Future of Education

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?

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.

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….

After reading this post by Bob Sprankle, I finally had a little light bulb click on in my head (it may be a dim bulb, but at least it turned on). The days of integrating technology need to end. For those of us who have had the job of technology integrator, it has been a great run. It needs to change. As long as we are integrating technology, the big shift into 21^st century learning will not happen. We need to embed the technology into the classroom, not just integrate it. What is the difference? Great Question! Look at the definition of the two words:

Embed: to incorporate or contain as an essential part or characteristic
Integrate: To make part of a larger unit

When we integrate, it is sometimes there, but it isn’t essential. You can integrate technology for one day, or one week and then not use it again. If the technology is embedded, it is always there.

There is only one way I know of to make this happen and that is to put a machine in the hands of every student. I have started a push for a 1:1 program in my district. It is actually being recieved better that I could have ever imagined. What are you doing to make the shift happen? I would love to hear.

I have been thinking about a way to get the students in my building blogging more and better. I have convinced a few teachers to create blogs where they post a topic or article and the students comment. They are doing this once per nine weeks. Good start, but not truly the idea behind blogging. Here is my first step toward the answer. Maybe it is a coincidence I thought of this the same week the Student 2.0 blog came out and I am writing this after reading David Jakes’ Post The Kids are Alright.

“Many educators want to change education, and have been looking for a way to do that-looking for that next great conversation that will make all the difference. Wouldn’t it be ironic if they’ve created just that, without realizing it, by teaching their third grade class to blog?So if you are someone who wants educational change, look no further. Change is coming, and it will ultimately rise not from us, but from the voice of our very own students.”

My idea is to give my students a voice by: creating a blog, in Moodle (I am using Moodle due to our districts blogging policy). I will post prompts for students to comment on their learning.  I will ask questions such as “how social networks could be used productively in schools?” I may get some junk answers, but the good ones could help us give students the voice they deserve.

Since the blog will be private, I will paste the good post on here once I get it started. It will most likely be in January since we start vacation in one week. Woohoo! Any and all prompts for the students are welcome.

Nine months ago, I wrote One at a time. After reading David Warlik’s post, My Apologies, I revisited my post to evaluate how successful have I been at my “One at a Time” theory? The reusults:

• Three teachers, who I never thought would get on the blogging bandwagon without a fight, came to me and got the ball rolling.
• Four others, who I expected to hop on board, are blogging. 
• I have another teacher ready to use a wiki to post a summary of his class each day. He isn’t going to post the summary, the students are. The students will also have access to the unit assessment on a wiki. They will be allowd to make changes to the assessment to make the questions better fit what they have been taught. We are just developing this, I will write more about this in the next month. Thank you to Steve Dembo for this great idea.
•  We wrote group research papers using wiki’s in a language arts class. (Each kid wrote a section and the group worked together on the into and conclusion.)
• Outside of web2.0 tools, all 400 of our 8th graders used Photostory 3 to create a video on the life-cycle of a star. I love digital story telling and if you haven’t seen it, Photostory is one of the best tools to date for simple videos. (side note…i didn’t work with a single 8th grade science student last year)

I’m not a patient person, but when I think about it, this isn’t bad. My next step is to get a pilot 1to1 team going. Anybody have some money they want to donate to a good cause?

So my idea of using this blog to collect ideas on how teachers were using blogging in their classroom didn’t get the results I had hoped for. I did get a few new ideas, which means the work was worth the effort.

I am now getting ready to present on wiki’s at the Etech Ohio Conference in February. I want to gather as many ideas and post them to a wiki as a resourse for the presentation and beyond. If you use wiki’s in an educational setting, or have any ideas on how to use them, let me know by posting a reply. I will take all replies and complile them on a wiki. I will post the link to the wiki on here in January. If someone has already done this, I would love to know. Less work for me and easy resources are always a good thing.