Does you wiki?

I have been thinking about wiki and it's application for our classrooms at RFSD. I expect some teacher has done something like this. I imagine:

sharing technology with students in the flow of their instruction. The class is organized to work together and help document their own instruction within a wiki. Doing a unit on a subject, they add details to the reading, lecture and discussions they are having in class. Studying US Government, they take and post notes from class lectures and discussions. They contribute their own ideas and answer quetions in the content the wiki. Their contributions could include written, audio, still and video content. The wiki becomes a reference for the teacher as they expand on the lesson, make assignments, and assessments, and when they repeat the lesson next year. As an added benefit the wiki becomes a class portfolio, a measure of what they know.

I'm not sure if you can do all this on a wiki but I expect you can do most of it. Perhaps the assessment piece isn't in there. You could do some of your assessments using Google forms, like you would a poll.

In this way the class plays an important role in their own learning. They work with the teacher to build a learning community, learn the content, and produce evidence of their learning. The cool thing about the wiki is that it tracks who contributes, making work easy to find and evaluate.

Watching training - Meaning or Mechanics?

I'm sitting here watching people struggle to understand the meaning of the Instructional Practices of Marzano. The presenter is trying to incorporate the use of technology in his instruction. We are logged into a wiki and into a McRel blog - at least some of us are. There is a fair amount of frustration in the room. Part of this is due to the adults general frustration with technology. We often think that we are supposed to understand things the first time. If the technology doesn't work the first time we try it, we are annoyed and look for someone or something to blame. The thing with tech is that it is very experimental by it's very nature. There are few times, if any, that it works out of the box especially with a large group of people. In our case we have 50 people in the room, on a wireless connection, logging into accounts that were just created, using tools that are novel to most. This is a formula for stress and frustration.

It is difficult to control for some of these factors. It would be great if we could do a pretest of people's knowledge and ability with the tools beforehand. It would be a good idea to host the workshop in a setting that is well equipped for bandwidth and power. It would be a good to avoid first time login issues. Advice to self: If you are going to create accounts for people in a new app, you should probably send them their credentials ahead of time and invite them to let you know if it doesn't work.

We are just about to break for lunch and we have just begun to get into the content of the workshop - the Practices. The presenter has assigned a table of people to take notes (trying to keep people from breaking the lock).

Afternoon - Everyone has a username and password and can sign on to the blog and the wiki. That's not a bad turnaround on the account solution problem. While the presenter has described the difference between a blog and a wiki, I'm not sure that people understand the distinction or more importantly understand how it would fit into their instructional work flow. And this is the challenge. On the one hand we have technology. On the other we have instructional practice. If I were a teacher I think I would need a time to practice with each and each together. Despite the frustration, I think we are on the right track in this workshop. The question is whether people understand the instructional practices that are being illustrated with the technology. Also, will the get enough exposure in this session or in the ones to follow to benefit from the use of technology? There needs to be some amount of exposure to the tools with a easy reference to them for later use. Along with this, teachers need to have a deep understanding of the Instructional Practices.

I have assumed that the second ingredient, the Instructional Practices, were second nature to teachers. After speaking with some of the participants I realize that they are familiar with them but not enough to be able to train other teachers - and that is the point of this training. We are trying to encourage teachers in new practice - sometimes even breaking old bad habits. This group of teachers and administrators are supposed to be our ministers for best Instructional Practice. They are frustrated that this - the backbone of the workshop - is being sacrificed for the technology. I'm not saying that I have made this judgement, but it seems to be the prevailing theme.

At the end of this workshop I had stuff to clean up - I'm the AV guy :-) This gave me an opportunity to reflect on this question of balance with the presenter and the participants. Quite a bit of frustration was expressed by the participants. They felt there wasn't enough exposure to the practices. The presenter seemed a little puzzled at the frustration. He thought it was important for people to learn about the different free and low cost tools available to deliver the different aspects of instruction. He thought that technology was a useful tool for examining and illustrating the practices.

Participants thought there were some great tools and resources shared but felt that the technology overshadowed and delayed the presentation of the Instructional Practices. The time taken to get the wiki and blog working was a fairly large portion of the morning. The tech examples that were presented with each practice took quite a bit of time as well. Some of this time was spent in understanding the mechanics of the tool rather than the meaning of it for the practices

In order to frame the frustration of this workshop, it is important to understand the backdrop of people's frustration. Our district is under high pressure to decrease the achievement gap between our high achievers and low. Our teachers and administrators take this task very seriously. They want to help kids be successful. They want to fix the problem now. While most if not all of the teachers think we should be doing more with technology, they don't think that technology is the issue in this gap. There is a concern that, if we dwell on technology, we will fail to fully understand the Instructional Practices that are key to instruction.

