Sir Ken Robinson @CUE 2013

The keynote speaker at CUE 2103 was Sir Ken Robinson.  His presentation was worth the price of admission!  He is such an amazing, inspiring, articulate, intelligent and funny man!  I am really not sure how to even compile my notes, so I am just sharing sound bites (bytes?) along with (my comments). It should be evident which is which.  Feel free to ask me to elaborate.

On earth, over the entirely of human existence, there have been about 100 billion lives. Yet, each life is unique and unrepeatable.  You are at a unique moment in human history.

We feign knowledge we don't have. Dalai Lama - "I don't know"The mark of a great teacher is to say at times, I have no idea, what do you think?

To be born at all is a miracle.  You should never resent growing old.  It's a privilege denied to many. It is a miracle we are here.  It's amazing how little people settle for.

Human talents are like natural resources, they are often buried and need to be drawn out

It is our differences that make us interesting.  We have to cherish our diversity. It is our best hope for sustainability.  Education currently does the exact opposite.  Human beings are naturally creative.

'My own personal Everest'.  Getting his PhD was his "own personal Everest". (I love that idea! what is your Everest?!)

Where you stand now is not governed by where you started out. So what are you going to do with your life?  You don't get your resume with your birth certificate, you control who you become. 

Education has a narrow view...it is focused on what they thought was wrong with you, not what you could do! You should teach the child, not the subject (Monger says he stole her line)

The effect of standards is to narrow the curriculum.  (Amen.) Who says Americans don't get irony? The person who named No Child Left Behind GETS irony. NCLB has had the effect of shrinking the curricula.  We are confusing the symptom of the problem with the causes. Rather than narrowing we need Expansive that celebrates diversity...Organic development and change...

Effect of mimeograph machines on teachers was profound!  (Tee hee - I think you had to be there)

Out of Our Minds:Learning to be Creative. his new book 

10 years ago... No smart phones, social media - perhaps it should be called Asocial media (This made me laugh later that night, +sheila monger  and I were sitting next to each other, (Y) ing each other's facebook posts, rather than just talking to each other). 

We are the largest generation in human history.  There are more people on earth now than anytime in humon history. We don't know if we can make this work. - (I am paraphrasing for sure here) essentially, he said that if everyone on earth would consume what the average person in India consumes, we'd be fine. Yet if we all consumed what the average American does, essentially we'd need 4 more Earths.

Current forms of Education are locked into the previous century. We need a radical personalization.  There are 4 drivers of the need for change in education:

Economic. If people are better educated we think they'll be in a better position to get a better job and be able to be economically independent. I can't tell you much I want my son to be economically independent. 

Cultural.  The world existed before ou got here and will continue.  But the world that is you only exists because you are here.

Social.  

Personal. In the end, education is always personal.  Could not be a greater irony that we are cutting funding to Ed and increasing funding to prisons. In the US, 30% of students don't graduate. In some areas, 60%. 1 in 31 in US in the penal system.  We have to get away from standardizing education to personalizing it - technology is the key.

The Empty Space by Peter Brook     Is about how he set out to transform theater. Before we can ask how, we have to ask what is it? What can we take a way and have it still be theater? An actor in a space and someone watching.  It is the relationship. There is an analogy to Ed ...our job is to facilitate learning.  They'll do it on their own so when we add ourselves into the mix, we have to add value. Facilitate. Enable, inspire, recognize diversity, recognize possibilities inside them.  Too many distractions- unions, building codes, etc that have gotten in the way of education.

Our job is to teach students not subjects.

Recognize learning styles

Broad set of experiences

Individualize schedules. ex. School of one in NY

Kids learn at different rates... Multi age

New technologies are disruptive but give us the means to change education.  By the way, Technology is not technology if it happened before you were born.

Photo by zota via flickr

Death Valley - it is not dead, just dormant.  What happened with extreme rain in spring 2005 was amazing display of wildflowers.  

Seeds of possibility. If conditions are right, life is inevitable.  Fill them with hope and a sense of ambition.  Education has (and still does) define students by what they CAN'T do rather than what they CAN do

Celebrate our creativity along with our students' creativity.  The focus on education should be LEARNING. Nothing should be added unless it contributes to learning.

It takes more resources to block effective Ed than it would to do it right

Tweets about "@sandramc59 @sirkenrobinson"

The Bedley Bros' Research Communities

The past few days, some of us attended the CUE conference. 

