Beyond School

This isn’t theoretical - necessarily. It could be the beginning of a beautiful relationship.

Given a 1:1 MacBook school, a geeky teacher, no bandwidth or filtering or blocking restrictions, how would you design an elective class to showcase 21st century learning possibilities?

I’ve got an elective “writing seminar” beginning next week, with about ten students from age 15-17. Most have MacBooks.

I’m free to structure this class however I want. And it should be obvious I take “writing” in its communicative (and digital) sense - including multimedia, connectivity, project-based learning, the whole nine yards.

I see this as an opportunity to experiment. And to co-teach with anybody out there with an idea needing a classroom - maybe one of the many administrator, librarian, or academic readers out there who wish they still had a classroom to implement some ideas.

How can we seize this opportunity to do things differently and demonstrate the possibilities?

The conditions: class meets every two days for 75 minutes. There are no issues of filters or bandwidth to worry about: you name the site, from Skype to YouTube, from Twitter to eternity, we have access.

Assessment and grading can be as non-traditional as you please.

So there it is. Sketch your vision(s) below*. And let me know, also, if you want a hand in actually playing “teacher” for this class. You don’t have to be a “schoolyteacher.” Heck, you can be a freelance musician or gonzo entrepreneur for all I care. Socrates didn’t go to teacher certification school.

If I like the idea - and if the students do - we’ll run with it.

Deadline: Tuesday, 8 January 2008.

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*Remember: this is an Open Thread. That means there is no such thing as a comment too long. The thread is the thing. Also: notice your comment is followed by a link, via my CommentLuv plugin, to your last post, by title. [Update: Check out the 30-odd comments on the first Open Thread, "Your Fantasy Alternative School," to see how open threads collect great ideas and invite you to visit the blogs of the contributors.] And finally, if you like your comment that much, of course you can post it on your own blog as well. It’s not an either/or. Both here is better, since the thread adds to conversation, and the posting on your own blog keeps your own developmental archive intact. Thanks!

Photo: peter-noster on Flickr

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Every week is interesting when you’re launching an all-Apple Laptop high school. This week was no exception.

I run a 40-minute Web 2.0 activity club every Thursday. (That experience, by the way, makes me weep for teachers who teach classes of less than an hour’s duration. I have time for almost nothing in 40 minutes and will, I swear, have a heart attack from the adrenal rush of trying to reach my objectives in that eyeblink of instructional time. We have 77 minute class blocks at my school, which feels just right.)

Last week, our IT Manager configured a Mac Server for class drop-box folders, shared resource folders, and private student folders. We needed to get all 240 students registered on the server - and, oh yeah, their teachers too.

Then some other teachers started asking for a way to train the students in iMovie - everybody and their dog is suddenly using iMovie in the classroom, which raises its own issues. A couple asked me to pull that off.

But the question was, how? How train an entire faculty and student body in the server network, iLife software, and more?

The answer seems wonderful: My Thursday Web 2.0 Club has 23 students. We have our weekly Homeroom during each Friday’s club time - and we have 22 homerooms. You see it: one student is available to teach each homeroom in a weekly cycle. Here’s how it looks on Bubbl.us* (thanks to Patrick Higgins for the Twitter tip about this tool):

[bubbl]http://bubbl.us/view.php?sid=49550&pw=yaVWC.w6Lr12UMzJlY3ladE5ZSFBQLg;500;400;Tech Training;100[/bubbl]

Today was our first run-through, and by all accounts, the students did a great job. Next week they’ll walk through the first “Cutting the Crap from Student Movies” video.

I think we’ve found our system here. And a way to give students experience as presenters and trainers. Pretty cool.

*WordPress users: Bubbl.us requires a WordPress Plugin. I installed it here on WP 2.3, and it works fine.

For more on staff technology development, see these articles:

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Here’s an 8-minute promo movie I made for my school over the last few hours. I share it in case anyone wants a resource that talks through a couple of class projects we did last year in my grade 9 history and English classes - and shamelessly boasts about how special my school is for being the first 1:1 Laptop School in Korea.

The first project is “A Broken World,” a student-created wiki textbook and companion whole-class reflective blog about world history from World War I to World War II and the outbreak of the Cold War. (There’s lots of frustration in the sphere right now about blocked sites in schools, so this might be a useful demonstration of how valuable YouTube, wikis, and blogs are for enhancing creativity and learning.)

(By the way, I’ve been scratching my head lately about what to do with that Broken World wiki textbook. It’s really good stuff, and I’m proud of my students for making such an impressive resource. It seems a shame to just abandon it like one of Graham Wegner’s “learning jalopies” or some piece of digital flotsam. Anybody have any ideas of how to put it to use? I’m open to others fact-checking, extending, editing, using, donating, whatever. I just feel like there’s some experimentation possible here on how to put the “legacy products” we so easily talk about in the theoretical to the much-harder-to-pull-off practical use. In other words: help?)

