#pikemalltech

Rethinking the Honor Roll

It’s time for educators to make honor a core value in schools. It’s time to build honor into our curriculums and establish it as one of the primary social and emotional learning goals we work to help students achieve.

Full disclosure: I am a reformed honor roll student. I made that list all the freaking time, save for my middle school years.

Why not in middle school? Because I refused to do homework. It was pointless for me. I didn’t need the work and did just fine on any and all exams. But my middle school teachers insisted on grading homework, of which there was more than a metric ton each night.

I had better things to do, like read comics. Or watch Jeopardy. Or Star Trek reruns.

So, like many other students, I missed out on the perks of being on the “honor roll” that many of my friends were enjoying. As a matter of fact, I’m pretty sure I lost some friends because I wasn’t on the honor roll.

Personally, the idea of the honor roll disgusts me. And it’s probably time we get rid of it.

Students don’t make the honor roll for any number of reasons. Whether it’s because they simply don’t care about getting the grades because they realize for most people the grade they got in 10th-grade geometry is no indicator of success in life or because their life away from school isn’t set up to support a great learning environment, many students just don’t care about the honor roll.

Let’s also think about the lengths that some students are willing to go to earn a spot on the honor roll. Yes, some will cheat. I’d venture to say that a student’s desire to cheat is directly proportional to their pressure to get good grades.

And how many students will lose precious sleep to stay up and cram information so they can “brain dump” on a test to get the grade?

Trust me, folks, sleep is way more important than a high GPA.

Perhaps it’s time we either get rid of the honor roll altogether or rethink the purpose it serves. Maybe we should focus on teaching students what honor really is and how to do work that is worthy of honor, not just a grade.

Stop Cancelling Recess

I admit I have taken recess time away from students. OK, maybe not recess time since we didn’t have recess in my middle school but we certainly incentivized certain achievements with a “recess reward”.

Yes, we even used recess as a reward for students who achieve our version of the honor roll.

What a horrible policy. Kids need time to play, at every age level. And using the excuse of placing them in an “activity” class doesn’t cut it.

They need time to decompress and just goof off. I’m 45 and I need time to do that every day.

Recess is an essential part of childhood (and adulthood) and we have to stop taking it away. Some states are moving to create laws to protect that time.

Which is pretty awesome.

Linkus Randomus

The Untold Story of the White House’s Weirdly Hip Record Collection

After more than 20 years, Apple retires the iPod

Colophon

Currently writing:

Volume 1: The Heretic Chronicles – a fantasy story about a girl, her sword, and extreme fundamentalist religion (WC: 15,457)

Untitled Sci-Fi novel – a group of students race across the stars, avoiding an evil empire (WC: 275)

Sci-fi short story – earth as a farm for aliens (WC: 492)

Currently reading:

The Library Book by Susan Orlean (52%)

Theodore Rex by Edmund Morris (17%)

Black Sun by Rebecca Roanhorse (1%)

Upcoming Appearances:

2022 Technology & Teaching Summit – Murray State University (VIRTUAL) (June 7)

2022 Kentucky DLC Summit (Private event for KY DLCs) – June 14

TeachMeet Central & Northern KY (IN-PERSON) – July 20

TeachMeet Kentucky (IN-PERSON) – July 22

*************************************************************

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 license. That means you can use it any way you like, including commercially, provided that you attribute it to me, Mike Paul, and include a link to pikemall.tech.

Quotations and images are not included in this license; they are included either under a limitation or exception to copyright or on the basis of a separate license. Please exercise caution.

How I would learn to code (if I could start over)

I was a computer science major back in the early part of this new millennia in another life. Somehow, I managed to leverage that into getting a job writing computer science standards for the state of Kentucky.

I still don’t know how that happened. Weird.

Anyway, the first coding language I learned was Java. It’s a beast with a very steep learning curve that intimidates most people. And it’s a horrible language to tackle when you’re first starting out.

If I had it to do all over again, I might go this route.

Service-learning isn’t just for after school clubs

I love service projects organized by students. Clothing drives, food drives, clean-up days, and many others are great ways to engage students in their communities.

But we shouldn’t just leave service projects to after-school clubs.

What if we made them part of the learning process in core content classes?

Tom Holman, board chair of the Search Institute, told me that their research shows one of the three most positive indicators (predictors) of future success among young people is their belief that “what they do makes a difference” (searchinstitute.org). He also recommends the Multiplying Good organization, which can be found at minnesota.multiplyinggood.org.

Producing More Successful Students Like Grant

Personalized certificates with The Google

It’s near the end of the school year for most places in the US and that often means certificates.

