It was VERY early on Wednesday morning, but students in Mr. Carrier’s homeroom at Nashwaaksis Middle School enjoyed a connection they won’t soon forget as they moved on to the next phase of their ongoing French language project with students at the American School of Bombay in Mumbai, India.

With the school day yet to start in Canada, and students staying into the late afternoon in India, the two classes connected virtually through the power of video-conferencing. Students were able to connect and share their work and then had a chance to spend a bit of time having fun together.

A couple of notes about this project. One of the real barriers to developing global collaborative projects is trust – mostly that the teachers and learners on the other end simply won’t disappear. While services like ePals, Global Teenager et al provide a valuable opportunity to connect, the best projects are built on personal relationships between the teachers involved. I have done many sessions on global project, and I always suggest that teachers look back at the people they studied with in university. Where are they teaching now? Can they be a partner?

I am fortunate that I get to attend one or two major conferencs a year. I go with two goals in mind; learning through conversations and to develop professional/personal relationships which might also be leveraged as contacts for student projects.

This project came out of relationships I have made over the last couple of years with a few ASB staff, namely Shabbi Luthra (IT Director), Dianna Pratt (Tech LS) and Oanh Vovan (French Teacher). This project could not have happened without their friendship and professional trust.

Secondly, this project was multi-faceted. In a province that is officially bilingual (English/French) it is important that our young people be given the opportunity to learn French – not always an easy task for anglophone students in a sea of English media. They also need to learn about the world in this new global environment. This project allowed us to do both.

This project was simple, students were to use a wikispace to share stories about their life as young people in India and Canada. They told narratives of food, music, etc…all the staples of life as a teenager. They soon found out that they have differences, but also many similarities. It is indeed a flat world!

This video hookup was developed to allow them to share their new understandings. Each student introduced themselves and (in French!) talked about their work on the project. Back and forth they went as they shared ideas and asked questions.

Then came the fun…for the last 15 minutes or so they were given the chance to be kids… sharing… tittering… talking… singing… they even did the Macarena together! I think there was even a bit of puppy love in the air. It was wonderful. Kids just being kids, coming together and learning to connect.

A 21st Century learning experience at it’s best! Check out the photos on the slideshow! Their smiles say it all…

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I’ve had a couple of chances to model the value of a connected world to students the last couple of weeks.

Learners in the undergrad university education course which I lead were treated last week as fellow edublogger Jeff Utecht joined our class via Skype from Shanghai for a few minutes to talk about the impact Asia and automation will have on our global community. He gave us a beautiful view of the next day’s dawn sky from his apartment balcony while we sat in eight different classrooms throughout the provinces of New Brunswick and Quebec, still captured in the previous evening.

Utilizing a mixture of Skype, Polycom and Bridgit video conferencing, we were able to connect a number of different people located on opposite sides of the globe – all for the goal of learning. While our Polycom link froze before students could ask Jeff any questions (he had to run and catch his bus to work), they got the message – the world is flatter and more connected than ever before.

This week the scene shifted to our middle school theatre for another visit from the future, this time with a group of grade 8 students. Chad Ball‘s class has started a study of Oceania and the South Pacific. They have been working on Maori dances (teaching themselves the chant and movements from the Internet!), snow sculpture replicas of Easter Island (there’s always a benefit of this crazy winter!) and many other things.

Without a doubt the highlight of the week, however, was another “visit” from the future as Anne Mirtschin graciously gave us some of her time to share her school, community and country live from her home in Hawkesdale, Australia.

After herding three classes of Grade 8 students into our school theatre, Anne suddenly appeared on the screen via skype…literally larger than life (the screen is 12′ x 20′). Anne had prepared a wikispace with her slideshows for sharing, which joined her on the screen.

The neat part was that Anne and the kids could actually interact. Vidcams at both ends enabled interaction on the go. The kids learned much about life in Australia (Anne should get a salary from local tourism department) but, more importantly, I hope they grasp the increasingly small nature of the world.

The connected global community no longer requires encyclopedias, videos or classroom teacher presentations. Instead, primary sources and connections with fellow learners and experts will be how we learn in the future. The authentic narrative is just too powerful to ignore.

