Life Lessons Learned at ISTE12

This past week I attended ISTE12 in San Diego.  I have gone to 5 previous ISTE conferences so I knew what to expect.  I went through my online conference planner and selected the major events; keynotes, social events, and highlighted speakers, leaving time for walking, talking, and just breathing in the ocean air.  I arrived a little early to build in recreational time in San Diego.  My arrival day was Friday.  A walk on the beach was planned for the afternoon and a dinner with a few other early birds in the evening.

At ISTE11 Joan Young, @flourishingkids, made a quick stop at my post session to introduce herself and to say that she followed me on twitter.  I responded to her with the same. For the past year we tweeted with acknowledgements to one another.  Having heard via Twitter that she was arriving early, I invited her for my walk on the beach that Friday.  After about 10 minutes of a little shyness and getting acquainted, we began to really talk . . . and talk . . . and talk, not about the weather, not about our jobs, but about our life passions.  Joan astutely noticed that social media had set the stage for us to interact with one another as if we were beginning at page 100 of a book.  The setting, character development, and part of the plot had been set through our connections via social media.

Fast forward to Saturday evening about an hour prior to the keynote featuring Sir Ken Robinson.  I was extremely excited about seeing Sir Ken Robinson having been a fan since his first Ted talk on Schools Kill Creativity and having developed a Teaching with TED page on his work.  So when he was announced as a speaker, I yelped with joy.  That evening I went to the #edchat tweet-up at the San Diego Conference Center to meet up with Joan for dinner.  Lisa Dabbs, @teachingwithsoul, another passionate educator, who I also met via our social networks and in person for the first time at ISTE12, was going to join us.  Through a tweet posted a little earlier, I saw a picture of Joan with Zoe Branigan-Pipe, @zbpipe, at the #edchat tweet-up.  I knew and respected Zoe’s work, and asked Joan to introduce me to Zoe.  Joan took me over to Zoe.  I introduced myself, and with a big smile of recognition and warmth on her face, Zoe gave me a big hello type of hug.  We told Zoe that we were going to dinner.  Someone near us said the line to Ballroom for the keynote was getting long.  She looked at the time. She looked at us.  She looked at the time.  She looked at us. (Yes, this happened several times).  Zoe, coming out of deep contemplation, said, “I can watch the keynote on video, but how often can I get to spend time with an amazing group of women?” We “picked up” a few more women along the way including the extremely energetic and passionate Lisa Neale, @lisaneale, who had reached out and connected with me via Twitter and Facebook.  What resulted was a few hours spent with amazing, powerful women, who originally connected through social media, and who became even more connected and friends through our dinner together.  We did not get into the ballroom to see Ken Robinson but we did see his keynote from Blogger’s cafe.  The keynote is forgettable, our dinner together is not.

These events set the foundation for what I experienced and learned at this year’s ISTE conference.  It was quite a different experience than in the past.

Grab on to Opportunities When They Present Themselves.  This may mean letting go of the the best laid plans.  The Ken Robinson Keynote versus Personal Networking/Communicating became my theme for the conference.  With laptop open and the ISTE online conference planner accessible, I would head for that next session presentation.  More often than not, I would run into someone I knew or who knew me from Twitter.  That next session became a lengthy conversation with that person.  As a recommendation for attending ISTE12, I recommended via Twitter that folks should approach the conference like planning a lesson: To go in with a plan, but to let go of that plan when teachable moments afforded themselves. So with that in mind, laptop would close as these opportunities opened leading to the following  . . .

Be Present With Folks in the Moment. With a background in counseling, I often teach the art of active listening, and it is an art.  It does not come naturally.  True listening means clearing the mind and fully engaging in the speaker.  It becomes a state of flow, where the only thing that exists in time and space is the speaker and what he or she is saying.  In line with grabbing onto opportunities, I became intentional in my active listening.  I gave up the need to try to get to sessions, to look around to see what other were doing, to make my own point, or to think about what I was going to do next.  I faced the person who was talking to me and cleared my mind so I could listen and be fully present with her or him . . . hopefully a small gift to them, definitely a large gift to me.  I even received a gift from Rudy, the shuttle van driver back to the airport.  I became interested in his amazing energy, sense of humor, and zest of lift.  Being in the van for a length of time with him, I asked questions and listened to his philosophy of life. He said, “I have been depressed. I have been in the outs, but now live life fully.  Life don’t stop until the casket drop. I make a habit out of being happy.”

We All Have a Voice. One Person Can Make a Difference. I consider myself a professional Tweeter.  By this, I mean I use Twitter to tweet resources, blogs, articles, news about education in an effort to change education.  I use my blog for the same purposes.  I had a dream that started when I was 18 years old, and it is to change the education system so it honors and addresses all learners’ learning preferences, passions, geographical locations, cultures, income levels, and specific needs.  I now have a platform via social media to move this mission along.  So I tweet and I blog.  I get a few re-tweets, and likes and comments on my blog post. Nothing major but I am appreciative.  It is not a lot of feedback, but it is some.  I continue to tweet and blog even without any major acknowledgement and recognition because I have to do so.  It is like an artist who has to create art.  As many tweeters do, I put my Twitter name on my ISTE name tag.  This year at ISTE, I had quite a few people come up to me to say thanks for my tweets and blog posts. I felt affirmed.  I am unbelievably grateful for that these folks approached me and told me so.  I do not tweet and blog for affirmation nor recognition, but being human, it sure does feel good.  I often preach that social media provides us all with a voice and every person can make a difference.  In the isolation of virtual connections and communications, I sometimes have some doubts about my own impact.  My ISTE interactions gave me evidence that for a few folks I am.

Professional Development is Everywhere All the Time. For the first time in the six ISTE conferences I attended, I did not learn any specific new technology integration strategies, technology tools, nor classroom activities.  It wasn’t only because I attended less sessions, I realized, it was because I participate in 24/7 professional development.  Twitter provides me with links to resources, blogs, news pieces, webinars, and conference live streams.  I actively engage in professional development every day.  As such, I do not need to go to face-to-face conferences to learn and keep up with the current trends and best practices in education.

Being an introvert, I had some meaningful connections during past conferences, ISTE and others, but not many.  So when I read pre-conference advice about using conference time for connecting and networking, I said, kind of like an acquiescing kid, “Yea, yea, right.”  This year was different.  I learned that it really is about coming out of the isolation of the silos that many, especially innovative, educators experience (thanks to Sheryl Beach-Nussembaum for the metaphor) to connect with like-minded folks to build a tribe.  I used to think that there was no hope for public education.  I am finding that previously isolated innovative educators are coming out of their isolation and connecting via social media.  These connections become deeper in conference face-to-face communications.  I now have hope as we band together, virtually and face-to-face, that this growing group of educators will make a difference in the world of education.

The Flipped Classroom: The Full Picture for Tinkering and Maker Education

If you have been following my blog series on The Flipped Classroom: The Full Picture, you know that I am using this opportunity, given all the press on flipped classroom, to discuss a model of teaching and learning based on experiential education.  It is a model in which authentic, often hands-on, experiences and student interests drive the learning process, and the videos, as they are being proposed in the flipped classroom discourse, support the learning rather than being central or at the core of learning.

The idea of experience being core to learning has been discussed by Dale Dougherty, the publisher of Make Magazine, in the context of Maker Education:

I see the power of engaging kids in science and technology through the practices of making and hands-on experiences, through tinkering and taking things apart. Schools seem to have forgotten that students learn best when they are engaged; in fact, the biggest problem in schools is boredom. Students sit passively, expected to absorb all the content that is thrown at them without much context. The context that’s missing is the real world.

Learning by doing was the distillation of the learning philosophy of John Dewey. He wrote: “The school must represent present life—life as real and vital to the child as that which he carries on in the home, in the neighborhood, or on the playground.”

Those involved in the maker movement have noted the problems with the type of learning occurring in the formal educational setting:

Formal education has become such a serious business, defined as success at abstract thinking and high-stakes testing, that thereʼs no time and no context for play. If play is what you do outside school, then that is where the real learning will take place and thatʼs where innovation and creativity will be found.

