iLearn Technology

A few years ago I watched the documentary TED: The Future We Will Create.  Being a fan of TED talks, I was curious to learn more about the behind the scenes of TED talks and how the conference came to be.  I had heard snippets here and there that the TED conference was like a boys club…you had to have money and “be” somebody to get into a live event.  The documentary pulled back the curtain a little on the intentionality of the way that TED conferences are set up.  They are intentionally packed with entrepreneurs and successful people from various walks of life to bring together change makers.  The actual speakers may not be well known (at least not prior to the talk), they have a limited time to speak, and they share an inspirational message.  But TED isn’t really about the talks, TED is really about the talks that happen in between the talks.  It is about those serendipitous moments that happen when people are exposed to a shared inspiration and then have opportunity to dream about it together.  The magic is in those moments when people with different perspectives come together and share their thinking from that unique vantage point.  It is really about the in between moments, that seemingly empty and unimportant time.  TED does something else that I wasn’t aware of, they offer one TED speaker a “prize”.  Only the prize isn’t really a prize (not in the way we typically think about prizes), instead it is that this person gets to make a wish.  They get to cast a vision and a “what-if.”  They get to challenge the audience to solve a problem that matters to them.  Then comes the incredible part- these people actually use their unique gifts and talents and perspective to help make it so.  World changing.  A future that we create.  Together.

As I was pulling together resources for our current inquiry block about “sharing the planet,” I came across several fantastic TED talks that could act like a catalyst for deeper thinking and additional curiosity.  As I watched each video, I kept thinking about the behind the scenes, the in-between talks that aren’t documented.  The change happening as a result.

Then it hit me, we could do this at Anastasis.  We could watch these talks together, and then allow for the in-between talks.  We could be intentional and let our students engage in the discussion, the serendipitous moments of one thing leading to another, and another.  We could give our students time to just talk and wonder and discover together.  We could narrow it down to 3 or 4 TED talks and provide our students with serendipitous in-between.  We could open up the opportunity for our students to come up with the “wish” or challenge that the others would work to make happen.  We could empower our students to go through this same process and then watch them use their unique perspective, gifts and talents to find solutions and dream up new possibilities.

I’m excited to try this.  I believe that we are in the midst of genius every day at Anastasis.  These kids are really incredible.  I want to see what unfolds when we offer just a little inspiration related to our inquiry and then give them some space to just explore and talk.  I want them to see that when hunches collide, BIG world changing ideas happen.  I want them to understand that they are world changers.

Has anyone else done this with students?

I think that this will be a starting point.  For now we will watch talks.  Next year, I would love to have our students plan their own talks.  I want to invite the best-and-brightest from around the world to come listen to our talks.  I want to provide the in-between moments where change is enacted.

Stay tuned…

Okay, here is the thing, we (the collective we) have exactly 25 days to raise $83,570.  This number represents change. This number represents personalized learning for our kids. This number represents revolution.

$83,570.

It is big. But not that big. Not that impossible.  We can do this. One dollar at a time.  When you view this campaign you will see suggested donation levels beginning at $5 and going all the way to $5,000.  Those are merely suggestions.  If we all take a minute out of our day, chip in one dollar, spread the word to one other person, this project is completed in no time.  Are we willing to give up a cup of coffee (and a cheap one at that!) to make education better for all?

We often wax poetic about changing education. This, right here, is your opportunity to really do it.  I wish I had a trust fund hiding out somewhere that could make this happen.  That just isn’t the case.  So here I am, shamelessly asking you for a dollar.  Kind of like an internet panhandler.

We have 25 days to do this. Make the choice right now to chip in click here:  The Learning Genome Project

What: The Michigan Reading Association is hosting an interactive virtual book club for anyone to join via Facebook.   This is an opportunity to network with educators around the world and take charge of your own professional development.  The first book is Readicide by Kelly Gallagher (who will be hosting the book club with the Michigan Reading Association).  If you aren’t familiar with this book, you can read a post I wrote when the book was first released here.  The idea behind the virtual book club is to give educators a place to connect with others, share ideas, reflect and improve your classroom.

