Making Distance Collaboration Work

We hear often today that we need to be collaborating with others outside of our classrooms. It isn’t enough that we only talk within our own schools and districts. We should be talking with other educators and students outside of our schools, but what does that really mean? Until recently I really didn’t know what it meant, even though I believed we should be engaging in those kinds of activities. So I thought I’d briefly describe my recent experiences facilitating collaboration between UNI students and CAL elementary students.

What we are doing here at UNI is connecting with rural schools and one of them is the CAL school district. One of our courses takes all of the UNI students out to CAL towards the end of the semester for a full day of the arts. Leading up to that culminating event are a number of smaller events and one of them is a video conference between CAL and UNI. We are doing that today in fact and my biggest take away is ensuring that we make every moment a learning experience, both for the CAL students, but also the UNI students.

For CAL students, they are excited to learn more about who the UNI students are: What’s your favorite color, do you have any pets, what’s your favorite thing to do outside? These are just a few among a host of questions the CAL students have had. For the UNI student, their learning surrounds becoming a teacher. What questions should we ask? What do we do if they don’t say anything? How do you relate to students on their grade level? What do I do if I freeze up and don’t know what to say? These are just a few of the things we talked about here at UNI between groups.

As I look at the learning that’s taking place for students at both ends, I can see truly see the value of collaboration, especially with those outside the school. Which brings me to my point. If we are really going to take advantage of collaboration and not simply collaborate in name only, we really need to be deliberate about what the students are learning when they collaborate. It isn’t enough to open Skype, the Polycom, or Google Hangout. There has to be substance to what the students are doing. It sounds so simple, but even today it took us a minute to really discover where we needed to target our learning for the day.

What I’m trying to say then is that collaboration is only as good as you make it…so make it good. It truly makes a difference.

Take Aways from Class

The semester is in full swing and this has been my first week back in the Ed.D. program.  Here are some take aways I came up with while sitting in class.

• Students come to school (K12/College) expecting to be engaged, however, when they come to school they aren’t engaged, at least not in the way they want to be engaged. It’s no wonder students drift off to Facebook, Twitter, texting, or even sleep. Sitting in lecture/discussion is not engaging and as the size of the class increases, motivation and accountability to be engaged decreases.
• Just because students stray from lecture/discussion does not mean they have short attention spans. Rather they have better things to do than participate. How engaged would you be if someone talked to you for an hour or more and didn’t interact with you in any way. Saying they have short attention spans and that technology is to blame is a copout for the traditional teacher. See how attentive they are when you engage with them in meaningful ways, perhaps using technology. You might be surprised.

Image Credit: http://flic.kr/p/5y2Uqm

Involvement

What does it mean to be student centered? Can we still consider a lesson student centered if the learner isn’t involved in the planning process? At what level does the learner become involved? These are some questions I’ve been reflecting about for the last day or so. The more I think about learner involvement and student centered instruction, I begin to feel like there is a continuum. On one end we have high student involvement throughout all aspects of the lesson, from planning through lesson evaluation. On the other end, we have low involvement throughout the entire lesson.

Traditionally, I’ve thought that student instruction was somewhere in the middle of these two points. Probably more towards the high involvement than then low, but not all the way to the extreme points. As a rule of thumb, I never go all in to one extreme over the other, but I’m wondering how student centered a lesson really is when the learner isn’t interested in the content being learned?

I understand the fact that the more relevant a lesson is to the learner, the more engaged and committed he or she will be to the learning process. But is that enough? What if the learner sees no value in the content or sees value, but wants to be more involved in the selection and design of the lesson? As I reflect on how I’ve taught in the past, rarely have I considered the value learners place on the content they are engaged with (I’m not going to say learning because I’m not sure they really are learning the content if there is a philosophical barrier between what I’m selling and what they’re buying). The content is important to me, but maybe not to everyone else.

I’d make the argument that if faculty (and probably students too) don’t believe in the content or how it is being disseminated, then minimal learning can take place. I don’t feel it’s enough to be student centered in the way that the learner is actively engaged, or even to the extent that the lesson is hyper relevant to the learner. I think there is another factor involved that is preventing a number of new ideas from being implemented. And I think that factor is full disclosure involvement from content selection, through design, and implementation.

I wonder how many of us that provide learning opportunities for faculty (as well as students) do this on a regular basis? I know I don’t…perhaps it’s time that I start.

Leadership Day 2012: Don’t Adopt Technology on a Whim!

