The Teaching Meme I Never Responded To....

Cindy Barnsley passed this meme on to me on 8/22/07. Despite showing a lack of technorati use, I figured I would honor the meme and continue it along even though it is quite belated.

1. I am a good teacher because…I think about how my students will be changed when they leave our classrooms, and do everything I know to do to affect that change.
   
2. If I weren’t a teacher I would be a…struggling writer, professional trailrunner (I wish), professional student.
   
3. My teaching style is…entirely based on my passion for the subject matter. If I don't feel it, I find it hard to believe that the students will either. Think about it, people have so much on their minds anyway that if we don't make it matter to them, we are just noise.
   
4. My classroom is…wherever my laptop and LCD projector can be plugged in, or even further, wherever I can find wifi.
   
5. My lesson plans are…more and more being influenced by UbD; I start with the end in mind more than I ever have before.
   
6. One of my teaching goals is…get rid of the term "integrate" in regards to technology.
   
7. The toughest part of teaching is…creating authentic assessments to examine whether or not our students have reached the level of understanding we need.
8. The thing I love about teaching is…the satisfaction of hearing your students talk about your class material serendipitously outside of the classroom.
   
9. A common misconception about teaching is…it ends at the end of the last period of the day.
   
10. The most important thing I’ve learning since I started teaching is…every parent was once a student too, and their experience as a student bears mightily on their attitude towards you as the teacher of their child.

I will pass it to Erica and Cathy.

Flickr photo credit to Arash Behshadpoor's photostream


Technorati Tags: education,, teaching,, learning,, philosophy

New Teacher Training, Part 2

Yesterday, we met with our new staff for the second time this year, but really it was the first time to get a hold of them after their first impressions of the classroom have sunken in. And rather than focus solely on what they were experiencing and how they are dealing with it, which is of dire importance, we pushed their buttons a little.

Let me explain: our first year induction program for new teachers was recently revamped to be more of a reflective practice that centers on Dr. Robert Marzano, Debra Pickering, and Jane Pollock's book Classroom Instruction that Works. This year we also added the reflective feature of asking them to blog about their practices and its relation to Marzano, et. al's book, on a blog through 21classes. What this enables them to do is to reflect on their own practice, comment on others, but also archives these reflections for them throughout their first year here.

These are all common practices for those who have been blogging for a while; however, to teachers fresh out of college, or new to our district from another district, it set a fairly high bar in terms of the instructional style that we expect of our staff.

Does this reflect how our veteran staff uses technology or their familiarity with social technology? Not exactly. But this is a great start. The conversations that I was privy to during the day all centered on the focus we are putting on not just technology, but also using it in a way that matters, that is consistent with our curricular goals, and that is nearly transparent.

As the day moved from discussion of their program to the nuts and bolts of class website creation and online gradebook setup, several of them pulled me aside and asked if I could help them set up their blog, their podcast (which is the format that they were asked to submit their reflection in for month two), or asked me if I know about wikis. They were excited though, and I made a great effort to allay any uneasiness that showed up. I used Toeffler's quote about illiteracy in the 21st Century to end the session and let them know that change will define their teaching career, and embracing it would surely lead to greater success and lifelong learning.

On a side note that is somewhat related, if my schedule is any indication of the direction we are moving in, than this year is going to one of great change and innovation.

Some thoughts on Changing our Practices

From David Warlick at 2 Cents Worth in response to a posting from Doug Johnson yesterday about the number of jobs he has held. David really gets at what teaching is going to mean in the coming years: learning how to learn and unlearn, and knowing how to teach yourself to do things. People often state that they can't keep up with what is going on out there because it changes too quickly. To combat that, we need to focus on knowing how to decipher meaning, teaching our students to pull out what is important, and teach them that learning is not, and should not be, something that happens solely in school.

In my efforts to understand what the labor department’s projections and my work experiences mean, within the context of school reform, I ask myself, “How did I learn…”

..to play guitar (bass & Banjo) and organ? I taught myself!

..to write software? I taught myself.

..to code web pages? I taught myself!

..to self-publish a book? I taught myself!

The schools that I attended in the 1950s and ’60s tried very hard to teach me how to be taught. I believe that this is one of the shifts that we have to achieve as we try to retool classrooms. We need to do less of..

teaching kids how to be taught,

and instead,

teach them to teach themselves.

I think that the point is not that everyone is going to have 10.2 jobs between the ages of 18 and 38. Many of us will only have one job. But how many times will that one job change? 10.2 times? Perhaps not, but when it changes, who’s going to teach the new skills?

We need to stop teaching literacy, and teach learning literacy.

We need to stop teaching literacy skills, and teach literacy habits.

We need to stop thinking about lifelong learning, and instead, work toward every student leaving our schools with a learning lifestyle.

