Connect Learning, Connected World – ISTE 2014

Currently in Atlanta Georgia to participate in ISTE2014. As a part of that, I am presenting a two-hour poster session on mobile applications in a project-based learning classroom. I was particularly interested in sharing applications that were open-ended, constructive and creative. I grouped my applications into four main categories:
– data analysis and simulation
– web, blog and writing
– graphics and infographics
– media

To do the poster session, I created four panels to go on the board – I’ve attached these below as images,
ISTE 2014 panel 4

ISTE 2014 panel 3

ISTE 2014 panel 2

ISTE 2014 panel 1

and then I put together a slideshow presentation that showed some of the same examples and I have included the embedded YouTube video below.

The pdf version is here – the links should work for that:

Mobile Apps and PBL

It was a lot of fun putting it together, as it gave me chance to look through student work over the last two years and find interesting ways in which we have used iPad applications to support the kind of student driven project-based work that we are committed to in our MPX program.

Looking back at 5 years of School of the Future

Last week Monday April 28 was our last Community of Learners Meeting for our schools involved with the “Schools of the Future” grant initiative. Although our work continues as individual schools, we will need to develop new ways to connect and converse on our work. As a part of the last get together I put together a slide presentation reflecting on the journey and what it meant to be involved. My slide deck is included both as a pdf and slideshare show.

PDF version linked below:
sotf final prez dole cannery

My Deeper Reflection about Deeper Learning 2014

Deeper Learning 2014 Reflection

I suppose I should start my reflection by reminding myself what the purpose of the conference was based on their own language:

Connect – I have made several new connections and have deepened my relationship with several old connections.
Innovate – I have new ideas for how to better support deeper learning in my organization, school, or classroom.
Experience – I will experience deeper learning for myself, which will help me to apply deeper learning principles to my own work.

so measured against their own questions, here is some of my thoughts

***It is worth pointing out that ALL the conference materials for the sessions are free and available at : https://sites.google.com/a/hightechhigh.org/dl2014-workshops/ **********

Wednesday: Deep Dive: Teaching Science with Robots with Dr Karl Wendt

After walking us through a series of robots that he had built – from underwater robots to programmable motorized robots – Karl introduced us to the project of the day – building, and testing a small entry-level robot that cost less than $10 to build called spout.

resources for all of his work are located here:
https://sites.google.com/site/discovercreateadvance/home

One of the strengths of what he’s doing, is he made a series of short instructional videos that show how to build the robot. My partner was Ben Daley, and we agreed that by doing it as a series of self directed videos, there was a sense of pacing and authenticity in constructing that would’ve been very different if it’d been synchronously teacher led. We found his work on these videos to be excellent, and felt that we could initiate this project right away.

My Take Aways: The thing that struck me about this project/deep dive was that there was a good principle at play here: the fun part begins with the students building the robot. The hook is that in order for the students to solve the challenges, there needs to be enough core content knowledge (electricity, torque, light, friction, switches, etc.). Depending upon the way the activities of the challenges are set up, it’s entirely possible to cover different branches of physics and physical science. That to me was the strength of this activity – in the kind of work that we do with STEM education, the way to get kids engaged in by bringing some authentic design challenge or construction. Careful selection conversation and building an adequate resource library to support learning will help shape the learning that needs to be part of the academic rigor. Karl’s webpage for his resources is located here:
https://sites.google.com/site/discovercreateadvance/projects-1
Nice. Design.

After dinner, there was movie night and a panel discussion. The teaching channel has built a resource area that includes 50 videos that are meant to be short explorations of specific practices of schools in the network (looking at student work, advisories, comity partners, etc). this is a great source that I plan to use extensively in my work both on campus and outside of campus. the video series is located here:

https://www.teachingchannel.org/deeper-learning-video-series

Thursday:
Keynote with Ron Berger.

