’s the maps app that I use, and notifications are crucial during navigation.
IF: The app for IFTTT.com. I have some IFTTT recipes that remind me to do certain things at specific times (such as checking to make sure I closed the garage door each night at 7pm).

That’s it. Some of you may be thinking, That’s still a lot. And for you, that may be true. For me, there are still 82 apps on my phone that cannot interrupt my day with a notification. No Instagram, no email, no work email, no Twitter, no Snapchat, no Slack, no News, no Reddit, no Google Drive, no MLB, no eBay, no Foursquare. None of those apps are allowed to break my concentration or take me away from whatever I’m working on or whoever I’m playing with.

That’s not to say that I’m not on my phone at all during the day. I take brain breaks just like everyone else, but not having these notifications – take “likes” on Instagram, for example – has made me realize that looking through those notification feeds in the app once or twice is a day is all that’s really necessary. Instead of getting 30–40 notifications on my phone over the course of an hour from Instagram, I’ll take less than a minute to scroll through my Instagram notification feed when I decide to.

The biggest thing I’ve noticed over the last week is that when my phone buzzes in my pocket, I know it’s something important enough to pull out and check.

B. I give myself 30 minutes each night after our boys go to bed to sit down at my computer and process everything I’ve “missed” throughout the day. That’s 30 total minutes for email, work email, Twitter, news, SBnation, reddit. I use Inbox for Gmail and Spark for my work email. Those make processing email quickly. Sometimes I go over my 30 minutes, sometimes I don’t use it all. The goal is to get in and get out quickly.

C. I’m working to be project-oriented when I’m on my computer. I keep the busy work to those 30 minutes and any other times, I’m working on a video project or a design project.

D. Lastly, and this is going to be the most simple, I changed one setting in Tweetbot to reflect this new mindset. I used to check the box in front of “Open Links in Background” which would mean I’d scroll through my Twitter feed and click 15–20 links, all of which were opening up in new tabs in Chrome. Then I’d take weeks to dig through them all eventually just closing them without reading as they piled up each time I opened Tweetbot. I unchecked that box and now, when I find a link that’s worth clicking, I read it right now then move on. I’m reading more of the articles I find interesting and skipping the ones that I would not have read in the first place.

Hope this sparks some ideas for you.

I push because I care

Thu, 25 Feb 2016 10:54:21 -0600

If I’m not thinking about how something can be better, it means I’ve moved on from that thing. Probably not forever, but definitely for now. That thing could be an app, a job, a sentence, a project, an idea…

Don’t be put off when I push or when I come with a “How could this be better?“ mindset. It’s how I’m wired. And it means I care.

It’s when I’m not pushing or not interested in making something better that you should be worried.

Google Photos is pretty great. Lately, they’ve been adding...

Sun, 20 Dec 2015 10:00:33 -0600

Google Photos is pretty great. Lately, they’ve been adding some more manual control over what Auto Awesome creates. This morning, we made some gingerbread houses at home. I took some video while we were doing it and a few hours later, Google Photos let me know they had made a video for me. I saw a few icons while I was watching the video, so I tapped them. You can see in the screenshot above what those icons do.

I highly suggest using Google Photos as a backup for your pictures as well as a fun way to see how Google can play with what you’ve shot.

Here’s the 23 second video they made for us: https://goo.gl/photos/U9xMrGgt19GKA29T7

When parents say they don’t understand standards-based...

Mon, 07 Dec 2015 16:40:37 -0600

When parents say they don’t understand standards-based grading…

(Also, my son’s swimming lessons are competency-based. Think about that.)

Preparing them for college

Tue, 01 Dec 2015 14:27:38 -0600

Matt and I have led some standards-based grading workshops the past few summers for teachers and administrators. Without fail, we end up spending time on the same mental roadblock from at least some of the educators in the workshop:

If we don’t ___ , we won’t be preparing students for college.

Fill in that blank with nearly anything you can think of.

Take off for late work
Give zeroes
Grade homework

You get the idea. Matt and I came up with a rebuttal for that this year that helped them see the absurdity of taking one tiny aspect of high school life and extrapolating it out to “preparing them for college.” When this conversation inevitably came up, we said, “OK. Let’s prepare them for college, then. Starting their freshman year of high school, we’ll move them all into apartments and they can live on their own. Right?”

