We get asked about our classroom workflow and technology a lot, and since the last posts I've done about technology are out of date (for example, we no longer use any LMS whatsoever), I thought I'd try again.

So Andrew has occasional access to class sets of Chromebooks (last year he ended up with 3-4 days a week, actually), but no open BYOD network for students.  I am moving from a school with a barely-functional BYOD network (and a paucity of decent student devices) to a school where we are 1:1 with MacBooks and many (if not most) students will also have their own smartphones that can be used on the school wifi.  Seriously.  I know, I'm ridiculously blessed in this regard.

However, none of that is going to change the basics for us.  Before I go into the tools we use, here are a few of the principles we operate under:

• Everything should play nice with Google sign-ins.  We are both at GAFE schools, but have had students use outside accounts to bypass the ownership/sharing issues with GAFE.
• There should be as few tools as possible. Keep it simple.
• It's okay if we're not experts on the tool or tech.  It's good to admit to students that you're learning alongside them.
• Everything we use should be as functional for the students as it is for organising course content.  

So here are the tools we use in our class.  I've divided them into lesson design and management and student major and minor players.

1. gmail and google drive for collaboration, communication, storing documents, uploading and sharing videos and creating drawings. We also use google hangout to collaborate and connect with others, and google presentations (both for ourselves and for students)
2. the tmiclass website (created on Weebly), where students can find course assignments and project resources.  Each of us embed our google calendar of assignments and have links to every assignment
3. lessonpaths, where we have playlists to host all the assignments in every unit in order. Students also use lessonpaths to create portfolios of assignments or to upload assignments
4. video making, editing and storage tools are a little trickier. These are more fluid because of a few factors. We host most of our videos on YouTube, though we do use ShowMe for others, particularly reading videos.  To make simple videos we use ShowMe or Playback (this is new to us, but is really cool because you can also have your face in the video and it's all done from an IWB app on the iPad)
5. for any video that requires editing (which is most for us), we use Camtasia for Mac.  For real simple screencaptures that don't require editing, we'll use Snagit sometimes too. This video was for a conference but it gives you some information about those apps
6. for students, we have them use Splice for iOS (make sure you search for iPhone, not iPad apps) and WeVideo for Android/PC (it's also available for iOS) because they are free and pretty easy to learn
7. remind (formerly remind101) to send texts to students with updates and announcements
8. bitly to give our students shortened links so students can find the assignments quickly, especially on mobile devices
9. on our website, we embed a google form that runs with the help of a script called autocrat.  Every time a student submits the form, it creates a document and emails a link to the student so they can have editing access, but it's owned and organised in our google drive.  The link above is to a walkthrough I did for how to set it up
10. grammarly to have students proofread their own writing. Here's a video I did about it

So some of those are lesson design or management tools, and some are used by our students to create or share their work.  In order to make the workflow more clear, let's take a sample assignment and work it through what it looks like in the classroom.  

Andrew and I make a video using Google Hangout  and Camtasia, then load it on YouTube.  We then show it in class, while students take notes on their own device or paper.  We give them a shortened link to the video so they can watch it later, and we add it to the course calendar and lessonpaths playlist so they can access it there too.  We add an article to the playlist and students read that on paper or their device.

Then we ask them to write a short essay on something related to the video and article, so they go to tmiclass and fill out the form for their class.  They then check their gmail or google drive and open the file.  It is already titled and shared correctly and has the standard heading on the top of the document, so they don't need to worry about any of that.

Then we ask students to collaborate by reading each other's work.  The students exchange gmail addresses and add their partner to the sharing permission for the document.  They use the comment feature so we can see their work.  We then ask them to run it through grammarly to check for mechanics issues, and they work with their partner to get it up to the level we require. [alternately, they could post it on a blog and them comment as well, although we did not use blogs last year at all]

The next day, we ask them to turn their two essays into a collaborative video blog so they write a script and use their mobile devices to film it.  They edit it on Splice or WeVideo and then either email it to us or upload it to google drive or add it to their playlist.  Where it goes depends on the purpose of the assignment and whether it was a first or second or final draft - we tend to ask for drafts on drive or email and final drafts on YouTube and/or lessonpaths.  That way, they are only making the final product sharable, but we are able to keep them accountable for the drafts.  When the final product is due, we send a remind text to students telling them to upload it to their portfolio playlist and when it needs to be completed.

