Salman Khan Describes Future Classrooms with Blended Learning

Interesting video from the mind behind the Khan Academy. Here he discusses how online learning is meant to mesh with — not replace — classroom learning. For me, this echoes Karen Hume’s discussion of balancing tradition with innovation. “Salman Khan Describes Future Classrooms with Blended Learning” on YouTube:

5 Ways Social Media Will Change The Way You Work in 2013

Although it is obviously written for and from a business perspective, I think there are some connections to be made to how we teach and what we teach students:

 

In the nine short years since Mark Zuckerberglaunched thefacebook.com, social media has evolved from dorm room toy to boardroom tool. Last year, 73 percent of Fortune 500 companieswere active on Twitter, while more than 80 percent of executives believed social media engagement led to increased sales.

So what does 2013 hold for social media in the workplace?

 

Laptop Spying to Combat Digital Distraction?

I stumbled upon this article this morning, which is another interesting piece to add to the puzzle of the role of digital devices in the classroom and the articles I posted yesterday.

By Louise Brown of the Toronto Star:

York University prof enlists student snitches to battle digital distraction

When professor Henry Kim noticed a student this week paying more attention to his laptop than the class discussion, he asked another student to check out the suspect’s screen.

Twitter.

Busted.

The business professor at York University’s Schulich School of Business quietly asked the tweeter to leave for the rest of the 90-minute class for breaking the pledge his students must take not to use laptops for anything but class work.

And it meant using another new pledge this frustrated teacher had students take this fall; to spy on a classmate’s screen, if asked, and report truthfully what they see.

By recruiting this new breed of screen snitches, Kim hopes to make digital distraction so socially awkward that students will close forbidden windows — Facebook, email, Sikh field hockey matches — and plug into class…

READ MORE

 

 

Digital Classroom: Good Idea?

Here’s a trio of articles I have come across recently which explore the idea of increasing the digital presence in the classroom:

7 Solutions for Educators Who Want 21st Century Students to Tune In

From http://theinnovativeeducator.blogspot.ca

“If your target audience isn’t listening to you, it’s not their fault, it’s yours” Seth Godin

More and more I am reading articles like this one Colleges worry about always-plugged-in students. In it they talk about college professors and administrators who have or are considering unplugging student’s access to the internet or banning technology altogether so students will focus. These learning institutions are moving in the wrong direction!

When we blame or ban the technology,  we solve our issue temporarily, but we are ignoring the root of the problem.When it comes to learning, many educators know banning is the easy way out, but there are a number of reasons behind why students are not paying attention. Rather than taking away student rights and the freedom to use the tools they want, we must address the root of the issue that is causing the problem. My advice comes from someone who teaches adults and students in a “no ban zone.” These ideas work for me and they will work for you…
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Let’s unplug the digital classroom

By Doug Mann, The Toronto Star,
Saturday October 06, 2012

We are entering an age when the “digital delivery of course content can free faculty in traditional institutions to engage in direct dialogue and mentorship with students.”

So says the Ontario government’s 2012 white paper on education, “Strengthening Ontario’s Centres of Creativity, Innovation and Knowledge.” Professors muse that the classroom must “evolve or die” to become more “fun and engaging” for the modern student.

Such views are misinformed at best, crude propaganda for Apple and Microsoft at worst. The use of digital technology in higher education has promoted ignorance, not knowledge, and severely degraded basic reading, writing and thinking skills. It’s time to hit the off button.

One problem with the most enthusiastic futurists is that too many of them haven’t spent any time in the classroom in the last decade.
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School 2.0: teachers will be liberated from the classroom

Somewhere, this year, a university hired its last tenured professor. That’s because of the economic pressures on higher education. Next year, a university will hire its last faculty member expected to teach in a classroom. And that’s because of the technological pressures on higher education.

Technology won’t kill university education any more than television killed radio, but it will transform it. While your kids will still go to college, and it will still cost a fortune, their study time will look radically different than it does today. Even though our university classroom teachers may be replaced with robots, websites or direct-to-brain Ethernet jacks, on-campus higher education will still have a place that no Massive Open Online Course will supplant in our lifetime.

To understand why the future won’t kill college, it helps to remember how technology has already transformed education.

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Today’s Meet

What is Today’s Meet? From their website, http://todaysmeet.com/:

Imagine you’re giving a presentation where you can read the mind of every person in the room. You’d have an amazing ability to adjust to your audience’s needs and emotions. That’s the backchannel.

