Ed-Tech

While my brain still hammers around some of the other societal / culture issues around School 2.0, I thought I'd make an attempt at tackling a more concrete piece of the puzzle -- the Web Portal.

I am convinced that one of the keys to building School 2.0 is a robust web portal that creates the virtual center of the community online. As much as Google is creating incredible apps, and as much as we can have a few dozen external tools that power our kids' learning, I think that they / we need a home-based around which we can build and strengthen a community. As one of our students said to Steve Hargadon, "If we had gotten the laptops, but not had the web-site and Moodle, it wouldn't have changed that much about the way we learn."

At Beacon, the school forums and teacher/student we created gave everyone a reason to check back to the site often. But with the advent of all the Web 2.0 tools, there's no way I'm going to write the next generation tool we need. I'm not that good a programmer, and that's not exactly my role anymore.

Here's a quick critique of the three tools we've got installed as potentially major pieces of our core web portal:
1) Moodle -- Amazing at what it does. It's an incredible piece of course management software that gives us our core infrastructure. By creating an online environment for every class, it really serves as the focus of our community. Moodle's limitations are what it doesn't it. It doesn't play outside the "walled garden" very well. It's blogging functionality is less than stellar, and while my little hack to allow parents to see homework assignments is passable, I wish that there was an easier way to create limited parental access. In the end, Moodle is a fantastic walled-garden course system, but for better or for worse, that's what it is. (I'm told the newer versions are starting to rock, but we'll see...)

2) Elgg -- Pretty easy to set up and run. Solid multi-user blogging / social networking program. Great for creating an individual-driven, educational networking, but it falls down as a school-driven system because you can't easily set up classes, nor can teachers easily create course-based RSS feeds. Passable, but really individual-based, not great for a community where at least part of the community is top-down defined -- say, as in a course schedule.

3) Drupal -- I started poking around in Drupal tonight. Wow. I started playing and turning on various features, and I can see its power. Blogging, podcasting, unbelievably customizable, scalable. I got the sense there wasn't much I wouldn't be able to do with it, as long as I could figure it out or be willing to build it into the program. And that was the problem -- IF I could figure it out. I'm pretty good at this stuff. I've been doing systems administration and computer programming for over twenty years now. (Yee gods.) And I was intimidated by Drupal's administration. I know if I had a few dozen hours, I could probably figure Drupal out and configure it to do about 80% of what I want it to do, but I don't have that time. And I could imagine a lot of edu-techies looking at Drupal and running screaming. And as I was poking around, I started to get the sense that even Drupal might have some limitations...

So what's the tool I want?

One login to a portal that gives members of the community access to their courses, their email, their RSS feeds, their blog and displays the most important parts of that on the front page. (i.e. -- you have new mail, 500 new RSS articles, a link to create new blog entry, etc...)

A really robust course management system, ala Moodle.

The bility for teachers and students to decide what is and isn't public. For example, it'd be amazing if a class could develop a wiki inside the walled garden and then, a teacher could go into an admin function and decide to publish it.

Blogging / podcasting that can be tied to classes. Individuals would all have their own blogs, but if a student published a blog entry by clicking through a course page, the entry would automagically have the keyword or category with the course name built in.

... and therefore, RSS feeds by course so teachers can easily follow student blog entries. (As well as the typical user-based RSS feeds... and site-based RSS would be helpful as well.)

Parent access to whatever pieces of the "walled garden" that teachers allowed, but at bare minimum a system that allowed parents access to all assignments with due-dates and project sheets attached. (I was able to hack moodle to give access to everything but the project sheets that the teachers post.)

And then the piece that isn't part of any of these tools yet -- a strong Student Information System that allowed teachers to collaborate, get information about kids, write narrative reports, track student progress over time, etc...

And again, there are lots of pieces of the puzzle out there. There are rumors of one of the portal companies partnering with a district to create a student portal. GooglePages could provide a more robust portal than most schools already have, but I still believe in the single login killer app that is school-based, community-centered, with a focus both on the user / student / teacher and the class.

(And yes, I'm still pinning my hopes on Open Academic.

Marcie and I will be presenting at NECC! Our proposal, Starting From Scratch: Building School 2.0 has been accepted. Because the NYC school year ended so late, I never got to attend NECC, so this will be my first time at the biggest educational technology conference in the US. Just looking at some of the folks presenting... it's going to be an amazing conference. We'll have just finished up our first year, and we should have a wonderful -- and interesting -- story to tell.

