Lot’s of ways to connect and create

Part of my job here at ESSDACK
is to explore and learn about the devices that schools will buy and use
to educate kids. I’ve been exploring gadgets my whole life and it’s fun
to have a job that requires this nerdy quest of mine. I’ve had an
iPhone for a long time and have used multiple iPod incarnations before
that. The HTC version of the Android phone
joined my life soon after I bought the iPhone 4 and the iPad that I’ve
been test driving and creating on was recently joined by a Samsung Galaxy Tablet.
As you might be surmizing, I juggle a lot of gadgets. I want to
dedicate this post to telling you about my experiences with these
devices and what I think their strengths and weakness might be.

Pretend for a moment that humans could
add limbs at will. If we wanted more arms, we simply ordered them and
added them to our bodies. Equipped with our new arms, there would be new
things we could do but the brain would need time to fully incorporate
the new limbs into the nervous system. In the short term we would be
clumsy creatures, waiting to get the full use and value out of the new
acquisitions.

I feel a bit like this sometimes.
Sometimes I feel like Dr. Jekll, injecting myself with various formulas
to see what the result will be. As a technology integrationist, it is my
duty to experiment and test drive new technologies before educators and
schools purchase them because I want to be able to advise them as to
their potential usefulness. This can be a good thing if you like new
devices but if you’re like me and feel compelled to really spend time
experimenting and getting to know these gadgets, it can be overwhelming.

I try to simulate the scenarios a
classroom teacher might find themselves involved in so that I can answer
questions they might have. I know that I am not surrounded by 25
students in my imagined scenarios so the advice is only as good as my
personal purview. I will attempt to sum things up in this post and at
least start sharing some of the lessons I’ve learned in the last two
years or so.

I will admit to some bias toward Apple
products because I had the iPod and iPhone and iPad first. I’ve found
that some loyalty is established when you learn a new platform and it
works well for you. Admittedly the Android OS and it’s implementation in
some of my recent devices has been a late comer to my thinking but the
Galaxy Tab has a done a lot to balance my thinking with regard to pad
based platforms.

I got an iPod almost as soon as they
came out when it was a glorified jukebox that did the same thing other
MP3 players did while looking cooler doing it. I listened to audio books
and lectures and collected podcasts, all of which I listened to on the
many long road trips my job called upon me to take. When the video iPod
was released I moved into one immediately and added video to my learning
consumption model.

The iPod Touch was for me the “shot
heard round the world”. Here was a device that gave me access to all of
my music, audio and video and it introduced me to the idea of apps.
These amazing little (sometimes useful) mini-software solutions held out
tremednous hope of being very useful to educators and education. In the
short term apps were fun and funny but I rarely found one to be truly
useful as anything but an icebreaker at a party.

After a couple of summer camps in Colby
Kansas where Teresa Morgan and I set out to prove the usefulness of iPod
Touches as learning devices. I was starting to see a new vision of the
role these devices might play in education. During that camp we seemed
to have two kinds of projects going on. Some projects were made of paper
and found objects and others were centered around performance using the
iPods. I believe that I could not easily see and design around the
confluence of digital and analogue tools at that time and the products
of my approach to a creative camp showed it.

Youtube and Podcasts became game
changers in my mind over the next year because I started seeing and
trying to gauge the value of hand held devices like iPods as instruction
collectors, or libraries of learning possibility. I was struck by the
many ways educators could deliver learning to the palm of kids’ hands
and started publishing on Youtube to experiment with the creation,
distribution and consumption elements of this phenomenon.

I had moved to an iPhone which had
quickly rendered my iPod Touch obsolete. It’s camera and built in mic
one-upped the Touch and the formerly useful device found it’s way to the
bottom of my bag. I was using the phone to take all of the pictures and
short videos that once required me to carry a separate camera . My bag
was getting lighter.

The idea of distribution was my central
focus for the better part of a year and I wanted to help schools design
their own podcasts or channels on Youtube so they could offer help to
struggling students or students who wanted to learn more in other
places, after hours. Schools often grew nervous at the mention of
Youtube and in those days it was hard to get many of them to move
forward on the Youtube terrain.

