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.

How much money do we spend to go to conferences? A few hundred, easily.

How much money do we spend on tools, apps, programs, and resources to use in our classroom?

Or better yet, how many people show up for sessions which talk about programs you can buy to use with your kids in the classroom?

It’s strange that we put so much out there to travel and hear about tools, but all we want to hear about is the free stuff.

I get asked abou my grading a lot because it’s pretty different than a typical classroom. I’ve refined it slowly over the years, and I’m by no means totally happy with it, but I’m happy with how it’s changed the way I (and my students, eventually) think about grades.

I tend to struggle and wrestle with what grading communicates, even if it’s not something students (or other teachers or parents) latch on to at first. I’m a big believer in the idea that everything we do sends a signal about what we believe. Grading is at the heart of school (unfortunately) and the policies in place say a lot about teachers.

1. I grade skills, not papers. I don’t care what papers get turned in. It doesn’t prove anything to me. Mostly because copying is rampant, and this helps curb that tendency. Writing something down does not equal understanding. I want to see application and thought. That can happen in writing, but it’s easier to see in the moment with probing questions and observation. I think at the core, you could call this modified Standards Based Grading.

2. I want to see evidence. Papers may not be graded themselves, but they can serve to build an argument to demonstrate understanding. A student may have the written work – even copied at times – but it lays a foundation for their understanding. So, keeping track of notes, worksheets, labs, etc., can build a more convincing argument for learning. But, remember, students still need to communicate the skill in addition to showing the evidence.

3. I make sure grades are fluid. Once a grade is in the book, it isn’t final (up until the quarter/semester deadline, at least). If a student isn’t happy with their grade, they can take a minute to make it better. With this system, it’s not just a missing assignment: it’s a gap in a student’s understanding. The standards are specific, and they can go back to work on that one idea to improve their grade. At the same time, I’m reinforcing the fact that I care about what they learn, and not what they turn in.

I don’t have a specific book setup, other than each standard goes into the book as a one (you get it) or a zero (you don’t). I don’t play with percentage arguments because it’s all subjective. If a student feels they deserve a 90 rather than an 85 on a lab, prove to me why, and I’m happy to change it. Grading should really be the ultimate form of formative feedback – a glance at where they are on a given day that informs work for the future.

I’m a big believer in letting students make their own decisions as much as they can. In high school, they’re dictated to. A lot. I figure picking somewhere to sit is one way to give a little bit of agency and ownership to the classroom space.

I’m back in the classroom for the first time in nearly two years. I’m the fourth teacher this particular class has had – starting in January. This is a near perfect-storm of tough starts. I wanted to set my standards high and gave the privilege of allowing students to sit where they wanted – I was hoping my act of good faith would let them see that I wanted to treat them like adults.

Well.

Turns out that no, making a seating chart doesn’t make me a bad teacher. I’d forgotten that structure and routine are what allow us to get to a point where students work independently reliably. I have to build the ethic into them, and part of that is restricting extraneous factors which can cause distraction.

I’ve realized that I worry about the wrong things sometimes. I’ve focused so much over the last fee years on being ‘student-centered’ that I’d forgotten the fundamentals. I’d forgotten that setting boundaries allows students to focus on what’s most important – learning. Many of our students don’t know what the learning process looks and feels like, so we have to emulate the basics. Once habits begin forming, then we can begin to ease some of those procedural guidelines.

And that’s the big difference for me – I’m setting these restrictions because I know what the endgame is. It isn’t a powertrip or “classroom management resource.” I’m setting up an environment which will – eventually – be one in which my students can learn openly and independently.

I get really, really excited about comets. I remember seeing comet Hale-Bopp back in 1997 hanging in the sky and being amazed that those wanderers exist and that we have a chance to see them from time to time. This year, we’re lucky to have another comet swing by the Earth and though faint, may become a pretty good sightseeing opportunity as we move through January.

South Bend isn’t known for it’s clear winter skies, but last night I had a chance to go outside and do some comet hunting. C/2014, Q2 (also known as Lovejoy) has been below the equator until just recently. Additionally, it just brightened up enough to be seen in dark skies with the naked eye if you know where to look.