We talked about other aspects of college life that we aren’t so apt to bring down to high school. The conversation became fun and nostalgic and by the end there was a sense of, “All right , we get it. Maybe we’re holding onto some things for ourselves and not in the name of preparation.”

I had this thought about preparing our students for college pop into my mind the other day. This time it was in the context of the new course I’m teaching this year. I haven’t written about it, so here’s the gist:

I have a group of 17 juniors and seniors each day from noon to two-thirty in the afternoon. We don’t meet at Waukee high school. I don’t even have a classroom at the high school. Instead, we meet in downtown Des Moines in a space inside the DLR Group, an architecture and engineering firm. The students act as consultants doing work for local businesses in marketing, media production, and graphic design. They work next to other professionals all afternoon long. So far this semester, they’ve worked with Unplugged Adventures (a single-owner adventure race business), the Board of Educational Examiners, the Des Moines Social Club, and many others. They’ve set up job shadows with corporations such as Meredith Corp. as well as the Iowa Cubs. They’ve created personal brands. They set up meetings with their clients. They learn their clients’ needs. They communicate with their clients frequently to gain feedback on the iterations of their projects. My role is that of manager. I keep up to date with their projects and clients. I bring in new clients when necessary. I reflect with them. I help them set growth goals. The two-and-a-half hours they have each day are theirs. We eat lunch together at noon, then go through a daily standup where we each share what we worked on yesterday, what we’re working on today, and any roadblocks we foresee. When a project calls for certain skills, they either learn them or pull a peer onto the project with the skills. They manage their time. They set deadlines with clients. They solicit and use feedback. They dress professionally every day. They communicate with me and keep our shared calendar updated.

We had representatives of a community and school district visit us the the other week to see the students in action. Inevitably questions from the traditional classroom came up. Grading, attendance, that kind of stuff. When that thought – Are they wondering about the whole “preparing them for college” thing? – crept into my mind again, I thought, What truly is unique about college?

Here’s what I think it is:

Up to that point in our lives, college is simultaneously the most freedom we’ve ever had and the most responsibility we’ve ever had.

So, are we preparing them for college?

In an interview with CNN Money, Apple’s Eddy Cue was asked...

Tue, 01 Dec 2015 08:07:34 -0600

In an interview with CNN Money, Apple’s Eddy Cue was asked why they created a built-in app for news (called News). Here’s the beginning of his response:

We’ve only created the apps that we think everyone uses every day…

Up top you’ll see the 22 pre-installed apps I have never opened, let alone “use every day.” Those apps can be sorted into two categories: apps that have vastly better 3rd-party counterparts and apps that I would uninstall if I had a choice.

Better 3rd-party (I apologize if this table is borked. I can’t figure out which Markdown Tumblr is using for tables.):

Apple	3rd-party	Notes
Voice Memos	DropVox	Uploads voice memo directly to Dropbox
Calendar	Fantastical	Combines Reminders and Calendar, uses natural language processing
Notes	Evernote, Drafts, Paper	These apps either have more functionality, less clutter, or a combination of both
Music	Google Music	Google Music holds 50,000 of your own tracks for free
Mail	Mailbox, Google Inbox	Mailbox and Inbox allow for “snoozing” emails unti you’re ready to handle them
Weather	Perfect Weather	Better widget, more information
News	Flipboard	More sources
Podcasts	Pocket Casts (among others)	I prefer Pocket Casts, but you can take your pick of many podcast apps that are much better that Apple’s Podcasts. In 3rd-party apps, syncing is reliable and there are other functions such as Overcast’s Smart Speed and Voice Boost
Maps	Google Maps	I like not getting lost.

Apps that I would uninstall if I had a choice:
- Wallet
- Compass
- iTunes Store
- Videos
- Stocks
- Find Friends
- iBooks
- Watch
- Game Center
- Health
- Tips

Apps that I never interact with but I guess it could be argued that I use their functionality via Siri¹
- Calculator
- Clock

Which isn’t that great. ↩︎

The Engaging-Boring Continuum

Sat, 17 Oct 2015 09:28:42 -0500

I miss Grant Wiggins. Reading through his blog makes me realize just how much he has impacted my philosophy of teaching and learning.

