I have been blogging for more than a year, and one of the benefits is that now I have enough material that I can connect unfolding events to previous blog posts I’ve written. Because I’ve been blogging, I can make more sense of events in the world.

The idea behind having middle school students at Triangle Learning Community (TLC) blog about world events for three years (6th through 8th grade) is that they will bring three years’ worth of thinking with them to high school and beyond. They will also develop the habit of paying attention to the world outside the US, which is a good thing for an empathetic global citizen to do.

So here’s the cool connection that made me appreciate my blog — and made me want to have students blog.

I was reading my friend James Kessler’s Facebook page, where he noted the senseless violence going on in Syria (about which I am deeply disturbed and about which I will blog soon):

Now one of James’ friends, Michael-Ann Kelly (who I’ve never met) asked if James is following @acarvin on Twitter.

Who’s @acarvin?  That’s easy enough to find out:

So I went to Andy Carvin’s twitter stream, and I found lots of troubling reports about Syria.

But also in his stream, I found this reference to Wael Ghonim:

Why did that name mean something to me? Well, back in March of 2011, I wrote a long post about Wael Ghonim, and how amazing it was that I was able to follow current events as they were unfolding in Egypt.

Here’s an excerpt from my earlier blog entry:

Now let’s just think about how incredibly cool this is — he’s in Cairo, Egypt.  And he gave a speech at a TED talk in Cairo.  In MARCH.  And I got an email on March 9, opened it, read it early in the morning, clicked on the link, and started learning from Wael Ghonim. I mean, this sort of thing simply wasn’t possible when I was growing up.  We read history in the textbook, which was written several years earlier.  Now, we can access primary sources that allow us to think about events as they happen:

On a second look, we don’t just want students to think about events as they happen — we want them to get active and put those events into context, by using such tools as Google Earth to locate Egypt and by conducting online research to do what I call Applied History.

But the point here is that my earlier blog post about Wael Ghonim became a part of me in ways that I fear most students’ study of history and/or current events does not often become a part of them.

My investment in blogging about Wael Ghonim’s story 11 months ago makes me want to listen to this NPR story (pictured below) Well, maybe not all of it since it’s 38 minutes long — I’ll likely listen to the first 5 minutes to get the sense of it and hear Wael Ghonim’s voice…   Then I’ll go back and read the transcript once it’s made available online in a few days:

Apparently, Ghonim has written a book about his experience.  As you can see from the highlighted portion below, he felt like he had to do something, so he started a Facebook page to dramatize the killing of Khaled Said. He was anonymous when he started the page, but Egyptian officials figured out who he was. Shortly after that, they  kidnapped him.

This is gripping stuff.

Imagine being a middle school student who followed this story back in March. Imagine now wanting to follow-up, but not having time to do so because you are swamped with homework.

Imagine if you had the flexibility to pursue your passion. At TLC, students will learn how to assign themselves homework. They will also spell out the rationale for that HW so everyone is clear about why they are reading that play or working on that math problem.

This means that a TLC student in my position — one who was following events in Egypt — could give herself the homework assignment of reading Wael Ghonim’s new book over the next week. As she read, she would blog about sections of the book that the student found most compelling. When she finished, she might write a review of the book and post it on Amazon.

Many students are passionate about events they learn about, but are stuck doing their teacher’s homework. We need to mentor students so that they are able to learn on their own, and then we need to trust students enough to let them blog about events they care about. Then we need to allow them to follow-up and learn more.

I just watched a great video by Alan November, who says early in the video that the one question he asks when he wants to determine whether a school is a good one or a great one is this:

Who owns the learning?

If it’s the teachers who own the learning (and the curriculum) — if the teachers are working harder than the students — then something’s wrong. The teacher’s job is to create a learning environment that make the students engage with and take ownership of their learning.

If the goal is for young people to become empathetic global citizens — which happens to be the goal of TLC — then why on earth would we stop them from getting to that objective through an unexpected route, such as following up on the Arab Spring?

We need to have students blog more, and we have to give them the flexibility to follow their curiosity wherever (within reason) their blogging may lead them.

This does not mean drop math so you can focus exclusively on Wael Ghonim. But it does mean that if the plan was to look at poetry next week, there would be enough flexibility to let that student focus on Wael Ghonim this week and catch up on poetry later.

If we did it right, the student might even be able to write some poetry about what’s going on in Egypt. She could post that poetry on her blog and we could connect her with a school in Egypt who could read her blog and comment on her work.

But it’s also an opportunity to describe —  in “Blogging 101″ how-to fashion –why I think students and teachers need to be blogging (and tweeting and emailing) more. We need to make our learning transparent so that we can share with others and make connections with people all over the world as we broaden our global perspective.

I wrote a post earlier this year titled Why Blog? which I think made a pretty good argument for why students and teachers should blog.

