April 20-25 -- I hope you'll join us!!  

Registration link = http://www.learnnowbc.ca/educators/moodlemeets/default.aspx

1) All attendees will be given a link to download advance copies of Notebook11. There are some wonderful new features and good news for Mac users. The download link with be posted on the Moodle Meet page.

2) YOU DON'T NEED A BOARD TO PARTICIPATE. Notebook software is available on a free trial for 30 days. The people at SMART Technologies are very generous with their downloads. If there's a board in your school or even in your district, chances are you can get the registration key and have Notebook software installed on your classroom and home computers. In fact, I'm retired and don't have regular access to a board, but I can hook up my Wacom tablet and use all the pen functions with my stylus. If you have no tablet, just stick with the keyboard.

• Link to an article -- http://www.brighthubeducation.com/teaching-methods-tips/67112-how-to-open-smart-notebook-files/

3) There will be 2 webinars during the week. The link will be up on the Moodle Meet websiteor can be reached from the CEET Ning page from the Events panel (left side)>>webinar title. There is also a non-members' link to the webinar room--  http://bit.ly/djnDpq .

•   Sat. April 21 at 1pm PDT (GMT-7)  Unveiling Notebook11

 Stephan Doyle (Manager, Education Product Marketing for Software, Content and Services at SMART Technology) will walk us through Notebook11. He’ll demonstrate the new features as well as show newcomers enough of the basics to create and share great learning activities right away.

  Stephan has been with SMART for 13 years. He lives in Calgary, Canada, with his wife (Kimberleigh Doyle, also of SMART) and two kids Theo (8) and Annika (6).

•   Mon. April 23 at 5pm PDT  Using SmartBoards with Special Needs Students

 Angie Scarano-Iuorio and Valia Reinsalu will show us how to use a SB as an assistive technology for special needs students including those with Autism Spectrum Disorder.

 Both women are on the assistive Technology Team in the Special Education Department for the Toronto District School Board. The team follows the belief that “all students, not just those with special needs, can benefit from the use of assistive technology,” to guide their efforts. Using communication methods including a robust website, newsletter, Facebook Fan Page, and a Twitter account, the AT Team strives to keep teachers, students, and parents informed of software tips, training dates, resources, and success stories.

 Valia worked for the Toronto Star and the CBC before becoming a teacher.  She served for 5 years five years  on the Educational Computing Organization of Ontario's yearly Conference Committee, and helped coordinate the inaugural unconference event, Edcamp Toronto, held at York University last October. One of her passions includes finding ways to use technology in teaching and learning to meet the needs of all learners./p

  Angie is the leader of team. She has presented over past fifteen years to groups ranging from parent councils to large groups of 500 teachers on a variety of topics pertaining to Special Education (from Autism to Technology) This includes various Ministry symposiums and Educational forums.

It's going to be a great week. Here's a sneak peak at the resources I've been compiling. I look forward to meeting everyone to share questions, ideas, experiences, resources, and Notebook files.

This is an invitation to a FREE 1 week, online professional development opportunity about Smartboards and Notebook software sponsored by CEET from April 20-25.

Register through LearnNowBC ()http://www.learnnowbc.ca/educators/moodlemeets/default.aspx) or join CEET (http://ceetbc.ning.com/) and click on 'Professional Learning'. 

Participants engage in the learning activities and discussions that interest them the most at times that best suit them. Webinars are synchronous but they are archived for later viewing.

All educators welcome. Pls. pass this on to anyone you feel might enjoy the event. Hope to see you there.

This morning as I was looking for images to use in a new math course I'm developing for students in a country I've never visited, I came across the work of a math educator named Ben Chun. Chun seems to be one of those brilliant people who, fortunately for his students and those of us who read his blog, gravitated into teaching. His "Facebook Visualization" in Flickr Creative Commons

... bears an interesting resemblance to the Fibonnaci seqence (from Algeblog9)

... and will fit into my unit on Patterns in math, nature, music, art, and more.

