The reality of NCLB in schools is completely different and huge.

For students to be able to progress between grades or years they must achieve a mininum level of competency. According to the teachers I spoke to there are students in New York who will be entering the 3rd Grade for the fourth time this year.

The testing regime of NCLB is impacting on teaching and learning. Teachers, out of self defence, are teaching to the test. Teachers are scared to experiment as they are measured against standardised tests. School districts (and not the one I was in) are strictly prescribing what a teacher can teach, and these conform to the standards required for NCLB.

There is a huge industry built around the tests. Companies provide tests, administer them and mark them for huge fees. In some schools students are test on a monthly basis to see there progress towards the standardised tests.

A frequent comment we heard as we spoke about different approaches to taeching and learning with a focus on higher order thinking, student engagement and student ownership of teh learning task and process was – how can I fit this in as well, as I have to reach my benchmarks.

Standardised testing on this scale and with the huge emphasis placed on it is killing creatyivity, stifling imagination and rendering worthless what students are learning. The focus on meeting benchmarks is diverting attention from the real purpose of education – our children.

Placing mandatory standards for progression between grades is condeming the less able; those who do not learn in the prescribed read/write learning style; the kinesthetic learners; those with learning disabilities and too often boys to  failure, humilation and disappointment.And for what? a pass mark in a standardised test?

Source – Scott McLeod – Dangerously irrelevant - http://www.dangerouslyirrelevant.org/

This is fun. The project is focusing on getting the teachers to have the students construct their learning. It is project based learning with a twist that is innovative and exciting – the problem that form the project comes first and the learning is scaffolded and student directed towards achieving the project and therefore the learning outcomes. Students become increasingly independent, self directed learners.

These guys are great. The reflective buzz sessions are yeilding brilliant insights and reflection. The staff are confident in speaking to the whole teaching body and they don’t run away from microphones. They are engaged!

ENGAGED Learners are motivated learners. Motivated learners will learn. They are enjoying this.

The Morning saw Lee present a pair of stunning presentations on Understanding Digital Kids and Living on the Future Edge. Both of these were brilliant. The content was exciting and dynamic. The afternoon was mine.

My focus was looking at Learning styles and then matching this to learning tools. I discussed briefly what I believe are the 4 aspects of a person that contribute (there are more than this) :

• Sensory learning (I use Neil Flemings VARK Model)
• Personality type (Myers-Briggs)
• Gardner’s Multiple Intelligences
• Technological learning style – Neo-millennials, digital Natives or Net Gen

The Model I focused on was Fleming’s VARK because it is a manageable tool for the classroom. VARK stands for

• Visual
• Auditory
• Read Write
• Kinaesthetic

However, for me the hardest part of this process was developing this for an Audience that was exclusively Apple. This was fun and there are some great toys for Apples. But its worth noting that there are also a large number of tools that I use on a PC that are also available for the Macs. I take my hat off to the developers of FOSS tools that create both PC and Mac version.

Source: http://images-1.redbubble.net/img/art/size:large/view:main/3082851-2-eye-collage.jpg

The process of getting here has been quite long, but I had yesterday (saturday) to recuperate in Memphis. We went out last night to BB Kings house of Blues and had 4 hours of brilliant blues.  ZDA the princess of Beale st was the star act. (Thanks to Lee and his iPhone for the Photo)

We got over to Cherry County today and had out initial briefing with the district superintendent. This was insightful and fun. Its great to see an administrator with passion and care & concern for the education of the students.

We had a look around the elementry & secondary schools. The Elementery school is new (opened this year) and each student has a desk (no suprises there) but the desktop has a clear glass panel and underneath this is a 17in monitor, a pull out draw for a keyboard and mouse and a Mac Mini.  THIS IS EVERY STUDENT FROM K-4, beyond that they have laptops.

This is exciting, they have a traditional appropriate size and height desk with which to learn in a traditional paradigm and incorperated into this is a powerful and user friendly computer. Not one or two computers but one for every student.

A major part of our focus is project based learning. Building problem solving,  supported and facilitated by technology, into a a K-12 curriculum. This is a cool project and exciting.

I can’t wait to start.

http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1912419,00.html

This article in time magazine is looking at the “death of cursive handwriting”. Its an interesting article not because it sits an bemoans the fact that cursive handwriting is now an obsolete skill, rather its looks with some realism that things are changing.

I suspect that for most people reading a blog this is an obvious statement. From my perspective teaching teaching students to writing is important and vital, but as the flowing cursive style is obsolete and redundant, hard to read and impractical. The need to teach our students hand writing is matched equally with the drive for digital literacy as a minimum and fluency as a goal.

