Helcat Rants and Ramblings

In my last post, just a short time ago, I alluded to a great summer speaker line up. This post is just meant to isolate the speaker series information and acknowledge how lucky I feel to be able to have this kind of talent come to help our teachers - and any of you who might be close enough (Saint Louis, MO) to join us- improve their understanding of the many powerful ways that technology can enhance learning.

Here is the exciting line up -
May 29th Alec Couros

Alec will speak to the entire upper school faculty followed by a workshop with Enlgish and History teachers on Personal Learning Networks and Integrating technology in the classroom. He and I still need to work out the details of the presentation but I know it will be a terrific learning day for them. I have learned tons from Alec just by taking advantage of what he offers to my own learning network.

June 9th David Jakes

David will do sessions on Google Earth and Digital StoryTelling. I’ve been fortunate to see his presentations on these topics and know that my faculty are in for a real treat!

July 7th Vicki Davis and Julie Lindsay
Vicki and Julie will help MICDS teachers explore flattening the classroom and digital citizenship.

July 8th and 9th Vicki Davis and Julie Lindsey
Vicki and Julie will offer a flatclassroom workshop to others. We are merely thankful for the opportunity to host.

July 21 Darren Kuropatwa

Darren will work with out Math and Science teachers to help them learn how to employ blogging and personal learning networks. He does such a fantastic job with his classes. We can learn so much from him.

I am really looking forward to all of the learning that will be happening on campus this summer. Things are changing and its fun. Let me know if you are in the area and want to drop in on us!

Vicki Davis posted an interesting piece on the evolution of faculty professional development and I couldn’t agree more with the suggestions she offers. We have been preparing to move to a 1:1 program and have already made some changes consistent with Vicki’s suggestions.

The most recent evolution of our PD program looks something like this -

We eliminated the mandatory 6 hours of training in favor of having faculty create portfolios of curricular technology use in their classroom or documenting things they were learning with technology.

We used an Elgg network for this to simultaneously begin the discussion about social networks. It has been moderately successful with not all faculty members fully participating this year but it is in place for use next year.

We picked Elgg over Ning because of the increased ability to set granular permissions.

As the upper school technology integrator, I was asked to write divisional and departmental goals. I expanded that and wrote goals for each course and each faculty member. Individual goals are very attainable. Course goals are slightly more ambitious since they can encourage each other. Department goals have a healthy, high-expectation bar. I tied the goals to use of the Elgg network. Faculty need to be held accountable and I am fortunate to have a division head who will read what they post on their Elgg Blogs.

We held a final Teaching and Learning Committee Meeting and used it to discuss technology in the 1-to-1 classroom (I wrote more about it in the previous post) but we made it an example session of networking. We ustreamed and skyped with members of my learning network. Participants from my twitter network were achivetta, pwoessner, courosa, cburell, scmorgan, linkseak, and bassman_sean. This even gave faculty a first hand look at how easily connections and communication can occur. It allowed them to experience an introduction to the power of a network. It is the creation of individual networks that I hope will become our venue for Professional Development. I hope to help them create a network and will try to make it a habit for them -as Vicki suggests.

We are fortunate to have summer money to fund faculty who choose to work on curriculum revision. Those funds were designated for work on curriculum in support of 1-to-1 implementation. My job was also expanded from 10 months to 12 so I would be available to support faculty as they rework curriculum. We have lots of interesting projects in the works for this.

We have regularly scheduled department times to slowly help teachers set up a few required accounts. Last Wed. morning, every faculty member was moved to del.icio.us bookmarks. They were told that we no longer support Firefox bookmarks. We then gave them a new tablet and collected their old one so del.icio.us was the only venue for their bookmarks. We are helping them move to some other web 2.0 tools as well. Exam proctoring schedules will be filled out on Google Docs so they will all need to have an active google account. Almost everyone has a ning account because that was the venue we used for summer reading. Before they leave, everyone will have google reader set up and will they will have subscribed to 3-5 blogs – it is written into their goals. Not everyone has a personal learning network, but some of the basic pieces are being put in place. We are trying!

I’m a big believer that bringing in motivational experts is a good thing so we have planned a summer line up. The line up (to be posted soon) is mentioned in the personal and departmental goals and follow up work to the “MICDS Summer Speaker Series Workshops” is funded with the summer money. This line up is quite exciting and we stand to learn a lot - more info coming very soon. ( I really just want it to be a separate post for easier reference for folks this summer.)

