Growing in the SAMR Model

My school has a one to one MacBook program.  Every student that I teach brings a school issued lap top to class, and we do many different kinds of things using technology.  There are good ways to do this, and there are bad ways to do this.

The first year of our program (four years ago) was amazing.  We all learned new tools and how to express the same material in new ways.  Kids were making videos left and right, and it was all new and exciting.  As happens with many projects, we reached a plateau.  In the second year, we reverted into what was comfortable while keeping a sort of veneer of technology over it.  This is the way to fail with technology.  Our awesome technology team recognized this and made sure that we would keep growing.

Enter the SAMR model.  If you are in education, you probably know what the SAMR model is and can skip this paragraph.  For the uninitiated, SAMR stands for Substitution, Augmentation, Modification, and Redefinition.  As you move from one level to another, you increase thinking level, creative skills, 21st century tool usage, etc.  An example of Substitution would be taking notes on the computer.  It is essentially the same as taking notes on paper with some slight improvements (search ability, the ability to input pictures, etc).  Augmentation means that the technology provides a feature that couldn't have been done to the same project (e.g. inputting links to youtube videos to augment written work).  Where you want to be is called "above the line" because the M and R portions of the model bring you into the good pedagogical places.

That first year of the program, we had jumped from nothing to the S and A levels of the scale.  It was exciting because it was new.  Jumping straight to M and R would have been overwhelming for everyone, so it was appropriate that we were at that level in the first year.  After that plateau, our awesome tech team (Can you tell I like them?) encouraged us to LEVEL UP!  They made it fun by inventing "missions" that we could earn badges for completing.  The missions involve using new tools, watching TED talks on education, speaking at a faculty meeting about technology, etc.  We earn the badges by doing discussion board posts.

Another addition was the technology integration meeting.  Each quarter, we meet with the media/tech specialist to discuss how we would like to implement technology and how she can help us do it.  At our first meeting this year, I wanted to hit the R on the SAMR model.  R means Redefinition.  It means accomplishing something that was unthinkable before we began using technology in the classroom.  We decided that we would have my 8th grade make their own website about the chemical elements.

In my next post, I'll tell you how that website is going.

Spirit Week

One of the age old traditions of school is Spirit Week.  Right before the homecoming game (for us that has been basketball because we have only had a football team for two years), every school in America has this week where students dress in theme days.  There's Pajama Day or Superhero Day or Tacky Day.

How does dressing as a superhero show your school spirit?  On its own, it doesn't.  If I come to school on February 3rd dressed in my pajamas, no one is going to think, "Wow, look at how much school spirit Miss Hawks has."  Instead, they would probably call my mom (my emergency contact) to come take me to a home for the bewildered.  So, why was wearing my pajamas this week different? 

 Answer:  It was unifying. 

For all its distractions and schedule changing and chaos, Spirit Week serves a purpose.  It is the week when people realize that looking silly together is better than looking normal alone.  Since everyone is going to be dressed tacky, you attempt to be the tackiest.  No one feels silly until they realize they need to stop at the grocery store on the way home. 



A few years ago, a student put on her volleyball uniform and bemoaned how silly she thought she looked in her high socks and knee pads.  A wiser teacher than I was standing nearby.  She said, "You look like a volleyball player.  If you go on the court in your regular clothes, you will look silly."  The student happily skipped off to her game, knowing that this outfit meant she was on the team.  The look she thought was bad only a few minutes earlier became a mark of achievement. 

On Monday, I told my nephew that he was quirky.  After asking me what that meant, he didn't like it.  He didn't want to be quirky.  I said, "Well, that's too bad because it is why I like you."  My mom said to him, "Everybody is quirky, so there is nothing you can do about it."  We all think that being the same is what makes us normal when the reality is being quirky is what makes us normal - because everyone is quirky.  This should unify us every bit as much as dressing in school colors does. 

Schedule Changes Give Everyone ADHD

I don't know if this happens in other professions, but I've been in enough schools to know it is universal for education.  When there is any change to the "normal" schedule, everyone becomes ADHD.

I am in an area of the country that doesn't get a lot of winter weather; so when we do, we overreact just a bit.  School is sometimes called off altogether for a half inch of snow.  Typically, we get more ice than snow, which is a different thing.  A quarter inch of ice is worse than any amount of snow when it comes to driving.

My least favorite call in all of this is the two hour delay.  I would rather be at school all day or not at all than deal with the chaos of the two hour delay.  It shortens our class periods to 30-35 minutes.   Students believe this isn't enough time to accomplish anything, so they come in expecting to do nothing in every class.  Teachers know this is only 15 minutes shorter than normal, so we should be able to get some things done.  It changes lunch times and eliminates or daily snack time (because you just ate breakfast an hour ago, for heavens sake).

