Future of Education

I would like to share my experience last night. I umpire high school baseball. Over the last few years I have been assigned more and more varsity level games. Last night I was assigned a game between two of the better teams in central Ohio. I was exited to get the game, but once I got to the game I became very anxious. As I pull into the parking lot, there sits a production van for a local cable network, Columbus Sports Network. Think of it as ESPN for central Ohio.

This was a positive and negative to me. The coach in me was excited that I could go home, set the DVR (they are playing the game 7 times this week and putting it on the local on demand channel) and have footage to be able to evaluate my work. The human in me was anxious because any mistakes I made would be shown in slow motion over and over.

Skipping to the end of the story…It was a great game, 10 innings 5-2 final score. My partner and I did a great job. Every close call received some oohs and ahhs from the crowd, 50% of the people always think you are wrong (high school parents can be brutal). I look forward to seeing the game to find out if I was right on all of my calls.

Now what I took from this as an educator. How do 15-18 year-olds handle playing on TV. The coach told me the station had been working in the school for a week. Interviewing players and learning all about them. When I asked how the kids handled the distraction, the coach told me it was harder for the coaches than the players. It once again show the difference between these kids and us. If I knew a week in advance I was going be playing on TV, I wouldn’t have slept. They want to be published, to be on TV, and on the Internet. Lets keep pushing to get them there. When our students work hard, they deserve the recognition they get by being “published.”

Yesterday I had the pleasure of presenting to a group of administrators of career technical schools. The presentation was in the form of a round table discussion around the topic of using wiki’s in education. This is the first time I have ever done a session directed towards administrators. It was an eye opening experience.

These administrators were very interested in how the technology can be used. They asked great questions, and I thank them for inviting me to be part of their professional development event. I believe I may have learned something more importaint than any of them did. As we try to get teachers to see the value of web 2.0 tools, we need to put a little more focus on getting administrators to see their value.

My new goal (I realy need to stop adding to this list) is to teach administrators how to use blogs, wikis, etc… as communications and collaboration tools. As they learn to use these tools, it will model for teachers how powerful these tools can be.

So my current goal list is:

• Do a better job of doing my job (should always be number one for all of us)
• Teach in a 1:1 environment (one computer per student)
• Get administrators to model how to effectively use web 2.0 tools
• Get teachers to effectively use web2.0 tools.

Now the challenge, how do I get the ear and time of the administrators? Off to start.

It is nice to be back to my blog again. After a week of making websites with 7th graders (very cool project, check out the final products). I have a few minutes free.

Life has been good over the last week. I found out my job isn’t being cut (this year), created the websites mentioned above and saw the Columbus Destroyers (Arena Football) win a game. Why did I mention the game? After the game my friends and I are sitting and listening to a band, interesting funk band at that. The table next to us are a bunch of kids (early 20’s) snapping pictures. I overhear this statement made from one of the young ladies to a young man: “what is your name? I’ll tag it.” Our kids are living in a world where they know what tags are and how to use them. How many teachers know what a tag is? How many teachers have even heard of a tag? I asked a teacher what a tag is in regards to technology and the reply was “is that the sticker with the number on the side of the computer?” A tag to a teacher is a sticker we use to identify the computer in our inventory. This comment stresses to me that we have a lot of teaching to do, not just to our students, but to our teachers.

 The question being when? With it being testing season finding time is tough. Everything right now is “I can’t till after the test.” UGH

In the world of failed school levies and 4 million dollars in cuts, union negotiations, and all the other “stuff” that negatively effects our schools, I need a positive moment. Here is my dream school.

Every student has a computing device with wireless access. To make this even more of a utopia, they have wireless access to the network from home also. Every teacher has a laptop, smartboard and projector. All of these teachers have spent days of professional development time preparing themselves to engage their students in a 1:1 environment. The teachers are also given 2 periods per day for planning and professional development.

Gone are the days of the teacher speaking at the students for 50 minutes about something they truly could care less about. The students are creating content: wikis, blogs, videos, podcast, social networking sites, etc… The assignments are project based, not memorize these facts based.

My roll in this classroom will be very similar to what it is now. Ongoing training and support of how to seamlessly embed the technology into their lessons. When a teacher needs help, I will plan with them and go into their classroom and help.

Hopefully one day soon I will live in this utopia. There will always be issues and problems, but I hope we solve the big ones that exist today (at least in my district and state) very soon. 

My new motto (needs work)…”It’s not about the technology, it is about teaching and learning. The technology will allow us to change how we teach and improve the students learning.”

