Category: professional development

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Teacher PLC at the Learning Games Network

Teacher PLC | Learning Games Network

Are you a teacher interested in using games in the classroom? Help design a new Professional Learning Community (PLC) at the Learning Games Network.

The PLC will provide a forum for teachers to share experiences and ideas for using existing games in the classroom, as well as discuss ideas and concepts for where games could fill gaps and niches in curricula. Teachers involved in technology will also have the opportunity for professional development in workshops with developers and producers.

Be sure to fill out the short survey to share your interests and sign up for more information. Pass this on to other educators interested in games!

Sylvia

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Can lectures be interactive?

How do you create interactive computing lectures? « Computing Education Blog.

Nice example from Mark Guzdial about interactive lectures.

A real, authentic problem, with a teacher who doesn’t know the answer, can be energizing for students.  When I make a mistake in live coding, it’s always unscripted, so I don’t immediately know what the bug is.  Most of the time, some student will yell out what I did wrong before I figure it out for myself.  I think that’s a great position to be in, though it does require a heaping helping of humility before starting the lecture.

This doesn’t have to be about coding…

Sylvia

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Constructivism in practice – making lectures work

Posted with permission from The Institute for Learning Centered Education – Don Mesibov

If you must lecture, please don’t do it early in the lesson.
Most teachers begin a lesson with a launcher, anticipatory set, ice breaker, bell ringer or an exploratory activity (which we recommend). Each of these often motivates students to think something good might happen during class; some of the students actually begin to look forward to what might come next.

Unfortunately, just as students are beginning to think they might not mind being in class, the teacher too often launches into a lecture and all momentum is lost. It’s like the dead scene in a play that interrupts the flow of excitement generated earlier.

Why do teachers lecture early in a lesson? It’s because we have new information we want our students to learn and we want to start by telling them what we want them to know. But it isn’t effective. If the content is completely new to students it is hard to follow the words of a speaker. It is like trying to learn the rules and procedures of baseball when you’ve had no previous knowledge that such a game existed. If you want to teach someone baseball, hand them a glove and have a catch. Put a bat in their hands and pitch to them. Then you can start to explain how the game is played – after, not before, you have actively engaged them.

I’ve sat in the back of the room as teachers have tried to explain to students what they want them to learn. I’ve noticed the faces of the disinterested students. They have no hooks to hang their thoughts on – no context for understanding what the teacher is saying. Sometimes what the teacher says early in the lesson would be more effective if said near the end when the students have been engaged with the new information. The lecture might be more effective as a summary. Once you’ve tried hitting a ball with a bat for fifteen minutes, a mini-lecture on how to stand and how to hold the bat has much more meaning.

Here are some examples of how to engage students with new information BEFORE beginning your explanations.

  • BILL OF RIGHTS: Don’t explain or describe them. Distribute a one page summary of the Bill of Rights, pair the students and ask each pair to prioritize them in order of importance. Then ask each pair to justify its prioritization. There is no right or wrong and it doesn’t matter how each pair prioritizes. What is important is that the students have been challenged to think about each article and what it means.
  • TOO, TO, AND TWO: Pair or group students and ask them to design an ad for their favorite TV show or DVD, or food using each of these words correctly at least once.
  • MIXTURES AND SOLUTIONS: Give students different substances to mix and ask them to share conclusions they reach based on the results.
  • PERCENTAGES: Ask students, in pairs or groups, to share their perceptions of what’s good and what’s bad about buying with credit cards. This can lead to a lesson on percentages that students perceive as relevant when you ask them to assess whether the purchase of a sale item, using a credit card, will actually save money when the interest payments are taken into account.

You can probably come up with more and better examples. My only point is that after you grab the students’ attention with a good opening, don’t blow it by losing the momentum with a lecture that the students probably won’t understand anyway.

Please know that your work in the field of education is as meaningful to our society as anything anyone can possibly do. Thank you for caring about the future of our children!!!!

Don Mesibov October 2009
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Copyright (c) 2009, Institute for Learning Centered Education. All rights reserved.

The Institute is currently registering teams for the 2010 summer constructivist conference, July 19-23, at St. Lawrence University, Canton, New York. Don’t miss the opportunity for this unique conference that models the constructivist behaviors that teachers are using increasingly in the classroom. More information at The Institute for Learning Centered Education.

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Constructivist Celebration @ NYSCATE

Well, it’s official, there will be a Constructivist Celebration in partnership with the annual NYSCATE (New York State Association for Computers and Technologies in Education) conference in Rochester, NY.

