XO Laptop Experience in Seattle Classroom

A recent guest post about the XO laptop on OLPC News:

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How in the world did I end up with six XO laptops in my third grade classroom? I only bought one, back in the original 2007 G1G1. I remember that day well.

Showing off at Seattle XO

I was pumped to order one on the first day they were made available, so I was up early. Unbelievably, our cable Internet service was out! Determined, I plugged in a laptop, snagged a neighbor's Internet connection (all in the spirit of international collaboration of course), and ordered one. Thankfully, I was spared from the delivery nightmare suffered by many others - mine arrived just before Christmas, 2007.

I soon found I wanted to connect in person with other XO users, and so attended a couple of meetings of the Seattle XO User group. It was a wonderful group of people, but I felt WAY over my head technically. The group may be reforming soon, as I was happy to read in Re-Starting Pacific Northwest OLPC User Groups.

Anyway, word eventually got out that I was a teacher, and I soon had a couple XO's (Lincoln and Earthday) donated to my classroom. The kids of course couldn't believe their good luck, and expected more any day...

In February of 2008 I was presenting at NCCE in Seattle and brought along my XO's, as folks were pretty interested in them. I ended up at a bar one evening during the conference with my three XO's, meeting up with edtech blogger Wes Fryer and his wife, and principal Glenn Malone and his wife.

XO's connecting at NCCE

Glenn had bought an XO as a Christmas present for his wife Tami (ahem, grin), and they decided then and there to loan Tami to my classroom for the rest of the school year. So for half of that school year, we had 4 XO's in class.

Over the summer somebody left a comment on my blog, saying they loved hearing how my kids were using them, and would I like one more? Jude arrived in the mail from Colorado shortly thereafter.

Just before Thanksgiving, 2008, our fifth XO was donated to us by someone who worked in the administration of a local university - a friend of a neighbor who knew about my XO adventures in the classroom. I named it Arbor Heights, in honor of my school, which was at that time threatened with closure. So we had 5 XO's for the 08-09 school year. Our school stayed open, by the way.

As the 09-10 school year started up, I was contacted by a local person who had been following my blog and had read about my kids using the XO's. Dorothy was donated in person, which was a first. Until that moment, I had never actually met, or had the chance to shake a hand and say thank you in person to any of the donors.

These donors were G2 purchasers, in a sense, giving both of their XO laptops to kids. All of the donations had a couple of things in common. They were not being used, and their owners wanted them to go to somebody, kids preferably, who would use them. To those generous folks, I say thanks once again. And yes, they are being used by kids!

So is there a lesson to be learned here? Well, I've learned that sometimes it pays to share your learning and adventuring with others, and sometimes it pays to take a chance. I loved the concept of OLPC when I first heard about it, and I thought having one in my classroom might be a good learning experience. Seemed just about right for 8 and 9 year olds.

I look forward to sharing that part of the story.

Mark Ahlness writes about his experiences at Room Twelve

Turkey Courage

Today our President pardoned a turkey on Thanksgiving. Courage was not alone. A bunch of third graders in Seattle spent some time working out solutions to help several other turkeys avoid being served for Thanksgiving dinner. Here's how some of their blog posts started out...

One day in Boston, Massachusetts a turkey was running around the back of the Ritz Hotel. His name was Bob....

One day in the forest there was a baby turkey. Her name was Sunset. She was the most sweet turkey in the world. But her parents were afraid to go out of the forest cause Sunset was born around Thanksgiving....

Hank Hill is a turkey. That’s me, I’m Hank. I live in a cottage with Goldilocks...


The turkey’s name was Natalie. She was the happiest turkey alive....

It all started at Joe’s Farm with Farmer Joe and his last turkey....

Sound like fun? Indeed it was. I posted this on our classroom blog, where you can read them all if you click and scroll down. It'll be worth a couple of minutes, trust me...

Students in room 12 have been using their imaginations and their writing skills to serve up a little Thanksgiving fun here. Their stories are in response to "Pretend you are a turkey. How will you escape being served for Thanksgiving dinner?"

Click on Turkey Escape, 2009, and scroll down to read over 20 great stories!

Have a safe and happy Thanksgiving, everyone! - Mr. A.

Meanwhile, here's the story of Courage, one very lucky turkey (interesting and hopeful that my students' escape stories relied on ingenuity and scrappiness, and not just blind luck):

Visit msnbc.com for Breaking News, World News, and News about the Economy

What makes me doubly happy here is that my third graders' stories have legs - legs that will carry them far beyond two weeks on the family refrigerator. Their blogs are there for everyone, pretty much forever....

Happy Thanksgiving!

Thank goodness, one more time

Seems like the tougher things get, the more frequently the obstacles come flying at me - the more often I find myself saying, "thank goodness for the kids." Been saying it a lot lately.

My birthday was last week, and there was no school, as usual, in honor of it (November 11th) - ha. My third graders came up with a wonderful card and a bag of sweets that took my breath away. We were all pretty happy. Thanks, everyone!

Later that day one of my students presented me with a handcrafted birdfeeder, made out of recycled materials and a lot of ingenuity. Of course I put it out when I got home. Thanks, Eilis! By the way, the birds liked it, too.

New Internet Task Force

There has been a flurry of activity lately on a couple of edtech email lists, wwwedu (Andy Carvin's long running list), and ednet2 (which I recently began moderating) that is making me nuts. Words are gushing forth once again about internet filtering and internet safety. More books are written, studies done, and committees are formed. There are government agencies and task forces popping up every day.

They are all based on fear.

Every single email post and response fans the flames of that fear. Most all of the people talking have good intentions, but I am so tired of nobody seeming to get that they are making things worse.

I suggest the formation of a new government task force:
The Internet Potential and Promise Task Force

Put a few billion behind something like that, and let's see if we don't end up with a better result.

Dream Come True

This will sound so corny, but I just don't care. What happened today at school was a dream come true.

This is my fifth year blogging with a third grade class at roomtwelve.com. When I started, in the fall of 2005, there were not a whole lot of elementary classroom blogs out there. But once we got rolling that year, I began to think about the future of the writing my students were doing. What would happen to all those articles, the comments, the conversations? My students struggled with this as well. At the end of that first year, I wrote in Rugged days :

The kids really want to blog. Yesterday we talked about next year, when they won't be with me, when they won't have their beloved blogs, and so on. There were tears as I explained how I would phase them out. Lots of good questions. They were grasping at straws, trying to wrap their heads around how the blogs could still exist, live on, somehow remain. This phenomenal response is unlike anything I have seen in 25 years of teaching.

As of today, nine students are missing from a very long Room Twelve Alumni List, and that is the dream come true. I managed to transfer every word from their third grade blogs to their new fifth grade teacher's classroom blog. Every single blog post, comment, and conversation from their third grade writing experience is back with them, so their new teacher can to continue to facilitate and guide their growth as effective 21st century writers.

Tomorrow they finally rejoin that journey. I have dreamed about this happening for over four years, and I could not be happier.

The transfer of bodies of work like that, held in databases, referenced and hyperlinked all over the Internet, is no small feat. I held my breath as I sat next to their new, young, fifth grade teacher, each of us logged in to our classroom blogs. I went through the process of making students "orphans", making them available to their new teacher, and then watching him "adopt" them into his new classroom blog. Several came with over 50 pieces of writing. Not exactly like walking down a school hallway to offer a thick manila folder of writing samples to a cringing new teacher who may or may not ever look inside - never mind share with another person....

This transfer was unbelievably exciting - for both of us.

One person is responsible for this, David Warlick. My hat is off to him for having the vision, for putting in the countless hours developing and debugging an incredible tool, and for caring about our kids' education. Thank you David, for Classblogmeister.

So Ready

Last Friday, on the third day of school, I introduced my students to our classroom blog. I barely had time to show them the login process, go over the Bloggers Contract, and give out passwords. We ran out of time.

Over the weekend, one student published an article, and another started one and saved it to finish later. I had not showed them how to do this - they just figured it out - from home.

My students are are third graders, 8 and 9 years old.

I've been doing this long enough to realize that every year my next group of third graders comes into my classroom a little more facile in dealing with technology, but this was really, really surprising.

