New MHS Lobby Design Promotes Collaboration

This past week was a milestone in terms of re-design of spaces in two major areas at Mercy High School. First, we made the furnishing choices for the collaborative area and digital creation room that I have described in recent blog posts. 

Secondly, we took delivery of Steelcase furnishings that we have installed in our auditorium/gym lobby. The students love the comfort and lay out of the new design. And while it will allow students to socially as they wait for practices to begin or rides to pick them up, you can see that our choices also allow for collaboration on projects. This is phase 1, which creates seating for 53 students.

Take a look!

We await funding for phase 2. Here is a diagram of the entire project:

Designed by TMP Architecture

Marriage of Design and Transformative Instruction - part 2

In my last post I described a visit to a neighboring school which I believe is engaging in transformative educational practices which are accommodated by ingenious design elements. Fundamentally,  Hillel Day School has eliminated traditional classrooms. Consequently teachers can/must consider the optimal learning space for each lesson. 

In this post I want to reflect on how important flexible design is to collaboration and student agency. As I mentioned previously, Hillel's gathering spaces are open and transparent. Conference rooms have glass walls. Teacher "offices" are common spaces, encouraging collaboration. 

The Hillel students can create their own furniture arrangements for working in small or large groups. They can gather in a variety of commons areas or can sit at furniture in the hallway. 

Open spaces, mobile furniture, comfortable seating at Hillel (photo by G. Bank)

This fascinated me because at Mercy we are also trying to repurpose large spaces in our building and create more opportunities for students to collaborate. A great example would be the courtyard re-designs which allow students to comfortably gather.
  

Of course the courtyards are subject to weather and Michigan's hard winters. However, we are taking advantage of an enormous underutilized space in our  lobby. Next week our new furniture is arriving for a phase one 53 seat arrangement depicted. Currently students are forbidden to go into this lobby during school. That changes once the Steelcase furniture arrives (photos to come!).

However, I anticipate the lobby usage will largely be social. On the other hand, for our Media Center pilot we intend to repurpose a corner of the room clearly aimed at project work. With the help of NBS designers we are selecting furniture that is very similar to Hillel's: it is movable and supported by media, not unlike the corner configuration below, though with additional options. 

I was blown away by how many markable walls, surfaces and boards existed throughout Hillel. We also hope to bring this feature into the Media Center-- the object of course being to expand on our pilot throughout the space

NBS is also helping us take steps toward creating maker spaces in the Media Center to promote student agency. Hillel has done an astonishing job in this area too. This subject will serve as the third installment of my reflections on that fine school and how it is influencing the initiatives at mine.

iCreate - An iWizard Workshop for Middle School Students

iWizards creating iPad resources for new students

The iWizards are going to host an iPad Workshop for middle school students on January 17, 2015 from 9:30am - noon.*  It will be named iCreate. This was decided at the initial meeting about the project where the iWizards brainstormed with one of Mercy’s admissions officers.  At their next meeting the students will collaborate with the school's Fine Arts teachers.

Here are some of the initial ideas and remarks that came from the first meeting:

- The workshop will consist of 3-4 sessions that each middle school student will attend.

- The sessions should be long enough to allow attendees to create products.

- The sessions will focus on creating multimedia through apps like iMovie, Animation Creator HD, maybe Keynote.

- We might include a light breakfast.  We will not charge but will expect paid-for apps like iMovie to be loaded on students' iPads.

- We can use I.T. Department loaners for students who may not have iPads.

- We should promote the event at the November Fall Open House.

- New iWizards can be recruited help staff the event.  The event itself will be a good recruiting tool for iWizards.

- We will invite the Fine Arts Department faculty to our next meeting for input.  We also would be pleased to have them involved at any level they might wish to be.  We would be happy to promote the Art Curriculum through the event.

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*The idea for hosting a middle school workshop actually came from a member of our Board of Trustees.

Instructional Tech at Our School

Two nights ago, with a colleague,  I made a presentation to the parents of our ninth graders about our 1 to 1 computing program.

Once again I have found that I learn quite a bit by making a presentation on a subject.  Since our 1 to 1 computing program is six years old, we can now point to some very significant elements of technology that are now commonplace in our curriculum:

* Coursework and activities delivered online.

* Group Collaboration through shared documents and wikis.

* Multimedia presentations by students and teachers.

