Today I had the pleasure of speaking with Dr. Rod Berger of RANDA solutions for The Core of Education podcast. We had a great chat about education reform, personalizing education and a bit about my personal journey in education. You can listen to the 20 minute podcast here: The Core of Education.
On Tuesday I had the distinct honor of chatting with @thenerdyteacher on The Nerdy Cast. Nick and I have been buds for years, working on various projects together, talking education and pop culture. You can listen to our whole Nerdy Cast chat which includes our humble adventures in blogging, starting Project PLN , starting a school and my newest project, The Learning Genome.
Big, sweeping changes don’t seem to happen overnight, as quickly as we might like. Thirty, forty, or a hundred years go into those sweeping changes: race relations, animal testing, women’s rights, recognition of addiction as a disease. And yet, in each case, there was a turning point. Those handful of pivotal moments when someone(s) decide it must be different and that in this moment in time, change will begin.
For me, this pivotal change happened in October of 2010. Two years ago. That moment of “it must be different” led to a school. Anastasis Academy. In many ways, Anastasis feels like it happened over night (we started a school in 4 short months!) and in other ways, it feels like it will take years before the vision of Anastasis is realized.
Sweeping changes happen over time. Often, they are hardly noticeable as they are happening. This explains the 5 year old, struggling through their ABC’s who is ‘suddenly’ reading. When did that happen?!
People often ask why I don’t write more about Anastasis. The whole process has been incredibly organic and hard to describe to someone who isn’t seeing it unfold with me. I can tell you about students who are becoming fully alive and discovering that they love learning. Until you see this happen before you, until you hear the students talk about it, it is really a weak representation of what is happening. Here we are in year two. In a lot of ways, it has felt like a harder beginning. This is strange in light of what happened last year…starting a school in 4 months from a place of zero. I think it feels harder because the vision of what could be is being more fully defined and dreamed up each day. There is this sense of frustration that it isn’t here yet.
The change is hardly noticeable as it’s happening. It is organic and creeping. Sometimes I overhear students talking animatedly about figuring out ratios, and exclaiming over learning what portion of the population lives on less that $1.25/day, the change is happening. The vision is being realized one moment at a time. These kids are becoming fully alive. Those teaching them are doing the same. We hear parents describe what we do to others.
This is community.
This is family.
This is church.
This is Anastasis.
This is the beginning of sweeping change, where students can be fully alive and learn how to properly manage their freedom.
So, we will go on wishing that we could already see the full realization of this vision, but we will also rest in the hardly-noticeable moments of change in this journey. We will appreciate the moments in time that keep everything from happening at once. We will rejoice as we watch it all unfold in it’s perfection. We will wait anxiously for the day when this type of learning is available to children everywhere in the world.
***While we wait, consider joining in this mission to help students be “fully alive” in their learning. Donate and spread the word about the Learning Genome Project. This is the vehicle we will use to share this vision with ALL children.
Schools often talk about professional development as if it is the key to a successful school. I’m not convinced more professional development is the answer. I think it’s all about culture. When you have people who come together around passion, who enjoy each other, who have a common mission: that changes everything.
Our teacher handbook doesn’t look like most. It was inspired by creative companies like Valve and Apple. We are a group of rebels here. Our handbook had to reflect that.
We are on a mission to humanize learning. We are on a mission to make personalized learning available to EVERY child in the world. Please help us spread the word. Donate, tweet, blog, and email others about the Learning Genome Project.
What it is: The Miniature Earth Project is a great website that poses the question: “what if the population of the Earth were reduced into a community of only 100 people?” Based on this assumption, the site helps students understand what the breakdown of nationalities would be, religious representation, how many people would live in an urban area, how many people would have the majority of the world income, how many would live without clean world, those that live on less than $1.25/day, etc. The purpose of the site is to break our quickly approaching 7billion people in the world down to a number (100) that we can more easily wrap our minds around. The point of the site is to help kids (and adults) understand the real landscape of the world and cause positive action.
There is a video on the site that breaks down the infographic in a different way. Students can submit their own videos about the Miniature Earth.
