Dangerously Irrelevant

I ran across a great video by Richard Armand, the Mesquite (TX) Independent School District Administrative Officer for Technology. I have added it to the Moving Forward wiki.

You can view the video online or download it for presentations. I have a group next week for whom this will be perfect. Nice work, Richard!

[cross-posted at the TechLearning blog]

State and federal accountability schemes require that students master low-level academic content. Our decisions regarding how we structure our instruction to facilitate student mastery of that content strike to the very heart of what we believe about teaching and learning. To facilitate conversations about this issue, I made a short video:

What do you believe is the best way to structure instruction to ensure student content mastery?

Music credit: Safe Passage, Freeplay Music

Last week I had a brand new middle school teacher ask me what the best online resources were for learning about (and teaching about) information literacy and/or media literacy. Since this isn’t the world I live in on a regular basis, I thought I’d throw the question out to you. What sites do you find valuable related to this topic?

So far 85 people have completed the online survey version of the Beginning of the Year Technology Checklist. Initial results are very interesting…

If you haven’t yet completed the survey and would like to do so, it will remain open through this Friday.

I realized that in two years I had never added a link to subscribe to Dangerously Irrelevant via e-mail. LeaderTalk has had such a link since its inception. So I created one in Feedburner. Clicking on the Subscribe via e-mail link takes you to a web page where you can enter your e-mail address. Hopefully this will be a good option for administrators and others who aren’t ready yet for a RSS reader.

I also added this blurb to the navigation menu:

I rarely look at for-profit PR pitches. If you send me something, please ensure that it relates to the topics of this blog: technology, leadership, and/or school reform.

Hopefully this will cut down on the number of unsolicited publicity requests I receive from corporations touting their latest miracle initiative for schools. I know they’re well meaning – and I recognize that the initiatives actually do some good – but I think that most of the projects just tinker at the margins and basically are more about the corporations than the schools. This is not a surprise, of course. Thoughtful corporate assistance to schools that makes a real difference still is hard to find. If you know of any such projects, please share them with the rest of us (and tell us why you think they’re making a difference so that we know you’re not just a corporate shill)!

I’m not quite sure what to make of this Shocking Economics 2008 video but it’s definitely thought-provoking. Sources are available at the American Freedom University web site. Happy viewing!

It’s the first day of school here in Ames, Iowa. The past two years at this time, I’ve posted the following checklist, wondering if schools have made any improvement since the previous fall. This year I changed the checkboxes to a scale of 1 (low) to 5 (high) and thought I’d try something a little different…

You have two ways to participate…

1. Download this checklist in Excel. Enter the name of your school organization and fill in your ratings (editable areas are in yellow). Click on the Chart tab at the bottom, then print. Disseminate broadly!
2. Participate in the 2-minute online survey. Fill in your ratings and click on the Submit button. I’ll publish everyone’s aggregated results in a future post! (deadline: Friday, August 29, 2008)

Feel free to use and distribute the Excel file and/or the survey link as desired. If you would like to conduct this online survey within your school organization, contact me about hosting a version just for you (at no cost). Hope you made some progress since last year!

We have a bunch of crazy dice at our house, including fractions dice, decimal dice, money dice, alien dice, dice with colored dots on them, and dice within dice. We also have a bunch of Dungeons and Dragons dice from a toy store in Duluth, Minnesota. Instead of six sides, those dice have four, eight, ten, twelve, and even twenty sides.

Yesterday I found my kids playing Monopoly with the crazy dice. If they paid $5 to the bank, they got to use one of the crazy dice. If they paid $10, they got to use two. If they used a die with a color dot, they got to move to the set of properties with that color.

Kids don’t need us to ‘train them’ to be creative. They just need permission, space for their creativity to blossom, and maybe a little active encouragement and/or nurturing of their creative spirits.

Roll the dice and see what happens!

Most schools currently expect students to somehow (maybe magically?) be responsible, successful digital citizens upon graduation from high school – able to navigate all of the intricacies of a digital, global world – despite having little to no opportunity to learn or meaningfully practice what that means during their 12+ years of schooling.

Continuing my analogy from my previous post, we have to stop pretending that students are like Athena, able to burst forth fully-formed from the head of Zeus (or the cocoon of schools), ready to successfully function in a complex adult world without prior practice or experience.

Linda Fandel’s blog at The Des Moines Register is focused on “world class schools for Iowa.” Kudos to her and the Register for devoting time and attention to this issue.

In a recent guest post advocating better civics instruction, former U.S. Senator John Culver said:

Many young people leave school lacking even a rudimentary understanding of how their government works and how it affects their lives. This lack of understanding leads to a lack of interest, a lack of trust and a lack of participation.

In my comment to his post, I said:

Another reason that students lack interest, trust, or participation in governmental affairs is that many of them are quite cynical about whether Constitutional freedoms even exist. As a 2003 report from the First Amendment Center noted, “Students will not learn the lessons of democracy if they cannot experience firsthand the freedom to make their own choices.” And yet so much of school (and, let’s be honest, home) is about control and lack of trust. Few students get a chance to meaningfully participate in decision-making about their own learning. School restrictions (and accompanying lawsuits) regarding student speech, expression, and behavior have escalated over the past few decades.

Supreme Court Justice Robert Jackson, ruling for the majority in West Virginia v. Barnette, said that the Court must ensure “scrupulous protection of constitutional freedoms of the individual, if we are not to strangle the free mind at its source and teach youth to discount important principles of our government as mere platitudes.” Why would we expect young people to be active, engaged citizens upon graduation when they rarely, if ever, get to see their supposed ‘freedoms’ at work? Are we surprised that young adults are apathetic (or is it just realistic?) when their primary interaction with government – school – is in a limiting, suppressive environment that, at every turn, tells them that their voice doesn’t matter? Unlike Athena, who was supposedly born fully-formed from the head of Zeus, our students need practice with both the rights and responsibilities of democratic citizenship before they graduate if we are to accomplish our desire to have an interested, involved citizenry.

What do you think? Do students get adequate opportunities in schools to see their Constitutional rights and responsibilities at work?