Without question, the one area which lags behind expectations would be ebooks.  While a couple of the courses have gone bookless altogether, our students still carry enormous book bags full of texts.  Primarily this is due to the  publishers dragging their heels. As ebooks become more commonplace we can move toward less expensive devices and enter a new phase of digital learning.

Here are some slides from my presentation:

Parent Night Slides

An Interesting Perspective on Teaching

Circumstances have conspired to allow me lengthy conversations with my brother-in-law this year.  Even though he married my wife's sister over thirty years ago, I never considered that we had much in common and polite chat was the norm when we got together now and then.

But Fred is a pretty amazing guy.  A couple of years ago he decided to change careers.  He was doing well with a steady job underwriting insurance for a profitable company.  He had regular hours and good compensation.  However, he had come to loathe aspects of his work, and rather than grit his teeth until retirement, he decided that he wanted to become a teacher.  That meant tons of course work, student teaching, the whole bit.

So now he's teaching, and though he's traded off many of the material benefits of the business world, he's happier.  I really admire that.  I've worked with a number of teachers who seemed to grow unhappier as the years went by and behaved as though they were trapped in their lives.  They became pretty bitter.

But bitterness and life's choices are not the themes of this post.  Instead, I want to offer two of Fred's perspectives on teaching that I think are pretty significant.  He's been subbing throughout his region in all kinds of schools, and he has been struck by . . . .

1) The technology divide between schools and the outside world.  He felt that the schools that he visited were "30 years behind" the business community.  He saw technology in classrooms that was not being used either because A) the technology was relatively useless or B) the teacher was pretty clearly clueless.  He also was asked to develop lessons where "anything goes" if the student was doing it with media instead of text.

In my view education is incredibly insulated from modernity.  Besides the fact that many teachers have a great deal of autonomy, stakeholders in the process-- like parents view old teaching methods of instruction are the right ones, because that's what they know.  Despite a kind of ongoing chronic crisis in USA education, traditional approaches to "information delivery" as instruction remain the norm, even though a global communications revolution has occurred in the mean time.

2) Teachers talk about collaborating, but in many schools the level of collaboration that exists is insignificant compared to business work environments.  Fred described an insurance organization that operated through different groups of teams where members were interdependent and the whole benefited from the individual assets that each team member could bring to bear on challenges.  Fred has visited school districts which are very generous to staff in terms of "prep" time.  But too often, he observed that teachers retreated into their solitude to grade work or follow solitary routines.

Having spent 36 years in the classroom, I know how hectic a typical school day can be.  There just never seems to be time for anything.  But of course there is time. Case in point:  we started and online forum to discuss issues about education at our school.  The response was pretty good, but some teachers complained that they didn't have time.  Oh, please.  It's a matter of school culture, priorities, and motivation.  I know when our CBL Pilot group of teachers were determined to collaborate, they found a common meeting time an held it sacred.  A stronger team attitude at my school would be a plus and I hope we can work harder to make it a priority.

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"Desert Palace" Flickr CC photo by CYNICALifornia

A Pleasing Department Collaboration

Even though most of my teaching prep now involves American Government, for the first eighteen years or so at Mercy, I taught English classes, exclusively.  I even served as Department Chair for a period.  Now, due to a variety of choices and circumstances I am down to merely one section of English the entire school year.

My emotional connection has also weakened to the department.  My enthusiasm for ed tech in general and Challenge Based Learning in particular has not been warmly embraced.  And by pursuing these interests, I have lost interest in important department issues.

So I found it quite heartening to participate in a major collaboration that involved all members of Mercy's English Department.  

Each department at Mercy has made a presentation to staff about what it does.  English decided to lean on multimedia for this presentation.  They spent months composing a script that conveys the scope of its election rich curriculum.  I'm sure this was difficult with so many wordsmiths in the same room!  On the other hand, it was probably a great exercise in considering their mission.  We decided several months ago that my good friend, Mike Gruber, would record audio files of each member reading portions of the script.  Our Yearbook advisor,  Hallie Smith, accumulated a vast trove of photos for the project and organized them to correspond to each podcast.  When more photos were needed, Lynn Waldsmith and I grabbed cameras and shot the needed content.  The needs became evident as I mixed and edited the narration, music, and  photos with Photo To Movie.

