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Edu Panel at the 140 Conference Los Angeles

Just got back from a quick trip to Hollywood, in the rain no less. We probably got a whole .00001 inch, which meant that traffic was at a standstill. We just aren’t used to it!

But I did make it on time for the 140 Conference LA (Exploring the State of Now) where I teamed up with some great educators to talk about the impact of Twitter and other Real Time Communication on K-12 education.

Aparna Vashisht (@parentella), CEO of Parentella, expertly organized and moderated the panel that included Lisa Dabbs (@teachingwthsoul), Tanya Roscorla (@reportertanya) and me (@smartinez).

Aparna posted a summary of the conversation on her blog 140 Conference Los Angeles 2010: Edu Panel | Parentella.

We didn’t have much time, but I think we all made good points about the opportunities and challenges of bringing this disruptive technology into the classroom.

If the video appears online, I’ll post it here. (But the live stream wasn’t working and there were a lot of very upset techies running around so I have some doubts!)

Sylvia

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Elevating the Education Reform Conversation – Live Monday 5PM EST

Don’t miss this!

FutureofEducation.com and Edutopia are sponsoring Elevating The Education Reform Debate from 5 pm EST to 7 pm EST. The all-star panel of educators will tackle some of current controversy around education “reform” stirred up by the movie Waiting for Superman, and MSNBCs week-long EducationNation. Set to appear: Julie Evans, Alfie Kohn, Chris Lehmann, Deb Meier, Diane Ravitch, Will Richardson, Sir Ken Robinson, Gary Stager moderated by Steve Hargadon.

Date: Monday, October 4, 2010
Time: 2pm Pacific / 5pm Eastern / 9pm GMT (international times here)
Duration: 2 hours
Location: In Elluminate. Log in at http://tr.im/futureofed. The Elluminate room will be open up to 30 minutes before the event if you want to come in early. To make sure that your computer is configured for Elluminate, please visit http://www.elluminate.com/support. Recordings of the session will be posted within a day of the event at the event page.
Event and Recording Page:  http://www.learncentral.org/event/106358
Hashtag: #elev8ed
Seriously – tune in.
Sylvia
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Back to school: Student-led conferences

OK, fall is officially here so I suppose it’s time to wrap up the “Back the School” set of blog posts I’ve been doing.

Last but not least, Student-led Conferences. This is something that most schools do NOT do, but some do very successfully. So why is this practice not more well-known? Perhaps it takes a matching philosophy of student empowerment in all areas, including assessment and planning.

Traditional parent-teacher conferences are places where a teacher shares information with parents about their child, parents can ask questions, and together, they can steer the course of a successful educational experience for that child. That’s the ideal, of course, but even that leaves out the most important stakeholder, the student. How can this succeed if the student themself only gets third party reports about what happened?

Proponents of student-led conferences say that the practice put students in charge of their own learning, gives students a better handle on their own progress, and shows parents that student achievement is in the student’s hands, not theirs (or the teacher’s). The hallmark of an effective student conference is preparation, not just for the student to create an authentic report of their own progress, but also for the parents since this is not what most parents are used to.

Resources:

Student-led Conferences – Very recent and up-to-date information, examples, and resources. Multiple videos for a range of grade levels modeling best practices, viewer guides, handouts, and planning guides from Curriculum Services Canada. These videos show that student-led conferences aren’t just a stunt, but a serious reflection exercise for students, parents and teachers.

Student-led Conferences (Education World) – A good overview article of student-led conferences. Some of the  links have gotten old, but enough are still working to make this a recommend resource.

How to Run Successful Parent-Team Conferences: Tips by the Dozen for Middle-Level Educators (PDF) – An article from Middle Matters magazine in 1998. These tips are timeless!

Student-Led Conferences Hold Kids Accountable (Education World) – quotes research about the benefits of student-led conferences, including higher rates of parent participation.

Successful Student-Led School Conferences – A number of resources and articles from MiddleWeb – Exploring Middle School Reform.

Sylvia

More back to school posts!

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Fearless Explorer

Guest post by Joe Wood

Believe it or not, I wouldn’t consider myself a very techie person. I can’t set up a server, can barely understand the wireless network in our house, and have enough blackened sockets to know I should never be trusted with any electrical handy work. However, friends, family, and colleagues often call me for computer or cell phone technical support. No longer can I attend a family function without spending some time working on a computer problem. Recently, I purchased an iPad just because so many people were asking for help and yet I had never played with one for longer than five minutes at the Apple Store. Rather than calling myself a “techie,” I tend to think of myself as a “fearless explorer.”