I struggle with the idea of filtering vs teaching. I believe we filter way to much and educate way too little. I’ll leave the rest of that thought for another post. I found this article to be very interesting. The article, quoted below, talks about how we are overdoing the “Internet is a dangerous place” talks.

“One of the biggest surprises in making this film was the discovery that the threat of online predators is misunderstood and overblown. The data shows that giving out personal information over the Internet makes absolutely no difference when it comes to a child’s vulnerability to predation.” (That one blew my mind, because every single Internet-safety Web site and pamphlet hammers repeatedly on this point: never, ever give out your personal information online.)

Read the entire NYTimes article

Any thoughts or reactions?

Here are my current favorite 5 sites.

1. Delicious How did I manage when I kept my bookmarks on the computers I was working on. I suggest everyone learn to use it today. It makes life a lot easier!
2. Netvibes If you don’t use an aggregator, or don’t know what one is, let me know and I will get you started. Everything I look at on the web is all gathered in one place.
3. Yahoo Free mail–Great place to send all the junk. Fun desktop widgets too.
4. CBS Sportsline What would the world be without fantasy sports
5. Wordpress and Edublogs These are categorized as blogging sites, but they are so much more. You can create entire websites that look good and  are easy to create. Best of all…They are FREE.

These are my current top 5, what are yours. Even if you only have one or two I would like to know what the educators look at and use on the web. If you have any questions about my top 5, ask away.

This video clip shows the amazing things we can do with technology today. If you need something a little inspirational, check it out. I have never used Skype, but I am looking forward to the day where we have the bandwidth to use it. If we all had this resource, like this video shows, less children would be left behind. 

If you have never watched the show Boston Legal, you are truly missing out on one of the most intelligent shows on television. MENSA put it on their 10 smartest shows of all time. I don’t always agree on the social commentary they are trying to make, but it always makes me think and more importantly, laugh! Last night, through the great technology of DVR, I watched the December 11th episode. Half of the show focused on NCLB and testing. Unfortunately they are not streaming this show currently. If this episode comes back on through reruns, I encourage all educators to watch it. It would be great if all legislators watched it also. It makes the point that our schools are failing, not the fault of the teachers. It is the fault of the system the teachers are forced to teach in. Today my building is spending an hour practicing for “the test.” When are we going to start practicing for the real world? Since Hollywood is were we get our political opinions from now a days (sickening) hopefully more of Hollywood will put on shows such as this to get the governments attention.

Today I had the great experience of presenting at the Ohio eTech Conference with my wife. I have presented at conferences before, but this was special. I want to thank her and everyone who attended for making it a great experience for me.

For those of you who attended the session, I hope you enjoyed it. I appologize that we didn’t get to share more ideas for using wikis. All of the great questions guided the session in a direction I didn’t expect. All of the ideas I was going to share are on the website. If  you didn’t attend the session, the website should be a good resource for learning how to use wikis in educational settings. I will also be adding a few more resources to the site when I get back to my building Thursday.

Feel free to let me know what you thought. If you have a wiki, or go out and start one, post the address on here. I would love to see what everyone else is doing with wikis.

One thing I didn’t get to mention at the conference is I have a free 1 year upgrade for pbwiki. The first person to post their pbwiki address on this blog will get the upgrade.

From time to time I believe all teachers ask this question to themselves. I had a frustrating day yesterday and I started asking questions to myself (I don’t believe you are crazy if you talk to yourself, you are only crazy if you answer yourself out loud in a public place). Questions like: why am I working so hard to get teachers to use technology as and instructional tool? Why am I trying to start a 1:1 initiative when I have no idea if the districts administration will even listen to my ideas let alone implement my plan? How do I get the majority of educators to buy into a huge shift when I cannot get them to sign out a camera properly?

My reason why comes down to one answer. I Believe. I believe this is the right thing for the kids. Our country is an amazing place to live, but we are at a turning point. We need to make a change before a change happens that we don’t want to see. I believe our kids need to be creative, not spoon fed facts that can be found in seconds on hundreds of different websites. Yes they still need to know how to add, subtract, etc… But why not embed those skills into creative, real world, collaborative projects that will engage them? Technology does not create these projects, good teachers do. We have good teachers, they just need a catalyst to spark the change. I believe technology is that catalyst. If we; put a computer in every teacher and students hands, teach them how to use them, train the teachers to shift their lessons from one small lesson a day to teaching a big lesson over time that incorporates all the little skills, then we will be on our way to change.

Now I’m off to work some more on that change….