If you urgently need me...

If you are among the 1 or 2 people who actually keep up with my blog I can be reached on this beach from now until April 9th. You will find me there with a small blond boy, covered in sand and a baby girl doubling as a sand monster. I will be the one with a cold drink, a big smile on my face, and sand between my toes anxiously awaiting the arrival of the daily breeze so I can join my friend Mark and we cruise the turquoise waters of Las Terrenas with kites fully powered.

If I don't see you there, I guess I'll meet you back in the blogosphere on the 9th.

Nos vemos y cuidate!

In Response to Warlick's Question

Please look over at my colleague, Mark Picketts' response to Warlick's posting You just Got the Nod...

Some interesting changes that will take place here at Carol Morgan in the near future that should take us a step or two closer to having a school facility to handle the demands of the 21st century classroom.

Literature circles

This video about conducting literature circles is on Teacher Tube and was made by several of our elementary and middle school staff. Check it out and pass it on to your language arts teachers, reading/writing specialists, or anyone else who might find it helpful. It is a long video so it might take a while to fully load depending on your Internet connection.

Alan November Interviews Dr. Yong Zhao: Part I

I highly recommend listening to the newest interview on Alan November's blog if you can find the time. Some very good forward thinking and analysis about what American schooling is missing in his interview with Dr. Yong Zhao, what we are up against in terms of competing with Chinese and Indian schools. Anyway, I especially found the portions about students as contributors to communities a refreshing idea and one that i have been tossing around for a while. What would a school that based itself on student centered community projects and businesses look like. The kids would come to "work" not "school", they would contribute to a need of the community, they would learn while doing. Certainly this is not a radical thought, but getting there seems like a radical journey from the type of school that is the norm in the world today. My fourth graders for the last two weeks have been working on a business plan of their own that they will then have to execute. Most are selling baked goods but some are offering services. I really have gotten into this project with the kids and I think this is exactly the kind of project we need to see more of to make learning relevant to our students. My favorite student idea is offering the service of waiting in the lunch line for a small fee for students so they can go play . Who wouldn't want to pay that so they could max their recess time instead of standing in the cafeteria waiting for food. And, as the student pointed out (a fourth grader mind you), "there is no overhead in offering a service Mr. D., so I think we can get the most profits that way."

Perfect.

Warlick's got me thinking

Warlick's post a while ago has had me really thinking for the last week or so about my role and my title. Apparently I was not the only one either since the post "Are Computers a Tool?" has had 11 comments. This post started out with the following passage

There are a number of phrases that we use in our ed tech speak that, though useful in some contexts, might actually do more harm than good. One is Integrating Technology or Technology Integration. I’ve talked this one down for years, that it isn’t about integrating technology, but integrating the digital skills that are a crucial part of contemporary literacy. Integrate the skills, and the tech has to come along.

What has me thinking is this idea of Technology Integration and the notion of it carrying a negative stigma, or rather an unwelcome inferred message. I guess my problem comes when I look at my own role at my school, Carol Morgan. As the Elementary Tech. Facilitator (definitely not a Tech. Integrator) it is my job to meet with my grade level teams and to implement technology into their respective unit or lesson plans for a given cycle. However, I'm wondering, isn't that integration? Is it so bad if it is? Most of what I am doing is taking the traditional teaching lessons the teachers are doing in class and adding a tech. element to them . We are making students use digital skills to a task that could also easily be done with paper and pencil. So, am I facilitating or integrating? The computer and the selected program(s) we use for any given lesson is THE tool to take a traditional lesson to the next level but the deeper question that begs asking is what is happening in the classroom? If the computer is THE tool, then shouldn't the kids be on the computer for all lessons? Shouldn't every lesson, every day be about using Digital Skills? And, if this tool shouldn't be integrated but rather just used as if it was the same as a pencil (we don't have pencil integration specialists) than what would that look like? Would the classrooms here be 1:1, would every teacher here have advanced training/degrees in Educational Technology? If the computer is THE tool than what is the need of the whiteboard, the television, the desk, the book, or the pencil? What is the use of walls or the institution, why not just use the computer from home? Certainly I am not saying I am in favor of getting rid of "schools" as we know them now (walls, rooms, etc.)-not yet anyway, but where does this notion of the computer being IT, THE TOOL, THE ONE and ONLY stop? Furthermore, I'm not sure about your school but mine is no where close to being ready for a 1:1 classroom in the high school let alone in the elementary. As Jamie McKenzie often points out, it is less about the hardware, software and wires but more about pedagogy, questioning, and using the computer as a tool where and when it best fits.

At the end of the day for me, If I can integrate tech into what would be a standard paper and pencil lesson that also is getting kids to think critically, collaborate, and carry on conversation about the project or process and use their digital skills to accomplish a task then I go home feeling good.

