Top 5 Learning Trends for 2009

Chief Learning Magazine recently published its Top 5 Learning Trends for 2009.

While I normally don't pay attention to "Top" lists, this one hit home, as embedded into everything I do every day is the search for the solution to the question, "How can we improve learning?"

Included in the list are Mobile Learning, Do-It-Yourself Learning, Flexible Learning Environments, Virtual Worlds, and Games and Simulations.

One of the fascinating parts of this List is the reasoning behind it. Stated in the justification for the various choices are statements such as "drawing people in" and "responding to the gaming culture of younger workers".

IMO, schools would do well to address these issues as well.

VP

The End in Mind

Last evening, Carla shared with me the weblink to an online book she was interested in using for our U.S. Government class. When I Googled the author, Jonathan Mott, I found that he not only has a Ph.D. in Political Science, but that he is also a well-known proponent of the use of instructional technology! Jon’s blog, The End in Mind, is a fascinating dialogue of how to truly reform and transform education by reversing the focus from teaching to learning. This is the same concept outlined by renowned educator Rick DuFour in a podcast that I originally was going to share with you this week, but cut out of our agenda in the interest of sanity.

Hopefully you can find the time to take a few minutes and read one of Jon’s blog posts, Roger Schank and the Tyranny of Grades, which reminds us that Learning is our ultimate goal. And I find myself reiterating that, as we rewrite courses, we should do so with exactly that in mind: the End, the Standards, the Goals--the Learning--that is supposed to be the “take-away” for our students.

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Adobe launches free online photo editing and gallery service

eSchool news reported that Adobe has launched a web-based version of Photoshop, called Photoshop Express: eSchoolNews article

I signed up and tried it out—it’s pretty good!



But beware of the terms:

8. Use of Your Content.
a. Adobe does not claim ownership of Your Content. However, with respect to Your Content that you submit or make available for inclusion on publicly accessible areas of the Services, you grant Adobe a worldwide, royalty-free, nonexclusive, perpetual, irrevocable, and fully sublicensable license to use, distribute, derive revenue or other remuneration from, reproduce, modify, adapt, publish, translate, publicly perform and publicly display such Content (in whole or in part) and to incorporate such Content into other Materials or works in any format or medium now known or later developed.

Photoshop Express online service

(but then, perhaps the other photo-sharing sites have similar EULAs?)

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ITSC Notes v3 When does meaningfulness start?

When does meaningfulness start?

Dr. Tim Tyson, in the closing conference presentation, challenged everyone to transform their teaching practice into what he describes as School 2.0:

• Authentically engaged learners
  
• Self-directed learning
  
• Project-driven instruction
  
• Independent problem-solvers
  
• Empowered by technology innovation
  
• Collaborative learning community
  
• Relevant
  

Spurred by the request of a middle school student to work during the summer to perfect his project to share globally, Dr. Tyson created Mabryonline.org so that student projects could be distributed globally on iTunes. He asked his students, “What do you have to say that’s so important that everyone on earth needs to hear it?” Their responses, in the form of student-produced videos, exemplify the potential results of true educational reform and should serve as motivation for all of us:
Mabry Middle School Videos

ITSC Notes v2 The View from Google Earth

Instructional technologist Lynn Lary of Oregon’s Springfield School District presented a dynamic workshop on the use of Google in education. The 3-hour workshop focused mainly on the powerful spatial representation capabilities of Google: its advanced search capabilities combined with mapping tools and Google Earth.

Dr. Lary led collaborative activities in which participants acquired hands-on experience in utilizing Google’s amazing power to locate and analyze various types of data. Most importantly, Lary shares, through her blog, exemplary activities in utilizing the power of Google to transform education by providing students with relevant, meaningful project-based learning that can be replicated across the curriculum: http://handheldcomputers.blogspot.com/

If you haven’t yet delved into Google Earth, Lary’s blog gives you the power and the incentive to do so.

ITSC Notes v1

This weekend, I have had the privilege of attending ITSC, the annual conference for instructional technology geeks held in Portland.

The Keynote Speaker, Marco Antonio Torres, was absolutely riveting! His presentation is entitled, “Now What Do We Do With IT?” He has accomplished phenomenal things with low income students in a huge inner-city school in southern California.

Be sure to check out his websites:
sfett.com
flickschool.com

The two premier workshops that I have attended so far were by Leslie Fisher, a self-proclaimed technology geek, and the infamous Kathy Schrock. Both of these workshops were fantastic! Here is a link to Leslie’s presentation handout.

