One of my favourite sayings these days is:

‘Teachers should be the lead learners in the classroom.’

I think that if a teacher goes into a class believing first and foremost that they are ‘model learners’ and that they will learn with their students, then that teacher will create a meaningful and engaging learning environment for their students.

I’ve always been a fan of Kevin Honeycutt, I think he is creative and his podcasts are great. Well now he shares this video that tells the tale about why we need teachers to learn. Enjoy!

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Related posts: Shifting Education and Hargreaves and the 4th Way [Part 2].

I’m at a Canadian School in China. At a staff meeting I shared a thoughtful blog post by a student reporter for the Vancouver 2010 Olympics. It’s a great post by a student that went and visited ‘Tent City’, built to house the city’s homeless during the Olympics: Olympic Games Side Effects on Vancouver. My Grade 9 teacher asked for the Students Live website and a link to this post. (I mentioned the Students Live bloggers here.)

The Students Live website provides a number of different ways to connect and interact with the Olympic reporter student bloggers. However, we live in China which filters a lot of social software websites and so these were the options that my Grade 9 teacher was confronted with:

Facebook: BLOCKED

Twitter: BLOCKED

YouTube: BLOCKED

Blogspot Blogs: BLOCKED

Flickr: (recently) BLOCKED (again)

I had to use my VPN to bypass the Chinese filter in order to cut and paste the blog post, mentioned above, into an email so that my teacher could read it in his class. A potential global ‘conversation’ reduced to a reading, confined to a classroom. Frustrating!

Now here is the thing… I chose to move to a country where a lot of sites get blocked. I can’t imagine what it’s like for teachers in the ‘free world’ that have their own school districts do this to them!

If you are in a school where filters filter learning, here is a little poster for you to hang up in your front entrance:

In his weekly email newsletter, George Siemens wrote/quoted:

This is one of the more insightful statements I’ve come across recently – What Google Could Learning From Goffman: “When we merge social groups together, we are challenged to manage our disclosures across these groups, which have different norms of propriety.”

The social software I use regularly – Twitter, Facebook, Linkedin – allows me to form different social groups. I have different interactions with different people in each….

Google, however, smashed together different social groups with Buzz, forcing information to flow between groups that were previously distinct. Buzz’s failure was not one of only disrespecting privacy, but rather one of dishonouring social clustering.

This really hit a chord with me and I can’t help but relate this to a Seinfeld episode where George Costanza sees his ‘Worlds Collide’ when people from different social groups connect:

It gets very funny when George declares that ‘Independent George’ will cease to exist by an encroaching ‘Relationship George’.

Although Google Buzz isn’t causing my worlds to collide in such a dramatic fashion, I am keenly aware that it opens up my social communities and combines them in a way that I am not sure I’m prepared to do. Fred Stutzman calls this ‘context collapse’:

When you create a profile in a social network site, or share a stream of Tweets, you’re essentially creating a representation of an identity.  As we’ve seen time and time again in Facebook, we run into problems when identities collide during “context collapse” – when people from a different segment of your life view an identity you’ve constructed for your friends.

For instance, I tried linking Twitter to Facebook and all I did was infiltrate my non-twitter friends Facebook timelines with context-less tweets that really meant nothing to them… it lasted about 24 hours. Similarly, Buzz came out and I started chatting with a few people in it, then my daughter (a Gmail user who was quicker than I to figure out Buzz) said to me, “Dad you sure talk a lot about buzz with people.” And this got me thinking about how I’m normally very purposeful with my online identities. I think about where I say what, to whom and why… I contextualize my conversations to the tool.

It’s not that I’m hiding anything… My tweets are open to the public, so is my LinkedIn profile. Meanwhile, except for my recent updates to Facebook while on holiday, I keep that more candid, limiting my profile to students that I’m connected to, and being selective about what information I share in my profile. That said, there is nothing in my Facebook profile that I am ashamed of or that I wouldn’t want others to see, but I talk differently there to my family and friends than I do on other networks. I tend to share my blog everywhere and so that too has a different voice than with other tools in other contexts.

