21k12

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This sweet Derek Sivers video from  provides a lovely little followup to my previous post, the ethical obligation of sharing.   I want to clarify that it is not that I think there are many educators who are ethically opposed to sharing (there are a few, and that few is far too many, but only a few).

I think rather that it is obstacles, not opposition, which limit sharing, and I suppose the obstacles to sharing are three-fold.

One is time/energy/initiative:  though sharing by publishing is now entirely free financially,  it probably just seems too great an expense of these other precious resources to bother.  That is understandable, but it is mistaken.  Developing a familiarity with web 2.0 tools for sharing will take an initial learning curve of a few hours, but at the other end you will be a far more valuable and more greatly contributing citizen of our digital age, and you will then easily and swiftly be better able to influence the improvement of the education of children and the future of our society– something which is the moral responsibility of us all.

The second obstacle is an inability to appreciate the value of our own accomplishments: how could what I have to share be of value to anyone else?  This second one is exactly the subject of the video above: don’t hold off sharing because you don’t know its value:  share and let others determine the value, because sometimes, more often than you might think, they will.  As the Sivers in the video says:

Everyone’s ideas seem obvious to them.  But maybe what is obvious to me is amazing to someone else.  We’re clearly a bad judge of our own creations.  We should just put it out and let the world decide.  Are you holding back something that seems too obvious to share?

The third obstacle might be fear of criticism (as Jacob Martens suggested on Twitter).  I understand this– I do, and I have felt the sting– but I think that we as educators should be willing to model for our students and others risk-taking, transparency, and a willingness to be challenged.

Let’s support each other in identifying, confronting, and overcoming these obstacles: Post and Share for education’s advancement.

(thanks to Jonathan Schmid’s Tech Savvy Teachers Blog for sharing the Sivers sharing video)

Saturday afternoon I enjoyed a very stimulating conversation with an outstanding educational leader who told me about a fascinating, unconventional educational initiative at her school.    Recognizing I wanted to learn more, I asked her if she had “posted” it.   She told me they had presented it in several workshops and had explored doing a book, but that hadn’t come together.   But I followed up: have you put it up online somewhere, on your school’s site or some other sharing venue?

No.

Last month, NAIS President Pat Bassett emailed out a fascinating list of about a dozen schools which were leading the way in the use of “Backward Design” to advance the learning of 21st century skills for their students (I am proud to say that yes, our St. Gregory “Egg” was on the list).

As I scanned the list, my instinct was immediately to look for the links to where I could learn more.   There were only email addresses for the Heads of School.   I followed up by visiting some of those schools’ websites and searching for pages about the programs, and using google to search more widely, but with only a few exceptions, I found nothing.

In my presentation yesterday to the school heads of Virginia, I shared my 8 steps for leading learning forward; the list has grown by a step since my similar, (though shorter) presentation at NAIS last February.

The added 8th step is the shortest and perhaps simplest, but, I think, incredibly important: Documenting (Posting) and Sharing. 

We live in an incredibly exciting and valuable age of networked learning and connected educators, and we al
l have in common improving the education of students, all students everywhere, in every way we can.  We know this is best for kids, to whom we are all so dedicated, and to the future of our society, for which they will very soon be assuming important responsibility.

For those who share this common commitment (and really, who among us does not?), there is, I am arguing,  a moral responsibility, a strong one,  to share our educational initiatives and innovations: to summarize them, share their key elements, show examples of them in practice, and, at best, reflect upon their successes and lack thereof. (more…)

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I greatly enjoyed presenting and sharing this conversation with the very fine educators of the Virginia Independent School Association.  This post has only the slides and the videos associated with the slides (Most of which I didn’t have time to share– watch them now!).

It is my aim to add a new post within the week with a transcription of my spoken remarks to go with these slides.

My thanks and appreciation go to the fine VAIS staff and educators for welcoming me so warmly, especially Kim Failon and Simon Owen-Williams.

Here are the 8 steps themselves, if you wish to view them only, loosely modeled on Covey’s Seven Habits of Highly Effective People. .

Here, and after the “more” are the associated videos.

Alexandria Country Day School Assistant Head Nishan Mehta on their iPad pilot:

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the Edleader21 video on the importance of 21st century learning leadership.  (more…)

This is a very worthwhile 15 minutes for those interested in the question of how curriculum should be changing, and also, for those attending ISAS Teacher Conference in a few weeks, this offers a nice sneak preview to one of the event’s most exciting presenters.

