A big concern some people may have about online learning is communication and interaction with the instructor and fellow students. With the great web technologies that exist now, this is actually not a problem at all. Communication and interaction happen in a few ways. The instructors do synchronous sessions and facilitate discussions via Wimba. Wimba sessions occur once or twice a week, depending on the instructor. Students can also use the Wimba platform for group collaboration purposes. Other VoIP tools like Skype and iChat are used. And, of course, social media tools like Twitter and Facebook are used for other asynchronous communication. My only issue is that I’m literally on the other side of the world from the instructors and fellow students. It’s morning time in Beijing when they are doing the Wimba sessions in the evenings in the States, so I’m always at work. This is only a small drawback since the sessions are recorded. I can listen back to the session anytime afterward asynchronously. Any questions I have about the session can be addressed to the instructor through the other means described above or email.

The learning materials have been great so far and relevant to 21st century learning. We are sent books that we are required to read for each course (I do hope that the books will offered electronically soon, though) and there are Internet-based readings we do, as well. We’ve watched TED Talks, videos made by the university, and other videos on the Web. We have to respond to discussion prompts on discussion boards that relate to ideas in these readings and videos, using the e-learning system the university uses. Of course, we are expected to incorporate elements of the readings and other media into our assignments. All of these different learning media have been from the latest and greatest minds from Gardner to ISTE to Jensen to Robinson to Shirky.

The assignments are challenging, as well, both in content and process. They mix rigorous content understanding along with promoting technical skills with our Macs. For many assignments, we are given a choice for what tool/application we want to use, but sometimes we have to use a certain tool/application. We’ve done podcasting, videos, webpages, desktop publishing, presentations, and Web 2.0-based work. A majority of assignments are open-ended to an extent and allow for creative interpretation. Others are more “traditional” writing assignments that have to follow APA formatting guidelines. This includes the thesis I will have to do in order to graduate. Assignments have been done both individually and in groups. It hasn’t been too difficult to complete group work when you’re at a distance from your partners. This in and of itself has been a fantastic learning experience. All assignments are assessed with a rubric. Most assignments are submitted through the university’s e-learning portal; others are uploaded to the instructor’s iDisk, and a few others have be posted to Web 2.0 sites. Strict deadlines are given, and we are expected to meet these. Technical problems aren’t considered an excuse for not submitting on time.

All-in-all, it’s been a great experience so far. I am learning as much or more than if I was sitting a physical classroom. Though there are strict deadlines, I can complete the assignments according to my schedule and inspiration. Outside of the traditional thesis we have to write, the program has been rather progressive in it’s approach and content. It’s just been really busy doing this program on top of a full-time job. I am feeling a little burned out right now, but at least summer is only a few weeks away!

Over the last 7 years or so, “version” labels have been added to help make sense of major changes and evolutions in society and technology. For example, in The World is Flat, Thomas Friedman laid out the differences between Globalization version 1.0, Globalization 2.0, and Globalization 3.0 (the third edition of his book is referred to as “Release 3.0“). Based off of this, some thinkers are even speculating Globalization 4.0. Maybe a little more popular in its “versions” is the Web. First, of course, was Web 1.0; we are now amid a dynamic Web 2.0, and Web 3.0 is hot on the heels of Web 2.0 and is already accessible some ways in its early stages.

Education is also going through an evolution process. The pace of change and adoption of new, transformational learning frameworks, however, is definitely not as fast as that with digital information technologies. Despite the slow pace of change, “version” labels are being tacked on in order to help understand the stages of evolution in education. Like the other version labels described above, the labels for education show where it’s been and where we need to be with it. Not surprisingly, two of the three versions actually still lay ahead of us! In some recent blog posts, the organization Education Futures gives some nice overviews on these versions of education, with a particular focus on Education 3.0. I’m not going to summarize them here. The posts aren’t long and are well written, so take a look:

• Leapfrogging to the New Basics
• Designing Education 3.0 (this post gives a nice overview of the differences between Education 1.0, 2.0 & 3.0)
• The Role of Schools in Education 3.0
• The Role of Technology in Education 3.0

After reading these posts, the issue in my mind is this: the process of moving from Education 1.0 to Education 2.0 has been very slow in many places. If there were a continuum between 1.0 and 2.0 written in increments of .1 (i.e. 1.1, 1.2, 1.3 and so on to 1.9, 2.0), my perception (and that is of all-in-one k-12 international schools since that is where my career has been for the last nine years) would be that most schools are between 1.3 – 1.6 in evolving toward the 2.0 model. Some people might consider this rating generous.

