Educational Change Comes from Within

Imagine K12 teams hear from Diane Tavenner of Summit Public Schools.

Over the last few weeks, I've had several conversations with educators and read a few interesting articles about vendors in education. This latest post from Silicon Valley Business Journal goes into some depth about how businesses are hoping to profit from the Common Core. Karen Lein of Imagine K12 states, “The advent of Common Core is a change for schools, and change is great for startups." Karen's point is well taken, and I have personal knowledge that Imagine K12 has some of the best educators in the world working on technology solutions for classroom teachers.

Yet while change is happening all around us in education, I believe that we need to focus on the fact that true change in education must come from within. Through my involvement with our district's 1:1 student computing initiative over the last three years from early planning to full implementation, I've seen this concept in action. No vendor can come in and put a solution in place that will bring about change. Some vendor solutions are more effective and easier to deploy than others (read the article), but Rajen Sheth, Director of Google's Chromebooks in Education team, hits the nail on the head in this statement, “When you start with goals and think about how you’re going to re-orient your teaching model to utilize technology in the classroom, it works much better. When you just throw devices in the classroom and teachers don’t know what to do with them, they either become a distraction or just end up not being used.”

Joel Handler is modest when he talks about the 1:1 initiative in Hillsborough Township, NJ that he oversees. I've seen his team in action and had conversations with them about their project goals. As a team, they're constantly engaged in evaluation of their initiative and putting all the right conditions in place for teachers to be successful. Districts and schools like ours learn from each other. Change like this has to come from within. Vendors, no matter how in tune they are with educators, can't bring about the good results that we're seeing with our 1:1 initiatives. Success depends on the teachers who are in the classroom every day using technology in transformative ways. They can't learn those skills from an outside professional development provider. They learn from collaborating with each other and working with district personnel who understand their needs and concerns.

That being said, there are many startups run by passionate educators who want to help teachers make a difference in education. In my recent visit to Imagine K12, I met Justin Mann and Anton Troynikov of Geddit as well as Quim Sabrià of EdPuzzle. Both teams are passionate about their products and eager to receive feedback from classroom teachers. Through their personal experience as educators, they know the challenges that classroom teachers face and want to provide teachers with quality products and support. Our teachers are assisting them in refining their products, and we look forward to all the enhancements that are coming our way. 

My advice to all the new education startups is this: Don't become too far removed from the classroom that you forget about the challenges and joys of being a teacher. Visit classrooms, talk with students and teachers, work with teachers, and continue to focus on student learning. Applaud the teachers who are seeing improved results through transformative technologies and work closely with schools and districts to support their initiatives. We're in this together and your success depends on our success.

Learning about Innovation

In April I posted about my exploration of the topic of innovation. Since that time, I’ve read lots of books, talked with many people, attended conferences and school visits, and reflected…a LOT.

Here’s a presentation that showcases some of my learning from a recent trip to Silicon Valley and the Nueva Innovative Learning Conference:

Wordsworth, Bunnies and Lemon Cake

I've been thinking deeply for a few weeks about how to share my summer of learning. I started the summer by attending ISTE and had a wonderful time of networking and sharing. The massive vendor hall and hundreds of sessions, however, left me feeling brain dead. I wondered how I could assimilate all of the ideas and make any meaning out of them.

Part two of my summer included a two week family trip to England and Scotland. I had a bucket list including a visit to the Lake District to see where one of my favorite poets, William Wordsworth, got his inspiration. Being in the place gave me an entirely new perspective and caused me to begin asking lots of questions. I also had the opportunity to visit the area where Beatrix Potter painted and wrote, and we finished off the trip with lemon cake at The Elephant House where J. K. Rowling began writing Harry Potter.

So, physically exhausted with jet lag and brain damaged from the fast-paced learning at ISTE, I was ready to put an end to travel. I'm so glad that I didn't let that stop me from attending and presenting at BLC in Boston. BLC brought everything together for me.

