Mark Hines EdTech Blog

I gave a talk at the fall HAIS conference on the topic of Online learning and teens. I have attached the pdf version of the keynote I gave. I used a lot of video for the use of telling the story through case studies. Most of the graphics on the slides link to video stories that set the context for how teens learn with online media.

One aside – I tried the iphone app Keynote remote – it was marvelous – love it!
http://mhines.edublogs.org/files/2009/10/online-learning-and-teens.pdf

A post I recently added to our ETEC Ning on the topic of Christensen/Horn’s “Disrupting Class” and our upcoming book club on it:

As some of you know, I have been working the past year and a half with a grant through the Hawaii community foundation titled “schools of the future”. As a part of that, we have been sharing books that we felt were provocative and discussing the need for education to transform. The foundational book for us was Tony Wagner’s “the global achievement gap). Shortly after reading that, we found disrupting class and found a great source for explaining how and why incremental change for schools was not going to be enough. Since then, I’ve had a chance to both hear and talk a bit with Michael Horn about the book, seen him in a public forum on the debate about bricks and mortar at this year’s NECC and seeing the ideas percolate through at least some of the conversations in forums like the future of education.
Scott McLeod (Dangerously Irrelevant) gave a great updated view of this at NECC here

so where do I sit on this? I have come to believe that Christensen is really correct about the forces that are going to shape the relevance of education. For those of you that are not familiar with what has happened with Florida virtual school’s, with the national movement from K12.org, and others, they are providing a new model for education that is beginning to be felt by schools. Locally, Hawaii technology Academy (HTA) is showing this disruptive potential already. I really believe schools aren’t ready and struggle with students who wish to be in a different environment than traditional school.
One of the goals we set for the schools of the future grant (kudos Elizabeth Park, Mike Travis, Lisa Waters for leading their schools to successful grant proposals) was for schools that were looking at substantive change, not just dressing up traditional school. The big debate at NECC this year was whether the bricks and mortar of schools were still viable, or needed a complete reworking.
Day 2 had a public forum debate — was provocative, passionate and showed some insight into the promise and peril schools face (Michael Horn was on the panel as was Gary Stager and Cheryl Lemke). Tape video archive here.
So I do believe traditional K-12 education is in peril — both because of its inability to adapt to a new world, and because there are forces in learning that it has not been able to address. I believe to survive school must become a learning environment that utilizes what we know about learning and technology. Homeschoolers have known this for a long time — if you start by understanding the child, build rich powerful learning around their interests, use the community, mentors and experts to support their learning goals, then you end up with a powerful experience. For most of our students today, school is still just “one thing after another” 5, 6 or seven classes a day of disconnected information with little opportunity for students to explore their own interests, or event input. Recent study of classroom interaction in schools showed that in a typical day student has rare few minutes of opportunity to express their own thinking — how can that still be happening with what we know about how the brain works, and how knowledge is constructed?
so what will education be like, or more to the point what should it be like? Using the best that technology can offer to individualize and diversified learning, in using the bricks and mortar as a learning center where learners of all ages come together to work in a community under the guidance of learning experts has promise and has already been implemented in charter reform efforts with great success.
Caveat — if you didn’t see the recent article about the Microsoft school of the future failure, it is worth looking at as an example of putting the wrong things in place in the wrong order. ESchool news had an article on this recently here.

NECC Summary

This document is the summary report for this year’s conference. Thinking about what’s most readable, I decided to do a little differently. I’ll summarize all five days in a paragraph or two here, and then if you wish you can look for the detailed notes, which are more “bullet style” but have specific tools and links as well as as many comments as I could cram in while I was typing with my laptop and tweeting. Caveat emptor!
After note — for the sake of readability, I broken down each post by day — that way the documents won’t be too far apart from the information that refers to them.

Saturday June 27

The morning was a session with Robert Craven from Orange County Florida with the title “Construction Paper for the 21st Century: Google and Free Tools”. great session with really good planning and resources listed. We spent a good part of the time using tools in Google — particular Google docs. For example we made a survey, and then were able to take it and collect data — including on mobile devices like my iPhone.
We spend time using the collaborative features, and talked about the way these can be used in the classroom.
We spent the second half of the session talking about other free and open tools he has a wonderful list of these on his website but a few of the ones in particular that he drew attention to were thinkature, Voicethread (probably the cool thing here that I learned was how easy it was to post a voice comment using a cell phone — this was very cool!), and more.
http://sites.google.com/site/digitalroberto/Home
One of the things you’ll find on his site, are screen cast videos of many of the tasks needed to accomplish the activities. This resource is a great one and I appreciate the work Robert took the This time to build a useful library for interested teachers.

The afternoon session was with Vicki Davis with the title “cell phones for classrooms, calendars, and life management”.
The best part of the session was our first hour or so was spent talking more about philosophy and policy — everything from legal precedent for students that do inappropriate things, to a conversation with the group attending about their current school philosophy and where we need to go. She showed us a video that the George Lucas foundation made about her and her students here:
http://www.edutopia.org/digital-generation-teachers-vicki-davis

nice idea — she had us role-play a few true court cases (student pulls down teachers pants, films and posts on you tube) it gave us a chance to get to know each other, weigh in on our thinking, and be active about this material. Nice modeling of her work.

great resource to help with policy — book by lisa guerin “smart policies for workplace technologies” definitely worth giving to help consider some of these devices and how we can correctly articulate expectations to staff students and parents.

