Tech Ed-dy

I have been struggling all week to figure out how to frame an answer to this question that doesn’t get bogged down in fancy words and jargon.  I am feeling the need for some clarity regarding the skills that I need to make sure I am teaching my students, the classroom structures and processes that are best for teaching these skills and finally, the best approach for changing my classroom practice in a productive way so that I am really teaching 21st Century Skills (in other words, what are the best first steps?).

It all started with a great post on 21st Century Pedagogy written by Andrew Churches.  In the post he has a great Cmap (one of my favourite mind mapping tools) diagram illustrating the key features of 21st Century Pedagogy.  They are,

?    building technological, information and media fluencies [Ian Jukes]
?    Developing thinking skills
?    making use of project based learning
?    using problem solving as a teaching tool
?    using 21st C assessments with timely, appropriate and detailed feedback and reflection
?    It is collaborative in nature and uses enabling and empowering technologies
?    It fosters Contextual learning bridging the disciplines and curriculum areas

This is a great list and I agree with all the features, the problem is that there are too many.  In my busy day to day classroom teacher life I don’t have the energy or brainpower to figure out how to incorporate all of these features into my curriculum.  However, it seems to me that I actually only need to focus on project based learning and the rest logically fit into their appropriate place.

For the last 4 years I have been lucky enough to teach the IB Middle Years Program Technology Curriculum.  This is a curriculum that is very well suited to project based learning and has really opened my eyes to the power of this approach.  As a busy classroom teacher I believe that if I make it my focus to use project based and inquiry based learning effectively in my classroom then I will also be building technological, information and media fluencies, developing thinking skills, using problem solving as a teaching tool and fostering contextural learning (after all a project by it’s very nature is based on real challenges that cross curricular boundaries).  It is also collaborative in nature.

This still raises the question what good project based learning looks like.  I’m no expert but the elements that have to be there for me include:

• Using the Design Cycle explicitly.  In my classroom this means that we take the time to break down what it means to really INVESTIGATE – PLAN – CREATE – EVALUATE an end product.  We take the time to break down each of these steps into concrete actions and we agree on assessment criteria for each step before we begin (ok, if I’m being honest this doesn’t always happen, but I’m trying).  I like what Andrew Churches says about assessment:

Students should be involved in all aspects of the assessment process. Students who are involved in setting and developing assessment criteria, marking and moderation will have a clearer understanding of: what they are meant to do; how they are meant to do it; why it is significant; why it is important.

• During the INVESTIGATION stage I take the time to teach my students the skills they will need to be successul in their project.  Often this includes exposing them to knowledge, facts and information – the traditional classroom stuff.  This gives them the base they need to jump off into higher order thinking activities.  This is also where I often end up incorporating lessons on building technological, information and media fluencies.
• During the PLANNING and CREATION stages I have found a critical element of success to be the creation of Checkpoints and Milestones that groups can use to measure their ongoing progress.  I am always so busy that this is a real challenge for me, but when I do manage to structure ongoing feedback during a project the end product is always vastly superior.  Again from Andrew Churches:

Linked to assessment  is the importance of timely, appropriate, detailed and specific feedback. Feedback as a learning tool, is second only to the teaching of thinking skills [Michael Pohl].

In the funny way that these things happen I was just sent this edutopia link today about a school in Pennsylvania that is using project based learning as a vehicle for teaching 21st century skills.  They include the following excellent suggestions:

• Connect to Standards – don’t be distracted by the flash of the technology
• Plan, Plan, Plan – projects are complex, so a carefully planned framework is essential
• Expand Your Audience – using web 2.0 tools to expand the reach of students is motivating and gives projects context
• Walk a Mile in Their Sneakers – try the technoloigy yourself first.  It often takes longer than you think.
• Keep it simple (this is my biggest challenge)
• Be on the lookout -stay connected to a community of professionals.

A fairly comprehensive list of project based learning resources can also be found here.  So what have I missed?  Are there any skills or knowledge that can not be taught using a problem based learning model?  Are there any other key elements of project based learning that are essential to it’s success?

