 | NCCE 2000 Reflections April 19-21 Portland, Oregon |
One of the important "lessons learned" I've discovered from previous conferences is the importance of recording impressions and reviewing information acquired. What follows are reflections and elaborations on what I experienced or have synthesized so far. I reserve the right to change my opinion as folks point out the error of my ways and I encourage people to challenge my interpretations.
In general, this year's conference was about doing educational "stuff" online. Access to resources over the Internet is being pushed hard and the jury is still out on the current implementation. Everybody considers access to be vital but the hows and caveats seem to abound. The biggest concern isn't so much about access to inappropriate material but access to relevant and essential information in forms appropriate to the task at hand.
Videoconferencing, video production, collaborative online discussions, state standards, and integrating technology into the classroom were common topics for many of this year's conference sessions. The number of sessions with web sites ending in "wednet.edu" far outnumbered the sessions with ".k12.or.us" which probably shouldn't have surprised me but it did never-the-less.
Finally, the underlying theme for this year's conference was a cry, no, a plea for purposeful and thoughtful implementation and integration of technology into classrooms where students use technology as a value-added element of their learning rather than as a skill unto itself. We may over time discover the use of technology replaces ways we teach today and taught yesterday, but I'm certain we will find twenty years from now technology will never replace hugs and smiles. I was genuinely touched by the passion both keynote speakers shared in their speeches. Every now and again it is important to me to remind myself I don't work with computers; I work with and support people who use computers.
At the risk of sounding like a travel log, I do feel it is important to note that I drove up to Portland to the conference with Peter Casey (COCC), Jan Spitz, Linda Bilyeu, and Debbie McPherson (Elk Meadow). We also saw Dr. Bruner, Romona Greeno (Cascade) and Barbara Klett (COCC) as well as a huge contingent from Redmond.
- 8:15am: Online Discussion: Does it Enhance Thinking?
- 9:30am: Keynote Speaker: Brenda Laurel
- 12:30pm: Web-Based Student Portfolios
- 2:00pm: QuickTime Streaming in 5 Easy Steps
- 3:30pm: Using Your District Web and Intranet
Thursday Evening:
7:00pm: OMSI
Friday:
- 8:00am: Internet Filtering: The Pros and the Cons
- 9:00am: Exhibits
- 10:30am: Getting to Navigator: A Compentency-Based Staff Development Plan
- 12:00pm: Improving and Managing Your Web Site
- 1:30pm: Beyond Technology: Questioning Research and the Information Literate School
- 3:00pm: Keynote Speaker: Debbie Silver
Thursday, 8:15am: Online Discussion: Does it Enhance Thinking?
Billed as an "analysis of material produced during several years of online discussion usage in a teacher education program" I was slightly disappointed with this presentation. The speakers, John Klapp and Randall Michaelis, were excellent and clearly have a vision about the potential positive impact online discussions could have for students; however, their "student writings" did not significantly demonstrate growth or improvement over more traditional classroom exercises. However, all of the writing we viewed were written at the college level and, as one gentleman pointed out, what we were reading was for the most part "oral" language captured and not so much "written" language.
The speakers shared with us the notion of how "freeing" online discussions could be for students, and staff, if used appropriately. I was amazed by some of the comments from folks in the audience concerning grading and participation requirements. Applying traditional assessment techniques such as in-the-seat credit is particularly lame in online discussions. The ability to assess the quality and growth in student's writing is essential to providing appropriate learning environments for students. Anecdotal evidence appears, in the opinion of the presenters, to support the notion over-all conceptual understanding of the topic or sharing of different viewpoints was improved for some students.
Interesting to note, they did apply some of the writing analysis models to the student's online writing samples (Flesch etc.) and found slightly decreased performance for those students who just "chunked" their responses pretty much live as opposed to those who copy and pasted text from a word processor. Duh!
I was surprised to see they use WebCrossings which is a piece of software I demoed this year with Mark Brown's class down in La Pine MS.
They mentioned Richard Paul's "Critical Thinking" as an important tool.
Resources:
http://www.whitworth.edu/
http://www.ubc.edu/
tophttp://www.whitworth.edu/
http://www.ubc.edu/
This might be a slight misquote, but I think Peter's initial response to Ms. Laurel was, "what a charming speaker." Quiet, unimposing, her message clearly fell on many deaf ears as people streamed out of the auditorium to move onto their next session at the first opportunity.
