Sharing Big History

I recently responded to the blog of Melissa Seideman, a Social Studies teacher in Cold Spring, NY.  The title of her blog is “Not Another History Teacher: History and Technology: a Perfect pair.”  I found the purposes of her career and blog to be rather inspiring and apropos: “My goal is to help my students fall in love with history and technology the way I have.  I believe that technology reaches students in a way that other mediums can not [sic].  It ignites a fire, a desire to learn, and gives them the ability to express themselves in meaningful ways …. My goal is that my blog can provide teachers with resources that can excite a student’s love of learning. I am a strong advocate that technology can meet student needs, engages them, and help them to be the best learner they can be.”

Ms. Seideman's post “Documentary Series: Gold Fever” presented a resource, a video series on the Discovery Channel about the California gold rush in the United States in the mid-nineteenth century.  I informed her that I was reaching out to a “fellow history teacher who values technology and its ability to engage students.”   I also inquired as to whether she knew about “Big History”—about the Big History site  and Big History series presently on the History Channel (H2).  I then defined it for her: “Big History looks at history at different temporal and spatial scales from the Big Bang to the present (with some conjecture for the future), and includes science and other disciplines in the study of history.”  Next, I provided her with further reading: David Christian’s Maps of Time: An Introduction to Big History; David Christian’s This Fleeting World: A Short Story of Humanity (an abridged version of Maps of Time); Cynthia Stokes Brown’s Big History: From the Big Bang to the Present; and David Christian, Cynthia Brown, and Craig Benjamin’s Big History: Between Nothing and Everything. Finally, I provided her with the episode title for a Little Big History (LBH) about gold and why people have come to value it as presented on the History Channel (H2) last Saturday evening, November 9, 2013: “Big History: Gold Fever.” 

Having recently watched the episode and viewing part of the series that she presented, I thought that sharing the LBH about gold would include me in the professional learning dialogue that she seemed to value.  In fact, in addition to the blog, she is a “co-leader of #sschat on Twitter ... an engaging chat with wonderful social studies teachers on Monday Night’s at 7 PM EST.”  Unfortunately, because my response is very recent, it is still “awaiting moderation.”  Nevertheless, I have given more thought recently to making blogging part of my teaching in the future.  Below is a screen capture of my comment: 

 

Cartwheels

I can see making Google Docs and a BYOD (Bring Your Own Device) policy significant facets of my classroom.  And, I really enjoyed the first two speeches on an e-portfolio (or G-portfolio) with Peter Pasque and ways to incorporate technology in the classroom with Liz Kolb.  In addition, I have seen good use of Google Docs and a BYOD policy (to a degree) implemented in my placement.  Peter Pasque's brief discussion on the concept of badging and mastery learning is also intriguing, and Liz Kolb's personal story about her journey as both a student and an educator was inspiring and a selling point for talk on technology in the classroom.   I do have my concerns, which were voiced by some of our peers, as well: school expectations and policies, teacher and student privacy when posting information online, and protocols established for (as well as the actual logistics for ensuring) appropriate use of technology in the classroom.  And, on the latter point, I have already confronted the latter issue of technology use both in my past teaching experiences and now at my placement, and have referenced it in past blog posts.

However, when it comes to Jon Palmer's talk about flipping the classroom (for Physics), although I am also intrigued by "flipping," I am less certain about its implication for its use in my Social Studies classes than Google Docs and BYOD.  Moreover, Jon admitted that the students who were taking his flipped class (at least for one semester) were taking an elective (Physics), which had easier content to learn during the second semester and fewer students due to those who dropped the class.  The idea of flipping is appealing, and with more time to reflect since all of our guest speakers, "Tech Tool" presentations, and, just recently, peer webinars, I can better imagine the possibility of flipping my Social Studies (most likely History) class.  But, I am not yet ready to commit to flipping the classroom.  For, as Griffin said after Jon's presentation, providing students with readings and other assignments (e.g., videos) at home that provide students with information prior to entering the class, as was the case for him (and for me), that already seems as if it could be, to a degree, a way of flipping the classroom.  

