the art teacher’s guide to the internet

While skimming through my notes from Friday, the last day of the BLC conference, the following highlights surfaced:

• Thanks to Lauren Panton for teaching this old dog a few new tricks regarding ways to get teachers up and running with Web 2.0 tools. While I knew about most of the tools and sites mentioned in this session, I didn’t see the benefits of setting up a start-up page on iGoogle or Netvibes, or for that matter switching from Del.icio.us over to Diigo to store my links. I do now.
• Listening to five of Marco Torres‘ former students share their reflections on being members of his media classes, the San Fernando Education Technology Team (SFETT), and staging the ICAN film festival was a treat. I especially appreciated hearing about their early successes and the challenges they faced in making their first movies and in planning and staging the first Student Film Festival in their community.
• A special shout out goes to Bob Sprankle for providing a great crash course in Voicethread. I picked up some valuable tips on using Voicethread with students and am more aware of the various options available through the site.

The presentation that clearly stands out from Friday and in fact still lingers in my mind days later is the keynote given by Dr. Pedro Noguera of New York University who spoke on “Changing the Culture of Schools.” What began as a rather sobering if not at times depressing account of the current state of [many] American schools, ended with a sense of hope that we can reinvent the kind of schools that will help students meet the challenges and exploit the opportunities they will face in the 21st century. But, Noguera made it clear that relying on old paradigms won’t allow us to create the schools we need.

Weaving research data, lessons from high performing schools and reform efforts that didn’t work, stories from inner-city classrooms, historical context, and at times good ole common sense [something that seems to be sorely missing in recent school reform efforts) into an hour-long presentation, Noguera spoke passionately about the urgent need for systemic change in American education and then lit a pathway to potential reforms that have the most potential for success including, among other things, cultivating the imagination and creativity of children. His comments clearly resonated with this audience as reflected in the standing ovation he was given at the end of his talk.

Personally, I originally felt that Noguera’s keynote might have been more appropriate for the first or second day of the conference to offer more time for dialogue about his remarks among conference attendees, which incidentally made few references to technology. In hindsight, however, it may have actually hit the nail on the head where it was in that it reminded us all who had just spent 3 days immersed in a Web 2.0 world that technology use in the classroom, however wonderful it might seem, will not in itself transform education or schools. Indeed, the changes that we need to make to fix our broken schools go well beyond putting a computer or digital camera in the hands of students or offering them opportunities to use Voicethread or make a podcast.

Friday ended with a wrap-up session with Alan November who asked for and received audience comments and reflections on their year’s conference and suggestions for next year’s meeting in Boston. On that note, I want to send my personal thanks to the Alan November team for staging such a great meeting with so many thoughtful and timely sessions.

With my afternoon on Friday free, I decided to un-plug for a while and take in the Boston Museum of Fine Arts. That entailed taking a ride on the Boston Subway into the city and back—an adventure in itself.

It was well worth it. The museum has a fine collection of 19th-century European Art and a number of well-known Early American pieces like John Singleton Copley’s portrait of Paul Revere.

As I sat there studying Revere’s contemplative stare I felt as though he was asking me, “Okay, now what are you going to do?” I’ll address that in my next posting. . .stay tuned.

Tags: blc08, diigo, school reform, video, voicethread, Web 2.0

Thursday started for me with a cup of coffee and rolls, checking the log of overnight conference twits on Summize, and then I was off to a 7:30 session by Julia Leong on Narrative Inquiry. This was an easy morning session for me to wake-up in. It explored the construction of visual narratives through digital photography and the possible meanings that can occur from deconstructing the images teachers and students create in the classroom.

Julia did a nice job of getting the audience involved during her presentation by asking questions like “How do our photos share our memories?” “How are our experiences articulated through images?” and “Whose point of view is shown in this photograph?” She proposed three types of experiences to photograph: (1) Photos of Self; (2) Photos of Place (indoor/outdoor, closed/open space, etc.,); and (3) Photos of time (literal time, suspended time, etc., ). She also suggested having students tag images and use tools like the roll-over notes feature on Flickr or Voicethread to add their interpretations (or “truths”) to images.

Julia cited Rita Irwin’s A/r/tography model as the source for her ideas and methods involving narrative inquiry. She also recommended looking at the 366 group on Flickr, which asks members to take a photo a day, upload it to the site, and tag it with GPS coordinates. When I searched for this group on Flickr, I found several listed.