Podcasts were an easier sell and many
schools had either made a few themselves or heard of other schools who
were experimenting with distributing learning resources this way. An RSS
(really simple syndication) feed had much utility in diseminating newly
created resources and iPods were natural born collectors of these
resources. It was a ball and glove, let’s play pitch construct but I
still wasn’t thrilled with the ways a learner could throw the ball back.
Distribution alone is like old AM radio. You could listen to all the
programs you wanted but talking back to the creator might just mean
talking to yourself. Kids and parents needed to know that they could
comment on the posts and that schools wanted interaction to help shape
the content in the future.

I got my first Android based HTC phone a
couple of years after getting my forst iPhone and I have to admit to
being dubious of it’s quality or value. To really give the phone a fair
shake I would have to have a stroke and forget all of my growing and
learning to love my iPhone. I cursed the device for not being an iPhone
and not getting the porche model with a big screen was a mistake. 44
year old eyes don’t cotton to a device that requires a Clint Eastwood
squint every time you interact with it.

What I was coming to love about the
Android and a Verizon contract was accessibility. The iPhone was far
superior in terms of user interface and overall user experience but all
of that didn’t count for as much on my trips to South Dakota where
AT&T service was all but non-existent. The iPhone had it all over
the HTC in big cities but in the wild, the HTC and Verizon were my only
means of connecting to the world.

As I struggled to learn the nuanced
differences between the two hand held communicative computers, the need
for connectivity forced me to use the HTC more often. I started liking
this phone more and more and this is when my focus went back to
distribution. I’d been looking as apps as distribution devices and
wanted to explore the idea of creating one, for both platforms.

My friend John Jones aquainted me with the iSites company and the idea of outsourcing the creation of some apps intrigued me. I visited their site and added the RSS feed of my ArtSnacks Youtube channel
and had a simulation of my app in minutes. For $99 a year they create
your code, add your RSS feed and submit it to the Android Market and the
iTunes store for you. Our graphic design maven Lori Fast created icon
art and a splash launch page as well as a app header for each of them
and I published two apps with them that week.

With the dashboard provided by iSites I
could monitor downloads on both platforms and track which episodes were
most popular. I began to see having an app that provided extended
learning services as a strong tool that schools could add to their bag
of services.

About this time I purchased my first iPad.
I got the device on the day of release and took a picture with the Fed
Ex guy to memorialize the moment. I know the iPad would be a game
changer and not simply because it was an Apple product. The combination
of a bigger screen, a touch screen, thousands of useful apps and a user
interface that scared neither Grandma or grandson meant that the laptop
may become a dead man walking soon.

It was a big, usable iPhone and I
started moving toward the cloud immediately. Because storage was so dear
on the device I knew that the idea of killing my junk-drawer hard drive
approach needed to come to an end. I started organizing my photos
online for easy retrieval. In the past I’d dumped my files for safe
keeping but saved them in ways that ensured they would be nearly
impossible to find later.

I began experimenting with apps in a
larger way, prompted by some assertions from other people in my field
that iPads were merely consumption devices. I agreed that they were
amazing consumption devices and wandered what was wrong with consumption
since it was the main way kids learned in analogue classrooms. To be
truly transformation I thought that creation and creativity had to be
possible and easy using the device.

I started with musical instrument apps
like guitar because I was most comfortable with teaching guitar. I
thought that if I could find a guitar app and actually play it with
control and a little finesse that we might be looking at a creation
device. I thought that if you could play a song on an iPad it would
follow that a virtual instrument that allows you to play a song with
fidelity show also allow you to write one. I came to love apps like Pocket Guitar, iShred and Drum Meister and practicing playing and singing with them regularly.

Alongside this activity I was also drawing with some of the art apps like ArtStudio
to see how artistic I could be. The short answer is, there was no
limit. I could draw with control and finesse with a number of these apps
and send the product of my effort to anyone with one click. I think the
people who have difficulty seeing iPods, iPads, Androids and other
devices as creation tools are looking at the creative process, the act
of creation too narrowly. The device itself isn’t the entire act. It
might in some cases be the canvas, in others be the studio, in others be
the means of distribution.

The act of creation is much more than
the palette or the brush. Seeing these devices as tools that can aid
creation is a more balanced way to look at them and I continue to
experiment personally and watch as teachers and students find their way
toward creating and learning with them.

