Bill Strickland: A Man Who Changes the World with his Vision

Bill Strickland is a man who has a vision. He grew up in Pittsburgh in a rough part of the city. He learned about building things with clay in high school and hasn't stopped building since.

He has spent his life building schools, facilities and lives for inner-city kids and parents. He believes that people will respond to respect. He creates an environment for kids filled with sunlight and flowers to reflect hope and human possibility.
He says that "it is often the way that you think about people that determines their behavior."

It is difficult for me to explain Strickland's story so it is best for you to just watch this 35-minute TED Talks presentation.



I used to teach drop-out recovery in East Los Angeles and this strikes a deeply-seated chord in my heart. What is your reaction?

Z

Millenials: They Have Different Learning Needs

 

drzreflects.com                   

In the UNI workshop on our Liberal Arts Core, I mentioned the need for educators to consider our students' needs and address them - not the other way around. 

 At UNI the average undergraduate student is 21 years old. This places this audience right in the middle of the Millennial Generation. 

Don Tapscott completed $4 million worth of research into the millennial generation and shared his results in his book, Grown Up Digital.   Many of the attendees of this workshop asked me for the citation so I am placing it on here on my blog.  This is a quick and easy post and I will write more in-depth  at a later date, but here are some links to his books and YouTube videos.

Books:

• Growing Up Digital (1999)
• Grown Up Digital (2008)

Videos:

• Don Tapscott: Growing Up Digital (26:43)

I will be adding additional resources in the near future.

What is your opinion about the needs of millennials?  Is it a valid issue or should we ignore it and make our students learn how to adapt to our teaching styles?

Can you add additional resources in your comment?  Click Comments link below.
photo:amazon.com

Teacher Education: USING technology is Not Enough, MODEL it.

How do teacher educators use technology?

Many of faculty use the BlackBoard content management system for posting grades, emailing their students, providing copies of their PowerPoint presentations and provide assignment pages for students to better understand what is expected in class.

They are USING technology but how are they updating their students' (future teachers) ideas about what learning opportunities can be made possible using technology? How will these future teachers teach differently than they would have because of this technology application? 

The Apple Classroom of Tomorrow research yielded the 5 Stages of Teaching with Technology. These 5 stages include:

1. Entry - Teachers learn to use a new technology.
2. Adoption - Teachers use technology to support traditional instruction.
3. Adaptation - Teachers integrate new technology into traditional classroom practice.
4. Appropriation - Teachers focus on cooperative, project-based and interdisciplinary work - incorporating technology as needed and one of many tools.
5. Invention - Teachers discover new uses for technology tools and allow student to select between the tools.

The applications listed above fit into the Adoption mode of these 5 stages. This does not foster change. We MUST look beyond adopting technology into our curricula. We need to MODEL using technology to provide participatory learning activities in our classes. This requires at working at least at the Adaptation level.

I recently shared a social media video, Social Media Revolution 2, with my colleagues. That email was the inspiration of this posting. (I will specifically address this video in a later posting.) It shares the dramatic changes that social media is creating in our world and underlines how we need to integrate social media into our educational curriculum. 
One of my colleagues suggested that CMS programs like Blackboard will allow us to "mimic some social media but have the advantage of a controlled environment." This is true. Blackboard provides chatrooms, areas for discussion and places to post podcasts or other links to the web. But are they being used in ways that foster student-centered learning? Will their teacher candidates use these learning experiences as a model for creating stimulating activities for the future students?

One of my colleagues pointed out that some people JUST MODEL technology and never integrate the technology into the teaching/learning process.

The most important aspect of using technology in teacher education is modeling new methods for learning that will mold the teacher candidates' perspective on teaching.
What do you think?

Z

photo: flickr.com/GoodImages

Is Teacher Education Addressing the Needs of Future Teachers?

How do we effect change in our schools if our Teacher Education programs just keep doing more of the same? We talk about changing the learning environments of our schools, but where is the paradigm changing in our Teacher Education institutions?  A new set of standards (INTASC) are being released to guide teacher education programs, but will it make difference?

