New School - No Constraints - What 2.0 Tools?

Replies to This Discussion

Permalink Reply by Daniel Craig on November 25, 2007 at 4:18am

Hi Chris,

I'm happy to be the first one in here. You must have caught folks on a busy Saturday :)

That's kind of a tough question. You have a good list of objectives that you want to fulfill, but I'm not sure that all of them should be "Web 2.0". However, I'll address those that could be helped by Web 2.0ish technologies.

- Student/Teacher/Parent collaboration
- Trying to keep in touch with graduates
* Social Networks (Ning) and Portals (MS SharePoint, Drupal, etc.) are both great ways to keep people in touch. A service like Ning is basically an open approach that puts everyone in the same service. This might or might not be the best approach, but it's free (or cheap if you want to get rid of advertising) and has a lot of great features for keeping people connected.

However, Portals are really made more for schools and organizations that have to have more control over access to data. Many of these are content management systems that now do a little bit of everything. I named Drupal because that is the one that I've seen used by smaller organizations. It's open source and easy to set up (though difficult to do very well with a large organization like your school).

Microsoft's SharePoint Server is a very powerful system that integrates well with MS Office and Exchange. If you are using these already, SharePoint might be a great addition to the set. Last time I checked, it was free. Of course, you have to be running Microsoft's suite of server software, which costs quite a bit. If you are already doing that, no problem. SharePoint is incredibly powerful, but does require MS know how. Expect to have an IT staff involved in set up and maintenance.

I should add that most of the Portal applications out there have some social networking functionalities built-in.

- Managing the class schedule
* Wikis - this is a great way to manage a flexible schedule that can be updated by the teacher and even students.
* Google Calendar is a nice, free technology to manage and share calendars

Being Classroom 2.0, I'd love to hear how/if your new school will approach Learning 2.0 :) I think that would make a big difference in the recommendations that you receive. It seems to me that much of what we discuss in this network as well as what is done outside is focused on getting the job done in contexts that done fully support our mission. It would be nice to think about a place in which that is not necessary.

Maybe I'll chime in again later after more time to think about this.
Dan

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Permalink Reply by Connie Weber on November 25, 2007 at 5:44am

Hi Dan,

Just thinking about what you said about "getting the job done in contexts that don't fully support our mission." That seems so pertinent. What, would you say, is "our mission"? I'd be really curious to see how much agreement there is about this on CR2.0. Would you think it'd be interesting to try to do a mission statement? (Or a few different ones?) Is there a sense of communal mission? Has it already been defined?

Great advice, lots of helpful ideas.

If you "thought about a place in which that is not necessary" how would that look? Would it be a sort of Ideal School, in a building perched in the wild overlooking a river? A building in the urban center? A building at all?

Another thing that might be really fun is to try to design the "ideal school" within the current Flat World economies, the sudden global connectedness. Is school now to be "in a place"? How does it look?

Chris,
Welcome, and thanks for the questions. You'll get a lot of good answers here. And more questions.
You'll also get debates about what the change in education means, what it holds as promise for the future.

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Permalink Reply by Daniel Craig on November 25, 2007 at 2:49pm

Hi Connie (and Chris),

I should have said "missions", because I really didn't imagine a shared vision for this diverse group. I envision our very general mission as instructing learners in ways that work best for them. Of course, this is where we will likely diverge. What are these best ways?

I feel that the traditional classroom, assessment, and organizational models are outdated and I would like new schools to represent this. In short, the one-classroom-suits-all approach is not appropriate (never really was). I would like to see learners taking classes across grades, based on their needs. You would likely still see most grade-levels in the same courses, but this allows for those who need to advance to do so and for those that need remediation to get it. At higher grade levels, this will likely translate into many students learning outside of the physical school (probably online) in search of courses/experiences that meet their needs.

On top of this, I would like to see more of a flow in education, which would mean rethinking what we mean when we talk about courses. It's not natural to have learning begin and end at a certain time. This is something that we constructed to manage education. Enabling students to flow in and out of classes based on their learning goals makes more sense (not in the management sense, but the learning sense). Think about it, why keep students in a class for about 18-36 weeks, if they meet the objectives (standards) in less time than that.

Ok, I'd love to continue on this, but it's time to go to work. You killed my pre-work prep time :)

Dan

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Permalink Reply by Connie Weber on November 28, 2007 at 11:27am

"I feel that the traditional classroom, assessment, and organizational models are outdated and I would like new schools to represent this." I sure agree with you about this. I'm reminded of a book I read long ago, The Saber Tooth Curriculum--
from the Amazon review: "With tongue firmly in cheek, Peddiwell takes on the contradictions and confusion generated by conflicting philosophies of education, outlining the patterns and progression of education itself, from its origins at the dawn of time to its culmination in a ritualistic, deeply entrenched social institution with rigidly prescribed norms and procedures." It's a great parody, showing how things that don't work keep going and just get more entrenched. Seems like what's going on currently. The book was written in 1939! It's very funny, definitely worth reading.
But what's happening isn't funny, really. It's time to change. I love your idea of intermixing grades and ages and "enabling students to flow in and out of classes based on their learning goals ." With Web 2.0, this can be accomplished in a variety of ways. Time for the best of the old (Dewey's "progressive" lab schools) and the new (all that Web 2.0 has to offer). Let's do it.