Two weeks ago I acquired a Samsung
Galaxy Tablet and my world is changing again. Much like my positive
experience with the iPad because of it’s bigger screen, the Galaxy Tab’s
bigger screen has wooed me anew. Suddenly I noticed a superior web
experience on this Android based device. It seems made to deliver the
full web but it didn’t always deliver it properly due to a sometimes
misalignment between the device and some websites. There is a need to
scroll frequently and it’s obvious that this is a problem and might be
for some time. I suspect that future, more full szed Android tablets
with deliver the web in a more native, iPad like way. The device is half
the size of the iPad which is nice because it fits neatly in one hand
and also in a suit jacket pocket. Your fingertips are on one side as
your thumb safely cradles the other. I will say that the price point for
the Galaxy, ) over $600 after service) is a bit high for a device with
half the screen real estate of the iPad.

What I’m rushing to do now is find
useful, quality apps for the Galaxy. I search the Android Market for the
same quality apps I’ve come to expect from the iTunes store and I find
this process frustrating. The same democratic process that allows any
app to enter Android’s Market means that many, many, many terrible apps
that barely work, live right beside the best apps. Do five stars mean
this is a great app or do they mean that the developers have lots of
friends. I know great apps are in there and I have found a few but I
want an easy way to know what’s prime and what’s junk.

I was angry when my first two apps were
rejected by the iTunes store, OK I was spitting mad but I also know my
apps were freshman efforts that were perfactly priced as FREE. I think
the control Apple exercises with their store ensures a quality of
experience no matter where you come down on the democracy vs autocracy
debate.

I’m enjoying learning with my Galaxy
Tab, iPhone, iPad and HTC but am feeling overwhelmed as I strive to
remain agnostic with regard to devices. I want to study the bigger
picture of distribution, creation, learning and collaboration via any
hand held, connected device so I think the cost of admission is not
marrying a single platform. What has become clear is that fatigue in a
new form is setting in and is becoming a familiar copilot.

Digital Limb Fatigue
is what I’m calling it and it results from the constant introduction of
new digital limbs to the organic systems of the brain. There is a
learning curve to endure as we add new functionalities, no matter how
useful and transformative those functionalities my be.

Learning to use each new device and to
extract the intended value from them is akin to being in physical
therapy. I often have to learn to do basic things, using limbs that
don’t yet know how to be used my me.

What is comforting to me as I navigate
what from the outside might look like a geeky wonderland is that most
people will choose very few limbs and become athletes using them. The
challenge to a person who does what I do it that I have to try many of
them to become well versed enough to advise others who’ve not yet chosen
the limbs they will use. There are moments of jubilation, followed my
the realization that I will need to be clumsy with a new limb until I
learn to walk and then run with it.

It would be so easy to tell people that
one kind of limb is best and to steer them toward the one that I am most
comfortable with but the realist in me knows that this would not be
fair. It’s a lot like the challenge I regularly issue to teachers to
move out of their comfort zone and do what is necessary to help learners
where they really live. So what is the best device? I think the best
device is the one that works best for you. The limbs you choose that
allow you to be the the best learning athlete are the best. The limbs
your kids choose that work best for them are the best. A combination of
devices is for some people the best recipe because different devices
transmit different personal strengths and talents. I think that
maintaining an open mind and choosing from a buffet of tools keeps us
most flexible in our work helping learners. The cost of this approach is
constant learning but I think that is also a benefit.

Last edited by kevinh on Mon Jan 03, 2011 11:39 pm; edited 1 time in total

Learning in it's most engaged form



From my first
year in teaching I was two teachers. I was the teacher who taught the
way I was taught, from books using lesson plans and rubrics and ALL of
Madeline Hunter’s steps. I taught art but even art wasn’t immune from
the sometimes stagnating effects of so much control that didn’t belong
to the students in my classes. This was the institutional model and many
days it felt like an institution the kids weren’t a part of. Students
were passive recievers of knowledge and if they paid attention and took
good notes and met the expectations of the teacher, they could do very
well. I was building future middle managers.





The other teacher I was woke up in the
summer and designed art camps. In this world, a world I lived in for 17
years I was the teacher I wanted to be. The model was simple: Come up
with a slate of five themed classes for multi-age kids that would play
out an hour at a time over five days. In the summer my classes had to
fill or I would be just as broke as I was during the school year. A
roster of classes in a given summer might look like this:





Join us for Kevin’s Art Camp Extravaganza!





