Complete Message / Complete Apology

In the corner of my classroom, I have two small posters. One lists the parts of a Complete Message. The other lists the parts of a Complete Apology.

Early in the year, I thoroughly teach my class what each of these mean. Then, when there is a conflict between students, I am able to send them to that corner of the room for a bit of privacy and time, with these reminders of how to rebuild their relationship.

It has met with great success, and brings greater relational health to my classroom. It is also beginning to have an impact on the adults at my school site. 

Here is an explanation of both.

Complete Message

1. When you…

2. I felt…

3. I thought…

4. I need…

1. When you…

         This is a statement of fact. Describe the situation as impartially as possible. No judgements about motive, intentions, or hidden agendas.

If “Presuming Positive Intentions” may be difficult, but at least try to “Presume NEUTRAL Intentions”.

2. I felt…

3. I thought… (These could be in either order: “I thought”, then “I felt”)

         Own your own feelings and thoughts. No “you made me feel…”. Just a description of what you experienced. Since these thoughts and feelings occurred “when you…”, the suggestion is that the event played a large part in those thoughts and feelings.

         This stage might be tricky. “I felt that you…” might not be received well. You’ve lapsed into accusation at this point.

4. I need…

         Without this piece, the listener to this “complete message” might wonder, “What’s the point?” Perhaps you’ll need an apology, or some discussion about how things could be better next time. Perhaps there’s a way that things could be repaired. This step is where you describe what you think could help heal the relationship.

Complete Apology

1. I’m sorry…

2. That I…

3. because________.

4. Here’s how things will be different next time.

1. I’m sorry…

         Or, “sorry.” This is where we DON'T want students to stop. Adults don’t want to hear this word alone, either. By itself, this is pointless and without real meaning.

2. That I…

         Mention exactly what you did that caused hurt. It will be meaningful to hear you own your actions.

         Don’t say “I’m sorry that you felt hurt…” This might be perceived as avoiding responsibility, and will not be very meaningful.

3. because________.

         You need to mention why this was not OK for you to do. What’s wrong with what you did? This will be extremely meaningful to hear.

4. Here’s how things will be different next time.

         Most of the time, the person being apologized to needs to know that you won’t do it again. Here is an opportunity to explain what you will try to do differently next time.

Many thanks for teaching me about these ideas goes to:

Ron Claassen, from the Center for Peacemaking and Conflict Studies at Fresno Pacific University

and

Delores Friesen, PhD, Profesor Emerita of Pastoral Counseling at Fresno Pacific University

Thanks to Edutopia for stimulating the conversation, which prompted me to write this up as a blog post! 

Make screencasts with Screencastify!

Screencastify is a free Extension for the Chrome browser that allows you to make a screencast of your screen as you narrate. This is a marvelous tool to demonstrate for your students how to do an assignment, or for your colleagues how they might use something with their students.

Here are some resources on how to get started with Screencastify:

https://www.screencastify.com/

A good blog post that walks through how to use it

A good YouTube video walking through how it works

Click here to go to the Chrome web store to install the Extension right away...


Screencast videos you create reside on YouTube, or on your Google Drive. You can embed them into a Google Site, a Blogger blog post, or any other web page you have access to to embed things!

Embed YouTube videos into Blogger

To embed something in your Blogger blog or Google Site, it is basically the same process. I'll explain how to embed a YouTube video here, and you can adapt this to embedding other things.

1. Click "Share"

1. Go to a YouTube video page, and click the "Share" button (which looks like a Greater Than symbol, and is near the "+Add To")

2. Click "Embed"

2. You will now see three options: Share, Embed, and Email. Share is selected by default, which shows you a simple URL. This will allow you to just allow someone to click and see the video on YouTube. This is not what you want. Click on the word "Embed", and you will see the embed code, which is HTML code.

3. Copy this HTML code to your clipboard.

3. Copy this HTML code to your clipboard.

Steps 1-3 may look a bit different, depending on the site you get your embed code from.

4. Now, in Blogger, begin a now blog post.

5. Click HTML

5. In the top-left area of the screen,
you'll see Compose and HTML. Click HTML.

6. You'll now see the way that blog post looks in raw HTML code. Since it's blank at this point, it will only look like this:

7. Paste the embed code you got from YouTube (Step 3, above) in that window somewhere. It will be easy to move it later, if you don't choose exactly the right place.

8. Click back to "Compose", and you should see your video will be.
        If you're using Google Sites instead of Blogger, you will see a rectangle where your video will be. You need to click "Save" to see the actual video.

9. I suggest adding a bit of text just before your video, to explain to your audience what they're about to see. This way, they will perhaps be persuaded to actually click on, and view, the video. Entice them to spend the time necessary to watch the whole thing, etc.

Below is what your blog article might look like, if you were introducing this YouTube video:

----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

You may wonder how to embed things into Blogger. Here is a great video I found on YouTube that you might find useful.

Let's Go Diigo!

Why use Diigo?

Curate resources you find. If you're like me, especially when using Twitter, you may find it hard to keep all the resources that you're finding organized. I'm afraid I'll lose track of a dynamite resource. I can't exactly bookmark a tweet...the stream keeps flowing!


