My blog is now at jgregorymcverry.com

My blog is now at jgregorymcverry.com

This is how it posts to Google+

Google Play Store for Education

UPDATE: After listening to last week's episode of TWIT (the Google I/O summary. I realized that my hope was a little overblown. Google Play for Education will be for the Android Store. The Chromebooks of course use the Chrome Web store. So until these two infrastructures talk schools must decide do the want an Android tablet or a Chromebook.

Will it be a game changer? Yesterday, at Google I/O, Google stepped up their educational game. As many of you know I would love to throw my weight behind Chrome initiatives in 1:1 classroom. The price point is right, the enterprise features fit, Google Drive and Sites can be the LMS...but...the Apps just are not there.

Now I have argued in the past that the teacher and not the app matters. Yet there are glaring holes in the app infrastructure in the Play Store. These are tools that enhance teacher pedagogical goals. Most damaging for me is the lack of interactive whiteboard apps (if you know of any please let me know). There are others.

I am hopeful that this new effort will fill the void. So hopeful that I just ordered a classroom cart of 30 Chromebooks. I will pilot the use of these Chromebooks at a summer camp for 150 seventh graders.

+ianobyrne and I will be running a ChromeCamp unconference this summer. Stay tuned for details

In sum, the Google+ features are amazing, but it is Google Play for Education that excites me the most.

College Celebration Day

Far too many of our young our lost before they even begin to think about secondary education. We must, as a nation, encourage students, especially students of color, to attend college. These efforts must start early.

That is why I was so proud to be involved in the College Celebration Day at Southern Connecticut State College. New Haven Public Schools co-sponsored the event.

Throughout the day the students saw our ambassadors lead a cheer, the drumline perform, heard from Dean's about our programs, and then I led them in an activity on the top ten reasons to go to college.


This of course can not be a one off event. SCSU will be following these 392 7th graders until they graduate. Sports teams and college clubs serve as mentors to the students. We have also recruited and trained a cadre of tutors who work with literacy and math coaches, teachers, and students. College, for these student, cannot be seen as a choice. It must be the next natural step.

Taking the Digital Out for Digital Learning Day

You see it in their faces first. Borderline Walking Dead extras staring blankly at a screen overcome by a mixture of exhaustion and frustration. They came to learn about digital teaching and learning. They wanted to use the latest digital texts and tools enhance their pedagogical goals. Yet they are lost.

Tumbling in a world of pixels grasping for the comfort of print.

And I am okay with that. You see at many professional development seminars I run the ultimate goal is for participants to leave with a curricular activity that utilizes digital teaching and learning. I, usually with my colleague +Ian O'Byrne, lead participants through our framework of online research and media skills.

Then after providing sessions about online collaborative inquiry, online content construction  and online collaborative inquiry participants are introduced to a variety of digital text and tools. Finally we conclude with digital workshop time to allow participants to develop their own ideas.

Granted this usually happens over a series of days, but as last day approaches I will inevitably stumble across a teacher that does not know where to begin. They were overwhelmed by the digital texts and tools, amazed by the possibilities, and still lost.

So I walk over and turn off their computer. They have print on the brain and that is okay.

Pre-writing in a pixel age is no different than prewriting in print age. Writer's block is still a lack of strategies for getting started. People need to recognize this. So when I see a student or teacher struggling to get started I turn of the machine an turn to my most potent tool the writing conference.

I ask them to think about their goal for the week. I ask them to consider their pedagogical outcomes they would like to enhance. Then I break out paper. We storyboard their videos or websites. We remove the digital from digital learning for awhile.

Then suddenly all is right for the world. Students and teachers begin to see the navigational links they require. They draft copy for their projects, and they think about images.

So digital learning day is upon us do not be afraid to take out the digital in learning for just a little while.

