NextGenTeachers

Big movements start with small steps……………..

A simple conversation with Scott last week started like most conversations at ISB, passing each other in the hall.

“Hey Justin! I’m looking to get a little deeper with peace day this year, got any ideas?”

Scott is always looking for meaningful ways to get his students engaged in the writing process and reflect on a deeper level. He has been using his classroom blog as a tool in process but up until now it did not really have an audience other than parents. It was time to change that. Together we came up with some questions for the post that we felt would stretch students to think about peace and what it means to them. You can see the post here.

Time was a factor here as Peace Day was the next day. As we know the read/write web is a powerful tool that can quickly and easily bring people from all over the world together to share and collaborate. The only barrier is knowing that each other exists. I decided to reach out to all my contacts and get the ball rolling. I put out call to teachers and coordinators to have their students stop by and share their perspective along with the country they came from. I also helped Scott embed a cluster map on his site so we could track where the hits were coming from. If you don’t have one on your site get one today! The goal of this little post was to get a few different perspectives from other students to create and opportunity for further conversation about peace.

The results…………..112 posts!!!!!

Mark Picketts at Carol Morgan School , Dominican Republic answered the call and got several of his teachers to involve their classes

Mark Dilworth at International School Manila, answered the call and also got his teachers involved.

Kim Cofino at International School Bangkok , answered the call and reached out to her global community to bring in some great comments from the U.S

Carolyn Foote - Librarian, Texas , answered the call and wrote a fantastic post about Scott’s experiment and featured some of her favoriet student comments!

Maryland answered the call.

Philadelphia answered the call.

The list goes on…………….

One conversation…….led to one email………….led to 112 posts………..which led to a global audience and a conversation about peace!

That is what these tools are for. That is why they MUST be BLENDED into everything we do. Because the time invested reap rewards that keep on giving.

All it took was a teacher willing to ask “How can I go deeper?”

If you are reading this and interested in involving your class please drop by Scott’s Learning Blog and have your students post. We would love to read their thoughts!

One small step at a time.

Perhaps I should not have used the word “centralized”. My goal is to offer a space for folks to use as a backchannel that has lots of functionality.

What I’d like to do is create a web-based IRC spot, whereas folks can drop by and chat all they like and not have to register for anything. No registration, no password, no privacy concerns, just chat. Just backchannel.

I am thinking IRC because it is an already-established network and I would merely provide a gateway. This way we can prevent all the trouble of IRC clients and frustration. Imagine if at the blogger’s cafe folks could just hit up edublogosphere.com and start chatting.

I like it because there’s no need to be someone’s contact, no need to download Skype, no need to hook up to twitter. It’s just easy, accessible, and requires no effort.

It doesn’t even require a download. Now, for those who want, they could use an IRC client just as easily, and perhaps more easily. See, flexibility.

So that’s my thinking thus far, now comes the implementation. I found ONE that I like, that’s clean enough for my taste. We’ll see if I can manage to get it installed. This is where I am stretching my knowledge, so I’ll have to learn this one on the way through it.

I’ll keep you posted!

Earlier this week, I posted a monster list of 20 ideas inspired by the Learning 2.0 Conference and now I’m starting to take the time to really flesh out those ideas, make some good contacts and get the ball rolling…

The first big idea I’d like to tackle is the concept of creating a “global communications center” in your classroom as described by Alan November. This is something I’ve been thinking about for a while and am really excited about.

Ideally, I’d like to have one classroom at each grade level (PK - 5) with this type of global communications center in their classroom. To keep things a bit more streamlined, I have created a wiki to help centralize communication and facilitate collaboration on this project. Please let me know if you’re interested in participating!

For convenience, here’s a brief recap of the idea from my earlier post:

Thanks to my wonderful colleague, Jennifer, from my previous school (who was also at Learning 2.0), we came up with the idea of using YackPack to set up mini-personal learning networks for each student in a class. YackPack is a web-based audio communication service that allows students to share and exchange ideas in a user friendly graphical interface that requires little to no reading skills. I used it extensively with my middle school classes last year when we collaborated with Chrissy’s class in New Zealand, and loved it!

