Skyping in to Detroit to talk current events

On Tuesday, I had the privilege of being a guest teacher for nearly an hour in a fifth grade classroom, where we started to discuss what’s going on in Syria.

What makes this particularly cool is that the fifth grade class is in Detroit… and I live 500 miles away, in Durham, North Carolina.

I “met” the fifth graders’ teacher, Ben Curran, because he found my blog at the beginning of this school year and he took the time to comment on a post. We started tweeting and emailing; we even scheduled a time to Skype with each other back in September, and we’ve become friends.

In addition to teaching 5th grade, Ben is also one of the curators of Engaging Educators, a fantastic blog that I read on a regular basis.  It’s worth checking out.

A few weeks ago, Ben and I wondered what it would be like for me to Skype into his classroom to try some of the current events teaching I plan to do on a regular basis with sixth grade students at the middle school I’m opening in 2013, Triangle Learning Community.

Ben and I planned on Sunday, and then I made a short 4-minute YouTube video early Monday morning as a way to introduce myself to Ben’s students (apologies if you watch it — I had a cough — but it was cool for his students to get a preview of their mystery guest). He played the video in class on Monday and then had his students read and discuss an article we selected. It was about reporter Anthony Shadid and how he died of asthma while in Syria covering the protests against the government.

His students then came up with questions, which they recorded on a Google Document that I was able to review so I had a sense of what they were thinking about before Skyping in on Tuesday.

Ben has a great account of what happened in his class on his blog.

When you do a video call on Skype, you can share your screen, and so once the students saw my face and we said hello, I switched to “share full screen” to let them see my screen projected on their computer.

As you can see, we talked for a little more than 53 minutes.

I started by showing them around Durham, where I was calling from, and then I asked them questions about their school in Detroit.  What I found fascinating was that some of Ben’s students learned — for the first time — that they live five miles from one of the largest concentrations of Muslims in the United States — Dearborn, MI.

As a result of our Google Earth session, Ben and his class may take a field trip to an Islamic Center in Dearborn.  That suggests to me that there are lots of opportunities to use Google Earth to learn more about your own neighborhood.

[Update: Ben and I set up a Google Document so we can share resources for his students to read as they follow up on Syria, and Ben just posted a link there to an article in the Detroit Free Press about how hundreds of Syrian Americans in Dearborn are rallying in SUPPORT of President al-Assad.]

Once we moved away from Detroit and over to Syria, we started empathizing with the people who live there. I showed the students some of the cities that have been under attack, and I showed them a picture of Bashar al-Assad, the president of Syria. We then read the blurb about Assad from Wikipedia:

I asked them why they thought he ran unopposed in the elections in 2000 and 2007.  They first wondered if he was very popular because he took over from his father, but then they saw his father was a dictator.

We did a sort of role play, where I asked for volunteers to stand up to run against Assad. Each time someone volunteered, I explained that the volunteer – along with his/her family would be killed as an example of what happened to people who wanted to oppose my government. We did this a few times and they soon “got” what happens to people who dare to oppose President Assad.

I explained that I was exaggerating a bit, but not by much.  That explained why he runs unopposed.

Our conversation moved to a discussion of what you could do if you lived under such conditions, and some students said they would leave the country. We talked about how that’s happening — in a limited way — as people become “refugees” (some of them learned a new word).

Then Ben and I asked them what they thought would happen if the government let anyone leave who wanted to leave.  They got the idea that if that happened, there would not be many people left for President Assad to rule over.

I then showed them this political cartoon, and since they’d seen a picture of Assad, they got that he was the one being depicted in the cartoon.  And they were able to figure out what the cartoon was saying, just by us providing them with the primary document and asking “what do you think the cartoonist is trying to say here?”

We didn’t get into the UN or Russia’s role yet, but they got the idea that he was killing his own people — and they were confused about why that would happen.

And that was a great place to leave off — with some cognitive dissonance.  Why is this happening in Syria? [And why do some -- but not all -- Syrian Americans in Dearborn support President Assad?]

Ben’s students did a great job and seemed very focused (he set up the camera so I could see most of them on Skype), even though we went for more than 45 minutes.

Ben’s students went on break for a few days after we had our session, but when they come back on Monday, he’s going to continue following the story in Syria.  We’ll keep in touch, and I plan to Skype back in again soon.

