Wishing you and your family a wonderful holiday season!!!
Peace
Matt
January 2010: We started out the year on a sad note as we said good by to our cat, 'Mr. Kitty,' who owned me for the better part of 14 years. He meant a great deal to us and we were sad to see him go. A special thanks to Dr. Marissa Cruz at the Hawley Vet Clinic for her treatment and care near the end of his life.
February 2010: Erin and I visited the beautiful country of Costa Rica and had the adventure of a lifetime! Erin was nearly three months pregnant at this point and it was wonderful to have such a great experience together prior to welcoming our new baby in August.
March 2010: Our good friends also had babies this year...as a matter of fact, Karissa (pictured to the left) had her baby in June, Brynn (middle) in July and Erin in August. It was so much fun to experience the process with them throughout the first six months of 2010. This is a picture of the three of them at Karissa and Greg's place.
April 2010: Erin's mom visited us and we went down to Pacific Grove on the Monterey Peninusula to meet up with her brother and nephew....'twas great fun. We also had great fun visiting with my buddy Dave and his wife Sherrie who were in town for the Big Sur Marathon near the end of April.
May 2010: Bucky took every opportunity he could find to sit on Erin's lap during her pregnancy. Erin was roughly 6 months pregnant at the time of this photo.
June 2010: My family visited the Bay Area...Brother Mike and nephews Tucker and Trey visited us for over a week in June...we had a total blast hitting all of the great sights in the area. We mapped out our experience as well...
July 2010: Visit to Michigan to see the family. We had a fantastic time visiting with friends and family in Michigan. Pictured alongside Erin are nephews Quinn, Jack and Patrick at a shower that our family threw for us in Lundington!
August 2010: Weighing in at a very nimble 6 pounds, 3 ounces, little Morgan Kathleen Montagne was born on August 6 at 1:00 am!! This photo was taken minutes after her birth.
September 2010: Baby Morgan's birth announcement photo:
October 2010: Morgan's Aunt Mickey visited us for 5 days!
November 2010: Nana visits Baby Morgan...my mom visited us in the Bay Area for Thanksgiving week. It was so fun having her see Baby Morgan for the first time in person!
December 2010: Baby Morgan in the Christmas tree hat that her Nana made for her...this also happens to be the photo used in our Christmas card this year.
Teachers have always been a resourceful lot. Whether it is the student who shows up to class without their book, limited class access to resources, or only one Internet connected computer in the classroom, we just find a way to make it work. This has always been the case and its no different with digital learning tools. Have the need for photos? Have the students who own a cell phone with a camera take the photos. Need a quick website for a project your class is working on? Create a wiki in wikispaces or a blog in posterous.
Yesterday in our French IV class we had the unanticipated need for a small team of students to do a quick recording and post it online for use within a google site that they were working on. The solution? One of the students had an iPhone so I asked her to install iPadio, do their recording, and then publish it online. After this was done, she embedded it on her team's site (I'm also embedding it below-its in french, which means I have no idea what the students are saying). All told, this process probably took 15 minutes-contrast that with the typical process of tracking down a school owned audio recorder/mic, doing the recording into garageband/audacity, editing, and then posting online.
I can imagine a bazillion other ways to use student owned iOS devices in our classes. Teaching music theory and don't have enough guitars/pianos to go around? Ask students who own an iOS device to install a guitar or piano app. Have a need for students to do some sketching, painting or drawing? Have interested students use a drawing program for their cellphone to try creating in the digital medium (see this piece from the NYTimes titled, "Subway Sketches").
As some of our students return from winter break in January outfitted with new digital devices, I wonder how we can ready ourselves to be resourceful and to make use of student owned technologies in positive ways in our schools.
What are some ways that you've been resourceful in your classroom with digital tools?
I'm happy to submit my nominations for the 2010 Edublogs awards via this post. While I'm often not a fan of these types of extrinsic awards, I believe the spirit of the Edublogs Awards is more growth oriented than anything else-and quite honestly, blogging (and most any online work, quite frankly) is still in its infancy and needs systems these this to provide much needed incubation.