We then make a lessonpaths playlist of all the videos and create a bitly so we can ask students to see what their classmates created.  We have them on a single collaborative document filling out a rubric for each video based on the criteria in the assignment.

All of that is archived on our website in the assignments calendar and in the embedded lessonpaths playlist.

In our classroom, much like in every other classroom, nothing ever runs this smoothly or is as ideal as it’s written here.  We don’t use every tool in every assignment, but it should give you a picture of what it’s like to be a student in our class.  

Because we don’t use an LMS like Edmodo or Moodle, a lot of these systems are built so that it’s easy for us and easy for our students to find all of the things.  You may find that using an LMS suits you better, but for us, we have been hit by so many changes in school or in technology supported by the district that we have found it useful to have an independent website that stands alone.  It also makes everything open source and collaborative, and easily adaptable to any instructional context.

But fundamentally, it works for us.  And what works for us probably won’t entirely work for you, because we’ve designed this around the way we teach and our technology preferences.  And that’s okay.  The bottom line with using technology in the classroom is that is has to work for you and work for your students.  

We also know that there are probably better ways to do some of these things, and that with the introduction of Google Classroom we might be changing...but that’s just how it goes with technology.  We just get used to something and it disappears forever.  Or it becomes a paid app.  Or our district blocks it for no apparent reason.  So we adapt, and as we adapt, we keep pushing towards a model that makes our classroom work better for us and our kids.

What do you use in your classroom?

Recently, a few of my Twitter friends had an exchange about one way that teachers engage and share ideas online: Teachers Paying Teachers (TpTdotcom)

There are lots of ways to share ideas on the internet, and I recognise that many teachers find the idea of making money on the lessons they've developed in their own classroom appealing.  In fact, there is nothing objectively wrong with it.  No matter what state you teach in, you probably don't get paid what you should be paid to do the work of shaping the minds and hearts of young people.


But there is a fundamental problem, at least in my mind (and I think the boys would agree): We Are What We Share.


In all aspects of culture, I believe in free and open sharing.  My favourite bands all allow their fans to bring in recording equipment and trade the tapes freely.  My favourite software companies are (or have been) open source and have understood that a key part of their culture was bringing in the best possible ideas, even if they didn't exist in the corporate structure.  Many companies, like Google, even give their employees paid time during the day to work on a project that doesn't fit into their job description but is exciting to them....and many of those projects have become the technology we use every day, like gmail.


Turning back to Teachers Paying Teachers, I think the major problem I have is that it turns what we do into a product, rather than something that is a collective endeavour that is better when it is shared in community.


This post didn't start out being a rant about TPT.  In fact, I started writing to talk about something Andrew and I have built into our practice: a weekly Twitter chat.  But the reason I talk about TPT is that it is exactly the antithesis of the #flipclass chat Andrew & I moderate on Monday nights (8 PM EST/5 PM PST).  The chat is built around bringing together smart, passionate teachers who believe in sharing openly and freely.  Ideas are regularly given away and even improved upon through conversation.

The #flipclass chat community is something Andrew and I are very intentional about cultivating, and we have seen somepretty amazing things happen.  But what keeps coming back is that this group of educators believe in giving away their work in order to help other teachers improve their practice, and with the belief that any time you share an idea with someone else, it doesn't return to you void.  

As an example: I came up with the idea of using todaysmeet as a backchannel for discussion as I played a video of me reading the text.  So students were hearing the text, seeing it on their screens (or on the main one) and were able to interact immediately with their peers (and with me).  Having the reading on video meant that I could be far more present with them, but I found that the number of questions I answered actually went down because they were getting answers from their peers too.

So that idea is something I shared on Twitter a lot.  Now, I see lots of variations on that idea from tons of #flipclass teachers.  Did I invent it?  Probably.  But I also know that no invention is truly a work of a "lone genius" or "Eureka moment" and that the #flipclass Twitter community helped me have the idea in the first place, and have made it so much better now that it's been out there for a while and tried in tons of classrooms and blogged about...etc.  

And that's the tragedy of TPT.  That kind of group collaboration and open sharing of ideas just doesn't happen when you're locking your ideas behind a paywall and then taking it back to your classroom...the only one that will be changed by those ideas.  That is depressing. 

I think I'm a great lesson designer, and I bet I could have made tons of money if I had done TPT for the last few years.  But I can't put a price on the ideas I've had improved by my people in the #flipclass chat community.  I can't put a price on the ability I have to share openly and know that others are helped by what's happening in my classroom.  

