Are We Wringing the Creativity Out of Kids?
In the process of writing his new book, Imagine: How Creativity Works Jonah Lehrer has discovered that many children lose their playful sense of creativity as they get older, specifically between the ages of 3rd-5th grade. Lehrer believes this is partially because our students are deemed valuable based on their ability to sit quietly in class, when in actuality, students who have distraction problems in school have a higher chance of becoming “eminent creative achievers.” Lehrer discusses the importance of giving our children a large menu of creative opportunities, and allowing them to select what they enjoy. Once they’ve found something they love it is up to adults to help them pursue these creative interests and encourage them to work hard and persevere to achieve greater goals in these areas.

The Global Search for Education: In Search of Professionals
This article interviews Randi Weingarten, president of the American Federation of Teachers. She shares her insight on what she hopes the next generation of teachers could look like, discussing her experiences and the importance of combating teacher attrition rates. In addition she focuses on the importance of respecting teachers, improving teacher training courses and providing development and support once teachers are on the job. She highlights how we must stop training our teachers in the education programs from 20 and 30 years ago, and focus on teaching for todays students.

A Great Reason for Appreciating High School Teachers
This week in National Teacher Appreciation week! Bob Lenz, the Chief Education Officers of Envision Schools in California, shares his first hand experience on how hard many high school teachers in the country work every school week; putting in an average of 70 hours of work after you calculate teaching time, staff development, lesson planning and grading. Today, as our education system is struggling, much blame is put on the shoulders of our teachers. Lenz believes that instead devoting our efforts to eliminating “bad” teachers, we should support our educators and provide them with the professional working conditions they need to thrive. It is also our responsibility to tell our policy makers that we need to create a system in this country where teaching is a valued as other high prestige career fields, such as doctors, so the most talented and dedicated individuals move towards the industry.

Be careful when comforting struggling students
This recent British study found that teachers who believed students have fixed ability levels in math were more likely to make prematures ability-based excuses for underperformance. These students also performed at a lower level on assessment (compared with students of teachers that believe math ability can be malleable) when their teachers attempted to comfort the students with comments such as “you are very talented overall, but some people just have difficulties in math.” While it may seem painful to see a student struggle in a subject, even teachers with best intentions can actually harm students when they attempt to comfort them by claiming their struggles are due to an inability to succeed at a higher level.

This weekend Kika and I attended edcampNYC. Edcamp, described as an “unconference”, is free and put together entirely by educators in different cities throughout the United States. This was my first edcamp and I really enjoyed the comfortable, supportive atmosphere. All attendees are invited to host workshops. It was acceptable to switch between workshops halfway through if you felt the need. When I met new people many asked “what do you teach?” as opposed to “what do you do?” How cool is it that this was the instinctive question to ask?

The teacher centered atmosphere made me think back to the Tom Whitby post I shared in the round up on Friday, titled Vendors: Villains or Visionaries? In it he discusses reservations that educators have with workshops run by vendors. I don’t consider myself a vendor, but of course I’m not a teacher and I do work for ShowMe, so this article provided some valuable insight. One point he makes really stuck with me “It has been my experience that the industry looks to recruit teachers whenever possible, so that their personnel do have classroom experience. Unfortunately, I think it takes about a year out of the classroom however, before credibility as a teacher is diminished if not wiped out altogether.”

I went to school for teaching and as a student teacher last year I was given full responsibility of my cooperating teachers’ classes and students. Regardless, I’m not in the classroom now, and because of that I can’t fully understand what is going on. We can’t learn what teachers and students find valuable unless we speak to them ourselves. That is why we so value the relationships we have with our teacher and student users. They are our gateway into what is actually going on in the classroom. This is also why I enjoyed edcamp and why you didn’t see any ShowMe workshops being offered. Although we’re always happy to host workshops, we were there to learn and build relationships.

In the past two months I have learned so much from the educators I speak to, either at conferences, over the phone or during school visits. Some teachers are doing amazing things in their classroom using ShowMe and other forms of educational technology. You’ve seen the posts our ambassadors share on this blog, great ideas that they’ve discovered themselves to make ShowMe a powerful tool. When we talk to other community members we like to share things that students and educators have done/do with ShowMe, not what they could do.

I may not be in the classroom this year, but I am thankful that we have so many active users that take the time to reach out to us, meet with us, and share their classroom insight and experiences. They are the reason ShowMe can be a valuable and relavant tool!

