Digital Learning, Illustrated

One of the better activities for teachers to do is to look at the following YouTube video and answer the following questions:

• What type of learning is taking place?
• What role is technology playing?

It is worth it to take a look at the comments the boy has received (66 total when I posted this).

The type of learning that is taking place is illustrative of "digital learning".  It is student-centered, inquiry-based.  It draws upon teachers from around the world.  The individuals who are helping this boy out, the boy does not even know.  It is an authentic real-world experience for him, not something contrived and solely useful in the walls of a classroom.

In brief, he is learning through making connections.  And, it's not about the technology at all.  He didn't create this just to "make a YouTube video".  We aren't interested in assessing his videography or editing skills.  He wanted to learn how to use a bowdrill set, and the technology was merely a conduit to get to that learning, just as he would use a pencil or a calculator in other situations.

In this sense, digital learning is not about the technology at all; it is about the deeper purposes and important learnings that you want students to have.  It is about a curriculum that creates connections for students to multiple sources of learning, not to simply the one answer in the back of the book. 

The easy mistake to make, the wrong conclusion to jump to, is to think it is about the technology, since as an outsider that is what you see when you walk into a 1:1 school.  But if a school is doing it well, it's not what students should see.  As Chris Lehmann from Science Leadership Academy in Philadelphia points out, technology "should be like oxygen, ubiquitous, necessary, and invisible".  Students should no more be conscious that they are using the computer than other pieces of technology in their room.

Will Richardson: "You need to share more"

I'm still percolating thoughts from yesterday's session. Here are my biggest three.

1. DISTRICT RE-CALIBRATION
We have a lot of enthusiasm from the represented districts about teaching in the 21st century. They want to gear instruction towards project-based learning. They want to embed technology. They want to prioritize creativity, innovation, and critical thinking. They want to connect with other schools. And, this enthusiasm--this willingness to try and risk failure--is absolutely critical for a district to be successful.

But, there is perhaps a perception of the districts that their involvement with a one-to-one means they are truly teaching in the 21st century. Will repeatedly mentioned purchasing the digital technology and using it is actually very easy. It is transforming the curriculum that is difficult. He asked where districts taught Wikipedia, or taught about sexting. He asked about authentic assessments and internships. And, the educators there realized, there is a way to go.

And this is a problem. When the Newell-Fonda's, Okoboji's, and Van Meter's of the state try new things, they don't have a model or blueprint to look at. They have to build the plane while flying it. And in addition, given their relative position to other districts, it does look like they are doing things very well.

These districts have to re-calibrate their understanding of effective teaching. No longer can they compare themselves to "business-as-usual" instruction that you might see in other Iowa districts... they have surpassed that. They now need to look at schools like the New Tech High school or Science Leadership Academy. They have to see how these schools go beyond having computers and using projects to fully improving instruction and assessment.

2. STATEWIDE LEADERSHIP
We have a lot of enthusiasm from the districts... much of the conversation was driven by them. But there wasn't much conversation from DE or AEA consultants (myself included). You could make too much of this, but the contrast with who was participating was striking.

My thought is this: Not every school has the leader who can vision schools functioning in the way Will Richardson talks about. We need statewide leadership to help promote one-to-one initiatives and not merely cheer lead. I'm not sure that has happened up until this point.

3. BUILDING COMMUNITY
The biggest takeaway was Will's reflection, invaluable as an outside viewpoint looking in. He mentioned that the current work of the schools represented, and their leadership they are providing, is excellent. But, it is pockets of excellence at this point. Much as a district has an excellent teacher here and an excellent teacher there, if there are districts doing great things, it was apparent that they were in isolation from everyone else.

Will asked several superintendents how other people knew what they were doing, and the response was typically "Come visit us" or "Look at our website". Which isn't active sharing... it's passive sharing. A willingness to share doesn't mean anyone is going to do it. And this has been the downfall of our statewide efforts many times before.

Will mentioned Clay Shirky's analysis of what constitutes a community. Shirky writes that while networking and connecting is important, people mistake that for a community. True community starts with sharing, then moves to collaboration, then to collective action. Collective action is the place we want to be in Iowa, where we are moving forward all schools. How will we start the sharing?

Better Tool Training for Educators

Before we mentioned how schools mistakenly put training on tools ahead of the purpose of using technology in the curriculum. Switching that order is still the most critical item for successful technology professional development. The ideal order:

But, we have room to improve within the tool subset as well. That is, once we get to the part where we train educators how to use Microsoft Word (or blogging or Voicethread, etc.) we still don't do it well.

Below is a graphic that demonstrates typical PD steps used to learn a tool:


Some thoughts with this. 1) Schools are getting much better at getting past the first step, "awareness". But there are still many times when I've fielded the request, "Can you come out to our district and show us all the different web 2.0 tools out there?" And then, nothing else. If the school district doesn't provide professional development time and opportunities to do the next steps, expecting staff to do it on their own, it won't happen.

2) The next three stages work together, and often not sequentially. For example, you might start with an idea of how you'd like to use a wiki to develop collaboration in the classroom first before starting to learn how to make a wiki. Once you get started, you might see that you can upload files like MS Word documents and pdfs to a wiki, and you might reconceptualize how you would use it in your classroom. And, that might require you to learn more specifics on how to create a wiki. Regardless of the number of times you bounce back and forth between those stages, the purpose is to gain enough experience to use the tool independently.

