What Natives Need - ISTE 2010 Day 1

David Warlick always documents his sessions well and this one is no exception:

• Handouts from the session
• Backchannel (type in istedw for the event code)
• Twitter

David started by showing a video of a 13 year old entrepreneur and asked "Why is he different than I was?" He worked through many questions and concluded that the student has no ceiling. The information environment he lives in ignores behaviors, empowers accomplishments, allows manipulation of abundant information and has gateways to find others. It's an environment that is difficult to contain. David asks:

"If their information experience cannot be walled in, what is school to our students?"

David described Millennials as having a culture of communication, collaboration and information. However, he says that video games, cell phone and social networking don't need to come into the classroom for students to invest in school. Instead, schools need to leverage what those things do that meets student need. They are where are student's friends are. He says if we can crack the code of what these things are offering, we can get to what students want (links in his list are to my previous blog posts on related subjects):

• Responsiveness: You try something and get immediate assessment. (Technology and Assessment for Learning, A dropout talks to educators)
• Traction: Pushing and pulling against peers (teacher, text, bell in the schooling tradition). You can also access a support network of others - that is who you push and pull against.
• Fuelled by questions - We have no step by step - we ask questions and look for answers using a problem solving or inquiry process. David contrasts this with the most common question students ask us in the class, which is how much we want "How many pages?" He notes that some assignments are actually question-proofed, because they are so proscribed that there is no explanation. (on using a Google jockey to model looking for answers to questions
• Driven by conversation (on why people participate in digital conversation, sample of conversation -read the comments)
• Safe to make mistakes (growth mindset)
• Creates personal investments (Students making real choices, how choice causes us to invest)
• Should be fun and involve making useful or interesting things so it is intrinsically motivating (on changing our filtering practices to allow for doing meaningful things

I have seen David present before in Saskatoon, and have shared some of his thinking about literacy with others in the division. Documenting one of his sessions is never as good as being there. He makes a point and then use a variety of examples to illustrate the point. Often his stories, or the morals of them, connect to stories of my own. One of David storied points:

We want our students to be the students we want to teach, instead of teaching the students they are.... How much time do we have before we figure out what questions we are going to ask on our texts with Google in their pockets?

I think that Google question is an interesting one and it's one I never answer the way my fellow teachers wish that I would. One of women I worked with has figured out that an iPod Touch can access the Internet, and when her students are "listening to music" they could be getting answers. She asked me what to do. I replied they could be listening to answers they recorded to tapes back when they had walkmans. She asked what we could do now that they could get answers instantaneously, short of taking their phones away or blocking them. I said: "Starting asking questions that are too high level to be answered using Google alone."

Then we talked about my To Kill a Mockingbird exam I gave last year. I don't give many exams other than required finals. My exam is open book, and you are encourage to work with others. But the questions are things like:

Using research-based criteria and examples from the novel, establish Atticus' strength and weakness as a parent.

What's more, I even gave them the questions from the year before, and three examples of student responses that we scored collectively. Confused, she asked what I am testing if I am not testing knowledge of what happened in the book. I have never taught literature for that reason, and actually she doesn't either. She is a great English teacher. I replied that on this test, students need to think critically, skim for theme and context, assess something against criteria, build an argument, write use persuasive techniques etc. Those are skills that matter (and are curricular outcomes), but simply knowing what Atticus' response to the mad dog  is worth nothing beyond the class. Leveraging what our students do well to help them do meaningful work is what really maters for teachers, but sometimes the fact that we are not digital thinkers leads us to be trapped into thinking which is actually inconstant with our epistemology.

I am not convinced that the needs David articulates are really digital traits, although many researchers agree with him. In my mind, these traits have always been the hallmarks of the best learning. They are just a lot easier now that technology facilitates them. I do agree that students expect them more than they used to. I think that's a real opportunity to hack the code of traditional schooling and rewrite it to do what elegant code always does - meets the need in the most effective way possible.

