Gen Yes from Jeff Darrow on Vimeo.
This student made video is from the GenYES class at Winston Churchill MS, San Juan School District, California. Looks like fun!
Sylvia
Posts Tagged ‘technology’
What do GenYES students do?
Monday, March 15th, 2010Edutopia – Students Teach Technology to Teachers
Monday, March 8th, 2010“When middle school students Alison and Nat confer with their teachers, it’s to talk about the lessons the students are preparing for student teachers as part of a new Generation www.Y program. The young people are part of a growing group in schools across the country who are sharing their own expertise to help make prospective teachers more aware of how students learn and the best ways technology can be used to support their learning.”
Edutopia, the website of the George Lucas Educational Foundation published this story and video on the GenYES program in Olympia, WA. The video is from a while back when the model was called Generation www.Y. That was a bit difficult to pronounce, so we changed the name to GenYES.
This video was created during an interesting time period – the GenYES students not only worked with teachers at their school, but formed teams with their teacher and a pre-service teacher. These 3 member teams learned and taught each other technology, and prepared lessons using new technology. Just another way students can be involved in improving education for all!
Sylvia
NCCE student tech support at your service
Tuesday, February 23rd, 2010
At the Northwest Council for Computers in Education (NCCE) in Seattle March 2-5, 2010, over 70 students from districts around Washington will be on site to assist. Students from grades 7-12 will help with video and audio production, technical support for attendees, geocaching events, and support for speakers. Generation YES is proud to be a sponsor of these student volunteers. They hail from several local districts that all use the Generation YES models of student technology.
If you are attending NCCE and need technical help during the NCCE conference, just go to the Generation YES Student Tech Support Station. It will be right outside the exhibit hall entrance and will be staffed with trained, helpful students from Tuesday – Friday 9 AM – 5 PM. Students will also be taking photographs, shooting video and doing interviews throughout the conference to document all the events at NCCE. Don’t miss the closing keynote for the debut of their production!
These students work daily in their own schools to help teachers use computers, video and more to make education better for all. If you meet these fine young men and women, you are sure to be impressed with their professionalism and knowledge about technology. They are pros at helping out — they do it all the time!
I won’t personally be at NCCE this year, but if you are a Generation YES blog fan, be sure to stop by and say hello to the students, Dennis Harper, Megan Evander, and Steven Hicks, the rest of the awesome Generation YES team.
Sylvia
Students show off their tech skills in the Show Me state
Friday, February 19th, 2010
GenYES students from Reed Springs, MO, just came back from Show-Me Techknowledge Day. This is an annual event at the state capitol in Jefferson City, Missouri. Students went to share what they do to assist teachers and other students with technology throughout their school.
In Reed Springs, GenYES students meet in an after-school club where they learn technology and how to help teachers who are participating in a laptop incentive program.
Instructional technology specialist and GenYES advisor Janna Elfrink says, “The GenYES students work with these teachers each month after school, where the students teach the teachers how to utilize and incorporate the technology to meet the needs of the students and teachers. Our goal is to create a community of learners where the teachers present their curriculum to the students, and the students match the available technology with the curriculum. Students and teachers communicate through the TAPs request system and through Gaggle email.”
When planning their trip to the state capitol, the Reed Springs GenYES club did a really smart thing.
“We emailed all state representatives and senators prior to the event, inviting them to visit our booth. The response from representatives and senators was overwhelming. One representative invited the students to visit him in his office, and provided lunch for us. Another introduced our students on the House floor during session. State officials, teachers, administrators, and students commented on our work through the GenYES program and took information from us about our program.”
It’s so important to have these positive examples of students doing good things with technology. This is especially true with politicians, who often only hear about educational technology when things go terribly wrong.
Janna continues, “We have now been invited to be student presenters at an annual technology conference in March at Missouri State University. We have also been asked to present a program review to our Board of Education.”
What do the students do?
At Reed Springs, Janna explains how the students use the GenYES TAP request system to track teacher needs and projects. This is an online TAP (Technology Assistance Project) system that every GenYES school uses.