Tonight, a third student submitted a blog post. They are so ready.

Still ticking

It's been nearly 2 months since I last wrote here. I spoke up some on Facebook, and a little on Twitter - as I continue to figure out the best way to converse about teaching and technology - and still have a life.

Some tech stuff just keeps on coming:

• My school continues on Facebook.
  
• August 14, 2009: the 15th anniversary of my school's presence on the web - picture on the right is from the first home page, in 1994.
  
• August 24, 2009: my school starts a Twitter account
• Sept 1, 2009: my third graders from last year become Alumni, and a new group of third grade bloggers starts up at roomtwelve.com, my fifth group of bloggers.
  

Lots more happening of course. School starts two days after Labor Day. I'm still here, leaning forward.

Hard year in the classroom

Hard year in the classroom
Originally uploaded by mahlness

Two of my five XO laptops, that had a particularly rough year. The one on the left (Jude) lost the "F" key - somehow it just tore off eventually, and I replaced it with a piece of paper and some tape. Works fine. The XO on the right (Arbor Heights) had a student actually fall on top of it in a wild moment in the classroom. Still works fine, I have the broken off piece, and need to find the right kind of glue (hobby shop trip, for sure).

Mr. A's Art Show, 2009

Mr. A's Art Show, 2009
Originally uploaded by mahlness

Some of my artwork from 08-09 on display, moments before they were all given away to my third graders - who were reminded of the artists we studied this year (that did not become famous during their lifetimes, and whose paintings are now worth millions!)

PLN's, Recess, and Twitter

Today on a work day after the last student day, I sent an email to my colleagues, encouraging them to try Twitter, Facebook, Flickr, rss, some ed/tech blogs, etc. over the summer... Later on, we had a staff meeting, and I brought my laptop. We got into a discussion about a major program change for next year, and I sent out a request for feedback on Twitter... After school I sent the following email to our staff:

As a follow up to my earlier email about tech things to try this summer, and as some additional feedback to our discussion on whether we should have recess before lunch next year…

While we were discussing the recess/lunch thing at our staff meeting today, I posted a note to Twitter, saying we were talking about the issue for next year, and asked if anybody had any thoughts. Within 5 minutes, I had the following 3 responses (on top):

… from teachers in CT, WI, and NE. I thanked them later via Twitter, and told them the result of our vote. I also had a response from an AH parent on my Facebook page, which automatically displays my Twitter posts.

You will certainly hear more about Personal Learning Networks (PLN’s) in the future. This is a small example of one in action. - Mark

I've never really put my relatively small Twitter network to work, asking for assistance in a realtime situation. I have certainly responded when others have asked for greetings, etc. during their presentations. It was really gratifying and reassuring to get responses. I was even better able to articulate a point at the meeting as the result of a Twitter response I received.

I know I'll be even more conscientious about responding to others as a result. This is indeed how networks grow, ideas spread, and better decisions are made.

Technorati tags: twitter facebook pln recess

674

Last week I asked my third graders (roomtwelve.com) how many blog articles they thought they had posted as a group this year. Some knew how many they had written as individuals. I knew a few had posted over 50. Nobody guessed over 350. When I suggested it might be over 500, there were a couple of gasps and several shaking heads. Couldn't be.

So they counted on their own blogs, wrote totals on the board (without names of course), and we added them up. 674. As of May 29th. With 3 weeks to go in school. An average of 32 posts per student, roughly working out to one blog post per student, every week of the school year.

They were pretty surprised, and so was I. As I was getting my thoughts organized for this post, I wondered about my previous classrooms. This year seemed like a really prolific group. So I found a post from June of 2007, where I had totaled the student posts from the 06-07 school year: 711. I had also totaled my first blogging group, in 05-06: 340.

Now I'm pretty sure, with 2 weeks to go in the school year, this group of bloggers will surpass the group from 06-07. But why was I so certain in my wrong assumption before we counted them up, that this year's group had written so much more?

So I've been looking back. Many variables have remained relatively constant - student age, number of computers, number of kids, blogging platform.

