Aswirl

Influencing this post:
Karl Fisch's Thought for the Day 11-25-07
Jeff Utecht's Where's the R&D in Education?

Karl Fisch excerpted this quote from Shelly Lazarus, CEO of Ogilvy & Mather:

We’re living in a world now where consumers are bombarded with thousands of commercial messages – they’re everywhere you look. Unless you cut through that and engage someone, I think you are lost. Consumers are now clearly in control. They control what they hear and see, when, and where. You have to find new ways to allow them to actively engage with you, or the money you spend is wasted.

and I immediately thought back to watching Seth Godin's TED Talk in which he spoke about the noise created by advertising. Lazarus is on to something here, as is Karl with his appeal to the educational community. What's the parallel?

Lazarus's quote echoes what has been said many times over: engage them don't enrage them because they have heard it all before. When Godin spoke, the most striking thing, and being an Apple geek I understand this all too well, was that he spoke about how the center of the populace doesn't hold it for advertisers any longer; if you are going after the biggest demographic, you are going to lose and and lose bad. The niche market, the long tail, the early adopter is who you need in order to tip the scales in your product's or idea's favor. There's the link--the early adopter, or as we like to call them here, the blue-bird.

Bear with me.

Jeff posted today about who is doing the R&D in education. He argues that it is us, the educational technologists, who are doing the majority of the testing and playing with new ideas. Taking Seth's and Shelly's ideas into consideration, we are the early adopters. It's what we are paid to do, and, in my experience, what we are passionate about. However, is that where we should be heading? I've got this idea stuck in my head that the best way to transfer the R & D is not through my work, but the work of the early adopter, the blue-bird.

Have you ever seen teachers learn from one another? It's magical, and quick! There is no wasted time, just "do this, do that, this works well, this doesn't, let me know how you do." While it is our responsibility to encourage and guide the early adopter, I am so amazed at how well teachers relate to one another when it comes to tackling new concepts, or as Jeff put it, R & D.

Here's my plan: I want to begin shifting the professional development onto the blue-birds. They use these tools practically. They use them daily and see them for what they truly are. Couldn't they offer classes in what they do? This is not a shirking of responsibilities by any means, but rather a hard look at effective transfer. Teachers learn well from teachers. In bouncing this idea around with a few colleagues, another great idea came out: why not co-teach the classes or at least Skype in one teacher they know during the workshop?

My role is to find the next thing, understand its pedagogical uses, and bring it to the faculty. The same ratios will apply in that you will get early adopters to whatever you are selling. But you will need them. They are your niche market, your standard bearers.



Technorati Tags: nichemarket, sethgodin, shellylazarus, karlfisch, jeffutecht, professionaldevelopment, education,

Reflections

We have done quite a bit this year regarding moving our teaching to another level: we've introduced the read/write web into our teacher's lexicon and their tool kits; we've shown the power of using social bookmarking; we have shown them how to aggregate feeds and bring their research and planning to a new level. But that is me talking--that is what I think we've done. Over the next few days, I am going to try to include some teacher reflections on what they have seen this year.

Note to all: I did not solicit these in the form of asking for performance reviews on my part. Nor am I posting them for any reason than utter transparency. That some of them may reference me is in no way meant for self-promotion or ego inflation.

The first one here is from Jo, who along with Erica (whose quote follows hers), worked together on Ambertangerine, a wiki used as a book discussion. She has been a mainstay at my professional development classes since last summer and has made some amazing discoveries. She brings such a great teaching style to the classroom, and technology is just one way she uses to reach the students:

This year, I believe that I have crossed the line. I used to be the teacher who used bits and pieces of technology while integrating the curriculum. This year, however, I feel confident that I can use new, advanced, and innovative technology with my students. I am able to understand that students today learn differently and deserve to be taught differently than my generation. I have been fortunate to have the support of Patrick Higgins and Erica for these endeavors. Their expertise in technology has helped me to develop an interest and willingness to further my knowledge in this area as well as to strive to integrate more technology into my lessons. I have participated in several technology courses offered by Patrick Higgins, and I plan on attending more throughout the summer. This is only the beginning...

