Happy Birthday to The Innovative Educator

Happy Birthday to The Innovative Educator! You are two years old today.

It was exactly two years ago that The Innovative Educator took its first step in an effort to publicly become a part of the conversation on educating innovatively. As I shared in my post Why I started a blog and why maybe you should too, this blog was born in great part due to the prodding of blogevangelist Will Richardson who I have since named my Blogfather. It was Will who I would run into at events and conferences who would ask, “Have you started sharing your ideas yet on a blog?” and who would write, “if you want your ideas to resonate with me and to be taken seriously, don’t just talk. Engage. Publish. Converse.”

I took his advice and like any proud parent, I can say I’ve learned so much from the experience of giving birth to this new creation that has developed a purposeful and professional digital footprint consisting of 268 entries. Now, when I'm Googled, it is me, not one of 1000s of others, who comes up on the front page. And, there are all sorts of other important footprints that The Innovative Educator has made. Its print is left on the front page of Google searches like: Educating Innovatively, cell phones in education, technology education quotes, teaching in the 21st century ideas, personal learning network, Renzulli learning to differentiate instruction, and more.

I’ve watched my baby blog grow from no readers to an average of 125 a day last year and 336 a day this year. There have even been a few times when The Innovative Educator has received significant international attention. Last year, during the Inauguration she received more than 6,000 hits a day from people interested in teaching the inauguration in innovative ways. This year thousands of visitors flocked to the blog to read a number of popular posts. Among the most popular were

• 21st Century Educators Don’t Say, “Hand It In.” They say, “Publish It!
• Fix Boring Schools, Not Kids Who Are Bored
• Why Social Media Curriculum is Critical in Schools - 140 Character Conference
• Don't be illTwitterate or aTextual
• My Top 20 Education Quotes from 2009
• Kids Teach Kids with Mathcasting
• Get Going with Google Apps in Your School
• Five Ways Innovative Educators Can Use Texting As a Professional Tool
• 8 Innovative Schools Provide Ideas and Inspiration for 21st Century Education
• Using a School Wiki to Increase Communication, Collaboration, and Enrich Instruction

• The Why, What, and How of Getting the Benefits of Student Response Systems without the Cost or Equipment

• 5 Innovative Ways to Differentiate Instruction as Witnessed During My Visit to the School of One

  
  

I also want to thank The Innovative Educator for the opportunities it has brought me. Because of you I now contribute to the popular educational magazines Leading and Learning and Tech & Learning. I also have a book in the works about "Teaching Generation Text" and your success has enabled me to present keynote presentations on ways to educate innovatively and serve on panels at conferences like Tech Forum and the 140 Character Conference.

You also now have Authority! Growing from being just one of millions of blogs to gaining a credible 544 authority rating on Technorati. But, even before anybody was reading The Innovative Educator, you enriched my life with opportunities to practice my writing skills and articulate and develop my thoughts.

The Innovative Educator has helped me understand the power of influence and given me an outlet to share with my readers about what I love most – “Educating Innovatively!” So, happy second birthday… and many more!

Promote Student Passions with Pencasting!

Today Marc Prensky and I worked with students and teachers to partner to innovate instruction. The pedagogy is based on Prensky's new book, "Teaching Digital Natives: Partnering for Real Learning." The premise in part is that 21st century teachers don't have to be experts in using technology, we have the kids for that, but they do need to partner with their digital native students to allow them to use technology to learn in innovative ways. In order to do this we we invited students to partner with teachers in thinking about how to make instruction engaging. We had a variety of technologies for teachers and students to explore and teachers and students wrote proposals and videos explaining what they were doing.

One of the technologies showcased was smart pens. A smart pen allows you to connect voice, music, and sound to anything you write on smart paper. With smart pens the power of having students in the professional development really came to life. While many teachers first thought, "Wow, this is great because students can record notes when I lecture!," the students had other ideas for the device.

