Multi-faceted Refractions

I am fortunate. This year, I am a recipient of a Parents Association grant. My grant will enable me to travel to a place that I have never been and have always wanted to go to, Cooperstown, New York. Many of you may not know that I am a huge baseball fan and amateur baseball historian. So for me, this will be a trip to Nirvana.

I am blessed that I will be able to share this trip with my family. As such, this next week will be a week that I am primarily off of the grid. Very limited tweeting. Extremely limited email. Little to no blogging. Not that I won’t be writing posts, it is just that they will not be published while I am gone.

Instead, it will be time to road trip with my family, playing card games, engaging in conversations, and pursuing my passion. Not only will I go to the Hall of Fame, but I am planning on spending time at the National Baseball Library as well. For me, pure indulgence, pure heaven. And maybe on the way home, a side trip to Cedar Point for thrills, excitement, and family bonding time.

I am thankful that the Parent’s Association at my school provides this funding annually for faculty and staff to apply for. Each year, four to five experiences are awarded. This year, other recipients have traveled to Nicaragua for immersion in Spanish and to do service, a Broadway theater workshop. A past library assistant once got funding to attend the Skip Barber School of Racing. Our school encourages us to explore our passions in addition to our other responsibilities. I am glad that they not only talk the talk, but also walk the walk.

See you in a weeks time.

This morning, when going through my tweet-stream, I was pointed to a blog post by Tim Holt’s post on the Powerful Learning Practice’s Voices from the Revolution blog, The 30 Minute Questions. Tim’s thoughts echos one of  both Kevin Honeycutt’s at the Leadership Symposium at ISTE and Jeff Utecht’s Laptop Institute messages

In a typical school day, what 30 minutes will your students remember the most?

This question is one which is powerful and needs to be asked and addressed. However, as we near the opening of schools in the next month in North America, I have had a similar question, slightly flipped,

In a typical school day, what 30 minutes will be the ones that as teachers, you remember the most?

In the past, when my colleagues and I talk about the memorable moments that we have had at school, a great majority of them take place outside of the classroom, just as Tim writes. For me, it was the pride and joy my first yearbook staff had as they presented the final pages that they had scrambled to complete during the time my mother quickly and suddenly passed away. It is the time that I watch various Science Olympians finally turn a corner towards mastery and understanding of a complex project. It is the time, as an adviser, that an advisee came to realize that they had hit a wall and began developing strategies to overcome them. It is during our week long Interim Week, that our relationships and understandings of each other deepen, forged by the availability of more time and the lowered barriers of normal routine and structure

Less rare are the ones which happen in the classroom. But even in the classroom, it is not the great lecture or demonstration that you do, but almost always is when either 1-1, or in a very small group, that the magic generally happens. It is when involved in social learning we connect and forge stronger bonds with our relationships. It happens when a student, with whom you have been working with, finally gets a concept that was just out of reach.

These are important things to remember. As a teacher or  lead learner, we have to remember to create the social space for learning to occur. We have to create spaces where ideas and intersect, collide, and be churned together. It is where relationships are forged and wisdom is passed down.

They won’t remember the details of the lecture on solving two-step equations. They will remember your coaching and guidance when it was needed to solve two-step equations.

And likewise, we need to remember to carve time for our selves, with other teachers and lead learners, to acknowledge successes and celebrate failures. And ask ourselves, daily:

What have I done to provide the best 30 minutes of my students day?

and

What was happening during the best 30 minutes of my day?

Reflect. Find the common bond and build upon it.

One of the experiences that I will not be able to attend this fall is the National Summit on Re-imagining the Design of the K-12 Library which will be held September 23-25, 2011 at the Lovett School in Atlanta, Georgia.

Organized by Laura Deisley, Director of 21st Century Learning at Lovett, and Christian Long, this event promises to be challenge notions and begin to guide participants towards solutions that they can begin to implement in their own buildings.

The advisory team is very impressive and includes librarians Helene Bowers, Buffy Hamilton, and Joyce Valenza, technologists such as Lucy Gray and David Jakes, and members of OWPP including Trung Le, who is the architect of the our new Upper School which will open next month.