I'm happy with the product of our mutual labors, not the least because at least for a week or so, it moved me back toward a department that despite all the changes,  \my heart has never really left.

Here is a one minute slice of the 14 minute movie, plus full credits.  A big thanks to Claudia Michalik for giving me permission to blog her wonderful narration.

Collaborations Near and Far

I feel buoyed by two recent collaborations. For the first time, I will be working on a course project with a colleague in the building. She's a new teacher but she did a 30 hour classroom observation stint with me two years ago. Cindy will be teaching a couple of sections of American Government at Mercy this year. I'm thrilled-- She's sharp, creative and passionate about engaging students.

Using a Google Doc, we've been swapping ideas about a big Fall election project. We have the notion of putting the students on two project tracks, simultaneously. On the one hand they would research and share information about the actual upcoming November election. But each class would also sponsor the campaign of a fictional presidential candidate. What we would like to do ultimately is hold a mock election for the school that would include real candidates and issues, but would also include the pretend candidates. We are thinking of commercials, polling, debates-- the whole shebang. Perhaps we can't do all of this, but at least we don't lack for ideas.

My other collaboration was more distant, involving someone who I have never met personally. Rumsey Taylor is a graduate student in film. I found his essay on Terry Gilliam in the Australian online journal, Senses of Cinema. He gave me permission to use portions of his text in the narrative of a Photo to Movie piece for my Lit into Film class. Though this particular collaboration is a one time deal, I've created several other similar pieces with the help of generous authors like Rumsey. Here's the Baker/Taylor collaboration:

Making Learning Transparent

When we make our learning transparent, we become teachers--

George Siemens

For two years I have advocated for a culture shift at my school. I would like to see us more aggressively leverage our 1:1 computing model to build learning networks. I would also like to see a more open and collaborative environment.

Fortunately, change is in the wind. Administration has provided a copy of Tony Wagner’s Global Achievement Gap for every staff member in the school. It is assigned summer reading for all of us. When we return in two weeks, we are going to consider the prospect of a more student-centered curriculum.

Such a radical shift would call for much greater transparency than we have customarily experienced. In my own realm, I have unlocked all of my Moodle courses and licensed my materials under Creative Commons. I also have an open door policy for visitors . This school year I will advertise the policy more aggressively. However, I would like to see a more transparent environment throughout the school.

I am truly hopeful for learning culture change, but building architecture is a huge impediment. Except for our computer labs, the rooms themselves are pretty much bricked away from views. Teachers generally close the door and seal what goes on inside. I would love to have teachers feel more free to observe each other, but I'm afraid "classroom observations" are strongly associated with evaluations and judgments. Administrators (and other colleagues) should feel free to walk through classrooms unannounced in order to better understand what the learning experiences in the school. But for this to work, they would need to develop habits in transparency as well. At the very minimum input for new policites should be solicited and their rationale should be clearly explained. Better yet, wouldn't it be great if staff and students were welcome to "walk through" some policy discussions.

Are you up for a more tranpsparent learning culture?

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"Hidden Agenda the Boys Are Back" by kind permission of Robert Britz (Krause)

Give Swirrl a Whirl

If you have visited this blog lately, you know that my latest social media passion is something that I have named M-Hub. This stems from recent experiences with personal learning networks and Challenge Based Learning.

I aspire to create an online vehicle that would help students learn how to network. It would be a database of adult "experts" within the school community (parents, teachers, alumnae) which students could access for research on projects, careers, college, etc. M-Hub could help give them more autonomy over their own learning and lead them to authentic outcomes. And as Bill Roberts recently suggested to me, if set up properly, M-Hub "may be useful to put together 'topic pages' so that students can see the advice provided to others with similar questions."

Some very dynamic students, staff, and alumnae have responded with enthusiasm to the project, and we have moved forward at a faster pace than I ever imagined we might. One of our first quests has been to find a "platform" for the knowledge hub.

I quickly found out that "cloud" databases are few and far between. The wikis with which I was familiar were not helpful. There are plenty of cloud apps for word processing, spread sheets, and even slides, but databases are rare and most that might fit M-Hub's needs are prohibitively expensive.

But then I found Swirrl. It has many of the features that we are looking for:

*Ease of use
*Unlimited Users
*Search and Tags
*permission control
*revision history.