Georgiano, the student in the below video, sees using the smart pen as a tool to capture student passions. His idea is for students to sketch their passion making a pencast about what inspires them. He explains that if all students sketched their passions these could be collected into a collage of pencasts that can be enjoyed by all. Here's how it would work. The student would sketch their passion and then record music, sound, and voice to go along with the sketch. Live viewers could tap on each students sketch to learn about the passions of each student. Virtual viewers could click a link that enables them to see and hear each students pencast, so that as this student shares, "The whole world that pen allows you to draw, then record as a part of the drawing music, sound, and voice which you can hear by tapping on the paper. The pencasts can be shared via a link and published so that as this student shares (time 1.43), "It is amazing. We can present to everyone in the world and show our passions!"

Promote Student Passions with Pencasting! from Ted 21C on Vimeo.

You can see what other classes are doing at the Livescribe smart pen website. The smart pens sell for $139 each.

Death by Math

By Jacob Gutnicki

The comic cartel was in full force. Briefcases in hand, the swap took place. Outside the classroom a group of students were flicking cards against the wall. Elsewhere, another group of students played with their PSP’s. In one back corner of the classroom, the daily arm wrestle competition was on. Students in the middle rows were texting while other students were tweeting.

As always the lookout force was on the job. “Dudes, math teacher approaching; hide all electronics.” The students quickly hid their electronic and gaming paraphernalia and scuttled to their assigned seats. Michael Lotta the math teacher was approaching the door. Armed with his thermos of mocha latte the math king was ready to pronounce his order of the day. “Janice, write these questions on the blackboard. Class you have 10 minutes to answer these questions. Justin, your lucky I didn’t see you daydreaming. Jennifer I am confiscating your cell phone and Dennis hand over that Ring Ding.”

After the students posted their work on the blackboard, Mr. Lotta started his lesson on truth tables. Mr. Lotta started by saying; “We will now define the logical operators which we mentioned in our last class, using truth tables. Let us proceed with caution; most of the operators have names, which we may be accustomed to using in ways that are fuzzy or even contradictory to their proper definitions. In all cases, use the truth table for an operator as its exact and only definition; try not to bring to logic the baggage of your colloquial use of the English language.”

Justin was fast asleep. Jennifer was cracking her knuckles to stay awake. The comic cartel was reading their comic books under the table. Some of the more brazen members strategically placed their comic books in the math book. The arm wrestling group resorted to finger wrestling while the gamers, texters, and tweeters struggled to stay awake.

Meanwhile, Mr. Lotta continued to lecture and said, “The first logical operator which we will discuss is the "AND", or conjunction operator. For the computer scientist, it is perhaps the most useful logical operator we will discuss. It is a "binary" operator; a binary operator is defined as an operator that takes two operands.”

Thump!!! Out of sheer boredom, Dennis fell out of his seat. A cackling laugh ensued the classroom. The loud noise startled Justin, woke him from his slumber, and caused him to bump his head against the table. A chorus of laughter broke out. Mr. Lotta banged his thermos of Mocha Latte and angrily exclaimed, “ Justin and Dennis; a 55 for today’s work. Dennis said, “For what?” Mr. Lotta said, “For making noise.” “I didn’t make noise”, proclaimed Dennis. “Now you are”, laughed Mr. Lotta. Mr. Lotta proceeded to continue his lecture and stated, “p AND q is traditionally represented using the and symbol. We will represent it using the ampersand since that is the symbol most commonly used on computers to represent a logical AND.”

Brinnngggg!!! Saved by the bell. No one really understood what Mr. Lotta was talking about. We were just glad the agony was over; for now.

Removing Versus from Our Ed. Reform Dialogue

by John Clemente

TED talks are often an incubator for iconoclastic thinking - the talks in general carry the message think out of the box. And so it comes as no surprise that the TEDxNYED conference speakers last weekend delivered a message that runs counter to the current big trends in education- There is a national movement towards developing common standards. There are incentives for states to lift caps on charter schools. States are building complex electronic assessment systems to track and analyze standardized student test data.

The speakers at TEDxNYED emphasized their ideas are at odds with these trends. They spoke of how the classroom environment needs to be redesigned to foster collaboration and self-directed student learning; how we need to shift from standardized assessments to portfolio assessments that focus on the creation process. They spoke of how we need to co-opt gaming/fantasy culture, social media and incorporate real world problems to engage students in learning; how broadening the curriculum (not narrowing it) is critical to preparing our children for tomorrow's world.

Many of the talks were inspiring and that kind of thinking needs to be more prominent in the national education reform conversation.

But...