Next year, we are signed on to be part of one of Sheryl Nussbaum Beach and Will Richardson’s Powerful Learning Practice cohorts. The team of five involved will represent each department and the will act as mentors for their respective departments. We also plan to take advantage of the k12 online conference. We will have ipods, headphones and webcams available for faculty to take advantage of that venue and will offer some group meetings to debrief or discuss things that faculty learn. Faculty also have their portfolio/Elgg site to express some thoughts as they learn things.

The advisory program is also a place where we hope to foster growth. We will be going 1-to-1 in grades 9 and 10. This means that half of the faculty will be involved in advisories for grades that have tablets. We have an active student technology group, largely because of student2oh.org blogger Anthony Chivetta. Our plan is to have each advisory appoint a technology mentor for that advisory and the will be members of a stutech cohort. They will meet every other week and will be given a tech tip or tech question (ethics, copyright, digital citizenship) to take back to the advisory.

It feels like there is a lot going on. I’m excited by the changes we are making. I have days when I’m discouraged and it feels like we are moving backwards or standing still. I think it has something to do with expanding technology integration from living in the power users’ rooms to occurring across the curriculum – moving it from a personality driven endeavor to systemic change. I think we are on a decent path, but if anyone cares to adjust the compass- or the GPS system (is that more 21st century?) - please fell free to help me with the coordinates of this journey!

Last weekend, I read a post on Will Richardson’s blog that pointed me to a video of Clay Shirky’s speech at the Web2.0 Expo that occurred in April. The video is well worth the 15 minutes.

In the event that you don’t have time to watch, there are a few nuggets you simply must consider. As you read these first two nuggets, try changing the word media to education.

“This is something that people in the media world don’t understand. Media in the 20th century was run as a single race–consumption…..But media is actually a triathlon, it ’s three different events. People like to consume, but they also like to produce, and they like to share.”

"Here’s something four-year-olds know: A screen that ships without a mouse ships broken. Here’s something four-year-olds know: Media that’s targeted at you but doesn’t include you may not be worth sitting still for. Those are things that make me believe that this is a one-way change. Because four year olds, the people who are soaking most deeply in the current environment, who won’t have to go through the trauma that I have to go through of trying to unlearn a childhood spent watching Gilligan’s Island, they just assume that media includes consuming, producing and sharing."

Shirky, entertainingly points out that in the past, media was about consumption. In today’s world, Shirky explains that media is now threefold – consume, produce, and share. Shirky goes on to explain that this sharing, the sharing that produced wikipedia, is actually a “cognitive surplus” – an intellectual currency that is formed from a once passive audience that  is now  in possession of social software that provides for, encourages, and even demands participation and interaction. He surmises:

 “The early phase for taking advantage of this cognitive surplus, the phase I think we’re still in, is all special cases. The physics of participation is much more like the physics of weather than it is like the physics of gravity. We know all the forces that combine to make these kinds of things work: there’s an interesting community over here, there’s an interesting sharing model over there, those people are collaborating on open source software. But despite knowing the inputs, we can’t predict the outputs yet because there’s so much complexity.”

In some ways, Shirky offers better educational advice for me than Dan Pink who has recently gotten some negative reviews within my own personal network. Shirky’s “cognitive surplus” is, in my mind, the release or the channeling of the right brained thoughts all of us have. It is not that right brainers are now going to rule the world but that our collective, social, right brained ideas now have a venue in which to mature. Plenty of us left-brainers actually have really good right-brained acumen. I’d argue that Einstien, Schrodinger, Heisenberg and all those associated with the development of the modern theory of the atom were very left brained but their right brained acumen allowed them to think outside of the box and reinvent the world of physics much like technology is reinventing social participation.

In his book Here Comes Everybody, (of course I went out and bought the book), Shirky builds his case for “the Power or Organizing without Organizations” or the Physics of Participation with a few key concepts. “When we change the way we communicate, we change society.” (p.17) He explains that communications media in the past was a one-to-one proposition and broadcast media was a one-to many proposition. (Don’t forget to consider changing the word media to education – you can just see the 20^th century teacher imparting wisdom to a captive audience be it an individual student or a class.) Shirky discusses the way social software tools can be used in various levels of communication and sharing; simple sharing, cooperation, collaborative production, and collective action. He states that “Communications tools don’t get socially interesting until they get technologically boring.” (p.105) For today’s students, the communications tools include cell phones, IM, skype, and social network sites and, while these tools may not be boring to them, they are certainly second nature and very powerful.