The Thursday morning Keynote presenter was John Davitt, a British author, developer of learning tools, former English teacher, and educational writer for the Guardian. What began an ingenious display of British wit turned into a thoughtful and entertaining hour-long demonstration of how to engage and inspire an audience of educators (or a classroom of learners). Throughout his keynote presentation and afternoon session, which I also attended, Davitt offered up a number of memorable “one-liners” such as the following that contained subtle yet important messages for school administrators and teachers:

• Chase the endorphins of enthusiasm.
• Let’s make schools delightful.
• Stress kills learning.
• Students go through school getting assessed, but never noticed.
• Keep the locus of control close to the student.
• How do you want your learning?

Since students today live in both a digital and analog world, John believes that teachers need to bridge these two worlds. He promotes using technology coupled with our growing knowledge of learning styles and the brain to differentiate learning in the classroom. While John is enthusiastic about returning “fun” to the classroom (by making learning more active and less passive), he is equally passionate about making kids think, scratch their heads, and wonder how to do something (i.e., through the use of what he called “struggleware” or “scratchware.”)

At times self-deprecatory about his technological abilities, John showed he was quite adept at creating video mash-ups and using Flash 4 to teach animation to young students. While much attention in education today is focused on digital technologies, John promotes the notion of students becoming authors/creators of their own learning resources using a variety of digital tools and traditional analog media.

To learn more about John Davitt’s educational philosophy and methods, see his New Tools website, and be sure to give his Learning Event Generator at the bottom of the homepage “a go.”

I also had the opportunity on Thursday to listen to Aarti S., a very mature and amazing 11-year-old student from the West Island School of Hong Kong introduce some of her “learning footprints” and global learning experiences, which are documented in her e-portfolio on the UniServity cLc Learning Platform system used at her school. Aarti showed us portions of her e-portfolio that included her “highs and lows” in school, “things that encourage me,” a slideshow of her photographs, her weekly “top video” pick, plus the blog and wiki spaces she uses for writing about herself, her thoughts on such things as racism, her informal learning experiences, and school assignments. As you might imagine, several adults in the audience expressed concern about Aarti’s activities on the Internet, which representatives UniServity and the school quickly responded to with assurances that only people with school accounts can access her work.

Aarti added that she accesses her website from school and home, using feedback from her schoolmates and others to make improvements in her site. She also mentioned using online tools like Mind42 and MindMeister to do mind-mapping for school project with her classmates. All in all, an eye-opening presentation of what’s happening in terms of student use of technology in some schools outside the U.S.

Another Thursday session I attended that’s worth mentioning here was Alan November’s interview with Jessica Jackley Flannery, Co-Founder of Kiva, the world’s first peer-to-peer microlending website, which allows anyone to loan money to small businesses in developing countries. Although I knew about Kiva before the conference, it was interesting to hear Jessica talk about the development of the organization and how successful they’ve been in achieving their goal of poverty alleviation (e.g, a million dollars goes through the site every few days and 99 percent of loans thus far have been paid back.) One aspect of Kiva I wasn’t aware of is that they are developing an educational portion of their site to encourage schools to get involved in raising and loaning money to entrepreneurs in developing countries. This is something I definitely will share with my students who have previously raised money for the Empty Bowls Project.

The day finished up on Thursday with a cruise that featured dinner, dancing, good conversation, and amazing views of the sunset and moon rise over Boston Harbor.

One more day to come. . .

Tags: blc08, creativity, davitt, digital natives, education, kiva, photography, school reform, technology, voicethread

I’ve written about my previous trip to Alan November’s Building Learning Communities (BLC) conference in 2006 and the impact it had on my thinking about technology in education. I came back to BLC this year recognizing that I may not experience the same sort of paradigm shift that I did in 2006, but I was hoping to gather some new resources, teaching strategies, and curriculum ideas, along with a few new tools to use with my students. All in all, I achieved that goal and then some.

The conference began on Wednesday with a keynote address by Ewan Mcintosh, National Adviser of Learning and Technology Futures for Scotland. Ewan’s talk, titled “Not All Native Wit: from Creativity to Ingenuity,” centered on the role and attitude of the teacher in a technology-rich learning environment. He proposed early on that successfully integrating technology into the classroom is not about having access to the latest technology or some sort of natural ability to work with technology. Rather it has much more to do with having teachers who are curious about the world and actively engaged in learning themselves.

Give a teacher a button and they ask what to do with it. Give a button to kids, and they click it.

Ewan used a number of digital tools and resources to illustrate several points, the first of which was:

• To understand technology you as a human being have to be interesting. To be interesting, you must be interested—in everything.

For Ewan, far more education occurs outside of school [and online] these days than inside classrooms. He briefly took us through one of his typical daily online sessions, which usually entails checking his RSS feeds, reading edublogs to find out what others are thinking about and doing, saving some links to his del.icio.us account, and using a few other online tools. Ewan stressed the importance of staying informed, and keeping tabs on what people are saying about your field, your school, your family, and you.

Other points Ewan made include:

• A quality teacher is passionate about education and tireless in her acquisition of methods that will inspire learning in her kids.
• The value of achieving “shared awareness.” i.e., knowing what your students think is important.
• The importance of understanding participatory culture.
• Decide what simple tools can help you become a remarkable teacher and your students remarkable learners.

A key idea threaded through Ewan’s talk is that in order to transform or improve education, you have to first improve teaching. Or, put another way, technology won’t transform education itself without teachers who are passionate and transformative in their teaching.

In a follow-up session after his keynote, Ewan divided the audience into teams to identify 1-2 questions that were on our minds from his earlier talk. Some of these questions included:

• How to get senior management in a school district to embrace technology change?
• What can be learned from students’ use of social networks for the purposes of pedagogy?
• How do we harness students’ digital life without poisoning the well?
• What does change look like? How do we plan for it when we don’t know what it looks like?
• How to fit technology fit into the school day? Time management?
• How do we reconcile round pedagogy with square bureaucracy?

In response, Ewan raised a number of points and questions himself:

• Have we compartmentalized curriculum to the point where we no longer allow for the free flow of thought and learning in our schools?
• How do we encourage students? Teachers need to learn how to be quiet and listen to their students. Give them ownership of their learning. Ask, “How do you want to learn this material?”
• Acknowledge their learning. Provide feedback and encourage peer assessment.
• Don’t focus on technology per se. Look at technology use by and for teachers. Also, there is no one way to use technology in the classroom.
• Try Retro-planning. Base what you do tomorrow on what’s been done today.
• Rather than integrate technology in schools, “leak it” it into schools (i.e., get teachers using the tools in their personal lives and that will wash over into their classroom practice).

Lastly, Ewan asked “What changes would you make to get small passionate groups of practice at your school?”

My big take-away from Ewan was the importance of focusing on pedagogy and student learning rather than tools—a point that’s been popping up over and over for me lately.

Other highlights for me from Wednesday include:

Liz Davis and Lisa Thumann’s session focused on building online learning communities with Twitter and Ning. Before introducing the tools, they had the audience swap three business cards with online IDs, and then encouraged everyone to join Classroom 2.0 and connect with the people they exchanged cards with through Twitter. My Take Aways: (1) The value of building a face-to-face network & connections (at conferences like NECC and BLC); and (2) Encouraging teachers to not only join a network, but to begin building their online presence by contributing to one.

Lastly, Marco Torres talked about the importance of audio in a movie and offered some tips on using Garageband to generate a movie soundtrack. He also talked about how he encourages his students to engage in conversations with family and community members for the putposes of generating movie ideas.

To be continued . . .

Tags: blc08, school reform

Here’s a brilliant new animated short by PES (aka Adam Pesapane). While there are many other great examples of stop-motion animation to show students on PES’ website, be sure preview them before showing any in the classroom as some of the movies on the site are not suitable for young viewers.

Tags: animation

This is Chapter 1 of a three-part series recently aired on Thirteen/WNET that takes viewers behind the scenes of Olafur Eliasson’s Waterfalls and other public art projects like The Gates in New York City. Even though I’ve mentioned these projects previously this program looks at them and other public works in more depth and from another perspective; and, thus, I thought it was worth highlighting here.

You can watch the other two chapters of this program on the SundayArts website. Enjoy.

Tags: pbs, public art, sculpture