Category Archives: Daily-Ink

Twitter has changed, but so have I

Back in November, I celebrated 12 years on Twitter and I reflected,

“I still love Twitter, and it is still my go-to place to connect and learn from others when I’m online. But, 12 years in, I miss the power of this network to engage me in deep learning filled with rich conversation. However I also recognize that my focus has changed too. I transmit more than I converse, I dabble more than I engage. If I’m honest, I probably could not have maintained the engagement I gave Twitter at that time for 12 years.“

Recently, I responded to a tweet that asked: “has anyone ever found a friend through twitter and actually met up with them?”

https://twitter.com/hashplanted/status/1260988566676668422?s=21

And I responded, “Again and again and again…”, then shared a few examples:

I genuinely miss the days when I would get onto Twitter at about 4:30, after a day of teaching, and I’d scroll my timeline all the way back to the last tweet that I read in order to ‘catch up’ on what I missed during the day. I miss conversations that would last 15+ tweets, with others joining in to the ‘conversation’, and I miss the sense of connectedness and intimacy I had with genuine friends that I had never met face to face. I miss how Twitter was connected to blogging, and conversations went from sharing a link to conversations in the blog’s comments. It was a different time, and it comes with some nostalgia.

But as much as Twitter has changed, so have I. I lurk a lot more. I move conversations to Direct Messages, or other communication tools. I transmit – meaning, when I write this Daily-Ink, or a post on Pair-a-Dimes, or on my Podcast, or YouTube, then I share a link on Twitter… sometimes my last 3 or 4 Tweets might be me sharing something I’ve done. This can seem like I’m marketing or doing self-promotion, and some people don’t like that… I look at it 2 ways: 1. I produced some content to share, and I’d actually like some attention on it for the effort. And, 2. Is it really self-promotion when I’m not selling anything?

If it really bothers someone, it’s really easy to hit the unfollow button. I also don’t read and comment on as many blogs as I used to, and so I’m not engaging the way I wishes others do. That said, I still find it funny when someone retweets a link I share (be it to my content or someone else’s) faster than it would take to read the content that was shared! I make it a rule not to share anything I haven’t taken the time to read or watch myself.

So, as much as I miss the old days of Twitter, I’m using Twitter differently and can’t expect the same experience I had before smartphones, hashtags, and less than 500 people on my timeline. Things have changed. But I still love Twitter, and 95+% of the time I see good things and ‘Angry Twitter’ doesn’t show up in my network. That’s a far better ratio than Facebook, and my community on Twitter that I engage with is still pretty awesome. It’s not what it used to be, but neither am I.

—

PS. Twitter EDU is a free eBook I wrote to help people find greater value in the tool when they get started. Share it, if you know someone that can use it.

Missed opportunities

Here is a quick look at how we are doing with this thing called remote or distance learning. While things are good, I think we should have been more prepared for maximizing this ‘opportunity’, rather than just being more prepared to cope with it.

Background: Since returning from China in 2011, I’ve been a leader in Coquitlam Open Learning, the district’s ‘Distributed Learning’ (online) school. That year my Principal, Stephen Whiffin, pitched the idea for Inquiry Hub Secondary and I got to co-found and lead this innovative, blended learning school. I’ve been directly involved with integrating technology into learning as a leader for over a decade, and this has been an integral part of my role for 9 years now.

Current State: Over the past several weeks my staff of teachers have definitely struggled far less than most teachers.

For my online teachers very little has changed other than they are working from home, and assessment practices had to change in some courses. We have always provided testing and support blocks at our schools, and supervised assessments have been key to validating authenticity of work done at home.

For Inquiry Hub, every class was already on Microsoft Teams, and/or had a class OneNote, and/or had digital resources shared in Moodle. Classes moved digital, but there are still many opportunities for students to connect online, have meetings and discussions, and continue with lessons and assessments as if we were still in the building.

So, the transition to remote learning has been smooth. Great… But what are we missing?

The online school: We are continual entry, and so my teachers, at any moment, have students starting the course, doing their final assessment, and everything in between. As a result, they almost never run synchronous lessons. So while I previously mentioned two great ‘Learning Experiences‘ my teachers did with students, these are exceptions rather than the norm. And as I mentioned above, assessment changes needed to be made, but I’d say the changes we made were not really groundbreaking or norm-changing. We are doing a good job, but we aren’t pushing any boundaries.

