BYOT Field Trip

My sixth graders and I took a field trip to The Bandai Edison Museum yesterday and I thought it was an ideal chance for a Bring-Your-Own-Technology experiment. Our current inquiry focuses on personal histories and the primary objective of the field trip was to reflect on how the Thomas Edison Exhibition tells the story of his life.

The task was to choose three artifacts in the exhibit and deduce what invention led or might have led to it, and what inventions came after. Usually, iPads and other mobile digital devices are not allowed in school, but for the field trip, I said they can bring any technology they want to complete their assignment. I created a simple google form and posted it on our class blog for those with Internet access. Some students chose to write their reflections with paper and pencil, but a few brought their iPads, smartphones, and a couple DSs, and were excited to use them!

After completing their reflections, some students took photos or made videos of their favorite exhibits. It felt great to provide them with the autonomy to use their technological resources to inspire and motivate their inquiries. The enhanced engagement and enthusiasm to share their work was a clear benefit.

I plan to have a BYOT policy in place in the classroom when we start working in earnest on our culminating Exhibition, and the field trip experiment demonstrated to me that these technologies, coupled with independence, are remarkable learning multipliers.

In our reflective discussion, many students cited their digital products when describing Edison's place in history and the connections between inventions. I'm considering ways that this strategy could be expounded to transform field trips into "Connected Learning Expeditions" and would appreciate knowing your experiences and thoughts!

No Sleep November

I hereby dub this month "No Sleep November" because there are so many fantastic learning opportunities for teachers and I don't want to miss any.

First, I'm participating in the COETAIL (Certificate of Educational Technology and Information Literacy) program and working toward a Master's Degree. Course 1 was an enjoyable survey and blogscussion of Connectivist Learning Theory and Course 2 promises to address issues related to technology.

Next, the Deeper Learning MOOC preview. This is exactly the kind of exploration I've been looking forward to and will mercifully commence in January. The preview is this week, and will focus on Academic Mindsets.

To further inform and develop my Independent Inquiry project, a philosophy and framework for connecting learning in and out of school, I enrolled in the Make/Hack/Play Together MOOC. I'm planning to participate along with my students, so hopefully a good portion of the assignments will be completed during class time.

Finally, I'm hoping to catch up on everything I missed in the K-12 Online Conference. I made a note of this awesome event months ago and checked in on the last day only to be blown away by all that I had missed! 

Did I mention I'm writing a novel? I've put down about fifty-thousand words, although haven't worked on it for a few months. Thanks to the folks at Educator Innovator for reminding me that November is National Novel Writing Month! How convenient. I don't expect to finish mine this month, but I shouldn't let it slide for too long.

How can I possibly expect to do all of this? It can't be ignored that I have a rambunctious two-year-old son at home and a school-wide musical to organize, rehearse, and produce!

The solution, of course, is to forgo sleep. Rather than burning midnight oil, I'm considering a regimen of coffee-fueled early morning work sessions. Even just five hours per week should be enough to stay on top of these projects and lead to wrapping up 2013 with a thunderous bang.

Here's musical score for 'No Sleep November', my own composition for jazz orchestra, Insomnia.

What's your story?

The most important question I ask myself constantly while planning instruction is, "so what?". The most valid reason for learner disengagement is irrelevance. When designing learning experiences, I try to ensure that everyone always has a reason to be engaged.

In the case of this unit, What's your story?, personal connection is the hook as the learner will inquire into a family or community member to deduce connections between themselves, their research subject, and History. They will also use photo, video, and other media applications to organize a VoiceThread presentation to tell their subject's story, or personal history. VoiceThread will be the new technology application, for them and me. In terms of writing, we will inquire into writing a documentary style script and visual literacy as it relates to organizing and presenting media, as well as the importance of copyright and citation.



We have already started this unit by inquiring into primary sources related to the Russian Revolution and spread of Communism in Europe. It has been a great way to begin to explore Perspective in History and develop skills that students can apply to their independent research and project production. Most of the students are planning to create a personal history for a grandparent or older relative, so the connection to World War II and the Cold War should be very strong.