The key quote from that post actually comes from another blog — in this case, Culture of Yes, a blog written by Chris Kennedy, Superintendent of the West Vancouver School District in British Columbia, Canada.  Chris wrote:

The ultimate goal is not to have students blog, it is to have students improve their literacy skills and have the ability to be digital writers, and to do things that would not be possible without the technology.  It is about students creating content to hyperlink to the world, to embed photos and video with text.  It is about students publishing, and then to have the opportunity to receive feedback on their work, review, edit and republish. It is about students producing work not only for their teacher, but for the world. It is about students having their own space to be creative and connect in new ways.  It is, ultimately, about students having greater ownership of their learning.

It’s also about connecting people. If a student writes just for a teacher to get a grade, and not for a wider audience, that student loses the opportunity to have others see the work he/she has produced.

Today’s For Better Or For Worse cartoon makes this point quite well — as anyone who’s written for a newspaper knows, it’s fun to share your thoughts with an audience:

Elly may not be getting paid, but she is getting her ideas out there.  And a well-written newspaper column (or blog) can lead to other opportunities.

Today, Elly would not need the newspaper to get published — she could simply start blogging.

Tavi Gevinson is a 15-year old fashion blogger who has “been invited to runway shows all over the world and has written for and been profiled in magazines like The New Yorker and French Vogue.”

Why? Because Tavi started blogging as an 11-year old and has valuable things to say. She already has her own Wikipedia Page, which notes that “Her parents did not appreciate what Tavi was doing [with her blog] until she asked for their permission to appear in a New York Times magazine story.”

Tavi was featured in October 2011 in a 10-minute segment on one of my favorite NPR programs, Wait Wait… Don’t Tell Me.

I learned about Tavi last weekend from the principal of the iSchool in New York City, a dynamic educator named Alisa Berger. I saw Alisa present about the iSchool at a phenomenal conference in Philadelphia called Educon (about which I will blog next week — Educon rocked my world and introduced me to two educators from The Westminster Schools in Atlanta who have become fast friends, and with whom I look forward to collaborating in the future, Jill Gough and Bo Adams).

And I learned about Educon through my blog — well, sort of.  I learned about it through the group of online educators I connect with via my blog and Twitter.

I just looked back through my Twitter stream (which serves as a nice journal of my online learning — another reason to tweet!) and found the exact date when I registered for Educon back in August 2011:

@Deacs84 is Laura Deisley, a dynamic educator with one of the coolest titles ever — she’s Director of 21st Century Learning at The Lovett School in Atlanta, GA.

Laura hosted the first Powerful Learning Practice (PLP) Conference I ever attended back in 2007 in Atlanta (thanks to Sam Morris for bringing me to that conference), and it’s through Laura that I met PLP co-founders Sheryl Nussbaum-Beach and Will Richardson, who have also had a huge influence on my learning.

This may sound like name-dropping, but it’s really a recognition that the work I’ve done with the folks I’ve met through PLP and in other online spaces has changed the way I learn and connect in the world. It has led me to leave my job teaching at a prestigious high school to open an innovative middle school called Triangle Learning Community (TLC) in Durham/Chapel Hill, NC.

At TLC, all community members — students, teachers, and even parents — will blog on a regular basis.

What’s the value of publishing our reflections to the world? As I publish this 101st blog post, I think about all that I’ve learned since I started blogging seriously about a year ago.  More than 60 of my 101 blog posts are from 2011 to now, which translates to more than one post per week on average (before 2011 I blogged occasionally at best).

Blogging has become part of what I do: I learn neat things about the world and then I blog about it and share it with the world — hence the name of my blog: “What I Learned Today.”

But blogging is more powerful than just writing and reflecting in a journal. Blogging allows me to learn in public — to share my thoughts and my writing and my creativity with the world.

My blog also serves as my digital portfolio.

When I meet people like Bo Adams and Jill Gough at conferences such as Educon, I can point them to past blog posts I’ve written about such topics as:

How to use Google Earth to bring the world to life,

Why people should tweet, and

Why it’s a mistake to “integrate technology” into the existing curriculum.

My specific purpose in blogging right now is to give people who might come to my school (or people who might provide financial support to help TLC meet its commitment to socio-economic and cultural diversity) a taste of the sort of learning that will go on at TLC.

The purpose of TLC is to mentor a group of students so that they become empathetic global citizens who make the world a better place. In the process, they will learn a ton and will demonstrate what young people are capable of doing.

One of my favorite examples of a capable young person is Jessica Markowitz, a remarkable young woman from Seattle, WA, who learned — as a sixth grader – about Rwandan children who had lost their parents to genocide and war and could not afford school.

In response, Jessica started a foundation called Richard’s Rwanda, which has raised $80,000 to support girls in Rwanda to finish their primary and secondary education. She’s also raised the consciousness of her community about what happened in the Rwandan Genocide. And she’s learned a ton by serving on the board of a non-profit at age 15.

Jessica is now a senior in high school, and I look forward to talking with her this week.

I wrote Jessica last week, expressing a desire to talk with her about what she’s learned from starting Richard’s Rwanda because I want my students at TLC to do similar work.  I noted that “middle school students are capable of doing far more than educators typically give them credit for.  We’re also at a moment when middle school students can connect with people all over the world to do great things.”

