Tag: edchat

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Learning @ School – Keynote

I’m excited to be heading off to New Zealand next month to keynote the Learning@School 2011 conference in Rotorua (Feb 23-25). It looks like a wonderful conference, with some really interesting themes and strands.

I’ll be talking about student leadership and empowerment – and the way we can structure learning environments to offer those opportunities. Putting students into positions of responsibility for what and how other people learn teaches them that what they do matters, and gives them new insight into how they (and others learn.)

People always say, “you learn so much by teaching” – so why not have students learn AND teach. Combining this with technology, for which students today have a natural instinct and interest,  just makes sense. Students can teach other students, teach teachers, support technology professional development, help with technical set up and support, and much more. It creates natural collaboration opportunities, provides challenges at many levels, and is really useful. Giving students this kind of responsibility creates a win-win situation where students are valued for their expertise and hard work – real, needed work!

I’ll also do a follow up session to talk about the “how tos” of student technology leadership programs, and then another one about games in education.

I also hope to get some time visiting the famous geysers, boiling mud pools and thermal springs of Rotorua!

Sylvia

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Math 2.0 interview with Sylvia Martinez

On Wednesday, Oct. 27 2010 I’ll be talking with Ihor Charischak of the weekly Math 2.0 online chat about Engineering, Game Development, and Math Education.

A couple of careers ago I was an electrical engineer and programmer in aerospace, then did game development for consoles and PCs. Some the games were “educational” and some weren’t, but the process of building a game was certainly educational for me! The connections between these subjects might not be obvious, but I think the connective thread is that “real world” math is disconnected from “school” math in many ways. Hopefully we’ll get a chance to talk about all that and some solutions during our hour together.

Ihor and I are old friends, so this gives an opportunity to make some of our private conversations over the years more public.

When: Wed October 27, 2010, 18:30-19:30, US/Pacific (GMT-08:00)*Find your local time zone here.
Participant URL: http://tinyurl.com/math20event
More information: http://mathfuture.wikispaces.com/events

Please join us!
Sylvia

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Catch-A-Teacher Day

This example of creative thinking about professional development comes from Tomaz Lasic (aka Human) in Freemantle, Western Australia — Catch-A-Teacher Day. I rarely do this, but I’m copying almost his entire post here because I think his description showcases some of the most important details of student involvement in professional development. More on that after Tomaz…

“It’s over! Our four day school Web 2.0 Expo extravaganza over the last few days of school year was largely (and I don’t use the word lightly) adjudged as ‘a success’, ‘eye opening’, ‘interesting’, ‘informative’, ‘fun’, ‘enjoyable’, ‘a bit crazy’, ‘unusual’ by a range of people around the school (eclectic and funky as our cover clip 🙂 )

For four days, three teachers and about a dozen student-helpers (13 to 15 years old), put on a ‘23 things’ of a kind for our school community to inform, teach and stir about ‘Web 2.0′ and its culture-changing potential that is starting to be realised in our societies yet (still) largely outside school walls.

To ‘walk the talk’, we not only set up stations, but also created the event’s wiki (largely student work!), even a Ning (well, sort of … 🙂 ), got a bunch of students to start up their blogs, Twitter, set up RSS readers, fooled around with Skype, Etherpad, Twiddla, Moodle etc.. We had a number of educators from around the world dropping in virtually via Etherpad, we had encouraging tweets from around the world … all in all, we were ‘doing’ Web 2.0.

But out of the four days of messing up, playing, teaching, learning, succeeding, working together, guessing and generally having a ball, the last day will remain seared in my mind forever.

Until the last day, we had very few staff that came to the expo. They would bring groups of students down but then (most of them) didn’t quite engage with the expo in any way. “That’s for the kids, not for us…” was the general sentiment, with few notable exceptions. With the whole thing PRIMARILY for staff, we weren’t making the dent. The matter was raised at our regular morning ‘war briefing’. We made the decision that the last day was going to be ‘catch-a-teacher’ day.

Catch-a-teacher ... live

It was pretty simple really. Student-helpers were encouraged to approach a teacher, invite them to the expo, try to work out and ask what the teacher might be interested in to learn…then demonstrate, teach and help them learn (about) a particular Web 2.0 tool and how it could be useful to them (the teacher). Wealso asked our student-helpers to note down on the central ‘tally’ board what teachers they taught what.

Students took up the challenge very seriously and we had them literally chasing teachers down the halls to invite, talk to, teach the teachers. With most teachers agreeing to come (even if out of courtesy if not curiosity) it was an incredible sight.