Swirrl is wiki designed as a database. Essentially each "page" of the wiki can store information, uploads, tags. And it's all highly searchable. What's more, the free version is rather generous-- 1000 pages and 100 mb of upload storage. I'm confident that teachers might find this useful for classroom or personal use.

I'm not sure that M-Hub will be using Swirrl, as our needs go beyond the "free" model, but I wanted to share this resource with my readers and also thank the Roberts brothers for helping me become acquainted with Swirrl and troubleshoot some of M-Hub's technical challenge.

Check it out and give Swirrl a Whirl!

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Screen Shot of Swirrl home page

Elegy on "Classroom Teacher"

Recently I wrote presentation proposals for MAME 37 and MAPSA. On one of the forms I was asked to indicate my professional role. Perfunctorily, I began to enter "classroom teacher." But then I realized how ironic this phrase was considering the topics of my proposals:

Using Apple’s Challenge-Based Learning to Build Learning Networks

Building A Knowledge Hub for Your Learning Community

Challenge Based Learning removes the teacher from the role as dispenser of knowledge and places him or her into the role of guide.In my experience, most of the learning takes place outside of the classroom for my projects. Students use the school schedule and space for meetings on logistics.

Professional teachers also have a role in knowledge hubs, but their expertise is not utilized in a specific "room" at a scheduled time. Students are encouraged to network with any teacher, not just "their teachers". Students are likely to confer with teachers on subjects they are not even assigned to teach in any classroom that school year.

It is my hope that "Classroom teaching" may soon become a kind of anachronism like "steam shovel" or "dial tone." We still us the phrase, but those shovels aren't powered by steam and few people access a tone by "dialing" a phone. With today's technology we don't need to conceptually confine authentic teaching to classes or rooms.

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MHS tenth graders engaged in challenge project

Friday Take out from the Drive-thru

Jean Piaget
The principle goal of education is to create [persons] who are capable of doing new things, not simply repeating what other generations have done- [persons] who are creative, inventive, discoverers

Tony Wagner

Students who have learned to collaborate, to think critically, and be more confident about their own ideas also tend to make better moral judgments.

George Siemens

When I hear people talk about the neutrality of technology, I get worried. . . . We are controlled by what we’ve created as much as we control it . . . . Today, I view my iphone less like a device than I do as a part of my cognition. We need to surface technology’s hidden ideologies and philosophies. If we don’t surface these aspects, we dance blindly to a tune that we refuse to acknowledge, but still shapes our moves.

Trung Le

Even before students set foot in a classroom, most schools still are built like factories: long hallways, lined with metal lockers, transport students to identical, self-contained classrooms. . . . Encourage learning to happen throughout a school building by creating spaces that allow ideas to circulate as readily as foot traffic. At Thomas Deacon Academy [click for virtual tour]. . . learning spaces freely flow into each other. Students can see different types of learning occurring all around them and every inch of the school can be used to educate.

Megan McArdle

Forget the literary giants who once traded barbs at Elaine’s or the Algonquin. Now the battle over the world’s literary territory, a contest on the epic scale of Mothra vs. Godzilla, is between Amazon’s Kindle and Apple’s iPad.

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"Take Out" with generous permission of americanvirus

Hub-Cap

The M-Hub Project is officially launched. Twenty of us shared ideas for building a digital platform that would network our extended school community. The idea is to help students learn to build personal learning networks from "the inside-out".

The students had terrific ideas for using the hub. They also impressed the adults with their sophisticated suggestions on the technical side of the project. Staff in attendance represented the Art, the Media Center, Counseling, English, Tech, and Religious Studies. An alumna joined us en route to the Horn of Africa where she will work to cure tropical diseases. Needless to say, we had a rich variety of perspectives.

Perhaps the best sign of the meeting: When I arrived home from the meeting, I had three emails waiting from attendees that bubbled with more ideas for our enterprise.

The next step is to build a leadership team with the students. I want to meet with them next week. Another general meeting is scheduled for May 11. The topic? A platform for our network! I will keep you posted.

Visit the Marlin Knowledge Hub Project Site
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Photo by L. Baker, April 20, 2010.

The Knowledge Hub Project

My last three posts have led me to the launch of M-Hub. As explained in The Inside-Out Knowledge Network, our schools generally do not A) teach our students to network B) utilize expertise within reach of the school and local community.