In a vanderbilt.edu site, the section “What are the key elements of the flipped classroom?”  seems to second Griffin's sentiment: “The pre-class exposure doesn’t have to be high-tech, however; in the Deslauriers, Schelew, and Wieman study described above, students simply completed pre-class reading assignments.” Nevertheless, I am still trying to keep an open mind about flipping a Social Studies classroom, but I am not yet sold on what it could/should look like.  Instead of staying flipped, I feel more like I might be doing cartwheels and land back on my feet until I can better envision a flipped Social Studies classroom.  But, for my Social Studies colleagues (or anyone else), see the video(s) below for some ideas.

Icarus Flying ...

The Short Version: Icarus was the son of Daedalus, a great artificer.  He flew with wings of feather and wax and climbed and climbed until he was too close to the sun.  Great hubris brought him to the sun before he fell to his demise.   

In my school placement, and more specifically in my classroom placement, I have access to technology.  But, what is technology?  What is the etymology of the word technology?  If you look at the Greek word roots techn (techne: art or craft) and ology (logos: word; and legein, meaning to talk or discourse), the word literally means talking about (having a discourse about, or more loosely, studying) the way that something is crafted or gained (or achieved).  Thus, maybe we should think about technology in our placements as the things in our classroom and school (and beyond) that will enable both teachers and students to craft learning opportunities so that something meaningful can be gained or achieved.  

Fire is technology.  Agriculture is technology.  They are some of the earliest forms.  Many things are forms of technology, but in our classroom at Thurston, these include wireless connection to the Internet, a desktop, personal laptops, thirty-six Chromebooks for student use, LCD projector, overhead projector, TV connected to a central media hub, and several more traditional modes of technology, such as a Whiteboard (well, this is an updated version of the blackboard, or chalkboard), pencils, markers, dictionaries, textbooks, several other books and the bookshelves on which they rest, lights, HVAC, and on and on.  I even acquired a Logitech Wireless Presenter R400 recently in order to provide a smoother process for delivering PowerPoint and Prezi presentations.  But, throughout the school, there are fewer opportunities for students and teachers to interact with some of these same technologies: There are a couple of computer labs;  there is limited software for students to use; some teachers have LCD projectors, overhead projectors, and/or other tools that many others do not; and there is a District website and an online system that teachers, students, and parents can access for a combination of uses and communication possibilities.

For me, the question that I have recently considered is, Which technology is useful for a particular teaching moment?  In addition, How should I expect students to interact with a certain technology?  This past Tuesday, after I finished teaching a full lesson, I felt like Icarus.  That is, in his descent, not ascent.  I felt as if I had crashed and burned, so to speak.  (Well, technically, Icarus fell into a sea and drowned.)  It probably was not as bad as I originally thought.  The students were compliant.  They worked, somewhat productively, with the Chromebooks.  It was, after all, the AP class.  Nevertheless, I expected more of them as well as me, given my past teaching experiences.  Don't get me wrong!  This is not an indictment of the students or even wholly of myself.  But, making a decision to let some students to continue to work on a QuickWrite or Stop-and-Jot while trying to Share Out was probably not "best [or better] practice."  My intention was to give students more opportunity to write, given the time constraints of losing some time due to the added FLEX period to the Tuesday schedule.  Simply put, I probably should have had them shut their Chromebooks, regardless of whether they had all finished or not.  Then again, during my most recent teaching experience prior to starting this program, I was at a school where all students had a laptop and were allowed to use them during class, if the teacher permitted.  I made them close their laptops at certain times, and yet I did not do so now.  And yet, there were elements of the lesson that could have been tweaked and relied less upon the use of technology.  

