edutonica

Online Schools - The Best Ones Have the Best Curriculum

2011-10-23T11:58:00.000-07:00

I can remember about 13 years ago, sharing with my then current boss in the technology department, something that I had created using, probably Supercard at that time, that duplicated many of the same software instructional strategies found in an application the elementary schools were paying thousands of dollars to implement. I can remember my boss being impressed but then saying, why would teachers want to learn to create their own software when they could buy it from some a textbook publisher. The fact that I had created, what I’ll call a proof of concept, in little more than a week and incorporated aspects that I thought were more relative to the students in our schools was lost in the belief that most teachers didn’t have the skill, computer knowledge, or creativity to design and develop their own software. I may just caught her a little off guard with my impromptu presentation of what was capable. In either case, her comment bothered me, and 13 years later I’m hearing the same arguments when it comes to online learning. There are many reason why I think just purchasing tools from a large publisher is a bad idea and that as educational professionals, it just strikes me as ridiculous that we would even be thinking about purchasing online learning curriculum from some outside-our-community publisher.

First, teachers have been developing curriculum for their students as long as I can remember. Curriculum is not just a textbook the State has blessed for use in the classroom. Curriculum is not a program that streams over the Internet to some indiscriminate student in front of a LCD screen. Curriculum is the collections of tools that addresses a specific learning concept or goal that we have deemed important for identified unique students. It is a collection of content, strategies, practices, mistakes, and innovations on the part of the teacher and learner to construct meaning in the head of the student, and many times in the head of the teacher. You will find no better curriculum developers, that are in touch with your community, know your students, and understand what is most important for your students to learn, than the hard working men and women in your local classrooms. These individuals have been doing this work from day one. We should be taking advantage of these resources to develop curriculum, maximizing the new technology tools, and in the process providing avenues for looking at how school can be done better for our children. So much of what is currently available for sale by large publishers today in the online education arena is the same old classroom content that we have been creating and using for years just snatched up, repackaged in a shiny new box, and stamped with the words “Online Learning Curriculum.” The worse we could do by developing the online curriculum ourselves is to duplicate what is currently available through the big publishers. Even then, our curriculum would be more targeted to our students and community as opposed to being created to address the widest audience possible. One other point is the fact that when commercial publishers talk about their online learning curriculum, try to pin point what percentage of the instruction is using technology and is online? How much of what they provide is actually different from a traditional face to face classroom and capitalizes and strengths of technology (communication/collaboration/creativity/development/voice/perspective/action) and how much of it is the same thing just viewed through a few thousand pixels.

It should not be surprising that creating curriculum for an online learning environment is not something a school district would do without cost. However, any school district that is seriously thinking about shelling out 75% or more of their ADA to commercial content provider should not be dissuaded from moving in this direction. For schools and districts that go down this road, there will be a learning curve and an initial investment of resources. It would be expected. However, successfully implementing a curriculum development process would provide the institution with advantages leaps beyond those that implement online learning programs with generic curriculum. The best online schools will be those with the best curriculum, and those that are the most successful will have created their own curriculum.

Innovative Schools Committee - Summary

2011-09-16T08:25:00.000-07:00

A group of teachers, administrators, and parents met over the period of a year, every three weeks, to discuss topics related to meeting the needs of the students in the Sylvan Union School District now and well into the future and provide the school board with recommendations. We brainstormed needs, and we looked at the projected trajectory of where the future is taking us, and how those needs can be addressed in light of the directions we are heading.

Initially, the needs shared numbered well over a 100 and discussions continued to define, combine, and describe them as succinctly as possible. At times, the information shared regarding our changing hyper-connected world and our steadfast educational system seemed disjoint. We struggled as a team to discover models and solutions that others have successfully implemented and may hold promise in our own. Our school district’s background has been rooted in success and achievement for students. The past models of instruction have served us and our students well to this point, and looking at some of the models left us questioning whether continuing with our current model might not be such a bad idea. However, we realize the world is changing and the demands that our world put on us are changing too. In order to server our students needs in the current world, we need to change along with it.

Our current students will be entering a world where the opportunities provided by the older system are becoming extinct. Our economy is suffering and our unemployment percentage is at about 18%. When things do improve, the jobs and needs of our world will no longer consist of those that have for so many years, been the staple of our young, educated population. In the place of those old jobs will be those that place a premium on creativity and imagination. It goes without saying that in order for our students to be successful in these core skills, they must possess a basic understanding simple principles of communication, computation, and critical thinking. We must instill in our students a desire of continual questioning and a seeking of answers, a desire for life long learning. We should never instill in our students the idea that there is a point when learning is not needed or complete. Learning is never complete and there is no end to learning.

The Innovative Schools Committee ultimately came up with 5 key recommendations. Each one was presented to the school board in subsequent board meetings this summer. They are:

1. Digital Revolution - Direct staff to create a timeline identifying strategic components and requirements necessary to provide students and schools with resources to support online instruction in blended format, alternative ed format, and accelerated instruction model.

2. Meaningful Assessments - Direct staff to keep in mind the following principles when designing and evaluating assessments:

Know who’s learning;
Attempt to build fun, pleasure, and satisfaction into core assessment loop;
Change the learner assessment experience over time; a good learning experience takes the learner on a journey;
Build assessments that reward what is learned and provide goals for improvement;
Create assessments that clearly define paths to future goals;
Design assessments that increase challenge and complexity: create conditions for flow;
Provide assessments that incorporate intrinsic motivators like power, autonomy, and belonging.

3. Home/School Communication - Direct staff to create guidelines for home/school communication that account for new technologies and modern communication practices.

4. Changing Roll of Teacher - The committee asks the board to direct leadership to invest an equivalent amount of resources in the development of passionate, curious, enthusiastic, and creative staff equal to professional development in the area of academic student achievement.

*(Translation - As with students, the success of our teachers with the challenges of educating a modern population will require creativity and imagination. Without fostering those skills in ourselves, we will be at a loss of fostering those skills in our students.)

5. Global Relevance - The committee asks the board to direct staff to incorporate the five concepts shared by the Innovative Schools Committee into the work of the PLC and its charge of designing strategies that address improving student learning and our schools.

*(Translation - Global Relevance in today’s world translates into working collaboratively with your peers, whether they are in the classroom next to you or across an ocean. The initial steps to being globally relevant start very small and close to home. The PLC, Professional Learning Communities, system is the beginning of this process and fosters habits and strategies that eventually promote global relevance.)

The work of the Innovative Schools Committee and the 5 recommendations presented are by no means the end of the work. This is only the beginning of a process that will continue to evolve with the continued effort of dedicated community, educators, staff, parents and students.

*(Image courtesy of leedsyorkshire, CreativeCommons Licensed http://www.flickr.com/photos/chrisrobertshaw/2571742452/ )

Floating Cities & K12 Learning - Instructional Game Theory Model

2011-07-15T16:07:00.000-07:00

Imaging using a tool to create instruction that incorporates both synchronous and asynchronous student participation, requires students to work together, does not limit students by age, grade level or location, has very few rules requiring students to create and learn the rules as they progress, incorporates skills students will use in “work” world, promotes creativity, writing, questioning, fact gathering, uses intrinsic and extrinsic rewards, provides ample feedback (from teacher, “peers,” and self), addresses content standards, incorporates the students’ physical environment, provides a model for ethical and responsible engagement, social networking skills, multiple solutions, “highly” engaging, game play, writing for multiple purposes, digital and physical components, and the tool could be reused over and over again for different instructional goals.

Imagine that this tool could be used to teach a specific concept in a particular grade, used to teach an entire class, or even used as a tool to develop an entire school.

What might that tool look like? It may sound like I’m describing the “Holy Grail” of instructional tools. I don’t think I have discovered that particular tool, but I do think I have an idea of one that seems to point in a direction that leads to more possibilities in the “Holy Grail” tool direction.

A few weeks ago I caught wind of a site called The Floating City. It was created by Thomas Dolby, the musician - “She Blinded Me With Science” fame, and a small crew of creative individuals not numbering probably more then ten, from what I have read. The site is named after his next album, The Floating City and takes place on a fictitious world, in an era which seems to be around the time of the Second World War and loosely imaged as what the planet may have looked like if things turned out a little differently. To get a visual, think of the Kevin Costner movie, Waterworld, but taking place during the 40s with a strong SteamPunk theme. The site is designed as a multi-user game, with teams of players searching for clues as to the reason for the (fictitious) Floating City. Along the way, players of the game read the Gazette, the only remaining news paper, gather clues floating in the water, trade objects (named after some of the lyrics in a Dolby song) back and fourth to create complete sets which then can result in codes to download complete mp3s of the particular Dolby songs. Everything in the game from the objects, the Gazette, the names of locations on the world map, to the clues that are provided through game play, are provided to give players a chance at forming their ideas related to how the Floating City came about. Is there a correct answer? Will one be fleshed out? Either way, it’s a great strategy to promote creativity. If you’re interested, I highly suggest you take your browser over there and get yourself an account and check it out.

What I really enjoy about the Floating City site is how it was constructed and the learning model it promoted. As I mentioned earlier, the Floating City was constructed with a small, creative, team of developers. They took advantage of OpenSource and free tools, such as Google Maps API, and mashed up their entire game using a little of this tool, and a little of that tool, to eventually get to the environment that is the Floating City. Not having to develop a ton of code to create a discussion board, or a messaging system, or a graphic user interface, such as the game map, freed them up to develop the look, feel, and more importantly, the narrative (instruction) of the game. Looking at how they developed this got me thinking as to why couldn’t we do the same thing in our schools or classrooms. There really is no reason, aside from the prerequisite knowledge of basic installation requirements that some of these tools require, skills most of our school IT departments readily have, why could we not allow teachers to create instruction modeled on a similar tool? I think most teachers are very creative and would jump at the opportunity to create instruction that was more game like, promoted creative thinking, writing, sharing and collaborating while at the same time addressed standards, digital citizenship, and technology.

So this last week I decided to see what it would take to develop the “bones” of a similar model based on the Floating City. As a Director of Technology, I know a little about a lot of technology. I have a very liberal education as it comes to instructional technology. I’m not an expert C+ coder, or a PHP web site developer, or a database design guru. I do know a little though…just enough to be dangerous.

A multi-user (game) environment requires sharing of information between the players. In order to do this you need to store the player information. So right from the start, you need to use a network based database. My database of choice was mySQL. Looking at the other “instructional components” of the Floating City such as the discussion board and messaging system, these tools are also OpenSource (free) and work within the mySQL database. I looked at the Google Maps API, and in the short time I evaluated the API, everything made sense to me with the exception of the custom map tiles. With a little more time I probably would have figured it out, but when I went back and looked at the Floating City map, having a custom map this based on true latitude and longitude coordinates is probably not necessary. The Floating City map is used primarily to access the profile and inventories of other player and could have well been either a random representation of players on a image of a map or even player determined locations on an image of a map. So I scrapped the idea, at least for now, for using the Google Maps API for an interface component.

The Floating City is all web based and that makes it compatible with almost all devices and all operating systems. However, on the iPhone the layout is a bit cumbersome due to the layout just being reduced to fit the screen and requiring the user to pinch to zoom in on links. They probably could solve that with a custom App. I thought about doing my model just using php and MySQL. But that would also require time spent on developing CSS, php and lots of html code. It could be done, but I decided that I did not have the time. Plus, if this model is to be used over and over, I wanted a development tool that would provide me a little more flexibility. The tool that I chose was RunRev’s LiveCode. I should point out that LiveCode is not OpenSource. It is a commercial application with a variety of licensing options. However they do give a discount to educators. LiveCode stands on the shoulders of other rapid development tools such as Apple’s old HyperCard software. It allows for the development of applications very quickly and uses a scripting language that is very easy to understand. One difference between doing the development in LiveCode as opposed to doing it all in html/CSS/PHP is that in LiveCode you actually compile a standalone application. That being said, you can provide your users access to your LiveCode programs via the web and using a web plugin. The plugin can be installed by your users for free and then your application will play in the user’s web browser window, similar to how Adobe’s Flash works. The other benefit of using LiveCode is that they make tools to port your LiveCode application to MacOS X, Windows, Linux, Apple’s iOS, Google’s Android, and Windows Mobile. So with a little tweaking on the design layout, you can compile for mobile devices.

In about a week’s time, working on it when I had the time, I was able to create my own model. The model is just the bones, there is no narrative or design yet, but the logic is all in place. The model consists of the following components:

User Login and Authentication
Location of Player on Map
Ability of player to relocate themselves on map and save coordinates
Ability to click on other players map icon and get player profile and current inventory
Ability for player to review their profile and inventory
Ability for player to initiate a trade
Ability for player to accept or decline a trade
Ability to generate an automatic message when trade is initiated
Ability to send a reply to received message
Ability to delete messages
Ability to send a new message to different player
Ability to enter code or phrase to unlock mission
Ability to enter mission code to receive “badge” or recognition

Though many of the missions are hard coded, based on entering the correct data by the player, because the data is stored in a database, it does provide the teacher the ability to change things on the fly such as rewards, badges, and inventory. In addition, the missions can be as varied as the teacher’s imagination. They could be as simple as a code the player types in, a website that the students is directed to and research, an audio sample or video file, or even a QRCode. As long as it can provide some type of definitive code that a player can enter into the game and that the game can verify as correct, it can be used within the game.

The following is a screen cast of the LiveCode project:

The wheels are turning, and I have some ideas for narratives that may fit well within this model. Stay tuned for both student and adult examples!

Is Online Learning Stuck in a Rut?

2011-06-20T14:23:00.000-07:00

Last week I had the opportunity to attend a full day seminar on online instruction our county office of education was hosting. It consisted of a panel of individuals responsible for the online school programs at their locations sprinkled throughout the California Central Valley region. The Central Valley is the “bread basket” to the rest of the State and a good part of the rest of the Country in terms of farming and produce.

Our communities in this area, due to our industries and geographic location, continue to evolve creating challenges for community services and public education. I was hoping to hear how other schools and school districts are using online education to address some of the challenges we face here in California in educating our children. I wanted to hear about how the technology has afforded them the tools to teach children in different ways than traditional brick and mortar schools.

Okay, in the back of my head I knew that I probably would not be hearing anything too revolutionary in terms of educating children. I was correct. Online learning is still in its infancy and we are still stuck in thinking about the use of our new technologies as little more than video infused, web based “clicker” (student response system) correspondence courses. We are delivering instruction in our online schools the same exact way we are delivering instruction in our brick and mortar schools. We are not evaluating how we can be using these technologies to deliver instruction in a way that is more productive in fostering student learning and that addresses the needs of our students, and not the needs of the institution.

The closest we come to addressing students’ needs in online education is be providing students with a little more autonomy in the “when and where” they receive the typical instruction. For highly motivated students, this provides them with a strategy to accelerate through the standards based content. What we should be asking ourselves is does giving the student the ability accelerate through our standards based curriculum equate to higher degrees of acquired intelligence; or just the ability to forget more of what they “learned” much quicker than a student in a brick and mortar school?

Our current vision of online learning revolves around two key points: providing students with more autonomy in how they “receive” our standards based curriculum and providing students “classroom” opportunities in content areas that their brick and mortar schools do not. Both of these are valid and positive, but for all the effort we are making to address online learning it seems a little short.