How did this happen? Well, I blame the Federal Government. After all, they’re always the “bad guys,” right? In my case, the techiness started with an Enhancing Education Through Technology (EETT) Grant. In 2005 I decided to search for a job in a school district closer to home. While perusing EdJoin, I stumbled across a science position at a middle school right in my neighborhood. At the last minute I decided to apply and was offered the job. A few weeks later, after getting my classroom set up and meeting students and colleagues, my principal sent me over to the District Office to pick up my “computer stuff.” I wondered what might this “stuff” be? A laptop? Maybe one of those new LCD projectors? My previous school site had purchased one and since twenty-seven teachers shared it I was able to use it once to show my students a virtual frog dissection website. It was amazing!

When I arrived at the district office I met John, the Director of Technology Services, someone who would quickly become my mentor – whether he wanted to or not. John explained that the school district had been awarded an EETT grant, placing technology in every 7th and 8th grade science and social studies classroom. The goal of the grant was to use this technology to increase academic performance, while at the same time improving both student and teacher technology proficiency. Like a magician with a really deep hat, John started pulling out all of the hardware I would receive as participating teacher. I walked out of his office with a new laptop, a document camera, a LCD projector, and a wireless tablet. He also informed me that the following week fifteen student laptops, a printer, and a wireless access point would appear in my classroom. John tried his best to explain how each of these devices worked, but all I really heard was “flux capacitors” and “1.21 gigawatts.” It was as if Doc Brown from Back to the Future was talking to me himself.

Keep in mind, at this point in my life, I wasn’t totally clueless about technology. I had been using email for almost a decade, was quite adept at shopping on Amazon, and had successfully made it through college with Microsoft Word, Excel, and PowerPoint as my close, personal friends. However, I decided that the only way I would be successful at using this gear with a bunch of pre-pubescent adolescents was if I took it home and fearlessly explored. I also had an inkling that when those fifteen student laptops appeared that everything in my classroom might change and I would need to be a little more technology proficient.

I remember that first night quite vividly. I laid out all of my digital gifts on our large kitchen table. Once the laptop, projector, document camera, and wireless tablet were all neatly organized in a perfectly symmetrical manner, accompanied by their collection of cables and adaptors, I just stood there and stared. What do I do now? I started with the projector. Surely, hooking it up to the laptop couldn’t be that hard. I looked at the back of the projector and decided to begin with the power cable. That was easy. Digging into the recesses of my mind from the one other time I had used a LCD projector at my former school, I scanned the back of the projector, as well as the back of the laptop. “Hmm, there is a blue outlet on the back of the projector that matches the blue outlet on the back of the laptop,” I thought to myself, “I wonder if there is a cable that will connect these two?” Sure enough I found one that had two blue ends matching the outlets and it seemed to work. I played until midnight that evening piecing things together like a giant puzzle. Around 12:15am, when I finally had all of my technology connected, it dawned on me that I would have to reconstruct this mess in my classroom tomorrow! Doing the only smart thing I could think of, I used masking tape and a sharpie to label all of the ports and their corresponding cords, and gently packed them away.

The next morning I arrived at school just before 6:30 and amazingly it only took me 45 minutes to hook everything back up. Naturally, a couple of the pieces of tape had fallen off, I somehow ended up with an extra cable, and the wireless tablet only wanted to occasionally connect to its Bluetooth adapter. Regardless, I was up and running right around the same time my students started pouring into the room. Since I had spent nearly all night figuring out how to plug everything in, my lesson was a little less than stellar. Honestly, I can’t even remember what I actually taught that day. However, what I do remember was the look on every single kid’s face as they entered the classroom. It was that look of pure imagination and curiosity. In every period there was a palpable vibe of excitement emanating from the students.

“Whoa! Look at that Mr. Wood! We can see your desktop. What are you going to show us today?” “Hey, since you have your computer set up, does this mean we are going to start using the student laptops soon?” “My friends said they started using them last week in science. They sound cool.”

The following week the student computers did arrive and we completed our first technology project – a PowerPoint presentation about cells. Naturally, since this was our first computer project, not everything went as planned. One computer crashed, two refused to connect to the wireless network (I later discovered each computer had a wireless on/off switch), and nearly every PowerPoint presentation demonstrated that one could insert too many animations. However, during this project I witnessed the future of my teaching. As I walked around the room, I observed students who were completely excited, engaged, and enthralled by technology- infused learning. I noticed tables of students working in pairs, debating the best way to display a nucleus or cell wall and engrossed in scientific conversations about the difference between prokaryotic and eukaryotic cells. I watched students reflect, collaborate, solve problems, and search for information without any prompting from me. At the same time my students saw their teacher as a learner – as someone who didn’t have all the answers, but a person who was willing to be a fearless explorer and discover the solution with them.

