When I am feeling blue.......

I am a gamer. Playing games is an intregal part of who I am. Playing games is a good thing. I can remember sitting on Paul Filbert's front porch in the summer time and playing Avalon Hill war games or Rummy Royale. I can remember playing chess in Hankie Pauley's kitchen on Friday nights with the glorius wooden chess he brought back from his trip to Mexico. I can remember the giant Risk tournaments we played over entire weekends. Joey Chachulski usually won them. I can remember designing lionel railroad empires in Jeffery Pyzinski's basement or creating rockets out empty CO2 cartridges and launching them filled with matchheads for solid fuel and soldered on sheet metal wings for guidance. Kermit Avenue had the best young Diplomacy players in Buffalo, New York I am sure! Our imaginations raced with new ideas and expanding horizons all of the time. We were not stressed, we did not feel depressed at all. We did not do any of these things in school and we were not watched over every minute of the day. We empowered ourselves.

Games are good for us. They empower us. A recent book by Dr. Jane McGonagal, Reality is Broken , has opened my mind to all types of new ideas, particularly the new science of happiness and the concepts of flow and fiero. Games produce flow and fiero. It makes for great reading and spurs ideas.

Couple Reality is Broken with Johann Huzinga's brilliant Homo Ludens and you will gain new insight into human nature.

Video games also may help us to cope with the crazy world that speeds up every day and infuses us with great anxiety and depression. A research study from the East Carolina University cited the following statistics about human beings in this world we live in from the National Institute of Mental Health:

According to the National Institute of Mental Health in the United States an estimated 20.9 million American adults (9.5% of the U.S. population age 18 or older) suffers from a mood disorder, and more than two thirds of those (14.8 million U.S. adults) are cases of major depression. Depression is the leading cause of disability in the U.S. for people aged 15 to 44. Depressive disorders often co-occur with anxiety disorders, and approximately 40 million American adults (about 18 percent of all U.S. adults) have an anxiety disorder.

The study then when on to explore what effect playing video games has on subjects such as those refereneced above. Playing games like Bejeweled, Bookworm, and Peegle from Popcap games significantly reduced depression, stress and anxiety levels in the study groups. All of these games are free by the way and blocked by most school web

filters. I play all of these games and am particularly drawn to them after particularly stressful days at school or when I am feeling overwhelmed by my task and to-do lists we so routinely heap on ourselves and our students. The results of the study are quite startling and deserve to be studied and applied in our schools.Video Games Can Reduce Depression And Anxiety - Study
should be read by every teacher in America. Games may just be good for us.

The Panera Blues

Here I am sitting in a Panera's Bread in Gainsville, VA writing a 6 AM Thoughts like I envisioned writing it when I conceived the idea. Somehow it just does not feel right. Maybe it is because it is after 7 AM.

I am weary of the constant battle to frame my thoughts in the current school paradigm. I am supposed to be a Technology Integrator. It is always a struggle at

best and impossible at worst to get veteran teachers to leave the safety of broadcast teaching. The technology makes narrow casting possible. The technology allows schools to embrace the long tail!. I am coming to the conclusion that as long as school stays rooted in the Broadcaast paradigm, my task is hopeless.

Most people think that school is about teaching. Education is about learning!! And to be frank about it, it is about individual learning. If Independent schools are to become Independent learning centers they must stop trying to be smaller and more gentle "public schools" from a previous time. No more classrooms, no more fixed curriculums, no more general assessments for all, no more lecture method for instruction. Independent Learning Centers need to be about reading, reading, reading and more reading, and becoming conversant in the present literacies. It is not 1955 any longer. And it should be reading about whatever the learners are interested in.

A dream I know, and one I am not sure I could even participate it because I learned my literacies from a different century. Those are my 6 AM thoughts for February 10, 2011 sitting in a Panera's Bread (or should I say learning center?).

It is a whole new paradigm

I have been absent from the blogging world for a few days because of various and sundry things. School just keeps getting busier and busier as it fights to retain the 19th and 20th century way of doing things. School continues to dig in and resist the challenges to its perceived knowledge monoply.

One of my favorite blogs is called Teachpaperless and it has tirelessly advocated a new paradigm of teaching. Blake-Plock writes on Teachpaperless, January 13 something that struck me right between the eyes.

And I would argue that to see the iPad as a fad is to miss the bigger picture: the iPad only exists within the context of a mobile-connected world. That mobile-connected world is not a novelty; that's a paradigm and a reality.

