The leaves are turning its autumn colors and it is relatively quiet in this household, both signaling that September has arrived bringing colder weather and another round of schooling, hence my boys are away from home. In addition there are clear signs that my younger son’s school once again in full swing has adopted some changes. I received my son’s schedule by email and will get regular updates via email each week for his sports, activities and reports on progress. Not much new in that regard from the previous year, however the school has adopted electronic billing as well. Oh great, I now get the bills faster thank you… however I also see my son’s activities on a house blog and keep up to date on his friends in Facebook, and view the calendars on the website. In fact we communicate frequently with him and the school and the tools allow me to be an active participant in his growth and development. Adoption of change or practice is likely slow but is happening one brick at a time.
As for me, I am in full swing at LEARN including the task of building up the math, science and technology resources for the Anglophone students in the province. More on this later…this afternoon on a cool fall day I explored Animoto with some of my summer pictures. Enjoy.
Sharon Peters presentation on global collaborative projects captured the attention of many participants at the New Brunswick educators conference. She challenged participants to become more globally minded and used the experience of her children as digital natives as examples of today’s learners, their connectedness with friends and the modes of learning. The use of her children’s online presence as digital natives is both informative and educational. The students behavior in a virtual spaces are keys to their cross-cultural communication, collaboration and critical thinking skills.
Educators from across the province participated in a very illuminating conference, with a majority of teachers moving to 1:1 notebook programs in their schools. This is the second year teachers have laptops in the classrooms. The sessions provided by the eLearning division of the Department of Education ranged from How to use Microsoft Word to Video Games as Learning Engines presented by David Warlick.
Teachers inspired by the presentations now have a collection of tools and resources for their classroom and have been inspired to re-imagine the possible.
Dr. Michael Fox is presenting the findings of his research on the 1:1 notebook project on three schools in New Brunswick. He summarizes the report by stating that the students are ” highly motivated” and teachers find that “students are more engaged” in their own learning and they are “more motivated to go to school”. In describing the results of his research over a two year period, the report concludes that the project is highly successful for implementation of laptops in teaching and learning. The full report is available at the New Brunswick education eLearning centre.
I am currently at the Department of Education conference in Fredericton, NB. The focus this morning is on supporting new or veteran teachers who are moving into 1:1 notebook classrooms. This general session is supported by presentations on the use of laptops for teaching and learning. The support from the DOE has been exemplary as the DOE has provided all teachers in the province with a laptop and even more schools are implementing school-wide laptop programs this year. With generous funds from the provincial government, the department has also issued a grant application process for innovative learning funds (ILF) that will enable teachers and administrators develop classrooms of the future. This expanding initiative to provide classrooms with the tools and training for 21st literacy skill development is gathering praise from researchers, teachers, parents and learners.
I just completed teaching a summer graduate course entitled, “Technology and the Role of the Educator†at Bishop’s University. It wasa wonderful few weeks working with keen educatorsin order to challenge, support and coach them on some of the existing theories of education, the QEP reform , and emerging tools and resources in education and having them reflect from their own particular experience. Why some of them volunteered for taking part may remain a mystery but I am sure theywill walk away with their eyes open and eager to apply what skills, knowledge and ideas they captured (mostly from their colleagues!) in their own classrooms in the fall.
I found it to be such a wonderful experience for my grounding in the state of education at large. We are all reminded of the privilege of knowledge and skills using emerging technologies and their induction into education as most of us have followed the exchange between David Warlick and David Thornburg recently. When the teachers first arrived some had heard of blogs and only one had actually written one, and soon realized that this was the extent of their knowledge in the use of many read write web tools. I began the task of constructing the course around their needs in order to enable them to be adopters while meeting the graduate course requirements of the University.
The entire course was created in a private wiki and all instructions and materials where housed there. As the course progressed I introduced blogs, google docs, delicious tags and RSS feeds to the challenges. Of course we had the usual twitter session and Skype encounters and even were led through Second Life. Their group project highlights the accumulation of confidence, skills and collaborative efforts. Given the short time frame this is very well done as a group.
