the Good, the Bad, & the Ugly - Group presentations and Final reflective projects

[Before you read my actual blog post: I was struck tonight that while I am able to add hyperlinks, share images and upload videos to my blog, I am expressly forbid from adding simple audio (I'm inferring). So I've tried to circumvent that using embeded code from soundcloud.com to share a new song from City and Colour (aka Canadian and Alexisonfire frontman Dallas Green). Now you can read while hearing what I heard when I wrote this.]




We've been exposed to a lot of information this term and perhaps it was only fitting that the last few weeks were dominated by two major projects. The first was a collaborative group project that (for our small group of first-year pre-service teachers) proved to be a lesson in creating content in the cloud via google docs, communicating using mobile-based apps and sharing the responsibility of a large project.

[click through the presentation here: https://t.co/FViumGDe]

I feel that we were all a little daunted by the open format of this lesson (our assignment contained a title to use for our presentation, and left the interpretation and delivery up to us), but within a week had the brunt of the data and ideas available on google Drive. One of the more difficult problems that presented itself was not so much the content itself, but rather the matter in which to present it. We discussed (face to face) whether we had an argument to make, or whether to follow a more general "The More You Know..." format (via 1980's Bill Cosby, thanks to archival footage from NBC). 

In the end, Bill won out - but that didn't stop the presentation from taking a debate-style approach at times as we often disagreed as to what was 'good', 'bad' or 'ugly'. That conversation was, interestingly to me, the beginning of a thought that I've talked about previously in another post. Our group debate focused on the positive and negatives of open-source resources such as Wikipedia, with both pros and cons raised. The short of the argument is that the internet is neither good or bad, but like any tool, highly politicized for its various low and high points. 

Our peers also made amazing presentations that utilized wiki's, back-channeling (via todaysmeet.com), and a mobile-based realtime survey. While each group made very thorough arguments, I was particularly impressed by notions of a traffic light system for Bring Your Own Device (BYOD) usage; and the wiki on 'How not to steal' - a highly valuable skill for anyone in the digital age. 

The same group behind the wiki also presented on Creative Commons - and it brought to mind that we may have a problem admitting that any idea (blog, essay, presentation) is not entirely original. I wonder if we can better support the sharing of where ideas come from, in order to teach children that it is great (and important and needed to avoid plagiarism) when using resources. Perhaps emphasizing that others will read the same material and come away with very different perspectives, that their view of that material is (in itself) unique and original? 

Finally, as part of our final assignment, each of us (in #I4Ed) presented a reflective piece about what we have learned this term. Generally, many of us utilized a piece of social media called Slideshare to upload PowerPoint-esque presentations online that contained an audio or video component. Awesome as it sounds, it was not a simple process as Slideshare required a separate recording of the audio to be uploaded, thus eliminating any work that some students had previously done with PowerPoints audio recording extension. Several of us utilized the WhatsApp chat group we had used in the previous group project to troubleshoot through the process and share tips (big thanks go out to @Affleck24 and @mslinzebraun for attempting it first!). 

While attempting to get a handle on the past nine weeks was definitely a scramble, as an exercise in reflection - before heading out into our field experiences - I feel that it was a needed assignment just to revisit everything that we had covered this semester. Archived WhatsApp chats provided both commentary and context, while blog posts became my class notes. Bookmarking of websites via diigo.com (love that diigo dates items when they are tagged!) aided hugely in adding depth to ideas from each of our presenters; while I kicked myself in the same breath for not 'favorite'ing more useful tweets. 

In Σ, much thanks goes out to Prof. Mike Nantais (pronounced na-da, for those not in the know) on behalf of a small cohort of First-Years for generally saving the semester. Looking forward to another awesome semester in the fall! Till then...

What have i learned from NicklasBaron

The future of education: on the Horizon.K12 report

The NMC Horizon Report 2011 K-12 Edition, informally known as the Horizon.K12, is this massive international collaborative report that not only produces a snapshot of education trends and challenges across the world, but operates as a wiki. In order to focus the vast scope of material, the report returns just five key trends, five critical challenges and 6 practices to be aware of over in the next year, over two, and after five years. 

While it is a fairly dense, technical document - it is actually quite approachable and appears in reflection to be a great resource - so much so that I'd make the suggestion that this might be better as required reading prior to taking a course on the Internet or Technology in the today's classroom. Most handily, each section of the document is wonderfully referenced and includes detailed links regarding further reading, organizations that are implementing each trend mentioned and useful websites that the every-day pre-service teacher might utilise this upcoming semester. 

www.nmc.org

[While I found several familiar faces in the references, Northwestern Universities 'iLab Central' holds heavy promise as being a great resource for students in schools that may not have a developed science program or simply lacking some of the more expensive tools.]

