innovation3

Experimenting with this new tool that I discovered through Konrad Glogowski’s blog. Not quite there yet, but willing to take the risk of publicly failing. Try number 4 is the gem – got it! Cool…

This is my first post on my new Edublog site. (I transferred my blogspot posts and comments to this site.) I thought it would be a fitting platform for announcing important news to all those who signed up as collaborators on the Learning Beyond Boundaries (LBB) Wiki. I hope to make a public announcement of this news at the Building Learning Communities Conference (BLC08) next week.

Part I – Come Collaborate with LBB Collaborators and ASCD Annual Conference Staff

The time has come to start developing the LBB collaboration with ASCD. I hope you will become an active participant in our effort.

Little did we know when we started the Learning Beyond Boundaries wiki that the vision several of us had at the time might have a chance of fruition. What would happen if we approached those responsible for ASCD’s Annual Convention and asked them to partner with interested educators in a discussion on how best to infuse learning about the read/write web 2.0 culture into the annual conference? The hope was that the ASCD staff would allow us a channel to bring the read/write web 2.0 culture to a broader audience of teachers and administrators. We wanted to break out of the echo chamber and come up with a strategy to help, not a few but, thousands of educators learn how the Internet can now be used as a tool to engage students and educators in powerful, substantive, self-directed learning.

The deadline we set for ourselves was May 5, 2008, the due date for ASCD’s 2009 Annual Conference presentation proposals. One hundred people signed up on the LBB Wiki endorsing the proposal we crafted to submit to ASCD’s Planning Committee. Here is the opening of that proposal, framed as an open letter to ASCD.

May 4, 2008
8:30 P.M. EDT

I am Dennis Richards, Massachusetts ASCD Affiliate President and ASCD Leadership Council member.

I represent a group of educators who have the expertise available through our extensive online Web 2.0 network of educator presenters to assist ASCD to fill a technology-rich strand at the 2009 Annual Conference.

Today we not only consume information from the Internet, we are contributors of information. All Internet participants have the potential to become teachers and producers of content as learning becomes personal, authentic, and highly individualized. Social software includes wikis, blogs, podcasts, instant messaging, and any system that allows communication that also emphasizes the richness of personal interaction instead of the technologies that make the interactions possible. The generations we teach now and will teach in the future innately use technology to communicate. The need for learning experiences to adapt to meet a new generation of learners is upon us.

Here is the full proposal; here is the current list of LBB collaborators. I have opened the wiki for now so other educators can join us. I expect to close it again on July 20, 2008. If you know people who may want to join us, please tell them to sign up on the collaborators’ page by that date.

Kathleen Burke, Director, ASCD Annual Conference, was very interested and accepted our offer as soon as I spoke to her the first week in May. At the time she said she hoped we would be willing to work on a three-year plan to educate ASCD’s membership to the read/write web 2.0 culture through the Annual Conference. I was extremely pleased, but I thought the 2009 conference would be year one. I expected Kathleen to get back to me soon so we could start planning. Then little communication until Thursday, July 11, 2008. Kathleen and her staff had been busy working on the details of the 2009 conference. In the meantime, some of us received notices that our workshop proposals were accepted. But what about our collaboration proposal that seemed stuck in limbo.

Well, yesterday Kathleen and I spoke, and now it is time to begin our work. More details are coming in the next few weeks, and Kathleen and I are open to any suggestions for content and process to further our goal of integrating technology seamlessly into learning for all students and educators.

Here is what Kathleen and I discussed over the cell phone yesterday as I traveled to Cape Cod in my car from Boston, Massachusetts. The wonders of technology… (No, I did not take notes while driving. Kathleen was kind enough to email me what we discussed.)

Pre Annual Conference – Fall of 2008

• ASCD would like to conduct one or more interactive online session(s) (using Elluminate or some other similar online conferencing tool) with you and your team members to discuss and develop the components of a three-year technology plan for the ASCD Annual Conference in order to promote the integration of technology into the curriculum/school day and to support educators’ use of technology in learning.

At Annual Conference – March 2009

• ASCD invites LBB collaborators to audit the technology sessions at the 2009 ASCD Annual Conference and provide feedback on the sessions as well as suggestions for future topics to be presented at Annual Conference over the next three years.

• ASCD invites LBB collaborators to participate in a technology interest work session at the Annual Conference (I’ll ask Kathleen to arrange for you to attend this session virtually, if you can not be at the conference.) to provide input on how ASCD can promote/support the integration of technology into the curriculum/school day and to support educators’ use of technology in learning.

• ASCD invites LBB collaborators to review the draft of a 3 year plan for technology for the ASCD Annual Conference.

