Dangerously Irrelevant

It’s that time of year again… time to register for the 4th annual Iowa 1:1 Institute!

The last two years of the Institute have averaged 1,200+ attendees. There are multiple reasons why the Institute is so successful. It’s a grass roots conference at which peers talk to peers. The focus is on learning and teaching, not tools. Session emphasis is on hands-on work, discussion, and participant engagement. No ‘sit and get!’ Students are encouraged to present and there usually are multiple student-run sessions; those are always great. Whether you’re currently in a 1:1 setting – or are interested in moving that direction – or are simply passionate about robust, technology-infused learning, the Institute will be a phenomenal event for you.

This year’s Institute is on April 4 in Des Moines. We always have guests from other states so please join us. Register soon – the Institute fills up fast. Group discounts are available. Plus you can get free registration if you present!

At its heart, connectivism is the thesis that knowledge is distributed across a network of connections, and therefore that learning consists of the ability to construct and traverse those networks. Knowledge, therefore, is not acquired, as though it were a thing. It is not transmitted, as though it were some type of communication.

What we learn, what we know — these are literally the connections we form between neurons as a result of experience. The brain is composed of 100 billion neurons, and these form some 100 trillion connections and it is these connections that constitute everything we know, everything we believe, everything we imagine. And while it is convenient to talk as though knowledge and beliefs are composed of sentences and concepts that we somehow acquire and store, it is more accurate — and pedagogically more useful — to treat learning as the formation of connections.

Stephen Downes via http://www.huffingtonpost.com/stephen-downes/connectivism-and-connecti_b_804653.html

As a school leader, are you facilitating robust STUDENT connections to other resources, individuals, and networks?

As a school leader, are you facilitating robust EDUCATOR connections to other resources, individuals, and networks?

I am delighted to announce EdCampIowa, Iowa’s first cross-state unconference! EdCampIowa West will be hosted by Prairie Lakes AEA at the Buena Vista University Forum in Storm Lake. EdCampIowa East will be hosted by Bettendorf High School. Both locations will run on Saturday, February 16, from 8:30am to 3:30pm. Our hashtag will be #EdCampIowa.

What’s an EdCamp, you say? EdCamps are unlike any other workshop or conference that you’ve probably attended. EdCamp sessions are created by the attendees in the morning. The rest of the day is spent in conversation around the topics identified by participants.

If this sounds strange to you, it’s likely because you’re used to a different model, one in which the agenda and sessions are determined ahead of time. The challenge of traditional workshops or conferences is that you didn’t get to pick the sessions, someone else did. As such, they may or may not meet your learning needs. At an EdCamp, participants, not planners, determine the sessions so they’re much more likely to be targeted, relevant, and timely. ‘Voting with your feet’ also is strongly encouraged, so you can (and should) quickly leave one session for another if it’s not meeting your learning needs. Since all EdCamp sessions are facilitated discussions that tap into the collective wisdom of attendees rather than ‘sit and get’ presentations directed by outside experts, EdCamps always turn out to be incredible, energizing days of conversation.

How do you know if you’re right for EdCampIowa? If these types of questions resonate with you, you’re a prime candidate:

• What if we didn’t have class periods?
• How can we help kids think more deeply?
• Are high school diplomas and university degrees still necessary for credentialing?
• What is getting in the way of us changing faster?
• How can preschool and elementary students use digital tools in powerful ways?
• What if we didn’t ignore that most of the time students are bored?
• What might school look like if students were in charge of teaching at least 20% of the time?
• Do we really need grades?
• How can we better facilitate school-university partnerships?
• Are tablets or Chromebooks viable 1:1 devices?
• What has to go in order to make competency-based student progression work?
• In a multimedia world, what is the future of reading?
• and many, many more… (see the EdCampIowa web site!)

We hope that you will join us on February 16 for an amazing day of discussion and learning. We promise that you will leave with many great ideas, excited to take action back home! Registration is FREE, lunch will be provided, and we’ll have Internet access for any electronic device that you bring along. Please encourage your students, staff, school board, parents, legislators, and community members to participate too. Everyone is welcome at an EdCamp!

More information is available at www.EdCampIowa.org. Sign up soon. Only 200 slots at each location!

It’s 2012. Technology suffuses everything around us. The Internet and Internet browsers have been pretty mainstream for at least a decade.

And yet, I continually run into significant numbers of educators who still don’t know how to work their Internet browser. They struggle with copying and pasting. They get confused just clicking between 2 or 3 different browser tabs. They don’t conceptually understand the difference between their browser’s Google search box and the box where they can actually type in the URL and get there directly. They have no idea that they can right-click on things like hyperlinks or images. And so on… [And this is just the Internet browser. I'm not even talking about individual software programs or online tools.]

