Presenting at miGoogle and Michigan State

We will presenting The Way of the Google Drive: Thoughts and Tools to Inspire Change at two conferences the first week of November.

• miGoogle 2015 in Brighton, Michigan
• Michigan State University College of Education Technology Conference

It will be a fast paced combination of motivational thoughts and practical examples of how we've seen the ideas work.

To prepare, I've been posting articles here or on my other blog every day of October. Here are some popular ones from this week:

• The outline of our session
• Always Striving to Improve - My interview with Jake Gentry, who will be presenting with me at both conferences
• Lifelong learning, PBL and a passion for encouraging others - My interview with Clark Rodeffer, who will join us for miGoogle

Click here to see all posts from Teaching Like an Artist with the tag "The Way of the Google Drive".

And if I haven't promoted it enough yet, don't miss our EPIC session trailer!

Thoughts on 'Most Likely to Succeed'

I first heard about Most Likely to Succeed about six months ago when organizing some staff professional development for project-based learning. I watched the trailer and all the sound bites gave me chills. The things the teachers and the experts were saying in the film were all the best things I was discovering in the job as I was implementing project-based learning.

A few weeks ago, while my mind has been swirling with ideas for my upcoming conference sessions, I was thrilled to learn they were screening the movie at a nearby college. My wife and I were able to watch it tonight.

I won't give a detailed review of the movie. I would want to watch it again and dig into a few claims before I would do that. I want to get a few thoughts out, though.

To provide some background, the film contrasts the traditional education system with innovative teaching methods and organization of High Tech High. What's wrong with the current system and the promises of the new approaches to teaching come out through interviews with familiar faces like Sal Khan and Ken Robinson as well as staff of High Tech High and experts in business.

I enjoyed it thoroughly from start to finish. I want to watch it again as soon as I can. Every educator should watch it the first chance they get. It raises excellent questions and even if you think some of the visions were too idealistic or that High Tech High is too unrealistic, it offers at least a glimmer of hope for what education can be. Seeing the students perform or show their work in the exhibitions was powerful.

As someone who has been working in ed-tech now for almost eight years, a lot of the points were nothing new. Yes, the current system was originally designed over 100 years ago with a purpose of turning out good factory workers. Yes, computers are making many jobs obsolete and we don't know exactly what careers will even be available for today's K - 12 students.

Some of these insights will be new to many, though, and what I appreciate most is the film made them loud and clear. Viewers will be forced to think about the questions that are raised. Teachers will have to form convictions.

One of my favorite statements came from Dr. Eric Mazur. He raised the question of why we test students the way we do when we know the posture and restrictions of a student taking a test is never what we see anyone doing in the world of work. I have a lot of respect for Mazur's work and it's something I've pointed out myself. He put it brilliantly.

I enjoyed how it let parents and students provide the counterargument to the ideal world of High Tech High. Parents of the students who attended the school asked great questions of the teachers about the lack of course content. In one school, the students banded together against their innovative math teacher and said they just want to be prepared for college, not necessarily life. In some cases the teachers didn't have much to say in return.

The film ultimately portrayed a decision between these extremes as a gamble for the parents. The facts are simply not in yet as to which is better. As a parent, I waver on this myself. The traditional and the innovative approaches have some benefits. Is a good balance possible? If not, which is best? What about the majority of us who don't have a very innovative option for our children anyway?

But the biggest question in my mind during the film was this: Who decides what matters?

Is development of "soft skills" like empathy and leadership more important than the broad exposure to traditional content? Do we let the government decide the standards by which schools are measured? Or do we listen to Sal Khan and the rep from Google, as they talk about what the most forward-thinking companies should be looking for in their employees? Do SAT scores matter just because they matter to colleges?

I look forward to exploring these questions with administrators in my district and with my colleagues. I hope the film will be widely available soon. At least parts of it will be excellent for use in class. I want to hear what students have to say.

Let's keep the conversation going with a focus on being the best educators we can be.