Using Twitter at social media conferences has become a great way to do just that. But Twitter isn’t appropriate for every situation.

• Your audience isn’t on Twitter.
• You don’t want the discussion to be public.
• You need to see only relevent updates.

That’s where TodaysMeet comes in. TodaysMeet gives you an isolated room where you can see only what you need to see, and your audience doesn’t need to learn any new tools like hash tags to keep everything together.

TodaysMeet is a good way to have a quick convo in a relatively quiet place.

TodaysMeet helps you embrace the backchannel and connect with your audience in realtime.

Encourage the room to use the live stream to make comments, ask questions, and use that feedback to tailor your presentation, sharpen your points, and address audience needs.

The backchannel is everything going on in the room that isn’t coming from the presenter.

The backchannel is where people ask each other questions, pass notes, get distracted, and give youthe most immediate feedback you’ll ever get.

Instead of ignoring the backchannel, TodaysMeet helps you leverage its power.

Tapping into the backchannel lets you tailor and direct your presentation to the audience in front of you, and unifying the backchannel means the audience can share insights, questions and answers like never before.

Here’s an example of Today’s Meet being used in my Grade 12 University level English class as we navigate our way through Hamlet.

 

 

 

 

 

 

CAVEAT:

When my grade 12′s first got on our Today’s Meet ‘meeting room’, their habits of doing and saying whatever they want on the Wild West internet took over and a few of the students started writing ‘shout-out’s’ to other students — and to me — such as, “Whaddup” or “Mr. Cooke brings the boom”. And then some students started to get a little cheeky or mildly inappropriate by making jokes, including joking about the word — wait for it– ‘butt’. Needless to say, I had to simultaneously chastise them for writing that while reminding them that this is for school purposes and that it is permanent, and that I would shut it down if they couldn’t use it properly. They did settle down, and what transpired was a really interesting and, I think, powerful experience in the classroom — using the ‘backchannel’. But because their thoughts appear live right in front of them, they thought it was ‘cool’ and they were all engaged.

19 Bold Ideas for Change (in Education)

I have been following Will Richardson by reading his articles or his tweets for a few years now and he never fails to

Who is Will Richardson? He is “an outspoken advocate for change in schools and classrooms in the context of the diverse new learning opportunities that the Web and other technologies now offer.” www.willrichardson.com

Here is a quick 5 minute presentation he gave recently. (The slide titles are below.)

1. Give open network tests — not open book tests.
2. Roll Your Own Textbooks.
3. Be Googled Well.
4. Flip the Power Switch.
5. Change the World. — Broaden scope of lessons
6. Don’t “Do Your Own Work.”
7. Learn First. Teach Second.
8. No More Workshops for Teachers.
9. Share Everything.
10. Ask Questions You Don’t Know the Answers To.
11. Repeat after me: “I want to be found by strangers on the Internet.”
12. Unlearn. Relearn.
13. Resume. Shemesume.
14. Stop Googling. Get a Network.
15. Go Free and Open Source.
16. Create an “Uncommon Core.”
17. Don’t Deliver… Discover.
18. Disrupt the System.
19. SCREAM!

iste-presentation from Will Richardson on Vimeo.

Will Richardson: Preparing Students to Learn Without Us

Wow. I read this article when I received the magazine in February and remember it being powerful. But re-reading it now, it kind of scares me.

In a way, the article lays out a challenge to me as a teacher, and in that challenge are calls for, essentially, seismic shifts of the tectonic plates of traditional
education.  ’Time and place’ learning, personalized learning, even differentiation with a small ‘d’ are not quite adequate enough for reaching and empowering today’s learners who live in a world of personal choice 24/7, who need to be shown how to learn on their own. (Indeed, I have students who already have ‘outgrown’ this version of the school system, and online learning, such as The Khan Academy, facilitates this ‘spreading of the wings’).

Richardson discusses re-formatting the very nature of the classroom experience, the curriculum, and the role of the teacher — and this is scary and exhilarating to think about.  Sacred, time-honoured texts and lessons and activities would be supplanted by learning objectives that serve as the north star to follow, and with this objectives in place, the students choose the content, the product and even the pace. That’s a pretty massive shift in the structure of learning.

Furthermore, the mantra of “We need to prepare them for university” casts a pretty long shadow over — and even extinguishes — initiatives, such as ‘personal learning’, before they even gets a chance to be discussed, let alone be introduced in an experimental fashion.

