The “bookkeeping” elements of teaching have been transformed by the laptop experience in some dramatic ways:

(1)   “The dog ate my homework” is simply not possible; NING postings are designated by date and time – you either handed it in by the due date or you didn’t.  (I did have every student create a backup file of each posting, but no one ever had to use it.)

(2)   All assignments are posted online; all schedule changes are updated daily online; all student questions about homework are posted for all sections to see, and most of the time such questions are answered by fellow students before the teacher even has a chance to get to them.

(3)   Rough drafts, revisions, and final drafts in progress are readily available for the teacher to comment upon.  I will admit that I never became comfortable grading the online documents.  The students submitted the final copies and I made hard copies to mark with my red and green Pilot pens.  Sorry, but some things will never change.

(4)   No piles of paper.  In my classroom are two tables.  Table # 1 is for my non- laptop AP English Literature class in which I have spent all year forcing the students to produce handwritten documents to prepare for the low-tech AP Exams.  Table # 1 is covered with piles of paper, some listing precariously, all destined for the recycling bins.  Table # 2 is for my laptop classes.  Set in the middle is a laptop and to the left is a small pile of final examinations – one the few handwritten assignments (along with reading quizzes) of the year.  There is probably a secure way to give exams online, but I haven’t gotten there yet.

(5)   Only a few textbooks to return (or lose) at the end of the year.  While Gulliver’s Travels and A Tale of Two Cities are available online, I just wasn’t ready to abandon paper for works of that length, so we used the texts.

Dr. Lynch’s final post will be a reflection about the entire process of going paperless.

Christmastime came and went, as did Lent, Semana Santa, college acceptances and rejections, and AP anxiety.  This file was left behind to brood, unopened, wherever in cyberspace such files reside.  I never tried another prezi, although I spent some time playing around with assessment rubrics in case I did.  I suppose it could be said that I opted for more cowardly technological applications, continuing to follow and contribute to the rather wonderful threads of my students’ NING entries and tracing those of three other teachers who had joined the fray.  But the truth of the matter is that by the time Semester II was well under way, the “laptop” feature of this course had become second nature to me.  Every class began with a request to three students whose postings seemed worthy of attention to read out loud and begin the discussion.  Students who had not done the homework were put on “dictionary duty” and required to look up words and other necessary background information on the internet.  One (frequently non-homework-ready) student, an accomplished musician and aficionado of musical internet links, provided us with examples of Baroque music for Gulliver’s Travels, Romantic music for our unit on Wordsworth, Keats, Shelley, and Byron, French Revolutionary martial tunes and folk music (the Carmagnole of The Reign of Terror) for A Tale of Two Cities, and WW I music for our final unit on War Poetry.  Others contributed contemporary paintings, photographs, and current events relevant to the themes and time periods of the literature we were considering.

As the year progressed, I got better at handling “screen stare”- that inclination to look at the screen rather than the human beings in the room during a discussion.  I never found a better solution than Steve’s original “45 your screen” advice.  Leaving the screens up and available at all times is deadly, not to mention uncivilized.  Indeed, an unforeseen benefit of having to deal with screen stare has been the opportunity to discuss techno-etiquette with the students in a non-threatening environment.  After all, this course is encouraging the use of technology, not carping about it.  As a group, we were able to consider the best ways to interact with our fellow creatures while devising some best practice techno-rules.  After a few weeks, the kids were 45ing their screens automatically when appropriate, and even asking me:  “do you mind if I look up something relevant to the discussion?”  While I am sure that there were, from time to time, students who sneaked a peek at email and games, there was no more of this kind of inattention than in a non-techno classroom, and in some instances, less.  After all, it is hard to fall asleep draped over an up and running laptop.

