Educator, Thinker, Consultant
ISTE 2016 Unconference starts today. I’ll be heading off to listen, learn and share with others. This is always a great opportunity to listen and reflect on where we are in Education, regarding technology and more. It’s also a great opportunity to figure out where we should be going next.
There will be lots of great people here. They’ll have lots of great ideas. There will be lots and lots of walking too.
Edutopia frequently has some good articles. Lately, they have really nailed it. They have recognized the Middle School Matters podcast as one of the podcasts that you should listen to.
Check out the article. Here is the write up from the article:
This show has over 300 episodes and includes some very practical conversations about the day-to-day life of a teacher. It really is like hanging out in the teacher’s lounge after school – equal parts “shop talk” and hanging out. I appreciate the specificity of their conversations and their chats about pedagogy (rubrics, teaching strategies, the Middle School Science Minute). Their website offers detailed show notes of what they chat about in every episode.
Thanks Edutopia.
It was my pleasure to have been a principal at the middle school that this wonderful young lady attended. The world could use more people like this.
Moodle 3.1 has added Competency frameworks to the mix. This fascinates me. Competency based is called Standards based education in the United States. The implementation in Moodle ties activities to specific standards. Interestingly, an activity can be set to multiple standards.
At this point, I have more questions than answers. But I am excited about the possibilities. I am currently playing around with the Competencies, and do have a few answers.
There is also the new option to create a Learning plan based upon competencies. I haven’t had a chance to look at these yet, but the concept is assigning students a variety of competencies to master.
There is lots to like about this so far. It does look as though it will add a few steps to the process. However, there is no shortcut to monitoring these standards for students. Teachers have to identify an activity and associate it that activity to standard. The devil is in the details. Will the process in Moodle be easy enough for teachers to actually use? Will the benefits outweigh the additional work?
The jury for me is still out. However, I’m optimistic after my first bit of exploration. The real question will be in whether or not teachers will use the capability. An additional challenge will be in associating that information into our Student Information System. If we can do that, teachers will be very interested.
Our next steps will include taking the standards that we have in our district and formatting those to import into Moodle. There is a plugin to import standards from the RDF – Achievement Standards. These include the Common Core Standards as well as the standards for the State of Michigan.
Should educators check out the latest and shiniest of web sites? Or should they do the hard work of developing skills?
I work with a lot of teachers. Recently, I had the opportunity to work with new teachers and their mentors. When I work with teachers, I try to do a ton of listening. It is in listening that I usually really find out where the individual is on their journey. By far, most of them are doing really excellent work.
I noticed something recently. It’s nothing new really. But it stuck out. I had several teachers tell about multiple web sites that “you’ve just got to check out”. I knew most of them. But, I ask them a couple of questions:
I usually get pretty similar answers. Teachers tend to like a site because it is “easy to use” and attractive. Those are two good and important features in educational tools. However, the rest frequently falls down. All too often, teachers don’t consider all the options. There are many teachers who are leaders on the Internet listing the “10 Portfolio Tools for students” and the such. The thing is, you don’t need ten, you need one that works.
I’m not blaming teachers in the classroom. It is human nature to want the fun, new thing. There are lots of competing interests trying really hard to capture the attention of teachers. However, it’s really not in the best interest of education and students that we constantly change what we are doing just to change what we are doing.
So here’s my call to spend some time and do some work. It may not be quite as much fun as constantly checking out new tools, but it will lead to better implementation and thus, better student learning. Free up yourself to really pick a few tools and focus on them. Learn how to really, truly use them effectively.
Joomla occasionally interviews experts on their Expert Interview page. I was recently honored to have been interviewed on Student Centered Environments with E-Learning. I hope that you’ll head over and check out the interview.
I talk just a bit about the concepts of student centered learning. The real focus is on the role of the teacher. I still believe that teachers make a HUGE difference in the educational process. A good teacher handily beats good software. It is far better to have a good teacher and good software.
Anyway, please check out the interview.
https://www.joomlalms.com/blog/expert-interview/student-centered-approach-troy-patterson.html
Thanks.
Sometimes, you get things right. It is always good to receive positive feedback. Recently, this has happened with me in terms of curriculum mapping. It is something that I believe in strongly, in terms of communicating what the curriculum should be.
