So if you’re looking for a model of a school that’s heavily invested in social tools but using all open source or home grown apps to begin to teach even their youngest kids the benefits of publishing and networking, read on. During my visit to Melbourne I met Richard Olsen, a former teacher and ICT co-ordinator at the Concord School who now has a role at IdeasLab, a group that is exploring the best ways to implement large scale technology projects across Victoria. We talked at some length about the ways in which over the last three years he implemented everything from blogging, to photo sharing to bookmarking with his students in some big ways. Big like in over 70,000 photos that are housed on the school’s server documenting just about every aspect of learning that goes on there.

Embedded below you will see a brochure that Richard created before he left documenting his efforts. You can see from the introductory statement that Richard’s attempt to leverage the potential of these tools is pretty visionary.  Lumil was the Flickr-type app that Richard himself coded. It uses tags, sets, albums, the whole deal. As you’ll see, you can even sort the pictures by a particular date range, so viewers can get a sense of what’s happening at any given moment. They used Scuttle to house their own social bookmarks, WordPress MU to blog, and Scratch and others for social game making activities. Be sure to spend some time on the skills matrix at the bottom. All in all, it’s an impressive suite of tools and pedagogies that did much to change learning at his school.

What’s most compelling to me here is not necessarily the tool set, however, as much as the vision that brought this to fruition. While most all of this work is done locally on an internal network, the concepts are preparing kids at Concord for the very global network they’ll inhabit once they leave the system. And here is the best part: Concord is a special needs school, a place where kids with all sorts of disabilities attend. The work that these kids do in these contexts is very rewarding on a number of levels.

The larger point here is that this isn’t too far out of the reach of most schools provided they have the courage and the leadership to make it happen. Aside from the photo-sharing tool, the rest is freely available. There’s nothing really too difficult about it aside, perhaps, from creating good teaching around the tools. Makes you wonder what so many other schools are waiting for.

Concord School Web-Based Social and Collaborative Learning

Edutopia writer Sara Bernard is looking for student input in terms of advising teachers on how they might use technology in the classroom.  I’m wondering if anyone out there might want to pose the following to his/her students and send Sara some responses. It would be great to comment back here as well so we can see what kids are thinking.

What if you had to teach the classes you are taking now or something you learned years ago? How would you use technology to do it? What devices, software, games, networks, or applications would you use to help students learn more easily — and have more fun learning?

For instance, imagine that it was your job to teach algebra, Charles Dickens, volleyball, poetry, a foreign language, science, or the Civil War. Would you have your English students use Facebook to create profiles for each main character in Jane Eyre? Would you have them use Garage Band to create a World War II song or the national anthem of a fictional country?  Would you use instant messaging or cell phones as tools for classroom discipline? Could you learn math from Mario?

The point of this is for Edutopia to gather specific ideas and advice from you for teachers to try in their classrooms. So, be sure to describe things in a way that a teacher – any teacher – would understand. You might want to mention any rules about technology and media that exist at your school and whether or not they would need to be modified. We’d love to hear as many suggestions as you can think of!

According to Sara, “student responses can be based on experiences that they’ve actually had in class or just ideas that they’ve come up with themselves. They should also feel free to offer basic advice for teachers about technology integration, or any other thoughts they have on the topic. Also, this isn’t an essay contest, so no pressure — students can just drop a few lines into an email if they like (though I’d appreciate it if they could include their name, grade level, school, and location).” Her e-mail is sara.bernard@edutopia.org.

(Full disclosure: I am a National Advisory Board member for the George Lucas Education Foundation which publishes the magazine.)

So the whole conversation that has developed over the last two days has been another one of those amazing, intellectually stimulating back and forths that I feel extremely privileged to be involved in. Let me just say at the outset that the number of quality, thoughtful comments that have been coming to this blog of late has just blown me away, and I thank all of you for being willing to participate. I can only hope that those contributing or reading are getting as much if not more than I. There is another entire post forming slowly that connects this to the whole Classroom 2.0 idea and some other stuff that’s evolving out of it…but that’s for another day.

Without beating a dead horse, this latest conversation has got me thinking, on a number of levels. First, on how interesting it is to see the nuanced interpretation of what I originally was writing about. Second, on how my own thinking keeps going back and forth as I read through the comments, pushed by people who I respect and admire greatly who have vastly different viewpoints. But ultimately, on how certain snippets, certain phrases push me to bigger insights or questions. I find that whole process incredibly interesting.