I loved learning about animals and lifecycles! This ShowMe from Barbara Ainscough demonstrates the lifecycle of a frog.

Happy May! We hope to see some of you at EdCamp NYC tomorrow :)

In Crown Heights, Getting Past Stereotypes Through Learning
Fours girls from the High School for Global Citizenship in Crown Heights, Brooklyn recently participated in a WNYC radio reporting workshop in partnership with Facing History and Ourselves. These four girls are all immigrants from the Caribbean, and until recently had no knowledge of the Crown Heights riot of 1991, the climax of long existing tensions between the black communies and the Lubavitch Jewish communities in Crown Heights. This tension still exists today, and these girls as recent immigrants had heard rumors about the Jewish community which made them wary. After doing some deep investigation and speaking to Lubavitch Jews themselves, the girls learned that the Jewish community valued its privacy, but the hurtful rumors they had heard were unjust. I love this video for a number of reasons, it is great to see students put in effort to learn about different members of their community, and I enjoyed watching these girls become so engaged in learning.

EdX: A Platform for More MOOCs and an Opportunity for More Research about Teaching and Learning Online
In a joint press conference on Wednesday, Harvard University president Drew Faust and MIT president Susan Hockfield announced the new nonprofit partnership between the two universities called edX. Together they will provide free, open, online courses and the opportunity to receive an online certification (but not college credit) after completion of the course. If these courses are successful it could be a “game changer” in the higher education field, with the top tier universities now offering free online courses.

Vendors: Villains or Visionaries?
I found this article especially interesting since ShowMe is an education company and I am not currently a teacher. Tom Whitby discusses how many educators feel about the education product vendors that appear at almost all education conferences. He explains that many educators don’t enjoy vendor directed workshops. The vendors may be experts on their product, but they are not experts on the classroom and there can be an visible disconnect. In addition, some educators are still quit hesitant to embrace technology, especially with the increased rumors that the tools could eventually replace teachers. I found it to be an interesting perspective and good to keep in mind. What is your opinion on education product vendors attending conferences and workshops?

It’s Time To Crowdsource Your School’s Social Media Policy
Instead of having every school district across the country create their own private social media policy, why not create a crowdsourced policy with input from the dedicated teachers already using social media as a valuable education tool in education. This policy can then be shared with administrators across the world. It also aims to be more than a list of rules and demands, but also a resource for best practices in social media and helpful tools for teachers. You can take part in creating the policy now, Edudemic has created a live google doc that can be edited here. 

I believe in lifelong learning as a goal. Sure, since I teach, I talk to students about becoming lifelong learners and that seems like the right thing to do, but I don’t do it because it’s the right thing to do, I do it because I believe in it. As a result I don’t believe in summer homework assignments or summer reading. I do believe that kids should read in the summer and I do hope that they flex their mental muscles with ideas, but schools shouldn’t be the ones to assign it. Summer is a good chunk of time to test the chops of lifelong learning.

For me, every summer is a chance for me to explore. I walk into the time off with a list of things I want to do, ways I want to expand my knowledge. Sometimes it’s curriculum driven and sometimes it isn’t. Take last summer, for example. I was staring down the exciting beginning of a 1:1 iPad program and the potential for me to get a Smartboard in my classroom. I focused my summer on technology by playing with ShowMe and Khan Academy, attending a workshop on using Smartboards in math classes, and became very familiar with the ways I could use the iPad. All of those activities were full of learning experiences, but I never allow my summer of learning to be limited to “school stuff.” For the past several summers it has been a goal of mine to become a better cook and expand my cooking horizons and skills. On the technology front I further explored Twitter as a tool for marketing and found that I could use it as a way to bring me information I never knew existed. My love of music and my former life as a college radio dj challenged me to explore podcasts and create a thirty minute radio show to get a better understanding of how they work. Every summer I learn so much to continue to grow as a person and to live the thing I believe.

This summer started early for me, as I began my paternity leave last week. My summer list is a little different this year. At the top of the list is to spend time getting to know my young son and create a bond with him that will serve the both of us well for the future. I want to develop better habits for buying food in order to spend less and waste less. I want to continue to explore the best uses of technology in the classroom as well well as expand my knowledge and experience with what’s out there. This blog is a learning experience for me, as I find a way to use my voice to interact with educators who happen to read these posts. I challenge you to make a summer lifelong learning list and make progress on it every day. You may find out things that you never knew, and that makes it a worthwhile activity.