I can't put a price on a community that has changed my life, my classroom, and the way I think about education.  This community brought me a collaborative partner, a group of teachers who love me and challenge me and support me, and a weekly chat that inspires me and keeps me pushing towards the kind of classroom I want for my students.

That is priceless.

**

Never done a Twitter chat?  Andrew and I made a video about the weekly #flipclass chat and how to get involved.  We hope to see all of you there!

On Monday at about 5:05, I noticed that Andrew and I were getting tons of notifications from Twitter.  He and I had spent the day on collaboration tasks for our upcoming school year - we recorded a bunch of videos, built a slide deck for his TED Talk, and redesigned our course website to build a space to house the workshops we've taught over the last few years.

I looked at him and panicked because we forgot about the Twitter chat we have moderated for almost two years.  But what happened was sort of magical, and reminded us about the values we've worked on building in this community during our time as moderators.  

By the time we arrived on scene, people had created questions and decided on an order for who would ask them.  They had basically built a lesson plan in the first few minutes they were left alone.  Now, we're all teachers, so we are all used to writing lesson plans.  But I've never seen something like this before: when the "teachers" were gone, the students identified their needs, figured out who could help facilitate, and then they went to work.  

This past year, I actually had something like that happen when I had a sub for a few different workshops I was leading.  My students explained the sub plans to the guest teacher, and then they divided up the work and were so efficient that the sub notes were full of praise for their industriousness and for how genuinely nice they all were.  This is a group of 9th graders that mostly have serious behavioural issues and get in trouble in most of their other classes, and have records longer than you could possibly imagine.  And because of the flipped classroom, they took charge of their education to the point that I was made redundant at times.  

And that is an amazing problem to have.  

We wish we had missed the chat on purpose to create this experiment, but it was a total mistake on our parts.  However, just like good flipped class students, the teachers in the chat took over the lesson and made it work for them.  They even ended the chat with suggestions for what to do in our next chat.  

Andrew and I couldn't be more proud of the community we've helped create.  It's one of the best communities on Twitter, and it's a true privilege to call this group of people colleagues. 

If you want to go back and see the chat and how it played out, check out the archive of one of the moderators of the impromptu chat.  And thank you again to all of the amazing teachers who made Monday night a success.

We will see you all next week.  And this time, we'll show up.  

Yesterday in #flipclass chat, we did our #teacherconfessions.  But I didn't really get to the heart of mine in the chat.  I could claim that's because the pace was frenetic (and it was) but that would be a lie.

In truth, I am scared.

I am scared that I'm not doing a good enough job. 

I am scared that I've worked for ten years to teach high school students and it ultimately will be meaningless.

I am scared that all of my best ideas were stolen from others or jettisoned at some point along the way.

I am scared that my colleagues judge my class and think that I'm wasting students' time.

That fear is a terrible master.  It continually robs me of joy, of excitement, of passion for my job.  It pushes me to work harder, do better. be better, because I'm always just one step ahead of failure.

That fear causes me to keep back parts of what I do in my class, worried that if anyone sees them, I'll be exposed as the fraud I am.

That fear mocks me when I get up and tell students that what matters most is working hard and not innate talent.  It says that my best isn't good enough, and I just must be stupid.

That fear shuts down my blogging, my tweeting, and even my conversations.  It isolates me.  Whispers things that my harshest critics have said and reminded me that they really did know better than me, and I am kidding myself to think any differently.

I have spent ten years of my professional career trying to figure out how to make it stop.  At several points, I thought that it would be better just to leave the profession, but the fear reminded me that this is the only thing I have really ever done in a professional sense, except for working at Blockbuster Video...and that's hardly a career path.  But the fear controlled me for a long time.

But.  There is a way to start to drown out that fear-voice: by replacing it with people who really do see you and your practice, with all the rough edges and failures and not-good-enoughs, and love and support you anyway.  When those voices start to rise in concert, the fear-voice has less power.

THAT is the power a good PLN has.  I have found people to drown out the fear-voice, and who remind me that who I am matters more than what I do.  That success isn't measured in innate intelligence, but rather in hard work and determination.  It's something I never could have done for myself.  And the primary beneficiary? My students.

And while it's true to say that I am a much better teacher today because of my PLN, what is more true is that I am a better teacher because of my friends.  The people who pushed into my life and refused to accept my fear narrative.  The people who keep reminding me that it's worth it, and that the only failure is to not try.