I do, however, have a few questions:

1. One element to ‘personal learning’ is that it relies upon or is facilitated by web 2.0. What if computer access is limited in the home and in the school?
2. What if students are uncomfortable with this form of learning?
3. What if only one teacher engages in this type of learning and it goes contrary to what other teachers in a department or school are teaching?
4. What are the mechanics of managing 20 to 30 students in a classroom setting?
5. What are the mechanics of managing ‘assessing in the moment’?

Nonetheless, I am definitely intrigued by the ideas Richardson puts forward here, and perhaps part of the scariness of this article is that asks me to ask myself, “What is my role as a teacher? The repository of all knowledge on a topic? The gatekeeper? A people-manager? A facilitator? A ‘guide on the side’?”

February 2012 | Volume 69 | Number 5
For Each to Excel Pages 22-26

Preparing Students to Learn Without Us

Will Richardson

By pairing personalized learning and technology, a teacher can help students learn what they need to learn through the topics that interest them most.

Here’s what I wonder: Can my 12-year-old son Tucker, a kid who lives for anything having to do with basketball, learn just about every math concept he needs to be successful in life in the context of playing the game he loves?

I posed that question on my blog a few months ago, and the post elicited more than 60 responses from readers who connected basketball to the study of bivariate data, complex equations, statistical analysis, slope, variables, predicting outcomes, probability, geometric shapes, mean, median, mode, averages, arc, force, angles, percentages, fractions, linear inequalities, volume, speed, mass, acceleration, and dozens of other concepts that are no doubt part of Tucker’s K–12 math curriculum (Richardson, 2010). And when I showed him some of the great ideas that teachers had left on my blog, he lit up. “Really?” he asked. “I could do that?”

Yes, I think he could. That’s not to say that he wouldn’t need…

 

 

 

 

PLUS: An article Richardson references that he himself wrote in 2009:

Personalized Online Learning

Taking what you already do and putting it online doesn’t make it learning.

Will Richardson: Should We Connect School Life to Real Life?

Should We Connect School Life to Real Life?
October 5, 2012 | 6:00 AM |

Excerpted from Will Richardson’s new TED Book Why School: How Education Must Change When Learning and Information Are Everywhere. Richardson offers provocative alternatives to the existing education system, questioning everything from standardized assessments to the role of the teacher. In this chapter, “Real Work for Real Audiences,” Richardson envisions students creating work that is relevant and useful in the world outside school.

By Will Richardson

So what if we were to say that, starting this year, even with our children in K– 5, at least half of the time they spend on schoolwork must be on stuff that can’t end up in a folder we put away? That the reason they’re doing their schoolwork isn’t just for a grade or for it to be pinned up in the hallway? It should be because their work is something they create on their own, or with others, that has real value in the real world.

I’m not even necessarily talking about doing something with technology. (Let’s face it, though: Paper is a 20th-century staple that has severely limited potential, compared to digital spaces.) There’s lots of creating our kids can do with traditional tools that can serve a real audience. Publishing books, putting on plays, and doing community service are just a few examples.

But what if we got a little crazy and added some technology into the mix? We could tell our kids, “You know, in addition to taking that test on the Vietnam War, we want you to go and interview some veterans, then collect those stories into a series of podcasts that people all over the world could listen to and learn from.”

How Video Games Have Freed Storytelling

Wow. What a cool article about how “…video game stories don’t have to follow a singular vision defined by a master storyteller.” From the perspective of a high school English teacher who is motivated to explore how to keep 21st century learners engaged, I found this article really interesting.

21 Things That Will Become Obsolete in Education by 2020

I feel a little behind the times, but better late than never, I guess. I just discovered this blog post from a site that already sets me aflutter whenever I go there.

But, to add to the complexity of this original post from 2009, the author, Shelly Blake-Plock (@blakeplock), has written about his revisiting the aforementioned post. And that re-visit is powerful in and of itself:

What Will Education Look Like in 2020?

Here’s a quotation from the article:

“We aren’t professionals with clear-cut job descriptions or miniature technocrats micromanaging our classrooms, after all. Our job is to lead young learners to new heights of understanding and achievement.

The future of education isn’t in finding the best way to get all students to pass the same test. It’s in using the connections that technology enables to leverage the social capital of ­communities and inspire children to dream, innovate and create.”