David Jakes, Diana Laufenberg, Ryan Bretag
Are your kids involved in learning communities and are they involved outside the 4 walls?
Where do we want to be in 4 years:
- More than teachers, students and chairs, open to everyone. Pervasive across the disclipines, not an isolated incident.
- Interactivity between students, classroom, and outside walls
- Permability is no longer optional
- completely integrated immersed technological exoerience. seamless/transparent use of technology
- promoting collaboration between students AND between teachers modeling the collaborative process within their practice
- Open classroom possibilities, open content… access to the content and the learning that takes place around it…. those are hte important points.
focus on the learning, pick the right tool for learning, pick the right tool for learning, tools are temprorary but what is the process of learning that is supported by the tools.Visual Literacy
- ear to brain is dial up
- eye to brain is broadband
- Brain perceives yellow first
- red: alert, high priority, caution
- yellow: Most visible
- Green: renewal
- Blue: trust, America’s favorite color
Obstacles
- Change: fear of change and failure
- Teacher adoption buy in
- attitudes
- money-resources – equity
- collaborative mentoring/difficulty with impletentation
- administration:visions, models, and leadership
- systemic vision
- Professionsal development for all stakeholders – questions of why and the how.
- Inertia/Apathy
- Facilitating the conversation at the decision making levels if schools – school board involvement – policy setters
Discussion of what works
- School Board involvement is a persuasive conversation amongst those teachers/schools that are seeing the movement towards a new school environment.
- Can you have change only from the bottom up? top down? what combination of the two?
- Introduce the tools into the practice of the leadership , model the process for learning new tools and ways of communicating
- Discussion of collaboration and learning rather than just tech
- 21st Century skills are the key, not the tool necessarily.
- Professional Development is key to engage the teachers in an environment of lifelong learners
- Semantic Shift: took technology out of the writing…rewrote hte language of lifelong learning
- Devolping as a professional instead of professional development
- Unleash the student potential to explore and discover rather than the teacher”know it all” before “teaching with technology”
- Bridge the gap between home use of tech for gamin/social networking for the school/learning environment
- Eliminating the isolation of teachers in the classroom, connect the educators with each other for support, resources and growth
- Collaboration between teachers and students rather than teacher – teacher and student – student but also teacher – student
- Active participation in technology by teachers as individuals when they go home will facilitate more
- Use piloting program to bring in new and innovative ideas.
Ideas
- Would you be willing to devote 15 minutes a day to read a blog?
- Why do I want to learn this? What’s the purpose?
- Renaming the sessions… collaborative writing
- Six essential questions on different pages of wiki.Each group moves from page to page answering. Helps understanding of wikis
The 4 S’s: Four Solutions
- Focusing on stakeholders – involving the whole school community, understanding the process and getting support
- Semantics (focus on learning NOT tools)
- Students (how important they are in the process)
- Structure of learning – culture where risk taking is embraced and expected, collaboration and shared learning, not just teacher driven – transparency of learning by honoring and respecting the process
The View From My Window 