I was often impressed by the forward thinking of the report, reflected in comments on digital literacy ..."[sic] is less about tools and more about thinking, and thus skills and standards based on tools and platforms have proven to be somewhat [short-lived] (p. 5)", and open content that I felt were not only inherently truthful statements, but also ones that I want to become a part of solving; such as: "Many believe that reward structures that support the sharing of work in progress, ongoing research, and highly collaborative projects, along with a broad view of what constitutes scholarly publication, are key challenges that institutions need to solve (p. 22)."

One of the more transformative ideas within the Horizon.K12 was the concept of Learning Analytics, which when paired with Personal Learning Environments, appears to me to represent the future relationship between educator and student. As classrooms shift from the one-size-fits-all, teacher-centered lecture-methodology to that of the differentiated, inquiry model, the role of teachers (I feel) will increasingly be that of the guide. We are all well aware that the best teaching happens in a one-on-one environment, but outside of highly funded private contexts that situation is unattainable for (the 99% of) students. Yet with increased learning analytics of student behaviour, the ability of a single teacher to first understand, and then guide the learning of individuals students appears to be ever more possible.  In Σ, as knowledge becomes ever more accessible to all students via advances in technology, connections to the internet and the rapid expansion of content a la open-source resources and creative commons, our role as knowledge-holders will decrease exponentially. That does not mean that we will be replaced 'hole(s) in the walls', but rather our role will be to teach ways of learning and critical skills needed to to sift and make meaning of all that information.

Perhaps we should be a litte skeptical about Mitra's Hole in the Wall ideas: ow.ly/izh4L
— Chris Lehmann (@chrislehmann) March 8, 2013

[For those that don't feel like reading through the report, "Learning analytics loosely joins a variety of data gathering tools and analytic techniques to study student engagement, performance, and progress in practice, with the goal of using what is learned to revise curricula, teaching, and assessment in real time. Building on the kinds of information generated by Google Analytics and other similar tools, learning analytics aims to mobilize the power of data-mining tools in the service of learning and embrace the that dynamic learning environments can generate (p. 7)."]

Ps. Not related to the above, but I'd like touch on something that I found amazing:

WHO from Bangladesh is reading my blog? From Indonesia? From Venezuela?

show & tell with Socialcam

  

My first attempt at both video-blogging and showcasing the Socialcam app. Much thanks to Mike Nantais for introducing us/me to Darren Kuropatwa who uses this app for his WhileWalking series on youTube.

on great TED Ed videos and questionable Vimeo mini-doc's

The first video that I'd like to share comes from a TED-EdB Best Flip lesson plan titled 'The Dawn of Art' by Genevieve Von Petzinger. The video shows ancient paintings recorded at Chauvet Cave in France, and may be used with a given lesson plan that provides a few summative questions and extending resources that explain what the images are and where they came from. This video/lesson plan would work well with the Manitoba Grade 8 Social Studies curriculum about World History: Societies of the Past.

I would feel comfortable using the above video in any school setting - however my second choice would require some discretion:

I've chosen to share a video titled SKATEISTAN, a mini-documentary about a skateboarding program in Kabul, Afghanistan and its impact on the youth there amid the withdrawal of the the Taliban and the subsequent war. Do to the mature content and themes, I feel that this video would be best used in a Grade 12 Social Studies setting where students were possibly discussing global issues of social justice and human rights. However it may be possible to work this video into a younger grade level, if given proper context, due to the age of the children in the video and the possibility that it may help students here develop empathy and a common ground for children on the other side of the world: both physically and culturally.



SKATEISTAN: TO LIVE AND SKATE KABUL from Diesel New Voices on Vimeo.



Mike also put forth the question of "would you consider (if your school allows it) putting student/class made videos up on YouTube (or another site) & share? Why or why not?"

In a word: Yes! When looking at the way social media and technology are escalating, it is quite clear to me that as internet speeds increase and video capture quality increases, we will continue to see more and more people utilizing video over 'traditional' text, images or podcasts.

Since Christmas my significant-others nephews (who are nine, seven and five years old) have been using facetime to call us from the oldests iPod. If we don't answer, we often receive a 5-10 minute video of their latest Lego creation, or an examination of what their puppy dragged home. The first video's had classic too-close shots of the face (reminiscent of the Blair Witch Project) and long pauses, but since we've been talking more with them, their use has also gotten better. 

