A Roadtrip To Remember

Although I wasn't a big fan of the TV show, it was enough of an institution on the tube that the phrase, "you'll find it on Route 66!" is firmly fixed in my past.

Guess what? There's a Route 66 University which, it says, is "destined to become the premier source of online information for America's most famous highway, variously called the Mother Road, Main Street of America, Route 66, and U.S. 66." You'll be amazed at the information (and, for me, bit of nostalgia) that's collected here. I can easily believe one can earn an "advanced degree" through Route 66 University!

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Lausanne Laptop Institute -- Day 4

Today’s keynote speaker, Dr. Milt Dougherty, gave a talk entitled “Schools of the Future: Reality over Illusion.” Dr. Dougherty is apparently a sought-after consultant and speaker. He gave a well-presented presentation the main point of which was that we are in the midst of a real change in how we, as teachers, and schools, as institutions, educate our students. He spent some time having us look back to the schools we knew in the past and how they focused on preparing students to become workers in factories. He presented many statistics illustrating how this scenario will not work if our goal is to prepare students for the world in the 21^st century. He made much of the failure of our schools and society to produce the workers that our industries will need in the future. He made many thought-provoking points. The over-riding principle is how we must individualize the educational experience and make learning a “doing” experience. He urged us to abandon the scenario where the teacher goal is to try and pour the knowledge the teacher learned in school/college into the minds of the students….and hope they retain it. Passive learning – as opposed to engaged learning – is no longer acceptable as the student experience in the 21^st century.

Dr. Dougherty is the superintendent of USD#444 in Little Rivers, Kansas. He also has his own consultant company, Milt Dougherty and Associates. Dr. Dougherty was a very charismatic and effective speaker. If there was one theme to his remarks, it was that we are educating our kids for the past and not the future. That we are ignoring the reality that countries such as India and China are producing people with the skills that are going to be needed in the future (engineers, programmers, information technology) and we are not. I hope to get access to his presentation online when it gets put up on the Lausanne Institute website because he produced many thought-provoking ideas and statistics.

Session I was focused on using Microsoft OneNote in the classroom setting. The presenter was Cindy Salkeld, a member of the technology team at Girls Preparatory School in Chattanooga, TN. OneNote is a program that I believe is available on our upcoming 7^th grade laptops, and it is also on the recently distributed faculty Toshibas. Based on Ms. Salkeld’s presentation, there seem many potential uses of this program. One of the untapped uses is using OneNote for kids to create paperless notebooks. While that’s fairly useful, if a bit mundane, OneNote can also be used collaboratively….sort of like one big SmartBoard. The teacher can start a “session” which will allow individual kids or an entire class to access the teacher page (or kids could do this with each other) and, depending on how the teacher sets it up, teacher and kids can all contribute to the session, making additions or editing the notebook page(s) in real time together. The notes can be saved and/or e-mailed….or not. All the notes are searchable. I came away from this session wanting to spend quite a bit of time exploring OneNote and being ready to advocate its use to some of our teachers.

Session II is called “Spinning the Web: Collaborative Learning with Web-based Projects” and the three presenters were Michelle Koetke, Kathryn Gazso, Rose Wong, and Kathryn Civetta – all teachers from School of the Holy Child, Rye, N.Y. In some ways it was unfortunate to end my Lausanne experience with this presentation. While nothing was wrong with it, per se, it was a bit of a re-telling of another school experience moving to a laptop program. That plus the fact that a couple of these four presenters were not the most skillful or effective speakers.

I also spent some time talking with one of the exhibitors at Lausanne….that of finalsite. finalsite (no caps) is a company specializing in designing web presence for schools, among other tools. The rep I talked to was Jon Moser and I will pass his name (and the access to some schools sites finalsite now has in development or near-release) on to Maia M. in case Lakeside is considering a re-do of their web presence. A number of other attendees had very positive things to say about their own experience with finalsite (and a few with a competitor, WhippleHill).

Looking back over these four days of Lausanne, I consider the experience to have been well worth it. I came home with a bundle of resources to explore. I also came home with a lot to think about from all three keynotes, not to mention Tom Daccord’s session. I have found a great deal of value in other “conventions” I’ve attended like GIS, NCCE, and NECC. The big plus, I think, for an experience like Lausanne as compared, say, to those more grand scale gatherings is that, with 300 attendees at Lausanne, the fact is that you will run into some of the same people day-after-day. You have conversations that begin and then continue after you’ve had some time to digest new ideas and present your own. It was also great that they offered us meals together, again an opportunity to strike up new connections or build/maintain ones already establish. Everyone who was there was so open, friendly, and energetic. It was an invigorating and very enjoyable atmosphere that was professionally rewarding, too. That’s a great combination, I think, and I hope to go again next year. Actually, I plan on offering a couple possibilities for presentations that I’d like to give next summer. We’ll see if Stewart takes me up on it!