3) We need to diversify the ways we do steps 2 and 3 as well. Gaining competence by having everyone in the lab at the same time as I go step-by-step how to make a power point is not effective (ask the poor teachers at Howard-Winneshiek who suffered through those years ago). People learn at different paces. They get curious and want to explore different features than everyone else. And they learn best from each other. Having flexible groups (with teacher quality money assistance), professional learning communities, individual tutoring sessions, and using resources like Atomic Learning allow people to learn at their own pace. The key... learning at your own pace does not mean learning on your own.

4) But the three thoughts above don't even scratch the surface of this last thought. We spend too much time, even on professional development directed by AEA staff, on steps 1, 2, and 3. That isn't professional development. That's training. And there is a big difference.

A quick example. We at Heartland give thousands of power points a year, to all types of different audiences of educators on all types of different topics. Our staff have stage 4 "experience" down pat.

But, until recently, we never talked about what made an effective power point. Sure we can use a template and put in bullets and such, but does that mean you should? The answer is a resounding no. Bullet points in a power point lead to rote reading off the slides, shifting the audience's attention away from the presenter, and ultimately making the presentation less effective. Or another easy example to see, just because you can add sound effects and transitions doesn't mean you should.

There is a level with technology professional development that gets at the best practices of using a tool. It gets beyond the "how do I use a tool" to the "how should I use a tool". And this is where professional development truly is. And accompanying this is actual evaluation of how you are using tools so that you can improve your practice. The evaluation of technology use by teachers themselves I have yet to seen done in an impressive way. And indeed, this is a topic of many posts in the future.

At Heartland, we're wrestling with that question as well. We have started training of our staff on Moodle, Adobe Connect Pro, Ning, and other online content creation programs in an effort to ramp up our capacity to deliver online content to schools. But, our aim is true professional development for our agency consultants, and that's a tall order, when best practices for how to facilitate a Ning forum or how to create a Moodle unit are in their infancy.

How well does your school get up to the steps of true professional development and evaluation?

Laptops as School Supplies

With several schools in Iowa looking at going 1:1, many are encountering the question of expense. Jim Klein poses an excellent question, when do laptops become school supplies?

Think about this for a second. In many schools, we require students to have TI-## graphing calculators, notebooks, dictionaries, and many other supplies that can add up in cost. How about purchasing a $300-$400 netbook that can easily last 3-4 years? In some families, the kids already have laptops, and for others, they would be able to rent from the school for a reduced price.

With the learning power that comes with the computer, it is far more instrumental a tool than all the other school supplies a student could purchase, to be dynamically used in all curricular areas, transforming their education. Where else could you get that potential of a difference for $100 a year?

And with primary cost out of the hands of the school, now the only thing that stands in its way is the school's willingness to handle a multi-platform environment. Which, shouldn't stand in the way of a school taking their curriculum into the 21st century.

Klein comments on the feasibility of this:

The trick, of course, will be achieving critical mass of parent supplied netbooks. 60% probably isn't enough, unless the district has the wherewithal to provide enough backup equipment to accommodate the other 40%. But, if the parents provide 70-80%, and those who don't are provided with equipment to use at school and all the software for use at home, have we achieved our goal? When do the laptops become school supplies? If we no longer have to teach students how to use the laptops themselves, no longer have the burden of providing significant support for them or training on how to use them, and we make sure all of the tools are free and easily accessible no matter what device the student uses, does the laptop suddenly become like a calculator? One of many means to an end?

Interesting food for thought.

The Digital Curriculum, Student Research, and Diigo

As schools move their curriculum into the digital format, bypassing printed resources in favor of digital resources, there are fears abound about rampant cut and paste. The popularity of Wikipedia, and its accompanying scrutiny by teachers, exasperate the issue.

But exasperating the issue of research is not a bad thing. What passes as "research" in many of our nation's schools is troubling, and in many other cases, teachers set up high expectations for research without any scaffolding to help students get there.

NOT A BOOK REPORT
What often students expected when it came to research (and very likely what was expected of them), was being given a topic to find some information about, going to some sources, finding the information, and then writing the information in correct essay form. Often, students were somewhat familiar with citing sources... perhaps they had exposure to it one time.

This, of course, is not research. "You've done book reports," I told them about their earlier years. And don't get me wrong, book reports have their place. It's the skills of summarizing the main ideas and communication through composition. And, sharing of information to the rest of the class is an effective way of individualizing learning and even sparking engagement.

Problem is, that is done way too much. Students "researched" an element of the periodic table, only to write up in an essay what its atomic number, mass, and isotopes are. Students "researched" Costa Rica to regurgitate what its chief exports, GDP, and style of government were. Students "researched" an artist to state what years they lived, what style they painted, and how they died. Fill in your own example here. All of these are book reports.

BUYING A CAR
What made sense to students was the analogy of buying a car. This is mainly because, students were already actively researching which car they would be buying next year without even knowing it qualified as "research". (Probably the lack of a bibliography threw them)

Students have trouble seeing that research is the act of finding an educated answer to a question... a question that isn't a cut and dry question. By all the book reports they have done throughout their years, they have learned that the answer is always there, but you have to find it in three places to make the teacher happy.

