It’s May.

Already.

We had our “graduation” on Saturday; although it felt more like a commencement/start of Phase II than a valediction. For me, that means leaving the classroom and returning to school, full-time, in the fall to pursue my PhD. This decision grew directly from my Kenan experience, in which I realized that I am stronger than I think and I can do more than I know.

Phase II for me also involves me taking on a more public role as an advocate for students, teachers, and families. I come from the theatre world, where I worked decidedly behind the scenes. I had no interest in the publicity of an actor’s life; I preferred to create with my hands deep into the early morning hours. And while I have since left the physical backstage behind in a past life, ghosts of the theatre still tug at me. For example, I dressed in all black for our school’s recent Math and Science Night: ready to go behind the scenes and stage manage. I am the woman behind the curtain; pay no attention to me.

Except that, for all of the ritual of education, teaching and theatre diverge. At some point, it isn’t enough to bear down, nose to the grindstone, in search of a beautifully, effortlessly elegant seam. Kids don’t work that way. And neither do communities in which they live.

And so, I need to step forward and realize that I *am* “that teacher,” the one who pushes boundaries, who gives voice to ideas, who connects resource with resource at a level beyond just my school or district. It is time for me to take on a new role, one I never saw for myself.

So maybe, instead of “Phase II,” I am really about to enter “Act II.” Either way, the curtain is rising…

I have had a Twitter account for several years, mainly because I wanted to use Paper.li as a way to connect my families with news articles that might be of interest. I pulled together a feed culled mainly from respected news organizations in math, science, and art, signed up for Twitter…and ran into school board policy.

Until this year, we were not allowed to use social media in any form to communicate with families. (The current policy is available here.) Skype was even blocked in our district for a time. On one hand, this protects teachers’ privacy, and the school board’s legal pockets. [Full disclosure: I’m not on Facebook. My husband has an account that I use on occasion, but the account is mainly his. As a teacher who lives in the community I serve, staying off Facebook represented a small way to buffer my family from my work. So I get the arguments about privacy and data control.] On the other hand, blanket blackouts represent a missed professional opportunity to teach students about the world using the tools that they have available to them.

I look at the work done by Matt Gomez with kindergarten students where digital tools are explicitly incorporated into the classroom so that students understand both the permanence and the human impact that digital learning can have. I recognize that there will always be “mean girls,” but perhaps there might be fewer if we start earlier in helping students to understand “their” world is both bigger and smaller than it has ever been. Kids are on social media, whether we choose to acknowledge it in schools or not.

Later this fall, I am going to try an experiment with my students, born purely of Twitter-fueled happenstance. Among the organizations I followed on Twitter for my Paper.li feed was NASA. In September, NASA-JPL held a contest, randomly selecting followers for a backstage tour. In November, I will be heading behind the scenes at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory–and they are going to let me livetweet the event for my students to follow along. The school is going to create an account for me to use so students and families can follow me on my adventure and ask questions along the way. I’m hoping that this will turn into a teachable moment about the power of social media to extend the world, person by person, as well as the responsibility one has when using social media.

How do you teach kids to use digital tools?

A post office, two gas stations, seven churches, and one school.

Add in a feed store, a factory, and Missy’s Grill, and you’ll have much of Efland. Our tiny hamlet is not well known, except as an exit off the highway. (In fact, when giving directions, I ask people if they know “Elf-land” and we go from there.) And yet, it is my world. Tiny Efland holds deep those nearest to my heart. They are sheltered beneath its trees, nurtured by its streams, fed by its fields. Its gentle, not-really-wilderness of buzzing insects, poison ivy, and rotting-log-kingdoms affords a level of biodiversity not as easily found in the manicured neighborhoods of nearby towns.

My love letter to my adopted home was inspired by Rob Dunn’s guest blog for Scientific American. In the article, he traces out the possible connections between trees, people, and insects, both plain and exotic. We know so little, still, about our world; there are so many places we haven’t thought to look.

For my students, so many places remain hidden, often obscured by curtains of poverty, culture, or language. Many have never left our county. Some have never left Efland. As I think about the year, I want to help them connect to the scientists with whom I have been fortunate enough to work, scientists from around the wide world who even speak the same language. I want to help my students connect to their own passions through 4-H. And I want to help them see, Matrix-style, the marvelous, mostly unknown, microbial world they inhabit and to which they are fundamentally connected.

I want to peel back the curtains for them, to bring forth for them the world, so that they may better love our small corner of it.

(This machine doesn’t actually use fluorescence, but it was far more photogenic than the machine that did. Coulter counters count cells using changes in impedance. Sorry about sacrificing scientific accuracy in the name of art. It’s the designer in me.)

In our lab, we used Picogreen, a reagent used to sort out double-stranded DNA from RNA, single-stranded fragments, and random free nucelotides. When the reagent encounters double-stranded DNA, it binds to the molecules and fluoresces. Keeping track of the fluorescent signals helps the scientists to know more about the quality of their samples.

I’ve been feeling rather like a free nucleotide floating in the miasma for much of this project. The past week, however, I had to put together a slide show for my lab explaining what I learned, and I realized that more “stuck” than I realized. I missed the individual signals, but found substance in the aggregate.

So my fluorescent moment is that learning can be slow and subtle, even to the point where we might miss it on the first scan. But once the catalyst starts to work, and we know what to look for, those tiny points of light coalesce into something illuminating, brilliant, beautiful.

40 years ago last week, Neil Armstrong stepped on the moon.

The computer system that guided Armstrong, Aldrin, and Collins on their iconic flight was less powerful than a USB thumb drive.

This story has been running through my head over the past week as I have been musing the question about implementing the Common Core, NC Essentials, and digital learning tools. On one hand, I do think that the standards will have more administrators paying attention to whether or not teachers are using digital learning tools. On the other hand, I also think that, without a clear understanding of what “implementation” can mean, we will end up with more stories like the one Christina Lowman shared, wherein “ELMO on” is interpreted as “digital learning.”

As educators, it is incumbent upon us to talk about what “implementing digital learning tools” means, and to remember that it isn’t the technology but the tool-user that is our moonshot. In what ways are we helping students use digital learning tools so that they make take their own giant leaps?