always learning

Having been a middle school teacher for most of my career, I have to admit the littlest kids were my biggest fear when I accepted this elementary-focused position. But, oh, they are just so adorable! No matter what happens during the day, the moment I walk into the kindergarten classroom, or they come into the Learning Hub, I can’t stop a huge grin from spreading across my face. There’s nothing quite like a knee-level hug from 10 five-year-olds at once!

After working with one of our fantastic pre-Kindergarten teachers last year and getting a little bit of an idea of just what the youngest of our little darlings can do, I was anxious to try another project this year.

I heard a lot of talk before I started about how the younger kids “can’t” use computers and how they “don’t know how” to work a laptop. So, those of you that use technology with your kindergarten classes will know just how pleasantly surprised I was to see just what they can do, and for those of you that don’t – they can do a lot more than you would expect.

Certainly you have to break each step down into manageable chucks, of course you can only do short bits at a time, and for sure, they need a different type of support than middle school students, but they absolutely can use technology – and a lot quicker and more independently than I was lead to believe.

This year I’m working with two amazing ISB Kindergarten teachers (and 8 other teachers around the world) on the KinderKidsDraw project. Basically, we started from the idea that the kindergarten students used to go to the computer lab (which no longer exists) to “learn” KidPix once a week with the technology teacher. After thinking about the fact that once a week, for 20 minutes each time, and often extended breaks in between, may not be the best way for kids to build their understanding of new concepts, and maybe KidPix isn’t something we want them to “learn” since we’re looking to enhance core content not teach software, we came up with a new idea:

Use KidPix to enable students to draw their understanding about the new concepts they are leaning in class. Spend perhaps 20 minutes a day for 3 days in a row breaking down the drawing steps into small chunks so that they can create a finished drawing every few weeks. Then, taking that finished drawing, upload the picture onto VoiceThread and have the students record what they learned that is represented in the picture. Over the course of the year, these VoiceThreads can become an electronic portfolio of their developing understanding in various subjects.

We started with the “All About Me” social studies unit by having students draw (first by hand, to be able to compare later) a picture of their face, and then record an introduction to themselves on VoiceThread. It was interesting to see just how many of the students preferred drawing on the computer, even though they said it was much harder than drawing on paper.

Each class has now posted their completed VoiceThread on our collaborative wiki so that we can help students find connections with their peers all over the world.

On Thursday we watched the VoiceThreads from Spain, the US, and Canada as a class. As we were watching, we paused every now and again to ask how many students in the room have a common interest with the students in another country. It was fascinating to see their looks of surprise when they realized that kids all over the world love Ben 10, cupcakes and the color yellow.

Once they had an introduction to each class, I worked with our students (one-on-one) to select one specific student from another class, and then record a comment on their VoiceThread introduction. They were very quick to choose which ones they wanted to leave a comment on and they absolutely loved hearing their own voice play back through the VoiceThread.

Next up we hope to do something around the topic of weather and seasons. It will be interesting to see which of our students have actually seen snow previously and sharing the pictures of our different seasons should be a real eye-opener for those that have lived in southeast Asia all of their lives. The plan is for these connections to continue throughout the school year so that our students can begin to have the experience of create an (age-appropriate) personal learning network with their peers in other international and public schools around the world.

We are definitely proceeding slower than I would in the intermediate and middle grades, and I am doing a bit more facilitation than I would with older students, but it is working. The students are enjoying the experience and they are totally ready and excited to “talk” to other students around the world. It’s still pretty amazing to me that a five-year-old in Bangkok can get to know a five-year-old in Spain with just a few quick lessons and audio recordings!

What do you think? Can kindergarten students “do” age-appropriate technology-rich projects? Or should I be focusing my attention on the upper grades?

Chalk by onlyalice
A Puzzle of Paint by brentdanley

Over the past two and a half years I’ve been focusing on helping teachers make connections with other classes around the world. For the most part, our collaborations have been about general topics – book reports, water, persuasive writing, enhancing oral language, things that almost any classroom teacher would be able to connect with, and they’ve been great!

But this year, inspired by Clarence Fisher‘s ThinWalls project, I’m looking for something new, something deeper. A real connection based on shared goals and common assessments. Something that will last longer than your average globally collaborative project. A classroom connection, based on specific curricular needs, that will last an entire school year.

I’m fortunate to be working with so many wonderful teachers at ISB and around the world that are willing to be patient and wait until we find just the right classes with just the right needs. They are willing to build these collaborations from the ground up, focusing on student learning, and taking the time to plan meaningful and authentic experiences for all involved.

One of these projects is our fifth grade Students Teaching Students podcasting and blogging collaboration around the Lucy Caulkin’s Readers and Writer’s Workshop.