Our kids can be learning more efficiently—and as individuals. We imagine that schools can become places where students learn to identify their own challenges, solve new problems, motivate themselves to complete a project, engage in difficult tasks, work together, inspire others, and give advice and guidance to their peers. (Makerspace Playbook)

Initiatives such as the Tinkering School, Maker Education, and Expeditionary Learning are trying to change that.  My goal, in line with these initiatives, for proposing The Flipped Classroom: The Full Picture is to honor a more natural and engaging process of learning.

A major purpose of maker education and the flipped classroom model based on tinkering is that it:

. . . exemplifies the kind of passion and personal motivation that inspires innovation. We can engage students as makers who learn how to use tools and processes to help them reach their own goals and realize their own ideas. (Makerspace Playbook)

This post describes how The Flipped Classroom: The Full Picture can be used to support maker education and tinkering with the focus being on students acquiring more process-oriented “how-to” skills, skills needed to develop and enhance creativity and innovation.

The Flipped Classroom: The Full Picture has four phases:

1. Experiential Engagement: The Activity
2. Concept Exploration: The What
3. Meaning Making: The So What
4. Demonstration: The Now What

This model has aspects and phases similar to Gever Tulley’s Brightworks Arc (used at his tinkering school).

Students explore ideas and pursue their interests through a structure we call an arc. Each arc takes as its premise a central theme, to be explored from multiple perspectives. Students interact with this theme in three different phases: exploration, expression, and exposition.

Experiential Engagement: The Activity

The cycle begins with students exploring the materials and the skills related to a topic of interest. They are provided with lots of tools, materials, and “stuff” to play with and explore. They are encouraged to just tinker.  Some suggested tinkering stations include:

• Physics:  levers, locks, bicycle parts, machine parts
• Music Creation:  musical instruments, objects that make sound
• Art:  lots of art materials, paper, pens, markers, clay, paint
• Writing: lots of different writing utensils, books making materials
• Game Development: lots of board and card games, gaming devices with games
• Robotics:  recycled items (to make robot prototypes), machine parts
• Food: food items, cooking utensils, recipe books

(Note: These are just some basic suggestions to spark ideas. The station theme and materials should be decided by educator and students interests, budget, and desired outcomes.)

If a more structured or targeted outcome is desired, students can be asked to do one of the Make: Kids projects found at http://makeprojects.com/c/Kids, the Tinkering Activities featured by the Exploratorium http://tinkering.exploratorium.edu/activities/, or the Science Toy Maker. This still honors and emphasizes beginning the process with a making experience.

Whatever is decided, this introductory experience should have the following characteristics:

• Consider the diverse interests and skill sets of your students
• Make sure that the project you choose is open-ended enough to welcome all kinds learners
• Build on the learnersʼ prior interests and knowledge.
• Choose materials and phenomena to explore that are evocative and invite inquiry.
• Provide multiple pathways, donʼt ask your students to adhere to rigid step-by-step instructions. (Makerspace Playbook)

The following video shows tinkering in action, a great example of what this phase should look like:

Concept Exploration: The What

This is where the use of videos, as proposed in the flipped classroom, is used.  The difference, though, is that the videos are selected and offered to the students once students identify their interests in the Experiential Engagement-tinkering phase as opposed to being selected prior to the lesson as typically occurs in traditional lessons.  In other words, through tinkering and making, they discover what they want to learn more about.  Once this is identified, the educator and other interested students find videos to support the learning.  The focus of these videos becomes on learning more of the how-tos.  Some video libraries and how-to websites that can be explored include:

• 5min Media
• eHow
• Howcasts
• Mindbites
• Instructables

While viewing the how-to resources, students can post thoughts, ideas, and questions via a collaborative online chat tools such as Google Docs, Primary Pad, or Wallwisher.

Meaning Making: The So What

During this phase, students synthesize and make meaning from their experiences and concept learnings from the previous phases.  It is a time for reflection.  Given the theme of making and tinkering, students can make meaning through:

• Photo collages of key learnings
• Mash-up videos from the How-To Videos
• Use of Web 2.0 tools such as Wordle, VoiceThread, Imagechef, and others to showcase key concepts.

Demonstration and Application: The Now What

This is the phase where students demonstrate the expertise they achieved with their skill acquisitions.
Students can be encouraged to showcase a project created and/or demonstrate a set of skills learned.