What hope do these teachers have of providing meaningful, technology-rich learning experiences for their students? What hope do these leaders have of creating and adequately supporting powerful, technology-rich learning environments for students and staff? Little to none.

Is it even possible to get these educators to where they need to be? How are we going to do what we need to do for our kids when our current levels of technology fluency and understanding are so low?

Can you tell I’m really struggling with this lately?

[Guiding question: What can we do to build the internal capacity of both individual educators and school systems to be better learners and faster change agents?]

Image credit: Shutterstock

[cross-posted at Education Recoded]

Part 1

… we have to answer the ‘why should we?’ before we answer the ‘how do we?’

Part 2

… if we’re struggling to meaningfully incorporate replicative technologies, what chance do we have of meaningfully incorporating transformative technologies?

Don’t waste your precious dollars on the numerous Common Core products and services purport to help with your children’s college and career readiness. A better bet is on the people in your schools – spend the money on teachers and school leaders – excite them with opportunities and support for their innovation, inspire them with high quality professional development programs, minimize the bureaucratic burden placed on them, reduce their class sizes, and give them time to learn and collaborate with their colleagues.

Yong Zhao via http://zhaolearning.com/2012/06/17/common-sense-vs-common-core-how-to-minimize-the-damages-of-the-common-core

August 2012 is officially Connected Educator Month here in the U.S. Today is the first of the month and there are a variety of launch events occurring, including multiple keynotes, webinars, online chats, and panel discussions. My session today is titled Connected Education and Peer Professional Development. The people who are way smarter than me who also will be participating in that session are Howard Rheingold, Tom Whitby, Judi Fusco, and Steve Hargadon. Check out the entire day’s schedule and see what other enticing events lie in store for the rest of the month. Be sure to also explore the blog, book club, publications area, and online communities. Hope you’ll join us and maybe even get involved yourself!

Seann Dikkers [Guest Blogger]

In my first year of teaching a veteran leaned over during a particularly dry workshop and said blandly, “If you spend a whole day in these things and walk away with even one idea, it was worth the day… Today is not our day.” Cynical? Yes, but true. After 15 years as a teacher and principal this veteran’s words came back to me twice a year during professional development (PD) workshops. For good PD the wisdom was decidedly more uplifting.

Yet, there has to be a better way. Doesn’t there?

Now I’m knee deep in research on new media technologies for learning at the University of Wisconsin – Madison under Kurt Squire and Richard Halverson; both of whom argue that there are better ways. As much evidence as we muster, (in support of new models for leading and educating for learning), those in the system must embrace new practices for any changes to occur. In other words leadership matters and teaching matters as much as (or more) than GamingMatters (shameless self promotion) or any relevant new ideas for education.

Many studies seek to inform practice by examining experts in a field. In this post, I want to share some of the preliminary findings in the 21st Century Teaching Project (21CTP) – a study of teacher professional development trajectories toward the integration of new media technology.

I’ll edit the study details a bit: This is a ‘best practice’ style qualitative study after Dan McAdams’ methodology. Phase one: find out relevant practices. Phase two: quantify them in a larger sample to see if they hold water. 39 of the nation’s award winning teachers (TotY, PAEMST, ING, AMF) and authors make up the data set. If these are the teachers we choose to recognize as excellent, then we should listen to what they have to say about their PD – especially when there are consistent messages emerging.

So what do they say?

The next five blog entries will cover five findings that popped out of the data from the 21st Century Teaching Project (21CTP).

21CTP Theme 1: Teacher Training

In the initial interviews the participants kept telling me, with a conspiratorial tone, that their training wasn’t like most teachers, ”It’s a rather unorthodox journey”, said one. Then, one after another, they shared stories that all converged one one point. Traditional teacher education was at best – irrelevant; and at worst detrimental to being an outstanding teacher today.

“I don’t care what school you go to, it really doesn’t prepare you for what you are going to do in a classroom”.

One author/teacher has yet to get an official license to teach, another accidentally dropped out of high school, another manipulated the system to use certain technology regardless of the class content, and it went on. Each felt their story was unique – yet there was this common thread that was worth pursuing in the larger study with new questions:

Were you trained to teach in a teacher education program? What training most equipped you to teach like you do?

The results were striking. Stop for a moment and consider the following numbers from 39 of our award winning teachers.

• 10% credit their primary training to a traditional four year certification program.
• 21% credit their primary training to a hobby, game, or interest.
• 33% credit their primary training to another job/profession.
• 36% credit their primary training to another field of study.

• Only 31% completed a traditional four year certification program.
• 46% were employed in other fields or left the teaching profession for a time.
• 67% were trained in other fields of practice before getting a certificate in a 1-2 year program.