She then spent time developing a theoretical model for the types of activities that cell phones can support, and the point at which they become viable either because enough students have them, the cost is no longer prohibitive, and they take the place of another device more powerfully.

one of the cool things that we did at the end was take a list of cell phone technologies and use their mobile devices in small groups, then show them to the rest of the participants. For instance, myself and my partner Adam took pictures on our mobile devices (iPhone, Blackberry) and e-mailed it to our Ning site. this works as well with video! The power of this can’t be missed stated — students in the fields, could be taking pictures and posting directly from their phones to a community learning site to build a database of images, documentation.

in the “you heard it here first” category, she mentioned that one of the new trends we’ll should be looking at is QR codes. These have the ability to embed information that mobile devices can scan and playback. She feels (correctly so I believe) that we are going to see these become embedded in many objects soon.

She keeps an excellent set of resources here:
http://coolcatteacher.blogspot.com/

Her website for the presentation is:
http://celled.wikispaces.com/

I did grab the text version of the back channel and posted with this blog as well.

all the notes are located
http://sites.google.com/site/necc2009test/documents-from-necc2009
or here

At the Honolulu Board of realtors meeting on June 5, we had the chance to hear Payton Dobbs, who leads Googles effort in e-commerce. he shared seven key ideas emerging for anyone involved in thinking about technology overlays with their development. There is nothing here that is terribly groundbreaking, but what is significant is someone as high up in Google really identifying the importance of these things — they are all relevant to our mission education and are worth taking to heart:

mobile Internet will explode — gave lots of relevant examples of how cell phones and smart phones are becoming the primary way by which people use and learn with the Internet. Good example — Apple iPhone 60% of the phone use is for not making phone calls. Lots of other examples of 3G growth, preponderance of mobile phones in populated areas like India, China, Japan, etc. Japanese teens spend two hours a day on their mobile phones — not talking. Examples of people authoring books entirely in the cell phone.

Maps are a key interface — again, give examples of how tools like Google Earth have changed the way people view the world. This is not a huge surprise to me (Mark) since my interest in tools like GIS have been around for a decade. What is interesting to me, is that we’ve skipped over GIFs as a tool and gone straight to rich intuitive tools like maps on the iPhone, Google Earth on the Internet to understand the world. A good example of this is the number of students we see in the Weinberg Tech Plaza that spend part of the day using Google Earth to look for surf spots, find their friends, and take tours of places they have not been. The new features in iPhoto for geo-tagging are another example of this becoming more prevalent.
The divide between the web and desktops will this appear. This is essentially the argument for cloud computing and there is no doubt that we are seeing the emergence of tools like smart phones and networks. He made the case that within a few years most people will ask that their data to be in the cloud, so they have access to contacts, documents, information matter where they are. Is the fact that our teachers cannot access their files from home another example of how we are disconnected from this movement?
Everything will connect — previously inanimate objects will now be connected. He gave us his example the significance of RFID as a technology. The fact that devices will become smart enough to know what they are how they are connected to other objects around them is an example of the way technology drives innovation. If our refrigerator knows that milk is spoiling, if our car knows conditions are unsafe, if objects in the supermarket know our likes and dislikes, it will greatly change the way you interact with the objects around us — and how they will interact with us!
The web will be more personal and social — his observation was that people were less and less distinguishing between online and face-to-face interaction. We are already seeing this with the school age generation who see talking to and using tools like text, avatars, as real conversation and relationship. Another example of this is using online interfaces for medical advice — something which used to be the purview of the doctor’s office has become a much more online experience and moving more that way. He advocated for all businesses (and schools?) To have a social area of this site to build a community that will bring conversation, creation, and commitment to those focused around that organization.
Internet will be the primary platform for media — we see lots of examples of this recently with releases of Hulu, YouTube, and Flickr, Picasa, etc. For me, personally, this begs the question of platform independence — when we are reaching the point that media including tools like Voicethread now, and potential video editing sites are just n the horizon, is the fact that right now the Macintosh is the weapon of choice for media development for most schools, a long-term reality for a short-term phenomena?
Going green is here to stay — he gave lots of examples of Google’s own efforts to be green — solar generation test projects that are fully online, electric car hybrids being developed, and just the nature of the need for us to all live within their means that the earth gives us. I think the example of Hawaii preparatory Academy’s new energy lab as a model in this venue — I am excited for what it will mean when it will become a model for schools to consider how to best utilize the resources around them.

he finished with the quote below — recognizing that for many in businesses and schools that these changes will not be easy or comfortable. They are however, the reality we are looking into and we disregard any of these to our own peril.
. Catherine the great –
“there is a great wind blowing and will either cause imagination or a headache “

discuss…

this is the second part of my visit to the Metropolitan school in Providence Rhode Island.
The earlier notes are published in the blog under part one…

lunch with some of the teachers
a tour by Alicia
some sitdown time with some of the students
in participation in a student exhibition as part of their judging panel
– I’ll try to get this post tomorrow

