The first thing that strikes me when I visit a new school is that the classrooms don’t look a whole lot different from my dad’s one-room school house in 1940s Saskatchewan. (In fact, my dad’s classroom, above, generally looks more vital and lived in.) Not much has changed except the colour of the chalkboard in 200 years.

Highlights from Angela Maiers’ great session on authentic writing on Friday. Angela brought in 12-year old Zoe for her perspective on schooling:

N.B> this is cross-posted on November Learning’s blog.

At the Building Learning Communities 10 conference, keynote speaker, Rahaf Harfoush, told a great story about an experiment in which five monkeys were put in a room. In the corner of the room was a shelf on which sat a ripe banana. But, when a monkey reached for the banana, his pals would be hosed with cold water. It wasn’t long before the monkeys learned to beat the hell out of anyone who reached for the banana.

Next the researchers subbed-in a new monkey, who didn’t know the hands-off-the-banana rule. As you’d expect, the startled newcomer took a hard lesson form his pals. The researchers eventually subbed-in four more monkeys until none of the original monkeys were left. Nevertheless, none of the monkeys would go near the banana because they knew they would take a lickin’ from the others, even though the researchers had long since stopped spraying water.

Corporate policy–school policy–is too often informed by this monkey-mind.

N.B. this is cross-posted on November Learning’s blog.

Everyone says that the great part of a conference is all the informal networking and chat that happens between the keynotes and presentations. Here’s what I’ve overheard in the in-between at November Learning’s Building Learning Communities 10 conference:

N.B. this is cross=posted at November Learning’s blog.

At the end of April I gave this presentation at the Canadian Association of Independent School’s Best Practices Conference held at the Crescent School in Toronto.

The idea that students are digital natives is a myth. None of the potential educational advantages of social media or cloud computing are self-evident; and just as students had to be taught to see a pencil as a learning tool, they need to be taught to see the web as a learning tool. As we focus that teaching on ends, not means—just as we say let’s do some writing, not let’s do some penciling—we find increased student engagement and quality of work. This workshop shows how to view the web (browser) itself as the go-to platform and how to sort web tools by function—research, production, publication, discussion and management—to create a simple, solid framework for helping student and teachers make sense out of an ever-growing, ever-diversifying web.

Here’s my slide deck;

I recently wrote a chapter for an upcoming online book, Eduaction forna Digital World 2.0 Here is the webinar presentation on the chapter with Steve Hargadon and Sandy Hirtz hosting: Go to CEET and click “Developing Higher Order Thinking Through Blogging.”

Adobe Ideas, the drawing app for the iPad is becoming one of my go-to tools. I use it to sketch out big ideas,

create slides for Keynote

and capture content from mother people’s presentations.

I’m especially like the way It let’s me annotate images by adding a layer on top of a screenshot or photo:

I’ll go to my grave with a real book in my hands, but I’ve become a huge fan of ereaders. I have Stanza on my iPhone and Kindle and iBook apps on my iPad. They let me take stacks of material on planes, trains and automobiles.

Can someone stitch these two–an ereader and annotating tool–together for me? I can’t read an important book without a pen in hand for scribbling margin notes and I’d like to be able to do the same electronically. It’d be really nice, too, if I could save and share these annotations the way I can save and share highlights and sticky notes on web pages in Diigo. And, if it’s not too much to ask, I’d like to be able to hot link any cross references between pages…and even books!

This ability to make margin notes is the missing part of the reading experience offered by ereaders.

I was in Toronto last weekend giving a presentation on the Myth of the Digital Native at the SEAL (formerly Canadian Association of Independent Schools Best Practices Conference. on the flight home I happened to sit beside a group of students The York School and their head of senior school, David Hamilton, on their way to an outdoor camp near Squamish, in my backyard.

I gave the kids my iPad and asked them to pass it around for the duration of the flight to Vancouver on the condition that they leave a comment ont eh Notepad app  or add a drawing in the Adobe Ideas app. You can see what they said and drew below.

I chatted with a few, too, and after we got past the novelty factor they very soberly said that the iPad felt like a much better classroom tool than either a laptop or iPhone. It gave them a bigger, and therefore easier to use interface than the phone and wasn’t as clumsy as the laptop, said one student. Another felt a drawing program such as the Adobe Ideas app they were playing with would be a great tool in math and science, as well as art classes.

THINK Global School gave me an iPad to play with two weeks ago, which was “real sweet” as one of my students said, because it made us one of the first on our block with the newest cool tool.

