In my long term plan to take over the free world, it’s now time to take a pretty daring step forward -a step away from my comfy computer chair and into the real world.  This semester I’m opening my calendar for some free teacher training across the state.  The focus:

free hybrid online learning practices from the grass roots right

I’ll let the big dogs fight for policy change and negotiate for expensive contracts with districts.  I’m looking to take what I’ve learned in online education and spread it around in North Carolina amongst its wonderful face to face teachers.

If you’re a reader of my blog, you’re probably an online teacher who is part time online while teaching full time in your face to face school.  I want to come to your school during a faculty meeting or a training day, take 30 minutes of your school’s time, and get teachers pumped about hybrid online learning.  I will show teachers tools they can use at their school with their equipment, meaning I’ll tailor the presentation to what’s available at the individual school.  And in a time of tough budget cuts, I will come do this for free.

My plan is to get the old reputation up, pep talk the teachers, give NC educators a taste of the good stuff… and then, in a semester or so, I’ll start charging for trainings and consultations.  So, in short, get it while it’s free.

Trainings will consist of how to:

1.  Become textbook independent in your classroom for free, assuming you have the computer access you need for this.

2.  Get the computers you need for free.

3.  Use mobile learning techniques!

4.  Open your classroom digitally using wiki’s, google docs, and twitter so that students and parents get involved at home and become more accountable for student success!

5.  Use an LMS (like Blackboard) or create an LMS-free platform for student learning that can be reused, recycled, and improved year after year.

6.  (and) Gather data to improve instruction and processes in the classroom with the intention of improving teaching and learning across the state one classroom at a time.

If this sounds like something you’d be interested in seeing for free at your school, hit me up in the comments section of this blog and I’ll contact you off list.  Remember, because it’s free, the calendar will fill up fast.  I hope to see you at your school!

Shu

This article appeared recently in “Silhouettes,” an online journal focusing on at-risk youth and alternative education:

The Hybrid Classroom:
A Technological Focuson Student-CenteredLearning

Two years ago I was challenged by my principal to increase attendance in my English class. He said, “We’ve gotta make school somewhere they want to be. Can you make learning fun? Can you fix our attendance problem?” I didn’t know if I could at the time. I think since then, I’ve found a solution for my school and schools across the state.

In the daytime I’m a mild-mannered teacher at an alternative school in downtown Raleigh, NC. It has about 150 at-risk youths, and its average daily attendance is somewhere around 60%. From experience, I know that attendance is the number one obstacle for these students –it’s a side effect of every other obstacle they face in life. I wondered what could be done about attendance in the face of drug abuse, gang membership, teen pregnancy and motherhood, low basic skills, and even homelessness.

I felt challenged, and I wanted to improve my school and help my students. I researched games, and I started using a digital projector for fun, team learning lessons. I also integrated a hands-on aquaponics project into the course. Class was fun, but attendance didn’t increase. This was mainstream thinking, and I was convinced I had to get outside the box.

Desperate to try anything to move the average attendance numbers, I spread the word that I would shave the word ‘nerdy’ in the back of my head and run up and down Lake Wheeler Road if 85% of my students showed up on an upcoming Friday. I am a white teacher in an African American school and Weird Al’s ‘White and Nerdy’ had just been released; the kids thought this
would be great fun. They were pumped about it, and they really talked it up. I started to let my shaved head get prickly so “Nerdy” would be really legible, but on the designated day we just didn’t make the numbers.

The promise to make a fool out of myself was all I could do, was as far as I could go. I couldn’t promise any more, and I didn’t have anything else to put on the line. I was stumped.

I realized that I didn’t have the power to change the attendance rate at school –it’s a distinct possibility that my students’ attendance is out of their control because their lives are out of their control.

I realized I would need a new approach, and I really started to think outside the box. How could I make attendance a non-issue? How could I take this obstacle off the table for my students?

Technology was clearly the answer, but at the time I didn’t have the knowledge or the skills. I taught myself web design over the summer of 2007. By the next semester, I had a website up and running that I think will eventually change the way we approach education in North Carolina. The website, quite simply, contains the class in its entirety. It represented hundreds of hours of work at the time because I was self taught and learning. But when it was finished it had 90 days of direct instruction tied to the SCOS and copyright violation free due to a handy bit of html password coding. It continues to evolve, and now it is tied to Blackboard, which is what the district uses as a Content Management System. Blackboard has features like Tests and discussion Boards so it makes assessment easy. The website, however, utilizes web 2.0 tools for direct instruction, collaborative web tools for student interaction, and just about every interesting, innovative, annotative, tool I could get my hands on.

