This weekend I was fortunate to spend the afternoon with Randall Fielding and Prakash Nair from Fielding Nair International. They call themselves Architects and Change Agents for Education.  They were visiting our little Independent School because we are in the process of trying to envision how we will grow and expand onto the 40 acres of land we own on Vancouver Island.  What I found fascinating was their vision of what education should be and how passionate they were about building schools to help facilitate this vision.  Some examples of these schools can be found on this Design Share website.

At some point I think they referred to their ideal model of education as the Creative Age Student-Centered Personalised Model, which I rather liked.  They also talked a lot about the need for passion and creativity to be a part of a child’s education (Daniel Pink and Dr. Ken Robinson were both referenced a number of times).  It was really quite something to listen to Architects talking about the same sort of things my Twitter Network of mostly Educators is always mulling over.

They shared with us some of the building design patterns they had developed to support the creativity and passion that is a part of their vision.  Some of these included:

• Breaking down schools into smaller learning communities of no more than 150 students each.
• Vistas and connection to the outdoors.
• Variations in ceiling height.  They claim that there is research showing that higher ceilings stimulate more creativity!
• Cave space – places for reflection
• Building learning spaces that cater to the Multiple Intelligences.
• Spaces that support the notion of 1 teacher to 100 (community) instead of 1 teacher to 25 (classroom cells)
• Not teacher offices; teacher collaboration spaces.

I came away from the afternoon with a whole new appreciation for the importance of the learning space in education.  I would count myself very lucky if I ever had a chance to teach in one of the schools they have designed.
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As an aside, at one point we broke into groups and were given 20 Learning Modalities to mull over.  We were all supposed to pick the 3 that we thought were the most important.  In the context of trying to design an education that puts the child at the center of their own learning and in charge of their own learning I ended up picking the following 3 modalities:

1. Design Based Learning.  I picked this one because I think that a design framework like the MYP Design Cycle is an important guide for students that gives them the support they need to successfully tackle meaningful and challenging projects.  Some sort of framework like this needs to be in place when giving students more autonomy with their learning.
2. One on One Learning with Teacher.  For me this is where technology can be really useful, it can free up the teacher to spend quality time with each student in order to meet their individual needs.  As students become more autonomous it stands to reason that they will need more personalised attention, which they will only get from one on one attention.
3. Social/Emotional Learning.  I didn’t pick this one originally, but as other people in my group shared their thoughts I started to realise that for a student to really take charge of their learning they need to be have confidence in themselves.

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A new disruption seems to happen at our school every year at about this time, and it seems to be a Grade 7 phenomenon.  For whatever reason this is the age at which our students acquire an iPod Touch, and by this time of the year enough of them have one that it starts to get disruptive in the classroom.  It’s a perfect storm: a portable device that allows access to the internet, applications and enough memory to store just about anything; and the onset of puberty which leads to increased experimentation and consequence free thinking.

Last year we successfully navigated this hiccup by meeting with all the middle and high school students and engaging in a conversation about their use of their iTouch at school, some of the topics we covered were: how it is a privilege not a right (not sure I still believe that any more); how it can be distracting and affect their school performance, and how it can also be an amazing learning tool; our expectations for how the iTouch will be used at school (no video games, a teacher can check apps at any time); and the consequences if they continue to misuse this tool.

This year I am thinking bigger.  We will still have to have some variation of the conversation above with the students, but I am hoping our school response can be more nuanced and pro-active.  In particular I want to engage the teachers in a conversation about how we see the iTouch fitting into our classrooms and develop some kind of plan for how we are going to take advantage of this technology and not just manage it.  Currently it mostly functions as an entertainment tool that is allowed to come out at recess and break.  A recent poll of my Grade 7 class revealed that over 60% of them have an iTouch, and this number is sure to grow.  Surely we should be leveraging this technology, not fighting it.

The question that I am trying to answer right now is, what knowledge do teachers need to have in order to engage constuctively in a conversation about new technologies and their place in our school? Right now I am thinking about the iTouch, but I think this thought process is important for any visioning regarding technology use in a school.

The first thing that comes to mind is that very few teachers at my school understand what an iTouch is or what it can do.  Understandably, viewed from this position this can be a very scary piece of technology.  Part of the solution to this is to give them some time with an iTouch; I’m imagining having a few in our library pre-loaded with useful applications.  There is also this useful k12 online presentation: The iPod Touch in the Classroom, and accompanying documentation.  Particularly in light of the recent iPad unveiling and the possibility of them showing up in schools, i believe  teachers really do need to understand this new kind of operating system and how much can be done with the right Apps.

