Todd’s Teaching & Technology Talk

It is a very busy year here at Byhalia High School! We are now finishing up the first nine-weeks grading period and have gotten most of the profession development programs that we have planned for the year underway.

One of these programs in particular that I want to share with all of you is what we have decided to call the Byhalia Instructional Leadership Development Institute (BUILD). This institute is basically a technology initiative. At the beginning of the year the administration selected six teachers who we felt already had a level of proficiency using various technologies in their instruction, and asked them if they would be interested in being a part of a technology team. Our chances of getting the response that we wanted what probably not hurt at all by the offer of a new MacBook Pro to use as their own for as long as they remained with us, but none the less they all agreed. Since that time the group has spent five full days with Dr. Clif Mims, head of the Instructional Design and Technology department at the University of Memphis. The main objective of these days spent with Clif has been to introduce the group to web 2.0 tools that are useful in the classroom, yes, but as those of you who know Clif know, “It’s not about the technology, it’s about the learning.” We’ve been asking the teachers to write objectives that reach into those upper levels of Bloom’s while at the same time incorporate the use of some of the tools they have been introduced to.

A few of the tools that the group has been really excited about are:

Wordle – a word cloud of any text you choose

Glogster – digital posters

Bitstrips – make your own comic strips

Posterous – a super easy way to blog

Prezi – a new twist on presentations

Diigo – sharing your favorite things from the web, no more notecards for research papers

Zap Reader – speed reading any text you choose

Story Bird – write and illustrate your own books

And these are just a few of the things that we have talked about. For a more complete rundown of the things that we have been doing you can visit the BILD Homepage.

Next week the group will start presenting their favorite tools to the rest of the faculty. I’m excited to see if they are able to transfer their learning to their peers.

I really wish that we had one, but unfortunately I don’t think that our website is going to impress anyone. I want our site to be one that people enjoy visiting, one that’s user friendly, one that’s up-to-date containing information that people can’t wait to get their hands on, but our site barely informs people of the basics. Now, I promise that I’m not criticizing those who created it or those who administrate it. They are overworked and underpaid. There is already too much work for the two of them to get done in a day. That is why I want your input, so that I can offer my help to improve what we have. I’m really embarrassed to include a link, but I will anyway just because I want your input.

Byhalia High School

Here’s where I really want input from you. What is it that makes a good school website? What examples do you have? Whose is the best? Most importantly, how do I get our site to the level that we are looking for?

I really like the Corinth school district’s site. What do you think?

My very first attempt at a podcast, so be kind!

This episode is about professional development opportunities being planned at BHS for the 2009-2010 school year. 

Hope this works!

bhs-episode-1

“Try to learn something new everyday!” We hear people giving that advice all the time. We understand the wisdom behind having the attitude that says never to be satisfied. We realize that there is so much out there to be learned and if we don’t continue growing then we are destined to fall behind. 

Having said all of that, we also have so much to do in our lives that it seems like too much to ask that we should try to add learning something new to the “to-do” list of our day. After all many of us have a hard time balancing the things that we already know and do. But sometimes its just worth the extra effort!

I have spent a good deal of my year this year learning something new. As many of you know, I left the middle school classroom this year to go into school administration. What a learning experience! I went to classes (just like in my teacher education program) where they tried to tell me how to do the job that was set before me, and I learned a lot while there, but there was no way that they could prepare me for everything that I would face. In fact they didn’t tell me anything about how to prepare for a federal programs audit, how to write a plan of improvement when your school missed AYP because of participation rate, or how to stretch $30,000 worth of textbook money to satisfy all thirty-four teachers who are begging you for new books just to name a few. I had to learn these things and many more in just the same way that most of us learn…completely on the fly. I don’t know that I can tell you that I learned something new every day this year, but I can certainly tell you that I learned a lot. And I am sure that the learning will continue.

