Why do you blog?

Chances are, you started blogging but still felt like you didn't have anything worth sharing.  Long time readers of this blog know that it used be called "Pathetic Attempt at Blogging," which Crystal, Karl and Andrew convinced me was no longer accurate once I had dozens of posts in only a few months.

I've also played around with student blogging over the past few years.  My first attempt was for students to respond to classwork on blogs rather than on documents as short essays.  They would write about the content, mostly.  But most of it was so specific to my class that using blogs was style over substance.  I also used a platform that made the blogs completely hidden from the world behind a password-protected group...which made the whole thing seem pretty pointless, both to me and my students.

Then I tried having students use them more like a journal.  But without the kind of confidentiality you have with a paper notebook that can be fully in your control at all times, the blogs were watered down and mostly uninteresting.

Soon after, we tried having our students use blogs as the vehicle for our 20% time projects, and we had Andrew's students read my students' blogs and vice versa.  That was cool in many ways, but the cross-country collaboration didn't work out as well as we hoped, and the blog wasn't the right format for many of the projects our students chose.

Then a year with no technology left me wondering if blogging even had a place in my classroom.

But I keep coming back to the idea because I KNEW there had to be a way to conquer the issues I'd faced before - lack of technology, blogs that were not sharable outside the classroom or that were too private to share publicly, or using a blog for something that could be better done in a different format.

And that's when it hit me.

In some ways, my life would be a lot easier if I just said no late work, ever.  I mean, I don't give homework, so late work is only class work not finished during class time.

But that doesn't mean students finish everything when they "should."

If I didn't accept late work, I would rarely see the kind of "helping" some parents and tutors do. 

If I didn't accept late work, I wouldn't get frantic emails at 10 PM on a Friday night about how I would ruin the student's weekend if I didn't let them turn in a few assignments late.

But if I didn't accept late work, I wouldn't give my students a chance to fail.  Andrew and I make a big deal about school being the right place to get to practice failing - especially middle school.  I want them to use up as many mistakes as possible with me so they don't have to face much more difficult consequences later.

Here are all the posts from this week!  The topic was: What is one tool, trick, hack, app or program that has changed the way you teach?


Here are the blogs:
Cheryl Morris - Making the Technology Invisible in my Flipped Classroom
Andrew Thomasson - Hacking #flipclass with Kaizena
Katie Lanier - Practice Check It Prove It: Flipped Classroom Hack
Shai McGowan - Relationships, SCoodle, and Sites: Oh My!
Robin Nehila - Weekly Menu
Kate Baker - Classroom Hacks
Delia Bush - Willingness to be Different: A Game-Changer
Jennifer Gwilt - What is Working in Class Today
Lindsay Cole - #flipclass #specialskillz

Google Drive has changed the way I teach.  And Autocrat has changed the way I Google Drive.

My colleagues complain about students having disorganised folders, or how students send work named incorrectly and titled badly and without spacing or a heading...etc.  

My Google Drive is organised so that every assignment is in its own folder, separated by period, and titled with "Last Name First Name Assignment Title."  That makes it incredibly searchable.  It also auto-fills a heading, a title, and puts a timestamp on it.  Finally, it's set up in whatever format I want - single or double spaced, with a table, or with questions already loaded...basically anything I want

All that happens through Autocrat, an add-on for Google Sheets.  The installation is fairly simple, and it creates the easiest document management system I've ever found.

Today I asked a student if they felt like writing was a struggle for them.  They replied, "Not really.  I just don't like to do it so I put it off or don't work as hard on it."

That encapsulates the battle raging in my head right now: How do you push students to do their best because the learning and the skills are intrinsically important in a system designed to measure "good enough" with a letter and a percentage?

That's something I've been thinking about a lot lately.  

***

The idea of teaching character alongside content is not a new one; education reformers always throw in the character traits they value most or feel is lacking in the previous generation.

My generation was pushed towards individual achievement and "reaching our dreams."  Now, we talk about grit and determination as being essential to success, but the dialogue in education is FAR more about how to integrate the 5 C's: collaboration, communication, creativity, curiosity and critical thinking.

Are those things bad?  Hell no.  If you've read my blog for more than five minutes you know I'm a fan of all of those things.

But what I keep struggling with is how much to push my students to figure out for themselves, and how much to walk them through step-by-step.  

Because if I don't walk them through step-by-step, then they make mistakes.

And if they make mistakes, their grades go down.

And when their grades go down, they panic, and their parents panic.

And then they email me with ALL OF THE PANIC.

And that's the week I've been having.

Tonight, we did something that I'm pretty sure has never happened before:  We made out weekly #flipclass Twitter chat into a community blogging session.

We started with a few questions about how people felt stuck in their practice, and what they could do to get unstuck.  Then we announced that was the blog topic, and let people go write for 20 minutes.

That's when the magic happened.  So far, there have been 18 posts shared as part of the chat, and we hope others will join us asynchronously and we can add to the list!

What follows is a list of everyone who participated in the inaugural Flash Blog Post #flipclass chat.

Confession time: I never feel like I'm doing a good enough job.  It doesn't matter how many students are successful and learning.  It doesn't matter how good my evaluations are.  It doesn't matter how many parents thank me for the difference I'm making for their child.

It still never feels like enough.

Some days, that feels crushing.  The truth is, I get stuck there more often than I'd like to admit.

Ever had a class that really liked to ask questions?  Or maybe just a single student who always had some unrelated question they were dying to ask?

Ever said to them or him or her, "I'm sorry, we don't have time for that question.  We have work to do"...but when you reflected on it later, you regretted not MAKING that time?

That happened to me for years.  

I had a routine early in my career called Check In.  We did it at the start of class every day, and we took those random off-the-wall questions that students had and shared them, found answers, talked about college, relationships, parents, school...pretty much everything.  

But as with many things, I felt like it took too much time from curriculum so I stopped doing it.  

That has felt like a mistake ever since.

Tonight, after two weeks off, we tried to have #flipclass chat.

And right at 5 PM PST, Twitter went down, at least for the West Coast.  East Coast people (including my co-moderator, Andrew) were able to tweet a bit, but nothing was showing up with the hashtag.

And again, my professional development seems so close to my professional practice.  In class this year, you hear this a lot:


"My [computer/internet/Google Drive] isn't working."
"Well, did you restart?"
"Yes."
"Did you turn the wifi off and back on?"
"Yes."
"Did you try a different browser?"
"Yes."
"Well, restart one more time."
"I've already restarted three times."
"Oh.  Go to tech support, I guess."