I have just finished listening to the interview with Thomas Friedman over Skype at the Flat Classroom Conference in Doha, Quatar.  I kept having to stop the podcast to jot down something he said because he has got a great way with words and most of his answers contained little gems that really got me thinking.  To me his message seemed to be very much that technology is changing the world but that the use of these new technologies is fraught with danger and distraction and that now, more than ever, teachers are needed to help students learn how to cope with these new challenges.  Here are a couple quotes I really liked:

Continuous partial attention is lethal to creativity.

It was interesting to hear that someone who is a real hero of the Web 2.0 world takes great pains to keep himself unplugged so that he can maintain the focus and creativity needed to write two newspaper columns a week.

You can’t download judgement or wisdom or values.

We need to take advantage of what is new but not lose sight of what is old.

These two quotes really resonate with me when I wear my IT integrator hat.  I want the teachers at my school to feel valued for all the skills they already have and know that the important things they have to teach – judgement, wisdom, values are more important than ever.  Even if the information they teach is not as rare a commodity as it once was.

One more sound bite I really liked:

The internet will make you smarter but it won’t make you smart.

The truth is I’m not sure what the inauguration and math have in
common, but I decided this morning that it was important for my grade 7 math class to
watch this historic occasion.  As we sat in the computer lab watching
streaming video live from Washington it occurred to me that this was an
amazing example of the way that technology is changing the nature of
information and how we interact with information.  We watched streaming
video on CBC, but there were a multitude of other ways that we could
have experienced the inauguration.  A good list can be found here.

Other examples of the new ways information is being used and created in the 21st century:

• President Obama has a Blog (just like all of our teachers)
• We can now analyse his speech for word usage and create a visual representation like this one:

In the end we did give it a math spin.  Homework was to
find out how many people were live at the inauguration and then use
mental math to estimate how many times bigger that was than our school population.

I’ve done it.  I finally stood up in front of a group of people and put voice to all the ideas that have been bouncing around in my head and on this blog recently.  It was quite cathartic and I actually felt like I knew what I was talking about.  I gave my presentation after a colleague gave her great presentation on non-fiction literacy and while I think I did manage to touch on some very important topics I realised just before I was about to go up that my presentation had a very big gap in it; in all my big picture thinking I never took the time to think about strategies that my students can use to actually READ the information on a web page.  This is ironic because it was the difficulties my students were having actually reading on a computer screen and sifting through all the words to find the stuff they really needed that got me thinking about literacy in the first place.

So today we had a staff meeting and tried to unpack what the actual things are that we do with our eyes and brains when we skim for information (in order to find the big ideas) and scan for information (in order to find answers).  And this got me thinking about what a skills articulation might look like for non-fiction reading online.  I think it has to start with a teacher or librarian picking good websites that are at an age appropriate level.  These could then get bundled into a google custom search box.  The students would have to be taught how to ask good questions and come up with appropriate keywords for their search.  When they get some hits they should know how to toggle the cache so they can see all their key words highlighted; they should also know how to use the find feature in their web browser to search for further key words.

I think this is just the beginning though.  I need to start modeling for them the strategies I use for reading online, how I scan and decide what is pertinent.  And I need to make sure they get practice at this all the time.

The next step is to introduce them to google notebook, delicious and PLNs, but I think I’ll go one step at a time.

Picture from Flickr by Earl – What I Saw 2.0

In a few days I am going to have a chance to present to our parent body on the subject of Digital Literacy.  My presentation is going to be on the heels of a longer presentation about Literacy in general.  I am excited about this opportunity and feel like the timing couldn’t be better.  We are about to launch our new school intranet based on Wordpress, the teachers are all starting to experiment with blogs and the entire ed tech community seems to be buzzing with great thoughts regarding Digital Literacy.  Here is the description of what I am supposed to be talking about:

The second part will focus on the digital literacy skills your children should be developing so that they can become safe and productive members of our increasingly digital society.  Parents will hear about digital literacy projects Aspengrove School is currently involved with and discuss how parents can help foster these skills at home.

I am finding that my biggest challenge right now is in sorting through all the buzz in my head in order to put together a presentation that will be both eye opening and empowering.  My hope is that by writing my thoughts about this presention down as a blog post I will be able to make my own sense out of all the conversations I have been eavesdropping on.

