Texas School Board Curriculum Survival Kit

#edchat #Texas @russgoerend

I can't help but get emotionally upset by the most recent turn of events in Texas. I am grateful that my children will not be going to school there any time soon. A couple months ago I spliced together this video on the matter and posted it to YouTube but had not taken the time to share it here until now:



Now, it appears there has even been some attempt by members of the Texas School Board to block student access to the very same open source curriculum I refer to in this video. Given the outrageousness of the curriculum they just passed 9 to 5 I am sure they will be successful in this initiative as well.

So, here is my new simple 3 step
Texas School Board Curriculum Survival Kit:

1.


2. Create your own wiki to make corrections and/or replacements to supplement the curriculum missing or misrepresented in the new textbooks (you could even have your students help you do this as a project). I am sure at least one of these tools will make it through the Board's filters:

• - Free wiki host. Allows you to create web pages that anyone with a password can quickly and easily edit. Great for community knowledge construction and information gathering.
• - Free wiki host. Allows you to create web pages that anyone with a password can quickly and easily edit. Great for community knowledge construction and information gathering.
• - Free wiki host. Allows you to create web pages that anyone with a password can quickly and easily edit. Great for community knowledge construction and information gathering.
• - Free wiki host that integrates well with other Google products.
• - Free wiki host. Allows you to create web pages that anyone with a password can quickly and easily edit. Great for community knowledge construction and information gathering.
• - Free wiki host. Has a drag and drop editor for easy page layout. Supports audio and video captions.
• - your online notebook based on wiki
• - Quick and easy to way to collaborate online with others. YourDraft creates an online document similar to Microsoft Word and gives you a URL of that document. Others you share the URL with can edit the document too without a password.
• Savable online text document that saves a copy of every edit. Kind of like a one page wiki.
• - Simple web publishing tool: copy and paste content then click publish
• - Free wiki host with a social element that allows users to create their own profile pages. Kind of a blend between PBwiki and Ning!.
• Couchit - Very simple wiki development tool.

(This could also be done with Zoho or Google Docs)

3. Use Quickmark to make QR Codes or Stickybits to make scanable bar codes that can be placed in the fraudulent textbooks which link to pages of your wiki that contain the information your students should be learning.

[Step 3 is derived from a project idea Russ Goerend (@russgoerend) and I came up with via a discussion on Twitter a few weeks ago.]

Geo Game & Text Messaging Idea #iteach

OK, it is 3:00 on December 23rd, with 20 minutes before Christmas break. Why do all my most creative ideas happen when I know I won't be able devote energy to them for at least 2-5 days? Grrr!

So, here is my big Eureka!:

Two tools I have know about for a while now but have not given too much thought to are uMapper and JotYou. uMapper allows you to create your own Google Map-like embeddable maps with pushpin markers and other information. JotYou is a free text messaging service that allows you to send text messages that are location based. Basically, JotYou lets you send messages to anyone on your contact list who is within so many feet/meters/yards of a specific GPS coordinate. It also lets you set times on those messages so they are delayed or persistent. These two tools used in conjunction could be used to create highly engaging geo games.




Here are just a few, off the top of my head, applications:

1. Create an adventure based on a piece of literature (ex. Turn your school grounds into Mordor).
2. Historical tour.
3. Scavenger hunts.

It is now 3:15 and I need to go. If you can think of any other creative uses of these two tools please leave a comment.

JotYou™ - Location Based Mobile Messaging via kwout

Augmented Reality - Imagine The Possiblities

Try it out yourself:

boffswana.com/news/?p=392
ge.ecomagination.com/smartgrid/#/augmented_reality

Video Credits:
youtube.com/watch?v=oHkUOpYNhoM
youtube.com/watch?v=EL2ByYozGOI

Music:
John Lennon - Imagine

Augmented Reality

This post is in response to a post that was made today at Muve Forward titled, "Virtual to Augmented to Holographic Reality." In that post Chris Topher shares with us the following video he found on YouTube regarding augmented reality:



Imagine the possibilities here. I have often pondered how such a mashup with the real world could happen and if in the future this will become commonplace. We are approaching, with this and what I will follow it with, very close to making some of the more awesome technologies from science fiction possible. Growing up, the one thing I wanted more than anything to become reality was the holodeck on Star Trek TNG. So, to follow with Chris' post, here are some things I have dug up in the past 6 months that blew me away along the same lines:





I also saw a video this fall on YouTube that I can seem to locate today that showed a Korean University student who put together a project that used three cameras to track the motion and capture the appearance of a person and import that image as the avatar in a virtual world. In other words, total visual immersion.

Chris Dede - Community of Interest Discussion: Role-Playing Games and Simulations in K-12 Classrooms - notes

https://wiki.ties.k12.mn.us/Chris+Dede

What if we did this without the media?

-the control in the River City experiment used a traditional lab instruction
-these paper based control curriculum, they believe, are better than average instruction
-Kids liked the technology/media complimented approach better

Are we doing kids a disservice by banning cell phones?

-At Harvard they have invested a lot of $ in making each seat tech ready with power outlets, Internet access, etc.
-Instructors are saying, "put the cell phone away, turn off the laptop"
-We are not going to integrate these things fully in the short term
-We can find activities for students to use cell phones sometimes.

