by Scott McLeod | Feb 6, 2007 | Law, Policy, and Ethics, Tech Tools |
Some daycare centers are allowing parents to log in and watch what’s happening in their kid’s classroom via secure webcam. As sort of a follow-up to yesterday’s post, here are some questions a friend of mine and I recently had about extending this idea to K-12 teachers…
- How would most teachers feel about parents being able to watch and hear, via a secure password-protected webcam connection, what was occurring in class on a regular basis?
- Would teachers’ classroom instruction / pedagogy be better, worse, or the same if parents could watch and hear what was occurring in class on a regular basis?
- Would classroom management / discipline be better, worse, or the same if parents could watch and hear what was occurring in class on a regular basis?
There are some other issues too, such as the impact on school bandwidth, but I think discussion around these three questions might be pretty interesting…
by Scott McLeod | Jan 31, 2007 | Law, Policy, and Ethics, Leadership and Vision, Planning and Funding, Tech Integration, Tech Tools |
David Warlick has blogged often about our need to tell a new story. A story about the technological shifts that are occurring in our society. A story about the impacts that digital technologies are having on our lives, the workplace, and, indeed, our very economies. A story about the future of eduation and what our kids need to know and be able to do in the New Economy. A story that helps people make the move from an education system designed for yesteryear to a system that is designed for tomorrow. This story needs to be told in a compelling way so that it resonates with listeners.
I agree with David. We do need a new story. We probably need multiple new stories, told in different ways to different people at different times in different settings. We need to tailor the new story for different audiences to ensure maximum reception. But I’m also thinking that a new story is not enough. A new story alone will not get us to where we need to be.
I think we also need a BHAG: a big, hairy, audacious goal. A tangible, concrete target that lets us know when we’ve reached some crucial point. A new story (or three or four…) is a necessary component, but I don’t think it will be sufficient in and of itself. I think we need a new story and a BHAG, because the BHAG will help drive action and allocation of resources. A new story tells us what the issues are but it doesn’t necessarily help people know what to do. The BHAG helps people understand where we might go and how to get there. Together a new story and a BHAG will help educators, and parents, and community members, and politicans create the will and the action to move us forward.
I think we’re starting to wrap our heads around what a new story might look like. For example, I know that the presentation set I’ve been delivering lately, which combines diifferent resources and quotes and materials from the blogosphere and elsewhere, is resonating well with folks here in Minnesota. But we still need a BHAG.
So what might a BHAG be? What might be a big, hairy, audacious goal, a target that makes us gulp a little bit but also is focused and achievable? What might be something that would help us accomplish our goal of moving schools, students, teachers, and classroom pedagogy into the 21st century? What might be a goal that is tangible and yet energizing, a goal that grabs people in the gut and serves as a unifying focal point of effort?
I’ve been thinking a lot about this and I can’t come up with anything better than this:
- ubiqitous nationwide high-speed wireless Internet access, and
- a wireless-capable laptop for every student and educator.
I’ve previously blogged about variations of the first component (both here and here), and I think we’re starting to see the revolutionary impacts of giving every kid and teacher a computer, even when those impacts weren’t foreseen or desired at the outset. I think these two in coordination (and you need them both, I believe) are a BHAG worth rallying around. Now of course the question is… what do you think?
This post is also available at the TechLearning blog.
by Scott McLeod | Jan 26, 2007 | Gaming, Leadership and Vision, Podcasts, Pre-Service Preparation, Professional Development, Tech Integration, Tech Tools |
Here’s something if you have a 60- to 90-minute block of time with educators…
100% Proficiency on Old Skills? A Candid Conversation About the Demands of NCLB and Preparing Students for the New Economy
P.S. This presentation is better than the one I did last week.
by Scott McLeod | Jan 16, 2007 | Blogging, Communication, Tech Tools |
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The Minneapolis Star Tribune has a story on CASTLE’s Principal Blogging Project today:
Read it while it’s hot off the press. I think Star Tribune articles are no longer free after a week or two…
Also, not so hot off the press, two of our principal bloggers, Dave Younce and Jason Bednar, were profiled in December in the Chicago-area Daily Herald.
by Scott McLeod | Jan 12, 2007 | Blogging, Communication, Tech Tools |
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Last October I announced a bold new CASTLE initiative. Because of what was clearly a lack of presence by school principals in the blogosphere, we set an ambitious goal for ourselves of getting 100 principals up and blogging in 100 days. Dean Shareski at Ideas and Thoughts from an EdTech expressed skepticism that we’d reach our goal. It’s now the 100-day mark – how are we doing?
Obviously we’re not doing as well as we had hoped. As the chart above shows, we’ve had 54 principals request a new blog. We’ve set up all those blogs, 5 in just the past few days. Of the other 49 principals, 25 are actively blogging (if sometimes infrequently) and 24 have never posted. I said in my comments to Dean’s post that I anticipated this project would be interesting. Here are a few thoughts on what has occurred so far with this initiative:
- Reaching principals has been a challenge. Most principals are not active readers in the blogosphere and we have neither easy access to nor the budget for advertisements in the print publications that they do read. Nor do we have easy access to principals’ e-mail addresses for electronic communications. We thus are dependent on others to help us spread the word about this project. To date we have seen clear ‘bumps’ in the number of requests that we get after each online update and/or conference presentation that we’ve done.
