The 5 year technology plan: Focus on your INFRASTRUCTURE!

If you think you know what tools you will need in 5 years, you are probably wrong.

If you are budgeting so that you buy sets of an item over several years, you’ll have a dichotomous challenge: the item will become both cheaper AND less desirable.

If your infrastructure can’t support the technology you have, your technology is ineffective.

If you don’t invest in a learning culture for adults, your ‘knowledge infrastructure’ will hold you back.

The 5 year technology plan? Do this 5 years in a row: Purchase/spend for this year; make sure your infrastructure can support your needs for next year; and, re-evaluate frequently.

My advice beyond this:

• Budget for time, money and energy to go into transforming practice, (here is a conversation starter). 
• Mobile connectivity for teachers, (device may vary according to ‘vision’), 
• Wireless projectors, (for every classroom rather than shared), and 
• Enough, predominately unfiltered, bandwidth for students to use their own devices… (Or to put it another way: Infrastructure for students!) 

My goal: Create a three minute video that tells it’s own story, using other videos. My hope is that this will invite further exploration, conversation and learning.

Here is what I came up with:

(Watch on YouTube)

For ease of use here are the links. I hope that some rich conversations will emerge from watching them.

http://2di.me/Trans4mEd1 – Alan November: Myths and Opportunities: Technology in the Classroom

http://2di.me/Trans4mEd2 – Diana Laufenberg: How to learn? From mistakes

http://2di.me/Trans4mEd3 – Adora Svitak: What adults can learn from kids

http://2di.me/Trans4mEd4 – Chris Lehmann: School 2.0 – Creating the Schools We Need

http://2di.me/Trans4mEd5 – Chris Kennedy: Students Live! Real-world Learning at the 2010 Olympic/Paralympic Games

http://2di.me/Trans4mEd6 – Tom Grant – (Disclosure: This actually goes to a video created by me for the K12Online Conference, Tom Grant is my Superintendent and this is his interview excerpt from the video): Transforming Education

http://2di.me/Trans4mEd7 – Stephen Heppell: Learning Conversations

http://2di.me/Trans4mEd8 – Mitchel Resnick: 2011 Prize Winner

 http://2di.me/Trans4mEdu – This post, for easy access to the links above.

This year has been quite transformational for me. I started the year Questioning Everything… especially the idea that we need to teach less and learn more. I’ve challenged late penalties, homework, and even AUP’s. I’ve talked about things becoming more open and distributed and I’ve even written an Open Manifesto. I’ve cautioned about flipping classes, I’ve seen a flip in my desired pro-d model… and now I’m flipping my perspective on C.O.W.’s:

C.O.W. = ‘Computers On Wheels’, essentially a mobile cart which has a combination of a projector with a computer.

Two years ago in August I moved to a school in China and quickly began advocating for every teacher to get a laptop and LCD (actually the cheaper DLP’s – Digital Light Processing) Projectors. Before requesting this we had 3 C.O.W.’s, in a building with 4 floors, that 19 teachers shared. I presented a case to the school’s owner and convinced him to purchase DLP projectors and netbooks for our teachers. He provided 11 more projectors for our 14 ‘homerooms’ and also provided every teacher with a school netbook. We also had to improve the wireless and upgrade our server. All but one of the projectors were mounted in classrooms, with one being left as a COW so that it could be moved to and from the gym or activity room when needed.

The reality is that there is no place in education anymore for the mobile C.O.W. to be shared between teachers!

It just isn’t a useful model.

For a projector to be a truly tranformative tool that’s worthwhile, it needs to be available at any given moment AND the teacher needs to have full access to the computer that links to it… that’s why I also provided my teachers with netbooks. There are great tools like diigo to bookmark your links and dropbox to transfer files and even usb drives to share things, but we are still at a point where teachers tend to find these slow them down or add work to their planning. So, providing teachers with a laptop/netbook that they can pre-load with everything they need (before a lesson) invites greater interaction and use by them and hopefully also by students. As I suspected, the ability to take the netbook home created opportunities for teachers to experiment with technology far more than I’d seen prior to the netbooks and projectors arriving.

Having a shared C.O.W. is a flawed model… it doesn’t work because, as a teacher, when I had to share a projector I was far less likely to develop lessons that required projector use, and I think a projector is a key teaching tool in today’s classrooms. As a principal, I preferred to see the computers be fully mobile and in the hands of teachers at all times, rather than just when they used the projector and/or sat at their desks.

