Tag Archives: family involvement

Flexible Pathways

Parenting a student-run business

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There’s learning in the lemonade stand

project-based learning and parentsWhat might be your child’s first experience with business? That’s right: the lemonade stand.

I mean, what is cuter and more compelling than a few eager kids selling sugar water? Believe me, I’m a sucker for a lemonade stand. In fact, I’m a sap for anything created by and sold by kids. Just something about those earnest faces and homemade products makes me start peeling the bills out of my wallet.

But, what makes kids so eager to create those lemonade stands every summer?

I suspect it’s because business is power for kids.

For better or for worse, our children are raised in a commercial culture where buying and selling, profits and losses tend to rule the world. When you are small and young, you feel that power is beyond your reach. You see it belonging in an adult world, but it’s not a world that you are allowed to enter. So, when a child is allowed to enter the adult world of business, it feels like competence. And when kids are given that competence and power, the result is legitimate and passionate engagement.

This year, I took the lemonade stand concept a step further with my own child, and learned a few things along the way.

Parenting a student-run business

It was summer-time in Vermont and we were finding creative ways to pass the time. As always, I was eager to find things for my kids to do. My oldest child started a summer job for the first time and was raking in the dough, and my eight-year old daughter, Jane, was envious of his cash. I proposed that Jane enter to host a table on Kids’ Day at our local Manchester Farmer’s Market. The Gray Wolf pop-up shop was born.

 

 

All we needed was a concept, products, some marketing, and a sales approach. This was serious business! We settled on this being a store for relaxation and creativity. We would sell bath products (bath bombs, salts and scrubs), friendship bracelets and kits, and woven wall hangings. It was a pinterest dream come true…

And my daughter was fully invested.

The challenge for mom was to keep her focused and manageable. You know, making 30 bath bombs was not in the cards (we made five). As the event neared in mid-August, we needed to nail down some business details. Did we need a “store name”? This decision took the longest of all. I felt like it was akin to naming your first album. Jane chose “Gray Wolf” as the name for her shop after her favorite color and her favorite animal. Done and done.

 

 

 

The learning was anything but temporary.

What I saw from Jane in this farmer’s market experiment is the kind of out-of-school learning and effort that educators and parents dream about. Not only was she was motivated and engaged to succeed and make money, but she was developing essential skills. She was learning how to communicate, persuade, persist in design challenges, and implement a long-term plan.

Kids are often begging to get involved in the adult world of economy. Check out the story of Mikaila Ulner, who turned her lemonade stand into a booming business. Not only is her business financially successful, but part of her company mission involves solving a real problem in the world: helping the declining bee population. She calls herself a “social entrepreneur” and shares her business tips.

 

 

What can we learn from these examples?

We can learn:

  • That when we allow kids to participate in the global or local economy, their engagement is strong and real;
  • That when kids create and manage their own business concepts, they are learning truly important life skills;
  • And that kids are compassionate beings, and they are capable of seeing ways of creating businesses that do good things for the world.

Do your students have an interest in business? Are their schools supporting those interests?

I would love for you to share your thoughts and experiences with me.

Innovative Edtech Classrooms

How to get students to communicate with families

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Welcome to the Best Part of My Week

And yours, likely. Peoples Academy Middle Level educator Joe Speers shares how to get students to communicate with their families. He uses a technique called The Best Part of My Week.

Speers’ sixth grade students use the iOS Explain Everything app to record a short message to their families, talking about the best part of their week. Each message must include a selfie, a short text-based message and a voice recording. Then students store each message in their Google Drive. That way, families know where to go to get the latest updates from their students. But best of all, these messages can be included in the students’ PLPs. Short, personal, and emotional goalposts depicting what each student finds most satisfying about their lives as they grow and change.

how to get students to communicate with their families

While Peoples Academy uses the Explain Everything app, any digital app that can combine text, photo and audio can work. Shadow Puppet? Yup! iMovie or WeVideo? Why not! The tool’s almost immaterial, so long as students feel comfortable. The underlying principles here are mindfulness, reflection and repetition.

  • Mindfulness: It takes a steely resolve to carve ten minutes out of a busy school day for one specific activity.
  • Reflection: We know how much students benefit from reflecting on their learning. This is just applying that principle to their emotional selves as well.
  • Repetition: Every Friday. (Snow days notwithstanding.)

Joe previously showed us how his students use Corkulous to create vocab flashcards, and how he uses Google Drive to organize student work. Which is to say: he is rock n’ roll personified.

How do you get students to talk with their families?

Innovative Edtech Classrooms, Student-Led Conferences

Want end-of-year family involvement?

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Try Passage Presentations.

family communication around education, social media and digital citizenshipThe end of every school year is tough. Teachers and administrators struggle to keep students in line, finish assessments, plan field trips, and tie up loose ends. But what’s really important? To provide closure, celebrate accomplishments, and allow students to reflect on how they’ve grown and developed. And including family in those celebrations is vital.

I had the pleasure of witnessing a particularly strong example of how well this can be implemented.

