The power of curation

This was written by Scott McLeod who is an Associate Professor of Educational Leadership at the University of Kentucky and the Founding Director of CASTLE, the nation's only academic center dedicated to the technology needs of school leaders. He blogs regularly at Dangerously Irrelevant and can be found on Twitter at @mcleod. This post was originally found here.

by Scott McLeod

Most students need help learning how to get organized. And if we're honest with ourselves, we'll admit that most adults need help in this area too! One of the best ways to use technology in the classroom is to help students and educators learn how to curate and organize the information and resources that they find on the Web.

There are a number of different tools available for Internet curation.

Delicious, a social bookmarking service, remains a favorite of many. By adding the Delicious button to their Internet browser toolbars, students and teachers can quickly bookmark a web site, blog post, video, or any other resource that they want to access again later. It's also easy to add keyword tags or notes to anything that they bookmark, which means that they can quickly create collections of things about which they're interested or passionate. [Creating a new unit? Tag the resources! Doing a school project? Tag everything found online with a special class project tag! Found three new skateboarding or music videos and want to save them? Tag them!] Since Delicious is an online service, it is easy for educators and students to log in and access their bookmarks from any device. Plus, many mobile apps now have the ability to send directly to Delicious, which means that individuals can bookmark resources from their mobile phones or tablet computers too.

[TIP: Common tags that are used by multiple students and faculty members also are a great way to create collections of learning resources by unit, class, or subject area.]

Another useful curation tool for teachers and students is Evernote. Evernote is a digital storage tool that allows individuals to create and store notes, documents, web sites, and much more. Evernote is a very robust digital storage box that can handle nearly anything that students and educators may want to throw into it, including text, images, documents, audio, and video. Like Delicious, Evernote has buttons for Internet browsers that allow users to quickly 'clip' and save all or part of a web page. This is particularly useful for capturing online information that may expire or disappear later, because once you've captured something in Evernote, it's yours to keep! Also like Delicious, Evernote supports keyword tagging which means that individuals can quickly label and categorize notes and other resources. Additionally, Evernote allows students and educators to create folders to further organize materials. Those folders can even be shared publicly online with other people. Evernote lives on multiple platforms and thus can be used on a desktop, laptop, or tablet computer as well as on smartphones. Everything in Evernote can be synchronized across devices, thus facilitating access at any time from anywhere. Evernote also has a very robust user community that shares tips on how to get the most out of the service.

There is a wealth of information available to us online. The challenge for most of us is how to organize and make sense of it. Mastery of digital curation tools is a critical learning need for both students and educators.

School makes me...

Scott McLeod's blog Dangerously Irrelevant is a profoundly progressive read. Scott tweeted me a link to his post that featured this picture:

Try it. Go to Google and type in "school makes me" and see what autocomplete choices come up. When I did it, I got school makes me:

• sad
• feel stupid
• fat

So why does this matter?

Perhaps you are not aware how Google's autocomplete works. Google explains:

As you type, autocomplete predicts and displays queries to choose from. The search queries that you see as part of autocomplete are a reflection of the search activity of all web users and the content of web pages indexed by Google.

Several hundred million searches are made with Google every single day and this is a reflection of the search activity students are conducting. Are we paying attention to this? Are we prepared to take this seriously?

I am a staunch supporter of public education but I also understand why Sir Ken Robinson asks "Do Schools Kill Creativity, John Taylor Gatto writes about Weapons of Mass Instruction and Kirsten Olsen writes about people who are Wounded by School. 

The way forward is not to build schools that are a better version of yesterday. Before school can improve -- school has to change. Rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic ain't going to cut it anymore.

Here are three quick suggestions for how I think school needs to change:

1. Curriculum is not something created and laminated by distant authorities and mailed to the schools. While there can be a skeletal framework created by provincial, state or federal departments of education, curriculum is something that must be negotiated between teachers and students at the school. Here's an example of what real learning looks like.
2. Assessment is not a spreadsheet, it's a conversation. We need to stop demanding that students show what they have learned by doing things they hate. Anything worth learning is worth doing in a context and for a purpose. Students should experience their successes and failures not as reward and punishment but as information.
3. Accountability is really about providing the public with information regarding their schools.
   Unlike standardized tests which are notorious for their inability to provide anything more than a limited and incomplete snapshot of a student on a single day, a collection of performance assessments assembled in a learning portfolio can inform the teaching and learning process in a timely fashion while simultaneously assuring the public that students are receiving a high quality education. Ultimately, the best evidence parents can receive about their children's learning is to see their children learning.

