K-12 (Primary / Secondary)

This book that really challenged our view of how technology supports the learning environment. The book is titled Disrupting Class: How Disruptive Innovation Will Change the Way the World Learns by Clayton M. Christensen. Here is a link to an article about the book. In the book Christensen discusses why it has been so difficult for schools to change to a more student-centric approach to learning and how technology will support the change in the context of disruptive innovation.

The premise is based on the notion that we have tried to integrate technology into a system that is very resistant to change. The processes and structures of the system will only produce pockets of innovation with technology, but will not produce a total shift toward student-centric learning. The author believes that the shift will happen in two phases. The first phase will be to apply disruptive technologies in places where the alternative is nothing. For example, in schools that have students that want to take Latin, but the school lacks the resources, they can use online or distance learning to provide the instruction. The second phase will occur when 50% of all instruction is delivered online and is gives the student the ability to learn based on their dominant learning styles.

Here is where I am challenged – my view, up to this point, has been that we will reach a tipping point when the technology finally becomes ubiquitous and we can focus on learning. I guess my premise failed to account for the fact that the school systems that we work in will continue to support antiquated processes and structures.

Do you think we can truly get to a student-centric approach to learning if we don’t consider learning styles, change the present notion of schools (a building), and build the technology to support this approach?

Vote for your favorite student photo for a chance to win a Latitude 2100 notebook. Our first global student photography competition, Where Do You Like to Learn ended on Sunday with more than 200 entries from all around the world! On Monday, we selected our nine finalists, shown below. Our panel of Dell judges included Jason St Peter, a Dell employee and photography blogger and KerryatDell and I from the Education team. With so many fantastic student pictures, picking the top finalists was no easy task.

How to vote and be entered into the prize draw:

Voting is easy, simply post a comment to this blog and indicate the number of the photograph that you want to win (i.e. 'I vote for photo #6'). In addition to helping one student win a Latitude 2100 netbook, and a teacher win a tablet PC and projector, you will also be entered into a prize drawing for your very own Latitude 2100*!

Voting is open from November 19 - December 4, 2009, so pick your favorite photo (click on it below to see a larger image) and ask your friends to join the Edu4U community to vote! Only one vote per person will be counted, so help your favorite photo win the grand prize.

Vote #1

Vote #2

Vote #3

Vote #4

 Vote #5

Vote #6

 Vote #7

 Vote #8

 Vote #9

Author's Note: You may notice that there are 9 image finalists instead of 10. The reason for this is that since the time of the finalists being selected the 10th image has been withdrawn from the competition.

*Sweepstakes limited to residents of United States, Australia, Brazil, Canada, China, France, India, Ireland, Italy, Japan, Mexico, New Zealand, South Korea, Spain, and the United Kingdom. Click here to read full terms and conditions for this contest.

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Who am I and why am I writing here?

I am a teacher. I am a computer and technology teacher. I teach at an elementary school in Sacramento. I also blog about what I do at. Sometimes I'm witty, sometimes I'm insightful, but there are lots of blogging teachers, why me, why here? You can blame it all on Steve Dembo.

What is a DEN "Star" and what is their National Institute?

At this point, you may be wondering what is DEN? Discovery Educator Network is a professional development network that supports Discovery Education services. It has a number of employees (like Steve) who provide support in the form of presentations, ideas, and support, but the most important part is getting together, online (on blogs, in Second Life) and in person with fellow teachers who are using Discovery Education, to share our ideas and experiences.

What is a Star educator? Those educators are doing more with Discovery Education products and more importantly, with technology. The requirements for becoming a Star are pretty do-able. You view a video, answer an online quiz, fill out an application and report about two events (any "meeting" where you discuss Discovery Education services with three or more teachers).

Once a year, Discovery Education has a National Institute for their Star educators. It's a really great deal because they cover all expenses for the 5 day institute except for travel to and from the site. This year is was at the Headlands Institute in Marin, California. This is a short two-hour drive from my home, so I applied to go (the application usually comes out in Spring).

Why the National Institute?

Discovery Educator Network's National Institute is really a different gig than most of my other professional development experiences. It is at once so intimate (fewer than 100 educators, and we're all rooming together), and the schedule is so full (starting early at 8 a.m. and finishing after dark at 8 p.m. or later) that it truly is a morning, noon, and night experience.

It's also a great contrast between "play" and business. This in my second National Institute, and they started both with a group activity to get us all working together, and dorky though it was, it was a chance to get to know each other. The first full day we did a tour of nearby San Francisco. Last year, it was a night tour of monuments in Washington, D.C. Those activities, and doing them together, make it more of a group activity. While there is a definite structure, unlike district PD, there is no one taking attendance, so you do have the freedom to abstain, or do your own thing.

It has a variety of educators in terms of geography, age, experience, and technology expertise. DEN has everything from teachers relatively new to technology, to district tech specialist. For those looking for how-tos there are those, but for those with more advanced skills, we help by doing presentations, or in other ways.

My part was to help with the "documentation", but it was a was not my task alone. Dean Mantz, a DEN Star from Kansas set up a "live blog" using Cover It Live. I've used Cover It Live before but it has some new features that really made it shine in this instance.

Cover It Live is a way to live-blog that will self-refresh for viewers. This means that unlike, say twitter, new entries will come up in the live blog window when you add new info. It's not static. But that's just the start, you can add video from LiveStream, or UStream, or YouTube. So you can live stream video and type in comments. You can also pick up twitter feeds for search terms or hash tags or for specific users. This was used during Malcolm Gladwell's Keynote at NECC 2009, so that tweets with the tag #necc09mg could be included in a live blog.