Listening to us on these days, you would think that we had been set on another planet with no instructions at all.  In reality, it is only a slight change, but the perception is that EVERYTHING has changed.  Furthermore, it happens EVERY time.  Last year was a particularly strange year, in which we had six days off for weather, two early release days, and four two hour delays.  You would think by the fourth one, we would all know when to go to lunch, but we didn't.  We were still all in a tizzy trying to figure out where to go next.

What is it about a change in routine that gives kids and adults alike the attention span of toddlers?  Does this happen in the animal kingdom?  If you walk your dog at a different time, do you throw off his whole day?  Does it make them confused about when they are going to eat?  Someone should get a grant to study this phenomenon. 

Hyperlinking Brains - Part 2

In my last post, I talked about why I decided to write my own textbook for 8th grade as a way of taking advantage of their hyperlink prone minds.  I have now been using the book for one semester, so I cannot yet fully speak to how it is going but I do have a few observations about it.  I also have some advice for anyone out there who would like to try for themselves.

My Observations
1.  On the first day of school, the kids are super impressed.  When your textbook was written by your teacher, you think that person is an expert whether they are or not.  I have tried to tell them that it isn’t like I had to get it published, but they don’t get that. 
2.  All media is in one place (offline).  Our school as a great LMS where I can put videos and other resources; but you have to be online to get to them.  Having them in the book has been great because they don’t have to be online to use it.  This means they can still do their homework on an athletic bus or if the network goes down.
3.  I was able to use the analogies, mnemonic devices, examples, and stories in the book that I think work well with the material.  If you have been teaching longer than two years, you have a favorite analogy for double replacement reactions, an acronym that you love for helping kids remember a list, a great example of iambic pentameter, or the perfect illustration that helps your kids wrap their minds around the meaning of manifest destiny.  These are rarely things you got from your textbook because they have to use pretty bland or generic examples to avoid problems.  If you write your own, you get to include what works for you.
4.  The kids are more likely to read it because they know (and like, hopefully) you. 
5.  It is editable.  Because I was trying to get this done for this year, I didn’t have time to the proofing I would have liked.  As a result, I have found spelling errors and grammatical issues while using the book this year.  I remind the kids that they are the guinea pig group and encourage them to point them out.  I will be able to fix it for next year.  Better than that, I can edit the content for next year.  If I find a video that better illustrates a point than the one I have, I can replace it.  If I go to a national park and see a good analogy that I never thought of before, I can add it to the book.  I can update the book as often as I want to re-issue it.  For me that will be only once a year, but that is still better than the printed textbooks I was using 6 years in a row before replacing them.
6. 


The hyperlinks.  You may remember that this was the reason I started this to begin with.  I wanted to include links for students so that they could explore something if they found it interesting.  These are screen shots of a couple of pages.  Each red word you see is a link.   They mostly lead to wikipedia pages, although I did include a few for How Stuff Works, WebMD, dictionary.com, and the Physics Classroom as well as some other sites I thought might be of interest.  While writing, I learned some interesting things that I wouldn’t have time or space to include in a book, but including a link allows anyone who finds the thought as interesting as I did to explore it.  For example, when researching about the early days of NASA, I found that we built it from an already existing organization called NACA, which had been the governing body for airplane flight.  I don’t have time to teach them this, but if they find it interesting, they can link to the NACA wikipedia page.  I don’t know how many of those the kids have taken advantage of, but it is an option for them.  When I survey my kids at the end of the year, it is something I intend to ask.

Advice
If you’re a teacher with Mac access, let me recommend that you take advantage of iBooks author to make some content of your own.  You don’t necessarily need to write an entire textbook.  Perhaps, there is one unit in your book that you feel is weak.  You could just make your own chapter for that.  Here’s some advice if you are up for the challenge.

1.  Organize your thoughts first.  Remember making outlines for research papers?  It’s still a good idea, but now you can do it in a way that is a little more helpful.  I dedicated a jump drive to the book.  I made a folder for each chapter.  Within that chapter, I made folders for each section.  I put a document or two in each folder.  If you have videos that you use frequently, you might want to include those too.  I already had those separated by chapter on my Mac, so I didn’t use jump drive space for that.
2.  However long you think it is going to take, it will take longer.  This isn’t a weekend project for the weekend before you start the chapter, at least not if you want to do it well.  I made doing the entire book a summer project and got through about two thirds of it.  If I hadn’t had other goals for the summer, I probably could have finished it; but it was more time consuming than I imagined. 
3.  Let the links come to you as you write.  I started making a list of links before I began writing, but as I wrote, I found that it was really easier to let them lead me.  As I was writing an example, I would want to look it up.  I figured if I wanted to look it up, the kids might too and included it.  If I had limited myself to the planned material, I wouldn’t have as much good stuff.