We need to be willing to take every piece of furniture our of our classrooms, clear the walls, burn it all, and start all over again. The world has changed that much.

Anything less is an insult to our children.

Cross-posted at TechDossier

Educational Heroes

I pulled this image from Ben Wilkoff's Academy of Discovery Wiki, and he attributes it to the folks as Science Leadership Academy, but is something I think everyone involved in education should examine.

Let's take a look at some of the words that are used to describe and "Educational Hero" in this picture:

• Provocative: the first on the list, and for good reason. What is someone in education if not provocative. By nature, information is meant to incite in us something that lay dormant or underutilized. Giving our students access to such provocation is an act that we need to do often.
• Risk-Takers: We teach our students to take compositional risks, to make cognitive leaps, and to attempt to connect several disparate ideas into one usable and coherent whole. Why should we as teachers not be doing the same? By nature, our approach should be daring, and variable based on "teachable moments."
  
• Balance-Freedom-Guidance: I like the inclusion of these words, and of "nurturing," because if nothing else, our students need to feel valuable and safe before they can take the risks that they need to. These words, these actions are what makes it easier for learners to reach from the solid ground of what they know towards that which is shaky, unknown, yet incredibly valuable.
• Humble: When I work with teachers who are trying to shift away from being the sole arbiters of information in the classroom, I always stress humility over the stress of trying to know everything. Being grounded, centered and comfortable with the idea that you do not have all the answers, and that these students can help you continue to learn, makes it all beautiful, doesn't it?
• Want to be like them: Perhaps the highest compliment anyone in education can receive. With the omnipresent stream of role models of ill-repute, being someone that learners want to be "when they grow up" is no small feat. I remember the moments that some of my past teachers did something amazing, showed us a door that we didn't know existed, and then thinking back to it years later as I was doing the same thing to a group of students. It is high praise indeed.

Literacy

The gentleman that runs our monthly meeting, Ned Davis, just came out with a quote that I thought was interesting regarding the students he teaches at St. Elizabeth College. He was decrying the multitude of resources that they have to sift through in order to get the correct information for their research:

"There is just so much crap out there!"

This, to me, makes a great case for literacy to be revisited at ALL levels of education. Even students who have grown up immersed in technology and are ready to enter the world are often not equipped with the ability to deconstruct multiple sources and recognize validity. Ned's students, confronted with multiple resources might be struggling because the literacy skills they have accumulated in the academic environment do not fit the types of media and information, or even the amount of information.


How do we teach discerning students? What are some methods we are using to do this in our classrooms or seminars? We talk about digital literacies, but what are some tried and true methods?











Technorati Tags: njecc, literacy, digitalliteracy, methods, education

To My Children

Dear Parker and Audrey,

I have been meaning to write to you about your futures, but the pressure has not really mounted, being that neither of you can read just yet. However, the ideas and thoughts I have about your futures are beginning to overwhelm me at this point, and I felt that I should at least commence something in the way of a letter to your future selves.

On the way to school today, you and I were talking, Parker, and you asked where the yellow school bus in front of us was going. My answer, without thinking, was of course, "to school." But you were quicker than that and immediately asked "why?" My answer was to tell you that it was taking the kids to school so they could learn.

As soon as I said it, something in my head clicked. That was the wrong answer, or at least the wrong syntax. The way I said it to you implied that school is exclusively the place where you go to learn, and that could not be further from the truth. This is true today, and will be increasingly more so as you and your sister get older.

Your future contains aspects that no future has ever contained before, the most key being something we call ubiquitous access. What that means is that you will be able to learn, gain access to, and process information from any location you are in: a school, a city sidewalk, running through the woods with your father. That changes things more than you can imagine. For your mother and me, when we wanted information, or wanted to learn, we had to physically move ourselves to where that information was. In most cases, it was school, and in special cases a library, museum, or artistic event. Your future will give you the opportunity to seize an idea at any moment and go with it, unhindered by physical constraints or the constraints of individuals who might want that information for themselves.

The biggest shift for you in relation to my comment about the children going to school to learn: you will have more teachers than your mother and I did combined. Your teachers will be accessible to you at any time and will come in the form of professionals in the field of study you are interested in, databases and visualizations that people create for you, and yes actual teachers in your school who are connecting to teachers of their own to continue to learn and explore. Your learning cycle will not stop arbitrarily at age 18 or 22, but will be continuous throughout your life and will be filled with several careers combined into one. Where your mother and I were taught to be concerned with facts and linear thinking, you will be taught to find patterns, see bigger pictures, and connect ideas that bear no resemblance to one another on the surface.