We’re planning to have his students make an online guide that will explain what’s going on in Syria (and in the overall “Arab Spring” movement, of which Syria is a part) to young people around the world who might be curious. More as that plan develops…

But this was an incredibly cool thing to be able to do for an hour, and it suggests all sorts of possibilities for using current events as a vehicle for developing empathetic global citizens.

Don’t let HW get in the way of learning

This is an argument about why students (and teachers) should blog, and why, once we let them blog, we should give students the curricular flexibility to follow their interests and passions. When they go deeper into material they care about, they will develop their literacy and numeracy in a real-world context. The learning will be more genuine and more meaningful. They will own the learning.

I have been blogging for more than a year, and one of the benefits is that now I have enough material that I can connect unfolding events to previous blog posts I’ve written. Because I’ve been blogging, I can make more sense of events in the world.

The idea behind having middle school students at Triangle Learning Community (TLC) blog about world events for three years (6th through 8th grade) is that they will bring three years’ worth of thinking with them to high school and beyond. They will also develop the habit of paying attention to the world outside the US, which is a good thing for an empathetic global citizen to do.

So here’s the cool connection that made me appreciate my blog — and made me want to have students blog.

I was reading my friend James Kessler’s Facebook page, where he noted the senseless violence going on in Syria (about which I am deeply disturbed and about which I will blog soon):

Now one of James’ friends, Michael-Ann Kelly (who I’ve never met) asked if James is following @acarvin on Twitter.

Who’s @acarvin?  That’s easy enough to find out:

So I went to Andy Carvin’s twitter stream, and I found lots of troubling reports about Syria.

But also in his stream, I found this reference to Wael Ghonim:

Why did that name mean something to me? Well, back in March of 2011, I wrote a long post about Wael Ghonim, and how amazing it was that I was able to follow current events as they were unfolding in Egypt.

Here’s an excerpt from my earlier blog entry:

Now let’s just think about how incredibly cool this is — he’s in Cairo, Egypt.  And he gave a speech at a TED talk in Cairo.  In MARCH.  And I got an email on March 9, opened it, read it early in the morning, clicked on the link, and started learning from Wael Ghonim. I mean, this sort of thing simply wasn’t possible when I was growing up.  We read history in the textbook, which was written several years earlier.  Now, we can access primary sources that allow us to think about events as they happen:

On a second look, we don’t just want students to think about events as they happen — we want them to get active and put those events into context, by using such tools as Google Earth to locate Egypt and by conducting online research to do what I call Applied History.

But the point here is that my earlier blog post about Wael Ghonim became a part of me in ways that I fear most students’ study of history and/or current events does not often become a part of them.

My investment in blogging about Wael Ghonim’s story 11 months ago makes me want to listen to this NPR story (pictured below) Well, maybe not all of it since it’s 38 minutes long — I’ll likely listen to the first 5 minutes to get the sense of it and hear Wael Ghonim’s voice…   Then I’ll go back and read the transcript once it’s made available online in a few days:

Apparently, Ghonim has written a book about his experience.  As you can see from the highlighted portion below, he felt like he had to do something, so he started a Facebook page to dramatize the killing of Khaled Said. He was anonymous when he started the page, but Egyptian officials figured out who he was. Shortly after that, they  kidnapped him.

This is gripping stuff.

Imagine being a middle school student who followed this story back in March. Imagine now wanting to follow-up, but not having time to do so because you are swamped with homework.

Imagine if you had the flexibility to pursue your passion. At TLC, students will learn how to assign themselves homework. They will also spell out the rationale for that HW so everyone is clear about why they are reading that play or working on that math problem.

This means that a TLC student in my position — one who was following events in Egypt — could give herself the homework assignment of reading Wael Ghonim’s new book over the next week. As she read, she would blog about sections of the book that the student found most compelling. When she finished, she might write a review of the book and post it on Amazon.

Many students are passionate about events they learn about, but are stuck doing their teacher’s homework. We need to mentor students so that they are able to learn on their own, and then we need to trust students enough to let them blog about events they care about. Then we need to allow them to follow-up and learn more.

I just watched a great video by Alan November, who says early in the video that the one question he asks when he wants to determine whether a school is a good one or a great one is this:

Who owns the learning?

