If you are new to making presentations on Web 2.0 pedagogies and want to see someone’s work to emulate for content and style, here is a good example from a South Carolinian, Cathy Nelson. Good stuff Cathy!
Creating, Contributing, Collaborating
Comment on the features in this this style of presentation. How does this style of presentation differ from a typical bulleted slide presentation? To ignore it is to choose ~ Death by PowerPoint.
In this presentation from the North Carolina Association for Educational Communication and Technology Shift Happens Conference, March 12-14, 2008, Sheryl Nussbaum-Beach shares her understanding of how to build online communities of Powerful Learning Practice. She really drills down into the topic, good insights!
Here is a Ustream.tv feed of the presentation. Below it you’ll find the slide presentation and go here to find additional resources Nussbaum-Beach provides learners.
NCAECT Shift Happens 2008 Conference Wiki
I think this is an interesting development in the world of networked learning. Although I don’t like the corporate slant to the applications of research, perhaps we could have some influence on directing part of the energy of the center to education.
While people have talked about collective intelligence for decades, new communication technologies—especially the Internet—now allow huge numbers of people all over the planet to work together in new ways. The recent successes of systems like Google and Wikipedia suggest that the time is now ripe for many more such systems, and the goal of the MIT Center for Collective Intelligence is to understand how to take advantage of these possibilities.
Our basic research question is: How can people and computers be connected so that—collectively—they act more intelligently than any individuals, groups, or computers have ever done before?’
The Center for Collective Intelligence brings together faculty from across MIT to conduct research on how new communications technologies are changing they way people work together.
MIT Center for Collective Intelligence Launch Video (Requires RealPlayer 8.0+)
The Apple Tour of 21st Century Learning I attended this week offered a lot to think about. I created a mind42.com (a really useful free online tool) MindMap Apple: A Tour of 21st Century Learning to represent some of the ideas that were presented in the Opening Presentation and three hands-on-the-computer-they-give-you sessions. The differences between this event and EduCon 2.0 in Philadelphia in January 2008 were striking:
Despite these failings, I praise the Apple team for their efforts. Their hearts are definitely in the right place and they worked hard to deliver a good day. I just think we all have a lot to learn, myself included, before we know how to consistently push learning off the charts for students and educators. All children need to be healthy, safe, supported, engaged and challenged every day. We’re not there yet.
Guy Kawasaki in the video on the Art of the Start speaks about passion and a desire to save the world as key ingredients for a start-up company’s success. Guy claims these ingredients were keys to Apple’s success. I wonder if Apple remembers that history? It sure didn’t seem as if they did in the learning environments we experienced last week. They said the right things. Now they need to learn how to walk the talk. Keep the focus on Claiming What We Imagine for our students!
Some Questions
Jackie B from my Twitter.com network put me onto this site. Students with an interest in mathematics will appreciate the humor: Brown Sharpie. Math teachers can use the comics to add a little levity to the learning. If carefully guided by the teacher, I suspect it could also allow students with an aesthetic interest to show other students in the class how you can use an artistic lens to take a substantive look at math concepts in a way that extends and deepens their learning. What a great activity to publish in posts, a new scribe post activity worth investigating for math class – do the math and transform your understanding into something fun. For those who might not understand the math concept, it would help to accompany the comic with an explanation of the math. For another activity, how about asking your students to explain the math in the comic in a way that their parents can understand? In all cases these are opportunities, I suspect, for the teacher to assess what students understand about the math ~ formative assessment. With that information in hand, you can take the next step for each learner that is appropriate given their current level of understanding.
I got a tip to check this tool out from Jeff Utecht. Thanks, Jeff. Here is my first Live Blog, archived for the world to see. Just a test run!
Thanks to David Jakes’ first post of the year on The Strength of Weak Ties, I learned how to create a placemark using Google Earth. I noticed on Twitter that David had created his first post of 2008. Mixed Media-Extreme Environments was a tutorial on how to use an online HTML editor to create a placemark for GE. When I learn how to upload and embed files to Blogger posts, I’ll let you see the results. Impressive. Text, picture, links, video link (David helped my over Skype and we learned after much trial and error, that GE does more support videos in placemarks for Macs), and resource web page for National Geographic.
Here is my comment on the comment Patrick Higgins left in response to my December 23, 2007 post.