I know that it was just a question that you asked, Parker, and in twenty years you will not remember it at all, but to me it signified something larger. Your future is not just my responsibility as a parent, it is also my responsibility as someone in the position to institute real change in the way we understand and execute the processes of learning and teaching.

My real hope for you is that you discover what I have recently discovered about working: it has to be grounded in the same ideas you are using now at your ages. Discovery. Mistake. Attempt. Attempt. Attempt. Failure. BooBoo and ouch. Play. Build. Create. Mix. Smear. Mess.

I love you both.

A tempered rant.

Dean Shareski posted the other day about Possibility v. Probability, where by he addressed the issue of building an infrastructure within his school where change was seen as urgent and necessary in regards to how we use technology in our teaching. This same idea, in various forms, is one that I find myself answering to both internally and with teachers that I work with. The most frustrating aspect of my job so far has been the feeling that teachers don't see the value in what I do in regards to their own teaching methods. There are two disconnects I see in the schools today: complaints I hear regarding cell phone usage, the ubiquity of iPods, and the persistent time-wasting of online gaming and social networking through MySpace and Facebook and the lack of change in pedagogical methods to captivate that audience and use those ideas and technologies to draw in the learners, and the sore-thumb syndrome, whereby teachers are using technology for technology's sake rather than as a tool that will foster growth and understanding. Below, is a great clip from Stephen Downes as he responded to Dean's post and follow up question of what schools will look like in five years, followed by my own comment:

Comment by Stephen Downes

May 26, 2007 @ 6:54 am

Well
there’s no easy answer to that. Schools change very slowly, so although
there will be increased penetration for tech (usually sanitized to
separate students from society) things will look much like they will
today. There will be increased pressure - especially from the U.S. -
for alternatives, but it will be difficult to separate educational
ventures from commercial ventures.

Meanwhile, online media will have gradually become more pervasive
and more immersive. It will occupy an increasing amount of students’
time. Online will be - indeed, is already - be thought of as ‘normal’
and most students will be in constant communication with their friends
(watch out for loners shut out of this network, as they will be more
isolated than ever).

Mostly, school will be about socializing and learning pushed to the
back burner (at least, for students). There will be an ongoing (and
losing) battle by teachers to prevent students from using their
technology. The number of schools breaking down and accepting the
online world will increase. Adoption will be uneven, with urban schools
being at the forefront, rural schools late adopters.

The students’ real learning environment - their online world - will
penetrate the school environment one class at a time. Innovative
teachers will attempt to actually remove students from the school
grounds much more frequently than in the old field-trip days (this
allowing for 100 percent use of online techs). The amount of school
time actually spent ins school, as an average, will constantly decrease
(in five years it should be roughly 80 percent, give or take a lot; in
ten years it could be down to 50 percent, give or take a lot).

Comment by Patrick

May 27, 2007 @ 4:44 am

Depending
on where you are, as Stephen said above, the ratio of innovative
teachers to traditional teachers will fall in favor of transformation.
For districts that lie in the suburbs and are truly committed to having
their schools remain centers of community outside of athletics and
arts, the shift is essential and the acquisition and support of
“shifted” teachers will bely their success at being involved in the
real learning process of their students.

This thought process that you had, Dean, is one that I have been
struggling with as I attempt to penetrate(I hope that word doesn’t
sound to pugnacious) classrooms that don’t necessarily see the need for
change. My biggest issue is with the technology not being as
transparent as it should yet. I have several teachers dieing to use
“technology” in their classroom, and several Professional Improvement
Plans submitted by teachers that use that terminology “integrate
technology” but what for? It’s apparent that they are taking that step
just for the sake of using technology. What about making it
transparent, so that it’s just another tool, like heterogeneous
grouping, that they they use to accomplish the goal of learning? That
is where my biggest disconnect is: the technology sticks out too much.

Technorati Tags: technology, education, integration, embedding, edtech

Something akin to sensemaking

Like most of us out there, we are nearing the end of the year in my district, and with it comes the rush of exams, the spontaneous absence of students due to field trips and warm weather, and all of the various celebratory events that accompany June in New Jersey. However, this is the time of the year where taking stock of past events becomes essential to learning from what we've done.

Mark at Anecdote wrote recently about talking to a client of his about sensemaking as it relates to having perspective on situations that we need to understand in our life and work:

It provides an opportunity for an unhindered look at the experiences of
participants and the gaining of new and valuable insights into the
state of the system under examination; what is working and what isn’t,
and the implications moving forward.

A few days ago I had the wonderful opportunity to work with a group of first-year teachers in a two-hour workshop. When the idea was pitched to present to them, I immediately began thinking about what were essential concepts that I could present in two hours. To do this, I looked back at the past year of notes, big paper brainstorms, but most importantly, I looked at the conversations that I have had through this medium. It hit me when I was reading Eric Hoefler's post called 60-30-10: I am not writing in isolation. The best way to fully experience this is look over previous posts and analyze personal change, notice patterns and assess growth.

