Future schooling

I recently co-facilitated a 3 day workshop on Teaching Reading and Writing in the Content Areas. Having a background in elementary with my strongest areas in science and math, I wondered how much I personally would be able to bring to this workshop. Anyone can learn a PowerPoint, but making the learning come alive is what really makes a workshop worth attending.

Luckily, my co-presenter had a strong background in secondary literacy and was able to take the lead on the content. Where I came in was with my knowledge of technology and Web 2.0 that make literacy and writing so much more engaging and collaborative. The result was a wonderful meshing of content and skills….traditional, research-based methods with exciting methods of communicating.

We started off simple: when Dana showed different strategies for activating background knowledge, I demonstrated Inspiration, Bubbl.us, and BrainPOP. In addition, every URL and handout was already uploaded to their wiki, showing the power of using quick, easy tools to make access easier. (No longer do we have to make a long list of things to email to people; we simply upload it to the wiki instantaneously.) They used the wiki throughout the workshop, uploading their own examples of Concept Definition Maps and Semantic Feature Analyses.

Perhaps the greatest moment for me in the workshop was on the second day, when we talked about Teaching Writing in the Content Areas. I showed them Digital Storytelling and how powerful movies can be to motivate students to write. We watched as they explored MovieMaker, many for the first time, and created their own short movies.

The final day was my favorite. They took all that they had learned and began building their own tools to use in the classroom. Most created a classroom blog and it was incredibly exciting listening to them talk about how they planned to use the blog for literacy in their content areas. It was exciting hearing them troubleshoot with each other and show how to do something new with the interface of the blog. Some went on to create wikis to help facilitate collaboration and to provide access to documents and Web sites for their students.

There was so much learning going on: my learning of secondary literacy strategies, Dana’s learning about technology tools, and the participants learning how to put all of this together in order to improve their instruction. It was adult learning at its best.

I’ve really gotten into some reading to help me think about my presentations with teachers and how to make them more dynamic. I want to model what I’m talking about when I say that we as educators need to think about our 21st century “audience” and how to best engage them.

A couple of resources that I’ve really enjoyed include Dan Pink’s A Whole New Mind and Garr Reynold’s Presentation Zen.

I was planning on summarizing a great video that I watched called “Present like Steve Jobs,” but then I found this one from the same author, Carmine Gallo, that’s even better.

Two ways I plan to use this information: 1) to inform my own practice working with educators and 2) to share this information with teachers and see how they can apply these tips to their own teaching practice. We are all teaching an entirely different generation of learners and these eight practices can help us (me) think differently about getting my message across succinctly and elegantly.

I gave a demo yesterday to a group of very tech-savvy educators in Sioux Falls of how VoiceThread could be used with various learning styles. Some of the participants had already heard of the resource and several had used it with their students. One project in particular really caught my interest.

http://voicethread.com/share/81021

Tags: voicethread, multimedia, differentiatedLearning

One correction from yesterday:

The Learning 2.0 Conversation was facilitated by Ben Wilkoff. (I’m not sure how/why I assumed Budtheteacher.) It was a great conversation that I hope continues. Some key points:

1. How do we keep alive the momentum of conversations like this? How do we help them to expand beyond our own community?
2. How the physical structure of schools and classrooms are so indicative of the prevailing Industrial Age model of education.
3. TIE and NECC - possibilities
4. Are we, in our current roles, helping to push and model Learning 2.0?

(Later)

5. What would a Web 2.0 starter package look like for educators just getting their feet wet with all this? Some ideas that were tossed around were Google Reader - frontloaded with a couple of subscriptions (Warlick was mentioned, as he was one of the first bloggers many of us had read), del.icio.us, and Twitter.

Thanks, Ben and all, for a productive Sunday evening!

Tags: future, web2.0, learning2.0

Sometimes you have those weekends where all of your interests, job descriptions, and sense of play all come together for you. This weekend was just that for me.

So tomorrow morning, when people ask what I did this weekend, I can honestly answer that I worked all weekend…or learned…or played…..

Tags: web2.0, professionalDevelopment, diigo

About a year ago, I worked with a teacher in Nevada to help him create a wiki for his 3rd grade students in which they would collaborate on state reports. I’ve kept tabs on the wiki and watched it grow tremendously.

A couple of days ago, I left a comment on the “Georgia” page, offering the student my Flickr pictures from my travels in Savannah, St. Simons, and Athens. I received the following email from the teacher today:

“Let me tell you a story: I wasn’t at school on Tuesday, so I didn’t have a chance to tell my students about the email I received from you on Monday. When I got home Tuesday evening and found your email that said that you had commented on the Georgia site, I decided to check it out. There was no comment at all. I thought that was strange, so I checked my bloglines account, which is the way I do a quick check on what the students have been doing on their reports. I found your comment and printed it off to bring to class today. This morning I talked to the class and found that the students had checked their comments yesterday, and when they found things from people they didn’t know they just deleted them. I explained who you were and showed them a copy of “Using Technology with Classroom Instruction that Works” including the group picture at the back of the book. The class felt bad about it, and I gave the student who was working on Georgia a copy of your comment. While I thought it was kind of humorous, I was really impressed that they did delete the content, since it goes along with beware of strangers.”

