Education Innovation

A Tale of "Two Teachers" --Teaching and Technology

Teacher 1:
"Walking into a classroom that doesn’t have all that media is like walking into a desert."

"...collect information from other sources, and borrow, and steal, and put it together and reshape it. Isn’t that a skill that I want them to have?"

"I am not saying that cheating is okay. I am saying that cheating is something you have to look at closer to say what is cheating and what’s not cheating?"

Teacher 2:
"Students know how to do things I can’t do technologically in the classroom and I just let them take over and they are naturals."

"I feel at though I am fighting the good fight.  I am trying to hang on to what I think is the most important part of what I do. But, my time is over. This is too much for me. It’s not the educational arena I entered into."

Two teachers dealing with the cultural changes to the educational landscape caused by technology. Which one describes you?

See the video from FrontLine's Digital Nation: Life On The Virtual Frontier --Education In The Digital Age

How Google Saved a School

Thoughts:

Technology is like oxygen.

Wow. Doing interesting things. Feeling of independence.

Real World Skills

If students are getting the work done, they will be doing so while the are IMing, gaming, etc.

Rigorous, challenging, interesting.

Creating original content and adding to the Internet.

Teaching students to muli-task

I don’t think I as an adult can sit and do work for an hour, so I don’t know why I would says it is a drawback that my students can’t?

Focuses them.

Essential Education: Jeff Jarvis' "What Would Google Do?"

comes this Essential Education video on Jeff Jarvis' book "What Would Google Do?" Take a look and then ask yourself if you are preparing your students to work and thrive in this business environment and global marketplace.

Brain Rules: The Ultimate Guide To Brain Rules Ideas in Education

If John Medina, author of Brain Rules, ran your school it might look something like this.

Brain Rules for Presenters

View more presentations from garr. (tags: reynolds garr)

Teaching School
The school would be a combination of regular school, teacher preparation school, and a research school that combines educational theory with brain theory. Think of a teaching hospital. Teachers who are currently teaching, aspiring teachers learning and interacting daily with students and teachers, and educational researchers working with brain researchers to develop new teaching theory.

Great relationships between student and teachers
Great relationships enhance learning and reduce stress which decreases learning.

Students are taught to love learning
Students learn that learning is about intrinsic curiosity and desire. Students love to learn because they see the intrinsic value of it, and not to earn a grade.

Parallel schedules
Because some brains are more effective during different parts of the day, there would be two schedules to match the needs of teachers and students who work better early or late.

Exercise
Recess would be held twice a day. In the morning, 20-30 minutes of aerobic activity, followed later in the day with 20-30 of strength training and stretching. Students would wear gym clothes all day. Tread mills would be installed in classrooms to further increase opportunities for students to exercise while learning.

Small Class Sizes
Small class sizes allow teacher to better understand the inner motivation of their students, easily seeing if a student is engaged or confused and if the teaching is being transformed into learning. Teachers would think of themselves as managers of minds, and the fewer minds to manage the better.

Technology
Adaptive software that adjusts to the needs of each student would be used to better individualize and differentiate for student needs.

Lecture and Lesson Design (1)
The introduction is key. How the teacher introduces the material has a huge impact on learning. Lesson would be broken into 10-minute blocks, each of which focuses on a single subject or objective, the gist of which can be explained in 1 minute. In between each 10-minute block an Emotionally Competent Stimuli (ECS) will be place to grab the student’s attention by triggering emotion and make the subject matter relevant. During the lesson blocks, the teacher will provide a mental map of the lesson and will check with the students to ensure that they know where they have been and where they are going in the lesson.

Lecture and Lesson Design (2)
Lesson or lectures will be highly visual. Many photos and computer animations will be made use of. Lesson will be multi-sensory to the extent possible. Heavy use of real world examples will be used to help make meaningful connections.

Lesson Review
After lessons, students will be given time to talk and think about the learning. Reviews of material would be scheduled every 3-4 days. These reviews would be multi-sensory as well.

Teacher Evaluation
Teachers would be screened for their ability to manage minds, understand their students, and create brain focused lesson plans.

So there you have it. The ultimate guide to the Brain Rules school design.

For more info I suggest:

No Such Thing As Learning Styles

Tips and Techniques for Memory Enhancement

Working Memory Capacity, Encoding, and Retrieval from Long-Term Memory

Learning About Swimming Takes Place Best At A Pool: Brain Rules Part 8

The Golden Moment of Learning: Brain Rules Part 7

Great Teaching and Presentation with the Brain Rules Lesson Plan: Brain Rules Part 6

Are You Paying Attention? -- Brain Rules Part 5

Theory of Mind-- Brain Rules Part 4

Billions of Intelligences? --Brain Rules Part 3

Student and Teacher Relationships: Brain Rules Part 2

 Increase Test Scores with Exercise:Brain Rules Part 1

Learning and Success Is Trying Longer and Harder

From Mark Batterson's blog Evotional.com: Spirit Fuel, comes this interesting thought. I has implications for all of our learners, be it school, church, or corporate training. The power of persistence.

I came across a fascinating study this week. Can't stop thinking about it. Priscilla Blinco did a study involving Japanese and American first graders. She gave them a very difficult puzzle to solve. The American children lasted, on average, 9.47 minutes. The Japanese children lasted 13.93 minutes or 40% longer.

Any one want to guess who has higher scores on standardized math tests?

Fascinating study with interesting implication. The argument is that we might give IQ more credit than it deserves. Persistence quotient might be a better predictor of success! How long are you willing to try something before giving up? Successful people, in every arena, aren't just smarter. They try harder and try longer.

What would it mean for our teaching if we knew our students would last a little longer?  What might that mean for your school, your church, or your business? What would the cummulative effects of this look like over years of teaching and learning? 

Success. And that is Education Innovation.

Teachers Are Irreplaceable, Right Up Until The Moment They Are Replaced

What does Clay Shirky's book Here Comes Everybody, scribes, the printing press, teachers, web technology, virtual learning, and a barking robot all have in common?  

    

Let's put them into the Education Innovation blender and take a look.

What ever happened to scribes?  Scribes were one of the most essential of professions in the 1400’s. Few people could write, and it was the scribes that hand copied existing written work. If not for scribes, the loss of ideas, wisdom, and knowledge would have been lost through the ravages of time on existing written work. The scribe was crucially important and irreplaceable, for it was the scribe who was able to preserve and pass on the knowledge of the past and current.

Then, one day, scribes became outdated. They had been replaced by movable type. It didn’t happen all at once of course. For a time scribes worked simultaneously with publishers using the printing press, but the reality was that the society in which they labored had fundamentally changed. The protestant reformation and the printing of bibles in many languages were transforming the society in which scribes and printers worked.

Scribes, not wanting to lose ground to the printers, published a very eloquent defense of scribes. The hypocrisy of it was that they used the printing press to publish it. Times had changed. The society was different and the technology of the day, the printing press, allowed for those changes to continue and spread. Scribes were no longer essential as they had once been before, swept out in the revolution of the reformation and the bible in many languages. The printing press was the technology that made it easier, not the cause.

As Clay Shirky writes, “Professional self-conception and self-defense, so valuable in ordinary times, become a disadvantage in revolutionary times, because professionals are always concerned with threats to the profession. In most cases, those threats are also threats to society…”

He continues, “But in some cases the change that threatens the profession benefits society, as did the spread of the printing press…”

Education and classroom teachers are in much the same situation as the scribes of the 1400’s were. How is that you ask?  Simple, we are in a revolution of how our society connects, communicates, and in many regards, how it functions. The technology of the web has changed how we communicate. It has made it possible to communicate and teach from virtually anywhere. Learning is no longer limited to the teacher in the classroom or the brick and mortar school. Learning can take place anyplace and at anytime with web technologies. Online courses, online schools, etc. have arisen and benefited from the revolution of our 2.0 society.

The train has left the station on virtual education. It may not be heavily adopted yet, but it will. Why wouldn’t it?  We in education can resist, fight it, and even argue against it, but like the scribe of the 1400’s, we are living in revolutionary times and we are working along side virtual schools, teachers, and classrooms. The shift is already beginning, the question for us becomes, adapt to it and adopt it, or go the way of the scribe. I think we are much too smart not to do the former, and far too important to do the latter.

But so did the scribes.

Derek Baird at his excellent blog, Barking Robot has an excellent post in which he summarizes some of the most current research on e-learning. Take a look.

Catalytic Questions:

In what ways might your old beliefs or assumptions about education need to be eliminated?

How might you combine web based technologies and virtual learning opportunities into your educational plan?

In what ways would you need to modify your existing instructional model and methods to meet the needs of online or virtual teaching and learning?