Conceptualising this course has been a bear of a task. Many of the students drop out when they are young teens, and a one-to-one laptop program with individualised learning packages has been instituted as a way to keep them engaged in school work. The students will have no connection to the internet so the wonderful world of online interactives cannot be accessed.The courses have to be completely self-contained and self-managed so if the students go into school only occasionally, they can still be successful.

Interestingly, depriving me of the ability to use what I've spent 5 years becoming good at has forced me to think more deeply about the relationship of curriculum structure to student learning. How do I build in interactivity? What will be its purpose? How can I make math into a 'do with' rather than a 'get through' subject? How can I give the students more choice and control and at the same time ensure they take on the responsibility for ensuring they have the skills needed to meet the requirements of standardised tests? I want them to look forward to opening their laptops to do math. I want them to be interested enough to take on the hard stuff rather than have the course reconfirm that math and staying in school are not for them.

Chun's reflection on the benefits of teaching programming to math students is a nice metaphor for  my underlying big idea:

"School teaches that errors are bad; the last thing one wants to do is pore over them, dwell on them, or think about them. The child is glad to take advantage of the computer’s ability to erase it all without any trace for anyone to see. The debugging philosophy suggests an opposite attitude. Errors benefit us because they lead us to study what happened, to understand what went wrong, and, through understanding, to fix it." (http://goo.gl/Mdqgu)

You can't convince a kid on the verge of dropping off that math is good for him because it will help him get something he wants some day in the future. The work either has to be intrinsically interesting or have a real-world usefulness. One has to get the kids staying with the work and enjoying the results so they have an opportunity to engage in what Chun calls 'computational thinking':

"When we analyze the effects of computation, we take note and measure how data is transformed. We look at how information is processed and what is accomplished by that processing. We can think about what we might do if such computational power wasn’t available. That can also help us start to imagine new things we can strive to accomplish using computation." (http://www.ctillustrated.com/)

Another math educator, David Tall, comes at mathematical thinking in a different way (http://www.lsri.nottingham.ac.uk/mtw/onlinevideos/Tall.html). His writing reminds me that there is also still a place for solid procedural learning in my course. Part of math learning requires that students give up replicating real or natural processes over and over and do the work of commiting facts to memory and coming to recognise relationships automatically.

Most of us don't have to examine and mentally aggregate the parts of a table to know we're looking at table. We've been there and done that enough times that we can instantaneously recognise table-like shapes and objects. Yet many children, especially those who struggle in math, cling to primitive routines such as counting (instead of learning math facts). This makes such processes as long division and calculating fractions into Herculean tasks. If students don't encapulsate mathematical processes into "thinkable objects", all their attention and brain power is sucke up be by the lowest level tasks. These students end up with huge 'no go' mathematical zones that at first slow them down and eventually cripple their ability to enage in the the kind of nimble, flexible thinking needed to use math more powerfully.
 
So today's conclusion is that crystallized intelligence +  fluid intelligence = a more "global capacity to learn" (http://psychology.about.com/od/cognitivepsychology/a/fluid-crystal.htm). People aren't either left or right brained. The 2 hemispheres are in continouous communication with each other giving us our ability to engage in complex behaviour and higher order thinking (http://goo.gl/Qdfm and http://goo.gl/R6GqH).
 
The problem of what will make a good course structure then becomes a sort  of 'chicken vs. egg' problem of where to start. How to keep more students learning more math more successfully comes down to letting the students choose where to begin --i.e. with learning prodedures if that makes them more comfortable or exploring problems and projects if that's what will draw them in. It doesn't really matter where a learner starts in the mathematical landscape, but the couse must also develop the understanding that it's not good enough to just get better at what you already does well or like.

Becoming a powerful thinker involves leveraging what you do well to learn something new or different. In math it means growing and expanding your talents rather than using them as a boundary or circumference to delineate what you will (safe; inside the circle) and won't (too far outside the compfort zone) try. It also means being able to later look back, engage in a little of Chun's computational thinking, and savour how far you've come.

I just finished co-authoring and co-moderating a Moodle Meet on mLearning.

(Click on the heading to see the entire resource collection).