Here’s Jessica’s response:

Hello Mr. Goldberg, thanks for your email.
I’m happy to speak with you after my school finals on February 1st.
Your school sounds amazing!

For the next three days, I will be immersed in learning from and with the wonderful 350+ educators who will attend Educon, an innovative conference hosted this weekend by Science Leadership Academy, an innovative project-based 1:1 high school in Philadelphia.

In anticipation of meeting lots of cool people at Educon, these next paragraphs are a statement of what I think about the potential for 21st century learning, and why I am opening a new middle school for empathetic global citizenship in 2013, called Triangle Learning Community.

I believe that we’re at an amazing moment in learning. Think about everything that’s possible for students to learn and create and do.

Now think about how little our schools have changed to fully leverage what’s possible. Yes, we have some technology integration, but as I’ve argued before, simply integrating technology into the existing curriculum is a mistake.

Here’s something cool I just learned from Twitter — there’s a sophomore at UCLA who takes an hour a day to learn something new beyond his regular course load — he’s just completed his 1,000th hour.

The blog post that describes this student’s learning path (click the link above for the blog post) notes that:

So much of school consists of a teacher delivering pre-digested morsels of knowledge to students that students often flounder when seeking out learning on their own. Often, the very structure of school makes learning painful enough that few students want to pursue it on their own. Finally, we overschedule students’ lives so much that even if they did want to find time for an “hour of learning”, they couldn’t find the time.

The bold and red emphasis above the end there is mine — and I’d like to expand upon those ideas.

First, the floundering: when I taught students at a reasonably progressive college-prep school, where all students had tablet PCs, I tried to get students to learn on their own. Result? Big-time floundering on their part and on my part. They wanted me to play by the unspoken rules — tell them what’s on the test, so they can cram that material into their heads. And the structure of the school made it easier for my assessments to conform to that norm. So that was what I did. But it drove me crazy.

Now, the nuggets of information were often connected, and some of it is good stuff for people to know. But to be teaching about ancient Rome when the Arab Spring is erupting around students seemed quite wrong. And to teach about Rome, or Islam, for only a week or so (as is the case in most survey courses) also seemed wrong — we’re just skimming the surface and it’s not what (most) students are passionate about learning.

And the things students might be passionate about have to take a back-seat to getting good grades, and that’s a function of doing what the teacher tells you to do…

So as noted above, even if students did want to find time for an “hour of learning”, they couldn’t find the time.

We need to change what we’re doing.

Here’s my concept — mentor a group of 20 socio-economically and culturally diverse students in 6th and 7th grades to do progressively more complex project work, so that by the end of 7th grade, students are leading 2-3 month long projects about topics in which they are heavily invested.

Then, in 8th grade, let students propose a project they are passionate about that they will work on for six solid months. It could be creating a foundation to support girls in Rwanda to finish their primary and secondary education (click to learn about a young woman from Seattle who did just that as a middle school student).

Or it could be a young man who sets up and hosts a regional conference to help people in his neighborhood learn more about the world-wide decline of honey bees (not an actual student project — yet — but a real problem that a student I know of cares about).

As Chris Lehmann points out in a recent TEDxPhilly talk, titled Education is Broken, ”High School Stinks” because students have no choice about what they learn — they have to do what they’re told over and over and over again…

We need a new structure. We need to give students more flexibility but still hold them to high standards. My school has a different approach. Here’s the basic schedule, which we’d modify as speakers and other opportunities came to town (with Duke, UNC, NCCU, NC State and Durham Tech all in the Triangle area of North Carolina, there are lots of learning opportunities).

I. WELCOME AND COMMUNITY MEETING (30 min)
II. 2-HOUR MORNING SESSION
(includes time at the end for reflection on a blog)
III. HEALTHY SNACK AND BREAK (15 min)
IV.  MATH FOR AN HOUR
(using a modified Kahn Academy flipped classroom)
V. PHYSICAL ACTIVITY (from cultures around the world)
VI. THOUGHTFUL LUNCH FOR AN HOUR
(includes time to read if students choose)
VII. AFTERNOON PROJECT TIME FOR 2 HOURS
(includes time to reflect on how the project is going in a blog entry)

At the end of every day, each student will assign his/her own “DELIBERATE PRACTICE” for homework, so each student will have work to do that is tailored to what each student needs.

If this looks interesting to you, please download the executive summary. If it looks REALLY interesting, here’s a 20-page document with more details

If you would like to keep updated as TLC develops, please click here and enter your name and email.

So first things first — there’s no way that’s a picture, right?

It’s too surrealistic with twisted branches — and that sky — the sky is never that color orange, is it? And even if the sky were that orange (and what are those white specks?), sand isn’t blue.

In fact, I just did a Google search for “surrealistic desert” and this painting is exactly the sort of thing that comes up:

So clearly it’s a painting — there’s NO WAY this is a picture … right?

Wrong.

As my five-minute video below demonstrates, it really is a picture — from a desert in Namibia. Sorry about the sound quality — but if you crank up the volume you should be able to hear me…

As a way to orient you to my voice, I start the video by saying “Hello, and welcome to ‘bringing the news to life using Google Earth’ “

I spent a few hours making this video — finding the place marks on Google Earth, planning the script, and recording a few takes of the video — and I had fun making it.

