October+2010

October 6th, 2010
Four more laptop carts will be arriving at our school some time in the next six weeks, and the 10 of us on the 21st Century Learning/School Planning Committee are in the position to recommend the allocation of these new resources to teachers/departments within our school. Talk about teacher leadership! It is exciting to see that the formal leadership in our large school is placing trust in the committee, and it also means we have to take our role seriously- we want to get it right.

The whole point is to involve our students and teachers in activities that will enhance student learning. Almost all of the research I've seen on 21st Century learning and 1:1 laptop learning show that there are gains in student engagement. The Metiri Group's study of the 3 year Emerge program in Alberta shows that students in schools that had these sorts of programs tended to fare better in test situations than comparable students in schools that didn't have such programs.

Remembering that all of this is about student learning and not the buzzing & whirring of each little CPU and software sub-routine is critical, and really hard to do. The "tools" are new, they take time to figure out how to use, and so a great deal of time and energy can be expended trying to see how learning with information technology is qualitatively better than learning without it. Then again, banking is qualitatively better with info-tech. I like paying my bills at home, I like the convenience of banking when I want to do so. Air traffic control is qualitatively better with info-tech. Maybe even finding friends and people who share common interests is qualitatively better with info-tech than without it.

Education today seems to be where Banking, Medicine, and Engineering were in about 1982- aware of a looming and potentially revolutionary digital future but hanging on for dear life to the analog processes, tried & true practices, and thread-bare maxims of days gone by. Bankers, Doctors & Engineers around the world had to adapt or be left behind by others in their field. Much the same is beginning to happen in education now. Hopefully educators will adopt digital practices in wise and thoughtful ways that actually help students instead of maniacally creating an "Edu-tech" bubble that bursts, leaving the next generation of teachers to clean up the mess and this generation of learners to fend for themselves.

So we work to drown out the drone of the machines, and remind ourselves that individualized learning that starts with good questions (inquiry based) and requires students to collaborate to solve real problems (project based, authentic) is the kind of thing Dewey was promoting 100 years ago. Dewey was right then, he's right now, and the difference is that we are finally starting to develop tools that allow large scale universal education programs to also be individualized.

New changes every day. Interesting times, indeed.

October 8th
Thanksgiving weekend coming up- and there certainly is much to be thankful for! Committee work at school is busy, classes are going well, got past the first round of interim reports, and now our committee is gearing up for a school planning meeting in an hour. Already we have the October staff meeting in our sights- changes to the venue & format are going to happen in an attempt to allow for more discussion and collaboration- hard to do in a staff of 120+.

So much of our planning right now seems to be focused on the immediate- how to allocate new technology, getting bugs worked out of what is already in place, and trying to introduce 21st century learning in a way that doesn't just water it down to a set of bleary-eyed educational cliches. I do wonder about where we'll be in October 2011, 2012, & 2013. I wonder if the changes from now until then will be trackable & recognizable, or if so much will change that it will be difficult to know how we got from A to B to C.

Then again, maybe less will change than I imagine! After all, thousands of well-meaning educators have been working on changes towards collaborative, community focussed inquiry learning for, oh, 40 years (since Papert) and beyond (since Dewey). Maybe we're cogs in the wheel, maybe we're on the band wagon, or maybe the wheel just turns, and the time has come for these ideas.

Whatever happens, right now I have to finish this post & go to a meeting (about these very issues).

Turkey or ham, turkey or ham, nice to have options!

October 24, 2010
Life rockets by. Out to Lethbridge for my convocation (can't believe I'm done!), back home, back to work, City-wide PD Day (SAG), and in the meanwhile develop a distribution plan with the 21C committee and make recommendations for the four new computer carts. At my last count we now have over 180 mobile computers in our school, plus three labs of desktop machines along with one teacher computer per class. computing technology is not yet ubiquitous, but we are closer every day.

Life in Twitter and edupln has been interesting- getting to know a few more people in the cyber-verse. I'm still a fan of face to face meetings, but the more I work with social networking sites the more I realize the melding/merging of my face to face and online collaborations.

SAG was really good- attended ebit- the special area group for business and info tech teachers- it was their largest attendance ever at SAG, and I expect that their group will grow as other curricular areas continue to blend & dovetail with this discipline. The afternoon session on games in the classroom is really a glimpse forward, I think. SIMS of all sorts will become more important parts of main-stream public education over the next decade, I believe. Already there are great SIMS available for high school accounting class, as were highlighted in the session, and the notion of learning via gaming is gaining traction. The morning sessions were good: one session on new directions in career development, and a discussion group on current and future assessment, evaluation and reporting practice. There was no plenary speaker, but this allows for greater customization for the participants, so it was good.

Coming up to our first round of report cards soon. Hard to believe. Life rockets by.