Gallant 2006 Update: Jawed Karim

G'Day folks,

Those of you in the US might remember a magazine that all dentists seemed to have in their waiting rooms: Highlights for Children. A popular feature of this was the Goofus and Gallant cartoon where two boys were used to illustrate basic good behavior ("At the department store, Goofus runs on the escalator" while "Gallant stands still on the escalator as it goes up to the second floor." - see the cartoon).

One of the things I sometimes do during keynotes is engage the audience by pondering who today's "Gallants" might be. I like to nominate Matt Mullenweg (of Wordpress) and Blake Ross (Firefox), both apparently nice guys and in their very early 20s. The past few days, the blogs and media have been abuzz with another: Jawed Karim. Mr. Karim is the third member of the YouTube team celebrating their company's aquisition for $1.65 Billion. What's really nice about Mr. Karim - from a teacher's perspective - is that after doing the part of the Tech start-up process that he enjoys, he opted not to work for YouTube, but to pursue a Masters degree at Stanford University. Mr. Karim describes himself as:

a nerd who gets excited about learning.

"Good on him," as we say down here in Australia. The son of a Bangladeshi father and German mother, Karim displays the quiet confidence and unshakeable values that make a true Gallant.

As technology empowers learners, those who are self-motivated can achieve extraordinary dreams. One thing that most Gallants of 2006 have in common is that they take time out from their formal schooling to pursue these dreams. Isn't that interesting... I suggest that the opting out of formal education has more to do with assembly line learning approaches than it does with technologically impoverished learning environments. What do you think?

ITM 1: Calling Planet Earth

Thanks for watching the premiere episode of the ITM! We know it was a long episode, but we just had so much to say. We promise to make them shorter in the future, and we hope to vary the topics more too. Please be patient as we figure out how to get the most from this great medium. And feel free to send us your ideas and comments!

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Show Notes:

Textmapping is a graphic organizer technique that can be used to teach reading comprehension and writing skills, study skills, and course content. The Textmapping website has great examples, lesson plans, and email discussion groups.

The Inertia video was created by Erica Eng when she was a Senior at Skyline High School in Oakland, CA. More examples of student produced media can be found at Listen Up!

Hart Island is just outside New York City, NY. You can get historical information here and look at the detailed satellite images here.

The new Google Educators website has lots of resources to help K-12 educators get the most from Google's FREE tools.

Hall Davidson runs the CA Student Multimedia Festival, and he works for the Discovery Educator Network. He is a board member of Computer Using Educators, and he is a popular speaker at education conferences. He visited Franklin Elementary School in Hollywood, CA for his "field trip."

Google Earth is free to download and use.

The Jane Goodall Institute is a global nonprofit that empowers people to make a difference for all living things. Jane Goodall has dedicated most of her life to the study and preservation of chimpanzees in Tanzania. The virtual tour of her work can be downloaded here for use in Google Earth.

Learn more about the educational uses of Google Earth at the Juicy Geography website.

A "mashup" is when you combine two or more technologies or media products together to create something even better. Learn more about mashups on Wikipedia or see some great mashups that use Google maps at Google Maps Mania.

You can find, download, and share "placemarks" for Google Earth at the Google Earth Community

Get the World War II "Places, Battles, and Special Ops" placemark to use in Google Earth.

Check out Wikipedia's full entries for World War II.

Thanks to the students from Mr. Hernandez' class at Price Elementary School in Anaheim, CA, for their great introduction to the Infinite Thinking Machine!y

Sixth Grade Spanish Teacher Integrates Technology

Chris Craft teaches Spanish and Latin to sixth graders at Crossroads Middle School in Columbia, South Carolina. Having worked in technology-related jobs before becoming a teacher, Chris has actively sought to integrate computers into his classroom. He has his Spanish students using wikis (JotSpot and WetPaint) to explore the topic of immigration, and has set up a blog for each of his students using the Open Source program Drupal--which has allowed him a more tightly controlled environment for blogging.

Chris uses computers which were "resurrected from the trash heap." His only requirement was that they could connect to the Internet and run the Firefox web browser. His oldest machines he keeps running by installing the Linux operating system distribution Xubuntu. He applied early on to what is now Google Apps for Education and made sure each student had a Gmail account. His goal was to take his students from being "consumers" of Internet content to being "contributors," and to truly engage them.

When his students realized that there was an "audience" for their work, even just the audience of other students in the school, the quality of their work "absolutely skyrocketed." They went from "turning their work in" to "publishing it." One really fun project he has them do in Spanish class is to have the students work in teams to create a "radio commercial" on why it is important to learn another language. By using the Free and Open Source program Audacity for recording and editing, which even runs on an old computer with 64 MB of RAM, the students can put in special effects (like echoing) in the commercials.

I asked Chris how the parents have reacted to his students active use of Internet technologies in class. He said that his kids had been talking so much about how much fun they were having in class with these technologies that his classroom was "standing-room only" for the school's open house--while other teachers later lamented how few parents had attend their classrooms. He walked his parents through the online privacy issues, and made sure that everyone was comfortable with what he was doing. He also showed them how to access his class blog, and taught the parents what an RSS feed is so that they could easily keep up with what was going on in class.

Listen to Chris talk more about his experience with me in EdTechLive.com's "Take 5."

Creative versus scripted teaching

I was inspired today during Global Learn Day by the presentation of Stephen Downes, who observed that our current elearning environment is more a place where where we come together to collaboratively create and share content, rather than a place where people merely consume content in a traditional, passive way. I certainly think of the ITM blog in this way, and hope you will too! Your participation in this dialog is both invited and essential!

One of the most challenging characteristics of our current K-12 educational environment is the emphasis on scripted teaching from many quarters. For a variety of reasons, many people seem to be advancing a vision of teaching and learning where the teacher is provided with a "script" of things to say and do in the classroom, and s/he is expected to essentially "perform on cue." I know Phil Schlechty has written about the importance of teachers viewing themselves as designers of engaging learning environments, rather than mere PERFORMERS and DELIVERERS of the curriculum.

I definitely understand the need and vital importance of a robust curriculum, and I also understand (and appreciate from my own experiences when I was just starting out in the classroom) the importance of more scripted lesson plan ideas for novice teachers. I take issue with a vision of teaching and learning, however, that assumes the best teaching and learning environments will be the planned and scripted ones. I have found in my own teaching and learning experiences that often the most significant, valuable, and memorable learning moments were not planned. As teachers grow in their experiences and skill sets as instructional leaders, I think we both need and deserve more instructional autonomy.

Only by providing teachers with more autonomy, and fewer mandates, can we hope that teachers will broadly be empowered to truly differentiate learning for students. Whatever the politicians decide, the good news is that teachers still make important choices each day about how they invite students to join them in the learning process. It's my hope ITM will help you find new ideas to create for, engage with, and motivate your students to new heights of learning!