Archive for February 2012

Supplementing Textbooks with Student Constructed Knowledge Bases

February 28, 2012 Sam Gliksman 5 comments

Orig­i­nally posted on iPads in Edu­ca­tion Ning net­work site
Authored by Sam Gliksman, Twitter: @samgliksman

We’re just a few weeks removed from a major Apple announce­ment regard­ing the release of a new eText­books ini­tia­tive. I’m keenly aware of the sig­nif­i­cance of the move to eBooks, espe­cially as I have a 13 year old that car­ries 20 pounds in his back­pack to school every day. How­ever impor­tant the move from paper to dig­i­tal text­books, I’m still left with a taste for more.

I have been crit­i­cal of the ways most schools still rely on text as the pri­mary, almost soli­tary, medium for exchang­ing infor­ma­tion. The “real world” trades infor­ma­tion using an amal­gam of dif­fer­ent media that includes video, audio, images … and text. Of course, it’s also no secret that most stu­dents are way more com­fort­able watch­ing tuto­ri­als on YouTube than read­ing pages from a text­book. So what’s the prob­lem? Apple has given authors of all vari­eties a mech­a­nism for cre­at­ing inter­ac­tive, mul­ti­me­dia school con­tent … but it doesn’t feel like enough.

iBooks could have included aspects of social read­ing so “friends” could exchange ques­tions and notes right within the pages of the book. It may have included a sys­tem for imme­di­ate feed­back, for­ma­tive assess­ment and cor­rec­tive branch­ing — that would have added to its value. The abil­ity to gen­er­ate sum­mary usage reports for par­ents and teach­ers could have helped eval­u­ate the progress of stu­dents. All things con­sid­ered how­ever, Apple has man­aged to estab­lish a solid base and it’s sure to improve as addi­tional updates are released. It doesn’t how­ever solve the core prob­lem of textbooks.

One of the major com­plaints about “20th cen­tury edu­ca­tion” was that it cen­tered on con­tent deliv­ery. We acknowl­edge that stu­dents need inde­pen­dent learn­ing skills that enable them to enter soci­ety con­fi­dent in their abil­i­ties to adjust to chang­ing cir­cum­stances and equipped with skills to learn and relearn as new needs arise … yet many of our tech­nol­ogy appli­ca­tions keep draw­ing edu­ca­tion back into the model of con­tent delivery.

While the eText­Books ini­tia­tive is a won­der­ful stride for­ward from our old paper text­books it’s still essen­tially a re-constituted con­tent deliv­ery sys­tem that wasn’t designed or intended to change the one-way process of edu­ca­tional exchanges. Reliance on any type of course text­book – dig­i­tal, mul­ti­me­dia, inter­ac­tive or oth­er­wise – only fits as a more mar­ginal ele­ment in student-centered learn­ing mod­els. It’s not the nature of the text­book as much as its rev­er­ence in the class­room as “the” sin­gu­lar author­ity for learn­ing. Life­long learn­ers need to be skilled in find­ing, fil­ter­ing, col­lat­ing, eval­u­at­ing, col­lab­o­rat­ing, edit­ing, ana­lyz­ing and uti­liz­ing infor­ma­tion from a mul­ti­tude of sources.

Instead we could pri­or­i­tize “con­tent con­struc­tion”. Text­books are an impor­tant gate­way — a start­ing point from which stu­dents can learn and then begin their explo­ration of infor­ma­tion on any topic (although even on that point I feel we should encour­age the “crit­i­cal read­ing” of text­books). How­ever the days when stu­dents could respon­si­bly rely on any text­book as a sin­gu­lar infor­ma­tion source are gone. Also, the process of access­ing, syn­the­siz­ing and uti­liz­ing infor­ma­tion is often as impor­tant as the prod­uct. The skills devel­oped are an essen­tial com­po­nent of edu­ca­tion and life today.

We have access to an expo­nen­tially grow­ing amount of infor­ma­tion to process and apply. There are many excel­lent tools we can all use to help in con­struct­ing and orga­niz­ing that con­tent. Here’s a short selec­tion of some of the more pop­u­lar ones. They can be used by indi­vid­u­als and also by stu­dents or teach­ers col­lab­o­rat­ing in groups.

