Last year, Justin Medved and I sat down to tackle the big question, “How does an information and technology curriculum stay relevant and meaningful in the 21st Century.” As Technology and Learning Coordinators at the International School of Bangkok this question was important to us for three reasons.
1) 2006-7 was a WASC accreditation year for ISB and we were charged with taking a look at the K-12 Information Technology curriculum and creating a plan of action to improve it.
2) The discussions and writings coming out of the edu-blogosphere last year were rich in ideas all about “shift” , “re-thinking” and “who is teaching these new skills?”. It was hard not to feel like there was some momentum building around a fresh educational paradigm and a shift away from the “integration of technology” in the classroom, moving towards “embedding” it in the way schools “do business”.
3) Prior to our roles as coordinators we had both taught in schools with elaborate technology scope and sequence plans which we felt had little to no impact on learning and often became outdated the moment they were written. We also felt that the previous NET standards were too bulky and disconnected from the average classroom teacher. We wanted to create something that could stand the test of time and be manageable to the average teacher.
With initiative and a purpose driving us forward we sat down to write a rationale to guide our approach. We came up with this:
“We believe that technology is a tool that can help and enhance learning. Everyday we see technology used as a tool outside of formal schooling for communication, collaboration, understanding, and accessing knowledge. It is our goal in developing an integrated curriculum to ensure that the way students learn with technology agrees with the way they live with technology.
Technology is in a constant state of evolution and change. Access speeds, hardware, software, and computer capabilities all evolve and improve on a monthly basis. This change occurs at a rate at which it is impossible for schools to keep up and adapt. Is it not time that we create a curriculum model that understands and this fact and works with it rather than tries to control it?
Too often typical information technology curricula have focused heavily on skills and their scope and sequence across the curriculum. The hard reality of this approach was that they became outdated as soon as they were printed due to changes in software, hardware and the skills that students came equipped with.
Instead of asking the question “What technology skills must a students have to face the 21st century?” should we not be asking “What thinking and literacy skills must a students have to face the 21st century?” These skills are not tied to any particular software or technology-type, but rather aim to provide students with the thinking skill and thus the opportunity to succeed no matter what their futures hold.”
We felt strongly that for too long that way technology was integrated with learning focused more on the tool and less on the curriculum/content that it could be used to support. To compound this fact ,since technology changes so rapidly it became almost impossible to map what “skills” students needed to learn from year to year as new technology arrived on the scene and old skills trickled down age groups. It wasn’t long ago that spreadsheets were the domain of high school students in accounting classes. Now we introduce them to fifth graders doing graphing and data analysis.
Typically teachers saw teaching these technology hardware and software skills as “someone else’s job.” IT skills to be learned in isolation. Yet schools rightly began to insist that technology be integrated into classroom practice.
Under this technology skill curricular model, faced with teachers ill-equipped and not believing that it was their job, IT integration was doomed to failure.
We had to think bigger different ……..
Looking at Wiggins and McTighe’s Understanding by Design approach to curriculum and unit design we liked how big “essential questions” and “enduring understandings” had helped us plan and design units when we were teaching math and social studies. What if this same “best practice” approach could be applied to the way technology was used and talked about in the classroom? If this was good curricular design practice, why should technology and thinking curriculum be any different? What if that same approach was used in the way we looked at connecting technology and learning across the curriculum? What if there were only a few manageable questions that even the most tech-resistant teacher could see value in?
Over the school year we fleshed out these questions and ideas and came up five essential questions that we felt addressed the core elements of a comprehensive technology and learning curriculum - one focused on the thinking that was needed for the 21st century learner, rather than the technology.
When Scott put out his initial request for guest bloggers on school leadership, Justin Medved and I considered whether we fit the bill. We are not school heads or principals, but rather a different kind of leadership that is emerging in this current era of technological change and efforts in education to use this change positively.
We are Technology and Learning Coordinators at International School Bangkok. Our primary role is to lead teachers toward embedded technology use, enhancing learning opportunities in the classroom and beyond.
More and more however, we find that school leadership looks to us to guide and inform on all sorts of decision-making, ranging from curriculum to hiring practice to processes involved in running the school. This defines a new kind of leadership in schools – one that breaks down typical hierarchical set-ups into one of collaboration and deferred expertise. One that is less top down and one that is more shared – at least in some areas. Ultimately, the buck continues to stop at the top, but input and influence seems to be growing from the “middle”.