• Only 10%, or 4 of 39, affirmed that their official ‘teacher training’ was relevant to their current practice. The rest were inspired elsewhere.

There were no patterns on what these other field/professions were other than that they covered the gambit: Medicine, Aviation, Acting, Mortuary Work, Rock-n-Roll, Journalism, etc. etc. Commonly, these teachers felt their training in that field was what actually influenced their teaching.

Ironically, those that are being recognized as excellent teachers, were largely not trained as such. Moreover, they largely went out of their way to make sure the world would know it.

So what does this say to educational leadership?

Do we want more 21st century teachers? The most innovative teachers are drawing on experiences and skill sets they developed outside of education.

Later I’ll show results that 21st Century skills are a key part of what they are bringing into the classroom, while traditional education programs still reduce “technology training” to the use of an over-head or interactive whiteboard. The following posts will uplift the sources that positively affect teacher training.

Immediately, a few things… this data would suggest if you want to employ innovative creative teachers, you may want to consider:

1) Interview non-traditional candidates; those with other training, lifelong learners with avid hobby interests, avid readers, and yes, computer gamers. These seem to be better predictors of potential among the sample set.

2) Refine your interview protocol to uncover these interests outside of the profession. What do you do for fun? What other interests do you have? Have you ever worked outside of education? Where?

3) Encourage workshops and training outside of education and validate those experiences with modified accreditation. NASA led summer workshops for teachers that were brought up by three of the candidates – none of them were high school science teachers and two of them went on to get flying licenses.

4) When a teacher leaves to work in another profession, this may not be the end of their teaching career. It may be the beginning of an adventure that will return to teach in coming years and win awards for excellence. Stay in touch with teachers that have left to work elsewhere. Encourage them and keep the door open.

5) We can’t assume that teacher training is actually doing so. When the local prep program is redesigning, participate and vocalize what skills today’s teachers need. Ask for the things that worked for our nation’s ‘best’. Demand that professors are modeling new media pedagogical practices, out-of-field training, student teaching for every course, design work, and community building.

6) Finally, when planning your school’s professional development time, consider experiences over content area. I’ll speak more in future posts on the specifics that were useful to my participants. For now, weight 2-3 day workshops, conferences, curriculum connected technology, and buffet style PD considerably more than guest speakers, mandatory training, and mass technology purchases for the staff (drop-in tech).

More on those in the next post.

Best,

Seann

gamingmatter.com

[cross-posted at LeaderTalk]

Individual choices add up. For example, at the moment when I eat something unhealthy, it seems like a fairly trivial thing. Over time, however, those calories and pounds add up and one day I look in the mirror and have to admit to myself that I seriously need to lose some weight.

Individual choices have collective impacts on society too. For example, the decision of an individual family to move from the city to the suburbs may be a completely rational decision, made in that family’s self-interest as it looks for a nicer house, a bigger yard, etc. But over time, the collective impact of those choices in most cities is white flight and a concentration of economically-disadvantaged families in city neighborhoods and schools. Similarly, as this PowerPoint shows, individual family choices to have a student attend a new magnet school can result in other schools having greater concentrations of students with lower social capital (because the other students’ families often don’t have the means to navigate the magnet school choice system).

We see the same thing when it comes to technology usage by teachers. A few days ago I asked this question:

Given the realities of our modern age and the demands of our children’s future, is it really okay to allow teachers to choose whether or not they incorporate modern technologies into their instruction?

Many of the comments to that post rightfully insisted that teachers must make the decision whether or not it makes sense to utilize digital technologies for an individual lesson or unit. No one wants teachers to use technology for technology’s sake and no one wants digital technologies used in inappropriate ways.

But the collective impact of all of these individual teacher choices, often made by teachers with little pedagogical fluency with digital technologies, is much like my weight loss example above (or Mike Schmoker’s example of the ‘Crayola Curriculum’). Any individual choice seems quite rational and/or trivial at the time. At the end of the year, however, we look back and see that most students have little meaningful or substantive interaction with learning technologies, which of course is of particular concern for disadvantaged students who have limited opportunities outside of school to use technology at all, much less in creative, interesting ways.

So I think we need to be more purposeful. We need mechanisms for reminding ourselves that being relevant to students’ technology-suffused, globally-interconnected futures is important for schools, and we need a greater shared commitment to make deliberate, intentional choices to seek out opportunities to integrate digital technologies into lessons. Sure, we can teach any individual lesson or unit without incorporating much technology. And, to be honest, for many teachers this would be much easier and more efficient / effective, at least in the short term. But if we don’t pay more attention to this issue and change our practices and our mindsets, we will continue to look back at the end of each year and realize that we let our students down yet again when it comes to their 21st century learning needs.