Yes, I repeat: teachers are far less likely to say no to a student than a ‘tech integrator’ with a reasonable (tech) proposition for teacher’s problem/idea in class. It just works!

ACatch-a-teacher ... come innother highlight of the day was the technically so damn easy yet so profoundly different (to ‘regular school’) Skype conference of our ‘helpers’ with a good friend Ira Socol. I saw Ira tweeting, hooked up over Skype and within seconds the whole class said ‘Hello” to Ira and his dog (“with a weird name Sir…”) in Michigan. We soon shared a screen with Google Earth on it where Ira literally showed us around his neighbourhood, place he works, we zoomed out to see and learn a bit about the Great Lakes (some of the kids watching have not been further than a few blocks from their place in their life!), cracked a joke or two and after a few minutes thanked Ira for his time.

After the event Ira tweeted:

Damn right!

I read the tweet aloud to claps, cheers and hollers of approval at our post-expo ice cream ‘debrief’ (yes, we did treat the awesome crew :-)

The sense of community, appreciation, working together, problem solving, the JOY of learning, particularly on the last day of our Expo was palpable. Many of our student-helpers ‘got off’ on it, dare say far, far more than many a lesson in the year just finished. There it was, a working rhizome of education I dream of, where roles/status/label/credit did not matter, only what we can learn, share, help, improve. Sure, it was quite an intense day, but one where the students saw the potential of what many of us have been banging on about for … years now.

Before we took our parting group photo, I asked the student-helpers is they would like to attend a school organised and run a bit like our expo – passionate, hard-working, following people’s interests, funny, a bit messy and unexpected, unclear at times but always valuing learning of all kinds: “Yes, sure, we’d love to…” I replied with just a line: “Demand it for your own kids.”

via Catch-A-Teacher Day « Human.

So what happened here?

  • A simple idea – have students ask teachers to participate in technology professional development
  • Teachers “can’t say no” to students
  • Teachers learn something they didn’t expect to
  • Student helpers have a powerful learning experience, “… sense of community, appreciation, working together, problem solving, the JOY of learning…”
  • Students helpers learn they can be knowledgeable advocates if they are prepared and assertive

The structure of professional development often reverts to the worst kind of “sit and get” classroom experience that everyone knows doesn’t work, but seems to be the only way to reach out to lots of teachers. It’s a bit like the old joke about the cop asking a man who is looking for something in the street what he is doing, and the man says, “I lost my glasses in that dark alley over there, but I’m looking here because the light is so much better.”

But with Catch-A-Teacher Day, the professional development was “…passionate, hard-working, following people’s interests, funny, a bit messy and unexpected, unclear at times but always valuing learning of all kinds…”

It DOES work to work one-on-one with teachers, but it’s supposedly more “cost effective” to try to reach all teachers at once. It’s strange that the logic of doing something that doesn’t work because it’s “cost effective” always seems to go unnoticed. But imagine if the efforts of one tech specialist were multiplied by a group of student helpers who can make the most of opportunities to spark teacher interest, answer their quick questions, or fix a problem for them that is holding them back.

And folks, this was ONE DAY – really, these things don’t have to be that complicated. As they say, a journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step.

What are you doing to leverage your own technology professional development to “catch” your teachers? Maybe Catch-A-Teacher Day can be another tool in the tool belt!

Sylvia

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The feeling of twitter as a metaphor for education

Repost from July 2008. Still relevant today!

OK, my turn. Obsession over Twitter, a microblogging tool that’s a favorite of millions thousands hundreds of edu-tech-bloggers, is running rampant over at Will Richardson’s blog Weblogg-ed – What I Hate About Twitter.

Will is ambivalent about his own reaction to Twitter, and the 103 (and counting) comments range from agreeing, explaining, dismissing, and accepting various theories about what Twitter is and should be.

In my experience, Twitter is a nice place to hang out with people. Sort of like Second Life without bumping into things. A lot like a lunch room. Twitter is simple to use and gives you 140 characters to say something, anything. You see everything your “friends” say, and you can choose your friends based on any criteria you like. So loose groups of people tend to form who have similar interests.

On Twitter, the flow of tidbits is fast and completely random. Depending on when you show up, you hear about mundane details of people’s lives, work highlights, baseball color commentary, requests for help, and more than a few musings on educational technology. Not surprisingly, when you get a bunch of people who live, work and sometimes breathe education and technology, the conversation trends that way.

