I love my Info Pusher. She spends shocking amounts of time finding and absorbing information, and whenever she finds something I might like, she shares it with me. And when it’s something I think teachers and educators might like, I share it here, and it makes me look clever and connected. Everybody wins. Thank you Info Pusher.
First, an amazing tool (still in beta) to help with math homework, called Mathway. This bit of genius lets one type in a math question, and spits out not just the answer, but all of the steps towards getting the answer, with explanations. It’s absolutely brilliant, and I can see it saving the evenings of many a parent helping with homework. Here’s a link: www.mathway.com/ . A big cheers to the developers.
Second, a Boing Boing review of a book called Boy Proof that sounds fully worth checking out. The author, Cecil Castellucci, is apparently also a graphic novelist, intriguing to me because I’m doing a unit on Comics/GNs this year and there wasn’t anything exceptional on my list specifically for girls. I have ordered both from the library. Looking forward to checking them out.
The OER (Open Educational Resources) Commons is a great site (albeit a little hard to look at) that shares zillions of teaching ideas and lesson plans for all levels of teaching and learning. Signing up for membership (free) allows one to “tag, rate, review, comment and save favorites to a portfolio”. Looks like a place one could spend some useful hours.
Not sure if this is schooly or just cool, but Find How looks brilliant and useful. Haven’t tried it yet – but in theory it’s a search engine that only looks for quality instructions, which seems to be one of the best things going on online. Just in the last few months, my IP and me have used this sort of free internet helpfulness to make our own granola, learn to play the drums, find a good deal on cars, tune a guitar to the drop-D, use DJing programs, and make certain baked goods. If this place pulls all that together, right on.I love geeks, I love the internet, but I love the Info Pusher more.
Just found this – a youtube type site with a teachery bent. Looks interesting, although I think most of what’s there is also on youtube. Here’s a funny video to introduce Teacher Tube. I’m not sure if this sort of thing works, but young teachers doing new things is cool in any case. If it doesn’t work, at least it gives the kids something to laugh about in math class.
The best teachers, it turns out, are eight year old alien kids. Who’da thunk. Video courtesy of the Learning Disabilities Association of Ontario. And here’s a great video by the International Dyslexia Association. Keep an eye on the subtitles/bouncing ball. And kudos for having the kids run away in terror. I think many organizations would call that too “negative” and have the kids hug the faceless dog as an ending. Right on.
This is interesting and righteous – something from the States called “The Strengths Movement” which is very much on the same page as we different fish are. Here’s an intro to the founder, Jenifer Fox, a school she runs, and the Strengths-based curriculum.
Forgive the hokey music and the infomercial tone. The ideas are solid.
All of it is based on the clever idea that strengths are more useful than weaknesses, and teaching kids what they’re good at is better for them – and for everyone – than concentrating on what they’re not.
Some ideas are so clear and good that they seem inevitable – after they’ve gained enough momentum: Doctors should wash their hands; People should choose their leaders; Kids should be encouraged.
I wish that every time I typed the words “the future” they would go all wiggly like the TV did when Ernie was remembering something on Sesame Street. In “the future”, that might be easy to do. All Wiggly is what I get when I think about the future, and what I get when I hear news that makes me think we’re already in it – like this article about sending thoughts to devices across distances. Oooooh! The future!
The future is also my second-favourite setting for thinking about education – because in the future, of course, we’ll have collectively realized that it isn’t possible to spend too much money on schools, that schools are the heart of culture and community and society, and that full and inclusive, individualized education would be good for, well, everybody.
My info-pusher just sent me a link to a righteous website – Research Channel – that shares and streams educational videos. And coincidentally, I was just re-pondering a utopian school idea I’ve been kicking around for a while, which would resemble Research Channel (in the same way a modem resembles an iPhone). It goes something like this:
I was Completely Unable to conceive of Cells when I was a kid (and through high school). I could see the drawing, and the little rectangular onion skin thing under the microscope – but I could NOT understand how a little thing like that related to me, nor begin to fathom how small it was. It wasn’t an across-the-board problem with abstractions – I think I just needed to really see a thing to get it. Relatedly, I absolutely hated Science classes, which always seemed unbelievably abstract, unrelated to my experience and boring.
I did eventually become very interested in science, at about the age 20. I was selling magazines and naturally skimming through most of them, and found Discover magazine, with its short but informative articles and great photos and illustrations. Once the scope of what “science” was became clear to me, I was pretty hooked. It was – like my major, English Lit – a subject about Everything! Part of this personal evolution was just preparedness – the articles I chose to read were answering questions I was bringing to the table. But it also made starkly clear how terrible my education in Science classes had been. How do we take a subject so broad, so relevent, and make it boring? (This irate, fist-shakey resentment came pretty naturally to me at that age, so it wasn’t uncomfortable – just empowering.)
