October 19, 2012

Malala: Student, Social Justice Advocate, Real-World Problem-solver, Blogger, Icon

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This has been composing itself in my head for nearly ten days, but, when her very life hung in the balance, as it did until today, it felt too soon to write about  Malala Yousafzai as a hero and role model.  As I tweeted and facebooked last week, I found myself so moved and affected by her shooting, but writing a full blog entry was hard for me to do– in part because I was still too emotional and too concerned.     But today the New York Times reports, “she is now able to stand with assistance and communicate in writing,” and it is impossible not to note the particular good news that she is able to communicate in writing now– because that is so central to her place and contribution to the world.

The past ten days, following Malala’s story, I felt particularly sorry not to be currently a school-leader, or part of a school community, which I have been for nearly every year of my life previous and which I expect to be again before too long.   Because if I were, I would take some extended time with students to view the video telling her story, to hear her voice and read her writing, to have moments of silence to hold her in our thoughts, and to share with students why I think they should view her as an icon of their generation.

This blog is intended to celebrate 21st century K-12 learning, and my particular vision of 21st century learning includes as a central element an empowerment of students to develop their voice and strengthen their skills and  problem-solving creativity to address real-world problems, using technology in every way possible to amplify these things.

Malala represents this so exactly, so brilliantly, so movingly, and all that much more because her particular cause is itself education and learning.   She is a young person, still only 15, but she has been an activist for girls education in Pakistan for four years or more, and a blogger since 2009, when she was in 7th grade.   Oh to be a seventh grade Social Studies teacher right now, (I’ve been one before), and take some time to read her blog, see the world through her eyes, seek to understand her motivation and world view, and then evaluate her as a role model.

Hear her blogging voice:

Do not wear colourful dresses – 5 January 2009

“I was getting ready for school and about to wear my uniform when I remembered that our principal had told us not to wear uniforms and come to school wearing normal clothes instead.

“So I decided to wear my favourite pink dress. Other girls in school were also wearing colourful dresses. During the morning assembly we were told not to wear colourful clothes as the Taliban would object to it.”

Several times this summer I wrote and spoke about Martha Payne, another awesome model of a justice-seeking young person using a blog Never Seconds to extend her voice and impact, changing the conversation and the meal plan in Scottish schools.

Malala Yousafzai But clearly Malala now has a profile of vastly greater significance.  With the entire world hoping and praying for her, she may have the full recovery she and the world deserves her to have, and thereupon, she’ll take draw upon her strengths and her resilience to become a global leader for peace and justice.

This possible future global leadership role, this possible future Nobel Peace Prize award, began with a girl who wanted to go to school, who was supported by families and teachers to advocate for her cause, who was enabled to seek this justice as part of her schooling and part of her learning, and who used technology and the web to broadcast her voice and share her vision and change the world.

 

July 26, 2012

Rheingold’s Excellent Net Smart: How to Thrive Online, An Appreciation

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Choosing what I believe is the Book of the Year is always a fun task —what new book each year most informs, illuminates, and influences me?     2008 the nod went to Tony Wagner’s Global Achievement Gap (Godin’s Tribes the close runner-up), 2009 Perkins’ Making Learning Whole,  and 2010 was the year of Steven Johnson’s Where Good Ideas Come From (with Shirky’s Cognitive Surplus close behind.)  In 2011 John Seely Brown’s New Culture of Learning took my prize.  (Christensen’s Innovators DNA and McGonigal’s Reality is Broken were also contenders.)

2012 is only half over, and it isn’t impossible that my current nominee will be toppled, but I don’t think it likely.   Howard Rheingold’s Net Smart: How to Thrive Online is terrific: ambitious in scope but humble in tone; enthusiastic about opportunities but tempered by the recognition of the risks and downsides;  sweeping in its broad-brushed depiction of our new era of empowerment and participation while specific in its suggestions of precise techniques and initiatives we can take to best leverage our staggeringly new connectivity.

It should be said that this valuable book is a bit more work than most of the other titles mentioned above.   Johnson’s book was popular in airports, published by mainstream presses and written in a very general non-fiction manner, intended for wider audiences and reasonably easily read on a cross-country flight.   Brown’s book is breezy and accessible, with large font and charming anecdotes, easily able to be read over a 90 minute flight.   Rheingold, by contrast, is published by MIT press, with smaller font size and a greater seriousness— it isn’t an academic monograph, but will take more concentrated and extended attention than the others.

As I noted already in my previous post, Rheingold deserves great credit for his carefully nuanced balance of enthusiasm and sobriety about digital engagement and connected-ness, for which I am so appreciative.    Digital media is (or are, if you prefer) a great gift to us and to our abilities to form community, to collaborate and create, and to gather information and to contribute information, to participate and contribute to the wider world in ways we never had before.

