You have to love teachers who are able to see possible value in a web tool and try it in their classroom.  A few weeks ago I saw Edmodo on my twitter network and wanted to check it out.  Edmodo is promoted as a private, micro-blogging platform developed specifiaclly for classrooms, where teachers and students can connect during and after school hours.

Sensing it had potential, I approached one of our teachers, Rob Miller, and asked him to have a look.  Over the next couple of weeks he signed up, created a class group and had his students sign up.  Immediately it showed merit.  This week I had a chance to catch up with Rob and debrief.  He and his students have loved the platform and are continuing to explore it’s potential.

Below is a video that demo’s this cool new tool.

Technorati tags: technology, education, whipple, learning, edmodo

It’s probably a good thing I don’t live in a city with a major or minor league baseball team, because I would most likely be broke and single after spending many nights at the ballpark. Baseball is the most beautiful of all the major sports with a long history, many stories and a major place in the social fabric of America.

In his book, The World is Flat (should be a must read for teachers), Tom Friedman looked at how evolving technologies, travel and geopolitics have created increased possibilities for individuals from many areas of the globe.  Geography is meaning less and less when it comes to opportunity.

Friedman didn’t specifically mention sports, but yesterday I was drawn to this story of two young Indian men who are now pitching in the Pirates organization.  Like everything else in Asia, when you have a few billion people, someone is bound to have hidden talents that aren’t necessarily valuable locally but can be sourced using the power of the web and traditional techniques.

They have been matched with a mentor, USC pitching coach Tom House, who notes that their inexperience is not necessarily a bad thing.

“The idea is that getting somebody brand new, with no bad habits, would be easier than trying to teach somebody to undo bad habits,” House said.

Kind of reminds me of the Jamaican Olympic bobsleigh team from a while back, but now it’s about BIG money driving the search.  Wonder what will be skill-sourced next?

Technorati tags: technology, education, whipple, learning

Ran across this via Karl Fisch yesterday.  Free Rice is an organization that is committed to helping feed the world.  They have developed this interesting – and free – web game that helps users build vocabulary while at the same time providing food for people in developing nations.

As users get correct answers – it’s a fairly simple vocabulary multiple choice game – a couple of philanthropic organizations will work with the UN Food Program to ship a few grains of rice.  The more success visitors have, the more rice gets distributed.

As Karl points out…

I think this is another interesting use of the web, combining educational activities (not just the fairly simple vocab building activity, but educating folks about hunger itself – including links to the sister site poverty.com) with contributing to the greater good. I could see this being a springboard for writing activities, social studies units on developing countries or poverty, and even some math and science activities (calculating how many grains of rice it takes to feed a certain number of people, nutritional value of the rice, caloric intake, etc.)

The program has been around for a while and has met with much success.  From the website FAQ…

The rice you donate makes a huge difference to the person who receives it. According to the United Nations, about 25,000 people die each day from hunger or hunger-related causes, most of them children. Though 20 grains of rice may seem like a small amount, it is important to remember that while you are playing, so are thousands of other people at the same time. It is everyone together that makes the difference. Thanks to you, FreeRice has generated enough rice to feed more than two million people since it started in October 2007.

They have recently added vocabulary from several subjects.  Check it out.  The start of some great conversations in many areas for you and your students.

Technorati tags: technology, education, whipple, learning, karl fisch, freerice

Riding solo on a seven hour drive home from Nashua, New Hampshire gave me some time to reflect on the many conversations I had with educators at the Christa McAuliffe Technology Conference.

Conferences are like superfood for educators.  While I can connect with my PLN everyday through the web, there is nothing like having the chance to sit down for a period of time and picking brains, sharing ideas and just being encouraged.  I also had the opportunity to share through a presentation on Student Global Collaborative Projects – which I believe are crucial to building real cultural understandings without the filter of entertainiment media – and a beginners workshop entitled Ten (not-so) Secrets About Wikis. Both were well received – one was even UStreamed – and I have received emails from participants from both sessions asking followups.

On Wednesday I had the opportunity to hear Dr. Yong Zhao for the first time, who spoke on How Technology Defines Talents – What Should Schools Teach?  His entertaining and sometimes humorous presentation was well worth my hour, starting with some new (to me at least) comparisons of student achievement results from 40 years ago and compared them to where those countries stand today.  His findings show that the higher the nations test scores were then, the lower their current economic performance.  This is startling in that it calls into questions our preponderance to compare our students to those in other countries, but the question now has to be why?  Just what does this data mean or predict about our kids future?

Another captivating story from Zhao’s address was his comparisson of global populations, education and economies using a series of images from Worldmapper.  Using distribution maps showing the size of countries as relative to their populations and levels of education, we could see drastic differences between North America – I expect Canada to be tied so closely that we can use a common measure – and the rest of the world.  On comparison in particular caught my eye.  Images that show royalty payments showed NA as huge, with the rest of the world miniscule, while another that demonstrated toy manufacturing showed NA as very small while Asia grew.  The message – the dominant position of North America currently enjoys is due to our advantage as an economy of ideas vs widgit making.  But his question was – how will this change as our world economic shift continues?

What was really interesting was the ability and number of people to join the conference virtually.  Both David Warlick‘s Tuesday keynote and Zhao’s message were UStreamed, with almost 50 people tuned in for Dave’s address.  A number of other people were twittering and live blogging during both presentations, extending the conversations beyond the physical space (isn’t that a great model for schools?).  After leaving for another event in North Carolina, David even captured most of my tweets on Zhao’s address and blogged them.  Fascinating and increasingly connected community we have here.