If you imagined yourself as a student, what sorts of things would you want in online education or virtual learning?

How might you allow your school or district’s virtual teaching and learning programs develop? In what areas might you need to force the action?

In what ways might you adapt the online-based technologies you use frequently to develop your online education plan?

What else might you need to think about?

Where else can you look for ideas, methods, and models for online or virtual learning?

The New Media Litearacies

Discovered this video from my PLN. It was created by the The New Media Literacies Project.
According to their site..."Project New Media Literacies (NML), a research initiative based within MIT's Comparative Media Studies program, explores how we might best equip young people with the social skills and cultural competencies required to become full participants in an emergent media landscape and raise public understanding about what it means to be literate in a globally interconnected, multicultural world."

This group is doing some great work in this field.

The video list these skills as part of the New Media Literacies student will need to learn.

Judgment
Negotiation
Appropriation
Play
Transmedia Navigation
Simulation
Collective Intelligence
Performance
Distributed Cognition
Visualization
Mulitaksing

Take a look at the video

Teaching and Learning Will Be: Predictive, Preventive, Personalized and Participatory

What does the future of the U.S. Health System, the human genome, Wired Magazine, and Leroy Hood have to do with education? Into the Education Innovation blender they go…

In my previous post (The Smart List- (Education Didn't Make The List) Wired Magazine’s The Smart List included Leroy Hood; a 69-year-old biotechnologist proposed shifting the United States health system around the human genome. DNA sequencing will soon be a low cost test that can be used to predict which diseases a person is likely to get.

Hood proposes that genome and DNA sequencing be the basis of a new health care system centered on the four Ps. What are the fours Ps and what do they have to do with education you ask? Let me explain.

The four Ps: Predictive, Preventive, Personalized, and Participatory.

Predictive:
In health care this means using genome sequencing and blood tests, a doctor will be able to predict a patients likelihood of getting certain diseases.

Education too should be predictive. Assessments should be given early and frequent as a students brain develops to identify and predict the likelihood of developing certain learning disabilities and problems. Following a Response To Intervention like model, students identified to likely develop learning disabilities could be given the support they need at an early age. Predictive testing and assessments can get students the resources they need at an early age.

Preventive:
In health care this means using an individual risk profile to start therapies in advance to cut the likelihood of illness.

In education, preventive means using individual assessment profiles to identify the best strategies, methods, programs, and resources that should be directed at a student early on to interdict learning problems and disabilities at an early age. The prevention will be customized to the individual learner’s needs.

Personalized:
In health care this means using millions of data points to create drug therapies that are suited to each genome, eliminating the “trial and error” approach of doctors today.

In education, personalized assessment profiles could be used to customize learning experiences to maximize the education experience for each student. In addition to using the assessment profiles for learning disabilities or problems, a system based on personalization will take into account a student’s interests, curiosity, brain, personality, behavior, family, economic situation, and a multitude of other factors. These can be used to create a personalized educational experience, the type of experience the Open Model of Education can provide.

Participatory:
In health care this means people become involved in their own health care by treating the symptoms and by learning about their own predisposition.

In education this means changing the focus for teaching to learning. This puts an emphasis on the learner allows the learner to have input into how they want to learn, when they want to learn, where they want to learn, whom they want to learn from, and what they want to learn. When learners participate in their own education, the Open Model of Education becomes an obviously better delivery model for teaching.

In short education need to adopt the four Ps as a basis for how to build a new education focused the best of what teachers, students, and parents have to offer each other.

Can You Help Me Put This Genie Back In The Bottle?

by elvis_payne

While I sat in my health class today pondering if I had a greater chance of getting Lime disease or the West Nile virus, a discussion broke out among my classmates on the problem with kids using technology to share tests, test questions, and answers with their fellow students. Also indicted was the Internet. Seems the Internet has allowed students to share test question or even find all the versions of tests that the textbook publishers create for teachers. Apparently, some teacher on the other side of the country posted all the versions and the answers on the Internet and these kids found it. How dare they!

I chuckled inside as I listened to teachers from all over the spectrum bemoan how easy technology has allowed this to happen and how much info students were able to find on then Internet these days. They were arguing about how best to put the genie back in the bottle.

Finally, after it looked like the Internet and technology were headed for a guilty verdict, I added a though or two to the conversation.

