CLMS / CLHS Conference Published 2006-11-19 under conferences

I am in beautiful Monterey, CA attending "Teaching The Millennial Generation" conference. My session, "Online Collaboration Tools" is over so I could spend the day enjoying the presentations. David Warlick was the keynote speaker for the conference. I have heard David speak on numerous occasions, listen to his podcasts and the day outside was absolutely beautiful. Despite all of these reasons to be tempted to skip the keynote, I found myself in attendance.

While there were one or two new things that I got from David's presentation, I was more impressed with the storytelling as much as the story. His style is captivating and I think that this is as important as any bullet point from his slides. David points out that one of the most important leadership skills is the ability to tell a story.

I attended a session later in the day on developing videos for online teacher training. I went with a single question - how do you get content experts to create compelling and engaging scripts, stories? The presenter glossed over the question (several times) by saying that it is not difficult to get a subject expert to create a script. While he wanted to focus on issues such as online follow-up assessments, I feel he missed the point - the craft is in the telling of the story.

It has not been my experience that it is easy to develop content packaged in a compelling story. Dave Warlick's gift is his ability to package his ideas into a story and deliver it in an engaging fashion. This is an important skill that we need to be teaching our kids.

... Bringing me to Digital Storytelling - a topic that was conspicuously missing in the program (actually there was one session on it that I missed). There were sessions on how to find free multimedia on the web, how to use PowerPoint to replace your poster board projects, and even how to edit photos using Google's Picasa. But the focus was on the technology, not the story, not the storytelling. I am excited about one digital storytelling tool that Bob Fishtrom introduced - Photo Story 3 - which gives PC users the ability to easily create a digital story. This is a free download from Microsoft for users of XP.

I attended Chris Walsh's session on the Google Universe to see what is new since his presentation at CUE back in March. The change in the name of his presentation says it all - the presentation used to be Google World. Google is taking over, not just the world now, but the universe. Chris goes through just a few of the ever growing list of services that Google has to offer. The one that I had not heard of and that Chris highlighted in an Infinite Thinking Machine video played prior to the start of the session was SketchUp, a 3-D modeling software (PC and Mac). The personal addition is free - wow! But the real meat of Chris' presentation was about accessing information, whether it be using one of Google's special search features or searching from your phone using SMS. Where is the benefit to learning? Chris asked how we might incorporate these services into our curriculum and the answers he got back were not great. In fact, Chris said that he is still trying to find the "killer" use for the SMS feature in education.

The point is we now live in an age where accessing the information is no longer an issue. What we do with it is the important part. This was one of David's main points in his keynote. Google is making access to information ubiquitous. We need to now teach our kids to view the information with a critical eye filtering out the irrelevant or inaccurate information and draw connections between other bits of information. This critical thinking has always been a goal in education, but it is made easier when the information is so accessible.

From the perspective of both a presenter and an attendee, one hour "breakout sessions" are not long enough to really get into the meat of the issues. I commend the organizers of this conference as they had several 2 1/2 hour sessions - most were in labs - where we could really learn. As an example, Amy Murphy had her class podcasting, not just listening to an overview of the subject.

Monterey is a beautiful place and despite the natural beauty outside, I am glad that I spent the day at this well run conference.

Tags: monterey06, montereytech06, millennials, warlick

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Importance of the Arts in Education Published 2006-11-07

I was raised to believe that any education requires more than Reading, wRiting, and aRithmetic. I remember licking stamps and stuffing envelops with my parents as they helped a school board candidate who campaigned on the platform of fighting the fundamentalist movement in our local school district. I also remember those election nights seeing our candidate lose and enduring the restrictive curriculum that followed.

It seems appropriate that on this election day that I revisit the idea that education is more than just learning facts or the basic skills.

This morning I stumbled on a speech about "The Role of Creativity and the Arts in 21st-Century Education" from Stanford University - April 2006. I am a great fan of including "creativity" as one of the basic principle to be included in any education.

What I find so interesting in this article is that Stanford not only recognizes the importance of the Arts in teaching / fostering creativity but also the importance of creativity beyond the Arts.

The arts can help us break out of traditional patterns of thinking and adopt fresh approaches to intellectual experiences. Discontinuous innovations require novel thinking and breakthroughs in how a particular problem or challenge is approached. I believe the arts offer an expanded tool set for learning and understanding that can enhance creative thinking skills. But this will also require facilitating more cross-disciplinary collaboration between the arts and other fields.

As I head out to my polling place, I don't have a candidate for whom I have licked stamps and stuffed envelops. But the issues of the 70s and 80s remain. What do we value in our education system? For my money, creativity must be high on the list.

Tags: education, creativity, stanford

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How Do You Collaborate? Published 2006-11-02 under conferences

I am excited to be speaking at this year's CLMS/CLHS/NHSA/CUE conference in Monterey, CA titled "Teaching the Millennial Generation: Technology Tools that Transform the Learning Experience".  I will be speaking about online collaboration tools such as wikis, writeboards, and Office-like tools.

