Effective reflection should involve four steps: Assessment, probing deeper/looking for meaning, planning and review. The act of reflection becomes tremendously powerful when we couple it with the discipline of taking action and checking for results. We will look at each of these steps and offer a set of simple tools to help you improve your reflection practices.

Now, while the memories are hopefully clearer, is the perfect time for you to conduct intentional reflection on this past school year’s performance.  These questions should provide a systematic questioning or assessment of your performance in several key areas. To give you a starting point, four key areas have been pinpointed and several questions to ask yourself are provided. As you answer these questions, be sure to record your observations in a special notebook or computer file for later reference. If you have questions that you feel will serve you better, feel free to replace the ones provided  with your own.  What’s vital is that you answer the questions honestly and as fully as possible.

1. The Big Picture (school year as a whole).
   • What is my overall view on the school year?
   • In what situations did I or did I not really succeeded this year?
   • Have I been more tired  or spread thinner than in the past?
   • Does this fit with my personal mission?
2. Planning/Instruction
   • How was the pacing?
   • What lessons seemed less effective this year than in the past?
   • Am I teaching a specific lesson out of laziness?
   • Are there any students that I am under-serving or having difficulty reaching?
   • How can I make my classroom better serve my students?
3. Relationships
   • How are my relationships with the administration, fellow teachers, students and parents?
   • What could I do to improve these?
   • In what ways could I experience growth in my relationships?
4. Professional Development
   • What would I like to learn to improve as a teacher?
   • What do I need to commit to learn in order to stay relevant?
   • What additional actions could I take to meet my personal mission?

Step two, consists of studying your responses and performing a deeper analysis of these responses. This is done with the intent of finding shared commonalities or previously unidentified connections. In the process of reflection, it’s quite common to identify the surface symptom rather than the less visible core cause. By digging a little deeper, this misdirection can be significantly reduced and allowing for the crafting of solutions that will be more effective. Several questions that will help in this process are provided below.

• How are these successes/problems connected?
• Could this be a result of classroom management?
• Is this connected to scheduling or planning?
• Is this a result of teaching methods?
• Could this be caused by my limited knowledge of a subject?
• Is this a failure of technology?

Following the deeper analysis, it’s time to create a plan of action. With the core causes identified, rank the identified solutions in order of importance. It may help to separate these into three categories based upon urgency. Those needing a short-term response (one month or less), longer-term  attention (greater than one month), and those of questionable importance. From these groups, pick the actions to which you are most committed and determine the logical time necessary for their accomplishment. Use a calendar and set a target date for completion of these actions. Hint: Make sure that you set clearly definable actions as your objectives (i.e. Read The Elegant Universe by August 1^st or create a good writing habits poster by July 17^th). Furthermore, it is very important to select reasonable completion dates.

The fourth and final component of effective reflection is to review your progress. Often goals and deadlines are set but there is no follow-up to see if they were achieved. To minimize this, pick at least one day each month and set half an hour aside to review your progress (try and make it the same day every month). Goals that are met may be crossed off the list, while those that haven’t been achieved will need a little more attention. As you examine these, see if you still believe in their importance. If you still feel that they are vital, go ahead and revise your process or completion date in the manner that makes the greatest sense. Those that no longer maintain relevancy can be dropped. Reviewing your progress on goals not only brings great satisfaction from seeing the progress, it will make you a better educator.

So take an hour or so and put these tools to use before you find yourself saying, “I can’t believe I let another year go by without really reflecting.” There’s no better time than today to reflect on your past year and begin crafting the future.

Twitter for Teachers

For several months, Shawn and I have been receiving requests about how educators can effectively use Twitter. After sorting through emails and responding to requests, we realized the best way to answer these questions was by creating a video tutorial for educators.

After much hard work, we are proud to announce the launch of  “Twitter for Teachers in 15 Minutes” . The first in a series of video training with easy to follow instruction, specifically designed to help educators use Web 2.0 tools more effectively. In fifteen minutes we’ll teach you how to become Twitter Savvy. This product also includes more than twenty-five minutes of advanced material that will help you become a Power Twitter User. Of course there are some very cool bonuses as well!