Nancy brought me to one of the building lunchroom’s — I should explain that there are four main buildings on campus and Senate each of the four corners of the property beaches labeled liberty, justice, unity when I can’t remember the fourth of a speech building holds something on the order of eight advisories — two for each grade level.
So I have lunch in one of these buildings with some teachers. we talked about the challenge of the environment — some of the teachers were advisers, a few were LTIs which I think students with learning something integrators — in a sense they’re specialists that help shepherd the process and actress resources for students and advisers. one of the teachers I spoke to, Dennis, was very willing to share the challenge is that his experience has — he had been a traditional teacher in Florida — green biology was his degree work, and he had been teaching Marine science, biology, and environmental science in Florida.
He came up to Rhode Island he was looking for a new environment to teach — and so had to transition to this new paradigm. We talked a bit about the challenge and he was very positive about the adjustment and in going from teaching a single subject, to being a generalist in his advisory role. (This was his second year at the school). The agreed with many of the things that Nancy had told me about the need for organization, the chaos of day-to-day learning (it’s messy), and the truly wonderful pleasure of seeing every student in your advisory being engaged in real work.
If I remember more, I’ll add here about my lunch conversations… I didn’t take notes here because I was eating and talking at the same time
after lunch, I joined the tour with a group of about 15 students from Keene State College in New Hampshire — liberal arts majors they look so young, they look like the students!
The tour was led by a senior — Alicia and we looked at the different buildings and campus including the media Center and the wellness Center. she was another example of a great, highly engaged students. Her brother goes to a more traditional school and I asked her about how that difference plays out and she admitted theft there are days of very different.
One of the interesting parts of the tour, was the media Center which is pretty much managed by a single individual — Brian Mills — he is a daunting task of managing performance space, and their media Center which includes a studio, editing equipment, audio equipment, etc. He clearly has a lot of work — even though he doesn’t have an advisory he works long days and nights to maintain all the resources needed (will see an example of that at the two o’clock exhibition that we attended)

after the tour we were able to sit down with two students — hope and allysa so that we could ask them about their experiences at school. Hope was a senior who had spent the last three years at the New England aquarium working as a exhibit guide, a behind the scenes exhibit curator, and in the medical area working with animals. Her goal was veterinary science. I think she also may have been interested in marine biology as a secondary topic.
Alyssa was new to the school (three months) — she had spent the last couple of years volunteering at a therapeutic writing center — this was before she came to the school. The reason her parents applied her, was the opportunity for her to more fully be involved in the writing Center is a part of her curriculum — and it was clear she was highly motivated by her commitment and her love of working at the center. She admitted that they had become so dependent on her during her internship at if she wanted to switch to a different internship he would probably affect their program adversely. If one of the questions we asked him the students was anything that they would like to see that the program doesn’t have, and a couple of students venture that they’d like a little more rigor in their mathematics and science. I remember in talking to Dennis about Clay Christensen and it struck me that the possibility of using well-designed online learning modules might well fill in some of this gap that falls outside of their internship and advisory experiences in school
what was striking about all the students that we spoke to was their sense of commitment, ownership,

I next attended an exhibition of work from an 11th grade student (Angie). there were about 20 people in the room that she presented her work to and she had about 1 1/2 hours to do this. The group included students, other teachers, her parents, and some members from the community including her mentor. Essentially, at the end of each stage of learning, the students present an exhibition — this was her third quarter exhibition of learning. And this was the highlight of her work
so the highlights of exhibitions — how did the student meet the goals in their learning plan?
How could a student go deeper?
We were give in a form to comment on the quality of the presentation on evidence of learning
there were five A’s that we were asked to comment on:
authenticity
active learning
academic rigor
adult relationships
assessment

for her learning plan, she started by talking about her 75 page autobiography that is due for all students when they graduate. At this point, she has 30 pages completed to date (keep in mind this is due for her in a year and a half.)
She she did a facing history Project and she talked about how she had worked at speaking at a conference regional CES (? This is what my notes say the conference was called) with her mentor, who is a college professor.
In working with her mentor, she worked with teacher development programs, and looked at how she created a product for looking at under served children in the community
for quantitative reasoning she did comparisons of To student teacher is then look numerically at why one was a better candidate than another
for reading she gave examples of some of the books she had read the power of ideas, one person at a time learning goals,

There was a lot of conversation about how they prepare students for college. In particular, they made a point of talking about how they worked on creating a great profile that was more in lines that colleges want to see. Essentially they wanted to get this right.

Back to Angie -in her mentorship she worked with the principal read the evaluations, talk to students, use the observation tools for teacher professional growth. She looked at their reflections, their notes, is very powerful — she was able to see how people write in improving what they do.
Her goal is to do more administrative professional development for teachers after college.
Then, she showed us her project-the video archive of exhibition work from the MET
the purpose was to help newer teachers see what a good quality project looks like. Also, it’s possible to use in class with incoming students and with professional development to help both students and teachers develop a more refined sense of what an exhibition should look like. (Mark’s note to himself — got to read Alfie Cohen’s work on homework)
for her video project need to see the artifacts in the documents to understand what’s happening.
to accomplish this project, she taught herself Final Cut Pro in the use of all the equipment (cameras, microphones, audio interface, etc.) — impressive! She also had to spend many hours entity, as she did to camera shots to show both with the student is doing and a larger view of how the audience plays a role in the exhibition.
All in all a wonderful example of powerful and directed exhibition of quality work that wrapped around self designed and implemented projects that are real and effective.