Innovation and the Impossible - ISTE Day 1

"It always seems impossible until it's done..." Nelson Mandela

One of my favorite Mandela quotations is one of the series of banners about excellence throughout the Conference Center for ISTE 2010. The session I am attending now is called Innovative Leadership: 21st Century Innovations that Mater. Its main focus is how leaders set up environments to create the opportunity for innovation. The presenter is Cheryl Lemke, and for those of you who like to see all the information:

• The background
• The backchannel (a way that the audience in a session talks to each other while the session happens)
• On Twitter (#metirigroup)

Cheryl started by talking about how students learn and noted that attending school is a small part of students' learning. Students also use peers and home as they always have. Relatively new are the networked public, work and distributed resources. Cheryl argues that we need to tap into their interests and use them in school in order to have the opportunity to have most powerful impact of students' learning. We'll only get 18.5% of their life time to help them learn so we want to set them up to keep learning in the post powerful way possible.

Cheryl's big focuses for Innovative Leaders:

1. Own the innovation - don't delegate it to the right people, lead it. CEOs in top innovative countries don't delegate creative work, they do it themselves (The Innovator's DNA). Technology, social media, multimedia and eCommunication should inform every decision. They should be a factor via digital content, implementation, student voice, environmental scanning, expectations for teachers etc. The technology facilitator should be at all tables and be an advocate for the ways students learn best.
2. Drive the change through creativity and knowledge - be creative, informed, tolerant and critical of digital technologies and our youth driving changes.  Our customer, our students, are digital natives. There are three basic was of thinking of learning: as acquisition, as participation, or as knowledge creation. As we focus on knowledge creation, we need to design our technology and our assessments to support creation. Knowledge creation doesn't happen in a vacuum - it uses teaming, Internet etc. We pull students out of this when we assess them and it doesn't make sense. Our structures are also set up to support acquisition not creation. Top innovators do some key things. They associate with things outside their sphere of influence and bring two different things together in new ways. The implications for the education is the need for more integration. Innovators ask questions all the time, and they asks the unaskable questions. Observing is another key trait of innovators. They watch the clients and users (students) and have student voice in what they do. We need much more student voice in education. Innovators are also experimenters. They believe failure is an essential part of success. We can do this with teachers around action research. Finally, they are networkers who bring people together and build effective groups. I think the role of Learning Leader is designed with this in mind - obviously a good thing that this is a main focus for us.
3. Shift from Rules to Shared Principles - actively facilitate the development and adoption of guiding principles for 21st Century Learning. This one has big implication for how my division might approach things.
4. Establishment of a Professional Learning System - includes observation, virtual and face to face work. Involves less student contact time, lesson study, and classroom observations. Doing there walk-throughs is very helpful for principals in particular, but for all leaders. We have been shifting our professional learning pretty dramatically in the last few years with these exact ideas in mind. We are still learning how to do this most effectively.
5. Shape culture - the leaders establishes the culture of openness, collegiality, honesty, and adaptability, all focused on standards or goals. Leaders should look for positive deviants, who are those working outside the rules to make something work for students. This is a topic that is really on the radar of the Collegiate Renewal team.
6. Ensure Digital Access and Infrastructure - including networks, devices, data systems, applications (web 1.0, 2.0, 3.0), instructional, business and technical support, policy). She noted that the system needs to be open enough to allow blogging, twitter etc. I think our filtering changes, use of online communities and use of web 2.0 tools are starting to make inroads here.
7. Data, Assessment, trends and accountability- it needs to be focused on student engagement, not just metrics on competence. This whole section was closely correlated to our work, complete with diagrams of flow, like the one in the Collegiate Renewal data from this year. I think we need to keep working on a systematic approach to evidence collection, and I know that is a major focus of learning for next year in administrative professional learning.

