What are the key elements required for a transformation of teaching and learning through the use of technology? There are obviously many reasonable ways to look at this. From what position do you view this issue? Are you a teacher, instructional coach, building principal, technology facilitator, director of technology, chief administrative officer of some flavor, superintendent, parent, or student? For you, this issue will likely run through the filter of your current position.
It will also run through the filter of your experience. Are you an eighteen year old student who lives a life that is highly digitally integrated, or are you a teacher of 20 years or more who is just now trying to become familiar with the Internet as it relates to teaching and learning? Are you a superintendent or head of school who is beginning to open to the importance of a smart approach to technology integration, or are you a technology facilitator who has been a digital evangelist for the past five to ten years?
Those filters should all be applied to the problem of how to retool schools along the lines of technological transformation. (Though I didn’t think it worked in the title of this post, you will see below that I would rather use the term transformation as opposed to integration.) At this point, the vast majority of school systems are behind the curve in this area. Being this far behind might just have one distinct advantage. If there is no way to see any of the individual trees in a forest, you are likely going to be forced to start your mission with a whole-forest view to begin with. This is not a bad thing. It allows you to realize two important things:
1) You don’t need a flashlight. It’s not that dark in there anymore. Trust that there are others who have proceeded down this path before you, and they have learned many important lessons. Collaborate. Learn from their successes and failures. Do not go it alone. Resist the temptation to slap a digital device in the hands of each student and call it success. Have a plan.
2) Rarely do we get to make decisions with the clarity that a little distance provides. Take your time (but hurry). Ask yourself: what can we do with these new tools available today that we couldn’t do before? If we could remake our curriculum any way we wanted, how would we do it? Think transformation of the way teaching and learning is done in your district, as opposed to integration into it as it exists.
Allow me to run this challenge through my own filter for the next several paragraphs. For more on my filter for these ideas, consult the About page. Also- I certainly do not profess to know all of the answers. I am currently sitting on top of a nice little foothill of educational technology leadership… and staring up at some pretty massive peaks ahead. Allow me to talk about a few things that make these peaks seem climbable from where I stand.
It is my belief that all schools (and/or school systems) need the following four pillars below any technology “integration” effort…
An Innovation engine
All systems need what I will call an “innovation engine.” Whatever the system, whatever the setup, schools and school systems need pockets of sponsored innovation. Without some folks directly charged with instructional innovation with digital tools, we will always be just trying to fit technology into what we do on a day to day basis. It is far better to build innovation directly into the system, and to foster it purposefully. I know this may seem somewhat fringe in the world of public education, but it can’t afford to be much longer.
“At enlightened, forward-thinking companies, managers understand the connection between learning, innovation, and higher productivity — in fact, employees at these companies may even be encouraged to spend time learning and experimenting with new technologies.”
~Joe McKendrick, FASTforward
So who will drive this engine of innovation in your school? Will this be a technology facilitator? Will it be a technology coach? Perhaps an instructional coach. A ad-hoc committee of teachers? A requirement of your leadership team or department heads? If you are thinking of this from a district perspective, where does this responsibility land? Will you just hope for it, or will you truly sponsor innovation in new approaches to teaching and learning afforded by digital technologies?
Administrative support
An innovative technology leader will be of little use beyond their immediate world without direct, purposeful and inspired administrative support. Administrators: join forces with your innovation team. Learn what they learn. Push them to new heights. Allow them to bring innovative approaches to the classrooms and teachers of your school. Support your teachers every step of the way as they slowly transform the classroom environments they create toward new and better approaches to learning…
…and then hold them to it. Hold staff accountable for bringing their skills up to the present realities of the 21st Century. We’ve been living passively in this century for almost ten years now. It is time for all of us to sit up and take a direct and active role in the changes happening within the learning profession. Without strong administrative support, advocacy, and supervision, no real and lasting changes of the magnitude are possible. Guidelines for such leadership aren’t exactly guesswork. Grab a copy of the NETS and familiarize yourself with these standards today if you have yet to. They come in three fine flavors: for students, teachers and administrators.
Unfiltered ubiquitous access
So now you have innovation closely coupled with administrative support. With those two things, you can get a pretty immediate return for your buck, provided one more terribly important thing: that you don’t filter the very usefulness out of the web. A school can have instructional innovation and local administrative support and still fail with regard to technology integration. How do you kill innovation quickly? Tie it down. Even today, many schools filter all of the good, interactive raw materials right out of the web. Figure it out, people. Ask a school who only lightly filters. Ask. Don’t assume there isn’t another way.
Our school system does currently block Facebook and MySpace. However, our general approach is to put the filters in place required by law, and then keep the real Internet open for education. Yes, that means we have open access to YouTube, Flickr, UStream, Ning, Twitter, Blogs, Wikis, etc… We have our hands on far too much fuel for innovation to even worry about looking at Facebook and MySpace at this moment. They are where our students already are. But for now, we are luckier than 95% of school districts I encounter. This fact has allowed us to move quickly toward figuring out the advantages and disadvantages of these powerful new tools in an educational setting.