This professional development was opportunity was wonderful and we wanted to share what we learned. So I'll be posting notes from the sessions I attended.

Using iPads to Build Research Communities in a Common Core Classroom

by the Bedley Bros - +Scott Bedley  and +Tim Bedley 

This standing room only CUE TIP was informative and engaging. It was a short presentation but packed with great ideas and examples. They talked about students can learn to research collaboratively. Tim discussed how students can delve deeper into a subject by using technology and their brains to mine reliable sources. Students were gives a topic to research and had to come up with consensus in their research community - (GLAD=>expert group)

Tim Bedley, is one of Riverside County's Teacher of the Year from 2013! He has some great info on his website about projects, his band links to some great classroom videos.  You can catch the Bedley Bros. #edchat which gives much of the information from the presentation. Tim also has an amazing band Rocking the Standards, check out their educational and entertaining songs. 

Their parting piece of advise, Leave your voice out! I am the last resource for feedback.

The session was time well spent, I just wish it had gone on longer!

Weather Kids

Weather Whenever, Wherever! I am so energized to be collaborating with two colleagues at two other schools in our district on a new project: Weather Kids. The three of us (Debbie, Camille and I) met last night to create a weather project for our students. We were inspired by a team that Debbie met at Napa Cue teachers Stacy Holder and Julie Berglin. I'm teaching 5th grade science but both my 4th and 5th graders will participate in the project. Debbie teaches a 3-5 SDC combo and Camille, a K-1 combo. Our students will be collecting data on rain fall, temperature and wind speed using a variety of high touch instruments. They will then record and share the weather data using our iPads via a Google form and Edmodo. Weather is a part of the science curriculum in both first grade and fifth grade so it fits all three of our curricula.

Stacy and Julie were warmly willing to share their templates and experiences with us to make roll out for us much easier.

We are also hoping to use either Scribble Press or PaperPort to create science journals that the students can share with one another. But we are still trying to figure that piece out. Everyone in our academy is finding sharing from one device to another to be challenging. We are also hoping to Skype between schools to build some community.

Eventually we'd like to add more tools such as barometers and hand made anemometers. I was thrilled to receive generous funding from friends and families through adopt-a-classroom. We'll be incorporating math with calculations to find dew point, converting between metric and US customary measurements (inches) as well as graphing and creating charts to help understand and analyze data. We will also be writing (we've already started with weather themed parts of speech) and geography as results start to come in from schools we partner with throughout the country and the world!



I just found out from UPS that my equipment was delivered while I was in our meeting so I'm super excited to get started! With the ferocity of Superstorm Sandy, my kids are well aware of weather and have a lot of interest in this project as well! Of course, they think it was named after me;)

- Posted using BlogPress from my iPad

Lead3.0

This weekend I went to a two day conference, Lead3.0 put in by TICAL, CUE and ACSA (my cousin, George Manthey is the  the Assistant Executive Director of Educational Services, of ACSA and the event co-organizer, an amazing guy).  


The first session I attended talked about Common Core Standards. The second session was near and dear to my heart.How Two Superintendents Collaboratively Launched an Initiative to Maximize Classroom Effectiveness in the Digital Age

Dr. Jacqueline M. Horejs, Superintendent, Union School District & Dr. Deborah L. Blow, Superintendent, Cambrian School District: Aware of the importance of collaboration as a 21st Century skill, Dr. Debbie Blow.. and Dr. Jacqueline Horejs, ... decided to initiate a 21st Century Digital Media Academy to provide professional development for teachers in both of our districts.  Teachers from each district applied and were selected to participate in a year long academy to learn how to effectively use digital media in their classrooms.  ...  Management team members are also collaborating on book studies including Trilling and Fadel’s 21st Century Skills, and workshops on the effective classroom use of iPads.

It was so cool to hear Dr. Blow talk about what we are doing and I honestly have never felt more proud of my school district! It was interesting to hear some of the background behind the thinking of the Academy concept & design, which basically is "feeding the rabbits" or as my previous Superintendent called us, "fire-starters".  Find the people who want to use it, they will use it and thus excite and teach others.