Don't be a Dodo

I can imagine that by the time the boys are graduating from high school, the majority of the way they express themselves in an ELA course will be dominated by simply speaking & representing, rather than traditional writing. I'd probably even wager that with the proliferation of speech-to-text apps that appearing, that the physical act of typing will go the way of cursive hand-writing and the Dodo bird.

What I'm long-windedly getting at is that using videos in class will be an excellent opportunity to model  appropriate and responsible use of a technology that will only become more and more prolific with time. I believe it's best to get on board now.

Darren Kuropatwa: edu (video) blogger

I have to thank Mike for sharing Darren Kuropatwa's video blog last month on Ning: it was Darren's WhileWalking video about assessment that introduced me to this Curriculum Coordinator for Digital Learning from the St. James-Assiniboia School Division in Winnipeg, MB. 

Darren's blog can be read at adifference.blogspot.com, where he shares stories like his transformative experiences at the Unplug'd educational conference, to the differences between traditional reading & writing and writing with digital text using hyperlinks, or the CJOB radio debate that sparked a blog post about the differences between curriculum and pedagogy. Overall though, what has set Darren apart from other edublogger's for me has been his narrative. He is - first and foremost - a great story teller, and it comes through in everything he speaks about. Please listen to Darren talk about the importance of the narrative and sharing stories with others:

It was actually a week or so after I first began reading through Darren's posts that I realized he hadn't published anything since last August - panicked (I had mistakenly thought that Darren's video was a one-off), it was almost another week before I watched Darren's video on assessment again and was drawn to his youTube channel, where he has continued to share his experiences via his WhileWalking series since last September.

Darren has utilized an app called socialCam to share the videoblogs he creates on his walks to work in the morning - which really showcases his well-spoken, narrative approach to philosophizing on education, technology, and the internet. His most recent vlog discusses the type of questions we can ask our students that aren't 'google-able': questions that don't have a strict knowledge component to them, but rather tap into each students thoughts and beliefs about what the answer may look like. 

While Darren speaks to a number of topics, one of things that really stands out about his blogging is that while he longer is teaching at the K-12 level, he constantly relates his ideas and reflections to (what I would call) real-world teaching moments. 

A great example of this is Darren's post on Evernote (#WhileWalking 77: Evernote For Public & Private Sharing) where he is considering the real world integration of an app into a classroom setting - and he gives a step by step guide of how he would implement it in, and then reaches out to his audience to ask how they may be using that particular piece of tech. 

It is that relatability between tech, educational philosophy and real world pedagogy that sets Darren apart from the field as an edublogger. 

podcasts for education: a case study

So - despite my chronic procrastination when it comes to publishing - I've been listening in to a daily podcast for the past week from CJSW 90.9FM out of Calgary, AB, titled: Today in Canadian History.

Covering all things Canadian (like did you know that on today in 1994, the venerable John Candy passed away?), the podcasts vary from 3-15 minutes and often feature snippets of personal stories regarding a notable birthday, the opening of a historical hockey rink, or the day Saskatchewan and Alberta became provinces in 1905.

(September 1st, in case you were wondering)

While the facts themselves have become, well, trivial - these easily digestible sound bytes provide an interesting resource to add to my social studies toolbox. Maybe something for my auditory students to listen to in the background during class work, as a novel activating strategy, or as an example of what a podcast may look like. Additionally there is a balance or fairness to each podcast, which would require students to conduct research before they put together a podcast as a piece of journalism. 

Overall, Today in Canadian History is a great model for students to follow, as it doesn't follow a particular length or structure - but aims to entertain and connect on a common level. There are cross-curricular connections to be made, primarily in the English Language Arts, and in Information & Communication Technology. 

Smarter, dumber, and the bits of grey in between

What if the internet neither makes us smarter or dumber but it is our interaction with it, that gives it meaning. It is only a tool after all.

Lets use the car as an analogy.

We could easily make the argument that having cars make people lazy:  it enables us to not use our bodies in the way that millions of years of evolution have given us. People are know to drive a few blocks, distances so short that driving may actually be less inefficient than walking. The problem is especially evident in car-loving North American towns and cities where mass transit or bicycling is almost non-existent compared to similar-sized European equivalents. Our love affair with driving only exasperates the obesity health problem that plagues our society.

