Seeing the Forest AND the Trees: Student Exploration Time

By Darin Anderson

Picture this: You arrive for your first painting lesson from a renowned local artist. Before you lay all the materials you need to begin creating your first masterpiece.

As you settle in with your surroundings, in walks the artist, who begins visiting with each participant about the beauties of art and painting.

You simply cannot wait to get started.

Monsieur Paintbrush walks to the front of the room and begins speaking to the group about the endless possibilities of paints and palettes and prisms of color. He continues into very interesting dialogue about purpose and passion, and you become even more excited to fill your empty canvas with wonder.

However, as the minutes pass by, you notice the instruction, while incredibly valuable and inspiring, has left you no time to do what you came for.

As the artist bids you a find adieu, you leave your still blank canvas and pristinely clean brushes behind, hoping for a chance - next time - to work wonders with them.

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Would you stand for such circumstances? Regardless of whether or not you paid a fee for the class, I'm certain you would be disappointed with the outcome. Why, you never even got to open up the paints!

Imagine the thousands of students who walk in and out of thousands of classrooms each school day with the same emotions - "Sounds cool, but I never even got a chance to try it out!"

Now, imagine yet another situation - similar and just as frustrating to our students:

Monsieur Paintbrush walks to the front of the room and instructs you to follow his lead in painting a red flower. He takes you step by step through the process, even stopping the class to ensure that each participant neither speeds ahead or lags behind. "We all must build the red flower as I do," he says.

Since you are a decent painter who has done his or her share of flowers, bushes, and trees, you begin to become antsy and annoyed at the teacher for not letting you "do your own thing" and paint what you want. But in the interest of staying with the group you decide to just remain silent and paint your red flower.

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While I understand the need for direct instruction and scaffolding in classrooms, I believe that we often go overboard with controlling the scenario in the interest of classroom management and, honestly, making our own lives as teachers easier.

However, many of our students leave classrooms each day without having had the opportunities to explore and design and create and tinker with (insert content/skills here).

Think of the tools we have in our classrooms that are metaphorically represented by the canvas, brushes, and paints in our story:

Computers and laptops

iPads and other tablets

Video cameras

Student Smartphones
3D Printers (perhaps)
CNC Machines (perhaps)

Not to mention these:
Glue
Scissors
Cardboard
Paper
String
Plutonium (according to Dr. Emmett Brown, it should be readily available these days)

But those "standard issue" tools are only the beginning. Think of a computer (or other device) as a box of toys. In and of itself it is a container with little practical use. However, the inside holds the wonders of the world (and I'm not talking about word processing programs).

For example:
+ Google Hangouts or Skype allows staff and students access to content area experts all over the world.
+ 3D programs such as Tinkercad and Thingiverse make design and creation easily accessible for users.
+ Video and audio creation programs allow students to express themselves as never before.
+ 24/7 discussion and collaboration are a snap with Google Drive and a wide variety of social media outlets.

But here I am preaching to the choir. Or am I?

Please take to heart the memes inserted in this post. Ensure that on a daily basis you are having your students explore, create, design, and tinker with content, skills, and - most importantly - their own thoughts and ideas.

Our world - and their - will be the better for it!

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IPad Lit Circles: Daniel Pink, Aurasma, Wikispaces and Interclass Collaboration

While reading Daniel Pink's book Drive, I came across for me a very earth shattering passage. In his chapter entitled "The Rise and Fall of Motivation 2.0." Pink sets up a an interesting thought. To paraphrase, he asks his readers to imagine that it is 1995. He says, “I’m going to describe two new encyclopedias—one just out, the other to be launched in a few years. You have to predict which will be more successful in 2010.”
Below, I would like to set up his binaries.

Encyclopedia 1	Encyclopedia 2
Microsoft Funded	Doesn’t come from a company
Well paid Professional Writers	Written and edited by a thousands of people for fun.
Well compensated Managers	Contributors work 20 and sometimes 30 hours per week, for free.
Completed on time and on budget	There are no deadlines and no budget
Sold on CD Rom Later sold on the internet	The encyclopedia exists completely online and costs nothing

He continues saying "According to my crystal ball, in 2010, one of these encyclopedias will be the largest and most popular in the world and the other will be defunct."

Now, we are lucky to have the hindsight to know that Encyclopedia 1 is MSN Encarta, which Microsoft ended on October 31st, 2009, and Encyclopedia 2 is none other than Wikipedia.  Pink goes on to talk about why this is the case. I do not plan on getting into that today, however if you'd like to dive into that, I very much suggest you read Daniel Pink's Drive, or at the very least check out his Ted Talk.

After reading this, I wanted to test this out in a classroom setting. In our state, my Junior English Students are asked to do a lit circle at the end of the year. This body of educational evidence is known as "the Reader's Choice". In this assessment, students are to read a book of their choice and engage in class discussions surrounding theme, vocabulary, literary devices, special quotes and a handful of other topics. They are then asked to synthesize all of this information into a visual presentation.
I chose to do this a bit differently than what was done in the past.

All year long, we had done many group projects within classes. I felt like there were few combinations that I could make that hadn't already been done. So instead I took all 4 of my classes (this totaled roughly 105 students) and threw them all together in a pot. I wanted to see if I could have students working on a project completely online, and where they never once met face to face in person. I understand there are social aspects of group work that were missed here, but with our world operating on such a global scale, I thought this would definitely be a 21st century skill.

I began looking for an educational online platform where students could read, chat, post ideas,  and present their findings together. I essentially was looking for a wiki. I came across wikispaces.com.
I plan to post a few "how to's"  and specifics on what we were able to do with wkispaces. Suffice it to say, it had everything I needed and even things that I didn't know I needed that became essential to the process.

We essentially used 4 iPad apps for this activity:
Wikispaces
Bcontext
Aurasma
Todaysmeet

I will go through how we used all 4 of these programs in upcoming posts. This activity was extremely successful. Not just by my standards, but I used an anonymous poll and found that the kids really enjoyed it as well. The students mentioned that they "felt like (we were) doing something special every day." I also had one student say "I usually read something and then forgot it. With this project, I was able to see the progress and remember."
Our website, which I give complete credit to our students for what they created, was featured on wikispaces as an outstanding use of their software. As a representative of the class, I had the opportunity to do a google hangout with Wendy Gorton from wikispaces on how we used it in the classroom. You can check it out below.
Here is the article.

Below you can find the link to the wiki, if you'd like to check it out.

Mr. Einfeldt's Class Wiki Page