Today I was looking back through this blog and came across this passage which was written in 2008. It was part of an interview I gave for the company (Freepath) which generously sponsored my first conference presentation. At the time I'd only had internet and a computer in my house for about 18 months. Yes, I was an edtech late bloomer .....

Question: How do you see social media impacting students in the 21st century? How does it impact teachers and where do you see the intersection? 

My response: Marshall McLuhan created the slogan "Reach out and touch someone" for the Bell system in 1979.   I think he’d be delighted by the way technology has so shaped our lives in the nearly 30 years since his death.

Clearly many students are wrapped up in a web of connections -- whether it’s as simple as passing notes by texting each other or participating in Facebook or Second Life. Contrary to school rules, their phones are always on. We can either fight this or, in the parlance of the 60’s and 70’s, co-opt it. We may not be able to ‘out-tech’ our kids but we can certainly outsmart them and harness their desire to be connected and use it for our own purposes.

Students with their phones out on their desks, accessing the internet and completing tasks using these as a primary learning tool can’t be texting each other under the table.  Students who are using the wealth of the internet as their primary learning resource and who are more engaged in their learning don’t have time in class to manage their Facebook files and keep up with their Tweeting friends.

Regarding how social networking impacts teachers:  I’m of the “Be wary because Big Brother is watching” generation, and I still have a lot of distrust for living so publically, but I will say that finding how willing people “out there” are to make time to help each other completely took me by surprise.

That 2008 reflection of mine sounds so much like many of the comments about the educaional benefits of mobile devices shared by participants during last week's Moodle Meet. Did I have amazing foresight or, as was suggested yesterday during a TLT Friday Live webinar, has education moved into a state of perpetual 'beta' with advances in technology both forcing us to revisit the same challenging questions and giving us the opportunity to experience the same joys of redicaovery over and over?

This week I started out by thinking about David Wiley's challenge to all Change.MOOCers to envision how our personal ideas about change and educational technology might be played out in the world at large. He urges us not to be content to keep our thoughts inside ourselves but to actualise them by dreaming BIGGER and pushing our vision for change out beyond its normal horizons.

Then I came across this oh-so-short but eloquent piece from a Brazilian blogger.

(Link to original -- http://lucidatranslucida.blogspot.com/2011/10/fragments.html)

And I was reminded of a piece I read years and years ago in the weekend supplement of my hometown newspaper. It was an interview with Jean Vanier about L'Arche. Vanier explained how he'd been frustrated by his inability to change society. On the advice of his local priest, he created a home for two mentally challenged people. Through his daily life with them, he came to understand that his desire to be of some use in the world could be realised through simply giving one person (or a few people) a better life. Vanier gave up on being a radical and as a result has become a revolutionary.

So, perhaps the greatest task of new age educators is to confirm/reassure/convince/ each student who comes into our care of the value of his/her own fragment .... of the potential of that fragment to be the missing piece in someone else's bigger picture. Holding back may mean that other person's moment of understanding will be lost. Contribution may result in an exquisite new pattern or trajectory.

I've been working for a while on an application for a position as Educational Technologist in a Canadian university. Because I'm not a perfect-fit glove for the fingers of their job description (I've only used 2 of the 3 specific tech tools they mention and have no higher ed. instructional experience),  I'm crafting a statement of qualifications to try to convince the selection committee to give my application a second look. It needs to convey to them that the experience, skills, and understandings I've developed over a 30 year career as a K-12 teacher and during my recent foray back into the world of higher ed as a student pursuing an M.Sc.in Instructional Media make me uniquely qualified for this position. (I can figure out the hard skills in less than a month. And anyway -- because one of their big 3 programs creates flash-based media that don't work on many mobile devices, they'd be better served by hiring someone who will find them something new and easy-to-manage fast.)

Over the past month I've steeped myself in this campus's teaching and learning literature, created 2 Scoop.its on blended learning, and attended a bunch of webinars in the higher ed world. The latest was yesterday's with Martin Weller on Digital Scholarship. His blog led me to to another Cormier/Siemens course. From there I linked to an interesting  'bark out' in the Cogdog (aka Alan Levine) blog about his getting caught for a gross breach of copyright. Near the end of Levine's article was a paragraph about how hard it is to do a really good mash-up -- to combine ideas and learnings from a number of different sources "into a whole to create a new meaning or structure" (Ask.com).

