Ed-Tech

I gave the closing keynote at ISTE on Wednesday, and it was a really wonderful experience. It's an amazing thing to get up in front of 5,000 plus people and talk about what you deeply believe. It was particularly hard for two reasons - one, the ISTE community is as close to a "home-base" outside of SLA that I have in the world of education. There are so many people - too numerous to mention here - who have been friends, co-learners, mentors, sounding boards over the past six years that to speak in front of all of them in one place was both exhilarating and a little intimidating... and many of them had heard me speak at other events, so finding something new for that segment of the audience was a real challenge.

But the real reason it was so hard to craft this speech was because I was preceded by my students.


The SLA Slam Poets did a three-part poem about education that was simply breath-taking. The movement from what is wrong to what could be to Sinnea's vision of herself as a teacher was simply magical. And I knew I had to be worthy of their words. And I knew that I couldn't just come out and say what I usually say in the way I usually say it, because what I said had to build on their vision... had to honor it... had to, simply, be worthy of it.

And then there was the not-so-insignificant challenge of just being able to speak at all after their words, because I, like many others in the audience, was just absolutely moved by their words.

In the end, I had to really rethink much of the way I move through a keynote. I knew I had to talk about what those kids had just done and what that meant first. That led me to the idea that I had to lead with helping students develop agency. And I knew that Sinnea's amazing ending had given me an ending that I felt deeply was important for all of us who have been feeling less than beautiful, given all we have been up against lately. But I was struggling with what else had to build from there.

Staring at old slides wasn't working for me, so Christian Long and I spent a day reworking everything about the way I talk about this stuff. It started with me just talking about what I believe... an off-the-cuff keynote in my kitchen, with Christian writing down key words and phrases on post-it notes, and then we stuck them on the table... grouping ideas, getting rid of redundancies and looking for patterns. After that, I started separating key ideas that could be a slide with phrases or concepts that I wanted to mention as part of the speech, but were often explanations or sub-ideas of a larger idea. Finally, we found a through-line or two that I could come back to, and that proved powerful. Post-It notes made it up to the wall, and after the better part of a day, a keynote began to take shape.


The response has been humbling and gratifying and just amazing. I don't quite have a handle on why it seems to have resonated so deeply with people, other than I think we all are at a point where we need to feel like we have a chance to be the best versions of ourselves for the kids and for ourselves. It's been a long year for many, many educators, and as Marchella and Mecca pointed out in their poem, we have so many issues facing us.

But if we can come together... if we can heal a little bit... if we can work to find common ground and common goals... I believe we can build healthy, wonderful places of learning for all of us - students and teachers (and principals) alike.

Let's remember Sinnea's goal to always tell our students that they are beautiful. And let's remember that we are too. Thanks to everyone at ISTE for making me feel beautiful.

[This entry is cross-posted at ASCD's Whole Child blog. It is kind of an entry point into what I believe about how technology can humanize and revolutionize our schools.]

There has been, over the past decade, an increasing trend to push technology into schools. Everyone, it seems, knows that kids should use computers in schools, but we don't often ask why. Larry Cuban, among others, has written a great deal about how technology in our school has failed to reach its promise. Schools have spent millions of dollars on computer labs and interactive white boards to find new ways to do many of the things that schools have always done.

And today, many people are arguing how technology and "on-line learning" can transform student learning so that kids can learn from anywhere. But kids have learned everywhere for generations. What on-line learning can do is recreate the construct of a classroom anywhere, anytime.

And we wonder why we have not seen technology truly revolutionize education.

The true promise of technology does not lie in being able to reproduce - in shinier ways - the things schools have always done. If all we can imagine is how technology can "deliver instruction" in new ways, we will forever be limited by our own lack of vision. What technology can allow us to do is to realize the promise of many of our best ideas of progressive education. It can allow students to inquire, collaborate and connect in ways that allow us to realize the promise of Dewey's dream. Moreover, it allows students and teachers to see themselves as real people, defined not just by the power dynamic of the classroom, but through the social networks that should and will and must cross.

