NYSCATE Leadership Summit 2010

A link to my presentation at the NYSCATE conference this afternoon. I'm shocked, but I got assigned the Auditorium. I have to use a microphone. Wish me luck!

Group Work and Peer Editing

I was trying to explain to a class just how revolutionary I think online document platforms like "Google Docs" are going to be. I thought I'd share some ideas about it here.

As an educator, you can put yourself in as a collaborator on any or all of your student's documents. A teacher can simply make it a requirement that the student shares the document editing process. The National council of teachers of English encourages writing as a process. As a teacher you will be able to see how the student is revising the document.

First the student must share the document with the teacher. The student clicks the "Share" button in the upper right hand corner and types in the email addresses of those who will have access to the document. You have the choice of letting the collaborator view or edit with you. Here is a document with many collaborators:



All the teacher has to do is sign into google documents and they will see all their student documents. The document list shows the documents you are a collaborator on. It also show the names of the other collaborators. If the student hasn't added the teacher as a collaborator, it won't appear. I make it a requirement that I must be a collaborator in each of my students documents.

The teacher clicks on the student's document and then can see when the student has been working, how many changes have been made and if anyone else has been editing the document.

The teacher simply need to click the menu choice "REVISION HISTORY"




At the revision history screen, the teacher will see the process of editing the document. Below is a the revision history from the Technology Plan that my district recently completed. We had a entire committee of people editing the document as once. You could quickly see who made what changes and how much time they had spent.



This new online document tool ushers in a new era for student document collaboration. No more will group work be done by one student while the others slack off. No more can a student slap something together on the day of the deadline. The teacher can check and see when the editing was done and by whom.

It is powerful tool for a teacher. A Google document account is free. As educators we should be taking advantage of this technology.

Kim Cronin Bunchuck

Engaging Parents

ASCD Conference - Monday - GOOGLE DAY

Today I spent a bit of time at the google booth.





There session on Curriculum mapping using google calendar and docs was great. I'll share more...

ASCD Conference "Don't Laugh at Me"

The highlight of Sunday afternoon was a session with Peter Yarrow. He is the "Peter" from Peter, Paul and Mary. When I think of all that man has done for peace, most notably, the march on washington, I get goosebumps.

Currently he's spearheading a program called "Don't Laugh at Me". It attempts to stop bullying by distributing free curriculum with the anti-hate message.

So I was in the front row when Peter started setting up and he was gracous enough to pose for a picture:



It's a little fuzzy, but priceless!

ASCD Conference - Day 2 - Don Tapscott

I started tweeting Saturday afternoon during the one-to-one session. There were many tweeters at the conference and if you checked you got a great sense of what was going on.

Here is the Tweeter screen with some sample posts:




I walked the vendor floor the first thing of the day which was a great way to gather information for my school. After the curriculum mapping session yesterday I was particularly looking for software solutions.




At 10 am the General session met with a talk by Don Tapscott on the "Net generation"

He started out by quoting Dylan "There's something going on here and we don't know what it is."

I too have quoted Dylan (see my earlier blog post) to show how technology is changing education in a major way, just like his lyrics talked about the changing society in the late 1960.

Here are some of my notes from his lecture:

He felt the critical periods for brain development are 0-3 and 8 -18 years old.

But because of our kids exposure to multitasking their brains are better at switching than ours are. He says there is emerging evidence that exposure to new technologies may push the brain beyond conventional "capacity"

He feels that our current kids are the smartest Generation.

Don't blame the internet for problems in the school. the Internet isn't the problem it is part of the solution.

He notes that back in the day the family structure was that - Mom reported to Dad and the kids reported to Mom

Today the kids are the center of the family - The family organization chart is a circle with the kids in the center and all family activities revolving around them. They are:Coddled kids, trophy kids.

He feels that facebook and social media is how kids communicate. Kids don't understand the concept of Privacy. So we should go through the privacy controls on facebook so that kids don't give away all their personal information.

Today's kids want to make a difference. They are in a culture of collaboration and cooperation. If you embrace that culture you get better results.

Banning facebook is demoralizing. We don't understand your tools, we don't trust you.

We fear what we don't understand

When we graduated, we were set for life, just get a job and keep up. Now the degree has a time stamp like a milk carton, it will go sour. Lifelong learning is the goal.

The old school ways of teaching: Drill and kill, Sage on the Stage, Broadcast model of learning - one way, teacher focused. In this style the student is isolated.

Student focused is the way the new generation learns. Collaborative classrooms is very uneven in today's implementation.

Children have a right to the tools of learning for their time and their century. Change the model of pedagology into a collaborative model.

But after he said all this he said that you can't just throw technology in. You need to change to a more collaborative learning style. Cut back on lecturing, empower students to self-organize and work together.

If you want to follow tapscott on twitter, he is: @dtapscott


More later - Kim

ASCD Conference

I had the pleasure of attending the ASCD conference in San Antonio Texas in early March 2010. The conference focused on education. I attended many sessions. Here is a recap of my day on Saturday.

The first session was on Curriculum Mapping - How can we use 21st century tool to navigate teaching and learning?

The presenter of this topic was Heidi Hayes Jacobs, who is a leader in the curriculum mapping field. She wanted to dispel the notion that curriculum units are like real estate - teacher feel they own them. This is a wrong notion. Curriculum is a shared, growing, evolving thing.

She noted the four phases for implementation of Curriculum Maps:

• Laying the foundation
• Launching the process
• Sustaining the map
  
• Advanced tasks

She also talked about five types of Alignment

• Internal - District align to one another
• Cumulative - Year to year K -12
• External - Aligns with state standards
• TO Students - Mets the needs of the learners in your district
  
• Global - Aims to help the school w/ global community

She also is a big proponent of Digital Portfolios. She feels that assessment is going to be done with digital portfolios.

I am anxious to read more of her materials and start to bring some of this to my district.

Each of our students has a network folder with their work. I hope to expand on Heidi's idea of digital portfolios and help the students move their high school work into their portfolios.


At 10 am on Saturday was the Keynote speaker, Jeffery Canada. I can't say enough about how much I enjoyed hearing him speak. I'm going to summerize his talk in another blog post because what he said was so important.


I focused on One to One computing on Saturday afternoon. The session was a bit of a letdown. I had hoped to get ideas on how to implement a one to one program. Instead it was just a justification lecture on why districts should move towards one to one. I felt the lecture was "preaching to the choir" with their reasons on why one laptop per child is so necessary.

Here are some of the reasons:

• Put the learner at the center of the learning process.
  
• Computers as imagination machines.
• 1:1 isn't about hardware, but software.

Three kinds of schools that have laptop one to one programs.

1. The pioneers

2. The Marketeers (want to get in the news)

3. Their neighbors (copying the other school but not having a plan)

A good resource for districts starting a one to one program is twitter. Follow tweets on one-to-one andsee what they are doing and not doing

The last session of the day was on Handhelds in education

Cell phones are not going away. We have to deal with them.

Saturday was a packed day.

I'll post about Sunday and Monday next.


Kim