What will be the next big thing?

A social studies colleague of mine relayed this to me. He was e-mailing back and forth (how 20th century!) with his college room mate who is now a consultant/production manager for Microsoft. When my friend. asked, on behalf of his students, what the next big thing will be, this was the reply:

The next big thing your kids will likely see is the convergence of experiences on all their different devices…if you think of the TV, the XBox, your phone, your computer, and then think of all the Internet experiences you have available on the device you are working on. We are all getting there in some ways, but still a long way to go.

This is something I’ve suspected for awhile now, but it’s nice to have some validation from someone who actually knows what he’s talking about. A device like this only magnifies the need for us as educators to ensure our students are verse not in technology (they’re already the experts in that), but critical thinking, networking skills, technological responsibility, and problem solving. The world is shrinking before our very eyes, and the next wave of technology will demand that not only the kids be able to exist in this new world, but that we as teachers be able to keep up and engage them in it.

Interesting – Or at the Least, Food For Discussion.

I encourage you to check out Will Richardson’s latest blog entry, here. It sort of flies in the face of those in education who believe we need to fear sites like Facebook and MySpace.

You may not agree, but it certainly is thought provoking.

Some Days I Just Don’t Want to Write…

…Copying and pasting works, especially when the author makes the point sufficiently.

Take a read from Ira Socol’s blog, “SpeEdChange:

Three comments from teachers on a New York Times article on mobile phones in the classroom.

“Not my classroom, not ever. My kids are on their own in class, not propped up by gadgets. And don’t tell me they’re a tech-literate generation: they’re quite helpless, even at age 20 unable to change a single-spaced document to a double-spaced one, and unwilling to pursue any question or issue beyond the first screen of its Wikipedia entry.”

— Real Teacher, Bloomington, IN

“Seriously? Are you kidding me? As a teacher I am engaged in a perpetual battle against this technology as students use it in an increasing variety of non-productive ways. From kids who are simply not paying attention, or who are engaged in personal, (but very public), phone calls in the halls, to kids who text each other or check the web to cheat, this technology only encourages the ‘what is the answer’ mentality and discourages any real learning.”

— Augusta Johnson, Andover, MA

“How about using a brain for a change, instead of cell phone?”

— Taras, Hancock, NY

OK, one by one.

Is this “Real Bad Teacher” in Bloomington, Indiana? His or her students are incapable of research because they have mobile phones or because he/she has not taught them how to do research? His or her students can not change document formatting because of phones or because technology education in his or her school is so poor? And, oh my, “My kids are on their own in class, not propped up by gadgets.” How positively Socratic. Get those books out of the room – memory only. Get rid of that chalkboard – that technological devil of the 1840s. Pens? Pencils? Paper? Just ridiculous gadgets which make communication easier. Maybe we should get rid of the alphabet as well. Just one more silly invention to simplify and improve human communication and data handling. “Technology is everything invented after I was born”? This teacher truly believes that. I’m glad these students are being firmly prepared for the world of 1970.

Ms. Johnson in Andover: You are in a “perpetual battle” against this technology and your own students. How’s that working out? When I present I often hold up the back of my right hand, where the “lead” of a pencil still resides from a stabbing with a pencil by a friend at age nine. It is funny, the teacher’s response that day was not to remove all pencils from the room. I also watched many students pass notes in class and doodle, but I’ve never seen a teacher respond by removing paper from the room. When I was thirteen a classmate threw books at me. The teacher let books remain in the room. I’ve even seen students cheat with pens, with paper, with notes written on their clothing – yet all those technologies probably remain even in your classroom. See, Ms. Johnson, you either teach and demonstrate the best uses of the technology of your time or you find another job.

And Taras, we are humans, we are tool users. It is tool use, and the progression of tool capability, which has allowed human progress. I can imagine “Taras” sitting around at the birth of the stone age, “How about using your hands for a change, instead of that stone hammer.”

I am so tired of teachers who refuse to look at the world around them, who refuse to adapt to a changing society, who refuse to respond to their students’ needs and their students’ interests…

There you go.

The World, it is a Changin’

 

As if we needed any more evidence that we are rapidly moving towards a Web 2.0 (and in many cases, 3.0) world, check out today’s front page of CNN.com

 

He's a Gui-tar Hero...got stars in his eyes...!