I have never been a fan of oral presentations.  By high school, students have usually done a fair number of them.  The favored mode of delivery is wooden, the information bland, the conclusions predictable.  PowerPoint has not helped much as students generally just read the power pointed items to those assembled.  Upon reflection however, one cannot imagine a language arts skill, save writing, more important to master.  Regardless of particular educational, professional, or life choices, almost every student will, at some time, be required to present material to an audience.  And as we all know, nothing is more painful and dispiriting than a poorly conceived and delivered presentation.  Armed with a disinterested sense of making a purposeful contribution to the betterment of society, I therefore decided to make “The Presentation” the focal point of our academic endeavors in Quarter I.  The content to be covered included:  (1) Joseph Campbell’s essay “The Hero’s Journey” (online); (2) A collection of assorted readings on the Anglo-Saxon warrior culture (online links); (3) the complete text of Beowulf (an online adaptation and a direct translation).  As we worked our way through the first half of the epic in class, we began to compile a list (from festivals and funerals to women and warriors) of researchable topics that were deemed worthy of our attention, and, most importantly, that we felt would help illuminate our understanding of what must certainly be considered a misty time and place. By the time Beowulf had gotten old and was preparing to fight the dragon, the students had each chosen their topics, and Steve was ready to introduce the prezi.

In a moment I will reveal the results, but let me say outright that I strongly discourage flying by the seat of your pants on this one.  The students needed Steve above and behind them for the key phases of construction and for multiple instances of troubleshooting prior to delivery day.  Fortunately his office is about 25 feet away from my classroom door and he responded without apparent irritation to our bleats of distress.  It’s not that the system is terribly hard to master (especially for the kids), but the psychological barrier to operating without step-by-step instructions is daunting for those of us who lack computer confidence.  I would also advise monitoring prezi construction in scheduled classroom workshops, partially because this gives the kids a chance to see the innovations of others and mostly because the teacher needs to watch the “building” process.

OK, now for the outcomes: (1) While, as with any academic enterprise, quality varied, the visual/sensory element of the prezis was a revelation.   Color, movement, film, music, and collage were incorporated smoothly into the written text in a way that energized presenters and audience.  There were original works of art, cartoons, and comparative illustrations that brought the Anglo-Saxon characters to life.  There were wonderful historical insets, and clips from films.  There were artifacts from archaeological digs and excerpts from critical tomes.  It provided something of the aesthetic pleasure of leafing through a well designed coffee-table book – a feast for the senses.  With some exceptions, the presenters abandoned the drone-like power point reading, and adopted a livelier mode of delivery, pausing to discuss a variety of research “discoveries,” and responding to questions with enthusiasm.  And there were more questions.  This is a profoundly sensory generation of learners; they come to life when they are in the presence of light and sound and are pretty sophisticated about evaluating what they see and hear.  Ultimately, our biggest problem was keeping the kids down to the 25 minute limit we had imposed, and in the end a majority of the groups had gone overtime. (2) Steve and I had agreed that it made sense for us to collaborate upon (but not divide) the grading; he was more cognizant of the technological level of difficulty and I was more knowledgeable about Beowulf. Both of us, as veteran teachers, were experienced evaluators of oral presentations.  While we agreed on most of the grades, I think we were both surprised about the huge gap (sometimes spanning two or three grade levels) in our assessment of the group of presentations about which we disagreed.  What was happening here?  In my experience, collaborative assessments vary quite narrowly, if at all.  Was I resisting the technology in a way that would cause me to downgrade those with more elaborate displays on the assumption that they must have skimped on the content? (I will admit that on a number of occasions, I was so deer-in-the-headlights dazzled by the stuff on screen that I sort of stopped making notes on the coverage of ideas.)  Or was Steve, in his understanding of the level of technological difficulty, assigning more credit to elements of presentation than substance?  Whatever accounted for this phenomenon, it left me uneasy, hesitant in my explanation of the students’ grades, and feeling like I had lost control of my goals for the project.  Steve and I agreed that we probably needed to make a better assessment plan ahead of time; in mitigation, however, how can you do that when you don’t know what to expect?  The only sure way to address this conundrum is to try again.