If you cannot attend, there are plans to have a virtual component that you can participate in.

Check it out. Knowing the planning team, this event will be hot.

During the dog days of July, between the time the old year has wrapped up and the new academic year begins in earnest, I like to take some time to pursue some of my own learning. This past April, I learned more about the power and potential of Google Apps Scripts. Google Apps scripts lets you create scripts in Google Spreadsheets and Google Sites to automate and amplify the capabilities of the apps. Example apps include being able to create reservations systems, event management complete with the ability to create calendar events and then sending confirmation emails, and the ability to pull calendar events and create new announcements in sites.

Wonderful examples of Apps Scripts are Flubaroo, a script that will allow you to create a self-grading quiz using a Google Form and voTer, a script that will remove duplicate entries from a Google spreadsheet that one can use for a voting system or ordering system.

For me, I am trying to see if scripts will allow me to solve two problems:

1. To create a Google Form which teachers can fill out for an assessment that they are planning and then populate one of four calendars, one for each grade level with that assessment. In the calendar entry, it will list the time that the assessment was added to the calendar. Once the teacher fills out the form and it is added to the calendar, they will get a confirmation email. We want the date created for the entry, so that if a student has more than two assessments on a day, they can see which one was added last and negotiate an alternative date for that assessment.  This script will be running in the background

2. To create a script which will create a scheduling calendar, which will invite all of the appropriate teachers and rooms into a calendar. Once created, I will then play to see if this can be modified for rotating schedules (A-B block, 6 Day, 7 Day, etc.)

During my learning today, I was able to get a sense of the syntax, which is java based. I am getting the hang of the methods available and am adding. I have been documenting the steps, so that anyone else who is interested in learning more about scripts can hopefully follow along and learn how to use this feature themselves. I will let you know when I have that completed.

If you are interested in learning more about Google Apps Scripts now, you can watch this free Google Webinar or visit Google’s  tutorial site (http://code.google.com/googleapps/appsscript/guide.html)

In October, I first dipped my toes into the Web 2.0 world by beginning this blog. Even though my audience is firmly entrenched near the far right-hand side of the long tail. But I am not necessarily writing for an audience. Instead, I write for myself as a way to allow some of the idea fragments which are bouncing around in my head an opportunity interact, and combine with each other. It allows me a chance to reflect on both my personal and professional practice, celebrate failures, and acknowledge successes.

In part because of what I have learned previously about the sheer act of writing to promote thinking, I began to advocate for others in our school, both teachers and students, to participate in this practice. At the time five years ago, not many people saw the value that I did.

But now, in the summer of 2011, I think that we either have achieved or are close to a tipping point. Over the past two years, students in our Contemporary World Religions course have blogged as a way to deal with their relationship with the material and their own spirituality. Our French students blog to gain better practice with their language. This summer, more teachers have created blogs to share their summer experiences.

So I would like to point you to each of the teacher’s summer blogs. Connect with their reflections. And if it moves you, comment and connect with them.

North Shore Country Day Athletics (http://raiderathletics.blogspot.com/) – Don’t let the title fool you, this blog, written by our athletic director covers many aspects of teaching and learning, both kinesthetic and academic. I have particularly like the reflections of his own learning journey.

Ms Specht’s Asia Trip (http://msspechtsasiatrip.blogspot.com/) Enjoy the travels of our 8th Grade Humanities teacher to southeast Asia as part of a Fulbright Fellowship

Ceil’s Escritos (http://ceilscanlan.blogspot.com/) Enjoy the adventures of one of our Upper School Learning Specialists as she travels to Nicaragua in a Spanish immersion

Broadway Bound! (http://machollbroadwaybound.blogspot.com/) Enjoy the reflections of our Upper School Drama teacher as she participates in an acting workshop in NYC

North Shore in St. Malo (http://nsinstmalo.blogspot.com/) The blog of two of our Upper School French teachers who took a group of students to St. Malo and Paris.

Sometimes, when we cultivate new ideas, we are too impatient. But given the right conditions and encouragement, it is fun to watch (and read) as teachers learn and grow.