- We have discovered a few principal blogs that we didn’t know about. As word of this project has spread, principals have been e-mailing us their blog URLs. Right now we know of 21 principals who are blogging that did not start because of this project. You can access their blogs at our list of known principal blogs (they’re the ones in red). It’s possible that there are other principals using tools like edublogs, November Learning Communities, or blogging software provided by their school districts and we just don’t know about them.
- Although we haven’t yet done a systematic survey of our active principal bloggers, my informal interactions with these folks have been uniformly positive. Several have been quite surprised at the positive reception that their blogs have received from parents and community members. Also, apparently several have been just dying for someone to offer them the opportunity to blog. As soon as we made the offer they not only started to blog quite frequently but also began asking for header graphic, clustr map, and myChingo modifications. They’re really getting into it! It makes me wonder how many other principals would jump at the chance if they just knew about our offer. The principals that began blogging because of us clearly are finding value in doing so.
- We have encountered difficulties with district and/or personal e-mail filtering systems. A significant percentage of our principals have not been able to receive the invitation e-mail from TypePad to set up their guest account because their districts block anything to do with TypePad. Others are finding that the TypePad invite goes straight into their junk mail folder. Either way, they never receive the information they need to get started. We also have heard from a couple of district technology coordinators and/or principals that they would like to do this but can’t because of district restrictions on usage of outside tools.
- I passed out cards with information about the project to nearly every attendee at the big educational administration professors conference in November. The idea was that we could reach local administrator and preservice administrator populations across the country through the professors that work with them. Although I can’t say for sure, I’m fairly certain that we received only a handful of blog requests as a result of that work. I’m not sure why. Perhaps my educational leadership faculty colleagues at other institutions are not supportive of the project or perhaps they don’t understand the potential of blogs enough to make it worth forwarding our information to their local educators.
- We’ve also set up blogs for five central office administrators. They were interested in blogging and asked, so we said sure!
So has this project been a success? No and yes. No if we judge it by our initial ambitious goal of getting 100 new active principal blogs within 100 days. Yes if we recognize that we’ve already doubled the number of known principals in the blogosphere.
Here are our next steps:
- I’m going to track our requests for another 50 days and report out on how we’re doing. After that the project web site and our offer to create free blogs for principals will remain open but I’ll quit reporting on our progress. Why the additional 50 days? I still am hopeful that we’ll get some more folks to sign up because…
- Earlier this week we sent out informational e-mails about the project to every state educational technology director in the country. We also sent out e-mails to the executive director of each state’s superintendent association, secondary principal association, and elementary principal association and have notified CoSN, ISTE, SETDA, and others about the initiative. We asked these folks to pass the word along to their membership. We’re already starting to see a surge of requests as a result.
- Because word of mouth is the best advertisement, we will ask our active principal bloggers to tap one of their local peers and suggest that he or she start blogging too. Our active bloggers are in the best position to describe the benefits that they’re seeing from blogging. Other principals will be best persuaded by one of their own who’s already doing this.
- We also will get some testimonials from our most active principal bloggers and put those up on our project web site. Maybe hearing from other principals will help persuade a few folks who hear about the project but are undecided.
- If I can find a spare moment, I would like to write a brief article on principal blogging and submit it to a print publication that principals read. I think we would get some additional requests if we could get an article written up and published. This won’t happen within the next 50 days, though, both because of my schedule and because practitioner magazines don’t turn stuff around that quickly.
- I will continue to present about the project, either live at conferences or virtually via videoconferencing, as much as I can (first folks have to ask!). I have a couple of presentations coming up that may net a few requests.
We’re open to suggestions, comments, or other feedback that anyone has for us. We are extremely thankful for all of the support and publicity folks have given us to date. I am confident that eventually we will reach our goal of creating 100 new, active principal blogs. It just may take us longer than we had hoped.
by Scott McLeod | Jan 10, 2007 | Communication, Tech Integration, Tech Tools |
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Thanks to Seth
Godin’s blog, today I found this very cool resource for teachers and
students looking for different visual ways to represent information:
This is great on so many levels and is yet another example of the power of
the Web over print. Kudos to the folks at Visual Literacy!
by Scott McLeod | Jan 8, 2007 | Blogging, Tech Tools |
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I rarely write about technology tools here, but I ran across two web tools recently that I think may be useful for bloggers…
- Cite Bite. Input a URL and a block of text from that web page. Cite Bite will create a link that not only will send you to the page but also highlight the block of text for the visitor.
- SceneMaker. SceneMaker allows you to create bookmarks within a YouTube video and then hyperlink to them. This saves visitors from having to sit through nonessential parts of the video. See also veotag and mojiti.