This is the essence of sensemaking; we are looking for meaning and deciphering patterns in our own thought when we examine our posts, and even deeper so when we analyze conversations in comments.

In doing this, what did I see? What were those concepts? Considering the discussions and the tremendous amount that I have learned in the past few months regarding direction and philosophy of education, two hours looked like too small a window for me to fit what I considered essential. However, that thought in itself taught me everything that I needed: the information is what is important, not the technology. Jeff Utecht makes this analogy so well in Embedded Technology on his blog, where he promotes the idea, gleaned from discussion on a previous post, that it is far better to consider technology as an integral piece of the planning, rather than a bell and a whistle at the end. My take on the same piece as applied to these two hours was that rather than show them some bells and whistles, I would focus on individual productivity. My choices? Aggregating RSS feeds and social bookmarking.

Upon scrutiny of this past year in terms of my professional development, nothing has allowed me more access to information than my aggregator and my ability to use smarter people than me to search for me on del.icio.us. Two hours on those two aspects was more than enough time, so much so that I was also able to slip in connective writing and creating global classrooms.

In the next couple of days, provided the 8-week old steadily moves toward a more fixed schedule, I will continue to examine this past year by covering some topics that are truly meaningful to me as I prepare for next year, such as changing school philosophy and environment, building teams, and taking risks.

Sensemaking, to return to the original theme of this ramble, is the art of connecting yourself to the larger ideas that surround you. Stopping to take a look at them is the first step towards learning from what you have done.




Technorati Tags: anecdote, sensemaking, education, school 2.0, reflection

Online Portfolios

A colleague of mine asked me the other day whether or not I knew of anyone that had on online portfolio for other teachers, administrators or prospective employers to view. It got me thinking about the nature of what we are all doing here.

One of the principles that is most important in the transformation to school 2.0 is that of ethics and what Will Richardson describes as "being clickable." I am going to venture to say that my online portfolio exists in the content I create, and how I am able to collect that content via the feeds and links that extend from my blogs. If we are asking our students to be aware of the content they create and to adhere to an ethical standard, I am hard pressed to find a better example to give them the the blogs that we keep.

As professionals, a portfolio is essential. In one of the schools I work in, we are given a yearly "brag sheet" to list all of the accomplishments that we would like included in our yearly reviews. While the content I create here is not done for the purposes of recognition on a yearly review, it is nonetheless something I am proud of, and would want to share with colleagues, supervisors, and yes, future employers if that should ever come up. Portfolios, like these spaces here, also give us the opportunity to reflect on our practice. What goes in? What stays out? That decision making process in itself forces us to contemplate our daily and yearly progress as a teacher or administrator.

As is the case with me lately, I still have to wonder if there is some better method out there. A quick search in Google under portfolio's in education reveals some interesting things. One that immediately catches my eye is that from Ohio State University's Faculty and TA Development center. Outlined at the site are some very effective reasons for keeping a teaching portfolio to show the depth and scope of what you have taught. But nowhere does it say that it should be digital or not. Another search under portfolios online, yielded a company called blueskyportfolios, who specialize in creating online portfolios for executives and artists. This resonates, and while I might not want to shell out the money for their services, their layouts appeal to me.

I think I have hatched a new professional development class for my district....

We all make mistakes when we are learning

This picture, originally featured in Russell Davies blog, found it's way to my Reader through Metacool.

As Davies says on his blog, it's incredibly disarming, yet it's a fact that is often lost in the shuffle of daily life in education, especially as the children get older. We need to think on this one for a while and let it marinate. How many of the situations you faced today would look different through this lens?

LectureFox and Freedom

Cruising around today looking for some new information, I found Lecturefox, a repository of not only MIT's lectures and materials from their OpenCourseWare project, but also courses from UC Berkeley, Bristol, Carnegie Mellon, and even my alma mater, Syracuse, among others.



As I prepare for the second week of my Web 2.0 class, I really want to stress to the teachers I am working with the importance of these type of sites, where people can have access to information that used to be considered scarce. I also want to let them see the role they may play in shaping the way students can access that information. It is not that we will be reduced to obsolescence, but rather our role will be to design and shape, and specialize in knowledge management.



If you get a chance, check out LectureFox. I don't normally get worked up about this type of stuff, and it slightly depresses me for financial reasons (pay scales in New Jersey for teachers are based on graduate credits earned), but this is some great stuff. Now you will have to excuse me, I am going to read up on my Buddhist Psychology.



