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Posts Tagged ‘alan november’

The Speaker Who Made Me Think Differently

Posted in Assessment, Change, Technology, tagged , , on February 27, 2018| 4 Comments »

For me it was Alan November.

When I look at which speaker I saw who finally got through to me and made me think differently about teaching and learning, it would be Alan November. It was 2004, and the web 2.0 world was coming alive.

I have seen hundreds of speakers who suggested I needed to think differently but for some reason on that fall day at the Terry Fox Theatre in Port Coquitlam, Alan November got me thinking in new ways and I never looked back.

I have written on some similar shifts I have made – like My Aha Moment when I took what I heard from Alan November and brought it into my practice and My Own Watershed Moments when I reflected on influential conferences, people and presentations on my thinking.

The short version of what I remember from the November talk of 14 years ago, is that we need to have students own their own learning (He would ask, “Who owns the learning?”), and some of the new technology tools can help do this in ways we had only dreamed about before.  Of course, he also had some great hooks, I am sure I am not the only one who remembers him showing Dog Island, The Pacific Northwest Tree Octopus among other sites around information literacy.

So, why on that particular day, did that talk change my thinking?  I think it is because:

  1.  I was already thinking about things differently but needed someone to help me pull the ideas together
  2. I felt confident in my job, and ready to move beyond “just getting by” to be open to new ideas
  3. There was a culture in the District I worked that was open to new ideas
  4.  I could see how the conversation in education fit into a larger shift in the world beyond school
  5. Some speakers just hook you in.

Several of us looked back on this event and referred to it as the “November Awakening” in Coquitlam.   This was the right event at the right time.   Of course, we never change our thinking based on a 2-hour-talk, but sometimes we can look back on certain sessions that really helped pull our thinking together.

So, who was it for you?  If you had to identify one speaker you heard who changed how you think about your practice who would it be?  What was it about that speaker on that day that led to a change of thinking?

 

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My Own Watershed Moments

Posted in Change, Professional Development, tagged , , , , , on September 9, 2016| 1 Comment »

what-is-a-watershed-and-its-health-benefits-3

Dean Shareski posed an interesting challenge last week. Through his blog post on his own watershed moments of learning, he asked those in his network to do the same.

At first, this seemed like a really simple task – like naming your favourite movie (Shawshank Redemption) or the best concert you have seen (Simon and Garfunkel) or your go-to beverage at Booster Juice (Ripped Berry). I read his post a couple times, and tried to quickly come up with a response, but it was not so easy.  Watershed is such an interesting and challenging idea.  While Dean gave us the permission to alter the categories, I will try to use the same ones he used:  PD Event or Conference, speaker or presentation, book, tool, and person.

PD / Conference

I am fortunate, especially in my current role, I get to attend many pretty interesting events.  In recent years I have moved away from attending the large conferences, particularly those built around keynote speakers presenting to hundreds of conference delegates.  More recently various formats from TEDx, to EdCamp to Ignite have more held my interest.  I have also tried to participate in more experiences that are about doing things than being told things.  That said, it was a large conference that stands out as a watershed moment for me. For me it was the November Learning Conference in the summer of 2005.  The event helped me understand the digital work was not about giving people computers, it was about ownership of learning.  I heard from speakers who I would later regularly read and reference like Alan November and Will Richardson.  And as is often the case, it was the conversations with those I attended the event with, that helped make it particularly powerful.  I was there with Coquitlam Assistant Superintendents Maureen Dockendorf and Julie Pearce, along with Director of Technology Brian Kuhn and Coquitlam Teachers Association President Kathleen Thomson.  I left the event inspired about what was happening in the larger education community and excited that we were and could continue to be doing it in our own community.

Presentation

I know the typical answer would be a presentation that I saw live.  For me it is Karl Fisch’s presentation, Did You Know?  I have written about this before describing it as My Aha Moment.  The presentation was powerful, but it really changed how I thought about presentations in a networked world.  As I previously wrote:

That experience was my “Aha” moment.  I learned about the power of a network and also learned that it is not only the smart people you know, but the smart people they know that can help you.  I also learned about the new power we all have to influence conversation.  Previous to this experience in networking, there would have been no way I would have ever seen a PowerPoint created for an opening day presentation in a high school in Colorado.  Now, just days after it was presented, I was remixing it and sharing it with my staff, and hundreds of others were sharing it around the world.  I was also reminded of the generosity of our profession — we are all sharing and learning together with a common purpose around student learning.

