Rob Evans

Along with being hilarious, Rob Evans has a great message about change. While many speakers here have preached ominous messages of "change now or become obsolete", Evans has a nice balanced message about why we change. His focus on thinking about what change brings to the whole institution rather than to ourselves, and being careful not to toss out the continuity that makes your school successful, strikes me as thoughtful and pertinent to this time of transition at MCDS. I look forward to trying out some of the new ideas we've learned at this conference, but Evans will help me ask the big picture questions needed to evaluate why I'm trying new lessons or technologies. His reminder that learning starts with loving the kids is a great way to end the conference.

Formative, "21st century" Lessons and Assessment

At BCL11, I've been using new technology that I haven't been using on this trip, from Twitter to Flicker to a number of blogging sites, but I'm most interested in the ways in which lesson plans and assessment are being discussed.

Ewan MacIntosh made reference to a paper entitled Inside the Black Box : Raising Standards Through Classroom Assessment by Paul Black and Dylan Wiliam from King’s College London School of Education that I found helpful and relevant to our teaching.The article discusses the importance of giving students as much feedback as possible as they learn rather than relying on sumative assessments. I feel that trying to create many ways to replicate and transfer the skills you want students to learn is intutitive but not always easy to carry out in a day to day 40-80 minute block. Using the "flipped" classroom model of having the kids do the research and content work at home and the engagement/discussion/"doing" at school helps alleviate this problem, and the use of blogging and wikis gives the kids a chance to interact intellectually and socially at the same time while completing homework tasks.

Ewan and many other presenters also point out the importance of peer feedback. Using technology and other methods of creating meaningful peer feedback, especially in the writing process, is an area where I want to continue to improve, and this workshop has me thinking of new ways to do it.

The "Hair Raiser" - Mobile Phones

The most “hair raising” session I have attended was one involving the use of mobile phones. I went on an outdoor adventure and learned how to use QR Codes and Google My Maps to create an engaging, authentic learning experience. I was surprised at how easy it was and it made me realize that I was fearful of the use of mobile phones in a school setting because I had not seen how they could be used in a meaningful and impactful way. The exercise was collaborative, creative and fun. I also learned how to use Poll Everywhere, a web-based feedback tool, where users can text in their responses via a mobile phone, in a clicker type fashion. I have already incorporated Poll Everywhere into my Advisory letter and have asked the 8th graders to respond to a Poll Everywhere survey via text or computer prior to the first day of school. I also anticipate using QR Codes at school with my Advisory group and I would like to talk with Jeff Escabar about how we might use QR Codes on an admissions tour. The outdoor learning adventure session challenged many of my assumptions about mobile phones.

Goodbye Lectures, Hello Flipped Classrooms

The demise of teacher-as-lecturer was the theme of Dr. Eric Mazur's morning keynote address, with a reminder that teaching is far more than the transfer of information from instructor to student, that learning is about assimilating information and applying it to new circumstances, and that hardly any of us would list "teacher lectures" as the main ingredient that allowed us to become really good at anything. What, then, are 21st Century teachers doing to optimize learning? Enter the age of the "flipped classroom."

Mazur used a course management system (CMS) during the keynote called Learning Catalytics that he and others designed at Harvard for his college physics courses. This tool allows him to pose live quiz questions to students throughout the class to assess for understanding, to publish polls, generate word clouds, etc. Mazur's method is that if fewer than 30% of his students respond to a poll correctly, he stops and reexplains. He repeats until a critical mass can answer correctly and his questions ask students to apply knowledge in a new context rather than regurgitate his original explanation. His fluid use of Learning Catalytics in today's presentation made me think about the set of 30 Promethean ActivInspire Learner Response clickers we have at school, and made me wonder how to get teachers to use instant assessment tools like this more frequently. We should stop by the Promethean display for a group demo before the week is through!

After the keynote, I sat in on Darren Kuropatwa's session on 21st Century Bricoleurs. Kuropatwa is a high school math teacher from Winnipeg, Manitoba who shared how he and his students are utilizing cell phones, Flickr, wikis, blogs and YouTube to "show and share what they know with the world and contribute to the global knowledge commons" -- Wow! Here is a link to one of his AP Calculus class blogs.