8:00-9:00am


Styrosaurs!


Learn all about the fascinating world of
dinosaurs as we design and build dinosaur skeletons out of found
objects. Will will become docents of our own exhibit here at the art
gallery and you will take home your very own dinosaur skeleton!


9:15-10:15am


Pompeii, Life Under the Volcano


Join us for this action packed learning
adventure! We will study ancient Pompeii and the lives of the people who
were lost to history and construct a model of their city. We will also
contruct Mount Vesuvius and set about reinacting the tragedy that
happened in 79 AD. Bring your imagination and your oven mits, this could
get hot!


11:00-12:00am


Mission To Mars


If you like space and science then this
is the adventure for you! We will learn about space flight and Mars and
construction a Martian outpost. Astronauts will design and construct
their own space suits and live out an exciting Mission To Mars!


1:00-2:00pm


Viking Voyage


Grab your helmet and get ready to set
off to adventure as we learn about the Vikings, their culture and build
artifacts to understand these amazing people. We’ll construct a Viking
ship, make Viking clothes and other artifacts and set off on a sea
faring adventure to conquer new frontiers!


2:15-3:15pm


Twister


Are you fascinated by tornadoes? So are
we! Join us for this experience where we’ll build a tornado right in the
art gallery. We’ll learn about weather and the ingredients that cause
tornadoes to form as we construct a huge tornado, complete with
lightning, thunder and debris. Don’t blow this chance to learn about
this powerful weather phenomenon!





__________________________________________________________________





Over 17 years of doing these summer
classes, I yearned more and more to bring the excitement and engagement I
saw to my regular classroom. To do this I would have to let kids have
control, let them problem solve and even make noise. To some degree I
tried to unleash these kinds of projects in my room but I really
struggled getting the culture to undertand that we weren’t just playing
in the art room.





The idea of project-based learning was
something I was always open to, after all about every thing we do in art
is a project. I love these adventure based/passion based learning
opportunies but how can they fit in a regular school day? I began
experimenting with this question in my last years in the regular
classroom. I had to see if I could catch learning lightning in a bottle
in my classroom like I did in summer art camps.





First steps...


As I was juggling my two lives I was
also studying the human brain and trying to understand why the
adventures of summer were so much more powerful for kids that my most
carefully designed units in the classroom. Summer was my petri-dish
where anything could happen and the school year was a crop I tended,
knowing what the harvest would look like. As I delved into the
literature on learning and the brain I started noticing that emotion
seemed to play a key role in engagement and rentention of knew
knowledge. It made sense to me since I knew that we are designed to
remember experiences. We think in story or narrative, much like the way a
movie plays out temporally, over time. Our brains anticipate based on
previous experience and learn or reinforce previous learning when our
anticipations are either met or not met.





In large part the things that occured in
my classes didn’t make good, memorable stories. The expected daily
grind of what I thought was good pedagogy was turning my learners into
passive zombies, working to please me. I decided to try to put them in
charge, to create conditions favorable for life-long remeberance. This
is when I jumped into project-based learning with both feet.





I looked at my summer model for the first part of my classroom design:

1. 
   
   1.Choose an interesting artifact or project that much other learning could be entwined with.
   
2. 
   
   2.Design an adventure or culminating event that would drive the learning and create a sense of urgency.
   
3. 
   
   3.Make
   sure the learning was authentic and that the kids would have to become
   experts in the subject matter relating to the experience.
   
4. 
   
   4.Design the experience to last five hours. (I was used to having only an hour a day for five days.)
   
5. 
   
   5.Find a way to sanctify the learning products that the kids created.
   

I used these ingredients with the idea
that in the future, when my kids became used to a culture where they
were asked their opinion about what and how to learn, this approach
would become much more student directed. I gave myself permission to
take baby steps at first and made sure I had a safe landing zone in case
an individual lesson crashed and burned.





The corporate construct...


How do you bring this approach to
learning to a public school without scaring people? My answer to this
was the corporate construct. I would build themes around artifacts and
challenges that were happening in the real world, the world of
work...the world I was preparing kids to enter.





