If I could put in a few phrases what I took away from this year’s Educon experience it was this:

Stop complaining. Be the change. Love your students and do well by them. If that includes technology, so be it.

And it was those first two that stood out, for me at least. I heard variations on those themes more in the last two days than the first two Educons combined. Maybe it was because there were more people this year. Maybe because we’re finally getting tired of talking about change, about waiting for something or someone else to change. Or maybe because when you get into a room of people who are seriously reflecting on their own practice and their own schools, getting fired up and committed to action is just easier to do. I kept thinking during the sessions I attended that if I could start a school picking my teachers from those who were in the room, it could be a pretty amazing place.

But while most in attendance want to change the classrooms and the schools they work in, that vision of change is still amorphous. Jon Becker wrote about that fact pre Educon, and I hope he follows up with more thoughts post. I mean David Warlick and others were talking about creating a new story for education like four years ago and we still don’t seem to have a handle on it. It’s the tease of having the conference at SLA where you get to spend a couple days in a school that probably comes as close to what most of want our schools to be. All sorts of tweets along the lines of “I’d kill to work here” were popping up in the stream, as if SLA were out of reach at their own schools.

But do we all want an SLA? I know that I would want the culture of learning and the singular focus on kids, something that I don’t see very much in my travels. I mean I’m sure that SLA teachers have their complaints, but their good fortune is to work in a culture of teaching and learning that represents no new vision of schooling as much as it does leadership that can successfully navigate the current minefields that work against that vision. What I’m finding more and more as I visit schools that are getting more serious about “change” is that they have someone at the top who is willing to focus on the learning and not on the other crap. And you can pick these people out in a heartbeat; they are leaders AND learners, and they’re not ashamed to share the driving questions they have about their schools with those around them. They have a passion not for making AYP or top schools lists as much as they do supporting their teachers to be learners, allowing them to look at their own teaching as a deep learning experience and share that learning with others. I see those types of leaders very rarely. But more and more this year I heard, “so what?” I heard “you [teachers] have more power than you know.” I heard “It’s too important to wait for permission.” Create your own vision for change that you think is best for your students and implement it. Love the struggle. Love your kids. Lead. What choice do you have?

One of the things that makes Educon special is the structure: these really are conversations, not presentations. I don’t go to sessions to learn as much as I do to think, to contribute, because that’s where the best learning takes place. But I’m wondering if (and I hope to talk more about this later in the context of my own session) if next year we can call the sessions “conversations/actions” or some other phrase or term that captures that “be the change” idea. We’ve been talking about this stuff for so long; maybe 2010 can be the year we really start creating a clearer 2020 vision for our schools with more of a roadmap of how to get there.

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(Cross posted to the PLP Network blog)

One of my favorite things that Sheryl says when she talks about the challenges that schools face right now is that this generation of kids in our schools is the first not to have a choice about technology. Most of us grew up in a time when technology was an add on, and for many of us, we still see it as a choice, especially in education. (Just the other day I was at a meeting of about 25 school leaders and teachers to discuss how social learning tools can be infused into an inquiry based curriculum and only one person was using technology to take notes…me.) I look at my own kids and I know that technology will be a huge part of their learning lives because a) they want it to be and b) they’ll be expected to be savvy users of the devices of their day to communicate, create and collaborate (among other things.) They’re not going to be able to “opt out.”

That no choice theme is borne out by a new Kaiser Foundation report that came out this week. The title sums things up pretty well: “Daily Media Use Among Children and Teens Up Dramatically From Five Years Ago”. And here is the money quote:

Today, 8-18 year-olds devote an average of 7 hours and 38 minutes (7:38) to using entertainment media across a typical day (more than 53 hours a week). And because they spend so much of that time ‘media multitasking’ (using more than one medium at a time), they actually manage to pack a total of 10 hours and 45 minutes (10:45) worth of media content into those 7½ hours.

Anyway you slice that, kids are immersed in media, and that immersion is having huge effect on the way they see the world and on the way they learn. And while most of that media consumption is still tied to more “traditional” forms like television, the computer now takes up, on average, almost 1.5 hours and it is the fastest growing medium on the list. It lead the director of the study to say:

The bottom line is that all these advances in media technologies are making it even easier for young people to spend more and more time with media. It’s more important than ever that researchers, policymakers and parents stay on top of the impact it’s having on their lives.

