CPS and CCHS Superintendent

September 1- Opening

2010-09-01T10:22:00.000-07:00

September 1, 2010
Opening Remarks

Welcome Back! It is nice to see everyone rested and ready for another great

school year. We were lucky this year to enjoy wonderful summer weather.

One of the many things I love about the months of July and August is the

slower pace which means more time for summer reading. I read some fun

books; bestsellers such as Cutting for Stone; required reading; Tales of a Fourth

Grade Nothing, from the fourth grade list; Tangerine, and House of Scorpion;

from the eighth grade list, and Copper Sun from the high school list – all good

choices.

I also read some professional books which I highly recommend, Mindsight

by psychiatrist Dr. Dan Siegel. It’s about changing habits of mind to be more

flexible, adaptive, and energized. I read Daniel Pink’s Drive about his theory of

motivation. He believes that it’s not the carrot and stick approach that motivates

us for high performance and satisfaction but 3 things: autonomy, directing your

own life, mastery, learning and creating new things, and purpose , to do better by

ourselves and our world. I also read 21st Century Skills by Trilling and Fadel,

and of course I reread Dr. Wagner’s Global Achievement Gap.

I’m convinced that education and schools have to adapt to the major changes

brought on by the technology revolution, global economy, environmental issues,

and community needs. And I agree with Trilling, Fadel, and Wagner that the

“knowledge economy” requires high levels of imagination, creativity, and

innovation to continually invent new and better services and products for the

global marketplace as well as solve the great problems of our times – economic

recession, global warming, poverty, war, terror, and diseases.

What I’ve been thinking about as we start this school year are the following:

How do we better prepare our students to be problem solvers, communicators, collaborators and innovators?

AND

How do we shift our practices in our Concord schools to meet these demands?

I’m excited to begin this school year with thoughtful district wide and school wide

discussions in response to these major questions. In Global Achievement Gap,

Dr. Wagner suggested several major questions to begin our discussion:

What do we think all CCHS graduates need to know and be able to do to be well prepared for college, career and citizenship – in the next decade of the 21st century?

Since we can’t teach everything, what is most important?

How might Concord’s definition of academic rigor need to change in the age of information explosion?

What are the best ways to know whether our students have mastered the skills that matter most?

What do we need to do in our schools to motivate students to be curious and imaginative, and to enjoy learning for it’s own sake?

How do we both support Concord educators and hold them more accountable for results?

What do schools where all students are mastering the skills that matter most look like and what can we learn from them?

I’m thrilled that Dr. Wagner is here today to begin our discussion. He is the Co-Director of the Change Leadership Group at the Harvard Graduate School of Education and the author of the “Global Achievement Gap: Why Even Our Best Schools Don’t Teach the New Survival Skills Our Children Need---And What We Can Do About It”. He was a high school English teacher for twelve years; a school principal; a university professor in teacher education; cofounder and first executive director of Educators for Social Responsibility;project director for the Public Agenda Foundation in New York; and President and CEO of the Institute for Responsive Education.

For the past few years, many CPS/CCHS administrators, teachers, and technology specialists have attended Dr. Wagner’s keynote speeches at professional conferences and/or have read his book, so we are thrilled he is here today to share his ideas about the seven survival skills for the “net” generation with the entire faculty and staff as we begin the new year.

For more info see Wagner's website www.schoolchange.org

2009-09-17T10:48:00.000-07:00

More on digital tools on this YouTube video
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y-wm3Hazx

Our Notes on Alan November's Presentation: September 2, 2009

2009-09-04T08:37:00.000-07:00

Main themes: web literacy and potential revolution is the change in the culture of teaching and learning where children take a lot more responsibility in teaching and learning in class.