In art, this seems easy to do since
there are many careers when art and design skills play a pivotal role. I
would create scenarios where we: the class would hired to fulfill an
order by a customer. If this is all we had done what I would have had on
my hands would have been a good CTE
class. While I love careers and Tech Ed, I wanted more. I wanted an
immersive experience with embedded learning that kids would never
forget.





I decided to use pod groups of five to
six kids, based on my research on group dynamics and optimal learning
teams and turned my 25 kids into five distinct companies. Each company
has a CEO and this leadership position changed hands with every unit.
Kids completed job applications and were interviewed bu the CEOs that I
hired. I was the owner of all of the companies and CEO’s reported to me
as a mentor/boss.





During our automotive design unit the my
high school groups became Ford, Chrysler, Honda, Chevrolet and Mazda.
They were tasked with designing a new car to target a specific segment
of the market. To get started they had to research the automotive market
and learn the difference between cars in various market segments. They
had to make connections with local car dealerships and learn about
pricing and the options consumers could get on a car.





Kids had two weeks, (a total of 10
hours) to research and design, build their cars and create marketing
materials. The CEO was in charge of a budget, (hypothetical)
productivity of employees and maintianing communications with corporate me.
This was a challenging job and I wanted every kids in my class to try
on leadership at least once durinf the school year. I saw remarkable
transformations and teachable moments as kids assumed this role. Some
students who probably never saw themselves as leaders, grew into the
role right before my eyes as I mentored and advised them.





Each unit culminated in a presentation
of some kind. In the case of automotive design it was a car show. Kids
could use software, cardboard, clay...whatever material they wanted to
create their autos but everyone in the group was responsible for an
understanding of the entire concept from headlights to tailpipe. The
companies were asked questions by me and the entire class after their
presentation and we made sure to ask every kid questions in case there
were any escape artists who were just along for the ride.





I had an evaluation tool I used that
covered effort, demonstratable learning, group contribution and teamwork
and kids did evaluations of one anothers’ performance which was
averaged into their final grade.





These units were the most popular ones
I’d ever taught in my 13 year classroom tenure and I think I know why.
Kids had choice and freedom. This gifts were bestowed with the limits of
the lesson design and a tight deadline that helped insure they didn’t
wonder too far from the learning I was responsible for bringing them.
The difference here was in large part, they were bringing it to
themselves. Kids who missed a lot of school were seldom absent because
they were crucial to a project. Passive learners became leaders and I
became the mentor and guide to motivated students. I can’t say it all
went smoothly. There were moments of terror where I was sure a lesson
would crash but I persisted and made corrections and asked questions
until we got back on track.





I used this model at all grade levels
from first to 12th. This wasn’t easy because I only had grade school
students once a week for 45 minutes. In this environment the whole
system had to be compressed but the expectations and rigor remained.
Occasionally I had to let a project/unit drift across two weeks to give
kids enough time.





Soft and Hard Deadlines


What became clear to me right away was
the crucial nature of deadlines. Without deadline kids would drift and
procrastinate and adjust their workflow based on ease. (Adults do this
too!) I designed two readlines within every unit, the soft deadline and
the hard deadline. Sfot deadline occured at the halfway mark in our unit
calendar and were designed to show students how much they had to do and
how long they had to do it.


I know that one of the things kids
struggle with is a true sense of how long things take. They always think
they’re nearly done no matter where they are in the process. The soft
deadline helped them see reality and helped group pace themselves and
redistribute work assignments in time to meet the hard deadline. The
hard deadline was just that. All work was expected to be done, no
apologies or excuses were allowed. Failure is as instructive as success
in through a critique after the presentaions we did an autopsy of the
project and learned where the learning train had gone off the rails.





What I believe today


Whether you use something like the
corporate construct, the template of the Buck Institute or a system of
your own design, project-based learning can be a powerfully motivating
approach to learning. If cleverly designed these unit can be
multi-disciplinary, multi-age swiss army knives of learning possibility.
One has to be confident to allow such learning to take place and I
believe that we must foster a learning culture that permits and
encourages experimental approaches to learning.





I still get to teach kids using these
and similar models and I still see the same levels of engagement and
excitement. Through my partnership with schools like Turning Point Learning Center,
I get to witness talented teachers trying innovative approaches and
what is best for me is getting the opportunity to ride along as kids
learn to drive their own learning.





