Morgridge Family Foundation Presentation

I am doing a 10 minute session today at an event for the Morgride Family Foundation. I was asked to do something on the topic of Project-based learning, and so I have reinvented the Ignite Denver Presentation for the purposes of this session. Here it is if you are interested:

Response to Paul (on PD must be better)

This post is in response to a comment on my last post which went something like this:

As I read your list I went back and forth agreeing with you.

Do you ever question if it is not how we do PD but the audience that we have hired and put into the “seats?”

Do you think we could stop “doing PD” if we simply hired a different caliber of professionals?

Do you worry that we have to “give(!!!) context, meaning and perspective” to teachers?

Here is my response:

I do think that it has to do with who we are talking to and what messages they will accept. However, I really do believe that if given enough reason to change, everyone will. I believe in the power of people to see something great and to become a part of it.

I also think that we could stop “doing PD” once people start thinking about networks as PD, but I still think we need to give people time away from their classroom responsibilities to actually create that network and to do their learning. We are passionate about learning what is “new”, but not everyone is. Others have to be given the time to do so, even if they are able to be a networked learner. They need to have the space to network.

All learners need to be given a space that has context, meaning and perspective. While I may create a lot of the context for what I do, I live it every day. I cannot expect people who do not blog to understand the context of blogging. I cannot expect people who do not use twitter to understand the context and meaning of a twitter conversation. And, I cannot expect people who do not use wikis and revision history to create a perspective to gain that perspective by doing anything other than actually using wikis and looking at revision histories.

When I say give, I believe that I am giving an experience. The experience is what matters to me. It is what will allow them to start creating context, meaning and perspective. Nothing else will do this and expecting them to create that experience on their own is just a little to harsh for me.

Technorati Tags: learning, pd, response, online, elearning, professional development, paulbogush

Why online PD must be better.

1. Right now, we are asking teachers to learn in an unfamiliar and, many times, unintuitive way.
2. Right now, we are asking teachers to teacher themselves without any connection to a network.
3. Right now, we are asking teachers to be experts in course creation without seeing any real examples of good online teaching.
4. Right now, we are dealing with “good enough” tools when we should be pushing for the right tools for the right learning.
5. Right now, we believe that everyone will need online learning in the future without really defining what we want our future to be. We are reacting to every new fad technology and not putting together our own vision for how things can and should work.
6. Right now, our teams are not collaborating.
7. Right now, we are not asking questions when we create learning environments. We are simply accepting the environments that exist and building within them.
8. Right now, we are focused on the tools and not the concepts we are trying to teach.
9. Right now, we are unable to isolate the skills from the technology.
10. Right now, we are telling one another that we are doing something great and that each of us is a pioneer, when all we have really done is translated an old style of teaching into 21st century formats.

If we can’t give context, meaning, and perspective to our teachers, how do we expect our teachers to be able to impart them to our children?

Another one bites the dust…

One of the more promising tools that I had seen in the last year was Flowgram. I had used it to do a few tutorials and to show people just how easy it is to create a learning path for people with your voice and few good links. However, now it seems as though that is all coming to an end. I received this e-mail this morning:

Dear Flowgram user:

Today is a sad day for us. We have decided to terminate the Flowgram service as of the end of the month (June 30th, 2009).  The service received excellent reviews and had an enthusiastic core user base. However, we were not able to demonstrate (especially in these economic times) that Flowgrams would ever be prevalent enough for us to adequately monetize the business, either though ads or subscriptions. This is obviously very disappointing, but building the Flowgram platform was a lot of fun, and it was wonderful to see how many of you used our tool to express yourselves in a deep and meaningful way.

Although you won’t be able to play your Flowgrams after the end of the month,  you can export them to video by clicking “share” from the website or “more sharing options” from the Flowgram player and scrolling down to the export to video section.  It is very important, if you wish to keep your content, that you export to video and download the video by the end of the month.  Please let us know at support@flowgram.com if you have any difficulties doing this.

Again, I would like to thank you for your support, for your Flowgrams and for your good wishes.

Best Regards
Abhay Parekh (Founder) and the rest of the Flowgram Team

So it goes.

I definitely see more of this happening in the near future. In fact, I am basically scared for all of the tools I use, and at this point, I would like to flat out state that if the following tools would let me pay for their service, I would gladly do so just to ensure that there are there tomorrow:

1. Twittter
2. Screentoaster
3. Delicious
4. Google Reader
5. Youtube

So if any of these services are reading this blog:

Please develop a sound business model, or at least open up your platform so that others can keep it going after you have run out of money.

Not knowing what I can share

For a week or more I have been conflicted about knowing what I can share from a class I co-taught this week on Best Practices for Online teaching and learning (yes, I know that I have blogged about there being no such thing as “best practices”). The reason why I am conflicted is because I do not own all of the rights to the content within the course and I have never tried to share the work of other adults amongst whom some are reluctant to have open classrooms. Because my district would like to take a look at running this course again and again internally and eventually running it for other districts as well, it would be hard for me to share the actual content of the course that I co-created (with my good friend Liz Walhof).

