Learning is Change

I was just thinking about one of my favorite movies, Gattaca. In it, Ethan Hawke is trying to assume a genetic identity in order to fulfill his dream of being an astronaut. This intrigues me as a premise, but it isn’t what got me thinking. I started thinking about how through the convention of flashbacks we are expected to believe that at least 3 different human beings at various ages are all the same character. The “child” version of Hawke’s character looks approximately like what he looked like as a kid, but that isn’t Ethan Hawke as a kid. Even less plausible is the semi-adult version of the character that is running away from home. He could pass for a younger version of Ethan Hawke, but they are two separate and distinct people. We are just expected to believe that they are the same. Our brains, in fact, want them to be the same so that the story works.

I started to think that this is the same thing that we do with education. We have one idea of what education looks like (whatever version of education you received), and we pretty much expect every version of education to have continuity with the version that we know. It is as if there were a movie that was started a long time ago and education was cast in a certain light: proud and resilient, stubborn but hopeful, an all around good person with a lot of emotional baggage. This movie has been playing forever, and we can’t seem to shake this typecasting effect. We need this character to look the same in every scene or at least have it be plausible that this is the more “grown up” version of education. It can have more wrinkles or become wiser, but recasting is just out of the question.

Perhaps I am taking the metaphor a little to far in saying that I think it is time to recast education. We need to have a new face to tell the story. We need something that is so unrecognizable as “education” that it doesn’t get confused with its former version. Perhaps we need to take a look at the “James Bond” model for recasting. Although each character is named James Bond, no one would ever confuse the Daniel Craig with Sean Connery. They may have similar catch phrases (“shaken not stirred” or “authentic learning”), but they behave in a different way entirely.

So, who is education now, and how do we make sure that people don’t confuse the kind of change the connected learning advocates are promoting with the education that no longer works for the majority of our connected population. How do we recast education?

So, I have run into quite a few hiccups with my Google Apps and Moodle Integration so far, all of which I think are my fault. I single handedly broke the portal by installing a rancid plugin. I have also been trying to push the integration farther than intended because I don’t want to be stuck talking about “moodle” and “google apps” as individual entities. I want to talk about the greater strategies for communication in an online learning space and having conversations about the ways in which we treat children’s privacy in a k-12 school.

Yet, I have had more meetings about specific tools in the last few days than I have in the last year. It seems as though, as much as I try to dodge my responsibility for being the “tech guru” (our art teacher’s words, not mine), it seems to catch up with me. I have to both talk specifically about how to create groups in gmail, and talk about how creating groups in gmail will create an ongoing message board of sorts when anyone clicks reply all (or we turn on labs to have that be the default). I need to be able to teach others how to create a Google Site and subscribe to the pages of importance, but then go deeper into what makes the subscription different than simply going back and checking on student’s progress.

The hard part is really getting to that deeper level. Once people see you as the person who has the “tech answers” it is hard to push beyond that. I guess that is why I continue to ask so many questions. I want to know things and be able to do things, not because I want to teach others, but because I want to learn for myself. I’m not sure that many people accept that there is just as much that I want to learn from them, as they may want to learn from me. How do I convince them?

With that question asked and not answered… here is my bit of concrete skills for the day.

If you would like to be able to log back into moodle from your Google Apps installation, you will need to either use the built in gadget that comes with the moodle-google package or you can simply use that gadget and put it onto any webpage. So long as you are logged in to google apps or moodle, you should be able to put this gadget in any webpage and perform a hocus pocus of single-signing in back to moodle.

<script src=”http://www.gmodules.com/ig/ifr?url=http://edcsd.org/login/auth/gsaml/moodlegadget.php&amp;up_selectedTab=&amp;synd=open&amp;w=320&amp;h=200&amp;title=eDCSD_Moodle_Gadget&amp;border=%23ffffff%7C3px%2C1px+solid+%23999999&amp;output=js”></script>

(notice that “http://edcsd.org/login/” is where your moodle directory would go and instead of “eDCSD_Moodle_Gadget”, you would want to have your own information).

Sometimes, cookies really are amazing things. I have yet to try it out on anything too fancy, but I like the idea that you could put this onto your blog, a wiki site, or any other webpage in existance that takes this kind of embed and have students get right back in to their moodle access (and therefore, google apps). Anyone care to think of a good use for this outside of what I have already outlined.

The power of possibility the only kind of power that matters. The power of the status quo no longer is a value because it can no longer provide kind of security it once did.