Technorati Tags: opencourseware, lecturefox, web2.0
Image Credit: crimsondevotchka on Flickr

Using Video Game Design Principles in the Classroom

Here is a great idea that the University of Chicago came up with at the North Kenwood Oakland Middle School along with the Center for Urban School Improvement's Digital Youth Program:

The challenge we chose to accept was to use video game design principles to design a course to develop students’ digital media skills, media critique skills and overall computer literacy. If successful teachers could effectively take advantage of the resources afforded by the school’s 1:1 computing environment. Our solution - a 90 minute weekly media arts class set up as a simulated record label taught by two members of the Digital Youth after school staff who are involved in the music industry. Each sixth grade class was given the goal of creating by the end of the school year; 2 recording groups, 7 songs, 2 music videos, a publicity campaign that included a 30 second radio promo, a website and a CD. The culminating activity for this Media Arts class is a record label launch party.(from Pinkard: Videogames Inspire a Different Design for Classroom Learning)

The prospect of asking large public schools to infuse technology into their curriculum is harrowing enough sometimes, and asking them to then use the model of a video game, long considered the arch-rival to academic rigor, is one I wasn't really able to visualize before I came across this article. I like the idea of creating a multi-layer project under the guise of a far-off product release or showcase. It's authentic to the students and according the article, fulfilling enough for them to use higher-level thinking skills to accomplish. Meanwhile, the students will never see it this way. Through their eyes, they are making something happen, making something appear alive where there was nothing in the beginning: it has value and meaning rather than second-hand obligation. It always reminds me of when I start saving money for something; as the amount in the bank grows, the momentum becomes palpable and you begin doing whatever you can to see it continue and increase. In the end, the correct environment was created.


I am curious as to what the discussions are like among group members in this project and how they have set it up; what was the bait? Thanks to Scott McLeod for turning me on to anti-teaching, and the merits it has in creating questions, rather than demanding answers. Mike Wesch, the author of Anti-Teaching, comes to the realization that the environment where learning takes place far outweighs the benefit of "good" teaching. He states:

Borrowing from Marshal McLuhan’s famous aphorism, “the medium is the message,” Postman and Weingartner argue that the environment (or “medium”) of learning is more important than the content (the “message”) and therefor teachers should begin paying more attention to the learning environment they help to create. The emphasis is on “managing” this environment rather than teaching per se.

The project created in the North Kenwood Oakland Middle School is a fantastic example of this. A non-traditional setting where the students determine the outcomes based on questions that they themselves generate. An environment where structures and scaffolding were not limiting, but rather acted much like a game situation; when one problem or question was satisfied, another level of questions presented itself. There's the connection then: let us design lessons not to replicate the pace, or even the technology of the video game, but rather its emphasis on challenging the learner with a series of tasks that engage them and move them along a semi-determined path.



If anyone has any similar lessons or designs like this, I would love to start moving toward this with my staff. I know there is a bridge to gap between where the students aptitudes and interests are (see "Manifesto"), but the difference does not have to be made up solely by technology. Mike Wesch does it with little technology, save the digital cameras for recording the outcome, with close to 400 students. This is possible.

A Squarely Hit Nail

A few years back I worked in a publishing house, figuring that to become a writer I first had to understand the business behind the book. Well, what I discovered, aside from the fact that everyone I worked with was also a writer-in-training, was that books did not magically appear from the pen of the author and land sweetly in the hands of the reader. The writing was such a small part of the production of the book, which was itself a commodity. Very quickly, any enthusiasm I had for the job waned, as did my performance. I was king of the minimum yearly raise. Where all of the other hacks I worked with got upwards of 5- and 6%, I slunk by with my 3%.

This recollection came to me after reading Kathy Sierra's post at Creating Passionate Users regarding how to instill passion in your employees. To quote a passage that struck me:

[UPDATE: I do not consider "caring about the user" as separate from "our work." In other words, I consider one who is truly passionate about their work to have "the effect it has on the user" as a fundamental part of that work. A tech book author/teacher who has brilliant wordsmithing and technical breadth but no effect on the reader is not a professional. A software developer who crafts

brilliant code that doesn't include that code's effect on the user is not a professional. Part of what makes us professional/craftspeople is that we value and never forget the POINT of our work, and the point is--for most of us--what it means for the user. It's quite sad that many of our professions have rewarded work without making the user the most important attribute of how we asses that work.]

I have been having a short conversation with Steve Borsch based on my comment about his post yesterday dealing with the issue of people relying heavily on products that are not really ready for them to rely on. He was talking about YahooPipes, and I was talking about using Web 2.0 apps with teachers. As we use these applications we are discovering that they don't all work for us: some are great, others unreliable. But, in theory, they are fantastic. Kathy's post lets us know that passion for the creation of a product is not enough, that there has to be passion and understanding for how the product will be used.