The C.O.W. is dead… But so is my model of mounting projectors in a room…

Long live the P.O.W. ~ Projectors on Wheels! Take the computer off the cart and put it in teachers’ hands. Take the projector off of the ceiling mount and put it on wheels. Why?

- The projector, without the computer invites both teachers and students to use their computers with the projector.

- Move the projector into different learning spaces.

- Remove the white screen as the ‘Front’ of the room… allow the projector to be used in smaller groups, smaller spaces and different spaces.

- a mobile projector (especially coupled with BYO Laptops) allows as much student engagement as an IWB – Interactive White Board… but is more mobile. (And it’s a heck of a lot cheaper!)

However, effective use of a P.O.W. takes a transformation of practice because the blackboard… that became the green board… that became the whiteboard… that became the projector… still put the teacher as the central disseminator of knowledge. Putting a projector on wheels will only be transformational if students get to use the tool and to move it into useful spaces to work in small groups as well as with the entire class.

In reality, it isn’t just the projectors that should go on wheels! I’m excited to see wheels on desks and chairs and wall-dividers and anything that helps to create interesting learning spaces for students… but that’s a whole other post!

A few minutes into this presentation I demonstrate that I’ve been a fan of the K12Online Conference for 5 years now. So, it was wonderful to be able to participate this year and share a video of my own.

[Link to K12Online video page]  |  [Link to YouTube version]

I’d rather let the video speak for itself, than to go on about it here. I’ll just share that I really appreciate the time and effort people put into sharing their video interviews with me. I asked them 4 questions:

Explore:

1. Share your thoughts on the future of education .  (Pie-in-the-sky look at exciting things that are positive & possible.)

Engage:

2. What advice would you give an educator wanting to engage in new ways to teach and to learn?

Connect:

3. What does it meant to be a connected/Networked teacher?

Lead: (At all levels)

4. How do you lead the transformation? Or, what advice would you give an educator at any level about leading the change?

The answers I got were very insightful!

Since I really wanted to inspire people to take action, I created a website for this presentation: Trans4mEd.org and I hope people will share some thoughts on twitter with the hashtag #Trans4mEd. The Engage page has two VoiceThreads to interact with. One has Contributor Quotes and the other has Image Quotes from the video. I’m hoping that people will comment there and share their thoughts as a symbol of their commitment to engage as a connected educator. I plan on sharing participant videos there over the coming weeks. I had planned to have them up already, but this video took a lot longer than I’d thought it would.

Please take a moment to comment on the VoiceThreads, and as always, your feedback is appreciated.

Pick a VoiceThread and comment!

(See a larger version on VoiceThread)

- – - – -

(See a larger version on VoiceThread)

It is easy to add your comment… start sharing! Thank you.

Ps. Forgot to mention it in the video, but a special thanks to Bryan Jackson for interviewing his students… they were an important contribution to the video ‘story’.

I’ve commented regarding Klout on here, here and here (see #46)…

but sometimes a picture can say more than words:

(Link to a larger version in a new window.)

Yesterday I sent out some invitations to help me with my K12Online Conference presentation. Today I’ve decided to demonstrate some of the key points around making connections, having a valuable network, and being an active learner. So, I am asking YOU:

Please join me and be a part of my

Transforming Education presentation!

I’m hoping to get participants from all levels of education from students, to teachers, to administrators and district leadership, to parents. Have fun with this and share your views.

The presentation is called, ‘Transforming Education’ and it is based loosely on my ‘Broken or Transforming‘ blog post with an emphasis on being part of the change we want to see in education.

I have two learning intentions:

The first is to transform our language

and the way we speak about education.

The second is to have participants take action!

‘Taking Action’ can be demonstrated around 4 themes, and I have a question related to each theme that I’d like you to ANSWER ON VIDEO.  The ‘Taking Action’ themes are:  Explore, Engage, Connect & Lead.

Help me show others the value of being a connected, engaged and lifelong learner! 

Here are the 4 questions that I’d love for you to answer. 3-6 sentences for each question is all I’m really asking for, more only if you are so inclined.

Explore:

1. Share your thoughts on the future of education .  (Pie-in-the-sky look at exciting things that are positive & possible.)

Engage:

2. What advice would you give an educator wanting to engage in new ways to teach and to learn?

Connect:

3. What does it meant to be a connected/Networked teacher?

Lead: (At all levels)

4. How do you lead the transformation? Or, what advice would you give an educator at any level about leading the change?

Special requests:

Here is a Powerpoint: Video And Digital Footprint Requests …to help guide you on two things regarding this video taping, (do you still call it taping?)

First, I’d like for you to be ‘off centered’ in the video frame, with a plain background. I’ve included two examples on the 2nd slide to give you an idea of what I mean.

