Sentiments On Common Sense

This entry has been cross posted to LeaderTalk.

As I work this academic year in rolling out a 1:1 program, I have thought long and hard about the next steps after the initial “out of the box” experience has worn off and the machines find their place in the daily lives of the students and their teachers.  Now in month 6 of the implementation, I am faced with some decision making about the next steps to drive home the initial success of our program.  Success, in this case, is a feel of “normalcy” around the school with technology.  The networks is working well. Service centers are up and running.  Teachers expect things to work most of the time and indeed, I think they do.  They are also meeting the daily challenge of using the machines in activities and units daily.  Technology standards are being met more readily.  Students are expecting to use their machines for projects, research, lessons in all subject areas.  Again… the normalcy of the implementation is beginning to set in.

Most recently though I  have struggled just a bit with the integration of the walk through protocols we have established at our school and the clear, consistent identification of quality technology use by teachers and students.  I believe that many administrators and supervisors are still struggling with clarity around the NETS-S and NETS-T and the identification of specific examples where and when the standards are being implemented in classrooms.  To the neophyte technology user, any technology use must be good technology use. We all know this is wrong!

I will be rolling out for my leadership team this next week the ISTE Classroom Observation Tool (ICOT). We will have them share specific examples of the “look-for” clues are to determine appropriate, strong and progressive use of technology in our classrooms.  We will do side-by-side walkthroughs to develop our common understandings around the use of this very useful framework.  It should be noted that the ICOT tool online is currently out of date as ISTE has not updated it for the updated NETS-T but that is an easy trade off for the other parts of the tool, and I (heaven forbid) even PRINTED it out for them to look at, pull apart and examine the sheer genius that is this observation tool.

The tool asks the observer to evaluate:

• the physical layout of the room
• student groupings
• the role the teacher is playing
• learning activities that are being used
• the essentiality of technology to the activity or lesson
• the specific technology tools being used by the teacher
• the specific technology tools being used by the students
• The NETS-Teachers being addressed (see attached)
• Total time for technology use during the walkthrough and…

A Three Minute Chart is provided to track technology:

• Use by Students (For learning or not?)
• Use by Teacher (for learning or not?)

I believe this framework has tremendous potential to help educational leaders as we learn to train our eye to the key components of technology use in our classrooms and make it possible for us to more effectively lead technology integration at our school.  In the course of classroom observations school leaders make hundreds, if not thousands of professional judgments every week.  This tool guides the user to structure those judgments more precisely and I also believe that over time the administrators will be able to use this information to make technology expectations more ubiquitous in our organization and judgments based on data gathered over time.

The fact is that we are at the point next academic year where the communication of expectations for teachers in the use of technology is going to be more important that the actual implementation and training of the use of technology tools.  It is obvious that we have got to ramp up our expectations (with continued, persistent, consistent and insistent professional development support) or we will plateau and that could sound the death knell for our 1:1 program.  Value added results are expected and if we don’t deliver the program is done.

As part of the increase in expectations, I am hoping that next year we can do an all out ICOT observation month to gather school wide data for technology use in our classrooms.  This will indeed bring forward the power of the NETS-A, and show the school the importance of implementation attention for systematic improvement, visionary leadership and a focus on professional practice.

Technorati Tags: tech plan, implementation, PD, proD, professional development, 1:1, technology

I had a nice compliment this week from visiting consultants we had at school. In our debrief with them at the end of an intense week of embedded PD, they noted to me that they liked working at my school because I keep my job focused on the big picture. Hmm… I thought… the “big picture”.   What exactly does that mean?

After it is all said and done, my search for the view from 35000 feet continues to keep me up at night. I wake up suddenly with a start and realize that we had not thought of this or that, and I really need to hone in on that idea further.  One of those is the role of libraries in our effort to provide a balanced digital and print environment to our students.  Yes… that’s right.. BALANCED!  Seeing as how the idea of balance needs to be defined, I was glad to see that one of my favorite blogger authors Doug Johnson (note:this site is blocked in China) has co-authored an article with Joyce Kasman Valenza in the School Library Journal titled “Things That Keep Us Up at Night”. (SLJ, 10/1/09) The article is targeted at librarians, but really has hit home with our administrative team at my school this week as well.  They write…

The future of the school library as a relevant and viable institution is largely dependent on us and how quickly we respond to change.

