Today I had the oppor­tu­nity to tour the Sci­ence Lead­er­ship Acad­emy (SLA) in Philadel­phia.  Actu­ally, I enjoyed the tour so much I toured the school a sec­ond time.  Through­out the tours, I was able to speak with stu­dents and teach­ers from SLA along with other edu­ca­tors.  My thoughts have really been all over the board since the visit, and I must first say how amazed I was with the school.  SLA was a dif­fer­ent type of school.  Here are some of the biggest things I observed that I would con­sider dif­fer­ent from most schools.

• Stu­dents took com­plete own­er­ship in the school.  When we asked them ques­tions, they would answer with the word “we” quite fre­quently.  We talked with one stu­dent about the admis­sions process and he shared how “we are try­ing to make that process better.”
• The school had a vision, which they called their core val­ues, that were evi­dent every­where in the school.  Those core val­ues were inquiry, respect, col­lab­o­ra­tion, pre­sen­ta­tion, and reflec­tion.  The work that stu­dents did in their classes, stu­dent work in the hall­ways, and the entire atmos­phere of the build­ing reflected those val­ues.  One teacher said the two things that made SLA bet­ter than other schools that he had worked in were the com­mon­al­ity of vision and language.
• Teach­ers were not the own­ers of all of the knowl­edge in the class­room.  In many of the class­rooms that we walked into, I didn’t imme­di­ately know where the teacher was (No, this isn’t because they were run­ning off work­sheet copies in the office).  Instead, stu­dents and teach­ers were work­ing side by side.  When asked about their teach­ers, stu­dents described them as a sort of friend (this rela­tion­ship may lead to an entirely dif­fer­ent con­ver­sa­tion).  They said that they were very com­fort­able talk­ing with them. 
• As a for­mer prin­ci­pal, I of course had to ask about dis­ci­pline.  My tour guide explained that there really weren’t any major dis­ci­pline prob­lems in the school.  If a dis­ci­pline prob­lem did occur, the stu­dent would meet with the prin­ci­pal, guid­ance coun­selor, teacher, and par­ent, to decide how to best deal with the sit­u­a­tion.  He said that they didn’t really have lots of strict pro­ce­dures or poli­cies to deal with dis­ci­pline.  They did have three rules that I saw posted every­where.  Those rules are listed below, and were sim­i­lar to the schools vision in that they seemed to be engrained in the school.  It was extremely appar­ent that respect was a key com­po­nent to the school.
• • Respect your­self
  • Respect the community
  • Respect SLA as a place of learning
• Although tech­nol­ogy was every­where in the build­ing, it wasn’t the focus of instruc­tion.  The core val­ues (inquiry, respect, col­lab­o­ra­tion, pre­sen­ta­tion, and reflec­tion) were the focus of instruc­tion.  When tech­nol­ogy was used, it was to enhance their core val­ues.  This is a mes­sage that I fre­quently try to deliver to 1:1 schools, but observ­ing SLA gave a more pow­er­ful exam­ple of this than my words ever could.  If I was asked what was the most dras­tic dif­fer­ence between SLA and more tra­di­tional schools, I would describe their focus on core val­ues and not tech­nol­ogy.  The teach­ing and learn­ing were extremely focused on those values.

On the back of my busi­ness cards, it reads, “I met with Nick and.….…. I’m ener­gized.”  I have to say that today I vis­ited SLA, and I’m ener­gized!  This school renews my faith that schools can excel and meet the needs of our learners.

The title of this post comes from an arti­cle writ­ten by Thomas G. Car­roll nearly ten years ago!  His arti­cle has really got me think­ing.  How would your stu­dents respond to the title of this post?  How about teach­ers?  Parents?

Edu­ca­tional lead­ers who are attempt­ing to make change in their orga­ni­za­tion may want to use this ques­tion to guide dis­cus­sions with var­i­ous stake­holder groups.  I would love to see these groups cre­ate plans for what model schools of today would look like .  Once groups cre­ate these schools, the next cou­ple of ques­tions may be just as thought provoking.

Why haven’t we changed to make our schools fit the design for schools that we have created?

How can we make our schools look more like the schools we created?

Although Carroll’s arti­cle is nearly ten years old, he makes some strong points about tech­nol­ogy.  Here are some other quotes from the arti­cle that are great con­ver­sa­tion starters.