I have also posted some pdf of school documents here:

Summary of my visit to Francis Parker Essential school in Devins, Mass
April 7, 2009

My point of contact was Rebecca Kane
when we first met, she explained some of the general philosophy of the school:
juniors and seniors spend 60 hours getting back to school (school service project work)
they also are required to do senior seminar at Spanish is their fifth class
they spend time in the community
their schedule has three divisions: 7-8, 9-10, 11-12. These are called division one, two, three
there is an academic Dean who works on the schedule for the kids — the academic Dean works extensively with Division III students this is where they have their senior project
students need a portfolio for graduation and need to fill this.
For their transcripts for college, they still don’t put grade point averages or grades — it is all narrative
their experience has been that colleges now have “traditional” and “nontraditional” piles
for the Division III class the students spend an hour six times a day
for the Division I and II classes, students spend two hours in interdisciplinary classes three times per day
it talked about gateways into division two research projects
learning habits and learning how to learn and creating independent work is if the goal here
not a focus on facts, but knowing how to apply knowledge is a universal conversation on campus
I observed a Division III class on Shakespeare with Josie
why do they allow this? It allows students to fill up their portfolios with more individualized/teacher choice courses, and also to get exposure to a more college like disciplinary experience.
The students were talking in the class about abject jealousy (MacBeth)
Josie’s class felt more like a seminar — 13 students in a roundtable format with heavily dogeared and annotated text of Shakespeare talking about themes within the text and the readings.
Marks note-what are teacher and student roles here? students are the ones who are requested to create, express, interpret the work
student makes a comment about a blog when students mentioned that weapon is a broadsword and not a dagger — it is clear the students have spent much outside of time working on building their knowledge for this conversation
students asking questions appears about rationale choices they’ve made in their descriptions
interesting point: for the hour that I observed percent of student talking 85% percent the teacher talking 15% in the process of 20 minutes each student has at least a few minutes to share and demonstrate their understanding in their ideas about the current reading – all students are engaged and involved – leaning forward
interesting: sign on the board — post your ideas on the blog!
yet still, paper here (text, original media, readers, etc.)

next I visited a division to math/science class
this class was a little more traditional, and the teacher mentioned that they do something called in class content assessment (ICCA). in other words they do in class testing — although they do not post grades for the work students do externally. In this particular class that I observed, the science part were talking about simple machines, and the math were measuring heights using tools that they would later develop in the semester to look at scale
today’s lesson was really the “hook”-the teachers were
the activity was to find how tall objects were given some simple guidelines about measurement (cannot directly measure, must come up with a strategy, must be able to explain your method to class reasonably)
a few things I saw — students were allowed to bring in food and gum into the class and seemed respectful of this — clean up after themselves, etc.
it did seem that in the math and science integrated class the activities were much more teacher led, not student driven. There was on the other hand, a built-in expectation that students were going to try things potentially fail and compare what methods worked and what didn’t. The teacher did not give specific instructions on how to do the activities at hand.
The two advisers go between the groups discussing the methods to see what they did.
Students were given a challenge I asked a student as we are walking down the hall what do you think of this process of learning? His answer: “hard as hell!”
Talked to Nathan (teacher) about the school planning conditions for this I talked to both teachers about planning time and how they hand off curricula etc. They stressed how important the long planning time was to develop coherence in their curricula
class conversations on the differing ways they measured interesting process to draw how the students what they know and what they need to know to solve the problem better
Later, I was allowed to talk to a student — Paul I had met him earlier in the Shakespeare class
I found him confident, he was an artist who would’ve looked ordinary in our campus in the theater department.
The senior project he chose was on tribal mystics
some of the things that he observed he feels ready to learn anywhere and anyhow — not worried about what he might’ve missed in a universal curriculum, as he feels prepared to move forward
wishes they’d spent more money on arts, as that is not one of the main focuses of the school
he said from his experience 50% of the work they do on campus’s revision and reflection that this is part of their process and everything they do
he felt the feedback is part of their process that is significant — he has friends in college and in other schools and are frustrated by work that they submit and then they never get an opportunity to receive feedback on the status — a frustrating thought
College for the students at his school he feels that they don’t have problems because being an independent learner is something that they’ve been asked to do since they came to the school
I had lunch with one of the teachers-Laura she was a Division I well-being teacher and Nathan who I observed in the division to math class we talked a bit about the advisories, and how they are so powerful. It is often like our homeroom structure at mid-Pacific, where the students are with the teacher for the four years at the school meet with them every day at the beginning for 10 minutes and at the end for 10 minutes and once a week for an hour to do an extended activity. It was noticeable, that their culture for their homeroom students was much more involved than ours — they related stories of taking their students out to field trips, planning home visits where the cost or did arts and crafts, much more of a family feeling that I found most of our homes. Not sure if this is cultural and they just managed to convert what can be a mundane process into something much more social, but it was powerful to see that this really works for them
the essential structure of their school is in the documents that I have PDF, but in a nutshell:
grade 7 and eight — students attend a two-hour math science integrated lesson (22 students to team teachers), students then attended a two-hour social studies and language arts integrated lesson (the same structure), there is lunch, and then they have a two-hour Spanish and health and well-being integrated class
notice here, there is no differentiated groupings — all students take the exact same classes it is homogeneous — and purposely so
Grades nine and 10 — same as above
grades 11 and 12 – students now have six one-hour blocks in the same schedule, or they can take a more “elective” experience — Shakespeare, AP biology, etc.
moving from division to division is based on presentation of work — an exhibition
these are called gateways and they literally are what allow students to move from one to the other
one of the lines about their assessment — “students can gateway from one division to the next through successful completion of a Gateway portfolio. Students Gateway one domain at a time. It is entirely possible for students to be in different divisions for different domains.”
So what’s my general impressions of the school?
Still an amazing environment that is student centered, as easily identifiable rigor, relevance, and relationship. This is a school that most teachers would feel more comfortable in, as they still saw a traditional relationship and schedule, content, and day. What is very different are some notable things:
a teacher’s typical day is a two-hour block of team teaching 24 kids, another two hour block team teaching 24 kids, and a two-hour block for planning and curriculum development. This is a tremendous difference from our current way of working with teachers, students, and scheduled
the catch is what you need to give up in order to accomplish this — all students take the same contents for the first four years, there is only one language, there are no “specials” — art, theater, religion, technology…these things are all embedded in the 3 domains vast are defined in division one and two.
Highly recommend you take a look at the school documents in PDF format – they are posted on the following link
http://mpifuturefacing.wetpaint.com/page/Francis+Parker+Essential+School

