Building Understanding

It is getting close to the Learning 2.0 conference in Shanghai and I am becoming more and more excited to present the work that Justin and I have done in preparing what we believe is a new and better way to approach technology learning in schools – Curriculum 2.0.

Better?

Better than what?

Better than the incredibly thorough, but utterly oppressive I.T. scope and sequences or standards (or some other s-word) that have been the norm at schools.

Better than these documents that – rather than making technology integration accessible – serve to intimidate teachers and foster the counter-productive notion that talking about technology is for tech geeks and experts, thus eliminating it from the classroom.

Better than what we’ve done before and seen fail.

At least we think so.

Here’s the blurb on our workshop in Session 8, Sunday at 10:15 am (I’m not listed in the real program):

Information Technology Curriculum 2.0
By Justin Medved (and Dennis Harter)
At ISB, we believe that technology is a tool for learning. We believe that technology is used as a tool outside of formal schooling for communication, collaboration, understanding, and accessing knowledge. It is our goal in developing an integrated curriculum to ensure that the way students learn with technology agrees with the way they live with technology. At ISB we believe we must focus on the higher-order skills that are necessary for success in the 21st Century. These skills are not tied to any particular software or technology-type, but rather provide students with the opportunity to succeed no matter what their futures hold. In this session we will share our curriculum model and our implementation plan for the next three years.
Room: C-228

It’s a work in progress, but it’s progress that we focus on.

We’d love your feedback, so if you are going to be there, hopefully you’ll attend and give us your thoughts.

If you are coming to Shanghai, introduce yourself here and we’ll meet again in a few days!

Looking forward to it.

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Technorati Tags: learn2cn curriculum2.0

This weekend is the Learning 2.0 Conference in Shanghai, China. Featured speakers include: Alan November, Sheryl Nussbaum-Beach, Will Richardson, Jamie McKenzie, Gary Stager, Wes Fryer and Chris Smith.

Are you kidding me?! That’s like a who’s who of Ed Tech RSS feeds! And as exciting as that line-up is, also attending are Always Learning’s Kim Cofino and Medagogy’s Justin Medved (then again I work at the same school – so I see them regularly) and Thinking Stick’s Jeff Utecht (one of our hosts).

How can I not be psyched?!

SHAMELESS PLUG ALERT: Justin and I are presenting one session on our ideas for embedding the new literacy we all talk about into school life and curriculum. We believe that our approach may give it a chance to be successful finally. We’ve seen too many IT scope and sequence documents fail. Our approach, we believe, makes all of this accessible to teachers and their buy-in ultimately seems to determine the success of a program. If you are at the conference we hope to see you there in room C-228, for Session 8.

We are hoping that the minds of fellow Ed Tech people will help us frame our work and improve it as we go. The collaboration in our jobs is just so great.

Can’t wait…it’s going to be fun.

Every now and then you get lucky. And then even more rarely, you get professionally lucky. And then, if all the planets align and you have your lucky socks on, and you eat the right breakfast something happens that fills you up with professional optimism.

In Ed Tech blogging, we tend (not always) to blog about similar ideas. About the need for change and about the power of the change we see coming for learning. And sometimes we ask each other about how to change. Because change is not easy. It is particularly “not easy” in education where the professionals who do the job have a great deal of autonomy and often are resistant to change. So we ask ourselves, “what do we need to do to affect change?”

How do we convince the teachers and administrators at our schools that what we see as NECESSARY, fundamental change needs to happen and it needs to happen soon?

What is the Tipping Point for this change to happen?

Lucky little me might be about to find out.

You see, last year, when I took the technology facilitator job, I was lucky. I joined a technology director whose focus is on learning. He makes his decisions for technology spending on learning and he still has conversations about learning. And he’s supported by a School Head and CFO who also focus first on learning.

Then this year, Justin showed up. Suddenly, I had a NextGen leader pushing my thinking. We bounce ideas off of each other and share in our efforts to create something new, dynamic and effective in educational technology and learning. Well, that’s pretty lucky.

But how lucky would you be if you then are joined by ANOTHER NextGen teacher next year? Yup, that’s happening. Along comes Kim, always learning, to join as an information specialist. Are you kidding me?!? I am not.

Well, that’s just unfair lucky.

It gets better. (now I’m just bragging!)

Our administrators are embracing this thinking about thinking – the focus on thinking as curriculum in itself. This is awesome and it makes me think that I may be seeing the beginnings of real change possibilities. And that’s pretty exciting.

The previously mentioned voices, you’ve been reading, or if you haven’t you should be: Justin at Medagogy and Kim at always learning. But now add a new, different voice to that mix. Our ES Principal, Annelies has begun to blog about “Thinking” in her blog In-tu-it-think and what she’s come to realize in her own growth as a school leader.

