better

i hope our goal is better humans and better relationships, not just better machines.

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radical ideas at work in ed

what a great, packed, article...

10 they found taking hold in districts and schools across the country..

one of the 10:

Trash Windows and Go “Open Source”
The thinker: Jim Hirsch, associate superintendent for technology for the 53,300-student Plano, Texas, school district
The idea: Uttering the words “wide open” and “public school” in the same sentence tends to make administrators shudder. But creating a virtual world with no barriers is the idea behind the open-technology movement. Open technology includes the use of open-source operating systems, applications, and content; open standards for interoperability; and open hardware.

Developed collaboratively and offered at little or no cost, open-source technology can be a powerful new element in district programs that have long relied on proprietary and sometimes costly software. Including applications like the browser Firefox and operating systems like Linux, open-source technologies are free, continually updated, and—say many—the wave of the future for school information systems. “It’s easy to pooh-pooh open source,” Hirsch says, “when in reality Amazon and Google are built on open technologies. The rest of the world gets open technology, and we’ve got to catch up.”

Open applications can be freely modified by the district or school. Open-source versions exist for nearly every major administrative and instructional system out there. And some of them are just as bulletproof—if not more so—than their commercial equivalents, say proponents. “People are attracted to open-source technology not just because it’s cheaper but because it often has more features, is updated more regularly, and can be copied and sent home,” says Hirsch. “You can’t hand kids or parents a copy of Photoshop, but you can hand them a copy of Gimp [an open-source alternative].” What’s more, by using a variety of programs, schools can offer more to their students for less.

Plano has placed 3,500 refurbished computers in the homes of its low-income students. Licensing Microsoft Office is not an option, but kids can do what they need to with Open Office. “We’re only going to use the proprietary software that makes the most sense,” Hirsch explains.

Very rarely does a district switch overnight from proprietary to open technology, and in most cases the goal is to have a compatible mix of both types of systems in place. In some districts, the open-source effort begins with applications that teachers or administrators want to use or just start using on their own. Lesson-planning software like Moodle or assignment-sharing programs like QUIA are examples. In other cases, district leaders learn about and make the shift from the central office with little apparent difference to teachers and students.

Hirsch says the biggest challenge is getting school administrators to rethink the purchasing paradigm. “There’s a lack of awareness about the amount of open technology available,” Hirsch notes, “and people say, ‘Why change? What we have is working.’”
For more information:
k-12.pisd.edu/open
my.cosn.org 

another is via James Paul Gee... :)

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jonathan kozol

savage inequalities

no need to only look to africa...

finding out more...

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finland schools

on getting good results

The Finnish philosophy: 

.....everyone has something to contribute and those who struggle in certain subjects should not be left behind.

.....a tactic used in every lesson is the provision of an additional teacher who helps those who struggle in a particular subject.

.....pupils are all kept in the same classroom, regardless of their ability in that particular subject. 

 .....Finnish children spend the fewest number of hours in the classroom in the developed world.

.....teaching is a prestigious career in Finland. Teachers are highly valued and teaching standards are high.  

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1898.. michael wesch

school as real life

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tony wagner

live interview

my notes:

iste

national ed tech plan 2010

Making the Grade - his earlier book

started as unhappy hs school student and realized school didn't have to be boring, so became educator, 1st 5  at risk, then at political school,

read the world is flat by friedman, and realized the changing world, became concerned with all skills young people would need

and wanted to reach a broader audience

ed alone can't do it

we need to specifically engage business leaders

late 90's national ed summit - few ed's invited, they hatched this idea of accountability and standards movement

now - need to decide what kids will need

what do they need, how can we engage them

wagner presenting to admin in iowa

kipp might be too regimented

site to find Tony's videos and books, etc

10th grade example?

sports and performing arts - use video tapes routinely to see where to improve - we should be doing that

per participant (sorry missed the name)  tech plan

we're way too focused on answers than on questions

ie: focus on getting people into shelters - when that wasn't the problem.. homelessness is

he wrote a new afterward for global achievement gap

need methodology for engaging community

virginia beach city public schools - got 1000 people in their civic center on an evening

need to learn research and development

 check this out....

