Friday Recap

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:

Project PLN Take 2

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

Friday Recap

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: Opening Keynote Steve Hargadon

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.

The Goal of Education

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.

TED Talk Tuesday: Bring on the Learning Revolution

Since I won’t be with the CHC staff hosting Webspiration Wednesday lunches, I thought I would institute TED Talk Tuesday and share an inspiring TED Talk each Tuesday with all of you.  TED has a great tag line “ideas worth spreading”.  This non-profit brings together people from Technology, Entertainment, and Design.  (The scope of the talks is actually much, much wider.)  TED.com is a free collection of the very best talks with new talks are being added all the time.  TED believes “passionately in the power of ideas to change attitudes, lives and ultimately, the world.”

Todays TED Talk Tuesday is dedicated to Sir Ken Robinson.  You may remember this Webspiration Wednesday sharing of Sir Ken’s Schools Kill Creativity.  This is Sir Ken Robinson’s newest TED Talk, Bring on the Learning Revolution.

Sir Ken Robinson has such a way with words, the message he shares is profound.  I agree with the summation that reform is of no use, the evolution of a broken model isn’t going to get us where we need to go.   We need a revolution where education is transformed into something else entirely.  I have watched this video several times since its release, about a month ago, and each time I am struck by something new.  This time what stood out most for me was the talk about innovation.   Innovation is hard because it means doing something that is challenging, it isn’t the easy or obvious solution.  It challenges what we take for granted, things that seem obvious.  Just before beginning this post, I read an excellent article by Blogging Alliance member Chris at EdTechSwami.  He writes: What Educators Can Learn From Steve Jobs.  I think Chris makes some excellent points in his post, it all comes back to innovation.  Apple doesn’t usually do the expected, in fact sometimes they purposefully step away from what is expected and what seems logical.  The reason is that they are finding new solutions and even creating new problems.  They are looking to the future and anticipating what is coming next.  Sir Ken helps us to see that innovation is difficult because there are so many things in this life that we take for granted.  We don’t even think about them any more because they are the way that we expect them to be.  It is only when someone comes along and points out a new way of doing something that we realize we have been taking it for granted.  In schools we take for granted that there is a linearity to education.  We start in kindergarten and move through until we reach the 12th grade, at which point we are encouraged to attend college.  What else do we take for granted in education?  Classrooms, grades, tests, desks, handwriting, curriculum, blackboards (IWB’s), policy makers, NCLB…

Today I was able to join in on the midday Twitter #edchat discussion.  The topic was reform in education and how teachers could be a louder voice.  The discussion was a great one with a number of good ideas.  I wonder if we are approaching the topic in an innovative enough way?  We tend to frame our answers with what we think might be possible. We frame our answers so as to play nice in the policy makers game.  What if we didn’t do things their way? What if we came up with a new way?  What if we taught kids how to be advocates for their education and learning and gave them a voice?  I threw this out there during the #edchat and @bliarteach reminded me of the big push there was for learning about recycling in school.  Kids became passionate about recycling and saving the earth, they took it home with them.  Soon families were recycling and changing their garbage habits.  This worked.  I was one of those kids who made my mom wash every piece of aluminum foil so that I could bring it to school and add it to our big ball of recycled foil.  I was the kid who was adamant about separating plastic, glass, and paper.  I became the adult who still does this.  Involving kids in advocating for their own education and learning has the added benefit of helping them to realize the importance of their education.  Suddenly they aren’t learning because we tell them to, they are learning because they believe in learning.  They have a pride and ownership in their own education.   The great thing about involving kids in the discussion is that they don’t take so much for granted.  They ask questions and challenge the way that we think.

So, lets figure out all the things we take for granted in education.  When we have a clear picture of those things, lets work together to find new solutions. Lets revolutionize education together, lets make the revolution viral.  If you can think of something that we take for granted, leave it in the comments below.

(Raise of hands, how many of you are wearing a wrist watch?) 🙂  Yeah, me too.