Musings - Just Learning

Last year, the moodle was my fave online technology tool/environment. I hosted a moodle on my own server and enjoyed exploring some of the nifty modules that made the environment so flexible. It was a little slow, at times, but it provided a great environment for our students involved in international projects to communicate and collaborate. I am using a moodle again this year, but I haven’t given it as much thought or attention as this time last year.

Two other tools, this year, have surprised me this year with their power and potential.

I had tried using wikis last year, and clearly was just fumbling around without seeing how it could be used effectively. We had also been using it within the moodle, so there were limitations to its usefulness.

This year, I had a few good models of how to use wikis. Vicki Davis is a master of educational uses for wikis and I was fortunate enough to catch on to her school’s wiki very early in the school year.

First, I had my students explore Vicki’s students’ wiki work. This provided them with good modelling of how to communicate information on a wiki.

The novel we were studying in gr. 9 English was A Tourist’s Guide to Glengarry - a novel set in Edmonton, Alberta in 1971 by Canadian novelist Ian McGillis. Within the novel, there are many cultural and historical references that could have been difficult for a 14 year old student to understand. The students were asked to use a wiki to create encyclopedia-type references for one chapter of the novel.

The resulting Glengarrypedia exceeded my own expectations of my students. The author himself was impressed with what the students had accomplished!

I am very proud of my students!

Next term (next week!), we begin two international collaborative literature projects using the moodle and the wiki with a class in Israel and a class in Russia. The students have been communicating for the past two months or so in the moodle forums. During our next stage we begin handling short stories and poetry that have our home cities as a central theme.

For an example of another very excellent cross-cultural wiki project, check out the Flat Classroom Project between Vicki Davis’s students at Westwood High School in Camilla Georgia, and Julie Lindsay’s students at International School Dhaka in Dhaka, Bangladesh. Very, very impressive stuff! I can’t wait to see who wins the awards!

And it was actually Julie Lindsay who inspired me to explore that next tool. I attended her presentation at NECC 2006 and “reported” it to eschool news.

Now on to the second unexpected tool - the podcast. Actually, I want to broaden that a bit more and say audio recordings in general. Yes, I have certainly downloaded and listened to a number of very good podcasts. But I wanted to put the power of creating content into the hands of my own students. So I bought a few recorders (Olympus model - at Julie’s recommendation), and had my students do a few projects with them. Because we have many laptops in our school, as well as some spiffy computer labs, editing is not that difficult.

One thing I discovered was that my younger students appreciated my audio recordings of dramatic readings of the literature we were studying. I would read the novel out loud to the recorder in front of the class, then upload the file to FirstClass so the students could listen again at home. Cool application!

I have been fascinated with how engaged the students have been with using the audio recorders and editing software. They like this stuff and they like listening to themselves afterwards!

I have a long way to go polishing my podcasting skills, but it is one of my new year’s resolutions and ongoing self-training projects.

Next week, the day before our students return to classes, I will be making brief presentations on what I know about wikis and podcasting to some of my colleagues. Let’s see if I can pass on some of the vision!

technorati tags:

moodle, Vicki Davis, Julie Lindsay, Flat Classroom Project, wikis, wikispaces, Glengarrypedia, NECC 2006

Okay, enough ranting in my blog posts– time for raves.

I have been doing quite a bit of reading as I continue to find creative ways to procrastinate writing my thesis paper. The rationalization that the reading somehow helps me with the writing process is somewhat valid!

Last summer I was the first person in my circle of friends and workers to read Thomas Friedman’s wonderful book The World is Flat. When I heard that he had updated and expanded it this year, it was the first pick of my summer reading for me. It was great to revisit his ideas as I looked through the book for the new material.

Much of the new material is in the area of education which is even more interesting and relevant for me. In the new edition, Friedman outlines four skill sets and attitudes that should provide our young people today with “the right stuff” for adapting to a flattened world.

As an educator, I would like to reflect on some of his ideas and throw out some challenges to those of us who teach our children.

It is not new news that the first skill set he presents is to “learn how to learn”. Adaptability and flexibility of the work force has been a key message for some time now. But how do we teachers teach this fundamental skill? Friedman suggests that we make our learning environments as engaging as possible. He urges students to ask around and find out who the best teachers are and take those courses, no matter what subject area they represent. The teachers who have the best rep amongst students, he reasons, are the ones who have the most engaging environments. And by fostering an environment of engagement, students will be more willing to learn.