What Year are you preparing your students for?  Tests from the 70s and 80s are just the same as they are now; Most schools are preparing students for 1991.

Instead of the oral report, one of the low points of civilization, let’s do video podcasts.

Media Literacy, Global Literacy, Digital Literacy: What are these things, really?  Let’s think more carefully about these terms and how to teach them.

Let’s ask students to do assessments:  What does a quality blog look like? Have students define the standard and ask students meet it.

What is a quality podcast?   Don’t just make a wiki, determine what is a quality wiki.

I think every student should design an app: I can’t think of a better thing for them to do.

My new mantra: Get time out of the way, move aside, think about all the connections that are possible, and what I am looking for is Future Schools Now!

Jacob has a strong and ambitious vision, and she wants to support teachers: one step at a time.  Revamp just one curricular unit or area each year, and before too long, we will alll be well underway.   Focus on the new critical literacies, elevate consistently students’ consciousness about what is quality and how we know it, and engage students and strengthen their skills by use of powerful Web 2.0 communication and creation tools.

I love the message that students should design apps: we have a few doing that at St. Gregory, but not every student– not yet.   It is something we, like so many other schools, are moving toward and ought to be moving toward more swiftly.

There are so many great things students can be doing and creating in this day and age, and let’s take inspirational figures like Jacobs to keep asking ourselves: how can we make learning more engaging, more meaningful, more connected, and more preparatory for our times?

Yesterday’s New York Times offered fascinating piece that struck directly at the the heart of a topic I write about often: the connection of creativity and collaboration.    Regularly here I write with enthusiasm that by promoting better collaboration among our students in a myriad of ways– from group-work in the classroom to building powerful online networks across the world– we will facilitate our students in becoming more creative and innovative.

I cite Steven Johnson’s writing most often, as when he explains in Where Good Ideas Come From: A Natural History of Innovation that the most innovative spaces are situated at the scientific laboratory conference table and innovation occurs most often in the densest of networks: first in cities (and his research is compelling that the densest and largest cities are the most innovative) and now in online networks, most exemplified by Twitter.   Clayton Christensen too, in the Innovators’ DNA, elevates five traits as essential to the “Innovator’s DNA,” and networking is number 4.

At first glance, the New York Times piece by Susan Cain, The Rise of the New Groupthink, with its subtitle “Collaboration is in. But it may not be conducive to creativity” appears to be a major assault of sorts on my belief and argument.    But a closer reading of the piece leads me to believe that the headline distorts: to my eyes,  this piece is a nuanced and balanced essay which argues for the value of both solitude and collaborative/networks as offering value for innovative work, except when it goes off its own rails to strike an unfairly strident and wrong-headed note.

Cain opens with an admiration for the introverts who are often highly creative and for the value of solitude in creative endeavors, and speaking for myself as an introvert, I appreciate the endorsement:

The most spectacularly creative people in many fields are often introverted, according to studies by the psychologists Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi and Gregory Feist. They’re extroverted enough to exchange and advance ideas, but see themselves as independent and individualistic. They’re not joiners by nature. (more…)

I’m busy this winter preparing several talks in the spring on the topic of “innovative schools, innovative students,” and so have the pleasure of diving in again into the best thinking I can find about the rich, complex, and often enormously gratifying nature of innovation.

In the TED talk above, author Matt Ridley makes clear with wonderful historical references that “through crowd sourcing,through the bottom-up world that we’ve created, where not just the elites but everybody is able to have their ideas and make them meet and mate,we are surely accelerating the rate of innovation.”

Collaboration and sharing are qualities of character and skills of cooperation which we often teach and advocate for their own sake, but what is so rewarding to come to understand better is how essential they are for innovation.   When we strive to have our students work in groups, and when we encourage them to research best practices and seek out innovative practices online, and when we assist them and assist ourselves in developing their own networks of connection with others around the world who share their passions, we are empowering them (and us) to be better innovators and better problem-solvers.

And innovation isn’t itself the end-goal, it still always the means: the means toward the end of making a better world:

Awful things will happen in this century, I’m absolutely sure. But I’m also sure that, because of the connections people are making,and the ability of ideas to meet and to mate as never before, I’m also sure that technology will advance, and therefore living standards will advance.

Some favorite quotes from the talk:

The computer mouse is made from a confection of different substances, from silicon and metal and plastic and so on. And more than that, it’s a confection of different ideas, the idea of plastic, the idea of a laser, the idea of transistors. They’ve all been combined together in this technology.