Orga­niz­ing Content

Con­tent con­struc­tion starts with col­lect­ing and col­lat­ing. Dig­i­tal solu­tions for col­lect­ing resources are mod­eled on the old shoe­box or file cab­i­net we used for stor­ing paper based resources.

Live­Binders, as the name sug­gests, is designed to work and look like the binders we use at school. You can store con­tent of all types in binders and then set the binder per­mis­sions to made pub­lic or keep them pri­vate within any class or group of members.

For younger stu­dents Muse­um­Box (requires Flash) allows stor­age of images, text snip­pets, web pages and more.

Ever­note is a very pop­u­lar resource that works across all plat­forms. It’s an invalu­able tool for col­lect­ing and shar­ing any type of con­tent — images, text, links or your own notes. Set up Note­books by topic and add infor­ma­tion by click­ing on an Ever­note icon or even email­ing it directly to your spe­cially des­ig­nated Ever­note email account. The Ever­note “Clip­per” is a tool that allows you to cut out any por­tion of your screen dis­play and saves it as image. I’ve used Ever­note effec­tively with classes that want to col­lect and share infor­ma­tion and it’s also an extremely valu­able tool for per­sonal use. You can also sign up for pre­mium school accounts now and then cre­ate and man­age stu­dent accounts.

Instapa­per is a sim­ple ser­vice for sav­ing web pages. It adds an icon to your tool­bar. Click on the Instapa­per icon and it saves a page for later read­ing. Instapa­per is a tool that’s used pri­mar­ily for sav­ing items to read later rather than for col­lat­ing and tag­ging items in libraries for research pur­poses. It is how­ever a very effec­tive tool for sim­ple archiv­ing. You can even down­load web pages for read­ing offline when you’re trav­el­ing or out of Inter­net range. Apple recently added a “Read­ing List” fea­ture to Safari in iOS 5 but Instapa­per still works across all devices and platforms.

Method­ol­ogy: Don’t for­get that the skills required in col­lect­ing resources require teach­ing and train­ing. Search­ing, assess­ing, fil­ter­ing, group­ing and/or tag­ging – these are all skills that require guid­ance and rep­e­ti­tion. It’s about process not just product.

Social Book­mark­ing

Social book­mark­ing is an extremely effec­tive method for col­lect­ing con­tent on the web. My tool of choice is Diigo. Social book­mark­ing works by hav­ing you tag web pages that can then be anno­tated and shared. You pro­gres­sively build a library of tagged links and there’s a sim­ple search and retrieval mech­a­nism when­ever you need to find a tagged arti­cle or note. The two pri­mary fac­tors that dis­tin­guish social book­mark­ing is that it uses tag­ging to orga­nize infor­ma­tion rather than a sim­ple lin­ear struc­ture and sec­ondly, it allows you to con­nect with other users and share tagged information.

Click the Diigo tool­bar icon to anno­tate and tag any web page

Open an account with Diigo and add a tool­bar icon within your browser. Diigo works across all plat­forms includ­ing mobile devices and iPads. When you find con­tent you want to archive sim­ply click on the Diigo icon. High­light any text, add notes to the page and then add some key­words that will allow you to find it eas­ily after­wards. Click to Save it to your Diigo account and when­ever you go to diigo.com (or use their iOS app) you’ll have access to the libraries of tags and links that you’ve col­lected and annotated.

There’s also a promi­nent “social” com­po­nent. Share your links by sav­ing them pub­li­cally. You can start or join a wide vari­ety of dif­fer­ent groups with like inter­ests and share con­tent within your group. When search­ing, you’re also able to search through tags that oth­ers in the group have added.

Sign up for an edu­ca­tor account and each stu­dent in your class can also get an account. Now you can use Diigo to find and share con­tent among mem­bers of your class. It’s an extremely effec­tive way of enabling stu­dents to build an infor­ma­tion library. They can share high­lights, notes and com­ments. Used in that way Diigo will become an invalu­able resource for your classroom.

Cura­tion

We’re exposed to so much infor­ma­tion that it gets a lit­tle over­whelm­ing at times. One of the newer cat­e­gories of tools for orga­niz­ing infor­ma­tion on the web is “con­tent cura­tion”. Cura­tors gather infor­ma­tion from any web based resource (news sources, web pages, rss feeds, Twit­ter etc). They then fil­ter the con­tent and add selected web pages to the library of curated con­tent. Other users can then fol­low a curated library and get more select, pre­mium con­tent that has already been fil­tered. A pop­u­lar con­tent cura­tion tool is scoop.it .