But what if the question is "what car should you get?" Suddenly, students see the answer depends on a lot of variables. It's not cut and dry at all. It's an argumentative/persuasive process. Go and find the answer, and then assemble your supporting evidence to convince everyone else you found the right answer.

What helps with the car analogy is the next question, "what resources would you use to find your answer?" No, you aren't going to start with Motor Trend. You are going to look at statistics--horsepower, cargo room, gas mileage, and most importantly, price. You are going to ask experts for their opinions, such as your mom and dad, or the non-academically/athletically inclined grease monkey student who now has become the most valuable student opinion in the room. And most of all, you are going to experiment, as in go for a test drive.

That's research. You get a variety of information from all these places, and then you synthesize it to answer your question. And your answer could very well look different than your neighbor's. In fact, as a teacher, if I'm assigning a research project where I already know what the correct answer is, I'm not doing an effective job. That's reason #1 we get cut-and-paste.

A BETTER EXAMPLE
When we taught a cross-curricular 1960s research unit, students didn't research a topic. We started with the following research question:

The 1960s have been a labeled as a decade where people tried to go against tradition (or the status quo) wherever they could. They did so in the form of a “massive cultural revolution”. But, how revolutionary was it? By selecting a specific topic, argue whether the 1960s have been more revolutionary than the 2000s or not. Use research to back up your conclusions.

And the results were exciting. Students having to determine whether the Beatles were more revolutionary than Eminem. The miniskirt more revolutionary than the women's pants-suit. The Civil Rights Act more revolutionary than Civil Union legislation. There even were students who neverbefore had an interest in social studies, language arts , or math, do a statistical analysis on the 60s muscles cars vs. the cars of today.

Individualized. Rigorous. Authentic. That's the power of a good research unit.

SCAFFOLDING REQUIRED
But it doesn't happen with just a good research question. The second big problem is that students are often expected to do research without ever being taught how to.

Students need meta-cognitive help to understand each step to the research process. A teacher should not assume this is done somewhere else in a student's career... it needs to be done in their classroom. Break down the steps.

• Formulate your research question
• Determine what type of information you will need
• Identify what good sources would be to find that information (including sources from "all angles")
• Find and critique sources for quality, bias, etc.
• Process those sources for information (note-taking)
• Draw a conclusion from the information (or a hypothesis)
• Synthesize your information into a composition or presentation (which of course has its own process)

This is where we often fail. There aren't many great lessons which teach students how to do these steps, and when there are, students often have problems transferring that meta-cognition to a different occasion and a different subject area.

DIIGO
One of the steps in particular, "process those sources for information", is always assumed to be known. The fact of the matter is, if you give students an article to read, students have a difficult time identifying what information is important for another purpose.

Diigo helps immensely. It is a social bookmarking tool that allows students to highlight and annotate an article, and then share annotations with others. You can share them publicly or with other invited people, like classmates.

After a teacher model and discussion about how you would do the process, students can each analyze an article separately, highlighting the 5 most salient points to proving X. Then after students are finished, everyone can turn the shared annotations on and see what others (including the teacher) have identified. Now you have working examples to use as a springboard about the "why is this fact important and this one not" discussion.

For more on Diigo and the research process, check out Will Richardson's recent post.

Two satirical videos on textbooks

Two of my favorite satires on those who are hesitant to move away from textbooks and towards digital curriculum, as though students will forget how to read when that happens. The second video is from the Science Leadership Academy in Philadelphia.

Student Presentations and Audience Microblogging

Despite the abundance of them in schools, I'm not a fan of book reports or posterboard displays. Mainly for three reasons:

1. They are regurgitation instead of analysis
2. Unless taught by a speech instructor, they usually do not accompany any teaching on how to present. The belief is that either they already know how to make a good presentation, or just the process of working on it without any teaching or constructive feedback will get them there. Which usually means, the presentations are poor.
3. As long as the members of class are not disruptive, they usually have license to not pay attention.

Neither #1 or #2 follow the principles of Understanding by Design, but many educators mistakenly think that, because they are a project, they do. If this is our definition of rigor/relevant projects, we need to rethink things. I've never seen a posterboard project that is anything other than "Quadrant A".

But, one thing that would help #1 and #2 is if #3 wasn't true, if there was an active audience that you were presenting for. From a digital curriculum point-of-view, there is a better way to make seamless integration that enhances learning and engagement.

Using a microblogging tool such as Twitter or Edmodo, the class can respond and engage in critical dialogue while the presentation is taking place. It is like having a structured study guide for each student's presentation, but allowing for more flexible leaning and discussion to take place.

HOW THIS MIGHT LOOK
Let's say we take the normal, average book report (not recommended, but we'll start there). The teacher could assign to the class "Make sure you tweet at least two important thoughts you heard the presenter say." Or, "Make sure you tweet one similarity and one difference to your novel." She could have a discussion, even a practice speech with herself presenting, to examine which are deeper observations or comparisons and which are surface-level.

Through microblogging tools, you can set it up so that each student (and the teacher) is "following" each other. This will allow them to watch the running conversation of the audience as the speech is going on, including what other students are noticing and finding interesting.

The teacher then can use the tweets as a learning opportunity. The teacher can pose instructional questions mid-speech without saying a word and disrupting the speaker. These questions can direct students attention. Or, other students could pose their own questions and get "re-tweeted" (copied by another student) for emphasis. The teacher could "re-tweet" to draw attention to what a student has observed. And, the "re-tweet" becomes a powerful tool for student confidence and reinforcement.

