Lessons Learned

Instructional Technology - International Education - Wellness

Category: Thoughts (page 1 of 2)

Virtual Elementary School – Looking Back To SARS in Hong Kong

With the outbreak of the coronavirus in China and its spreading to other locations outside China, we are seeing both public and international schools closing in Asia. The response to the SARS epidemic in 2003 was similar. At that time I was the instructional technologist for the Upper Primary of the Hong Kong International School (HKIS). I vividly remember the sense of despair and anxiety in our staff trying to make the decision whether to stay in Hong Kong or travel to their home countries. Our parents were desperate for information, especially about how to provide stability and emotional support for their children.

Moving to the present day, I did some reflection this past week about the needs of the students, parents, and staff if our international school might need to close to then go virtual. I am also seeing other folks thinking about virtual school and posting some helpful guidance on tools and platforms that schools can leverage when going virtual. Our menu of tools at HKIS in 2003 was very limited but our focus was not on the technology. Here is a bit of our story.

Our head of school sent out the announcement that the HKIS would close. Those staff members who had not already left Hong Kong leading up to closure were figuring out their next move. We realized that closing the physical doors to our school was not our only option. We could open virtual school doors to our community. We realized that with the majority of our students being local that many would be holed up and isolated in their apartments and houses for who knew how long. It was also clear that their days would probably be unstructured which would only increase their anxiety and that of their parents.

The idea of going virtual was not much of a sell to our principal Bruce Kelsh. His response was to tell me to form a team and to get started immediately to create our Upper Primary Virtual School. The Middle and High schools jumped on board and we began to make our plans. To learn more about those experiences, here is an article describing the effort and some of the lessons we learned.

Now firmly in the present day thinking about what might happen next with the coronavirus, I am putting together a list of ideas for my elementary school. Here is what I have so far.