And it’s this combination, this cumulative technology, that intrigues me, because I think it’s the secret to understanding what’s happening in the world.  (more…)

 A little holiday treat from TO-FU: these 100 seconds will remind and reinforce you of what you already know if you seek to greater creativity in your life.  Some of my favorites:

• make lists
• try free writing
• get away from the computer (!)
• quit beating yourself up
• be open
• collaborate
• practice, practice, practice
• don’t give up
• allow yourself to make mistakes
• Got an idea: write it down [or blog it!]

And to my amazing educational colleagues here at St. Gregory, and to my incredible on-line PLN,  I dedicate this– my most favorite suggestion:

• surround yourself with creative people

About a month ago, I posted here a lengthy piece sharing my learning about the ETS iSkills test/assessment.  In that post, which includes nearly 80 slides explaining the test in great detail and which was based on a webinar I “attended” and  on my followup interviews with an ETS program director, I reported that I found the test intriguing conceptually, but I was unsure about its quality in practical implementation.     Surely many of us believe that “digital fluency” or proficiency in using digital tools to effectively access, analyze, organize and communicate information is of incredible importance for students and professionals, so the test’s goals are worthy.

Recently, our new Librarian and Director of Information Literacy, Laura Lee Calverley, managed a pilot if the iSkills with seven of our students who volunteered to participate.  This is her report about our pilot of the test, which, on balance, she found disappointing.  We don’t expect to move ahead with using it in a broader way anytime soon. 

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The iSkills assessment measures digital fluency, testing with a range of activities designed to simulate real-world, information literacy dependant scenarios.  We were very excited to run our own pilot of the iSkills test with a small group of students here at St Gregory, where technology is so much a part of our school.

Our experience with the test was somewhat mixed.  Ordering and purchasing was simple, but we had some frustrating issues with setup.  The web-based exam is currently only available on PC computers with Internet Explorer, a browser that we do not use or support on school computers.  Since our computer labs and library computers are all Macs, setting up PCs for testing also added a lot of extra hassle.  (more…)

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Providing students laptops in learning is intended, in my view,  to empower them to be more effective creators, communicators, researchers, and collaborators; technology integration isn’t intended, in my view, to enhance students ability to watch, but to do.   In previous posts I have referred to laptops as “more powerful pencils,” not more powerful televisions or film projectors.  I am also especially enthused by the way we all, students and educators, are better able to pursue our passions to far greater depths by having tools by which we can access rich mines of information about our passion and build powerful networks with others who share our passions.

When the first iPad was released, I was, and to some extent still am, a critic and a cynic.  My concern has been that it is designed far more for the consumption of information than the creation of it.   It is a shiny, gleaming screen through which we can surf, scan, and survey, and by which we can be endlessly entertained.   It reminds me a little of the fancy screens the human characters in the Pixar film WALL-E watch, endlessly, as they consume media and calories but don’t construct or create anything at all.

Now consumption is fine, some of the time, and if you are in a household with multiple devices, like my household, an iPad may well have a great role to play. But as a singular tool for students, I didn’t think it is the right way to go for schools which seek to promote learning by doing, technology enhanced PBL, and 21st century skills (and with the iPad 2, I still don’t entirely, but my concern has diminished), .

In reading the recent biography of Steve Jobs, then, I was struck to recognize that Steve agreed with the criticism.

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I don’t write often enough about the importance of architecture and the design of physical spaces for effective contemporary learning, but it is something I want to spend more time learning about and examining.   Ira Socol is one resource; I find his thinking about elevating the importance of spatial design inspiring; another fine resource is the work  being done at Stanford Design School about innovative learning spaces by Scott Witthoft, a D School scholar and, I am proud to say, a St. Gregory alumnus.

In the same spirit, there are exciting things in development around classroom furniture, ideas and inspiration I want to learn more about and share here in future posts.

The video above is primarily just an architectural firm’s self-promotion, and I don’t want to over-sell it here:  In some ways it is old hat. “Open learning” environments were a signature element of many progressive schools in the ’70s.

Nonetheless, as I watch it a  few fine elements stand out:

1.  The respect the architect and the school administrators show for teacher voices, and the way they sought to include the faculty into planning these reinvented learning spaces, are excellent and admirable.