 

If you notice the highlighted story, you’ll see that a kid setting a record on Guitar Hero now constitutes front page news on CNN. I’m not really trying to make a value judgement here. I’m just observing, as interesting, how this technology is transforming the way we live, right down to what respected news services think is news.

Make no mistake, if CNN didn’t think  A LOT of people played this game, and thus would find this interesting (translation: led to people visiting their website and thus seeing their advertisers) they wouldn’t have posted it. Imagine where we’ll be in a year, or two.

Just throwing it out there…

A Great Start.

You ever seen the movie “Independence Day”? You know, the one with Will Smith and Bill Pullman. Remember how they couldn’t even scratch that alien ship hovering over Houston with the nuke because they couldn’t get past the aliens defense shields? What was the answer? They had to destroy the mother ship in order to take out the other ships.

 

While at EduCon last weekend, (There will be more to come on that incredible experience, once I’m able to digest everything.) one of the things I really took away from the Friday night panel discussion was our need to “destroy the mother ship” if we are ever going to initiate any real and transformational change in education. What that means is that the system has to be fundamentally changed from the top down. If we just continue to nibble around the outside, or concentrate on the “smaller ships”, there’s always going to be something that will come around to obliterate the movement.

Governor Strickland (from my home state of Ohio for those of you reading around the country) gave his State of the State address yesterday, and outlined his plan for reforming Ohio’s education system for the 21st century. It’s fairly detailed, but I’ll  summarize his six point plan here:

1. How and what we teach will be designed to prepare students to thrive in the 21st century. There will be a premium placed on creativity, innovation, critical thinking, technological literacy, and adaptability. Schools will be required to use “innovative” teaching formats like interdisciplinary methods, project-based learning and service learning
2. There will be increased opportunities for students to learn by increasing their learning time (universal all-day kindergarten and increasing school year to 200 days), engaging the community and encouraging life-long learning through several new initiatives.
3. Revolutionizing the way we train and provide professional development to teachers in Ohio. You need to read this, but I LOVE it. Essentially, a procedure will be put in place that is modeled after what physicians need to go through for their residency. Teachers will basically have to go through a four-year mentored clinical experience before they can attain their professional teaching license. Teachers skills and accomplishments will be recognized with four licensure levels, with advancement based on the teacher’s credentials and experience. There will also be put into place a less restrictive system to recruit and license the best people from outside education into our classrooms. FINALLY! I’ve always said that if we as educators ever wanted to be taken seriously as professionals, we needed to take a more rigorous approach to how we train and retain ourselves. Yes, everyone can point to that one teacher who really made a difference in their lives. However, our perception problem is aided by the fact that everyone also remembers those teachers who were the easy “A’s”, who skated through the year with the students learning nothing, simply getting to the next Summer Break.
4. Abolishment of the OGT (Ohio Graduation Test), and replacing it with end-of-course exams, and a required service-learning project and senior project.
5. An unprecedented level of school district accountability and transparency.
6. After 12 years, finally adhering to the Supreme Court’s edict to effectively and equitably fund Ohio school districts. Two big components of this are the elimination of “phantom revenue”, and increasing the state share of education funding.

This all sounds fantastic, and echoes what those of us who know what the problems are and how to fix them, have been saying for years. What encourages me most, is that as I read the objections to the Governor’s plan, I am not seeing anybody disagreeing with the fundamentals of it. The only beefs seem to be with how it is going to be paid for. While the money is a big part of it, I see it as a very positive thing that at this point everyone seems to be on the same page about what needs to be done.

I encourage you to read the plan and comment here.

Web 2.0 – Promise/Risk/Barriers

As those of you either know me or have read some of my earlier stuff have most certainly already figured out, I am firmly behind the movement to include Web 2.0 tools into teaching curriculum, probably to the point of evangelism.

The promise of Web 2.0 as a classroom tool as well as for personal/professional development is unbounded. The kids are the real experts on this technology, as they are already using it to network and collaborate every day. We are only limited by their imaginations as to what we can do with these tools.

I will offer a few anecdotes I’ve heard to illustrate the possibilities:

- A girl, as a sophomore and a B/C student, wrote a three-page paper for her Language Arts class on the topic of bullying after reading the book, Please Stop Laughing At Me. Impressed by the girl’s insight and the improvement the paper was over anything she had ever done, her teacher asked for her permission to post it on the class’ blog. Over the course of the next several months, hundreds of people from all over the world commented on the blog entry about the paper. She heard from bullying victims who had their story to tell, bullies who were moved to realize what they were doing to their victims, psychologists, social-workers and other experts in the field who gave their input on the matter, and ultimately, the author herself, Jodee Blanco who gave her insight on the book that no one could.

Months turned into years, and each time the girl received a new comment, she would think about how that input either fit into or challenged her ideas in the paper. By the time she was a senior, she had revised it dozens of times into 32 pages. Now, how many times have you ever heard of a student still revising a paper two years after receiving the grade?

- A fifth-grade class was doing a class project over a particular village in Africa. The kids posted their research and insights on their class blog. It received so many hits from the kids in the class, that when a Google search was done on this particular village, the class’ blog was #2. A person in that village, at an internet cafe was browsing around and decided to Google his village where he came across the 5th grade class’ site. He e-mailed the class and said, “Hey, I’m from that village. What would you like to know?”

Now that’s learning. And that’s information that a classroom teacher could never give to the kids on their own.

The potential risk of Web 2.0, aside from the obvious security issues that we’ve all warned and been warned about, in my mind is allowing pedagogy to be driven by technology instead of the other way around. I’m afraid that teachers will be so smitten with this new “toy” that they will allow the technology to be an end itself, instead of merely using it as a way to actively engage students into learning what we all want them to: critical thinking, spelling, grammar, sentence structure, reading for understanding, etc.

There are two primary barriers to Web 2.0 in the classroom as I see it:

1) Not every student has reliable access to the internet, at will. There are even some schools where the technology infrastructure is insufficient to sustain these tools. The “A” students, while they’ll probably love these things, are going to be engaged and perform highly no matter we do. It’s all the others, the kids who are spending 3.5 hours a day on-line instead of doing their homework, who will greatly benefit from this. It’s sad to say, but in many of our classrooms, the kids who are the most challenged are usually the ones who don’t have the hardware to take advantage of this stuff.

2) I’ve not always been a teacher. You can read my introduction and see that. However, in my short time as an educator, I have come to the conclusion that teachers, as a profession, are more resistant to change than any other group I’ve ever experienced.

A big problem I see is buy-in. It’s hard to convince some teachers who have 20, 30 years in, who have had complete autonomy in their classroom and have been doing things the same way since they got their first assignment, who have seen educational fad after educational fad come and go…(you get the point), to get on-board with something that they a) don’t understand, and/or b) refuse to open their minds to because it’s just too different, and their way has always “worked” for them in the past.

Now, before teachers in my own building start commenting on this (…like they even know what a blog is. Heh.), ripping me apart, I’m not trying to suggest that anyone who doesn’t get on board with this is a bad teacher. There are many outstanding teachers out there who are engaging their kids every day, without this.

I’m just saying…

Say it Ain’t So…

Those of you who have visited the bio page on my website know that I’m an enormous Atlanta Braves fan. I grew up watching them on TBS in the 80’s when they were the only game on T.V. most nights, stayed with them through the abysmal 100 loss seasons and swelled with pride throughout the 90’s and division title after division title. Of course, any baseball fan will tell you a large part of their success was due to the fact that the NL Cy Young award seemed to have a permanent home the ATL clubhouse.

Maddux (who hasn’t been with the Braves for some time now) announced his retirement recently, and Glavine, who returned to the Braves last year, is coming back, at 42, from season-ending surgery and is tenuous at best. Now, my favorite of them all, John Smoltz has just announced that he is signing a one-year deal with the Boston Red Sox. The RED SOX!

I'm in mourning.

As most people also know about me, while I live in Ohio, I’m from New York, my heart lies there, and I still see myself as a New Yorker. WHY THE RED SOX?! He could have gone to literally any other team in the league and I couldn’t have begrudged him after all the enjoyment he’s provided me over his illustrious career. But the Red Sox? I have been conditioned, lo these many years, to believe that with maybe the exception of the Sons of Liberty and John Adams, nothing of any redeeming value has ever been associated with Boston. Now my belief system is about to be turned completely upside down.

I wonder if it’ll be possible to root for Smotzie while hoping the rest of the team bats .178 and commits 3 errors a game…

Protecting who from whom?

I’ve decided to start using this blog in the way that blogs were most traditionally intended.

From this point forward, I am going to use this forum to publish, on at least a weekly basis, my musings, ruminations, and ongoing personal commentary about things that I find important, interesting, funny, etc. The title of this column will be aptly named, “The Opinions Expressed Here…”, partly because I think it’s kind of catchy, but also to remind the reader that each installment is merely one person’s opinion to be either agreed with or challenged, and should be in no way construed as representing the official position of any other person or entity besides the writer…me.

That said, let me kick off the first one…

I understand the pressures faced by administrators and IT heads as they balance the need of supplying internet in the schools with the danger of letting students (and teachers) surf whatever they want, unchecked.

I also understand, I think, the legal responsibility the district faces with this issue in regards to a major source of technology funding: A federal program called E-Rate exists to provide discounts to assist most schools and libraries in the United States to obtain affordable telecommunications and internet access. Westerville is a participant in this program, and enjoys grants that pay for approximately half of our district’s technology needs.

A major condition to this money is that the district adhere to the Children’s Internet Protection Act (CIPA). The legislation essentially provides that any school who receives E-Rate assistance must ensure that some sort of technology protection measure is in place, and that they adopt and enforce a policy to monitor online activities of minors.

However, CIPA also allows for an authorized person to disable the blocking or filtering measure during any use by an adult to enable access for bona fide research or other lawful purposes. The problem as I see it now is, the only people who aren’t able to access anything on the computers in our building are teachers! Pull aside any 20 students in the hallway and ask them for the address of a proxy server that can bypass security, and I’d bet you’d get at least 5 different sites. Block those and there will be 5 more the next day.

One of my heroes in education is a man by the name of Will Richardson. He was once a classroom teacher, just like myself, but now travels the world espousing the value and importance of integrating technology into the classroom. I first heard him speak at the e-Tech Ohio conference in 2007 and was immediately a follower. He keeps up his own blog at weblogg-ed.com.

A recent post of his really struck a chord with me as a really eloquent argument that’s right on point with the way I feel about our technology issues. I’d like to share it with you here.

Filter Fun

So I’ve been getting tweaked by filters again and the amount of stuff that many schools block and try to keep away from kids and, to a depressingly large extent, teachers as well. I know this is just a repeat of the same basic issues that have been floating around here for a while, but for some reason I’ve been slamming into that wall both technically and intellectually in the past weeks more than usual. Frustrating when it seems to be getting worse instead of better.

At one recent event, I had a couple of hours between my sessions and since the wireless was spotty, one of the school administrators offered up his office and his computer for me to use. “Slow as hell,” he said as he logged me in. He wasn’t kidding. But the worst part was that I really needed to get onto my Gmail account to snag a file and it was, of course, blocked. Google docs, blocked. YouTube, blocked. Webpages came up with photos and videos “x’d” out. Apparently, everyone in the school suffered under the same filter. And the same was true of a school superintendent I spoke with who lamented the fact that his IT staff wouldn’t give him access to YouTube and even Wikipedia.

I swear I wanted to grab them both and shake them and say, “You’ve got to be kidding me! Why do you stand for that?”

Oy.

I say this all the time, but I truly believe that filters make our kids less safe. They step off the bus into unfiltered worlds with no context for making good decisions about the stuff coming at them. It’s a huge problem. But on some levels, the bigger problem is what we are doing to our teachers. It insults the profession to not at the very least provide desktop overrides for teachers when they bump up against a filtered site. Have a policy in place to deal with incidents where teachers make poor choices if that’s what the concern is.

Seriously, am I missing something? Why is that so hard to implement?

The only way we’re going to get students, or teachers, to master the Web is to let them use it.

I couldn’t have said it any better myself. So I didn’t. I copied it instead.

“Everything was fine.”

I was thinking about Sound Offs today, and it got me thinking about areas where some of you can improve, and this clip.

Go to “Sound Off example” in the Multimedia section of your class web page to enjoy.