The second project shown in the video is the first annual 1001 Flat World Tales flat classroom writing workshop on Wikispaces: 130 students at my school, Chris Watson’s school in Honolulu, and Michele Davis & Karl Fisch’s school in Denver. The promo walks through not only the wiki, but the (damnably) still-under-construction but worth-a-peek anyway 1001 Flat World Tales blog and website, featuring the prize-winning stories selected by our international student editorial board, plus author profiles, author podcast readings, editor profiles, student testimonials, and more.

Those student testimonials are highlighted in subtitle bars on the movie, which might be effective for persuading your admin to unblock these sites, again.

I really went over the top promoting my 1:1 Apple Laptop School as being “on the 21st century map,” since the point of the thing is to entice parents to send their kids to my school. It might produce a motivating jealousy in your own admin or school board to go 1:1 so they have such bragging rights themselves.

Or maybe the thing’s just a piece of junk. You tell me. (If nothing else, I got some iMovie practice out of it. Still trying to hone those skills.)

(And if you click on the video, by the way, it’ll take you to my AP Literature class Ning, which is open to the public. Sylvia Martinez of the Generation YES blog, and Diane Cordell of Journeys have both joined my students for literary discussions in the forums. You’re welcome to come inside yourself. Interesting talks about “schooliness” and literacy in there.)Find more videos like this on KIS AP Lit 07-08

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Kent: Now, banish’d Kent,
If thou canst serve where thou dost stand condemn’d,
…Thy master, whom thou lovest,
Shall find thee full of labours.
–King Lear I.iv.5-8

Photo Credit: “Iron Team” by 3blindmice on Flickr (via Everystockphoto.com)

What. an. intense. week. or two.My last post was a rant against what I perceived to be the beginning of the end for our fledgling 1:1 program: filtering and blocking websites due to the possibility of finding sexual content.

I would (and will) fight the same battle, and as passionately, every time that Filtering Foe draws near. But in this instance, I regret one thing: I didn’t first speak to my admin privately to advise them to re-think their directive.

There’s much to be learned here on all sides, so I’ll share it.

First, my admin didn’t first ask my advice before broadcasting that directive in an all-faculty email. Had that happened - had I been included in the conversation about Everystockphoto.com (which is a similar service to Creative Commons Search) - then the policy directive might have been different. Even if it weren’t, it wouldn’t have blindsided me with such force, because I would have known and been prepared for it.

And I would have written with less heat.

In fairness, it must be hard for administrators to make the shift, since it’s happening too fast to be taught in college M.Ed. programs and such. This will take time.

Second, I should have had a cup of coffee and taken some quiet time before writing my reply. I wrote it as forcefully as I could for a reason: I wanted to soundly thrash the idea that content-filtering and site-blocking is a good idea. Similarly, I sent my email “all faculty” in order to de-stabilize the idea’s acceptance by the faculty. In other words, I wanted to re-frame our initial picture of “school 2.0″ and its possibilities.

But fatigue, shock, and disappointment that I hadn’t been included in this decision - an example of a bigger question concerning vagueness about my role in our 1:1 launch - eclipsed what my better judgment should have remembered, and it’s this: as I’ve said many times in these pages, my high school principal really is first-rate. Without his advocacy over six long months of negotiations, debates, and never-saying-die about becoming an Apple school, we’d all be suffering with PCs right now.

And in my passion to attack an idea, my language could too easily be construed as an attack on him as well. That I regret.

So I’ll let the follow-up email I sent to the faculty speak for itself: it couldn’t be more sincere, and it should have been labeled, “The Iron Team Lives” ~

Dear All,A real quick clarification in case anyone mistook my argument _for_ school policy as, instead, an attack _against_ anyone: that wasn’t the intent.

This _is_ a crucial issue, and deserves “passionate” debate. In my desire to keep one point of view from settling too firmly about it, I chose to “reply all” when articulating a different viewpoint - but I did it upon waking from an overdue nap after the workshop, which robbed me of much sleep, and reading that email first thing, before coffee. I wrote and hit “send” before doing an e-tone check.

I can’t un-ring that bell - but I can add this: I should have known Rich meant his email to be a temporary guideline pending further discussion and debate, which we all know is (thank goodness) Rich’s leadership style.

So for the record, two things:

1) The day before the workshop, I happened to tell Rich in a meeting with Jason and Wade that I didn’t think I’d ever find a better principal to work with (and I told him I wasn’t “blowing smoke up his whatever,” which was true); and because that’s true, I want to make sure that that’s public knowledge;

and 2) Rich didn’t ask me to write this. I offered to do so willingly. We’ve done amazing things together over the past few months. Most of the credit is his.