This does not preclude LBB collaborators from working together this summer and throughout the year to prepare for more direct work with Kathleen and her staff. Let’s collaborate, contribute, and create through our LBB association in a way that will impress ASCD with our insight and experience, invent a whole new way of delivering our message to a broad audience of educators, and significantly transform the vision students and teachers have of learning spaces.

Leave your thoughts by commenting on this post.

Part II – October 1, 2008 Deadline for Educational Leadership – Literacy 2.0

On a related note, ASCD’s premier publication, Educational Leadership (EL), will publish a March 2009 Annual Conference edition in March on Literacy 2.0. Here is what they have online for the issue.

March 2009

Literacy 2.0

Students are more plugged into technology than they have ever been before–through smartphones, iPods, laptops, social networks, and electronic games. This issue will explore the role of literacy in our ever-evolving digital environment. How can we help students learn and transfer traditional literacy skills? What new literacy skills are called for—and how can students guide teachers in acquiring these key skills? How can we teach students to judge the reliability, accuracy, and quality of information? Articles will explore how wikis, blogs, RSS feeds, and portals of streaming media have affected how students read, write, speak, think, and work.

Deadline: October 1, 2008

I will be speaking with the editor about how we can help ASCD prepare for this issue, but here are some of my thoughts. You can collaborate by

• getting the word out to people you know who should write an artcle for this issue,
• suggesting questions that the articles should try to answer so that the March 2009 EL is a best practices examination of the field, and
• suggesting article topics and/or people whom we should encourage to write for the EL issue.

Leave your thoughts by commenting on this post.

You’ve seen the word, you’ve seen the web sites and you may even have one. But have you ever wondered: What’s the big deal about blogs?

This is blogs in plain English. Here is another video production from Commoncraft.

San Diego County Fires
[ Last Updated 1:20 p.m. Oct 23 ]

Major wildfires are burning throughout San Diego County. We’ll update this map as information comes in. Burn and evacuation areas are estimated. For more information visit www.kpbs.org.

Live radio stream: http://www.kpbs.org/kpbs64k.asx
Live updates via Twitter: www.twitter.com/kpbsnews
Email: webnews@kpbs.org

Yellow: Evacuation Areas
Red: Burn Areas

With some help from AllanahK and Chris Betcher I was able to understand how VoiceThread works. But to really make it stick, I decided I needed to create my own.

Along the way I watched a VoiceThread on New Zealand money that Miss K’s class produced and titled Money, Money, Money. In their own words, “Today we recorded our comments for our Voicethread about New Zealand’s money. We used a resource from the Reserve Bank to find out more about our coins and notes.” The students’ work inspired me to use this tool in a very familiar way to say thank you to them.

Because I occasionally visit classes to read stories, I decide to use VoiceThread to read a story to Miss K’s class in New Zealand.

Hope you enjoy it kids! Mr. Richards

PS When you start the story thread, you can use the magnifying glass to zoom in and out with a click and to move around the screen by moving the cursor left and right. You can also record an audio comment or a text comment by clicking on the appropriate button and clicking save when you are finished. Click the arrows to move to the next screen shot. The cluster of four small photos can be clicked to bring up a screen of all the pages. Click a page to go to it.

I want to thank Karen Janowski for making me aware of a post on Darren Draper’s blog Drape’s Takes: Our Fearless Leaders – Technologically Incompetent? In the post Darren speaks of his trip to present at a conference.

… I had the privilege of presenting (thrice) with Margo Shirley and Kathy Ridd at the National Federation of Urban & Suburban School Districts conference. The small, annual conference attracts an elite crowd of superintendents, school board members, and other high-ranking district administrators from various school districts across the United States.

I am a superintendent in Massachusetts, and although I did not attend the NFUSSD conference, I have recently had many experiences that confirm Darren’s experience. He goes onto say…

While presenting, I was struck (and rather severely) with the realization that many (certainly not all, but many) of the participants in the conference had extremely limited technology skills. Furthermore, this realization had even greater effect as I better understood to whom I was presenting: Remember, these participants were educational leaders (superintendents and the like) of school districts throughout the country. Indeed, I was literally awestruck as I was forced to throttle back my discussion (almost to the point of that famous right-clicking lesson), in order to help several of the participants to understand.

Last summer I was totally unaware of the extent of the paradigm shift that is going on in the world of Web 2.0 and so readily experienced through the stellar creativity, ingenuity, and drive of so many educators who have built the free and open online world at K12Onlineconference.org currently happening on the internet. I was not technologically illiterate. I had a laptop; I know how to use much of the typical Microsoft tools and used them when appropriate; I used Wikipedia; I had tried blogging and a wiki (a little). Then I met Alan November at a technology conference for superintendents. Alan’s message had nothing to do with the sales pitches I heard over those two days. There was something new and unusually insightful about what he was saying.