Each teacher will create a YackPack for each student in your class, each student will have 4 partners in other schools around the world, for a total of 5 students in each Pack. This will enable the exchange to be more constant, more flexible and sometimes involve just a portion of your pack and other times all of your pack (depending on curricular needs).

The Pack can be used for: storytelling, practicing reading with emotion, share their favorite book, talk about the author, reflecting on learning and the process of learning (metacognition), collecting “data” (for ex: for graphing activities). Students will use inspiration / kidspiration or an online mind mapping software to brainstorm ideas about what they will talk about so students are not reading from a script.

This project could be extended by creating a collaborative Ning or Imbee for the classes for a place to share pictures, videos, etc and/or video conferencing with Skype or TokBox (video e-mail) where video would be required to enrich the experience.

My first step is start this project with one of our fabulous second grade teachers, Susan, who also attended Learning 2.0 and is totally inspired and ready to start. Right now I’m struggling with the management issue of setting up 20 different YackPack accounts - one for each member of the second grade class I’m working with. Because second graders don’t usually have their own e-mail address and since the school doesn’t provide them I have to figure out how to set them up and maintain them for the kids. After working in middle school for the past seven years, I’m really not used to doing all these little things for the kids. Does anyone have any suggestions?

Are you interested in participating in a project like this?

Tags: learn2cn, elementary, 21stcentury, globalcollaborations, internationalschool, flatclassroom, yackpack, alannovember, globalcommunicationcenter

Following hot on the heels of the Learning 2.0 conference there is a buzz around ISB. Teachers are asking new questions, taking new risks and experimenting with possibilities. For a technology and learning coordinator this is an important time. A moment to seize. Right now it is important to provide support, celebrate ideas and broadcast the creativity of the staff. It is certainly wonderful to have Kim Cofino around getting hands on with teachers and students in the classroom. It is amazing what she has done in just over a month. If you are looking for a collaborative project to jump on to there is no better place to start than here “20 project ideas inspired Learning 2.0″. If you are interested in working with teacher and students from the International School of Bangkok just post a comment on our CONNECT 2 blog and we will get back to you.

How inspiring would it be if your principal and vice principal were to model 21st century literacy by starting their own blogs? We are fortunate to have just that. Struan and Annelies have done just that. It sets a new standard for leaders to follow.

The Learning 2.0 conference was a reaffirmation that we are on the right track. That our ideas are sound and that this movement is not just a trend but is rooted in best practices, sound pedagogy and inspired people. What became clear over the course of the weekend was that while these tools are fantastic for enhancing teaching, learning and the curriculum, they can be even more powerful in helping solve some of our global problems. By bringing people and their ideas together from all corners of the world we all draw a little closer, see each others perspectives and deepen our patience and tolerance.

Tomorrow, Sept 21st it is PEACE ONE DAY  which provides a fantastic teachable moment to take a few minutes to discuss peace with the class and why it is important. One of our grade four teachers in particular is looking to get some global perspectives on this question and is having his students post to his blog tomorrow as part of the refection process. If you are interested in connecting your classroom and sharing your student perspectives please drop by http://lamontslearningblog.blogspot.com/ and have you students post. Make sure that they leave their country of origin after their first name so the students can see where the comments are coming from.

We hope to hear from you and your students!

Peace

We had our first Coffee Morning session for our parents today and it was a total hit! This is the first time I’ve actually done something like this, so I have to admit that I’m very pleasantly surprised with how things worked out. I’m very comfortable with teacher concerns, but I’m really not used to presenting in front of large groups of parents…

Basically, we invited all of the parents to an open dialogue session to discuss what we’re doing with technology in the classroom. We advertised it in the weekly “Panther Paws” bulletin that goes home to parents via e-mail, I posted it on the new Learning Hub blog, Connect 2.0, and we asked our very well connected parents to spread the word. In the end we had about 30 parents show up for our hour-long session, which was perfect.