Educators products, are of course the students we teach. So, not to commoditize it, but if we place that model into our schools how does it fly? Let's look at a special education student for example. When we create curriculum for students to follow, we map out our strategies and lay out our scope and sequence with an eye forever on the state standard that we are trying to satisfy. Our product, the student, will have to go through this "machination" in order to emerge finished on the other side. Education is different in that the "machination" cannot be homogeneous, the processes by which each product is created have to be unique.

So passion is not lacking, and I think parent and child can attest to at least on teacher they had that was truly passionate about their subject matter and the fact that they learn it (thank you Mrs. Fitz). The publishing house taught me a great lesson: I could not work in an environment that did not make me want to, as Sierra puts it "pull an all-nighter because I wanted to." It had to be something that got under my skin, ticked me off, and pushed me even when no one else was around.

We can add all the technology we want, but that essentially does not change. After all, its just hardware.

powered by performancing firefox

Value-based learning

This was taken in one of the science labs at SLA last week and it reminded me of a few things, the most prescient being that I love the idea of a school organized around a few wonderful, core ideas. Chris Lehmann has this school humming from what we could see, and I have to think that these ideas are essential to his early success.

In a school here in New Jersey where I used to teach, we had similar organizing principles, called the Quality Standards, by which the students were held accountable for the richness of their work. These here are more geared to the high school level and the methodologies that SLA is employing to reach those goals. Ours were more centered around the middle school mentality and establishing habits in the type of work students produced. They looked something like this:

• Following Directions- the ability to perform the tasks asked of you
  
• Presentation- how your work appeared to others when finished
• Supporting Details- was your work substantiated
• Connections- were you able to make a meaningful connection from your research to something outside of the scope of the project
  
• Higher Level Thinking- the ability to synthesize and evaluate in your work
  
• Evaluation and Revision- your work showed that you had spent time in thought evaluating your finished product

From looking at the SLA model in comparison, I can see that the focus has shifted in education to reflect a new skill set. We want our students to be able to competently show us their abilities in some form--it's the creative component that we keep hearing so much about through people like Dan Pink.

Having been to SLA, but not really having spoken to Chris about these values, here is how I have come to interpret them:

• Inquiry- what questions are you asking, and what makes you ask them
  
• Research- use every attainable and relevant resource available to you to answer these questions
  
• Collaboration- can you use the technology available to you to create meaning with others
  
• Presentation- showing an audience what you have uncovered and the medium in which you choose is paramount in order to convey your message
  
• Reflection- you must be the first one to evaluate the merits of your own research and thought process.

The last paragraph of the Mission and Vision section of their website is what really separates this place from most other secondary institutions at the moment:

At the SLA, learning will not be just something that happens from 8:30am to 3:00pm, but a continuous process that expands beyond the four walls of the classroom into every facet of our lives.

This is where I think we need to move to.

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

Finding the Rabbit

Thanks to Chris Sessums for drawing my attention to this:



Web 2.0 ... The Machine is Us/ing Us. Dir. Michael Wesch. 2007.


A link of David Warlick's post to Julie Coiro's recent work got me motivated. A lot of my thinking lately has been directed in not only digesting the power of connectivism and the potential of Web 2.0 as it applies to school, but also how to sell it to educators. My job is to facilitate the use of technology in classrooms and to support the staff as they implement it.

It requires a little more when we begin talking about an entire pedagogical shift. It becomes a matter of first making it meaningful to the staff. I would never want to ask a teacher to stand in front of a room of students, especially the digital natives that we have in class today, and have them teach using Web 2.0 tools, unless that teacher had bought in themselves.

Coiro uses the Miss Rumphius Awards as an example for steps that teachers should take when integrating technology in a meaningful way. I like them for what I want to do, and how I want to approach my staff. Taken directly from her site, here they are:

1. Start out small and move through stages.
2. Take a few risks along the way.
3. Take a proactive approach to learning.
4. Encourage your students to share their expertise.
5. Never underestimate the power of collaboration.
6. Seek authentic learning opportunities.
7. Be prepared for change.

Every district has what I term "rabbits," and this term was bandied about at the conference with Will Richardson on Friday. This morning, I listened to his podcast with Rob Mancabelli regarding how to implement social networking technologies into existing schools and the idea of passion and meaning in regards to selling districts on these ideas matched up succinctly with the idea of the "rabbit." We need these tools to mean something to our staff before we ask them to take it to the students. They have to buy in and see the value for themselves as learners, before they use them as teachers.

Which one of you will be my teacher today?

Inasmuch as time hides changes in its gradual flow, slight movements in our philosophies can sometimes go unnoticed, and can surprise us when we are faced with a familiar decision that now has a new outcome.