One aspect of my thesis paper is in the area of self-monitoring skills which falls under the broader umbrella of metacognition. Part of my study examines how students could use self-reflection in their participation in an online forum to improve their academic performance. Many of the students had never really thought about their own learning styles or the habits or actions that they possessed while studying or doing homework. The majority of the students agreed that study skills should be a regular part of the curriculum – they are not in the standard curriculum at all in this part of the world. Getting back to Friedman’s idea, how can we teachers actively teach our students to learn how to learn if we are not including such metacognitive self-reflective activities? What kind of self-reflective activities and how much should we be including in our classroom practices?

The second theme Friedman presents has to do with possessing qualities of passion and curiosity. Those students who display these qualities are much more likely to succeed in a flattened world than students who rely entirely on their IQs. Certainly I would like to contribute to the passion and curiosity of my students. I have to ask myself – do I possess those qualities about the topics I teach? Do I transmit passion and curiosity as I communicate?

The third skill set has to do with getting along with others and possessing good people skills. Again I will ask, what are we doing to build those skills in our classroom? How much collaborative and cooperative work are we encouraging? How do we evaluate these skills? Are we modeling these skills to our students as we work alongside our fellow teachers and administrators?

Lastly, Friedman presents a fourth theme of nurturing right-brain skills and credits Daniel Pink (A Whole New Mind: Moving from the Information Age to the Conceptual Age) for many of his ideas about this. Left brain skills involve more analysis and sequence-handling while right brain skills involve synthesis and forging relationships. It would appear that right brain skills involve more creativity, artistry and emotional expression than the left brain skills and these are the differences that will set apart those who can succeed in a flattened world. How do we encourage our students to use more right-brain skills? How do we get an educational system that focuses so much on science, mathematics and standardized testing to include more right-brain skill-stretching activities?

Friedman also presented many examples of what it will take for businesses to succeed in a flattened world and a potent warning for those who resist the changes that will become necessary to survive. I wondered as I read it if our school system should be heeding those same warnings and preparing themselves for the inevitability of a different world. I read or heard somewhere in recent memory someone say that it takes the school system 50 years to catch up to the present day in terms of pedagogical philosophy. Let it not be so!

A friend passed along the little book “Who Moved My Cheese” which was a great read for me and very validating for my own approach about change and how to manage it. It should be made mandatory reading for anyone who is resisting change and I think particularly of teachers who are not yet ready to embrace any new technology tool.

The other book I have just finished reading is Coming of Age: An Introduction to the New World Wide Web. Thanks to Jennifer Wagner for passing it along. It is a free book, available on the link, co-authored by 14 educators who share their use of web 2.0 tools. Wow! It is full of tips and resources as well as good lesson ideas. I mentioned it the other day to the forty or so teachers at the University of the Southern Caribbean before even reading it and now I am glad I did. I hope I have the opportunity to guest lecture again next week because now I can speak of the book with even more enthusiasm and depth. I highly recommend it to any and all teachers!

The book was particularly good for me in the area of podcasting because that is probably the topic of which I had the least background and the most questions. Hey, I even finally learned how to get a podcast on my spiffy new iPod! I have downloaded all the NECC 2006 podcasts (linked to the site, but you can find them on Itunes under “Podcasts”) so that I can enjoy them on my morning walks.

For me, the most engaging of the contributing writers was Ewan McIntosh. His essay stands out a bit from many of the others because he tackles not just the how-tos or the what-is of the web 2.0 tools, but analyzes the societal movements, particularly of young people, because of these new technologies and the power of connectedness that they enable. He even tackles the very tricky issue of defining what are information, knowledge and wisdom and what differentiates them from each other. And critically, what are doing about teaching our students about information literacy? I hope he doesn’t mind if I quote him:

The problem for Scottish teachers, and almost certainly for those elsewhere in Europe at the moment, is that the R&D of today is taking place in the same countries that jumped on our bandwagon [of the British Industrial Revolution]. I feel we’re seriously missing the boat on the information bandwagon through our education system’s reluctance to adopt ‘risky’ (in their eyes) solutions that have potential. Meanwhile, our students are living in a vacuum of knowledge – the knowledge that really matters to them in their futures – because their elders are not actively seeking to put in the effort to make risky projects work.