The kids didn’t stop talking about Anne’s visit all week. They loved her accent, her pictures, her stories and her interest in them. It was 8:30 am here, 9:30 pm same day for Anne in Australia…13 hours in the future! A true 21st century visit.

Added April 11 – Chad’s students were so excited about Anne’s visit…you can read their comments on the class facebook (yup…I said FACEBOOK!) site… 

tags: technology, education, whipple, jeff utecht, anne mirtschin

Part of life in Canada (and Alaska for that matter) is winter. Snow, sleet, ice…the works. Schedules are never set in stone, delays happen. We deal with it.

Jason Ohler gets it too. He’s from Alaska.

Today he’s here in Fredericton, a guest of the New Brunswick Department of Education. For the next day and a half he’ll be leading us through a workshop that was supposed to happen almost a year ago. Last March Jason made it all the way to Toronto before being snowed in, never making it to New Brunswick – at least until now. Better late than never!

I am really looking forward to this. I wasn’t so sure until this morning. Nobody in my twitterverse had heard of him until I happened to run into Julie Lindsay on-line, who spoke highly of his work.

Onward…to the story.

tags: technology, education, whipple, twitter, jason ohler

School is an interesting place when no teachers or students are present. It’s Spring Break in our part of the country (although spring doesn’t seem to be making an appearance) and, aside from the occasional glimpse of janitorial staff, the school is eerily quiet.

Between planning this month’s PD sessions and organizing / assessment for the university course that I am instructing, I have managed to grab a few minutes to consume some of the unread posts in my never-dry feedreader.

One that grabbed my attention lately is the new student 2.0 blog. In particular Anthony Chivetta’s post on Thinking Creatively caught my attention. Anthony writes…

Twenty-first century education won’t be defined by any new technology. It won’t be defined by 1:1 laptop programs or tech-intensive projects. Twenty-first century education will, however, be defined by a fundamental shift in what we are teaching—a shift towards learner-centered education and creating creative thinkers. Today’s world is no longer content with students who can simply apply the knowledge they learned in school: our generation will be asked to think and operate in ways that traditional education has not, and can not, prepare us for.

The shifting nature of information in the new global community necessitates a comparable shift in our schools; a shift from teaching to learning, from students as content consumers to students as content producers.

Being literate in the 21st century will require much more than being able to read printed words on a page. As other forms of digital media dwarf text-based, print communication, success in the digital age will require information intelligence – the ability to locate, assess, harvest, connect, construct and communicate new knowledge. The ability to fluently read text remains vitally important – it’s just not enough.

Schools need to focus on two objectives; providing students with traditional, text-based reading, writing and numeracy skills (a political reality if nothing else!) while providing opportunities for students to explore, innovate and collaborate with learning partners from across the classroom to across the world using powerful, web-based 21st century information and communication tools.

Although digitizing previous teaching practices has certain efficiencies and benefits, the goal should be to move past the basic shift offered by technology where old practices are done in new ways. Instead, we want to continue the shift to focus on new practices, where learners (both teachers and students) work together to utilize new tools to focus the learning through a wide-variety of collaborative, learner-centered, project-based learning opportunities.

The need to know the capital of Florida died when my phone learned the answer.

Clearly, the focus needs to be on literacy – both traditional text and digital media – and not on content regurgitation.  All members of a school community need to become 21st Century learners, modeling active, collaborative and reflective learning practices. A heavy emphasis needs to be placed on learners as content producers, where sharing their work with authentic audiences will motivate students. Real connections with parents, students and experts from around the world will provide assessment that can’t be measured by a letter grade.

Literacy should be embedded across the curriculum. It irks me when a Math teacher begs off writing in their class…”I teach Mathematics, not literacy”…All teachers need to be given direction, and the tools, to be literacy teachers. Cross-curricular, student-centered and purposeful content production will provide the basis for students to begin to acquire the skills to work, play and learn as 21st Century global citizens.

Before taking on my current position, I team taught with another teacher…two if us with 60 kids, one big classroom, all day. Not being tied to a schedule gave us the flexibility to work in a variety of ways. Today, if I was given the opportunity, I would do things even more differently. The only things being “taught” would be literacies, both language arts and mathematics. Other subjects would be “learned” by students, as they worked on producing content for, and making connections to, the authentic world outside the classroom.

tags: technology, education, whipple

Photo Credit: classroom concentration, Originally uploaded to flickr by phitar, Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 2.0 Generic

Found this pic while looking for something else on flickr. Reminded me of Mrs. Mutch (Grade 3 and 4!) in the two room / 4 grade school I started with in the little stretch of community called Boom Road.

