Teach42

Back in 1986, my father brought home our first computer. He’d probably say it was his first computer, but he’s wrong. He bought it for himself but by letting me play around with it he launched a hobby/passion of mine that has temporarily turned into a career. For those of you that are dying of curiosity, it was a Kaypro II. He also brought home a printer. To be honest, it was more like a typewriter than what we call printers today, but it certainly did the job.

I typed up my first paper on it and haven’t looked back once. I haven’t voluntarily hand written a paper ever since. I remember that it was a short story about a Neanderthal creating a cave drawing. I was proud of that story. I must have done a decent job because somebody once told me that my teacher hung on to that story and for years she used it as an example for how to do the assignment right. Yeah, I was very proud of that story. Nearly every assignment I’ve done since then was created and stored digitally.

Back then, those papers were stored on 5.25″ floppy disks. A few years later, I took all of those and moved them to 3.5″ floppies. Initially I was using Wordstar as my word processor, but soon I moved to Ami Pro. I remember how advanced that seemed at the time. As I moved from computer to computer, from CPM to DOS to Windows, I kept copying those disks. I figured, disks don’t take up much space, why get rid of all that work that I pored into those assignments? Eventually, they got put onto Zip disks, and then Sparq disks and then CDR’s.

I still have all those files. I have creative stories I wrote in middle school, poems I wrote in high school, essays I wrote in college, lessons from my student teaching, research papers I wrote while getting my masters degree, and every lesson plan and newsletter I have created. Not all of it is organized, and there’s more than a few files that I can’t even open anymore (anyone know how to open up WordPro documents?), but the fact is that I have it all. A few things have gotten lost throughout the decades, most notably that caveman story from sixth grade, but I have nearly every piece of work I’ve written since the late 80’s.

It’s really amazing to be able to journey back through my educational career and visit all the different sites along the way. There’s some work in there that I’m really proud of, that I spent a good chunk of my life creating. It seems ridiculous to just let it slip away when there’s really no need to get rid of it.

So why this trip down memory lane? Will has a great post about
how we should be sharing the work our students do.

…up until now, we haven’t had the means or the technologies to archive our students learning in meaningful ways for them to reflect upon and for others to learn from.

But now we do.

This is the big shift that the system is going to have to come to terms with. We have to stop seeing our kids as consumers and start supporting them as creators that can all contribute meaningfully to our collective body of knowledge. And we have to give every kid access to the tools to do so. I know there are many things that we have to make sure they know, and many literacies that we have to help them master. But any more, not to find 18 or 10 or even 5 quality things that each of our students creates in the course of a school year and not share them with the world does us all a disservice.

The paper I wrote about ancient Egypt in 8th grade may not have contained any new revelations, but perhaps it could have inspired other 8th graders, or even another 8th grade teacher. In college, I wrote some pretty profound things about My Name is Asher Lev, and even though I failed that paper (yes, I’m still bitter), other students might be able to learn a thing or two from it. I would love to be able to archive my entire body of work, from Kindergarten through this very morning, in one aniline portfolio. That way it could easily be sorted, categorized, summarized, highlighted, and displayed proudly for people to see. Imagine a third grade student being able to read his own teachers work from when she was in third grade.

It reminds me of something else Will posted about quite a while ago, the idea of a Lifetime Personal Webspace. Someplace where from birth through death, you could store your work, your ideas, your successes and your failures. A journal, portfolio, a trophy case and a soapbox all rolled up into one. A place to put videos of your school play, recordings of your own garage band, and everything you’ve ever written.

It almost seems like a crime that there are middle school students who don’t have copies of the work they created a few years ago. Especially considering it would almost certainly all fit on one DVD with room to spare.

How far back does your own personal archive go?

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