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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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.

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.

This has gotten me thinking about my responsibilities as IT coordinator at my school.  I am in the process of encouraging teachers to use more technology in their classrooms, which by default means they will probably be spending more time working on computers.  The state of our school budget being what it is most of the teachers (myself included) are working on reconditioned computers with old keyboards and mice (mouses?).  A quick survey of teacher desks reveals that most of them have positioned their screen at the side of their desk so they have to turn to see it, and no-one has their keyboard in the correct position.  I am also championing netbooks at our school as a way to move towards 1:1.  The small screens, keyboards and ease with which they can be used anywhere seems to be to be a recipe for repetitive stress injuries.  In light of my recent injuries I believe that this is not sustainable.

I realise that I need to start lobbying our administration to find some money for teacher training and upgrading of keyboards and mice.  It makes no sense to get everyone excited about using technology only to have them all come down with repetitive stress injuries.  I’m curious how other schools and school districts are approaching this issue?  Are there any exemplars out there of schools taking a really proactive approach regarding RSI?

photo by morgret on flickr

hastened and ran out from the lines toward the Philistine

rather than battling toe to toe with Goliath.  Of course, he also chose to fight with a sling and stones rather than swords.

The article then goes on to describe a breathtaking array of examples where the underdog won for two main reasons (the two parts of the insurgent’s creed): being willing to go against the conventions of society (do what is “socially horrifying) and being willing to work harder than anyone else (which takes courage).  In the end victory in these examples came down to effort.

Effort can trump ability – legs … can overpower arms – because relentless effort is in fact something rarer than the ability to engage in some finely tuned act of motor coordination.

Threaded throughout the article is a story about a middle school girls basketball team that enjoyed incredible success despite being inexperienced and not very skilled.  Their secret was the full court press.  In short they tried harder than the other team.  When there was a turnover they didn’t run back to their side of the court to defend, they tried to get the ball back.  They didn’t bother covering the person throwing the ball, instead they focused their energies on getting to the ball before the other players.  They played by their own rules and had incredible success as a result.  The article goes on to describe the career of a college coach called Rick Pitino who went on to use the full court press to win championships with teams that didn’t have many all star, potential NBA, style players on them.  It was obviously a very successful strategy, but it was never widely adopted because it took too much work.  Pitino described his workouts this way:

The players are moving almost ninety-eight percent of the practice.  We spend very little time talking.  When we make corrections they are seven second corrections, so our heart rate never rests.  We are always working.

The implications for how I run my classroom seem obvious.  It’s really such a simple observation that effort and motivation are the keystones of effective learning that I wonder why I don’t always see it?  I can get so caught up in either the content or the particular output that I want them to produce that I am not always asking myself what I am doing to keep them motivated.  Sometimes I am guilty of assuming that if I badger them enough they will somehow find it in themselves to be truly interested in what I want them to learn, when deep down I know that the only really useful thing I have to teach my students is a love of learning.

If we don’t treat motivation as intrinsic (or something that can be turned on and off as a result of badgering my a teacher), then we can start to explore the things that really motivate in a classroom.  I can come up with three:

1. Control.  As I understand it, if our students don’t feel in control of their learning their hypothalamus  has been triggered.  They are in some sort of fight or flight mode.  When this happens information gets backlogged in their “primitive brain” and never makes it to their cortex for processing.  So whatever I teach them will never stick.  Conversely if students feel that they are being listened to and have some control of the process then it stands to reason they will be willing to invest more in the process.
2. Choice.  This is linked to control as having choices helps students feel in control.  Cathy Nunley does a brilliant job with this in her Layered Curriculum Model.  I taught Science with this model for a few year and was amazed at how motivated my students were, I couldn’t stop them working!
3. Value.  In order for effort to be valued there needs to be a reward linked to the effort.  Of course we have grades, but often grades are a mystery and if the direct path from effort to reward is not obvious then how can I expect grades to motivate?  Using rubrics and being clear about grading schemes can obviously help here, but even then grades have very little intrinsic value.  They are all about getting something;  for example, if you get good grades you can go to university.  Portfolios and exhibitions are a lot more work than just giving grades but it seems to me that the social aspect of the feedback received in these situations carries a lot more value than grades.

