Strike at the Root of Evil

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Students have rights. School treat students as if they do not have rights. They are forced to attend, have little or no no choice over what is included in the curriculum,and no choice over what technological tools they are allowed to use to learn. As to political rights, they are non-existent. The Bill of Rights stops at the school house door. I find that to unacceptable. Everyone should read Justice William Brennan's dissent in the schoolhouse rights case, Hazelwood School District v. Kuhlmeier. The text of the decision and Brennan's dissent can be found here. Schools also can search students person and lockers (personal spaces) without a warrant. Right now the Bill of Rights stops at the schoolhouse door. We are in a new age now and students more than ever also need a technology Bill of Rights. Here is one that I believe fits the bill very nicely . +++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

posted by Lee Crockett on Twitter Feb 3, 2012

Educational Technology Bill of Rights for Students

by Brad Flickinger

The following are what I believe are the rights of all student to have with regards to using technology as an educational tool, written as a student to their teacher:

1) I have the right to use my own technology at school. I should not be forced to leave my new technology at home to use (in most cases) out-of-date school technology. If I can afford it, let me use it -- you don’t need to buy me one. If I cannot afford it, please help me get one -- I don’t mind working for it.

2) I have the right to access the school’s WiFi. Stop blaming bandwidth, security or whatever else -- if I can get on WiFi at McDonalds, I think that I should be able to get online at school.

3) I have the right to submit digital artifacts that prove my understanding of a subject, regardless of whether or not my teacher knows what they are. Just because you have never heard of Prezi, Voki, or Glogster, doesn’t mean that I should not be able to use these tools to prove to you that I understand what you are teaching me.

4) I have the right to cite Wikipedia as one of the sources that I use to research a subject. Just because you believe the hype that Wikipedia is full of incorrect information, doesn’t mean that it is true -- besides we all use it anyways (including you). I am smart enough to verify what I find online to be the truth.

5) I have the right to access social media at school. It is where we all live, it is how we communicate -- we do not use email, or call each other. We use Facebook, Twitter and texting to talk to each other. Teachers and schools should take advantage of this and post announcements and assignments using social media -- you will get better results.

6) I have the right to be taught by teachers who know how to manage the use technology in their classrooms. These teachers know when to use technology and when to put it away. They understand that I need to be taught how to balance my life between the online and offline worlds. They do not throw the techno-baby out with the bathwater.

7) I have the right to be taught by teachers who teach me and demand that I use 21st Century Skills. Someday I am going to need a job -- please help me be employable.

8) I have the right to be accessed with technology. I love the instant feedback of testing done technology. I live in a world of instant feedback, so to find out a couple of week later that I didn’t understand your lesson, drive me crazy. If you were a video game, no one would play you -- feedback is too slow.

9) I have the right to be protected from technology. I don’t want to be cyberbullied, hurt, scared or find crud online that I would rather not find. Please help me use technology responsibly and safely. Please stay up-to-date with this kind of information, and teach me to make good choices. I am not you and we don’t see eye to eye about what to put online, but help me to meet you in the middle.

10) I have the right to be taught by teachers that know their trade. They are passionate about what they do and embrace the use of technology to help me learn. They attend trainings and practice what they learn. They are not afraid to ask for my help; they might know more than me about the Civil War, but I know Glogster like nobody’s business.

The Learning Hive

I created a post where I outlined what I thought should be the guiding principle for 21 century learning centers. In what follows in this post I intend to present what the philosophy of teaching and learning that I believe should guide the learning environments that we create.

