“If you wanted to design a learning environment that was directly opposed to what the brain was really good at doing then you would design something like the modern classroom.”

Want to hear more………?

Watch this great talk.

All Dr. John Medina’s research and book reviews can be found here: http://www.brainrules.net/

It has been a while since I have posted here. Being a parent, coach and busy Technology and Learning Coordinator has left me with little time to share and write.  Such is the life of the “semi-pro”.   In the coming weeks I hope to remedy this as I reflect on the last two years here in Bangkok and what the next chapter as in store.

Tonight  Dennis, Kim and I have been invited on the S.O.S - Shift our Schools Podcast to talk about our curriculum work , our vision for 21st century literacy and the journey of thinking, talking and collaboration that has taken us to our “temporary fixed position”.  We like to use that term around here as it speaks to our evolving and shifting thinking. The S.O.S - Shift our Schools Podcast is hosted by Jeff Utech and David Carpenter and is a great bi-monthly listen. Lots of great ideas and thoughts get tossed around.

The essential question for this week’s show is:  How Do We Connect Technology and Classroom Instruction Seamlessly?

For Dennis and I the road to answering this question began two years ago with another question.

How does an information and technology curriculum stay relevant and meaningful in the 21st Century?

Prior to our roles as coordinators we had both taught in schools with elaborate technology scope and sequence plans which we felt had little to no impact on learning and often became outdated the moment they were written. We also felt that the previous NET standards were too bulky and disconnected from the average classroom teacher. We wanted to create something that could stand the test of time and be manageable to the average teacher.

As we approached answering the question we felt strongly that as the world changed around our students, so must a curriculum if it was to remain a relevant institution whose mission was to prepare students for the shifting demands of global citizenship. Every day our pupils read and navigate through a “global electronic library” as well as through the media housed in traditional libraries. They have access to a wealth of information and resources unimaginable even five years ago. Student are able to access, create, design and present information in so many new and exciting ways that educators are having trouble keeping pace. A new literacy has emerged and with it comes a brand new set of skills, responsibilities and challenges. We felt it was time to rethink the role that information technology played in schools and transition from  a disconnected entity to a partner in learning.

Now how to achieve this………………..?

To quote an earlier post:

“Looking at Wiggins and McTighe’s Understanding by Design approach to curriculum and unit design we liked how big “essential questions” and “enduring understandings” had helped us plan and design units when we were teaching math and social studies. What if this same “best practice” approach could be applied to the way technology was used and talked about in the classroom? If this was good curricular design practice, why should technology and thinking curriculum be any different? What if that same approach was used in the way we looked at connecting technology and learning across the curriculum? What if there were only a few manageable questions that even the most tech-resistant teacher could see value in? ”

We shopped the ideas around and started to create understanding within our own institution. Lots of meetings and discussion followed and over the past year with many educators participating we have come up with:

Click on the ISB21 logo to visit our curriculum in progress.

Tonight we will discuss where we are at with all this and where we are going.

We have come very far but we have to much further to go.

“What a long strange trip it’s been”

Tune in if you can.

Look out Wikispaces and Wetpaint Google just entered the wiki market and their product is SLICK!

There is HUGE potential with this one!

Check it out here.

News Master Robin Good does a great review here.

Check it out.

Yesterday we (Justin Medved and Dennis Harter) spoke about our efforts to broaden the conversation that we had been having within our department with our wider school and the leaders within it. It became very clear to us early on that unless there was a shared understanding of concepts like “21st century literacy” and why our classrooms needed to educate for it then we would be stuck in a curricular holding pattern. There is lots of talk about the need to broaden student literacy to encompass and address the skills needed to navigate the new visual and information landscape, but what does that look like in practice and how do you write it into the K-12 curriculum in a way that is manageable and meaningful.

