Continuing on my data collection and analysis streak, I’ve got a little project to throw out into the wild and see what happens.

Student response systems are expensive and can be clunky. Google Forms are taking over the role of the stand-alone response system because of their flexibility in the wild during collection (device agnostic) and during analysis.

I like using forms, but they don’t work so well when students don’t have access to an Internet-ready device. So, I came up with a way to allow students (or anyone, really) to respond to a poll using either a form input or a text message.

The challenging part of this is getting the message into the spreadsheet. I have a Google Voice number, so I looked into Apps Scripts for Voice. Unfortunately, there is no way to access Voice using Google Scripts. There is an API for Hangouts, but it’s not documented very well and doesn’t look like it would even work with Apps Scripts or Spreadsheets. Maybe I’ll head back down that road someday, but not right now.

I decided to go with IFTTT, which has some benefits (easy to set up and manage) and drawbacks (only checks every 15 minutes-ish, so you need to manually run it during a session). It’s clunky and adds a breakpoint in the flow, but it works.

The Flow

Method 1 – Pure Google Forms

The audience opens the Form and answers the question displayed live. They hit submit.

Easy.

Method 2 – Text Message to IFTTT

First, in Voice, you set up email notifications for text messages. Then, in Gmail, set up a filter to catch the emails and do two things: add a label (I used “text”) and then mark it as “read” (mostly for your inbox-zero sanity). Now, have the audience send a text to your Google Voice number (see below for formatting).

In IFTTT, set up a trigger which uses Gmail -> Google Drive. The Gmail trigger should do a search for your new Gmail label. When it finds that email, it appends a row to your form input spreadsheet.

More complicated, but now we have a way to get raw text data into the spreadsheet. Now, you need to make sure the text message is formatted correctly.

function splitCells(from) {
  var sheet = SpreadsheetApp.getActiveSpreadsheet().getSheets()[0];
  var colC = sheet.getRange(2, 3, sheet.getLastRow()).getValues();  // C2:C, only non-blank rows
  //Logger.log(colC);
  for(var i=0; i< colC.length; i++){
    if(colC[i][0] != ''){
      // If we received a SMS response, set a formula to parse it
      sheet.getRange(2+i,4).setValue('=if(istext(C2:C),split(C2:C,",",true),"")')
    }
  }
}

Continuing on my data-trends this week, I’ve realized (consciously, at least) that when quantitative data is shown to students, it’s a report of some kind: a report card, a progress report, test scores, etc. It’s all final information – it isn’t actionable.

Yesterday, we played a review game where students submitted answers to a Google form which then spit out a grade based on those submissions. The purpose was to get them thinking about the information and to give them some immediate feedback – as a class – on how they did.

Seeing the gauges along with their place against all reported classes helped visualize where they fell on a preparedness scale in context.

It also helped the class see what specific standards they needed to go back and look over. I didn’t want individual information for this activity because the goal was generalize, actionable information.

Michael Pershan prompted my thinking this morning with his video (and comments) entitled, “Why Our Hints Don’t Help.” It’s extremely insightful (go take a look) and really helped me think through how I talk about quantitative information. It should be a call to action, not just a report.

It also changes the way students see these scores. They aren’t final any more – it’s a spot check on their progress. It’s a reality check for their perception of how well they have learned the information. It also leads to more good questions like, “Where can we find more information on [X]?” It’s a visual prompt, more than anything, which helps set the course for subsequent learning.

I tried something new today with my students – I asked them to rate their confidence in their answers on a 1 (total guess) to 4 (definitely know I know it) scale. I collected the aggregate information for each class and started flagging issues.

First, this only took me about 5 minutes to do. So, after we finished the questions, they started working on their review for our test this week. I pulled in the numbers, ran a formula or two, and had the percent correct for each item as well as the average confidence. Then, we started talking about what they noticed.

Some noticed right away that a few questions were more missed than others. Someone also noticed that questions with a high percent correct tended to have a high confidence rating. The same was true for lower-scoring questions. I then pointed out what I was really interested in:

Discrepancy.

I saw nods and furrowed brows as I pointed out low-scoring questions with high confidence ratings. It doesn’t compute. If so many people got it wrong, why were we so sure it was right?

This highlights areas I need to go back and review again, which is really nice. It also helps students reach a metacognitive place on their own work – it was only 6 questions, so they know what they got right and wrong.

Different classes, different priorities.