How to integrate The Miniature Earth Project into your curriculum: Right now the Jr. High at Anastasis Academy is looking at the following line of inquiry: “Understanding our rights and responsibilities as individuals and the similarities and differences of others helps contribute to the development of world citizens.” The Miniature Earth Project is a great place to put the world’s challenges in perspective for students. We have been having fantastic conversations about the rights that we enjoy as Americans, and the responsibilities to others around the world that come with those rights. Students have also been exploring rights they believe all world citizens should enjoy and what responsibility they share in making those rights a reality for those who don’t currently enjoy them. As you can imagine, the discussion has been fascinating!
A great place to start this discussion is by asking students to create their own personal code of conduct. What standards will they hold themselves to? At Anastasis we talk often about managing our freedom. Freedom comes with responsibility, it isn’t a free-for all. We also ask students to think about what their actions would look like if it were multiplied by 7 billion people. What would the world look like? Is it a place they would want to live? The Miniature Earth Project is a great place for next steps. Looking at who makes up their world, what kind of challenges are faced. We ask our students to think about solutions to those challenges. They are NOT too young to come up with solutions!
Since the 100 person Earth is such a manageable number, ask students to create graphical representations of each figure presented in the Miniature Earth Project. What questions do they have based on the data? What challenges do they see? What common ground do we have? What are our responsibilities? What rights should we claim for all humans? What are ways that we can make the world a better place for all? What impact can a small change make on such a large population (does it change when you think about it on a smaller scale)?
Want to show students how their actions can change the world? Share the story of the 13 year old who has the world planting a million trees! The story of Felix Finkbeiner is an awesome one! Equally cool for our students: we have a Mr. Finkbeiner who teaches at Anastasis.
Tips: There are great links to more information about our population approaching 7 billion. Be sure to have your students dig into those resources to learn more!
***Want to do your part as a CHANGE MAKER in education? Check out, support and spread the word about the Learning Genome Project!
Please leave a comment and share how you are using Miniature Earth Project in your classroom!
*** If you need the cliff notes version of this post, skip down to the Call to Action section!
Last year I had a “hunch” about learning…specifically about curriculum. That hunch turned into a full fledged idea and a mission to do better for kids. Everywhere. Along the line I met some truly incredible people who taught me things I didn’t know how to do before. Like wire framing (thanks @ianchia), and pitching ideas (thanks @houseofgenius), and how to go about picking up programmers (thanks @toma_bedolla). Now I’m ready to share the culmination of all this work with you.
This isn’t just a post to tell you about what I’m doing, it is a call to action for everyone (yes, even you). It is a request for you to join me in this mission in whatever form that may take.
I have a vision: to make personalized learning a reality for EVERY child.
I know, it is big. It is also doable.
For those who are new to following me, here was my original “hunch” written on my other blog, Dreams of Education:
“The problem with curriculum and textbooks is that they complete thoughts. Curriculum and textbooks give the impression that learning has an end. That when you have made it from cover to cover, the job is done. I know in my own schooling this was true, I thought that school was teaching me what was important and that anything outside of the curriculum wasn’t important or relevant to my life…wouldn’t they have included it otherwise? How did curriculum get this way? Well, people realized that there was no possible way to cover every facet of learning, so they stripped it down to what they thought was important. The problem? What is important to you may not be what is important to me. What’s more, something that is very important to me may have been cut all together so I don’t even get the chance to know that it is important to me. Humans tend to like things that are definable, we like things that we can put into a neat, orderly box and carry out in a predictable way. It feels safe and manageable. This is what led me to the following hunch:
What if curriculum was more flexible? What if curriculum/schools/learning looked more like Pandora. If you aren’t familiar with Pandora, it is an online radio station that plays the music that it thinks you will like. You type in an artist or song and it creates a customized radio station just for you. It is remarkably accurate. Pandora almost never gets it wrong for me. It is like they have a direct line to my brain and can predict what song I would like to hear next. When it is wrong, I can give the song a thumbs down and it apologizes profusely for the error and promises never to play that song again on my station. The other thing I love about Pandora: I can have multiple radio stations. Because sometimes I really couldn’t think of anything in the world better than Frank, Dean, and Sammy; but other times I also want a little Timberlake, Whitestripes, or Bangles. What if curriculum looked like that? What if learning happened as a result of typing in one subject or topic that a student was enamored with and a completely personalize learning journey began playing out for them? What if students were led through a journey that was completely customized? What if they had several stations mapped out for them?”