Technology Can Realize Dewey's Dream
For years, teachers have worked with students to help students learn to construct knowledge through project-based learning and the creation of authentic artifacts of learning. But the tools we had at our disposal made student creation more difficult, more time-consuming and the tools often lagged far behind what a professional would use. (I remember the times in my career as a student when they didn't. It was what made shop class so incredible. We were using the real tools... (even if I made what might be the worst birdhouse in history.) Today, the tools at our students' disposal allow them seek out the answers to their questions and then create powerful artifacts of learning that can be as polished as what a professional might create. And once they have created their work, they can share with the world. The progressive educational idea of the exposition can be on-going and can extend far beyond the walls of the classroom and the school to the world at large.

Technology Can Humanize Us
There is incredible debate right now about whether or not we should let students friend us on Facebook... or if we should follow students on Twitter. I am not naive enough to not understand the issues around it. However, at root, what social media can allow us to do is to see a much greater range of each other's human existence. When teachers and students can see themselves as more fully developed people, we can relate better in the classroom. When we know more about each other's lives, it is that much harder to create that sense of "otherness" which can poison a classroom. We should not run from the opportunity to see each other for the whole people we are.

Networking Can Change the World
2011 may well be the year that social media grew up and became a force in the world. Wouldn't it be wonderful if we allowed our students to be a part of the global change we see around us? Right now, we are at a moment in time when the echoing voices of every people are affecting change all over the globe. In that moment, how can we continue the soft illusion that learning is contained solely in a classroom? Why would we? When we help our students develop their expert voices for the world, who knows what they can build, create and change? When students' voices live in the world they can both change that world and be changed by it. We have an obligation to let them try.

For years, in our schools, teachers have told students that school is preparation for real life - a statement that divorced the meaning of school from the lives kids led in that moment. With the research, creation and networking tools at our disposal, we have the ability to help students see that the lives they lead now have meaning and value, and that school can be a vital and vibrant part of that meaning. We can help students to see the powerful humanity that exists both within them and all around them. And technology can be an essential piece of how we teach and learn about that.

Don't we have the moral obligation to try?

My article in Technology and Learning magazine, Top 3 Leadership Skills, is up online! T&L asked me to write about the top three tech skills administrators need, and fortunately, they allowed me to write about the soft skills that are more important than knowledge of any one tool.

I focused in a short piece on three ideas - Filtering: the ability to sort throgh all the information that comes through these days; Fearlessness - the need to be willing to take risks; and Foresight - the idea that we have to be able to imagine the ramifications of the decisions we make. Are those the most important? Maybe? Probably? Probably not? I don't know. Perhaps more importantly, they aren't explicitly tech skills, and that was the point of the article.

Being a techie is a helpful start to bringing a school into the modern age, but it's not essential. If we counted on principals to be experts in everything at their schools, we probably wouldn't get very far. I'm very comfortable with the idea that I am nowhere near as masterful as my teachers in every content area except English... and there I probably only come pretty close. But I think I can make sense of good teaching when I walk into a class that isn't in my strong skill set, and I do love how much "stuff" I learned from students and teachers in the past few years. I have often found myself doing an observation and losing track of "observing the teacher" because I too busy learning from what was going on in the classroom.

And perhaps those are the most important leadership skills for being ready to change our schools - openness, humility and a true spirit of inquiry. I don't claim in any way to always be good at all of them every day, but I strive to be. Those ideas embody the best of who I hope to be. And they are the skills the students and teachers of SLA need from me if I am going to be the leader they deserve in these very exciting and challenging times.

The trope that the "world is changing" has been beaten to death, but it still bears repeating from time to time. You don't have to know where everything is going, you just have to be willing to let the change in, you have to be humble enough to accept that you really have little to no idea where the world is going, but you still have to try your damnedest to help your kids get ready for it as best you can, and you have to be truly curious about where the world might go... and want to work with your kids to figure out whatever small piece of the puzzle you can.