And then here’s the aggregate data for all classes:

For now, I’m adding the red flags myself based on an arbitrary percentage and confidence level discrepancy. I’m doing that because I don’t know of any other way to make that comparison. So, here’s the question:

Are there statistical analyses that can be done on two-variable data (correct vs. confidence) which can then highlight areas significantly lower than expected?

I even went so far as to perform a correlation test on the data, which shows a definite positive correlation between the score and student confidence:

But again, I don’t know how to set up that discrepancy benchmark statistically. I may be thinking too hard about this, but I’d really like to have more to go on than, “This one is low compared to confidence.” It’s also a very small sample, and I know most correlation tests (t-Test, ANOVA, etc) require 10 samples, usually, so I’m not putting a ton of weight on the stats.

If you have any experience in this kind of analysis, I’d appreciate some pointers in the comments.

I meant to grab a bag of stuff for school this morning on my way out the door. Turns out at 5:45 in the morning, you don’t remember to grab things off the counter (thankfully, I don’t need that stuff until tomorrow). I don’t like to-do list apps (prefer pen and paper), and my phone is on silent each morning until I get to school.

I hate notifications anyways, which is why I turned everything off other than phone calls and text messages. I still get calendar reminders (out of absolute necessity) but even then, I tend to close those without thinking too much about actually remembering to do something.

Texts, though, are a different story. I pay attention to them. When someone sends a text, it has my attention.

So, rather than rely on a to-do list or plain calendar reminders to do something, I’m routing those through IFTTT to send myself a text.

To do this, log into IFTTT and create a new recipe using Google Calendar as the trigger. In step 2, be sure to choose “Event from search starts” as the trigger. Otherwise, any time you add an event, you’re going to get a text message, which isn’t cool.

Then, pick a keyword – I used “reminder” – to search for. It has to be in the title or the event description to fire correctly. So, for me, my calendar event would be: “Reminder – get groceries.” Then, set the time to when you actually want to do whatever it is you need to do. Again, mine is around dinner tonight because I’ll be near the kitchen and can do it quickly.

Set the SMS channel as the action (make sure your phone number is correct!) and heypresto, you have a SMS-enabled text reminder system for those little things you tend to forget.

Again, I know that this can be done just using the calendar notifications. But, if you’re like me, and hate those, you can use this instead. Also remember this works with any phone, not just smartphones. So, if you revert (like I’ve also considered) you can have the benefits of notifications when and where you need them on any platform.

I took the time the other day to show my students what exactly I look at when I’m grading tests. I use standards based grading, so I’m going way deeper than just the number right divided by the number wrong. I don’t even put tests into the gradebook, really. They’re each broken down into the standards contained within and they’re reported individually.

This is really hard for students to understand. So, I showed them the data I look at when scoring their tests.

Individual student report

Each student has a report generated (name obfuscated here). Questions on the test are broken down by standard, and I’m shown a quick, high-level gauge of where they stand on this assessment. This is not the only information I take into account when assessing their skills, but a look through this lens can be helpful. I can also see (further down the page) which questions they get wrong and compare those with the item analysis screen.

Individual class report

I can also take a high-level look at each class. Mean score and deviations are given for the entire assessment, and each standard is broken down again based on the aggregate. This view is especially helpful for remediation and follow-up to the test. Some classes get more attention to one standard, others get different priorities. It’s really helped me make more effective decisions when planning following an exam. This page also has individual student scores broken out by standard down below the gauges.

Item analysis

Finally, the item analysis. This helps bring it all together. Again, I see the high-level information for each question, and it helps me pinpoint which items need the most attention. I can then cross-reference those with each individual class and even down to the individual student to see which standard they struggle with the most.

So yeah, I showed this to my students.

And they were surprised that I put so much thought into it. I also think it helped them see the fact that everything we do in class is two things: related to the standards and for their benefit.

I don’t give tests because they’re fun (ok, well, the analysis can be fun…) or because they’re super effective. They can help me make informed decisions which, in turn, help them in the long run.

I don’t think they’d ever seen information used in this way in such an honest and straightforward manner. Many of them actually expressed that I was putting myself through too much with these tests, which means I must’ve gotten through something…

Either way, if you’re collecting information, make sure it’s used productively. Also consider taking it up a notch and plainly showing what you do with that information just so they know.

**Update 12.22.2016** Since this has become quite a popular script, I’ve converted it into a Google Docs Add On so it can be used across documents. Check out [the blog post](http://blog.ohheybrian.com/2016/12/introducing-endnote-generator-add-on/) or the [Endnote Generator website](http://dev.ohheybrian.com/endnotes) for more information.

