Remote Access

Whose Tools? Theirs.

Still fighting with 54 students logging in to Moodle chat rooms at the same time, we decided to take the collaboration between Snow Lake and St. Elisabeth school in Los Angeles outside of school hours. All of our kids have Internet access at home so their in-school-chat- task this week was simply to schedule a time where they could meet to chat outside of school hours. We thought this would reduce the load on the software, allowing the chat sessions to flow much more smoothly.

But looking at the logs from chat session #1 that happened outside of school, we were all frustrated. Even though there were only five kids on at once, the same troubles were happening. The logs showed kids constantly being kicked out of their chat sessions and having to spend time logging back in and trying to pick back up on disjointed conversations.

The technology was taking over. It was in the way. We were losing our focus on learning.

Talking Thursday by email and by Skype, Barbara, the principal at St. Elisabeth's school, and I were both frustrated and saw what was happening. It was time for a change. Why can't we simply allow the kids to use the instant messenger programs they use at home? I know all of my students use MSN, can't they just use that? They came back with the problem that only seven of their kids have MSN. But in deeper conversations on their end, it ends up that their students all use Yahoo Messenger: which can talk to MSN!

We quickly typed up a short code of conduct for using IM software outside of school for school purposes but before we could get it traded, the school day ended in Snow Lake. A simple document, it simply states that kids need to have user names and personal messages that are appropriate for school, they must use language that is appropriate for school, they must not abuse in any way the list of student email addresses they will be receiving, and finally, that they must send us a transcript of their chat sessions when they are completed.

Fast forward a few hours to find Barbara and I chatting on Skype when an email from a student rolls in that is obviously a transcript of a chat session between students from our schools. But wait a minute: these students are supposed to be meeting in a few hours in a Moodle chat room.....? They don't yet know of our discussions today about using IM instead. Turning to MSN, I find the student of mine who was involved and begin peppering him with questions about how this happened. Ends up they had a change in their schedules and had to move the chat forward a few hours so they simply found each other and they knew we would want a copy of the chat so they sent one on to us.

This story is everything a story about kids and classrooms and technology should be.

- They are independent learners.
- They are responsible learners.
- They are thinking globally.
- They are using technology transparently.
- They are using technology to solve problems and overcome obstacles.

Barbara and I were simply wowed. We wondered why we keep getting in the way of their learning. We wondered about our role with technology and students. She deserves great credit for being an administrator who can see the value of things like this and simply allow them to happen. She allows the learning to emerge and the focus to remain on it instead of on using the "right" tool.

So now our job becomes one of validating the channels that are being used. The tools work. Get the focus back on to the learning. Safety is still a concern as is privacy. But now I am predicting an explosion of communication between the two classes. It will not be on "official" channels and much of it will be "under our radar" and on their own time. But this will change the relationships and deepen them between our classes. It changes our role.

Tags: barbarabarreda, st. elisabeth, MSN, technology, learning, classrooms

The Coming Boom

Since my K12 Online presentation, I've had many, many comments about the beauty of the place where I live. And you are right. My house is directly acorss the street from a lake and my kids and I love to go camping, canoeing, or just walking in the bush at the end of the street. Several kilometres of paths are less then 5 minutes from my yard.

But it is not always easy living here. We have one grocery store, one garage, and several other small businesses. There are two hotels and you literally cannot buy a new pair of socks in town. There is no place at all to buy any kind of furniture, clothing, electronics, etc.  Everyone saves their money and laughs about "power shopping" when we leave town. My family does a lot of my shopping online. Latest purchase, a new pair of skates for my son that we are still waiting for. We are two hours from an airport and a seven hour drive from a major population centre.

When I grew up here, we had around 2 200 people in town and 500 kids in the school. We had two classes at each grade level. These days we have about 900 people in town in 145 kids at the school. Our highschool hovers around the 40 mark.

But things are changing.

The main mining company in Snow Lake announced yesterday that they have found several massive ore deposits within 15 kilometres of town. Everyone had already heard these rumours, but the announcement yesterday makes it official. In 36 months time, we will have several new mines operating in our area with a workforce in the range of 500+ people. That may not sound like much but consider that is over a 50% addition to our current population. That is not including families that would come as well. This means that within three years, we will be moving from being a town of 900 people, to closer to 2 000. This is of course great news for the community. In danger of dieing completely, these mines are estimated to have over 30 years of life in them. That means I will be able to stay here as long as I wish to work. That means my two sons will be able to grow up here and have a single, steady place to go to school. That also mean that my in-laws, who live five houses down from me, will have access to their grandsons for the rest of their lives.

But this will of course mean changes. Our community has few houses left for sale (I finally sold my rental house!!) and the apartment buildings in town have waiting lists already. New homes will need to be constructed. And rumour has it that those beautiful walking paths not far from my door are soon to be lost to a new subdivision. Our school will need teachers (never mind desks, supplies, etc.) and the community will absolutely need more stores.

So the balancing act of life continues. I wonder what all of this will mean for my classroom?

Tags: snowlake, hudbay minerals

Learning = Connecting

Just over a week ago, I wrote a post called Learning = Remembering? In it, I questioned the idea of learning being equated to simply being able to recall a bunch of facts. I had been to a presentation where the facilitator spent a lot of her day talking and demonstrating brain based learning strategies that were great for "improving recall" in her words. This worried me.

Over the past week, I've spent time thinking about this. If learning isn't remembering, what is it?

I've crawled up the side of the mountain slowly, and who did I find sitting there? George Siemens.

Although I am a great fan of George's work and have written about his ideas many other times, I am interested to begin to understand a bit more of the truth behind what he has been telling us: learning is about connections. Connections between people. Relationships between people and their information as well. Learning is an inherently risky, personal act. It involves changing our thoughts about an issue, our opinions, our understandings. Before this takes place, the relationships and the trust need to be there. Do I trust you enough to value what you are saying? Do I trust you enough to believe what you are saying?

This fall we've heard over and over again about the wonders of tools like Twitter and the power of the network of hyperconnected international educators we can now have almost instant access to. But I'm also realizing that this is moving my ideas beyond tools. The tools have changed and continue to change. We all have chased accounts, setting up at places like Voice Thread, Ustream, Operator 11, etc., etc. The tools will continue to change. So the tools are not important. What is important is that we realize the power of these tools and what they add to our classrooms. The tools let kids connect with each other on a personal level. This is not scary or creepy; this is life. We all connect to each other around us all the time, this is what relationships are about. We do it face to face and over the virtual learning networks we design and participate in. We cannot allow ourselves to be frightened of letting our kids getting to know others on a more personal level. We cannot expect them to delve deeply into academic issues under consideration without first allowing them to spend time with each other learning about others and their ideas and perspectives.

Today we have a third chat session scheduled with our partners at St. Elisabeth in Los Angeles. I guarantee that the first questions issued will be about the tragedy of the fires that are consuming southern California. This isn't what we have on the agenda for the chat session today, but this is about them and their connections to each other. They are humans, not unconcerned, unconnected robots. Last Friday they had a scheduled long weekend at St. Elisabeth's and it felt to me like half my class was missing. I missed talking to their teachers and their students. I wondered where they were and how they were spending their day.

These ideas of relationships between people, between information sources and about the power of the network are central to meaningful learning; much more than any tool will be.

Tags: georgesiemens, connectivism, relationships, learning, john pederson

WOW 2.0

If you are around tonight and are looking for your daily dose of professional development, swing by, I'm on Women of Web 2.0 tonight. 8 P.M. CST.

Tags: WOW

They Asked For it

Thankfully in much of Canada and in my district, huge assessments are not looked at as a terribly valid way to promote student success. In grade seven, my students write a provincial math assessment and in grade eight, they write a provincial expository writing assessment. Added to that, my district also requires a writing assessment at all grade levels from one - eight. But this assessment is different. Meant to model good teaching as much as anything else, these assessments are not reported on report cards and are meant to provide data for teachers and parents as much as anything.

