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Education 101

I've spent this week at a Council of School Leaders Summer Institute. It has been an interesting week hanging out with administrators. We've talked about assessment and leadership and an entire host of issues. As someone who is still in their classroom (and who deeply loves the classroom) this week has involved a mindshift on my part. As part of my homework for this course, I have to write about my philosophy and beliefs of education. Rather than just writing it and turning it in, I thought I'd post it here where there's opportunity for discussion and feedback. So here goes....

Education is one of the most powerful forces in our society. There are few variables that most people have access to in our part of the world that may have as profound of an effect on their future as does education. At their simplest level, schools are places of learning; but only someone who is not involved with education sees them only as that. Schools are many things to different groups in our society. They have taken on different roles throughout history and their responsibilities in our society continues to undergo rapid change. Schools have been described as "containers" and "warehouses" for children at their worst, as well as places of safety and social refuge at their best. Teachers have lately seen their roles balloon as they become parents, social workers, and counsellors as well as content area experts and care givers for children.

This continuing change places educational leaders in a precarious place. I believe that education is a complex human process that attempts to balance a wealth of goals. My philosophy recognizes that education is a process that requires constant improvement and emerging practice based on context. I firmly believe that there is no such thing as a cookbook of best practices that is fully transferable between communities or classrooms but instead that as professionals we must be constantly self reflective of our actions and our goals.

Educational institutions must help people grow to become fully human. Our institutions must help learners to build bridges between cultures and communities, growing increasingly aware of varying global perspectives. Education is a life long process that occurs across many spaces and cannot be limited to certain times or places but must flex as needed. It is both a current and future focused process that allows people to engage with the realities of their society and become both critical and creative in solving the problems they encounter. Education is about tolerance of multiple viewpoints, the inclusion of multiple ways of thinking and knowing, and of engaging with the complexities of life.

I also believe that education is not something that, at best, prepares students for a far off future, but instead requires them to engage with their current realities, gaining experience dealing with information in all of its forms. Education is about knowledge, understanding and hopefully wisdom.

All comments welcome.

Tags: education, philosophy

Hanging Out With Administrators

I'm spending this week at the Manitoba Council of School Leaders Summer Institute. I've decided to work on my administrator's certification and gathering hours of PD is a path towards this. So I'm spending this week at this conference being a student. We spent yesterday (Day One) and today (Day Two) working with Damian Cooper talking about assessment.

While I'll freely admit that I don't agree with everything that Damian says, this is the first time that I've seen him present and he has done a good job.

But hanging out with administrators is different....

I'm still teaching grade seven and eight next year and out of the 55 people who are here, there are only a few of us who are still in the classroom; by far the majority of the people here are current principals and vice principals. This is my first time I've spent at a conference where the majority of the people are administrators.

I'm spending the week thinking about leadership and what makes a good leader. I'm thinking about developing leadership capacity in myself and in school buildings. Lots to think about and much food for thought as I've got a long way to travel down this path. To be honest, I'm not completely comfortable yet in my own skin thinking about myself running a building that needs to move ahead on a constant basis. Being a person who loves my classroom, this is obviously a mindshift for me that I need to pursue.

Looks like this will be a good week, but one that will require me to look at myself more.

Tags: COSL, DamianCooper, administrators

Roald Dahl Knows All

I was downstairs clearing up some year end things with my librarian when I found this book sitting on a shelf in her office:

I guess this must be what we all look like after too many late night sessions on twitter.

Tags: RoaldDahl, thetwits, twitter,

After 16 Years

I realized the other day that this year marks the end of my 16th year of teaching. I started when I was 23 and now I'm 39.  This should also mark the half way point in my teaching career as I should be eligible to retire when I'm 55.

I was really quite shocked to discover all of this. I've said before that teaching was the last career that I ever thought I would end up in. While I did decently in school, it was a place that I often chafed to be in. I was desperate to be finished school and away from the small town I had grown up in. The 18 year old I was would be quite shocked to see that I'm happily married with two sons, living in this same small town and teaching instead of living on a motorbike out of a backpack in California.

Shows the saying to be true: God laughs when man plans.

The last few years of my teaching practice has been transformative for both my understanding of what teaching is and of what it means to be a "teacher." While blogging and working with a like minded community of educators around the world has been the current phase of the journey, it actually has never really had a beginning point.