I pointed out that test questions and test answers are simply pieces of information. A question or an answer is simply a piece of information; a piece of data that can be discovered and shared like any other piece of information and data. They may not want it discovered or shared, but because it is digital or can be converted into digital pieces of data, the information can and will be shared. I simply asked if anyone thought if finding and sharing of data and information would become easier or less easy in the coming years.

I could see the gears turning and then a bit of fear began to wash over them.

Frustration, Aggravation, and Sheer Annoyance...
Originally uploaded by Vashtia

Then I approached it from the creativity and innovation angle. What the students were engaged in was cheating, piracy, and plagiarism. (Teach Students to be Pirates and Plagiarists) There is a great deal of creative thought and innovation in there somewhere. While educators now frown on what these pirate students do, their future employers will value these same students for being able to quickly, creatively, and innovatively find, remix, and share information and data.

I suggested that they focus on using assessments that required the students to generate new and meaningful ideas, connections, and insights with their knowledge and not just true/false or multiple-choice. I explained to them that we know live in an era where technology has made the discovery, sharing, and re-purposing of data and information, and that assessments that rely on data or information only questions are going to be subject this effect.

Assessments must change to require original thinking or use of the data or information, not simply recalling the information. Technology has made to need to memorize facts and information less important. If you can look it up on the Internet anytime you like, why memorize the data? If you are relying on tests that assess a student’s recall of data, don’t be amazed if they use technology to treat your test and it’s answers like data too.

A silent hush fell across the room, and I thought I heard a fear tears falling. Then, slowly, the group considered its options and rose together in one voice to say that they just didn’t want kids to use technology or the Internet anymore in their classroom, and maybe they should just hand write their tests or ban student cell phones.

Together, they determined, that maybe, just maybe, they could put the genie back in the bottle.

I smiled and went back to considering my odds of a sucking chest wound.

Education's Paper-and-Pencil Penitentiary: Life Behind The Walls

How goes the working conditions of teachers, so goes the education our students receive.

Students and teachers are working in a paper-and-pencil penitentiary.

_{The Adelaide Gaol | A-Wing Prison Cell - HDR Originally uploaded by Artie | Photography}

“ ‘We’re here for the kids.’ ‘We do what’s best for kids.’ Often have these words been proclaimed from atop school district offices. However, has anyone thought that by doing what’s best for teachers you are doing what’s best for kids?”  Brian Crosby, Smart Kids, Bad Schools

“Teacher working conditions are student learning conditions.”  North Carolina governor Michael F. Easley

Death to All Sacred Cows authors David Bernstein, Beau Frasier, and Bill Schwab point out that focusing exclusively on the wonderfulness of your customers can alienate and demoralize your employees. Without a happy and motivated workforce, your business will wither and die.”

And if your business is educating students, then spending all your time focusing on the needs of the students while ignoring the needs of the teachers is a recipe for poor morale, poor teaching, and eventually poor results.

Ken Futernick, writing in the Los Angeles Times said, “We have a high-school dropout problem in large part because we have a teacher dropout program.”

Teachers dropping out of the teaching profession is a serious problem. According to a 2007 California State University study, nearly one-quarter of new California teacher leave the profession in four years or less. Think of that, one out of every four teachers is leaving education after just a few years, even after all the training, education, and time they spend to get into the profession.

Teachers are expected to prepare students for success in the 21st Century, while working and teaching in 19th Century conditions. Compare how the conditions are for teachers, students, and prisoners.

Wouldn’t students and parents both benefit from a system treated teachers like professionals and put their long-term needs first ahead of the changing needs of students and parents. Students would get the education they deserve because they would be receiving instruction from teachers who are getting the treatment they deserve.

Fine dinning in New York City is not a place where you would think the customer comes second. But that is exactly the philosophy of restaurant owner and operator Danny Meyer. Death to All Sacred Cows puts it, “Danny Meyer certainly believes in treating the customer well….He just happens to think that the customer second and that his employees are the most important part of his business.” 

Meyer once said in the in an article in Time Magazine, “If you are devoted to your staff and can promise them much more than a paycheck, something to believe in, you will get the best service for your customers.”

Yvon Chouinard, founder of Patagonia clothing company, titled his book, Let My People Go Surfing: The Education of a Reluctant Businessman, If I were to write a book it might be titled Let My People Go To The Bathroom.

Give your teachers the best and they will give your students the best.

Give your students the best and they will change the world.

Education Innovation