Remote Access

Five Ideas

A few weeks ago a tweet from JP passed across my twitter radar that I promptly copied to a sticky note on my desktop which is where it sat; percolating. JP wrote about the important things they have learned about innovation and change at BT. His ideas focused around five things: agility, partnering, global sourcing, democratised innovation, and converging disciplines.

What do these five things look like from the inside of a classroom?

1.) Agility - This is the ability to move quickly, to change course, to find new paths and respond to needs easily. This isn't something we've excelled at in classrooms. From the teachers side, being agile means being able to change course when designing learning experiences for the students in our classes and being able to bring in new ideas, new sources, and new material when needed. Most of all, being agile in classrooms means being open to the idea of needing to be agile. Learning experiences do not need to be written in stone long before they begin. While a plan and a starting path are necessary, changing course to meet the needs of those we are teaching is vital.

2.) Partnering - We have done better with this descriptor. We are learning to learn to with others. We are learning to partner with other learners in our classrooms, our buildings, and around the globe. We have seen the emergence of networks and are beginning to understand that the type of learning this period of history requires is performed best with others. Global collaboration and not only global competition. Partnering also requires transparency in our practices.

3.) Global Sourcing - Of knowledge. Of innovation. Of networks and contacts. Technorati watchlists to learn about a new topic. Making contact with outsiders and bringing them and their knowledge into the classroom as a valued node. Not being the most knowledgeable person in the room and being OK with that. ThinWalled classrooms.

4.) Democratised Innovation - This is one of the cornerstones of what I consider to be classroom 2.0. We need to learn together and students need to have input into their education and the information they acquire and design. Innovation comes from all places, not only the teacher. New ideas may come from the students, from their learning network, from textbooks, the internet and from the teacher. Evaluation and synthesis of new ideas and innovation is a vital skill.

5.) Converging Disciplines - This descriptor often turns into a barrier at the higher grades where subjects are much more compartmentalized and classrooms become specialty warehouses. How are we working to cross the divides of knowledge and bring disciplines together in order for students to see larger pictures? Still a challenge in many spaces, including my own. The benefits of what can be examined are enormous.

How does your school or your classroom fit against these five descriptors?

Tags: confusedof calcutta, JP Rangaswami, ideas, classrooms

Who Cares About the Box?

What does this picture mean to you?

Yesterday one of the kids in my class needed to get online after she had finished her math assignment. A student was using one of our desktops working on a graph in Excel, another machine was tied up with a student writing a blog post. The eight students who bring in their own laptops from home all had them busy in various ways. She was frustrated. Another student sitting across the room listening in our conversation said to her, "Don't you have your iPod here?" Her eyes lit up and off to her locker she went. We hooked it up to the our classroom wireless network and she was soon off and running, finishing a last bit of research for an assignment on ancient Egypt.

The box matters less less. It is simply a channel.

My classroom is beginning to look more like a mish mash each day rather then a coherent arrangement of technology. I used to dream of the day when I would have 20 new white iBooks to work with. All of the students connected and sitting prettily behind their clean new boxes. Now I have two old desktops (2 others have died this year), the one tiny Asus laptop ( still waiting on my other 10), eight students who bring their own laptops from home in a rainbow of Dell, Gateway, Toshiba and Sony colours, as well as two students who now realize they can use their new iPods they got for Christmas as more then containers for music. We are still living in the days of no cell phone service here (although rumours abound of its impending arrival in the spring....) or I'm sure I would have them in class as well. The point is just that the kids and I are both realizing more each day that the technology is just a channel, a pipe, a point of access to what is really important; the connection, the information, the people out there.

Tags: ipod, classroom, wireless, information, access

Classroom Vlogging

I'm thinking about starting a classroom vlog.

This blog has mostly focused on research, questions I have, ideas that need punching around, and interesting links. But it often doesn't capture what life is like in a classroom pushing to become something different. I love this blog and the response I get. I love having an audience and a network I can rely on, but I'm also looking to do something different, something I don't think is being done anywhere else; more of a diary format about what strikes me today or about what we are up to, or about changing roles of teachers in classrooms. Some of that would overlap with this blog and that is fine too as I don't have any plans for it to disappear.

I am no videographer as evidenced by my K12 presentation. I want this to be minimal in time and production, focused on ideas. Basically I am thinking about several minutes several times each week. Most likely shot from my classroom but possibly from other places where my laptop and I might be. I would like to do minimal editing and put it up online (iTunes?) where it can be accessed and RSSed.

All of that being said, I am here looking for advice. Do you think this would be a worthwhile venture? Can anyone offer me advice about software, storage, uploading, etc. What questions do I need to ask that I have not been thinking about? What else do I need to know?

Tags: vlog, classroom, teaching, education, learning

Education Should be Simple

Education should primarily be a simple exercise. Get people together and help them to learn new things. Humans are curious. It is natural that we would want to pursue new ideas. In our time, when we are literally surrounded by information, it should be a relatively easy thing to undertake. The problems surrounding learning arise when the process becomes politicized and when certain forms of knowledge and representation are honoured and legitimized above others. It is like Sir Ken Robinson's TED story (how many times do you think educators have referenced his talk so far?) about the girl who was a dancer. Her system did not honour her expertise and instead looked at her as a problem learner; attempting to fit her into a box which they were comfortable with. Arguing for allowing students to pursue their own learning goals and use forms of representation they are comfortable and experienced with is not a lowering of standards. It is instead a way to individualize and humanize the process of learning and honour multiple ways of knowing: because we always need to remember that we are dealing with real humans in our classrooms. Not numbers and national learning goals or statistics; but real live humans who have their own processes and ways to understand the world. As Paulo Friere constantly reminds us, education needs to be a process that pushes us to become more human instead of one committed to filling students up with banked knowledge. Thinking about the time I've spent over the last few days at school preparing new units, I am wondering about setting more learning goals with my students; about ways of putting provincially mandated outcomes into "kid - friendly" language as a starting point and then asking them for their ideas. A sort of two - tiered "OK, this is what we NEED to do, what do we WANT to do when we have looked at these things?" sort of structure. As well, I am wondering about starting a TED talks process in the classroom based simply on questions of innovation, change, and problem - solving. What are some of the issues facing the globe? What are some of your ideas for possible solutions? Classrooms need to bring back the importance of curiosity, of creativity, and of problem solving. Evolving curricula to match our understandings of evolving pedagogy.    