Strong National Museum of Play
Rochester, NY
Sunday, Nov 22, 2009
9AM-4PM

The Constructivist Celebration is an opportunity for you to let your creativity run free with the world’s best open-ended software tools and enthusiastic colleagues who share your commitment to children, computing, creativity and constructivism. You might think of this stimulating event as a spa day for your mind and soul!

Best of all, the Constructivist Celebration @ NYSCATE is being held at the Strong National Museum of Play, a great setting that should prove inspiring and fun.

The day kicks off with a keynote, by Gary Stager on “Creative Computing”. By the way, for you Stager fans, this will be the only chance to see Gary at NYSCATE this year.

Then you will enjoy five hours of creativity on your own laptop using open-ended creativity software provided by consortium members FableVision, Inspiration, LCSI, and Tech4Learning. Representatives of the Constructivist Consortium will be there to assist with your project development.

Plus you get to keep the software and have a fabulous lunch!

For more details and registration, see the Constructivist Consortium registration website. (If you want to register for BOTH the pre-conference celebration and NYSCATE at the same time, click here to go to the NYSCATE website. You will be asked to become a NYSCATE member, but this is free!)

I’ll be co-leading this event, so I hope to see you there!

Sylvia

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ASCD does it again! Free e-book: Challenging the Whole Child E-Book (Limited Time)

ASCD has done it again!

A few months ago they published the first of a series of e-books on the “Whole Child”. I was honored that my article (Working with Tech-Savvy Kids) was selected to be in that issue. My post about that is here, but now you have to pay for that first issue.

Now the second of the series is out, and ASCD is offering it for free for a limited time.

Challenging the Whole Child E-Book Free for Limited Time – ASCD blog post explaining offer (August 3-16, 2009)

Sample chapters (PDF)

I’m not in this one, and not as familiar with the authors, but I trust ASCD and the editorial staff of Educational Leadership. The selections look timely and useful, and you can’t beat the price.

And don’t miss the companion study guide and the always free, always updated Whole Child Blog.

Sylvia

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Constructing Modern Knowledge 2009

Wow, I’ve had this post in draft mode for way too long and it’s getting way too long as a result! This may turn out to be a couple of posts.

Constructing Modern Knowledge 2009 was July 13-16 in Manchester, NH. This is the second year for this event, and my second year being on the faculty.

First of all, the event once again exceeded my expectations, both in content and the attendees. The things that happened there and the conversations I’ve had fueled a lot of new thinking on my own part. There were also some things that I wished we’d had more time for.

At CMK, there are few presentations, so that the bulk of the time is spent working on projects and thinking about how these kinds of project experiences, especially using computers, translate back to the classroom. But two presentations stood out to me and invaded my thinking throughout the event and beyond.

Deborah MeierDeborah Meier was one. She was warm and grandmotherly, smart, and her presentation was amazing. And when I say presentation, it wasn’t a powerpoint. It was just her, standing in front of us recounting her own journey to becoming a progressive educator with insightful, interesting anecdotes that perfectly illustrated her points. Her appeal for a community-based approach to education and its connection to building our democracy was compelling and reinforced much of my work in regards to student voice.

I was glad that I re-read her book, The Power of Their Ideas on the plane ride to Manchester. It reminded me of how subtle ideas can be so powerful when executed with passion and care. Her talk reinforced how much work it takes over long periods of time to make things you care about sustain and grow.

Lela Gandini was the other speaker that brought it home for me. Dr. Gandini is the United States liaison for the dissemination of the Reggio Emilia approach, a revolutionary learner-centered approach pioneered in Reggio Emilia, Italy. Her presentation was complemented by amazing visuals of the Reggio schools and the work of children. The schools are constructed with deliberate care to provide space, light, and to support a creative learning environment. The attention to detail and the constant working towards making it better was fascinating.

Reggio is also built on having teachers carefully listen to children, document and discuss their work, and take direction from the interests of children to build a rich, layered learning experience. There is a lot of attention paid to the integration of art using rich materials to draw out children and help develop the child’s sense of self, and their place in the community and the world.

The juxtaposition of Meier’s focus on student voice as a part of creating a stronger democracy and the Reggio focus on listening carefully to student ideas to guide learning opened my eyes once again. They both were saying similar things, yet in subtly different ways. There were so many factors that go into creating these kinds of learning communities, not the least of which is the importance of engaging adults who are willing to be open to learning themselves and sublimating their own desire to quickly impart knowledge into a desire to guide children as part of a life-long learning journey.