“After getting buy in from our administrative team and the teachers, I began working with high school students during our late-start Thursdays. We run our GenYES program as a club, with students working on TAP requests and their TechYES projects during that time.
The work that the GenYES students do has carried over into working with other teachers in their building on technical needs and projects.”
Reed Springs also uses our TechYES program to ensure technology literacy for their students. Students not only help teachers, but also their peers as they show tech literacy through authentic projects.
“Our GenYES students also participate in TechYES, where they are creating at least two technology projects this school year. The students are nearing the peer-edit phase of their work, and they each have a goal to submit one of their projects to our annual Reeds Spring Technology Fair in April.”
What students say
Now I know I’m violating all the sacred rules of blogging by going on this long, but there’s more. One of the reasons I’m so passionate about student empowerment is that it’s one of those win-win solutions that have beneficial ripples, both expected and unexpected.
Empowering students and enabling student voice is at core of the GenYES philosophy, so hearing what they have to say matters.
March Foster – “GenYes and TechYes have been opportunities to allow me to take on the true role of a teacher, both by teaching people, and learning new things in turn from them. GenYes has been a great learning experience. It has allowed me to expand my horizons beyond learning just school based curriculum and into more technologically advanced studies that the curriculum can’t support. Beyond that it expands my social enviornment by allowing me to develop friendships with people of similar interests. This has lead to many great relationships to be formed with other GenYes members, and peers.”
Terrion Conner – “no matter the age, you never stop learning” and “never be greedy, knowledge should be shared”
Chris Benson – “I feel that the GenYes program is a great way for me, the student, to show some of my teachers how to do things that honestly I didn’t think were hard but were for someone that didn’t grow up with the technology, and I enjoy getting the teaching experience and it has opened my eyes to the idea that I might teach latter on in life.”
Jack McCoy – “I enjoy the camaraderie of the guys in the program, and think that we have done a lot of good for the teachers and school district”
Mason Vrobel – “I find TechYES an excellent opportunity to do projects such as the computer-in-a-Nintendo.”
Austin Merath – “Genyes is a fun and rewarding experience for me. I like to share my knowledge of technology with the teachers to help them teach their students. I love seeing them learn and excited about learning with the computers and programs I know.”
Yup, what they said.
Sylvia
NAIS and PETE and C
Tuesday, February 16th, 2010February and March are hotbeds of activity for state and national education and technology conferences. Next week I’ll be at both ends of the U.S. at two conferences of interest to educators interested in technology.
NAIS is the National Association of Independent Schools annual conference. Private schools have been on the forefront of the laptop movement both in the US and around the world. The 2010 conference is in San Francisco Feb 24-26, and I’ll be there with the Constructivist Consortium. This is a group of small companies who promote constructivist use of software in schools for creativity and student-centered learning. Generation YES is one of the founding members and we’ll be at booth 239 – come by and say hello!
PETE&C is the Pennsylvania state technology conference held annually in Hershey, PA. Yes, that Hershey, and yes, it does smell like chocolate! Running Feb 24-27, this conference is all about technology and education. Pennsylvania’s education reform program, Classrooms for the Future (CFF) has created a strong network of educator-coaches who support innovative programs statewide. Building internal leadership like this is a terrific idea, and Pennsylvania is certainly reaping the benefits of investing in their own people.
At PETE&C, I’ll be doing a session on Feb 23 on student leadership and digital citizenship – if you are going to PETE&C I hope you’ll stop by.
Student leadership is a topic that might not on the surface seem to be technology related, but schools hoping to increase their authentic use of technology need to be thinking about. The guiding principle of putting power into student hands can be both concrete (actually handing them equipment) and abstract (giving them responsibility and agency over their learning). Both support each other, and schools that give students responsibility and guide them as they learn to use it gain so much. Students who believe that they have a stake in their own education will contribute to the effort to make education better for all. Schools that take this empowerment to heart help create the citizens, learners, and leaders we need in the world.