In his post, Stutzman paraphrases Erving Goffman:

In essence, Goffman argues that identity and interaction are performative, a concept that maps very well onto social network sites.  By “creating” identities, we’re not living dual lives, but rather engaging in a well-established performance of identity that lets us share the proper “front” in context.  We act differently on LinkedIn and Facebook because these sites have contextual norms, not because we’re duplicitous.

Later in the article Stutzman continues:

…it was simply too much to ask us to configure ourselves to the technology.

By fabricating new social groupings, Google ran head-on into Facebook’s biggest problem – that of context collapse.  When we merge social groups together, we are challenged to manage our disclosures across these groups, which have different norms of propriety.

Google Buzz has mashed all these ‘worlds’ together. I don’t really want my daughter or my LinkedIn network to see me telling Seth Bowers (in reaction to him asking when I’m going to finally get on Buzz) to ‘Buzz off!’ On Twitter, with an @reply, there is context and even appropriateness in the comment (as poor as the humour may be). To my family and Facebook friends, that could easily be seen as rude, and more to the point, irrelevant when it is ‘pushed’ at them in a different setting with different norms than where the message was intended to reside.

As Seth said in his only two Buzz comments so far:

I don’t know if I need my inbox to be social…

and

Man Google sucks at social…

I may be wrong, and perhaps Google Buzz will catch on, but I think it has a bumpy road ahead, because the social web requires socialization, which in turn requires contexts for appropriate social norms and behaviors.

I’m not freaking out like George Costanza on Seinfeld, but I really don’t want a tool that merges my digital identities and forces my worlds to collide.

Cross-posted on Fireside Learning Ning: Conversations about Education.

Being the edu-nerd that I am, I often look at parallels between my experiences inside and outside the world of schools and education, (see Bubble Wrap for another example). Now, two-and-a-half weeks into my Thailand & Vietnam holiday, such parallels are jumping out at me, and I think of them as ‘traps’. It seems that everywhere we go on this holiday there are tours being offered and trinkets to buy. The packages and prices are all designed to steer you to the ‘deluxe’ version, “…for just a little bit more, you can also get…”.

Then on the way to your destination the washroom or lunch break also happens to be a great place to buy more trinkets and souvenirs and artwork and…. (insert ‘local’ artisan specialty here). This is also known as a ‘Tourist Trap’- you are committed to the tour, now let’s see how much money we can extract from you while you are here.

One parallel that I see in education is the ‘Textbook Trap’: “Buy our textbook and get the free online supplement! Oh, and by the way, each teacher will want our Teacher’s Guide, and don’t forget the Blackline Masters and the Student Workbook will save your students hours of copy-time so they can focus on the learning. Also, notice how we have designed the books to build upon themselves, you’ll also want to purchase for the next grade too. Of course if you bought more then we can increase your savings to 40%!”

… And there is the trap, you aren’t buying a textbook, you are buying a program. You are ‘investing’ a significant portion of your budget in a fixed ‘paper’ product designed with both features and flaws that become, over time, what teachers ‘deliver’ to students: A fixed/set curriculum, (that is based on, but is not necessarily the mandated curriculum).

That brings us to the next trap, the ‘Curriculum Trap’. I hear curriculum as an anti-technology ‘excuse’ all the time. I won’t even get into the Standardized Testing Trap: “It’s easy to integrate technology into the lower grades, but I have so much content to deliver that I can’t ‘waste time’ with a project like this.”

Instead, I’ll look into another aspect of the ‘Curriculum Trap’… The whole idea of curriculum being ‘fixed’: “After chapter 1 we will do chapter 2, then we get a little crazy and do chapters 4 & 5 before going back to do chapter 3.”