The other piece that I found the other day is this wonderful Technology Integration Matrix from the Florida Center for Instructional Technology.  I can imagine a staff pro-d session in which teachers look at this matrix and decide which parts of it they are comfortable with and make a plan for how they will get there.  I think Sue H models the right approach to this grid when she says:

Personally, I don’t see this table as presenting a progression of goals from less to more valid or more ideal, but rather as a patchwork quilt of possibilities.

So, I am imagining teacher pro-d that starts with an introduction to the iTouch, moves into a discussion about all the possible ways technology could be integrated into the classroom, and finishes with a discussion about how we as a school are going to move forward with a pro-active plan for integrating technologies like the iTouch in a thoughtful way that maximizes their potential and minimizes the disruptions.

What have I missed?

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I’ve just presented wordle.net to the teachers at my school using some great resources I found at Free Technology for Teachers. In playing around with it I found that I could create a wordle of this blog:

I was interested to see how much I use the words REALLY and LIKE.   Just for fun I also made one of my Delicious bookmarks:

There are certain books, blogs, ideas and methodologies that I have come across in the last few years (in one case it was almost 10 years ago) that I can’t seem to get out of my head.  For one reason or another they have resonated with me and made me question my assumptions about why I teach, what I teach and how I teach.  Over the years I have made small changes to my teaching practice as a result of these influences but recently I find myself really wanting to make substantial and thoughtful changes, ones that entail a certain element of risk and hopefully some reward.  I plan to start down this road of making changes by describing what I believe and how I have come to this belief.  In later posts I will (maybe) try and nail down what changes I plan to make in, specifically, my grade 7 math classroom.

I believe that instruction must be differentiated.

In many ways I think I started down this path when I read Disrupting Class by Clayton Christiensen.  There were a lot of provocative ideas in this book but the one that stuck with me was the idea of using technology to differentiate instruction.  I was intrigued and as it happens had just gotten my hands on a free subscription to Mathletics.ca through my student’s participation in World Math Day.  Mathletics has a number of features that have helped me to differentiate my instruction: it lets me easily customise the kinds of questions my students work on (easy, general or advanced); it gives them instant feedback on whether they are doing the work correctly (rather than doing 10 questions the wrong way); and it is backed by a great database that lets me easily track how my students are doing.  Along with using Mathletics I also started using a Blog as a place to post weekly assignments, powerpoint lessons, voicethread tutorials etc.  Anything that I thought might be useful to the students as they tried to learn new concepts.

In a good week I manage to provide my students on Monday with a schedule for the week.  This includes the work that they are responsible for on Mathletics and in the textbook, as well as extension work and some problem solving practice.  My thinking is that by providing them with this information up front they can start to develop their planning and time management skills.  It also gives them some choice as to how they used class time.

I believe in giving my students choice and control

My current bio contains a few sentences I wrote when applying for my current job at Aspengrove School:

I believe strongly in giving my students choices and empowering them
to take control of their own education. My job is to carefully craft a
framework that gives them the support, structure and skills they need
to make informed decisions.

In coming to this belief I have been very influenced by the work of Kathy Nunley on her Layered Curriculum Model.  Her explanation of how information has to travel through the hypothalamus or primitive brain in order to reach the cortex, and how when a student feels threatened it triggers a fight or flight instinct that blocks the information at the hypothalamus made a lot of sense to me.  Her Layered Curriculum Model is designed to allow students choice and control over how they learn the material and how they get their grade.  I tried it for a few years in my Science Classes and was really amazed at how motivated my students became, especially the lower achieving ones.  I’m not sure I would go back to using the Layered Curriculum model in my classes but I am hoping to borrow from it as I work to give my students more choice in how they learn mathematics and more control over the assessment piece (lots more to say on this later).

I believe that my job is to help my students help themselves

Using Mathletics has really removed me from the front of the classroom and allowed me to spend much more time one on one with students.  Being able to focus on individual student needs more has made me very aware of the difference in helping a student by giving them a “nudge” in the right direction and helping them by providing the tools and knowledge to find the right direction without a “nudge”.   In this I have been very influenced by Dan Meyer’s mantra “Be Less Helpful“.   Dan’s blog posts and talks on this topic have really helped me understand why some students have an almost compulsive need to ask me if their answer is correct, and why they can be so reluctant to get started on solving difficult math problems when really, these were the only ones worth trying to solve.

