Category: student voice

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Youth Voice Toolkit – New Free Resource

The FreeChild Project, run by our good friend Adam Fletcher, has been at the forefront of the Youth Voice movement for a long time. Today, they released a new free toolkit for Youth Voice resources.

As readers of this blog know, I often talk about how the term “youth voice” can be misunderstood as simply listening to youth as they say anything. But in reality, youth voice is about youth and adults working together to DO something, as Adam says, “Only through action do words take power.”

The Youth Voice Toolkit contains resources of interest to everyone working with youth. This isn’t just about political action. For example, our GenYES and TechYES programs use the principles of youth voice to help students take charge of their own learning, collaborate with adults and peers, and learn how they can help their own schools use technology effectively. We believe that with guidance from interested, caring adults, youth CAN change the world — and a great place to start is school.

Included in the kit are:

  • Definitions
  • Measures & assessment
  • Overcoming myths & obstacles
  • Guidelines and working resources
  • Links for further study: research, organizations, and books

Hope you take a look, there is something in this FREE Toolkit for anyone who works with youth and wants to learn more about encouraging authentic youth voice.

Sylvia

PS Did I mention, it’s FREE!!

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Helping students tell different kinds of stories via video

A while back I did a post about having students create “how to” videos for your school using the Common Craft model of simple illustrations with an informative voiceover. This is a very common GenYES student project, with students creating videos about how to use the technology found in their own school.

Now Common Craft has posted a blog showing their behind the scenes process of planning, shooting, and editing their latest video — Electing a US President.

This is a terrific post for a number of reasons:

  • It proves that no matter how experienced you are, creating a video is a process of trying things, seeing what works, and the intertwined nature of risk-taking, mistakes and creativity. We often don’t let kids have enough time for the crucial “oops….aha!” part of the process.
  • It emphasizes the value of editing. Editing is where an author turns a bunch of sounds, words, and pictures into a story that has an intentional impact on the viewer.
  • It shows the value of powerful non-fiction storytelling. Digital storytelling should not be confined to personal stories and feel-good vignettes. Putting together a coherent video about how to save a file to the network server, how to recycle, or how to set up a classroom laptop cart might seem simple, but it’s harder than you think, and a great learning experience.

Here’s the video – show your students and tell them it’s their turn to explain something that other people will find useful.

Electing a US President in Plain English from leelefever on Vimeo.

Sylvia

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Believe in…

This year, the Dallas, Texas school district hosted the usual meeting for teachers to kick off the school year. The unconventional choice for convocation speaker was Dalton Sherman, a 5th grade student in the district. His speech, I Believe in Me, Do You? was given to the 17,500 teachers in attendance. It was a huge hit, won him a standing ovation and national acclaim. This video is making the rounds of education blogs (some a little over the top breathless) and being played in lots of opening day staff meetings. The YouTube version has had over 34,000 views so far. I have no doubt we’ll be seeing this in numerous keynotes this year.

In the speech, Dalton asks Dallas teachers to believe in him and all students, “…what we need from you is to believe that we can reach our highest potential.” He asks that the teachers believe in their colleagues too, “…trust them and lean on them when times get tough – and we all know, we kids can sometimes make it tough.” (Full text of the speech.)

It’s a good speech, but it’s the performance that takes it to the next level.

Dalton won his first oratory contest in the first grade, and his rightly proud parents say his talents are “a gift.” But Dalton works hard at his craft and has earned his acclaim. He’s given speeches at churches and events all over Dallas. He enters (and wins) contests. He practices. For this speech, Dallas ISD contacted his family in June with the invitation. They wrote the speech for him, and he practiced three times a week all summer long, working on his timing and performance to turn the words into a powerful, inspirational message.

He’s great, isn’t he? But wait…. there’s more to think about here.

Like… Is it cynical to put words like “believe in me” in this child’s mouth, no matter how admirable the performance? This is what some anonymous adult in charge wanted other adult underlings to hear, and they used the passionate talent of a youth to deliver the message. They knew that the message would better reach its target that way. Does it matter that it’s a “good” message? Is it manipulation or simply smart marketing?

We talk about “student voice” all the time, and this obviously is NOT an example of student voice. There is not even the pretense here that the message came from a student, although the performer was young and talented. That’s a tough distinction to puzzle out, because praise flows easily to students who deliver adult messages and play by adult rules. It’s easy to believe in them, because they validate what we believe about ourselves.

But what about the “other ones”. You know the ones, the students who don’t toe the line, the ones who have checked out. The ones who deliver uncomfortable messages in voices at times eloquent and at times spectacularly clumsy or even crude. The ones who challenge the world and the ones who seem not to believe in themselves. Do we listen when the message isn’t so pleasantly packaged, isn’t so clear, isn’t so crafted? Do we believe in them too?

Sylvia

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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

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Service learning prevents dropouts, engages and motivates students

An op-ed article in today’s Christian Science Monitor by John Bridgeland contains some powerful evidence that service-learning could be a key factor in lowering dropout rates, increasing engagement, and motivating students.