So say hello in person or on Twitter! I love to meet friends new and old!
Sylvia
Tinkering and Technology
Monday, February 8th, 2010Before this all slips my mind, I wanted to post some thoughts about the conversation I led at Educon 2.2 last weekend called Tinkering Towards Technology Fluency. I had a few slides prepared, and a general list of things I thought would be interesting to discuss, and some questions in case there was a lot of deadly silence. Well, that didn’t happen! What happened was that we had a really interesting conversation, which wandered a bit but no one seemed to mind. That’s the cool part about Educon, the conversations are the point. I learned as much from everyone there as I hope they learned from some of the things I shared.
What I’d like to do here is provide a short skim through the topics I brought to the session. I think many of them either support themes I’ve posted about before, or will in the future. I plan to return to them in the future and explore each one in depth.
This is such a rich area for two main reasons:
- Unstructured time is undervalued by School.
- Tinkering supports technology and technology supports tinkering.
Random thoughts in no particular order:
Humans yearn for tinkering and playful activity
The popularity of the Food Network, HGTV, and shows like Monster Garage illustrate how people want to learn from watching others DO things they love. Work is interesting when you can see it happen, and people are interesting when they work. Make magazine is awesome.
Tinkering is social
Yes, there is the stereotype of the lone tinkerer in his basement. But more often, tinkering is a shared, social experience. Social learning with no structure or single, all-knowing teacher can happen! Leveraging the power of social learning seems like something we should be thinking about in this day and age.
Bricolage
French for tinkering, using found objects, playfulness in creation. (Wikipedia)
Tinkering/bricolage vs. the scientific method/analytical design
Seymour Papert, the father of educational technology, defined two styles of problem solving: analytical and bricolage. School only honors one style. What are we losing? (Who are we losing?)
“The bricoleur resembles the painter who stands back between brushstrokes, looks at the canvas, and only after this contemplation, decides what to do next.” Sherry Turkle
Tinkering and gender
The book by Sherry Turkle that I couldn’t remember in the session was “The Second Self”. I also forgot to mention this crucial connection to tinkering and gender issues in technology. Turkle says that tinkering is a “female” approach to technology, calling it “soft mastery” (as opposed to the “hard mastery” of linear, step by step problem solving, flowcharting, and analytical design). However, these “hard” styles are often taught as being superior, with “soft mastery” styles deemed messy or unprofessional. Again, who and what are we losing by ignoring (and denigrating) alternative learning and problem-solving styles?
Tinkering requires similar conditions to project-based learning and games in the classroom. Implementation brings up similar questions
Teachers who are looking at project-based learning or games are struggling with the same issues that arise with tinkering. Time, space, overwhelming curriculum requirements, tests, etc. These all need to be solved in similar ways, and teachers are doing this all around the world. Sharing is important.
More connections with games
James Paul Gee (What Video Games Have to Teach Us About Learning and Literacy) says that we should examine the attributes of gaming such as identity and agency and how to bring those to the classroom. We are being too literal with “games in the classroom.” The attributes of tinkering are similar. We have to be willing to give students agency and allow them to develop their own identities as problem-solvers and learners.
Why is tinkering learning?
Tinkering is a uniquely human activity, combining social and creative forces that encompass play and learning.
The problem with the scientific method
A pet peeve of mine is this structured monstrosity called “the scientific method.” We teach it to children like it came down on stone tablets. It’s not how science really works. Science is about wonder and risk and imagination, not checklists.
Risk and design – what happened in engineering in the 80s
When I went to engineering school, they taught us to use the “waterfall” design methodology. Every stage was planned and went in order. Then in the 80s everything changed.
What happened? Computers. Digital design and modeling decreased the cost of making mistakes. You could try things out with little risk or cost. It’s called the spiral design method, or rapid prototyping, sort of like tinkering with an audience. It’s why Google is always in “beta”. Of course it doesn’t work for everything, you can’t release a “beta” skyscraper or tinker a space shuttle, but for digital products, what’s the harm?
