Dangerously Irrelevant

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Many schools filter YouTube, Twitter, blogs, wikis, podcasts, social networking, and other content-rich online services for both students and employees. Why on earth would you filter the adults who work for you? This is a loser strategy that prevents educators from accessing potentially-powerful educational material and damages employee morale. Does this make sense to anyone? Nice job, administrators…

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Much ado about nothing

I just read the text of President Obama’s hotly-contested speech tomorrow. I encourage you to do the same. Could it be any more innocuous? Whatever happened to waiting to see what happens first and THEN hollering about it? A lot of crying wolf has been going on lately…

If only these opportunities actually existed at scale

I was pleased to see this passage:

What you make of your education will decide nothing less than the future of this country. What you’re learning in school today will determine whether we as a nation can meet our greatest challenges in the future.

You’ll need the knowledge and problem-solving skills you learn in science and math to cure diseases like cancer and AIDS, and to develop new energy technologies and protect our environment. You’ll need the insights and critical thinking skills you gain in history and social studies to fight poverty and homelessness, crime and discrimination, and make our nation more fair and more free. You’ll need the creativity and ingenuity you develop in all your classes to build new companies that will create new jobs and boost our economy.

I just wish I had more faith in our current schooling system to nurture the problem-solving and critical thinking skills and creativity and ingenuity that the President mentions. Right now I don’t think we’re doing so well in these areas…

On Wednesday I spend the day with 80 or so high school students (juniors and seniors, mostly) in Northwest Iowa. What should I be saying to them about their schools, technology, globalization, and their futures?

A while back I shared one of my two favorite passages from Pamela Livingston’s excellent book, 1-to-1 Learning: Laptop Programs That Work. Here's the other one:

[W]e need to make “The Shift.” The Shift: to classrooms that are not solely teacher-centric, with the teacher as lone disseminator of knowledge and the children in the awe-stricken and lesser role of recipients of the knowledge. The Shift: where the teacher sometimes has the central role when he or she explains and coaches and elaborates on work to be done … but not always. The Shift: where the learners sometimes have the central role, either individually or in groups. The Shift: where the roles of teacher and learner are fuzzy; sometimes the teacher learns from the students; sometimes the students learn from one another; and, yes, sometimes the students learn from the teacher. The Shift: where sometimes it’s hard to know who has the central role, where activities are buzzing along, learning is happening, dynamics are shifting, and no one is “looking up” to anyone as the sole source of knowledge.

Nothing jumpstarts The Shift quite like 1–to-1. Because when every student in the room has a [laptop], he or she does not have to look “up” to the teacher for resources or ideas – the student has resources at his or her fingertips. There is no distribution or retrieval of materials, no sole purveyor of information, and no firm start or stop to learning because it can continue beyond the classroom into the library, or home, or anywhere.

Some find The Shift dangerous. And in a way, it is. It’s dangerous to the educator who controls the classroom with an iron fist and wants all the answers on the test to be things he or she said in class, repeated word-for-word. It’s dangerous to educators who have assigned the same report on Gandhi over the past 20 years and haven’t started to require synthesis or analysis of information. It’s dangerous to teachers who physically stay in one place – the front of the classroom – and move only to write on the chalkboard or whiteboard. It’s dangerous to educators who don’t want anyone to “read ahead” or to “think ahead.”

It’s dangerous to educators who view themselves as the most knowledgeable person in the room and are personally invested in staying that way. It’s dangerous to teachers who haven’t paid attention to their unengaged students and keep covering the material anyway, they way they think it ought to be covered, believing students should adapt to their approach.

If you haven’t checked out Pamela’s book, it’s well worth the read. I give it 4 highlighters.

For those of you who are interested, here are the final regular season standings for BlogBall09, our edublogger fantasy baseball leagues. As league commissioners, apparently both Jon Becker and I got to finish in 7th place, one spot out of the playoffs. Ugh.

The New South Wales province in Australia is on a quest to outfit every Year 9 to 12 student with a customized Lenovo netbook by 2012. It is expected that over 200,000 computers will be distributed to students and teachers. If you’re interested, you can read more about the project or listen to a podcast about the initiative. 

I think this is a GREAT idea. Guess which high school graduates will be better prepared for a digital world: those who get to use computers in interesting and empowering ways on a regular basis or those who don’t?

