School 1.0

• Rituals, rules, and routines
• Focus on the right answers
• This is okay.

School 2.0

• Engaged
• Self-directed
• Project-driven
•  Independent problem solvers
• Teachers and students are empowered
• Learning community

Meaningfulness + Significance + Connectedness =  Contribution

EXAMPLE:

Conrad calls the school during summer vacation, wants to come to school to work on his video project.  He won’t take no for an answer.  The school secretary forwards the call to Principal Tim Tyson.  The principal explains that it is too late to make your class grade better, the report cards have already been printed.  “But Dr. Tyson, I got an A”, Conrad explained.   “You said if the project was perfect, you would put it on the school website and into the iTunes Store for the whole world to see”, he continued.  The next day, Conrad showed up at 9am with two of his partners to get back to work on his project.

For the first time, schools can have access to true global distribution.

MabryOnline & iTunes

• School website serves up 1.5 million files per month on average.
• In June 2007, it served up 4 million files.
• People can subscribe to school content via iTunes.

The deal that Dr. Tyson put forth to his students:

• Your work has to be the best of the best
• Ask yourself: “What is it about your work that is so great that it needs to be out there for the entire world to see?”
• Students from New Dehli, Tasmania, Beijing, Shanghai, Peru, Georgia, Australia, UK are viewing their work.
• Students feel a great deal of satisfaction when their work is globally relevant.
• This is authentic assessment: when an A is not good enough for a student.

When does meaningfulness start?

• First job?
• Graduate college?
• Right now!
• We need to have a meaningful activities for students right now.

Project on Human Embryonic Stem Cell Research

• The students approached Dr. Tyson with their topic.
• Two weeks later, the students (on their own) had already scheduled a field trip to Emory University to spend two hours with Dr. Chetta in her research lab.  She presented one of the same intro presentations that she does for her doctoral students and physicians.
• Produced a movie that Patrice Weaver said was the best thing she’d ever seen.  Won the film festival.

Students wanted to make a difference, not just report:

• Commercialization of Drinking Water
• Human Embryonic Stem Cell Research
  • Shot everything but the video of the sonogram.
• Child Slave Labor on the Ivory Coast
  • “Social studies, but more grown up.”
• Saving African lives from Malaria
• Captivity of Elephants
• Poverty in China
• Organ Donation
  • Done like the series 24.
  • Students created every scene except for two that were recorded in the operating room by Emory University.
• Immigration in United States
• Genetically Modified Food
  • Students changed the way their principal buys his food.

Not all about technology and connectivity

• “I wish we could get away from this argument in our profession.”
• The effective educator is the one who bridges the gap between technology and meaningfulness.
• Students want to go beyond preparing for the next year, they want to make a contribution today.
• School 1.0 = Taking it in
• School 2.0 = Giving it out
• We need to stop simplifying our students’ education into tiny little segments.

Dr. Tyson’s closing keynote video/slides can be found here.

Link to session information page here.

Tuesday 3:30-4:30

Some resources:

• thefischbowl.blogspot.com
• learningandlaptops.blogspot.com
• www.lps.k12.co.us/schools/arapahoe/21c/necc2007.html

Staff Development is critical!

• Teachers meet once every three weeks for three hours - talk about:
  • educational theory, latest research, etc
  • pedagogy, how it looks in the classroom, collaborating & coming up with ideas (would try things out and then come back in person & blogs to report)
  • technology piece, show tool (blogger, del.icio.us, wikis, etc) and talk about how they can be used in the classroom.
• Key point that helped them: teachers teaching teachers, not from administration or coming from above.

How did they want to change the way they taught? They realized they wanted to teach via Constructivism - humans construct knowledge. Learning is an active process.

Created professional learning environment. Treated students as professionals.

• Tables, rolling chairs, so they can change the dynamic of the classroom all the time
  • allows for increased collaboration
• changed posters in the room to things students were interested in, and added some motivational type posters
• posted expectations the students created (what do you expect of your teachers, of the class, of each other?) Had students sign it, laminated it, and posted

Successes

• engagement. Engagement with teachers (lunchtime isn’t teachers complaining, they talk about how they’re teaching & share ideas). Engagement with students (they’re blogging! Voluntarily!)
• Students blogging around the perimeter live while others discuss in a fishbowl
• Skype is better than blogger

Collaboration

• within and without the classroom
• what’s important for our students to have to be successful in the 21st century? Teamwork! Know when to be a leader and when to be a follower
• Collaboration on wiki with another class from another country
• Collaboration != cooperative learning
  • collaboration: students together are teaching each other and learning. Helping each other understand. Goes beyond walls
  • cooperative learning: same idea, but not as engaged. Restricted to classroom.

Get students connected

• Be a reflective thinker - ask the students to be reflective on their learning. They can tie it together to things they did before in the course, in other courses, etc. Promoting the reflection promotes connections.
• Take an active role in their learning. Want to learn want to make connections.
• Blogging gives voice of their own
• whose standards are you using? Yours or your students’?
• Podcasting! You’d be surprised who is interested in what students have to say. Anything students write can be podcasting. Grandparents can listen!
• Wrote their own textbooks. Student editor worked with instructor. Teams of students got photos, format, text, etc. Used wikis to help collaboration.
• Googledocs, review toolbar in Word
• Digital Storytelling. Ask one big question, talk about it all semester (What does it take to challenge the system? What matters? etc). Everything relates to question, at the end they build a digital story relating everything to that question.

