I went to a conference two weeks ago, and I am still sitting on my “what I learned at (insert conference name here)” post.  It’s not that I didn’t take anything away that is worth squawking about, nor that I haven’t the time to write about it, because, let’s face it, so few of us do anymore.  It’s rather that I’ve been trying to find the way to say it without ruffling the feathers of those who put on conferences all over.

There shouldn’t be any educational technology conferences anymore.

Oh great.  Now it’s out there.  There goes any chance I ever had at presenting at ISTE (or NECC, or whatever it’s next iteration will be).

While I truly love the conference I am speaking of, being that the first time I attended was one of the biggest eye-opening events of my career a few years back, something has changed around the world of education and educational conferences.   What’s changed is not the technology–that’s a given.  What’s changed is that we now ask different questions than we did before. The more “Ed Tech” conferences I attend, the  more I see people there who don’t need to be there.  If we are talking about real change in education, the kind that makes nervous people of those with big jobs in big companies that depend on education as a market, than we’ve got to get different people here.

Instead of the word technology or educational technology being mentioned anywhere in the nomenclature of the conference, why don’t we focus on student learning.

If you can’t show me (preferably with live students) how what you are talking about is credible, gets kids excited to learn, and allows them to share their learning with whomever wants to be a part of it, I don’t know if I am interested.

I know this has been said before, and many times here in this space, but it’s not teaching with technology, or learning with technology, or educational technology.  It’s just teaching, just learning, and just education.  It’s here, it’s your computer connected to the world, and it makes your job easier.  And if  the educational technologist in your district would just let you know about these conferences, it might just become very clear to you.

It’s becoming increasingly clear that these conferences need to recognize the fact that we moved beyond just inviting directors of technology, technology coordinators, or higher-level administrators, but rather classroom teachers, students, and even community stakeholders.

These things we call relationships, they are funny things when it comes to our professional lives.  Regardless of what field you are in, you started in that field somewhere.  Depending on where you are now in said field, there are those who you started with in certain positions that either still hold those positions, or have moved on to other responsibilities.  It’s just the nature of what we do, whether that be public sector or private sector.

How you handle that relationship matters a whole lot to your success.

Or does it?

I just wrote this in response to a teacher who reacted to an article I sent out to her department entitled “7 Bad Writing Habits You Learned in School:”

That’s precisely the question I want everyone thinking about. We truly focus so much of our energies on getting the format down and getting the “i’s” dotted and “t’s” crossed, and for many of the students we teach, that is completely necessary; however, as we begin to look at the next phase of what we’d like to do in the district which includes more than just being “proficient” on some state test, can we blend some of the thinking in this post into what we are doing.

And as for making people angry, my advice is that you don’t get the results you really want without making a few people angry along the way. Not that you try to, but when you know that what you are doing will make your students better, you just go with it.

She was asking whether or not it was all right to go forward with some of the ideas in the article, even if it angered some of her colleagues.  My response can be boiled down to very few words: “hell yes.”

We don’t propagate change in systems unless we are ready to have battles that we know will end up with feelings being hurt.  This is a fact that I am still warming to, as it is very contrary to my personality, and since I am creating change at the curriculum level in a district in which I originally taught.  When I think of the alternative, though, I can use that to gather the strength necessary to move forward with the type of thinking that will lead to the schools we need.

Yes, we can create change without alienating everyone on the bus, but there are times when we need to be strong enough in our convictions to say “yes, your voice has been heard and your input factored into the decision, but we need to move forward with this decision.”  Or, more simply, this is how we have decided it has to be done.  In no circumstances would I advocate a lack of explanation behind the decision, nor sound research supporting that decision.  When moving schools forward, we must always ask ourselves, regardless of the position we hold within that school, “does this help/hurt kids.”  Once we have that determined, the rest falls into place.

Image Credit: “Invasion/Relation” from colinwhite’s photostream

It’s now a few days since my presentation at TechForum Northeast, and judging by the lack of hate-mail or the searches I’ve conducted on all the available backchannels, I didn’t offend anyone too greatly.  Although, by traditional standards, I may just be the worst presenter ever.