Virtual School (VS) Lessons Learned from HKIS During SARS

  • Virtual School Leadership Team. Create a leadership team to design the overall plan to then work with and guide the grade-level teams and specialists into implementation. One might not just go with current leadership structures. It depends on what the main responsibilities of the team will be. In our case at HKIS, we needed green hat thinkers who also had experience in using technology. We were a school that used de Bono’s Six Hats thinking approach which could be a helpful framework for our VS leadership and grade-level teams. We also had folks who brought their skills in logistics, communication, facilitation, etc. to the leadership team. Make sure to have a counselor/psychologist on the team to bring the lens of wellness to the discussions and actions.
  • Virtual School Plan. The first task of the VS leadership team at HKIS was to construct our VS plan of operations. We began the process by recording lots of questions and “what if’s?” This is where we are fortunate at the ES to have so many facilitators and program developers. Note that the VS plan documentation is an ongoing process. You can get your initial goals, roles, and systems in place. However, your learning, reflecting, and adapting are ongoing as you get feedback from teachers, students, and parents. So be ready to keep your plan up to date with built-in markers to pause, reflect and make changes. All the documentation will obviously pay big dividends down the road if and when you are forced to reopen the virtual school.
  • Pedagogy came first– not technology. Our guiding design process at HKIS centered on what we called the Three C’s: Communication, Community, and Content (Interactive). We reviewed the everyday literacy, math, etc. lessons and unit projects (similar to our super units) through the SAMR and TPACK filters looking to create lessons that would have our students easily communicating (and collaborating) with each other and their teachers, building SEL connections (community) while engaging with the interactive content to then move into creating with or without technology. If we are to take a similar approach I would drop the SAMR as it can be confusing for some. A cleaner and simpler approach is Replace, Augment and Transform (RAT). I add “amplify” to augment as we help students share their learning with a greater audience.
  • The Instructional Technologist (Instructional Coach for Technology): This is obviously a key role today just as it was back in 2003. I have written a lot about this role with real emphasis that your instructional technologist must be allowed to apply his/her training as an instructional designer and facilitator of the curriculum development process, especially in the case of virtual school. What I have seen happen in the past few years with the growth of more and more educational platforms is that the instructional technologist is in some cases returning to the pre-2000 role of technology coordinator. Back in the day, the tech coordinators were definitely the “tech guys” who were mainly technicians making the computers and printers work. Today I am seeing the instructional technologist not only managing educational platforms and accounts but also being the caretaker of hardware as in iPads, robotics labs, etc. So let your instructional technologist dive into the TPACKing process of guiding teams to work as designers bringing their content, pedagogy, and technology knowledge together to create the lessons and unit projects. If possible, as part of applying individual skill sets in various roles, get your Dreambox, SeeSaw, etc. teacher experts to provide that type of support while their grade-level partners carry more of the curriculum development work. And of course, this designing and creation process is going to be fluid with some getting-started needs that will diminish as teachers feel more comfortable using various technologies.
  • Collaboratively develop uniform lessons by grade level teams as opposed to having each teacher go it alone. At HIKS this led to more buy-in from staff feeling the work to be less daunting while benefiting from the more efficient use of time, distributed expertise of teammates, and creativity of teamwork. The leadership team designed protocols and frameworks to help provide a uniform presentation of curriculum and experiences for students. An additional principle was that we tried to break lessons into simpler portions as we obviously did not have the benefit of face-to-face explanations with our students. This leads to thinking about how we do build a system for students to ask questions of each other and their teachers.
  • Communication Conduits. Connecting to uniformity for ease of understanding by our stakeholders, we also had protocols for handling information requests, needs for extra social-emotional support, setting good boundaries with parents, etc. The admin team at HKIS had very clear structures on who spoke for the school and when information would go out. This is a larger issue that our admin already has in place but we will need guidelines for parents emailing grade-level teaching teams for information and requests.
  • Distributed expertise led to teachers taking on various roles engaging their skill sets as handling the web work, parent communication, liaison with the Virtual School Leadership Team, etc. This approach benefits from having very upfront discussions with team members about their strengths and weaknesses as to where they can best apply their skill sets.