The problem is that school hasn’t caught on to this design methodology. What do we need to do to get school design courses to catch up to the real world?
What can we learn from other unstructured (but successful) school activities?
This also connects back to a post I wrote called Technology Literacy and Sustained Tinkering Time which connected the ideas of Sustained Silent Reading to using technology in less structured ways. Schools have embraced Sustained Silent Reading in the face of scripted curriculum and standardized testing – what can advocates for constructivist education learn from this?
Technology literacy without tinkering time is hard to fathom
Maybe we should be talking about technology fluency anyway. Literacy is such a low bar.
Teaching risk free design is so 20th century.
More later – your feedback on what to tackle first is welcome!
Sylvia
The Tech and Learning 100 at 30 – Vote for Dennis!
Friday, January 22nd, 2010As part of the 30th anniversary celebrations of Tech&Learning Magazine, they are creating a compendium of important people in the creation and advancement of the use of technology in education.
The first set of honorees will be the pioneers— the founding fathers and mothers whose inventions, declarations, and theories set the table for where we are today.
And guess who is on the list of nominations – Generation YES founder Dr. Dennis Harper. For those of you who don’t know, Dr. Harper definitely belongs on this list.
Dennis wrote the first textbook for educators about computing and taught the first graduate level educational technology class in the world back in the 1980’s. He also he brought the first computers into K-12 schools in over 30 countries across Africa, Southeast Asia, and the Caribbean. He was one of the four founders of California Computer Using Educators (CUE) and ran the first computer camp for kids with David Thornburg (also on this list.) And all along the way, he has been a tireless advocate for student empowerment as the only path to true technology integration in schools.
Tech&Learning has created an online poll to vote for ten of of these leaders. There are some other names on the list that will surely catch your attention, for example, Seymour Papert, the undisputed father of educational technology.
You have 10 votes – it would be great if you used one of them to acknowledge Dennis Harper and his legacy of student empowerment and student ownership of their own learning through modern technology.
Sylvia
Say the change you want to see
Wednesday, January 13th, 2010
For schools embarking on a change process, one key success factor is envisioning what that change looks like and sharing the vision widely.
In many of the schools we work with, the change involves a vision of students and teachers working together to use technology tools in new ways. They envision empowered students stepping up and taking part in the effort to improve education. They see teachers who feel more comfortable about technology. They see students and teachers as co-creators of the learning environment. And they hope that our GenYES or TechYES programs can help them bring about that change.
But often, the stated objectives don’t match the full vision. There are unspoken wishes, hopes and desires that go along with the hard statistics. The problem is that if you don’t explore these hidden wishes, you can’t plan for them, articulate them, or share the vision. Sometimes these are harder to measure or they sound “soft”. But sometimes these unspoken outcomes are the most powerful of all. Surprisingly, you may find that they are widely shared, but people feel that they aren’t important or scientific.
You shouldn’t be embarrassed to say them out loud. It’s not silly to hope that the work you do changes children’s lives and to make that clear.
If you put those goals in writing, you can plan for them, and more importantly, figure out how to measure them.
Finding hidden objectives
One exercise that we do with schools is to “say the change you want to see.” It’s a simple visioning exercise. First, imagine that everything you hope for comes true. Now write a story for your community newspaper about “what happened.”
The beauty of this exercise is:
- It has to be simple and clear. No academic citations, obtuse language, grant gobbledygook, or pages of distracting data. Using present tense and plain language creates impact. Real quotes and anecdotes make it come alive. Pretend you are writing for your Aunt Betty and you’ll end up capturing the heart of the project.
- It uncovers unspoken wishes. Often there are outcomes that are never really articulated, but people secretly hope for. You think that teachers will use technology more, but you also hope that students will be more engaged. You write in the grant that student achievement will rise, but you hope that students will love learning and feel empowered. You purchase technology and measure its use, but secretly hope that teachers will find that spark that made them want to be teachers in the first place.
Perhaps your fantasy newspaper story starts like this.