Part 1: Setting the Stage

I have decided that the main message I want parents to leave the presentation with is that the nature of information today has changed and that we need to add some more Literacy tools to their children’s Literary toolbox so that they are able to interact with digital information in constructive ways.  To get this message across I plan on doing the following:

• Introduce them to the new nature of information by looking at Wikis and Wikipedia and have a discussion about whether they would trust the information on Wikipedia.  After this I will tell them about the study comparing Wikipedia with Encyclopedia Britannica and about Pluto still being a planet in paper based Encyclopedias.  I will show them the discussion and history tabs in Wikipedia and introduce them to the idea of learning and knowledge as a conversation, rather than as a static thing.
• Following on this I will give them the URL of the wiki I have created as a resource for them parents21c.wikispaces.com and explain that I hope this will be a place we can start to share resources regarding Digital Literacy.

Next I want to find a good Presentation Zen way to present the following quote (I still need to find the original source, I got it from the newliteracy wiki), which I want to use to illustrate how radically the nature if information is changing.

In 2006, 5 million gigabytes of new information were added to the world and of that only .01% was printed.

Following on this quote I want to transition to the idea that the way information has changed is having a dramatic impact on the world we are trying to prepare their children for.  I like the following quote,

For the first time in history, our job as educators is to prepare our students for a future that we cannot clearly describe.

This next part is the tricky one.  I want to use this idea that with the future being so uncertain Literacy (both traditional and digital) is vitally important if their children are going to be able to function and participate in the information rich world around them.  I  like this quote from Marshall McLuhan about the ‘rear-view mirror effect’,

We see the world through a rear-view mirror.  We march backwards into the future.

I want the parents to come away from this presentation willing to stop looking backwards at some of the ways that they learned and be able to think openly about the new things that their kids need to learn to be successful in the future.

Part 2: Sharing a Framework for moving forward

I have to admit that while I have been fascinated by the current online conversations on Literacy and documents like the Jenkins White Paper and the MacArthur New Media study I have had a hard time figuring out how to turn this conversation into a working plan I can use in my classroom.  So instead I have decided to introduce Digital Literacy to the parents with this graphic.

I am comfortable with these three different aspects of Digital Literacy because they are all incorporated in my current curriculum to some extent and as such I have relevant examples I can share with the parents.  I am not sure that the Venn Diagram is the best representation, but I like that it shows overlap between the different skills.

Access and Critically Analyse Online Information

I plan to introduce this aspect of Digital Literacy by sharing some of Alan November’s work.  In particular I have found that the REAL strategy he recommends is the most effective tool I have found for quickly determining whether you can trust the information on a website.

To make sure that the parents really understand each of these steps AND the importance of being able to verify the accuracy of information online I will take them through an evaluation of www.martinlutherking.org.

This will be the most hands on part of the presentation and I am a little worried about the trade off between the time it will take and the benefit but I think it is important that people going away feeling like they have learned something they can use right away.  To that effect I am also thinking of taking a minute to show them how to toggle SafeSearch in Google.

Engage in Safe and Constructive Social Networking

This is a part of the presentation that I am really looking forward to because it is the piece I have been thinking about a lot lately as a result of my experiences in the Digiteen project.  The message that I want parents to get from this part of the presentation is that they can`t expect that their children just know how to be safe online because they seem so tech savvy, and that they best way to keep them safe is to engage them in conversation about their online experiences.  One of my experiences in the Digiteen Ning involved coming across innapropriate behaviour in a chat room conversation.  My first reaction was to just delete the chat and exert my teacher “control”, which is I think what a lot of parents want to know “how do I control my childs internet use”?  While there are certainly a number of things a parent can do like making sure the family computer is in a public space in the end they will very likely be out maneuvered if what they want to do is try and control the situation.  This is illustrated really well in some of the Growing Up Online videos produced by PBS.

On the other hand the Digiteen Ning provided me with the tools to set up an asynchronous online discussion about Digital Etiquette as a response to the chat room behaviour and I was absolutely amazed at the number and quality of the responses I recieved.  Similarly I think that for the parents in my presentation to really keep their children safe online they have to take and interest in their online lives and make sure the channels of communication are open.