  • An added wellness PERMAH benefit at HKIS was that virtual school also connected our teachers who had left with those of us who stayed in Hong Kong. Teachers had more positive emotions due to the relationship building of the grade level teams engaging in creative work leading to flow as well as feelings of achievement and satisfaction of contributing to the well-being of our students and their parents. It was also very evident that giving teachers opportunities to engage their strengths and skills also added to their well-being by connecting to the E and M of PERMAH. Admin provided ongoing emotional and informational update support for staff as well. Moving to the present day, I would introduce the term wellness to our communications while providing a curriculum to help our students and parents better understand how to handle their feelings of fear, anxiety, isolation, etc. that arise in crisis situations. The nature of Positive Psychology is to focus on how to equip ourselves to engage our character strengths within each of the PERMAH pillars to enhance our well-being and thrive. It is important to note that the same efforts must be provided to support staff with their wellness needs as they deal with the isolation that comes from a virtual school. I would recommend that a wellness/self-care curriculum be developed for staff that is offered face-to-face and/or virtually depending on the status of being on campus or not. It is obvious to point that teachers and students get so much energy from being with each other. The loss of energy and potential of experiencing more negative emotions becomes more and more evident with the loss of daily classroom routines and face-to-face contact during the longer virtual school runs. As for the present moment, we already have our PERMAH and Character Strengths lesson idea resources on the web and ready to roll. We can take small steps limiting the language of Positive Psychology and PERMAH by simply using the terms our students know as the value of relationships, the positive feelings that go with accomplishment, and the strengths of being creative and self-understanding for example. One structure to support this process would be to designate a wellness or SEL lead on each of the grade-level teams. This person would work with me to design SEL activities that would be a part of the regular curriculum just like the regular subject areas.
  • Self-Management and Study Skills. It goes without saying that students take a leap in their development around self-management skills and the character strength of self-control. Our younger students of course need a great deal of parental supervision while our upper primary students are more self-reliant to some extent. The virtual school puts our students into an entirely different learning environment with limited interaction with their teachers. One support mechanism is to provide lesson(s) to help students construct their daily learning plan (i.e., goals, task listing with time expectations, use of a timer, etc.) that includes breaks from technology with designated wellness breaks. The wellness coach (counselor) could support the effort by creating a website of wellness activities for students, teachers, and parents to draw from. A guiding principle would be to get everyone, including teachers, to take nature breaks several times a day.
  • Interdisciplinary Learning. Our specials teachers at HKIS were a big part of the design effort to offer integration and standalone learning opportunities for their content areas. They came up with lots of creative and FUN activities for students to do. The librarian played a key role in providing online resources of databases, reading resources, etc.
  • Our Coaching Model. The instructional technologist, the science coordinator, and the librarian led the VS leadership team at HKIS. We are fortunate at the ES to have three coaches, learning support teachers, two counselors, and EAL instructors to help lead and share their areas of expertise collaborating with the VS leadership and the grade-level teams in their design and implementation work.
  • Web Resources for Independent Learning. We did build a section of our web presence to house links to online resources for students to explore on their own. We need to remember that our regular curriculum will only take up a portion of our students’ days. The supplemental enrichment resources at HKIS offered self-directed learning opportunities that included inquiry and research. I am reminded that we also had a section for parents for their FAQs which cut down on the need to respond with full explanations to parent emails. Our leadership team would need to decide whether to have one central listing of sites broken down into categories and age-appropriate sections or to have each grade level have its own resources page. Connecting to having roles on the grade level teams, one role can be the curator of web resources. Here is one listing of web resources divided into four themes. There are many other curated lists that we can draw from.
  • Social and Emotional Support. Our biggest lesson learned was that through the structures, systems, and connections of VS that we helped our students and their parents feel a part of a community. I cannot stress enough how important this was. One needs to recognize how isolating it was for some of our families who chose not to go out for walks and visits with others. Other parents chose to not be so isolated. As noted in the article, some students who lived close together would congregate at someone’s home for their face-to-face version of school interacting with our VS curriculum. Some parents organized the day into blocks for LA, math, social studies, etc. Note in a couple places in this post that our staff also benefited socially and emotionally with their running of the virtual school which offered routines and ways to engage with the pillars of PERMAH. Do understand that the longer virtual school runs, the more social and emotional support takes precedence over other goals and academic needs. So we should look at every opportunity to have our students interact with each other. The interaction can take place in virtual synchronous morning meetings, sharing photos, recorded audio and video messages, working in teams on projects, and so on. Simply find ways for shared face time! I also would definitely broach the idea going forward to work with staff, students, and families to create some sort of wellness plan using PERMAH and the Character Strengths. Goal-setting within the PERMAH pillars with supportive action steps could be a part of the wellness plan template.