I believe in learner-centered learning. A learning environment exists for the learners. I am an unrepentant constructivist. I define constructivism as developmentally appropriate learning that is learner initiated and directed that is supported by the connected physical and digital network of the teacher and partners of the learners. Like Huzinga and Piaget, I see play as instrumental to human learning as it is quite literally, practice for life. I also believe, like John Dewey, that learning should have a practical aspect to it and relate to the learner's world. Learning should be hands on, touch and try rather than the prevalent mode of tell and test. I believe in dialogue and story telling as the primary structure for communication in a learning environment. Like Jerome Bruner and Roger Schank, I believe we organize our world with narrative order by telling stories and that we should encourage learners and teachers to interact in this way. Learning environments should prepare us for the world by allowing us to interact with the world to, as Sir Ken Robinson encourages “find their element”. In this technological flat world this is very possible, necessary and doable.

The primary task of a teacher is to discover the passions of the learners and to connect those passions to the curriculum in the learning environment. The learners need to feel safe so that they will try things and risk failure. Learners should proceed at their own rate and not be penalized for failure but rewarded for success. Assessment should reward the learner for what they can do rather than penalize them for what they cannot do yet. The feedback loops need to be as immediate as possible much like in a video game so that the student will continue to “level-up”. Progress is marked by benchmarks set by the teacher and learner and should proceed at an individual pace and design in collaboration with classmates ( games). I believe that the learning environment should be a constant dialogue between the members of the learning reality with each other and the world around them. Technology should play a large role in expanding the world of learning. Students should be engaged with the real world.

Learners should have real world experiences in their learning worlds. We should strive to put students in situations where they are practicing being what they are interested in. Rather than being lectured to about history for instance, learners should practice being historians by writing history whenever possible. Learners should be journalists by creating newspapers and magazines, not just reading about it. If a learner wants to write, the learner should publish short stories and novels or magazine articles and journal articles. Learners should be encouraged at all times to share what they learn with the world, to find an audience for what they know. The purpose of the learning environment should be to put the learners’ names in lights. The environment should be a dialogue and have no physical limits or time boundaries. The learning world should be a place where learners and teachers share stories about the world around them with each other and with the larger world through the use of digital technology. The learning environment should be as interdisciplinary as possible. Curiosity should be encouraged rather than destroyed as it is so often in learning environments. Learners' interests should drive the learning, within a broad curriculum. Every group is different and every member of the group different from the others. No groups should be taught the same way and no learners learn the same! Learning is an active verb, something you do yourself and not something you have done to you. Learning is empowerment.

Everyone in the learning environment should be encouraged to see the world from as many vantage points as possible. That is how a community begins to join together into a new vision of sharing and collaboration. Imagination creativity, group formation are the special traits of human beings that learning environments should be trying to encourage in everything that they do. Learning is a social activity!

I believe everyone in a learning environment is a teacher and a learner. Human beings learn best by example. Our every action presents a way of being to those watching us. That is a tremendous responsibility that I have always been anxious to shoulder. When we leave learning environment at the end of the day we should all have sore shoulders from all of the students standing on them and leaping into the new world.

I just finished reading an interesting Blog post in The Real Mr. Fitz, A Teachers letter to Obama: A Lesson in Irony. I found this post to be just another argument to find a way to protect, preserve and encourage the present school paradigm. School doesn't work and needs to replaced with new ideas. I offer these ideas and encourage response from anyone.

First, make school non-mandatory!!

Second, end the physical tyranny of buildings, schedules, and classrooms.

Third, design learning around what the learners want to learn about.

Fourth, Improve feedback loops through Gamification and play which is essential for learning and needs to be part of learning networks.

Fifth, Embrace Bring Your Own Digital Device(BYOD) and Robust Universal Broadband Access(RUB) to create de-centralized digital learning networks everywhere.

Sixth, Make knowing something more important than certification, the prime qualification for teachers.

Just a start! Call this revolutionary irony!!

