True Tech Grit

Don’t get me wrong. I LOVE using technology and do so more than is required or even expected of me. It is not a matter of mandate for me, but a matter of value to the student. You will have different camps that immediately circle their wagons when the technology heathens come in to raid their comfortable little journey across the plains of the school year. Let’s go over the different camps that I tend to see the most.

NOTE: I hate people who label others and group individuals based on stereotypical observations. That being said, here are some groups that I have labeled based on stereotypical observations I have made over the years.

1.       Chalkboard Cowboys: This camp is still bitter about toilets that flush and wish the world was still made in such a way to force a kid to walk to school uphill, both ways, in a hurricane while milking the family cow and writing FDR a letter in hopes of a personal “Fireside Chat”. Don’t fall in to this trap. Technology is about as welcome as a fox in a hen house in their circle! Bitterness and sourpuss attitudes do nothing but ruin careers and good people in love with the reason we are teaching. Don’t argue with them. Let them make their stand during the trainings and faculty meetings. There is also no age requirement for this camp. I have seen them as young as a 23 year old first year teachers to a 70+ year old award winning teacher in the last year before their retirement. Don’t worry. There are other camps to choose from.

2.       Urban Cowboys: You know who you are. These are the ones who wear the boots and the hat, but have never mended a fence or even have seen a horse close enough to see the beauty in their patient stare. (For the record: I am not a fan of horses.) This camp is a tricky one to spot. They broadcast themselves with their stories of technology in the classroom, but only when they are at the community coffee pot with at least one Administrator within ear shot of their slightly louder than normal conversation with the new teacher who is half asleep from grading papers until 3am the night before. These guys are friends of the Chalkboard Cowboys, but usually don’t have the testicular fortitude or tenure to be so outwardly negative against things. So, they play the system a bit. Technology comes into their lessons when it counts: an observation, a required cross-curricular project with another teacher, or out of plain desperation to show up another person in their department. Don’t fret. There are more campfires burning just over the horizon.

3.       Town Crier Cowboys: Old Timers would attribute this to the “Me Society” or some other group than their own that can easily be blamed. The truth is that this camp is where all the teachers who love to email THE ENTIRE #$@!% SCHOOL some website, app, or some other nonsense that works only for one content area, or a single grade with only a handful of students gaining benefit from it. But, Hey! Everyone now knows they are tech savvy and maybe now their name will be mentioned next week in the faculty meeting! These guys haven’t learned how to be “Urban” yet. They are just working way too hard. Soon they will realize they do not need to put forth so much effort to act the part. Don’t go here. Those who stand on tables and beat their chests to get attention for doing what is expected of them is a short fuse to a huge problem. Don’t worry, there is still hope.

4.       The Real Cowboys: They are the ones who work hard every day, help those who need help, raise the herd, and go to sleep each night staring into the campfire allowing the embers to comfort them to sleep. There are more people like this in every school than is believed. It is easy to over look the people who quietly do the job, take on the new tech challenges, and figure out AND USE what works for their kids. It is difficult to spot these in your building. The best way is to listen to your students. Ask them about what projects they are doing in other classes, what they are excited about working with, and who is doing them. The Real Cowboys are perfect poker players and can carry a blank face when the “Urbans” and “Criers” are wasting good oxygen and file space in your inbox. Once you find one of the Real Cowboys, go talk to them, face to face, alone, and without any intent to draw attention to what awesomeness they are doing. This camp is quiet. Not much talking, but a lot of knowledge and opportunity.

Remember, that each camp has value to you. Appreciation for anything only comes when we can truly see all sides of it. Listen…with restraint…to the Chalkboard Cowboys; most of them have the experience that will give you insight into the “latest and greatest fad” that overwhelms education like relentless winds on the prairie. The “Criers” and “Urbans” will usually use and promote the easiest stuff that will get them the desired result. They will have good sources, just check your spam folder and pack some ear plugs.

One more thing. A school system will throw more tech ideas, sites, programs, apps, and other nonsense than you can honestly handle. The idea is NOT for you to use all of them, but to try them and find a couple that work for you. It will be overwhelming at times. It will be annoying at times. It will seem like they have lost their minds on the time it takes for us to plan and teach, but they do know. You can be more effective by trying it and reporting back what did and did not work instead of running to the Chalkboard camp.

We are given the task of being educators in a world of technology that is advancing faster than the laws that regulate it. We are members to one of the oldest professions and must remember to be timeless in our approach in being relevant.

To be life-long teachers we must also be life-long learners. Have the "True Tech Grit" to make your classroom a place where your students can help keep the camp fires burning bright for years to come.