If it’s the teachers who own the learning (and the curriculum) — if the teachers are working harder than the students — then something’s wrong. The teacher’s job is to create a learning environment that make the students engage with and take ownership of their learning.

If the goal is for young people to become empathetic global citizens — which happens to be the goal of TLC — then why on earth would we stop them from getting to that objective through an unexpected route, such as following up on the Arab Spring?

We need to have students blog more, and we have to give them the flexibility to follow their curiosity wherever (within reason) their blogging may lead them.

This does not mean drop math so you can focus exclusively on Wael Ghonim. But it does mean that if the plan was to look at poetry next week, there would be enough flexibility to let that student focus on Wael Ghonim this week and catch up on poetry later.

If we did it right, the student might even be able to write some poetry about what’s going on in Egypt. She could post that poetry on her blog and we could connect her with a school in Egypt who could read her blog and comment on her work.

Blogging 101

First of all, this really is my 101st blog post.

But it’s also an opportunity to describe —  in “Blogging 101″ how-to fashion –why I think students and teachers need to be blogging (and tweeting and emailing) more. We need to make our learning transparent so that we can share with others and make connections with people all over the world as we broaden our global perspective.

I wrote a post earlier this year titled Why Blog? which I think made a pretty good argument for why students and teachers should blog.

The key quote from that post actually comes from another blog — in this case, Culture of Yes, a blog written by Chris Kennedy, Superintendent of the West Vancouver School District in British Columbia, Canada.  Chris wrote:

The ultimate goal is not to have students blog, it is to have students improve their literacy skills and have the ability to be digital writers, and to do things that would not be possible without the technology.  It is about students creating content to hyperlink to the world, to embed photos and video with text.  It is about students publishing, and then to have the opportunity to receive feedback on their work, review, edit and republish. It is about students producing work not only for their teacher, but for the world. It is about students having their own space to be creative and connect in new ways.  It is, ultimately, about students having greater ownership of their learning.

It’s also about connecting people. If a student writes just for a teacher to get a grade, and not for a wider audience, that student loses the opportunity to have others see the work he/she has produced.

Today’s For Better Or For Worse cartoon makes this point quite well — as anyone who’s written for a newspaper knows, it’s fun to share your thoughts with an audience:

Elly may not be getting paid, but she is getting her ideas out there.  And a well-written newspaper column (or blog) can lead to other opportunities.

Today, Elly would not need the newspaper to get published — she could simply start blogging.

Tavi Gevinson is a 15-year old fashion blogger who has “been invited to runway shows all over the world and has written for and been profiled in magazines like The New Yorker and French Vogue.”

Why? Because Tavi started blogging as an 11-year old and has valuable things to say. She already has her own Wikipedia Page, which notes that “Her parents did not appreciate what Tavi was doing [with her blog] until she asked for their permission to appear in a New York Times magazine story.”

Tavi was featured in October 2011 in a 10-minute segment on one of my favorite NPR programs, Wait Wait… Don’t Tell Me.

I learned about Tavi last weekend from the principal of the iSchool in New York City, a dynamic educator named Alisa Berger. I saw Alisa present about the iSchool at a phenomenal conference in Philadelphia called Educon (about which I will blog next week — Educon rocked my world and introduced me to two educators from The Westminster Schools in Atlanta who have become fast friends, and with whom I look forward to collaborating in the future, Jill Gough and Bo Adams).

And I learned about Educon through my blog — well, sort of.  I learned about it through the group of online educators I connect with via my blog and Twitter.

I just looked back through my Twitter stream (which serves as a nice journal of my online learning — another reason to tweet!) and found the exact date when I registered for Educon back in August 2011:

@Deacs84 is Laura Deisley, a dynamic educator with one of the coolest titles ever — she’s Director of 21st Century Learning at The Lovett School in Atlanta, GA.

Laura hosted the first Powerful Learning Practice (PLP) Conference I ever attended back in 2007 in Atlanta (thanks to Sam Morris for bringing me to that conference), and it’s through Laura that I met PLP co-founders Sheryl Nussbaum-Beach and Will Richardson, who have also had a huge influence on my learning.

This may sound like name-dropping, but it’s really a recognition that the work I’ve done with the folks I’ve met through PLP and in other online spaces has changed the way I learn and connect in the world. It has led me to leave my job teaching at a prestigious high school to open an innovative middle school called Triangle Learning Community (TLC) in Durham/Chapel Hill, NC.