Oh, and ubiquity. Access to these tools must be easy and everywhere. Soon after access is all around you, it doesn’t even feel like “technology,” it just feels like the way things are done. This is a good thing, for when technology becomes invisible, we can finally focus on the value added from new uses of these tools. The world is moving quickly toward wireless access in all corners. If your school isn’t wireless, then only your students have wireless access. That’s right- via their phones. You have a cell phone policy in your school? Don’t kid yourself. Your students are on the raw, unfiltered Internet via the 3G connection of their cellphone more often in the classroom than you care to admit. Why ignore this… or worse yet, why punish it? Embracing might just be the answer. Try it.
If your school isn’t at a 1:1 ratio of students to laptop computers… and the students don’t take them home with them night by night, all year long… then you don’t yet have an ideal learning environment for 2009 in my opinion. However, there are other ways until that time to assure ubiquitous access. Our school currently employs MacBook carts at a ratio of 2.5 students to one computer. 60 of these machines will be available for checkout from our Media Center in the fall. Our Media Center/Library will also be open well beyond school hours. It isn’t perfect, but it is allowing us to move ahead intelligently. We are moving quickly toward the 1:1 environment everyone knows is inevitable in schools.
Instructional model
So now you have innovation on the ground level, administrative support, and unfiltered access. Be proud. If you can honestly say this characterizes your school or school system, then you are in a very small but fortunate minority. You work with smart, visionary people who know how to plan and have been doing so for some time now. If your lone goal is to have students, teachers and administrators all gleefully pushing buttons and gazing at computer screens… then your work here is done. Congratulations. However, if what you were wanting out of this nationwide technology push was something a bit more… substantial, then you had better finish reading.
The fourth pillar of “instructional model” is more than a quick soundbyte allows. I see three levels of this notion with increasing value as follows: 1) You have thought about and encouraged good instructional practices in your building/district. 2) You have a well-articulated plan for effective instructional practice that is building or districtwide. 3) You have a true learner-centered instructional model in place in grades K-12 that credits the constructivist nature of human learning.
I am fortunate to say that though our district has awakened late to the call of real and purposeful transformation via educational technology, the toughest of our four pillars has already been built. The final pillar of a student-centered constructivist model for instruction that is carefully stated, professionally-developed, supported, and supervised… is in place.
As I stated earlier, we are looking up at some pretty tall challenges ahead of us. Locally, we have unfiltered access to all of the content and interactivity the web affords. We have pedagogical experts in district leadership positions who have put in place an ideal instructional model for the future. We have a quickly multiplying group of administrators at both the district and building levels who are responding to the call of the digital world, and we are making plans to foster innovation and creativity in our classrooms.
I feel like I am at the foot of a mountain that a handful of good people have climbed… 20,000 feet below the summit, yet armed with the best climbing gear and support I can get my hands on. Our immediate future should be interesting indeed.
Where are you?
So where does all of this leave you? How many of these pillars have been already constructed around you? What have you done to help in that construction? What do you see as the greatest challenges in this mission? What can I or others do to help? Are there other pillars that you believe I have missed here?
This post was initially intended to be a part of “Leadership Day 2009“ as conceived by Scott McLeod. I am posting it at 1:30am on July 13th instead of on July 12th. This is not to shabby considering my two baby girls thought that since it is technically summer here… it should feel like it today.
Yep, I just quoted myself. It’s OK, I’ll take that one. In fact, I think I’ll take it and run with it for a bit. Check it out. See, I don’t deal well with what one of my science department colleagues refers to as the “Negative Nelson.” These are folks who jump quickly to the most negative outlook possible to begin any task, discussion or debate. Now I’m certainly not talking about people who exhibit the valuable skill of being able to ferret out potential pitfalls in any new endeavor. Karl Fisch, in a recent workshop at MICDS in St. Louis, referred to those elements of a system as the “yeah, buts.“ His willingness that day to confront potential snags head-on is one of the marks of any successful project manager.
That said, negativity used as a strategy to push back from the table (whether conscious or unconscious) in order to avoid change or conflict is a very toxic thing. Life is too short and too difficult as it is. Stirring up extra negativity in such a challenging career field is more than a waste of time. In my 18 years as an educator I have had the benefit of working in environments that were so positive and supportive that I was constantly inspired. I have also had my years where “clowns to the left of me, jokers to the right” is about the most polite way I can put it. Negative Nelsons. Thanks, Jennifer. That one is elegantly simple. It made me laugh, and it made me reflect. So obviously, I haven’t been able to get in here to write very much as of late. Please excuse the rapid-fire unloading of thought here. I’ll get back to succinct when I get more time.
“I would have written a shorter letter if I had more time.”
~Blaise Pascal
Why the “2.0?”
Now that I think of it, I probably could have just entitled this one “2.0″ because this is now what this phrase means to me. I’m not going to go off into the history of the quirk of using “2.0″ to signify the newest iteration of….. something. Heck it is now used for pretty much anything: Web 2.0, School 2.0, Library 2.0, Government 2.0, and on and on and on. Tack a two at the end and instantly whatever you are talking about, planning, or selling becomes better, newer, shinier. From my personal perspective, what at one point meant something to those pushing the envelope of using the Internet in education, now means means less. The more you use something, right? I get it. I know. After a while of having “2.0’s” ping-ponged about in the echo chamber of online communications… the meaning does tend to get stale. If you subscribe to the tweets of some of the more connected edtechers out there, you’ll find more than a few who are just plain ol’ sick of the term.
