fiddling: annoyingly trivial and petty

I spent a disturbing amount of my puberty putting paper reinforcers on the holes of college-ruled notebook paper. This started as early as eighth grade when I attended a small, evangelical Christian school in Chesapeake, Virginia. While the school’s curriculum included a number of unofficial yet unfortunate topics (ie: how Catholics are idolators, why dating isn’t Christian, etc.), I came to appreciate its emphasis on primary-source documents and the development of notes and resources by the student that would then become a resource/textbook. Maybe it stemmed out of a need to save money, but “your notebook is your textbook,” they would always say. With this in mind, I would convince my mother to drive me to OfficeMax at the Janaf Shopping Center in Norfolk where I would think and mull over which folder or tab system would be best for which subject. Always ready in my well-organized Jansport backpack was a roll of paper hole reinforcers, White Out, and various shapes and sizes of Post-It notes. Oh, and who could forget the mini stapler and the matching, very necessary mini staple remover? Needless to say, I was poked fun of by my friends for my quirky concern with office supplies.

And this was just office supplies. I would also go through phases in school where I decided to suddenly alter my penmanship. I went through the phase of writing in tiny CAPS before moving onto a Frankenstein hybrid of print and cursive that I thought seemed more adult. As if the penmanship was more important than the words going onto the paper – the college-ruled, hole-reinforced paper.

That was then.

My love of the Internet and technology has ushered in an entirely new way of obsessing over and tweaking my systems. I recently read David Allen’s book “Getting Things Done.” As someone perceived to have so much potential and yet hopelessly prone to procrastinating and missing deadlines, I am always in search of something to save me from myself. I approached GTD out of the same desperation. Many of Allen’s concepts blew me away – I had lots of aha moments and lightbulbs. Yet I still spent an inordinate amount of time tweaking and fiddling with my Evernote, with tags and saved searches, to set it up as a digital GTD system. I even had a friend bring a box of plain manila folders over from the U.S. for my paper reference/filing system because I just wasn’t into the folders here in The Netherlands.

Tags and file taxonomies and GMail labels – these have become my paper reinforcers and White Out and file tabs. I am still doing the same thing and letting the same behaviors mask problems and confidence issues I have lurking underneath all of this seeming “organization.”

I come from a family of attention-deficit folks. My father, my brother, my uncle, and probably countless others are textbook “ADHD” and have been diagnosed as such. I have never been diagnosed nor have I sought out doctors to tell me either way. Young girls weren’t diagnosed with ADD or ADHD as often as boys when I was in middle and high school. If you were a daydreaming girl who couldn’t focus or stay on task, you were deemed lazy or told to “get your head out of the clouds.” I always seemed to be on task, seemed to be busy focusing and working to the untrained eye, but any close inspection (which my teachers never did) would have revealed a serious problem. I did not have trouble focusing, but rather found it impossible to focus on the right thing when I needed to. I can cook a big meal from start to finish and not forget an ingredient. I can knit a pair of baby mittens while listening to a podcast. However, ask me to meet a writing deadline after I’ve finished the interview and I shut down. I’m not ready. I’m still thinking. I’m still brainstorming and figuring out my lede. Ask me to sit down and write that unit plan, the one I’ve been googling and saving links for, the one I’ve been jotting down notes on legal pads for, and again I shut down. I’m not ready. I’m too busy thinking and trying to plan before I plan before I plan. These behaviors are problematic for someone who has an affinity for jobs that require grown-up homework (journalist, teacher).

I came to think about all of these issues while listening to one of my favorite new podcasts. At first blush it would seem to have nothing to do with my life and work, but “Back to Work” with Merlin Mann & Dan Benjamin seems to speak loudly and clearly to my current situation and the way I approach my work and creativity. These are two guys that seem a world away from my life as a teacher, but I can’t help but identify with them. In many ways it’s a superficial connection – I’m a nerd and enjoy the geeky banter, strange facts and movie references that pepper the conversations. I’m also a Mac geek like the both of them. But more than these, I identify with the hunger to create something and the many, many things that can distract and keep you from doing just that if you allow them to.

I just started listening to this podcast, so I’m a bit behind on the episodes. In the most recent episode I listened to, Merlin Mann said that “no one has ever thought a novel into existence.” He rambled on about how the brain and the gut can do a lot to discourage our hand from making something (and I mean ramble in a very good way). He clearly admires writers like Don Murray and Natalie Goldberg and references them often, in connection with writing of course, but also in creating anything. I too came to love Don Murray for the way he framed writing as an approachable practice – it is something you have to practice to get good at. Before he died, he wrote every single day. If a writer stops writing, she is no longer a writer. Anyone can write, but to be a writer, you have to sit down and write. You can’t just think about writing and expect a piece of work to appear. Seems simple, right?

Writing is another activity I avoid – a creative process for which I find countless justifications for not engaging in – because I am afraid of the permanence and finality of having something on paper or screen. With my students, we write in journals every day and practice the act of freewriting – of letting your hand just move across the page, without editing. I tell my students that they can save a piece of writing or throw it away – it doesn’t matter, because it is the act of doing it that is important. However, I also understand how difficult that can be for some of them. This is my own complex, but yet it is something that connects me to those students as they sit down to write. Some get this concept easily while others need support, encouragement and coaxing to move toward a regular writing practice. They need to practice writing if they ever hope to slough the fear of writing. I am not there yet myself.

