A.D.M. & Technology

Had the opportunity to listen to the Assistant Deputy Minister of Education at yesterday's Director's Address and he had some interesting comments on using technology.

Learning Cultures

He spoke about e-learning being huge and had a story about appropriate use of Smartboards. His final statement is the most powerful: "It is about helping to improve pedagogy and the support for learning."

Listen to this segment of his talk here:

Assistant Deputy Minister of Education on Technology and Pedagogy.

What is Learning?

Alan November has a discussion with Elliot Washer Ed. D. Mr. Washer talks about how children learn and how students develop themselves. How do we create an environment for learning? We all have objects we hold dear. He illustrates his discussion by describing an example of how a boy was "drawing cellos" in his home without cellos and the learning that follows.

He talks about people learning in small communities and in one-to-one environments. Mr. Washer is part of a group of people who started "The Big Picture Company" which is dedicated to designing smal break the mold school communites around the world.

Listen to this podcast here: Alan November & Elliot Washer

The Horizon Project

The 2008 Horizon Project is a Global, Multicultural learning project. This project analyzed the future of College education. Here Vicki Davis explains the project and its benefits to her students.

Flat Classroom Project

In 2006, The Flat Classroom Project was a collaborative project between Julie Lindsay's Grade 11 class in Dhaka, Bangladesh and Vicki Davis' 10th grade class in Camilla Georgia.

The project was based on Thomas Friedman's book The World is Flat. The classes focused on the 10 "flatners" that Mr. Friedman talks about in his books.

In 2007 the project expanded to include 7 schools from around the world.

Networked Learning

Here Canadian and middle school teacher Clarence Fisher, a Prime Minister's Award winner from Snow Lake Manitoba, speaks about learning and how it is networked .

He talks about how teaching and learning is a collective effort and not an individual accomplishment.

Personal Learning Networks

Personal Learning Networks. Here, Will Richardson talks mostly about connecting. How do you build a network and start learning about what you are passionate about? The context is an on-line environment. Students are already engaged in their own personal on-line environments Our responsibility is to guide and instruct students in how to use them responsibly. How do we get teachers and other educators to respond in this environment?

The best way is to create our own personal learning network. Fortunately, we are not far off with the introduction of our Sharepoint environment which offers teachers a safe and secure way to start building their learning network.

These P.L.N.s can have profound impact on how we learn. So, educators need to participate and then encourage and support each other and students to help them understand the potential of these types of networks for learning.

Read-Write Web - 2

In part 2 of the Will Richardson interview the discussion begins with Will speaking about what the future of students and learning will be like. Collaboration, ownership and copyright are discussed.

Students now and in the future will need to be flexible and responsive as they work with people around the world in their careers.

The term "organizational literacy" is introduced and is tossed around as a new method of how teachers and students will organize their lives. There will be more working with others around the world - - collaboration and networking.

What will the school system look like in 15 or 20 years? Florida virtual high school. Virtual learning. There are global models which are starting this process. Finland, Ireland, Scotland and New Zealand have started to allow technologies to change the face of learning.

We attended Leading and Learning a week or so back where Professor Dr. Roger Austin from the University of Ulster in Belfast spoke as a keynote on how collaborative Video Conferencing was helping to build student communities as students connect in Northern Ireland with students from the Republic.

So, how do we get schools to change? Will has some ideas on how this process can be started. He ends off with a talk about "Thinly walled Classrooms" - Clarence Fisher. He talks about what it is we do in both physical space and on-line space.

The ends with a quote from Alan November on Classrooms - "Media Centres to the World"

Read-Write Web - 1

In this clip, Will Richardson talks about the Read-Write web. He does an amazing job at explaining how the web is now more about collaboration and interactivity than "back in the day" when we only went to the web to receive information.

There are 3 main sections to this clip:

a) Write/Create content and Publish Widely - Implications
b) Implications for Professional Learning
c) The Role that Writing plays in Reading

Here are a couple of additional articles you may wish to read on the topic.

1. An Educator's Guide to the Read-Write Web - Will Richardson
2. Chapter 2 The Read-Write Web - Oreilly.com

Alan Luke - Digital Learning and Multi-Literacies

Dr. Alan Luke speaks about writing and webpages, writing music, video games and other new technologies in this May 2007 Ministry of Ed. webcast. He talks about pathways to the new economy. He talks about the "generational exchange" which should occur in staffrooms.

To hear the full 53 minute talk and other topics from Dr. Luke, you can subscribe to the RSS feed here.

Rosa & Elizabeth Ruvalcaba

If you are unable to watch the clipped version the direct link is here: Interactive Innovations

Two of Marco Torres' former students Rosa Ruvalcava and Elizabeth Ruvalcaba presented in Nelson B.C. last year. In this video of their presentation, they explain how their experiences at San Fernando H.S. helped to mold them into who they are today. They describe how it was really not about the technology. It was about students using multimedia to tell stories about their community and who they are within that community.