But wait -- isn't that the definition of SYNTHESIS? And shouldn't a pedagogy of abundance pay special attention to synthesis? And where is synthesis in the updated version of Bloom's Taxonomy?

Some educators equate 'creating' with 'synthesizing'. But more and more I'm feeling that, in this age of information abundance, it's short-sighted of us to ignore synthesis as an important higher order cognitive skill in its own right. To assume learners come to courses knowing how filter and blend so much input is to make mental mashing-up into a precarious task.

I agree that the old Bloom needs revising, but perhaps, instead, 'applying' and 'creating' could be subsumed into one new category -- innovating -- which would then leave room for us to restore 'synthesizing' to the critical thinking skills list thereby ensuring learners have lots of chance for practise.

So here I am -- still at my lonely desk -- trying to mashup what I have to offer this university into a package that will fit enough of what they need so they'll invite me for an interview. If I write it well enough the selection committee will be able to give up just enough of their preconceived notion of what an ed tech person should bring with her to this job to give me a kick at the can.

I've been clearing out my webmail this morning. I'm in a MOOC, and Moodle Meet, and the MathFutures Google Group, and there is so much material is floating into my inbox that I tend to let it pile up like a log jam and then have to selectively blast out a few holes so I can find critical daily communications amongst the torrent of inputs.

But before I finish my clean-up, I want to address the issue of filtering when it comes to input overload because this idea keeps coming up over and over again for me. It was in an old email I will throw out after today and in a Moodle Meet discussion I read last night. For that Meet, I'm curating the main discussion points and resources that are being shared. I'm just following the discussion so there's no overarching or underlying organizing principle; it's simply a record.

The suggestion was made that perhaps the entries could be arranged to show a better correspondence between teachers' needs and wants and the information bubbling up in the course. But I'm wondering if this might end up helping to perpetuate traditional paradigms by giving them a 21st century face lift (not necessarily a bad thing) and whether leaving the information messy and MOOC-style might encourage people to construct their own processes using the pieces they like. Is filtering helpful when it comes to consolidating best practices or a hindrance to innovative thinking?  I think as long as the amount of information doesn't deter potential readers altogether, then hodge-podge might serve many goals whereas linear only fulfills one.

In late August the video below touched off a similar discussion in the MathFutures forum about what constitutes a good thinker. 

When I first saw that during a cognitive neuroscience course a year before, I so completely missed the gorilla I had to replay it to make sure it wasn't a hoax. I knew part of the problem was my gullibility. Like magicians who use sleight of hand in card tricks, the video makers sucked me in and even reinforced my selective attention with misdirection.One view in the discussion group was that missing the gorilla is a sign of a highly-focused brain. A good thinker is someone who can "dismiss unnecessary inputs". Although I've cultivated that ability, I'm no longer sure it's always a strength.

A long classroom teaching career has taught me that many educators are too quick to dismiss unexpected inputs or inputs that don't seem to fit a pattern as unncecessary. The kid who doesn't work productively in class becomes a trouble-maker who needs to learn to conform. Complaints become inappropriate remarks that are personally motivated instead of information. New technolgies become add-ons that take time away from the important stuff in a curriculum.
   
After a recent workshop on a new math program I stayed beind to listen to the workshop leaders debriefing the day. There was one person in an audience of 20 who'd kept urging them to shorten their traditional 'show and tell' (pushing out of information) and move the learning into more interactive, small groups. The leaders were relieved that she would not be back for Day 2 as her comments were deemed 'unnecessary input'. The proponents of this program have scientifically-produced research to prove that the best results are achieved when people stick to the script. There is no room for creative applications of key ideas. Digressions are politely acknowledged and then just as politely ignored. Workshop groups are doggedly herded along one trail.

