Leadership for the Digital Age with Alan November - Day 3

Tuesday, May 20th, was the third and final day of TASA's Leadership for the Digital Age with Alan November. This academy has truly been a privilege to be part of and a growth experience for me. November made me think deeply about what I already know and consider it from multiple angles. And the other districts which participated shared amazing ideas. I am full of things I want to do and try to further improve educational practice among the already wonderful educators I know.

The highlight of my day - Alan November sat at the table my boss and I were sitting at for lunch! So I was able to participate in a bonus conversation, face-to-face with a thoughtful, encouraging educational leader whose work I have followed for nearly 15 years.

There was much more Tweeting on this day of the academy than there had been on the first two days, so instead of taking notes on my own, I decided to curate the Tweets from the day. 

Just over 100 Tweets made it into my curation. I hope I caught them all! There are wonderful thoughts and resource links included throughout. You can view them in a slide-show format below, or view the original Storify in a vertical, multi-page format.

You may also be interested in my notes from the first two days of the academy.

• For my notes on Day 1 of this academy from January 15, 2014, click here.
• For my notes on Day 2 of this academy from April 8, 2014, click here.

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All original work in this post by Sandy Kendell is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License. Please see specifics on my re-use policy in the right-hand column of my blog before re-posting/re-using any of my blog content.

Notes from Leadership for the Digital Age with Alan November - Day 2

Notes from day 2 of  TASA's Leadership for the Digital Age with Alan November. For my notes on Day 1 of this academy, which took place January 15, 2014, click here.

Notes from the Discussion

We no longer have to go to school if we want to learn.

edX -www.edex.org - MOOC site, courses are all free, people who teach the courses are from Harvard, MIT, Berkeley, University of Texas, etc. (Click here to see all of them.)

Coursera is another option for higher ed MOOCS.

November's son is taking courses through edX and will get an associate's degree from Harvard. Student needs 32 credits from another university, and 32 credits from Harvard. More info on Harvard online degree programs and certificates.

Students can graduate from high school with dual credit then get the rest of their college experience entirely online.

Swivl - Apparatus that lets you use an iPad to video record a lecture or presentation. Moves the camera to follow presenter around the room. (Use for teachers and students! Imagine sharing student presentations to the world!)

High school library prediction - Librarians will become resources to help students find online courses. Part of function of library will be to become an online learning center.

Close to 10% of students got into MIT by excelling in a MOOC. Did not go through traditional admissions process as we know it. For example, this young man from Mongolia.

Are we going to prevent, ignore, or encourage students getting college credit for nothing?

We should be advertising these opportunities to students!

Number one skill for being successful in learning: the ability to self-assess. 
Number one skill for being successful in teaching: ability to give quality feedback on student work.

When focusing on 1:1, iPads, etc: Focus on teaching teachers to give better feedback and students to self-assess instead of the technology. A participant in the room shared about an 8th grade Engilsh teacher using Google docs and going paperless - students walk in and go immediately to their Chromebooks because they want to see the feedback the teacher has given them. Now it is spreading because of the quality of teacher feedback.

Districts Sharing Ideas

Be positive with feedback! What you can say:

• I like that because...
• Have you thought about...
• I have a resource for you...

Distict #1: Principal of an elementary school shared that as part of their 1:1 initiative, they want to create a bank of lessons created by students based on http://clubacademia.org/ which Alan shared last time.

Speaking of, the 17 year old creator of http://clubacademia.org/ wants to give away her shell to any school that wants to use it, and then will link all of the shells together to make a global network of student lessons. 

Good apps for creating tutorials: Explain Everything, Screen Chomp, Educreations

District #2:  Revisiting their BYOD initiative. They brought in a panel of students to ask about their experience with BYOD. They videoed the students responses so they can use it in further PD with their administrators and teachers. Some students did not know that they were allowed to bring devices even three years after the initiative began. In other places it's off and running. It was found they were using it more at the middle schools than at the high schools.

Lessons learned from above district: Don't jump in to quickly. Pick teachers who are already strong in their content. If you push teachers to do things before they are ready, it can be detrimental to them and their students. Also, realize teachers who have been successful in the current system, with high test scores, etc, may be more resistant.

District #3: Next Generation Digital Classroom - moving away from laptops and desktops. Have narrowed down to four vendors to try iPads, Android tablets, Windows 8 tablets, Chromebooks. Teachers are applying to be the one teacher per school who pilots the devices at their campus, plus 8 librarians across the district. Goals based on Project Red and SAMR. Pilot will be evaluated for what tech works and doesn't, learning environment/classroom space to incorporate best instructional practice, and PD needs, all of which will be approached from an action research standpoint. Teachers will write their own questions and goals that they want to meet each fall and spring. They will complete video showcases at the end of each year to use as a resource for curating best practices through the project and informing future steps across the district.