At Triangle Learning Community, the middle school I’m opening in 2013 for empathetic global citizenship, students and teachers alike will take time just about every morning to use Google Earth to gain more context about our world.

This surreal picture is the prompt today — students will see it and want to learn more about it.  Some mornings the prompt might be a news article about unrest in Syria, or a powerful poem, or even a song. And the prompt won’t come from teachers all the time.

The prompt might come from students or teachers or even parents who have something cool to share. And who says every student has to write about the same prompt?

Whatever gets students interested in learning about the world, expanding their global horizons, and practicing their communication skills (by blogging or making videos about what they learned) works for me.

Because if a student starts with this crazy surrealistic picture and ends up becoming fascinated with the Namib Desert (or with surrealistic art) and learning about it for a few days, and then blogs about what she learned, that would be a good thing.

I mean, the Namib Desert looks like a pretty cool place to learn about:

Let’s find a way to help students engage with the world in a rigorous way that they find fascinating and fun.

If you are a rebel who does not follow directions, or if you need more convincing before you click on the link to the video, Will makes several great points — he starts with this one:

And I know that this is stretching it a little bit … but it’s plausible that I could learn physics on this phone.

Content is not scarce any more … teachers are not scarce any more … my children don’t need school in the same way that I needed school — they have different opportunities (assuming they are connected to the internet)

Will ends by noting that “It’s about doing meaningful real work. School should be real life.”

Will is a compelling speaker and if you have not stopped reading and watched the video yet, you really should do so now. It’s only 5 minutes long (okay, 5 minutes and 31 seconds) and it’s well worth watching and sharing with colleagues.

So that’s the “inspiring Will Richardson video” part of this blog entry.

But the reason for the rest of this blog post — the “(found via Twitter)” part — is that I think it’s pretty cool how I happened to find this video via Twitter.

This video is not posted on Will’s website (at least not yet), and it’s not something that has been popularly shared online — at least not to my knowledge.  Perhaps you reading this post will change that. If you like the video, please share it with your learning network or at least email it to a few friends.

But now I hope you are wondering: how did Steve find this video clip???

Well, that’s where Twitter comes in.

For new readers to this blog, I have written about the benefits of Twitter three times recently.  I think it is the tool that has most changed my learning in 2011, and I only started tweeting regularly in August 2011.

A few days ago, I wrote about the value of blogging and tweeting in a post called Why blog?; in December, I wrote To Tweet or Not to Tweet (the answer is: Tweet); and back in September 2011, I wrote Why you should use Twitter, a thus-far failed attempt to get my wife to tweet in any significant way. If you are not into Twitter yet, please consider it.

Let me explain how Twitter led me to this inspiring video:

A few nights ago, I was adding to the list of people I follow on Twitter.  For those of you who don’t know Twitter well, when you start to follow someone new (“following” means receiving their tweets in your Twitter stream), Twitter suggests people who tweet things kind of similar to that person, who you might also consider following –

For instance, here’s what Twitter recommends when I view Jason Ramsden’s page on Twitter (Jason’s Twitter name is “@raventech” because he’s the Chief Technology Officer at Ravenscroft, a great PK-12 school in Raleigh, NC):

[For Twitter newbies: the @ sign is what everyone's Twitter account starts with -- I'm "@SteveG_TLC" because someone else grabbed @stevegoldberg before I could get it; TLC is short for Triangle Learning Community, the middle school I'm opening in 2013]

I respect Jason and would like to see Twitter accounts similar to his — so at some point I might want to follow @dfrankel or @jbeaver…

But what happened to me a few nights ago was that while I was adding a few people, Twitter suggested that I look at a person who works at Proctor Academy, a woman named Kim Hurlbutt Kulacz — here’s her profile from Twitter:

I clicked on Kim’s account, and saw her most recent tweets, known as her “Twitter stream.” What drew my attention and made me decide to follow Kim was this second entry (circled below in red) that mentioned one of the people who’s had a huge influence on my thinking in the past five years — Will Richardson.  According to Kim, Will “reinvigorates” the faculty at Proctor Academy:

I clicked on Kim’s link and was wowed by the video clip from Will’s presentation, which he must have delivered early in 2012 at Proctor Academy.

Without Twitter, there’s no way I would have found that video clip from a school in New Hampshire that I’d never heard of before (no offense to Proctor Academy — looks like a very cool place).

It’s so wonderful that Will Richardson allowed himself to be video taped, and it’s doubly wonderful that Proctor Academy shared that video clip from Will’s presentation on its school website.

And it’s not like Proctor Academy is hiding the video — you can go to Proctor Academy’s website (I just did) and see the video listed on its home page — it’s called “Live to Learn” and it’s circled in red below:

But without Kim’s tweet, not too many people outside of the Proctor Academy network are going to stumble upon Will’s video. Kim has about 500 followers on Twitter, and they have followers, and you get the idea –

It’s an amazing time to be learning and sharing and thinking about all the changes going on in education. If you don’t get connected, using resources such as Twitter, you might miss some very cool stuff…

And when you see something cool, do what Kim did — share it! Blog about it; tweet it; get the word out. If you don’t tweet or blog yet, that’s fine — share by other channels.