What does your PLN do for you?

Andrew and I tell the story of our collaboration frequently.  We did the Flipped Learning Network's opening webinar a few weeks ago, and we presented at the Global Education Convention about our journey together and what it has done in our classroom and to our practice.

I never feel like we can truly capture how much has changed as a result of committing to work together.  The easy answer is "everything" but even that doesn't feel like enough.  In truth, meeting Andrew was like taking collaboration crack - he and I started creating and never looked back, to the point now where not one aspect of my life is untouched by the influence of our collaboration.

And yet, it is only recently that I've begun to see the way in which my view of creativity has been shaped by our collaboration.

I never thought of myself as an artistic or creative person.  I do know how to play several instruments, and I can sew, knit, and crochet, but the nerve damage in my hands has made the fine motor skills required for art nearly impossible for me.  You see, my definition of "artistic" was "can draw well" and because I couldn't, and had little "innate talent" (really, a desire to work as hard as I would need to in order to improve) I decided I just wasn't a creative person.

What I missed in my narrow definition was that creativity isn't about drawing.  It's about thinking differently.  It's about bringing new things into the world for the purpose of making people's lives better.  That's what I learned in my first few years teaching, and became for me the point of my professional journey: helping students see differently, and create in them a desire to continue learning because of the content and skills developed in my class.

When I met Andrew, I exaggerated my video editing capabilities.  I knew I could figure it out if I really wanted to, but hadn't had the need to before that point.  He brought the impetus, so I learned how to edit videos.  And eventually, I started to see video editing as a creative endeavour as much as visual art is.  All art is about telling a story, not about lines or shapes on a page.

The story we were telling was not just one of classroom transformation.  It was one of personal transformation.  I now see the ways in which I'm tremendously creative, almost to the point that I feel ridiculous for ever thinking that I wasn't.

Seeing that shift, I began to see the role of creativity in my classroom differently too.  I used to have art projects as part of the curriculum, but I phased them out because rigor.  I used to have students do elaborate projects that were often beautiful and artistic, but I stopped because standards.  I used to try and make creativity the bedrock of the student experience in my class, despite my narrow definition, but I stopped because confidence.

Genius Hour cemented in my mind how much has shifted because of the influence Andrew has had on my practice.  Actually, that's not quite accurate.  Yes, it was Andrew's entrance that marked the beginning of the change, but really, it's all about what we've built collaboratively.  It wasn't Andrew or me acting in isolation - all the good ideas and creativity and innovation come as products of our time spent in collaboration.  None of it exists without all of it.

My students almost all did their project on something to do with creativity.  I heard them discussing what it means to be creative, and it mirrors my own (much better) understanding: being creative is seeing possibilities where others see only limitations.  It is being willing to be different, even when that's the harder choice.  It is taking risks and daring greatly, even when it pushes us so close to the edge that we fall off a few times.  They all understand that.

And that's the real beauty from Genius Hour: only a few students wrote down facts or specific details about the content of what we learned.  Instead, they made abstract renderings of those ideas.  The common themes were about divergent thinking, growth mindset, factory-models of education being crushed by a new way of learning, how puppets are a pedagogical tool, and even why flipped learning gives them more control over what they learn, how they learn it, and how to demonstrate their learning.

Our students are experiencing something profoundly transformative: that collaboration drives creativity, and you have to practice taking risks to be able to truly learn.  

I now know how to use Adobe After Effects - professional level graphics software as well as basic video editing programs because the collaborative relationship Andrew and I forged compelled me to truly learn, even when it took failure after failure to produce success.  In a very real way, I am now able to be much more creative because there was a space made and a spark of inspiration lit by the relationship Andrew and I have.  And my creativity fuels the learning environment in which my students catch the spark to light their own creative furnaces.

That's what collaboration can do: light fires that had been extinguished.  Foster creativity and critical thinking.  Provide the space and motivation to learn something deeply.  That's why Andrew and I will continue to tell our story.  We believe that ALL teachers should have the same opportunity we did to be transformed.  We believe that our students deserve that.

And we believe that our collaboration will continue to produce more creativity as more teachers start the journey we've undertaken together.  I hope we can continue to point the way to the road less travelled, where while there are thorns and rocks and unsure footing, there is also great beauty and joy and when you've walked far enough, you get to see something that never before existed.  Something that wouldn't be in the world, but for you finding it together.  It is that collaboration that will make you more creative, and will in turn give your students more opportunities to be creative as well.