Libraries are no different than the classroom environment in many ways. The library, like the classroom is beginning to face an identity crisis of sorts.  The role of the learning space is being stretched by always available, always accessible and always relevant resources at the fingertips of the students.  The people who run libraries and classrooms are facing a sea of changing faces, with our students being completely at home in the digital environment and engaged in what seems like so many, many things simultaneously. Some of it good, and some of it bad and some of it useless and some it needing the guiding hand of a

trained professional educator, while other parts of it can be easily mined, harvested and mashed-up and republished.  Johnson and Kasman Valenza note that the challenge of keeping up with these trends will keep us all busy. Again, speaking to librarians they state,

Look around your state conferences. How many of your colleagues graduated from library school more than 20 years ago? Remember what the landscape looked like in 1989? How do we stay one step ahead of our staff and students in information accessing, evaluation, use, and communication in order to be seen as experts and collaborators? Do we know more about current information strategies than our school’s technology coach? No excuses. We must! If we are truly information professionals, we need not only to keep up, but also be on the cutting edge of changes in the search and information landscapes.

My favorite part of the article though speaks to “Advocacy by nonlibrarians”.  Here they write:

Rather than creating a perfect library, we need to reshape our thinking and create the perfect library for our individual institution. We can do this by changing our mind-set from adopting best practices as defined by our own professional organization to adopting a “customer service/support” orientation by crafting goals that support the larger goals of the organization.

Should this not hold true for all parts of our schools?  The best part of this though is that this is librarians thinking about and discussing their craft knowledge and reapplying it to a potentially new setting with a focus on the goals of the larger organization.  This is big picture thinking in action!  No wonder they can’t sleep. This is exciting stuff!

The authors write at the end of their article a bit of a call to action for libraries and librarians.  The word apathy certainly is written here, but I that the gist of the message is that without urgent action educational change, technological change and the variety of political forces in schools will define the role of the library for us.  I agree with the authors when they state their clear warning that:

Our best librarians will evolve, adapt, and thrive in effective
schools. But will they be called librarians? And will they be in
sufficient numbers for the profession as a whole to survive?

From 35000 feet I know that some things will be changing soon.

—————————————————-

Flickrstorm Photo Tagged “38800 FT” on : http://www.flickr.com/photos/20420218@N04/3903688501

In my last post, I noted that I’d been saving this bookmark in my computer for quite a while.  Sean Nash from the blog nashworld wrote in July about the “Four Pillars of Technology Integration.” I wrote last week about our experiences with our Challenge Based Learning workshops that we were hosting in the month of September.  Today, I would like to explore the ideas that Sean has written about focusing on “Unfiltered, Ubiquitous Access”.

Sean spends a lot of time and lines writing about the requirements of the law in his state. The US has a lot of people telling each other what kids should and could see in their school networks, all the while the little darlings are going home and REALLY wanting to explore those sites because there are adults who have told them NOT to go there. Sigh… same story now as it was in the old days when boys would cruise the magazine racks for the occasional adult reading material so easily in their reach and so easily accessible.  Same holds true today.  But… that is not what I want to reflect on here.   Instead I would like to write about Sean’s comments around the ubiquity of the tools that may or may not be blocked in his district. The fact is that we all have a goal in our technology implementations that Sean describes so well.  He states:

Soon after access is all around you, it doesn’t even feel like “technology,” it just feels like the way things are done.  This is a good thing, for when technology becomes invisible, we can finally focus on the value added from new uses of these tools.  The world is moving quickly toward wireless access in all corners.

In my schools, we are now operating on a new wireless network and finding that it has freed us up in so many new ways.  Truthfully, the power of this tool alone is worth the price of educational admission at most schools, where roaming bands of learners find that access is found in any corner of the campus. We worked to ensure that the access is fully realized in the fields, cafeterias, student lounges and playgrounds with the realization that we need to have access where the students are located and stop worrying so much about locating the students in a lab or classroom.  By developing that freedom of space, you also free up the time of your community to learn and grow in any space and at any time.

Ultimately though it does come down to getting the machines in the hands of the students.  Sean writes:

If your school isn’t at a 1:1 ratio of students to laptop computers… and the students don’t take them home with them night by night, all year long… then you don’t yet have an ideal learning environment for 2009 in my opinion.

If you are a regular reader of my blog then you know how I feel.  Frankly speaking, I believe I have staked a lot of my career on the belief that a learner needs the tools of thought, voice, action and deed.  For a construction worker a shovel may be the tool of his trade, or another it may be a ruler, level or even his voice. For a learner, the tool of information access, information creation and information processing is currently a laptop computer. I cannot even imagine getting my work done without it.  I also have to ask how a student can get through school without the tool that virtually every adult uses day in and day out. Computers, whether on a desk or in a bag, are here to stay and getting more and more accessible each and every day.