Sometimes, confirmation just takes a while to happen. I work on several long term projects. One of those long term projects is the implementation of curriculum mapping. I’ve set up an electronic system to map and communicate our curriculum. We used TODCM as the basis for our implementation. Sadly, this doesn’t seem to be actively developed anymore.
We set the system up a couple of years ago. We heavily tweaked the system so that it would work for both elementary and secondary teachers. My constant pitch is that this has to work for classroom teachers. I don’t really care if it works for administrators or not, it has to work for teachers in the classroom. The system was largely born out of my visit to a kindergarten class. I was there to help a teacher with an iPad question. I watched the teacher for a few minutes. The lesson was engaging and high quality. I made a comment to her about what a nice lesson that it was. Her response was “I spent all weekend finding the lesson…” I thought that is was terrible that a teacher would have to spend a weekend looking for curriculum and lessons. We have several excellent kindergarten teachers. Shouldn’t they be able to easily share lessons?
Elementary teachers have very different needs than secondary teachers. TODCM, which we renamed DEC (Dearborn Educational Curriculum) is set up much better for secondary teachers than elementary. Each course is mapped to a subject area, thus secondary is a natural fit. We had to redo elementary by marking periods and make each marking period a different subject so that elementary teachers could see all subject areas at once.
Recently, I was informed that we needed to do some additional work on DEC. Not so much we, but the curriculum committees. It seems that teachers are now using DEC and have noticed that it is inconsistent in terms of quality of resources. (I’ve been pushing for more curriculum work for a while.)
Here’s the good news. We are now taking additional steps toward making the curriculum more consistent and more conveniently discoverable for teachers. This has taken longer than I would’ve liked, but it is another step in the right direction. Having curriculum committees review and agree on what the curriculum really should be is an important step. Making that curriculum available for all teachers is just as important.
All too often in the past, everyone “knew” what the curriculum was, but rarely did two people “know” the same thing. Now, we have the opportunity to easily have everyone looking at the same material. Additionally, we can identify those exemplary lessons and share those with all appropriate teachers.
Now the system is far from perfect. There are some technical issues that we can improve upon. However, the biggest improvement that we can make is in determining exactly what classroom teachers would like it be. I will be exploring that this Spring through some focus feedback groups.
When I was an Assistant Principal, you knew that you’d “made it”, you were official, when your name was put on the bathroom wall. Usually, your name was preceded by swear word. I was talking to a friend who got a call from an Assistant Principal. It appears that the Assistant Principal had suspended a student. The Assistant Principal wanted to know if there was a way to save a YouTube video. Apparently, the suspended student had put quite the rant about the Assistant Principal up on YouTube.
I had a good laugh as I was able to pull out my old man creed of “back in my day”…kids put your name on the bathroom wall. Apparently, YouTube is the new bathroom wall.
OER (Open Educational Resources) is in the news again. The United States Education Department has launched a campaign to encourage schools, districts and states to Go Open (actually, it’s #GoOpen, thus further acknowledging that everything must have a hashtag). The GoOpen movement is being touted by the The United States Education Department as a way to “ensure that high quality resources created through our public funds are shared with the public”. The underlying idea is to provide high quality materials for all students. This movement is directly connected to materials that are created through grants from The United States Education Department.
Andrew Marcinek was hired as the first open educator adviser for the U.S. Education Department.
Additionally, a ten districts have taken up the #GoOpen challenge to replace at least one textbook with openly licensed educational resources within the next year. Additionally, there are Ambassador Districts which have committed to help more districts move to open resources.
I’ve written before about OER (Open Textbooks). In that post, I noted that the movement had begun a few years ago, but seemed to have died down. California has an Open Educational Resources Council, but California pivoted from PreK-12 to focus on Community Colleges. This happened in 2012. Utah similarly seemed to be pushing for open resources, but the latest post on their blog is from January of 2013. The Utah Open Textbook Calculator has moved off of the Utah Open Textbook site to the Open Ed group.
Michigan has supported open textbooks through the 22i TRIG program. Michigan has developed four social studies books. These books cover fourth grade, fifth grade, sixth grade and economics. There was quite a bit of controversy when they were first released. The books were criticized for grammatical issues and cultural bias. (There was very little follow up that I could find from WXYZ about the corrections made in the book).