Be sure to follow the links back to the root domain and see all the free information and funny stuff Leslie has to share!

Unfortunately, you’ll have to wait until this evening for Kathy to upload her presentation handout. But she has so much other cool stuff on her website, it’s worth a look anyway: KathySchrock.net

Don’t miss out on Springfield Middle School teacher Eva Lamar’s website; she has wonderful tips and tricks for promoting literacy using Microsoft Word and Firefox, as well as projects that integrate technology.

Happy surfing!

Google Doodles contest

Google is famous for innovation. Here's a new contest that encourages art, innovation, higher order thinking skills and literacy, all rolled into one!

Picture this: You're standing in front of your class, but instead of keeping their eyes on the blackboard, the students are all sitting there doodling.

For once, though, they're actually working on an assignment -- namely, the Doodle 4 Google competition www.google.com/doodle4google which offers young artists the chance to play around with the Google logo and perhaps have their artwork seen by people all over the world.

The theme for our U.S. doodling competition is "What if...?"

What if...I could live underwater, or in outer space, or in Colonial America?
What if...I could see into the future?
What if...I could build any kind of invention I wanted?

Google will display 40 finalist doodles on their site and invite the public to vote for their favorites. The winning doodler will receive a $10,000 college scholarship and their design will take over the Google homepage for a day (the winning school will also receive a $25,000 technology grant).

Want to get in on the fun? You'll find everything you need, including detailed lesson plans, at www.google.com/doodle4google Registration closes on March 28th.

Have fun and good luck! You can check out Google for Educators @
http://www.google.com/educators

By George, I think they've got it!

Recently, the Library of Congress began posting some of their photos on Flickr. Their reasoning? To gain a wider audience and to harness the power of community. LOC Director of Communications Matt Raymond, on the LOC blog (Wait! The Library of Congress has a BLOG too?!), states: “We want people to tag, comment and make notes on the images, just like any other Flickr photo, which will benefit not only the community but also the collections themselves.”

Obviously, the LOC “gets it”! And not only do they blog and participate in Flickr, they have podcasts as well!

What awesome leadership! Now if only we can get more people in the education community to follow suit…

Keeping the lights on

Not too long ago, a conversation with a colleague about the effect of people’s careers on the world made me stop and think. Sometimes, we teachers take teaching for granted. As teachers, we have a unique opportunity to make a difference in the world; to influence others’ lives in a significant way. What will our students remember about their experiences in our classes? How will their online learning experience influence their lives?

Perhaps the New Year is a good time to reflect on each of our contributions and to the built-in influence that is part of a career in teaching. Michael Dell, CEO of Dell, Inc., states in a recent article in PC Magazine that “Most IT departments spend around 70 percent of their budgets simply ‘keeping the lights on.’” Social anthropologist Dr. Jennifer James, in her speech to COSA last June, explained that one of the differences in the Digital Generation is that it is the first generation to grow up with all their basic needs fulfilled. This generation has more time, opportunity, and money than any previous generation to fulfill their need for self-actualization, and they intuitively know this. I believe that to reach these students, we have to do more than just “keep the light on.” Social networking, multimedia, and Web 2.0 provide us with tools, but it is our job to create opportunities for our students to use those tools to develop the communication, innovation, and creative skills that life in the 21st Century requires.

It is our challenge as technology-using educators, delivering education over the Internet, to do more than just “keep the lights on”. It should be our mission to lead by example and to create best practices on how this can be accomplished. Our challenge is to structure our lessons and our courses to reach beyond the basic, beyond the norm—to tap into the self-actualization and innovation that each of our students is capable of; to create meaning by creating new content and repurposing old content in new ways, using the tools of the 21st century.

Making Lemons into Lemonade

A couple weeks ago, I wrote in my blog about Wikipedia and Wikinomics. This topic is still one of fascination to me (no, I don’t have anything better to do!)

My husband and I are in the parenting stage we call “housefuls of teenagers”. In the 21st Century, high school students, much like college students, seem to form their own learning communities to study various subjects. I love it when they gather at our home because it gives me a chance to find out what’s happening. Recently a group visited our home and gathered around the computer in the game room. When I walked in, they had Wikipedia up on the screen. I casually asked what they were doing, and they said they were researching something. I noted that they were using Wikipedia and asked how their teachers felt about that. My query was answered with, “Mom! We’re just using it to get started!” Then they showed me that when you scroll down to the bottom of most articles, there is a list of resources from which the information was gleaned. This list was the basis of their research. No teacher had showed them this; some student just figured it out, showed someone else, and now they are all infected with the “Wikipedia-as-research” virus.

