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Blended Projecting…. I love that label! Reuven Werber just created it on the fly after we had a very successful audio conference (with a webcam too – though using two different apps) to plan our next collaborative literature project between our two schools – LCC, here in Montreal, and Neveh Channah in Etzion Bloc, Israel.

Reuven has passed along some websites about blended learning to me recently. Here is a wiki dedicated to blended learning, which also points to the wikipedia article on the same. Also, Reuven passed along this article by Diane Oblinger from Educause about the future of e-learning and our need for a better definition of the concept. There are many different flavours of e-learning these days and we must be careful to choose the best approach for our learners as we go along.

We had a terrific meeting and I met both Phylis, English dept. head at N.C. and Leora, the teacher I will be collaborating with. It was great to see Reuven too. For this year’s lit project, we have decided to do short stories. The teachers have selected 3 Israel short stories, which will be translated into English – so two different subject areas will be involved as they hope they can get the Hebrew teacher to teach the stories in that course as well. I will choose a similar amount of Canadian short stories for my students. We created a timeline for the project during the meeting. Then we took a look at the moodle learning management system that I had created and played around in it to explore its features. We decided we would use it as the place the students will communicate with each other, but will take it for a test drive for the rest of the summer to make sure it is stable. It has a nifty instant messaging feature (a true plus!) plus the ability to create quizzes and even wikis.

I am quite excited about our project this year!

The Laptop Institute 2005

The final session has ended and now is the time to make some general comments about the overall experience.

I am still in awe of a conference that is able to charge a mere $250 (USD) for an intensive, full 3-day conference that includes 3 dinners, 3 breakfasts and 3 lunches of some pretty decent food (shrimp for lunch today), AS WELL as provide 11 sessions of material and 3 opening addresses by 3 different keynote speakers. Apparently, they had about $30,000 of sponsor money to work with!

Of all the sessions I attended, I was only disappointed a couple of times and it was probably my own fault for not choosing a session that better fit my own interests.

One weakness that I found – and it’s more my Canadian sensitivity – was that this was a very American conference. If Lausanne wants to be more globally inclusive, they will have to take the time to explain some of the acronyms and vocabulary that come with their presentations.

The Lausanne campus was very impressive and the staff were very friendly and well-organized.

The content of the conference was a good mix of practical and pedagogical philosophy. For those seminars that provided mostly resources or practical classroom practices, I would have liked to see more research or pedagogical principles that undergird their practices or resource choices.

I was particularly interested to see many of the schools already using a blended approach to instruction. As one who has searched and searched for research of high schools who have used this approach, I would like those schools using it to consider documenting it and providing some research about this model and their experiences. Given what has been stated about the ubiquitous use of computers in teaching and learning at the conference, I suspect that blended instruction is going to become even more common and viewed as the best model for learning for many subject areas in the near future.

I already have some ideas for presentations for next year that might include presenting some thoughts on the new learning theory of connectivism, my own experiences with online learning in a blended environment, or the collaborative literature projects with which I have been involved in the last two or three years.

Yes, I definitely want to go back next year!

The Laptop Institute 2005

Review of the 4 steps to laptop Program

Creating the need for laptops:

like us, their program started with mentors – or that was the intention

Price Pritchit – New Rules…. – he suggests we google the name

If you don’t believe we don’t have a need to change…. then probably shouldn’t be doing laptop

Challenge Mental Models

presently we all have the same model of how schools should operate

until we change the mental models of how schools should operate

Paradigm=problem-solving approach

Joel Barker’s The Life of a Paradigm

over time the paradigm quits solving many of the problems or the new problems

leadership failure because leaders treat adaptive change as technical problems

Technical solutions = we call these “best practice”

or work avoidance

-denial of problem
-diversion – this isn’t our problem
-laying blame or displacement
-neutralizing the intervener (mediator)
-holding onto the past
-phony solutions – program of the day – form a committee – define problem very narrowly
-sterile conflict – no listening – curiosity or creative engagement

adaptive challenge = solutions we don’t yet

we have new adaptive challenges and trying to solve them using tech solutions – this can lead to burnout

We have a new problem – we need new solutions

Heifiz – look up books

Provide the Tools and Training

-the easy part

-problem is what we do with the tools

innovate vs. automate

shows video clip of Andy Griffiths

Do business differently

-the quartz crystal – who invented it – Swiss gave the technology away to Japan

If you were going to home-school your own children, how would you do it?

they posed this question to get educators to honestly address the question about what represents good education

generalization = knowing a little bit about a lot of different things

customized learning, individualized

asynchronous
flexible schedules
teaming
site-based, self-directed work teams

Gave the example of the development of the fuel cell – instead of putting the cell into the existing car, they have decided to build a vehicle around the cell

The Innovator’s Dilemma – When new technolgoies cause great firms to fail-

-has education become this way?

shows videoclip – Cat herders – superbowl commercial from EDS

-difficult to control – not about control

right now, school is designed for adults not for kids

Good question about how this is a systemic problem

change can’t just be about what happens in the classroom

Ranting on money problems:

There is always money to find solutions

Good teachers can handle large class sizes – they spend a good deal of time planning, but once class time hits, lets them do the work (PHEW! I’m not the only one!)

