After my last post I went to hear Alan November speak at an afternoon Pro-D session. I then read Brian Kuhn‘s blog post and added a comment, which I have edited slightly and included below. In the process of writing this comment I realized a valuable lesson, which I will discuss below the comment:

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The afternoon session With Alan November was great!

It was wonderful to hear Alan November again. His webcast for the district was one of the things that lit a fire under me and encouraged my to explore technology as a means for students to learn ‘new things in new ways’.
This weekend I was listening to some of his podcasts and I wrote a blog post about them : Looking back at it, my reflections were somewhat sarcastic and negative… A product of feeling like things just haven’t been moving fast enough.

Tuesday afternoon changed that for me. There are a lot of great teachers out there doing wonderful things, and there are many more teachers out there feeling overwhelmed by how much there is to learn, who are still willing to take the next step forward. On a more personal note, the world of web2.0 has given me wings , but I realized that I too have a long way to go before I am doing all the things that I can to give my students wings too!

Thanks to Jill Reid for the invitation, to all the leaders who helped make a day like today possible, and to Alan November… I am refueled and ready to continue my journey of learning along with my students.

Here are some notes about today e-mailed to me from Joni, a true leader in our school. She may not be tech savvy (yet), but teachers like her who offer their leadership, guidance and support are what will help ‘us’ move forward using technology ‘for learning’ rather than just using technology to teach!

Great tool: webcast site ‘Jingproject‘.

Suggestions: Kid jobs for the class

1) Answer questions from class. This kid needs to answer all questions, if he can’t, he needs to find the answer on the web, then post the answer.
2) Continuous researcher through class
3) Official scribe: takes notes for the class every day. Post them to the site.
4) Create a Wiki site. Allows children make a contribution to the world. wikipedia, or your own space like www.wikispaces.com [My attempt - ScienceAlive.]
5) Contributing any source that they find on he web to the class: use a social networking site. eg. www.diigo.com create a diigo account for the class or every student has their own account and then “share to group”. [I used delicious and am now moving to diigo]

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Reflect and Learn

Here is the sentence from above that has hit home with me over the past few days, “the world of web2.0 has given me wings , but I realized that I too have a long way to go before I am doing all the things that I can to give my students wings too!”

I currently have a private Ning network for my students, but it is really driven by me! The blog posts, the groups, the forums… all initiated by me! Yesterday I read a post by Konrad Glogowski. The post, “Conversation with Pre-Service Teachers – The Set Curriculum“, was about just that, ‘the set curriculum’ (something I have written about a few times) but a specific section struck a chord with me:

“It seemed logical to me that my responsibility as an educator was to prepare a collection of texts, resources, diagnostic and assessment/evaluation tools in order to achieve specific learning outcomes. I saw myself as a subject expert whose primary responsibility in the classroom was to teach a very specific set of skills and competencies. I saw myself as someone who possessed knowledge and perceived my students as individuals who needed to acquire it.”

I am new to teaching planning 10, and I am trying to launch a specific program, YPI , that I am learning about with the students. So, I did what many teachers do when they are unfamiliar with the curriculum… I teach to it.

In the last little while my posts have been peppered with negative undertones about things not moving fast enough and technology limitations that I have found frustrating. Well, although those things are legitimate concerns, they are things that are for the most part beyond my control. What I can do is create an engaging classroom environment that actually gives my students wings.

Another thoughtful lesson inspired by Alan November , and realized through my blogging/web2.0 experience.

Originally posted: November 23rd, 2007 Reflection upon re-reading and re-posting: After reading Konrad’s post, I went into my classroom and wrote a forum post for my ning networks titled, “You lead the way“, and this is what it said: Here is your chance to be the teacher today. What do you want to learn more about? What questions do you have? What interests you? This can be about Planning 10 or anything else. It can be questions that you often wonder about or just a thought in your head. You have 2 choices. 1. Respond to this forum 2. Create your own forum discussion Feel free to link to other websites. It can be really small ideas or really big ideas. Then I would like you to read what others have written and join in the conversation. Some of the student discussion choices were (in my opinion) silly. Others good, and still others were heated, including a thoughtful discussion on the Death Penalty, where I had to bite my digital tongue…and sure enough a student came up with a perspective that I thought needed to be shared. These ‘free’ conversations gave the students some ownership of the site and encouraged a greater amount of online conversations afterwards.

I started this post sitting in a waiting room at the auto shop waiting for my car: No WiFi, pay-for coffee and snacks available. It had an outlet if my laptop battery didn’t hold out, comfortable seats and, if I was interested, a tv to make the experience a little more comfortable. But I knew exactly what I wanted to do. I am a fan of Alan November and I just downloaded, to my iTunes, his November Learning Podcast Series. With ear plugs in and a word doc open, (I would have preferred Google docs), I began listening to Alan November interview Dan Pink.

A little history here…
My first classroom blogging experience was inspired by an Alan November webcast that launched me into my web2.0 experiences… (My teaching2.0? What do you call this transformation?
…And a question on the side…
What do you call a digital ‘immigrant’ that is fully immersed in a digital world? I am an immigrant to Canada, but truly consider myself a Canadian, though I will never be a ‘native’. Perhaps I am a Digital Citizen, or more aptly a Digital Denizen!

den•i•zen noun formal or humorous an inhabitant or occupant of a particular place : denizens of field and forest. • Brit., historical a foreigner allowed certain rights in the adopted country.