What does all of that mean for education. Education like media needs to acknowledge that it isn’t a one to many learning economy. It is a many to many learning environment of sharing that properly harnessed can see students take sharing to the highest level of collaborative action and that can engage students in global collaboration and digital citizenship. It means that education like media needs to shift from the one dimensional consumption model to to its own three part system that includes accessing knowledge (consumption), collaborating to construct meaning (producing), and transforming the meaning into a shared product (sharing).

The accessing knowledge phase now includes getting information from social networks, from experts that are readily accessible via technologies like ustream and skype and from a wide variety of sources in a wide variety of mediums; blogs, podcasts, documentaries, databases, and good old fashioned texts. The producing phase is increasingly collaborative and the playing field has changed such that teacher is no longer the team’s general manager but should assume a role that more closely resembles that of player-manager. The sharing phase in today’s world includes a plethora of opportunities for learners to publish books or videos, to post presentations and podcasts, and to host conferences and seminars.

So, what might this look like in the school setting?  I offer  three examples.

For our last Teaching and Learning Committee Meeting, we elected to discuss the questions: "How can educators and students effectively bridge out of school technology practices with in school 1:1 laptop learning?"and "What is the change in education that makes laptops (and other emerging technologies) such critical learning tools?” We invited some of our students and gave them the lead voice and we included students from Hawaii and Scotland. We also invited technology specialists Alec Couros from Canada, ClayBurell from Seoul, and Susan Morgan from Virginia. We invited others using twitter and ustreamed the event. Students and teachers discussed learning on an even playing field and the conversation was many to many.  

On May 6^th the advanced chemistry class will hold a Global Climate Change summit. The class was given the freedom to choose topics to research and students were encouraged to contact and interact with experts like the director of the NOAA/Mauna Loa Observatory in Hilo, HI. Their experts and members of the MICDS community have been invited to the event which will be ustreamed as it occurs. This is an example of a class learning together and taking sharing to a level that approaches collective action.

Lastly, we are offering a new course that is also being offered at ten other high schools and four colleges next year. (More on the course can be found here.) The course will allow participants to collaborate with each other. It will be an interdisciplinary course that will focus on three strands:

History of the Sudan region including religious, cultural, and geopolitical factors that have contributed to the conflict today

Literary works about the conflict that provide a human element and push students to examine cultural perspectives

Understanding and creating documentaries.

The class will get footage from a photographer who is currently in the Sudan/Chad area but who has not been heard from in 2+ months and whose safety is not assured because of the political unrest of the region. Students and teachers are challenged with developing an understanding of a culture and a conflict and to articulate that to a wider audience by creating a documentary. (The teachers involved in this course have never used Final Cut and have not had courses in the history of the sudan making the  playing field truly level.) The ultimate goal would be to inspire in all involved an awareness of the complicated significance of culture and conflicts of culture. Wouldn’t it be grand if the course could get participants to really view the world through the lens of another culture rather than judging it against our own? The ability to connect with others across the globe and to interact with experts makes achieving this goal more likely. However, it won’t really be the technology that will allow us to meet this lofty goal. The technology will merely be a facilitator. It is the change in attitudes, learning process, and curriculum that will allow for powerful change.  It will be understanding that education like media is no longer a one dimensional student consumption model but has become a three dimensional model in which accessing, creating and sharing meaning supersedes knowledge acquisition for a final exam.

Shirky ends his book with this sentiment:

“I’m old enough to know a lot of things just from life experience. I know that newspapers are where you get your political news and how you look for a job. I know that music comes from stores. I know that if you want to have a conversation with someone, you call them on the phone. I know that complicated things like software and encyclopedias have to be created by professionals. In the last fifteen years I’ve had to unlearn every one of those things and a million others, because they have stopped being true….Meanwhile, my students, many of whom are fifteen years younger than I am, don’t have to unlearn those things, because they never had to learn them in the first place.”

Faculty are finding themselves in a position of needing to unlearn in order to become active participants in this new learning landscape. Much like physicists in a pre-atomic bomb era resisted the new right-brained ideas of some of their counterparts, there are those in the educational world who don’t yet get this new Physics of Participation. Unlearning is difficult but today’s students are going to increasingly demand it from us. Alvin Toffler wrote, “The illiterate of the 21st century will not be those who cannot read or write; but those who cannot learn, unlearn and relearn.”

How can I teach a faculty to unlearn so they can understand?