In order to ensure that all classrooms involved share the same goal for the project, we are following the Understanding by Design model of curriculum planning. And to make sure that we’re all in it from the ground up, we’re planning via a Google Doc. Although I’ve used Google Docs at school with team members a lot, I haven’t yet used them for curriculum planning across time zones and schools. I’m looking forward to seeing how it works out.

So far, all of the project participants are listed on the Doc, with contact info and class details carefully noted. We have determined the basic focus of the unit and are starting to share tips and advice with each other. Over time, I’d love to use the Doc (or a Calendar) to plan common events or activities.

For example, here is what we have so far for this project (all a work in progress):

Enduring Understandings:

• Good readers use strategies to deepen their understanding.
• Good readers read fluently and with expression, paying particular attention to the conventions of grammar.
• Authentic audiences encourage good reading and writing.
• Collaboration and communication both inside and outside the classroom will prepare students for being productive citizens within our global society.

Essential Questions:

• How do I use reading strategies to deepen my understanding?
• Why is fluency important?
• How does my audience influence or affect my reading and writing?
• How does collaborating with others help me to learn?

Assessment:

• Student self reflection
• Teacher self reflection
• Class blog as portfolio

GRASPS Task:

Goal: Your goal is to entertain your audience with personal stories about reading strategies
Role: Broadcasting team: On-Air Personality/Show Host, Producer, Writers, Mixing Team, Manager
Audience: Peers at ISB, both younger and same-age, partner classes around the world
Situation: You need to teach your audience effective reading strategies
Purpose: To collaborate with your  team to effectively communicate reading strategies to a wide audience

Supporting activities ideas to build understanding (brainstorm):

• commenting quality – rubric for commenting
• specific points in the year where you pick an earlier piece of writing that you rework and link back to old version to see the growth

Planned activities to support learning (brainstorm):

• Introduction to online safety
• Introduction to blogging
• Introduction to GarageBand/Audacity
• Podcasting a written piece for fluency
• Posting a podcast
• Read a story from a book for practicing fluency to be podcast later
• Developing quality commenting skills
• Collaborative teaming to develop a podcast focused on reading strategies
• Reflective pieces of writing on the blog

I love the idea of being able to plan a curricular unit for several classes all from one Google Doc. This is my idea of collaboration – everyone literally on the same page and working towards the same goals. Although I’ve done quite a few of these projects before, I usually ended coordinating via e-mail and never really “flattening” the planning process – I inadvertently usually had all planning go through me.

This type of process, with the project clearly outlined, is the way I would normally plan a project with a classroom teacher face-to-face. How amazing and easy it is to now do the same thing, anytime, anywhere, with a Google Doc!

I’m hoping that this transparency in planning, and the clarity in goals for the unit, will help us stay focused throughout the year and enable us to dig deeper with our students.

What do you think? Have you ever used a Google Doc to plan this way? Have you ever had shared curricular goals that are ongoing throughout the year with another class, in another country? How did it go?

Many of us are the lone voice of change in our institutions. Some may be lucky to have the support of their administration, or to have a group of teachers ready and willing to change their teaching practice, or even to have a small team to work with, but very few seem to have a whole-school focus on changing the way we teach and learn (except for maybe one, of course).

So, if you don’t have a school-wide focus on changing practices, and you don’t have ongoing professional development offerings at the institutional level, and perhaps you don’t have the expectation to change from “the top,” where does the energy to change come from?

It comes from us, the lone voices. If we are not energetic and enthusiastic about moving forward, if we are not constantly offering ideas for how to engage students, if we are not tirelessly promoting new ways of thinking, who else will do it?

I worry about apathy, about giving up when the institution doesn’t value the same things we do. Or when the institution is so big that we know it will take years to reach the tipping point. I worry that when our lone voices stop bringing the energy and enthusiasm for learning in a new way, it will just fall by the wayside.

Why is it important to always keep institutional change in mind as the ultimate goal? Why not merely keep working for small-scale change on a daily basis, and hope that things will gradually improve? For one thing, the stakes are too high not to be thinking about the big picture. As Scott McLeod’s K12Online presentation points out, schools as institutions are themselves in real danger of becoming obsolete.

Referencing Dr. Clayton Christensen’s work on disruptive innovations, Scott shows that institutions that don’t embrace change early enough will simply become obsolete and disappear once the change they have ignored happens. Similar to the old land-line phone companies who didn’t switch to mobile networks fast enough, unless schools start thinking about technological changes now and new types of learning that will arise in the near future, there might come a point when everyone decides that we don’t need schools as institutions anymore – and it may be approaching sooner than we think. Either way, it’s clear that most schools will not embrace disruptive innovations (in this case, technologies used for learning) until it’s too late.

As Scott points out, we can no longer make decisions based the assumption that people will always need schools. In fact, these disruptive technologies can and will become so much more useful than the current state of our schools, that the “customer base” schools have come to expect, may in the near future no longer exist, simply because there are so many more meaningful ways to learn outside of that institution. Think about the last time you used a public telephone booth – almost overnight, the entire infrastructure of public phone booths became irrelevant to its customers. Unless we (even as lone voices) keep working towards embracing and changing with these disruptive technologies, the school classroom may become the “public telephone booth” of the future.