• November suggests Stratosphere which talks about how to evaluate technology projects.

District #4: Instituting a technology apps elective for middle school students next year. (Have only had fine arts electives up to this point.) In individual classrooms, teachers are working with students who are ahead of the rest of the class to create a library of tutorials for other students. In library they are using stop motion technology to develop stories. Doing cross-curricular projects with students in other grades. Also starting a middle school coding class.

• Another participant suggested code.org which has a middle school coding curriculum
• November suggested Scratch; you can start with other kids' created programs and tweak them instead of starting from scratch (ha ha no pun intended!)
• November's podcast of an interview with Dr. Mitch Resnik, creator of Scratch.

District #5: Kindergarten teachers started class Twitter accounts! Here is Mrs. Cook's Twitter. They follow other Kinder classes and have connected with a class in Korea.

• November suggests you can follow someone on Twitter via text messaging instead of having to set up a Twitter account.
• You can also add a Mystery Skype since kids like learning about kids from other places.

More Discussion Notes

November suggests no more technology workshops. Integrate the technology into core content PD. Also tell teachers principal will show up 30, 60, and 90 days after PD to look for specific strategies that were communicated in the workshop. Example: Working toward self assessment of math. Are teachers using Wolfram Alpha, Khan Academy, Think Through Math, etc when principal observes. Then assess if the staff development paid off based on student achievement data. Workshop needs measurable goals, follow-up, and results based on data.  The key is the principal holding teachers accountable.

Often, the technology coordinator/director is reporting to the WRONG person. Org charts need to change.

November advises superintendents to have a student advisory panel that they meet with them once a month. Ask them things like:

• What's the best thing technology has done for your learning?
• Is there anything you've learned with technology that you could have done without technology?
• What are you doing outside of school on your own that helps you learn?

Are we showing kids how to do really good searching? Ask them to find an image representing American History. They will get this. But with a tweak, we can show them how to get this or this.

Key to getting workshops/PD to have effect in classroom: Have the workshop presenter/leader come and teach an actual class with actual students. All teachers watch the workshop leader run the class. Important for modeling classroom management. Make sure to debrief afterwards. (Can also use Swivl or something like it to record and archive master teachers.)

Here's an idea to empower kids: Let them lead workshops for their peers. For example, an after-school club for using Minecraft to create virtual environments. Check out this Egyptian Pyramid! (NOTE: Teacher does not need to know how to use Minecraft to let kids use it for producing a project.)

November says if he could teach teachers ONE thing, it would be how to be life-long learners with today's tools. Twitter is his favorite tool for professional learning. Every teacher should be following teachers who are sharing what they are doing. Then, if you are lucky, all of your teachers will have a blog. Use every bit of social media that you can. Pinterest. Instagram. Diigo.

• November Learning Popular Education Hashtags on Twitter

November makes his doctoral students join Diigo and participate in a Diigo group he created for them. Now he can see what they are researching and reading and the students can see what each other is reading and they can converse about it. Can set it to email you when people add bookmarks. (Great way to build community among faculty.) Here is November's Diigo library. (And here is mine. I LOVE Diigo!)

Leaders should be creating community using tools like Diigo groups!

PD Tip - Start with something teachers love to teach instead of a tool the presenter thinks is cool. Example: Tweak one of their favorite lessons. Hint: Look for hashtags that will help them get more info for the assignment. You can teach people the mechanics of a tool, but you also need to help them make connections to their curriculum. Give it context. Start with the question: "What's your favorite assignment? Let's redo it."

Principals need to make heroes out of their teachers. Start a podcast where you interview them and get them to tell their stories!

Homework Before Day 3 in May

The First Five Days - What would you do in the first five days of school to teach kids how to learn to learn?

• Podcast on Implementing the First Five Days

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All original work in this post by Sandy Kendell is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License. Please see specifics on my re-use policy in the right-hand column of my blog before re-posting/re-using any of my blog content.

Notes from Leadership for the Digital Age With Alan November

Yesterday, I was privileged to spend a day learning from and with Alan November, a consummate digital age educator whose work I have followed for many years. My first exposure to Alan was the article "Teaching Zack to Think," which made me painfully aware of the work that must be done to promote literacy in our digital age. 

I'm grateful to my school district and TASA for this opportunity!

What I loved about Alan's presentation was it was organic. He had definite goals and topics to cover, but due to his vast knowledge he was able to customize the content as questions came up. Several times as he set us on an activity he said, "I haven't done this before, but let's see how it goes!" 

When I grow up, I want to be a teacher/lead learner/presenter like Alan November!

Before You Get to the Notes...

You'll probably glean a few gems from my notes, but notes being what they are, they won't give you a cohesive picture. If you've never had the chance to learn directly from Alan November before, I encourage you to watch this TEDxNYED Talk he gave in 2011.