This entry also posted on Digital Learning Environments Blog.

I’ve been asked to write for the Digital Learning Environments Blog It is an interesting experience for me and not one I’m necessarily smart enough for. The blog is sponsored by HP and Intel. My involvement with DyKnow software created the opportunity. Dyknow partners with HP. I’m not going to post the same thing in two places but will note the topic here and provide a link. For this post I chose to write about how technology can be used to establish a culture of learning.
My second post on Digital Learning Environments can be found here.

If you read my rambling posts, it gets pretty clear that everyday is a struggle to get my head
wrapped around what we need to do and how best to do it. Its a giant puzzle with so many pieces. One thing I know is that learning needs to be paramount to everything else. It needs to supersede our tendency to teach like we always have and our fear in risking new ways of doing things. Our obligation to making our students and ourselves life long learners is the driver for change in each of us, in our peers and our institutions. It isn’t about technology at all. Its about the skills students need to maximize their lifelong learning potential. Its also about the curriculum that can support a mission and a goal of learning.

One of the most important skills students can acquire if they are to be lifelong learners is the ability to research. Research is a process, it isn’t googling although googling can certainly be a piece of the process. Its a process that has become more complicated as the world has acquired more information to manage and as the sources for information have grown. With the emergence of participatory media, evaluation and the concept of intellectual property have become increasingly important. Good research requires the researcher to be a discriminating consumer of information, and that skill needs to be taught as well. The research process should sustain continued inquiry, revision, and reflection. On occasion it will be independent and on occasion it will be collaborative. It could be argued that even the individual research is actually a collaboration that includes at least the teacher and the librarian if not the instructional technologist as well. Teaching research is a traditional part of school culture. It might have changed with the advent of the internet, but it is a skill that a schools can acknowledge needs to be taught albeit in a new way. Technology and a strong alliance with the school library can help in this endeavor.

The librarian and I have talked about ways to make the research project collaborative and transparent. Collaborative in that she and I can help students find sources and discuss next steps. Transparent in that we can see what they are finding and follow their thinking as they go or get a window into how they approached the process when they are done. There are a variety of tools that help with this. Technology enters because it serves the purpose of meeting a teaching goal.

Tools to help with the Research Process

Del.icio.us Bookmarks

Having students use del.icio.us to save the internet sources can be a handy way to see what they are considering to be a valubale source for their research. It also provides a way for the teache, librarian, and instructional technologist to save sites for the students. Student can be taught to use the subscription service to find additional links and to use tags for ready access to information at a later date. Student like the portability of their bookmarks and generally take to this tool well.

Diigo Bookmarks - Social Bookmarks with Annotation and Groups

Diigo is another social bookmarking site like del.icio.us but with added features. Students are able to annotate webpages. They can save highlights and add notes to internet sources and their annotations are viewable within their bookmarks. Students can be told to add a note of evaluation to the site and the librarian can follow along in the process and correct any misconceptions about reliable sources that surface. Diigo also has a group feature so students doing group projects can collectively identify and annotate sources. It is possible to bookmark to diigo and del.icio.us at the same time by setting the preferences in diigo.

Google Notebook (or Zoho Notebook)

Google or Zoho Notebook can be a valuable piece of the research process. Notebooks are created and shared with teacher and librarian. Students highlight information and images on webpages as they research and can choose to “note this” and put it into their noterbook. Content gets transfered into the notebook along with the URL so an accurate bibliography can be completed later. The notebook can be easily organized with section or tags and content can easily be dragged between sections and notebooks to help with organization. Each section has a place for comments. Comments can be useful for both feedback and reflection during the research process.

Notefish

Notefish is another notebook application that some of our students have adopted independently of any faculty direction. It works much like google notebook but students say it feels a bit easier and projects seem more self-contained than projects in google notebook.

Zotero Firefox Plugin

Zotero has only been used on our campus by faculty. It is a powerful independent research tool. It requires a firefox plugin and local resources so it seems to be a tool that is only accessible for those that are in a 1:1 environment where students can customize their learning environment. Zotero allows you to capture webpages or parts of wepages and to annotate them. It provides an area for note taking. It has a built in search feature as well as tagging functionality. You can create a timeline of your note taking. When completed, zotero will export the citations for sources that you used in ALA or MLA format. You can export an entire notebook to hand in should anyone want to access the research process as evidenced in the notebook. Zotero lives as a button at the bottom of the browser and can be opened or closed as needed making it very convenient to access your notes.