Head outside and look to the southeast. Find Orion in the sky, and then look below that for a slightly-lopsided box – that’s Lepus. Hover over the photo below to see a labelled image.

Lovejoy is moving higher in the sky over the next month, through Lepus and up next to Orion. The comet is still pretty faint, but it’s the small, greenish smudge in the photo and should increase in brightness as it moves closer to perihelion (nearest point to the sun) in late January. I don’t have a tracking mount, so my photos are all a little blurry, but I managed to get one that shows the comet’s nucleus and coma.

…and a little closer…

Why am I putting this on a blog about education and technology? A comet sparked my curiosity in space and is something that stands out very clearly even today. Our students live in a world of screens and media. We need to be the people in their lives who expose the bigger world at every opportunity. Not every student will think this is as amazing as I do, but that’s okay – we’re not there to make every student love what we do. If one student gets excited over something bigger than themselves, we’re accomplishing the mission of teaching.

This year, my wife and I decided to make many of the gifts we gave for Christmas. Me, having a bunch of time off from working, and Lindsey, raising a beautiful one-year-old who enjoys playing with necklaces and her dog, had plenty of time to dive into gifts. It’s always extremely satisfying to be able to tell someone, “we made that for you” because it shows intent, love, and a deeper thought about something they might like.

I got to dive into some design work I’d never had a chance to do before. I opened up Inkscape for the first time and taught myself some of the basics of vector editing. It started with creating a new website for my father-in-law, Dave, and then bled over into making custom labels for our homemade vanilla and lemon extracts.

We also chose to take some new photos of our daughter to give to family and friends. Lindsey is an amazing photographer and has a great eye for capturing something with a lens.

The last two months have been rough. There are plenty of bright spots, though, that remind me to be thankful even when things don’t follow the plan. This fall was definitely out of the scope of the plan, but I’ve enjoyed the time regardless of the circumstances. Make sure you spend your time doing things worthwhile.

I’m really struggling. I lost my job in November and I’m in the midst of trying to balance what I do with who I am.

I wrote in January about the confusion I feel with identity. It’s even bigger now, with more questions than answers. Bill Ferriter was kind enough to leave a very wise comment for me:

(That’s just a snippet, but it helps.)

In May, I wrote more about being a teacher…what it means for identity and working. I still think that a teacher is a holistic undertaking – you don’t do teaching. You are a teacher. It’s unique in the sense that not many other professions can make the same claim.

I think I had it right back in January – I need to stop defining myself by one quality. I may not be in a classroom, my expiration date may be past, but I’m inextricably wound up in education, regardless of what I do. Maybe that’s the real lesson.

Email is a bear. The Oatmeal covered it pretty thoroughly. I use a few little tricks with Gmail that many people don’t know about, so I figured I’d share a few. Maybe one will help you out.

1. Use filters and create labels. Our inboxes get filled up so fast with so many different things, it’s easy to lose an email from your wife or a friend. Filters and labels are sort of like automatically-applied tags. You set them up ahead of time, and then Gmail does the rest.

The easiest way to set this up is to save a search for emails from someone you want to pull out specifically. For me, I want all emails from my wife to be labelled so I can find them later.

I would say avoid using the “skip the inbox” option because it’s easy to forget to check for emails from your friend (or wife), and that’s bad.

Essentially, just like filters, labels can let you find emails quickly. They just set the email off to the side for a quick reference. I wrote a post the other day about a helpful search, and I’ve made a label for that so I can find those emails with one click. Note that you can add, delete, or edit any label you have in your Gmail Settings > Labels.

2. Multiple inboxes are your friend. A few updates ago, Google introduced the managed inbox where you were given tabs and emails were automatically filtered into things like Social, Promotional, or Important. Ditch that thing immediately. You miss emails in the long run, and that can be bad. You need a filter and a label for that filter in order to get this to work correctly.

