The following are my notes, reflections, and slidedeck from my ASCD podcasting presentation.

I presented this session with Jeff Arnett, the Chief Communications Officer for Barrington Community Unit School District 220.

Jeff and I began the session asking the question, “What can you accomplish when you merge communication strategy and innovative instruction?”  As Jeff is the Chief Communications Officer for our district, he is constantly working to ensure our district is communicating effectively with our community.  Often times a role like this in a district ends up being more of a public relations role wherein the individual works to shape and control the stream of communications coming from a district.  Jeff, however, works very hard to maintain open dialog with the community about what is happening throughout our district, and in particular, what is happening with our students as they are learning.  This is evidenced in his use of Facebook and Twitter as a strong component to our district’s communication plan.

My focus as Instructional Technology Coordinator for the district is on engaging students in learning experiences through technology.  I work to help teachers establish and identify their learning goals, and then we move to extend the learning experiences students are engaging in a way that moves them beyond the point that was possible with traditional learning tools.

A year and a half ago, Jeff and I began discussing the potential of establishing a district podcast where we can both accomplish goals for our respective areas of work.  What we came up with is the content for our presentation.

We spent the first portion of the presentation talking about the why of this project.  Why did we do it, and why do we believe in it?  We framed the discussion around three main points; purpose, power, and product.  We each answered how our goals worked in these three points.  We then talked about the process that got us to a district podcast.

The questions we posed for each point were:

Purpose-

Jeff- How are your current communication strategies engaging your stakeholders?

Ben- What are you doing to create engaging learning experiences for students?

Power-

Jeff- What you are doing to create ownership of your message and brand?

Ben- What are you doing to release ownership of learning to your students?

Product-

Jeff- Is your product adaptable to emerging technologies?

Ben- Are your learning experiences adaptable to emerging technologies?

We presently have three different shows in the network.  Elementary Insights, where our Superintendent of schools has a discussion with elementary students about issues and topics of interest happening in our district.  The Midpoint, where members of our Board of Education have discussions with middle school students about what is taking place in the district.  The Barrington 2:20, where high school students report on stories from the community.  To hear a short sample of each show, click here.

We started the network a year ago, and if you look at our blog, you will notice a serious lapse in new content.  We spent the fall and early winter in a targeted effort to transition to a new content management system for our district, and once that transition is complete, we will move all our podcasts to our new platform.  This work is nearly at the point where the podcast network can begin again, and in fact, we recently recorded new content for Elementary Insights and The Midpoint.  Both should be released within the next week or two.

I believe a partnership with communications and instruction can yield powerful results for students, teachers, and the community.  I could talk a whole lot on this subject, but I’ll leave it at this.  If you have any questions on this project, please feel free to let me know.

A couple things ran through my mind today as I flew into San Antonio for the 2010 ASCD conference.  Both related to education.

On the trip, I started reading 21st Century Skills: Learning for Life in our Times by Bernie Trilling and Charles Fadel.  Admittedly, I’m not the biggest fan of the name.  I don’t necessarily like it, but I do get it.  While these skills have absolutely been a requisite part of our society and learning for many centuries, and they aren’t unto themselves new skills by any means, there is a new context in which we should be engaging them.  I agree with that.  Emphatically.

It seems over the past decade, our education system has temporarily lost the use of its mind.  We went from focusing on a more complete education of our youth to a finite focus on basic skills.  And we ramped up the testing and the accountability for those very specific skills, and we left many important things behind as a result.  Now the focus of many instructional programs is on test preparation.  And the majority of those skills apply very narrowly to the experience of taking a standardized test and can then be discarded by students once they are done with that two week window.  We do this at the cost of creativity, innovation, collaboration, problem solving, and other important lessons students should be learning about being a part of a democracy.

Frankly, it’s tough to watch.

And the watching led me to my second thought.  Airplanes.

What is it that airplanes are designed to do?  Really designed as their most core function?  Fly.  Take hundreds of people up thousands of feet in the air and fly them over the earth at mind numbing speed.  Transport us across the country in a matter of hours rather than months.  They are truly amazing, and though that word has been prone to overuse in our society, in this context I believe it is a perfect descriptor.

But what must an airplane also be able to do as a necessary utilitarian function?  Drive.  On the ground.  I was struck with this thought as I looked out the window when taxiing at the airport.  The comedy of it.  Looking out and seeing these incredibly elegant flying marvels of science lumbering around the holding grounds.  All that ingenious design and the power of jet propulsion being used to move along the ground at the speed you or I could match on our bicycle.

And that’s when I realized what we’ve been doing this past decade.  We’ve taken the airplanes and tried to make them cars.  We’ve told our students the most important part of what they learn is the utilitarian function of powering down all their potential to crawl around the ground.  There’s a reason we don’t use airplanes to commute to work on our highways.  The basic functioning of driving on the ground is such a minute part of what makes an airplane so powerful.