ThinkTank and NoteStar

Thinktank and Notestar are simple tools that facilitate basic research. Thinktank helps students with topic determination. Notestar provides electronic notecards that operate in a manner similar to google notebook but maintain a notecard analogy. Teachers do have the capability of creating classes for monitoring projects.

Lumifi

Lumifi is an all in one container that splits the research process into several components and isolates each component in a sliding panel. It includes a panel to search and analyze information, a panel to manage the information by adding notes and annotations, and a panel to share, collaborate and publish to web or export to word documents. It seems to be a browser based version of zotero and combines different steps of the research process into one central notebook. I’m not convinced this is ready for prime time and have not used it with students. It is somewhat buggy and worked better in Internet Explorer. Nevertheless, it is a tool that is worth watching.

The above is simply a collection of tools that can help students and faculty become better researchers together. Tools that facilitate the teaching of a traditional skill that is increasingly important in a world loaded with information. These tools provide a means for librarians and teachers to participate in the process to help ensure students are doing effective research in order to move into a phase of communicating and producing with the information that they find. These tools also serve as a means of ensuring that students can track the original location of the information that they are using so proper credit can be given. More importantly, it isn’t about the technology. Luddite and Bleeding Edge adopter would have to agree that it is ultimately about the student skill set and how best to teach our students to research effectively for a lifetime of learning.

My goal today was to get up and attempt to articulate upper school and departmental goals for each department in light of our move to 1:1. Yesterday, I made rough outlines and have been thinking about it and having discussions with my colleagues for some time so it was a realistic goal. Unfortunatley/Fortunately(depends on how you look at it), I checked twitter and then spent another hour reading and listening to things that resulted in a network-created “teachable moment” for me and have furthered my thinking. Before I get to work, I thought I’d blog to help me refine my thoughts even more.

This “teachable moment” for me actually had its beginnings with the post 21st Century Literacies from the NCTE by Will Richardson. Will’s post pointed me to a new adoption by the NCTE, TOWARD A DEFINITION OF 21st-CENTURY LITERACIES. It enumerates competencies as follows:

Twenty-first century readers and writers need to
• Develop proficiency with the tools of technology
• Build relationships with others to pose and solve problems collaboratively and cross-culturally
• Design and share information for global communities to meet a variety of purposes
• Manage, analyze and synthesize multiple streams of simultaneous information
• Create, critique, analyze, and evaluate multi-media texts
• Attend to the ethical responsibilities required by these complex environments

I couldn’t wait to pass this and some Helcat advice on to my english faculty. To my eyes, this not only drips of opportunities to utilize technology but in fact cannot be done without technology playing an important role. I realize that I need to make sure that I create a teachable moment for my faculty so they read this with a similar lens. There is a challenge in that.

Then this morning I read Ewan MacIntosh’s post on Beyond the three Rs.

It includes the statement:

“Curricula the world over are going through ‘revolutionary’ changes to cope with the demands of the 21st Century but none so far have stated in black and white that teachers must help their students understand how to read social networks, blogs, games, comics - the whole panoply of literature young 21st Century citizens read. No-one, except Scotland.”

Challenge on! I think that needs to be written into our school goals and so my thinking for today and the work I was doing was directly impacted by my network yet again.

I followed Ewan’s links and read Scotland’s outcomes for Literacy. They are both impressive and inspiring. I do give NCTE credit and think that their statement is approaching what Scotland has stated more explicitly and applied to its entire curriculum. I especially like and find relevant the Scottish definition of what constitutes a text.

“A text is the medium through which ideas, experiences, opinions and information can be communicated. Texts include those presented in traditional written or print form, as well as those presented orally, electronically or on film. Texts can be in continuous form, including traditional formal prose, or non-continuous text, such as a chart, graph or webpage. It will be important to provide opportunities for using various and appropriate kinds of texts. ”

We have been discussing eliminating texts in several courses next year including biology, chemistry,all regular history 9-11th grade, and AP History. I realize now, we are eliminating traditional texts in favor of using electronic media organized as a 21st century text. I’ll use the above definition in my departmental and school wide goals and think that it will help me transition those who are slightly afraid of dropping a text largely because they have always had one. This definition will come in very handy. Thanks again to networked learning and connections across the pond!

The post also led me to Ewan’s sllideshare ingenuiously titled Bebo Boomers. Its definitely worth listening too but the part that really impacts my thinking this morning occurs in the second half where the presentation discusses the importance of audience and ingenuity and gives kids credit for independent learning when given the opportunity to use their own resources.