I once worked with a group of ELA teachers on student writing rubrics and portfolios, and when it came time to identify key criteria of story-writing the teachers were very reluctant to use an engaging-boring continuum because it seemed so wrong. But, I protested, don’t you easily recognize boring vs engaging and trite vs creative work when you read the stories? Oh, yes, they said. Isn’t that key to what a good story is about? Well, yes, they said. But it seems wrong to say that a piece is “boring” – even if it is. Why, I persisted? Should we deceive the learner into thinking that their writing is better than it is? Is it right to lie to them about such a basic issue of author purpose and desired result? We don’t have to say “boring” but we should certainly say if the readers were not engaged, shouldn’t we? They reluctantly agreed – and found that their students easily understood the difference between “engaging” and “not engaging” and accepted the assessment criterion as common sense. Oh, you mean you don’t want it to be dull and boring, said one kid? Uh, yes. Oh, we didn’t think that mattered in school writing, said a girl. Exactly.

Via Grant Wiggins

Is it ok to teach the students to be in the moment?

Sat, 13 Jun 2015 10:34:48 -0500

Is it ok to teach the students to be in the moment? To see what is around them? To communicate face-to-face? To listen? To respond to a question with verbal clarity? To develop higher level questions on the spot? To fully engage 100 percent without outside distractions? To develop their mind, thinking power, and emotional intelligence just using their god-given powers with no assistance from outside help (because they might not always have access to technology)? and letting them believe that they can think for themselves BEFORE they use technology?

via PK from a comment on Scott McLeod’s blog, Dangerously Irrelevant

Summer of Food Month One: Jalapeño Creamed Corn

Mon, 25 May 2015 10:45:24 -0500

I enjoy cooking. When I retire from the classroom, I want to open a food truck – assuming food trucks are still a thing at that point.

This summer, I’m trying to get good at one recipe each month. I’m being loose with “recipe.” This first month is jalapeño creamed corn, inspired by my favorite Des Moines Restaurant, Malo. I haven’t decided what next month’s recipe will be, though I’m thinking about trying to get ribs on my Weber kettle figured out. We’ll see.

Here’s how I make the jalapeño creamed corn – note that this is a double batch:

Here’s all the stuff you need:

16 oz cream cheese
8 Tbs butter
40 oz corn
Mezzetta tamed Jalapeño slices
½ teaspoon garlic powder
½ teaspoon salt
¼ teaspoon pepper
½ teaspoon chili powder

2. Slice up the butter and cream cheese and add it to the crock pot

3. Turn on the crockpot to high and let it start to warm up that up. While that’s happening, give your jalapeños a rough chop then add them. The tamed jalapeños are awesome for this. They really are tamed – I can eat them like pickles from the jar. So, I add enough to the creamed corn that you have some crunch in almost every bite. There’s some heat, but not enough that kids can’t enjoy it.

4. Dump your corn on top.

5. I like to give it a bit to let everything thaw, then add the seasonings. Leave the crockpot on high for a couple hours then turn it to low.

6. About fifteen minutes before serving – I assume you’re grilling with this as a side, if not you should be – scoop the creamed corn into grillable pans, top with parmesan cheese and toss on the grill.

Heard this the other day

Fri, 22 May 2015 17:00:05 -0500

If you’re thinking about an idea you can solve in your lifetime, you’re thinking too small.

-Wes Jackson

My teacher closet

Fri, 24 Apr 2015 17:32:23 -0500

My friend Katie moved into a new position in a new district. She’s in more of a coaching role and she emailed asking ideas about resources for English/Language Arts teachers. Here’s what I sent her.

Reading:
The Reading Zone Atwell
Interactive Read Alouds Holt and Sandvold
When Kids Can’t Read Beers
Teaching Reading in Middle School Robb
The Book Whisperer Miller
Assessments for Differentiating Reading Instruction Robb
Day-to-Day Assessment in the Reading Workshop Sibberson
Creating Robust Vocabulary Beck
All of Kelly Gallagher’s Reading books

Writing:
All of Kelly Gallagher’s Writing books
Steal Like an Artist Austin Kleon
Lessons that Change Writers Atwell
A Fresh Look at Writing Graves
The Craft of Revision Murray
Mechanically Inclined Jeff Anderson
Everyday Editing Jeff Anderson
A Writer’s Notebook Ralph Fletcher

Poetry:
All of Paul Janeczko’s book

Kits:
Ralph Fletcher’s Teaching the Qualities of Writing

That’s all I’ve got. If I were to move to a new district, that would be my list I’d take with me. I’m sure I’ve missed something and it’s probably something great. So it goes.