I love this because I can customize what I see when I log in. I use stars to remind me to do things because I can add them in the mobile app as well. They’re right there at the top, reminding me to take care of those messages. Using “Add Section,” you can apply any filter that you have set up and get it’s own section in your inbox. Be intentional about what filters you set because they can really make your life easier.

3. If it doesn’t need a response, and you don’t need it, delete it. Or archive it. Get it out of your Inbox.

4. Use Google’s advanced search operators. You can use a filter for this, but it’s more about using the Gmail advanced search operators in savvy ways to narrow down your results. For instance, you can use:

has:attachment pdf

and you’ll get any email with an attachment that’s a PDF. If you get a lot of one kind of attachment, this is incredibly helpful. Another one of my favorites is to use:

is:read newer_than:7d

The newer_than:7d returns emails from the past week only. You can search by date, but seeing what’s there from recent days is helpful when you’re trying to stay on top of correspondences.

There are tons of articles online with more tips, these are just some I use to manage my life. My inbox typically only has a dozen or so emails at a time, which is a pretty big accomplishment. Leave your own tips in the comments.

This is the final post for my Creativity in Teaching and Learning course, and it’s broken up into three parts.

David Wees asked a question on Twitter today that I thought would be pretty easy to solve:

@bennettscience I probably read the email though. In fact, I at least look at every email I get in order to quickly catalog it.

—David Wees (@davidwees) December 1, 2014

Turns out, no so much.

In my searching, I did come across a service which reminds you to follow up with emails which are unreplied to you, but not ones which you need to send the reply.

You can use filters and other little workarounds to get it done, but that usually means having to remember to actually add the filter or mark it unread when you’re going through your inbox. That’s hard to remember to do in the moment, and can even be impossible (like if you’re using the mobile app). Luckily, you can combine search operators in the web view to get pretty good results.

The trick is you have to be using a signature so that every email you send has a unique string in it that we can filter out.

For me, I have a link to my website – ohheybrian.com. It’s pretty unique, which makes it a good search term. You can use your name, too, but you want to be careful with that in case the sender used your full name – if that’s the case, it’ll get filtered out.

To find emails which need replies, you want to use is:read -Re: -your_unique_phrase.

This checks for read emails (in case you forgot to mark it unread), without Re:, and without your_unique_phrase.

Mine reads: is:read -re -ohheybrian.

Emails which are part of a thread still show up, but they’re based on the last email of the conversation. So, the thread may contain replies, but you haven’t replied to the last one you received, which can still be handy.

You can limit it even further by using in:inbox or some other filter, but that isn’t usually necessary.

Unfortunately, this isn’t perfect, so you’ll still need to do some spot checking. There is no perfect solution as of right now (no is:reply filter or something similar) which you can use, but Google does have a good list of the Gmail search operators that you can play with to build some pretty powerful searches.

Polarization is easy to achieve, but it’s hard to undo. Education is riddled with polarizing issues, both political and practical, and the issue of homework is one of the worst.

The central argument: Homework doesn’t benefit students, and you shouldn’t be giving it.

Aside from pushing buttons and for increasing retweets, search hits, and Klout scores, the homework argument doesn’t go much farther than that. Unfortunately, it’s also gotten to the point where teachers who do give homework feel ostracized in the popular education social spheres. Apparently, that means they’re bad teachers, so instead of trying to engage with an already polarized community, they hunker down and don’t bring it up.

It’s a tragedy that we can’t talk about teaching without diving into our camps.

This girl is in every blog post or slide deck about homework…including this blog post. Creative commons licensed (BY-NC) flickr photo by Cayusa: http://flickr.com/photos/cayusa/2194119780

Homework in and of itself is no more a “bad” thing than giving multiple choice tests or lecturing in class. What’s bad is when we do those things – or any thing – without thinking through what we’re doing and why we’re doing it. Rather than pushing for ideological conformity, why don’t we take time to discuss what the real issues are behind each action?

Let’s consider some valid reasons to have work done outside school hours:

Students need time to process their learning individually. This isn’t always done best in the classroom. Time to reflect, process, or otherwise chew on information alone should be done outside of school because it is more conducive to finding insight.