My original blog post was going to be about less is more. I thought about calling it Lessons from Poetry because visiting the Lake District and reading Wordsworth's poetry made me realize how important it is to be thoughtful about ideas. You can't read poetry fast and you can't speed walk through the ISTE vendor hall and assimilate everything at once.

BLC confirmed my suspicions that less is really more. There were fewer people but many more opportunities to talk in depth with people about ideas. In one speed networking session I met teachers from Austria, Australia, Latvia, and South Africa. We shared our contact information and are looking at ways to connect our students. BLC is all about global connections. Alan November hit home with his one-to-the-world session. We need 1:1 computing to put the world in our student's hands, but we shouldn't focus on the device. We need to focus on giving our students the opportunity to learn new perspectives, connect globally, and be global publishers.

The Notosh session with Tom Barrett helped me bring understanding to my crazy summer. He led us through design thinking in an hour that covered immersion, synthesis, ideation, prototyping, and feedforward. After going through the process with my very fun group, I decided to apply the process to my summer experiences. I tried his activity of 100 ideas in 10 minutes to brainstorm all the things that I've learned this summer. Here's the list!  I ended up with about 50 ideas in ten minutes but decided to go through my notes and stop at 150. I think this is a good start for me to begin identifying problems to solve. I would also like to go through this process again with a group.

I've been reading Tom's book, Can Computers Keep Secrets, and I'm really excited about applying design thinking to instructional activities. I used my trip to the Lake District to go through the design thinking process and how it might translate if used in a classroom. I asked lots of questions generated by my visit to the homes of beloved authors and I was able to make everything connect. If I were planning a design thinking activity with a class, my generative topic might be "Why Do We Create?" Does lemon cake and ginger beer give you ideas for caldron cakes and butter beer? If you're painting in the garden and see the white tail of a rabbit disappear, does that get you thinking about what the rabbits are really up to? When the sun breaks through the clouds in the Lake District, do words start tumbling around in your head?

In his ISTE keynote, Adam Bellow said that innovation is the intersection of fear and bravery. I hope that my bravery is sharing my thought process will encourage you to make connections, remix ideas and start conversations that will lead to innovative ideas and design thinking in your school or district.

Thoughts on Innovation

In preparation for a discussion about innovation in my district, I’ve been doing a little research on my own. After looking at lots of TED Talks including Stephen Johnson’s Where Good Ideas Come From, I decided that I needed to dive deeper. I stumbled on two books by Seth Godin that have made an impression – The Icarus Deception: How High Will You Fly and V is for Vulnerable (a picture book). V is for Vulnerable led me to the website for the illustrator, Hugh MacLeod, which led me to the graphic below and an interesting article called “How to be Creative.”

I felt a little like Alice going down the rabbit hole as I went deeper into the topic of innovation. You have to throw out a lot of your preconceived ideas in order to explore innovation. I’m going to take a while (the slow hunch) to think about creativity and the collision of ideas. When everyone starts doing something like redesigning work space, is that really innovation anymore? Do innovators always need to be one step ahead of things? Can you copy innovation? I don’t think so – I think you have to create and remix in order to be innovative. I look forward to hearing your thoughts and sharing our next steps.

What a Difference a Year Makes

I can’t believe that a year has passed since my district began rolling out devices for our 1:1 student computing initiative. One year down the road with around 17,000 student devices, and we’re now planning the third phase which will complete our 1:1 initiative for grades 3-12.

A recent topic of conversation on a webinar with other 1:1 districts was “what keeps you awake at night?” I’m happy to say that I’m sleeping again, and it’s because of all the great teamwork that’s gone into our implementation. In my October post I talked about scaling up and next steps. I’m happy to report that our technology leadership series has given administrators the tools that they need to begin taking 1:1 computing to the next level at their schools.

It’s exciting to go into schools and see students engaged in learning that is designed to incorporate technology tools and best instructional practices. Focusing on the Project RED key implementation factors has taken the spotlight off of devices and placed the spotlight on technology integration.

If you’re a teacher in a 1:1 classroom or an administrator in a school with 1:1 computing, visit the Project RED website and read Revolutionizing Education Through Technology. I think you’ll find that you sleep better at night.