Bill Van Loo’s Design and Technology Education blog

The Open Education blog completed a three part series on the digital commons and the preservation of the open source concept, and the blog’s editor, Tom Hanson, was kind enough to ask for a comment from me in the course of writing the series. You can read what I said here:

http://www.openeducation.net/2008/02/26/the-open-digital-commons-a-truly-endless-array-of-success-stories/

Wouldn’t it be great if we encouraged students to try revising work this much, and gave them the opportunities to do that in a safe environment?

http://www.37signals.com/svn/posts/408-james-dyson-on-living-a-life-of-failure

I’m pleased to announce that I’ve just created a new blog and a new Flickr account for the Honey Creek Middle School web design class. We’re going to be redesigning Honey Creek’s website as our class project, and so there’s a new blog and Flickr account to document our progress.

Here’s the new blog: Honey Creek Web Design Class Blog

Here’s the class Flickr site: http://www.flickr.com/photos/honeycreektech/

The class will be updating this site as we work, and I’ll be posting relevant stuff to it for the class to read and reflect on. Should be a fun process!

When I started this blog, I intended it to be mostly a list of resources for design & technology teachers. I started it while I was still finishing my teaching certificate work at Eastern Michigan University, and I kept finding great resources that I wanted to share. That will still be the case, but with a change in my situation, it’s going to be expanded to include other reflections, too.

The change in my situation is this: last Friday, I accepted a job as the new Technology Specialist for Honey Creek Community School in Ann Arbor, Michigan.

A little backstory: In my previous career, I worked as a Web developer in downtown Detroit for a company called i33 communications for about 8 years. In August of 2005, I left i33 in order to pursue a post-baccalaureate teaching certificate full-time. I finished that program at Eastern Michigan University in April this year, and after a long job hunt during the summer, found the position at Honey Creek.

At Honey Creek, I’ll be doing a mixture of two roles. As the school’s Technology Specialist, I’m in charge of our technology assets, including maintaining, updating, and administering the computers and other technology. As the Technology teacher, I’ll be doing hands-on classroom instruction, working both independently as well as teaming with the other
classroom teachers.

As you can see, I’ve been taking photos of my progress so far, most of which show my progress in getting my office space cleaned out, organized, and getting the school’s computers ready for the start of school next Tuesday (September 4, 2007).

Some reflections on my first week:

I definitely wished I had worn my Gerber multitool my first day on the job. We started at noon on Monday, and after a 3-hour staff meeting (which was great, contrary to what you’d think reading that), I got to spend a few hours working on cleaning up my office. I probably spent an hour just breaking down boxes!

On the upside, I have good cell reception and full bars of Airport wireless network in my office, so that’s nice.

On Tuesday, I really learned what a great team I joined. Honey Creek is moving its media center from one room to a larger 2-room space, and the old room is becoming a middle school classroom. My colleague who’s getting that room was mildly freaked out by the fact that her classroom was still filled with books and shelves 7 days before school was due to start, so mid-day Tuesday we all pitched in and helped clear stuff out. In 90 minutes, we made some serious damage, and she pretty much had her room cleared out and ready to be cleaned & prepped by the end of the day!

The school’s computers are all Macs, with a wide mix of old and new. There are plenty of old iMacs running OS9, some eMacs running OS X, and a bunch of iBooks running OS X, along with a random mix of a few other things. One thing I’d forgotten, due to not spending much time in it for a few years - OS 9 is SO FAST and RESPONSIVE! Amazing. I wouldn’t trade the power and flexibility of OS X, but it was really surprising to realize how quick the OS felt when moving around in it.

More reflections to come - after all, school starts on Tuesday! You can see more photos from Honey Creek at the Flickr site I maintain as a parallel to this blog.

One Wednesday during my student teaching, I decided to teach the 20-minute 8th grade advisory class, which my cooperating teacher and I usually split. Wednesdays are always “Family Day”, as opposed to the normal study and quiet reading days, and on “Family Day”, we usually try to have some sort of conversation with the students. That particular Wednesday, I was given the task of passing out brochures about the process of transitioning to high school.

One would think this topic would be of particular importance to 8th graders who were a little more than half-way through their final year of middle school - in just a few months, really, they would be moving on to the wild world of high school. As I started discussing the topic with them, however, I realized that many of them had no idea of the importance their high school experience could hold.

