Session Description

In the one-room schoolhouses of the past, community was narrowly defined, composed of students from several families over a limited geographical area. However, in today's digital world of connective technologies, community is not necessarily defined by geography but by shared, common interest. Accordingly, today's student has the power to leverage these technologies to connect and interact with people and ideas in a way that was unimaginable ten years ago. Join David Jakes as he explores the critical questions that surround the use of these technologies for teaching and learning, and how they can be leveraged to build and sustain learning communities that are independent of time, space, and place.

It is now easy to create a globally-connected classroom.

What happens when schools and classrooms become permeable?

Should we help kids understand the value of collaborative and collective intelligence (idea from Miguel Guhlin)

But what does this mean?  Should the learning be transparent, and made available to people around the world?  How does that change the classroom dynamic?

What kinds of competencies do you want your students to exhibit?  Do you want help students become self-directed learners, capable of working collaboratively in a digital environment where time and distance are relatively meaningless?

At the heart of the global one-room schoolhouse is the capability to network, and build networks.

With Web 2.0, that is fundamentally easy to do.  Sometimes it's not so easy to do inside schools.  Roadblocks exist.

How do we frame working with global collaboration within the context of best practice?

8 Factors of School Readiness:

1.  VISION.  What do you want learning to look like?  Do you have a clear picture of that within the context of connective technologies?  How permeable do you want your classrooms to be?  Do you know what that statement suggests? Will you have open tools or will you be in a walled garden?  What type of communities do you wish to develop? Will they be local, global, or a combination of both?

2.  READINESS.  Do you know what these tools do?  How knowledgeable are you?  How knowledgeable is your leadership?  Your teachers?  Do they have an understanding of how the connective technologies of Web 2.0 can alter the learning landscape of classrooms?  What is your comfort level with change?  How comfortable are teachers with change?  Are your students ready for this?  And how do you know?  Is your school community ready?

3.  EXPECTATIONS.  Will the use of connective technologies be expected?  Or will it be a choice?  Will it be goal-based, or left up to individual teachers to implement?  Are you interested in systemic change or pockets of innovation?  Will you have a scope and sequence that consciously and creatively matches skill development with grade level?  What type of impact are you looking for? Individual impacts on teachers, classroom impacts, or organizational impacts, or a combination of all three?

4.  LITERACY.  Have you gone beyond tools to think more deeply about these technologies?  Do you understand how these tools relate to literacy?  Have you considered the difference between 21st century literacies and 21st century skills? Are you focusing on blogs and wikis, or are you focusing on writing, communication, and collaboration?  Are you familiar with 21st Century Skills, NETS S, NETS T and NETS A, and NCTE 21st Century Literacies?

5.  BARRIERS. What types of barriers currently exist to implementation?  Have you identified these?  What is the relationship between the curriculum department and the technology department?  Are your instructional technology personnel associated with technology or curriculum?

6.  IMPLEMENTATION:  Do teachers have the skills required to be successful in this new kind of learning environment?  What types of professional development will you have?  Will you require teachers to live these skills first?  Are your teachers networked?  What skills do they have?  How do you know?  What kind of policies do you have in place?  When is the last time you re-did your AUP?  Shouldn't your acceptable use policy be reframed in the context of responsible use?  How do you rollout new technologies?  Do you have a procedure?  Have you identified a common set of tools?  Will you rely on free online tools or will you host solutions yourself, which are typically open source?  If so, have you considered Total Cost of Ownership (TCO)?

7.  SUSTAINABILITY AND GROWTH:  Do you have a plan for locating, considering and evaluating new technologies as they emerge?  Do you have targets?  How will you know when you get there?  Have you built in periodic reviews of your progress, and do you have methodologies for course correction identified?  Do you understand that this process is continual?  How will you be ready for the next step, to be propelled forward.

8.  ASSESSMENT AND EVALUATION:  How will you assess the impact of the tools on learning?  Of course we evaluate learning all the time, but will you evaluate the value of the technology to that learning?  For example how well did blogging actually support the development of different types of writing and communication?  It's time to assess not only the student learning but the impact of the technology on the learning!

The concept of best practice usually illicits some strong emotions from educators; what exactly is best practice.  Best practice means different things to different people.  With that in mind, here is my perspective of a framework or scaffold that can help school districts implement learning technologies appropriately.  Again, my perspective; yours might be different.  Read my blog post on this topic.

1. Does the use of the technology support a fundamental literacy that the school believes in? This can range from a holistic literacy like writing to content specific objectives for a particular course. For example, digital storytelling first and foremost seeks to improve the ability of students to write.
2. Does the use of technology add value to the lesson? Does the technology extend the lesson to a place that could not be achieved unless the technology was included? For example, using the process of digital storytelling also helps students learn visual literacy skills, project management skills, network skills, and how to use media in an ethical way. If the products are shared, then the student can potentially write for a world-wide audience, and that's a much different experience than writing for a teacher.
3. How will I structure the lesson so that the technology fulfills the first two criteria? For example, the time-tested methodology of preparing a narrative, developing a script, storyboarding, locating imagery and other media, and then building and sharing the story is a truly effective methodology or framework for effective digital storytelling.  What pedagogical process will I use to structure the lesson?
4. How do I know what I did works?  How will I assess the outcomes, both from a student perspective (did they learn what they were supposed to learn?) and from a lesson design perspective (did the technology perform as anticipated, did the pedagogical process work as intended, and did I meet Criteria 1 and 2?).  How will I use assessment data to improve what I do?

Examples of community-building in action, from a classroom and global perspective.

AP Calculus-Darren Kuropatwa

Upload:  Barbara Barreda and Clarence Fisher

Ning and Wikis:  Elizabeth Helfant

Life Round Here Project: Chris Craft

Advice Through Ethereal Walls |Consumer Math | Darren...again