It’s interesting to me that she didn’t mention educators in that list of folks who need to be paying attention, because more than parents and policymakers, we’re the ones who need to help kids make learning sense of their time with media of all types. And I emphasize that learning piece of it because all too often those opportunities and being blocked and filtered away in schools instead of made a basic part of the curriculum. Right now, most schools are making what I think is a bad choice by not immersing their students into these online learning environments which are creating all sorts of opportunities for us to learn. In doing so, they’re implicitly saying that technology is an option. It’s not.

Probably my favorite quote from Seth Godin’s book Tribes is this:

Leadership is a choice. It’s the choice not to do nothing.

We may not feel comfortable in a world filled with technology. We may not like the way it’s changing things and, even more, how fast it’s changing things. We may not like the way it pushes against much of what we’ve been doing in schools for eons. But our kids don’t have a choice. And if we’re going to fulfill our roles as teachers in our kids lives, neither do we.

My nine-year old Tucker plays AAU basketball for a struggling inner-city team about 30 minutes from where we live. His teammates call him “Shadow” and most times we are the only white family in the gym for games and practice. We (mostly my wife Wendy) haul his (and his sister’s) butt down there three times a week for a couple of reasons, first and foremost because we want him to see that a large chunk of the world looks little like the un-diverse, rural space in which he’s growing up, and, second, because the basketball is just grittier, tougher, faster, played at a different level than in these parts. The gym in which his team plays is 2/3 the size of regulation court with blue-padded stanchions that jut out from the sidelines and become part of the game, and dim fluorescent lighting that depending on the level of sunlight filtering in from the grimy skylights makes the basket a dark target. It’s a no blood-no foul type of game they play, the fundamentals of which are no look passes and under the basket scoop layups which even on a 10-year old level are both beautiful and at the same time difficult to watch. For most of these kids, basketball is a respite from the the difficulties of their lives, lives that are surrounded by poverty, violence and drug use. There are gangs in the middle schools, absent fathers, job layoffs and more, so whenever these kids get the chance, they play, and play, and play some more. And my kids try to keep up.

Tucker has made some fast friends with his teammates. They are sweet, respectful, fun kids to be around. The last couple of weekends, we’ve hosted sleepovers, or more aptly, shootovers as most of the time the sounds of basketballs being pounded by the hoop at the end of the driveway echo through the house. But we’ve also been doing some “field trippy” sort of stuff. A couple of weekends ago, Wendy got their parents to give them a day off of school to go to a statewide GreenFest to have fun but, as is my wife’s way, to get them thinking about the environment. They saw solar cars, learned about organic foods and, at one point, got a lesson on worms. Each of them got a container with some compost, a few poop generating worms, and instructions on how to use them to create great fertilizer for plants. It turned out that for two of the three kids that Wendy spirited off with, it was the first time they had ever held a worm. In the course of the few days they were hanging around with them, we found out all sorts of stuff about their lives and about what they knew about the world, which was, not too surprisingly, not much. At one point when Wendy asked one of them how many people he thought were in the world, he answered “10,000″. The next weekend, we went to “Ringing Rocks” which is this strange little geologic enigma near us, followed by some first-time skipping of stones in the Delaware River near our house. It was an interesting few days of learning for all of us.

There is no doubt that these kids face some pretty difficult futures as a result of circumstances not of their making. It’s pretty obvious they are behind in terms of what they know about the world and their ability to express it well. That’s not an indictment on their schools, per se, as much as it is the inequality that exists in this state and others between the education of the haves and the have nots writ large. But while they say they get “Bs” in school, I can’t help but wonder what that means. No doubt, there learning lives are aimed at what’s on the state assessment, yet they are behind in reading and writing and math. And to be honest, I’m not sure the system can overcome the difficulties present in these kids lives from the start. I don’t think the answer for them is longer school years or teachers getting “merit pay” (or battle pay) as much as it is a fix for the societal problems that surround them. Yet in this moment of steep budget cuts and layoffs, those fixes don’t seem to be on the horizon for them any time soon.

