MindShare Learning Magazine did a spotlight on me as the recent 1 of 3 national winners of the 21C video contest.

My-Journey-towards-21C

Giving a Talk in the specially created SMART COLLABORATIVE CLASSROOM which is based off of my classroom at RHS. My talk is a combination of two of my videos from Youtube on the COOPERATION vs COLLABORATION. Your choice of technologies, 1:1 or IWB’s, and pedagogies greatly impacts the group dynamics and the learning.

‘Multiple Teaching Approaches, Teaching Sequence And Concept Retention In High School Physics Education’ was just accepted for publication in the Journal of Computers in Mathematics and Science Teaching. Thanks for the collaboration Dave Geelan !! It has been a long time coming. Perserverance pays!

Frank Gallagher (chair) and Helen Soulé (interim executive director) of The Partnership for 21st Century Skills (P21) were interviewed about 21st Century Learning, Common Core and new education.

They commented that the original P21 Framework had too many skills, so they were boiled down to the 4 C’s: Critical Thinking, Communication, Collaboration and Creativity.

My work was specifically referenced by them. Here is the Question and the Reponse.

Many classrooms use shared interactive displays along with personal devices to optimize student collaboration— does P21 have recommendations for best practices around that learning model?

Helen: We have just begun our exemplar school project and we have seen some rooms with SMART Boards and personal devices used together but we still need to develop our case studies and models, so we’ll get back to you on that. I thought the Fogarty study you referred us to was very interesting because it gave an interesting look at a really different pedagogical approach to how something can be taught, which is very instructive to people.

Collaboration is a big word these days in education. It shows up frequently in Tweets, literature, promotional videos, and branding including 21st Century Learning.

I often hear, “when my students can have 1:1 technology or BYOD, then they will be able to collaborate”. Although that might be true sometimes, I think we need to be careful. Like any tool, it is all about how skilled the users (students and teachers) are at using the tool.

It is interesting to see how the choice of tools seems to impact group behaviour. Silly things like the size of the screen and who controls the mouse seems to greatly impact the group dynamics and the learning.

The embeded video shows my experience with 1:1 technology, BYOD, Ipads and SMARTBoards (IWB’s).

I’m invited to speak at the British Educational Tech Tradeshow in London at the end of January. Looking forward to talking about the collaborative classroom of the future in the SMART classroom. Hoping to visit old technology at Stonehenge and see what problems I can bring back to my physics class.

So I took this course from SMART Technologies called Math Tools. When I talked to someone about it they gave me a false answer. They said, oh, you can make graphs easily and that is about it. Boy were they wrong. Yes it is true that it is easy to make graphs from points. I can see it being very useful for younger grades, but not so good for me. If this is it, it is not worth the money.

FORTUNATELY, it was not it! The first thing that got me was that it reviewed some tools that come pre-installed with Notebook. I was able to have students create very nice and accurate diagrams of double slit diffraction. This topic requires precise geometry which had always previously eleuded me. I had to resort to using a digital pic. But there is something special about making it the diagram infront of them. It slows me down and allows students time to process. It allows students a chance to watch it develop. Small but important nuances.

Then the course started talking about how I can put two equations of lines on a graph. It was so perfect for showing collision questions in kinematics for physics. We call them “When Harry Met Sally”.

Then what is magical, is when I finish a long question of math that took most of the period and it ends in a quadratic euqation. The students are frustrated and then being to work out the equation on their paper. It takes them a couple minutes. But magically, I was able to use Math tools to “cheat” and solve it with the SMARTBOArd. A student exclaims, “it IS a SMART Board”!

Very useful course and tool.

This is what school should be like. This is what science should be like. There are so many cool things about this. But you cannot write a concrete outcome, a specific essential learning or create a test before you start for the whole class. Report cards and standardized curriculum get in the way. Congrats to the teacher who was willing to take a chance. Kids are asked to take chances all the time, but we teachers are expected to know all.

There are so many pedagogical good things here that remind me of the GRAND Projects that we used to run at RHS, the brain child of TIm Beatty.

But from a logistics point of view, this is so good because it is simple, the materials are relatively easy, the research is real, the answer is valuable, and there is no right answer. The trick is to find other examples that are not pre-fab, standardized, pre-packaged, out of the box. This is something to aspire to, and the younger the grades..the better. It reminds me of Preston Middle School activities with their animal guzzler.

How Do You Personalize Learning With Multiple Types Of Technology Including The Iwb With Tablets, Etc.?

Even though I have been teaching for many years, and have been part of many PD sessions, I am just starting to wrap my brain around how to personalize my classroom for my students? Now, I am starting to have some lectures to get the ball rolling, some labs for the hands on learner, some video for the lost, late, or absent student, online notes, and online quizzes for the student who wants repetition. My experience is starting to understand some of the neessary steps that requires scaffolding and still other content that are wonderful detours. It takes a while to figure out the difference here.

The essential learning and the wonderful detours require an asynchronous classroom. I am working towards a situation where some students can work on this and other students can work on that. NOTEBOOK files are starting to provide a perfect way for small groups using their own Smartboards or individuals at laptops to walk themselves through a short lesson to scaffold them for the next activity. It allows them to have a follow up formative quiz so that they know if they are ready for the summative assessment, in whatever flavor that might be.