4.  Don’t feel like you have to write in order.  If you are putting your writing in documents and then copying and pasting them into iBooks Author (which I recommend), you don’t need to write it in order.  Start with what you are most comfortable with writing.  It gives you some momentum.  Write the chapter you taught this week this weekend while it is still fresh in your mind.  When I was trying to start with chapter 1, I made little progress.  It was too daunting.  When I started with my favorite chapter, it was much easier to get going.

If your kids have Macs with Mavericks, they have iBooks to read.  If not, you can export to pdf.  The videos won’t work, but everything else will.  Some of my kids parents have asked for it on pdf because they have windows machines at their home and would like a “printed copy.”  I don’t know if they ever print it, but they can if they want to.

Don’t be afraid of this.  It seems scary, but it is really taking what you already know, teach, and do and putting into a lovely and accessible format. 

Hyperlinking Brains

A few years ago, before GRACE began to implement our one to one laptop program, our wonderful IT trainer, Diane, began talking to us about kids brains being wired different from ours because of their lifelong exposure to technology.  She sent us articles that described the students as “digital natives” while we were classified as “digital immigrants.” 

One of the things that stood out to me in this discussion was that they liked to learn with hyperlinks.  If you don’t know, hyperlinks are what you see when you read a page on wikipedia.  It allows you to have choices while you are reading because you can choose to continue on the page you are reading or click on the word that seems more interesting or that you didn’t understand.  When I was a kid, if I was reading a passage in the textbook and encountered a word I didn’t know, I would have to take the initiative to look it up in the dictionary.  Let’s be honest, most of us didn’t.  We just skipped the word and hoped context would be our friend.  If a kid is reading a website and come across a word that they don’t know, they can usually click on it and be taken to a page about that word.

There are certainly drawbacks to this in the sense that you can end up going down the rabbit hole and never finish the passage you were supposed to be reading.  However, the great benefit of this is that you will pay attention to what you are reading because you chose to read it. 

I spent a long time trying to figure out how to teach in a way that would take advantage of their hyperlink thinking.  If I could figure it out, I could teach beyond my curriculum guide, interest the kids, keep their attention, give them choices in what they learned (sort of - because I do still have to cover what is my curriculum), and give a bit of self pacing.  The problem was, I couldn’t figure it out.  How was I supposed to arrange my notes to let them jump to what interested them? 
I tried including links in my keynote and giving them choices about what to go to next, but that fell apart pretty quickly.  I teach science, and some things really depend on what you learned before that.  Jumping over the foundation wasn’t going to work.
I tried KWL sheets.  Tell me what you Know and what you Want to know.  (L means tell me what you learned, but nobody ever gets to that part.)  This didn’t work at all.
I design all my projects with some choices, but that wasn’t really taking advantage of this hyperlink idea.

We were three years into our one to one program, and I still hadn’t grabbed onto an idea that really worked.  Each kid has their own laptop, so it should be easier; but I just couldn’t land on an idea that really represented what I hoped to achieve.

A year ago, the school sent the science department to a free three hour workshop on Apple Apps.  I don’t remember everything I learned at this workshop.  I mostly remember two things.  First, the newest business buzzword must be leverage as a verb.  She must have told us these were things we could “leverage with our students” 941 times in the three hour class.  At point I thought I could teach her what leverage meant by actually hitting her with a lever, but we were learning good things in spite of it; so I held back.

The thing I left most excited about was the App called iBooks Author.  As she described writing your own digital textbooks, I turned to my friend and said, “We could do this.”  In my first 11 years at GRACE, I had 8th grade physical science textbooks that I didn’t use at all.  Ask my kids; we may have opened the book twice during the year.  Some years, I didn’t even check them out to them because it seemed silly to have them carry them when we didn’t use them.  I didn’t like the books because they rarely arranged the material in the order I thought best to teach it.  They often overemphasized points I found trivial and under-emphasized points I found critical.  I e-mailed our administration and tech people from the workshop, telling them that I would like to write my own textbook, because I knew telling them would force me to follow through.

I sort of began writing during the school year, but it was pretty slow progress because I still had normal things to do.  I took it on as a summer project.  It took far longer than I anticipated.  You think you know something well that you have been teaching for sixteen years, but it is difficult to sum it up when writing.  I also wanted to use pictures and videos and links, so that took some time.  At the end of the summer, I was completely finished with first semester and about two chapters into second semester.  I exported first semester and handed it out on jump drives to the kids.  This turned out to be better anyway because of the file size.  I continued writing a bit on weekends and finally finished the second semester book on New Year’s Day.  I can give this out to the kids our first day back. 

I have just realized how long this blog post is, so I am going to save the evaluation of all this for my next post.