I decided at that point to try to get down to what I perceive as reality: that there’s no way that the educational system can truly prepare students for the future. One popular meme these days among educators is the idea that we are preparing students for jobs that don’t exist yet.

I am a personal testament to this idea, in fact, and I told the group of 8th graders that. My own experience is this: when I graduated from high school in 1993, there was (for all intents and purposes) no such thing as the World Wide Web. Although Tim Berners-Lee first came up with the idea in 1989, it wasn’t until 1993 that the Mosaic Web browser was first released, and it took several years past that for the Web to truly begin to explode. In other words, I couldn’t have told my high school guidance counselor that I wanted to go to college to be a “Web developer”, and yet I began doing paid Web development only two years into my college career, and went on to work in the Web development industry for another 8 years after graduation (most recently for i33 communications in Detroit).

The wildly popular presentation “did you know” points out this idea of “preparing students for jobs that don’t exist yet” and gives a number of amazing statistics to support this idea. For example, the claim is made that the top 10 in-demand jobs for 2010 did not exist in 2004. As the presentation states, “We are currently preparing students for jobs that don’t yet exist, using technologies that haven’t been invented, in order to solve problems we don’t even know are problems yet.”.

My challenge to my 8th graders was this: how can you use the opportunities that high school presents to prepare yourself for this world you will live in? What things do you see as being important? I went down the list of subject areas - take Language Arts, for example. What language arts skills did the 8th graders think would be important? They listed such things as the ability to write well, in order to communicate with team members who might be in different cities.

We talked about foreign languages. I presented the fact that the most widely-spoken language in the world is Chinese, yet there were no offerings for this language at any of the Ann Arbor high schools (to my knowledge, and a quick survey of the Ann Arbor Public Schools website confirms this - the offerings are Spanish, French, German, and Latin). I wondered out loud why that might be? One student spoke up and asked me if I knew Chinese myself? I admitted that I did not, but wondered if I might have to in 10 years in order to survive.

This whole exchange served to further a growing question in my mind: what does it truly meant to do “professional development” as a teacher in the world we live in, where new technology can so radically change the dynamic of interactions between people, where jobs can be outsourced at will, where a middle school student today might be doing a job that does not yet exist for a company that does not yet exist, in an industry that does not yet exist?

On his blog, Weblogg-ed, Will Richardson writes about this question this way:

“In a world where knowledge is scarce (and I know I’m using that phrase an awful lot these days), I can see why we needed teachers to be, well, teachers. But here’s what I’m wondering: in a world where knowledge is abundant, is that still the case? In a world where, if we have access, we can find what we need to know, doesn’t a teacher’s role fundamentally change? Isn’t it more important that the adults we put into the rooms with our kids be learners first? Real, continual learners? Real models for the practice of learning? People who make learning transparent and really become a part of the community?”

Here are my some of my thoughts about these issues.

First, I think it’s important to know that you have to have a deep connection with your students before you can begin to address these sorts of issues. The sort of real, tangible, “this speaks to the world I live in” kind of conversations that we need to have can only happen if all the other junk has already been dealt with. I’m a firm believer in the Love and Logic methodologies, having worked toward applying them in my own family and then working through the “Teaching with Love and Logic” and “Creating Classrooms Where Teachers Love to Teach and Students Love to Learn” books directed at educators. Digging even further into the Love and Logic ideas and applying them more (and more consistently) is an area where I plan on continuing to improve myself as a parent and teacher, but I find, even in my relatively limited experience as an educator, that it gives a great framework for building the necessary kind of trust and relationships.

Secondly, I think that students have to know you don’t see yourself as the source of all knowledge. In the area I teach in (Technology and Design), this is particularly easy to emphasize, as our program is all about the kind of problem-solving and self-discovery that a world of diffused knowledge demands. My answer to most student questions along the lines of “how do I do this?” tends to be “what do you think?”, and my second question tends to be, “where could you find out?”. By taking this stance, I am purposefully forcing students out of the box that says the teacher knows everything. Now, I still forget sometimes (and steal away a chance for a student to learn on their own) by simply giving them the information, but it’s something I’m cognizant of.