Notes from TASA Leadership for the Digital Learning Age with Alan November 1-15-14

Notes from yesterday's same workshop in Ft. Worth - http://tinyurl.com/tasa11

United States has least amount of capacity for innovation of all the countries Alan visits. We are good at getting kids stuff, but the ability/will to make the culture shift seems not to be there. Poorer countries seem to understand that the internet is the ticket to learning.

Before we do technology there should be a clear vision for why we are doing it. The technology itself cannot be the ultimate goal.

The real revolution is information. The internet. Any answer to any question that has a known answer is available right on your phone.

In the age of the internet what is the value of the teacher?

Ex: Wolfram Alpha - Type in any equation and the site will show you the step-by-step solution. (When Alan showed this to high school students, at the end of the school year, the students were angry that they didn't know about it all year so they could experiment with variables, check their homework, etc. The math teachers, however, were mad at Alan for showing it to the kids because he had destroyed math as they knew it.)

www.wolframalpha.com/examples - See what Wolfram Alpha can do!

If you can get to vast amounts of data this quickly, you can move to higher-order problem solving.

How about this for authentic learning? Problems that can't be solved through Wolfram Alpha...

 http://novemberlearning.com/connecting-students-to-geometry-through-twitter/

The mind of the teacher is the most valuable resource you have in the classroom.

What is the best use of time/a teacher's mind in the classroom? 45 minutes to an hour a day...

A.    Transfer of Knowledge

B.    Teachers Speak Little & Listen to Students

C.   Teacher is Connecting Kids to Authentic Problems All Over the World

D.   One Room Schoolhouse - Get rid of grades as we know them. Kids work to teach kids.

E.    C & D

Books suggested by a colleague based on November's presentation:
Better Learning Through Structured Learning - book from ASCD

Role Reversal - another ASCD book

What questions should we be asking before we even think about technology?

• What is our instructional framework?
• What are the top variables in improving student achievement?
• http://grantwiggins.wordpress.com/2012/01/07/what-works-in-education-hatties-list-of-the-greatest-effects-and-why-it-matters/
• Student self-assessment/self-grading/control over their own learning
• What does life-long learning look like? (Information acquisition and organization).

We should have learning design committees/planning teams, not technology planning committees.

We should have learning design directors, not instructional technology directors/coordinators.

Games are scientifically designed to engage and motivate. Teachers should be learning game design theory and using it to structure learning. (Follow #gbl on Twitter for current info.)

1. You don't need grades, you need a leader board! (see mathletics.com)

2. Real time feedback - optimal design of feedback loop is half a second

3. Autonomy

4. Education - All kids love to learn. iN a game, kids choose a hard level just beneath what will kill them. Allow your students to pick their level.

5. Collaboration - The really powerful games that engage students allow them to interact with real people, not just with a computer. Kids want to win.

The real problem is telling teachers to stop what they are doing and start doing things differently.

It is a myth that the teacher needs to learn everything first.

Staff development as we know it is a myth.

Let every teacher bring two kids to the PD. Teacher's job is to watch the kids use the tech and implement pedagogy of using tech they don't understand. Learn how to assess. Let the kids learn the tech.

@LiveFromRoom5 - Kinder teacher sends about 10 photos home per day. Shows what kids are doing and tells parents to ask kids about it at the end of the day. Teacher sets up every parent's cell phone on open house night to receive these Tweets by text.

Schools are terrible at marketing. They need to tell their stories well. Superintendent should be podcasting. Principals should be Tweeting, being the cheerleader for their teachers and students.

A lot of parents aren't going to go to websites. We have to push information out to them.

What skills can we teach today that will outlast the technology? One-off projects are not the best way. The internet is not going to go away and information is the key.

Big Skill: How to deal with the enormous amount of information out there!

Huge change is students no longer get their information from pre-selected sources. They have to understand how to assess information.

We need to give students messy problems, not well-structured problems. When you solve real/messy problems, there is

• Too much info
• Not enough info
• Info in the wrong order
• Problems that change as you are solving them

Google Searching

• One of top criteria - if the search terms are in the URL
• Limit searches to a specific country - example: How do you get resources on the Iranian Hostage Crisis from Iran?
• Teach precision - search operators (Google wants to make money; won't give you best quality unless you search for it)
• www.powersearchingwithgoogle.com - Free online self-paced courses

We are still giving assignments as if we control all of the information, but we don't. We have to teach teachers and students how to find, evaluate, and manage/organize information.