Currently, many school administrators and curricular leaders are not “up-to-date” or savvy on current ed tech thinking or even on current technology tools. They lead from an understanding of traditional schools attached to isolated IT classes with computer labs for student use. They don’t grasp the possibilities of a participatory web or realize the true potential of the “network” (social and hardware).
For the most part, this is not because they don’t want to change, but because they don’t know what’s possible. This speaks less to their skills as an administrator and more to their backgrounds as educators. It is a credit to those administrators who recognize a changing landscape and ask for guidance from those in the know.
So they come to us.
We work in this dual role, convincing administration of directions we need to move, while at the same time working for teacher buy in. Administration defers to our expertise in these matters.
Both may be considered the jobs of the administrators, yet both jobs fall on the guys with the ideas and the people skills to get it done.
Do you have a similar situation in your schools? If you are reading this as a technology-type, what is your role in this alternative leadership? How much responsibility/say do you have?
Justin and I often tackle the question,
what does it take to bring administration on board to make significant change in schools, curricular or otherwise?“
This week we’d like to share with you the process that we went through from both a leadership side as well as a curricular side. We are in the process now, because we are trusted to do so, in moving ISB forward into a model of embedded technology founded on the Essential Questions of the 21st Century Learner. This curricular model has come directly from us rather than the curriculum office because we see a need for a different way to approach learning with technology.
In the coming posts, Justin and I will take you through our thinking on this curricular model with two purposes:
To get feedback from you and to push our thinking forward.
To hopefully inspire thinking at your own schools about how to best “embed” technology into classrooms so that is accessible to teachers and agrees with the way children live with technology.
This is a terrific opportunity to speak to a different audience than the readers we have already have at our own blogs (and those who have seen us present), so thanks, Scott. We are looking forward to the week.
Tomorrow’s Post:“Birth of a question and a concept” - How does an information and technology curriculum stay relevant and meaningful in the 21st Century?
Will Richardson, Karl Fisch, and Anne Smith presented outside of Philadelphia on the Read/Write web in a session called, “21st Century Education: 20/20 Vision for Schools”. In preparing for that, they put out a plea to edu-bloggers to chime in with tips, sites, or encouragement for the educators in seeing the direction that we believe education needs to go.
They have a wiki for this which is quickly developing into a fine example of the power of our Web to tap into the collective intelligence/knowledge of people - in this case the edu-bloggers.
As Will suggests in his blog, our contributions prove the very point we try to make about the power of the current and future web.
In essence, we want them to walk away understanding the power of connections that can reach far beyond the classroom.
Today, Justin, Kim, and I were de-briefing after a UStream presentation with the FLNW guys and Justin mentioned how important that online community is for the unconverted in helping them to see that lots of people out there are “getting it” and on board. That online community’s participation - whether through a blog comment, a wiki contribution, or a live chat presence - give credibility to the very tools that we extoll in our presentations. That presence does more for getting teacher buy-in than anything we could say. It’s like seeing the impact of learning happening right before their eyes.
So get on that wiki and add! Prove that the collaborative power of this technology can tap into the intelligence of the many.
I am already adding that single page to my Delicious - it’s going to grow into a fine resource.
There has been a lot of conversation over the Vision of Students video by Mike Wesch. Scott McLeod referred us to the “dust up” and Gary Stager and Wesch are having a good talk write about it. I see Stager’s point that the blogsosphere can “inflate” the worth of a piece of work, but I still think that the resulting conversation is powerful.
And not possible without blogs and RSS and our edublogosphere.
Whether the video portrays university education’s flaws or whether it gives us a picture of students’ reality or even if it just shows us that students are “whiners”, what has resulted from the video is a conversation that is awesome.
Students in the classroom are talking to teachers about their lives outside of the classroom.
Teachers are talking to their students about relevancy.
Educators are talking to other educators about how to engage students more.
Parents are wondering what their child is getting for 20,000 dollars a year.
And ultimately, people who believe in and loveeducation are talking about rigor and scholarship and lesson design and LEARNING.
And that ain’t bad.
But in the end, what I wanted to share in this post was a quote from Wesch’s response to Stager and other’s criticism. This is why students (digital native or captive or whatever) still need teachers.
The great myth is that these “digital natives” know more about this new information environment than we do. But here’s the reality: they may be experts in entertaining themselves online, but they know almost nothing about educating themselves online.
What a fabulous quote. That whole paragraph is great. Check it out.
