Next Vista for Learning

I just wanted to plug a site and a venture that I learned about at PETE & C in February. Yes, it has taken me this long to get around to posting about this great site shared with us by a google educator at a wonderful, insightful session.

This is a link to a .pdf with a list of great resources:
http://www.nextvista.org/resources/NextVista-Resources.pdf

What's NextVista.org?

An online library of free videos for learners everywhere - our goal is to gather a set of resources to help you learn just about anything, meet people who make a difference in their communities, and even discover new parts of the world. Next Vista for Learning wants to post your educational videos online, too. Everyone has an insight to share and yours may be just what some student or teacher somewhere needs!

Next Vista for Learning: http://nextvista.org/

The free, online and content-screened library being built by and for teachers and students around the globe. Current collections are Light Bulbs (explanations of academic topics), Seeing Service (profiles of those who help others), and Global Views (videos of communities around the world).
Check out these resources and these sites. You will be glad you did.

Using Web 2.0 Tools to Increase Engagement and Foster 21st Century Skills

My first session today was linked to the tiny url http://tinyurl.com/y727sms and if that gets blocked you can use the long url by copying and pasting the long url:
http://www.jogtheweb.com/run/KQpuHyHtUgVy/Using-Web-2.0-Tools-to-Increase-Engagement-and-Foster-21st-Century-Skills
The platform that Ken Lockette, Principal of Avonworth High School, used was Jog the Web,a user friendly site used to creat presentations for browsing the web to find resources.We received a handout with all the sites listed, including their urls, that he included in his presentation.Many were free./ Only 2 mentioned involved a cost and they were video conferences e-Missions http://e-missios.net/ and Cybersurgeons http://site.cybersurgeons.net/ that sounded very interesting and each was under $500 for schools to have their students participate.

Make Learning Irresistible

I am at a One to One preconference titled Making Learning Irresistible for CFF coaches. The main speaker for the day is Dr. Tim Tyson.

Dr. Tyson feels very strongly that every teacher should blog, create podcasts, and have a strong online identity. Students and parents should know who we are by our online identity. If parents like what they see, they will move into the area. Prospective teachers will want to come and teach here.

Learned about a great new tool that is especially great to aid research when blogging or writing in other tools. It is called Zemanta. Download it and it gives links and media help you look to other resources for further sources. See some links within this blog and some sources at the bottom for further reference.

Web 2.0 is self-forming. High dynamic photography is an example. It is a community of practice that creates its own value and they welcome participation. So, how do we allow curriculum study (mastery) to be more "self forming?" How de we facilitate empowering the leaning communities in and around our class to create, share and.. How do we make learning irresistible? What role does technology have in this endeavor?

I don’t want my son to be limited to leaning only what his teacher already knows. – John Couch

TED2009: Dan Pink who wrote Whole New Mind also wrote Drive – put on your must read list

TED2008: Benjamin Zander

Working on the Work by Phillip C. Schlechty

Building Common Vocabulary
Student ownership of Learning
Teachers are the Instructional Leaders
Maximizing student achievement in a culture of caring.
Defining Best Practices for Middle Grades
Learning By Design
Curriculum Mapping
Intelligent Behaviors
Best Instructional Practices (Marzano)

Bena Kallick & Art Costa‘s work on
Habits of Mind & Intelligent Behaviors - must read

Some ideas that were brought to the table in the presentation:

• Balancing intrinsic & extrinsic motivations in your school setting
• Building a clear, irresistible, shared vision that promotes 21st century values: What have you already done; What strategies could you use to more deeply infuse the vision into the culture of the school
• Your thoughts on the current state of "irresistible" in your school and ways to enhance that
• Infusing Autonomy, Mastery, & Purpose in both teacher and student work

Working on the Work by Phillip C. Schlechty

Phil's thinking had a deep impact on the entire staff at Mabry Middle School. The school did two book studies, with every teacher receiving a copy of each book--this was one of the two.

One of his main ideas: How students respond to the tasks they are given from their teachers in school will have a substantive and compelling impact on their academic outcome.

He describes 5 ways students respond (page 3):

1. Authentic Engagement

• results from clearly meaningful tasks of relatively immediate value to the student who is eager to take ownership of the learning and share the outcomes with a wide audience important to the student who affirm the value of the knowledge work

2. Ritual Engagement

• results from work with little or no inherent value to the student who is merely trying to attain extrinsic outcomes (grades) that have margin value to long term goals

3. Passive Compliance

• minimal effort expended only to avoid punitive consequences

4. Retreatism

• disengaged from what is perceived as meaningless work but is not acting out or disrupting the learning of others

5. Rebellion

• actively subverting and disrupting the learning environment

Phil (pp. 18 - 21) delineates 12 standards of quality teacher-assigned student school work that promote authentic engagement. They are:

1. Patterns of Engagement (school wide systemic change)
2. Student Achievement (community satisfaction)
3. Content and Substance (curriculum is relevant, goals are clear, consistent, and shared))
4. Organization of Knowledge (compelling, rich and varied support resources)
5. Product Focused (relevant knowledge products)
6. Clear and Compelling Products (committed to meeting or exceeding the assessment standards)
7. A Safe Environment (physically and psychologically)
8. Affirmation of Performance (people important to the student value the performance-based knowledge products)
9. Affiliation (collaborative work)
10. Novelty and Variety (wide range)
11. Choice (Curriculum is non-negotiable; Assessment for demonstrating mastery provides considerable choice.
12. Authenticity (Curriculum, instructional strategy, and assessment products are related to consequences with which the student attaches great importance.) 

Things for us to ponder here:

1. Roughly guess-timate the percentage of students at each level of engagement in your school.
2. What correlations do you see in Phil's work (2002), Dan Pink's book, Drive (2009), and what we do in school?
3. In what ways could your staff be well served to explore the 12 standards for quality teacher-assigned student school work?
4. What strategies do you have in mind to help your staff develop a common vocabulary that can then build into a common culture focused on value-added instructional practice that fosters authentically engaged student achievement focused on higher order thinking skills and contributions? 

Related articles by Zemanta

• How to evaluate the best toolkit for your class (deangroom.wordpress.com)
• Technology transforms learning and teaching? (Christine Jager, ACEC 2010 Day Three) (ictelt.blogspot.com)

Your Choice?

So I write my new curricula and because of budget short falls I am given a choice to make. Administration, or someone on their behalf, approaches me and asks which one of the three, new computers, new software, or the textbooks, would I pick to purchase if I could only have one. We run a four year curriculum writing cycle and I may only purchase books or software in "my year".

My admin also hopes I will grow my program but I may be left with old software that the kids are not interested in using. Pagemaker, the software currently used in desktop publishing is outdated. I think that with new software, the students will be more interested in taking the courses. They did not sign up to take the the courses next year because the students don't believe that I will get the computers and software that I am hoping for.

Keep in mind this scenario. The current computers are 8 years old, running 512 MB RAM with the CPU running pentium 4 at 1.6 GHz. The new curriculum for web page design and desktop publishing courses wants to introduce students to Adobe Creative Suite 4. CS4 wants at least 2+ GB RAM  and the CPU running at more than 2 GHz. In order to do any DVD work the computers will need DVD-ROM drives at a minimum, which the old machines don't have, they have CD-ROM only, and preferably DVD-R burner drives for students to create DVDs.

Okay, so right away I can decide that the textbooks are out. If I go without the software and get computers, I will just be running the same old software but on newer machines and have to wait 4 years to maybe get software. If I get software, I can't run it now but maybe the tech staff will upgrade my computers in the meantime from their budget and then I can run the software.

So back to my title, what would be your choice?