Lausanne Laptop Institute -- Day 3

Today’s keynote was by Dave Berque from DePauw University and his subject was “Pen-Based Computing: An Emerging Technology with Pedagogical Promise” This is another keynote that I want to back to when the talk is posted on the website. Mr. Berque presented many convincing examples of how pen-based computers – especially tablet PCs – are going to offer far more interactive and creative work on the computers by students. He provided some examples, one of which is a program he either wrote or was closely involved in as it was developed. The program is called DyKnow and the little that I saw about it in his talk, it sure does sound like something worth investigating. For example, it seems to offer many of the interactive tools that Mr. Berque obviously values (he was fairly brutal in his criticism of PowerPoint as a presentation tool, sure, but a very passive, non-interactive one). DyKnow offers products that have the interactive power that Dr. Berque talked about as well as another that helps supervise and control student access (similar to Classroom Secure, apparently). I don’t know about the price – and, frankly, I’m not that knowledgeable yet about what all DyKnow can do – but I do think this is something to look into. All in all, Dave’s keynote was another stimulating talk. It certainly piques interest in what the Tablet PC might offer in the classroom.

Session I today was “Blogging Can Enhance the Learning Environment” and the presenter was Gail Braddock. Gail’s presentation was really an advocacy of using one particular blogging service: Blogmeister (http://classblogmeister.com). One reason is that Blogmeister is the idea and initiative of David Warlick who is a dedicated educator and technology advocate. She had us set up a Blogmeister account for our school. The case she made for the educational use of blogs was somewhat focused on the difficult-to-deny fact that blogs are getting much attention these days. Just a bit of “they are the rage, so they must be good!” Gail called attention to resource materials by people other than David Warlick who are very involved in the educational use of blogs such as Anne Davis (http://anne.teachesme.com/) including Ms. Davis’ “Think Abouts” (http://www.eschoolnews.com/eti/2004/10/000182.php). A later presentation included more positives about blogging but came out strong for a service such as TypePad (which costs something like $149 per year for unlimited blogs) rather than Blogeister, though the latter is free. Another person she recommended who is quite involved in the realm of blogging in schools is Will Richardson and his Weblogg-ed website (http://www.weblogg-ed.com/about).

Session II, presented by Tom Daccord – Noble & Greenough School, was next. Tom’s position at Nobles is “Academic Technology Advocate” and a number of people seemed to recognized the appropriateness of this moniker…..it acknowledges what a number of us do. His talk was called “The Effective Laptop Teacher: Tools, Strategies & Lessons.

Tom began with a series of recommendations that we quite practical and in the realm of what some of us might consider “common sense.” His advice to us, as we consider working in a laptop classroom, included such things as 1) think about your “strategies for minimizing distraction” among your students (or yourself!); 2) make sure the plug-ins and add-ins you need for your materials and web resources; and 3) projector placement and control. He went on to talk about some laptop integration strategies including such good ideas as making sure you come up “authentic tasks and complex inquiry,” “interactive learning,” and “constructive learning.” Tom advocated the use of online chats for encouraging (and capturing) classroom discussion (Tom has a set of criteria to maintain the proper tone and focus of chats that all students must conform to). He also spent some time talking about his use of blogs, especially advocating TypePad as a method of creating and hosting blogs and having each student have his/her own. Tom has a major web presence with his Best of History Websites portal (http://www.besthistorysites.net/index.html) and Center for Teaching History With Technology (http://thwt.org/).

The first session of the afternoon was called “The Road To Technology Integration.” Presenters were Cathy Kyle and Martha Turner, both of whom teach at Presbyterian Day School in Memphis. Although not without interest, this was mostly a retelling of the process of setting technology goals and strategies – including a multi-year technology plan. It was good to hear how some of their plans were actually accomplished sooner (rather than later) than planned. PDS is a day school for about 573 boys, starting with pre-schools to 6^th grade. The have a take-home laptop program for 6^th graders (school-owned machines) with carts of laptops for 5^th grade and below. The presentation followed the line from roughly 1995 ‘til now. Cathy showed us the various stages and put some focus on the additions they were able to make to their staffing (e.g. they have built up to the point where they now have three people devoted to curricular integration). It sounds like PDS has a successful program.

