One Flea Can Worry a Whole Dog

Interesting class last night for TEAM. Dr. Mark Weston gave a presentation, One Flea Can Worry a Whole Dog, where he talked about the evolution of education, where it has been and where can it go. He pointed out that 65% of students complete school; of those, a large percent require accommodation; about 30% feel they are not challenged. Roughly 1 in 3 students feel the system is working for them. How do we interpret this situation? What are the 4 or 5 practices that we must have?

Dr. Michael Byrne, co-chairman of the educational technology graduate program at Long Island University, added some interesting data from a survey (sorry, I don't know where the survey is from) of some parents:

67% of parents think that the web don't help kids teach to communicate.
87% of parents think it doesn't help them learn to work with others.
3 out of 4 parents did not believe the web could teach kids to be responsible in their communities.

He continued to say that technology should be the 'flea' that positively effects differentiated learning for our students. If we are going to make changes we have to be able to demonstrate to the community that the technology can have a positive effect. Most schools can't demonstrate this.

Technology is the single most powerful force we have to dramatically improve learning down to the individual. The vast majority of educators see technology as a piece of chalk. That is true if it is not integrated into the curriculum, not into the community. It is an expensive piece of chalk!

So, how do we communicate what we are doing with technology to the community? I know that in my district, there are a handful of teachers who are successfully using technology in a way that is helping students communicate and collaborate, through blogging, wikis, skype, various web 2.0 tools and global collaborative projects. In my school, Noel Forte, Adam Dugger, and I have our students blogging (talk about communication!) and working in collaborative wikis with other schools from different locations in the U.S. We have a third grade class communicating and sharing information with a school in Australia, I have a first grade class working in a wiki with a class from Taiwan. I have recently received emails from a teacher in Poland and a teacher in New Zealand who want to work with our classes. In another school in our district, Lisa Parisi and Christine Southard have been doing amazing technology-centered projects working with classrooms from all over in wikis and google docs.

We are a handful of teachers who have our students podcasting, vodcasting, working with students inside the classroom and outside the classroom. We have tapped into this new creative avenue that allows our students to communicate what they are thinking and learning in differentiated ways to a worldwide audience. Our students are engaged and excited in a way not seen before. We have invited parents to be part of it, to read the blogs, view the Voicethreads, and leave comments. Lisa, Christine, and I have been teaching professional development courses in our district to share our experiences with other faculty. It is a slow process, to get others on board.

We want the technology to be more than an expensive piece of chalk. We want to be the 'flea that worries the dog'! Are we succeeding? Time will tell. With programs like TEAM and this core group of mentors modeling what they are doing with others, I know we are beginning to shake up the dog, I think, I hope. Change is slow--and that is perfectly OK. To make this shift we must be willing to share what we know and what we are learning. The technology landscape is constantly evolving. Everytime I check out my feeds in Google Reader, or click on a link from Twitter friends, I learn something new. I am lucky to work in a school district that applauds the kind of efforts that teachers like myself and the others mentioned are putting in and are willing to examine what we have accomplished and support it through staff development opportunities. As Peter Senge says, in The Fifth Discipline, a learning organization is "an organization that is continually expanding its capacity to create its future." As a district, we must create a new shared vision about technology.

Route 21

The Partnership for 21st Century Skills has launched Route 21.
TEAM cohorts should make it their business to explore this site!

More About The Partnership for 21 Century Skills

Adam Dugger posed some great questions in his comment to my blog about Karen Cator's keynote. Some of his thoughts came up during the q&a at the panel discussion at the conference. Of course, testing and how that limits the 'creativity' for teachers was brought up by more than one teacher. And teachers do have to abide by that right now, but both David and Karen felt that there is a little progress. The 21 Century Skills partnership is supported by the AASL, and many organizations.

Karen Cator said that this 21st century learning framework is a step in the right direction. From their site:

New Online Education Resource to Feature 21st Century Skills

Oct. 10, 2007 -- Skills such as problem solving, innovation and creativity have become critical in today's global economy, and educators will now have additional resources to prepare our young people to succeed.