I would love to wax eloquent about the power of Personal Learning Networks but I think that will have to wait until another time.  Still I feel that there is a piece missing here.  If I am going to talk about Social Networking as a part of Digital Literacy then being able to learn from a network and create a network are an important piece.  Maybe  I can give them Vicki Davis’s latest article in Educause.  I am also thinking of handing out Will Richardson’s article from Educational Leadership entitled ‘Footprints in the Digital Age‘ in an effort to get them thinking about managing their children’s digital footprint instead of trying to ignore it.

Know How to Create and Share Knowledge

I am thinking about showing them this video on the New Media Literacies as a way to show that being able to interact with digital information and communicating what you know by producing more content is another aspect of literacy.  I’m still not sure if this is the best video, my other option is Learning to Change – Changing to learn.

For this section I want to emphasise that the PROCESS of creation is as if not more important than the technical skills involved.  I will talk briefly about the IB MYP Design Cycle and how I am using it in my Technology classes and then I think I will talk about Chris Craft’s Life Round Here 2009 Project which my grade 6’s will be participating in this year.  I might show one of the Photostories they made last year.

Part 3: What’s Next.

Finally I will wrap up by encouraging them to visit the Wiki I have created.  I am also going to start a blog on our private intranet in which I will highlight projects being done at the school that include Digital Literacy skills.

And that’s it.  If you have actually read this far all I can say is WOW.  I would really appreciate comments and feedback of all varieties as I really want this presentation to be a stepping stone on the way to our school becoming a real 21st century school.

I have just finished marking my student’s reflections from last years Digiteen project and am feeling a need to write my own reflection on the project.  In general I was happy with how the project went in my class.  My students learned a lot about web 2.0 communication and collaboration skills, and in some areas their thinking was challenged and learning took place.  In other ways, however, I felt like they were just going through the paces and weren’t authentically engaged in the experience.  When I read through their reflections an obvious thread is that they found the Ning networking experience to be very engaging and empowering, while the Wiki editing experience was not as fruitful.  I have been thinking quite a bit lately about the power of Personal Learning Networks and how they could be introduced in my classroom and I have started to wonder whether there might be a place in the Digiteen project for the Ning to be more front and center in the learning process.

I keep coming back to a recorded breakfast conversation between David Warlick and Steve Dembo that I recently listened to on the way to work.  In it David refers to students needing to learn how to ‘mine the conversation’ and suggests that teachers today need to be ‘master learners’.  These sound bites have really stuck with me as more and more this has become how I learn.  I follow Twitter links and scan my rss reader to find parts of the conversation that relate to my needs and interests and when something catches my attention I drill down deeper bookmarking sites in delicious to come back to and taking notes using google notebook or by pasting them into a wiki.  This has been the most powerful learning experience of my life.  Could we replicate this in a classroom setting using Ning?  If we did it might look something like this:

• Before starting the project all the teachers involved teach their students about tags, rss and get them set up with a feed reader.
• Each student is then assigned the task of becoming an expert on one of the  9 elements of digital citizenship.
• Each expert must review and post a summary of maybe 3 different resources to their blog and tag the posts with tags related to their summaries so that they are searchable.
• Each student then subscribes to feeds from the experts that they think will provide them with the information they need to help them with their final presentations.  There could be an expectation that students comment on each other’s blog posts so that they all get peer feedback.
• There could also be a discussion group started for each topic and the experts on that topic could be assigned the task of starting a discussion thread and moderating the discussion.  The groups could be where students  go to post
  questions in the discussion forum.
  These questions could then be the start of a richer discussion about the
  different aspects of each topic (especially if teachers also join in once in a
  while) and hopefully that these richer discussion would lead to more balanced student perspectives.

I’m thinking I ought to try this within one of my classes to see how it might work.

I was tagged by Cindy Martin (and Errin Gregory too) with the 7 Things Meme.  I was quite pleasantly surprised to be tagged as I think it means that at least one person is reading my blog and is interested in learning a little more about the person behind the often wandering thoughts.  On the other hand I now find myself agonising over what kinds of personal information I want to make public.  There is also a small part of me that wonders who started this meme and for what purpose.  Anyway, here goes:

1. My undergraduate degree is in Biology and at one point I was as passionate about understanding evolution as I am now about understanding the impact technology is having on our schools.  As such I have read The Selfish Gene by Richard Dawkins twice and as far as I know this is where the term meme was first used as a way to describe a self replicating idea.  Dawkins wondered if a meme might evolve in a fashion similar to genes.
2. I once met a man with a sailboat on the coast of Kenya and as I had always wanted to learn to sail I changed my plans to travel overland to South Africa and instead sailed with him up the Red Sea and through the Mediterranean to Gibraltar.  I then got off the boat and went to Morocco to climb Mount Toubkal, the highest mountain in the Atlas Mountain range (because it was there).
3. Prior to becoming a classroom teacher I worked as an Outdoor Educator.  My job was to get kids to try new things in a wilderness setting and then facilitate discussions on topics ranging from group dynamics to environmental ethics.  Now my job seems to be to get kids to stay inside on sunny days and stare at a computer screen.  Sometimes this makes me wonder.
4. I have been hunting with the Inuit and have eaten both raw caribou and seal skin (which has the consistency of tire rubber).
5. I lived in Indonesia for 5 years and was a member of the Hash House Harriers.  This meant that every Tuesday I would go running around in the countryside with other pasty white expats endeavouring to follow a trail of little bits of paper through rice paddies and villages while shouting Òn,On!!  It was great fun.
6. I once considered going on the dole in England so that I could rock climb full time.
7. The first dog I ever owned was a deaf albino Great Dane.  We rescued him from a family in Jakarta that had tied him up in their driveway for a year.

Now I think I am supposed to tag other edubloggers and I find that I can’t.  There are lots of great educators in my very nacent personal learning network that I would be interested in learning more about but I guess I will have to wait for other opportunities.

I got an iTouch for Christmas, and I find it interesting how it has changed the way I interact with information on the internet.

What I like.  More immediate access to Twitter.  Being a parent, partner and teacher keeps me busy enough that I am not in front of my laptop enough to keep on top of all the amazing conversations going on in my Twitter network.  Having the iTouch in my pocket, however, has allowed me to peek in on these conversations more regularly and bookmark the parts I want to comeback to.

In particular I have really enjoyed peeking in on the current conversation regarding literacy.  I first became aware of it when Will Richardson tweeted an invite to this elluminate session, then I came across Ryan Bretag`s blog post summary of his thoughts on `The Great Literacy Debate`.  Finally, this morning I found (via AngelaMaiers on Twitter) this great blog post by Beth Holmes giving some great historical background to the conversation.  I wouldn`t have been aware of any of this without the iTouch.

What I don`t like.  The biggest drawback so far is that I have become much more of a consumer of information and less of a producer.  I find the virtual keyboard on the iTouch difficult to navigate and so find myself reluctant to type much more than a search term or username.  At the same time my laptop is open less as I can now follow conversations and go to websites using the iTouch.

I am also a little put off by the fact that Apple insists on me providing them with a credit card number to get a Apple ID, which I seem to need to download any applications onto my iTouch.  From what I can tell there are a lot of FREE applications that would help me to sync my iTouch with all the cloud computing services I use, but I can`t get them without giving Apple a credit card number.  I will probably break down and sign up for an Apple ID soon, but for the moment I`m going to be quietly indignant and continue to just use the applications it came with.

The Holidays have left me with about four half thought out blog posts and I can’t seem to get myself into the right headspace to finish them off.  I think maybe I’m taking them too seriously, so instead I think it’s time for more of a stream of consciousness post.

I just finished reading Will Richardson’s heads up regarding his Educon 2.1 presentation (oh, how I wish I could go) entitled “What will classroom learning look like?”.  He has collected some great resources on this topic in a google notebook page and asks for the participants in his discussion to peruse them beforehand.  His actual presentation is going to be more of a facilitated group discussion.  What a great idea.  With google notebook it is easy to collect a series of clippings and links on any topic and publish them immediately.  Why aren’t we using this more in the classroom as a way to front load student knowledge before they come to class?

Will’s notebook page led me to a blog post by Mark Pesce called Fluid Learning.  It is a long post and I can’t claim to have read the entire piece but what I came away with was that sites like  ratemyprofessors.com are putting more and more control in the hands of students and leaving less control in the hands of the institutions.  The quotable piece that stuck with me was:

The lesson is simple: control is over. This is not about control
anymore. This is about finding a way to survive and thrive in chaos.

I believe this.  But I’m not sure this is the best message to use to try and empower overworked and unconvinced teachers to try using more technology in their classrooms.