Why it doesn’t bother me
Let’s just get this out of the way first: According to Global language Monitor, “Web 2.0″ is the 1,000,000th word added into the English language. So there. It means something. For the “How’d they figure that?“, click here.
I’ll be honest. I hate it too by now. It is the height of cliche’ in my head. However, I think I am just sick of it considering how much I actually feel the need to use the term in my current job as an instructional coach in the middle of a constructivist reformation/technology integration pilot. I try to use a ton of helper phrases to describe this entity as well: read/write web, social web, participatory web, and other. Those are great, and do help, but I still need two-oh.
In a recent technology summit in our school district, an administrator actually started out one of the segments declaring that in terms of education, Web 2.0 “doesn’t really mean anything,” and that people really can’t agree on whether it will have an impact or not. This is one statement I had to disagree with point blank that day. Really, I get why it might seem less-than-concrete on the surface. With utmost respect, to an educator not using the participatory web in the classroom (or anywhere else professionally) “Web 2.0″ must look a bit like the wild west compared to the pricey and packaged comfort of a content management system like Blackboard, WebCT or E-Companion. But think about it- a constructivist classroom probably does look like Dodge City to the vast majority of people who were educated in the neat and tidy rows of desks in the American schools of our past.
What it means for me is that frankly… I don’t have to wait for anyone any longer. When I want to go, I go. When my students are ready for something better (that fits good pedagogy) we go. With a robust and lightly filtered network- no longer did I have to wait for more software to be decided upon, purchased, server space to be allocated, or passwords to be doled out. With Web2, I was able to immediately make a go at what I, my administrators, my students, and my parents thought was the right path to follow. I could hone a web tool to my liking in a weekend. I didn’t need to wait for a comprehensive plan filled with multiple opportunities for job-embedded professional development and one-on-one coaching. I was ready, and I rolled on.
All of a sudden, more than at any time previously in my career, I was able to model myself as a learner in the classroom right alongside my students. I was able to show them what it looked like to be a connected learner in the digital world of current information and communications technology. Now I am ready to go back and help build that comprehensive implementation plan for our teachers and students. I hope I am continually able to model those experiences in the other direction as well… still as a learner modeling the navigation of our newly-digital terrain, though not only for our students but also for those who make far-reaching decisions for each of the students in our town.
Positivity and possibility
I need positivity. My engine thrives upon it. I need open potential. I need new possibilities. Here’s why I decided today to “re-like” the terminology of 2.0: It is just so full of possibility. School 2.0? Seriously, who isn’t interested in reforming the future for the largest open-schooling system in the world? Don’t answer that. Good point. I’m sure there are plenty who aren’t. But look how many really are. Because of Web 2.0, the folks who want to step up and have a hand in the remaking of our outmoded schools, libraries and governmental participation models… can.
Web 2.0 is still a novel and effective tool for democracy. It is still a new way to interact via the Internet. Why not let it remind you of the shiny possibility of doing something better the next time you try? Sticking a two at the end of something doesn’t automatically make it better. However, possibility is as contagious as negativity. Spread some love, will ya’?
Modeling fluent reading. Introduction of outside text every period of every day in every class. The opportunity to bring relevance to adolescents. With whole-school immersion in text and reading, ideas and concepts naturally follow. The teacher reads, the student follow along a copy of the text. Content-area literacy expert, Janet Allen calls it “eyes past print with voice support.” At my school, we call it a requirement… one element of a building-wide literacy plan.
Two years ago, after our sit-down session with Janet Allen in Orlando, Florida, our leadership team decided on a school-wide implementation of this strategy as an element of our focus on literacy skills. Co-Principal in charge of instruction, Dr. Jeanette Westfall, was a former elementary teacher, high school communication arts teacher and instructional coach. There is no doubt that her background helped her decide that a non-negotiable approach to reading improvement across content areas was a valuable thing given our situation.
Why we went there
Data analysis in our school improvement planning sessions clearly indicated the need for a systemic effort to improve reading. However, witnessing and characterizing the problem is only the beginning. The ability to design concrete, strategic approaches to solving such a problem is a crucial next step. Bringing the teeth of accountability into the picture is the final piece of the puzzle in comprehensively addressing a systemic educational issue.
The accountability piece tied to EPP is a direct requirement from our building administration to employ this “read aloud” strategy for an absolute minimum of five minutes per class per day. For students this translates to a daily minimum of twenty minutes of engagement with rigorous text with a fluent reader. The next logical step of a strategic teacher is to quickly adjust planning to take advantage of this requirement to bring rigorous and relevant content-specific text into the beginning (or end) of each period.
For a teacher with traditional style, this also forces at least one transition within the daily lesson. In the hands of an effective teacher, these transitions help to keep kids actively engaged and using their brains in varied ways. Data showed that not only was there a need, but that our kids simply weren’t reading enough. You can make strong suggestions about what goes on outside of the classroom. Inside the four walls of a classroom is a different story. You can guarantee immersion within the walls of a school building.