But it’s not just them. Last week I was on a panel with the state assistant commissioner of education where she told the story of seeing the “new” digitally published third-grade “U.S. States” projects, the ones we all did as kids, taking a state of the union and pasting the state bird and state flag and state flower on top of a map with some interesting statistics around it. She asked one young man who did New York State to talk about his slide and he read off all of the stuff. When he got to the population part he said “and New York State has over 19 million people,” and she responded with “Wow! Is that a lot of people?” He looked at her for a moment and said, “you know, I really don’t know.” It was a great example of the context and value that information loses when we fail to teach meaning over memorization.

For Tucker’s friends, for that kid learning about New York, for a lot of kids in this country, it becomes obvious very quickly that we are failing them. Like I said, I know it’s more complex than just blaming the schools and the teachers, which seems to be de rigeur these days, btw. Which is what is so disheartening about the rhetoric that continues to come out of Washington around education; there’s nothing really new. Nothing bold. Nothing that makes me feel like we’ve turned any corner on any of this. We’re arguing about the same old ideas and writing about the same old shifts when the reality is that the lives of those kids on Tucker’s team haven’t changed a bit from all the bloviating going on.

Not suggesting I have the answer here. My frustration just gets more acute when faces and smiles and hook shots come with the statistics.

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A few disparate ideas and experiences funneling into this post…

Recently I heard Robert Garmston speak about the need to adapt in times of significant change. He wasn’t speaking specifically of schools but about any organization, and he made an interesting distinction between technical change (which is what most schools have been undertaking) and real, adaptive change. Adaptive change, he said means:

• The implementation of almost all new practices as opposed to simply extending past practices
• New organizational ways of working
• Challenging previously held values
• Requires gaining new knowledge and skills

And much of that work, he said, has to be taken on not by the “wise folks” at the top but by everyone, inquiring, re-thinking, re-envisioning within “professional communities learning” (nice twist on the phrase.)

I thought of all of that while reading “Rocks New Economy: Making Money When CDs Don’t Sell” which talks about how the music industry is adapting to the changes brought about by these new technologies. Here is the money quote that I think captures much of the dilemma surrounding all of this:

Cliff Burnstein, co-owner of the management firm QPrime — which represents Metallica and the Red Hot Chili Peppers, as well as smaller acts like Silversun Pickups — says the old major-label model is fading fast. “That’s definitely over,” he says, noting that Silversun Pickups, on the indie label Dangerbird, have licensed several songs for TV and do well on the road. “Silversun Pickups make a decent living,” he says, but adds that he wonders whether most musicians can put the time and energy into negotiating the changing landscape — or if they even should. “It’s hard enough to write a decent song,” Burnstein says. “That’s still the talent I’m looking for.”

That article was referenced by Paul Krugman of all people in today’s Times in a thought-provoking column titled Bits, Bands and Books about how business models and, specifically, books are trying to figure out how to adapt. The most interesting part to me is the way he covers the building debate over free content and intellectual property.

Now, the strategy of giving intellectual property away so that people will buy your paraphernalia won’t work equally well for everything. To take the obvious, painful example: news organizations, very much including this one, have spent years trying to turn large online readership into an adequately paying proposition, with limited success. But they’ll have to find a way. Bit by bit, everything that can be digitized will be digitized, making intellectual property ever easier to copy and ever harder to sell for more than a nominal price. And we’ll have to find business and economic models that take this reality into account.

Which brought home a recent visit I made to a storied, venerated, old private New England academy that is successful by any traditional measure despite a very different approach to learning, one that has resisted (and is still resisting) technology as a learning tool (and even as a teaching tool). They are seeing the change coming in their students now, the ways in which they interact outside of class, the videos they are producing, the debates over intellectual property. The connections the technologies facilitate are seeping into their classrooms, and they’re not quite sure what to do about it. Some interesting conversations have started.

So all of that has me reflecting once again on how we think about changing this education model we’re always talking about, about what needs to change, and about how it all plays out. Not just in terms of how we do our own education business, but in how we prepare our kids to live in a world where many of the models for making a living ain’t what they used to be. I still think these changes “start at home” so to speak, with our own personal understanding of them.

And, to rephrase a bit from above, I still wonder whether most educators can (or are willing) to put the time and energy into negotiating the changing landscape, though I am absolutely convinced they must.

(Photo Be the Change by danny.hammontree.)

