This is the first post in a series reflecting on John Spencer’s Sages and Lunatics.

A report came out in early May with data showing college students saw teaching as one of the easiest majors to follow and said that teaching was the top profession for “average” people. In the wake of the report, there have been calls for more stringent teacher preparation, making certification tests harder, and encouraging alternative, more “rigorous” methods of teacher certification from the private sector.

Teachers are a strange breed. Heading into the job, we know that there will be long hours, little pay, and unfair expectations put on us and our students. Yet, we walk into the building every day, excited about the possibilities. I never considered teaching a “job.” It wasn’t just something I did to pay the bills.

John brings up an interesting idea in Sages: Perhaps we aren’t paid to teach. Perhaps we are paid so we can teach. (Actually, Brad the Philosopher brings it up, but John wrote it down).

I’ve written on this before, but even being out of the classroom for more than a year, I still jump to say I’m a teacher when asked what I do. It’s in my heart. I think about schools, curriculum, students, and instruction all. The. Time.

I got to thinking, would you still teach if you didn’t get paid? In other words, if you could do nothing but teach while not worrying about bills or other financial constraints, would you commit your life to doing so?

Teachers – whether you know it or not – you are some of the most trusted people in society. Parents send their children to you every day for instruction, for nurturing, for support, and they do so often without ever meeting you face to face. Aside from the obvious problems with the reality of parent engagement, this is an incredible burden. I’m also left wondering how schools, how communities, would change if we look at teaching from the point of view of the trust they’ve put into us.

Yet we take this burden without question. We welcome the happy, the sad, the hungry, and the lonely without question. In our rooms, we see the children and we pour our hearts into them. The time we invest with each child every year is second only to their parents…how are you spending that time? Teaching isn’t a job. Teaching is a lifestyle.

My name is Brian E. Bennett, and I’m a teacher.

Fingerprint icon by Yaroslav Samoilov on The Noun Project CC BY 3.0

No, not that Mars.

FlipCon14 is coming up June 23-25. This is the 7th annual event, and I’ve had the privilege of watching it grow from 35 people in Woodland Park (FlipCon10) to nearly 450 last year in Minnesota. This year, we’re in Mars, PA (near Pittsburgh) and we’ve got a fantastic lineup planned. Along with Jon and Aaron’s keynote, Molly Schroeder will be opening the conference with her Living in Beta keynote.

If you’re on the fence about coming, we have the full schedule – including all concurrent sessions – posted online for review. Hopefully, that will help tip you over the edge.

I can honestly say that this conference kicked off my interest in improving digital teaching and learning. Each year, I learn more about what teachers are doing to help students and how I can adapt some of the things they do to my own practice. I’m excited to see old friends, and meet new ones. If you’re also planning on heading to Pittsburgh, leave a shout out in the comments.

Twitter mailase has set in big time. Twitter is dying! No, it’s just beginning!

• *I’m not sure I can really explain my own confusion or mixed feelings. The power in any network is in how it allows you to connect with people. Part of the reason I’ve started to migrate away from Facebook is because of the backend filtering of which posts you see based on “engagement.” I have no control over that filtering, and it doesn’t sit well with me that I can’t change the way it works.

Twitter, on the other hand, shows everything. I can choose what to work with and what to ignore. I’ve gone through the stages, but now I’m trying to figure out what’s next.

Deep discussions happen. Off-the-cuff questions are answered rapidly. But I’m feeling a lack of connection. I feel a lack of purpose. I’m afraid that Twitter is become one of two things: A) A place teachers go because Twitter. B) A place where people talk all the time but don’t do anything different. Ideas stop when they hit your eyeballs. But, you can justify the time as “idea-searching.”

Maybe I’m following the wrong people, but it seems like a lot is put out by the bigfolk. I want to see new people, but how do we discover the new thinkers and leaders? I feel like there’s a lot of echo without much growth. And if that’s the case, it may be time to move on.

But where do we go?

Short post tonight. For the final assignment this semester, we were asked to read Thomas Friedman’s OpEd on Passion Quotient and Curiosity Quotient as the big need moving forward in the world (the previous need being IQ – intelligence quotient).

I have to admit, this particular assignment really stumped me. I wasn’t sure about what I thought or how to best communicate those ideas. In the end, I thought about a world without passion or curiosity, and when I landed myself in that spot. Rather than telling here, on the blog, I used my absolute favorite iPad app: Storehouse. The preview below will jump you to the story.