**Update 8.27.2016** As Phil noted in the comments, the script didn’t format anything over two digits in length. That has been [corrected in the source](https://github.com/bennettscience/footToEnd). If you need more (100+ endnotes may be too many, though…) leave a comment and I’ll go back and make the changes.

Krissy Venosdale asked on Tuesday if there was a way to make endnotes in Google Docs as easily as footnotes. I thought, “Surely there is.”

Well, there’s not.

So I wrote a script that does it.

It’s hosted on GitHub along with instructions on how to install the script (it’s not an add-on…just a custom script) and run it in your document.

Here’s a peek:

When you add the script to the document (manual process right now – read the instructions) it adds a custom menu from which you run the script.

I know endnotes and footnotes aren’t really used in high school, but if you’re writing a book or something…maybe it’ll be helpful to you.

Either way, it was fun to write and it works pretty quickly. I haven’t tested it with documents more than a few pages long, so if you’re going to try it on something major, I’d suggest making a duplicate copy to run it on first, just in case.

I’m a teacher by day, after all.

Some backstory.

A month ago I wrote about Geddit going out of business this summer. I mentioned another response-system app, Kahoot!, which has exploded over the last few months. Specifically, I called out their Terms of Service (TOS) which states that any content a user uploads gives Kahoot! a royalty-free license, yada yada yada. With no qualifying statements, that’s a lot of rights to give up.

What I didn’t expect was a tweet from the CEO of Kahoot! asking if I’d be willing to have a conversation about their TOS.

So we did.

I can’t give specifics about our discussion, but there are some themes that stood out to me:

1. There can be major cultural differences when TOS are written up. Kahoot! is a company based in Norway, and Norway is a country where privacy laws slant heavily in favor of the consumer or user. Not so true here in the States. Johan and I talked about this a little, and he admitted that when Kahoot! was launched, they thought the Norwegian TOS benchmark would be self-evident and that users wouldn’t really worry so much about data loss. I appreciated his honesty in the admission that they are arbitrary, and in countries like the US, some clarification would help.

For the record, that license you agree to is so the community can function. Without granting rights to the company, they’d have to get individual permissions to share any lesson uploaded with any one other person. Totally reasonable, and clarification on that point would be helpful.

2. Kahoot! isn’t interested in personal data because it doesn’t help the service. Johan explained that they started as a formative assessment service – something in the moment and not perpetual. That’s why students don’t sign in. Data is given right back to the teacher as an Excel or csv download. As a company, Johan said they’re focusing on how information is being learned, not what information, which is why storing scores isn’t really important. If a teacher is using it formatively, then the actual score itself should only be informing the next instructional step, not to track progress over time.

It reminded me of a conversation I had with Bob Ambrister, the developer behind Write About. Paraphrasing, he said that nothing about the student helps run the service. All they ask for is a teacher’s code (to link the student with the class) and a name. No email, no birthday, SSN, or twitter login. If it doesn’t help, Write About doesn’t want to collect it.

Johan echoed that sentiment (without prompting), which made me feel much better about using it with students. A pin to get to the quiz and a nickname. Now, we didn’t talk about storing the data on servers, but given that a student can put in whatever nickname they want, it would be pretty hard to link that information back to anything with value. The key is that they only take what matters in order to run an effective formative assessment service.

3. Transparency is more important now than ever before. Clarifying statements and human-readable TOS and Privacy Policies say a lot about the credibility of the company. If you’re willing to clearly and concisely explain what you’re collecting and what you’re doing with it, people tend to trust you more. I also like that Johan was proactive in reaching out to discuss some of the concerns I brought up.

Finally, Johan did hint at some changes the team is working on regarding transparency. I’ll update this series again once that’s pushed out.

I went about four months this year without a smartphone. I used an unlocked flip phone that barely made calls and didn’t have reliable text prediction. I was back to thinking in threes, and I can tell you on which number lies any letter in the alphabet without thinking too hard. The only times my phone made noise were when I received calls or texts, and that’s if I remembered to turn on my ringer.

Then, I bought a cheapo smart phone after reading a great article on Medium about minimalistic thinking when it came to buying a smartphone (the author uses the word “shitphone,” which I like, but find a little crass for day-to-day discussion).

I bought my own [STRIKEOUT:shitphone] economy smartphone and rejoined the world of tweeting, instagramming, emailing, and other various -ings that I’m supposed to do with one of these things. I also rejoined the world of constant notifications. Buzzing, beeping, and LED blinking.

