The Element

I just finished reading one of the most personally and professionally relevant books I've read in a long time - The Element by Ken Robinson. I attended the PETE&C conference in Hershey this past February and Sir Ken was a keynote. I had not heard of him before this event. When I went to the keynote, I was surprised to find that Mike Hardy and Pam Francis were attending. I later learned that The Element was assigned reading for the A-Team. After attending the keynote address I went to a follow-up session with Sir Ken then went to a book signing and bought the book.

The book touched me in a personal way living with a person who is still searching for his element and also being a person who easily slips into her element. I don't think I'm always very understanding of the struggle to find the element.

Professionally, I was touched by the wide variety of life stories where students who were not well served by our schools went on to do great things. We've all heard some of the more common stories of intelligent kids who didn't do well in school - perhaps with ADHD - but Sir Ken's stories encompass so many more forms of intelligence. During the keynote I found myself thinking about how this should impact what we do in schools. If I were in the classroom how would it change what I do? How could I engage all students more effectively? How could I build the confidence of students who have not experienced success in school? How could I help students feel good about themselves and to discover their element.

My final thoughts about this book relate to the A-Team reading assignment. The superintendent felt the book a worthwhile read but what does that mean? How does that transfer from the superintendent to the classroom? Would I have known about this book were it not for seeing 2 administrators at the keynote address? How do we reconcile the need for meeting students' needs, learning styles, talents, intelligences, etc. with the accountability imposed by standardized testing?

Free tool lets students participate during class

I read an article today from eschool news regarding a new tool released by Microsoft. Here's the URL for the article: http://www.eschoolnews.com/2010/04/30/free-tool-lets-students-participate-during-class/ It was interesting to read the rationale and the specifics. A few thoughts come to mind.

There are so many Web 2.0 tools that teachers easily become overwhelmed. Many have really neat whistles and bells that make them really attractive. Many of the tools do the same sorts of things with some different details. How do we help teachers decide which Web 2.0 tool is the best for what they're trying to accomplish? I think there are two important considerations - what are the curricular objectives and who is your audience? Once those questions are answered teachers can start to whittle down the choices or even offer students a large menu of choices, continually bearing in mind the answers to the two questions. Have students demonstrated deep understanding of the content and have they chosen a tool that is appropriate for their audience?

The large array of options available to teachers are very attractive but present some obstacles. Is access to the tool blocked by our internet filter and if it is, why? Does each student need to create an account to use the tool? How can the accounts be managed?

The next aspect of this article that caught my attention is that it's all about data capturing. I think the catch phrase that I've heard most this year in education is data driven decision making. Making decisions based on data is something new - we all do it every day both formally and informally. The best decisions are based on good data. What concerns me is that we are putting all our eggs in the standardized, multiple choice basket when it comes to data collection. This format is certainly one of many ways of gathering data but to place so many important decisions in the lap of this data collection is frightening. MicroSoft has jumped on the band-wagon to give us a new tool to gather this same sort of data.

The final thing that torqued my rotors is that Microsoft releases this incredible new educational tool and it's only for Windows. What are they thinking? We are fortunate to have other tools for taking this little snapshots within our SCASD technology arsenal.

Online Courses

Our work in this area is really interesting and grabbing much of my attention. I have taken one independent learning course in the old days of paper and snail mail. I've taken several online courses - both for Act 48 credits and for college credit. I've never been part of a face to face class with an online component - I missed that wave. Now as we are looking at offering online courses and as teachers are becoming interested in offering their courses online, I've become much more aware of the workings of an online course.

What makes an effective online course?

Am I part of a cohort or am I an Island?

Do I have a schedule to maintain or do I set my own schedule?

And what does the answers to these questions mean as I'm designing my online content?

Now that we are gathering more experience about the workings of online courses I am ready to try my hand at building a course in Scoodle for training teachers which is stand alone and robust enough to award Act 48 credit. Maybe I'll begin with SchoolWires.....

Learning Management Systems

Thoughts of this have been stirring around in my head for a few months - time to commit the thoughts to digital ink. :)

In December we invited a trainer from Remote Learner, Michelle Moore, to do some advanced Moodle training. We had her spend one day with the district ITSs and some folks from Computer Services then she spent two days doing sessions with teachers who are already using Scoodle and ready to advance to the next level.

Having some targeted professional development is so uplifting. Michelle is an extremely competent trainer, has classroom experience (Middle School Math!) and does a good job reading her audience. The day spent with computer services was a great opportunity to collectively reflect on our current Moodle implementation and to set some goals for next steps. Moodle has tremendous potential for allowing us to take quick snapshots of student understanding with immediate feedback (using quizzes) and also allows for transparent differentiation of content delivery and assessment using Groups and Groupings. It's always exciting to find more power in existing tools to give us some focus instead of needing to seek additional tools to accomplish our instructional objectives.

I look forward to investing more time doing further explorations of the power of Moodle and also look forward to sharing much of what we learned with teachers.

Professional Development

Goals are important. This year I set goals to do more professional reading and to reflect on the reading through my blog. I have many blogs mostly extremely under-active (last post here was fall 2007!) but decided to use this one for my reflections.

I haven't done so well with the professional readings but I have been very active with my personal professional development in the area of Moodle, our district's learning management system (LMS). Through training from our support contractor, my understanding of the potential of Moodle has increased greatly. My focus now is on the differences between using a LMS to create a resource for a face to face course, to deliver content totally online but within a virtual learning community (common start time, common end time, due dates and online interaction between participants) and teaching on a totally individual basis (only interaction the student might have is with the teacher - like the district Copyright course). I am beginning to frame some ideas in my mind about what elements are necessary in each of this situations. I will create additional posts on two of these areas and describe in more depth what I've been doing.