(cross-posted form Karen’s Mashups)

Below is one of my favorite mashups of all time — a compilation of different clips from TeacherTube. If you aren’t familiar with TeacherTube, it’s a video sharing service for educators that has all kinds of great content for a variety of subjects and grades and even professional development topics, produced by teachers, students, and professional organizations. I think this is a terrific resource for differentiating instruction (especially with mobile devices).

Full credits and links for this show here.

Please feel free to use this in any way you find useful. I plan to use it at professional development workshops to give folks a quick look at all the great free video resources available to them.

I presented a keynote a couple weeks ago on Open Education. In talking about the reasons for open ed, I make the following points:

• We must differentiate instruction if we are going to engage and reach students who have increasingly diverse backgrounds, skills, and interests.
• Textbooks are not an effective tool for differentiating (or engaging) students.
• Technology can be a better tool, but high quality content is required for effective integration.
• There is a huge industry that has grown up around the development and adoption of textbooks. There is a lot of money invested in this industry, and it is not likely to change, regardless of the benefits to learning.
• Open educational resources (OER) provide a new approach to this challenge.

So after my presentation, a very excited teacher came up to me and said, “I’ve done just what you’ve said! I’ve thrown out our textbooks!” (He told me later that they actually sold their textbooks. Great idea for a fund-raiser!)

He then went out to his car and brought back the materials he’s developed to share with me. He is a history teacher and has developed a very innovative system that he calls the “dynamic classroom.” It involves binders that the kids construct over the course of the year, bringing together predictable learning routines, effective strategies, and hands on activities.

What most struck me in talking to this gentleman was 1.) his passion for his subject matter and for teaching, 2.) how much personal time and effort he’s put into his teaching, and 3.) the results he’s gotten with his students.

Then I started thinking about the potential of this approach. The materials appeared to be perfectly suited to building a wiki. I began imagining each kid with a $300 laptop building interactive web sites instead of binders. The possibilities are rich. Then I started thinking about this project built as an open-licensed curriculum. Everyone could benefit from the work this industrious teacher has done.

I know that there are teachers all over the world doing creative things like this, prompting their students to have rich learning experiences. These teachers know more about their content and engaging kids than most textbook publishers do. I think that most of these teachers are willing to share.

This is the potential of Open Education.
———-
Image courtesy of Alexander Baxevanis.

Over the last year or so, I have been working on methods to differentiate professional development that I facilitate. Some things have worked better than others, and I’m refining my methods.

A lot of the impetus is on the participants, and I encourage them to take control of their own learning. Occasionally, I have a group, though, that just wont. If they don’t understand something, they don’t ask questions or use the various provided resources to help them. Worse yet, sometimes they just sit and do nothing. Others who may already know something I’m covering don’t explore new areas as I encourage them to do; they instead do email or shop online. It’s frustrating.

Over the past week, I have worked with a group that did a uniformly great job of making the most out of the PD time based on their own needs and abilities. People who were at a beginner level asked a lot of questions, used various resources provided, and learned at their own pace. People who were further along and more comfortable with what we were doing worked on advanced topics of interest to them, regardless of where we were as a group. They asked questions as needed, and everyone had a successful workshop.

After the workshop, a couple people who had asked me about something that had sent them on their own leaning course that was different from where we were as a “group” stopped to talk to me. They thanked me for letting them do their own thing and not being insistent that everyone in the group do the same activities. I thanked them for being assertive and independent about their own learning. I shared that sometimes people aren’t willing or able to do that. They went on to say that many of the workshops they go to have facilitators who are very strict about everyone “being on the same screen.” They said they’ve had bad experiences in the past with facilitators constantly looking over their shoulder and being intolerant of them working at their own pace or on their own interests.

That really got me thinking. Maybe the reason that some educators seem to have trouble taking control of their own learning in PD is that they aren’t encouraged to do so. Even worse, they may be discouraged from this.

I know that it is not always comfortable as a PD facilitator to have a roomful of participants all working on different things, at different paces, and with different styles — but that’s what differentiation is all about! If we can’t model and practice this ourselves with adult learners, how can we expect to accomplish it with kids?

The best learning practices are not always neat and orderly. We need to remember this for adults as well as kids.

For those of you in my session “Using Mobile Technology to Differentiate Instruction,” here are the links to the cell phone stuff we did:

Photo blogging from a cell phone

Audio blogging from a cell phone

Polling via text messaging

And here are the results of the survey:

Happy New Year! I haven’t been blogging as much as usual the last month or two because I am up to my ears in a ton of curriculum we’re developing for mobile devices. (THE Journal ran a nice article about using mobile devices for delivering content if you haven’t seen it.) We have been developing everything from mini-movies on subjects like sight words and how to skip count for little kids to interactive ebooks on topics from world history to percents, decimals, and fractions for secondary and adult learners.

This had gotten me thinking a lot about a couple topics:

1. How electronic resources can be more effective than textbooks to engage kids and especially to differentiate instruction

2. How the future of 1-to-1 computing for schools is shaping up

I think that both of these are critical if we’re going to be successful in engaging kids. I’ll write more about the first topic in another post. Regarding the second topic, there are a lot of new devices shipping, including things like the XO computer, the Eee, the Kindle, the iPod Touch, etc.

I think the keys to a solid device for education are:

- Low cost (under $300 seems to be a key price point for schools)
- Long battery life (at least 6 hours)
- Multimedia capability (audio and video)
- Capacity for “real” computing (word processing, spreadsheets, presentation — could be via Web 2.0)

There are other features that I’d rate as nice-to-have but not essential like wireless, color, durability, etc.