The final session for me today was “SmartBoards in the Math Classroom” presented by Thaddeus Wert, a math teacher (and department head) at Harpeth Hall School which is a “college preparatory school for girls grades 5-12” (http://www.harpethhall.org/). He gave a good (and convincing) presentation about how to use a SmartBoard. He had not touched a SmartBoard a year ago but saw a workshop about SmartBoards a year ago (at Lausanne, by the way), convinced his school to put them all the Math rooms and has not really looked back. Strong interest in SmartBoards has spread to teachers in other departments, so more will be installed at Harpeth Hall school in the coming year. Tad also showed some tools for using a virtual Texas Instruments calculator on-screen and Geometer’s Sketchpad. I haven’t looked at the contents of the CD he passed out but it apparently contains some useful (and free, I think) programs he recommends. (The projector went out a couple times during the presentation to due to an incredible lightning and rain storm going on outside. The bus ride back was amazing as we wove our way around [and sometimes through] lakes of water in the roadway and many, many cars backed up all over the place. Quite a dramatic gullywasher!)

Lausanne Laptop Institute -- Day 2

This day began with a 6:30 wake-up call. The bus was ready to take us to Lausanne at 7:30. First item on the agenda was coffee and breakfast, followed by a short welcome message from conference organizer, Stewart Crais, who is also Lausanne’s Director of Technology and Media Services. He immediately set the tone of a friendly, casual, interested sponsor and host. We certainly felt welcomed to the Institute.

Stewart introduced the keynote speaker, Howard Levin. Howard has a Northwest connection, first at Overlake School and later at the Jewish Day School. Now he’s at the Urban School in San Francisco. Howard’s talk was called, “Making the Laptop Disappear: Moving Toward Seamless Integration.” His emphasis was on the notion that we need to get to the point where the focus is not on the laptop (the hardware) but rather on the information and results…..and, of course, the learning taking place by the students. I found much to think about in his talk. Stewart said the keynotes and the other workshops will be on the Institute website in the near future, and I hope that includes Howard’s presentation. I hope to go back and look again at Howard’s talk. The notion of having the laptop “disappear” – again, where the emphasis is not on the hardware but on the learning – is a concept that I completely agree with. I don’t know how soon it might happen; the “toy” features that computers in general – and laptops in particular – offer kids (and adults) seem to be quite tempting and seductive….I mean, you gotta admit that there are a lot of fun things a person can do using a laptop computer. As great a help it can be in organizing and helping gather information, it’s also great for games, going all over the place on the Internet, and playing music, movies, editing pictures/graphics….not to mention spending hours playing around with screensavers, desktop wallpaper, emoticons, etc., etc., etc. My sense is that computers are far from a mature technology and our users are pretty far from making consistent mature use of them in the context of teaching and learning. The hardware itself also keeps morphing, getting smaller, lighter, faster, more capacity, more features, more multimedia. In any case, as I say, I look forward to going back to review what Howard had to say and continue to reflect on his ideas.

Session I for me was “Managing the Laptop Classroom” by Thomas Haynes from The Culver Academies. I happened to ride on the shuttle bus with Tom this morning and got a bit of a preview of his talk. We also chatted about the open source content management system – Moodle – which I’ve been looking at recently. In our chat on the bus ride, he talked about some of what he is doing at Culver. He mentioned that his school uses Moodle widely and is very positive about it. He included Moodle in his presentation, too. The bulk of what he had to say had to do with some pretty common-sense guidelines for classroom management, such as enforcing lids down (with no exceptions), and by being absolutely consistent in a whole series of expectations he demands in his laptop classroom. Another tip was if kids insist that they have to take notes on the laptop (when that is not necessarily the classroom practice or expectation) that they send a copy of those notes to the teacher. He strongly advocated not allowing kids to resume work on their laptop if they finished a test early….or to go off to freely surf if they used their laptop to take the test. Letting them go off on their own as soon as they finish runs the risk of encouraging kids to speed through tests/quizzes so they can get back to do what they want on their laptops. He seems to be a teacher that kids might label “strict.” In this last example, if kids do go off on their own on their laptop after finishing a test without his okay, they get a zero on that day’s work….no exceptions. These sorts of strategies stem from the right spirit – namely thinking ahead about the guidelines and tone you want to exist in your laptop classroom, and then be absolutely consistent about enforcing them – even if I might differ with Thom somewhat on this or that specific rule.

Next came Susan Artkras who presented “Computers in a Writer’s Workshop.” Susan describes herself as “a 7th grade English and social studies teacher in a 1 to 1 laptop classroom in the Webster Groves School District in Missouri.” Much of what Susan presented was a wide-ranging list of websites for writing and collaborative projects that she recommends. I’ve bookmarked her resource lists and definitely want to spend time exploring the places because there does indeed seem a lot of potential there. In some ways one of the nice features of Susan’s fairly low-key session was the amount of enthusiasm, good ideas, and resources that came from the others in the room.

