Taking Read Across America Literally (OR How To Stress Yourself Out And Dress Like the Cat in the Hat at the Same Time)

Today was Read Across America.

I was in charge of Read Across America. Why? Because it's my favorite school holiday ever. It's Halloween but with Dr Seuss. And Dr Seuss is the greatest author ever. The equation is simple:

Seuss cosplay + Seuss books = Happy Dougie

This year I decided to make things extra difficult on myself. Normally I send a few weeks working with the librarians and anyone else who wants to help finding members of the community like firefighters, cops, councilpeople, school board members, etc who are willing to come to my school and read to our kids.

This year I had a baby seven weeks ago. And I forgot to start planning. Because baby. Yes, I'm absolutely blaming my lack of preparation on new baby. Stuff gets shifted and forgotten when there's a squish at home.

So I was unplanned. And in a meeting with my VP I said, "I'm on top of it. It's not for a few weeks." At which point she showed me how calendars work and I thought, "Awww, crap. I'm screwed."

I ran to the twitters for help. I built a schedule in Google Spreadsheets taking into account everything that would be in everyone's way (I thought, I forgot about computer lab and how just because lunch ends at 11:40 that doesn't mean you're back at class at 11:40), posted it to twitter, and said, "HALP! Find a teacher and a time that works for you! Don't forget I'm in Pacific Standard Time!"

Damned if twitter didn't respond. After a few hours half the schedule was filled up. By the next day even more of it. Soon I had only a few spots left that I was able to fill with humans from my area. But most of the Read Across America readers would be coming to classrooms via Google Hangout.

I don't know about your staff. Maybe they are all tech-savvy. Maybe this plan wouldn't be any kind of an issue for your school. For my school this was very nearly a real dumbass plan. We do not have the most technologically comfortable teachers. Not all of them! Some are fine with computers. They aren't scared of breaking the internet. They are cool troubleshooting. They knew what I meant when I said "GHO" instead of "Google Hangout". They knew what I meant when I said "Google Hangout" instead of "a video call on your computer."

Some...not so much with the comfort or familiarity.

I had less than a week to prepare them. Here's the thing. I think GHO is really easy. I find the program intuitive and easy to troubleshoot. I also recognize that I'm in the minority. So I made a Slideshow and shared it with my staff going through every possible step I thought they might need, while also keeping it brief enough to not be scary.

I almost nailed it. So close.

I sent multiple emails to my staff last week. "Please please try this out with each other before Monday. Please email your readers, you have their contact information. Please please please hook up your Chromebooks and make sure you won't have any questions on the day."

Teachers are a lot like students.

Some did and I was able to help. Some didn't and I had emails Monday morning like, "We don't have the right cord to do this with the new Chromebooks." Ok good. I'm about to start teaching but I'll be down at recess or lunch to see what the hell that could possibly mean. We got the cord thing worked out, by the way.

Final verdict- It went better than I expected. I never expected it to go perfectly. I feared mass failure and pitchforks and anger at the blue-haired teacher who thinks tech is sooo easy for everyone. There was no mass failure. There were failures, but this is a first time thing, basically a giant experiment where I forced my staff to be guinea pigs. Fail happens. There were problems I didn't anticipate and problems I did but they didn't notice that I had.

The main issue was calls not connecting. I have seen that GHO does that. Sometimes you make a call and it says it's ringing and the person on the other end isn't seeing the ringing. I don't know why it does that. I do know that when it does that you stop, hang up, and try again a different way. A bunch of teachers did that. "I'm not sure how I got it to work but I started pushing buttons and it worked," one told me. Perfect. That's not far from what I would have done to help you. The less tech comfortable or patient teachers, and I'm not blaming them, gave up on the call. It happens, that's fine. I think there are things they could have tried but it's cool. I'm sorry to the readers that were supposed to read and never got connected.

One teacher or reader I think missed the pacific standard time thing. One read my schedule backwards, thinking she had a live reader when she had a GHO reader. And one told me she had a schedule conflict Monday morning.

The other common question was, "Why does the projector just show more of the Chromebook background but not the Hangout?" I heard this nearly a dozen times walking around collecting feedback after school. A TON of my teachers had no idea the screen extended when plugged into a projector. I swear I put it in my slideshow, but didn't want to say, "I told you this would happen," because they were asking for help very nicely. But I did tell them. It's the second slide. It's cool, most of them figured it out.

Those who did connect loved it. They were thrilled to talk to other teachers in other places. Their kids loved seeing the readers. It was awesome. I cannot thank everyone who tried enough. We took Read Across America literally. Readers from Washington to Virginia to Chicago. And beyond America! My class had an Aussie and an American in the United Arab Emirates. Talk about a lesson in time zones! Poor Jordan. "What time is it there?" my kids asked.

Jordan rubs his eyes, "It's 12:30am here." My kids don't understand. I show them a globe and how he's directly on the other side of it. He's calling from Tuesday.

My other non-American reader was Kim Sutton of Australia, who called from 7am Tuesday Aussie time. The future again!

Lindsey is less special. She just called from a few hours in the future. Kidding Linds, it was excellent.

Thank you to everyone who went out of their way to make this stupid big undertaking a success. I can't tell you how much I appreciate you showing what truly connected educators can do.

My call-in readers were Andrew Mead, Lisa Berghoff, Ashley Gravelle, Ryan Winklemann, Lindsey Lipsky, Kimberly Sutton, Ross LeBrun, Stephanie Robertson, Jordan Lanfair, Kory Graham, Travis Phelps, Dana Hsi, Grace Bedient, Sam Bates, Sarah Thomas, and Jessica Lifshitz. Find those people on twitter and show them all the love.

