Constructing Modern Math/Science Knowledge 2009

Ever question why technology seems to have gone missing in so many math and science classrooms? What happened to the “compute” in computing? Wondering what STEM really looks like?

Yes, technology, math, and science can be friends!

Constructing Modern Knowledge is organizing a one-of-a-kind educational event for January 22, 2009 at Philadelphia’s Science Leadership Academy. Constructing Modern Math/Science Knowledge is a minds-on institute for K-12 teachers, administrators and technology coordinators looking for practical and inspirational ways to use computers to enhance S.T.E.M. learning. Constructing Modern Math/Science Knowledge is a pre-conference event for Educon 2.1, an innovative conference and conversation about the future of education.

The presenters represent high-tech pioneers and seasoned veterans at the forefront of innovation in math, science and computing. Read more about them here.

Come to Constructing Modern Math/Science Knowledge and stay for Educon 2.1!

  • Early-bird registration (before December 15) – $100
  • Regular registration – $130

You may register for both Constructing Modern Math/Science Knowledge and Educon 2.1 with one click.

Sylvia

Back to New York and NYSCATE

Well, it seems like I just got home from the east coast, and I’m off again!

This time I’m headed for the New York State education technology conference NYSCATE in Rochester, NY November 23-25, 2008. I’m looking forward to seeing old friends and meeting new ones, most likely at Dinosaur BBQ.

If you are going to NYSCATE, be sure to check out these sessions:

NYSSTL –Technology Leadership for the 21st Century
Sunday, 1:45PM Stacy Ward
Learn how the HFM and WSWHE BOCES have created the New York State Student Technology Leaders (NYSSTL) Club in 30 middle schools. Students help their teachers learn to use technology and their classmates prove their tech literacy, creating a community of 21st century learning in our schools.

Where Teachers Learn, Where Teachers Teach
Monday, 10:45AM Sylvia Martinez
For many teachers, technology professional development happens outside the classroom and never crosses the doorstep into the classroom. This session will explore two models of professional development that cross that barrier: classroom embedded and student-led professional development.

Little Green Monsters: The XO and Its Implication For Education
Tuesday 10:30AM Brian C. Smith, Sylvia Martinez, Dr. Gary Stager
The XO low cost laptop was designed to revolutionize education in the developing world. The panel will discuss the lessons we can gain from this learning initiative and the implications for the future of education. We will also explore why such a simple idea has created such controversy.

By the way, I’m happy to have someone record, live blog, or ustream my sessions IF you can come and do it. It’s just too hard to do it AND present.

After that, it’s back to New York City for a family/friends Thanksgiving, and then some workshops in Brooklyn. More about that later!

Sylvia

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What Makes a Good Project?

The Creative Educator magazine is running first of a two-part article on project- based learning by Gary Stager and illustrated by Peter Reynolds.

What Makes a Good Project? covers eight elements of projects that make them worth doing:

  • Purpose and relevance
  • Sufficient time
  • Complexity
  • Intensity
  • Connected to others
  • Access to materials
  • Shareable
  • Novelty

Stager concludes with questions teachers can ask themselves to improve the design of project-based learning experiences for students.

Project-based learning does take extra work to design and implement, but the results are worth it for everyone involved. So if you make the effort, it’s worth doing it right. As Stager says, “Making things is better than being passive, but making good things is even better!”

Update – Part 2 of this article is now online!  Part 2: What Makes a Good Project

Fair use explained for educators

“Fair use” is the doctrine that allows some use of copyrighted material for education purposes without requiring the permission of the copyright holders.

However, confusion about what exactly is allowed has caused many educators and students to either avoid ALL copyrighted materials just to be safe, or to use ANYTHING without regard to copyright laws. According to a report last year from this same organization, teachers’ lack of copyright understanding impairs the teaching of critical thinking and communication skills.

To help everyone understand fair use, The Code of Best Practices in Fair Use for Media Literacy Education was released today by the Center for Social Media in the School of Communication at American University.

The Code of Best Practices in Fair Use for Media Literacy Education outlines five principles, each with limitations:

Educators can, under some circumstances:

  • Make copies of newspaper articles, TV shows, and other copyrighted works, and use them and keep them for educational use.
  • Create curriculum materials and scholarship with copyrighted materials embedded.
  • Share, sell and distribute curriculum materials with copyrighted materials embedded.

Learners can, under some circumstances:

  • Use copyrighted works in creating new material.
  • Distribute their works digitally if they meet the transformativeness standard.

The limitations and circumstances are explained more fully in the report.

Along with reports like this one, the Center website contains some really useful resources for classroom use. Classroom and discussion guides, videos that are perfect to start class discussions and projects, and more.

Thanks to Doug Johnson of the Blue Skunk Blog for the heads-up on this valuable resource!

Community of interest or community of practice?

I’ve been seeing a lot of talk around the edu-blogs and at conference sessions about online learning communities, or building a personal learning network as part of a educator’s professional development. Often, these are referred to as “Communities of Practice” – a term coming into common use only a few years ago. Many educators were introduced to the term in grad school through the work of Jean Lave and Etienne Wenger, who wrote Situated Learning: Legitimate Peripheral Participation.Learning in Doing: Social, Cognitive and Computational Perspectives (Amazon link) in 1985.

Their book explored how natural learning that takes place in apprenticeship situations, and profiled several different Communities of Practice (CoPs) from around the world. The “practice” part of CoP is the work they do, and the learning takes place in context, or situated, in the common work. These groups of people learn to do their work not by lectures, but by everyone working together, from experts to newcomers, and most importantly, by talking about their work together.

The concept of “Legitimate Peripheral Participation” is key to the idea of communities of practice. This is when newcomers learn needed skills by doing work that is on the periphery of the community, and as they prove their competence, being invited into more important roles. The other part of legitimate peripheral participation is how newcomers move into the community through talk. The shared stories of the community, particularly war stories told by experts, are part of the experience. Newcomers learn to participate by learning the traditions and vocabulary of the group, first by listening, then by trying out their new verbal skills within the group, and if their words ring true, by moving from the periphery and becoming more central to the shared expertise of the group.

It’s obvious that this sounds similar to what happens to educators as they break down the walls of their classroom and use new technologies to find and participate in new communities.

I think, however, that we confuse different kinds of communities. Specifically, I think that educators who come together in online communities, or even temporary real life groups, are more often than not, communities of interest, not communities of practice.

I’m not just being picky about semantics here – the problem is that calling any community a “Community of Practice” presumes that it will have similar benefits and impact.

In Second Life, for example, a teacher may meet educators from around the world who are doing similar things in their classroom, have similar hopes about the future of ed tech, and share similar frustrations. They may find the interaction refreshing, educational, and maybe even inspiring. These professional collegial interactions are too often missing from teacher’s lives. And Second Life is just an example. This could be Twitter, or a social network, an online group created for a graduate school class, or even people you meet face to face at a conference.

However, just having similar work doesn’t mean that this is a community of practice. They really aren’t doing the same work. Once this interaction is over, they have to go back to their real place of practice, their classroom and school. The benefits of shared vocabulary, shared experiences, shared stories are all gone. Now these teachers have to sit in meetings where no one is on the same page, frustrated that everyone isn’t seeing the light.

In fact, these outside communities of interest may serve to pull teachers away from their local communities of practice, distancing them from the colleagues whose mindshare would be vital to real local change. It’s an all too convenient place to vent about everyone who “doesn’t get it.”

It’s hard for me to imagine any kind of educational change that doesn’t draw on the participants at the ground level, meaning the people in the school. That’s why I advocate for student participation in education technology initiatives. Changing a community means involving the stakeholders, all the stakeholders, in the process. Building a healthy community of practice in the place of the actual practice is a first step to change.

 

K12online 2007 is still online!

The other day I mentioned the K12 Online Conference 2008, and my Games in Education presentation.

But what I forgot to mention is that previous year’s sessions are still available, and still really relevant to educational technology! On the K12online conference website just look down the right sidebar and you will see the links to the archives of all the sessions from the previous years of 2006 and 2007.

Last year I participated in the K12online conference with two sessions and contributed to a third (see K12 Online 2007 Conference – comfy slipper learning for the whole story).

This year I came to my senses and only submitted one idea for a session about games in education. For those of you who don’t know, in two of my many previous careers I was an executive producer for Davidson & Associates (now Knowledge Adventure) and VP of development for a consumer software and console game company. Since then, I’ve kept up with the changes in the game market and uses of games in education.

Creating these presentations push my thinking and my tech skills, and I’m always glad for that.

Sylvia

Games in Education – K12 Online Conference 2008

Now in its third year, the K12 Online Conference is underway. But don’t worry — you haven’t missed anything, it’s all online!

My session this year is Games in Education. The time limit was 20 minutes, so that was a challenge! To give it more depth, I also created a companion wiki page with lots more resources.

I cover topics including: Why games?; What’s wrong with edutainment?; Serious Games; Casual puzzle and logic games in the classroom; Virtual Worlds, Commercial off the Shelf (COTS) games; Overcoming Objections to using games in the classroom; and students designing and programming their own games. Yes, all in 20 min…

Beyond games, if you are interested in learning more about technology in education in general, and seeing presentations from educators all around the world, then you will find some great stuff on the K12 Online 2008 conference site. Since the conference is online and all the sessions are pre-recorded, they can be downloaded or viewed online anywhere, anytime. For first-timers, be sure to read the “how to” page here.

Check the conference blog for both recorded sessions and live chats with keynotes and presenters.

Sylvia

Edutopia Offers Free Video Content on iTunes U

Edutopia has announced the availability of many of its videos through the iTunes U Beyond Campus portal. Edutopia videos are excellent, and focus on how to create student-centered schools and authentic learning experiences.

They are organized into six “Core Concept” Albums:

  • Integrated Studies
  • Technology Integration
  • Social and emotional learning
  • Project learning
  • Teacher development
  • Assessment

We are happy to say that our own video, made several years ago at Washington Middle School in Olympia, Washington, was chosen to be among the first to make it into the new iTunesU!

Although the name has changed over the years from Generation www.Y to GenYES, much is the same. GenYES students are still helping teachers with technology integration, and teachers still need the help!

Edutopia’s iTunes U content can be accessed directly here. You can find our video in the Teacher Development album, or it’s online here with the accompanying article.

Sylvia

You (yes, YOU) should present at a conference

Educational technology conferences happen all the time all over the country. There’s probably one going on every day of the year! At each of these conferences, the organizers look for interesting speakers and presentations that will excite the attendees. Where do these presenters come from? It’s no secret – THEY are YOU!

Steve Dembo of the Discovery Educator’s Network just wrote a blog post, You know you’re a rock star… Now prove it! that contains a handy list of all the state educational technology conferences and links to their session submission pages.

The problem is that many teachers don’t believe they are rock stars. I hear this all the time, ...oh, I’m just a teacher… lil ol’ me? ….. I just do my own thing in my classroom and no one even notices down the hall! Why would anyone else care?

Really now people, and especially you GenYES and TechYES teachers out there – you are doing some terrific, interesting things that other people want to hear about and understand better. You can’t fool me! I hear your stories all the time, and what you do is just as amazing as most conference sessions out there. The only difference is that the people presenting sessions have screwed up their courage and decided to share.

Putting forward good examples of student-centered learning and explaining how that happens is everyone’s job. Otherwise, people just assume it’s magic. So — why do you care about student empowerment? What does that look like? How do you create project-based experiences in this age of accountability? What is it you DO that creates the environment where students don’t just perform – they blossom?

Speaking at a conference is not “tooting your own horn”, it’s not egocentric, and it’s not just to get fame and fortune. Believe me, it’s not about fame and fortune! Actually, you can think of it as part of your professional development — it’s a balanced part of being an educator, doing reflective work about your own practice. OK, it’s scary to get up in front of people and talk, but for goodness sakes – you do this for a living! And how can a conference audience be any more scary than a gaggle of 14 year olds after gym class?

And now I’m going to up the stakes even more – take your students along on the adventure. If what you do in the classroom is meant to enable student voice and to empower students to own their own learning, let them take that experience outside the classroom. Let your students show others what it means to be a 21st century learner. Education conferences are becoming more open to student presenters, and really, it’s not that hard.

Sharing Student Voice at ConferencesTo help, I’ve written a how-to guide about taking students to conferences. It’s called, Sharing Student Voice: Students Presenting at Conferences. The focus is on making it an enriching experience for students AND also meeting the needs of the adult audience. It starts with how to propose sessions with students, goes through planning and preparation, and includes a handy Top 10 Tips for student presentations.

You can download the PDF here or read an online flipbook version.

And yes, I’m talking to YOU!

Sylvia