Many of the principles Cheryl talked about next are those of Collegiate Renewal. We spent time talking about the value to motivation for staff and students and how to create engagement. One thing she highlighted was the shift to lesson study as a form of professional learning for teachers in schools where students are the most successful. Some interesting achievement statistics related to teaching:

• Teacher effectiveness has the number one effect on student learning, and professional learning must be sustained over time, content based, focused on concrete tasks, in community etc.
• 3 effective teachers in a row = +50 percentile
• Single ineffective teacher is detectable 4 years later
• A minimum of 6 days focused professional learning is necessary to make a substantial change in student performance.

My favorite quotations from the session:

"We defined the school system to make it the way it is, and we are the people with the power to redefine it. It is us."

"Business and industry are asking us turn education on its head. Let's go after that and do it."

"Sometimes behavior comes first and belief comes second. You can create change with resistance if you are doing something people will be able to see the impact of. Progress is the biggest motivator."

"People tell me that older teachers are stuck in time, but they came into teaching because they wanted to move things forward for kids. We need to give them real permission to go after 21st Century Learning."

I enjoyed this session quite a bit and it has lots of implications for the Collegiate Renewal work. Some we are working hard on, like professional learning systems and assessment and accountability. Others need more attention as we move forwards. I am leaving with lots to think about and record a fraction of what Cheryl said. I always enjoy a session like that. I left the session refocused on continuing to push for innovation.

Technology and the Arts - ISTE Day 1

My first session this morning is called Rethinking Arts Education for the Youtube Generation. I have worked a fair amount with the arts over the year in couple capacities:

• Drama 9-12
• Arts education 10-30
• Visual Arts 10, 20
• Theater Arts 20, 30 (Technical Theater)

In general, I use technology a lot for the critical responsive strand in each of these. It will be interesting to see what the focus is for the two women who are presenting. They are a music specialist and visual arts specialist.

They argue that new technical tools provide ways of working with media instantly, and that they can be well suited to digital learners. Learning about the arts helps us to create more compelling media and really understand what creativity means in the 21st Century. They also mentioned that the issue of copyright and being a digital creator not consumer will be discussed.

What do we need to teach our students? The presenters showed a number of projects from their school and talked about the opportunities for arts teachers to help students learn fundamental skills.

• First, they showed a sample from their school of pictures of students to a copyrighted music. They recommended teaching about creative commons and copyright (new laws coming here in Canada).
• Next they showed a digital story with poor resolution images. They suggested me need to teach about file size, types of images etc. I use Google image search here to solve this issue once I have taught students the basics.
• They also showed digital video creation. The video they showed wavered badly and they didn't understand composition. The presenters argued that even suggesting a tripod would have helped, but teaching composition is a real strength of arts
• Next they played a song. This one had issues will levels in the audio.
• They also showed an example of a poorly constructed digital slide show and talked about the need for teaching presentation skills and how to construct and effective slide show. I think that would be helpful to teach many adult presenters these skills - it would have helped our keynote speaker last night, and he was the former vice-president of the World Bank
• Last they showed a student re-illustrating a professional's picture book and talked about why it is essential to create their own original work.

Next the presenters moved on to talking about creativity. They referred to Daniel Pink and his work as a good example, but think that many leaders use creativity as a buzz word and don't understand it. The stages of creativity in the multimedia process:

1. Pre-production - use a concept map (think Bubblus for free or Inspiration as common software) or make jot notes about key things you want to focus on. In video, you might use a treatment, even before storyboarding.  These pre-production processes to make the key ideas clear is often missing in student work.
2. Production - here we need to make sure that students understand basic theory so the work can be both sophisticated and successful. They used the example of teaching the rule of thirds and focal point before having students take a digital picture.
3. Post-production - this is where students get ideas for how to polish the work to make it really sing. This often happens to me in the last three weeks of a drama production. These polish elements work best when you understand the possibilities and the teacher allows you to play with them. Very specific rules often prevent originality.

They had a number of resources and links for arts educators, including a prezi with national standards. However, much of their presentation was pages of presented text, an unfortunate choice given the subject mater. When the audience asked them a couple of questions, there was simply a reference to the handout.
They referred to many things, like the reference to creativity in ISTE's technology standards for students, called the NETS, but didn't actually fully explain any of their ideas.