About col­lab­o­ra­tion.…

“The new and more pow­er­ful oppor­tu­nity avail­able to edu­ca­tors today is to use these tech­nolo­gies to help indi­vid­u­als col­lab­o­ra­tively con­struct net­worked learn­ing com­mu­ni­ties that will accel­er­ate and help indi­vid­u­als col­lab­o­ra­tively con­struct net­worked learn­ing com­mu­ni­ties that will accel­er­ate and aug­ment the community’s learn­ing, as well as each individual’s learning.”

About the future of schools…

“But most schools and class­rooms will no longer be the cen­tral learn­ing hubs they are today.   Today’s model of school­ing is to bring the learner to the knowledge—tomorrow we will bring the knowl­edge to the learn­ers.   We must rec­og­nize that schools and class­rooms are becom­ing nodes in net­worked learn­ing com­mu­ni­ties.   We must begin to think about how to orga­nize learn­ing in net­worked com­mu­ni­ties and not limit learn­ing within the bound­aries of class­rooms and school buildings—which would be to limit our think­ing to what has been pos­si­ble in the past in a sin­gle school or node.  ”

“Our schools may become mar­gin­al­ized as learn­ing places if they con­tinue to focus only on knowl­edge trans­mis­sion, while our work­places, com­mu­ni­ties, and homes begin to take full advan­tage of mod­ern com­mu­ni­ca­tions and infor­ma­tion tech­nolo­gies for knowl­edge adap­ta­tion and generation.”

About the chang­ing roles of stu­dents and teachers…

“We should stop call­ing these indi­vid­u­als “teach­ers” and “stu­dents” and start call­ing them “learn­ers” instead.   More than just a change of names, it is a change to a fun­da­men­tally dif­fer­ent role.   It is very dif­fer­ent to be a “learner” than to be a “stu­dent” or a “teacher.””

This week CASTLE launched the Iowa 1:1 Net­work.  CASTLE’s guide­lines for the blog are described as follows:

“You can post any­thing that you think would be help­ful to the com­mu­nity.
Ran­dom thoughts, ques­tions for the com­mu­nity, plan­ning doc­u­ments,
fund­ing mod­els, les­son plans, pho­tos, videos, links to out­side
resources, pod­casts, research reports, excit­ing things hap­pen­ing in
your class­rooms, nifty tech­nolo­gies, upcom­ing events - lit­er­ally
any­thing that you think would be of inter­est is wel­come. Con­trib­u­tors
can be admin­is­tra­tors, teach­ers, other edu­ca­tors, par­ents, stu­dents,
etc.”

Although I real­ize that many of you may not be from Iowa, CASTLE’s new blog can serve as a model of col­lab­o­ra­tion for other states and regions.  By cre­at­ing a forum where any­one with a shared inter­est can col­lab­o­rate with ease, CASTLE will help strengthen the one to one net­work of schools in Iowa.  Like most states, Iowa has very few one to one schools, and it may be easy for those schools to feel iso­lated and not max­i­mize the poten­tial of one to one.  Hope­fully this blog will serve as a tool for edu­ca­tors to share resources and answer ques­tions so that all schools benefit.  

After I posted yes­ter­day, I was able to con­tinue the con­ver­sa­tion about how tech­nol­ogy can enhance learn­ing and teach­ing.  My col­league Jamie Fath and I actu­ally dis­cussed this topic for much of our long ride home from Cedar Falls.  One model that Jamie brought up was also echoed by edu­ca­tor Matt Towns­ley in his response to the post. 

Both indi­vid­u­als rec­om­mended that I take a look at the Tech­no­log­i­cal Ped­a­gog­i­cal Con­tent Knowl­edge (TPACK) model.

This model does an excel­lent job of illus­trat­ing what needs to hap­pen in order for enhanced learn­ing to take place.  Many teach­ers seem to get caught up in one or two aspects of this model, but fail to con­nect all three. 

One arti­cle that Matt sug­gested does a nice job explain­ing TPACK.  Another resource that you may also want to take a look at is the  TPACK web­site.   

Today I was in a work­shop in Cedar Falls, Iowa with approx­i­mately 50 admin­is­tra­tors.  Much of our con­ver­sa­tion cen­tered around teach­ing, and how tech­nol­ogy could enhance learn­ing.  Through­out the day we watched videos of three dif­fer­ent class­rooms, and dis­cussed how the use of tech­nol­ogy had impacted learn­ing in each of them.  One guide we used to eval­u­ate the lessons was a form adapted from Tech­nol­ogy and Learn­ing Mag­a­zine.  This guide is an excel­lent way to dis­cuss and eval­u­ate lessons, and it can serve as a way to truly deter­mine if tech­nol­ogy is actu­ally enhanc­ing learn­ing in the class­room.  Here are the eight ques­tions posed on the guide.

