Will Richardson

Speaker, consultant, writer, learner, parent

The One Word That Prevents Real Educational Reform From Happening

By 2 Comments

Given the common sense arguments for learning that run counter to the current day structures and practices of schools, it would seem that a real rethinking of our education system would have happened long before now. It’s hard to argue that forcing kids to learn the same thing on the same day in the same place at the same pace with other kids their same age from their same neighborhood with the same teacher to be assessed in the same way is built on any sound theory of learning and not instead focused on being as efficient as possible in “delivering” an education to our kids. Kids don’t learn that way before they become school age, and no one learns like that in real life. Imagine, if you can, if we set the same conditions for our adult learning. We wouldn’t stand for it, would we?

But despite the obvious problems with the structures, we come up with all sorts of reasons for not changing. It’s because we can’t ignore the state assessments. Or we can’t change the structures. Or we can’t make the parents upset. Or we can’t ask the unions to change. Or we can’t risk our college placement rankings. Or we can’t…

And that is the word, “can’t,” that we use to quell any real discussion of change and reform. Real change is just not possible. It just can’t be done.

15519253863_2fc81c8dd4_bBut here’s the thing: in my travels, I’ve seen every one of the “can’ts” overcome in one school or another. A number of schools don’t give grades because they think they’re detrimental to learning, yet their kids end up going to great colleges if they so desire. Other schools have mixed age groups because they believe that’s a better condition for learning. There are schools that have created relationships with parents so that when change is needed, the community comes out in support of an at times even initiates the change. And there are schools who have stood up to the state assessors and asked for and received waivers to what they see as counterproductive policies and practices. Or, they convince constituents that the test scores are not where real learning and preparedness for the modern world resides.

If we’re honest, it’s not about “can’t.” Instead, it’s about “won’t.” We won’t do those things, even though common sense says we ought to, because we don’t have the conviction or the courage or, importantly, the conscience to do them. And so, we introduce cosmetic changes meant to soften the disconnect between what we believe and what we do all the while knowing deep in our learning minds that we’re trying to do the wrong thing right. (I know, broken record.)

Sure, real change that requires us to think differently about the experience we provide for our kids is extremely difficult. And it challenges centuries of history and practice.

But let’s be clear: it is not impossible.

It’s happening all around us.

If we want to resist real change in our schools, so be it. But let’s just own the fact that it’s not that it can’t be done.

It’s that we won’t do it.

(Photo Credit: Maurits Verbiest)

Risky Business

By 4 Comments

Reading this most excellent post by Ira Socol this morning got me thinking about the word “risk” and its use in a learning context. So often I hear that we in education need to “take more risks,” or that our kids need to do that, that “risk-taking” is an important part of learning.

And I totally agree.

But what is “risk” exactly? I mean, what’s the bar for “risk-taking?”

surf deleteAt it’s most basic level, as Ira suggests, it’s just doing something different, changing up the lesson, changing the environment, or trying a new technology. While I may not see these as “risky” practices at all, I understand how hard it is for some to do even that much. (Actually, maybe I don’t understand that, unless the adults feel no sense of a culture that supports (or expects) at least these kinds of minor tweaks.)

At it’s most extreme level, I would assume taking a risk would mean to put kids in harm’s way. To be honest, I don’t think I’ve ever seen or heard of someone doing that, regardless of how you define “harm.” (I’m sure someone will share a story of such “risk-taking” now that I’ve said that.)

So what is the “risk” that we’re really talking about?

Is it the “risk” of failure?

The “risk” of losing control?

The “risk” of not having permission?

I’m sure that’s a part of it, but it’s arguable how “risky” those things really are.

But my sense is this: The real risk people feel in education is around letting kids make decisions for themselves and have agency over their own learning. It’s also a risk to let teachers do that stuff, too, to let them be learners in their own right. That’s just not the way it’s done. We don’t trust “them” enough to learn with us instead of from “us” however you define those groups.

I wonder what we risk by doing that, by not making it about the learning rather than the teaching. I wonder what we risk by not creating cultures where learners are trusted, at every level, from the board to the administration to students to the community, to find and pursue meaningful and interesting questions that matter to them.

I wonder what we risk by not taking risks.

(Image credit: Anton Repponen)

If Engagement is the Problem, Technology is Not the Answer

By 7 Comments

I have a standing search in Google News that lets me know when there are ever any new stories in the world that contain the following three words: school, technology, and learning. It’s not that I don’t have enough to do already without scanning the usual 15 or 20 articles that crop up on a daily basis from all over the place. And mind you, I don’t check the feed every day. (I’d probably be in therapy by now if I did.) But every now and then I drop in to see what people are doing that’s worthy of a write up in the local (or sometimes national) press.

That’s how I found this story from the ABC News affiliate in Fort Wayne, Indiana titled “E-Learning: Technology changing the culture of the classroom.” I’m always drawn to headlines like those because most often, the story doesn’t quite live up to the hypeline, if you will. And this one is no exception. [Read more…]

One School's Journey to Online Social Learning

By

So if you’re looking for a model of a school that’s heavily invested in social tools but using all open source or home grown apps to begin to teach even their youngest kids the benefits of publishing and networking, read on. During my visit to Melbourne I met Richard Olsen, a former teacher and ICT co-ordinator at the Concord School who now has a role at IdeasLab, a group that is exploring the best ways to implement large scale technology projects across Victoria. We talked at some length about the ways in which over the last three years he implemented everything from blogging, to photo sharing to bookmarking with his students in some big ways. Big like in over 70,000 photos that are housed on the school’s server documenting just about every aspect of learning that goes on there.

Embedded below you will see a brochure that Richard created before he left documenting his efforts. You can see from the introductory statement that Richard’s attempt to leverage the potential of these tools is pretty visionary.  Lumil was the Flickr-type app that Richard himself coded. It uses tags, sets, albums, the whole deal. As you’ll see, you can even sort the pictures by a particular date range, so viewers can get a sense of what’s happening at any given moment. They used Scuttle to house their own social bookmarks, WordPress MU to blog, and Scratch and others for social game making activities. Be sure to spend some time on the skills matrix at the bottom. All in all, it’s an impressive suite of tools and pedagogies that did much to change learning at his school.

What’s most compelling to me here is not necessarily the tool set, however, as much as the vision that brought this to fruition. While most all of this work is done locally on an internal network, the concepts are preparing kids at Concord for the very global network they’ll inhabit once they leave the system. And here is the best part: Concord is a special needs school, a place where kids with all sorts of disabilities attend. The work that these kids do in these contexts is very rewarding on a number of levels.

The larger point here is that this isn’t too far out of the reach of most schools provided they have the courage and the leadership to make it happen. Aside from the photo-sharing tool, the rest is freely available. There’s nothing really too difficult about it aside, perhaps, from creating good teaching around the tools. Makes you wonder what so many other schools are waiting for.

Concord School Web-Based Social and Collaborative Learning

Advice From Students to Teachers on Technology Use

By

Edutopia writer Sara Bernard is looking for student input in terms of advising teachers on how they might use technology in the classroom.  I’m wondering if anyone out there might want to pose the following to his/her students and send Sara some responses. It would be great to comment back here as well so we can see what kids are thinking.

What if you had to teach the classes you are taking now or something you learned years ago? How would you use technology to do it? What devices, software, games, networks, or applications would you use to help students learn more easily — and have more fun learning?

For instance, imagine that it was your job to teach algebra, Charles Dickens, volleyball, poetry, a foreign language, science, or the Civil War. Would you have your English students use Facebook to create profiles for each main character in Jane Eyre? Would you have them use Garage Band to create a World War II song or the national anthem of a fictional country?  Would you use instant messaging or cell phones as tools for classroom discipline? Could you learn math from Mario?

The point of this is for Edutopia to gather specific ideas and advice from you for teachers to try in their classrooms. So, be sure to describe things in a way that a teacher – any teacher – would understand. You might want to mention any rules about technology and media that exist at your school and whether or not they would need to be modified. We’d love to hear as many suggestions as you can think of!

According to Sara, “student responses can be based on experiences that they’ve actually had in class or just ideas that they’ve come up with themselves. They should also feel free to offer basic advice for teachers about technology integration, or any other thoughts they have on the topic. Also, this isn’t an essay contest, so no pressure — students can just drop a few lines into an email if they like (though I’d appreciate it if they could include their name, grade level, school, and location).” Her e-mail is sara.bernard@edutopia.org.

(Full disclosure: I am a National Advisory Board member for the George Lucas Education Foundation which publishes the magazine.)

7,500 Words on the Irony of Social Computing Degrees Later…

By

So the whole conversation that has developed over the last two days has been another one of those amazing, intellectually stimulating back and forths that I feel extremely privileged to be involved in. Let me just say at the outset that the number of quality, thoughtful comments that have been coming to this blog of late has just blown me away, and I thank all of you for being willing to participate. I can only hope that those contributing or reading are getting as much if not more than I. There is another entire post forming slowly that connects this to the whole Classroom 2.0 idea and some other stuff that’s evolving out of it…but that’s for another day.

Without beating a dead horse, this latest conversation has got me thinking, on a number of levels. First, on how interesting it is to see the nuanced interpretation of what I originally was writing about. Second, on how my own thinking keeps going back and forth as I read through the comments, pushed by people who I respect and admire greatly who have vastly different viewpoints. But ultimately, on how certain snippets, certain phrases push me to bigger insights or questions. I find that whole process incredibly interesting.

So here’s what got me to this post. Liz Lawley, who was one of the people who really helped me understand the pedagogies of these social tools very early on in my reading of blogs, left a couple of pretty challenging comments, which pushed me to think. In the second, she wrote:

Will, debates like this are absolutely a good example of a back-and-forth collaborative learning process. But expecting that people will systematically (a) seek out and (b) find examples of every important theme and its associated points of view is–I think–naive.

The real value of a formal educational process is that all too often “we don’t know what we don’t know”–and so without a systematic structured approach to a complex topic we run the very real risk of not seeing the big picture, and falling into the trap of generalizing from our anecdotal experience.

I hear that, but here are the questions that provokes for me…and they are sincere, not simply meant to start more discussion.

  • How much of people’s inability to systematically “seek out and find examples of every important theme and its associated points of view” is because we simply don’t teach them to do that in a systemic way from very young ages?
  • How much of that is because we are so focused on content and not learning, because the system that’s still in place hasn’t shifted at all to keep pace with the fact that we can connect to information and knowledge and teachers on so many new and profound levels?
  • Can we systematically teach students to “see the big picture” in ways that will allow them to construct their own process that might actually come close to replicating that formal educational process?
  • Or do those types of potentials only come at a later age or from experiences that cannot be replicated in a K-12 system?

Those may be naive, I don’t know. But what I’m struggling with is how do we re-envision what we do in our classrooms to prepare our students to leverage the potential of the connections now available to (most of) them, connections that have not been available in the past.

And while I know this is a bit of a different topic from the above, I’m not saying that physical space, high-level coursework isn’t going to remain important and in fact relevant for some pursuits. But I’m not convinced that stringing courses together to earn a degree has to remain as the only way to achieve “expertise,” which in an of itself is open to all sorts of different interpretations.

(Photo “Inspiring the Class” by Brian U.)

Technorati Tags: ,

91.2% of Class Time in Their Seats

By

USA Today is reporting on a new comprehensive study of elementary school classrooms that is being published in this week’s Science magazine. Aside from not being overly engaged, the study of over 2,500 classrooms showed that “The typical child in the USA stands only a one-in-14 chance of having a consistently rich, supportive elementary school experience.”

Did I mention I have two kids in elementary school? Did I mention I already knew this?

More engaging are some of the nearly 100 comments that the article has garnered due to the new USA Today bloggy style. I didn’t read them all, but I found this one especially charming:

Perhaps the problem is the fact that the formerly drugged up hippies of the 60/70s is the gerneration that are control of not only the government, but also run the colleges, universities and news outlets. These are also the same peace and free love people who do these studies.

Well, there ya go.

Technorati Tags: , ,

The Steep “Unlearning Curve”

By

(Cross-posted to “The Pulse“) One of the most challenging pieces of figuring out how to move education forward in a systemic way is an “unlearning curve” that we teachers and educators have to go through to even see the possibilities that lay before us. So much of our traditional thinking about personal learning and classroom practice is being challenged by our ability to publish and connect and collaborate primarily because of the opportunities afforded by the Read/Write Web. For instance, in a world where literally any place can be a classroom, we have to unlearn the comforts of four walls that we’ve become accustomed to. When we can share our work with wide audiences, we need to unlearn the idea that student writing and projects are simply ways to assess what they know.

There is no curriculum for unlearning, and, of course, in many ways it’s simply learning to see things differently or to at least be open to it. To me at least, the key is attempting to understand how these technologies can transform our own learning practice (and, I would guess, our unlearning practice as well.) If we can get started on that road, it can become much easier to re-envision our classrooms and our schools.

So, with that brief introduction, here are 10 things that I think we need to unlearn:

We need to unlearn the idea that we are the sole content experts in the classroom, because we can now connect our kids to people who know far more than we do about the material we’re teaching.

We need to unlearn the premise that we know more than our kids, because in many cases, they can now be our teachers as well.

We need to unlearn the idea that learning itself is an event. In this day and age, it is a continual process.

We need to unlearn the strategy that collaborative work inside the classroom is enough and understand that cooperating with students from around the globe can teach relevant and powerful negotiation and team-building skills.

We need to unlearn the idea that every student needs to learn the same content when really what they need to learn is how to self-direct their own learning.

We need to unlearn the notion that our students don”t need to see and understand how we ourselves learn.

We need to unlearn our fear of putting ourselves and our students “out there” for we’ve proven we can do it in safe, relevant and effective ways.

We need to unlearn the practice that teaches all students at the same pace. Is it any wonder why so many of our students love to play online games where they move forward at their own pace?

We need to unlearn the idea that we can teach our students to be literate in this world by continually blocking and filtering access to the sites and experiences they need our help to navigate.

We need to unlearn the premise that real change can happen just by rethinking what happens inside the school walls and understand that education is now a community undertaking on many different levels.

Certainly, there are many others, and I’m sure you have your own unlearning ideas; feel free to add.

(Photo “Old Classroom” by shuichiro)

Technorati Tags: , ,

Moving Schools Forward–A School 2.0 Project

By

So here is one of the burning questions in my brain these days: How do you take a fairly “typical” school that is currently steeped in a 20th Century model of teaching and successfully move it forward in a systemic way toward a more relevant 21st Century, or, if you will, School 2.0 model that fully takes advantage of a more connected, collaborative, creative world?

With any luck, I’ll be able to begin answering that question here over the next few months and years. My colleague Rob Mancabelli and I are working with a medium-sized, rural school district to help plan and guide a project that, if successful, will serve as a model for other schools to follow in their own re-envisioning process.

Needless to say, I’m a bit excited.

Ironically, I’ll be spending the next two days at Chris Lehmann’s Science Leadership Academy which is probably as close to School 2.0 as you can find right now. But while I absolutely love what Chris is doing, his is not really a scenario that is easily replicated…a new school pretty much from the ground up, a student body that has been selected through an admission process, etc.

While I can’t get too specific with names and places at this point, we think that this project, should it be successful, would come much closer to becoming a roadmap for other districts to follow. So, here’s the scenario in broad brush strokes. The district has three schools and serves a primarily rural area about six squares miles in size. There is some racial diversity, but the vast majority of students are white and come from lower middle to middle class families, many of which have owned farms in the area for generations. The town center has one stoplight and lies about 30 miles from the nearest city, and while economic fortunes and enrollments have been on the decline of late, there has been an upswing of home building of late that indicates the community may be on the cusp of change.

Rob and I spent the day with the district leadership and others recently leading conversations about why were all at the table, what our purpose was, what we envisioned as “wild success” some years down the road, what strengths and opportunities were already in place, and what weaknesses and threats we would need to address. It was an amazing conversation that reflects, as one of the participants described it, almost a “perfect storm” for change in this district. The leadership team, despite already having a highly successful school in terms of test scores and traditional standards, recognizes what’s coming and wants to be proactive in helping teachers and students practice real 21st Century education, understanding that there is no set definition of what that is. The regional state entity that was also represented is totally supportive from a technology and pedagogy sense and is committed to invest in an “R &D” project of this type to see how it can help other schools it serves move forward. What Rob and I hope to do is inform the vision and guide the process over the next few years, hopefully, as we work together to figure out what the unique recipe for change is with this district at this moment.

While there is much more to write and to tell, let me just end this initial post with some of the things that really get the butterflies going about this project. First, everyone in the room realized that this was about more than just the district. This was about the community itself. To that end, we’re in the process of creating a project team that includes every constituent group, from business owners to parents to industry representatives to town leaders and others. There is already talk, and this might be premature, of providing a broadband wireless cloud over the six square miles that will at least make access available for every resident. That in itself could be quite an interesting step. And, second, what really struck me about these initial conversations was the willingness to look at change from a systemic way, understanding that this means re-envisioning almost everything they do. It’s not about tools, in fact, technology was rarely mentioned in Monday’s meeting. It was about learning, the willingness of the leadership team to model new ways of learning and communicating, the need to create a new vision for what all of the looks like in the classroom. And it was a willingness to face head on the disruptions that come with all of this.

No question, there are many hurdles yet to be overcome if this is to work, and many, many, many conversations to start. There is a huge education job in front of us to make sure the various constituent groups have the context for the conversation. And there are, as always, the issues of money and time.

But I am incredibly humbled and excited by this opportunity. And I would love your thoughts along the way. More in the coming weeks, I’m sure…

Technorati Tags:

Using Social Technologies to Redefine Schooling–the Podcast

By

So one of the reasons I’ve had no time to blog of late (or read for that matter) is that life is getting crazed once again. Seven weeks off goes much too quickly, but I’ve gotten into some very cool projects that I hope to blog about in short order.

Meanwhile, in case any one is interested, here is the link to the presentation that Rob Mancabelli and I did at FETC on Friday. I’d be really interested in any reaction from those of you that might listen and watch (sort of) it.

Technorati Tags:

diigo and del.icio.us

By

You may have noticed (or you may not have) the daily bookmarks posting that has been showing up here for the past few days. It’s a list of all of the sites/posts that I have been saving to my diigo account, which in case you haven’t heard of it, is a social bookmarking tool that feels like a combination of del.icio.us and Furl plus a bit more.

With diigo, you can do most of what you can with del.icio.us in terms of saving links with various tags, connecting to other users who have saved the same post or used the same tag, and tracking either users or specific tags (or specific tags of specific users) via RSS. Even more, however, is that like Furl, diigo captures a copy of the page, so if it disappears from the Web at some point, you can access it in your archive.

But what’s really different is the diigo allows you to highlight certain sections of any Web page you’re on, and also gives you the ability to attach sticky notes to the site. Those highlights and notes are then visible should you visit that page again. But even better, if you have a diigo account and I have “forwarded” the page to you, you can see them add your own when you visit the site as well. Think digital feedback on student work.

Now while the diigo user base is much smaller than del.icio.us, quite a few people are adding some interesting links and resources. And one other nice feature is that when I add something to my diigo account, it also gets added to my del.icio.us account. By the way, C-Net has a review of diigo that highlights some of the good points.

There are a lot of applications for classrooms here, and I’ll try to expound on them the more I experiment with it. Bottom line is I’m starting to like this tool more and more, and I’m wondering who else might be playing with it.

(Image from diigo)

Technorati Tags: , ,

Science Leadership Academy Up Close and Personal

By

On Monday, my colleague and soon to be blogger Rob Mancabelli and I dropped in on Chris Lehmann at the Science Leadership Academy in Philadelphia for a three hour tour and chat. Bottom line is that Chris is building a vibrant community of learners among both teachers and students that has a unique feeling in the world of public schools I’ve seen. (BTW, here’s a Flickr set of some photos I took of the students and the structure.)

And it’s really not about the technology as much as it is about the culture of learning that they are creating. Yes, every student has a laptop. And they have been working with Moodle and Elgg to build class sites and online portfolios. But what’s neat is that the students are taking real ownership over what happens at the school. Without giving too much away since Chris said he was getting ready to blog about this, there has been one issue that has arisen that in most schools would cause all sorts of overreaction from administrators and the like. At SLA, the kids are dealing with it through the use of the Moodle forums, where, amazingly, they have been communicating since months before the school even opened in September. Chris and his teachers chime in too, and the conversation is open and honest, effectively dealing with the situation to date.

The physical space is beautiful and there is lots of room to grow for the 400 or so more students who will be coming in the next three years. And it won’t be hard to fill it up; SLA has received about 2,000 applications for just over 100 spots next year.

As with any new school, it’s hard to predict what the next day will bring. But thus far, SLA looks like it’s doing really well in terms of creating a very special foundation for education in a School 2.0 world.

technorati tags:, , , ,

Dispatches from the Front Lines

By

This is why we open up and connect our kids to the world and teach them how to function there safely:

About a month ago, two of my students reported on research by a geneticist involved with sleep and memory, and posted their reports to the my class blog. In their reports, the students raised some questions about the research.

Yesterday, that researcher responded to the students questions in the blog itself. This is incredibly exciting!

So far, in less than 8 weeks, we have interacted with a graduate student from Ohio who was doing research in the instructional use of blogs. My students participated in a survey, which formed a key part of a paper she has prepared.

Earlier this week, we heard from an author of an article from National Geographic, who was impressed with a student’s critique of his work. And now this.

Frankly, I expected to see the benefits of blogging in terms of students connecting with one another. But I never expected to have them connect with the world at large so quickly.

There are a billion teachers out there…

Go, blogs! Go!

technorati tags:, , ,

"Nervous but Thrilled"–Yet Another Flat Wiki Project

By

So the project wiki run continues with this entry from Chris Craft in South Carolina whose students are prepping for a flat-ish Skype call with students at the American School in Lima, Peru next month. In this iteration, groups of kids are studying various aspects of the Peruvian culture and economy that will serve as the basis of their discussion. Chris is going to try to capture the event and hopefully he’ll be able to share it out later.

On his blog yesterday, he was talking about a “dry run” that he did with the Peruvian teacher. At first, the technology didn’t cooperate very well, but when they got it going, it was electric. Here’s a snippet:

When the video flipped on the class went wild. They quickly settled down and we chatted with a teacher down there. My kids were nervous but thrilled! They stepped up to the mic (figuratively and literally) and did a great job muddling through basic Spanish. The teacher there spoke perfect English, and she was gracious about it.

Then the cool stuff happened. Her room started to fill up with kids.

Then my kids got to talk to their kids.

That was cool to watch.

Isn’t that what we want our kids to be? Nervous but thrilled? That’s the edgy-ness that these technologies bring, a nervousness that’s built on a couple pinches of newness and risk at pushing through your limits, and a thrill of doing something real and immediate. Aren’t those the times when we really learn about oursevles and really cement our knowledge?

Compare that to taking tests when our students are mostly just nervous. Which would you want for your own kids?

Go, wikis! Go!

technorati tags:, ,

Aggregating Student Blogs in Google Reader

By

This isn’t much different from doing it with SuprGlu (in fact it may not be as elegant) but since it’s the first use of a public Google Reader page to collect a classroom full of student blog posts that I’ve seen, here’s a link to it. The posts are from a 6th grade social studies class whose teacher Mike Hetherington is “mother blogging” here and offers up some pretty good “rules for blogging,” a wiki, and some podcasts (though nothing recent.)

Mike latest post on his blog is, I think, another great example of a teacher using a blog to build community among his student bloggers.

technorati tags:, ,

Great Fifth Grade Book Wiki

By

Two fifth grade reading classes in Georgia have put together what I think is a great example of a book study wiki filled with information about the book itself and contextual information including photo slide shows, audio recordings of student performances, interviews and historical reports. The book is Patricia Beatty’s Turn Homeward Hannalee. One thing that I think is especially cool is that the teachers took the time to add their reflections to the site which is a great way for the rest of us to learn and think about how this might work in our own practice:

This project gave the students the opportunity to “become the teacher” and is a great example of authentic learning. The students immediately took ownership of this project, so I was able to simply facilitate the process. I was pleasantly surprised that everything ran so smoothly even though I had never attempted to create a website on my own or with my students. Since the students were each given a different area to work on they were able to express what they had learned in their own unique way. This activity allowed the students to integrate what they had learned to create something new. Also, it gave the students a confident feeling to see their work in a format that will help other students and teachers learn about the two thousand Georgia mill workers who were shipped north by the Union Army during the Civil War, and the many other historical facts and interesting information from Turn Homeward, Hannalee.

I know I say this a lot, but this is a perfect example of giving our students the opportunity to teach what they have learned. This work now has a chance of becoming a part of other students’ study of not only this book but this part of the state’s history. In Marco Torres’ words, this is work “that has wings.” BTW, the teachers are also looking to get feedback from other educators, students and readers.

technorati tags:, ,

Teaching With the Read/Write Web…or Not

By

From the “E-Mailed Stories that We Liked Dept.” (blogged with Andy Losik’s permission:)

Today in my elementary Infotech classes, I realized the horror of life without
online resources that are tabbed as being part of “social networking”.

Inadvertedly our school district’s filter profile had “Web Logs/Personal web
pages” added to it this morning, meaning anything that was blog-based or in
reality Web 2.0 was blocked.

I blog at mrlosik.blogspot.com out of sheer convenience. I post content for my
students in grades K-5 to access efficiently. The blog has become a favorite of
the students and parents alike. Students show their folks at home the online
activities and websites we use at school.

When the site was blocked this morning and kids were trying to access the
activity I had blogged, it hit me as to how effective this tool can be, even in
the very “rough” way I use it.
It got worse though. I sent the students to the backup assignment and I began
trying to access my Bloglines account. Blocked! Furl…blocked.
Del.icio.us….blocked….Weblog-ed….blocked! Those great kids in Room
208….blocked!

A huge chunk of my professional life was now severed from me and my classroom. I was literally placed in a time machine and shot backwards to Web 1.0. What was I supposed to do? Gopher my way around the Web?

Within a couple of hours and after panic-riddled emails to the Intermediate
School District, the problem was resolved and called a mistake. It felt more
like being awaken from a nightmare.

Holy cow! Shutting down the “Web Logs/Personal web pages” as the 8E6 filtering
system calls it, cuts us off from the ability to share real, pertinent, and
meaningful information. I am not sure where legislation stands but this is
something I hope to never experience again!

And so it goes…

technorati tags:,

Kansas State Launches World's Largest Podcast Program

By

Another sign of things to come…

K-State plans to have all 6,000 class podcasts available to its students this year, making it by far the education realm’s largest podcasting implementation worldwide.

So does the classroom of the future, even in high school (maybe middle school) have the built in capability for teachers to record and post their lessons?

technorati tags:, ,

The World is Flat…Revisited

By

I’m in the throes of research for a next book, and I’ve been going back to my highlighted, starred, underlined, exclamation pointed parts of The World is Flat in my idea collection process. I’m impressed at how well the implications for education seem to be holding together. Anyway, I came across this one starred part that I hadn’t remembered, a section titled “From Command and Contral to Collaborate and Connect.” I’m going to sub-in some of my own phrasing in italics, but I think there’s an interesting point made here:

This is what happens when you move from a vertical (command and control) educational system to a much more horizontal (connect and collaborate) flat educational system. Your student can do his and your job…Students, if they are inclined, can collaborate more directly with more of their peers than ever before no matter who they are or where they are in the world…But teachers will also have to work much harder to be better informed than their students. There are a lot more conversations between students and teachers today that start like this: “I know that already! I Googled it myself. Now what do I do about it? (212)”

The intellectual relationships and roles we have with our students are changing. I’m just sayin’…

technorati tags:, , , ,

Getting Closer…Another Student "Blogging" Example

By

So here we have an example of a high school civics class blog by a student that is using the tool pretty well, I’d say. Especially just a few days into it. Once again, comments on Civics dude! are open, which has led to a pretty interesting exchange between student and unknown commentor. To guide you through it, here’s the original post, the comment, and the student’s response. I love this part from the student:

I think it’s so funny that someone I don’t even know who it is (Gayatri?) is posting comments on my schoolblog. I see how it can be very upsetting reading a highschool kid’s view on what America is doing. It is truly not my meaning to sound ever-knowing, or wise. Let’s face it, I’m seventeen and I don’t know 1% of what’s going on in the world. But I think that not understanding that I am a student trying to learn and expand my world, is pretty narrow-minded, as Gayatri said I was.

This is getting closer, I think, to what can happen…writing in response to reading for real audiences.

And by the way, Sanna’s teacher, I think, provides a great model for teachers to follow in terms of pointing to good blogging work by their students. This is how you start modeling the connections, by reading and linking. I snipped one such “mother blog” post below…click it to go read the comments.

technorati tags:, , ,

TeenTek, Teen Kontent

By

So Jeff (who is becoming a daily link-to here) has announced a new site for a new class on Web 2.0 tools that he’s teaching. TeenTek is all about his students blogging about what they find newsworthy and interesting, and it’s all about teaching the tools of the trade in the context of what the kids discover as meaningful. (I know, I know…once I latch on to some phrasing it takes me a while to let go.) And, it’s all about helping kids to understand that one of the most powerful things they can do when they have an audience is teach. (I’m learning a lot about cell phones already.) I really hope Jeff’s students feel the license to explore their own passions but at the same time come to understand the power of being able to take what they learn and communicate it in a way that readers (in the broadest sense) will understand and learn from.

But the other piece of this is, of course, that this is a course specifically created to do the type of learning we’re all talking about. (What a concept…hey, really…what a concept! I wonder if Jeff would share his proposal so others might, um, propose a similar course at their schools.) What about the 99.999% of courses out there that are about content? Even Jeff himself in a comment to my previous post says:

I wish I could spend that much time developing the stories, interacting with the world here in China in which these students live. But theissue is content. I have to get through x amount by 1st quarter, by 2nd quarter, etc. Our school systems are not built around learning, instead they are built around content and assessing the learning that takesplace within that content or context.

And he continues by asking the $23,456.34 question:

How do you make that change? How do you ’sell’ this to principals and parents when they walk in and ask, so what have you covered? Instead of asking, what did my student create, contribute and learn?

Yeah. So how do we do that?

technorati tags:, , , , ,

Discovering Content

By

I’ve been thinking a lot (again) about where we’re at with all of this from a student perspective and wondering (again) why it is that there aren’t more examples of kids using blogs (in particular) to make their thinking and learning transparent. I mean there is no doubt that more and more teachers are using the tools with their students, and that there is some residual learning that happens by that mere fact. But I’m hearkening back (once again) to something Tom March said in that interview at NECC about “where are the real best practices with kids using these tools?”

What got me started on this, actually, was the work that Jeff’s kids were posting to YouTube. Now before I go any further, I’m in no way demeaning that effort; I think it’s a great start down the road. But there has to be more here. At some point, I’m hoping Jeff will scaffold up from “the same-old-report in a different format that has a big audience” work to more “critical analysis of the content that we’re producing to test our ideas” work. I mean that, at it’s core, is what is powerful about these technologies. They allow us to take risks with our ideas, to test them in authentic ways with real audiences, and learn from the process. (In many ways, this post is a risk.) Why shouldn’t we be asking students to do the same?
Take the IBM video for example. What if next, that student does a second video (or writes a blog post) that deconstructs the marketing efforts of the company, shows how the brand is manufactured and sold in China, and includes personal responses to the advertising? Something that involves risking his ideas or interpretation with the payoff that the viewer (or reader ) will learn something absolutely unique, something that can’t be found at Wikipedia, and may, if done in a provocative enough way, motivate that viewer to respond. Something that genuinely teaches something new.

Now I know there are those who will suggest that for this scenario to truly play out, we need to open up student work to audiences in ways that we may not be comfortable with. But I look at the links to student work that Clarence posted today, think about how that content is “exposed” to open commentors (though I will guess they are moderated), and wonder how much more his kids are understanding the potential because of it. I mean, there is some nascent blogging (the verb) actually happening in those posts. It’s closer…
The shift with doing something like this is more than just safety, however. The real shift is with the stance of the teacher. This idea forces us to move away from delivering content as we have for 100+ years and instead move toward assisting students to discover content on their own. What are the ideas, concepts and examples that can be woven together to create meaning in the context of our class goals and outcomes? What personal learning can be made transparent that informs a larger discussion of the curriculum? It’s not our (the teacher) answer that is important.