[This is my attempt to walk the talk. Online engagement in conversations about our practice. Can we get better at our student learning? I really think so, but we are going to have to stop doing some things and start doing other things if we hope to succeed.]
Hi Patrick,
Glad you dropped by and shared some thoughts.
I do think the ideas I presented in the December 23rd post are replicable in any school or district. If I can elaborate, feel free to get in touch. You can direct message me on Twitter at dennisar.
I think the come-on-along-and-blog with me challenge is much more daunting than you let on. My little experience with it (my web 2.0 birthday – July 2007) tells me that initially it has nothing to do with PD. This is going to seem like a radical notion, but, face it, in education, we don’t read and we certainly don’t write about the art and science of our practice. I’d go so far as to say that even though we are the learning profession, we do not truly invest in self-directed learning for ourselves. The culture of our profession is more prone to build walls than bridges. For example, I have my degree. Now leave me alone so I can teach.
I make these comments with affection for my colleagues because I count myself a member of this class. I certainly did read about our practice and did write occasionally, but nothing like I have done since creating my wiki in August 2007 (now I have a second one) and this blog. It takes a lot of intellectual scaffolding to gear up to engage in this effort. Learning every day is hard work.
I try to post at least once a week, if not more. I read twitter comments and investigate leads about new ideas , tools, resources, blog posts, articles, and books, and meet people who have similar interests as I do and develop important professional relationships. It is a very stimulating environment that few in our profession want to participate in for a whole variety of reasons. In ten minutes I’m sure you and I could brainstorm a top ten list of reasons teachers and administrators would give for not engaging in reflecting, reading, writing, thinking, and communicating with others about their practice on an ongoing basis, even if it is off line! Isn’t that a learning environment? Until that issue is confronted, I do not believe teachers and administrators, in general, will
The later two actions, as you and I know, have a synergistic impact on the first two. First, we have to find teachers and administrators willing to our schools into learning cultures.
It is also worth pointing out that although we want students to be life-long learners, we never confront the fact that we may be modeling just the opposite for students. How much richer would our schools be for students if we expected the Framework for 21st Century Skills of ourselves ~ all teachers and administrators, even unions negotiating for learning cultures in all our grades, teams, department, schools, and districts.
I’m not really sure who to blame (I’ll take my share) or what all the answers are (I strive for answers in my face to face work and through my online professional network). We need the critical mass of teachers and administrators involved to get beyond blame so we can think critically and creatively so innovative solutions can be owned by all of us for the profession that cherishes student learning above all else.
As a former English teacher, I agree with your comments about the writing process. Writing within the online environment of blogging is similar to other writing. I think it is very intense if presented correctly to students. Others are much more skillful doing that and writing and speaking about that than I am. I think blogging can help students learn a lot and develop net literacies that will serve them well in the future as the world becomes more and more digitally oriented.
Thanks again for stopping by; your comments got me thinking. Without them I would not have posted this morning. That is one reason I blog: the commitment to post causes me to think and write; the comment by someone about my post causes me to think and write in a way that extends my thinking. Well, Patrick, let’s see if anyone else offer us their insights on our exchange.
Patrick Higgins left the following comment in response to my December 23, 2007 post.
Dennis,
I figured I would come here and drop my comment off and continue the conversation a little bit.
You lay out a great plan for implementation as a thought and planned process, and I must admit, since reading Kim’s post initially, I have had visions of how to organize this meeting with our ed tech and curriculum staff. We need plans like this for addressing exactly how an why we ask our teachers to introduce technology, or better, to embed it into their planning.
As you probably can tell, I am a blog “evangelist” among our district’s teachers; There is so much power right at the fingertips of students when you give them space, guidance, and freedom to choose their voice. But that is not to say that we put them there and let them go, yet. We’ve got much scaffolding to do in order for our students to understand the parameters of writing online and for a relatively unknown audience.
Does blogging or any form of connective writing differ from traditional paper and pen writing? Absolutely; however, there are so many things about it that easily translate: drafting before you publish, proofreading, prompt writing, process writing, relevant topics, finding voice, bringing in expert sources, etc. My biggest stumbling block has been to pull teachers on board to show them how similar the two can be and that the shift, while significant, is not much of a change for them or their students.
