Communicating

Another Beginning

Jul 05

Life is unexpected. Just when you think you’ve crested a hill and can look long at the path stretching before you, opportunity arises and you find yourself taking a road unanticipated. I won’t say I’ve taken the one less traveled by, but I have taken another.

Today, I officially began my job as the Director of Technology and Communications in Oak Lawn-Hometown District 123. It is a role about which I am incredibly excited. Because there’s great opportunity here. And I earnestly believe I can seize it.

I’d like to say I’m beginning this position with a long list of answers sitting at the ready for implementation. But that would be a dishonesty. Because at this point, I have more questions than answers. I’m hoping, however, that the right questions can prove more powerful than me thinking I have the right answers. I’m hoping such for what it could mean for our students, our staff, and our community. And what it could mean for learning.

It seems to me as I’ve observed the advent of modern technology increasing in utilization in education, there has grown a rift between those in the Director of Technology role and many of the others in an educational institution. Somehow the two sides seem to be at odds. Neither understands the other. As it is most often manifested, the one side is prone to thinking in terms of restricting what takes place in the technological environment, while the other side believes those running the technological environment know very little about education. I know I’m speaking in broad generalities, but it is what I have observed in many places.

I don’t want that to be my case.

I was a classroom teacher for eight years before I left one of the most incredibly rewarding professions in the hopes of making a difference on a broader scale. However, I learned quickly that there is little more rewarding than directly investing in the lives of students in a classroom each day. It is simply an amazing endeavor. I left that not to take a position where my actions matter little to the experience of students and those who are working so hard to help them learn how to learn. I left teaching with the hope that I could make a difference in a different way.

It is now, standing once again on the edge of great new change, that I begin with questions. I’m hoping these are the right ones. Or at least the ones that will lead me to the right ones. And the right ones are those that will make a difference in the lives of the students, staff members, and community where I have the privilege to serve.

As is always the case, your input and help in crafting and molding both these questions and my potential to make a difference is extremely important to me. Here is my beginning.

1. How is what we’re doing with technology making a difference for learning?

2. How can we support teachers and do everything we can to help them help their students learn?

3. How can we support teachers as they continue to learn?

3. Does the environment we create build trust?

4. How can we communicate more effectively and better meet the needs of our community?

5. Are we reliable?

6. Are we making a positive difference?

I hope these questions guide the work that I have ahead. And I hope I keep questioning the questions. And I know I will keep learning.

ASCD Literacy in a Digital Age Presentation Notes

Mar 26

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

I presented this session with Angela Maiers, a true guru in the land of literacy.

Angela and I began our presentation by asking the participants to answer the question, “What is literacy?” Certainly there has been much written and discussed on this topic, and we explained that our approach to the subject is rooted in communication; specifically, how we input and output through various mediums and modes.

We briefly discussed the work of Luke and Freebody and their Four Resource Model. We discussed how these four resources work both as we input and output in communication.

We then discussed how important the medium is and how much it has changed. This change is significant, and that significance is evidenced in videos like this.

We asked the participants to then consider the medium and the mode of communication and which one we most often use as adults. We typically favor speaking, but what do we require our students to use the vast majority of the time they are working to communicate their learning? What if we started changing our expectations and removing some of the barriers that trip kids up when they are trying to communicate? What if we let them tell their stories and demonstrate their learning like this?

We discussed a practical example of the way we traditionally teach literacy by using an example of the book Number the Stars. We explained how we could be doing so much more with our students and expecting them to dig so much deeper in their exploration of reading. We showed two videos, and explained how the second led to an incredible learning experience for the entire school based on a comment someone left on the students’ YouTube post.

We wrapped up the session discussing how dramatically the web has changed in recent history, and we discussed the implications for literacy based on this change. We ended the session with this video and explained how important passion and audience are for our students.

Ascd Engaging Literacy in a Digital Age

View more presentations from Ben Grey.

ASCD Podcating Presentation

Mar 08

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.

Ascd Podcast Presentation 2010

View more presentations from Ben Grey.

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.

Airplanes and Education

Mar 06

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.