At some point, they will put the video of this keynote online. My guess it will be linked somewhere from the main page here: http://deeper-learning.org/dl2014/
Ron talked a bit about beautiful work, but the highlight of his presentation was four 8th grade students from Polaris Charter Academy in inner city Chicago. Their presentation was engaging, compelling, executed flawlessly, and a powerful story. Their work started with the investigation of the preamble of the Constitution but evolved into a study of gun violence in their neighborhood and what that told them about their freedoms and liberties and protection for the common good. 
If this video does get put online, I highly recommend you watch it!

Looking at student work
attendees were put into groups of about 10 and given a piece student work. Facilitation of the session was led by a high-tech high student – our young lady was Killian and she did an excellent job leading and guiding our conversation. We looked at a compiled magazine that was created by sixth grade students to answer their big question of inquiry about different cultural and scientific theories about the end of the world. Our group had an excellent conversation about the things we saw that indicated deeper learning was evident, and places where we think the work could have been made stronger.
My take away from this one was a recognition that we need to more regularly look at our own student work as a team to help us decide how we are doing in looking at the rigor of our work, as well as how well it meets the other deeper learning characteristics like collaboration, developing academic mindsets, and problem solving.
Hour. Well. Spent.

Session 1: From Scratch with Scratch with Don Mackay
In this session, we were led through a series of design, Inquiry, and challenges about our understandings of electricity and magnetism. The documents for the workshop were here:
https://sites.google.com/a/hightechhigh.org/dl2014-workshops/workshops/session-1

After investigating , we were challenged with building a spinning motor from the equipment that he gave us. One of the things that made this interesting was the play between designing and exploring what we understood about electromagnetism. You can see that in the document linked above.
What were my big takeaways? I really feel that the pedagogical approach Don took was excellent – in our modeling terms from ASU, he began his studies with a discrepant event which challenged our notion of what we understood about the phenomena that underlie a particular field of study – in this case of electromagnetism. I like the bite-size nature of what he designed to explore this naïve understanding that we might have. I think this would suit well as ways to build knowledge in projects we do that a more extensive so that we’re creating place for rigorous conversation about what we understand. I’m going to try that with our light project will be doing in May.

Session 2:  From Maker Space to Maker Campus with David Stephen
Wow. I had never met David until this day, but he was a teacher and the architectural designer of the interior spaces for the high-tech high buildings. Wow. He led an excellent, progressive session about the work that he does, and how he sees the importance of space as one of the ways to create and support student agency and 21st century teaching. Instead of summarizing what he did, here are my tweets I sent out for his session (there are in reverse order last to first):

#deeperlearning Session with David Stephen http://www.newvistadesign.net  Provocative, Progressive, Powerful ideas on Agency by Design

#deeperlearning ideas for transforming spaces on the cheap: Make Space http://dschool.stanford.edu/makespace/  Great book. Easy to read. Low hanging fruit.

another great site on maker ideas – The Fab Lab http://fab.cba.mit.edu  #deeperlearning

#deeperlearning the resource at @AgencybyDesign is tied to the Making Thinking Visible team as well. too cool!

Two useful resources on design: http://www.archachieve.net  and http://www.designshare.com  Great ideas abound! #deeperlearning

#deeperlearning SO much of our conversation on Agency by Design is reminding me of the work by Pine and Gilmore on the “Experience Economy”


#deeperlearning Agency By Design is a project out of Harvard Project Zero http://www.pz.gse.harvard.edu/agency_by_design.php …

#deeperlearning great turn of phrase from Davis Stephen: “airport grade” soft furniture. Love it! I’ve seen blown apart bean bag chairs!