I have to admit, and I did so to open the session, presenting at EduCon has changed the way I view conferences. The format asked for at EduCon, from the start, has been conversational; the standard role of presenter is completely changed to that of facilitator, and that changes the way you prepare. Personally, it becomes a situation in which I completely invert the presenter-presentee experience.  Instead of pursuing the traditional “I speak, you listen” model, the ruling ethos has become

The smartest person in the room, is the room.

-David Weinberger

As I have prepared for the last few presentations I have given I am forced to keep asking the same question: How do you get a group of concerned educators together in a room and just deliver the message are asked to  deliver without turning them loose on one another?

Very simply, you don’t.

You ask pointed questions, and then listen, and listen very closely to what they say.

Think about where you are when you give a presentation, or view a presenter at a conference.  You are in the company of many passionate educators, those passionate enough to travel a distance to learn more about their craft, and most likely lose class time with their students.  Who holds the knowledge in that situation?  The speaker?  perhaps.  But what I am banking on when I present, and this may cancel every proposal I submit over the next few months, is that the best information you will gain from being at a conference is from the people who are there attending alongside you.

That is not to say that I have no role in the learning that goes on in these presentations.  There had to have been something in the idea I had in pitching the presentation in the first place, and there had to be some direction in which I intended the pretty slides I prepared to move in, right?

But would I have ditched all of it to have a great conversation about how to make the schools we work in into the schools we want to work in?  You bet.  My role for them was to put in place the interaction pieces so that they could construct something of value for themselves.

This model should sound familiar…but does it?

Image credits:

“January 25th 2008 – The word for the day is “knowledge”, pass it on,” Stephen Poff

“The Seven Principles of Learning,” dkuropatwa’s set on Flickr

This is just great.

We have a problem in our district that most of you probably have: we do not have enough teachers to do what we really want to do.  We have classes we’d like to make smaller, classes we’d like to offer more sections of, classes that we dream of creating, and classes that we used to offer that we can no longer staff.

This year, the issue arose with our 5th grade Introduction to World Languages program.  Due to schedule changes at both our high school and middle school, the teachers that had in the past traveled to 5th grade from those two buildings to introduce the students to four additional languages they can study at the 6-12 level (they have Spanish from K-4th grades) could no longer travel as the times they are available didn’t match up to the elementary schedules.

We’ve spent the better part of the last two years increasing the minutes that our students spend learning languages in the middle and high school, and to do that we moved the Introductory program to the 5th grade thereby having our 6th graders choose a language to study for their middle school years.  Eliminating it was not an option, but realistically nothing was working out for us.

Last year, I reluctantly met with a sales rep from Rosetta Stone.  I am not big on proprietary software systems like Rosetta Stone; I find them cumbersome most of the time, but this one was different for a few reasons.  First, it reminded me of how the Florida Virtual School worked in that there is the element of individual pacing, and secondly that it may work for students who don’t traditionally perform well within the classroom.  I saw potential for its use all over the district.  After that meeting, I eagerly brought the demo back to a few members of the department to see what they thought of it.  Most dismissed it outright, but some were intrigued, so the idea got put on the back burner.

When our scheduling issues came to a head this summer and it was made clear that we could either move the Introductory program back to the middle school and steal a year away from the focused study of one language, or find a solution that would allow the students to experience the four languages before making a decision to study one further in middle school, out came Rosetta Stone once again.

This past Tuesday, I worked with the four teachers from our department (Russian, German, Mandarin, and French) to create custom curriculum within our web-based launch of Rosetta Stone.  Some of these teachers were among those that initially balked at the idea, so I was interested to see what their reaction was once they were immersed in it.  Their task was to be a student and go through as much of level 1 as possible, then change hats and become the designers of that curriculum.  Rosetta Stone allows you to modify their existing curriculum for their languages, or create your own curriculum entirely.