Ms. Laurel's message seems to be rolled up into one phrase: "Are our stories up to the challenge of helping kids determine what is true and good?" Her points on popular identity and popular culture rang true for me. Professional athletes who have no qualm whatsoever in biting the head off of an official or a fellow team member on public television, music lyrics without any sense of hope or community awareness, and the entire spectrum of human experiences exposed for children of every age over the Internet without any structure or framework to guide the experience are all examples she shared as being indicators we have some work to do on values.
Ms. Laurel shared with us how she "tongue in cheek" had her children watch "Road Warriors" after the Y2K deadline came and went. She called the Y2K experience a "successful prevention" to which she referred to several times more in discussing technology and the importance of ethical literacy. Her plea seemed to be we need to be careful in not allowing the pendulum to swing too much more to the side of the "dot.com" mentality ("get there first, build it, and then cash out). Her concern over producing money and not value was evident. The quiet message of "happiness is virtue" is lost on most folks under the age of thirty; most kids today only hear a "story of selfishness." She mentioned "Playing the Future" by Rushkoff (sp?) as a good read.
Ms. Laurel spent a fair amount of time discussing importance of developing "interactive simulations of complex systems" in helping all of us, not just children, develop "webs of causality." She remarked on a biologist, the late Terence McKenna (sp?), who spoke of virtual systems as "texturaling the world and exteriorizing your soul." The notion of "distributed information" was also important to her. She mentioned the SETI experiments as being a wonderful example of distributed computing in which everyone becomes a stakeholder in the process.
Wrapping things up she pleaded for saving or, in some cases reinstating, History, Literature, and Fine Arts in secondary curriculum. Her concern was without these in place, the link to human values would be lost. She also stated a case for community service. "Work is something that happens in the context of our world." Finally, and this probably was the straw that broke the camel's back, she seemed to be stating a case for "schools unplugged"! Go outside and smell the roses.
topMr. Duane Duxbury has worked hard and frankly, it shows. Mr. Duxbury developed a "CIMTrack" type of environment where teachers, students, and parents can experience student's works online and see how these efforts relate to state requirements. Student's also have the opportunity to evaluate other's works and reflect online about their own. Super, super, job!
Resources:
www.sbicd.everett.webnet.edu
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Wonderful technical session (the young person, Thuan Nguyen, who presented the session did a fantastic job!) in which I learned a great deal about how much I truly don't understand. Thank God we have Jeremy Kline in our school district.
Resources:
Terran Interactive Inc. http://www.terran.com/QuickTime/Article/index.html
QuickTime Pro 4 for Macintosh and Windows: Visual QuickStart GuideJudith Stern, Robert Lettieri, Peachpit Press, $17.99
Terran Interactive Inc. http://www.terran.com/QuickTime/Article/index.html
QuickTime Pro 4 for Macintosh and Windows: Visual QuickStart GuideJudith Stern, Robert Lettieri, Peachpit Press, $17.99
http://www.apple.com/quicktime/authoring/
http://www.terran.com/CodecCentral/index.html
tophttp://www.terran.com/CodecCentral/index.html
This session confirmed for me that we have a long ways to go in utilizing our resources to their fullest potential. During the session the speaker showed us his district's web site and many of the functionalities they provide. Admittedly, this particular school district, from the technological perspective, is more of a benign dictatorship than anything else. Some might put forward a similar case for our district but this one has us beat hands down when it comes to who really owns the network!
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What can I say about OMSI? It's cool, fun, and Jan's boat was way faster than mine!
Oh, I did see a really neat way to distribute URLs on bulletin boards. You know those want ads folks create with the phone numbers you just tear off below the body of the text of the message? Instead of the phone number, you put the URL!!!
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Blah, every conference has a session like this it seems. The speaker was useless; however, put a room full of motivated people together and something good is bound to come of it. A brief and slightly animated discussion erupted at the very end of the session in which it became apparent, to me, that as flawed as perhaps our district's implementation of an Internet filtering system was, the right thing has been done in spite of ourselves.
Harry Potter, move over bud, you ain't seen nothing yet.
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This year the theme was "online services." Ironically, most are services our filtering system now blocks or are prohibited by our district's Internet policy/procedure. Many of these services are free (or have components that are available for a fee). Most were just neater than sliced bread!