2.  The balance of open space, much more open space than in any conventional classroom, with nooks, corners, and round tables for individual work and collaborative study, is great.   There are a few chairs, but it seems that this environment allows for great mobility and activity, and honors students as doers.

3.  My favorite element is the transparency: walls are replaced throughout with windows, and learning becomes open, public, visible.  Classrooms become theaters for all to observe learning and indeed to learn from learning.   Teachers become inevitably collaborators and co-creators because of their much enhanced understanding and appreciation of the work of their colleagues.   Lovely.

It is nomination season for the Edublogger Awards (deadline is Friday, December 2), and, like so many of my colleagues, I am participating again with mixed feelings.   As many readers know, I have expressed my hesitations with school awards ceremonies, and hate the idea that we might divide a learning community by singling out some for internal awards.    But at the same time, I am entirely supportive of our students and teachers pursuing and being honored with external recognition.

Before preparing my nominations, I took some time to update my “Blogroll,” and I want to emphasize its importance, much greater than this post: Find it on the right hand column bar.   The 78+  names on that list, and as I am continuing to work on it, what will soon be more than 100, are incredibly important parts of my intellectual universe and learning network, and I am deeply indebted to them.  Please be assured, it is an evolving list, and I will be adding to it regularly.

The Edublogger award nomination page doesn’t make clear, to my eyeballs, whether you can nominate only one, or more than one,  in each category.  For most of the categories I am writing about I will offer several suggestions, but the last in each section, in bold, will be my particular singular  nomination.

Best Individual Blog:

Lisa Nielsen’s Innovative Educator: Sharing Ideas about Learning Innovatively provides an informative, prolific, and passionate advocacy for her view of educational progress and innovation, much, though not all of which I share.   She’s got so much energy, enthusiasm, and idealism for digital empowerment of students and for a whole world-view of networked, tech-savvy, open-minded, educational advancement that it makes you want to jump up from your chair and join a march for her cause.  Among her great strengths is her continuing concern for youth voice.

Kids love having the opportunity to learn online but it’s not merely the medium or the technology that students enjoy. At the recent iNacol Virtual Schools Symposium I listened to high school students who have experience learning this way as well as teachers who have experience with these students, share some advice for making this type of learning even better.

Rick Ackerly also speaks for kids, but does so not by sharing their voice as by honoring, treasuring even,  their experience and point of view.   His blog’s title, The Genius in Children, captures it effectively.

Notice, delight, respond, conflict, challenge, inquire, define, love, and watch how the child’s unique character reveals itself to you. Notice how that character is driven by some ineffable inner voice, her own unique genius. .

Bill Ferriter’s The Tempered Radical speaks for teachers, especially; it is remarkable to me that a full time teacher can maintain such a frequent and outstanding stream.   But he also speaks for all of us who share this vision of the importance of innovation and educating our our students to be innovative; of the exciting synergy of Web 2.0 and 21st century skills; or professional learning communities and networked learning.

“Constructing a TED in their heads” is a cool phrase, isn’t it?   It is an approachable reminder that when we are building our own learning networks using social tools like blogs, Twitter and Facebook, we need to intentionally reach beyond the thinking of leading educators.

Best Group Blog:

Connected Principals has become a second home for me online, and one I am extremely pleased to learn from weekly and contribute to monthly.    (more…)

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One of our initiatives underway this year is a pilot of Schoology, an online social network for schools in by which teachers and students can communicate and collaborate, and manage their courses.    About five of our teachers are using it, and, particularly in the middle school, we are finding good success with it.

One of our teachers working with it, Corinne Bancroft, who teaches 6th and 8th grade English, offered a session recently with her colleagues to showcase her usage and encourage others to come aboard.    The slides above are from that talk, and she provided the comments below.

I do think Schoology is the best free solution to get our students’ homework all in the same free place, consistently organized. … I believe that Schoology is more appropriate for middle school.  My students’ parents value the privacy and safety of Schoology.  My students find it easy to use, and the sixth graders think it is cool because it is like facebook (which they for the most part are too young to have).

Schoology does not have the more complicated functions that [high school teachers may wish to ]use (but that’s fine for middle school).  One has used moodle successfully for a few years, which is also free; Moodle worked better for her, but she thinks it is not as intuitive and would not be so easy to figure out for younger students.  Finally, the other cool thing about schoology is they recently added a parent membership.  (more…)

Rest assured: anonymity and confidentiality will be preserved here.   No mention of the school, fine as it was, or my fellow visiting committee members, excellent as they are, will be uttered here.