Branded toys and branded writing

Sun, 12 Apr 2015 18:24:44 -0500

Play-Doh is often sold in branded kits with branded stamps. Cars and trains are no longer just cars, but characters from the movie Cars. Trains are now Thomas trains with particular personalities. When kids play with these branded toys, they often play into brand narratives rather than coming up with stories of their own.

Via Raul Gutierrez in “Empowering Kids to Create”

My first thought was about writing: I wonder if there’s a corollary between what he’s saying about Play-Doh (and Legos) and fan fiction vs. um, made-up fiction.

Play is play, right? Writing is writing, right?

Right?

Consider the difference

Tue, 17 Mar 2015 19:04:42 -0500

Listening vs. waiting to respond.

Nothing revolutionary here. Just consider the difference.

A thought from the President

Fri, 13 Mar 2015 10:40:14 -0500

Imagination is its own form of courage.

-Kevin Spacy as President Francis J. Underwood

A random thought:

Tue, 10 Mar 2015 18:45:10 -0500

Time spent building consensus could be better spent building momentum.

-Me

All books want our attention

Fri, 06 Mar 2015 13:20:15 -0600

All books want our attention, but not all of them want the same kind of attention, and good readers know this and make the necessary adjustments.

Source: The Pleasures of Reading in an Age of Distraction

"The expectation for your first draft is not that it is perfect, but that it is purposeful."

Fri, 06 Mar 2015 10:40:15 -0600

“The expectation for your first draft is not that it is perfect, but that it is purposeful.”

- Me, to a student who asked if she should worry about “spelling and punctuation and stuff” on her first draft.

Reflections and Resources on Close Reading

Sat, 28 Feb 2015 10:40:11 -0600

Purpose:

I’m writing this post to gather some ideas, definitions, resources, practices, and reflections on and about close reading.

Definitions:

Wikipedia:

Close reading describes, in literary criticism, the careful, sustained interpretation of a brief passage of text. Such a reading places great emphasis on the single particular over the general, paying close attention to individual words, syntax, and the order in which sentences and ideas unfold as they are read.

Kylene Beers:

Going back into a text, reexamining a passage over and over again…recognizing particular things in a text and stopping and saying to yourself, “What does this mean? and Why is this happening? and How does this affect my understanding of the tale? and How does it affect me?

Close reading is what happens when students are noticing and noting.

The Partnership for Assessment of Readiness for College and Careers:

Close, analytic reading stresses engaging with a text of sufficient complexity directly and examining meaning thoroughly and methodically, encouraging students to read and reread deliberately. Directing student attention on the text itself empowers students to understand the central ideas and key supporting details. It also enables students to reflect on the meanings of individual words and sentences; the order in which sentences unfold; and the development of ideas over the course of the text, which ultimately leads students to arrive at an understanding of the text as a whole.

My definition:

Multiple readings of a text¹, first for pleasure, then again in specific parts for noting new and interesting spots, asking questions of the text, and making connections with the text.

Theory:

There are our working definitions. Before we move on to what close reading looks like in practice, some theory:

Now, when we read something complex or in another way difficult, we may not know what to think about it. But that’s when … we ask questions. Of course, if you speak a question into the pages of a book, there’s not much point in holding it up to your ear for an answer. The technology doesn’t work like that.

But if you write the question in the book’s margin – even if you just scrawl a question mark – you are marking the scene of your confusion. Your are registering your puzzlement, not for the book’s sake but for your own sake. The interruption in the flow of your reading is a significant event, and you are quite literally taking note of it. Writing out the whole of your question is better than just flinging a question mark onto the page, because doing the former takes more time – it gets you out of the flow of mere passive reception – and because it forces you to articulate the precise nature of your vexation.