Second, I’d like you to share your ‘digital footprint’ with me. You can design your own on the template provided or just tell me which links/identities you would like me to add and I’ll do it for you.  Please save as a .avi or a .mov if you can… hopefully email will work for us, or you can try http://www.sendspace.com/ (Thanks for the tip Dean)! *Update: To clarify, the video should ideally be .avi or .mov, but the ‘digital footprint’ can be back to me in Powerpoint, or even pdf or jpg etc. 

Also remember to have fun!

NOTE: I might just use one small clip in my K12Online Video, but I will use video of all four answers you share in a special location… more on this later… but know that your time will not be wasted and your leadership is appreciated and will be shared!

If you’ve read this far and are planning to send me a video, 1,000 thank you’s. I’m hoping to have everything by Saturday night, but I am happy to chat about getting a video from you later as well. Please let me know if you are planning to share! (Or just leave a comment- Thanks again!)

~Dave.

Before: There was a built in validity (not necessarily accuracy) in opening up and reading the information in an encyclopedia.

And now: Can the same be said of a web search? Whose job is it to check validity and accuracy now?

(Forgive my sense of humour with this link:-)

Before: We watched along as our teachers played dry, (usually humourless) documentaries as we filled in the blanks on our worksheets.

And now: Students find, and create, their own videos.

Before: We tried to plot abstract data on graphs.

And now:  We explore them, and dive into them.

Before: We read about people in other parts of the world.

And now: We work with them. And change their lives while we learn.

This isn’t a competition because the old way cannot compete. In my classroom I worked on differentiated instruction as best as I could, and then I tried blogging & wiki’s and my students and I realized a big shift had occured.

Before:

In non-digital/non-tech-using classes,

‘the teacher’ tended to differentiate the learning ‘for students’.

And now:

With digital, social and collaborative tools,

‘the students’ tend to differentiate the learning ‘for themselves’.

This empowering nature is embedded in the intelligent, transformative, use of technology… more so than without tech use… and only if the teacher empowers the student with the opportunity.

___

Think about the fundamental changes.

How many of you clicked on at least one hyperlink on this page?

Have some fun, and create your own “Before:… And now:…” examples.

Accident or not, Steve Yegge’s Google+ Rant is public. On the surface it is about management, development and architecture of a customer/user platform. But this gem of a statement goes beyond that: (Emphasis mine)

I’m not really sure how Bezos came to this realization — the insight that he can’t build one product and have it be right for everyone. But it doesn’t matter, because he gets it. There’s actually a formal name for this phenomenon. It’s called Accessibility, and it’s the most important thing in the computing world.

The. Most. Important. Thing.

If you’re sorta thinking, “huh? You mean like, blind and deaf people Accessibility?” then you’re not alone, because I’ve come to understand that there are lots and LOTS of people just like you: people for whom this idea does not have the right Accessibility, so it hasn’t been able to get through to you yet. It’s not your fault for not understanding, any more than it would be your fault for being blind or deaf or motion-restricted or living with any other disability. When software — or idea-ware for that matter — fails to be accessible to anyone for any reason, it is the fault of the software or of the messaging of the idea. It is an Accessibility failure.

Like anything else big and important in life, Accessibility has an evil twin who, jilted by the unbalanced affection displayed by their parents in their youth, has grown into an equally powerful Arch-Nemesis (yes, there’s more than one nemesis to accessibility) named Security. And boy howdy are the two ever at odds.

But I’ll argue that Accessibility is actually more important than Security because dialing Accessibility to zero means you have no product at all, whereas dialing Security to zero can still get you a reasonably successful product such as the Playstation Network.

How does this relate to Education?

I’ll get the second idea, security, out of the way first, then look at the real point of this post. Filters are an Arch-Nemesis of Accessibility. It is critical to keep students safe, but the pendulum has swung too far on the side of safety and security. You want students to be safe? TEACH them to be safe! Spend time on it, value it. Allow students to learn from mistakes rather than force them to hide their mistakes from you because they were using social software behind your back and now they can’t talk to you about the trouble they are in.

Now on to the idea of Accessibility:

The. Most. Important. Thing.

How accessible are our schools for every student?

What do we do to make learning opportunities more accessible?

Are tools, resources and expertise to support struggling students easily accessible?

Something I’ve been dealing with recently: How do we make non-traditional choices such as online courses and independent study credits more accessible choices?

Is your LMS – Learning Management System accessible to students? Is it easily accessible to teachers? Are we providing enough support for teachers to be successfully using our LMS’s in a meaningful way, or are these management systems just an added layer of complexity?