Not only do some of us use cars when we needn't, but worse are people who are just bad at it: the stereotypical 'bad drivers' that plague our roads. Now we don't put the blame on bad cars, but understand that intrinsically some people have not developed the skills to aid them in operating a vehicle at speed amongst other drivers. In Canadian society we're aware that youth are not developed physically and cognitively enough to make mature decisions about their operation of a vehicle, and we limit their experiences to drive until they're 16 years old.

So are cars good or bad? Remember, they - like the internet - are a tool. The development of the automobile: the shift from steam power to internal combustion engines, the creation of a personal method of transportation was fired by the minds of generations of engineers and craftspeople who tinkered, thought critically, modified their technology to its physical limitations and then created new iterations. It has taken an unbelievable amount of SMART people for some people to be able to drive two blocks the wrong way down a one-way.

As with all technology, their is a certain amount of the population that take it for granted and do not take the time to 'get under the hood' and understand exactly what it is they are using. That does not mean the internet has made them dumb - it simply means they've chosen to pick up the keys before considering the distance their going.

For our youth, we should recognize that their are levels of their own cognitive development that is needed to form before they are able to use the internet in what would look like a responsible manner. The internet is the entirety of human knowledge at one time, and that can be daunting. As Prof. Nantais mentioned during our discussion yesterday, the internet has given everyone a voice and broken down the traditional filters of disseminating information. The responsibility is now on you to decide whether or not my (or anyone's) voice is worth sharing with others.

A map of internet traffic produced by the Opte Project. Licensed under Creative Commons.

[I got off writing on a tangent earlier - it no longer fits with this blog - but I felt I should share rather than delete:]

Now I'm not saying that the internet is a car - but rather a method of transportation. We crawl, walk and then run. We pedal, with training wheels, before attempting any sweet jumps. We observe others transporting us in motorized vehicles before trying to pilot it ourselves. Clearly some of us will be more adept than others, for various reasons, but the important factors are that the rules have been in place for sometime and there is a method of development in place. 

Interestingly, some internet sites have attempted to limit or control the impact of immature 'drivers'. Notably the social sharing website 'reddit' utilizes a robust voting system that is policed by a team of moderators. Clear rules for posting content are in place and users often regulate one another via the up-down vote system to re-inforce social conventions like grammar, spelling and even the location of some votes into 'sub-reddits'. 

graphical design + INFORMATION =

Infographics combine data with design to enable visual learning. This communication process helps deliver complex information in a way that is more quickly and easily understood - Mark Smiciklas

Beautiful too look upon, robust in their ability to express large amounts of data or complex ideas in a series of images or a single picture, infographics are without a doubt one of the more interesting applications of web-based software that were traditionally the domain of mad men-esque advertisers.

Here is a great example of an infographic, which (created by the Huffington Post) usefully is about infographics -  -  -  ->

While the 'idea' of representing information visually is certainly not a new concept, the use of technology through websites - like infogr.am, visual.ly, and piktochart.com  - have greatly placed the ability to create these type of documents at the fingertips of the average web user.

Which means that even the most graphically or statistically incapable teacher (or student!) might be able to throw together some eye-catching visuals to augment what might have been another text or data heavy presentation.

As we know from 'Success for all Learners', differentiating our instruction in order to meet the individual learning needs of our students is an important part of lesson planning for today's teachers. By utilizing graphical designs to meet the needs of our visual-spatial learners, infographics may be used in support of a teachers pedagogy - if used properly.

I was able to create my first infographic to use in a presentation for another course, using StatsCan data to give a Canadian perspective to the content we were discussing from our American text book. The only difficult issue I encountered was adding the visual to a PowerPoint document, as infogr.am is primarily meant for sharing in web-based contexts (like this!). 

Please click and explore:

Family types of Canadian Parents | Infographics

I have little [digital] feet apparently

According to UrbanDictionary.com, a 'Nick Baron' is:

A troll commonly found riddling people around and abouts the Hillsborough county area in Florida.

Which I thought was odd, mainly because I've never once riddled anyone around Hillsborough County.

... And so began my search into my digital footprint. Googling my name returned nothing of interest in the top 10 links; aside from the definition (above) and use-in-a-sentence (below).

That bouncer just riddled me to get in the bar, must be a nick baron.

Awesomely, the top rated item from Bing.com was for Special Agent Nick Baron's (no relation) investigation into the 'Dimitron Duo', who were wanted by the FBI on fraud charges. However, neither Bing or Yahoo.com returned any valid results within the first 50 items. In fact, it wasn't until the thirtieth item that this blog showed up in Google, representing my first footprint in the digital world.