We are holding a special contest and giving away two copies of “Twitter for Teachers in 15 Minutes“.  There are two ways to enter:

1. Add a comment at the end of this post, explaining how you’ve found Twitter useful as a teacher.
2. RT this article on Twitter. Be sure to use the hashtag #edbuzz

The deadline for entries is 9 p.m (PST), Wednesday, December 30, 2009. We look forward to hearing from you. See the full sales page here…

In addition to her fine guest article, Jennifer has graciously provided EDBuzz fans the opportunity to win a copy of ISTE’s The Best of Learning and Leading with Technology. There are two ways to win:

1. Click here to register
2. Tweet or retweet the link to her article (http://bit.ly/1xepIM). Be sure to attach the hashtag #edbuzz

A winner will be selected Oct. 2, 2009. Spread the word and we’ll look forward to seeing you tomorrow…

The @ONE Project was initially designed with the purpose of making it easier for California Community College faculty and staff to learn about technology that would enhance student learning and success. With this goal in mind, the @ONE Project provides training, online resources and research for free – or at a very low cost (funding is provided by a Telecommunications and Technology Infrastructure Program grant from the Community College Chancellor’s Office). The great news is that you don’t have to work for a California Community College to use these services. These training tools are available to all educators.

Training offerings include:

• Desktop Seminars (presented at lunch)
• Online Courses (led by an instructor)
• Self-paced Training
• In-person Institutes

With the desktop seminars taking very little time and so many training options available for free or generally less than $75, the major barriers to an educator’s learning are removed. This makes @ONE inviting, not only for the educator that seeks to be proactive in their technology training, it also provides an inexpensive option for schools/institutions to effectively train their educators. Quite an attractive option for either party in these economic times.

Because @ONE provides training in such a variety of subjects, from file management to Dreamweaver MX, it may seem a daunting task to decide what classes to take. @ONE works with both educators and administrator’s to help create the most beneficial paths for learning. In addition to having training for a wide variety of subject, @ONE provides courses that aimed to serve varying levels of proficiency. With this flexibility it is easy to see several ways of using @ONE to provide the learning/training for education staff. I hope to bring you more regarding the @ONE Project in a future installment.

In his talk, Professor von Ahn pointed out that in 2003, the world spent 6 billion hours playing solitaire. This was contrasted with the 7 million hours necessary to construct the Empire State Building or the 20 million man hours required to complete the Panama Canal. Professor von Ahn proposes that: Using human skills and abilities, it is possible to solve large-scale computational problems and teach computers many of the basic human talents.

The first example provided is reCaptcha. Professor von Ahn developed reCaptcha, a new form of Captcha that helps digitize books. In reCaptcha, the images of words displayed to the user come directly from old books that are being digitized; they are words that optical character recognition could not identify. It is estimated that 200 million Captcha’s are solved dail by humans around the world. reCaptcha was designed with the purpose of using crowdsourcing, to identify distorted text. Once a piece of text has been agreed upon by the necessary number of humans, it is re-inserted to help in the digitization of the book.

Professor von Ahn next turned his attention to the use of computer games to achieve his goal of solving large-scale computational problems that computers aren’t capable of solving. Google images provided a perfect case study. In this situation, a user may search for an image by keyword, however, the implemented method of tagging these images was woefully inadequate. Far too often, images had no relation to the keywords associated with an image. To solve this problem von Ahn invented the ESP Game. ESP takes two players that don’t know one another with an objective to get them to type the same word without communication. Both players share an image and words are provided by the players that describe the shared image. As users agree on keywords they become taboo or unusable. This helps spur the further identification of keywords to be associated with an image.

Professor von Ahn stated that already 50 million tags had been agreed upon by 200,000 players. A surprising number of which play for more than 20 hours a week and sessions of 15 hours are not unknown. These numbers lead to belief that if 5,000 players played simultaneously, all of the images in Google would have been agreed upon by humans in a few weeks. While the ESP game is rather addictive and has proven a hit (licensed to Google), the obsessive nature it fostered, bothered Professor von Ahn and a maximum of 15 consecutive hours (10 for .edu) has been imposed, after which, the the system will lock you out.

An interesting side note mentioned regarding the ESP game project, was the acquisition of user data. Students constructed prgrams that could accurately determine several demographics of ESP users. After assessing a couple of responses from players, in 98% of the cases, gender could be accurately identified, while age could be fairly accurately determined in 85% of the cases. This could potentially provide very powerful tools for marketers, as well as training material for computers.

