Ideas and Thoughts from an EdTech

Once a year I get about 30 minutes to try and share with our Board of Education all that’s happening with digital learning in our schools. I call it the State of the Union address. I created this 7 minute video that touches on a few things happening locally. I find that this is a much more powerful way to communicate learning than a standard report which I also provided.

After the video, I talked for a few minutes about trends I see and what where we need to be headed. The Board members responded with some great comments and questions. One Board member recognized that while he might not have the understanding of how learning and education is changing, he knows we have to do a better job sharing this with parents. Another mentioned his excitement for a virtual school project that’s currently on hold. Still another shared a story about his granddaughter who asked him about bio-diesel fuel and when he didn’t give her the answer she wanted said she’d ask Mr. Google. It’s clear they embrace the future.

I was clear to tell them we don’t have all the answers. I told them that many schools can’t figure out how to handle cellphones but they need to begin involving students and understanding its power. To demonstrate I asked if they knew the population of China. While they debated I texted 466453 and “population China” and had the answer set to me before they could come up with an answer. I emphasized that it requires shifts for our teachers and while we have some great examples of those that are on their way, we have a long way to go.

I came across this video from Susan Young after I presented. I wished I had it earlier. I think it would have told them even more.

I’ll take these kind of interruptions any day. Working in my office, the familiar Skype chat box sound alerts me to someone wanting my attention. It was Matthew, a grade one student in Kathy’s class. He wanted to chat. This is our conversation:

Matthew:
are teechr sas yes you can cum from Mathew.

Me:
I will come over tomorrow if that’s okay

Matthew:
yes can you cum at 11:00?

Me:
okay, it’s a date!

Matthew:
see you too moro.

Me:
Sorry I can’t come in the morning. It will have to be later in the afternoon or else on Wednesday.

Matthew:
how about 1:20

Me:
That should work. I think my meeting will be finished by then.

Matthew:
OK
do you wont to see wat we havein awr cllas rite nou

Me:
sure

This is what he wanted to show me.

Update: As you can see this was largely a copy and paste job via Skype chat. I inadvertently left the name of the student in the post. Fortunately, Kathy was Johnny-on-the-spot and noticed but decided to check with the parent. The parent was quite happy to have the name left on. Thanks Mom and Dad whoever you are.

I’ve been thinking for a long while about some of the angst people feel about content and keeping up. We definitely are suffering from an old school belief and/or understanding that in order to be current we have to have a handle on the very latest research or content in our field. Obviously 20 years ago, actually you probably only have to back about 5, it was quite easy for educators or anyone for that matter to feel like they were aware of the latest greatest. Subscribe to a few key journals, read a book or two and year and you were done. The good old days?

So now we add to the mix every blog, social network, new tool, changing media, easy publish, youtube, rss reader and the list goes on. We hear about information overload. We hope these tools will help us manage. They won’t.

Is this a generational thing? We need to get comfortable with the messiness as a virtue. Most of us don’t like messiness. My kids don’t seem to have a problem with it. Although I razz Will at times for his struggles with managing it all, I heard him say recently that doesn’t worry about missing things because his network is his filter and that the cream of content will eventually rise to the top. Good advice.

While there seems to be a desire for first posts, I’m also grateful for the revisiting of old links. Today I was reacquainting myself with the lectures of Randy Pausch. Although I posted on this back in the fall, I noticed Wes Fryer just recently discovered him and posted on him today as well after someone posted this on twitter. I think this is great. Ideas, people and stories worth telling are worth telling about more than once and they will. So if you missed Randy Pausch in the fall, you got to hear about him again. (if you’d like a great lecture on time management, watch this one)

I missed the whole color war thing, don’t really get diigo, still don’t really know all the my new Macbook can do. I don’t care. I’m not sure if I was Alec who said it, or where I heard it, but understanding that learning and content today is not a reservoir but a river, is a great metaphor.

Don’t panic if you don’t get twitter. If you don’t check your facebook account for 3 weeks, who cares? So I’m urging you to mark this post as read in your reader. Don’t worry if you don’t read it. Okay, that may be stupid to say since if you’re reading this it’s already too late. But the fact that you’re around, sipping in the river leads me to believe you’ll be fine. If you don’t read this post or the next, it’s no big deal

Update #1: Stephen Downes may have said it first
Update #2: Rob Wall posted a similar idea a month ago. See good ideas resurface.