During their presentation Rosa and Elizabeth showed two of the videos they produced while at San Fernando H.S. I've edited them out of their original presentation but have included them as links here:

1. Ham and Eggs - A very touching film about one of their Uncles and his adjustment to life in San Fernando.
2. Digital Students - A passionate film about the disconnect between and among anolog teachers and digital students.

Also, here are their slides. Amazing photography.

Grandparents on Skype?

One of my favourite people in education is Alan November.

Here, Alan discusses [at NECC 2006] how Kindergarten teachers can create a community of Grandparents using Skype. He explains how books can be read by Grandparents. Now, here at home we will just invite grandparents in for a visit and they can read with our students. Or in some cases "Grandfriends" programs exist to fill the grandparent void. What Alan speaks about is more about when communities may not have the opportunities that we have here.

This really illustrates what our learning environments [read classrooms] can be like these days. As we discussed in our meeting the other day, this Web 2.0 thing it is about people and how they make connections with one another. The technology just helps us to get there.

Web 2.0 History Classroom

I discovered history teacher and Missouri Teacher of the Year Eric Langhorst's blog/podcast a while back. He is what we would all like our history teachers to be like.

Click on the image to view a .pdf of parts of his most recent slideshow.

Class Web Sites - L & L

The May 2008 Leading and Learning with Technology journal arrived in hard copy today at the office.

One of the articles has an excellent overview of a topic we were discussing yesterday in our team meeting -- Classroom Websites.

Elizabeth Baker PhD., examines and presents cases for three methods:

1. Web Site Providers
2. Blogs, Groups and Wikis
3. Be Your Own Developer

You can download and read the article here.

Edspeak - Australia

Marco Torres has released his latest films. He's calling them EdSpeak. EdSpeak is a collection of voices from around the world on what it is to be learning with technology. Here, the Executive Director of Schools, Greg Whitby, in Parramatta, New South Wales, Australia explains his vision for education.

Click on the image to view the 18:43 movie. Or if you would like to view the movie in segments subscribe to Marco's vidRSS here.

Psychology of Social Networking

One of my favourite podcasts I've been listening to for a long time is Michael Krasny's KQED Forum out of San Fransisco.

In this episode Michael has two experts on and he discusses the psychology of Social Networking. Near the end he has a call in.

Why it Works

Here the Director of Education Don Cansul talks about why the laptop project in his school board works.

View the slide show here. Also the Director of the IT department showed an overview of the inner workings of the technology side here.

1000 Students - 1000 Laptops

Meet Randy MacLean.

He is the Principal of Massey-Vanier High School in Cowansville, Quebec. The man just next to him is the full time repair technician at Massey. His job is to repair any and all laptops which become damaged at the school. He has a loaner collection of 30 laptops. Here's how it works. Students bring in their laptops, [about 15 of the 1000 laptops from the school are in the depot per day]. Students receive a loaner for the time theirs is down.

As we walked from classroom to classroom at Massey, we saw all students either were working on their laptops or had it nearby. Here is Principal MacLean's PowerPoint presentation he showed during our visit.

Magog, Quebec 1 to 1

Hello from the Eastern Townships of Quebec at the 4th annual 1 to 1 laptop conference.

To say I'm in heaven would be an understatement. The students in the class pictured here have just returned from a field trip to Montreal. Pictured is a student showing the guests her slide show of the many sights she saw at one of the field trip stops.

Every student in this grade 5 class has a laptop on her/his desk. Wait, it gets better. They are allowed to take them home which extends the learning day. When one student wants to present her/his project they just waltz up to the projector and connect the laptop and they are ready to go.

That's a Smartboard they are presenting on. In this picture the student completed the project in iMovie and another student presented her project on Monarch Butterflies using Smart Notebook software. Or here is the same project in .pdf format.

There is an Air Port express on the ceiling and many more things like a home brew docking station at the side of the room.

And are you ready for this. It is not about platform here, folks. If you are still reading then you will think I'm a little off but really it is about the students/teachers having 21st century tools at hand to assist and transform their learning.

For more photos have a look at my Flickr pix. Oh, and we checked for privacy info before we all took pictures and all students in the photos have been cleared.

More soon.

L and L - Twitter on Blackberry

Today is day one of the Leading and Learning conference at the Delta East in Toronto. A really good day. Went to a session this afternoon with Rodd Lucier who was demonstrating at light speed all things "Social Software". Everything from wikis to twitter.

Since I'm new to Twitter I thought there had to be a mobile twitter app. for Blackberry. Sure enough there is. It is called Twitterberry of course.

Now all I have to do is learn how to twitter.