Are the Rohingya going back home? Is this a good thing?

Time Magazine: Myanmar and Bangladesh Say Repatriation of Rohingya Refugees Will Begin Soon

A year ago about one million Rohingya fled out of Myanmar and into Bangladesh because the Myanmar army was enacting genocide on them.  Thousands of Rohingya were killed as the army attacked and burned their villages.  While they have found safety in Bangladesh, they have been living in horrible conditions.  Bangladesh does not want them and they are trying to send them back to their homes in Myanmar.  The UN is worried that the Rohingya will be attacked again if they return, although Myanmar says they will be safe.  As someone who has followed this conflict closely, this sounds like a horrible idea.  The only way it might possibly work is if Myanmar agrees to give the UN full access to the Rahkine State so they can try to keep the Rohingya safe.

Article about B Franklin

https://www.tweentribune.com/article/tween56/benjamin-franklin-was-first-chart-gulf-stream/


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Malala Quiz

https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSd1h-QiehsQNO_LRSnnPcaYRFkQkMH8O29QFmo1xPwMgTEKdw/viewform

Room Design Challenge!

Please take our survey!

Please help out my 6th graders.  They are in the middle of a project where they are trying to redesign our classroom best for learning.  They have read articles about color, lighting, furniture, arrangement and how they impact the learning process.  Now they are working on empathy and understanding how  other people feel about classrooms, not just what they want in a classroom.  To do this each group has made a survey.  We would love to get as many responses as possible.  Will your class take our surveys please?  Below is a link for the five surveys.

    Survey #1

    Survey #2

    Survey #3

    Survey #4

    

    Survey #5

Lemonade Stand School

This is a picture of two of my daughters and two of their neighbor friends doing a lemonade stand on a sunny and warm April weekend.  It might be their favorite thing to do.   They sit there and yell about their lemonade and sometimes they walk up and down the street telling people about their lemonade. To them it is play.  They are having a blast.  However, if you watch closely you will see that something else is going on they are learning.  They are learning a lot.  They learn math when they sell stuff or when they have to go to the store for more supplies or fractions when they make the recipe.  They are learning speaking and listening skills as they interact with people in the neighborhood.  They are learning how to work together to set a price, pick the right spot and make a sign.  They learned they needed a trash can after a number of people asked the first day.  I would day say that my 4th grade daughter learned more "playing": lemonade stand this weekend as she will learn in school this week.

This should not be a surprise to educators but I think it is. We are asking the wrong question-- "What is the best way to teach?" Instead of asking "what is the best way kids learn?"    Research tells us that kids learn best while playing, yet we continue to take recess away from in kids in search of test scores.  Research tells us that when we teach things to kids at a stage in their life when the concept is irrelevant most kids brains will dispose of the knowledge as soon as possible, yet we keep teaching fractions to 2nd graders via worksheets.  Research tells us that a kids attitude toward school is a primary indicator on how well they will do in the later grades but we still do school in a way that turns students off (especially boys) to school at a young age.

I know we can't all have kids do lemonade stands everyday, but we can use things like lemonade stands as a model of how we can try to teach.

1. Engaging-  As an educator we all have those lessons or those days that we know are not engaging.  We have to pull the kids the through the lesson.  I taught a lesson last week that I could just tell was bring my kids as I taught it.  I think sometimes we think that we have to have days that like to make sure we are covering the objectives, but I think we need to rethink that.  The fact is that for the most part if kids are not engaged and do not see the information as important they store every thing in short term memory.  In our school they call it summer learning loss.  It is not really summer learning loss it is the brain's way of getting rid of useless information.  I am at the point in my profession where I believe if I teach something in a way where the kids are not engaged I am wasting everyone's time.  We need to start realizing that time spent in a lesson for no other reason then to engage the kids in what they are going to earn is time well spent, not time wasted.

2. Peer Driven-  You should have seen these girls try to solve problems together, especially the two older ones.  They would talk to each other and listen when the other one was talking.  It something I would love to see in my classroom.  It took them longer to figure it out on their own then me just butting in and telling them but them figuring it out on their own is what learning is about.  I but in way too fast in my classroom.  Usually for the sake of time, I end up showing my students how to do something.  

Teachers have a huge role in a classroom like this but it not telling the information like in a traditional classroom.  As I watched them I was amazed at all the chances I had to as an educator to help them process something or to challenge them to think deeper about something.

3. Real life-  When you are dealing with real money all of sudden math becomes very important.  They were doing math and they enjoyed it.  It mattered.

Google Cardboard VR in Classrooms

This week Google announced that they will be giving classroom sets of their Google cardboards to schools for free.

These things are a game changer.  Imagine teaching about the heart and having a classroom of kids going on a virtual reality tour of the heart while you lead the tour in your own classroom, or a tour of Aztecs ruins, or the bottom of the ocean.  The opportunities are endless and the engagement would be out of the world.  I have one of these in my classroom and my kids love it.

Here is the catch they are doing this in cities that show a lot of interest so I am encouraging all teachers in the Grand Rapids area to sign up.  Lets get Google to come to Grand Rapids to launch the Google cardboard revolution.

Info about the Google cardboard/expedition program:  Google Expeditions

Article about Google cardboard and education:  Article

Come on Grand Rapids educators sign up!