I’m happy to report that my old school won a New Jersey Best Practices award for an ESL Literature Circle Weblog that we started last year with the ESL classes and the library. From the press release:

The ESL Literature Circle includes the selection and discussion of reading material in a Literature Circle format and is designed to increase students’ English language skills through reading, listening and writing activities. Students also write and post summaries of their reading on a Weblog, which includes online discussions.

It’s great to see the imagination of the teachers and the technology get some recognition.

technorati tags:blogging, education, books, literacy

The biggest news in the blogosphere today seems to be that the number one blog in the Technorati 100 is now the 老徐 徐静蕾 新浪BLOG from China written by Xu Jing Lei, replacing Boing Boing. Couple that with the information in the latest report by Dave Sifry that less than 1/3 of the blogosphere is now written in English and it’s hard not to be impressed by the global reach of the Web. It’s pretty amazing and inspiring. Now I know that we’re still talking about a comparatively few actual content creators instead of just content consumers. If my math is right, 40,000,000 bloggers/1,000,000,000 Web users is 4%, right? If the trends continue, however, we’re going to have more and more international voices entering the conversation.
Similarly, I had a chance to revsit Global Voices Online this morning, and I was just blown away by the work that’s happening there. GVO is a project from the Berkman Center at Harvard:

A growing number of bloggers around the world are emerging as “bridge bloggers:” people who are talking about their country or region to a global audience. Global Voices is your guide to the most interesting conversations, information, and ideas appearing around the world on various forms of participatory media such as blogs, podcasts, photo sharing sites, and videoblogs.

It’s an amazing resource for any student or teacher studying international issues. It’s an amazing model for the type of work we could be doing with our own students. And, as Clarence writes, it’s sorely needed in our classrooms:

These are the voices I’ve been waiting to hear. The voices that most North American kids, locked up in our continental fortress need to hear. We need to listen, to read, to understand; to grow in global understanding and perception. The ability to cooperate internationally, to compete internationally, to know how others live through their days will bring a deeper understanding.

And, I would add, we need to contribute our own voices and those of our students to that mix.

The problem is that these types of technologies and the shifts they are facilitating are not prominently on the radar of any of the conferences I’ve been to of late. In fact, I am still amazed at the virtual lack of presentations that put the use of any technology use in the context of anything greater than the four walls of the traditional classroom. We need to be more expansive in our thinking. We need to be talking more about the opportunities “out there” instead of how to make things incrementally better “in here.” (I’m serious, right now, all sessions on PowerPoint should be banned from conference schedules.) If educators who pay their way to ed tech events don’t at least leave with a sense of the changes and opportunities that the Web affords these days, they’re wasting their money.

Tags: blogs, education, classroom, global

Alan uses a Blogger blog to present “More Than Cat Diaries: Publishing With Weblogs” at a conference in Hawaii. (Lucky cogdogblog.) I love the notes/no notes option…and now I know how to do it even. (Now if only I had the time to play…)
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Ok, now I know this wonderful example of a student actually blogging comes from my school, but I just wanted to highlight the good stuff that her teacher Tom McHale is doing with the class. Note not only the linky, reflective, deconstructive style of her writing, but also see the RSS feed pushing content to her page about the stuff she’s reading and writing about. It’s coming from Furl where she’s using the annotation feature when she saves her links to provide the summaries you see on the page. See on the class homepage the conversations they’ve started about Blinq, the new Philly Inquirer blog, and how the author Daniel Rubin is responding to them. It’s good stuff. It’s not hard stuff. And it’s good learning.
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There’s no doubt, in my mind at least, that a well tended course Weblog can deliver more information about what a student has learned than just about any standardized exam we can come up with. Unless, of course the standardized exam is to identify and reflect upon the learning evidenced in the Weblog. It would be so simple, right? Take the goals and objectives of the class. Heck, for that matter, take the state standards and say to students “Here, find where you’ve done this in your Weblog. Reflect on what it took to learn it. If you can’t find evidence of the standard, reflect on why. What prevented you from reaching that goal or understanding that concept? What do you think you need at this point in order to master it?”

We all know this: 95% of the facts and figures and formulas and definitions we “learned” in school are long gone from our brains. But the processes that we learned to learn stay with us. If they actually create learning, of course.