I am giving a presentation on the topic: “Shrink Wrap and Shrinking Budgets: Open and freeware in Education” – the goal is to share both client and cloud solutions that can augment or even replace the tools we traditionally think of as “need to buy”.

The PDf version of the presentation is here – all the software has link in the document. I also created a del.icio.us site with links to all the software here: http://delicious.com/open_free4ed
hvln-open-source –

Microsoft Future School Summit day 2
(All of the presentations (powerpoints, etc) are available on the conference website:
http://sofsummit.com)

Also – don’t forget that I maintain a delicious site – all conference sites I tagged with sofsummit

Breakfast – met Mari who works with FinPol – She is working with SRI to develop an architecture for immersive virtual worlds for the Finnish government. Diana Oshiro spoke with her sum is well to try and find a connection for the elearning hawaii initiative

Keynote: Tony Wagner
Clay Parker – need to think and frame good questions – can get employees to learn new knowledge, but communications and thinking are critical

elite private school head “why is it the longer students are in my school, the less curious they are?”
tony describes what his walks into classrooms show pretty consistently
ex – 18 classes in three days – only one in 18 was student challenged in a way that college prep
example – AP chem class students following lab – students confused by incorrect result – waiting for teacher – “what is you hypothesis about what is going wrong?” students were not even sure what he meant
Jonathan King – MIT molecular scientist – how are kids prepared? Intro class – best and brightest – microscope “tell me what you see?” – students “What should I be looking for?” students are programmed to know what the answer is, not determine it from their experience
about the only thing that educators and work agrees – this generation lacks work ethic – tony’s question “to what extent is this true” – tony’s experiences – differently motivated – this gen is habituated on the internet – they are one the web all the time, collaborating, sharing
slides show stats on teenage use – interest driven self directed learning and self expression
surveys show students want to make a difference and do something worthwhile
tony gives example of 22 yd old google employee – driven to make a difference

Action Items for leaders: Test for competencies, not just coverage – we test for content standards we SHOULD test for performance standards (example knowing a term vs use it in context)
tony gives examples of performance based tests – PISA, CWRA, iSkills
tony uses the finnish examples – one of the reforms they did – schlecter – involved in their education
finnish teacher moved from assembly line to knowledge worker
tony advocates making the process transparent – video taping performance (like sports and performing arts)
need R&D money in education – where is this for us? We need to incent the risk takers in education (like skunk works)

feedback – need to pay teachers like knowledge workers – finland – high status – not through pay, but working conditions – only 1 in 9 education college applicants is accepted to Finnish schools of ed
respect, opportunities,
Question from columbia – reality of schools way behind actually completely different place – for a country like theirs , what do they do with the constraints they have – kids are not even coming to school with breakfast – huge obstacles, they have computers and connectivity, but students are coming from poverty…what to do…tony – lived in mexico for a year – poverty is an impediment – policy makers are still a problem – they want schools to be like they remembered – the social norm
australia – question – obsession with testing – governments and universities determine what kids need to to in order to advance, what is your opinion of how gov and univ should
toy – I believe in accountability “having the wrong yardstick is worse than having one at all”
finland has a few high standards – math standards k-12 10 pages. They test samples to look at the system, not the whole.
what is the yardstick – that which gets measured gets taught
tony gives pisa as example – open ended questions are 70% of the assessment – not cheap – takes longer to build and test – is this a priority
parents& schools – afraid of risk and want to keep schools the same for fear of failure…
admin – first job is to create urgency – if people understand what’s at stake they will be
Tony “I see deeply bored children in school after school – we need to create an urgency about this!”
example of teacher using great tools – but still irrelevant to students “Why do we need to learn this” – never addressed
executives – asking really good questions is the kernel – tony says that technology won’t teach that – but socrates understood…he likes technology but as a support tool not as the tool
mexico teacher – not about technology, about getting kids involved in process

canada – namibia – the notion of transparency is interesting – video taping – are teachers willing to take part in this – how to share this. What if the students are doing the taping so it is more about recording what happened in class
tony – teachers should keep libraries of their teaching, video tape focus groups of students talking about their experiences use as feedback into the system
question – AP exams – and course – too burdened with facts – 20th century
tonys website schoolchange.org

Breakout 1: Knowledge Hub: Reusing Open Educational Resources
http://khub.itesm.mx/
Monterey – university knowledge transfer
overview of monterrey tec
how are we using oer
strategies for transferring knowledge to society