The keynote speaker at lunch was Alan November. If you ever get a chance to hear him speak, DO IT! Here are some notes I took, but doesn't really do him justice. If you have time - watch the video recording they made.http://novemberlearning.com/

• Teach by asking not telling
• Unlearning misconceptions is a phenomenally difficult thing to do.
• Math train.tv 6th grade teacher site .for kids to make movies about math.  We so have to do this
• Teach not only content but courage.  We have to teach them to be fearless learners.  Global publishing.
• Children would prefer content provided by children when they are learning something new.
• Unleash an army of creative problem solvers creating problem solving across the curriculum.   Kids work for free.
• Check out Prime factorization by bob on Mathtrain.tv.  She says she learns more doing the videos that the kids watching because she "really has to learn it."
• Kid who per teacher is not a Good 6th grade because she is lazy, as to why she is not doing school work but literally publishing content to a world-wide audience, "I have to decide, do I publish for my teacher or for the world?"
• What is the proportion of work that has purpose and adds value to the world vs work that is done for a grade?
• YouTube Dan Pink drive rsa animate   3 motivators...purpose, autonomy and mastery
• Seed and tree. ...how did it get there?  Kinder give same answer as harvard grads.  And they went to school between then!
• If they don't have internet access, download to DVD and send home.
• Mrs. Cassidy classroom blog   In Moose Jaw, 1st graders reaching a global audience creating documentaries of how they learned something.

Later I attended Technology Tools to Support Academics in RTI by Sheri Wilkins, Program Manager, Desert/Mountain Special Education Local Plan Area.

This workshop will provide participants with opportunities to explore technological solutions that will extend the effectiveness and efficiency of a Response to Intervention (RTI) model. The session will focus on tools for assessment and intervention in the areas of reading, writing, and math. Participants will be given time to explore the tools that are shared in the presentation.  I was hoping to find some good technology sources for reading intervention. This session focused mostly on assessment and not strategies.  I did talk to a vendor who has something similar to SuccessMaker but it runs on an iPad, so I might trial it.

I also attended a session with an innovative PD model between San Bruno Park SD and the Krause Center for Innovation.  I am a MERIT graduate so was interested to see what they did, which was produce an accelerated program to create tech savvy teachers. Creating Affordable and Timely Professional Development by Skip Johnson, Principal, Steven J. McGriff, Teacher-in-Residence, KCI, Gay Krause, ED, KCI and two teachers from the district: Providing high quality professional development to promote the use of technology is a challenge. In the San Bruno Park School District we created a partnership with the Krause Center for Innovation housed on the junior college campus of Foothill in Los Altos Hills to provide low cost professional development through the establishment of the Danford Center for Innovation.

The final highlight of my day was collaboration time with Jason and Martin.  We did some brainstorming about apps, they gave me encouragement about being laid-off, again, and then we went to the Apps for Apps mixer, where it was like speed dating but with iPad apps.  We learned about some really cool apps. I'll add links later.

• App. Home 3d. To build a mission
• App. Reflection can display whatever is on your iPad onto the computer, than project it.  Not as big a deal if you have appleTV
• What we then brainstormed is to use a free app...Join me. It shares my screen with the kids they sign with a code.   Can also log in remotely.  This might be the solution Sheila and I were wondering about if we want all of our users on the same "page" at once, for example with a read along.
• App. Classroom management. Can assign Badges, kids see how they are doing..they get points.  Could display using 2 windows so kids cn always see their status.  It can also be set up to send parent emails.  Maybe useful for 'that kid'.
• app.  Educreation.  Just like show me. A little simpler. can't download videos with show me so if you want to embed them in something else, you may want to use Educreation ..both are free.
• App Explain everything. 2. Cool app to annotate presentations, images, etc.
• Doceri 3 versions can edit with the video then record   Export to an mov. Free $25 no ad, $30 also controls computers
• If you are going to make movies, there is a Case/tripod mount/adapter for lenses. $64 Makayama. iPad 2. You can attach a 37 mm lens.  Kinda cool.  You can also attach external mic with $20 dongle
• Cosmonaut. Stylus. A bigger handle for little kids. http://www.studioneat.com/products/cosmonaut
• App and web based tool  take notes and store them in the cloud for anywhere access..  It is where imam typing this!  Evernote. Shared folder so you can share assignments with kids that they can access anywhere...maybe much the same as Google apps though frankly docs is super slow and awkward.  Jon from Minnerette high school.   Taking notes in the cloud. 
• Assignment: using Ask a friend three questions and record. (t has a voice feature) Then write summary. They have to stay on task because they have to produce soemthing!  

I am so happy I went to this event. It was engaging and re-invigorating. Will post later about the closing session with Steve Dembo