After a year of participating in the TEAMS project, student excitement about learning is at an all time high at Fallsburg Middle School. Mary K., a seventh grade student, says, “I love learning this way, I was getting bad grades but now I love coming to school.” Parents feel the same way and see the learning as being more “real world.” Before TEAMS, only 26% of FMS parents said they felt what their children were learning in school was relevant. After only one year, this rose dramatically to 87%.
Measuring hidden objectives
So the next part of this exercise is figuring out what in your story needs to be measured and planned for. The numbers don’t have to be the actual goals, that’s not the important part. The important part is to unpack those hidden agendas and make them tangible. If some of your goals are not currently being measured, MEASURE THEM. If you don’t measure them they won’t happen and a year from now, you’ll wonder why. Do what you must NOW to make that story work a year from now.
If a goal is to have happier students or more satisfied teachers, how will you know? Somebody better ask them. How will you show it? Somebody better shoot some video and collect some quotes. Plan for that now! Is one of your goals community involvement? Better ask them too! Plan some surveys both before and after the big project. If you want to say there is an improvement, you have to measure before, after, and maybe in between.
And ask what you really want to know; don’t let naysayers drain the life out of it. Some people think dry and colorless means authoritative. Don’t let it bother you when somebody rolls their eyes when you say you want to ask students if they like school better. Ask for the change you want to see.
If you don’t plan this, you won’t be able to document the real hidden hopes and dreams that bolster all the hard work and long hours. It may sound more “scientific” to collect “hard data”, but collecting targeted qualitative data can be extremely valuable.
Say the change you want to see. Ask the change you want to see. Be the change you want to see.
Sylvia
Join today! Professional Learning Community for Games in the Classroom
Wednesday, January 13th, 2010Interested in exploring the possibilities of using learning games as educational tools, and/or in developing games of your own for educational purposes?
Today is your day!
Join a new Professional Learning Community (PLC) hosted by the Learning Games Network on Wednesday, January 13, at 8pm EST / 5pm PST at LearnCentral.
RSVP on Facebook | RSVP on LearnCentral
This PLC is brand new, so get in on the ground floor and help chart the course!
Read more at 2010: More Games in More Classrooms? | Learning Games Network.
Related posts:
iPhone and iTouch games for learning
Two new white papers on games in education
More on Flunking Spore…
Grand Theft Auto 4 and video games in education
Sylvia
2010 MLK Day Technology Challenge
Tuesday, January 12th, 2010From Serve.gov | Martin Luther King, Jr. Day of Service.
We are calling on educators and web professionals to join our new effort – the 2010 MLK Day Technology Challenge. The idea is simple: to connect schools with technology needs to IT and web professionals, developers, graphic designers and new media professionals who are willing to volunteer their skills for good, take on these technology projects and give back to a school in need.
Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. once said, “Life’s most persistent and urgent question is: what are you doing for others?” We ask that you answer his call in 2010 by participating in the MLK Technology Challenge.
Why not turn this around – how about students offering services to the community or their own school? Why rely on the help of kind-hearted outsiders when there is a tech savvy crew right on campus who just need some guidance to get busy!
The Day of Service website has some great suggestions for projects -
- Enhance the school’s website by creating blogs or discussion groups for various student groups, such as student council, chess club, drama group, dance troupe, or varsity and intramural teams.
- Create a Facebook Fan Page for your school or for your Parent-Teacher’s Association, Student Government Association or Alumni Association.
- Create a NING social network for your school or a school organization.
Of course, all of these things could be done by students.
Even if you bring in outside expertise, include students. You can register your school’s technology need and ask for help by registering your school’s technology need as a “volunteer opportunity” with one of the partner websites listed here.
When you create your volunteer opportunity, be sure to:
- Use a descriptive title and make sure to include the “MLKTech” keyword – the keyword is necessary for search.
- Set the date as January 18, 2010
But remember, when you do get volunteer help, include students in the meetings. Let them apprentice with the volunteers so that once the volunteers go back to their real jobs, you still have students who know what to do. Building local capacity pays off in the long run!
Sylvia