Where: It is easy to join just click to view the Facebook invitation and select “I’m Attending.”

When: The book club will meet during the month of May.  Login whenever you are available to browse posts and conversations and add your own thoughts.  Each week there will be a post that outlines a general road map that chunks chapters so we are reading and reflecting at a similar pace.

How: Purchase Readicide, view Kelly’s website and follow him on Twitter, “attend” the facebook invitation, let the fun begin!

I really enjoyed reading Readicide and look forward to reading it again-this time with friends to reflect with!  Who else will be joining us?

Thank you to Erin for inviting me!

There are some things, that when presented to you in life, you want to run away from.  In my experience, those things I want to run away from, are often a window into my future.   My immediate reaction is to resist, but in the end, as I get more comfortable with the idea, I end up embracing it with passion.  Over the past 3 years, I have been approached by different people, in different walks of life, to start a school.  The first time conversation headed in this direction I was intrigued and, if I’m honest, totally terrified.  What do I know about starting a school?  I continued the conversation because I love talking education and learning and thought I might learn something in the process.  Last year, my mindset about starting a school began to change.  I can’t pinpoint exactly what caused that change, maybe it was being in a private school and realizing that even there, education isn’t what it should be.  Sure there are more resources, money, involved parents, more freedom, but education is still being done the same way it has been for nearly a century.  We have tools and resources at our disposal that would make customizing education a much easier task than it was even 20 years ago and yet the direction we are heading in is to standardize more and individualize less.

Somewhere in the span of a year, I decided to really take this on.  Even if the end result wasn’t a school, I wanted to really intentionally re-imagine education.  I wanted to re-imagine what a school is.  I brought together a few teachers who share my passion for education and learning and a passion to improve education.  Two of us decided to pursue what it would take to make our ideas a reality and start a school.  We brought an entrepreneur into the mix who has no background in education but knows how to build a business.  That may seem like a strange thing to do, but we both felt that an outside perspective is needed.  Sometimes we are too close to education to get a clear view of the possibilities that exist because we can build up walls that are unnecessary.  The three of us are coming to a place where we are ready to invite more voices into the mix.  I would relish your input in the formation of this school.  This is your opportunity to help shape education!  I think the best way to ask for that input is through Google forms.  I will be throwing out Google Forms with questions about education, learning, school design etc. over the next few months, I hope you will help out when you can.

First I should give you a 10,000 foot view of what we are looking to accomplish.  I don’t want to give away too many details just yet because as I am asking for input, I want it to be separate from our ideas and biases.  We are looking to create a replicable school model that could eventually take the place of public education.   Right now it is our feeling that public education is beyond tweaking.  Education needs a major overhaul and re-imagining.  To try to do this within the current system is going to be slow at best.  We want the school to be free for everyone (tuition-free) but private (not government-funded).  I will post more later about our ideas for how to accomplish that.  The focus of the school will be building up a community of learners.  I will be adding more details and fleshing this out for those who are interested in later posts.

With this in mind, I would love your help with the first round of questions.  If you can take a minute to help out it would be greatly appreciated.  This first Google form focuses on the learning environment.  Don’t feel like you have to answer each and every question, answer those that you have an opinion about or are passionate about.

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You may be wondering what the title of this post is all about… about a month ago @cybraryman1 and I came up with the idea of Twitter Academy, the ideal school created and shaped by educators on Twitter.  As I progress with this project, I will be using the hash tag #twitacad on Twitter to follow conversations and progress.  Please feel free to add to that conversation by adding #twitacad to any of your tweets.  @cybraryman1 has started a page on his awesome site for Twitter Academy.

It is a beautiful Friday in Colorado, the beginning crispness of fall is just breaking through the summer heat.  I hope you all had a wonderful week.