Professor von Ahn mentioned the strong bond created between partners that play the ESP game. Partners that perform well together not surprisingly, find a warmth and connection. These have led to some users wanting to date their anonymous partners and describe the game as “anonymous intimacy”, “like crack”, “a great way to learn English”

In what manner can this be applied to today’s classroom activities? Where can crowdsourcing provide learning opportunities? Small inefficiencies in procedures or schedules can grow over the school year to an enormous figure. For example: Two minutes, five periods per day of wasted time, turns into 30 hours over a 180 day school year. How can we recycle these wasted human cycles?

L:uis von Ahn has several current projects including the ones mentioned in this article. See the URLs below for more information:

• http://gwap.com
• Luis von Ahn’s blog

It doesn’t take an engineer to realize that $10 per laptop will be a very ambitious project indeed. The current (and final) iteration of MIT’s OLPC stands at $176, 76 percent higher than originally estimated. The primary reason for the cost increase was hardware upgrades, with the machine now sporting a 433MHz AMD Geode processor, 256MB of RAM, 1GB of Flash storage, three USB ports, 802.11b/g, and an innovative dual-mode display.

Can India do it? The inner philanthropist hopes so, but the realist who buys technology says, “No way.” Why? Component prices are simply too high. The screen for the XO laptop, which is probably the single most innovative thing OLPC has to offer, was estimated to cost $28 per unit, in volume, by Merrill Lynch. OLPC has said that the complete motherboard/CPU package will cost roughly $75, and based on the Merrill Lynch estimates, it looks as though a third of that cost will be for the CPU alone. In other words, the CPU itself, the motherboard, the screen, the NAND flash storage, and the RAM… each of these costs more than $10 to manufacture for inclusion in the OLPC. India’s $10 price hopes appear to be nothing more than pure fantasy.

As it turns out, she and the skeptics were right. It appears that the prototype currently costs more than $20 dollars to produce and is missing input and display devices. Techtree’s article explains:

After being bombarded with various media reports about India’s very own $10 laptop, its time to get real.

The much-touted cheap computing device named “Sakshat” turned out to be a fancy “pen-drive” as The Times of India put it, with some bells and whistles. The details of the product, which are still not available, were unveiled by the Ministry of Human Resource Development at Tirupati recently.

As for the product, what you get for Rs.500 are the following: 2GB of storage memory, WiFi connectivity, Ethernet port(s) and USB connectivity. This is a far cry from the laptop it was touted to be. For starters, there is no screen on this one — so there goes the computing device mumbo-jumbo. What this means is that for it to display data stored on it, it will need a compatible output device (which could be a laptop!).

The “Sakshat” measures 10″x5″ and will be priced at $10 even though the manufacturing costs had reached almost $30. But then, thanks to a considerable cost cutting endeavor, the cost was finally bought down to $10.

On the surface it appears that the Indian government has clearly sold a bill of goods it can’t produce. However, while this may be true, there is still much about the project that should be intriguing. When one looks at the first two of the five Sakshat modules, not only have these modules been constructed, but they provide the basis for a rather powerful tool.

Sakshat press release…

Educational Resources:these help the learner to explore through the vast knowledge base available on the net in the form of e-books, e-journals, digital repository, digital library etc. Most of the sources listed are open source material.

Scholarship: this module is specifically meant for scholarship holders at national and state levels to keep track of their progress and keep them informed about other scholarship opportunities through news feeds and announcements.

This means that a tool that will provide access to e-books, e-journals, and online lessons, will have been created for somewhere near $10. I’m aware that people will immediately bring up the fact that there is no display and that inherently makes the Sakshat useless by itself. While this is true, the Sakshat, if it can be hooked up to a television becomes very useful. It wouldn’t be difficult to see this working very well in a family setting to provide an incredible educational opportunity.

During the next year or two, a cost-effective solution may be found to deal with the input and display issues. If a computer could be built for $40-50 it doesn’t seem like anyone has failed. This would bring unprecedented opportunities to hundreds of millions of people.

Scott Mcleod shares his thoughts in his blog.

Keep posted. Between OLPC’s XO, Sakshat, and netbooks, I believe we will be revisiting this topic quite often in the near future.