The Bullying of Gay Students, the new ESL, and the It Gets Better Project

(Sorry for the wonky formatting!)

I'm sure that most media savvy people have at least heard about the latest public discussion surrounding bullying in schools, specifically against gay students. As is typical of the news media cycle, it needed something sensational to focus it's lens on. Unfortunately, it took several recent suicides as a result from bullying to bring focus to this problem. It's a huge issue in America and there has been a lot of reporting done on it. Although we didn't touch on this topic in depth it came up in a class discussion this morning about the new ESL students: Early School Leavers.

We were told by our prof that they have been trying since the Harris years ('95-'02) to reduce the drop out rate but that it actually keeps rising. I tried to check out the stats that she cited (by Dr. Bruce Ferguson) but I wasn't sure which publication it came from. I'll have to ask her about it. What I did find was that "in Ontario, the drop-out rate over the 2001-2002 to 2004-2005 period was 9.1%, about half of what it was at the start of the 1990s"(Stats Can).  I'll obviously have to do more study on this subject when I'm not swamped with work.

Now, in class, I made the point that if they've been trying to change the schools for so long with little effect, then maybe they need to look much more closely at outside factors. Obviously this is quite difficult since there is such a vast array of things that are out of politicians and educator's hands. While the challenges may seem daunting, we certainly should do everything we can and one of those things is to make sure that senseless suicides don't occur.

In our tech class, there was a bit of a debate on the second day where a student who is also a mother ranted a bit about how she would never, ever, under any circumstances allow her child to use a blog, at school or otherwise. If the teacher tried to do something so irresponsible, why, she would "march right down there and yank my kid out of that school.". My prof tried to gently warn her that these technologies are going to be a part of our future world and that we have to make a choice between being knowledgeable about them or sticking our heads in the sand. Alas, this person promptly went and dropped the course that very week. While I personally applaud her zeal in wanting the best protection for her child, I don't really think that this was the best response.

In that regard, I was reading a wonderful article tonight on the NPR Website, called
Schools Urged To Teach Youth Digital Citizenship

A quote:

Like many students at Rutgers, senior Hina Khaliq was dismayed by Clementi's suicide. But, she says, the problem is that the rules of the Internet are unclear.

"Nobody has come out and said, 'This is how it's supposed to be.' There's no guideline set down for us when we start using the Internet at an early age — or any age — so I think it's a free-for-all," she says.

It doesn't have to be. Researchers say social workers, teachers and parents need to reach out to troubled kids online. And by that, they don't mean monitoring or limiting access, but providing the kind of brick-and-mortar services available at community centers, schools and health centers in the virtual world as well.

I think this is an excellent article and the ideas about teaching students online stewardship certainly mirror one of my primary motivations in taking my extra course at Brock which is focused on learning to use online tech in the Intermediate/Senior stream of teaching.Check the article out!

Furthermore, I wanted to highlight the It Gets Better Project created by Dan Savage, a hugely syndicated sex advice columnist, author, media pundit and journalist. It started with the suicide of Billy Lucas, a student who was bullied and tortured by fellow students because he was perceived as being gay.  Savage wished that he could have talked to him for just five minutes, to let him know that things really do get better, especially as soon as you leave high school. However, since gay adults are often not allowed to talk to teens who are gay, this doesn't happen very often. So he started this collaborative effort where he and his partner of 16 years asked people to record their own videos about being gay as a young person, with a focus on how things can and will be alright.

I think it's an extremely powerful use of online social media and it's certainly something to see and bear witness to. I'll be the first to admit that I wasn't always the most open minded of people when it came to sexuality but we all grow up and hopefully learn more. That's part of the reason many of us went into education, right?

Procrastination and Facebooking Hamlet

I have a lesson plan due for my English class and, like all good procrastinators, I am writing it pretty close to the deadline. My friend and I had a discussion tonight about study habits and he was expounding on his method of getting up every day at the same time and heading to the library to start studying in the morning. He combined this with studying between classes and, thus, he was able to just relax when he went home, content in the knowledge that he'd put in a good day of study.