Interestingly, a person-specific search engine called ZoomInfo did actually return one valid result: my employee profile from when I interned for multinational Enterprise Rent-A-Car. So with such few results, I took a page out of Mr. Affleck's blog on his digital footprint, and combined my location (Brandon) with my name.

While adding the address did not change the ZoomInfo results in any significant way, it did have an immediate impact on the traditional search engines, with the top four Google links actually being me!

Surprisingly, none of my twitter, Facebook or social media content came up - in fact the only information that I could find was related to the blogging we have done for this course, and my participation as a karate instructor.

What little feet I have.

today's connected student

So I've been struggling with what todays connected student looks like: from reports of Facebook membership evaporating among teens, to rumours of anonymous messaging apps... Am I really already 'not with it'?

So instead of guessing, I've tried to do some research on the 21st Century Connected Student:

From the Pew Research Center, we get info on what devices they are using -  -  -  -->

A quick search of wikipedia gives us some of the most popular social networking websites in North America:
facebook, fourSquare, skype, Google+, pinterest, snapChat, flickr, imgur, youtube, blogspot, blogger, netflix, reddit, instagram...

And an app search reveals: kik messenger, tumblr, vine, Voxer (walkie-talkie), wordpress...

While these are all access points/tools to communicating with one another, they really give no hint to the amount that students use them - that is how popular Instagram is over Facebook among adolescent users. A recent article published by the San Francisco Chronicle highlights Facebooks waning popularity with youngsters, and hints that they're looking for different, more private ways of connecting than 'big brother'-esque Facebook.

It's Official: Teens Are Bored With Facebook - SFGate sfgate.com/technology/bus… via #I4Ed
— Nick Baron (@NicklasBaron) March 4, 2013

Interestingly, and I attribute this largely to a generational divide, but I have seen few 'connected students' posts that consider gaming consoles and their attached online communities (like XboxLive) that surround particular games (like the infamous Call of Duty series of first-person shooters). Personal computers still satisfy groups of players on MMORPGs, which constitute an entire different form of social-networking where individuals are encouraged to create an online persona that differs from their away-from-the-keyboard identity. 

So it's with some forethought that I present my 'Connected Student' diagram:

on blogging, commenting, tweeting, searching, curating... and comprehending

Dear classmates of Prof. Mike Nantais 'Internet for Educators', 

With class time last week being designated as group-project work and an informal sharing session, it allowed me time to reflect on the past weeks: on the speakers who've taken the time to share with us, on the different tools each of us use, the impact those instruments and ideas may have on my future classroom, and the responses from you - my fellow classmates - on all of these ideas.

First, how do you all stay up on reading everyone's blogs? I've attempted to use a Chrome extension called 'SpeakIt!' which converts website text into audio via the voice of your choice: English Canadian Male speaker or Hong Kong Cantonese Female or ..., &c. While I really like 'hearing' what you have to say - the app still requires that I select each individual bits of text, which  unfortunately is time consuming and undermines the real reason for attempting to use it in the first place. I've put the question to twitter to see what you all have to say:

Struggling to read everyone's blogs from 'Internet for Educators': What are your hints/tricks to read and make meaningful comments? #I4Ed
— Nick Baron (@NicklasBaron) February 19, 2013

In the same vein, I've constantly ran into a little bug where I'm unable to comment on your  blogs because my profile is not signed in - despite accessing your respective blogs from Google Reader and repeatedly clicking sign in. Which brings me to a bit of a techno-wish: why can I share your writings on Twitter, facebook, Google+; but I can't comment within Reader?  

Todays' a rant day dear readers: please place your rants below!

Edit: I'd also like to share with you my (current) go to site for new music: 

indiecurrent.com

leading the student ... to web based courses

Not a speaker phone, but similar

Throughout my academic history I've taken four distance courses for various reasons. In high school, I was considering applying to university in Ontario around the same time that that province was phasing out OAC. In order to increase my chance of being accepted, I took a paper-based course in Calculus that was centered around a speaker-phone call once a week in the schools library.

Later during my undergrad I was unable to fit a required course into my schedule, but was quite thankful that a distance course was an option. Finally last fall, after finding out that one of my teachables was no longer accepted at Brandon University, I was able to meet the Education Faculties requirements for a second teachable via two web-based courses at the University of Manitoba as a visiting student. 

