School ended on Saturday(a makeup ice day)though I am working for a couple more weeks, teaching workshops, etc. So I’ve been a bit quiet due to the rush of end of school, library, and family events, but also just needing some time to back off and reflect.
There’s a lot to process about the last year, and about my own exploration and sharing of web 2.0 tools. As Christian Long depicts it, (thanks for the image!) we’ve gotten on the School 2.0 flight. Only thing is, we are embarking into uncharted territory.
In a post at Dare to Dream, Barbara, a K-8 administrator, describes her introduction to a Life Science model of education. The tenets of it are:
Equilibrium is a precursor to death
Living systems move to the edge of chaos
Self organization and emergence take place
Systems can not be directed along a linear path
She comments: “Being comfortable with living on the edge of chaos is a real challenge for our educational system ( and myself as a type A personality) but I believe those of us who are embracing all things 2.0 see this as a reality.”
This year has felt that way. Some days or moments you can see the “emergence” happening, a thread starting to develop, real change happening, and it is very exciting. You can feel the “living system.”
Other days, it just seems like chaos, not organizable, and overwhelming.
But it also strikes me that we have to think about what happens when equilibrium and the status quo are disrupted. It can be uncomfortable, frustrating, and even make people feel angry. For those who love change, it can be very energizing, but also frustrating when not everyone ‘gets” what the change is about.
One of the reasons I think educational reform is so difficult is that we try to find “top down” models that can be applied anywhere, but as this theory points out, “systems” cannot be directed along a linear path. Every system, at every school, even within the same school district is different. There has to be a fundamental respect and understanding for, and celebration of that. We also have to respect and anticipate some of that discomfort, and work with staff on it.
Web 2.0 tools and new technologies have introduced that chaos into our systems in a major way. Knowledge is a more flexible entity than the way it traditionally is presented in schools, textbooks, or on standardized tests—it is ever changing, and growing.
“We use blogs, wikis, podcasts, and many other Web 2.0 tools to help students understand that knowledge is an active process of construction and not something that arrives in a textbook, neatly compartmentalized into chapters or units.
How can we possibly help our students be co-contributors and researchers if we ourselves don’t engage as learners and experience what it means to construct knowledge?”
We cannot help our students understand the flexible nature of knowledge unless we ourselves are life long learners—be we librarians, teachers, administrators, or parents. We have to model what we are asking our students to do and treat information as a dynamic and changing thing, not a static set of beliefs.
And I honestly believe that life-long learners learn from everything. We have to believe that knowledge and wisdom can be found everywhere, in many different fields, mediums, etc. And we should encourage our students to seek connections everywhere. That is one of the core benefits of utilizing web 2.0 tools in schools. We can’t cordon off a certain zone of knowledge and tell students it isn’t valid or available to them and remain credible as learners ourselves.
But also as educators, we also have to acknowledge, I would add, that everyone learns differently. Just as we expect students to have many different learning modalities and preferences, we have to expect that teachers/librarians/administrators will as well.
I was struck by Barbara’s description of how her faculty worked on 21st century skills during inservice meetings. She commented on their end of year discussion that in discussing technology literacy, “much of the discussion was about pedagogy not the tools.”As Patrick Higgins also commented at Dare to Dream, “The conversations I have been having with my staff lately center less on technology, but more on the thinking we will need to keep pace with its capabilities.”
This was a good reminder to me as we move forward as a campus on this uncharted “flight” to keep the discussion focused on the teaching and learning and “the thinking we will need.” As I teach workshops this summer, I want to make that focus clear.
Fundamentally, the key to adapting to all of this change is flexibility and openness—openness to the chaos, so to speak. And that is where I see the struggle in schools. Schools are often built on “tradition,” a core set of knowledge, and creating a sense of stability for students. So for schools to both embrace that sense of permanence, while also embracing a sense of constant change, is an interesting paradox.
As we take this uncharted flight, we’ll have all of our baggage with us. The difference is, we won’t entirely know where we are going until we get there. But this trip isn’t about the destination, because as the cliché goes, it’s about the journey.
As we end this school year, I enter the summer with a sense of adventure and hope. Let’s see where we go.
Antes del fin de escuela mañana, los estudiantes de la clase de Sra. Garza se prepararon el “videoblog”–
Students from our Spanish AP class prepared this videoblog from their class for the Notes in Spanish videoblog project on YouTube. Our staff and I helped slightly with the video editing process and uploading the project, but the students did all the work! One of the students in the film is the chairperson of our Vision technology committee, as well!
Not only am I thrilled to see students participating in a blog, but creating their own videoblog and interacting with other students or college students who have created theirs. It’s a great opportunity for students to interact across school boundaries. (Now the only downside is that YouTube is blocked to students here, but it is available to teachers, so we can share the results with the students in the class).