IMHO what these students need, and what is sorely missing from most school curricula, are media literacy and research skills—for the 21st Century. With the loss of licensed media specialists in most of our schools during the funding decline of the last two decades, and greater demands on standards and testing, media literacy is often left by the wayside. The advent of the Internet has made information more readily available than ever before in history—but misinformation is more readily available as well. Simply banning students from CITING Wikipedia obviously does not prevent them from USING it.

Perhaps a better strategy would be to meet this problem head-on: Teach students how to use Wikipedia appropriately, how to evaluate the information they find there, and--gasp!--maybe even contribute to the common base of knowledge found there. Omigosh, we have just touched on most of the recently-updated NETS standards for students (9-12):

1. Identify capabilities and limitations of contemporary and emerging technology resources and assess the potential of these systems and services to address personal, lifelong learning, and workplace needs.
   
2. Make informed choices among technology systems, resources, and services.
   
3. Analyze advantages and disadvantages of widespread use and reliance on technology in the workplace and in society as a whole.
   
4. Demonstrate and advocate for legal and ethical behaviors among peers, family, and community regarding the use of technology and information.
   
5. Use technology tools and resources for managing and communicating personal/professional information (e.g., finances, schedules, addresses, purchases, correspondence).
   
6. Evaluate technology-based options, including distance and distributed education, for lifelong learning.
   
7. Routinely and efficiently use online information resources to meet needs for collaboration, research, publications, communications, and productivity.
   
8. Select and apply technology tools for research, information analysis, problem-solving, and decision-making in content learning.
   
9. Investigate and apply expert systems, intelligent agents, and simulations in real-world situations.
   
10. Collaborate with peers, experts, and others to contribute to a content-related knowledge base by using technology to compile, synthesize, produce, and disseminate information, models, and other creative works.
    

As an educator, you might be wondering, “But how am I going to do this? I don’t know much about Wikipedia myself; how ever will I figure out how to teach students about it?”

As it happens, I came across an excellent article the other day by educational technologist Andy Carvin. Andy writes a blog called Learning.now that is connected to the PBS Teachers site, and has blogged about both Wikipedia and media literacy several times. The article I came across is not his most recent on this topic, but what I found helpful is that there are many suggestions within the article on how to use Wikipedia as a vehicle for teaching research and media literacy skills.

Every course that asks students to do any type of research needs to explicitly teach the skills that students need, and not expect, as educators sometimes do, that “their previous teacher should have taught them those skills.” Utilizing the strategies from the article covers a plethora of content standards as well as the NETS standards.

It is imperative that our youth learn to research appropriately, to think critically, to question validity, to evaluate accuracy, and to use responsibly. Using Wikipedia as a vehicle to teach these skills provides us with a free resource, as well as an opportunity to do what educators do best: Make lemons into lemonade.

GPS Training

Music: The times they are a changin'

Downloading illegal music is a huge issue in most families with teenagers. UK rock band Radiohead has a solution: Give the music away. They have circumvented normal conventions and made their most recent album, Rainbows, available for download on the Internet--and the consumer sets the price!

Check out their website at http://www.inrainbows.com/Store/ItsUptoYou.html

Technology writer Steven Levy discusses the potential future effects of this phenomenon in the October 29, 2007, issue of Newsweek.

The power of distance learning

Sometimes we get so caught up in the day-to-day tasks of our jobs that we forget the broader view. This week I have had the opportunity to step back and take a hard look at how distance learning affects students and schools. And the view is impressive!

As products of the factory model we call schools, many of us tend to take the school schedule for granted: start at 8, change classes every 50 minutes, eat lunch from 11:50 to 12:30, more classes, out at 3:30. Halls should be empty and quiet during classes, students work primarily independently and out of textbooks, are only allowed off campus during lunch, only fraternize with students from their own community, and tuck away their communication tools at the door. How does this type of schedule prepare our students for their future jobs, where they are likely to telecommute, work with people from many cultures across mostly transparent international boundaries, and use technology tools ubiquitously?