Technorati tag: necc07

Will Richardson writes today about the difference between having a blog and "blogging." He writes:

Ok, so here’s my beef, again. Blogs are powerful communication tools. Blogs are powerful publishing tools. But blogging (the verb) is still much more than that to me. Blogging, as in reading and thinking and reflecting and then writing, is connecting and learning, neither of which are discussed in the article. (And maybe they weren’t meant to be, I know) I’m not knocking what Tim or his teachers are doing, I think it’s great. But I’m just asking the question: how are his teachers modeling the use of blogs to learn not just to teach?

And I agree. A blog is a web page that's easy to publish. But that's not blogging. I tend to look at my own blogging here, and I get frustrated when I see too many quicky posts in a row that toss out an idea without exploring it in any kind of depth. Blogging for me has to be about reflective practice.

It's about putting ideas out there, exploring them, sharing them, and taking part in a larger community. Sometimes, yes, it's just about an announcement or two, but at its best, my blogging helps me think, brings others into my thought process and improves it because of their input and forces me to make sense of my thoughts -- which is why it's so damned hard sometimes.

Blogs make publishing easier, but having something to say is still hard. But if we can model reflective practice, if we can embody the old Socratic ideal that "the unexamined life is not worth living," if we can publicly create communities where thoughtfulness -- truly being full of thought -- then we have accomplished something powerful.

And hey, we can always post the daily announcements and homework assignments later.

One of the true visionaries in both the computing and the educational technology community, Seymour Papert is in critical condition after being struck by a motorbike. Papert invented Logo which turned millions of kids onto programming. He was one of the proponents of Constructionist learning, which has a powerful influence on SLA and all of the project-based learning folks, and lately, he's been a consultant on the One Laptop Per Child project.

For more information about Seymour Papert, I encourage you to read Andy Carvin's Prayers for Seymour Papert post. And I'd like to add my prayers to the mix as well.

We're starting to move with our blogs -- and with Elgg -- now... Our English teacher, Alexa Dunn has been doing an Odyssey blog project, and our Tech Coordinator Marcie Hull is teaching all the students to keep digital portfolios of their work. (And I'm realizing that I'm going to have to buy a much bigger server to hold all this stuff... we're going to have terrabytes of files very soon.)

It's exciting to see what's happening, as now that we've gotten our feet wet, more and more teachers are looking to help the kids get their work online. We've got some Spanish 1 videos about to appear, we're got a spoken word project, and once we get ProfCast on all the computers, the kids will be able to publish their PowerPoint presentations as m4p files with their voice explaining the project.

We're going to do a school-wide reflection blog experiment through Advisory right before the Winter Break, and that should be a really interesting experience as we ask the kids to all look back on their first few months of SLA. I'm curious -- what questions would you want a group of tech-savvy, first-class-ever ninth graders to answer as they take a look back on the whole of their initial experience? What questions would you want the teachers to answer?

So, we thought we had the money to buy the Adobe Creative Suite for our laptops, but due to some unforeseen circumstances, we don't have it. It's about $20,000 to get 120 licenses for it, and while that raises a larger question about the sustainability of 1:1 -- I figure between the Adobe Suite and Final Cut Express, you're talking about a minimum of $900 of extra software per machine -- I'm not interested in delving into that question right now.

Our machines have Microsoft Office and the iLife '06 suite, but that's the extent of the proprietary software right now.

Instead, I'm looking for free (Open Source would be good, but not necessary) or low-cost publishing (web, desktop, graphic) solutions that work on OSX. I've found some leads so far, but I'm always open to more.

Here are a few of the tools we're looking at:

Google Earth
Google SketchUp
ArtRage
NVU
ProfCast

Anyone have some other good suggestions?

I found out yesterday that I've been named as one of 20 to Watch -- a group of twenty educators doing innovative things in educational technology -- by the National School Board Association and Technology and Learning Magazine. From their conference blog, the explanation of the award is as such:

As education technology has changed over the past 20 years, the vision, passion, and human spirit behind the tools have been the critical components in the transformation of teaching and learning. Many of the early pioneers were teachers, superintendents, school board members, librarians, principals, and technology directors who have become the often quoted and well respected voices of today’s innovation. Technology continues to evolve and new leaders have emerged to further mine the power of technology to enhance education.

You nominated them and NSBA has identified 20 educators who are the "20 To Watch," a group who are becoming the new generation of technology leaders. Learn more about the 20 To Watch listed below.

And here's their write up of me:

Chris Lehmann, Principal, The Science Leadership Academy (PA)
Chris, a long time leader in educational technology, was tapped to lead the new Science Leadership Academy, a high school in Philadelphia, due to his charisma and seemingly endless energy. His methods have led to student assignments being turned in digitally, including a science research journal and movie trailers for Shakespearean plays.