Service learning tackles high dropout rates and civic disengagement

Service learning programs like our own GenYES create win-win situations where students are empowered and engaged to solve real problems in their schools and communities. In GenYES, students learn how to work with teachers and staff in their own school to solve technology problems and help teachers use more technology in the clasroom.

Service learning is an educational technique that combines classroom learning with community service. What’s critical is that it is not only key to getting more students engaged in their communities, but, according to a report released last week by Civic Enterprises, it is also a powerful tool to keep students on track to graduate from high school.

This report, called Engaged for Success, is well worth downloading – it contains research, case studies, and much more. And it’s not just drop-out prevention. This research would be useful to support adding service learning to improve student motivation, increase engagement, and encourage student voice.

A nationally representative survey of high school students, including at-risk students, paints a hopeful picture. Eighty-two percent of all service-learning students said their view of school improved because of their service-learning classes, and 77 percent said that service learning had a big effect on motivating them to work hard. Furthermore, 64 percent of service-learning students claimed that service learning would have a fairly or very big effect on keeping them from dropping out of school.

Although we hear a lot about “research-based” programs. But many times schools only look for research to justify what they are already doing. Research should be informing the search for innovative solutions, not done as an after-thought.

And it’s something students want. They are looking for opportunities to make a difference, to be somebody, to count and to be counted on.

Although high-quality service-learning programs are cropping up across the nation, such programs are still unjustifiably rare. Eighty-three percent of students said that if their school offered it, they would enroll in a service-learning program. Yet only 16 percent of all students, and only 8 percent of students at low-performing schools, reported that their school offered service learning. All too often students do not have access to, or do not even know about, such programs offered by their schools.

You don’t need to look outside the school walls to find authentic problems that students can solve. Technology integration is just such a tough problem for many schools. The research is clear here too – technology integration improves student achievement. And yet, it remains at the bottom of the to-do list in far too many schools.

This makes GenYES a double-impact research-based innovation. By helping teachers use technology in all classrooms, GenYES students provide a much needed service in their own school and gain much in return. GenYES students learn more than just technology skills or how to help teachers. They learn that they can make a difference, that their talents are useful and needed, and that they can have a say in improving education for all.

Research proves it.

Sylvia

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11-year old network administrator

Via Steve Hargadon:

When Victory Baptist School, a small private school in Millbrook, Ala., was struggling to keep its computer network together last year, an 11-year-old student named Jon Penn stepped in as network manager.

Eleven? Yes, eleven.

Jon not only runs the network, he fixed the virus and filtering problems, upgraded the computers to run faster and better, and helped write the school’s web policy.

The lesson here is not that Jon is a one-of-a-kind special kid. Of course he is. But he’s not THAT uncommon. The uncommon thing is that someone let him have this opportunity. Many, many schools have students with this potential. Given the opportunity, students can provide reliable, thoughtful help with school technology.

Suffering with a school network that lacks resources? The answer may literally be right under your nose.

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Preteen steps in to install security gateway, grudgingly agrees to MySpace blocking.

Jon Penn

When Victory Baptist School, a small private school in Sherwood, Ark., was struggling to keep its computer network together last year, an 11-year-old student named Jon Penn stepped in as network manager.

Slideshow: He’s 11…and it’s his network!

Penn did it to help his mother, Paula, the school librarian who had computer support added to her workload a week before the school year started when the existing IT systems overseer suddenly departed. For Jon — who says his favorite reading material is computer trade magazines — it’s been the experience of a lifetime, even getting to select and install a gateway security appliance largely by himself.

“This is kind of a small school, and I’m known as the computer whiz,” the sixth grader says.  “We spent $2,158,” says young Penn, describing how he picked out the McAfee Secure Internet Gateway Appliance after evaluating it in a 30-day trial. He also looked at the Barracuda box — a tad more costly — and tried the Untangle open source product, which he said didn’t meet the school’s needs as well.

His school needed a gateway to protect against attacks, filter viruses and spam, and block inappropriate sites. Keeping costs down is important since the school is operating on a shoestring budget to keep its 60 aging computers, a donation from years ago, working for the roughly 200 students permitted to use them, along with the teachers.

The first thing Jon found as he leapt into the role of network manager was that he had to map out the network to find out what was on it. He bought some tools for this at CompUSA and realized there was an ungodly amount of computer viruses and spam, so he pressed the school to invest in filtering and antivirus protection.

“These computers are so old they don’t support all antivirus programs,” Penn says. The school took advantage of a Microsoft effort called Fresh Start that offers free software upgrades for schools with donated computers, switching from Windows 98 to Windows 2000.

One reason to do this was the hope of one day centrally managing the school’s computers so Jon doesn’t have to change them individually. To install Windows 2000, he removed obsolete network interface cards, Ethernet, video, print and sound drivers with the intent of having a better computer base by next fall.

While Jon says he spent some time evaluating antivirus products — he admires Kaspersky Lab’s software especially because it’s “lightweight running.” In the end the decision was made to get a gateway appliance to filter and block viruses and spam.