The next big step in my learning is occurring even as I type this post. I am working today on my very first Mac computer. With the funds that our school is receiving as a result of school improvement we are purchasing forty-two Apple computers and placing them into what has previously been an all PC school district. I am really excited about the shift, but at the same time turning this computer on yesterday almost felt like starting all over. I realized that I have a lot to learn, in fact I even had trouble figuring out how to do something as basic as opening a program. Obviously, I figured it out, and maybe if I work hard at it and ask lots of questions of those who know more than I, and I don’t give up I will keep on learning something new. 

Maybe even every day!

During the spring semester of 2009, a team of students from Byhalia High School received the opportunity to participate in the Mississippi Area Remapping Strategies (MARS) project. This project enabled these students to accomplish two major goals. Our first goal was to introduce students to GPS/GIS technology. It seems that this technology has exploded over the last several years and the students wanted to learn more about it. Our second goal was to use this technology and what was learned to do something that would benefit the community where Byhalia High School is located.

Initial contact was made with town officials including Mayor O.R. “Scooter” Dempsey and Mr. William Rose, Public Works Director to determine what projects might be done. During the course of conversations with these men it was determined that there was a need to map the locations of all fire hydrants inside the city limits of Byhalia. This effort would not only produce an accurate count and location of the hydrants, but would also provide information about fire protection coverage in the town.

Once the determination was made to proceed with this project, students, with the help of sponsors Sterling Brown, Lisa Martin, Nichole Sanders, and myself began the process of learning how to collect the necessary data in the field. It didn’t take long to learn the basic operation of the handheld GPS units which were provided through MARS, and once this training was done the students were off. They spent many afternoons going through the streets of Byhalia locating and marking the fire hydrants that they found. The only thing that was able to hold them back was the unpredictable weather.

There is no doubt about the excitement that the students had concerning the work they were doing, and naturally we wanted to share information about the work with others. Mr. Brown arranged for few student members of the team and myself to go and present a summary of the project to the local Lions Club. I spoke for a few minutes and then opened the floor for questions or comments. Many members of the Lions had questions about the technology, and how the final project would be presented and used. As a result of this meeting we also got the opportunity to meet with the fire chief of Byhalia, Mr. Leland Reed. We shared the work that had taken place up to that point and he was very excited and even had suggestions on where we might look for hydrants that we hadn’t already found.

During the course of the data collection phase of the project an attempt was made to learn how to transfer the data that had been collected to the computer and the mapping software provided to the team. This is where we realized we would definitely need help. We found that help in the form of Matt Hanks and Andrew McColgan from the DeSoto County GIS Department. Matt and Andrew were extremely helpful in teaching the students and sponsors how to utilize the features of the ArcView software package. They also showed us other resources such as the Mississippi Automated Resource Information System (MARIS) website. Matt was even able to acquire high quality photographic imagery for us to use to accurately represent the locations that we had plotted. The team was then able to merge the data with this imagery and other resources to produce a map that we feel is a very accurate representation of the fire hydrant locations in Byhalia, Mississippi.

The only thing left to do now is go down to Jackson on May 5th and present the project.We will spend this last week getting ready for that.

There have been many benefits as a result of the MARS project done by the students at Byhalia High School this year. First of all, we believe the community has benefited because they now have an accurate count, location and condition assessment of the fire hydrants. The total number of hydrants located ended up being 130 which is a significant difference from the 57 that were previously known. Secondly, the students got the opportunity to be introduced to a new technology that many of them got very excited about. In fact, I was told by one member of the team that he now intends to make GPS/GIS his career. Finally, we had fun! We enjoyed the work so much that we do not intend for this project to be over just yet. Our next step will be to take this project and with the help of town officials to continue to improve upon it so that it might be even more useful for them. The possibilities are endless! Who knows where it may take us?

For those of you that have been reading this blog for the last month or so you know that I have been on a bit of a mission lately. Ever since I discovered the world of 2.0 I have been a little bit obsessed with trying to wrap my mind around every tool I could get my mouse on. To some degree it has been overwhelming, but it has also been an amazing start to what I hope will be one of the greatest growth spurts in my educational life.

