Future of Education

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.

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.

This week I sat through 2 meetings in the same day. The two meetings seem to have gone in opposite directions. The morning meeting was a group of our districts technology teachers discussing how we get the message out (the message of teachers not being the source of information for students, but to teach students to find their own sources and then become the source themselves). We came up with this great list. Due to time that is all it was, a list. At a future meeting we will be discussing strategies how to make that list come to life. I was feeling pretty good. We were using a Wiki to collaborate our thoughts and ideas. Blogging on various edtech topics was happening at the same time. We were not using our computers because we were the technology people; we were using our computers because they helped us communicate more efficiently.

I went back to my building for a while in the afternoon to finish preparing for the 20 minute presentation I had to give at a staff meeting. 15 minutes of the presentation were about a district data initiative, the other 5 was to be spent on how to log into the blogging and wiki’s I setup for our teachers so they could: experience blogging, communicate using a wiki, and learn about these great new tool that was available for them to use in their classroom. When the staff meeting started I was first on the agenda, good sign. I presented, answered a few questions and sat and listed to the rest of the staff meeting. 

Here is what made me feel like I was fighting a battle that is not winnable. The rest of the meeting discussed: NCLB proposed changes, upcoming standardized testing, union issues, AYP, and various other topics. A quote from our principal, “I’m glad I am in year 29, not year 10.” WOW, I’m not feeling so good anymore. My poor wife is going to have to listen to me rant about this one. 

Two days later, not one teacher has logged onto the blog I set up. With all that is going on, teachers are overwhelmed. Those of us who have “seen the light” realize technology and web2.0 tools have the power to help revolutionize education. The problem is; how do you get the mass population to see it? Humans have an animal instinct, when they are under attack; they protect themselves with the tools they know best. Teachers know how to teach with direct instruction, overheads and chalkboards. They are good at it. With all the pressure of testing, and now job security if you are in the bottom 25%, how do you convince teachers to come out of their cave and take a chance? More importantly, how do you convince administrators? I was on the verge of being depressed.

I’m an impatient person. I want things to happen now! I’m also realistic and know that change takes time. My job is to help change take place. Once I had a bit of time to reflect, I’m glad I am in year 10. I am going to spend the next 20-25 years finding answers the question “how do we get there?” Right now I just need a little help figuring out where to start!

I feel like there is a small group of us (less than 1% of educators) who are looking for a new direction for education. While I look around the building in which I work and see teachers who are set in their ways, not realizing that a change needs to be made. Why? There are many issues why. Testing, administration, Ect… I am starting a WIKI to

1. List all the issues in education
2. Come up with solutions to these issues

Hopefully this will give me some insite for the direction to go next. It is quite frustrating having a vision you believe will aid in inproving “the future of education”, but not knowing how to convince others that your vision is the direction they should be going in also.