I hated it.

I’m enjoying the rate at which I can send a text with a full keyboard, which is what really keeps me from bouncing back to ye olde flip phone. Other than that, I enjoyed being relatively disconnected. I enjoyed reading email when I happened to open it during the day. I enjoyed not knowing someone had liked a photo I put up. Notifications fed my ego and pushed me back into always wanting to know what was up.

So I turned them off.

I find it eerily similar to turning off tracking and stats for this site. I enjoy writing much more. I’m enjoying my life with a smartphone much more now that it isn’t always squawking at me.

All my phone does now is buzz when I get a call or a text. And that’s if I remember to turn my ringer on.

I have a [STRIKEOUT:shitphone] economy smartphone with the noise-making capacity of a flip phone. And I love it.

We had school on Good Friday this year because of snow day accruals, which means we had a ton of students out. I wanted to give one short assessment to see what needed to happen when we returned from break. Students who were out of school had an option to complete the assessment online (totally their option. I made it clear that family trumps chemistry every time) so they didn’t need to worry about taking it when they got back from break.

I wanted some method of keeping the questions secure, so I decided to use a Google Form to keep track of access to the document.

From the class website, I posted a link they could use to get to the test.

From there, they were taken to a Google form with the following statement:

They then had to type their name in the box and submit.

Once submitted, they were given a link to the test so they could take it.

I’m not naive. I know that they could just grab the link and pass that around. That’s not the point.

Standards-based grading helps with the conversation piece – their grade is attached to the learning they’ve done during the chapter. You know the information, or you don’t. It makes grade conversations much easier because students recognize that they haven’t proven their learning…yet. That also gives me a much more solid platform for catching misrepresentation of ability. I know what they can do, and the test scores usually match up pretty closely.

Which brings me to the second point: honestly representing what you can and can’t do goes beyond the classroom. Don’t fake resumes. Don’t fake online profiles. Be who you are, and that means being honest with what you know and don’t know. By signing the form and then taking the test, the student is entering an agreement that gives us a starting point if uncomfortable conversations need to happen.

Another extension to what I wrote last night, mainly for my own purposes so I don’t forget what I did or where I put scripts.

bash is great, but it doesn’t play so well with Windows. I tried Cygwin, which installed fine, but on the school computers, filesystems are locked down somewhat and I can’t get access to certain install directories. Rather than fight the system, I translated my bash script from yesterday into Python so it works on any OS.

print "You are about to make a batch of files."

num = int(input('How many files do you want to make?: '))
name = raw_input('What should the base filename be?: ')

for i in range (1,num+1):
  filename = name + str(i) + '.doc'
  print 'Made ' + filename
  i = open(filename,"w").close()

This works nearly the same, only I didn’t make it executable like I did the other script. The other thing this does is makes it easier to use the Google Drive API to create docs right in Drive rather than upload .doc files up to Drive and then wait for a conversion.

I’ve been programming a lot lately, mainly to make my own life easier. I usually start something when I’m doing a menial task that a computer could do much more efficiently. As a result, I’ve learned just enough to know what should be possible, but not enough to know when something is a good idea and something is a really dumb idea. This one turned out to be a good idea.

Two months ago, I wrote up a way to automate rubric score reports using docappender in Google Drive. It worked great the first month.

Today, I went back to score a second set of writing prompts with the rubric. docappender works great to do this, but I have to go into Drive and create six separate documents with the class hour as the name for the form to work correctly. Google has no batch-create option, so I had to make each one individually. It didn’t take too long, but it’s something that really should take any quantity of time.

Major props to Ken Bauer and Alan Liddell for pointing me in the right direction. Here’s what to do…

for i in $(seq 1 7);
do
touch file$i;
done

echo "Number of files: ";

read number;

for i in (seq 1 $number);
do
touch file$i;
done

#! usr/bin/env bash
echo "You're about to create a series of files."
echo "Enter the number of files you'd like to create and then push [ENTER]: "

read number

echo "Enter a generic filename and then press [ENTER]: "

read file

for i in $(seq 1 $number);
do
touch $file$1.doc;
done

echo "Finished."

Update 3/31 – After more tinkering, I’ve changed the code to be more stable with any changes Google makes in the future. Code snippets are up to date and irrelevant instructions are now [STRIKEOUT:struck out].