I like the idea of these kinds of tools. They empower users with greater control over their hyperlinks. Anyone know of similar tools out there that might be of use to bloggers?
by Scott McLeod | Jan 5, 2007 | Miscellaneous, Research and Evaluation, Tech Tools |
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David Warlick blogged a bit about this idea last June, but I thought it was interesting that one of the most popular articles in 2006 from Harvard Business School’s Working Knowledge series was the one titled Open Source Science: A New Model for Innovation. The article discusses using open source software development ideas to address previously-unsolvable scientific problems. The article is definitely worth a read, as are several other of the top articles from last year.
It would be fascinating to use this model in a school system. For example, a school or district blog could throw out a question (e.g., How can we better engage parents? How can we improve the academic achievement of non-English-speaking students? How can we cut our heating and electricity costs?), and solicit solutions from educational experts, other experts, the general public, etc. Obviously you’d have to sort the wheat from the chaff and, in some instances, there might need to be some way of providing an incentive large enough for folks to participate. Nonetheless, I think the idea has some power if implemented thoughtfully.
Does anyone know of a school or district that is doing this right now and seeing positive effects?
by Scott McLeod | Jan 3, 2007 | Communication, Law, Policy, and Ethics, Leadership and Vision, Pre-Service Preparation, Professional Development, Tech Integration, Tech Tools |
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Over the past couple of days, David
Warlick has posted several times about the decreasing need for students to
memorize discrete, unconnected factual bits of academic course content:
Although David has blogged about this issue before, he says in his second
post that he may have come off a bit ‘over zealous’ the day before. I’m
not sure that he did, but I might reframe the issue slightly.
Here is the landscape as I see it:
- We are rapidly nearing almost-ubiquitous wireless connectivity, at least in
more-advantaged countries. WiMax, EV-DO, and similar,
already-existing technologies show us that this is a thing of the near future,
not dreamy science fiction. I don’t think it’s unreasonable to guess that within
10 to 15 years your wireless device will be able to connect to the Internet at
all times in most places. Even in the wildnerness of Minnesota’s Boundary Waters, you’ll be able to
surf the Web (now, whether you would want to or should is a different issue; the
bottom line is that you’ll be able to).
- We already have small, portable devices – cell phones, PDAs, laptops – that
can connect to the Internet at fairly reasonable speeds.
- We already have pretty decent voice recognition software, even the kind that
doesn’t have to be trained to your individual voice (think, for example,
telephone airline reservations systems). We also have pretty decent
text-to-speech software. Both will continue to improve and surely will be much
better by the time ubiquitous wireless connectivity occurs.
Put these all together and you have a portable device that you can talk to,
that can talk back to you, and that can connect to the Internet anywhere,
anytime. In other words, you can ask the device on your hip a question (What’s the capital of Slovakia? What is a gerund? What is photosynthesis?) and get the answer back as spoken text, as a diagram, as a video, etc., all within reasonable wait time.
Once all of this converges, the question is not “Do students still
need to memorize stuff in school?” There always will be some core knowledge
that students need, if only so that they know enough to be able to access more
complex information that they haven’t memorized and to judge the worth and
credibility of that new information. Instead, I believe the questions
become:
- In light of this new information technology / access landscape,
what do students still need to memorize?,
- What are we now asking students to memorize that they don’t
really need to?, and
- How can we better use precious school time?
Note the emphasis on what, not if, in the first question.
While there will be some core that students need to memorize, I’m guessing
that the list will be a lot smaller than it is now (e.g., when’s the last time most
arguably-successful adults used sine, cosine, and tangent? needed to know, without being able to look it up, the difference between an
acute and obtuse angle? needed to use Newton’s Second Law? needed
to name the capital of South Dakota or the fifth U.S. President?).
In the end, this is all part of the ongoing tension between conservative and
progressive ideologies of education that’s
been simmering for at least a century. To greatly oversimplify: memorization
(see E.D. Hirsch) versus critical
thinking (see John Dewey).
What’s different now, of course, are two things…
- The fact that technology makes it unbelievably easy to look up almost anything,
factual or otherwise, qualitatively changes the discussion in ways that it never
could when one had to go look something up in a printed book (if there was even
one close enough to be convenient); and
- The fact that the mental skills necessary for workers to survive and thrive
in a technology-suffused, globally-interconnected, creative class economy are different than
those needed by workers in the industrial age factory line economy. It is these
latter ‘21st Century skills’ that are exactly what employers are looking for
(see, e.g., the recent TIME
article, or the Partnership for 21st
Century Skills, or the New Commission
on the Skills of the American Workforce or David
Thornburg, or …).
Future-oriented schools (and schools of education) would start discussing the
three questions above now.
by Scott McLeod | Dec 7, 2006 | Blogging, Communication, News and Events, Podcasts, Tech Tools |
On Tuesday at the TIES conference
I gave a presentation titled The Blogging Administrator.
I discussed the benefits to principals of blogging generally, highlighted our Principal Blogging Project specifically, and had two principals, Drs. Jan Borelli and Nancy Flynn, speak to the audience about their blogging experiences (Jan connected from Oklahoma City via Skype).
The materials from this presentation are available on my TIES 2006 web page, including both my PowerPoint slides and the podcast I made of the presentation.
[FYI, for those of you who are tracking our progress, we’re about halfway to our goal of getting 100 new principals blogging in 100 days]