Erica came to me this year with so many ideas to implement in her classroom, and was one of our first teachers to utilize Lecture123 effectively:

This is what she had to say about her experiences this year:

I think it is important that if you are teaching “digital natives” you must be a digital native yourself, at the very least. To be even more effective, you must be a digital pioneer, always one step ahead of the students. This year was the first year it didn’t feel like I was integrating technology in my classroom, it just was a seamless part of everyday instruction and assessment, almost completely invisible. A big part of that comes from having an ingenious technology coordinator to work with. Teachers often have great ideas, but have trouble implementing them due to lack of time or technology. However, with the support of a technology facilitator such as Mr. Higgins our dreams of technology integration became a reality greater than I could have imagined. Best of all, the students became global citizens and digital pioneers themselves.

I have noticed a lot of others in this sphere have been doing this as well, and I think it is truly important for tech coordinators to allow teachers to articulate what they are learning, just as I believe in that for students.

There is some hope for me...

I posted this on my Tech Dossier site the other day to show how the new teacher's took to some of the Web 2.0 technologies that they saw. I was really trying to build on the word of mouth popularity I was hearing from people in the building--the new teachers liked what they had seen and been able to do.



So, in analyzing this graph, I can see that the most easily adaptable technology was del.icio.us, the social bookmarking site. More people planned on using it, and they did not require additional professional development on it. Conversely, videoconferencing proved to be the least adaptable after the workshop, and the teachers voted that they needed more professional development before they were comfortable using it. That will shape a lot of what I do with the new teachers next year. It also shows me that there is interest in things like wikis and blogs, but the learning curve appears to be a little on the high side, and that is OK. That is why we have professional development classes and it's also why when teachers add technologies like that, I work closely with them until they are comfortable.

We met with our technology committee today to discuss a few things to wrap up the year and plan for the summer maintenance on all of the machines in the district (we are switching over from an antiquated network to a brand-spanking new one). Also on the agenda for today was a discussion of the training needed for our teachers who are piloting our tablet PC rollout this coming fall. Now, I make it sound like it is a huge plan based solely on the fact that we want to start putting laptops in the hands of teachers, and at heart (well, my heart) it is, but in actuality it is being done because we are entering a three-year construction schedule for our high school. The teachers who are moving to a portable classroom are being issued a tablet PC and a wireless Epson projector in lieu of all of the machines they will lose in their rooms.

Always glass half-full, I look at this situation as a turning point for our district; if this group of 30 or so teachers can find success with these machines, rolling them out to the rest of the staff, and ideally the entire high school, will be that much easier due to the initial buy-in. But in recent weeks, we have been regaled with stories of poor planning and implementation programs causing egregious wasting of taxpayer dollars on technology that was doomed to fail. So, my selfish agenda at the tech committee meeting today was to get a feel for what the high school teachers on the committee saw in the way of training needed for those going to the tablets.

What I got was a great list of ideas, all based on the level of proficiency with the technology. Some of the teachers moving to the tablets are at a point where using a laptop in front of the students is not something they would feel comfortable with. Others will take the machine, plug in and just go like they have always had it. My idea is to do two things: for those that need extra training, start with basic uses and applications to give them success, aiming for an in-class usage percentage of about 50%. With the other group of teachers, I have loftier goals:

So you have been issued a new tablet PC and you are teaching in a modular classroom this year--what now? The machine you have at your fingertips has the ability to change the way you approach your classroom, much more so than a regular laptop. Sitting in front you is a traveling interactive whiteboard, a mobile production studio, and the biggest productivity streamliner you have ever encountered.

I want to show them ways to actually make that portable classroom more technologically advanced then the room they came from.

If you have any ideas in this regard, please feel free to pass them along.

Image Credits: "Cuneiform Tablet," allanimal on Flickr, "Tablet PC," Calixto el octavo satélite de Júpìter on Flickr

1:1 Learning and teaching

Rising out of the conversations that I thought I was having about virtual schools and arming our faculty with laptops is a wholly different, but not unrelated conversation about who we are as teachers, and who we are going to be.