Well, I'm not like that. In fact, I never have been. And yet, when I teach students about writing, how it's a step-by-step process, best approached methodically and in pieces, with careful review every step of the way, I can't help but feel a litttttttttle bit hypocritical. Not that I let my conscience bother me in that regard or anything. If there's anything that I've learnt from teachers college, it's that different people learn and work in different ways. Now let's just hope that my future students find this and bring it up in class. What an interesting discussion that could turn out to be!!

As you might've guessed from the title of this post, the lesson plan is supposed to be about that old standby, Hamlet. And, lurching around the internet as I have been, I accidentally came across this new article on an  "online classic, Sarah Schmelling's "Hamlet (Facebook News Feed Edition)," a retelling of the Shakespeare play that was published in McSweeney's in 2008". I found it pretty hilarious and I think it could be an interesting exercise to do with students after some modified formatting.

Then again, I was reminded of an online course I took once where one of my advisors cautioned us about using modern styles to "update" classic texts. He cautioned that refashioning the classics like Shakespeare into, for example, a hip-hop cadence, could quickly devolve into hokiness if not done with tact.  The last thing you want to do is appear contrived in front of your students. As my History professor, Dave Hamilton, said: "What are high school kids but masters at telling who or what is and what isn't cool? If you're not totally yourself and you try to fake it or phone it in, they will see through you in a second. And then you're toast.". Food for thought and another hour of my time spent off task!!

"Neo-Minimalism and the Rise of the Technomads"

Having moved across the world yet again, I was forced to go through my things and decide what was necessary and what was not. Most of my stuff fell in the "unnecessary" category and I summarily gave them away or sold them. It just didn't seem prudent to ship everything back to Canada nor did it seem worth the cost.

There are another group of people who have been thinking about this and a lot of them are taking it to the next level. These group are known as Technomads or Neo-Minimalists and they are trying to use technology to unclutter their lives. Technomads argue that physical stuff is becoming increasingly unnecessary as our technological devices can help take the place of collections of things like books and record collections. Sean Bonner has written an interesting and insightful article as he, his wife, and his newborn son have started a year of travel where they plan to live in different cities around the world.

They're not just randomly choosing places but are moving to a new city each month and working from there like they would any other city. It's an interesting idea but obviously something that you can only do if you're a person who is able to work while on the road. Bonner has written about the experiment as a special feature for BoingBoing.net (my favourite blog) and he will be continuing to blog about it as the project unfolds. I like that I have just enough stuff to fit into two or three suitcases but it's going to be hard for me to cut down more. What about you? Do you think that you could live with less stuff? What about a significant amount of less stuff? Or would it be too heartbreaking for you to let go?

Yowzers! Busy!

Oh wow! Teachers college plus life seems to have hit me full frontal this past week and weekend and I haven't had time to write anything. Have no fear, trusty single follower: I have a ton of stuff to write about. I just have to get it out of my brain and onto the page (screen).

I think that a lot of bloggers, especially new bloggers, have a difficult time keeping the flow of information and writing going on a regular basis. It's too often that it just falls by the way side. I actually had a blog when I was finishing University but it, like many other things, dropped off until I wasn't able to do it anymore. Actually, that's not true: I was quite able but just didn't? Lost my mojo, so to speak. Not sure but it didn't happen and I am determined not to let it happen agian.

Not to sound like a whiner but keeping up with blogging and twittering are hard work!! (#firstworldproblems)

Twitter.....Before: Nay. Soon to be "Yay"?

Twitter. If you've lived in North America for any length of time, you know what it is. I have to say this, though: I avoided it like the plague when I lived abroad. And I had a lot of reasons which worked juuuuuust fine for me.