I am interested in your experiences in collaboration and what you find to work in your classrooms.  What do you use to collaborate?  Do you have your students use collaboration tools to do group projects?  What is important to you in a tool? Reliability, ease-of-use, features, notifications, use statistics?

Let me know if you are planning on attending the conference and whether you have any specific questions about collaborative tools. 

Thanks and See you in Monterey!

Tags: edtech, collaboration, tools, CLMS, CLHS, NHSA, CUE

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Importance of Information Published 2006-10-26

I had a wonderful evening a couple of days ago attending a dinner/speaker event at Caltech. The presenter was Richard Murray, director of IST (Information Science and Technology) at Caltech. He described the Institute's work in developing a interdisciplinary research and teaching initiative based on information.

Information science and technology has evolved over the last fifty years from an activity that focused on enabling more efficient calculations to a major intellectual theme that spans numerous disciplines in engineering and the sciences. To go further, however, we need new, unified ways of looking at, approaching, and exploiting information in and across the physical and biological realms, as well as the social sciences and engineering. from IST website

Information Science is a favorite of mine so I was excited to be attending and I was not disappointed. Besides an excellent dinner and wonderful dinning companions, Dr. Murray's presentation was fascinating, two highlights of which I would like to share.

First, Information Science is one of the core sciences that all Caltech undergraduates must study (the others being Biology, Chemistry, and Physics). Wow! That really makes a statement of the importance that Institute is placing on information and its interconnection with all that is done there. Many (e.g. Warlick, and November) write about a new literacy. This is exactly what is being done at Caltech. Information permeates our existence more today than any time in history. It is important that we study these information flows and consider novel ways of acquiring, filtering, and processing information. How many of you are reading this post by directly browsing to http://digiwalks.blogspot.com? Or are you using an RSS aggregator? Or are viewing this through a portal channel? Through some social networking site?

The other fascinating topic on which Dr. Murray spoke was Team Caltech and the 2007 DARPA Urban Challenge. Like in past challenges, students will design and build an unmanned, autonomous vehicle that will have to negotiate a track all on its own. What is different this time is that the track will be in an urban setting where the vehicle will have to travel down streets obeying traffic rules including stop signs. Dr. Murray showed us a video taken as Team Caltech travel through the streets of Pasadena. The two video feeds (one from the front and one from the side) show what the vehicle will "see" and process. What really excited me was something that Dr. Murray said: "Before the students can start solving problems, they must first figure out what problems need being solved." YES! As teachers we are always telling students what to do. Isn't it more realistic (authentic) to have them determine what need being done. Not only could they be assessed on how well they solve a problem, but also on how well they define the problems to be solved.

Congratulations to Caltech and Dr. Murray for recognizing and institutionalizing the importance of information and interdisciplinary projects. I can hardly wait for this movement to spread to all Universities and into High Schools. It is not a matter of if but when.

Tags: information science, Caltech, DARPA

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I Must Have Hated Math Class... Published 2006-10-19

In school, I did well in my math classes to the extent that I began my college career majoring in the subject. According to a recent Brookings Institution study, I must have really hated math in school. The study found that students in the U.S. generally enjoy math class more than their counter-parts in other countries but faired worse on achievement tests.

The argument here is not that student happiness causes low achievement. Correlations do not prove causality. But school reformers should take note. When thinking about how schools can be improved, the intuitive attractiveness of the idea that making students happier results in better education should be held in abeyance. Happiness is not everything ... [ref pg. 14]

Their point is well taken especially the idea that we should not assume that making school more relevant and enjoyable will increase student performance. Don't get me wrong! I am a strong believer in relevance, project-based authentic learning. But as evangelists, we cannot afford make such assumptions. We need to backup our ideas with facts and result.

I remember hearing about this math teacher who confronted by a parent who was a traditionalist when it came to the teaching of mathematics. This parent was concerned with a group project that the teacher assigned designing a rollercoaster. The teacher listened to the parent's concerns and then related conversations she had overheard during lunch earlier that week. Students were discussing their projects, defending the mathematics and challenging their classmates to do likewise. They were passionate about their projects, about math! She then sealed her argument by noting that all of her students passed the AP exam the previous year with all earning 4's or 5's.

I was talking with an educator the other day about this report and he noted a similar study that suggested that our science students are more confident than their counter-parts in other countries but performed worse on standardized tests. Installing a false sense of confidence in our students is not productive, but neither is the opposite - giving our students a falsely low regard for their abilities. [Only 6% of 8th grade students in Korea (one of the highest performing countries in math) report that the "usually do well in mathematics" ]

By the way, the truth is that I really liked math class. I enjoyed the challenge of solving problems and learning new cleaver ways of working on even more complicated problems. I dropped my math major in my Junior year precisely because it was not relevant. I could solve the problems (I was doing well in my classes) but I had no idea what all of this stuff was about. Speaking personally, I attribute my success in math directly to my teachers' ability to make the subject challenging and engaging.

Reference: "How Well are American Students Learning"

Tags: mathematics happiness

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