I started my day off like most; shower, coffee, in the car for my 30 minute drive… Then the juices started flowing. I had a new thought. A potential solution to a dilemma I was faced with last week. Then, I hit a traffic jam that I knew was going to cause me to be a little late. Usually I start griping and looking for people to pass, not today. Today I pulled out my iPhone, opened the voice recorder app and started talking. The ideas were coming out faster than the rain of the day was coming down.
Then…
It hit me. I control this everyday. I don’t control everyone else. I control me. This is such a simple concept. Why don’t we all see it? In education there is so much to get overwhelmed with. Last week I sat at meeting and everything that came up boiled my blood a bit. Many of these decisions just didn’t make sense to me.
What I thought about today was, this is reality. How to I affect this reality positively? If I join the gripers, I just become part of the problem. I stop progress. As a leader in the area of 21century skills, it would be hypocritical for me to impede progress.
I’m not saying I am going to stop working for what I believe in. I am going to change how I frame things in my mind. If this is reality, what can I do to this reality to make it a positive one? I am going to make every day a great one!
I always start professional development sessions with a video clip if I can find a good one that fits. I just saw this one and am wondering how teachers would react to it. What do you think?
I am very fortunate to have one of the largest technology conferences in the US only 15 minutes from my front door. The unfortunate part is the lack of technology available at this conference. We have some of the best minds in the country keynote every year. This year Wes Fryer was the opening keynote speaker. He brought a great message of bringing change into the educational world. With thousands of educators in the audience he tweeted a message that he was going to have a back channel open using chazzy. As the introductions were made, he chatted with those of use that were in the chat room. WOW, chatting with the keynote speaker 2 minutes before he walked on stage, this is cool use of technology. This could have been a powerful conversation, but!
There is no wireless Internet at this conference. Ok, there is a coffee shop with one small hotspot. The only people in this conversation were those of us with smart phones (as if I needed a reason to love my iPhone, it gave me another). What about all the people in the audience who could have benefited from the conversation?
So what does this mean? Every negative has a lesson. The lessons I learned are:
• Make sure you have the connectivity to support your audience. In schools, the wires, servers and other network hardware are more important than the computers. Feed your funds into the backbone of your network!
• It is productive to have a digital background conversation during a lecture. I was engaged in the lecture (which is what a keynote really is). Our students can text, chat, IM during class and be productive. There need to be rules and guidelines though. I need to ponder this one a bit more.
• Even the tech people evolve. A year ago I would have never said “let them use their cell phones I class.” This showed me as a learner how it can be done productively.
Those are lessons I have the ability to affect. One lesson I can’t affect is regarding eTech Ohio. I’ve been told for years about the dysfunction of eTech. This conference displays the dysfunction. Hopefully new leadership in the state of Ohio will bring new life to the governing body of technology in the state.
As I work toward the future (or catching teachers up to the present), I struggle with where to start. The day to day tasks of emails, meetings, etc… sometimes move my focus. I am now trying to refocus on the question, how do we get teachers into the 21st century. Some are already on their way. Those are the early adopters. Many are interested, they just don’t know what direction to take. Should I focus solely on these folks right now. There are enough of them to fill my days. The dilemma I run into is, what about the kids who don’t have these teachers? Is it fair? A student could luck out and get all the “21st century teachers” and live an engaged life. Another students could sit through 6 hours of lecture a day. The only engagement they would get would be lunch conversations.
My goal today is to figure out what the focus of my work is. Do I target groups? Do I fight the fight to change the entire system? Do I keep spending my time with the teachers who come to me (the good news is there are enough of these to fill the majority of my time)? Oh, my brain is already aching and I haven’t even started?
I am furious. I just received an e-mail from a counselor in our district that her wiki is blocked. I then tried to go to my wiki, blocked. Seriously? We are blocking wikispaces? We use a consortium for our filters. Many of the schools in central Ohio use this same filter. This means that at least on of these schools has asked for wikispaces to be blocked. When will this ignorance end? When will our students and teachers be aloud to enter the 21st century? I’m so mad at this moment I cannot even formulate intelligent solutions.
Lucky for me, we have override power. I’m confident that our district will have their access back before the end of the day. What about the other local districts? Do they have people inside who are educated enough to know these sites shouldn’t be blocked? What about the great collaborative learning experiences their students are missing? Words cannot tell how sick I feel right now.
A while back I wrote that my new goal was to get administrators to model the use of web 2.0 tools so staff members would see their value. Since I wrote that post, I moved to new district. I have a different set of administrators to try to convince. I envisioned this could go two ways. I could walk into a dream school where the administrators were ready to go day one. Dream is the key word. The other way was more realistic, it would take months or years to build trust and relationships before we would really make any changes. To my surprise, it has been a little blend of the two.
My working partner and I were meeting with HS admins a few days ago. We were giving them some updates as to what we’ve been doing and where were going next. Then out of the blue the principal asks us if we can teach him about blogs and wikis. He is a great leader, an excellent principal, but not very high tech. For him to jump into the 21st century will be a huge boost to our efforts to create a 21st century school district.
The next step is to actually get him into the training. Not only does he want trained, he wants to do it along side his teachers. I went to the Language Arts department head today to see if his department would like to take part in this event. Sounds like we are a go.
I am starting to see a little bit of light through the trees. We have a long way to go till we have a 21st century school, but the first step is to have teachers and administrators walking down the same path we are.
After a long layoff, which I will explain in a future post, the “Future of Education” Blog is back. As I start writing again, I want to truly focus on the title of the blog and its tag line. What is the future of education and where are we going?
In my writing, I am going to focus on educational change and 21st century skills. That is the future and the direction we should be going in.
In the area of educational change, I want to reflect on what is good in education today as well as what is not. I will not list the problems schools have. I will talk about solutions. In some post I will be seeking out solutions. I have many answers. What I hope this blog becomes is a way for my answers to become better ones with the help of a community of readers (assuming I build a group of readers again).
With 21st century skills, I will share; successful examples of 21st century learning I see, resources to help educators in the 21st century and links to blog to other sites that do the same.
It feels good to get the keyboard clicking again. Hopefully you will join me in moving education into the 21st Century here at the Future of Education blog.
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.”
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.
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.
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