Roadmap for Change - Feb. 1, Vancouver, WA

The idea of Roadmap for Change is an interesting analogy - and the title of the workshop that Tom Woodward (Bionic Teacher) and I will be conducting this Monday, February 1 in Vancouver, WA for superintendents and principals from Oregon and Washington State. We've planned a hands-on interactive session and hope that participants will have the first draft of their own maps for change when they leave.

Jumping into 1-to-1 with stimulus money is happening at many schools now and it can be a good time for jumping - partly because there are so many schools who have gone before and can provide cautionary tales and successes. That is, it's a good thing so long as stakeholders are fully involved and there are clear goals articulated by the school or district on specifically what 1-to-1 might accomplish for teaching and learning - and so long as everyone keeps an eye on these goals throughout the process.

Podcast from Oz

Here's a podcast with Leslie Wilson, Ben Paddle Jones, and myself conducted by Chris Betcher. Australia is about to become the largest by far provider of laptops to students and teachers - and they have learned from their predecessors. We talk about this program and what can work in general as well as some of the caveats to dodge if possible.

1to1schools.net

I've been blogging on 1to1schools.net after being kindly invited by Dr. Scott McLeod the renown expert, blogger, presenter, researcher on technology, leadership, and much more. So c'mon over! There are several of us there giving perspectives on 1-to-1, schools, and education.

Teaching Adults Online/Mark Milliron/Temple Univ. Online Teaching Strategies

These are complicated times with shrinking resources and an unsteady national and global economy. Planning and sustaining educational programs is more complex than ever. Are we teaching what's needed for the future our children will inherit? Will right brain careers dominate or is there some other skill or expertise that will be essential to making a living 10 or 15 years from now? Are we acquiring the right skills we need for our continuing careers as educators? There's one thing I think is going to only grow and provide some answers - online teaching and learning - virtual courses for children and adults. It makes sense for financial reasons - it allows rich offerings - and learning can occur without constraints of time or place.

There's a trajectory for technology in education - first it's about the technology - then it's about learning. In the early days of networks being introduced into schools the buzz was about the network itself and solving the problems it introduced became the focus of workshops, conferences, professional organizations and listservs. Eventually the messy part came along - leveraging technology for teaching and learning. The same happened with 1-to-1 - initial questions were on how schools solved issues of battery life, wireless network, power, access. In 1-to-1 we're now reaching the ubiquitous stage where it's no longer unusual to provide laptops or tablets to children in your school or district; it is however very complex to support and sustain the kind of meaningful student-centered learning that 1-to-1 affords. This logistics-first trajectory is necessary however because there are issues to solve before learning ensues.

We're now moving along the continuum of online virtual learning because we're talking less about the tools and more about what's different when the entire environment is partly virtual, partly not. There are blended approaches to online learning such as what's done at Chestnut Hill College in Philadelphia, where I received my M.S. in education and technology and now teach, and there are wholly online courses in many schools and universities and colleges. My employer opened a virtual school in South Carolina in September with more to come; enrollment exceeded expectations and children, empowered by a virtual environment, using laptops from their own homes, work through a rigorous high school curriculum while interacting synchronously and asynchronously with teachers and fellow students.

Knowing how to teach online, how to engage, motivate and support students in this environment, and how to keep content rigorous and meaningful is one of the most important skills educators should learn if they are planning to remain in education for the next 10 years.

I recently had the pleasure of attending an event at Temple University in Philadelphia entitled Online Teaching Strategies for the Health Professions. Professors from Temple described how they engage their students virtually through chats, online discussions and forums, how they facilitate the community of the course and how they overcame the challenges of the virtual classroom. As an adjunct professor, I listened intently for ideas and tips and took many notes. Because of Dr. Rosalie Schofield, for instance, I will introduce the idea of SAOQ's - Summary - Analysis - Opinion - Questions - as a model for online forum postings by my students. Dr. Deanna Schaffer talked about telephoning all of her students before the course began - what a simple but supportive technique to help ease introduction into the course learning community.