Here is a recap of what I have been up to when I’m not blogging here:

• Break Free of the Box- a Dreams of Education post about what school currently looks like, and my vision of what school should look like.
• When Hunches Collide- a Dreams of Education post about some hunches I have about education, things I have been thinking about but haven’t totally figured out yet.  I could use your help on that post!
• The obligation to desert mediocrity: Waiting for Robin Hood- a Dreams of Education post about the current state of education and teachers who look more like Robin Hood than Superman.
• LearnBoost Gradebook- A post on iPad Curriculum, LearnBoost is a free gradebook and classroom management system that is online and can be used from any web browser as well as on the iPad.
• New lessons posted this week- Technology and Character Education: A lesson in empathy.
• Don’t forget to enter the EdTech UNconference contest to win a year long pass…a $200 value!
• Don’t forget to Change the World!

Yesterday was the release of Project PLN, it didn’t come without some hiccups in the form of technical difficulties.  First Openzine seemed to have crashed and then Slideshare didn’t want to make our document public. Stressful after the build up Nick and I had so carefully planned out.  It happens!  If you were affected by the difficulties yesterday, let me share the Openzine version here for you.  Hopefully it will be nothing but smooth sailing from here  We so appreciate all of your encouragement, thoughtful comments, and passing our idea on to others!  For those of you asking how you can contribute to the next Project PLN, please take a look at the Mission: Project PLN article from Nick and I.  Nick gives you a list of our upcoming topics and offers a variety of ways to submit your work.

projectpln10 – Project PLN Issue 1 PLNs

Create Your OpenZine

In case you missed what I was up to on my other blogs this week, here is a recap.

I wrote a new post today over at Dreams of Education called Teachers as Expendables

Over at iPad Curriculum I wrote a post about Kaplan Publishing offering 87 FREE ebooks (hurry this offer ends soon) and a post about turning any text into a spoken track.

New blogging educators are joining us every day at the Edublogger Alliance Wackwall, come join us!

I officially opened my iLearn Technology eStore this week where you can find lesson plans, ebooks, and Promethean Flipcharts.  Right now there are two price points $.99 and free (I’m publishing my content iTunes style).

Hope you all have a wonderful weekend, thanks for all of the comments, tweets, and support this week!

Reform Symposium Conference Presenters: Kevin Jarrett and Mary Beth Hertz

I am moderating Kevin’s session and won’t be able to live blog it so I’ll just post links where you can find the recordings later.

Kevin’s Second Life in Education session

Mary Beth’s It’s Not the Tool, It’s How You Use It

This weekend is the Reform Symposium eConference, 48 hours of free learning! I am going to do my best to keep notes of all of the great conversations and learning when I am not moderating or sleeping

This was the opening keynote by Steve Hargadon:

• Information overload vs. Web as a conversation
  We have to get past our perception that participation is only for the elite. Everyone is a participant and a creator.
  The answer to content overload is to create more content because our paradigm shifts and we start seeing everything as conversation.
• Our students hold in their hands technology that was the stuff of dreams when we were growing up. They are incredible devices for learning. Learning is everywhere.
  We are seeing an amazing shift toward openness. Consider Wikipedia that in a relatively short amount of time an open encyclopedia took the place of a cultural institution.
  MIT is now providing classes to free when anyone goes online. The value is no longer in the specific content but in being actively engaged and they are doing something that is valuable to humanity by providing this openness.
• Flexbook- online open virtual textbook initiative. This will bring value and save money.
• Participation is being reinvented, it is a return to participation. It is a pre-broadcast, pre-factory, un-consumer model. This is dramatically changing the lives of youth because their lives are largely interactive.
• Flickr, YouTube, Facebook, and Myspace are showing us a new model of growth and success that is driven by consumer demand instead of top down economics.
• Linux is running Google’s servers.  This is incredible!
• Volunteerism 2.0- we have always recognized value of volunteering but we are now seeing the opportunity to volunteer and participate in ways that weren’t possible before.  Clay Shirky calls this the “Redistribution of Our Cognitive Surplus”.  We are spending time creating instead of consuming.  This is unleashing energy.  Clay Shirky Ted Talk.
• This is a change in structure it is participative (like democracy).  The Internet is doing this for content and knowledge.  We need the same structure in education.
• We have to move toward the freedom end of the structure in schools.  We aren’t used to thinking this way.  It is possible for students to be their own driver in education.
• We are organizing without organizations. What used to take financial resources to pull together to get something happening, doesn’t require that any more.  (Case in point the Reform Symposium conference!!)
• Wikis let us organize information the way we want them, post at our convenience (not every day like a blog), but social networking has been widely adopted in a way wiki’s and blogs weren’t.  Social networking opened the door to the participation and conversation and made it easy to come in.  Blogs take longer to get the conversation going. Wikis are a little more complex and have a learning curve.  Social networking aggregated web 2.0 tools in a single location.  Facebook is now up to 500,000,000 members.
• Steve started Classroom 2.0 and it now has 45,000 members, social networking is valuable to the education world.  It gives peer-to-peer practice sharing and conversation.
• We have to get over that social networking is a dangerous place to be.  It will become the framework structure of the educational experience.
• Communication platform: social networking + learning management system + live collaboration
• It makes us rethink how teaching and learning take place.
• We have to ask how well are we preparing students for this world and how prepared are we from this world?
• Principles of school 2.0: contributing, collaborating, creating.
• The best way to predict the future is to be it: Be a learner first, we need great teachers to be a part of the conversation and figure out how to harness web 2.0′s inherent capabilities, keep perspective-students need really great teachers more than ever, join an educational or social network (lurking is allowed), become a part of the conversation and encourage others to do so, help collaborate to build a new playbook and be a voice in the public discussion (Twitter #edchat!!), embrace the change process (this is going to be a wild ride, it is going to challenge the way we think).