I thought this blog would help me decide what to make my title in my signature on my outlook messages, but I am still going around in circles like I was when I started this post. I think this week I will settle on Jeff Dungan, Digital Skills Integration Facilitator Specialist. Yep, that should cover it.

1001 Project Update

What a long strange trip it has been....but we have made it. George, my third grade teacher participating in the 1001 Flat World Tales Project has posted his stories to the CMS Elementary Wiki. I will say this, I am impressed how George and his kids went about this project. George seeing an opportunity to tie the project into his curriculum had his kids explore "known" myths that the kids were familiar with. After partnering George with our writing specialist, Cassia they had kids dissect myths and determine what the "anatomy" of a myth is. From here kids were able to invent their own myths about certain aspects of Do Culture, Music, etc. Truly I am impressed and I think this pushed George's third graders to think a little differently about their writing. Did I mention the art to go along with the writings? Each student also has contributed an illustration of their story and Iminican Republic Geography, have not seen those but with the imagination I saw in the students as I looked over some of their myth stories, I no doubt will be equally impressed with those as well.

I will be honest about the next step of revision. I do feel a little intimidated for our kids being a grade lower than the kids we are sharing with and being the only non-native English speaking elementary class in the 1001 Project. But, I guess that is part of the experience and will hopefully be a cultural learning experience for our kids to read what native speaking children write like and vice versa on the part of the classes in the U.S.

Anyway, I have to now contact Terry Smith and Dean Meyer and let them know that kids can start revising our kids and to let them know that we will be doing the same for their students.

I'll keep you posted...whoever you are.

A Call to Question

I finally have found some time to update so here goes it. First some updates. I finally have a class here working diligently to catch up and get their 1001 Flat World Tales stories Posted. I have had a lot of contact with Terry Smith (Missouri) and Dean Meyer (Michigan) about pairing students up for collaboration and revisions. The wikis for this have been working well, and I have enjoyed setting up a wiki for the Carol Morgan School elementary classes. After playing around with it, a little I found it very easy to edit the navigation page, to build internal and external links, and to customize the site. I have a few ideas for future workshops for the CMS staff here kicking around now. George tells me that his kids will have their stories up and ready by the middle of next week and it is neat to see his kids engaged in the writing process. I also paired George up with our elementary writing specialist and she is pretty excited and is tossing around the idea of getting some of the younger elementary kids going on it as well. It was fun to see her get more and more excited as the details of the project became clearer and clearer. I think that is the nature of these international collaborative projects that once you understand how special the learning interactions can be, it is hard to think just inside your own classroom walls anymore.

Other related but different news is that I have led one of my 5^th grade classes into the Comparing Our World project that Chris Craft started. Along with Kim Cofino’s class and Chris’ class we will be doing a cultural survey of our respective cultures based on aspects such as dress, food, traditions, sports, economics, etc. While this project is not as extensive as the other cultural project Kim is doing, International Teen Life, this will serve as a nice smaller scale project as we head towards the end off the school year. God, did I say that? It is hard to believe that there are only 2 ½ months left in the school year. It was nice to be able to Skype with Chris this week and toss around ideas and logistics to make his project even stronger. Thanks Chris for being open. Among some of those ideas were formation of some good essential questions to drive student learning and the outcomes for the project. It is our hope that with these in place, the reflection piece of this project will pack more punch for the students and will enable them to see the “bigger picture’ of why these types of international, cross cultural collaborations are essential for learning in the 21^st Century.

This all brings me to my final point which I just touched on above, questioning. I am sure many of my readers (do I even have any??? Who cares I’m on a roll) are familiar with the work of Jaime McKenzie and his push for using questioning to stimulate higher level thinking and problem solving skills in our classrooms. As a science teacher I embraced much of what he preached and was happy with my kid’s results. With the right questions, kids are forced to actually think, and we get away from the regurgitative (I don’t think this is a word but I like it so it will stay) state that educations still seems content to languish in. We also get away from having to use plagiarism sites such as turn it in.com to check the originality of student work. With good essential questions there typically is no “right” answer ands they push the students to synthesize information that is presented and to form and opinion or viewpoint based on knowledge. I think this falls in line with what Clay Burell has been also discussing with how teachers might be the death of blogging. Really it all comes back to good educational design in the classroom, starting with the teacher asking him or herself, what is the essential understandings(s) I am trying to reach with this, blog, wiki, podcast,etc. Before we encourage staff to take this technological leap and to use these technologies, we first have to make sure that sound pedagogy is behind it. After determining essential understandings we then should consider what are the big, open ended, questions that we can ask our students to facilitate the higher level, critical thinking skills that we want our students to posses when they leave our classrooms. I feel without these aspects to any unit, assignment, etc. we are simply teaching traditionally, herding our students, and these technologies as Clay notes, simply become more technologically advanced methods of homework collection.