• Does tech­nol­ogy advance stu­dent learning?
• Are stu­dents work­ing toward a lesson-relevant goal?
• Does the tech­nol­ogy give stu­dents a deeper under­stand­ing of the content?
• Are stu­dents using tech­nol­ogy to solve a problem?
• Are all stu­dents ben­e­fit­ing from the incor­po­ra­tion of technology?
• Is learn­ing improved by the use of tech­nol­ogy in the lesson?
• Are stu­dents moti­vated by the tech­nol­ogy, does this increase their learning?
• Can teach­ers eas­ily explain the ben­e­fit the tech­nol­ogy brings to the lesson?

All three videos had some form of tech­nol­ogy use, but two of the three lessons didn’t use tech­nol­ogy to enhance learn­ing.  One of the par­tic­i­pants made a com­ment that accu­rately described what we saw in the final video.

“This was the first les­son that enhanced learn­ing.  It couldn’t have been done with­out the technology.”

That state­ments sums up one of the most impor­tant things that we all should know and under­stand as we use tech­nol­ogy.  Tech­nol­ogy must be used as a tool to enhance learn­ing.  When used appro­pri­ately, that tool will dras­ti­cally change teach­ing rather than just doing the same thing in a flashy new way.

I spent the day last Wednes­day in Newell, Iowa at a 1:1 Apple con­fer­ence.  It was excit­ing to see approx­i­mately 90 par­tic­i­pants there rep­re­sent­ing numer­ous schools inter­ested in learn­ing more about one to one.  From what I can tell, Iowa will see about a 200% increase in one to one schools next year.  Hope­fully, this trend will also be seen through­out the country.

If you’d like to see more infor­ma­tion from the day, please take a look at my notes.  One impor­tant take away for the schools in atten­dance came from an Apple rep­re­sen­ta­tive who described the key suc­cess fac­tors for one to one schools.  Here are the seven major com­po­nents that he listed.

• Lead­er­ship
• Assess­ment and Evaluation
• Cur­ricu­lum and Pedagogy
• Pro­fes­sional Development
• Com­mu­nity Involvement
• Infra­struc­ture
• Finan­cial Plan

I have pre­vi­ously posted about online edu­ca­tion, and the pos­si­ble future for our cur­rent schools.  Indi­ca­tors point to a dras­tic change in how high school courses will be taught in years to come.  Another inter­est­ing phe­nom­e­non with online edu­ca­tion has been hap­pen­ing in higher edu­ca­tion, and it could have an impact on teach­ers and stu­dents.  That phe­nom­e­non is uni­ver­si­ties are post­ing entire courses online for any­one to take free of charge.

One course that I took a look at was a com­puter pro­gram­ming course.  This online course included all of the lec­tures, assign­ments, and the exams with solu­tions.  Education-Portal.com ranked the top ten uni­ver­si­ties with the best online courses and MIT was at the top of that list.  It becomes appar­ent after look­ing at the list that there are a huge vari­ety of classes being offered from the universities.

So are the courses of high quality?

My review focused mainly on MIT which offers 1,800 free online courses.  The course that I viewed was taught by two pro­fes­sors with a com­bined 55 years of teach­ing expe­ri­ence at the col­lege level.  Obvi­ously, you would not have all of the ben­e­fits of actu­ally being enrolled in the course at the uni­ver­sity, but the courses are free!  Stu­dents who take the courses do not receive credit, and don’t receive the sup­port from the uni­ver­sity that stu­dents who were enrolled would receive.  Even with these lim­i­ta­tions, these free courses pro­vide a pretty amaz­ing oppor­tu­nity for those who decide to take them.

Could this impact our K-12 schools?

I see two major impacts that this could have on our schools.  Pro­fes­sional devel­op­ment for teach­ers is one of the ways these courses could impact edu­ca­tion.  These online courses may be an excel­lent, not to men­tion cheap, way for pro­fes­sional devel­op­ment to really become indi­vid­u­al­ized for teach­ers.  Admin­is­tra­tors could work with indi­vid­ual teach­ers or small teams to deter­mine how to best use these online resources.