So here’s what got me to this post. Liz Lawley, who was one of the people who really helped me understand the pedagogies of these social tools very early on in my reading of blogs, left a couple of pretty challenging comments, which pushed me to think. In the second, she wrote:

Will, debates like this are absolutely a good example of a back-and-forth collaborative learning process. But expecting that people will systematically (a) seek out and (b) find examples of every important theme and its associated points of view is–I think–naive.

The real value of a formal educational process is that all too often “we don’t know what we don’t know”–and so without a systematic structured approach to a complex topic we run the very real risk of not seeing the big picture, and falling into the trap of generalizing from our anecdotal experience.

I hear that, but here are the questions that provokes for me…and they are sincere, not simply meant to start more discussion.

• How much of people’s inability to systematically “seek out and find examples of every important theme and its associated points of view” is because we simply don’t teach them to do that in a systemic way from very young ages?
• How much of that is because we are so focused on content and not learning, because the system that’s still in place hasn’t shifted at all to keep pace with the fact that we can connect to information and knowledge and teachers on so many new and profound levels?
• Can we systematically teach students to “see the big picture” in ways that will allow them to construct their own process that might actually come close to replicating that formal educational process?
• Or do those types of potentials only come at a later age or from experiences that cannot be replicated in a K-12 system?

Those may be naive, I don’t know. But what I’m struggling with is how do we re-envision what we do in our classrooms to prepare our students to leverage the potential of the connections now available to (most of) them, connections that have not been available in the past.

And while I know this is a bit of a different topic from the above, I’m not saying that physical space, high-level coursework isn’t going to remain important and in fact relevant for some pursuits. But I’m not convinced that stringing courses together to earn a degree has to remain as the only way to achieve “expertise,” which in an of itself is open to all sorts of different interpretations.

(Photo “Inspiring the Class” by Brian U.)

Technorati Tags: learning, education

USA Today is reporting on a new comprehensive study of elementary school classrooms that is being published in this week’s Science magazine. Aside from not being overly engaged, the study of over 2,500 classrooms showed that “The typical child in the USA stands only a one-in-14 chance of having a consistently rich, supportive elementary school experience.”

Did I mention I have two kids in elementary school? Did I mention I already knew this?

More engaging are some of the nearly 100 comments that the article has garnered due to the new USA Today bloggy style. I didn’t read them all, but I found this one especially charming:

Perhaps the problem is the fact that the formerly drugged up hippies of the 60/70s is the gerneration that are control of not only the government, but also run the colleges, universities and news outlets. These are also the same peace and free love people who do these studies.

Well, there ya go.

Technorati Tags: teaching, schools, education

(Cross-posted to “The Pulse“) One of the most challenging pieces of figuring out how to move education forward in a systemic way is “unlearning curve” that we teachers and educators have to go through to even see the possibilities that lay before us. So much of our traditional thinking about personal learning and classroom practice is being challenged by our ability to publish and connect and collaborate primarily because of the opportunities afforded by the Read/Write Web. For instance, in a world where literally any place can be a classroom, we have to unlearn the comforts of four walls that we’ve become accustomed to. When we can share our work with wide audiences, we need to unlearn the idea that student writing and projects are simply ways to assess what they know.

There is no curriculum for unlearning, and, of course, in many ways it’s simply learning to see things differently or to at least be open to it. To me at least, the key is attempting to understand how these technologies can transform our own learning practice (and, I would guess, our unlearning practice as well.) If we can get started on that road, it can become much easier to re-envision our classrooms and our schools.

So, with that brief introduction, here are 10 things that I think we need to unlearn:

We need to unlearn the idea that we are the sole content experts in the classroom, because we can now connect our kids to people who know far more than we do about the material we’re teaching.

We need to unlearn the premise that we know more than our kids, because in many cases, they can now be our teachers as well.

We need to unlearn the idea that learning itself is an event. In this day and age, it is a continual process.

We need to unlearn the strategy that collaborative work inside the classroom is enough and understand that cooperating with students from around the globe can teach relevant and powerful negotiation and team-building skills.

We need to unlearn the idea that every student needs to learn the same content when really what they need to learn is how to self-direct their own learning.

We need to unlearn the notion that our students don’t need to see and understand how we ourselves learn.

We need to unlearn our fear of putting ourselves and our students “out there” for we’ve proven we can do it in safe, relevant and effective ways.

