If Twitter is any measure of trends, I see a turn in the conversations among teachers and administrators. To be sure, most of the tweets I read in the group of educators I follow are still are about things to do with technology–make a screen cast or share video on a Ning, sorts of things. But I read a growing number of discussions around policies and guidelines governing student behaviour online. This morning @mscofino sent this (click the image to go to her tweet & download her rubric):

Hers is a well-made rubric. But I just don’t think you can use such a thing to guide behaviour on a blog. Oh, it might work for a single post, or when you are trying to evaluate whether a student has the technical skills to embed video, for example. But a rubric is too prescriptive for something as complex and variable as a blog. For example, in @mscofino’s rubric you might be considered just a “Beginner” in terms of “Quality of Presentation” if you have few images:

But you don’t need images to make a a great looking blog; have a look at these minimalist WordPress themes that focus on the written word. Conversely, there would be no writing at all to assess in an all-photo blog.

The point here is not to critique Cofino’s rubric, although I do think it contains a bias toward one particular kind of blog. The point is to say that I don’t think we should make a blog template, even if it is disguised as rubric, for students to copy. I worry that that will force everything into the same mold. I suggest instead that we find ways to describe to our students habits of mind or ways of being on the we, and then let them create what they will. At Island Pacific School, where I teach, we came up with this set of guidelines for working in the school’s wiki:

And I wrote the following for a ning where our students and those from Calgary Science School will come together to collaborate on a study of Western philosophy:

To be honest, and to be fair to Cofino, we are just beginning to open up our wikis and ning to the public, so it’s too early to say whether this approach works better than a rubric or hard policy. But I think it will. In my experience, young people are capable of much more than we often give them credit.

But I am interested in hearing how other people handle all this.

This term I introduced my students to Nings, Diigo and–for some–moodle. Most already know how to work a wiki and all are fluent with Google Apps. That’s a lot of stuff and I expected the kids to feel at least a little confused and frustrated.

And they do.

But their behaviour suggests that their confusion and frustration isn’t caused only by the number of tools they have to use. Indeed, they are quite adept at learning how to work any number of new games. I wonder if another part of problem is that they see a computer as a tool that delivers entertainment and not a tool for doing work. I need to clarify that: I think they do see that you can use a computer to produce things–word documents, spreadsheets, PowerPoints and so on. But they don’t see that we can use a computer to discuss and publish work. (That wouldn’t be surprising because I don’t think anyone has yet shown them how to that.)

So now when we talk to our students about new technologies, we divide the tools we’re using at IPS into four categories based in function with the idea that this structure might help kids see things more clearly:

Production Tools
Google Apps, Jing, video editors, Garageband etc.

Discussion Tools
Nings, Diigo, IM, email

Publication Tools
wikis (there are other platforms, but these are best compromise of ease of use and sophistication for our grade 6 – 9s)

Administration Tools
Google calendar and moodle edmodo

I realize there is some overlap in the capacities of theses tools. Wikis also make excellent discussion platforms, for example. But my hope is that this structure actually gets us away from talk about the tools and moves us to talk about the function, which I think is more important.

What do you see in your classrooms? How are your students taking up new technologies? How do you deal with gathering up all the output from all the tools?

Addendum

Since writing this post I’ve added a fifth category of tools: research tools such as Google and Bing, but also custom search engines, RSS and Twitter.

Phil Macoun (@pmacoun), a far-seeing teacher at Aspengrove School, and I are taking different approaches to creating Nings for our schools. Phil says he’s letting a couple of keen teachers create their own Nings around their subject areas. He expects others will follow when they see what students can teachers can do with a Ning. At Island Pacific School, I’ve created a single Ning and made a group for each of my classes. So far, I’m the only one using the school Ning, perhaps because my staff and I are putting more time developing a school wiki.

It’s not yet clear which approach works better. It may be that there is no one best approach. Aspengrove teachers and students can bring the full power of a Ning to organize a community of learners around a specific subject. They have the advantage of knowing that all the material in the Ning is subject-related; no need to rummage through history and English videos to find the science shows, for example. But the information in those Nings is not easily shared with those outside. My class-groups have fewer tools–really, a group is just a nice looking discussion forum. But because the staff and students must put (and tag) their videos and photos in the general pool shared with everyone, I think this will create more opportunities for sharing, cross-fertilization and inter-disciplinary work.

Phil and I are going to Skype again soon to compare notes. I’ll post more data when we have it.