In terms of Global Collaboration, I understand the VoiceThread allows comments in various forms by any other VoiceThread users. I've been collaborating with a teacher in Hawaii who is very keen to exchange feedback via VoiceThread, which has been a strong motivator for me to learn that application. Another possibility would be to invite other teachers to do the same project and provide the students with an opportunity to link their presentations into a sort of historical net. Perhaps while my students are researching their subjects, I can delve into more research about technology tools to support this project.

We will be publishing our projects on our class blog, so I hope you'll come visit to see them in a month or so!

Constructing The Learner Profile

One of the most positive and sincere refrains one hears in education is to teach 'the whole child'. Most of the time, however, what that means isn't clear. Common sense dictates that we should care about students' emotional and social growth as much as academic. Inquiries into learning modalities or multiple intelligences seem to shed light onto planning more inclusive learning opportunities. As a slogan, 'teach the whole child' is perfectly fine.

The IB Learner Profile takes a much needed step toward articulating more specifically what the attributes of a 'whole child', or indeed any person, are.

My approach to reflecting on and documenting development of the Learner Profile in my classroom is very simple. The attributes are posted at the edges of a large blank display. As students demonstrate an attribute, they or I suggest to attach an artifact of the event on the display. When someone 'nominates' an artifact, it's an ideal opportunity for reflective discussion and celebration of our achievements!

Thus far, we determined that exchanging origami Peace Cranes with students in Hawaii showed that we are caring, so we stuck some cranes on the board.

Our origami Peace Cranes show that we are caring.

Symbolically, I love having a visual representation in the classroom of our growth, not only as learners, but as people.

Our learner profile will fill up as the year progresses.

Visualizing our thinking and learning is a fun and remarkably useful endeavor, particularly in elementary school. In what ways are your students showing what they have learned and how they have grown?

COETAIL, meet Connected Learning.

My first truly connected learning experience was the Learning Creative Learning course from MIT Media Lab. The philosophy, content, and community opened my mind and clarified so many notions that had been simmering in my educational philosophy, but hadn't yet boiled over. The course syllabus and Google+ community are still active, and I highly recommend anyone interested in the nature of learning to explore them. It was my first connected learning experience, but I didn't actually know it yet.

During the course, I discovered many brilliant people to follow on twitter and participated in the Google+ community, which led me to find the Making Learning Connected MOOC at the beginning of last summer. If Learning Creative Learning opened my mind, Making Learning Connected blew it up and sent the pieces flying in all directions. While sailing through the air, the pieces of my mind connected with too many wonderful connected learners to count, let alone mention. You can follow my personal 'clmooc' journey on my blog, Symphony of Ideas (links to posts tagged with the 'clmooc' label).

Most of the action occurred in the Making Learning Connected Google+ community. It's hard to describe how I felt or how I grew, but I think any curious inquirer would learn a tremendous amount from reading the participant's posts and viewing the wonderful variety of learning artifacts. An adventurous connected learner might even complete each 'make cycle'! I'm sure you would receive very useful feedback and enthusiastic encouragement from that outstanding community. At the very least, please take a moment to read the Connected Learning Principles and reflect on how they apply to your own learning and the learning in your classroom or school.

The rest is, as they say, history. I've connected with a fascinating array of people, communities, organizations, and had a few interactions that defy classification. All along, I've had a strong sense of wanting to share the thrill of connected learning with the students in my class, so that's what I've been doing. In a few short weeks, we've utilized our class blog to publish some of our learning and connect with other classes, practicing invaluable 21st Century communication and collaboration skills. We give and receive insightful comments globally and one of my student's first posts was even featured on Comments4Kids!

My Independent Inquiry project has also flourished as a result of my summer of connected learning, as you can see on our class wiki.

The research behind Connected Learning coming from the DML Research Hub (including Mimi Ito, whom COETAILers would certainly recognize) and all of its associated projects and communities are an indispensable resource for any connected educator. Enjoy!