It didn’t take long to see that the iPad is not about the apps. They are great, gorgeous even. Developers are taking full advantage of the iPad’s big glass touch screen. Elements is a stunning example of what can be done on the new, Evernote for the iPad beats all other versions of that app, even the desktop. iCal and Mail are gorgeous–in fact, the iPad is now my preferred mail reader. But the iPad is not about the apps. After all, we’ve had apps for a long time–my first was an early version of Wordperfect that spit running on my old 8088 back in the late 80s.

To be sure, the iPad has a few shortcomings. It outputs video to either a projector or monitor but, frustratingly for a teacher, I cannot share the iPad screen itself; that is, I can show inline video (HTML5 or QuickTime) but not, say, a Safari search.

Projecting a YouTube video from my iPad

Also, the iPad does not connect to the cloud quite as well as you might expect for such a new device. Out of the box, I cannot create or edit Google Docs, although a third party app, Office2 HD ($7.99) does the job for now.

You don’t have to look very hard on the web to find a host more pros and cons. But these all miss the point. There is the iPad-the-thing, and as I and many others have said, it doesn’t seem quite ready yet.

Then there is the iPad-the-idea and that, I firmly believe, is a game changer.

The iPad is bigger than its little brothers the iPhone and iTouch, but this quantitative difference makes for qualitative gains. The iPad is a social tool, whereas smart phones and laptops are personal tools.

Can't do this on a laptop

Just look at the body language of the user. Phones and laptops cut the user off from whoever else is in the room, either because the user has to direct all his or her attention to a tiny screen, or because the user has to look over the laptop screen which sits like a wall between the use and anyone else in the room. I took the iPad to our parent conferences this week and connected it to our online student database. The device sat unobtrusively as a piece of paper between the students, parents and me and I felt that made a significant change in the timbre of the meetings. They seemed more open. Not that I’ve ever had anything to hide, but I’ve always felt that the big screen of my 15″ Macbook Pro created a mixed message: I was saying trust me while effectively keeping my notes hidden.

The iPad is also terrific classroom research tool, not because it has a web browser but because when a student find something it’s so easy to share. I regularly ask students to be official researchers responsible for looking up answers to questions on the fly during class. Searching is no problem on an iPhone or laptop but the former is too small and the latter is too unwieldy to hold up. The iPad screen, however, can easily be seen across a room.

I also often ask students to work collaboratively to build notes. We use Google Docs for this, with each contributor writing in a different colour. I could monitor the students work from my laptop, but that keeps me at my desk. Portability is a relative term and although it’s easy to pack my 15″ MacBook Pro from home to school in my briefcase, it’s undeniably awkward to cart it opened up from desk to desk, especially in a classroom as crowded with stuff as mine. I could close the laptop, but every time I do that I temporarily lose my wireless connection. As we do all our work in the cloud, this is annoying. Much more importantly, however, it increases the visibility of the technology whereas the goal is to make it as invisible as a pencil. With the iPad, I can keep tabs on what any of the students are writing and still move about my classroom to mingle and coach.

Monitoring collaborative docs on an iPad

That might look like a small difference, but it’s a substantial change in classroom practice. Indeed, I think it might alter the basic structure of the classroom. The presence of a teacher’s desk and the computer monitor it holds up stratifies the space, no matter how contemporary the design. That’s why I don’t have my desk in my classroom.

More observations of the iPad in use coming soon

Since I posted my reasons for thinking an iPad makes the ideal classroom tool (that’s classroom tool; ideally, all students ought to have a smartphone, the ideal out-of-classroom tool, too) back in February, developers have been working at a good clip to come up ways to exploit the tablet’s features. This app, called CourseNotesApp, is a good early indication of what can be done on an iPad. It will make note-taking as writing on a laptop and, because it has built-in sharing over e-mail and Bluetooth/WiFi, it will let students do those important 6 collaborative classroom jobs out of the box.

Now, this little app might not be the perfect tool–the developers are still working on adding image and voice support–but I think it is proof of concept.

What I’d love to see is a mix of CourseNotesApp and something like this new magazine experience from WIRED magazine and Adobe:

I really like the dual axis navigation of this WIRED e-magazine. I’d love to see a developer put together a content creation tool that I, as a teacher, could seed with essential course material along the horizontal axis. Students could then and notes, rich media and connections to other subjects at any point along the vertical axis.

Interestingly, this is starting to look like a fantasy app I described a year ago almost to the day. That app would let me capture content, like delicious I said, and more importantly, let me show visually how those are related (unlike tagging). Maybe my fantasy will come true this year?