We haven’t celebrated Blogging Friday in awhile, so today I want to highlight two new bloggers in our district!
Margie Brown, one of our elementary tech coordinators, has started a new blog, K5Tech, which is already impressive. She’s already been sharing projects going on in our district at the elementary level, and it’s fascinating to see what our younger students are learning already.
Our business and career teacher and a very enthused member of our Vision committee, Vicky Abney, is leaving for Bejing this week, and has started a blog , WHSCareerTech, to share her trip with her students and the staff. We helped her set up a flickr feed so she can post pictures of her travels, as well.
I’m excited to see the power of blogs to connect those of us in the same district. This process will allow all of us to have a window inside of their programs, which will inform all of our teaching.
I was very happily surprised recently to be picked by Scott McLeod at Dangerously Irrelevant as a “Fantastic commenter.” It’s nice to be recognized, but it also leads me to think about the values of commenting on a blog in general.
Why comment on someone’s blog?
It lets someone know you are “out there” reading. (For example, the author Cynthia Kaplan just commented when she saw I was reading her book–neat to know that she found my blog!) It also opens a dialogue with other educators. It allows you to “meet” a blogger virtually by communicating with them. It connects you across different states or countries. It allows you to share new ideas. It allows you to be a “maven” or “connector” as Malcolm Gladwell terms it.
In January, when we began talking with our English 3AP teachers about a way to make their Vietnam Wall project more “reachable” online, the goal was to allow students who were reading The Things They Carried to retell the stories of those individuals whose names were listed on the Vietnam Wall.
Now, our collaborative Vietnam Wall Experience project for English 3AP is almost completed, thanks to the efforts of many hands. (Thanks to the teachers, Becky Stucky, Sandra Coker, and Michelle Crocker, and Joel Adkins, our technology coordinator, Paula Murray, district tech coordinator, and Kevin Schwartz, Information Services department).
Students created a video project, using a variety of software, to tell the story of a soldier’s life and death. Each student was assigned a name from the Vietnam Wall. Some had access to much more information about their person than others from the Virtual Wall site and some were even able to interview family members or friends via email.
In beginning the project, Joel and I worked with all three teachers’ classes to demo software and share examples of how they could approach the project, and to talk to them about appropriateness of tone and music, as I wrote about a few months ago. We began the project using a pbwiki site we had created to host software tutorials and sample videos. Teachers worked with students on the research, bibliographies, and their class presentations, among many other things.
Some students let the text or interviews tell the story, others the music and images. The list of videos is lengthy, so here are a few excellent examples of work students did.
This is by far the largest video project we’ve done, with almost 300 students involved, and only some of their work is represented on the Vietnam site.
We have learned some lessons about helping students more during the editing process(before movie projects are finalized), as well as issues with using photostory (and iMovie which many of our students used at home), as well as about hosting video projects online.
I also wish we’d allowed more time to explore the idea of recording narration. A few students did that, and it added a touching overlay to the video and conveyed more information than text can.
I think students learned how to “drill deeper,” especially when they didn’t have much information on their soldier available, as well as how to tell a story effectively in a multi-media environment, and how to be aware of their audience. And we do have some work to do on the actual classroom presentation of the videos–do they stand alone? Should students speak as well?
More details about the projects, as well as a place for comments can be found on the website or feel free to comment here or at Joel’s tech blog.
Each video tells a story as the student interpreted it. As Tim O’Brien so aptly wrote in the Things They Carried, “I want you to feel what I felt. I want you to know why story-truth is truer sometimes than happening-truth.”
Yesterday was a unique event which the library hosts every May — Dylan Day.
If you aren’t familiar with it or aren’t from our campus, Dylan Day is a celebration of community and music, where teachers and students play and share Bob Dylan music for an entire day. It is the brainchild of one of our English teachers, Bill Martin. The library hosts it, moves out most of our furniture, and closes for “normal activities” during the day, which is quite an undertaking.
Why do we do it? Bill asked several of us to write reflections to share with students about what it means to us. I wrote both about Dylan Day and about my grandmother, who has been very ill recently. I thought about her sense of fun and play and how she liked to be part of a community.
I reflected that I very happily open up the library for this because this day is about the kind of play that builds community for our school –it’s not about perfection, competition, achievement tests, or even really about performances. It’s about sharing something together. It’s a day that builds community for our campus in a very unique way.
When I look out every year over a sea of high school students sitting on the library floor, singing “Blowin in the Wind,” I am always amazed at how much warmth and openness Dylan Day brings to our school. To see students (and teachers) work up the courage to sing in front of everyone, to see their friends singing along, and to see the cooperation involved is a powerful experience.