Approach your students, your schools, and the world with an open heart and open mind. More and more, I find myself coming back to that idea. It seems to me that might be the starting point for meaningful change. And that idea is both incredibly easy and so incredibly, incredibly hard.

ISTEVision has published my presentation at NECC -- Progressive Pedagogy and 21st Century Tools. And here's the the wiki that accompanies the session. Enjoy!

[Couldn't resist Scott McLeod's call for Leadership Day posts...]

So... I'm going to come at this from a strange place. I think most folks in the edu-blog world would agree that trying to affect meaningful change is frustrating, and at one time or another, we've been incredibly frustrated by the pace of chance -- or even convincing others of the need for change.

But let's assume one is in a situation where the obstacles to change have been overcome, and the need for change has been understood -- then what?

I think one of the most important things we can do at that moment is to be very deliberate -- and even dare I say slow -- in how we manifest that change.

Be it technological reform, pedagogical reform, policy reform, I think the road is littered with too many failures because leaders did not allow most people to follow them.

I had the opportunity to meet Ron Sofo - Superintendent of the Freedom Area School District near Pittsburgh. He's been there for decades, and he and I spoke at length about how he took an initiative and rolled it out over several years... about building teacher buy-in, parent buy-in... about building a broad coalition... about listening and changing. And ultimately, about success.

Granted, most of us don't have years to make change happen, but we also don't have the ability to make mistakes because we rushed.

So some thoughts on how to affect change in a timely, and yet, deliberate fashion.

• Know why you are changing... and know what you are giving up by making this change. Every change creates winners and losers, so be sure to think through what you gain and what you lose (thanks to Neil Postman for that framework.) which leads to...
  
• Always ask "What is the worst consequence of your best idea?" Do it for two reasons - one, because if you can't live with that consequence, don't do what you planned, but two, because the process of thinking this through will help you (and your team) mitigate the problems and you won't be as surprised when the thing you didn't think of comes up.
• Research like crazy. Who has tried what you are doing? Who has tried something close to what you're doing? Who is talking about it? Who is writing about it? Who says the idea is already crazy? There aren't many truly new ideas in education, so figure out the history of your idea and learn from who has come before you.
  
• Get lots of opinions - Come up with a smart, sensible, honest way to explain your idea and then listen. Listen a lot. Listen to the folks who don't like the idea, and ask them why.
  
• Be honest - Don't oversell, don't overpromise, and don't pretend that the idea is perfect.
  
• Build consensus - If only a few people are on-board with the idea, it won't work. But consensus doesn't mean taking something from everyone and sticking it onto the original idea until what you have is the worst of committee-based decisions. It means listening for the truths in what other people are telling you and being willing to make substantive change when it makes sense.
• Know when to move forward. Don't let ideas die in committee because the team gets hung up on the final 5% of an idea. 
• Set realistic expectations for initial success, and then set up a plan to get there. If it's a tech idea -- get the tech right. (Nothing worse than getting everyone excited about a new innovation and then getting everything but the tech side of it right. It took us a year to get our website even close to where we wanted it at SLA, fortunately, we got enough right that folks kept at it.)
  
• Finally, keep communicating throughout the process.
  

There are too many reasons effective innovation seems so hard in education. We should make sure that we, as change agents, are thoughtful and deliberate enough to make sure that we aren't one of them.

Tags: leadershipday09

... but first we have to ask ISTE to include him.

ISTE will be having a moderated debate as a Keynote Panel on June 30th. The six panelists have not been announced yet, and this is a perfect chance to lobby for one of the best voices we have to advocate for the intersection of progressive pedagogy and technology. I have known Gary for several years now, and I've even been lucky enough to be on a panel with him at EduCon 2.1. Gary speaks passionately and eloquently about the schools we need, and his debates at EduCon and with Will Richardson have sparked dialogue long after the events are over.