Teachers tend to teach the way they were taught. Learning experiences will have a greater effect on a teacher's teaching style than all the textbooks in the world. We can't fully appreciate a different learning experience unless we personally experience that experience. New teachers won't teach differently in their classrooms unless they have learned in a different manner and found it to be a positive experience. In short, we won't see change in our schools until we change how we prepare new teachers.

Last week I attended the School Administrators of Iowa (SAI) conference in Des Moines as a representative of our Iowa Technology and Education Connection (ITEC) organization.  I spoke with scores of administrators who told me that they are in the process of exploring and/or implementing a  1-to-1 computer learning environment. When I asked them how they were going to change their curriculum and pedagogical strategies so that the technology-enriched environment would actually make a change in how their students learned, most of them chuckled and said "We're still trying to figure that out."

Technology doesn't make the difference.  It provides the opportunities for education to be different. It is truly the teaching/learning strategies that make the difference.  But if we haven't defined the teachers' knowledge, skills and attitudes that are needed to successfully support a different technology-enriched learning environment, how can we provide a preservice teaching program to address these needs?

A Teacher Education program needs to identify what skills and tools need to be mastered to effectively work in a 1-to-1 learning environment and then they need to teach/use those methods in the classes they teach.  It's as simple as that.

I made a drastic change in the way I taught my Emerging Instructional Technology course this summer.  I have spoken on it at ISTE '10, but haven't blogged on it yet. It changed the way I plan to teach all of my courses and such an insight into how learning can be different is something that all teacher education professors should acquire.

This posting is part of the ongoing self-inquiry I am going through to become a better teacher. You might remember my first posting, How Do I Move to an Inquiry-Based Form of Teaching/Learning?

What are your ideas about this?  Do you know a source for finding/identifying the necessary knowledge/skills/attitudes/tools for optimizing a technology-rich learning environment?

What do you think?

Z

photo:http://illinoiseducationassociation.org/

Backchanneling in 1st Grade?

Backchanneling is a process where students converse in an online chatroom, usually while listening to a lecture or watching a multimedia presentation of some sort. We have been using backchanneling with our university students at the University of Northern Iowa. Rob Galloway talks about this on his blog. We have been using CoverItLive to allow our students to discuss what is happening in a 200-person lecture.  It has been quite effective.

Imagine my surprise when I saw Cyndi Danner-Kuhn's discussion of back channeling It appears that she hasn't actually done it yet, but referred to a couple of teachers who have used backchanneling in their elementary classrooms.

The first one is by "A First Grade Teacher" (I will refer to "her" as AFGT since I can't find his/her name anywhere) who tells of using TodaysMeet as a backchannel for his/her 1st graders. The initial experience was almost accidental. She used the chat room as a brainstorming exercise and it was a huge success. Later, she had her students chat while watching an online presentation about teaching with technology. The adults involved in the process were backchanneling too, and AFGT compared the structure of the chat logs of the two age groups.  The fascinating part was the similarity that she found between the structure of the discussions of the two groups. "Both groups started out with greetings, shared many of the same concerns, and even interjected with some light-hearted exchanges between on-task discussions. "

I would like to see the chat logs of AFGT's students.  It would be interesting to review their lines of thought and how they expressed it.  I have asked AFGT to share them, but haven't heard back yet.  (on 8/19/10, Aviva (AFGT's real name) sent me a link to the chat log.  Quite interesting. You should check out her comment below.)

The other example was from Sylvia Tolisano and how she used back channeling with a 5th grade class. I am a big fan of Sylvia's. She is an extremely innovative educator. The difference between her posting and AFGT's is that Sylvia is quite descriptive about the steps she took and the results she observed. The teacher she was helping wanted her students to use the backchannel as a way to review questions for a social science test. This is a completely different circumstance than AFGT. The teacher asked a question and all of the students could answer at the same time. Interestingly enough, the students did quite well on their tests.  Here is a comment from Mrs. Z (no relation) "I am totally amazed.  The kids took their Social Studies test on Friday and I have never seen such good papers!  I am convinced the back channeling was a major factor."

I have never used TodaysMeet but it looks like the kind of tool I would want to use in the classroom. It is easy to set up. The discussion room can exist from 2 hours to 1 year.  It can even integrate Tweets using a specified #hashtag. It isn't as functional as CoverItLive, but sometimes we don't need all of that.