With that said, my 2010 nominations follow:
Best Individual Blog:Steve Taffee's 'Blog-Ed Indetermination'
Steve is clever, witty, and a damn good writer-be sure to add this feed to your reader--great blog that often times talks about technology infused pedagogy and methodology (disclosure-I work with Steve).
Best Teacher Blog: Katie Sauvain's 'Keep Asking' - smart, thoughtful and reflective teaching blog written by a middle school english teacher (disclosure-I work with Katie)
Best Use of Video: Dan Rezac's'Mathedemics' YouTube Channel Best Use of a Social Network: Paul Allison and Company's "Voices on the Gulf" project--an incredible community that has sprouted up to build solidarity with the residents of the Gulf of Mexico region who have been impacted by the BP Oilspill
Best Educational Tech Support Blog: Richard Kassissieh's 'Kassblog'
--I'm not nominating Richard because he is one of the few people to leave a comment on my blog...his work is much, much broader than 'Tech Support" and really is more focused on learning, but its a blog that I like reading and one that I feel is deserving of an Edublog award for sure.
I'm pleased to say that our student run, student operated live Internet radio project known as the Gator Radio Experience, is set to return on Friday, November 19th at 2:50 PM Pacific time. As many of you know, this project has been the highlight of my recent professional existence and I was sad to see it fall victim to the busy schedules of our students last year. The show is redesigned this time around to be much shorter (30 mins this year vs 60 mins previously) - this should help with the overall sustainability of the project. The students still plan on including an interview segment, a music spot, and then some type of op/ed review piece. At this point we're going to aim for 2 live broadcasts per month and if things go well, we'll try to ramp up the project so we're doing weekly broadcasts.
This year we'll be conducting our shows here at school using this new setup that I put together with the guidance of one of our parents, Steve Fields, who is an audio engineer (a HUGE thank you is in order to Steve for his time and help!) We'll try to have him on one of our first few shows to talk a bit about the setup and how it works. For project updates be sure to follow our Twitter page, join our Facebook group, subscribe to email updates at our website.
To satisfy your inner-nerd, here is the equipment and software that we're using to produce our shows:
Behringer Xenys 1204USB Mixer
ART Five Channel Headphone Mixer/Amp
Sennheiser HD202 Headsets
Electro-Voice Model 664 Mics (purchased on eBay and refurbished by Steve)
Garageband for recording high quality audio for the podcast - click here to subscribe to our shows in iTunes
Ustream for the live audio broadcast - click here to access our channel
My apologies about the non-standard theme of this post, but I can't turn down the opportunity to win a bike as cool as the one below from Madsen. If I win, my wife will kill me for bringing another bike in the house...if you'd like the chance to win a sweet Madsen cargo, follow this link to learn more. I believe they announce a winner on Nov 17th.
And in the event that I do win, here is my email address for the folks from Madsen: mjmontagne at geemail dot com.
Hat tip to Rob Rowe for posting this on his blog recently.
The notion of tying teacher pay to student performance of any type makes me sick all the way out to my fingers and toes. People do irrational things all the time for money-merit pay is destined to create a culture of unethical behavior in schools that fall for this. However, I think money can be used to directly fund and support teacher innovation in all sorts of interesting and meaningful ways.
Instead of merit pay to teachers in exchange for student performance on standardized tests, what if we were to do the following types of things:
1. Fund teachers to write open source texts for the CK12 Flexbook project.
2. Fund teachers to participate in professional learning communities on topics of interest.
3. Fund teachers to go to conferences. Fund teachers to create conference learning opportunities for their own school or district.
4. Fund teachers to participate in free online learning opportunities.
5. Fund teachers to take online courses. And then fund them to create their own online courses with the explicit understanding that the materials would be fully licensed in the Creative Commons as open educational resources available to all.
6. Fund teachers to travel to a place where they can have an experience that will help them become better teachers.
7. Fund teachers to work on special projects with students after school and on the weekends.
8. Fund teachers to engage in regular professional growth and learning.
9. Fund teachers for developing their own professional portfolios online. And then fund teachers who are interested in building portfolio assessment experiences for students.