[See the Beowulf prezis]

The first startling result of this enterprise was the virtual disappearance of paper from my pedagogical environment.  The initial sensation was vaguely disquieting.  Something was missing.  Bulky spiral notebooks had been transformed into a collection of daily NING postings– reflective and analytical writings due each day that were visible not only to the teacher, but to all of the students in the three sections of the course.  Class Notes and impromptu writing were being entered in personal folders kept by each student.  Formal writing assignments – including multiple drafts – were stored for ready access during in-class writing workshops.  While I have, of course, posted schedules and assignments online for some time, the all laptop scheme allows for all materials and links to be posted and modified on a continuing basis and via the collective will of the classroom community.  The most challenging paradigm shift in this area, for me, has concerned the replacement of textbooks with online resources.  The complete texts of all three of our major works for the first semester, including Beowulf (The J.R.R. Tolkien translation), Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, and Hamlet, were read and studied online. [Project Gutenberg] I have mixed emotions about this.  On the one hand, I am an inveterate lover of books; I like the way they smell, and look, and feel in my hands.  I even find pleasure in distributing old books, the ones with marginalia of days and students past scrawled on the edges of the text.  There is, undoubtedly, a fundamental psychological disconnect that even the most tech oriented among us must feel when looking at an electronic text.  Indeed, staring at the familiar lines of cherished works of literature on a screen, even as I try to communicate a love of reading for its own sake to my students, takes an extra measure of negative capability.  The other problem is the quality of many electronic texts.  The version of Hamlet we are using, for example, while complete, contains a number of inexplicable mistakes (the text suddenly being presented in italics, for instance; using continuous line numbers, rather than beginning, as is the standard convention, with each act or scene).  Better editions can be, of course, ordered and paid for. (Beware, though; books I have ordered on my personal Kindle are often filled with mistakes.) On the plus side, if an institution is strapped for cash, free, minimally flawed editions of books in public domain can save a great deal of money.

If there is a scene more unnerving to a teacher who still owns and fondly peruses the contents of all of her original file folders from 1974 to the present, it is entering a room full of glowing rectangles, each manned by a cheeky, tech-savvy young person.  I was in for it now.  Weeping uncontrollably was not an option.  Fortunately for me, Steve and Harry had opted out of a “tech tough love” strategy,  instituting instead a plan in which Steve would be in the majority of my classes with me for the first three or four weeks, and would be available during my planning periods to help me technologically rethink paper and pen assignments.  His presence in the classroom in the opening days of Quarter I was essential in several important ways.  (1) He was there to troubleshoot any initial difficulties as we:  set up the NING site, got the students registered, and began to experiment with ways for them to post, and me to assess, their work.  (2) He was there to model laptop instructional techniques:  how to keep the kids on task, when to 45 the screens, how to keep the discussions flowing.  (3) He was there to keep me from freaking out.  I would argue that while it is possible to “break in” to tech by yourself, if your personal profile in any way resembles mine, the presence of a tech mentor in and out of the classroom is essential.  By the end of three weeks, I felt confident enough to manage all of the daily assignments with a certain amount of aplomb.

Sign up here.

