Vote for the ITM!

We're proud to announce that the ITM has just earned a nomination for "Best Group Blog" for this year's EduBlog Awards! We love producing this blog, and I'm constantly amazed at the great posts that are published each week. Kudos to Wes, Lucie, Tom, Mark, Julie, Lucy, and Steve!

If you love the ITM too, please take a minute to submit a vote for us! And tell you friends too! Voting ends on 12/16, so what are you waiting for?

Nominations and info on the EduBlog Awards are here.

Voting is only one-click away. So vote now!

Thanks again for all your support!

Chris : )

Flat Classrooms

Two pretty amazing "School 2.0" stories to report from the trenches.

Vicki Davis' 10th grade Computer Science class at Westwood Schools in Camilla, Georgia and Julie Lindsay's grade 11 ITGS class at International School Dhaka (ISD) in Bangladesh are in the middle of a two-week combined project to discuss topics from the Thomas Friedman book The World is Flat. The students are paired, with one student from each high school classroom, to work together. First they record an introduction to themselves, then they work together to produce a collaborative wiki, video, and podcast. There is even an amazing grading rubric. Wow.

Chris Craft, that innovative language arts teacher from South Carolina, has done it again. Using old computers and Skype, Chris brought his 6th graders into a direct videoconference with students at an American school in Lima Peru. To prepare, he had them work on a wiki and research common topics about Peruvian culture. They chose topics such as food, sports, and others. In their dry run, when they established video contact, the kids were wild with excitement. Click here to read this description of the actual day--you'll be glad you did! Talk about helping students become excited about learning. Double wow.

Vicki, Chris, and their students are the "Infinite Thinking Machines." Hear them describe their projects in a short audio clips here.

Taking the School Out of Learning

G'Day,

I've written and thought a lot about "School" and "Learning" over the years. A recent article from the UK's Times Online serves as just one more example of the clash between assembly line schooling and digital learning. Here we have the typical "Hacker" versus "The Establishment" confrontation (jamming phone signals to prevent cheating on national exams).

I suggest we're in a transition between schools modeled on factories and the personal learning available through the Web and social networking / Web 2.0 applications. With the Web came easy plagiarism, then came Turnitin.com. With "Web 2.0" came Wikipedia, RSS feeds & podcasts. How does education respond? Monitor student mouse-clicks or do something radical like change homework assignments? A bit too snide, sorry about that.

But the point is clear: when do we stop putting energy into the "Clamp-down" and invest it in the "Ramp-Up?" You might guess I have a lot of opinions about this, but here's a quick quotation for an article currently in press. It suggests considering the "open source community" as a model for schools in place of the top-down, factory model:

Although the contrasts are many, the most significant demands stating at the outset: an open source community is built on the premise that people want to create and contribute and that they can be trusted. With this foundation of trust, good things emerge. Shouldn’t education expect the best from people, as a matter of efficiency, if not out of principle?

I'd love to see what people think. As digital technologies undermine the "one-size-fits-all" approach, what aspects of "schooling" can we leave behind as rust-belt remnants, artifacts related to the logistics of a mass production model, not pedagogy, cognition or human development? And what elements do we need to add to make personal learning scale?


Please add your comments to this post.


Cheers, Tom

Unleash Your Inner Artist!

Daniel Pink encourages us to nurture the creative side of our brains in A Whole New Mind, a stimulating book that draws attention to a new skill set possibly needed by workers in this age of globalization. Interestingly, Pink notes that MFA degrees are becoming more relevant than MBAs in the working world and he describes six concepts worthy of aptitude development: design, story, symphony, empathy, play and meaning. Pink gives practical ideas for developing facility in these areas and others have suggested that A Whole New Mind is the ideal companion to Thomas Friedman’s A World is Flat.

Teachers looking to develop these sorts of skills in their students might want to consider a truly unique piece of software called Art Rage 2. Art Rage 2 is a painting program developed by a New Zealand based software company, Ambient Design. It is unlike any other painting program as its tools mimic real painting tools. For instance, the oil paint tool employs a paint-like texture and runs out of paint as you drag the "brush" across the digital canvas. Other
implements include chalk, felt pen and crayon tools and each is adjustable in terms of color, width, and pressure. The most unique feature of Art Rage 2, however, is the ability to load tracing images. A digital image can be uploaded to appear underneath your painting canvas. This makes it a cinch to trace with the tool of your choice or to simply turn the image to blendable paint. Tools can be set up to automatically select the correct colors from your digital image or you can choose your own hues. Pictured here this blog posting is an example of a “chalk” drawing I did in Art Rage 2 and the original digital photo I took last summer while visiting Monet’s garden in Giverny, France. Perhaps Claude would be rolling in his grave if he knew of modern day technological advances!

Art Rage 2 is completely engaging for students. My students are currently finishing self-portraits, which we are publishing to an online gallery. Many kids have even downloaded Art Rage 2 at home as the basic version is free and available for both PCs and Macs. I recommend upgrading to the paid version ($19.95), which allows for layers and additional tools including glitter. What kid (or adult!) cannot resist glitter?

The classroom implications are limitless. I can see students using this software to create their own maps, label blank maps, trace Google Earth imagery, record scientific observations, and to create graphics for other projects such as digital slideshows and web sites. My eight year old daughter came home today from school with blackline mandalas to color today, and it just occurred to me that these pictures could be uploaded and colored using Art Rage. Try playing with Art Rage today and add other potential project ideas to the comments section of this blog posting!