PowerPoint was only the beginning. Since that day my students and I have fearlessly explored the use of blogs, wikis, cell phones, and even a virtual electron microscope. Some things worked out flawlessly, while other resources were only used during first period and then quickly abandoned for an alternative by the time second period students appeared. Teaching in an EETT classroom was a transformational experience in my career. Through the integration of technology, my classroom moved from a teacher-centered system to a student-centered learning environment. Along the way, I learned that computer expertise is not the secret to integrating technology – it’s simply a willingness to play, discover, and explore. Also, it never hurts to have some masking tape and a sharpie close by.

——————————–

This essay was written by Joe Wood, Teacher on Special Assignment in the Department of Professional Learning & Innovation of the San Juan Unified School District in California. Joe wrote this at the National Writing Project Summer Invitational at UC Davis. He shared it with us here at Generation YES and gave us permission to publish it.

This essay is a perfect expression of the kind of jump in and swim around with the students attitude towards technology that works so well in schools. Today, Joe is the district coordinator for San Juan’s GenYES program running in 6 middle schools as a result of this same EETT grant. Now he’s sharing his ‘fearless explorer” attitude with lots of teachers and student tech leaders district-wide.

For more information on the San Juan EETT program, watch this video, it’s great!

Sylvia

Previous posts about the San Juan Schools GenYES programs:

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Words Gone Wild 2.0

Web 2.0’s value as a marketing term now far exceeds its value as a technical term. Anything Web 2.0 must be more techie, more interactive, and have more onlinier goodness than before, and therefore, just be better. “Web 2.0” is a straight shot into the brain, don’t worry about the subtle details of what it actually means.

What a handy shortcut …and a trap. I’ve posted before about the danger of adopting marketing terms as meaningful language. Marketing terms work because they are emotional shortcuts. Marketeers love these words because they can say more in less time, allowing the consumer to fill in the pesky details of whatever is being sold with what they were hoping to hear.

For educators, this is a cautionary tale about being swept up by what marketeers call an “empty vessel” – a term that evokes strong associations but actually is meaningless. (Think shampoo descriptions like “citreshine”, “silkessence”, etc. – made up words meant that evoke cleanliness, fullness, and the happy feeling of lush, shiny hair, but without any actual science behind it.)

You may have heard that Web 2.0 is “all about” interactivity, ease-of-use, democratizing publishing, collaboration, communication, connectivity, users vs. bosses, new business models vs. old, two-way vs. one-way, personalization, micro-functionality, customization, online apps, the new architecture of society, networking, a platform, innovation, long tails, style, transparency, participation, generative, folksonomy vs. directories, the wisdom of crowds, clouds, self-sorting, finding vs. searching, syndication vs. stickiness, services, an attitude, a network that learns, emergent, in perpetual beta, the collective intelligence, engagement, … should I go on?

All of these are true, and at the same time, none of them are the true single lens to see what Web 2.0 is. Something this malleable, this variable, this divergent, can’t also be meaningful in any one single sense.

And because Web 2.0 is essentially meaningless, what it means for learning is not known without more details. Talking about Web 2.0 tools and learning is meaningless as well – until you  explain what the tools are, what they are used for, and what the students do with them. It’s just not good enough to talk about how the Luddites don’t get it. Simply using the term “Web 2.0 tools” deliberately obscures the facts — no wonder people don’t get it.

Can this be undone? Can we nag people into proper usage? No, I don’t think so — it’s a done deal. Web 2.0 has reached escape velocity into the orbit of common use, one more empty vessel pretending to have meaning where there is none. It’s too easy, too convenient a shortcut to express the current new new thing. There is no way to wrangle it back down to earthly reality. These terms are typically short-lived, though, as the next new new thing will surely take its place.

Web 3.0 anyone?

Sylvia

Related posts:

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Report: School Principals and Social Networking

via press release:

A new research report was issued today that summarizes the results of an extended look at school principals’ use of social networking. The underlying research for the report, “School Principals and Social Networking in Education: Practices, Policies, and Realities in 2010,” was conducted by edWeb.net, IESD, Inc., MMS Education, and MCH Strategic Data.

