#gafesummit Oklahoma 2015

I decided to spend some time at lunch today thinking about the things I thought about a conference this past weekend at which I was with the 'cream of the crop' of educators here in Oklahoma. It was a valuable conference and worth every penny spent on attendance. The conference was a Google Apps for Education Summit (#gafesummit)

I was privileged to attend the pre-summit which began the process of preparing me to become a certified Google Education Trainer. This was some very valuable training and helped to further conceptualize how you can integrate SO many different apps/programs/sites with GAFE.

I think initially when I thought about attending the pre-summit, I thought it would be good for some 'on-the-side' consulting work as more and more districts/schools will be moving to GAFE in the coming years. However, after attending, I realize that I have more than I can handle to get my own faculty ready to meet the coming challenges of the Digital Education Environment.

I learned some new things, such as croak.it and some more innovative uses of socrative.com. The pre-summit was a great time of thinking about the challenges we face in education with our students and how to overcome those challenges.

If you aren't a teacher, you may not know the wide variety of access many of our students (don't) have. Some students have some access at home (desktop, wireless internet, etc.), some have smartphone access only, some have both, while there are some students who have no access to the interwebs at all. One of the primary questions I have (as a teacher) is: "How do I get each of my students equal access?" (at least while they are in my classroom) As an instructional designer, that question changes slightly. Rather, how do I get my faculty to (1.) allow their students to have on-demand access? (2.) How do I help those faculty create a culture of trust for technology use in their classrooms, especially when we aren't modeling that culture of trust? (3.) What are the pre-requisite issues I need to solve/change with my faculty in order to empower them to innovate in their classrooms? In other words, just because I am not married to ANYTHING I do in the classroom, my faculty may not be quite so willing, so how do I sell innovative practice to them?

Often, when I attend conferences, I may not learn a ton of new things (beyond the new webapp or add-on for browsers), but I am pushed into thinking about my faculty and how we can move their student engagement up a notch, how to deepen their understanding of difficult concepts (through on-demand remediation) and/or how to push their students to be learners who (1) enjoy learning (2) are motivated to learn (3) and are able to see the relevancy of what they are learning. This conference really did that for me.

I had an opportunity to meet some great folks and expand my PLN, both here in Oklahoma and throughout the US. I heard some great keynotes by Holly Clark, Mark Hammons, and Lise Galuga. We thought about the adjacent possible, moved toward future-ready, and decided that an elephant is best eaten one bite at a time. Overall, the weekend was a total success.

Thanks @edtechteam for a great learning experience, thanks @bmchs1 for hosting, and thanks to @BekahHightower for your hard work in coordinating the entire thing.

One more thing, I did present a couple of sessions, but my favorite was the new presentation I did about the great work we are doing here at Canadian Valley Technology Center using Google Scripts. I had a full session so I broadcasted/recorded on YouTube so others could attend virtually.

Using Scripts with Google Drive to Track Student/Teacher Progress

I've been at a conference for the last couple of days and had an opportunity to share some of the great things we are doing at Canadian Valley Technology Center, specifically in using scripts to create calendar events (like a bus request), automated progress reports, professional development transcripts, and teacher evaluations (coming soon).

Background:

The first script I ever used was one which would send the results of a form to someone other than the person submitting it. I found it online, changed the email address, and made it work. That looks pretty simple now, but it started me on a journey which has led me to my current place in learning programming.

Gist:

We have started using scripts (which are bound to Google spreadsheets, calendar, forms, etc.) to take the results of a form (set up as a way for instructors to enter their professional development for the semester), create a copy of a template, replace all information in <<>> with information from the form, move it into a shared folder (one shared with the teacher's supervisor), share the document with the teacher (view rights only), and email a link to the document to the teacher. 

This was the first project we used to integrate the automation power of Google Scripts. We have since created an automated transportation request (auto-creates) an event on the bus/van/etc. calendar. We have also moved to a Google Sheets gradebook (from an Excel template), with automated progress reports. 

We are on about the 4th iteration of each of these as it has been a somewhat large learning curve for someone like me who had zero programming experience. I have done about 1/2 of the codecademy.com Javascript course which has enabled me to begin to conceptually understand Scripts within Google. 

But it takes so long!