I propose setting up a "knowledge hub" database with spokes that connect to staff (past and present), parents, and alumnae. We will also identify other professional and academic "experts" in the extended community who are willing to serve as "nodes" on our learning grid. M-Hub will allow our students to shake off the conventions of school calendars, meeting times, and classrooms. The M-Hub will be designed to network passionate learners and serve as a model of collaboration. Its greater purpose will be preparing our students for life-long learning beyond MHS.

I believe this is called a stretch goal. But why not dream big? The first meeting is scheduled for tomorrow and I've invited dreamers to come and help choose a platform for our database. Naysaying will not be featured on the agenda.

I have set up a web site which describe the philosophical underpinnings of the Hub.

Any member of our school community will be welcome at the meeting and may join the virtual discussion at our M-Hub Project Ning. (If you wish to join the ning, please contact me by private email). So far, the Ning has attracted a very nice blend of students, staff, and alumnae.

You can be sure that you will hear more about M-Hub at the Drive-thru!

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Screen shot of M-Hub web site. Visit for more information.

Weekend Take-out at the Drive-thru

Katherine Mangu-Ward-- Putting reading materials and lecture notes on the Internet, like many teachers do today, is just the first step; it's like when, in the early days of movies, filmmakers pointed a camera at a stage play. Kids are still stuck watching those old-style movies, when they could be enjoying the learning equivalent of "Avatar" in 3-D. Thousands of ninth-grade English teachers are cobbling together yet another lecture on the Globe Theatre in Shakespeare's day, when YouTube is overflowing with accessible, multimedia presentations from experts on Elizabethan theater construction. . . .

George Siemens-- We are at a point where we ought to be conceiving new models driven by the affordances generated by networks, technology, openness, and social software. Instead, many systems are at the equivalent stage of being pushed down the hall in a wheelchair at a senior care home.

Ellen Kumata (as quoted by Tony Wagner)-- Our system of schooling promotes the idea that there are right answers, and that you get rewarded if you get the right answer. But to be comfortable with this new economy . . . you have to understand that you live in a world where there isn't one right answer, or if there is, it's right only for a nanosecond."

David Pogue on iPad-- Hulu.com, the Web’s headquarters for free hit TV shows, won’t confirm the rumors that it’s working on an iPad app, but wow — can you imagine? A thin, flat, cordless, bottomless source of free, great TV shows, in your bag or on the bedside table?

National Educational Technology Plan (as quoted by Will Richardon): In connected teaching, teaching is a team activity. Individual educators build online learning communities consisting of their students and their students’ peers; fellow educators in their schools, libraries, and afterschool programs; professional experts in various disciplines around the world; members of community organizations that serve students in the hours they are not in school; and parents who desire greater participation in their children’s education.

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"Take Out" with generous permission of americanvirus

Fear and Loathing in Las Videos

Less than two years ago, I made it a personal goal to bring video into my teaching. While I am not exactly a whiz, I can shoot, edit, and post with simple tools like my Flip Mino and iMovie. I also require student created video in all three of my courses.

For the most part, this is all cool. But sometimes, I feel kind of out there alone, floundering around. Since students are used to Skyping, chatting, or creating quick video messages for Facebook with their computer cameras, they don't necessarily arrive to class with high production values for their assignments. As I posted recently, our school has no universal standards for video, so I sort of make them up on the fly.

Colleagues present a different type of frustration. Thanks to the mandate by our administration, each academic department will make a short presentation about their curriculum to the entire staff. Thus, both of my departments have approached me for technical help, so that we can look hip and with it (There is considerable irony in this, since both groups have been slow to embrace techie stuff). Well, I recently made a suggestion to one department and posted in to our ning:

I propose that we include a 4-5 minute video that features the projects we do. . . . .The video would be composed of 40-50 still photographs and a voice-over narration. Each member would identify a cool project he or she does and collect some digital photographs that capture it.. . . . I am willing to edit the video but would like someone else to quilt the narrative pieces together into a whole script. I can then work on cutting down the photos or narration to fit the project.

I suggested we get started immediately. Well, you can still file this one under Procrastination.

Finally, since so many staff members are unfamiliar with actually creating videos themselves they have an anything-is-wonderful level of discernment for student creations. This semester, I have attended two all-school assemblies where student created videos were projected for the entire student body (at the request of adults, I'm sure). They were awful. In one case the editing was sloppy; in another case the sound was dreadful. The problems were so basic that the productions would never have been approved in other mediums. But since they were videos, it was assumed that something sort of YouTubish would communicate to our student body.