They talked quite a bit about the need for a global audience, and how student projects are shared on a school screen, but also on Youtube, via blogs and in online communities. They said all of this required changes in school culture and the comfort level of teachers with the digital media tools. They recommended one-on-one planning and instructional support to grow teacher competence. They also says that digital tools should not be siloed into a class or a room, but should be present everywhere.

Overall, this session was hard to follow and vague - even though I understood each individual thing they said. It would have benefited from stronger structure and more practical elements. Both presenters clearly felt that they had to advocate for the arts, even though their audience was composed predominantly of arts teachers and clearly in agreement. I have noticed this issue with arts teachers in the past. When we are together and could work on making things happen we sometimes use the time to agree it is important that something happens instead. One thing I was really hoping would be a focus (given the title and description) was how are students are changing and what we need to do to meet their learning needs. Other than mentioning students like to create digital products, the presenters did not cover this at all.

The most interesting part was a discussion between some music teachers about the value of playing in a high school band versus teaching each student to arrange and compose, so they are creators not consumers. The group discussed Finale, which some of us in Saskatoon are using. I really like it, although licences are expensive. If you are a music teacher and would like to play with it, you can download it for 30 days for free and play with it. They also talked about Stomp and other ways of teaching students "music is alive, not dead." People discussed iPod touch Orchestras using the music apps and other ways to essentially use digital technology as either instruments or mediums.

Beyond Digital Storytelling

The first session I am attending is a bring your own laptop session. The resources for the workshop are found at http://beyonddigitalstorytelling.wetpaint.com/. Each of the session presenters introduced themselves, and one I have followed for a while via his blog http://budtheteacher.com/. One of the other presenters introduced us to a blog I thought would interest Captain Orange, who frequently comments on this blog. It's a vegan and technology blog http://www.wokwildside.com/.

The team's main point: Many times we teach digital storytelling without explaining storytelling well. Each talked about how telling stories in a variety of forms is important:

The shortest distance between truth and a human being is a story - Anthony de Mello

Other key ideas:

1. Framing the story. The group discussed how each story has a story spine. I liked the part where they talked about the value of improv in building the story (close to my heart as Drama and English teacher). They did a sample improv for the group and then had us develop stories in small groups by framing. It was a good way to involve the audience and helped us to see that the spine of a story is easy to create. They also showed us a video that uses the storytelling spine - a funny anti-smoking ad. They also took us through a series of writing prompts and version of circle stories I have used for years.
2. Expanding the story. The framing is not enough. They talked about the frame of StarWars is not as good as the whole narrative. They did not use this bunny video - but I think it illustrates their point. they used the StarWars example to show that expanding and growing stories makes them richer. They asked us to think of a story that is important to you. I thought of Wolves in the Walls. We each drew one word from each other's story, and then on the drawing we got back, wrote things that were like the story and not like it. The wolves I got back looked a lot like book, but the act of like and not like helped us to get all the adjectives and verbs associated with the main idea. I liked this activity and would use it again.  The presenters also talked about some of us did this digitally and others used paper and how the tool you use doesn't matter - it is how well it meets your needs. They showed is 5 card Flickr for storytelling. I have used it before and people like it so muck they won't move off it.
3. Stories worth telling. If the story is good, students care about it and return to it - that's a good subject and it focus the story on what is most important. They also remember the content. The team talked about sharing the stories as an act of creating relevance - stories worth telling. Go to the digital story only with those stories that are really relevant to your students or the heart of your curriculum. They showed us a series of pictures that students created about how they learn. I think it would be a great idea for collegiate renewal to do in terms of student voice. The first picture on their stories worth telling page  illustrates it.
4. Sharing the story. This section could have been better titled tech tips, as it covered a variety of how-tos. I would have liked more on how to share it so it is part of a community or gets found.

