Be of Use

When I decided to blog I made the call not to give it a tech-centric name because I was at a crossroads in my career. I was smack dab in the middle of graduate school, getting my administrative certification and becoming a principal seemed like a potential career option. While my path didn't lead me in that direction it has veered me off the track of solely technology integration - coordinating data and assessments. For the first time in my professional life I'm looking at how I can help teachers assess student work, or meet the Common Core changes, rather than evangelizing why they need to embrace 21st Century Skills development...communicate with Web 2.0 tools...or something of that nature. It's refreshing. I think Krista Moroder's post on focusing on learning  helped to make me conscious of the importance of remembering why we're in education. She blogged more about this just the other day . I have no doubt I had lost site of that, lost in the world of wireles...

I'm sold on personalized learning for kids. As a parent I see everyday, if you give kids the opportunity to create and explore they take off with it. Adults, that's a different story. We've already been programmed to learn a certain way. This past winter (well we're still technically in winter...) I lead a professional development day starting with a keynote on Digital Literacy. In my email to the staff a week ahead of time I listed the learning resources and clearly stated that this would be self-directed learning time. After my presentation, I go off to the library to facilitate and I have 50 teachers staring at me waiting to start. Be free my children...go off and learn. Easier said than done. How do we break people of the habits they've learned over decades of schooling K through a Master's Degree, on to professional learning events? Putting together/curating resources is easy. The adult learning...that's the hard part. I think having personal learn...

Over break I kicked the tires on Udemy for the first time. Being that Big Data and Personalized Learning are my current obsessions I choose Educational Big Data and Learning Analytics as my first class. Above is a video from that class - I was surprised I had not seen it yet. Warning - it is put out by Ericsson - but they aren't selling broadband plans with it ( at least not directly). There's plenty of good sound bites in here, but Sugata Mitra's line toward the end jumped (19:07) off the screen at me - "the teacher needs to step back and say, 'today's topic is this, now open your notebook and figure it out.'" An exciting (at least for me) and simple statement on his vision of education. I have hear and read a lot about holding  students and adults responsible for their own learning. Frankly I think that there's a lot of focus on student learning and not near enough on teacher learning. This statement certainly asks the learner to own it....