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