Later in the day I found myself at a session called Flip Your Classroom led by two dynamic high school teachers named Aaron Sams and Jonathan Bergmann. To them, flipped classrooms are "hubs of learning where the teachers interact individually with every student every day." One of the ways they have achieved this in their math and chemistry classes is by recording the entire year's worth of lectures and frontal demonstrations into short and engaging video podcasts (vodcasts) which the students watch and learn from on their own time, using iPods, phones, computers and even DVD players. The point is that little to no class time is used for whole-class instruction, a teaching method which inevitably leaves a portion of the class disengaged. Rather, students arrive to class and get straight to work on projects or labs independently, with the teacher circulating between students to check in individually and assess for understanding. Disengaged students? Not a problem. Here's the link to their site. With many of our Upper School classes lasting a mere 35 minutes, I can't help but wonder how to maximize our students' time with us and how to flip some of our own classrooms.

Finally I sat in on Kern Kelley's session on how to deploy Google Apps for Education, which he has done in his rural K12 district in Maine. You can see his session slides here.They use Docs, Gmail, Blogger, Sites, Forms, Video and Picasa to enable students to publish and share their work, to turn in assignments, to blog and to create. When students graduate, the district pays for them to have a personal domain for one year, to give them a home on the web for them to continue housing their prior work and to continue growing their web portfolio. At MCDS we are about to begin Year 3 with our own Google Apps domain for Upper School students, but we have only begun to scratch the surface of potential for this toolset. The Tech Department is exploring the idea of migrating faculty to Google as well, which would only encourage us to collaborate with each other and our students more effectively.

Risk-Reward

I attended Ewan McIntosh’s “Managing Risk-Reward with Digital Media in Schools” presentation today. He started by asking us two questions:

What aren’t you allowed to do at your school with technology?

What are you allowed to do at your school with technology?

Barb, I am back to rethinking your question from yesterday about how we can create global, media-literate (etc) students with all of our filters and blocks on the internet?

Does our school embrace new approaches and ideas or are we risk-averse? Have we measured the risk?

Check this out

http://www.personalizemedia.com/garys-social-media-count/

Alan November

How much of the work that we give students have purpose?

This might be Tweetable, but I also would love to hear everyone's thoughts....I think we are trying to move in this direction, but it takes a lot of thought, work, and flexibility on the part of the teacher. Purpose to one group of students might look different than another group.

How important is this to us as teachers?

Thoughts about Misconceptions

Some thoughts after hearing Alan November:

What are the common misconceptions in our discipline/course? How many of our students enter our classrooms with those misconceptions? Where did they get them? How do we find out what they think? How do we know if we have been able to move them from misconception to understanding?

Shana and Ted talk one to one

Shana and I went to an utterly horrible workshop on the collaborative classroom this morning, leading to us escaping to the lobby to discuss how we use technology. After a vigorous discussion of how to best use blogging and our aversion to Twitter as a classroom tool, we discussed the one to one laptop roll out in 7th and 8th grade.

We feel each advisor should house and monitor their advisee's laptops to create equity and democracy in supervising the brave new world of one to one laptop use. Having a half class of laptops living in one classroom is inviting a traffic jam of students in those rooms and a serious headache for the teachers trying to administer 30 some computers in their classroom. If we can come up with some very clear rules and procedures about how to store computers during the school day when they're not being used, we'll have the clarity we need to start the year right.

Data Reveals Stories - Ewan McIntosh

Robert and I are attending a preconference season on making data visually interesting -- here's the link to the first of his 6-part series of posts on the topic, here are his delicious links, here is a helpful graphic with types of data visualization grapic, and here's a link to David McCandless' TED Talk on this subject.

Scratch

Barb and I spent the afternoon playing with Scratch. I had heard so much about this program from family members who have used it, but I never had until today. I could see ways to use this in the classroom, but also see great value in some kind of club or after school activity using Scratch where kids who really love this kind of this can dive deep.

Ask to see our games!

born to blog

I'm hanging out with Noah in a publishing and empowering in the classroom workshop. It's quite good, and I just made a podcast. Lots of great ideas for classroom writing.

What is BLC11?