Technology helps reconnect with and learn about kids. Learn their interests.
Children have a developmental need to connect with other people
What web literacy [web syntax and grammar skills] do our students need to know to be successful learners and producers in a global community/economy?
Who should teach web literacy, how and when
- Think of your class as one collaborative team!
- Your students can help you apply and use technology. Ask them what they know. Ask them to help!
Looking at change in the mission of K-12; how do you setup for change within an existing structure/organization
Including different points of view - considering different points of view (e.g Pope's speech within Turkey)
"Bad results" - misleading results - can be produced from google/search engines as a result of bad use of key words. Eg. use country code .ty to get turkish references vs. Fox news references.
search engine results reveal what has been searched e.g. Places in Lexington on Google Maps includes "Buckman Tavern" a British! landmark for that area. American Revolution - different points of view.
With google docs in real time you can understand what your students are thinking. (Activstudio tools/skills can help teachers do this, too!)
Goal: Prepare children to be globally competitive

"The more technology there is in society, the longer it takes to move your kids out of your house".... the escape!:

Teach children critical thinking in the web
Do students know how the google algorithm works?
Do they use skills to decipher web authors when they research for you

Use students' technology knowledge and skills to assist you with what you don't know.
Altavista is a good search engine for finding links coming to technology.
link: martinlutherking.org host: .edu link:www.stormfront.org
assessing the process along with assessing the product
primary sources in the process of building a review of Number the Stars
if you assess the product and not the the process - you may not be seeing/assessing how the students work or learn -- so can you change the mission to assess/work with students on the process [We can't give the same kind of homework we've always been giving.]
Students are eager to be teachers, they learn as they teach and produce. e.g. Hours on a tutorial to help her class. Student told Aland - different/engaging for her to work to help others vs. to help just herself for "regular" homework2.
- The real revolution is the change in the culture of teaching and learning where children take a lot more responsibility in teaching and learning in class.
- Who should own the learning? The culture that the American education system is designed on is that teachers own the learning. Should this be changed

References

Books:
Web Literacy for Educators and
Empowering Students with Technology by Alan November

Use country codes to search internet for points of view.
Using Google Maps maps.google.com.
Marshall McLuhan - "The medium is the message."
Use Google Docs for classroom collaboration, as a team, in notetaking.
Use kids to teach YOU how to use web tools to enhance learning!
AltaVista search engine, limit search to host:edu (sites hosted at universities) to help students evaluate and sites on the web.
YouTube is fastest growing site on the internet and kids need to socialize around the world. Number the Stars: book trailer from Copenhagen
Use Podcasts of teachers' presenting lessons as homework.
Have students make podcasts of a week's learning and kids have a record of what was learned.
http://www.bobsprankle.com/blog/
Mathtrain.tv about prime factorization - a student produced tutorial
Jingproject.com for creating screencasts
host:nasa.gov search in altavista - don't need www or http - to produce a quick video tutorial.
Free tools on internet for producing all kinds of learning.
Use Skype to teach similar units in classrooms around the world. Have debates.

Implications for Instructional/Assignment Design

If students take notes using Google docs, teacher has the ability to see student notes - students can reflect on notes with teachers, classmates.
Google docs essential tool for students/class collaboration
With Google docs, students have access to material from any computer with Internet access
link:www.martinlutherking.org (really white supremacist website)- go deep for web exploration, validation of sources on Internet
One of the most powerful teaching techniques on the web is to show students the work of other children around the world - YouTube is a good resource for doing this (number the stars - book trailer created by an elementary school student)
At High Tech High in San Diego they give students the 10 most difficult concepts in the curriculum to ask them for ideas on how to teach them
assessment - we usually assess the final product and not the process for getting to the final product
what used to homework probably should be class work & vice versa
if a student makes a mistake on WH , mistake become embedded int he brain and any delays in formative feedback will further embed the mistake
good HW - podcast of teachers presenting
Wells, ME - Room 208 weekly podcast - "How to make a podcast" http://www.bobsprankle.com/blog/
http://www.mathtrain.tv/

relevance of homework?
Classroom tasks for students: daily scribes, recording things going on for weekly review reflecting on learning, kids create tutorials, software:jingproject.com
students who take notes from a pod cast do better than with live notes
jing.com assists with development of lesson plans/ tutorials
real revolution is not technology = it is a change in the culture of teaching & learning where children take a lot more responsibility for contributing to class ( collaborative notes, tutorials, etc.
Who should own the learning??? currently - teachers (teachers work harder than kids in the classroom) - we underestimated what kids can do
revolution - redefining literacy to be more than decoding paper
use Skype to connect with students around the country and the world.