  • Social and Emotional Support for Staff. Just as in regular school, the administration needs to be out and about nurturing connections, taking “moral temperatures” and cross-pollinating ideas. The art of active listening through acknowledging, validating, and celebrating more than ever must be taking place as achieving and “stretching” teachers need support with their well-being by school leaders. As mentioned, I would also look to form a wellness support team to come up with self-care and morale-building activities if we are able to work from school. We could definitely put together a menu of “afterschool activities” for staff if we get to work from school. We also need to draw on the expertise of the counselors/psychologist and outside-of-the-school mental health providers to provide information about mental health and how and where to get support, if needed.
  • Parent Buy-In to VS and Their Role as Teachers. This happened naturally but I would make it more intentional in our effort. We could possibly put a parenting/teaching set of guidelines together. We would also need to do the same for nannies if the parents are going to work. And note that some families will choose not to participate and/or be sporadic with their engagement.
  • Delivery Tools and Platforms. The intent of this write-up is to not list the delivery tools we used at HKIS. There are so many good ones to choose from now. What I would think about is how to package research assignments and super unit projects. One approach would be to use some adaptation of WebQuests especially when inquiry is involved. To the point of keeping the directions simple and clear, it makes sense to think of formatting the learning in some sort of learning module for “one-stop learning”. While WebQuests have been around for over 20 years, they check a lot of boxes for clear task and rubric identification, collaboration through roles, inquiry, higher-level thinking skills, and learning project creation. They also make the research process simpler by providing a listing of resource sites within the learning module. And regarding tools and platforms, it is helpful to have either a central or by-grade-level virtual school toolbox for students and parents to access tutorials for all the technologies. Also, make sure to have one central posting place for assignments whether on a weekly or bimonthly timeline. In using a variety of tools for different purposes such as creation, curation, collaboration, and/or communication (i.e., Information and Communication Skills- ICL), it can become confusing for students and parents to know exactly what is expected and when it is due. So make sure to have the central assignment place for easy reference whether it is in your LMS. Google Docs or a website.
  • Cross-Pollination. Just as in regular school, we had pockets of innovation taking place within grade-level teams. It was my good fortune to watch creative teachers find ways to design learning activities that supported our “Three C’s” approach while I also was able to share their ideas with the other teams. As mentioned, at the ES we have a great many coaches and specialists who can bring their skills to each team while picking up innovative approaches to carry and diffuse out into our learning community. It made sense for us at HKIS to start slowly helping to guide our students into learning virtually. But as our students got the hang of things so did we which led to richer and deeper learning experiences.
  • Opportunity. Our experience during SARS at HKIS was difficult at times. Thankfully there were no cases of illness within our community. Instead of allowing hysteria and troubling emotions to rule our thoughts, our community like many when facing challenges, worked together to make the most of the moment to shine and to excel. Disruption and challenge definitely can provide opportunities to reflect and engage our growth mindsets to then charge forward. This was the case for some of our teachers who tended towards a bit of a static mindset. I can still see several of their faces beaming at what they accomplished especially when previously being reticent in using technology. Many of our students made leaps in their development becoming more self-driven and independent. Our early adopters who sometimes did not get recognition for their creativity and innovation really shined when given the opportunity to showcase their ideas.
  • Reentry and Reflection. Build opportunities for students and staff to reflect on their experiences during virtual school. There is of course the social-emotional processing that needs to take place. The very positive personal growth also deserves time and attention. Back to the theme of disruption, we learned that with positive attitudes and growth mindsets students and staff found ways to engage their character strengths and skill sets to experience real personal growth.
  • Transferability. We learned a lot about differentiation through innovative pedagogy delivered via technology when not able to provide face-to-face instruction. Many of our quiet students found their voice thus growing their confidence by fully engaging in virtual learning. Some of our teachers found ways to continue aspects of their online content and activity work thus moving into more blended instruction during regular school.
  • Co-Curricular Learning. After-school activities were a major part of the learning taking place at HKIS. From orchestra to sports to crafts, you name it, we had teachers and contractors providing engaging learning opportunities after school for our students. I cannot remember if we offered some of the activities virtually during SARS but I can say I would definitely try to find a way to include them in some fashion in the present circumstances. Disruption leads to opportunity so I can see after-school providers finding ways to virtually connect with students to run their activities and keep their businesses afloat. As noted, the SEL needs of students to be connected with one another and to participate in energy-providing activities that lead them to engage their Character Strengths (i.e., creativity, curiosity, social intelligence, etc.) means that we really should think about how we can deliver the benefits that co-curricular learning offers.