I do  not mourn the loss of cursive hand writing as a skill any more than the progression beyond sliderules and slates. If I want a flowing script for a reason I select a suitable one from my writing tool of choice my laptop, pda, or tablet.

Is the time of hand writing in general also reaching a point of obselecence? This is an interesting question. After school and university, where we teach our students to use computers and examine them using hand written papers. What was the last meaningful and significent product or document you wrote by hand? do you?

• hand write legal documents?
• hand write reports?
• hand write student assignment tasks? and distribute these to the students?
• hand write professional letters and communications?
• Send hand written letters home to parents?
• Hand write your morgage agreement, bank loans etc?

Hand writing is important, but I suspect decreasingly so in our forseeable future.

Today we had a presentation looking at Formative assessment (more on this) but one of the aspects of this presentation that I liked was a model for feedback. The model is ranked from weak feedback to strong feedback and the students will get the most benefit from strong feedback as part of their formative assessments.

Here is the model (Nyquist 2003)

What I like about this is its straight forward, simple and quite common sense (though the use of abbreviations does give it a superficial feeling of complexity).

1. The weakest form of feedback is just knowledge of their results, where our students are told this is your marks.
2. The next level is where not only do they get the results but also the correct answers. This could be analogous to handing back exam papers and reading out teh correct answers.
3. Next is explaining why they answers are correct or incorrect.  This is Knowledge of correct results and explanation.  Again if we look at the analogy of handing back examination papers this is:

• here is your exam
• here are the correct answers
• here is why they are correct

4. At a stronger level is KCR+e (the last point) plus specific actions to reduce the gap between your exam answers and the correct answers. With the exam analogy it would be  “revise the following topics, areas concepts with particular attention to……”

5. The final stage is as above with an activity to reinforce learning or correct inaccuracies.

However…..

While I like this model and I can see the benefits of it, and they are clear. The application maybe a different issue. I suspect that for the majority of teachers, the biggest constrain they will face is not willingness rather it is TIME.

I believe if we are going to implement (and we should) timely and effective, personalised and relevant feedback we must also address the pressing issues of time and its compounding factors of class size and curriculum. If you have a class of 25 students how much time do you have to provide timely and effective feedback. If you look at the average class being 50 minutes long, the time available to provide timely feedback is limited. here are some possible classrooms activities and timings with out feedback.

Classroom Activities

• Students arrive in class, and set up  – 5 minutes
• Teacher introduces class focus and details objectives/outcomes – 5 minutes
• Administration (roll/roster etc) – 5 minutes
• Starts lessons, scaffolds topic/content etc 15 minutes
• Summaries and concludes, reflects on task, packs up 5 minutes

If the teacher is providing 1:1 feedback they have 15 minutes to talk to each student. That’s 30 seconds per student.

We have to consider what we are doing in the classroom. I do not believe that we can ignore providing feedback, its is one of the most effective tools we have in our teaching toolbox. So what can we look at changing to facilitate and enable this tool? What about…

• reducing curriculum content
• decreasing class size
• increasing class time (this is stealing from Peter to pay for Paul)

These would help but are going to be limited by financial considerations

Reading:

http://www.slideshare.net/harvey_mellar/dylan-wiliam-1374277

(this is not the presentation we saw but is almost identical)

I like the simple GUI, the fact that I can produce media that contains, images, documents, video, voice and text. This is a rich tool for teaching and learning and one well worth using. I love that students can comment and reflect.

Starter Sheet – voicethread

The only issue I have with it is the limitations of the free version – you can only have three voicethreads. However, a quick look at the pricing plan provides a cheap and reasonably priced alternative. There is a free educator plan (by application) but for a one off fee of $10 you have access to their Educator Pro plan – 10GB of storage and unlimited voicethreads. This is worth the investment.

Worth reading is their classroom guide.

http://voicethread.com/media/misc/getting_started_in_the_classroom.pdf

Ian

The article is “The impending demise of University“. The article is written by Don Tapscott

Here is a quote from the article

“The old-style lecture, with the professor standing at the podium in front of a large group of students, is still a fixture of university life on many campuses. It’s a model that is teacher-focused, one-way, one-size-fits-all and the student is isolated in the learning process. Yet the students, who have grown up in an interactive digital world, learn differently. Schooled on Google and Wikipedia, they want to inquire, not rely on the professor for a detailed roadmap. They want an animated conversation, not a lecture. They want an interactive education, not a broadcast one that might have been perfectly fine for the Industrial Age, or even for boomers. These students are making new demands of universities, and if the universities try to ignore them, they will do so at their peril. ”

About a month ago, I had the opportunity to visit the University of Queensland and meet Professor Philip Long (of horizon project, MIT and UQ fame). The visit was a pleasure, as Prof Long and his staff showed us many of the innovative learning spaces that the University of Queensland boasts.