What is your favorite way to use Diigo?
There are several ways to set up your desktop, laptop, or mobile device to optimize your use of Diigo. Look at the list here, and see what looks good.

https://www.diigo.com/tools

Here are a few suggestions from that link to get started. Please leave a comment regarding which you have tried, and which are your favorites.
Diigo Chrome Extension
https://www.diigo.com/tools/save_tweets
https://www.diigo.com/tools/tagroll
https://www.diigo.com/blog_this/config
https://www.diigo.com/tools/diigolet

And one more idea or reason to care...
Embed your own Diigo feed on your website
You can let your PLN know what resources you have put together. You don't have to tweet out each one, especially if you found them a while ago.

Best Practices for Bringing Your Best

The other night, in the class I am teaching at Fresno Pacific University, I and my students were all struck by a particular passage in our textbook, "What Connected Educators Do Differently", by Whitaker, Zoul, and Casas.

We reflected on what the authors refer to as "best practices for bringing our best to our job every day". I hope this list challenges and inspires you as much as it did us.

•They bring their best to their organization every day, whatever their best may be that day. They are grateful for the opportunity to make a positive impact on a child every day.

•They are intentional with their time and make the effort to connect personally with students and staff on a daily basis and then follow up with a quick word or note. They realize that even the smallest gesture of kindness can make all the difference to the person to whom it was extended.

•They are empathetic. They take time to understand, share, and be sensitive to another person’s feelings in order to foster a culture of trust. They recognize that every student and staff member will face some sort of personal and professional challenge at some point in time and they are sensitive to this fact. 

•They value mistakes and failure as learning opportunities. When they themselves make a mistake, they own it, apologize, and work to make sure it does not happen again. When they fail, they reflect on the experience as a way to see what they can learn for future attempts. 

•They model forgiveness—they are sincere in accepting apologies and moving on. They believe that most people’s intentions are good. 

•They understand they will not always see immediate results when working with kids. They are patient and think long term. They do not take things personally. They have figured out that many kids are just testing a system which had failed them long before that particular teacher came into the picture. 

•They have high standards for all kids every day. They do not make excuses for kids based on race, socioeconomic class, environment, or poor parenting. They truly believe in all kids all of the time and, more importantly, they love them as though they were their own. 

•They acknowledge inappropriate behavior of kids. They understand that by not doing so, they are sending a message that the misbehaving student is not worth their time or that they have given up on them. They have come to learn that if they hesitate to correct poor behavior, they have become part of the problem. 

•They bring positive energy every day. They know that complaining and talking negatively about kids, staff, or the work environment without offering a solution says more about them than it does about who or what they are complaining about. They take time to smile and laugh and encourage others to have fun.

These are traits that we hope to exhibit (on our good days!), which have very little to do with technology, a PLN, or anything in the course. However, working on a PLN is all about relationships, and this list is all about relating to each other in a healthy way. It is about healthy relationships, a healthy school site. It is a great list of ways that we can love our neighbor as ourselves, with deep respect... our neighbors being our students, our school-site colleagues, and our PLN-colleagues... ways we can do this with respect for ourselves, as well.

Invite Guest Bloggers

To add value to your Platform, and to offer more to your PLN, one strategy is to invite someone else to write a blog article on your blog.

Most successful blogs have a regular pace - a schedule of how often they post an article. Since you will want to establish a regular schedule of blogging, this is also good for when you want to take a vacation.

Go to your blog's Settings and select "Basic". You will see a screen like this.

You'll notice several things from this.

1. You can change your blog's URL from here. See "Blog Address"?

2.  You can "Add authors" to your blog. This should feel a lot like shareing a Google Drive file with someone. Here, I am preparing to invite Barack Obama to write a blog post on my blog. All I have to do is click "Invite authors" now, and he will get an email inviting him!

Watch this space for some stimulating articles of domestic and global importance coming soon. That is, if this is actually his gmail address...and assuming he knows or cares who I am. 

Use URL Shorteners to Tweet

As you develop your Personal/Professional Learning Network (PLN), you will be using Twitter.
There are many powerful professional conversations are happening there every day.

When using Twitter, you will notice that many professional tweets include a web resource in the form of a URL. However, when tweeting, we are limited to 140 characters.

That means that if I want to share my classroom website, it eats into my 140-characters to tweet the full-length URL: https://sites.google.com/site/misterwarkentin/

That's 46 characters! 

"There's gotta be a better way!" you might think. "Some URLs that I might want to share are way longer than that. And then if I want to actually SAY anything in my tweet, I can't afford a long URL!"

Using URL shorteners are just the thing for this problem. You can use them with a free account, and the URLs that you shorten will be saved, so you can look them up again, if you ever want to use them again. Or, you can use them without a login.

My two favorite examples are:

https://bitly.com/  and

https://goo.gl/

I used https://bitly.com/ to reduce my class website's URL to: http://bit.ly/senorw

That's only 20 characters - less than half of its former self!

(and a whole lot easier to share with someone, even outside of Twitter)

I used https://goo.gl/ to reduce my class website's URL to: https://goo.gl/YeoYF6

That's only 21 characters - also a significant diet!

One other advantage of https://goo.gl/ is that you can easily make QR codes with one more quick step:

Click Details, right next to your long URL on your the https://goo.gl/ page.

You'll then see a QR code image on the resulting web page.

Copy that image to your desktop, and you can paste it into whatever document you need it for!