Below is the publicity video for the initiative (thanks, John Strange, for leading me to this). Happy viewing, everyone!

If you haven’t seen it yet, here’s a video created by Shawn Gormley and Kevin Honeycutt that highlights some of the digital disconnects that exist between students and teachers:

Thanks, Angela Maiers and Wes Fryer, for blogging about this. Happy viewing, everyone!

Today is the LAST day of THE PUSH!

Today we focus on EDUCATION POLICY. We're looking for excellent education policy blogs (liberal, conservative, or neither) that P-12 educators should be reading. If you know of any, please add them to the Moving Forward wiki.

Why are we doing this?

• To identify blogs that P-12 educators can use to initially seed (or expand) their RSS readers
• To create a single location where P-12 educators can go to see excellent educational blogging
• To highlight excellent disciplinary blogging that deserves larger audiences
• To learn from disciplines other than our own and get ideas about our own teaching and/or blogging

Thanks in advance for helping with this initiative. If we all contribute, at the end we should have a bevy of excellent P-12 blogs to which we can all point. Please spread the word about THE PUSH!

FYI, yesterday was a good day for THE PUSH. We now have a list of 9 excellent superintendent / district blogs (and that's before I add a few that I know about). Thank you! We’re doing okay in most other areas but still could use some help with these:

• agricultural education blogs (only have 3),
• athletics / extracurricular activities (only have 1),
• drama / theater education blogs (only have 1),
• family / consumer sciences education blogs (only have 4),
• physical / health education blogs (only have 7), and
• school counseling / college and career counseling / career education / school psychology blogs (only have 3),
• vocational / applied / industrial technology education blogs (only have 2).

The American School of Bombay (ASB) in Mumbai, India is hosting a 1:1 laptop computing conference in February 2010. While the conference is aimed at other international schools, it should be an excellent learning opportunity for anyone who can attend. I attended (and keynoted) ASB's first conference two years ago, brought my buddy, Dr. David Quinn, and had an absolutely wonderful time. I met a bunch of really great international educators and learned a lot about effective 1:1 programs. I highly encourage you to try and attend; Mumbai's a fascinating city! The conference is a collaborative effort of ASB, the Anytime Anywhere Learning Foundation (AALF), the Laptop Institute, and the NESA Center.

If you'd like to submit a proposal to present, the deadline is September 5. The deadline to register and attend is November 15. More information on the conference – including how to register and/or submit a proposal – is at the ASB Un-Plugged Ning.

CASTLE will be sending three representatives to the conference. We're going to make sure we're there in time for the preconference with AALF, which looks totally amazing. ASB is the best 1:1 school I've seen to date; I'm looking forward to seeing how much progress they've made since my last visit. I'm heading up the leadership strand of the conference. Vicki Davis, Julie Lindsay, Doug Johnson, Scott Klososky, and Helen Barrett will be leading conference strands too. Hope to see you there!

Related posts

• Sharing the global stage: Musings on Mumbai
• Musings from Mumbai: Fostering a climate of innovation in the middle and high schools

Just 1 day left for THE PUSH! 

Today we focus on SUPERINTENDENTS / SCHOOL DISTRICTS. We're looking for excellent superintendent, central office, or district-wide blogs (e.g., where multiple individuals contribute). What superintendent / district blogs should P-12 administrators be reading or viewing as models? If you know of any, please add them to the Moving Forward wiki. 

Why are we doing this?

• To identify blogs that P-12 educators can use to initially seed (or expand) their RSS readers
• To create a single location where P-12 educators can go to see excellent educational blogging
• To highlight excellent disciplinary blogging that deserves larger audiences
• To learn from disciplines other than our own and get ideas about our own teaching and/or blogging

Thanks in advance for helping with this initiative. If we all contribute, at the end we should have a bevy of excellent P-12 blogs to which we can all point. Please spread the word about THE PUSH!

FYI, yesterday was a good day for THE PUSH. We now have a list of 24 principal / school blogs. Thank you! We’re doing okay in most other areas but still could use some help with these:

• agricultural education blogs (only have 3),
• athletics / extracurricular activities (only have 1),
• drama / theater education blogs (only have 1),
• family / consumer sciences education blogs (only have 4),
• physical / health education blogs (only have 7), and
• school counseling / college and career counseling / career education / school psychology blogs (only have 3),
• vocational / applied / industrial technology education blogs (only have 2).