Students present their work in a public exposition. They demonstrate skill, express understanding, and explain the workings of their creations, receiving feedback and critique from their audience. http://sfbrightworks.org/the-brightworks-arc/

This can be done through:

• Live or videotaped instructional videos, where students teach others the skills acquired.
• A performance or demonstration to a live audience
• A pitch for a new invention or process: the learner presents ideas for a new invention with the audience providing recommendations and positive feedback.

Here are some examples:

• 4th Grader demonstrates the windmill he created after tinkering with and learning about robotics.

• 3rd Grader talks about his creation from our from puppets to robots unit.

• 5th grader combined her desire to learn t-shirt design with her love of reading.

• Graduate Education students demonstrate and teach how they plan to integrate the arts into their classrooms.  The following demonstrations show scrapbooking and guitar playing.  They had the other graduate students in the class learning these skills:

    

• Upper elementary students spent a few months exploring and tinkering with Web 2.0 Tools (I’ve written about this at Tinkering and Technological Imagination in Educational Technology).  As part of her demonstration, this student shows another student how to create a Voki.  They shared a laptop while the other students watched via an image project via the LCD projects:

A Technology/Mobile-Enhanced I AM Poem

I blogged about this activity before.  I am using it for an online course for the first time this summer and am so excited about the results, I wanted to report on it again.  The I Am Poem is a popular exercise for language arts.  I thought it would also be a good ice breaker for students to get to know one another.  It goes beyond the, “Hi, my name is ________, and I live/work at __________” type of introduction, and reinforces the importance of beginning an online course through developing a sense of community.  Some general strategies to do so include:

• Connecting people’s names and faces is a first big step to forming bonds.
• Students need non-threatening, interesting ways to begin creating online community.
• Social interactions between and among learners enrich the learning community and should be supported in the instructional design of the course. (http://frank.mtsu.edu/~itconf/proceed01/19.html)

I have used the I Am Poem in a face-to-face undergraduate course (see http://usergeneratededucation.wordpress.com/2012/02/01/mobile-driven-identity-activities/).  For this summer semester teaching online courses on Integrating Technology Into the Curriculum for the Boise State Educational Technology graduate program, I asked students to do the I Am poem as one of their first course tasks.

Students were provided with the following directions:

• Write an “I Am” poem using the template, either electronically – http://ettcweb.lr.k12.nj.us/forms/iampoem.htm or through the template below to write your own poems.

 

• Once your poem is written, locate or take a photo via one of your computer devices that symbolizes who you are, the essence of your poem.
• Send your photo to Flickr along with your first name in the subject line and your I Am Poem in the email body to (email to my Flickr account – randomly generated by Flcikr).
• Since all the group’s images will be sent to this single Flickr account, you can view each other’s poems via the Flickr account http://www.flickr.com/photos/78773858@N03.
• You do NOT have to have a Flickr account to submit your I Am Poems nor to view other students’ pictures/poems, but if you want to comment on a photo/poem (not required), you will need to have an account.
• A full description of this activity can be found at http://community-building.weebly.com/i-am-poems.html.  Here you can find more directions how to set up the activity for your own class.

Here is a screenshot of the Flickr page of student submissions.  I love the diversity and creativity they demonstrated both through the images selected and poems written.

. . . and some specific examples:

Mobile Learning and The Flipped Classroom: The Full Picture

I have jumped onto the Flipped Classroom craze to take the opportunity to propose and discuss an experiential model of education (ala John Dewey and Kurt Hahn), one that has experience at its core and provides learning options for all types of learners.  In this model, the videos, as they are discussed in the flipped classroom. support the learning rather than drive it.

My series on the Flipped Classroom – The Full Picture includes the following posts:

• The Flipped Classroom Model: A Full Picture
• Flipped Classroom: The Full Picture for Higher Education
• Flipped Classroom Full Picture: An Example Lesson
• UDL and The Flipped Classroom: The Full Picture

This post continues the series by providing an overview of The Flipped Classroom: The Full Picture using mobile devices.  Each phase of the model has suggestions and ideas for mobile-driven learning activities which can be implemented on most devices.  This supports Bring Your Own Devices programs and increases the chances students will use similar learning activities on their own devices outside of the classroom environment.