The keynote speaker, Mark Milliron, was excellent and I would highly recommend seeing him if the opportunity presents. An avid reader and futurist, he talked about the Next Generation of Learning. For instance, our students can text at 60 wpms, and age 16-20 prefer text to voice. One university with an infrequently-used library space put a Starbucks in the middle of it and saw exponential gains in its use as a community center of learning. He said it's useless to dichotomize in the "get onboard or fall behind" way of thinking - better to see the whole picture with many learners. If you want to avoid Alzheimer's, he said, be a rookie every year. The idea of Trigger Analytics was a topic; apparently a course at Purdue University "signals" students as to whether they are on track or not - most useful in the online learning way when bringing students back is a frequent effort. He talked about holographic caves where a hologram of, say, a brain is projected into a room and students can walk around it to understand it better.

I can hardly wait to see how it all - virtual teaching and learning - plays out in the next 10 years and what the children we are parenting and teaching will build next.

Consider Twitter

I've been on Twitter since 2007 when I saw David Warlick presenting it at an educational conference. For quite a while, I was an evangelist, trying to explain it to various people, following lots of forward thinking educators, making it a demo during presentations I've given. It would go like this - I'd send out a tweet while everyone watched:

"Please reply to this group of educators from XXX and tell us where you're from and what Twitter means to you!"

And we would watch as various "tweeple" would reply e.g.:

"Sam XXX from London - Twitter keeps me connected..."
"Joan XXX from Cleveland - when Twitter runs in the background my PLN is always there..."
"Jeff XXX from NJ - Twitter is intelligent cocktail chatter for educators ..."

Above were made up but you get the idea. It was thrilling to think of all these people communicating synchronously in 140 character bytes of pithy conversation, adding to our shared knowledge and ideas, enriching us all. And that, in a nutshell, is what I like the most about Twitter.

The things I don't like about Twitter:

• Being followed by spammers
• Seeing yet another "making PB&J sandwich for my son" style comments - IF this is the only feed from this person - some PB&J is fine with me so long as it's mixed with intelligent ideas, contributions, links, educational ideas, etc.

The PB&J comment makes sense when you remember that the essential Twitter question is "What are you doing right now?" However, I am hoping the people I follow are often expanding that question to "what am I reading/writing/creating/pondering/linking to/reflecting on right now?"

The negatives bulleted above are not a long enough list for me to quit Twitter, however. The benefits right now are greater than the downsides especially when I have a chance to consider everyone I follow to make sure they're involved with the latter question above.

I told my daughter I was thinking about Twitter lately. She said she wasn't surprised. I'd shown her Twitter back in 2007 and sent out a tweet and we watched for a while. The tweet was not a question, just a statement. She said "awwww, they don't answer." She said she wasn't surprised now because in her words "there's no center." There's no one place to go, no extension of the 140 characters, no central community.

We live in really interesting times don't we. Community is all over the place in various forms but there's no one place at all, there's no center, for almost all of us.

I'm staying with Twitter for now but bouncing in and out as needed. It's worth it because of the good stuff and I'll take some time to mediate the other stuff.

Adult Learners and PD

Blogging from Las Vegas during a 3-day Professional Development session and thinking about Adult Learners. The work of Malcolm Knowles continues to resonate even though he did not write about technology or the field of education per se - he wrote about andragogy - or adult learning. Knowles explains that adults have a wealth of knowledge, want involvement in learning, want hands-on experience, are practical, are motivated by their own needs, want their own learning styles maximized, and need time to think and reflect. The book I use most by Knowles is The Adult Learner which is now in its 6th edition.

When Professional Development is designed for the Adult Learner, knowing that adults need opportunities to be hands-on, should do and not just view, that they have an average attention span of between 8 to 20 minutes, that they have a wealth of knowledge, that they are highly practical, and that they need to see the value of the learning, it works and you will see evidence in post-session surveys.

Here are some ideas that have worked for education technology working sessions:

1. Getting participants hands-on as quickly as possible. Brief intros and a broad stroke of purpose and goals - possibly turning to participants for purpose and goals.
   
