For a while now, I’ve been using my blog as a learning space to reflect on professional development… and after BLC08 there still seems to be a lot to talk and think about. But there is a problem: My brain is full.
Here are some brief ‘take-aways’ to jot down before things spill out and away.
1. Never do 3 different presentations at one conference. At the very least repeat one of them. Enough said.
2. Online networks develop meaningful friendships. I’m blown away by the immediate connection I made with so many people in my Twitter network.
3. Face-to-face meetings with your network are powerful… very powerful.
8. Ewan made it clear that if we create meaningful spaces for teachers to connect, and if we make those spaces useful to teachers, they will connect in new and meaningful ways. In my opinion, usefulness comes out of purpose and design… two things we need to work on.
9. We need to connect with others to meaningfully learn. COLLABORATION time is essential for learners of all ages.
10. Don’t say more than you need to just to fill the space.
Bill C-61 is a copyright law that is truly scary to anyone that shares what they teach online.
The following is an e-mail I received from Kris at http://wanderingink.net She is 16 years old. Bold font is mine, for those that only want to skim…
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Fair Copyright Montreal (a branch of the same group I participate in) posted a full analysis of Bill C-61, the proposed Canadian DMCA. But don’t click on the link yet, I want to highlight something first. Read the link afterwards and shake your head at how much these people are stuck in the 20th century.
The bill has a special section for “Lessons”, new copyright laws that apply to the classroom. Are they exemptions? Special permissions? NO. I personally read the text of the bill that applies (section 30) and decided that Fair Copy Montreal had the best summary, which I’ve posted below.
Here they are, the new copyright laws for education in Canada. Read all of it. Emphasis is mine. Note: when they mention students, it’s impossible to claim “everyone is a student” as a loophole. In fact, they supplied their own greviously outdated definition in the text of the bill: “a student who is enrolled in a course of which the lesson forms a part is deemed to be a person on the premises of the educational institution when the student participates in or receives the lesson by means of communication by telecommunication.”
Read the following new laws with that exclusive definition of “student” in your mind:
What educational institutions are allowed to do:
Broadcast lessons if the broadcast recipients are exclusively students (Clause 18, section 30.01, subsection 3)
What educational institutions are not allowed to do:
Print more than one copy of any digital reproduction communicated in a lesson (Clause 18, section 30.02, subsection 2)
Use a work from the Internet if the website or the work has any form of technical restriction (Clause 18, section 30.04, subsection 3)
What educational institutions must do:
Destroy lessons 30 days after the final course evaluations have been given out (Clause 18, section 30.01, subsection 5, paragraph a)
Take measures to ensure that students exclusively may receive lessons (Clause 18, section 30.01, subsection 5, paragraph b)
Take measures to ensure that students may not copy lessons (Clause 18, section 30.01, subsection 5, paragraph c)
Take measures to ensure that any digital reproduction cannot be communicated to anyone else outside the institution (Clause 18, section 30.02, subsection 3, paragraph b)
Take measures to ensure that any digital reproduction cannot be printed more than once per person that has received the lesson (Clause 18, section 30.02, subsection 3, paragraph c)
Take any measure prescribed by regulations for any copied digital reproduction (Clause 18, section 30.02, subsection 3, paragraph d)
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Can you see what a huge STEP BACKWARDS this is for 21st century education in Canada? It makes everything that you do illegal. Confining “copyrighted” learning to people who are on the physical premises… what a 20th century idea! I don’t think they’ll be able to get away with this unless they at least make an exception for distance education, but even then, this bill is so counter-productive!
Think about those universities like MIT and Berkeley that broadcast their lessons for free over iTunes or their own websites to whoever just wants to learn. That is exactly what is going to become illegal, at least in Canada. How are Canadian universities going to be able to compete for students in a global market if they can’t let anyone on the outside take a look in? Canada is going to lag behind if our government can’t adapt its laws for the 21st century.
They’re going to be voting on the bill THIS September when Parliament is back in session. The NDP is on our side, but the Liberals are so far uncertain. The Conservatives are a lost cause - they’re all going to be voting YES on this as a party (because it’s a bill introduced by the Government). The Bloc Quebecois will probably be voting with the Conservatives. The bill could go either way depending on how much pressure there is from the public.
Anyway, I just wanted to share with you a portion of my concern over this new copyright bill. Read the rest of the analysis if you like and find the other reasons to be concerned, but I thought I would bring this one to your attention because it strikes so close to home.