Used mindfully, how can digital media help us grow smarter?  My years of study and experience have led me to conclude that humans are humans because we invent thinking and communicating tools that enable us to do bigger, more powerful things together. (more…)

 

August 15, 2011

Schoology at St. Gregory: a new experiment

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At St. Gregory this year, about half a dozen of our teachers are piloting a new program called Schoology, which functions simultaneously as a learning management system for teachers and a social network platform for students and teachers.  Inside it, teachers can post their syllabus and assignments, and, if they choose, track student attendance, maintain a gradebook, and much more. On the site, teachers can provide students resources and links, and organize materials into folders for better organization.

As Peter Smith writes in a helpful overview at EdSocialmedia, teachers can also “Quick Post Lesson Assessments:  Schoology gives the ability to create quick online quizzes, which I plan to use as post lesson assessments. These quizzes will be less than four questions and will give me a quick snapshot of how many students understood the material that day and how well I did as a teacher.”   Furthermore, the analytics sections of Schoology offers teachers “a great analytics tool which allows the teacher to know when and how often students access virtually anything in my course. This is a great way to hold students accountable who need the extra help but are reluctant to access it.”

More importantly, Schoology provides students a better tool to manage their various courses, keep track of assignments, and benefit from the calendar functions, which they can use as a planner for all courses operating within schoology.  Now, certainly many other LMS (learning management systems) offer all this, but what schoology adds is a social network element with a look and feel very similar to facebook, making it more intuitive and natural for regular facebook users.   Students can use a vehicle they are so familiar with, facebook style posting, commenting, threading and linking, and do so with their classes to enhance their learning. (more…)

 

January 3, 2011

The Synergy of 21st century Skills and Web 2.0 tools

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October 18, 2010

Wings Smackdown at St. Greg’s: Faculty Professional Dev. Meeting Sharing Learning Tools and Resources

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21 presentations, 2 minutes each: the Wings Smackdown this morning at St. Gregory, with teachers sharing tools and resources and techniques being used in their classrooms or at school regularly.

A partial list:

Sr. Rabinowitz:  Students in 6th and 7th grade Spanish maintain a blog (via wordpress) where they respond to assigned questions by speaking their answers, en espanol, into their webcam, recording them onto either youtube or nimbb.com, and posting to their wordpress blog for the teacher to review.

Ms. Heald:  Students in middle school drama prepare a “this I believe” statement by listening to those of others on this site, and submitting their own for inclusion (this is one of our students’ published essays.

Ms. Mulloy:   Student work is posted to web-pages which Ms. Mulloy organizes using delicious bookmarking; she also finds useful the bookmarks provided on delicious by the author of our summer reading book on Reinventing PBL.

Ms. Berry:  Students are using glogster edu to prepare digital posterboards to share and reflect upon their learning.

Ms. Kuluski: Students are completing their homework, and submitting it, online using webassign.net

Ms. Bancroft: Students in sixth grade English are working in groups to create a wiki of their favorite recommended reading, edit each others work, and comment on these reviews, learning digital citizenship and collaborative editing techniques even as they write book reviews and articulate their ideas about literature, in groups.  They are also studying other online book review sites for modeling and inspiration.

Ms. Clashman: Students are learning French geography, culture, and vocabulary by househunting in France, selecting a dream home, and then furnishing it from French Ikea.

Mr. Herzog: Students are completing warmups as his class begins by completing answers on google forms, and he is able to monitor the results as they are posted and immediately identify the gaps.

Mr. Connor: Students are using a social network style, facebook-like, Ning site for their class communications and conversations.

Ms. Bodden: Students are using google docs in a myriad of ways in her class.

Dr. Morris:  Students can access podcasts of Chemistry lectures he has prepared to review or to cover topics they might have missed.

Ms. Faircloth:  Students love the virtual heart transplant surgeries they do on this site. (more…)

 

September 30, 2010

Steven Johnson’s Where Good Ideas Come From, and Applications to Innovative Schooling

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Very excited about Steven Johnson’s Where Good Ideas Come From: The Natural History of Innovation: it offers great stimulation about the nature of contemporary innovation, and inspires us to think further about how our schools can be sites for innovation in our teaching and in our student learning.  (The book is released next week; I am quoting the reviewer’s advance copy)

Johnson’s book, I think, belongs right next to another recent favorite, Shirky’s Cognitive Surplus, in its enthusiastic embrace of the value and power of the internet to unleash and unite creative and productive energies from around the world as forces for good, for reform, and for innovation.   Johnson argues persuasively that the web, (and Twitter particularly) is our new coral reef where diversity of life is phenomenally abundant, and is our large metropolitan cultural crossroads, where good ideas meet, merge, and reinvent themselves. (more…)

 

August 8, 2010

Web 2.0: Educating students to create, communicate, and collaborate

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Will students be using their laptops primarily for taking notes in lecture?

Above is a common question I hear these days as we unfold our new 1:1 laptop program.   No, not primarily, I explain, and then launch into a slightly too-elaborated explanation of empowering our students with the digital tools they need to best implement Aristotle’s advice (yes, 4th century BCE Aristotle) of learning by doing– learning to create, to communicate, to collaborate in the most modern ways by doing all these things digitally and on-line.