Collaboration will change your view of creativity forever, just as it has mine.

This collaborative road will be more difficult.  Sometimes, it will be so difficult that you struggle to remember why you started walking in the first place, but if you have found a partner who makes your classroom better, it will be worth every moment of difficulty.  

We - all of us - are #bettertogether.

Andrew and I often employ some advice that we heard from Jon Bergmann:

Do you want it perfect, or do you want it Tuesday?

Most of the time, we want it Tuesday.  There are very few ideas that merit spending extra time and energy on developing them when you have as much work as Andrew and I do.  We often feel pulled in so many directions that it's all we can do just to get them done to Tuesday-quality standards.

The one aspect of our practice where we make an exception is in video production.  Sure, we make quick videos, like the ones I do on ShowMe, or the close reading videos
that take more time to record than they do to edit.  But most of our best work takes hours.

That's why the summer is the time we get the most video work done.  Last summer, I re-edited the research paper series to make it more manageable and useful.  We did a series on writing a literary analysis essay using Twilight, by Stephanie Meyer (essay prewriting video here). 

And we started a video about The Great Gatsby.  It began as a close read of the opening passage, but evolved into something that has taken months to perfect.  In order to make it, I had to learn Adobe After Effects.  That alone was hundreds of hours.  We wrote, edited, assembled, designed, rendered, and then revised it all and started over.  

The goal of this video was to help students get excited about reading the novel in class.  Not only does it do that, but it also demonstrates how we developed the claims put forth in the video.

So here is the video we made.  It may not be absolutely perfect, but of all our work over the last year and a half, it is the product of which I'm proud.  If you enjoy it, pass it on.  We hope that it helps more than just our own students appreciate a text as rich and beautiful as The Great Gatsby.

And if people like it, we may just try to make another video that ends up more on the "perfect" side, rather than the "Tuesday" side.

Disclaimer:  I am probably crazy for even considering this.  That's what it feels like as I look out on students preparing right now.

In a week, every 9th grader at East Bay Arts will be delivering a TED-Talk style presentation.  They will get two minutes to talk about something about which they are really passionate.  They have to use a visual of some kind, and have been told DO NOT DO PUBLIC READING. ESPECIALLY FROM A POWERPOINT.  Unless they want to make their teachers cry, that is.

So let's back up.  Every students in 9th grade started the year with a unit on learning, the brain, and education.  The centrepoint of that unit was a series of TED-Talks.  We learned how to take notes and listen attentively.  We talked about passion, and how passion influences people to speak from a place of excitement and power.

Concurrently, they have been working on their very first all-school project.  At EBA, every grade level does one major project per trimester.  For the  first freshmen project, students have traditionally been asked to choose a social issue that is important to them and both write an essay about it and prepare a presentation to be given to a room of their peers and graded by the teacher.

If you read my blog and/or know Andrew and I, we tend to blow things apart and find the pieces in the rubble that work, and then build up the structure around those things.  That's kind of how this project started.  We liked the idea of self-selected topics.  We liked students giving a presentation that means something to them.   We also liked the idea of a project that all their teachers could see, work on with them, and learn from.  

But we also saw problems: most teachers from last year reported there being a ton of speeches on abortion or drug laws.  Having students write a research paper then deliver a persuasive speech seemed like a mismatch, and like too much for first trimester freshmen.  The topics don't necessarily touch the students' lives in a serious way, or in a way that is relatable in a 4-5 minute speech.  Also, the teacher in charge last year pretty much just told the other teachers what to do, and we really wanted to include the rest of the project team on the planning.

So we decided, in collaboration with the other two teachers on the team, to make it a presentation about how they wanted their school to change.  We started gearing up for that when we had a better idea.  Instead of advocating for a change at school, what would happen if we gave them the freedom to share something that made them truly passionate and interested?  What would school be like if every student got to share something they loved for a day?

Wouldn't that be the best day of school ever?  Wouldn't that MAKE the kind of school they would want to attend?

Then the next piece  that fell into place was when we realised that this was basically the structure of a TED Talk.  Since we've watched so many, it was an idea students quickly embraced.  It also has the benefit of being a real-world context for public speaking.  After all, how many people leave high school and ever have to present about a social issue for five minutes on their own?  But sharing an idea with passion and enthusiasm and clarity...that's something EVERYONE has to do.

