Game-Based Learning

In this edition of the December eNewsletter, I have included some great resources and links for bringing Game-Based Learning into the classroom. How is Game-Based Learning being used in your classroom or school?

A World Without Power

During the Halloween weekend, the east coast got pounded with it's first big Noreaster of the season. Living in Maine, I have grown accustom to the long winters, but starting in October is a bit ridiculous even for our standards. At my house we only lost power for about 27 hours, but many people around us and certainly in southern New Hampshire lost it for almost an entire week. It got me to thinking...

We truly have started to become completely dependent on technology and the ease of accessibility anywhere at any time. I was thinking to myself, that I really had to mail in my assignment on Saturday before the storm hit, because my town of Wells, Maine has become a ghost town now that the tourist and "leaf peepers" season is officially over. It would have taken me 30 minutes to drive to a coffee shop with free Wi-Fi.

A colleague and I were discussing that the future of the military will probably no longer be investing so highly in explosives but rather in new technologies like Pulses and Pinches. These are like mini generators that when activated, will actually take out an area completely so that there is no power. The scene from "Ocean's 11" where they are ready to rob Andy Garcia's casino comes rushing back to my mind.

We were fortunate enough to have power back on at school on Monday when we returned, but it took 3.5 hours for the IT department to get our network and Internet connection back online. I truly felt useless at school in those hours and couldn't even access my calendar to see whom I needed to postpone our meeting with as it was locked up in our network.

eNewsletter November

In this month's edition of my eNewsletter, I dive a little deeper into the Apple iOS update and what it means in an educational setting.

21st Century Team

The York School Department has established a 21st Century district team. This team is a compilation of different administrators, tech. integrators, and a variety of classroom teachers that span the entire K-12 perspective from all of the schools within our district. Members were asked to apply for the position in the spring of 2009 and the Superintendent of Schools, Director of Technology and Curriculum Coordinator met to establish the team and coordinate the first introductory meeting in the fall of 2010. In our first year, we really tried to establish what 21st century skills look like for York teachers, and every member was given an iPad by the district to play and learn more about how mobile technologies can promote problem solving and 21st century skills on the go. It took the entire year really to establish our mission. We met once a month during the school year, to understand our goals and to really identify what we wanted to do in order to help move education in York into the present and hope to look towards the future.

 This has been a real frustration for many members, as things were discussed and sorted out, but rarely was a true decision made by the team at any given meeting. We all wanted to move forward, but were not sure that the group, as a whole, knew how or could agree on what it was that needed to be done in order to do that. Unlike other district teams that I have been on, within this district and in others, there was no real target to shoot for or goals/steps to check off as they were completed. We were treading in open water. There were certainly some resources that have helped pave the way, or shed a little light towards a distant end of a tunnel, but it was tough to take a step without knowing where we wanted to go in the first place. For this reason it has been a slow process.

 This year's goals for the team are to create windows of how teachers and students within our district are already using 21st century skills in-and-out of the classroom. Hopefully with these examples published, other teachers, community members, administrators and school board members will understand what it is that we are looking for and trying to achieve. It's a good first step anyway. Another big goal for the team this year is to plan out a full day teacher inservice centered around 21st century skills. This presents an interesting issue and potential problem. In the past, this inservice day has been designed around technology as a whole, and in more recent years, technology as it integrates within everyone's curriculum. Inservice days are always met with mixed emotions by the staff. Time is always an issue in education and giving a teacher some time without students can truly be beneficial if the day is planned out correctly. In the past few years, teachers have not seen these inservice days as planned out to help them, but rather as one more thing on their plate that caused stress and anxiety. Technology integration, in my eyes, should not be counted as "one more thing" as in many cases it is already happening all over the place, but I do see how one can be concerned with a new set of skills that are needed in order to manipulate the technologies to fully engage students and bring about higher quality of work and thinking. I'm just afraid that a day labeled, "21st Century Skills", even though we are 11 years into the 21st century already, will be looked at as just one more thing to add to the overcrowded teachers' plates. So how do we create a day, centered around 21st century skills that will be met by teachers with excitement and a sense that it can be accomplished without adding too much? It's a daunting task for sure, and one that I fear may take a lot more meetings then we have time for. Do you have any ideas, or have you created something like that in your district?