There always seems to be this guilt that hangs over me when I don’t post for extended periods of time. Like I am letting down subscribers…luckily I don’t have too many (thank you, those of you who are here!).
But not having posted does not mean that I haven’t been involved and getting stuck in. (I also post tech how-to’s on another blog, Talking Tech.)
Even got a little mention on the 2 cents blog, which was pretty cool. Though, appropriately, it was for something a student said to me, rather than any epiphany I’ve offered.
Figures.
In that same chat online I shared a cool NYTimes opinion piece on Facebook from the students’ perspective. Paraphrasing:
We adults take this networking thing too seriously…it’s all supposed to be fun with our friends.
Definitely a good read.
Then working at home last week, I was twittering at the right time to catch Chris Lehmann’s invite to join his class at SLA in a UStream conversation - a terrific experience that Chris posted about. His students are articulate and offered the best description of the difference between a project assessment vs a test.
Paraphrasing:
Tests are what the teachers thinks you’ve learned based on what they covered, but a project is based on what you need to learn.
(Only more eloquent than that.)
The point was well-made. Students own the learning they do in authentic, open-ended projects. For tests they do what they need to, in order to get a good grade.
And all of this got me thinking…
I worry about getting too far removed from the classroom as an Ed Tech guy or as an administrator. Away from the classroom, we lose touch with the wisdom of our students - the insights into how they see the world and the openings for us to be their educators.
We concern ourselves with the big goals and forget the small goals. We don’t have, often enough, the conversations that allow students to connect with us and us with them. The conversations that show how much we value them and their thoughts.
I think that ALL educators in and out of the classroom need to remember and embrace that they are more than “content delivery devices” or even information facilitators. There is a human connection that must be made with students.
Years ago, I heard or read that so much of teen difficulties come from the fact that they are undervalued in society. In pre-Industrial Revolution days, they were working the farm, contributing to the family. Valued. But now, they have little to nothing to make them feel “of worth”. This was a main argument for Service Learning in schools and I am all for that.
I also think that educators have the power to make students feel valued and worthwhile EVERY DAY. In the way we treat them, the way we listen to them, and the way we ask them what they think.
Chris did this with the students on UStream for us, but I imagine he and the SLA faculty do this all the time with their students. When asked what they valued about being at SLA, these students did not speak of the technology or the technological prowess of their faculty. They spoke of the connectedness and self-worth they felt with their teachers, who genuinely cared about their learning and their well-being.
For a while now, I’ve been intrigued by the ever-growing need for visual literacy in our off- and on-line worlds. This is not ground-breaking stuff…the sense/need for learners to gain visual literacy has been around for a while – even pre-Web.
People have been studying and manipulating how the eye moves over a page of text (see any speed reader) or scans an advertisement (see any cigarette ad in the past 10 years) or views a web page (see any basic web design course) for quite some time now.
For the most part, it is humanity’s top sense and so our brains are wired to interpret a visual world.
More recently, though, I have been struck by how effective tag clouds have become as a visual representation of popularity or importance. (In today’s web is there a difference? But that’s another post) I remember the first time I saw a tag cloud and thought, “wow, that makes so much sense.”
Does it makes sense because the human brain builds understanding in visual ways (seeing is believing) or is it because I have become so visually sensitive from years of doing this ed tech stuff?
Does it matter?
Ultimately, our learners live in this world. So do we.
This world is requiring of them (us) a sophisticated visual literacy that reaches beyond the “scanning of a page” to understanding visual cues, reading iconography in an instant, and deciphering intent and meaning from intentional layout and design.
A month or so ago, I was on the TED Talks site. Terrific stuff, most of you reading this have been there, seen the videos, bought into the messages.
But have you checked out their homepage? Have you seen how they handle communicating popularity? Or currency?
Squares of various video moments grow or shrink depending on what criteria you click on the left. You want most recently updated? Click that and the videos change size to reflect your choice. Watch them change when you click most talks or most discussed or most emailed.
Awesome.
Don’t trust my little explanation…check it out. View the videos later. For now, learn from how they use visuals to communicate.
A kind of dynamic image cloud - always changing, always user-driven.
That thinking got me thinking, “what if you kept notes that way?”
What if students people became so visually-tuned that they organized thought that way?
Maybe we already do. In which case, what if note-taking matched that visual style?
I’ve always been an “outline” note-taker. You know the type…make a point, related points get indented underneath that point. New points get outdented (I love that that’s become a word). You’ve seen this form of note-taking or done it or taught it.
