Laptop Learning - an Essential Question

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!

Copy of Email to Our New Faculty

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.

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August 20, 2010

Dear new faculty members,

My apologies for missing you all at Monday's orientation, but I was a bit busy looking after our 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 a really long introduction 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. 

A few of my favorite projects from these past experiences include book reviews written by 2nd graders back in 1998, multimedia enhanced podcasts constructed by 5th graders in 2006, a music video built in scratch by a 7th grader, an 8th grade US history paperless unit on the cold war through the 1980s, Junior AP English profile projects, a live/interactive radio project developed by high school students here at Casti, a persuasive facebook video project in our 8th grade film class from last year, student created 'mathcasts,' design of online learning spaces (moodle, google sites, etc), etc. 

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 archived online here. Two years ago I also helped plan and implement Castilleja's spring professional development day...more on that here. 

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,

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Matt Montagne
Instructional Technology Coordinator
Castilleja School
Palo Alto, California USA

Sylvia Martinez on Project Based Learning

Sylvia Martinez was our featured guest on the day during our Summer Learning Institute that was dedicated to project based learning. Sylvia really helped us push the needle and advance the conversation regarding the relevance of project based learning in a content focused, college preparatory experience like the one that exists at our school

A special thank you to our student interns for the week, Angelica Ortiz and Sam Cecil, for managing the video recordings and live streaming.

Castilleja School YouTube Channel

This is just a reminder that our school has its own YouTube Channel that it will using to share videos from our school community. We foresee sharing talks by special guests, student projects, student speeches, etc. I am one of the designated video uploaders at Castilleja and I'm hopeful that we'll be able to post 1 video per week throughout the year. I recently posted Marissa Mayer's June 2009 Commencement address and the two parts to this talk are embedded below. Subscribe to our Channel if you'd like to notified when we post new videos.

Marissa Mayer Castilleja Commencement Address Part I (June 2009):


Marissa Mayer Castilleja Commencement Address Part II (June 2009):

Changing My 'Mindset'

The summer reading book for our faculty and staff at Castilleja is Carol Dweck's, Mindset. I've found it a fascinating read and already am finding that it is positively affecting my own mindset about long held beliefs I've had about my ability to learn certain tasks. The essence of Ms. Dweck's book is that humans have two different types of mindsets that they slip into when learning. The first mindset is one where we believe that the ability to learn something is hardwired into our DNA. I've had the fixed mindset about learning music for years - I believe that you either have an innate ability to learn music or you don't. People who have the second mindset, or the growth mindset, have a totally different approach. They believe that new skills can be cultivated and developed through hard work and effort.

In the book she cites many examples of individuals who have taken on either a fixed mindset or a growth mindset. She tells Michael Jordan's story and how people with the fixed mindset tend to attribute his success to natural ability and great physical gifts. They forget the fact that he was cut from his high school basketball team in his senior year and that he was a notorious gym rat well before he established himself as one of the greatest NBA players ever. Michael Jordan is the classic growth minded athlete. Clearly he not only enjoyed great challenges but he thrived under these pressure situations. The video below demonstrates Jordan's perspective in failure and success:




Mindset has already had an impact on my attitude about learning new tasks. I was recently in Ludington, Michigan visiting with my family and friends. My brother-in-law, Bill, is an incredible card player. All of his children are excellent card players as well. For years they've asked me to play cards, but I would always say something like, "I'm terrible at cards," and then I'd sit on the sidelines. Bill comes from a family of card players and I've always considered his card playing ability to be hard coded into his DNA. Since becoming more aware of the various mindsets, I now am able to see that Bill's card playing skills have nothing to do with innate ability. Bill has spent hundreds, if not thousands, of hours playing cards with his family and friends over the years. He can anticipate someone holding a jack in their hand while playing euchre not because of some magical ability, but because he has tons of experience playing the game. He is poised and calm during cards not because he is a "cool-cat," but because he has a great deal of experience practicing. On my last day in Michigan, my sister asked me if I'd like to learn and play euchre with Bill and their daughter, Tenley. I put myself into a growth mindset and said, "Sure." I concentrated and applied myself a bit and while I still struggled to learn all the nuances of the game, I did learn some basic rules and now feel as though I can at least play and enjoy a game of euchre. If I didn't have the growth mindset, I'm guessing I would've turned down my sister's offer to play and learn the basics of a new card game (more importantly, I would've missed out on a fun experience with my family!)

In upcoming posts, I'll reflect on how I'm thinking about applying Mindset to my work with students on the Gator Radio Experience and students in my 10th grade advisory section.