With the rate of change in all other aspects of society happening so quickly, it seems the adoption of and evolution toward the 2.0 model should be moving a lot faster. Since it’s not in most levels of education (at least at the high school level, which is where I teach), should we skip some aspects of Education 2.0 and start looking to create the environments for Education 3.0, doing the “leapfrogging” the first post describes above? If we were to wait for our school’s to go step by step toward Education 2.0 then toward Education 3.0, it might be too late. Considering the slow pace of change that has plagued education, that could take up to 20 years or more! In this case, I don’t think educators and schools can wait until the necessary educational framework is in the mainstream in order to adopt it. By then, the world and technology will have zoomed so far ahead that schools as we know it would likely be irrelevant.

I think we need to moving toward this 3.0 model sooner rather later. The question is, however: what do we need to do to release the ball and chain that unfortunately keeps education from moving forward more quickly?

It became clear in a recent “high level” high school meeting at my school (about the role of technology in learning) that one of the biggest barriers to effective and compelling technology integration seems to be the culture of isolation in which many colleagues work. Even though colleagues are talking to each other about various issues throughout the day, they aren’t often explicitly sharing best practices. This especially includes best practice with technology and creating 21st century learning environments. At the same time, colleagues don’t often seem to seek out this information either. For example, a few colleagues and I often offer various tech oriented workshops, but the attendance at these is often low and often have the same people in attendance. This problem of isolation isn’t only happening in my school. It’s been a problem in most schools for most of the history of education, I would say.

In a recent post on Academic Commons called “Opening Up Education- The Remix,” the authors stated:

“The failure is harder to put into words. It could be described as our lack of progress on sharing “pedagogical know-how” among educators. We have systems to run e-learning courses and content to view, but we have not captured the teaching processes that expert educators use to bring learning alive in their e-learning courses. If an educator creates a great sequence of learning activities that leads to a rich learning experience for students in an e-learning class, how does this educator share the activity sequence with colleagues so that they can automatically run the same activities or adapt them to suit local conditions? How does the educator share the thought processes that led to the design of the activity sequence?”. . . Put simply, what we lack is an agreed way to describe and share the teaching process, regardless of whether the activities are conducted online or face-to-face. As a result, individual educators spend heroic amounts of time on planning and preparation, but with enormous duplication of effort and no economies of scale. Apart from the lack of efficiency in preparation, educational quality also suffers: While some educators regularly create outstanding learning experiences for their students, some do not. How could the best teaching processes be shared among the widest number of educators?”

This culture of sharing best practice and collaboration can happen in many different ways. Professional development conferences, both regional and local, have always been a great place to learn what other educators are doing. For educational technology and 21st century learning, a couple of great regional examples here in east Asia are the Apple Leadership Conference in Hong Kong which occured this last weekend and the Learning 2.008 conference that happened in September 2008. An upcoming conference in September 2009, the 21st Century Learning Conference in Hong Kong, will surely be a great one, as well. These regional conferences only happen a couple of times a year, though, and not all faculty attend these. Furthermore, those conferences that have a educational technology focus (like the examples above) tend to be attended by ed tech leaders and teachers who have already shifted toward 21st century models of education. We obviously need to be sharing with more educators than those that have already shifted and are doing the sharing. “Regular” teachers need to be encouraged and given incentive to attend these conferences.

When time and money constrain people from attending distant regional conferences, local weekend workshops can provide wonderful opportunities for sharing best practice and building collaborative relationships. Of course, these types of workshops aren’t uncommon. They just need to be promoted more explicitly at times, I think. One that I know will be great for those in the Bangkok, Thailand area will be TechTrain 2010: Beginners Learning Technology Tools Together which will occur in January 2010. Events like this will surely achieve great in-roads to helping educate the faculty that need the most assistance. Presenters at these local workshops will be local themselves and possibly from the same school, so getting further face-to-face assistance beyond the workshops will be much easier.

The last way this culture of sharing best practice and collaboration can be promoted is by creating a viable and explicit intra-school model. For those teachers that don’t have the time or motivation to attend external workshops, having situations for learning how to effectively integrate technology and create relevant 21st century learning environments is essential to move the whole school forward. Examples can be collated and presented through online showcases; there could be face-to-face show-and-tell sessions, and there could be the usual in-house workshops that promote these instances. An example of the latter is the 7 Steps toward 21st Century Education that two colleagues and I created. Trying to make time for workshops like these during the school day is critical, however. Some people can’t stay after school or come to school early due to family or other commitments. So, it’s often these people that miss out and are getting left behind. At my school, we will tackle this time problem by having early release Wednesday’s starting next school year where we will have two hours every Wednesday afternoon for professional development.

Even if you can’t physically attend a face-to-face session in any of the contexts above, social media technologies make it easy to follow what’s happening. Most conferences and/or presenters will have a wiki or a Ning site that will delineate most of the information shared in person. At the same time, many attendees at a workshop will Twitter the backchannel. By following the hash-tag #hksummit, this is how I kept up with the recent Apple Leadership Conference in Hong Kong. Though not as much as those physically in attendance, I still learned a lot from the backchannel of this conference. Following the backchannel is so easy to do and doesn’t require much time and/or effort. We just need to teach people how to do it.

All of these are important ways to build understanding of best practice in technology integration and relevant learning in today’s ever changing world. All of these situations need to be promoted and encouraged in a school. Moreover, administrators need to be attending these situations along with strongly encouraging common faculty members to attend, not just the ed tech leaders in the school. When this happens, and everyone has opportunities to learn that fit their schedule and style of learning, I think isolation will lessen and a sharing and collaborative culture will be achieved.

I joined Second Life about year and a half ago to see what the hype was about. After creating Benji, I had him wander and fly around a bit on Orientation Island. It was fun for a little bit, but after a while I got bored. I think I went back maybe one time after that. I just couldn’t see any value of pushing this avatar around for hours without any specific results. I’m all for trying and evolving the use of new technologies, but my first life has been so busy, so to spend unnecessary time in Second Life seemed like an unneeded distraction.

This new and required opportunity for my class created a second chance for Second Life to show me some value. After doing a couple of software updates (it had been a long time since I last signed in), I got going. Benji appeared in what seemed to be a new Orientation Island. I wandered a bit and got used to moving and flying around. Some of the other controls had been updated so I figured those out, as well.

The five required places I had to visit were Kuttara Zen, Koru, Teaching Island, Weather Island, and EdTech Island. They were all interesting. My favorite, though, was Koru. It was a bizarre little place. It was night time, so the place had mood and ambience. Benji definitely enjoyed it.

The five places I chose to visit were International Schools Island, Dublin, Galveston Isle, Virtual Morocco, and Numbakulla Island. All had their unique qualities and were fun to cruise around. My favorite of these five was Numbakulla. It was billed as an immersive game. I didn’t follow the game (it wasn’t even clear what to do), but it definitely was worth the meander through it’s surreal, turquoise flavored architecture.

The crazy thing about all of these 10 places is that they were all empty- not an avatar to be found! When I signed in, it said that there were 55,000 people in Second Life at that moment. I have no idea where they all were, but they weren’t in the places Benji visited. It was kind of like being in an episode of the Twilight Zone.

There is some educational value in Second Life. It can be a more interesting place to meet with students and educators from around the world, being an alternative to video conferencing. There are also game-like, problem solving activities that can be done (like what is done on Numbakulla Island, apparently). I also thought the cultural immersion places like Dublin, Galveston, and Morocco are great ideas. These could be used to get a sense of what the real place is like either for student and/or tourist benefit. I think there some islands that are replicas of historical places, which would also be great for students to experience and explore.

I’m a little more enthusiastic about Second Life now. I still don’t plan on spending hours in it, but as it continues to evolve I’ll definitely keep an eye on educational uses.