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After virtual school at HKIS, we started running an annual practice week of virtual school in which all members of our community practiced virtual learning. Here are some questions that came up in one of our initial planning meetings. There is some overlap with what is covered earlier in this write-up but some of the questions offer new insights.

  •     What will your online assignments/lessons look like?
  •     How will they support what you normally would be covering in class?
  •     How will they involve cooperative learning?
  •     How will they be project or problem or inquiry-based?
  •     How will you avoid fluff work?
  •     How can multimedia teacher-created lessons engage students more than static worksheet ones?
  •     How will some assignments involve doing research that the student can access online?
  •     How do we continue our normal curriculum?
  •     How will you build community?
  •     How will you support one another?
  •     What would our enduring understandings be if we should close down?
  •     How would we reach those understandings through the curriculum?
  •     Who would be responsible for what areas?
  •     Then what technology will support what we want to do?
  •     And how can the TAs help us?

 

Image Source: Learning & Leading with Technology. Volume 32. Number 8.

Innovator’s Mindset and School Culture

I have been thinking a lot lately about how we support student and teacher innovators in our schools. I wrote a short post on this topic back in June. Thinking in terms of strengths such as curiosity and creativity, how are our schools supporting the well-being of their innovators by giving them opportunities to grow their strengths that support innovation?

When I spend time in classes at my school I see teachers offering creative learning experiences for their students. Sometimes they elaborate on given practices like the thinking routines and other times it seems that they came up with something totally new designed to support a clear learning objective. I pause and think about what led to those innovative practices.

Which leads me to ask what do we have in place to nurture and possibly cross-pollinate ideas within my school?

 

A few other questions come to my mind in looking at schools in general:

  • How do schools nurture their ideators and creators and connectors of ideas?
  • What constructs and systems do schools have in place to support innovation?
  • What protocols do administrators use in their staff meetings for the open and fruitful exchange of ideas?
  • How do schools support sandboxing for ideation and prototyping?

It is time to take some action.

I am going to reread George Couros’ book The Innovator’s Mindset: Empowering Learning, Unleash Talent, and Lead A Culture of Creativity to help me with these questions. His new book, co-authored by Katie Novak, brings in UDL to help with designing learning experiences based on the UDL principles and will also go on my reading list. It is also on my learning list to go back through George’s blog to find answers and come up with more questions. 🙂

 

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Celebrating and Sharing with the Community of Learners

How does your school celebrate and share the learning within your community? We have many tools today to do so, including the power of portfolios with students in the authentic role of communicating directly to the community while making their thinking visible.

At my current school, Saigon South International School, I continue to learn via teacher Twitter posts, school YouTube videos, SeeSaw portfolio posts, and good old emails from our math/science coordinator.

In a moment of remembrance, I thought back to my time at HKIS to jog my memory a bit to celebrate our efforts to share the learning. The image above is a screen capture of a page of our elementary Teacher Toolkit resources site where I posted innovative practices that often used technology. The site is now down, but I have a link via the Way Back Machine. I offer the link here to share how teachers used the technology from those days (2003-2004) to enhance solid instructional strategies that stand the test of time. It is something to think of all the new tools we have today to transform learning.

We also had a school blog. Our web portal didn’t have a blogging function. Were there blogging websites in 2003 anyway? Jeff Utecht did start a blog at this same time. I need to ask him what the blogging platform was. So I used Word to make PDFs to make web posts which I uploaded to our website for easy download. There was no comment feature as modern blogs have today. We also had a media server pre-YouTube days, where we posted student learning examples. Here are a couple of examples.

The Market
Grade 3 Daily News Show

Testing for What Purpose?

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My son Sam just completed a music video for his IB Film Studies class. He invites his audience to consider all the academic and co-curricular work students put into applying to our top US universities. I told Sam that a documentary covers this (i.e., Race to Nowhere), so he felt validated in his effort. We also spoke about expanding his video to cover the even greater academic pressures found in many other countries. The Washington Post recently ran articles on the after-school tutoring market in Korea and Hong Kong. During our years in Hong Kong, Taiwan, and in our travels, we met many young adults teaching in the English tutoring business who spoke of the overwhelming workloads that their students experienced.

I picked up today’s Washington Post to find an opinion piece on this topic written by the owner of a Hong Kong test prep tutoring service. It is a timely article as the world academic rankings were just published. The article “China’s Academic Obsession with Testing” is a worthwhile read as the author explains how her students’ lives are so managed, controlled, and focused on taking tests that they are not learning the fundamental skills needed to succeed.