Scoop.it:  When you open an account, you select a topic to curate (eg. iPads in Edu­ca­tion) and add any num­ber of con­tent resources such as web­sites, rss feeds, Twit­ter accounts or hash­tags and more. Scoop-it will serve up the con­tent daily and you then decide which articles/sites to add to your curated library. You can also add an icon to your tool­bar and add con­tent on the fly as you surf sites on the web. Typ­i­cally, oth­ers will fol­low a curated topic to get fil­tered con­tent on a par­tic­u­lar theme. Arti­cles can be tagged and searched. Typ­i­cally, this process is par­tic­u­larly effec­tive in a class set­ting when you’re research­ing any theme that has a lot of cur­rent, top­i­cal infor­ma­tion being released on a fre­quent basis. Your stu­dent cura­tors need to browse and read all related resources and only add those that pro­vide the most help­ful information.

Other Tools…

There are many addi­tional tools and meth­ods for build­ing infor­ma­tion libraries:

- Wikis have been a pop­u­lar method for cre­at­ing col­lab­o­ra­tively built con­tent and peer edit­ing. You assign each stu­dent a login and groups will cre­ate pages. Each user can add and/or edit exist­ing con­tent. The wiki admin­is­tra­tor can track all changes and roll back to prior ver­sions. One of the bet­ter resources for start­ing your own wiki iswik­i­spaces.

- YouTube is an under­rated source for video based con­tent. Open an account for your class and stu­dents can add videos to a class Favorites list. One way of using YouTube is to use your class account for col­lect­ing tuto­r­ial videos on any topic… and of course, stu­dents can and should add their own. Vimeo is another sim­i­lar resource.

Some schools are uncom­fort­able allow­ing stu­dents to browse YouTube at school. If that’s the case at your school, con­sider using SchoolTube instead.

Lastly, it’s not just the infor­ma­tion library you’re build­ing that has value for stu­dents. As opposed to hav­ing them access a slice of con­tent that some­one has selected for them, the process of search­ing, fil­ter­ing, orga­niz­ing, ana­lyz­ing and edit­ing exer­cises valu­able skills and helps develop their abil­ity to become the inde­pen­dent learn­ers we’re hop­ing to grad­u­ate from our schools.

Sam Gliks­man
samgliksman@gmail.com
Twit­ter: @samgliksman

No Laptop for You! (Until You Set Goals)

February 28, 2012 Nick Sauers No comments

The fol­low­ing post was writ­ten by John Nash on big think. It is a great post, and John gra­ciously allowed me to cross-post it to this blog!

A teacher friend of mine wrote me recently. She said that her school was work­ing on bring­ing in iPads for grades six and seven next year and asked if I find that schools pre­fer lap­tops to iPads when mov­ing to a 1:1 device environment.

That’s a ques­tion our cen­ter gets quite a bit. In the end, our advice is: be sure your school defines clear goals for what it seeks to achieve by hav­ing com­put­ing devices in the hands of its students.

For instance, if writ­ing is an impor­tant goal, you prob­a­bly want a device with a phys­i­cal key­board — so lap­tops are a good choice.  Schools that are inte­grat­ing writ­ing across the cur­ricu­lum, for instance, would want to take this into account.

But if your goals are about enhanc­ing over­all stu­dent engage­ment with mate­r­ial, then tablets may be the way to go. iPads are excel­lent for giv­ing stu­dents access to infor­ma­tion.  If enhanc­ing cre­ative capa­bil­i­ties of stu­dents is crit­i­cal, then lap­tops may be the way to go because of the wider array of appli­ca­tions and the abil­ity save cre­ative work to disk and share it across plat­forms (print, web, etc).