Their reaction?  Let’s just say it’s going to be hard pressed to keep our licensing agreement intact–they want to use it in the other schools they teach in.  They loved the idea that they could create rich, dynamic curriculum and learning environments for students and get accurate, timely feedback on their progress.  Plus, each of our students is going to be able to progress through the languages at their own pace, and on their own time.  Due to the time constraints that our school day places on language learning in 5th grade, which only allows for 35 minutes per week, these students are going to be asked to work on these languages outside of school.   Having access to their learning via the web goes a long way toward respecting the time of the students.

I am not affiliated with Rosetta Stone, nor do I think it’s a perfect product; however, what I do think of when I see our teachers working in this environment is a glimpse into what schools can look like in any subject area when quality learning environments are created both online and off.  What I am finding in working with more and more teachers on projects like this that change the perceptions of teachers and traditional learning is that what we all can agree on are the elements of that need to be in place for learning to happen.  Whether or not those elements look exactly like what we’ve all grown up with is not important to most.

How much information is too much?

That’s a question that has been flying around not only my own head over the last few weeks, but also the departments with which I work.  We are moving toward an open gradebook whereby students and parents will have access to grades online.  Yes, I know, for many of you this is old hat; however, as many of you also may remember, it didn’t occur without significant conversation around how it was going to be done (or maybe not).  We are in the beginning stages of getting our teachers ready for it, and in speaking with teachers about the process, there is considerable trepidation about how much information parents should have, and whose responsibility is it to make sure they have that information.

For better or for worse, we rely on our students to act as portals to their parents when it comes to giving updates on their progress, and when that system fails, we then access parents directly either via the phone or now through email.  In past years, I may have included the traditional handwritten note in that group, but we are talking mainly middle and high school students here, and it is a well-researched fact that there is a cut-off point for when students cease bringing home paper documents from school in their weekly folders.  That cut-off point is sometime around October of their 5th grade year.  Does the use of web-based grading systems step in at this point and provide that solution for the failed communication between school and home?

Not entirely.  Just as I feel that we can never have a completely virtual schooling systems in which there is no personal contact, there can never be a portal that parents and teachers can rely on all of the time, regardless of the information displayed there.  However, I truly feel that making student grades and student attendance available 24/7 does much more harm than good for relationships between schools and communities.

The pushback we are receiving is coming in the form of increased pressure on teachers to get grading done in a timely manner.  In most math classes, it’s not such a big deal, but in AP Literature and other writing-based classes, the issue of how long a teacher has to grade a major paper becomes a thorny issue.  How long does it take to grade two sections worth of five-page essays?  How long does it take to grade a senior research project?  Two weeks?  a month?  In addition, the conversations around personal grading styles is now put in the spotlight.  If a parent can now see exactly how “teacher A ” grades compared to “teacher B,” they may begin to wonder why they are so different.  Why was Johnny weighted so heavily in participation as a sophomore in US History, but not at all as a junior in US History II?

When we moved to providing every teacher with a web page, it made it possible to post everything you handed out in class, effectively building out the excuse made by students that they didn’t have the “handout” or the notes.  Not every teacher did this, but it certainly was possible.  Philosophically, some disagreed with it, saying that it fostered no accountability by students to pay attention in class.  That’s flawed thinking, in my book.  Build out the excuses: if they have access to the documents from school or home, their reasoning is not plausible.  The same is true, I feel, for gradebooks.  By eliminating the unknown, as in how their child is doing, you are removing that from the table when discussing a child’s progress with parents.  Instead of “I was shocked to see that he is failing,” the conversation can begin with other terms, such as “how do we get him to do the work?”

I understand that opening up your processes to public scrutiny may feel like an attack on autonomy, but that is not where we are going with this.  Getting a group of intelligent, well-educated individuals who care about the success of kids to talk about their instructional practices, especially assessment, will move mountains.  It will begin to change the culture of a building.

If you have done this in your district, what input did teachers have on determining the policies behind the implementation and what parents see?  I’d like to have a few ideas so that when I begin working with teachers, I can offer suggestions as to how they should proceed.