Find the recording of the Keynote here.

Tonight’s #edchat topic on Twitter was: Can we agree on a common goal of education?

My response:

The goal of education is to provide the conditions for learning.  I think that it is a broad enough goal for everything else to fall into place.  I engaged in some discussion about how current conditions keep us from that goal.  While I agree to some extent, I think that excuses are an easy way to stay where we are.  We can create conditions for learning without administrative support, without funding for technology, without the best conditions.  How do I know this?  Because I had teachers who did it for me.  They used what they had, within the system they were in, to provide us with the conditions for learning.  And guess what?  We learned.

Now, this is not to say that the goal wouldn’t be more attainable if we weren’t mired in a system that is run by testing and policies.  It is better to have ubiquitous use of technology and freedom within our classrooms.   I believe that those things will come.  But right now we are working within this system.  For now we can create conditions of learning for our students using what we have available to us.  Is it ideal?  No.  Is it possible?  Of course.  All it takes is some creativity.

I want to be clear, creating conditions for learning does not mean that every classroom looks the same.  It means that the conditions created match that unique student population.  The conditions that I learn best in may look different from the conditions that you learn best in.  This means that teachers have to know and understand the needs of their students.  The conditions of learning may change every year, every month, every day, and even every hour.  We are human, our needs are constantly changing.

Someone mentioned during the #edchat, that it would be great to see how students answered this question.  I actually know how my students answered this question, because I asked my 3rd-5th grade students to answer it last year.  My students answered something like this: the goal of education is to get good grades and pass tests so you can go to college.   Not the answer most of us would like to hear but there it is.  Did we really expect differently?  This is what our school system breaths.  This is the current goal of education, to move students through so that they graduate and go to college.

Being the computer teacher has some major advantages, one of which is that there is no curriculum to follow.  I write my own curriculum every year.  I have a scope and sequence of skills that I want my students to gain and I use a different path to get there each and every year.  I didn’t originally intend for this to be a year-long project, but that is what it became because it made my students think differently, creatively.  It made them question, discuss, and debate.  It was brilliant.

We had just finished learning the Internet safety rules, and were practicing netiquette.  I wanted my students to have an authentic place to practice their newly acquired skills so I sent them on their way to write their first blog entry.  The topic: Write about your dream school.  If you could make a school look like whatever you wanted it to, what would it look like?  How would learning happen there?