If you think this is appropriate reason to be concerned and if it’s not too much to ask, do you think you could forward this email to other web 2.0 educators or anyone else in Canada that would be interested? I want to raise as much awareness as possible about this new bill among the people it would effect. If you’d like more information then let me know and I can give you some more links or explain it to you myself.
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Thanks for sharing Kris! Please share this information with anyone you think might care, or contribute to preventing this Bill from stiffling education in Canada!
1. Where do our learning conversations need to go? Here are three guiding principles to help us find our way:
• Not the Knowing, but the Process of Inquiry.
• Not covering the curriculum, but ‘uncovering’ the curriculum.
• A focus in innovation, creativity and design.
How do we model this… every day?
Here is the video Famous Failures that I couldn’t get the sound to play for.
The second part is only shared here… not within the presentation.
2. It is the questions we ask ourselves and our students that help make Project 2.0h’s great. This take-it-with-you powerpoint presentation will help you provide the scaffolding for engaging digital projects.
Description: Since keeping a blog I have learned that little lessons can form big ideas, altering what a teacher can and must do. I’ve recently moved my blog, and in doing so, I have reflected on every post along the way. Here is an anecdotal look at a few things my blog has taught me.
Here is the second part of the presentation where I ask participants to join in on the journey or the conversation…
Thanks for being part of my presentation… answers to your one question, thoughts, feedback, and comments are all welcome. If you blog a response, please add a comment with a link below.
Here is what it looks like from my perspective: (I pulled out my tablet which is on my lap to do this post)
Special thanks to my new friend Lorraine, who put the camera on her computer, and took care of the camera operation… tough job as Alan moves around a lot!
Hope you enjoy the Ustream!
As a fun aside: photo of the desk in my hotel room after Dave and I arrived and started recharging things:
I like to lurk in Twitter, but I’m having full-on conversations with Plurk. I just spent over an hour putting my Firefox tabs into diigo. After that I started cleaning up my desktop and found a screen capture I made on twirl over a month ago:
I also bookmarked this Liz Davis post because I could easily have written this introduction… and in fact have done so several times in my head:
I continue to be amazed by the affect that blogging has on my thinking. Everything I do and see and experience is filed away as a potential blog post. I make meaning of my world in ways I never did before. I am constantly composing posts in my head. It makes for some incredible learning experiences, but can also make it hard to sleep.
So as my three presentations for Alan November’s BLC08 approach, and I’m hours-and-hours away from being done, I feel overwhelmed and overloaded.
And so, I’m going to be unplugged from my microblogs (Twitter and Plurk) as well as this blog for a few days. I’m going to bookmark some tabs on my Tablet PC then shut down there too.
It isn’t something I want to do, but rather something I have to do. The problem is that these tools are great for learning and communicating, but they consume too much time. An hour of work turns out to be 15min. of work and 45 min. of reading, reacting, conversing and otherwise being engagingly sidetracked.
I’ll surface in a few days, probably starving for the interaction, but for now it is all too much and I have a few presentations that I want to make meaningful and powerful to what will probably be a very diverse audience.
So, L8R, TTFN, and So Long and Thanks for All the Fish.
I missed out on NECC both physically and online. Despite my wonderful network, with @derrallg Ustreaming, and @durff plurking live links, I just could not find the time. I’ve read a few blog posts about NECC, but one has caught my attention. Ewan McIntosh is (Not) coping with cognitive overload:
I feel like the glass that’s got water gushing into it from the tap - despite all that water this particular glass is always going to be half empty when the tap eventually turns off. Most of the input will have fallen off down the drain.
I’m feeling that too. It’s past 3am and I’m up writing a post. I am also ‘working’ on my presentations for Alan November’s Building Learning Communities - BLC08. I’ve had some great help with these presentations recently, but I am requesting a little perspective…
Here are the presentation descriptions:
This, my blog has taught me!
Since keeping a blog I have learned that little lessons can form big ideas, altering what a teacher can and must do. I’ve recently moved my blog, and in doing so, I have reflected on every post along the way. Here is an anecdotal look at a few things my blog has taught me:
• I’m a square peg in a round hole. I’m also Batman, not Borg.
• Digital learning environments create diverse thinking opportunities.
• Learning from reflection is more than surface deep.
• Networks do what classrooms cannot.
• I teach, therefore I blog…
Learning Conversations
Guiding principles and guiding questions. This presentation has two distinct sections, the philosophical and the practical, or simply, the thinking and the doing.
1. Where do our learning conversations need to go? Here are three guiding principles to help us find our way:
• Not the Knowing, but the Process of Inquiry.
