Google Sites or Blackboard?

A question I get quite often is, "What should I use to manage my class website?"  Whether you want to get away from using a complicated tool like Expressions/SharePoint/FrontPage, or your school site is discontinuing the program you've always used, or you're just looking to improve and/or simplify your communication with students and parents, you have several tools that you can use.  In addition to a number of freely available options, the district supports two choices:  Google Sites and Blackboard.  How do you decide which one you should use?

It depends on what you want your class website to accomplish.  Take a couple of minutes to look at this presentation that I've put together.

The evaluations here are of course my own.  If you have more questions, please let me know.

Google Custom Search

As you are planning for second semester, you might consider including a customized Google search on your class website.  With this tool, you can specify which sites are searched and which are ignored.  For example, if you know several good websites for U.S. History resources, you can set up a custom Google search box on your class website that only searches those particular sites.  It's pretty easy to do; there's help available at Google Support; or you can just get started at www.google.com/cse.

What is My Job?

Last night I presented to the SDUHSD Board of Trustees. Our superintendent had asked me to give a short presentation describing my new position and what I have been working on so far this school year. I appreciated the opportunity to get to speak, and enjoyed the experience. The process of trying to write a concise summary of what I do (as well as the reasoning behind it) really helped me to gather my thoughts. Here are my notes that I wrote out ahead of time; I stuck to them pretty closely, with only a couple of ad-libs.

Many of you know me; I've been a science teacher at La Costa Canyon for the last 16 years, teaching Physics and Earth Science. This year, I'm serving as a Teacher on Special Assignment for Technology and Learning. As you know, this is a new position for our district, so it's an honor and a challenge for me to define exactly what this role is.

One way to think about this role is in the name itself. Many districts have a similar position, working with "Instructional Technology". Ours is "Technology and Learning". It's more than a semantic difference, it signals that our focus is on student learning and what students do, rather than focusing on what teachers do. Obviously, teachers influence what students do, so as Rick and Mike and I have defined my role, it has fallen into two categories: core technical skills, and 21st-century learning.

Most of the work I've done so far this year has been around providing support and professional development for teachers to improve their core technical skills. We've put together a short list of "what a technically competent teacher can do", including skills with Aeries.net, Gmail, Google Drive, websites, and instructional technology. We had all teachers respond to this survey, and I'm now working with the site administrators to plan and deliver professional development for teachers who need to get up to speed.

I've worked a lot with teachers at all sites to help them use their websites to communicate effectively with students and parents, and to use Blackboard, our online learning management system, as a complement to their in-class activities. I've supported teachers who are using Plato for the 9th grade health component of PE or for support and intervention classes for students performing below grade level in mathematics or who need extra help to pass the High School Exit Exam. I've also been working with teachers who are using electronic textbooks, as we begin to move in that direction, to make sure that the teachers and students can easily access their class materials.

The other side of my job at this point is to help our district to define what 21st-century learning looks like. Our current education system remains largely a 19th- and 20th-century creation; (and here I am speaking not just about our district but about our country as a whole). This system was designed for an age of information scarcity; in which knowledge was difficult to get, and largely held and disseminated by teachers to students.*  We don't live in that era anymore; we are in an age of information glut; most students have access to more information than they know what to do with, and they can look it up on a powerful computer that they carry around in their pocket, unless we make them turn it off when they enter the classroom.

So if schools are no longer the holders and disseminators of information, then what is the role of schools and teachers? There are a number of groups who have been working on developing sets of 21st-century skills or 21st-century fluencies. It's a little bit unsettling that we are 13 years into the 21st century and are still discussing what 21st-century skills look like; probably educators will still be working on it for another 87 years. But there is a broad agreement that while students have access to all the information they could want, the role of schools and teachers needs to be to teach them what to do with it.  So this is where the notion of skills comes in. The upcoming Common Core standards are much more about skills than about factual knowledge. Students need to be able to find information, curate information, evaluate information, combine information from different sources, work collaboratively with others, and then produce and present their own contributions to the world's knowledge.

Toward this end, I have been working with a small group of teachers from all sites and all disciplines who are interested in experimenting with instructional strategies that can be effective in moving students toward 21st century skills. We've got teachers who are using a strategy known as "flipped learning"; using videos of themselves (among other resources) to provide direct instruction to students who can watch it any time in any place, then using classroom time for interactive activities where the teacher's assistance can be of most use. It's called "flipped" because what was traditionally done in class (direct instruction) is now done at home, and "homework" is now done in class. But it's really about teachers making the best use of scare classroom time with students. There are teachers who are having students produce electronic portfolios to showcase and share what the students have been able to produce. We've got teachers who are using online communication tools like discussion boards and chat rooms to provide extra support for students outside of the school day. This nucleus of teachers is working to explore what kinds of instructional strategies can be effective in helping students to develop the skills they need to be successful in the world of the future.