My friend Michael Ulku-Steiner, Headmaster of The American School in Switzerland (also known as TASIS) liked Will’s video enough to include it in the newsletter he curates and sends out to his school community every weekend.

Michael does not tweet (yet) but here’s how he shared Will’s video, which I emailed to him a few days ago…

Michael notes, as he’s about to fly to London for a faculty recruiting trip, that it is “fun to see the pace and reach of good ideas.”

I’ll say it again — this is an amazing time to be learning and sharing and thinking about all the changes going on in education.

Here’s the paragraph in Susan’s post that led me to Book Drum:

Meanwhile, through my professional learning network (PLN), I learned about a website called Book Drum, which broke down novels page by page and provided images and sounds for readers to better grasp the context of their reading. For example, the entry for To Kill a Mockingbird provides a photograph of a bowl of scuppernong grapes that might be unfamiliar to readers outside the South; another page offers a video of a Bobwhite issuing its distinctive call. Unfortunately, the site only allows participants 18 years of age and older to contribute. But why not, I thought, do this with poems, and in a Google Document? The result was an exhilarating week of co-constructed learning.

I’d love to see what Susan’s students came up with when they did the equivalent of Book Drum on their own. But for now, I’m excited that someone else is doing what I’ve been encouraging students to do for a long time when they come across an unfamiliar word — look it up online! (assuming they have a laptop, which my students had)

So here’s an example — let’s say you are reading To Kill A Mockingbird, and you come across this passage (I took a picture of the book):

Many middle school or high school students won’t know what a Model-T Ford is… but thanks to Book Drum they can find out:

Similarly, a few pages later, there’s a reference to a chiffarobe:

And when you get to that point in Book Drum, look what’s there for you, providing context:

To Kill A Mockingbird is one of my favorite novels.  I’ve read it several times.  But I never before had a true picture of what a chiffarobe looks like.  I pictured it as a basic dresser, but now I see that there’s more to it.

I love the concept of Book Drum

And I especially love what Susan had her students do — create their own version by bringing poetry to life in a Google Doc.

Here’s a neat idea — partner with another class and have them share in the Google Doc as well.  One class brings pages 1-50 to life, and the other class does the same with pages 51-100. Then, we share with each other and give each other feedback as we learn about and discuss a classic work of literature.

What a wonderful time to be a learner!

P.S.  Book Drum has more than just bookmarks — here’s the side menu:

If you choose setting, for example, here’s what you get for The Grapes of Wrath:

Not bad, but I just ran my own search and came up with what I think is a better picture:

Can’t you imagine class “A” finding the first image, and class “B” finding that second one.  Which is a better photo for empathizing with the family that the Grapes of Wrath describes? Why?

That’s the beauty of co-constructing meaning and bringing a text to life — we can have conversations like that. Thanks Susan, thanks PLP Network, and thanks Book Drum

You may be curious why there’s all this attention focused on New Hampshire, a tiny state up in New England.

Who cares about New Hampshire?

Well, it’s the second state to have its Republican voters decide who they want to represent them in the November 2012 election against President Obama. Here’s a list of Republican primary and caucus dates from Wikipedia — the first contests in January are Iowa, New Hampshire, South Carolina, and Florida.

The first state to make its choice was Iowa, which you likely heard a little about last week. That was a very close race, with Mitt Romney, the current “front runner,” winning the Iowa Caucus by eight votes:

In a caucus or primary (they’re not all that different for our purposes), voters from a particular party vote on who they like best. In most primaries, only registered Republicans can vote for the Republican nomination.

I just learned that in the New Hampshire Primary, non-registered voters can vote in either primary. Here’s a blurb from Wikipedia about the NH Primary:

It is not a closed primary, in which votes can be cast in a party primary only by people registered with that party. Undeclared voters — those not registered with any party — can vote in either party primary. However, it does not meet a common definition of an open primary, because people registered as Republican or Democrat on voting day cannot cast ballots in the primary of the other party.

Democrats (and non-registered voters) are also voting for their nominee, but that’s a far less exciting prospect, since President Obama is basically running unopposed for the Democratic nomination.

It’s good to win, but Romney was expected to win. So in Iowa the candidates who came in second and third place were especially pleased with their results. Rick Santorum’s campaign got some much-needed momentum, and Ron Paul’s campaign, which was not expected to do quite so well, clearly exceeded expectations.

Here are the full results from Iowa:

These early contests matter because they give an indication of how well organized each candidate really is — at least in Iowa and New Hampshire.

How much do these early votes matter? Well, as a result of her poor showing in Iowa (her home state), Michele Bachmann withdrew from the race, leaving just six major candidates — all white men.

Heading into the New Hampshire Primary tomorrow, Mitt Romney should do quite well. New Hampshire shares a border with Massachusetts, the state where Romney served as governor from 2003 to 2007.