Finally, I wonder how all this will play out as more and more courses go online?  In my experience online courses are wonderful for students who are already motivated and willing to put in the effort.  But if I don’t physically have the student in my classroom, what can I do to motivate them to buy into the “full court press”?

Photo by Sebastia Giralt on Flickr

21st Century Pedagogy by Marco Torres

21st century schools with Stephen Heppell

Some great presentation zen style slideshows by Kim Cofino.

The 21st Century Learner

The 21st Century Educator

I recently came across a post by Kim Cofino called The Next Generation Conference that I think had some more practical insights into what makes for a really successful pro-d event.  She suggests that in order for a conference to be exciting, engaging and community-building it needs to include the following:

We need to make conferences more practical, not just hands on training with new tools, but a focus on the actual creation of something that bridges new learning with what you already know, and asks you to create something useful.

I agree completely.  I think the trade off is that creating something new and meaningful takes time and often at a conference or training session participants and organisers are focused on filling up the time with as much content as possible.  Often when I am at a conference I feel frustrated when 3 sessions I want to attend all happen at the same time and I can’t get to them all.  I feel like my role as a participant is to be a gatherer of content.  If I was asked to enage in meaningful creation and collaboration at a conference then I think I would get frustrated because I wouldn’t be able to collect as much “stuff”. In order for me to be able to by into a pro-d opportunity that focusses on creation I would need to be prepped to go into the entire process with a different attitude.  So how can that happen?

I would love to see a conference where attendees were grouped the first day, and spent the whole conference reconnecting in various formats with a group leader.

All groups could have an ongoing task that lead you through the conference, asking participants to put their new knowledge to work, building on each plenary and presentation session, and then culminating in the production of something practical and useful during a hands on workshop time.

In order to ensure that there was enough cross-pollination across all conference attendees, the group action projects could be structured in such a way that each group is required to interact with members from the other groups in order to complete their project.

I really like this idea beacause it gives the conference/pro-d attendees a framework for thinking about and using their new knowledge.  It also spreads out the group/creation process over a longer period and intersperses it with plenary sessions and practical sessions that would make me feel like I was getting my money’s worth out of the event.

Students could do … sessions on how to use new tools or on what they’re doing with technology outside of school, or what they’d like to see in school (imagine that?). What about having students as experts on a panel discussion of what schools should be doing with technology? Or how technology has changed the way they receive, create and distribute information?

This one has gotten me thinking.  At my school we have some older students that use technology in incredibly savvy ways (they are linus experts, run their own web servers, jail break their iphones) and they tell us that they don’t see technology being a big part of their schooling because they don’t think we can catch up with them.  It would be great to have them involved in helping train and tutor teachers on how to use new tools.  This would have two potential benefits: 1) Teachers would become more aware of how these tools are an integral part of many of their student’s lives and 2) It would free up time for more big picture discussions around curriculum and pedagogy.

No matter how much you know about a topic, there is always a need for discussion after an engaging session. After each session, a group leader could facilitate an unconference style discussion, with a focus question or Visible Thinking routine to get people processing the information.

It’s amazing to me that this doesn’t happen more often.  In our classrooms we are always talking about Blooms Taxononomy and Constructivism but when it comes to our own learning we often default to the lowest level of Blooms.  Maybe it’s because that’s the way many of us were taught and it’s the mode we are the most comfortable with.

Picture by netopNyrop on Flickr

After enjoying a brief few months as a prolific beginner blogger life seems to have gotten in the way and the blogging momentum has tanked.  I suspect that this is a common trend amongst us blogging newbies and I think that, in my case at least, part of the difficulty has been in taking myself too seriously.  I enjoyed blogging a lot more when I used my blog as a platform for thinking and trying out ideas, rather than as a place to store fully formed thoughts.

I suspect that the shift towards “serious blogging” stems from the fact that I am trying to write posts that I can cross post between Tech Eddy and my school blog, and the school influence is pushing me towards “seriousness” and “finished” rather than “work in progress”.  I prefer “work in progress”.