Education: There isn't an App for That

After a life imposed hiatus I have returned to my Twitter account. It truly is my best tool for professional development, but it was a recent tweet of mine that drew a lot of attention and retweets that made me rethink my conclusions about digital teaching and learning:

There is no one app for education. You are the app. Thats like calling your textbook the curriculum. A tool does not make a school. #edchat
— Greg McVerry (@jgmac1106) January 30, 2013

As you know I have been doing professional development all over the country on the integration of tablet computing (usually the iPad...though I would recommend the Chromebook over the iPad). The first item on every teachers agenda is like finding that perfect app to solve all of their pedagogical goals.

They are like students searching for the one website that has all of the evidence they need for a research paper. In both cases neither exists.

It was Colin Harrison @ColinHarrison who really cemented the idea at a symposium on tablet computing I organized for the Literacy Research Association. An audience member commented that they could not find an app for reading comprehension. They audience sounded very similar to the teachers I work with who search for the perfect app. Colin commented that what decades of research on comprehension have taught us is oral  language and talk are the best tools to improve comprehension.

No app will change that. Instead teachers need to identify ways in which to enhance their pedagogical goals using iPads and other 1:1 computing devices. The easiest approach it to identify what works well in your classroom and transform the lesson for a digital environment. Do not reinvent the wheel.

Think-Alouds


The iPad can be a wonderful tool for teaching text structure or completing close reading activities.
You can use:

•  Fiction books available in the iBook (See Picture Book Tutorial)
•  Informational texts in apps such as iStorybook.
• Taking screenshots of informational texts and importing them into whiteboard apps.

Using your iPad as a document camera. 
The first step in using the iPad for think alouds is to create a text copy that can be annotated by the students.

Step one: Develop your learning activity.

• Decide what aspect of reading you wish to teach.
• Choose a text.
• Preview the texts. Identify elements of the text and genre you wish to highlight with students.
• Choose an additional text or sections for guided or independent practice.

Take screen shots of a text you are reading in class.

• Open up the book and lay it flat in a well lit area.
• Select the camera app on the iPad.
• Take a picture of the page you wish to annotate.
• Upload the image to a private file sharing system. Google Drive or Dropbox. Do not make the image public.

Model the think aloud for students. Make sure to annotate the text. Pay attention to text structure.

Have students then either open a screenshot or tae a screenshot. They can then complete a think aloud and record it using a whiteboard app.

Yes this lesson requires an app, but it is merely a tool. The learning is based on decades of research. The app just increases the efficacy and efficiency of classroom practices.

Analytics Won the Election and Other Hard Truths about New Literacies

I joke with the few family and friends I have in the analytics business and call them a bunch of "click counters." Yet analytics as a field is shaping our lives in ways we simply do not know. Most recently Barack Obama can thank his analytics team for a second term. It was a a socially connected ground game driven by analytics support that help to seal the White House. In fact Mitch Stewart who directed much of the analytics team drove this point homw to campaign staffers in the eve of the election:

Our analytics team constantly evaluates our program so we can ensure these volunteers are making a difference in the conversations they have with voters, especially after graduating from our interactive trainings.

On the flip side the Romney camp, Rassmussen Polling, and American Crossroads failed to utilize analytics correctly had distorted polls and lost the White House.

This failure was especcialy true for Romney headquaters on election day. They had a voter identification and analytics machine dubbed ORCA. It was more of a beached whale then a killer whale. Politico's MAGGIE HABERMAN and ALEXANDER BURNS report that the ORCA analytics was a disaster:

Numerous Republicans in and around the Romney campaign called the ORCA platform a total bust, stranding thousands of volunteers without a way of reporting data back to headquarters and leaving Romney central command without a clear view of developments on the ground.

Sure there were other mitigating factors that lead to the President's win (Romney's careening to severely conservative principles,  backfired efforts to limit access to the polls, an improving economy, etc) but 2012 was the year analytics helped to win the white house.

This why I tried to stress the issue of social networking and data driven marketing when I spoke at the Connecticut Business Educators Association Annual Conference. My basic premise was if you are not preparing business students for a world in which data drives your marketing decisions then you are not graduating students that are college and career ready.

If 2012 taught us anything it that data is everything. I attach my talk below: