Will Richardson

Speaker, consultant, writer, learner, parent

The Wrong Focus

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Train (v) – “teach (a person or animal) a particular skill or type of behavior through practice and instruction over a period of time.”

From CDGW’s EdTech Focus on K-12:

In a recent survey by Education Dive, sponsored by Sprint, 86 percent of respondents agree that teachers in their district need more training in educational technology. Unlike Price of LAUSD, 41 percent of respondents say they don’t believe their districts have an explicit plan that lays out for teachers how educational technology can be most effectively used in lessons and curricula.

6917574943_eb479afe70_bIf you want to understand more fully the larger problem we have in education, it is this: just like our students, teachers are waiting for someone to teach them something rather than just going out and learning it.

I’m not saying there isn’t value in teaching stuff or skills or other things in the moment.

But to suggest that more “training” for some future lesson is somehow going to transform the use of technology in classrooms once again misses the point.

This is not about teaching. It’s about learning.

If we’re focused on building plans that “lay out for teachers how educational technology can be most effectively used in lessons and curricula” then nothing will change. Nothing.

I ask this a lot: Anyone know of a nine-year old kid who was “trained” to learn Minecraft? Took a workshop in Snapchat? Why should we be ok with adults waiting for a workshop?  

Why should we be ok with adults waiting for a workshop?

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If you really want to change things, focus on culture and on developing more kid-like dispositions in the adults to use technology to learn, not just to teach.

Don’t, as the CDGW article suggests, start by “making technology the focus.”

Instead, start by making learning the focus.

(Image credit: NWABR)

The “Common Sense” Argument

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Last week I spent a chunk of time talking education with a couple of family members, one of whom is a teacher at a “high performing” district in Connecticut. It was a pretty aimless conversation, but it kept coming back to a certain question: “Why do we do that, again?” And a certain response: “It just makes no sense.” We must of said that at least a half dozen times in a 45-minute conversation.

I know I’ve riffed on this before, and I don’t want to do a deep dive into it again, but it still astounds me the extent to which we in education look at our practice and fully acknowledge that it’s hard to justify in a developing-kids-as-learners context, but we just keep doing it anyway. Easier for us vs. better for kids. Trying to do the wrong thing right. Etc.

Today while I was working with a group of educators in Central Pennsylvania, I decided to use that as the starting point for a discussion on why we need to rethink, really rethink schools.

Mechanicsburg

And the ensuing conversation reminded me that the “Why?” question is really not so much about why we do the things we do…tradition, nostalgia, training and more. We all get the history.

The real “Why?” question is “why do we keep doing the things we do?”

Especially today.

PD for Teachers (Like Students Do It)

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Here’s an idea for your next PD day around technology (assuming you’ve already started a conversation around social learning tools and curricular change…no small assumption, I know.)

Step 1: Put up a wiki page with a list of interesting tools that teachers might use in the classroom, fairly complete descriptions of what the tool can do, and a few links to great examples of use in the classrooms. Ask teachers to read through the descriptions and sign up for the sessions that interest them. Schedule sessions in rooms with computers and internet access. Only run those sessions that have at least four people signed up for it.

Step 2: When people arrive in the rooms where the sessions are scheduled, write this on the board, whiteboard, smartboard, etc: “YOU HAVE 90 MINUTES. FIGURE IT OUT.”

Nervous Writing / Well-Trained Teachers

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A couple of vignettes from the road last week that I wanted to capture briefly. Both have had me thinking over this very enjoyable holiday weekend.

I often show FanFiction.net in my presentations as an example of passionate participation. I happen to know a couple of kids (here’s one) who do fanfic on a fairly regular basis, and every now and then I check in and dig around for some good stuff to read. It’s usually not too hard to find. Anyway, Tucker has been checking out the Percy Jackson stories fairly regularly since after the fifth time through the series, I think the books are finally starting to lose their luster. Some of the Fanfic stories he likes more than others, but the cool thing is that he’s been thinking of trying his hand at writing something himself. But at almost 11, he’s still a little nervous about putting something up there for everyone to see, regardless of his own anonymity in the process.

Last week when I told this story, a tech director raised her hand and said “You know, I think it’s interesting that your son is nervous about sharing his writing. Does he ever get nervous about his writing for school?” I thought for a second and said “Um, no…you know you’re right. He hardly thinks twice about that stuff.” She said “I’m guessing he’d be more motivated to work on his Percy Jackson story to make it good than he is his homework.” And ever since I’ve been wondering why we can’t instill a healthy nervousness every now and then into our writing process, now that we have these ready made audiences (or at least easily found audiences). All it would take is a willingness on our parts to let kids write about the things they truly love from time to time and connect that to an audience larger than the classroom. Shouldn’t be too hard these days…

The other story is less hopeful. At a collection of school leaders and IT people, one of the participants told the group that his school had bought a number of iPads for teachers and that they had scheduled a chunk of training on how to use them. Unfortunately for him, I had just read an exchange on Twitter where Gary Stager had made the point that I quickly made to the group: “You know, something like 1.3 million people have bought an iPad and I doubt any of them have gotten any “training” on how to use it.” The people in the room half chuckled, but one woman said “Our teachers won’t do anything with technology unless we give them training.”

Sigh.

We’ve done the same thing to our teachers that we’re doing to our kids, namely conditioned them to wait for direction on what to learn, how to learn it, and how to show they’ve learned it.

The PD Problem

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I’ve been reading Linda Darling-Hammond’s new book The Flat World and Education, and while I’m finding it rich with detail about everything that’s troubling about the US education system (and the potential fixes), I’m also struck by the fact that there is very little here in terms of a meaningful discussion around what role technology plays in educating for a “flat world.” Kind of ironic.

Anyway, I’ve been particularly interested in her section on professional development and the huge disparity she writes about in terms of the time that teachers in other countries get for both individual and collaborative learning and planning as opposed to the US. She writes, “the landscape of supports for quality teaching looks like Swiss cheese.” In short, we spend more, much more time in the classroom than in other countries, we get only a fraction of the time for professional learning, and there is a huge disparity in the quality and types of professional development that teachers in the states receive. (Not to mention a huge disparity in the amount of pre-service education and on the job training we get before even entering a classroom.) And even more troubling, according to Darling-Hammond, is just the general inconsistency in the delivery of professional development. Here are a couple of extended snips that paint the picture pretty compellingly:

No high-achieving country approaches teaching in this way. These nations realized that, without a comprehensive framework for developing strong teaching, new resources in the system are less effective than they otherwise would be.: Reforms are poorly implemented  where faculty and leaders lack the capacity to put them into action; districts and schools are often unable to develop and maintain comprehensive training opportunities at scale, and scarce professional development dollars are wasted where teachers turn over regularly. Furthermore, when a profession’s knowledge is not organized and made available to the practitioners who need it most, advances in the state of both knowledge and practice are slowed (195).

If teachers, principals, superintendents, and other professionals do not share up-to-date knowledge about effective practices, the field runs around in circles: Curriculum and teaching practices are inconsistent, many poor decisions are made, and the efforts of those who are successful are continually undermined and counteracted by the activities of those who are uninformed and unskilled. The American educational landscape is littered with examples of successful programs and schools that were later undone by newly arrived superintendents and school boards marching to a less well-informed drummer. Equally common are successful initiatives that were not sustained when the teachers and principals who made them succeed moved on to be replaced by others with less skill. Good teachers create little oases  for themselves, while others who are less well prepared adopt approaches that are ineffective or even sometimes harmful. Some seek knowledge that is not readily available to them; others batten down the hatches and eventually become impermeable to better ideas. Schools are vulnerable to vendors selling educational snake oils when educators and school boards lack sufficient shared knowledge of learning, curriculum, instruction, and research to make sound decisions about programs and materials. Students experience an instructional hodgepodge caused by the failure of the system to provide the knowledge and tools needed by the educators who serve them (196).

And in terms of the effectiveness of the professional development we deliver when do make time for it?

Short workshops of the sort generally found to trigger little change in practice are the most common learning opportunity for US teachers…A summary of experimental research found that short-term professional development experiences of 14 hours or less appear to have no effect on teachers’ effectiveness, while a variety of well-designed content-specific learning opportunities averaging about 49 hours over a 6- to 12-month period of time were associated with sizable gains: students of participating teachers gained about 21 percentile points more than other students on the achievement tests used to evaluate student learning (205).

I know there is nothing earth-shatteringly new with any of this, but what is particularly daunting is coming up with a solution. I know in the work that Sheryl and I have done with PLP has attempted to change the model to at least give teachers an extended period of time in an immersive environment, one that addresses most of the issues that Darling-Hammond cites. But even with 6-7 months to learn deeply, we know that many of our participants struggle with time. A few schools actually give their teams release time on a regular basis to talk about and reflect on their experience, and there’s no question those teams get further down the road than most others. Most who participate have to make or find the time on their own, and those that do walk away with a deeper personal and practical understanding of what’s changing.

Darling-Hammond advocates for state and federal intervention in much of this, writing that “ultimately, a well-designed state and national infrastructure that ensures that schools have access to well-prepared teachers and knowledge about best practices is absolutely essential.” I’m not optimistic that will happen anytime soon. We can’t seem to agree on much in this country these days. I’m wondering instead when we’ll get to the point where a major part of teacher preparation is teaching teachers how to teach themselves, how to be transparent, networked and “do it yourself” learners. Not that there still wouldn’t be a need for structured professional learning, but that we’d be a lot further down the road, I think, if the culture of teaching moved toward a more open, collaborative, shared enterprise than it is today.

Continual, Collaborative, on the Job Learning

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It’s been a few days since John Pederson posted this Tweet, but I’ve been thinking about that phrasing a lot ever since. It’s pretty obvious that as my professional life has changed, my interest has been moving away from classroom practice more toward individual learning and how we help educators understand the potentials of these spaces for their own learning first and their teaching second. The shift has been deepened by my work with Sheryl in PLP, but it’s also rooted in the continued frustration I have with a) the pace of even a coherent conversation about systemic change and b) teachers resistance to looking inward before moving outward when considering these shifts. (See these two posts and subsequent discussions for context.) While we have debated the “tools first” approach on the periphery, I’m still convinced that while we need an understanding of tools to make the connections, the personal shift around those tools drives the pedagogical shift. It’s difficult to understand the impact that online learning networks and communities can bring (and their potential downsides) without being a part of them.

So when John Tweeted “Community building is the new professional development” it really resonated, because it suggests that unlike most so-called pd that schools offer, getting our heads and our practice around this is a process, not an event. It’s learning, not training. (I cringed a couple of weeks ago when a principal said “Wow, our teachers are going to need a lot more ‘training.'” Ugh.) It’s not something we can “deliver” in a four-hour PowerPoint-like session. As Linda Darling-Hammond suggests, “…teachers need to learn the way other professionals do—continually, collaboratively, and on the job.” If that’s not a description of what I see most of us doing in these spaces I don’t know what is. Somehow, by luck or hard work or a combination, those of us who are taking advantage of the affordances of learning in online communities and networks have found a way to invest the time, not in big chunks in a physical space classroom but in as-needed, passion-driven, hour-here-fifteen-minutes-there learning flow that relies on the interactions of many learners, not on the expertise of any one person. And it’s in knowing how to effectively navigate those interactions where the value lives, not in effectively navigating the tools.

Our continued emphasis on tools in pd misses that larger point, obviously, because the power of the Read/Write web is not the ability to publish; it’s the ability to connect. Broken record, I know, but tools are easy; connections are hard. And so the question becomes how to best help educators realize these potentials in the learning sense first. Because at the end of the day, community building has to become an integral part of what we do in our classrooms with our students, as well. We have to be able to model those connections for them and understand them in ways that are meaningful to our own learning practice.

The challenge is, of course, that “continual, collaborative, on the job” learning isn’t very convenient for professional developers or for teachers in classrooms. It means re-thinking what learning looks like, and that’s a scary place still for most in education.

Live Shirky Interview This Thursday 11 am EST

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As I’ve mentioned before, I’ll be doing a live streaming interview with Clay Shirky this Thursday at 11 am at my Ustream Channel. I’ll be picking his brain on how what he sees are the educational implications of the changes and shifts set out in his book “Here Comes Everybody,” and I’m hoping you’ll participate as well. Most UStreamers know that there is a chat window that comes with every show, but I’ll also be opening up the cohost feature for those of you with camera and mic that want to come on and ask a question as well. (I’d appreciate it if you’d let me know ahead of time if you plan to do that, just for organization sake.)

If you’d rather just leave a question in this comment thread, I’d be happy to try to work it in.

Hope to see you on Thursday!

Business as 'Un'usual

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“Education is not merely about transferring information. It is about contextualizing that information in the real life experiences of the learners, and in relation with the experiences of other learners…It is the relationships among people and sharing contextualized experiences that create emergent knowledge that is the basis of education.” Mark Federman

One of the things that has been bothering me about my own work of late is the inherent limitations of the current conference workshop or district in-service day structures that I find myself a part of more often than not. I really feel like when people ask me to do a keynote or a general presentation that my job is to inspire, cajole, provide some cognitive dissonance or start conversations. And I am happy to try to do that. But the workshops are a different story. In the best case, they are a full day of one or two particular tools. In the worst case, they are one or two hours on a lot of tools. Either way, the experience usually serves to overwhelm, and at the end of the day (or hour) the participants head back to the craziness of their teaching lives where I’m guessing much of what they have “learned” fails to take root. Now that may be my fault to some extent, but it’s also a direct result of the “drive by” nature of much of what we call professional development. There’s little if anything to support the experience after it’s over. It’s a little better at conferences where people by and large choose to be there, but the larger point is that motivated at the moment or not, there is rarely time for contextualizing the skills and connecting and sharing those experiences after the fact.

Yet, that is the inherent power of these tools, the connections they allow us to create. And in those connections and the networks we can build around them, we begin to seriously challenge many of the traditional constructs of how we do our business. Take conferences, for example. The truth is that the vast majority of what will be offered at NECC this year can be had online, in a community, when you need it or want it. Sure, there will be some sessions that will inspire and push our thinking, but most of the folks who spent time in the Blogger’s Cafe last year will be heading to San Antonio with other priorities than skill building or presentations of papers. We’ll be in San Antonio to push forward the conversations that we’ve been engaged in all year long since Atlanta, to make our networks physical which in turn deepens the virtual. We’ll be there to do what we do in our online community which looks nothing like sitting in rows quietly watching presentations in rooms filled with people.

And the pd part of our business has to change too. These tools support the need for the relationships and the sharing of real-life experiences around the information transfer so that the “learning” isn’t done in relative isolation. We can create community around the experience, community that is not dependent on time and place but is instead available to the learner when needed or wanted. The tools give us opportunities to add value to the face to face, but only, and here’s the rub, if we know how to use the tools. And that’s why workshops feel so stressed, so mind-numbing. Because the way we approach it right now, we have to get it all in one sitting and then hope for the best.

So what about doing it differently? What about doing long-term, job embedded, relationship and network building professional development that blends the best of face to face with the “Fifteen Minutes” model that Carolyn Foote writes about? What about giving teachers new to these technologies just enough to get them started and then take the school year (or more) to immerse them in the tools and networked learning environments where they can learn at their own pace (with some appropriate nudging and guidance from time to time)?

Well, that’s the “different” approach I’ve been taking of late with Sheryl Nussbaum-Beach, whose knowledge and passion for this work I grow to respect more each day. Working off of the model Sheryl helped develop in Alabama, we’re currently in the midst of six-month long professional development programs with a couple of hundred educators from around the country, leading them through a process that we hope will allow these concepts and skills to really take root in their own learning practice. And it is focused on their own learning, not teaching, not classrooms, not kids. That’s hugely important to us, that these educators be selfish about the learning. No doubt, many of them struggle to approach this process with anything but a teaching lens. But both Sheryl and I feel strongly that what will really create meaningful change in schools and classrooms are teachers who personally understand the potentials of these connections. Already, the most powerful piece of these cohorts to me is that in the process, we’re collectively beginning to build the relationships and share contextualized experiences “that create emergent knowledge that is the basis of education.” The connections are deepening.

Sheryl is fond of saying “This is business as ‘un’usual” and I agree. But it shouldn’t be, should it? While there will always be a role for time and place, physical space, face to face learning, there are other ways and, in some instances, better ways to do workshops and conferences and professional development, ways that definitely do a better job of helping us understand what it means to create and sustain the types of personal learning networks that are now possible. The same types of learning networks, both physical and virtual, we want our own children to master in their own practice.

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Teachers as Learners Part 27

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The whole integrating technology discussion that many have been chronicling of late has been sticking in my craw for a couple of reasons. First, a couple of weeks ago I had a bad teacher day while I was doing some training, the kind that really gets me pessimistic about how difficult a road this is going to be.

With this particular group, it was made clear that the only reason they were in attendance was that they were getting paid for the day, that any teacher who came in during the summer and wasn’t getting paid was ruining it for everyone else, that the technology wouldn’t work in their classrooms anyway, that they didn’t have time to practice what they were learning, that, well, fill in the blank. It was one of those days, and they don’t occur very often, but it was one of those days when I walked out of the room thinking “Thank god my kids don’t go to this school.”

Depressing, to say the least.

The second reason is that it’s becoming exceedingly clear that we have an outdated perception of what teachers need to be. Like David, more and more I think there is a “T” word that we should stop using, only mine isn’t technology. It’s teaching. And let me say up front that this is one of those “I’m blogging this so people will help me figure out what it is I think” posts as my thoughts are still somewhat murky. But here goes.

When we say “teacher,” what we are really saying is “the person in the classroom to whom students look for knowledge” or something like that. In the traditional classroom that almost all of us grew up in, the teacher was the focal point, the decision maker, the director, the assessor. Teachers, well, teach, or try to. We hire teachers based on how well they know their subject matter and how well we think they can deliver it to students. Teaching, the way most of us see it, is all about imparting knowledge in a planned, controlled way.

In a world where knowledge is scarce (and I know I’m using that phrase an awful lot these days), I can see why we needed teachers to be, well, teachers. But here’s what I’m wondering: in a world where knowledge is abundant, is that still the case? In a world where, if we have access, we can find what we need to know, doesn’t a teacher’s role fundamentally change? Isn’t it more important that the adults we put into the rooms with our kids be learners first? Real, continual learners? Real models for the practice of learning? People who make learning transparent and really become a part of the community?

I hesitate to make blanket statements about teachers because a) they are seldom appropriate (the statements, that is) and b) they get me in trouble. But when I ask myself what percentage of the thousands of teachers I’ve worked with over the past two years are practicing learners, I have a hard time convincing myself that it’s more than half. Maybe even one-third.

I’m not saying this is necessarily their fault. We teach teachers to teach, we don’t teach teachers to learn. Even in professional development, we teach them stuff they need to be better teachers, but do we give them the skills they need to be better learners? Do we evaluate them on what they’ve been reading? On what they’ve been writing? On their reflectiveness?

There is a section in Henry Jenkins’ book that somewhat goes to this titled “Collective Intelligence and the Expert Paradigm.” I’m going to blog about it in this context when I next get a chance (which might not be for a few days.)

But for now, I’ll keep trying to think it through. What if we hired learners first?

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More Teacher Blogs Blooming

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So this “High School’s New Face” Conference has been really interesting and another example of how the people out here in Western New York are working hard to move schools and education in a different direction. There are about 150 educators here with each school bringing at team of teachers and a building principal or superintendent They have been split into four cohorts: Engaging the 21st Century Learner, Connecting the 21st Century Learner, Designing a School for the 21st Century Learner, and Leading the Way, the last for the administrators. The idea is that the different teachers from different districts take different strands and then will get back together after the conference to teach each other what they learned and hopefully have meaningful discussions about how to move forward.

I’ve been working with the Connecting group to learn about the tools, and I have to say that despite some connectivity issues, they have been absolutely great. We did two sessions yesterday (the last until 9 pm.) two more today, and will have one more in the morning…a total of almost 16 hours together! We’ve listened to students from local districts and from the Met School in Providence talk about what good teaching and learning is. (One of the students from the Met school read an incredible poem he had written basically about how the school had saved him from drugs and crime in his neighborhood…it was absolutely amazing.) We’ve teleconnected with an educator in Kansas, and tomorrow we’ll be hearing from the creators of Tech Valley High. It’s just been very well planned and delivered, and I’m just getting a really positive vibe about all of it.

The 50 or so members of my cohort are already producing some interesting content too. Kim Moritz who is a principal at a local high school, is asking some great questions about her curriculum. Beth McIntyre is already reading and thinking and writing about what she’s reading and thinking. And there are others who are just starting. We have our own Mother Blog and a cohort wiki as well. We’re getting there. As always, it will be interesting to see how much of it sticks, but if the conversations and ideas are any indication, much of it should.

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Blogs For Professional Development

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Yesterday, Bud pointed to the work of Karl Fisch in Centennial, Co, and although I had seen Karl’s name popping up in various spots and I think even linked to him on a couple of occasions, Bud urged me to “Pay attention” to Karl’s work. So, this morning, I did some digging around “The Fischbowl.”

The latest post on Karl’s blog is a really interesting explanation of a staff development program with real vision, and how blogs have become pretty central to the way he and his teachers reflect on their practice and create community around common goals which were to “improve teacher and student use of technology, to achieve curricular goals, to help transform our school to a more student-centered,constructivist approach, and to prepare our students to succeed in the21st century.” The program has been funded by a couple of grants, so the teachers who are involved have been given some time to meet and think and focus on those goals. And if you read some of the end of the year entries in the individual teacher blogs along with Karl’s summation, it seems to have been a very successful undertaking. I was especially struck by this description:

What we are asking our teachers to do is to examine all of those assumptions they have made about education, instruction, and their classes and really think about what they feel is important and what the best ways are to achieve their goals. For many teachers, they really haven’t thought about a lot of these issues since their methods classes in college. Once they were actually in the classroom, it was survival mode at first and they naturally did many of the same things their more veteran colleagues were doing. After a while the focus was often just doing those things better when what was needed – sometimes – was to question whether those were the right things to be doing in the first place. While I as the “leader” of the staff development certainly have strong opinions, we’ve all agreed that we will continue to be individual teachers with differing opinions, styles and ideas about what is “right”. My role is to get them to think about their instruction, to “push” their thinking and make sure they are not only doing the best job they can, but that what they are doing truly aligns with their beliefs. In the end we will hopefully do a better job of working together to achieve our common goals for students. And we will discuss freely and openly the issues facing our students in a time of rapid change.

How cool is that? Now I know that in most schools, there is little time for discussions of this type, for real reflection on practice. But when you look at some of the work and the writing that these teachers are doing on their own personal and class blogs (see the links in the right hand column) it pretty easy to be amazed at the results. I’ll just to point to one interesting post from early in the school year titled “Will Blogs Take Over the World” by one teacher who writes

…twice already members of the outside world have commented on our class blogs (though one was actually helpful), and some of my students have used the blog to passive aggressively attack each other. I’ve addressed these situations, and I think use of the blog will continue to improve, but I think that so many students are accustomed to blog sites like “MySpace” that the line between the personal and the academic blogs can be fuzzy, especially in a course like English. But for the most part, I am blown away both by my students’ perceptive comments and by their honesty. I feel a little closer to them now, and I look forward treading their entries.

You can follow the rest of her journey as she blogs about her year. And make sure to read the comments to this post from last month where she writes:

This year my students have seemed more like actual humans to me…in past years certain students might as well have been 2-dimensional cutouts because the only things I knew about them was how often they turned in their homework and how proficient they were in reading handwriting. When I look at them this year, however, I can see little pieces of the adults they’re becoming. And I’m excited for their futures, even if I no longer play a part.

It’s good, and, I think, powerful stuff. Blogs and blogging can have amazing effects on so many levels…we haven’t even begun to scratch the surface. But with efforts like those Karl and his teachers are putting in, I’m still really excited to see what will happen as more and more teachers start to bring this tool into their practice.

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49 Captive Superintendents–One Message

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So, I get the chance to address 49 Superintendents in Upstate NY on Thursday. I’ve got some ideas of what I plan to show them about the power and potential of the Read/Write Web, about what teachers and students are already doing, and about the obstacles that we need to begin having serious conversations about. But I’m wondering, if you had 90 minutes with this group, what one thing would you bring up/point to/challenge them with? What would be your most important message?

Chime in before Wednesday because I would love to point them to this post during my talk.

When Parents Contribute to Student Blogs…

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Anne pointed to this pretty amazing exchange that occurred on one of her student blogs recently, and it’s an interesting and effective example of how involved parents can contribute to their childrens’ learning in these more transparent spaces. I wonder how many teachers actively invite parents to at minimum read and perhaps respond to the work that their children are doing in their blogs. I know when I was in the classroom, I made a point of letting parents know what the URLs of the blogs were, but I left the decision to have parents comment on the sites up to the students themselves. Since it was high school, most opted not to let that happen. But a few did, and while the responses were not many, almost all of them were helpful, instructive, and relevant. And I do think for the students who allowed their parents to contribute it was a positive experience, especially for the parents who like the opportunity to be more involved.

Anyway, it’s nice to see such great discussion happening on student blogs. It’s rich, personal and, in this case at least, adds a great deal to the topic.

Superintendent Ends Personal Blog

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Dean poined to the fact that Clayton Wilcox, the blogging superintendent at Pinellas County in Florida, has shut down his blog because of the acrimonious debate that took place among the commentors. It’s unfortunate, I think, not just because this will be seen as another indictment against the transparency and openness of blogs, but because I think he had an opportunity to find higher ground with it. In instances like this, I would have no problem with someone vetting the comments and not approving those that made no meaningful contribution to the conversation or were mean-spirited. I know there is a bit of a “slippery slope” there in terms of the potential for steering the community in one direction or the other. But in this instance where the blogger is high profile and where the intent is to start a dialogue, I’m sure a third party reviewer could have been put in place so that the debate could have remained respectful and prductive. In addition, some clear acceptable use guidelines would make that work even easier.

We need to be more imaginative in the way we deal with these issues, because I think Wilcox’s willingness to engage in a more open way was modeling something very important, not just to the people in his disctrict, but to educators and school leaders in general. As Dean points out, pulling the plug on these technologies when people in the community behave egregiously is not an answer for our superintendents or our students. Wilcox had a teachable moment here, and he failed to teach. Too bad.

Learning 101

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Creating Passionate Users is becoming one of my favorite blogs, and today’s post “Crash Course in Learning Theory” really just blew me away. The best part? Basically she equates blogging with learning. Read the whole thing, but here are the highlights:

  • Talk to the brain first, mind second.
  • Learning is not a one-way “push” model.
  • Provide a meaningful benefit for each topic, in the form of “why you should care about this” scenario.
  • Use visuals!
  • Use redundancy to increase understanding and retention.
  • The more senses you engage, the greater the potential for retention and recall.
  • Maintain interest with variety and surprise.
  • Use conversational language.
  • Use the filmaker (and novelist) principle of SHOW-don’t-TELL.
  • Use “chunking” to reduce cognitive overhead.
  • Since stress/anxiety can reduce focus and memory, do everything possible to make the learner feel relaxed and confident.
  • Use seduction, charm, mystery to build curiosity.
  • Use a spiral model to keep users engaged.

  • Don’t rob the learner of the opportunity to think!
  • Use the 80/20 principle to reduce cognitive overload.
  • Context matters.
  • Emotion matters!
  • Never underestimate the power of FUN to keep people engaged.
  • Use stories.
  • Use pacing and vary the parts of the brain you’re exercising.
  • Remember, it’s never about you. It’s about how the learner feels about himself as a result of the learning experience.

    Really good stuff that I’ll be mulling over as I blog…

    • The Blog Tango

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    Darren Kuroptawa has put together an extremely engaging in-service on teaching with blogs, RSS and the like that should serve as a model to all of us. It’s all about building a learning ecology in the classroom that supports the small pieces model, where students become self-directed learners using a variety of tools and techniques.

    An ecology is an environment that fosters and supports the creation of communities … A learning ecology is an environment that is consistent with (not antagonistic to) how learners learn … The Instructor plays the role of gardener.

    That is such a great metaphor, certainly one that fits what I think of when I look at the way Darren and Anne and Barbara and Clarence and Konrad and many others are employing these tools in our classrooms.

    Darren’s workshop speaks to the unlearning that we have to do, because almost everything he asks of the participants challenges their preconceived notions of teaching and classroom structure.

    A Model for Professional Development

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    I’ve just recently tapped into the “Web and Education” discussion group at Yahoo Groups and at first blush it looks like a pretty robust discussion about many of the technologies I’m interested in. I’m wondering why it took me so long to find it. (Maybe a case of blog blinders?)

    Anyway, the good news is it has an RSS feed, now duly added to my Bloglines account (and I was trying to cut down…), and it seems to have a weekly preview of all the amazing professional development an educator could get at Tapped In. This week?

    This week’s Tapped In schedule starts off on Sunday with the Webheads in
    Action TESOL/ESL/EFL/ELL community discussion for language teachers.
    Blogstreams Salon, which focuses on blogging, will meet in the
    Blogstreams Salon group room.

    Monday’s grrrrreat events include Grreat Grants and Patrick Flaherty’s
    Class Notes Online. Tuesday is busy with E-Portfolios with Joseph
    Ugoretz; David Weksler’s Math and Technology with guest Jonathan
    Middleton will explore Music Algorithms; and Bill Hilton Jr. leads us on
    an exciting learning experience during Nuts About Nature. Wednesday let
    Lesley Farmer share Technology for Reluctant Readers and Learners (a
    must for all Special Ed teachers) during Targeting Librarians!, and
    Donna Hendry will show you Language Arts Resources. Thursday, Linda
    Ullah will guide us on a Project Based Learning journey through Projects
    That Make a Difference in the World and BJ Berquist opens the
    Alt/Correctional Ed Forum to a discussion on how to survive the upcoming
    stressful holiday season.

    Included in the events scheduled for Saturday is Jeff Cooper’s
    Collaboration Central and a discussion for Religious Educators led by
    John Greenamyre (if you’re unable to participate in the Saturday
    session, John holds office hours for Religious Educators from Monday
    though Saturday from 12 noon to 1pm ET).

    Mercy. Too much good stuff.

    Showcasing New Technologies

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    So, if you had an hour in front of your full faculty to do a show and tell of some cool sites/tools out there, what would you show? We have a staff in-service on September 23, and I’ve got that hour. I’m thinking:

  • Google Earth
  • Wikipedia
  • Bloglines/RSS

    What else??? The nominations are open!

    • Blogging Teachers

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    One thing I seem to be noticing more and more of is teachers who are blogging about their working lives. And it seems like there is a burgeoning support network out there that is pretty cool. Hipteacher has been on my blogroll for awhile. But all of a sudden I’ve run accross Mz. Smlph, First Year Teacher, Catherine Grimm, The Flaming Cheeto…

    Sheesh…maybe there really are “a few hundred thousand” educators blogging out there.

    And if you haven’t already done so, join the Educational Bloggers group at Flickr.

    So much to see, read, write, share, hear, experience together these days, huh?

    Blogvangelism

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    I’ll be doing a 2 1/2 hour workshop with Kevin Jarrett at the From My Classroom to Yours conference at Richard Stockton College tomorrow. I’m hoping to finally meet Ken Tompkins who was a big help in getting me up and running with Manila. With all the good workshop stuff coming out of late, I think after this it’s going to be time for a major upgrade of what we’re doing, which is basically a overview-hands on with MoTime. Hopefully, we’ll be bringing about 25 teacher bloggers into to the fold…
    —–

    Great EduBlogger Question of the Day

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    In reference to Hipteacher (mentioned here a couple of days ago,) Jeremy asks:

    Young, independent and creative, with good taste in music and no fear of using technology, she makes you wonder how education will be transformed if we see a whole generation of teachers like her roll through the system.

    Well, I guess that’s not really a question, but you get the point. What happens when student teachers suddenly have a whole host of pseudo blog mentors out there whose experiences they can read about and learn from? And with no fear…really? At the snail’s pace of education, I’ll be feet up on the beach by then. But even so, I’ll still be a part of the conversation if I so choose.

    Hipteacher

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    Ran into this site through my referers and I liked what I saw, especially the tagline “one redheaded girl’s journey into the world of public education” and the following post:

    I am supposed to be writing a paper about the results of my “study” using blogs to teach descriptive writing. I designed and taught the unit and now I have mountains of student essays and comments on their blogs and student feedback from the end of the unit. Deep inside my brain, I even have a semi-theory about how and why things worked.

    But I can’t find decent theory about using blogs in stuffy academic journals. Plenty of teachers out there use blogs in the classroom. Have any of them published theory/results/other academic junk? Probably. So, where are you???

    So far, the only articles I’ve found deal with using those crazy “word processors” and new-fangled, and potentially immoral, “electronic mail.”

    I do not consider 1987 relevant to my study.

    Sounds like the type of teacher I would have liked. I wonder if she ever wrote up her study. (And I can’t wait to tell Miss Higgins that she’s been blogrolled!)

    A Blogging PIP

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    Well, here’s a first. One of our English teachers who has been using Weblogs behind closed doors for his creative writing classes told me that one of his PIPs (Personal Improvement Program) for next year is to incorporate blogging (noun AND verb) into his Media Literacy classes! He really wants to explore the use of Weblogs as a research tool, but he’s also interested in seeing what happens when students read, think, synthesize, write, respond and read some more in terms of pushing their understanding of the topic. We talked briefly today about how regular blogging and responding to other’s blogging might just serve to help students make learning more relevant and therefore more meaningful. (Don’t tease me…) And we talked about how with this particular class, at least, there is an opportunity to write about an area in which they are interested, maybe even passionate about like gender issues, violence, politics…whatever. This might be a great opportunity to do some action research. We’re going to get together over the summer to formalize it a bit more, but I’m really psyched that he took the initiative to make this a part of his professional development plan.

    Key is, as Robert Scoble says, is that passion part.

    Lately people have been asking me “how or when does weblogging and/or syndication go mainstream?” It goes mainstream when everyone in society gets passionate about something. If someone isn’t passionate about SOMETHING they won’t get weblogs. Hence, the numbers of weblog authors and readers will remain small, when compared to overall society. (Via Dave Winer)

    —–

    EdBlogger Panel at SXSW

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    There is going to be a EdBlogging Panel at the SXSW Interactive Festival in Austin, Texas in March, and I’ve been asked to see if I can drum up some blogging teachers who might want to be a part of the panel. The expected audience is 40 or so middle school teachers who will be hoping to get ideas about classroom use of Weblogs. If you are attending SXSW, live around Austin, or want to submit a case study that could be presented in your absence, just add a comment to this message.