September+2010

September 7, 2010.
Just starting to try to figure out the page architectures for a wiki- how to link pages together & such. For now, I expect that this wiki will be a bit more of a blog- an online spot for me to park a few ideas about learning and teaching in a way that so many call 21st Century learning.

September 9
Just finished my first full day of 1:1. Met 3 new classes of 16-18 year old students. Introduced the idea of a blended learning environment- on-line & face to face. Had all three classes work through joining wikispaces and then joining their class wikis, and it went well! If everyone (about 90 of them) are signed up as members of their wikis by next Friday, I'll be happy.

The biggest thing today- having students work with one another to solve the problems of how to register for the wiki. //Technology problems happen all the time.// For example, the toaster might not work in the morning, but that just means you have to do something else for breakfast. Same thing with the computers. They'll work most of the time but when they don't work, all of us just have to learn to find another way instead of just shutting down or stopping. The problems themselves help us to be creative & collaborative. [|Bruce Dixon of AALF] brought this up at the Emerge 2010 conference this summer.

Focusing on //the learning// is the thing- the paper/pen/board/netbook/computer/hologram/ is just a tool to aid the learning. I think we just have to learn to use new tools, and the tools help to inform the learning. The tools a sculptor or a painter uses come through in the painting or sculpture, so I guess that the tools used for learnnig come through in what is learned as well. I'll have to think about that comparison a bit more.

September 10
Friday, Friday, Friday! Quite a bit of success with students working through membership in wikispaces, and then joining their class wikis. After a discussion with another teacher today I have to look into using the "my site" in our school division portal, because it provides a good tool for collaboration in class that is password protected. The spooky thing for me right now is how open the architecture of a wiki is- but I know there are ways to lock it down if I need to do so.

September 18
Here's a copy of an email I just sent to the folks on our school planning committee: ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ Hi Sports Fans- Saturday at noon, but I have stuff I have to share with you!

Noodling about in twitter, I was sent this link- now you have it too! http://21stcenturymirror.wordpress.com/2010/09/16/50-tweet-links-from-sept-1-to-present/ This page is authored by William Kierstead, the Director, 21st Century Research Office New Brunswick Department of Education.

Here is a New Brunswick promo video about their 21st Century learning program called NB3 21C: [] I'd like to show it to the whole staff sometime- for now share it around in email, just like all of this stuff.

New learning with new tools is catching on in jurisdictions world-wide, and close to home. Here in Winnipeg, Seven Oaks has a MET school up and running, but I don't know much about it yet: [] Here is more about MET/"Big Picture" schools in general, FYI: []

And here are the links to my humble efforts at establishing blended learning (face to face and online) classes this semester at Dakota: http://dci---b-slot-11-english---mr-norris.wikispaces.com/ http://dci---d-slot-12-english---mr-norris.wikispaces.com/ http://dci---e-slot-12-english---mr-norris.wikispaces.com/

and one more I'm only using as a simple public diary/blog: http://roynorris.wikispaces.com/

Our school plan at Dakota will be reflecting this local, national, and international momentum as educators re-imagine what it means to teach now, using new tools available now, for learning now.

Zoya, Chris, & Corrine- welcome to the school planning committee! If you have any favourite links to share about 21st century learning, please share them with all of us!

Bottom line: I'm always open to talking about these topics & trends, and working together to figure out how we can tap into all of "this" to more fully engage students in their learning.

See you Monday! (unless you email before then or tweet me - [|@Roy_Norris]) ~Roy ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~  ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ The school year has started incredibly quickly, and there is so much to try to understand, to absorb, and to learn about 21st Century learning, and how all of this is changing my own role as an educator, how my school is changing, how I think my own kids will be educated (they'll graduate in 2020 and 2022, hopefully, if not before!).