After the students had a chance to blog their dreams, I asked them to pick their favorite idea and add it to our class Wallwisher.  I cannot tell you how disappointed I was with the answers.  They were the most unimaginative answers I had ever seen.  I’m talking zero in the creativity department.  It was as if they were writing what they thought I wanted to hear.  Then it hit me, they were writing what they thought I wanted to hear.  Isn’t that what their education has primed them for?  Guess what the teacher is thinking.  There is only one right answer and then we move on to the next thing.

Not willing to let the project go, the next week I sat all of my students down and asked them again what their dream schools would look like.  They hadn’t gotten more creative with their answers in the week they had to think about them.  The look of utter confusion on their faces was obvious.  They couldn’t figure out what the right answer was, the one that I wanted to hear that would move us on to the next topic.  I showed my students pictures of the inside of Googleplex and Pixar.  You have never heard so many “oohs” and “awwws”.  By the end of the slide show, every kid was declaring that they were going to work at Google or Pixar some day.  I asked them why they would want to work there?

“Because it is SO cool!”

“Did you see the Lego room?”

“They get to play all day!”

“It is so colorful.”

“It looks like a playground.”

“They have a chef that cooks lunch for them.”

We talked about why Googleplex and Pixar look the way they do and the philosophy that each company has.  We talked about what it means to be creative and the things that help us get in that creative element.  Then I showed them some pictures of schools,  one had a slide in the building, another had students singing and dancing on top of desks, another of students sitting on exercise balls instead of chairs.  The common phrase uttered was “they are so lucky!”  I also showed them the YouTube video of the piano stairs.

I asked them to go back to their seats and blog about their dream school again.   I told them that there was no right answer.  The right answer was their answer.  The sky was the limit.  This time the ideas were infinitely more exciting.  Some students still played it safe and stuck to what was possible in the confines of the school system they knew.  Others wanted anti-gravity classrooms.  There were common threads in every one of my students blog posts: they all wanted flexible learning spaces, they all wanted more hands on/active learning, they wanted school to feel like play, and they all wanted animals to be involved in some fashion.

You can see some of their answers on these Wallwishers:

3rd Grade1

4th Grade1

4th Grade2

5th Grade 1

My students got so excited about this little blogging activity that they continued to post about what their dream schools would look like (even though I hadn’t assigned it).  I had students stop by my classroom and tell me another idea they had for a dream school.  Then I had students start asking if I would ask the administration to make our school a dream school.  I can only imagine how that would go, so instead I expanded the project.

I asked my students to imagine that they actually got the go ahead for their school, and now they had to advertise for it.  They had to convince me to send my imaginary children to their imaginary school.  They had to make a convincing case for why their school made the best place to learn.  Each student made a brochure advertising their school.  They highlighted the features of their school, promised amazing things, and sold it!  I am telling you, I have never seen such amazing work out of my students!  I would have sent my imaginary kids to any one of their schools.  Boy did they sell it!  The brochures looked amazing.  I brought them into the teacher’s lounge to pass around.  The teachers couldn’t believe what their students were capable of.  It was great!  A few of the kids brought the brochure they created to the administration to show off.

The kids hadn’t had enough, they wanted to explore the idea further.  I had them create commercials for their school.  I showed them the Kaplan University commercials and told them they could be inspiring like Kaplan, factual, funny, or any combination of the three.  They set to work using their method of choice.  Some used Keynote, others recorded in Photobooth and edited in iMovie, some used Xtranormal, some GoAnimate, and others used the ZimmerTwins.  The commercials were fabulous.

Toward the end of the year I had the kids create websites for their imaginary dream schools.  They used Weebly to create the websites.  I cannot tell you how impressed I was with the level of creativity, innovation, and fun that showed up on those sites.  The kids were convincing, but more than that, they were right.  They may have started with every student having a laptop, pony, and anti-gravity rooms, but where they ended was with rich learning experiences.  At the core what our students want is an opportunity to discover, play, and experiment with their learning.  They want to feel safe.  They want to be active.  I wish I could share the finished sites and commercials with you, I can’t because they contain pictures of students and other identifying information.

I learned a lot from my students as a result of the project, at the heart of it is this: provide conditions where we can learn.