And the final piece (stolen from Jon Corippo and Minarets): the teachers will not be assessing the students.  Instead, students will judge one another, based on the format of American Idol (the original).  There will be a Simon, a Paula and a Randy.  They will offer feedback based on the rubric categories and will decide the grade...but more importantly, will share what they thought and how it could be improved.

We will be filming the whole thing, and students will vote on which ones to feature on our YouTube channel.  I also told students that this was their chance to show their teachers, their parents, their friends, and the world that they were more than just a "dumb teenager who only cares about stuff posed on Facebook."  This is their chance to prove that they can have 80 9th graders in one room, listening to each other talk about something they love and not fall apart.

I'm writing about it here because I'm very aware that it might fail.  In fact, failure is likely - not of the whole event, but of certain presentations, and certainly technology.  But I'm sharing it so that I am clear going into it that the outcome doesn't matter.  What matters is that we aimed high and worked hard.  And that we learn from whatever failures may come.

In a week, it will all be over.  I'm excited to share what happened.

Over the summer, Sam Patterson and I started talking about puppets.

Now, we all know he's the Puppet Man, who actually does have Twitter accounts for all his puppets, and even features them on his YouTube channel.

So when I was selected to take over the Leadership class at EBA, I quickly found an application for puppets on campus: hosting the weekly video news broadcast.  Here is the playlist of all the Ninja News episodes so far.  Yes, our mascot is the Ninja.  Purple ninjas, actually.

Now, once other students saw the puppets, they wanted in on the sweet puppet-making action.  So I ran a few workshops on Choice Day teaching students how to make puppets, and we even had all the 9th graders make sock puppets one afternoon.

Here's what I've learned about puppets since starting this endeavour:

• Students come alive when they get to do, make, build, and design
• Students love challenge when it's presented in a way that makes it seem fun (like: build a sock puppet! No directions! No help!)
• Grades and points cease to matter when something is truly engaging.  I did have one student ask if his sock puppet would be graded, but other students told him to Just Stop before I had to.  That feels pretty awesome.
• Kids become kids when they have a puppet on their hand.  Suddenly, they are more playful, more funny, more animated, and more interesting.  Yes, I mean interestING - I think you have to be interestED to be interestING.  They also have started to think differently, and are much quicker to get to creative solutions to problems.
• Making puppets requires divergent thinking, storytelling, imagination, and creativity.  Many kids find that overwhelming, because they are being asked to do things that aren't quantifiable.  They get lost in the design phase because it cannot come from rote memorisation, or reliance on good academic habits.  It becomes scary for them to have to try something that might fail.  Those students need the most help and the least instruction.  I spend a lot of time listening, and then helping them glean their ideas from all of the rubble.  But if I give them an idea, it's no better than asking them to memorise the date Shakespeare was born.  The real work still came from me in organising, planning, and valuing the information.  
• Puppets are a great vehicle for teaching that it's okay to make mistakes.  My first puppets aren't great (in order of how I made them: Albert, Kiwi, Gypsy, New Unnamed Puppet), but I'm proud of them, and I learned a lot more from making them than I did from just using the puppets Sam let me borrow (EduFelon and Tina).  Figuring out how to do something like this required lots of YouTube videos, many hangouts with Sam, and a lot of trial and error.  And it was really, really fun.

L to R (& puppet maker):
Tina (Sam)

Gypsy (Me)

EduFelon (Sam's student)

Albert (Me)

Kiwi (Me)

This is my newest puppet.  He was built with a pattern Sam traced from Wokka.  

The kids absolutely love him.

The staff think I'm carrying a dog when I walk in with him.

Also, people can't agree on this puppet's gender.  I'd like to know your thoughts!


So TL;DR:
Puppets are amazing.  They are viable as an instructional strategy.  They help students be more comfortable in their own skin, and with taking risks and thinking differently.

Go make one.  Now.

A few years ago, I thought that using video in class was the lazy way out.  It was for teachers who couldn't figure out how to have a class discussion or didn't want to make copies.

I also thought YouTube was for cat videos and people with too much time.

Boy, was I wrong.

Now, I start class with a short video (under four minutes, generally) every single day.  This unit's playlist has dozens of videos that were shown in class, most of which I didn't make.

So what changed?

