March 8, 2013
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Above are my slides for the webinar I presented yesterday for Simple K12. The full 30 minutes webinar, on video, can be found at their site here, though if you are not a member there I’m afraid there is a $17 fee.
(The slides include a few prepared originally by Suzie Boss for our presentation together at NAIS.)
February 28, 2013
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Although the hour went by much too swiftly, Suzie Boss, Brett Jacobsen, and I had a great time sharing our thoughts on the topic of Bringing Innovation to School today at NAIS AC 13
The slides are above. If you are interested, you can click over to read Mike Gwaltney’s notes from the session.
In my remarks, I made reference to my presentation a year ago at NAIS on Innovative Schools, Innovative Students, which you can find here.
My remarks also drew heavily upon a post I wrote last fall on about the power of peer networking and Steven Johnson’s new book, Future Perfect, which can be found here.
Highly recommended for our attendees and everyone else interested in this topic is Suzie’s book, Bringing Innovation to School.
As a part of our session, we invited attendees to answer themselves on sticky notes questions about how they are, or how they would, bring innovation to school– and as promised, I’m happy to share them here:
Learning assessment?
Learning space?
December 13, 2012
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Just last week I was asked by a colleague for a readily accessible, engaging and stimulating short introduction and overview of 21st century learning he could provide his faculty, and, somewhat embarrassingly, I found myself a bit stumped.
I know of plenty of great books, but what the best single short and free resource?
One option, and it is a pretty good option, is the pamphlet from NAIS, A Strategic Imperative: A Guide to Becoming a School of the Future, (which I was pleased to be a small contributor to). But it is written a bit more for school-leaders than for teachers, is a bit long, and is a little dry. It is still a great resource though; I’ve embedded it at the bottom of this post [after “more…”].
So it was with great satisfaction that I scanned the above first publication of Brain Food for Education, which comes from the innovation firm Unboundary and was produced by my good friend and highly esteemed educational blogger and thinker, Bo Adams.
This is a great tool for the purpose I described, and as such, includes of course great links for those who want to dig deeper and learn more.
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4 things I like especially:
1. The visual look and graphic design is tremendous: bright, appealing, professional.
2. The Discussion prompts shared on page 19 are very helpful: they could be a great resource for schools working to generate more and better conversation among all their constituencies as they facilitate change. (for an additional resource, see the discussion prompts included in the guide to becoming a school of the future,page 36).
3. The schools selected as exemplars are inspiring– from the nation of Finland (and I was glad to learn of the RSA video about PISA here) to High Tech High and Nueva Schools in California. As Bo writes, “just seeing even one example can help us raise our aspirations and trajectories.” Indeed– and I’d underscore, try to go and see them first-hand.
November 12, 2012
I enjoyed a great day presenting at ISACS last week in Louisville.
Below you’ll find most of my materials from those presentations; thank you all who attended and thank you ISACS for inviting me.
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Innovation is Iteration: the Marshmallow Challenge
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After this highly interactive and energetic workshop, participants shared with me a set of great ideas they had for bringing the marshmallow challenge back to their schools. One person spoke of being at a K-8 school with “family groups” composed of one student for each grade k-8, and using them there; another said she was at a PS-12 school where the pressure to be perfect and right all the time felt very strong and she wanted to do a school-wide marshmallow experience; another explained they were moving toward an iPad 1-1 implementation very slowly, concerned they needed to get everything in order just right before launching and that she wanted to do this to encourage people to jump in and start experimenting.
January 4, 2012
See previous post for more information about the Design Build Tech Innovation Class. Reports written by students in the class.
Alex, Nik and Michael: An LED matrix.
This project started with a 7 by 5 L.E.D Matrix found in the physics room. I then had the urge to get it working, so I started to test connections on the Matrix too see how the wiring was done.
I figured out that the Matrix worked in a row column fashion which made it impossible to make any other letter than I or l. Then I told myself that if I switched rows and individual dots every millisecond, I could then make any letter, picture, shape, etc. I then started looking for the most practical programming chip, an Arduino.
After the large amount of wiring I started programming. My first program consisted of turning on and of lights very quickly, which is simply but requires about 150 line of code. After completing one letter, “N”, everybody realized that this thing was freaking awsome! So everybody started to get involved (mostly Alex). (more…)
January 4, 2012
I’ve been writing recently about FabLabs (here and here), and the importance of providing times, ways, and places for students to design and build their own “solutions” to problems, especially problems they discover, and to refine those “solutions” in multiple iterations.
(Be sure to see the two other posts sharing class work also: here and here).