You can create a custom Google search engine for your website (or group of websites) which can be very handy for a variety of reasons. If you’ve got a gigantic website, like Jerry Blumengarten, having a custom search bar can help find materials. If you’re working with students, a custom search can help limit where their information comes from. They’re easy to do, but there are some limitations, so be sure to read the Terms of Service if you’re going to set one up.

John Stevens asked on Twitter if there was a way to get a random post from a custom search. I felt like there ought to be some way to do that, so I started digging. Because the MTBoS index of blogs is on all different platforms and not networked in any particular way, it turned into more of a chore than I originally thought. Really, when you get down to it, randomizing search results is the anthesis of what search engines do, so we have to accomplish the “random” aspect of the Google search with a different method.

I’ll be using a search for my own blog for the demo here (down below). Brace yourself for some code.

[STRIKEOUT:First, rather than using the Google script you get from the Control Panel, use this HTML instead:]

You’re given one line of HTML to put in your page where you want to search bar to appear. Simply add the button line to add the random button:

Random

Line 5 adds a new button – the Random button – to the search form. That button is important. Rather than needing some text in the input field, a user can click on the Random button and some JavaScript magic will happen.

If you want to use this, you’ll need to do a couple things:

[STRIKEOUT:Make sure your site has jQuery installed. If you’re not sure, go to your site’s code and paste this in before the closing header tag:]

You’ll need to put a script in the footer of your site. You can also do this with a widget with a lot of platforms…there are too many to list, and the footer solution is usually the best approach. If you’re not sure what to do, leave a comment, and I can try to help you out.

This script will take that Random button we added earlier and pop a random term into the search box and carry out the search. yOu need to set the terms in the array (line 3), each term in single quotes and each term separated by a comma. Make sure to keep that syntax correct or else it won’t work.

[STRIKEOUT:Also, if you try this on any site other than your own, you can run into issues. I’ve been testing this on Codepen.io with mixed results. Once thrown into my own page, though, it works just fine.] I’d create a new page on your site and drop the code into place. Test it as a draft page to make sure everything is kosher and then run with it.

If you want to see a sample implementation (proof of concept, not really helpful), check out this spartan search page. You can type in a search term and hit submit to see how it works. Then, try hitting Random without putting any text in to see what it does.

Do note that WordPress has a pretty good random post feature built-in. This is meant more for wider searches across multiple platforms using the Google index of sites.

I hate missing school. It’s stressful. I have to do multiple days worth of planning ahead of time, plus know what’s happening the day I get back. Then, I have to turn those plans into a written document that anyone in the world can follow to the letter.

It’s stressful.

I still leave a document with some specific notes for a substitute – things like management or specifics to take note of. But now, instead of writing out a ton of information on what to do, I record a simple video and post it to a static page on my class website. There are a couple little tricks I learned along the way:

1. The page should be bare bones. Don’t worry about making it “feel” like the rest of your class site. It should be something easy to display on a projector without having to hunt through menus to get the information. That also allows you to just replace the video and written instructions for the next time you’re out. Flexibility is key.

2. Embed the video right in that page. If you’re like me, you want to make sure that video is responsive, too. I found a super-handy little snippet of CSS to make YouTube videos responsive, and I used that so students can access the information on their own later on any platform.

3. Keep your video unlisted so it stays within context. I have a lot of content on YouTube, I want to keep the sub plans isolated because they don’t really fit in the flow of anything else there. This way, the video only “exists” when student need it – while I’m gone.

It’s not totally un-stressful now, but it’s way better than it used to be. If you’d like to see my “away from school page,” or even copy the source for your own page (self-hosted), that’d be dandy.

Geddit, a response-system app will be turning off its servers on June 30th, 2015. I heard about this software about a year ago when I sat down next to one of the co-founders at CUE. I was really excited about the platform because they not only allowed for students to respond to questions in the live lesson, but they also gave confidence scores for those answers. It’s fantastic way to do formative assessment both before, during, or after a lesson.

But, Geddit tried the free route because that’s what educators respond to. Lots of people signed up and started using it. Love and tweets don’t pay the bills.

Sure, there are other response apps out there thrown around – Kahoot being the current favorite – but I’m staying away from that one with a 10 foot pole because of this gem in their terms:

We do not assume any liability for any content posted by you or any other 3rd party users of our website. However, any content posted by you using any open communication tools on our website, provided that it doesn’t violate or infringe on any 3rd party copyrights or trademarks, becomes the property of Kahoot! AS, and as such, gives us a perpetual, irrevocable, worldwide, royalty-free, exclusive license to reproduce, modify, adapt, translate, publish, publicly display and/or distribute as we see fit. This only refers and applies to content posted via open communication tools as described, and does not refer to information that is provided as part of the registration process, necessary in order to use our Resources. (emphasis added)

In other words, “We won’t charge you, but we’ll take anything you upload and make money off of it without any attribution to your intellectual property.”