We started off the session with a short introduction by our fabulous Principal and Vice Principal describing their experiences at the Learning 2.0 Conference and how they have come to realize just how important 21st century literacy skills are for our students. They did a great job emphasizing how quickly technology changes and how intimidating it can be for all of us to keep up, but that we believe it’s just as important to educate the parents as it is to educate the students so that we can maintain a strong school-home connection.

Next, Justin and I showed the Did You Know 2.0 video:

After the video was over, we asked the parents to turn to their neighbor and discuss something that struck them as they were watching. We gave them about 5 minutes to chat and then asked them to share.

The response was amazing. Just this one 8 minute video encapsulated everything that Justin and I wanted to express, and the message got through loud and clear: the world our students are growing up in is radically different than the world their parents grew up in. One group of parents shared that they noticed a key date in the video was 1995, and that was the year they stopped working and became full-time mothers. They realized that, had they still been working full time, many of these ideas would not be so “out there,” but now that they’re out of the working environment, they really feel that technology has passed them by. This is exactly why we are hosting these sessions!

I then shared a little story about my personal experiences with blogging and told them about how I spent my day off on Monday to give them an idea what an average day for a globally connected educator looks like - the key point being that if this is how I spend my days today, imagine what our students days will be like when they’re my age (I’m 29).

We talked about blended learning and our philosophy that technology is just another tool like a pencil and paper. Classroom management came up so we explained some simple things like having students “lower their lids” when the teacher is speaking and they have the laptops out. We shared our web-based learning portals where all the “teacher approved” web-links are bookmarked for students so that they have a safe and welcoming entry page every time they go online.

We shared the Connect 2.0 blog with the parents and invited them to actively participate in the discussion online via the comments section. Each time we have a session like this, we will post a recap on the blog, with links to key information that we shared so that parents can review key points and share the information with the rest of their families and other parents that were not able to attend.

By the end of the meeting, parents were asking for the coolest things:

• free, lifetime e-mail address provided by the school to ensure that they are always part of the ISB network of learners.
• online resources to help their children learn about American history because we don’t cover it in every grade, but they want their children to be prepared when they return home.
• links to all the teacher and student blogs so they can follow what’s happening in the classroom on a regular basis - and an easy way to track all that information.
• if they can come to our extensive teacher training sessions on technology so they can learn along with the teachers (we offer flexible PD every afternoon after school).
• help setting up their very own family blogs! We even had one parent that had already set up her own blog!

This is exactly the kind of stuff I want to be doing - and it’s exactly the kind of stuff that parents should be asking for!

We are going to run these sessions once a month for now, but I’m thinking they can definitely grow into something more. If our parents are willing to be involved and active in this aspect of their child’s learning, just imagine what kinds of great conversations can be going on at home about using these tools appropriately. It’s going to be like I can be teaching them all the time! How exciting!

We all know that you only get out of a conference what you put in. So, I did my best to make the Learning 2.0 unconference sessions work for me by moderating 2 of the 3 sessions (during the third session I was totally wrapped up in Alan November’s amazing presentation on Creating a New Culture of Teaching and Learning).

Both sessions had enthusiastic groups of educators from all over the world, all of whom are eager and ready to get started on some globally collaborative projects. We ended up having a great balance with our first session focused more on lower elementary ideas and the second session focused on upper elementary. All the ideas we brainstormed only require web 2.0 tools that are free and available online.

So many great ideas came up that I thought it would be appropriate to start a new wiki to allow everyone interested to take ownership of these projects. As much as I would like to participate in every single one, I know that realistically it’s not possible. With this Global Collaborations wiki we can begin to connect individual schools together on projects that truly enhance the core curriculum units. Please feel free to contribute anything and everything to this new space!

For convenience, I have listed all of the projects that we brainstormed here, along with a number of collaborative projects that I’m already working on or have already initiated with colleagues over the past few weeks. Now comes the hard part: actually getting started on all these inspiring ideas!

Lower Elementary Ideas

Partnering on YackPack or TokBox for Early Elementary: Connect students in several international schools to create a “global communication center” as Alan November suggested in the roundtable discussion. Each teacher will create a YackPack for each student in your class, each student will have 4 partners in other schools around the world, for a total of 5 students in each Pack. This will enable the exchange to be more constant, more flexible and sometimes involve just a portion of your pack and other times all of your pack (depending on curricular needs).