For his technical recommendations, Jon has had to present his suggestions to the school’s management for approval (“Because he’s not an adult, I’ve been hovering around,” his mother says.)

Along with school staff, the younger Penn has gotten involved in contributing to school policy on Web access. While blocking access to social networking sites such as MySpace wasn’t popular with many fellow students, he had to agree the school really didn’t need it.

Penn is now the technical support much of the time on everything from printer jams to setting up an external drive to backing up the school’s most important server. He was allowed to give a few lessons to his class about basic computers, having his classmates pull out a few components from old machines.

His father, Dave, a civil engineer, says: “I knew when Jon was three and could boot up my laptop, sign in and open Paint, that he had a knack for computers. But I never dreamed he’d be a network administrator at the age of 11.”

Penn’s parents both believe that technical people must have “integrity and character,” and should use their skills for beneficial, not malicious purposes.

Her son is precocious when it comes to computers but Paula says in the final analysis she hopes the experience with the school’s network helps him realize, “It’s his job to fight the bad guys.”

As for Jon, he says he loves testing virtualization software like VMware and wants to obtain “A+ certification” by passing the computer-technician exam by that name developed by trade group CompTIA. “Hopefully, I can do that this summer,” he says.

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This just in…

Stop the presses – having just one teacher who cares about them can stop a high school student from dropping out.

Obvious? Sure. But how many obvious things aren’t we doing in schools?

Among the conclusions:

  • Students generally like school and want to graduate.
  • Some feel financial pressure to drop out and get a job.
  • Some are driven out of school by a fear of violence.
  • Students believe that some of the challenges they face are caused by a lack of resources in their school.
  • Students who believe a teacher or coach cares about them are more inclined to stay in school.

Here’s the full report from the California Dropout Research Project. You can download the entire report or a condensed version there, and see a series of video clips of student interviews here.

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Student perspective – all you have to do is ask

Ryan Bretag:

The last two weeks, I had the opportunity to begin involving students in these discussions: How do they feel about the infusion of technology into the classroom? What do they know about all of these “emerging technologies”? What should the learning environment look like in the future? Why do they feel, if at all, technology is of value to their own learning? What is the connection between their current use of technology and the technology educational technologist long to see used in the classroom?

Their thoughts, ideas, and insights offer much to the discussions occurring about educational technology. Will we listen? Will we begin having these discussions in our own school? Are we willing to challenge our own beliefs about technology based upon their beliefs?

Find out what these students said at Ryan’s blog

Congratulations to Ryan for walking the talk about student voice!

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Learn 2 Teach, Teach 2 Learn

Teens in Boston have the opportunity to join Learn 2 Teach, Teach 2 Learn.

This program teaches teens (14-19) how to teach others in their community about technology. Run out of the South End Technology Center @ Tent City and started by Mel King, the program has a mission to enable people to become producers of knowledge and sharers of ideas and information. They provide free or low-cost access and training in most aspects of computer-related technology.

Teens can learn how to work with others, learn to teach, and improve their community. More details and the application are on the website.

Sylvia

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Educon 2.0 – What is Student Voice

video clip SLA conversationEducon 2.0 was held last weekend at the Science Leadership Academy. It was billed as an “unconference” with focus on conversation rather than traditional sessions. I met many people whose blogs I read, and many people came up to me and said the same thing! It was if my twitter and RSS feeds came to life.

I had the chance to lead a conversation about Student Voice. It was a little unnerving, going in to the session with no slideshow and no master plan of what I would say or do. I had a few graphics gathered and a few things I wanted to talk about, but other than that, I was depending on the audience to pitch in and sustain the conversation. I have to say I think it went really well!

Student Voice sessinoThere is a video of the conversation, and all of the sessions at Educon were live streamed on the web by students from the school. I haven’t watched it, I’m too chicken to watch myself!

I did play enough to see that it doesn’t start exactly at the beginning, it starts in the middle of a discussion where we deconstructed the Wikipedia definition of student voice and opened the conversation that way. This is also on the same wiki page under the video.

SLA students talking about student voiceTo me, there were several great takeaways from the session. First, the students and teachers from the Science Leadership Academy came and were active participants. They had a wide variety of opinions about what student voice meant and were able to provide really clear and compelling examples from their own school. Even in a school where student voice is a primary tenet, it still needs constant debate and refreshing.

Another big aha moment for me was a discussion of the place for both student voice and teacher expertise. Audience participationThe students there were quite adamant that they valued the expertise of their teachers and in fact, wanted to be taught. But both students and teachers alike could give great examples of how listening to students created opportunities for greater connection to the lessons, and ideas for activities that the teacher might not have thought of by themselves. The input of students did not diminish the expertise of the teacher, but in fact enhanced the learning experience.

I’d like to write more about Educon 2.0. It was a very rich experience, probably the first conference in a decade where I wanted to go to every single session! My excuse is that it’s been a busy week for me. After Philladelphia I went to New York City, visited with some of our schools in Yonkers, and then drove up to Massachusetts for a meeting with a new potential partner. Hopefully I can share more about that later!

Sylvia