This is old news that has been thoroughly covered in the blogosphere as we work to shift our schools to what we call the “21st-century skills” model. It is helpful to hear in the mainstream press from someone in the test preparation business to say how misguided so many nations and families are. One topic that the author doesn’t cover, though, is that even if tutors were able to help develop the skills of collaboration, communication, problem-solving, etc. that they are still taking away from the everyday learning that takes place after school when students socialize, participate in activities of their choice, have jobs and learn to manage their own lives.

Oh yes, definitely look to take three minutes to watch Sam’s video. 🙂

John Hunter’s Wisdom… More Than Just the Game

WP

You might have seen John Hunter on television, heard him on some Edreach podcasts, or viewed the documentary. You may have visited the World Peace Game website. These resources communicate the extraordinary collaboration, reflection, problem-solving, and critical thinking that John’s students experience by playing the game.

Your next step is to read the book.

John delves into the individual stories of his students and their learning. It is astonishing how much the students experience through the World Peace Game. Gaming is growing as a pedagogical technique for a good reason. John nails it with his multilevel game board that allows students over many weeks to “not know” as they wonder, speculate, search, and face failure while not being pushed into it. John says, “Instant answers.” The students develop what John terms their “intellectual stamina” as they go in and out of negotiations and planning sessions that take lots of time and processing to find potential answers to complex problems.

The World Peace Game reminds me of the experiential learning that I went through in my youth while taking an Outward Bound course. While there were many activities to experience, that pushed everyone out of their comfort zones and regular way of thinking, time was set aside for the processing and reflection that goes with deep learning. John also stresses the importance of open time and “empty spaces” for his students.

A huge bonus in reading the book is that John provides much wisdom about learning and life. I found myself constantly stopping throughout the book to have many “aha” moments thanks to John’s teaching that reminds the reader to think about one’s mindset and how to broaden our perspectives to gain more understanding.

Thanks, John, for continuing to be my teacher. I will be sharing your book with my sons.

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eFolios, Reflecting, Documenting and Workflow

I am going to ramble here, but the thoughts are all connected just as we work to help students connect their ideas and reflections. 🙂

eFolios:

We piloted eFolios last year in the Fifth Grade. One goal was to help our students reflect on their learning while setting goals for future growth. Teaching students how to reflect and make connections in their learning is a challenging task. Yet, it should be central to every school’s culture and mission.

To also guide the students to find evidence to support their reflections is an additional skill that takes time for students to grasp. We supported the reflection process by having the students respond to guiding questions around our Portrait of A Graduate (POG) attributes (Independent Learner, Communicator, Community, and Balanced) while providing evidence of their work toward reaching the POG attributes. The students met with their parents at the end of the year as part of our student-led conference system, using their eFolios to communicate their growth. This year, the eFolios are being rolled out to the rest of the Middle School students.

We use the eFolio module of our learning management system (Haiku), where we insert a template with directions and questions to guide the students as they reflect and record their ideas into the template. Here is a link to a draft of our eFolio template. It provides one approach to have students review their learning from a course perspective and one with the Portrait of a Graduate approach. As noted, we had the students use the Portrait of a Graduate focus. The template can provide practical ideas for other schools using eFolios or looking to do so.

Our grade-level advisers are now working together to review the guiding questions in the template for each of the four POG dispositions. The questions are being refined and differentiated for and within each grade level. As we know, a Fifth Grader’s ability to grasp complexity and work with open-ended questions can be quite different from an Eighth Grader’s.

A further connection is to consider having teachers and administrators develop eFolios as part of their professional growth experience. eFolios can also be used in partnership with teacher coaches and administrators to be used in teacher appraisal systems. This leads to the next topic of how students and teachers document the evidence/artifacts to be used in their folios.

