21st Century Skills

Time to Move

Dec 10

We talk a lot about change around here. By we, I really mean me and assume there’s some of you here to. But talk, as they say, is cheap. There’s a point where it has to start costing. Or paying. Or doing something other than being a mere utterance.

I’m excited that my talk is one step closer to action.

Last night I held our first District Technology Committee meeting for Oak Lawn-Hometown District 123. I know there are some in the educational technology sphere who think there shouldn’t be such an existence of such a committee. Those individuals think that by starting a technology committee, we make technology a separate entity. I think otherwise.

Our committee is charged with creating a Five Year Technology Plan for our district. Obviously, that means we’re going to be looking through more global lenses and avoiding getting too specific about exact technologies to be put in place five years from now. Things change too fast for that. True, we will need to make some decisions about specific hardware to be purchased. If we kept waiting to predict the next thing, we’d end up always holding to the hope of what might be rather than moving and getting devices in the hands of our students. There will always be a better version just around the corner, but at some point you have to jump in the water if you want to get wet.

So, our plan has three pillars upon which we’re building. We’re going to begin by creating our district’s vision for learning with technology, then we’re going to create a professional development plan for our staff, and we’re then going to create scenarios to reduce our student to learning device ratios. At present, we lack the first two, and our student to computer ratio for computers four years old or younger sits at an average of 9:1. We must address that.

Our district is about to embark on significant curriculum work to align to the Common Core Standards. Our plan will partner technology with our curricular goals in a way that will make our technology a conduit for our learning experiences. Our focus will be on the impact these learning experiences will have on students and how we are creating well educated students in an ever changing world.

There’s lots of work to be done here. Lots of exciting, challenging, fascinating work.

I can’t wait.

Thanks to AGrinberg for the use of the Flickr image.

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.

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.

Thanks to Drewski2112 for the use of the Flickr image.

Communication and Collaboration

Mar 02

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.

Communication and Collaboration

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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.