Summercore Professional Development Experience Reflections

We just wrapped up an intense week of professional development on all things relating to educational technology. See my previous post to view a Michael Wesch inspired video that we created at the end of the week. All-in-all, I thought it really was an excellent experience with a total of 26 faculty members going through Summercore together. Below are a few questions and reflections I have

1. How can we share out our work from this week? We can do this virtually by making our Moodle site public and I think we could possibly do some sharing at a faculty meeting in August/September when we get back to school. What else can we do??

2. How can we make learning experiences like this a more regular part of our culture? While this was a fantastic week, it was only a single week. Can we make this type of learning a regular part of what we do without it becoming another add-on?

3. The cross pollination between teachers of different departments and divisions was immensely valuable. How can we extend the non-traditional groupings of faculty throughout the school year? Perhaps faculty could self form groups based upon professional learning interests.

4. Everyone was a teacher and a learner over the course of the week. Many thanks to Heather, Bear, Sarah and Doris for serving as faculty assistant instructors. The model of teachers teaching teachers is a good one and quite worthy of expanding.

5. The morning discussions where each person shared their thoughts on the previous evening's readings were fantastic. I only wish that some of these discussions took place virtually in moodle forums so that our faculty members would've had this experience as well.

6. I think the 8:30-5:30 days were about an hour or two too long. I think the days could've been shortened up to allow for more asynchronous reflection work in forums/blogs.

7. Did we focus too much on the tools in not enough on the concepts? For example, should it be, "iMovie and Voicethread," or rather, "Conveying a message through a mixed media narrative?"

A special thanks to Steve Bergen and Lynne Schalman of Summercore. This was our second year of working with them and they really have helped us progress in our thinking about the role of digital technology in learning. The "Olive Tree and the Lexus" metaphor is one that we'll all be grappling with as we move forward.

are we ready? Castilleja Mini-Conference Keynote Panel Podcast Recording

This is a podcast recording of our opening keynote panel that kicked off today's "are we ready?" mini-conference day from my school here in Palo Alto, CA. The panel features Denise Pope, Ericka Fur, and Rick Reis who are all from Stanford. I thought the panelists did a wonderful job of helping us frame the day's activities by asking some compelling questions of our community.

This recording is about 40 minutes in length.

Help Needed!

So I'll be moderating the opening keynote panel for a wonderful professional development day that we have planned at my school this coming Monday, March 9th. We have an excellent group of panelists from Stanford who have a great deal of experience in the area of interdisciplinary learning, differentiated instruction, assessment, and global education.

I'm fairly nervous about moderating this panel and could really use some help in developing some questions that we'll use to guide the keynote panel discussion. If you have any suggestions, I certainly would appreciate you jotting them down in the form of a comment here at this post.

By the way, we will ustream broadcast the keynote and a few other sessions. The link to the ustream channel that we'll use to broadcast the keynote is here...we'll also post the links to the ustream channels over at the mini-conference website. The broadcast of the keynote will begin at 8:30 am pacific (click here to convert to the time in your region of the globe).

Thank you for your help.

are you ready?

I'm helping plan out a mini-conference day here at Castilleja for our faculty on March 9th, 2009. Here is the little video trailer that we created and sent out today to help get folks fired up about the day:



We could've sent this message via a typical all-faculty email, but the mixed media created a buzz in a way that is not possible via textual media alone. I think we're starting to understand the importance of being able to effectively convey a message via mixed media in the same way that it was important to know how to create a compelling point via a five paragraph essay when I was of school age (not even so sure this last sentence makes sense, but you get the drift).

Thursday, Feb 5 Parent talk Update

This morning I gave a 30 minute talk regarding some of the new initiatives we have going on here at our school. The talk primarily focused on how we use Moodle as a virtual learning environment and we also talked about the Gator Radio Experience student run live radio project. Both projects align very closely with our school's new strategic plan which is titled, "Castilleja School...defining educational excellence for girls in the 21st century."

I feel bad that the talk went into overtime and that I didn't record the audio...I'll go back and record the audio along with the slides so folks who were unable to attend have the chance to listen in. Until that happens, here are a few links to resources that we talked about today:

1. Parents as Partners project - We have a blog and a Facebook group

2. Image from the Horizon Report

3. Gator Radio Experience Website/Blog and Gator Radio Experience on Twitter

4. Connect with Matt on Twitter or Facebook (or subscribe to this blog via RSS on the right or email subscription)

5. Casti's Moodle Virtual Learning Network

Thanks again to Martha and the CSA crew at Castilleja for inviting me to talk to the group today!