Right after I was finished university my wife and I moved to Abu Dhabi in the United Arab Emirates. This experience opened my eyes to the world and to possibilities. It helped me to understand that the world can be seen through many lenses, all of which are legitimate. It helped me to see that people who live in different parts of the world and live in ways that may be strange to me are not "failed versions" of North Americans; but in fact may be living in ways that make more sense than we do.

After this two year contract we returned to North America and I soon found myself back teaching in my hometown. Teaching grade one in a place where a student told me one day "my mom says men shouldn't teach grade one." I told him that he needed to go home and tell his mom that men could do whatever they wanted to. From there it was on to a grade 2/3 split class, grade 4, grade 6, grade 8 and now a grade 7/8 group that I consider to be a combined class.

Along the way I completed a master's degree that changed how I thought about academics and learning. It was a great experience for me and I fell in love with ideas about the power of teaching and learning and the danger to the status quo that these things can be.

I also began to realize that I have a voice. I thought deeply about literacy first and technology second. The web came along and taught me about connections. Now I'm thinking about networks, about informatics and how information travels across the globe. I have been fortunate enough to work with both a critical audience and a caring community. I have traveled to, and spoken at, conferences in different parts of the world, teaching me ever more about education and context. I have seen schools and systems large and small and I can see the beauty of both.

When I first started this blog post I meant it to be a list of things I've learned, but I realize that there is no way to make that list. There are too many things I've been fortunate enough to do along the way. All I can say to people is:

- Care deeply about everyone around you, both students and colleagues. Even when no one else seems to; care.

- Learn from anyone and everyone. Be willing to talk and listen to anyone.

- Be open to the world and to new ways of seeing it. They are all valid and come from somewhere.

- Be thankful for the people who truly matter most. Like these folks:

A few years old now, but still one of my favourite pictures of my family.

Thanks for being part of my journey.

Tags: life

Techforum Midwest Keynote

I was in Chicago at the end of April to give the keynote presentation for Techforum Midwest.

Hunting around on their website tonight, I see that they have a link posted to a podcast version of my presentation and a link to my slides from the day.

The slides are kind of zen-y so you may need the audio to help you through them.

In any case it was a great day.

The audio can be found here and the slides are here.

Tags: techforum, chicago, midwest

Information Warfare and Classrooms

I'm 39.

When I was a kid growing up in a small town, I remember when we a second television channel came to town.

"The news" was a show that was on TV at 6:00 PM that my parents often used to watch. Our community had a newspaper that came out once each week.

As I grew older and both my community and myself became more connected we had more television channels, more magazines and newspapers available. As much as this seemed revolutionary to me, the news still came in drips and drabs, over channels that were broadcast out to the masses by editors who were in control over what we read, heard and saw. I also remember when CNN hit the air. A 24 hour news network, it was supposed to change everything as news moved from being "something that had happened" to "something that is happening."

But over the last few months and especially the last few weeks, I've begun to realize that the landscape is completely shifting again and I'm wondering about how we will begin to work within it in our classrooms.

Having spent two years living in Abu Dhabi in the United Arab Emirates, I am very interested in events in the middle east. Lebanon and Iran are two nations that are on my "someday I must get there" list. This at least partially explains why I've been glued to my computer following all of the channels I can find about the events taking place in Iran. Although I've been a fairly heavy twitter user since I first signed on, in the last few weeks following first the Air France crash and now the battle for hearts and minds in Iran, I've learned a few new skills. I've learned how to search and filter through the trending topics, focus my searches to specific geographic areas of the globe and live in the middle of an information (and deliberate mis-information) war that is taking place online. Combine twitter with citizen created videos posted to YouTube, pictures posted to flickr and the more official channels of the BBC, CBC, and Al Jazeera and I think I have as solid of an understanding of the conflict that is taking place as anyone else who doesn't speak Farsi can have. In times like this, I wonder which channels are more likely to be more informative; the "official" networks who are being repressed and censored by the governments in power, or the "man on the street" accounts that are filling twitter, flickr, YouTube, blogs, wikipedia, etc.

We have information warfare being handled on a global scale in public as we have never seen before. With people posting server and proxy information for Iranians, open channels that they can get their news out on for the world to see, it makes me think about how these issues are no longer "news," instead they become "events" that we can not only read about, but participate in.