2. Changing activities and approaches frequently.
3. Adjusting as needed - paying attention to the body language of participants and having some activities ready should the session lag.
   
4. Breaks. This may seem obvious but adults need to stretch, move, and walk away in order to return fresh.
5. Getting feedback and participation different ways. Some will feel comfortable speaking out, others will prefer reflecting on paper, others will like an online survey or a back channel.
   
6. Sparing use of Powerpoint - but - not so spare that there is nothing to follow or see for your visual learners.
7. An electronic version of it all somewhere - a Wiki, a Ning, etc.
8. Some type of paper handout. We don't want to kill trees but we are in this interesting in between stage right now involving adults who are "paper-trained" - and those who are immersed and comfortable in the fully-electronic delivery of media. Give them something to hold in their hands and you will see relief on the faces of many participants.
9. Reasonable times for all activities - not too long or too short - adjust if you start seeing people taking a break when times for working hands-on.
10. A reinforced theme - go back to that whenever possible.
11. A "parking lot" for ideas or tangents that are brought up.
12. A positive activity describing the intent of the session and asking people to buy in somehow - we posted a large smiley face, gave out star stickers, and asked people to post 2 things on how they will be ensuring they stay positive at their schools while managing change.
    
13. Participant sharing in different ways - not just talking - showing, demonstrating, sending out links, etc.
14. A druther - 2 projectors in every room - one for the present(ers) with a screen and one for the participants with a screen/wall as well - speakers for both - jump drives if needed and a spare laptop

Starting the second day this morning of our session which we have adjusted and changed multiple times and feeling energized about working with adult learners. It is so much better than being a "talking head" (although I've done my share of that)!

Back Channel: Boon or Bane?

One difference between NECC this year and past years is that back channels, as is the case in many conferences, are alive and well and very active. During keynotes there were up to 4 going at the same time. If you're not aware, backchannels are live chats where participants comment on something going on. The best backchannels are actively moderated. Cover-It Live, Tinychat, Chatzy are just three to list, but there are more. During NECC's keynotes I was active in the backchannel as was my 17-year old daughter who attended this year's conference (her 4th!)

During a conference last week for my employer (see "about me" for full information - I blog as an individual and not as a representative of my employer and my thoughts and ideas represent only my own ideas and not current or past employers or clients) we initiated a back channel and also set up a private Ning. It went quite well and added to the dynamic in many ways, and was fully moderated. We were about as fortunate as we could be to have the thought-provoking dynamic Vicki Davis as our keynote speaker (anytime you can possibly see Vicki live do it!) My musings below are about NECC as at the EdisonLearning session we had a smaller more controlled and focused backchannel which did what we wanted - to allow people to question, consider, reflect, share and experience together.

At the NECC back channel at one point my laptop battery died. So I could no longer participate in the back channel, but my daughter continued to do so. I tried to consider what was different after my laptop was shut. And what I saw myself do was hone in more on listening and focus in a different way. This was not necessarily better, just different. I had no one else to bounce ideas off of and did not take any notes, just tried to listen. I think different things made sense but different things were missed.

Note that I am not a strong auditory learner, that in every learning styles test ever taken, I skew towards visual and kinesthetic. I usually take notes in meetings and at conferences, but the notes are visual with lines and drawings and quotes - and often are never reviewed - the experience of the pen and the drawing helps me absorb what's going on and make some sense of it all. But with my laptop shut I did not have a pen or a pad or anything for drawing or notes.

The back channel experience seems that it can be noise or it can be reflection, it can be focused or it can be highjacked (especially when someone goes off on a tangent and is not brought back by the moderator or participants), it can be effective or it can be disruptive (and not in the "disrupting class" sense of moving towards a new paradigm), it can take people to a higher plane or it can scroll off the screen too fast to make sense. It favors fast typists, fast readers, and quick thinkers. It can be like the best most stimulating fascinating cocktail party conversation or can be annoyingly one-sided and didactic. How very human this all is.