What has changed is the amount of time I can devote to writing. With mandated curriculum and assessment demands spiking sharply in the last couple of years, no wonder I feel like they've written more. They have had much less time to write. They're just squeezing it in. Students now blog during earned free time. Many post their morning Journal entries regularly. It is amazing they are able to write online as much as they do.

Another thing has changed. I do not have hard data to share, but I'm pretty sure students are writing shorter articles on their blogs. Call it the face of today's literacy being influenced by the sound byte writing of Twitter, MySpace, and Facebook - I don't know. Philip Greenspun has an interesting perspective in How the Web and the Weblog have changed Writing.

Along with a mandated math curriculum, there is a huge push these days for a Writer's Workshop approach. It's a real nice way to teach writing, but not in the 21st century. It does not prepare our students to write in the world they go home to every night - or the world they will live in when they leave our classrooms.

So what's important to me, as a teacher of third graders, in my approach to literacy - specifically writing? As their teacher, I am most certainly influenced by new media, and I tend to reflect my values in the classroom. What do I care about? Is it the 19th and 20th century model of The Writing Process? (uh, no...)

• Fluency. Kids have to be able to sit down and write, easily. They must be able to respond to a variety of assignments without it being like pulling teeth. They have to like to write.
• Conventions. Kids have to be good enough at spelling and grammatical conventions so they can express themselves easily.
• Expression. Kids must at least be exposed to some basic writing skills - enriched vocabulary, leads, summaries, paragraphing, etc.
  
• Forms and Audience. Kids need to know their audience, and what type of writing is appropriate for which audience.
  
• Conversation. Especially in today's world, kids need to understand the value of written conversation, have some basic understanding of what makes a good conversation, and what does not.

These ideas guide my teaching of writing. I do not have a curriculum guide from a publisher, sorry. My guide is this: learning from 28 years of teaching experiences, and a few years of looking forward to imagine my students' futures.

My kids will do well as writers, I know it. Shooting for 750 blog posts this year. Will update.....

technorati tags: writing writers workshop literacy

90!

90!
Originally uploaded by mahlness

June 3, 2009. In my third grade classroom at the end of the school day. Hard to think and move, never mind teach and learn.

The Best of My Blog

No, not the best of this blog. This was not a meme or a blogging retrospective. This was about the best of my third grade students' blogs, a book.

My students just compiled their best blog articles from the year to be their books for our school's annual Young Authors' Conference. They looked through the articles they have published this year on their blogs (some had over 50). They selected the best, copied and pasted into Word, reformatted the text, and added illustrations. They used watercolor pencils to make pictures to go with their writings. I photographed those pictures, edited them (cropped, resized, etc), and put them in their networked folders.

The kids really had a wonderful time taking their writing to another dimension. In their blogs on classblogmeister, they have very little latitude in terms of appearance and formatting. And no pictures - at least not easily included, for 8 and 9 year olds.

So for the past couple of weeks, my students have pulled information from the Internet (their own work!), and have experimented with how that information, their writing, should look - in a for real book that you can hold in your hands.

A few of the things they learned about in the process: cropping and resizing images, pixels, image color/contrast, image placement, font appearance, consistency and variation in appearance, and much more.

It was nice to be able to guide them through seeing their writing in another dimension. Dean Shareski has said for a long time that Design Matters.

Now Dean was talking about more sophisticated presentations - video, PowerPoint, and such. But I think that these days even in the simplest, shortest, most basic pieces of writing, design does indeed matter.

Maybe next year my kids will be publishing their books online.

Naturally, they blogged about the process :)

News Reporter Backsliding

Maybe that's an unfair title, I don't know. I'll try to tell this in as small a nutshell as possible. My school, Arbor Heights Elementary in Seattle, has a tradition of a student newspaper - online. It started 18 years ago, the same year I came to the school. It is billed as "The oldest continuously published elementary school student newspaper on the Internet". We got it online in the '94-95 school year. I'm the editor.

For the past four years, I've had reporters enter their reports on a blog, as comments. I then turned all that writing into a monthly print edition for everybody at school, and a pdf of the same, on the Internet. We even have done podcasts and have had them on iTunes. Lately, there is just no time for that.

