ITEC 2008 - Day 1

• Slow start to my day, as I was presenting on distance learning at our AEA and arrived late. Just in time to see the last 10 minutes from Hall Davidson (and from what it looked like, I missed the highlight of the day). It was my first time hearing him, and it won't be my last. He hits the need to open up cell phone usage and other mobile devices in the classroom.

• On a related note, Waukee is, amongst others, seeing the use of cell phones. While the opening paragraph makes the ugly claim that their allowing them only because "they are losing the battle", I give kudos to Superintendent Dave Wilkerson, who was very perceptive in saying:

We're creating a false world for them in the school, a world so different from what they're dealing with on the outside.

• Perhaps Marc Prensky's visit is already paying dividends? I vote for Clay Shirky next.

• Speaking of Marc Prensky, I'm putting my vote in for asking for his thought on what 21st century skills means in the context of the Iowa Core Curriculum. I'll be pushing to bring the ICC team and Prensky together.

• Which brings me back to ITEC. The legislative update was sans legislators and a bit anti-climactic. Some good questions raised, though.

1. How specific will the descriptions for core content be? There's a thing to be said for local control, but many teachers will be looking for x, y, and z to cover to hit the 21st century skills.
2. Piggybacking on #1, if the ICC lays out the curriculum, there is that major piece of assessment. How will we assess these skills? Marzano et. al. have mentioned that, in building your teaching, you have to start with the curriculum (the end goal), then determine your assessment (how we know we've achieved the end goal), and then develop the instruction (how to reach the end goal). Are we doing these out of order? Or, do we have some plans in the works for assessment? (I have a diatribe, er... a call for action on this).
3. Are these skills (especially the 21st century skills component) flexible? In other words, are we determining what it means to be employability literate today and for the next 15 years (which we did 15 years ago and has created the mismatch that we have today)? Or are we going to be reviewing this sucker every few years?
4. Where do the businesses, industries, and service sectors weigh in on this? Or are we shooting ourselves in the foot by redesigning our curriculum without consulting them?

I'll admit, I am a big advocate of the ICC and feel this is an excellent opportunity to make that huge jump, but I'm having difficulty answering the questions raised.

• Liked what I saw from Andy Crozier (Grant Wood AEA) et. al. about Apple's Classroom of Tomorrow, Today. Natural fit with the Iowa Core if I do say so myself...

• And, one last thought. There were a lot of sessions marked "gizmos", "gadgets", and "toys". I didn't attend any of them, so there might have been an excellent reason for each (and the presenters for each were top quality). I'm just leery of the message this sends. Gotta get past the wow. It should be about about the learning, not the innovation component.

Annotating Flickr

For those not using Flickr in your classroom, you are missing out on a great tool. Photosharing in the classroom isn't just for a photography class; it helps with visual literacy, a 21st century skill applicable in all areas.

One of the greatest uses of Flickr is the notes tool. Not only can you identify who can see your photos, you can also identify who can notate your photo through the privacy settings.

Once a person has permission, the can click on the "Add notes" tab at the top. Next, they are set to define the boundary and add a note.

Want students to identify countries on a map? How about identify presidents from a composite photo? Perhaps label the appliances in a kitchen? Or identify the parts of a flower? Flickr allows for a limitless set of possibilities.

Image citation:
Abbey_evan. (2008, July 8). Parts of the flower. Abbey_evan's photostream. Retrieved October 21, 2008 from http://www.flickr.com/photos/8992816@N02/2963618024/

Using Wikipedia in the Classroom

A teacher once told me Wikipedia is the McDonalds of the digital world. It suffers from being the biggest fish out there, and because of this, is the victim of misinformation and rumors. And while all of its rivals get a free pass, it continues to thrive.

This analogy didn't work for me to well (I loved Supersize Me) but I see the point. Before I even have this discussion with teachers, I get the "Wikipedia? I won't allow that in my classroom. The information is not credible." The rumors out there are too persistent to trust it.