All things tech seem to evolve at a glacial pace in education, including minimal expectations.

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"with fear in my eyes . . ." Flickr Creative Commons photo by ifranz

CBL Video - A Different Kind of Project

Alissa emphatically points out important differences between an Apple Challenge Based Learning Project and conventional group assignments. Until I tried a CBL, I was always frustrated by the artificiality of "project" assignments which were basically designed by the teacher and completed for the teacher. In those kinds of projects, students simply jump through hoops.

In my government classes I have often tried many different types of current events projects. But the results were often depressingly superficial. This school year I have tried cbls with both my AP and sophomore government classes. As Alissa reflects, the results were refreshingly different.

Motivation

Motivation is a very tough thing to gauge. It certainly isn't a feature of standards and testing that so often serve as the marks that we are trying to hit in our schools. In fact, the tests themselves are supposed to be the motivators-- and I suppose they are.

But, without any question, motivation is critical to learning. And what the cbl experience reflected was that intensely motivated groups of learners became deep learners, engaged with activities that enriched their understanding of our course material (and the world) in ways that no one could possibly plan.

Jenna became so involved with her group web site that she claimed that family members were worried that she was becoming "addicted." Rosie's determination to set the bar high for her group's web design had everything to do with her group presentation and the public dimension of the group projects. The coolest thing about the cbls: The kind of motivation exhibited by Jenna and Rosie was typical of my other students, rather than extraordinary.

Authentic Audiences

Lauren's Challenge Based Project group attracted over a thousand hits in the first days they went live. In a previous post I referred to it as a "web masterpiece". How did this happen? Well, they were a very bright group of young women to be sure, tight knit and motivated as well. But in this video, Lauren conveys something that was a constant theme across the CBL groups: They were highly motivated to create a medium for an authentic audience.

Unique, to Lauren's group was their determination to reach sub-audiences, as well. She describes a three tiered approach at the Democracy of Tomorrow site. (If you "google" , the name, it's the top hit). Watching this happen has changed my view on how to teach.

Blurring the Lines between Personal and Professional

Over the last two years I have received considerable personal pleasure working on projects related to technology in education.

In one case the boundaries between personal and professional are particularly blurred. Once a month, I make a movie-- often using Photo to Movie -- about film. Sometimes I do it for class, like my short piece on Akira Kurosawa. Sometimes I simply select a great film like Three Colors: Blue, and post it to my Film Favorites web site. Occasionally, a movie I makelike the review of The Passion of Joan of Arc (pictured here) will serve both purposes.

Is this work or a hobby? It doesn't really matter to me. Like a hobby, I've accumulated a nice collection of these pieces which I have housed at my YouTube channel. If I come up with ideas that I might be able to use in the course, all the better.

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Screen capture from my Commentary of the Passion of Joan of Arc (1928)

Ning Nut or Nuts to Nings?

I have become a kind of Johnny Appleseed of Nings this year. And after my staff in-service presentation, a thousand flower-nings bloomed.

All sorts of folks have let me know about their Nings. They have started them up in their classes, for their departments, or even for their families! This is ironic at two levels: 1) I really haven't really pushed this particular social platform. 2) Most of the Nings that I have joined through school have one active participant-- me!

I have written before about my frustration with starting the Blog Squad club with a Ning. I had dozens of students join but very little participation after joining. More recently, I have joined Nings that were started by the chairs in my two academic departments. I have posted a number of discussion threads and items to each one. But no one else is really using these virtual meeting places, let alone responding to my posts.

Between you and me, the Nings could almost completely replace our physical meetings. So this is a bit of a head-scratcher for me since I find many such meetings to be time-wasters and would rather participate on my own terms with the Nings. So I'm going to be a bit stubborn about this. Both departments have asked me to help out with some techie issues. And I will......But the help will be channled through their poor neglected Nings, not through some watch-the-paint-dry meeting. We'll see if this helps to reactivate the Nings (You can count on me to keep your posted). As usual, I welcome your reactions and insights!
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"May 8 - Multi-Color Ning" Flickr Creative Commons photo by Paul Robert Lloyd (old)