We need to unlearn the practice that teaches all students at the same pace. Is it any wonder why so many of our students love to play online games where they move forward at their own pace?

We need to unlearn the idea that we can teach our students to be literate in this world by continually blocking and filtering access to the sites and experiences they need our help to navigate.

We need to unlearn the premise that real change can happen just by rethinking what happens inside the school walls and understand that education is now a community undertaking on many different levels.

Certainly, there are many others, and I’m sure you have your own unlearning ideas…feel free to add.

(Photo “Old Classroom” by shuichiro)

Technorati Tags: learning, unlearning, education

So here is one of the burning questions in my brain these days: How do you take a fairly “typical” school that is currently steeped in a 20th Century model of teaching and successfully move it forward in a systemic way toward a more relevant 21st Century, or, if you will, School 2.0 model that fully takes advantage of a more connected, collaborative, creative world?

With any luck, I’ll be able to begin answering that question here over the next few months and years. My colleague Rob Mancabelli and I are working with a medium-sized, rural school district to help plan and guide a project that, if successful, will serve as a model for other schools to follow in their own re-envisioning process.

Needless to say, I’m a bit excited.

Ironically, I’ll be spending the next two days at Chris Lehmann’s Science Leadership Academy which is probably as close to School 2.0 as you can find right now. But while I absolutely love what Chris is doing, his is not really a scenario that is easily replicated…a new school pretty much from the ground up, a student body that has been selected through an admission process, etc.

While I can’t get too specific with names and places at this point, we think that this project, should it be successful, would come much closer to becoming a roadmap for other districts to follow. So, here’s the scenario in broad brush strokes. The district has three schools and serves a primarily rural area about six squares miles in size. There is some racial diversity, but the vast majority of students are white and come from lower middle to middle class families, many of which have owned farms in the area for generations. The town center has one stoplight and lies about 30 miles from the nearest city, and while economic fortunes and enrollments have been on the decline of late, there has been an upswing of home building of late that indicates the community may be on the cusp of change.

Rob and I spent the day with the district leadership and others recently leading conversations about why were all at the table, what our purpose was, what we envisioned as “wild success” some years down the road, what strengths and opportunities were already in place, and what weaknesses and threats we would need to address. It was an amazing conversation that reflects, as one of the participants described it, almost a “perfect storm” for change in this district. The leadership team, despite already having a highly successful school in terms of test scores and traditional standards, recognizes what’s coming and wants to be proactive in helping teachers and students practice real 21st Century education, understanding that there is no set definition of what that is. The regional state entity that was also represented is totally supportive from a technology and pedagogy sense and is committed to invest in an “R &D” project of this type to see how it can help other schools it serves move forward. What Rob and I hope to do is inform the vision and guide the process over the next few years, hopefully, as we work together to figure out what the unique recipe for change is with this district at this moment.

While there is much more to write and to tell, let me just end this initial post with some of the things that really get the butterflies going about this project. First, everyone in the room realized that this was about more than just the district. This was about the community itself. To that end, we’re in the process of creating a project team that includes every constituent group, from business owners to parents to industry representatives to town leaders and others. There is already talk, and this might be premature, of providing a broadband wireless cloud over the six square miles that will at least make access available for every resident. That in itself could be quite an interesting step. And, second, what really struck me about these initial conversations was the willingness to look at change from a systemic way, understanding that this means re-envisioning almost everything they do. It’s not about tools, in fact, technology was rarely mentioned in Monday’s meeting. It was about learning, the willingness of the leadership team to model new ways of learning and communicating, the need to create a new vision for what all of the looks like in the classroom. And it was a willingness to face head on the disruptions that come with all of this.

No question, there are many hurdles yet to be overcome if this is to work, and many, many, many conversations to start. There is a huge education job in front of us to make sure the various constituent groups have the context for the conversation. And there are, as always, the issues of money and time.

But I am incredibly humbled and excited by this opportunity. And I would love your thoughts along the way. More in the coming weeks, I’m sure…

Technorati Tags: school reform change education learning

So one of the reasons I’ve had no time to blog of late (or read for that matter) is that life is getting crazed once again. Seven weeks off goes much too quickly, but I’ve gotten into some very cool projects that I hope to blog about in short order.

Meanwhile, in case any one is interested, here is the link to the presentation that Rob Mancabelli and I did at FETC on Friday. I’d be really interested in any reaction from those of you that might listen and watch (sort of) it.