The mobile connected world is not a novelty, it is a paradigm. Schools need to realize that and make that world part of the school paradigm. That does not mean schools need to pass out digital devices as "gifts" to the students to use in ways the school deems acceptable. Schools are not enlightening students to these tools and way of being....the students are already that way. We need to learn that lesson. Schools need to use the tools in the learning process.

An example again comes from Teachpaperless. Here is a post that outlines an exam given in the new paradigm. A human geography exam. The immediate question will be, will this prepare them for the AP Exam? Who cares!! It will prepare them for the world they DO live in!

A Learning Manifesto

1. Provide universal robust wireless internet access without restriction to students, faculty, staff, and anyone who sets foot on the campus.

2. Expect everyone who sets foot on campus with a digital device to connect that digital device to the wireless internet.

3. Expect everyone on the campus to use the digital paradigm in everything they do.

4. Move everything the school does into the digital cloud.

5. Expect every student to have their own digital devices in their pockets or briefcases NOT PROVIDED BY THE SCHOOL.

6. Expect every teacher and administrator to USE the digital paradigm in their own ways with digital tools NOT PROVIDED by the school but chosen and acquired by the individual.

7. Unplug the copy machines and throw them out with the trash on friday.

8. Outlaw paper in the school.


It can be done! Let us do it!!

It is 6AM and the world has not yet begun to wake around me. The sky is dark and there is now snow on the ground around me. This is a very hard time to go to school. It is cold and miserable outside right now. Why should we want to go to school?

Maybe we are all like little puppies being crate trained. All we want to do is explore everything and everywhere. We sniff and smell and poke our nose in everything we find. So should our curisosity be trained as to how to use it. The big question is does crate training destroy us or does is socialize us to use our imaginations in better ways? Was Enstein crate trained? That is what I am thinking about this morning as I wait for the sun to rise.

Blended Learing

We are looking for more time in our math classes and in our foreign language classes in the school I teach at. Since I have an MA in Distance Education I have a bias towards on-line education and really believe that our solution lies in the arena of what has come to be known as blended learning. Instead of looking for more teaching time, we should be looking for more scaffolded learning time. It seems to me that, that time will be found outside of the traditional school day. Social networking may just offer a solution.

Today's 6AM questions are:
Can you teach mathematics in Face Book? Can you use Twitter to answer questions in a foreign language? Is following a teacher's twitter feed a reasonable way for mathedmatics teachers to communicate with students? Can you blend a face to face classroom with an Learning Management System to provide additional learning time for student?

That is what I am thinking about this morning. Do you have an thoughts on the subject? Dialogue!! Share with me.

Voice--what does it mean?

I was reading a blogpost from MiddleGround by Dr. Troy Roddy and he listed a number of things that he believed made for a good school. Most of the list was hard to argue with because they do make for good organizations.

High-involvement schools…

• offer challenging and enriching courses.
• provide faculty, students, and families a voice in the leadership and management of the school.
• are committed to low student and faculty attrition.
• support a culture in which all employees are appreciated.
• nurture the work of divisional, departmental, and ad hoc teams designed to advance the mission of the school.
• are committed to genuine professional development.
• demonstrate individual care and concern for all school members and work to align the individual needs of these people to the overall goals and mission of the school..
• provide a competitive salary and benefits package designed to attract outstanding professionals and maintain the “leadership density” often gained by employing such professionals.

I would like to spend a bit of time speculating about what the term voice means as it is used in the second bullet point above. Is there real power involved in the idea of voice or is it just a way to make constituentcies feel they they have are involved in the decisions of the school? Does voice mean decisions are made by vote? Does voice mean that decisions are made by consensus, and if they are who decides when consensus has been reached? Does voice mean a role in setting the agenda for what happens in a school? Does voice mean there is no hierarchy of decision making? Does voice mean everyone is equal?

Everybody wants a voice in how things are run. What exactly does that mean?

First Day Back

Christmas break is over and I am back at school getting ready for the first day. I am sitting at my computer in Catharpin wondering why I go through all of this. I am having stomach ulcers worring about how everything with the Google expansion is going to go. I received word last night that it did not go well for one of our most active users. I am not sure how we are going to fix it but I am sure that we can. We will figure it out.

The more immediate problem is what we need to do with all of the sixth graders that are going to walk into class bright eyed and bushy tailed waiting for somethink to do. I am wondering if we will do something with the new Google apps or just keep pounding away with the HTML stuff.