T.H.E. Journal reports that Texas is leaving the door open for schools to purchase electronic textbooks in addition to paper books.
While this change does not take education to the totally open and flexible iTunes purchasing model as some would prefer, it does provide significant flexibility to districts. In addition, it opens up the Texas market to a large number of companies that heretofore had no chance to compete. For the basal publishers that have owned the market, creativity and flexibility will, or at least should, become a new mantra.
There are already worrying signs that California is trying to go digital on a shoestring. Traditionally, publishers provide schools with a complete package: student textbooks, teacher’s guides with sample lessons and tests, and teacher training courses. In the emerging model, teachers must assemble their own package, combining e-books with free course “wikis” (shared online resources any user can update or revise), and networking with other teachers over the web to share best practices. It’s a new responsibility some would prefer to avoid.
The digital divide needs to be closed not just in hardware, but even more important in what to do with the hardware and software. Most teachers are not online in any significat way and and have never created a wiki or blog. Schools will have to open up their filtering and the 19th century modle of edcation will have to be scraped.
I am visiting my 96 year old father and 85 year old mother who are both in poor health. It is important to stay mindful of the drama that plays out in families so that divisions do not become wider. It is amazing how quickly children can divide into camps about what is the right thing for mom and dad to do. Spouses of children are not spared the trama and can be deeply involved also.
I have been working on developing an online geometry Moodle course as part of the grant that I am currently working under. Every time I develop another Moodle course I learn more and more about the power and versatility of Moodle. The Assignment block is a Moodle function that I was familiar with but had not used. It allows you to design the course so that students can not proceed to the next lesson unless they pass a quiz at the end of each lesson.
I am also using Geogebra, an interactive math website. This will give the students real experience in constructing geometric shapes. They will be able to discover geometric rules by manipulating the geometric shapes they build.
Have you ever been over whelmed by the number of Web 2.0 applications? I know I have, that is why The Best of Lists are helpful. By their nature Best of Lists are self limiting, but at least they narrow the list of Web 2.0 applications to a managable few.
Larry Ferlazzo, an English teacher is Sacramento, CA is a blogger and Best of List developer who can help you cut through the Web 2.0 clutter to find some gems. Look on his sidebar for links to the Best Of pages.
On Saturday, May 2, I was fortunate to be able to attend the New Media Literacies Project conference at MIT. When I first saw the email about the conference I was integrated, but little did I know how important this conference would be.
At NML’s May 2nd conference, we will share our new web-based learning environment, the Learning Library, and host a series of conversations and workshops about the integration and implementation of the new media literacies across disciplines. Workshops include “The Complexities of Copyright: Shepard Fairey v. the AP,” “Mapping in Participatory Culture: Boundaries,” “Using Wikipedia in the Classroom” and many others. Henry Jenkins’ closing remarks will address the future of NML and participatory democracy.
As happens in most conferences the workshops were great but too short. Most of the workshops were based on research that is current or ongoing so I feel like the participants were exposed to a scholarly discussion. At times the workshops fell into research jargon that you had to listen carefully to to gain understanding.
I was also struck by how young many of the researchers were. MIT does attract some of the brightest young minds in the world. The Learning Library and teaching resources they have created will help the classroom teachers and tech directors begin to infuse new media literacies into the curriculum.
I had heard of Henry Jenkins, but I had never heard him speak before. He is leaving MIT for USC so it was a gift to be able to hear him in. Here is a link to a talk he gave at USC in 2007. The MIT conference was recorded and will be available on MIT’s Techtv.
If you do not know who Bill McKibben is you need to lean about him. Bill is an environmentalist and writer who writes about global warming, alternative energy, and economics. Nena and I attended his talk on 4/2 at Mt. Holyoke College. It was standing room only as Bill started the talk by telling us he was there to depress us.
Bill is touring the world to let us know how important the number 350 is. 350 parts per million of CO2 in the atmosphere is the upper safe limit for humanity. Right now the measurement is 387 ppm, so we are past the level of CO2 that is safe for us.