The way I see the direction of online schools, we are essentially providing the same instructional model we have today. The online learning model fits nicely with in the current structure of public education. In doing so, it also fits nicely, up to a point, with addressing the same students that are successful in our current brick and mortar schools. These students would be just as successful in our online school as they would in a brick and mortar provided: a) their parents are going to be much more involved in their child’s education than they were when they were in a brick and mortar school; and b) the curriculum for the online learning makes up for the deficiencies of separating the learner from their peers. (One factor that brick and mortar schools have in their favor, which is easier for them to accomplish, is motivation as a result of peer interaction.) This second point relates more to the fact that it is much more difficult to motivate and engage students online than it does in a traditional brick and mortar school.

Even the experts have a hard time defining the true benefits of our new technologies when it comes to online learning. iNACOL released a report titled, Online Schools and How They Address At Risk Students. If you read that report they describe successful strategies that these online institution are deploying to help at risk students. What are their solutions? Almost every one of them are strategies that have nothing to do with online learning. Strategies they share are one-to-one and small group direct instruction, and technology tools that could just as easily be used in a brick and mortar school. Other influencing factors they describe are flexibility in allowing students to go back over the content as many times as they need. We could be just as flexible in brick and mortar schools if we chose to, but this is unlikely though as we would have a heck of a time getting through all the standards based content.

The above point gets to the heart of what the real issue is regarding online learning. Online learning, and the technologies that go with it will revolutionize how we educate children. The problem right now is our trying to make online learning fit the existing model, which many would decry is not working for students on both ends of the curve, and would probably wreck havoc with some of those learners in the middle of the curve too in its current design.

When you read an article about online learning, ask yourself, could this not be implemented in a traditional brick and mortar classroom? If you are like me, the majority of “answers” you find are going to be that it could be implemented in a regular classroom. If it can, why do we need to do it online?

There are many reasons why this might be the case, economics comes to mind for one. But we will not be solving any of our problems with public education if we go down this road. The reason is because nothing will have changed except for the delivery model.

What does our current technologies bring to the table that enables us to answer the opposite? “No. This could not have happened in a traditional brick and mortar classroom.”

Meaningful Assessments

2011-06-13T14:06:00.000-07:00

Tomorrow night is the second presentation I will be giving as the chair of our District’s Innovative Schools Committee. The committee has been looking at current practices and where we feel we need to begin moving to in terms of addressing learning in a modern world , what ever “modern” means...

The first presentation was titled the Digital Revolution, and was primarily the foundation for the four topics that follow. A one page summary of the initial presentation content can be found here: http://is.gd/swd3Ak (Presentation consisted of a mash-up of listed video resources lasting approximately 10 minutes.)

Tomorrow night’s topic is Meaningful Assessments. Meaningful assessments, as per the committee’s definition, are assessments that are primarily useful for the student, and secondly, useful for the teacher. Educational assessments that are valued by any other entity are deemed as non-primary assessments and are not included under the meaningful assessments heading.

The presentation will begin with a review of common assessment terms such as formative and summative assessments. Examples will be provided of both types of assessments. The most widely familiar summative assessment is the state standardized tests. However, this example could possibly be argued to be defined more as a score as opposed to an assessment. Formative examples of assessment are more closely tied to the individual learner, and provide diagnosis or strategy for improvement. Though most would say formative assessments are primarily the types of assessments we are describing below, there is no reason why summative assessments could not posses the same types of characteristics as formative assessments.

Following the assessment review, common characteristics of assessments will be presented as determined by the committee. These characteristics are:

1. Assessment & Instruction are inseparable - If you can separate the instruction from the assessment, you don’t have an assessment.

2. Assessments have a specific purpose - They possess a goal or target as to what is being measured.

3. The results, or data, is time specific and by no means limit or define an individual with the exception of the identified goal or target at the instant of that assessment.

4. The results are dependent on motivation. If the results can be independent, then you don’t have an assessment you have a “score.” Scores and assessments are not the same thing.

Video Clip: Tom Chatfield: TED Video - 7 Ways Games Reward the Brain (Motivation) Fast forward to 8 minutes and 30 seconds:

Every time you hear him say game, think of learning and assessment instead.

5. Assessments provide guidance on how to improve the learning.

6. Just as the results are time specific, the assessment tool itself must adhere to the instructional and societal norms of the time period in order to be (the most) useful.

Video Clip: Social Aspects of Learning and Engaging (Full video, Breakthrough Learning in a Digital Age - Session III available at http://youtu.be/pPply3vZVwM

Video - Assessment (and therefore instruction too) is specific to learner’s moment in time i.e. TEDxSF - Scott Hess - Millennials: Who They Are & Why We Hate Them ← Think about the generation in our elementary schools now and how millennial characteristics are evolving in this bunch of learners...

7. Assessments should be designed based on the needs of the student in a developing modern world.

The last component of the presentation will be that the board directs staff to design and implement assessments that emphasize preparing children for a world that they will shortly inherit and to keep these ideals in mind when creating assessments:

1. Know who’s learning (What do they need/want? What’s fun/motivating for them?)

2. Build fun, pleasure, and satisfaction into core assessment loop.

3. Change the learner assessment experience over time (a good learning experience takes the learner on a journey.)

4. Build assessments that reward what is learned and provide goals.

5. Create assessments that clearly define paths to future goals.

6. Design assessments that increase challenge and complexity: create conditions for flow.

7. Provide assessments that incorporate intrinsic motivators like power, autonomy, and belonging.

(The seven principles above were the result of assigning “assessment thinking” to the list that Amy Jo Kim is described as creating in the blog post, https://insructionaldesignfusions.wordpress.com/tag/ted-talks/)

A example of an assessment system that begins to contain many of these characteristics can be found here: The Classroom Badging System - http://is.gd/PkFNZX

(image of squirrel courtesy of exfordy, http://www.flickr.com/photos/exfordy/1183633621/sizes/m/in/photostream/ on Flickr.

When Databases Ruled the Earth

2011-05-16T19:20:00.000-07:00

When people think of computers and technology taking over civilization, they often think about armed robots, or robots with super human power such as in the Will Smith movie “I, Robot.” If technology and robots due take over it will be much more subtle than that. In a similar plot line, many people feel that education, and teachers in general, will be replaced by technology and computers. We do not have to worry so much with the threat of super human robots taking over, but what we should be cognitive of is the degree to which computers can store data, analyze data, compare vast amounts of data, and synthesize new information in just a blink of an eye.

In education we have evidence of tools like this in place right now. They are still rather crude, but they do provide a simple model of how this technology may work. Many of you have probably heard of Vantage Learning and their product, MyAccess. MyAccess is a web based writing tool for students. Students write to a specific prompt using the web based application and when they are completed with their writing the web application will fire back suggestions for how they can improve their work. This web based application is able to make recommendations to students based on the thousands and thousands of other writing assignments written to this same particular writing prompt. It has stored what qualities a good essay possesses for this prompt, and the qualities of a poorly written essay. It is then able to compare the student’s writing to this huge database of writing samples, and can then provide the student with recommendations based on what is missing from their work.

So let’s take this up a notch. We have had the ability to map the human genome now for what seems like an eternity. The genome is essentially a map that describes all of our individual genes. Each individuals genome is unique. However, there are also many similarities in genome maps. Currently we have been using these similarities to identify things that we have found common among individuals, whether that is health related similarities or physical similarities. When we ge to the point of having databases consisting of thousands and thousands, say millions, of individual human genomes and the technology to compare, analyze them; we then have the ability to synthesize new information from these comparisons. This information can then be provided to individuals with likely scenarios for their futures based on their genomes.

Now take this genome information and compare it to data stored in other databases. What other data you ask, essentially everything about us that is not related to our genome? We are the culmination of our experiences. These experiences are all stored in databases. The key word being “databases,” plural. Everything you purchase is stored in a database. Evey thing you eat, whether it’s purchased at the grocery store (think of your grocery receipt) or at a restaurant (think of your credit card receipt) is stored (potentially) in a database. Every television show you watch, every movie you download, every trip to the doctor is all stored in a database some where. The people you talk to on your mobile, the people you text, the people you “follow,” are all stored in a database.

Your children’s information is also stored in databases. Their grades, their assignments, their awards, the books they check out from the library; it’s all stored in a database. The friends that they hang out with and communicate with, and the places they hang out can all potentially be stored in a database.

If we begin comparing an individual student’s databases with thousands of other student databases, could we not provide recommendations to the student, or the parent, for improving their well being (learning, health, etc.) in the same way a web based writing application makes suggestions for improving a student’s writing skills?

If you then throw in the advances in technology as it relates to I/O (input and output) of “computers,” you can begin to see a time when this synthesized data can be delivered to the individual at anytime and on any device. For example, Google last week introduced a technology on their upcoming Android platform that will allow the camera on a hardware device to track a persons iris and provide information to the individual based on the location of their iris. Imagine eating dinner with your child at a Chinese food restaurant surrounded by beautiful Chinese paintings. Each one of those paintings is actually a “computer” and the canvas is actually a digital display device. The “picture” could recognize you (based on data stored in a database) and your child as you eat dinner; and then almost simultaneously compare the databases for each of you, your friends, your child’s grades, and within a split second provide you with information along the lines of things to discuss at the dinner table to help your child’s slumping ancient civilizations history grade. This information would be provided to you confidentially on your mobile you have resting on the table by your plate. Or it could be displayed on the digital canvas of the Chinese print on the wall behind your son’s head, held private by the constant measurement of your iris as you look at the framed picture, angling of the message’s pixels so that they are only visible to your eyes. What kind of information? How about talking points based on your child’s teacher’s current and upcoming lesson plans in his history class. Or, maybe you have a business associate in another state that you converse with regularly through social media who is going to be taking a trip to Mexico and will be staying near ancient Mayan ruins.

The true power of technology is the data that is stored within it. Someone will come up with the algorithms to take advantage of disparate databases combining what makes us who we are and to our experiences, providing us with a map of possible “learning” suggestions that are constantly updated and modified. This technology will change how we learn, and how we think of school, and who we consider our teachers.

Classroom Badging System - Re-Evaluating Assessment Part II

2011-05-02T20:49:00.000-07:00

Time afforded me during the second to last week in April, while the family was still in school, (spring break did not start until the following week for them) provided me with uninterrupted computer work time at home. There were not telephone calls, no interruptions, and except for the occasional land line call, and those I gave up answering years ago; it was great!

During that time I managed to scrape together a working beta, draft, “first-try” ...what ever you want to call it, badge assessment management system. Rather than restate what I said in the previous post all over again, this system and idea were the result of discussions that had taken place in our school district’s Innovative Schools Planning Committee in the preceding weeks. The discussions centered around student assessment, and the concepts we felt would be valuable in a effective student assessment system. The badge assessment ideas, and the resulting management system, are a working model of some of the concepts we discussed.

The committee realizes that there can never be just one assessment, but multiple measures should be used to gauge the successful learning of students. A badging system could easily fit within a total assessment strategy, and would provide some of the concepts that our current assessments systems lack. Some of these concepts are:

No ceiling on achievements.
Graphic, pictorial representation of achievement ideal for display and sharing.
No ceiling on what can be measured.
Any person with a stake in the success of the learner can contribute assessments, including the learner themselves.
High degree of assessment relevance for learner.
Assessment system can be deployed in multiple environments/formats.
Graphic, badge/display focus lends itself to a development of learner culture with emphasis on emotion, beauty, desire, creativity, etc.
Assessment system fosters intrinsic motivation.
Assessment systems fosters greater degree of “buy-in” from learner.
Assessment does not expire or is limited by a specific time period.
Assessments can be tied to real-world experiences.

The fun and challenging part for me during my uninterrupted computer time was to create a tool using technology that would help teachers to manage this type of assessment system. I decided to create a little web based system, and used a mySQL database as the backend and PHP to glue everything together. It was a great opportunity to dust off some skills I had been neglecting for awhile. In addition to these technologies I learned a little bit more about Spry objects in Adobe’s Dreamweaver , and very nice system called Smarty that provides a templating system to separate your html, or css design, from you PHP code. I nabbed Smarty out of the most recent version of Wicked Cool PHP Tricks by Steinmetz and Ward. The books a nice resource for other handy PHP recipes needed in the creation of basic web apps. As this was, as every time it is a learning experience for me, this little project gave me many new learning opportunities. (Actually, the project was also the basis for some ideas I was kicking around in my head related to the development of some Android and iOS applications using LiveCode . The LiveCode User Conference was the following week in San Jose. More information about my experience at the conference will follow in a later post.)

As with many things I put together fairly quickly, the code behind the system is poorly commented and the design is rather utilitarian. However, if you are interested in looking at how this thing works, or are interested in looking at the code that makes up the site, just shoot me an email.

You can access the site at: http://www.classbadge.com

You will need to log in with the following credentials:

Teacher - username: teacher password: password

Student - username: styler password: password

As I mentioned earlier, this site is very rough. There is no documentation or “help” screens. I’m hoping someone like yourself though won’t have any trouble figuring it out. Also, if you visit more than once, you are likely to see changes.

Let me know what you think!

Re-Evaluating Assessment; Recognizing Achievement and Skills

2011-04-06T20:49:00.000-07:00

My daughter is a daisy. A daisy is the entry level status of a Girl Scout. Like the Boys Scouts of America, the Girl Scouts are an organization of people that support local causes, learn about their world, and share experiences. Their accomplishments and experiences are recognized by the earning of badges that gets fastened to their uniform. This sash of badges provides a visual record of their experiences and accomplishments and are treasured by the girls that earn them.

There are many assessment systems that we use, outside of our schools, that are based on the similar principles. One obvious example is the assessment systems that are built into digital games. An elaborate example is the assessment system built into the game World of Warcraft (WOW). This assessment system has players earning honors, levels, and capabilities through their game play and are represented in an elaborate profile system within the game. The honors, levels, and capabilities are achieved through experiences and activities the players complete during game play.

Another example of an assessment system that you may be familiar with is the one found within the NikePlus running system. In this tool runners have the ability to log all their runs, sign up for challenges, track their progress, communicate with other runners, and get tips from one another on improving their running skills. Accomplishments are measured through earning awards (badges) for challenges met, and tracking progress through graphs and charts. These accomplishments and recognitions can be shared with friends on the site and to the rest of the world through social media tools.

These two assessments systems, though very different in the content areas that they assess, nevertheless have some very strong similarities. First, these assessment systems cater to the individual. They address the individual’s interest from within the confines of the total activity. For example, in WOW players can choose to work collaboratively to achieve honors and levels, or they can choose to work independently to achieve honors and levels. In the NikePlus assessment system, the individual can choose to focus on challenges such as burning calories, losing weight, increasing speed and a whole host of other specific challenges. The challenges and the area of assessment are under the control of the individuals. They are not predetermined or created by some higher organization. A second important similarity is that these systems foster a model of intrinsic motivation. The individual’s desire to to achieve and improve is based on what the individual wants to do, not on what some other person thinks they should do. Intrinsic motivation is a very powerful tool in learning and education and forms the foundation for all types of learning. One last similarity of these assessments tools is their reliance on a visual representation of the individual’s achievements. People have always seemed to gravitate to displaying their achievements and status through visual representations. I can think of many examples: beaded jewelry, military uniforms, letterman sports jackets, medals and trophies, letter abbreviations before and after names, i.e. , Dr, PhD, EdD, coat of arms, flags and banners, seals, etc. etc. Visual representations of our achievements and skills have been around a very long time.

My thoughts on these types of assessment systems, and how we assess students in our schools, was actually launched in relationship to our district’s Innovative Schools Committee work. In looking at what we would like to share with the school board, in terms of where we should be heading as a learning organization, the ideas of how we assess our students kept creeping back into my head. How useful is the current assessment system? Who is the systems useful for? Are there alternatives to the current system? Are there more relevant tools that are more current for our current environment?