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Ewan’s slideshare shows examples of students learning outside of school but learning with the objectives listed by the NCTE and the Literacy outcomes. It also gives solid school examples. Somewhere there is a powerful formula that mixes the best of both worlds.

Blending intrinsically motivated student learning with teaching that harnesses that power is a challenge that requires school’s change and embrace 21st century literacies. It is something my school is trying to examine. While it wasn’t on my list to tackle today, this morning’s learning will certainly impact another task before me. I have been asked to help plan what is becoming an annual teaching and learning faculty meeting. The date is still to be determined as it is dependent on when Harvard’s David Perkins can hopefully join us. The session is being designed to ask teaching and learning questions that support a successful 1:1 launch. The central question to be examined will be “How can educators and students effectively bridge out-of-school technology practices with in-school 1-to-1 tablet learning?” Anthony Chivetta of students2oh.org will be the student helping to organize this. I’ve asked Coolcat Teacher to join us and Anthony will be in charge of organizing a student voice. The goal of this meeting for our school will be to further the conversation about and understanding of 21st century skills, teaching, and learning and to make progress in reinventing our curriculum. It will be an opportunity for students to participate in establishing what and how they learn. I believe that the NCTE statement and the Scottish Literacy outcomes are relevant for this meeting because they are beginning to recognize the out-of-school potential for learning and trying to bring it into school. Its a great step but we will have really done something when we make both school and library institutions without walls, institutions that transcend the school walls, days, and geographic and cultural location. But that’s another blog post for another day. For now, back to defining our goals and challenges.

Needed a break today so I took a little time to play with a few apps just for fun. Some, maybe all of these could be used educationally and while I have some ideas for educational uses, I am just goofing off right now. I concentrated on apps that are fun to use with video. I think I see the most potential for asterpix and veotags for our school environment. Anyway, here’s a look at how I wasted a little time.

Youpop.com lets you add videos, photos, or audios for your readers to either vote on or express their opinion about.

Overstream is an application that lets you add subtitles to online video.

I can imagine using this is foreign language or to provide a line of questions for students to consider when watching a video.

Asterpix allows you to add hyperlinks to video. We did use it during our participation with the flatclassroom but haven’t done anything with it since then. I’m thinking we might use it with the health commercials so students can link to their sources to validate the statistics they always use in that project.

Viddlerallows you to add comments to the video. It could be used much like Overstream but has a different feel.

Veotag allows you to add tags and link to files. It creates a menu so your video or audio file is easily searchable. Here is an example.

This one is really just for fun. Add Graffiti to your videos.
Here is an example.

Back to work!

Last Friday I was given my first opportunity to talk to the entire Upper School Faculty since they learned that we would begin a 1:1 tablet PC program in grades 9 and 10. It was an incredibly inopportune time since I was not going to be in attendance unless I chose not to watch my child at the state wrestling tournament and it was the last hour of a week that had seen faculty teach a MiniTerm course for the first time and they were grumpy and tired and not up for another initiative. Since time is hard to come by, I took it and worked with my second in command, an English teacher who runs the Upper School tech committee affectionately called Helcat’s Tech Posse. This is how that meeting played out.

Given the timing we knew we had to be fun. We decided that we would invite them all to the next “party”…. a 1:1 extravaganza. We purchased 100 single serving drinks and put them on the stage. We had Iron Mike’s Smirnoff beverages, an assortment of individual wine and beer bottles, a selection of soft drinks and a few single serving liqours with shot glasses. (Yes, I got permission and it was on an afternoon when the students were not on campus because of faculty professional development. No, this is not the norm for my school.) When the tired and grumpy faculty came into the room, for the first time ever, they sat front and center. We had their attention. Then my second in command delivered the scenario that would send them off to brainstorm what their needs were as we approached 1:1.

She started by explaining that we had yet another party to prepare for and that everyone was invited and everyone had to come. She explained that it was a One Shot deal to plan the party properly and she used her shot glasses for a visual aid. She also moved to an aside that explained to them it was all my idea and poked fun at the fact that I was an English Major and really wanted to teach English even though I had been known as a chemistry teacher and then geek to most of them. (Many reported after the fact that she had done a terrific job at my expense.) She went on to say everyone could have fun at the party and there were lots of ways you could enjoy it. There were Hard Core ways like she and I hence the liqour bottles. There were more moderate choices and there were even soft choices. There was always the potential to mix, match, share, and grab one for someone else. She then dismissed them to choose their beverage and to reconvene in departments to begin to discuss what each department/individual thought they needed to do to be ready. They were in a much better mode then when they entered and were enjoying what was a party metaphor for some and a party analogy for others. As they reconvened they considered designated drivers, 12 step plans, over the limit penalties. It was all in good fun and hopefully not offensive to anyone.