But this also makes me wonder about the kids in my classroom. When I think of classrooms filled with static textbooks that were printed years ago, how will students ever learn to navigate this news landscape? Developing news stories such as the attacks in India in the fall, the recent crash of the Air France flight from Brazil, the outbreak of the Swine Flu and now the growing undrest in Iran are unfolding across innumerable sources; both official and unofficial. Information has become decentralized and diverse. It comes as text, as video, and as still pictures. It comes on blogs, wikis that we can all join and paritcipate on as well as on micro blogging sites such as twitter and through email and instant messaging services. There is no single way to aggregate this information and pull it all together in one place, in all it's forms and filtering out what is true from what is not. A massive mash up of all things dumped online, it is up to each of us to serve as editors and filters of our own news channels.

This is how we must learn to study current world events in our classrooms. This is the state of literacy.

Photo Credit: http://portal.unesco.org/fr/files/8113/11607381033Communication_Information.jpg/Communication%2BInformation.jpg

Tags: informationwarfare, twitter, literacy, iran, criticalthinking, classrooms, currentevents

Playing with Opera

Opera Unite was released today. Opera is a browser that I played with a few years ago and was pleased with it except for the fact that at that point, there were ads built right in and if you wanted them disabled you had to pay. Even then, I wasn't too happy about paying for software so I moved along to something else. But today I cam back to Opera to play with Unite, the newest version. Opera is a solid browser. Fast, easy to use and configure, I soon had it up and running. But basic browsing isn't why I went back to Opera, I went back to try out the built in Unite features. Unite is a series of simple to configure web services that you can access from directly within the browser Unite offers built in services that may prove powerful in the classroom. A built in private, password protected chatroom is one of them. Simply give kids the URL and you host the chat. You can also share files, photos or music easily; no uploading necessary. The first idea that comes to mind for me is that you could set up an entire module of material, hand outs, media, links, spreadsheets, etc; once again giving students the password needed and the URL and they could access all of the material. For those of you at a higher geek level than I am (and that doesn't honestly take all that much), Opera also allows you to host your own website using the built in software to do this. For the next few days I'm just playing. I haven't switched browsers since I moved to Flock when it first came out in the developer's version and moving to a new browser kind of makes me feel like I'm swimming in deep water. I'm not sure where everything is and I miss my built in blog editor and media uploader, but these new tools make this worth a try.

Technorati Tags: opera unite, browser, classroom

Engage or Censor?

As teachers we don't always agree with the opinions that students have in our classrooms. But does that mean that they don't have a right to express them?

One of the things I have enjoyed most about my end of year ning experiment has been the ability to engage students in discussion about the things they believe. By being able to hold these discussions it has given me a deeper look into some of my students than would have been possible without it.

For example, this posting was left by a grade eight student in my class in a forum in which students were talking about food aid to developing nations.

This was my response:

Unfortunately, she didn't seem to change her mind about this issue as here was her next posting:

Unfortunately, this being an end of year experiment, I don't have time to further engage this student on this issue on the ning. Her and I have talked further about this face to face in class and while neither of us are able to agree with the other, I still feel that it is important that we have had the opportunity to engage. I would like to see this student continued to be challenged in the hope that her mind could be changed about this issue.

As well, a discussion group has also emerged in our ning regarding issues that concern women. Responding to an earlier posting, this grade seven student wrote:

In my mind this posting was rude and bordered on inappropriate. But again, I chose to engage this student on their beliefs:

Interestingly, after this, several other students now chose to engage in the discussion:

Postings #1 and #3 are both made by the same male student (a different student from the one above) while #2 and #4 are made by the same female student. I was happy to see the results of this conversation. One engaged student challenging the beliefs of another with good results.

This conversation in this thread continued:

Posting #5 was made by the same male student who started this thread while #6 was the same female student from above who posted #2 and #4.

When we first began working in this ning several weeks ago, I was disappointed to see few students involved themselves in this discussion thread. As time went on and a few students began posting questions and comments that were on the edge of inappropriate, I was pleased to see more female students invovled themselves in the discussion and begin to publish their beliefs on the imortance of this issue. This one student for example deserves great credit for being articulate in defending her point of view.

Allowing students to publish online can be challenging as sometimes we cringe to see things in print that we don't agree with. We worry about the views of students gaining ground which we don't agree with. But I think it is vital that we engage these students rather than censoring their views. We also need to be confident that many times students will engage other students about the plausibility and appropriateness of their viewpoints. We do not bear the entire burden of the teaching when we work as a community; we become one voice among many.