Part of the answer is distance learning. Distance learning provides opportunities for students to learn outside of the box. It transforms both time and place as well as world view. Teachers can be available during extended hours by email, phone, instant message, or chat. The teachers have lives that extend beyond the communities in which the student live, communities that for those in small, rural areas are in many ways extensions of the four walls of the school—the same people with the same opinions doing the same things.

I visited this week with students in Prospect, Oregon, a small former timber town of about 650. The entire school district has only 180 students. Their principal states that distance learning is vital to their school because it provides the students with opportunities that they otherwise would never have. In one room, two students were taking an accounting class via videoconference, while 5 additional students, working on computers along one wall, were quietly working on their online classes which ranged from Japanese to Algebra to American History.

Not only are these students learning the content for these courses, they are gaining valuable skills in the use of technology and communications that can not only expand their own world views, but help transform that of their community. These students, whose education would from outward appearances seem underprivileged by many standards, no longer assume that everything worth learning happens within the four walls of their school. Wherever these students go, they will be forever shaped by distance learning, where they are discovering that the scope of their experience is not limited by time or space. As future parents, teachers, community members, and citizens, they will never assume that all learning has to be from 8 to 3:30 inside of the four walls of a building. By working with these students, we are helping to shape the future of not only the lives of these students, but of education as a whole.

Thanks for all you do!

Mindstorms from E-learning Conference

Wikinomics

Usually in this space I rant about how we must change our teaching methods to fit the learning styles and habits of today’s students.

Instead, today’s blog is about how these same technologies affect the economy. This effect is called wikinomics. Wikinomics is a term used by authors Don Tapscott and Anthony D. Williams to describe how Web 2.0 technologies have transformed many aspects of 21st Century society. More than just a way to engage and motivate students, Web 2.0 has become a corporate strategy to facilitate collaboration not only among employees, but suppliers, customers, and perhaps even competitors as well.

In the first chapter (which you can download for free), the authors tell a story about a company who took a chance and used collaboration with their own competitors in a desperate attempt to stay afloat—and it worked. The company is described pre-collaboration as “desperately needing to inject the urgency of the market into the glacial processes of an old-economy industry.” (I can’t think of a better way to describe schools.)

Tapscott and Williams believe that businesses will have to “harness the new collaboration or perish,” and that individuals will be required to “embrace constant change and renewal in their careers.” But the good news, according to Tapscott and Williams, is that growth and innovation can be achieved by learning how to facilitate this engagement through co-creation activities such as wikis.

This concept has interesting parallels with Cable Green’s stance that learning can no longer be proprietary: witness MIT and Stanford’s posting of all their coursework online.

And these authors walk their talk. On their website, www.wikinomics.com, anyone who’s interested can collaboratively write and edit the last chapter of the book.

On second thought, this post IS about teaching, learning, and schools. I stand corrected.

Herding Cats

One of the students in my professional development class recently shared her frustration of her school district’s policy that not only blocks online videos but also purposely neglects to install sound capabilities in their school’s computers.

The question we need to ask is, Are these technologies blocked for the students' benefit, or for our convenience? In 2001, education technology visioneer Marc Prensky labeled students as "Digital Natives" and those of us who are older than 25 or so as "Digital Immigrants". Teenagers ubiquitously navigate through audio, video, IM, text messaging and many other forms of digital communication on a daily basis. Just because we "Digital Immigrants" don't understand, does that make it useless? or bad?

A study published in August, 2007 by the National School Boards Association found that 96% of students with online access use social-networking technologies. No one taught them how to use MySpace--they learned from each other. Big surprise that many use it inappropriately! There are some obvious parallels we could draw here.

School administrators keep asking me how their schools can use electronic portfolios, and they are surprised when I tell them that their students already are--it's the teachers who need to learn how to do it. Some school districts, like Seattle Public Schools, are proactive, purchasing services such as Medley and providing the requisite training for teachers and staff--as well as instruction for students regarding media literacy, evaluating sources, and other 21st Century Learning Skills.

IMHO we need to accept that our teenagers probably know a lot more than we do about many of these technologies. However, we tend to have a couple things they don't have: experience and judgment. Together, these provide us with the ability to make predictions regarding the potential results of our actions. Students, as the ultimate optimists, rarely think what they do is going to injure them. The side benefit of this optimism is the willingness to learn and try new things. Isn't this the attitude we want to promote in our students? IMHO we as educators spend all too much time and effort in an attempt to control something we don't know about, understand, and are afraid of. And in the end, it's like herding cats. Maybe if we walked among them, we could lead them in a direction that's more appropriate.