My thinking on this particular topic has also been profoundly impacted by becoming a parent and the opportunity to experience everyday the impact my words and actions have on the way my daughter is growing up.  Alfie Kohn has written a very compelling piece called Five Reasons to Stop Saying “Good Job” that I think should be required reading for all parents and teachers.  His argument is that praise is:

a way of doing something to children to get them to comply with our wishes. It may be effective at producing this result (at least for a while), but it’s very different from working with kids – for example, by engaging them in conversation about what makes a classroom (or family) function smoothly, or how other people are affected by what we have done — or failed to do.

I have a suspicion that teachers in particular have difficulty standing back and allowing students to truly wrestle with difficult problems because it is our nature to want our students to succeed and to be able to measure this success.  The easiest way to do this is for students to complete a task we set for them, even with a bit of help.  We can easily fool ourselves into feeling like we are helping, when in fact what we are helping them with is arbitrary and artificial.

So, this is what I believe.  The next step is to turn these beliefs into concrete actions in my classroom.

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My Twitter network pointed me towards this video on Critical Thinking and it took my breath away.  It is an amazingly well produced and compelling piece of work.  Well worth watching.  I have tried to take some notes below:

Critical thinking involves a multitude of thought processes involved in evaluating information and evaluating our thought in a disciplined way.

It isn’t just thinking a lot.  It is possible to spend a lot of time thinking about a flawed position, or pursuing a question that needs to be reformulated before progress can begin.  To think critically we need to examine possible flaws and biases behind our thinking approach.

To think critically we must seek to pinpoint and minimize biasing influence from culture and upbringing.  We must seek out and be guided by knowledge and evidence that fits with reality even when if refutes out cherished beliefs.

Critical thinkers cultivate attitude of curiosity and eagerness to widen perspective and broaden knowledge and are willing to do work required to keep themselves properly informed.

Critical thinkers embrace scepticism: doubting and suspending judgement about claims with which we are presented.  Take time to examine reasoning, assumptions and biases behind any claim.  The truth value of factual claims is not determined by the emotion that accompanies them OR the fact that they may be believed by certain social groups.

These traits can sabotage one’s capacity for critical thought:

• lack of respect for reason
• intellectual arrogance
• unwillingness to listen
• intellectual laziness
• lack of respect for evidence

One of biggest barriers to critical thinking is unwillingness to see complex issues in anything other than black and white terms.  “If we think in false dichotomies we will draw false conclusions“.

Black and White thinking often reflects an underlying intolerance of ambiguity.  Leaping to flawed conclusions because you can’t tolerate not knowing.  This is about comfort.  Critical thinkers can handle uncertainty.

“When we teach and encourage critical thinking we empower individual lives and invest in our collective future”

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I was listening to SOS Podcast #30 recently and was intrigued to hear about TwitterTim.es.

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I’ve been carrying this article called Online Safety 3.0: Empowering and Protecting Youth around on my iTouch for a few days and finally had a chance to read it while riding a BC Ferry today.  It’s well worth a read in it’s entirety but the gyst of the article (as I understand it) is that we need to re-think our approach to online safety and move towards an approach that focuses less on negative consequences and more on media literacy and digital citizenship.  In the article, Online Safety 1.0 is characterized as the ‘predator’ danger approach and Online Safety 2.0 as being mostly about the harrasment and cyberbullying that has become prevalent due to the peer-to-peer nature of today’s internet.  Both of these approaches, it claims, are negative, lack context and are largely irrelevant to youth.  Online Safety 3.0 on the other hand they describe as being about enabling …

youth enrichment and empowerment. Its main components – new media literacy and digital citizenship – are both protective and enabling.

They share some interesting findings from the Internet Safety Technical Taskforce which wrapped up in January 2009, including that:

cyberbullying and harassment are the most salient risks youth face, all children aren’t equally at risk, and children’s psychosocial makeup and environment are better predictors of risk than the technology they use.

This may seem obvious to many, but to me it was an eye opener.  Our tendency to focus on the technology (Facebook, MySpace, IM etc) that allows peer-to-peer interactions online has a tendency to make us look at the problem as a ‘one size fits all’ one (students are misusing Facebook, so lets block it in school), when in fact problematic online behaviours are really just problematic behaviours that happen to take place online.  Instead of talking about the technology we should be talking about the behaviours, and the underlying reasons for them; just as we do with real world behaviours.