Special thank you to Jordan for the book. It means a lot. And everyone should know that Sarah Thomas was stuck at home because of snow so she read her class a book she wrote and illustrated when she was in second grade. I think that wins Read Across America book choices.

This is how tech works in the future. And even teachers scared of tech, teachers who had never done it before, managed to pull it off.

Harnessing the TeacherTwitter Brain

I am not the first person in line to sing the praises of The Twitterz from the rooftops. I don't have to be, plenty of teachers have made their entire accounts towards that end. That does not mean, however, that I am anti-twitter. I like twitter quite a bit. It's a powerful, valuable tool. It's not the alpha and the omega of PD, but it sure is nifty when harnessed correctly.

I am not, and this will come as not surprise to anyone paying attention, shy. I'm not shy about my opinions, my methods, or my attitude. If you had 150 words to describe me you would never approach shy. Your fingers would never hover doubtingly over the s and h keys.

What Twitter can be very good for is most easily used by teachers who are not shy. Creators who have no problems with putting something out there in the world to be read, commented upon, shared, and potentially laughed at, mocked, and held up as an example of why you're not such hot stuff. This doesn't mean we don't worry about those things happening, we just don't let those worries stop us.

Twitter is the perfect place for Hey, check out my stuff people. There's a bunch of people right there, a click away from checking out your stuff. Be it rubbish or not, people will click on your stuff. They like clicking on stuff. Clicking is like breathing. It fills a hole. It must. Why else would Buzzfeed still exist?

57 Reasons Why Clicking Is Awesome (Number 6 Might Change Your Life!)

Yesterday I wrote a project for my class about the California Gold Rush. We are fourth graders, we read a story about it that was pretty good but didn't delve as deeply as I would have liked, and we had a four-day week coming up. This is the Perfect Project Storm. I stretch a one week story into a two week story and use the second week to let my kids dig deep into gold mining. (Get it?)

Once the project was written I thought to myself, "I bet there are interesting ideas I haven't thought of for this project all over twitter. I should ask." So I made the Doc sharable with commenting rights through a link, wrote several drafts of the perfect tweet, and put it into the world.

Immediately the Doc was populated with Anonymous Capybaras, Anonymous Mice, Anonymous Nyan Cats, and Anonymous Chupacabras. Feedback flooded in, all of it wonderful and helpful. All of it making my project better for my kids. I added parts, clarified sections, tweaked, massaged, and finessed wording. I got ideas for bonus portions, next level thinking strategies,and ways to make it friendlier to my lower and ELD kids (those are not the same populations, just to clarify).

The collective Twitter TeacherBrain improved the learning my students will be doing this week. You made my project better.

But what a risk!

Yes, I'm confident. Yes, I know I'm a good teacher and I knew the project as I had written it was solid. Still, I'm not The Best and there are some amazing teachers on twitter. What if I shared it and people started poking holes in it? Pointing out flaws. Making the Impostor Syndrome that many, if not all, of us feel come into the light. What if I ended up curled up on my couch clutching my two week old, sobbing, and looking for jobs in a warehouse somewhere so as to limit my human interaction as much as possible? What if I'm wrong about how strong this assignment feels and everyone finds out?

Obviously that didn't happen. But I think those thoughts go through the minds of many teachers when they think about sharing drafts and ideas of student projects. Some of you right now have a small pit in the middle of your stomach just imagining sharing a project.

Share it anyway! Teachers are amazing. Here's what really happened because I shared my Gold Rush Project (Holy crap, a list right after I mocked lists! Oh, cruel irony!):

• It got better, which means possible student learning got better
• I got to meet more teachers and learn how wonderfully smart you are
• Some teachers will steal my project and make it their own
• I feel better about the project and about the world of education
• Some teachers were inspired by my sharing and will share their own work, which means learning will ripple and we will all learn more

Be brave and share more than your successes and failures and thoughts. Share your actual work so that we may steal it and be better for it. Share it so we may help you and be better for it. Did I take everyone's suggestions? No. Even though I got a lot of good ideas and comments some did not fit my overall goal or my class. I still have those ideas in my back pocket for next time. For another lesson.

Share. Sharing is caring. Sharing makes us better. Sharing makes us stronger. Sharing builds up the profession. Trust your instincts and ideas, be you a brand new baby teacher or an experienced teacher who remembers when social media was finding a note in a glass bottle on the beach. Because remember,

#NorCalChat 3/31

I co-moderated tonight's #NorCalChat on twitter. It was a great time, we talked a lot about the book. I'm going to post the questions we asked, then link to the Storify which has all the interactions from the chat.

Q1: Doug is a bombastic frontman of a never-ending funk machine. How are you a performance artist? #NorCalChat

Q2: The book explains that discipline is about teaching, not punishment. How do you use discipline to change behavior? #NorCalChat

Q3: HtWT frequently mentions the value of engaging lessons. What tricks do you have up your sleeve to create engaging lessons? #NorCalChat

Q4: Doug frequently mentions the need for empathy. How do you show  empathy in your classroom? #NorCalChat

Q5: HtWT mentions the importance of leadership. How do you exercise leadership in your school as a T, P, or both? #NorCalChat

Q6: The book mentions the importance of professional dress. How important is this to you? #NorCalChat

Q7: Perhaps most importantly, how do you HAVE FUN teaching? #NorCalChat

And Here is the Storify