Bill, and others, are organizing A Global Day for Climate Action on October 24, 2009. So go to the web site and find out how you can join. Bill is also on FaceBook and Twitter so that you can stay connected.
As I was looking through my Authors@Google subscription this morning I found a talk by Muhammad Yunus, the founder of Grameen Bank. The bank give micro-loans of a few dollars to the poor of Bangladesh who then use the money to start businesses in their villages. The bank has been so successful that 7 million people in Bangladesh now receive loans and the rate of repayment is 98%. I learned about this bank through my wife, Nena, who read Yunus’s book. As I listened to Yunus’s talk about how the bank works I was struck by his approach to teaching the poor of Bangladesh how to start and run a small business. The bank doesn’t “teach” business skills, they believe that everyone is an entrepreneur and all a person needs is someone to believe they can be successful.
Our natural curiosity is like a wild animal; it hunts where it needs to in order to satisfy its deep hunger. As children, we awaken each day with an insatiable appetite to learn. It is in our early years that we are “wolves of learning”. There is a deep, DNA-based, natural connection between learning and survival; call it the burning relevance of the empty stomach.
Pete writes that we have domesticated “the wolves of learning” and children now expect to be feed with out going on the hunt. Unlike Yunus, our education system does not believe that everyone is a natural learner and entrepreneur. We believe that children need to be taught and teachers have the answers. As Yunus has shown that is not true. Or as Pete says,
Let us find ways to give our children back their birthright, their natural curiosity and facility to learn. There have to be ways that we can organize our learning institutions to accommodate individual curiosity and the standardized curriculum. I believe that thoughtful educators can create environments that are less restrictive and provide much more natural habitat for learning. Let us find ways to foster the wildness and thrill of learning again. Let us answer the “Call of the Wild”.
As I was looking through my iTunes downloads I found this video from Edutopia about the Ariel Community Academy in Chicago. What interested me most about the video is that Sec. of Education Arne Duncan supported this school.
This is a quote from the principal’s web page.
Philosophy of Education: Our philosophy is congruent with the Experimentalist philosophy which views change as an ever-present process in a student’s learning experience. Experimentalism insists that curriculum is the subject matter of social experience and instruction is a problem solving, project-oriented process. The role of the teacher is to assist and advise the student, actively participating and contributing to their learning in order to expand and discover the society they live in and share experiences together. We believe that a child’s education at Ariel Community Academy should be based on current and up-to-date research that is supported by the best teaching and learning methods. Therefore, students should be aware of their own multiple intelligences and utilize a wide variety of abilities to demonstrate what they have learned.
The last sentence says to me that the end of high stakes standardized testing is at hand.
I set up a ning for the Bodhisara meditation community I belong to. No one asked me to do it. Boshisara has had a website for a few years and it has good information, but there is no way for members to stay connected. I have been thinking about ways to help the community communicate for several months. The Bodhisara community is scattered across western Massachusetts with several subgroups within the community. Bodhisara is held together by Mark Hart and a loose group of volunteers. Mark’s main way of communicating with the members of the community was through email, which is not the best way to communicate with a large group of people. I had suggested a wiki to Mark, but after seeing the ning that Tricycle has I decided ning really is the way to go. So far the response has been positive and there are a few posts about upcoming events. I am sure that some of the members of the community have never used a ning or any social network before, but as a community we can help each other stay more connected.
The 1:1 wireless laptop classroom is still in the process of being developed. Jake (IT) and I put a package together of 12 Lenovo netbooks, an HP for the teacher, a mimio capture system, and an LCD projector. The classroom has 12 special ed students who learn differently. At the present time there are 8 desktops in various stages of usefulness.
I have been working weekly in the classroom introducing different Web 2.0 tools to the students and the teacher. The students have epal email accounts, a Delicious account and the class has a wiki. The teacher is very excited about the laptops and is eager to learn about integrating technology into the curriculum. She will be going to the MassCUE Technology Leadership Symposium with myself, Jake and 3 other teaches. None of these teaches have been to an edtech conference. If their first exposure to several hundred educators excited about the changes technology can bring to education is anything like mine, their approach to teaching will be changed.
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