I think we have a problem in education, that of the misunderstanding of the potential uses and value of digitally integrated learning, and I think the solution lies at least in part in rallying around the concept, and incredible power, of the Web 2.0.

Naming things is significant; a name might be simple, might be short, might be seen as jargon, but with a name something becomes referable, deployable, scalable that much easier.   Web 2.0 is this term, and offers this power.

Over the past few years I have had heard the term;  it was zinging around out there on the periphery of much of my very much developing thinking.  But lately it has meaningfully converged– this is the term, so simple and short a term, to capture a concept that has become so very significant to me.

And yet, I fear that still only few educators know the term and understand its implications for teaching and learning.   Eric Sheninger, who is an excellent New Jersey principal and blogger/tweeter, recently tweeted that he interviewed four different Science teaching candidates, and not a one knew what web 2.0 meant.  I think this needs to change. (more…)

 

August 1, 2010

Looking for the Mouse: Clay Shirky’s Brilliant Cognitive Surplus: Selected excellent quotes

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I loved this book.   It is a complete delight, and so powerfully aligned with my own developing thinking about the ways our connected world of the web can be such a powerful force for good in the world, and is more and more (and more) about creating and producing knowledge, and sharing and collaborating to do more and get more good things done.    And to think, we used to spend so much time watching TV!

Rather than a review, I just want to share a few favorite quotes, but watch the video, read the book, and embrace the tremendous opportunity our era is presenting to share, to connect, to collaborate and cooperate, to create and produce.

I am partially adjusting and modifying a few of the quotes to elaborate the point each is making.

Today’s twentysomethings cannot begin to understand how profoundly the world has changed:.  A much harder thing to explain to them is this: if you were a citizen of the world twenty or more years ago, and you had something to say in public, that you wanted to share publicly, that you wanted others to know you were thinking, you couldn’t.  Period.   (more…)

 

July 20, 2010

Learning about and appreciating Glogster EDU

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https://i0.wp.com/mwiser.wikispaces.com/file/view/glogster.edu.JPG/81446663/glogster.edu.JPG

At the Edu-Blogger Con East, the  first session, is about Glogster as a tool for learning in classrooms.

Participants share, and one enthuses about universal design of learning (UDL).    She offers a big endorsement, particularly for the classroom poster board program as an alternative to the normal paper posterboard projects so often used.

GlogsterEDU participation among students is equally split among elementary, middle, and upper schools.  The original glogster is a social network site,  “mostly used by teenage girls who use it express their angst.”   Now, more and more schools are using it as an online scrapbooking, journaling, and poster making site.   EDU Glogster is entirely separate, and has no links back to glogster.

As schools like our own, St. Gregory, adopt 1:1 laptop programs, we need to become better informed about options and tools for classroom use.  As at most schools, our students regularly do posters for presentations, but with each student having a laptop, the opportunities for them to do work like posterboard presentations online.   Glogster seems a great tool. (more…)

 

March 28, 2010

Levin on Laptops: More Communication, Organization, Info. Access, & Production

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Howard Levin is a friend (my blogging “career” began in his “classroom” at Urban School CIT), and I greatly admire his vision and  leadership regarding laptop integration.  I first saw him present his outstanding program, making the laptop disappear, back at a conference in June 2006, or thereabouts, and more perhaps than any other single session, it transformed my view of education.

A friend asked me about whether I knew of independent schools which were succeeding greatly in 1:1 laptop integration, and of course I thought of Urban School.  In doing so, it brought me again to Levin’s fine body of work on the topic.   I want to draw upon his wisdom in two excellent articles, one entitled Laptop Program Update in this post, and the other Here and Now in the School of the Future in a subsequent post.

Levin’s update article is already five years old, but it remains valuable.   Two years into his program’s implementation, he reports, “teachers are now having students use their laptops to do more of what was previously impractical or impossible… Few question the wisdom; nearly all are finding effective and innovative ways for laptops to support learning.” (more…)

 

September 17, 2009

Teaching Vocabulary, 21st c. style (Marzano in Ed. Leadership, and Moulton in edutopia)

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In recent posts I have argued, vigorously, that 21st century learning does, indeed, teach content and is serious about it– and indeed, we believe our contemporary teaching techniques teach content better.    And in my recent post on the 21k12 model, what we are serious about, I listed as number 12, that we are serious about research (or evidence) based teaching methodology, and I listed Robert Marzano as the leading national figure in this evidence based approach.  (I have appreciated Marzano previously on this blog.) Ed. Leadership,  in its recent excellent issue, is initiating Marzano as a new regular columnist, and this is an excellent thing.

Marzano’s piece is on teaching vocabulary effectively, and vocabulary, most certainly, is content, is knowledge, and I here loudly endorse the importance of this!   Marzano offers six, research tested and research demonstrated, steps for effective vocabulary teaching:

  1. Provide a description, explanation, or example of the new term.
  2. Ask students to restate the description, explanation, or example in their own words.
  3. Ask students to construct a picture, pictograph, or symbolic representation of the term. (more…)