Character is demonstrated in many ways by a teacher. One of the most important is showing up everyday and doing your job. In my last position I have showed up every day. In the three years that I worked at Wakefield School I did not take a sick day. I have taken very few sick days in my 32 years of teaching. You can count on me to show up everyday and getting the task completed. A second indicator of character is dedication to the vocation, to service to the students and faculty. I am dedicated to what I do. I am defined by what I do. A colleague, Mr. Thomas Bazar, writes of me “I can honestly say, like James Brown, who was considered the hardest working man in show-business; Mr. Constantine is the hardest working man at Wakefield. He always was available, or made time, for students, colleagues, administrators, parents, etc. His patience and ability to multi-task is astounding”. I have always tried to improve myself through professional development including conferences, seminars and graduate school. I owed it to the teachers and students of my community to always be the best that I could be. Character generally leads to excellence. I have received several teaching and service awards in my career demonstrating excellence. They include The Tandy Technology Scholar Award and the 2006 Maryland K-12 Distance Educator of the year and several service awards, from the Newport School, The University of Maryland, and the Wakefield School.

One of my primary goals as a technology integrator is to find ways to knock down the classroom walls and expand a teacher’s ability to reach students using digital tools. I worked with a Russian language teacher preparing students for a competition in Russian called the Olympiada of Spoken Russian. We set our goal to provide the students with on- line rehearsal examples of the set poetry recitations for the competition and on-line written free conversations. Essentially we were trying to make an on-line language lab with the resources at hand. The teacher and I recorded several video tapes of her reciting the set pieces for the competition. We then placed the videos on a web site which was accessed by the students. They watched the videos and then recorded their own which they emailed back to the teacher for evaluation. We also set up a list serve for all of the students to converse with her in Russian as well as established a class network on AOL instant messenger. We were making vidcasts and podcasts way before they became popular. The students had spectacular results at the Olympiada winning several gold medals in the competition. It achieved the results we were seeking and expanded Russian instruction way beyond the classroom. We extended both the student’s digital skills and language skills.

Happy New Year!!! Let us work together to make this a better year for the bottom half of society which many are rapidly falling into....making it more like the bottom three fourths of society. It all reminds me how my dad once told me...there is not a real middle class in america...most workers are a pencil eraser away from poverty. There is more and more eraser dust on the social scene!

It has been a month since I last wrote anything here. I have become a bit dispirited as I try to figure out the next stage in my life. This morning I came across a tweet from @cpohanka alerting me to an educamp-in-va taking place in Fredricksburg VA and so I went to the Wiki for the event. The best part about the event is that is seemed like an un-conference and it was free. My Edupunk juices started to flow and I decided to post something on the event wiki. It all stemmed for a Will Richardson list that follows. Here is what I wrote.

Will’s World/

• Create your own education.
• Find problems and solve them.
• Be unique.
• Make beautiful, useful stuff.
• Build a network of really smart people who you will never meet.
• Be indispensable.
• Do real work that changes the world.
• Have a brand.
• Share widely and safely.
• Collaborate.
• Add value.
• Be a voracious learner.
• Tread softly but boldly.
• Edit the world.

You should learn about what you want to learn about, or need to learn about. I believe that means that you should create your own learning or education. Now how do we help students to do that in school. It really is not that hard conceptually, it is just hard work. It is a teachers responsibility to find out what their students are interested in before they even begin to develop objectives for what a course it about. A great teacher discovers what their students are interested in and somehow connects those interests to the subject. Making the connection is what teaching is. It is helping the fish to understand the water. You should never teach Algebra I or American History for instance the same way. Everything should be different every year because THE STUDENTS are different every year. Experience is a collection of learning and dealing with a changing environment. As to the how to fly a plane example, imagine if the student doesn’t want to be there, has no interest in flying planes, and is forced to be then until he/she is 16? -Norman Constantine

The only thing we really need to do in “schools” is teaching human beings to understand the code of communication and memory...be that the alphabet or or movie making or whatever. Teach children to read and discover what they want to know about, then turn them loose and be there to pick them up when they fall. READ READ READ. A human being connected to the Internet can discover the sum total of what human beings know and remember. They do not need “school”, they only need the ability to “break the code”.Norman Constantine

Please comment on these ideas. I am going to try and expand on them in future blog posts next week. Help me out.