From the notes they took, and they were actually really good notes for a time slot of 2-3 Friday afternoon, a few themes emerged.

• They want training of all types - short sessions, extensive sessions, summer sessions. They want the training supported with documentation on tools they can use and on troubleshooting guidelines. (We have Atomic Learning and will definitely use it to help with this.) They specifically want to learn DyKnow and OneNote.
• They want time to discuss curricular changes that will need to take place. They said they want to use UbD to determine where tech should go. Some want to know more about formative assessment and using rubrics. They want to articulate within their departments when and how tech is embedded in their work and what the skill progression is.
• They want to know what is happening in other departments specifically with respect to library and technology use but also in general. They want to know more about copyright and databases. They want to know when and how kids are approaching research in all departments.
• They want to know that the technology will work and they will be supported when it doesn’t but from a hardware and a curricular support perspective. They discussed expanding the roll of stutech. The asked about creating a “Mentoring Pyramid” to provide help for each other by identifying experts in division, grade level and department.
• They want to figure out what things are consistent between all departments - rules, electronic grading, use of etexts. etc.

I was encouraged by their desire for training. I was also happy that the work we have done on research, copyright and library this year has them acknowledging that they need to know more. All in all, it was a productive and fun hour and has given me some ideas to work with as I sit by the fire, cuddled up with my tablet, working on a 1:1 plan on a snowy St Louis day.

images: Get High!!! by RAM PRASANTH and iYule from www.sungsblog.com/images/iyule.jpg

In my first post I said I was committed to blogging at least once a week. The problem for me is my inability to focus on the contents of a post when there is so much to question and to flush out. I suspect the name of the blog will be somewhat self-fulfilling. Nevertheless, here is another attempt that is prompted by belated blog reading.

Last weekend I got up early and was trying to catch up on blog reading. I checked bloglines and found Chris Lehman’s post about Feb 1 post “When to Publish.” It stirred my thinking about our responsibility to teach blogging or more broadly the concept of electronic publishing as well as how to do it systematically. How do we introduce publishing and scaffold it across the curriculum so students learn about audience and voice with a process that strengthens their ability to write, collaborate and communicate Chris’s post also pointed me to Grant Wiggin’s collective blog The Faculty Room on which some notable bloggers are examining some essential questions.

As I read some Essential Question posts, my crazy brain which is constantly aware that the launch of our 1:1 program is rapidly approaching, begin to think of the essential question we need to deal with. It occurred to me that the one that might be most critical to a successful 1:1 program might be:

What kind of learner do we want our students to become?

Which rapidly gets framed as How do we prepare our students to be that learner?

Nothing about that question is inherently tech related. However, I don’t believe you can produce a life long learner in this day and age without utilizing the opportunities that technology can provide. I know my own learning has certainly evolved out of necessity and in an environment filled with technology.

While it might seem evident that this question needs to be answered, I don’t know that this question is readily apparent for faculty, at least for faculty in a traditional k12 independent school. I know when I started my teaching career as a 4^th grade social studies teacher at The Haverford School in the suburbs of Philadelphia, this would not have been the question. The question would have been “What skills (traditional ones) do my elementary school students need to acquire?” The following year when I became the AP Chemstry teacher, a story in and of itself, the question changed and became “What content do I need my students to master?” It seemed that in the upper grades the emphasis on learning shifted to content and the only mention of skills for a science teacher was lab skills. Eight yeas ago when I was hired at my current school as a chemistry and physics teacher, the question was still largely one of content. In the past three-four years, this question has evolved and there has been a greater interest in the upper school in asking what skills students need in a broader sense than just lab, writing, or math skills. Teachers are now asking about the skills of collaboration, creativity, and communication. That is a very good thing since it means our thinking has evolved to a point where we can effectively tackle the essential question of “What kind of learner do we want our students to become?” and can subsequently determine the path we must take to prepare them.

