Edustange

I did this a month ago. This time I managed to flip from a perceiving type to a judgmental person. Perceiving people are flexible, like to keep their options open and think randomly. They like to act spontaneously and are adaptable. Perceivers like to keep things open ended. Judging people like order, organization and think sequentially. They like to have things planned and settled. Judging people seek closure. (My Personality, 2010)

So much depends on a sunny day, a good night’s sleep, and a clean desk at work. You can be more sure about some things than others I am afraid and like a photograph, these tests seem to capture a moment. That is why we look for trends before we generalize. Competent administrators evaluate their subordinates over time and not on a single visit.

This principle of evaluation contributes to my concerns over our increasing reliance on assessment instruments in public education today. We can all compile a list of significant variables and factors that can have an impact on our students results, yet our decisions lean heavily on each discrete test. My grade 3-4 team recently did a reading assessment with our four classrooms. Our plan is to establish differentiated reading groups across all four. I think our reorganization will be based on a number of interdependent factors, but I suspect the results of our recent assessment will weigh heavily on our decision-making. The quantification of the counted beans leave us more comfortable than the intuitive assessment over time.

Dean Shareski took a moment over lunch to demonstrate this to me and then I demonstrated it to my students. Many of them lit up when I suggested we might be able to design our own figures some time. How we might do this will unfold in time I am sure. How we might find it useful in communicating learning together is another question. At the moment, designing your own models so they mesh with our physical environment is time consuming. Imagine the possibilities though. I have to lay this one aside for the moment I think.

I could not quite lay aside the concept of augmenting reality though. An iPhone app that provides data display reminded me of a concept I struggled to convey to my high school history students. When they would ask me why they should study history, I would respond with the the familiar rationale that we inform our contemporary decision-making with our understanding of past events and the way they have shaped our contemporary lives. I then tried to explain that historical literacy adds dimension to immediate experience. This is of course true of all learning. Learning augments reality.

My wife is a reluctant farm girl. Very happy now in the modest urbanity of Moose Jaw, her childhood was spent on a small farm in the Saskatchewan southwest. There is next to nothing there now. Her childhood homes are gone. Most of the outbuildings have been removed and the shelter belts are wild and in decay. I stood beside her last summer as she surveyed all this and knew each aspect she absorbed was layered with information inaccessible to me. Like the image triggered by the card in the video above, buildings, machines and people pop into view. There is also the constant data flow we retain about all things in our lives. It is not visual, but adheres to the objects we see. We rely heavily on this data flow of memory and accumulated facts and most of it comes to us unconsciously.

An iPhone that gives directions seems fairly benign. Augmented reality that attempts to persuade makes me pause.  The years of learning and life experience that have augmented my reality are personal and reflective. Advertising is cunning stuff and very different from learning. I would be more cautious about the claims that pop up as I scan the stores along a street.

A case can still be made for accumulating a store of organized knowledge in schools. We are not just sophisticated operating systems that need affective applications to process and display information. We operate on a core of knowledge about the physical, social and ethical environment we inhabit.  It is not enough to understand how a nation is structured, we need to understand the particulars of our own nation. Augmenting our reality digitally may become very useful to us, but the end game is augmenting our personal lived experience.

In Prairie South School Division Westmount School’s Kathy Cassidy was selected as one of Canada’s most tech-savvy teachers. I’m impressed with the technology she has introduced in her classroom. She is leading in a direction I want to follow. I was reflecting on the absence of DVD or VHS use in the video. There were no shots of books or traditional seat work either. It is there in the classroom I am sure and I understand why it is not in this short video. The video highlights new instructional technologies. In 2010 viewers would wonder why a video would highlight decades old technology like video recordings. They have been more or less successfully integrated into North American classrooms. I hope we are working for the day when Skyping with a guest, receiving an aunt’s response to a blog, and compiling data from around the world on a wiki are as prosaic and unremarkable as slapping a DVD into a machine and watching Bill Nye the Science Guy.

My mind kept shifting to the two days I will be away this week during the many interludes in the course of the day. I sent them happily on their way, paused long enough to make some tea, and then began preparing for Wednesday and Thursday. It is going to be the usual mix of good ideas and bad ideas.

The group is working on Heritage Fair research projects so I booked the computer lab and distributed times for each student on the classroom computers but those tools are incidental to the learning that needs to be done. They represent moments when the young people I work with will be reasonably self directed but part of the computer time is booked for SuccessMaker. I’m ambivalent about this interactive program.

I stayed until 5:30 coaxing a series of dubious worksheets out of our overworked photocopier. A daunting stack of paper is perched beside my desk now. I use the word ‘dubious’ because I did not have the conviction that these activities represented anything more than busy work. Other times when I left the room I could confidently tell the substitute that the students knew what they were supposed to do and could be counted on to do it. That is a good feeling and when it happens I feel like learning is on track.

Perhaps it is too much to expect nineteen nine and ten year olds to be autonomous learners for five hours on two consecutive days. I think we need to work toward that. I think the challenge is to create a classroom where students can learn independently in a variety of ways without relying on a computer nanny like SuccessMaker or my treasured collection of blackline masters. Point me in the right direction someone.

The tweets from this conference just keep flowing past like a rushing stream. I really have no way to keep up with it all. The EduCon 2.2 conference is hosted by the Science Leadership Academy. Check out the site if you want to connect with the sessions.

Ideas and Thoughts

Dean Shareski, January 30, 2010

I was fortunate to be able to spend Thursday and Friday hanging around the school. Here’s what I saw:

• Lots of smiles.
• Loud classrooms
• A principal’s office that looked more like grand central with equal numbers of staff and students talking and working, coming and going
• Teachers who discussed personal issues with students
• A brief power outage that didn’t paralyze learning despite them being a 1:1 school
• A lack of emphasis on technology
  
• Students occasionally off task
• Students excited to talk with adults

None of these things are particularly amazing and are all things you could find in many, if not all schools in North America.  I didn’t see one thing that couldn’t  be done almost anywhere. The teachers are good teachers but they aren’t doing anything I haven’t seen before. So what’s the big deal?

Increasingly, there is no big deal. We speak about integration as a goal for new instructional technologies and remain surprised when we actually encounter situations where technology is no longer an innovation. Better than half of my fourth and fifth graders have cell phones and the rest use their parents mobiles as thoughtlessly as they use the land-line in their homes. “I’ll Skype you,” is a common phrase at the end of the day in my room. You commented recently that our division has 1-2 computing. It doesn’t actually feel like that to me in practice, but I realized that if the computer lab and library at our school were distributed tot he classrooms, we likely would have it. Technological integration is emerging around us.

I’m reminded of another blog-tweet (cannot discriminate between the two sometimes) requesting that we stop talking about teaching for the 21st Century. We are nine years into it now. Thanks to the open policies of our division, we can be technologically integrated now. There are other sorts of openness that contribute to effective learning environments.  Effective staff teams, an open-door administration, and flexible environments are a few.

Wednesday and Thursday I distributed ActivExpression handsets to my fourth and fifth grade students so we could become familiar with them. They found the multiple choice buttons momentarily confusing. Except for two of them, they understood the texting function immediately. It seemed natural for the text to be limited to about 140 characters. The handhelds were novel to them, but not a big deal. I liked them too, but recognized them as an incidental addition to the full range of tools I might use in the classroom and frankly not my first choice.