Remote Access

Everything New is Old Again

Darren Kuropatwa and I had the pleasure at BLC of giving one session together.

While Darren and I have done things together in the past, this is our first opportunity in a long time and one I definitely enjoyed.

Called Everything New is Old Again, it was a reflection on four societal trends and the effect these things can have on pedagogy and classrooms.

As an aside, Darren and I had an interesting time actually designing this presentation, living hundreds of kilometres apart from each other,  and on the road for much of the time. We used Google docs to start brainstorming ideas and Skype to collaborate through video and audio. From there, we first made up the presentation using Google's online presentation tool and finally downloaded it all to Apple's Keynote for the actual day. It was a learning process, one we had never been through before. As I sat in a Starbucks in Edmonton Alberta the week before BLC and we worked on the final pieces of this presentation, I was impressed with what our tools allow us to accomplish.

Cheryl Oakes was kind enough to capture a ustream for us

and Bob Sprankle captured the audio.

Finally, the slides for this presentation are here:

Everything New Is Old Again

view presentation (tags: blc08 socialchange participatoryculture pedagogy)

Tags: DarrenKuropatwa, Cheryl Oakes, Bob Sprankle, BLC

Literacy and OS

Earlier this summer I decided that I needed to actually get on with it and spend the money to upgrade to Mac's latest OS, Leopard. I know. I took my time, this upgrade being released ot the market over a year ago. But since then, I've found it interesting how it has changed how I use and search my computer. As with many other people, my hard drive is large and getting more full each day. Stuffed with everything: podcasts, video files, tons of documents and pdf files, I often have a hard time finding things. "Now where did I file that?" sometimes turns into my favourite question.

This is where Leopard is interesting.

In all of the years that I've used a computer, the OS has always just had a generic icon that stood for each type of file. A little rectangle with a stylized "W" on it for a Word document, another rectangle that stood for a pdf file, etc. But Leopard actually gives you a small preview shot of your file as the icon.

For example, this is a small group of documents that are sitting on my desktop right now:

While they are all pdf files, it is interesting to see that what you actually get is a tiny screenshot of the actual cover of the documents. Here is another small group sitting on my desktop:

This is a different group, having a combination of four different things. But again, the .png file, the pdf, and the .doc are actually previews of what these documents look like.

Why is this significant? This is important to me because in the month that I have had Leopard, I'm finding it much easier to find things on my computer visually instead of by having to only remember the name of the file. Now, if I have a rough idea of the file name, I use the cover flow view (similar to what you get in iTunes) and flip through folders and files, looking for what the file looks like. Between remembering a partial name or a folder where something just might be located and what the file actually looks like, there is a much better chance I might actually find a half forgotten artefact.

How will this effect student computer use? What does this say about my learning style and how how I do things?

Just as in a previous post, I spent some reflecting on how the Mac, Windows, and Linux OS may reflect a different philosophy in the classroom, I now wonder about how an OS like this may reflect a changing, complex idea of literacy. One where visual elements are much more important and stand directly beside the print that has traditionally carried information.  Much of this stems from the web itself, where many pages are a complex jumble of visual, print, and even animated or audio elements in a single space. Teaching students to navigate these spaces is something that needs to be considered in classrooms as they are very different from a novel or other piece of written text. The combination of elements makes these spaces much more open to people who gather information in different ways, but it also makes them more visually complex and difficult to navigate.

I think this changing OS reflects this change in our concept of being literate. It gives us choice in how we want our information displayed. It gives us multiple types of cues and it looks familiar to people who spend a lot of time online. Complex literacies. Complex choices. Changing perceptions.

Tags: Apple, OS, literacy, classrooms, information

BLC Reflection

Just home a few days from November Learning's Building Learning Communities Conference in Boston.

I had always heard about this conference, but this year I was fortunate enough to be asked to attend as a speaker. And I have to say, that everything I heard about it was true.

 It truly is a great conference.

Although it has apparently grown significantly over the last several years, it still has a great buzz about it. People are there to talk, to learn, and to connect. I'm not going to post names for fear of missing someone, but I met a lot of people from other parts of my network that I never had had an opportunity to before this conference. We ate, we drank, we laughed and had some serious discussions. It was well worth the trip in the middle of July. I met some great new people who are now voices in my learning. The speakers that I attended were practiced and interesting, the sessions were well attended and the conversation was warm, welcoming, and challenging.

Thanks to November Learning for the opportunity to attend and for all the hours that you put in ensuring this conference runs well and smooth. You deserve great credit for all that you do.

Tags: BLC, November Learning

This is not a Test - BLC Presentation

I am in Boston for the great BLC conference put on by November Learning. Only finishing day 1 but so far, this conference has a great buzz to it.

