Yesterday, I wrote a post about thinking about the right tool for the job. I wrote it because after working with teachers on a variety of tools like wikis, blogs, document sharing, etc., I am often asked “How do I know which one to use?”

The real answer is not a formulaic pros-and-cons chart, but a deeper understanding of the tools and what they do. Think about other tools we use. When you’re getting ready to write something, you inherently know whether the best tool is a pencil, a cheap stick pen, a fancy fountain pen, or a word processor. Why? Because you’ve used these tools all your life, and you really understand at a deep level which is best for what kind of job.

The conclusion I keep coming to is that we have to use these tools ourselves, both for professional and personal use, to gain a deep appreciation for how they can best be used.

In having these conversations with folks, I often conclude by saying that if we could get kids to grok the tools to the point that they could choose the best tool for the job, then we’d really be doing our job as educators.

I feel this way not only about tech tools, but about other tools as well. I do a lot of work with writing and different tools for prewriting and writing based of the form, genre, and audience of the piece of writing. Often, though, kids are unable to decide for themselves what tool (or approach) will work best for the task at hand. They rely instead on the teacher telling them what tool to use (or what genre or tone to adopt) or failing that, they use whatever tool or format was last assigned in class.

So I’m thinking about all this in the context of teaching real 21st Century skills and then I read Vicki Davis’s post on Google docs this morning. In it, she says:

“When do my students and I wiki and when do we Google Doc?
When we want to collaborate and edit, we use the wiki. But, when we’re under a tight deadline and need to “crank out a document” or “hash things out quickly” we move over to Google Docs. It just makes sense.

But then again, when we do projects, I don’t really TELL students which tool to use. If it is a project, they are to pull from all of their previous tools or find new ones. We focus on getting the project done, not on the tool used.”

That gets right to the heart of it. This line of thinking also implies some potentially uncomfortable things to consider:

• Everyone doesn’t have to use the same tool for the same task. (differentiation; choice)
• The teacher doesn’t have to have mastered (or even be knowledgeable) about all the tools students choose to use.
• We probably need to rethink how and what we are teaching. Knowing how to evaluate and choose the best tool for a job, being able to learn new tools as they go (without pedantic step-by-step instruction), and learning how to learn independently are skills that will bring students future success.

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.

Wow — I had a great time at the Mid-Atlantic Handheld and Emerging Technology Conference again this year. It had all the elements of a great conference: small, high energy, interesting people, very hands on and interactive, and an intriguing mix of pedagogy and technology.

Thanks to everyone who helped put this together and who attended. Stay tuned for upcoming posts on some things that got me thinking there.

If you didn’t get a chance to attend, check out the wiki. All the session and workshop materials are here.

And for those who did attend, I posted some follow-up things from my sessions that answer some questions raised or otherwise might be of interest. (This on-going communication is one of the things I love about PD wikis.)

We had a great time at the Web 2.0 All-You-Can-Eat Buffet workshop in San Antonio.

All of the resources we shared are available for anyone to access, share, and use in any setting in the Web 2.0 All-You-Can-Eat Buffet wiki.

Here is the “roadmap” and some quick start guides for the workshop.

Enjoy!

Over the past year, I have been working on strategies for differentiating PD. I am more convinced than ever that a great way to provide meaningful, hands-on, inquiry-driven PD is with a wiki and a “road map” that lets people work at their own level. I am trying to do less and less presentation at my workshops. I sometimes get a few comments from people who prefer a slower, step-by-step walk-through of each thing we’re doing, but most people like what I think is a more authentic and meaningful approach to PD. Here are some comments people have made about this:

“I liked being able to work at my own pace. ”

“[The wiki] was great! Everything you need to know or to have for review will be available in one easy location anytime I want it!”

“Great hands on approach. I learn best when I can do it myself.”

“These kinds of topics need time for exploration and right-at-the-time questions.”

“I liked the break up of overview and hands on. This allowed participants to play and ask questions when needed.”

“Great balance and I did not feel guilty when I was working on the laptop.” [Presenter's notes: I didn't see anyone doing email or other "off-task" things during the copious hands-on time. This made me feel good!]

Here is an awesome new wiki WebTools4u2use about Web 2.0 tools produced by my good friend Donna Baumbach.

Also, in preparing for my own upcoming workshops Web 2.0 All You Can Eat Buffet, I’ve had a lot of fun playing with many new Web 2.0 tools. Here’s a sample project I created with VoiceThread. Please join in and add your comments (text, voice, video) about events in our nation’s recent history.

I’ve been looking at different wiki software lately, looking for ones that are free, hosted, and allows for simultaneous editing. (I love MediaWiki for my own use, but we host it here. I like WikiSpaces as a remote-hosted site, but it has some issues with simultaneous editing.)

In doing this, I found this cool site: WikiMatrix. It compares a large number of wikis and filters the list according to your criteria. Very useful.

A lot of schools seem to be migrating to Microsoft’s SharePoint software for web authoring.

While I don’t have firsthand experience with SharePoint, from what I hear, it is not easy to learn and, obviously, you have to pay for it. With all the new robust and free open source solutions like MediaWikia, Drupal, etc. out there, I’ve wondered why one would use SharePoint.