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I'm doing a challenge this month to post on one of my blogs every day. It's in preparation for my conference session, The Way of the Google Drive. Be sure to follow me on Twitter or on either blog to keep up with the "thoughts and tools to inspire". 

Click here to see all the posts from Teaching Like an Artist with the tag The Way of the Google Drive.

Learning and Creating Like Never Before

Here's another wrap-up of some posts from my Teaching Like an Artist blog. I'm in the middle of the series of daily posts leading up to my conference session The Way of the Google Drive.

My most popular post from the last week is Art and Risk. Uncertainty adds to the excitement. What does that say about the routine of school?

The shortest post - a list of five things that help me know I'm on the right track with teaching.

I also finished up this video trailer for our conference session. Jake and I were trying to be epic. If nothing else, it answers the question of where I got the title for the conference. It has a few of my favorite one-liners.

I hope to finish one more video in the next week that is more down to earth and that includes contributions from our other co-presenter.

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I'm doing a challenge this month to post on one of my blogs every day. It's in preparation for my conference session, The Way of the Google Drive. Be sure to follow me on Twitter or on either blog to keep up with the "thoughts and tools to inspire". 

Click here to see all the posts from Teaching Like an Artist with the tag The Way of the Google Drive.

Teachers and Students Discover the Power of Technology for Learning

This is a combination of two posts from my Teaching Like an Artist blog. I'm doing a series there about topics related to our upcoming presentation at miGoogle 2015.

The first part is an interview between me and Jake. The second part shows the encouraging responses we received from a student survey. Both highlight how encouraging this activity was for us and the students.

The Interview
In preparation for our conference presentation, Jake Gentry, a Geometry teacher at the high school where I work, decided to try an inquiry based learning activity in his classes. We have worked together on a couple project-based learning activities in the past, but we both felt we weren't being "hands-off" enough in letting the students explore the concepts.

To see if inquiry-, discovery-based learning could really work, Jake went all in and had students explore and discover using technology instead of using any direct instruction.

In this recording (around 10 minutes long) I asked him some questions about what he did, what he learned and how effective he thought it was. They're still working through the project, so these are his thoughts so far.

The general outline of the talk is:

• Why we did it
• What the activity was like
• What has he seen so far - is it working?
• The level of thinking that was going on during the activity
• What tech did the students use for learning?
• What tech did he use to run the activity?
• What effects has he seen on the students?
• Was there support from the principal?
• How the focus shifted from "Is this right?" to the learning goals

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The Survey
Next we gave the students a short survey to see what they thought about the experience. We received 86 responses and a few significant findings are reported below.

Overall, Jake and I were again encouraged by what we learned. This makes it even more likely he will continue exploring these teaching strategies in future lessons.

We first asked students to indicate how much they agreed or disagreed with this statement:

I prefer to learn by exploring on my own instead of just having the teacher explain material to us.

Here are the results, from Strongly Disagree to Strongly Agree:

I was surprised to see only about 15% of the students disagreeing. This was a great sign that the students were with us in this endeavor. I thanked them for trying this out and being such great sports about learning with us.

For many the seven class periods spent exploring a guiding question without much direction from the teacher was the first experience with such "hands off" learning in math. It was wonderful to see the students were this open to it.

After reading some comments from the students, I made it clear that our intent is not to replace teachers with computers. Obviously it helps to have an expert in education designing the learning experience, even if he or she is not delivering the material to the class in a traditional manner.

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Results of this second question were most significant to me. Again, they were asked to rate how much they agreed or disagreed with this statement:

I can learn a tremendous amount on my own by exploring online tools such as search engines, videos and interactive websites.

Note first of all that this statement is not limited to Geometry or even math. It is simply a statement about being able to learn with online resources. 

Also, it's interesting to me that Jake and I debated about using the word "tremendous". I pushed to leave it, even though we knew it could make some students less likely to agree.

This is how they responded.