A major focus of mobile learning these days seems to be centered on the apps, but my focus is on designing and providing mobile learning activities that are cross platform.  Smartphone ownership is up in the United States, but it is still not universal and especially not within lower income communities.  Discussion of the app gap and this type of digital divide has occurred within several recent articles:

• Screen Time Higher Than Ever for Children
• The Digital Divide Still Exists

It also is the basis of my teaching philosophy – to provide access to learning regardless of learning differences, income, digital access, and geographical location.  Most students own mobile devices that have photo and video taking capabilities, and have Internet for content access.  The mobile activities described for the model below take advantage of these functions.

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Engaging Experience

The lesson or unit begins with an authentic, engaging, often multi-sensory and often hands-on experience.  Its purpose is to hook and motivate the student to want to learn more about the topic.

Photo and/or Video Examples of Real Life Situations. One method to do so is to ask students to locate evidence of the learning topic in their immediate environments and record that evidence via a media sharing sites such as Flickr or Youtube.  Both of these sites generate (random) email addresses that can be given out to students so they can upload their photos or videos to the educator account.  Students do not need email accounts. The media is then aggregated onto the educator account.  For example, at the beginning of a unit on personal identity, I asked students to take photos of their core values and upload them to my Flickr account – see Picture Our Values.  This description also includes directions how to set up a Flickr account for a class project.

Texting Observations, Questions, Two-Way Communications. Students can use their texting functions to interview one other, discuss real world observations made, and report on real life experiences based on suggestions provided by the educator.

Example experiential mobile activities I have done with students to engage them in the topic include:

• I Am Poems
• All About Me
• Interviews
• Directions Via Texting
• Building Communications

There are so many ways to get students excited about the content topics especially when asked to use their mobile devices to do so.  My advice to educators is to take the best experiential activities they have done and/or experienced and include a mobile element as I did with the activities above.

Concept Exploration

During this phase, learners explore the theoretical concepts related to the topic being taught.  This is the phase where videos, such as those being discussed in relation to the more popular articles and posts about the flipped classroom, are used in the lesson.  To make the content more accessible, as per Universal Design of Learning, a multimedia learning environment needs to provide multiple, flexible methods of presentation.  It is important to include content material presented in a variety of formats including ebooks, audiobooks, and content-rich websites can serve this purpose.

• Video services such as Youtube which features Youtube Education has several mobile options, Youtube for Mobile.  Students will need to have internet access.
• Audiobooks and Podcasts through services like Librivox
• Read books on mobile/cell phone, e.g. BooksinMyPhone

The key to this phase, to the use of these materials, and why it is called the flipped classroom is that content resources are recommended to the learners, and then they review them during the own time frames, sometimes as homework.

Meaning Making

Learners should, often need, to be given the opportunity to reflect on what they experienced and concepts explored during the previous phases.  For learning to be meaningful, they need to construct their own meanings and understandings of the concepts covered.

Some options for learners to reflect and synthesize their key learnings include:

• Microblogging with Twitter using hashtags.
• Microblogging through SMS and group texting services such as Cel.ly
• Blogging and Media-Based Reflections via Posterous in the Field or Cinch
• Phonecasting via ipadio or Google Voice or Cinch
• Photo-Audio Sharing via Yodia: Yodia in the Classroom
• Vodcasts/Video Reflections uploaded to Youtube (uploading from a mobile)
• Texting summaries: e.g. Messaging Shakespeare

Demonstration and Application

This is the integration phase where students demonstrate what they learned and how they will apply it to other areas of their lives.  This can be viewed as a celebration of learning where students create a project that represents their key learnings, significant experiences, and commitments-contracts for post-lesson implementation.

I discussed ideas for using Web 2.0 for this phase in Technology-Enhanced Celebration of Learning.  Many of these strategies can work on the students’ mobile devices.

The following is TJ’s example from an undergraduate course on interpersonal relations.  He used his skills at the Minecraft game and the webcam on his laptop to demonstrate what he learned.  What is especially relevant about this demonstration is that TJ has a mild form of Asperger’s Syndrome.