What do you use?  Is 1st grade too young to backchannel?  If you aren't using backchanneling now, how do you think that you could integrate it into your class?

Z

• Seven Things You Should Know about Backchanneling.
• Backchanneling in Middle School Social Studies.
• 10 Sites for Backchanneling
  

photo:flickr.com/kevin_marks

ISTE 2010: What a Wonderful Week!!!

What a Wonderful Week!!!

I have just spent a wonderful week in Denver at the ISTE 2010 conference. Formerly known as NECC (National Educational Computing Conference), this event has been running for decades. I first attended in 1992 and have gone every year except once when I was in Malaysia and once when I had back surgery.

Sessions
The ISTE conference is filled with hundreds of sessions where educators share what they have been doing in their classrooms. Notice that I use the term, "share." The sharing attitudes of the attendees is what makes this experience so valuable. Presenters are sharing but the attendees will often share their ideas as well.

ISTE Leadership Symposium
My first "session" was the ISTE Leadership Symposium. This is an honor because it is by invitation only and I have been invited to attend over the past few years. It has been quite an experience. The best experience is the people you get to meet. I was honored to sit with Kathy Schrock, Dennis Harper, Scott Merrick, Bonnie Thurber, and Linda Lieberman. Best thing was that we also had a high school student from a Denver high school with us.  His name was Culver.  That is what is missing in our Educator Meetings - student, right Dennis?  Culver was a great addition to the discussion.  We were exploring new ways to situation schools. The final project for the team was to identify a unique environment for situating a school.  We decided that it would work to put a high school in a mall. This would be a great place for business classes to help the store managers. It would also be useful for students in Consumer and Family Sciences. The best part is that it wouldn't be a problem getting the students to school because they usually hangout at the mall anyway.  There were many other innovative ideas posted as well.

Regular Sessions
I didn't have a chance to attend too many sessions, but I enjoyed Howard Rheingold's presentation on Crap Detection 101.
I also attended the last hour of the EduBloggerCon on Saturday afternoon. This was good because I was able to get in on the last few minutes of a discussion of teachers' experiences with having their students online. 

Excellence Lounges
You can also see sharing in much more informal settings. Throughout the conference setting are Excellence Lounges like the Bloggers Cafe. These are designated places where people of like interests can convene and talk. It is always nice to bump into someone whose blog you have been reading for years - Shout out to Bud the Teacher. It provides a basis for discussion when you meet them and a greater feeling of connectedness when you read them.

Another Excellence Lounge that I enjoyed was for the Virtual Environment SIG. It's always great to meet the humans who connect with the avatars that roam Second Life.  I was walking by the lounge when Scott Merrick was taking the clan on a tour of a virtual world.  He said "Hello, Leigh Zeitz" to me and I returned the salutation.  Would you believe that 4 hours later I received a Skype message from my good friend, Pawel Topol, in Poznan, Poland. he said that he had been watching the presentation and saw me in the presentation.

THAT is what the I in ISTE stands for!!!!

Workshops
I was both the student and the teacher in ISTE workshops this year. I began my excursion with a 3-day Digital Storytelling workshop presented by Dr. Bernajean Porter. This was a wonderful experience that was as much about building and managing an effective learning community as it was about making digital stories. Bernajean ran the class as though she were preparing teachers to run such a class. She would always present the rationale for her teaching strategies as she used them. I will try to cover the essence of the class in a future posting.

I also ran a couple of workshops. The first workshop was entitled Digital Portfolios Made Easy with Google Sites and the second 3-hour workshop was Using Social Media to Build Your Personal Learning Network.

Digital Portfolios Made Easy
The Digital Portfolios Made Easy workshop is the continuation of a workshop I have been giving for probably 5 years. Andrew Krumm, a former student, and I originated templates for teacher portfolios and have presented them for conferences and teacher in-service sessions across the country. Here is the DPME slideshow that I used.