Jake gave me a high-five when we saw the graph after the first period. When the upper ratings remained high class after class, I was excited. I get chills when I talk about this stuff! To me, 4's and 5's on this graph (submitted by a full 73% of the students) means students are aware of the possibility before them to learn in amazing ways. 

Doors of opportunity opened to students who realized this through our lesson. In whatever areas they choose, they inched a step closer to success this past week.

We had a couple open ended questions on the survey and many students did say that through this activity they realized they could learn by exploring online resources. Some admitted they didn't think they could, but now they know otherwise. Some referred to gaining confidence by working through the lesson.

Jake and I know there's a lot we can do to improve the activity. Realistically students might be giving themselves way too much credit for what they actually learned. Still, this is the kind of thing that gets me out of bed in the morning. I love encouraging students to use the power of technology for learning. I look forward to seeing where it takes them.

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This is a combination of posts from a series on my conference session, The Way of the Google Drive. Be sure to follow me on Twitter or on either blog to keep up with the "thoughts and tools to inspire". 

Click here to see all the posts from that blog with the tag The Way of the Google Drive.

Conference Session Update - The Way of the Google Drive

I'm really excited about this conference session! Here are some updates:

I already posted about the miGoogle conference in Brighton, MI on November 3, but we were also accepted to present that weekend at the Michigan State University College of Education Technology Conference!

I will be presenting with two friends who will enhance the conversation tremendously. My friend and colleague, Jake Gentry (@jacobgentry1026), will be at both conferences. We also confirmed this week that Clark Rodeffer (@CDRodeffer), will be joining us at miGoogle. A little background on them:

• Jake is the youngster in the group. He is responsible for bringing that young teacher idealism. He also comes with (possibly too much) energy! The two of us work in the same school district and we've been incorporating a lot of innovative practices into his class in preparation for our session. Stay tuned for a short podcast or two about those.
• I met Clark years ago at a game design convention. He had an unexpected career change a few years ago and he ended up in education with a job similar to mine. His background in engineering and unique experiences in a New Tech high school in Michigan has given us much to talk about when it comes to innovation and change in education. It's an amazing opportunity to have him join us.

The full title of our session is The Way of the Google Drive: Thoughts and Tools for Inspiring Change.

Among other things, I'll be providing the big picture backdrop for the session. We will have plenty of practical examples, but with a title like The Way of the Google Drive, we'll get deep at times.

To hone in on those big, fundamental ideas, I challenged myself to write something (at least vaguely) related to the conference session and post it every day in October. Most of those posts are over on my Teaching Like an Artist blog. Here are some key links:

• Why I always start my training and conference sessions with the big picture
• A short three-part series on the inspiration of art and the power of tech
• The third post in that series is particularly important because it explains what this "way of the Google Drive" is all about.
• To easily access all posts on that blog that I tagged with The Way of the Google Drive, click here.

If any of that seems too abstract, don't worry! Most of the session will highlight classroom examples we've been a part of and I will address some of those over the next week.

If you want more information about the session, our page for the miGoogle conference can be found at this link.

The Way of the Google Drive - Thoughts and Tools to Inspire Deep Learning

Next month I'll be presenting a session at the 2015 miGoogle conference in Brighton, Michigan. Jake Gentry, a friend and colleague, will be presenting with me.

Our session is called The Way of the Google Drive. It's a reference to note a student gave me when he thanked me for telling his class about the power of technology for learning and creating like never before.

To build some hype and to refine our thoughts, I'm going to be blogging about the underlying ideas every day throughout October. Most of it will be a better fit for my Teaching Like an Artist blog (here's the list of posts tagged with The Way of the Google Drive), but I'll post some items on this blog as well.

For now, here is our session description:

A student with a computer and a Google account has access to the most powerful tools in the world for learning, connecting and creating. In this session we will explore some big ideas about inspiring students to use those tools to reach their dreams and potential. 

All concepts will be grounded in practical applications useful in all subjects or grades. I'll demonstrate creative presentation options like comics, narrated slideshows and music videos. We will also look at several tools that can take any student project to a wider audience.