I've wanted to say something like "are you nuts? That's the one sure-fire way to get them to use the site." I once banned kids from reading John Knowles' A Separate Peace, not because I didn't want them to read the book, but because I wanted them to. For years of offering it as a free-reading choice, I'd have vicious stares from students who felt betrayed into reading something "so boring". When it was banned, however, they had to read it. And you thought reverse psychology only stopped working at age 4.

But, to say that would be a little crass. So, here's what I generally say about it. What site do you trust? What site is beyond the need to be critical of what it says?

The reality is, as Will Richardson points out, we are having a great shift in literacy:

In the era of textbooks and printed resources, we could be pretty sure the content had been checked and edited before being published. Reading, for all its intents, was a fairly passive experience. Today, however, readers cannot assume that what they are reading has been reviewed by someone else with an eye toward truth and accuracy. The Web is now a printing press for the masses, and so readers themselves must learn to be critical consumers of the information they consider.

Thus, all sites are essentially important to the learning process, even those that are marginal in quality, for it gives students a chance to discern bias, reliability, timely information, and embedded opinion.

This is not to say Wikipedia is my resource of choice; it isn't. But it is my student's resource of choice. And therefore, as a teacher, I need to instruct them on its uses and limitations, just like I need to do for Google.

One of my favorite thinkers of education, Wesley Fryer, raises many good points (check out his blog entry for a more thorough explanation of these):

1. Have students follow up on the external links listed in the notation section
2. Have students create their own content to become part of the collaborative process
3. Teach students the proper use of quotations
4. Use it to follow breaking news
5. Use it to explore controversial issues

One teacher I had in a graduate course I taught would have added a sixth. Show how fraudulent the website is with required reading about phony experts and contrived entries, and show students examples from the website that are inaccurate. I thought this was, at least, educating them about the website, rather than straight out banning it with no explanation whatsoever. Unless she was secretly going the Separate Peace route.

ITEC Conference starts Sunday

The 2008 ITEC conference will begin with its Sunday Workshops at 1:00. Then on Monday and Tuesday, they will have guest speakers Alan November and Hall Davidson present, as well as several breakout sessions.

Teachers will find several sessions highlighting technology tools that can be used in the classroom. This year's sessions continue the shift started last year of more web-based programs being featured, as "web 2.0" is a hot item.

Technology coordinators will have Scott Fosseen to look forward to. He will have an assortment of topics like usual, including upgrading the wireless network, information about the analog TV cutoff, archiving email, and picking a data projector.

Very important for all, there will be a breakout on legislative updates as well as a breakout on the future of education in Iowa. Hope to see you there.

Definition of Integration

Like many parents, my wife and I ask our kids what they did at school today. When my kids first started school, they would list off "recess, lunch, reading...", things they did every day. They quickly became more sophisticated in their answers, saying things like "Today we had music", or "Today we had an assembly." One of the answers I get about once a cycle now is "Today, we had computers".

When I work with teachers on using technology in education, we use the buzzword "integration". That word has slipped to the likes of "standards" and "rigor" in terms of a word with a watered-down definition.

For most teachers, integration means "use". For a few, it means forced use ("I do it because we're told to use technology..."), but the overwhelming majority of teachers look forward to having students use technology. It provides energy and opportunities for learning... both for student and teacher.

The problem is, "use" of technology is peripheral. It's a side item in the day, a separate chunk of learning circumstances and environment. It is like it is for my kids: first we have reading, then we have computer time. Or, today is the day we get to go to the lab.

This isn't integration. The use of technology isn't seamlessly infused into the learning process. It is an abrupt and conscious shift in it. No student will be unaware when they work on a computer.

This leads to technology being used for technology's sake, not learning's sake. David Warlick has phrased this as "getting past the 'wow' of technology." Sure, learning about technology is important, but this practice doesn't mirror life. When you are at work, do you consciously have "computer time"? For me, the answer is that I used to, back when computers first came around, or when the internet first came around. But now, using the computer is a seamless part of my workflow, as I bounce from using it to using other tools to accomplish my tasks, like face-to-face discussions, the telephone, and resource manuals.

Think of seamless integration this way: a pencil is, for all intents and purposes, a piece of technology. It is used for a great deal of work in school, and that's a good thing. However, my kids don't come home and tell me "we used a pencil today." It's picked up and used and then put down again with out conscious interruption. That's where we need to get with computerized technology.