Is the great tech tool you shared with teachers easily accessible? How big is the learning curve and who is there to support teachers on that curve?

Are multiple ways for students to demonstrate their learning accessible?

Do we make what we do, how we do it, and why we do it accessible information for parents and for our community?

Do the messages we convey about schools and education help make opportunities more accessible for our students? For our teachers?

One more noticeable thing about Steve’s rant is that it unintentionally says something about the importance of transparency. Steve could have made this about “Google sucks”, but his love for Google was not lost. He was unsatisfied with the status quo and he shared something valuable beyond just a rant. Whether it came out accidently or not, Google has reacted by being responsive to the criticism (or rather feedback).

Currently, I can not stand the “Education is Broken” mantra I’ve been hearing. It does not serve us. Education is transforming, not broken. We have some accessibility issues to work out. And, I’m beginning to see a lot of transparency in what educators do… a lot of open sharing that highlights areas of strength and areas that need improving.

I have yet to find an occupation with more dedicated, hard-working employees than in edcuation. Yet the underlying message educators get is ‘you aren’t doing a good enough job’. Really? I think ACCESSIBILITY just might be the biggest issue education faces. We are confronting accessibility failure. At the root of it we have teachers trying to hit a moving target of ‘what a student needs to know when they graduate’… A target that has moved more in the last 20 years than it has in the hundred-and-twenty before it… A target that isn’t even fully agreed upon…  A target that can’t be aimed at out of school structures that educators have been put into… A target that teacher training doesn’t fully prepare them to aim for… A target that keeps getting new things added to it, making the target harder to hit.

To paraphrase Steve: When idea-ware fails to be accessible to anyone for any reason, it is the fault of the messaging of the idea.

As we transform education, let’s not promote accessibility failure in our attempt to share new ideas, let’s make sure our messaging makes things more accessible!

Since writing my 3 Keys to a Flipped Classroom blog post, I have been reading many great contributions to the discussion around flipping classrooms. Last week I was commenting on Lisa Nielsen’s thoughtful post Five Reasons I’m Not Flipping Over The Flipped Classroom and something occurred to me…

I have flipped my Professional Development!

I’ve done this with my blog and with Twitter.

Professional Development for me used to be about going to sessions on specific days and then trying to ‘bring back’ what I’ve learned and incorporate it into my daily practice. Sometimes this was very challenging, I would get inundated with new information and find it very hard to apply what I learned into what I did on a day-to-day basis. Often my notes would be filed away, not to be seen again.

The Old Way

Sign up -> Go to session -> Take (paper) notes -> File notes away (with intentions to go back to them) -> Repeat.

Now Pro-D seems to be different for me. The key thing is that I don’t ever wait for Professional Development Days or conferences to initiate learning opportunities. In fact, my Pro-D choices stem from what I’m already learning about on Twitter, and sharing in other learning spaces like my blog, Diigo, and Scoop.it.

The New Way

Follow links on Twitter -> Dig deeper then blog my ideas -> Seek related Pro-D opportunities -> Connect to other participants -> Share as I learn -> Consolidate ideas and blog again -> Follow links on Twitter…

Now, Professional Development needs to change to accommodate a new kind of learning journey that participants are on:

1.  Share resources, and make connecting easy, ahead of time.

2. Make sessions about action not information.

3. Use the skills of the participants (have them not just participate, but also lead).

Examples:

1. Share resources/connecting ahead of time

• Teasers, Sharing slide decks, conference #hashtags, participant profiles

• Learning in Louisiana - I joined a team from November Learning to present to groups of teachers on the topics of Blogs, Wikis, Podcasting, PLN’s and other Web2.0 tools. Most of the event was hands-on with teachers having a lot of time to try the tools out.
• Flat Classroom Conference – Beijing 2011 – We broke into teams and developed our own flat projects. I haven’t followed up with our ‘Reportizens‘ project yet, but I do think this is something I would like to pursue!

3. Use participants skills

• EduBloggerCon events which include a ‘Smackdown‘ where participants share tools they like in rapid succession.
• Edcamp – “…an unconference devoted to K-12 Education issues and ideas. A new kind of professional development dedicated to giving educators a voice.”

Putting these three pieces together isn’t easy. If you pre-load too much before hand, not everyone will come prepared. If you are all about action and not information, then why do people need to come to your sessions? If you empower participants to lead, some will thrive on it, while others will wonder why they paid if they had to help run a session.

You can please some people some times, but you can’t please all the people all the time!  