In the last couple of years it has been tough getting kids to remember to come to my classroom (on Wednesdays) to work on their reports. Now, they could of course do their writing from anywhere, and at anytime. I hammered on that for three years, but it never took. Not enough buy-in, readiness, or whatever.

Then a month ago I got word that November Learning Communities was going to discontinue their blog hosting for educators.

At the end of my rope and out of ideas, a couple of weeks ago I put the problem of getting kids to remember to come to meetings, to everybody at a staff meeting. The unanimous suggestion was to return to paper/pencil reporting, which I had done for 10 years, before starting up the blog.

It would be impossibly long and boring for me to recount here all the things I've tried to increase student commitment and involvement. Part of the problem is that it's simply the nature of the beast, when you have changing student reporters.

So this month I got a lot of reports, a lot more than had come in on the blog in some time. This is good.

I also got 3-4 more hours of work a month as an editor/interpreter/transcriber of student news "reports". Not so good.

The extra time I don't care about, really.

But the implications of this backward move break my heart.

The letter sent for sure

The letter sent for sure
Originally uploaded by mahlness

Three days ago I received this very same letter via regular mail. Today my wife signed for this for me (thanks Honey, I guess). I have been legally served. Here's the original.

The slam to my feeling of self worth is enormous. Multiply that by the 3,300 teachers in Seattle. Multiply that by the number of students in classes taught by those teachers, and there is a very big black cloud over Seattle Schools right now.

Here's an editorial by the Seattle Times today. Read the comments to feel an extra warm, supportive shout out to teachers from the public. Not.

For Our Moms

This is the first Mother's Day without our moms for Janeanne and me. It has been a tough five months. We miss them both so much.

In my third grade classroom this week everyone wrote something about, or to, their moms. Many printed their thoughts out and put them on hand made "Promise Bouquet" Mother's Day cards. Some also wanted to share their writing on their blogs. Here are a few sweet words from 8 and 9 year olds about their moms:

• Aundra - About my Mom
• Lauryn - My Mom
• Sergio - dear mom
• Andrea - My mom
• Rumi - Camping and Mothers Day
• Kathy - A rockin' mothers day
• Jacob - About my mom
  

A final moment just for my mom. She loved people so much. Couldn't stop laughing, hugging, helping, kissing. She was a remarkable woman who brought joy to many, many people. I love this picture of her with tenor Jerry Hadley. I saw her like this thousands of times with all kinds of people. I'm happy and proud that she gave Jerry this moment of laughter and joy.

Anyway, thanks to all the moms out there. We love you - always!

Stimulus Disconnect

This was left in my mailbox at school yesterday. My "stimulus bucks"? Please. I've been at my school for 18 years, and the amount of money and services coming into it for students right now is laughable, compared to just a few years ago. Just where are these stimulus bucks, who is getting them, and what are they for? Does anybody really understand what is happening in US schools right now?

Today I received a special gift: a nonrenewal of my teaching contract in the mail. Here it is. A 28 year teaching veteran, I am one of 3,300 teachers in Seattle getting this. I am being offered a new contract for less money. I have 10 days to appeal this. Believe it or not, my state has a collective bargaining agreement. My union negotiates our contracts with the school district. Or so I thought.

It is the weekend, of course, so it's a great time have this happen... less media coverage and all that. The bare bones of the breaking story were here and here. Much has happened in the past few hours. My union told me the letter was coming. The district denied that it was mailed. It arrived today. I will try to add updates here. Here's the latest.

What a very sad drama in Seattle for teachers and their students. The disconnect is bizarre. It becomes so difficult to teach with enthusiasm, energy, and passion.

Believe!

Looking for inspiration? Check out #20 in the Boston Globe's fantastic Big Picture entry, The 2009 Kentucky Derby

Mine That Bird in last place, 18 horses ahead of him (most of them bigger), going around the first turn. A 50 to 1 shot, he won by nearly seven lengths in a breathtaking race.

Sometimes you just have to believe, against all odds and circumstances, in what you can do.