Who knows?  Maybe I'm a bit rusty, so to speak.  Nevertheless, my point is that knowing your students, having protocols for using different technologies, and knowing when and how to use certain technologies (or learning by trial and error sometimes, even if research would suggest when and how to use certain technologies) is important.  That said, I have seen my mentor use the Chromebooks in an efficient manner.  I have also had the opportunity to observe Rory effectively include them (in conjunction with a SMART Board, iPad, and stylus) in his class instruction.  And, Rory has modeled that for us in EDUC 504.  In addition, today, my mentor conducted the AP class without using the Chromebooks until the last fifteen minutes or so when students worked in small groups and were permitted, not required, to use Chromebooks.  Up until that point in the class, there was a good Share Out that built upon what I had begun in my lesson on Tuesday, what my mentor continued with them yesterday based on what I had done in class as well as my own "Exit Ticket" that I shared with them via email last night, and what he had done with them earlier in the class.  But, what the small groups were able to do with textbooks, notes, additional sources, and Chromebooks did not amount to much--well, as much as we, my mentor and I, had expected from the students.  But, it was a starting point.  So, what I have also learned, or have been reminded of, is that what we plan for a lesson (with or without technology, be it newer or more traditional) might not always work accordingly.

Inspiration and Evolution

I was driving to church (Second Baptist Church of Detroit) last Sunday morning (10/20/2013) and was listening to this interview on the radio (now also a podcast online) on On Being with Krista Tippett.  (But, the original interview dates back to May of 2012.)  Later in the day, I noticed that Greg had sent us an email with a link to an article (edited lecture) in The Guardian by author Neil Gaiman.  Thinking of myself as a burgeoning practicioner, of the emails MACers have been sharing with each other, and of Greg's email in particular, I was inspired to share the podcast of the unedited interview with everyone, which I did via email.

Thinking about it some more, and inspired by Nathan's most recent plug for his Tech Tool (podcasting) during Jonathan Palmer's guest speech, I felt it necessary to share the podcast again here. (Below is the link for the edited version of the interview.)  It's with evolutionary biologist and SUNY--Binghamton professor David Sloan Wilson.  In it, Wilson talks about how we humans subconsciously perceive our environment(s).  One of the directions that the interview takes is how the concept of perceiving one's environment could be related to the learning environment in which students, particularly at-risk students, find themselves when attending school.  Beyond the scope of behavior in school, though nonetheless connected to it, is the concept of prosociality (Check out this article about prosociality by Wilson et al.), which Wilson also mentions in the podcast.   In a nutshell, prosociality could be succinctly defined as altruism.  Being a social studies teacher--well, being a teacher in general, I guess--prosociality seems apropos.  Helping students to embrace civic engagement is something that is important in a democracy.

Interview with David Sloan Wilson on On Being (May 2012)
(I encourage you to hear the whole edited interview. But, if you don't want to listen to the entire 50 minutes or so, and want to listen solely to the discussion about school environment, go to 33:50 of the podcast.)

My thinking about teaching with technology had been focused mainly on how we can implement technology in a meaningful and efficacious way within the confines of our classroom and/or by extending the physical classroom to a virtual one.  Now, I see teaching with technology as multifaceted insofar as I am no longer just a classroom teacher.  Now, I am a practicioner, as well, and using technology to be part of a professional learning community of teachers is something that I have begun to better embrace and now think important.  Being a practicioner, for me, is perhaps one of the most important takeaways from the MAC program (Ball and Cohen, 1999).  And, it has only been reinforced at my placement (Thurston High School), which has recently implemented a new program called Critical Friends Groups (CFG).  In this way, I have been inspired to evolve as a teacher, and technology had helped me to achieve that.

Around the World in 180 Days

I had only used Prezi once, and seen it in use only a few times, before last Thursday’s collective presentation by four teachers, each from a different discipline: Evan (world languages), Cory (history), Matt (English), and Jeni (science, in abstentia).  Here’s how I experienced Prezi that night:

With Evan’s Prezi, I tried to imagine as if I were a middle school or high school student, seeing this new way of viewing language (or, possibly, history or literature or any myriad ideas).  And when I did, I felt as if I had been traveling all over the world, bouncing from North America to Europe to Africa to Asia and … the possibilities seemed almost endless.

