This podcast, recorded on my way home from Learning 2.0: A Colorado Conversation, is just a stream of consciousness reflection on the day. I am humbled to be in community with so many wonderful , talented and devoted educators, both here in Colorado as well as around the world.
Today's podcast, one of several recorded today, is a reflection about my upcoming session for Learning 2.0: A Colorado Conversation, recorded on my way home from the Colorado Podcast Summit. I hope to post more audio from the summit as time allows. (But, since time won't ever allow, I'll try to do so anyway.)
Today's podcast is a reflection on some experimentation I did today with Brian C. Smith as we're both learning how to collaborate via the XO. In short, we were impressed. Enjoy.
Links
Chris Craft's post
Xochat.org
Tom Hoffman's hardware/software post
I'm pretty excited about tomorrow. Tomorrow, I begin this class:
The K120 Online Conference is an online offering of presentations created by educators and centered around new applications and new technologies. It's a way to address both teachers' needs as well as the opportunity to connect to an online network of professionals that can be drawn upon for future professional development activities.
There will be four face-to-face sessions of this PST. In between each of these sessions, participants will be expected to engage two sessions from the conference, for a minimum of eight face-to-face hours and eight online conference hours.
Each participant will write a two-page reflection and keep a log of the sessions attended. The final face-to-face session will be a facilitated discussion about what was learned, the benefits of the conference, and the next steps for those involved in terms of taking their learning back into their classrooms. This discussion will be recorded and released as a podcast.
I'm excited about the class because it allows me to do two things that I think are pretty important:
1. Introduce smart people to new tools and opportunities.
2. Take our time and do it right.
I think so many of the professional opportunities that teachers are afforded are races, mere dips of a toe into the waters of potential. There's lots to do and not enough time to do it. Time is a precious, precious resource that is in short supply. I also think that many of the tools that are influencing my network, and , frankly, me right now, encourage haste and speed and the like. Twitter, on the short list of my favorite read/write web tools, can be reflective, but perhaps not richly so. I wrote a tweet the other day that hasn't left my head. I was thinking about how busy I've been lately - racing from one really interesting project to the next, knowing that the excitement wasn't a good replacement for the lasting learning that I knew just wasn't happening for me:
Not much reflection, though - just lots of doing. That's not sustainable. Or worth sustaining.
I want sustainability. I want reflection. I think others want it, too. we don't learn by racing. We learn by doing and reflecting and questioning. It's a recursive cycle, and one that doesn't happen enough for me. I wonder if it's become too easy to communicate, in some ways. Do I get so busy communicating that I haven't bothered to say anything? (Does that even make sense?)
Which leads me back to tomorrow. (Man, I really, really buried the lede in this post, didn't I?) Tomorrow, I begin a facilitated, slow and thorough look at the K12Online Conference, both the 2006 and 2007 editions. Over the next four months, in two hour chunks, I hope to study and learn from the presentations of the last two years. I want to dig in to the content that I felt whipped by so dang fast in late October when it was released. This is what the conference invites, as all the sessions are archived.
So we will. I hope to use the class time as discussion time to talk about the different presentations, as well as an opportunity to think about how these different sessions might offer some ideas for change in our classrooms here in my district. I'll be asking participants, on a voluntary basis, to share their favorites with the group in 15 minute "spotlight sessions." These, I hope, will foster conversation and inquiry into new tools and classroom strategies.
I'm interested, too, in looking for ways to connect folks from all over to my district's virtual classroom. but before I do that, though, I want to meet the class and make sure they're comfortable with that. Stay tuned for further developments.
If you've any advice, or even a "must see" presentation recommendation for these first time K12Online Conference attenders, I'd welcome it in the comments - we'll share your tips during our first session.
I always hate being at technology conferences that focus too much on tools and not enough on learning. I'm pleased that this conference wasn't one of them. I attended one "tools focus" session, and that seems like the right ratio for me this conference.
Over the past three days, I've had some great conversations with folks from my district about tools and strategies and learning and teaching and "21st Century Skills" and lots of other buzzwords and whatnot. But the big takeaway reminder for me at this conference is the reminder that most of what I want to do with students, and most of what I think the folks that came with me want to do, too, is to promote the progressive ideas of the 19th and 20th Century and (hopefully) the early 21st Century. Conversations with Chris Lehmann really helped me to re-focus that in my own head (Thanks, Chris!). We might not say it that way, but really, amidst all of the talk of computers and interactive whiteboards and Internet access, I think we want to create rich spaces full of relevant information for our students and teachers to be able to interact with and contribute to and ask questions of and be in awe of and concern about. Sometimes, that means using computers. Other times, it means using paper and pen(cil). Still others, crayons, or perhaps clay or chemicals. Or guest speakers. Or whatever.
I think we just want to be able to offer teachers and students and administrators options for how to make their learning goals happen.
I was talking with one colleague this morning about textbooks and why we can't yet get rid of them. I was having this conversation in whispered tones during a keynote speech, so I wasn't able to articulate my points as well as I'd like. Since I know that he's now a subscriber of this blog (Hi, Jeremy!), as well as a soon-to-be new blog author himself, I thought it would make sense to further elaborate here.
I'd like to shut down the textbook flow tomorrow. Textbooks are un-authentic ways for us to distribute information to teachers and students. But, rightly or wrongly, they're the tools that we have. In our current paradigm (I know - buzzword - but work with me here), they are also the tools that are not considered frivolous or unessential. In a better paradigm, we would have ubiquitous access to the information streams around us. We'd have a meaningful 1:1 program for every student. We'd not have to beg, borrow and steal to provide sufficient bandwidth to all of our classrooms. But we're not there. Yet.
