High Tech Humanitarianism

Recently there has been a lot of excitement at my school around the website Freerice.com. Our school's Civil Rights Team has sponsored a school wide competition on the site. The website has two simple goals.
1. Create a SAT type vocabulary practice for students.
2. Raise money to donate rice to starving countries.


For every right answer a student provides, Freerice donates 20 grains of rice to the UN World Food Program. The money comes from advertisers running ads on the bottom of the site. I have had several conversations with students trying to explain the concept of ad-supported services recently. They seem totally unaware that their myspace, facebook, Gmail, or even their local TV are supported by the advertisers.

The site lets you remember your previous total on that machine without having to log in and adjusts your questions to a difficulty level you are comfortable with.

Our Civil Rights Team is providing prizes to the individual and the homeroom with the highest amount of rice donated. The competition for our school will end on May 15th, when we will tally up the totals and award the prizes.

It has been a great motivator for students and since we have a 1-to-1 laptop initiative for our whole high school, it is being played by most students several times a day. This is a good thing since I heard a news story on NPR recently that the world food market for rice has been disastrous. Apparently the price of rice per ton has gone from $250 USD to $860 USD in just a short time. Click below to listen to a news report about the food market pressures.

Who would have thought that laptops could feed people? If you'd like more information about how we started this competition so that you could sponsor one, send me a comment or email.

Default setting: Change the Policy

I was in a teacher's meeting today which was basically an outlet for staff members to express their troubles with a district policy that allows students to retake assessments. The typical arguments arose "We are enabling them to be irresponsible" "Why should they get more than one chance, I never did?" "Kids aren't doing homework to prepare for assessments, we need to return to the practice of grading homework"

I understand the frustrations of my fellow staff members and I am not blogging this to mock them. But I see an unfortunate trend when it comes to trying to make change happen in my school. The policy change. For some reason the major push always seems to be to create a new policy or take out and old one. Apparently, that is change. If it's posted on the wall, in a handbook, or just plain written down, it's change. This seems a little cynical, sorry.

But I struggle why we never look at the underlying issues of these symptoms.
Symptom: Students aren't doing homework, or adequately preparing for tests and assessments. Root cause? Who knows, because we don't discuss that part. Worse yet, we forgot to ask the patient-- the student.

One of my colleagues did just that after the meeting today. One answer, "the homework we are given doesn't help us on the assessment, it's just given to us in a packet that we are not taught about, just handed out." I'm not saying that teenagers' words aren't often designed to get to the path of least resistance for them, I'm just saying that we have not started to truly reflect on the way we run our classes to expect real learning from our students.

We never want to start in a teacher's class room when it comes to changes in a school, we always push the mark as far away from the teacher as possible. Maybe because hard working teachers put a lot of effort into their work and any questioning is a sign of a dissatisfaction with the staff member.

I know I am kind of rambling on tonight but I just hope that our conversations can morph into examining the underlying issues of student motivation, relevance of our curriculum, learning strategies (not teaching strategies) and the use of assessments for diagnostics, not just summative evaluations.

Going Live

I spent most of this evening trying to figure out how to do a live interactive show for my podcast Wicked Decent Learning. After looking over some tools, we chose to give Skype a try with an added call recorder called PowerGramo. The call recorder will probably cost us about $15.00 USD but if it works the way we are hoping it will be worthwhile.

So here's an open invitation to educators. On April 11th, 2008 at 8:OO PM EST we will be asking for feedback from folks on the topic "What do you think is Wicked Decent" in education. Basically it's a chance to see what ideas people have seen in the classroom lately that are positive, exciting or innovative... you know Wicked Decent.

If you have never used Skype before, it's free, easy to set up, and worth downloading. Even if you don't have a computer microphone, you can text chat during the show with it. Our screen name for Skype is WickedDecentLearning.

Hope to see you there.