So here’s to more discussions about the high seas we’re sailing

Thanks all,

Clay

So what does this all come down to? Careful communication, it seems to me. And it’s noteworthy that the whole teapot tempest occurred in that worst of web 1.0’s communication tools: email.

One more post for my “apologies” tag. But a good one to post as an epilogue and denouement.

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Awake and refreshed now. Neurons still firing from a heady mental cocktail blending the Shanghai Learning 2.0 Conference, my RSS subscription to Crooks and Liars (my favorite political blog), the creative potential of iLife for student-people and teacher-people alike and, five minutes ago, a dash of eureka inspired by reader comments to a week-old and month-old post on this blog.

Crooks and Liars linked to an ACLU online graphic novel about racial profiling that caught this English teachergeek’s eye. I followed the link and read the comic. Here are a couple frames:

Then I thought of my AP Literature King Lear project (we’re adapting the Lear story to the present, re-writing the verse as contemporary English prose, still in dramatic format, on our King Lear Street Talk wiki, after which we’ll record “radio theater” performances of it for publication on Librivox).

I thought of two reader comments of late that gave me ideas I wouldn’t otherwise have had (the power of blogging-as-conversation, again, for Those Who Still Don’t Get It): One of those readers - also a writer, in what I want to call the “reader/writer web,” since this new web turns all of us who use it into a new breed of reader/writer/audience/co-thinker - was Diane Cordell (her Journeys here). Reading one of Diane’s posts a month ago, in which she posted a comic creation she’d made on ToonDo, led to me making one of my own here. This led to Diane’s comment,

You DO realize that the next step might be to create graphic novels - or graphic poetry anthologies.

I loved the Illustrated Classics comic books (not the abridged novels we use now for reluctant readers) that were published when I was a child - I’d be interested in seeing how your class portrayed good old J. Alfred - or tackled Blake’s Tyger. Or re-interpreted Beowulf (maybe you could collaborate with Christian Long’s Brit Lit class). Frankenstein might also be fun to tinker with.

Then I thought of another comment from Patrick Higgins of the always-excellent Chalkdust, replying to my post about the Lear project. Patrick wrote,

I am going to scout out our curriculum tomorrow for our AP Lit teachers and see if they, too are reading King Lear and have them [meaning "the students," I think - and being an ESL specialist, I see the value here] use your page as “cheat sheet” when they have difficulty.

And it hit me: Diane was right about Classics Illustrated comics in the Old Days - I loved them. I remember getting an A on a high school English class essay on the Iliad based on the comic version * And Patrick underscored the usefulness of such a product.**

And we have Apple’s Comic Life bundled on our students’ MacBooks, plus ToonDo online, for two options for making a modern King Lear graphic novel.

The only problem I can see is time. Making the graphic novel still requires the re-writing on the wiki, so creating the comic art would add more hours to the project. But I still think the graphic novel idea is pedagogically valuable, because that genre differs from the prose wiki format in a way uniquely tailored to benefit student writing in the much-needed area of verbal economy. Look at this panel from the ACLU comic and you’ll see what I mean:

The graphic novel, by restricting text to limited fields - narration boxes, speech and thought bubbles - forces economy in a way that text-only writing does not. And economy - saying the most with the fewest words possible - is a stylistic skill sorely in need of training for my seventeen-year-olds (and let me beat you to the punch by confessing I need it, on these pages, as well).

So if anybody else out there is reading Lear this year, and is interested in collaborating…. If we could divide the labor, my 35 students creating the book alongside yours, just picture the final product: a talking graphic novel - wiki-based? - with mp3 performances of each page embedded on the page. How cool would that be?

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*That Comics Illustrated Iliad was probably better than many of the lame, archaic prose translations high schools assign out of either cluelessness or cost-consciousness. I can’t believe how many English classes I’ve seen using horrible, 100-year-old translations of the classics that I would hate to read, but that students, due to the Victorian or otherwise stilted English of those bargain-basement translations, would have a hard time even understanding - when there are fantastic new translations in our own generation’s English that might bring those classics to life in the classroom. Examples: Stephen Mitchell’s new Gilgamesh translation, Theo Cuffe’s new Penguin translation of Candide, Jack Zipes’ recent Signet adaptation of Burton’s translation of The Arabian Nights. Yet teachers still buy the Dover editions. *shudder*

**I shared Patrick’s comment with my classes, and they saw the sense of what he noted, and seemed to see that this was more real-world than a stupid homework or school project because it would be used Out There in the World. Thanks, Patrick. Getting students to understand the Beyond School goal is incredibly difficult.

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