YackPack is an audio e-mail service that allows students to share and exchange ideas in a user friendly graphical interface that requires little to no reading skills. TokBox is a slightly more complex video e-mail/live video chat service.

The Pack can be used for: storytelling, practicing reading with emotion, share their favorite book, talk about the author, reflecting on learning and the process of learning (metacognition), collecting “data” (for ex: for graphing activities). Students will use inspiration / kidspiration or an online mind mapping software to brainstorm ideas about what they will talk about so students are not reading from a script.

This project could be extended by creating a collaborative Ning or Imbee for the classes for a place to share pictures, videos, etc and/or video conferencing with Skype or TokBox (video e-mail) where video would be required to enrich the experience.

Global Village: One of our grade two classes will be working with Alecia Dry’s teachers on the Global Village project to connect elementary students around the world. The goal is to merge our two classrooms into one global village by conducting joint activities or projects once a month. We are going to focus on intercultural understanding and making connections between or different lifestyles.

Upper Elementary Ideas

Book Club / Literature Circle: Use Ning or Imbee to share our thoughts on our reading - create literature circles with students from a variety of schools - each group would have a community on a collaborative Ning/Imbee.

Connecting ESL students: Discussing common books that our grade 5 ESL student read using podcasting or YackPack. Please share some of the books that you would like your students to start a discussion around - we are confident that there will be at least some overlap between schools if we’re working at the same grade level.

Weather: Drawing conclusions from data - collaborate to both collect and present data on weather

Blogging: Connecting grade 5 classrooms - individual student bloggers connecting about their learning, areas of interest, creating a community of learners. It might also be an interesting idea to connect our younger students with some more experienced middle or high school bloggers. I know Clarence Fisher had a great experience with this last year and several middle school teachers have expressed an interest in partnering up: Jabiz Raisdana, Annabel and Jennifer Cronk.

Life ‘Round Here: An excellent international digital storytelling project designed and initiated by Chris Craft, designed to introduce students to different cultures and lifestyles around the world. Deadline to join Sept 21st.

Cross Grade Level Ideas

Great Book Stories: Listen and See: A great (new, but existing) digital storytelling project based on book reviews produced by students using Voice Thread to integrate audio and visual elements. Find an overview and two samples on Wes Fryer’s recent post.

1001 FlatWorld Tales: A wonderful collaborative storytelling project developed by Clay Burell, using wikispaces to create a never-ended story based on a central theme. I worked on this project last year with my middle school students and we loved it! This year Jeff Dungan and I will co-coordinate the elementary section. We’re hoping to encourage students to see stories within stories so that students all over the world can build on each other’s idea. We would also like to see use of audio and visual elements to the stories, so there is lots of room for growth with this powerful project.

PodPals: Students use podcasting tools to connect on social issues, curricular integration can develop as the year continues. Jamie Hide has already expressed an interest in participating.

Online Art Exhibit: Using Flickr and/or Voice Thread to post an international art exhibit from a variety of international schools. Also, allowing students to discuss each other’s art by posting pictures and allowing others to comment on areas that interest them by audio, text, and drawing on the images.

Exploring Our Communities: Use Voice Thread to share drawing of the different communities that each student is a part of and describe those communities. Share among schools.

Learning About Local Culture: Representing art in the culture you live in teach students about local art - students teaching students

Social Networking : Open Ning or Imbee network just to connect and communicate - starting with more casual conversation, exploring our likes/dislikes, culture, school experience and build as the school year goes. Jamie Hide has already expressed interest in starting a social network with his students in Canada.

Voices of the World: An existing project created by Sharon Tonner to connect children from around the world using their voices. All too often we ask children to communicate at a distance using text rather than voice. Voices Of The World will hopefully prove that we can unite and learn from one another using our voices in the simplest way possible. I am looking forward to this challenge ahead of us which will surely motivate our children to learn about other cultures through the use of the voice.