POWERpoint or PowerPOINTLESS?

In college you learned about how to properly put a group of adults to sleep with a PowerPoint presentation of wordy real estate and a lack of action. Then, you show up to your classroom and hear all this talk about using “technology in the classroom”, but see there is not much funding for the really cool stuff you read about in all those Education magazines. So, you scrape together an LCD projector by bribing your librarian with free coffee until Christmas Break. Then, you spend a Thursday night with a couple glasses of wine, a king size pack of Kit-Kats, and a Youtube playlist of music to make you feel like your I.Q. is glowing from all its academic power. You strut into your classroom for a cool Friday lesson with the comforting hum of the projector pumping out pictures like your students pump out text messages while in the bathroom during class.

You crank up the Powerpoint, the kids are poised for greatness, and you start your presentation that would have gotten a perfect score in your college computer class. Everyone else is not so happy… Your expectation of having an “Avatar” kind of day quickly turns into the outtakes from “Steam Boat Willie”. The class is not impressed, not engaged, and not caring about the effort you put in last night. Frustration sets in and you vow to call “technology” a dumb idea.

Three words: PUMP THE BRAKES!

It is not your fault. You were taught how to make a “successful” PowerPoint by people twice removed from an actual classroom where they are using guidelines created, no doubt, from the tutorial for the program itself. Not everyone does this, but it is the general thinking I have seen in my college career and the ways of thinking with most of my student teachers over the years. There is nobody at fault for this. At least there is some kind of training going on. Just remember your audience. Audience changes rules, throws out the list of “don’ts”, and leaves room for imagination. Audience = Adaptation.

Things I do with my PowerPoints:

• Solid backgrounds and no weird font colors. Remember, there are people with different eyesight, seating, color blindness, and the presence of mind to realize eye strain sucks for anyone. White is always my background and black and dark blue are usually my font colors. Remember, an LCD projector also dulls colors…
• Less is more. I hate that saying, but it fits here. Do not put a huge amount of words on each slide. Chunk it to go over a few slides. This makes it easier to digest and less intimidating for the student.
• Make everything move and make sound. Watching moving objects goes all the way back to the Caveman. Which means it really is, “so easy a Caveman can do it.”
•  Use more than the stock sounds. Go search free sound effects, movie quotes, etc. You can find several free sites where you can download these things and use them. Do it. There is only so much cash register, clapping, and whoosing sounds someone can take before they feel like they are at Guantanamo Bay. We know when we hear certain sounds on T.V. it connects with certain products or events. Come on…all I need to saw is “Jaws”….you are 'duh dumming' in your head right now. Do that! Not 'Duh dumming', but assign sounds to specific actions. I have a sound that leads to extra credit. I tell the kids and let them listen for it. Sometimes they get it, sometimes they don’t. I also have one for “test question alert”. I tell them that too….only once or twice. Let them get into it and find the clues.
• Pictures are a good thing. Bing, Google, Yahoo, and whatever else you use has an images search feature. Use it. Hot tip: If you right click on the photo you can copy and paste in into your slide without increasing the size of the file by saving it and inserting it…and make sure you are following copyright rules if you are putting this thing out there to the public. Talk to your Librarian. They are a WONDERFUL resource. Probably the smartest people in the building…
• Earlier we talked in the “8 and 2” post about creating your own in-class commercial breaks. There is nothing wrong with a slide having a question or photo to generate this. Your call.
• Make it fun. Vary up your motions you assign to the content. Making it all appear via motion/click means no one gets ahead of you and loses focus or disrupts others.

Our students are bombarded with sounds, pictures, and easy to read phrases all over the place. I use the exact same idea when introducing content. The real work begins after we all know what we are talking about, but when we ARE talking about it I want to make sure it is as comfortable and “easy” as possible.

Just remember that, “Audience = Adaptation”. Make it fit your students. Ask for feedback and actually listen to it. They will tell you what they want to make it less painful. If they are having fun while learning then the trust they have for you multiplies. If they trust you, then they will perform for you.

8 and 2

We have all been extremely frustrated when that commercial break came in the middle of our favorite show. But, in that commercial break you have done things that could have rivaled the best Olympians in the world today. Poured another drink, used the restroom, checked on your kid, and liked your friend’s dumb photo of his neighbor carrying a pink flamingo. (Okay, maybe I am telling a little too much about my personal viewing habits, but you get the picture.) Our focus is renewed during these interruptions and we are ready to get back into the content of the show. This isn’t always the case when we watch a movie…no interruptions cause us to create our own. This is probably why popcorn is so popular; it is a tasty thing to do when you need a good distraction. I could really go for some buttery popcorn goodness right now.