I am coming up on the end of my first techno-semester, and responding at last to the faint whimpering heard occasionally from the file I opened back in August that was to be dedicated to a frequent and eloquent flow of reflections on the experience, I am ready to make a few tentative pronouncements that might serve to encourage those who are contemplating a move in the same direction.  While I have, I believe, already been introduced by my mentor, Steven Katz, and my husband and principal, Harry Grzelewski (an approach that may have seemed coy, but was actually motivated by terror), you need to know that previous to this August, my technological repertoire included: (1) being able to show a video to the class even when “12:00-12:00-12:00” was flashing on the VHS player the whole time; (2) being able to use the word processor like a typewriter ; (3) being able to input grades if, and only if, I followed a handwritten list of instructions taped to my hard drive, the function of which I have never been entirely certain about.  (I was the only person at a dinner party a few years ago who didn’t laugh when someone told the story about the guy who wrote his computer company asking if he could order a new “cup holder” because the one on his hard drive had broken off.) So when I made a sort of off-handed remark to Steve and Harry last spring that I might try turning my British Lit class in the fall into a laptop course, I didn’t really expect them to start making plans.  After all, neither man had ever actually shown signs of being mentally unbalanced.  Strategies for evasive action began to formulate in my head:  I wasn’t ready…  someone else, a person with more of a can-do spirit, would be better…  I wasn’t really feeling all that well … etc.  I probably should have been suspicious when Harry suddenly bought me a laptop as a “gift” right before we left Texas this summer, but it all just seemed so remote.

Reclaim your Facebook privacy in one minute using this simple tool.

Facebook’s Gone Rogue by Ryan Singei for Wired

Facebook Freak-Out! by Richard Kassissieh

Facebook Privacy: A Bewildering Tangle of Options from the NY Times

The Tell-All Generation Learns to Keep Things Off Line by Laura M. Holson for the NY Times

Facebook’s privacy guide – READ CLOSELY

Facebook privacy settings guide from Kiwi Commons (published March 18, 2010)

How to disable Facebook’s instant personalization from Mashable

Facebook photo privacy flaw from Kiwi Commons (published March 4, 2010)

Protecting reputations online by Common Craft

Facebook Privacy for Parents on Prezi

One of the biggest struggles in education, or any large group setting for that matter, is how do you insure that the really important questions get asked.  The traditional method of getting questions asked is the “hand raised” method, in which you call on the hands that get raised.  This random approach getting questions asked works, but it isn’t terribly efficient, and unless you have time to get to every raised hand, there is no way to insure that you got the most important questions answered.  And that doesn’t even cover the situation of the question that someone is too shy to raise a hand for asking!  It might be a great question, but if the one who thought of it is too intimidated to ask it, it just stays in their head unanswered!

The solution:

Thankfully, the great minds at Google have helped us out again with the online program Google Moderator.

Google Moderator serves as a simple question or idea housing center. Have a question? Put it up on the Moderated page.  It then shows up on the page for all in the session to see. You can even post questions anonymously, so for the shy student, this is a great way to get their voice heard! To check out a simple example from a principal’s meeting, click here!

Not just questions:

The great thing about Google Moderator though, is that it isn’t just about asking questions or putting out ideas. Through Moderator, users can vote on the questions that they think are really great questions.

By looking through the list, you can vote for a question that you’ve been wondering about…or just realized you should be wondering about!…but also, you can vote against a question that you really don’t feel needs to be asked.  Google Moderator then goes through and ranks the questions live, allowing the moderator of the session to see the most important questions first, and then work down the list!

To take it a step forward, there is even the capability of adding responses to questions, so as you go through, you can add answers to help students go back and refresh themselves on the answer later!

How can you use it?

So how can you start using this in your classroom today? Well, here are a few ideas:

• Create a weekly moderator session in your math class, allowing students to post questions from their homework each night with which they struggled.  Students can agree or disagree with the questions they struggled with and it helps the teacher know which problems to focus on the next day during warm-up.
• Create a list of hypotheses for a science experiment and allow students to vote on which they think is the best.
• Give students an interview project and allow them to work in Google Moderator to define which are the best questions to ask.

Google Moderator truly answers the great question of the classroom and we hope you jump in there and start getting your questions answered!  For more ideas on using technology in your classroom, be sure to check out more of resources and blog entries on the iCafe Blog!

Teach Paperless blog by Shelly Blake-Plock

Paperless wiki

Share ideas for going paperless on this Google Doc.

Pledge to go paperless.

See the list of over 1400 teachers from around the world who have pledged to go paperless for Earth Day.

See a map of these teachers.

Subscribe in iTunes (or leave a review)