Tech Ed-dy

In case you are here looking for Tech Ed-dy it can be found at macoun.edublogs.org

This site was my first attempt at blogging and consists mostly of notes from a Virtual School conference I attended in 2006.

I also visited a number of booths to see what they had to offer. Two that I found intriguing were:

1. Pilot Math – www.pilotmath.com that seemed like it might be an effective online companion to a math 10 program – and lots of the online offerings are free.
2. Elluminate Live is an online meeting room mostly used by distance educators. But one thing it can be used for is as a place to store interactive whiteboard/tablet lessons so that students can review them later.

Here are what I consider the key things/thoughts that I’m taking away from this conference:

• Yesterday’s closing speaker was very dynamic and thought provoking. His pitch was that by 2010 the amount of information being digitized and being made available online will double almost every day. We are going to be faced with a digital divide with on one side an explosion of information, hyperinflation of time (doing more in less time) and an accelerated pace of change and on the other side the constancy of human cognitive ability. We are going to be deluged by information, so how are we preparing ourselves and our students to deal with it. The wacky part of this presentation was his solution – entering 3d worlds like 2nd life and learning virtually in collaborative online 3d environments. It was actually pretty cool but not for the tech faint of heart.
• Todays keynote speaker was Tim Magner the Tech director for the US Department of Educatio. He wasn’t nearly as dynamic a speaker but introduced an interesting resource called http://school2-0.org/

  ‘School 2.0 is a brainstorming tool designed to help schools, districts and communities develop a common education vision for the future and to explore how that vision can be supported by technology. School 2.0 provides a “big picture” perspective that allows for a common point of entry so that all community stakeholders can participate in this important conversation’

• The last speaker I managed to catch before my brain gave out was Stevan Kalmon from the Council of 21st Century Learning who talked about learning organisations of the future. He started by comparing the industrial culture that we are still in vs the information culture that we are moving towards – some of the comparisons were: assembly line approach vs workgroup approach; line of reasoning focus vs narrative focus; emphasis on objectivity vs on pradigms. A lot of his thoughts came from a book called The Power to Transform by Stephanie Pace Marsh. He had some really neat ideas tying current models of ecosystems that are based on information and energy flow and possible future learning models. I won’t go into it anymore as I risk sounding like a looney. But it was neat.

Finding, Archiving and Using Digital Resources

I was interested in this presentation because I am interested in finding easy ways for all teachers at Aspengrove to get online and have our students use the internet more effectively.

Essentially we were shown how to make a simple webpage of links to sites that students could go to rather than just letting them loose on the internet. All you need is Microsoft Word and it’s really easy.

He reminded me how great Google Directory is and it got me wondering how many Aspengrove teachers know about it. You can get there by googling ‘google directory’. It’s a great collection of links that have been filtered through humans (so no inappropriate sites) and organized by category. The education category is huge!

School Thin Client – Barriere Secondary – SD73

This one was really technical AND very interesting. In brief this school has gotten rid of Microsoft and stand alone computers. Instead they are doing everything using a powerful server computer with all the software on it and cheap workstations that get everything they need from the server.

The two parts that were particularly impressive were:

1. All the software was free
2. They had almost no problems with computers going down

ALSO, the system gave all teachers remote access to their school computer, gradebook, student work etc. It ran Lesson Management Software called Moodle that let the teachers post online assignments, quizzes etc.

I’ll spare you the rest of the tech talk.

Moving Learning into the Global Classroom

Jennifer Lock, UoC

This presentation was very IBish. She has designed a theoretical framework for guiding innovative use of technology to facilitate global online collaboration.

She started by mentioning some key facets of effective online communication:

• Tech integration should be seamless – at the back – PURPOSEFUL SELECTION OF TECHNOLOGY!!
• The technology should ENRICH the classroom experience.
• Students should collaborate around decision making, communiation, dialogue etc.

She mentioned some neat strategies for interpersonal exchange. Like:

• Information exchanges
• Database creation
• Electronic publishing
• Telefieldtrips
• Pooled data analysis repository

A guru of this stuff is Harris whose website is

http://www.2learn.ca/Projects/Together/structures.html

Her framework suggests that effective online projects should include:

• Social Presence – how do students become comfortable online
• Teacher Presence – the tasks
• Cognitive Presence – higher level thinking

She had examples of some neat projects:

• A class in Australia studied Xmas by inviting online guests from around the world to text message for ½ hr with the class. Had a guest from Antarctica.
• International Telecollaborative Case Study about rivers – used Elluminate Live and Email
  • On BLACKBOARD shared pps about rivers
  • Then started looking at what is similar and different between rivers
  • Children worked in virtual teams to work through series of questions to create brochures on awareness around bottled water. Students went out taste testing – did spread sheets.

The morning’s keynote speaker was Jennifer James,a cultural anthropologist speaking about the challenges of today’s transitions. She was an interesting choice of opening speaker for a room full of techies but by the end of her talk I was impressed, if slightly befuddled.

The gist of her message is that we are currently at a huge tipping point in our history with technology changing not just the way we do things but the way we are. Children in particular now have access to information ‘anywhere, anytime’ (also the theme of this conference). She started with the example of how adolescents around the world now have the ability to talk together, which means they can start to overcome tribalism (a localized view of the world).

She likened the technological change that is happening to the end of apartheid in South Africa. The reason the transition out of apartheid was bloodless was that Nelson Mandela was a leader who told a compelling story of the future. He helped South Africans imagine a new cultural tapestry (a word she used a lot) that did not yet exist; because they could imagine the new tapestry they were able to forgive past atrocities. Their actions weren’t governed by a past paradigm, but by the vision of a future one.

(I’m not sure this makes sense – she talked quite fast)

She then suggested that many leaders around the world today are not telling compelling stories of future; they are retelling stories of the past. Holding on to the past.

How is this relevant to technology? Well, she suggests that Technology is slowly going to tear apart our cultural tapestries. Not all at once, but slowly. It is human nature to resist. The more technology pushes us the more we push back. Homo sapiens has always done that. They key is to find the balance.

We are is a system in transition with incomplete knowledge and change creates tension.

You can take bits and pieces out of our cultural tapestry and its fine. But when a large chunk like religion is torn out then the tapestry reacts. The question is what does this do to people? When does it become too difficult and you get war? When it gets too difficult she suggests the fallback position is always tribalism (or for us science types we start to use out amygdale – the lizard brain).

In terms of change in the classroom she suggests that we are raising the most intuitive generation in history. The children we teach have not just a greater technological sophistication but also a greate psychological sophistication. They ask us questions we would never have considered asking our teachers. Do you think this is true?

As a result kids are disengaging from the school process because it no longer matches their energy. To meet their need we are moving towards more individualization in the classroom and technology allows us to ratchet up individualization.

SHE MENTIONED THE IB!! Particularly the Diploma Program Theory of Knowledge course which is about thinking about thinking.

She concluded by reiterating that we can’t see the new tapestry. We are caught between a loss of so much and a lack of visionary leaders who can help us see the new tapestry. Over and over in history we have these voids – tipping points. Always these are times of burning of witches and Armageddon.

You kind of have to read between the lines.