Learning Disruptions

Just read an interesting article about the K-12 publishing market and some of the challenges the "Big Guys" (Apple, Pearson, et al) will have in creating content for states and districts.

The idea of a mobile device in the hands of a student, loaded with digital textbooks that have up to date content, interactive media, assessments, that all target the needs of a that student brings my thinking back to the "Flipped Classroom".

Again, we can now put more content in the hands of a student than ever before.  We can customize that content to meet the needs of individual students.  We can connect those students (and the content) to other students and experts all over the world!  What does this mean for the teacher?....  It means the teacher is no longer the gatekeeper of knowledge.

Before we can fully embrace the idea of every student coming to the classroom with a mobile device loaded with digital content, we must reflect on how the classroom must change.  Instead of the students coming to the classroom predominately to access the gatekeeper of content (i.e. the teacher) the vast majority of the time in the classroom should be devoted to engaging with the content... using knowledge to build new knowledge.

More on this later....

This infographic was passed around the "Twitter-space" pretty heavily yesterday.  I presents a good vision of how we can begin to move towards a blended learning environment where we are meeting the needs of individual students while providing them opportunities to deepen their knowledge by actually using knowledge.

Under this scenario, students don't come to class to hear the teacher lecture or introduce new content... rather, they access that part of their learning online.  Students get the content via teacher created videos, sites like Kahn Academy  or Brightstorm, online supplements provided by the curriculum publisher... or even taking online courses (all outside of the classroom).  This gives the students the chance to dig into the content at their appropriate pace.  The technology also allows the content to be differentiated to meet students' individual needs and learning style.

So what does the teacher do?

When students come to the classroom, that is the opportunity for teachers to do what teaching is really about... crafting experiences for students to engage in the lead to deeper understanding (e.g. project/problem based learning).  These types of experiences help students take concepts and form meaning and relevance around them by actually using the knowledge.

The problem is that many see this as a "innovation" rather than what it is... good teaching.

Click on the image view the entire infographic.

In the coming year, I am going to be focusing a lot of time around the idea of “Blended Learning Environments”. 

Washington State (as well as the entire country) has seen a rapid growth in online learning opportunities for students.  Today, a student can take their entire high school program online and receive a diploma while never stepping foot within the brick and mortar school building.  Additionally, students attending small/rural schools who don’t have access to a rich array of offerings can take courses that were never available to them before (e.g. AP Physics, Mandarin... or maybe AP Physics in Mandarin ).

Online schools and schools offering online courses are providing a great service to students who want to take more advanced courses, make up credits, or continue their schooling when they are unable to attend school for what ever reason.  It can truly meet the learning needs of students by allowing them to engage their interests, work at their own pace and access rich content. However, while there is great potential in fully online schools and courses, I believe that these models will ultimately serve only a limited number of students (for a number of reasons I’ll get into in later posts).  Critics will also decry that online learning can’t fully replace the engagement, discourse and social interaction that a face-to-face learning environment provides.

So, is there a way to leverage the power of online learning with the dynamics of a face-to-face learning environment?  I believe the answer lies with Blended Learning... 

Take a look at a real example of a school that leverages the best of both online learning and face-to-face environments.  I think this is the answer...

Carpe Diem Marketing Video - Final Cut from Nicholas Tucker on Vimeo.

Link: Carpe Diem School, Yuma, AZ

Well... back to this blog.

It's acutally been a few years since I've posted anything here and I felt is was time to start posting again.  A lot has happened around the world of teaching, learning and technology in that short amount of time... 

• Explosion of Social Media
• iPads/iPhones/iPods in schools
• The Common Core State Standards
• Digital Books
• Students taking online courses

Oh... and I summited Mt. Rainier last summer (booyah!)

In the comming months I'll be posting regulalry about the world of education and technology and how we can amplify instruction.

Came across two very interesting posts today, thanks to Will Richardson and David Warlick.

The first is an article about a school district in the UK that is in the process of closing all of its 11 secondary schools and ultimalely reopening seven "Learning Centers".