Amen to that! In my opinion, what is fueling so much of the reluctance is the widening gap between the digital immigrants (those above 40 or so who have little exposure to social computing) and the digital natives who have been raised the twitch generation. Unfortunately, it is the digital immigrants who are teaching in the classrooms and setting policy.

So there are my fave book picks, at least for this week. Now I am off to join in the skypecast for the dreaded DOPA issue and Blackboard patent….

Technorati tags: NECC2006, NECC, web 2.0, education, technology , teacher, Internet,Thomas Friedman, The World is Flat,Who Moved my Cheese?, podcasting,

The other night (Wednesday, July 5) I had the rare privilege of sharing dinner with an incredibly talented group of teachers from around the world at a beautiful restaurant in Old Town, San Diego. We had been invited there by the board members of Global SchoolNet to celebrate the GSN Teacher award winners for 2006. As a finalist, I shared the table with former award winners, and present award winners Marsha Goren (Israel) and Jennifer Wagner (California). What an opportunity for rich discussion and shared experiences of global collaborative learning!

I had met Jennifer at the Laptop Institute last year and it was a pleasure to renew our acquaintance. She is brilliant and prolific in the school computer lab and will be presenting again this year at Laptop Institute. She was kind enough to loan me her power supply for my Dell laptop for an afternoon - a lifesaver! Hopefully we will keep in touch in the future!
I sat next to Yvonne Andrés, president and CEO of the Global SchoolNet Foundation who has been a pioneer in computer exchanges since the early 1980s. Sitting across from me, was Karen Eini from Israel; she is the powerhouse who created the Friends and Flags program several years ago. Karen was born and raised in Montréal and will be there next week so we are arranging a meeting to discuss possible collaboration in the future (I hope). She is very inspiring in her passion and dedication to her project.

Many inspiring stories of computer and Internet collaboration were represented that night, but perhaps the most inspiring was that of Harry Konnor Tetteh who was also present at the dinner. Harry was visiting San Diego from Ghana - West Africa. He had been the coach to the GSN CyberFair entry (silver medallist), Arts of Music. The school in Ghana did not have Internet access so Harry travelled a number of miles from the school to an Internet cafe where he would upload the research the students had completed to students at John Muir School who would put the information on webpages to be viewed on the Internet. Harry so believed in the power and importance of global collaboration through ICT that he spent a good deal of his own money to gain access to the Internet. We who have high speed Internet access for less than a dollar a day (a very small percentage of our overall income) perhaps cannot appreciate that Harry’s Internet expenditures represented a significant percentage of his monthly income. He truly sacrificed much more than just his own travel time to make the collaboration between students take place. The resulting website is rich in content and information about the important link between culture and music in Ghana.

Board members of GSN shared their memories of the earliest days of pioneering computer collaboration between students in schools. Their passion and vision for global partnerships has certainly been passed on to a new generation of teachers who have more tools and opportunities than ever before. Founders Yvonne André and Al Rogers unveiled their latest development for GSN - iPoPP - International Projects or Partners Place.

Global VOICES : Videoconferencing Opportunities, Information and Cultural Encounters

Jody Kennedy
Friday, July 7 – 2:30-3:30

In spite of the late hour of the conference on the last day, this session was well attended by a variety of other educators. Jody Kennedy invited five of her colleagues to co-present with her to provide a better scope of the Global VOICES presentation. Jody was well supported with a bevy of her own administrators attending this session.

She first related how initially her school was open to using new technologies to teach and was just getting comfortable with this when the tragic events of 9/11 took place. They realized that these technologies afforded the opportunities to explore making connections globally with other students around the world.

Jody wanted to explore the use of video conferencing with other schools but had several hurdles that thwarted her attempts to make this happen. Some of these hurdles include lack of funds, lack of resources, safety issues, and especially meeting curriculum standards. She invited a number of similarly-minded “players” – people who had the connections to make a video conference happen. Many teachers and subject matter experts cooperated and collaborated in order to achieve the goals of the project.

