I spent most of today recovering from the Expo that McDowell County teachers attended in Beckley this week. Day five of the Expo was a good experience.
We spent the morning in a series of short workshops. Kim Mutterback held a 45-minute workshop on SmartBoards that was probably the most useful workshop of the day for me personally. Kim works as a technology integration specialist in Mercer County. He presentation clued me in to a lot more that I could do with the SmartBoard I’ve been using. (You may enjoy Kim’s blog if you’re interested in educational technology.)
Shelia Hall gave a presentation on Google applications that I found useful. It gave me a few things to come home a play with. Vicki Witt, another TIS from Mercer County, gave a workshop on electronic student responders. I’ve seen the responders in action (though I haven’t used them myself), and while she was quite competent, there wasn’t much in that particular workshop I hadn’t seen already.
Our own TIS, Amanda Fragile Farmer, spent 45 minutes covering blogs and wikis. While I know blogs fairly well I’ve basically just ignore wikis up until now. Amanda’s presentation gave me a lot of insight into their potential for collaborative projects.
I’d like to say that I have pictures of the workshops, but instead I can say that I went out and bought a new camera today…
Perhaps the highlight of Day Five was the break between the morning sessions and the afternoon. Someone set up Guitar Hero in the conventions center’s Arena: Kristy East my leave education to go pro with that. There was also some music and, well, dancing (see the picture below). RESA Director Keith Butcher can boogie…
Dr. Steven Paine, who has served as West Virginia State Superintendent of Schools since 2005, spoke to McDowell County teachers today at the Beckley-Raleigh County Convention Center as part of the 21st Century Learning Expo. His message was well received.
Dr. Paine began by talking about the state’s new content standards. West Virginia is instituting a new, more rigorous set of standards – partly in response to a decline on the NAEP among WV students. Dr. Paine described the decline as an “unintended consequence of No Child Left Behind,” which focuses on raising all students to a minimum standard of achievement. He said that while NCLB with its disaggregate approach to accountability might be the single most important piece of civil rights legislation ever passed, there were more important things than making AYP. Simply achieving the goals of NCLB will not prepare students for the 21st Century.
Dr. Paine said that professional development for teachers is an important key to success in the future. He added that while he was not at all interested in paying teachers for test scores, the state needed a new hybrid compensation model for teachers that took professional development, leadership and performance into account.
Dr. Paine’s presentation included a lot of information about education in other countries. Singapore was a focal point. I’ve lived in Singapore. I spent a little more than two years there in the late 80’s and early 90’s with stints in Australian, Malaysia and Thailand thrown in for good measure. I haven’t been to Singapore now in 15 years. But their education system was outstanding even back then. One of the things I appreciated the most about Dr. Paine’s message was that he made it clear that competition with places like Singapore isn’t really the issue. If we educate our students properly for the 21st Century, cooperation with the other countries of the world will benefit us greatly. There were no alarmist overtones to Dr. Paine’s message, and I appreciated that.
I managed to speak with Dr. Paine briefly before he left. It was a pleasant, relaxed conversation as he walked toward the parking lot. The state is fortunate to have someone at the helm for education that is as approachable as him.
I’ve heard Dr. Paine speak before. It’s never been bad by any measure. But today’s presentation was the best I’ve heard. The message that compliance to NCLB is not the guiding light in state education policy was very reassuring to me…
Hats off to The Inquisitr for pointing out to me today that research company Hitwise has released a list of the top 20 Web 2.0 websites.
Numero Uno? You guessed it: MySpace is the number one Web 2.0 website.
What is Web 2.0 you ask? Wikipedia defines Web 2.0 as “the trend in the use of World Wide Web technology and web design that aims to enhance creativity, information sharing, and, most notably, collaboration among users.” According to Hitwise, the top 20 websites in the category are:
Now, I confess that I’ve never even heard of some of these. But I have accounts with eBay, Facebook, and YouTube, and I’ve contributed in the past to Wikipedia. I also have a Flickr account and a Blogger account. And in the past week I’ve published about 30 unique pages on the Web at seven different websites.
So, how much of a Netizen are you…? After all, it’s the 21st Century.
Today was Ian Jukes day at the McDowell County Schools 21st Century Learning Expo in Beckley. I experienced a couple of disappointments. One was that the lighting in the arena at the Beckley-Raleigh County Convention Center was pretty bad – and that lowered the quality of the video below. The other was that Ian was quite as irritating as I expected him to be…
Those were my only real disappoints of the day. And to be honest, I probably didn’t find Ian as irritating as most people. After all, with me he’s preaching to the choir. Sure, I have plenty of room to improve technology use in my classrooms. But I understand (and accept) the need for change, and I get that the scope of the change that is coming is probably beyond my grasp to comprehend.
Ian took us through a number of the handouts available at his website. He walked over some of the same ground that I heard covered by Steven G. Feifer at the WV Reading Research Conference back in March. Neuropsychology, brain plasticity, and changes in the brain that can result from changes in our experience. It was nice to hear it confirmed from a second source.
