… that’s how big my classroom is.

On Thursday my class in Snow Lake had our first Skype call of the year on our second day of school. We skyped with Heather Durnin‘s class in Wingham ON. (Heather is a plpeep btw…)

Today our call was simply to connect our two classes and let our kids meet for the first time. Because this will be the first of many. Heather and I have hooked our classes up for the long haul this year. We are working with the thinwalls model. Thinwalled classrooms are different than traditional collaborations. In most globally collaborative models, students are hooked together with other classes for what I call “the sprint.” In the sprint we pull our kids together for six or eight weeks so they can complete a unit together. We spend our time praying that things don’t break down and we ask our principal’s for exceptions to be made to filtering policies and for websites to be opened up. We hold it together for the duration and then when the unit is over we go back to the way things were. Just when our kids are getting good at communicating globally and working in teams, the experience ends.

In a thinwalled classroom, you are in it for the long haul. We plan on having our students hooked together as one class for the entire school year. Our classroom blog will list all of the kids from both classrooms as one. They will be grouped together to complete assignments, to read novels and to blog. We have a few lessons planned already that we are going to be teaching both classes over skype and we will be reading a book aloud to both classes.Bringing our classes ever close together, the plan is to bring the students into daily contact with each other.

Thinwalls is about living openly and honestly with another teacher and another class, even though they may be far away. Heather and I have had to be open and honest with each other about ourselves, our styles and about the challenges we face.

Our students are already interested in the similarities and differences between our two spaces. Although we both live in smaller rural places, Heather lives in a place that is mainly supported by farming and is fairly close to urban areas whereas where I live is more isolated and supported by mining. It’s also interesting (and slightly strange) to note that although I have been using technology in my classroom for a number of years and worked with people from around the globe – this is the first time I’ve worked with someone from within my own country.

We will have a lot to share as we move forward about what we’re doing and how we do it. The tools we are using are available to all for no cost to very low cost (a pro flickr account – $25, for example). More important than that is the changes to our pedagogies we are working on to support learning in these ways.

Ended my first day of school with an unexpected interview with the CBC (Canadian Broadcasting Corporation) regarding social media and student grades.

A new study out of the Netherlands “sounded the alarm” that kids who study while on Facebook or other forms of social media have grades that are, on average, 20% lower than those who don’t. The CBC was looking for a response to this.

Seems like kind of a no-brainer to me.

I tried to make the point that social media was simply the latest target in this. Used to be television, or studying with music took on this role. Now, it’s Facebook. I tried to say that the study sounded reasonable to me. Kids are distractible (as we all are) and a few studies in the past few years have been tearing up the idea of multi tasking and now instead we deal with continuous partial attention.

Finally, I wanted to make the point that social media is not the bad guy in this story. Social media can be a very effective tool for connecting people around the globe; to help kids learn about new places and new cultures. Use the tools for what they do best.

How well I accomplished what I set out to do I will leave up to you to decide.

Social Network Interview (Download .mp3 819 kb. 6:49)

A great quote from a recent Stephen Downes post:

“Software colonizes. It imposes order as surely as statutes and police”

Is the software you use in your system meant to control and impose order, or to free students to be connected, creative and reflective?

This is a picture of my two sons. Christian (left – without the gun; he’s not grouchy honest, just a bad time for a picture.) and Alexander (right – still without the gun). I took this photo in Deadwood SD this summer right after we had watched the shooting of Wild Bill Hickock.

Alexander turned 12 this year and with a rush of pre – teen pride is entering grade seven. Which in our small town means that I am about to become his home room teacher. Alexander and I will be in the same classroom for most of the day. I will be teaching him math, science, language arts and social studies.

This has brought education and planning home to me in a whole new way. Each unit that I’ve been looking at before this school year has begun, I’ve found myself thinking of my own child:

Does he know how to do this? Will he struggle with this?

I think this is natural. We all want the best for our kids and are concerned about them.

As well, this has made me much more aware that EVERY child in my classroom has a parent behind them that wonders the same thing each day as they walk into my classroom. As classroom teachers, we go a long way towards helping kids build their dreams into a life time reality. People not involved with education may believe that we will be “easier” on our own kids if we have the chance. In fact, I can see that I will have to work very hard not to be too tough on him.

We bought Alexander a new Macbook this summer and he and I have been playing with it, setting up software, learning to use it a bit more and making sure he’s ready for his first days in the classroom. I’m both nervous and excited to have him in my classroom. I of course want him to do well and to learn to see the world with ever-more-mature eyes. Should start off the year in a new and interesting way.

“Why do people go to school?

Why?

Yeah.

Didn’t your mother tell you?

She just said everyone went.

Well … they go to learn. That’s why.

To learn what?

About the world.

What for?