For Inquiry Hub: We’ve really had a smooth transition, kids are still getting a lot of support, and we have, as a staff, had daily meetings that always touch on two things: How are kids doing/who needs support? And on professional development and planning for some great integration of courses working in edu-scrums for next year. This is exciting work, and it happens in the background while teachers are working smoothly to maintain a continuity of learning for students.

So what’s missing? Where are the missed opportunities?

  • Relevance: what have we done to connect and relate the global experience to what we are learning in class?
  • Service: What could our students be doing to support their community?
  • Assessment: What a great opportunity we have to rethink our online testing and personalizing it for our online learners?
  • Community: What more could we do to build community ‘in’ our schools, both for students, and for families?
  • Well being: How could we better support the kids we know are struggling, and also identify and support the kids who are struggling that we don’t know about?
  • Course delivery: What opportunities do we have for students to learn in different ways?
  • Inquiry learning: How could we leverage support for students inquiries when there are so many homebound experts in different fields that would love to help students out?
  • Supporting colleagues: How have we shared what we know and do well with colleagues that are struggling with the transition?
  • I wonder if we wouldn’t have innovated more if the changes required were more drastic? Have we missed too many opportunities with a smooth transition? Will we be further ahead when things return to normal, or will things go further back to normal than they need to be?

    • Empty your cup

    Empty Your Cup
    A Japanese Zen master received a university professor who came to enquire about Zen. It was obvious from the start of the conversation that the professor was not so much interested in learning about Zen as he was in impressing the master with his own opinions and knowledge.

    The master listened patiently and finally suggested they have tea. The master poured his visitor’s cup full and then kept on pouring.

    The professor watched the cup overflowing until he could no longer contain himself.
    ‘The cup is overfull, no more will go in.’

    ‘Like this cup,’ the master said, ‘you are full of your own opinions and speculations. How can I show you Zen unless you first empty your cup?’

    Taken From: Zen in the Martial Arts By Joe Hyams, 1979, pp. 18-19.

    This is a favourite parable of mine. However there is another perspective that I take which contradicts this in one way, and complements it in another.

    Yes, when you are learning something new, your previous perspective and knowledge can ‘get in the way’ of what you can learn.

    But what about cognitive load? What happens when the issue isn’t that you are espousing your knowledge and blocking new learning, what about when you’ve reached the point where you feel you’ve learned too much too quickly, and there isn’t ‘enough room’ to add anything new?

    (I think a few educators are feeling this now, after 6-8 weeks of remote learning.)

    This is where I find that this parable becomes a paradox… when cognitive load feels too much, an instinct is to feel like, ‘My cup is full, I can’t fit any more new learning in.” When this happens, it’s actually a great time to try something new! To step out of your comfort zone, empty your own cup and play. Learn something you don’t ‘need’ to learn.

    When someone is teaching you, you need to empty your cup.

    When you feel like you’ve learned too much, you can add a bit more, in a different field of interest, and this will actually empty your cup a bit.

    Being ignorant of your cup being full puts you in a spot where you need to empty your cup. Knowing your cup is full, you can increase the volume of the cup when you stop adding the same tea.

    Do you feel your cup is full right now? Choose something completely different and interesting to learn and you’ll find more room in your cup again.

    Attention in online delivery of classes

    There are some pretty funny and creative ways that students are avoiding class now that it is online. Here are some fun examples:

    1. A video of a student using a video of himself on his phone, ‘paying attention’, set up with a tripod in front of his laptop’s camera.

    2. This kid has different priorities:

    3. And Zach, who is known for his video magic, has fun with Wi-Fi challenges.

    All joking aside, it’s harder to hold a group’s attention for too long in an online setting, compared to having a ‘captive audience’ face to face. It becomes a matter of thinking this through thoughtfully, or literally ‘losing your audience’. Remember Bill Nye The Science Guy? I don’t think he ran any segment of his show for longer than 3 minutes. There were quick lessons interspersed with flashy examples and experiments. Compare that to a 40 minute lecture with a teacher, and compare that to a 40 minute lesson online?

    Here are two simple questions to ask:

    1. What is being done to engage the learner?

    2. What is the learner’s experience?

    I’m not saying we need to entertain like Bill Nye, but I am saying that if we don’t think of the end user’s experience, we are going to see our audience’s attention dwindle.