What did I learn from this? The tradition of teaching is alive and well and it is likely to stay that way for quite some time. The sheer number of educators using Web 2.0 tools is very few compared to the whole so this is still a new beginning for most people. I was impressed by the class participant’s willingness to challenge themselves, yet were cautious in the application of these tools into their own teaching and learning. If there is a lesson in all this I think it is worthy to look into multiple days for professional development rather than sporadic PD attempts to implement and certainly awareness is key. Of all the education processes that are incorporated is a school system communication of professional development opportunities for learning does not appear to be a strength.
There are seven more adopters out there.. so lets spread the word.
This posting is primarily for my students in my graduate course.
Recently there have been a growing number of conversations regarding the need for a global perspective on education initiatives, highlighted by Graham Wegner’s comments on the Olympic Effects Theory which encourages all of us to think global. Although the structure of education systems tend to reflect cultural values, societal norms and national standards, Web 2.0 technologies and tools enable greater sharing of ideas, thoughts and innovations among educators (and students) that was previously not possible. We are in a new area where global collaboration is the norm to innovate, construct new knowledge and improve learning.
Once again I revisit the Coming of Age book by Terry Freedman. This book has multiple contributors each one adding a level of practical, tested experiential evidence of the use of tools and resources for the everyday classroom educator and school leaders. Collectively it demonstrates the power and potential of global education collaboration and brings with it an international perspective embracing the core value of the use of tools in teaching and learning. Although many of the tools, links and resources may be new to the reader, the emphasis is clearly on improving learning outcomes and not on the tools themselves and this is the real strength of the collective works. Rather than considering a hardcover volume, I visualize Coming of Age becoming an ongoing archive documenting the expanding nature of the global edusphere.
Today was the first day of my graduate teaching course. Several practicing teachers are enrolled and we covered many topics including Google docs, use of delicious tags and collaboration tools, adding to the course wiki and even created an online mindmap. The main focus of this course is to stimulate thinking for the application of technologies in teaching and learning. The students in this class are accepting the challenge to push themselves to a higher capacity and learn to use these tools to apply them to their classrooms when they return in the fall. It was a great opening day and although we had introduced several new tools, I believe this today sets the foundation for our work in this class and allows the transfer of skills to their own learning environments. All participants will create their own blogs and add comments to their peers beginning the communication cycle. It is a pleasure to work with this group of educators.
Well I am attending my eighth NECC conference in various capacities, teacher, administrator, consultant, vendor and presenter. However I am currently in David Warlick’s session on Advanced Blogging. Yesterday I attended the edubloggercon session and heard various speakers talk about the transformation of the education landscape using web 2.0 tools. Why do I feel that I am learning for the first time? The new web 2.0 tools brings affordances that were not possible even a year or so ago , and thus the technology is catching up to our thought process of interconnected ideas and workflow finally coming together. And this is just the early hours of day 2. There is much more to come.
There are many models of teacher professional development and with the many interconnected factors to be considered for planning and implementation effective PD is a process that has not achieved desired outcomes in most instances. In most cases there is little or no follow-up to the PD particularly in terms of measuring outcomes of success or changes of behavior after participating in the initiative. “How do we know it works?†should be central to planning in order to establish a base for research of PD effectiveness. Pendred Noyce’s article on PD states the nature of the task as;
There is no question the evaluating the impact of professional development is more complex that evaluating the effectiveness of a new drug or medical treatment It’s easier to measure the number of new hear attacks than to measure gains in understanding of rational numbers or greater disposition to persist on solving mathematical problems. But hard is not impossible.
While there are many that profess, and I am one of them, that Personal Learning Environments (PLE) is a model that may lead to improved effectiveness of PD it is still a growing model. In fact, I quite like the idea for personal growth in a blended environment and when properly constructed a PLE with built in metrics for reflective practice is one that has the greatest probability for success. Whether or not a PLE with metrics is the ‘pill’ for solving our PD symptoms taking this path is certainly worth the risk. For me the better cure is to lower class sizes, as I know of no other profession that deals with 30 - 40 people (students) at one time.
I was thrilled to be asked to write a review of the latest iteration of Coming of Age. Terry Freedman’s groundbreaking presentation of the education landscape in the first version has been thoroughly enhanced through the collaborative efforts by a cadre of education contributors and his own efforts.