#deeperlearning how to create inviting educational spaces – David Stephen uses the term ‘artifactorium’ to define exhibit space feel of HTH

#deeperlearning with David Stephen of New Vista Design talking about creating Student Agency By Design “From Maker Space to Maker Campus”


His three shared documents are on the materials page under session 2 :
https://sites.google.com/a/hightechhigh.org/dl2014-workshops/workshops/session-2


My Take Aways: This session rekindled in the and interest and passion around the importance of facility design editing needs to both support and lead teachers needs and behaviors into the place they need to be and to not reinforce things that are keeping them from advancing their professional practice. This topic has been of high interest to me since we started designing the Weinberg technology Plaza on our campus back in 1998. I definitely want to spend more time going through his resources and the agency by design website mentioned above.

Friday:
Session 3: Beautiful, Beautiful Math with Marcia Dejesus-Rueff

We had about 16 people in this session and we looked at ways to bring Art (poetry, dance, musics) into the mathematics that we do. I really liked the fact that her compelling case was mathematics is a search for patterns. These patterns can be found in poetry, dance, music, just about any art form we looked at a Dylan Thomas poem, and a Frank Lloyd Wright stained glass window as ways to create a linking between art and mathematics. Her documents can be found on the session 3 resources page here:
https://sites.google.com/a/hightechhigh.org/dl2014-workshops/workshops/session-3

my takeaways: I am still professionally challenged by looking for rigorously appropriate and engaging art that can lead to deep understanding of algebra to mathematical principles. the session provided me with opportunities to look at some other examples of how that looks.

Unconference Sessions:
Polls were taken on Thursday to determine the topics that would be offered on Friday. They were a variety of sessions offered that looked at everything from how to start your own deeper learning school, to what assessment looks like, to professional development strategies for teachers.
I attended:
The Leader’s Guide to Deeper Learning with Ken Kay and James Gibson
Ken is now at EdLeader21, and the session focused on walking us through the deliberate planning process and leading a school through transformation to deeper learning. At our tables, we modeled the process of developing core competencies, identifying new student skills necessary, and finished by proposing strategies to move towards these goals. The pictures of the chart paper are located here:
https://flic.kr/ps/2Rxk1U

the resources that they shared in the workshop are located in session 3 folder here:
https://sites.google.com/a/hightechhigh.org/dl2014-workshops/workshops/session-3

Other Thoughts:
Larry Rosenstock mentioned in his address the importance of recess for our group as a means to connect with familiar and new colleagues. I can’t agree more with that impact – whether it was lunch time, or just corridor conversations, or the after hour social events, the group used the time outside of the sessions at least as powerfully if not more so as a means to explore, connect, challenge and extend their thinking about their work. Looking towards our conference in November (http://sotfconf.org) there was a lot we could take away from what work here at deeper learning 2014.

Student work is everywhere in High Tech High. Every time I come I take pictures to add to my collection – but this time with different intent for me. Since our students are going to work on building projects for the rest of the year, I wanted to capture some examples of already displayed student work to challenge my students to think of how they could make something as good as or better than what they see in the images. I have included a few examples below.

photo 1-1

photo 1

photo 2-1

photo 2

photo 3-1

photo 3

photo 4-1

photo 4

photo 5
Last Word
One of the last things we were asked to do was fill out a post card with at least one idea we would implement. I wrote three:
for my MPX program, bring more student work protocols into our meetings
for our work with Kupu Hou, find ways to sustain a community of learner model that will more directly influence the attendees to stay connected over a longer period of time
for work with the Hawaii education leadership Summit, rethink what the topic might be by spending more time asking our intended audience what would suit their needs past so that we can align our work with their needs

MPX STEM Week of March 10 update

The past couple of weeks in our class have been focused on a few ongoing projects:

Energy Project:
Over the course of the past semester students learned the ins and outs of energy audits – not just the science of electricity but a more broad view of alternative options and conservation approaches. Trips to places like Hawaiian Electric and Kahuku WInd Farms were brought in to have them consider the ways we are trying to address energy needs of the island. For their culminating activity, the students have come up with a project that would change someone’s behavior around energy use. Student ideas cover a wide range ideas. One group is creating ad designing eye catching stickers to go near places like light switches, where a change in behavior will save energy and educate.
Reminder sticker

Another group is developing an infographic on alternative wind energy to help people understand why these are such an important past of our mix of options. A few groups are making videos that help people everything from ghost/phantom loads to a kitchen survey to better understand how to save.