I think this way of 'not seeing' goes to the heart of the main shortcoming of their entire program. Although they can ensure all participants will be able to count the number of baskets, the regimentation is turning teachers off so the program isn't getting broad acceptance in the public school system. As a result, huge numbers of kids are missing out on a wonderful learning experience. But the program leaders, armed with their own selective focus, choose not to see that gorilla. The potential to transform the way math is being lost because they're taking this all or nothing approach. Instead of showing people the fundamentals of what makes this program work, they are teaching scripts.
 
So I think we often leap too quickly to the 'unnecessary' brand and remain unaware of potentially important information (i.e. the gorilla) because we get too intent on theone path we see between us and our desired outcome. Sometimes being open and alert to what does not fit can be as (or more) important than just paying attention to what does. That way lies creativity and innovation and best of all - delightful surprise.

Can you watch the gorilla and count the passes at the same time? I haven't tried but I suspect not. Perhaps this means that we should be modeling and teaching how to become more adept at swtiching focus, at seeing issues through different lenses, especially when it comes to educational change. In the words of Mike South (member of the MathFutures discussion group): "In the case of the gorilla problem, you are asked to solve something simple, and the better you are at ignoring distractions, the better you are going to do. I think the brain that sees all the motion on the screen and then goes to 'ignore everything in black' is doing the right thing ... but only if you were right about the nature of problem in the first place." And in retrospect, how often does that really happen?[[posterous-content:pid___0]]

I've been watching a video of Doug Belshaw's 2010 presentation about the importance of not taking a one-size-fits-all approach to implementing mobile learning (or any other educational reform for that matter).

Good ideas in education have a always had way of 'catching on', but in this era of social media, some go viral. What starts out as a creative innovation that solves one school's or one person's problem is picked up by a few others. They tell 2 friends and they tell 2 more and so on and so on until  teachers everywhere are trying to reproduce this innovation in their classrooms and what was innovative becomes the norm.  'Same-old, same-old' is replaced by 'same-new, same-new'. 

It's not that the innovation was a bad one. It's that  giving it the tag of 'cure-all', mass producing it, and then professionally developing everyone in to go about it (sort of), means the original vision becomes so diluted, the very thing that made it innovative in the first place is lost. It's no longer a creative response but has morphed into an expected norm. The more we chase formulaic fixes to the problems of teaching and learning the less responsive we become to leaner's needs.

Belshaw's article on the commoditization of learning makes a good point. He says embracing new techniques (in this case ‘flipped classroom’) can divert us from the important work of  "challenging core assumptions about how we can and should be educating young people." When one teacher's innovation turns into an educational movement, once again some students' needs will be met, but others will lose out.

Perhaps that's why really big MOOC's have the potential to be different. They become like massive think tanks -- but with each individual bubbling up his/her own unique caldron of unique responses to unique conditions. Double, double, toil, and trouble ... aggregate, remix, repurpose, feed forward... Perhaps this kind of learning can keep us out of the stew pot.

Readings:

~George Siemans: Narratives of Coherence (http://ltc.umanitoba.ca/connectivism/?p=61) ~Teaching in Social and Technological Networks (http://www.connectivism.ca/?p=220) ~Constructivist Learning Theory (http://www.exploratorium.edu/IFI/resources/constructivistlearning.html)

For some time I've struggled with constructivism. Surely, I've wondered, there's a lot of knowledge that's just better passed on in the old way -- taught directly by a person who understands it well. Would I want to entrust my body to a surgeon who'd completely constructed his/her own learning? Would I want to buy a house wired by a completely self-taught electrician?

Unfortunately, for some students, when their teaches implement a constructivist model, they abandon the role of instructional leader in the name of giving students responsibility for their own learning. Such teachers laud the value of peer-to-peer sharing and helping, but what they fail to see is that often the stronger students end up shouldeing over instructional role and provide teach their friends who need help. (I suspect that in some constructivist classes, there's plenty of direct instruction going on. It just isn't emanating from the teacher.)

