21st Century Ephemera

I despise Animoto’s use as evidence of learning in the classroom. It produces a veneer that implies intent but requires none. It allows people to put on the facade that their students are doing intelligent work. They seem to trick even themselves.

That being said, I finally came up with a use that would require some thought. Pretend Animoto is an author with intent and intelligence. Analyze the choices in image juxtaposition, camera angles etc. Really break it down as if the director had some control and thought behind all the choices. You could do this with random videos from the showcase, have students contribute their own images etc. It’d also be fun to make comparisons between two auto generated versions of the same images. Which film was produced later in the artist’s career? What experiences caused the change in filming techniques.

A simple idea but it does require some thought in a process otherwise devoid of intellect.

cc licensed flickr photo shared by bionicteaching
This is pretty simple and likely to be pretty fun. It probably fits best in an English classroom¹

I’m not sure how I’d start this . . . I think I’d go this route. I’d show the kids a bunch of article headlines and quotes complaining about the deterioration of today’s society and how today’s music sucks. This is really just to get them riled up and interested in proving they’re not the brain dead people being described.

The kids pick their favorite favorite song and go find the lyrics.

Then you have the kids run they lyrics through something like this site which calculates reading levels. This one isn’t great for this purpose but it’ll do for this demonstration. We just want some sort of number that quantifies the sophistication of the lyrics.

The challenge for the kids is to increase the reading level as high as possible while maintaining the spirit of the song and it’s rhyme scheme (if any).

So they have to really figure out what makes the reading level go up or down and then apply what they learn. They’ll be working with vocabulary, sentence structure etc. The students will have to think about the essence of the song and struggle with the subtleties of word choice.

cc licensed flickr photo shared by bionicteaching

I saw a presentation today delivered by Jason Tester (Institute for the Future). It was one of the more interesting presentations I’ve seen in a while.

The whole presentation was framed around superhero skills for the immediate future. The names are a little silly but he had some fresh websites and I think the ideas are solid. Tester is not an education expert and so he didn’t try to make tight ties to how these skills play out in schools.

• mobbability -work in large groups while maintaing role, organize and collaborate with many simultaneously
• influency -ability to be persuasive in multiple social contexts
• ping quotient -measures your responsiveness to other peoples request for engagement, propensity/ ability to reach out to others via a network
• protovation -fearless innovation in rapid, iterative cycles
• open authorship -creating content for public consumption and modification
• emergensight -ability to prepare for and handle surprising results and complexity (or create the right conditions for it)
• signal noise management -filtering meaningful info patterns and commonalities from the stream of information coming into our lives
• cooperation radar -the ability to sense, almost intuitively, who would make the best collaborators on a particular task
• longbroading -thinking in terms of higher level systems, cycles, the big picture

One of the things that struck me was an art project based around emotion maps (see image above)/ I’d seen this before on Boing Boing or something but today it sparked an idea. It may be that I’ve been dealing with trying to figure out how to gather data to assess our 1:1 initiative¹ The basic idea is the artist build a GPS device that tracked people’s emotional states via some sort of skin temperature reading. So it picked up emotional highs and lows. The individual could also text in information.

Here’s what I thought would be interesting for a school. Think of the map above but done in a school. There are a variety of ways it could work even without the thermal readings and GPS data. Even if you did the data collection with simple a simple number system, you could map the people to the time codes and then to places or do it through an online database that skipped a step or two of that process. There are definitely ways to work it out.

Think of what you could do with an emotional map of your school and/or class. You overlay that data with location and various teachers/subjects/standards and you’d be able to have some really interesting conversations.

It’s late and I’ll try to make this more exact in a forth coming post on the ultimate data dashboard for educators. There’s also a fair chance I’ll post more on Tester’s presentation.

Here’s my advice.

