The Coalition of Essential Schools took the opportunity in late Spring (actually April-June) to showcase the potential of Student Exhibitions as a valid means of alternative assessment. CES called it National Exhibition Month, and their efforts garnered the attention of...

We love Educational Leadership's summer Online-Only edition. The material is always good. And all the articles are publicly available at no cost! Just click and read. This summer's edition has the theme Thinking Skills NOW -- a hot topic among...

Scott McLeod---the mind behind Dangerously Irrelevant---has started an interesting July 4th tradition designed to support the digital development of school administrators called Leadership Day.  To participate, Scott asks interested edubloggers to:

Blog about whatever you like
related to effective school technology leadership: successes,
challenges, reflections, needs. Write a letter to the administrators in
your area. Post a top ten list. Make a podcast or a video. Highlight a
local success or challenge. Recommend some readings. Do an interview of
a successful technology leader. Respond to some of the questions below
or make up your own.

Having had my own learning permanently changed by digital tools over the past few years, I can't imagine a more important project to get involved in.  I passionately believe that digital tools make learning easy for everyone---and that by failing to integrate them into our practice, we are leaving our children unprepared to grow as self-directed thinkers and at a competitive disadvantage in a knowledge-based society.   

Heavy stuff, huh?

What's most frightening, though, is that I just plain doubt the digital capacity of most educators.  Many have yet to master efficient learning in the 21st Century---and some struggle to even seem interested in change! 

Now, it's difficult to argue that the mental stagnation surrounding schools is completely our fault.  Anyone who has worked in education for any length of time knows that
adult learning has generally been pushed aside as we sprint through
days in a state of panic about leaving no child behind. 

The few moments that we can steal for professional development
(typically beginning and ending in July OR starting at 3:45 after we've
wrestled with kids for eight hours) are spent in sessions with
"experts" pitching the latest silver bullet.  We rarely get to self-select learning opportunities, pursue professional passions, or engage in meaningful, ongoing conversations about instruction. 

We end up jaded, literally groaning
when given "opportunities to learn." 

How's that for ironic!

Heck, even Richard Elmore---Professor of Educational Leadership at Harvard and all-around educational policy rock star---has gone as far as to argue that school structures make learning for adults unlikely at best and nothing short of impossible at worse:

It would be difficult to invent a more dysfunctional organization
for a performance-based accountability system. In fact, the existing
structure and culture of schools seems better designed to resist
learning and improvement than to enable it.

As expectations for
increased student performance mount and the measurement and publication
of evidence about performance becomes part of the public discourse
about schools, there are few portals through which new knowledge about
teaching and learning can enter schools;

few structures or processes in
which teachers and administrators can assimilate, adapt and polish new
ideas and practices; and few sources of assistance for those who are
struggling to understand the connection between the academic
performance of their students and the practices in which they engage.

So
the brutal irony of our present circumstance is that schools are
hostile and inhospitable places for learning. They are hostile to the
learning of adults and, because of this, they are necessarily hostile
to the learning of students.

Amazing, huh? 

To argue that schools are hostile to learning is a bold statement---but if you're a school leader, chances are good that you were nodding your head in agreement as you read through Elmore's thoughts. 

Times have changed in two significant ways, however, since Elmore began describing the hostile learning environments that have held schools back.  First, a new emphasis has been placed on the importance of collaborative learning between members of close-knit teams in schools. 

Second, digital tools now provide new "portals through which new knowledge about
teaching and learning can enter schools."

Specifically, thousands of accomplished educators are now writing blogs about teaching and learning, bringing transparency to both the art and the science of their practice.  Coming from every content area, grade level, school size and geographical region, they are actively reflecting on instruction, challenging assumptions, questioning policies, offering advice, designing solutions, and learning together. 

And all of this collective knowledge and professional challenge is readily available to your faculty for free!

Not a bad deal, huh? 

With the investment of a bit of time and effort, you can expose your teachers to more interesting ideas in one day than you've been able to expose them to in the past ten years of high-dollar professional development!  Better yet, this learning has the potential to be authentic---driven by personal interests and connected to classroom realities. 

All that you need to do is introduce RSS feed readers to your faculty!

Feed readers are probably the most important digital tool for today's learner because they make sifting through the amazing amount of content added to the Internet easy.  Also known as aggregators, feed readers are free tools that can automatically check nearly any website for new content dozens of times a day---saving ridiculous amounts of time and customizing learning experiences for anyone. 

Imagine never having to go hunting for new information from your favorite sources again.  Learning goes from a frustrating search through thousands of marginal links written by questionable characters to quickly browsing the thoughts of writers that you trust and respect.

Sounds too good to be true, doesn't it?

It's not!  Here's a Commoncraft tutorial explaining RSS Feeds in Plain English:

Have I hooked you yet?  If so, then it's time to take action!  To get your faculty learning again, take the following 10 steps:

1. Start by using a feed reader as a learning tool for a few weeks yourself.  If you're really brave, find a collection of blogs that target school administrators and organize them on your own with an aggregator of your choice.  If you're not quite sure where to begin, try this collection of educational leadership blogs that my buddy Adam Garry and I organized with our favorite feed reader. 
2. Dedicate a few minutes each day to browsing the content in your aggregator.  Notice how new posts are added automatically.  Make a commitment to reading two or three entries a week.  Find topics that you're motivated by and let your thinking be challenged.  Leave comments for the authors and see whether or not they respond.  Engage other readers in conversations or friendly debate. 
3. Remember that all of this learning is completely free! 
4. Smile profusely. 
5. Tell others how much you enjoy having your thinking challenged by the blogs you are reading.  Share a few posts that you find with peers.  Ramble on about the beauty of RSS.  Use your enthusiasm to generate a buzz about the potential for professional learning to be fun again.
6. If you're really brave, use a feed reader to create a collection of blogs for your teachers to explore.  Remember to find writers from different content areas and grade levels.  Focus on writers that offer specific, practical advice or model the kind of reflective thinking that you'd like to see more frequently in your building. 
7. If you're not sure where to begin, use my personal feed reader.  I read the blogs in this collection all the time.  Some leave me challenged.  Some leave me angry.  Some leave me jazzed.  All leave me energized and ready to learn more.   
8. Ask your teachers to share the most interesting articles that they find with you.  Read what they're sending and then extend conversations every chance that you get!  Make it a point to talk with a teacher about a shared blog post at least twice a week. 
9. Remember that all of this learning is completely free.
10. Smile profusely! 

Over time, you'll start to see a real change in the quality of the conversations in your faculty workroom.  No longer will teachers be sharing war stories or groaning about students.  Instead, they'll be debating the merits of the new instructional practices or the challenging ideas that they've stumbled across online. 

Better yet, you'll start to see RSS feeds finding their way into classroom instruction as well.  Teachers, driven to show others how to learn, will begin creating collections of student blogs for their kids to explore or designing automatically updating pages of resources on topics connected to their curriculum. 

To put it simply, you will have used a free digital tool to make individualized learning a part of the very fabric of your organization!

Shouldn't that be the ultimate goal of every school leader?

(Image credit:  Computer by Guillermo Esteves, licensed Creative Commons:  Attribution)

California teacher Kathie Marshall is our latest TLN Forum member to be interviewed by TeachersCount, the New York-based organization dedicated to promoting teaching and teachers. Kathie's interview, titled "Lessons from a Literacy Coach," shares insights garnered over six years as...

I've got a bit of a confession to make, y'all:  I still haven't gotten over the unexpected criticism that Brett and the boys of Kitchen Table Math laid on me last week over my confession that I struggle with evaluating the impact of my instruction. 

And while I'm certainly comfortable with my responses to the gang about accountability, I haven't had a chance yet to reply to their other assertion:  That the time I spend advocating for digital tools in the classroom is wasted. 

Brett writes:

His blog focuses
on incorporating new technology (wikis, Twitter, etc.) into
instruction, and he argues forcefully for the use of these tools. But
you have to ask the question - to what end? Why would you advocate so
strongly for the use of technology - or the use of any other
instructional tool - when you admit up front that you have no idea
whatsoever whether it helps students learn...

He's incorporating technology because he likes it;
there's no other explanation. If he cared whether students were
learning, he'd make an effort to learn how to assess that learning, and
tailor his instruction based on their progress.

Clearly that's not
going to happen - not, at least, until he retires.

Actually, Brett, I'm incorporating technology because it facilitates learning the required curriculum for my students, delivers instruction in a highly motivating format and prepares students for the workplaces of tomorrow. 

You see, technology has the potential to make all learning easier.  Students today have access to information in ways that you and I never had access to information.  They can almost immediately find content that would have taken us hours to hunt down---and that information is far more engaging than any of the traditional resources that schools provide for classrooms.

Which means that one of the greatest challenges facing kids today is learning to manage the amazing amount of information that is available to them. 

They need to learn to identify resources that are reliable and to streamline their searches for content that connects to personal and professional interests.  If I were to allow my students to leave my classroom without a developing foundation of strategies for working with online information, they would be hopelessly inefficient learners (and employees), wouldn't they?

I also incorporate technology into my classroom because I know my students---and they are completely driven by communication with peers.  This innate and unrelenting desire to interact was probably best defined by Danah Boyd--a PhD student at the University of California-Berkeley studying the networks developing between digital youth--in a 2008 blog post when she wrote:

They are desperately craving an opportunity to connect with their friends; not surprisingly, their use of anything that enables socialization while at school is deeply desired.  [The value of social networks] is about the kinds of informal social learning that is required for maturation -- understanding your community, learning to communicate with others, working through status games, building and maintaining friendships, working through personal values, etc...

We need to recognize that not all learning is about book learning -- brains mature through experience, including social experiences.

So I'm decidedly unapologetic about creating opportunities for my kids to communicate around ideas related to our curriculum.  I see each of these conversations as motivating places for my students to wrestle with content together.  They polish their core beliefs, have their thinking challenged by peers, and revise notions that they once held as true. 

Need proof? 

Then take some time to poke through the thinking in this Voicethread presentation where my students wrestled with political cartoons on the genocide occurring in Darfur. 

Interpreting political cartoons allowed me to address several of the required elements of my language arts curriculum (identifying bias, making inferences, challenging the thinking of peers) and of my social studies curriculum (identifying how governments treat their people, recognizing how culture joins and separates people, understanding how countries wrestle with issues of justice and injustice). 

Oh yeah---and while viewing, remember that the 85 UNGRADED comments you're looking at were ALL done out of class.  My students found this digital forum motivating enough to willingly engage in an ongoing conversation about classroom content without any formal assessment needed.  It was the social nature of the learning experience that mattered to them. 

When was the last time that you've gotten students to willingly engage in an ongoing conversation about classroom content without attaching a grade to the final product?

For me, it happens all the time. 

Here's a follow-up conversation with over 250 comments that we had with a group of eighth graders on the idea of hatred after studying the cultural elements of conflicts that have divided the US, the Balkan countries and Northern Europe---also a part of our required curriculum.

Brett and the gang specifically mentioned wikis in their criticism, so I wanted to explain why wikis matter:

Wikis are tools that are designed to promote digital collaboration between individuals in an organization.  Easily editable websites, wikis can be used to develop shared final products by groups of people regardless of location or time. 

In education, wikis are largely being used by students to create repositories of knowledge about topics connected to the curriculum.  Two of my favorite examples of classroom wikis include the Carbon Fighters (a collection of jointly created letters to the Governor of North Carolina advocating for alternative energies) and The Flat Classroom Project (a collaborative project between students in Dhaka, Bangladesh and Camilla, Georgia). 

Like the wikis that I use in my own classroom, both of these projects engaged students in the process of peer production.  Teams of students used digital tools to create content together while studying the required elements of their curriculum. 

And while the learning outcomes of both of these projects are significant in and of themselves, I'd argue that teaching students the skills necessary for peer production are far more important.  You see, major industries are embracing peer production and creating work environments that are driven by digital collaboration. 

Don't believe me? 

Then pick up Wikinomics someday. 

Written by Dan Tapscott and Anthony Williams, Wikinomics works to explain how digital tools are changing today's workplace.  In it, Tapscott and Williams highlight how industry giants like Proctor and Gamble are opening their companies and encouraging digital collaboration across borders, primarily because they recognize that the human capital beyond an organization will ALWAYS be greater than the human capital within an organization.

To Tapscott, Williams and other business leaders, this can only mean one thing:

"A power shift is underway and a tough new business rule is emerging:  Harness the new collaboration or perish.  Those who fail to grasp this will find themselves ever more isolated---cut off from the networks that are sharing, adapting, and updating knowledge to create value."

Heck, even IBM has recognized the importance of joining digital communities that are creating knowledge together.  They've released tons and tons of their proprietary information to the loose programming network building Linux---a free online operating system that probably best represents the new business marketplace. 

IBM has also assigned hundreds of their programmers to work on the Linux project full-time.  That means IBM engineers are being paid by IBM to collaborate with dozens of volunteer programmers across the globe to create a free operating system. 

Crazy, huh?

Why would a company join collaborative communities creating products that run in direct competition with their primary product line? 

Simple.  It saves them HUGE amounts of cash:

IBM spends about $100 million per year on general Linux development.  If the Linux community puts in $1 billion of effort, and even half of that is useful to IBM customers, the company gets $500 million of software development for an investment of $100 million.

(Kindle location 1493)

So I guess what I figure, Brett, is that if companies like IBM and Proctor + Gamble are embracing peer production and open collaboration across borders today---and making huge amounts of money doing so!--- more companies are likely to follow in the future. 

Does this make sense?

Which means the skills necessary to be efficient digital collaborators will be of great value in the corporations of tomorrow.  If one of my charges is to prepare students for the workplace of the 21st Century (and it is---check out the State Board of Education's recent mission and vision statements), then using collaborative tools like wikis is entirely appropriate, don't you think?

Whew!  Glad I got that off my chest. 

I guess what I'm trying to say is that digital tools have a well thought out place in my classroom.  They're far more than just novelties that make me feel good.  Instead, they're essential for delivering content, for engaging students, and for preparing kids for tomorrow. 

If any of these goals are essential outcomes for education, then I guess I'm doing the right thing.

Push back, anyone?

(Image credit:  Scented Acre Chicken by Kristine Kisky, licensed Creative Commons:  Attribution)