In each of these courses, I had a need for a course credit, but was unable to wait or travel to a regular classroom. So in that sense Distance Learning was a great fit for me and satisfied the prerequisites I needed... 

However, I have learned that I do not perform very well in a distance learning environment. While I obtained passing grades on all of these courses, even today I'm struggling to recall anything particularly relevant.

So it is with some experience in distance learning that we listened in on Sophia & Donald's presentation on their work with the Distance Learning unit from Manitoba Education. As a preservice teacher, knowing that their are optional courses out there for my future students and course resources for myself, is a true benefit. Additionally, as Prof. Mike Nantais was keen to point out, the BlackBoard webware provides an alternative to public blogging and internet usage that some conservative communities may be unease with. 

One of the more interesting statements from the presenters was Sophia's emphasis on pedagogy first, rather than focusing on creating a course because the tools are there. Thinking of the students learning needs, including whether a distance course fits an individual students learning style, should be at the forefront of every teachers mind. From my own experiences it is clear to me that there is a demand for distance learning, but I wonder that if some differentiation had been built into the course content that the (and my own) outcomes could be greatly improved. 

on Clarence Fisher: connecting students to the wide world

So far we have had principals, government officials, and industry consultants speak to us, but Mr. Fisher, is our first Teacher. First practicing teacher that is: Clarence Fisher teaches a split grade 7/8 class up in Swan Lake, Manitoba, and was also the first speaker to truly talk about using technology and the internet to benefit the students in his remote classroom.

Fisher touched on the changing mobility of education, from the inclusion of students own iPods, laptops and tablets, and debated the authenticity of students blogging and posting pictures in the classroom. His most influential comments (to me) were about using that technology to gain perspective, to introduce his students (who are nearly 700 km North of Winnipeg) to global communities. 

Clarence referred to this as expanding their 'network of learners':

'if kids are only exposed to the same kids in your class, then that's it. But the larger the network the better - no longer is any kid, or even myself, the oldest/smartest person in the room - and that fundamentally changes things' - Clarence Fisher, February 7/2013.

Which he did by taking an old idea - pen pals - and giving it a moden turn: Clarence connected his students with classes in Colombia, Peru, Los Angeles, and Malaysia through like-minded teachers through the internet. By doing so, he was able to give his small town classroom an international presence and open his students up to cultures, ideas and concepts that they otherwise would likely of never had.

What Clarence has noticed about this expansion of his students learning network, is that they have become engaged. He has noticed them working at home with students from another country on group activities, assisting each other with homework; essentially learning based on their own inquiry. By sharing through their youTube account, posting pictures to Flikr, his students have found new ways to represent and view the world that wasn't possible a generation ago.

At this time, Clarence is experimenting with computer coding in the classroom, exposing his students to AutoCAD, animation/video making and exciting new developments like 3D-printing in a bid to keep his classroom within the authentic real world. To me, Clarence's class is real world inspiration of how a teacher can be effective wherever they are in the world today, and that if an educator has the humility to let others into their classroom, it can make a world of difference. 

anti-awards, anti-grades with George Couros

http://georgecouros.ca

Last Thursday we had the great opportunity to Skype with Mr. George Couros, Division Principal of Innovative Teaching and Learning for Alberta PSD70. While John Finch spoke to us about 'big-picture' topics like copyright law and public policy earlier in the week, George took a pragmatic approach throughout his presentation. He offered advice on making a digital vs analog impact with professional portfolios, discussed the differences between a holistic 'school' teacher vs the isolated classroom teacher, and offered sage words on contacting parents while being angry with their kid.

However, the most powerful message I received was his thoughts and experiences with removing grades and awards from his school. George stated this as the difference between performance goals and learning goals. Performance goals are the checkmarks, the conditioning, the "if you sit, I will give you a bone" type of summative assessments; whereas learning goals can encompass the broader, more inquiry-based goals of "I want to speak fluid french". 

While the concepts of formative versus summative assessment are not new to us, and have been advocated heavily for by professionals like Brian Cox (Real World Teaching) and MB Education (Rethinking classroom assessment with purpose in mind), they have been theoretical or isolated to a single classroom. George's experiences, however, extend to an entire school where they removed both awards and grades.

After class I tweeted George about this school, as I was unaware that such a school existed within the public system in Canada. He directed me to an archived blog post of his about the subject (here), where he discussed the cons of the traditional system and the advantages of moving towards solely formative assessment.