I believe this is possible. I believe it is within our reach to create a completely personalized learning experience to every unique child. I believe that we can honor humanity instead of treating our kids like widgets in a factory. I believe that teachers should be teachers, focused on the needs and development of the child instead of teaching the masses through scripted curriculum.
The Learning Genome Project will empower teachers and parents to become engineers of learning by providing each individual student the exact content they need, at the exact moment they need it. The Learning Genome will enable students to explore the process of inquiry, experimentation, discovery and problem solving. Instead of learning how to pass the next test, we will enable students to construct meaning and learn how to transfer that meaning to new life context. At the hub, the Learning Genome is a platform that aggregates resources and, using a series of algorithms, provide recommendations of the BEST resources to meet the individual learning needs of a specific child. The Learning Genome creates those serendipitous moments of finding just the right learning tool to meet the needs of children at the right time.
Much like Pandora finds that perfect piece of music, the Learning Genome will find the perfect piece of learning material to aid the student in learning. The key to the Learning Genome’s success is crowd sourcing. I will be drawing on educators around the world (that’s you!) to help me tag curriculum, books, lessons, videos, apps, websites and other educational content. This collection of tagged content lives in the centralized “cloud” and wil allow users around the world to find and access materials that best suit student needs. By gathering information about the individual student’s learning style preferences, multiple intelligence strengths, social/emotional levels, interests and passion, the Learning Genome can help teachers to create customized learning maps for each individual. This portion will be free. Every child deserves a unique learning experience.
In addition to the Learning Genome Hub (the aggregate), the site will include a complete Student Information System, planning tools, e-portfolios, e-learning, individual learning plans, assessment and blogging tools. All of these will work seamlessly together for you go-to for learning and planning.
4. Tweet about this project…a lot. Let’s completely take over the Internet with tweets about the Learning Genome and taking over education for kids! Please make sure to link back to the indiegogo campaign so that others can learn about it! Use the hashtag #standagain (because after all, we are helping children “stand again” in their learning)
6. Mention us on Facebook and like us on Facebook!
7. Did I mention spread the word? Seriously, that is SO helpful! You never know who might see that tweet and drop a couple thousand (or more) to make this project go!
8. Time is of the essence. I have 40 days starting NOW to make this happen. eeek! I need your help!
So, what are the perks to helping with this project?
$5 gets your name on the Learning Genome Change Makers page. You are changing education. That makes you a big deal. I want everyone to know what a big deal you are! I know many of you don’t think that your $5 can do anything. Wrong. According to my cluster map, I have hundreds of thousands of visits to this blog. If each of you pitches in…we all win fast!
$10 Remember all those cool Bloom’s Taxonomy posters I made? This campaign is now the ONLY place you can get them. These are 8.5″ x 11″ versions of the poster.
$30 Learning Genome beta tester. You get the inside scoop and ability to play before ANYONE else. I know, pretty cool.
$60 EXCLUSIVE A full size large-format print of my Bloomin’ Peacock mailed to you. That awesome little Peacock looks even better large. Did I mention this is the ONLY place you will get a big version of this?
$500 Even more EXCLUSIVE you get all of my Bloom’s re-imagine posters in the large format. Perfect for your classroom, library or as a gift to your favorite teachers.
$1000 My Searching for daVinci webinar for your school. What better way to spend your professional development dollars than learning how to create a daVinci like culture of learning at your school? Worth it!
$5000 For my corporate friends who want to see their logo in lights as a company that supports education and changing the world. If you have an education company, The Learning Genome Project will be the place to be seen.
We have $85,000 to raise. It sounds like a big number. We can do it together. I figured if I am going to lean on crowdsourcing to transform education, the funding should be crowdsourced too. How awesome will it be to join together as an education community to say, together we transformed the way learning is done. We changed things for every child in the world. Yeah, it’s big.
What it is: I first wrote about Qwiki in 2010 when they launched their search service. I just got word that you (and your students) can now create your very own Qwiki. When students search using Qwiki, instead of coming up with a list of links to websites, images, and videos, a slide show of images and videos begins complete with computer voice narration. It is truly an incredible experience.