One of my favorite quotes is by E.M. Forster who pondered “How do I know what I think until I see what I say?” That to me is one of the things that can be so intimidating about writing. You may not truly understand yourself until you get things down on the paper or the screen and maybe there’s a reason you avoid doing that – maybe there are things you aren’t ready to understand about yourself. Julia Cameron and her recommendation of “Morning Pages” – of writing three pages every morning, long-hand – approaches writing as near-therapy.

These memories are bubbling to the surface as I think about my students. Those few students who, like myself, are painfully organized and enjoy using highlighters and Post-It notes, only to miss out on the messy, real learning that can go on if you just let go. One of my favorite comedians  is Marc Maron. He joked once on his podcast that he visited a friend’s house only to find the friend’s house was extremely clean and organized – every little thing in its place. Maron chuckled and asked “So what are you running from?”

I struggle. I concentrate too much on getting the system just right that I miss out on the opportunities to create somehting with the system. Right now I am thinking and thinking about units and what to do with my students, but avoiding putting anything down on paper. I am letting my mind run wild as my hands sit idle – as the creating muscles atrophy.

I’m just beginning to analyze my perfectionism and procrastination as a sign of something deeper. An apprehensiveness about making mistakes. And when you’re a teacher, mistakes are par for the course. As a teacher, you take time getting to know students, their learning differences and interests so that you can meet students where they are and help them stretch and grow. And, now and again, you make mistakes. You select texts that bomb. You assume students know something only to realize mid-lesson they don’t and then you need to reteach it. You have your “off” days.

I am walking into this new year with goals in mind, hoping they aren’t too pie-in-the-sky or unachievable. I plan to sit down with students and have a discussion about what we all want out of this learning experience. I’ve been reading through “The First Days of School” based on rave reviews from teachers. While I understand the need for procedures – and I will certainly have them – I am more interested in getting to know these kids first than in scaring them into submission with lists and policies. It’s important that I see who has the messy bookbag and who is fiddling with organizing papers rather than paying attention. These observations are just as important as responses on surveys and paragraphs about summer vacations and writing diagnostics. And it is important that they learn who I am, faults and all. Building trust and community is my goal. But first, I must create learning experiences that will allow this all to happen naturally. I must commit them to paper and shake that feeling of permanence and remind myself: every lesson is a draft.

As the time ticks down to the end of August when I will meet my students for the first time – students that will likely be from all over the world, with experiences my younger self could only dream of having, with passport stamps to lands I’ve only seen in movies – sweat is beginning to bead upon my brow. My breathing has increased in pace and seems unlikely to slow until I get into a groove this fall and find some confidence and systems and routines. Sleep is unfulfilling and interrupted with bursts of 3:30 a.m. panic or inspiration or both.

See, I haven’t taught for the last year. I moved to The Netherlands in the summer of 2010 and spent months securing residency and trying to settle into my new home. I have had my head in the education world thanks to some other work and planning this new school, but as for teaching, I’ve not been in a room with students since June 2010. And really, I hadn’t spent too much time working with students before that. Still a “new” teacher, remember?

I am a new teacher. In a new school. In a new country. Doing so many new things, I feel like I’m learning with every turn. Nothing feels like something I’ve done before. This is a powerful and exhausting experience and I constantly find myself asking “is this right?” I try to see my newness as a positive and not as a disadvantage, but there are those days where you can’t help but feel like you will never measure up to the pros.

Thankfully I have that digital network of teachers behind me. It can feel, at times, like a sounding board in the form of a well-worn safety blanket – something to run to when you just don’t know where else to go. This metaphor could be perceived any number of ways – is it a way to feel “connected” in a profession prone to loneliness? Or a false sense of security in a job where, in the end, you really do it on your own every day?

But a strange thing has happened. As I feel the pressure of not disappointing my colleagues, parents, my new students, myself…I feel an even bigger pressure not to disappoint this network. See, when you surround yourself with people you consider experts – people you admire and learn from every day, sharing wowing ideas and experiences in education – you also have an even bigger cadre of people you can disappoint. This pushes me to try harder and do my best, but I know there will be mistakes. There will be days when I think “man, should I even BE a teacher?” I’m wondering if I’ll be confident enough to share those moments with these same teachers, or if I will bury them away in my notebook and keep the shame to myself. I find myself wondering if the “mistakes” shared by the educators I connect with online are akin to the “weaknesses” job applicants share in interviews – perceived downsides that really just beef up your strengths in the end. Do we really share the teaching skeletons in our closets? The moments we were so happy no one was observing that day? The strategies we used and think back on with the sort of stomach turning that only an embarrassing, high school moment can induce? And if we don’t share them, acknowledge them, and think about them, do we really learn from them?

I will be teaching Language A & B English and Technology in all years of the MYP* in addition to some other hats this year as our new school opens later this month. A new school necessitates many hats being worn by only a few teachers. I bounce between moments of feeling brave and proud of myself for tackling such a project, but as the days tick closer those wins are punctuated with “are you crazy? What makes you think you can do this? Leave this stuff up to the pros – you’re not there yet.’” My consolation is knowing that my colleagues are in this with me. We are heading into unfamiliar seas and it is scary, but we are together.