we need to create laboratory schools - labs for innovation  - (yay!)

strategic plan is one page - and posted   ( i think he was referring to virginia beach - again - check this out)

this site is a great read in and of itself:
Rigor Redefined
another book: Educational Leadership - Expecting Excellence

too much focus on content -  more about how you think about content, how you access content

 schools are entirely focused on timeless learning

21st cent... what matters most - just in time learning

how do we do both?

ie: battlefield manuals always written by army

today - the army writes manuals as wikis where they expect every soldier on the front to contribute (just in time - or new ) learning

dr's doing same thing,.... have to engage in just in time learning to serve patient's needs in 21st cent.

how do we put these together?

that is ed hour of need:

there's no way to teach the competencies (21st cent buzzwords) w/o also teaching academic content

of course critical thinking is going to be around content

Leonard Waks: The key is to have a curricular framework that is just a framework -- curriculum lite.

dlaufenberg: I think it comes down to how you measure the learning.  At the end of the unit how do you measure competency... a test?  or a project? which one evidences competencies and which one measures content

ransomtech: "knowledge-able" - Mike Wesch

dlaufenberg: almost nothing in what Tony is talking about... is mirrored in RttT/NCBLB

---------------------
Leonard Waks: @kas if th

dlaufenberg: teachers who want to have kids look into media literacy... newstrust.net is a great project

angela - Great book to start with Digital literacy lessosns- Alan November: Web Literacy good stuff to model

Karl Fisch: I used to use the quote "You never get a second chance to make a good first impression." It now takes on a whole new meaning with a Digital Footprint. People often "meet" you and your ideas before they physically meet you. Important conversation to have with students - and parents - and teachers.

1. ask right questions

worry about requiring all people to study higher math? why not require stats?

we're requiring it because colleges are... but why? perhaps because it's a sorting tool

2. more important is performance standards than content standards

3. effective teaching

4. the president praised school district for firing teachers, but where were the leaders.

not asking the right questions

martin: Rocket rob, great question. What is "real" education for individuals? How can they apply thear learning and new knowledge to their live long learning goal?

content is no longer king, competencies rule more

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ipad

from this

“We think the iPad will become the device students carry with them everywhere, and the laptop will become the base station in their dorm room,” said Greg Smith, chief information officer of George Fox University. “The iPad becomes the mobile learning device.”

national ed tech plan 2010

reading from this...

crafted by these people:

what i heard was this:

revolutionary transformation rather than evolutionary tinkering

{if we're just tweaking..i can sleep more}

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and this:

seat time, age-grouping

 {seat time and school is life}

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and this:

online learning communities

process and connectivity

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 and this:

new and better ways to measure what matters

new standards

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and this:

access

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james paul gee's articles

lucid action

When I act in the game (embodied by my character) I always know why I am doing what I am doing and I understand what my actions mean in the “emotional economy” of the story.

....makes for immersive and powerful game play.  

....an important cognitive state for humans when they are learning and performing at their best.

....probably both connected to and more important than “flow” in both gaming (of the sort I am talking about here) and science and other forms of accomplishment.

words

...a very different view of language than the traditional one.  

...words are just labels for files full of experiences, images, texts, and dialogue.  

....the result of where our minds and bodies have been in the world...our trajectories through social space and time. 

...this view of language renders most of how we teach and learn language, literacy, and second languages in school odd.  

How could people be “learning” language and literacy if they are not moving through the world and negotiating with others about how their experiences in the world do or do not “square” with that of others and how and whether they need new experiences in the world?

 what is academic language

...researchers have not focused much on how children acquire new styles of academic language.
We know much more about how they learn to decode print, which is ironic because more children fail or quit school because they cannot handle academic language than because
they cannot decode.

By the time children come to school, they are well versed in using conversational styles of language to think about, talk about, and act on the world of their daily experience. 

The dilemma for teaching...how such conversational styles can serve as a foundation for
students’ learning in science and, in parallel, their acquisition of academic styles of language.

Bridges must be built through language between the identities students have developed outside
school and new ones they are being asked to take on in school.

bridging their conversational style of language and a more academic style as they work out possible meanings for scientific ideas they actually care about understanding.

Failing to build on students’ conversational dialects is a recipe for destroying their interest in and affiliation with school and schooling.
At the same time, failing to teach all learners new ways with words privileges those whose conversational styles already incorporate aspects of academic language. 

It places at a disadvantage those students whose early language socialization has not incorporated aspects of academic language that are valued

if this is true... what about this ... then everyone starts off better.

an opportunity to learn - a language based perspective on assessment:

Standardized tests are used for what policy makers call "accountability", that is, they are used to hold schools and teachers accountable for the achievement of all students, rich and poor alike. This testing and accountability agenda has often been tied to calls for a return to "basic skills" and even to scripted forms of instruction in reading, math, and science. The view of learning and assessment on which this whole agenda is based is a profoundly impoverished one. 

opportunity to learn. If two children are being assessed on something which they have not had equivalent opportunities to learn, the assessment is unjust (unless, of course, the purpose of the assessment is to demonstrate this disparity in opportunity to learn).

...producers (people who can actually engage in a social practice) potentially make better consumers
(people who can read or understand texts from or about the social practice).

...A corollary of this claim is this: writers (in the sense of people who can write texts that are recognizably part of a particular social practice) potentially make better readers (people who can understand texts from or about a given social practice).

....reading tests that ask general, factual, and dictionary-like questions about various texts with no regard for the fact that these texts fall into different genres (that is, they are different kinds of texts) connected to different sorts of social practices. Children can often answer such questions, but they learn and know nothing about the genres and social practices that are, in the end, the heart and soul of literacy.
Schools will continue to operate this way until they (and reading tests) move beyond fixating on reading as silently saying the sounds of letters and words and being able to answer general, factual, and dictionary-like questions about written texts (Coles 1998, 2000). You do, indeed, have to silently say the sounds of letters and words when you read (or, at least, this greatly speeds up reading). You do, indeed, have do be able to
answer general, factual, and dictionary-like questions about what you read: this means you know the "literal" meaning of the text. But what so many people—unfortunately so many educators and policy makers—fail to see is that if this is all you can do, then you can't really read.

Fifth Principle
People have not had the same opportunity to learn a given social language unless they have had equivalent experiences dialogically with people who know that language and who have used it in rich enough contexts to allow the learners to "guess" what perspectives the word and forms being used mean.
 Sixth principle

People have not had the same opportunity to learn unless they have equivalent opportunities to "play the game" connected to the texts they are reading. Here "game" applies equally to video games and to different semiotic domains relevant to school.

In the end I claim this:......The solution is not more tests or "accountability". The solution cannot be accomplished only at and by schools. The solution lies where we always knew it did—social justice

wow - and the new standard idea we have - fits that... everyone having access to what is needed to learn and play and flow..

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i need more time to read.... 

also reading diy u - excellent so far.

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darcy moore on plns

great resources, 

esp on personal learning networks, 

via @darcy1968

cool news:

we are talking with our local uni - 

1) getting credit for pre-service teachers that show they are in a pln and for existing teachers that do the same.

2) getting a course for pre-service teachers that is an innovation lab

oh yay.

we think pln's are going to drive the future of ed, just now reading diy u - more great insight.

and.. we're now one step closer in our redefine school trek.

and on what we think should be the new standards, brief summary:

1. access: do kids have it

           a) broadband   

           b) natural tools   

           c) time to use both tools and wifi at school

2. process: are teachers in a pln - so they can learn and model learning

3. connectivity: are students in a pln - modeled and facilitated by teacher

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james paul gee

 

we can show what things mean instead of tell them

nobody's giving you a lecture, they're showing what they mean

within the complicated language it comes in -simultaneously building up digital and literacy skills

people going into teaching among the lowest of digital literacy

call for break the mold schools - 

we need to be able to network those experiments

MacArthur Foundation

the MacArhur foundation is fed up with the K-12 system.  They have moved away from trying to change the system and are working on after school programs and other programs to make change.  This is what I understand from my conversations with people like Henry Jenkins.