It just so happened at about the same time I started formulating and idea for an alternative assessment system, the following items were shared by some of the people and groups I follow online. “Why Badges Work Better Than Grades” by Cathy Davidson, and available here: http://www.hastac.org/blogs/cathy-davidson/why-badges-work-better-grades and “Badges in the real world - How badges lead to jobs, career advancement and new learning opportunities” by OpenMatt and available here: http://openmatt.wordpress.com/2011/03/17/badges-in-the-real-world/ These two posts only reinforced my thinking in terms of looking at alternatives for how we assess children in our schools.

As you have probably deduced from above, the alternative assessment system I am dreaming up is based on a type of badging system. The following chart compares what a badging system has to offer as compared to our current assessment system in our schools, specifically the school report card.

Badging Assessment System	Report Card Assessment System
Graphic, pictorial representation, strong desire to display and share badges.	Letter grades, A,B,C,D, F or O, S, N, U
No ceiling on achievements.	A+ is the highest you can go.
No ceiling on what can be measured.	Established by standards and governing organization.
Any person with a stake in the success of the learner can contribute assessments, including the learner themselves.	Teacher is the assessment contributor.
Higher degree of assessment relevance for learner.	Assessment record is limited in its relevance ability.
Assessment System can be deployed in multiple formats: specific content area, specific projects, theme/game based, etc.	Assessment system is standardized and predefined.
Assessment System lends itself to development of a culture, or foundation that can capitalize on human characteristics such as emotion, beauty, desire, creativity, etc.	Assessment system is limited in building culture or capitalizing on human characteristics
Fosters intrinsic motivation.	Foster extrinsic motivation.
Fosters greater degree of buy-in from learner.	Fosters limited buy-in from learner.
Assessment does not expire or is limited by a specific time period.	Assessment tool is limited by predetermined amount of time, grade level, or age.
Assessments can be tied to real-world experiences.	Assessment is tied to generalized content areas.

There are probably many more differences and a few similarities between the two types of assessment systems described above. Please feel free to share your ideas in the comments below.

I am a geek. So you should probably realize that another big component to my ideas on an alternative assessment system would involve a technology component. The technology component focuses on the deployment and management of an assessment system based on badges. To be honest, the technology component interested me just as much as the alternative assessment system idea. This idea provided me with an opportunity to take something from an idea to an actual “application,” putting my teaching methods courses in the area of mySQL, PHP, and application development to good use … yes, I’m half-way joking, but truly believe if teachers came out of teaching programs with the ability to program and create tools for their students, I can only imagine how powerful that would be in our schools.

Stay tuned for part II ...

School Innovation Process - Part II: 5% Digital Proposal

2011-02-07T14:26:00.000-08:00

“Inaction breeds doubt and fear. Action breeds confidence and courage. If you want to conquer fear, do not sit home and think about it. Go out and get busy.” - Dale Carnegie.

“The man who achieves makes many mistakes, but he never makes the biggest mistake of all - doing nothing.” - Benjamin Fraklin.

Just getting started with difficult tasks is sometimes the most difficult part. In regards to new ideas, the path of least resistance is not to fight an idea, and it’s obviously not to implement a new idea either. The path of least resistance is to do nothing; to be frozen in inactivity. If you're anything like me, most of you can attest from your own experiences, taking the first steps on a difficult project can often spur a bout of procrastination, but once the first steps are taken, often, things start to flow. Even if the flow was not what was originally anticipated, it seldom leads to wasted efforts. In terms of taking action to improve our public schools, much has been discussed recently about the use of technology in the news:

School CIO: The New One-to-One
http://www.techlearning.com/article/36144

Online Course Reviews: The Rise of K12 Blended Learning
http://bbridges51.edublogs.org/2011/02/01/online-course-reviews-the-rise-of-k-12-blended-learning/

Three Trends That Will Shape the Future of Curriculum
http://mindshift.kqed.org/2011/02/three-trends-that-will-shape-the-future-of-curriculum/

Teacher-Replacing Tech: Friend or Foe?
http://www.fastcompany.com/1722914/can-computers-replace-teachers

Teachers, Parents Question Education Reform
http://www.magicvalley.com/news/local/west-end/article_ba4fad7f-3ca5-5ddb-85b5-b3658a60c67d.html

The writing is on the wall and the belief that an online component to public education is inevitable. Many private companies are coming out with education solutions. However these companies are commercial businesses with the ultimate goal of satisfying investors and earning money. Commercial developed curriculum can create instructional materials that address state standards, but they cannot create resources that effectively address local community needs. This is because they purposely create curriculum that can address the widest audience as possible. This inevitably will lead to curriculum that is very generic, or average at best. (I should say this argument also holds true for the current textbook materials we have even using for decades.)

Many people have a miss guided perception of technology in schools and digital curriculum. The ideas that computers are going to replace teachers is ridiculous. The evidence supporting the use of digital curriculum is supported in the concept of a blended instructional model. One where students continue to attend regular classes with other students and a teachers, but also are receiving instruction through the use of digital content outside of their normal classroom.

In terms of school innovation in general, one of the most widely sought after innovations is the ability to create more time; more time for learning, more time for school, more time for PBL (Project Based Learning), more time for meaningful computer usage, more time for professional development, more time for PLC (Professional Learning Communities), more time for relationship development, more time for individualized instruction, more time for feedback, more time for assessment, more time for student interests, and on and on and on. Many have tried to synthesize “new time.” Most of these have been focused on changing the structure of a typical school day. They have created block scheduling; class periods that last for hours as opposed to 55 minutes. They have lengthened the school day, to increase time students are required to be in their seats. Most of these have met with varying degrees of success, primarily based on whether or not curriculum and instruction had changed in response to the addition of more instructional time. One problem with these strategies is that they do not address the time outside of students in the classroom. In other words, teachers are still provided the same amount of time to develop the instruction for these longer class periods as they had when they were designing instruction for a fifty-five minute period. (Granted these examples are middle and high school examples, elementary schools face similar daunting tasks due to required minutes of instruction in content areas, and the emphasis on addressing standards found within the state assessments.) The thought being that developing instruction to capitalize on longer instructional periods takes more time, not just in the sense of the teacher developing an actual lesson, but also the fact that teachers will require professional development to effectively design those lessons to utilize the additional resource (time). So if we appear to agree that more time seems to be one acceptable solution/innovation that we have actually acted upon in the past in our schools, albeit one that is pretty much null on the scale of disrupt-ability, then how do we magically create more hours in a day that addresses all aspects of school and education, not just student seat time?

Here is my proposal. The components of which are fairly obvious, and one that leads us through a common agreed upon notion in terms of innovation. The simplicity of the idea at the initial phase will create results that compound as we get better and better at the it eventually leading to the potential to radically change how we educate children. I actually believe we have been in this early innovation stage for a number of years now, but are only now entering a period of time that all the pieces are coming together. Our actions today will only control the speed at which we get to the ultimate result and the degree to which we decide to use up resources in the process. This innovative idea is already in practice to some degree, in pockets around the country, however it is handicapped by its self-restricted small scale. The most effective use of this innovation only reaches its full potential when the number of people implementing it is beyond the size of a single school. What is this grand idea? The simple idea that school districts mandate that all teachers be required to convert 5% of their classroom curriculum into a digitally deliverable, shareable, modifiable resource.

How does the conversion of traditional classroom instruction to digital content address the ability to create time? It does so indirectly. A common argument about requiring teachers to convert 5% of their curriculum each year is the idea that they would just be duplicating what they do in the traditional classroom, just putting it in a digital format. This is actually a valid argument. But it falls directly within the acceptable norm for the initial phase of this innovation. This is common with any type of technology. The first use is to actually automate a current practice by either making it easier to do or doing it faster. This automation principle may not be relevant to education in the beginning, because teachers would naturally say that the time it takes to create these initial digital resources could be well spent in other work related activities. But that is kind of my point. If the content that they are initially converting can be delivered digitally to students, why not deliver it digitally and use the saved classroom time for more guided complex instruction? For most teachers, converting components of their curriculum into a digital format would be something completely new to them. However, if the results of their initial efforts are successful, it brings up one very important fact; if students are able to access the learning content digitally on their own, why have we been using up valuable time in the classroom for this teacher led activity? Why don’t we recoup the time we save with the digital delivery of content and utilize it in the classroom with more meaningful face-to-face instruction, and design an instructional day that can accommodate professional development?

The practice of this innovation over time would lead to additional innovations that would further improve on the initial idea. For instance, over a number years, the coordinated development of digital resource by teachers would lead to a very large library of digital instructional content. These content resources would be extremely valuable in the sense that they are locally created and address the local population. If and when a school district were to begin offering innovative alternative education programs to students, they would have a collection of instructional resources that could be readily available to that alternative education program. In addition, with an ample supply of teacher created digital resources, the purchase of “textbooks” could be eliminated and the teacher created resources could be used to create the district authored "textbooks."

This proposal though simple in idea, is vast in its implementation complexities. But by successfully addressing the all the complexities of this idea, and changing our expectations of administrators, teachers, students and parents, a few years down the road we could be really in a position to improve our public education system. Digital resources the teachers would be creating would also evolve into more powerful learning tools, a curriculum, over time capitalizing on the continued sophistication that teacher would be acquiring. It is not out of the realm of believability that with the advances in technology and software development you could have teachers creating their own applications to help improve student achievement. Granted those are extremely optimistic predictions in our current economic environment, but after a decade or so of implementation, I believe we could be at that point.

The following is some brainstorming on some of the complexities of what a proposal such as this would entail. I'm sure I've missed plenty, so if you have other ideas, questions or comments, please post them below in the comment section.

Full Version available here: 5% Digital Each Year on Prezi

(CreativeCommons Licensed Image Courtesy of Don Wright on Flickr.com)

School Innovation Process - Part I

2011-02-04T11:53:00.000-08:00

Back in the Spring of 2010, I was asked, along with one of our site principals, to chair a committee of parents, teachers, administrators and community members to begin investigating the future for our school district and which directions the district should be investigating for long term planning. Initial meetings focused on determining the needs of our students, schools and community as we move into the future. We listed and ranked those needs and identified the top needs receiving the highest rankings. The highest scoring main categories were: Student Communication, School to Home/Home to School Communication, Improving Instructional Program, Technology, School Culture, and Professional Development. Under each of these main categories were specific needs that were submitted and ranked high by committee members. Once those needs were identified, the committee began to research how other schools around the country and world, were addressing those same or similar needs. The results of that research were shared with the committee on subsequent dates. Not surprising, one common thread that appeared through each of the main categories was the use of technology to address the needs.

The committee also interviewed students, adults who were products of the school district, and members of the local community to gain insight as to what they felt was good about their educational experience and what they felt could have improved their educational experience. Our guests had varying experiences with the educational system, primarily due each of their unique life experiences. One idea that shared some commonality was the importance of cultivating caring relationships. This idea of relationships is important because in points at an obvious fact, we are all different. Strong relationships are built upon one to one, honest, personable contact. I’m going to take a little liberty here and stretch an idea, if students feel relationships are important, and yet all students are unique and different, how should be we addressing our approach to teaching and learning when we have 30 students in the classroom?

The answer to that question is designing instruction that is unique to each student. That is only possible when you have fostered a strong relationship with each of your students, clearly identified each of their learning needs, and possess an instruction strategies supply that you can use to pull out tools specific to their needs. At best, what we have been doing up to this point, is grouping our students together (i.e. grade levels, reading levels, pre algebra, algebra, etc. etc.) with what we feel are similar needs and using our “bag” of strategies to address those similarly grouped student needs. Does this strategy work? Sure, up to a point. Could we do better? Of course.

Our school innovation committee is at the point now where we would like to take some recommendations to our school board. These recommendation will focus on what we feel the next steps should be in preparing our schools for the future. I, being a member of that committee, have some thoughts on this and have developed a recommendation I will share at the next meeting. I will explain my idea in a future post. But I will finish with two recordings and a reference to one of my last posts.

Clayton Christensen and Michael Horn have written a book titled, Disrupting Class: How Disruptive Innovation Will Change the Way the World Learns . In his recent interview on TheFutureofEducation, Mr. Horn explains the main themes behind his book and their recent updates to the book. I have excerpted out a section of that interview below with the section relevant to my idea. The full recording of his interview is available here: http://www.learncentral.org/event/132741

The second recording excerpt below is from Karen Cator, Director of the Office of Educational Technology at the U.S. Department of Education. In this recording she shares the 2010 National Education Technology Plan and responds to a question related to why innovation is only found in pockets across our educational system. The full recording of her interview is available here: http://www.learncentral.org/node/131618

Finally, my post here, http://edutonica.blogspot.com/2011/01/big-target-goal-digital-delivery-fo.html gets to the big idea I will be sharing in more depth in a future post.

Feedback encouraged...What do you think?

(image courtesy of wwworks on flickr.com)

Never Ending Intravenous Drip of Potential Learning & My “Minions”

2011-01-26T10:35:00.000-08:00

( I love the juxtaposition of the word minion as it relates to Twitter... ;-)

Twitter is like a never ending intravenous drip of potential learning. To prove my point, from the time I left the office Tuesday evening, through the wee hours of the night, to the time I arrived Wednesday morning, my Twitter “information peddlers” had been busily working away sending me potential useful information to help me do my job. I don’t pay them anything, and they don’t send me invoices, but they provide a valuable service. If you haven’t learned to take advantage of these “busy bees,” you are really missing out. You are cheating yourself. Get with it!

Here’s an example, while I was at the gym, spending time with my family, and sleeping, my “minions” sent me the following:

1. “Deep Media,” Transmedia, What’s the Difference?: An Interview with Frank Rose (Part One)
by Henry Jenkins

http://henryjenkins.org/2011/01/deep_media_transmedia_whats_th.html

Henry Jenkins, USC Professor interviews Frank Rose on his new book -- The Art of Immersion: How the Digital Generation Is Remaking Hollywood, Madison Avenue and the Way We Tell Stories. Mr. Rose describes a concept of “deep media.” His description of deep media involves stories around how deep a individual wants to immerse themselves into a story. He describes his research in story telling and games and how they both relate to deep media and concepts of transmedia. How might this information relate to teaching and learning in the classroom? For me that’s pretty easy, teaching, and for the matter communication, is all about telling stories. I feel the better we can tell our classroom “stories” the better opportunity for our students to immerse themselves in classroom stories, the better their learning.

2. The New York Times - The Opinion Pages
Products of Rote Learning
http://www.nytimes.com/roomfordebate/2011/01/24/does-college-make-you-smarter/products-of-rote-learning

Leo Botstein, the music director and conductor of the American Symphony Orchestra and the Jerusalim Symphony Orchestra, and the president of Bard College takes a critical look at higher education and its current practices of undergraduate programs that do little to inspire students to develop a passion for learning.

3. Shift to The Future
http://www.shift2future.com/2010/09/stephanies-first-day-of-school-in-2020.html
This is Brian Huhn’s blog and on this day Brian shares his creative thoughts on what the first day of school could look like in the year 2020.

4. Fast Company.com
State of the Union Address Word Cloud Shows Obama Thinking About “People”
http://www.fastcompany.com/1720934/state-of-the-union-address-word-cloud-reveals-obama-thinks-a-lot-about-people

Kit Eaton runs President Obama’s State of the Union Address through Wordle to analyze the “big words” and “small words.”

5. New York Times
The Opinion Pages
A Different Type of Student
http://www.nytimes.com/roomfordebate/2011/01/24/does-college-make-you-smarter/dealing-with-a-different-type-of-college-student

C. Kent McGuire, former dean of the Temple University College of Education and now the president of the Southern Education Foundation. Mr. McGuire expresses his concern for higher education and its need to adapt to the modern times. These concerns sound very similar to the types of issues we all face in education.