Since the creation of MySpace and LinkedIn in 2003 and Facebook in 2004, online social networking has quickly become a pervasive means for people to connect all over the world. Yet schools are one of the last holdouts, where many of the most popular social networking sites are often banned for students, and often for teachers, librarians, and administrators, out of a concern about safety, privacy, confidentiality, and lack of knowledge about how best to ensure appropriate use.

At the same time, education reform initiatives from all corners—Federal and state programs, education research, and policy initiatives—are advocating the use of innovative and collaborative technology to drive improvements in teaching quality and student achievement.

The goal of this research study was to take a close look at the attitudes of school principals about social networking for their own personal use, with their colleagues, and within their school communities. Principals can play an important role in encouraging and training their teachers and staff to adopt new technologies, and in setting policies for the use of technology and the Internet in schools.

The research was conducted in two phases: an online survey sent to a cross section of educators across the country in the fall of 2009, followed by an in-depth EDRoom online discussion with 12 principals who are currently using social networking in their professional lives.

Among the key findings:

  • Most principals who responded to the survey believe that social networking sites can provide value in education because they provide a way for educators to share information and resources with an extended community of educators, create professional learning communities, and improve school-wide communications with students and staff. About half of the surveyed principals felt that social networking is very valuable for these purposes.
  • Most of the principals in the discussion group thought that social networking and online collaboration tools would make a substantive change in students’ educational experience. Specific types of changes they mentioned included:
    • Development of a more social/collaborative view of learning
    • Improved motivation, engagement, and/or active involvement
    • Creation of a connection to real-life learning
  • None of the responding principals in the discussion group had school/district policies in place on social networking that were deemed adequate, suggesting the need for conversations and collaboration on establishing policies that can facilitate appropriate use of social networking in schools for educational purposes.

The PDF is being made available for free. Download School Principals and Social Networking in Education: Practices, Policies, and Realities in 2010 (PDF)

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Open myths, closed responses about ‘digital natives’

The latest issue of the Journal of Computer Assisted Learning (Volume 26, Issue 5 – October 2010 – Wiley Online Library) has a special section of articles on various aspects of the “net generation” and “digital natives”. This is a topic I’ve written about a couple of times, noting that while students may be facile with technology it doesn’t mean they know anything about it. This myth creates misunderstandings and false generational prejudices that may seduce educators into feeling that youth don’t need their guidance and wisdom in this area, when in fact, the exact opposite is true. It also creates excuses for teachers to deny that technology must be incorporated into classrooms. (see Digital natives/immigrants – how much do we love this slogan?)

The Journal has some fabulous looking articles – but I can’t read them. Most of you can’t read them either. It’s a closed journal. Sorry, only for academics and researchers. Here’s the problem. The “digital native” myth is being perpetuated in popular culture, books, and keynote speeches, all easily accessible. These rebuttals, well-researched (I assume), peer-reviewed, and not sensationalized, are locked behind closed doors.

So when teachers hear that the curriculum is being modified to meet the needs of “digital natives” – what can they do? When educators present at conferences about this issue, should they cite the abstract to refute the silly (but free) sloganeering? When they talk to friends, neighbors, teachers, or the school board who think that kids “brains are different now” can they pull from a deep knowledge of brand new, relevant research? No – it’s not available.

I’ve taken the liberty to cut and paste the abstracts from the articles here. But’s that all we get!

Beyond the ‘digital natives’ debate: Towards a more nuanced understanding of students’ technology experiences Bennett, S. and Maton, K. – The idea of the ‘digital natives’, a generation of tech-savvy young people immersed in digital technologies for which current education systems cannot cater, has gained widespread popularity on the basis of claims rather than evidence. Recent research has shown flaws in the argument that there is an identifiable generation or even a single type of highly adept technology user. For educators, the diversity revealed by these studies provides valuable insights into students’ experiences of technology inside and outside formal education. While this body of work provides a preliminary understanding, it also highlights subtleties and complexities that require further investigation. It suggests, for example, that we must go beyond simple dichotomies evident in the digital natives debate to develop a more sophisticated understanding of our students’ experiences of technology. Using a review of recent research findings as a starting point, this paper identifies some key issues for educational researchers, offers new ways of conceptualizing key ideas using theoretical constructs from Castells, Bourdieu and Bernstein, and makes a case for how we need to develop the debate in order to advance our understanding.