According to these polls of voters in New Hampshire from the website Real Clear Politics, Romney has a huge lead in New Hampshire (he’s the one in purple on the graph below) .

The up-and-coming candidate (aside from Santorum and Paul, who should have momentum from their strong showing in Iowa) is Newt Gingrich, who recently benefited when a billionaire from Las Vegas made a $5 million donation to a political action committee (or PAC) that supports Gingrich.

Who is Newt Gingrich? A cartoon of his face appeared on the cover of the Jan 2 New Yorker magazine:

Newt was Speaker of the House of Representatives back in 1994, when Republicans took over control of Congress from the Democrats. Here’s a blurb from the Wikipedia article about the 1994 Elections:

The point of The New Yorker cover is that Newt is trying to rekindle the magic of 1994, when he was immensely popular within the Republican Party.

The other candidate in the race, Rick Perry, had been doing quite well in national polls, with over 30% of the Republican vote back in September…
(see the graph below from Real Clear Politics)

As you can see from the graph, various candidates have had their rise and fall — first Perry, then Cain (who dropped out in the wake of sexual harassment accusations), then Gingrich (The New Yorker‘s cover came out when he was peaking) — but throughout the campaign, Romney has been polling a steady 25% or so. Paul is at an all-time high, and Huntsman has not yet been much of a factor.

We will see what happens when the results come in from New Hampshire on Tuesday night, when the polls close. But now is a good time to start paying attention.

If, as a citizen in your early teens, you don’t know who these six candidates are, it would be worth investing some time to learn a bit about them.

Given the state of the economy, and the usual pattern of the President in the White House getting blamed for the state of the economy, one of these six people has a good shot at winning the 2012 election and becoming President.

For additional context on the 2012 election, see my two earlier posts:

Electing a President (from August 2011) and

Following the Presidential Race (for Middle School Students) (from December 2011).

Update on 1/13/12 — the new cover of The New Yorker shows the path the candidates take around the country, from Iowa to NH to SC to FL and Nevada…

But while you read blogs, do you yourself blog? Until about a year ago, my answer would have been no.  I had a blog and I dabbled with it, but I was not a serious blogger. I read some people’s blogs and found them interesting, but I wrote maybe one entry per month on my own blog.

One entry per month is not a blog — it’s a newsletter

But the more I thought about it, the more I realized that I needed to put my ideas out there and engage readers. Part of my learning process had to be testing out my ideas for others to comment on.

I started blogging seriously in late January of 2011, when I started following the revolution that was unfolding in Egypt (here’s a link to one of my first real blog posts).

I should also note that my blogging about my teaching got more “real” a few months later, shortly after I made the decision not to sign the contract to return to Cary Academy for the 2011-12 school year so that I could focus on starting a new school.

I know many teachers who do not feel comfortable blogging because if they shared their true thoughts, they could find themselves in trouble with their administration. So they do some quality teaching, but they keep their classroom door closed so nobody finds out that they are deviating from the curriculum and doing actual learning with their students.

Unless you are very secure that you have administrative support, blogging (about some subjects, anyway) can get you in trouble…

But let’s put aside school politics for the moment and think about why students should be blogging. Students at my school, Triangle Learning Community, will blog about what they learn twice a day — once at the end of a two-hour morning session, and once at the end of the day to describe the progress they are making on whatever project they are working on. Plus they will blog about math roughly twice a week.

And I expect they will also be inspired to blog on their own about their own passions.

Why blog so much?

I just read a great piece called Students as Blog Leaders that explains the benefits of student blogging. It’s written by Chris Kennedy, a Canadian superintendent I just learned about from a tweet by my friend Lyn Hilt. Here’s Lyn’s tweet that let me know about Chris’ post:

[For readers who don't already tweet, the @chrkennedy is Chris Kennedy's blog name (mine is @SteveG_TLC), and the bit.ly/wSb6oz is the link to his blog.  The symbols #cpchat and #edchat are hashtags -- if you want to know what those are, click this link)

[And if you want to know why you should tweet, see my previous posts, titled Why you should use Twitter and To Tweet or Not To Tweet]

Anyway, here’s the quote from Chris’ blog, which Lyn pointed me to on Twitter (thanks Lyn!)

When I read this quote, I was inspired to write this blog post (the bold emphasis belongs to me, not Chris):

I often remind people who are looking in from outside the district with skepticism, envy (or both) at our technology use, the ultimate goal is not to have students blog, it is to have students improve their literacy skills and have the ability to be digital writers, and to do things that would not be possible without the technology.  It is about students creating content to hyperlink to the world, to embed photos and video with text.  It is about students publishing, and then to have the opportunity to receive feedback on their work, review, edit and republish. It is about students producing work not only for their teacher, but for the world. It is about students having their own space to be creative and connect in new ways.  It is, ultimately, about students having greater ownership of their learning.

That’s exactly what it’s about — students taking ownership of their own learning.

That’s why it’s important that, as an educational leader, I model active learning on my blog — which I’ve intentionally named “What I Learned Today.” Students should be around teachers who are learning and growing on a daily basis, and the more transparent we can make the process for students, the better.