Regard­less, it’s the set­ting of goals that’s impor­tant. It tran­scends most other school fac­tors in deter­min­ing 1:1 success. For instance, we’ve seen schools issue iPads to stu­dents but not do a good job of expec­ta­tion set­ting and train­ing only to have teach­ers leave the school because of it. Per­haps that’s a worst-case sce­nario, but it’s emblem­atic of the bad feel­ings that can creep in to the teacher ranks when changes are not well com­mu­ni­cated. Other schools that have aligned cur­ricu­lum, trained teach­ers, set clear expec­ta­tions, etc. have stu­dents doing amaz­ing things. The schools that are really good at this don’t call them­selves 1:1 schools, even if they tech­ni­cally are.  Take for instance the Sci­ence Lead­er­ship Acad­emy in Philadel­phia. They have five core val­ues in their school, none of which are about tech­nol­ogy. How­ever, they do use tech­nol­ogy to ful­fill those values:

  • Inquiry
  • Research
  • Col­lab­o­ra­tion
  • Pre­sen­ta­tion
  • Reflec­tion

They are now doing things that are unimag­in­able with­out the devices. And they got there because they had broad agree­ment across their school’s stake­hold­ers about what the goals should be. My col­league Nick Sauers talks about this in a post he wrote a while back. He notes:

“One to one learn­ing is one way to enhance what stu­dents learn and the ways that they learn.  It can turn teacher cen­tered class­rooms into stu­dent cen­tered class­rooms.  More impor­tantly, it can move stu­dents from the bot­tom of Bloom’s Tax­on­omy to the top level where stu­dents create…Unfor­tu­nately, one to one could also serve as a tool to pro­mote the ways things have always been done. (The key is to) truly iden­tify what stu­dents should learn and make those things the focus of every­thing the school does.”

Is your school think­ing about imple­ment­ing a 1:1 lap­top pol­icy? Some things to be aware of might include:

  • Think­ing about how to get devices in teach­ers hands the year before stu­dents receive them.
  • Ensur­ing every­one feels the urgency that teach­ing and learn­ing must change to pro­duce suc­cess­ful stu­dents in today’s world. This “urgency build­ing”, as we call it, helps teach­ers under­stand why a school is embark­ing on an ambi­tious move such as 1:1. Not all teach­ers nat­u­rally feel the urgency that can drive a deci­sion to go to 1:1. Kot­ter talks about the 8 stages of cre­at­ing change, and many schools skip step 1 and 3 (urgency and vision) in lieu of just get­ting mov­ing. They just jump in but don’t know the why they really want to do it.
  • Inte­grat­ing stu­dent voice into the plan­ning and imple­men­ta­tion process.  Increas­ing stu­dent voice in a 1:1 plan­ning not only uncov­ers new ideas that a plan­ning team will never think of, it pro­vides stu­dents with a stronger sense of own­er­ship in their school. Stu­dents highly value hav­ing their voices heard and hon­ored.  

What else should a school embark­ing on a 1:1 jour­ney keep in mind?

Photo Credit: (cc) Flickr user flickingerbrad

Tags: 1:1, BYOD, change, goal set­ting, goals, iPads, Lap­tops, one-to-one, stu­dent voice, urgency

Rethinking exams

February 16, 2012 Nick Sauers No comments

A cou­ple of weeks ago CNN aired a story that focused on how cheat­ing had become com­mon among der­ma­tol­ogy and radi­ol­ogy stu­dents tak­ing their cer­ti­fi­ca­tion exams. In the story they noted that next year the board will be rolling out a new exam for the first time in more than 10 years. I’m not going to pre­tend to be an expert on cer­ti­fi­ca­tion to be an MD, and quite frankly I don’t care about the process as much as I should. This story does how­ever does gen­er­ate some ques­tions that could have impli­ca­tions for those of us in K-12 education.

  • Why would you not change your exam in 10 years? Even if, big IF, infor­ma­tion doesn’t change in that time, shouldn’t your knowl­edge about your assess­ment tool change?
  • Why is the infor­ma­tion on the test some­thing that can be eas­ily shared with oth­ers? Shouldn’t it be infor­ma­tion that can only be under­stood from eight years of med school?
  • How impor­tant is it that stu­dents can mem­o­rize facts? Is that more impor­tant than demon­strat­ing competence?
  • Why is it a secret what is on the test? Shouldn’t stu­dents know from the begin­ning of their courses the impor­tant things that are con­sid­ered essen­tial to their learning?
  • Should one exam at the end of an eight year degree be the most impor­tant assess­ment for candidates?
These ques­tions could eas­ily be altered to address K-12 edu­ca­tors.  Assess­ment is always an impor­tant topic for edu­ca­tors. Those one-to-one schools that have focused on truly chang­ing teach­ing and learn­ing also need to think about address­ing assess­ment dif­fer­ently. When stu­dents have access to unlim­ited infor­ma­tion with the click of the but­ton, edu­ca­tors are forced to con­sider new ways to address assessment.