Lit2Go
In other posts this year, I have suggested online services that might add to our implementation of EPP. In this post, I would like to introduce another interesting online resource from Florida’s Educational Technology Clearinghouse. Lit2Go is a website I remember running across a year or so ago on Apple’s iTunes. On the USF site within iTunes you will find audio files for K-12 education organized by grade level.
However, in my opinion, the organizational website for Lit2Go is what makes it useful for the strategy described above as well as others. The main page allows many typical content searches for literature. Author, Title, Keyword, and Reading Level are all available search functions as well as a direct link to the files on the iTunes service for slipping smoothly into your iPod.
My first try was an author search- I pretty randomly chose Lewis Carroll. I ran down the list of ten offerings for the author and clicked to select The Two Clocks. The contents page for any selection has a nice set of overview information such as an abstract, word count, reading level, origin, genre, lexile level, theme, suggested educational strategy, Sunshine State Standards (of more use if you are actually IN Florida), and more. On this page, it is the collection of not only the .mp3 audio file of the work, but also the text in both .html and .pdf format that makes this a valuable resource. It also looks as if some pieces contain other “support material,” though the attached document for this particular story seems pretty useless.
Overall, the fact that this site provides both audio and clearly-printed text of a good number of classic pieces makes it valuable for efficiently selecting and managing EPP within a literature or communication arts class.
An easy win
The “clock that doesn’t go” in Lewis Carroll’s story is right two times per day. The other clock which loses a minute a day is only right twice per year. Surely, implementing EPP in a setting where reading immersion strategies are warranted is a way to be “right” at least four times per day. If this form of “being right” seems worthwhile to you in your own educational setting, then give Lit2Go a try and come back and tell us what you thought. Did it work quickly and easily for the described strategy? Even better… do you have another innovative use of Lit2Go to share? Bring it here, and help us all to be right more than two times per day.
What I have found particularly true in the past year is that even the fanciest website on the Internet doesn’t produce a solid educational event outside of the carefully-created framework of a skilled instructor. Compared to many of the applications/websites I have talked about on this blog in the past year, this one could be seen as one of the less “sophisticated.” However, any good teacher knows that what happens when you plug a device into the wall… pales in comparison to what happens inside the mind of a child.
Not long ago, the MS Office suite comprised the bulk of computer applications in the world of mainstream business. I have to admit that as a career biology educator and instructional coach, I have precious little knowledge of the “real” business world. That said, this past year I have found my work overlapping many trends in business as I explore the efficacy of collaborative online applications in education. I am deeply interested in them as a framework for professional development as well as for classroom utilization.
“Yeah, but mainstream businesses aren’t using the Web 2.0 stuff… those are mostly a few cutting edge companies with money to burn.”
How much more “mainstream” can you get than Best Buy? Will Richardson pointed to the above video a couple of days back on Twitter, and I have held that browser window open since that time. I really enjoy some of the language found within. For example, one gentleman interviewed said that Web 2.0 applications allow the workforce to “…try a lot of different things, fail really fast, and then try things again.“ I dig that attitude in almost any endeavor. To me it is pretty clear that being fearless and willing to innovate is a big plus in much of the business world as well as in education. I also like the fact that another interviewee listed the following things as benefits to social media applications being implemented within the company structure:
better loyalty
less office politics
ability to meet other individuals passionate about the same things
ability to stretch an idea across an entire organization
Shifting schools
Now which of those things is not good as well for a school faculty? Of course blind loyalty leads often to the Abilene Paradox, and this is never a good thing. However, other than that, I’m betting that this list of four things is something all school administrators and staff would value in their world as well.
Those four items, as well as a few others, are a target of our school’s shiny new social network- Virtual Southside. This site was piloted by a cohort of 20 teachers and administrators at Benton High this year in the midst of an academic technology integration program. Starting next year, with our entire staff online in the program, this site will be a major part of how we conduct asynchronous staff professional development. Today I interviewed several cohort members about the benefits of working within our social network this past school year. A short list of their replies about our foray into social media is as follows:
develop general comfort with social media
ability to collaborate asynchronously
differentiated professional development
makes all staff a “professional developer”
makes professional work transparent
allows feedback from a wider dynamic of personalities
provides an archival record
creates an avenue for extrinsic motivation
Nearing the end of our first year employing social media in our school and in our classrooms, I am excited to see some of the benefits rolling in. In my opinion, the featured video showing similar strategies in a mainstream business model provides another interesting nod to the value of utilizing these strategies with our teachers and students as well. Are collaborative social tools being used currently where you work? What role do you see for social media in our schools and with our students?
Artwork thanks:
*Thanks to Stephen Collins for the “fail gloriously” slide image.
Hi, this is Punya Mishra from Michigan State, guest blogging for Sean while he is away doing cool things. I would be lying if I said that I don’t feel some pressure to come up with a particularly interesting posting. It is one thing to write on my own blog, that’s my space and I can do what I want there. Writing for someone else (with as august an audience such as you, dear Reader) is a different matter altogether. When Sean asked me to guest blog he suggested that I write about the TPACK framework, a topic I seem to have some expertise about, so I will do that, but with a slightly different tack. I would like to talk about what technology can do for us as educators.