Continue reading Want end-of-year family involvement? →

The 21st Century Classroom

What it’s really like to use an LMS with students

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edmodo vs Schoology, digital badges and how to leave a great comment

The 21st Century Classroom podcast by the Tarrant Institute5th grade Peoples Academy Middle Level teacher Hannah Lindsey returns this week with a look at what it’s really like to use an LMS with students. She sat down with Mark Olofson to talk about her experiences with edmodo and Schoology in the classroom.

Continue reading What it’s really like to use an LMS with students →

Innovative Edtech Classrooms, News, Tools We Like

Leveraging Google Calendar in the Classroom

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leveraging google calendar in the classroomInspiring collaboration between teachers, students and families

The free suite of tools through Google Apps for Education have certainly inspired collaboration and connectivity between teachers, students, and families.  Christ the King School (CKS) recently started exploring the possibilities within the GAFE domain, and not being a 1:1 school, wanted to begin with a tool that could easily be used without individual devices.  They leveraged Google Calendar as a professional and classroom tool; instead of just meetings and appointments, CKS decided to use Calendar as a way to think about student organization and student/teacher/family collaboration.

Continue reading Leveraging Google Calendar in the Classroom →

Uncategorized

Digital divide in the classroom

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Digital divide[1], participation gap[2], cultural divide[3]: over the decades the language of equity issues in technology have shifted along with the technology.  This shifting language reflects the way we view technology and our relationships with it.  What hasn’t changed is the challenge that these terms highlight—that some individuals have greater access to technology, both inside and outside the classroom.

Two fundamental components of access to technology are a fast, consistent internet connection and an appropriate device: Who in your classroom has internet at home?  Who has a device they can use at home?  What tech is in the classroom? What controls on student use exist?

A harder to see component of access is the participation gap and cultural divide: Who is consuming digital media? Who is participating and engaging in digital experiences with others? Who is being taught how to understand and critique media?  Who has the resources (time, cultural understanding, money) to create digital work that improves their social status (both inside and outside the classroom)? [4]

These two frames demonstrate how a technology gap must be understood as occurring on multiple levels, from hardware and connectivity to our roles as consumers and producers of digital media. We can use these frameworks of access to assess technology in the classroom, specifically ones own classroom.

As the evolving construct of the issue demonstrates, the way we as educators use the technology impacts our individual students and the divide. When we become more aware of ourselves, the differences our students bring, and how we react to those differences we are more equipped to set up a meaningful learning environment.

 

How we think about technology

Technology is a tool, and like any tool, the way we think about it impacts how we use it and how we ask our students to use it.  We can use it to enhance traditional ways of learning and producing, such as word processing and memorizing.  We can use it to increase participation, both between students inside the classroom and outside the classroom, through collaborative tools and multi-media. We can also use it to develop critical cultural skills of questioning and evaluating digital media and power structures.

When we limit our view of technology to a digital pen and paper, we miss the ways students can increase their participation, build relationships, and develop cultural capital.  For those students whose primary access to technology is through the classroom, this further widens the gap. When we use technology to allow for a variety of ways to access, evaluate, and develop knowledge, we demonstrate how we value multiple avenues of knowledge.

As a classroom teacher when you become aware of the frameworks you use you can increase your choices of how to use the technology available to you.

Questions to answer:

  1. How do you use the tool of technology?
  2. Do you consume, produce, and/or participate?
  3. How does your personal use of technology shape the way you think about the tool?
  4. How do you critically think about the tool?
  5. How can this tool be used to connect people, build participation, increase critical awareness of equity issues?
  6. How do you think technology allows for various forms of knowledge to be valued?        

 

How we view others

How we think about technology shapes the way we approach planning our use of it.  How we think about our student’s use of technology shapes the way we interact with them and their use of it, much of the time when we are unaware of it.

Research looks at the technology gaps, both in hardware/connectivity as well as use in the classroom.  Holfeld, et. al. 2008, have found that schools with lower socioeconomic status have stricter student use policies and teachers who are more likely to use technology for rote learning, rather than creative engagement.[5] These schools and teachers are most likely not aware they are furthering the technological divide.

The cultural message that children and youth are more tech savvy than adults can also affect our policies and practices that increase the tech divide. This message implies it is a “natural” thing for children and youth to be good at tech. This hides the socio-economic and cultural factors of tech access. It also produces the flip side of the message that when children are not good at tech, for lack of access, they are individually flawed. For teachers who unknowingly believe this message it can result in preferential treatment to those students who have access outside of the classroom, thus furthering the divide[6].

Just as increasing our awareness of our framework is helpful in impacting our behavior and reducing the divide, increasing our awareness of how we think about other’s use of technology impacts our behavior and affects the divide.

Questions to answer:

  1. What is your first thought when a child seems to be “tech savvy”? Does it just seem “natural” to them?
  2. What is your first thought when a child doesn’t seem to be at ease with technology?
  3. How do you engage students in questioning technology, questioning the viewpoint of sites, analyzing the credibility of games? Do you engage different students differently in this critical thinking?
  4. How do you think about the reasons for the economic and social circumstances of your students (at all SES levels)?
  5. Do you think about how your SES shapes your relationship to technology?
  6. Do you try to control the content of some students more than others?
  7. What are your judgments of differing family involvement?
  8. Do you set up technology use so people with a wide range of backgrounds can use it?
  9. How open are you to learning, and incorporating, the way your students think into the way you teach and use technology?