And that form works. You can study from it. You can remember how points relate and there is a flow to your notes that reflect the chronological time spent listening.
But what if a more visual style fostered better understanding?
I decided to play with the idea.
At the Learning 2.0 conference, I used Smart Notebook software (typically used for presentations on Smart Boards) to take notes in each of the sessions I attended. (They were awesome by the way) I chose this software, because it allows for quick typing and then instantly moving the text object anywhere on the page. Resizing is a click and a drag of the mouse and font color changes are no more than a highlight and click away. Add to that the ease of adding new “slides” (one click) and re-ordering them if needed. The ease of layout manipulation and simplicity of tools made this an easy choice over Word, Photoshop or any other software I had on my computer.
Did it work?
That’s a little harder to say definitively.
All note-taking is subject to personal taste and recall. It’s intent is recall for the note-taker, rarely for someone else. It’s why supplying the notes on the conference Ning was helpful for others, but still NOT like being at the session.
I’ve shared one example from a session I attended given by Alan November. At times I added my own questions in among the notes, emphasizing them with white space, color, size, or alignment.
Have a look…the slides lose a little impact in the export/translation to PowerPoint and then to Slideshare (not to mention the size factor is lost). But you get the general idea. “Order of slides” still handles general flow of the session, but the freedom to go back, add comments and manipulate layout to reflect thought processes was pretty interesting.
(And I wasn’t playing so much with it that I was missing out on what the speakers were talking about.)
I was putting thoughts to screen in a way that was reflective of how they were being formed in my mind.
That’s pretty cool.
Maybe it’s not the way to teach note-taking to children. Maybe it’s too wishy-washy or hippy or crunchy or new agey or Web 2.0-ey. Maybe children need help organizing their thoughts rather than fostering “cloud” thinking.
But given the visual literacy requirements of the now and the future, we are obligated to show students tag clouds and sites with visual components like TED talks.
We NEED to talk to them about visual literacy and making meaning from color and alignment and layout and design.
And then, we need to ASK THEM to explain to us how they see the world and how they make meaning from what they see.
It is getting close to the Learning 2.0 conference in Shanghai and I am becoming more and more excited to present the work that Justin and I have done in preparing what we believe is a new and better way to approach technology learning in schools - Curriculum 2.0.
Better?
Better than what?
Better than the incredibly thorough, but utterly oppressive I.T. scope and sequences or standards (or some other s-word) that have been the norm at schools.
Better than these documents that - rather than making technology integration accessible - serve to intimidate teachers and foster the counter-productive notion that talking about technology is for tech geeks and experts, thus eliminating it from the classroom.
Better than what we’ve done before and seen fail.
At least we think so.
Here’s the blurb on our workshop in Session 8, Sunday at 10:15 am (I’m not listed in the real program):
Information Technology Curriculum 2.0
By Justin Medved (and Dennis Harter)
At ISB, we believe that technology is a tool for learning. We believe that technology is used as a tool outside of formal schooling for communication, collaboration, understanding, and accessing knowledge. It is our goal in developing an integrated curriculum to ensure that the way students learn with technology agrees with the way they live with technology. At ISB we believe we must focus on the higher-order skills that are necessary for success in the 21st Century. These skills are not tied to any particular software or technology-type, but rather provide students with the opportunity to succeed no matter what their futures hold. In this session we will share our curriculum model and our implementation plan for the next three years.
Room: C-228
It’s a work in progress, but it’s progress that we focus on.
We’d love your feedback, so if you are going to be there, hopefully you’ll attend and give us your thoughts.
If you are coming to Shanghai, introduce yourself here and we’ll meet again in a few days!
Will Richardson has a much larger readership than I do, so if you find his post through me, something is amiss. I loved what he said at the end of his post on a recent cover story from Business Week on “The Future of Work” which he shares highlights from.
I wonder how many teachers are getting ready for the new school year by developing a deeply collaborative curriculum, one in which they model for their students not just connections with other teacher/learners but co-creation of knowledge, in whatever forms that takes. I wonder how many of them are being supported in that effort. We have the capability to create these types of environments; what we need is to provide more and more opportunities for teachers to connect and learn with other educators and professionals from around the globe.
Amen.
Is anyone someone asking their students to co-create knowledge? Where is the support coming from? When will our curriculum not focus on content knowledge, but rather on the co-creation of new knowledge?
Entries (RSS)