With the transition to Cori’s Prezi, I felt as if I were back in our “History at Scales” class (EDUC 547) with Bob, changing the perspective or level of history at which we were examining history unfold through time and space, moving from Evan’s global examination of the French language to a regional, European level at which the Protestant Reformation manifested through the primary sources that Cory foregrounded.  And by this point in our Prezi experience that night, I had looked over at Casey, one of my fellow historians in Bob’s class, a few times already—simpatico, there was recognition, this was “Big History” and Prezi seemed to have much to offer our discipline, the learning process, and our students.

The journey, however, did not stop there, for Matt took us on a “romantic” (pun intended) rendezvous around the world, pursuing Romanticism’s own sojourn in different continents over the course of its life.  By this point, with Evan, Cory, and Matt all having zoomed in and out at certain parts of their presentations, and demonstrated how nesting items or files within parts of their presentation could enhance the audience’s—the learner’s—experience, I was sold.  For, in juxtaposition to this experience, earlier that day, I was helping a high school student to complete an assignment on the IOTN (Indian Ocean Trade Network), and she was having difficulty answering the questions that required of her a knowledge of basic geography (of the continents and, perhaps a bit more challenging, regions), as well as certain procedural knowledge for finding other sources of information that might better inform her and help her to answer these two questions:   “What important regions/continents are connected by the IOTN?” and “What important regions/continents are NOT connected by the IOTN?”  Part of the directions instructed her to look at the maps in the PowerPoint that was available to her via Google Docs on a classroom-provided Chromebook.  Granted, these maps focused on a particular area of the globe, but she also had, not even ten feet from her, a full-world map of the continents to her right.  With the PowerPointPowerPoint, the Internet, and the map (which I pointed out to her), she still seemed somewhat lost.  Perhaps her experience of what should have been reviewing how to read maps and understand basic geographical concepts a few weeks ago could have been better enhanced by Prezi as opposed to PowerPoint.  In our past reading of Willingham, he seems to have dismissed the idea that there are different learning styles, such as visual, aural, and kinesthetic.  Although it felt good to be needed in some way, to be able to facilitate this student's learning, I would like to think that had she experienced and learned about geography and the world through Prezi, she might not have needed my assistance for these questions.

And, on one final shift in scale apropos my digression on a recent teacher moment, Jeni’s Prezi, as presented by Matt, showed us that using Prezi can get even smaller in this set of scales of space and time, and bring us right into the classroom, whether learning about how to use one of the microscopes in the classroom or explaining how a task with different stations throughout the classroom is going to be conducted.  What her Prezi shows us (and can show our students) is that there are norms, rules, routines, procedures, and assessments that are part of the physical space of our classroom in the here and now, regardless of discipline, that can be reinforced through reviewing it via Prezi.   

Just as Phileas Fogg, the main character in Jules Verne’s Around the World In Eighty Days, has a wager to circumnavigate the world in eighty days, perhaps teachers, especially Social Studies teachers, can make a bet with themselves to help their students travel throughout our classroom, our school, our town, our city, our state or province, our nation, our continent, our world, and our universe in one hundred and eighty days.  (Well, I know, I know, “Do we really have 180 instructional days?” you might ask.  But, you get my point, right?)

One caveat I might have about the use of Prezi, though, is about the degree to which we, as teachers, might share specific information about our classroom in a public forum such as Prezi.  At least with Google Docs, we can decide to share certain folders and documents with others (although there are other concerns of saving information in some “Cloud” that might be accessed by a company that provides such a service).  With Prezi, at least based on what I know and what was presented, anyone who is browsing (intentionally or unintentionally) through Prezi could stumble upon those that you made and the (personal) information you included in them.

One final note: A technological limitation of standing or sitting right next to your computer in order to advance the Prezi could be to have some hand held presenter/pointer, but the presentation would still be limited even then unless facilitated with some handheld tablet and stylus that could be remotely connected to your laptop or desktop that would allow you to explore fully the features (zooming, scrolling, etc) of Prezi.