Horizon.K12 2009

The Horizon.K12 2009 report was recently issued by the New Media Consortium. I wrote about the process involved in producing this report back in January and thought Infinite Thinking Machine readers would be interested in the final product. Post your reactions and observations in the comments section of this blog! I'll be talking about this report on EdTechTalk's Seedlings web cast with Alice Barr, Cheryl Oakes, and Bob Sprankle on Thursday, March 26.

Horizon.K12 2009

View more presentations from New media Consortium.

Friday Five from Wee Web Wonders

This week's Friday Five come from a group of stellar students from Sahuarita Intermediate School and their rock star teacher, Dr. Jackie Gerstein.






In my recent visit to Arizona, the colors of the flowering cacti, were a notable and inspiring contrast amidst the sparse and arid dessert backdrop- gaining my respect for all that not only survives, but thrives within the parameters of the Southwestern U.S. In a similar fashion, the vibrant classroom of Dr. Jackie Gerstein and her students, was exciting and inspiring against a backdrop of daily newspaper articles featuring stories of budget woes by surrounding Arizona schools, aging computers, inadequate bandwidth, and exhausted supplies where students are bringing in printer ink and paper from home to be able to continue using classroom printers.

Within minutes of arriving at Sahuarita Intermediate School, both Dr. Peggy George and I, we were greeted by two very poised 5th grade students who lead us to a classroom filled with evidence of constructivist learning- a fertile ground for nurturing the infinite thinking machine.

Every student was fully engaged in activities that challenged them to take charge of their leaning. One student was putting the finishing touch on a miniature piano made of craft materials, while her partner was busy programming Pico Cricket sound sensors to play the melody they had composed as part of an interactive digital story they were writing. Another was demonstrating how the hot Arizona sun could be used as solar power in a windmill created with legos. Two fifth grade boys huddled around an aging computer debating the plot of the digital story they were writing using Tikatok's online book publishing site. At other computer stations, students were exploring Tux Paint – an open source software. Others were using the forums in Think.com to critically analyze the potential of Web 2.0 sites for learning. Storyboards and backdrops made of legos, clay, science kits, and other craft materials filled tables and shelves, each to be used with student's original writing in a long term digital storytelling project.

One classroom wall was lined with student created newspapers as evidence that the students had developed interviewing skills to learn more about each other. Another wall was lined with colorful 3-D representations of FIVE word questions that was to guide a self directed research project. In the middle of it all hung a student created hand painted Wordle that captured the essence of the type of learning that filled their day and avatars of the students who drove that learning. The avatars were enlarged versions that the students had traced and colored of the actual avatars these students use to safely participate in collaborative learning environments outside their classroom using a variety of Web 2.0 tools made available to them through their classroom wiki- Wee Web Wonders. Here are just five of the many web sites we saw student using during our visit with Dr. Gerstein and her incredible infinite thinkers.

1. http://www.tikatok.com/

When we arrived in Jackie's classroom, students were using Tikatok to write and
publish their stories. Teachers can set up classroom accounts and manage their
own student accounts. The site includes story starters, prompts, and
collaborative options. Students can share the stories with coauthors, family,
friends. Parents can order printed copy of the students book in hardcover or
softcover.

2. http://www.shelfari.com/

Jackie's students proudly showed us the books they've read using Shelfari
bookshelves. They have become experts at putting widgets that display the books
they read on their project wiki. They also use the site to read reviews of books
or write their own.

3. http://atlantis.crlt.indiana.edu/

During computer time, some of Jackie's students collaborate with students all
over the world in a 3D environment helping the council of the virtual world,
Atlantis, solve problems impacting its water, air, health, and animal life. As
an active member of the Second Life Educational Committee, its easy to
understand how Jackie found Quest Atlantis a very compatible technology tool to
her constructivist teaching.

4. http://www.think.com/

As I walked around the classroom, I noticed one of my favorite sites, Think.com,
on some computer screens. The students were using this very safe social
networking site to post reviews about new web 2.0 links their teacher had
posted. The site is especially supportive of teachers, parents, and students who
want a more private place to collaborate. Oracle has very stringent rules about
participation and offers teachers a setting that allows their students to
interact ONLY with those from the same school. Oracle also checks each teacher's
credential and school affiliation before activating accounts. Teachers are
required to carefully monitor their classroom Think accounts.

5. http://www.mystudiyo.com/

One of the most impressive examples of learning and student leadership I
witnessed during my visit was students using the projector to lead their
classmates through group participation in student designed quizzes about the
topics they were studying. Students used My Studiyo to create quizzes, embed
them on their research wikipages, and then facilitated group decision making
about the answers to each question as they proceeded through the quiz using the
classroom projector. These student presentations were far from the traditional
student presentation. They had mastered the concept of “engaging” the audience.
It was obvious that they had witnessed good modeling from their teacher – Dr.
Gerstein who doesn't know the meaning of “sage on the stage” when it comes to
teaching. These students are defintiely in charge of their learning, and their
teacher is a superb 'designer of learning environments.

I wish I could share all of the great ideas and websites, I learned about during my visit to Sahuarita Intermediate School, but I think I will follow Jackie's philosophy of letting the students be the guides and leaders. Follow their evolving project pages at weewebwonders.pbwiki.com/
and see for yourself the evidence of student centered learning, and if that doesn't blow you away, brace yourself and visit their fantastic role model of self-directed learning by visting Dr. Gerstein's own learning space.



P.S. Thanks to my Personal Learning Network powered by powerful Web 2.0 tools like Twitter, I had the pleasure of meeting both Jackie and Peggy face to face and you have the opportunity to meet their students virtually. Special thanks to Jackie for inviting us into her classroom, and for Peggy to driving all the way from Phoenix to join me in this visit.

Friday 5: A Tale of Two Conferences

With the advent of new communication technologies, it's now possible for educators to participate in professional development by virtually following conference events. While face to face interactions are still important and clearly aren't going away, people can virtually be in several places at once. This occurred last week as Illinois Computing Educators held its annual conference in St. Charles, Illinois, and simultaneously, the National Association of Independent Schools conference took place in nearby Chicago. For some educators, this presented a conundrum of which conference to attend, particularly because keynote presentations at each conference were great draws. Fortunately, through the use of blogs, wikis, streaming video and Twitter, people were able to get a flavor of each conference. And, records created by these tools are still available for virtual and real attendees to revisit as they try to absorb the plethora of information that came out of each event.

I think this is the future of conferences and it is to the benefit of organizations to plot their social media strategy. I personally am more likely to attend a conference in person after getting a taste online and, if people will be physically present that I've added to my personal learning network via these aforementioned tools. Social media is not be an alternative to a conference; the use of such tools helps disseminate important information and spotlights an organization. In this open source, long-tailed world, this is the way to go.

This week's Friday 5 is more like a Friday 9; take a look at some of the material that came out of the ICE and NAIS conferences. Dig around and you might find some useful links and food for thought!

1) ICE web site
http://www.iceberg.org/

2) ICE conference ning
http://myiltce.ning.com/

3) ICE conference wiki
http://iceconference.wiki.zoho.com/

Within this great wiki maintained by Scott Weidig and Luke Allen, you can find streaming video archives of keynote sessions as well as presenter handouts.

4) ICE conference twitterstream
http://tinyurl.com/icetwitter

5) NAIS Web Site
http://tinyurl.com/nais2009

6) NAIS bloggers
KaTrina Wentzel http://blogs.moundsparkacademy.org/nais2009/
Jonathan Martin http://21k12blog.net/
Michael Obel-Omia http://publiusrex.wordpress.com/

7) Sarah Hanawald's liveblogging of the NAIS conference
http://gdsmstech.blogspot.com/2009/02/nais-09-live-reports.html

Sarah used CoverItLive to liveblog for her colleagues back home.

8) NAIS twitterstream
http://tinyurl.com/naistwitter

9) Independent School Educators' Network
http://isenet.ning.com/

Another great online community in which educators can connect. A great deal can be learned from the private school sector and vice versa!

Friday Five: Create, Express, Learn with Primary Source Material

This week, I'd like to share some powerful web resources that use the increasing amount of primary source materials online and have the power to engage students using digital tools and their desire to express themselves.

As an educator who believes in teaching students to honor intellectual property, I'm always looking for sites that include materials students can use to create multimedia projects. Fair use guidelines gives us some flexibility in using multimedia inside our classroom. But in the world of Web 2.0, the audience for these media projects has expanded outside our classroom, with more and more interest in publishing for an authentic global audiences. All one has to do is look at the popularity of You Tube and other video sharing sites to know that young people are highly motivated to express themselves to audiences outside the classroom. Thanks to the Creative Commons license, more and more materials are available online that students can use to create and publish their multimedia productions for a global audience.

This week, I'd like to share 5 sites that go one step further than Creative Commons materials. These sites host primary source materials and encourage young people to use them to produce and publish their own creations. Some even include online tools to help students with the process.

1. http://www.remixamerica.org/

This site was created by a voter registration organization who wanted to keep the young people they registered involved and engaged. To do this, they provided them with free online tools and raw materials through “America Now” and “America Then” playlists. Remix America encourages students to draw parallels between the present and the past. They hope that viewing seminal speeches and events from American History will inspire young people to express themselves and take action on the issues that matter to them.

Teachers around America have stumbled across Remix America and incorporated the materials in their classroom. One teacher asked her students to take a quote from Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar and apply it to the 2008 election. Another asked her students to create PSAs on the issues that matter most to them – censorship, war, civil rights. You can browse through “Favorite Remixes” section to see some of these great remixes!

2. http://www.nasa.gov/audience/foreducators/diypodcast/
   
   NASA has done something similar to engage students in science, technology, engineering and mathematics. The NASA's Do-It-Yourself Podcast activity provides students with audio clips, video, and photos related to space. Students can use the NASA materials to produce their own audio or video productions.
   

3. http://www.primaryaccess.org/

PrimaryAccess is a web-based tool that offers teachers and students access to digital images and other materials that enable them to construct movies using tools provided by the web site.

Although many of the primary source materials are photograph and still images, the tools provided on the website allows students to add motions to create a movie effect. I first learned about Primary Access while listening to Glen Bull's presentation during the 2008 K-12 online conference.

4. http://take2videos.org
   
   This project is slightly different in that it not only provides the raw materials for students to produce a video, but also complete an advocacy event. The project requires schools to register and the topic is more focused. According to the project web site “Each year, Take 2 shoots 2-3 months of high definition footage in a different conflict region and creates extensive supporting and background documentation then licenses the package free of charge to qualified educational institutions. Participating schools will complete one small task to help grow Take 2’s infrastructure and undertake at least one advocacy event upon completion of their projects
   
   
5. http://www.kitzu.com/

   This website is not yet populated with lots of materials, but has promise in offering students free, educational, copyright-friendly media resources. According to the project website “Students and teachers around the world can access pre-made collections, or "kits," of various digital assets - still images, background music, narratives, video and text. Each kit is built around a common theme, or curricular topic. For students, this becomes the construction paper of the 21st century --allowing them to create reports and projects filled with rich, immersive media for communicating their vision of whatever subjects they chose. AS they master the technology, they will progress from building projects with supplied materials to projects where they find or create their own resources -- a strategy that results in truly authentic assessment as measured by the projects produced."

Have you discovered similar collection of primary source raw materials and tools that encourage students to create and express themselves? I'd love to find more of these.

Friday 5: 21st Century Skills

This week, it's my turn to come up with a thoughtful list of resources for teachers, and I have chosen the theme of 21st Century Skills. Recently, in the main stream press and in the edublogger/eduTwitter world,  there has been debate about the validity of such a skill set. This particular blog post will not do justice to this ongoing argument, but I do have one observation to add. 

I recently had the amazing opportunity to travel to Singapore to visit schools and assist with the 2008 Apple Distinguished Educator Asia Institute. A more comprehensive blog post about my experiences will follow one day (I'm still mulling over everything I experienced), but I was really struck by the attitudes of the people I encountered. It seemed to me, from my conversations with administrators and teachers from Singaporean and international schools, that many agreed with the basic idea that students and teachers today are require to employ a different mindset and set of abilities in this changing world. There was no ongoing debate; it was accepted that education had to change in light of this, and that this change happened through collaboration and exploration of global best practices. 

In my opinion, U.S educators need to stop arguing semantics on this topic and need to get down to the business of educating our peers about teaching and learning in the 21st century. Here we are, nearly 10 years into this new millennium, poised to start making meaningful, substantive change happen. Let's get on with it, people! We've got hard work to do!

That said, I'm off my soapbox and I recommend the following resources for investigating the idea of 21st Century Skills:

1) The Global Achievement Gap by Tony Wagner (Tony's website: http://schoolchange.org)

http://tinyurl.com/globalachievementgap

2) The Partnership for 21st Century Skills

http://www.21centuryskills.org 

3) 21st Century Literacies: Tools for Reading the World

http://www.noodletools.com/debbie/literacies

4) 21st Century Learning

http://tinyurl.com/21stcenturylearning

5) The Emergent 21st Century Teacher, Mark Treadwell

http://www.i-learnt.com

6) The Metiri Group: What's So Different About the 21st Century?

http://www.metiri.com/features.html

Feel free to offer any other recommendations in the comments here!

Future of Education Interview Series

(Cross-posted from SteveHargadon.com)

My "Future of Education" interview series is moving forward in full swing now, and you can see the details at FutureofEducation.com.  Tomorrow (Wednesday, February 11, 2009) I interview Julie Evans, the CEO of Project Tomorrow, a national education nonprofit organization (formerly known as NetDay), about what has been learned from Speak Up, the annual national research project facilitated by Project Tomorrow. The Speak Up data represents the largest collection of authentic, unfiltered stakeholder input on education, technology, 21st century skills, schools of the future and science instruction. Education, business, and policy leaders report using the data regularly to inform federal, state, and local education programs. A copy of the "top ten" report is attached to the discussion page at the discussion page at Future of Education. Join me for the interview and a Q & A session--details at the bottom of this post.