Nick Sauers

 

 

 

3rd Annual Iowa 1:1 Institute

February 6, 2012 Nick Sauers No comments

I’m extremely excited to offi­cially announce that the 3rd Annual Iowa 1:1 Insti­tute will be held on April 11 at the Events Cen­ter in Des Moines. The con­fer­ence was launched two years ago, and it was made pos­si­ble through the help of the one-to-one schools in Iowa. Iowa’s one-to-one schools con­tributed to the con­fer­ence by pro­vid­ing pre­sen­ters who had suc­cess­fully imple­mented one-to-one. Those pre­sen­ters along with the excite­ment around one-to-one have helped the con­fer­ence grow from approx­i­mately 600 atten­dees in year one to 1300 last year. Although the con­fer­ence con­sists of pre­dom­i­nantly Iowa edu­ca­tors, we have had atten­dees from all of the sur­round­ing states and even the east coast.

With CASTLE’s move to the Uni­ver­sity of Ken­tucky, we did make some changes to the con­fer­ence. How­ever, our pur­poses have remained the same.

  • Help Iowa’s 1:1 dis­tricts learn from each other about inno­v­a­tive teach­ing, learn­ing, and admin­is­tra­tive prac­tices that are occur­ring in their districts;
  • Build excite­ment and ‘buzz’ around 1:1 lap­top com­put­ing ini­tia­tives in the state; and
  • Help oth­ers who are inter­ested in 1:1 com­put­ing learn more about how to get started and be successful.

On Tues­day of last week Iowa one-to-one schools were invited to sign up for the con­fer­ence. That prelaunch has already led to nearly 300 reg­is­trants. If you are inter­ested in learn­ing more or par­tic­i­pat­ing, click on one of the links below:

We hope you will be part of what has become the biggest, and we hope best, one-to-one con­fer­ence in the world!

Nick Sauers

 

Everything I Need To Know — About Education — I Learned In Kindergarten

February 2, 2012 Sam Gliksman 3 comments

Orig­i­nally posted on iPads in Edu­ca­tion net­work web­site - http://ipadeducators.ning.com/profiles/blogs/kindergarten

Authored by Sam Gliksman, Twitter: @samgliksman

I had some­what of an epiphany while doing a work­shop at a local ele­men­tary school recently. Walk­ing around and speak­ing to teach­ers and chil­dren it sud­denly dawned on me that many of the “rev­o­lu­tion­ary” edu­ca­tional changes that many of us have been call­ing for have already been around for quite a while — just talk a stroll down to the Kinder­garten classes.

If only the rest of school looked a lit­tle more like those class­rooms. In fact, eight impor­tant pil­lars of a 21st cen­tury edu­ca­tion can be found in most Kinder­garten class­rooms every day of the week:

1. PLAY

The first rule of Kinder­garten is to have fun. Our youngest stu­dents love com­ing to school, and if any child doesn’t seem happy then we make it a high pri­or­ity to find and rem­edy the prob­lem. Play is a highly effec­tive method of infor­mal learn­ing that requires imag­i­na­tion and cre­ativ­ity. Happy, play­ful chil­dren are not day­dream­ing and clock watch­ing — they are engaged and absorbed in their activ­i­ties. As chil­dren get older how­ever, play starts tak­ing a back seat to “aca­d­e­mics” … which are usu­ally pri­or­i­ties deter­mined by peo­ple in offices far away from the stu­dents’ actual class­room environment.

2. CREATE

Cre­ativ­ity is becom­ing lost in the shuf­fle of the cur­rent “back to basics” school move­ment. While cer­tainly required in any artis­tic endeavor, cre­ativ­ity is also a highly essen­tial cop­ing skill for our rapidly chang­ing lives in the 21st cen­tury. Our tod­dlers are con­stantly being encour­aged to think and play cre­atively. We even struc­ture the class­room phys­i­cally in an attempt to stim­u­late cre­ativ­ity — using bright col­ors, infor­mal seat­ing and allow­ing chil­dren ample room to move. Con­trast that to the staid col­ors and fixed rows of desks found in most upper school classes where “fol­low the norm” has replaced “think out of the box”.