10. Fund teachers for integrating play based learning into the curriculum.
11. Fund teachers who are interested in connecting their classes with the local community and the world
12. Double the funding for teachers who do any of the above in collaborative teams.
Last week I co-facilitated a Wednesday morning professional development session on the topic of, "Student blogging." Click here to access the resource document that we created for our attendees. This was a part of a periodic series of workshops known as "Learning Exhanges" - this is something new that we're trying as a way to promote sharing of all forms in our school community. Our session was very well attended and we set out to answer the following great, big question:
How can we use blogging and other online writing opportunities to provide opportunities for students to reflect on their learning, publish for a large audience, break the myth of perfectionism, and as a tool for formative assessment?
As so often happens in these types of tech-related learning sessions, the questions from our attendees seemed to focus around things like platforms and the 'how to' types. Not that these aren't important-they are-but as far as I'm concerned they're secondary in comparison to the ones posed in the big question. My co-facilitator and language learning teacher extraordinaire, Flaurie Imberman, summed it up well when she talked about the many challenges that we've experienced in using blogging our Latin American and Caribbean History course. She mentioned that our experience has been difficult because most of the work that we do with students in our classes is highly private. Very rarely do we ask them to open up and share their thoughts, processes, and final products with an audience that goes beyond the teacher. Blogging, if approached properly, certainly has the potential to serve as an antidote to the privatization of class work, teaching and learning.
In the context of this session on blogging, I'd like to link to five blogs that have been born over the past 6 weeks at my school.
Middle School online newspaper - this is the first online newspaper at my school, and it comes from our middle school students and teachers. Please leave a comment or two if you have a moment
Philosophy Class Lectures - Teacher Bill Smoot is posting all of his lectures for his semester long course on Philosophy. They are all available in iTunes as well.
Mobile Learning Group Blog - I mentioned this in a recent post. This is a group blog being authored by 16 colleagues at my school who were all given an iPad with the expectation that we'd engage in regular professional development around this topic.
Stories from Advisory - I started this as a tool to keep the parents of my sophomore student advisory (sophomores in USA schools are typically 15-16 years old). Parents can be so valuable in extending the conversations that are often times initiated in school activities like advisory - conversations at the dinner table can be dramatically altered and improved when parents have a little insight into the school day happenings.
Latin American Caribbean History Group Blog - this group blog was a compromise that we made with the students in this class who felt very insecure about blogging - generally speaking, the students didn't feel like they should be writing in a public space about a topic they weren't 'experts' on. So we compromised and they came up with the idea to co-author in a group blog. Posts should start appearing this week. Please comment!!!
I posted about this great graphic from the Flowing Data website that has been making the rounds on Twitter at the end of last week. As I said, it really jibes with my thinking about how I conduct myself online.
Due to the incredible amount of attention that tends to prop up every three months or so about Facebook's privacy policies, I immediately thought of the following remix:
The more I thought about it, the more I realized that ANYTHING attached to the Internet belongs in the orange circle, including organizational email systems AND school networks.
So I revised the above Venn diagram to look like the following:
The bottom line for me?? If I want my information to be totally and completely private, I shouldn't digitize it on any device or platform that is connected to the Internet.
How about you?? How might you remix or revise any of these Venn diagrams or the original from Flow Data?
Like many other schools, folks in my community are quite interested in learning more about the possibilities of highly portable mobile devices like the iPad, cellphones, iPods, etc as tools to personalize, customize, deepen and amplify learning. As a result, we recently launched a study group that is dedicated to learning more about mobile devices like the iPad. Teacher participation in this group is totally voluntary and I’m pleased to say that we have 16 participants!
In exchange for participation in the group, all members were given a small budget to go out and purchase an iPad model of their choosing, some accessories, and software (we're fortunate to have a GREAT relationship with the Apple Store on University Avenue in Palo Alto). Most participants chose the 16 GB model, but a few upgraded to the 3G capable models (some teachers went over budget and had to go into their own personal budgets to pay the difference). The expectations for the participants are posted over at the ‘About’ section of our blog. We chose this hardware/software distribution model because the iPad is a VERY personal device that is nearly impossible to manage using traditional IT practices. If this goes well, I might recommend that our school scale this distribution model to teacher laptops-eg, instead of the school’s IT department giving each teacher a standard hardware/software configuration every four years, we’d give folks a stipend of a certain amount so they could go out and choose the hardware/software mixture that works best for their needs.