I hesitate. I am remembering what my wife said about being positive. I want to be positive. So they can work, I say. So when they grow up they can get a job and they can work. There’s nothing necessarily negative about that, I think.”

This is a conversation between a father and son as they walk together towards the son’s first day of school. It is taken from a fictional op-ed piece in the New York Times. While is is fiction, it poses plenty of good questions.

Is school about teaching kids skills so they can get a job? Seems rather narrow minded and Western. Is school about helping kids to see the world in a certain way? Seems rather colonial.

Shouldn’t school be about self actualization and not about productivity? Shouldn’t it be about asking questions about the world? About making the world a better place? About learning to dig deeper and see more clearly?

Three more days until my first day with my students.

As much as I love this online space, I freely admit that I prefer to spend my time between the pages of a book.

I just can’t get into reading from a screen.

I’ve spent the last few days deep down in the pages of The Book Thief. My new friend Heather Durnin told me about it. I’m glad she did.

I’ve recommended few books over the time I’ve been writing here: Cathy’s Book, the Boy Who Harnessed the Wind and possibly a few others; but The Book Thief will change you. Seen through the eyes of Death, it is the fictional story of a young girl living in Germany during World War II. A girl learning about the power of words and small deeds. Deeds which remind us all what it means to be human. It is the most powerful piece of writing I’ve read in a long time.

Read it. Share it with your class. I’m going to.

Over the years that I’ve been using social media and 2.0 technologies in my classroom, I’ve tried plenty of different services. When accounts are free, it is easy to try things out. Of course, what ends up happening is that plenty of these get abandoned. A service didn’t do what you thought it would, the service dies, or the you simply end up not using the tool in your classroom.

Whatever the reason, we’ve all created plenty of online orphans. What happens to all of the wikis we’ve created and never used? Or the email addresses we’ve changed from? The services we’ve signed up for and left behind.

What happens to all of these things? Nothing. And that is part of the issue. Every place you’ve created an account or a profile can be tracked back to you. Every single piece is a part of your digital footprint. With a memory the size of Google’s, these orphans, that we give little or no thought to, are an important part of who we are online.

In a recent op – ed piece published in the New York Times, Eric Schmidt, one of the founder’s of Google has suggested:

“that young people who catastrophically expose their private lives via social networking sites might need to be granted a name change and a fresh identity as adults.”

William Gibson, the author of the article has gone even farther, suggesting:

“If Google were sufficiently concerned about this, perhaps the company should issue children with free “training wheels” identities at birth, terminating at the age of majority. One could then either opt to connect one’s adult identity to one’s childhood identity, or not.”

While this is far fetched from us currently, as the school year begins again for most of us in the Northern half of the world, these online orphans are worth discussing with the students and teachers in your school. Think about the spaces you are creating. Are they needed and necessary? Can you reuse or recycle an already created space? Is this best accomplished at an external space or internal? What effect will this have on my digital footprint?

I’ve been thinking carefully about this as the footprint of my own classroom has expanded. We have our blog, a buddypress site, a youtube channel, a flickr site, various wikis and an as yet unused scribe blog. Each piece has been added deliberately giving us access to new functions and spaces for learning. After moving around between services as I learned the pros and cons of each, I am hoping that I will have these spaces for some time in the future.

The idea of digital footprint, orphaned accounts and online identity needs to be a part of any digital citizenship curriculum a school wants to develop.

The tools I’ve been using in my classroom have been mostly static for several years now. While this might seem like an eternity in internet time, we’ve been successful with our model.

Blogs, wikis, google docs and open internet service as cornerstones. Many others on the periphery such as audacity, igoogle, flickr, youtube and delicious. While my teaching has changed in this time (and I hope improved) using these tools, the tools themselves haven’t. I’ve learned to use them in new ways, digging deeper with my students, watching for patterns of use and learning how to help them to use these tools to see new issues.

While not resistant to using new things, I’ve been careful to not chase after every new online service or website that has emerged. I’ve thought of this as the “shiny object syndrome.”

This year however I am hoping to add a few tools to my cornerstones. I plan on working with both diigo and the online community I’ve set up using buddypress at Hive Thinking. I think that these tools will add capabilities that we currently don’t have in the classroom.

And this has got me thinking. Does using new tools allow for new learning? Are there new tools that change the landscape of information that is available? Are there tools that are so significant that they allow students to learn things in new ways that would not have access to without them?

A few different examples. Open internet service allows students access to information they simply could not have with out it. But does access to this information equal new learning? I would argue that it doesn’t. Simply having access does not guarantee anything. It is the same trouble that schools get in to when they go to 1:1 laptop programs. They believe that putting laptops into classrooms will improve test scores and lead to deeper learning and then are disappointed, blaming the laptops when things fail to change. In the same vein, blogging will not develop your classroom into a community and giving students access to Skype will not connect them with the globe.