I'm all for this, but as someone who graduated with grades, received awards and values my GPA - in short someone conditioned to succeed with grades - I question how students, who like me, adapt to a system without rewards? What sort of outcomes do students have within this revolutionary system? As with John Finch's argument for data over intuition, are we able to give a grade to anti-grade systems? After all, as George stated:

"We are measured as a teacher by what they do after, rather than what they do in class".

on Intuition versus Data - with John Finch

A big thank you goes out to John Finch from Manitoba Education for taking the time  from napping  out of his schedule to speak to us last Tuesday.

@ Brandon University working with pre-service teachers today with @miken_bu
— John Finch (@jfinch) January 29, 2013

A wealth of information, John was able to touch on subjects covering everything from the newly-written copyright laws to professional guidelines to cyber-bullying. For me, one of the big take-aways from this talk was the amount of decisions made by educators and administrators based on intuition rather than actual data. 

While cyber-bullying has become a hot button issue that has dominated media coverage and led to real world repercussions for students across Canada, student surveys suggest that bullying via technology is actually the least frequent form of abuse. Similarly, a look at the data from a Winnipeg school division with an EAL student population approaching 70% revealed that the greatest academic concerns weren't actually literacy, but numeracy. What this highlights to me is a common phenomena across professional services in the public sector: where plans of actions and decisions are demanded to be made, but are so often done based on individual case studies, personal experience and intuition. For example, the court systems have long relied upon psychiatric evaluations and psychological measures to predict the likelihood of (sexual) offender recidivism*. However, longitudinal and meta-studies have repeatedly shown the ability of these professionals to predict whether one person will reoffend after serving their sentence to be close to 50%.

In other words: flip a coin.

As people, we are horrible at making these kind of objective judgements and suffer the continual bias of believing that we are capable of doing so, simply because we consider ourselves professionals. Don't get me wrong - I am not saying we shouldn't be the ones creating policy - educators are after all the ones on the front lines. However, the time of has come where the tools exist to gather data and make informed, objective decisions that simply weren't possible a generation ago. As educators, we are in the most favorable position to know what to do with that information

Remember, it's not what you know - it's what you do with it.

*Edit: I was referencing material from my psych undergrad, but couldn't find the source material when I wrote up this post. A number of psychometric tests have been introduced in the past two decades that have significantly increased the ability to predict non-sexual offender behaviour, however predicting sexual offense recidivism remains shaky. Gendreau et al. out of the University of New Brunswick conducted a massive meta-study that highlights these points: A META-ANALYSIS OF THE PREDICTORS OF ADULT OFFENDER RECIDIVISM: WHAT WORKS

Personal learning network (beta)

This is my first attempt at conceptualizing my personal learning network (PLN), and I've attempted to capture all of  the web 2.0 sites that I access the internet through - both personally and academically. During last weeks google-docs assignment @Tyler_JL and I discussed learning networks where he first differentiated between PLNs and personal learning environments (PLEs), and then proposed his own interpretation of the two. 

Next will be an attempt to better capture the relationships between individuals that have made the connections to these individual websites and their importance to my learning. 

Alec Couros & participatory learning

This week, Mike Nantais delivered a phenom of a guest speaker (via adobeConnect this time) in the form of Alec Couros. Alec spoke at length about the prevalence of technology today, shared several web-based resources with us, and discussed the concept of participatory learning.

Not without its hiccups, adobeConnect suffered several audio-crashes throughout the lecture. Thankfully a number a I4Ed students were able to notify Alec via chat whenever things got garbled, but it added to a level of discontinuity that wasn't present with the presentation via Skype last week. There is something about the pace of a lecture and interruptions that is harmful to the message being delivered. I think that Alec felt the same way:

For a second there I thought that Adobe Connect didn't suck anymore. Then I tried to use my webcam and it crashed my browser.
—Alec Couros (@courosa) January 22, 2013

 Without a doubt, the prevalence of technology in our lives today is astounding. I was researching articles for a methods class this afternoon on the laptop when my iPhone buzzed: momentarily distracted, I noticed my girlfriend on the couch beside me shift her gaze from the adorable pets on her Pintrest iPad app to her mobile. As HIMYM played out on our wifi-enabled Netflix-supporting television, the alarm on my Nike GPS watch went off a moment later. Alec stated that kids are on the internet now by the age of eleven.

So with all of this technology and information, websites like hootsuite.com and about.me have popped up just to consolidate and manage all of the different information streaming at us at all times. Which brings us to participatory learning: at the heart of all this data is our own participation in what is going on around us. Of course it is possible to be passive, but Alec pushed that 21st century literacy is about understanding how these services work and how they network with those around them.