Photo: "Simple" http://flickr.com/photo_zoom.gne?id=279725672&size=m

Tags: democraticcurricula, classrooms, teaching

Online Reading

Amen to this:

Thanks to JP from Confused of Calcutta.

Tags: confusedof calcutta, online reading

21st Century Manifesto

Since I first saw Sir Ken Robinson's TED Talk on the importance of education and creativity, these thoughts have been close to the front of my mind. I have long been a believer of the fact that schools often seem to do almost everything in their power to knock the creativity and the curiousity out of kids. Having read The Ingenuity Gap by Thomas Homer - Dixon I often wonder about the raft of problems that humanity is creating for itself that we will one day have to solve.

This is why I find this article on Wired's website so interesting. 10 pictures and ideas on hacking the Earth to solve some of the environmental crisis we are living in the middle of. Innovative thinking and innovative problem solving.

These are the times we are living in.

These are some of the issues we need to be educating people to solve.

As I tried to say in my K12 Online keynote session, classroom 2.0 is about recognizing the power and the potential of education to solve the problems of today. Classroom 2.0 is about creativity, about new types of knowledge that are needed, and about new forms of representation. It is about creating networks of students and teachers who are able to look at the world openly and honestly and work on the ground in real and concrete ways to overcome some of these difficulties. It is about recognising the power of education to change the world.

As teachers, we need curricula giving us the openness and the freedom to work with current topics. We need policies and structures in place that allow us to network students and their knowledge. We need an understanding of the pedagogies and environments that encourage this type of thinking and problem solving.

As we move further along into the twenty - first century, classrooms, districts and nations that can solve these problems in education and learn to work in these ways will reap the economic and innovation benefits. Those that struggle with closing doors and tightening down structures for whatever reason will languish and be left behind.

Openness. Connection. Innovation. Knowledge.

These may be the only goals worth pursuing in education. Those places not working towards them will become the walled fortresses of our time who can only watch from the battlements as others pass them by.    

Tags: innovation, connection, knowledge, TED Talks, Ingenuity Gap, Thomas Homer - Dixon, education

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

Rethinking Adolescence Rethinking Schools

While I wasn't able to attend, the Canadian Education Association has posted mp3s and such of the workshop they held in Winnipeg at the end of October entitled Rethinking Adolescence Rethinking Schools. While I have not had time to watch / listen to many of them, there are some great nuggets here. I am also very pleased with the openness and willingness to record their sessions and place them online.    

Tags: CEA, conference, online

MacArthur Series On Digital Learning and Media

From danah boyd's Apophenia his AM I find that the MacArthur Foundation has rolled out into publication a full series of books on digital media, learning, youth online identity, play, gaming, etc., etc.

I've just started grazing through the series but it looks to be of enormous wealth and a feast of information and questions for people involved with kids, online behaviour and identity: ie: teachers.

While the series is academic in nature, they are written for a more general audience. Most exciting of all though was something I discovered on my own about these books: you can get each piece in them for free! I followed the links from Apophenia to the site and was searching through the table of contents that is posted about each book. Looking down on the left hand side of each page you will find a link called "Open Access Edition." Click on this link and you will be taken to another site where you can get a pdf edition of each and every essay in each of the books! Love MIT's commitment to making information available to all people. This may be great for educators as there may only be one or two essays that you are interested in. It's always better to have the book, but getting a few of the essays may be all that you want, so this is the way to go.

An excellent and exciting new resource that will give us more of a look into the kids in our classrooms.

Tags: danahboyd, apophenia, MIT, MacArthur Foundation, literacy, digital media

The Edges of Network Capacity

I've always been satisfied with the amount of technology in my school. I have four computers in my classroom, and access to two other labs. In a school with a population of only 150 students, I usually have no problem getting lab time and being able to book in whenever I need to. But this year I am finding it different. In our collaboration with Los Angeles, we are running up against the edges of network capacity. This is not a lack of bandwidth or a lack computer time, but rather a lack of access to the network for individual students at any given moment. Given the model of constant access that we are attempting to achieve this is a problem that I have not seen in past long distance projects that I have been a part of.

I've always been happy to have four computers in my classroom at the point of instruction, but now I feel like I need one for each of my students. For example, we've been challenged by our final project with the novel The Outsiders. Hindered by difficulties of communication that could be / would be solved by each and every student having a laptop for communicating with their partners. It has been interesting in this collaboration that every time we run into troubles, the technology rises to the forefront and the learning and the communication are left behind. When it all works, the technology is invisible, when it isn't, the technology stands in the way as a barrier.

With sufficient network capacity, our two classrooms become distanceless from each other. We become one locality. With enough network capacity, these students are seamlessly in one learning space. But we are finding the edges of the capacity of our students' learning networks with the technology we have. It sometimes feels like this project is about locating the edges and the barriers; an effort in a constant string of problem solving. We knew that of course when we started. We knew there would be many problems; that is part of the experience of doing something like this. What we did not know is what these problems would be but we are tackling them one at a time, hopefully breaking a trail that others might be interested in following.

Tags: thinwalls, collaboration, network