Post Updated 4/27/14 9:15PM – Since writing this post, my group has finished our project. Rather than adding a separate post, I’ve updated the links below to the final recommendation.

The semester is winding down and that means final projects are wrapping up. In Applying Edtech to Practice, my group tackled the problem of “rethinking teaching.” Essentially, we came up with a suggestion for how teachers can improve their practice based on The Danielson Group’s teacher evaluation tool.

The Framework for Teaching has four components:

1. Planning and Preparation
2. The Classroom Environment
3. Instruction
4. Professional Responsibilities

The instrument breaks each area down into indicators which we used to outline our proposal. Using the TPACK framework as a guide, we looked at each subgroup in the Framework and linked them to simple tools teachers can use to move toward the distinguished level of performance.

To organize everything, we’ve created a Popplet as a graphic organizer. From there, you can learn more about The Danielson Group, the TPACK framework for applying technology as well as see our white paper recommendation and video of the process we used to create the final product.

Any feedback in the comments would be appreciated.

Blog readers, I come to you again asking for help with a survey.

As many of you know, I’m working on a masters degree in education technology through Michigan State University. I have a short survey in circulation looking at technology integration and the associated professional development. It will take 5-10 minutes, and your help would be greatly appreciated.

I was working on a Chrome Extension (feel free to download and use it) this evening and I noticed something awesome.

If you right click on a webpage in Chrome, one option in the menu is “Inspect Element.” It shows a lot of programming mumbo jumbo which is extremely useful in programming, but not necessarily for anything else, especially if you’re not programming.

At the bottom of the window, I noticed a new tab that said “Emulation.” So, I clicked on it.

Lo and behold, in the latest Chrome update (M34 stable channel) you can view any webpage as if it were on a mobile device. How. Awesome. Is. That? I was able to select one of dozens of Android devices and then emulate the page (after a quick refresh) to see how it would behave…including any JavaScript you have in there as well.

Click any image to see it bigger.

I used to have to resize my browser window or put the page I was working on up on a secure testing server or something. Gone are the days of trying to test for mobile on anything else because I can do it right in the Chrome browser. It even reads custom CSS based on media queries (if you use those).

Now, do note, that if you’re developing across multiple browsers (and if you’re doing web development, you should be doing that), so you’ll still need to test for compatibility in Firefox, Opera, Safari, etc. This is just one way to easily knock out some mobile responsive design from your browser.

Why is this useful? If you teach any kind of web development class, this will make your life much easier. Also, since 50% of the world accesses the web via mobile as their primary method, responsive design is a must for any design course. This is one way to help make that process easier for quick cross-platform testing as students learn.

Not all GIFs are created equal. Some just need a little help.

I haven’t posted more than once in a day in a while, but I’m really excited about my little interactive images kick from earlier.

I got links to work on top of an animated GIFs. After cracking my knuckles, I decided to see if I could push myself a little more. Now, I want an image with some instruction text to play an animated GIF on the hover, not jump out to a link. This is all hobby for me, by the way. Lots of coding and refreshing going on to get it working.

The first thing I needed to do was lay out my HTML tree and CSS skeleton

Now, I needed some more information. Problem number one: get the first frame of an animated GIF to use as a static placeholder in the page. Not too hard. I hopped into GIMP, and then copied and exported my first frame as a jpg image to hang out on its own.

Now, the hard part was to get the text to show up in the right place. You can use absolute positioning, but then your div elements can get all wonky. On a static HTML page, it isn’t too hard to do because you control everything. On a blog, it can be messy because you’re fighting with your template’s CSS and if you don’t use the right attribute names or calls, you can end up with a poor layout. So, to make things easier, I just used GIMP to throw some instruction text on to my first frame placeholder.

Now came the tricky part. I had to make sure I layered my images correctly in the HTML and CSS. After adding the correct links and the correct frame sizes, I had the following code:

And the result is:

One thing I’m still trying to work out is how to get the animation to pause when you move the mouse. Because a GIF is just an image, I don’t think there is a way to have the loop paused without some serious coding in the background. I’ve already poked through StackOverflow a little, and can’t seem to find anything promising. With this method, the GIF will continue to loop in the background after the initial hover, so you’ll see a little jump.