So how do we, as teachers, learn to teach in this new world? How do we not only take a stance that recognizes that we don’t know everything, but must actively work to remain relevant and deeply knowledgeable? As a brand-new teacher, having the limited experience of substituting and student teaching, I can only point to the tools and techniques I’ve always used to stay on top of things.

The phrase “life-long learner” gets bandied around a lot, and while it’s something I absolutely believe in, I think there are two areas that bear examining in the context of educators: attitude and tools. I’d like to look at each of these areas and explore some ideas surrounding each.

Attitude

I believe teachers need to see themselves as directly responsible for their own professional development, regardless of whatever the district or building happens to provide. Harry Wong, in his landmark book “The First Days of School“, talks about this very issue. He writes, “Leaders have control over their own lives. They know that the good things in life come from what they earn from within themselves. They generate their own happiness, and much of that comes from serving and sharing with others” (page 280, “The First Days of School”).

Almost as an aside, this idea of “sharing with others” is particularly important. Wong is saying here that it’s not just about getting all this new knowledge for yourself that makes you a leader, a great teacher, a professional. He’s saying that it’s about sharing this stuff with other people! As it happens, many of the tools that we have at our disposal are geared toward just that: sharing. More about that later, though.

This idea that Wong points out in “The First Days of School”, about being responsible for your own continued learning, absolutely rings true in my own experience. In my previous life as a Web developer, I became deeply interested in the fields of information architecture and interaction design, and purposefully forced myself out of doing strictly programming and into these new areas of interest by doing a number of things. I believe the most important thing was that I took the initiative myself. I subscribed to topical e-mail lists. I read Web pages. I found out about conferences, and bugged my employers until they actually sent me to one, and then I started looking for the next one to go to as well. I offered up ideas, and looked for opportunities. In short, I invented a position for myself, because I was willing to take on the task of educating myself about what I wanted to do. I see my role as a teacher as no different.

Here’s a difficult thing, though: can you teach someone to be a life-long learner? Can you truly change their attitude? I’m not sure. I believe that we, as teachers, are responsible for encouraging people, whether they be teachers or students, to find out more about the subjects they’re dealing with and grow in their knowledge and experience. I believe that we’re to be enthusiastic. I believe that we’re to share our own tools and techniques. I also believe that much of the responsibility lies with the individuals, however. Those who choose to succeed will do so.

Wong makes great points about how teachers’ perceptions of their roles determines their actions. Those who see teaching merely as a job will take whatever “professional development” is handed to them, and not seek out any more. Those who embrace their role as professionals, however, will see “professional development” as something they do naturally, because it’s integral to their role as an educator and leader in their learning community.

Tools

Having talked about the attitude educators need to truly be life-long learners and professionals, I now want to talk about some tools that educators can use in this goal. All of what I write about here is based on my own experience using these tools in my professional careers as both a Web professional and an educator, and I offer these experiences up in hopes that they may help someone else.

RSS Feeds

As an example of how teachers can stay in tune with the latest, take the example of RSS feeds. For those who don’t know, an RSS feed is a piece of technology that lets you “subscribe” to a website, using a special piece of software called a newsreader. Newsreaders can be stand-alone applications or Web-based, and they let you keep an eye on many Web sites at once - they show you all the headlines from the sites you’ve subscribed to.

According to my RSS newsreader (which happens to be the Web version of Newsgator), I am currently subscribed to 123 RSS feeds. This means that any time one of those 123 Web sites updates their content, my newsreader knows to show the new articles or content as a new item. The RSS feeds I read span a huge variety of topics, and an increasing number of them have to do with teaching, as I move into my new career.

An off-line equivalent might be this: let’s say you have 100 authors whose work you might be interested in reading. Instead of having to buy 100 magazines every month, with the hope that their work has been published, these authors instead mail you copies of their articles the moment they’re done writing them. It’s completely impossible in the physical world, but that’s exactly how RSS feeds work.

Blogs

Now, at some point the tools bleed over into the thinking process, or vice-versa. Take this piece I’m writing, for example, I could have written it as a traditional paper, mailed copies to some friends I thought would be interested, or even distributed it via e-mail to everybody in my address book. That would be one way of getting my thoughts out there. I could even have sent it to a journal or magazine in hopes of getting it published (not likely!), where it might have been seen by the journal’s entire subscriber base. The problem with all this, however, is that it’s a completely one-way street. There’s no chance for people to respond to the thoughts I’ve put down here, no way for them to easily point other people to the same thing.