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In order to document just what I am doing with moodle to make sure that it is the direction I would like to go in for creating (at least) a portal for our online school and possibly use it as the Learning Management System of choice for professional development, I will be writing about a few of the particular paths I am taking.

The one I am interested in right now is displaying content outside of the moodle directly in the moodle page. The reason for this would be because there are a lot of pages that display exactly the right content that I would want to be able to interact with in the moodle installation. These include wiki pages (non-moodle wikis), blog pages (non-moodle blogs), and tons of web resources. The blocks and activities that exist to do this are pretty good (they allow you to link to things, or html pages directly), but they don’t allow you to embed the page directly, making it look like one fluid page.

Well, I was able to find a block to do this and a patch to make sure that I could put blocks in the middle of the page as large content items.

Here is the block download

Here is the patch download

You can see an embedded google site page at our portal.

The best thing about this block is that it really makes it look like a part of the page and not just an iFrame of the google site within a moodle. It does, however, do some funky things with links, but I will figure those out.

Just thought I would share how we may be putting it all together. (Not earth shattering, but I do like putting things together.)

This post doesn’t have a whole lot to do with educational technology, but I really had to let everyone who might care to know that my family is moving into a new house. It is our absolute dream home.

I have toyed with the idea of putting up the video tour that I did in order to show my parents, but I’m not totally sure that anyone that reads my blog casually really needs that kind of a detailed view of where my children sleep. If you truly would like to have that kind of voyeurism in your life, send me a direct message on Twitter.

For now, though, just know that I am happy with our decision, and that I cant wait to move in.

Yesterday was my first attempt to inject Google Apps into the conversation about our online school. Now that we have most of the integration worked out with users, it was time to show just what it was capable of to our staff.

I held three different meetings at three different schools yesterday during which I showed off the capablilities of using gmail and calendar for communication, Google Docs for collaboration, and Google sites for holding projects together. I tried not to get too overwhelming, but I’m afraid that I wasn’t able to hold back my excitment for the possibilities (at least on one of those meetings). When I get started talking about all of the things that you can do “today” in order to improve communication with students, I start answering every question that is layed out in front of me.

Some of the more tangential questions that we explored in the sprawling of these meetings:

1. How would I conduct a book club using Google Docs?
2. Is there a way to do a discussion forum in Google Sites?
3. Can we integrate Ning with our portal page and Google Apps?

The staff is very excited, but perhaps a little overwhelmed.

My idea to make sure that they are not overwhelmed is to do a lot of face to face work with staff in order to make sure tha they have the skills they need in order to communicate effectively using Google Apps. My thought is to make a Google Spreadsheet that would allow me to track just where everyone is in their progression (and allow them to track it themselves). I will be creating this later today, I hope.

The next thing that I would like to do in order to roll it out is to establish the best plan for getting students and parents on board. I have already set up a meeting so that we can all come together and talk about it, but I haven’t gone much further. From our brainstorming yesterday, this is what I believe the roll out should look like:

1. Meeting to introduce Google Apps and have a conversation with parents and students about what they would like to see more of/less of in its implimentation. Answer any questions that come up.
2. Pilot meeting with 10-20 students from all grade levels. If I can see them face to face, it would be great to get them all trying out what they do and don’t like about it and where they want it to go next.
3. Measuring success along the way among staff, parents, and students on logging in, checking gmail, setting up their calendar, etc.
4. Switching on Google Apps within the LMS and switching off the internal calendar and message system.
5. Continued workshops on the topics of Beginner/Advanced Gmail, Calendar, and Sites.

My question to everyone that reads this is the following: “What am I missing?” What sorts of roll out pieces haven’t I thought of? What would make this transition easier for staff, students, and parents?

(I’m sorry that this post sounds so much like an e-mail. I really am just in a very procedural place right now. I have to figure this out, and one of the most basic places that I figure something out is on my blog.)

I have to say that for a long time I really missed the boat on Moodle. All this time I really just thought of it as a way to put courses online and distribute online content to students. While it is still those things, it took me a couple of weeks of heavy research to really figure out what the true genious of moodle is: The way it talks (and listens) to other things. Now, I am not just talking about the new integration between Moodle and Google Apps, although that is pretty cool. I am in fact, talking about the ways in which it can authenticate to many systems at once (Firstclass, LDAP, a drupal server, etc.). I am talking about the ways that it can accept content from many sources and formats and call it its own:

• Gift Format from Word
• Moodle XML from Word
• EXE SCORM export

I believe that I have finally found the glue for our online school. Whether or not we end up using Moodle for our Learning Management System needs remains to be seen. But, the simple ability to have students go to one place to access all of their content and have it actually make sense. Well, that is just beautiful.