Energy Hunters video

One group is developing a system to save on wasted food and energy in refrigerators.

nikki fridge project

These projects wil be featured in the next OwlLine and are slated to be finished the first week back from spring break.

Continued Math Work
Although we try and integrate our math as frequently as possible, we also do stand alone investigations of mathematics to practice and apply core ideas in algebra 2. Three examples from the past 3 weeks:
– we studied rational expressions, did some practice problems, then tried to apply it to solve the classic “When will we reach the middle of the journey” challenge that airlines typically give passengers on long flights. Students were given real head wind and distance measures and tried to determine the total travel time for a jet doing a round trip LAX to HNL.
– we determined the cost of running a water cooler on campus based on current electrical load and pricing from Hawaiian Electric. This required them looking at ratios and dimensional analysis to solve.
– We did practice problems this week to better understand radical expressions, but will use it to design a tank and pool system next week to apply the ideas to a real world problem

Personal Project Time
We restarted the personal project time in both Humanities and STEM class to give the students a class period a week to design and implement a project of their passion and choosing. The information for the project is given below. Students have already submitted proposals and we are seeing much clearer and achievable project ideas than last semester.

MPX 10: PIP/ PEP

You get one period each week in Hines and Davis to work on a project of your choice. The constraints are that a) your project must help someone b) you must include all four disciplines in some way in your project: English, US History, Physics, and Algebra II.

Your project must be an ORIGINAL IDEA.

You may work with up to one other person on this project provided that are with you in either Hines’ class or Ms. Davis’ class together.

*image

In-class time for project will be graded on a 3 point scale, judging on your focus, engagement, and productivity during this time.

March 11th: Draft of Proposal Due.

March 13th: Final Proposal Due

April 15th: Model or prototype is due.

April 30th: Second, improved model or prototype is due.

May 7th: Feedback session with community members who specialize in your area.

May 22nd: Final presentation off campus to parents and community members, all possible funders of your product or service.

Where to next?

For the STEM side, once we come back from break we have two more projects to undertake:

April: The Water Park Ride. We will be designing and building a portable, exciting, safe backyard water slide (we had wanted to try and do this in time for Ho’olaulea, but we needed to push this into April.

May: Waves, Light and Sound Exhibit. We will build exhibit boxes that highlight certain features or the wave and particle nature of light and examine wave phenomena in general.
The goal is for these to be displayed in the Watase Courtyard.

Building Knowledge and Assessing Learning

It strikes me that three things converged on the same professional question over that past month or so.

School:
In a previous blog post, I mentioned how we at MPI are engaged in the act of developing more purposefully conversations with students about the criteria used for assessing learning. We call this “co-constructing criteria”. Since I’ve talked about this before, I don’t want to go into detail, but I do want to point out that it implies there is a big difference between assessment and evaluation – assessment in the service of learning is a conversation with a student about learning targets, level of completion, and mapping out a pathway to get there. It draws the student and the teacher onto the same side of the table to ask the question “How will WE know when you have reached a sufficient level of proficiency or reason mastery?”

University:
Over the past two months I’ve been taking my data from online conversations, coding them and now I am making meaning of the data in order to finish my dissertation about knowledge building in online communities. One of the key aspects of my research is trying to more closely look at knowledge building principles as a means to evaluate the value of an online community of practice (CoP). (Etienne Wenger defines a CoP as “groups of people who share a concern or a passion for something they do and learn how to do it better as they interact regularly”).