Additionally, using the reply notation to address one person in particular, students can ask clarification questions of other students' tweets, as well as one for the speaker to think about when she is finished and back at her work station. It also serves as a way for the teacher to prompt other students.

When the presentation is finished, the teacher can show the entire dialogue on the lcd projector, or better yet, the highlight tweets (Twitter allows you to "star" certain tweets, which you can bring up later, separated from the rest of the dialogue). This digital data encourages not only audience participation and engagement, but also audience respect, since it can be saved and shown to parents as a model of student work, good or bad. But most importantly, the student data sparks post-presentation conversation. Which items in the speech were tweeted the most? Which questions came up? Teachers could mention "Carla, one of the questions that came up in the Twitter discussion was...", or better yet, students could ask.

"BUT, THAT'S TOO DISTRACTING"
The obvious objection to this type of strategy is that with all the twittering going, on, students won't be paying attention to the speaker. To this, I have two answers.

First, this shows the divide between those embracing technology and those fearing it. Students live in a multi-tasking world. Having them sit and listen to (in many ways) poor presentations for which there is no engagement or relevance is agony for them. If in doubt, become a cub scout leader and watch 8-year-olds squirm as they have to sit respectfully to hear the presentation on how the post office works without getting a tour of the building.

The reality is, students will multi-task whether we like it or not. By "forcing attention", students will multi-task by daydream, writing notes, or engaging in side discussions. Might as well let them do that in a productive way through Twitter. And, students actually learn better in these types of multi-processing environments. Plus, this is how the world is changing. Every meeting I sit in on or conference that I attend, I'm not the only one participating on the internet while participating in the discussion.

The second response is, this is where the art of a good teacher comes into play. If a teacher allows microblogging with no guidance, no governance, and no direction, they will get off-task behavior. Good teachers know, just like in regular classroom discussion, how to keep conversation flowing, involving all people, allowing for divergent thought, but then converging toward the objective.

The Digital Curriculum in Physical Education

My two oldest kids both mentioned to me that physical education is their favorite subject at school, which made me think. When I was in first grade, phy ed was my favorite as well. And somewhere in the litany of dodgeball games and half-effort team sport games, by high school it was my least favorite. And my experience wasn't that uncommon. Which, of course, is insightful on many levels.

First, it illustrates how important psychomotor activity is to young children, and how it should be a cross-curricular feature in all subjects, for kids at that age need to be active and learn best that way. And second, it illustrates how irrelevant the traditional phy ed curriculum was. Irrelevant for the athletic, as the games were a joke compared to interscholastic sports, and irrelevant for the unathletic, as it was a source of embarrassment to not be talented.

Fast forward to 2009, and physical education is one of the fastest changing curricula out there. I had the privilege to work with two great high school physical education programs at Howard-Winneshiek and Grinnell. Both utilized aspects of the digital curriculum to give students a 21st century education.

POLAR FITNESS
Both schools participated in the physical fitness grant, as many Iowa schools did, which brought not only workout equipment, but also Polar Fitness monitoring devices. In a nutshell, Polar Fitness systems consisted of watches and/or bands worn around your torso which gathered heart rate and other vital information, and downloaded it via infrared into a computer. The equipment could be programmed to help students stay in their target zone for physical exertion.

Tony Farmer, a physical education teacher at Grinnell, was the one who explained to me how critical the integration was to the curriculum. Without it, assessment was a constant subjective battle. It was very hard to get students to actually learn about their bodies physical activities. On the other hand, the technology gave immediate feedback in the form of digital data to every student, data that wasn't arbitrary. Every student could monitor their own individualized target zones and measure their progress off the digital data. And the technology was basically invisible... it didn't interfere with the physical activity.

The Grinnell phy ed staff upped the ante with individualized plans for students, who could set their own goals with certain physical skills. Students could focus on stamina, dexterity, healthy diet, strength, you name it. Combined with individualized research and a reflective journaling process, you had a highly engaging curriculum. These attributes--utilizing technology to give feedback and individualize learning, being student-centered, offering authentic assessment, all while being invisible, are key elements of the digital curriculum.

HEALTH LITERACY
One of the areas of the 21st century skills in the Iowa Core is health literacy. Like financial literacy, health literacy will be very challenging to integrate in core classes like math and language arts without it being contrived. Story problems about BMI in math class won't cut it.

I will argue there is no way to meet this need without cross-curricular work involving physical education teachers, health teachers, family consumer science teachers, and school counselors (the "health literacy" people) in contact with the core content teachers. This is a paradigm shift, as those educators are often the most compartmentalized in already-compartmentalized high schools.

Moreover, these can't be units. Health literacy has to be ongoing, just like character development, seamlessly woven into the routine. That's because healthy living is more than a skill, it is a habit.

How would this look? Health teachers can work with students to monitor their habits throughout the school day. Find ways to keep data on posture, water intake, and attention in all classes, for example, and then analyze the use. This helps students become conscious of their lifestyle and the effect it has on their performance.