The Partnership for 21st Century Skills has developed Route 21, an online, one-stop-shop for 21st century skills-related resources. Route 21 demonstrates how 21st century skills can be supported through standards, professional development, assessments and teaching and learning.

Route 21 will launch on November 7. Be sure to check back then to learn more about this groundbreaking online educator resource.

Also, on their resource page, The Partnership for 21st Century Skills offers "...various tools and resources to assist educators in integrating 21st century skills into education. Their tools were developed through a comprehensive process involving hundreds of educators, researchers and employers across the country."

They also have Assess 21 - "a Web-based repository for information on assessments of 21st century skills. This repository is designed to serve as a central hub for background information on 21st century skills assessments as they become available and is open to submissions."

Apple John Lennon Educational Tour Bus

Picture above from http://www.lennonbus.org/

Yesterday at the conference I was able to tour the Apple John Lennon Imagine Educational Tour Bus. It was amazing! It is a recording studio on wheels that travels all over the U.S. and Canada, visiting schools, (for free), and allowing students to spend the day in the bus creating their own music videos. Students write the lyrics, create the music, create the video, and the Apple engineers turn that into a MTV-style music video. That is burned to a DVD and given to the students. We got to see the Imagine bus and watched this video. How cool is that!

Technology Summit Conference - Keynote Karen Cator

Blogging from the conference...


Karen Cator – Directs Apple’s Leadership and Advocacy efforts in education.

21st Century Skills and Learning:

Why 21st C Skills?
Partnership for 21st c Skills – partnership of technology groups, AASL, technology companies - (such as Apple, Dell), cross section of entities involved in developing framework.

Route 21 will be on this website - standards, assessments .

Why do we have to talk about doing things differently in schools?

1. Global Competition: “Did You know” video on youtube. The top 25% of students in China outnumber the entire population of the US.
2. Global Interdependence – global warming, internet security, where are those things stored? A virus will travel the world 6x before it burns itself out. This is what kids have to think about.
3. Information is ubiquitous – if I can google the answers to the test is that cheating or is that resourceful? {What do YOU think???} Do we have to completely rethink the assessment systems?
4. Workplace Innovation – the workplace has completely changed with the advent of the Internet. What are companies looking for in the next 5 years that are not coming out of schools today? –->TOP two things they are looking for are:

• Creativity and Innovation – that has to be our niche if we want to compete.
• The ability to operate in a global environment – international trade –entire of integration of business and person relationships. The workspace has completely change.

5. Student Experience – outside of school has changed tremendously. Texting, communicating, problem-solving – not multi-tasking but parallel processing. Students are totally connected to each other –text each other, etc., when they come into school we tend to shut that down. We tend to shut down their creative collaborative side.

Individuals – ---->Sharing Content------>Virtual Communities

Today’s Challenge: Student Engagement
We have tremendous nonretention issue in the US. Every student, whether they are successful or not, every experience is about relevance – how do we engage them in a relevant experience; and a social and emotional connection –kids don’t care about NCLB, they care about that someone knows they are there. It used to be OK that 30% of our kids dropped out of school. It’s not anymore.

For every 100 9th graders in the US only 69% graduate, 40% enroll incollege immediately; 27% are still enrolled in college and 18 graduate college on time from National Center for Public Policy and Higher Education Policy Alert April 2004.

Tony Wagner, Harvard 2007 THE SCHOOLING DISCONNECT
Schooling today -

• Getting right answer and performing well on multiple choice tests
• Working alone
• Learning within academic disciplines
• Memorizing fixed info
  
• Adhering to external and inflexible time segments
  

21st C Schooling:

• Figuring out right questions and using skills to solve new problems
• Working in teams
• Working across disciplines
• Learning how to find info, communicate it and apply it
• managing time and commitments and prioritization
  

Creativity:

26% of employers use google myspace and facebook to look up potential employees – students are CEO's of themselves – what do you want the world to see you as?