    Monkey brain

    I’ve been doing daily meditation for about a year and a half now. Just 10 minutes in the morning. I used to do it right away, but I found that if I wasn’t done my daily write, that’s what my mind would go to. So now I usually write first. Yet even with this order, I struggle to stay focused for just 10 minutes. My monkey brain can’t stay quiet.

    I understand that meditation isn’t about thinking about ‘nothing’. I understand that meditation is a process of ‘returning to my breath’, meaning recognizing that my mind has drifted and recentering it on my breathing. I understand that when I notice I’ve drifted, that I should not attach anger or frustration to this, simply notice and refocus.

    Yet, I can have days like yesterday where I barely spent 2 out of 10 minutes focussed on my breath and the rest of the time drifting. I’m not sure I was able to focus on my breath for more than 3 breaths before my mind was on something else. I’m realizing that I’m still just a beginner. I’m wondering what I need to do differently?

    I’m aware that I need to let go of my expectations, but I’m also someone that wants and expects results. These opposing goals are not very Zen. They don’t help each other. I have so much still to learn or maybe just to understand… just not sure if my monkey brain is ready?

    If I were to start a school…

    This is a ‘10,000 foot view’ of something I’ve thought about for a while. It should be an essay, not a handful of bullet points, but I’ll put a few ideas down now and come back to this at a later date.

    If I were to start a school…

    • It would be K-12, with under 1,200 kids. Three classes per grade.
    • Kindergarten to grade 5 would be Reggio based, and resource and support rich. There would be a lot of intervention at these grades to ensure students who struggle are given proven strategies and structures of support.
    • Grade 6 to 9 would not be IB, but would run with a similar model to Middle IB. There would be significant focus on cross-curricular, big thematic projects, a lot of opportunity to mentor and lead younger students, and a focus on doing projects that matter in the community.
    • Grades 10-12 would be inquiry and passion based. Some students would reach out into the community to explore trades and careers, others would focus on academics and the pursuit of Arts and/or Sciences. All would have passion projects, time to pursue them, and mentors to inspire them.
    • Teachers would teach for 60-70% of the day, have 10% prep time, and the rest of the time would be to collaborate, and/or to support students working on projects that go beyond the scope of anything teachers teach in class.
    • The school would be broken into separate pods, divided by the grade groupings suggested above. Students at those different levels would be separated except for planned events… but these would happen regularly, with many student leadership opportunities.
    • Teachers would be expected to connect with teachers and/or students in at least one other level.

    That’s not earth-shatteringly different than what can exist, but it is cost prohibitive with class sizes and staffing needs. The driving forces are:

    1. Students having autonomy, choice, and support to do big projects and follow their passions.

    2. Educators having time to collaborate and work with students beyond course content and a fully ‘blocked’ and timetabled schedule.

    3. A sense of community support, student leadership, and a focus on meeting the learning needs of students.

    If you were to start a school, what would it look like?

    Learning Experiences

    Last month I wrote, ‘Just shifting online or shifting the learning?‘. This post looked at how to effectively shift engaging learning online, from a distance, as we moved to remote learning. Now we need to think about what we’ve learned, and what we want to bring back into our schools.

    There will be limits that social distancing will challenge us with. But when we final normalize what school looks like, how will this global experiment in teaching remotely change what we do in schools post a Covid-19 vaccination? What lessons will we take from this?

    Six years ago, I wrote,’Flexible Learning Opportunities‘

    In this post I said,

    “Blending won’t be something done to classes or students, rather it will be the modus operandi… the way teaching and learning happens. In fact, even ‘distance learning’ could have synchronous ‘face-to-face’ meetings in virtual worlds. It will be an exception to the norm, in a very short while, to have a class that is strictly face-to-face or solely online/asynchronous.”

    I got timing of ‘a very short while’ wrong, and it took a pandemic to make it happen, but now I think we are approaching this. When students return to school are teachers going to just revert to old ways or will they rethink how they spend their time in class?

    One of my schools that I’m the principal of is the district online school (Coquitlam Open Learning). For a while now, I’ve been talking to my teachers about the fact that over 95% of our online students are local, and asking how we can leverage this? Here are a couple examples:

    1. Math teachers running a Numeracy event, where they brought students from many different classes together to solve numeracy problems and help them prepare for the provincial numeracy assessment.

