Remote Access

Students and Skype

Trying to solve many of the communication problems we have been having in our thinwalls collaboration, we have been moving all of our students over to Skype. We tried Moodle and watched it repeatedly crash. We worked with the IM platforms the kids are using only to find that all of my students in Snow Lake were using MSN and the students in LA were using Yahoo Messenger. We then moved to Meebo as a work around and found that some students still could not connect.

So we made the decision to move everyone over to a central platform that we know is stable and also allowing them to extend their conversations into audio and possibly video.

While this still worries me, I was enheartened this morning by several students coming in to class first thing Monday morning telling me about a great audio conversation they had on Skype last night. They had found other people in the class and were having a conference call between them, adding more people from the class as they found them. One of the students even told me, "I changed my MSN name to "everyone get Skype, it's way better." I had sent a note home to parents explaining the need for the change over and asking them to help their child install this software on their machine. I enjoyed hearing from a number of parents who told me that they were learning many new things from their child.

Possibly over another hurdle....

Photo Credit: http://tn3-2.deviantart.com/300W/fs7.deviantart.com/i/2005/247/1/3/heart_by_jhebat.jpg

Tags: skype, classroom, thinwalls

Thinwalls and The Outsiders

We are in the final throes of finishing up our study of the novel The Outsiders in our thinwalled classroom. Beginning with a Skype chat back in October (while I sat in a questionable professional development seminar actually), our study of this piece has taken us through different stages and steps.

We read the book in both class in Snow Lake and Los Angeles. Instead of assigning chapter questions to suck the life out of the book, instead we had the students write a reflective blog post every two chapters. At first, we left this wide open to students. We expected them to write a summary of the chapters and we also talked about things that could be written about (traditional elements of literature: characters, setting, predictions, author's craft and style, etc.). Later in this study, we gave the students several words (heroism, fear, survival, and friendship) and had them choose one of these words for each set of chapters and defend their choice based on the book.

This part of our connection went well. We also built time in to our classrooms to get students reading and commenting on the posts of other students. They were involved, interested, and debates raged across the classroom and the blogospere about various things that came up in the book. We ended up with a fair number of pieces we were pleased that the students had produced.

For a final project, we wanted to take a different tact. We wanted the students to become more independent and think their way through this piece of literature. We set up a wiki where we asked kids to choose a theme from the book and organize themselves into the spaces they are interested in. After some shuffling, we had 17 total groups. We hosted an initial chat on Moodle for the students to set up their own times to chat. In this initial chat the students met to fill out a planning template we had posted on their wiki page. A basic outline asking them about their form of representation, a timeline outlining each partner's responsibility and their focus. From this point we provided class time and the students were on their way. While all of the students decided on a presentation of some kind (PPT or Google presentations or Voicethread), this actually might not have been a bad idea considering that we were only giving them two weeks to finish this project.

In the end, this was a successful connection but we learned a lot of things (as usual) about trying to hook kids together long term as we are doing:

- We've learned about the important of commenting on blogs compared to posting. They carry equal weight. They both need to be taught as skills and they both require extended periods of involvement to achieve some sort of mastery. For middle school students to push other learners in their class is something completely new to most of them and getting them to see the value of this difficult task is not easy.

- We spent the majority of our time during this part of our collaboration working with communication skills and channels. Over the course of this project, we had the kids using Moodle, MSN, Yahoo Messenger, Meebo, Skype, email, and the discussion tab on their wiki page. This number of tools shows the number of troubles that we had. We moved into using IM in the classroom after pushing the edges of what we could get Moodle to do for us. We thought this would hep to solve our troubles and increase the capacity of our network. Instead, it brought new problems. In the end, we still had students who had trouble connecting and the number of channels available to them may have led to some troubles and misunderstandings as they were often unsure of what tool they were to be using. But as Barbara has mentioned on her blog, the chat transcripts and the discussion tabs on the students' wiki pages have given us a unique view of their challenges and thought processes. One take away from this process that we have is that we have now made it a classroom requirement that all students have Skype installed on their home computers. We require kids to have specific school supplies, why not specific software?