Wrapping it up

Access to hardware and connectivity is only part of accessing technology.  Accessing the possibilities of participation and cultural knowledge is harder to see, but more within the classroom teacher’s control.  When educators see technology as a meaningful, varied means of expression for students, it invites students to participate in unique, every-evolving ways.  When students see themselves as capable of learning and using technology, they are empowered to continue accessing participation and cultural knowledge. This empowerment moves us all towards a reduction in the technology divide.

 

 

[1] http://www.pbs.org/mediashift/2007/01/your-guide-to-the-digital-divide017

[2] http://www.exploratorium.edu/research/digitalkids/Lyman_DigitalKids.pdf

[3]http://mitpress.mit.edu/sites/default/files/titles/free_download/9780262513623_Confronting_the_Challenges.pdf

[4] http://www.rethinkingschools.org/archive/27_02/27_02_vangalen.shtml

[5] Hohlfeld, T. N., Ritzhaupt, A. D., Barron, A. E., & Kemker, K. (2008). Examining the digital divide in K-12 public schools: Four-year trends for supporting ICT literacy in Florida. Computers & Education, 51(4), 1648–1663. doi:10.1016/j.compedu.2008.04.002

[6] http://www.exploratorium.edu/research/digitalkids/Lyman_DigitalKids.pdf

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Talk Us to Your Leaders: Penny Bishop & John Downes

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John Downes and Penny Bishop lead the Tarrant Institute for Innovative Education at UVM.
John Downes and Penny Bishop lead the Tarrant Institute for Innovative Education at UVM.

 

Welcome to our new twice-monthly column highlighting best practices for digital middle schools from a leadership perspective. Twice a month, Tarrant Institute director Penny Bishop and associate director John Downes will share their insight into what they’ve seen make a lasting and profound difference in technology integration with 21st century middle schools.

In this first installment of a 2-part column, they’ll address a critical but often under-addressed component of a successful digital middle school: the family.

wingding

As schools adapt to the digital age and integrate Bring Your Own Device (BYOD) programs, interactive whiteboards, handheld devices, and 1:1 computing and learning management systems, classrooms have begun to look less and less like those in which most of today’s parents were educated. Generations of parents have struggled to support their child’s learning; today’s parents face even steeper challenges.

How can educators capitalize on the promise of technology and engage families in new and better ways? What does it mean to increase family engagement in the digital age?

Across the many increasingly hi-tech schools we’ve examined, teachers are answering these questions with exciting new family engagement strategies.

In this installment, we’ll look at two: creating “trans-parent” classrooms, and supplementary guides.

 

Trans-Parent Classrooms

One team we know is launching a blog to showcase technology-rich work that students post daily from the classroom. The team will ask trusted parents to seed the blog with thoughtful and supportive comments, providing students with a new and respected audience for their schoolwork and modeling constructive and civil online dialog. At the same time, the blog offers families a window into the work of a 21st century team, demystifying the novel opportunities granted by current technologies and sparking rich conversations about technology and learning.

Many tnavigateeams use Google Forms or other online survey tools to probe parents about the successes and challenges of 1:1 learning at home. Teams poll families on the relative importance of various parenting issues  — monitoring use of social media, encouraging healthy online identities, for instance — and can get instant feedback for analysis and integration into their lesson plans and classroom communities.

Much as the middle school movement has encouraged student voice to enhance the relevance of curriculum, teachers can use parent input to inform their family information nights, and the ongoing development of their online parent resources.

Teachers can guide parents toward helpful tools and strategies to navigate this digital age. Team newsletters, portal resources and parent events can all promote family conversations about current issues facing students in their complex online worlds.

 

Supplementary Guides

Some teachers link parents to ready-made resources like those hosted by Common Sense Media, such as parenting tip sheets or advice videos. But rather than flooding parents with information, skilled teams curate these resources and steer families to those that most directly address their concerns.

Some teams also provide families with templates for home media use agreements that foster parent-child conversations — and ultimately written agreements — about online safety, social media behavior and balancing media use with other acuratespects of life.

When families participate in take-home 1:1 programs, these agreements can dictate privacy settings, expectations for the “care and feeding” of their school-issued device, and shape when and how long a child can be online. Teams can require that students return a copy of their signed home-use agreement, along with a video interview with the family about their agreement, thereby ensuring these critical conversations take place. They may assign semi-annual updates to the home agreements, pushing families toward ongoing and constructive dialog about technology in family life. These practices acknowledge the powerful influence technology has in homes today, its centrality to powerful learning in and out of school, and the new challenges confronting the vital home-school connection.

Next time: making parents partners in teaching, and the crucial role of volunteering, as our look at 21st century family involvement continues.

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Penny Bishop is the director of the Tarrant Institute for Innovative Education and a professor of middle-level education in the College of Education and Social Services at UVM. John Downes is the associate director of the Tarrant Institute and a member of the Partnership for Change board.