A cou­ple of years ago I attended a lec­ture by Amer­i­can artist, Erik Wahl. As part of his pre­sen­ta­tion he splashed paint around a can­vas while cre­at­ing a por­trait on stage. After­wards he turned to the audi­ence and asked, “How many of you con­sider your­selves artists?”. Out of an audi­ence of sev­eral hun­dred peo­ple only a cou­ple of hands were raised. He then related how he often goes into pre-school classes and asks the very same ques­tion. The dif­fer­ence is that almost every hand in the room imme­di­ately shoots up. The sad fact is that school squashes our inner sense of cre­ativ­ity as we get older. Instead of inspir­ing our stu­dents to be imag­i­na­tive and cre­ate we tell them to fol­low the rules — “Do what I tell you to do … and make sure do it exactly the way I asked you to do it”.

3. SOCIALIZE

We under­stand that young chil­dren are social by nature and encour­age them to min­gle. We don’t seat them alone in fixed desks fac­ing the front of the room. Instead we allow them appro­pri­ate time to roam and social­ize. Impor­tantly, we rec­og­nize the value of get­ting them to work together in small groups. When they get older and try to work together we often label the activ­ity “cheat­ing”. They’re usu­ally told to sit alone, face the front and work qui­etly on their own. Social­iz­ing is con­sid­ered an extra-curricular activ­ity that has no place in seri­ous aca­d­e­mics … well, not until you get out into the workplace!

4. DISCOVER

Chil­dren are curi­ous and love to explore the world around them. They nat­u­rally observe, ask ques­tions and demand answers. Kinder­garten class might be spent explor­ing a bug brought in from the play­ground or lis­ten­ing to a story from a par­ent with an inter­est­ing pro­fes­sion. Their world is a play­ground that they con­stantly explore.

As they get older we tell them that their world is divided into nicely delin­eated courses with pre­de­ter­mined content. Important ques­tions and issues that would nor­mally require dis­cus­sion and expla­na­tion are shelved because they don’t fit into some arbi­trary course cur­ricu­lum. How many times do you hear “we don’t have time for that today”? If course­work is com­pleted then there might pos­si­bly be some time left to explore a topic of inter­est. In the mean­time, explo­ration is put on hold.

5. EXPERIENCE

Effec­tive learn­ing occurs when chil­dren build new under­stand­ings based on expe­ri­ences that help them con­struct new knowl­edge. Kinder­garten teach­ers help pro­vide a myr­iad of expe­ri­ences for their stu­dents. We don’t read about ham­sters — we keep a pet in class and observe how they eat. We might even allow each child to take the pet home for an evening. We encour­age chil­dren to bring things into class so that oth­ers can feel, taste, expe­ri­ence and learn from them. Their expe­ri­ences pro­vide a scaf­fold­ing for the chil­dren to build upon and extend what they already know. We under­stand that chil­dren learn most deeply and effec­tively through experience.

How­ever, con­tent is king when they get to the older grades. It seems that the only valid expe­ri­ence for learn­ing is read­ing from a text book or lis­ten­ing to a teacher.

6. EXPRESS

Mix­ing dif­fer­ent forms of media and com­mu­ni­ca­tion is an essen­tial com­po­nent of Kinder­garten class. Chil­dren look at pho­tos, lis­ten to music, watch video, tell sto­ries and of course, read books. We under­stand that peo­ple com­mu­ni­cate in a vari­ety of man­ners and we bring them into play in our classrooms.

In upper grades our entire world is expressed through text. For what­ever rea­son, it seems that the only valid form of express­ing knowl­edge is through text. Out of class they con­stantly inter­act and cre­ate video, music and more. In class, we have stu­dents read from text­books and almost exclu­sively require them to respond in writing.

7. MOVE

Chil­dren need to move. We all need to move. It’s healthy for both body and mind. We under­stand that in Kinder­garten. The fur­ni­ture is arranged to facil­i­tate move­ment and we often have chil­dren move around to dif­fer­ent parts of the room depend­ing on the activ­ity. Out­doors, it’s essen­tial to pro­vide time and equip­ment for play.