I'm sort of amazed by this. That's some amazing company to keep, and I wish I could be in Dallas this week to meet everyone. I'd love to take a few hours with all of us in a room just to see what we could come up with. Who knows... maybe a skypecast or two is in order.

So Marcie and I had this radical idea that we could put together a video podcast for the K-12 Online Conference. Piece o' cake, right?

Well, except we forgot just how insane life is when you are trying to get a school up and running. So we finished one version of it, but we weren't pleased. It was shall we say... rough.

But in the spirit of Web 2.0, we have SLA Movie 2.0, which is much more of a cohesive narrative, and isn't quite as thrown together. And it was finished yesterday -- a good week and a half after it was supposed to be uploaded... and the amazing K-12 Online folks dealt with our last second change.

So go to our entry in the K-12 Online Conference -- Planning the 21st Century School.

(And thanks to the K-12 Online organizers and presenters for all their amazing work.)

Marcie Hull and I are presenting at the Montgomery County Community College Technology and Learning Conference. Marc Prensky is the keynote speaker.

Here are my notes from the presentation... with very little commentary, just the stuff that I was hearing and seeing as he spoke... Marcie and I were both really struck by how much his points were echoed in what we're trying to do at SLA.

"Engage Me or Enrage Me" --> Educating Today's Digital Native Learners

Twitch Speed --> the speeed at which our fingers move on a controller

"Are we generating engagement?"
Are we doing New Things in New Ways
Are we fostering mutual respect?

What's So Different about the 21st Century?
The need to understand and deal with change...
---> our expectations have changed because of digital technology.
---> "Nothing Ever Wears Out." Our tools change before our old tools wear out.

How much change is coming... it doesn't end. The change, the speed, the new tools... and no one -- not educators or anyone else -- really understands what it means.

Maybe our kids know. Why? They live it.

Ender's Game -- is the game the test? Is the game the reality?

Educators are having problems because:
1) The World is Changing
2) Our Students Are Changing
3) Engagement is Changing
4) Tools are Changing
5) Education is Changing

What do our students want?
-- it was our list.

We can no longer give kids content, we have to ask.

We must co-create knowledge.

We have to experiment and invent. We have to change. We have to adapt.

How do we combine random access / hyper-text with logical thinking?

Linear Processing v. Parrallel Processing

Stand-Alone v. Connected

We have a Digital Immigrant Accent
- Printing Out Our Emails
- Not Going to the Internet First for info
- Needing a Printed Copy for Editing
- Not Using or liking IM
- Thinking "Real Life" happens only off-line
- Assuming teaching equals learning
- Knowing DOS

We must Generate Engagement
-- If a learner is motivated, there's no stopping him." -- Will Wright
"Learning comes from passion, not discipline." -- N. Negroponte

Learning Feels like Play when you have engagement.

Engagement is more important than Content because content will change.

Invent New Tools to Solve Problems

We are all learners
We are all teachers

Today's Games --
They are complex --> 8-100 hours.
A complex game take the same amount of time as a course (30-100 hours)

What are the lessons of the video games:
- Goals (be a hero) -- if you learn skills, they are in service of the goal.
- Decision Making
- Adaptivity
- Iteration
- Cooperation and Competition

We should use simulations because learning to DO is good, especially when combined with the language of why.

Marcie Hull, SLA's Technology Coordinator, and I submitted a proposal for the 2007 NECC conference. Since Tom has posted his, I figured I'd post ours.

Starting From Scratch -- Building School 2.0

At the 2006 NECC, the Department of Education announced their School 2.0 vision. But what does School 2.0 really mean and how do we create schools that can realize that vision? What is the link between pedagogy and technology -- how do we build schools with a pedagogical framework that allows all stakeholders -- students, parents, teachers and administrators -- to harness the power of computer and communication technologies to change the way we think about schools and create a transformative experience for all involved?

The Science Leadership Academy is a new high school that opened in September 2006 in partnership with The Franklin Institute and the School District of Philadelphia. Opening with a powerful School 2.0 vision and a 1:1 laptop ratio, SLA looks to redefine the learning spaces and tools our students, parents and teachers use. The school uses open source tools such as Moodle, Elgg, Gallery and homegrown school information system software to create a robust school-web portal to support the learning that happens in classrooms. Our goal is to create 24/7/365 learning environment for all members of the community.

The workshop will examine both the planning process and first-year implementation of the Science Leadership Academy as a launching point for a discussion of School 2.0 school design. Participants will look at issues of technology infrastructure, staff development, curriculum design in a 1:1 environment, home and school interaction in School 2.0 and the pedagogical framework necessary to realize School 2.0.