A few days ago, I came across the term 'narrative of coherence'. "Aha," I thought. "Here's the secret that will save me!" I thought it show me the middle ground between traditional delivery and extreme constructivism. I thought I'd find someone else's vision for how to infuse learning experiences with an underlying narrative that would give students' explorations coherence. But when I read the articles (top 2 above) more thoroughly, I realised the phrase was used as a sort of educational pejorative.

'Narrative of coherence', it seems, is a way to describe what traditional teachers do. They work out the setting, plot, characters, and theme and tell the whole story to their students who learn it by listening and studying it over and over until they know it by heart. Reaching the end of a lesson is like coming to the end of a chapter when a bedtime story is being read. Learners develop the habit of waiting until the next lesson to find out what happens next. The problem isn't so much that students don't learn the story (for many do and have), but that they hear only one story with an ending that always comes out the same way.

I firmly believe that well-crafted learning experiences must offer COHERENCE. I grew up as a teacher when 'discovery learning' and 'concept formation' were the progressive ways to teach. We believed back in 1974 that these new models would end the 'learn & forget' cycle (sound familiar???) because learning would become a sequence of 'aha' moments. I remember one day trying to lead a young fellow through the process of discovering how to do long division. I patiently laid out a trail of bread crumbs that have led him to a magical moment of concept formation, but it just bewildered him. Finally he pleaded: "Please, miss, would you just teach me how to 'dibide'? I just want to know how to dibide!!!" So I did it the old way and after a few practice examples, he went away relieved and happy. For me it was a lesson learned.

But perhaps it was one I learned too well. Over the years I became a great educational story-teller, and my kids learned my narratives well, but for many that's where their understanding and questioning began and ended. Job well done, I thought -- but in retrospect it seems like a job only partially done.

So this morning I've been working on a new metaphor -- 'landscape of coherence'. I once read that some mathematicians see a landscape of math. Like a virtual world, for them math has geography that is navigable and can be learned, enjoyed, used, enhanced, changed, and perhaps even destroyed. I think this metaphor may hold some power for educators as well. Perhaps the middle ground I've been seeking between narratives of coherence and radical constructivism is 'landscape of coherence'.

This landscape has important landmarks with some pathways connecting them, but the way a learner moves around in it is determined sometimes by need, sometimes by signposts, and sometimes by interest. Instead of leading students down one garden path or telling them one story, teachers have to make informed decisions about what the critical landmarks are and then ensure the students understand & master those. We then entrust to the students the work of making their own network of meaningful connections. To foster this, we make time for sharing, comparing, crowd sourcing, and reflection (when we contribute our own perspectives as one of many).

When you revisit a learned landscape after a while, it's still familiar because it was extensively and intensively explored. You can revisit old landmarks and retrace old paths, but you'll also appreciate how the big picture has changed with time.

(Video Link: Rotating Earth Animation)

The key then is for the teacher not to refrain from making any decisions, but to give up on trying to teach everything to everybody in case they might needed it sometime -- because it never takes anyway. Our job is to do the much harder work of being selective -- of making better decisions about what the important landmarks are -- and to then ensure our students know how to fulfill their role in this new paradigm.

And so I think I've finally made peace with constructivism. I guess you can teach an old dog new tricks.

I don't think there's any way to be prepared when an educational tsunami comes your way, but it is possible to make sure your ship is water-tight so you can try to stay afloat.

This morning I've been working on my old Big Returns blog -- mostly getting used to the changes the Posterous people have made to how this all works. My feeling is that, in order to boost the social media aspects of blogging, Posterous has given up the absolute simplicity that drew me to them as my first blog site of choice. Like many fast food restaurants which have 'ballooned' their menus to attract more people to their counters and drive-throughs, Posterous has 'complexified' what used to be a very simple set of choices to navigate. It's taken me the better part of the morning to get ready for the real work of the MOOC to begin.

In any case, you can look at my Change.MOOC.ca page to see my initial impressions of the MOOC process, some links, and my goals.

I'm looking for a small team of study buddies to team up to figure out a way to spread the work of filtering the incoming wave of information we're going to have to sort through to keep afloat until the end of this event. Is anyone interested?