6. Stager-to-Go
Try Not to Cry!
http://stager.tv/blog/?p=1553
Stager-to-Go is Gary Stager’s blog and in this piece he describes his work between the years of 1999 and 2002 when he worked with children incarcerated in one of Main’s prisons for teenagers. His story describes a student by the name of Joey that learns to explore a passion for radio production, resulting in his work airing on National Public Radio. It’s a poignant reminder of the need for all of us to not give up a children and the need to encourage the exploration of student interests in our education system.

7. The New York Times
The Opinion Pages - Opinionator
Thread of the Union
http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/01/25/thread-of-the-union/?ref=opinion#andrew-rotherham-on-education

This is a series of posts on President Obama’s State of the Union Address. This particular link goes straight to Andrew Rotherham, a cofounder and partner at Bellwether Education Partners, a nonprofit dedicated to helping low-income students achieve, thoughts on the President’s speech regarding education.

8. The Washington Post
The Answer Sheet
Obama’s faulty education logic: What he said and failed to say
http://voices.washingtonpost.com/answer-sheet/poverty/obamas-stran-faulty-educationge.html#more
Valerie Strauss asks some clarification questions following President Obama’s State of the Union Address and his statements on education.

9. dy/dan
[WCYDWT] Obama Botches SOTU Infographic, Stock Market Reels
http://blog.mrmeyer.com/?p=9258
During last night State of the Union Address, the President provided some charts to make his points. In one instance comparing the gross domestic product of the United States and China, a reader of his blog pointed out that the circle representing the domestic product for the United States was out of proportion. Mr. Dylan turned this fact into a math lesson on ratios and propaganda.

10. The Washington Post
GWU launches online prep school
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2011/01/22/AR2011012203454_pf.html
This article describes a new partnership between George Washington University and K12inc. for a entirely online college-preparatory high school.

(Creative Commons licensed image courtesy of Will Merydith on Flickr.com)

The Big Target Goal: Digital Delivery of Learning

2011-01-18T13:36:00.000-08:00

The preponderance of information related to the future of educating our students using technology, specifically online, to address the needs of unique learners is great. Articles such as 10 Reasons Students Say They Prefer Learning Online, ViewPoint: The Future of Education Lies in the Cloud, and Reshaping Learning From the Ground Up, an interview with Alvin Toffler, all provide anecdotes of how technology is going to shape education in the future. Even our own U.S. Department of Education in their National Education Technology Plan 2011 provide a diagram with the learner and the computer at the center of the diagram.

The report states, “The challenge for our education system is to leverage technology to create relevant learning experiences that mirror students' daily lives and the reality of their futures. We live in a highly mobile, globally connected society in which young Americans will have more jobs and more careers in their lifetimes than their parents. Learning can no longer be confined to the years we spend in school or the hours we spend in the classroom: It must be lifelong, lifewide, and available on demand (Bransford et al. 2006)."

Initially, the ideas for this reflection began germinating after my Assistant Superintendent of Instruction and Superintendent asked me to research a product that one of our school board members was approached about at the last California School Boards Association conference. The vendor that approached our board member was sharing their program for creating an online school and for supporting online classes for students. Their program could provide the entire online school for a participating district, from the curriculum, the teacher, the student management system, you name it, for a considerable percentage of the student state ADA (funding.) However, if we chose to take on some of those responsibilities, such as providing our own teachers, then the fee was reduced accordingly. Their program addresses home school students, online schools, credit recovery programs for the high school, and just about every alternative education scenario you can think up. According to the marketing materials, it is used by states across the country.

I reviewed the vendors web site and their accompanying demo lessons online. The lessons were pretty standard fare consisting of flash based multimedia files. Many of the online screens contained considerable amounts of text, and the font was pretty small. Their lessons where also a combination of online and traditional offline activities with textbooks. In some of the lessons, it appeared the lessons were more offline than online.

After reviewing their site and examples, I began to wonder what a good reason would be to go with their solution. I could only think of one reason. That reason would be to use it as a tool to evaluate what works well and what doesn’t as a school district begins to pursue the development of it’s own program. The big disadvantages I can see with adopting a program like this are: 1. You are turning over control of educating your students to a private company. 2. The instruction provided by this type of company is designed to address as may different types of students as possible. As a result it is very generic, and will not adequately address the unique characteristics of your learning community. 3. It is expensive. From what I could tell through reading some of the evaluations of this product online by parents that are using it, the vendor makes it’s dime not by selling to home school families, but by selling to the public school districts at a premium. If you care to review some of the reviews by parents using this program, I have included them here and here.

If the experts are predicting that the schools of the future will be taking advantage anytime, anywhere digital delivery of instruction, catering to the unique needs of every learner, why haven’t we made that the priority in public education? Why haven’t we began converting our traditional classroom based instructional processes to digital processes? We seem to be dancing around the fringes of the big idea by focusing on 1:1 student to computer programs, “flipping” instruction, and other partial solutions. If we are heading down a blended, or online delivery of instruction, why are we not requiring the individuals that know our students the best to convert 5% or 10% of their instruction each year for digital, online deployment? Granted, for school districts like my own, there is a lot of hard work to be able to get to that point. It will not be an easy task. However the alternative, in my opinion, is a lot worse. What do you think?

(Creative Commons licensed image courtesy of Shaggy Paul on Flickr)

Shortchanging Learning

2011-01-14T11:47:00.000-08:00

The last two days of professional development at times reminded me of when I was a kid and going to church every Sunday with my family. I remember many nice things about going to church, but at the same time, there were huge contradictions that left me struggling with questions of my faith. Our professional development over the two days have focused on the research of effective instructional design. Instruction that is designed with the focus squarely on the student and their learning. There were a lot of great ideas, such as emphasizing lessons that are designed to provide the student with a clear idea of the learning objective or learning goal; the use of graphic organizers to cement declarative knowledge; and tips for effectively using rubrics for student assessment and feedback. However, at times, especially when discussing the research on declarative knowledge, I found myself back in a church pew as a teenager, trying to decipher the logic behind what the priest was stating in his sermon.

Let me explain. For this particular workshop, the presenter had broken down instruction into two different categories, declarative knowledge and procedural knowledge. Declarative knowledge in simple terms is knowledge based on facts, details, concepts, and principles. Procedural knowledge is knowledge based on processes or skills, for example, how you probably learned to do long division. During the workshop, one of my “church pew” moments came when the facilitator was providing an example of a strategy to help teach declarative new knowledge. The presenter asked us if we could name all thirteen of the original United States colonies. I had been taking notes on my iPad and I immediately typed out the question into Google and almost before she had the words out of her mouth, I had multiple listings of the correct answer in my browser. She proceeded to demonstrate the use of a mnemonic device and spent the next eight to ten minutes creating a whimsical story about a cow using the beginning word parts of each of the thirteen original colonies. Was her strategy successful? Sure. There were some who could remember the story, and then recite the state names. But that’s not my point. Some people could argue that having students memorizing a whimsically story in order for them to recite the first thirteen colonies is not very useful learning. But that’s not my point either. My point is that we are using a tool for learning that would have been useful for students in 1776. It worked then, and it still works today, but it’s completely outmoded by the technology that we as adults use day in and day out. Mnemonic devices are a tool for the memorization of facts, concepts, details, and principles. Technology, search engines, and the web are tools for learning declarative knowledge too. The technology tools are much more efficient tools than those such as mnemonic devices. How many times this week have you used a mnemonic device to remember something in your work? How may times have you used your computer to look something up in your work?

I am afraid if we use the example above and multiply that by everything we are required to teach students, we are wasting a ton of time. In terms of the end result, reciting the original thirteen colonies, whether you use a mnemonic device or a search engine, the end results are the same, with one exception. If you use the search engine you’ll have banked approximately nine minutes to teach something else. Communities that recognize this fact potentially have the ability to increase student learning exponentially just in the fact that they have more time for real learning. Real learning that focuses students on the “whys” and “how comes?” Learning that requires students to think, form opinions and test out their ideas and opinions on each other. Does it really matter that students can recite all thirteen original colonies, or is it more important for them to understand what those thirteen colonies stand for? If we continue to use outmoded tools, I’m afraid we will have no time for the learning that matters most, the “whys” and the “how comes.” What do you think?

(Creative Commons image courtesy of isforinsects on flickr.com)

The PLC Mindset and Trust

2011-01-06T11:03:00.000-08:00

I was on my way home yesterday listening to NPR on the radio, and a segment came on about the Cirque Du Soleil and the process the trapeze artist use to develop trust. Do they have some type of rigorous, multi-step process they run through to develop trust in one another? No. It something we all use, and probably the most important tool there is in developing trust in one another. What's that magical tool...? It's called "talking to one another." The trapeze artists are constantly taking with each other. They're talking when they are away from the show, they're talking to each other high above your heads when you're waiting for them to zoom down out of the sky. What are they talking about? Could be anything from what the guy in the second row is wearing to how their left pectoral muscle is a little sore. I think in developing trust, what they are taking about is not as important as to the fact that they are talking. In my opinion, the fact that they are regularly conversing leads, almost unconsciously, to the development of trust between them and the ability to perform when the "chips are on the table." (Granted, what they are talking about becomes most important after the trust is developed.)

Professional Learning Communities (PLC) are not things. It's not a seven step program, or a goal. A PLC is the development of a mindset. The PLC mindset is a group of individuals, working towards a common goal, and all expected to contribute, evaluate, and foster the continued learning of the entire group. Ultimately this learning is used to continue improving on their groups goal(s). In schools, most of us have developed pieces of this mindset, or even the whole mindset but usually on a much smaller scale. We have a buddy teacher, or we have a grade level team, or a teacher at another site that we trust and regularly practice our version of the PLC mindset. One of the the strengths in a PLC mindset comes from greatly widening our circle of influence and influencers. This however is not a comfortable thing for us to do. The effectiveness of PLC mindset is highly dependent on the development of trust amongst its members. In my opinion and effectiveness of the PLC mindset is almost solely based on the degree to which there is trust amongst its members.

Here's the rub, if the most effective way for developing trust among each other is to simply talk to each other, how the heck do you do that when there are close to 1000 members in the PLC? For that matter, how do you do that when there are only 40 members in the PLC? If you were to graph all the people that you would consider your contacts, people that you have interfaced with, and take into account all the conversations you have ever had with those individuals, and then chart them on a graph like so:
I bet those that you feel you trust the most are those that have high marks for previous conversation. Sure their will be exceptions to the rules, as there are probably people you have talked to a lot that you trust about as far as you can throw them. (Wouldn't you like to know who that person in the upper left of the chart is...?) But my guess is they will be the exception and not the rule.

What are the solutions for developing trust in a PLC if the logistics of being able to frequently talk with each member face to face is just not possible? I think one such solution is the advent of electronic social media. Whether you call it FaceBook, or Twitter, or your own BuddyPress deployment, encouraging members of the PLC to share what they are doing, feeling, thinking, in brief, sometimes nonsensical bursts of content can begin to provide members of the PLC with a statement of who each of us are and begin to allow us to develop that important trust component when the logistics of doing that in person, face-to-face, is not possible. Now I'm not suggesting that you have to friend every single person in you PLC mindset group, but it may not hurt. Also, if we literally did "friend" everyone in the PLC we may suffer logistics from getting through everyone's posts, but with proper filtering skills, and with a conscious effort in being economical with the amount of information that we post, it could be done. By having those asynchronous conversations with each other online maybe those online conversation can help to develop trust in one another? What do you think?

Twitter: jpatten
Facebook: jpatten1

(Creative Commons licensed photo courtesy of JMRosenfeld on Flickr.com)

Aviary Beta Education Version - Cloud Based Web Apps

2011-01-03T11:21:00.000-08:00

Aviary a popular web based suite of tools for creating images, vector graphics, audio and music recordings has released their beta education version. The education version of Aviary allows teachers to create a private classroom suite of tools that their students can use on any computer, netbook, etc that is Adobe Flash capable (sorry iPad users). The interface is clean, professional looking, and advertising free. Those of you that have used Kerpoof with smaller children will welcome the cleaner streamlined interface. Aviary eliminates the distractions of some of the competing education focused web based tools. Aviary provides a nice introduction to drawing and editing interfaces that are typically found in similar professional and prosumer level tools.

If you’re and educator, you can request your beta education account at: http://www.aviaryeducation.com/

Aviary Education Version from John Patten on Vimeo.

Creating A Course-Specific, Secure Pseudo Web Server in Moodle 2.0

2010-12-16T11:22:00.000-08:00

In today’s day of “click and drag” web site publishing brought to us be Google Sites, WordPress, Webbly, and the many other tools available, having an understanding of the coding behind the creation of a web page is still important to students. Having that knowledge is useful to understand the mechanics that makes up the information they are viewing on the LCD screen in front of them. Providing instruction to students and opportunities to create actual web sites by using basic html coding, or using tools such as Dreamweaver, goes a long way into providing them with an understanding of the pretty pictures on their laptops or mobiles. Completed student web projects can be showcased using your Moodle course.

In addition, many educational software applications export completed projects in a web site format. Examples of these types of applications include Teacher Gradebook software, Adobe Flash, RunRev’s LiveCode, etc. etc. (Note- For Flash and other web plug-in type content, the visitor to you Moodle course must have the accompanying software plug-in installed on their computer.)

Using your Moodle course to publish a web site enables you to share web sites you or your students have created in a secure environment; only you and the students in your course can view the shared websites (provided you don’t have guest access turned on). The media richness and interactivity of your Moodle course can be enhanced by including custom web sites, Flash projects, and other widgets generated through exporting them out into a plug-in web technology and uploading them into your Moodle course.

Moodle 2.0 - Creating a Course Secure Pseudo Web Server from John Patten on Vimeo.

The Power of Web 2.0 in Moodle 2.0

2010-12-10T12:39:00.000-08:00

For all of us, having an audience for what we write is key for helping us to improve our writing skills. With systems such as blogs, the ability for individuals to share their thoughts in writing, and then for others to comment on that writing is very powerful; this process of learning by sharing through Web 2.0 tools is not unique to adults and schools can help students to improve their writing using the same types of systems. Achieving an environment for students where they can share, reflect, and comment on each other’s writing can be done in Moodle using the database activity.

The database activity in Moodle allows teachers to create embedded database directly in their Moodle site. These databases can be populated with information by the teacher, or populated by the students themselves. In this example, I have created a database that has been designed to provide a tool for students to anonymously reflect on their learning. These reflections are shared amongst all students in the Moodle course and each student has the ability to comment on all individual student reflections. In addition, the teacher has the ability to rate individual anonymous record posts submitted by the student and an average score can be recorded in the Moodle gradebook at the completion of the database activity.

Video Tutorial One

Moodle 2.0 - Introduction to Database Activity from John Patten on Vimeo.

How this particular database activity appears to a student.
All students can contribute comments to each student’s record in the database.
Moodle 2.0 comments appear much more “Web 2.0” like and been integrated into many of the activities and resources in Moodle version 2.0.

Video Tutorial Two

Moodle 2.0 - Database Activity Settings from John Patten on Vimeo.

The initial database activities settings configuration.
Providing students with the ability to comment on each other’s contributions is vital for improving writing, holding them accountable, and generating discussion regarding what they are learning.
The “Require approval” setting if used, will provide the teacher with a button to approve any new record added by a student before it visible to other students. This can also be used as a way to provide a system to collect and store information from students without making it public to other students. For example, let’s say a student has posted some content in a new database record but there are some grammatical errors in the post. The teacher could add a comment to that students post regarding fixing the grammatical errors. That original post and the teacher’s comments would only be available to the specific student and the teacher. Once the student has corrected the errors, the teacher could delete their comment and then approve the students record so that it is visible to the rest of the class.