Why? Animations can be annoying in the corner of your eye. Giving people control over whether or not they want to see some moving pictures is a courtesy. Plus, I wanted to see if I could do it. So there.

I have a permanent item on my to-do list which says, “make pictures better on the blog.” I don’t really know what that means in the long run, and that’s the point. I want my content to be more dynamic. WordPress is great for that, but it still feels cumbersome for me. I have to think about a lot of other items like plugins, widgets, and having to dig to get something like custom CSS applied to a post. I’ve looked into switching over to another open-source CMS called Anchor, but I haven’t gotten around to migrating yet. It’ll happen eventually.

Either way, one thing I wanted to experiment with the other day was giving an image a mouse hover overlay which would link to something else. I have a working sample on a post from the other day, but the gist is shown below.

I tried to do this with inline CSS, but as it turns out, using the :hover pseudo property inline is a big no-no.

The reason you can’t do it inline is you have to add some extra div elements to the blog content, and then style each based on it’s id. Not too hard, but the code editing in WordPress really stinks, so it took me a while.

I had an idea of how to do this, but couldn’t figure out how to stack my new div elements. I found a demo that gave me the HTML structure and accompanying CSS. All I did from there was apply my own image URL and tweak the size of the box as well as the padding applied. My final code ended up as:

HTML

CSS – put this in style tags at the end of your content in the WordPress HTML editor.

So, it isn’t perfect, but it works. If I ever make the switch over to Anchor, I know this process is much simpler. Until then, I’ll keep posting tips.

I’ve done a lot of writing this past week. I mean, a lot. Many late nights, cups of coffee, and pints of beer went into my body and magically flowed through my fingers and into my paper.

For class, we were asked to create a personal manifesto which outlines skills essential to teaching. Along with a narrative of why we chose those skills to highlight, we pulled articles, blog posts, journals, videos…anything we’ve used in the past for growth to share with our readers.

I boiled mine down to nine skills essential to teaching. I outline this in the introduction of my paper, but I approached this from behaviors or attitudes rather than “hard” classroom skills like instruction and management. I did this partially because I think skills like Balance and Compassion are oft overlooked in teacher preparation programs. I also think the way we approach the relational side of teaching dictates our effectiveness in the classroom. I have no way to support that claim other than it’s been my experience, but I’ll stand by it.

I’d also like to thank Karl Lindgren-Streicher, Lindsay Cole, and Christiane Schicke for taking the time to leave comments as I was still writing.

Have you ever tried to read an article or paper but gotten so bogged down with the vocabulary that you didn’t understand what was going on? This happens to students every single day in schools, and especially to ESL, ELL, or reading disabled children. There is evidence showing that this is due to an overload on their working memory and can be addressed with some simple interventions in the classroom and with therapy outside the class.

Chrome Extensions are a great way to improve the web, including speech-to-text. I used them in my teaching to help students focus on the context of the entire article and not necessarily on the vocabulary on it’s own. What I saw was an improvement in comprehension and summarization of the text as well as a more open approach to scientific literature.

You can read the full Google Doc and, as always, comments are welcome.

Everyone is connected. There are reports of so-called “disconnect anxiety” afflicting our society because our desire to know what’s happening all the time. I have to admit, I’ve suffered from this. When I had a flip phone, I felt like I was missing out on the flow of my PLN and missing out on great ideas being shared. I have a smart phone now, but I’m ready to take it to the next level.

Tomorrow, beginning at 8AM, I’m going to begin my Connected Life experiment. For one entire day, I’m going to broadcast my life through a Google Hangout on Air.

Want to know what it’s like to work from home? Tune in to the Hangout. Want to know what my house looks like? Tune into the Hangout. Curious what I wear when I work from home? Tune into the Hangout.

This is an unprecedented look into my life, and I want my PLN there. Feel free to share it with your friends, turn it on in the background, or just hop on to see what’s up. I’ll also be doing a live Q&A through Twitter all day, so if you want to know more, hit me up at @bennettscience.

Looking for the live stream? Here’s the link. It’ll go live tomorrow morning at 8AM!

I went to CUE 2014 this year in Palm Springs, Cali. If you’re not familiar with the conference, it’s the largest regional education conference on the west coast with over 5,000 people in attendance. As I was preparing to go, I took a look at the keynotes.

Day 1: Dan Meyer. Solid.

Day 2: Levar Burton. Advocate for literacy since the 80’s. Plus, he was on Star Trek: TNG. Pretty cool.