1. Wikispaces . The class wiki for each of my classes is the center of our online learning environment. The students get almost all class information and due dates here; they complete class activities and discuss various topics; they collaborate with partners to achieve goals for projects; they share and comment on information provided by me and other students, and they embed and link to work here from other Web 2.0 sites. Links to my class wikis: Asian Studies, All grade 9 Asian Studies, IB ITGS.
2. Diigo and Delicious. These social bookmarking sites are used to collate resources for my classes. I bookmark sources relevant to the different content we cover and tag each source with a certain tag which causes the source to appear on the class wiki through a link roll. At the moment, I do this link rolling process through Delicious. I’m in the process of moving all social bookmarking process to Diigo. In Diigo, I’ve created a group for each of my classes. The students join Diigo and become members of our class group so they can share resources with each other and collaborate in the research process. Soon, I’ll be showing the highlighting and commenting functions of Diigo that make the bookmarking and sharing process even more dynamic.
3. Google Docs. As a collaborative writing tool that stores documents in the cloud, I use Google Docs on occasion to have students complete written activities they do in a group context. I also have them do collabortive planning here, as well. Here’s an example of a collaborative piece of writing my IB ITGS HL students did. All the assessment is done right on the document- no printing, no converting to a MS Word file.
4. DropBox. This is a fantastic online file storing and sharing application. It looks and works just like a Documents folder on a computer. The difference is that it’s connected to and syncs through the Internet to other computers on which you have DropBox installed. Alternatively, you can access your files through the secure Dropbox website. You can also share folders and files with others who have a DropBox account. Any kind of application file can be shared. I’m doing this process with five IB extended essay students where they save all work in a shared DropBox folder. The IB coordinator is also part of each shared folder. We can view their work whenever we want, and give give feedback that the student sees as soon as we save the file. It’s a wonderful tool.
5. Issuu. This is an online publishing tool. You can publish any kind of document here that then appears in a beautiful and easy to use viewer. Documents published to Issuu are completely searchable through web, so they can be considered officially published to the world. In my Asian Studies class, grade 9 students who had chosen to do a magazine article for an assessment had their articles collated and published through Issuu. See an example here.
6. YouTube. I don’t need to explain what YouTube is. For the same assignment where grade 9 students were able to choose to do a magazine article published through Issue, the other students chose to do a documentary style video that was published through YouTube.
7. Xtranormal. This is a site about which I recently learned. This is a simple video creation site (cartoon-like) where all you have to do is insert some text, chose a character and background, and you end up with a cool little movie. I will have my grade 9 students use this site as supplement to an opinion (for/against) paper they will write on a controversial topic about which they will be studying. They will take their for/against arguments, make them sound more conversational, insert the text into the script for two different characters on Xtranormal, and create a virtual debate between the characters. Here’s an example I created for the students to view.
8. MindMeister. This is a cool collaborative mind mapping tool. I just used it for the first time with my IB ITGS class. They used it with fellow group members to brainstorm ideas and start planning for a group project. It worked out well and allowed the students to easily complete this task outside of class since each person could access the centrally located mind map online.
9. Gliffy. Gliffy is an online, collaborative diagram software. It allows you to create professional-looking flowcharts, diagrams, floor plans, and technical drawings. As part of the same project for which ITGS students used MindMeister, they used Gliffy to show the layout of the network they are creating as part of their project. Gliffy has nice, visual icons for many different contexts. For the network layout, it provides icons for servers, computers, firewalls, hubs, etc. Here’s an example of a group’s work in Gliffy.
10. VoiceThread. This is becoming a very popular medium for presenting work at all grade levels. VoiceThread allows you to share images, documents, PowerPoint presentations, and videos. The great thing is that you can do this collaboratively with anyone with an account anywhere in the world. Moreover, you and your partners can narrate on top of the images or slides. Here’s an example from a global collaboration project my IB ITGS students did last year with a school in Shanghai and Helsinki, Finland.
11. SurveyMonkey. This site does exactly what its name says- surveys. I used this to do a student-teacher feedback survey I’m required to do each year. I also used it once to do a low-stakes, formative assessment quiz. It worked very well! We were able to see a summary of the class results within seconds of the last person finishing the quiz. We were then able to discuss immediately why any question was missed, thus giving immediate feedback to the students in the process.

As I mentioned in a previous blog post, PD “will need to come from all angles- top down, bottom up, grade level to grade level, subject teacher to subject teacher, and even student to faculty.” I continued to say that “explicit support and dedication to the transformation process from administrators and school boards will be essential.” (a little aside here- I think that was the first time I’ve ever quoted myself. Weird!) I think this second point about the top down leadership angle is so important. If our administrators don’t have a vision nor provide leadership for educational transformation as a fundamental goal (with technology integration being a part of the transformation process), then it will be difficult to truly unfreeze the status quo (if we are thinking of ‘unfreezing’ in terms of Lewin’s Change Theory).