With Qwiki Creator, it is easy to create your own Qwiki to share. Creating a Qwiki is really easy and intuitive. First, you find the content and media you want to add to your Qwiki. This could be web content, video, images, maps, content from your computer, text or even a tweet. Next you add narration and set your timing. Finally you can preview your Qwiki and publish it. I created the Qwiki above in about 5 min.
How to integrate Qwiki Creator into the classroom: Qwiki Creator is a fantastic way for students to create impressive presentations about their learning. Students can quickly create mashups of web content and record or type narration to demonstrate understanding of material. Qwiki Creator is also a great tool for teachers, create customized content for your students. This is textbook 2.0 for sure! It can be tailored to the exact needs of your curriculum and can become an additional way for your to “flip” your classroom.
I love the idea of students creating their own digital textbooks as they learn about a subject. Throughout their learning and research, students can keep a table of contents of items they want to be sure to include in their Qwiki. Students can create a Qwiki about the information they have learned, add text/voice/video narration to help describe the learning and publish it for classmates to learn from. The Qwiki can be shared easily or embeded on a student blog or website.
Create your own series of Qwiki’s for your classroom blog or website where students can further their learning. They can access any of the websites or resources you include in your Qwiki for a majorly upgraded version of a webquest.
Qwiki Creator could be used for digital storytelling. Students can find images, videos and maps that help them tell their story and narrate the creative story for others to enjoy.
In a foreign language class, students can give a web tour where they narrate in the language they are learning. This would also be neat to do in a geography or history class.
If you teach students who are younger than 13, consider creating Qwiki’s as a class using an interactive whiteboard and teacher account. Students can help put the Qwiki together and the finalized Qwiki can be put on a class blog or website for students to learn from any time.
Tips: Students must be 13 years old or older to use Qwiki Creator according to the Terms of Service.
Please leave a comment and share how you are using Qwiki Creator in your classroom!
If you are a regular reader of my blog (or Tweets) you know about Anastasis. This is the school that @matthewquigley and I started a year ago. It has been an incredible journey. What makes what we do everyday work? We surround ourselves with the VERY best. Seriously, we are smart enough to know that you hire people who are better than you are. Our teachers are incredible! They are so incredible, in fact, that we are growing and need to hire more.
At Anastasis Academy, we are a community of learners. We strongly believe that joining with passionate, qualified people is essential to building this community. We give our teachers FREEDOM to be teachers. We have two positions available for the 2012-2013 school year for a full time elementary and a full time jr. high teacher. If that is you, we would love to hear from you. You can learn more about the positions available and find our application for download here.
We are located in the south Denver area. If you aren’t, don’t let that stop you from dreaming, @michellek107 joined us from Nebraska last year!
If all that didn’t win you over, you should know that @matthewquigley and I are pretty dynamite bosses. We also happen to have the greatest staff and students.
What it is:Mixbook saved us this year in a BIG way. Being our first year as a school, we didn’t want to use a big yearbook publishing company to create our first yearbook. We wanted to be able to get as much of the year in as possible (most yearbook companies have mid-year deadlines), we were only having 60 made (small potatoes for big yearbook companies), and we wanted to be able to print one-offs if we needed to. We started creating in Shutterfly, it was a familiar program, most of our helpers had used it for personal books so the learning curve was small. And then the world came crashing down. It was the day before the deadline to get our order in so that it would make it before the school year ended. Two of us logged in at the same time and apparently properly confused the system and lost the whole thing. All 30 pages of it. After throwing a pity party, trying to get in touch with Shutterfly (unsuccessfully), and declaring that there would be no yearbook, I did what anyone would do- I took my pity party to Twitter.
I never did hear from Shutterfly. You know who did come to the rescue? Mixbook. They saw my pity party tweet, apologized for our bad fortune, offered their assistance and let us know that they would be happy to help in any way they could. I was familiar with Mixbook but hadn’t used it before. I hopped onto the Mixbook site and immediately liked what I saw:
The interface is incredibly easy to use.
It allows collaborative working and tells you when someone else is editing the book so you don’t override each other.