This saddens me because I am the type of person who has to share what is going on, has to add value to the work that is going on in changing the way education works. I really would like to share just how a hybrid course can look for professional development (we met on Monday, had asynchronous learning on Tuesday and met again on Wednesday with an extended skype session). I would like to share just how excited I am for people getting down to the business of making authentic learning objects with students and using Personal Learning Networks within an LMS. However, I respect the fact that I am not the only one who took part in the creation or learning of this class. I realize that I do not have all of the answers on this blog as well.

So, what I have decided to is to is to slowly take bits and pieces of things that I have learned from the course as well as things that were created during the course and share them on this blog. By doing this, I can satisfy my need to share as well as fulfill my obligations to show that there is valuable content within the course itself.

Here is the first set of objects, three visual representations of PLNs by members of this class:

I quite like how this activity turned out. I hope you do too.

Why Google Docs should matter to Schools:

I wrote this impassioned e-mail in response to a discussion about using Google Docs within our district. You may be able to sense the passion, but I hope it is at least somewhat of a restrained response:

I only know that I have seen and experienced for myself, my students, and for the adults I have worked with closely (in both real and virtual environments), but I thought that I would share a few thoughts.

I do not believe that we should consider Google Docs as a replacement for Word or as a competitor for OpenOffice. It just can’t compete, and I think that telling teachers and students that it is a good replacement for those tools would definitely blow up in our faces.

The only reason why we should be considering Google Docs is because of its collaborative toolset. It isn’t about creating the same thing in a different space, as OpenOffice or StarOffice would be. It is about changing the paradigm of creation. Although having things stored in a cloud is nice becasue you can access them from anywhere, this is something we could do in a decent way when Universal Content Management is up and running.

Although sharing a single document/presentation/spreadsheet and working on it together does not seem like a game changer, my experience has been just the opposite. When I introduce the idea of live-collaboration on documents, both adults and students shift their thinking. They no longer consider doing everything by themselves. They start to have an instinct of clicking on the share button first, even before there are words on the page.

Concretely, when students have access to this tool, they plan their own projects. They are able to own their learning much easier than with trading files and keeping things separate. For example, before I left the classroom, I used to do a National Novel Writing Month project where each student tried to write a novel in one month. We wrote these on google docs and then shared them with one another for commenting. We also had a single document for planning and keeping track of numbers of words (a short novel being 50,000 words). It was a terrific success, but that isn’t what I found valuable. After I left, my kids wanted to do it again the next year. Although they had no class that was asking them to do this, and no formal after school club, they set up the organizing document and started linking their own novels into it. They were able to organize writing a few hundred thousand words simply by having the tool to do so. (Although this may sound like wikis would fit the bill here, but on many occasions, students would use the Google Docs as a defacto meeting place when they were at home or in different parts of the school. They would ask questions of one another and make comments while 3 or more people were looking at the same thing.)

As for adults, the shift comes in when work is actually done. Putting Google Docs (or a similar synchonous collaboration tool) into the mix allows the work to get done in the meeting, rather than after the meetings. It allows for teachers to collaboratively lesson plan. It allows for the best ideas to come together without having to wait until “you do your revision”. To include a real-world example, when our Language Arts department was trying to come together on non-negotiable verbage in the classroom, using a Google Doc allowed us to all put our initial ideas on the white space (including the shy members) and then publicly comment on them. It shifted our conversation from debating words on butcher paper, to actually crafting the best language to use with students.

I know you can all tell that I am pretty passionate about collaboration. However, I also believe in the security of data surrounding that collaboration. If it takes longer to get a Google Docs integration right, so be it. But, I am not interested in having adults or students create in the same ways that they always have. We need to move them forward because these are the tools of the modern workplace. If we are not teaching them to collaborate as an instinct then I’m not sure that we are doing the job we are here to do.

I just want to say thank you to **** for “throwing these things out for discussion”. The best plans I have been a part of are when smart people get together and debate things out. I think that there needs to be a lot more serious discussion on whether or not other collaborative tools could perform the work of Google Docs for sure.

Thoughts?

What does flash have to do with it?

I was trying to figure out a very specific question today and I have been pretty much stumped ever since.

The question is this: Is there a free webtool that I can use to create interactive drag and drop activities to illustrate a point (The kind of stuff you would have a kid go up on a Smart Board for, where they drag something from one side of the screen into the correct category)?

So far I have come up with these not quite right solutions:

1. Draggable – a Java Script library that allow for some pretty cool interactive objects on a site, but requires a pretty hefty familiarity with html and web servers.
2. jClic – a Wonderful Java Webstart program that allows you to author and save a java application for drag and drop (and matching too) activities. This is specifically designed for the elearning crowd.
3. Dragster – By far the most robust tool that I found, but it costs and it is more sophisticated than I would ever wish on someone who is just wrapping their head around wikis.

So, while I am still looking for an answer (I’m looking at you network), I will be playing with easily the coolest thing I found all day: Produle. Produle is an extremely easy to use interface for creating flash applications (without any programming). I couldn’t believe some of the stuff it would let you do, like add rss feeds, map buttons to data, and even publish your flash anywhere you would like.