Now all those options have a very heavy bandwidth load. I like to think of this as the F-15 dashboard approach. Lots of options, lots of shiny buttons to press. What about when you have a really lousy connection, cause that seems to happen more and more at tech conferences. That twitter feed can really save a Live Blog. If you are having "connectivity issues" with wifi, but you're getting cell service that will let you send out tweets, you can just have it pick up your twitter feed, and use that as your live blog. You can have multiple "producers" on a blog and have folks "back home" take care of the administrative details, like making the blog live (turning it on), putting it in standby, or ending it. Dean, who set up the Live Blog for DEN National Institute, wasn't at the conference, but he was outside making sure it all ran smoothly. It was a real labor of love on his part. This is a really important way to share and get some participation from folks like Dean that couldn't be there. I had many folks who gave me positive comments and thanks for the video feeds I managed to get out.

Joshua Marks has focused his 20-year-long career on using emerging technologies to enable and improve learning opportunities for all children in both formal and informal settings. As Chief Technology Officer, Joshua oversees all technology development and hosting infrastructure for Curriki.org.

Not many people remember The Manhole or Cosmic Osmo and the Worlds Beyond The Mackerel as they were very early CD-ROM games and the first from Cyan Worlds, who went on to make the blockbuster game Myst. The Manhole actually pre-dated the CD-ROM and was packed with several floppy disks in its first version. I still have a really cool special edition Osmo with a holographic Osmo world on the CD jewel case. What fewer still know is that Myst, like Osmo and The Manhole before it, were created using a nifty program by Bill Atkinson for the original Macintosh computer called HyperCard.  HyperCard gave the world, and educators in particular, the promise of the concept of Hypertext and HyperMedia even before the advent of the World Wide Web. HyperCard was like a “gateway drug” for many future game designers and developers, and an early example of the promise of making tools for average people to create interactive media and hypertext-based content.

HyperCard, when released in 1987, was quickly adopted by educators because its graphical drag-and-drop and intuitive “Index Card” metaphor-based user interface enabled them to easily make simple quizzes and interactive lessons that allowed kids to explore concepts in a more engaging, multi-sensory and self-directed way. Much like the Public Domain shareware libraries of Basic programs I talked about in my last post, HyperCard once again enabled a group of innovative people, now without an interest in learning a programming language, to create and share interactive learning resources. These shared HyperCard games and activities become known as “Stackware.”

Some of these Stackware programs were enhanced and commercially published. Perhaps the best ever, besides Osmo and Myst, was the Voyager iterative exploration of Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring (which you can’t find anywhere but would make a killer interactive DVD with its detailed movement-by-movement analysis of that amazing work. Here’s a demo.). Sadly, HyperCard was officially discontinued in 2004 after years of neglect and now most of that creativity has been lost to history. But the lesson remains that if you provide innovative teachers a tool that is easy enough to use and understand, they will create really useful stuff and share it. That is what we are trying to do at Curriki, and in a way that will never be able to be discontinued.

As we continue to evolve Curriki, we seek to enable and inspire creativity and sharing. We, like HyperCard, are thinking beyond the “book” metaphor and into the world of hyper-connected hyper-media. What is new about Curriki is the collaborative way we seek to have end users create, mix, remix and improve the content. It is no longer about an author creating a work for a large or even mass audience; it is about the massed creating and sharing with the masses (or communities of practice with themselves). While Apple first used the “desktop” metaphor, and HyperCard used the “index card” metaphor, Curriki is lacking that single concept, idea or picture that serves as the organizing principle to bring all of the pieces of Curriki together: the communities of practice and peer review, the collaborative editing and remixing, the multitude of content and media types, the interactivity, and the idea of a shared library we can all add to.

Please add your comments on what metaphor you believe best encapsulates the ideas, purpose and experience of Curriki. Is it a “garden,” or a “library” or “rock soup,” or…???

Joshua Marks
Chief Technology Office
www.curriki.org

Along with being a father, guitarist, student of aikido, and dog-lover, Paul Tumarkin serves as the Communications Director for the Partnership for 21st Century Skills, the leading advocacy organization focused on infusing 21st century skills into education. 

In June, the Partnership for 21st Century Skills (P21) hosted the first National Summit on 21st Century Skills in Washington, D.C. focused on the critical need to combine rigorous core subjects with skills such as critical thinking, communication, innovation and creativity. Over 350 policy-makers, education leaders and business professionals joined in the discussion. In addition, the Partnership held an online Cyber Summit that drew over 3,000 participants. Those events were not endings but beginnings.

Based on feedback received from the national, state and local participants, the Partnership put forth a set of guiding principles to clearly define and advance the teaching of 21st century skills and core content. The National Action Agenda on 21st Century Skills was launched on October 9, 2009. You can read the principles on the P21 website here. The effort was widely supported by over 230 organizations – including Dell, the National School Boards Association, Upper Arlington City (Ohio) School District, Community Unit School District #200 (Ill.), National Staff Development Council, Catalina Foothills (Ariz.) Unified School District #16, National Association of State Boards of Education, Norfolk (Va.) Public School District and many others.

Certainly, discussions continue, but the message is clear from all sectors of U.S. society: our education policies, practices and strategies need to change to effectively prepare our children for the world that awaits them.

According to Ken Kay, President of the Partnership for 21st Century Skills, “The fact that so many schools, districts and state departments of education have signed demonstrates that the 21st century skills movement is gaining momentum in our communities and that we are closer to providing a world-class education for every child.”

So where will the movement go next? As we head to an eventual reauthorization of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA), the 21st century skills movement will have a voice in the process. The Partnership will engage with the Obama administration and state and local leaders to ensure education policy is on the right track.

Still, a movement is only as good as its supporters – we need your voice! So, subscribe to blogs like this one or the P21 e-newsletter or Twitter. How about writing your own blog or--even better--a letter to the leaders in your state?

Whatever you do, be heard. Be a part of change.