We need to approach this with some humility since technologies have often been hyped as leading to fundamental educational change. I wrote about this earlier on my blog, taking quotes from books written back in the 1930s!!
More immediately, this line of thought was prompted when I received a series of emails from people about a video that was making the rounds. It was a commercial created by an unnamed organization (you will see the video below, so the organization is not much of a secret) that spoke to how the educational system has failed us and suggested that technology could be a solution to finding talent and creativity. I saw the video and was impressed by its production qualities and overall tone, but something bothered me about it. This led to some musings that I place below AND a mashup of the video that I created. You can see both the original and my mashup towards the end of this post. You are of course free to scroll down and see the videos, just make sure to see them in the order they are presented (the commercial followed by my mashup) for full effect, but it would be good to read through what I have written below before seeing the videos, just out of the kindness of your heart
There is one fundamental problem with thinking about what new technologies can do for teaching. It has to do with the fact that we often look at new media to do things the old fashioned way. This leads to questions such as, is an eBook as good as a regular book? Is online learning as good as face to face learning? These discussions often seem pointless and futile to me, and I am reminded of a joke that I had once read, about two goats who come across a box of film in the Nevada desert, and as goats are wont to, they eat the film. At the end of the meal, one goat asks the other, “So what do you think of the film?” The other responded, “The book was better.”
What this, somewhat weak, joke hits on is what we often see when a popular book is turned into a movie. There are people who hate the new version, feeling that it fails to capture what it was that they had liked about the book. This to me is an aversion to change and an expectation that things that work one way would work the same way forever.
Similar to the goats in Nevada, I am often asked to compare between learning with and without technology. For instance speaking of online learning, I am often asked whether online can be as good as face to face learning. I often answer this question by flipping it around and asking “can face to face learning be as good as online learning?” The point here is that this question may be the wrong one to ask. Just as it seems futile to compare the film and print version of the same story, it is futile to compare one technology to another because the criteria for evaluation are (or should be) different. At the end, it depends on what the purposes are and which technology is appropriate for which of them. What we need to look at are the differing potentials and possibilities of each of these technologies – and develop strategies that utilize the best of both rather than set up these rather tiresome black and white contrasts. This sensitivity to affordances and constraints of different technologies is at the heart of the TPACK framework.
It was in this context that I saw the commercial and which prompted me to write this post and create my mashed-up version. But then again the more I thought about it the more I felt that a video demanded a video response, so an hour or so of work later, here it is. I should also provide a hat-tip to Leigh Wolf, my colleague, for her feedback on a draft version of this movie.
First, though let us watch the original video:
And follow that with my response:
In conclusion, we often approach technologies with our own biases and predilections related to appropriate and inappropriate ways of using them. Cognitive scientists use the phrase “functional fixedness” to describe the manner in which the ideas we hold about an object’s function can inhibit our ability to use the object for a different function. Functional fixedness often stands in the way of creative uses of technologies. Overcoming this is essential for the intelligent and creative application of technology for learning. So thinking of technology merely to supplant a lecture (which was my concern with the original video) is doing a disservice to the possibilities that technology provides us.
For example, a whiteboard has certain constraints and affordances: it is heavy and difficult to move, yet it is easy to write on and erase, and it can function as a public “writing space” to share ideas with others. These constraints and affordances, however, do not necessarily determine how a whiteboard can be used. The manner in which a whiteboard is used in a classroom as opposed to a science lab clearly indicates that the function of a whiteboard is determined very much by the context in which it is used. Similarly, one can use a digital camera to see the world in new ways, and PowerPoint, a presentation tool, can be used as a medium for artistic creativity. And Audacity, an open source audio editing program, can be use to compute the distance to the moon!
It is only with looking at technologies for what they can do, rather than merely replicate existing practices that we can hope to achieve their potential. At the end of my mashup I use three words to capture what I would most like to see happen: Explore, Create, Share. That is the only way I believe that we can achieve the potentials of these new technologies.
I hope you enjoyed the guest post as much as I enjoyed writing it. I look forward to hearing your comments and thoughts. You can post them here, or on my blog or write to be directly at punya [at] msu [dot] edu. Thanks also to Sean for giving me this opportunity. Take care.
We are less than a day away from our Marine Biology class field study on Andros Island in the Bahamas. I am still waiting for students to come in to weigh their gear. I still need to pick up a few last-minute items. I still need to prepare to be perfectly (and wonderfully) off the grid for an entire week. As hurried as I have been lately, I have done some fun preparation for this blog. Since I cannot write for at least a week, two of my electronic pals have agreed to make a guest appearance in my absence! Dr. Punya Mishra (of TPACK fame) and Stacy Baker (of Edublog Awards fame) will be taking the wheel.