The main focus of Freedman’s book, from a practitioner’s point of view is in sharing of the tools and resources which can impact today’s connected classroom teacher. Each shared vision and example provides a means for a teacher or a whole school to move forward, possible even transforming the learning environment. The goal is to meet the learning needs of our children for a tomorrow of learning and work, and thus we simply need to move forward and accept the changing nature of this new educational landscape and adopt some of the tools that will be common in the classroom of today. It is not the individual tools that change learning environments; it is up to the practicing teachers with students in their care.
Students need to become content creators and throughout this book there are numerous references to student inventions, innovations, and creations utilizing the read/write web toolset. The power to transform the learning environment, traditionally in the hands of educational leaders and the teacher, is now being augmented by the creative energy of the students themselves. We need to embrace this new paradigm of learning as the read/write web comes of age into every classroom. This is clearly articulated by active practitioners and learners in this book and is a must read for everyone in education. For me, after years of searching the web, I am diving deeper into the uses of RSS feeds as a miner of information as this has the potential to define personal learning.
I have often heard people embrace technology initiatives with the goal to engage students in the learning process through active participation in curricular tasks afforded by technology or with access to information. Yet, as David Warlick and his article suggests, students are often disengaged in the classroom from curricular tasks, believed to be the focus by the teacher. The read/write web has the power to transform classrooms into a social connected learning environment and thus present a more engaging active learning environment for all learners and this book has a bushel of examples. However, I am not one to endorse educational gaming as an entity in classrooms just yet even though David’s argument is compelling. Perhaps it is my lack of experience in gaming that causes my bias; no doubt I will follow the application of educational games closely.
As a teacher of teachers, Coming of Age will be mandatory reading for participants in my summer graduate course. It is exactly the collection of tools and resources in a single source that is required for pre-service teachers who will soon be back with the digital natives. Sharon Peters’ review of The World is Flat and the flat classrooms are particularly important concepts for changing the learning and workspace and I believe is very relevant for experienced or pre-service teachers.
Supporting the social constructivist nature of the web, this production of the Coming of Age book exemplifies the collaborative network and the ability to create an online learning artifact. The collective efforts from all contributors sharing their knowledge for the common good is brought together effectively by Terry Freedman. This is a prime example of read/write web and the power of the collective.
The essence of the book is in tying threads together to weave a tapestry that covers the new reality of Web 2.0 and give teachers a starting point to begin to take risks. Herein lies the book’s implicit goal - that doing something different in your classroom is a risk-taking venture, and sometimes taking that risk often goes against conventional wisdom. Yet in an era when the traditional classroom experience is not meeting the needs of all students, this updated, enhanced version of Coming of Age provides the spark to …just do it!
I would like to thank Sharon for encouraging me to get onto the blogosphere… it is time to share and the fact that she was holding the pitchfork at the time is not relevant!While we are on the subject of tools, I listened in on another session of EdTechTalk (ETT) weekly last night, where Dave, Jen and Jeff shared another excellent list of tools and resources to the EdTech community. This also marked the first session where ETT went live with a video of the show using Operator 11. It may not have been entirely smooth streaming as Jen’s voice was lost however we as educators must give these innovators their due for pioneering the landscape each week mining relevant tools and examining their use in education. Dave, Jen and Jeff are just a few of the many cadre of professionals who are willing to give their time and energy and demonstrate the use of these tools live.
We are seeing a rapid growth of software solutions in education of both the commercial and OSS (free) variety competing in an already crowded space for users (and buyers). Education has become the new marketplace open to all suppliers who can demonstrate that their solution leads to improving personalized instruction and performance outcomes. This is the new rallying cry for educators, something every school needs and no one has them. With all these tools and resources available, the critical link to proven results and measured success is still lacking. With the deluge of possible applications (see Jane Harts list too) and variety of implementation possible, including mashups, we may need to reexamine our instruments to measure results of our implementations and use.
In the absence of concise results-based outcomes, many educators continue to adapt new technologies at an ever increasing rate in order to engage and assist student learning. There may be many solutions to a single problem but when a solution is applied effectively we are getting one step closer to personalized instruction and individualized learning success, but I don not think we are there yet, and the solution is not likely a single application.I have lots of new tools and ideas to try this week thanks to Dave, Jen and Jeff archived in the ETT weekly delicious links, podcast and video, but for now I need to apply this pitchfork and get the current job done! I wonder how I can apply this tool to education…