Forward thinking grounded in present realities seems to be the order of the day,

In the words of John Dewey,

September 20.
A while back our school 21stC learning committee morphed into the school planning committee. Now it is becoming clearer to me that we will need to figure out our own "custom" set of 21st Century skills/competencies. [|New Brunswick] has done this, so has the [|Partnership for 21st Century Skills], and I like the [|Metiri group's work]on defining what constitutes these 21st Century skills/competencies. The [|OECD] is also working on this too, and just published [|The Nature of Learning: Using Research to Inspire Practice], which is a big book on the future of education in the 20 democracies that make up the OECD. I'd really like to get a copy of this one!

Our work here will have to draw on all sorts of resources like these to figure out how 21st Century learning looks in our context.

September 23
Spent most of the day learning the ins & outs of Sharepoint- I figure I know enough now to pull together a few web-parts, set a few permissions, and then wonder what on earth happened when I can't seem to navigate the thingy. Like everything, my new learning will take a bit of time to gel, and a pile of practice to cement it into something I can build on. Fortunatley there are good people in this building who can help to show me the ropes.

The pace of life is very frenetic right now- keeping up, hanging on...and I still use paper & pen for "to do" lists! Old habits die hard- Sir Ken Robinson's recent TED talk and the "Wristwatch" illustration comes to mind. There is some comfort in wearing my "single function" device, but I know that to-do lists and wrist watches are persietent reminders of days gone by. Both are simultaneously replaced by any decent tablet computer or even a smart phone.

Looking forward to having Ian Jukes speak at our school next week. I wonder how our staff will respond. I know that many are ready to move forward with new tools and the new learning and new pedagogy that is all a part of the parcel, but others are shy and wary. I suppose a few are outright opposed to or dismissive of the changes afoot. We all respond to changes in our environments differently. I do hope we can forge a positive way forward, even though leading change is challenging when the terrain keeps shifting.

September 28th
[|Ian Jukes] did a full day of sessions yesterday at our school. The morning was spent showing our staff of 100+ that the world is irrevocably changed by the torrent of technology that started with [|ENIAC] and has carried on ever since. no references to [|Babbage], but the first bit did seem like a computer science history lesson played in fast-forward. Information technology is a transformative technology, much like the printing press, the advent of radio, the silver screen and television. Every one of those technologies had a profound effect on education, and info tech will likely eclipse all of them in terms of the profound effect that it will have on the relationships between learners and teachers. I do wonder what the world will be like for the high school grads of 2020.

The afternoon sessions with Ian started to look at the [|21st Century Fluency Project] that he is putting together along with the gang at the [|Committed Sardine]. Our staff liked moving past the "problem & wonder" sessions in the morning to the "solutions & practicalities" sessions in the afternoon. When I wrapped up the session, thanked Ian & gave him his parting gift I mentioned to the staff that it is not everyone who gets to go to work to hear a world-class speaker talk about subjects that are of immediate importance for us in the profession of helping people to learn. Based on our exit survey over 90% of our staff found the presentations "worthwhile" or "very worthwhile".

Staff meeting today, one day after the presentations, and we were able to announce 7 new netbook carts for our school- 3 in the building now and 4 more to come. Allocating the 4 carts is like trying to divide 4 loaves of bread between 100 teachers ready to try this out. It'll be hard, we'll have to share, and a miracle or two along the way certainly would be helpful. The pace, rate, and intensity of this change is exciting, and every day the landscape changes. I think it could be very unnerving or disconcerting for those who would rather that it just all go away. Figuring out how to meet teachers at their personal point of need is really important, and tough to do. There will be some software training, a bit of new hardware in the buiilding, but the "headware" changes that Ian Jukes mentioned repeatedly will take time. If students are to learn the best that they can, we must meet them where they are, and they are on the computers, in YouTube, Flickr, Facebook, Wikipedia, and a myriad of other net destinations.

Seven new carts- 168 new internet connected computers. New wi-fi in the building. Things change, and people can change too.

Here's to Adaptation....all of us old dogs have new tricks to learn.