Quest to Learn

social system around Tony Hawk

we're going to have to produce people to create those kinds of communities, teachers have to become designers of that kind of learning environment

they don't just consume, they produce

commercial games have only explored 1% of the potential

most of what we can do isn't going to be done by the commercial industry

but by unis and schools

take a look at more youtubes here

if you didn't get the info for tomorrow (attachement) here's a screen capture of it

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kevin kelly on the shirky principle

take a look at  this

embedded in it is this

in it is this:  i've inserted the grey words

TT public school, like most organizations, could not be good at the thing it was good at and good at the opposite thing at the same time. The web hosting business authentic testing, because it followed the “Simplicity first, quality later” model, didn’t just present a new market, it required new cultural imperatives.

and this:

Diller, Brill, and Murdoch standardized test pushers seem be stating a simple fact—we will have to pay them we will have to take them —but this fact is not in fact a fact. Instead, it is a choice, one its proponents often decline to spell out in full, because, spelled out in full, it would read something like this:

“Web users public school will have to pay for what they watch and use, will have to keep being driven by these costly tests, or else we will have to stop making content standardized tests in the costly and complex way we have grown accustomed to making it them. And we don’t know how to do that.”

and this:

The critical fact about this negotiation wasn’t about the mothers students, or their stories or their learning, or how those stories might be used or how new learning might make students indispensable . The critical fact was that the negotiation took place in the grid of the television industry in the grid of a political stance, between entities incorporated around a 20th century business logic, and entirely within invented constraints and entirely within invented constraints. At no point did the negotiation about audience student involvement learning hinge on the question “Would this be an interesting thing to try a way to create indispensable citizens?” 

and then this:

When ecosystems change and inflexible institutions collapse, their members disperse, abandoning old beliefs, trying new things, making their living in different ways than they used to. It’s easy to see the ways in which collapse to simplicity wrecks the glories of old. But there is one compensating advantage for the people who escape the old system: when the ecosystem stops rewarding complexity, it is the people who figure out how to work simply in the present, rather than the people who mastered the complexities of the past, who get to say what happens in the future.

yes?

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project based learning - a school's model

Three high school teachers working to implement Project Based Learning in a unique teaching environment.

cool jets

via @shareski 's school district

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bud hunt inspires me

so - he's giving a prompt to write a poem every day this month...

here's todays:

and this is what i wrote... (don't be laughing)

cut it out...

this is school

you're here to learn

don't you know

that phone i spurn

cut some slack...

make school real

i want to learn

can i show you how

can it be my turn

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funny - i really have so much to do today, and now i just spent time crafting a poem. 

now that i didn't imagine when i woke up - with the list of to-do's in my head.

thank you Bud.. i liked reading the poems there.. and i like that i wrote one...even if it's not that poetic - i shipped a poem.

check it out for yourself

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adora svitak

whoa - here's a huge case for Student 2.0 and New School and Innovation Labs....

thank you @Darcy1968 for bringing this great talk to my laptop..

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think global school

come on guys.. quit making us so jealous.

kidding of course... carry on..

bravo.

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music, art, find it

speaking of Ted...

funny. 

I watched part of War Dance today - that is about the healing power of music.  {war dance is not funny, i'm not even sure i can watch the rest of it}

And now am listening to Robert Gupta, a violinist with the LA Philharmonic, talking about a violin lesson he once gave to a brilliant, schizophrenic musician -- and what he learned. 

That music is medicine.

We don't need programs to fix ourselves, we need things, passions, bigger than ourselves. An art, which by it's own definition includes a service...

Passion is caring enough about your art that you will do almost anything to give it away, to make it a gift, to change people.  -Seth Godin, Linchpin

That giving away is the cure.

This is what school should be. The place to find that passion/art and work on it. Work on something bigger than yourself, not busy work, and I swear, personal problems/addictions, and world problems/addictions, will start to solve themselves.

Called back onstage later, Gupta plays his own transcription of the prelude from Bach's Cello Suite No. 1. 

that's medicine for the listener as well....dang

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ted talks - rich content into the classroom

teacher of the year uses ted talks.

technology won't replace the best teacher, but it will free up the teacher, for personalized work with kids.

one way is true bring rich content in the classroom - ted talks, tedxteen, 

and i would add - bif talks

bif conversations, bif story studio

here's Christian Long doing just that..

i also think these talks are a great way to help kids find their art/passion, and/or feed it.

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sesame st is to cells as 60 us to 10

take a listen..

The disdain some of us had of parents who let sesame st babysit their kids, because they didn't embrace a teachable moment by merely sitting with them, parallels the disdain we should have for not only letting cells babysit our kids outside of schools hours, but as teachers/parents, not sitting with them, embracing these powerful teachable moments.

in the interview:
isn't this just about rich kids w/phones?...

no....it’s about 2 bill cell phones in the develop world." 

bravo @Anya1anya

i asked Anya if ipod touch was useable, thinking she was talking about smart phones and thinking touch was cheaper than a phone w/a monthly plan.
her response:
anya1anya @monk51295
Richard Rowe of OLE sez TeacherMate software cd run on next gen el cheapo Nokia phones-the kind ppl use in India, Africa, etc.

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Anya Kamentz - Open Ed

Anya Kamentz on the Open Ed Movement
via Michael Feldstein
1. look at Ted talks - great way to find out what might be your passion

2. take quizzes online - myers/briggs

3. college navigator can help you figure out how to cut costs

2011 - shame list will be released - colleges going up the highest - and why

http://learningspaces.org/n/node/42

as i'm listening to anya - she tweets this 

my response:

So glad I happened onto this. Great post, great video, great comments and links.

I am at the hs level, working on similar change. But also working with educators to make some drastic change in pre-service teacher training.

In our search for answers, we've come up with a diy highschool we are calling - your school-design it.  The premise and new standard being threefold, 1) access [to the web, tools, and time], 2) teachers modeling personal learning networks [modeling true learning], and 3) students engaged in personal learning networks. All this feeds into the personalized ed that I heard Anya talking about.

In our vision, we see k-8 as the place for foundational content standards, only through logic and programming and gaming. [and recently i've wondered about introducing everything as a foreign language, after spending kids' first few years learning 1-3 foreign languages.]
We see 9-12 as a quasi college, where kids spend time as Anya suggested, researching Ted talks, finding their art/passion, and then creating their own courses/curriculum to that end.
And then, we see higher ed, as a quasi career, where many are no longer paying for higher ed. We see higher ed cost perhaps non-existent, because students are in essence interning for their future employer, and know that free courses with no actual certificate will more than suffice. Or, major companies are actually paying for their tuition in return for their innovative ideas. Or, the government realizes that the answers to world problems would best be solved by these brilliant minds, if given the trust and resources to but tackle them.

It's ridiculous that change isn't happening faster.
The power of networking should make this a simple fix. I ask myself daily if the stall is because so many are that afraid of change. Especially when the change we need empowers students - which for some crazy reason unsettles the people who are used to making the decisions.
So many debates about "free" when really it's about better use. Flow of money, I think, is coming to a close. I think transparency is the new currency. I think school as real life, solves world problems without that flow of money, and gives students more purpose and fulfillment in their learning experience.

I feel it's ridiculous as well, that government is missing this.
I feel we can make this change on our own, because of the personalization, diy pln's etc, the web allows. We don't need more resources, or money, or time, if we are just smarter about how we spend each one.
But ...if we could get governing forces, [ie: the government, the rulers of the unis and public schools], to get this, and see that it really is the best option for all players, the speed and equity would alleviate a ton of stress, and seemingly endless debate.

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