I am SO proud of these students (and their teacher) for acting wisely given the situation. Now that they know who I am, I plan to go back and add a few comments to their wiki, but I love that there are these success stories out there to counterbalance some of the horror stories that get such attention.

Kudos to Gary & his class!

I just got back late last night from my first FETC. I had attended T+L, NECC, Colorado’s TIE several times, but this was my first state-wide tech conference besides Colorado’s.

Two sessions that I really enjoyed were “The Lessons of Chaos” from Stevan Kalmon at The Council on 21st Century Learning. Stevan was one of my professors in my Master’s program at UCD. I had lost track of him since graduation and it was exciting to see the new directions he’d taken.

The other session that I really enjoyed was “e-Mission: An Adventure in Distance Learning” by Jackie Shia at e-Missions. This was a fascinating simulation using video conferencing software with “mission control” in West Virginia. I was on the volcano team and had to relay incoming data regarding a potential eruption to the communication team. The evacuation team had to organize getting the inhabitants on the island of Montserrat to safety. They had to deal with realistic obstacles such as limited vehicles available and few existing shelters. I was so engaged, that I had to tear myself away at the end to prepare for my own presentation.

My biggest “ah-ha,” however, came during a discussion with another participant about how he was taking notes. Most sessions I attended (and my own session) did not provide bulky handouts. There were a few fliers and pamphlets, but no one did the PowerPoint print-outs. Since we didn’t have a place to upload our handouts, this forced everyone to come up with their own solution. For my session, I put all pertinent information on http://citw.pbwiki.com and directed participants to my del.icio.us account. During my discussion with the other participant, he said that he and a friend were using Google docs to take notes, then publishing them with the tag “fetc.” For my own notetaking, I found that if I had my del.icio.us account open in one tab, Google search engine open in a second tab, and my Amazon account open in a 3rd (for capturing books that I should read), that sufficed for gathering any information I needed.

How great it would be if we taught this sort of thing to our kids! Educause is on the right track, I think, with their recent publication “7 Things You Should Know About Google Jockeying.” This is exactly what I was doing as I was listening to speakers…looking up unfamiliar acronyms, getting more information in quick snippets. And not one person questioned whether or not I was paying attention ; )

When I talk with educators about the importance of using modern tools in the classroom, student motivation is often one of my top reasons for implementing 21^st century tools. I stress that school should be at least as exciting for students as their ”other” world in which they constantly communicate with peers, have access to multimedia-rich games and movies, and can quickly look up information they need. When students walk into buildings that have changed little since the 1990s, they must at times feel as though they are entering a museum of historical relics rather than a place where exciting discoveries and conversations can happen.

In What Works in Schools , Marzano (2003) outlines five lines of research on student motivation. As I read, I began wondering how this research aligns with 21st century learning skills and environments as outlined by the Partnership for 21st Century Skills.

Five lines of research on student motivation:

1. Drive theory - Students are either driven by striving for success or fear of failure. As students move through their K-12 years, they develop a strong tendencies to be either success oriented or failure avoidant. Those who are success oriented are motivated to conquer new tasks. Students who are failure avoidant may develop self-handicapping strategies.
2. Attribution theory - Students attribute success to ability, luck, effort, and task difficulty. Since the only one of these that a student truly has control over is effort, it is paramount that teachers help students to understand the importance of effort and its affect on achievement. Students are capable of developing “learned helplessness,” yet they are equally capable of developing “learned optimism.”
3. Self-worth theory is based on the premise that self-acceptance is one of our highest priorities as humans. In this theory, accomplishments  play a large part in determining self-worth. Those students who put forth much effort but gain little accomplishment can quickly have diminished self-worth if their effort is not rewarded.
4. Emotions play a large role in human motivation. They can sometimes override our rational and/or cognitive thought.
5. Self-system - Here, Marzano cited the work of Csikszentmihalyi and Maslow, in that for students to reach self-actualization (Maslow’s highest level) or “flow experiences” (Csikszentmihalyi), students need:
   1. freedom to set clear, meaningful, individual goals
   2. resources so that student can become immersed in the work necessary to carry out goals
   3. self-awareness in the student of how well he or she is progressing and making adjustments as necessary
   4. enjoying short-term successes while keeping the overarching long-term goals in mind

#2 under self-system caught my attention: “resources so that the student can become immersed.” For me, this includes books and encyclopedias as well as real-time access to information, tools that allow students to collaborate, and interactive tools to help students learn and master basic skills. Let’s face it; when was the last time you became immersed in an overhead or PowerPoint presentation?