And if you read my blog post from yesterday, about how to build (& get feedback from) your learning network, you will see that something else I’ve just modeled here is how I’ve expanded my learning network.

To deconstruct the last half hour or so of my life, one of my teachers and friends, Lyn Hilt, has just introduced me to Chris Kennedy, who I’m now following on Twitter.

Now what I find fascinating is that I’ve never met Lyn in person. We work together online in the PLP Network, and she regularly teaches me through her tweets and her blog, the principal’s posts (she’s the principal of an elementary school in Pennsylvania), but we’ve never met face to face (though we have video-conferenced a few times).

And why did I just decide to follow Chris? Well, let’s look at what happened just now as I clicked his Twitter profile:

He has written nearly 3000 tweets, and there are 3500+ people following him. That’s a strong endorsement. Oh, and he’s a superintendent of schools. Yeah, I’m gonna follow Chris. I expect I’ll learn a lot from him.

By contrast, I’m a Twitter newbie… as of Saturday morning when I’m writing this post, here are my “stats”:

I’ve been Tweeting seriously only in the past few months.  But I’m getting a lot out of Twitter. I’m learning more and more about (and from) Twitter on a regular basis, and I’m using it to build my network so that I can share with — and learn from — people around the world.

And that’s why all of us life-long learners (maybe including parents?) need to blog and tweet and get more transparent about our learning process — because students need to see that the adults in their lives are learning right there with them.

We also need to set aside time to do serious intellectual lifting — reading great books and thoughtful articles (see my blog post about the inter-disciplinary learning that can come from just two paragraphs of a New Yorker article) — but I’m convinced there’s a role for social media. The trick is to balance the two.

Why blog? Here’s one big benefit to blogging: I’ve met a bunch of incredibly cool people over the past year who I never would have met if they had not read my blog.  I look forward to meeting many of these folks in person at Educon 2.4 in Philadelphia at the end of this month.

Why else do I blog? Well, this is my 95th blog post. If I want to refer someone to some of my work, I have a whole portfolio here, and each entry is only a click away.

So if you don’t blog already, give blogging a shot. Take ownership of your learning. Share.  I’m betting you will make some friends along the way.

Specifically, over the course of three years when they work on projects at TLC, I want them to develop at least seven contacts around the world who will write Linked-In type recommendations about the kind of work they can do and what it’s like to work with them on a project. Each student’s TLC peers will also provide feedback at the end of each project about what it’s like to work with that student.

I borrowed this “peer feedback” idea from Randy Pausch’s “Last Lecture” at Carnegie Mellon University (CMU).  It’s 70 minute long, but it’s worth taking a look if you have not seen it — he was a star professor of computer science, specializing in human-computer interaction and design.

Professor Pausch died of complications from pancreatic cancer in his late 40s. He delivered his famous lecture in September of 2007, not long after he’d been diagnosed with cancer, and less than a year before he died in 2008.

This great website I just found while preparing to write this blog post contains both a video of the lecture (with subtitles) and a nice critique of what makes it effective as a speech.

If you prefer to read speeches, here’s the transcript of the speech (though Pausch’s delivery is amazing, and it’s worth watching at least some of the speech).

One of my favorite parts of the “Last Lecture” is where Pausch talks about providing students in his class at CMU (called “Building Virtual Worlds”) with feedback.  He puts up a bar chart where students in his class are listed on a scale labeled “how easy to work with”

Then he says, and this is a transcript from the lecture:

One of my goals at TLC is to help students build self-reflection skill through regular blogging (meta-cognition) about the work that we do. Students at TLC will generally blog twice daily about the work they do when we meet, and twice a week about the math they are learning.

While we’re looking at “The Last Lecture,” here’s another quote from Pausch that has stayed with me:

Today’s world is more about the portfolio than the pedigree.  What can students do?  And what are we asking them to do?  TLC aims to bridge the gap between “business as usual” and what’s possible in a 21st century learning environment.

Finally, this is a great short article from Will Richardson, an education reformer who has influenced my work a great deal.  It’s titled: “Are you an Old School or a Bold School? The time is now for some serious reinvention for schools.”

Here’s a great quote about the moment we’re facing:

We’ll soon hold the sum of human information in our palms, and we already carry a connection to over two billion potential teachers around in our pockets. In talking about this disruptive reality last fall, author Clay Christensen said, “I think it will not be long before people will see that those who took their education online will have learned it better than people who got it in the classroom.” Welcome to our moment of change.

Most schools are not embracing this moment of change — they’re doing business as usual (see my earlier post about how it’s a mistake to integrate technology into the existing curriculum — it’s time to re-think the curriculum in light of what’s possible in today’s learning environment).

I don’t want to see virtual learning replace learning in person from a teacher. There’s a lot of value in having students come together in the same physical location to work together and learn from one another. But when they do come together, it should not be to have information delivered to them… it should be to have them work together in small groups on meaningful projects.

And we should slow down so that they have a chance to reflect (a.k.a. “blog”) about what they are learning and also reflect upon how they work with others. To do that, we need to cultivate thoughtful feedback loops and we have to teach young people how to give (and receive) honest and thoughtful feedback.