• Not covering the curriculum, but ‘uncovering’ the curriculum.
• A focus in innovation, creativity and design.
How do we model this… every day?
2. It is the questions we ask ourselves and our students that help make Project 2.0h’s great. This take-it-with-you powerpoint presentation will help you provide the scaffolding for engaging digital projects.
“I can do that without technology”- Actually, no you can’t!
There are great teachers who engage and teach students ‘without technology’, but that does not justify the avoidance of technology in the classroom. This lighthearted presentation is subtitled ‘The Rant, I Can’t, The Elephant and the Ant’. It explores arguments to support the need for networked teachers.
• The Rant: Things are moving much to fast to keep up!
• I Can’t: Every student (and teacher) already uses technology- get used to it!
• The Elephant: No students aren’t ‘Natives’ but they are digitally exposed.
• The Ant: Networks both teach and engage students.
The presentation ends with the video premiere of ‘It’s a Brave New World-Wide-Web’.
So, with ‘overload’ on my brain… I will look outward for advice. I think that I’m trying to do too much in each of these 1-hour presentations. So please take a look at the descriptions and be so kind as to offer some early input/feedback.
What do you see in the presentations that you like? What could you do without? What do I need to focus on? What’s missing?
Which one would you most likely go to? Least likely? Why?
This blog has a subtitle: Reflections on Education, Technology and Learning
My other less-frequently used blog, ‘Practic-All’, is subtitled, Pragmatic tools and ideas for the classroom. Recently I started using this other blog to provide a digital addition to my Principal’s weekly e-mail update. I did 9 of these to end the year off. I called them Dave’s Digital Magic, (or school teams are the Magicians). Recently I’ve done some thinking about education, technology and learning on my Practic-All blog and so I thought I’d share it here too.
I tried to provide within each ‘digital magic’ a few links including some that promoted web2.0 tools, some that were fun, some that were for different curricular areas… and some that made you think. I put these ‘thinking links’ into a category called, THINGS THAT MAKE YOU GO HMMMMMM… and I ended each post with one of these.
This was a rather passive way to attempt some influence on my staff. I know some of them ignored the link to my Digital Magic, at least a couple of the staff were very regular visitors, and others waited to hear about something useful before venturing to a link or two. We are talking about tiny ripples rather than tidal waves… but, in keeping with the water theme, even the greatest waterfall begins with a single drop.
So now I put a challenge out to you!
Create your own ripples. Pick one of the nine THINGS THAT MAKE YOU GO HMMMMMM… and share it with your staff. Or create your own (and please share it with me as well as others).
1. THINGS THAT MAKE YOU GO HMMMMMM…
Actually here are two links for you!
a) Feel like reading? 15 year old Kris gives her eloquent view about what’s wrong with schools:
What do these two links have in common? They both make me ask myself questions.
Do we do what we do because we are used to it? Or, do we do what we do because it has always been done that way? Are we doing what’s best for our students? What do we do well? And, what can we do better?
A Feature in the The New York Times, By Po Bronson. I will let the article speak for itself:
Dweck sent four female research assistants into New York fifth-grade classrooms. The researchers would take a single child out of the classroom for a nonverbal IQ test consisting of a series of puzzles—puzzles easy enough that all the children would do fairly well. Once the child finished the test, the researchers told each student his score, then gave him a single line of praise. Randomly divided into groups, some were praised for their intelligence. They were told, “You must be smart at this.” Other students were praised for their effort: “You must have worked really hard.” Why just a single line of praise? “We wanted to see how sensitive children were,” Dweck explained. “We had a hunch that one line might be enough to see an effect.” Then the students were given a choice of test for the second round. One choice was a test that would be more difficult than the first, but the researchers told the kids that they’d learn a lot from attempting the puzzles. The other choice, Dweck’s team explained, was an easy test, just like the first. Of those praised for their effort, 90 percent chose the harder set of puzzles. Of those praised for their intelligence, a majority chose the easy test. The “smart”kids took the cop-out.
Later, when given a much more difficult test, these results were magnified. It really is worth reading the whole article, but here is a key point about the research above:
Dweck had suspected that praise could backfire, but even she was surprised by the magnitude of the effect. “Emphasizing effort gives a child a variable that they can control,” she explains. “They come to see themselves as in control of their success. Emphasizing natural intelligence takes it out of the child’s control, and it provides no good recipe for responding to a failure.”
