Future of Education

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.

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….