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.”

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. 

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….

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 am getting ready to create an online professional development class for the teachers in my district. It will be worth one semester hour college credit. I am currently trying to figure out what the content of the class will be.  I will be using Moodle to teach the class. In our district we use Moodle for our blogging, wikis, online classes, etc… Last year I taught a class that covered a wide range of topics (Inspiration, blogging, digital photography, photo editing, teacher webpages). It went well, but I want this class to have more of a focus. My thought was to center the class around “using web 2.0 tools in the classroom”My question is, with the numerous tools out there, what is best to focus on? Any opinions would be appreciated.

I will have to use this as my first Twitter question. I finally took the time a few nights ago to create an account. I now have to find a few more people to follow me. If you are a Twitter’er (what is the correct term?) my username is “futureofedu”

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.