Our New Literacies Presentations

Yesterday, I was part of a small team which gave a presentation about technology and New Literacies at the Massachusetts Department of Elementary and Secondary Education’s Curriculum Summit, which drew about 350 school administrators yesterday (and another day is taking place today). I ran a little voice recorder during our presentations, at the request of a reader here, and I wanted to share those podcasts with you.

First up is Don Leu, who is  a professor at UConn with a long and well-deserved reputation for his work around New Literacies. Don and his team helped lead the Massachusetts New Literacies Teacher Leader Institute this past summer and are now planning to work in another state next summer, handing off the reins here to us teacher-leaders to plan for 2011.

Listen to the presentation (16 minutes)

I shared this presentation the other day, but I’ll add it in again with the podcast.

Listen to the presentation (13 minutes)


A third presentation by a teacher-leader, Polly, who works with other classroom teachers in an educational collaborative is not yet online, but she focused on special education teachers using technology to engage reluctant learners.

Peace (in the podcasts),
Kevin

Reaching out to Rural Teachers

nwp rural websiteThere are still ideas left over from the National Writing Project Annual Meeting that I keep meaning to get back to. This is one of those. I was a co-presenter at a workshop around finding ways to use technology to reach out to teachers and students (and mostly, in this context, NWP teachers) who are geographically apart from others. Given how isolating that experience can be, we wanted to explore the options for teachers to connect with others (again, mostly in context of NWP).

Here is the website that we built (NWP: Across Geographic Boundaries) and shared for the session. But I wanted to share out two things.
challenges share
First, we had a good discussion at the end of the of the session, where participants shared out some ideas that were on their Action Plan. We created a podcast as a way to archive and share the thinking going.

Listen to the podcast

And a colleague from Oregon talked about how their NWP site is using Second Life as a virtual meeting space, all in context of deeper integration of technology across their writing project site. Peggy also shared this video, which is certainly worth watching:

Peace (in the sharing),
Kevin

Book Review: Curriculum 21

My wife is a curriculum coordinator (and media specialists) of a vocational high school, so sometimes her journals and books end up on my radar screen. Curriculum 21: Essential Education for a Changing World, edited by Heidi Hayes Jacobs, caught my eye the other day. The slant in this book is certainly a bit different than I am used to – how to change curriculum to reflect 21st century skills, told primarily from the administrative viewpoint. Of the various contributors here, only one or two seem to have had any real classroom teaching experience. Most of the writers are administrators or keynote speakers at education conferences. Which is not to say the pieces are not valuable. I’d read anything by Tim Tyson and Alan November, and the themes of global connections, sustainable design and digital portfolios are very important.

I admit that I read this book through a certain lens: I am being asked to co-present a session on New Literacies this week before a conference of Massachusetts superintendent, curriculum directors and other administrators. My task is to talk about my classroom. I am so used to having my audience being teachers that I have found this book helpful to step back and look at the larger picture of systemic change and how that might happen. I went back in to my presentation, adding some ideas on how administrators can support classroom teachers.

Jacobs’ message here is that integration of technologies into existing curriculum is not quite the right approach. It can’t be an add-on. Or even a one-to-one replacement. Instead, we would be better off looking at the larger picture of curriculum, and our expected outcomes of learning, and then work to transform classroom practice to meet those learning outcomes. She suggests starting small, one unit of instruction at a time, but she urges us to move 21st Century skills to the front burner of our curriculum design or risk a generation of disengaged learners whose world will look nothing like the classroom.

There is a very valuable handout in the book called “A 21st Century Pledge: A Curricular commitment from Each Teacher” that encourages teachers to be reflective and forward-thinking designers of lesson plans. The pledge notes that the commitment is not using an LCD projector, or having students write on a computer as opposed to a typewriter, or using an interactive whiteboard. Instead, it is a pledge to thoughtfully use technology to enhance content that can be evidenced in student projects and performances. And while the subtitle of the pledge suggests this is for teachers, she has a long section on what administrators must commit to doing, too, including providing support for classroom teachers, tolerate some levels of frustration, and celebrate the victories.

Chapters in the book include examining how the structure of the typical school day and the design of our buildings and classrooms might inhibit students; considering trends in technology that are impacting learning in the lives of young people; understanding the growing importance of media literacy skills; using curriculum mapping to make sustainable change; and mulling over the shift of the classroom from teacher-centered instruction to student-centered learning.

The book ends with some thoughts on the “mindshifts” that will need to happen if we are to transform schools with 21st Century thinking. Again, it is not the tools.

  • We need to move from knowing the right answers to knowing how to behave when the answers are not readily apparent;

  • We need to shift from transmitting meaning to students to finding ways for student to construct meaning;

  • We need to move away from just external evaluations (by the teacher, of student work) to more self-assessment, which breeds improvement.