Next post will be more about the attendees and the awesome project work we all did during the week. You may have also noticed that there seemed to be very little in this post to do with technology. I’ll talk about that later too. For now, though, just a few resources about these two remarkable women and “the power of their ideas.”

An online bookstore collection (by Gary Stager,) including books by Deborah Meier and books about Reggio Emilia.

More to come…

Sylvia

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Last chance for free ebook from ASCD

Update – this offer is now expired. You can still get the e-book for $9.95 (or $7.95 if you are an ASCD member.) Still a pretty good deal if you ask me!

May 6, 2009 is the last day to download a free ebook, Educating the Whole Child, from ASCD. After this, this 366 page e-book will only be available for a fee.

Do students really want to learn? Can schools and classrooms become joyful? Are there natural links between standard curriculum and what motivates students to learn? Explore these and other questions in this e-book collection of articles from Educational Leadership by renowned authors such as Carol Ann Tomlinson, Richard Sagor, Nel Noddings, Thomas R. Guskey, and Allison Zmuda.

Besides these fabulous and well-known authors, you will also get our article, Working with Tech-Savvy Kids, along with other articles by Will Richardson, king of the edu-bloggers, and many more.

Don’t miss out on this free offer!

Educating the Whole Child ebook – free download link (valid April 15 – May 6, 2009)

Sylvia

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Part 2: What Makes a Good Project

Creative Educator magazine has Part 2 of the article series What Makes a Good Project by Gary Stager.

In Raising our Standards, Developing Projects that Endure, Stager argues that good projects meet higher standards than those found in state mandated lists of curricular objectives.

I suggest that educators plan and evaluate student projects based on a loftier set of goals. Teachers should embrace the aesthetic of an artist or critic and create opportunities for project development that strive to satisfy the following criteria. Is the project:

• Beautiful
• Thoughtful
• Personally meaningful
• Sophisticated
• Shareable with a respect for the audience
• Moving
• Enduring

Read the article online here, or download the PDF here.

I recommended Part 1 in this blog post last November, and highlighted the other excellent articles (still free, still online!) found in that issue here.

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Successful, sustainable strategies for technology integration and tech support in a tough economy

This weekend I’ll be in San Diego as an invited speaker at the National School Board Association (NSBA) conference. I’m not sure I realized how relevant it would be when I proposed Successful, Sustainable Strategies for Technology Integration and Tech Support in a Tough Economy as my topic last year.

I’ll be focusing on 5 strategies that create strong local communities of practice around the use of technology. All of these strategies include students as part of the solution. They are:

  • Technology literacy for all – Creating an expectation that modern technology will be used for academics, schoolwork, communication, community outreach, and teaching. A key success factor is teaching students how to support their peers as mentors and leaders.
  • Student tech teams – The 21st century version of the old A/V club, this strategy expands the definition of tech support from fixing broken things to also include just-in-time support of teachers as they use new technology. This digital generation is ready, willing and able to help improve education, we just need to show them how.
  • Professional development 24/7 – The old idea that teachers would go off to one workshop or a conference and immediately start using technology has been proven wrong. Truly integrated technology use requires a bigger change than that, and it doesn’t happen overnight. Teachers require more support in their classrooms that they can count on when they need it. Students can help provide teachers with this constancy and supportive community.
  • Students as stakeholders – Whenever schools initiate new technology programs, there is typically a call for all stakeholders to be included. Parents, teachers, staff, board members, and members of the community are invited to participate — but rarely students. Even though students are 92% of the population at the school, and are 100% of the reason for wanting to improve education, their voice goes unheard. Students can bring passion and point-of-view to the planning and implementation of major technology initiatives. They can be allies and agents of change, rather than passive objects to be changed.
  • Students as resource developers – Students can help develop the resources every teacher and student needs to use technology successfully. These resources can be help guides, posters, instructional videos, school websites, or teacher home pages. Students of all types can use their talents to build customized resources for their own school. Artists, actors, and techies can contribute to this process.

Building a self-sufficient community of technology users means that whenever possible, you build home-grown expertise and local problem-solving capability. This is the high-tech equivalent of a victory garden, only with teachers and students all growing their own capabilities with each other’s help.

In this tough economy, no one can afford to ignore the potential students have to help adults solve the problems of technology integration and support. Students are there, they just need adults to teach them how to help, and then allow them to help.