Dennis Richards was kind enough this morning to ustream the presentation I gave this morning:

Free .TV show from Ustream

UPDATE: Maybe Slideshare doesn't hate me after all... After much trouble, (which included deleting my entire account, twice, I've managed to get the slides from the final form of this presentation uploaded. The problem is that between the day that Dennis recorded this presentation and the next time I delivered it two days later, I added a large portion to the middle of the presentation. So here are the slides from the presentation, but unfortunately, they do not completely match the video that is recorded. If you have any questions or thoughts about these, just let me know, I'm more than willing to share what ever I have.

Blc This Is Not A Test

view presentation (tags: teaching learning classrooms technology)

Tags: BLC, Dennis Richards

America .... You've Got Trouble

Dear America;

    First off happy birthday today and thanks for your hospitality. In the past few year, I've visited you a few times for both business and pleasure and I've met some great people. I'll be spending some more time with you in the next little while and we always have a good visit. But I have to be honest with you America, I think that you've got some trouble that you need to be looking at.

    I've been lucky enough to meet some of the most innovative, inventive people involved with your education system America. They are kind, bright, and open people. willing to share and willing to think in new ways; you should be very proud of them. But I don't think you're getting it. People like David Warlick and WIll Richardson keep telling their concerns about how the world is changing. But I don't hear many people talking about classrooms, or about how these concerns and worries about a changing world look like in practice. Many of your educational thought leaders are frustrated by a system that doesn't seem to honour them and their creativity. They are hampered by the complete dominance of artificial testing and by corporations who are controlling the debates that surround change. Many of them have unfortunately been driven out of your classrooms, right where you need them the most.

    You have the vision and can see the problems clearly America, but people don't seem to be able to see the day-to-day processes and classroom life that support the kinds of changes that you need. It curious that as outsiders, Canadians, Australians and people from the UK can see these things, but you have trouble looking inside yourself and supporting the people who have the vision and the ability to help you out the most.

    Your teachers need you America. They are trying to help you. But I get the feeling that you're not helping them as much.

    I don't mean to be critical America, but I do think that you need a critical friend. I'm hoping that as someone who is an outsider, but also a neighbour who sees what is happening in your house, you'll understand that I am worried about you. The world has changed around you America. The debates have changed. We are past dealing with flashy tools and are more interested in debates about pedagogy and learning instead of testing and controlling.  Transparency, openness, and sharing the learning are the fastest way forward and this means that you need to change your thinking.

    A birthday is often a good time to look back over your time, but also to look ahead, to look at where you want to go in the days ahead. So, happy birthday America and I hope you have some luck with making a few changes.

Tags: DavidWarlick, Will Richardson, education, learning, schools, teaching, change

K12 Online - Do it Anyway!

One of the sessions I attended at NECC was run by Wes Fryer, Sheryl Nussbaum-Beach, Dean Shareski and Darren Kuropatwa from afar.

If you don't recognize this group, these are the four convenors of the K-12 Online Conference.

My up front disclaimer is that I am a big fan and a big supporter of K-12 Online. I think it has powerful possibilities for expanding professional development across space and time. As well, being available to all people at no cost, I also believe that it is a leveller of information and experience, being open to all.

But another fascinating idea grew up in this session; the idea of doing it anyway.

Someone in the session asked about the review process (which is blind to the convenors by the way) and about how the sessions are selected. From here the discussion grew up into the fact of making your session anyway, even if it is rejected by the K-12 conference itself. This really does make sense. While I completely encourage people to submit a proposal to the conference, if you choose, or if your session is rejected, produce it anyway. If you planned on making a video or a podcast, make it anyway. Make your artifact and place it online. Every piece of information, every seminar, every session, every piece of learning contributes to the global discussion on issues of educational change.

This is one of the great things about being online where anyone can have a space and a voice.

Tags: necc, wes fryer, dean shareski, darren kuropatwa, sheryl nussbaum-beach, k12 online

Thinwalls Planning

Of course the greatest part of NECC is the people. I'm not even going to start to name all of the people from my network that I've managed to have at least some contact with over the last few days. As any one will tell you, this is absolutely the best part; it's like your aggregator and your twitter account sprung to life off of the page.

But it has been a buzz to finally meet my thinwalls partners from Los Angeles. Principal Barbara Barreda, teachers Lucy and Terri and technician Jan and I have managed to carve some time out of the madness of the conference to sit down and do some planning for next year's thinwalls classroom collaboration. It's been interesting. We've had plenty of people come up to us at the conference and say something like: "I sure would like to do something like you guys do, but I have no idea how to do it." "Guess what," we tell them; "we had no idea when we started either." We really didn't. We had no idea about what it would look like, how things would match up, about the tools and the possibilities. What we did know is that it is just too important that we try to connect our kids. They absolutely need the skills to collaborate internationally, to become globally aware, and to evaluate information. So while we didn't necessarily know what this would look like, we knew it was too important not to try.