Peace (in curriculum design),
Kevin

Thank You: Edublog Award Nomination

Thank you to those of you who nominated my blog for the 2010 Edublog Awards. I am honored and humbled to be in the same list as those other bloggers. Wow.

General information about all the categories is here and the section for individual blogs is here. Even if you don’t vote for me, these blogs should be part of your RSS feeds. In particular, I love the Most Influential Blog Post category — some great reading there.

Thanks, again, if you are a reader here. I see you every day I write.

Peace (in the blogging world),
Kevin

Seven Lessons Learned by Watching My Kids Play Basketball

I am rambling a bit here in this post because I am still trying to make some connections, and I do that best by writing it through. The writing helps me think, and glimpse the bigger picture.

Yesterday, two of my sons played organized basketball and both events offered some glimpses to me about learning. First of all, my oldest boy has been playing basketball for years now, and is on a traveling team. He’s in middle school. My little guy is in kindergarten. So the context of these experiences are very different.

My youngest son started on a kindergarten team with the city’s recreation department. He was so excited the other day, he started to do push-ups to get “strong.” He’s been pulled to many basketball games for his older brothers, so he has some sense of the game. Or so I thought.

Lesson One: Don’t assume (I seem to remember that from The Bad New Bears movie, but I won’t break down the word into its parts as Walter Matthau did.)

He is on the Wizards, which has him all in tizzy (he loves magic, Harry Potter audio tapes, etc.) The volunteer coaches seem nice, but when the kids were asked to dribble the ball, my son was clueless. He could barely bounce the ball. It kept bouncing off his foot. When the coaches told the kids to shift to the left hand, my son did not know which was his left hand. It was comical and that inner voice of mine was saying, how come the boy doesn’t know his left hand?

Then, the coaches started up with some drills. Now, remember, these are five and six year old kids. In the span of about 20 minutes, one coach talked about “crossover dribbles” and “pivots” and “in the paint” and “athletic position” and “the BEEF method of shooting.” The kids all nodded, but I don’t think a single one knew what they were nodding to. It’s a good thing they weren’t signing over the deeds to our house.

Lesson Number Two: Teaching requires appropriate vocabulary

The hour of practice ended, and we started to go home. My son was jumping around, yelling about how “magical” the Wizards were. His first practice was a resounding success, in his mind.

Lesson Number Three: Don’t suck the fun out of learning.

As we headed home, I mentioned that he might need to work on his dribbling a bit. He nodded (just like he did to the coaches, I noticed, so he may have not heard a word I said), and I suggested we get his older brothers to show him how to dribble the ball. He smiled, liking that idea.

Lesson Number Four: Use your natural resources.

Later in the day, my older son played his first game of the season in a regional tournament. You know how President Obama used the word “shellacked” to describe the recent election? The same word applied here to this game, and our team was on the bad end of it (we sympathize, Mr. President). It was a blow-out from the opening drive. The other team was bigger, faster, quicker — in just about every category.

Lesson Number Five: Sometimes, the odds are against you, and it is all about how you respond to the adversity.

My son’s coach kept calling timeout, gathering the guys around him. I wondered what he was saying to keep their spirits up. The boys played hard, as hard as they could, but it didn’t do much good. I watched the coach cheering on his team, shouting out encouragement and rewarding good plays with claps and cheers.

Lesson Number Six: Celebrate the accomplishments, even amidst difficulties.

The game ended, and I expected my son to be bummed out by the blowout. He wasn’t. He was disappointed, but he laughed at some of the plays. He seemed to shake off the losing in no time at all and turned his mind towards the game today.

Lesson Number Seven: Perseverance is part of learning.

So, there you go: seven lessons learned from the hard, wooden stands of two basketball events. I guess that idea of sports being a metaphor for life, and for learning, does hold up. It’s all in the lens we use to view it.

Peace (on the court),
Kevin

Resource Handout for New Literacies Presentation

I figured it might be worthwhile to gather up a one-page resource sheet for the administrators who will be in our presentation session this week around New Literacies. Here is a list of what I am including:

Selected Books

Assorted Online Resources

Some Important Videos

Peace (in the sharing),
Kevin

Presentation: Supporting New Literacies


This coming week, I will be co-presenting a session on the topic of New Literacies at a conference sponsored by our state Department of Elementary and Secondary Education. I was invited because of my work this past summer and this school year with the state-sponsored New Literacies Teacher Leader Institute, which involves more than 100 teachers, technology coordinators and administrators developing resources around technology and learning. I am one of ten teacher-leaders of the institute, which recently secured funding for a second year for 2011.

The audience for this particular event will be mostly superintendents, principals and curriculum coordinators, which is a slightly different audience than I am used. They don’t need to know the “how” of what we are talking about — they need to know the “why” of why 21st Century Literacy Skills is expanding into multimodal composition. I imagine they’ll be looking through the lens of accountability for student learning. I figure my short time will be best used showing some student work and then making the case for ways that they (the administrators) can support teachers in the classroom.