I’ve never seen a curriculum with a requirement of ‘Chapter 3′, and I’ve never seen a textbook that could teach a curriculum better than a creative, imaginative teacher. My kids may not remember what they did on the beach in Ko Phi Phi over a one week span, but they will remember sleeping in a floating hut just a one minute kyak ride away from viewing wild monkeys in Khao Sok National Park, Thailand. They will remember repelling from a 50meter tree after zip-lining from platforms equally as high. And they will remember riding on the neck of an elephant. These events were not part of our planned vacation, they were the side-trips, the unscheduled add-ons that became the memorable moments.

Comparatively, the ‘meaningful’ learning experiences of my education were the side-trips and ‘teachable moments’ that just came up… Discussions about world events and personal interest stories that were meaningful though not mandated or designated as essential.

The opening scene in the movie Saving Private Ryan can exemplify the horrors of war more than any textbook, just as Cry Freedom can teach students the racism of apartheid in South Africa. It’s one thing to talk about Leonardo Da Vinci and still another to watch one of his inventions at work on YouTube, or digitally turn the pages and read one of his notebooks, an opportunity only recently provided to the masses. We have to make time to be side-tracked by things that interest us and make learning memorable.

And one final parallel is the ‘Pro-D Trap’. Professional Development in education has become a fixed-time-and-date ‘event’. There is almost nothing professional about it… Punch-in, do your time, punch-out. The greatest reward a presenter can offer to participants is, “if all goes well then we’ll be out of here an hour early”. Yet, we have entered an era where anytime, anywhere learning is possible. I wrote my last post on a 3.5 hour van ride from Hanoi to Ha Long Bay. I’m writing this on the return trip a day later. I’m ‘unplugged’, but I’m thinking, reflecting & learning. I’ll be adding these posts to my blog over the next couple days and hopefully others will comment and contribute to my… perhaps ‘our’… learning.

And yet we somehow try to compartmentalize our ‘professional’ learning into ½ & 1 day sessions and we even divide those up into 45 minute, 1hour and 1.5hour sessions. Often these sessions are not even contextually meaningful: “We’re going to talk about blogging for the next hour, and you’ll know how to sign up for one when we’re done… But we don’t really have any time today to look at, comment, or discuss effective examples of blogs.” Hmmmm.

In the last two Pro-D sessions that I ran, I provided ‘play time’ in the agenda. I also provided choice: “Here are a few different resources that you might find useful. Go to one of them now, ’start’ you learning here, use me as a resource too.”

We need teachers to participate and interact with tools that engage learners and learning. We need them to take their own learning outside of their Pro-D sessions. We need them to try, to participate and to have a safe environment to make mistakes and learn from, and through, the frustrations of their mistakes. We need them to take this ‘real learning’ back to their schools with them and be the lead learners in their schools and in their classrooms.

It’s easy to fall into these traps, it’s harder to recognize them for what they are and step out of them.

For me it is a little bit difficult to think about the Vancouver 2010 Winter Olympics right now… I’m in a car outside of Hanoi, Vietnam heading to Ha Long Bay for an overnight boat cruise. The car ride is about 3.5 hours long and so I thought I’d use this time to plug a great project happening on the other side of the globe.

If, (unlike me), you are at a school that is in session during the Vancouver 2010 Winter Olympics, be sure to share this link with your students. Chris Kennedy, Assistant Superintendent of West Vancouver School District, has helped to organize 12 student bloggers to report on events at the Olympics.

These student reporters will be given access to many of the Olympic events & venues and they will be blogging, photographing, vlogging, tweeting, and updating their Facebook group page with all kinds of reports about the Olympics. I think it is fantastic to have students sharing their perspective on the Olympics and that we are starting to give students a legitimate voice in documenting world events. What will make projects like this really meaningful is interaction between these students and students around the world, so I’d like to encourage educators to get students and classrooms to follow these reporters and engage with them online.

Today, before leaving on this trip, I was connected to the hotel lobby wireless, checking email, and saw that Danny from Jan Smith’s grade 6/7 class left a comment on my blog, (Jan told me on Twitter that he did this on his own). I had a few minutes so I commented back on his blog. I mention this here because I think that as we encourage students to blog and connect online it is important for us to not just encourage but also to support these endeavors! One of the key things that makes blogging an effective learning tool is that it gives students a legitimate audience. Danny ends his comment with, “…so thank you for being a blogging teacher from the other side of the world!”