Exploring Digital Citizenship: A collaborative VoiceThread project to explore what it means to be a digital citizen - a critical issue discussed by many of the presenters this weekend. Joe Dale, Jamie Hide, Lisa Durff, PJ Higgins and Alex Savage have already expressed an interest in working on a project like this.

Flat Classroom Project: Flatten the walls of your classroom and partner up with another class around the world. Collaborative learning at it’s best. Check out the teacher Ning for more details.

Youth Radio Collaborative Podcasting : YouthRadio is an existing project that Kevin Hodgson shared with me earlier this year. From their site: “We are hoping to transform this site into a space where young writers and voices can connect with news stories about their communities, their schools and their interests via audiocasting (and podcasting). Our sites will include Norris Elementary School in Southampton, Massachusetts; Butler Elementary School in Sacramento, California; and the Odyssey School in Denver, Colorado; and we hope to have other partners along the way.”

Next Vista for Learning: An online library of free videos for learners everywhere - find resources to help you learn just about anything, meet people who make a difference in their communities, and even discover new parts of the world. And Next Vista for Learning wants to post your educational videos online, too. Everyone has an insight to share and yours may be just what some student or teacher somewhere needs! An excellent opportunity to help students teach student initiated by Rushton Hurley.

Global Virtual Classroom: The Global Virtual Classroom (GVC) project is a collection of free, on-line educational activities and resources. It aims to complement the efforts of governments and education departments around the world to integrate technology into their classrooms and curricula and to link their schools to the information superhighway. Jeff Dungan introduced me to this great 21st Century resource.

Known Issues:

• Each student may need an e-mail address to access web 2.0 tools - how do you organize this for lower elementary? Thanks to Susan Sedro for one solution: Scholastic.com. We could also try gmail accounts.

Ideas for Teachers

Join an existing network of educators learning together:

• Clasroom 2.0 Ning
• The Global Education Collaborative Ning
• NextGen Teachers Ning
• Support Blogging Wiki
• Ning in Education
• Tapped In
• K12 Online Conference

Of course there’s always room for more participants! Please let me know if you’re interested in participating in any of these projects or share your thoughts on the collaborative wiki!

Anything spark an idea for you? Please share your ideas here or on the collaborative wiki!

Tags: learn2cn, elementary, 21stcentury, globalcollaborations, internationalschool, flatclassroom

Today was Day 1 in terms of our laptop use in the classroom and we hit the ground running, so to speak - just how I like it. I am sure you have had days like today, when it is a bit of a whirlwind from 8am right through to 4pm - where does the time go? Today the sands just seemed to slip through my fingers! Not to say it was one of the best days for a long time.

We now have 8 Toshiba laptops running happily in both of our Year 5 classes and today we kicked off with a simple word level activity in literacy. One group worked on Race to Ramses! a game about combining prefixes and suffixes to create new words. I have taught with laptops in the past but the new technology (laptops and WAPs) is just so much more reliable. And it is great seeing children completely engaged with one to one technology supporting their learning, I am so pleased to see it in the hands of the pupils - which is the whole point. You might think “web game, one group…not really setting the world alight” - but I suppose it is a culmination of a lot of work and to finally get things in front of children, reliable and solid feels like a big achievement.

Needless to say in the afternoon we swam into deeper waters and I’d like to think we pushed the envelope a bit…

The morning was successful and the children enjoyed working on their own machine and many children asked for the web address for the game - so we will have to get our del.icio.us account sorted or get them into their Google accounts soon!

In the afternoon we were looking at some science work we have begun regarding healthy living and exercise. Today we explored pulse rates and we used an online spreadsheet to share our results, hence the title of the post. (This work is similar to some online spreadsheet action we had last year with my Year 6 class) I decided to use a Google spreadsheet as I have been using the Docs application for a while (in fact I have a few grumbles about that - more soon) but you could have easily used EditGrid as an alternative - I set the sheet up so that all of the children’s names from both classes were present in the first column. Then 10 other columns were labelled, “Resting Pulse1, Resting Pulse 2…” It was in these cells that the kids added their resting pulse after counting for 30 seconds and doubling.