• On PD- The team talked about how getting teachers to make a photostory and sharing it with a group of teachers is powerful way to help teachers grow their narratives (see a sample of a teacher's photostory with a given prompt). The group's website has how to's for the tools you need. 
• On sound - One nice tip they gave was how to reduce ambient noise in the room - like by putting kids behind a barier made of electronics packaging or in part of a box lined with cardboard egg cartons. Carpet scraps also make a great liner for quiet sound spaces.
• On using your voice - they showed us a a great video to illustrate the point that how we say things makes what we say more or less powerful:

They also shared a poem by the same author, Taylor Mali, on proofreading. It is a poem I know students would love, but the last line might be an issue in some classes.

Two tools I'm going to play with -  I'd like to use is Comic Life. I tried the free download (it is a 30 day trial). I have avoided it in the past because it is a pay version eventually, so not great for all. However, I thought it would be great for the Collegiate Renewal team, as we use comics for our major posters. I wanted to use it to make my digital story, but the defaults in my machine are set to a network drive, and the download doesn't allow me to change it, so I couldn't install properly.  I also saw a bit a Aviary - a free Google Ap. I'm not sure I'd recommend use of it as school as it is very intensive on the bandwidth, but I know some of my readers could use it at home. I had to settle for building a simple comic strip.

Once we were done learning the structure, they gave us time to build us a story for our selves and circulated to help us. We published stories on drop.io - I have used it before with students because they can call the number and record themselves creating their audio stories using a cell phone.

The "Last Post"

This week is my last week working with Collegiate Renewal, but I am hoping there is no Last Post playing mournfully to accompany the death of this blog. I'm being followed up as the Collegiate Renewal Educational Technologist by Scott St. Pierre, who has posted on it before and hopefully will again. I'll also post in partially in new curricular role when I attend ISTE next week.

I think the value of sharing what we learn with others in a digital manner is tremendous, especially because conversations with diverse thinkers really help your own thinking be richer.

Using RSS feeds has been my best way to deepen my own thinking and conversation this year, and it is a great accompaniment to conversations I have in the division. For example, in the last 5 days I have has 6 different conversations about the use of interactive white boards, like SmartBoards. It wasn't a topic I was specifically thinking about, as it was something I did extensive research on about 6 months ago. However, as it resurfaced in the division, I had a variety of ways to think about the conversation. Here is who I got to talk to:

 Face-to-face

• Judy, who publishes about technology in the Online Learning Center here in Saskatoon Public
• Jay, who bridges communication between our IS department and the learning side, and informs himself via his Twitter network of  Educational Technologists

Phone

• Ruth, just returning from an education leave after studying educational technology. Ruth also learns via a Twitter network and will be an elementary teacher librarian in two schools next year.

Digital conversations via blogs

• Blog post from Tim Comfort, an elementary teacher in our system
• Blog post from Bill Ferriter, an elementary teacher in Wake County, NC

All of these people were talking about whether or not whiteboards could be used for transformational teaching. I thought I'd like to extend the conversation more, and searched my Google Reader for references to whiteboards in past blog posts and found 103 references. 25 of them were about directly about the role of interactive whiteboards in teaching style. Each of the blog posts I read or people I talked had a whole series of research, conversation and teaching experience behind their thinking.

Why all this matters:

Pamoram, a marketing source,  has a number of great info graphics about social media and this one illustrates what is happening in different age groups.

Teachers have always shared resources with each other by giving their "binders", folders of handouts and plans they developed. In the last 3 years, I learned so much about engaged learning that my "binder" was always changing and I didn't really have a form I could share. My RSS feed replaced the binder, and it means I will never make a binder again. I am learning so much and changing so much thanks to the influence of research, other teachers writing and conversations that my professional learning resists being neatly packaged because it doesn't end. Like the conversation about interactive whiteboards, I have ongoing dialogue with students, teachers, and researchers about each topic I think about. No Last Post for me - and hopefully not for the conversation around technology and Collegiate Renewal.

I began this blog with a promise to stop lurking and put myself out there. I was the Spectator that 41% of Americans in my age group are. Thanks to my ability to become a Creator, Critic and Collector, I also have a community I can use to engage in my learning each day. Thanks for being a part of my community this school year.