Beyond natives and immigrants: exploring types of net generation students G. Kennedy, T. Judd, B. Dalgarno and J. Waycott – Previously assumed to be a homogenous and highly skilled group with respect to information and communications technology, the so-called Net Generation has instead been shown to possess a diverse range of technology skills and preferences. To better understand this diversity, we subjected data from 2096 students aged between 17 and 26 from three Australian universities to a cluster analysis. Through this analysis, we identified four distinct types of technology users: power users (14% of sample), ordinary users (27%), irregular users (14%) and basic users (45%). A series of exploratory chi-square analyses revealed significant associations between the different types of technology users and the university that students attended, their gender and age and whether the student was local or international. No associations were found for analyses related discipline area, socio-economic status or rurality of residence. The findings are discussed in light of the rhetoric associated with commentaries about the Net Generation, and suggestions about their implications for teaching and learning in universities are offered.

Net generation students: agency and choice and the new technologies C. Jones and G. Healing – Based on research investigating English first-year university students, this paper examined the case made for a new generation of young learners often described as the Net Generation or Digital Natives in terms of agency and choice. Generational arguments set out a case that links young people’s attitudes and orientations to their lifelong exposure to networked and digital technologies. This paper drew on interview data from mixed methods research to suggest that the picture is more complex than the equation of exposure to new technologies and a generational change of attitudes and capacities. Starting from the position that interaction with technology is mediated by activity and an intentional stance, we examined the choices students make with regard to the technologies they engage with. We explored the perceived constraints students face and the way they either comply or resist such constraints. We concluded that agency actively shapes student engagement with technology but that an adequate conception of agency must expand beyond the person and the self to include notions of collective agency identifying the meso level as an activity system that mediates between the students and their technological setting.

Debunking the ‘digital native’: beyond digital apartheid, towards digital democracy – This paper interrogates the currently pervasive discourse of the ‘net generation’ finding the concept of the ‘digital native’ especially problematic, both empirically and conceptually. We draw on a research project of South African higher education students’ access to and use of Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs) to show that age is not a determining factor in students’ digital lives; rather, their familiarity and experience using ICTs is more relevant. We also demonstrate that the notion of a generation of ‘digital natives’ is inaccurate: those with such attributes are effectively a digital elite. Instead of a new net generation growing up to replace an older analogue generation, there is a deepening digital divide in South Africa characterized not by age but by access and opportunity; indeed, digital apartheid is alive and well. We suggest that the possibility for digital democracy does exist in the form of a mobile society which is not age specific, and which is ubiquitous. Finally, we propose redefining the concepts ‘digital’, ‘net’, ‘native’, and ‘generation’ in favour of reclaiming the term ‘digitizen’.

via Journal of Computer Assisted Learning – Volume 26, Issue 5 – October 2010 – Wiley Online Library.

Sylvia

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The Digital Classroom – a podcast from ACEC 2010

Back in April I keynoted the Australian Council for Educational Computing (ACEC 2010) in Melbourne, Australia. After the keynote I had a tap on the shoulder from a lovely young man who works for a show called “FutureTense” on the ABC National Radio network asking if he could record a short interview for his show.

I think it came out pretty well – listen and you’ll hear all kinds of ideas about “The Digital Classroom” from me and others including Helen Otway, Chris Rogers, Alan November, Andy Penman, and Michelle Selinger. I especially liked opening the show by talking about how technology is not dehumanizing us as it’s often depicted. Rather technology allows a greater sense of community with people around the world, and how this can now include young people in an unprecedented way.

Sylvia

 

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Back to school: Ten commandments of tech support

Reposted for a new school year!

The ten commandments of school tech support

  1. Thou shalt test the fix.
  2. Thou shalt talk to actual students and teachers and make time to watch how  technology works during actual class time, not just when it’s quiet.
  3. Thou shalt not make fun of the tech skills of teachers or students, nor allow anyone else in the tech department to make disparaging remarks about them.
  4. Closing trouble tickets shalt not be thine highest calling; thou shalt strive to  continually make the learning environment better.
  5. Thou shalt not elevate the system above the users.
  6. The network will be never be perfect. Learning is messy. Get thyself over it.
  7. When teaching someone a new skill, keep thy hands off the mouse.
  8. Thou shalt listen to requests with an open mind and respond in plain English.
  9. Blocking shall be controlled by educators, not filtering companies. Thy job is to enable learning, not enforce behavior.
  10. Thou shalt include students and teachers in decision-making about technology purchases and policy. Their interest is not an affront to your professionalism.

Sylvia

More back to school posts!

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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