And after all, aren’t these the 21st century skills everyone talks about? Like solving real problems, learning how to learn, collaboration, and communication? How real is the problem of technology integration, and how foolish of us to overlook students as part of the solution, especially when the reciprocal benefits to the students are so great.

Sylvia

PS – For a look at how these strategies can be applied in laptop schools, download my new whitepaper – Student Support of Laptop Programs. (16 page PDF)

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Heavy-handed filtering is a problem, not a solution

I recently saw an email on the WWWEDU listserve by Nancy Willard, executive director of the Center for Safe and Responsible Internet Use, that I thought really needed to be shared. Nancy has given me permission to reproduce it here. Nancy is one of the sanest and smartest voices regarding youth and online safety. Her latest book on Cyberbullying (available at Amazon) is a must read for parents and teachers. I really respect her knowledge on this subject and feel that her approach, based on real data and work with real kids is far superior to the current climate of fear and scare tactics surrounding education in an online world.

In this email, Nancy answers questions about filtering and school responsibility for online safety.  If you are an educator dealing with unreasonable filtering that hampers your ability to teach, I urge you to explore her website and buy her books.

We must use knowledge, not fear, as our guide to face the opportunities and dangers of the 21st Century.

Sylvia

—————– The rest of this post is all Nancy —————–

We will NOT be able to effectively prepare students for their education, career, and civic responsibilities in the 21st Century if the technical services directors in schools throughout this country continue their heavy handed filtering.

It is essential to shift how the Internet is being managed from a primary reliance on filtering to more effective monitoring – in an environment where education – not social – use of the Internet is expected, and supported with effective professional and curriculum development.

Q: Dear Nancy, does the law specifically state how tight the filter has to be set. Do we have to set it at its most restrictive setting can’t it be at its least restrictive setting?
A: All you have to do under CIPA is set it to block pornographic material – obscene material and material harmful for minors. There is NO liability for schools if they choose not to set it to block an area and something “inappropriate” happens to appear on that site. The CIPA regulations mentioned the understanding that filtering is not perfect.

There is absolutely NO justification under CIPA for the heavy-handed filtering that is preventing effective instruction in schools today. The problem is that schools are overly reliant on filtering when they should be shifting to more of a focus on monitoring.

The other problem is the non-research-based fear-mongering about internet risk. Just about everything you hear in the press – or from politicians – about online sexual predators is not supported by the research data.

They are not targeting children. They are not tracking down teens based on personal contact information they post. 1 in 5 or 7 young people has not been contacted by a predator. There are not 50,000 predators online at any given time prowling for victims. There are legitimate concerns of adults who are preying on emotionally vulnerable or “seeking” teens. But the arrest rates for sexual abuse of minors have actually been going down in the last decade.

Q: Our district (actually most of the state) went to web washer and we are even more restricted now than we were before.
A: No one at the filtering companies is held accountable for the decisions that are being made. 8e6 has a close relationship with the American Family Association!!! Think of the objections if the American Family Association was the organization deciding what books would be allowed in schools. No one knows what biases the other companies might have.

It is OUTRAGEOUS that tech directors and administrators would think that these companies are better at selecting sites for their appropriateness than librarians and teachers!

Q: The person setting the filter is not an educator but an IT tech with little or no classroom experience.
A: This is a major concern. The people who are making content based decisions on what categories should be blocked should be the librarians and curriculum specialists. The IT folks should be involved only on decisions related to security and bandwidth issues.

Further EVERY librarian and ed tech specialist in the schools should have the authority to override the filter and provide access to a site that has been inappropriately blocked – based on the educational determination of its content!

Further, EVERY counselor, administrator, and school resource officer, should also have the ability to override to investigate online material that presents safety of student well-being concerns. (And they may need some help from more tech savvy folks to be able to do this.)

I am working on professional development resources to address both youth risk online and effective Internet use management for a Web 2.0 World. Should be available January. These will be narrated slides presentations with reproducible handouts – with CLE credit available.

Nancy Willard, M.S., J.D.
Center for Safe and Responsible Internet Use
http://www.embracecivility.org/
http://cyberbully.org

Cyberbullying and Cyberthreats: Responding to the Challenge of Online Social Aggression, Threats, and Distress (Amazon)

Cyber-Safe Kids, Cyber-Savvy Teens: Helping Young People Learn to Use the Internet Safely and Responsibly (Jossey-Bass) (also at Amazon)

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