My grandmother died yesterday just minutes after Dylan Day ended. She was 105. Though sometimes in the last few days she “pretended we never have met” as the Dylan song goes, I’ll celebrate and remember her sense of humor and love of family and community, and the fact that somehow she got to share Dylan Day with all of us.
Thanks, Bill, for bringing us all together once again.
Yesterday I wrote about the TED Talks, how inspiring they were, how the Encyclopedia of Life got jumpstarted there, and how I was thinking we should begin an innovation group at our campus.
Then tonight, I read on think:lab that a group of education folks have been quietly planning a world wide “TED Talks” for educators, called Learning D.N.A (Design.in.Action). To understand why I’m so excited about this, try watching a couple of the TED Talks videos, where world innovators come together to share and brainstorm and urge each other forward. Just imagining the same kind of forum for education has me thrilled.
As Christian Long explains it on think:lab, like the TED Talks, it’s planned to be a place for “a cross section of bold ideas and passionate thought-leaders.”
There will be both ongoing learning network and an annual conference showcasing innovation. And the conference will be held in two locations, one overseas and one in the U.S., but it will also be available online. That’s a conference I can’t wait to attend next summer –maybe it should be appended to the NECC conference next June?? (which happens to be in San Antonio…hmmm.. )
The other thing that really excites me about it–other than having a forum for truly talking about innovation in education–is that the network will include students from the get-go, at both the conference and in the online network. What a way to excite kids about the vitality of learning!
This really spurs me forward on the thought I’ve had in the back of my head this spring about starting an innovation group here, so I’ve just now this minute decided to volunteer to do that for next year. Anyone want to join in?
(cross posted at our Vision-ary — Tech committee blog)
An exciting new project has just been announced–the Encyclopedia of Life, which will be a worldwide clearinghouse encyclopedia for information about all life forms.
Edmund Wilson conceived of it as a way to collect information about every organism on earth, and presented the idea, which was in the works, recently at an innovation conference called TED Talks.
Within weeks, members of TED had jumped on board, collaborating to create a website for the project, donate photographs for the site, and even donating the url for the site.
Today a major announcement heralded the start of the Encyclopedia.
By the way if you aren’t familiar with TED Talks, it is an annual gathering of the world’s most innovative thinkers, who are invited to give the “best speech of their lives” in 18 minutes. Videos of the speakers are archived on their website, and the goal is to spur innovative thinking and collaboration.
The power of the web to spur this innovation is thrilling. Wilson predicts that with the combined power of scientists and contributers worldwide, that all 1.8 million species can be documented in the next ten years. I actually wouldn’t be surprised if with a global effort, it happens far faster than that.
There will be a teacher and student section, and the encyclopedia will be available in many languages, and also in novice and expert variations, so it can be a tool for scientists and our students, alike.
When I think of the potential for our students using sites like this where they may be working with or reading the work of the greatest scientists around the world, I think students are going to have unbounded opportunities for real collaborative experiences that we haven’t even begun to think of yet.
Our campus has talked a little bit about creating an “innovation” group or club. Perhaps sharing TED Talks videos with our students is a place to begin.
When people wonder about the power of web 2.0 tools or about the use of blogging, a story like this one about Miles Levin, a high school student who blogged about his life with cancer, illustrates the true human power of sharing our stories online.
How many people can be reached by his experience because he wrote about it in a place where it could be shared, far past his time?
He writes eloquently in a blog post featured on CNN,
“Unlike many cancer patients, I don’t have much anger. The way I see it, we’re not entitled to one breath of air. We did nothing to earn it, so whatever we get is bonus. . . .
What solace I do find is in the knowledge that I have done everything I can to transmute this terribleness into something positive by showing as many people as I can how to endure it with a smile.”
His writing reminds me that giving our students a voice and a community is a powerful gift, because they have so much wisdom to offer us.
Summer is coming and one way to learn more about web 2.0 sites is through the power of play.
Thanks to Sunlink for pointing out the California Library Association’s 23 Things program, which is a step-by-step, self-guided tutorial through many web 2.0 sites.
It is patterned after a Learning 2.0 training program at the Charlotte Mecklenberg Public Library, where staff was invited to take a self-guided tour of 23 web 2.0 activities over a period of 8-10 weeks.
In a true web 2.0 spirit, this program can be adapted for any library or school campus, and is spreading across many types of sites, including schools, college libraries, and even nonprofits, as a “self learning” tool.
If you are interested in learning more about web 2.0 tools, either site above leads you step by step through the experience — perfect for some summer “Life-long” learning.
One thing I like about this concept is that it involves the element of play, which I wrote about last week. Most of us who work with technology a lot don’t “know” it all–we see something, get interested, and play with it in order to figure it out.
Both 23 things programs above provide a nice, conversational scaffold for some “guided” play and provides an excellent introduction to a variety of web 2.0 tools.