“Deconstruct the curriculum” – that’s what he calls this approach where you give the project then stand back and see what standards were met.

Could not have done this without technology

By giving teachers laptops – admin gets free prof dev because the teachers will use their own time to develop their own lesson plans and projects.

Tech solutions are devised by admin

Adaptive challenges are met by those closest to the problem (i.e. students, teachers)

Didn’t ask permission from students, sold the idea to the parents

uses the analogy of the medical profession insisting on immunization years ago

we need to have a sense of urgency about our own epidemic in education

Failure of laptop programs (from my question)

400 laptop users with 200 IPs

top-down administration without buy-in

quick decision that was sprung upon the teachers

As an admin, you can’t mandate laptops, you need to create a need

He highly recommends Learning Station

The Laptop Institute 2005

Spinning the Web – Collaborative Learning with web-based projects

Lessons and Materials

Lesson plans and classroom management are discussed in this seminar.

Webquests used in math! Skills are taught which are later used in projects

Create your own mail order company – a percentage webquest This project used excel skills

Integrated project – math/history/geography

Currency in South America

6th grade graphing project

7th grade graphing project – review

Transformations: a lesson to analyse the effect of transformations (translations, rotations, reflections and dilations) on teh congruence and similarity of plane figures.

Web tools the math teacher created

I liked the math teacher’s calendar that had hyperlinked dates and lessons. Very organized!

Computer skills are taught in computer classes rather than in the context of other classes. This teacher believed that this class was still needed in the middle school.

Skills learned first, then assignment given.

Assignments were integrated with other courses.

Once tech skills more or less mastered, the students still needed help to organize their projects. She started by having them brainstorm with inspiration.

Laptop care and use – also taught in tech class

She thought that this was implicitly boring, but I disagree. This is a very impt subject and I have found that students love to learn about the tools that will help maintain their computer.

In fact, I am wondering if this is one area that the admin at LCC has thought through. It is my intention to show students during my classes how to maintain and care for their computers.

This teacher had her students create a PPt that will show how to care and maintain their laptop. She provides them with links and this permits them to customize their own approach to caring for their laptop. I like this idea! This is a terrific way to get students to internalize their own ways of caring for their machines.

This teacher also teaches her students to become their own troubleshooters.

I also liked her Nutrition project that was integrated with biology and phys. ed.

Data was tracked in excel to examine real life nutrition issues.

This was a very labour-intensive project – should have been broken down into smaller chunks?

Online Portfolios – student example

She stated that portfolios was what really changed the laptop program at her school. They set up benchmarks for each grade level. These clearly defined set of expectations are curriculum-based. These were measured by online portfolios. Projects are posted on their own webpages. By gr. 12 they will have a complete set of work that should represent the benchmarks.

Students themselves provide reflection on the web page of how each project tied in with the stated objectives. Wow!

Their websites are products that have a wider audience than just the classroom. This makes students care about what goes live online.

Having watched elementary schools and university students use electronic portfolios to catalogue their work over a longer period of time, I have been waiting to see how LCC will eventually move to this approach.

History Projects - teacher tries to use the Internet every day in her classroom teacher

Her Resource Page is really loaded and dense with material.

The teachers seem to work together collaboratively to create and carry out these technology-rich assignments.

I like the assignments where students were asked to create interactive maps using excel. Instructions are thoughtfully provided by the tech support.

The history teacher reminded me again of using United Streaming for which LCC has a subscription. I would like to explore NFB as well for their free online documentaries.

This teacher examines how technology has helped out history with its ability to archive materials.

French Revolution Empathy Webquest: cool idea!

Biology teacher:

-use of online textbook which can combine animations with video; online animated quizzes

-Use of Learning objects (she calls them webquests – but this is not a true webquest)

-Biology Project

Plants-in-Motion

She has Gizmos on her webpage as a resource. Looks interesting – but subscription is required.

Again, I think this is probably a bank of learning objects that are designed to engage learners using interactivity.

The Laptop Institute 2005

Stop Teaching Applications: Why do we do this anyway?

Harker School in San Jose – high pressure school

-reframe what it means to “teach computer”
-cause you to reexamine your assumptions

state of discourse – look at wikipedia

is becoming the agora – the marketplace of where the action is happening

Info. Fluency

- from ISTE

-CSTA – Comp.Sci. Teacher’s Assoc.

A model for curric for K-12 Comp. Sci.