This is not simply an online class with students working silently at computers for 90 minutes like Novanet (yuck!). This class is an online hybrid, combining the best of both online learning and face to face learning.

I came back to school a man on a mission. In my room I already had 5 computers on the school network. I got 5 more computers donated from UNC Hospital. They were old, but they ran
Microsoft Office, Audacity, Sketchup, and a few other simple, free programs. I moved desks to form 3 distinct stations –the exploration station, the creation station, and the sharing session.
Classes would be entirely in 3 groups of 5 students with no whole-class lecture. Each group, a little contained pod, would start at one of these sessions, rotating every third of the period. In this way, nobody ever sits still for 90 minutes on the same task. At-risk youth don’t do
well sitting still for 90 minutes. The exploration station focuses on exploring information online and using web 2.0 resources. The creation station focuses on using the information from the
exploration station to ‘create’ products that show learning. And the sharing session, which is centered on the digital projector with a wireless mouse and keyboard that can be passed around,
focuses on teams of students learning together to discuss issues and learn in teams.

An early issue I faced was how to get the products from the creation station computers, which weren’t online, to me. Small flash drives donated from a local electronics outlet, Tiger Direct, solved the problem. Right away I saw that students could email work to me from the computers that were online. They made gmail accounts the third day of class. A happy side effect of our system is that the entire class is paperless –we’ve saved thousands of dollars in paper over the last couple of years. We don’t use a textbook either, which will be a big money saver for school districts who adopt this model. Another side effect for the kids is that they are learning the benefits of email –they don’t lose work! If I’m missing an assignment and a student claims to have turned it in, I say “prove it.” The student can go to gmail, open sent mail, and look up the
day and session the assignment was sent. This has all of the benefits of a bulky portfolio with none of the hindrance that a bulky hard copy offers.

Students who have a hard time reading can read along with text to speech sites, and many assignments require students to record audio in audacity, which is a free download. Students use headsets in class to listen to audio books and record their own audio, and English comes alive, leaving the printed page in the dust. Teachertube gives students a chance to see excerpts of plays, and mp3’s give them a chance to hear poetry performed. In a way, the website has become, for me, the embodiment of the evolution of education.

Another important evolution this class exemplifies is the online grade book. I put the grade book on Google docs so students can see exactly what they’re missing and how they’re doing at any
given time. I ask parents to check their kids’ grades once per week, and they take responsibility for their child’s performance. In this way we share the responsibility of student success. There
is no personal information like names on the document of course, but having grades online makes students responsible for those little numbers. It’s better than locking the grades away in a little green notebook and then asking kids to be responsible for them –how does a kid do that, exactly?

My only problem the first semester was that my students, poor, at-risk, inner-city youths, didn’t have computers at home. To solve this issue, I found The Kramden Institute (www.kramden.org). The Kramden Institute is a nonprofit organization that gives refurbished
computers to hard working kids who don’t have computers in the home. They give away nice computer systems with Windows XP running at around 2.5 GHz, which is fast, and Kramden
provides free technical support to its recipients for as long as they’re in school. I became the Director of Education for Kramden a month or so after getting computers for my students.
Now I find students all over the state and help them cross the digital divide. It’s a great organization, and I encourage everyone I meet to check it out online.

At this point my students had computers at home, donated USB drives, their assignments were online, and they had 24 hour access to their grades in ‘real time.’ It was time to really settle in and pilot the program.

A year later, the classroom looks like a dream. I’ve read Harry Wong’s book, “The First Days of School” about three times, and it’s amazing what the class looks like by day 15. It’s about 90% student driven. The kids come in on time, and while I still hear teachers in the hallway begging kids to hurry up and get started, my students are quietly writing in their journals. Students in the sharing session start the online stopwatch, which the digital projector
counts down for everyone (http://www.online-stopwatch.com).