So how can we, those of us who believe in these disruptive innovations, help influence the outcome of schools as institutions, before they become obsolete? And how can we find and implement the best approaches towards reaching that change? Something I’m worried about is repeating the same strategy or approaches to the point of diminishing returns, or in getting trapped using ineffective methods repeatedly and hoping for the best.

Jon Becker’s K12Online presentation discusses some recent research about the role and effectiveness of technology facilitators, specifically in the United States.  He contrasts two different styles of technology facilitation: the collaborator and the salesman. The collaborator is one that attends team meetings on a regular basis, continually sharing new ideas for how to embrace technology within the core curriculum that teachers are focused on. The salesman is one that sits in the lab or an office, waiting for teachers to approach him or her with an idea, and then sells the “wow factor” of certain tools based on that teacher’s needs. Based on Jon’s synthesis of the research, the collaborator approach is far more effective, meeting the teacher’s pressing needs of teaching the curriculum, while being a constant partner in the learning process.

In terms of thinking about how to work towards school-wide change, there’s no question that the collaborative approach is a step in the right direction. Working at the team level authentically embeds the facilitator into the schools infrastructure – albeit at a much smaller scale. Teachers will naturally be more receptive to suggestions simply by virtue of the fact that the facilitator is an informed, contributing member of the team. Not only will the collaborator get a better picture of all of the intricacies of a specific team, but they will be so much more knowledgeable about that particular team’s needs. This could be one way to begin to institutionalize change – by working through the school’s existing infrastructure, and consistently demonstrating enthusiasm and energy for new ways of teaching and learning that are directly relevant to the teacher’s needs at that level.

Along with the team approach, I love the idea of Viral PD that Jen has been talking about for ages – why wait for the PD you need to be offered by an institution that doesn’t realize they need it (or isn’t ready to provide it)? I love the fact that it is grassroots, but it’s organized, with a clear structure and focus and it allows for people to learn at their own pace without having to “wait” for help. Methods of professional development for educators should reflect the new ways we teach and learn, increasingly through online networks and user-created content, just like Julie Lindsay‘s E-Learning for Life Ning with her teachers in Qatar.

I especially love the idea of having a “home base” for this type of professional development. This is something I’m always promoting for the projects I conduct with students, why wouldn’t we use the same approach when teachers are learning? If we can start building an infrastructure now, a place where teachers can effectively share what they know, that infrastructure can be used when the broader shift begins to happen and the institution finally embraces the changed nature of professional development. Taking the time to thoughtfully implement this infrastructure now, can then become the foundation for a changed approach to professional development at the institutional level.

I understand that change is slow and that each small step we take is valuable, but I am a planner at heart, and I would like to find a strategic way to approach these small steps so that they lead to something more. I don’t mean “strategic” merely in the sense of being complex or clever. To me, it means an approach that’s transparently organized, with definite goals and a clear focus on the future. If you’re lucky enough to be working in a team, being strategic might also mean coordinating time to work together, or methods of cross-pollinating and sharing the team members’ insight. Being strategic in this sense would mean concentrating on deliberately putting structures in place in the present that could help bring about future systemic change. Whenever I plan a project, I always start with the end in mind, so why can’t we do this with teachers? Even if it is a small group of teachers, we can be thoughtful and coordinated about how we help build their understanding, right?

So I’m starting to think about how I can use the Understanding by Design process with my seedlings (or Tribes, if you prefer). Maybe taking the ISTE Standards for Teachers and designing “units of study” that would help build teacher understanding of one standard at a time? Developing authentic tasks and experiences for the teachers I’m working with that would demonstrate their understanding at a deeper level. Instead of letting the learning be hit or miss, dependent on totally arbitrary factors, perhaps I could use this approach to help coordinate the learning among the teachers that are already interested? Does anyone else have experience using their classroom unit planning methods as the framework for collaborating with fellow teachers? What methods get the best results? What extra factors need to be accounted for, and what needs to be modified, when thinking of teaching peers as a type of “unit planning”?

Without the energy and enthusiasm of even just one lone voice in the school (whether it’s a tech facilitator or a classroom teacher or a librarian or specialist), none of this will happen. As so many of us like to say, we need to be the change we wish to see in the world, but can we organize and strategize enough to provide an infrastructure for others to adopt and adapt to these changed perspectives, eventually, perhaps the whole institution? Is this one way to ensure that the changes, ideals and ideas brought by one lone voice can outlast their time at one specific institution?

What do you think? Is it possible to be strategic (in the sense that even small groups of learners outside of the institutional PD structure can be organized and focused) when you’re the lone voice?