In “A Brief History of Knowledge Building” by Scardamalia and Bereiter, they state:

“Knowledge building has several characteristics not shared by constructivist learning in general, although common to organizational knowledge building. Two of these are:

Intentionality. Most of learning is unconscious, and a constructivist view of learning does not alter this fact. However, people engaged in knowledge building know they are doing it and advances are purposeful.

Community Knowledge. Learning is a personal matter, but knowledge building is done for the benefit of the community.”

Scardamalia, M. and C. Bereiter (2010). “A brief history of knowledge building.” Canadian Journal of Learning and Technology 36(1).

I believe one of the tangible benefits of good project-based learning is a sense of both purposeful knowledge building in our community, and intentionality in how we address looking at our work as a part of our community to strengthen our own personal learning.

Deeper Learning Network:
In the #dlmooc Deeper Learning MOOC last week, the topic was on assessment. Much of the conversation focused on assessment in the service of learning – that is, assessment that happens during the learning as a means to give students feedback, direction, additional strategies to support their building of knowledge – which is happening in conjunction with their peers in their teacher as a conversation. This to me has much of the same hallmarks as knowledge building mentioned above. In the end, there can be different assessments at the end to evaluate learning, but the act of formative assessment is an application of knowledge building principles and it’s exciting to see how it is the most significant step in the learning process.

“How do you know that?” In my training back in the 1990s on the Modeling approach to learning science (http://modeling.asu.edu), that question of how do you know something became a critical one for us to unpack students’ thinking. To me, it ties together these ideas of knowledge building, and assessment in the service of learning that seem to have converged in the last couple of weeks.

A Day with the Faithful or “What would Euclid Do?”

Disclaimer alert: This post is more philosophical than procedural – your mileage may vary on what you get from reading this…it is more of an intellectual exploration for me…

I want to thank my son, Aukai, for letting me to reflect and talk to him about this issue to help me consider how I might write this post – he was a wonderful reflective partner and I am his debt for his time, interest and feedback. He is currently a Junior at Mid-Pacific Institute.

I spent the day on Saturday, March 1 The Hawaii Council of Math teachers annual conference (http://www.math.hawaii.edu/~tom/hctm/Speakers2014.pdf) with a few specific goals:
I gave a presentation that was titled “Hands-on, Minds-on Math – An Offering of Homegrown Math Projects and Activities“ – I was both excited and anxious about sharing the work I’ve been doing the past couple of years with my colleague Gregg on designing large and small projects and activities that incorporate mathematical thinking and concepts to real problems.
I was interested in attending other sessions to see what kinds of ways I might build my professional knowledge as a mathematics teacher
I was interested in getting connected to a network of math teachers to better my collegial connections with both our math department ( five other high school math teachers attended) as well other math teachers from the state and beyond.

As I was debriefing the experience of the day which was both rewarding and challenging, I was struck by the enthusiasm, the fervor – that our community exhibited. It’s probably no surprise to anyone that reads my blog or knows me, that I find myself particularly challenged with the more traditional ways that math is taught and learned, and how that fits into a larger picture of the ways in which we would like to see our students use math to further themselves and use it in their daily lives. In many ways, it struck me that this math meeting was like a church revival – true believers who enjoy the company of each other to reinforce and engage themselves in conversation about their excitement and belief in their faith as well as ways to improve the way they share it with their community. In a sense, the ending of the conference felt like a benediction – go forth and do good work and keep the faith. Go forth to engender in your students a knowledge of and passion of mathematically thinking.

But here is where I have a quandary. Since anyone that knows me knows that I teach math and science, I am often greeted with an apologies from people saying something like “I’m not very good at math” or “I really didn’t like math in school” much the same as someone who hasn’t been attending church might apologize to a religious friend saying I haven’t really followed through on my faith. I may be a blasphemer in saying this, but I don’t think that morality comes from just attending church or being part of a organized religion anymore that I think mathematical thinking comes solely from the traditional scope, sequence and pedagogy of math problems and content. I was raised Catholic, and if you didn’t go to confession, you felt guilty because you didn’t own up to God about your sins. In much the same way, if you did not do well in math there is a stigma of not being a mathematician, or somehow being viewed as religiously or mathematically unworthy.