Here are all of my posts on six broad topics that we need to rethink so that we can reframe the realities of school.

Abolishing Grading

Abolishing Homework

Rethinking Standardization

Rethinking Lesson Planning

Rethinking Discipline

Rethink Accountability

I also suggest you look at some of the work being done by the Alberta Teachers' Association and their research report titled A Great School for All: Transforming Education in Alberta.

Best use of technology

Scott McLeod created this picture from a Chris Lehmann quote that came from a post I wrote about YouTube adding a multiple choice quiz function.

Scott McLeod's review of Will Richardson's Why School?

Here is Scott McLeod's Amazon Review of Will Richardson's book Why School? Scott McLeod blog here and tweets here.

by Scott McLeod

Why School? is a superb summary of why schools need to be different. We now live in a world where the rule is abundance, not scarcity. Where teachers are from all around the world, not just in those buildings down the street. Where students can make and do and share, not just sit passively and regurgitate.

There are lots of insights in this short text. I read the entire book in a sitting of an hour or two. But the ideas within will last much, much longer...

A few quotes to whet your appetite:

1. "let's scrap open-book tests, zoom past open-phone tests asking Googleable questions, and advance to open-network tests that measure not just if kids answer a question well, but how literate they are at discerning good information from bad and tapping into the experts and networks that can inform those answers. This is how they'll take the real-life information and knowledge tests that come their way, and it would tell us much more about our children's preparedness for a world of abundance."

2. "Discovering the curriculum changes the teacher's role in the classroom. It becomes less about how well the teacher develops the lesson plan and what that teacher knows (though those ingredients are still important). Instead, they must inspire students to pursue their own interests in the context of the subject matter. Teachers need to be great at asking questions and astute at managing the different paths to learning that each child creates. They must guide students to pursue projects of value and help them connect their interests to the required standards. And they have to be participants and models in the learning process."

3. "'How do your teachers learn?' Most answers I get follow along traditional lines: 'They go to conferences.' 'They take after-school workshops.' 'They read books.' They see their teachers' learning as an event, not an ongoing process."

4. "We saved every bit of paper that came home in the Friday Folders that year, and they grew to a three-foot-high stack in the corner of our bedroom. It was an impressive collection of stuff that my kids never again looked at once it was added to the stack. Countless hours spent filling in those worksheet blanks, working those test problems, finishing off those projects, and Tess and Tucker had literally zero investment in any of it after their grades and our signatures were in place. Zero."

5. "I'd articulate the shift to teachers like this: Don't teach my child science; instead, teach my child how to learn science -- or history or math or music. With as many resources as they have available to them today (not to mention what they'll have tomorrow), kids had better know how."

Make school different. Start by reading this book. I've already ordered multiple copies as gifts for colleagues, friends, and family members, with plans to expand the circle even further. If you like this book - and you will - do the same for your own circles. And then start talking with each other about what school could (and should) be.

[Now if I only could get legislators to read this!]

More of the same

I want to continue the discussion around technology and pedagogy. 

When I wrote my critique of using Google Docs to create self-graded quizzes, my premise was:

TECHNOLOGY + POOR PEDAGOGY = ACCELERATED MALPRACTICE

Scott McLeod then wrote a follow up post titled In the beginning, educator technology usage may not be very pretty, where he asked some thought provoking questions:

If teachers are engaging in instructional behaviors that we might consider less desirable, does showing them how to do those more efficiently with technology help them transition out of those practices or reinforce the status quo? Does introducing the technology tools potentially open the door to better practice or does it simply further solidify current practice? Do we hook technology onto what they already know and do – even if it’s not the greatest pedagogy - with the end goal of getting to a different place, or do we reject those practices and advocate immediately for something new and different?

I think Allan's comment answers some of Scott McLeod's questions:

In my honest opinion, the type of assessment drives teaching and when computers start to make life easier, it will not stop at multiple choices but using programs to assess essays etc (there are already such programs). These types of programs are so appealing to those in control of education because it provides data and fast. It won't free up time because there will be just more of it to come.

See this post if you want to see how technology is being abused and misused in assessing students' written work even at the post secondary, Masters level.