Thanks for this opportunity to speak to you, and I look forward to continuing to work with the students and teachers all around this district.

*Obviously my thinking here has been heavily influenced by Will Richardson's books, including Why School? and Personal Learning Networks.

EdCamp!

I spent Saturday in Los Angeles at EdCampLA, an un-conference.  This was a professional development opportunity put on by a group of teachers and sponsored by various companies.  What makes it an un-conference is that there was no pre-set program of presentations.  In the morning, there is an empty session board and a pile of index cards.  Participants decide what sessions they would like to present (if any), then write it up on an index card and post it on the schedule board.

I rode up with Holly Clark, formerly of Carmel Valley Middle School, currently an administrator at San Diego Jewish Academy.  The session was held at the Center for Early Education, in West Hollywood.  We got there a little before 8:00, and the schedule board was empty.  By 8:45 the board was full and the organizers had opened up another room for sessions.  After a few introductions in the gym (which served as the central location for the day), we chose the sessions we wanted to attend and moved out.

The first session I attended was a discussion about flipped learning; the second was a more traditional presentation by a group of four teachers who had prepared their ideas ahead of time.  The third session was one that I had come up with about 8:15 that morning.  I didn't think I would host a session; I knew I hadn't prepared anything.  But as I was talking with people in the morning, I realized that I had a question that I wanted to discuss with colleagues.  So I posted the session, emphasized that it would be a discussion, not a presentation, and started off with "I hope you're not here for answers!"  It turned out to be great having about a dozen dedicated teachers and administrators sitting around talking about effective ways to present professional development.

The last session I attended was about a tool that works with Google Apps to allow you to easily distribute files to students.  I appreciated that the sessions I attended were a nice mix of high-level, thoughtful discussions and immediate-gratification tools-you-can-use-tomorrow.  The other great part about this conference for me was that it was conducted by teachers, for teachers.  There wasn't a vendor in sight, nobody selling a book, just teachers who wanted to talk about their profession and think about how we can all make education better.

Holly and I had already kicked around the idea of bringing an EdCamp to San Diego, specifically to North County.  At lunch, we sat with four or five other San Diego-area teachers who are also interested, and we decided to start planning.  If you're interested in attending, or interested in helping out, let me know!

21st-Century Skills Chapter Review: New Policies for 21st-Century Demands

Linda Darling-Hammond is a professor of education at Stanford University.  In this interview, she recommends four policy changes that will improve the ability of the United States education system to prepare students for the future.

1. An aligned standards, instruction, and assessment system
2. An infrastructure that gives teachers and school leaders sufficient time to do the alignment work
3. Schools that are more supportive of in-depth teaching and learning
4. More equitable distribution of resources

One of the major components of her argument is that drastic education policy shifts over the last several decades have hampered American schools in ways that schools in other countries have not been.  The pendulum swings in emphasis between "skills" and "content" have damaged our ability to teach either.

"If you listen to great teachers, their answer about basic skills and thinking skills is always both/and, not either/or.  These effective teachers balance how and what they teach.  They prepare children both for decoding and for comprehending text.... In math, these teachers teach students both how to compute math facts and how to reason, think, and communicate mathematically.... These are the teachers who stay above the wars and reconcile the pendulum swings in daily practice." (p. 36)

Her prescription for stopping the pendulum swings starts with "respectful discourse":

"All must agree that both content and skills are important for serious schooling in the 21st century. ... [Some] organizations fear that the "skills people" will lose sight of valuable content.  They envision that the skills people will put an undisciplined emphasis on collaboration, teamwork, and project-based learning.  They see students working with clay and toothpicks without actually mastering challenging intellectual content.  On the other side, skills people are worried that the "content people" will try to reduce what is to be known and demonstrated to a list of dry, disconnected facts tested by multiple-choice items without attention to meaning or application."  (p. 41)

I am doubtful, but hopeful, about whether this "respectful discourse" is possible in the current political climate.

21st-Century Skills Chapter Reviews

This book is a collection of fourteen essays and interviews, collected and edited by James Bellanca and Ron Brandt, and published by Solution Tree Press.  The foreword by Ken Kay (president of the Partnership for 21st Century Skills) set the tone for the book.  He lays out the Partnership's vision for essential skills that students need, and elaborates on why they are necessary.

In the next few weeks, I'll be posting capsule reviews and summaries of selected chapters from this book.

Webinars from ISTE Online Learning Group

sigol.iste.wikispaces.net/Webinar+Archives

This link is to a collection of webinars sponsored by ISTE's Online Learning Special Interest Group (sigol).  As of today, the recordings include

• Google Sites - Tricks for Visually and Organizationally Effective Educator Websites
• Online Assessments, Data Collection and You
• Teaching Online: Lessons from the Pros
• Online Learning Awards Showcase
• 60 Web Tools in 60 Minutes
• Models of Blended Learning: What Works for Your District
• Learn from Poway Unified School District's Virtual High School Visionaries