A staff development roadmap

A long standing personal frustration has be my department's my inability to coordinate the efforts of our district technology and staff development departments' work. Both departments run good programs - but separate, even if somewhat parallel, efforts using separate funding, staffing and planning.

In an effort to help bring the work of the two departments together (and to bring the training efforts of our tech department more in alignment with our district's "strategic roadmap"), representatives from both departments have been meeting to first define the technology training needs of our teachers and then to organize them in a format that is consistent with the rest of the district's staff development efforts.

Below is a first stab at our brainstorming. My listing of brand names does not imply endorsement, only that that is what we use.)

Staff development needs in technology for teachers

Communication

• E-mail (GoogleApps for Education)
• Webpage creation (rSchoolToday, GoogleSites)
• Social networking (blogs, wikis, Facebook, Twitter)
• Student information system communication tools (Infinite Campus) 

Personal productivity

• Word processing  (GoogleApps for Education, Word)
• Presentations  (GoogleApps for Education, PowerPoint)
• Instructional video creation and delivery (iMovie, YouTube, GoogleVideo)

Record keeping / Data analysis/ Data gathering

• Grade book (in Infinite Campus SIS)
• Assessment management (Mastery Manager)
• Data warehouse/mining (Viewpoint)
• Spreadsheet (GoogleApps for Education, Excel)
• Online survey tools (GoogleApps for Education)
• Career analysis tool (Naviance)

Instructional uses

• Interactive white board (Smartboard)
• Interactive response systems (Dedicated and cellphone enabled)
• Portable student-used/student-owned devices.
• Intervention resources (Compass Learning,IXL Math, Read 180/System 44, Read Unnaturally, V Math, Transmath)
• Classroom Management Systems (Moodle)
• GoogleApps for Education (with students)
• Classroom audio-enhancement systems (Calypso, Epson, others)

Teaching technology standards

• Skills specific to content area applications (GIS for social studies, graphing software for math)
• Online research skills

According to our staff development coordinator, "classroom engagement" will be a hot goal in upcoming efforts for improving classroom instruction. I am hoping that our buildings' "continuous improvement coaches" will work in collaboration with our librarians to assist classroom teachers using technology to "engage." Combining forces - it will be like the Justice League applied to staff development!

While I know the "best-laid schemes o' mice an' men, gang aft agley," at least a scheme is coming together.

I am pumped!

• In Strategic Roadmap format
• Ties to Danielson’s Framework and Technology

Humanizing education with technology or ... ?

... children in one set of schools are educated to be governors; children in the other set of schools are trained for being governed.

The former are given the imaginative range to mobilize ideas for economic growth; the latter are provided with the discipline to do the narrow tasks the first group will prescribe. Jonathan Kozol, Savage Inequalities

This lovely long New Year's weekend has allowed me to catch up a little on my RSS feeds and I am again struck by the schizophrenic nature of school change.

Both Miguel Guhlin and Will Richardson have written recent cautions about the rise of corporate-led, for-profit "school reform" efforts that de-professionalize education with the testing steamroller Pearson at the head of the parade.

But I also finally watched Salman Khan's "Let’s Use Video To Reinvent Education" TEDTalk (with guest appearance by Bill Gates) from last March. I did not expect Khan to say:

But the more interesting thing is -- and this is the unintuitive thing when you talk about technology in the classroom -- by removing the one-size-fits-all lecture from the classroom and letting students have a self-paced lecture at home, and then when you go to the classroom, letting them do work, having the teacher walk around, having the peers actually be able to interact with each other, these teachers have used technology to humanize the classroom. They took a fundamentally dehumanizing experience -- 30 kids with their fingers on their lips, not allowed to interact with each other. A teacher, no matter how good, has to give this one-size-fits-all lecture to 30 students -- blank faces, slightly antagonistic -- and now it's a human experience. Interactive transcript.

Khan Academy resources may be the last breeze needed to create a perfect storm of educational change. Add these kinds of free, high quality resources to GoogleApps for collaborative work and Moodle for online assignments and activities - all accessible with inexpensive tablets, netbook or smartphones (many student-owned) - and there will be change.