The optimistic side of me is extremely pleased that we are focusing on open resources. As I’ve noted in other posts, I think that open resources could be extremely powerful and useful for schools. Open resources have the potential of providing better content at a lower cost. These could be customized and adapted for schools much more quickly and effectively than the textbooks that we traditionally purchased. Most of the textbooks that we purchased were targeted to the standards and expectation of Texas and California. Open textbooks could be tweaked to be much appropriate for states and districts around the country. As a middle school principal, we used textbooks that were older than the students. This was in large part due to the high cost of textbooks.
The pessimistic side of me is concerned that this will be the latest trend. Several schools, districts and states will “jump on board” with the OER movement. However, the hard work that is necessary to create, refine and implement OER will be missing. Some of those schools, districts and states will move on the next big thing before the true value of OER is realized. I’m also somewhat concerned that we won’t truly create open resources, but resources that are heavily dependent upon something else.
The President and First Lady have announced an initiative to provide ebooks for Title I schools and special education teachers. While this isn’t an Open Education Resource program, it is being billed in the same vein. The problem is that the resources aren’t open, most are private copyright enforced. Rather the resources are available only through an iOS app. So, the irony here is that the students who are identified as living in poverty (Title I), need an expensive device to access the free materials. It is better that this option exists than not, but I find the situation somewhat frustrating. (In full disclosure, I’m a really big proponent of the iOS eco system. I have a lot of Apple© products. I even bought Apple© stock long ago because I believed in the products.)
OER resources will remain a challenge. CK-12 is a leader in providing open resources. It is not an oversight that most of their materials are Math or Science. 3+4=7 can’t be copyrighted. Language arts becomes much more difficult. Copyright issues will continue to be a consideration when creating and using open textbooks. This is partly why the Department of Education announcement is crucial. It does mean that things created using Government grants must be open source. Most of the things that a government agency creates are open source. Thus, we get some great resources through NASA.
I truly hope that OER takes off. I hope that education will make the long term commitment to make OER an instrumental part of the educational process. I will work and support options that make that happen. But, let’s be clear. Creating resources is hard work. Making them easily available is a challenge as well. However, I believe in the many hard working, forward thinking, dedicated educators in America.
I love getting into classrooms. Recently, I visited a couple of classrooms that made me think. Both classrooms were in the same building. This was a middle school. One was down the hall and around the corner from the other. Thus, both had a similar student population. Both classrooms had two teachers (i.e. were co-taught classes).
The first classroom was a very traditional classroom set up. The students were seated in rows. The assignment was projected onto a screen. The teacher was leading the discussion. The teacher had set up a scenario in which the students were to respond. The students responded in their journals. Each student was to made a choice over which of the three options was the best choice. After a few minutes, the students then responded as to which one they chose. A few students volunteered why they made the choice that they did. The co-teacher was seated in the back of the room working directed with two students.
The second classroom was arranged into groups of tables. Each grouping of tables had four to five students sitting around the table. The students were working very collaboratively. The students were working on solving a problem. They were encouraged to talk to each other and check their answers with others at the table. Both teachers circulated and encouraged the students. One teacher had led the set up of the problem. The other teacher led the discussion of the answer (using a document camera to project onto the screen).
It was clear that the second classroom was much more participatory. The students as a whole were seemingly more engaged, more active.
In a follow up discussion, I was asked which classroom I visited was “better”. I think that this misses the point completely. Clearly, the second classroom showed the traits that we have been pushing to see in classrooms. The students were actively doing. It was different than what we would’ve seen even a few years ago. The first classroom was much more in line with what has traditionally happened in classrooms for years. Yet…
For some students, the “old” strategies work. Rather than saying this method is better than that method, we should insure that students have a varied experience in the classroom. There is not one single strategy or method that will work for all students. We never know exactly what the future will bring. Can we sure that getting kids to be active learners is good? Absolutely. We also know that novelty is crucial in learning. If every class is structured the same way, novelty goes down. By providing a variety of experiences, we truly reach the widest range of students.
The trick is to make sure that there is variety. This is not an excuse for each and every teacher to say “Cool. I’ll keep lecturing and let the other teachers be more interactive.” But, it is also a call to administrators and teachers to make sure that not every class looks and feels the same to students. We don’t need to sanitize education into a new standard. We need true variety, true novelty, true interaction with real students. Learning is messy.
So, let’s get out there and create positive experiences for students. Let’s make them do stuff. Let’s make them create. Let’s let them learn. But let’s not think that there is only one way to do that.
Troy Patterson
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