The fact that I write this as a blog post, however, means several things:

1. People can easily find it via Google

2. People can e-mail the link back and forth

3. Those who use an RSS newsreader will automatically get this new post in their newsreader if they’ve subscribed to my blog’s RSS feed

4. People can comment on what I’ve written here, using the comments form below.
These four things, among other attributes I haven’t mentioned, add up to more than just a new form of publishing. What we’re dealing with here is a new way to have a conversation. Sure, it’s a conversation that’s fragmented across different sites, and held in an asynchronous way (since it’s not a group of people sitting down at the same time talking), but it’s a global conversation none the less.

Case in point: one of the blogs I’ve been reading for the last 6 months or so is the wonderful Thinking Stick. The Thinking Stick is a blog about educational technology, written by Jeff Utecht. Now, Jeff writes some really interesting stuff about using new technology in the classroom. He’s the kind of person I’d be happy to sit down and have a face-to-face conversation with, except for one thing:

He’s in Shanghai, China.

Now, there’s no way I would have bumped into Jeff in person in the “real world”. The likelihood that he might have published an article I would have read in a journal is slightly higher, and if I’d read it I probably would have nodded my head in agreement with what he wrote, and moved on. But because I read Jeff’s writing from his blog, with my RSS newsreader automatically feeding me with anything he writes, I have a constant connection to what he’s doing.

Photo/Video sharing

During my student teaching experience, I started taking photos. At first, I intended to use them only to document what I’d done in my student teaching, and to put together some classroom materials. However, I soon realized that my cooperating teacher’s Web page could really benefit from showing more student work. I started a Flickr page for the classroom (viewable at http://www.flickr.com/photos/fmsteched/).

After I showed the page to my students, something remarkable happened. Students starting asking me to take pictures of their work so they could show their parents what they were doing when they got home. I had one student print out a picture from the site because he was so excited about it. Parents got to see these photos during parent-teacher conferences, when we set up laptops that played slideshows of the students’ work.

The important piece about taking these photos wasn’t that I documented the student work, although I believe that’s definitely important. It was that the work was documented and made available - shared with the world at large. Not only can our students point people to their work, but others can find it, and comment on it. That’s a huge hook for engaging students, and we as teachers need to learn to use technology like this in new and interesting ways.

Concluding Thoughts

So, let’s assume you’re an educator who’s just finished reading what I wrote above, and wants to jump in. Where do you start? Here are some ideas.

First, take a look at a few of the education blogs I read. They’ll (hopefully) give you a sense of the way things are changing, and certainly stimulate some new thinking about how technology and the changing world affect your life as an educator.

Weblogg-Ed, written by Will Richardson

http://weblogg-ed.com

The Thinking Stick, written by Jeff Utecht

http://www.thethinkingstick.com/

The Fischbowl, written by Karl Fisch

http://thefischbowl.blogspot.com
Second, explore some of the tools I discussed. Take a look around Flickr, the premier photo-sharing site (in my opinion). Spend a little time exploring YouTube or Google Video, if you haven’t already (apologies if these are blocked in your district - YouTube is blocked in the Ann Arbor Public Schools, and it sometimes frustrated me when I wanted to show examples, although I understand the reasoning behind blocking it). If you can’t get to either of those sites, check out TeacherTube.

Find a newsreader you like, and subscribe to some RSS feeds. Find out who’s writing stuff that resonates with you, and challenges you to become a better educator.

Finally, continue the conversation! I hope this has been a useful read. If it has, or you have questions or further thinking about these issues, please leave a comment on this blog entry!

Some References:

http://thefischbowl.blogspot.com/2006/08/did-you-know.html http://thefischbowl.blogspot.com/2006/06/about-this-blog.html http://weblogg-ed.com/2007/organizing-without-organizations/ http://www.jarche.com/?p=989
http://weblogg-ed.com/2006/teachers-as-learners-part-27/ http://weblogg-ed.com/2006/k12-online-2006-conference/ http://www.paulgraham.com/hs.html

John Maeda, who created the Design By Number software (among other things) at the MIT Center for Aesthetics & Computation, offers up a wonderful look at a 73-year-old man named Paul Polak who’s pushing the limits of designing within constraints.

http://weblogs.media.mit.edu/SIMPLICITY/archives/000392.html

“I had an interesting conversation in my office with Paul Polak who at the young age of 73 is in continual pursuit of finding ways to fight poverty in developing nations He showed me this prototype flashlight that is completely solar powered (recharged in sunlight), easily constructed from common off-the-shelf parts, and can last for well over a decade of use.”