Cross posted at Techlearning.com

Dean Shareski posted this photo recently.  Created by Will Lion, it aptly states what many of us have felt, and helped teachers and students deal with.

A while back, in the throes of a bout of information tsunami, I lamented the fact that I couldn’t keep up, and as Dean states, it really wasn’t me that was failing, but rather the structures that I set up.  Dina Strasser stated as much in the comments on that post when she said:

Consider the parallels to so much of our current curricula. Do our kids think better when we hand them breadth, not depth? So too with blog readers and other social media. You will not miss out on anything if you prune them. On the contrary, your thought will have that much more room to flourish, and seize upon the truly novel and challenging ideas that deserve your attention. Decide what your true upper limit of information is (ten blogs? fifty followers? more? less?)– in otherwords, how much you can take in at a sitting before feeling overwhelmed. Then make a commitment to stick to those limits. You may even wish to abandon some one or two media wholesale. Blogging and Facebook are it for me, for example. Twittering left me with mental caffeine-overdose-like shakes and I had to unsubscribe.

It is now much more for me about making very quick decisions about what information I have time for, and just letting go of the rest.  Much like the changes in my department this year (we are no longer in charge of the IT within the district–more on that at a later juncture), it’s difficult to not have all of the answers or to not be the one who reads all the posts or links.  That’s what the filters are for.

Dean recommends using others to help you find out what is important–the re-tweeting aspect is one I hadn’t thought of, but will use now.  Each morning, I sift through both my reader and the links from the various Diigo groups I belong to.  Between those two sources, I think I am keeping myself abreast of what is happening within my sphere, or as Dean suggests, my niche.

Tagged: deanshareski, dinastrasser, filterfailure, information, overload, theline, twitter ]]> http://chalkdust101.wordpress.com/2009/09/14/worth-spreading-around/feed/ 2 pjhiggins Firehydrant http://chalkdust101.wordpress.com/2009/09/11/the-embedded-curriculum/ http://chalkdust101.wordpress.com/2009/09/11/the-embedded-curriculum/#comments Fri, 11 Sep 2009 18:10:09 +0000 pjhiggins http://chalkdust101.wordpress.com/?p=1149 ]]>

(Caveat: I haven’t written anything worthwhile in some time, so I apologize for this post’s and any subsequent posts’ inherent lack of quality voice.  These writing muscles are near atrophied.)

This phrase has often been spoken of as the aspects of your curriculum you don’t explicitly state as your objectives: socialization, team-building, self-expression, etc.  These are the words that don’t fit neatly into state standards documents.

After spending my spring and summer of this past year creating and editing new curriculum for over twenty new courses, I am noticing something else in regards to the term “embedded curriculum.”  It’s the ability to get students the tools they need.  It’s not an add-on anymore.  It’s necessary and vital to the success of not only the programs we create for them, but to their success after they leave us.

In our district, every teacher from grades six through twelve has a laptop (either a tablet PC, a MacBook, or a standard laptop), so at that level we have put tools in the hands of the teachers.  We’ve automated and digitized much of their administrative tasks: our SIS handles all grading, scheduling, attendance, conduct, and record-keeping, all lesson plans are done via our online lesson planner, we have more than half of our K-12 population with Moodle accounts, our Google Apps will be up and running in days, and I could go on.

But what does it all mean?

Our teachers are very wired, but our kids don’t have the same access.

For the most part.

We’ve begun the “Great Netbook Experiment,” in twelve of our classrooms at the middle school.  Initial returns are positive, but I haven’t seen the dynamic change yet.  What does your classroom look like when you have ten laptops that are always available?  How does your teaching change?  How can your students learn differently?  These are questions I need answers to before I go heavy in that direction.

Recently, we’ve been interviewing for another position in the district, and one of the candidates really hooked me when he stated that the next big hurdle for schools was to put the power to learn back into the hands of students.  For me, that means moving the focus from giving the teachers the technology towards putting it in the hands of the students.