If I examine my own learning as a means of deciding what is key, I find that I am intrinsically motivated to learn about lots of things. I love reading books and soaking up their content and, if it is well written, the language itself. My English friends will pass me nuggets from the New Yorker as I rarely have time to read it cover to cover and depend on them to filter content for me. I could spend hours reading about history but prefer to read it in the context of a well written book or in the context of a current issue. The science major in me gravitates toward environmental science issues and I try to make time to read from popular science or Scienctific American. I do these things because I am curious and knowing more is gratifying. It makes my brain smile. I do the majority of these activities in isolation, with the exception of my tradition academic network giving me a paper article every now and then. I think I do these learning acitivites this way in part because it is how I was taught to do it. It occurs to me that the content I am learning is interesting but is static and makes me a formidable foe on trivia night. It also occurs to me that this type of learning is linear when it is in paper but it becomes more branched if I use electronic sources, a benefit of hypertext.

I find that I am intrinsically motivated to learn about technology. Some would argue that I am obsessively motivated and have crossed a threshold that is approaching mental illness when they see me exploring the daily new Web 2.0 additions on SimpleSpark and go2web2.0.net just to see what new possibilities might exist. Because my job interests me, challenges me, and forces me out of my comfort zone, I push myself to “get smarter” and I work very hard. I am fascinated with both the teaching and the learning process and want to know more about it. While my tech learning is also influenced externally because it is my job and that job will be evaluated, I find that the extrinsic factors don’t push me to become excellent, they simply tell me what the baseline performance must be.

As I explore teaching, learning and curricular revision, I am frequently compelled to find answers or design solutions that will allow faculty and students to do new and interesting things. As I do my job, the traditional learning venues either don’t work or they would simply take too long. When teachers wanted to try electronic journaling it would have taken forever with a traditional learning approach. I would have read about blogging platforms, servers and installations, and CSS stylesheets and code modifications. I would have tried to determine copyright issues and best practice protocols. Similarly if I had applied the elements of traditional linear learning, my entry into Web2.0 would have been an arduous route through image editing, audio editing, video composition, etc. In my job, I need a venue that expeditiously facilitates my learning. I need access to information and ideas and to feedback about my ideas. In this area of my learning, I find that I am very nonlinear and am dependent on the ability to find the information I need and then to apply it, often creatively, to a curriculum that must be both taught and learned. I have adapted as a learner so that I can handle nonlinear learning. I can filter through information and learn by collaborating with others in a social way that lets my ideas mature and evolve with input from others. My ideas are refined and deepened by the collective wisdom of a network that works because its members all believe in participatory, networked learning. I want my students to develop this skillset. I believe they NEED to develop it.

Agreed, this has been rambling but it is a process that is helping me figure out my core beliefs about learning against the backdrop of this essential question.

The important learning skills and characteristics I have uncovered for myself in my ramblings are in nonlinear, cloud tag form :

While elements of traditional learning must still be taught, for our students to become the kind of learners that can navigate the information landscape of today’s world, the kind of learners that we need them to be will require substantive changes to be made.

Assessment needs to change. We need to value the process as much as we value the product. Technology can help make the process more transparent and can provide a fabulous vehicle for increased feedback about that process, feedback that is not restricted to just the primary teacher but can include peers, librarians, instructional technologists, and external experts. Take for example our wiki labs or our google notebooks. Librarians, instructional technologists and teachers provide feedback during the research and product creation phase.

Schedules and structures need to change. We need to rethink the day to day traditional structures and the components that compose them. I feel very confined by our 45 minutes a day structure. Students need to get engaged in work that is relevant and have time to explore, research, collaborate and create.

Learning needs to be valued over teaching and we need to become a community of learners first on out own campuses and then as a global collective. Much of what we need to teach them, we still need to learn ourselves.

Libraries need to be integral and technology needs to be infused everywhere within the library structure itself and with the library program at large. The library needs to transcend the building- see previous post!

So, next week as I talk to my faculty, I am going to challenge them to tell me what kind of learner we want our kids to become? And then they need to tell me why the student needs that skill. I might point them to Will Richardson’s Valentine’s Day post “What Do We Know About Our Kids’ Futures? Really.” All my faculty have an Elgg account and I’m thinking this could be the first blog prompt that everyone needs to respond to….and then the first blog I ask them to subscribe to as they learn about RSS feeds will be students2oh.org since they might find it interesting to read the kind of learner students want to be!

(Photos - Strata @MIT by joebuxton , Logo2.0 part 1 by Stabil0 Boss, UFO,Unidentified Flying Oranges by jefg99 from Flickr)