Then I read this humorous article about “Micropedia,” Microsoft’s installation of the open source MediaWiki software. Apparently, SharePoint lacks revision control, or as Microsoft researcher Steve Ickman says, “Once it’s gone, it’s gone.”

At a presentation I did last week, Wes Fryer was in the audience and asked me how we deal with spam in our wikis. (I hoped that he asked because he had a brilliant answer himself, but alas not.) For wikis, we try to monitor recent changes and revert spam out as quickly as possible. It’s not an ideal solution.

For my blogs, I find that the spam-catching feature on WordPress is very good. (As it tells me every time I log in, it has caught many thousands of spams for me.) Occasionally, it flags one of my own comments as spam (usually one where I’ve posted a whole slew of links), but that’s ok. After I go crazy trying to figure out where my post is, I fix it in a matter of seconds.

Today, I went to a web form that didn’t accept anything with any web links (to weed out potential spam). Wow! I had to edit my whole message. It’s hard for me to converse about anything without any links.

Anyone out there have any other ideas for catching spam on wikis and blogs?

Image credit: David Hegarty; used under a Creative Commons NC license.

Sidenote: Did you know they make sushi out of Spam? This is the kind of thing you could only know because of incredible world of user-generated content.

Here is another free, open, wiki-based, online professional development course: Mobile Multimedia: Podcasts, Mini-Movies, and More on Handhelds.

This one covers finding, using, and creating multimedia resources for differentiating instruction with students.

In case you missed it, another earlier free, open, wiki-based, online professional development course I published earlier was Hands On: Using Mobile Technology to Differentiate Instruction. There is some overlap between these courses, but also some very different content.

Stay tuned for more of these. I am becoming a believer that wikis like these are a great professional development tool, because they extend learning beyond a f2f workshop. And because these are free and open resources, you may use them for whatever purposes you’d like, including using them for workshops at your own schools and districts. Please also add to them. (If you’re about this, make your additions in the Discussion tab.) I hope they are useful.

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Yesterday, David Warlick, in writing about Wikia, mused “what if we had a curriculum that was open and inviting to being gamed by the learners — in a good way?”

I’ve spent most of the last couple months neck-deep in state standards, textbooks, and other curriculum materials, trying to develop some more comprehensible and engaging ways to teach things. A few thoughts and experiences I’ve had while doing this:

- If a kid was tasked with creating with a concise, understandable, and engaging way of presenting a math concept as a 2-3 minute video (as I’ve been doing), he or she would sure understand the concept.

- If a kid researched the history of India and found three “reliable” sources (none of which were Wikipedia, though I’d add that as a fourth resource) that each had a very different take on the “facts” with no consensus on “key dates” like when India became a British colony, some real understandings would emerge. (Some of these might include that all sources are somewhat subjective; that there often isn’t clear consensus on what is a “fact;” that events happen on a continuum, not on a specific day; and that understandings of underlying motivations and themes are more important than names, dates, and places.)

- If a kid had to develop an assessment that tied to key state standards, they might well wonder how these standards were developed and have some interesting reflections on curriculum, standards, and assessment. (Or maybe that’s just me talking.:)

All of this fuels my interest in the open education movement and the idea that open tools like wikis are a very interesting alternative to textbooks. My interest in this area is grounded in a belief that most textbooks and other curriculum materials are ineffective educational tools.

One real problem with the idea of having kids actively creating their own curriculum and learning is time. I concede that there really aren’t enough minutes in the school schedule (or even hours in the whole day) to explore the content required in that kind of detail. Of course if teachers didn’t have to reteach skills and content every year because it wasn’t mastered in previous years, that would help. But there still isn’t enough time for everything.

Following that line of thought leads to looking at curriculum frameworks. There is simply too much included in most sets of standards to be reasonable. That leads to a curriculum that becomes a whirlwind of trying to get kids to memorize a rush of facts that will get them through the state tests. The result is kids who don’t know the basics and, even worse, who have poor basic literacy skills and a real lack of critical thinking and analysis abilities.

We need to examine critically state standards.

Having sat on various discussions with state DOEs and textbook committees, I know the problem. We all want kids to learn what is important. And we all have different ideas of what is important. Get a committee of 20 or more people together to discuss and negotiate this, and before you know it, you have a set of grade level expectations that is 100 pages long and a textbook that weighs so much that it is a health concern (for chiropractic reasons….not considering the learning implications . [Sidenote: The textbook industry has come up with the clever solution of having schools buy two textbooks for each child so that one can be left at home. They seem to have sidestepped the learning implications at stake.]

How much of this is really critical information? Will it help kids get a job or compete effectively in the 21st century world?

These are tough questions. It’s much easier to include everything in the curriculum than to make hard decisions about what to drop. It’s more politically expedient to declare that no child will be left behind than to look at why our education system is not preparing students for the modern world. It’s more convenient to blame things that are out of our control like kids’ home lives or text messaging than to think that the problem is at the very core of how we’ve been defining successful learning.

While I’ve heard a lot of luminaries point to a lot of problems with education, I haven’t heard many people point to frameworks and standards as a source of the problems. What do you think? Do state (national, district) standards need to be reformed?

This problem is so steeped in politics that it is difficult to know where to begin working on it. But like others, I want to try.