I won’t rehash for you in this post things Ian said today. (He was in front of us for over four hours.) I may revisit his ideas down the road in my blog here.
Ian did something I found reassuring. He placed traditional literacy skills and math skills on equal footing with the need to develop technology fluency and critical thinking skills in students. In my personal experience, it’s not always clear to me that people who speak on 21st Century Learning have that commitment. I was in a discussion someplace else recently on the subject of “digital literacy” and I said that the sue of that term concerns me because I think it confuses the issue – make people think that reading skills will be replaced somehow by technology. I’m not sure I ever heard Ian use that term: digital literacy. I like his use of the concept of digital fluency. And I appreciated the clarity with which he asserted on a coupe of occasions that technology fluency needs to be taught side by side with the traditional skills of math and reading because those traditional skills remain essential.
The video here is of fairly poor quality. I need to invest in a new camera. I lost 10 to 15 minutes of footage to a corrupted disk. The lighting, I couldn’t help…
The title: Ian used the term “full frontal lecture” a couple of times today in a disparraging manner. It’s true that Lecture is not long a style of presentation that is generally effective with the digital generation we’re education now. But with the images and the sort of engagement that Ian had, I not sure that what he did today really qualified. And, of course, most of us there were digital immigrants…
I’ve known text-to-speech software was out there for a while now. I saw it on display at the West Virginia Reading Conference back in 2005. But I didn’t realize how much it had progressed and just how common it was now until recently…
I was looking at a blog post by Tracy Rosen this past week at Leading From the Heart and noticed her TTS widget. It’s a server-side application that allows her readers to click on the “Listen Now” button under her blog titles in order to hear her blog.
Tracy’s post is about digital literacy’s social implications. I gave her a hard time in the comments because it bothers me to hear the term literacy diluted as a metaphor. I don’t think reading and writing will ever be replaced by technology as an essential skill – or, I didn’t, at least. Now I’m not so sure.
Being a wantabe geek I decided that if Tracy could make the widget work, so could I. It was kwel and I wanted it on my blog. Bottom line: I don’t have access to my server, so I can’t load the widget. Oh well.
In surfing around to find alternatives to the widget Tracy was using, I found this article: TextAloud Helps Professionals Succeed, Despite Dyslexia. The success stories with TTS software got me thinking about classroom implications. It would be great for the students I have that have some actual reading disability. But my eventual conclusion was that our annual high stakes test still requires that those student succeed at actual reading – without any form of accommodation.
And with TTS software, someone still has to write the text. TTS may be a valuable accommodation for people with disabilities. But will it one day replace reading? Things that make you go “hmmm…”
The week looks heavy on technology issues – intorductions to Blogger, Wikispaces, Google Tools, electronic student responders, the Thinkfinity site (that replaced Marco Polo), and much more.
In the past this week has been aimed at elementary educators from the county. I think this is the first time that it’s open to everyone.
After seven or eight weeks of vacation, the week serves as something like a wake up call. Beckley is about a 90 minute drive from my house. We need to be there at about 8am — five days in a row. Dressed and with our teeth brushed and all. I guess summer’s mostly over…
What international news stories are you following? I ask because the NY Times ran a story yesterday that said that only 10% of newspaper editors in the US think that foreign news is “very essential.”
I suppose my perspective is a little unusualy. After all, I’ve lived outside the U.S. and traveled pretty widely: Stuttgart, Singapore, Barcelona, Bangkok, Canberra, Kathmandu and a few places in between. Four continents and over half the world’s time zones.
Education is faced today with a trend toward globalization. It’s not that we want our education system to necessarily look like everyone else’s. We don’t have to copy China, Germany or Japan. But in many economic sectors, our students will have to eventually compete with people from those countries. And at the very least, our kids need to know that the rest of the world exists…
One of the goals of the 21st Century Learning Initiative is to be sure that the basic elements of our education system prepare kids for a future in which globalization is inescapable. The truth of the matter is, the world isn’t all that big a place anymore.
That’s not to say I don’t keep track of the obvious: the upcoming Olympics, Iraq, Afghanistan, etc. But our kids need to be aware of the world. And for that to happen, we have to be aware of it ourselves.
I came across this video on a site run by the Political Science department at the University of St. Thomas: PoliSci@UST. The comparison to China seems to pop up everywhere these days. I mentioned it myself recently in a piece somewhere else on how many Chinese students got doctorates in the U.S. in 2006.
What should high school be like? I’ve worked at three high schools in the past decade. High school should be different. Should it be China? That’s the question in the PoliSci@UST post. My answer is, “Probably not. But it should be different than it is.”
Part of the problem is that the purpose of education is changing. I don’t think we have a clear vision, a national consensus on what purpose education should serve. Globalization will continue to exert influence on us, to try and get us to adopt a global purpose for education when we don’t yet have a national consensus. The time to come to gripes with the issue will be here soon, if it isn’t already here…
Dr. Paine began by talking about the state’s 
I was looking at a blog post by Tracy Rosen this past week at 
Kicking off the week: 