Video Tutorial Three

Moodle 2.0 - Database Activity - Designing the Database from John Patten on Vimeo.

Creating fields for your database and adding those fields to the list view, single record view, and Add (record) view templates.

The Difficulty of Solving Your Own Problems

2010-11-05T15:51:00.001-07:00

We had our most recent Innovative School Thinking Meeting last night, November 4, 2010. The group has dwindled to a select few individuals consisting of: one middle school principal, one superintendent, one board member, one semi-retired principal, and one director of technology. We started off sharing the video of Katie Salen and her work with the New York City public middle school Quest To Learn. The Innovative SchoolThinking committee is expected to be looking to the future, 2020 and beyond in terms of how our schools should be in order to provide the best education for the students they serve. The difficulty with attempting to determine the future, beyond the obvious, is being able to provide a story, or to create a story, that provides a vision for all stakeholders for what schools can be in 2020. Ultimately, that is one of the goals that we would like to get out of these committee meetings. This is no small task, especially when you're looking at: 1. An institution that have relatively been the same in how the operate for over 100 years; 2. All members of the committee are products of these institutions, and in our case; 3. Overall our schools in our district have been on the whole quite successful.

However, the need for improving our schools and creating a new story is a result of the projected and ongoing changes that are occurring in our community. Two examples of these changes are the massive influence that technology has had in the last 15-20 years and the projected demographic changes in population projected for our little "neck of the woods." The influence of technology on how we live in this day and age is unmistakable. Unfortunately it has not yet translated, or lived up to its potential in our schools. There are many reasons for this and though we constantly struggle with improving our use of technology, it is happening in very small steps. For example, when a member of the committee asked me about a class that is part of one of our 1:1 student laptop initiatives, she witnessed students creating sentences using some
identified vocabulary words. She was wondering if this was what we meant in terms of under-utilizing the technology. I would have to say if this was the extent to how these computers were being used, then yes they are being under utilized. But if what she witnessed was just the first part of a series of activities that had students then electronically share, evaluate, modify, record, re-synthesize the collected work into a new format, which can be done very easily electronically (GoogleDocs, VoiceThread, etc.); then that extends the initial use of technology she witnessed to one that is much more appropriate.

The second glaring need is the fact that we have not been able to narrow, or close the achievement gap. What we (royal we) have been doing has not made a big difference in lowering the achievement gap for minorities. This effects us as a district because by 2025 in California the projected Hispanic population in California will go from approximately 29.1% of the population in 1995 to 43.1% of the population in 2025. We have a very large Hispanic population in the central valley and if we continue to educate our students in the same way, it would seem logical that an increase in the students that fall into the achievement gap category would mean an increase in students who are not achieving. This responsibility falls squarely on the shoulders of our schools.

Here is where the difficult part comes in to play, can we create a story that provides a road map or a vision to address our needs in a more global approach. In our short discussions last night two ideas related to implementing change stuck out, the first was the strategy which I would label as abrupt and to the point. It was a more "top down" approach, as opposed to bottom up approach. This strategy seems to fit mostly with some of the more popular charter school enterprises we hear about in the news. They can capitalize on their ability to focus on a specific clientele or population that is disenfranchised with the current state of their neighborhood public school. This approach works for the specific clientele but it does not appear to scale well. The problem I see with charter school innovation is that it provides only pockets of innovation and ignores the larger institutional changes that are needed when addressing, for example, the needs such as technology and the achievement gap. Change on a larger scale is far more complex. An entire district, and the schools within the district, do not appear to have the ability to adopt a change model that is more suited to a nimble individual school. The second idea shared was one where the larger systematic change happens more gradually and smaller actions led by passionate, enthusiastic small groups of individuals. These small actions are programs that are very different than what is the norm at a school; they must be compelling, engaging and excite students. One example suggested was something similar to what is being implemented at Quest To Learn, using game theory and design but on a smaller scale, possibly an extended day program at a middle school. If implemented correctly, the belief is that the enthusiasm for this type of program would spread across a campus, affecting parents, and the conversations that take place inside school, during collaboration meetings between staff, and outside of school in the community. A successful program like this could lead to a community in favor of funding more technology across the district, such as site wide 1:1 computer initiatives, digital texts, district created digital "texts," and support for infrastructure that would support wide use these types of tools.

But let's hold on for a second, we may have an even larger problem, and that is, are we even capable of formulating a story to address our needs? Steve Hargadon has a very nice post in Redu, Factory Schools: A Debate where he writes that the popular opinion right now is that our public schools are broken. "If there's a more general acceptance that the story or narrative we've told ourselves about the purpose and value of education for the past 100+ years is now broken, there's also an awareness that we don't have a ready replacement for that story." Compounding this idea are the facts that one, many of our schools have been doing quite well up to this point, and two, we are all products of the existing system. On Ewan McIntosh's blog, edu.blogs.com he shares a post titled Culture Popped: what can pop culture teach museums, the arts and education about engagement. In the first few slides he has a quote from Clay Shirky, "Institutions will try to preserve the problem to which they are the solution." And one from Upton Sinclair, "It is difficult to get a man to solve a problem when his salary depends upon his not understanding it." Mr. McIntosh's presentation was not referring to schools and education in general, but was more business focused, but I can't help but think some times, that at some unconscious level, we in education suffer from this malady at least in regards to coming up with new stories.

We measure the success of our students based on the structure of a 100 year old paradigm. If we are really thinking about doing things better in schools, shouldn't we be measuring students using a paradigm that does not make us conform to the existing paradigm? For example, last
night someone mentioned the fact that there have been attempts to change things in the past, for example in the 70s. The result of some of those early trials were children starting third grade with a kindergarten reading level. Or in another example, of a state assessment for math that was more critical-thinking focused. It resulted in utter failure by the students and as a result the assessment was never used again. If we are really thinking outside the box, maybe a model of instruction that results in a student, in what we would now call third grade, with what we would call now, a kindergarten reading level is okay in our new story? Maybe the assessment that we were using to evaluate our students math and critical thinking skills was right on target? Maybe we were not doing a good job at instructing our students and providing them with the skills we were trying to assess them on? Or maybe we should have just evaluated our scope and sequence a little more closely and made some modifications?

My involvement with the school innovation committee has generated many more questions than even a faint outline of a new story. How long can we continue on the current path? What will the ultimate results be if we do not address them now? Is there a problem to address? Will it all just
sort itself out on its own? Can we afford to let it? ...

*(Image Creative Commons licensed courtesy of sjdunphy via Flickr)

Community Based Education Reform vs Structural Reform

2010-07-09T16:28:00.000-07:00

There has been some recent discussions and posts related to how public schools should go about reforming themselves, for lack of a better word, in regards to educating children. The Federal government has offered money to states in a competitive grant process called Race To The Top. The two awarded states this year promised sweeping changes in terms of assessing students and monitoring their progress through statewide data systems. These types of proposals are very large and usually recommend systems that are meant to be implemented across the board in all schools and all school districts. Larry Cuban in a post describes these types of reform efforts as large structural reform (more about this later on with links to his post on the topic). Large reform projects are not new to public education, and have been deployed and implemented for many years. One such example, on a smaller scale, is the text book adoption process that occurs every 7-8 years. School districts around the country adopt a new text book/program and deploy that program in a manner that gets the most students through the most content by the end of the school year. If you have been in education for more than ten years, it's a safe bet you have gone through at least of few of the large structural reform projects yourself.

The flip side to large structural reform, is reform that is created locally. In this model, needs are determined by the community and school (as they relate to the students,) ideas are researched and generated to address those needs, and plans are created to put those ideas into action. Of the two types of approaches, the locally generated reform model is the most difficult to implement, and as you would have imagined, is also the most successful in terms of creating positive changes in improving instruction.

Why is this type of reform so much more difficult to implement than structural reform? The obvious answer is because it requires greater participation and a full understanding of what it takes to prepare our children for the 21st-century. Usually many of the members of a this type of group do not have a strong background in education pedagogy, they are not educators in the traditional sense and will only have familiarity with education based on what they remember from their schooling and/or their children. Another reason for why this type of reform is more difficult, is that it demands participation. Committee members must be able to speak and share their ideas without feeling like they have something to lose. Most people still are uncomfortable sharing their ideas with, essentially, strangers. There is an insecurity that comes with this type of committee, and due to the technology tools that are often used to help facilitate the discussions, this insecurity is amplified.

I am currently experiencing this first hand in the committee that I am co-chairing for our district. We are in the very early stages of developing this group, but already some of the challenges are apparent from the initial meeting and follow up online (or lack there of) discussions. We have our second meeting in August and the goal is to have shared some areas that we would classify as needs, electronically, prior to that meeting. Our second face-to-face meeting we will focus on those needs and begin the process of prioritizing those needs.

The following are pieces that have sparked my initial reflections I've written about above and on some ideas related to some of the work I've been involved with in my district:

Will Richardson's post titled, "A Summer Rant: What's Up With Parents?" expresses his frustration with attempting to engage parents in the education of their own children and the community in general with helping to motivate them in helping to improve our schools. To see the wide range of feelings on his ideas in this post, be sure to check out the comments.

http://weblogg-ed.com/2010/a-summer-rant-whats-up-with-parents/

Larry Cuban's Blog, School Reform and Classroom Practice, July 27, he writes a post titled, "Admitting Error is Very Hard To Do: Structures and Classroom Practice.

He begins his post describing how Alan Greenspan testified in Congress to the fact that he was wrong regarding the belief "that self-correcting market structures and federal regulations were enough to avert a major recession." He uses it as an example to demonstrate the difficult in admitting error. His introductory paragraph about Greenspan sets up his own admonition that for a great part of his educational career, he believed that structural reforms would lead to better classroom instruction. Now, after 15 years of teaching, and years of research on the topic, he feels this fundamental idea was incorrect. He goes on to describe that one of the champions of large structural reform projects are policymakers. It's a policymakers job to work in scale, designing solutions that get the "biggest bang" for their/our buck$. He goes on to describe that "changing one child at a time, changing one teacher at a time, changing one school at a time is incredibly inefficient use of limited resources." However, he has come to believe that to be successful in improving teaching practices, the "slow-motion Mom-and-Pop-store-one-school-at-time" is the correct process. We have all witnessed sweeping structural reforms come and go. His research and others have demonstrated that structural reforms do not lead to improvements and that working directly on individual and collective teacher norms, knowledge, and skills at the school and classroom levels have a far better chance of improving teaching practices.

http://larrycuban.wordpress.com/2010/06/27/admitting-error-is-very-hard-to-do-structures-and-classroom-practice/

Chris Lehmann is the principal and instructional leader for the Science Leadership Academy, in Philadelphia, PA. He runs a high school that has been doing a lot of innovative teaching and learning. As a result they have been getting a lot of good press and kudos for the work that they are doing and the accomplishments of their students. A lot of this attention on SLA has produced a great deal of discussion on how to grow or implement their practices in other schools. Mr. Lehmann has been spending some considerable amount of time reflecting on this ideas in his blog, PracticalTheory.org. Many of his posts about what happens at SLA contain a foundation that is based on school/local community collaboration. Whether that is projects that the student partake in, or determining the direction and needs of their school. Each year SLA sponsors a conference titled EduCon, it is primarily a tool for SLA to share the innovative practices they are implementing with other educators on a wider scale. Attendees get to see and discuss practices that are taking place at SLA and at the same time, SLA gets to pull ideas from the presenters and attendees that help them improve what they do. EduCon naturally inherits many of the same philosophies that are a part of SLA. In a recent post, Mr. Lehmann discusses what it would take to grow the EduCon experience beyond their little neck of the woods. In the process he describes both the core principles of EduCon and some of the core principles of SLA. All of which are his attempt at bringing the practices conceived at the local level into an arena that is more broader in the hope of gleaming nuggets of information that can be used not only by SLA, but by all participants.

http://practicaltheory.org/serendipity/index.php?/archives/1242-Growing-the-Movement.html

1. photo courtesy of Max-B, http://www.flickr.com/photos/massimobarbieri/3998455558/ CreativeCommons Licensed.

Creating With Computers (Part VI) - The Student Reading Recorder Example

2010-05-17T21:49:00.000-07:00

The fundamental design concept behind all of the Web 2.0 tools such as Twitter and Facebook are very similar to my simple Student Reading Recorder application. What you see on your computer screen when you are looking at Twitter or Facebook is the same thing that every single person on the planet sees, at least in respect to the layout of the elements on the screen. What is different is the content that fills in those little elements of space on your screen. The way Facebook and Twitter determines what to put in those little boxes within the layout is based on information that you generated and they store in their database. In Twitter for example, every person with an account that has selected me as someone to follow has an entry in the Twitter database that identifies my account as one that they want to follow. When I add a new tweet, that action initiates a query through the twitter database looking for all accounts that have marked my account as one that they are following. When the query locates my unique account information in somebody else's list of people they are following, it pulls my last tweet out of the database and puts it into the list of tweets of the for that individual. At least that's how I imagine it. I don't work for Twitter or Facebook, but my hunch is probably pretty close. My little reading application works the same way.

My database consists of four tables. The first table holds information about the teacher. The second table holds information about the students. The third table in the database holds information about the assessments and the last table holds information about the individual student assessment results.

The first screen of the student application pulls information from the database out of three of the tables. The start button initiates a call to the database that queries the database to retrieve the unique identification number for the specific teacher that the students types in to the "class" field. This identification number is then used to generate a drop down list of every student that has that teacher's unique identification number saved into their student record. When the student selects their name from the drop down list, a second call to the database is initiated and uses the student's unique identification number to retrieve the students current reading assessment activity. In addition, it uses the student's unique identification number to retrieve their avatar icon for the upper right of the screen. The avatar icons are titled with the student's unique identification number.

The remaining icons on the screen consists of two buttons. The red circle button begins a recording session. This recording session works with Apple's Quicktime technology and requires that the QuickTime player is installed on the student's workstation. The sound recording is actually saved to the local "recordings" folder on the student workstation. (This works in the same fashion for both the Macintosh platform and the MS Windows platform. The Linux platform does not have an Apple QuickTime player so it records audio a little different. I will describe the Linux version in a separate post.)

In order to provide the teacher with the ability to evaluate the student's reading recording from any networked computer, the green triangle button, which is used by the student to navigate between the screens, also uploads a copy of the student recording to the remote server via an FTP process.

A copy of this application is linked at the bottom of this post. One important fact, this tool has not been designed for commercial release. This is an in house tool designed for a specific goal and in a specific environment. The environment that this application is running is very robust and latency issues at home over a DSL speed connection are not experienced in the classroom.

The remaining student screens provide students with additional focus on thinking about their reading using the recording that they created in screen one. This second screen prompts the student to listen to their recording and count the number of words that they read. They can strike the space bar on the keyboard to help them count the number of words that they read aloud during the recording.

The third screen simply has them rank how well they felt they read the paragraph and allows them to drag a marker on a line to identify their rating.

The fourth screen allows the student to listen to the recording again and identify one word that they thought was particularly difficult to read aloud.

The fifth screen provides a ranking which is actually just a number that increments by five each time they do an recording activity. The screen is particularly vague as I am interested in how the students that use this tool would describe what this number represents. Obviously the more times they do an activity the more obvious it will be that the number increases.