Konrad Glogowski writes:

When I first looked at the exam I used last year, I realized that it wouldn�t be very effective in helping me collect any evidence of learning. First of all, I already have that evidence. After months of blogging not only as individual students but also (perhaps primarily) as a community of learners, my students have already shown to me how much they have learned about course content (which they have co-generated with me and each other) and how much they have improved as writers and independent thinkers. So, I asked myself, Do I even need this final exam? What is it going to show other than what I have already gleaned from participating in the class blogosphere?

It’s a great question, and in many ways it gets to the heart of what student blogs can do when a teacher takes the time to understand blogroom management. (Bad, I know.) When communities of learners work through a topic, share in the construction of the resources and the meaning of the work, and contribute the results for others to see, the learning happens.
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Over the last week or so I’ve come across a few new edbloggers who are writing, thinking and doing in ways that have pushed my own thinking…which is the best part of the Read/Write Web, the finding new teachers part.

First off is Konrad Glogowski who is writing the “Blog of Proximal Development.” He is a writing and media teacher in Ontario, I believe, and he’s been blogging since February but has already covered some pretty heady ground with his students. I like his first post:

I wanted my first entry to be about the practice of blogging in my classroom. I looked at some of my class logs and found an interesting comment:

January 27, 2005. It is now 11:40am, I am sitting at my desk and the students are working hard on their blogs. All I hear is the gentle clicking of the keyboards. No talking at all. They seem to be totally engaged and focused on writing. All I hear is typing. I am wondering if this kind of intense engagement is good and whether it will last. Is it good that they are so engaged? Should there be more collaboration? Some of them occasionally come up and ask questions about their work. They want me to see if their work is “good.”

On comments, Konrad writes:

In an electronic blogging community, these �pencil-scratches,� to use Poe�s words again, acquire a truly communicative function. In an electronic community of writers we never talk �only to ourselves.� Instead, our marginalia, our comments and trackbacks, are given a new function which enhances not just our own experience of interacting with a text but also affects the experience of the writer with whose text we interact. The margins where we �attach� our electronic marginalia belong to somebody else. Our notes are no longer written only to ourselves. As soon as they are finished, they become part of the learning landscape. The reader and the author become electronically linked, and the link itself, one can argue, can be just as helpful to the author as it is to the reader.

He also writes a lot about community and the changing role of the teacher:

In order to be truly effective, blogging needs to be used as technology to support students in an active process of co-constructing knowledge. This requires that we look at curriculum as facilitators interested in guiding students rather than spoonfeeding them. We have to enter their conversation not as superior evaluators but as guiding and contributing voices, as co-investigators.

Good stuff, and I urge you to carve out a few minutes to sift through it and add him to your aggregator.

I also have been introduced to Susan Sedro from Malaysia who has started the “Adventures in Educational Blogging” site. She and a few of her colleagues have brought blogs to their students, and she’s giving us all a chance to watch what happens.

I am finding that the pieces are so genuine that it is easy to respond to the content; natural questions arise as I read and we discuss them. Those discussions are often leading to revisions by the students, but it feels different from other writing conferences. My perception is that the students are making the changes because they truly want to communicate with their readers, are caring to be understood. They are not revising merely because it will give them a hirer score or because they think it is required. If these blogs accomplish nothing more than this, I consider them a success.

And today she writes that things are heating up:

Friday was a day of intense blog activity. As is typical with any class, the longer an activity runs, the more spread out the students become in terms of project completion. We now have some students publishing their third post and some students who are not yet done with their first. They all want to conference, are all in our faces saying, “Please check mine so I can publish.”

I can’t tell you how much fun it is to see these types of sites springing up. I’m sure there are many more…my classroom/teacher blog list is up to 130 which I know isn’t even scraping the surface. It’s pretty inspiring…

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Did I know this? Technology and Learning’s School Site of the Month for March is Anne’s “Write Weblog“. Well deserved.

It can’t be said enough…Anne does such great work with blogs and elementary school kids, and she’s really giving them a passion for writing. I can think of few better models for the technology. She works hard to highlight their best work, to celebrate their successes, and to capitalize on the teachable moments. It’s inspiring!
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So before I get to my semi-regular list of newfound practices out there, I just want to note a couple of people who for some reason have been drinking from the blog Kool-Aid because of my blogvangelism. Always nice to know someone’s listening…

Amy Bowllan, who I met at Mohonk last fall, gets my vote for Rookie of the Year so far this year. She’s really gone, shall we say, “blog wild” over at “Teaching in the 21st Century” to the point where just recently she even got her mother to start blogging. And the big news is that she just landed a gig as a blogger for the School Library Journal. How cool is that?