Day 3: Salman Khan. Oh boy.

I’ve tried to remain positive, giving the Khan Academy the benefit of the doubt. Maybe the journalism covering the Academy has been poor…perhaps it’s all media spin that can be ignored for the most part. I resolved myself to go to the third keynote even though I had a pretty good idea of how it was going to go down.

Observation one: the first half of the keynote was a history of Khan Academy. Seriously. Watch the TED Talk if you want to see it. Khan is a gifted speaker. He’s charming and endearing. His story is really remarkable. He didn’t go looking for all the attention he’s been given since 2011. The problem I had with this section is that it was all about him. You can tell a story about your life without sounding self-indulgent, and he wasn’t able to do that effectively.

Observation two: World-class education is defined by…?. The stated mission of the Khan Academy is “providing a free world-class education for anyone anywhere.” But, repeatedly, Khan seems to define that education within the scope of the Khan Academy. Why didn’t a room full of teachers get upset about the fact that he didn’t compliment teachers in this section at all? The entire premise of the Academy is that schools aren’t doing enough. As a teacher sitting in the audience, I was offended and really in disbelief that very few people had the same reaction.

Observation three: He’s kind of short. And Dan Meyer is a giant. It surprised me, is all.

Observation four: Khan missed an opportunity when it came to the SAT. This is the kicker for me. The SAT is a test that promotes rote learning and regurgitation. Even the essay. I’ve written about the changes before. In 2011, Khan Academy reported $11.8 million in donations and other income. That’s the latest information I could find, and considering corporations like Comcast and Bank of America, that number is surely much higher. They have clout.

So, if Khan Academy is for kids learning and exploring, why, why, would they team up with the College Board for some PR media about changes that mean nothing? Because Sal Khan is not an educator.

Sal Khan speaks for Khan Academy and for his own story, not for a free, “world class” education. Not for students. If he were for students, why hasn’t he reached out to leaders in education? When he’s criticized for poor content, why has he been so defensive? Why hasn’t he answered a single, to-the-point question about education practice in any interview anywhere?

Khan has missed opportunities constantly since 2011. Teachers and education professionals have reached out over and over, offering to help, to make videos, to design lessons…all to be turned down. Khan had an opportunity – as the “leader in world class education” – to take a stand against bad education policy. But, because it’s about the Academy and achieving it’s own goals, that will never happen.

Now, where CUE missed the opportunity was in offering a Twitter question submission from the audience using the #cuekhan hashtag. As soon as it was announced, I went for it. You can see the archive of the entire hashtag.* CUE had an opportunity to ask some more pointed and meaningful questions, and they missed that chance. I understand the PR agreement and that they were probably bound by some kind of speaker’s contract, but I still wish someone…anyone…had the gumption to finally get to the point.

*I removed RT’s from the archive for clarity. You can see the entire thread – including RT’s – here.

I’ve been reading James Paul Gee’s book, The Anti-Education Era: Creating Smarter Students through Digital Learning. Without diving too deep into how I feel about it, let’s just say it hasn’t been an enjoyable read for me. I find myself disagreeing with Gee a lot and struggling to find his point in the narrative. I haven’t finished yet, so I’m holding out hope that it will eventually improve. Time will tell.

The middle of the book is about institutions of thought and their tendency to become “frozen” in practice. Legal systems, city planning, and the QWERTY keyboard are all discussed, but Gee points to the stagnation of universities as his main point. Originally, they were places of religious training, then secular training, and now, research with schooling on the side. Yet, we talk about them as if they are still mainly places of education.

I’m in marginal agreement with Gee’s assessment, but I differ on the way to improve the situation. Local connections are absolutely essential to growth, and the Internet can help us create and maintain those connections.

Rather than posting the full text here, I’ve written it in a Google Doc which will allow anyone to comment in context rather than at the end of this post. Please jump over to get the big picture.

…is that it’s kind of hard to teach.

Sorry for the click bait…I couldn’t resist. This is an update for my master’s class on finding solutions to instructional challenges in the classroom.

One of the hardest things about teaching in a science classroom is the abstract nature of many topics. One of my favorite teacher-isms from chemistry was introducing atoms: “This entire unit is based on our best guess. We don’t actually know what atoms look like, but we can make a good guess from observation.” I would get some funny looks from students, but they need to know that what they’re asked to learn isn’t always “hard” science.