Remember, even thought this application is functional, it primarily serves as an example of what can be done with these types of rapid application development tools. Revolution is a great tool development tool and seeing how they provide a free version and educational pricing on more complete versions there is only a small investment in time to get started.

Download Examples
Examples of the Macintosh and Windows Student Applications Available Here

In part VII I will share the teacher management components of this example application and show off some of the other features of Revolution that helps make developing tools with this product much easier than traditional programming languages.

Thoughts On Privacy and Social Media

2010-05-15T09:35:00.001-07:00

The has been a lot of discussion lately on the issues related to privacy on Facebook and other web 2.0 applications. The straw man argument would be, "Well, you don't have use them. Nobody is making you." The fact of the matter is that we do in this day and age and depriving students of the necessary skills and guidance with these tools puts them at a disadvantage. Would it ruin their lives if they didn't get the experience and instruction? No. But it does put them at a disadvantage in our current global environment.

Part of the problem has been created by ourselves. If we had been teaching students how to use computers and technology beyond word processing and creating PowerPoint presentations for the last twenty years, our students wouldn't need Facebook to collaborate and communicate. They could be creating their own social networks, just-in-time, when they are needed and have complete control over their design and data. Imagine if you could roll our own "Facebook" as simple as creating a PowerPoint presentation. The server, database, and your code, all in your pocket, or stashed in your sock drawer at home available to those that you choose.

(photo courtesy of http://www.flickr.com/photos/daveynin/2536574111/)

Creating With Computers (Part V) - The Tools

2010-05-14T12:23:00.000-07:00

As I mentioned in Part II, my early interest in computers and education was launched when I first discovered HyperCard in the mid 1980s. The ease at which you could quickly create a custom application to do what you wanted it to do and to address a specific task was very enticing. The continued development of HyperCard by Apple lead to more and more possibilities including the ability to incorporate multimedia into custom applications. In my opinion, Hypercard was the ideal computer development tool for the classroom teacher and allowed for the development of instructional materials tailored to the needs of individual students. HyperCard eventually was retired by Apple, but other companies picked up where Apple had left off. Development tools such as SuperCard, ToolBook, and Metacard continued to evolve the HyperCard development model. This model of application development based on objects and events began to gain more and more popularity to the extent that one such tool, HyperStudio, became very popular with students and teachers. Though this tool was similar in design, it is targeted more toward students and is not as versatile as the previously mentioned software tools. However, it provides an excellent starting place for students to understand many of the important concepts of application development.

In 2003 Runtime Revolution purchased Metacard and used it to develop Revolution. RunRev, as they are now known, has developed mutliple versions of Revolution and address the needs of the wide range of users. RunRev produces versions of Revolution that run and compile on all three major operating systems, Windows, Linux, and MacOS X. Applications developed in Revolution can also be deployed as browser plug-ins similar to Adobe Flash applications. One attractive feature of Revolution is projects designed and developed in one operating system, such as Mac OSX can be compiled and deployed as standalone applications on Windows and Linux operating system. Future versions of Revolution are in the works that will provide deployment on mobile operating systems such as Google's Android.

Developing in Revolution is done by dragging objects from palettes to your window and then programing those objects using Revolution's Transcript programming language. Transcript is very similar to HyperCard's HyperTalk programming language and uses very English language like commands. The following example should help to better illustrate this description:

In Part VI I will begin to tie the conversation back to my example, the student reading tool, and share the necessary steps of connecting the student tool to a remote database.

Creating With Computers (Part IV)

2010-05-13T07:34:00.000-07:00

As we turn to more and more web based applications, the importance of a databases to store content used by the application becomes more and more important. Google Docs essentially is one very large database. When you log in to your Google Docs account, it pulls information in its database that is related to you and displays it within a template window of your web browser. Clicking on one of the documents in the documents list, you have previously created in Google Docs, results in another call to the Google database and this time returns the content related to the title of the doc that you clicked on. My little student reading application will mirror this type of database operation, but instead of displaying the information in a web browser window, it will display the information in a custom application. Understanding how databases work with computers will be a central skill as we move forward in developing our ability to control computers and use information constructively.

My experiences with databases and computers stems primarily from my work with setting up content managements system and blogs. Applications such as Mambo/Joomla, Moodle, and WordPress use databases to store content. Each of these applications use a database called mySQL. MySQL started out as an OpenSource database application at approximatly the same time that the Apache web server software was released. These two applications have supported a great deal of innovation that has been developed on the world wide web beginning in the mid 90's. In any case, my experience is pretty limited and my point is that with just a little knowledge you can begin creating something that takes advantage of a backend database to support a custom application.

In developing the mySQL database for my application, I used a mySQL application running on a hosted service called On-Rev. On-Rev is a relatively new service provided by RunRev, the makers of the application development tool I am using to create this student program. There are many benefits to using the On-Rev service with Revolution, however what I'm about to describe can be achieved with any hosting services that provides the mySQL database application. The mySQL database is primarily controlled via the command line. What this means is that there is no primary graphic user interface for the mySQL application. This was done on purpose to maximize performance capabilities of the database application and to conserve valuable microprocessor cycles to server your data and not a "pretty" user interface. Fortunately, there have been a number of "front ends" to the mySQL database that provides a more graphic user interface for manipulating the database (for those of us that have grown up clicking a mouse). The application I will be using is called phpMyadmin and it is a web based front end to the mySQL database. Using this tool you can easily create new databases, new tables within the database, and new fields to store your information within those tables. If you choose to use a mySQL database hosted on a commercial services provider, such as On-Rev, there is a good change that the phpMyAdmin tool will be available to you for manipulating the mySQL database.

For my student reading application, I decided to develop four tables within the database. Each table went with a particular component of the student reading application.
When developing your database, it is important to spend quality time thinking about all its pieces and how they will interact with your application. It is much more difficult to make changes to your database after you begin to create the actual desktop application as any new changes made to the database could have unforeseen consequences which will take time to decipher and fix in the desktop application. As with most things, careful planning upfront is crucial to eliminating difficulties later.

In the next part, I will begin sharing how the student desktop tool is going to be created and how the desktop tool exchanges information with the remote database.

Creating With Computers (Part III)

2010-05-10T13:07:00.000-07:00

Revolution is like a software Erector set. With a little bit of familiarity with the language, it is very easy to quickly create custom applications. I began the process of developing this tool by thinking about the ultimate goal, a software tool that students would use to hopefully improve their reading. I started with the ultimate goal in mind, and then worked back to components that would make that goal successful. The following is a list of features that I determined the student component should incorporate:

Simple student log-in a first grader could master.
The ability for a student to easily record themselves reading a passage of text.
The ability for a student to easily play back their recorded audio file.
A strategy to allow students to concentrate on what they read by providing them with a tool to count the number of words they read within the time limit.
A simple scale that allows students to rate how well they feel they read the passage.
The ability to identify at least one word that they felt was the most difficult to read.
A number presented at the end of the activity that represents their ranking/total score.

My hunch is that these described activities would help to improve a student's reading ability by steering them to think more acutely about their reading. Research has shown that special needs students actually do quite well working in a student-computer environment. The computer is often less threatening and students are less likely to be nervous or suffer from performance anxiety when in front of a computer as opposed to in front of their teacher. This I thought would hold true for all students. I envision this student tool being used in a center or independent group activity where students have 15-20 minutes at each activity.

After defining the components of the student software, it was time to decide on how it would be designed. I knew that I would want to be able to retrieve student work so that the students' teachers would be able to evaluate their students' work post activity. In order to do this, all student input would have to be stored in a database. Fortunately for me, Revolution provides this ability quite easily and I will be describing this process in a later section.

As I continued to work backward from the student activity component, my planning resulted in three supporting components. The first is the main administrator tool for creating teacher accounts. The second component is the teacher tool. The teacher tool should allow for the creation of individual student reports based on the students' activities. In addition, teachers should be able to create, edit, and delete students accounts. Finally, teachers should be able to create and edit new assessments/activities and assign assessments/activities to students in their class.

All these components require the storing of their data in a database. The creation of the database and the resulting tables in the database will be described in a later blog post.
(image courtesy of: http://www.flickr.com/photos/hinkelstone/2765597758/)

Creating With Computers (Part II)

2010-05-07T11:55:00.000-07:00

I was talking with my wife about some of her work with her English learner students. She was sharing all the assessments that they incorporate into their daily instruction and their practice for encouraging and modeling strong reading skills. I began thinking about the types of software that have been promoted to help students with their language arts, specifically reading skills. Scholastic's Read 180, Accelerated Reading, and Auto Skills came to mind. I was wondering how well those current software tools promote students to critically evaluate and think about their own reading skills? How many of these tools really get students to think about their reading?

These ponderings then turned to other thoughts as to what the ideal activity, or activities are to encourage students to think about their reading skills? Would an activity that promotes students thoughts about their reading skills even in the most basic activity fosters the needed attention to improve their reading abilities? What would those activities look like and what software tools are there that provide this instructional strategy without direct teacher participation? I could not think of one software tool that would promote this type of self-directed learning strategy that was simple to use, and could be started and completed in it's entirety in a 15-20 minute block of time, and provide the teacher with a record of the student's work.

The previous two paragraphs essentially defined the question or the task. Since I could not think of a software solution currently available, I decided to just create one myself. Granted I am not a classically trained software programmer. I'm what's referred to as a hack. Somebody who can get the computer to do what they need it to by "hook or by crook" at least in regards to software programming. My passion for technology in education began in the mid 1980s when I was introduced to the MacPlus and a new program on it called HyperCard. I fondly remember learning the trick to unlock the HyperCard Player so that it would divulge it's hidden software authoring tools. Though HyperCard is no longer being developed, there are a number of tools that have have picked up where HyperCard had left off. One such application, and my current favorite is Revolution by RunRev. This application is very similar to HyperCard. It is event driven and utilizes standard English resembling code. Many people earn their living developing in Revolution. One of the nicest features of Revolution is that you can develop on one platform and deploy on Macintosh, Windows, and Linux platforms. Soon RunRev has claimed you'll be able to deploy on the iPhone/iPad and Windows Mobile too. If you are interested in learning more about Revolution, they have a free version you can download called RevMedia.

Now that I had defined what I needed, an application focusing on reading that fosters students self assessment and analysis of their own reading, I set out to define the components.

(Photo courtesy of http://www.flickr.com/photos/ricardojesusflores/)

Creating With Computers (Part I)

2010-05-06T12:21:00.000-07:00

In the educational technology circles that I inhabit, a lot of discussion has taken place around the new Apple iPad. I've been interested in two opposing conversations that have taken place surrounding this new device. On one hand are those that feel this new device is going to change everything in regards to how we think about the personal computer and public education. On the other hand is a group of individuals who don't doubt the device will be a big success but that the device won't change education too much because it is primarily a device to consume content. There are some truths to both arguments and only time will really present the clear picture. However, after 19 years in public education, from what I have seen, the adoption of technology into everyday regular instruction has been limited at best. Sure there are pockets of innovation, but most of our instructional practices and strategies over those 19 years have not warranted the use of technology. The majority of technology use in schools has required that students know some fundamentals with the computer, where to save files, how to use a web browser, how to create a new slide in PowerPoint, and how to search using Google, etc. etc. For the most part, these skills can be taught after about two hours of instruction and some practice. My son did not need any training on how to use Facebook or locate the latest Flash based arcade game. If you know how to write, and have some familiarity with a keyboard, you are already a master of every social networking tool that's been and will be developed. Not surprisingly, the reasons for why computers and technology have not been utilized in a manner that takes advantage of their innate capability to create and innovate stems mainly on the primary charge of our educational institutions. Our focuses has been on eliminating the achievement gap, and improving our scores on state standardized tests. These are not bad goals, but our world is changing and our current goals are the same as every other developing country.

What is going to distinguish our students from those students in China or India?

I remember hearing a respected member of the community, out of frustration at the current budget mess suggest that we could save money by reducing our electrical costs by removing the technology tools, computers, projectors, etc. If you think about it, in ridiculous sort of way, turning off all the power to an average school may not hurt their standardized test results provided you had classrooms with windows or lots of candles and you'd save some money. Nobody would truly advocate for this but I am just attempting to make the point that what we currently evaluate our students on does not necessarily necessitate that we use technology to prepare them for these assessments.

We need to begin thinking about how we can instill in our children qualities that distinguish them from the rest of the world. One of the tools that we've had at our fingertips for the past 20 years, but have neglected to put it into use for this endeavor is the computer.

In (Part II) I will begin sharing a model of using computers that can provide us a strategy for distinguishing our students from the competition and showcase their many diverse talents.

(image courtesy of Xuoan's Dailies http://www.flickr.com/photos/xuoan-dailies/4089162168/)

Funding for California Public Education

2010-04-09T19:41:00.000-07:00

photo courtesy of Fickr and stuartpilbrow

On Easter I jumped into a spirited conversation about school budgets with my Dad and brother-in-law after dinner. In one of my jabs, I suggested we get rid of Proposition 13. My father just about fell out of his chair! He quickly came back at me with, "education gets all kinds of money just look at the California State Lottery." Yea, let's look at the California Lottery. Since it's inception it has provided approximately $17.5 billion dollars to K-12 education. In my district that is $1,000,000, about 2% of our annual budget. The perception of my father is that it actually provided much more funding. Public education is not cheap. The California State Lottery helps support projects and programs, but it is no windfall for public education. The general public's understanding of how public schools are funded is dismal.

Some resources that will help if you too are a little confused when it comes to funding public education:

The Basics of California's School Finance System - http://www.edsource.org/pub_QA_FinanceSyst06.html

The Basics of California's Proposition 98 - http://www.lao.ca.gov/2009/edu/prop98_primer/prop98_primer.aspx

California School Finance Highlights 2009-2010: The Impact of the Fiscal Crisis on California Public Schools - http://www.edsource.org/pub_SchFin09-10_highlights.html

Value In The Teacher

2010-02-23T16:15:00.000-08:00

Thinking Out Loud & Organizing Ideas My CUE2010 Concurrent Session: Defining Web 2.0 - The Skill of Strategic Socialization

Henry Jenkins, Provost's Professor of Communication, Journalism, and Cinematic Arts at the University of Southern California was interviewed in the PBS special Digital Nation. A colleague of his from the University of Buenos Aires, Ariel Glazer, mashed up the Pink Floyd and Jenkins interview. The complete video which Mr. Jenkins feels ...in many ways, captures some of his core themes and concerns better than the PBS documentary, is available here: http://henryjenkins.org/2010/02/_children_and_young_people.html

Though I thought this mash-up video clip would be a great introduction to the topic of strategic socialization, it and other ideas began to led me to investigate why we should be using modern tools in education in the first place. The recent EduCon2.2 Conference and Bud Hunt's session on The Caring Classroom , articles such as "10 Takeaway tips for Social and Emotional Learning" that were recently published in Edutopia, all lead me to begin thinking about what fundamental principles are at work in a class room when students are being successful. Though technology is great, it is not going to replace the teacher. The teacher will always be a key factor in the success of students. The effectiveness of that teacher depends on how well they can "teach." And when I think about the most fundamental aspect of teaching, it leads me to think specifically about communication. However, communication alone does not result in student learning. Effective communication results in student learning. So, how does a teacher provide effective communication and what is effective communication? Communication is only effective when the target of that communication values the communicator, in this case, the teacher. The following thoughts are ideas related to how a teacher and our institutions can generate value in our teachers in the eyes of our students. As related to the use of technology and strategic socialization, technology, as you will see, plays one role of many used to generate value.