For the past few months, I’ve been thinking about how best this process could work from the top down (administrators) angle. I’ve had (and continue to have) conversations with like-minded colleagues and even with my immediate administrator about this. Ideas are generated, but we never seem to finalize a strong idea in how to proceed.

Today, however, I just came across a few great ideas in the ISTE book in how to proceed (this is specifically in regards to training for technology integration). Here’s a summary of the ideas (from p. 111):

1. Change two simple things in the teacher evaluation process- require teachers to show how they are integrating technology in one formally observed lesson; have an element of technology integration be part of each teacher’s annual goals.

2. Require teachers to attend a certain number of PD workshops each year relating to technology integration.

3. Poll teachers each year on their needs and desires and offer specially tailored PD workshops based off of the feedback.

4. Offer special designations to teachers who do a certain number PD workshops relating to technology integration and can show explicit application in the classroom of what they’ve learned.

5. Skype in experts on various elements of technology integration to provide specialized training so that costs can be cut from having to travel to PD workshops that are out of town.

All of these are excellent ideas. I especially like numbers 1, 2, and 4. I think these three processes more clearly show that there is vision and expectation of ALL faculty to be actively involved in the learning process. This learning process and, of course, the implementation of the newly found technology integration skills will help the evolution of relevant and authentic 21st century learning environments. This would be the ultimate goal.

Transformation and change isn’t easy regardless of the angle of approach. For the top down angle, we must have leaders who don’t fear change if it’s going to happen sooner rather than later.

Reference:

Solomon, G and Schrum, L. (2007). Web 2.0: New tools, new schools. Washington D.C.: International Society for Technology in Education.

We are constantly evolving lessons and assessments to be more relevant. For example, in the last unit (Power & Conflict), we did two major assessments– formal oral presentation and timed writing. For the oral presentation assessment, the students did a 5-6 minute presentation with support slides in front of their class of grade 9 peers. They chose one of five broad topics that they then narrowed down so they could go into more depth rather skim across historical detail. They also had the option to create their own topic for their presentation if they came across something interesting in their content research throughout the unit. This year we kept the same topic options as we did last year. What we changed, however, was our approach in educating the students in how to prepare for and use effective visual support in a presentation.

In the past, we encouraged the students to use images in their slides, but we still ended up with students presenting with mostly bulletted, text-based slides, which caused the slides to drive the presentation in many cases. If you follow the world of presentations, you may have heard of this type of presentation as “Death by Power Point” (of course, there are other presentation qualities that ‘kill’ the audience along with bad slides). This year, we chose to take the Presentation Zen approach in educating the students. Presentation Zen is a book written by Garr Reynolds where he emphasizes strong preparation and design princlples in both creating the presentation and the slides that support. We used some of his suggestions for preparation, but we really took inspiration from his design emphasis on slides.

On my class wiki, I put excellent examples of Presentation Zen-type slideshows from SlideShare that the students could view. I also found examples of great presentations from YouTube, made them into a playlist, and embedded a playlist player into the wiki so students could watch those, as well. The students were required to view the videos prior to practice presentations and respond to some guiding questions on the discussion tab of the respective wiki page. I also did an activity called “Extreme Slide Makeover” where the students took poorly designed slides about the life of Gandhi and made them more ‘Zen’ like. They produced some fabulous results! In their final presentations, almost all of the students produced wonderfully designed, visually oriented slides that truly supported their presentation. The content and other presentation skills will very strong, as well. Of course, presenting is a skill, so the students are still developing some qualities, but overall they showed vast improvement, and the audience was usually engaged during each of the final presentations. No more Death by Powerpoint! All the students said they feel more confident as public speakers now and understand how to better engage an audience with the interaction of their content and slides.

The other assessment was a timed writing. In the past, we did a traditional pen to paper multiple paragraph essay in 45 minutes for this assessment. We had largely done this as a foreshadowing to IB expectations they would have in a couple of years. This year we decided not to think about tests like the IB any more as motivation for what we do. Instead, we decided to focus more on information fluency/literacy, strengthening the students’ online research skills and emphasizing how video sources can be just as valid as text-based sources. Over the course of the unit, we introduced the students to Google Scholar and Books as more reliable sources to search before a ‘normal’ Google search. We also showed them how to use YouTube and other video sites like AcademicEarth for educational purposes. Our school just got a subscription to Safari Montage, so that was heavily used in the process of learning. Lastly we showed them iTunes U for all the great video and audio podcasts it stores for educational uses. It was amazing how many of them did not know about iTunes U despite being iTunes users!