At St. Gregory, where we aspire to “create innovators,” one of our most important and most exciting initiatives over the past two years has been the steady advance of our “Design Build” Tech Innovations class, taught by the amazing and awesome Mr. Dennis Conner. It is an entirely PBL formatted class, with no set curriculum other than having students investigate “problems” and choose one to design and build solutions for.
The class continues to be a great success, and the difficult question looming for us at St. Gregory is whether to decide to move it from an optional elective (it is taught pass-fail, students can take it as many times as they wish, and it has received great enthusiasm from its participants) to a required freshman or sophomore class, formatted as an “introduction to and foundations of innovation” class. The jury is still out on this one.
Suzie Boss, an edutopia blogger and author of Reinventing Project Based Learning with Technology, and who visited St. Gregory last spring for two days, wrote this recently, in a piece entitled “How Design Build Curriculum Can Transform a Community.”
Where does a project like this fit into current discussions of 21st-century skills?
Our students are learning skills like welding and carpentry, 2D and 3D modeling. But those are the vehicles to do something else. We blog as much as we’re on the table saw. We’re giving them tools for entrepreneurship, for innovation, for local citizenship and engagement. We’re giving them a way to think through problems in their own lives. Design is all about possibility. For a student, that’s the best gift you can give them.
With the fall semester now completed, I want to share, in this post and in two following posts, examples of student work completed in the past few months by their own reports. You can find the whole set on the class website here.
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Filmed at our soccer field just behind our Science Laboratories, and also at a Trebuchet competition held in October on the campus of the University of Arizona, in which our students competed.
November 27, 2011
The recent Steve Jobs biography by Walter Isaacson is, I found, un-put-downable and compelling: a sweeping, stimulating, poignant narrative of one of the most fascinating persons of our era.
Jobs is not an exact contemporary, being about 12 years older than I am, but he is near enough to make the book that much more connected to my own experience. I found the book vastly more fascinating when its narrative timeline intersected with my own personal experiences with Jobs’s products: experimenting with an Apple II in the early ‘80s, excitedly acquiring my own Macintosh in 1984, thrilling to my iPhone in 2008.
Isaacson doesn’t hold back on the negatives: this is not a hagiography. As fascinating as the book is, it does not lead you to like Jobs as a person, and it leads you only to a very qualified degree of admiration for him as a leader, even as you are (or I was) astounded by his accomplishment.
Of course I was taken aback, even appalled, by his ferocious cruelty toward nearly everyone around him. Isaascson similarly is repelled, and makes clear in his conclusion that it was unnecessary and at times detrimental to his success. But—is it possible there is something to learn from here? Is it possible that we could all benefit from being a little bit less determined to spare people’s feelings? Isaacson:
The nasty edge of his personality was not necessary. It hindered him more than it helped him. But it did, at times, serve a purpose. Polite and velvety leaders, who take care to avoid bruising others, are generally not as effective at forcing change. Dozens of the colleagues whom Jobs most abused ended their litany of horror stories by saying that he got them to do things they never dreamed possible.
I think of some of the cooking competition TV shows I like so much, such as Next Food Network Star and Top Chef, and one of the things I appreciate most about these shows is the skillfulness by which they give strong, direct, frank, honest, cutting, criticism, and, even more, the way most contestants take that criticism and use it to make themselves stronger. (more…)
November 20, 2011
[cross-posted from Connected Principals]
Heidi Hayes Jacobs: ”If you’re not updating your curriculum, you are saying that nothing is changing.”
“Nearly two-thirds (63 percent) of school administrators who responded to a recent survey said 1:1 computing classrooms where teachers act as a coach for students are the future of education.” (T.H.E Journal)
“Innovative teaching supports students’ development of the skills that will help them thrive in future life and work.” (ITL Research)
One of the most exciting books of the year for those of us seeking to become ever more effective as innovative school-leaders and leaders of innovative schools, and, even more importantly, seeking to facilitate our students’ development of more innovative mindsets, is the new book from Clayton Christensen (et.al), The Innovator’s DNA: Mastering the 5 Skills of Disruptive Innovators.
(Bill Ferriter has written brilliantly about this book here, here, and here).
The book is framed around the Five Core Skills of Innovators, a framework highly valuable for ourselves and our students: What are we doing to do more of and become better at
It is my aim to write more about these five traits, particularly for teaching and learning, but here I want to focus upon school leadership and the book’s concluding three chapters, People, Processes, and Philosophies, to draw and offer 15 takeaways for Principals and School-Leaders: What You Can Do to Become Stronger Innovation Leaders in Your School:
1. Own as Principal the role of Innovator-in-Chief: You can’t delegate innovation:
“Innovation distinguishes between a leader and a follower.” Steve Jobs.