Whatever approach you choose, design
around good content and standards. I don’t think we have to throw away
rigor and academic expectation to try PBL. I think not only that we can
still perform well on assessments but that we will build self directed
learners who will do well in life. We just have to be clever designers
and build challenging work that takes learners through a gauntlet of
content, new understanding and powerful learning skills on the way to a
goal. These units can be quick in and outs or ongoing, coss curricular,
year long opportunites. We get to decide what role they play and to what
extent our days include them.





Today’s Tools


With today’s tools so much is possible.
Learners have choices from cardboard dioramas to Second life virtual
worlds. If we explore the tools at our fingertips we can build authentic
simulations of real life things. We can even affect real life and
become activist learners, out to change the world.





If you’re going to try PBL my advice is
to take baby steps and give yourselve and your kids permission to fail.
Just make sure that you learn from your failures and continue to
improve. I offer you some of the lessons I used and others created by me and colleagues of mine.
If in the end what you have are students who are passionate learners
who know how to learn and relish the challenge, then I think we’ve put a
positive dent in the educational universe!

The benevolence of being open to new tools...

Most of my
work in the field with teachers involves winning some of them over to
the idea that new technology tools are important for them to embrace and
use in the classroom. To do this, I have to believe it myself and I do.
I’ve seen these powerful tools lead to exciting things for teachers and
learners and I’ve driven them myself and seen the powerful learning
vehicles they can be. Recently I thought about an adjacent value new
tools might have for learners who’ve never been the best at anything.

In 1978, in a classroom at Hawthorne
elementary school I was a struggling learner being taught by Mr. Austin.
He was a nice man and no doubt a concerned one when it came to my
progress in math. Try as I might, the neural energy required for me to
comprehend and actually use the math he was teaching was smoking my
cognitive wires. I could feel the tank emptying as Mr. Austin walked us
carefully through new concepts. I could feel the tendrils of my willing
dendrites as they tried clumsily to dance with the new ideas but toes
were mashed and I was quickly becoming a wallflower when it came to the
math dance.

One day a package arrived in our
classroom and Mr. Austin made a big deal out of opening it in front of
us. As he pulled the contents out of the box I saw the strange word
“digitor” written a very space age looking device. I was rivetted as he
plugged it in as the whole class gathered around. I didn’t know it at
the time but I was gauking at the first electronic classroom tool to use
a microprocessor (the intel 1502).

He turned it on a pushed a few buttons
but it was clear that this little robot wanted to teach math. It
assigned problems and if the user got the assigned series right, they
got a LED smiley face, if they got one wrong, they got a frowning face
and a list of right and wrong answers. Mr. Austin spent a few minutes
looking at it and pushing buttons but then he said something that shook
my world. “I don’t have time for this right now, so I’m gonna need one
of you to learn how to use it and teach the rest of us” he said. Then he
looked at me and asked: “Kevin, can you explore this thing for me, be
in charge of the Digitor?”

I nearly callapsed that day when Mr.
Austin trusted me with this obviously important, expensive and complex
tool. Questions ran through my fourth grade mind. Why he chose me was
one of the primary ones. I had many other questions but none of them
stopped me from excitedly surviving the day, waiting for my after school
time with the digitor.

I quickly learned the devices’ features.
The black knobs on the sides allowed the user to control the difficulty
of the assigned problems. The digitor could assign problems in
addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division and you could
control whether it assigned 10, 25, 50 or 100 problems. I spent time
testing the device and to test it, I had to check it’s accuracy with
math. This ensured I spent a lot of time doing...math. Mr. Austin was no
dummy. The man had done the one thing that was guaranteed to glue me to
a chair doing math until he kicked me out of the classroom after 5:30. I
was the digitor expert and everyone knew it. I was proud to be the
digitor technician and I was quickly becoming proud of what I could do
with math.

Flash forward many years and you’d find
me looking for the modern day equivelant of the digitor for my students.
What the digitor offered in the form of a machine in the past, software
coupled with a computer was offering to my students fifteen years
later. Using digital video, I was seeing kids happily write, review and
edit. Using digital draw pads I was seeing kids who wouldn’t draw with a
pencil beg for more time to finsih their digital drawings of cars,
horses, people, fashions...well you get the picture. I became a
tradigital teacher not because I loved technology but because I loved my
kids and cared about their success in learning and being ready for
their futures

Flash forward one more time and teachers
today have a million potential digitors. Every powerful, functional and
in many cases free web 2.0 tool might be just the thing some kid can
use to find their inner motivated learner. Every kid coupled with a new
tool has the potential to be the best at something and might just get
lured back onto the fertile ground of learning. What is clear to me is
that being the best at something is a real motivation for many
kids...heck for many people. An understanding of these tools in the form
of web apps, iPad apps, iPod apps and interactive whiteboard apps is no
small power for a teacher to leverage.