Some universities have taken heed of the warning that Don Tapscott eludes to in this article. UQ is one of them. Many of the spaces we visited were exciting and innovative. The spaces facilitated communication and collaboration. However, I suspect many of the Universities are not adopting this mode of education.

In a world of High speed, ubiquitous internet access; in a world where there are now exabytes of information produced annually; where your phone can be your laptop, your television and a games machine, there are still lecturers (and sadly teachers in schools) who stand at front of the room and spout forth. Many of these students are adapted to digital media. We know that Nueroplasticity has shown that constant exposure to multimedia and technology causes our brains to adapt. Our students at schools and many of the students at the Universities are adapted to technology, to coin Marc Prensky’s phrase “digital natives”.

As Don Tapscott notes the pedagogy used in education must change to suit the students and their learning needs.

Here is another quotation from the article

“There is fundamental challenge to the foundational modus operandi of the University — the model of pedagogy. Specifically, there is a widening gap between the model of learning offered by many big universities and the natural way that young people who have grown up digital best learn.”

For many of the lecturers (and also for many of the teachers) the students we were taught to teach no longer exist. Well done to the Universities (and schools) that are changing, to those resisting the change…

Your audience is changing, if you want to keep your audience you must change to suit them.

Robin Williams’ played Professor John Keating in the Dead Poets Society. Keating was a rebel, he did not conform or agree with the then norm’s of teaching.

“Now I want you to rip out that page. Go on, rip out the entire page. You heard me, rip it out. Rip it out! Thank you Mr. Dalton. Gentlemen, tell you what: don’t just tear out that page, tear out the entire introduction. I want it gone, history. Leave nothing of it. Rip it out. Rip! Begone, J. Evans Pritchard, Ph.D. Rip, shred, tear. Rip it out. I want to hear nothing but ripping of Mr.Pritchard. It’s not the Bible. You’re not going to go to Hell for this. Go on, make a clean tear. I want nothing left of it. ”

Source: http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Dead_Poets_Society

Keating was pilloried because he did not teach in the manner and mode expected of a teacher of the time. For many of us, Keating’s approach to teaching, his exuberant interaction, his enthusiasm, adaptability, flexibility, learner centric focus and passion is something we strive towards. He was a risk taker. We may not rip out introductions of textbooks, but we encourage discussion, analysis, evaluation and creativity – higher order thinking in classrooms based on passion for learning.

I wonder how many of the early adopters, innovators and mavericks of technology integration have been treated the same way as Williams’ character in the Dead Poets Society.

How many of the teachers who have taken risks by encouraging blogging, by opening the classrooms via collaboration, video and audio conferencing; by working across classrooms, cities and countries; by putting aside the unit plans to pursue the curriculum by oblique pathways? How many of these teachers have felt ostracized?

Being a 21^st Century educator means you are a:

• Adaptor
• Communicator
• learner
• Visionary
• Leader
• Model
• Collaborator
• and risk taker

You need to be these things to to teach our 21^st Century Students. Like Robin William’s Character, John Keating, in Dead Poets Society.

The opening keynote was Martin Westwell of Flinders University. He was presenting to the conference on Nueroscience, education etc. The difference was that in addition to all of the assemble principals etc were students from independent schools.

The students were in four nodes around the country and were beamed into the conference via HD video conference on KAREN. Kristin, Southwell (Hamilton), Scot’s College (Wellington) and Christ’s College hosted the nodes and the students from the independent schools in the region.

At the end of the Keynote, the assembled students were presented with a challenge in the form of a experiment on Multitasking. Over the next 2 days the students tested their peers and teachers. They processed and collated the data on Editgrid.

Saturday the students reassembled at the host schools and processed, analysed and evaluated the results. They then reported back to the closing keynote of the conference (and their principals) via the video conference (the keynote also video conferenced in from Flinder’s University).

The experience was brilliant. The students conducted the experiment, recorded and processed the data and then presented this back to a conference of the heads of the independent schools of New Zealand. They were fine ambassadors of their schools. The conclusions, analysis and evaluation showed a high degree of understanding, imagination, and maturity.

It was for me a privillage to be involved. I don’t know if this has ever been done before, certainly to the best of my knowledge it hasn’t. The focus was not the technology, that was for the most part seemless and unnoticable, rather the focus was on the students and their learning.

Wow! what fun.