A part of my job is to provide guidance and examples of ways that technology can be used to fundamentally change the way we teach students for the better. Obvious ideas that quickly come to mind are the ideas of improving communication and extending the time students are in "school." I'm not going to touch the latter, that one is a slam dunk in terms of the use of technology, however the first one is essential to the success of the second.

Communication is a big topic and in terms of education, effective communication is a necessity in promoting the highest levels of student achievement. In order for the communication to be its most effective, the message being received must be of value to the individual receiving it. In education, if the messenger is not valued is the message they are sending really considered communicating? A large part of the value placed on the message by the receiver is not necessarily related to the message itself. Most of the time the value comes from the message sender and not the actual information that is being communicated. In order to create effective communication in the "classroom," this value needs to be fostered between the teacher and the students, and vice-versa. There are many ways this value is cultivated by the teacher. It is not just generated between verbal exchanges between the participants, it is also built through external influences all of which are in our control. For example:

http://www.ted.com/talks/lang/eng/liz_coleman_s_call_to_reinvent_liberal_arts_education.html

How does the information presented by Liz Coleman foster improved communication (generate value in the minds of our students for their teacher)? Teachers adopting a mindset that all subjects are worthy of study, beyond just their particular expertise, will be interpreted by students that their "expertise" or contributions are valued, even if their strong suit is not say, geometry or algebra. To carry on the math example see Dan Meyer's blog at http://blog.mrmeyer.com/ for examples of this concept in a math class. Dan brings in much more than math content into his math classroom. Marco Torres generates value in his work with students and video production too...http://www.edutopia.org/marco-torres-empowering-students-through-multimedia. Marco's emphasis on fundamentals of story telling, planning, and technique enable students to explore concepts that are of interest to themselves, besides developing an understanding of the core instruction.

The video of a student explaining their work is another example of a teacher that has incorporated multiple disciplines into a lesson to strengthen, in this case, the student's understanding of math but honoring the student's values and interests, all of which translate into value in the teacher in the eyes of the student.

The Old Stand-by Is Still Relevant Because it Generates Value Too - Expectations

The following video is a common story of disenchanted/disengaged student. Richard Florida is an author and popular speaker covering topics such as the importance of creativity in the world and education. Embedded in this clip also is idea of "value." He doesn't speak directly to it, but where does the idea of learner value for their "teacher" appear?

He makes some good points, but the underlining idea here is not that technology is the solution, its what the use of technology generates in students. In my opinion he's missing a very big point. He shares how he hated school, never went to classes even in college, but would have high level, intense conversations with his buddies over beers. He talks about Bill Gates and Steve Jobs dropping out of school, but now in adulthood being very successful. What is he actually saying underneath those words? He is essentially saying there was no value for him in what was being communicated in school. Would he and his buddies have benefited if their teachers had higher expectations? If students perceive teachers honestly care, have high expectations, and are looking out for their best interest, does that build value? Recent popular movies such as Stand and Deliver or Freedom Writers counter Mr. Florida's view of his own education by providing a ("Hollywood") view of teachers with high expectations and students that become successful by a large degree primarily for the development of value they develop for their teacher and ultimately for what is being "communicated" to them.

(Full Richard Florida video available here: http://bigthink.com/ideas/18102 )

Design and Environment Generate "Plus or Minus Value"

Larry Rosenstock, CEO of the San Diego's High Tech High

This clip provides the ideas behind the school environment at San Diego's High Tech High. It does not look like a school, it looks like an "incubator for a start-up company." There are glass walls, you can see easily into classrooms, and the walls of the place are hung with examples of student work. How does this create "positive value" in the students at this school for their teachers? How could we create this type of environment in existing school/classrooms if we didn't have a spare industrial building laying around to use? I'm not even going to address the issues of generating negative value. I'm hoping those examples would be pretty obvious after watching the video.

Another big point that I feel generates this "value" in students for their teacher, indirectly, is the idea of not categorizing students. At High Tech High there is a conscious effort not to segregate or separate out students.

When you segregate you are unconsciously, or consciously, assigning value. By not segregating your are creating value by affirming individual contributions and strengths. This is similar to the point about liberal arts mindset in the point above with the video of Liz Coleman.

The full video on San Diego High Tech High can be viewed here: http://www.mobilelearninginstitute.org/21stcenturyeducation/films/film-larry-rosenstock.html

Stefana Broadbent - TED Talk Video

I said I wasn't going to point out the factors that could induce "negative value" factors in our learning environments, but Stefana Broadbent outlines many of them in this excerpt from her TED talk video. How would the things she describes create a negative effect in how value is generated by a students for their teacher? These are factors that are not the direct result of the teacher's actions...by the way.

Stefana's TED talk is really about the emergence of some new phenomenons brought on by our advances in communication technologies. She says in the past, and right up to today, Imposed Isolation has been the norm ... in our institutions...however, that is changing due to technology. We school our children to this norm, schools mimicked the environments we would find in the work-world outside of school. This is changing and all institutions need to adapt. Imposed Isolation is no longer becoming the norm.

What kind of message does this send our students when we block the tools they use to communicate with the people who THEY value? If we are proponents of communication learning), high expectations, and student achievement, but yet we block students from communicating with those that THEY value, does that build value in ourselves as teachers in the eyes of our students? We need to invest ourselves in our students and strive to become one those 5-6 most influential individuals that Broadbent describes. We need to use these tools to build value. (The full TED Video by Stefana Broadbent is available here: http://www.ted.com/talks/lang/eng/stefana_broadbent_how_the_internet_enables_intimacy.html )

Motivation & Value
Daniel Pink's new book Drive explores the topic of motivation. He breaks down the history of motivation into three versions, Motivation 1.0, Motivation 2.0, and Motivation 3.0. Motivation 1.0 are the basic motivators that include the need for food, reproduction, and survivability. Motivation 2.0 are the traditional institutionalized techniques he refers to as the "carrot and the stick." Motivation 3.0 is more related to intrinsic motivation. He uses examples of OpenSource software development where there is not monetary, or extrinsic reward. People create software just to create it in the hopes of helping others. He also uses the example of Tom's Shoes, http://www.tomsshoes.com/default.asp Where for every shoe they sell they give a pair to a child in need. Employees are motivated by the intrinsic reward of being associated with a company that is helping children. Altruistic? Maybe, but it motivates workers and buyers. Motivation 3.0, intrinsic motivation, which is tied to teacher expectations, builds value. Teachers promoting intrinsic motivation in their students promotes the idea of value in them, and in return add to the teacher's value (in the student's eyes).

As a side note regarding Pink's book, he claims that the baby boomer generation are all approaching their 60s. In his words he describes this generation as one who has worked very hard, but may be feeling like their work has not lead to any substantial achievements. He implies that they my be struggling with their intrinsic motivation drives. He claims every thirteen minutes, 100 adults turn 60. He says this will continue until 2024. Pink thinks the Boomer generation aging will result in a wave of volunteerism as they struggle with their Motivation 3.0 drives that have been neglected in the Motivation 2.0 work days. They may be a resource that schools will want to begin preparing to tap if Pink's prediction is correct. Would a program in our schools that takes advantage of this volunteerism generate value in teachers by their students?

"Caring about students is listening to them, learning about them from them."

Chris Lehmann the Principal of the Science Leadership Academy in Philadelphia made that statement earlier this year at the EduCon2.2 conference. That statement drips with value generating potential. A school culture that honors that philosophy will generate value in the eyes of students for teachers and learning. That philosophy requires a commitment that begins with the teacher and transcends to the foundations of the learning institution. Developing a learning organization that creates value does not happen over night, it takes time, planning, and a concerted effort.

Many strategies can be developed to bring about additional value in schools. The title of my CUE Concurrent session is Defining Web 2.0: The Skill of Strategic Socialization. Web 2.0 tools provide an easy entry point into establishing strategies to develop more value. The first is allowing modern communications tools in schools, and providing students and staff with instruction on effective use. The second is for teachers to model the use of these tools with their students, and the third is to use these tools ourselves to grow and learn as educators.

Blending F2F and Online Learning with Web 2.0 and Project Based Learning

2009-05-28T20:20:00.000-07:00

Last Tuesday, for lunch, I was fortunate enough to get to sit down with Steve Hargadon, and about over 100 other education peeps, and listen to a presentation by Michael Wesch. Mr. Wesch is a cultural anthropologist out of Kansas State University ( http://mediatedcultures.net/ksudigg/) who studies the impact of new media on society and culture. You may be familiar with him through his YouTube videos. One particular video you may have seen is: The Machine Is Us/ing Us.

On this particular episode of Steve's LearnCentral he turns over the spotlight to Mr. Wesch. Mr. Wesch's description of his latest course design is a textbook example of a blended face-to-face and online learning environment that uses both Web 2.0 and project based learning. He obviously is a tech geek in addition to an anthropologist. However, by default, aren't all anthropologist geeks anyways? ... I wish I could describe him as a non-techie, but that probably would not be fair. Rather than describe it in my own words, I'll just share what I lifted from the archived presentation on Steve's site. If you like the full presentation is here (http://www.learncentral.org/node/4016), but my edits just cut to the juicy parts.

Mr. Wesch's Purpose-Driven Course

exploration stage
guided introduction to the field
self-guided research
publish research paper
share with world (video, website, etc.)

First clip: (Introduction of Course LMS and Exploration) Mr. Wesch talks about his learning management system developed by combining freely available web applications.

Resources Used:
NetVibes - http://www.netvibes.com
Diigo - http://www.diigo.com/
WetPaint Wiki - http://www.wetpaint.com/
(Yahoo's) Pipes - http://pipes.yahoo.com/pipes/
Blogger - http://www.blogger.com
Sony Vegas - Windows (PC) Video Editing Software - http://www.sonycreativesoftware.com/vegaspro
YouTube - http://www.youtube.com

Second clip: (Exploration) Research Proposals and Video Trailers

Resources Used:
Zoho Creator - http://creator.zoho.com/ (used to create the web form for students submit their proposals)

Third Clip: (Guided Introduction and Self-Guided Research) Collaborative research proposal as culminating activity.

Resources Used:
WetPaint Wiki - http://www.wetpaint.com
Blogger - http://www.blogger.com

Fourth Clip: Nice example of using the LiveScribe gadget to assess student presentations. (This example almost makes me want to buy one! Almost.)

Resources Used:
LiveScribe - http://www.livescribe.com/

Fifth Clip: (Publish Research Paper) The KYHOI (Knock Your Head Off Idea) ...great new word!

Resources Used:
GoogleDocs - http://docs.google.com

Sixth Clip: Mr. Wesch responds to a question about what he does to help teach all these tools he uses in class with his students...gotta love the answer :-)

The last part of Mr. Wesch's outline is "share with the world." They are primarily doing this through YouTube and web sites. His YouTube channel is: http://www.youtube.com/user/mwesch.

Thanks for the great examples Mr. Wesch!

Strategies for Teaching in a 1:1 Computer to Student Classroom

2009-05-01T15:32:00.000-07:00

A number of our fifth grade classrooms that have begun using laptops with their students. Each student has their own Asus EeePc Netbook computer. These student computers are all running the Linux version (Asus's custom Xandros installation). The reasoning for running Linux on the student computers was three fold: cost, support, and ease of use.

With the Linux version of the Asus EeePC, each computer came with a complete suite of software tools. In addition, we are able to easily add any OpenSource application(Google Earth, Scratch, Pencil, etc.) that we choose. Software is added via shell scripts that run off one of our main servers. Each student laptop connects to the server on start up, and checks the shell script for updates. If updates are present, they download and install behind the scenes automatically. In addition to easily updating student computers, the Asus EeePC comes with a protected harddrive partition that allows the student laptops to be easily re-imaged to their original deployed state. These two support features come in very handy when you are a teacher and have a class of 32 students with their own laptops. The updating of student laptops happens behind the scenes and software problems can be remedied on start-up by the teacher with a keystroke. Finally, Asus has customized the Xandros Linux to run very well on their 901a netbooks . The desktop is a series of tabbed windows, and applications are large icons within the individual windows. Applications are launched with a simple click of the mouse.

So, I know what you're probably thinking, that's all great, but how are teachers teaching with a room full of students on laptops? Aside from them all working independently on research projects, collecting information, and synthesizing all that collected data into a new product (which is usually not difficult for the teacher that is familiar with using technology in the classroom); is it possible to transition teachers into using laptops with their students in a more traditional whole group, teacher led style? Good question, and I concur, we have to be realistic in classrooms that are just beginning to implement 1:1 computing. A teacher who has never experienced 1:1 computing and is dropped into that type of environment is going to be a little intimidated. The biggest fear of teachers going down this road is their fear of lack of control. They are very used to controlling the learning environment and sequence of instruction. I am happy to report that their most definitely is a way.

One tool that we have added to our students laptops and teachers Windows based laptops is the OpenSource application iTalc ( http://italc.sourceforge.net) . iTac is an administrative tool for the teacher. It allows the teacher to view every student netbook on their own laptop display. These can be thumbnail images all at once, or individual images of individual student displays. In addition, the teacher can lock and unlock student computers , very handy when you are doing teacher led instruction. Teachers can also remotely control any student computer. This feature comes in handy when the teacher wishes to share a student's work on the student's laptop with the whole class. The teacher's display becomes what the student is seeing and is then projected out through the LCD projector connected to the teacher's laptop. We have noticed a few things that do not work. However, they are not essential features. For instance, the software apparently will allow a teacher to boot or shut down a student computer; however our Asus EeePcs are lacking a network feature that would allow this to happen. This is not a big deal.

iTalc provides teachers with a way of controlling their learning environment. The most difficult part of teaching in a 1:1 environment, once you have the control, is designing instruction that is both familiar to the teacher, but at the same time utilizes the strength of the computer and power of the resources available on the network. It 's almost as if you need a software tool that acts like anaperture on a camera. You need it open real wide, to collect as much data that it can at times, but you need to be able to clamp that aperture down and restrict what is possible at other times. Some of this can be done through strategically using theiTalc administrative software . A teacher can limit and share what students can do or see on the laptop during instruction. This is just an extension of the old "hide and reveal" strategy on the overhead projector. However, when you do the reveal part now, there are a ton more capabilities than doing the reveal part on an overhead projector!

Keeping things simple is imperative when working with teachers not familiar with technology in the classroom. You don't want to make a teacher use a dozen different applications to teach one lesson. Ideally, you want to use an application that is familiar in operations to traditional instructional tools, but at the same time combines the collaborative and resource rich components of new instructional tools. This also would provide opportunities for teachers to teach computer/information literacy skills as well as the content standards. So, who has a tool like this? Well without too much difficulty, I have discovered one such tool that I feel meets those requirements. It is called Nota and is available at http://www.notaland.com. The nice thing about this application is it web based and free, no installation necessary, and no licensing fee. What I have found with most of these "Web 2.0" resources is that they are not perfect, and by their very nature of being designed for a large audience require some creative thinking on the part of the teacher. For example, Nota requires that it's users have an email account. You can't get a Nota account without an email address because like many web applications, the process requires that you are able to receive an email message to authenticate your account. We do not provide our students with email accounts. A creative solution around this problem would be to create one account and share the account amongst all your students. Nota allows multiple users to log in with the same account at the same time. This has it's apparent drawbacks, but it is one solution if students do not posses email accounts.

Nota is like a digital notebook that combines the features of a traditional notebook, being able to write down notes and information, with that of some common digital tools. For example, you may embed a discussion board directly into any of your notebook pages. Or, you can embed Creative Commons licensed photographs offFlickr that you are able to search for directly from the Nota interface. Other resources that are directly accessible through Nota include: YouTube, Wikipedia, Google Maps, Picassa, and more all search-able from the Nota interface. In addition to the resources that are accessible in Nota , you also have the feature of a shared digital white board. So instead of one or two students at a time at the front of the room on a"smartboard," they can all be contributing to the content of the Nota page simultaneously from their desk.