Image from: http://dangerouslyirrelevant.org/site/wp-content/uploads/2012/08/LeadershipDay2012.png

My message for this year’s leadership day is going to be simple: Stop making decisions to adopt technology on a whim! You are damaging your school every time you decide to adopt a new technology initiative, because your faculty, staff, and students cannot be expected to change every time you attend a conference and come back with the latest flyer from the vendor hall. Gather a team that represents all stakeholders in the school and work together to create a vision that has student needs at heart.*  Once you have that vision, bring every resource the school has into making it happen, including technology.

I may seem a little harsh, but I have become frustrated with both administrators and teachers, who lack the common vision for where they need to be and how they are going to get there. When this happens, numerous initiatives are started and the disconnect is so great that it is difficult from an organizational standpoint to support everything everyone is doing. The cliché, a mile wide and an inch deep, is very reflective of where many schools find themselves. Everyone has their vision for what needs to happen, but since many of these visions compete against each other, no one can do them well, not to mention enact meaningful change.

If you find yourself in any leadership position, I urge you to stop and take a step back. Gather key stakeholders that represent your school community and take a deep breath and consider where you want to go. What’s important? What skills do your students need to leave with as they enter college or the workforce? What is the light at the end of the tunnel that each student needs to reach when they leave? Define what that is, and then begin talking about how you can get there. How will you use every resource the school can leverage, including technology resources and funding, to make that vision happen? Most important, how are you going to  build capacity within those around you? Figure out what it is that you need do and do it extremely well. This isn’t going to be easy, but it has to be done.

I want to conclude by saying that once you have made your plans and it comes time for implementation, be sure to encourage a culture where change is embraced. Any meaningful change you implement is likely going to be different from what has been done in the past. Teachers are going to need support and lots of it. If a major technology initiative is being implemented to support the vision, be sure to support a culture where teachers and administrators are willing to work with each other and willing to fail together. Perfection isn’t achieved on the first run, so be willing to re-invent your plans, your techniques, and most important, yourself. The road is going to be bumpy and mistakes are going to be made. Lead by example and take risks that could end in failure,  learning from your mistakes. Be willing to move on to find the right solution.  And above all, be true to your vision and stick it out. Don’t let the static of vendor halls and technological novelties interfere with your vision. Don’t adopt a technological innovation on a whim.

 

*Yes I know schools have these teams, but I often question their effectiveness. How much is what these teams accomplish for show and how much is for real change? Is the culture present within these teams to allow for failure without blame? Is this team really helping your school move forward? If not, maybe it’s time for a change? Certainly not all schools are like this, but I’m sure too many are.

Rote learning: A necessity but not for the classroom

Image from: http://www.flickr.com/photos/mischiru/2860228008/

At UNI we are still in the transition to Google Apps and the last major transition is from our old calendar platform to Google Calendar.  As I was reading the email I noticed that instead of having formalized training sessions on how to use Google Calendar, there was a link to Lynda.com where users can find training on all apps.  This left me wondering, why aren’t we doing this for all rote training needs we have?

As a technology specialist and educator, I understand that in order to reach innovative use of technology in a course, it is necessary to have some “how-to” knowledge about the technology being used.  Typically (going to generalize here) this is taught in large group sessions in a very rote way.  Click here, this feature does this, and so on.  We’ve all attended these trainings and many, including myself, have led a number of these sessions.  I’m wondering however, if we’ve reached a point where we no longer need to concern ourselves with teaching rote knowledge.  If we have very good tutorials on how to use X or what X is, do we really need to take up time “teaching” this when we are all together?  Wouldn’t we be just as or even more effective if we hand picked the videos we wanted our colleagues or students to watch so they can gain that rote knowledge that’s absolutely necessary for being successful?  Then, couldn’t we spend more time learning about how we can be effective with this technology in our courses?

I believe we have entered a point in society that you have to be a lifelong learner.  You simply cannot function without that essential characteristic.  At UNI, I’d say nearly all the people I work with would more than be capable of lifelong learning and I’d imagine many of you would agree you see the same in your colleagues.  However, as educators, have we truly embraced what it means to be a lifelong learner?  Do we take the initiative to learn new innovations as our organization adopts them?  I don’t think we have and I think we are wasting time organizing formalized training sessions on the latest innovation.  I know I’m guilty of this, we all are.  But I think we have a professional duty, as educators, to learn about new innovations as they become available in an asynchronous way.  I’m not saying you need to be an expert in every innovation, but I do think you need to be knowledgeable enough to either have a discussion about the innovation and/or be able to use the innovation in a basic sense without having to sit through an hour or even a full day workshop.