Also, Danny’s classmate Lizzie commented on my daughter’s fledgling blog and asked a question, so I encouraged my daughter to reply and then I helped her go to Lizzie’s blog and comment.

The next time I get online, after posting this, I’ll be visiting Jim Wenzloff’s wife, Chris’, new class blog, THE CLEM, and commenting on some student posts… And I’ll be mentioning that I’m writing from Hanoi Vietnam & living in Dalian China. I would like to encourage anyone reading this to take the time to comment on some student blogs from across the hall, across the city, across the country, or across the world. If you don’t know of any then visit Chris’ or Jan’s students… Or check out Sue Waters who is an excellent advocate for student bloggers that deserve a global audience.

And finally, I’ll end where I started, recommending that you help connect students around the world with the student reporters at the Vancouver 2010 Winter Olympics.

Augmented Reality (AR) has been around for a while. Fans of Monday Night Football have always had the television advantage of ’seeing’ the first down line conveniently added for their viewing pleasure. A more advanced version of augmented reality can be seen here, where you can see information about all the nearest subway locations in New York superimposed onto your iPhone’s camera view.

And now from Ewan McIntosh I’m introduced to this application of Augmented Reality, possible due to face recognition software.

Ewan says, “…In a schools context this could be seen as lethal.” And then he asks:

“But there are some amazing potential side effects – what would yours be?”

I can think of a few that are really exciting in a school context:

• What if teachers could see a student’s attendance record, allergies, current marks and timetables.

• In class you could see links to a student’s current projects AND see your most recent comments/feedback to that student.

• A live RSS feed of all the things a specific student is working on in class.

• Students can see who still needs a group partner or search tags to see who is working on similar projects to them.

• Counselors and Administrators can see what a student needs to hand in, marks in their courses and office referrals.

• A quick scan of the room with your phone and attendance is taken. The office and parents can be instantly notified if a student misses a class.

Even without the face recognition aspect AR could provide classroom data like:

• What class is in session, what subject matter, what’s on the homework board, who the teacher is, and links for the lesson.

Concerns: Who decides what should be shared, and with whom? Do we want Big Brother kind of surveillance on students, or for that matter on teachers? That said, most of the information that I’ve mentioned is already tracked for students… on paper and in digital data banks. We aren’t talking about collecting new information, just providing timely information to people who could use that information to benefit a learner’s experience in school.

Seeing someone’s social networks is fun, and may be useful in social and work environments, but seeing someone’s Learning Resources and connecting to their Learning Environments… instantaneously… that’s something that can be very exciting for education!

How would you define a moment?

I love how this video takes absolutely random visuals and makes a story out of them… a story about the value of time, or at least single moments in time. This video changes my breathing pattern, it alters my thoughts, moment by moment, in a way that says more than words can. I think too often we let moments slip by when they should be cherished. Take a moment now and enjoy…

(for those of you behind a filter who can’t get YouTube: Watch it here.)

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*Update: November 28th, 2009

David Deubel, whom I first connected with a while back on Classroom2.0 and other Ning networks, wrote about this video here: The Dimensions of the present moment. He takes this a step further by editing out an adult scene and creating lessons for this on the EFL Classroom 2.0! Ning, (you need to be a member to see this but it is free to join). I love it when teachers take a resource like this and make it meaningful to the classroom… Way to go David!

Caring across the curriculum

Sometimes I get tired of seeing the school day broken into subject-matter based courses. We don’t teach subjects we teach students, and students of all ages engage in a real life that matters across individual fields of study.

Watch the video* Miniature Earth:

How many different ’subjects’ can we teach with this video? How real is the Math? How relevant is the Social Studies? Can we tie in History? Current Events? Economics? Environmental Issues? Healthy Living?