I then accessed the same spreadsheet through my Google login on all 8 laptops per class that I put around the room - so in effect I logged in 16 times (plus my PC and SMARTBoard, so 17) to the same document from different locations. We talked a little about how to find our pulse and then asked the children to record 10 instances of their resting rate into the spreadsheet. It was great! With the live update feature we were able to see individual results popping up all over the place and even from next door in Rick’s class who were doing the same. Google Spreadsheets has an Auto Save option which makes life much easier and gives you the opportunity to see the live data. Not only did the hardware hold out fine, but accessing the spreadsheet was excellent - even with 17 simultaneous users on a single login. The children really enjoyed seeing each other’s work and it gave them a great overview of not only the class year group working together, but also to the sorts of data people were adding. Children from the other class were nipping across the corridor and questioning the validity of results from kids in my class.

The children had a tendency to sit with the laptop in front of them, in small groups rather than freely moving around the classroom and accessing any machine. But I suppose that is due to the nature of task.

Within the space of about 40 minutes, perhaps less, we collected approximately 600 individual results all in one place. No doubt they will be quicker next time. This method of data collection also allows us the ability to then manipulate the results afterwards, working out averages of the whole year group etc. I would highly recommend doing this if you have the reliable kit in your classroom, we have already said that it will be an excellent data entry method for our maths lessons on data handling.

It is now 12 hours since I started the day at school and I am just about coming up for air, no don’t worry I am not at school still! - but it is great to reflect here on these sorts of days. One to remember and I hope you might take some of these ideas and use it yourself.

Because Monday was a school holiday here at ISB, I was able to spend most of the day online, which, due to the time difference, meant that I had time to connect with some wonderful colleagues during hours that I would normally be at work:

6:00 am:

As usual, I woke up way too early and raced upstairs to check my e-mail, twitter, comments, etc. This morning I found an e-mail invite from Lucy Gray to join the Global Education Collaborative YackPack group. Once I accepted the invitation and opened up the Pack, I saw that Silvia was online in Florida. We ended up having a great chat about the ups and downs of being an elementary technology facilitator. We firmed up some plans to start a collaborative project after she gets back from her amazing school trip to Egypt.

8:00 am:

Tweeted about my great conversation with Silvia, which prompted Lucy to invite me to join her FlashMeeting with some other members of the Global Education Collaborative. It was my first time in a FlashMeeting session - what a great tool, so easy to use - and I got to “meet” Sharon Peters, Lucy, Westley Field and several other members of GlobalEd. Plus, Lucy gave me the heads up about one of her colleagues in Philadelphia who’s doing great things with tech, so now I can follow her on Twitter too!

10:00 am:

Started checking blogs and commenting - there never is enough time in the day for just reading and communicating… Plus a few tweets here and there with other edubloggers in this region of the world - a real treat since posting to Twitter seems to be blocked at work.

3:00 pm:

After a late breakfast break, and a much-needed nap, I got back online and saw Chrissy online on Skype. We haven’t had a chance to really catch up since I moved to Bangkok in August, so it was great to have some time to chat. Chrissy is taking a course at the WebCast Academy and asked me to do an interview with her for next weekend (local times here).

I wish I had one weekday every week to spend some time online, just connecting with colleagues when they’re available. Imagine how powerful it would be for your classroom to have a global communication center open all day when they can connect with other students around the world during their “work day”…

What a weekend! I’ve barely been able to sleep since the Learning 2.0 Conference started because my brain has been in overdrive - just being around so many like-minded people in one place was absolutely the most inspiring experience I’ve had in years. Over the summer I was jealously following the tweets from NECC and BLC bemoaning my decision not to go to any conferences (due to our move from KL to BKK), but now I finally feel all caught up and back in the swing of things - just in time for the K12 Online Conference!

The presentations were amazing, of course (more on that later), but the best part of the conference for me was connecting with past colleagues from other international schools and online colleagues that I’ve been working with for about a year now, and meeting some of my edublogging heroes. Who would have thought that I’d be sharing a glass of wine with Wes Fryer, Sheryl Nussbaum-Beach, Will Richardson, Clay Burrell and Jeff Utecht this weekend? Definitely not me!