So, having just come from some heated discussion about Internet filtering, I reviewed these online services rather critically. I practically bit off the head off of one vendor when she couldn't answer my questions ( not particularly good behavior on my part considering it was Good Friday). If you thought knowing which adult was allowed to pick up Johnny after school was tough, wading through this Internet access via the web seems to be just as much of a challenge. As far as I can tell, nobody seems to have a lock on "the" right way to do this.
I also observed quite a number of vendors hawking presentation systems. The most impressive device I saw was the interactive whiteboard from SmartBoard. Too cool!!! Additionally, they have a grant one can apply for to reduce the cost in obtaining one of them; however, I think they would sell more of them if they just offered them at an educational discount instead of making folks jump through the grant routine. Grants of 25 to 30% are usually given.
I also observed some cool compute to TV solutions! PowerScan II from PowerR seems like a reasonable option for either PC or Macintosh to connect to a TV ($150). The iTView from Focus seems like a interesting option for iMac users (I think it will work on other Macs as well).
And for the science folks out there, good heavens, there are some really, really cool devices you can attach to your PC or Mac to record data. All you need is a lot of money to buy these things.
Resources:
http://www.MetaCollege.com/
http://www.SharedLearning.net/
http://inetlibrary.com/
http://bigchalk.com/
http://schoolcenter.com/
http://www.nschool.com/
http://www.chancery.com/
http://www.k12planet.com/
http://www.SharedLearning.net/
http://inetlibrary.com/
http://bigchalk.com/
http://schoolcenter.com/
http://www.nschool.com/
http://www.chancery.com/
http://www.k12planet.com/
http://www.lightspan.com/
http://www.powerr.com/
http://www.FOCUSinfo.com/
http://www.powerr.com/
http://www.FOCUSinfo.com/
http://www.vernier.com/
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It is amazing what one can do with $27.5 million dollars. The folks in Lake Washington School District in Washington presented an outline of the staff development plan they developed for technology training for all of the certified AND classified staff in their district. Basically, they've got buy-in from all the unions to require mandatory technology training for everybody.
On one hand I said to myself what stupid waste of resources. I mean, $27.5 million dollars is one huge pot of money to throw at teaching folks how to do e-mail, word process, and create spreadsheets. On the other hand, who wouldn't want to be rewarded for all of the countless hours of training done on his or her own time which has thusly gone unnoticed and/or unrewarded. I guess if we had a "Microsoft" in Bend we'd have a different point of view about technology.
Their program is online for all to see. All of their material is there for review except the testing material which they indicated if you contacted them they would be happy to work something out. Unfortunately, they did not seem to have $27.5 million dollars to share. Bummer. If you are interested in this sort of stuff, I encourage you to beam into their web site listed under the "resource" heading below.
Resources:
http://www.lkwash.wednet.edu/
tophttp://www.lkwash.wednet.edu/
Humbling experience. I just love going to webmaster sessions where I'm told in that ever so subtle tone, "If you do this, your website is substandard!" Ok, ok, so maybe our district web site has room for improvement...
Resource:
http://www.meridian.wednet.edu/mms/
tophttp://www.meridian.wednet.edu/mms/
Jamie McKenzie does a great show! Somewhere between "edutainment" and "technotainment" lies the answer. Teach people to be able to ask good, essential questions with follow-up subsidiary questions, followed up by analysis skills to evaluate the answers and everything will be just fine.
"Do a couple of things well and bridge the gap between kid's lives and content."
Information literacy needs to take a greater role in education. DON'T use the Internet when looking up the information in a book is a simpler and more eloquent solution.
Resources:
http://fno.org/sept98/infoltta.html
http://wwwbir.bham.wednet.edu/
tophttp://fno.org/sept98/infoltta.html
http://wwwbir.bham.wednet.edu/
Last but not least, this year's keynote speaker was fantastic. We laughed; we cried; we were amazed, startled, and befuddled. I can't possibly do justice to her remarks. I truly hope one of my fellow conference participants will be able to share their observations.
Ms. Silver's speech was entitled, "Be a teacher; be a hero." Her story is compelling, to say the very least.
Key phrases I managed to write down:
"Every effort has been made for every participant to have an equal chance to succeed."
"All people have gifts; they just open them up at different times."
"This teacher says she has thirty years of experience; I say she has one year of experience thirty times."
"You have the opportunity to make difference in every student's life. You can be a hero every day."
topRevised: April 24, 2000
Contact: John Aubry