The Liverpool High School 1:1 laptop failure has brought drawn lengthy grimace on the face of the edublogosphere, and a considerable number of "well, what did you expect?" from the more noted members of our community. Here's a smattering:

Andy Carvin at Learning.now:

I’ve lost track of the number of times I’ve seen students using their
laptops in the classroom as if nothing else had changed, lined up in
neat rows, each laptop on a desk, with students listening to a teacher
lecture or taking a test on the laptop. Those aren’t laptops - those
are expensive pencils. Of course you’re not going to see
achievement improve when pedagogical practices aren’t rethought from
the ground up! Where is the boldness, the pedagogical imagination
required to put these devices to use to reach their teaching potential
- and students’ learning potential, for that matter?

Tom Kennedy on Andy's blog:

We must create the context in which 1-1 computing can be effective
by redefining what education looks like and how it is assessed. Until
then we will continue to see “islands of innovation” that prove
successful (usually because the rules of engagement have been
suspended) surrounded by expensive failures.

Technology can’t force a change in education, as I once believed it
could. Education must change first. Then we will begin to realize the
full potential of technology

Will Richardson on a note from del.icio.us:

Note: There are so many potential reasons for this, but the basic reason is because learning with technology is simply not a systemic part of the K-12 curriculum. It’s not a part of the way we do business. Instead, it’s something we try to make work at certain times for certain purposes. And even then, we don’t fully understand the implications and potentials of the tools. Not surprising…is it?

The discussions I have been having in my physical world center on how to change the environment so that if we did move to a 1:1 initiative our pedagogy would be in line with what our technology was. Liverpool failed for all of the reasons stated above. My district would as well because our method of teaching, for the most part, is derived from a model that worked really well for a very long time, and, if all were to remain the same, would work really well for a longer time. We know, however, that our students are not going to let that timeline stand still, that they are making the needle jump all over the place. What do we do to make ourselves into seismologists capable of reading that needle?

Reinvent. I am leaning more in the direction of Tom Haskins when he writes:

An underground movement is recruiting subversives to replace the massive machine for the manufacture of controlled content. Must see learning as a growth process. Must demonstrate the envisioning of a botanical
process of planting of seeds that blossom into flowers. Insights into
ecological cycles, successions and transformations -- a plus.

Must have experience with industrial models of schooling. Evidence of switching from pushing content to pulling for the learners is a requirement. Context creators preferred over content developers. Must be able to win without a battle and not make enemies of power trippers who think they can make learning happen with "command and control" requirements.

An M.Ed in informal learning optional. Must show the abilities to have nurturing effects
on learners, to act like a learner oneself and to approach life as an
endeavor of continual learning. Evidence of significant personal growth
given precedence over stagnant or composting developments. Contact with
educational aliens taken into consideration.

When I survey my teachers, formally or informally, about their use of technology and the stumbling blocks to using it in the classroom, I get fewer responses about teachers not being able to handle the know-how. What I usually get is that it sticks out of the lesson too much; that it is too obvious and obtrusive. The goal is transparency, not only in what we are doing being available to all stakeholders in the community, but also in our ability to move from mini-lesson through speaking, to mini-lesson through Skyping the chemical engineer to further the point.

So, I can continue to rant about how people are not using the amazing technologies that we have available, or I can find ways to sneak it into their pedagogy. The failure of the Liverpool initiative, like others in the same boat, rests not on the students for their misuse or lack of performance on standardized tests, but rather on the school administrators and staff for failing to realize that a seismic shift needed to take place in their philosophy towards school. If I am fortunate enough to be in that situation, I will do my best to initiate change before that happens.

Who do we want to be then, the teachers who metamorphosize and are willing to dismantle only to rebuild? Or just the opposite? I know where I am going.

Some very useful advice

Like most of us, I am trying to see where the whole social networking piece fits into my world, and Steve's Hargadon's two sites, Classroom 2.0 and School 2.0 have so far been great sources of information and resources. In my first attempt at posting to my page, I cross posted a series of questions about creating Web 2.0 buy-in from teachers and administration from my Tech Dossier page in order to solicit some additional feedback. What followed from Carolyn Foote appears below, with her permission. It's great stuff.

I've mentioned this here in another discussion but I think bringing the administration into the conversation and having their enthusiasm and support can be huge.

Our new principal set up a Vision committee to plan for the graduates of 2020 and invited all staff, parents, and students to join voluntarily. As part of those discussions, we kept running into the issue of "time" which is significant in the school community.