My class is currently in the centre of this assessment. Taking several weeks to complete, the writing task that students have been assigned to examine at the grade levels I teach (7/8) is bullying. But here is the catch, we were told point blank that at these grade levels students are to produce a written representation they are comfortable with on this topic. Form does not matter.

OK, they asked for it.

My class went through all of the required pre - writing tasks. We did some role playing, we used graphic organizers, we made sketches. Then we talked. They had given us some suggestions: a speech. a newspaper article, etc. We talked as a class about the kinds of writing they do and that they spend time with. I told them that the form of representation was not terribly important to me as long as they were happy that they could get their thoughts across using it and they were comfortable using it.

Cue classroom explosion.

I now have some students writing blog posts, some kids designing brochures, while others make comic strips. Several students asked about using flickr (with adding written captions), while others asked about video ("we'll write a script Mr. Fisher for the part we need to hand in"). One student is designing several pages out of a fictional "Top Secret Bullying Survival Guide," complete with rip marks down the side of the page, coffee stains, etc. Students are spending time with the collection of Wired and Sky and Telescope magazines I have in the classroom looking at page layouts, colours, options, etc.

I'm not quite sure what my consultant and my division will think of all of this. I'm sure they had a much more conventional writing assignment in mind. But you know what? They asked for it. They wanted the students to choose a form they are comfortable with, that displays their thinking, that is a representation they are comfortable with. On top of that, the students are actually interested in everyone's choices, in their representations, and in how they are showing what they know about the topic.

Feedback and fallout remain to be seen....

Tags: assessment, representation, multiliteracies

Access to Basic Tools

Fast forward a very few years into the future when cell phones and laptops are even a touch more ubiquitous than they are now.

Keep the same policies in place that many schools and districts currently have over filtering content and refusing students the ability to bring their own technologies into classrooms for learning.

How long will it be until a parent files a lawsuit over:

1.) access to information or accusing a school system of censorship,

or

2.) accusing a school system of doing active harm to their child's ability to learn by refusing them access to basic learning tools?

Just wondering out loud.....

Whose Tools?

The thinwalls collaboration continues to give us much food for thought. Tonight, one of my teaching partners in LA, Lucy Martin and I had an 80 minute Skype call to sort through a few issues and make some plans for things that are coming up next.

One issue that came up repeatedly was our understanding that even though we are using interesting tools to connect kids and classrooms, this is not enough. We want to ensure that this type of learning becomes business as usual for these students just as it is becoming for us. One thing we talked about was the kids' frustration sometimes with the tools. They want them to just work. They want them to be transparent and facilitate conversations. And this is what they are, until they don't work. When the tools malfunction, when kids have trouble logging on to servers and when Skype misbehaves with its audio and video as it is sometimes prone to do, the kids of course become frustrated.

We have noticed that the kids sometimes call for their own tools to be used in class. When Moodle acted up, the kids wondered why we were not just using MSN. When Skype gave us audio fits, the kids told us that there was ways around it using things that they use at home. Tonight we were stuck with this idea. What to do? We are finding ways for our kids to be more connected outside of class and to accomplish learning goals they are pursuing. I've been surprised that MSN connections have not started to flow between our classes already, but we have been adamant that online safety play a large role in what we are doing so the kids have not had an opportunity to swap email addresses or MSN names.

I've run into this personally before. I tried a few years ago when I first discovered Skype, I tried to get kids to sign up for it as a homework hotline in the evenings. While a few did, most were using MSN and never saw a need to move away from a tool they knew worked. What did I do? I went to them; I now have an MSN account that I use just with my class. Certainly we like Moodle so it can log the chats that the kids are having after hours. And surely we like Skype as we use it for our own learning networks. But does this mean their tools are not useful? Are their tools second rate just because we, as hyperconnected internationally networked professionals are not using them? What does this say about them and more importantly; about us and our biases?