This brings me back to ideas that I first began to encounter when I began blogging with students. The importance of the teacher being present in the discussions as both a guide and mentor is vital. We cannot engage students with tools without taking part in the discussions ourselves. We must be present in the space to set the tone of the discussions, to serve as an example, and as a vital voice.

Tags: ning, classroom, conversations

Workaround as Tech Skill

I'm wondering if creating a work around is a valuable tech skill for students to have.

Case in point:

Over the past several weeks we have been creating multiple episodes of podcasts and videos of local events and advice for teens. Over this time we've run into a few problems:

- our Windows machines would not create mp3s using audacity ( yes I know I need the lame plug in and yes I have it installed. Something to do with where audacity is installed compared to lame - a Windows permissions error which apparently I don't have permission to fix)

- we tried multiple options for rendering the movies out of our Pinnacle Studio software. Some were better than others.

- some of our machines which have Pinnacle loaded on them are not being cooperative when it comes to creating titles and transitions.

- other random shut downs and Windows freeze ups that happen when dealing with large file sizes combined with older software and machines that have been around for a few years.

These are regular, everyday sort of troubles that people have when they enter a computer lab with a class. (as a side point, these are also the kinds of trouble that chase teachers trying out new things out of the computer lab and make them promise never to enter again unless they can be guaranteed that things will absolutely work)

For us, these problems took on a more philosophical nature: "this isn't working. What else can we do to get where we need to be?" So we devised a different work arounds. We exported files from audacity elsewhere and made mp3s so we could post our audio products to blip.tv. We played with rendering options until we came up with the smallest file sizes with the best quality that we could send to our YouTube channel. We used Microsoft's pre - installed paint program to make our own title slides for the videos.

All of these are problem solving experiences. Identify the problem. Be analyical about options. Keep the goal in mind. Work through, over and around problems instead of focusing on them. In the end, I'm happy with many of the creations that these grade seven and eight students are completing. Making multiple episodes is a different experience and requires different skills than simply producing something as a single, stand alone experience. Add to that the problem solving experience we are gaining and I believe this has been a valuable project.

Photo Credit: Baby's Birthday Cake: http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3649/3408987201_f68818f210.jpg

Tags: tech, skills, classroom, work around, audacity, pinnacle, video, audio, creation

Blogs, Wikis and Ning

This is why I love social tools.

I posted on twitter this AM that I was checking through my classroom's ning for hotspots of activity; places that as a teacher I needed to spend time asking questions and guiding some of the discussions that are happening. Soon I found myself deep into a conversation that began with Jenny Luca in Australia and Jabiz Raisdana in Qatar. The three of us discussed the different possibilities of forming communities using blogs, wikis and ning.

Opening our conversation up to others, we soon had a cascade of people commenting on community building efforts using different 2.0 tools. We found common ground best expressed by John Maklary from Texas who expressed it this way:

and

This second idea is one that was expressed by a few people who joined the discussion. Nings are great places, and in them opportunities abound for communities to grow and emerge. But many people felt that the blog space provided in the social network is a weak point. I understand the philosophy behind their inclusion. The creators of ning possibly felt that providing a blog space would allow people to host discussions in the groups and forums and then use the provided blogs as a place to "head home" to, where they could reflect and comment on what was being written about in the communal spaces. But few found them to work that way. Instead, many people (including myself) called for a wiki to be provided by ning. We felt that in a classroom, a ning is a communal space where discussions are held, but that having a wiki as well would allow documents to be created that are more in the form of final understandings; tieing together what has been discussed.

And through the wonder of technology, what happened next in our twitter discussion is that ning's representative on twitter popped up into our conversation:

First of all, kudos to ning for having a responsive presence on twitter, using the medium in real time to trouble shoot problems and questions.

Second of all, lauraoatning pointed us to an artilce about the launch of ning apps that was recently featured on mashable, providing an (at least partial list) of applications that you will soon be able to embed directly into your ning space. Some of these inlcude a wiki, a ustream channel, google docs, twitter, etc., etc. The full article and the list is here.

This is great news. Using ning in my classroom (even for only this short time this year as an experiment) has allowed me to see the possibilties with kids. But it has been lacking in customization. My vision and throughts for my space, how I want to form and direct it, may be very different from others; but up until now I haven't been able to change the space to fit what I need it to do. Now I'll be able to do that.

Lots to think about today.

Tags: jennyluca, jabiz raisdana, john maklary, ning, classroom, mashable,