At TLC, all community members — students, teachers, and even parents — will blog on a regular basis.

What’s the value of publishing our reflections to the world? As I publish this 101st blog post, I think about all that I’ve learned since I started blogging seriously about a year ago.  More than 60 of my 101 blog posts are from 2011 to now, which translates to more than one post per week on average (before 2011 I blogged occasionally at best).

Blogging has become part of what I do: I learn neat things about the world and then I blog about it and share it with the world — hence the name of my blog: “What I Learned Today.”

But blogging is more powerful than just writing and reflecting in a journal. Blogging allows me to learn in public — to share my thoughts and my writing and my creativity with the world.

My blog also serves as my digital portfolio.

When I meet people like Bo Adams and Jill Gough at conferences such as Educon, I can point them to past blog posts I’ve written about such topics as:

How to use Google Earth to bring the world to life,

Why people should tweet, and

Why it’s a mistake to “integrate technology” into the existing curriculum.

My specific purpose in blogging right now is to give people who might come to my school (or people who might provide financial support to help TLC meet its commitment to socio-economic and cultural diversity) a taste of the sort of learning that will go on at TLC.

The purpose of TLC is to mentor a group of students so that they become empathetic global citizens who make the world a better place. In the process, they will learn a ton and will demonstrate what young people are capable of doing.

One of my favorite examples of a capable young person is Jessica Markowitz, a remarkable young woman from Seattle, WA, who learned — as a sixth grader – about Rwandan children who had lost their parents to genocide and war and could not afford school.

In response, Jessica started a foundation called Richard’s Rwanda, which has raised $80,000 to support girls in Rwanda to finish their primary and secondary education. She’s also raised the consciousness of her community about what happened in the Rwandan Genocide. And she’s learned a ton by serving on the board of a non-profit at age 15.

Jessica is now a senior in high school, and I look forward to talking with her this week.

I wrote Jessica last week, expressing a desire to talk with her about what she’s learned from starting Richard’s Rwanda because I want my students at TLC to do similar work.  I noted that “middle school students are capable of doing far more than educators typically give them credit for.  We’re also at a moment when middle school students can connect with people all over the world to do great things.”

Here’s Jessica’s response:

Hello Mr. Goldberg, thanks for your email.
I’m happy to speak with you after my school finals on February 1st.
Your school sounds amazing!

This post is about my 101st blog post, but I don’t blog in a vacuum, and I’m using “blog” as shorthand for all the ways we can connect with the world — through blogging, tweeting, emailing, and even using Facebook to organize (as my good friend Ken Okoth is doing as he runs for a seat in Kenya’s Parliament).

It’s all about learning in public — sharing — reflecting — and in the process, helping students to reach their learning potential.

As folks like Jessica Markowitz and Tavi Gevinson demonstrate, a young person who follows her (or his) passion is capable of changing the world.

Let’s abandon the schools of the industrial age and create constructivist educational spaces — such as TLC — that allow students to work hard, change the world, and have fun at the same time. It’s fun to learn and it’s fun to pursue your passion — those should be things students do on a regular basis.

Let’s have fun.  Let’s blog! (and tweet and email…)

POSTSCRIPT ABOUT CONNECTED LEARNING:

Not five minutes after I posted this entry at 7 a.m., Jill Gough read it and tweeted about it:

What I’m learning at Educon

My blog is titled “what I learned today” because I believe that teachers should be “lead learners” and that students should have answers to questions such as “what did you create with people from around the world today?” and “what are you excited about learning?” and “what did you and your teachers learn together today?”

For the next three days, I will be immersed in learning from and with the wonderful 350+ educators who will attend Educon, an innovative conference hosted this weekend by Science Leadership Academy, an innovative project-based 1:1 high school in Philadelphia.

In anticipation of meeting lots of cool people at Educon, these next paragraphs are a statement of what I think about the potential for 21st century learning, and why I am opening a new middle school for empathetic global citizenship in 2013, called Triangle Learning Community.

I believe that we’re at an amazing moment in learning. Think about everything that’s possible for students to learn and create and do.

Now think about how little our schools have changed to fully leverage what’s possible. Yes, we have some technology integration, but as I’ve argued before, simply integrating technology into the existing curriculum is a mistake.