All of the talks stayed inside the box with regard to how we dialogue about education publicly. It is a well-worn war paradigm... whole language vs. phonics... core knowledge vs. critical thinking skills... Luke Skywalker vs. Darth Vader... good guys vs. bad guys metaphor of your choice...

This paradigm doesn't work in the best interests of a child's education. When I was a teacher, my 6th grade students in the Bronx endured changing reading programs 3 times in 5 years. Switching philosophy in a reading curriculum is good politically- those in charge get a clean slate and time to implement their new initiative. But it is disruptive to the child’s learning experience. When we switch from whole language one year to a phonics focused program the next, students lose consistency; something all too familiar for the students I taught.

Michael Wesch said something that resonated on this chord for me. He described his experiences studying the people of Papua New Guinea. Instead of putting people on trial, they put the failed relationships between them on trial. We need to shift our national education dialogue this way. There should be less finger pointing, wagging and gesturing in our dialogue, and more hand holding, shaking and slapping with an emphasis on building relationships and making connections between ideas that people often rush to say are inherently at odds. We should view all of the current innovative ideas –including those that carry the banner of “market-based reforms” and those that are of the “school 2.0/21st Century” ilk- as a patchwork of thinking that it is our responsibility to weave together.

The thought leaders that spoke at this conference need to be assertive in the way they connect their ideas to the thinking of the people carrying forward reforms with a focus on accountability and standards. There will be common standards, there will be more charter schools, there will be a bigger emphasis on standardized assessments. All of this will happen whether they choose to engage with them or not. While there is reason to be leery, there is also tremendous potential for good in these trends. I suggest we all weave our solutions to that quilt.

There are nascent innovative projects like School of One, a project to rethink human capital in the school context and utilize technology to personalize student learning, that would benefit greatly from the thinking of the speakers at TEDxNYED. I implore these innovators to knock on the door and invite themselves to sit at the table to make connections between their ideas and the reforms rapidly taking root. This challenge is perhaps more difficult than setting the course for education independent of the accountability movement; but it is also a much more worthy cause. Otherwise, for these provocateurs, the echo of their voices will continue to fade into the background- lost to the next generation of leaders.

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John Clemente is the Director of Educational Services at Teaching Matters

They're here... The Common Core Standards - Available for Comment

They're here...

This was five-year-old Carol Anne's ominous announcement made at her parents' home while starring into a static television when referring to the presence of unknown beings in her home. Their antics, benign at first, such as moving and stacking the kitchen table chairs soon turn quite disturbing as Poltergeist fans can attest. Like the unknown beings in the movie, the newly released draft of the Common Core Standards have had a ghostly presence to the masses who have seen pictures of Governors linked in arms with smiles on their faces as they unite to support the release of standards for a nation. While I do agree the premise of having international or at least national standards, makes sense, I do have concerns that these at first benign, perhaps even good-intention-seeming standards must be treated with EXTREME caution.

I shared my primary fears around these standards last October in my post All Children Left Behind - Common Standards for Our Student's Past. My concerns presented themselves again yesterday as a DOE official shared with a gleam in his eye that The Common Core Standards draft had been released and this was going to mean a whole new era of even more rigorous assessments for our students.

Ahhhhh!!!!!

Join the Department of Education's Innovation Portal

The Department of Education has developed an innovation portal for people to come together to identify the best ideas to improve our schools! This space will serve as an online forum where key stakeholders in education can share their innovative ideas and collaborate to turn those ideas into a new reality.

Arne Duncan, US Ed Secretary explains that the site will serve as a place to connect ideas from educators and supporters across the nation to develop a marketplace of ideas about how we can ensure that every child, “graduates ready to succeed in college and the workplace.”   …As an innovative educator, I would add “society” in the mix and I’m not convinced that college is necessary for all citizens either, but this is a step in the right direction for sure. 

Duncan shares that this site was developed out to the belief that, “the innovative ideas that will transform our education system will not come from Washington, D.C. They will come from communities across the country. The Department of Education will play a role as convener of these diverse ideas and facilitator of partnerships. The Innovation Web Portal is the first of a number of initiatives that the Department will launch over the coming months as we work to build these partnerships that will drive innovation in education.”

You can register for the site and join the conversation at https://innovation.ed.gov.