This gets me thinking about how to get my students to critically think about their online lives and behaviours in a meaningful way.  Often I feel like our conversations are about 2-d solutions to 3-d problems.  My students already know about the 2-d solutions, so much so that they have become buzzwords.  The word “cyberbullying” has become a buzzword and I don’t feel I done a very good job unpacking it with my students.  When I used to be an outdoor educator we had other buzzwords that were equally frustrating, words like “team work” and “communication”.  My students all knew that these words were important and what we were trying to teach them, so they were quick to use them during debriefs.  The really powerful learning came when they were forced to unpack what these words meant in a specific context, or even better when they were put into a situation that really challenged their ability to work as a team and communicate and forced them to re-examine their preconceived notions of what these concepts really meant.  I can’t help feeling like I’m dealing with the same dynamic when it comes to the words “internet safety” and “cyberbullying”.  These have become buzzwords in my students lives and they know enough about them to feel like there is nothing else to really discuss, when in fact there is lots.

This is the second year that my Grade 9 students have participated in the Digiteen Project.  As part of this project they spend some time researching the 9 Elements of Digital Citizenship before deciding on an Action Project to undertake at our school.  This has been a challenging project for me and I am still struggling to figure out why it hasn’t had the impact on my students that I thought it would.  What I am coming to realise is that quite a few of them come into my class feeling like they already know about Internet Safety and they don’t really see how Digital Citizenship is relevant to them.  I wonder if this is because they have spent years having adults talk down to them about these issues, instead of involving them in the discussion.  They say this really well in the article:

And young people themselves need to be part of the discussion, not just to listen and parrot what adults tell them to say, but to help think through the issues, help adults understand the difference between real and imagined dangers, how youth themselves are dealing with the real ones (research shows a good deal of intelligence on their part), and help adults come up with messages that will resonate with their peers.

So the question then is how do I get my students to take this conversation seriously enough to think critically about it and not just fall back on the buzzwords.  One of the models in this article gives me hope, it’s called the ‘Net Effect” and it’s based on a group of characteristics packaged by social media researcher danah boyd that really capture why what we do online is different than what we do face to face:

* Persistence & searchability: the Net as a permanent, searchable archive
* Replicability: the ability to copy and paste from anywhere on the Net, to anywhere online
* Scalability: high potential visibility well beyond the audience you had in mind
* Invisible audiences: never really knowing who’s seeing, reading or watching what you post
* Blurring of public and private: an extension of invisible audiences because boundaries aren’t clear – private from whom?

These seem like very tangible, personal topics to me and possibly just the framework for exploring issues of Digital Citizenship with my students in a way that will get them more involved.

I also keep coming back to this blog post by ben blumsmith on teaching Mathematics.  In it he talks about giving students a problem with an superficial pattern that seems to explain things, but actually doesn’t.  The argument being that the cognitive dissonance that arises when they realise their pre-conceived notions don’t work is enough to get them to delve deeper.  This has got me thinking whether I can come up with some good scenarios (maybe videos, maybe stories) that will challenge my students pre-concieved notions regarding Digital Citizenship and get them to delve deeper?

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Back to the blog, and lots to blog about.

It’s interesting to reflect on how the nature of my participation in Social Media has changed.  At first it was all about the blog, and now it’s more about Twitter and Nings.  But  I miss my blog.  It’s the place that makes me slow down and be accountable for what I am thinking and saying.  In contrast I am more inclined to lob something half baked out into the Twittersphere to see what will happen; I own it less.  However (now that I am thinking about it) since I am braver on Twitter it is also the space that has encouraged me to seek out people that challenge me.  This twitter post for example:

As someone who has been guilty of spreading the “factory model” meme I considered this one worthy of a retweet because right or wrong it made me take a step back and examine my own thinking.

Through Twitter I also recently found a Globe and Mail article called Information Rich and Attention Poor in which they argue  that since data and information today are in abundance the scarce commodity is time and attention, and a growing consequence of this shift is an increasing emphasis on speed at the expense of depth.  In other word there are so many things we could be doing it is hard to justify focusing on one thing.  Like blogging … when I could be tweeting instead.

The article also has this great quote about the production of knowledge:

We may think metaphorically of the production of knowledge as a function of “information” and “attention,” with attention understood as the set of activities by which information is ultimately transformed into various forms of knowledge.

So if attention is one the wane, how do we turn information into knowledge?  Maybe I am missing something here.  I know that there is a lot of power in the collective intelligence of the masses, but what this article seems to imply (and which I might be inclined to agree with – if I wasn’t such a fence sitter) is that this collective intelligence can cover a lot of ground, but not dig into it very deep.

The article goes in to discuss the decline of the “expert”.

But while hundreds of thousands of Web-empowered volunteers are able to very efficiently dedicate small slices of their discretionary time, the traditional experts – professors, journalists, authors and filmmakers – need to be compensated for their effort, since expertise is what they have to sell. Unfortunately for them, this has become a much harder sell because the ethic of “free” rules the economics of so much Web content.