More food for thought from the article:
Psychologist Wulf-Uwe Meyer, a pioneer in the field, conducted a series of studies where children watched other students receive praise. According to Meyer’s findings, by the age of 12, children believe that earning praise from a teacher is not a sign you did well—it’s actually a sign you lack ability and the teacher thinks you need extra encouragement. And teens, Meyer found, discounted praise to such an extent that they believed it’s a teacher’s criticism—not praise at all—that really conveys a positive belief in a student’s aptitude. In the opinion of cognitive scientist Daniel T. Willingham, a teacher who praises a child may be unwittingly sending the message that the student reached the limit of his innate ability, while a teacher who criticizes a pupil conveys the message that he can improve his performance even further.
In a nutshell, praise effort rather than intelligence. The article goes on to mention the value this has on developing persistence when faced with failure, while praising intelligence increases the stress and reduces the desire to face such challenges. I will be thinking about this a lot over the next few days both at school with my students and at home with my own kids. - - - - - Po Bronson’s blog, “How Not to Talk to Your Kids” Part 2, Part 3, Part 4. From Part 4:
“A common praise technique that people use (I know I did it with my tutoring kids… up til a few weeks ago, that is….) is to use a present success to control future performance. For example, if a typically-sloppy child writes an essay that’s atypically legible, a parent or teacher may say, “That’s very neat: you should write all of your papers like this.” Even if it’s meant as sincere praise and encouragement, the research shows that’s not only an ineffective way to praise. In fact, like praising for intelligence – it can actually damage a child’s performance.Here’s what is going on…”
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3. THINGS THAT MAKE YOU GO HMMMMMM…
Clarence Fisher, a brilliant Canadian teacher and blogger, wrote this short paper (4 easy-to-read pages), Changing Literacies (PDF).
Being literate is so much more than being able to understand a written text on a piece of paper.
Here is a quote from his section on Access,
“Fast forward to our society and the ability we now have to drown ourselves in
cheap, disposable information from books, television, the internet, radio,
magazines, video, etc. In our time, one of the major skills of being literate is
the ability to access texts in many different forms from many different sources.
Importantly, it is not about searching for texts, it’s about finding them.”
In this article, Clarence describes why I became a ‘technology guy’. Actually, I don’t really care about technology… I just see how these tools, like wiki’s, can engage students in meaningful ways, where they create and share what they have learned in new, interesting ways.
NOTE ON THE USE OF THIS RUBRIC: [Check out the link before reading this!]
“Habits of Mind are the characteristics of what intelligent people do when they are confronted with problems, the resolution(s) to which are not immediately apparent. These behaviors are seldom performed in isolation. Rather, clusters of such behaviors are drawn forth and employed in various situations.”
(Arthur L. Costa and Bena Kallick: 16 Habits of Mind) The purpose of a rubric when assessing student work is to provide benchmarks of achievement based on these habits which allow a student to understand their current level of mastery and discipline in order to set goals for future drafts, assessments, or marking periods. For as long as possible we will refrain from discussing grades, per se, and focus our discussion on achievement and progress. As long as a student continues to set goals, reflect and evaluate their work and habits, set new goals and modify their work, habits and effort accordingly, they will realize increasing success and achievement as the year progresses. Thus, rather than penalizing a student who begins the year as a believer and ends the year with nothing compared to them by averaging a lower earlier grade with a later higher one, the student is evaluated according to mastery and achievement as demonstrated by their ability and mastery by the end of the year. However, a student who may begin the year with the drive and motivation to knock on heaven’s door, but who then slacks off, loses focus and discipline and ends up wondering what they did to deserve this, will not be boosted from a D to a C because first quarter was strong when it is not reflective of the ability or master he or she consistently demonstrated.
Could you use this rubric or parts of it?
How important are these ‘Habits of the Mind’?
What does this rubric look at compared to what our report cards look at?
Do you ‘average’ previous terms or give ’snapshots’ of where students are now?
This blog post is written by Darren Kuropatwa, a brilliant high school Math teacher.
Here is an excerpt:
“You can require your students to demonstrate their understanding of what they are learning by having them apply their knowledge analyzing and evaluating relevant novel situations or problems. Better yet, get them to create content that educates an interested learner and they will automatically incorporate all those levels of engagement while they make their learning sticky. I don’t need to tell you that there’s nothing like having to teach a thing to make you really learn it.
Darren walks the talk! His students will go home and spend hours helping to teach others, when it is there turn to scribe the class notes and post them on a blog for the other students in their class. You can see this in his Scribe Hall of Fame… or if you aren’t into Math, just check out the link to the article.
