–George Orwell

We are more than a decade into the 21^st Century and Orwell’s quote is as relevant as ever.  Information and misinformation travel at the speed of megabytes per second via text messages, Facebook status updates, blogs, tweets, etc. In addition to these online sources, we have television and radio news networks trying to fill up much of their 24 hour schedules with speculation masquerading as news.  When it comes to the clutter and clamor of the omnipresent media, our students need to be able to separate that which is reasonable and true from all that is questionable and maybe even preposterous.  Helping our students further develop their critical thinking skills is one way to help them deal with the multitude of messages coming their way.

When students become better writers, they also become better at examining how others develop and defend ideas.  They become better critical thinkers.  I didn’t fully appreciate this concept until I went back to school to work on an administrative endorsement.  Every course involved a lot of writing.  Some of the courses were online, and because of the nature of online courses, a great amount of writing was required.  The more I wrote for my classes, the more I began to realize that becoming a better writer was also making me a better thinker.  Writing forced me to have a good understanding of my subject in order to effectively communicate my thoughts,  research, and conclusions to my teachers and classmates. I also had to be able to defend my ideas, because writing also exposed me to scrutiny and challenge.  I came to appreciate the importance of being my own devil’s advocate.

It is possible for people to be good writers, and their messages turn out to be intellectually bankrupt.  Political speeches and propaganda are possible examples of this type of writing.  The writing sounds reasonable and maybe even inspiring, but turns out to be as substantial as a soap bubble when pricked by the slightest scrutiny.  It is important that we challenge the thinking behind our students’ writing.  We need them to be able to defend their positions and cite their sources of information.  We also need to teach them to establish the validity of their sources.  In addition, students need to critique the writing of others in order to discover how the writers develop their arguments, and to discover the writers’ biases, assumptions, or examples of lazy thinking.  These challenges will take them beyond just writing and on to deeper thinking.

This type of writing requires students to take big risks.  In order to prepare students for the challenges that will be directed at their ideas, they need to be able to trust their teachers and their classmates.  Teachers need to develop a safe and trusting environment in which discussion of multiple viewpoints is encouraged and no one feels personally attacked when asked to defend his or her position.

Orwell’s statement, found at the beginning of this blog entry, provides direction in helping our students become the critical thinkers they need to be.  In order to help our students think for themselves, and keep others from thinking for them, we need to have them write often in every subject while also challenging their assumptions, arguments, and conclusions in a safe and supportive environment that allows for risk-taking.

For additional information, see the links below.

Foundation for Critical Thinking

http://www.criticalthinking.org/

What is Writing?

http://www.unc.edu/depts/wcweb/pdf/writing.pdf

An excerpt from the book How to Write a Paragraph

http://www.criticalthinking.org/files/SAM-HowtoWrite.pdf

I signed up for a Twitter account and started following a few of the people who were at that meeting.  They tweeted many useful resources and ideas on a variety of educational subjects.  I began to see the power of Twitter as a personal professional development tool.  I began to follow other educators, and my personal professional development community began to widen.

After about a year, I discovered Tweetdeck and hashtags.  Tweetdeck is an application that not only displays tweets from the people I follow, but also shows me updates from my LinkedIn account, Facebook page and any hashtags I want to follow.  I can also tweet from Tweetdeck and have those tweets also go to my Facebook page.

I still feel like a novice.  Other people have written excellent articles about Twitter and teachers, so I will refer you to their writings.  To learn more about using Twitter as an educator, visit Justin Tarte’s blog at http://justintarte.blogspot.com/2011/01/10-steps-for-educators-new-to-twitter.html .  To learn more about hashtags, visit Chris Messina’s blog at http://twitter.pbworks.com/w/page/1779812/Hashtags .  You can follow me at http://twitter.com/mpruter.

http://kinderkidsdraw.wikispaces.com/

http://lesliedavison.wikispaces.com/Voicethread+Examples

http://voicethread.com/library/40/

Maybe it’s time for teachers to look for ways to embrace the cell phone and turn it from a distraction into a tool to enhance instruction. A simple way to start exploring this possibility might be to use those cell phones as a type of classroom response system. A classroom response system allows students to respond to a teacher’s question by electronic means such as a “clicker“.

Poll Everywhere is a website that helps you accomplish the same task, but with student cell phones instead of clickers. Polleverywhere allows you to create a multiple choice poll question along with the possible choices. Students then select one of the choices and text that choice with their phones.

A good way to see the possibilities of using this would be to watch the video of a 9th grade history teacher (Greg Kulowiec) using Polleverywhere with his class. Notice how the graph changes as students text in their votes. The video is found on the blog Teaching With Classroom Response Systems. Also read the pedagogical observations found below the video.

You can set up a free PollEverywhere account for an audience of 30 students. This means that up to 30 people could respond to the poll at a time. For $15 a month, you can set up an account for an audience of 50.

For additional information, refer to the PollEverywhere FAQ at http://www.polleverywhere.com/faq

The most recent conference I attended was the Nebraska Educational Technology Association (NETA) conference.  This is a premier conference attended by over 2000 Nebraska educators each year.  The NETA folks pulled off another great conference this year.

As many of you know, there is a lot of trash on YouTube, but there are also a lot of great resources for school.  YouTube is blocked in many of our schools, but what if you are searching YouTube from home and find a great video you want to use in your classroom.  At NETA I learned one method of saving a video to your computer or to a flash drive so that you can then show it in school.  Here are the steps:

1

You are searching YouTube and you come to a great video you’d like to download and save.  The URL might look something like what you see below:

2

Type the word kick between the www. and the word youtube and press Enter on your keyboard.  This will take you to the site KickYouTube where you will be able to start the process of downloading the video you just found.

3

At KickYouTube you will need to select a file format to save your video.  MP4 works with Quicktime players, FLV works with Adobe Flash Player or Real Player, AVI and MPG both work with Quicktime and Windows Media Player.  3GP works with Quicktime and Real Player.  If you’re not sure which format to choose, just experiment.  If one doesn’t work, delete the file and try a different format.

4

Next, click on the green Go button.

5

Next you will see a blue Down button.  This stands for download.  You will need to right click on the blue Down. You will get a drop down menu.  Choose “Save Link As” and then navigate to the place on your computer where you would like to save this file.

6

Now you can navigate to where you saved the file, open it and play it on whatever player you have installed on your computer.  If you saved it to a USB flash drive, you can take the file to school and play it on a computer there.  I hope this helps a few of you resolve your YouTube issues.