Gator Radio set to return on Nov 19th!

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

Madsen Cycles Link Contest

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.

Forget merit pay - fund innovation instead

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.

New blogs are born & thoughts on our student blogging workship

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!!!

Remixing the "Internet and Privacy" Graphic

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?

Mobile Learning Study Group

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)

"Privacy and the Internet"

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.

Why Gladwell is Wrong

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.

Making my office and room a 'Safe and Hate free zone' for LGBTQ youth

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.

Why I Like Design Thinking

One of the slides I shared from my classroom 2.0 presentation last Saturday...