Whenever I start a literature study I like to have the kids make a simple timeline of one kind or another, just to put the things in historical context. But, I’ve never liked how much time it takes students to draw, cut and paste, whether on paper or in a drawing or charting program–all we need is a quick picture. BeeDocs (Mac only) handles all that grunt work and automatically creates high quality timelines with a novel 3D interface that combines both context and detail (see their promo video). All the students have to do is drag & drop an image, write a few notes and add a reference URL. It’s the sort of thing a class tutorial team can master with just minimal instruction from the teacher. Best of all, the timelines can be exported as video for iPods and iPhones so kids can take the timelines with them.

Here’s are two samples:

Early development of empiricism & rationalism in Western philosophy, created by my Grade 9 philosophy students last year:

Comparison of ancient Egyptian, ancient Greek and medieval Christian European civilizations, created by this year’s Grade 7 tutorial team:

Since the beginning of the year, my students and I have been experimenting with performing the 6 classroom jobs for students that Alan November talks about in his workshops and on his web site. This week I had the Curriculum Reviewers (really just one student this week) turn this week’s review notes for our Grade 7 study of Biblical and Classical references into a mind map and post it to our wiki. Here’s the whole curriculum review wiki page and a close up of the mind map:

IPS English 7 Curriculum Review Wiki Page

Closeup of Mind Map Embedded in Wiki

The mindmap, made in MindMeister, is live, so as students add more review notes to the map each week or so those notes will automatically appear in the copy of the map embedded in the wiki. The links to web sites and files in the map are also live so students can download right from the wiki (and the review team only has to add links and upload files once–to MindMeister.) I’m looking at a number of mind mapping platforms but right now I’m leaning toward Mindmeister because it’s easy for students to use and handles the embed so well.

To be sure, the whole tangle of wikis, Nings, Google Apps and maps presents an organizational challenge for both me and my students. But we are starting to get some sense of how all the various technologies fit together in our school: Google Apps, Jing & Mindmeister (so far) for production; Ning for discussion; and a wiki for publication. And, I’m really excited about this embedded mind map.

UPDATE:

Here’s an example of an embedded, live mind map: Wiki Experiments.

The raw notes from my conversation with @prawsthorne We were talking about how to make emerging web technologies fit into a school in a way that made sense, from top to bottom, and that allowed for sustained and sensible growth. Details on each part of the discussion to follow.

The internet is the platform. Let me make that declaration.

I’ve spent the last four weeks trying to build the framework for technology at Island Pacific School, trying to figure out which tools we’ll have the students use for producing documents, spreadsheets, video, images, podcasts and so on. And then I tried to figure a way to put this all in one bucket using Moodle or Google sites or something like that.  There are plenty of options in each category, but the staff and I felt it important to choose one and make it the school standard or default tool.

But after a couple good conversations with @pamcoun @prawsthorne and @chriscorrigan I thought, “Who cares?” Working on the web is not about putting content somewhere, it’s about connecting it. I don’t think it matters where or how a student produces and shares a video, using Kaltura or iMovie, as log as they make one and show it to me. After all, I don’t ask all of you to put your content in a convenient format or place for me to read; I go out and connect it myself using RSS, FriendFeed and so on. Or I let the web sort out the translation problems–my browser will let me watch all kinds of video formats. So why should I ask my students to work within specific platforms?

I couldn’t find a satisfactory answer to that question. The need to standardize seems tied up with ideas of control, not good pedagogy, and whenever that issue comes up we need to ask where is the locus of control in the school and does that get in the way of good teaching? So, going forward from my declaration that the internet is the platform, the first thing I’m going to do when classes start again in the fall is let my students decide which tools to use for any given task. The only criteria is that we can somehow connect the content together.

I have stared at this blank space for weeks now with an odd kind of writer’s block. Every time I sat down to write something I’d ask myself not “What to write here?” but “Why write here at all?” There were several possible reasons but they boil down to two:

First, I had started SITS as a place to get into discussions around questions I had about emerging technologies and education, but those never really went anywhere. It’s not uncommon to criticize blogs as weak platforms for conversation and for good reasons (see BBC’s The Blog is Dead; Oh No It Isn’t and RWW’s Is Blogging Dead?). Blogs lend themselves to making declarative statements, even in the comments section; their architecture makes dialogue difficult. I suppose it could also be that my posts were boring. Some say conversation has moved to micro-blogging platforms which was largely the case with me. Twitter has nicely satisfied my thirst.