We learn when we take risks. We learn when we fail. That’s one of the most difficult lessons I’m trying to help my own kids learn. It’s fourth grade, and for Tess, now the onslaught of grades really begins. Everything is a 97 or a 84 or (god forbid) a 75. Nowhere on those sheets is even an implied message that says “Congratulations! You got stuff wrong! What an opportunity to LEARN!” And so my daughter continues and will continue to look to the teacher in the room to deliver to her what’s important instead being compelled to discover, through managed risk-taking and safe failure, what learning may await her.
This is difficult work. Just ask Konrad and Barbara (and others,) both of whom continue to inspire me with the depth of their reflections about their practice and how disruptive these shifts are in their own work. But at some point, we have to get to it in ways that push our students farther down the same road we in this community are traveling. At some point, we have to see it more manifest in front of us.

technorati tags:, , , , ,

Isn't it Ironic…

By

…that Jeff Utecht‘s kids in Shanghai are publishing a series of History of Technology videos to YouTube that most American kids probably won’t be able to see?

What’s not surprising is that because they are being uploaded to YouTube, Jeff’s students are starting to understand the reach of what they can do.

We talked about what these numbers meant and that they were producing something that could potentially be seen by millions of people. I then read them the comments that Clarence and David left on my last posting about the videos and more than anything that was what really caught them off guard.

“You mean people are waiting for us to finish this?”

“Canada? I’m from Canada!”

As I looked around the room there was all of a sudden this sense of ‘he’s not joking’. One student completely deleted his work and started over proclaiming, “This isn’t good enough.” I had another student go home that night do more research and then come back Thursday with a 4 page report on the history of Google. We had to have a talk as YouTube videos must be under 10 minutes, and as he recorded his voice we decided that talking faster wasn’t a good solution to fitting all his information in a 10 minute slide. Another student that was finished came over and helped him edit his work decided to cut the years 2001, 2003 out completely and chopping some paragraphs here and there. He didn’t finish his on Thursday so it will be uploaded to the account on Monday. My teaching partner has his students uploading their videos on Friday so you might want to stop by and check those out as well.

These technologies empower students to do good work. As I wrote on Thursday. They become contributors to society and they understand that and live up to that potential. Empower students with information and what them go!

Let your students teach to the world and watch what happens. But if you’re here in America, you’ll probably have to find a way to do it without using the most insanely popular publishing tool out there right now.

technorati tags:, , , , , , ,

Great Example of Elementary School Publishing and Kids Teaching

By

So here is another example of what elementary kids can do in terms of publishing text and audio to the Web. This is the Top of the Fold online newspaper that Grandview Elementary in Monsey, NY uses to publish student artwork, podcasts and more. The teachers have a lot to do with posting the work, but the idea is pretty simple: give kids the opportunity to share their work with wide audiences and have them teach to others what they themselves have learned. Take a quick listen to this podcast to see what I mean.

Just think for a second about how differently these teachers consider the work they assign. I’m finding more and more, that’s the real power in all of this. We need to stop passing paper back and forth, don’t we?

technorati tags:, , , ,

Learning Economics Through Snowboarding

By

Pat Aroune who is a high school teacher in upstate New York and a new edblogger (after 16 years in the business) sent along a link to some student Weblogs from his summer class on economics and a couple of them, Greg’s Public Views and Economics According to Andi struck me because of some of the work there and their reflections about blogging. Pat’s idea was to have them use their blogs to study economics in the context of whatever their passions were, and the results are pretty telling. Greg commented

I’ve learned in a way that tailors to my interests, what with using the internet to its fullest extent and writing about things that I am interested in. I would write about things like snowboarding, soccer, filmaking, eating, sleeping… whatever I wished, as long as I related it to economics. After doing this for a while, I started to realize that I was learning much faster than I would have normally by reading a boring (sorry, they almost always are) textbook. Not only could I write about things that I like and post them, but others could view those posts, as could I theirs, and consequently learn from their experiences and interests as well.

I think about this all the time in terms of my own children, who are learning to do all sorts of things in the context of what they are passionate about be it Power Rangers or horseback riding. And I’m really trying to nurture their entry into a world where they can learn together with other kids who are equally passionate about those topics (well, maybe not Power Rangers…)

Andi states it a bit differently but clearly makes the point:

To be quiet honest, I’ve become so accustomed to the “old skool” way of learning through the textbook and lectures, taking tests, and writing essays, that it’s just how I learn the easiest. It’s all I’ve known. How is this blogging thing gonna really help me? How am I even gonna know what to do? What does my teacher expect from me and how will I be able to meet those expectations? That was the main question right there. I’ve found that I learn in a way that requires a lot of structure. Someone tells me what to do and how they want it done, and like the mindless little nerd-monkey that I am, I do it. But by using this blog, I’ve been exposed to a new way of thinking and learning which has really been of benefit to myself. I’ve learned to think outside of the box and learn how I want to learn. You need to read her entire post about the experience…some very thoughtful and challenging reflections.

So here is a “new” bloggy teacher kicking the tires by allowing students to use blogs to write about things they are interested in and still draw it back in to the subject at hand. It’s not perfect…as the kids say, more commenting could have helped. But I really admire the initiative to change and experiment and reflect. And to make me think…

technorati tags:, ,