What we can do together is more than what I can do.

There is so much that I like about her first post, but that line is my favorite. You have to love a blog from a Principal that has the tag line, “How does education meet the needs of the 21st century learner?”

Certainly a welcome new voice to the discussion!

And as fortunate as it’s become for me professionally here, I am pretty psyched about “what we can do together” in the coming years.
Lucky me.

A colleague of mine just passed this article on from the Associated Press (through the Post-Gazette). I recommend reading the short article, but in case you don’t, here’s the gist: Laptops in classrooms are engaging students and supported by teachers in Pennsylvania as part of their “Classrooms of the Future” program.

And why is it working in Red Land High School when the NY Times tells us it isn’t working in Liverpool, NY?

Pennsylvania’s program places special emphasis on training teachers to use the technology and know how to incorporate it into their lesson plans, Ballen said.

Note the focus on training teachers. I posted on this need just the other day in my response to the NY Times article.

“They have laptops at home, iPods, cell phones … and then we have them open up a social-studies textbook and ask them to outline a chapter,” [Superintendent] Frantz said. “They’re not learning the way they’re living.”

The same article goes on to say that conservative lawmakers are resisting growth of the program in order to further analyze results. Fair enough, but again, should they also look at what makes a common sense idea work, as well as judging a program on poor execution (like in Liverpool)?

I plan on writing more on the idea of laptops for school use, but not to take home the way they do in the 1:1 scheme. More on that in the next post. Just wanted to get this article out there.

(originally posted on harterlearning on Feb 1, 2007)

2 Cents Worth » Take it away! Take it All Away!:

Then someone asked if the literacy skills that I was talking about were part of anyone’s curriculum. The answer is, “Yes!” My own state, for one, has been teaching and testing computer skills for more than ten years. However, it is a reductionist response to the need for digital literacy (what I call contemporary literacy). We have reduced computer skills out into their own list of standards, separated again into objectives, and performance indicators. We’ve reduced it down to components that can be discretely measured.

In this post David Warlick talks about the typical standards document that all tech people have been involved in creating: the skills document that says when kids will have to learn computer skills like how to use a mouse and later spreadsheets and presentations. And we are all careful to avoid saying “Microsoft” or “Excel” or “PowerPoint” because we are concerned with the skill, not the software itself, but then in the end, our document hold us only to teaching that particular software.

This is a document we’ve all worked on … and we’ve all watched it die.

These documents either intimidate the teachers who are supposed to integrate it into their teaching, or it hides on a shelf in a curriculum office, ready for an accreditation.

But here’ s a thought: what if technology was treated as the tool we think it is?

What if our “document” instead required that we focus our attention on thinking skills and 21st century learning – the very ideas that we all seem to celebrate in these blogs?

Let’s take the skills out of that document for a second and focus instead on Grant Wiggins and Jay McTighe’s Essential Questions, from Understanding by Design. By planning student learning using “Backwards Design” (how much longer do we have to call the correct way, “backwards”), we can focus instead on what are the fundamentals of what we believe children need to learn.

School 2.0’s essential questions aren’t about skills. They aren’t about learning spreadsheets or databases or movie making. They are not even about blogging or podcasting or wikis. The essential questions of School 2.0 are about critical thinking and communication and evaluation of resources and information that are everywhere in children’s lives.

If we want the ideas of our blogs to be taken seriously by administrators and curriculum planners, then we must approach our planning the same way that all other educators are expected to. By starting with a focus on those essential questions and those enduring understandings. If that’s the case, then wouldn’t our I.T. document read with questions like, “How do you know something is true?”

Isn’t that greater than just a tech question? Isn’t that a question that stretches from PreK to 12th grade and beyond? And isn’t that a question that all teachers can take ownership of, regardless of their technology skills. We don’t need to take “non-tech” options away from teachers, we need to provide them with a context where tech needs to exist. PreK kids will talk about truth and validity in the context that makes sense to them. So will 4th graders. So will seniors.

So how does technology get into this conversation? The answer: when it fits. Now of course, this requires some amount of articulation by educators who know what they are talking about. Librarians and I.T. coordinators and classroom teachers who do have technology skills. For example, when a discussion of truth includes science and proving a theory with experiments and data, then spreadsheets are introduced to demonstrate techniques of data analysis. Technology is the tool here, not the skill.

We blog all the time that it isn’t about the software skills, that’s it about something greater. But then we all keep making these technology skill standards documents for grade levels and curricula. And I don’t see anyone using them.

Instead of trying to force our stuff on others with our integrated scopes and sequeneces, why don’t we join them? Why don’t we frame great questions about thinking and learning and questioning? And then why don’t we show kids and teachers how technology can help them do all of these things? It is, after all a tool, right?

So now…what are the essential questions of school 2.0?