I don’t exactly know what they will be bringing to nashworld other than the typical insight and wit they spill forth in their own projects on a regular basis. Stacy’s class blog was the 2008 Edublogs Award winner for “best class blog.” Her insight on how to pull off this type of framework will certainly be valuable. Along with Dr. Matt Koehler, Dr. Mishra is one of the co-developers of the TPACK framework. Our school has begun to embrace the simplicity of the framework as well as the deep commitment it takes to move toward the “center” of the model. I am convinced this framework will be more valuable as more of America realizes the need for true integration of technology into our current and future models of education reform.
We have a ton to learn from these two. I am already excited to read what they bring to the site while I am away. Did I mention that I still haven’t left yet?
Andros Island?
Without going into too much detail in my frazzled state, I will say that the reason for our choice of field station locale is simple. Andros Island boasts what is said to be the third longest barrier coral reef in the world. We will be on 45′ sailboats for seven days, snorkeling the reef, mangroves, sandflats, blue holes, etc. Just a few hundred miles off the coast of Florida, Andros is an amazing and surprisingly remote place.
At nearly one hundred miles long, Andros is overwhelmingly the largest land mass in the Bahamas. Nassau, the capital city, sits on New Providence island with over 250,000 inhabitants and is the bulk of the tourism target. Andros, on the other hand, is large, flat and green with just around 8000 inhabitants. This island is wonderfully and yet very strangely “backwoods” considering its proximity to the United States.
Until we return with our many fish tales, take a second to visit our class network or perhaps some of the images from our 2008 field study. The Ning site is less than a year old. It will be exciting to spill the journals, images, and videos of eighteen students onto that space when we return. We stopped updating our crusty old static “Web 1.0″ page back around 2003 or 2004.
Protecting living coral
That said, our crusty old static presence was still quite functional a few years back when I was contacted by a member of the Center for Biological Diversity about using some images from our site for an historic petition to list the first coral species under the Endangered Species Act. Apparently, our images of the Andros reef chronicled the state of two threatened species of Caribbean-region corals quite nicely. And of course, being a marine biology teacher, I have images that tell the entire “natural history” of the ecosystem as opposed to merely pretty pictures.
The petition that was prepared (by no means a typical “petition,” but instead a 111 page formal manuscript that takes patience to load) not only features one of my images on the cover, but is illustrated using mostly our images from the Andros reef. Hey- whoever said “Web 1.0″ wasn’t much for education? My students get a kick out of all of the international communication that happens as a result of our network, blogs, etc. However, this one event in 2005/2006 stuck out like crazy at the time to my students of Saint Joseph, Missouri.
I suggest checking this document out. If for no other reason than to see what something like this entails. Well, that and… the photos! If you do check out the petition, slide all the way back to the “acknowledgments” on page 111. It was pretty cool to see our little school district listed there so prominently on such a landmark document. The real bottom line here: this petition succeeded in getting both Elkhorn and Staghorn coral listed as threatened species under the ESA. These are some of the only invertebrate species ever gaining protection under the Endangered Species Act.
So stay tuned for Punya & Stacy… and a ton of news from the reef!
“OK Sean, I am ready to start reading some blogs. Can you tell me where to start… give me a few places to begin?”
Connecting
The above question is one I have begun fielding more and more often from faculty members as of late. Many teachers at Benton, and a growing number from other schools in town are ready to start tapping this powerful resource. In my opinion, this is a fantastic way to begin. Read. Read. Read. The best way to understand blogs is to read them.
The second step in the process is usually making your mark publicly and actually commenting on a few blogs that stir your interest. This is a very important move because it is the step that actually defines you as a contributor. This is no small thing, for this is a contribution to what has become a vibrant and global conversation.
For some, the final step in joining this conversation is to set up a blog, which is a place to guide a community of conversation of your own. Sure, some folks will say that they blog “for reflection”, or to “sort out their thoughts”, or even to “create an archive of what is happening in my life or work.” To this, I agree completely.
My perspective
Blogging fulfills many of those things for me as well. However, if that was all I really wanted to do, I certainly wouldn’t need to go to the Internet for it- much less do it in global public spaces. I would simply download one of the available free journal applications… or just tap away at MS Word. Right? Okay, perhaps Pages for me… but you get the point.
For me, the act of blogging has been responsible for more synthesis of thought than I have experienced in a really long time. For me, this is not only a place to put together professional thoughts, life experiences, and opinions, it changes the way I experience things. I find that I am now engaged in the act of “blogging” even while away from my laptop during most waking hours (and likely a few while asleep). I have always composed in my head, and this exercise makes it happen often. That said, for me personally, it is also very much about the interaction with those who reply to, link to, or blog about the ideas that I present there. That interaction between interested people from many countries not only changes the conversation after I post to the blog, but it also affects my future writing as I once again consider the audience that unfolds there.
So, where do I tell folks who ask where to look? The first place I suggest looking is down the right-side column of my blog under the header “blogroll.” This is a list of bloggers who, for differing reasons, have compelled me to plaster a permanent link from my site to theirs. Looking through someone’s blogroll is akin to mining the bibliography of a really super journal article. My blogroll is my “go to” list when I get a hour to read. How did I find those names in the first place? The answer to that question is as diverse as is the list.