Seven minutes later, the timer goes off. The kids put their journals away and begin to work in their stations. The timer is set for 25 minutes, and a second browser tab is opened for a second timer set to 26 minutes. The students in the sharing session read the instructions out loud, passing the mouse and keyboard around while tracking their reading with a laser pointer in case I need to look up and pronounce a word or in case anyone loses his or her place. While they are working together to finish the instructions for the session, I’m floating to the exploration station and creation station to make sure everyone is on task and answering questions. I’m sometimes involved with the sharing session, but for the most part it runs on its own. The timer goes off again, and the students know they have a minute until it’s time to switch. Students email their assignments from the exploration station, and work at the creation station gets saved on flash drives. Then the ‘move’ signal buzzes, and everyone rotates. The same times get put on the timer for the next sessions, and the class continues to operate consistently and smoothly.

Sure, 60% attendance is still a problem for the school. But the solution isn’t to make the students come to school. The solution is to take down the wall –to not allow attendance to be a barrier for these kids. Now they can be successful no matter what their situation is –the responsibility is theirs, but the opportunity, the possibility, is in their hands. They might not be able to control their wild home lives, but they can control how they do in class.

“How can one offer lessons online that are as effective as a teacher in class?”is a question I get from some of the older teachers, some who are slow to see change as beneficial. What they
don’t understand is that the internet is more than just a place to keep text. With the development of web 2.0 and now 3.0, direct instruction is available through avatars, screen tutorials, and plenty of other lecture-presentation tools if lecture is really the way you want to
go. Personally, I question the value of a lecture for more than ten minutes at a time, but the beauty of technology is that there is room for every kind of teaching style.

Personally, I like discussion. And when it comes to discussion, there are LOTS of places students can discuss issues online with each other. Blackboard and a free, open source product, Moodle,
both come to mind. Online content tools for the hybrid model are numerous, and every semester my course content gets better and better, largely because I improve the wheel in my planning
period; I don’t reinvent it every year.

I’ve recently presented web 2.0 and the hybrid classroom at the North Carolina Technology in Education Conference in Raleigh, NC, and it’s my goal to tell more people how to benefit the
education industry by taking down the attendance barrier, by teaching and using technology, by saving money on textbooks and paper, and by ensuring education keeps up with our evolving
society. I’m available to consult and can be contacted at mpshumake@yahoo.com

-shu

Why Instant Message? We already have email…

School after school I visit has blocked instant messengers. Yet, over and over we encourage collaboration. The kids know how to instant message, and they ‘collaborate’ during tests. Schools answer this unauthorized collaboration, better known as cheating, with blocks on all instant messengers. Even the teachers’ instant messengers in the webmail we (over)pay for is blocked. Here’s why we should fight that:

Yesterday, I was teaching my students when to use good and when to use well. I was mid-sentence, when the burp of the overhead intercom interrupted me with a crackling announcement that J__ Smith was to come to the office. I rolled my eyes at my kids, and after wondering aloud where I had been, we got back to it. Then, the classroom phone rang. It was another teacher a few doors down with a question about a student. After that, a student walked in from the office with a note admitting him to class with a time of ten minutes ago. I asked the kid where he had been, and he said he had just left the office. I figured he had been wandering around the school aimlessly for ten minutes, but I didn’t want to interrupt the lesson further to investigate. Again, I got back to work after wondering where I had been before being interrupted. A few minutes later, we had an overhead announcement that the school was facing a ‘code yellow’ situation, and all teachers should act accordingly.
I remembered that there had been a meeting seven months ago about which code meant what, but we hadn’t used any of the codes since. I poked my head into the hall, and I saw other teachers like lemurs on a lonely prairie, glancing curiously about. Nobody knew what a code yellow meant. Was it a tornado or a lockdown drill? One meant everyone filed into the hall, the other meant we lock our doors and turn off the lights. Uh-oh.

We speak in code because we don’t want students to panic… but the information is important NOW -no time to wait for people to check email when they get around to it. We interrupt each other and distract students, because we need immediate action. But there’s a better way, and the kids already know the solution. It’s instant messaging. Imagine if while teaching, there was a brief ding from my desktop or laptop. It would mean that I could finish my sentence and find out what the office needs without missing a beat. Teachers could communicate… and collaborate… with ease. But most importantly, school safety would be positively affected. Rather than autonomous classroom units, teachers would suddenly become a net of nurturing, communicating guardians, working together to protect and support our students. Support instant messaging for teachers in your school. It will mean fewer interruptions during class, and it could mean the difference between a tornado drill and a lockdown situation.