 The third and final goal for our group this year is to create a base line online professional development course for all educators within our district that clearly label how York would like to continue with 21st century skills, and provide opportunities to the learner to research, examine, play and reflect on web 2.0, mobile, and other technology tools that can enhance the teaching experience and therefore the learning of each and every student that walks through the doors within the York School Department. I've taken several online courses, as I am finishing up my masters degree in the Technology in Education program at Lesley University in Cambridge, Massachusetts, however, many of the classes are setup in modules in which we were asked to research how a task could be used in class, read examples of potential outcomes, create a product or task for our students to try out and then reflect on the outcomes. These are all good practices, but each tool that I have used was the focus of the task. Teaching technology tools are great, but in order to promote 21st century skills and also hopefully only have each staff member take the course once within their tenure here in York, we will need to make it more of a theory and methods course. Heck, the way technology changes and improves, by the time the teacher taking course learns how to Tweet, we may have a better way to communicate in a similar way. I'm reminded of how I felt when I heard the Flip camera was no longer going to be manufactured after spending 4 professional development days with staff showing them how to use the technology and import the footage into a video editing software program in order to publish their masterpieces to the web. Again this will be a difficult task. Has anyone out there created a baseline class for either tech. integration or 21st century for education staff?

Our Latest Arrival

I'm sitting in the window seat of our hospital room looking out over the city of Portland as the clouds make way for the sun, while my wife and new arrival, Elsa Grace, are both napping. Of course I checked-in and uploaded a picture on Facebook already. It's times like these that I'm not only thankful for my life and loved ones around me, but the wonderful ways that technology can keep friends and family close together. I don't have to excuse myself from the room every time I want to talk to everyone on "our call list", I can just jump online with my iPhone and tell the world about our new bundle of joy. There is some debate amongst my generation and older, that much like the tag line, "video killed the radio star", the text message will kill human interaction and communication as well. This has been a subject I have been very frustrated with in the past as many people seem to abuse the technology and forget the biggest part, communication and human interaction. There are certainly times and places for these technologies and I have witnessed it first hand this week as I was able to update my Facebook and Twitter accounts to tell my friends and family world wide how my wife and baby are doing. I still had a short list of immediate family on the call list, and certainly gave time to express my true emotions over the phone and as they stop by our room to visit too though. I think that is the biggest and most important part of these new technologies. It has been a huge time savor and wonderful way to communicate in a speedy amount of time of our happy news, but I think it is always a good idea to have a balance too. It's true about all technology and how we integrate it within our educational practice and within our lives. As a technology integration specialist, I am constantly finding ways and being asked to think creatively about how technology can be infused within a lesson, unit or activity. It's almost impossible for me to think of a lesson without some component of technology being used now, even if it is on the lower level of technology use, but I am always reflecting on the lesson and asking if the amount of technology used transformed or gave the lesson a higher quality or not. I would never use technology just to make sure it is in there, but only if it made the lesson better.

On this beautiful fall day in Maine I'm reminded why I live in this great state. Now I can't wait to get back home with my beautiful wife and baby to share our new life together! Everyone can see how proud and happy I am of this moment. Isn't technology a wonderful thing?

The Fall Preview

As many of you know, I create an eNewsletter each month for the staff members in my district. In this month's eNewsletter I take a real hard look at 21st Century Skills. Here is a snippet of my article. You can also click for the full eNewsletter for October. No doubt the message is loud and clear by now. 21st century skills are more then just buzz words. It isn’t going to be going away any time soon. In fact, people have been talking about this for more then 12 years now. A shift in education is happening, although it may be slower then many people had hoped or anticipated. Whether you have seen Sir Ken Robinson’s speech adapted by RSA Animate on his views for a need to shift the educational paradigm, or you have merely heard about it at faculty meetings, college courses, conferences, or even webinars, it has hopefully reached you at some point. So what are 21st Century Skills? We hear about them all the time, but why haven’t they just been defined and presented as curriculum goals or state standards by now for goodness sake? Well, they aren’t the easiest to completely define. It’s like taking a look into the future, although we are currently more then a decade into the 21st century, these skills are defined as those needed by the students of today to be successful within the world of tomorrow. This can present a few problems. How can we predict today what life will be like in 10, 15 or even 20 years? True, some things will not have changed too drastically by then, but unless you live under a rock, you have realized that technology has played a huge part in our lives over the past 10 years and continually evolves making life easier and more manageable. I mean the iPad that I received last fall is already way outdated! There are some great resources though for catching a glimpse into what 21st Century Skills look like and how they can be taught to our students of today. Web sites such as; The Partnership for 21st Century Skills has set up the framework towards skills needed to achieve success and be problem solvers for the world of tomorrow. Instead of set skills as we were used to in our educational experience, the skills are defined as ways to promote higher order thinking so that students can adapt to the ever changing ways of our world. 21st Century Skills aren’t all about the technology though. Technology will play a huge part in our shift in education, but it has been a huge part of our lives outside of school as well, so that makes sense. It’s true, technology will be used for many of the things we do, but it is just the tool, or conduit, towards the real learning. 21st Century Skills are more then just the latest technology trends. They are skills needed to be successful problem solvers and citizens of the future. The International Society for Technology in Education (ISTE), defines these skills for students as; 1. Creativity and Innovation, 2. Communication and Collaboration, 3. Research and Information Fluency,4. Critical Thinking, Problem Solving, and Decision Making, 5. Digital Citizenship, and 6. Technology Operations and Concepts.
 The shift is already here, but we certainly need innovation leaders and risk takers to help educate students with this new shift in education. These people cannot be afraid to learn something new, even if that is from one of their own students. 21st Century leaders and educators must grasp this idea and promote real world thinking and problem solving. The world of tomorrow is closer then you may think!