Now, I’m not saying Geddit is perfect either:

If Geddit, or substantially all of its assets, were acquired, or in the unlikely event that Geddit goes out of business or enters bankruptcy, user information would be one of the assets that is transferred or acquired by a third party. You acknowledge that such transfers may occur, and that any acquirer of Geddit may continue to use your personal information as set forth in this policy. (emphasis added)

Bill Fitzgerald has a fantastic post on the practice companies are using to hedge their investment: sell our user data.

So, the cycle perpetuates itself.

1. Create company
2. Let teachers use it for free to build up buzz and userbase.
3. Try to monetize.
4. Fail – “paid” in education is a no-no.
5. Close doors and ship off user data.

We’re selling our data – our information and histories – so we don’t have to pay a few bucks to use a helpful service.

Data is worth more than money these days, and we’re selling ourselves short. The free-only economy in education has to change.

The community is suffering. Students are frustrated and they’re looking to me to solve the problem. I’m faced with deciding whether or not my commitment to an individual students takes precedence over my commitment to the class as a whole.

creative commons licensed ( BY-NC-SA ) flickr photo shared by ShawnMichael

I mentioned earlier today in a tweet that Audrey Watters had a post back in January about applying the Hippocratic Oath (albeit, for education technology, but the application is the same) and it’s really stuck with me. I’d never read the oath, but now I have one printed and hanging next to my desk. I’ve started to re-purpose some of the lines in the 1964 rewrite of the Oath to apply a little more to my day to day work.

I will apply, for the benefit of students, all measures which are required, avoiding those twin traps of overtreatment and educational nihilism.

I think the first time I had a student leave my room was in my third year teaching. My temper doesn’t get pushed too much and I can usually let the little things roll on by. Small redirection and nuance have been powerful tools for me, and they’d worked relatively well. This year, though, it’s a whole different story. I don’t feel like I’ve given up hope that these students can learn or improve, but my toolbox is feeling more and more empty as I try more and more techniques to rein in the behaviors.

I will not be ashamed to say “I know not,” nor will I fail to call in my colleagues when the skills of another are needed.

I really resist having students leave my room. Perhaps it’s hubris, perhaps it’s stubbornness. I refuse to fall into a habit of removing problems rather than resolving. However, at what point do we move on from individual situations and focus on the whole? Am I shirking responsibility as a teacher by relegating individual students to situations where learning is impossible? On the other hand, by keeping students in the room, am I relegating the whole class to the same fate?

creative commons licensed ( BY-NC-SA ) flickr photo shared by E.L. Malvaney

I will remember that there is art to teaching as well as science, and that warmth, sympathy, and understanding outweigh the expectation of compliance or any grade awarded.

Finding nuance in a situation where patience feels like the enemy is difficult. The more time I take to try and weave a better plan together for individuals feels like time lost for the other 22 people in the room. I’m falling back on old habits and a bad attitude about students. My empathy is running out and I’m entering a realm where I’d rather have compliance than a real rich atmosphere for learning.

If it is given me to arouse curiosity, all thanks. But it may also be within my power to stifle the desire to learn; this awesome responsibility must be faced with great humbleness and awareness of my own frailty.

I realize that it’s the teacher’s burden to always remember the ones we lost – those we couldn’t connect with or engage. In the end, I’d love to have my cake and eat it, too. I think I can still do that – there are bright spots, and we celebrate those days. But, I’m responsible for the learning environment as a whole.

ἀσκέειν, περὶ τὰ νουσήματα, δύο, ὠφελέειν, ἢ μὴ βλάπτειν

Last year, I took some time to write a small blog theme for Anchor CMS using some PHP and a lot of CSS. Too much, if you ask me. If I had the time, I’d go back and clean a lot of it up. Maybe during a rainy day.

I haven’t logged into GitHub in a while. Teaching has been all consuming lately and I’ve not really had time to mess around with some coding projects I’d started so long ago. I hopped on tonight to grab some code for something else I’ve been working on, and alas, a problem with my theme.

