Alan+November

Schools of the Future Conference Thursday, September 8, 2011

Rethinking the nature of teaching and learning Uses of Project-Based Learning, Performance Assessments

__Alan November: The Ownership of Learning, Purpose, and Global Learning Networks__ There is a gap between what they learned in school and what they need to know to move out of parents house. :)

ActivExpression
 * Who owns the learning? Who should own the learning? (starts class, organizes lessons, assessments, determines rubrics, etc)
 * What is the single most important 21st century skill? Alan says: being self-directed, leading their own learning
 * Where do trees get their material? Where does the mass come from? Sun, Water, Soil, Air

From questions to concepts 1 - homework: impact can be negative because it drills in incorrect thinking, brain only needs 1/2 second to learn something wrong 2 - lesson plans: teacher covers curriculum, sequence organized along continuum
 * The measures we use to determine if someone is educated doesn’t come close to actuality...we are fooling ourselves, Alan is concerned
 * two things we learn from school:
 * Professor Eric Mazur: YouTube
 * read, think, reflect before lecture (flip your classroom)
 * HW - students asking questions instead of giving answers
 * transfer of knowledge,
 * instead of lesson plans, you study the questions of the students
 * students tell teacher what to teach, what to clarify, what to explain
 * pretest and post test give...adds 20% value to learning
 * turn to your neighbor and sort out the pattern of answers...THINK about what people think...__its the conversation of defending and questioning your position__...there is a transfer of who owns the learning...peer teachinglooks like conversation is important in the process of learning...if you believe children are social. :)
 * How do we train teachers, what tech to buy....How about:
 * Should we really give homework
 * Shouldn’t children be forced to talk with one another and work out their misconceptions?

Suggested Path Forward...If you accept the idea that HW and lesson plans must be re-engineered
 * 1: Ask students to design tutorials to cover the entire curriculum**
 * See your selves as one community of teachers, not separate from different schools
 * Link all the knowledge in this room together for all the students all the time
 * EX: Mathtrain.TV podcast - took “bob” just under 3 hours to make the tutorial shown
 * why would you spend two ours on one problem (tutorial) instead of 7 minutes on several problems? Answer: my teacher already knows the answer...my tutorial helps others who don’t know.
 * ClusterMap t show people from around the world that see their work
 * Student who posted tutorial can see how many people and from where around the world their work has had an influence on
 * Students have a global voice
 * **Give students an audience of more than one, give them a global audience**
 * We need to teach students courage of sharing their work with their world
 * We need to start young
 * What if you had just one website, with a team of teachers who approve the tutorials created by students across Hawaii
 * **PURPOSE** - a hugely motivating factor in the work you do
 * __**Add purpose, not technology**__
 * **SHIFT control of the curriculum and the explaining of concepts to students**
 * easy to give them the software, but its not about the software
 * 2: Link Teachers together**
 * Kamehameha HashTag on Twitter (#ksfaculty)
 * campuses all over island - key is linking the knowledge together
 * __The real revolution is not technology...it’s the INFORMATION!!!!__
 * The 1:1 program is really 1:MANY
 * The Hawaiian culture and language - what if all the teachers got together and built a curriculum together?
 * Students building a curriculum together: dgh.wikispaces.com/What-Is-History


 * **Improve quality with PURPOSE and LEGACY (build something that helps others and lives on...)**


 * Wikis, VoiceThread
 * Search for info in other counties: root zone; site: dk “Number the Stars” to find more **authentic info from sources closer to the subject/location of history** than ourselves
 * **Conversations with people who are closer to the subject source** than oursleves...**EMPATHY...VALUE THE PERSPECTIVE OF OTHERS**


 * **every classroom should be a GLOBAL COMMUNICATION CENTER**


 * **In every classroom beginning in pre-kindergarten**
 * Organize learning networks for students in your class (like the kindergarten grandparent network)