A few things.  I started delving into the world of online video and YouTube content creators because of my interest in John Green and his brother, Hank Green.  They have been video blogging (vlogging) on YouTube since 2007, when they went for a year using video instead of any textual communication (emails, texts, etc.).  Since then, they have added over a million subscribers, and have one of the most amazing online communities anywhere on the internet (called Nerdfighteria, with individuals being called Nerdfighters - basically, instead of being made out of flesh and bone, Nerdfighters are made out of pure awesome).

I saw thousands of teenagers interested in music, literature, politics, news stories, and even in helping make the world suck less.  The central tenet the Vlogbrothers and Nerdfighteria promote is that our job as humans is to understand each other complexly.  Humans, especially those growing up in this rapidly changing world, are used to seeing black and white, but often fail to see the much more complex tapestry that makes up human experience.  

As a literature teacher, that idea resonates with me.  I read so that I can understand what it's like to be someone else, living a different life.  I read so that I am connected to people with whom I could never otherwise be connected.  I teach reading so that my students can not be limited by what they see, or what they experience, or even what they are.

Exploring the Vlogbrothers led me to a variety of other channels.  If you're interested, here are some of the other channels I now subscribe to, here are some of my favourites: ViHart, WheezyWaiter, ZeFrank1, ZeFrankenfriends, Schmoyoho, TheGregoryBrothers, CrashCourse, Hankschannel, HankGames, KidPresident, gunnarolla, MentalFloss, Pewdipie, TheArtAssignment, TheLizzieBennettDiaries, TheFineBrothers, CGPGrey, Veritasium, VSauce, SciShow, MinutePhysics, PemberleyDigital.

I subscribe to some of those channels because they are EXTREMELY POPULAR.  For example, Pewdiepie, a Swedish video gamer, is the #1 most subscribed user on YouTube.  If you think that's weird, watch this video of him playing a game called Happy Wheels.  Well, don't watch it if you are offended by swearing.  He does that a lot.  But he also is pretty funny.  And that is what our kids are watching.  I want to be watching what they are.

I may never show his videos in class, but I do think it's important to understanding our students.

Some of those channels make content that is outstanding, like the reimagined Jane Austen stories on Lizzie Bennett Diaries or Pemberley Digital.  Some of them are science content, like V-Sauce, Veritasium, SciShow, and Minute Physics.  And some are just awesome and educational, like Crash Course or Vi Hart (if you hate math, watch this.  And then repent of hating math.  I showed this video months ago, and I still find fractals filled with elephants on papers).

Those videos are the ones I show because it says to my students:

• I care enough about you to understand the world in which you live
• I am interested in a lot of things, and I spend time learning when I'm not in class
• There are amazing things on the internet that can teach you anything you want
• I value other voices and other talent 
• There are people who can explain something or tell a story in a way that I never could match

On the practical side, here's some benefits to the strategy:

• Students hate missing the opening video.  That means they get to class on time
• It gives me time to take attendance, pass out papers, and get everything set for class
• It helps students settle into the routine
• It gives them something to write about in their daily writing warmup

Now, I also use longer content.  For example, in this unit, we have been studying the brain, how we learn, and how education can best meet the structural, psychological, and cultural challenges of adolescence.  I could have learned all of the content in the half dozen TED Talks we watched, and designed lessons with scaffolded note-taking and worksheets, and given multiple choice assessments on that information.

Or I could let the expert talk, and use it as a chance to teach students to monitor their comprehension while listening and how to best handle note-taking.  Plus, it allows me to take my own notes during the video so I can model how to do that best.  And, I take notes every time I watch the video, which shows them how much my notes improve every time I watch the video.  

Now, I don't think that my job is to just teach them how to sit down, shut up, and take notes.  In fact, if that's what education is, then we're failing our students completely.  However, I do think that note-taking is something that everyone needs to learn, and every teacher assumes another teacher has taught already.  Spending this much time taking in content and working on producing notes that accurately capture the information in a way that's useful to the student is totally worth it to me.  It builds the skills they need when they start taking on more responsibility for their own learning.

In this first trimester, the goal is to help them learn how to do all of the things they will need to do when they are more self-directed.  As Andrew and I have learned, throwing students into a self-paced autonomous environment right away is ALWAYS a failure...and especially at schools where the culture is one where spoonfeeding is accepted and expected.  So we teach them the basics.  Kind of like boot camp.  Only more fun.