Based on these five ideas on student motivation, Marzano outlines action steps for educators that can positively impact student motivation: (Italics are my own)

1. Provide students with feedback on their knowledge gain.
2. Provide students with tasks and activities that are inherently engaging.
3. Provide opportunities for students to construct and work on long-term projects of their own design.
4. Teach students about the dynamics of motivation and how those dynamics affect them.

As I read this chapter on student motivation, I was struck by how some of these ideas echo some of the standards by the Partnership for 21st Century Skills, particularly regarding Learning Environments, Life and Career Skills, and Creativity and Innovation.

21st century learning environments include games and activities that give students real-time feedback on their progress. These could be in the form of online tutorials, quizzes, and games or as a whole-class activity using clickers.

21st century learning environments, when equipped with multimedia-rich resources and opportunities for students to collaborate with peers and experts in the classroom and beyond, are inherently engaging to students, tapping into their own comfort in these settings and using tools they use in their social or home life (or would like to).

Finally, I find that when teachers create 21st century learning environments and truly integrate technology, their teaching style changes. They are no longer the experts who disseminate the information, but the guides for long-term projects, often designed by the students themselves.

Several months ago, I blogged about my observations while conducting a technology audit. It was amazing to me how obvious it was how technology impacted student engagement. I found myself wondering if these teachers ever observe each other to see the differences.

Are there other correlations (or dichotomies) that I haven’t included here? In thinking about your own experiences, either as teachers, facilitators, administrators, etc., what evidence have you seen that 21st century learning environments have an impact on student engagement?

I haven’t blogged in many, many months for various reasons. I made a promise to myself, though, that after T+L in Nashville I’d give it another go.

The biggest idea that I took away from T+L is that the conversation is shifting. This observation has been further supported in conversations with teachers and administrators while currently conducting a technology audit. The conversation used to be about whether or not technology made a difference, how to get across the idea that it’s not about the “wires and plugs,” but about the motivation, differentiation, student engagement, and teaching efficiency that happens when a teacher has all the modern tools available and knows how to properly use them. The conversation has shifted, at least in my experiences lately, in that no one is denying the importance of using these tools anymore. In recent conversations, people are no longer questioning “why technology.” When I ask teachers about their vision of the future of education, I now commonly hear words such as “facilitator,” “projects,” “collaboration,” “seamless integration.” Teachers are aware of 21st Century learning skills, Prensky, the flat world, and other ideas that I can recall at one time only hearing in the “techie” world. Is it possible that the echo chamber has spiraled into mainstream conversations? Are we close to a tipping point in changing outdated methods of education?

I recently had the opportunity to visit some classes at the elementary, middle, and high school levels. I observed some things that led me to truly question whether it should be an option for a teacher to say, “I’m just not that into technology.”

In one 8th grade class, a teacher was giving an algebra lesson using an interactive whiteboard, a remote tablet, and an enhanced PPT, with graphics, movies embedded, etc. He would walk around the room as he used the tablet, circling areas on the screen to which he wanted to draw attention. He had the kids go up to the whiteboard and demonstrate problem-solving techniques. EVERY SINGLE STUDENT WAS ENGAGED. One student even had an assignment (I’m assuming from another class), in which she had to take care of an interactive doll. During class, the doll started “crying” and the student had to “feed” her, sit the doll on her desk, rub her back, etc. Even with all of these distractions, the girl was completely absorbed in the lesson, raising her hand and offering answers.

Later, I was walking down the halls of a high school. I was amazed at how little had changed since 1990….same lectures, same overhead projectors. I observed another algebra class in which the students were graphing equations. There was definite learning going on, but in one exchange I observed, a student raised his hand to ask for clarification of how the graph will change given two similar equations. The teacher drew a quick graph on the overhead and showed the student the difference. The student nodded, made a note, and the class went on. I’m assuming the student made a note to help him remember the information for an upcoming test, but did he really understand the difference in the two equations? How would this lesson have been different if he had a laptop on his desk and was using interactive software to watch the graph change as he entered different equations?

In a final observation, two identical elementary lessons (by content, at least) were being taught: one with every child using a Palm, the other by listening to a lecture. In the first class, every child was engaged and conversing with a nearby student about the lesson. In the other classroom, every corner was occupied by a student who had presumably been sent there for disciplinary reasons….plus an additional student at the file cabinet corner.

Is it any longer acceptable to teach with outdated methods, using archaic technology? How do we balance honoring teachers’ comfort levels with technology vs. creating learning environments that excite, engage, and provide our students with the experiences they need to do the best work they can do?