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Permalink Reply by Chris Richardson on November 25, 2007 at 5:47pm

Connie,
Yes, I do think that school will always be a place but one of my premises to my future school idea is that current schools do not leverage their 'place' effectively. The average public school typically has a great location but does very little to bring those stakeholders (I described in my response to Dan) to engage at the school as a true community. I am not sure what your ideal school location would be but to me it does not matter, wherever it is situated that place needs to bring in people from the society to improve upon the education process - then everyone benefits in my opinion. What is the current reaction? Many schools work to keep everyone out with closed campuses and I am wary of any solution that moves towards a closed solution.

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Permalink Reply by Connie Weber on November 28, 2007 at 11:40am

Hi Chris,
I want the "flow in and out of the schools" that characterized Dewey's lab schools, only redesigned so this occurs both synchronously and asynchronously. There's no reason not to be forming learning communities all over the place, in the local community as well as across the globe. Dewey's idea was to have a flow of kids out into the community (for apprenticeships and study) as well as the community into the school (for mentoring and partnerships of many kinds).
Personally, I'd like my school to be in a wild place, so that kids can study nature in great real-time, actual depth. I'd like school to be "grounded and connected"--both--as a friend of mine aptly stated it. The kids who are studying their local habitat in great depth (in my case, in a natural setting) would be hooked up with other kids around the world (in both urban and natural settings) who are doing the same. They could share notes about "stewardship" and caring, also how to effect positive change. That's my ideal.

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Permalink Reply by Chris Richardson on November 25, 2007 at 5:19pm

Dan,
Thank you so much for taking the first 'shot' at my difficult question and your comments about collaboration and schedule are right in line with what I was hoping to hear! I hope that this will spur other dialogue around the tools. One note: I did put a wide range of areas as I wanted to see what people thought that Web 2.0 could help improve but you are right, maybe some of those processes cannot be augmented (only time will tell).
As to Learning 2.0 and my school, I am still in the organizing stage to see if there is a viable plan. Since I left teaching in '98 I have been involved in the business community and want to bring some new ideas into the classroom but there needs to be an economic case to justify the risk/investment (please don't let my business mind scare away the conversation :-) ).
A high-level summary (that unfortunately simplifies a very difficult issue) is that I don't think that the key stakeholders (parents, students, teachers, administration, and business community) are properly aligned. I am trying to see if I can bring those expectations closer together so that parents have more of a say in the education process (and actually leverage their involvement instead of a generalization of apathy and belief that school is a form of daycare), students enjoy learning and that it is branded as cool to be smart/engaged within subjects, teachers get paid better and in general are further rewarded on many levels because of this closer alignment, administrators help to orchestrate this engagmement between the stakeholders as opposed to restrict it with the current bureaucracy (not just seen in traditional public schools either) that stimies change, and finally that businesses and the community can get involved in education in better ways that prepare students for life and the working world. I know that this sounds like utopia but I have been trying to develop something different for a long time and finally feel confident that there is a solution. I will describe a little more below in response to Connie's question and over time will provide more specifics about the idea once I have officially taken the leap and founded the school. The key for me is to get started and for now this community is a great source of inspiration.
Please keep up the input - THANKS,
Chris

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Permalink Reply by Daniel Craig on November 26, 2007 at 9:56pm

Hi Chris,

Thanks for the clarification. One more question, what grade levels?

I don't know if I'm stealing this from anyone, but it's something I thought about when reading your post

Design is about the dream.
Development is about the possibilities.
Implementation is about reality.

I hope that your Design and Implementation can come together :)

Dan

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Permalink Reply by Chris Richardson on November 27, 2007 at 9:18pm

I agree completely; it isn't easy to make the leap of faith and dreaming is the easy part. But the pieces have been falling into place lately that help move this idea towards implementation. The initial rollout of the concept would be at the secondary level (grades 7 - 12).

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Permalink Reply by Nancy Bosch on November 25, 2007 at 3:51pm

I read this article in the Kansas City Star this morning, thought it was an interesting add to this conversation.

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Permalink Reply by Chris Richardson on November 25, 2007 at 6:00pm

A quick summary:
Article discusses larger class audiences (think of the traditional Poly Sci 101 at a public university) and the difficulty regarding the learning process. It does bring up a new technology called the 'clicker' (think the voting buttons of any of the reality TV shows that poll the audience) where a teacher gets a poll of the learning progress to see if more time is required before moving on.
Thanks for sharing Nancy!

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Permalink Reply by Jack Phelps on December 17, 2007 at 1:59pm

Hi Chris--
A little shameless self promotion here: our tool is about 20 days old so since probably it wouldn't find it's own way onto your list, I'm just trying to get the word out. The site is called ChitChat (http://ChitCh.at), and it's designed to let teachers build course content on the web, share it with (or borrow from) other teachers, and--perhaps most importantly--assign it to their students. We give teachers a class website they can stick content on, and have their students reply to it online; we then show the teacher a simple list of all their students' work for each assignment and give them feedback tools so they can write onto the text just like with a red pen. In a week or two we're also launching flashcards, so you can give your students practice cards, and then automatically see reports on their performance, weak areas, etc.

So if you've got time, check it out: http://ChitCh.at. I appreciate your time even reading this, and hopefully we'll be of help! I always love feedback, so let me know if you've got any.

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