I write often about the value contemporary digital tools can offer our students and ourselves in learning to be better collaborators, and I want to share the very successful experience I had this week using google docs for such collaboration with an accreditation visiting team of 13 as we worked together for four days preparing our substantial report.

We took the bold step (not that bold) of being the first team in our accrediting association to forgo flashdrives in preparing the report and instead using, nearly exclusively, shared google word docs for our collaborative report writing.

Traditionally in my experience of about eight visits, individual team members each write their own report sections on their own laptops.   Then, commonly, they print them out, and share their printed copies with colleague/team members, asking for notes and mark-ups on their drafts.   To do so they have to go through the motions of printing, getting the papers to their colleague and back (as everyone is moving around), and then deciphering the comments/markings on the paper, and entering the changes manually back into the draft document.  Sometimes versions are emailed back and forth with changes made, which can be more efficient, but I always end up with multiple versions of the same document, and have made changes in one version while someone is editing an alternate version, and then have to reconcile what have become two divergent versions– and I have to keep track of which document is now the current and updated version.    Then everyone has to ensure getting the right version to the chair, by flash drive hand-off or email.    When the group works together as one on drafting the major commendations and recommendations, things are written up on a whiteboard and then have to be transcribed later into a document which can be emailed out to all but doesn’t allow for shared editing.

Instead– consider the value of working together on shared docs as we did.   The joy of there always being only one version of a document, never multiples that must be reconciled and identified as the most current or accurate.   The delight of having multiple editors working simultaneously, with no passing back and forth, whenever they wish and from wherever they are.   The chair having always, at any moment, access to check in and observe how each and every report is proceeding, able to identify emerging themes in the write-ups of a dozen different team members, and then upon completion having at the ready every document in one place.   (more…)

Good Morning St. Gregory students and teachers:

Thank you for attending our special ceremony marking the life of the man who was perhaps the greatest innovator of our lifetime; it is especially appropriate that we do so here at St. Gregory because we are a school which celebrates innovation and is particularly committed to “creating innovators,” and we want regularly to affirm the excellent work you all do as especially innovative students and thinkers.

Let me also thank all of you who “dressed like Steve” today to mark this day of honor and remembrance.

Steve Jobs was a remarkable innovator; let me highlight three elements of his innovative mindset and practices.

First, in technology, he, more than any other computer designer before or since, reinvented computer technology to serve users– we humans– as user-friendly, intuitive, devices, able and available for discovery and application from the moment you pressed the “on-button,” with no manual required.   This was an enormous advance, as I well remember when I opened the box on my first Macintosh in 1984: with the Mac, computers became our devices, rather than we being their devices, it seemed.    Jobs continued with extraordinary advances in user-friendly, intuitive use tools such as ipods, iTunes, iPhones, and much more, and revolutionized not just our tools but our very understanding of what it is to develop technology which serves regular, every-day creators and communicators.

Second, no computer inventor has had a finer sense of design and aesthetic appeal; for Steve Jobs, every tool had to be a work of art also, demonstrating extraordinary and exquisite sensibility and sheen. (more…)

My college studies took place in large part on my first-generation 1984 Apple Macintosh, my essential tool for writing, editing, and creating.  Today, my iPhone is my umbilical cord to the wider world, the way I connect to family and friends and the way I access anytime, anywhere, an enormously wide world of learning and information. Pixar films have been a defining element of my parenting, as we have enjoyed together each and every one of these masterpieces which unite with joy and compassion visual art, narrative, and technology.

Steve Jobs was the Edison and the DaVinci of our lifetime, but he may have been greater than even that: his genius for invention, innovation, and design transcended, and his ability both to envision a different way of using technology and bringing that vision to life has been deeply transformative.

Take the time to see his famous Stanford address, if you haven’t already.

Do what you believe is great work, and the only way to do great work is to love what you do.  If you haven’t found it yet keep looking, and don’t settle. As with all matters of the heart, you’ll know when you find it.  And like any great relationship, it just gets better and better as the years roll on.  So keep looking, and don’t settle.

Remembering that I’ll be dead soon is the most important tool I’ve ever encountered to help me make the big choices in life…  Remembering that you are going to die is the best way I know to avoid the trap of thinking you have something to lose.  You are already naked; there is no reason not to follow your heart.

Stay Hungry, Stay Foolish