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Here are the highlights of the interviews with my two-dimes worth added in!

Interview 1: With Dan Pink

Pink Re: Standardized Testing as a measure of a school. “What ultimately I care about is the individual kids, that’s what parents care about and obviously that what the kids themselves care about… if I had a magic wand I would do a very serious, very radical overhaul of the entire education system”.

We have to be willing to measure these: (From Wikipedia on Dan Pink’s A Whole New Mind )

1. Design – Moving beyond function to engage the sense.
2. Story – Narrative added to products and services – not just argument.
3. Symphony – Adding invention and big picture thinking (not just detail focus).
4. Empathy – Going beyond logic and engaging emotion and intuition.
5. Play – Bringing humor and light-heartedness to business and products.
6. Meaning – Immaterial feelings and values of products.

As long as we measure schools and measure students with tests that do not appreciate and include measuring a student’s ability to express these senses, we are measuring the wrong things.

I have an idea: First we will measure a poem with a word count… Then we will measure compassion with a ruler… And finally we will measure the making of a work of art with a stop watch. Then we will add the numbers together and tell you how well your child is doing in school.

From a previous post , “there is a dichotomy here: Our ‘educational language’ around standardization and accountability juxtaposed with differentiation and flexibility… we seem to have two mutually exclusive camps, yet there seems to be a move to embrace both. To embrace both is to accomplish neither.”

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Interview 2: Dan Pink

School architects use a 35-year-old formula, with teachers left out of the conversation… “Appalling that a Starbucks is a more appealing place to be than a classroom.

It doesn’t have to be more expensive, just smarter. If you built cabinets and shelving units for picture-tube tv’s or carrying cases for Sony Walkman’s and you didn’t adapt your designs, where would you be now?

Pink: People are opting out of the public/formal education system… “Our education establishment, which we pay lip service to as the most important element of our society, are probably the most out of sync with the realities of 21 century life than any other institution in American society.

‘This is important! We need to change… pass the chalk’.

November: Emerging models – Schools… “should be much more embedded in the community, where kids are adding value and making a difference, much more action based.”

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Interview 3: Dan Pink
(The last podcast (#2) ended a discussion about Design: Creating things in context, ideally cross-curricular. This theme continued here.)

Pink: The two most important things in professional success & personal fulfillment are “intrinsic motivation & persistence.”

I wonder how much schools pay attention to these two things? Even when we praise, we don’t inspire intrinsic motivation, and although in some ways we promote persistence, we also give students a grade of ‘C’ and move on.

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Interview: Dr. Mitchel Resnick (MIT)
Topics: Creativity and Innovation to the Digital Divide
Research group name: Lifelong Kindergarten Group (kindergarten-like exploration and play)

Many of the best learning opportunities come when people are engaged in creating and designing things.

Check out http://scratch.mit.edu/ (I’ve been here a few times, but need to explore the possibilities)

Sharing… building on other’s ideas… ‘borrowing’ not copying. Give proper credit and acknowledgement and then adapt and go further, and then putting your ideas out there for others to add to.

This reminds me of the Larry Lessig’s TED Video I recently watched on ‘(Re)-creativity’.

If you give credit, it isn’t ‘appropriates’ but rather ‘appropriate’!

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Reinforcing the thoughts of Resnick I recently found this post on the blog of none other than Dan Pink:

Re: a pop artists exhibit , “The show celebrates the fizzy remixing typical of Pop Art and is replete with “cut up magazines, copied comic books, . . trademarked cartoon characters like Minnie Mouse… But in a bizarre move, the curators have banned photographs — not to protect the physical integrity of the works, but to avoid infringing on the copyright of the creators.”

The irony is not lost on me.

Originally posted: November 20th, 2007 Reflection upon re-reading and re-posting: My italicized comments in this post are seeping with sarcasm… which I note and reflect on in my next post. In truth, I’m not a huge fan of podcasts, primarily because I am a very visual learner and also because I have not had a commute longer than 3.5km in the last 9 years. I’m either in the car with others or I’m in the car for 5-7 minutes. So, usually when I’m trying to listen to a podcast is when I have my computer in front of me, (in which case I tend to start reading something else and the podcast becomes background noise). Listening to these podcasts with a word document open for note-taking made them worthwhile to listen to since I could ‘see’ what I was learning from listening.

How Not to Talk to Your Kids: The Inverse Power of Praise.

A Feature in the The New York Times, By Po Bronson.

Thanks to Kris from Wandering Ink who sent me this link.

I will let the article speak for itself:

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:

More food for thought from the article:

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.

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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…”

Originally posted: February 13th, 2007 Reflection upon re-reading and re-posting: Last year I cleaned up this post (just used the text, and no reference/sidebar of my blog), and sent this to staff via e-mail. I’ve never been thanked so much for passing on information! On a more personal note, my wife and I struggle with this, especially when our kids come home feeling proud about what they did/created. A year later I can tell you that this approach takes practice. Part of the difficulty is that praise of intelligence and ability so pervasive in our society… it is almost expected. “Daddy look what I made!” ‘Wow, look at the detail on that, you really put a great effort into it, didn’t you?’ “Yes. Do you like it?”