On the docket for upcoming interviews are:

• Erin Reilly, the Research Director for Project New Media Literacies (NML) (more information)
• Keith Krueger, CEO of the Consortium for School Networking (CoSN)
• John Palfrey, co-director of the Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard University, on his book Born Digital: Understanding the First Generation of Digital Natives. (In conjunction with the PBS - Classroom 2.0 Webinar Series.)
• Gary Stager, progressive educator and all-around gadfly
• Bud Hunt, Ben Wilkoff, and Karl Fisch on "Learning 2.0" and their annual conference on the topic
• Mike Huffman and Laura Taylor on the bold experiment in Indiana with Open Source Software

And we're just getting started... :)  Recordings of previous events with Tom Friedman, DonTapscott, and Carol Broos are also available on the Future of Education site.  Hope you'll consider joining our conversations!

Julie Evans Interview Information:

Date: Wednesday, February 11, 2009

Time: 5pm Pacific / 8pm Eastern / 1am GMT (next day) (international times here)

Location: In Elluminate. Log in at https://sas.elluminate.com/m.jnlp?password=M.05AE98D09503B33735A7E36EC6A874 The Elluminate room will be open up to 30 minutes before the event if you want to come in early.

To make sure that your computer is configured for Elluminate, please visithttp://www.elluminate.com/support.  The interview will be recorded and the recordings placed in the discussion page at Future of Education linked above. 

Lucy and Lucie's Friday Five - Cellphones in Education

Earlier this school year, I decided to follow in the footsteps of fellow educator, Lucy Gray, by posting a weekly list of websites, called the Friday Five, within my school. Lucy started the Friday Five tradition on her website back in 2006. This list has turned out to be one the most successful professional development methods I've tried this year. It seems like in a world where we are overwhelmed by choice, "more" is not always better. Just ask Barry Schwartz, author of Paradox of Choice. In a world, where the cookie aisle at your store has 285 types of cookies and Google yields millions of results for most queries, educators are welcoming a "short" list of websites related to a theme.

Therefore, Lucy and I have decided to pool our efforts to bring this Friday Five feature to the readers of Infinite Thinking Machine. We hope you will enjoy a 'short' list of five or so websites around a topic or theme related to using technology to help you shape your students into Infinite Thinking Machines.



This week's list comes on the heel of the Horizon 2009 report's predictions, and includes links ranging from broad predictions of the role of cellphones in our future, ways to use them in education, and reminders of the need for increased discussions about safety around their use.
Photo Credit: Flickr Creative Commons: Deeknow

1. 2009 Horizon Report » One Year or Less: Mobile
   wp.nmc.org/horizon2009/chapters/mobiles/
   
   The whole Horizon Report is a MUST read for anyone interested in technology, change, new media, and education. Take note of the biggest prediction for ONE year or LESS: MOBILE
   An accompanying web site focusing these issues on education is1.
   http://horizon.nmc.org/k12/Main_Page
   
   
2. From Toy to Tool: Cell Phones in Learning
   www.cellphonesinlearning.com/
   (and related interviews or podcast with the author of this site)
   
   Cell Phones in Education - An Interview with Liz Korb - Interviews -
   cellphones.org/blog/interviews/cell-phones-in-education-an-interview-with-liz-korb
   
   Cell Phone Books - Reading Is Reading :: The Education Business Blog
   www.educationbusinessblog.com/2008/02/cell_phone_books_reading_is_re.html
   
   
   
3. Good Web Post from Wes Fryer with thoughtful insights and resources
   http://www.speedofcreativity.org/2008/01/30/opening-minds-about-cell-phones-for-learning/
   
   
   
4. Guidelines and Instructional Uses for Cellphones in Education
   
   http://teachdigital.pbwiki.com/cellphones
   Explore reasons some school districts are embracing the use of cell phones for learning both inside and outside the classroom and examine specific guidelines school districts are utilizing for student cell
   phones.
   
   
5. E-School News article about risky behaviors by students related to cell phone use
   http://www.eschoolnews.com/news/top-news/news-by-subject/safety-security/index.cfm?i=54064
   A good article in Eschool News about how schools are handling some of
   the more recent riskier behaviors related to cell phones.
   

I hope this collection of sites is useful to those of you currently discussing cellphone use in your school community. And Lucy and I look forward to bringing you next week's Friday Five. Feel free to offer your own related websites in the comments, or suggest some topics for future Friday Fives.