For the written assessment that replaced the timed writing, we gave the students a prompt relating to the content they had studied throughout the unit. With a laptop in hand, they then had an open Internet they would use to find evidence to support the points they would write and explain over two paragraphs. No more rote memorization and regurgitation here. They had to properly parenthetically cite any information used from the web along with providing a full MLA formatted source entry at the end of their writing (we’ve been practicing this citation process the whole year). They also had to explain how they found each source and why they felt it was valid and reliable for the task. The students were challenged in this assessment, but they completed it well. This skill of information fluency is something they will always need in their life.

For our next unit (Change and Modern Society) we will be bring together all grade 9 students together in cyberspace. There are 9 sections of Asian Studies spread over four teachers. The wonderful world of Web 2.0 will allow us to break the walls of time and space so we can get the students collaborating and communicating with their other peers that are not in the same class section. We’ve been doing this the past two years on a wiki. We will continue to use this same wiki for discussion, sharing of research, and presenting of various activities. All of this work will culminate in a group discussion on topics the students will have chosen. In the discussion they will support and debate one side of their topic, after which the group will work on solutions to the problem within the topic.

This year we will be adding the use of Diigo to the research and collabortive process. As a social bookmarking Web 2.0 tool, Diigo will make it easier for students to share resources with each other since they will be members of an Asian Studies Diigo group. They will also be able to use some great features of Diigo like the highlighting and commenting functions which will allow them to highlight pertinent information in a source along with with having discussions right on the webpage. We will also show and explain how Diigo can be used as a search engine to find sources that other Diigo members found as pertinent, valid, and reliable to topics they follow. They will continue to learn the importance of tagging. We’ve also gotten the librarian to be a contributing member of both our wiki and Diigo group, so between the Web 2.0 tools, all grade 9 students, the teachers, and the librarian, the students will be part of collaborative research powerhouse! We look forward to using these tools during this last unit. I’m sure the students will understand the great benefit it will bring them as 21st century learners.

Asian Studies has been a great course to teach. It’s wonderful to work with flexible and forward-thinking educators in making the course what it is today. Having the wonderful social tools of Web make it even greater. Of course, the students are the ones who make it really happen in the end.They are great.

We thought about doing some activities that would produce some “creative” processes with the group, but we weren’t too thrilled about those ideas. We then came across another set of videos by Ken Robinson called “Creatively Speaking” Part 1 and Part 2 from a presentation he did at an Apple Leadership summit in 2008. After viewing these videos, we thought- why not let the guru himself speak to the group. So that became the beginning of our 90 minutes. We decided to precede the videos with an “into” thinking/brainstorm question- Think of a time you found your students being especially creative. What were the conditions that allowed that to happen? The conditions created for learning are so important to allow for creative processes. We thought it would be important for the group to think about their previous experiences before hearing what Sir Ken had to say.

In “Creatively Speaking,” Robinson refers to effectively designed curriculum, assessment, and pedagogy as the essential entities needed to promote more creative learning environments and conditions. With that idea, the rest of our session was framed. We elicited the assistance of our curriculum director (CD) to facilitate parts of these elements. Our school will be implementing a “Learning 21″ framework that will incorporate Creativity and Innovation as one of the essential component to our learning environments. Our CD has a lot of knowledge about implementing a creativity environment and is in the process to putting together the vision and documentation for this at our school, so we thought it would be important for him to delineate where our school is heading with this component of learning.

My colleague also came across an excellent document online called Assessing Creativity: A Guide for Educators from the The National Research Center on the Gifted and Talented. This is a super long read (121 pages; don’t let the end of the executive summary think you are finished!), but has some great research and ideas regarding assessment of creativity. Assessment tends to be the most challenging part of facilitating an environment of creativity. This a great go-to document to help understand that process. We also referenced Apple Classroom of Tomorrow – Today (ACOT2) Culture of Innovation and Creativity site and the Route 21 site on Creativity and Innovation to help us flesh out the rest of our ideas.