The new centres will open from 7am until 10pm in both term-time and what used to be known as the school holidays. At weekends, they will open from 9am to 8pm.

Youngsters will not be taught in formal classes, nor will they stick to a rigid timetable; instead they will work online at their own speeds on programmes that are tailor-made to match their interests.

Much of the learning will be online and could be potentially done from home, but students will be coming to the center regularly to collaborate with other students.

The second is an Invitation to Participate in a Groundbreaking New Online Learning Experience. Roger Schank, founder of the Institute for the Learning Sciences at Northwestern Universtiiy, is taking the idea of open curriculum development to the next level.

In our attempt to build an alternative to the 1892 curriculum and the idea that education means learning to pass tests about what you have temporarily memorized, we have completed construction of our first full year of what is to eventually become the Virtual International Science and Technology Academy.....

The curriculum is delivered entirely on line. It consists of nine projects with regular deliverables.[2] Students work in groups with an on line mentor to solve complex real world problems that come up in the health sciences. No previous knowledge of anything is assumed. Students will be grouped together with students of similar abilities.

These two models are very intriging (students engaged in learning environments that are empowering, engaging and collaborative). Kind of reminds me of my old elementary school. So the question is... are these examples of radical reform of schools or are they examples of what we should have been doing years ago?

technorati tags:schoolreform, Teaching, learning

Was perusing my del.icio.us links the other day and found that I had added a link to a pretty cool mathematics graphing tool...

I can't remember where I originally found this (thank goodness for del.icio.us), but FooPlot allows you to input a linear, quadratic, parametric, or polar function and it draws the graph for you. OK... mathematical graphing tools have been around for a while but this one has a couple of cool features that I would have loved to have back when I was teaching mathematics.

• FooPlot allows you to export your graph as an image in a couple of different formats. Here's a graph of two functions:
• r(theta)=.3theta where 0<theta<3pi
• y=sin(2x)
  
  
  
  
  
• Ok... If that didn't grab ya, you can add a function into the string of a url and it will automatically go to the graph on FooPlot. For example the url: http://www.fooplot.com/3x^2+.5x-1 will take you directly to the graph. Great for linking students to the graph of a function without having to download the image.
  
  

Katy, our Mathematics Ed Director, pointed me to another great tool. GeoGebra is a GeoSketchpad-like app that you can download or run on the web. It has a lot of the same functionality of Sketchpad, and the price is right!

technorati tags:edtech, math

A few weeks ago, I wrote about hosting the Where in Washington event with students from Valley View Elementary (please go back and read some of the comments students wrote about that day). Additionally, I mentioned that this was the last year of this unique school.

This weekend, I had the great pleasure of attending the Valley View Elementary Closing Celebration. It was a wonderful day. I ran into old friends from the days I attended there, and made a great many more. We had a common bond… we were all part of an amazing school and shared in the dismay of its closing, and the joy of its legacy.

It’s difficult to explain to someone, who is not a part of the Valley View Family, why this was such a special place. However, during the event I picked up a brochure, printed in 1969, which attempted to describe the school. The brochure explains how a task force was formed to design the school and its instructional program, stating that, “Valley View is a school for today… and tomorrow.” The task force set out to “design a building and an instructional program for children who will live a major portion of their lives in the twenty-first century”.

Reading on, the extraordinary vision of the school is revealed …

The concepts that emerged shaped the new school: that the child can share the responsibility for his own learning; that children can be grouped effectively to implement learning, regardless of what their respective ages might be; that facilities and program can be planned to make greater use of the teacher’s creative potential; that a variety of methods and materials can encourage the child to become an eager participant in his own education; that individualized instruction should allow for the differences in interest and creativity as well as learning ability.

These concepts are not “experimental”, nor are they entirely unique; talented and conscientious teachers in schools throughout the Highline District put them into practice daily. Valley View provides a new kind of environment which makes it less difficult for teacher and child to overcome the limitations inherent in conventional classrooms.

Much of my work involves working with schools and their school improvement plans. I have read dozens of vision and mission statements, but none of them come even close to those words written nearly 40 years ago.