Listening to Will Richardson yesterday had me spinning in so many great directions. One of the most crystallizing moments happened very early on in the meeting when Will showed us that Christian Long, who was also in the audience, had already blogged about what we were talking about. Christian had noted something that Will said:

"Everyone that comes to my blog is a potential teacher of mine."

This statement had, up until that point, been an elusive idea for me as I began to blog and to post comments on other people's blogs. What was it that I was doing? I knew that I wanted dialogue and communication, feedback and even a little controversy. Putting these actions that I was making into the context of teacher/learner shed some light on the relationship between these 2.0 concepts and how they relate to my schools and schools everywhere.

My limited time in education has shown me a few things that work and several things that don't when it comes to student learning. The most cogent so far is the need for students to connect their thinking, their work, their own meaning, to other people and ideas outside of the classroom. At Smith School, we were always expected to ask our students to show us connections between the subjects at hand and the outside world. This is what blogging has become for me over the last few months, and this is what Will was talking about when he made that statement.

Here is the essential process that I garnered from our discussion yesterday:

1. Read: the need to seek out quality information will never disappear. Once I find it, I'll use it.
2. Think/Synthesize: reflection on what we are consuming as text: photos, videos, text, multimedia. Where does it belong in my network?
3. Write: put it out there for your community, the world, and let the dialogue begin.
4. Process: what has happened to your ideas? Do you need to reassess?
5. Write: respond and defend, acquiesce, merge.
   

I learn because I pursue information. The tools made available to me by read/write technology don't insure that I will learn, just as syllabi and extensive reading lists never did. We make choices about our learning as we go through school, and not just about what courses we will take. We choose to retain certain pieces of information more than others; we choose to use certain research over others for our writing. Why?

Because we have learned to be editors of information. The flow of information is now slightly overwhelming, and the ability for us to gain access to it blows me away. The tools are only half the game though. The choices about what we let past our filter determine the depths to which we learn. What is quality, what is not? The days of choosing the top three entries on a Google search (one of my least favorite student habits) need to be altered.

What School 2.0 is to me right now is about creating networks, about placing our schools into those networks where they can become part of their own communities. I want the world to see what we do, so that in turn, we can use that world as part of our network.

We'll see how it goes.

Am I going too?

I was pointed in the direction of Christian Long's "Future of Learning Manifesto" and its subsequent additions and expansions by visitors and commenter to his blog. One part of it really stands tall for me and lends itself to my work:

10. Nobody Knows the Answer. Get Comfy with the Questions.

One of the most difficult things to do in life is to cede control of a situation for fear of ceding control of our classrooms. A common theme coming across the waves is that in order for us to provide a relevant assessment and a "school 2.0" environment, we have to provide environments that are not controlled in the traditional sense that educators have come to know it. (See also remote access "Chaos Theory")

And I get it on both sides of the equation. On the traditional side, in order to do what the "Manifesto" points us to do, entire curriculums would need to be re-written, staffs retrained, and students empowered in a way that they have not been before. In my personal situation, the logistics behind doing that are overwhelming. I can't imagine viewing the directive from the standpoint of someone who has been in the classroom for 20 years or more. This would be just another pendulum swing in the world of educational reform and theory. They have seen it before in the way of phonics v. whole language, or inquiry-based learning and PBL's v. standards-driven curriculum. and any other of a host of attempts to change the environment in a classroom. How does that teacher become convinced? How does that teacher see value in giving up control in favor of becoming the driver of creative questions? And also, what if the students, they feel, are not capable of asking meaningful questions, or lack a solid enough foundation in basic terminology or facts to conduct relevat research?

What is happening in terms of the read/write web and collaboration is intense and unbelievably mercurial in nature. To be tied down to one method for too long is missing out on 4 or 5 others that pop up to supersede it (see del.icio.us v. diigo v. Google Notebook--diigo for me). And therein lies the key. There are more questions than answers now. Which is best of research?(digging on Grokker right now) What method can I use to find primary source material on a topic? How can I find relevant, credible resources out of the plethora of hits I get back on Google? When I saw Long's #10 on the list, I sighed because I knew this was the way to go. Get cozy with the "I don't know, let's play around and see," approach. That's where we get the skeptics; Create a possible task and give them tools that make doing it unbelievably easy.

Malcolm Gladwell spoke about the ideas and actions that lead to a radical shift in social policy, design, and consumer power. That is what we are looking at here. Is it podcasts? Blogs? Wikis? Pink or red iPods? No.

What it will be is something that makes accessing information for classroom teachers accessible and safe, something that makes them fearless and confident in front of a roomful of connected students, and something that lets them be comfortable with "I don't know."

Two Quick Points

Internet Time Blog :: Mark Oehlert on the Future Look of Learning

• Two interesting concepts here that I can thank the good folks at Think:Lab for bringing to my attention.
  