    2. The Biology teacher running fetal pig dissections to teach about the different body systems. Second year university med students taught our online & Inquiry Hub students about the different systems and did rotating demonstrations, then our students taught gifted middle school students in the same format later that day, with the university students assisting.

    In both these cases, when the online students came together, it was for an ‘experience’, not just a lesson. How can we think about this as we bring some of the asynchronous learning to our synchronous classrooms? How can we rethink the experience of school when students all have access to resources, digital conversations, and videos and lessons that they don’t need to be together to see and do?

    How can we leverage the digital access and connectivity to change what we do when we meet kids face to face?

    Can we give them more guided time to work independently, with teachers providing just-in-time support?

    Can we focus more on learning experiences, rather than lessons?

    Are we just going to shift the learning back into classrooms, or are we going to start thinking more about how we can shift the learning experiences we provide while kids are in our schools?

    A concrete example of this is that students at Inquiry Hub Secondary have about 40% of their day when they are not in front of their teachers. During this time, they work on assignments teachers give them (imagine group work where students never need to meet outside of school), they work in digital components of their courses (like video lessons), and they work on some pretty interesting student-designed inquiry projects (that they get credit for). You can learn more about how we make Inquiry Hub work here.

    Are we just shifting the learning back into schools or are we also shifting towards different kinds of learning experiences?

    Future Success

    Future success comes from the habit of pushing yourself beyond what you can do today. I can have goals, and I can make plans, and I can talk about what I want to do. I can ‘do’ all of these things, but it is actions and effort that make the difference.

    Here I am failing to do handstand push-ups against the wall.


    I scraped some skin off me knee on that last fall. However, that last fall came after 3 successful reps. That’s 3 more than I did on the first set. I’m getting there. That doesn’t mean the failures feel good. That doesn’t mean the next 3 will feel easy… yet. I have a lot of hard work and effort to get there.

    Six weeks ago, if you told me that I could do something like this, I would have ‘No, waaay too hard!’:


    But that’s only 32 days after trying to do just this:


    After sharing my fail video above, Kelly Christopherson tweeted:


    The reality is that Kelly and Jonathan Sclater have been inspiring me as well. We are sharing our efforts publicly and push each other: To keep improving; To appreciate effort and hard work; and, To recognize our incremental improvements;

    My future includes being able to do a 30 second, unassisted handstand. I failed at reaching this goal on my original two timelines. My next timeline is aggressive and I might not make that either. But it will happen. The journey will include more failures, and false starts, and frustration.

    I started by saying, ‘Future success comes from the habit of pushing yourself beyond what you can do today.’ If I’m going to push myself beyond my comfort zone, I’m going to reach failure points. But last months failed attempts got me where I am now, and tomorrow’s failures will bring me future success.

    It will be quite different

    I went to swap out my snow tires today. Usually when I go to the tire store, the show room for new tires is open, and there is free coffee and self-serve popcorn. Instead, a table sat in the front entrance blocking the showroom and allowing only one customer in at a time. The popcorn maker was empty. While at some point the showroom will open again, I think the days of self-serve popcorn are over.

    Will we see self serve bulk food in grocery stores again any time soon? What will buffet meals look like? What new etiquette will be required for bathroom use in restaurants, or changing rooms in clothing stores? What will hair dressers and massage therapists do to their stations and rooms between customers?

    Even without these changes, on a personal level, I look at door handles, railings, and elevator and crosswalk buttons completely differently than I did a few months ago. The new normal will be quite different than what we were used to in 2019.

    Social distance in schools

    A couple days ago our premier made a major announcement about the reopening of the economy in BC. The timing of our March break gave us a huge advantage over other provinces, and the residents of BC have done a very good job of social distancing.

    As part of the plan in BC, continuing to practice social distancing is key:

    So what does that really look like in schools?

    Students used to be put in rows, and worked mostly independently, but that has changed quite a bit in the past few decades. Things like collaboration, group work, and peer support are all part of what a typical class looked like in 2019… What will this look like for the rest of 2020?

    How do we integrate the lessons we have learned teaching from a distance, to reduce the physical distance challenges we will now face in classrooms? If we aren’t thinking about this, it will be easier to revert to more individualized learning than it would be to try to foster the same (or similar) collaborative experiences that have made schools more engaging for students in recent years.

    How do we provide rich learning experiences in schools, while also adhering to social distancing etiquette and expectations?