Ramblings of a Self-Appointed Technology Evangelist

I had the opportunity to attend and participate in the Pacific Northwest/Washington Blackboard Users Group Conference in Eugene, Oregon, on Friday, October 19.

For some reason, this particular conference resonated intensely with me. I gleaned many valuable concepts, resources, and strategies to share with the many groups with whom I am working: Oregon Online teachers, SOESD School Improvement Team, SOESD Ed Tech Cadre members.

The Keynote presentation, by Cable Green, introduced the concept that education should be (is?) in perpetual beta; that is, that our methodology and pedagogy and content should be constantly changing and evolving as our society and technology change. One question that arose is: Are educators modeling lifelong learning if they don't model and integrate the use of technology?

The question we should all ask ourselves is, “What am I doing differently today/this term/this year than what I did yesterday/last term/last year?” If the answer is “nothing”-then Houston, we have a problem. The world has changed since yesterday/last term/last year; what are we doing to keep up with it?

One could argue that it is impossible to keep up with everything. But those of us who have chosen education have a special responsibility: To prepare children for their future. One of the great quotes from the conference is:

“We are preparing children for jobs that don't exist yet
using tools that haven't been invented yet
to solve problems we haven't discovered yet.”

One could argue that education's mission is not necessarily as narrow as preparing students for the workforce. But if we replace the word “jobs” above with “tasks”, it seems to give the quote more of a sense of students as the global citizens who will, in a few short years, be taking our places as the leaders, inventors, entrepreneurs, parents, citizens, and even teachers of the future.

One of the anecdotes I've heard regarding this is about Rip Van Winkle. As we all now, this legendary figure fell asleep for a hundred years. Imagine his confusion when he woke up, wandering the roads and cities, seeing so many unfamiliar sites: skyscrapers, automobiles, television, cellphones, shopping malls. Finally, old Rip wandered into something familiar from 100 years ago: a school.

It would be funnier if it weren't so true. How many classes in how many schools around the nation-the world?-teach in the traditional style of stand and deliver? How many classrooms have desks in rows, seats assigned alphabetically, and work primarily out of textbooks, where students copy down answers to questions that don't matter onto the remnants of dead trees? And how much of our so-called online learning is simply the digital version of this?

What are the alternatives? Cable Green (yesterday's Keynote speaker) labeled the solution “Participatory Learning.” I'm sure he did not coin the phrase. Whether we've heard it before or not, we have all encountered the participatory nature of the new millennium: YouTube, Wikipedia, eBay, blogs-even American Idol. People like to feel that they have a choice and a voice. Are we preparing our students to live in a participatory, increasingly digital, globally-connected world, or are we preparing them instead for the world we grew up in, where we were admonished to color inside the lines, girls played half-court basketball, and people like our grandfathers often worked for the same company their entire lives?

Each of us needs to ask him/herself what he/she is doing to incorporate participatory learning into his/her (virtual) classroom. If you are doing the same things today as you did yesterday, it's probably not enough. Am I advocating that you immediately dive in and overhaul everything you are doing? Not exactly, but I'm hoping that you are all dedicated enough to children and to learning and to education to join with those who are working towards true educational reform: helping the digital natives learn to reason, compare, evaluate, communicate, and make thoughtful choices as they become lifelong learners and responsible global citizens.

I began 20+ years ago as a Self-Appointed Educational Technology Evangelist, and have since gone semi-pro. My mission is to continue to spread the word and to develop ways to model/encourage/nag/support others to join me in the ever-evolving pursuit of making learning more participatory by integrating technology into education.

What does this mean for ya'll? Consider taking one baby step at a time into the world of participatory learning. Begin by pledging to explore at least one new technology/skill/website each week, and to work towards incorporating participatory learning into your teaching strategies. Your students will be glad you did.

Digital Natives

Sounds as though the Seattle school district "gets it." According to an editorial in the September, 2007, issue of District Administrator, Seattle Public Schools are launching an in-district social networking service called Medley. As Lindell Anderson, one of the lead developers for the project wrote, "Incorporating Web 2.0 for education isn't 'sugar to help the medicine go down,' it's speaking the native language and honoring the digital world-view of a technologically fluent generation." http://www.districtadministration.com/viewarticle.aspx?articleid=1270