Having said that, I have found one tool that has definitely out-shined the rest at least in initial usefulness. Many of you probably already know more about Twitter than I, but for those of you that might not yet know what the big deal is let me have just a couple of minutes of you day to tell you why I think Twitter is such a great tool for teachers.

First of all, it is super easy! It has been my experience that lots of the teachers that I have worked with are a little bit afraid of new technology. They don’t want to bother with something that takes forever to download, setup and learn to use. Twitter couldn’t be much easier to get started with. The setup takes a matter of a few minutes, and if you can type 140 characters and click update you can get started.

But the real value comes in the network that you are able to build. Since I got started only about a month or so ago I have begun following about 80 of the most intelligent, well read, well connected educational technologist in the world, and I am learning so much from them. I am being pointed toward great articles on topics that I’m interested in. I am being given links to websites that feature tools and activities that I can pass on to my teachers to use in their classes. I am engaging in conversations that make me think about things in ways that I might not otherwise think about them. The people in my network are interested in educational technology mostly, but you can build your network to include any topics you might be interested in. Its as easy as do a search for people who are talking about what you’re talking about. Choose a few to follow and get the conversation started. Pretty soon your network will grow and the learning expands. Education, the Internet, technology, or whatever topic you want to know more about can often be overwhelming to tackle on your own, but when you enlist 100 or so friends to work together with it becomes much more manageable.

A couple of weeks ago I was watching PTI on ESPN and Michael Wilbon said, “Twitter is the worst thing to ever happen to America!” Well, I’m not sure why he would say anything like that, nor do I have any idea what his experience with it is. I will say that while I am not ready to say it is the best thing to ever happen to education or to me, it is without a doubt my favorite and thusfar most useful new learning tool. If you haven’t given it a try, I hope you will. Who knows? You might just learn something new!

Technology is growing perhaps faster today than it ever has, and I for one am excited about pretty much every bit of it. This growth offers so many opportunities for us to change the way that we learn, work, play and live. Maybe one of the most exciting and coolest technologies to me is GPS and GIS. I have a handheld GPS that I sometimes use when I go out hunting or fishing. I have a TomTom that I use in the car when we go on long trips or to places that I’m not familiar with. Now I even have an iPhone that has GPS technology built right into it so that the apps I use know where I am without me having to input anything. Amazing, and sometimes a little scary!

Needless to say when Joyce Brasell called me and asked if we at Byhalia High School would be interested in participating in Mississippi Area Remapping Strategies (MARS) which would introduce some of our students to this exciting field, I could barely wait until she was finished describing it before I said yes.

Through the project our team of 8 students, along with Lisa Martin (Geography Teacher), Nicole Sanders (U.S. History Teacher) and myself have been provided with 2 handheld GPS units, a laptop computer, and all the mapping software necessary to conduct a project benefiting the town of Byhalia. Our team decided to map the locations of all the fire hydrants within the city limits in order to assist the fire department and the city engineer in determining areas of need.

Up until today our work has consisted of using the handhelds to mark the hydrants as waypoints. Today we learned how to take the data from the handheld and put it into the software along with maps and other imagery that would take our work and turn it into something useful. It was amazing! The looks on the students’ faces when they actually started to see the work coming together was priceless. I will admit that it seemed as if they had begun to loose interest in what we were doing, but not after today. A big thanks goes out to Matt Hanks, Director of Desoto County GIS and his co-worker Andrew for coming by today and showing us all the cool things we could now do with the data we had collected. I really don’t think we would have figured it out without their help.

I am so glad that my kids are getting to be involved in a project like this. Not only are they learning about a great new technology that some of them may even decide is a viable career option for them, but they are also getting to work on a project that they believe in and that they feel will make a difference. It’s amazing how hard students will work when motivated by those kinds of things!