A Question
Why not start [teacher's modeling for students] earlier, right from the moment our students sign in [to their blog] for the first time?
Patrick Higgins, who works for the Sparta Township, NJ Public Schools, posted on his blog, Chalkdust: the latest incarnation of my professional self, about the help he gave to one of his colleagues who wanted to set up a blog for her class. His protocol for assistance in this case involved
… showing her what the other Civics class blog looked like, including the types of assignments and assessments the class was using, and the general pattern we followed to allow the students to transition into writing on blogs. A couple things stood out to me as I was describing the process to Carole on Friday:
- allowing students time to get used to the space is essential
- rigor is also necessary; time given to assimilate onto the blog should be limited and have a definitive end time where the students know that they can still play, but they are being held accountable for their content.
After we had set her up to play with the blog and finalize her vision for where she wanted to go with it, which she will have time to do over the holiday break, I headed home, still thinking about how I described the process to her.
Later in the post Patrick comments that he read a post by Kim Cofino.
When reading this passage from Kim Cofino, something new was apparent to me about the blog spiel that I deliver to teachers:
All too often, teachers set up an online space for their students and then just “let them have a go” – basically leaving the students on their own in this new environment (sometimes because the teacher is not sure where to start). Not only does this provide fertile breeding ground for misbehavior, but it is definitely not something teachers would do in the physical world, so there’s really no rationale for letting them go in a virtual environment. Teachers must be the model for appropriate behavior online, just like they are in the physical classroom.It makes perfect sense: teachers rarely give students directions so vague and expect anything of quality to return. As Kim states, it’s a breeding ground for trouble to begin. We ask our teachers to be present online, as it insures that they are an integral part of the process the students undergo online; our most successful teachers with students online are our most frequent commenters. Why not start that process earlier, right from the moment our students sign in for the first time? Instead of “hey, let them play for a couple of days,” I think I will advocate having the teachers model how to customize their page and require that they “assign” a few of the layout changes to the students by a specified date.
I responded to Patrick Higgins post with the following comments on the educational context I believe is very relevant to the question raised by his post.
The Education Context
Patrick,
As you know, it is not about technology, it is about learning.
We need to professionalize PK-21 leadership and learning. The way to do that is for everyone in the profession to always use our knowledge base to guide our decisions and actions each day for each student. We meet with student 180+ days a year to help them learn. Each of those days is precious and must include relevant learning activities and formative assessments guided by three beliefs: 1) What we are doing today is important; 2) You can do what I am asking you to do; 3) I(we) am(are) not going to give up until you have learned what we believe is essential for you to learn. It is critical that we communicate these beliefs in our words and actions to students throughout school day, each and every day.
Are activities using technology any different?
A blog provides a tool for learning. “Students, what we will do today with this blog is important, you can do it, etc.” Prior to that event in the class, our grade-level team or department team should have asked what is essential for the students to learn? We decided that using the blog is the best way to help the kids learn the essential “it.” During and after students have used the blog, we check (formatively assess and then summatively) to see if the kids learned what we believe is essential for them to learn.
But what do we do if students do not learn what we consider essential?
As a team, department, and as a school we must have a plan in place to ensure that students will receive emotional and academic support from a variety of different angles and providers to ensure that we find a way for students to learn the essential “it” that, so far, they have not learned.
Providers that could be part of the plan for helping students learn the essential “it:”
When it comes to the essentials, I think we need to trim down the learning standards that the academic associations and the states have set as targets for student learning and integrate the Framework for 21st Century Learning (21stcenturyskills.org) and the new literacies for powerfully using the internet for learning. We need to act on “What are the essential” standards students need to learn.
FYI, I am collecting information related to 21st Century Net Literacies on a wiki in case you are interested.
Thank you for the prompt your post provided. I hope my comments are helpful!
Regards,
Dennis
The Implementation Context
Kim Corvino on her blog, always learning: teaching technology abroad, posted about the first year implementation of social networking with elementary school students at the International School, Bangkok, Thailand. She pushes the profession to take Web 2.0 very seriously, as serious as any other effort to establish a meaningful learning environment. Kim models what we need to do to advance the knowledge base in this area. It is an excellent commentary on academics, technology, implementation, change, learning and leadership. Thanks Kim.
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