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!