Now, this isn't the fault of the teacher. I recently showed some teachers Survey Monkey as a way to pre-assess student understanding before a lesson. The teachers were very excited about the possibilities. So, being the killjoy that I am, I raised the question "What would it look like if you tried to use this in your current classroom?" For the elementary teachers, that would require getting all the students up, go down to the computer lab for a 2-minute survey, and then come back. 10 minutes of time lost in the transportation, another 10 lost in the preparation. The secondary wasn't much better, as a student would have to go get the laptop cart from next door and then each student would have to get out a laptop, take the survey, and put the laptop back. The truth is the teachers won't use it. I wouldn't either. Despite its obvious benefits, Survey Monkey is a conscious interruption to the learning process.

This has serious danger to everything we do with teaching technology integration. When Inspiration came out, I loved it. I saw so many uses, and not just of the end-of-term big-project variety. Five minute applications like take the concepts we talked about today and sort them on this venn diagram, and the computer will tell you whether you are correct. But, I couldn't integrate it... it had to be peripheral learning. We can be gung ho about the read/write web, but it will sadly become the latest Inspiration if we don't change our structured approach to integration. We have to get a device in the hands of every student and make this learning seamless.

K-12 Online Conference

For those with a stake in online education, or those who are junkies about this new wave, this is an excellent opportunity. The K-12 online conference has started, and offers several advantages.

1. You don't have to drive (it's online)

2. You can take part any time (it's online)

3. It's free

All of this for an opportunity to meet with some of today's top thinkers. Educational leaders like Wesley Fryer and David Warlick will be participating, as will influential edubloggers like Bob Sprankle and Bud Hunt. This conference takes place over the next two weeks, so there is plenty of content and new ideas available.

For those in bce08pls, this is the conference Mindy blogged about.

Delicious

In the recent ranking of the top 100 learning tools put out by the Centre for Learning and Performance Technologies, the top tool chosen by the panel is Delicious. This is somewhat incredible. While delicious is certainly becoming more well known, the panel chose it over such stalwarts as Microsoft Word, Power Point, and Excel, as well as Internet Explorer and Firefox. Even Google's search didn't rate as high, which is the only online tool a large portion of teachers and students use. In other words, if there was any doubt to the power of delicious, you should be using it... now.

Delicious is a social bookmarking site. After creating a free account, you can save your bookmarks to your account. Since other users are saving their accounts, you can cross-reference (this is the social part). Say, for example, I bookmark a site which gives me a good recipe for chicken curry. On Delicious, I look and see 35 other people have bookmarked that site as well. I can now look at their bookmarks and find additional recipes, er... sites that I might like. I've just found access to a lot of valuable information on the web without having to take time to dig for it.

This gets even more powerful if you tag. A tag is a keyword placed on your bookmark. For my chicken curry recipe, I could use "chicken_curry", "Indian", "spicy" and "food". If I wanted more chicken curry recipes, I could search the "chicken_curry" tag in delicious and get all the other sites that have been so marked. Or, I could search for "Indian+food" and expand my search. And since it is a search, I can use RSS and subscribe to the feed. Every time a person in the world tags a site as "chicken_curry", it comes straight to my RSS inbox.

This is the definition of a 21st century tool. I have taken the entirety of the world wide web and made it manageable. While Google search gives a computerized way of sifting through the web, Delicious gives it a humanized way of sifting.

Just like RSS, Delicious gives teachers a way to expand their own knowledge base, be it with their content area or pedagogy. But more importantly, this is a tool that students need to use. In a connectivist classroom, each student should be given the chance to become master of some content. Given RSS and Delicious, they should be challenged to see how much knowledge they can attain on that subject... can they stay on top of new aspects? Can they find expert opinion? Can the fully discover the past history? Can they find obscure angles?

As a professional development coordinator, I use Delicious to expand the variety of examples I can use to share with educators. Whereas before, when I had to make a quick web page to share the sources with teachers, I now can simply point them to my Delicious account, which not only I can update, but others can too, since I subscribe to tags. My account is here, by the way.

How can you use Delicious?