Peace (in the sharing),
Kevin

Wandering off to “Imaginary Lands”


I have a huge stack of Imaginary Peaceful Land Travel Brochures and just in time for the report card crunch time, too! Just kidding. My students did a fantastic job on this project. The task: invent an imaginary land that uses elements of our school’s Peacebuilders program and tap into expository and creative writing to create a brochure, including a brief history, descriptions and a map.

I will probably pull out some ones that struck me as very creative in the next week or so, but for now, I am sharing the music video of some of the projects (I took so many pictures that it was too long for Animoto, so I need to create a second one).

Notice how many of them used elements of design: color, layout, images. We talked about design elements here, looking at real brochures, and I was happy to see so many students remembering that and using it in their projects.

Peace (in the sharing),
Kevin

Making a Video Game, part five

(This is part of a continuing series to dive into gamemaking and see what I can learn, and reflect on the possibilities for the classroom. You can read the other posts in this series here.)

I know I came off as a sort of complainer yesterday about my efforts to construct a simple maze game with Gamemaker software (which is free and not worth complaining about, really). To give you a glimpse under the hood of Gamemaker, I thought I would show you two screenshots of the programming that goes on just to make a character move through a maze via keyboard arrow commands.

In the first screenshot, you can see the overview of the editing, where “sprites” have been designated as “objects” in a “room,” where objects are characters and building blocks (such as the walls of the maze) and the room is the game board itself (you can add multiple rooms, too).
Inside look at Gamemaker
In the second screenshot, I went a layer deeper into a single movement of my player, showing how you would designate the player to move “left” with the left keyboard arrow.
Insider look at Gamemaker 2

What I notice is that I need to adapt to a whole new lexicon of language here, from sprites to objects to rooms, not to mention an array of programming options that are available to use, such as collisions, key presses, key releases, alarm, step, set variables, etc. It’s like wandering into a world of strange words where the meaning I think a command might have is not always what the command does in the game. I really have to come at it with a different mindset.

My next task: to figure out how to get other pieces (ie, objects) moving randomly in the game which my player will have to avoid, or risk losing points. That sounds simple enough, but here is some of what I will have to do to accomplish this:

  • Create a sprite
  • Turn the sprite into an object
  • Designate a movement action (random movements or specified movements)
  • Make sure the object stays inside the game (ie, bounces off walls)
  • Make sure the object can collide with players
  • Designate a negative point for each collision
  • Make sure that negative point tally is reflected in the player’s overall score (they will need to reach a certain score to win the game)

That is pretty complex and there are lots of steps that need to be done in those actions. I sure hope I can find a good tutorial to help me out. Youtube, here I come!

Peace (in the gaming),
Kevin

Making a Video Game, part four

Yesterday, I just about threw up my hands and said, enough.

What had me in a huff was the tutorial that I was using to create a video game (I’ve been writing all week about my adventures in creating a video game using Gamemaker8 software). At first, the PDF tutorial on how to create a maze game seemed pretty straightforward. But it took a turn for the worse in a single section that I needed the most: how to program the game so that the player can move their character through the maze with the arrow functions on the keyboard.

The tutorial just jumped over about five steps and clearly, the writer thought I knew more than I knew, or that I had enough programming mojo to figure out what I should have already known. I didn’t, and I couldn’t, which is why I was using the tutorial in the first place.

So, I almost gave up, and came close to declaring that this kind of project would never work in the classroom. If I was frustrated, what would happen to my students?

So, I thought, what would my students do?

I turned to YouTube, and sure enough, I found a tutorial posted by umarshiekh2002 that walked me, silently, through the entire process of setting up a very simple maze game. (Thanks Dude!) I was pausing, playing, creating and going over it a few times in this strange silence (we expect sound from videos, don’t we?) except for me talking to myself and suddenly, I had my simple maze up and running.

Success!

It reminds me of how many resources there are out there and how powerful search engines can be. I was reminded of the recent NWP Makes! session that I took part of in Orlando, where we talked about an entire online culture of people sharing how they do things through videos and screenshots, and this video tutorial that unlocked the maze for me is certainly a prime example of that.

As to my thoughts of applicability in the classroom, I am still mixed on it. Now, I am thinking, this might be better for a summer camp for a smaller, more focused set of gamer kids. Much to mull over …

Meanwhile, I wanted to try to post my simple game to the YoYo Games site (home of Gamemaker8) and that was breeze. Wanna try my simple maze? You might need the Gamemaker plugin to launch the game.

YoYoGames

Screenshot_of_sample_maze_with_me_as_icon_2_

Mazing It
Added: 02 December 2010
By: dogtrax

I still need to learn to add roaming elements to the maze, and award points for collecting items, before I can start in real development to my game idea I am calling Running Late. But I feel as if I am on the right track (notice I was able to use my own avatar icon in the game, which means I can draw my own game pieces for my Running Late maze. Another mystery solved ..)

Peace (in the game),
Kevin