In this post-The World is Flat era, schools are struggling to make changes that can prepare children for a 21st Century full of challenges that never existed in the past. It is a tragedy that a school like Valley View is closing at the precise time that we need many, many more schools like it.

Today marked the start of our next round of Where in Washington video conferences. If you are not familiar with Where in WA, eight classrooms of 4th graders come together on Washington State's K-20 Video Conferencing Network and share clues about their city so that the other classrooms can guess... Where in Washington they are. (click here to see a short video that describes the project.) Every time I help put on this event I ask myself, "Do I really get paid to do this?" It is just so fun and the kids do a great job.

Today was an especially special event for me. One of the classes participating was from the elementary school I attended... a long time ago. Valley View Elementary opened in 1969 as an "open concept" school. The building was designed with no classrooms; rather, it had three large rooms with no dividers where students met. It was an incredibly collaborative environment. Students were encouraged to explore, ask questions, and learn about things that were interesting to them; all while a fantastic group of loving, passionate, and caring teachers created an environment where every student built a solid foundation of learning. Reflecting back on it now, it was a remarkable place. I was part of the first group of students to go from kindergarten to 6th grade at the school, starting when it opened in 1969. Sadly, this is the last year of this extraordinary school. Valley View will be closing at the end of the school year.

I hosted today's "Where in Washington" event from the Highline School District offices with students from Valley View. After the conference, the students and their teacher, Tracey Drum, invited me to come back to the school for a tour. I was expecting the students to show me around the school but it turned into me being the "tour guide" sharing with them memories from a place I now realize was a second home.

Tracey handed me a copy of my second grade picture taken in the fall of 1971. I'm the handsome young fellow with the yellow stripped shirt. (If you look closely, you'll notice a black eye and a fat lip... the result of a spectacular bicycle crash days before the picture was taken.) After looking closer at the picture, remembering names and faces, I realized another unique element of Valley View. This is not a second grade class... it is a cross-aged group. Mrs. Downing (gosh she looks young) was our teacher for two years and the students in the front were the new group of first graders. I couldn't resist, after seeing the picture, and asked my student "tour guides" to take a picture with me on the same steps.

Today was one of those, "I will never forget this day" days. I'm so sad that Valley View will be closing. I just hope that the legacy of this wonderful place of learning... the innovation, the creativity of students and staff, the true sense of community, will carry on and influence other schools.

Cheers to the legacy of Valley View.

technorati tags:videoconferenceing

One of the benefits of being an ASCD member is that about every six weeks you receive a new book from the ASCD library. This has created a nice stack of "yet to reads" on my desk. Recently, one caught my eye and I began to read The Best Schools, How Human Development Research Should Inform Educational Practice, by Thomas Armstrong.

Armstrong's thesis is that over the last 30-40 years, the focus of "education reform" has centered around an Academic Achievement Discourse; a conversation that uses terms like,"accountability", "standardized testing", "adequate yearly progress", "No Child Left Behind", "closing the achievement gap", and "rigorous curriculum". Attention to the issues of "achievement" have drawn us away from an equally important conversation in meeting the needs of students, what he calls Human Development Discourse. He is not talking about sex-ed, but conversations that center around an understanding of the developmental needs of students and crafting learning experiences that are developmentally appropriate.

The book examines four developmental stages of students and offers some suggestions, reflective of brain research and developmental psychology, for how educators can create learning environments that meet both the academic and developmental needs of students:

• Early Childhood: Learning through play.
• Elementary: Learning that there is a world out there and how it works.
• Middle School: Attending to their social, emotional and metacognitive needs.
• High School: Preparing students to live independently in the world.
  
  

It has been a good read and has forced me to think a lot about the way we structure learning experiences for our students. I've been asking myself, "what happened?" It almost seems that we have forgotten some of what we studied in our preparation programs (Piaget, Skinner, Maslow, Dewey, et al).

If we are not having human development conversations as a central part of our academic achievement conversations we will never be fully satisfied with the results of our efforts.

technorati tags:education