A significant attempt was made to create an inter-disciplinary cross-curricular project. Her vision is to provide global citizenship opportunities by inviting 10 schools from around the world to participate in the global run. Students clocked their steps and miles during the month of October. Once the data was collected, it was passed on to the math classes to be interpreted mathematically and build mathematical skills. The students wrote informational essays about the culture they were matched with. Money raised from the walk was sent to a needy village in Kenya. A new school was built there with the funds raised.

Jody presented a video that documents the development of the project for every month of the project with the culminating footage on the school in Kenya that was built from the funds raised.

This is clearly an amazing project that shows what vision, passion, persistence, collaboration and availability of technology tools can do to bring an exceptional learning opportunity to students in many different cultures. Audience members of the session were impressed with the complex learning situations this project provided.

In 2004, a non-profit consortium was created to assist this program. Each partner contributed their unique skills to help the project achieve its goals.

The slogan of this project was Global Run Project: Taking steps to support the Millenium Development goals.

The sponsors Tandberg and the Rotary Club pitched in one dollar for each mile that the students walked. The Rotary Club already had the relationship with the village in Kenya so this provided the immediate conduit to the partners.

Next year, they want to partner with many other schools for a similar project.

DVDs of the video that was created to describe and chronicle the project was made available to the session participants.

One of the major partners for this project was Global Education Motivators – another portal for global collaborative partnerships.

This is a presentation based on the research paper of Sophia Tan, Coastal Carolina University (SC).

She discussed her work in the context of distance education so many of the problems with online courses are related to problems of disconnectedness to a face-to-face community.

She posed the research question: How do people form relationships online?

Past studies have pointed out that social interactions benefit learners (Lou, Mackay and d’Appolonia).

Past research has been performed mostly on traditional courses.

She hyposthesized that the selection criteria for online participants to interact with each other by personal characteristics, social presence, social integration, knowledge, and learning environment.

Results are consistent with predictions in the literature. Interaction is based on the motivation for academic growth and interests rather than physical attractions. This makes sense if one is not seeing the other participants f2f.

She recommends that traditional teaching should become more blended to avoid the tendency for people to choose friends based on socio-economic status, race and gender.

Sophia and I had a good conversation following the presentation about how blended learning is truly the optimal approach for best learning practices. It is very encouraging for me to know that I am not the only voice in the wilderness about the many benefits of a blended learning environment.

stan@coastal.edu

This was the first session that I attended at the NECC 2006. I covered this session wearing the hat of an eSchool News reporter, so you can find my blog entry posted there.
What I didn’t mention in my report was that Julie Lindsay, the presenter, used the term “ubiquitous computing environment” to describe her school’s one-to-one laptop programme, but she also qualified her use by adding “for curriculum integration”. I am not off the wall with my thinking on that phrase! I must have heard that phrase and subconsciously absorbed it.

Tomorrow morning I head off to California, first to The SF Bay area to visit relatives, then on to San Diego on Monday to attend the NECC 2006.

My blog is listed, along with a number of others, on the Blogging NECC page. If you are going to be there or are interested in the conference, please do visit the other blogs as well. I have visited a number of them and have been impressed with what I have seen. As Kevin Clark points out on his blog, only 22 bloggers covering 300 concurrent sessions by about 13,000 participants is not enough blog coverage! If you are blogging NECC, please let us know by leaving a comment so others can find you too.

In order to give you an idea of what I am planning to cover, I posted my NECC schedule. I will also be covering a few of the sessions as an eSchool News Conference correspondent - a new experience for me. Please look me up if you are attending the same session!

One of my goals at the conference is to find other teachers from around the world willing to participate in online collaborative literature exchanges in the coming academic year. I will be teaching English to grades 7 and 9 next year. In particular, I want to do at least one project from issues and topics related to the book by Jeanette Walls, The Glass Castle. Our school has chosen it as our “LCC Reads” book choice of the year for 2006-07 and all staff and students will be reading it. If you are interested in participating with your class, please let me know. I have a moodle set up for students’ discussion and participation.

Hope to meet a lot of you at the conference!