I’m going to shift gears slightly, but remain on the same topic.  I think we need to begin developing this literacy in our students as well.  How much time do we spend in education teaching students rote knowledge?  When was the Civil War?  What is the atomic weight of Boron?  What is the formula for calculating the surface area of a parallelogram?  We need to stop teaching our students how to do these things in our physical classrooms!  The answers to these questions can be found online and are very well articulated in a variety of mediums.  Why, I ask WHY do we still use low level rote instruction?  We’re good at doing it, but someone else is better and they’ve decided to share it with you for free (usually)!  Send your students to these resources online to learn this knowledge and then in class have them apply the concept they learned at home, the library, a friends house, etc.  It’s the application of the concept that get’s interesting and is where students have questions and is where our efforts as teachers should be.  Helping students apply knowledge in a meaningful context.

I’ll end by saying that rote learning, is necessary, but it shouldn’t be the only kind of learning that takes place.  I remember when I was in student teaching, my university supervisor asked me, “When are you going to develop the low level knowledge needed for your students to be able to answer the high level questions you’re asking them?”  This statement has remained with me ever since.  Before we can synthesize, create, or analyze, we need to first be able to understand the concept in its most basic form.  I think advocates for reform forget this, especially those who are critical of the flipped classroom.  I think flipping is exactly what we need to be doing, but it’s not the only thing.  It’s just one piece in the puzzle.

Unpacking the Iowa Mentoring and Induction Institute

Today was another packed day at the Iowa Mentoring and Induction Institute.  There were great conversations and new ideas discussed that it has me swirling and feeling like I need to unpack some of the major themes I heard during the different sessions.

The first theme I think of when I reflect back on today is what Jody Stone said about the state of change in Iowa’s schools.  The desire for change is there in many educators across the state that we are now at a time when real systemic change can take place in our schools.  This really got me jazzed for the day and for moving forward in what comes next in my small part of the world of education.

The next thought that seemed to keep reappearing was the need to have a change in the type of culture within the school system.  We no longer are able to sit back in our classrooms and say, “I’m doing a good job so just leave me alone to teach in my little isolated part of the school.”  We all have to participate regardless if we are a highly effective teacher or highly ineffective teacher.  But to do this we have to develop trust with one another, both among teachers and with administrators.  We need to be able to make mistakes so we can learn from them, but we also need to have the time to observe other teachers’ mistakes so we can learn from their experiences as well.  Dan Fox made this very clear during the panel discussion and I couldn’t agree with him more.

Molly Boyle brought up an important point that we need to be intentional with everything we do.  The time for trying to covertly influence others has passed.  Whether it’s in the classroom or with a group of teachers, the time for being passive has past.  We can no longer afford to dance around problems.  The time for being blunt and decisive is here so let’s embrace the chance that needs to take place, no matter how ambiguous it is, so we can start moving forward.

Finally, no discussion about effective teaching can be complete without talking about how we measure and assess effective teaching.  This was certainly a prominent topic at the Institute, especially with Director Glass in attendance.  While there are many paths we can take and argue for or against, there are a few things we do know.  It’s not going to be easy, there is no silver bullet to fix all our problems, any teacher performance assessment must take into account multiple measures, and it is going to make some people unhappy no matter which path is chosen.  While this may seem like a reason to get down and be less than optimistic about the future, I feel like there is a reason to be hopeful.  Hopeful because when we create an assessment system for measuring a teachers’ effectiveness, we will have overcome a challenge that will have required educators from all aspects of the educational sphere to work together and build consensus.  While we won’t agree on all aspects, I think we will work together to create an assessment system for teachers that measures what counts and can lead to more highly effective teachers.  In the end, we can’t afford to do anything less.

My experiences with blended learning

Note: This blog post is being used as part of the UNI Teacher Quality Partnership Course Redesign Summit that will take place from June 1-7, therefore, this post may seem a bit out of context for those not participating in the summit.  However, feel free to leave comments and interact as you see fit.

I’ve had a few experiences with blended learning as a student, some good and some bad.  My first experiences were during my undergraduate course about distance education.  This course was taught in an entirely blended format.  There were face-to-face meetings on campus and there were also a number of interactions using a learning management system.  Like many things, the first time you try something is rarely the best experience and mine was no different.  Having never taken a course that met at a distance, I was unprepared for the online experience of the course, in particular, the online discussions.  I’m typically a more reserved person when it comes to discussions in front of my peers and this transferred to the online environment.  When the time came for discussions it was difficult for me to engage with others in the course.  I’d have something I would want to share so I would post it in my forum, but I rarely received feedback from anyone else in the course.  Essentially I thought what I was posting was wrong and no one was telling me otherwise so I went on that assumption.  I felt isolated.  As time went on I continued to feel more and more isolated and in the end my performance in the course suffered.  The problem with this first experience was that I didn’t feel like I was noticed by others in the course.  This is what is called social presence, which has to be facilitated and cultivated by course instructors.  If instructors fail to do this, students tend to fall into the same situation that I found myself in during my first blended course.