It is interesting to look back on this, now 10 years later, and see how far we have come (or not).

Book

The World is Flat from Thomas Friedman gave me the larger context I was looking for concerning the changes we were and are talking about in education.  The history teacher in me really loved the book and it was one we used as a study group book with staff.  There was an urgency that the books created, doing nothing different was simply not an option.  The runner-up would be Dennis Littky’s  The Big Picture which was a great read on rethinking high school (and showing it can be done).

Tool

I waffled on this one a bit.  It definitely could be the blog.  My blog has given me a global network to share ideas.  It also could have been Twitter.  I was in the community during the early “let me tell you what I had for lunch” stage, continued through the deep engagement era, and am now still participating in the “can’t it be like it used to be” times.  And it could have been Delicious – my first step into the social web through sharing bookmarks.   In the end I am landing on a gizmo and that gizmo is my iPhone.  It has truly changed how I can work.  With some credit to some earlier smartphones I had, it was the iPhone that really unchained me from my desk.  There is very little I need to do that I can’t do during a day from my phone, making it possible for me to define work differently.  Work is no longer about a place.  And yes, simply a computer a computer does some of this, but the convenience of all of this in your pocket really changes things, at least it has for me.

Person

What a challenging question.  When I use the term watershed moments, it is not really the same as other terms I use for people like mentors, trusted colleagues or inspirations.  I have written at various points about family members, former teachers, and colleagues that have been profoundly influential on me.  When I think of people and watershed moments of learning, I think of people who take me from “I used to think X” and “Now I think Y”. So for me it is my former Coquitlam and West Vancouver colleague Gary Kern.  Gary has always pushed me in my thinking to a place of discomfort.  And that is a good thing.  In Coquitlam, he helped me solidify my views around the work we were trying to do at Riverside Secondary and in West Vancouver he was the architect of many of the structures we continue to benefit from today, ones that were well ahead of the pack – from giving students their own digital spaces, to providing staff with a choice of devices to systematizing bring your own device structures in our schools.  He was always the one sharing the article about “where to next” as soon as we thought “we are good”.

In looking at my answers it is interesting that many of the events that quickly surfaced as watershed moments for me, came fairly close together for me.  They were largely during my school administration time in Coquitlam – in the window between 2001-2007. I wonder if there was something unique about that time with the explosion of digital changes, or maybe I was at a point in my career I was ready to move beyond doubling-down on what used to be and ready to look to what could be.  Perhaps I just need distance to best identify these moments and my list ten years from now would include events and people from my time in West Vancouver.

I look forward to others keeping this conversation going in the comments or in their own blog posts and sharing their watershed moments of learning.

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Information Literacy is Not New

Posted in Change, Personalized Learning, Social Media, Technology, tagged , on April 21, 2011| 13 Comments »

I was reminded last week of a video I saw when I was in Grade 4 at Woodward Elementary School – the Swiss Spaghetti Harvest:

I remember being sucked right in.

Of course, the tools have changed. In recent years, Alan November has done a great job of sharing the web equivalents of the Swiss Spaghetti Harvest in:

All About Explorers

Dog Island Free Forever

Pacific Northwest Tree Octopus

Victorian Robots

Just as so many of us learned how to find the author, publisher and other pertinent information with books and magazines, these skills are more important than ever. I was convinced that we were winning this battle, but several visits to classrooms lately, and through conversations with students, I’ve come to the conclusion that we  need to do more to reinforce the idea that just because “Google” puts it at the top of the list on a search, doesn’t mean it is any more valuable that the other results. As we unleash more students in one-to-one situations in an era of personally-owned devices, information literacy is just as important now as it was when we learned how to find the author of a book.

Again, Alan November is helpful with this. Some of the skills he advocates for include:

One way I have seen this done (in a Grade 6 class in our district) was that the teacher required students using a website for a project to not only give the URL but also include WHO wrote the information on the site, WHAT the purpose is for the site, WHEN the site was last updated, WHERE the information comes from and WHY the information is useful for the project. This is inline with the suggestions that come from Kathy Schrock’s Guide for Educators.

Information literacy is not new, but the tools have changed. As the number of devices continue to increase, and we put them in kids’ hands at younger ages, we need to be sure that information literacy is a key aspect of our instruction.

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