So, in the spirit of thinking out loud … recently David Warlick wrote a post about 21st Century Literacies in which he quotes James Paul Gee:

In my view, in the twenty-first century we need the following—and we need them fast and all at once together: embodied empathy for complex systems; “grit” (passion + persistence); playfulness that leads to innovation; design thinking; collaborations in which groups are smarter than the smartest person in the group; and real understanding that leads to problem solving and not just test passing.  These are, to my mind, the true twenty-first century skills.

I found this a refreshing change from the usual topics normally associated with 21st Century Literacy, so I wanted to try and unpack a few of these ideas.

embodied empathy for complex systems

The world we live in and the problems we face are all really complex.  In my experience as long as a teacher tries to be the repository of knowledge they will end up simplifying the issues and students will end up with a limited understanding of the problems and a very simple ideas regarding the solutions.  The only way we can really help students understand the complexity around us is to allow for messiness and “not knowing’ in our classrooms.

“grit” (passion + persistence)

It seems to me that it is easier than ever these days to find a community that shares and can support your passion, but I was recently in a staff meeting where I was told that universities are complaining that kids these days are lazy (read lack of persistence).  I’m not so sure.  I think that kids learn differently and have different expectations regarding the ease with which they can access information, but I’m not sure that equals laziness.  I do wonder though whether the ease with which my students can use technology to access information makes it more difficult for them to learn persistence.  If they can’t google it or find it on Wikipedia they are apt to give up.

playfulness that leads to innovation

This is all about not taking yourself too seriously so that you aren’t afraid to make mistakes (sort of what this blog post is about).  You have to be willing to make and learn from mistakes to innovate.

design thinking

I think that embedding the design cycle into all my lessons has been one of the best changes to my teaching practice, ever.  Why?  Because I can see my students starting to look at what they are producing and asking themselves “Is this the best solution to the problem?” rather than “Is this going to get me an A?”  Ok, this might be a bit of an exageration.  They still want that A.

collaborations in which groups are smarter than the smartest person in the group

This is the next step I want to take in my classroom and school, I’m just not quite sure how.  The past year of blogging, tweeting and being involved in a flat classroom project have convinced me on a personal level of the power of personal learning networks.  Now I have to figure out how to gently introduce these concepts to my students and teaching colleagues.

real understanding that leads to problem solving and not just test passing

The first thing that comes to mind when I read this is YES, but “how do you measure this?”.  In my technology classes I can honestly say that I do teach this 21st century skill.  It’s all about project based learning.  But my math class is a different place.  I want to teach real understanding, but sometimes and for some students the rules have to come first and the understanding later.  And sometimes real understanding is what helps them pass a test.  I still struggle with this one.

Photo by by FotoRita [Allstar maniac] on Flickr

I decided that before starting my students needed to know the difference between a Radio Story and a Written Story.  As a class we listened to a great Twilight Zone Story and discussed how it was different than a written story.  We agreed that dialogue, sound effects and music were all important.

They then needed to know how to:

• Record each part of their story as different tracks in Audacity.  In particular I needed them to understand that they didn’t need to record their story in a linear fashion and that each section should be a seperate track.
• Find and download royalty free music and sound effects from the internet and import these effects into Audacity.
• Use the editing tools in Audacity to tidy up audio and insert effects.

To practice these skills we recorded a version of the Lion and Mouse story as a class.  I then took the raw recording and mixed up the tracks before saving it to our shared server along with some pre-selected music and sound effects.  The student’s investigation task was to re-order the tracks,take out all pauses, level the audio, and import the music and sound effects.  Those that finished early used some of my favourite free sound sites to find extra music and sound effects.  Finally they all had to export their story as a .wav file.

Design/Plan

All my students had written English Stories so their first task was to look at all the stories their group members had written and decide on which story would make the best radio play.  A big factor here was which story had the most dialogue.  We learned last year that a story that is mostly a descriptive narrative makes for a fairly unimaginative radio story.