Our 7 Steps PD usually has a technology integration slant to it, but technology wasn’t really referenced in this session. Why? The software and the Web 2.0 tools we’ve referenced throughout the previous Steps make it obvious how they can promote creativity. The group understood this without question. What’s important in this case of creativity is not so much the tool, but the environment in which creativity, as both an intellectual and artistic process, can thrive. Technology would just a means in the creative process.

The session went very well, and some very good discussions occured. I look forward to continuing the discussions on this issue. If you have thoughts, ideas, and/or experiences in facilitating more creative learning environments, I would love to hear your responses.

The idea for the PD initially came about through a couple of conversations with our high school principal about facilitating a “23 Things” type of PD to introduce colleagues to the powerful world of Web 2.0. From there we continued the discussion among ourselves, eventually moving to collaborative planning meetings with the curriculum and PD directors at the school. In that process, we decided that the focus of 21st Century learning-related PD shouldn’t just focus on technology, but rather on the shifted focus in what needs to be learned this century and the reasons why we need to transform the way we educate our students today. Technology is an important means to the larger ends, but there are also other ways in which transformed learning environments can occur and achieve the goals without technology.  However, since the integration of technology does tend to be a weak point for many teachers at our school, we did decide to emphasize ways to integrate technology in the process of achieving the larger goals as part of the PD. In creating the Steps for this PD we largely referenced the new ISTE standards and the Route 21 framework. We also fused our own ideas based off of conversations between each other, like-minded educators in our own PLN’s, books like A Whole New Mind by Daniel Pink, and educational organizations like Edutopia .

The next question was how to deliver this PD. We thought about just doing it all online, but we realized this might limit the number of participants. We also came to the conclusion that having face-to-face (F2F) time is still important in PD today. So, we decided to create a hybrid learning environment for the course.  Along with face-to-face meetings that correspond with the Steps (plus an introductory F2F session), we created a Ning to be our online platform for asynchronous learning and interaction.

In order for our colleagues to get a sense of what a dynamic online personal learning network feels like, Jeff, Rob, and I encouraged people in our own PLNs to join the Ning before the F2F sessions began. The response was great! Bringing in outsiders into a single school’s PD offering was a departure from the usual in-house PD process. Technology, when used effectively in the classroom, can help blow out the walls of time and space in the learning process. With that idea in mind, we thought by allowing remote educators and experts to join our online PD environment, thus blowing out the walls of the school, it would make a much more dynamic learning experience for our colleagues.

Lastly, we are planning on bringing in some students during one of the Steps to facilitate a discussion or activity. Students can be a great source of insight and ideas in this shifting process. We can’t forget that they aren’t only the recipients of what we do as educators- they should be a partner in the process. And, we need to realize that it’s ok to give up control at times and let the students educate us.

Step 1- Different Education for a Different World
Step 2- The World is at Your Fingertips (Communication)
Step 3- There Is No “I” in We, World, & Success (Collaboration)
Step 4- Work and Learn Smarter, Not Harder (Information Fluency)
Step 5- Technology and a Whole Brain Approach (Creativity & Innovation)
Step 6- Cultivating Habits of the Mind (Critical Thinking & Problem Solving)
Step 7- Bringing It All Together

Upon perusing the Full Sail website and detail about the courses, I liked the very hands-on approach with technology in the context of current learning theories and curriculum models that the program offered. Also, the fact that the coursework could be completed in 12 months was inviting. The quality of the program that sealed the deal, however, was Full Sail’s partnership with Apple. Being an Apple Distinguished Educator, I thought this would be an exciting opportunity to hone my skills with the various Apple software suites and other 3rd party creative application suites while learning and contributing knowledge and creative education projects through the dynamic online learning platform Full Sail has created.

All Full Sail students are required to purchase a Macbook Pro, which is pimped out with iLife, iWork, Adobe Master Collection, Office 2008, Screenflow, and some more stuff. Because of Apple’s innovation and leadership with creative software and Full Sail’s focus on entertainment, media, and design, the partnership was a natural one. This technology partnership is referred to as “Project LaunchBox” and is the first of its kind.

It’s going to be an intense 12 months, doing this degree, working full time and offering professional development opportunities at my school. But, the experience is going to be fantastic, I think. I’ll post more about my experiences and projects as the year goes on.