After lunch I went to an open roundtable session for curriculum integrators. The subject we talked about was teacher training. It was quite interesting to hear about the challenges faced by other trainers in situations somewhat similar to mine. Schools do have different policies in place – some require hours of training in every teacher’s schedule (e.g. an hour every two weeks), some expect an explicit technology goal (or goals) in each teacher’s (and probably administrator’s) professional development plan, and some schools require department heads to develop explicit technology expectations (often in collaboration with the tech integrator in the building) which are then transmitted to department members. Department heads are responsible for tracking the accomplishment of those goals by each of her/his department members. Whatever the institutional practices/policies, all agreed to the importance in finding ways to foster an environment where faculty members challenge themselves to seek new knowledge. The role of the school and the department head, then, is more to enable, encourage, support and reinforce the individual initiative for greater technology integration among their department members.

Session IV of this day was called “Now That You Have It…..How Do You Use It??” and the presenter was Lucie Calvin from St. George’s Independent School in Collierville, TN. Ms. Calvin seems to be a very strong proponent of using PowerPoint, emphasizing that this part of Office can be used for much more than presentations. She seems concerned about the need to be responsive to the visual learners in her room, and uses PowerPoint to put together quick, one-slide current event “bell ringers” and quick quizzes. She went on to talk about using cameras for photojournalism and presented sample worksheets. In her examples the websites and other resources that students are to use are listed. Wide-open web searches are requested of her students sometimes, but she more generally recommends having teachers search out the most useful resources and providing those links to students. The final portion of her presentation was an attempt to give us some sites that have “ready-made activities” and a quick word about blogging.

The Institute provided a sit-down dinner at the Hilton which was quite enjoyable. I’m looking forward to tomorrow.

Lausanne Laptop Institute -- Day 1

We took the shuttle from Memphis Hilton (where I'm staying) to Lausanne Collegiate School for registration and check-in this afternoon.

In the late afternoon/early evening, another shuttle bus took the conference attendees who are staying at the Memphis Hilton to the Isaac Hayes Restaurant in downtown Memphis. We were served a very enjoyable buffet dinner and were shuttled back to the Hilton. It was a great opportunity to meet a number of conference attendees and sense the interest and enthusiasm of the people there. At my table were a 4^th grade teacher from Arizona, an 8^th grade teacher also from Arizona, and a vendor/exhibitor (Step Up 4 Learning). The evening was a good send-off for the conference with both pretty good food and a lot of great people to meet.

Memphis, Here I Come!

I bid Seattle adieu and made my way to Sea-Tac Airport (and Northwest Airlines) to take off for Memphis, Tennesee. Why? To attend the Lausanne Laptop Institute which starts tomorrow. The sponsor is the Lausanne Collegiate School in Memphis, Tennesee. I'm looking forward to it!

Looking Back To 1969

Today doesn't mark one of those typical anniversaries -- 10th, 20th, 25th, 100th -- but I can't help but mention the Apollo 11 mission to the moon. Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin (supported by Michael Collins back in the command module) landed on the moon on this date 36 years ago.

It is so easy to forget about this amazing accomplishment, and there are many people in the US that weren't alive way back then.

Check out Surfing The Net With Kids Site Man Walks On The Moon.

Movie Magic

If you're interested in the most recent news about special effects in the movies, you might check out the blog, vfxblog.

A Cosmically Smashing Success!

Yesterday, right on schedule, a man-made space satellite released a refridgerator-sized probe and aimed it on a collision-course with a comet some 83 million miles out there somewhere. The purpose of this crash was to use the resulting explosion of dust and debris to study the nature of the material on this comet. What sort of dust/dirt/ice/??? is up there? What can that information tell us about the role comets played or did not play in the formation of planets and the introduction of minerals or water to our own planet Earth.

From what I've read, it seems like the project could not have gone better and the data and pictures the team is getting from the satellite (and observations using powerful telescopes from earthlings) are quite cool.

Check out the Deep Impact website by clicking here. You'll be amazed (and impressed)!

Fourth of July Lore

If you need any reading material while you're waiting for the skies to darken tonight and for your local (or personal) fireworks display to start, you need go no farther than the Fourth of July Celebrations Database. Concerning things The 4th -- you got the question, they've got the answer.

Also, if you want a more historical slice of what happened on July 4th, check out the Library of Congress site -- Today in History: July 4th

Hungry?

The George Mateljan Foundation has a website devoted to the World's Healthiest Foods. Next time you're hungry but you conscience demands you eat something "good for you". check out the many food choices here....and also find out why they're so good for you!