In our CBL workshops we spend some time talking about the effects that the computers in each student’s hands will have on the working relationship that teachers and students develop over time.  The fact is that by giving students access like a laptop will certain democratize and “flatten” the social structure of a classroom. All of a sudden the teacher is not the ONLY resource to student for knowledge and in fact, the knowledge held in the head of an instructor may be “dated” or even wrong.  This, of course, moves all conversations to classroom management.  Frankly speaking I have been struggling finding resources for teachers on classroom management that will make them feel empowered and more comfortable.  Some of the more sage instructors will tell me (and their colleagues) that “good classroom management is good classroom management, laptops or not”. 
While I want to believe that is mostly true, I do think there will be some “figuring out” how to make it all work.  Thanks to my friend Blair Peterson, I was sent to the Friday Institute for Educational Innovations which is coordinating a study of 1:1 classrooms in North Carolina.  I found some great resources there and a great NING that is growing up and taking shape.  Take a look!

Laptop Friendly photo courtesy of http://www.flickr.com/photos/81374383@N00/521630871
Technorati Tags: FIEI, Friday Institute of Educational Innovations, 1:1, Unfiltered Access, Ubiquitious Access

I’ve been saving this bookmark in my computer for quite a while.  Sean Nash from the blog “Nashworld” wrote July about the “Four Pillars of Technology Integration.” and has created a very nice graphic to go along with the post (noting there that he spent too much time on the graphic).  I on the other hand will use it here (to the left) with FULL attribution!  Thanks Sean! Please check out the post!

What I want to write about today though is his initial insights into technological transformation. We worked through some training with our teachers over the past two weeks focusing on what we tried to represent as Challenge Based Learning to our teaching community.  The idea, sprouting from input from Apple Distinguished Educators who are part of our teaching staff, grew into a two day experience for all teachers in the classrooms which will be part of our 1:1 laptop implementation this year.  All in all, the workshops are going well, and have show to have teachers experience what I expected.   Some teachers to be struggled with technology. Some teachers found initial, early and dynamic success. Some teachers rebelled against the idea of the computers taking over their classrooms (and thus their lives). Other embraced the ideas shared and discussed and will be successful right away.  I also continue to believe that success will find us in our classrooms around this program due to our classroom teacher’s drive to use all the tools that are in their reach and the students love of the digital environment that they live in right now.  I believe our school has made some strong, agressive and noteworthy steps to get from what Mr. Nash states as “behind the curve” of technological transformation and instead get out in front of the crowd to distinguish our program from those that have come before us.

What initally connected to me in his post has nothing to do with the specifics of the Four Pillars of Technology integration, but instead it was his statement about the filters one applies as we consider as we retool schools along the lines of technological transformation.  Sean states:

If there is no way to see any of the individual trees in a forest, you are likely going to be forced to start your mission with a whole-forest view to begin with.  This is not a bad thing.

He then outlines two important thoughts:

1) You don’t need a flashlight.  It’s not that dark in there anymore.  Trust that there are others who have proceeded down this path before you, and they have learned many important lessons.  Collaborate.  Learn from their successes and failures.  Do not go it alone.  Resist the temptation to slap a digital device in the hands of each student and call it success.  Have a plan.

2) Rarely do we get to make decisions with the clarity that a little distance provides.  Take your time (but hurry).  Ask yourself: what can we do with these new tools available today that we couldn’t do before?  If we could remake our curriculum any way we wanted, how would we do it?  Think transformation of the way teaching and learning is done in your district, as opposed to integration into it as it exists.

This is just the message I wanted to have the teachers EXPERIENCE in the workshops we have been providing. That’s right… EXPERIENCE.  If we spend time taling at the issue (which we also did a very, very small amount of in the two days together), we miss our own point.  Frankly, I am a strong believer in the common sense approach that says that you can tell people things like this over and over, but as I learned in “Influencer” if you show and demonstrate, rather than tell will garner fuller more expansive results in our efforts.

Thus our results show (after reviewing the progress and the exit survey results) that we did a decent job of addressing the following goals:

1. To provide teachers with the opportunity to become more aware of the power of the laptop computers the students will have full access to through this program.
2. To provide teachers an opportunity to engage in a collaborative and collegial learning experience in the same way the students may engage in our classrooms.
3. To provide the teachers in the 1:1 classrooms time to examine the challenges of classroom management in a technology rich environment and develop thoughtful strategies on how to address these concerns.
4. To provide teachers an understanding of the logistical processes involved in getting technical help, additional resources and integration support at Shanghai American School.