It is hard for a one-hour session or even a conference to meet the needs of every participant. That said, I do think there has been a shift in expectations as more educators have become connected learners. For me and for many others, the Pro-D session of old can no longer meet our learning needs. We have flipped our professional development and now we want, we expect, to be active participants in our learning before, during, and after a professional development session.

[Cross-posted on The November Learning Blog]

Distributed Learning – Any learning that allows instructor, students, and content to be located in different locations so that instruction and learning occur independent of time and place; often used synonymously with the term “Distance learning”. (Source)

Previously I’ve said,

Let’s take a ‘T.R.I.P. into the Future’ looking at some changes that are shifting learning in a way not possible just a few years ago. Here are 4 trends that education is moving towards: Greater Transparency, greater Responsibility, greater Individualization and greater Permanence.

Now I’ll add to that ‘Open and Distributed’… but what I’m ultimately talking about is greater Individualization with greater Responsibility on both schools and students.

Within 5 years, every student from Grade 6 or 7 right up to
Grade 12 will be involved in some level of distributed learning.

I’m also not just talking about Distributed Learning but, more specifically…

Blended learning – Blended learning is any time a student learns at least in part at a supervised brick-and-mortar location away from home and at least in part through online delivery with some element of student control over time, place, path, and/or pace; (Source)

Blended learning is what will define good schools in the future.

I currently work in our Open Learning school and my principal, Stephen Whiffin, is always thinking about how we can create a ‘continuum of service’  for our students. We don’t want to see students taking all their courses online, but we do want to see a seamless learning program offered to students who struggle for any number of reasons to have their entire high school program delivered out of a brick and mortar school.

So, the current model is to see what we can do to ‘fill the gaps’, but what I’m arguing here is that we can, and in the near future will, provide every child with a blended experience. Rather than just meeting circumstantial needs of certain students, I’m talking about embedding blended and distributed learning into the programs of every student to take advantage of some latent needs that we tend not to serve in most schools.

What are some of the game changers that make this possible, or dare I say inevitable?

Here are some thoughts:

1. BYO Laptop to school. Every student linked to the cloud, linked to the world, and not having to wait to get into a computer lab. The thought of school districts buying laptops for students is archaic in design and simply too expensive to maintain. In school I had to buy a calculator for Math and anyone who couldn’t afford one had one provided to them by the school… The BYO Laptop model is an affordable and a realistic solution to providing connectivity. I also bet there is hardly a school, even in the poorest of neighborhoods, across North America that couldn’t get corporate funding to help support needy families in this approach. Once all students are fully connected, there is no longer a need for the student to be completely tied to a class schedule.

2. Mobile phones. See Chris Kennedy’s TedxUBC Talk and think about how learning can go mobile:

The real world is indeed addictive and engaging. Why does learning need to be tied to a building?

3. Automated & individualized feedback for students learning at their own pace. See Salman Kahn’s TedTalk, (Linked to the 8:14 point, or you can go to the 11:11 point to see how teachers can use this). When teachers do meet with students they won’t be teaching 30 students a lesson only 5 or 6 of them really need, instead students will receive individualized and/or remedial attention based on their learning needs… increasing the ‘Student to valuable human time with the teacher ratio’, (14:54).

4. Language Learning. Why on earth would we want students to wait until Grade 10 to start learning a second language? Why wouldn’t we provide students who already speak a second language at home with an opportunity to learn their other language(s) in a middle (or even elementary) school? We can’t have Spanish, Farsi, and Mandarin teachers at all schools, but we can have one teacher who teaches a language online to all students in a district… who also offers an after-school language lab for students who wish to interact face-to-face with other students learning along with them.

5. Athletics & Arts. Young athletes, musicians, and performers will often miss hours of school time in order to train in their areas of intense focus and practice. Why does their schooling need to be ‘missed’ just because they are not in a specific, physical school setting?

6. Travel. Whether on a world adventure or following working parents for a 2-year offshore stint, why should students uproot their graduation plans or lose credits because foreign courses don’t transfer neatly into a graduation program?

7. Work & Family Needs. Some teens need to work to support their families. Some young students help raise their even younger siblings. Some teens have to raise their own children. Why allow school blocks and fixed timetables to limit the boundaries of their learning?

These are just seven of a myriad of things that make distributed and/or blended learning appealing and necessary. What others have I missed? What opportunities lay before us when we de-construct school timetables and when we make room for opportunities untied to fixed times and locations within our schools?

The future of education will be open and distributed.

We owe this to our students, with all their individualized learning needs.

[Cross-posted on the Connected Principals blog]