One theme that continues to resurface at this conference is the importance of leadership vision in the learning organization. My question is how do you go about articulating this vision so others get on board? What about succession planning so the vision doesn’t die when the leader moves on? Ideas . . .?
Wed. July 18, 2007
Prairie South School Division’s Technology Learning Consultant Dean Shareski presented at the BLC07 conference in Boston. Dean’s Session was called “Beyond the Wow Factor with Google Earth” and focused on using the amazing mapping software applications that are available for free on the web.
It was comical when Dean introduced himself as being from Moose Jaw, Saskatchewan and asked if anyone knew where Moose Jaw is located . . . and then proceeded to show us where he lives on Google Earth – not just location of Moose Jaw, but also his house and the location of his office at Lindale School!
Click here for Dean’s wiki about the session.
BLC07 – Building Learning Communities
Presented by November Learning
I arrived in Boston on Saturday night. Spent some time in old downtown Boston on Sunday afternoon – Boston is huge. Walked around and soaked in some history and was able to enjoy a refreshment at the bar that inspired Cheers!
Pre-Conference Sessions:
THE MET
On Monday I traveled to Providence, to spend the day at the MET School. This was a very interesting day. The MET, part of the Big Picture schools system, utilizes a project based learning approach for each of its students. My first impression was that the campus was very impressive – 4 separate schools that share a media lab, library, fitness and health centre. However, like all schools, it is not the bricks and mortar that make the school. The program relies heavily on the interpersonal relationships developed within the small advisory groups. An advisory is comprised of one teacher and 15 to 18 students. The advisor meets with the students at the start of each day and is responsible for overseeing and facilitating the students’ learning plans. The students stay with the same advisor for each of their four years of high school. As the students progress, they learn how to seek out an internship mentor and eventually end up spending Tuesdays and Thursdays away from the school at their LTI – Learning Through Internship. The resulting authentic learning is relevant and engaging and often makes a real world impact. The focus is not necessarily on the learning about the career associated with the internship, but rather the learning that occurs through the internship. This appeared to be an excellent sort of alternative high school arrangement – particularly for disinterested learners. One example of a project that a student was involved in was the Big Picture Soda Company. This company now produces and markets their soda in New England. Two things concerned me – one was the low student teacher ratio – 15:1 is pretty rich and the mathematics achievement/exposure via this mode appeared to be weak. All in all though, an intriguing school!
A Web of Connections: Using Blogs, Wikis, RSS and Other Cool Tools to Connect and Learn
The Tuesday morning session was presented by Will Richardson. Will is a forward thinking educator who is now making a full time job out of helping others make sense of the social networking technologies of Web 2.0. The session basically focused on the importance of using RSS feeds to subscribe to and stay up to date with web content, organizing bookmarks through Delicious and starting a blog and developing a social computing network.
Will’s session demonstrated how educators need understanding and vision about what the future looks like for our students and what our education system needs to do to prepare the kids for that.
A few of the gems I took away:
The power of technology used to be that it allow us to produce reams of information, now it allow us to easily connect and collaborate with people from all over the world.
Karl Fisch’s slide show – Did You Know? has been downloaded over 7 million times!
Social computer networking is changing the face of many different areas. Examples include:
Politics – Obama’s blog has generated millions of dollars $5 at a time! There will be a CNN You Tube Presidential Candidate Debate. Each of the candidates has a My Space site.
Music – some artists are giving away their music, rather than producing cd’s. They then analyze where the fans who have downloaded their music are located and then go there to play a concert.
Rather than prohibit technology, we as educators, need to leverage it in our work with kids. We need to teach the students how to use things like my space – both safely and responsibly.
Students need to be taught to read and write in hypertext environments.
Teachers/educators need to use the Web 2.0 for themselves first – to understand the power of these tools as learning opportunities – once they have a personal understanding of the social networking tools, they can then utilize it in their practice.
Fanfiction.net is a site where people can write the next chapter of the book or a sequel to a book. Majority of contributors are adolescents who are doing this on their own, away from school!
Overall, this was an inspiring session. I was left feeling both motivated and overwhelmed by the work that needs to be done if we are truly going to prepare our students for their futures.