How far can we extend the learning? These are 1990 statistics from the state of the Village Report. What are the stats now? Can you predict what they will be 10 years from now? “Write a paragraph from the perspective of…”

But caring isn’t just about identifying a problem, it is about doing something about that problem.

Watch the video* World on Fire by Sarah McLachlan:

More real life relevance across the curriculum and proof that one person can make a difference!

So what can a class do?

Kiva.org is a great example of what can be done. Mico-Loans to poeple from many parts of the world that would have a hard time getting regular loans.

Kiva’s mission is to connect people through lending for the sake of alleviating poverty.

Kiva is the world’s first person-to-person micro-lending website, empowering individuals to lend directly to unique entrepreneurs around the globe.

The people you see on Kiva’s site are real individuals – not marketing material. When you browse entrepreneurs’ profiles on the site, choose someone to lend to, and then make a loan, you are helping a real person make great strides towards economic independence and improve life for themselves, their family, and their community. Throughout the course of the loan (usually 6-12 months), you can receive email journal updates and track repayments. Then, when you get your loan money back, you can relend to someone else in need. (About Kiva )

If you want to know how meaningful this can be to a class of students, check out what Jen Whiffin has done with her Grade 4/5 class. She starts her post: Math Made Compelling: The Kiva Renaissance with this quote:

“Building a thought-filled curriculum serves the larger agenda of building a more thought-filled world–an interdependent learning community where people continually search for ways to care for one another, learn together, and grow towards greater intelligence.  We must deepen student thinking to hasten the arrival of a world community…” (Arthur L. Costa, “The Thought-Filled Curriculum”, Educational Leadership, 2008)

If you enjoy that post, check out her other related posts Math Made Compelling and Math Made Compelling: Phase One of the Kiva Project . Also check out her class’ Kiva profile.

Grade 4’s and 5’s learning about GDP per capita? Why not? But take this real-life meaning away and the math just isn’t… compelling.

A curriculum of caring and making a difference, across many fields of study. Learning that matters and connects our students to the world they live in.

*Update: For those of you ‘Behind the filter’ like my teachers here in China, since you cannot see the embeded and linked YouTube videos. Here they both are: Miniature Earth and World on Fire. You can watch them online or download them thanks to drop.io!

When my grandfather was a teenager in the Ukraine, he played his accordion for the ‘moving pictures’. He was a member of the band that would play scripted music as damsels in distress were first tied to train tracks by villains, then rescued by heroes.

The music the band played added life to the moving pictures and helped to set the mood or build suspense. Essentially another channel of meaningful information was added to these silent moving pictures… the new channel improved this form of media and created something greater than what was there before.

For his services, my grandfather received two paid entries to these same movies, 20 cents worth of tickets. He would watch movies again and again, and he would charge friends 5 cents (half price) for his second ticket, to earn some pocket change. But never would he sell both tickets, he loved the movies too much. Eventually he would own a cinema, and his fascination and appreciation for movies stuck with him his entire life.

The idea of moving pictures marveled people in these early days! Today we can be momentarily entertained by movies such as this, but not unexpectedly, we expect more from a movie today.

Just as we expect more from our movies and our entertainment, I think our students expect (or at least should expect) more from their classroom experiences today. On a very simple level, how is a poster board different than Glogster or Museum Box? How is an encyclopedia different than wikipedia?

But so often when we make such comparisons, there is the notion of ‘out with the old and in with the new’… this very notion seems to set people off about how we can’t replace the classics or ‘I can do that without technology’. Both of these views miss the point.

We may not be captivated by the ‘damsel in distress’ movies of the past, but we can marvel at the comedic social commentary of Charlie Chaplin; We can study and learn from the the visual story telling of Orson Wells.

We can find value in old black and white films and likewise we can find value in using some important lessons learned in education. We can appreciate quality and learn from what works… BUT… we can’t pretend that times haven’t changed. We can’t hold on to a black and white world.