Technorati Tags: fetc07 social read_write_web

You may have noticed (or you may not have) the daily bookmarks posting that has been showing up here for the past few days. It’s a list of all of the sites/posts that I have been saving to my diigo account, which in case you haven’t heard of it, is a social bookmarking tool that feels like a combination of del.icio.us and Furl plus a bit more.

With diigo, you can do most of what you can with del.icio.us in terms of saving links with various tags, connecting to other users who have saved the same post or used the same tag, and tracking either users or specific tags (or specific tags of specific users) via RSS. Even more, however, is that like Furl, diigo captures a copy of the page, so if it disappears from the Web at some point, you can access it in your archive.

But what’s really different is the diigo allows you to highlight certain sections of any Web page you’re on, and also gives you the ability to attach sticky notes to the site. Those highlights and notes are then visible should you visit that page again. But even better, if you have a diigo account and I have “forwarded” the page to you, you can see them add your own when you visit the site as well. Think digital feedback on student work.

Now while the diigo user base is much smaller than del.icio.us, quite a few people are adding some interesting links and resources. And one other nice feature is that when I add something to my diigo account, it also gets added to my del.icio.us account. By the way, C-Net has a review of diigo that highlights some of the good points.

There are a lot of applications for classrooms here, and I’ll try to expound on them the more I experiment with it. Bottom line is I’m starting to like this tool more and more, and I’m wondering who else might be playing with it.

(Image from diigo)

Technorati Tags: diigo, delicious, social_bookmarking

On Monday, my colleague and soon to be blogger Rob Mancabelli and I dropped in on Chris Lehmann at the Science Leadership Academy in Philadelphia for a three hour tour and chat. Bottom line is that Chris is building a vibrant community of learners among both teachers and students that has a unique feeling in the world of public schools I’ve seen. (BTW, here’s a Flickr set of some photos I took of the students and the structure.)

And it’s really not about the technology as much as it is about the culture of learning that they are creating. Yes, every student has a laptop. And they have been working with Moodle and Elgg to build class sites and online portfolios. But what’s neat is that the students are taking real ownership over what happens at the school. Without giving too much away since Chris said he was getting ready to blog about this, there has been one issue that has arisen that in most schools would cause all sorts of overreaction from administrators and the like. At SLA, the kids are dealing with it through the use of the Moodle forums, where, amazingly, they have been communicating since months before the school even opened in September. Chris and his teachers chime in too, and the conversation is open and honest, effectively dealing with the situation to date.

The physical space is beautiful and there is lots of room to grow for the 400 or so more students who will be coming in the next three years. And it won’t be hard to fill it up; SLA has received about 2,000 applications for just over 100 spots next year.

As with any new school, it’s hard to predict what the next day will bring. But thus far, SLA looks like it’s doing really well in terms of creating a very special foundation for education in a School 2.0 world.

technorati tags:science_leadership_academy, chris_lehmann, Philadelphia, schools, education

This is why we open up and connect our kids to the world and teach them how to function there safely:

About a month ago, two of my students reported on research by a geneticist involved with sleep and memory, and posted their reports to the my class blog. In their reports, the students raised some questions about the research.

Yesterday, that researcher responded to the students questions in the blog itself. This is incredibly exciting!

So far, in less than 8 weeks, we have interacted with a graduate student from Ohio who was doing research in the instructional use of blogs. My students participated in a survey, which formed a key part of a paper she has prepared.

Earlier this week, we heard from an author of an article from National Geographic, who was impressed with a student’s critique of his work. And now this.

Frankly, I expected to see the benefits of blogging in terms of students connecting with one another. But I never expected to have them connect with the world at large so quickly.

There are a billion teachers out there…

Go, blogs! Go!

technorati tags:blogging, education, learning, connectivism

So the project wiki run continues with this entry from Chris Craft in South Carolina whose students are prepping for a flat-ish Skype call with students at the American School in Lima, Peru next month. In this iteration, groups of kids are studying various aspects of the Peruvian culture and economy that will serve as the basis of their discussion. Chris is going to try to capture the event and hopefully he’ll be able to share it out later.

On his blog yesterday, he was talking about a “dry run” that he did with the Peruvian teacher. At first, the technology didn’t cooperate very well, but when they got it going, it was electric. Here’s a snippet:

When the video flipped on the class went wild. They quickly settled down and we chatted with a teacher down there. My kids were nervous but thrilled! They stepped up to the mic (figuratively and literally) and did a great job muddling through basic Spanish. The teacher there spoke perfect English, and she was gracious about it.