One of the requirements for participation in this group is to submit blog posts to our group blog throughout the year. Stop by our blog and subscribe via email or RSS to keep up with our group’s progress and thinking throughout the year.
*image courtesy of FoxyCroxy on Flickr (Creative Commons License)
I LOVE the simplicity of this graphic. It is representative of my behavior in any physical and digital public space. Privacy settings at websites create a false sense of security-I behave as though anything I post can be rebroadcast and reposted anywhere on the open web.
Thanks to Diana Laufenberg for posting this on Twitter. Click here to view the image source.
I've been sitting on Malcolm Gladwell's article from the New Yorker earlier this month for the past few weeks. In a nutshell, Gladwell makes the case that new media can never replicate the kind of social activism that we saw in the late 50s through early 60s. When I initially read it, a huge part of me agreed with him, but after giving this a good deal of thought over the past few weeks, I've come to the conclusion that Gladwell is dead wrong. Here are three reasons why:
1. Gladwell spends a good deal of time in the article comparing the activism of the 60's to various activist movements in social media. This is a really, really poor comparison. In the 60's, there was a draft. This meant that people from all social and economic backgrounds had the potential to be drafted against their will to fight and die in Vietnam. People protested and gave their lives because of this. Now we have a volunteer force that is made up of a very small percentage of our population. This means that most of us are very disconnected from the various wars being waged by the USA right now. If we had a draft and the sons and daughters of the political elite had the potential to be sent off to war, I guarantee that there would be violent protests all across America.
2. Yesterday's "Spirit Day," in which millions of people across the USA wore purple to show solidarity with those who are oppressed due to their sexuality, was a HUGE success. From what I gather, people of all ages all throughout the country participated. This wasn't possible 25 years ago. I'm not even so sure it was possible 5 years ago. I don't care what Gladwell says, the fact that people of all ages could RSVP to the Spirit Day via facebook is a game changer-the simple act of letting others in the LGBTQ community know that they have allies will not only save lives, but help create pathways for ALL people to realize their full potential.
3. Gladwell must not know about the "It Gets Better" campaign on YouTube. He might not think that having one of the most innovative corporations share employee stories of how it gets better matters, but I do. He might not think that the courageous story of a Forth Worth,, Texas city council member shared on YouTube makes a difference, but many others think it matters. And I guarantee it matters to LGBTQ youth in California, Alabama, Texas, Wyoming, Utah, and all throughout our country.
I could go on and on and even share stories of how innovative teachers and students from around the world are using new media to build cultural competencies and compassion in unprecedented ways, but for the sake of brevity, I'll end it here. And at the end of the day, I agree with Jeff Jarvis' take on Gladwell-he is just another member of the "Young Curmudgeon's Guild," a group that is more interested in protecting the interests of old media than anything else.
Like so many others, I'm saddened by the recent tragedies centering around LGBTQ in our country. As an adult who works with youth I want to do my best to create an atmosphere of tolerance and respect for all human beings. To that end and in support of "Ally Week," I am taking the action of creating a "Safe and Hate Free Zone" in and around my office. I posted the following sign in my office to let other people in our school know that they are welcome to come talk about issues, challenges, feelings, or anything else that is on their mind (related to LGBTQ issues or not, actually).
I also posted this sign in the space that I meet with my sophomore (students ages 15-16) advisory each Thursday afternoon. See the image below:
I'm proud to say that many of my colleagues will be doing the same by posting these signs in our classrooms and workspaces. In a show of support and solidarity, we want to let everyone know that bullying and hate will not be tolerated.
What are you doing to support LGBTQ and ALL youth in your school and community?
For more resources and to print out this flyer to post in your room, office, etc, visit http://www.glsen.org/. Click here to access the page with the direct link to the flyer that I posted in my office. You may also order an entire kit for your school for minimal cost.
As many of you know, my school recently forged ahead with a laptop learning paradigm. All students in grades 6-12 are now required to show up to school each day with their own personal laptop computer. We take an OS and software agnostic approach-students and families self select their OS and software mix so long as it meets the minimum specifications outlined in this comprehensive document. Students and families purchase the computer on their own and the school provides a limited amount of technical assistance (we help them connect to the wifi network, manage printers, develop personalized data backup strategies, access network storage, etc).
Our tech support plan for student owned computers is crudely simple...we provide 15 minutes of support for student laptops and a loaner netbook for the times when students need to take their computers in for repair.
I'll be writing a few reflections throughout the year on our progress with laptop learning...here is my first and I'll do it in the form of a list.
1. We had HUGE fears about damage to student computers, theft, loss, accidents, etc. While a few minor things have happened, I'm glad to report that the students take really, really good care of their computers. No surprise here, really. Would you want to lose something that was valuable and contained your important documents, music, video, etc?
2. Having ALL students come onsite for learning sessions for two hours in the three days before the start of the school year was really smart. We used this as an opportunity to show the students how to connect to the network, access server shares, manage printers, etc. I can't imagine if we tried to do this in classrooms in the first few days of school.
3. Having Moodle and Google Apps for Education in place as core academic learning platforms was crucial in allowing us to deploy this OS/software neutral laptop learning model. Our teachers have been using both systems for nearly two full years prior to this year - this has been super helpful.
4. Laptop learning has exposed weaknesses in the area of professional development. While we've offered summer learning institutes for the past three years running, we really don't offer anything systemic or sustained during the school year. As a result, we've started a series of visits to area schools who have been doing this for a while along with some periodic "learning exchanges" where faculty have the opportunity to share some of the things they've been doing in their classrooms. It is my hope that we can increase the opportunities for teachers at ALL levels to engage in regular sharing, reflecting, etc in informal, formal, and vertical/non-departmental/non-grade level groupings.
5. Student involvement in the process is still something I'm struggling with. We have a student powered "Genius Bar" that is supposed to be a place for students to help with troubleshooting, tech support, etc, but we don't have a great deal of traction with this. Our students are incredibly busy and often times don't have the time to do this. I'm still not giving up on this concept as this is such a wonderful opportunity for youth involvement and leadership.
6. On the technical side of things, the Cisco NAC device that we are using is overly complicated and buggy. Users have a client application on their computer that they use to authenticate to the WiFi network...sometimes it loads, sometimes it doesn't-when it doesn't load, they can't connect to WiFi. Also, I can't say that we've managed the printing challenge very effectively either.
7. Having ed.Voicethread integrated into our Moodle network has been pretty slick. A few of our language learning teachers love it and I think this is going to grow and increase in use.
8. We don't require teachers to use computers in their classrooms...this approach is genius. As with any classroom tool, teachers make the choice about what will be used on any given day. I believe this has created a calming influence on our folks and prevents TICS (Technology Integration Coercion Syndrome).
9. During morning recess in our Middle School we require students to put their laptops in their lockers so that they can get outside and play. It has been GREAT to see kids playing four square and other outdoor games during this time. I'm glad to know that the presence of laptops has inspired our school community to think more carefully about creating more opportunities for kids to play.
10. We have unfiltered access to the Internet here at Castilleja and I'm quite proud of this. I'm also quite proud of the choices that students make when they use their computers during study halls, lunch, and other discretionary time periods. I often times walk around and ask students what they are up to...nine times out of ten they are working on school business which is evidence that they are doing a nice job of managing their time. Yes, some do use facebook before, during, and after school, but by and large they are using their computers quite responsibly as we would expect.
That is all for now...sort of a mind dump. I hope to have more stories from the classroom in in future "Laptop Learning Progress Updates" here at the blog.
Last Saturday morning I had the good fortune and privilege to share my story of design thinking with 60+ others who showed up in the elluminate to listen in live and participate in another Classroom 2.0 Live session. I felt a bit awkward sharing about something that I have so little experience with--but I'm also a firm believer in the notion that the best way to learn something is to teach it. This medium isn't the best way to share design thinking methodology, but it certainly was better than nothing.
Near the 3/4 mark of the session I had the participants use a set of brainstorming rules that I just shared to engage in a little group brainstorm about how we can inspire more play in our schools...I was blown away at the contributions that participants made in the very short amount of time they were given (click here to see the ideas of session participants...a few minutes later I asked them to create a prototype-click here to see photos of a few of their prototypes). Design thinking is a fairly amorphous concept and I hope this exercise and the session at large gave all who participated a feel for the possibilities associated with this methodology.
Finally, a special thanks goes to Lorna Costantini, Peggy George, and Kim Caise for their incredible work in sustaining the Classroom 2.0 Live Saturday sessions. I consider myself fortunate to have access to these fantastic and free learning opportunities each Saturday. Be sure to check out their archives and to tune in live on Saturday at noon eastern/9 am pacific in North America (16:00 GMT/UTC) .
The Blip.TV archive is embedded below. Click here to view the archived elluminate session complete with Chat. The show notes and links are posted here.
In early September I had the chance to facilitate a session on creative problem solving using 'Design Thinking' for a group of sophomore students. What follows is a little lesson description along with photos and a reflection on the process.
A range of brainstorming and design medium such as post it notes, large butcher paper/large post it paper, markers of all colors and sizes, blue painters tape, 8 1/2" x 11" scrap paper, pencils, pens, wood blocks, legos, sidewalk chalk, and any other materials that would be suitable for building prototypes and models.
Quotes from Tim Brown's book, Change by Design, posted on 8 1/2" x 11" paper. These are used as a warm up activity when students come trickling into the room. Click here to view slides of the quotes.
Age Range:
Elementary school all the way up to adults (I did this activity with 15/16 year old sophomore high school students)
Time:
This entire activity took 3 hours.
Lesson Flow:
Warm up: 10 Minutes
As students enter the room, ask them to walk about and look at the 10-14 different quotes from Tim Brown's Change by Design. Encourage them to pick one or two that really resonate. Gather back in the circle and then give students the opportunity to share their favorite quote. Ask that they also share why.
Brainstorming: 20 minutes
Watch the two videos on brainstorming and David Kelly's fireside chat video. After the videos are over, ask the students to generate a list of brainstorming rules. Ask two students to be the scribes and record the rules on a large piece of butcher paper. The essential rules are as follows: Defer judgement, encourage wild ideas, build off the ideas of others, 'Headlines,' record everything, and quantity over quality. Post the brainstorming rules ideas on the wall for everyone to see.
Actual Brainstorming: 5 minutes
After watching the videos, break the students into teams of two and have them brainstorm as many things as possible around campus that they'd like to re-design. This could include things like the classroom layout, new uniforms for their team, better bike accommodations, better lockers, etc. Encourage them to go for wild ideas, quantity over quality and to practice the established rules for brainstorming. Give students no more than 5 minutes to brainstorm, but encourage them to get 100 ideas (they won't be able to come up with 100, but this really pushes them to look for the non-obvious when brainstorming).
Prototyping Overview: 5 minutes
Show the students the video, "Have Paper, Will Prototype." The point is to show them that the point of prototyping is to bring your thinking alive through some type of object. A prototype can be just about anything-the boy in this video uses a piece of paper to share a design for a video game. Another key aspect of prototyping is that is should be low resolution-eg, we don't want to spend too much time on the prototype-create a down and dirty prototype to expose our thinking to feedback as soon as possible! Read some of the quotes from Tim Brown's book on prototyping directly to the students...this will help them formulate a picture of what prototyping is all about. Show students the different prototyping media that they may use: butcher paper, post its, wood blocks, legoes, blue painters tape, sidewalk chalk, etc are all useful mediums.
After the prototyping video and discussion, tell student pairs that they have to quickly pick one idea from their brainstorm list to turn into a rough prototype.
Student Project Prototyping: 3 minutes
Give students 3 minutes to create a rough prototype of their idea.
Prototype sharing: 5-10 minutes
Give each group of students 30 seconds to share their prototype. After each group shares, allow 1 minute for feedback (groups should record the feedback they receive from their peers, but should not respond to it directly). This phase needs to happen QUICKLY.
Prototyping Version 2.0: 3 minutes
Give students 3 minutes to incorporate feedback into a new iteration of their prototype. If you want to go through another round of feedback and iteration, go for it.
Next steps discussion: 5 minutes
After version 2.0 of their prototypes are completed, ask them what they might do next to receive feedback. Who are some other folks they might want to share their ideas with? Might they want to do some additional observation and research?