She has worked with the district to create time in the schedule for the next school year...and we are looking at completely revamping the schedule the following year to build staff development time into the week. We have seen several schools who do this by having an early release one day a week or a late start, so that teachers have some common staff development time.

This is a real dilemma--change in education works best when it is somewhat grass roots, or when you have some staff on campus that can help "bring everyone in" so to speak.

I think it also involves starting small or with some specific projects with specific campus innovators.

Another great idea I posted about in the previous comment is Charlotte Public Library's 23 Things.
http://plcmcl2-about.blogspot.com/
They gave incentives to their staff for participating, and because it's on the web, it's all self paced.

We're thinking of trying a smaller version, like 13 things.

At our campus, our tech coordinator and I (i'm the librarian) have been doing a weekly 20 minute workshop on Wednesday mornings and afternoons that teachers can voluntarily attend. We branded it, (modeled after Project Runway), put up flyers, sent email reminders, and our staff could gain credits by attending. Each session we do one small web 2.0 topic.

We certainly haven't reached everyone, but about a fifth of our faculty has attended and from departments all across the board. Some people come to every session and some to just one. But it's been a way to get some of the tools out there, demonstrate and discuss their use, and let people run with it and we offer support.

Teachers can visualize the possibilities once you show them something, and just doing one "theme" per session makes it easier to digest.

We're considering having a community-wide read this summer for parents, students and teachers as well, with a book like Whole New mind.

It is a struggle though, and there are so many things competing for teacher's attention, and some are still so uncomfortable with the technology. That intimidation factor is huge.

The Key Ingredient in a Collaborative Writer

This new post from the people at Zoho has me thinking that they are, more than ever, on to what we might need in a collaborative document editor.


A couple of days ago, George Siemens posted about Coventi Pages and it's unique way of showing edits and comments as a sidebar, which makes for great editing and collaboration. What I like about Zoho's product, first off is the prettiness of Zoho and the whole suite of apps, and now they just announced that their will be a chat feature added to their Zoho Writer. This is a good thing for anyone who has worked with either Zoho or Google Documents.


I could never figure out why Google Spreadsheets had a chat feature, but Docs did not. In my opinion, the chat feature should be a standard on any collaborative editing package out there.


This post also brought up another problem for me when I looked at it in terms of what is available in this area of Web 2.0. As more of my staff are beginning to see the possibilities of lesson design that utilizes Web 2.0, they are not ready to deal with the onslaught of choices. As a tech coordinator, I try to steer them in a direction that I think will minimize confusion, frustration or data loss. That decision often has a lot to do with what is recognizable to the user.


Branding is important. As someone who is actively involved in finding better options for teachers to use to create lessons, integrate technology and design curriculum, this is something I run into all of the time. A brand carries a lot of weight with people, often at the expense of functionality and efficiency. However, where is the line between what the teacher feels comfortable with and what is the more efficient product? This is where apps like Coventi and Zoho might struggle. Schools, like all other businesses, have been the victims of so many fly-by-night technology companies that have sold them something cutting-edge, only to have that bite them in the proverbial arse shortly thereafter. A solid brand like Google, though completely functional and usable in the online writing application genre, will win out among casual users every time because it is a recognizable name that isn't going anywhere. With that comes an illusion of accountability to the user that is yet another feature that draws the user to their product.


So, while Zoho and Coventi's products show promise, and in my opinion contain better features than Google Docs, I will be hard pressed to sell the use of Coventi or Zoho to my staff. That's OK, because I think this is a win-win situation; if we are using these collaborative pieces, that makes me happy.

Photo from Morguefile.

Workshop updates

A while back I posted about how I have created an outlet for collaboration and dissemination of information: the Tech Dossier. In order to foster some collaboration with my workshops, I have created the workshoponestop wiki. I can use this to extend my classroom to go beyond the short time I have to work with teachers in workshops (if I am imploring them to do it, I guess I should too). I apologize in advance for the lack of inclusion in these projects, especially the wiki, but after the completion of the spring semester I will open up the wiki for public collaboration. As it is now, you can take a look around, but comments should be directed back here.


