Lessons Learned

Being an educator raising our children overseas in international and American Schools really works for our family. However, one aspect of this lifestyle I struggle with is the bubble that sometimes surrounds us as we go to school each day, attend co-curricular activities and spend much of our time with fellow expatriates.

One of our family goals is to really go deeper to be involved in the culture that is outside this expatriate lifestyle. This sometimes isn’t so easy with language and cultural barriers. Some expatriate families put their children in local schools for a time period and find programs outside the international school activities for their children to participate in.

I bring this topic up after listening to another excellent podcast by Tom Ashbrook with his On Point radio program where he discussed the nature of global students. His guests on the show were Maya and Tom Frost who shared their experiences sending their four daughters overseas from the USA for high school and university studies. Their children attended local high schools becoming fully immersed in the language and culture of their new homes.

Maya recently wrote a “how to” for parents looking to give their children similar experiences in the book entitled The New Global Student: Skip the SAT, Save Thousands on Tuition and Get a Truly International Education. Much of the conversation in the show was about life changing experiences for their children and those of callers to the program. It really struck home for me thinking about my sons and where they might attend university one day.

On a similar note, international educators Brent Loken and Sheryl Gruber recently made the decision to pursue their dream of providing global citizenship and cultural immersion opportunities by creating an educational program called Ethical Expeditions. They will start their expeditions next year taking students to Borneo and Zambia to do community and ecological work.

Image Source

Jeff and I concluded our second year of podcasting about shifting schools to the School/Learning 2.0 model. We would like to thank all of our guests who shared their insights and practical ideas to help students, teachers, administrators and parents work together in the shifting process.

You can listen to shows directly from the SOS Podcast page or subscribe through iTunes.

Here are the Essential Questions we discussed this past year:

How to shift when the administrators are not on board?
What prevents administrators from shifting?
What are some shifted practices in our schools?
How to recruit shifted teachers?
Once shifted, where do we go next?
How to make the shift systemic and sustainable in our schools?
Which comes first, shifted practices or 1:1 laptop program?
How to move students from being dependent to independent learners?
How are we preparing pre-service teachers to be shifted educators?
How to measure how shifted your school is?
How to do a school tech makeover on the cheap?
How can we help teachers take more risks in their teaching and learning?

The TPACK approach of connecting technology, pedagogy and content to use the power of their convergence is being covered in the May issue of Learning & Leading with Technology. Punya Mishra and Matthew Koehler, the authors of the article, also share a wiki site that provides further information on the framework.

Judi Harris and Mark Hofer of the College of William & Mary will soon have articles also published in L & L on the TPACK theme. They recently took the theory and moved into the practical by creating their Learning Activities Type wiki. There you can find examples of regular instructional practices and assessments matched up with various supportive technologies categorized by ones that lead to convergent learning and ones that offer ways for students to show their divergent thinking.

Another resource for learning about TPACK is a podcast by the GenTech boys. Check it out.

Image Source

The spread of the H1N1 virus reminded me of our running a virtual school in Hong Kong during the outbreak of SARS in 2003 when all the schools were closed. Our elementary team of teachers came together to create a program focusing on what we called the “3 C’s of Communication, Community and Content (Interactive & Collaborative)”. We quickly realized that continuing the learning became secondary to the creation of a network that provided our students and their families the social and emotional connections that they so needed during their very isolated days.

I wrote an article entitled “Surviving Crisis Mode” in Learning & Leading with Technology that documented our many weeks of virtual school while outlining the follow up efforts to prepare for the future possibility of school closure. It hopefully can provide some insights to readers thinking about creating and implementing a virtual school plan.

One important positive from the experience was that our school leaders, teachers and parents were much more open to the shift in instructional an assessment practices that our small team of early adopters had previously been pushing for.

For other ideas on how to prepare for the possibility of school closure, check out Britt Watwood and Stephanie Sandifer’s recent posts.

Image Source ISTE

Mark Hofer, Steve Whitaker and Michael Kelly will join us on tonight’s SOS Podcast where we will be discussing this question of teacher preparation. It should be an excellent discussion as all three taught pre-service teachers at the University of Virginia. Mark now teaches at the College of William and Mary.

To answer this question I think of what we do with our colleagues in our schools to help them shift their teaching practices to more Classroom 2.0 practices. We have covered many topics in the podcast that support shifting individuals and schools but two in particular jump out at me when working with new teachers.

Risk Taking- I wrote about this in my previous post. We ended up needing to postpone that podcast discussion with John Mikton. It is now scheduled for April 30th. When working with university students, I am thinking one can start with the practices they already use in their lives for communication and learning. In most cases this will involve tapping into their everyday life experience of using cell phones, social networking tools, information literacy, etc. while guiding them to see that that already have learning networks in their lives.

Professional Learning Networks- So much to being a shifted teacher is about being a lifelong learner connected to one’s physical and digital learning networks. We again draw on the pre-service teachers’ natural proclivity to use technology to help them set up their RSS reader and to start connecting to the blogs, wikis, etc. that support shifted practices and new learning while offering examples of risk taking activities by educators from around the world.

John Mikton will join Jeff and myself to talk about this question on the Shifting Our Schools podcast taking place tonight. To start answering this question, I think the obvious starting point is with our teachers individually to ask them what needs to happen to help them try new ideas in their teaching and learning. I don’t see large workshops or sending folks to conferences as the starting point to help build a culture of risk taking. Large scale PD efforts can provide models of shifted practices and get folks excited to try new things but it still comes back to each teacher in his/her classroom. I think it says so much to talk to teachers a few weeks after returning from a conference to see how things are going in trying some of the practices they saw at the conference. Many times they haven’t acted on their excitement due to barriers in their schools.