Working collaboratively with health and drama teachers, core content teachers can find ways to get students active kinesthetically. Ask the students which activity do they remember the most from Mr. Abbey's classes, and the answer will surprisingly not involve computers. It was rather when I taught my ninth grade English class the finer details of stage swordfighting during Romeo and Juliet. Using dowel rods, students learned the dramatic twists on fencing to make for fine stage art, and then integrated the learning into recreations of scenes from the play. Because of the high energy level, students became more aware of their physical bodies. And, those student-choreographed swordfights were excellent... we drew audiences from the elementary school.

Health literacy can be the springboard for authentic change in cultural ways in addition to personal. It is no secret that classrooms feature a lot of sitting and straining of the eyes. Some schools, led by active health teachers, are leading changes in the culture by encouraging students to push for "stand time" in the class. This has caught on in some schools, which are eliminating the traditional desks. As good principals will mention, situations where students can change the culture not only improve the school, but also give the students a feeling of self-worth that cannot be recreated in an infinite number of gold stars.

Michael Wesch, the changing face of education, and the digital curriculum

An educational thinker that every educator should follow is Michael Wesch, who recently was named "Professor of the Year" by the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching and the Council for Advancement and Support of Education. Wesch is a professor of anthropology at Kansas State University.

Below is a presentation he gave at the University of Manitoba last June:



The presentation is long, but there are a couple things pertinent to our discussion. Wesch does an excellent job analyzing how the classroom is changing (starting about a minute into the video). Interviewing his students, he found that over half hate school, but no one hates learning. He challenges the following traditional unspoken assumptions from the traditional classroom:

• To learn is to acquire knowledge
• Information is scarce and hard to find
• Trust authority for good information
• Authorized information is beyond discussion
• Obey the authority
• Follow along

At about 27 minutes into the presentation, Wesch switches and talks about his own classroom, where he is fully immersed, implementing the digital curriculum. He uses a netvibes mashup site to bring in student blogging, commenting, wiki contributions, and social networking (diigo and twitter among others), as well as RSS from articles throughout the internet, for students to use 21st century learning.

100 Posts and Counting...

I see from my odometer that this is my 100th post in this blog, which in the grand scheme of things, is just a drop in the bucket (many edubloggers have several thousand posts).

Rather than look back on the posts, I thought I'd share with you the things I'm working on currently, and how they'll benefit Iowa schools:

1. I help facilitate the statewide online council, representing each AEA and the DE. The council is working on ways to provide more and better online training for teachers. Right now, we are working on a central clearinghouse registration system, so that we share resources across the state. Our hope is that if I'm a teacher in Keokuk, I could take an online course from a teacher in Sioux City, who might be the expert on that topic. Geography won't matter anymore.


2. To further help with that, the online council is developing online teaching and course standards to ensure quality. We have a working draft completed with standards based on the Iowa Teaching Standards, NACOL standards, SREB standards, among others.


3. Those standards are leading towards better training for would-be online instructors. We are developing courses off those standards to help all educators--instructors, facilitators, administrators--become more confident in their knowledge of online education. Since we are going statewide together, you will see quality courses.


4. We're also expanding the definition of what online training means, beyond the Moodle course. In addition to the mandatory trainings Heartland offers, we are adding training for Web IEPs and Positive Behavior Supports.


5. The council is also looking at developing statewide online communities to help teachers connect with other teachers, and to build their own personal learning networks. Our goal for these communities is to have them available in the fall of 2009.


6. Just as important, I am working with the Iowa Association of Alternative Education, which is starting to look at the ways online education can benefit the student at-risk. Just as we hope to provide training for online professional development instructors, we also hope to provide training for online K-12 teachers and facilitators. For those interested, I will be presenting at the 2009 Spring Conference on March 26 & 27.


7. I'm also working locally with a couple districts on their 1:1 initiatives and implementation of the digital curriculum, including providing training and support for instructors as they digitalize their curriculum. Other districts interested, feel free to contact me.


8. I also serve as a member of the Iowa Core network, specifically their new technology/21st century skill team. Our goal is to help crystallize what the nebulous "21st century skills" look like in the classroom and help schools discover the tools to get there. We've just started work in this area... we have a long ways to go.


9. On a local level, I provide training for AEA staff, area Superintendents, and the area Curriculum Network, as all three groups are looking at social media and web 2.0 tools.


10. And as you know, I will continue to blog. My goal for the blog is to both highlight and facilitate change in Iowa's schools and to provide a discussion of the resources to do so. I'm on the look-out to continuously improve the blog to do that.

And with that, I'll start on my next 100...

Wesley Fryer on eliminating textbooks, the digital curriculum

Thought I'd share the ideas of Wesley Fryer, perhaps my favorite edublogger, in his latest post, as it ties in with our discussion of eliminating textbooks and the digital curriculum:

How I yearn for leadership in the state of Oklahoma which will help usher in the learning revolution. We don’t need to keep buying $75 textbooks for K-12 students in all the mandated content areas. That madness should stop now. We need Netbooks for EVERY student and teacher, in EVERY grade, starting in third grade. Yes, I love Macs dearly, but what leader of a 1:1 laptop learning initiative can financially justify a $1000 investment for hardware for each learner compared to a $250 Netbook? You can’t. The digital curriculum, networking infrastructure, and professional development which can be provided for learners with the money saved by purchasing Netbooks instead of full-blown $1000 laptops is staggering.