However, my second experience was much different from my first.  I enrolled in a distance masters program where all the courses were taught primarily at a distance.  In each of the courses, we only met physically about once or twice a semester and, for the most part, the people I began my courses with were the same throughout the entire experience.  This helped each student develop relationships that will last a lifetime.  There were many typical class activities, such as readings, lectures, discussions, and collaborative group work, that were done at a distance with people from all over the US.  The key for the experience was being able to work asynchronously, but still on a schedule to ensure we progressed through the course together.  This way we could learn when it was most convenient for us.  Also making this a positive experience were the instructors who were flexible and responsive to the needs of the students.  If something needed to be changed, they worked with the entire class and modified the course accordingly.

Reflecting back on the experience, there were a number of changes from my first blended course to my last.  The biggest factor has probably been time.  About 7 years has elapsed since my first experience and during that time a number of advances, both intelectual and technological, have been made with blended and online learning that have made them easier to design and teach.  This isn’t because blended and online learning is an easier format to teach through, but instead, we are better able to identify and change problem areas both in the design process and once the course is underway, which in the end makes the entire process easier.  While we will share and discuss many of the resources and strategies you can use to design effective blended learning environments, I underlined a few words above to have you start thinking about how you and your students interact in your courses.  Even though there are a number of contextual differences between my experience and the ones you create for your students, these are still common themes that will appear in nearly all blended learning environments, so think about these themes in your context and what it means for your students.

M.Ed. Portfolio Blog Series: Ethics and Technology

This coming Saturday I will be defending my master’s portfolio and I wanted to share some of my hard work with others who won’t attend my defense.  We often spend so much time creating artifacts of our learning, whether it be a document, video, song, web page, etc., to only have it viewed by a relatively small number of people.  I wanted to do something different and share my work with as many people as possible, because I’ve worked hard over the last three years and have grown tremendously as an educator during that time.  So, every day this week I will post about my experiences and share my reflections, with the hope that some conversation can be created about what I’ve done over the last three years and keep our learning going well past my defense.  Today I’m going to talk about the Ethical and Human Issues and Technology performance indicator.

I felt this was the most difficult performance indicator to talk about, because of the nature of the topic.  When we talk about ethics and some of the human issues with technology, we really are talking about some heavy topics.  Everything from bullying, to cheating, to child safety, to preparing students for the future are all fair game in this topic.  I struggled to find a topic initially, but then I started thinking more about what I felt this competency meant and I came to the conclusion that this is my chance to stand on my soap box and steer the conversation to a place where I thought it was important, where I thought it needed more attention.  So for me, this competency meant talking about three topics: unblocking social networking software, helping students develop an online presence, and helping students develop information literacy.  Influencing my decision was the fact that I hadn’t seen much on a 21st century perspective of this competency in either my conversations with other educators or in my actions.  Instead, I typically saw these topics discussed in a 20th century perspective, which I feel is much different.

I landed on unblocking social networking software, because often we have the wrong reasons at heart when we make decisions to block certain Web sites.  From my experiences as a technology director in a K-12 school, our decision to block social networking sites was based on classroom management considerations supported through the guise of protecting students.  However, what we failed to realize is the shift that is (was?) taking place in how our students learn.  Our students are social beings, but we don’t teach using social tools.  When we introduce social technologies into the classroom there is an inevitable butting of heads.  The easy solution was to block the social technology, when the right solution is to change how we teach to become more social.  Socializing isn’t a bad thing for education, but really is just the next evolution.  Eventually my school began to understand (not that we fully understood) the benefit of changing how we teach to leverage social networking sites.  There was an opportunity to reach our students in a way we had previously dismissed, thus dismissing a part of who our students are.

The second topic I landed on grew out of the first, developing student online presence.  Something we miss when we don’t use social networking software is how students develop their online presence.  Often they are left to do this themselves, alone, which is a breading ground for trouble.  All we need to do to find evidence of this is do a google search for cyber bullying and I all but guarantee the medium used to bully is social.  Here I advocate for teaching our students how to use social software so we can begin to instill our values into this new layer of society.  While some people may think this isn’t the job of school, but when we look at what schools are truly preparing students for, it clearly is being a successful citizen. With social networking sites not going anywhere anytime soon, it’s time schools begin helping students succeed in this arena as well.