Documenting Information:

I have written several posts about students creating their personal learning systems of Web resources, software, and hardware tools. I will remember to include teachers and administrators in future posts as they also work to use their personal learning systems to gather and document information, curate it, and communicate their learning and professional growth.

The students at our school are using their iPads to document examples of their learning. The next step beyond using examples of work from Pages documents, links to Prezis, video projects, etc., is to help our students use their technology literacy to choose tools to record their thinking about the work they are producing.

Many of us have moved from paper and pencil to digital tools to record ideas, reflections, goals, etc. On the iPads, the students might use Evernote, Notability, mind maps, voice recording, and the camera for screenshots, still shots, and video. A wide variety of apps assist us in recording our thinking.

The tools are easy to put into the hands of our students. The more significant challenge is to help the students be more reflective about their learning and go to the next step to record their ideas throughout the year. Making this recording habitual is another teaching and learning task that will take some time. But once the students, teachers, and administrators get into documenting their thinking, they will be ready to bring their learning artifacts and reflections into their eFolios.

Workflow:

Mark occasionally mentions how he manages his workflow on the Edtech Co-Op podcast. This led me to think further about how our Information and Communication Literacies (ICL) curriculum includes targeted lessons to help students not only find information but also help them manage and eventually communicate their understanding. An example of an ICL lesson is when we teach how to use Noodle Tools for research documentation, synthesizing information, and creating a Google Document to communicate one’s findings. Here is a link to a post from our school blog that covers it.

What we need to work on regarding eFolios is helping students build a system for processing and synthesizing their recorded reflections to then publish their understanding in their eFolio. This workflow challenge will need to be differentiated for groups of students and eventually individualized for each student as they build their workflow system, including one’s personal learning system tools to use in this process.

As I like to provide tangible examples of ideas presented here, I look to review a WebQuest we used several years ago at an international school in Taiwan. The Middle School there started in Grade 7. As the school’s culture was very progressive and one where students used a lot of technology, we created WebQuest as an orientation to the Middle School, connecting it to the students’ study of culture in the social studies curriculum. There were no iPads or similar devices during that time, so WebQuest doesn’t include any information about apps. If I were to write up a similar WebQuest for my current school, it would include information on using iPads/Android tablets and smartphones.

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5 Questions for All Educators

Steve Anderson at the Digital Learning Environments blog wrote an excellent post sharing the five questions he asks himself daily as a leader in instructional technology. The questions all focused on learning as opposed to being about technology. This learning-focused approach to instructional technology is what we speak about on the Edtech Co-Op podcast.

Steve’s post made me connect to a recent conversation with a co-worker. I was sharing a few ideas and some questions about the future of our school. The co-worker responded, “You really should look to be an administrator.” I smiled and responded that I didn’t need to be an administrator to ask questions and wanted to be part of the conversation about the school’s future. Our conversation ended, but I could have responded that in many of my previous schools, it was typical for teachers and even students to have conversations about the school’s future. Asking questions and engaging as a community member was part of the school culture. In addition, as the students moved into the middle and high schools, they were often asked to share their questions about the school’s operation and to give their ideas on what they wanted their school to be.

Circling back to Steve’s post while connecting to my previous schools, Steve’s questions apply to all the members of a school and district learning community. As we speak about so much on the podcast, collaboration between students, teachers, and administrators is central to building a dynamic culture of learning. A community that is moving forward needs members who consistently ask questions and who engage in conversations about the future. My two sons are working diligently to connect with their teachers and administrators to share their ideas and make a difference in their school community. Between starting a Future Problem Solvers club, meeting with the principal to create a system for students to give teachers feedback, and building school spirit by running three-on-three basketball tournaments at lunch, my sons feel that they are helping to provide leadership as to the direction their school is headed.

While we look to administrators like Steve for vision and guidance to reach goals, the “vision thing” should be a shared one crafted and acted upon by all community members. This is an obvious statement that doesn’t always happen, especially when students and teachers believe that only the administrators are the leaders at one’s school.