The sec­ond area that these free courses could ben­e­fit K-12 edu­ca­tion is in increas­ing oppor­tu­ni­ties for stu­dents.  I’m not say­ing that stu­dents would just jump in and take an entire online course in place of one of their courses, although I do believe this pos­si­bil­ity needs to be con­sid­ered.  These courses could open doors to stu­dents that were oth­er­wise unavail­able.  MIT offers courses in Chi­nese, Ger­man, French, and Span­ish.  How many schools cur­rently offer those courses to their stu­dents?  Unfor­tu­nately, many schools feel hand­cuffed by state poli­cies that dic­tate what courses can be taught and what actu­ally con­sti­tutes a course.  A lit­tle less dras­tic step may be to use bits and pieces of lec­tures to enhance a course in which stu­dents are enrolled.  

In read­ing this, some peo­ple may be a bit con­cerned what this could mean for edu­ca­tion.  There is a fear that stu­dents or edu­ca­tors will have decreased inter­ac­tions with one another and not be engaged.  Hmmm.…doesn’t sound much dif­fer­ent from many schools today.  It is also impor­tant to real­ize that teach­ers and stu­dents all have dif­fer­ent learn­ing styles.  If online courses can enhance a stu­dents edu­ca­tion or give them oppor­tu­ni­ties they would oth­er­wise be unable to have, shouldn’t we try to give them those opportunities?

“Every­thing that can be counted does not nec­es­sar­ily count; every­thing that counts can­not nec­es­sar­ily be counted.” — Albert Einstein

In a new lap­top pro­gram, it’s tempt­ing to try to mea­sure any­thing that will stand still long enough to be mea­sured. You are spend­ing a lot of money under extra scrutiny, and you want to SHOW that you know what you are doing.

I’ve writ­ten before about some of the ways to help schools through this change process with mea­sur­able data. This recent post from the Gen­er­a­tion YES blog, Say the change you want to see describes a vision­ing exer­cise that helps uncover the hid­den hopes and dreams that accom­pany any major change like a 1:1 implementation.

While we may write in our grant nar­ra­tives that we expect x% improve­ment in test scores and y% decrease in text­book costs, we really hope that 1:1 changes more than these bot­tom line dig­its. In secret, we hope that stu­dents and teach­ers fun­da­men­tally change what school means. How can you  artic­u­late that, much less mea­sure it?

And yet, it’s imperative.

Because often, the stated objec­tives in an imple­men­ta­tion plan don’t paint the full pic­ture. There are unspo­ken wishes, hopes and desires that go along with the hard sta­tis­tics. The prob­lem is that if you don’t explore these hid­den wishes, you can’t plan for them, artic­u­late them, or share the vision. Some­times these are harder to mea­sure or they sound “soft” and messy. But many times these unspo­ken out­comes are the most pow­er­ful of all. Sur­pris­ingly, you may find that they are widely shared, but peo­ple feel that they aren’t impor­tant or scientific.

You shouldn’t be embar­rassed to say them out loud. It’s not silly to hope that the work you do changes children’s lives. If you put those goals in writ­ing, you can plan for them, and more impor­tantly, fig­ure out how to mea­sure them.

You can read about this vision­ing exer­cise in my longer blog post, but the bot­tom line is that you have to envi­sion what suc­cess means, includ­ing all the hid­den goals, and then mea­sure those fac­tors. Sounds sim­ple? Not so fast.

If a goal is to have hap­pier stu­dents or more sat­is­fied teach­ers, how will you know? Some­body bet­ter ask them. How will you show it? Some­body bet­ter shoot some video and col­lect some quotes. Plan for that now! Is one of your goals com­mu­nity involve­ment? Bet­ter ask them too! Plan some sur­veys both before and after the lap­tops roll out. If you want to say there is an improve­ment, you have to mea­sure before, after, and maybe in between. And don’t just gather data, gather stories.

And ask what you really want to know; don’t let naysay­ers drain the life out of it. Some peo­ple think “author­i­ta­tive” means “dry and col­or­less” — NOT! Hold your ground when some­body rolls their eyes when you say you want to ask stu­dents if they like school bet­ter or if the lap­tops change the way the learn. Qual­i­ta­tive data is not a dirty word!

Ask for the change you want to see.

Sylvia Mar­tinez
Pres­i­dent, Gen­er­a­tion YES

Blog | Web­site | Twit­ter

Cross posted on Cre­ative Ten­sion. Trans­fer these ideas to a 1:1 envi­ron­ment and my argu­ment becomes even stronger.