While our Acceptable Use Policy is designed by the Department of Education, we are one of the few 1:1 schools in the province. I am finding more and more that it’s simply not reflective of the realities of the school 2.0, where we focus on students not as content consumers, but as content creators.

The reality of day to day operations in a 1:1 school are challenging. Can you think of anything you would add/change to this poster for every classroom?

How about…

Respect…information.

Listen...to your network.

Pay attention…to the world around you.

No eating…connect

Raise your hand voice…

No Daydreaming….please!

tags: technology, education, whipple

Photo credit: Classroom Sign, Originally uploaded to Flickr by Chris Campbell, Attribution-Noncommercial 2.0 Generic Creative Commons

Our school began a 1:1 pilot four years ago (I was the lead teacher for the project), and we went full-blown 1:1 across Grades 7 and 8 in the fall of 2006. In that time our students and teachers have become familiar of at least some of the opportunities and challenges that are inherent in 1:1 computing environments.

Over the past couple of weeks a common issue keeps being brought to me by administration; a seeming lack of understanding of, and respect for, the role technology should play in learning – by both teachers and students. Increasingly we are hearing from teachers who are concerned with students finding their way off task (as if this was solely a computing issue) and utilizing technology in “non-educational” ways.

Like most schools, we have an Acceptable Use Policy (ours is a standard policy that is implemented province-wide with a common form that is signed off on by students and parents). It is quite “legalize” in it’s style, probably written by a well-intentioned bureaucrat in the Department of Education. However, it fails to address the challenges we face on a daily basis.

Our AUP was written several years ago and, in the spirit of web 1.0, fails to look at the growing amount of user generated content – and doesn’t really see students as content producers. From our worldview – as one of the first 1:1 schools in our province – the authors really didn’t envision such technology-rich learning environments, instead addressing issues one would expect in occasional computer lab access. It simply fails to take into account the daily administration of universal classroom computing.

To that end, there have been a number of common practices developed within our school over the past few years of the project. Most teachers are able to manage most student use. However, a growing demand from both students and teachers is leading us to try and develop a common set of “rules” of student computing use within the school. These protocols would address Care and Maintenance, Daily Use and Web 2.0 tools.

I am torn on much of this. As a teacher, I would want as few rules in my classroom as possible. The fewer filters and access issues to learning tools, the better. Other teachers, however, are demanding more and more defined rules. With every student left disengaged and unsupervised who wastes a few minutes on Facebook, I hear the calls again. This while his/her teaching colleague down the hall is actually using Facebook as a tool in their virtual learning space.
Some of this bothers me. Personally, I think educating young people in proper use is far preferable to pinning a bunch of “that shall not…”‘s on them. Some teachers (and students) want to have rules as they provide either a stick (“the rules say…”) or an excuse (“but the rules didn’t say I couldn’t…”). Unfortunately, any set of protocols will never cover all situations or issues. Thus the dilemna.

I had a chance to twittertalk with a student of Clay Burell in Seoul for the last couple of days. His perspectives were interesting. After getting past the immediate reaction that all Middle School students needed lots and lots of rules and that long and complex documents would scare them, he offered some interesting insights into what students will accept in these types of documents. As he said, they need to be guides, not punishing tools.

So, I have started a simple one pager that we can give to students and teachers setting up the expectations / guidelines for computer use in the school. It is meant to be simple, short and light in tread, pointing out what we expect students to do with the technology, as opposed to what they shouldn’t do. Unlike Soojin, some teachers are looking for that stick to oppress or that excuse to point blame. Accepting that misguided and disengaged students will wander off into the cyberland, it’s our job to engage them and guide them along the way.

Check out the ideas I have placed on the page so far. It is based on feedback from teachers (and a bit of editorializing by me). It’s a work in progress. The goal is to have a one or two page document, written in language a middle school student would read and understand, that we could share with students and teachers so everyone is on the same page.

Comments?

tags: technology, education, whipple