Live Blogging Tim Magners School 2.0 Speech

[Notes... with commentary when I had the chance to do so.]

School 2.0 - Live Blogging

Tim Magner -- Dept of Ed

Can we tie in district content resouces w/ Classroom Formative
Assessment w/ larger assessements?

I like what he's talking about w/ interoperability and tying together data.

Classroom Based Practice --

Use of software performace data to inform future instruction -- careful...

Explicit connections between off and online learning.

* Good classroom management -- really? come on...
School Based
-- most of his bullet points are around software. One mentioned collaboration around practice w/ software.

The world in which we're living is online. We know.

What is the big picture? (He posted the Sch 2.0 graphic as a tool.)

There is some good here. There's no question of this...

If none of us know what school 2.0 looks like, then bring people together to talk about it. That makes sense, but there needs to be a conversation about how society has changed, but kids have not.

I feel like the comment "Moore's Law doesn't apply to the human brain" is important here. Our kids are still kids, and we have to be very careful not to assume that the technology has fundamentally changed the experience of being a kid.

Announcing of etoolkid -- a set of tools to help communities plan.
Make the poster interactive. This is cool if it's done well.
They say that the hardest thing is to explain what stuff is.
He keeps talking about the vendors on the floor. Why isn't he talking about the educators giving sessions. If this is about the vendors, we're in a lot of trouble.

Self-Assessment Tool (electronic confessional - heh)
designed to help practioners evaluate their own skill set.

Meeting in a Box
Provide stakeholders with an effecgie way to have a range of conversations about this stuff. Ok -- again, that can be incredibly powerful... if it is not didactic, but open ended. I love the idea of a "cheat sheet" for the foundation ideas of all this... and in his current language this does sound a lot like top-down support for grass-roots growth, but my fear is -- as always -- that this becomes top-down push for a specific kind of reform. Nothing he's showing really suggests that, but it's a just a long-time fear having been in education for over a decade now.
The online drawing / planning tool seems, well, reductive to me a bit because I'm not sure that we can just draw a picture of School 2.0. Sure, it's a nice first step, but like the School 2.0 poster, it's only good if it moves the dialogue as a first step. The next step might just need to be a lot harder and longer than that.

Bandwidth Planner -- I think thi is smart, lthough I wonder if this is a one or two year necessity. This is one area where schools can just piggy-back on the larger societal question of bandwidth... because that's going to be a big issue.

In the end, a very interesting presentation... I like that DoE is taking this on. I question if School 2.0 and NCLB are compatible goals for the DoE, for schools. (O.k. -- I do more than question... I flat-out disagree.) I liked that he made mention of the need for more formative assessments, rather than just summative. But I hope that we can start to understand that this means more than more multiple choice tests.