This workshop introduces those templates and provides the attendees with background to enable them to create/modify and implement these templates in their own personal settings. You can see more about this at DPME.org. I have written about my ideas on Digital Portfolios Made Easy in past postings, and will write more about the on-going evolution in future postings. This workshop was sold out with 30 students representing 8 states and 3 countries. It went well and I owe a great deal of it to my friend, Bonnie Thurber, who helped me as a lab assistant at the last minute.

Using Social Media to Build Your Personal Learning Network (PLN)
My other workshop was Using Social Media to Build Your Personal Learning Network (PLN)  that I taught along with Lois Lindell. Lois and I have taught this workshop at the AECT conference in Florida and the ITEC conference in Coralville, Iowa. As the name suggests, we introduced the concept of a PLN and then had them use a variety of tools to develop their PLNs. This workshop only had 10 attendees and 4 of them were IT (Information Technology) people. HOOOOORAY!!! There MUST be more communication between IT folks and teachers so that they can work together and IT specialists won't be given names like the "Locked Nets Monsters."

Schmoooozing
Another aspect of the conference experience that is important is the network of connections that you create, build and maintain at these conferences. This is where I get to discuss ideas and make plans with others face-to-face. These sorts of connections can be made online, but nothing beats the face-to-face communication that you can have at a conference.

Unexpecteds
I didn't attend too many presentations because I was too busy either teaching, learning or schmoozing. Here are some interesting happenings in no particular order.

• Bumped into Rosie Vojek who I earned my Doctorate degree with at the University of Oregon in 1992. Hadn't seen her almost 2 decades and we connected in a real-world session about virtual worlds. She and her husband, Rob, have written a book, Motivate! Inspire! Lead!: 10 Strategies for Building Collegial Learning Communities.  I haven't purchased my copy yet, but it looks like it will fit nicely into the books that I am reading nowdays.
• Had dinner with Vicki Davis and Julie Lindsay where we discussed the Flat Classroom Conference 2011 next February. The dinner wasn't as much a surprise as the wonderful Thai food we ate while there.
• I was also able to connect with a high school friend, Doug Hartwell, who I hadn't seen in almost 40 years (gosh I'm old.)
• I met Kevin Honeycutt who is a bundle of musical energy. He introduced me to:
• The Band app for the iPad and iPhone. This is an AWESOME musical application that turns musical theory into a musical instrument for all to play.
• I even had a chance to sit down and talk with my friend, David Thornburg. 

There are so many things that I learned at this conference that I will be writing about them for the next couple of weeks. I would be interested in your including specific questions in your comments so that I can respond to them or add your perceptions if you happen to have attended ISTE 2010.  I will continue to share things that I found in the next few postings as well.

Z

Free Google App Inventor: Now You Can Create Your Own Droid Apps

It's HERE!!!! . . . . well almost here.

Mashable just posted that Google has launched a new tool called the Google App Inventor.  This new tool is supposed to enable non-coders to develop their own apps. Using a modular programming process, the neo-developer can drag and drop "blocks" to create the look, feel and functionality of the desired app.

Imagine using this capability in K-12 schools. I am not talking about programming class.  I am talking about History, Geography, Math, English and Spanish. Students will be able to augment their learning by creating apps that can assist them in solving problems and posing new ones.

The New York Times said that Google has been testing this for a while in the schools already to test out how it works.  A nursing student at Indiana University created an app that would call an emergency number if someone fell. The program used the phone's accelerometer to sense a fall and if the person didn't get up in a short while or press the onscreen button, it would automatically make the call.

I said that the App Developer was "almost here."  That is because I clicked on the link to take me to the Google App Inventor, and it took me to an application for being considered by the Google App Inventor team for receiving access to the beta version.

Not a problem. I told them that I am a Google Certified Teacher and then explained some of my visions for this wonderful way to empower the "regular guy/gal."  I hope that I am accepted.

Here is a video that shows how a neo-programmer creates, loads and executes a simple Android app in just over a minute.



Will these be polished and sophisticated applications?  I don't know enough about the interface, but at least this tool will provide the canvas upon which our creative artists can develop prototypes that can later be refined commercially if need be.

What do you think?  How would access to this type of programming assistant affect how students learn in your class?

photo: fonehome.co.uk