Shift to the Future

School systems are faced with two major forces that I believe will cause sweeping changes: personalized learning and technology.  Personalized learning means different things to different people but it will likely involve significant changes for how teaching occurs, how students learn and demonstrate learning, who’s responsible for learning, how learning is assessed, what core knowledge should be, what skills must be learned, etc. along with a growing reliance on technology.  Turning to technology, there are some very significant trends occurring that will affect learning and teaching but also have a disruptive impact on the work of Information Technology (IT) departments.  The sky’s the limit when we’re talking about the future… Personalized Learning Teachers have an increasingly complex job to perform.  I was at a conference last week where one of the keynote speakers surveyed the audience on what the most important factor was for them being successful in schoo...

I think one of the more complex aspects a teacher has to wrestle with is assessment and what is worth knowing or what should be understood.  There are many writers, speakers, workshops, etc. on how student learning should be assessed for learning, of learning, how to gather evidence, how to inform teaching, etc.  I’m not a teacher but if I was, I would find that my job has become much more difficult with all the expectations to backward design my lessons, cover an ever broadening curriculum, give my students continuous feedback, and then somehow differentiate learning to meet the abilities, readiness, preferences, and needs of my students.  Not only am I expected to undertake assessment of learning but now I have to make sure to assess for learning. Add to this expectations to integrate and use technology for teaching, to enable my students to use technology for their learning, to give them more control over their learning, and learn the new math curriculum…  It al...

As educators discuss what personalized learning is and how it might be implemented, I think a very important topic should be fluency. “ Fluency (also called volubility and loquaciousness ) is the property of a person or of a system that delivers information quickly and with expertise .”, Wikipedia (April 17, 2011) Traditional definitions, including Wikipedia’s, talk about a set of fluency skills: reading, writing, comprehension, and speaking.  In our era of technology driven everything, fluency is so much more.  I think the images that Sylvia Rosenthal Tolisano ( @langwitches ) created to depict Information, Media, Network, and Global fluencies provides a picture of a broader sense of fluency relevant to today. Becoming an expert in finding the best information, quickly, from multiple sources and mediums, knowing how to analyze, evaluate, and organize it, using it appropriately, and sharing your information is a highly valuable capability today.  With infor...

It is fascinating how quickly new Internet services and now mobile devices and apps pop up.  It used to take years for innovation to take root and spread whereas now it seems every week there’s something new to be aware of.  There is so much power and convenience in these tools, what’s not to like!  Well, there are dangers lurking amongst the gems… I’ve been immersed in and managing my organization’s way through a serious issue related to online pornography.  Being a school District, we take issues like this very seriously.  I can’t provide many specifics ( read this newspaper article for more information ) but the gist of the problem is that an individual created a website on a free web hosting service and dedicated the site to serving pornographic images and videos.  Through pure coincident and how search engines like Google, Bing, and Yahoo work, that person’s inappropriate (horrific actually) images are automatically being intermingled with pictures f...

It is fascinating to me how people lived and interacted historically.  I’m reading “ The Shallows: What the Internet is Doing to Our Brains ” by Nicholas Carr (Kindle version – quotes refer to Kindle locations) and finding the historical perspective he provides on literacy to be very interesting.  From oral only to writing on rocks, wood, wax, clay, papyrus, and paper.  It’s amazing that people only had brain memory and no recorded memory, for so many generations. Even contracts and laws were simply oral agreements.  Fortunately, symbols were developed to enable the representation of what was spoken in a permanent form.  When people first wrote using an alphabet the words all ran together and were not in a grammatically correct order and all reading was originally out loud.  As the technology for writing changed, so too did the capabilities of authors. “As soon as the introduction of word spaces made writing easier, authors took up pens and began putti...

I’ve been in the technology business for over 25 years and during that time have seen massive change occur.  I can remember the first time I experienced word wrap on a Radio Shack TRS-80 computer – I was in awe when it automatically wrapped around to the next line. All I knew at the time was having to pull the lever on a manual type writer to perform a carriage return. I remember programming an Apple II to view data in a spreadsheet format from a floppy drive.  I designed the program (we call them “Apps” today) to dynamically adjust and wrap the data fields as needed – it was amazing (at the time).  I wrote “Apps” on a DEC VAX 780 dumb terminal that drew custom screens and forms for data input and manipulation.  I was the master of my technology…  Okay, I’m getting all nostalgic here… :-) Back in the day, most people didn’t interact much with technology unless their job required it somehow.  Today, technology invades our lives.  People line up over...

It’s encouraging to see an increase in discussion and blogging (eg, Steve Wheeler’s writing on 2020 curriculum , classrooms , and learners ) about what learning might look like in 2020, 2030, 2040, etc.  Also, people are talking more about what students need to know, not just what they need to be able to do.  Education reform is alive and well on many people’s minds.  Here in British Columbia we call it “21st Century Learning” or “Personalized Learning” or both.  With the speed of change we seem to be experiencing in society, perhaps education reform should just be a continuous evaluative piece for school systems rather than some big (scary) change event. Our Student Leadership Council recently organized an evening event called World Café UshapED.  I was invited by their executive to participate, it was a pleasant surprise and an honor to be counted among the invited guests to observe and document these 100+ excited students giving up an evening to brainstorm ...