While I have never liked the idea of having content trapped within a flash application, I think that it does make sense… it does have some uses. I had a great conversation with an online school colleague earlier this week, during which he said that there was no way that we were going to be able to compete with corporate elearning outfits because of their slick flash objects and project teams. Well, with something like Produle, I think we may have taken at least one feather out of their cap.

We need to be able to create learning objects of all types and share them across any learning management system. No matter how closed flash is, it is a universal format for the web. It can be played by any machine and any LMS. We would have to be pretty foolish not to at least use a freely available tool to create some decent content.

So, I guess my post has two purposes tonight.

1. I want an answer to my original question.
2. To ask this question too: What are the things that you have seen in other learning spaces that you would like to be able to do in your own? What is holding you back?

Content: The not so hard part

For the longest time, I really thought that getting content for an elearning platform was the hardest part (or at least the most expensive). Now, though, I really think that getting quality content for an online school is getting easier and easier. Now that I have the option of using all of the moodle and SCORM resources that are available, I think we may be able to focus on the actual teaching part rather than just writing curriculum and having to settle for something that is second rate. Anyway, here is what I am looking at right now:

1. OpenLearn – Here is a large list of entirely downloadable and importable courses for moodle that are of good quality and are built for asynchronous. They are creative commons liscensed, so let’s share alike.
2. The Moodle Course Exchange Portal – This is a starting place to get at many courses that have been made in moodle. I feel as though this site is really in the early stages (they are going to start promoting more heavily after Moodle 2.0 comes out), but it does have some good links to quiz questions and scorm components.
3. The Moodle Commons – This is also a site that is just getting started, but there are some high quality courses there (only about 5)
4. Moodle Share – Again, not a whole lot going on here, yet. But a resource, nonetheless.
5. OER Project (from New Zealand) - Really nice courses that are ready to go. Again, only a handful as of right now.

Alright, so it isn’t everything to everyone, but I think that there are a few places to go to start building a good online school. Please let me know if you know of any other repositories that put their content into moodle backup format.

No one else is neccesary…

I had a great conversation today with a fellow teacher and learner. We were talking about traditional elearning and what separates what we would like to do in the future. My contention is that traditional elearning consists of three things:

1. Learning Modules (Text and Pictures that make up the bulk of “the instruction”)
2. Learning Objects (Media files and hyperlinks including movies, presentations, audio, etc.)
3. Assessments (Formal checks on learning that are tied to a tracking system/LMS or informal checks that are just for the learner)

The reason why this is the traditional model is that it doesn’t require anyone other than a single learner to take part. The learning is the same regardless of if there are 3 or 300 people in the class.

Now, many people would say that traditional elearning also has an element of communication in the form of a forum/discussion board and e-mail. I would agree that this is indeed a feature of much online learning in the traditional mode. However, I would caution that only a good teacher that can model social uses of these tools. Forums and e-mail can very quickly become a space where there is very little collaboration, and much more question and response. In other words, it is very hard to build something together if all responses cannot live beyond the initial impetus for them (beyond the week of the course when they were asked… etc.)

So, what I am thinking that the only difference for connected elearning is the social tools we use to teach within it. These require someone else to be a part of the class, because otherwise, there is no one to create knowledge with. Here is what we came up with as the key features of a social elearning environment:

• Communicating, collecting, and commenting on knowledge from the users of the course (In a blog or wiki format it makes sense to have students repurpose the course content for their own spaces. The depth of knowledge becomes apparent very quickly when each lesson can be made their own)
• Learning Object Creation (Creating exemplars to be used again within future versions of the course)
• Learning network creation (i.e., How do I find other people interested in the things I am interested in? How do I find out more or go deeper? How does this knowledge live beyond this class?)
• Authentic Assessments (Projects that require their Learning Network through which understanding is proven. No project can be completed without resources and people from outside of the class itself.)

So, the question I ask is what else is missing? What are the other aspects of “new elearning” make it different from a traditional Powerpoint and quiz format?

Strategy for Mobile Devices

Our district is starting to consider using student smart phones as a part of our overall device strategy. As we continue to think about leveraging this growing group of learning opportunities, I have gathered three ideas that I think are worth putting on the table (and not just our district table):

1. This is an amazing list of iphone/ipod touch apps that are split out by learning discipline. There is more than enough there to do a pilot in high schools and middle schools.
2. I have used Textmarks.com and Textthemob and a twitter backchannel (through texting, smart phones and the web) to great effect. Backchanneling should be a part of much of the PD and teaching practice in the future. (Putting texting into an assessment system isn’t quite ready yet, but I think it is going in that direction… it looks like you can already use sms for forums and communication via moodle: http://www.moodletxt.co.uk)
3. This video is a great example of what the future may look like in terms of mobile devices. It is youtube, so you will have to access it somewhere other than on a school network (depending on the school).
4. I also think that this blog is pretty much the coolest thing on the topic of cell phones in the classroom. Nice tools and a great focus on learning.

Let me know what other resources you are looking at in order to ensure that we can leverage these devices more in the future. And more than that, so we can actually have a strategy for how to do it.