At least in the schools that Kozol describes as "for the governors" in the quote above. Those in schools "for the governed" will get textbooks and lectures and drill and practice and more Pearson tests.

2012 promises to be the latest in what i think have been a series of the most exciting years in both the education and technology worlds that I can remember. Unfortunately part of that excitement will not just be watching the best schools get more humane using more technology in better ways, but watching the slow train-wreck of poor, impoverished schools use technology to assign ever more numbers to define children.

And for those of us who work in schools somewhere in the middle, we will need to renew our personal commitment to making sure our kids are using technology to increase their "imaginative range" not just for labeling. Good luck to us. We'll need it. 

Walk

 All truly great thoughts are conceived by walking. Friedrich Nietzsche

Walking is man's best medicine. Hippocrates

And they discovered something very interesting: when it comes to walking, most of the ant's thinking and decision-making is not in its brain at all. It's distributed. It's in its legs.  Kevin Kelly

Everywhere is within walking distance if you have the time. Steven Wright

I've been either walking or jogging for 45-60 minutes a day at least five times a week for 30 years. It's no great sacrifice - just a long cherished habit - one of the few that I have that are actually healthy. When once asked for "secrets of success," my number one secret was to "take a walk."

Walking seems to have come into its own lately. A couple must read/view items:

• From starving off dementia to toning your behind, walking is the runaway winner This might be the most important short video I've ever watched.
  
• 23 and 1/2 hours: What is the single best thing we can do for our health?

These are some ways I make the most of my walking time. YMMV.

1. Walk during the day. I have the opportunity to walk at lunch time. I've often wondered if my time might be better spent socializing with teachers in the district in a lunchroom, but I've decided that my time spent alone with my own thoughts is as or more beneficial. A mid-day break clears the mind and loosens problems somehow.

2. Walk alone. On occasion I walk with others and enjoy the experience, but 99% of the time I walk by myself, at my own pace and where I want to go. It's hard to think when you are either talking or listening to somebody else. My sense is that the world would greatly improved were everyone to spend 30 minutes a day simply reflecting.

3. Walk outdoors, preferably in a natural setting. Treadmills don't do it for me. Avoiding traffic and exhaust fumes isn't much fun either. Look for a park or nature area to take your walk. (I wear a blaze orange vest when walking through a city nature area that allows bow hunting of deer during the fall.) Our low-traffic road here on the lake is perfect on the weekends.

4. Walk in every weather. A warm coat, hat (with earflaps) and gloves are all you need here in Minnesota to walk all winter long. Oh, I add ice grips to my shoes in the winter too. A rain jacket in the office works the rest of the year.

5. Walk, don't stroll. I don't speed walk. I don't walk with weights. I don't stop every five minutes to do jumping jacks. My regular walk looks odd enough as it is. But I do walk purposely fast enough to get the heart rate and breathing going a little faster. Throw in a few hills if you have them. Walk like you mean it.

6. Walk without a sound track. I can't concentrate when listening to music and I can't focus at all if there is a narrative playing. It's nice to hear the birds, the wind, and the horns of vehicles bearing down you anyway. And just how do people keep those damn ear buds in?

7. Walk a variety of routes. I have four circuits, each of about three to four miles mapped out from my office. (If you are used to walking a circuit in a certain direction, try reversing course sometime - it's a whole new world.) If I have a meeting I can walk to and back from. I do.

8. Walk on the weekends and walk on vacation. Make your days off work as pleasurable as possible by walking. Weekends are a good time to head to a park to walk - or snowshoe, cross-country ski or bicycle for a little variety. Books of walking tours are available for most cities and walking (or hiking) vactions are the best. You'll never want to see a country from the windows of a tour bus again once you've seen it while walking or biking.

9. Walk for your mental health as much as your physical health. No matter how busy, no matter how uninspired, no matter how lousy the weather*, I always am glad when I get back that I walked. My problems are often solved, new ideas hatched, and my mood improved. Or maybe I should say, walk for your spouse's and co-workers' sakes.

10. Walk how you want to walk. Ignore any of this advice. Just walk.

* It's 24 degrees F with 20-40mph winds here today. I walked.