Here’s something cool I just learned from Twitter — there’s a sophomore at UCLA who takes an hour a day to learn something new beyond his regular course load — he’s just completed his 1,000th hour.

The blog post that describes this student’s learning path (click the link above for the blog post) notes that:

So much of school consists of a teacher delivering pre-digested morsels of knowledge to students that students often flounder when seeking out learning on their own. Often, the very structure of school makes learning painful enough that few students want to pursue it on their own. Finally, we overschedule students’ lives so much that even if they did want to find time for an “hour of learning”, they couldn’t find the time.

The bold and red emphasis above the end there is mine — and I’d like to expand upon those ideas.

First, the floundering: when I taught students at a reasonably progressive college-prep school, where all students had tablet PCs, I tried to get students to learn on their own. Result? Big-time floundering on their part and on my part. They wanted me to play by the unspoken rules — tell them what’s on the test, so they can cram that material into their heads. And the structure of the school made it easier for my assessments to conform to that norm. So that was what I did. But it drove me crazy.

Now, the nuggets of information were often connected, and some of it is good stuff for people to know. But to be teaching about ancient Rome when the Arab Spring is erupting around students seemed quite wrong. And to teach about Rome, or Islam, for only a week or so (as is the case in most survey courses) also seemed wrong — we’re just skimming the surface and it’s not what (most) students are passionate about learning.

And the things students might be passionate about have to take a back-seat to getting good grades, and that’s a function of doing what the teacher tells you to do…

So as noted above, even if students did want to find time for an “hour of learning”, they couldn’t find the time.

We need to change what we’re doing.

Here’s my concept — mentor a group of 20 socio-economically and culturally diverse students in 6th and 7th grades to do progressively more complex project work, so that by the end of 7th grade, students are leading 2-3 month long projects about topics in which they are heavily invested.

Then, in 8th grade, let students propose a project they are passionate about that they will work on for six solid months. It could be creating a foundation to support girls in Rwanda to finish their primary and secondary education (click to learn about a young woman from Seattle who did just that as a middle school student).

Or it could be a young man who sets up and hosts a regional conference to help people in his neighborhood learn more about the world-wide decline of honey bees (not an actual student project — yet — but a real problem that a student I know of cares about).

As Chris Lehmann points out in a recent TEDxPhilly talk, titled Education is Broken, ”High School Stinks” because students have no choice about what they learn — they have to do what they’re told over and over and over again…

We need a new structure. We need to give students more flexibility but still hold them to high standards. My school has a different approach. Here’s the basic schedule, which we’d modify as speakers and other opportunities came to town (with Duke, UNC, NCCU, NC State and Durham Tech all in the Triangle area of North Carolina, there are lots of learning opportunities).

I. WELCOME AND COMMUNITY MEETING (30 min)
II. 2-HOUR MORNING SESSION
(includes time at the end for reflection on a blog)
III. HEALTHY SNACK AND BREAK (15 min)
IV.  MATH FOR AN HOUR
(using a modified Kahn Academy flipped classroom)
V. PHYSICAL ACTIVITY (from cultures around the world)
VI. THOUGHTFUL LUNCH FOR AN HOUR
(includes time to read if students choose)
VII. AFTERNOON PROJECT TIME FOR 2 HOURS
(includes time to reflect on how the project is going in a blog entry)

At the end of every day, each student will assign his/her own “DELIBERATE PRACTICE” for homework, so each student will have work to do that is tailored to what each student needs.

If this looks interesting to you, please download the executive summary. If it looks REALLY interesting, here’s a 20-page document with more details

If you would like to keep updated as TLC develops, please click here and enter your name and email.

Bringing a Picture to Life

Here’s a great picture I saw on NPR’s website back in May 2011:

So first things first — there’s no way that’s a picture, right?

It’s too surrealistic with twisted branches — and that sky — the sky is never that color orange, is it? And even if the sky were that orange (and what are those white specks?), sand isn’t blue.

In fact, I just did a Google search for “surrealistic desert” and this painting is exactly the sort of thing that comes up:

So clearly it’s a painting — there’s NO WAY this is a picture … right?

Wrong.

As my five-minute video below demonstrates, it really is a picture — from a desert in Namibia. Sorry about the sound quality — but if you crank up the volume you should be able to hear me…

As a way to orient you to my voice, I start the video by saying “Hello, and welcome to ‘bringing the news to life using Google Earth’ “

I spent a few hours making this video — finding the place marks on Google Earth, planning the script, and recording a few takes of the video — and I had fun making it.