Like every other kind of technology I have ever used in the classroom, yes, it takes a lot of time. However, all of the time you invest on the front side (development) you will get back probably two-fold on the backside. Time spent doing paperwork is reduced to nearly nothing. I remember the first school I worked at had a person who taught part time and the other part of her job was tracking professional development. This first script would have eliminated that entire part of her job. Not that I am in favor of people losing their jobs, but maybe that person could focus more on instruction? Or remediation? 

Next Steps:

If you are a Google District and you have someone who is willing to learn or already knows Javascript, I would highly recommend giving someone the autonomy to begin integrating something like this. There are scripts already written which people will/can share (I'm glad to share any I have done) and if you need help, some great resources are the Scripts documentation and stackoverflow.com. I do a lot of searching for help. 

If you would like to connect more about this topic, I'm happy to do so. You can connect through about.me/jbowie. If I can help you with anything, please let me know!

Cognitive Flexibility Memory aka Photoshop of the Mind

Do you think your technology use has affected the way you think and learn?  

Yes. Absolutely. I went back to school in 2004 and that was a time in which technology was really making serious in-roads into education. We were using Blackboard, heavily using email, and my undergraduate degree was in Science Education. We utilized technology in a variety of ways in the lab. No longer did I write papers with a pen and paper (or word processor/typewriter) like I did in the late 80’s. I could type my thoughts out about as fast as I could think them (as my typing speed improved). I wonder if that was the cause of Nietzsche's change in writing style when he moved to the typewriter? Maybe he was actually processing his thoughts at a faster rate than he did with a pen and paper? I could see an argument both for and against this (think about speaking a response vs. writing out a well-articulated response to someone's question).

If so, has the change been positive or negative?

I, too, have experienced the difficulty in engaging with long-texts. I’m working to get my habits of mind back to being able to engage with those longer texts (out of necessity - otherwise I might never finish this program!). I enjoy the snippets of information on the web. Twitter gives me a tremendous amount of information. I engage with only some it deeply. However, it has exposed me to so much more knowledge than I would have been able to see without it (twitter). Learning on the web (isn’t everything web-based now days?) is a bit like being a public education student. You get a tremendous amount of information and only some of the it sticks. To use Carr’s example, public education is much like the pancake. Students cover a huge breadth of subjects yet their shallow understanding of those subjects can often be problematic. Without going too far on a tangent, I attribute this problem more to education’s woes in testing (data-driven nature) rather than students’ inability to think deeply.

What ideas do you have for how the design of technology could facilitate positive, rather than negative, changes in human thinking and learning habits?  

I’m not entirely sure that I have anything new to add to the design of technology. I enjoy utilizing technology to encourage collaboration and get students to engage with (the instructor and) one another in new, deeper, more meaningful ways. That said, one big piece for me is to have students access knowledge (the internet) and do something with that information. An example might be to pull something from the news (say a natural disaster) and have students analyze it from a scientific (conceptual) point of view, a resilience (recovery) point of view, and a moral worldview. As Spiro pointed out, have students engage with a single mini-case from several different conceptual standpoints. While reading this part of the 1990 text excerpt, I kept thinking about Photoshop. If you are at all familiar with PS, you know that it works with layers. So you take several layers (each of which could stand on its own) and lay them on top of one another to form an image (which could be completely separate from the layers). The best part about this CF theory is the “multiplicative” nature of it - the sum of the parts being greater than the whole (which applies to one of my favorite physics theories, too).

For example, how can technology promote cognitive flexibility, or any other positive consequences you can imagine?

If I may digress a bit here, in education (specifically K-12) administration (including all elected officials) feel that education is a well-defined domain. They have taken a decidedly reductionist theory of education. One which can be simplified to a series of standards, lessons, and tests. This strategy absolutely will equal greater student achievement. However, practitioners (present company included) likely/hopefully recognize that education is an ill-structured domain. I recognize that there are exceptions to this idea. Young learners who are learning language or writing will eventually arrive at the same destination (a literacy of some degree in writing or speaking). However, when those two skills are required to be applied to life (e.g. a paper or a speech analyzing some big concept in history/business/education/philosophy) we begin to enter a domain which is ill-structured. In fact, isn’t this what education as a whole looks like? We have a series of processes that teachers are required to learn, tests they have to pass, several concepts and educational philosophers they should know (well-structured) and then they are turned loose in a classroom with a group of students and are expected to teach them the ideas, concepts, skills, and knowledge (well-structured - well defined destination with a clear roadmap to get to said destination) they need to know to be successful in life (ill-structured). Additionally, it doesn’t take long to look at the Common Core State Standards to know that we are expecting students to be able to work in an ill-structured domain (connections between subjects), yet how often do we give them the opportunity to do so?