Did we feel like we needed to give out teachers a flashlight like Sean mentions?  No, we did not.  Some, admittedly stumbled around in the dark a bit, but for the most part we met the needs of the groups (which were large and diverse).  We encouraged teachers to “Collaborate.” Some– no most– “Learn(ed) from their successes and failures. Teachers in our school learned that they “Do not (have to)go it alone”. No, we did not “slap a digital device in the hands of each student and call it success.”

Thanks Sean for the inspirational post that helped my reflections. I will reflect more on the remaining part of the post later.

I would like to follow up on my post yesterday. I have been doing a lot of thinking how technology builds a new classroom environment.  I use the word “new” very carefully here, in that we have been using tech in classrooms now for quite a while.  Heck… I used computers in my classroom way back in ’87.  That would be a healthy 22 years ago now.   Nonetheless, tech does move the classroom environment toward a more democratic approach with the direction of learning coming from both the adult and the child (or teacher and student).

Silvia Tolisano at the Langwitches blog wrote a great post on the 29th called “Take the Technology out of the Equation”. This post is worth a read if you have not had a chance to work through her thoughts and the links. It is a well written post that goes to the heart of my beliefs and the point of my “micro”-rant from yesterday.  Her wordle from the post is to the upper left of this post.

In the post she asks a series of questions about learning.

They are:

• How do we teach students how to learn?
• How do we motivate and engage learners?
• How do we create a climate where learning is valued, not test scores or a covered text book?

Yesterday I stated that if we as educators are constantly stuck in the learning skills we will never “…be able to drill down deep in our conversations about higher level thinking, collaboration, problem solving and content creation”.

Let’s think hard here.  It really is common sense. To get past the reasons and excuses and the lack of skills by both the teachers and the students (recognizing both as learners) we as school leaders must focus our organizations on learning and the learning process.  I have said in the past and probably will do again and again, that we are denying our students great learning experiences if we remove the technology component from the learning equation. I believe that technology could be the greatest learning tool ever invented, and it really does flatten the instructional process by involving all members of the learning community in the process.  By gaining the engagment of the learner, we also gain their trust and their passion for learning.

Silvia said it best when when she states:

Maybe we need to be talking about something no one can deny as a priority in our schools: STUDENT LEARNING. Maybe we if we talk on that common ground,  there will be less resistance, more collaboration and communication on how to achieve that.

Related articles by Zemanta

• Leadership 2.0 (deangroom.wordpress.com)
• Solo Teaching verses Team Learning. (deangroom.wordpress.com)
• QuickEd – The 21st Century Skills Curriculum (laf.ee)

student learning, Langwitches, collaboration, communications, 21st Century skills

Powered by ScribeFire.

Sigh….

Through my Diigo in Education group link I received a notice of a blog entry titled “Top 10 Tech Skills Your Teen Needs Now”.

Wow… that sounds like a great link to put in front of my community to focus them on some of the skills our school will be developing next year.  This will be great. With great glee I clicked the link and the number one thing list is: KEYBOARDING.

My common sense tells me that yes, keyboarding is important. I think back to my 8th grade year and my horrible experience in typing (manual typewriters and dull boredum of aaasssdddfffjjjkkklll;;; over and over again) where I earned some very bad grades!  I think to the hours that I have spent with elementary school kids teaching them “good” typing habits.  Was it time poorly spent. My answer is no, but my point is that KEYBOARDING is not a tech skill. It is a life skill.

After a quick search on the very same site I found this article which defines literacy (I read tech skills here) as:

• Using digital technology, communication tools and/or networks appropriately to access, manage, integrate, evaluate, and create information in order to function in a knowledge economy
• Using technology as a tool to research, organize, evaluate and communicate information, and the possession of a fundamental understanding of the ethical/legal issues surrounding the access and use of information

One would argue that keyboarding is a part of this list above, but frankly, without beginning the conversation at the most macro level, we will forever be stuck in the logistics of keyboarding instruction and morass that focuses on the skills of operating common applications.  Never will we be able to drill down deep in our conversations about higher level thinking, collaboration, problem solving and content creation.  If we continue to focus on the whys and hows of social networking and computer maintenance, then we will never be able to concentrate on using the machine as a ubiquitous tool.  You teach students only that using a database is about maintaining password security and using web searches to find and secure information then our kids never will understand the use of the deep web of informaiton that lies beneath a Google search, and will forever be doomed to simple information analysis.