I know the path toward becoming a great teacher means walking that path as a teacher. I know at some point you have to leave behind consuming and reading and learning from your network – the theory – to do the thing you believe you were meant to do – teach. After a year of floating around, I may not feel completely ready to do that, but I am hoping when I do I can turn back to that same group of teachers and say “you were right. It wasn’t so bad. In fact, it was amazing. And damn, it feels good to be here again.”

*This equates to 6th through 10th grade in the U.S. As a small school, we will have some grouping of grades, which is yet another new and exciting experience for me.

This week I started life as a student again. Like riding a bike!

This week I started course work through Michigan State University’s online program toward my Master of Arts in Educational Technology (MAET).

I’ve realized over the course of my brief but intense teaching career that technology in learning is something I want to know more about. I’d been asked by many why I didn’t just get my Masters in Education when I got my license since I already had a degree under my belt (and the classes were the same), but at the time it didn’t seem like something I wanted to pay extra for. At this moment I have no aspirations of being an administrator (though it seems that every back is wearing a target in education these days) and a Masters of Education seemed like a stepping stone towards that and little more. I’d toyed with the idea of getting a graduate degree in something more content focused, such as history or media or even literature again, but none of those grabbed me.

I am an English teacher, but I always felt a little too interdisciplinary for the English department. I liked to walk around, talk to other teachers, and daydream about collaborative projects we could do together if it weren’t for state testing, time constraints, and all the other excuses you can imagine. I needed something that wasn’t an umbrella degree like education, but wasn’t so focused that it limited me to certain content. I found in the MAET program something that spoke to me – a chance to take all of my raw ideas about tech and learning, reflect upon them, and hopefully coax them into some focused philosophy while picking up skills along the way, though that philosophy part might be a reach. My education philosophy seems to change with every day I learn in virtual networks or even talk with a fellow teacher. One shared link on Twitter can get me thinking and wondering about everything all over again. Uncertainty – it’s a nice place to be sometimes.

I’ve started a blog (Mary gets her MAET…still working on that title) separate from my usual teaching blog (See Mary Teach), because I want to keep my course work separate from my usual ruminations in education. Also, some of the content of my MAET blog might be a little dry for some (I’m getting ready to write an example blog post about the differences between web pages and blog posts for my CEP810 course, for example). This is always a challenge for me – to decide how I am going to use one space over another and what tools I’m going to use to achieve the goals. I’m an early adopter of many online apps and tools and often find myself saying things like “wait a minute, I have 45 different ways to take notes…is that necessary?” And determining the answer to questions like that – to finding the right tech tool for the job – is something I hope to become better at through the course of this program so that I may model it for the students I have next year and in the future. And I’m just excited to be talking about teaching and learning in another space in such a complicated time.

I will be cross-posting content from See Mary Teach and vice versa from time to time and while my grad blog is separate, I encourage anyone interested in following it to do so. I plan to be transparent in my learning and opinions of the courses and program as I move through them and I welcome your feedback and interaction.

Should we abandon the idea of boy- and girl-friendly texts?

I’ve been thinking a lot about the idea of teaching to boys and teaching to girls. I even had my mom bring over my battered copy of Reading Don’t Fix No Chevys from the states. My worry is that through these ideas – of accentuating the gender binary in our pedagogical strategies – that we might be enforcing this binary and pushing kids that don’t fit into it further into the fringe. Photo by sleepyneko.

I’m not the most well-read when it comes to YA lit, which is one of the many reasons I adore and appreciate and never take for granted the wonders of librarians. I depend on them and seek them out when I need recommendations or ideas of how to engage a student. Maybe the librarian even knows this student and can give me some ideas about what he might like. I get that it is much easier to describe texts with terms like “boy-friendly” or “girl-friendly.” It’s important to get boys reading. I will never dispute that. But I wonder if it’s more important for us to frame this as getting children reading and abandon this binary.

Thanks to amazing programs and a society with more and more progressive leaders, children are feeling more empowered to come out as whoever they might be. Young girls are coming out as lesbians at an earlier age. Boys are coming out as gay. Children are self-identifying as genders other than the ones they were assigned at birth. And then there are those “tom-boys” and “sensitive guys” that don’t fit the ideas of what publishers deem “boy-friendly.” What about all of these kids?

As a woman I know I’m often offended at the assumption I love rom-coms and tear-jerker films…or that I love jokes about high heels and how “men just don’t get it.” I don’t, for the record. I like documentaries and funny movies and sci-fi. I like comic books. I love RPG video games, but don’t like first-person shooters and things like Call of Duty. I love computers and technology and reading about science. But then again I also love cooking and read food blogs. I love knitting and arts and crafts. I enjoy surrounding myself with artists and designers. I despise clothing and shoe shopping, but like going to the hardware store and DIY projects. I liked R.L. Stine books as a child, but could never get into The Babysitter’s Club, though I had been known to read a few Sweet Valley High books. So…what book might a publishing company recommend for me?

People are complex and children are even more complex as they explore their identities and try to pinpoint who they are and who they want to become. Labels are helpful and make parts of our jobs easier, but they can dehumanize and mask the personality nuances that could allow us to see the real child hiding underneath. The girl that loves to knit but watches sci-fi and likes weilding a handsaw. Or the boy that loves to read fashion magazines, watch Top Model, and is captain of his soccer team.

I attended an ALAN convention once and sought out an LGBT workshop. This is a passion of mine and has been since I started on this teaching journey. I want every child to feel welcome and comfortable in my classroom – not ashamed or afraid to be who he or she or ze wants to be. It was refreshing to hear that authors were moving from books with the expected LGBT themes of coming out to including characters who are amazing and complex and who just happen to be gay. We as educators also need to look for books like these. Consider titles that include diverse characters – diverse in race, gender, sexuality, religion, etc. I’ve been thinking a great deal about these things as I have been charged with developing language arts curriculum and selecting books for the new international school I’m helping to open this fall. I feel a heavy weight of responsibility as I do this – not something I’m taking lightly – and something I’m seeking the help of others in doing because I know it’s dangerous to have one person make all of these choices. One person with biases, ideas, and perspectives.

So how do we do this? How does our language and how we label text effect the ways in which we help students (all students) learn and experience our classrooms?

Mama Worrell helping me see with new eyes.

I just returned from a trip to Paris with my mom (“Mama Worrell”) and my partner Thomas. It was amazing, frustrating, fun, exhausting…all of the things you’d imagine it to be. We saw amazing art, ate the best falafel of our lives (I’m still dreaming about it), and witnessed monstrosities like the Eiffel Tower. I had moments of wonder as I held my mother’s hand climbing stairs throughout this amazing city. And I had moments of despair as I tried to ignore four young African men trying to sell pieces of string as friendship bracelets. There is a lot of poverty every where I look, even when I’m not trying to see it. Seeing these sides of a touristy city make it hard for me to not feel ashamed of myself as I waltz around spending money in a place where so many struggle.

But then I remember the life I lived growing up with my mother working her ass off to support her children while my father was out of work. The mother who didn’t think twice about her pride when it came to seeking social assistance to feed her children. The mother who worked two full time jobs. The mother who got to go on one vacation to Florida with us when I was 11 years old. The mother who was probably still paying off the debt from that trip for years after.

Experiences are relative. I try to tell myself that when I feel guilty enjoying something I know many around the world wouldn’t dream of being able to. I sometimes envy those with thicker skin – the ones that can turn their empathy on and off when they want to really, hedonistically enjoy something without a hint of shame.

I made sure I brought a video camera with me to document all of my mama’s reactions and learning and amazement. I knew this was important and exciting. I’m still not sure how I’m going to compile the whole thing – maybe a few mini movies – but I just know I need to get this on record somewhere. So we can go back and see that from those humble and heart-wrenching beginnings, a family can still make it to the Eiffel Tower and read into that achievement however they wish. It can be nothing – just a trip – or it can be something inspiring. An event to give us happy memories and hope and pride and comfort that it was all worth it somehow. Mama is still pulling 60-hour weeks on nights as a nurse just to be able to fly over here and visit me. But she made it. While her 57-year-old body and achey knees struggled climbing and descending the many stairs of the Paris Metro (not even to begin talking about the stairs she climbed to the Sacré-Cœur), she would turn to me and say with pain still furrowed into her brow, “I can’t believe I’m here,” or put her arm around me and say “Can you believe we’re in Paris…together?”

This was my second time visiting Paris, but it felt new all over again seeing it alongside my mother – a person with whom I share a closeness that Hallmark cards and commemorative mugs can’t begin to explain. As I witnessed her wonder I couldn’t help but think about my work with students and bearing witness to their discoveries and amazements. I’m a bit of a cynical traveler when I visit cities like Paris, seeing the wealthy flaunt their money and my eyes turning instead to beggars and souvenir sellers and wondering about their stories and struggles. I couldn’t even bring myself to visit Versailles since I knew it would frustrate me – to wonder how much money is laid in every inch of that place that could have been used in more productive ways. I rarely see beauty in monuments, but rather waste and death of those used to create it. Traveling with me can be tiring, as you can probably tell.

I came from a low-income family that did a pretty good job of faking lower middle class status thanks to credit cards. It gives me perspectives I’m happy to have, but in some ways clouds my experience of other cultures and monuments and sites. I wouldn’t change anything, but I want to be more like my mother. Someone that can walk into a city wide-eyed, amazed, and not let the scars of her life taint her experience with cynicism. I am always learning from her and from the children I teach and hope to teach.

It’s never to late to shrug off the cynicism and see with new eyes. I’m trying.

I’ve always talked about wanting to make movies and digital storytelling projects with my students, but never had the chance to given resources in the buildings where I’ve worked. I secretly let out sighs of relief after learning this fact. Shame on me.

Even in my personal life I’ve limited myself to snapping photos here and there and taking videos on my digital camera. The videos have just ended up on my Flickr in their entirety. The idea of editing and piecing together something more cohesive just seemed beyond me and difficult.

But I’m happy to say that I have never been more wrong about something.

I’m doing work again for Powerful Learning Practice in a Program Administrator role. This is a great job because it allows me to work while collaborating with teachers around the world and I get to attend webinars with thought leaders around the convergence of education and technology. I’m there to work, but I always walk away with a renewed sense of inspiration about my practice as a teacher.

Such was the case last week. I helped moderate a session with teachers from Texas. Dean Shareski was presenting on video techniques in the classroom. He asked participants to take a video of themselves using the built-in cameras on their computers or devices they had with them and to upload those videos, each around 10 seconds, to his Flickr. In less than 10 minutes a page in Dean’s Flickr was populated with videos of teachers around Texas trying their hand at video making. Dean then took all the videos and edited them into a short.

After seeing the ease with which me and the other teachers learning in this session were able to tell short stories about ourselves in video, I was ready to try it on my own. I was inspired.

Dean shared a video he made using the 5 x 5 format, which involves telling your day in five, five-second video increments. It’s fun and gives people a taste of life in your shoes. I decided to try something similar using a terribly old camera – a point-and-shoot Canon Powershot that is around six years old. The camera records video in a fuzzy fashion, but it’s what I had at the moment.

Throughout the day I recorded snippets of my life here and there. I’d get the camera running, set it down, and record. I captured much more than five second increments and I knew I would have to edit the video to create a more clear story. I sat down with my memory card and proceeded to upload the videos from my camera into iMovie on my Macbook (it took a while for my computer to load each video even though they were quite short).

Once I had all the video clips in iMovie, I set about playing with the program. I’ve never even opened this program before this project. I learned how to play each video, right clicked around to see a drop-down menu of options, hovered my mouse over different buttons to get informational text (maybe this should have been a screencast…another thing on my list to try). As Sheryl Nussbaum-Beach often tells educators participating in PLP, we learn through playing and we need to give students and ourselves time to do that. Rather than get frustrated with not knowing the program right away or seeking out tutorials online, I just let myself goof around for a while.

Eventually I figured out how to edit a part of each clip (click until a yellow box appears and drag each side of the yellow box to the part of the video you want to clip). I selected five-second portions from each video and dragged them into the project window. I played it over and over as I added and edited, making little adjustments here and there.

Once I was satisfied with the clips (there were about 12), I needed to add some transitions. This couldn’t be any easier. You just drag a transition of your choice in between the clips where you want a transition and that’s it. You can make the transitions longer or shorter if you want, but I stuck with the default of .4 seconds. The last thing I needed to do was add a frame at the beginning and end of the video to give some information. I dragged a title screen to the beginning and one at the end, choosing a black background and adding my text.

Export the video and it’s ready to upload wherever. Not including the time I spent recording here and there during the day before, this whole project took me an hour – and that was without any experience in iMovie.

My point in writing this post isn’t to paint myself as some sort of tech savant able to catch on quickly – I’m not. My point is to show teachers that you don’t need to wait for someone to show you how to do these things. You don’t need a long in-service with tutorials. Just give yourself a small chunk of time to play around with a new technology. These days user interfaces have never been easier and more intuitive – you practically have to try to screw some of these things up. Hey, but if you do screw it up, learn from that failure and try again. And you don’t need to be an expert to know how to use these tools with your students. You’re an expert in teaching. Make sure your students know what you expect from them and decide what tools might help them achieve that and then let them loose. Allow them time to play, don’t stand in front of the room making everyone try each and every tool together. Be there to help and let students that have figured it out help the ones a little farther behind. It will be messy. No doubt about that. But you and your students will come out on the other side with highly transferrable skills and techniques to demonstrate learning. Plus, it will be fun. I promise.

And without further ado, I give to you A Quiet Day filmed in my still-very-new home of Breda in The Netherlands…

A Quiet Day from pickledtreats on Vimeo.

One of my favorite things about the web and connectedness is the availability of tons of free software. Developers and programmers blow my mind. I have Program or Be Programmed by Douglas Rushkoff marked as to-read because I am unabashedly being programmed. I don’t know much about how all of this stuff works – the stuff I sit down to use every day – but I would be lost without much of it. The authors of many of the free programs out there spend countless hours developing programs only to spend even more time answering questions in discussion threads, responding to tweets, making helpful screencasts, and addressing errors in the program with subsequent updates. They might request a donation here and there, but whether or not they get it they keep plugging on. I’ve started reading Seth Godin’s Linchpin on recommendation from my super-smart friend Amber Karnes. I realize that these software developers found problems or needs, figured out how to address them with a program, and set about spreading the answer freely. They weren’t waiting for someone to “pick them,” as Godin calls it. They went for it and boy am I thankful.

I’d just like to give a shout out to some of the rad software I’ve been using lately. All of this is available for free. A few of these have freemium options or additional things you can add on for a fee, but at their most basic they’re still great:

1. Calibre. I’d be lost without this program. With the many ebook devices, file formats, and files available, one can easily get overwhelmed. If someone wants to share a file from their e-reader device with you, but you only have a Kindle, you need to convert the ebook to a different format. How do I do that? Enter Calibre. With minimal input from you, the program will take a file and convert it to the format needed for your device. You can also download metadata like tags, book covers, author info, and organize your library. Another awesome feature is the news gathering option. Calibre will grab news from various sources and create a readable file from that online content you can send to your device. Oh, and did I mention it will grab all your Instapaper reads and send them to your device? Every time I turn around this program gets more awesome.