Refining a dream

In 1967 Martin Luther King Jr. was being interviewed and he was asked about his "dream."  His answer was an answer that I think every dreamer can relate to.  He told the reporter that his "dream" had become more like a nightmare.  In the 4 years since his "dream" speech he had learned a lot, he had witnessed the more subtle but just as damaging racism of the North in Chicago, he saw the effects of poverty and realized that the problems of the underprivileged went much further than the color of their skin and he felt what it was like to lose his political allies when he spoke out against the Vietnam war.

The dream became a nightmare.  In my experience most dreams do at some point.  I can think of business ventures, relationships and personal goals that started out as great dreams but at some point in the journey became nightmares.  Some of those dreams were beyond repair and I had to walk away, but the ones that could be fixed became better and more focused in the nightmare stage.  It is in this stage that the dream gets refined.  Unneeded parts get thrown away, important parts get refocused and parts I completely forgot get added in.  It is trial by fire.  What you are left with is a dream that has been tested, retooled and is now way better than your original dream.

I write this because I am living in one of those stages in my life as a teacher right now.  Teaching is a second career for me, I owned a small business for about a decade before teaching.  I somehow managed to get through teacher education with getting really screwed up (thanks to a couple professors that encouraged me to keep thinking outside the box) and I entered teaching knowing that education was broken but feeling that I could fix it, at least fix my little part of it.  And I knew how; I knew the answer that was going to fix it; it was technology.  The incredible things that technology could do for our students was going to change the way they learn and the way we teach.  The dream was there.

Of course I got hired on at a school that really had no technology, no future plan for technology and an administration that wasn't pushing for it or exploring its use, however none of that mattered to me because the dream was there.  I was lucky enough to be teaching with someone who had the same dream and the two of us started to work toward that dream.  We worked around the system, selling candy and having student dances to raise money for Chromebooks, we installed an "underground" wi-fi system since our building had none.  To me this is probably my favorite part of pursuing a dream, in this stage there are no concerns or fears.  It is just an all sprint to accomplish the dream.  The notion of the nightmare does not even enter your head (no matter how many dreams have become nightmares before.)

Today is about 6 years since the beginning of that dream and yesterday my administration sent me to Googlefest to learn more about being 1:1 because our sixth grade team is getting enough Chromebooks next week to be 1:1.  As I look at our building, that used very little technology just a few years ago, I see everyone is using it now.  Even the teachers that have been teaching for 35 years are using Chromebooks in their class everyday.  The dream is here.  I am lucky enough to have all the technology in my room I would ask for, my administration is pushing technology and all the teachers are using.  It should be glorious but instead when I look around and reflect on it it is a nightmare.

The part of the dream that I was not prepared for is how we as an educational institution would change technology to mirror how we already teach, I assumed that technology would change our institutions, but I was wrong.

Technology can bring out the best in our kids and our educational system.  It can inspire creativity with all the programs and knowledge that help kids create stuff.  It can inspire curiosity because answers are now available to you anywhere and more answers always bring more questions.  It can create collaboration between students in a class or students around the world.  It can give a voice to a quiet and shy student.  It can engage the un-engaged.



Technology can also do none of this.  Technology can be used to isolate kids.  Technology can be used to perform the equivalent of worksheets over and over.  Technology can be used to stifle creativity and curiosity.  Technology can be used to do the exact same thing we have been doing in education for the last 20 years and this is what we are using it for.

Look at how technology is being used your building.  In mine it things like IXL and iReady that are basically center worksheets.  It is used to practice memorization.  It is used to organize assignments electronically.  It is used to do the same things we use to do with a paper and pencil.  None of this stuff changes or fixes anything.

I am not immune to this either.  When I look at my own use of technology in my classroom I see a lot of examples that are just new versions of what I used to do.  So I came up with some questions I ask to evaluate my use of technology:

• Is what I am having my students do with technology isolating them in their learning or helping them collaborate with others?
• Is what I am having my students do with technology truly increasing engagement or is it just a polished form of something I used to do?
• Is what I am having my students do with technology encouraging creativity from my students?
• Is what I am having my students do with technology increasing my students curiosity or limiting it?
• Is what I am having my students do with technology encouraging all students to use their voice?

Obviously I still use technology that does not do all of this.  I love Khan Academy and the only criteria that it would meet is probably the engagement one.  However I am trying to be mindful to make sure that I use technology to make sure I can answer yes to everyone of those questions regularly throughout the year.  I challenge you to use questions like this and to always be evaluating how and why you use technology.

One program that I am very into right now is Peardeck.  I think that it engages students, it gives students a voice, it can be used to start conversations between students and it can build on their curiosity if I ask the right questions.

I know that I am not the only one who had the dream of what technology could do for education and I know I am not the only one that looks around now and sees more of a nightmare than a dream.  However this is not a dream that can be abandoned, it is too big.  It is time to refine the dream.  This is an easy dream to refine.  We need to commit to changing the way we teach first.  We need to foster creativity and curiosity, we need to commit to make our curriculum relevant and we need to give students more a voice.  Once we are doing that than use our technology to fit those goals, because technology alone won't achieve the dream.

P.S. If you study history you find that King's nightmare refined his dream also.  He takes his dream and it becomes a war on poverty that would lead to the poor people's march.  Sadly King gets assassinated before that march would take place.