Our initial work led us to form five essential questions that we felt met the needs of a 21st century learner. It was our feeling that a curriculum focused on just five questions would be much more manageable for the average teacher. These questions speak to thinking, critically evaluating, analyzing, and communicating. They value responsible behavior and knowing yourself as a learner. In a world in which it is impossible to predict what technology children will be using as adults, it is the “answers” to these five questions that will provide students the opportunity to succeed and thrive in the 21st Century. The power of these Essential Questions, lie in their applicability to all ages and to discussion more important and broad than technology standing alone.

A grade 1 teacher can and should have valuable discussions with students about being safe or recognizing truthful information. Who are the people you trust? What about them makes you believe what they say? Whatmakes one “source” more valuable than another? Those same questions can be asked throughout a child’s schooling, but the answers begin to include more sources and more critical examination of their world. And eventually, they begin to include technology. If experimentation and data analysis is a way to know something is true, then you will have to learn how to use the technology needed to analyze that data. If being safe is valued, then learning about responsible use of social networking sites, issues of privacy, and web 2.0 technologies inevitably will be discussed at a time appropriate to students’ use.It was our feeling that the broad nature of these questions makes them accessible to teachers whose responsibility it is to embed this curriculum into their students’ learning.

Teachers believe that they can teach effective communication but they don’t believe they know much about PowerPoint. Nor should effective communication be limited to a software title anyway. The answers to these Essential Questions are higher-order thinking skills and issues of global citizenship. These are the skills we NEED students to have and the ones that will serve them well once they leave the arena of formal education.

These were our beliefs and they had come from hours of conversation and reading about the subject. If we wanted to move our ideas forward others would have to own them as well. So we gathered some key players and leadership from around the school to come together on a number of different occasions to refine our idea.
Our google collaborative document was the perfect venue to allow this to happen. It was fascinating to watch as 12 people debate and edit the same at the same time. What a powerful tool!Our first challenge was to answer the question “What do we want our students to learn?” Our framework provided much of this information but it was also important to try and outline what we wanted our students to be able to do once they were finished at ISB. From the perspective of this framework we all agreed that the ideas could be synthesized down to three areas.We wanted out students to be:

• Effective Learners
• Effective Communicators
• Effective Collaborators

From this starting point and as a result of much discussion and collaboration, we all agreed that our ideas and five essential questions could be refined further down to three new questions.

• How do I responsibly use information and communication to positively contribute to my world?
• How do I effectively communicate?
• How do I find and use information to construct meaning and solve problems?

With these questions we then proceeded to flesh out the enduring understandings that went with them. It was our feeling that these should always be evolving to address the changing face of communication, collaboration and information. The curriculum frameworkwould be in constant beta. A testament to the ever expanding nature of the skills it was attempting to map.

What do you think?

Justin Medved, Dennis Harter, Guest BloggersCross Posted at: Medagogy and Thinking Allowed
Tomorrow’s post: Part 5 - Moving forward - from rhetoric to reality.

In our last post, we (Justin Medved and Dennis Harter) shared with you our 5 essential questions for the 21st Century Learner as well as our thinking behind how and why we felt the need to re-shape the way “technology” curriculum is embedded into classroom learning. We built our work on our new literacy wiki - as a collaborative environment for us, but also in anticipation of wanting needing to share our work with a greater audience for feedback and ultimately contribution at a later date. The wiki was the perfect environment for this. By documenting the evolution of this curricular journey in a public venue we hope to garner feedback and critical friending that will hopefully lead to a better and stronger framework.Besides isn’t this “shift” all about the power of sharing and networks?

While it’s focus is on making “technology integration” more accessible to teachers and more meaningful to students, it actually attempts to articulate an approach and create a through line that run beside all other subject curricula. Finally an answer to the question “who is going to teach these skills?”……….. Everyone is.

We called it Curriculum 2.0.

Once we finished the initial framework it was time to get some feedback.

Involving our Curriculum coordinators, Technology Director and our new colleague, Kim Cofino (how lucky were we?!), the conversations that emerged were awesome. We felt it important to shop the concept around to as many different people as possible in order to get a balanced perspective. Teachers ultimately want to know “what will this look like?” and “how will be it be supported?” and we had to have some answers ready. Through conversation, challenging questions, and true collaboration, we were able to fine tune our original 5 questions into three focused roles of technology in 21st century learning. More on this and the on the philosophy behind our structure in our next post, but until then you can ruminate on the diagram below.