I chose to tackle evolution for this particular assignment. Without getting into the philosophy of evolution, the task of teaching the mechanics is a well-defined problem. The principles are documented and observable, but students cannot conceptualize major changes in populations over time. That’s where the amazing simulations from the University of Colorado – Boulder come in.

The PhET Simulations have been around for a long time, yet not many people know about them. They’re interactive models of topics like evolution, but also chemistry, earth science, and physics, among others. Most of the simulations are still Java based, which means they don’t play well on Chromebooks or mobile. But, the HTML5 library is growing, and it is definitely worth checking out if you’re in a science classroom.

Let’s not forget the why. For me, it was simple: repeatability. The simulations are so simple to use, students feel like it’s a game. Playing with conditions (like trying to kill all the rabbits or blow the box of gases up) leads them to making general observations about their world that would be difficult to do otherwise. Mess up completely? No problem, hit reset and start again. Can you reproduce those results? What about getting an opposite result? Coming from multiple classrooms with limited resources, these simulations were invaluable to me each and every year.

If you want to play, my favorites were Natural Selection, Build an Atom, and Gas Properties. Have you used the PhET sims before? Which were your favorites?

The edtech land is losing their minds of the second major revision to the SAT in nine years’ time. In case you missed it.

Horray! The SAT is finally getting on board with what really matters!

Khan Academy will help more students get ready for the test! This will level the playing field!

< /end sarcasm>

The SAT isn’t changing. The announcement and following hullabaloo is a procedural shift to improve the appearance of the test without considering the deeper implications of standardized exit exams.

Students are still coerced into the exam by the testing machine and higher ed.

Students are still given an arbitrary rank (but it’s out of 1600 now) to show what they know.

The College Board is still making money.

David Coleman now has more control over the American curriculum (not really, but really).

Khan Academy can now pull in the test-prep market because videos.

The New York Times Magazine ran a fantastic article yesterday outlining how the major players came together in one magical-you-heard-it-at-SXSWEDU press event. I highly encourage you to read it.

I keep returning to a closing point in the article:

With a redesigned SAT, Calkins thinks that too much of the nation’s education curriculum and assessment may rest in one person’s hands. “The issue is: Are we in a place to let Dave Coleman control the entire K-to-12 curriculum?”

Before we start celebrating a victory, can we please talk about the bigger implications of the curriculum and assessment that is marching on without the input of teachers? Aside from CCSS, the SAT, and the people involved, why aren’t we talking about learning? Why isn’t that newsworthy.

So much for change.

I was able to travel again this year to Germany to attend the Inverted Classroom Model (ICM) conference. Last year, I spoke about teacher approaches to Flipped Learning. I tried to cover all of the content areas to give ideas of how teachers were approaching content and using class time more effectively.

This year, I was able to come and share student responses to flipping. In my last post, I asked for help with a survey, and you all came through! I had over 100 responses (making it a little more legit), with nearly 80% of those coming directly from students. I was able to pull out six major themes to lead a discussion with German educators from all levels. The hour was fantastic, and even included two current university students who were able to speak directly to a group of professors about class time, grading, and the pressures they feel in the classroom. I’ve got some notes I need to digest from the hour we spent together.

There are three things in the folder linked below:

• The Google form I used to collect responses.
• You can read through the spreadsheet or use the “View summary” tool in the form itself.
• The slides from today’s discussion

The images I used in the slides are attributed in the notes for each.

Get the Folder

Finally, I referenced a study completed by the University of Michigan and Michigan State University which questioned whether or not students would use screencasts if there were no external requirement. The Casting Out Nines blog post analyzes the data and includes a link the the published PDF. I wanted to call it out here because it has deep implications for how we approach creating and sharing digital content.

This Sunday, I’m jetting off to Germany for a one week, three city, two-conference tour with fellow TechSmithie, Anton Bollen. Part of my trip is speaking with German educators about Flipped Learning, and this year, specifically about student responses (both good and bad) to flipping. If you have five minutes to spare, I would really appreciate your help in gathering some very unofficial stories.

There is a section for students and teachers. So, if you’d be willing to share it with your students as well, that would be some great evidence to share next week. Just like the last survey I did, you can fill it out below or on the form itself.

If you’d like to share the form with friends or colleagues, please use http://bit.ly/stuflip so I can track the clicks on it.