As a language arts teacher, I preferred to use real-world, authentic texts with my students. Newspapers, novels, magazines, literature anthologies and many other authentic texts are far better tools for helping students to navigate the information of the human experience, as well as the world of the media and popular culture. These texts are real and not specifically designed for educational purposes - and I think that's a good thing. We need to teach and learn about interacting in the world.
Specifically, as I think about providing the most information to students as possible, I think about the Internet. (I bet that's no big surprise.) The Internet is a full-on fire hose of information that I would much rather be using with students. That information can be authentic, at least more so than a textbook can be. And we can take that information and fiddle with it before, during and after it hits the classroom in ways that maximize the authentic-ness AND the educational value of it. Our students can and should be a part of this process, too. 1:1 shouldn't even have to be an argument. But it is.
So when I say that I want to get rid of textbooks, but that I can't say let's get rid of them yet, that's more of what I'm trying to talk about. We need to provide lots of good raw information to our students so that they can do all of the wonderful things that we want them to do. Then we need to help them connect to and with that information and each other in some really authentic ways. But since we can't provide that information authentically, for too many logistically complex reasons, we're stuck with textbooks, at best an inefficient information delivery system. For now. I hope we can change that soon. I really don't believe it's that hard to do - once we decide we should be doing it.
In this podcast, I manage to define a network as a group (gulp - forgive the error) while attempting to explain some of what's been on my mind as I've been getting used to my new job. Yeah, that theme's getting a little old around here - but I think it's going to be that way for a while. Feel free to let me have it in the comments.
I've been reading lots of folks lately writing to the effect that this whole read/write web world is not about the tools, it's about how we use them. I agree with that notion. Mostly.
In some of the conversations I've been having recently, I've been arguing that, at least at some level, the focus should be on the tools, for a couple of reasons. One, we need to have a handle on what the tools can do so that we can apply them to our particular teaching and learning situations. If I don't know how to publish to the web (or that it's completely safe for students to do so), then I can't consider it as a possibility in my classes. Further, if I don't know that most wikis won't allow for same-time multiple edits/editors, then I won't realize (until it's too late) that having everyone edit the same piece of text in class is just won't work.
The second reason is a little trickier, but was really brought home to me this week as I was involved in some training on a web-based gradebook.
This particular tool, the one that our district provides to teachers as an electronic gradebook, appears to require a letter grade as an output. What I mean is that, as it's currently configured, the only possible output for a student grade is a percentage tied to a letter. While we could tinker with what percentages resulted in what letter, that was all the tinkering that we could do. So this particular tool (certainly, not a read/write tool, but a technology tool nonetheless) only allows for a particular type of output. Not using letter grades is not an option with this tool. (I know - I've really, really stated that - but I think it's very important.)
While I'm not going to make a case right now for eliminating letter grades, I want to point out that, if my school system decided tomorrow to eliminate letter grading, we couldn't. Our computer system would not "allow" it.
Currently, many of our middle schools have assessment systems that are standards based and don't involve letter grades. The software that creates those is aging and might not be compatible with the new system. See the potential for a problem?
I'll end this post for fear of beginning to lose my point, which is this: Sometimes, it is about the tools, and about how those tools shape what is and is not "possible" in particular situations. The tools and their use (or misuse) can completely drive a classroom or management scenario. Pretending that it is never about the tools, and is only about the pedagogy or philosophy, is shortsighted and ultimately problematic.
Barbara Morgan taught a lesson to students from space earlier this week. This was the highlight quote for me. I think she perfectly captures the essence of teaching and, for that matter, learning. From the article:
Asked how teaching compared to being an astronaut, Mrs Morgan, 55, replied: "Astronauts and teachers actually do the same thing. We explore, we discover and we share.
"And the great thing about being a teacher is you get to do that with students, and the great thing about being an astronaut is you get to do it in space, and those are absolutely wonderful jobs."
In today's podcast, I reflect a bit on the power of connections, meeting with friends, "starting over" as a blogger, and a teeny bit of what I'm up to in my new position. Enjoy!
Links from the 'cast
I'm still on a blogging vacation, buried in new work, new systems, adjusting to office work and just enjoying my family. I got stuck, in a writerly sense, as happens from time to time, and needed the extra time away from the blog. I'll be back soon, but in the meantime, I thought I'd share this passage, very well written, from today's aggregator. Bruce is a thoughtful teacher and an excellent writer. Today he captured a great deal of my thinking of late. Here goes:
As I think about what the new school year is going to be like, and try to prepare myself for starting over with new students, and a dizzying array of new tech tools, my concern is to try to find a balance between the traditions that I still honor—as for example, the reading of books and the slow, thoughtful appreciative engagement with the real world—and the opportunity for innovation, which may very well be technology-enhanced. I don't want to let go of what has always worked, and I don't want to give short shrift to what might be even better.
The post ends this way:
If we are, as Birkerts suggests, "a society that has begun to come loost (sic) from its textual moorings," should our role as educators be to try get the ship back into safe harbor and re-tie the hawsers, or to catch the rising tide and head out to open sea?
Those are just a few of the questions that are moving through the back of my brain as I doze on my metaphorical blanket under the seductive Hawaiian sun. No worries: I don't have to come up with the answers for at least another two weeks.
The stuff in the middle is the best part.
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