No offense to the author, but I believe she has missed the point.  Basic skills are good, but focus these skills on deep, meaningful and pertinent application in content study will create stronger more flexible, capable thinkers.

Image from Flickrstorm CC http://www.flickr.com/photos/21814877@N00/3363073562

Powered by ScribeFire.

This entry will be cross posted to the Leadertalk Blog

My colleagues and I got in an animated conversation the other day about the actual demonstrable skills teachers and administrators must have to be successful members of our school community.  Beyond the basics understandings that teachers must have of the new uses of the read/write web, what exactly do we expect our educational professionals to be able to use to enhance teaching and build better learners?

I’ve been pounding my fist of late in these meetings, demanding a well developed professional development plan that is clear, concise and has reasonable accountability build into it- with a sharp eye on the short term and a vision for what will be in year 2 and year 3 of the plan.  I personally feel it seems like a reasonable and common sense request, and as I have said over and over, I could probably sit down and write a draft myself, but that would not help us address what really needs to drive our school’s technology training strategy.  Then…out of the blue… it came out of one of the participants mouth. Their words (paraphrased and combined) were:

When are the school administration going to start holding teachers accountable and make them use technology and follow the technology plan?  We have NETS for Teachers in our performance evaluation program. We are working hard to ensure that training is in place for our teachers, but it will all be a huge waste of time if teachers are not held accountable.

Interesting thoughts indeed!  I didn’t say it but I wanted to hold someone else accountable.  Nonetheless, the conversation continued and what followed was a significant discussion about the frustrations of the technology specialists.  These folks are working long hours to prepare lessons for their peers in addition to preparing lessons for the students.  As we are all aware, adults are a lot more demanding than children and thus the time investment has been significant.  A typical PD session that is voluntary results in just a few “interested” teachers showing up, and the technology use being enhanced in classrooms where there is already integration already going on.  It is certainly not a loss, but it is not the gain we’re hoping for either.

So the question held in the air around us and we all were responsible for the answer.  Ultimately, we are talking about professional responsiblity and instructional excellence.  Ultimately, I feel it comes to making the standards and embedded skills in the standards managable and understandable for all members of the instructional community in a school.  One of the resources we are using to build from is a resource called “23 Things”. This group of educators has put together a great list of resources and concepts that they feel best addresses the current needs of a practicing teacher in a classroom. We took that list, analyzed it, and then added to it and adapted it in ways that will best meet our needs at our school.  What I think the 23 things and our additions and modifications does in this Professional Development Mashup is make the whole mess of what would seem to be disjointed applications, resources and skills into chunks of possibilities.  I would share it here, but it is not quite done. When it is, I will do so. But, the creation and formation of this structure does not answer the key question posed.  Are the administrators going to hold the teachers accountable?  If they are, do they have the will- the guts – the understanding of the technology to say “You must meet these standards or go find another school or another job?”

It is a tough call.  In 2000 the Center for Research on Information Technology and Organizations published a report called School Technology Leadership: Incidence and Impact.  In the report it states:

For technology to become an integral part of a school, it not only is necessary to help teachers use the technology but administrators must be involved in it, too. The importance of training for developing teachers in technology has long been recognized in the educational community. These findings indicate that administrative leadership and decision-making are equal, if not more important than spending on infrastructure to maintaining a successful technology program.

…Charismatic people may contribute to technology integration as well, but it is even more essential for a school to distribute leadership and become a “technology learning organization,” where administrators, teachers, students, and parents together work on how best to adapt new technologies to improve learning. (p. 17)

(Thank you Drape’s Takes for drawing my attention to this quote!)

After it is all said and done, I have to continue to believe that until we hold the ADMINISTRATORS accountable for understanding technology and exploiting the power of the web, we cannot and will not be able to hold our instructional staff accountable.  As was stated almost 9 years ago, it is the leaders who must build a “technology learning organization”.

What do you think?

Posted by Andrew Torris

——————————————————–

Reference:

• Anderson, R. & Dexter, S. (December 1, 2000). School Technology Leadership: Incidence and Impact. Center for research on information technology and organizations. I.T. in education, paper 98. Retrieved December 26, 2008 from
  http://repositories.cdlib.org/crito/education/98

Related articles…

• The Role of Leadership in Technology Integration
• Teachers that are Difference Makers
• Hacking the Curriculum
• Text Messaging Tips for Parents & Educators