I saw this arti­cle yes­ter­day in Dig­i­tal Direc­tions from Edu­ca­tion Week and  it’s been on my mind ever since. While I’m actu­ally a huge sup­porter of the use of tech­nol­ogy in teach­ing and learn­ing for lan­guages,  I believe that there are prob­lems with the way think­ing that is por­trayed in the arti­cle. Now I don’t know what the sit­u­a­tion is at the school and I’m not in their shoes, but it seems to me that their view is myopic and that they are not look­ing at the big pic­ture of the future. The future (and the present for many schools) is not in fixed labs where stu­dents and teach­ers have to be in a spe­cific loca­tion for learn­ing to hap­pen. The future is any­time, anywhere ubiquitous access.

The arti­cle men­tions that Robotel’s lan­guage lab soft­ware pack­ages range from $500 — $1500 per seat. I’m assum­ing that this does not include hard­ware costs since the arti­cle states “soft­ware”. Based on this figure, the Holmdel foun­da­tion raised $150,000 and, accord­ing to the arti­cle, they had three choices on which to spend it.

The Holmdel foun­da­tion was pre­sented with three options for a large fundrais­ing cam­paign this year: the lan­guage lab, LCD pro­jec­tors in every class­room, or instal­la­tion of wire­less Inter­net through­out the school build­ing. The foun­da­tion chose to raise money for the lan­guage lab, Bals says, because par­ents felt it was impor­tant for stu­dents to learn to speak other lan­guages, espe­cially in prepa­ra­tion to com­pete for jobs in a global economy.

What if the money could be used to increase over­all stu­dent access to tech­nol­ogy and also pro­vide stu­dents and teach­ers with access to tools that will help with learn­ing languages?

Let’s take the one class­room sce­nario that Scott M. Hansen, a vice pres­i­dent of Sanako Inc., presents in sup­port of the lan­guage lab solution.

… Advanced Place­ment lan­guage courses require stu­dents to undergo an oral exam that may take 15 min­utes of speak­ing directly to the teacher. In the past, teach­ers would have to pull each stu­dent to the hall­way for the oral exam, while other stu­dents kept them­selves occu­pied in class. Depend­ing on the num­ber of stu­dents in a class, that activ­ity could take the whole period.

With a dig­i­tal lan­guage lab, says Hansen, the stu­dents can take the oral exam, using their head­phones and micro­phones, all at once. Their com­ments are recorded, and the teacher can lis­ten to each stu­dent later.

Let’s say that the school instead decided to invest in a num­ber of lap­tops for stu­dents to check out so that they have access to a portable machine. With a wire­less net­work, they can work any­where in the school. I pro­pose this sce­nario in sup­port of invest­ing in wire­less, mobile access:

While the stu­dents are wait­ing their turn to speak to the teacher they can be …

• record­ing their own orals using Audac­ity, which is a free pro­gram. They can then lis­ten to their record­ing and self-assess their work or they can have a peer or the teacher review their work later on.
• col­lab­o­rat­ing on a story using pho­tos on VoiceThread, which is avail­able for about $1/ user per year. Voice Thread can be used in all sub­ject mat­ter classes since it’s not just geared for learn­ing a 2nd/3rd language.
• study­ing vocab­u­lary, lis­ten­ing to pro­nun­ci­a­tions,  or tak­ing short quizzes for for­ma­tive assess­ment by using one of many iPhone appsthat are avail­able for a min­i­mal cost.

These are just three low cost options that I brain­stormed within a mat­ter of 30 min­utes and these pro­vide the teacher with a larger bag of tricks to use as he/she deems appropriate.

Lastly, this topic is a timely one since my fam­ily and I are begin­ning to learn Por­tuguese to pre­pare for our move to Sao Paulo, Brazil in July. One of the free tools that we are using is Live­mocha and my wife and I are very impressed by the qual­ity of this free web 2.0 resource. Aside from the video/audio lessons our writ­ten and oral work is cri­tiqued by Por­tuguese speak­ers from around the world. Our respon­si­bil­ity is to do the same for users who are study­ing Eng­lish. Live­mocha has:

• courses in 36 languages
• over 160 hours of lessons for each
• help­ful tips from native speakers
• a focus on con­ver­sa­tion skills

While I’m not a lan­guage teacher, as a 21st cen­tury edu­ca­tor I’m for pro­vid­ing the stu­dents and teach­ers with the the porta­bil­ity that these other tools and a lap­top pro­vide.  To me they make more sense than invest­ing in a fixed lab with costly soft­ware and hard­ware solutions.