I recently had the opportunity to substitute teach for Tom Pachera at Forsythe Middle School in Ann Arbor, MI. I needed a few activities to do for an hour each, so I came up with these 1-Hour Challenges, adapted from several tech ed and small group communication projects I’d done in the past. (You can also read about the first 1-Hour Challenge: Vehicles in Motion).

The idea of the 1-Hour Challenge is that it’s a bite-sized lesson, just enough to fill about 45-50 minutes of class time, get students engaged, and complete the task while (hopefully) learning something.

This 1-Hour Challenge was to build a Lego bridge that held the most weight, using a limited set of pieces (an older Technics Lego kit). You can see the full lesson plan at the Lesson Plans section of my site: 1-Hour Challenge: Lego Bridges Lesson Plan.

I set requirements that the bridge must span 14 inches, with a maximum of 6 inches of overhand on each side, and can use only the pieces from 1 Lego kit.

You can see pictures of the resulting Lego bridges at the Flickr site I maintain as part of this blog: 1-Hour Challenge: Lego Bridges Photos

I recently had the opportunity to substitute teach for Tom Pachera at Forsythe Middle School in Ann Arbor, MI. Mr. Pachera is an excellent instructor with a thriving technology and design program, running classes in grades 6-8. He’s also the 8th grade class advisor, which meant I was running his class for 4 days while he was in Washington, DC with the annual 8th grade class trip.

For the small number of 8th graders remaining at the school, the choice tended to be taking students to the gym to play basketball. I took my 8th grade class down there the first 2 days, but quickly decided I’d rather be teaching. For the second 2 days, I came up with these 1-Hour Challenges, adapted from several tech ed and small group communication projects I’d done in the past.

The idea of the 1-Hour Challenge is that it’s a bite-sized lesson, just enough to fill about 45-50 minutes of class time, get students engaged, and complete the task while (hopefully) learning something.

The first 1-Hour Challenge we did involved vehicles in motion, in a very loose sense of the word “vehicle”. You can see the full lesson plan at the Lesson Plans section of my site: 1-Hour Challenge: Vehicles in Motion Lesson Plan.

The short version of the lesson plan is this: Design and build a vehicle that moves with minimal human power to get it started. It can roll, fly, slide or move in any other way the students decide on. There is a small collection of resources that their groups can choose from (rubber bands, paper, string, etc), and materials are secured by an auction-style bidding process. This means students get the experience of working with limited resources and being forced to modify their designs to accomodate new requirements based on the resources they could secure.

In order to speed up the process, I allowed the groups to use scissors, and to use as much tape (both Scotch tape and masking tape) as needed. Since there were only 4 students for this iteration, this wasn’t an issue; larger groups would probably need to be limited in their tape use.

You can see pictures of the resulting vehicles at the Flickr site I maintain as part of this blog: 1-Hour Challenge: Vehicles in Motion Photos

I came across this on Lifehacker (the best personal productivity site out there, in my book).

“Google SketchUp (free) is an easy-to-learn 3D modeling program whose few simple tools enable you to create 3D models of houses, sheds, decks, home additions, woodworking projects - even space ships. You can add details, textures and glass to your models, design with dimensional accuracy, and place your finished models in Google Earth, share them with others by posting them to the 3D Warehouse, or print hard copies. Google SketchUp (free) is a great way to discover if 3D modeling is right for you”

Check out Google SketchUp if you’re looking to add a 3D tool to your teaching environment but can’t spring for a license of one of the big 3D or CAD tools.

Putting together good objectives can be key to creating successful unit plans. One of my fellow Eastern Michigan University students, James Martines, sent in this information about a site that can help with the process of developing objectives:

“…This website has been a sort of “guiding light” in my attempt to put together an effective unit plan. I’ve found it to be extremely helpful and informative.”