The blog has been hugely successful with staff members, and for very simple reasons. First, it offers them a glimpse into classrooms that they might not normally see, especially at the high school where time is short and people are scattered. A quick post on a project or technology that another teacher employs is sometimes the spark that another needs to pull me in for a meeting and planning session. Secondly, it is offering them a quick glance into how quickly we can communicate an ideas and create buzz with a large number of people within a community. While we are still trying to get some interactivity going between the teachers on the blog, and while it is mainly me writing it currently, we are hoping to get some comments and some guest writers soon. Blogging is a funny word in education; most want to do it, but are strangely afraid of what it means. I hope this will show them how productive and thorough it makes us as professionals.

Balancing Levels of Concern

Teaching has always been synonymous with caring, and I see this personified at all levels. Whether I am at an elementary school, like I was yesterday, or dodging careening students at a high school like today, the teachers manifest their "caring" in different ways. Chris Lehman at Practical Theory posted yesterday about his definition of caring as it relates to teaching and professionalism, and I think it was, as is usual with Chris, a timely post. We have all been engaged in conversation at some point while explaining our choice to become educators to either parents or friends, when the idea that you have "passion" or that you "love kids" comes forth, either from you or as a suggestion from the other conversants. What does this really mean for us as educators? Many people in various professions love kids too, even ones that aren't there own. Christian Long says that we should be in love not necessarily with the children, but with the collisions we create with ideas, learning, and the students we teach. I dig that, but there has to be room for the idea of caring, or genuinely having a concern over their future, and the future of those that love them.

To continue a recent them on this blog (which might be long in the tooth), I read Chris' post with an eye on Ashley Merryman's almost simultaneous post on the responses to her an Po Bronson's article on Praise. They say similar things, whether Chris is talking about parents and choices being difficult, but necessary, or Ashley commenting that teachers should feel more comfortable about accountability at all costs. Take a look at a short sample:

Chris Lehman:

The best parents aren’t the ones who smoke pot with their kids because, ‘Well, they were going to try it anyway.’ And they aren’t the ones who let kids think that it’s o.k. to break rules, etc… they are the ones who teach kids the lessons they need to succeed in life, even when those lessons are really hard to learn. Same is true for teaching.

Ashley Merryman:

Since we began our research on praise and self-esteem, Po and I both heard many stories from parents and teachers about self-esteem issues. My favorite was from an English teacher. She'd recently given one of her students a "C," and the mother came down to complain, saying "You're ruining my child's self-esteem." The teacher shot back, "I'm not here to make him feel better; I'm here to make him do better."

For two years before I become a technology coordinator for this
district, I was a history teacher on a middle school "team." Our
philosophy, though strangely unspoken at first, was heavy on caring.
The lengthy list of issues that our students ran into, most
non-academic, were handled with a quasi-medical approach of "first-do
no harm." We genuinely cared for our students and we did everything we
could to make that known to them. Did this produce a major change in
test scores? Not that it matters, but probably not. Did it directly
impact learning? Again, I don't have that answer. What I do know is
that we all left those two years, teachers and students alike, with a
deeper level of respect for one another. What I now want to ask myself, however, is whether or not I was too focused on keeping kids feeling good rather than doing them the service of being honest.

This is the "art" of teaching, the intangible aspects of being a teacher that no length or depth of teacher training will prepare you for. These types of conversations bring us deeper into introspection, which I believe will lead us towards a higher level of empathy, one that does not involve just self-esteem for our students, but will allow us to make the difficult teaching decisions that we should.

Student Wiki Work!

It's really here. Here are some samples from work our students have recently done using wikis:






In the next couple days, I plan on bringing on the teachers I have been working with to talk a little about their experiences doing the project and the differences they have noted in student learning.

What strikes me is something that you hear all too often nowadays, and yet still not enough: it's all about the conversation. The learning going on "outside the lines," is unprecedented for me. Watching these students delegate, make informed choices, and offer up lines like this one to help the group accomplish a task:

"NEEDS FIXING, PLEASE READ
We, need to have some place for other imformation, those questions were only supposed to be a rough outline. I suggest having a section for any miscellaneous info any may have found. I am setting up my own. I suggest you make your own."

Rumors have been circulating around the community that the 7th grade is up to something that has the kids being forced to stop working on their schoolwork and go to bed. That's got to be good.

Check out one of them that is public: Country in a box