Technorati Tags: willrichardson, wesfryer, randypausch, aleccouros,

Jack Macleod is frustrated with a recent response to a typical cellphone faux pas:

…one of the schools in Nova Scotia had two serious fights with racial overtones on Tuesday. 26 students were suspended and the police are involved. Yesterday, the Principal held a press conference and let the media know that cell phones were involved. Apparently, students were using cell phones to text back and forth after the first fight and somehow this led to the second fight. (I’m basing this on news reports).

Jack’s frustration lies here:

…the Minister of Education called for a review of cell phone policies at all school boards in the province. Given the media scrutiny, a review is probably appropriate. However, the media reports indicate that the Minister “believes that cell phones have no place in the classroom.”

He asked for my response which I left on his blog and I’ll leave here as well:

Cellphones don’t have a place in a classrooms where global collaboration isn’t valued.

Cellphones don’t have a place in classrooms where multimedia and diverse communication isn’t valued.

Cellphones don’t have a place in classrooms where authentic learning experiences aren’t valued.

Another question is why do cellphones have a place anywhere? Should places of business have cellphones? If they do, why should schools be different? Do we want students to experience as much real world learning as possible?

I understand not every teacher has the wherewithal to implement a cellphone into learning but many do. Why not use the place that is supposed to prepare students for the real world and provide opportunity to practice and learn these skills?

As these devices continue to look and act more and more like a computer, schools will be confronted with the brutal fact that they are not providing relevant education. Again, this is not to suggest every school begin to allow every classroom cart blanche in using cellphones but the response to completely ban them isn’t the proper response either. In this particular case, it’s such a lame response that in some ways abdicates responsibility from schools. I’m a firm believer that if students were involved to create reasonable rules and etiquette, many of these issues would be resolved, not all but many. Then we can get on with the idea that these are and can be learning tools.

I actually think that Nova Scotia’s policy is a good start, not perfect but a start. I hope the ministry doesn’t pull an “Al Upton response” and react in haste.

Technorati Tags: cellphones, jackmacleod

One of my favorite posts of all time is Will’s Unlearning Curve. In fact, I included it in our school division’s digital learning vision page.

The past 2 weeks has been filled with unlearning as I move to the Macintosh platform. The unlearning will get even steeper since today my father-in-law’s iMac arrived (not sure why he bought Apple Care since who know who will be doing most of the troubleshooting) and on Monday I ordered my son his graduation present, another Macbook Pro. In addition to these personal purchases, our school division is introducing this platform into our Windows based network.

So over the past 2 weeks here are a few things, minor and major, I’m trying to unlearn:

1. The X in the corner doesn’t quit the application.
2. Beach balls don’t always mean fun.
3. You don’t have to name every photo religiously. Renaming photos isn’t easy but it may not be that necessary.
4. You don’t need a task bar. That’s what Expose is for.
5. Maximize doesn’t mean full screen.
6. The Alt key isn’t the same.
7. You don’t have to run defrag or anti-virus.
8. Drag and drop and shortcut keys for some reason seem more intuitive.
9. I can easily put my computer to sleep and wake it up….every time.
10. Macs aren’t perfect and don’t lead to happiness.

While these unlearnings will continue to grow, Clarence’s post about boxes continues to guide my thinking. While there is certainly some elegance to the Mac, the function and creative possibilities happen in both worlds and in other environments as well. Clarence’s post on OS and education also has me thinking about unlearning. While his premise is interesting and valid, I’m more inclined to believe that users and manufacturers are doing more to make learning and creativity happen in any environment. Users expect to be able to be productive and creative in any environment. There still needs to be understandings around the purpose of certain devices but when it come to creativity in particular, Windows or Mac shouldn’t matter. I recall my early days of video editing on a windows machine. Since firewire was an add-on, hardware and software compatibility was a nightmare. I was one of those odd souls who persisted and had some success. Today, these issues are largely solved. I certainly have very high expectations that the Mac will prove to be the superior machine. As a power user, I’ll be looking for certain functionality, but I also continually compare my Windows experience. During this transition I keep thinking, “how can I do this on my Dell?” I know the purists will point out differences and many of my hardcore Mac friends can officially whip the smirk off their faces as they’ve welcomed another into their fold. The issue for me continues to be finding machines that do the job. It shouldn’t be about one over the other. I’m glad to see our school division offer this option as well.