 

Okay, back on topic. Roughly, every 8 minutes of T.V. programming there is about a 2 minute commercial break. In all of my YouTube cruising it seems like 8 minutes is a good estimate for the average length of videos as well. From all of the things I have read on the attention span of teenagers I have found a range of 5-10 minutes to be the common denominator. That seems about right from what I see in class for an average student (stop yelling at me. I said average student. Of course an ADD/ADHD student has the span of about...pretty bird). It is also interesting that this is the exact range mentioned earlier. Not a coincidence. These T.V. Executives are hungry vampires out to suck the time and money from their viewers. What they are doing is working. That got me thinking about doing something similar in class. So, I started timing my lessons…I knew the kids could handle this type of time frame because they choose to engage in it at home, on their phones, and computers. The ground level had already been laid for me by that devilish T.V.!!!

I began turning my direct instruction style (which is the worst thing you can ever do to yourself or students) into PowerPoint presentations FULL of photos and movie quotes as sounds for the actions in the presentation. I purposefully began to insert things I knew would distract the student body. If I can control when they become distracted then I can better manage the class as a whole. (I will go into a lot more detail about my theory on PowerPoints in another post. That will surely anger a lot of computer/business teachers out there.)

You know when to shift gears. The class tells you. So, create your own commercial breaks. My commercial breaks are generally a question or comment to connect the lesson to a news story, something relevant in the school, or even a question that was commonly missed on a past test (Administration loves this one!). I have taken this a step further and plan when my breaks occur. I know based on my slide number in the presentation or by the clock. This is not as bad as you are thinking, so stop freaking out. Start out small. Get some “commercials” down on paper and keep an eye on the kids. When they start to fade out throw it out there. Then, jump back on subject. It may surprise you how well it can work if you have a little patience.

Movement is also key to attentiveness. If I am lecturing all day (rare) I will take a break in the middle and get everyone to stand up and do something fun/silly. If you create the opportunity to be distracted then they become less likely to do it on their own because they know one is coming from me.  My students love my class and talk about it to others. They look forward to coming in and be entertained while learning.

This development over the years of the “8 and 2” has generated a spike in my SOL scores and more importantly, higher level thinking within the content. This has worked for me in both an English and Social Studies classroom. Try it out…you might like it.

About me and the goal of the blog...

My name is Peyton Anderson and I have been teaching since 2005. I have taught 7th grade Civics and Economics in a collaborative setting, 8th grade English, and currently 8th grade Civics and Economics in a Center Based Gifted program. I am married to a much smarter young lady who has also been in the education field since 2005. She taught in middle and high school and is now an Assistant Principal at our local middle school. She is brilliant, beautiful, and a perfect friend and wife. I owe her a lot of the push I have needed over the years to develop this and make it available to others. She is the absolute best part of me. We are also expecting our first child this fall! Needless to say I am VERY excited!

Outside of the classroom I work for my father-in-law as an Assistant Artisan Blacksmith. No, I do not make horse shoes or swords...but, I do love working with my hands and the freedom of expression through to the traditions of a timeless trade. I am also an avid outdoorsman full of fishing and hunting. Most of my ideas for the classroom come while behind the anvil, getting a line wet, or sitting in a tree stand. It is all about quiet contemplation and reflection.

I have finally decided to take the leap and share with anyone interested my approach to teaching. It is not new, revolutionary, or ground breaking from where I am sitting...it is just what works for me. I am 100% sure others are doing similar work, but I had not seen it put in terms as I will do here.

The "Teach Like T.V." concept came about through my general A.D.D. type tendencies in lecture during class. I noticed my side stories and horrible puns would re-direct students by controlling their distractions as well. Through several "experiments" during lecture I found a good ratio of lecture to distraction. This roughly matched up to basic T.V. programming to commercial time. It got me thinking about what else this glowing idol of entertainment has to offer to my teaching methods. Observed basic advertising and branding strategies can be applied to lessons to further engage the student while promoting higher level thinking as well. My goal is to share with you what I have found to work so far in hopes of providing you with an idea or two that could work in your classroom as well. This is an on-going methodology. And I welcome you to come along on my journey.

I will use this blog to post ideas, topics, thoughts, and resources that can further our collective work in preparing the next generation for this complex work through the things we do in our classrooms.

Yours in Service,
Peyton Anderson
"Teach Like T.V."