-Shu

Do you have a project and need supplies, or do you need some technology in your classroom?
Is the principal muttering about money not growing on trees every time you bring it up?

Adopt-A-Classroom is a nonprofit organization that helps teachers get money directly into their classrooms without worrying about budgetary beaurocracy. Nobody tells the teacher how to spend the money; it’s donated to your classroom, so it’s your call. This year, I got money for:

1. ten headsets with microphones; now my students can record answers in Audacity, a program I’ll go over in a blog coming soon. They can also record narrations in PowerPoint presentations.
2. 512 mb USB drives for every student; now my students can keep all their work on their keychain rather than in a giant 3-ring notebook. It’s saved the school hundreds of dollars in copies already.
3. an extra printer with ink; now my student can print color copies or black and white for when they do need an occasional hard copy.
4. 10 USB optical mouses; now my students don’t take the balls out (why do kids do that?), the mouses actually work instead of getting filled with crud, and they have the little wheel on the top of the mouse that makes navigation easy.
5. flowers and a terrarium; now my classroom looks and smells nice. Of course, the terrarium has a big Venus Fly Trap and lots of baby crickets… kind of a guy’s version of a flower garden.
6. a scanner; now I can take old handouts, scan them to .pdf format, email them to the kids’ free google accounts, and the kids can keep them on their USB drives. Again, it’s paper-free. I can also scan in handouts and then project the .pdf version on the wall using my digital projector.
7. a digital projector, which is incredibly valuable in myriad ways. More on that in future blogs.

All you have to do is sign up for an account. After you sign in, you’ll follow the steps to ask for cash. It’s all self-explanatory, so I won’t redundantly list the instructions here.

There are a couple of little tidbits I will divulge though.

1. The staff at Adopt-A-Classroom will answer your emails personally and quickly.

2. When you get a cash donation, you do not have to spend it on the stores the website provides. If you email them and tell them that you can spend the money better locally, then they’ll just ask you for a receipt and then reimburse you.

They’re great, because they handle all the tax documentation that your donators might need. Most importantly, though, since ‘you’ solicited the money, you decide how it’s spent.

Now it’s time to think about all those contacts you have outside the world of education. All you need is email addresses. Who has money and might donate personally? What businesses might donate to your classroom for the tax break? What are you teaching that people in the community might be excited about? Who might be excited about it? What could you buy to make the lessons really cool for kids?
Now go get some cash!

-Shu

Grades, grades, grades…

I’m a Virtual School teacher, and I’m also a f2f (tech-speak for face-to-face, or ‘regular’ teacher). For both, I use blackboard. I like blackboard for the most part, but it hasn’t changed much from its original version, published at the conclusion of WWII. It holds assignments well, but the gradebook is largely responsible for my lack of hair.

The good thing about blackboard’s gradebook is that students can access their grades, and they are thereby responsible for keeping up with their grades. Unfortunately, that’s the only good thing about blackboard’s gradebook. So I don’t lose myself in disparaging comments about blackboard though, I’m going to instead focus on the merits of my newly found friend, Google Docs.

First, get a Google account. You don’t have to get a google email address to do this. But for Pete’s sake, get a google account. There is much, much more to google than searching. I could spend a series of blogs explaining how educators can use google features… hmmm, good idea! But don’t wait for me to get to it! Check it out yourself.

With your Google account ready, check out my gradebook. It’s ok. I promise. It’s all confidential, because there are no names available. Instead, I ‘hide’ the names column unless someone else logs on, and I can see when someone else logs on.

I can make changes. Students can’t change anything or see hidden columns.
I can add comments that pop up when the mouse scrolls over their cells explaining assignments.
I can add different pages for different classes.
I can access the spreadsheet from my cell phone!
And I can create formulas that do all the calculations for me.

Students, administrators, teachers, parents… anyone can see the grades. But only people who actually have the students’ ID numbers know which grades belong to whom. This makes students’ grades, students’ responsibility. However, I edit the grades directly on the page, which makes this feature waaay faster than blackboard, Wise, or other cumbersome, expensive, outdated, central-office-mandated programs.