And the question, of course, continues to be – what does this mean for our schools?  If a focus on comparing our students test scores with students from other global communities really means little in terms of predicting future success, just what are the measures that matter, and what are the skills that our kids will need for their future?

Technorati tags: technology, education, whipple, learning, yong zhao, nhste, nhcmtc, nhcmtc08

Technorati tags: technology, education, whipple, learning, warlick, wiki, nhste, nhcmtc, nhcmtc08

In one of my former lives, I managed a non-profit community radio station and later became President of the National Community Radio Association, a position I held for a couple of years.  Community radio in Canada includes a variety of non-profit stations with a variety of programming themes with the defining feature being the majority of the programming was produced by volunteers.

Participatory radio is magical, where individuals and groups produce programming by and for their own communities, not to make a profit but to share their eclectic cultures and build understandings.  While almost all stations have a full-time staff member or two, their role is to train, support and guide the content producers – the volunteers who invest their time and efforts – and not to produce content.

It strikes me that this is exactly the model we need for learning.  The full-time staffers – teachers – support the learning while engaged, passionate learners create and share their learning content. It’s the passion for the content – much like the radio producers are passionate about their content, that makes students but into the learning.

This will require a huge shift in mindset, as we move away from a hugely centralized and controlled curriculum, and allow students to direct and even create their own curriculum.

Participatory learning anyone?

Technorati tags: technology, education, whipple, learning

Photo Credit: Board, Uploaded to Flickr on June 2, 2007 by Observe The Banana, Creative Commons, Some Rights Reserved

I spent the better part of the day yesterday on a seven hour drive from my home in New Brunswick, Canada, down through the (very long) state of Maine to arrive here in New Hampshire for this years Christa McAuliffe Technology Conference.  It’s my first time at this conference, but not my first time in this area.

One of my good (non-teaching) friends lives in the next town over, so I am using this trip to spend some time with him as well.  As I drove over to Nashua this morning, I was thinking about how the web has wired us together.  We keep in contact closely, even though we only see each other a couple of times a year.

Today is pre-conference workshop day.  At his invitation, I am hanging out at Dave Warlick‘s Wiki session.  There are a dozen educators from Maine, Vermont and New Hampshire in the room.  Some are teachers, some are librarians (or “media generalists” as they call themselves here) and some are mentors – there’s even a Principal!

As I pulled into the conference hotel this morning, I was struck by the beauty of the place. Despite it being a dreary autumn day, the hotel is spectacular, fashioned like a castle.

I have two presentations scheduled. Tomorrow on Global Collaborative Projects, Wednesday on using wikispaces for student content.

Should be blast!

Technorati tags: technology, education, whipple, learning, warlick, wiki, nhste, nhcmtc, nhcmtc08

One of the biggest differences I see with our young people and my generation is a need to interact in their world.  Participation is key to the millenial generation.  I know, this is a generalization, but humour me.

Case in point.  As a young boy, I remember watching hockey on TV with my brother and dad.  Our participation was passive – we watched! Last night my stepson came up the stairs midway through the Eagles-Cards NFL game, carrying his laptop, and sat down in front of the TV.  As I watched, he proceeded to continue to watch while he interfaced with an on-line game linked with the game in progress on the TV. Seems he was participating in the game by “calling the plays” in advance and trying to win a game running parallel to, and dependent on, the game being played.

You see, our kids are not wired to be consumers.  In their world, their experiences, their narrative, they are always able to participate in someway. They are not willing to be simply consumers.  They yearn to produce, to tell their stories.

What does this mean for education?  What opportunities are we providing for our students to participate, to interact with and, yes, even create the curriculum? How can we continue to accept learning environments where everyone is “watching” the same game, without an opportunity to produce and interact with their own learning environment?

Technorati tags: technology, education, whipple, learning

Ran across this link on twitter a few days back and finally got around to watching it today.  It’s a trailer for the video Voices from the New American Schoolhouse.  It reminded me very much of the model of A.S.Neill’s Summerhill School in England that we studies in my undergraduate program in university.

The idea that schools can work when students are more involved in the administration of the school is an interesting one.  I would need a bit more coaxing before I would be inclined to believe that all students can succeed in the setting, but one thing I do know is that the current model of education as represented in our orderly, disconnected classrooms today is doing nothing to help our students learn.

One young students mused that much like we have found out much about what babies need to thrive, she figues that

someday researchers will find out that teenagers need to talk to learn and develop.

Of course, it’s not just teenagers, but all of us – learning comes from conversations.  So, then why do we place so much value on teachers whose classrooms are quiet, orderly, straight and filled with repetitive tasks?

Education is in the heart of the listener, not in the voice of the teacher.

Kids love to connect, either through conversations or – more often nowadays – digitally.  It IS real to them, despite what adults say.  It’s where their heart is, thus it’s where the learning will take place.

Just what would happen if we let them run? Who knows, maybe even REAL learning!

Technorati tags: technology, education, whipple, learning, newamericanschoolhouse

In yet another example of how Google and others are optomizing how users can define how they interact with content on the net, Google rolled out their “Search Wiki” feature late last week.  I first noticed it Thursday when I googled the Christa MCAuliffe Technology Conference, where I’ll be presenting next week in Nashua, New Hampshire.

The search results showed as usual, but had some new arrows and x’s beside the links.  At about the same time, someone twittered about the new feature, so I checked it out.

In short, the feature allows individuals to prioritize individual sites, exclude them altogether or annotate the sites.  All of these features only show in their own searches – as defined by their Google user login – but annotations can also be searched by others.

This short video provides more explanation.

Technorati tags: technology, education, whipple, learning, searchwiki, cmtc08