Then the cool stuff happened. Her room started to fill up with kids.

Then my kids got to talk to their kids.

That was cool to watch.

Isn’t that what we want our kids to be? Nervous but thrilled? That’s the edgy-ness that these technologies bring, a nervousness that’s built on a couple pinches of newness and risk at pushing through your limits, and a thrill of doing something real and immediate. Aren’t those the times when we really learn about oursevles and really cement our knowledge?

Compare that to taking tests when our students are mostly just nervous. Which would you want for your own kids?

Go, wikis! Go!

technorati tags:wiki, education, learning

This isn’t much different from doing it with SuprGlu (in fact it may not be as elegant) but since it’s the first use of a public Google Reader page to collect a classroom full of student blog posts that I’ve seen, here’s a link to it. The posts are from a 6th grade social studies class whose teacher Mike Hetherington is “mother blogging” here and offers up some pretty good “rules for blogging,” a wiki, and some podcasts (though nothing recent.)

Mike latest post on his blog is, I think, another great example of a teacher using a blog to build community among his student bloggers.

technorati tags:blogging, education, schools

Two fifth grade reading classes in Georgia have put together what I think is a great example of a book study wiki filled with information about the book itself and contextual information including photo slide shows, audio recordings of student performances, interviews and historical reports. The book is Patricia Beatty’s Turn Homeward Hannalee. One thing that I think is especially cool is that the teachers took the time to add their reflections to the site which is a great way for the rest of us to learn and think about how this might work in our own practice:

This project gave the students the opportunity to “become the teacher” and is a great example of authentic learning. The students immediately took ownership of this project, so I was able to simply facilitate the process. I was pleasantly surprised that everything ran so smoothly even though I had never attempted to create a website on my own or with my students. Since the students were each given a different area to work on they were able to express what they had learned in their own unique way. This activity allowed the students to integrate what they had learned to create something new. Also, it gave the students a confident feeling to see their work in a format that will help other students and teachers learn about the two thousand Georgia mill workers who were shipped north by the Union Army during the Civil War, and the many other historical facts and interesting information from Turn Homeward, Hannalee.

I know I say this a lot, but this is a perfect example of giving our students the opportunity to teach what they have learned. This work now has a chance of becoming a part of other students’ study of not only this book but this part of the state’s history. In Marco Torres’ words, this is work “that has wings.” BTW, the teachers are also looking to get feedback from other educators, students and readers.

technorati tags:education, wiki, learning

From the “E-Mailed Stories that We Liked Dept.” (blogged with Andy Losik’s permission:)

Today in my elementary Infotech classes, I realized the horror of life without
online resources that are tabbed as being part of “social networking”.

Inadvertedly our school district’s filter profile had “Web Logs/Personal web
pages” added to it this morning, meaning anything that was blog-based or in
reality Web 2.0 was blocked.

I blog at mrlosik.blogspot.com out of sheer convenience. I post content for my
students in grades K-5 to access efficiently. The blog has become a favorite of
the students and parents alike. Students show their folks at home the online
activities and websites we use at school.

When the site was blocked this morning and kids were trying to access the
activity I had blogged, it hit me as to how effective this tool can be, even in
the very “rough” way I use it.
It got worse though. I sent the students to the backup assignment and I began
trying to access my Bloglines account. Blocked! Furl…blocked.
Del.icio.us….blocked….Weblog-ed….blocked! Those great kids in Room
208….blocked!

A huge chunk of my professional life was now severed from me and my classroom. I was literally placed in a time machine and shot backwards to Web 1.0. What was I supposed to do? Gopher my way around the Web?

Within a couple of hours and after panic-riddled emails to the Intermediate
School District, the problem was resolved and called a mistake. It felt more
like being awaken from a nightmare.

Holy cow! Shutting down the “Web Logs/Personal web pages” as the 8E6 filtering
system calls it, cuts us off from the ability to share real, pertinent, and
meaningful information. I am not sure where legislation stands but this is
something I hope to never experience again!

And so it goes…

technorati tags:education, learning

Another sign of things to come…

K-State plans to have all 6,000 class podcasts available to its students this year, making it by far the education realm’s largest podcasting implementation worldwide.

So does the classroom of the future, even in high school (maybe middle school) have the built in capability for teachers to record and post their lessons?

technorati tags:podcasting, classroom, learning20