We made plans tonight to begin using Twitter as well. All of our kids have their own iGoogle pages and as we begin more project based work between classes, we want the students to paste the badges of the people in their learning network onto iGoogle and use it to follow each other and provide updates on their progress and difficulties.

The question is, do the kids have something better they are already using?

Tags: twitter, skype, MSN, classroom, thinwalls, st. elisabeth

Education Informatics

At the end of my K12 Online session, I called for someone smarter than me to do some programming. I called for the creation of a field of study I am naming education informatics. I wanted to take some time to flesh out this idea some more. The beginning of the definition of informatics in Wikipedia reads like this:

"Informatics includes the science of information, the practice of information processing, and the engineering of information systems. Informatics studies the structure, behavior, and interactions of natural and artificial systems that store, process and communicate information. It also develops its own conceptual and theoretical foundations. Since computers, individuals and organizations all process information, informatics has computational, cognitive and social aspects, including study of the social impact of information technologies."

Involving ourselves in education and in classrooms in our time, something should be clear to us: education = the information business. Teaching kids to navigate multiple streams of information, tell truth from fiction online and find trusted nodes and networks to work within, is an essential part of what we do. Even though I believe all these things are true, I think we are sorely lacking the tools to do so. Dean Shareski wrote a post not that long ago called Why Technology Assessments Suck that I referenced. I believe Dean is correct. Almost all of the assessments that I have seen are based very heavily on technical computer skills: can students cut and paste? Can they format the cells on a spreadsheet? Can they place animations on a PowerPoint slide? In my mind, this is like teaching literature and doing nothing but grammar. Do kids need skills to get around using a computer and know how to handle the software they are using? Certainly. But this portion of the program should be as small as is possible.

As we move towards becoming more connected spaces where both the teachers and students work within international (or national, or even local!) networks, we are missing vital pieces of the puzzle we need access to in order to change how both teaching and learning happens. We have few ideas where kids are spending their time online. We don't know whose blogs they are regularly reading, where they are leaving comments, where they are getting their information from, or whose ideas are influencing their own. This is not about censorship, web monitoring or anything else like that. There are enough tools and filters available to track kids online and ensure they are "safely" closed off from being able to make meaningful connections and become digital citizens. Instead, this is about teachers and students being able to develop profiles of their learning online.

It is instead a piece of software that would be a network visualization tool, allowing learners to take a snapshot of their network, animate it to watch how it changes over time and also give us the ability to see both the networks of our entire classes over time and on any given date. Simply consider the data a tool like this would give us: - where students have gathered the information for a project or a single blog post? - whose blogs students are reading on a regular basis? - which learners are the hubs and nodes in your classroom? - what kinds of posts attract the most readers and comments? - it would allow us to follow the spread of an idea across a network much like how medical professionals follow the spread of a virus across a population. - how have the learning networks of students (individual or group) changed over time? This gives us access to much deeper conversations  with students about their learning choices and about how they choose who they are reading.

The health and strength of a classroom network of learners is something that we currently have no tools to analyse. It is all guesswork and inference based on surface information. We are reading tea leaves instead of putting the strength of our computers to work.

All we need is a tool.

Tags: wesfryer, dean shareski, informatics, education, k12online07

Learning = Remembering?

I spent last Thursday at an inservice where the presenter spent all of her time talking about brain compatible learning. She had some interesting thoughts and strategies for reaching kids.  A lot of small activities where she focused on the fact that when lecturing, we have about 5 - 7 minutes before we lose kids completely. She spoke about reducing anxiety and stress levels in the classroom and providing emotional security. These were all good things. But what I was troubled by was the fact that in her words, we had to use these strategies in order to "increase retention in our classrooms."