What are your treasures?

Peace Cranes

Being a connected educator is not easy. Often, a single tweet or blog post will disrupt my plans for the day, bring my train of thought screeching to a halt, or overturn part of my philosophy of learning and teaching.

And I've enjoyed every minute of it! One of the best tweets I've received was from Melvina Kurashige, in Hawaii, inviting my class to exchange origami peace cranes as part of the Peace Crane Project. Who wouldn't want to do that?!

It was a simple and meaningful activity which involved writing messages of peace on paper, folding them into origami cranes, and sending them off. Just before sending ours, we received a package from Hawaii containing the beautiful cranes and postcard in the photo.

To bring our classes closer together, we held a brief Skype session in which the students asked each other questions about their schools, where they live, and their interests.

The activity connected perfectly with Shibuya Peace Day, one of our schoolwide events. I could imagine a class participating while reading Sadako and the Thousand Paper Cranes for a strong literature connection or as part of an arts & crafts unit on origami.

This fun global collaboration was most meaningful due to having a simple and worthy goal: to promote peace.

Global Collaboration: To the point

Having been a virtual participant in the Flat Classroom Japan Conference last March, and having connected students from grade two to six over the last several years from Los Angeles, Kenya, Lesotho, Japan, Australia, Hong Kong, and India, I am certain that global collaboration contributes to authenticity of learning, engagement in school, and the development of empathy.

Geeking Out with Google Apps

I love teaching and learning at a PYP school. Inquiry-based, conceptually-driven learning matches impeccably well with my constructionist philosophy and pedagogy. The chaos is inspiring and the triumphs and failures are motivating. The most relevant learning occurs when we provide the time, tools, and independence for each learner to build their understandings in their own ways, whether with their hands, computers, pencils, blocks, paint, sounds, etc.

My shift toward increasingly individualized education has been supported by technology. I would like to share a few of the tools I've developed with Google Apps which are intended to place the learner at the center of learning documentation and provide a transparent medium for reporting to parents.

Silent Discussion

Classroom discussion is a valuable opportunity to share ideas and develop communication skills, but often, the full benefits are enjoyed by the most extroverted and precocious students in the class. While I do believe that everyone should develop skills in all areas, especially those that are not as strong, I also believe that teachers, or better yet, metateachers, should design learning activities that provide equitable opportunities for learners with different strengths. The 'Silent Discussion' is just such an activity.

Simply explained, it's a way for a group to hold a discussion without speaking. I tried it recently and the results were fantastic, so I thought I'd share.

In our current unit of inquiry into Rights & Responsibilities, there are three lines of inquiry we have been following:

How rights are viewed globally
How rights are granted
Actions required to protect rights

Everyone knew that the lines of inquiry would guide our learning for the next few weeks, and the unit had been provoked by a guided inquiry into the Bayaka people of Central Africa. The Silent Discussion was intended to develop our understanding of the concept of Rights and focus our attention in a socially creative manner.

Organizing the Silent Discussion
1 Print the lines of inquiry, one each, on large paper (we used A3).
2 Place the papers at different corners of the room, or around a central table (consider elbow room).
3 Everyone browses silently with their favorite writing implement, writing comments and questions about the lines of inquiry.
4 Read others' comments and questions, reply, continue.


The activity started slowly, and grew in energy during a fifteen minute session. I injected some provocations and modeled different ways to engage with the activity (drawing pictures, circling and connecting different comments/questions). Finally, we posted the sheets and reflected on our thoughts and interactions.

I believe that the activity works best if it begins with abstract concepts or statements, rather than topics. It was also helpful to play thoughtful music (I generally stream KUSC).

It occurred to me that a techologized version of the Silent Discussion could be possible, but I rather like the museum-like energy generated by thoughtful browsing and the visceral nature of physically constructing our collective understandings on paper.

Another detail that would have extended the activity would be to post provocative images around the room, and perhaps provide videos or news articles to further contextualize the lines of inquiry.