Learning, unlearning, relearning….it’s all good.

Footnote:
One of our high schools sent 2 students to a provincial skills competition in video editing. They realized a week before the event that the competition would be using Macs, iMovie and Final Cut Pro. These students had never used a Mac. Their teacher wanted to pull them out of the event but the organizers encouraged them to compete. They received a 20 minute tutorial immediately prior to the full day competition. They gained a silver medal out of 15 competitors.

Technorati Tags: clarencefisher, willrichardson, mac, prairiesouth.

Clarence shares this article via my Shared Feed in Google Reader and it spoke to me on many levels.

Here’s a parent who, although obviously tech and internet saavy hadn’t realized the power of the internet for his own kids:

I’ve written about my kids literally hundreds of times and published dozens of photos of them. But, I’ve always drawn the line at showing their faces. Every picture I’ve posted is a shot from the back, a photo with the face turned away, a costume disguise, you name it- I’ve become a master of the private, public persona. So I have to admit, that when I saw the YouTube video and Tasha waltzing up to the camera, I was a little aghast.

But although he was “aghast” at first quickly changed his view.

But then a light bulb went off. She was excited that the video was going online and that sense of enthusiasm was evident in each of the kids as they made their presentation.

Reminds me of someone.

He goes on to write about how the author of the book connects with the student.

Where it gets more interesting, is that the author of the book discovered the YouTube video and wrote about it on his blog. In fact, he wrote: “My favorite is the girl who liked Fox because he’s part of the dog family and is cute.”

Reminds me of someone and someone else

Then he “touches ‘em all” with this quote:

Anything that gets kids excited about learning is something that I will stand behind. But it takes a teacher who gets how the technology can be leveraged to make this work.

And another home run with this one:

Seeing Tasha and her friends on the computer screen, it dawned on me that I’ve been participating in an online ecosystem, but with one foot still planted firmly in a largely imaginary safety zone. I think I’ve become the technological equivalent of the parent who won’t let their kids play unsupervised in the fenced back yard at an age when they themselves used to be allowed to wander six blocks to the park as long as they promised to be home before dark.

Not only should we be leveraging our students as evidence and support for online connection and engagement but finding more parents who will support and speak out. Whether we like it or not, we have a marketing issue on our hands and satisfied customers are valuable resources.

Image: Brilliant Minds, Brilliant Hardware: Bonding Moment
http://flickr.com/photos/courosa/413146410/in/set-723361

Technorati Tags: clarencefisher, karlfisch, davidjakes, aleccouros, internetsafety

Back in December Andrew Baetz, a graduate student and classroom teacher taking Rick Schwier’s 802 EDCMM class at the University of Saskatchewan interviewed me as requirement of this course. It’s interesting that I took this course 5 years ago and had the same assignment: interview a list of Canadian educational technologists. This year I was fortunate to make Rick’s list of interviewees.

It’s also interesting that this is my first post from my new MacBook. Andy recorded the interview using Call Recorder and his Mac and the quality was excellent. Andy also managed to edit this done to my best 14 minutes. (I didn’t know I had 14 minutes of quality in me!) This seems like a great tool and ironically I had forgot about this until Christian began his search for such a tool.

My apologies in the re-rendering, Andy get’s cut off. The default setting in imovie did this I guess.

Technorati Tags: shareski, interview, richardschwier, christianlong, callrecorder, skype, universityofsaskatchewan

I purchased an XO in efforts to consider the possibility of low cost computing and where this might fit into classrooms. I’ve played with it somewhat and was able to do some interesting things but  knew I needed some people better than me to do the real testing and dirty work. Enter Kathy Cassidy and her amazing grade one bloggers. What a treat it is to walk into a grade one classroom and they quickly resort to telling about their most recent published articles. As a former grade one teacher, you just can’t beat listening to them tell you stories about anything and everything.

I showed them the XO and a few things I’ve learned and made them a deal that they could keep it as long as they would share what they learn. (See Mark Ahlness who is already doing this with his third graders) I’ve suggested to Kathy that she allow them to take turns taking the unit home to explore. They’ll discover and learn much better than me. This computer is designed for them. I’ve now added a group of 7 year olds to my research team.

Image: Mr. Shareski Shows us the XO
http://www.flickr.com/photos/57634636@N00/2315119105/in/photostream/

Technorati Tags: kathycassidy, xo, olpc, markahlness