Fortunately for me, Alan became interested in helping my school district with a project we were trying to do with the scientific institutions in Woods Hole, a village of Falmouth, Massachusetts, so, along the way, I began to learn about his Building Learning Communities (BLC) Conference he had each summer in Massachusetts. Unfortunately, it was scheduled for the same week as the Massachusetts Association of School Superintendents (MASS) executive conference in July 2007. Many superintendents and assistant superintendents go to the MASS conference each you and I was one of them. Summer 2007 I decided to go to BLC — and am I glad I did. Publicly, I have said in many venues that it was a life changing experience for me, not because of the technology, but because of educators developing the incredible plethora of possibilities the new technological tools – and I mean something new is happening in this field daily it seems – have for pedagogy.

Here is a video that will give you a glimpse of the new story of learning; it is what I and 600 other educators experienced at the BLC 2007 conference. It introduces you to the educators who are in touch with the paradigm shift and using it to invigorate their classes, engaging students in powerful learning experiences through the application of technology tools. Notice the technology, but pay attention to the pedagogy threaded through the comments of these educational leaders. If you are in a school, I need to let you know that it is a link to a YouTube video so you will only be able to see it if YouTube.com is not blocked in your school. View it at home if that is a problem. It’s worth the trouble.

November Learning’s Building Communities Conference 2007

At the conference I attended Darren Kuropatwa’s workshop Thinking About Innovation in Education or Learning the Guitar. I remember thinking to myself, well, that was interesting, but the more my mind tried to move onto the content of other workshop’s that day I kept coming back to what Darren showed me about the technology tools, the pedagogy, and what and how his students were engaging in learning… and Darren’s presentation modeled everything he was saying about Web 2.0. As the conference continued, I began to develop a context for appreciating the other presenters’ workshops, but I could not stop thinking about what Darren Kuropatwa was saying and doing. So…I attended the other two workshops that Darren gave: New Tools, New Pedagogies: What Can I Do Now That I Couldn’t Do Before? and New Tools, New Pedagogies: Developing Expert Voices. What an eye opening experience! He’s a great teacher. To see these presentations, search for Darren Kuropatwa’s work on SlideShare.net, a new tool that Darren told me about in the workshop so I could, as he said, take away what he was having us experience and go home and apply it in my schools.

I have not stopped thinking about that three day conference. In my opening presentation to the staff of the Falmouth MA Public Schools in August 2007 I took everything I learned during the conference and during my reflections on the experience and combined it with the ideas I was developing while reading Stephanie Pace Marshall’s new book The Power to Transform, to create a presentation modeled after Darren’s presentations. I called it The New Story of Learning or Thinking about Abundance, Creativity, Interdependence, and Wholeness.

Darren Drapers’ blog post that prompted this post references The Partnership for 21st Century Skills’ framework of 21st Century Skills. I have been speaking about that framework for two years; actually the current framework is actually a revised version. I summarize it in a post below.

I developed a wiki that I won from Darren that week and then I got involved in trying to publicize this world of Web 2.0 pedagogy through telling anyone who would listen about the K12 Online Conference: Massachusetts superintendents and assistant superintendents, ASCD Leadership Council representatives from the 50 states and many counties in the world, my own school district’s Instructional Leadership, MASCD’s Board of Directors, participants in the state STEM Summit IV, and a gathering of 200 educational leaders who were convened to discussed The Future of Education in Massachusetts by the Governor’s Educational Adviser, the chairpersons of the Board of Higher Education, the state’s boards of K-12 education and early childhood and the commissioner of education Chancellor of the Board of Higher Education. I spoke after the presentations and said I had no questions or comments because I generally agreed with the speakers views. Instead, I wanted to offer them a solution that could dramatically transform the experiences in classrooms throughout the state. I spoke about my experiences with Web 2.0 and told them I have a model through which they could experience what I was speaking about, K12onlinconference.org. I would like to be able to say that I had a positive response; they were polite, but only 5 people approached me during the break to say they appreciated my comments and planned to visit the site. You need to know that I was the only one who had a laptop out at that meeting (internet access only if you had a means other than your laptop to receive the password that would be sent to you to access the internet through your laptop) and that was generally the same at the Massachusetts STEM Summit IV (no internet access), and a New England Association of Schools and Colleges and The Center for Secondary School Redesign’s Showcase of Model High School Programs Conference (internet access available if you asked and were given a sheet of directions that took a few minutes to implement). The comment, “Web 2.0? It’s not on the radar screen!” comes to mind.