Whether you’re handing out certificates to students or teachers (hello PD), there are options for you if you’re using The Google.

How to Create and Send Personalized Certificates in Google Workspace

Linkus Randomus

Stanley Kubrick & Arthur C. Clarke Spent Years Debating How to Depict the Aliens in 2001: A Space Odyssey; Carl Sagan Provided the Answer: Don’t Depict Them at All

Crafting a Digital Commonplace Book

On Dealing with Fake News in Education

Colophon

Currently writing:

Volume 1: The Heretic Chronicles – a fantasy story about a girl, her sword, and extreme fundamentalist religion (WC: 15,457)

Untitled Sci-Fi novel – a group of students race across the stars, avoiding an evil empire (outlining)

Sci-fi short story – earth as a farm for aliens (WC: 492)

Currently reading:

The Library Book by Susan Orlean (30%)

Theodore Rex by Edmund Morris (10%)

Black Sun by Rebecca Roanhorse (1%)

Upcoming Appearances:

2022 Technology & Teaching Summit – Murray State University (VIRTUAL) (June 7)

2022 Kentucky DLC Summit (Private event for KY DLCs) – June 14

TeachMeet Central & Northern KY (IN-PERSON) – July 20

TeachMeet Kentucky (IN-PERSON) – July 22

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 license. That means you can use it any way you like, including commercially, provided that you attribute it to me, Mike Paul, and include a link to pikemall.tech.

Quotations and images are not included in this license; they are included either under a limitation or exception to copyright or on the basis of a separate license. Please exercise caution.

In the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic, schools looked for any way possible to maintain contact with students, families, and the community.

Resilience, Reorientation, and Reinvention: School Leadership During the Early Months of the COVID-19 Pandemic

Leaders who may not have been keen on social media before were scrambling. They would use any and all means to stay connected with students.

Of course, working from home is not the same as working from school. Even for students who have internet access at home, it’s often not as reliable or as fast as what they can get at school.

Our public schools have at least 1Gbps upload/download fiber connections here in Kentucky, better than pretty much anything available to homes.

Also, knowing that as the pandemic began around 15% of students in the US did not have reliable high-speed internet access at home and 17% of teens indicated they did not have the resources to complete schoolwork at home (the “homework gap”), just connecting to students would be an issue.

Still, schools leveraged what they could.

I wish I could say that all schools use social media well but we’re still very much on the learning curve of these technologies. As with most other things in education, someone has to manage a program for social media.

Often, this falls to the school library media specialist or a technology teacher. And just as often, these folks have little experience with crafting a media message or dealing with comments from the public on social platforms.

If we want our schools to use social media, we have to find a way to fund having a person that takes care of that content.

Yes, your school needs a PR person. Of course, this person should likely also have interns (students) who want to learn the ins and outs of modern communications and PR.

I don’t think it’s too much of a stretch for anyone to admit that social media is not always the best tool to introduce to students, especially when we don’t talk about digital citizenship in schools.

The role of social media in spreading panic among primary and secondary school students during the COVID-19 pandemic:

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2405844020326505

Due to the nature of most posts on social, our attention span is shortening. We don’t deep-dive into subjects any longer, we just want to swipe and get the next hit of dopamine.

https://medium.com/@profgalloway/the-attention-economy-is-making-us-stupid-86461c0baa05

With TikTok challenges wreaking havoc in schools as students returned to in-person learning, school administrators are likely to look for ways to avoid social media and block school access.

https://www.asralertsystems.com/blog/tiktok-challenges-school-safety

Of course, blocking access leads to other issues. When schools move past blocking access to the most egregious sites on the web, they can get into the tangle of “I need you to block this site/app because my students are distracted” requests from teachers at every level.

Historically, blocking access doesn’t achieve much.

https://hechingerreport.org/schools-efforts-block-internet-laughably-lame/

Where can we focus our efforts in schools to avoid the trap of blocking socials and multiple other sites that are annoying to everyone but students?

Digital Citizenship

I've long been a fan of Hyperdocs; a lesson-building format that focused on providing students with the resources they need to work at their own pace throughout a lesson or unit.

Hyperdocs also gives teachers the chance to provide supports for students in a lesson exactly when they need it most. The format works well in either virtual or blended learning environments, giving students control over the pace of the lesson.

With a bit of a different twist, there's now the HyperRubric.

Think of it as a traditional rubric super-powered with examples and supports that will give students the resources they need to complete a task.

HyperRubrics can give help students answer the "why" behind what they are doing in a lesson rather than just the what. We've all had great lessons that students loved but at the end of the lesson, students can't really express what they were supposed to be learning during the lesson, only remembering the cool stuff they did.