(Just to make sure that I am being as forthcoming as possible, the most beautiful thing for me is in the fact that students will be able to be created in Infinite Campus, automatically created within Moodle, then automatically created in Google Apps. The less manual entering of student I have to do, the more I get to play around with the future of learning.)

One of my favorite moments of The West Wing is during a conversation between the communications directory and his deputy. It is not one that probably many people have as their favorite, but I believe that it is so important to everything that I do, that I have commited it to memory.

In this conversation, the deputy is able to convince the director that there is a need for a new advertising push to sell the environmental plan that they are espousing. He walks the director through a well worded argument about the need for such a campaign and the director gets it. He has bought in. But, the director asks a key question at this point: “So, what’s your idea?”

The deputy stops short and says that he doesn’t have one. Well, this throws the director into a fit in saying, “Have an idea. You can’t just walk me to edge and then not have anything there. We don’t need to want this idea, we need the idea.” (or something like that)

The reason why this story came to mind today is that someone passed this link to me yesterday (in e-mail of all places). It is a wiki made by Darren Wilson, who I was not aware of until yesterday. He has the idea that we should all create “inspired classrooms”, but more than that he has instructions on how to create such a thing. He has videos of how you should set up desks and then examples of those inspired classrooms in action.

The point is that this individual wasn’t just calling for action or doing his own version of pushing educational boundaries, he is in fact advocating something very specific that can be pinned down. He is saying what a classroom should and should not look like. He is defining it and then challenging others to redefine it.

I want to make sure that I have idea like this, that I am not simply saying to change for change sake. I want to make sure that I am defining the exact kind of change I would like to see and  then producing an example of that change that could be used as a model by others.

I’m not sure if I am there yet.

I don’t have a lot of time to write this post (crazy things happen when I get excited about an idea) , but I really want to share this resource.

This project is for a Senior to do research on Social Networking. It is very well formatted and asks for some real accountability from the students. They actually have to create a social network to analyze, not simply piggy back on existing (and somewhat less desirable networks). I would love to see more projects like this one that ask students to think critically about the technologies that they use and come up with some conclusions that can be shared with the rest of the learning community.

Social Networking in schools doesn’t require just a little bit of thought. It requires a lot. From all stakeholders.

As I have been looking for people who are working to roll out Google Apps for Education in their schools, I wasn’t really thinking that I would find a student so engaged in the process. But, I think this may qualify as the best Senior project I have ever seen.

I can’t get over just how cool a student creating a blog to chronicle the progress of rolling out Google Apps is. This particular student clearly wants both teachers and students to be using it to its greatest potential. I think my favorite quote from his blog so far is as follows:

Two of the students I was working with were techno-phobic a the beginning of our sessions last fall.  They consistently told me that they didn’t like computers, and were the first ones to simply give up when they didn’t get it the first time around.

 

The first one, most recently, made the same comment to me – “I don’t like computers” – and I simply asked him if he liked cars.  Of course, he said yes, and I asked him what you do to a car when it breaks or isn’t working right – he said that you simply fixed it (in a matter-of-fact tone).  So I then asked him what you should do when a computer breaks – the thought about it for a minute, and said, “fix it I guess.”  After that, he never told me he hated using the computers – and later in the week last week was the only one who actually followed along with my instructions and was getting everything right the first time – he even started to help other students if they had a question about the sites we were working with.

 

The second one kept iterating to me that he hated computers and that they never worked for him – I kept insisting that computers were pretty cool things when you think about all of the things you can do with them.  Then, when I was talking about how global data on the internet really was – he paid extremely close attention.  Now, this student really had very rudimentary typing skills (from lack of exposure to computers as opposed to lack of potential or ability) and therefore got relay frustrated, and usually had his partner do the typing for their online labs – last week, he actually took the computer from his partner and was insisting on typing everything himself.

This is a teacher in the making. He said that he realized that he was having the time of his life talking to teachers about how to use Google Apps. If you would like to encourage him a little bit (or ask him questions) , he put his email on the front page, but here it is for easy access: rminnick(at)brvgsk12.va.us.

I would also like to highlight some of his handywork. This is a great presentation, and I can’t wait to ask him what he left out of the online version (he said that he took out some activities because he wants to keep them as trade secrets).

With students like this, why is it that so many schools do not recognize their contributions or honor the ways that they can add to the learning environment. What if we asked all of our seniors to create a site like this to chronicle their passion? What if we had a huge repository of all of their creative endeavors?

And what if we didn’t just ask this of them in Senior year, but every year of their education?