Alan November Session

Alan November is a great speaker and author. I highly recommend his book, Web Literacy for Educators which I've ready with my building technology committee. He also hosts a yearly conference in Boston which I hope to go to in the next couple of years. I have some coworkers who have attended and spoke very highly of it.

I will say that he goes in a few directions, so my notes below do as well. I've cleaned them up a little, but didn't want to over-do the work-over. I am going to put all of my thoughts in italics. All of these points refer to something specific going on within my school or school district.

Alan started by speaking about a pattern with pioneering educators who are transferring management of class to students who are creating content, doing research, etc.

Social engagement gives students a let up on understanding information that they don’t understand from a class.

5 ways to shift ownership of learning to students. (This is the big point of the talk.)

Screencasting: every teacher should have a screencasting tool in their toolbox. (jingproject.com)
What about a math wiki with math screencasts of students doing problems to demonstrate understanding of the concept?
A different voice explaining the same content has an impact on student understanding.
The digital content should be available online, iPod, dvd and in as many digital boxes as possible

Rich Curriulum Review:
Podcast planning has a team leader where he/she uses a chart of parts of podcast: title and description, people responsible, written, recorded, mixed to track progress of the podcast. This is created and posted weekly by students as an overview of curriculum from the previous week. It was unclear, but I think the planning took place throughout the week and the recording took place the following Monday.

Used a mixer and microphones? That seems a bit over the top and $$$.

Search Engine Design Team:
Create Custom Search Engines for searching for younger students. What if you created a search engine for each topic, subject area, general resources. What if you had one just for Captain? Aligned to curriculum. (I've created one of these and the thought of what it could do if I could get teachers to let me do more, let students do it, or just make the tool be used more often blows my mind!)

Official researcher: (kids find their own quality content and this teaches kids to search with mini teachable moments put in here.)
One kid a day is the official researcher for the class and will use a machine to find the resources . Use this to grow that search engine since questions will be based on the curriculum.

Collaborative Note Taking:
Why aren’t kids taking collaborative notes when taking notes in class? Teacher assigns headings and students fill out parts; then we come back at the end and ask the whole class: What’s missing?

(homework, when done incorrectly, reinforces errors, because they don’t get feedback quick enough so the incorrect thinking is reinforced through the doing of homework)

But what if they do the tutorials at home (see above) and homework type work is done at school and gets immediate feedback to redirect thinking.

Social Responsibility:
www.kiva.org
Allows you to be a microlender. You can research and invest in someone’s business venture for as little as a $25 investment. You can follow them with an RSS feed.
Kivapedia.org to look up info on kiva groups, who has invested, etc.
I love this concept. Much better than the general fundraisers that I see happen ALL the time at our school.

Add to global knowledge:
Write an article on a local location/event, etc. through research & field trip and then write up for wikipedia. Find something that doesn’t yet have an entry.

Teach children to find the work of other children:
Searching book titles through youtube often shows student work/blook trailer, etc. Why are we not looking for these for further understanding if we’re not creating these (and of course we should be creating these)
They use that work from kids to base their work off of. Children become curriculum researchers in a sense when we teach them the research tools to do that. Can be motivating to do their work and shape the quality of their work (and may enhance what teachers are assigning) When students show a piece of work that they want to emulate, they own it. That’s powerful.

Okay, somehow I have seven things here, so I don't know if he just threw two in for free or if I'm missing connecting two of these together. Regardless, there are some great "guiding forces" to move a school or classroom forward and focus them in their use of technology. I personally want to make sure at least one class or group uses Kiva next year and at least one class or group puts an entry on Wikipedia next year. I'm definitely going to work on the others because I can see the power they can contain if they are done on a regular basis in a classroom.