But that’s what we’re doing with our students.  We’re leaving behind the best part of what they could be doing with their education.  Forgive the Lifetime Original feel-good movie of the week payoff at the end here, but I have to.  We aren’t letting our kids fly.  We’re keeping them grounded and using metrics to measure how well they taxi as airplanes rather than how well they could be flying.

Though I still don’t care much for the name, I really do hope that we will find ways to begin moving our focus, conversations, and effort to the 21st Century Skills approach to learning.  Remember that there’s a whole lot more that we could be having our students do.

This quote is listed at the beginning of 21st Century Skills: Learning for Life in our Times.  Will it every come to pass?  I don’t know.  But I certainly can hope.

“I’m calling on our nation’s governor’s and state education chiefs to develop standards and assessments that don’t simply measure whether students can fill in a bubble on a test, but whether they possess 21st century skills like problem-solving and critical thinking and entrepreneurship and creativity.”  -President Barack Obama

I think it’s time we start getting education off the ground.

*Cross posted at Tech & Learning Advisor blog.

Thanks to Drewski2112 for the use of the Flickr image.

This week I had the distinct privilege of presenting two sessions on Communication and Collaboration at District 30 in Illinois with Andy Kohl. Although we had enough material to last us through the day, we tried to cram it all in a 90 minute time slot. Needless to say, we didn’t get to everything.

I think the conversation was outstanding, and I believe we should all take the time to wrestle with these ideas together with other staff members. I’ll share the session notes and presentation here, and please feel free to use anything that will be useful for you. And really, I mean it, go have these conversations with other members of your institution. I think you’ll find it an excellent opportunity for growth and learning for everyone.

Introduce Moodle and backchannel to attendees. Invite them to join in the process, building collaborative notes.

9:30 – 9:50 = Introduce ourselves. Introduce Moodle and Backchannel. Ask teachers to define collaboration. Use Etherpad to have them build this definition together.

9:50 – 10:00 = Review the definition and reflect on the process with them.

- What was different about this experience?
- How could this look different for the classroom?

- Discuss portions of the Panitz article.

Review questions asked in the article.

Students must learn to routinely ask questions such as: “Are we thinking clearly enough? Are we being accurate in what we say? Do we need to be more precise? Are we sticking to the question at issue? Are we dealing with the complexities of the question? Do we need to consider another perspective or point of view? Are our assumptions accurate or are they faulty? Is our purpose fair-minded, or are we only concerned about advancing our own desires? Does our argument seem logical, or is disjointed, lacking cohesion?

In other words, these important standards of thought must be applied to all of the important structures of thought: to its guiding goal or purpose, to the central question, to the information used with respect to the question, to the judgments that are made with the information, to the concepts inherent in the judgments, to the assumptions that underlie the judgments, and to the implications that follow from it.”

10:00 – 10:20 = Roundup of tools which can help provide these learning experiences for kids.

- Moodle
- Wikis + Google Sites
- Google Docs
- Blogging

- Look at the bowdrill video from YouTube. Talk about this as a collaborative experience for this student. Use this as a transition to the topic of communication.

10:20-10:40 = Discuss how communication has both changed and stayed the same.  Show “Can This be His Home.”  Discuss the result of new mediums and the “four resources model”.

10:40 – 11:00 = Time for teachers to work on a lesson example or retool an existing assignment.

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We only got to the point where we showed “Can This be His Home.”  Lots of good stuff in the Four Resource Model.  Maybe we’ll get to it next time.

Thanks to American Backroom for the use of the Flickr image.

Notes from the session “Understanding by Design and Technology Integration” by Mark Fijor. Presented at the ICE 2010 conference on Friday, February 26.

Wiki link: http://sd25tech.pbworks.com/Understanding-by-Design-and-Tech

Start off with an essential question.  Something that is debatable.

For example, “Can technology really enhance and support standards-based curriculum or is it just a passing fad?”

Determine whether or not technology can enhance and support a standards based curriculum.
Collaborate and identify research tools to complete project.
Determine end product to demonstrate learning.

Use blogs or wikis or online discussion boards to demonstrate learning and wrestle with essential questions.

Fijor’s district uses the Big 6 research method. http://www.big6.com/

Establish the question, identify key search terms, use a resource like Google Scholar to conduct research, and then select end project to demonstrate transfer.

Used Turning Point Anywhere to decide as a group which project format we would use.  Options were Power Point, iMovie, podcast, Prezi, web page.

After the project is complete, students go back and evaluate the presentation against the question and determine if they have to go back and revise their project to answer the essential question entirely.

*My reflection*  It’s obvious that technology can play a big role in the implementation of Understanding by Design.  The most difficult part that I’m not sure we addressed in this session is the process of transfer.  Creating a PPT, iMovie, podcast, Prezi, or web page are not necessarily the best opportunities to create transfer.  Transfer is supposed to happen when you take a skill you are learning and demonstrate the ability to use and apply the skill in an unfamiliar situation.  I believe the beginning of the presentation was strong as we discussed essential questions and research, but the most crucial part of the process, transfer, was lacking a bit.