So let me take a moment to explain how I would have middle school students do a close reading of a challenging and well-written news article so that they learn about the world in an inter-disciplinary way.

One of the magazines I read regularly is The New Yorker. In the most recent issue, there’s a fascinating article about the spread of deserts — most notably the Sahara Desert in Africa, but the article also looks at the problem on a global scale.

There’s a movement to plant trees to prevent further desert spread (the fancy term for this spread is “desertification,” and as I learned from the article, that word was popularized in the late 1940s by a French botanist).

One particularly cool thing I learned from the article is that people in 11 African nations are interested in working together to plant a strip of trees 9-miles wide that extends 4,800 miles across Africa, just under the Sahara — it’s called the Great Green Wall:

In an ideal world, I would link to the article in The New Yorker in its entirety so you could read it — it’s worth reading. Unfortunately, I can’t link to more than a basic summary of the article, because The New Yorker requires that subscribers enter a password to access its archive of articles.

However, the copyright doctrine of fair use allows me to reproduce two paragraphs from the article for educational purposes, and these two paragraphs will work well for the purpose of this post, which is to show how middle school students can be guided to turn a close reading of a complicated text into a springboard to learn about science, math, geography, history, Nobel Peace Prize winners, and vocabulary — all at the same time.

Let’s jump right in and start with the eleventh paragraph of the article:

“Hoff” is Pieter Hoff, one of the researchers working to re-forest the desert. The argument he makes is pretty simple — human industry sends 9 billion tons of carbon into the air each year, and …

Okay, wait — how big is a billion?

Well, it’s a thousand million. But how big is that?

What would a billion pennies look like, for example?

(this cool image comes from the Mega Penny Project, a terrific resource for picturing large numbers)

And how much is a ton? Well, a ton is 2000 pounds, and a typical car weighs about 3-4,000 pounds, so a typical car is 1.5-2 tons.

It’s hard to do this without students, but before we read any further, I’d let student inquiry guide a brief discussion until we became reasonably comfortable with what “9 billion tons of carbon” means.

And then we’d try to corroborate that number; just because one scientist says it’s 9 billion tons does not mean that’s right. Estimates must vary, right? I just did a quick search and found this source (which quotes Science Daily) that says carbon emissions are up to 10 billion tons per year:

So this carbon emission thing is a big problem.

And the argument that Hoff makes (remember Hoff?)…

Hoff says that one acre of trees will absorb two or three tons of carbon. So if we want to clear up the air, we could either pollute less (not likely, since the world’s population is increasing, and places like China and India are rapidly industrializing) or plant trees to compensate for our industrial strength carbon emissions.

He says that planting five billion acres of trees should do the trick, because two tons of carbon per acre times five billion acres equals the 10 billion tons of carbon we emit as a species per year.

(By the way, an “acre” is roughly a football field, minus the end zones — it’s important, especially for middle school students, to develop the habit of understanding the terms we use — if they read over a term like “acre” without knowing what an acre is, it’s harder to empathize and connect with the argument Hoff is making.)

Let’s move on to the second paragraph in the New Yorker article:

Students at Triangle Learning Community (the school I’m opening in August 2013) would use Google Earth to locate the Negev Desert and would put a place mark there, so that they use this article to expand their world view and build their geographic literacy.

And if students had not heard of Wangari Maathai — the first African woman to win the Nobel Peace Prize — we’d take a five-minute detour to learn the basics of her amazing life.

Now we’re ready for the rest of that second paragraph (New Yorker paragraphs tend to be long, which is not necessarily a bad thing):

So that’s pretty interesting… the Chinese are planting billions of trees and plan to add 100 million acres more. As the article points out though, planting trees and making sure they actually grow are two different things.

As the article points out in a later paragraph:

For a little more math context, I just learned (via Wikipedia) that Germany covers an area of 357,021 km²

Let’s see — how many acres is that? How could I possibly make that conversion??

In this case, Google does not make the conversion for me (did you know Google makes all sorts of conversions?), but it does lead me to a tool that will help:

And when I used that tool, it turned out that Germany is a little more than 88.2 million acres. So yes, if China plants 100 million acres of trees in the Gobi Desert, that would cover an area larger than Germany.

That’s useful context to have when students look at a map of the Gobi Desert, such as this one:

Alert readers will note that in that third paragraph from The New Yorker, I underlined some phrases in blue:

If students had not yet studied the Great Leap Forward or the Cultural Revolution, we would take some time to go over the basics of those seminal events in modern Chinese history.

If students wanted more details about those events, we’d schedule time later in the week (or the year) to do a more involved look at those events. When we did that, we might read a book such as Red Scarf Girl, to better empathize with what it would feel like to live through that time in Chinese history.

So thanks, New Yorker, for providing challenging reading material that helps students learn about math and geography and politics and history and vocabulary and Nobel Peace Prize winners — at the same time as providing a fascinating look at the science behind the related problems of desertification and carbon emissions.

Not bad for a close reading of two paragraphs.