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6. THINGS THAT MAKE YOU GO HMMMMMM…
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Video’s are a great teaching tool! One way to start collecting them is to sign up for a free YouTube account. When you are signed in, and you find a video you like, just click ‘Favorite’ and you can collect videos there. Then from any computer you can sign in and find all your favorites.
You can also make Playlists, which lets you create video players, like the one seen on this wiki.
I like this because you can show a number of videos without students seeing the comments under the videos (which can sometimes be very inappropriate for classrooms). You can also use playlists to separate your favorites for different uses.
Start with the simple task of signing up for a free YouTube account, and then I’ll be glad to help you.
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7. THINGS THAT MAKE YOU GO HMMMMMM…
The purpose of homework…
Is homework an effective practice?
What is it intended to accomplish for student learning?
How do you use it effectively?
How do you deal with homework that isn’t done? Is this the same as others on your team?
What feedback have you had from students? Parents?
What I’ve read recently to get me thinking about homework:
In this approach students are part of the system itself. They participate in decisions about what is taught, what they would like to learn, and what strategies and tools they would like to use in the learning process. Some may decide to work more independently, some in groups; but they are part of the process of deciding what goes on in their own learning.
As we head into June, what can we do to help students leave our school feeling like they are empowered learners?
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9. THINGS THAT MAKE YOU GO HMMMMMM…
Teaching gifted students compared to teaching every student.
No link for this one, instead, here is a reflection Kari did on having a SHARP, gifted cluster, in her class this year. I thought this was very insightful and also thought about just how much this applied to every student, not just gifted ones!
Top 10 Lessons I Learned Being Involved in SHARP
1. Different is Good: Strategies for differentiation help all students be successful: Gifted, LD, ESL, Non-Categorized.
2. Free Birds Soar: Given the freedom to choose how to present their learning, Gifted students will surpass your, and their own, expectations.
3. Stimulation is Mandatory: Gifted students need to be challenged constantly, or else boredom sets in.
4. Knives and Spoons: Gifted students are not necessarily “gifted” in all areas of the curriculum.
5. Fun and Games: Gifted students are still typical kids- they need to have fun and be accepted by their peers.
6. Be Comfortable with Uncertainty: Gifted students ask lots of questions, but it’s okay if you, the teacher, don’t have all the answers.
7. Stars Are Part of a Larger Constellation: Gifted students need to be recognized for their uniqueness, but still fit in with the rest of the class.
8. Heads May Butt: Your cluster may not always get along or work well together all the time!
9. A Watered Flower Grows: Being involved in SHARP helps you to evolve as a teacher.
10. Hear Me Vent and Brag: Having conversations with other SHARP teachers is valuable and gratifying.
What do you think would happen if all the plants died? Why? We would not have shade from trees. This affects me because with no shade in the summer, I’d boil.
What do you think would happen if all the plants died? Why? I think that life would come to a halt because plants feed herbivores, herbivores feed carnivores and we feed on herbivores/carnivores. Also, plants give us oxygen.
According to this passage, how long does it take for people to fly around the world? A few hours. Sometime it take longer to get luggage than to fly.
How do you think the Wright brothers felt after the first flight? Why? They probably thought, “Wow, we have made the first flying machine everyone who ever flys (sic) will thank us.”
Do you think jet airplanes have changed our lives for the better? Why? Yes, because if you wanted to go to Disneyland for a trip if you took a car it would take a cople (sic) of days. If you flew it only take a cuple (sic) of house and then you don’t have grumpy whinny (sic) kids.
Someone I know has a child in elementary school. That child came home and complained,
“It’s no fair!”
“What’s not fair?” Her mother asks.
“We were lined up to go to the computer lab and two boys were noisy so we didn’t go.”
“What did you do instead?”
“Extra math sheets.”
And what was done about this? Nothing. No parent complaint or questions of concerns. And so, it happened at least one other time after that. It will probably happen again.
Obviously it is ok that computers are a reward. Obviously Math makes suitable punishment. Obviously I’m being sarcastic.
So often we are measured by what we do, but seldom by what we do not do.
Have you challenged yourself this year? Have you gone to the hard places when you needed to? Have you reflected deeply? Have you written thoughtfully? Have you commented meaningfully? Have you inspired a desire to learn?
Does your inaction reflect who you are or who you’d rather not be?
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“First They Came for the Jews”
By Pastor Niemoller
First they came for the Jews and I did not speak out because I was not a Jew.
Then they came for the Communists and I did not speak out because I was not a Communist.
Then they came for the trade unionists and I did not speak out because I was not a trade unionist.
Then they came for me and there was no one left to speak out for me.
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