Reluctant teachers who are afraid to learn in front of kids because their college
taught them it was wrong might consider jumping into the game if they
see the potential. When they see these tools as the keys to learning for
the kids they love and understand the power of being the best at
something. All I can tell you now is that I owe a lot to Mr. Austin for
letting me be the best as using a new tool that he didn’t fully
understand, the digitor.

Last edited by kevinh on Mon Jan 03, 2011 11:36 pm; edited 1 time in total

I use
Foursquare to tag places I go and I am interested in this dimension of
telepresence. Posting thoughts and sharing pictures on Facebook and
Flickr and other sites are a couple of dimensions of 21st century life
but this ability to share place and time adds a new wrinkle. There are
many possible implications to this but I notice that some businesses
notice and see the power of having customers tag them. On Foursquare,
a mobile app for your smart phone a few visits to the same place can
make you the Mayor of that place...until someone else ousts you by
visiting more.

As technology innovators and thinkers,
it behooves us to play with these new capacities and explore the
implications for learning and learners. I have to warn you, to some
Foursquare may be addictive!

After I won the mayorship of the Best Western Dakota Ridge,
they awarded me a prise package and a photo op. Kinda made me feel like
a big deal. Smart business to make customers feel that way!

Last edited by kevinh on Mon Jan 03, 2011 11:34 pm; edited 1 time in total

Graduation is NOT the end zone!

I like sports
metaphors to make points and I often use one about a quarterback
throwing the ball to where the receiver is going to be, rather that
where they are standing at the snap of the ball. My point is that as
educators we must throw education to where our learners are going to be
rather than where they are when the class bell rings.

I believe that many of us are too
focused on graduation as a sort of educational end zone. We see the kids
score their touchdown in their cap and gown, we clap and then we focus
on getting the next team ready for graduation. The problem with this way
of thinking is that it encourages educators to focus on the goals of
the current game of schooling exclusively rather than on the skills,
knowledge and abilities that kids will really need beyond our hallowed
halls. Even the mavericks who understand this have high stakes tests to
remind them not to stray to far off the beaten path.

As I watch the current federal focus on
education and attempt to divine it’s goals, I am disheartened by what
looks an awful lot like more of the same visionless rhetoric and teacher
blaming that have paralyzed us for decades. It is time for a movement
between and among the educators who KNOW what kids need because they
haven’t stopped learning.

Test scores are indicators that tell us
(in some cases) that what we are doing is working but I believe what
we’re doing in many cases is wrong. The focus has been on preparing kids
for college for as long as compulsion school has existed in America.
The assumption then was that preparing kids for a college education
would be a good thing for those that attended college and wouldn’t hurt
the ones that didn’t.

Largely, the things we teach today are the same things that the Committee of Ten
decided we should teach in 1892. 115 years is a long time to hold onto
one sacred library of essential knowledge! It is time for a complete
overhaul of the core curriculum and this time as we’re deciding what is
essential let’s add a freshness date, something like: Best if used in
the next year.

We know the world has changed
drastically. We know that education is misaligned with the expectations
of the real world and we know that we are struggling to catch up.
Focusing first on what we teach might just be the spark we need to
breathe life into a revolution that our kids need us to start and win.

I call upon the Obama administration to
STOP doing business as usual and get serious about taking a fresh look
at what it is that today’s kids really need. The three R’s and teacher
blaming through test scores is not what we need. It might be politically
expedient to continue to rearrange deck chairs on the Titanic but our
kids deserve better.

There are SO many educators and
administrators that get it, who know we need to do things differently
and they are brave enough to risk much in order to serve their kids and
families. I think it’s time the calvary came over the hill or at least
stopped crippling us while we’re in the battle.

If all we do is continue to focus on today’s end zone, I guarantee we will lose the game.