Once science became “real” to me I began to take all the opportunities that came along to learn what I could. Most of the self-guided education relied on videos – documentaries and The Nature of Things and Nova episodes and Bill Nye on PBS. Microcosmos, the film, was a pretty big deal for me – finding out that bugs were really, truly “alive” and fully interesting opened up my mind.
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So – back to cells – it was once I was able to SEE cells in action that I got a handle on them. When I was nearing thirty, I found a documentary called Death By Design: Programmed Cell Death at the local amazing video store, and watched it about five times in a row. Not only did it show cells of many sorts and explain them and their behaviour, it also showed them as the shockingly, profoundly beautiful life that they are and how they fit into my experience – through visual metaphor and clear explanation. It’s among my favourite films, still. You can see it (small, and in bits) on Google video by clicking this link. Just for fun, here’s a clip (from elsewhere) of a cell hunting food.
The blossoming of computer graphics and tiny film capabilities allowed me to view the things I was wondering about, which allowed me to really conceive of them. I don’t think I’m alone in this – I doubt the Human Genome Process Project would have gotten all the TV news time it did if there weren’t all the sweet moving pictures of helixes unwrappying themselves. And visualizations of, say, geographical processes are really helpful – witness the recent prime-time Suzuki series on Canadian geology (that’s right, series! Which is really good!). And both video and CG visualizations have recently become ultra-easy to find thanks to broadening bandwidth and sites like youtube and Google Video.
Which all got me thinking: if it’s true (and I suspect it may be) that kids won’t need to know facts so much as where to find them and what to do with them, and if it’s also true that individualized education is the best option for more kids … maybe schools in The Future will be less top-down “do this” and more of kids asking questions and finding answers (having been taught how, with constant encouragement, in an atmosphere where that would be rewarded and rewarding) – multimedia, multimodal answers from anywhere in the world, in any form, geared to any style of learning? A child wondering about cells (perhaps because they’ve been playing Spore 6)* might watch relevent information, and then have access to teachers who could discuss what they saw, and experts with whom they might consult, who might suggest further resources and consolidating exercises…
All of this would require supercomputers – already on the way – and a rethinking of copyright – already underway. If rather than accessing info on the sly, with the constant tug of war between owners and users, it were understood that making any and all information available for education would benefit humanity – well, isn’t that idea already embedded in the Public Library?
It would also require a paradigm shift in the way we look at education. It’s a complicated idea. How will schools create curricula? Where do all the awesome computers come from? What do teachers do in this model? How do we make kids Do What We Tell Them? But we don’t need to have the answers to this yet – this is all way off in the wiggly future. We don’t even know what sorts of people humans will be by the time any of this could happen.
Where it could start, though – where it is starting – is right here, on the magical information highway, with sites like, for example, Research Channel and youtube. With free and easy access to previously aired radio shows like Quirks and Quarks, and with the many free and available lectures available at university websites all over the place, and short films of cells catching lunch made available for fun.
What would be an awesome next step would be having this sort of stuff made openly, legally, widely and freely available for kids/youth. If teachers were free to show and share and clip and copy and reformat documentaries, news shows, feature films, games, books, magazines, in the same way people are doing on youtube all the time, you’d increase the effectiveness of teachers by a long shot. Instead – here anyway – teachers worry about the cost of photocopying, don’t have time to write, and feel sneaky when they show videos to their classes. Rectifying this stuff would be a great step – the screen gets all wiggly here – on our way to … The Future…!
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* Check out video of the upcoming video game Spore for previews of the most educational video game I’ve ever heard of – and a hint of how interesting schools could be if we put our minds to it. Watch video of Will Wright talking about the game at length at The Long Now here. We’ll argue about video games as a Good later on.
[Caution: There are some seriously dirty words in this post. Not mine, though. Don’t read if that offends you.]
Here’s an interesting tie in with the last bit on sex ed – the Globe And Mail had an article on March 13th (thank you to my info-pusher again) called The death of sex education, written by Siri Agrell. The lead in tag says “Now that kids can go online and learn about pregnancy and penis size on their own, are the squirm-inducing classes a thing of the past?”
This worried me on first glance – learning about sex on the internet for the most part means learning about sex from porn; more about that coming up.
But the real point of the article was a focus on a site mentioned in the podcast from the Um post, called Sex Etc, which is a right-on website written for teens by teens – it’s really well-done, and I would have loved something like that when I was young. The point of the Globe article was that using a site like this allows kids to ask questions without the worry of doing so in public, to a teacher, which is of course embarrassing.