Because my school responsibilities are finished, I am finally catching up on my blog-reading and it has been a treat to jump around the net and follow my own interests. Yesterday afternoon I had the opportunity to be involved in a skypecast - a new experience for me. I guess you can call it an online audio conference hosted by skype. I have been using skype a lot lately. For those of you who may not know, you can use skype now to phone regular phone numbers. More importantly, between now and the end of the year, one may call any North American phone number for free. I have been calling all over the place taking advantage of this freebie. And you can believe I will be using it a great deal when I am at the NECC in San Diego next week!
The skypecast was hosted by George Siemens (see his thoughts on connectivism) on the topic of the changing nature of knowledge. As a kickoff to the event, he posted a podcast earlier so that those attending would have some ideas to work with and respond to.

In George’s podcast, he presents 10 ways in which he believes knowledge has changed over the last few centuries (to me, it seems like a much more abbreviated space of time - more like 50 years?). Some key points include the pace and development of knowledge, access to knowledge, relationship and flow of knowledge, and the lack of knowing with certainty about anything.

About 15 or so of us showed up for the skypecast and it was an interesting mélange of people - mostly educators it seemed to me. George moderated the discussion and posed the questions: Has the nature of knowledge changed? And what is the most significant attribute to that change? The responses were varied. There was quite a bit of discussion about the manner in which some perceived private corporations were becoming more exclusive about access to knowledge and the creation of knowledge. While this is certainly happening, my own observation in the past half decade is that there has been a decided shift toward more openness and sharing between educators - as displayed in the movement to open source sharing of products. The Internet has permitted a much wider range of the sharing of resources, information and knowledge.

My own responses to his questions are grounded in my experiences as a classroom teacher of young teenagers. Yes, the nature of knowledge has changed since I was an adolescent learner; the access and amount of knowledge has certainly changed. Between these two features of change, young learners today are confronted with a huge volume of information presented in a range of multimedia approaches - much more visual and audio than my generation. It is imperative for we educators to provide much more than content to our students, but information literacy tools which will permit the students to use critical thinking and discernment skills as they sift through and choose information. Frankly, this seems to be an area in which we are falling short. Part of the reason for this neglect may be because of the generational gap between our teacher and students. Today’s teenagers are of the “Net Generation” who are digital citizens while the teachers may still be the digital immigrants. Teachers and administrators may not see the pressing need for info lit skills or do not how to teach them. We teachers are also overwhelmed almost daily with our responsibilities as it is. Keeping up with information flow is very challenging.

In his earlier podcast, George had asserted that knowing today means we must rely upon a network; we must create trusted networks where we take our knowledge and store it so that we can access it in the future. The Internet, and Web 2.0 tools in particular, enable this creation of a network. This resonates well with my own experience. I very much rely on my email archives, my server, and my laptop to act as my personal repository of stored knowledge.

Something we did not explore too much during the skypecast was the notion of how much the access and amount of information has empowered the ordinary individual; however, we did discuss how this is available really to only the developed nations. Third world nations do not have this kind of access to information but there is a growing movement to address the digital gap. The potential of empowerment of the ordinary individual because of access to information networks is huge and may yet be a force to revolutionalize society. I have the privilege of communicating with teachers from around the world who are providing their students with opportunities to communicate and collaborate with students from other nations so that they can develop those skills in global citizenship and global responsibility. I hope to meet even more global educators next week at NECC 2006. If you are there too, please look me up!

About the skypecast itself - the audio quality was great, and you can’t beat the cost (free), but it was a little frustrating at times not knowing who was speaking (no visual marker for who was speaking at the time) and not having access to the real names or bios of those who were in the skypecast area.

Phew! It has been a long eight weeks and certainly a lot more since I have been able to dedicate some time to this poor neglected blog. Not that I haven’t thought about it - again and again and again.

The grades are now all submitted, the school books are put away, and the dust is finally settling. After a very hectic week of two graduation ceremonies and two proms as well as final meetings, I was able to catch up on some sleep over the weekend.

Now is the time to turn to prepping for the NECC 2006 in San Diego. I am thrilled to bits that my school has agreed to send me and I look forward to it with great anticipation.

After reading David Warlick’s bit on tagging the NECC blogs, I am good to go. Last year I blogged the Laptop Institute conference in Memphis and found it an enriching experience and valuable practice.

I will be working hard this week to catch up on all those bits and pieces of news and information that have been pent up inside of me for a few months now and sprucing up my blog so it is very presentable for the NECC conference.