The foremost was that I personally believe that longer and more detailed pieces of writing are much more worth my time. I already have a low attention span and I thought that Twitter would reduce that even further. Beyond that, there's a reason that I don't have a smart phone: I'd be that obnoxious guy who would check his phone every second of every day, communicating with people far away but not with the people in close physical proximity. I was living in Korea, where elementary school children had more space aged technology hanging around their little necks than I had in my desktop comp at home. I felt that I had to work hard to not let tech take over my life.

But, really, it came down to this: it wasn't relevant to my students. Most of my students didn't even know what Facebook was much less how to use Twitter effectively. I spent my days trying to get them to put the verb in the beginning part of the sentence rather than at the end, so integrating social networking technology into the classroom was farrrrrrrr from my thoughts. It's not to say that Koreans in general and my students specifically were not technologically savvy. No, no, no, not that. They're some of the biggest online gamers on the planet (multiple TV channels devoted to professional online gaming) and if you look at your cell phone, I bet there is a good chance that it was developed there.

So....where is this attitude going to take me now that I'm a teacher candidate here in Canada? Probably not very far. Most people I know now have smart phones and there seem to be boundless possibilities when it comes to integrating technology (yes, even Twitter) into the classroom. Unfortunately, I am a bit out of touch when it comes to integrating software and online services into my teaching.  Only time and later blog posts will flesh this out but I'm interested and intrigued:  How did you come by Twitter? And further, how have you integrated Twitter either into your own learning or into your teaching? Or have you tried it and decided it wasn't worth it? I'm interested in both sides of the story and I hope that people can point me to some interesting resources.....and ones that are over 140 characters!!

Previous Experiences with Tech in the Classroom

For most of the people whom I'm just meeting here, they find it quite surprising to find out that I've spent the last five years teaching in the city of Busan, South Korea. It was a great experience and it also gave me a chance to develop skills in all sorts of different kinds of technologies useful for teaching.

Specifically, I've used:

* PowerPoint - the ubiquitous presentation software. I used this quite a bit when I taught at a middle school which had large televisions in every classroom. It was an excellent tool to create a "hook" at the beginning of class as well as to engage student interest throughout. When students didn't understand a concept or a word, it was great to be able to flash up extremely large pictures to help those visual learners in the class. Also, most classes had around forty students in them! It was much easier for those kids at the back to be able to see the screen rather than anything that I could have printed out.

*Classroom Information and Practice Webpage - <http://dan1freshman.pbworks.com> - I created this extremely basic site for the course in "Freshman Conversational English" which I taught at Dong-Eui University. As you can see from the site, I stopped adding new content at the end of the first month or so because my Korean students were really busy with their other studies (I taught mostly Engineering students) and because many students "don't care about English class" (an exact quote from a student). That was a bit of disheartening experience but one that I plan to learn from.

*A Live Scribe - I used one of these great tools which had come preloaded with information from a series of story books. When I taught kindergarten students, we read along with the story and when we came to new actions or vocabulary, I was able to point the pen to the small circle next to it and *BAM!* the pen was able to tell the students the word in Korean and in English. I had the lock-down on spoken English but, man, that pen could sing wayyyy better than I could.

* Various Computer Programs and Smartboard Setups - Rarely did I find a school that had a functioning smart board much less a projector to go with it but when I did it was a GREAT tool to amp up my classrooms. With these boards, I was able to turn something as basic as learning vocabulary into a hugely fun game which had every student in the class participating. I was able to do this with off-line materials as well but the projected set-ups made everything super easy and much more interactive.


I suppose those are just the highlights and, upon reflection, I've been pretty lucky to learn just the basics about these technologies. The great thing about my upcoming tech studies is surely going to be the ability to go more in depth with the tech and also finding novel ways to use it in the classroom. I fully expect to get schooled by some youngsters when it comes to finding new ways to use technology but I'll be damned if I'm not far behind them!!

Welcome!

Hello everyone!
Welcome to my new blog and it's first post. I created this as part of a new course that I'm taking: Computers and Instructional Technologies in the Secondary School. I'm pretty excited to learn and relearn about how to use technology in the classroom. Follow along with me as we explore the Interwebs!!