Oh by the way, Wes' post starts with looking at the difference between Canada's media's perception of education and the U.S's. Worth a read for us in Iowa.

Why the "Digital" Curriculum?

What are we talking about when we say the digital curriculum? Is that a metonymic word for computers?

Actually, I picked the term Digital Curriculum intentionally. It serves as both a high-powered metaphor as well as a literal description of what we are seeking.

When the world transferred from VHS to DVD, or from cassettes to CDs, it was a process of moving from analog to digital. Analog movies and music are static; they are hard to mix, manipulate, or transfer (as any teacher who had to spend 15 minutes of class cueing the tape to the right spot can attest). When they became digital, suddenly movies and music were dynamic. They were instantly accessible at all parts, and they could be transferred to different places for different purposes.

On a literal level, the digital curriculum requires that analog to digital conversion. Every piece of our curriculum will run through the digital media. Static textbooks will be shelved in favor of up-to-date RSS. Paper and pencil data collection will be removed in favor of digital data collection. Student productions and collaborations will have a digital interface to them, running through computers.

But on a deeper level, it isn't just the physical conversion... it is the pedagogical conversion. Gone are the days where knowledge is static in a textbook, where information cannot be improved upon or used, just regurgitated. In its place is the digital frame of thinking, where content and information is relevant to each student, where they have the power to manipulate it and transfer it into their own meaning, improving upon that meaning, and then sharing it with the world.

Thus... the digital curriculum...

Depth of Technology Integration

Technology integration is not monolithic; that is to say, just using computers does not mean you are fully integrating. There are degrees to the definition.

Those that do talk about the degree of integration often talk about the frequency, not necessarily the purpose. But both are components.

I've tried to represent this visually:
What are the levels of integration?

FREQUENCY
• Sporadic - Very occasional use of technology, perhaps a free day in the lab or one-time "research" looking up websites.
• Limited - Integration is influenced by factors. Students have to work on assignments at home because computers are not available. Or activities are modified for the one-computer classroom.
• Scheduled - Integration happens once a cycle, during scheduled time.
• Intensive Unit - Students are not working with technology regularly, but do so intensively during a particular unit (such as three weeks spent making an iMovie).
• Daily - Not only intensive, but there is a daily integration to technology. Can be ongoing projects or things as simple as daily student blogging or checking the message board.
• 1:1 - Daily integration to the nth degree. Now students are in possession of the computerized device, extending learning beyond the classroom time slots and walls. Also, integration becomes school-wide instead of classroom-wide.

PURPOSE
• Compliance - Integrating only because you are forced to as a teacher. This isn't much deeper than no integration at all.
• Convenience - Integration only where it is easier to do the lesson than in the absence of technology. Showing streaming video in the same way you would show analog video is convenient integration. So is using Microsoft Word for word processing. In some districts, Power Point is reaching convenient integration, where the technology is not a tool for learning but rather an easier method to the desired product.
• Unstructured - Free "play time" with technology. Can lead to student learning through their own inquisitiveness, or to a waste of time.
• Unconnected - Integration that isn't tied to the curriculum. Actually, this could be used as a descriptor for convenience, unstructured, or procedural integration than its own category. While the learning could be deep or shallow, the main feature of this is that it is teaching a tool/doing a project for the sake of experiencing the technology, not for the sake of learning the curriculum.
• Procedural - Training integration, where students receive explicit instruction on how to use technology (this can be a pre-cursor to other types of integration, or in the case of computer applications courses, it could be the only model).
• Constructivist - Integration is used by students to create products, artifacts, or authentic work, which allows students to construct their own meaning.
• Connectivist - Integration is used to connect students to a variety of resources and people, building their "knowledge net" and their exposure to the infinite number of learning items in the world.

A note: while there is general correlation between the two sides, there is by no means a requirement to be at the same level. For example, in a 1:1 school, you will probably have quite a few teachers at the constructivist level and also a few at the compliance level. And some creative teachers in a limited setting can find ways to develop constructivist learning.

If we made this chart into a chart of frequency used in schools, there would be several "hotspots". A lot of "integration" is Scheduled-Convenience. There also is a large portion of (what I would consider) quality integration that is Intensive Unit-Constructivist. Just as often, there is Intensive Unit-Unconnected (as my principal mode would say, tell me again why you are having the kids do this?). There are "dead-spots" as well, obviously with 1:1 and Daily, as well as Connectivist integration.

It is my premise that The Deeper, The Better. We should aspire to the Digital Curriculum at the bottom. This is where technology is not a conscious effort, or even worse, a foreign experience. It is where technology use in the classroom has become so native that is invisible, just like using a pencil.

To get there, though, we have to correctly identify where we currently are. We are not there just because we had students look up sites on the Holocaust last Thursday. We are not there even if we have that one cool unit where they make a podcast. If they are isolated events in the curriculum, technology use remains foreign for students. This was okay when people did not work and live with computers, but it is not okay now. Just like the work world and the private world, our technology use must be native.

Connectivism - Common Craft style

This is from Wendy Drexler, who working with her son, have put together a synopsis of what a connectivist student's day would look like. Note the similarity to the digital curriculum.

What worries me is that connectivism has not been mentioned with the Iowa Core. The "new way of teaching" pushed by the core, be it authentic intellectual work or project-based learning, is really constructivism. Not a bad thing, mind you (better than the behaviorism model of learning that permeates quite a few of our classrooms). But again, behind the times.

My worries notwithstanding, a nice video:

2020 Vision

We have 12 short years to the year 2020, a year that serves as more than a play on words with a future vision. In 2020, our current first graders, including my son, will be we graduating. We will be starting to see a new generation to enter our schools (post-"Net Generation"). We will be far enough removed from the end of NCLB to look back and fully assess its worth. And given the rate at which information and technology is expanding, a personal computer will begin to have the knowledge capacity of a human brain.

There are some things we can safely predict about the year 2020 in Iowa. Higher percentages of our students will be living in the Urban 8, meaning we'll likely have fewer total districts, requiring more distance learning opportunities. Quite a few of the top jobs in demand in that year don't exist today. And, those jobs will rely on the blending of technological advances with the advances in other seemingly limitless fields, like genetics or nuclear physics.

It goes without saying that the needs of students are changing; contrary to what you see in your local classroom, we aren't preparing students for the industrial age anymore. There are no longer set answers, set skills to master in order to be employable, like there was in work places of the past. Set patterns, answers, and skills can be learned by computers who can perform more and more of those tasks. Replacing it are those things that are not set, the solving of unclear problems and the mastery of soft skills, of consensus-building and relationship forming, and most importantly of teamwork and leadership. These are the mysterious "21st century skills" that the Iowa Core is emphasizing, in addition to math, reading, science, and social studies.

THE IOWA CORE: PART OF THE SOLUTION

There is still much work to be done on the state's vision of what those 21st century skills look like, how they are best implemented in the classroom. The Iowa Core is, after all, a curriculum, a system of standards, benchmarks, and indicators to be achieved. It is not a pedagogy of instruction, and although Iowa Core training for district leadership teams right now are emphasizing work such as Balanced Leadership and Instructional Decision Making, there is still a lot left open to individual districts, which is both good and bad.

I am very encouraged by the work on the Iowa Core and its call to ramp up the instruction, but a new set of standards and more push for the bevy of instructional initiatives alone won't get us there. In spite of where we are heading right now, we need more. We need more if we are going to meet our vision of providing a world-class education to all of our students so they can compete in the global economy.

THE PLAN WE NEED:

Enter Scott McLeod's plan for the 21st century learning system. I've included the graphic below:
Scott identifies 6 categories in order to create an educational world that mimics the world students will be competing in, not in the industrial age, but in the network age.

• Curriculum that supports 21st century skills- Which, is the attempt of the Iowa Core. Iowa is in a unique situation. Great change will be coming through state legislative mandate, and it will have an effect, just as NCLB did. Hopefully, the effect will be a positive one on instruction. But, I will judge the value of the Iowa Core Curriculum by its ability to bring about the Digital Curriculum.

• P-20 coordination and articulation- Because while the world has shifted to make college a necessity to compete, the educational system hasn't shifted nearly as much. There is still a communication divide between K-12 and 13-20.

• A computerized device in every student's hand- You know how I feel about this.

• Robust statewide online learning infrastructure- Ditto

• Broadband access for all those computers- Or else, the computerized device is a glorified graphing calculator.

• Preservice and inservice training for teachers- And ultimately, this is where we will succeed or fail, how tangible and meaningful can we make our training on 21st century skills be for teachers?

We have to get there. This is the "more" that we need. Having these things in place, there will be no mistake about it; we are not just setting ourselves up for another initiative that will go away, another binder that will soon collect dust on the shelf. We will have given students and teachers the actual tools (both technology and training). All will take notice.

HOW WE GET THERE

Scott identifies three important supports to get there: Legislative policy and funding, ongoing monitoring and evaluation, and a mindset shift. And, there is both hope and despair here. Legislative policy in Iowa hasn't moved at all here (which can best be shown by what NACOL had to say about Iowa's online developments), and this is a bleak time to look for funding. But in this bleakness, our businesses have an opportunity to build the shining star educational system in this post-Lehman Brothers economy, where an opportunity exists for new players (read: Iowa companies) in the national scene. Despite what the closed secrecy of the Iowa Core's development would suggest, those businesses need a place at the planning table, as well as a piece of the financial responsibility to bring about this plan.

Monitoring and evaluation might seem the most formidable to seasoned veterans, but this is one area where Iowa has truly made progress in recent years. Administrators and district leadership teams alike regularly use data in their decision-making process now; developing a quality monitoring and evaluation process for this vision is not nearly as formidable as it was 10 years ago.

It is perhaps the mindset shift that is the most daunting to me. We need more than lip service to the reality that we need to change to meet the changing times. We need the sense of urgency with the hope of possibility. We can do this and we must. How do we make believers out of educators, lawmakers, and community members? This is our task.

MY ROLE

And so, I get to my role in bringing about the vision. I know my limitations; I don't have the levers to move lawmakers for legislation or for funding from businesses. But I'm not helpless, either. It is my goal to do the following:

• Lead a statewide partnership of agencies and school districts to create quality online education for students. This is the heart and soul of what my job is. I'm heading up several groups in the state to bring about that very task.

• Help shape the Iowa Core Curriculum to make sure 21st century skills represent the Digital Curriculum. My role in statewide Iowa Core development committees will hopefully drive that.

• Train educational leaders in the 21st century skills- The opportunities I have now to work with districts is just a start.