OR: iTunes/YouTube and the Academic MySpace

This topic in one word: VOICE (individual identity, reflection, meaning making, and new literacy).

Why digital stories in ePortfolios?

• Reflection is the heart and soul of a portfolio
• Digital stories can humanize any model of ePortfolio

Plugs The World is Flat by Thomas Friedman.

“How we educate our children may prove to be more important than how much.”

Plugs A Whole New Mind by Daniel Pink.

Balancing right brain skills for conceptual age with the left brain skills for the information age.

6 Essential High-Concept, High Touch Aptitudes

1. Design - create objects
2. Story - ability to fashion a compelling narrative
3. Symphony - synthesis
4. Empathy - forge relationships
5. Play - laughter clubs
6. Meaning - pulling it all together

Experiential Learning Model - Practice and Metacognition as a continuous cycle.

Storytelling as a theory of learning.

Learner ownership and Control of Electronic Portfolio Development.

Digital storytelling process:

Learners create a 1-4 minute story (digital video clip, first person narrative, illustrated by still images, music track to add tone).

Purposes of Storytelling

1. Voice & Personality - Enhanced Audio of Granddaughter Victoria (so much energy!)
2. Legacy - My Sister Sarah (tell story about her newborn sisters’ fight with cancer)
3. Biography - Victoria reads her autobiography.
4. Memoir - focuses on the memories of the storyteller, often much longer than a typical story.
5. Reflection-Transition - Young man explains why he became a teacher to one of his elementary school teacher.
6. Reflection-Decision - Use a digital story to weigh the options in a decision to be made, document the process used to make decisions.
7. Benchmarking Development - A digital story as a snapshot throughout the development of a learner (example had a series of digital stories, twice a year from kindergarten to senior year in high school).
8. Change Over Time - Maintain a collection of work over time to help recognize when growth has occurred. Victoria talks about how much she has grown since kindergarten now that she is in 1st grade.
9. Evidence of Collaboration - provide explanation of the process of a group’s collaborative process on a project.
10. Documentary - Take the place of a PowerPoint or research paper. Story takes on the characteristics of a documentary, often fact-based without emotional content.
11. Record of Experience - Experience doesn’t always yield a discrete artifact. A digital story can reflect and document and experience and be presented as final evidence of an experience. Documenting a rural Alaska experience.
12. Oral Language - Learning to speak in a second language. Learners record their voice, speaking or reading aloud at different stages in their development.
13. Rich Digital Artifacts - Showcase student work with an explanatory narrative. Replacement for written narrative because some students have trouble reflecting textually.

Voice = Authenticity, digital storytelling brings out that voice.

Process to develop digital stories:

1. Script development, sometimes in groups called story circles.
2. Record the author reading the story (audio recording/editing)
3. Capture and process the images
4. Recods/edit the video.
5. Present/share the digital story.

Online tools for video editing:

• BubbleShare
• PrimaryAccess
• JumpCut
• EyeSpot
• PhotoBucket

Online tools for audio editing:

• Odeo
• Podomatic

Link to session page here.

Driving forces behind Wikitext:

• Students were not using textbooks, often sold back to bookstore with shrink wrap still on them.
• Dissatisfaction with timeliness of textbooks.

Theory behind Wikitext:

• Enhance student learning by increasing involvement in course content and encouraging higher level thinking.
• Introduce collaborative environments.
• Use technology as an instructional tool.

Designing the Wikitext:

• Developed an online text book by adapting content from existing textbook as a guide.
• Started with grad students, chose topics and wrote sample articles.
• Support sessions created, written support developed (formatting guidelines, resources, sidebars, composing quality questions, navigation, etc.)

Implementation of the Wikitext:

• Done in introduction to education course.
• 227 students, online and face to face.
• All students had to choose a topic to write a 1,000 word article. Needed to include 5 multiple choice questions, 1 essay questions, and a sidebar discussion.
• Students were put into groups. Each group reviewed and rated all articles.
• Rated on a three point scale (outstanding, satisfactory, unsatisfactory). Changed to five point scale in the next semester.
• Best version of each topic’s article was published in the wiki. This was the article that students were responsible for knowing on their exams.
• Ratings of articles were averaged into final course grade.
• Ratings tracked by student ID number. Edits tracked by TA’s.
• Students were then responsible for one major edit to an article (> 150 words).

Methods of the Wikitext:

• A lot of research was done on this process. Eight different studies done (attitudinal, student response to process, holistic approach to the process, comparison of student-assigned to teacher-assigned grades, pre-course, during course, and post-course etc.)
• Most data self-reported

Results of the studies:

• Student concerns: 28.3% research for article, 20.1% writing composition, 19.5% concerns on technology, 15.7% worry about quality of content
• Final grades were slightly higher than when using normal textbook.
• 22% reported high involvement in traditional course, 61% reported high involvement with Wikitext.
• 100% no spent ~2 hours, 50% spent no time out of class with traditional, 89% reported 1-4 hours a week with Wikitext.
• 69% agreed that they experienced active learning after the course was over
• 53% got a lot of worth out of the class.
• 79% said content currency was higher or much higher, 47% said quality was better.
• One student said it was the most inspiring undertaking of education revamping he had ever experienced.
• Some said they didn’t want to read articles by their “idiot peers” and that they didn’t want to do “the instructor’s work for them”. These students expected a more top-down pedagogy model.
• 62% wanted to use Wikitext again.
• 70% reported increase in technology skills.
• Conclusion: student centered learning increased, active-learning increased, technology skill level increased.

Link to the final versions of the book created here.

Link to session page here.