Practice. Don’t shoot the messenger, but skills need to be practiced. Again, corporate time in the classroom is not necessarily the best place for individual practice to take place.

Teaching time management. If we had unlimited and unscripted time during the school day, maybe I wouldn’t use this one in particular. But, when we get down to nuts and bolts, we can’t give unlimited time to accomplishing a task – and before you get all “real-world” on me, yes, it happens in places other than school.

Exploration of ideas. I would love to provide a fully immersive environment for my students, but I can’t replicate a forest in the building. Sending students out to take a walk and experience their environment requires that they do it outside of school.

We get so hung up on where this stuff happens that we miss the bigger point. Yes, I had students who took care of siblings, played sports, or worked. I did my best to limit the volume of work outside of school, but I think it’s a bigger adjustment to change what kind of work happens outside of school. Perhaps it isn’t the fact that homework exists but rather the homework we give tends to suck.

(No, not that myspace.)

I’m on my computer a lot. Having been a remote worker for 18 months and taking classes online, I needed somewhere to focus. When we bought our house, our bedroom had some recessed shelving already installed. Mishra et al. (2013) refer to architect, Christopher Alexander, and his suggestion that “the environment is best shaped by those native to that environment.” He may have been speaking about larger building projects, but reshaping our environment is a natural and expected behavior.

The entire remodeling industry is built on the fact that people want to reshape existing homes to better suit their needs. In my case, I added the desk in the thumbnail above to the bookshelves. It wasn’t a major project (before), but it was one that made the space suitable for the work (both creative and practical) that I needed to do.

I’m no stranger to home remodeling. Having some space set aside for myself was a respite from the major projects happening at the other end of the home. Again, back to Alexander: we were actively developing, changing, and shaping our environment based on the interactions we wanted to have in the space.

The article raises some interesting questions about how spaces (not just learning spaces) can be built to serve a population or a purpose, but seldom both effectively from the onset. If “architectural creativity” draws from “interactions that exist between the inhabitants of the environment,” (Mishra et al. 2013), does that mean building design has to consider multiple functions for a given space? In other words, can a room truly be built with a particular function in mind and still be effective? How much nuance comes into play with each inhabitant?

Truly effective spaces allow for flexibility in function as well as form. It may not seem like a big consideration, but having space for both old and new media on my desk allows me a greater creative range than I would normally have. Fostering both digital and analog thought allows for greater depth and refinement in “produced” work. Ideas are easier to jot down on paper and then refine out in the coding or writing process. Analogous to filming a project without a storyboard or script, writing by hand helps me find a theme to follow for the rest of the process.

Creating and publishing online has allowed for an unprecedented amount of creativity to both spill over as well as be shared. Anyone can make anything and post it online for the rest of the world to experience. New spaces often focus on providing the means to connect, as is described by Mishra et al. (2013):

The room had two large screens that could be used to project video of the participants at a distance, or to share a computer screen. There were cameras around the room, some of which could be controlled by students at a distance (using a web-based interface). The chairs in the room were unusual too: they were mobile, and equipped with iPads that could be used by participants for video conferencing.

The focus has been on giving students the means to connect rather than the means to create. Students and teachers already have devices on hand, so new spaces need to focus on accentuating the devices already present. So, rather than purchasing iPads, perhaps the space should have focused on peripherals or tools to use with whatever students walked in with. Flexibility in any space doesn’t come just from it’s use, but it what uses are afforded by supplemental tools.

Featured image creative commons licensed ( BY-NC-ND ) flickr photo shared by Jonas Tana

Shape is immensely important in science. The shape of a molecule, bone, or any other structure partially determines its function. When studying microstructures, it can be difficult for students to really grasp the complex three-dimensional structures that are proteins. I think a good analogy for this idea is the “human Tetris” phenomena. In simple terms, your function is to make it through the wall. Your shape determines how well you accomplish that task.

This is obviously an extreme example, but it’s an easy visual cue for what’s happening in our bodies all the time. In fact, you have proofreading enzymes that will break down a mis-formed protein so the constituent amino acids can be used in another functioning molecule.