Secondly, I had a couple unformed thoughts that needed some work before they merited a post and June, as any teacher know, affords little time for contemplation.

But here I am again; for better or for worse.

Two years ago I reviewed the literature on the effects of school size on academic performance and social development of students. The research, a lot of it available through the National Middle School Association (NMSA), seemed incontrovertible: given the evidence that students in small schools do so much better than students in large schools, it seemed morally questionable to put kids in big schools said one study. It was a bolder conclusion than the other studies, but nonetheless consistent with all the rest of the research. But now eSchoolNews reports that “after investing billions in U.S. education, the [Gates Foundation's] new CEO says better teachers, not smaller class sizes, are key.”

The two bodies of research seem to contradict each other at first. But I think–I’m not sure, I’d really like to read more of the Gate’s data–the two are looking at the same thing. I need to go back over my original review to be sure, too. But I wonder if the reported effectiveness of small schools is only indirectly a result of their size. Perhaps small schools, by virtue of a flatter organization and more intimate work environment somehow recruit, develop and retain better teachers more easily than large schools. The question we need to answer is “Are there proportionally more great teachers in small schools than large schools?”

In the meantime, here’s what all great schools do, according to the NMSA:

In any case, I’m glad to read the comments Gates Foundation CEO Jeff Raikes.

Raikes talked of a study of the Los Angeles Unified School District after an initiative to reduce class sizes led to a liberalization of rules on who could be hired to teach.

He said the district found that whether a teacher had a certificate had no effect on student achievement.

Raikes said the district found that putting a great teacher in a low-income school helped students advance a grade and a half in one year. An ineffective teacher in a high-income school held student achievement to about half a grade of progress in a year.

“We really have to focus classroom by classroom,” said Jim Morris, chief of staff at the L.A. district. “Every teacher matters, just like every student matters.”

Morris said the most important factor to successful schools is excellent teachers and supporting what they do in the classroom.

We can all watch a test of the Gates’ Foundations data at a new charter school opening next fall in Washington Heights in New York City.

The school’s creator and first principal, Zeke M. Vanderhoek, contends that high salaries [$125k] will lure the best teachers. He says he wants to put into practice the conclusion reached by a growing body of research: that teacher quality — not star principals, laptop computers or abundant electives — is the crucial ingredient for success.

I’m detecting a current of conversation about teacher quality in all the web 2.0 chatter and it’s exciting to hear. The web resists–even subverts–institutionalization, says Clay Shirky. In a “here-comes-everybody” world, teachers become more autonomous and accountable and I think that is a good thing because it forces a higher standard of teaching. When the standard is low, we need institutional structures to control quality. But when the standards are high we can instead rely on  professionalism to do the same.

The problem for WolframAlpha is not that people don’t see it as a serious research tool; the problem is that they take it too seriously.

If Twitter is any measure of consensus, most are intrigued, but feel that it didn’t live up to the buzz. I don’t know if Wolfram was driving the marketing or if it was our own runaway desire for something magical, but my sense is that people are disappointed. This, says Chris Brogan, is lacklustre:

And when you enter “woman” you get different sorts of data then when you enter “man”, which suggests it structuring od data is not quite worked out yet. On the other hand, you can do this sort of thing reliably:

Clearly, there’s work for Wolfram to do yet. It’s not a Google killer, but I don’t think it was ever intended to be. On the other hand, Google’s GoogleSquared is not a Wolfram killer either. But that disucssion is beside the point here.

The really neat thing about WolframAlpha, at least from a K12 point of view, it that is is a wonderful tool for playing with data.

For example, kids can calculate the nutritional value of their lunch:

And this is downright fun and, I think, rather more instructional than straight up data because it employs higher order thinking (if we take simple searching as locating then this kind of search would be comparing–3 steps up on Bloom’s taxonomy):

The typical elementary school country comparison projects are a snap to create; and I’m all in favour of a tool that lets’ me get the data I need quickly so I can move my students on to higher order thinking, e.g. analysis. I get this when I search “Canada Ghana” to compare our country with that of our school’s penpals:

WolframAlpha is not yet perfected, but it’s as good as perfect as a data sandbox for grade school kids. It gets at idea of a “play tank”–as opposed to a “think tank”–that Margaret Wertheim talks about near the end of this TED video on the beautiful math of coral and crochet: