Serendipity35

Alan November is a frequently chosen keynoter at conferences for K-12. I attended his keynote here today and decided to follow up with his two workshops. Some background - he lists on his website some of his key concepts:

The real revolution is not about technology. It's about access to information and communication. It's not about the wires, it's about what flows through them.

The Internet can provide any version of the truth to support almost any belief. We need to teach students how to read the “grammar” of the Internet and apply strategies to validate information on websites.

Access to more timely information and communication tools can empower educators to focus on individual learning needs of their students.

We have the opportunity to provide our students with authentic assessment relationships over the web that can help dramatically improve student motivation.

The reality of the networked global economy is that any desk job can be moved anywhere in the world within seconds. Our students must learn global survival skills of competing and cooperating with people around the world.

Articulating vision and mission, managing change, and aligning technology to primary goals are key skills for school leaders.

Here are my notes from the keynote:

• the importance of engagement by your student's family (one thing he thinks NCLB has right) Research shows that it is the number one predictor of success in school. An example - in California, the most engaged families and the highest achieving student group are first generation Asian families. These are not rich families. These are mostly low to middle class & new to the country families.
• a school that sent home a DVD home on science and what a family can do to help their child, finally gets calls asking what more can they do. Alan says that's partially because the most ubiquitous tech in the home is still a TV & VCR/DVD.
• How do you keep kids learning while they are not in school?
• We need to do much more with authentic assessment.
• Communities of teachers online sharing is the newest key to professional development. This is what I have called open source teaching.
• He did an impromptu South Bronx substitute teaching day when he was observing and recorded kids doing intros to poetry to post in iTunes. He realized that the first student wanted to do 4 more takes because Alan said he would put the podcast online. Would he have revised his written intro 4 times without being asked?

In the "workshop" sessions that followed, his topics were (supposed) to be "Teaching Zach to Think" and "Building Learning Communities" - topics he has obviously done numerous times.

He's off-the-cuff, jumping from topic to topic, taking questions that lead him to things like an impromptu demo of Skype. It's something I have noted with other speakers who do a lot of these presentations. They have too much material, so much they want to say, too little time and that tendency that a lot of us have to multitask to the point of being ADD.

Here are a few notes & links from session one:

• We looked at a third grade class in New Orleans that wrote the first article on Pitot House (a place they visit) for Wikpedia. Authentic writing, a chance to talk about the pro/con aspects of Wikpedia and the thrill for the class to see others begin to edit and add to "their" article. Certainly, a theme of Alan is that you need to address controversial things like Wikpedia rather than block & ban things.
  
• He looked at the martinlutherking.org site. This is pretty well known and documented as an example to teach students about finding out the source of a web site. This seemingly educational site is from Stormfront, a white supremacist organization. I've taught this site lesson myself, but it was interesting that the Stormfront site was down. Supposedly a "well-intentioned" denial of service attack has been organized to bring them down. November was bothered by the DOS which he doesn't feel is the way to deal with organizations and sites.
• He also talked about why the site comes out so high in a Google search, explaining "Google bombing" with that favorite example of: search in Google for the term "miserable failure" and see what comes up. Haven't heard of this one? Go ahead and try. Want to know why it works that way? Here is the explanation from Google.
• That led into a discussion on how to read a web address.
• He also fielded a number of questions about dealing with schools' fears of using these technologies - blocking access to blogs, Wikipedia, MySpace the librarian who blocks Wikipedia use at school
• He prefers students to use answers.com and for teachers to use altavista.com to check links to sites and host information and not become locked into Google.
• Some local color when he searches and finds the allaboutexplorers.com site which will tell you that Sir Francis Drake was born "around the year 1542 in Wayne, New Jersey. His love of the ocean can be traced back to the early days when he and his family spent many holidays at the Jersey shore." Wow, who'd a thunk it! OK, so the entire site is a site created to teach students about how to research on the Net. I wonder how many elementary students stil use the site for reports?
  

Then he was talking about building learning communities in the second session. Here are my notes with links added.

• We took a look at the blogging he's doing with the Seton Hall University Executive Ed.D. program students. Interesting that students that he no longer teaches are still writing and posting - after the grades are turned in. Teachers need to prepare their students for the time when there will be no teachers.
• Learning communities are an old idea - back to the Socratic method, seeing teachers as people who create dialogs and then stand back.
• Student willingness to take risks - in an online community like fanfiction writers (many of whom are students) post writing to get comments. They generally use pseudonyms. That way the criticism is of their writing, not of them. It's a safe place to expose yourself.
  
• Social bookmarking as community builder - using de.licio.us
• Using Bloglines and RSS (which he considers to be perhaps the most important technology online now) because you need to help students control the flow of information
• and finally, taking problems that occur with the technology (the kid who creates a blog to bash another student; the bad stuff that popped up in a Google search; the bad information students found on a site) and making them teachable moments instead of hiding from the technology or blocking it.

One thing that makes me feel good is that I am on the same page(s) as Alan November. He's big time guru these days, so I'm in the right place. What makes me feel sad is that so many of the teachers in attendance have very little knowledge of these tools or techniques. Hopefully, that's why they are here. Hopefully, they will take it back to their classrooms.