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Math Education, Technology and Journalism

Slate blogger Konstantin Kakaes dives into math education, offering his insights on how technology, especially calculators, interferes instead of promotes learning in math classes. Kakaes interviews Vern Williams, who teaches in Fairfax County, where my sons attend Marshall High School.

The editors of Slate then brought in a master math teacher to respond to Kakaes’ post, followed by a response from Kakaes. I share these posts as well worth a read to further one’s understanding of math education and demonstrate how difficult it is for journalists to cover education, especially when the topics are very complicated. It is important to note that the editors and writers at Slate are working to cover education with some depth, so do look for other articles and additional discussions from the commentators.

I continue to look for resources to help me understand what makes for effective math instruction. How can we better design math curricula while supporting our math teachers and students in how they use technology? Sylvia Martinez’s posts on Khan Academy helped me build my understanding as I questioned the flipped model for math, which emphasizes direct instruction via teacher-created videos. Hopefully, the daily follow-up classroom discussions and collaboration will be more concept and constructivist-focused, building on the lessons the students viewed the previous evening. But as Mark Hofer mentioned, this is all predicated on students doing their homework. 🙂

On a personal note, I am frustrated to read that the Fairfax County school where Mr. William works is spending funds to put interactive whiteboards (IWB) in each classroom. The lesson learned from the past decade of spending massively on IWB is that there are much more effective ways to spend school technology budgets. Thankfully, the principal of Marshall High School shared with me that the massive renovation of the school right now will not include any funds being spent on IWBs.

As an educator and taxpayer, I hope that the educational leaders of Fairfax County follow the example set at Marshall High School as they renovate schools each year. Thomas Jefferson High School, where my wife works, is up next for renovation. It will be interesting to see what decisions the principal and school board will make in technology spending for that project. They will likely engage their teachers, librarians, instructional technologists, and students to make intelligent decisions that support student-centered classrooms and collaborative learning.

 

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Texas Republicans Against the Teaching of Critical Thinking Skills?

Andrew Rosenthal of the New York Times shared a short blog post with the following plank of the Texas Republican party platform which included their view on the teaching of HOTS. This will need some further review to check for understanding as, at face value, it seems like a step backward into the stone age. It leads to worry not only for the students of Texas but all the other states who buy their textbooks based upon the curriculum Texas outlines for the textbook creators. Do take a look at the comments in the post for additional insights.

We oppose the teaching of Higher Order Thinking Skills (HOTS) (values clarification), critical thinking skills and similar programs that are simply a relabeling of Outcome-Based Education (OBE) (mastery learning) which focus on behavior modification and have the purpose of challenging the student’s fixed beliefs and undermining parental authority.

A Math Educator Connecting the Dots of Data

I read a Washington Post article entitled “Energy official sees climate ‘catastrophe'” this afternoon. The chief economist for the International Energy Agency said on Monday that we are headed to a 6-degree Celsius increase in temperature by 2100 due to forecasts of increased worldwide energy consumption. As a believer in the science and research that human activities are increasing the temperature of our planet, I wondered what the math was that led to this conclusion.

It then so happened that I turned to my RSS reader and found Patrick Truchon’s latest post, which explained the math behind forecasts about the high-speed growth of atmospheric CO2, which is leading to the expected increase in the temperature of the Earth. As I work to teach my students to employ various literacies when they gather and analyze information, it was neat to see a teacher demonstrating how to pull the data and use math to come to his conclusions. Bravo Patrick.

I can see how science, math, and social studies teachers could collaborate to develop a unit of study on global warming connected to the current Republican presidential nomination process. With several of the nominees denying that human activity is affecting the planet’s temperature, students could be challenged to take a stand on the issue while using research from current global warming studies, the science method, and math problem-solving to back their position. An additional area focusing on social studies and current events could be to have the students research and explain the factors that led the Canadian government to announce that they would not agree to a second commitment period for the Kyoto Protocol.

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