We know the list of barriers that often affect teachers in many ways not just in not taking risks (i.e., not enough time, too much to cover in the curriculum, assigned tasks that don’t support student learning, parent expectations, etc.). Experience tells me that by talking with individual teachers, finding practices they are confident in using in their classrooms and then asking what they see as interesting in other classrooms or in their professional reading, we as learning specialists (instructional technologists, librarians, learning support, GATE facilitators, curriculum coordinators, etc.) can then help them take small first steps to try new things starting within their area of comfort.

One theme that runs through many of our podcasts about shifting practices and schools is leadership. While learning specialists can make a huge difference in supporting teachers and learning in the classroom, it is our administrators who can really help push the shift by modeling risk taking setting a tone for the school that trying new ideas is expected. By communicating to the larger community through a variety of communication avenues (e.g., blogs, email, Twitter, various presentations tools in parent meetings, etc.), the administrator takes risks with new technology while inviting parents to understand and expect risk taking as part of the school culture. Celebration of teachers and students taking risks should be central to the shift in culture. While much of the focus will be on successful risk taking, we cannot forget to highlight the times when the results didn’t quite work out and learning took place.

If we work with individuals while having the community as a whole assess the nature of our current school culture, we can gather the information needed to create an action plan to build a climate that supports risk taking. While this process might take some time, if we start right away having our learning specialists work with teachers to share their opinions about barriers and needed actions for support while having our administrators lead by example, we can start helping educators take more risks in their teaching.

The teaching of information, visual and design literacies across the curriculum is a task many of us are undertaking. One interesting possibility to teach all three together would be to look at the world financial crisis by having our students research the validity of the numbers being shared in the media, challenge them to visually represent the data and to then task them to communicate the information in a well-designed presentation. The folks at Flowing Data offer several examples of such an effort in their 27 Visualizations and Infographics to Understand the Financial Crisis post. While one cannot be sure about the validity of the numbers presented in the 27 infographics, they do offer a wonderful opportunity to engage students to think about data, cause & effect and the power of visuals to get a message across.

There are so many other topics and available tools that can be used to have our students produce similar learning products for our classrooms. It makes so much sense to use these literacies (and technology literacy by having students create their own graphics) to help reach our course learning outcomes.

As you review some of the 27 examples, what are some ideas that come to mind for your classroom?

Secretary of Education Duncan spent an hour with Tom Ashbrook sharing the plan for improving American education. Listen to the On Point program. One comment on my part is that I did not hear Secretary Duncan make any reference to the role of parents and children in improving education in America until a caller asked him about this topic. The caller nailed it at the end calling Secretary Duncan a bit on the carpet about spending money but not taking steps to hold parents and students accountable.

The NPR Technology program does a segment on the use of clickers in higher education. Listen to the podcast. A follow up comment by one of the newscasters caught my attention. She asked how do clickers support critical thinking skills.

A teacher at my school recently used a simulation, technology and a subject matter expert to bring deeper understanding to her students’ understanding of Shakespeare.

Ms. Galland’s Advanced Placement Language and Composition class read Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice, analyzing how a moneylender named Shylock demands repayment from a debtor named Antonio. Shylock asks that Antonio repay him his 3000 ducats with a “pound of flesh” as promised in the verbal contract they agreed on.

The AP students held a mock trial in class before George Galland, who is an attorney in Chicago. Mr. Galland played the role of judge over Skype. The plaintiffs used legal opinions, evidence from the Folger Shakespeare Library, and other web sites and articles documenting the climate and laws in Elizabethan England to present and defend their cases. Mr. Galland decided in favor of the defendant, but was very impressed with the preparation, presentations, textual citation and courtroom performances of all the AP students.

Acknowledgment: Hilary Galland helped author this post.

I was reading email on my school computer using the Yahoo account my wife and I share when I noticed an advertisement that I had never seen before on the right side of the page playing a short video. What caught my eye was the attractive women seemingly talking to me. I looked closer and yes, she was inviting me to “video chat” with her. I then noticed the small amount of clothing she was wearing and before you know it, I felt like I was in Amsterdam being propositioned in the red light zone. It was bit uncomfortable especially with one of my sons looking over my shoulder.

I checked with my wife on her school computer and she was seeing the same ad. Our family emails involve discussions of who is going to cook dinner to weekend plans. We would definitely not come across as a 20 something testosterone-laden emailer looking for companionship. This new ad replacing our usual graduate school offering definitely seemed targeted at a wider user base.

I asked myself how could this type of advertisement be placed in a mainstream site like Yahoo. While it might be found at sites aimed at college age males, it definitely seems like a pretty big drop in standards for a company like Yahoo. It then dawned on me that Yahoo, which had difficulties even before the economic downturn, must be losing advertisers to such a degree that they now are lowering their standards to get any advertising. What worries me is so many of our students have their own online email accounts where they, too, will be viewing Ms. Video Chat.

With many teachers and students using a variety of online free tools, it seems that in our slowing world economy that we need to keep a keen eye for any changes in what inappropriate advertisements might be popping up on our students’ screens.

In addition, there have been plenty of discussions on tech-oriented podcasts that one has to be on the look out for free providers of Web 2.0 tools who will lose their funding and go under. Folks already saw Google drop a tool or two so one needs to be careful about what lessons, projects, and general information is being stored online by companies who might not be around in the near future.