2. Anki. I had a little trouble figuring this one out, but thanks to active discussion boards with responses from the program’s developer and screencasts, I’m set. Anki is a spaced repetition system, which most people consider to be the best system for reviewing information in a flashcard setting. I won’t get into whether flashcards are helpful for truly learning info (there is a lot of debate about the “best” languge learning methods), but it’s something I’m experimenting with in my learning of the Dutch language. To oversimplify an SRS system, it uses algorithms to remember what cards you answered easily versus the ones you need help with and puts the ones that need review closer to the front of the deck. There’s an Anki desktop app, an online version (both free), and a iPhone app ($25) that will seamlessly sync cards and statistics. The program also supports non-Arabic characters and is popular among people learning Japanese. This is a reminder to myself that I need to be studying my Dutch more…

3. NeoOffice. Who needs Microsoft Office? Seriously. This program allows you to save documents, spreadsheets, presentations, in tons of different formats, including super old MS Office file formats. While I tend to use Google Docs for everything, and I recently found my Office for Mac disk, I still need something to open files that might be sent to me in formats my programs don’t currently support. Not totally necessary, but it’s nice to have if you want all the bells and whistles offered by the ubiquitous Microsoft Office suite of programs. NeoOffice is part of the OpenOffice.org project.

4. OmmWriter. This is a distraction-free writing zone program. Once you open it you’re given a clear space to write without pop-up notices or anything else happening on your desktop. Omm has an upgrade for which you can pay, but the basic is enough for me. I’ve gone a little analog with a traditional writer’s notebook for brainstorming ideas, but when I need a clear space to write a blog post or free-write and want to type, Omm is my go-to.

5. Evernote. Yeah, this is another one where you can pay for extra storage space and features, but I’m still below that threshold (most of my notes are text) and find its basic to be enough for my needs. Right now I’m using my new favorite screenshot Chrome extension to grab articles I’ve written online and save them to Evernote. My hope is to create an online portfolio outside of links, which can often go dead.

There are risks with using free, start-up, and open-source programs (the biggest being programmers can just stop updating them or companies can fold without notice leaving users floundering), but those risks are outweighed by the great things you can do with them. And there are lessons to be learned when companies fold – things we can teach students, such as “Don’t put all your digital content in one basket (program)” and the one I need to remind myself of often, “Backup your data early, often, and in multiple places.” We teach kids about time management and organizing their notebooks – here are those same lessons, digitized. Photo by vancouverfilmschool.

So don’t just sit back and accept the suite of products that comes standard on your computer (or on your school computer). There are people out there creating programs that can put the best productivity suites to shame. Schools should be considering these programs first before heading to vendors and spending astronomical fees on licenses.

While the preceding tools aren’t all deserving of the term open-source, I wanted to mention it since I believe the open-source movement to be one of the most amazing parts of the internet. People are creating software and content and telling others to “go, use it, copy it, do with it what you want and maybe in the end it will be even better.” There’s a community out there and a lot of learning and creating going on without any payback (Wikipedia comes to mind). This intrinsically-motivated community is happy to share with others and often asks for nothing more than a bit of hyperlinked credit. This community is an important thing to introduce to students and offers a lot of potential for educational institutions (hello, free software! goodbye licensing fees!). Isn’t this what we want from our students? To not even think about the grade or the points value or the damn rubric, but to create because it’s fun and can make a difference?

In America, as most Americans can attest, your work attire is taken very seriously, particularly in offices. As a newspaper reporter I only dressed up when heading to a cushy office to interview someone and the rest of the time I rocked jeans and casual dresses. In a workplace where people (used to?) smoke and keep bottles of bourbon in their desks, this is an improvement. But when I became a teacher that all changed. I needed to “dress respectably to be respected,” as one principal told the staff during a meeting. Apparently dressing respectably meant skirt and pants suits like the administrators wore each day.

Last week I had the wonderful opportunity to begin training in the MYP curriculum. It was an all-day session that challenged me and my new colleagues to move away from our previous experiences as educators and think within this new curriculum focused on authentic, project-based learning and interdisciplinary collaboration. I’m still reflecting on the experience and writing about it, which I’ll share soon, but as invigorating as the experience was it was also a chance for me to chat casually with these teachers. Usually we’re cramming a lot into our meetings and have little time for chit-chat, but we had lunch together and tea breaks and I shared a lot about myself, the true outsider on the team, and learned more about them. Photo by semuthutan.

The most glaring difference I found while hanging out in the personeelskamer (teacher’s lounge) is that seeing people “dressed up” was a rarity. Now, these educators weren’t rolling into work in sweat pants, but here are just a few examples:

- Older gentleman in jeans, flannel shirt, suspenders, sneakers.
- Younger woman in cotton dress, tights, Ugg-type boots.
- Administrator in khakis, button-down shirt (no tie), and a houndstooth jacket.
- Younger man in khakis, loafers, and an untucked polo shirt.

It may seem that I’m being overly superficial, analyzing the wardrobe choices of the teachers I encountered, but it affected me so much that I knew there had to be a reason. I realized that this casualness toward dress code was indicative of something deeper in the culture of the school and the attitude toward the teachers. They are considered professionals and treated as such. It’s as if someone said “Yes, I know you’re a professional and I don’t need you to wear black pumps and suit pants to prove it.”