( sidebar of a funny story that is relevant – was at a conference a few years ago when a mathematician about this issue shared a story of talking to a friend who was saying that they had taken German three times and failed. The person said dejectedly “there is no way that my brain could ever learn the German language”. Their friend responded “ it’s a good thing you weren’t born in Germany, then!”. Language skills and mathematical reasoning are much the same – if they are part of our culture and we are immersed in them fully, everyone can learn it. Perhaps not all equally, but certainly functionally.)

I fundamentally believe that part of being human is a brain that is mathematical. When a quarterback looks down the field to find an open receiver, they do some incredible mathematics – gauge the speed of their receiver, extrapolate what location they will be at at the right time, determine the space between that person and a defender, throw a ball with the correct arch and speed to put it in their hands accurately – and all of this done in the blink of an eye – if you had to program that mathematically, it would be incredibly complex – but isn’t that the point? They’re doing this mathematics instinctively but somehow it’s not considered ‘real’ math. After all, who says, “Tom Brady is a incredible mathematician!”

I am not trying to make the case that we should not be including mathematics education for all students in school. What I am wondering, is what that scope, sequence, pedagogy and assessment should be like and how white might at least be more inclusive to the different ways that math thinking can be both exhibited and build on success for students.

At a wonderful session I attended by Robert Kaplinsky http://robertkaplinsky.com/ he highlighted some the important ideas that come from the common core about mathematics education. The first was that proper mathematics education needs to stand on three legs equally:
* students must be fluent in operational procedures,
* students must demonstrate understanding of mathematical concepts and what they mean, and
* students must be able to apply mathematical concepts to new situations so that they can demonstrate true fluency with it.

Think of it this way: we wouldn’t teach a world language class and only test vocabulary and sentence structure – we want students to be able to explain the language, perhaps even asking them to compare and contrast the similarities to other languages. And we would want students to be able to apply the language – have a conversation, visit a country that uses that language predominantly and feel comfortable in it, be able to read and that language for meaning and pleasure.

A math teacher I knew a few years ago was talking to some higher level math students and he admitted to the students that most of mathematics education is designed to teach students to be calculators – to memorize and execute specific mathematical operations to solve specific problems. He admitted that the goal was not to make them mathematicians. The students were offended and asked why wouldn’t we design curriculum to help them be better mathematicians, and not just computers, and his response was “because you can’t handle it”. I fundamentally believe that no more than we would teach a musical instrument by having students in isolation learn scales and note positions, but never perform, or learn the rules of grammar and vocabulary and never write beyond simple prompts, we need to rethink math curriculum so that it gives students not just a chance to understand the operations and procedures that are so important, but also to put their knowledge into practice – to walk the walk, and talk the talk of true mathematicians.

I fundamentally believe all students can create art, can writes elegant creative essays, can find wonder and discover important ideas about our physical universe and can see the world as a mathematician. Perhaps they can’t do this all equally – not everyone gets to be or wants to be the quarterback. But the idea of creating mathematicians in skill, understanding, and application challenges me to keep working on the curriculum I design and the experiences that my students have in my class.

Still left unanswered in this post, is a conversation about standardized tests like the SAT. Another day…

The slides from my presentation on some of the ways I’ve tried to design relevant, rigorous and engaging curricula are in my blog post previous to this is a PDF.

Religion and faith and mathematics are a tricky business – we want everyone to appreciate, embrace and apply the wonders we see unfolded from our higher view. The real challenge is to find ways to make that happen in the lives of everyone, regardless of their leanings, capabilities and dispositions.

This post is already gotten long, and I could rant on some more, but it was the beginning of my unpacking of my thinking from the conference…my work and thinking is “To Be Continued…”