That's another key to the whole "using video" strategy.  It's fun.  You know what's not fun?  Taking notes.  But when they are learning to do that with engaging content, it doesn't feel as soul-crushing.  Plus, we know that students can't really sit still for the entire hour-long class period.  Having short videos provides frequent breaks so they can help manage their attention and time on-task.  When a student knows that they will get a break in five minutes, they are able to worry less and learn more.

Fundamentally, using videos - both as short warm-ups and as longer content-delivery-systems - comes from the belief that when students see what life is like for something else, they will start caring.  Video gives them a much wider world to explore, and that gives them the opportunity to experience something they never could have on their own.  Literature still have a place, but I think English teachers have an opportunity to use this newer medium to teach many of the same skills and content we do for literature.

And that's pretty awesome.

Me: "Okay class, take a few minutes to add to your reading journal for Looking for Alaska."
Ethan walks up to me hesitantly.
Ethan: "There's no way out of the labyrinth, is there."
Me: "That is a fantastic question."
Ethan: "Yeah."

**

That probably doesn't mean much to you if you haven't read LfA (and if you haven't, you need to go read it.  Like now).  But the question he asked (or rather, stated) is the most central to the book.  It comes from the last words of Simon Bolivar: "How will I ever get out of this labyrinth?"  That question is central to the characters in the novel, and it's one with which we all wrestle at some point.

How do I live through suffering?  Is there a meaning in suffering?  How do I make it stop?  What did I do to deserve it?  Is there any way to get out of this labyrinth of suffering?

In the end of the book, John Green writes that he was born into Bolivar's labyrinth, as are we all.  It's not something we can just not experience.  So the question becomes, how do we get through the labyrinth of suffering?

That's what my 9th graders (and Andrew's 11th graders) are wrestling through right now.  Andrew and I joke that our curriculum ends up becoming a mirror for our lives all the time.  Teaching this book has become a way to understand our place in the labyrinth, and how we can best survive it.

Teaching this book also reminds me that when I was the age my students are now, I desperately needed an answer to this question.  I needed to understand why being a human sucked so much sometimes.  

Sometimes we condescend to teenagers and believe that because they are young, they can't possibly engage with the deep and meaningful questions of life.  But that's false.  In fact, whether we believe it's possible, they ARE on their own journey towards those answers.  And many of them react like the characters in the book.

Like the Colonel, they try numbing the pain.  That doesn't work.  Like Miles, they try ignoring the pain.  That also doesn't work.  Like Alaska, they try feeling the pain.  That doesn't work and leads to being paralysed with fear or anger or sadness much of the time.

One thing I've learned over the past year and a half that I've been team-teaching with Andrew is that the only to truly survive the labyrinth is in community.  In trying to articulate why it is that we collaborate, and why I believe all teachers should collaborate, I came back to this point: working closely with people who are sharing the suffering the labyrinth imposes on all of us is the only way to find meaning - and even joy! - through the pain.

Many people are driven to teaching because it's something that seems like you can get good at it.  We've all had good teachers, and most of the time, they make it look effortless.  So many people enter the teaching profession who are perfectionists by nature, or people who feel keenly their own lack of being "good enough," or who fake arrogance in order to mask just how far they fall short of their own standard, so it's no wonder that we expect teaching to be something one can perfect.  It's alluring to think that if you can just do this right, your entire world, your labyrinth, will make sense, will be meaningful, will stop hurting so damn much.

And that's a lie.  And it's why 50% of teachers leave the profession in five years.  Teaching, just like real life, is messy and difficult, and painful.  It's isolating...if you never feel like you measure up, you end up shutting your door, shutting your mouth, and putting one foot in front of the other, day after day, hoping that through your persistence you will finally end up being good enough.  That never happens.

I don't collaborate because it's easy.  I collaborate because it's how I survive the labyrinth.  I NEED people to help me take myself less seriously, to expose when my own ridiculously high standard is hurting me and my students, to take my brain crack ideas and make them real so I don't get paralysed and never do any of it.  I need someone to pull me out of the darkness of the labyrinth and remind me that there's light ahead, and if I can't make it, then they will help me.  That there's no way to be magically free of the labyrinth, but that it is built for people to face together, in community.

So I don't know how else to answer Ethan's question.  I know that there's no way out of the labyrinth except through, and I know that going through it with people who love me no matter what is the only way to not give up and let the labyrinth overwhelm me.

I also know that him asking that question is worth the entire unit.  Just for that one question.  

I can't wait to see what comes next.