I have to think these decisions are being made by people who aren’t in charge of instruction and who are mainly motivated by wanting “no problems.” (And as I always say, if you want no problems, just pack the computers away or don’t even by them.) I restate my offer here to talk to leadership teams at these districts about the benefits of these tools and the ways they can be implemented safely. Please let our teaches and students have the tools they need for 21st century learning!

Are whole categories of tools blocked in your district? Do you know who is driving policy on this? Have efforts been made to revisit these policies? What are the barriers?

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Think about your own AUP. How does it address things like student publishing on wikis and blogs? Log-ins? Teacher moderation? Instruction on Internet safety and responsible use?

Many AUPs don’t deal with these issues. (If you have or know one that does, PLEASE post a link here. We are looking for good examples.)

Take a minute to read the draft here and add your comments. It’s a thought-provoking exercise. (Plus it’s a great use of CommentPress!)

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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.

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• 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.

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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.)

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I am very excited to unveil the first piece of this: a collaborative, wiki-based dictionary builder. If you have a second, check out the site and add a quick definition (or click on recent changes to edit one someone else has done). Whatever you do doesn’t have to be perfect. Others can add to it and edit it later.

This project grew out of the need we have seen in classrooms and other informal learning environments for a dictionary that is kid-appropriate (both in terms of language level and content) and open for everyone to use in any context.

Down the road, we’ll be publishing this as a completely open, public domain dictionary that can be used on the web or offline on desktops, laptops, handhelds, ipods, phones, etc. Teachers will also be able to export custom glossary lists to incorporate into their own lessons, ebooks, web sites, etc.

We are excited about this project and hope many of you will join in and contribute. It only takes a couple minutes and is a great way to share and become a part of the Open Educational Resources movement.

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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.

The post Choosing wiki software appeared first on K12 Handhelds.

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.”

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I understand that filtering is mandated by law. At one extreme, most people can probably agree that blocking access to pornographic sites is a good idea. At the other extreme, we can (hopefully) all agree that blocking access to all Internet is a bad idea.

In between there are a lot of gray areas. Here are some questions that I think are worth some thought and discussion:

– Who should make the decisions about what is blocked? The federal government, the state, districts, schools, or individual parents?
– Are there any filtering systems that kids can’t get around?
– Should general tools (blogging sites, wikis, video sharing sites, nings, etc.) be blocked across the board, even though they may host some sites that are potentially objectionable?
– If we start blocking tools like this, doesn’t that logically lead to blocking most or all Internet sites? (How about paper and pencils? These too are tools that can be used to create objectionable content.)
– Can technology be used more intelligently to filter?
– What treasures are we depriving students of by blocking sites that don’t even have objectionable content? (Is this a technological challenge or a human decision?)
– Where are the respective borders of responsibility and censorship?
– What message are we sending students with our filtering policies?

I’m really trying to see both sides of this issue, but I guess my bias is showing. Please comment on this post. I’m especially interesting is heaving from anyone who could explain any possible rationale for blocking things like Blogger statewide. (Of course, if you live in one of those states, I guess you won’t be able to post a comment anyway. Sigh…)

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