Check out google docs, and create your spreadsheet. If you’re learning how to replicate your courses consistently, then you should be able to recycle the Google Docs Spreadsheet year after year. Doing this gives me more time to contact students and parents, improve future instructions and assignments, and be a better teacher.

-Shu

There is a new product out for use in education. It’s expensive, but it’s valuable as a data-gathering tool. It comes with software and about fifty credit-card-sized remotes. The remotes link up to a computer program, and the program shows what the button pushers pushed. The software works with PowerPoint, and the idea is NCLB-centered. That is, it’s all about testing. A teacher with an EOC (end of course), state-given final can design PowerPoint slides about his or her test. Then, the teacher shows the questions, the kids ‘answer’ them, and voila! -instant data.

With this tool, teachers have very pretty data that tells them what kids do and don’t know. As the first part of the KWL, (what we do know, want to know, and what we learned) this has been proven valuable data. The kids love the remotes, the planning is easy, and the tool helps teachers focus their lesson plans on where the students need the most assistance.

I’m a wine salesman as well as a teacher, and I often find myself talking shop while ‘at work’ in the wine world. Recently, at a wine tasting, I was talking about the remotes, my new toys in my arcenal. The woman I was talking to asked me how much my new toy cost the school. When I told her, she snorted wine, shocked. She asked me why I haddn’t bought 25 small dry-erase boards, put them under my kids’ seats, and used the PowerPoint slides to the same ends. The data wouldn’t be as pretty, but it would be pretty clear when the kids wrote a letter and held up the boards simultaneously whether they knew their stuff or not. Seriously, I told her that she should quit what she was doing and become an educational consultant. It was brilliant, and it would save thousands. I asked, what did she do, anyway? She told me she was teaching in a school in Raleigh, where she had been teaching for fifteen years. And that’s the value of experience, I reckon.

-Shu

Three years ago, I worked in Caldwell County. Caldwell is a small district, and I was surprised to find my classroom outfitted with a digital projector and a brand new laptop. It was my first experience with what I’d call toys in education, and I couldn’t wait to figure out some new, cool ways to use them. My goal is to not only ensure student learning, but to also capture their genuine interest and enthusiasm.

Other teachers drooled over these new technological tools with DVD’s in hand, looking forward to widescreen showings of documentaries, films, and shorts. Eh, not a lot of imagination, but it’d work. I wanted to go a step farther though. There was a young guy down the hall who brought his Playstation II on teacher workdays. Innovative and a lot of fun -but it wasn’t getting any student learning done. We played some pretty mean WWII flight simulations though.
As is often the case, my laziness sparked genius. Necessity is the mother of invention, and I figured out quickly that I didn’t need to lower that darn screen over my white dry erase board every time I used the projector. One time, with the screen still up and the projector shining on the slick surface of the board, I couldn’t find my laser pointer when I needed to point out an error in grammar. So, I grabbed a marker and stepped into the world of interactive projector editing. I wrote right on the board on top of the projected paragraph. It was genius. Within five or ten minutes, there were two teams of students, one with a blue marker, and another with a red marker. Each team took turns sending delegates to the board to edit a mistake-riddled paragraph written quickly in Word on the laptop. Kids were interested, they were interacting, and they were learning.

I looked into my collection of educational software to see what else I could find to use on this, what I now call, the ghetto smartboard, and I quickly discovered that the discs that come with Glencoe textbooks have almost every worksheet and book exercise in pdf format. Suddenly, these worksheets had new life and purpose. I had scoffed at worksheets in the past, disdaining worksheet-filled classes as inept busy-work centers. But now the worksheets became interactive games where students eagerly wrote answers on the board, stumbling into learning opportunity after learning opportunity.

A year and a half later, I saw a smartboard for the first time. It looked like a good idea, but I didn’t really think there was much it could do that I couldn’t do with my laptop and projector. The ghetto smartboard is more fun, because students can write directly on it. For some reason, students love writing on the board with those dry erase markers. Using the ghetto smartboard is cheap, which is great for principals who want their teachers to be innovative but don’t have the cash for more expensive smartboards. And, most importantly, it aids in student learning.

Hope that helps put something new in your toolbox,

-Shu