However, more and more I realized that before you fill up Google Reader with a ton of blogs you may or may not read later on, there might be a better place to begin. And really… if you are just starting to open up to blogs as a learning resource, you probably aren’t ready to mess with RSS just yet. I really do like Alltop. I still use it. I came pretty close to titling this post: ”RSS for the masses.” When I want a visual version of the latest posts from the best blogs, I scan the screen there and click at will. In the words of Alltop, their service “is an ‘online magazine rack’ of popular topics. We update the stories every hour. Pick a topic by searching, news category, or name, and we’ll deliver it to you 24 x 7.” There is also a nice little explanatory video linked near the top of the main page.
In fact, just this past week, Alltop has now added a feature called “My Alltop.” As you can probably guess, this is a user-customized screen showing only the latest posts of the blogs you choose from all categories. I created my personal page the day it went live, and it bookmarks tons of blogs on the topics of education, science, neuroscience, literacy, news and even a few humor and “being a daddy” -type blogs. To me, it feels like something between that of a beefed-up blogroll and an aggregator. Another cool feature is that you can share the URL to your personal page with others.
In fact, as of a couple of months ago, you can also find my nascent little blog there.
The day my link first appeared on the site, I received a message that invited me to go to Alltop and download a badge to adorn the blog. I’m not above badges. Badges are fun. Steeenking badges. The one you see just above is the one you’ll see in the right sidebar of my blog. However, if public education wasn’t my business of choice, I might have been inclined to choose the more playful one shown modified below:
Add Alltop Education to your bookmarks toolbar. Click when you have a slot of time that couldn’t dare handle the latest print release by ASCD, but certainly could slide in a blog or two. Oh and of course, look for me there:
Oh yeah… I almost forgot: My name is Sean, and I approve this message.
I think the TPACK framework is one of the most influential things I have learned about/grappled with this past year. As an instructional coach in the middle of an educational technology implementation, this is one piece I have relied on heavily for personal focus and planning.
One thing I worry about with concepts of this depth (that possess a graphic illustration so perfectly simple) is that the real idea gets misinterpreted by any old joe who does a copy/paste of the Venn diagram from a Google image search. You’ll see what I mean in the diagram below. I’m not saying the diagram is in any way off the mark. What I am saying is that the visualization is so elegantly simple that I think for some it might not at first glance convey the sophistication of the concepts presented. Would I change it? Not one bit. I think it is a really good example of distilled reality. Judge for yourself:
When it works
However, this post isn’t just another nod toward the synthesis of visualization and concept present in the TPACK framework (formerly TPCK). It is also about a brief and recent e-mail exchange between one of the originators of TPACK and I. Punya Mishra, professor of educational technology at the College of Education at Michigan State University, has been a fixture in my blogroll since I started nashworld. In my opinion, the TPACK framework is one of the few things in educational technology that you can truly hang your hat on. Tools will come and go, popular methods of instruction will as well… and content? Content changes in the blink of an eye in 2009. However, to me this framework is core to what we do (or should be doing) in education. And with a mouthful like “technological pedagogical content knowledge,” it really does help to have a visual representation that nails it cold like this one does.
Inspiring connections
I honestly don’t remember exactly how I first found Punya’s blog, but I instantly connected to the eclectic nature of it. Particularly, the fact that he is not only deep into edtech, but is also a huge fan of all things regarding the visualization of information. I too am fond of creative and innovative ways of visualizing data of all types. My mixed life as a generalist instructional coach (who also teaches biology and marine biology) is one that often blends strategies for learning data with methods of collecting and interpreting it.
From reading his brief but frequent posts sharing precious nuggets of visualization, I now think of his blog whenever I find one of interest that is new to me. So just a few weeks ago, I sent a different sort of link that included a visualization about visualizations… and to top that, it was bent and twisted into the familiar form of the “periodic table” of elements. My knee jerk on this one was not favorable. However, I thought I’d e-mail it to Punya to get his objective take. What developed into a small back & forth via e-mail, then developed into a full-blown post confirming not only what I thought he might find, but then quite a bit more. For a table about visualization methods, this could easily serve as an “anti example” itself.
Visualization risks
Punya makes the case that it works to do this in sort of a humorous way, and provides several examples in his article. I even have an example of this hanging above the sink in my own classroom. The Periodic Table of Fruits & Nuts was given to me as a gift back in the days when I taught an Honors-level Botany course to Juniors & Seniors. We had fun with the poster. In fact, it is quite pretty and really does display a ton of information. But I always made sure to point out the massive misconception machine that it was… in taking the shape of the periodic table of elements. The main point being, the table of elements is the shape it is because of the periodicity of the elements within. I assure you there is nothing periodic about the latin names of fruits, nor the caloric value of the nuts in my poster.
Everything that deceives may be said to enchant.
~Plato
Upon more closely mining the site for the source of this document, I finally found the original paper by Ralph Lengler & Martin J. Eppler of the Institute of Corporate Communication, University of Lugano, Switzerland. So, I suppose it makes sense that this does not have roots within the natural science community. All scientific inaccuracy, and creation of misconception aside, the authors apparently realized a few of the limitations themselves. The conclusion on page five states that the chart, “…cannot be seen as a close adaptation of the periodic table of chemical elements. It is rather a functional, metaphoric homage to it.”