- A constant stream of email, Skype chats and calls were required by the adults involved in this process to problem solve, open doors for students, and also to bring students together and hold them to account. We had to dedicate ourselves to this openness and these channels between our classrooms and schools. The time involved was not small, but this was essential to the success of this part of our collaboration. This was a "warts and all" process of transparency and openness.

Next up: a short collaboration, a compare and contrast activity of early leaders from Egypt and America allowing us to uncover ideas of what makes a good leader and what a society needs to advance.

Photo Credit: Collaboration http://flickr.com/photo_zoom.gne?id=235290355&size=m

Tags: thinwalls, The Outsiders, collaboration, Skype, dare-to-dream, Barbara Barreda

Wikinomics

Yesterday I finally finished reading Wikinomics. I found it fascinating on so many different levels; beginning with the subtitle: How Mass Collaboration Changes Everything.

Several ideas still rolling around:

1.) There are and will always be, no matter what you do, large mobs of smarter people outside of your organization than there are inside. From Boeing to Xerox, the book gives numerous examples of ways that companies have developed porous boundaries, allowing them to decide what functions are best performed in-house, while handing over others to individuals outside the company who may be better suited to the work.

Implication for education - first of all, wouldn't it be great if you could outsource some of the things in your classroom (some mindless grading quickly pops into my mind) to someone else, so that you could concentrate on innovation and planning in your classroom? The second thought is that as the teacher, you are no longer the smartest person in the room. Collaborators from across he globe can be brought in to your classroom to mentor your students; and this is OK. As a teacher at this time in history, I feel strongly that our jobs are only partially about teaching. Our jobs are also about connecting. Connecting our kids to other learners and to information. How do we develop classroom structures and routines that both honour and utilize the possibility of porous classroom boundaries?

2.) Customization - Google allows its employees to spend 20% of their time on projects of their own design and development. As well, on the other side, many online businesses allow you to truly customize your experience, the information you receive, the look of a product you purchase, etc. to fit your needs and your life.

Implications for education - On both sides, customizing education could have huge implications. Imagine giving kids 20% of their day to pursue an agenda of their own that is focused on some large issue. What would they design? What kinds of questions could they wrestle with? What could the come up with? Imagine the skills of independent research, growth and learning they could attain. On the other side, the implications for us as teachers are huge. Kids simply need custom designed educational programs. While a nightmare for us at first glance, there needs to be tools that allow this to happen. For us to truly motivate and engage kids they need custom sources of information and assessment that meet their skill level and needs.

3.) Customer Tool Kits - Much was made in the book about places such as Second Life and Amazon that allow their customers to create their own wealth on the companies own platform and backbone.

Implications for education - This is pulling back the curtain and letting the kids see the wizard pulling the strings. Can we give kids more control over the "strings" of classroom life? Can they design their own rubrics and other assessments? Their own projects? What about going beyond that and allowing them to design their own learning agendas and spaces? Can we create a basic frame for the learning that happens in our space and then allow kids to use these tool kits for their own good?

Still plenty to mine out of this book which I think has great potential as a source of ideas for educating our students in new ways that will meet the needs of our emerging, peered, globalising society. Many of them are fringe ideas in business and in education, some of them are simply untried and to the point of heretical as opposed to a "traditional" educational structure. But they have been proven to work. It is time for us to re-imagine what education can be and stop looking at what it is.

Tags: wikinomics, collaboration, classroom, globalization

Twitter in the Classroom

As part of our thinwalls collaboration, we are getting ready to begin using twitter in our classrooms.

All of the kids in each classroom have been reading the book The Outsiders by S.E. Hinton and posting responses on their blogs every two chapters. As well, we have been taking this time to try to teach commenting skills to the students and asking them to write more comments as part of this process.