According to the article, Sex Ed is being eliminated in Quebec (with instruction to teachers to incorporate sexual education into the rest of the curriculum).
If Quebec teachers are less puritanically messed up and actually able to incorporate sex ed into classroom discussions, right on: cross-curricular teaching is (I think) a better practice than isolating subjects from each other. But in Ontario, I’m not sure that if teaching sex ed was an option, it’d get done. This isn’t an argument against the website approach – I wonder if what we should offer is a computer lab with that site enabled and some free time for the kids in there. Obviously a comfortable teacher in the room would be a bonus.
I taught sex education in my middle-school-teacher days, and really enjoyed it. It was always interesting, never easy, and generally rewarding – but not because of any information I was imparting. Despite my repressive upbringing re. sex and the enormous shame issues I grew up with, I KNEW what I thought the case should be, so I was (I think) able to encourage comfort and openness and health in the students I spoke to.
Here’s a funny/scary story. I had a kid in a class who was way over-familiar with pornography. His family had plenty in the house and not much guidance, and he’d seen a lot. In one class, I offered to just discuss “terms” the boys (these were gender separated health classes, which is a good idea in middle school) had heard and wanted to know more about. Naturally, I learned a couple of new ones myself – though I’ll claim ignorance on what “felching” is forever – that definition is in a tiny box in my brain that I never open. Anyway:
One kid asked what a Boob Job was, and I said, “Well, I’m not sure, but I think that probably refers to plastic surgery that can change the size of a woman’s breasts…”
The porno-boy raised his hand and cut me off: “No no no… I can explain.” (To great laughter, naturally.)
“A Boob Job,” he explained with a great grin, ” is when a man sticks his dick in between a woman’s tits and fucks them and comes all over her neck.” (Absolutely gobsmacked, like the rest of the room, and a little scared, I just stared and stuttered for long enough that he was able to add: “It’s beautiful! It’s so PURE.”
Funny and terrible, I know. It did lead to a great conversation about porn (on another day; I can’t remember the rest of that day or how I dealt with that sad and suddenly popular kid) – and pornography desperately needs discussion because we’re fully porn-saturated now, and that’s seriously confusing to kids.*
The boys started mentioning all sorts of Acts they’d seen performed or heard mentioned or picked up rumours of, and the anxiety level in the room was building and building, and one sweet boy asked with all of the weight of the adult (Adult) world in his face “How are you supposed to know how to DO all that stuff?!”
And THAT was the gold moment, the moment when I was glad to be teaching it, and glad the kids were comfortable enough to ask what they wanted to ask. Because all I had to do was explain that what happened in porn was not what tended to happen on dates,and that the people in porn movies were acting, and that how they did it was not how everybody did it. The look of relief on his face was profound. I explained that dating could go slowly if he wanted it to, and that just spending time with a girl was great. And that people figured out sex together, didn’t have to know how to have sex right away, and that they had choices all along.**
I can’t imagine what it must be like to grow up saturated by pornography – not just the images, but the constant references to the imaginary perfect sex that everyone is supposed to be having. I’m glad there’s a great site like SexEtc.
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* The Onion summed this up nicely recently with the headline “Pornography-Desensitized Populace Demands New Orifice To Look At”. Full article here.
** No, I do not teach abstinence. I teach reality – that there are plenty of ways to be.
Planet eBook is a site featuring “Free classic literature to download and share”. This is right on for anyone who likes eBooks, but it is also wildly useful for students with LDs affecting reading, as screen-readers (that read onscreen content aloud) can read PDFs, if they’re formatted correctly.
Naturally, the downside here is that the books have to be free of copyright in order to appear legally on a site like this, which means they’re all at least 75 years old (is that right?), so the unusual tone and long-windedness of those books may turn off some who already avoid reading. The upside is that these books are often part of the canon, so the unwilling may be required to read them.
Here’s a link. I’ll post other similar findings on this same page.
My best friend sends me things she finds in her web-scouring that she thinks I’d like. Here are two that look like great and interesting and useful for teaching. I’ll continue to share these as I get them.
I. Voice Thread
Voice Thread allows you to comment and doodle over pictures, videos, presentations, etc, and lets others comment as well. Great for collaborating, gathering feedback, and sharing ideas.
First, an amazing tool (still in beta) to help with math homework, called Mathway. This bit of genius lets one type in a math question, and spits out not just the answer, but all of the steps towards getting the answer, with explanations. It’s absolutely brilliant, and I can see it saving the evenings of many a parent helping with homework. Here’s a link: www.mathway.com/ . A big cheers to the developers.
A Different Fish 