Thanks to the generous people associated with K12Online; I am slowly becoming familiar with their world. Sheryl Nusbaum-Beach was very kind to help me during a Skype session we scheduled because I had so many questions. “I need twitter friends,” I told Sheryl. “How do I reach out into the “twitterverse” and make friends who can help me learn about this “parallel universe?” Sheryl helped me a great deal, but now a suggestion. I need more friends and so do others looking to learn what we can from you so we can generate new knowledge as we interact. Follow me on twitter if you want to help me so I can follow you and watch you think about this world and reflect and contribute to the community conversation ~ that’s the only way we can continue learning. All I can promise is to be your friend, do my part in this movement, and continue learning, modeling and trying to help students, educators and others with a stake in or authority over education in Massachusetts, the USA, and the world.

www.twitter.com: dennisar.

David Warlick used a videocast to give the world an interesting pre conference address, Inventing the New Boundaries, to open the second annual K12Online 2007 Conference. In it he speaks about teachers and students wanting and needing new boundaries to define their work. David, try these ideas for new boundaries that teachers and students could use to define the border territories of learning in our classrooms and schools.

• Grappling for solutions to problems of societal importance (local, regional, national, international)
• Creating content to share with a global audience
• Inventing, supporting, and contributing to learning communities (local, regional, national, international)
• Using core knowledge as a critical resource
• Discovering interdisciplinary connections and interrelationships
• Etc. (See below)

Watch the Encyclopedia of Life Video and you’ll experience the future within which our students will live and learn:

David, as you well know, it’s not 1961 and your Grolier’s Encyclopedia is no more!

To really prepare our students for the learning communities that await them, I proposed to our district the following elements for a Framework for Learning, a new policy of learning for our school district based on the assumption that what students need to learn must be the way we teach them….

From Partnership for 21st Century Skills

Global Awareness

• Using 21st century skills to understand and address global issues
• Learning from and working collaboratively with individuals representing diverse cultures, religions and lifestyles in a spirit of mutual respect and open dialogue in personal, work and community contexts
• Understanding other nations and cultures, including the use of non-English languages

Creativity and Innovation

• Demonstrating originality and inventiveness in work
• Developing, implementing and communicating new ideas to others
• Being open and responsive to new and diverse perspectives
• Acting on creative ideas to make a tangible and useful contribution to the domain in which the innovation occurs

Critical Thinking and Problem Solving

• Exercising sound reasoning in understanding
• Making complex choices and decisions
• Understanding the interconnections among systems
• Identifying and asking significant questions that clarify various points of view and lead to better solutions
• Framing, analyzing and synthesizing information in order to solve problems and answer questions

Communication and Collaboration

• Articulating thoughts and ideas clearly and effectively through speaking and writing
• Demonstrating ability to work effectively with diverse teams
• Exercising flexibility and willingness to be helpful in making necessary compromises to accomplish a common goal
• Assuming shared responsibility for collaborative work

Information Literacy

• Accessing information efficiently and effectively, evaluating information critically and competently and using information accurately and creatively for the issue or problem at hand
• Possessing a fundamental understanding of the ethical/legal issues surrounding the access and use of information

Media Literacy

• Understanding how media messages are constructed, for what purposes and using which tools, characteristics and conventions.
• Examining how individuals interpret messages differently, how values and points of view are included or excluded and how media can influence beliefs and behaviors.
• Possessing a fundamental understanding of the ethical/legal issues surrounding the access and use of information

Life and Career Skills

• Flexibility & Adaptability
• Initiative & Self-Direction
• Social & Cross-Cultural Skills
• Productivity & Accountability
• Leadership & Responsibility

Financial and Economic Literacy

• Knowing how to make appropriate personal economic choices
• Understanding the role of the economy in society
• Using entrepreneurial skills to enhance workplace productivity and career options

Civic Literacy

• Participating effectively in civic life through knowing how to stay informed and understanding governmental processes
• Exercising the rights and obligations of citizenship at local, state, national and global levels
• Understanding the local and global implications of civic decisions

Health Literacy

• Obtaining, interpreting and understanding basic health information and services and using such information and services in ways that are health enhancing
• Understanding preventive physical and mental health measures, including proper diet, nutrition, exercise, risk avoidance and stress reduction
• Using available information to make appropriate health-related decisions
• Establishing and monitoring personal and family health goals
• Understanding national and international public health and safety issues

Core Knowledge

• English, reading or language arts
• World languages
• Arts
• Mathematics
• Economics
• Science
• Geography
• History
• Government and Civics