This link has been bookmarked by 53 people . It was first bookmarked on 12 Apr 2006, by Al delgado.
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Ronda WeryChris Lehmann's blog about teaching in the 21st century
blog education technology teaching edublogs web2.0 teacher Blogs
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Jay SwanChris Lehmann's website. Always kind of bums me out a little bit because his school sounds like such a great place to work, but always motivation to read his words.
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The simple answer is that good technology educational leadership is no different than good educational leadership; that the choices we make with technology education should be deliberate, thoughtful and in line with the overall educational goals of our organization.
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So the educational establishment sticks to safe ideas and traditional schooling because we know that while the outcomes may not be amazing, they are predictably mediocre at worst.
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The next step -- the idea of collaborative action -- is where it gets really hard. If Will is serious about trying to use these tools to affect change -- and certainly, it's not a bad idea -- we need to start to think about organizational structure, philosophy, shared decision-making, goals, action plans, etc... it's the more mundane kind of organization building that gets hard and tiring and frustrating and often fails.
So what could we do? What might it look like? Here's a thought: We could use the tools we have to start a call for change. We could look to set up a core set of principles for school reform that harnesses the best pedagogies and the new tools. We could look to build a coalition of administrators, teachers, parents and students to take action in the upcoming campaign. What might it look like? Shirky points out that for collective action to work, the action must require enough effort on the part of those taking action that decision-makers take notice. We could all go to used bookstores and look for old, beat-up textbooks and send them to our Congressmen with a flyer saying, "Is this how students should learn in 2008?" and a list of our core principles and goals. We could coordinate it all with Web 2.0 tools. We could follow up with an online petition to the McCain and Obama campaigns asking for a presidental debate on educational issues.
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15 Jul 08
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I remain very, very concerned with the notion that all we have to do is let the kids connect with the world -- just like they do on Facebook or MySpace -- and the kids will learn. There's a fallacy there, and my experience with how much really deep teaching of digital ethics we've had to do at SLA to counter all that the kids come in the door thinking about the digital world. Just introducing connection into our schools without a sense of what we want to do when we connect, how it changes things when we do it, and what we gain and lose when we change our schools this way. We have to stop just thinking that the introduction of these tools without an incredible amount of planning and forethought will change anything for the better.
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I remain very, very concerned with the notion that all we have to do is let the kids connect with the world -- just like they do on Facebook or MySpace -- and the kids will learn. There's a fallacy there, and my experience with how much really deep teaching of digital ethics we've had to do at SLA to counter all that the kids come in the door thinking about the digital world. Just introducing connection into our schools without a sense of what we want to do when we connect, how it changes things when we do it, and what we gain and lose when we change our schools this way. We have to stop just thinking that the introduction of these tools without an incredible amount of planning and forethought will change anything for the better.
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Graham WegnerChris Lehmann, Prinicipal, Science Leadership Academy, blogger.
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Engaged and Enraged -- Thinking about Marc Prensky's Ideas
Over at Dennis Fermoyle's always entertaining blog, In the Trenches of Public Education, there's a fantastic post and discussion about Marc Prensky's article Engage Me or Enrage Me. Dennis Fermoyle is, well, enraged by Marc Prensky's ideas. Mr. Fermoyle's argument starts like this:This morning when I got to school, I found that copies of a "motivational" article had been placed in all of the teachers' mailboxes. The name of the article was Engage Me or Enrage Me, and when I read it, I didn't know whether to laugh, cry, or vomit. I hope you'll excuse me for putting it so crudely, but the article really was sickening. I talked to another teacher who said he went and banged his head against a locker a few times after he read it. The point of the article is that we need to make school more fun for the students. The implied message was that if kids aren't performing, it's the schools' and teachers' fault because we haven't engaged them.
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But I'm going to also say that we also have to teach gumption. We also have to teach kids how to slog through things even when they aren't fun. And we have to teach kids what it means to see something through, and we have to teach kids that some values are not immediately fun, but are worth it long term. I used to say to my English classes, "Hey, on a warm spring day, I'd rather be outside playing Ultimate frisbee than teaching English, but we all have to be here, so let's find a way to make it meaningful." The flaw in Prensky's article is that there is a difference between recreation and work. It's wonderful when they overlap. It's wonderful when we learn from our recreation. But it's not always the case. And we need to teach kids how to find entry points into ideas that are not, prima facie, of interest to them. We need to find ways to teach students how to keep going, even when the thing they are engaged in gets hard or boring. - 5 more annotations...
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Most things worth doing get hard, and most things worth doing well force us to overcome a gumption trap or two when we would just rather give up. (And yes, I'm borrowing the phrase "gumption trap" from Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance.) -
How do we mine that and bring it back to the classroom? How do we find a way to teach kids that finding your own path to engagement and not always relying on others to do it for you is a powerful tool for self-actualization?
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We need to do a better job of finding a way in with so many kids. We need to find the spark inside them and then fan that flame so that it can sustain itself. Engagement is not a one time thing, it's a daily struggle -- as the 2 x 4s in my basement will attest -- but if we can find ways -- be it with computer games and cool technologies or if it's through more "old fashioned" ways like after-school activities -- so that more students can experience that engagement, then we will have started on the right path. -
Blogging vs. Podcasting
I keep a list of topics I want to write about on here. Right now, that list is getting long with several items that really would be hard to do any kind of justice to in under 1500 words. All of the topics are things I love talking about, but I've resisted podcasting about them which gets me back to one of the reasons I prefer to blog.
Writing is actually really hard for me much of the time. Funny for an English major and English teacher, but it's true. Writing can be a really torturous process for me. And that's why I do it. Blogging, in addition to everything else I get from me, forces me to take the time to put my words on paper (well, close to paper anyway) when I'd much rather just talk it out.
I've started questioning that, especially after listening to my interview with Steve Hargadon. His questions got me to articulate a bunch of ideas I've been struggling with putting on paper for weeks now.
Which got me to wondering -- part of my reason for blogging is to keep up the discipline of writing. But does that matter as much as getting ideas out there into the conversation? And if my answer is no, what does that mean for my students? -
Instead, we need to create meaningful, relevant curriculum that allows students sufficient opportunities to really step up and take ownership. We need to use the tools that every other aspect of our society and update our schools and our classrooms. But let's also be sure. We can do all of this. We can make our schools inviting, progressive, technology-rich schools, and there will still be kids who refuse to engage or who simply push buttons and press boundaries, even with a curriculum full of new ideas. There is no panacea in education, and some kids will struggle simply because, on a nice spring day, they'd rather be outside too. Or on the internet, or playing games (on the internet). We have to keep working with them to understand their role in their own learning process. We have to make explicit the steps we would take to them to create an engagement classroom and assigments, but then we also have to make sure they are willing to interalize those lessons as well.
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