However, the Plato quote above was lifted from another paper linked to the site, from the same university, entitled: “The Risks of Visualization.“ It seems that this second paper might have some further suggestions for the first, huh? There are some other interesting non-examples presented in this paper. Check them out toward the end of you have time.
What is happening?
Are you doing this at all? If so, how do you address visual literacy in (or out) of your curriculum? What do you do to help students acquire skills in this area? What supporting sources do you use? Do you have a colleague who is doing this really well? Have them weigh in. I want my kids to be visually literate. I think addressing this by the time a student is 18 is important. I think I personally have a reasonable level of skill in this area. I try my darndest whenever possible to address visual literacy. However, this is a far cry from being organized, efficient, and well-equipped to do so.
Other artwork thanks:
*Untitled by Ariel.Chico on Flickr
*Meat Loaf graph? I wish I could credit this one, but it is too viral for me to decipher the origin.
Tell me this isn’t good. I am inspired by the performance here as well as the coaching that led to a kid being empowered to this type of creation. Think this isn’t synthesis?
Lyrics: People get malaria when they’re bit by a mosquito
It’s taking lives like a torpedo
Every year one million die worldwide
But you can prevent it with insecticide
Maybe a breakthrough cure for malaria
To starve the parasite was their idea
Every thirty seconds a child dies
Without treatment, it’s no surprise
A family in Africa could be saved by a bug net
Too bad they can’t afford one yet
This treatment fights the drug-resistant kind
Hopefully we can put malaria out of mind
I wish this cure will help people everywhere
I want it to end their nightmare
Understandably, I often field comments like: “I just need to see what technology integration looks like.” Well, I would say this is a nice little example of a student taking a piece of content and exploding it into not only a scientific and artistic expression… but ultimately what may just move across the plane of classroom into social action. And to me, that is golden. This blog post and video are certainly not about the technology, but rather facilitated by it. To think that you can sit in front of a camera, and then a computer and create rich content like this to demonstrate learning is very cool. Though to think your response could actually move folks to action is, well… nothing short of inspiring.
The video is just a part of a really nice blog post that provides some nice context for the song. You really need to visit this link to get the full experience. Shoot- perhaps Miss Jennifer needs her own YouTube channel to publish future scientific songstress expressions?
This post was made by a student of Stacy Baker’s biology class. Stacy is one a handful of my Twitter friends who helps to keep The Synapse running along with Erin & I. Her class blog was most-deservedly voted “Best Class Blog” in the 2008 Edublogs Awards.
I am pretty excited to see all of the chatter about this post in such a short time (as I hope Jennifer is). You never know where these things will go. So what do you get out of this? What does it make you think? Is this to be valued as highly as I value it? Am I wrong in thinking so? I would love your feedback.
Below is the text of an e-mail I received from a favorite colleague, Terri Johnson, a day ago. This is a fun little glimpse into one of the many connections being made worldwide by teachers in my district this year. While I could go on about positive global connections made by colleagues in the quest to create personal learning networks- this time I got a really nice little play-by-play.
I had to tell someone–and I knew you’d appreciate it.
A series of serendipitous events:
1. You taught me the value of Web 2.O.
2. I finally started using Twitter.
3. Following lots of great people.
4. Barak Obama tells all Americans to try to help others-volunteer. (I read about it via Twitter and watching live streaming at CNN.com etc.)
5. Thought, OK! What can I do? What can my students do?
6. @teachmescience on Twitter Discusses National Pink Shirt Day to put an end to Bullying.
7. I recall Pink Shirt Day being mentioned on Channel One last year.
8. Start a discussion in my Teacher Advisory Class about the Pink Shirt Day and Bullying-they decide we should promote it at Truman.
9. We’ve made posters, kids have created Commercials to run in the AM at Channel TMS (our student run news program.), and are creating pink “labels” for kids to pass out and wear on the date-February 25th.
10. I mentioned this to @teachmescience via Twitter as a thank you for the heads up.
11. She mentions this via e-mail to the Radio Station who started Pink Shirt Day.
12. Evidently “National” meant Canada.
13. Said radio station just e-mailed me asking to set up a telephone interview for Wednesday Afternoon.
How fun is that?!?
Terri
So, apparently, she and a couple of her students did a radio interview on the Christy Clark show during school today on CKNW AM980 in British Columbia, Canada. Unfortunately, it was far too wild of a day for me to listen in, but I hear it was a great experience for all. A little research on my end led me to the website for Pink Shirt Day, as well as Christy Clark’s page on the topic. Apparently, this little movement aimed at ending bullying is gaining quite a head of steam, as Ms. Clark says on her site:
“I encourage all of you to wear something pink to symbolize that we as a society will not tolerate bullying anywhere. I wish I could take credit for this idea but it comes from two incredible Nova Scotia high school students.”
Terri- of course I’m hoping you’ll pipe in here to give up a few more of the details. Way to dive in an immerse yourself with like-minded professionals the world over. And what’s more… involving your students every step along the way in real social action. You are modeling some pretty powerful connections.
*UPDATE: This just in, an audio link the piece (about halfway through).
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