In this post, we wanted to focus on the conversations that got us here.

In addition to working with key people at ISB, we presented our work at the Learning 2.0 Conference in Shanghai in mid September. The feedback was very positive. It was validating to see that other technology coordinators were experiencing the same sort of difficulties with past IT integration scope and sequences. And it was energizing to see that our work was striking a chord. [side note: Dennis will present the work further at the EARCOS Teachers' Conference in Kuala Lumpur in March. If you are there, it'd be great to see you at the session.]

With positive vibes flowing all around, the next step was to include our school leadership. As we mentioned in an earlier post, we work closely with our school Leadership Team in a distributed leadership model with them often looking to us for guidance - leadership in a different direction. Over the past year, we have been presenting various technology tools and ideas to the LT to give them a better sense of what to look for in classrooms and what to expect in educational change in the coming years.

Here in the edublogosphere, we often preach to the converted. In general, there is a lot of agreement on how education needs to change and technology’s role in that change. We recognize the shift that is happening and the impact that will have on our students and should have on their learning. We commiserate on how administration or faculty just don’t get it and celebrate together when they do.

We seldom talk about how important the process to bring them along is - that is a conversation that matters.

Our work with the LT brought this to light for us. To a large degree, they trust us. And that’s a great start, but to enact major curricular change, we had to first convince them of the need. We had to describe an inevitable world that required innovators, thinkers, collaborators, and communicators. One in which knowing something was less important than creating something and in which working in a group meant talking to people around the world and being able to communicate in more than one way.

We had to create a shared understanding of what 21st century learning is and why it’s important. We had to allow them to help frame the context in which this could work at ISB. With that individual, personal input, you can achieve buy-in. Then you can challenge them by asking, what are we going to do about it?

Our point: you can’t skip these conversations.

As other schools or technology folks begin to use our framework to develop their own integration plans, we remind them, make sure you have the conversations. Use our work as a starting point for conversations that encourage questioning and challenge thinking. If we can’t defend our rationale for a curricular model like this, then it isn’t worth doing. Give stake holders a chance to process, question, and understand. (sounds like good teaching!)

Whether it comes via top leadership or from another direction, in order for school change to happen, buy-in has to come from shared understanding. And that only comes from conversations that matter.

For us, the next steps are to flesh out our framework and bring it more formally to teachers, where again, conversation will lead to shared understanding. It’s what didn’t happen at T.C. Williams and why all the tech in the world isn’t improving student learning there.

No matter how “right” we know we are, you must get buy-in and shared understanding.

You can’t skip the conversations.

Justin Medved, Dennis Harter, Guest Bloggers
Cross Posted at: Medagogy and Thinking Allowed and Dangerously Irrelevant

Tomorrow’s Post: Refining The Idea

Last year we (Justin Medved and Dennis Harter) sat down to tackle the big question ” How does an information and technology curriculum stay relevant and meaningful in the 21st Century.” As Technology and Learning Coordinators at the International School of Bangkok this question was important to us for three reasons.

1) 2006-7 was a WASC accreditation year for ISB and we were charged with taking a look at the K-12 Information Technology curriculum and creating a plan of action to improve it.

2) The discussions and writings coming out of the edu-blogosphere last year were rich in ideas all about “shift” , “re-thinking” and “who is teaching these new skills?”. It was hard not to feel like there was some momentum building around a fresh educational paradigm and a shift away from the “integration of technology” in the classroom, moving towards “embedding” it in the way schools “do business”.

3) Prior to our roles as coordinators we had both taught in schools with elaborate technology scope and sequence plans which we felt had little to no impact on learning and often became outdated the moment they were written. We also felt that the previous NET standards were too bulky and disconnected from the average classroom teacher. We wanted to create something that could stand the test of time and be manageable to the average teacher.