• Provide a working example of the Digital Curriculum- My top task is to work with some districts who, at a local level, can provide the items above in Scott's plan. I can provide the training and support, as well as the vision on the curriculum to make it happen.

What is your role?

Call For Action: Digital Curriculum

I had mentioned that providing a 1:1 for every 3-12 grade student in Iowa was the easy part. There's heavy irony given the current economic conditions and past funding levels of technology in schools.

Compared to this, though, the purchasing is easy. That's because what I call for now will really bring about dragging of heels and gnashing of teeth.

We need to completely change the structure of the learning environment in every grade and subject. The curriculum must be a constant interchange with the technology tools of today.

Let me give you a vision of what I am talking about. Jane arrives at school early and immediately goes to one of the learning pod areas, where she hops on her educational ning online. Here, she collaborates with a student in Texas, Kentucky, Nevada, Alberta, Sydney, and Nottingham. The group is extremely interested in crickets, and together they are discovering all they can about the insects. They share resources they have found on the internet with each other and pose different thoughts that they have. Bill, the student from Nevada, recently posed the challenge to the group to discover what conditions are ideal for the growth of crickets, and since the research the group conflicts, each person is experimenting with their variables at the local level.

After catching up on an update from those overseas, she goes to her first hour class, social studies. In class, the teacher is introducing a new concept (the Articles of Confederation), but wants to see what students already know. Every student has their laptop ready and they hop on Survey Monkey to take a quick pre-survey of the material. The teacher then displays the results, which show a couple students are quite knowledgeable on the concept. He turns the class over to them, and they discuss what they remember. While they say this, the teacher pulls up the class wiki and enters, as close to verbatim as he can type, what the students say as the initial entry on the wiki for the Articles of Confederation. After the students finish what they recall, the teacher has the students look online to verify the information and add to the wiki, or to branch off and make new entries based on topics that have arrived. Jane split her time between adding more on to the Continental Army, which the Articles gave some direction to, and putting together a new entry for federalists.

Second hour has her in family/consumer science today. The class puts their laptops on the work area next to the kitchenette. Today, Jane's group is to create a chicken entree given the ingredients that are found in their refrigerator and cabinet. They do a meta-search, given the ingredients, and find a recipe for a casserole. As they create the activity, they are to take a digital photo at each stage and upload that to their Flickr account. They also will take a temperature probe when the entree is finished and that data will be loaded in their classroom database record. Finally, they will portion up the entree, and each student in class will travel around and sample them. They will log in on their own computers and score the entree on a four-point scale of how it tastes. The teacher will use the digital images, hard data, and student feedback together to give summative assessment on student proficiency.

Third hour is physical education. Jane has already downloaded her playlist into her mp3 player for the day... she has picked her upbeat music since she is doing aerobics. Like always, Jane gets her Polar Fitness monitor, which will monitor her breathing rate and pulse to assess the exertion. Once again, Jane is doing well to stay in her zone. Like the rest of the class, she is given the last 5 minutes of class to download the data and write a 2-sentence blog on how she is progressing to her physical fitness goal (to reduce her "fitness" age and beat her previous best in the mile by 45 seconds).

Fourth hour is English. Students hop on their blog immediately to give their reflections to the question that was recently posted by a student in class. Each day, a student posts a question to trigger free-writing in a connection to what they are reading. Once students are finished with their blog, they shift into free reading of the book, until the teacher has had a chance to peruse the answers. The teacher then gathers a couple of quotes to share with the class for some further discussion. Then, the students are given an essay topic to write about, and they log into their Google Docs account to start the process of composition. With 10 minutes left in the class, Jane "invites" her editing partner Sarah to her essay, and vice versa. Jane looks over Sarah's writing, knowing she has to give 3 suggestions, be it thoughts to develop the essay, sentences to help the structure, or words to build meaning and style.

Okay, you get the idea. This is what I refer to as the Digital Curriculum. I'm not the first to use this phrase, but I needed to put forth a common term and definition.

You can see some of the features of the digital curriculum:
• Schoolwork makes seamless integration of the laptop in all that they do
• Learning takes place on an individual level, a classroom level, a small group level, and an outside-school level.
• But it always is student-centered. The student is pushing forward the exploration, the connection, the progress on goals, and the assessment of growth.
• The laptop serves as an extension, in and out of the classroom activity. It doesn't take 20 minutes to grab laptops and log in just to do a survey or a physical education journal entry because the device is there when you need it.
• The curriculum finds tools that fit their objectives, not vice versa.
• There is a constant data collection taking place; assessment is real, authentic, and ongoing, and the student plays the critical role.
• This pace may seem fast, but today's learners can handle this with aplomb. It mimics the pace of highly-skilled professional occupations, and is helping students prepare for the future.

There are many other conclusions you can draw from the example. That's the other piece... if we are going to require the state to provide a laptop for every 3-12 grade student, then we must have every teacher use digital information and collaboration as a central piece to the curriculum. And, this is equal parts daunting, scary, and necessary.

The leap that has to be made is gigantic. It will require new curricular development and mapping of 21st century skills. It will demand leadership and vision. Let me be the first to begin. Any school that would like to collaborate with me about how they can move to a digital curriculum, please contact me; if you are willing to make the leap, I'm more than willing to help.