Photo credit: Jamie Squire/Getty Images

Aging gracefully

The Earth Day Groceries Project turned sweet sixteen this year. In human terms that's just entering adulthood, but in Internet years, well, we're talking ancient. Pleistocene, at least.

The years have brought changes to the website of course. It's now a 501c3 nonprofit (donations welcomed). There have been posters, patches, and free bags....

This year I fiddled with .asp pages and didn't break anything in the databases that hold thousands of records of participating schools. Couldn't afford to hire that part out this time. Still firing on all cylinders, fingers crossed...

But the biggest change came out of self preservation, when I stopped hosting pictures from schools on the web site. This was a huge deal for hundreds of schools - to get pictures of their kids/bags on the Internet, so it made me very sad. But, in eliminating picture hosting, I've been spared dozens of hours of work in the past few days.

So what to do... I should have done this months earlier, but I started up a Facebook Group and a Flickr Group, hoping people might put pictures there. Considering the lateness of getting the word out, I think response has been not too bad. Below is a slideshow from the Flickr Group, which contains 105 pictures, at this writing:

I believe these are moves in the right direction, e.g., keeping in step with the times and using the the tools and networking sites widely used by the general public. What does not feel good is that the vast majority of schools cannot access them (Flickr and Facebook), at least in the US. I don't know what to do about that. Maybe if enough teachers railed against their tech department filter watchdogs for a good cause, something might happen. But I doubt it. That part is discouraging.

But what keeps this activity going year after year, and brings me hope, is the excitement and enthusiasm that children bring to their communities with this activity - and the stories they share on the project website.

If you're worrying about the direction our world is going, or thinking there just is not enough goodness and caring in people anymore, take a few minutes and Read Reports on the project website. Click on any state, Canadian province, or any of the 35 countries listed there. Here are some examples:

Heather Stewart
Jack Fields Elementary
Humble, TX USA
We decorated 342 bags!
About our project: The students at Jack Fields Elementary were so excited to begin this project! It is a great way for our students to make an impact in their community. This project allows their voices to be heard...the fact that they are able to make a difference is SO powerful!!!!

Michele Pietrzak
St. James Sewickley
Sewickley, PA USA
www.stjamesschool.us/
We decorated 400 bags!
About our project: This was A HUGE success for our FIRST year of participation. The students loved decorating the bags. Our school is in a small community (a suburb of Pittsburgh, PA). The local grocer was generous enough to buy the paper bags for us to use since they don't regularly stock them. Earth Day is celebrated school wide among our students and staff. We had school t- shirts made for the occasion, had a big assembly, and did individual class service & clean-up projects within the community. WE CAN'T WAIT TO DO THIS AGAIN NEXT YEAR!

Gheban Liliana
scool Gen. I.D. Sirbu
Petrila, Romania
We decorated 150 bags!
About our project: This is the third year we participate in the Earth Day Groceries Project. The kids really enjoyed this activity. They picked one slogan that they wanted to design their bag around or on their pizza boxes (we decorated 200 pizza boxes in the project national-Pizza mesanger). The kids were very eager to show off their artwork and creativity with the rest of the community, so they got right to work! We invited the the local press Gazeta Vaii Jiului . They were glad to take part to our activity and to become soldiers of our Planet. Our great successes were to make students feel the necessity of living on a clean planet! Inst.Gheban Liliana ,Prof.Barbu Elena , Prof. Ambrus Georgiana and prof. Chinta Cipriana School Generala I.D.Sirbu-Petrila ROMANIA
submitted on 4/25/2009

Happy Earth Day

(posted to Tweeters, on Earth Day)

Most folks around here know Marv Breece as a fabulous birder, a great teacher, and an all around good guy. He's also a wonderful photographer and a very generous soul.

For the fifth year in a row, Marv has allowed his pictures to be made into specially resized desktop wallpaper for The Earth Day Groceries Project - the largest educational activity on the Internet.

My third grade classroom is currently encircled with some of the most amazing computer desktop screens you can imagine. There is something special about Marv's pictures. People walk into my third grade classroom and gasp.

Check them out - they're available in both full and wide screen:

http://www.earthdaybags.org/gswallpaper.htm

Thanks Marv, and Happy Earth Day everyone!