Monterrey Tec – non-profit, private funded – 33 campuses plus a virtual university
1900 location based community ,earning centers (plus an additional 150 in the US)

moved from passive to active learning – moving from teacher center to student centered
(nice graphic on this slide)

Knowledge Hub – a search engine of open ed resources
Laura Ruiz, Victoria Patricia
what is it – strategy – knowledge transfer
identify best learning resources available so teachers can improve teaching practice (mark – is this somewhat like marcopolo does?)
model – universities feed into knowledge hub which then is shared with all kinds of organizations – ngo, schools, learning orgs, etc

no charge for Oer access
they use the Creative Commons license agreement

they believe in the wisdom of the group to elect the best resources – they rate these – flagged by metadata by experts they employ

even though they didn’t start with this, they found that by teachers commenting and rating resources, they have fostered creativity.
how it works: collaborators determine good sites, these are archived, then accessible for folks

they discuss the benefits and they are much like what Michael Horn talked about…
started in March 08 with 300 profs who looked at content
now 10,000 good resources, 1500 have been adopted into courses.
both faculty and students very positive in their use of the knowledge hub

challenge – internet is too open – too many resources, professors need a means to identify good resource
example – they used instructional design ideas to make the specific content usable and containable

5000 hours of aligned consent for their site now.

specific sites for high school, entrepreneurial academy, middle school, etc
this idea of researching and vetting websites has a lot of power – ownership and
their structures lets them keep adding learning objects to adapt

knowledge transfer implies collaboration, engagement, accessibility –

she is inviting folks to work with them to help build the knowledge

Bruce Question – the ability to rank – still development – very important part – is it ongoing? are you done? their social community continues to share and rank
one of their folks works on metadata and scorm to put more information into the resources – research in action
roger – to what extent are teacher contributing content?
3 ways to add content – build a evaluator –
broad assimilation process – teachers have to get into hub – if missing a resource they need – acts as an informal training
question: how did you find the evaluators – she invited profs and post grads who mostly were interested in research, but they are opening it up. incentive – leaders of change within the system. Creating innovation by optional leadership, not mandating roles

Breakout 2: Teacher eportfolio – Victor McNair – Northern Ireland
“grab their hearts and their minds will follow you
first activity – write in a sentence an inspirational teacher and why they were that way

these are the sentences the group wrote:
“inspired a strong sense of curiosity about all things and gave me tools and structures to explore the curiosity”
“unrelenting passion for getting it right, always tied to a performance”
“great ideas in every defense”
“they told stories that lived!”
“He modeled the practice!”
“Gave me self-confidence”
“orchestrated the class with clear expectations and a good mix of individual and group work that was challenging — led to success”
“engage with enthusiasm and varied teaching methods”
“talked about relevant issues that I cared about”
“recognize my ability. Made learning fun. Rigorous standards.”
“She does what she believes — a great practitioner”
“knowledge, compassion, inspiring teaching methods, humanity”
“role modeling, applied skills, caring, feedback”
“she stimulated my curiosity”
“Patience, energy, commitment, enthusiasm. Never get tired of showing me how. Allowed me to ask silly questions”

northern ireland (this ties to Jimmy stewarts presentation yesterday
fair comment – all use ict, but not all use effectively

4 step process – a diverse and authentic evidence of teaching competence that has been the subject of reflection, synthesis and selection for a professional audience
collection
reflection
selection
presentation

(he admits right now he is in charge of this gateway – doesn’t feel they are ready for opening up the process)
teachers progression:
teacher ed…. induction..early pd….performance review staff dev…accredited courses…teacher leadership
the site:
http://pebbleweb.co.uk/

the developed principles for eportfolios
ownership of content by teacher
orgs can develop own software
process dependent
evidence media rich varied
competence based
grounded in pd

2 axes – is this mandatory or not? is this structure or not
are we looking for empirical evidence or inferential evidence?
sometimes the soft evidence is the strongest (comments, interviews, ) mark’s note: this is the quantitative vs the qualitative debate
“the story i am most interested with my teacher students is the conversations we have on their thinking after a lesson – tells me where they are, and my advice on where they need to go”
the empirical vs the inferential is a positivist (skinner) vs constructivist (Vygotsgy/Gardner)

trying to build consensus in eportfolio
how to build a an set of tools for teacher students and experienced teachers
26,000 teachers – 200 in pilot – change model for manage

one of the goals in eportfolio is showing the progression in teacher development over time – to build a body of work that demonstrates what the teacher has and is doing

what is the process?
reflection on practice – knowledge on learning , social science, and content knowledge
how do you apply the knowledge in the classroom
his observation – people who care about kids matter more than subject matter expertise (though it matters)
essentially – we go into the class with expectations, after a lesson what do we do to reflect “I learn most when I am having a cup of coffee with my colleagues” – YES!
how to help teachers reflect on experience from lesson implementation
he articulates a structure that looks like lesson study – you teach, you reflect, you redesign – what is the process to make this happen?
the de-compression is the richest part of the learning – how is this structured?
showed a teacher comment (video) – the portfolio exposes what you are doing and makes you look critically at your craft
shows us examples of eportfolios – one area is resources teachers have found useful to support thier learning – he makes the point that without reflection on these resources, you don’t know whether they have reflected on the items shown
he has web 2.0 comment feature here that allows commentary
right now only he has the rights to comment and converse with students – he is using this to guide their learning – he sees more interaction with others over time
there is a nugget of sharing here that the HAIS might be able to use for the SOTF grant

needs to see a longitudinal development – this will broaden the base of evidence that teachers show “this encourages people to think about this a holistic way”
mark’s note – if teachers were using this tool, would it lead to them adapting the behaviors to look at eportfolio for their ow students?

interesting discussion – will this lead to litigation issue? information to public?