So when I sit down this year to re-create our Journalism class, my focus is going to be on giving these students the tools of new media specialists, the kind that Mark S. Luckie speaks about in his new book, “The Digital Journalist’s Handbook.” When I sit down to work with our Mandarin Chinese teacher to formalize his curriculum from 6-12, I’ll ask him which tools he’ll need to make his student successful.  Wacom Tablets?  Headsets for conversing?  We have to start tipping the scales in favor of the question “what could they do if they had…” and go from there.  If there is no money for it, fine.  But at least let’s start there.

Warning: somewhat of a tech bend to this post.

Last week, while I was on vacation we had a huge server meltdown.  While I am not an IT guy, I do understand some of the implications of what that means.  For example, our student information system (a great little product called Genesis), our wireless Internet radios, our Moodle courses, and many of our other essential services experienced outages that slowed workplace productivity to a crawl.  While it was a great week to be on vacation, it did bring to light some very glaring issues.

Jim Moulton, over at The Future of Education is Here, writes about a March article in eSchoolnews that cited:

Only 31 percent of respondents said their districts have enough IT staff to satisfy their needs; that’s up only marginally from 27 percent in last year’s survey. And 55 percent of those polled–the same percentage as last year–said they spend more than half their time reacting to technical problems, instead of working proactively on long-range planning and projects.

IT staffs in schools are traditionally understaffed.  In most districts I’ve been in, the ratios between number of IT staff and machines to service, not to mention servers and systems, is outrageous.  When issues like the one we ran into last week occur, an overworked staff becomes increasingly stressed.

Last October at TechForum Northeast, I was fortunate enough to sit on a panel with David Warlick in which we discussed some hurdles to implementation of new thinking in schools.  One teacher from the audience lamented, much as Jim did in his post, that the tech staff in his building are guarded and unwilling to allow for teachers to experiment with open-source technologies for fear of corruption to the network.  If, this audience member suggested, teachers are expected to push the limit on what they can have students achieving in the classroom, should they be constrained by an IT staff that does not have the best interest of the students in mind?

It’s an interesting dichotomy, the students v. IT staff one, isn’t it?  On the one hand we have students who are growing up in a world where 11-year olds make huge profits by designing iPhone apps, and on the other we have them working in school environments that can’t give them access to the types of tools that would let them create such apps.

At the tale end of Jim’s post, he presents a solution, one that I have heard via Gary Stager and Sylvia Martinez in the past: give the students the ability to aid the IT department.  We are not talking giving them access to the firewall, or the major components of the infrastructure, but rather allow them to handle basic repairs, quick imaging and system setups so that the IT staff can begin doing some of their own imaginative work.

Be sure to check out her list of GenYes Schools where this solution is actually in place.

I have not been a contributor to any of those whom I rely on for inspiration in quite some time.  This space, twitter, any of the Ning’s I belong to–all of them have been foreign to me.  While a good many of the teachers who find it difficult to contribute during the year have truly blossomed (I have been reading) in their comments and reflections during these summer months, there hasn’t been much for me to say.  Or, I haven’t had the motivation or the open thinking space in my days to make the effort.

See, I’ve reached a saturation point of sorts that I have been ignoring for a few weeks.  My influx of information is at an all-time high; more resources, conversations, and ideas come at me on a daily basis than I ever thought possible when I started down this road a few years back, but my ability to handle them has not kept up.  I need some pruning, and, actually, I need some tips on how to handle this overload.

Gasp.

A short time ago, I would have scoffed at the notion that I needed to figure out a way to handle all of the information coming my way.  RSS, Diigo, social networks, etc. was a rush.  Every day, sometimes multiple times a day I would gather the newest round of articles, links, quotes, or whatever my manual trolling brought in.  Not so any more.  I’ll admit it, I can’t keep up.  There are too many of you now that have great ideas.

So I ask, what is the next level?  I feel like I’ve just worked so hard to attain access to the Dragon Scroll, yet I don’t have enough inner knowledge to understand its message.  Can anyone point me to resources that attack this next level of information mastery?  Who has great systems in place for being discretionary about information?