• First, is the nanocast: a short quick podcast that relies on pointed, concise questions and zero scripting. Jay Cross at the Internet Time Blog has switched his format entirely to shorter versions of longer podcasts, which he claims do not hold his attention. Who doesn't have a problem with attention span these days? Nanocasting delivers nano-sized points on a specific topic. The benefit, as I see it, is for pulling in an audience with the promise that you don't need to keep them for a long time. As I write this, I am already thinking of doing this with the teachers that I work with as a post-lesson wrap up after they have completed their projects and have taken student feedback into consideration.
• Secondly, I listened to Cross interview Mark Oehlert on one of his nanocasts entitled: The Future Look of Learning, and I have to confess, I was both energized and slightly awestruck at some of the possiblities that Mark mentioned. As we search out more and more uses for Web 2.0 in education, the quest will probably become more competitive, not between those of us using the technology, but between those who are delivering it. The key word now is customization. What Web 2.0 is allowing us to do more than we have ever seen is to customize our environments to what we would like to see. Think widgets, think your personalized Google homepage or whatever aggregator you are using. The competition to make those type of platforms customizable for schools will be fierce. Once we really begin to overcome our fears of "what is out there," schools will likely embrace the idea of off-site hosting and "software" that is personalized. Oehlert and Cross mention that learning styles will be met much more successfully because we will be able to create a series of application that appeals to a visual learner by giving that student a series of applications and feeds that provide resources that are specific not only to the topic that the student is learning, but also to how that student will best learn it. I am psyched.
  
• Trepidation here lies within the fact that deciding what is best for those whom I work with will be difficult. What I am grappling with all the time is this very fact of what is best for me. Recommending to someone else is barely in the cards yet.
  
  

BTW, I apologize for the bullets, but this post was the result of a failed experiment with Diigo's "blog this" feature was does not currently support Blogger. End of January, they say.

The Vocabulary We will be using

Now that I have been reading what is an ever expanding blogroll for over two weeks now, I think the time is nigh that I start trying to make some personal sense out of what I have been ingesting.

At the Thinking Stick, Jeff Utecht talks about what the meaning of School 2.0 is, and how it is not enough that we are just digitizing. What the next step for most schools in America is to grab hold of the interconnectivity that their students, the natives, have already taken hold of.

School 2.0 needs to be about creating knowledge, analyzing information, and evaluating both. It’s about understanding a world in which connections and communicating with others is at the foundation of how we learn, that through creating our own knowledge not from what a teacher tells us, but rather from what we read, listen to, and watch ourselves is far more powerful. A teacher is a guide, much like the guide we had in Vietnam. Arrange the boat for the trip, but allow us to experience the trip, answer questions when we have them, and stay out of the way when we want to experience something ourselves. We could have easily called our guide a history teacher showing us the “Hilton Hotel” where POWs were held, allowing us to experience a silk factory, and filling in the gaps that we couldn’t or didn’t know. We did the learning, he did the guiding.

The folks over at Think:Lab in a post dated earlier in the week spoke about the premises that underlie School 2.0 date back to the progressivism of John Dewey. Without a doubt we are not touching on new theory here, but rather using the read/write technology in lieu of a woodshop or any other pragmatic tool used in Dewey's time. This is what we should take from the terminology: that the influx of technology means little without the useful, practical application of it in contexts that best fit the direction that the learner needs to go in. The guide spoken of in the post above did just that. Provide the framework, manage the tools, answer the questions as they arise, and be prepared for whatever bumps come up.

For years now we’ve talked about being the “Guide on the Side” in the classroom, and that’s what we need to be. Of course it’s hard to do that when you have to fill an 80 minute block. In School 2.0 a ‘tour’ might take 80 minutes it might take 10 minutes. It might be 10 minutes of background knowledge and then 80 minutes of exploration and creation of knowledge. Teachers need time to plan out the route, book the trip, and make sure the experience is available. We need to rethink schools and think about just how messy learning is.

Most of us, at some point in our teacher training, were given the phrase that Utecht uses "the Guide on the Side," and we chuckled at the rhyme, and maybe even took it to heart. However, the true meaning of School 2.0 lies in that very phrase. My aim as an educator has taken an abrubt turn in recent weeks due to the changing demographics of the American and global workforces.

Utecht talks about a definition of School 2.0:

What is School 2.0? It’s a school that defines learning and knowledge not by seat time, or hours spent on a project, but by what is experienced, created, and communicated.

Everything that has come across my nose in the past few months points to a future dependent upon creativity in problem solving, in collaborative efforts, and in the ability to see solutions to questions that haven't arisen yet. What better way to prepare student for that than to introduce him or her to the beautifully unsettling world at large through the use of available technologies? I will let you know as soon as I find it...