At Triangle Learning Community, the middle school I’m opening in 2013 for empathetic global citizenship, students and teachers alike will take time just about every morning to use Google Earth to gain more context about our world.

This surreal picture is the prompt today — students will see it and want to learn more about it.  Some mornings the prompt might be a news article about unrest in Syria, or a powerful poem, or even a song. And the prompt won’t come from teachers all the time.

The prompt might come from students or teachers or even parents who have something cool to share. And who says every student has to write about the same prompt?

Whatever gets students interested in learning about the world, expanding their global horizons, and practicing their communication skills (by blogging or making videos about what they learned) works for me.

Because if a student starts with this crazy surrealistic picture and ends up becoming fascinated with the Namib Desert (or with surrealistic art) and learning about it for a few days, and then blogs about what she learned, that would be a good thing.

I mean, the Namib Desert looks like a pretty cool place to learn about:

Let’s find a way to help students engage with the world in a rigorous way that they find fascinating and fun.

Inspiring Will Richardson video (found via Twitter)

This is an amazing 5-minute video by Will Richardson about how the world we’re learning in is different from the world our children grew up in. It’s REALLY worth seeing. Stop reading now and watch it.

If you are a rebel who does not follow directions, or if you need more convincing before you click on the link to the video, Will makes several great points — he starts with this one:

And I know that this is stretching it a little bit … but it’s plausible that I could learn physics on this phone.

Content is not scarce any more … teachers are not scarce any more … my children don’t need school in the same way that I needed school — they have different opportunities (assuming they are connected to the internet)

Will ends by noting that “It’s about doing meaningful real work. School should be real life.”

Will is a compelling speaker and if you have not stopped reading and watched the video yet, you really should do so now. It’s only 5 minutes long (okay, 5 minutes and 31 seconds) and it’s well worth watching and sharing with colleagues.

So that’s the “inspiring Will Richardson video” part of this blog entry.

But the reason for the rest of this blog post — the “(found via Twitter)” part — is that I think it’s pretty cool how I happened to find this video via Twitter.

This video is not posted on Will’s website (at least not yet), and it’s not something that has been popularly shared online — at least not to my knowledge.  Perhaps you reading this post will change that. If you like the video, please share it with your learning network or at least email it to a few friends.

But now I hope you are wondering: how did Steve find this video clip???

Well, that’s where Twitter comes in.

For new readers to this blog, I have written about the benefits of Twitter three times recently.  I think it is the tool that has most changed my learning in 2011, and I only started tweeting regularly in August 2011.

A few days ago, I wrote about the value of blogging and tweeting in a post called Why blog?; in December, I wrote To Tweet or Not to Tweet (the answer is: Tweet); and back in September 2011, I wrote Why you should use Twitter, a thus-far failed attempt to get my wife to tweet in any significant way. If you are not into Twitter yet, please consider it.

Let me explain how Twitter led me to this inspiring video:

A few nights ago, I was adding to the list of people I follow on Twitter.  For those of you who don’t know Twitter well, when you start to follow someone new (“following” means receiving their tweets in your Twitter stream), Twitter suggests people who tweet things kind of similar to that person, who you might also consider following –

For instance, here’s what Twitter recommends when I view Jason Ramsden’s page on Twitter (Jason’s Twitter name is “@raventech” because he’s the Chief Technology Officer at Ravenscroft, a great PK-12 school in Raleigh, NC):

[For Twitter newbies: the @ sign is what everyone's Twitter account starts with -- I'm "@SteveG_TLC" because someone else grabbed @stevegoldberg before I could get it; TLC is short for Triangle Learning Community, the middle school I'm opening in 2013]

I respect Jason and would like to see Twitter accounts similar to his — so at some point I might want to follow @dfrankel or @jbeaver…

But what happened to me a few nights ago was that while I was adding a few people, Twitter suggested that I look at a person who works at Proctor Academy, a woman named Kim Hurlbutt Kulacz — here’s her profile from Twitter:

I clicked on Kim’s account, and saw her most recent tweets, known as her “Twitter stream.” What drew my attention and made me decide to follow Kim was this second entry (circled below in red) that mentioned one of the people who’s had a huge influence on my thinking in the past five years — Will Richardson.  According to Kim, Will “reinvigorates” the faculty at Proctor Academy:

I clicked on Kim’s link and was wowed by the video clip from Will’s presentation, which he must have delivered early in 2012 at Proctor Academy.