Get your leadership on board with the same vision of what this looks like. That doesn’t mean “Yeah, P21 sounds good.” or “I like ISTE’s version.” If your administration is going to push this as something that needs to be done, they actually have to know what they’re talking about in detail. General comments about doing things 21st century style won’t cut it. The vision has to come from the top and it has to be focused on your county/school. Even if you could just apply some framework out of the box you’d lose quite a lot of value.

So now you’ve got your vision.

You’re going need to have some way to assess where you are now, otherwise there’s no way to see if you’re getting better or where you need to focus specifically. If you really think about you can make a tool that will perform a variety of functions with only minor alterations. This is a good idea for all kinds of reasons- for instance you won’t have to spend enormous amounts of time making brand new tools all the time and the commonalities will make the data more comparable and consistent. Think about observations, quick walk throughs . . .

Now you’re going to need to norm the observation tool. If not, you might as well not make one at all. As a group, each leadership member has to be able to individually look at a variety of lessons and agree on the key components that make the lesson 21st century as well as how those components rate using the tool. This is actually a really powerful and useful conversation. It’s also a great way to really test your tool before releasing it into the wild. I found it useful to hand pick lessons that illustrate issues that came up during the design of the tool. Have some best practice to evaluate but make sure you put in some examples that are contentious and that people will argue about. You might not have a lot of video lying around for people to analyze so you might browse

• iTunesU- this is the power search link but USF has some good examples as well
• From Good to Outstanding- interesting in a lot of ways
• Edutopia- some good but harder to see the actual lessons most times
• TeacherTube- last resort

You are also going to want to think hard about how you’re going to deliver this to your staff. You probably want a little sell on this, not a “Did You Know?” try to find, or make, something better and more focused on why teachers would want to change. I’d recommend doing a similar norming exercise. Get people talking and discussing what this is, how the tool works etc.

A few questions that came up for us.

• Is technology a necessary component?¹
• What is the difference between innovation and creativity?²
• How do you assess creativity/innovation?³

There’s a lot more to do but that’s not a bad start. Things get interesting when you’re assessing the data and using it to determine professional development and then how you start publicizing best practice.

When it rains, it pours snows people panic and Richmond shuts down.

Also when I find one good thing on the Internet, others often show up.

So here are minimalist TV show posters by Albert Exergian.

I’d do this for sure. It’s another in the line of restriction = creativity possibilities. The drawing skills are really low. It’s all about figuring out the essence of the novel/era/historical person and figuring out how to represent it as simply as possible. You’d have to stress what makes things modernist and really get students thinking about using color, shape etc. with as much thought as possible.

The example would be key, as would your explanation of it¹.

I ended up with this from one of the few email newsletters I find worth subscribing to – Very Short List. If you like this type of thing, it’s worth checking out.

We’re asking you to take your favourite film and re-imagine it for us in the form of a comic, within a six-frame panel (download template files). That’s the whole film, condensed into six frames.

This is another beautiful, reductionist way to analyze a book, historical figure, era, epoch or movement. I don’t see much use for math but I could also see some science possibilities.

You could pair up with an art teacher or just do it on your own. I’d have a stable of activities¹ similar to these and allow students the option to choose between them at various points.

Keep in mind, they don’t have to be drawn. Let them use photographs. They could even take their own pictures. The concept/framework is simple but don’t let it box you in.

This is the stuff I really like in history and English. It’s low work on the teacher, high processing on the students. Deciding what elements are essential is a task that requires a lot of understanding and critical thinking, then representing those ideas graphically is another level of processing.

I’m working on a history example but it’s taking too much time (and thought) to do well immediately.

I remixed¹ this video for our new specialty center which is focusing on teaching. Once you pass Obama, there’s some decent video covering students working in groups with computers, Promethean boards ², and digital probes. It might be useful to others.

I’ve got to deliver a 15 minute presentation tomorrow on what we’re doing in good ol’ HCPS with regard to 21st century skills¹. The audience is high level people from other local school districts. My goal is to let them see where we made some errors and hope they’ll then be able to avoid them. In a perfect world, I might also inspire them to try similar projects in the future with the goal of sharing both resources and expertise.