Combining a classroom full of students with computers, a teacher management tool such as iTalc, and a digital tool such as Nota and teachers can create engaging instruction that allows them to control the delivery of instruction and enable them to strategically address computer/information skills and content standards at the same time.

Links:
Asus Computer - EeePc - http://eeepc.asus.com/global/product901.html
Nota - http://www.notaland.com
iTalc - http://italc.sourceforge.net
Sylvan Union School District - http://www.sylvan.k12.ca.us

Mahara Tutorials for Students and Faculty

2008-12-18T14:51:00.000-08:00

I've created four tutorials for our students and staff on how to use the online electronic portfolio system titled Mahara (the Sylvan ePortfolio). I figured we might get a few student interested during the winter holiday break. I tried to keep it pretty simple and use fairly common language. I hope to give a quick overview of what can be done with Mahara and some of its key components.

Here is the first tutorial:

(These videos look best when zoomed to full screen.)

Here are the additional tutorials:

Part II - Sylvan Mahara - Creating Views (aka - "Web Sites")
Part III - Sylvan Mahara - Set Viewing Permissions (for other Mahara users)
Part IV - Sylvan Mahara - Creating Groups

Teacher Created Software with Web 2.0

2008-05-16T13:23:00.001-07:00

Macintosh Versions:

ABC-Fun!

EarthQuake!

Windows Versions:

ABC-Fun!

Earthquake!

The two example applications that are linked at the bottom of this post are full, standalone applications you can use on your Windows or Macintosh computers. They grab resources available on the web and nest them within the applications. One concern many teachers have, especially with younger students, is utilizing web resources in a more teacher directed manner. Also, teachers often do not like the fact that when students are doing research, a web browser can often lead students astray to non-essential web sites. This strategy mitigates some of these issues. Revolution does have a small slight learning curve, but once understood, the methods used in these applications can be re-used over and over again.

These applications and ideas were actually hatched after answering successive requests from my three year old daughter for music videos from the movie Enchanted on YouTube. She is not quite old enough to be searching YouTube for her videos on her own, so I was thinking of a way to provide her an easier interface to access those videos. This ABC Fun application is a derivative of that first application and address language arts and computer skills at the kindergarten level.

This is a proof of concept since I did not spend a much time sprucing it up and there may be a few quirks left to fix too.

This application was created using a development program called Revolution, http://www.runrev.com. If you remember the days of Apple Computer's, now Apple Inc., Hypercard, you can get a general idea of Revolution. Revolution is a cross between Hypercard and and some of the more common object oriented programming languages of today.

With Revolution you can create custom software that can embed any web resource (YouTube, VoiceThread, GoogleMaps, etc., etc.) directly into your application. This may limit the possibility of students getting distracted; such as when they access these resources in a traditional web browser and accidentally navigate to a different web site. Plus it provides you with the ability to focus attention directly at the content, and provide interaction with the content in way a web browser may not. Using Revolution may give teachers a better strategy for taking advantage of web resources with primary age students. What do you think?

I quickly created the second application in about 20 minutes titled Earthquake to demonstrate some additional interfaces that can be created. It actually took longer to write this post than it did to create the Earthquake application!

Give them a try, and let me know what you think!

For questions or more information, please contact John Patten at jpatten@sylvan.k12.ca.us.

Using the "Lesson" Activity in Moodle

2008-03-20T12:56:00.000-07:00

The Lesson activity in Moodle has often been overlooked due to the fact teachers think it is difficult to use. The Lesson activity allows teachers to construct online instructional resources that include differentiated instruction based on how students interact with the learning content within the lesson. This is simply achieved by providing "checking for understanding" opportunities embedded directly with in the Moodle Lesson activity. These strategies are typically questions students answer while progressing through the Lesson activity. In the video below, I attempt to explain how this Moodle activity can be used in the classroom to promote both the content and the communications skills of our students.

Warning! The video is 6 minutes long, and is 45MB in size. If you have slow connection to the Internet, you may want to jump right to the tutorials below the video.

If the video does not appear above this text, click this link (This link requires QuickTime player from Apple. You can download it here.

TUTORIALS
Creating a Lesson Activity on Moodle

1. Setting up Groups on Moodle and Adding Students to the Groups

2. What Does A Lesson Activity Look Like? (Preview of a vocabulary example)

3. Part I - Creating the Lesson in Moodle

4. Adding a Question to the Lesson

5. Add a Second Question to the Lesson

6. How it Appears to the Student

The example above is a very basic example of the Moodle Lesson activity. With more time and a little more creativity a lot more can be done with the Lesson activity.

I encourage you to try it out with your students and if you have any questions don't hesitate to shoot me an email or post your question to the blog.

PowerPoint Games - Updated

2008-02-28T13:36:00.000-08:00

Here is an additional example of using PowerPoint games modeled after a very popular second language software strategy used by Rosetta Stone.

If the video does not appear above this text, click this link. (This link requires QuickTime player from Apple. You can download it here.

The link below is the screen cast tutorial that reviews the process of creating this type of PowerPoint game.

PowerPoint Game Tutorial

Creating Learning Games with PowerPoint

2008-02-26T15:02:00.000-08:00

In part three of the Seal Surfer vocabulary resource re-mix, I will demonstrate how to create learning games using PowerPoint.

If the video does not appear above this text, click this link. (This link requires QuickTime player from Apple. You can download it here.

The following two links are a couple of tutorials covering two examples I whipped up to demonstrate using PowerPoint as a game. I also included the actual PowerPoint templates so that you can open them up and modify them for your own use.

Vocabulary Challenge - "Time Line Model"

PowerPoint Template - "Time Line Model"

Vocabulary Challenge - "Jeopardy Style Model"

PowerPoint Template - "Jeopardy Style Model"

The following screen cast is a tutorial that will walk you through the process of creating your very own PowerPoint game.

How to Create a PowerPoint Game - Tutorial

PowerPoint Game Links

FETC PowerPoint Games: http://teach.fcps.net/trt4/FETC03/fun2.htm

PowerPoint Game Templates: http://jc-schools.net/tutorials/PPT-games/

Parade of Games - http://facstaff.uww.edu/jonesd/games/index.html

PowerPoint Games - http://teach.fcps.net/trt14/Power%20Point%20Games/power_point_games.htm

Classroom Game Templates and More - http://www.murray.k12.ga.us/teacher/kara%20leonard/Mini%20T's/March%20Mini%20T-Games/Games.htm

Part II - Using Web Apps to Develop Vocabulary Review

2008-02-20T11:50:00.000-08:00

In the Part I of the lesson I shared on February 12th (which is posted below), I showed you how to collect Creative Commons licensed images off Flickr to support your vocabulary instruction. One of the things I like about technology is the fact that your initial time and effort in gathering and creating your initial vocabulary PowerPoint, can be leveraged over and over again with minimal effort. Resources that are digital are easily transferred from one instructional format to the next. Why would you want to do this? Well, the more ways we can engage students with the content we are attempting them to learn, the better off our results. There is a finite number of times we will be able to use an instructional resource, (in the same “environment/manner/students” and in the same style,) with optimum student interest. We need to change things up, differentiate the ways we present the content to keep students engaged. Digital resources allows you to easily do this and with the varietyof new, free or low cost technologies the initial content can be remixed into new engaging resources.

I will be focusing on three strategies that will result in three different new instructional resources. The first is just a physical change in delivery. The original resource (PowerPoint presentation) stays the same, but how the students access it changes. In the second example, the content and the delivery changes, and in the third example, the content changes, but delivery stays the same. How about that for mixing things up?

Example One

Cliff Notes Version - Use a set of inexpensive USB flash drives and allow students to check them out and use at home. You can place the installer for the PowerPoint Viewer on the the USB drive and any PowerPoint presentations you have created for your students. )

Note: Anytime you begin moving USB flash drives between school and home you run the risk of acquiring a computer virus. In most cases, such as ours, your school computers will be protected by the computer virus protection software installed on it. It is important that your school computer has the most updated virus definitions from your virus product tool before you begin USB flash drive check out system in class.

Note II: Your teacher station has a CDRW drive in it. This means you could do something similar just using CDs instead of USB flash drives. I'll demostrate this in a future post.

Updated - February 22, 2008 Click the CDROM icon for a tutorial on burning a CDROM:

People in the computer industry measure computer advancements in terms of them doubling in capability, every 18-24 months. A well know engineer and co-founder of Intel, Gordon Moore, reported this in 1965 and it is now know as Moore’s Law. Advancements in technology and computing capability have supported this original research for over 40 years, and it does not appear to be slowing down in the near future. One example of this, which leads to my first example, is digital storage space. We have gone from computers that had hard drives of 40MB, about the capacity of 30 3.5 “floppy disks”, to computer that now can come with 1 Terabyte of storage, about the capacity of 769,230 “floppy disks.” These changes took place in less than 20 years. One relatively new storage medium we have are USB flash drives. Some people call them “thumb drives.” Originally these came in pretty small sizes. About 4 years ago you get a 64MB or 128MB drive for around $30 dollars, now $30 dollars will get you a thumb drive that is from 4-8GB in size. So what does this all mean? Well, the 64MB or 128MB thumb drives are as cheap as $7. At the next educational conference you go to, the vendors there will probably be giving them away for free! Swing by a few of their booths’ a couple of times and you’ll create a nice classroom collection...no joke! Once you have a few of these, start a check-out system in your classroom for students to check them out and take home. Before they check them out, load them up with the, free, Microsoft PowerPoint Viewer installer and your vocabulary lesson PowerPoint, and the students can review the content at home with Mom or Dad! For those of view that are not familiar with thumb drives, the tutorial below will walk you through the process of using one and setting it up for your students.

1. Organize your resources on your computer

2. Download and save the Microsoft PowerPoint Viewer Installer application.

You can download the Microsoft PowerPoint Viewer Installation disk HERE.

3. Copy PowePoint Viewer Installer and your Vocabulary PowerPoint presentation to the USB flash drive.

4. Create a "Read Me First" basic text file to provide instructions and save it to the USB flash drive.

Example Two

| View | Upload your own

The tutorial below will walk you through the process of taking your existing PowerPoint presentation and converting it into a SlideShare presntation and then posting it to your classroom web site.

1. Create a new account on SlideShare.net

2. Upload your PowerPoint presentation.

3. Copy the html embed code into your classroom web site and test your new web resource.

Special Additional Note: It appears you have to make your SlideShare presentation PUBLIC in order for the embed html code to work.

Example Three

Example three follows much of he same processes as example two. In this remix of your PowerPoint vocabulary resource you will be combining high end video transitions and adding a music sound track to add just a bit more “spice” to your vocabulary presentation. We will be using another free web resource titled Animoto. This web resource will require that we export each one of our PowerPoint slides as a single images. These images are then loaded up into Animoto via your web browser, remixed together, and a soundtrack can be added by you compete the new resource. As with SlideShare, this new resource will have an embed code that you can copy and past into your classroom web site (via the html window).

Below is an example:

Below are the steps to create your own Animoto vocabulary review presentation.

1. Export you PowerPoint presentation as individual jpeg slides.

2. Duplicate your slides a couple of times.

3. Upload images into Animoto.

4. Select a sound track for your presentation.

5. Copy embed html code and paste it into your classroom web site.

No two Animoto presentations are ever the same. That means you could take the same exact images and create a second movie and the resulting movie would be different from the first.

For example:

*Floppy disk image courtesy of: http://farm3.static.flickr.com/2157/2225888887_4cd1d7bc6c_m.jpg

Using Flickr to Develop Vocabulary Review

2008-02-12T12:29:00.000-08:00

This is the first of a series of posts and I will be sharing that will provide easy entry into using technology with your students to engage them and facilitate learning. As we all know, the things that we learn the easiest are usually a result of the manner in which we learned them. I like to think of this as engaged learning. For example, you’re driving along the road when you come to what appears to be a four-way stop sign. You stop, notice a car coming from the left and expect that car to stop too. You start to proceed through the intersection only to hear the car to your left lock up it breaks and screech to a stop at your driver side door. Unbeknownst to you, the sign you neglected to see at the intersection was “cross traffic does not stop.” By all accounts, the knowledge you just acquired regarding that particular intersection is indelibly stored away in your “gray matter.” Wouldn’t it be nice if we could create that type of instruction in our classroom, albeit not as dangerous? The following example works primarily due to the fact that most students have not studied their literature vocabulary using a PowerPoint driven lesson. It accomplishes its engaging “factor” through a bit of novelty (fact being the teacher has not used PowerPoint to provide a vocabulary lesson in the past) and through visuals that provide hooks to students as to the meaning of the words. Both of which are fine instructional tools to engage learning.

I took the story Seal Surfer by Michael Foreman, out of the State adopted Houghton Mifflin Language Arts text and developed a little PowerPoint presentation to strengthen vocabulary lessons in the text book. Using Flickr, http://www.flickr.com/, and the images other photographers have taken and shared on the site under Creative Commons licensing, I combined them with the story’s vocabulary lessons. The initial investment in time of gathering the complimenting Flickr images to go with the story vocabulary will be reused over and over in subsequent lesson examples. This example will demonstrate how to search for images licensed under Creative Commons copyright, save them to your local computer with their original author’s information embedded into the images so they are easy to cite when used later. These images will be combined with the key vocabulary words to create a simple PowerPoint presentation that you could use with your students.

Flickr is a web site that thousands of people all around the world use to share and get feedback about their photographs. Many of the images are licensed under the Creative Commons copyright license. A Creative Commons license means the author of the work will allow other people to use their photographs in other works, whether that be PowerPoint presentations or a school report. I find Flickr to be very easy to use and share many of my own photographs on my own Flickr account. That being said, I would only recommend this site for teachers to use and would never recommend individual student use without direct adult supervision. To use Flickr to gather images licensed under Creative Commons copyright, you will need use the advance search function in Flickr. In the search window check the boxes for finding photos that are licensed under Creative Commons, type in your search term, and review the results. When you find an image that you would like to save and use in your own PowerPoint, click on the image, select the appropriate size, and then right-click the image selecting the “Save Image as…” option. Be sure to save the image in a location you will remember later when you are creating your PowerPoint. The last part of this process is to embed the link to the original image on Flickr within the photograph’s image properties. This way you can properly cite the original author of the photograph when you import it into your PowerPoint presentation.

Seal Surfer Vocabulary PowerPoint Presentaton (Click to Download File)

The following Jing videos will walk you through the processes described above:

1. Create a title slide of the cover of your story using your cell phone and edit the image online in the free software called Picnik.

(Click here to view tutorial)

2. Search Flickr for photographs licensed under Creative Commons

(Click here to view Tutorial)

3. Create your PowerPoint Vocabulary Presentation

(Click here to view tutorial)

Let me know how it goes and if you create a vocabulary based PowerPoint send me a copy so we can share!

Next time, learn how to take your finished PowerPoint presentation and repurpose it in different formats for additional "learning mileage!"

Until next time...

John

The Beginning...

2008-02-08T11:53:00.000-08:00

This is the first post to this new blog I have titled Edutonica. Edutonica will be dedicated to the sharing of information related to the creative use of technology and education. When looking up "tonica" on line, I found a definition of "tone" or "keynote." (I also like that it sounded close to electronica which is digital or electronic music, thus, electronic tone.) So this site is going to be about educational tone, or keynotes.

Stay "tuned" for more...