Without Twitter, there’s no way I would have found that video clip from a school in New Hampshire that I’d never heard of before (no offense to Proctor Academy — looks like a very cool place).

It’s so wonderful that Will Richardson allowed himself to be video taped, and it’s doubly wonderful that Proctor Academy shared that video clip from Will’s presentation on its school website.

And it’s not like Proctor Academy is hiding the video — you can go to Proctor Academy’s website (I just did) and see the video listed on its home page — it’s called “Live to Learn” and it’s circled in red below:

But without Kim’s tweet, not too many people outside of the Proctor Academy network are going to stumble upon Will’s video. Kim has about 500 followers on Twitter, and they have followers, and you get the idea –

It’s an amazing time to be learning and sharing and thinking about all the changes going on in education. If you don’t get connected, using resources such as Twitter, you might miss some very cool stuff…

And when you see something cool, do what Kim did — share it! Blog about it; tweet it; get the word out. If you don’t tweet or blog yet, that’s fine — share by other channels.

My friend Michael Ulku-Steiner, Headmaster of The American School in Switzerland (also known as TASIS) liked Will’s video enough to include it in the newsletter he curates and sends out to his school community every weekend.

Michael does not tweet (yet) but here’s how he shared Will’s video, which I emailed to him a few days ago…

Michael notes, as he’s about to fly to London for a faculty recruiting trip, that it is “fun to see the pace and reach of good ideas.”

I’ll say it again — this is an amazing time to be learning and sharing and thinking about all the changes going on in education.

Bringing Books to Life

I learned today about a superb resource called Book Drum, thanks to Susan Davis, who wrote a wonderful post on the PLP network – Knocked Out of My Orbit: Becoming a 21st Century Educator.

Here’s the paragraph in Susan’s post that led me to Book Drum:

Meanwhile, through my professional learning network (PLN), I learned about a website called Book Drum, which broke down novels page by page and provided images and sounds for readers to better grasp the context of their reading. For example, the entry for To Kill a Mockingbird provides a photograph of a bowl of scuppernong grapes that might be unfamiliar to readers outside the South; another page offers a video of a Bobwhite issuing its distinctive call. Unfortunately, the site only allows participants 18 years of age and older to contribute. But why not, I thought, do this with poems, and in a Google Document? The result was an exhilarating week of co-constructed learning.

I’d love to see what Susan’s students came up with when they did the equivalent of Book Drum on their own. But for now, I’m excited that someone else is doing what I’ve been encouraging students to do for a long time when they come across an unfamiliar word — look it up online! (assuming they have a laptop, which my students had)

So here’s an example — let’s say you are reading To Kill A Mockingbird, and you come across this passage (I took a picture of the book):

Many middle school or high school students won’t know what a Model-T Ford is… but thanks to Book Drum they can find out:

Similarly, a few pages later, there’s a reference to a chiffarobe:

And when you get to that point in Book Drum, look what’s there for you, providing context:

To Kill A Mockingbird is one of my favorite novels.  I’ve read it several times.  But I never before had a true picture of what a chiffarobe looks like.  I pictured it as a basic dresser, but now I see that there’s more to it.

I love the concept of Book Drum

And I especially love what Susan had her students do — create their own version by bringing poetry to life in a Google Doc.

Here’s a neat idea — partner with another class and have them share in the Google Doc as well.  One class brings pages 1-50 to life, and the other class does the same with pages 51-100. Then, we share with each other and give each other feedback as we learn about and discuss a classic work of literature.

What a wonderful time to be a learner!

P.S.  Book Drum has more than just bookmarks — here’s the side menu:

If you choose setting, for example, here’s what you get for The Grapes of Wrath:

Not bad, but I just ran my own search and came up with what I think is a better picture:

Can’t you imagine class “A” finding the first image, and class “B” finding that second one.  Which is a better photo for empathizing with the family that the Grapes of Wrath describes? Why?

That’s the beauty of co-constructing meaning and bringing a text to life — we can have conversations like that. Thanks Susan, thanks PLP Network, and thanks Book Drum