I met a young teacher who had the opportunity to do her student teaching internship in Pennsylvania as part of an exchange program. She said she was told she had to dress up and spent the first few weeks buying new clothes for the entire experience. She told me that in The Netherlands people dress down at work – wearing “work clothes” – and save their dressy attire for events and nights out. Makes sense to me. Teaching is hard work and I don’t know how many days I came home from my internship with my toes nearly arthritic from being crammed in fancy shoes for eight hours.

As a teacher in Virginia I’ve been frustrated with the discussions surrounding a potential ban on virtual communication between students and teachers. The state’s board of education is considering banning teachers from chatting with students on Facebook, Twitter, and through text messages. The reason? To protect the students. At first blush that sounds like a good idea. We all want to protect the students! But why would we want to protect them from their teachers? Yes, there have been the few cases of teachers and students sexting, but with nearly half a million teachers in the country that’s a small drop in the bucket. The education system paints with a wide brush and often does so to the detriment of innovation in our tired system. In this case, rather than deal with the inappropriate teacher-student relationships as they arise, the board is treating all teachers as potential predators than the professionals the majority of them are.

Yes, there are things online that I’d prefer students not run into – predators being the main one. But those dangers are everywhere, not just online. And to take away the one connection to responsible adults that kids may have in those spaces is truly irresponsible. Wouldn’t it be better for us to hold their hands crossing the road than to say “No, holding hands might lead to a sexual relationship, so we’ll just let the kid cross the six-lane highway. Alone.”

I’ve heard familiar gripes about teachers here – that it’s so easy and they get the summers off. Dream job! But overall the school culture itself seems to lead toward a mutual respect among colleagues and an understanding that no, whether one wears jeans or a suit doesn’t mean one is a better or worse teacher. Effectiveness isn’t tied to your tie. Leadership isn’t lost by leaving your collar unbottoned. Seems a little ridiculous when we think about it this way, don’t you think?

It’s small thing, but it means a lot. It has me wondering what other small differences might go a long way to change the entrenched culture of schools in America.

While those workshops are going on I also participated in the English Companion Ning winter webstitute “Work With Me,” which focused on collaboration. I’ve also registered to virtually attend EduCon 2.3 later this month, but for the moment I’d like to reflect on my experience with the ECN Webstitute. Photo by Mark Brannan.

I’ve been a member of the English Companion Ning since it’s inception. I was quite active in the beginning and relied on the encouragement and help of the educators there greatly during my student teaching. When I got my first teaching job I was swamped and struggling to stay afloat and I disappeared for a while. I’ve been slowly getting back in, reading posts, and thinking about how to help the teachers that meet there with ideas or just a pat on the back. I knew that the people I worked with in those spaces would welcome me back no matter how long it had been since I dropped off the grid. Such was the case last weekend when I dove into the Websitute.

The first session was with Penny Kittle. I’ve just started reading her book Write Beside Them, so I was stoked about this one. She shared a video of her students collaborating on a project focused on analyzing the craft of the author. Quite a few students who read The Hunger Games were working together and since I’ve read this book I can understand the excitement of the teens that came across in the video. But more important than the enthusiasm was the authentic analysis and discussion of the book bubbling forth at the table. A later interview with one of those students seemed like perfect justification of the hands-off, fellow learner/facilitator role I like to take in my classrooms and which I describe in my philosophy. The student, Amelia, said she was thankful Penny didn’t give her the answers – that she and her classmates were able to uncover meaning on their own, allowing them to delve deeper into those ideas and come to their own conclusions. She went on to say how difficult writing a paper about a book, or about anything, was if the ideas weren’t her own. (Yes!) The discussion that ensued in the forum included materials and pages from Penny’s writer’s notebook, questions about practical things like assessment and class time, and the general idea sharing I’ve come to love from the EC Ning.

The next session was about collaboration with colleagues and again the organizers posted a helpful video of one of their sessions, which didn’t focus on failures of students or behavior issues – the general bitching that can occur in meetings like this. Instead these educators were talking about what worked and the things they were stuck on – they were trying to figure out how to bridge gaps in their lessons and help students make deeper connections. They talked about what worked, what didn’t, and what they were going to try next. They trusted each other and felt safe tossing out any and every idea all with the goal of helping their students. I stuck around for a bit of the forum discussion, but around that time my coffee ran out and I had to go to bed. It’s an unfortunate side effect of living in a different time zone and trying to participate in U.S.-based PD. Next time I’ll take a midday nap.

Both Penny’s session and the collaboration group reminded me how important it is to document great things happening in your classroom and with colleagues. Sharing is crucial to the success of learning networks and professional spaces like the EC Ning. Lots of great things go on in classrooms and school buildings around the world, despite what talking heads and pundits say to fill 24-hour news cycles, so documenting it goes a long way to showing the greatness of teachers and helping others become great.

