Future of Education

On October 19th I ran a professional development session showing exemplars of 21st Century Learning. Most exemplars of 21st century lessons are going to have a technology component to them. In order to field questions about the lessons and technologies, I had participants text me questions using poll everywhere. Here are the questions I didn’t get to answer during the session and my answers to them:

What would b easier 2 manage – a wiki or moodle?

It depends on your goal. Moodle is a course management system. It does a lot more then a wiki can. A wiki is a website that is easily edited by many users. My suggestion is to discuss this question with an Integration Coach.

Could we see rubrics from teachers in the district?

We will be working on gathering and creating rubrics this year. The goal is to share them out with staff once they are gathered.

How time consuming is having a moodle with ur students? How do u manage?

If you manage it effectively, it will take you no more time that you are currently spending assessing your students. Anytime you do something new to accomplish a curricular goal, you should let something go. When you start using Moodle begin small. Ex. Replace a traditional formative open ended short answer writing with a forum in Moodle. You now have a rich discussion instead of an individual writing what they think the teacher wants to hear.

Have you seen teachers use this in class?

I have used every one of these items in class myself and endorse them all as powerful tools for student learning.

do u need to download voice thread? Could u share how to add it to Moodle?

Voicethread is a web based tool, No download is needed. I do not have a quick tutorial on how to embed Voicethread in Moodle. I will look for one.

do u think having the kids maintain a wiki with newsletter info would work?

That is a great idea for how to use a wiki!

pros / cons of using a wiki within moodle?

Pro: Inside moodle with all of your other course assignments, easy to manage groups of students and permissions.

Cons: Not as graphically pleasing as pbworks or wikispaces, only visable to students in your class (this could be a pro depending on the purpose)

can you use moodle for peer editing?

You sure can, here is an example of how one teacher used it for peer evaluation. Contact a coach and we can show you how to use it for peer editing.

can you show me how to have my students text me questions?

The website is polleverywhere.com. I would be more than happy to give a quick overview of how to use it.

My question to leave this post, based upon this event, do cell phones have a place in school?

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?

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.