So, what about technology? Our students are (by and large) connected (at a minimum through a smartphone) to the largest body of knowledge ever compiled in the whole of human history. Using technology and mini-cases (Spiro) we have the ability (and I would say the responsibility) to engage students in opportunities to construct their own connections between concepts, ideas, and events. Those concepts, ideas, and events are the layers of the Photoshop image before it has been “flattened” (where all the layers are combined and are no longer parts, but are integral to the whole image) and the connections are the entire image. These “images” constructed by students make up their entire knowledge base (about anything) and are akin to a collage of images (stored in their minds), with a series of layers (many of which may not be in the students minds, but part of the web/body of all human knowledge).

constructivism or instructivism?

Who Am I as A Teacher?
When I was teaching physics, I used both the instructivist and constructivist models in my classroom. I did (and still do in my current classes) a significant amount of lecture and guided questioning; however, we also spent (spend) a significant amount of time with students doing their own independent, student-directed learning.Instructivist - When students were learning fundamental principles, there was lecture. However, I was not the only person in the room doing the talking. During lectures, I asked guiding questions, students would answer in small groups and then share their ideas. Usually, the questions drew on personal experience and were designed to expose misconceptions about the guiding principles. This is often referred to as cognitive disequilibrium (although some call it cognitive disequilibration) espoused by Piaget (see equilibration), which clearly falls under the constructivist paradigm. So, even though I was using lecture/guided thought, am I an instructivist?

Constructivist - Once students began to master those foundational principles of physics, one day a week, I turned students loose with a computer and my own version of a problem based learning project. They knew the components that were to be included in their artifact, but they were able to do everything else, from picking a topic to designing an experiment/demonstration. This kind of explicit instruction is clearly instructivist in nature.

I use my examples (the links) above to show that in practice, at least for me, the line between constructivism and instructivism is quite blurry. Everything I can think of that I have done/currently do in my classes have components of each theory.

In every class I teach, I start the semester/year with two of my favorite Nature of Science activities: The Checks Lab and The Polar Bear Game. In both activities, students come to understand some of the components of science, i.e. evidence, inference, interpretation, etc. One of the the key concepts I focus on is that we all bring a different viewpoint to the “game of science.” We look at the evidence in different ways. Our experiences change the way we view the world, clearly a constructivist viewpoint. However, I guide students to that realization through questioning, which is instructivist.

Who Am I as A Learner?
When I was a Master’s student, many of my peers were very uncomfortable when the explicit guidelines were not given for a particular project/artifact. They wanted to know exactly what was expected. I found that I learned best when I was not limited by the written expectations of a project. So that indicates to me that I am a constructivist learner, or at least I can function in the role of one. Often, I felt as though I was running a bit “rough-shod” through assignments. Without clear guidance, I felt uncertain as to what I should be doing. However, when I look back on what I learned and how I was influenced by that experience, I feel that my learning was enriched because of the lack of guidance. While I do not have any evidence to support a qualitative claim as to which type of learning/instruction is best, I have my own anecdotal evidence to show what works for me.

So Which Theory is Best?
I hate to be a fence-sitter, but I really think the answer to the question of “Which cognitive theory is best?” is “It depends!” Students of today need to learn some foundational principles of a discipline, but they also need to be able to have enough freedom to explore the ideas and concepts with which they most closely associate relevancy. I have found that with some guidance (instructivist), students can find that relevance in any topic of a discipline (constructivist). That said, the teacher must be receptive enough to his or her students to be able to know when instructivism is needed and flexible enough to give students what I like to call “learning room.”

In the hotly debated Kirschner, Sweller, and Clark (2006) article, the authors use a constructivist model to make their point. I find it ironic (not just coincidental) that the authors use their own experiences to influence their knowledge base. They came up with a question, designed an experiment and/or used other’s experiments, and interpreted the results to make a claim. They even cite their own research as evidence in favor of their claims (Sweller is referenced no less than 21 times). Does anyone else see the irony there? I do not mean to imply that this is poor practice, but when you are trying to make a point and your practice supports the opposing viewpoint, it is, to say the least, amusing.