The time is drawing near for us to complete the novel and head into a final project. We have decided to draw out the themes of this novel (youth and family violence, friendship, heroism, etc.) and ask the students what topics they are interested in working with and what they would like to do for a form of representation. This is similar to the International Teen Life project from last school year. The groups they are designing will have students from both Snow Lake and Los Angeles in them and planning will take centre stage for some time as students make decisions about what they would like to do. We will approve their plans or send them back for clarification or change, but one requirement of their final project is that their representation will have to be accessible by all students in both classes. We have decided that this will leave us wide open enough to allow the students freedom with their learning and the tools, but will require high level collaboration and networking skills.

In comes twitter.

All of the students in both classes have iGoogle accounts so we have been thinking about getting each of them to sign up for twitter accounts and simply pull the RSS feeds of those people in their network (five? six? kids working on the same topic) into their iGoogle homepagest. This would allow them to stay in touch with each other and also give them a tool to ask questions of those who they are working with, post suggestions, share resources, etc. But now I am worrying about the effect of being in a network with only a few other people. As those of us who are heavy twitter users can attest to, a small network often gives small benefits and does not achieve critical mass easily. Five or six kids working together and using twitter as a communication device will be closely connected and able to see what each other is doing, but it will not allow others who may not be in their group to contribute resources, help when trouble arises, or drive forward the conversation. But the 54 kids total we have involved in this collaboration are certainly enough to be a network.

This will all still need to be "OK'd" by my teaching partners in LA, but I believe that if we get all of the students and teachers who are involved in this collaboration into twitter, and get them following each other, we will produce a stream of thought that will be beneficial to their learning. It will have to be monitored as does any tool that we use with students. I am worried about the "signal vs. noise" ratio that may emerge, but I also know that my own network is sometimes used for serious learning, and other times to cajole, laugh, and make general contact with each other. We are human. That is our reality. Their network will be the same. I wish their was a way to subscribe to this feed to allow it be archived and categorized by user. This would give us much more data in the end.

Another experiment in collaboration and networking across several thousand kilometres.

Tags: twitter, classroom, thinwalls, collaboration, networking

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

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

PhDs Probably Shouldn't Read This

I had an interesting Skype chat last night with Konrad Glogowski. I had emailed him several weeks ago, asking if we could meet up. As we are both junior high teachers and I had questions that I felt I needed to pick Konrad's brains about. If you've spent some time with his blog, it will become immediately evident why I thought I needed to talk to him. He does amazing things in his classroom and thinks at levels several times deeper than many of us do.

We talked for over an hour about our classrooms, a wandering reflective chat, and made plans to meet again; but even from this conversation, I spent the rest of the evening mulling over one of the things we talked about: going against what we had been taught during our formal teacher training.

To say that teachers have an uncomfortable relationship with researchers is often an understatement. I know of no other profession who complains as voraciously about their formal training as teachers. This has always bothered me. The next time my doctor tells me he didn't learn anything during his time at university, I'm running for the door. I always think that there is plenty to learn and that the relationships between classroom practitioners and researchers needs to be cultivated and strengthened as we have so much to bring to the table.

But Konrad and I were talking about how much of what we need to do in classrooms to help develop a community of learners that is involved, caring, and thinking, is counter-intuitive to what we were taught in university. We were taught to be caring, but distant. We were taught to stand off and be objective. We were taught to be critical and constantly drive ahead, looking carefully for every moment to dive in with teacherly voice and advice.

Instead, with a blogging classroom, we often find ourselves deep into conversations and comments with kids about things that are nowhere near our required curricula. We find ourselves part of the community of learners, thinking through issues with kids, "doing" school together, not to them. Once the time has been spent first forming relationships, cultivating the community and building a trusted space, then the learning can take off. But how can we expect kids to post their deepest thoughts, and do their best thinking if we haven't spent time on the relationships?

We talked about how kids' blogs are like their bedrooms, a customized, safe space that is their carefully constructed digital identity; so much more than simply a space to write in. It IS them. As teachers we have an ultimate evaluative role, but getting there with our students together is how relationships to each other, to information, and to learning can dramatically change. Kids are much more apt to listen to us, to take our advice, to value what we have to say if we show ourselves to be human and wiling to listen and learn from them.