This is important for two reasons. First, it sharpens your readerly attention now. Having formulated what’s bothering you, you have it clearly in your mind, and so when you return to the text you will be readier to note anything that answers your device: the written-out question allows you at some later point to recapture what you are experiencing when you first read a passage.

Source: The Pleasures of Reading in an Age of Distraction by Alan Jacobs

Bridge:

Now a bridge from theory to practice:

Critical reading–active engagement and interaction with texts–is essential to your academic success at Harvard, and to your intellectual growth. Research has shown that students who read deliberately retain more information and retain it longer. Your college reading assignments will probably be more substantial and more sophisticated than those you are used to from high school. The amount of reading will almost certainly be greater. College students rarely have the luxury of successive re-readings of material, either, given the pace of life in and out of the classroom.

Source: Six Reading Habits to Develop in Your First Year at Harvard Via: Susan Hope

Harvard’s guide goes on to list the six habits with details under each. Here are the habits:

Preview
Annotate
Outline, Summarize, and Analyze
Look for repetitions and patterns
Contextualize
Compare and Contrast

Practice

My personal close reading strategies are the same strategies my students use. There’s really no “the book” so what we do is not by it. But it’s what we’ve landed on after reflecting on and revising what we’ve used.

So, our practice involves multiple readings of short texts – first for pleasure, kicked back and ‘just reading’ – then again in specific sections for annotating. We use three annotation symbols:

We use those same three symbols each time. Three seems to be a magic number, as it were.

Here’s what it looks like in action in something I’ve been reading recently.

Reflections:

It’s hard for me not to annotate while I read², which at times makes reading arduous. When I catch myself in that mode, I stop writing and only mark symbols. Then I come back and re-read just those sections and write what my thoughts and questions are.

For my students, there was an intereting trajectory. We close read the short story "Eleven” by Sandra Cisneros at the beginning of this school year six or seven times – I’ve literally lost count. First we just read it and talked about. The next week we spent a period just looking at sections where the character was showing emotional growth. The next week we took a period and just looked at how the author slowed down and sped up time. Then we took a day and looked at secondary characters. And so on. We used a different color of pencil/pen each time, but the same three symbols.

First, they enjoyed the process. They either hadn’t close read before or this was more purposeful than they were used to. Then, they got over it and it was “boring.” I don’t blame them. Practice³ can be boring. Once we hit that same text for the fourth or fifth time and they realized just how well they understood what the author was doing we got to a plateu of realization where they see the power and simplicty of the way we close read.

Resources:

John Spencer on Five Ways to Fix Close Reading

Kylene Beers and Robert Probst’s Notice and Note

Christopher Lehman and Kathleen Roberts’ Falling in Love with Close Reading

Caveat:

The more heavily you annotate a text – the more questions you ask and comments you venture – the more often you disrupt the continuity of reading. There are times when I have thought a book or article was choppy and disorganized, when (I later realized) the real problem was that I had been so active in my commentary that I had disabled myself from following a flow that was actually there. I was blaming the road for my own riding of the brakes.

Source: The Pleasures of Reading in an Age of Distraction by Alan Jacobs

Or viewings of a video or listens of a piece of audio, etc ↩︎
See the caveat section ↩︎
Just ask Allen Iverson ↩︎

Net neutrality is alive for the time being

Fri, 27 Feb 2015 10:40:21 -0600

Net neutrality has won at the FCC. In a 3-to-2 vote, the Federal Communications Commission today established a new Open Internet Order that implements strict net neutrality rules, including prohibitions on site and app blocking, speed throttling, and paid fast lanes.

Source: FCC Via: The Verge

Is your data "under control"?

Thu, 26 Feb 2015 13:20:22 -0600

they find that their students’ scores on measures of writing ability over the school year increased significantly compared with those of comparable students whose teachers did not use these strategies.

Source: Tom Guskey

Via: Scott Mcleod

I pulled the last half of a sentence out of a paragraph about measuring whether professional development improves student learning outcomes. The paragraph is from an article titled “Does It Make a Difference? Evaluating Professional Development”. The emphasis is mine.

A question: in your experience, in data-driven contexts, are student data being compared in psychometrically valid ways? In simpler terms, are you using a control group? Or is it possible you’re making some spurious correlations?