First Two Weeks of School

As we are half way through our second week of school I have reflected on how different the beginning of the school year feels from that of 5 or 6 years ago to me. Of course, 5 years ago I was teaching 3rd grade and had a very enthusiastic group of 20-8 and 9 year olds in my own classroom space, so it would naturally feel different since as a tech integrator I am not blessed with my own classroom and students. So besides the physical space, and responsibility for my "own" students, what are the big differences you ask? I guess now more then ever I feel that the first few weeks are used for feeling out students and staff. These two weeks have always been overwhelming for many teachers, but I have certainly seen an increased stress level and high anxiety issues within the past 5 years as well. State and national mandated testing, Routes to Intervention and finding better ways to "group" students based on ability levels yet keep a heterogeneous community within a classroom has become a constant struggle for the beginning of the year. In our district, we test students using the NWEA and CPAA computer based test both in the fall and the spring.(The CPAA test is given 6 times per year. Two for each trimester.) It is therefore important, especially in the eyes of administrators within our district, to test early in the year so that teachers and students see the maximum growth throughout each year. Of course this makes our district "look good" when compared to that of other districts within our state. As a classroom teacher I loved this type of testing as it only took up about an hour of our day, the tests were individualized for each and every student, and scores gave immediate feedback to both the students and teachers. I still appreciate this style of testing due to the speed of feedback and the data that can be collected quite quickly, but I have to question how much information is too much? Researchers and people that love to make decisions based upon data will tell you that there is no such thing. I would tend to agree with that philosophy in theory, however, when do students have a chance to learn without feeling like their performance is being collected in this data bank that will ultimately mold their future and "class rank"? I remember loving going back to school in the elementary grades, but the approach was much different. Instead of testing, testing and more testing, we were given discovery time, and explorations. Of course the usual rules, expectations and books were "handed" out as well, but there was a real feel of community as we got to meet our new classmates and teachers through interactive lessons and discussions. The first few weeks were dedicated to community building and working as a team throughout the year. Again, this has not changed in theory within our district. In fact, one of our elementary schools holds the motto T.E.A.M.; Together Everyone Achieves More, and students remind students of this motto each and every morning after the pledge, but in reality there isn't time to build a true team in the first two weeks any more. Students are rushed to the lab for national standardized testing, then pulled out of the classroom for RtI or special education testing, and then rushed to the cafe to eat and outside for recess. By the time they are back into the classroom curriculum programs have already started in order to get through the material before the end of the year. It's no wonder anxiety levels are at an all time high, and teachers are too stressed to attend professional development courses in the fall. So the first two weeks of school are coming to a close and I have assisted in setting up tests, troubleshot all kinds of technology malfunctions and issues, and met with teachers to discuss what would be the best tools to display a typical day within their classroom for open house and parent orientation since that is right around the corner. I have not spent a single minute planning professional development courses, creating a tech tip of the week video tutorial, or sitting down with a teacher for some one-to-one help to revamp their website. I'm not complaining, but I do feel at this rate we are going to have teachers burn out of our profession and students liking coming back to school in the fall less and less in the future. Maybe we need to take a step back for a second and allow the first few weeks of school to become a discovery and community building atmosphere again and hold off on all of the testing. Ultimately, we are trying to infuse the love of life long learning into each and every student that walks off the bus and into our school doors aren't we? I'm not sure I would have gotten to where I am today if I had been tested so much especially in those early weeks of school. What do you think?