Christensen:
“In the most innovative companies, senior executives didn’t just delegate innovation; their own hands were deep in the innovation process… (more…)
October 2, 2011
Regular readers here know of my fondness for Steven Johnson, and my enthusiasm particularly for his 2010 book (the book of the year, I think), Where Good Ideas Come From: A Natural History of Innovation.
Now comes his next book, the Innovator’s Cookbook. I am eager to read the book and will certainly share more here soon, but the video above is a taste and a teaser. It asks us as educators who seek to cultivate innovative mindsets among our students to think about what we are doing to help them “get a little lost,” “get out of their normal environments,” and have “show and tell sessions,” when they share with each other eclectic arrays of what they are learning about in the wider world.
August 31, 2011
Two of our junior students adopted this summer a passion for the cause, CharityWater.org, and brought to all-school meeting an inspirational video promoting its 5th Anniversary September campaign; immediately afterwards they sold water bottles with the Charity:Water logo to serve this cause.
As one of our teachers, Lorie Heald, who oversees community service and is working hard to integrate CS in an exciting new way with our one year old faculty-study advisory program, transforming what had been isolated individual work into a new collaborative team initiative,
This morning Becca and Marion demonstrated EXACTLY what I would like each advisory to consider doing. They identified a need in the world outside of school, they chose a charity to support, they took action, then they shared it with the whole school. Community service will be much more meaningful if we follow their lead.
Awesome job girls!
The video is greatly engaging and moving, and the cause valuable and meaningful. It was important to me to balance this effort with another approach, “thinking differently,” that brings ingenuity rather than heavy machinery to the cause. It is not that one is better than the other altogether, but that they can complement each other valuably. Accordingly, I shared the following Ted Talk, which created quite a buzz among students in the theater as the presenter first created a batch of disgusting water, and then drank it out of his water bottle.
But as I have thought more about it, both of these two approaches– one about heavy machinery from abroad, and the other about ingenuity from afar, reflect something of a limited viewpoint: (more…)
February 7, 2011
We need not just educational innovation, but education for innovation. Our problems are too great, and our global competitive challenges too significant, for us to feel successful unless we educate our students to be effective innovators.
We know too that innovation happens in clusters, it happens in open societies which value and affirm innovation and create communities of inquiry, experimentation, and practice. Let’s help our schools be such places.
Two articles I encountered just today offer valuable insight into what I like to think of as the Ed2In project.
The first came from Harvard University’s Gazette, in an article entitled Innovate/Create: Innovation, Creativity power fresh thinking at Harvard. What is the formula, simplified? “Harvard’s combination of questing minds, passionate spirits, and intellectual seekers tackling society’s toughest problems fosters a creativity that has produced a stream of innovations.” (more…)
February 2, 2011
[original version, 11 Ways…, originally published at Connected Principals, 1.24.11]
[Numbers 11-14 have been added since the previous publication.]
Technology and innovation are accelerating rapidly outside education, but not rapidly enough inside education. To quote NAIS President Pat Basset, Schools which are not schools of the future will not be schools in the future.
Like others, I am fascinated by pieces forecasting the coming changes in schooling, and I am inspired by their example to offer my own.
Two that have been particularly intellectually intriguing and influential to me are Tom Vander Ark’s Ed Reformer post, The Pivot to Digital Learning: 40 Predictions, and Shelly Blake-Pollock’s post, 21 Things That Will Become Obsolete in Education by 2020.
I should add too that my thinking is greatly informed by the Christensen and Horn’s Disrupting Class, US DOE’s Karen Cator’s NETP: National Education Technology Plan, the writings of Michael B. Horn, and the Digital Learning Now initiatives.
This particular list is intended to present fifteen ways schools can continue to be relevant, compelling, attractive, and effective to both students and parents in the coming years. (more…)
December 12, 2010
Former Governors Jeb Bush and Bob Wise, together with Disrupting Class co-author Michael Horn (a multi-time commentator on this blog), have released a new call to arms for Digital Learning Now. Organized by the Digital Learning Council, the project has its own website, and a list of ten elements of High Quality Digital education on which it says it will grade states annually.
While I respect that Bush and Wise probably oversaw the politics of the effort, I am going to draw the inference that Horn is the key author of the report, because it seems so aligned with what I have observed Horn writing about the past few years. Horn’s analysis and insights are multifaceted, both an “is” and an “ought” : this digital revolution is happening whether we like it or not, and because it is, let’s try to steer this wave the way it best ought to happen. (more…)
21k12 