Thinwalls is the idea of moving beyond the short term international project. A thinwalled classroom is a space that is connected with another (or possibly several others) over the long term. Our concept was to put our kids in contact every single day across the entire school year. While we faltered some in the middle of the year, for the most part, we were successful. We used blogs and wikis. We used video and audio Skype. We used moodle and voice thread, instant messengers, presentation software and more. If we found a tool we thought would be useful, we introduced it to the kids and threw things up against the wall, seeing what would stick. We poured over each other's curriculum documents, got mad at each other and had our kids frustrated with things that broke down. We did not allow "the Moodle was down" to be an excuse. The kids had to have alternate plans, workarounds, and backchannels in place.

So yesterday we sat down in a Mexican restaurant and raked our successes and failures over the coals as we began planning for our collaboration this year. We plan on beginning the year with ideas of digital storytelling. Following some great advice from David Jakes we are going to pose to the kids the simple question: "What does it mean to be a Canadian / American?" to begin the year. We want to get into cultural context right from the beginning, getting kids thinking more globally. We plan on sharing a current events iGoogle tab between the two classrooms. We will place feeds on it that we consider to be required reading for our students, basically giving them an online source of free, constantly updated information. As well, they are going to be able to modify this tab, pulling in more and different global news sources for themselves. This will become the background to a weekly blog post about current events and the state of the world. This in turn will grow and become the base work for a much larger social justice project later in the year where the students will use Google docs and presentation to collaborate on a presentation which we plan on streaming to the world.

We talked about other possibilities; about pulling in live sessions with authors to discuss their writing and to involve them in studying common literature pieces. We discussed doing something with kiva.org,a website we planned on working with last year and did not get the opportunity to. So plans are crystallizing and its great. Even though I'm only on my first week of summer holidays, it looks like next school year will be a good one.

Tags: thinwalls, classroom, Barbara Barreda, David Jakes

I Guess I'm Still a Punk......

This is my first post from NECC.

I've been in a few interesting sessions so far but I've just returned from a trip through the exhibit floor and I've got to say something that will completely ensure that I never get any kind of sponsorship from any ed tech company: I don't get it. i simply don't understand how a lot of these companies stay in business. Who buy's their stuff?

I admit that I usually love exhibit floors at conferences. I love the NCTE conference. I've had to buy a whole new suitcase to get all of my books home from different cities. But I took one (admittedly quick) tour around the floor today and left with not a single thing in my hands.

I get it. I understand that Dell, HP, Toshiba, Smart, etc., etc. are trying their very best to convince us all that they have latest and greatest things which we just need to buy. I also understand that there are many smaller companies where people are trying to make a living and break into what must be a massive, global, multi billion dollar market.

But it leaves me wondering why the market even exists.

Why do people pour their thousands of dollars from school budgets into these tools when there are a myriad of options that are online or open source, and available for zero dollars? What do their products do differently? How do they change the learning that is possible? I always take pride in the fact that I can say that for my entire classroom technology budget, I spend about $25. While my school certainly has had to buy me tools such as laptops, cameras, etc., they pay nothing for our blogs, our wikis, our hosting services for video and audio. We use Skype, Google docs, and RSS which cost us nothing. I pay for a pro flickr account to give us more upload space, but besides this, we don't pay for any services. As far as I'm concerned, a solid internet connection and some cameras and recorders leave you able to access any of the latest global content and produce any type of product that you could want.

Are all of these companies pumping out skill and drill software? Are people still buying that stuff? Even if you want to use something like that in your classroom, there's enough of it available online for free that you should not have to part with a dollar. I saw several companies today selling Google Earth curricula for example. Google has designed a beautiful resource that really has the ability to change our knowledge of lives and geography which they give away, and people build a bunch of photocopied worksheets for it, turning it back into something that it just should not be.

So I'm with the edupunks. The anti - corporate, DIY people who would rather build something themselves, that fits their space rather then trying to shoehorn a photocopiable program into their classrooms.

Tags: NECC08, edupunk, exhibit floor

Final Day

This is it.

It's 5 AM and as usual I'm up early.

Today is the final day of the school year. The students come from 9:00 - 10:30. During this time we have a school wide assembly where all the various academic, sports, etc. awards are handed out. After this, they get their report cards and head home. The long bliss of summer begins. Today my wife and I drive down to Winnipeg, our provincial capital, where we'll be staying overnight before boarding a flight tomorrow morning for San Antonio. Our flight arrives at around 1:30 on Saturday afternoon so I hope to be at the bloggercon for the last few hours anyway.