Focus on teacher feedback. Audio feedback gets more attention from students than written feedback. (Teacher anecdote - when you record your voice, you give a lot more positive comments than you do when you are just writing comments.)

http://prism.scholarslab.org - Tool for collaborative interpretation of texts - FREE

http://www.subtext.com - Free starter version but have to pay for more robust version. Turns any book or document into a digital classroom. You can see what students highlight in the reading or questions they have. Teacher can access and see what students have accomplished.

clubacademia.org -  From Palo Alto, CA - Student created videos to explain core subject concepts

***In flipped learning, teachers work too hard. Let the students make the videos!!!!

Curse of Knowledge - Teachers know too much. First time learners think teachers are really really smart and never struggle to get answers. It's not good for kids to not understand the struggle needed to learn/understand.

mathtrain.tv - Free, educational "kids teaching kids" project from Mr. Marcos & his middle school students. Teacher NEVER grades the tutorials. He works with them to make them accurate, then approves and posts them. Kids are motivated by the number of other kids who view their tutorials.

RSA Animate version of Daniel Pink's Drive on YouTube - http://youtu.be/zTlmwsJHbzg

Teach kids to learn how to teach from a young age. Every learner a teacher. When you have to teach something, you learn it on a deeper level.

Change thinking on assessment - Mazur model - Take individual test, then have groups of students collaboratively complete the same test (come to agreement on answers), then have students create a new problem to demonstrate their understanding/learning of the same content. Average the three assessments to get the final grade for the content. Mazur creates the groups of students and changes them up every five weeks or so. Creates trust between students in class. [Requires shorter more frequent assessments.]

Questioning Toolkit - http://fno.org/nov97/toolkit.html - The single most important skill now is getting people to ask the most interesting questions. The teacher's job is to teach students to ask questions.

Verso - App that makes learning visible. Students answer & ask questions & can't see what other students say until they make a contribution. http://versoapp.com/#verso

How do you know what to teach tomorrow if you don't know yet what the questions are today? Administrators need to give up control over having lesson plans submitted ahead of time.

**Choose your apps wisely! Don't do 100 apps; just do 10 and make them count every day.

Essence of flipped learning is to ask an application question, not a memorization or regurgitation question.

Don't tell the answer; give more models until students get to the answer.

Ask the same answers twice to assess if there has been growth.

Teaching the technology is easy. What takes time (years even) is building a library of interesting application questions.

Kids can do well on tests, but can they apply their learning?

Ideas

Have one student be the scribe each day. Student takes notes and posts to class blog. Teacher conferences with student before post goes live. At end of year you have thorough record of the learning. Teacher also learns a lot about their teaching by conferencing on learning each day.

Students can also add extra resources to the learning.

Class Twitter account and blog to connect around the world. Let kids Tweet and write.

mscassidysclass.edublogs.org

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All original work in this post by Sandy Kendell is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License. Please see specifics on my re-use policy in the right-hand column of my blog before re-posting/re-using any of my blog content.

Web Activity Packs from PBS Teachers

This looks pretty neat, so I thought I'd experiment! PBS teachers has posted web activity packs with code you can embed in social media sites (like blogs or even Facebook) or into traditional web pages. There's a wealth of resources under the topic headings of The Arts, Science and Technology, Health and Fitness, Reading and Language Arts, and Social Studies. When you drill down into specific resources, you find video, interactives, and lesson plans teachers can use with students. What a great way to reach digital learners!!!

Here's a sample of the Breakthroughs in Medical Research Web Pack:




Pretty nifty, huh? Be sure to check it out. And if you don't know how to embed it into your blog or website or whatever, find a techie friend to show you how. Us techies love to do stuff like that! :-)

In case you missed the link in the first paragraph, here it is again: http://www.pbs.org/teachers/activitypacks/

The New Literacy

One of my first assignments was to react to a quote from the first week's reading. Below is the quote I picked and my response to it.

In The New Literacy: The 3 Rs Evolve into the 4 Es, Armstrong and Warlick state:

The challenge to us as educators lies in keeping up with an information environment that has changed dramatically in the past 10 years, a decade during which the very nature of information has changed in appearance, location, accessibility, application, and communication. Thus, it is crucial that when teaching literacy to our students, we emphasize skills that reflect the information environment of the present, not the past.

This quote appealed to me because it succinctly explains the tremendous change I have witnessed in technology and education during my career. It also emphasizes for me the gravity of the truth that we cannot settle for “teaching the way we were taught”.

I myself am struggling with wanting to print out the articles we are reading for this course so I can learn the way I’m wired to learn – by physically highlighting and making notes in the margins. This struggle combined with the quote above makes me realize that those of us whose brains were wired before the early 1990’s when the digital age really began to take hold in the main stream have an incredible task before us as we strive to create literate students who have grown up bombarded by and wired to take in information in ways and quantities that we barely comprehend. Learning more about learning styles and needs of digital learners needs to become and remain a priority for me so I can help prepare our teachers to successfully educate their digital students.

NOTE: Opening quote from
THE NEW Literacy: The 3Rs Evolve into the 4Es
Sara Armstrong; David Warlick
Technology & Learning; Sep 2004