In one of the most compelling podcasts I’ve heard in a while, Michael Wesch says:

In these rooms… that we are teaching there is literally something in the air that is changing the game completely, and that something in the air is nothing less than 1.5 billion people connecting all around the world… we need to learn how to educate in this media-scape.

If you look at all futurists, all predictions, they all agree on one trend, and that is that we are moving towards… Ubiquitous networks, ubiquitous computing, ubiquitous information, at unlimited speed, about everything, everywhere, from anywhere, on all kinds of devices.

…and meanwhile… scantrons are still happening in our schools where we are testing people for whether or not they are knowledgeable. What I am going to argue is that we have to move from being knowledgeable to actually creating students that are knowledge-able, that is able to critique and analyze and find and share and evaluate information.

It is less about leaving old ways in the dust and more about using the resources available to us. We have always wanted students to think for themselves, to be able to critique and analyze and evaluate what they’ve learned… we just have to do so using a current model. Wesch continues with a question, and his 3-part answer:

How can we create students who can create meaningful connections?

1. Engage in real problems that actually matter to students,
2. Do it with students, and
3. Do this recognizing and harnessing the existing media environment… (including libraries!)

It goes back to this simple realization:

How many channels of information do our students experience outside of our classes? How many in our classes?

We can still watch an old black and white movie, but we don’t go out and buy a black & white tv that limits our ability to see what is available to us in colour. Yet we place unnecessary limits on what can happen in our schools and classrooms, “we need to learn how to educate in this media-scape”.

Sonya Woloshen is a new teacher this year. She is a job-sharing French Immersion teacher at our school 2 days a week, and at another Middle School the other 3 days.

Sonya did a short pro-d session this afternoon with some of our teachers. Her session title: “I took the red pill”.

She ran through using Powerpoint/Keynote, Screencasts, and podcasts. But time and again her emphasis was not on the technology or the tools, but on the meaningful engagement of students. It was about students learning transferable skills and teaching each other as they learned.

Sonya also highlighted how she and her students use ipods/iTouch/mp3s in her class. Here is her ipod-touch-proposal she made to our Director of IT. She also wrote an article on ipods for CueBC.

For this presentation, she showed the first video here to start things off. Here are a few quotable quotes from her session:

“In 5 years I want to run a paperless class.”

“As a new teacher, I don’t think of it as a issue when one student doesn’t have the technology available. That’s not a problem, just something to work around.”

“I push technology in every project I do, but of course I make it available to my students to do a poster or paper presentation if they want to or if they don’t have the technology available to them at home.”

“What if you don’t know everything? Students love knowing more than you and teaching you.”

Sonya is a digital teacher. She gets that it isn’t about the technology but about engaging students in meaningful ways. She is brand new and yet ahead of the curve. What I really liked about this presentation was that she didn’t just ’sell’ technology, she mentioned the challenges too… from her iTouch being stolen (it was returned) to technical issues causing her to load programs on 25 iTouch/ipods only to have to reload 15 of them the next day when students should have been using them. These are not deal-breakers, simply challenges to overcome.

As she talked I thought about how many teachers get fed up with technology and give up. Imagine a teacher going to a photocopier and it doesn’t work, so they say, “That’s it, I’m never using that again!” Or a person getting behind the steering wheel of a car for the first time, struggling, and then never driving again.

What makes Sonya a Digital Teacher is that she sees the value that tech tools offer and she overcomes the challenges they present (fearlessly). Sonya understands the potential of POD’s, and she is starting her career at a point that I had to evolve to:

I’ve seen a real shift in my own thinking recently. Forget whining about access, disregard the slow speed of change, get over the obstacles! Go after meaningful results. Engage and empower students. Be a leader and a role model.   Opportunities, Access & Obstacles

It is exciting and inspiring to see a new teacher, confidently and fearlessly sharing her learning with a group of teachers, who in turn are equally interested in, and engaging with, new teaching and learning practices. Kids today are part of a YouTube Generation and they need digital teachers to help guide and inspire them to be lifelong learners, equiped for a future that I myself cannot truly imagine.