The other special mention is Tom McHale, who I’ve written a lot about lately as the teacher at my school who is trying to push the envelope of his practice using blogs. Well, the good news is he got tired of my harassment and finally started his own. And I love the name: “Professional Transparency: people who work in glass houses work better.” Amen. I’m sure he would appreciate some gentle encouragement.

Some other recent blog/wiki uses I’ve come across of late:

Paul Allison of East Side Community High School in NYC has been a long time user of blogs in the classroom but now he’s graduated to wikis in a big way. This site that he’s set up at Wikicities deserves a post of its own, but for now just dig around in there a bit and see what he’s trying to do. It’s pretty amazing.

The New York Math Exchange is a group effort “to provide teachers from across New York State with information regarding the New York State Math standards as well as create a forum for collegial sharing of best practices among teachers.” Nice. (Disclaimer: I’ve been working with this group in the Executive Ed. D. program at Seton Hall.)

And here’s another cool site from the same program, this one a collaboration between kids in Bayonne, NJ and Bayonne France. Cool!

The Introductory Compostion instructors at Purdue are all blogging with their classes. Alice’s Drupalrama is one example, with links to other instructor blogs at right.

Here’s a blog about building kayaks, which I think is a pretty interesting use.

Here’s a class blog for an Introduction to Educational Technology course being taught at St. Petersburg College in Fla. (I think.) The good news is that teachers in training are learning about wikis! What a concept!

As always, if you find more good practices, let me know.
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So remember the teacher from a few weeks ago who started having grand designs about using a Weblog to get students and parents talking about the process of the course not just the content? (If you don’t, you might want to read those links before proceeding.) Well, he’s made it happen. As Mr. McHale puts it, “it started slow, but it’s beginning to grow.”

I have to say I don’t think I’ve seen anything like it. The parents, students and teachers are talking, negotiating through the blog about how the course is working and what ideas might make it better. They’ve even enlisted a former teacher at our school who now lives in Minnesota. This is a combined English/Social Studies class, and at first, his team teacher wasn’t thrilled with the idea. But he’s come around.

I must admit that when Mr.McHale proposed this weblog idea I was a bit skeptical. I envisioned students using the weblog to complain about work without offering ideas on how to improve things. Although this fear seemed to be coming to fruition on the first day, it has been the exact opposite since. I want to thank those students that have contributed and the parents/teachers that have contributed.

And check out this thread where parents weigh in on the use of groups in class. They’re making serious, valuable suggestions, and at least one of them is impressed at being given the opportunity.

Interesting and sensible comments. I do want to say how encouraged I am by the thought behind the establishment of this site, and much of the conversation generated. I give teachers a lot of credit when they are willing to seek out student input as you’ve done; I know it can generate a lot of extra work for them. It’s been a long time since I’ve been in front of a classroom, but my students really seemed to respond well to those opportunities.

Now, I know that teaching is not all about winning a popularity contest with parents, and I know that this type of transparency can sometimes create more problems than it solves. But I’m anxious to see what evolves from this, to see what sticks. And the general idea that we can now create these sorts of connections still thrills me…
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I got wind of young edubloggers at the Willowdale Elementary School in Nebraska, and I’ve happily Furled these new examples of elementary school examples. There’s Mrs. Greenwald’s first grade blog where they are covering a whole bunch of topics, Mrs. French’s fifth grade class, Mrs. Sanborn’s fifth grade class, and Mrs. Everts’ fifth grade class. Mrs. Gibbons second grade class is just getting started.

Tony Vincent is the tech integrator at the school, and he’s got them using Kidzlog, which is something I hadn’t seen implemented before. Good stuff.

Why am I getting the feeling there are a lot more teachers and kids blogging these days?
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So this is cool…one of the health and physical edcuation teachers here at my school got a “Best Practice” award from PE Central for his class Weblog. He’s been doing some pretty good thinking with his students at the site, and I think it’s great that he’s getting some outside recognition for it.

Go Blogs. Go!
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