Break: 5 minutes
The Power of Play Video: 15-20 minutes
When the students reassemble, show them Stuart Brown's TED Talk on the importance of play. Talk with the students about the importance of a sense of play in the creative process prior to the video starting. Show the first 10-12 minutes of the video. After the video is over, ask volunteers to share their thoughts and take aways on the video. What moved them? What will they remember?
The Deep Dive Video and Discussion: 20-30 minutes
Show the students the "Deep Dive," which is a great glimpse into the creative process used by the design firm, IDEO. If you can get your hands on the entire 20 minute video, use it. Otherwise the 8 minute clip from YouTube will be fine.
Design Challenges:
After the Deep Dive video and discussion, launch the students into teams of 4-5 to work on various different design challenges. I had the students work on the following challenges around our campus: inspiring more play, re-designing our student clubs program, and re-engineering our school's dining room. Students were given design briefs on each one of these challenges. The briefs contained videos, documents, maps, and other materials that would be useful in helping them understand their challenge. Students were given the balance of their time to brainstorm solutions and to build a prototype to share with others for feedback.
A few photos/short videos of my students engaged in brainstorming, prototyping, and sharing of their ideas:
Students engaging in the prototyping of their ideas:
Students getting introduced to their design challenge by interacting with and discussion the brief materials:
Students sharing their prototype for redesigning the club experience at our school:
Prototype of various ideas for inspiring more play:
Students design a prototype for an 'alternate to stairs' so it is easier to get their heavy roller backpacks between the different floors at our school (backpacks are even heavier this year now that each student is carrying a laptop!)
Student designers in action. Just a long shot of several of the groups working on prototypes for their ideas:
One group of students was HIGHLY interested in re-designing our daily schedule. This is a photograph of this group sharing their thinking via a prototype they created:
I'm a HUGE fan of play. All sorts of good things happen when you give humans the opportunity to play. Stuart Brown talked about the vital nature of play in his TED talk and even wrote a book about it. One of the concerns of our new laptop program has to do with play. Adults were fearful that our students would play less during discretionary time periods once they started bringing computers to school each day. As a result of this concern, our school started putting out all sorts of balls, jump ropes, frisbees and other objects for the students to use during discretionary time blocks like recess and lunch. Guess what is happening? They are playing!
We even took a piece of sidewalk chalk and created a four square court...you should see the kids get in line to play. The line often times will run 5-10 people deep! I've even enjoyed jumping in on a few games (the game is much more difficult than I remember by the way).
I'm sure the laptops will inspire all sorts of interesting learning experiences for our teachers and students in the years to come. At this point, however, I'm quite excited that our laptops have simply inspired us to play more!
I'm quickly becoming a huge fan of "Design Thinking" as an instructional platform for inspiring creative thinking and unique approaches to projects and problems. I recently facilitated a a three hour project based learning experience with 60 sophomores where we used Design Thinking-more on that in a later post hopefully. The work that the students did was fantastic and the ideas that they generated for their various design projects blew me away.
But for now, I wanted to share a few of my favorite quotes from Tim Brown's book on Design Thinking titled, Change by Design. It is a book that I highly recommend reading if you are interested in providing your students, teachers, administrators, etc with a framework for creative thinking while working in teams.
Flip through the slide deck below for some great quotes on Design Thinking from Tim's book:
Our new Head of School asked me to work with our school's librarian and global programs director to develop a list of suggested books for our school's board to read. Embedded below is a living document of collected titles thus far-I feel as though this is a nice compilation of resources that meshes quite nicely with our school's strategic plan.
What might we be missing?? What are you reading that might fight with these titles?
Some of you know that the school I work at uses Google for our email and collaboration platform. I've used used many different email systems in my career as a school technology coordinator - Eudora client (not sure what powered this system), Exchange, FirstClass, and now Google. Without a doubt, Google's platform is superior for empowering both individuals, teams, and large communities. Whereas exchange and MS Office are all about individual productivity, Google is all about team productivity and hyper-collaboration.
One of my favorite things about the Google platform is the regular updates the Google Team pushes out to the platform. Yesterday during our faculty meeting I did a 25 minute update on some of these new features-in reality, many of these features are not exactly new, but for many who attended my session yesterday this was their first exposure to the updates.