As with all issues, everyone has their own perspective based on the role they play and their background. While I am hungry for integrating technology into the classroom, I realize that timing and meaning are essential to it's adoption. If people are overwhelmed with it OR with the other demands on them, their adoption will suffer. On the other hand I have to wonder when will the time be right to help people understand the meaning and the mechanics of integrating it. There is wisdom in exposure - immersion even. As people struggled to get logged into the wiki and blog I was concerned about the meaning being lost on them, but if not now - when will people begin to use the technology we have been talking about.

I understand and support the idea that these instructional practices are the meaning behind the practice of teaching. We need to help teachers understand and implement them with precision. If technology has to wait, so be it. But if we can find ways to interject technology into these practices we need to take these opportunities. We can take the time to document tech tools that bring the practices to light, to use these tools as examples and be willing to explore them even when they are a bit messy.

Working the Unconscious

Last night my family and I returned from a 5 day visit to Missouri where my Mom, Brothers and their families live. I can't remember the last time that I was there for Thanksgiving. It was a wonderful visit as I had a chance to spend time with each of my brothers and hang out with my mom quite a bit. It was rushed as you might imagine. It took us almost all of Monday to get there and all of yesterday - Friday - to get back (around 11 or 12 hours). 6 of that is time driving to and from Kansas City-Columbia and Denver-Glenwood Springs.

While I was in Missouri I kept my work instincts under wraps for the most part. I took some time to answer some email messages but didn't get into my project list. I took time to hang out with people, sleep until 8:00, shop, and eat. That's about it.

There was a time when I would be busy thinking or performing work related tasks no matter how far I was from Colorado. If I wasn't answering email, I would be working on a project in my head or on paper. Sometimes I find that working on a project from far away allows me some freedom to be relaxed and think out of the box. The relaxed part is the most important. Sometimes I feel that the distance helps me to be more creative, to look at things from a different angle. With the decreased pressure of a time line, I can loosen my grip on plowing through, step back and see the whole picture.

This vacation was different in that I chose to do nothing. But the question is, is doing "nothing" really doing nothing or are there unconscious forces at work no matter where a person is. And, do these unconscious forces continue to work even when we don't "work". I have been listening to the "Brain Science Podcast" by Ginger Campbell lately. In one of her interviews she talks with Robert Burton this phenomena. They discuss the writer's process wherein a person has an aha! experience and "discovers" the perfect ending to a story after working on a story for some time. The writer might attribute the aha! moment to some mystical experience wherein the "solution" is delivered to them. Burton and Campbell point out that there are all sorts of processes being performed on an unconscious level - some of them physiological (like regulating our heart beat) and some mental (paying attention to movement in our visual space). While we don't attribute these events to divine intervention, we have a hard time believing that there is background activity in our brain that can bring ideas together over time.

What significance does this have for me on my vacation? It means that while I am doing "nothing", yet exposing myself to new people and places, there may be unconscious connections being made. I may be working in the background without having to put a pen to paper. Obviously this doesn't mean that learning and creation can be automatic, but it does mean that there is a important role for letting go and not holding tightly onto the goal of our latest endeavor. It gives us permission to back away from our drive to produce and find new ways to stimulate our creativity.

Of course there must be a balance between work and play. What I am wondering is, what is the consequence of too much push and not enough letting go. Is there value in meditation or play for solving problems? Do these activities allow the associative aspects of our brains to make connections and find a better solution to problems.

Higher Education

Today I experienced my first teleconference. I met with the Technology Advisory Council for Colorado Mountain College. The technology was an interesting feature of the meeting. It was interesting to see how the distance changes the conversation. I don't know if all of the people were as inexperienced as I - something that would change their approach. My first reaction is that this arrangement makes it easier to speak up. I felt a certain anonymity. The participants were located in 4 or 5 different locations. In addition to the feeling of anonymity, I felt a certain kinship with the people in the room with me. I felt that we were kind of on the same team - more connected that "them" out there. Again, this was my first experience. It might be a unique. I may never have this feeling of kinship or anonymity. We'll see.

The other part of this experience was the conversation that we had. CMC is trying to find out what schools and businesses need in regard to training - for their staff or prospective staff. This question made me think about how my staff work, how they solve problems and how they move along on their career path. What I came up with is that we don't spend much on formal training. When we do pay for formal, linear, sit down training, it is project based. It is aimed at a particular technology or capability we are developing. Generally we purchase this training as part of a software or hardware purchase. Aside from this training my staff and I get, we learn along the way. We basically teach ourselves by finding resources on the web and learning from each other. I must say that I have the privilege of working with some very talented people - people who have some incredible intelligence and background. As such, they are very capable and doing research and have a lot to offer one another. I don't know how unique this is compared to others' experience.