Someone, somewhere thought my theme was good enough to use, which is pretty cool. But, some of the functions weren’t working correctly, and some were just plain missing (oops). I’d made a mistake somewhere in my cloning and rebasing, and I hadn’t taken the time to make sure I didn’t flub something up along the way. Anyways, long story short, he grabbed some code from my live demo site and got it working. But still. Customer support is our number one priority.

Here’s what I started with:

function twitter_account() {
    return Config::get('meta.twitter');
}

function twitter_url() {
    return 'http://www.twitter.com/' . twitter_account();
}

The idea was to have someone create some metadata (twitter_account) once and then have it populate a link to their Twitter page as well as be the attribution info on any of the tweet links on posts. Easy enough, right? Wrong. The account function wasn’t returning the correct URL because I done messed up my PHP call. It should have been this:

function twitter_account() {
    return Config::get('meta.twitter');
}

function twitter_url() {
    return 'http://www.twitter.com/' . site_meta('twitter_account');
}

I’d forgotten that the twitter_account meta field only stores the data object. I have to tell the second function that there is some site metadata stored in the twitter_account call, not just the function itself. Oops.

All’s well now and it’s working fine, from what I can tell. Iteration is the game. Back to the workshop…

A post caught my attention the other day and I'm usually not one to write response pieces, but I can't stop thinking about this.

This post is about why I quit teaching nearly two years ago, and why that was a good decision.

My Story

I was teaching in a charter school two years ago. My wife and I moved back to South Bend after living in Evansville, Ind. Moving back to South Bend was difficult because neither of us had work nor a place to live. I managed to land an interview pretty quickly at the school which was founded two years prior to provide a mix of academic and vocational training for students. We ran an alternative schedule, which modeled the “business day,” so staff and students were in session from 8AM to 5PM each day. There were nine class hours, plus an advisory. I taught seven of those nine first semester.

I was working my tail off. In addition, the school was dysfunctional. We didn't have completed schedules for students until the second week of school. We ran study halls for an entire week from day one. We had staff meetings with yelling and blame games. I tried to remind myself that it was a brand new school and that things would turn around.

As we continued through the year, I became more involved in integrating tech into instruction. I led some PD on flipping and using Google apps to extend the type of work being done. I felt good about taking on some of these things because people were interested. As we went into the Christmas break, I was talking with my administrators about consolidating some of my classes (one class had eight students) and splitting my time between staff development and teaching.

I got back from Christmas break with the same class load, PD responsibilities, and students missing schedules. I was asked to support people during one of my plans and co-teach my last science class with one of the middle school teachers. My students were confused, I was stressed, and the other teacher was caught in the middle of trying to set up new procedures.

Our staff meetings also began to focus on creating vertically-aligned tests. We spent time in the departments looking at what we taught and writing up exams to make sure students were progressing. I started asking questions about the use of the tests and it eventually came out that we'd be taking three days at the beginning and end of each semester to test. The results would also be used in determining our evaluation scores and our pay.

I left on March 1st.

Every other month, we give students an argumentative writing prompt which is then scored against a standard rubric. One of our school goals is to improve the quality of writing from our students, so we teach them not only the content, but how to make a good argument. Using things like facts along with application and persuasive writing techniques all blend into one piece.

With each prompt, students see the scoring rubric beforehand and then receive that back with their writing so they can see what needs to improve. I have a few (mostly organizational) problems with this:

1. I’m usually not organized enough to print out half-sheet rubrics before the prompt (it’s just a normal class day)
2. That’s a lot of paper because the prompt also needs to be printed, and it’s nice to let kids write on the back of the prompt itself.
3. My handwriting is awful, especially when I have 140 papers to grade and comment on.
4. I am a notorious paper-loser.

I have wanted to try some of the New Visions CloudLabs add-ons for Google Docs for a long time, but didn’t have a real need to. So, I dove into autoCrat because I knew it could take form data and push it over to a sharable and printable Google doc. It worked great, but it generates a separate doc for each student, which isn’t something I want to manage (I know I could use Doctopus in conjunction to make it easier, but I’m not at that point yet). What I really wanted was something to add new entries as a table to a class-level document. I could print those out, cut them into slips, and distribute.

Karl Lindgren-Streicher to the rescue.

@bennettscience Check out docappender. That might do what you want to do.

—Karl LS (@LS_Karl) February 5, 2015

docappender was definitely what I needed.

In my Drive, I created a folder with six empty documents simply labeled with the class hour. Then, I created a Form I could use to add the student’s name, their class hour, their score, and some comments.

docappender works by looking at your form for an identifying field (for me, class hour) and then finds the matching document in your folder.

