Shift to the Future

When my kids were in school the proverbial answer to “What did you learn today?” was, wait for it…  “nothing”.  Do any of you get that response from your kids?  I suspect so as it seems to be some kind of natural law.  As parents, we were never quite sure what our kids were learning.  The periodic report card or the marked work didn’t tell the real story.  With today’s access to technology, there are ways to mitigate this and keep parents ‘in the loop’.  There are various tools that provide a range of connections for parents.  Some enable simple consumption of lesson outlines, homework lists, pictures, stories, spelling lists, and with portals or other secure spaces, the viewing of marks.  Other tools such as wikis, blogs, etc., depending on how they’re configured, enable parents to interact with their kids and their teachers.  “ Technology makes connecting, collaborating, and learning easier than ever before in human history ” (Kindle 4...

Sharing with others what we’ve learned is rewarding.  Others are able to benefit from what we’ve discovered and we feel good about helping others with their learning.  The saying “it is better to give than to receive” really is true isn’t it.  I think the “movement” to document student learning provides a powerful way to share and reflect on learning.  In my work in my District I have the privilege of visiting classrooms and documenting and sharing the learning teachers and their students are experiencing.  Visiting classrooms regularly is one of my personal goals .  One such recent visit was to a Kindergarten class to talk with the teacher and one of her students.  The teacher had documented a young learner who became a “Mathematician at Work” one morning.  Jennifer Lawson Come along with me and enjoy Keira’s learning journey… Our District created a focus group this past school year.  About 20 K-3 and literacy support tea...

What does it really mean to call oneself a "professional"? For me, there's an implication that a professional is working in a field that is knowledge intensive and requires regular ongoing practice to become and remain highly accomplished and valuable to their clients. Wikipedia’s entry for Professional includes: Expert and specialized knowledge in field which one is practicing professionally Excellent manual/practical and literary skills in relation to profession In our rapidly changing world, professionals should expect to be regularly honing and upgrading their skills and knowledge so as to remain relevant and current in their chosen field.  Notice the reference to “practicing professionally”.  To practice involves the individual or professional in this context, taking some action on their part “to improve, to learn, to solve problems, to enhance or refine skills, to maintain skills”.  Malcolm Gladwell in Outliers claims that “researchers ha...

I’m impressed with how quickly the K-2 teachers involved in our District’s Making Learning Visible project are becoming both skilled documenters of early learners AND skilled users of digital tools for documenting.  Their purpose with this work is to collect and record learning events and experiences, to build a narrative from documentation to reflection.  Some of the purposes for digital documentation they are working with include: stimulating and supporting narrative illustrating a point providing evidence of learning opening up a conversation sharing an experience understanding a situation more deeply asking questions such as “What is going on here?”, “What have I missed?”, “What do I need to explore?”, “What’s the next step?” Digital documentation is “more than decoration”, “more than posed photographs”, and “useful in formative assessment”.  These teachers have had rich conversations about supplementing and / or replacing formal repo...

Our District has formed a Documentation Focus Group to “ Make Learning Visible ”.  I wrote last year about the early exploration of this approach to documenting learning in Capturing the Journey of Early Learners .  This year we have about 18 committed kindergarten teachers working with an external facilitator Pat Holborn, who specializes in Learning Through Play and Making Early Learning Visible in Early Primary .  They are embarking on an ambitious journey, going where most teachers have not gone before…  The stated purposes for this project include: build and share strategies and skills for documenting, assessing and sharing student learning over time. involve children and families in the documentation process. begin to develop a framework for documenting student learning, supported by examples in different subject areas that can be shared with others. explore ways to use technologies, including photographs, video and the Internet ( my43 ) to sha...

Well, the time arrived to replace my fence.  I’ve been putting it off for a few years but got a good start on it this weekend.  I am thankful for my three sons, they were a huge help in digging post holes, putting up panels, and cleaning up the mess.  It’s a lot of work to disassemble an old fence and take all the old boards, posts, concrete, rocks, clay, and dirt to the dump.  We’re on a corner lot and it’s a weird feeling to take your fence down – you kind-of feel a little exposed in your back yard! There is another type of fence that teachers, schools, and Districts are required to build with technology – walled gardens so to speak.  We need digital places behind “fences” that are safe, secure, under our control, etc. where students can store their work, communicate with each other and their teachers, write and comment on each others work, etc.  Teacher’s also need digital spaces that have similar attributes so that the work they ask their students t...

We are fortunate to have very creative teachers in Coquitlam School District.  A couple of our middle school teachers (at Banting ), on their own initiative, discovered Quest Atlantis , a 3D immersive learning environment.  Quest Atlantis (QA) is “ an international learning and teaching project that uses a 3D multi-user environment to immerse children, ages 9-16, in educational tasks ” developed at the University of Indiana.  Meghan describes how QA supports her students learning Meghan Enga provides a great overview of how her students are using this.  She is partnered with Cory Cleto (another teacher at Banting Middle school ) and her class on this initiative. Quick side bar, it’s amazing how easily these kids are able to talk about what they’re doing and learning.  With no preparation, warning, and very little prompting, they take us on their own personal learning journeys.  How cool is that. Dr. Sasha Barab is the principle researcher for the Ques...

I had the good fortune to be invited to the staff professional development (PD) day (Nov. 26) at Gleneagle Secondary School as a speaker (you can view my presentation here ).  More importantly though, I was able to sit in on the student panel session.  Five grade 12 students were asked to speak about their use of personal technology at school and in class, in particular cell and smart phones.  Their use ranged from addiction (yes, really) to indifferent. This school staff had recently been debating the use of cell phone technology in class ( see blog post here by @bryanjack ).  I am impressed that they included student voice in their PD day.  The back and forth between the students and their teachers (and vice principals) was very open, honest, and authentic.  Teachers had an opportunity to “drill” them on how teacher policies (ban, allow, or…) for personal technology affected them.  One student admitted to being very capable of covert texting…...

Many school districts have socio-economic diversity.  I know in our District there are school communities that are very affluent and others where families are quite poor.  We also have schools where there is a diverse mix of affluent and poor families.  When technology and access to the Internet is brought into the mix, we are unfortunately faced with the Digital Divide , a canyon so to speak, between have and have not families. (photo credits: http://www.flickr.com/photos/bestrated1/29567927/ ) We, as are many other school systems, talk about how technology (laptop, netbook, mobile) will become a common school supply.  This is based on the belief that tech costs will continue to decline and families often buy game consoles that cost about what a netbook costs today.  I wonder how close we are to this becoming a reality?  One where all families have equal access to technology in their homes, connected at high speed to the vast Internet, and their children...

I recently had the privilege of visiting a couple of our middle school classrooms.  Our middle schools have students in grades 6-8 and they are organized into teams of approximately 120 students who share teachers for their core subjects then explore other topics or subjects with specialist teachers. One classroom I visited is led by a technology specialist teacher James Gill .  I wrote briefly about this visit in a previous post Preparing Students through Educational Futuristics .  In this classroom, James was facilitating skills development and collaboration with a variety of technical tools including discussion boards within our my43 portal and using Google Sketchup (free) to propose designs for their new school to open in 2014.  Here is James talking about the setup for the learning activity… James talks about using discussion board to brainstorm school design Emily took the lead with a topic discussing the pros and cons of Smart boards vs. White boards and...