My in-laws came to visit us yesterday for church and lunch afterwards. It was a great visit! My father-in-law is a professor at Freed-Hardeman University and easily one of the smartest human beings that I know. Yesterday however, I got to teach him something! We were sitting at the dinner table having lunch and he said, “Do you know what Twitter is?” Now, being a newbie myself I was very careful in what I chose to tell him, but I did get to share with him the basic idea. I also spent a few minutes showing him how many of us use Twitter as a learning tool.

This opened up a conversation about the use of technology in education. During the course of this conversation he told me something that I found pretty hard to believe. This year Freed-Hardeman started a program in which every incoming freshman receives a Mac Book and an iPhone or iPod Touch. Wonderful, right? Sure that sounds great. Lots of colleges are doing this sort of thing. That wasn’t what was unbelievable. The unbelievable part was that some of the teachers on campus had banned these computers from being used in their classes, and had to be told by the president of the university to change that policy.

I hope that we’re not naive enough to think that resistance to technology integration is a K-12 problem only. This story just illustrates that if our colleges and universities are supposed to be leading the way then we might not be as far down the path as we hoped.

I always wondered how people created those cool online surveys. Now, thanks to my friend Dr. Clif Mims, I know. Survey Monkey is a great site that offers free online software that is super easy to use for creating these surveys. The variety of different types of questions that you can include is wonderful. I can think of tons of ways to use this service in the educational world.

Here is a survey on teacher use of technology that I created. Check it out and let me know what you think.

Teacher Technology Survey

Education is a tough business! The expectations are high, while the resources and support often times remain low. Stress often becomes an issue. The other day I even had someone ask if it was possible to use school improvement money (federal grant) to hire a full time massage therapist for teachers to visit during their planning time. I think she was joking, but at the same time hopeful that I might say yes. Because of these difficulties I personally believe that a good sense of humor is one of the most essential of all educator tools.

The other day I made a quick stop by the teachers’ lounge during lunch just to visit and see how my teachers were doing. While I was there I heard a story that really made me laugh and sort of illustrates some of the pitfalls of being a public school teacher. I promised I would do everything I could to hide the identity of the teacher involved in this incident, so names, and classes have been changed to protect the frustrated.

It seems that Mr. Lewis went to the closet inside his classroom a few days ago to retreive some materials needed for the project that his classes would be doing the next day. All the students and many of the other teachers had gone home for the day. Mr. Lewis always keeps this closet locked so that his students won’t go in and take things or disrupt the order that he had achieved there. When he entered the closet the door shut behind him like many doors in schools are designed to do. Mr. Lewis went on to gather the things he needed and proceeded to the door only to discover that the inside door handle had been removed. The maintenance staff had likely “robbed Peter to pay Paul” and used it in some more important area of the school, but at the moment no area was more important to Mr. Lewis. He was trapped!

His only goal in life was now getting out of that closet. He began to look around for any tool or implement that he might be able to use to open the door. There was nothing that was of any help. He then began to consider breaking down the door, but this door was solid and there was nothing in the closet heavy or sturdy enough to aid in that effort. Then it dawned on him that his cell phone was in his pocket. Thank goodness we haven’t banned teachers from carrying them yet! He removed the phone from his pocket and opened it up only to find that, surprise, surprise there was no signal inside the closet. He thought, “I’m going to die right here in the closet in my classroom!” He banged hard on the door, waited and listened, but no one came. In a last ditch effort, he climbed up onto a shelf, turned on the phone once again and “hallelujah!” one bar. An embarrassing call up to the front office and a short wait ended his terrible ordeal.

I am sure that during all of this it probably wasn’t easy for him to find any humor in the closet at all, but I am happy to report that he is no worse for ware, and he has an absolutely great story to tell in which he sees plenty to laugh about now.

Can’t you just see the headlines?

Teacher Dies From Budget Cuts On Doorknobs