Each time I submit a new score, the script runs and pops out a formatted rubric for the student. It’s great.

Now, I can have a class set of rubrics for students to use while writing, they can write on the back of the prompt (cut my paper use by 2/3), and they get a typed scoresheet back. I also have a digital record, so no keeping track of these papers.

We’re not one to one or GAFE right now, so I don’t worry about sharing with students. If we head that direction, you could easily go paperless using some of the other New Visions add-ons in conjunction with one another.

This weekend, our local over-the-air movie stations had a marathon of classic monster/science fiction movies. I watched a bit of King Kong (1976) with my daughter because you really can’t start too soon.

Later, I swung back through and caught the beginning of The Island of Dr. Moreau (1977) – which, by the way, was the better of the two film versions. I caught the scene where Michael York and Burt Lancaster are discussing the ability to mix human and animal DNA:

Dr. Paul Moreau (Lancaster): How does a cell become enslaved to a form, to a destiny it can never change? Can we change that destiny?

Andrew Braddock (York): Should we?

Then, during the Super Bowl last night, I caught Chris Pratt asking the same question in the new Jurassic World trailer:

You just went and made a new dinosaur? Probably not a good idea.

Holy foreshadowing, Batman!

It reminds me of Jeff Goldblum’s similar line from the original:

John Hammond: I don’t think you’re giving us our due credit. Our scientists have done things which nobody’s ever done before…

Dr. Ian Malcolm: Yeah, yeah, but your scientists were so preoccupied with whether or not they could that they didn’t stop to think if they should.

Oh, how our culture loves to ask rhetorical questions after the fact.

Tech in the classroom is in the same vein. Just because we can, should we?

Companies left and right are professing their capability of changing the way people learn through their brand-new-all-in-one-revolutionary-online-blended-learning-platform-sign-up-now pitches. Double bonus if it is built on brain science.

Just because we can put lessons online with videos and quizzes that work on all platforms doesn’t mean we should. But, we clamor for cross-platform compatibility and go to conferences to hear about the new stuff. Why aren’t we asking hard questions of the groups making the stuff?

Obligatory tech is important line yada yada.

Before diving into using the newest cool thing, stop and take a critical step backward. Is it really in your or your student’s best interest to take a ton of time and build a lesson on a new platform? What will they get out of it? Why is it better than whatever you had done before? How will you assess the growth because of the switch?

If we’re not asking these questions, we’re throwing our student’s education into the hands of the engineers. And we’re happy to do it, most times.

Maintain a critical eye. Hell, be cynical. It’ll protect you from doing something just because you can.

I nearly lost my temper this morning.

One class in particular has some…big personalities. I want to be able to do hands on, interactive work with the group, but they test my limits pretty regularly.

They don’t test me with silly questions or with using equipment incorrectly. No…it’s much more nefarious. They use the NBA.

For whatever reason, comparing NBA players and teams gets a small group of students heading down a dangerous path. Dislike of one player or another leads to all-out honor defenses and stat showdowns. If this were happening in a civilized manner like on Outside the Lines, I wouldn’t mind so much. But, these – lately – have turned into all out, across the room, Mr. Bennett is invisible cage matches.

I’ve done seating charts. I’ve set time limits and deadlines. I’ve used proximity, redirecting, and direct instructions to students. NONE of it has seemed to have any effect. And what makes it even more frustrating and intolerable is that the entire atmosphere of learning for the other students in the class evaporates completely, and I feel powerless to wrest it back.

And so today, they broke the camel’s back.

On Monday, we’re heading into full lockdown. They’ve shown that they cannot handle the independence. They are getting yet another new seating arrangement and I am taking the reins.

And yet, I feel like I’m punishing the community over the acts of the few.

I have control issues. I don’t want to spend my energy managing a classroom. I lose the interactions and the opportunities to talk about what learning is happening. I can’t prompt individuals and groups and I can’t celebrate small wins. But I don’t know what else to do.

How to you build community when the leaders in the group don’t care? They’ve never been asked to care about school, and now that they’re faced with that choice, they don’t know how to handle the responsibility. If it were the beginning of the year, I would love to take them through that team-building path of developing a culture of learning and a culture of open discussion. But instead, they’re functioning just outside the bounds of their traditional school experience, and it’s creating a chaotic space. And that’s not okay.

I feel like I’m a double bind – I need to direct the time more, but I don’t want to put the rest of the class in an unfair situation. Unfortunately, I don’t see any other alternative.