None of the devices above quite hits all of my “must-have” features, but they are all pretty close. The second-generation releases are likely to be there. Right now, the Eee is probably the closest, though the Kindle is the one that has my attention (in part because I think it may have the longest staying power, which is really critical to schools.) Interestingly, handhelds from Palm and HP — which have been around for years — already have all these features. Alas, though, they are no longer the latest and greatest. (Don’t get me started venting my frustration on how trend-driven technology is, even in schools.)

Some people have said that these devices are too limited for schools because there isn’t textbook content available for them. The more I think about the idea of textbook publishers putting their content on mobile devices though (something I used to look forward to, though it’s probably still a long ways off), the more I don’t think it’s the road to a better future. It’s easy to list reasons textbooks don’t work for most kids — they are huge; they are boring; there is no differentiation; there is little interactivity; the content isn’t comprehensible; etc. etc.

So why would we want that same content in an electronic format?

For those who requested them, here are the presentation materials from my sessions NCETC. Just for fun, I’ve used a few different slide sharing programs here, so you can compare and contrast; see notes below.

Using Mobile Technology to Differentiate Instruction [Google Docs]
(See also the workshop wiki for this here.*)

Podcasting: What You Need to Get Started [Google Docs]

Using and Creating Mobile Video for the Classroom [SlideShare]

Free Content + Open Tools + Massive Collaboration = Learning for All* [in a wiki; no slide sharing needed ]

* Licensed under Creative Commons. Feel free to use any way you like.
Other materials are under all rights reserved copyright; email me if you’d like to use them in a way other than showing them online as they are here.

At NCETC yesterday, I facilitated the “Using Mobile Technology to Differentiate Instruction” workshop using a wiki. (This wiki is set up to be used to facilitate a F2F workshop, such as we did at NCETC, or to be used as a self-guided learning experience. It is also Creative Commons licensed, so you can use it at your own school or district.)

My goal of the workshop was to present less and have participants do more. Using a wiki and letting participants structure their own time (within some suggested guidelines) was a way to allow everyone to differentiate their learning. This was especially important because participants had a variety of mobile devices (Palm, PPC, iPods, laptops, etc.) and because everyone had different experience levels (as learners always do).

I was interested in the participants’ comments afterwards on how they felt it went. They liked it. One person said that she felt that she was able to really focus on her own learning without having to pay attention to what was being presented.

I too liked the format. I’ve played with using a wiki to guide a workshop a couple times now, and I’ve almost got it down. It’s a little uncomfortable for me as a “teacher” to not be “teaching,” but I’m seeing the benefits. It also helps to have a group that is assertive about their learning needs — which we all should be.

While we all thought this structure worked well, we agreed that a relatively small group was needed to make it successful. I would say a max would be 15 participants. With more than that, the one-on-one support that was needed for individual questions would be too hard. (Unless of course you had 2 facilitators, but I haven’t figured out how to clone myself yet.)

I look forward to providing more workshops in a wiki format and am especially excited about the opportunity for remote participants to be able to access these materials.

ncetc ncetc07

Well, the workshop on “Using Mobile Technology to Differentiate Instruction” that I wrote about earlier is pretty well finished. I’m really happy with the content in it and think this is a great resource for schools using mobile tech and looking for resources.

I’ve structured this in a wiki, and it is intended to be used for either a face-to-face workshop or as an online self-guided learning experience.

This is licensed under a CC BY SA license, so you are free to use it for your own purposes as well.

This is my first attempt at using a wiki to facilitate both a F2F workshop and a self-guided experience. If you go through it, let me know what you think.

In my on-going quest to differentiate instruction for teachers as a part of workshops I do, I’ve been experimenting with using blogs and wikis as PD tools.

The latest installment in this is a hands on workshop on using mobile technology to differentiate instruction (coincidentally) that I am outlining in a wiki. I’m hoping that this wiki will also be able to be used as a self-study tool for those who aren’t at the workshop (or for those who attend and want a refresher or more in-depth learning later on).

Here’s a preview of a section on using ebooks.

We’ll be using this at my “HANDS ON: Using Mobile Technology to Differentiate Instruction” at NCETC on Mon., Nov. 26. If you’ll be there, I’m really looking forward to this. (This is a bring-your-own-laptop-and-mobile-device workshop. Contact me for more info.)

If not, stay tuned for the final version of this. I’ll post a note when it’s done (or as near to done as wikis get .

Last week, I did some hands on workshops in new format — 2 hours! Normally, the shortest hands on session I’ll do is 3 hours, and I prefer 6 hours, especially for beginner podcasting sessions. But I thought I’d give this a try.

Well, I pretty much knew that with only 2 hours, I really couldn’t talk much or give any background — I’d need to do a very quick run-through of the software we’d be using and then turn folks loose to create.

I was pleasantly surprised that this format worked great! Everyone in the session jumped right in and created amazing projects. It was really a great experience.

One thing that made this work is that nearly everyone in the workshops had been in one of my earlier one-hour presentations (not hands on). This provided them the background that they needed, whet their appetites, and left them chomping at the bit to jump in and do it.

Lessons learned:

1. As a facilitator, I don’t need to talk so much.
2. People can jump in and create with minimal instruction and make amazing things in a pretty short timeframe.
3. This is a great format for differentiating instruction in professional development workshops. It lets you work individually with those who want more instruction and lets others get busy on their own.
4. Perhaps an optimal conference format is 45 or 60 min. presentation sessions in the morning, followed up by 2 or 3 hour hands-on sessions in the afternoon.