They need models to guide them, a curriculum that makes use of the tools and an assessment program that honours the learning they have accomplished.

These things being said, I believe that the capabilities of our tools add dimensions to our pedagogy. We need to choose our tools carefully to ensure we have a full battery of abilities to share with our students.

More examples.

Email might be the most basic one. If our students have an email address and we allow them to access it during the school day and show them how to make contact with others to gain new information, their learning can be changed. They have access to people and information they do not have without it. Diigo can function the same way. Using diigo, students can highlight online text and leave their thoughts and notes behind for others. This concept of marking up and sharing online text is a new literacy skill that has only emerged from this tool and others like it.

If the literacies, skills and information we can access depends on the tools we use, does this make tools that much more important? Are our students missing out on possible learnings if they are not using certain tools?

While many edtech companies would like for you to believe that, I don’t.

First of all, most tools (if not all) are redundant; there are multiple services out there that allow for the same capabilities. For example, many video sharing sites allow users to embed their content. Free blogging and wiki sites abound. Image editing sites like picnik can be used in place of aviary or even free offline equivalents like gimp.

Second of all, the tools simply cannot come first. We cannot choose tools and then find ways to use them. We must consider the skills and abilities that we want our students to have and then choose the paths to help them get there. Our students do not need to know everything. They do not need to know how to do everything either. However, they do need to know how to access knowledge and skills when they need them. It’s the whole “teach a man how to fish” thing once again. Making choices about vital skills and knowledge is well… vital. We need to ensure our students have skills that will stand the test of time, that will be transferrable between pieces of software and that will help them to deepen their knowledge.

Ability to share resources they have found? Important. How to get there? Not as important. They might blog. Post on a wiki. Save to delicious. Share on a diigo network. Post on twitter.

Share their thoughts with a global audience? Important. Write a blog post. Make a video. Record a podcast.

What is not important is the individual software dependent skill. Click here. Then do this. Then that. Etc.

New tools are important. New tools give us access to information we wouldn’t have without them. New tools give our students the ability to share, to network and learn in ways they wouldn’t have without them. Choose your classroom cornerstones carefully. Expand on them. But don’t get caught up by the SOS (shiny object syndrome).

I put the cart before the horse today.

While I’ve constantly preached and believed in the fact that learning need and pedagogy come before selecting tools – I set up a new website today for my classroom and I’m not sure how it will be used.

As ning went through its changes this spring and re-emerged as something different, I still saw the need for a social network that could be used in the classroom. While I had only used ning for one project in my classroom, it had been a powerful experience and I felt I needed another space like this.

Going with the Idea Hive theme that I have branded all of my sites with, I registered Hive Thinking for a mere $10. I have in the past chosen Bluehost for my data and so with only several several mouse clicks, I installed WordPress. Once this was up and running, I installed the Buddypress plugin and searched for a theme. A bit of image editing for the header image and I was up and running.

If you haven’t heard of it, Buddypress is a free open source plugin for WordPress that allows you to run a full social network, similar to what you would get with Ning, on your own. Members can sign up, they can post questions in forums, make groups and connect with others. Two great things about Buddypress for schools: it is open source and free so not only is it simple to set up, you can edit it’s code to do what you want; and second, you have complete control over who can join your network and in the content that is posted.

Once you have Buddypress installed, you will have to sort through the settings, making certain that you have it set up in ways that will keep your students safe, and you operating within your school district’s policies.

For example, under the general settings menu of wordpress, you may want to uncheck the box that allows anyone to join your site. This means you will have to add your students manually, but it will most likely satisfy safety requirements.

As well, under the Buddypress menu, there are settings for the different components of the software. Some of these allow private messaging between users, allow users to create groups and become friends with others on the site. Again, depending on your situation you will have to make your own decisions about appropriate settings. The only one I shut off was private messaging between users.

The one problem that I had with getting all of this set up was with the forums. When I installed Buddypress and got the site running, I kept getting an error message about problems with the files that were installed behind the scenes. Luckily, Bluehost has a live chat function for support. I posted my question and had my answer in under 2 minutes. I needed to edit the php.ini files but following their advice I was quickly done this and the site now runs with no problems.

The simple reason that I did this today was that I had the time. I am certain that the need for a tool such as this will emerge early in the school year, but September’s don’t generally allow for a lot of free time. While I still have work to do before this is a fully functioning site ready for students, today has been a good day.

Quote of the day from Clay Shirky’s Cognitive Surplus:
“The hothouse environment of a collaborative circle can make the ideas and achievements of the participants develop faster than if the participants were were all pursuing individual goals without sharing.”

I love the idea of classroom as “intellectual hothouse.”