The irony of all this is that most of the knowledge that “the crowd’ uses and remixes originally came from experts.

The system works because it is able to mine intellectual capital. This suggests that today’s “cult of the amateur” will ultimately be self-limiting and will require continuous fresh infusions of more traditional forms of expert knowledge.

For someone like me who is usually so immersed in the ra-ra world of web 2.0 this perspective on information and attention was a refreshing change and like the tweet that I started this post with, it made me revisit some of my assumptions.  Which I hope, in the end, will keep me honest.

(This will be my last blog post for the summer.  It is time to hang out with my family and attend to my non-digital network.   I’ll be back in September)

I was indirectly tagged with this meme because I read Claire Thompson’s blog post on this subject and thought that putting my summertime pro-d aspirations down in a blog post was probably a good idea considering my inclination towards taking on too much.

My normal approach to summer pro-d is to randomly plug away at anywhere from 5 to 10 projects that usually get left to the last minute as a result of summertime distractions.  My hope for this summer is to focus on a few projects and actually accomplish them (along with moving house).  So here are the projects I will prioritize:

• Help plan and organize for the ISABC summer institute with Alan November.  In particular my goals are to: 1)set up a diigo group for the institute with a tag list and then embed diigo links in the institue wiki by subject and age level; 2)use the institute wiki to collaboratively plan the events for each day of the institute; 3) populate the institute ning with relevant and provocative (?) discussion topics.
• Move all of my gr6 to 9 technology lessons to a central wiki location so that they are easier to share.  As part if this process I plan to write up each lesson properly using the Understanding By Design process.
• Submit conference proposals to CUEBC and k12online.  I have in mind a presentation that starts by looking at how the nature of information has changed and how Diigo can be used as a powerful resource for finding, annotating and sharing resources.

Other projects I would like to undertake (but won’t commit to in this blog post) include:

• Planning my math 7 lessons.  My goal for this year is to use the Mathletics learning platform and a class blog to differentiate instruction and give my students as much ownership of their own learning as possible.  On the blog I plan on supporting classroom instruction with instructional powerpoints and links to online activities and tutorials.  I’m hoping to find a lot of these over the summer.
• Reading Clay Shirky’s “Here comes everybody”
• Learn more about managing Wordpress and Wordpress MU so that I can do more with our school blogs.

OK, I know this is too much.  My next plan is to map out a possible schedule for completion and see what is really possible.  Maybe I’ll link it to this post as a way to keep myself honest.

Like Claire I can’t bring myself to point the finger at anyone else, so I will finish by borrowing her words:

If you are reading this, first off thanks!  Secondly, if you haven’t been tagged already and think you’d like to participate, then consider yourself tagged

(note: this post was written in Evernote on my iTouch while hanging out with my daughter.  I am constantly amazed at what this little computer can accomplish.)

http://clifmims.com/blog/archives/2447.

I was aware that NECC was happening this week and feeling a little blue that my current circumstances prohibit me from just picking up and flying off to another cool conference.  Then I came across David Warlick’s great blog post called Gathering the Information at NECC, which explained how I could set up a search on Technoratti for the NECC09 tag and then subscribe to the search results via RSS.  It was like importing the NECC conversations into my Google Reader.  I was amazed at how many people were blogging their notes and reflections on the keynote speakers and individual sessions.  Here are some of my favourite finds from NECC 2009:

EdubloggerCon 2009 Reflections by Jeff Utecht.  I thought this post gave a very good overview of the main topics of discussion and some insight into the dynamics of EdubloggerCon.

Putting Gladwell’s Compensatory Model into Practice or NECC 09 Keynote Part 2! by Liz Davis.  This post describes the results of a brainstorming session aimed at figuring out what the Compensatory Model would actually look like.  Some interesting ideas and a nice way to move the conversation forward rather than getting stuck on whether or not he should have talked about Fleetwood Mac for most of the keynote.

Classroom 2.0: What is Web 2.0’s Role in Schools? I don’t know how Wesley Fryer managed to capture so much of the conversation in his notes (he obviously types faster than I do)?  He does a great job summarising the key points from a panel discussion that included Chris Lehmann, Julie Lindsay, Darren Draper, David Jakes, Steve Hargadon and Sylvia Martinez.  He also does a great job summarising the Tony Vincent presentation called Do So Much with an Ipod Touch.  The amount of details in his posts is amazing.  I suspect it has something to do with the meticulous way he prepared for NECC.

Thank you to all the NECC attendees who so willingly shared their sessions and reflections online.  I really enjoyed following along.