This past week I lead onsite student laptop learning seminars for all of our students in grades 9-12. I was fortunate to have co-worker buddies run these sessions for the middle school students-I'm not sure how we would've managed otherwise.
Each student was onsite for a minimum of two hours for these seminars...before setting up our computers, installing software, enrolling in the online component of this learning experience, etc, I gave a 20 minute introductory talk to each grade level. Many of our students wonder why we're going the route of requiring everyone to starting bringing a laptop to school each day-instead of answering this question for the students, my aim was to ask more questions in the context of various waves of technology innovations throughout history. It is my intention that they arrive to their own conclusions and become an active part of the conversation centering around laptop learning in the classroom.
This particular recording is from my talk with the sophomores-this also happened to be the last group I worked with and I can't say I was on my A game here. But I hope this gives you a sense as to how we set the table for our laptop learning experience here at our school. The slideshare deck has audio and only includes the first 20 minutes of my talk. The rest of the slides in the form of a google presentation are also embedded below.
Some of the readers of this little blog know that the school I work at will be embarking down the path of laptop learning this year. As part of this program, all students will be on campus for two hour long laptop learning orientation sessions prior to the start of the school year. The first session is tomorrow and the second is on Wednesday. I've been prepping my slide deck that I'm using to guide these seminars and I developed the following essential question that I hope serves as a guide for us over the next few years...
"how can we use our laptops to personalize learning, manage complex streams of information, interrogate information validity, reflect upon our own learning, engage with local and global issues, publish for a large audience, build cool stuff, develop empathy, network with others and expand our cultural competencies and awareness?"
I'll be meeting with all students in grades 9-12 over the next two days - I think it is going to be really fun having the opportunity to do these orientation seminars with this students. I hope they are receptive to this essential question...wish me luck!
I just drafted up and posted this email to the 9 new faculty members here in our school community. I essentially wanted to give them a sense as to how I could assist them with their practice. It was a much longer email than I was hoping for, but it serves the purpose I think. I'm rebroadcasting here at my blog in the event that other instructional technology coordinators may want to remix this for their own purposes.
--------------------------------------------------------- August 20, 2010
Dear new faculty members,
My apologies for missing you all at Monday's orientation, but I was a bit busy looking afterour little newborn(WARNING: if you ever reference a human form that is 4 feet or less, you're bound to be exposed to thousands of baby photos).
As promised, here is areally longintroduction with links to samples from my portfolio...hopefully this gives you a sense as to who I am, what I do, and how we might be able to collaborate on some interesting projects this year...
So here goes...
I'm entering my third year at Castilleja, but previous to my experience here I served as the middle school technology coordinator at the University School of Milwaukee. Prior to my work at USM, I worked as a technology coordinator at a K-8 school in the Milwaukee Public School system, a computer lab teacher in an 'open education' grade school in MPS, and a grade school teacher in a 'non-graded, continuous progress' school in MPS.
Throughout these projects, I've worked in a variety of capacities from pre-project collaborative concepting, to serving as an 'extra set of hands' in the classroom, to instructional lead.
A few other projects from the past few years may be perused herein my professional portfolio.
Over the past few years here at Castilleja I've also been involved in some of our professional development proceedings. Last year I worked with a small team of Castilleja Faculty members to plan out last June's "Summer Learning Institute," which involved a deep dive into the world of project based learning, portfolios, laptop learning, and digital storytelling. The entire experience is archivedonline here. Two years ago I also helped plan and implement Castilleja's spring professional development day...more on thathere.
Throughout my career in the world of educational technology, I've made just about every mistake possible. It wasn't so long ago that I thought the Internet was just a glorified yellow pages, blogs were a fad, social networking was a waste of time, and smartboard use was the highest form of technology integration. Its a good thing that I have a willingness and readiness to 'unlearn' as much as a learn .
See the icon links below my signature for some of the other spaces where I share and interrogate information, reflect on my practice, and attempt to make sense of things.
Looking forward to connecting with you soon!
Regards,
----------------------- Matt Montagne Instructional Technology Coordinator Castilleja School Palo Alto, California USA