Breakout 3: Anjlee Prakash
India – http://www.learninglinksindia.org/
education today
goal – 6000 model schools for 08-09
30% by gr 8 drop out! (over 100 million!)
education must be aligned to what we do in the future

their models for future schools
it literacy, integration, 1:1, global elearning

slide here has great detail on the differences
they have a great range of schools – poor rural and great private
her org is a non-profit that has the ability to work across the scope of this
3 big quest
is ict meeting ed obj
are tools align with curriculum
do they help locally and globally effective citizen

Model 1 – IT literacy (beginners) 2-5 computers in school
class size 40-50 chalk and talk
kids are coaxing teachers to start using tech – having great effect increasing demand
(reminiscent of the computer in the village model on TED.com from Sugata Mitra)

Model 2: Basic IT Integration 10-30 computers in a lab – (students do not have at home, but labs are open late)
she mentioned that india’s focus on exams – the teachers see the computers as tools that will help support this preparation
their content is in many languages (20 that are native plus 100 from outside)
BOOT model – corporations setting up computers for schools
BIG STAT – only 15% of schools in india have computers of any kind!

Model 3: IT Integration and Innovation
more pervasive access to tech – teachers using tech regularly in instruction

she showed a chart that mapped learning (retention, recall, grades, skill-subject wise) against the 4 models

Model 4: 1:1 technology
classmates intel machines
focus more on student centered learning

teachers/parents/students in this model are asking about pace, time and seat time
they are encouraging schools to not incrementally climb the ladder but leapfrog to the 1:1 model
research ongoing about the impact and adjustments need to support this

Model 5: Global eLearning
uses their education satellite anywhere anytime
online mentoring/ fully digital online
goal – 1000 school like this!

their development cycle – resources, then content and curriculum, then prof dev
she finds it is critical

models – need to be acceptable, adaptable,

“The vision must be followed by the venture. It is not enough to stare up the steps – we must step up the stairs.”
– Vance Havner

they use 60 hour of pd offered (required) for the ICT training (21 day module during break time) they get a 60 hr session for ict.

sustainability – not just getting into the classes – need to make sure used effectively

they are collecting data on attendance/drop out rate issue – she reports that the days the kids use the computers, they all go to school – the digital content is leveling the playing field and they feel this will drive up school attendance and matriculation

Lunch: Will Richardson and Andy Ross (FVS) – we spoke almost nonstop for now primarily a boat howl and the sets up and works in the Florida virtual school’s.
http://www.flvs.net/
Even though they have 10s of thousands of students in their system, grades 6-12 (adding k — five next year), only 600 or so are full time online students. The remainder are using FVS has a course replacement program for their face-to-face high school. Teachers in the FVS model work eight-hour days with a caseload of 125 students. Their system is only considered a success if students passed the class, and they only get funded based on the number of students to succeed. They have extremely high satisfaction ratings, and are continually working on product development. All of their profits go back into product development. The retention rate on a yearly basis is 97%. Their teachers work 12 months a year and earned vacation through hours cost, much like the business world. They currently have about 1% of Florida’s students in their system, and when asked, and he thought they might go as high as 5% but he feels hard pressed to see it getting more broadly accepted then that. most common course taken? Physical education. Biggest issue? Traditional schools lose funding when their students used this online service, and so they vie for the students even though they’re not supposed to discourage them from utilizing the service. They have started branching out from Florida their courses cost $400 for a year of course. Of course, the school that the student is attending must agree to accept the credits if a student takes one of your classes.
Mark’s note: here is an example of deferring out it into online space classes that may have more of a content versus competency focus. I asked Andy if you are seeing some schools evolve so that they use FVS as their basic skills requirement area, thus allowing them to focus on project-based learning more and their face-to-face time. he said he was aware of a few schools that were beginning to apply them all.
Will Richardson was concerned (as was I.) then not this was still a very traditional content driven model. And the admitted that there was some of them, but they do utilize Web 20 tools, but only within their system. It is a shame that these students are so close to being connected to the world, the privacy rights in Florida only allow them to share with other students in their own system. All in all a very interesting model.

Breakout 6: Korea elearning
pisa – scores 1st reading 2nd math 3rd science

inrfastructure – 5.5 students per pc

1/3 teachers trained annually
86%teacher use ict 99.6% use ict students
71% self-efficacy (OECD)

17 virtual academies

data and access and planning impressive – master plan I ‘96-’00 ..etc
current goal – lifelong learning society
they see the evolution in elearning design – diverse tools, changes to student centered, content is more individualized
e-lifelong learning society is a plan they are moving to
5 major policies:
improve quality of ed through elearning
develop human resources through tech
strengthen vocational and career ed
create regional integration through e-community
promote e-learning global partnerships

cyber home learning system – set up by keris
http://english.keris.or.kr/es_main/index.jsp
showed a 7 minute video that showed the system being used by a student to supplement her classwork – includes synchronous video elements

this was targeted to reduce the use of private education services – goal is to provide supplementary learning without charge – address urban vs rural access
aspects of the schools: 1:1 learning management, community support, customizable,
offered to gr 4-10 ss, math, sci, eng, korean plus additional service as need locally
scales to level needed, cyber teachers, system support
includes a lot of different activities and media – a really rich multimedia environment
LNMS supports 4 areas study support, academic, (slide went by too fast)etc
cyber teachers – manage learning – support the student activities
there is also diagnostic services (academic level and study habits) which than offers appropriate service for students
PLUS video real time for lecture and group meeting

utilization – since 2005 – 3 million
cyber teachers 60,000 parent tutors 4500, daily access 300,000!

