This particular podcast, we will be focusing on the question, “How Do We Connect Technology and Classroom Instruction Seamlessly?”
We’ve presented at Learning 2.0 in Shanghai and ETC in Kuala Lumpur on our work at ISB on moving towards an embedded curriculum focused less on tech skills and more on the 21st Century skills that you read so much about in the edublogosphere. We wrote about our thinking in our blogs and as guest bloggers on Dangerously Irrelevant. We’ve put up our work to share and collaborate with in wikis, initially in newliteracy and then as an ISB21 team.Now we are excited to take questions, speak to solutions, and tackle issues that relate to implementation on these very Big Ideas.
SOS is a biweekly podcast produced by educators in the Asian region discussing the latest conversations in the educational blogosphere as well as deep thinking about education and the changing nature of learning. Join us on Ustream.tv for the live broadcast. Listeners will have an opportunity to Skype into the conversation “on the fly” as well as listen to an archived version via iTunes.
Will Richardson suggests that we need to get educators on board with the read/write web, before we can really hope to make widespread change in education. I commented on his post (as the 100th commenter!!!) that while this is incredibly important, real change can also happen as we continue to engage students in this way.
Of course, a full faculty of web 2.0 fluent teachers is bound to lead to engaged student learners writing and collaborating online, but a growing student group trained in the power of the tools, versed in the possibilities of a world wide audience of readers, writers, and collaborators can also force change.
Secondly, Will also points out that those without a voice online are losing “credibility” with him. His reading is online, his network is online, and he learns online, so if you aren’t online, then do you have something of value? Will is a very smart man, which I’ve said before, but in this case I have to disagree or at least tread lightly. He takes an extreme position to make a point, but in truth there are a lot of educators who don’t blog, wiki, or twitter, but who do in fact engage kids and TEACH. And they get that these tools can be powerful learning devices.
To undersell that voice in a learning network that should include personal contact and professional learning opportunities at our own schools is to miss out on real voices positively influencing children.
On a final note, what I think about most about after reading Will’s post is what to do next?
Will is right…we need to get teachers on board. We need administrators who prioritize this alongside the other priorities of a school, rather than an add-on from the tech guys. But our voices are starting to echo in the spread out, but still small world of the edu-blogosphere.
We blog, therefore we buy-in (for the most part).
The big ideas are good. We agree to complain about the same issues.
Now it’s time to bust out of our discussion of those big ideas that we wonder why people aren’t doing…and start talking about how we are going make it happen.
What are the best ways to get teachers on board?
How can administrators be convinced of this need?
How can curriculum be re-shaped without stepping on the toes of existing content curriculum?
We all agree…let’s start working on the ones who don’t.
Will Richardson followed up his request for contributions to his wiki page mentioned in my last post with a thank you and an expression of appreciation for the power of people getting together to offer their ideas and share with others. To that, I left the following as a comment and since it is so closely related to my previous post, I thought I’d share it here.
(apologies to those who read it on Weblogg-ed already.)
The power of the collective intelligence that we can tap into with the web continues to amaze me. But even more so now, I am impressed and encouraged by the willingness of people to do so.
People continue to want to better EVERYONE’S knowledge and understanding through sharing, collaborating, and conversation.
I remember someone telling me (though I can’t remember who) that true collaboration is when educators recognize that they are no longer responsible for the education of their students, but rather they are responsible for the education of ALL students.
While easy for me to say in my tech coordinator role - it’s a tough thing to let go of and acknowledge for a lot of educators.
At the school level, that means a teacher letting go of caring only about the experience that their own students get and sharing ideas and resources with colleagues so that all children at the grade level or school benefit.
At an administrative level, that means letting go of representing only your own building or division and working cooperatively with other administrators to ensure that all students in the district or school can best learn.
What I see daily on the web is that very concept applied to its greatest level. We share ideas and resources not only so that our kids at our schools benefit, but so that ALL kids at ALL schools benefit.
We want EDUCATION to improve, and together, we are collaborating and conversing to make that happen.
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.
If you haven’t seen Mike Wesch’s video on the information r/evolution, you really need to. It’s a terrific look at how tags are reshaping the way information is organized (or not organized, for that matter). I have written a detailed post on it on my Talking Tech blog which tries to demystify web 2.0 tools for teachers.
So I won’t write that post again here.
But this video really captures how the back end hierarchy of categorizing information is no longer happening or necessary. Tags and search capability have created a way for information to be available in lots of ways - so different than the old model of the book being in only one place on a shelf.
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.
Web 2.0 continues to just amaze. To think that we hardly had internet 15 years ago and now I learn, accept, use new tools constantly. How can education not embrace this? How can we not provide better learning for children (and adults) with what is at our disposal now.
And a social studies teachers just shared with me Hans Rosling’s videos on TEDtalk using his amazing Gapminder software (named after the saying, Mind the Gap heard hundreds of times on the London tube). Gapminder was recently acquired by Google, which is a good indicator that it’s about to take off.
[side note: for a very cool lesson in "new" visual literacy check out the home page of TEDtalk. They use visual cues of image size to demonstrate most recently updated. You can switch the views on the side and change the visual cues to represent most discussed, most emailed, etc. Now this is visual literacy. How can anyone argue that we need to talk about things like this with kids!?!]
Am I really late on all of this? Is this old news?
I feel like I should have known about Rosling’s work already, but it really blew me away seeing it. If you haven’t seen his presentation, watch that first to get a real sense of how powerful this statistical data animation software can be. He is pretty dynamic, but it’s his graphs that steal the show. Calling them graphs is almost unfair…like calling a Ferrari a car or an iPod a walkman.
He has brought together world data with design and animation to truly provide understanding of what’s happening in the world. In the video I linked to he debunks the myths many have of the Third World.
He does not tackle lack of knowledge, but rather pre-conception. And that’s pretty powerful.
Don’t our students have preconceptions?
Don’t we want to students to question them?
This data analysis truly promotes understanding. When was the last time you could honestly say that about the data analysis your students are doing?
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