Finally, I decided to talk about developing student information literacy.  Knowledge and information is expanding at an unimaginable rate and everyone needs to know how to both search and use that information.  However, by continuing to stick with instruction that doesn’t allow students to search and use that information, this literacy will not begin to develop in our students.  Teachers are no longer the only source of information, but we continue to teach in ways that still support this notion.  My belief is that we as educators have an ethical obligation to provide learning opportunities for students that allow them to be engaged in data and research.  This is likely only possible by drastically changing how we teach and maybe to an extent what we teach.

Ethical and human issues of technology is such an important area in education, but we often don’t talk about it enough.  Here’s your chance!  What’s on your mind?  What do you think is an important ethics or human issue surrounding technology, but isn’t being discussed?  My three certainly aren’t exhaustive.  Add to the conversation and help everyone learn by adding a comment!

Reaction to article about Maine’s 1:1 program

Yesterday I read an article about 10 years after Maine’s 1:1 laptop program started and how things have changed.  I ended up having a conversation on Twitter with @kenroyal about the article and he encouraged me to put my tweets in writing, so here goes.

Going into this article I was expecting a bit more than I received.  I’m not sure what I thought I was going to get from this article, but I felt I wanted more.  The thing that bothered me the most about this article and it’s hard to determine if this is the reality or not, were the type of activities students were engaged in since receiving laptops 10 years ago.  While I know this isn’t a research article and I am only using this article as a 10,000 foot view of what is really happening, it seems like the students were only engaged in basic activities such as Internet research and essay writing.  Throughout the article there were numerous mentions of students doing reports, which begs the question, what else are they doing?  I would imagine students are doing more student-centered type of activities and projects, but this article seems to ignore this fact, which could be due to the author’s lack of understanding of education and technology integration.

What also bothered me in this article was the use of the video at the end.  During the article the author highlights the different successes of the 1:1 program in Maine, such as increased test scores.  I’m happy to see test scores increasing, but there seemed to be a disconnect between the achievement highlighted by the author and the realities of the students.  In the video students highlight their experiences with the laptops and it appears they are not used much beyond some very basic tasks.  One student even explained that he doesn’t use his laptop during the day at all.  I’m not trying to rain on anybody’s parade, but it just surprised me to see an article talking about the success of the laptop program which ended with a video of students saying how little they use the computers.  If the students’ reality is in fact the reality of most students throughout the state, are the laptops really making much difference?

My concern that this article highlights is that there may in fact be a disconnect between what educators see as the reality of a laptop initiative and what students see and experience.  With a number of schools in Iowa making the transition to a technology rich learning environment supported through the use of laptops or other mobile computing devices, I get concerned about how these programs will be evaluated to determine if they are meeting the goals and objectives they set out to accomplish at the onset of the program.  I don’t have any hard data that proves schools aren’t evaluating their laptop programs, but I just have this gut feeling that this might not be happening and it concerns me.  This seems like this would be a great place for some research, hopefully an area I will be able to contribute to in the near future.

I’m certainly a large supporter of technology rich environments, including 1:1 laptop programs, but the key for me is having the initiative planned and implemented with clear goals and objectives.  More than that, those objectives need to focus on the students and their learning, not perpetuating more of the same teacher-centered instruction.  Teacher-centered instruction is an instructional strategy of the past and we need to stop using technology in ways that continue to support an outdated practice.  With such an investment in people, resources, and other infrastructure, it’s wasteful to not have very clear expectations of a laptop program that can be measured and re-invented if necessary.

These are my thoughts, what do you think?  Keep the conversation going.

What’s the value of using technology to mask content students don’t find interesting?

I was reading an article Scott McLeod linked to on Mind Dump, about a teacher and the use of an IWB in the classroom.  The part of that article stood out most to me was when Jamie Long, a math major and secondary ed minor at Stonehill College said: “At the very least it made it more interesting and made more people pay attention.”  While this may be true, this shouldn’t be the role of an IWB or any educational technology.  The technology shouldn’t be the thing that captivates and holds student attention.  Relevance should be doing this!!  Technology in any form is merely a tool used to make learning easier, it shouldn’t be what makes students want to tune in and listen.  Repackaging the same ineffective lesson using technology doesn’t make the lesson any better.  It just makes it an ineffective lesson using technology.  If we are really serious about engaging the students in our classrooms, then we need to make the lesson authentic for them.  It may not be easy and will likely take some time, but if our end goal is to have students engaged in a meaningful learning environment, then we need to elicit passion in the things they care about and put the content in a meaningful perspective for the student.