While not explicitly stated, I supposed the mention of “novice learner” by both Downes and Kirschner, et al  indicates that everyone can agree that activities in learning need to be age-appropriate. For instance, it would not be appropriate to turn lower-elementary aged students loose on the Internet, although Dr. Sugata Mitra would likely disagree. However, if I take some high school students to a play ground with a curved slide and a merry-go-round and ask them to determine some of the basic principles of rotational motion, they might actually be able to “discover” some of them.

No doubt this debate may never be settled. It could be a bit like quantum mechanics. One of the basic concepts is that one cannot know both the position and speed of a given particle, if you know one, you change the other. This is known as the Uncertainty Principle (Heisenberg, 1927).
It is also entirely possible that we may never know whether constructivism is more correct than instructivism; or whether it is the other way around. Another idea in quantum mechanics that a particle can be in two places at once as shown in The Double Slit Experiment (Young, 1803). It may be that constructivism and instructivism are both right and wrong (depending on the circumstance). This is the more likely scenario.

Here we go again

I have no idea if anyone actually gets anything out of what I'm writing, but it's time to start learning again, which means writing/reflection. I've taken about 6 months off from school, but I'm back in class taking it to the next level. This time it's Trends and Issues in Educational Technology.

For class, I've been reading The Cambridge Handbook of The Learning Sciences (R. Keith Sawyer, Ed. 2005). I've just started, but the first part of the book is fantastic!

It begins with a bit of educational history, starting with the early years of Public Education in America and the concept of instructionism. While I write this, my computer says that instuctionism is not a word, but you are all familiar with the concept because it's how you were taught in school. There was a lot of wrote memorization and factual learning, but not a lot of critical thinking or application. It did a good job of preparing students for the "industrialized economy of the early 20th century" (Sawyer, 2005). However, in today's knowledge economy, this won't work any longer. Students cannot continue to be taught fact after fact. They cannot continue to be taught the same way they were 100 years ago, because the world is not the same place as it was 100 years ago.  We have to teach students how to think. Thinking is a skill. In order to teach it, students must be put in the position of practicing that skill. The only way they will get better is to practice.

Before picking up this book (on my new Kindle), I'd never heard of the Learning Sciences. I guess I had a vague understanding of what they were/are, but didn't know them by that name. However, beginning in the 1970's and ending in the 1990's, scientists and researchers began to word towards a consensus on the way in which students need to learn to be successful in today's society. Those are:

• It is important for students to gain a deep conceptual understanding. Many of you can probably recite Newton's 2nd law of Motion, but could you apply it to a situation?


• In addition to teaching better, some focus needs to be on students learning better. Great teachers are so important, but if the student (or teacher) doesn't have some grasp on how they learn, it may not do much good. Passive learning is no longer acceptable. Students must take control of their learning and begin to construct their own body of knowledge. (I know, Piaget has been saying this since the 60's!)


• Schools must create an environment where learning can occur. Facts are okay, but teachers and schools need to put students in situations that encourage thinking deeply about concepts and there must be some real world application.


• Successful learning comes as a result of building on the learner's prior knowledge.  Again, no passive learning. Students come in with prior understanding (or misunderstanding) and often only learn enough to pass a test, but their learning in no way affects the way in which they interact with their world.


• Reflection is important. That's why I write here. It's not so anyone can read. It's so I can process. This blog is a place for me to actively analyze my state of knowledge. What did I know before and what do I know now? How are those different? How will what I've learned impact me? Will it? If not, why not?

**bold sections: The Cambridge Handbook of The Learning Sciences, (R. Keith Sawyer, Ed. 2005).

Next week, I'm doing my "final" professional development session with public school teachers. I say final only because it's the last commitment I made while a State Dept. of Ed. employee. I'm supposed to talk about Problem-Based Learning. The early part of this book, while not explicitly so, talks about Problem-Based Learning.

Students need to engage in inquiry, beginning with a driving question and proposing a hypothesis/solution. They need to use complex representations to communicate and collaborate. They also need to use models, represented in some visual format. That's basically what my presentation is, in 3 sentences. If you are a Yukon Public School teacher, don't bother coming to listen. You just got the nutshell version!

Finally, there is a situativity perspective. This means that knowledge is not static. Knowledge is a process. I think of it as a sieve. When you interact with the information, you change what is there and it changes you, as well. It goes beyond simple knowledge acquisition and moves into a fundamental change in the way in which learners collaborate. This change comes as a result of the collaboration.

Bring it on. This is going to be a great class.

In case you are wondering what's going on here, here's a little intro video I made of myself for class.