So to all of you teacher educators out there: don't forget the relationships and the potential that slowly surfaces, bubbles up to the top after the time has been spent allowing students to become someone in our classrooms.

technorati tags:relationship, konrad, glogowski, blogging, classroom

Revising Voice Threads

Among the dozens of descriptors that need to be looked at and assessed on our report cards each term is:

"revises texts to enhance meaning."

The creators of this card were of course talking about written texts. But it has been interesting watching the students in my class as they create Voice Threads as a final introductory assignment for our connection with St. Elisabeths. As with any teens, these kids are struggling to find their niche and identity in the world and it has been an exercise in image creation for some kids as they choose the images and the words they want to represent themselves in a personal way to the students in a far off other school. And not just any school. But a school in the "cool" hub of the world, Los Angeles. Most of my students have mentioned several times, with concern, what the students in this far off, big city will think of them and their little town. I keep telling them that they will probably be pleasantly surprised by the connections and the similarities they will find between themselves, their lives and interests, and these urban students.

So they revise, they rework, they shoot multiple sets of photos searching for good ones to represent themselves with. They do the same thing with their recordings. Taking a few notes for themselves so they actually have something to say about each photo, they want to find a balance between being informative, and not being overly geeky and talking too much.

It almost feels like a first date.

The students struggle to find a balance, walking a line between meeting the criteria of the assignment to ensure they get a good grade and showing themselves off to these other students in a way that is favourable.

This is revision in the digital age. Revising images, revising their audio files, revising themselves.

It feels like watching danah boyd in action.

technorati tags:voice, thread, danah, boyd, text, literacy

Classrooms as Global Commuinication Centres

"Every classroom ought to be a global communication centre" Alan November speaking in Shanghai at the Learning 2.0 conference, reported by Kim Cofino on Twitter

I want every child in my classroom to be part of an actively constructed, personal network of learners. Helping students to construct and situate themselves at a nexus of activity is my job. Helping them to understand how this will make their learning different, more powerful, more global, and more personalized is also my job. Understanding how traffic travels through a network, a person who is centrally situated in a network, with many incoming and outgoing connections becomes a hub. A learner in this situation will be at the centre of activity and information flow. This is what we want; kids who are connected and working in spaces filled with conversation, resources and feedback.

As I've written in the past, in education, we no longer enjoy a monopoly on information. Kids are just as likely (if not more likely) to have access to a quantity and quality of information outside of our classrooms as when they are inside. So if this is true, what is our key asset in education for the new millennium? If it isn't a monopoly on information what else is it? How else do we position ourselves to best educate those that are in our care?

By being places of connectedness.

By becoming connected spaces where students know that international collaboration is "business as usual" and "how learning happens," we change the possibilities for our classrooms and for our learners.

A global communication centre is a networked, connected space. It is a place where students are creators, commentors and consumers of information. This brings us back to ideas of Personal Learning Networks (PLNs) and having to rethink our pedagogy to make this type of learning possible. Classroom activities for students need to focus on connections and relationships with others and with information. Time needs to be built in to schedules for students chat, to post, to revise their thinking and that of others as essential activities and not as nice extras. Classrooms that are focused on connections value relationship building that is local and international.

This brings us into another level of tools. While the basics like blogs, RSS and wikis certainly support conversation and connection, it is supported to a greater degree through tools that allow a more synchronous, immediate connection. Tools like twitter, video conferencing, and instant messaging allow students more access to others in real time allowing connections to grow and strengthen.

This isn't about worksheets and grammar quizes. This is about authentic knowledge gained through authentic work.

technorati tags:PLN, alan, november, kin, cofino, twitter, communication, classrooms

Classroom Plans September 17th - 21st

Anyone playing along in the classroom planning game can see my plans for the week here.

Still a few challenges to solve but hopefully they will be tackled early in the week.

technorati tags:google, docs, classroom, planning