On Will’s blog, the conversation about Twitter is fascinating. People love Twitter, hate Twitter, can’t stand the cacophony, want it to be neater and more organized, accept Twitter for what it is, and much much more.

But my thoughts are going elsewhere today. I’m thinking about Twitter as a human laboratory — as a metaphor for learning. Twitter is what it is. How people react to it is a mirror of how they manage their own experience and their own needs.

Imagine if we let children manage their own learning like this?

How many kids get the chance to express their needs in their learning process. Clay Burrell says, “I tend to jump in, swim around like a fish in a wine barrel, then flop out to dry up for a few days or weeks. Then jump back in again. I love the playfulness, the sharing, the relationships.”

Is there every a time we let students “swim around” in learning and then have a chance to reflect, to think, to catch their mental breath?

Nate Stearns says, “Twitter doesn’t work for me, but I know that’s more about me than anything else. I like longer bits to digest” Do we ever give children this choice?

Jarred says, “I often feel a need to “keep up” with the high-frequency tweeters out there…“ How many students are paralyzed by the competitive nature of many classroom activities?

From Christian Long, “The more we seek to create Twitterquette, the more the organic joy of it all becomes watered down so that only a small group of like-minded souls are willing to hang out.” From kindergarten on, school becomes increasingly structured and less joyful. In the end, only certain kinds of students thrive in this environment. We label these like-minded souls “successful” and denigrate the wandering souls with punishment, ever-more boring and structured courses with even less chance to find what might spark a love of learning.

You could read every single comment and create parallels about how most school experiences are so different than what we expect for our own learning.

Hopefully, you’ve realized by this time that I’m NOT advocating Twitter for the classroom, or even Twitter as a necessary part of an educator’s professional development. Far from it. Nor am I advocating that learning should all be freeform and lacking a guiding hand.

Some students can take the always-on, highly organized and structured nature of the classroom – but many can’t. What can we learn from Twitter to allow a more natural, unstructured mix of learning and socializing that might actually feel soothing to some students?

The “feeling” of Twitter may actually be what many educators hope to encourage in an inquiry-driven, project-based classroom. The thrill of getting an unexpected answer to your exact question. The ability to choose when to jump in and when to hang back.The excitement of an intellectual gauntlet thrown down and picked up. Watching experts do battle and learning that there are words to express your own inner thoughts in a more intellectual, accomplished way. Watching people verbally implode and thinking, “I won’t do that!” Socializing in a group and celebrating the common goofy humanness of all different kinds of people.

Educators who create climates of possibility in a classroom sometimes make it look easy, but it’s far more tricky than it looks to guide groups of students in goal-oriented, academic tasks while still allowing them to drive their own learning. I talk to teachers all the time who have been tweaking project assignments for years, subtly changing minor details of timing, instruction, environment and tools to increase the level of student agency while also increasing the quality of student work. It’s difficult, painstaking, rewarding work.

What might Twitter teach us about creating these learning environments?

  • The rewards of serendipity
  • Making it simple to participate, contribute, or watch
  • The importance of socializing
  • Choice
  • Freeing up time constraints
  • Questioning whether imposed rules increase or limit participation

Your thoughts?

Sylvia

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Project-ing Tech Literacy

More reaction to the new whitepaper Assessing Technology Literacy: The Case for an Authentic, Project-Based Learning Approach (Read more or download PDF)

From Education Week:

“A new whitepaper addressing recent calls for technology literacy education argues any such education should involve project-based learning, while a separate new report indicates the need for such education may soon increase. The whitepaper from Jonathan D. Becker, a grant evaluator for the U.S. Department of Education, and Cherise A. Hodge and Mary W. Sepelyak, doctoral candidates at Richmond’s Virginia Commonwealth University, insists that, despite contention over what exactly constitutes technology literacy, there is consensus in the 49 states with technology literacy goals that the construct is multidimensional, and that one of those dimensions is acting or doing. In other words, students don’t just observe technology. They interact with it, meaning any instruction involving technology literacy should include students using technology in an active or interactive way.”

via Project-ing Tech Literacy – Digital Education – Education Week.

Although they got Dr. Becker’s job wrong (he’s actually an Associate Professor of Educational Leadership at Virginia Commonwealth University,) it’s a nice analysis of the whitepaper! Hope you read it and share with principals, tech coordinators, and others wondering what to do about student technology literacy.

Assessing Technology Literacy: The Case for an Authentic, Project-Based Learning Approach (PDF)

Sylvia