To plan the recordings I assigned the following tasks:

• Open a copy of the story you want to record in Word. Double space and change the margins so there is lots of room for notes. Print a copy for each member of your group.
• As a group decide on which parts of the story you will record in one sitting and indicate this on your scripts.  Next year I am going to have them break the story up into the same number of sections as they have group members and assign each group member to be the Project Manager for their section.  As Project Manager they will have the resposibility for organising roles and responsibilities, making sure files are named and organised properly and backed up on our server.
• Brainstorm sound effects that would be good as either background to each scene or to emphasize a particular event. Make notes in your scripts.
• Split up the work of finding music and sound effects and start searching for all the audio files you will need.

Create

During this stage each group was given an eeepc with Audacity on it and a set of our Logitech recording headphones and they all went off to find a quiet place to record their stories.  This was the stage at which difficulties started to arise.  Instead of being able to circulate and check in that each group was on track and offering suggestions I was constantly helping the students troubleshoot technical issues.  I think the way around this next time would be to have each group do a training recording with me before sending them off on their own.  The bonus of these difficulties is that my students learned a lot about troubleshooting technical and file management issues.

Once the raw recordings were finished each group member was responsible for editing and adding effects to a different part of the Audacity project (this was their individual mark).  These different parts were then all imported into one Audacity project and exported as a .wav file for me to assess.

This was a really challenging project and there were times that I told myself `never again`, but after listening to the great work my students produced and reflecting on all the unexpected learning outcomes that came out of this experience I am committed to doing it again next year.  The lesson learned for me is that when embarking on ambitious technology projects with youger students it is VITALLY IMPORTANT to have thought through all the possible technical hurdles so that they can focus on the creativity and not get sidetracked by the technology.

I haven’t quite finished reading, but these are my take-away ideas so far:

• The reason that technology has not had a significant impact on student learning so far is that it has been implemented within the existing school framework and as such it has managed to improve how schools do what they do (teach to the middle; motivate extrinsically; teach to certain intelligences) but it has not helped the populations of students that traditionally don’t do well at school.  Christensen suggests that in order to for technology to transform education and truly help students individualise their school experience it needs to be introduced in the areas where the present framework doesn’t apply (what he calls the nonconsumers).  It is here that the technology can come into it’s own, the glitches can be worked out and it’s true transformative effects can be showcased.  Once they have proven their worth these technologies will work their way from the fringes into the center of our school systems, thereby disrupting the old paradigm.  They see online/e-learning as the area where disruptive technologies will work their way into our school systems.  This argument made a lot of sense to me and I wondered whether the same approach might work with teachers trying to use technology in their classrooms; if they first used technology to address a part of their classroom practice that they were unhappy with then they might be more willing to take a risk and try something new.
• In the future web 2.0 tools will allow everyone to be a teacher and everyone to be a learner.  They envision a future in which the online tools for creating content are sophisticated enough to allow anyone to create content and share it online.  This content would be modular so that different bits from different places could be fit together to create personalised lessons and courses that meet each student’s individual learning needs.  They see this content as being produced by and for a “user network” that drives the creation of new content and rates existing content.  This is a really powerful vision and I know that I haven’t done it justice.  I really liked the idea that in this context students become teachers of other students.  There was great quote along the lines of: “Teaching
  something is the best way to learn because you have to format material in a
  way consistent with your intelligence type”, that I really agree with.

I’ve been trying to figure out what this modular, user generated online learning environment could look like in the context of the tools available today, these are my ideas so far:

• Blog posts and Podcasts on certain topics could be aggregated into an online course assuming they are tagged in a way that they can be found.
• Mathcasts could be created by students in one class and rated could be used by other students to learn.
• Online flashcards like at Quizlet can be created by one user, improved by others and then shared with the rest of the community.
• Wiki pages on different topics can be created and shared by teams of students.

I have to admit I have found this vision of individualised learning facilitated by web 2.0 tools and user networks very compelling.  The piece that is still missing for me is the motivation and study skills needed for a student to be successful in an online environment.  This was really brought home to me recently when I read these blog posts by Ken Allen and Claire Thompson.