The mantra of upper school is to sit still and face the front. Classes are designed for quiet, motion­less, obe­di­ent activ­i­ties. That can be excru­ci­at­ingly dif­fi­cult for many students.

8. RELATE

Finally, in Kinder­garten we strive to make learn­ing as mean­ing­ful as pos­si­ble. Learn­ing has mean­ing as defined by its rel­e­vance to the lives of stu­dents. If chil­dren can’t relate to it then it won’t hold their interest.

On the other hand, the vast amount of bleary eyed, day­dream­ing stu­dents in upper grades is tes­ta­ment to the fact that they don’t relate to much of what passes for learn­ing in class. It’s usu­ally a pre­de­fined pack­age of con­tent defined by an “author­ity” sit­ting far from the lives of our stu­dents — phys­i­cally and emo­tion­ally. Just as impor­tantly, this pre­de­fined con­tent pack­age is becom­ing increas­ingly inad­e­quate in prepar­ing our stu­dents for their lives after school.

So if you have a few moments I’d strongly encour­age you to take a stroll down to the lower grades in your school. In fact, the lower the bet­ter. Spend a few min­utes observ­ing the dynam­ics in class. Note the energy, laugh­ter and enthu­si­asm … the gen­uine thirst for learn­ing. Then ask your­self why it can’t be that way through­out school.

Sam Gliks­man
samgliksman@gmail.com
Twit­ter: @samgliksman
http:\\ipadeducators.ning.com

What if or yeah but?

February 1, 2012 Nick Sauers No comments

I spent the day on Fri­day work­ing with a school in Ken­tucky that is actively seek­ing ways to enrich the learn­ing expe­ri­ences for their stu­dents. The super­in­ten­dent kicked-off the meet­ing with other school lead­ers with a clear direc­tive for the meet­ing. He wanted the group to think and talk about “what if” state­ments. The group dis­cussed some pos­si­ble “what if” state­ments, but more impor­tantly they planned to do the same with their staffs.

As I sat in on the meet­ing, a cou­ple of dif­fer­ent thoughts came to mind. The first was that every school has staff mem­bers with ideas about how to change their school. My sec­ond thought was that schools all too often fail to “dream” about the pos­si­bil­i­ties for the school. All too often schools get in the habit of talk­ing about ideas in “yeah, but” terms instead of “what if” terms.

  • Yeah, but the par­ents at our school won’t sup­port that.
  • Yeah, but our stu­dents won’t do that.
  • Yeah, but our bud­get doesn’t allow for that.
I would be the first to admit that I cer­tainly can be a “yeah, but” type of per­son. I am very prac­ti­cal at times, and I some­times quickly dis­miss ideas that don’t seem prac­ti­cal. Unfor­tu­nately, that atti­tude isn’t one that always har­nesses cre­ative and inno­v­a­tive ideas. As schools look for ways to change and trans­form, they should cer­tainly take the time to have some con­ver­sa­tions about the what ifs.
  • What if we involved stu­dents in impor­tant school decisions?
  • What if stu­dents were chal­lenged with work that was relavent to them?
  • What if teach­ers rou­tinely observed each oth­ers classrooms?
I have had the oppor­tu­nity to learn from design thinkers Chris­t­ian Long and John Nash, who is a col­league. Their work is extremely relavent to schools try­ing to redesign them­selves. One major con­cept that I heard cen­ters around the devel­op­ment of ideas. In that stage it is crit­i­cal to focus on gen­er­at­ing ideas, and not eval­u­at­ing ideas (What ifs vs. yeah buts). A sec­ond idea is that we have to be will­ing to fail. This doesn’t nec­es­sar­ily mean that you gam­ble on one huge change for an entire dis­trict at the same time. It may involve pilots or phased imple­men­ta­tion of an initiative.
If you work at a one-to-one school, some­one at some point cer­tainly dreamed of inno­va­tion and change. Beyond imple­ment­ing one-to-one, has your school con­tin­ued to have real con­ver­sa­tions about the “what ifs” for your school? If not, it may cer­tainly be time to have those conversations!
Nick Sauers