Where do they publish - where is theiroutlet for creativity? One place Apple Student Gallery -
Apple has insomnia film festival – 3000 teams were producing and publishing videos. Students were collaborating, writing, - think of the process that could be assessed!

There’s a whole new growth center for creative industries – how do we get our kids aware of this? Digital media careers will go from over 1 million employed to over 7 million by 2014.

What does innovation look like in education?

• How do we create that environment for students to be producers – to create, distribute, access and environment.

• Content creation tools. Communicate effectively with multiple media types – text, video, phtot, music, podcast, websites. What are professionals using? ILife is the pro set.

• Distribution environment: iPod + iTunes – mobile device to take away from your computer. iTunes education content from national geographic to David Warlick. iTunes U is now in regular music store. Open free public access in the itunes store. Gives you access to 30 public college and universities – this is amazing. Changes everything concerning distribution and content. Apple is thinking aout how to publish content specifically for k12. Look at usf --university of south florida-- has audio books for kids for all ages.

Collaboration -video ichat, online global community global awareness unit-peace, conflict and security on apple learning exchange.

Technologies to build relevant engaging learning environments.

Spread the Love

David Warlick, Chris Betcher, and so many others are blogging reminders to attend the K-12 Online 2007 Virtual Conference. David Warlick is the keynote speaker. TEAM students should REALLY think about virtually attending this conference. I know I will!

Top 10 Technology Tools

Just found a new blog worth subscribing to: Jane's E-Learning Pick of the Day.
From there, I found the list, Top 10 Technology Tools.

Pay It Forward

Pictured Left: Me, David Warlick, Neepa Shah

Last year, our school came into a little grant money, given in honor of an outstanding fifth grade teacher, Neepa Shah. My principal asked me to think of an effective way to spend that money. I emailed my friend and co-editor of MidLink Magazine, Joselyn Todd, asking for her for some help. Here is what she said:

“...The most lasting impact that this money could buy would be professional development to help your teachers take it to the next level in terms of their tech skills such that they could guide students in innovative project based work rooted in sound content. Joselyn's idea: hire someone to come in and teach your teachers some Web 2.0 technologies (with very practical “lesson plans”) that they can immediately implement in the classroom with the equipment that the school already has...Give the gift of a nudge in the direction of life-long learning to those educators who are in the “middle” of the tech skill continuum such that they can “pay it forward” to their students. Hundreds of students learning new tech skills by enthused and invigorated teachers would have very long lasting impact at your school.”"

Through MidLink, I had the good fortune to meet David Warlick on a couple of occasions down in Raleigh, NC. I immediately thought of him, sent him an email, and LUCKY for us, he came to NY and spent a day with a group teachers at my school. Besides teaching us how to "say grits" - (for you New Yorkers, it's "greee-its"), he taught us how to podcast and "invigorated us" with conversations about new literacies and possibilities. Not long after that visit, I had many of my students podcasting ... and well, since David's visit, the floodgates have opened in terms of my own professional growth in the area of Web 2.0.

Anyway, two weeks ago I started four classes blogging on Class Blogmeister, after introducing blogging to my fourth and fifth grade classes byway of a paper blogging lesson, co-taught with my friend and hallway neighbor, fourth grade teacher, Adam Dugger. We introduced the idea of writing for an audience, of private information vs. public information, of appropriate language, and of constructive criticism. The lesson called for students to write a passage describing a favorite food; others in the class had a chance to leave constructive comments by writing them on post-its. The lesson worked so well that I decided to make a bulletin board out of it for Back to School Night. I racked my brains for a title for the bulletin board, and then it came to me: "Our 2 Cents Worth" - what a perfect 'pay it forward' moment! The David Warlick ripple effect.
This album is powered by BubbleShare

BTW - I am writing this as the Wisconsin Badgers beat Michigan State in a very exciting game AND The Mets won today (finally!). Yay!