Digital Text Book project
10 minute video
connects to natl knowledge db, lms, eval tools, authoring tool, connection of content owned by the natl institutions
video on – incorporates all the materials used in the past, plus electronic functions, animations, etc…

to what effect – a autonomous u-learning environment

bridge the learning gap whether location or disabilities
reduced cost of private education

3 stages
now: development
07-011 phase in
2013 – full phase in nationally

includes both synchronous and async assessment

Keris – has really pushed this effort
Bruce explained that cost and time for private schooling – they want to address this
secondly – teaching english had been a problem – written instead of spoken – this has enabled oral development….

final keynote
Bill Hill
goal – reading on screen instead of reading on paper
topic – the digital renaissance
gutenberg brought change
we are in the midst of a new change

we are building a new human network
the full effect may take 50 yrs, but we need to make changes now to be ready

the web browser is a reader – development needs to focus on this – need to improve the reading experience
eBooks –
“I have an amazon kindle – it is just about readable – but I wish it did more…plus I reading the tub…and dropped it in”

we are all homosapien v 1.0 – the original version shipped 130,00 yrs ago and there is no v 2.0 coming any time soon – hunter gather in our system – our responses are tied to our need for food and safety – the corners of our eyes are continually searching for movement. Webpages and documents that have flashing sidebars continually distract from the reading experience, since our instincts tell us to mind for flashing as it may be a sign of danger.
so any technology for reading needs to address the design of the reading system we have shipped with…

interesting – the fovea of the eye is best used at 9-13 pt font due to the way reading occurs physically – tied to the size of the image the fovea can process at arm length

he has a paper “The magic of Reading” – will be on the conference web site.
is blog is here:http://www.billhillsite.com/

interesting – two issues – scrolling bad Because as the eye scans text it is cognitive work to lose your place and retrace words you’ve already processed. It affects memory in a continuous stream of thought. flashing bad for the safety reason mentioned above.

reading while scrolling and flashing text completely throws off the visual design of human readability

bill hill’s “new rules”
repeal no fixed page, no sizes in pixels
need adaptive layout technology
large print., text to speech

bill uses his son as an example – never went to school – he taught himself to read – learned it from the computer (he is reading things like faust)

people who create intellectual property must be fairly paid for their work

talking about copyright and intellectual property “information is free” is not a democracy – it is anarchy

Bill does not trust wikipedia – I don’t agree completely with his distrust, but I agree with the idea of compensation for creators of content

Bill shares his new Digital Declaration of independence (see the slide)
We hold this truth to be self-evident: That every human has an equal and unalienable right to the means to create, distribute and consume information to realize their full potential for Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness – regardless of the country they live in, their gender, beliefs, racial origin, language or any impairments they may have.

common thought. but worth repeating – are we preparing learners for jobs that don’t exist for yet, using tech that isn’t invented for problems that we don’t know yet?

he related the story of when he bought his first sitar in 1971 and when he bought he most recent one this year – access, experts, communication, training all through the web…

Again all of the presentations are available on the conference website:
http://sofsummit.com

Self-forming groups and learning communities

I just watched the TED lecture by Sugata Mitra about his studies of how primary children teach themselves – what a wonderful study and what it says about learning. He looked at 6-13 year old kids in remote Indian villages. He set up a single computer and left it with no instructions, no monitoring, no specified outcomes. Within minutes, the kids were teaching themselves and each other english, how to access new information, applying their understanding to look at the world in new ways. His bottom line – primary education can happen in self-forming groups when educational technology is present. It does not have to happen top down.

He broke his findings down to 4 outcomes:

Remoteness affects the quality of education
Educational technology should be introduced into remote areas first, not wealthy areas for greatest impact
Values are acquired. Discipline and Dogma are imposed.
Learning is a self-organizing system.

This in itself is a powerful idea whether you are talking about primary ed, or trying to look at change in systems by using community. My area of interest is educational communities, and how technology can make powerful learning communities shape change. If Sugata is right (and I believe he is), than we need to continually find ways to build stronger educational communities in primary and secondary education. The nature of web 2.0 for most educators is still in its infancy – although our students have found the social nature of learning through the web, we still have not fully seen the same adoption in education. The challenge is how to get there.
How many teachers build and share knowledge about their passion (education) compared to their students?

One other thought – Negroponte’s OLPC program has more merit than ever when you look at what Sugata’s research shows happens when kids are given access to technology. It is a shame that there was so much energy put into why it wouldn’t work when studies like this show how powerful well designed rugged educational technology can be in the hands of any learners.

Here is his video:

A few pics from my phone of students in our building this am

This is more than not how multi- modal social learning looks here…