Vision

Step one, will be to discuss how we’ve tried to set a vision for what a 21st century classroom looks like. That’ll basically cover the evolution of the TIPc chart which I’ve already done here. The focus will be on the movement towards simplicity, student focus etc. I also intend to bring up the effectiveness of the TPCK model in having this discussion with teachers and administrators. It really seems to clarify things.

It’ll also be worth noting that this is now our mission statement.

Henrico County Public Schools, in partnership with the community, will inspire, empower, and educate every student to be prepared for success in the 21st century.

There are some interesting things you can read into that if you want to.

Sharing

Step two, will cover how we’ve tried to share best practice and lessons. In my opinion, this has not gone well. Despite huge amounts of time and effort we simply do not share good practice and resources effectively. If you look at the content specific links here, you’ll notice that there’s a mixture of tools used (iWeb, blogs, Dreamweaver) and that many of the sites have been abandoned. Part of the reason for abandonment has been because of a push to put all these resources into shared object repositories in SchoolSpace (our Angel CMS).

It makes sense in a lot of ways to do something different. We have tried

• intranet based systems based on a series of folder hierarchies
• web based systems built in iWeb or Dreamweaver
• shared object repositories

None of these systems really meet what I see as our total needs. One major aspect is the ability to hold conversations around specific pieces of content. The ironic thing is that this conversation is probably more valuable in terms of changing instruction than whatever piece of media inspired it, yet we do very little to encourage this type of communication. We also neglect the community and social aspects that need to be addressed, built, and continually focused on in order to get real change to happen.

So we’re trying to define what our needs are in that area.

• What kind of content do we share?
• How do we share content in ways that engage teachers?
• How do we build conversation around ideas and concepts in ways that improve teaching?
• How do we do all this in ways that are sustainable?
• How do we design things so that the best content rises to the top?
• What does the structure that does this look like?

Data

We’re doing a voluntary program that’s been titled “reflective friends.”² You can read about the process here.

Essentially, principals volunteer their school and then decide on what kind of data they want to collect on practice in their school. We meet with them and then come back with an outside team to collect that data. The data is then presented and we work with the administrators to provide support and direction

Another 21st Century Plea from Tom Woodward on Vimeo.

I have mixed feelings about making this¹. It has reached the level of mediocrity. Comments regarding ways to improve it are welcome².

This has inspired me to get moving on the mock change education video I’ve been planning for a while.

I’ll detail how it’ll be used in a later post.

This is an interview with Wiley Hunnicutt who discusses a unit she did on tolerance with 8th graders at Byrd Middle School. This particular version is for a PTA night there having that focuses on 21st century skills and technology integration.

Wiley¹ is an amazing teacher and speaks passionately and intelligently about this unit. I’d be happy to have my children in her class.

Tolerance Unit from Tom Woodward on Vimeo.

Things about this video that I don’t like.

The sound is all jacked up. We had to shoot this in a room with multiple servers running and it was incredibly noisy. I tried dropping it out but the result is pretty tinny and slightly mechanical sounding. Additionally, I learned that if you edit the audio after clipping the video it won’t apply across clips and you’ll have to edit each clip individually. I do not recommend this.

It’s not bad for one camera man (me) shooting from two cameras but it’d be nice to have some B roll to mix in. I didn’t spend as much time as I should have balancing the look of the two cameras either. The levels are not the same and that’s irritating. One of the issues is that any time I do anything to the clips shot on the 5DMKII I have to re-render and that is incredibly annoying and time consuming. That’s one reason I went with black and white. It was easier to get similar looking colors and I figured it was appropriate given the somber subject. I worry that it’s a little melodramatic though.

In the end what I really want is to splice student work, classroom shots from the project and interviews of the teacher and students into a more complete picture of the unit. That’s our next step with these videos. We’ll then put them on the web with student work samples and tag them so they fit in with our 21st century skills modules.