So sign the petition, and ask (dare I say urge) ISTE to include Gary on the NECC Keynote Panel.

Tags: NECC

This comes from Tom Hoffman who asked for some linkage to spread the word about this.

Harvard has created a way for schools to report and therefore aggregate a list of all the sites getting blocked. They call it HerdictWeb. And Tom has a very good idea:

We'll be doing this at SLA. Who else wants to join?

Tags: filtering

I'm in the K12OnlineConference chat session, listening to Dean Shareski announce all the presenters from the past week, and Dean was noticing how many amazing Maine educators there are who are really pushing the envelope in educational technology.

There are. Of that, there can be no doubt.

But do we think that Maine, somehow, grows better teachers, or is there something systemic that has made it a fertile ground for teachers' creativity with technology?

Remember, Maine has the most extensive laptop initiative in the country. And when teachers have the tools, the time and the training, great things can happen.

Systemic change can work. If we want to change outcomes for kids, let's change the systems and structures -- and assumptions -- under which we currently work.

Tags: 1:1, Maine, laptops

[O.k. -- this too is an insanely geeky post. I promise, I'll write about education theory or EduCon or something like that soon. But for now, I've got my geek on.]

This is a very simple block in Moodle -- my first custom-designed Moodle block -- that makes it very easy to put a link on a Moodle course directly to the related DrupalEd course/group. As with before, this uses the Moodle variable "Shortname" and corresponds that with the "URL Alias" in Drupal. Those have to correspond or this doesn't work. 

And if you are into learning how to make custom blocks in Moodle, this page of Block Documentation on the Moodle.org site was incredibly helpful and important, and I really just used their template.

In <site>/moodle/blocks, create a directory called drupal_link. Then create a file block_drupal_link.php -- here is that code:


Then, create a file called config_global.html -- this is what will allow you to have global settings for the block. The global setting we create here is the root of the drupaled site, so that it's the same for all courses. (You could make this editable, course by course, but I didn't want to because we only have one drupal site.) Here's that code:

Once you do this, you may need to go to main moodle admin page for moodle to recognize the block, but otherwise, you should see the block in the Administration -> Blocks page. Edit the Settings with the root of your DrupalEd install (include the trailing slash), and you should be able to just add the block to any course and have the link show up. It will show up as the name of the course, rather than the URL. I thought that looked prettier.

Also... one silly issue that I'm wondering about. For some reason, the Block name is enclosed in [[ ]] brackets. I don't know why. Any ideas?

Tags: moodle, killer app, drupal, killerapp, programming

[Be aware -- this is by FAR the geekiest post I've written in a long, long time.]

Thought I'd share this for anyone who is trying to use both Moodle and Drupal. We just figured out a quick way to create a link on a DrupalEd Group page to a corresponding Moodle course.

Here's how:

This assumes that a) you have CCK and Computed Field installed

First, give every DrupalEd course an automatic alias that is the same as your Moodle short-course name. (Yes, right now, we have to do that by hand. That needs to change eventually.)

Then, in Content Management -> Content Types -> Course -- create a new field called field_moodle_link (or something like that) and select Field Type -- Computed and create the field.

In the next page that pops up, fill in the Label with whatever you want the label to be on the Drupal Group page. Then I chose "Required" under data settings, but I'm not 100% sure that's necessary. And under Computed Code, enter this:

Make sure "Display this field" is checked, and I use this as my display format:

And then save it.

Once it's saved, click "Manage Fields" and make sure that your new field has a lower numerical value than the Highlighted Content Field, so that it's at the top of the Drupal page.

What I'd like to do eventually, is figure out how to make that link appear in the Group Details block, but I haven't figured out how to edit that. Anyone who knows, I'd love to know.

In the meantime, drop me a note if you find this useful... or make it better.

(And now, off to figure out Moodle blocks. And yes, I'm still a principal, why do you ask?)

Tags: killerapp, drupal, programming