It was a large inservice with 100+ teachers in it so I decided it was neither the time nor the place to ask a lot of deep questions, but this is something that has always bothered me. After teaching for 13 years. I still really have no idea what it means to learn something. Are we talking about changes that happen in the brain? Are we talking about retaining facts to be able to spew them out later? Is learning a change in attitudes towards other people? Is learning having more skills and abilities? At different points, I guess learning is probably all of these things, but I was greatly troubled by the fact that this presenter equated learning with retention.

I equate retention with Google.

On the other hand, I would much rather spend the time that I have kids for in a classroom to work on projects and collaborations that push them to think about things in ways that are different. I would rather challenge kids, make them think, have them collaborate with others, and spend time thinking about their society's past and future. About their own future and about themselves and those around them as individuals, as connected humans.

While retention can be important, I would certainly consider it to be a side goal in what I do. I only have the kids in my classroom for X number of hours over X number of days. While it is certainly vital that they learn how to access information and how to learn the "value" that information has for them, I will not spend the majority of my time teaching them to memorize things that have already been written down somewhere else for them to find. These ideas bring me back to some of the core concepts of connectivism from George Siemens:

•    “Nurturing and maintaining connections is needed to facilitate continual learning.
•  “Ability to see connections between fields, ideas, and concepts is a core skill.”
•  “Currency (accurate, up-to-date knowledge) is the intent of all connectivist learning activities.”
•  “Decision-making is itself a learning process”.
  

Christian Long wrote a Future of Learning manifesto that I still have pinned up in my classroom and many of his points revolved around this as well:

1.  "Playing Small Does Not Serve the World."
2.  What Would Socrates Do?
3.  Nobody Cares if You Walked Up Hill Both Ways Barefoot in the Snow.
4.  Got Passion?  If Not, I'll Tell You What To Care About. 
5.  My Memory Is Only As Big As My Heart.  Otherwise, I'll Stick with Google
6.  Look it Up or Die.
7.  Collaboration Ain't About Holding Hands. It’s about Going Cool Places Fast.
8.  This Will Go Down on Your Permanent Record.
9.  It Ain't About the Technology.  It's About Being Inside the Story.
10.  Nobody Knows the Answer.  Get Comfy with the Questions.

Tags: connectivism, george siemens, christian long, think:lab, learning

Three Part Assignment

This reflection is several days old but I just have not had time this week to write anything lately. I've been tied up with too many other commitments. But this was interesting and worth some time.

Lucy Martin in LA and I organized a three part lesson with the kids in our class around ideas of power in society:

a) Define power

b) How does power affect personal relationships?

c) What role does power play in a person’s decision making process?

d) Why is having power important to a person?

These are the questions that we wanted our students to spend time with. With the help of their great tech coordinator at St. Elisabeth's, we set up 11 private chatrooms in Moodle, organized our students and set them loose. We battled through technical problems and the "lols" of the students. We organized a second chat so that the students could finish up their discussions. Each group of students needed a scribe for their group and they needed a reporter. Notes were posted by the scribe on their blogs and in a Moodle forum, and the reporters had to pick them up and organize a report which they gave back to the entire group over a video Skype call.

Here again, we battled mic settings and about 10 minutes of difficulty before we could get the video and the audio synced, clear, and loud enough for all in both places to be able to hear. In the end, it was a success and each groups' reporter was able to tell us all what their ideas were around these four questions.

Finally, part three.

Part three is personal reflection by the students. Each student between the two classes is having to write a blog post this weekend with their own synthesis of these two chats and the Skype call that has connected us.

This was our first attempt at a fully connected, several part assignment that brought the classrooms together live over an extended period of time. While we have had introductory Voice Thread assignments, blog posts and comments from the students as they have gotten to know each other, this was different. While we certainly had some difficulties, overall this was a very successful three part lesson and it has opened us up to further possibilities as we deepen our connection between classes.

Next up, a novel study of The Outsiders between our two classrooms.

technorati tags:st., elisabeth, skype, moodle, classroom, connection