With initiative and a purpose driving us forward we sat down to write a rationale to guide our approach. We came up with this:

“We believe that technology is a tool that can help and enhance learning. Everyday we see technology used as a tool outside of formal schooling for communication, collaboration, understanding, and accessing knowledge. It is our goal in developing an integrated curriculum to ensure that the way students learn with technology agrees with the way they live with technology.

Technology is in a constant state of evolution and change. Access speeds, hardware, software, and computer capabilities all evolve and improve on a monthly basis. This change occurs at a rate at which it is impossible for schools to keep up and adapt. Is it not time that we create a curriculum model that understands and this fact and works with it rather than tries to control it?

Too often typical information technology curricula have focused heavily on skills and their scope and sequence across the curriculum. The hard reality of this approach was that they became outdated as soon as they were printed due to changes in software, hardware and the skills that students came equipped with.”

Instead of asking the question “What technology skills must a students have to face the 21st century?” should we not be asking “What thinking and literacy skills must a students have to face the 21st century?” These skills are not tied to any particular software or technology-type, but rather aim to provide students with the thinking skill and thus the opportunity to succeed no matter what their futures hold.”

We felt strongly that for too long that way technology was integrated with learning focused more on the tool and less on the curriculum/content that it could be used to support. To compound this fact ,since technology changes so rapidly it became almost impossible to map what “skills” students needed to learn from year to year as new technology arrived on the scene and old skills trickled down age groups. It wasn’t long ago that spreadsheets were the domain of high school students in accounting classes. Now we introduce them to fifth graders doing graphing and data analysis.

Typically teachers saw teaching these technology hardware and software skills as “someone else’s job.” IT skills to be learned in isolation. Yet schools rightly began to insist that technology be integrated into classroom practice. Under this technology skill curricular model, faced with teachers ill-equipped and not believing that it was their job, IT integration was doomed to failure.

We had to think bigger different………

Looking at Wiggins and McTighe’s Understanding by Design approach to curriculum and unit design we liked how big “essential questions” and “enduring understandings” had helped us plan and design units when we were teaching math and social studies. What if this same “best practice” approach could be applied to the way technology was used and talked about in the classroom? If this was good curricular design practice, why should technology and thinking curriculum be any different? What if that same approach was used in the way we looked at connecting technology and learning across the curriculum? What if there were only a few manageable questions that even the most tech-resistant teacher could see value in?

Over the school year we fleshed out these questions and ideas and came up five essential questions that we felt addressed the core elements of a comprehensive technology and learning curriculum - one focused on the thinking that was needed for the 21st century learner, rather than the technology.

• How do you know information is true?
• How do you communicate effectively?
• What does it mean to be a global citizen?
• How do I learn best?
• How can we be safe?

You can read into the elements of each of these questions at our curriculum wiki - http://newliteracy.wikispaces.com/

What do you think of the approach? We’d love to hear your thoughts.

Tomorrow’s post: Curriculum 2.0 - Creating buy-in, shopping an idea and refining through collaboration

Cross Posted at: Medagogy and Thinking Allowed and Dangerously Irrelevant

A new bi-weekly podcast aired for its second time last week. Called Shifting our Schools International podcast and hosted Jeff Utecht and David Carpenter it is set to be a new twist on an important discussion and its coming all the way from Asia! You can catch it via SOS UStream and Jeff’s On Deck blog every second Thursday. I really like the format as each show centers around an essential question that is the lens through which all discussion should flow. I was a guest on last weeks show along with Julie Lindsay and the question “How does making connections affect learning? ”

If you listen to the podcast you will get to hear some great discussion and thinking around the value of collaboration and connecting classroom from some educators who are passionate about the subject but also who are practicing what they preach. There are some big voices in the edu-blogosphere but those who resonate the loudest with me are those who are DOING what others are preaching about and making it happen in an environment that is slow to embrace change and bound by countless  barriers and distractions…………SCHOOLS. IF you are interested hearing about real application and ideas in action. Tune in! 