How are you assessing that learning is taking place? (with the augmented reality project)

-have pre and post measures that measure the high stakes tests
-have diagnostic information from the handhelds to show what functions the kids are using
-include things like attendance records
-look for things beyond the test that show evidence of real learning

Jigsaw pedagogy - collaborative learning where each student must find and contribute a piece to the problem for the success of the entire group.

What professional development?

-smallest part is how to use the technology (kid can learn in 5 min, adult in 15 min.)
-Rivercity - 8 hours of professional development
-biggest part of 8 hours is how to have a collaborative discussion
-Rivercity already takes care of classroom management and engagement and allows teachers to dive right in to a collaborative discussion. (I suspect this is true of nearly all virtual world based instruction)

It looks like you have applied a progressive movement of education to technology. How does this stem from prior educational movements like progressive education movement?

-it stems from progressive education, Montessori, and Dewey
-technology making three things possible
1. society is valuing higher order skills that cannot be taught through traditional instruciton
2. technology helps standardize the learning process
3.

How does something like this scale?

-There are a couple things that will happen over time that will help
-we have a bad sense of first generation curriculum and assessments
-hope the next group of stakeholders takes a look at second generation curriculum and assessments
-argues with colleagues that say school is too hard to change and that we need to focus on informal learning

How do you see a students day evolving to blend the old and new?

-I would be horrified by a school that uses only immersive technologies for instruction
-I would like to see these immersive technologies three times in a course. First in the beginning and students would be lost and see the relevance of the learning. Second, midway as a diagnostic tool. Finally in the end as a summative experience.
-This is a nice blend of the old and the new.
-We must be much more nible in learning how to use web 2.0

What can we expect the web 3.0 to look like?

-unresolved contradiction between 1.0 and 2.0
-Web 1.0 gives you a way to listen to an expert at any time
-Web 2.0 is bottom up giving users the ability to tell us what they want
-Web 3.0 recognizes that both sides have merit
-building a social tagging project with students -www.edtags.org- looks like other social tagging systems - goes beyond by giving a concept map that shows how other people's tags are related- ranks users from top to bottom showing users whose tags are most like yours to those whose tags are least like yours

How might this stuff migrate down to the primary grades?

-would rather see students in the elementary schools learning the classic literacies
-we know that kids need real world sensory stimuli when kids are young - we don't want students to learn how to look up and down by having their avatar look up and down

How does ESL apply to your work with Rivercity?

My hypothesis with River city was students who were dyslexic and ESL would not do as well.
-All studies prove this wrong
-All students with these disabilities do as well because students collaborate as a team.

What about chronic behavior problems?

-We see increases in attendance.
-Teachers report that behavior issues go way down.
-Problem is kids who are engaged but not learning, kids are fooling around but not learning.

TIES 2007 Chris Dede: Immersive, Collaborative Simulations and Neomillennial Learning Styles: Implications for Education - notes

https://wiki.ties.k12.mn.us/Chris+Dede

Today's information is to vast and coming at us too fast for anyone to keep up with alone.

Rapid advances in information Technologies

Worries about whether our children are being prepared for the new information environment.

Division of Labor - which jobs are done by machines, which jobs are done by people

2 skills people are better at than machines
1. Expert Decision Making
2. Complex communication

Why teach something you can look up on Google in 15 seconds or less?

Learning Styles
-Sensory-based
-Personality-based
-Attitude-based
-Media-based

It is the media you use today that shapes your learning styles.
Some kids today do not act or learn like "digital natives" because of how they use digital media.

Juggling between digital media devices is not necessarily good or bad but it is characteristic of 21st century work.

Thinking has become distributed.

Cognition is distributed across human minds.

Showed video illustrating how necessary it is to be connected and be fluent with new communication technologies (cell phone, text messaging, IM, videoconferencing, etc).

New literacies are evolving as technology evolves.

The challenge is not to solve the problem but to understand the problem.

Multi-user Virtual Environments and wearable devices are next generation tools.

Most people see Muve's through the lens of video games.

Content in most online games are garbage.

We want to build things that are game-like because we want to harness the engagement of games.

Rivercity.

Fire is a wonderful technology because just by being near it you get a benefit from it.

Computers unfortunately you have to use to benefit from it.

The pedagogy is important.

Situated Learning - powerful in life but classrooms are removed from the real world
-can we have situated learning with muve's?

Ubiquitous Computing
-Augmented Reality
-Today no one really knows how many motors or microprocessors they own.
-Not necessarily good - Minority Report
-We now have the ability to create intelligent objects
-Handheld Augmented Reality - Alien Contact -Aliens landed outside of school and students work in teams to figure out why the aliens are there and what they should do about it. They have to work in teams to connect the information to get a clear picture.

Students are inside some sort of collaborative simulation and are using it to develop some sort of 21st century skill.

Soon cell phones will be capable of doing augmented reality.

Your students are struggling...lets give them something harder.

Neomillennial Learning Styles-Learning based on experience
-Students in the web 2.0 environment like to co-design their learning experience. They like to co-teach.
-They like to work together to construct knowledge

Unlearning is much harder than to learn

Changing adult behavior patterns is emotional - exactly the single biggest challenge in my role as technology curriculum integration specialist

media shape their messages
media shape their participants
infrastructures shape civilization

Solution to dark future is education

We need to avoid a world where an avatar world thrives while the real world rots away.