It is not enough to read a wiki and follow the citations to the source material; we need to get involved in developing the resources out there, we have to become part of the discussion. The popularity of massive open online courses (MOOCs) is a testament to this shifting paradigm where educators and students no longer just view the internet and technology passively, but participate in a bidirectional manner.

Alec referred to twitters hashtag (#) as being the soul the internet at the beginning of class. I think I disagree that the soul is that tangible. I believe that if an internet-soul exists, it is embodied by a need to learn and expand our minds, that is represented by a group of people who have come together for no other reason than for a primal need to know. Sharing was what was at the heart of ARPAnet, of wikipedia, of countless chatrooms, message boards, file-sharing programs and the controversy of 'free' education. So that people need not be limited by what they know, and only by their own ability to do something with it.

In conclusion I thought a quote from Tony Wagner that Alec put up was so fitting:

“Today knowledge is ubiquitous, constantly changing, growing exponentially… Today knowledge is free. It’s like air, it’s like water. It’s become a commodity… There’s no competitive advantage today in knowing more than the person next to you. The world doesn’t care what you know. What the world cares about is what you can do with what you know.”

First class of Internet for Educators

So first off, I just want to say that as part of the group of First Years that has been bumped around this session, having this class with Mike is already looking like one of the highlights of the semester. Sharing? Interactive? Social networking? Coffee and snacks in class? Find me a seat, I'll sit.

In reflecting on Dean Shareski's presentation - which was on the surface just inspiring in its message, and engaging in its delivery - the greatest idea that I took home was his thoughts on Viewing and Representing. The idea that we focus so intensely on reading and writing in the ELA curriculum, but if that is all we are teaching today's students: then we are actually failing them.

I just took the first middle years ELA methods class last session, and while all of those GLO's quickly became rhetoric, I distinctly remember during lesson planning that I failed to hit on these two basic forms. Programs like Boushey & Moser's the Daily 5 easily hit the first four, but in retrospect really failed to address viewing and representing.

Clearly these are important and the smart people that created our ELA curriculum got that, so why is it so under-represented in the documents that I've seen so far? Has anyone else noticed this missing, and importantly: is this a part of the curriculum that is covered more extensively in our second methods course? Your thoughts on this - please comment below ↴

While we figure that out, much thanks to Dean for taking the time to speak and to Mike for sharing his contacts with us.

Best,

Nick

About me

Hi!

If you're reading this, you must be Professor Mike Nantais, or possibly a fellow student in Internet for Educators! In either case, if you'd like to know a bit more about myself, then please read on:

Although born and raised in rural Manitoba, I grew up with a duality to my identity: my mom emigrated from Sweden in the late 70's and we travelled back and forth as much as we could in the early years. We were always outdoors as kids, skating by age three and playing shinny whenever we could. At age 11 my uncle introduced me to Karate and I went on to compete provincially and then nationally, excelling in Kumite. At 16 I earned my black belt under Sensei Nishiyama and started instructing soon after. 

After high school I moved to Brandon, Manitoba and began working full time. I saved and travelled to Europe that next year. That fall I enrolled at Brandon University in the science faculty and began my academic career. Simultaneously I began working with adults living with disabilities and over time my studies at the university focused on psychology. I began assisting honours students in the lab under Professor Goernart, but transferred to Simon Fraser University in the fall of 2007. 

Living on the west coast, I completed my degree in Psychology while volunteering for the Vancouver Winter Olympics and in the Psychology and Law lab at SFU under Professor Mansour. In 2011 I traveled to Manila to meet close friends who had been teaching in Kuwait at the American Creativity Academy. I intended to only be gone for a month, but ended up traveling to Bali and then cancelling my flight back to Vancouver in order to move to Kuwait. There I tutored and subbed at ACA while living with my girlfriend and later traveled to South Africa, Jordan and Barcelona. 

That fall we returned to Brandon, where she quickly got a position teaching with the Brandon School Division. I returned to Brandon University in order to prepare to enter the After Degree Education program and began working with youth living with disabilities. That position transitioned into the Children's Disabilities Services "Summer Services" program, which provides programming for youth throughout the summer. In the fall of 2012 I entered BU's Education program and simultaneously accepted a promotion to be one of the coordinators for CDS.

I am currently enrolled in my second semester of Education at Brandon University, providing respite and coordinating programs for CDS, and instructing karate in Carberry, Manitoba while living in Brandon.