What a gratifying experience to meet someone face to face who you’ve been conversing with online for almost a year (or in some cases, after you’ve been lurking on their blog for ages). Friday night I was chatting with the wonderful Susan Sedro, when, out of the corner of my eye I caught a glimpse of a very familiar face… Just a second passed and I turned fully around to see the 1001 FlatWorld Tales creator and edublogging superstar, Clay Burell. At exactly the same instant I say “Clay?” he says, “Kim?” And, thus begins our first face to face interaction, after working together on a variety of projects over the last year. What’s that they say about not being able to develop real relationships online?

There was so much going on at each presentation and unconference session, it’s going to take me days to digest, but there were a few big nuggets that really made an impact on me:

Blended Learning:

I’m not sure how I missed this specific term in my reading, but clearly it’s the phrase of the times and I am definitely going to start using at ISB. Blending online learning with face to face interaction is somehow very nonthreatening, it feels more like a term teachers can understand and relate to, like another facet of differentiation, which most teachers have already accepted and adopted as an essential method of instruction. Wes described how to blend learning in his Inventing the Future session on Sunday: allow for differentiated models of learning and creating work, create multiple paths for learning and assessment, and utilize multiple modalities of instruction - basically allow students the opportunity to learn and create in they way that they enjoy.

In his Creating a New Culture of Teaching and Learning session on Saturday, Alan November talked a lot about the core values of a school and how so many schools claim a core value is face to face interaction - but then they send students home to read for homework. How does that embody the core value of face to face interaction? Alan said “it’s not about the loss of f2f - it’s the shift of control.” Online tools deepen the f2f relationship because you can connect with kids when they’re not f2f (just like Clay and I were able to develop a relationship, never having met until this weekend). Powerful stuff, but clearly intimidating for anyone entrenched in an old school perception of a face to face core value.

The Importance of Teacher Modeling:

This is something that I’ve been saying for the past year only because I didn’t realize before how much blogging (reading and writing in collaboration with others) would change my life - not just enhance my professional development like reading a journal article, but change my life - the way I think, the way I interact with people, the way I work, the way I look at the world. It’s impossible to understand the impact of these technologies unless you are using them yourself.

As Will said in his The “Big” Shifts in Learning session on Saturday, “Educators must model learning in a networked world. Teachers must be learners too, they need to implement these practices in their own learning.” It doesn’t matter what topic they choose, but they must start utilizing these tools as tools for learning themselves. “My teachers are everywhere. Learning is 24/7/365 and it’s global. Everyone who comes to my blog has the potential to be my teacher.” Imagine that environment compared to a class environment (no restrictions, no time, space, or teacher frame to it). I totally agree with Will when he says, “This kind of learning is much more powerful than any classroom learning I’ve ever done.”

Will and Sheryl co-presented the Overcoming Obstacles in a Web 2.0 World / It’s Their Future: Making the Case for “Problem” Technologies in Schools session on Saturday and explained it’s essential to understand the environment that our kids are experiencing - teachers need to model appropriate use. We use scissors in the classroom, we teach them how to drive - if we can manage those tasks, we can certainly figure this out.

Doing New Things in New Ways:

This idea came up in the Apple seminar I attended last year in KL, and I was so excited to hear Alan November reference it during his Creating a New Culture of Teaching and Learning session on Saturday. He gave the great example of a teacher blog, with ideas, pictures, and topics posted by the teacher just being an online version of a teacher produced bulletin board. What we need to be doing is new things, new ways: giving every student a blog and then feeding their posts into the teacher’s blog. So many things that Alan said just resonated with me, and I love having quotes to share with teachers and administrators that so eloquently express exactly what I mean:

• The technology is relatively insignificant to your ability to apply and solve problems
• I would rather teach my students the courage to create their own community around the world for presenting their work to an authentic audience than for me to correct their work
• I believe my students should walk out of my classroom with relationships all over the world
• Being overwhelmed is part of the deal - you have to learn how to manage information
• There’s too much to unlearn. If you can’t unlearn DON’T GET IN THE WAY.
• People who understand how to manage information and deconstruct it, will have more power than those who don’t.