I was disappointed I couldn’t make the live Elluminate sessions later in the Webstitute, but I learned a great deal from the discussions I had on the EC Ning and simultaneously on Twitter. If I had a recommendation for the next webstitute it might be to hold the forum discussions asynchronously across a few days or a week. There was a mad dash to post and participate and respond (all great things!), but one could only keep up with constant browser refreshing. If the organizers wanted a live chat maybe a private chat room would have worked, but then we would lose the ability to upload and share documents in the context of the discussion (a great feature of Ning forums). Not sure what the answer will be, but my international time zone self would love a more aysnchronous workshop. Live events like Elluminate talks can never be asynchronous (though archives are available), but the forum discussions can be. The EC Ning has done this to great effect with its virtual bookclubs.

Over the course of the Webstitute I also joined the EngDo collaborative – a wikispace of document and resource sharing for educators. I’m still trying to piece together how this space will be different from the EC Ning, but my hope is it’s a more organized place for resources and collaborative documents while the EC Ning is mostly a forum where people post resources sometimes.

Lots to do and think about after just one weekend of real-time professional development. I’m off to work on assignments for my digital storytelling and podcasting workshops. I’m thankful to have such a great network of teachers on Twitter. I would have never heard about EVO if Larry Ferlazzo hadn’t posted about it one day.

But a few days ago I couldn’t miss the horrific shooting at a Safeway grocery store in Arizona where a number of people were murdered, including an innocent 9-year-old girl. It hadn’t hit my global news sources yet, but my Twitter network was in full force with people tweeting their feelings of shock, dismay, and utter frustration at the hate. Some speculated about the lack of serious gun control in America and its role in the event. Others wondered how much Tea Party rhetoric played a role in the gunman’s decision to attack this political meeting organized by U.S. Rep. Gabrielle Giffords,  a Democrat from Arizona who according to the latest reports is recovering from surgery. She was shot in the head.

We don’t know yet (and we may never, truly) if the shooter, Jared Lee Loughner, was compelled by the vitriolic rhetoric and campaigns of the Tea Party and extreme conservatives to attend the Giffords event with the goal of assassinating the representative. She has been outspoken about the xenophobic and hateful policies instituted by Arizona in an attempt to curb illegal immigration. One can’t ignore the language used by these campaigns to foment outrage and anger among a constituency that is anti-other and carries guns to political rallies. Words like “eliminate” in reference to contenders in races, “in the cross-hairs,” “on the attack.” Is it typical campaign language or is it something else? Language is power. To deny that is to essentially put your head in the sand and pretend the world doesn’t exist. What we say and how we say it has meaning, something I try to teach my students always when words like “faggot” or “retarded” pop up in class. Loughner may well be a psychopath – there’s no other way to describe someone who shoots up a group of random people in a grocery store – but how much did language play a part in how he decided to release that rage? For many people on the outskirts of society, people like Dylan Klebold and Eric Harris of the Columbine shootings, they often find solace in communities that are outside the norm. For years people tried to connect shootings like this to horror-core and other music genres, but most of us cried out in the name of censorship and said no, this is just a result of a community leaving these boys behind and children bullying, knowing not how they hurt others in doing so. Others lamented weak gun legislation. And of course there are always the people that shake their heads, call the shooters crazy, and move on from the event choosing never to reflect on how they could have done something.

But which is it? I’m a rabid support of free speech. Even in cases where I hate the subject and wish others weren’t writing/painting/singing about it in an attempt to raise even more supporters, I deal with it because I see it as a necessary part of supporting the right to free speech. But how far is too far? Most journalism students learned the case of Schenck v. United States where the phrase “clear and present danger” was first used (speech should be free unless it creates a clear and present danger to others). This can be stretched to fit anyone’s argument (for or against), but we must think about it in moments like these, even just a little. And maybe Loughner’s shooting had nothing to do with Tea Party rhetoric. Maybe he is just a psychotic killer and not a psychotic killer that’s also a Tea Party member (Jacob Weisberg tackled the idea that Loughner may have been influenced by both mental illness and political rhetoric on Slate.com, calling it “politically tinged schizophrenia” while David Greenberg labeled Loughner a political assassin.). The question still remains: How are we going to deal with a society that seems to be growing ever more hateful and outraged and a political system that purposely taps into that rage to push agendas only to back away and say “no, he was just crazy” when it blows up in their faces? I say these things, but then the hairs on my back stand on end when I realize I’m pushing to limit speech that is used in many situations (political campaigns, sports games, etc.). Maybe I’m just looking for a big group or movement to blame, something on which I can take out my anger when I see the faces of the innocent dead on web pages.

Blaming something big and without a face is easy…looking inside ourselves to see what we could have done to prevent this is not. As a teacher it’s my job to reach out and support my students – all of them – even when there are so many I can’t seem to find the bottom of the grading pile. And especially those students that seem to be on the fringe, getting lost in their own thoughts and shameful memories, bullied by students for being so damn different. This isn’t to say that it’s always the “weird kid” that ends up going on a murderous rampage, but it doesn’t hurt to care for those students and show them they aren’t alone in whatever they might be dealing with at home or just in their own heads. As news sources try to find explanations for an unthinkable event we will no doubt learn more about Jared. He already has a pretty clear digital footprint that should have been a warning to someone, but it’s hard to tell in a world where anyone can upload anything, where insanity and fringe behavior are rewarded with more hits and views. Loughner is getting lots of views and hits right now, but the warning signs are lost on viewers. It’s too late.