I've really been looking forward to this July. I'm lucky enough to be attending both NECC where I'm getting to meet my thinwalls partners for the first time and November Learning's BLC conference where I 'll be giving several presentations. It's always about the people, the new ideas that arise, and new possibilities. I'll be hanging around with a lot of very smart people this summer so I'm hoping that some of it will rub off on me.

And don't even get me started about September....

Tags: iste, necc, blc, november learning, learning 2.008

The Things I Carry

Kathy Cassidy hit a nerve with me on twitter last week. She mentioned that she was making a list of things she was going to give up in her classroom for next year. You can't do everything. I've long been a believer in this. Working in new ways, looking for new results requires a new pedagogy; new ways of approaching and acquiring information and new ways of actually teaching. If global collaboration and network formation are important to you, your classroom life and activities need to support these priorities. Basically, you need to be willing to put your money where your mouth is.

Kathy said she was making a list and I think this is a great idea. What have you given up? What has changed in your classroom to support it becoming a 2.0 space.? Here's some of the things I've given up in my classroom over the past few years:

1.) I don't run any type of spelling program. I believe kids are better served talking about spelling patterns and issues when they arise in the class and that their time is much better spent actually writing and reading. My anecdotal research using a standardized spelling test several times over each school year supports the fact the spelling abilities of kids in my classroom are still growing.

2.) I've given up trying to plan all possible interactions that occur between kids and learning materials. While I definitely have teaching goals planned and outcomes to get through, I am much more open to allowing kids and my class as whole a large amount of freedom pursue ideas and concepts that come up during our time studying whatever topics we are involved with. This has brought us out into whole new ideas that there is no way I would have thought of us pursuing on my own. As well, it makes our classroom much more responsive to needs and opportunities that arise as we go through the year.

3.) I assign far less reading and writing then I used to. While I believe that the kids in my class read and write far more than we used to, less of this comes from me in the form of "this you must read." While we certainly have novels in common, some shorter fiction pieces, and textbooks that we use, probably less then 40% of the reading that is done in my class is something that I've assigned. More often, kids find blogs and blog posts on topics we are studying. With fiction pieces ( we ended the year with a small unit on conflict for example), I gave them a a wide range of choices of reading material and asked them to work with a certain number of them. They are far more interested in the reading material if they at least have some choice.

This year, I'm looking at a few other ideas to give up:

1.) This year I'm starting off the year with having the kids look at the required outcomes for the ELA (english language arts) curriculum. There are a whole lot of them and I've decided to start with this one document since it is the one I am most comfortable with. I have placed all of the outcomes onto a spreadsheet, and in the fall I plan on having small groups of kids take one or two outcomes, write it up in kid friendly language, make up a rubric for assessing this outcome and then make a work sample that would meet it. Once all of this documentation has been produced, it will all be assembled into a binder which kids can access. But this is all background work. The purpose of it is to give kids choice about what they are learning. For example, if we are doing a unit on present day societal issues, at the beginning of this unit, I plan on having the kids choose possibly four or five of these outcomes that they want to pursue over the unit. They will then have to collect evidence and conference with me, showing me they have met the outcome. By years end, they should have spreadsheet that shows they have completed all of the outcomes. Done on a Google spreadsheet, we will be able to see its revision history, make comments on it, etc.

2.) The second thing I'm giving up on is trying to set up an arrangement in my classroom. I admit it, I'm a neat freak. I hate a messy classroom and I honestly think that a disorganized space makes it harder to learn for some kids. So I'm not saying anything goes by any stretch. I have shelves on two sides of my room, one with a 300+ book library on it and the opposite side of the classroom has a countertop that runs down it. On this space we put our laptops, projects underway, extra books, displays, etc. This space will remain neat and organized. But trying to use the floor space wisely in the room is always a challenge. Like most teachers, I wish my classroom was twice the size it is, giving us more room for large, small and individual work spaces. But this will not be so I need to make wise use of the space I've got. So I'm giving up trying to make a classroom arrangement and keep it. This means that desks, table and chairs will be moved around a great deal more. It means moving kids and their spaces throughout the day as needed. I would like to throw up some temporary dividers, but with kids of this age, I wonder about safety issues. I would like to create different spaces for kids to work and this is something I really need to spend some time envisioning.

I'm wondering if we've changed classrooms as far as we can without involving the kids more. How do they like to work? How would they like to see the day and the space structured? What can we do to help them learn more comfortably and in different ways?

So these are my thoughts. How about you? What are you giving up for next school year?

Stay Calm picture: http://farm1.static.flickr.com/184/420978199_0aa78b6fa4.jpg?v=0

Watermelon picture: http://farm1.static.flickr.com/71/154412033_3c284c48d4.jpg?v=0

Tags: kathycassidy, change, classroom,