Wendy

Critical Thinking and Social Studies - Day 2

I'm now in the second day of the critical thinking and Social Studies day with Roland Case. Yesterday, we worked on understanding inquiry and starting to plan a unit using a template.

We are keeping working on the template today, and have started the day talking about the connection between technology and  critical, creative and collaborative thinking.  Case explains that critical thinking is criteria thinking, then compares it to creative thinking and notes that they are often viewed as opposite.

Case makes the "case" that creative and critical thinking are good partners. He argues that a problem in critical thinking is a situation where the answer is not immediately obvious - he says creative thinking is activated when the problem is concerned with imaging. He also notes that critical thinking is designed to judge the merits of the options. That happens in creative thinking as well, and there is a purpose as well. Then

Case says we also need to do collaborative thinking.  He notes that doing something and then just showing it to others is simply consulting. Collaboration is the act of doing it together, and makes critical and creative thinking much richer and more powerful than it would be otherwise.  His way of thinking was helpful for me here - I have understand the creative and critical thinking parts well, but his summary of collaborative, because it helps me see the connection.

I am often working on helping teachers to understand how technology is not something else, but a useful tool to help us do something that involves critical, collaborative, and creative thinking. Case's framing will be a nice way to help others understand it. However, I notice that Case is slowly easing us into talking about technology. Perhaps he is nervous that we will react poorly as he adds in technology.

Case says each tool has a particular way that it is designed to be used, which has an advantage and disadvantage. He helps us through textbooks and microphones - two technologies we are comfortable with. Then he asks us to talk about a technique - sharing with partners. After we discuss, he suggests alternatives like think/pair/share or email as ways to support effective sharing. Each time he says we must:

• Explore each technology's orientation and disorientation
• Play to the strenghts and mitigate the weaknesses

As Case goes through his rules for do's and don'ts around technology I find myself in general agreement but critical of some specific points. Almost all his examples are about interactive whiteboards, which he notes increase transmission unless they are used well. Hopefully I can see some examples of "used well". I think Cases' point that technologies are designed to be used in a specific way is valid, and in my experience, you need to work against the design of the smartboard to create high-level thinking opportunities in the hands of students. I love a good opportunity to do some critical thinking.

Critical Thinking and Social Studies - Day 1

This week I attended a feedback session with the curriculum writer for the Social Sciences in Saskatchewan, and I am now sitting is a session with Roland Case of the Critical Think Consortium related to the renewed Social Studies documents. I have used a number of CTC documents and resources before - and I'd recommend them for librarians, history teachers etc. In particular, the summary of critical challenges is good place for social science teachers to start.

The type of Inquiry Case is discussing is a relatively closed form of inquiry. He makes the argument that we have specific curricular outcomes, so we need to direct the questions. However, he sees Inquiry as a process of developing intellectual tools throughout. Critical thinking doesn't happen at the end, it occurs throughout.

Case looks at 5 categories of tools (which he had us develop through concept attainment):

• Background Knowledge
• Criteria for Judgement
• Critical thinking vocabulary
• Thinking strategies
• Habits of mind

Students learn inquiry tools and practice inquiry skills throughout, using AFL to practice, get feedback and improve. The culminating task is interesting: "Draw on at least 3 past civilizations, recommend the the 2 most important lessons for future societies to remember. As a class, agree on the 5 most important lessons, and in groups, create artifacts to bury in a class time capsule expressing one of these lessons." I like this question because it is built to cumulatively, has some group and individual task, involves the academic and tactile and lends itself to differentiation.

I was gone from the session for an hour while attending an admin meeting, then returned to activities designed to help us check our understanding of the difference between fact questions, feeling/preference questions and questions that require informed judgement.

I think that these sessions would be helpful for teachers as they work towards understanding inquiry, and the direct ties to curriculum are very helpful. I'm hoping to see more on backwards design tomorrow.