Developing a Culture of Creativity:

Whether or not they will admit it to us, or to themselves, we know that a huge portion of our teachers see technology as a passing fad. We have all watched the experienced teachers that have been through plenty of other educational trends pass them by, sit back and thinking “I’ll just wait this one out too.” During Wes Fryer’s Inventing the Future session on Sunday, he made crystal clear why we all have to understand that this is not a passing fad. The Read/Write web is not just a trend in education, something affecting on our line of work, these tools are affecting every level of society. Our culture is changing and we have a choice: to participate or to fall behind.

“We have a tremendous opportunity for students to share their voice on the global stage, to receive global feedback, not to just be receivers of knowledge, but to be active creators of global knowledge and thoughts.” Meaningfulness and learning comes from connectedness - we need to allow our students to share and connect. We need to create a supportive educational climate for creativity, failure and sharing - it’s OK to fail and to safely share our thoughts and ideas and build upon the ideas of others. Our kids can’t wait - they need for us to be making changes today, the world has changed. These technologies are their world - why would we want to completely separate education from the world they live in?

Teacher as Advocate

Every presenter emphasized the need for teachers to see our role as advocates. It is our responsibility is to prepare students for the future, so we need to be able to show people why these tools are worth it. As Sheryl said in her Virtual Learning Communities of Change session on Sunday, “in the future it won’t be what you know, it will be what you can create - ideas and storytelling. The new economy will be who you know and what you know - building relationships.”

We need to be visionary as educators because we are the first generation of teachers who don’t know what our students’ future looks like. Clearly, it will be essential to know how to create relationships, team-building, being able to work in teams with people you’ve never met before, and to understand that out of diversity and conflict come innovations.

During the roundtable discussion, Wes Fryer asked every teacher to:

1. Blend the opportunities for learning that you give your students.
2. Invite students to create knowledge projects with media, which creates a different dynamic when their audience changes fundamentally - students are no longer producing just for their teacher.
3. Change your identity as teacher - view yourself as a connector - meaningfulness comes from connectedness.

In all honesty, this is just the tip of the iceburg. I will post my session notes here as well (so I can selfishly have them all in one place) and I really hope the conference Ning will continue to grow and become a true learning community for everyone - not just those of us that were lucky enough to attend. The combination of the momentum of this conference and the global scope of the K12 Online conference next month will be unstoppable!

Technorati Tags: learn2cn, k12online07, k12online, Will Richardson, Wes Fryer, Sheryl NussBaum-Beach, Alan November, Jeff Utecht, Clay Burell, ning

A New Literacy Landscape - Multiple Literacies vs. the Narrow Agenda and Wal-Mart Curriculum

By Jamie Mackenzie

In a decade characterized by narrow definitions of curriculum and literacy, Jamie builds a case for a dozen different literacies, suggesting that the health of a democracy depends upon the development of a citizenry that can do more than read and calculate. He challenges the audience to consider how schools might attend to cultural, social, artistic, natural, visual and ethical literacies

MAIN IDEAS

“Literacy must be re-defined to include all mediums and it is the responsibility of all teaches to teach it”

E-Literacy? - Does it exist ? Should it be given the same importance and put on the same level as “Literacy”

Do we have have a broad definition of literacy or do we give in to marketing pressure and label it “digital”
The Purpose of Schooling ?

Questioning
Understanding
Inventing
Finding meaning

We are creating school cultures where students assemble and collect information but we do not encourage original thought, invention or synthesis.

We can encourage original thought by using juxtaposition and getting students to compare and make judgments for themselves.

“synthesis is critical missing component to elite education”

Media  Literacy - The lines of  truth have been blurred.

Digital natives are “Digital Captives” - They are not aware of the difference between news and entertainment.

 Musical Literacy - How does music change the way we view life?

Cultural Literacy - The differences between people, places and culture

Ethical Literacy -  What should we do? Knowing right from wrong.
Looking and working past bandwagons !

All of this technology  is for naught if we don’t focus on the important skills.

www.fno.org