• The next show is Thursday February 7th. 7:00 PM Shanghai time.
• The guest will be Clay Burell from the Korea International School. Check out his Beyond School blog. This guy is worth reading and is PASSIONATE!
• Essential Question for the show: Passion for learning, how to nurture and grow it?
• Check out the SOS Del.icio.us bookmarking site for some great resources and links associated with each show.

Have you ever been to Kaohsiung?Do you even know where it is ?Well before this weekend I didn’t either. Kaohsiung is Taiwan’s second largest city and I have been flown here by SMARTBOARD to present at the 2007 Symposium on Development of Creative Intergration of ICT in Educationto. I am one of 5 keynote speakers who will be speaking to 200 Taiwanese teachers about technology, teching and learning. My presentation is titled - “Interactive Whiteboards: Their impact on teaching, learning and professional collaboration - Reflections on a 5 year study”.You can download the pdf version here: “Interactive Whiteboard Presentation Notes”So wow did I get here?Well it all started (like so many other connections this year) at the Learning 2.0 conference. I contributed the same presentation, the people from SMART seemed to like it, and so the invitation was extended.I have opportunity present quite a bit in my current job but this conference will provide me with lots of firsts.First time visiting Taiwan.First time being a keynote presenter.First time presenting with a Chinese translator.First time presenting to a non-english speaking audience.My talk is focused on how Interactive Whiteboards can change pedagogy, planning and promote collaboration in schools.The conference is at one of Microsoft’s schools of the future. This school (see below) is massive and hold over 3000 students. Factory style with a Feng Shui twist.I hope I can add some value.

This weekend I along with 49 other educators from around ASIA have been invited to attend the Apple Distinguished Educators institute in Bangkok, Thailand. It will be a chance to be indoctrinated immersed in all thing Apple through the lense of education.

What really excites me about the institute is that it is project based. All participants will be placed into groups and given themes and questions to explore using the variety of Apple products available to us. Lots of advanced workshops and new stuff to try out.

Some notable edu-bloggers (Kim, Clay) will be there along with MAC guru Steve Clark of Shanghai Community International School.

I’m psyched!

Check out all the action here

Following hot on the heels of the Learning 2.0 conference there is a buzz around ISB. Teachers are asking new questions, taking new risks and experimenting with possibilities. For a technology and learning coordinator this is an important time. A moment to seize. Right now it is important to provide support, celebrate ideas and broadcast the creativity of the staff. It is certainly wonderful to have Kim Cofino around getting hands on with teachers and students in the classroom. It is amazing what she has done in just over a month. If you are looking for a collaborative project to jump on to there is no better place to start than here “20 project ideas inspired Learning 2.0″. If you are interested in working with teacher and students from the International School of Bangkok just post a comment on our CONNECT 2 blog and we will get back to you.

How inspiring would it be if your principal and vice principal were to model 21st century literacy by starting their own blogs? We are fortunate to have just that. Struan and Annelies have done just that. It sets a new standard for leaders to follow.

The Learning 2.0 conference was a reaffirmation that we are on the right track. That our ideas are sound and that this movement is not just a trend but is rooted in best practices, sound pedagogy and inspired people. What became clear over the course of the weekend was that while these tools are fantastic for enhancing teaching, learning and the curriculum, they can be even more powerful in helping solve some of our global problems. By bringing people and their ideas together from all corners of the world we all draw a little closer, see each others perspectives and deepen our patience and tolerance.

Tomorrow, Sept 21st it is PEACE ONE DAY  which provides a fantastic teachable moment to take a few minutes to discuss peace with the class and why it is important. One of our grade four teachers in particular is looking to get some global perspectives on this question and is having his students post to his blog tomorrow as part of the refection process. If you are interested in connecting your classroom and sharing your student perspectives please drop by http://lamontslearningblog.blogspot.com/ and have you students post. Make sure that they leave their country of origin after their first name so the students can see where the comments are coming from.

We hope to hear from you and your students!

Peace