It has great templates.
It has great customization options.
The customer service is unmatched. Honestly, any time we had a question/comment/problem they helped within minutes. During business hours they have a dynamite online chat support system. When it wasn’t normal business hours their Twitter genius would get back to me. Emails were answered within hours.
Finished books can be viewed and shared for free online.
They were incredibly helpful in keeping the price of each book reasonable for us. They extended coupon codes, gave us bulk purchase discounts, and rushed our order so that it would get to us with plenty of time to spare.
The books are GORGEOUS. They look better than they do on screen (this hasn’t been my experience with other book companies).
Mixbook is a free online scrapbook/calendar/card creator. With Mixbook, you aren’t limited to pre made templates, everything is fully customizable. The online design software is extremely easy to use and works the way you would expect it to (no unwelcome surprises). Mixbook is integrated with many popular photo sites including Facebook, Flickr, Picasa, etc. You can also easily batch upload from your computer.
How to integrate Mixbook into the classroom: As we experienced, Mixbook is a fantastic place to make school or classroom yearbooks. Despite the short timeline, we enjoyed creating our yearbooks and are glad to have our first year commemorated so beautifully. At the bottom of each page, we created a running timeline of everything that happened in our first year as a school.
Because it is so easy to customize each page, students could use Mixbook to create “published” portfolios or writing. Take pictures of student work throughout the year, keep a folder for each student. At the end of the year, students can create a Mixbook of their work. They can include the pictures of their work and add text boxes where they reflect on their learning or explain the project. For original writing, students can create digital or hand drawn illustrations that get scanned and uploaded to the Mixbook pages. Students can type the story directly in Mixbook. The finished book can be shared for free online, parents will have the option to purchase the book if they would like to.
A photo calendar would be a great way to commemorate a school year and would make an awesome end of the year gift to your students. Each month can include projects and snapshots of what you did throughout the year.
Create specialized cards and thank you stationary for your classroom. Any time you need it, it will be ready to go and more special for your students.
Group projects are easy to create with Mixbook. The collaboration ability is wonderful! You could use Mixbook with colleagues to create custom learning guides that you can get printed.
Tips: As an educator, you get an extra discount for any order of 10 items or more. OUTSTANDING!
Please leave a comment and share how you are using Mixbook in your classroom!
Holy Smokes. It has been a CRAZY couple of weeks. Don’t let anyone tell you that starting a school is an insane amount of work; that is a piece of cake compared to ending your first school year! Blogging has obviously taken a back seat. It feels strange not to blog every day after making that a habit over the last 4 years.
Today is dedicated to Pinterest. I find so many fantastic things that spark ideas for must-dos at Anastasis. I’m sharing a few of them here. I hope they spark some ideas for your classrooms!
This year we did some composting, this was followed by planting seedlings in newspaper just like this. Each student made a newspaper “pot” for their seeds. We love that it is biodegradable!
We are ending the year at Anastasis with a Storyline Expo. This is a showcase of student work throughout the year. We wanted to show a progression of learning and a timeline seemed like a great way to do it.
We are making preparations for our first field day. Water noodle target practice looked like a great activity. What are we most excited about? A food truck for lunch. We are cool like that.
We have spent a good majority of the year sharing wishes and dreams. For our storyline expo, we are creating silhouettes of students sharing what they love about our school.
We have done SO many hands on experiments throughout the year. This one was particularly neat to visualize weather in a cup.
We took pictures of all the kids “holding-on” to rope like this. They made great bookmarks for our first ever read-in!
Every student created a poster with this quote on it. It so perfectly summarizes what we believe about students and learning.
This is SUCH a great way to practice equations and algebra. Each number on the clock is represented by an equation. Our students made some unique “geeky” clocks this year.
We really wanted students to find freedom in their learning this year. Creating unique thumbprints with information and thoughts from each student was a great way to kick this thought process off. They turned out great!
Words we live by daily!
To see the originals of these images (and many more), visit my Pinterest Classroom Inspiration page. Pinterest is my guilty pleasure, I add to it even when I don’t have time to blog! If you haven’t joined Pinterest yet, I highly recommend it. Fair warning: it is addicting!