Have you learned or taught through an activity like the Silent Discussion?

Don't be a node. Be a nexus.

Encountering the word 'node' in publications and discussions about networks and connected learning left me with an uneasy feeling. It sounds much too much like a pejorative nickname than how I would like to define myself. It's mentioned in George Seimens' Connectivism: A Learning Theory for the Digital Age and Jeff Utecht's Reach and it just bothers me.

When I visualize a 'node', it's like a lump with wires sticking out of it. I understand the implication that we're each a dot on a matrix of lines of digital communication, but connected learning means more than that to me.

image cc European Southern Observatory

My String Quartet

I've been meaning to write a string quartet for almost fifteen years. My multitude of notebooks contain dozens of beginnings, always unsatisfactory and abandoned. Even more fester in musical purgatory in long forgotten folders on dusty old hard drives.

Why?

There is an ethos surrounding the string quartet. Nearly every composer of Western Classical music has written them, and often they were the medium for innovation and experimentation. Even Ravel and Debussy, not fans of tradition, wrote one each, almost as if to prove that they could do it. I count those and the string quartets of Bartok, Ginastera, and Berg as some of my most revered artistic creations, and I can literally listen to Haydn, Mozart, Mendelssohn, and Schubert string quartets all day long.

Kneisel Quartet c1890 (photo public domain)

What was missing from my youth.

Learning to use digital media and observing how today's youth are steeped in a culture of connection is making me feel extremely jealous! It's not that I'm not excited to connect myself, but reflecting on my own formative years compared to the opportunities literally sitting in teens' laps now has got me feeling a bit nostalgic.

Angst aside, I thought it would be interesting to reflect on my earlier years by framing my teenage activities according to the research findings in Living with New Media. What were my friendship-driven practices? Which were interest-driven? What did I do while hanging out? Messing around? Geeking out?

Musical Keyboard Inquiry

In addition to being a PYP Grade 6 teacher, I also teach music to Grades 4-6, in addition to my own homeroom. Last year, I taught music to Grades 1-6, but as the school is grows, the schedule gets a bit tighter.

The fourth graders are just beginning their musical keyboard study, so I thought we could set the stage with a listening-based inquiry.

In the activity, we listened to recordings of various keyboard instruments from hurdy-gurdy to minimoog for which I had gathered YouTube links. After each listen, students responded to the question:

How do you think it produces sound?

photo cc Finchcocks Musical Museum

Back-to-School Marshmallow Spaghetti Tower Challenge!

I was first introduced to this activity during the MIT Media Lab Learning Creative Learning course. There are a few variations, such as limiting the amount of resources or including tape, but for my students' first day of sixth grade, I let chaos reign.

I gave each group a package of dry spaghetti, three small bags of marshmallows, and the simplest rules I could think of:

1 Build the tallest structure you can.

2 You may only use the materials I gave you.

3 We'll measure after 60 minutes.

Five innovations for the first day of school

Although I was at school last week, tomorrow is the first day for students and I'm very excited. I've changed a few of my approaches to teaching and can't to get started. I think other teachers may be interested, so I'll outline a few of this year's innovations:

1 Organizing resources with Evernote. As I've been reporting in my 'Inquiry with Evernote' posts at Inquire Within, I have a few hundred photos, articles, videos, websites, etc tagged according to theme, concepts, and disciplines. The result is a cache of resources that can be called upon in various ways and is meant to provide provocation and support for inquiry-based learning and teaching.

2 Using the class blog as a learning hub. This year, our blog will be central to learning, connecting, and collaborating. With that in mind, I've already prepared posts in draft form ready to be published when the time comes. For example, in our first unit, we'll view two videos and read a magazine article. We'll discuss them in class, but respond on the class blog. I've embedded the videos and link to the article in posts so that they can be reviewed before students respond by writing comments.

We'll be inviting other classes inquiring into similar themes or topics to respond, as well, by searching their blogs for related posts on which to comment and using twitter to raise awareness.