Snow Lake Manitoba, CA
Live blogging from BLC08
Clarence is setting the stage for his presentation, 1,000 people in Snow Lake, a small mining community. It is 2 hours to get anyplace from Snow Lake, 7 hours to the airport.
However, if you look worldwide, it is the best small place to learn.
I love that Dennis Richards , a superintendent , is Ustreaming this presentation!
You can live in a remote or rural place and still be global.
What happens when you start making connections, what are the trends, change happens.
What do you do with the technology and your pedagogy. The tools will change, but good pedagogy doesn't change.
What can we learn from businesses? Teamwork, transparency, empowerment, communication. Collaboration will allow you to do different things.
What opportunities do we make for kids?
Going global, going public.
What innovation is needed in your classroom for your kids? Think classroom.
Clarence's challenge is distance, not access. He has no museum, no movie theater.
A business has a challenge, the smartest person may not be working for them, so challenge is how to get the benefit of that person outside of your business.
How do we put our kids in touch with these people?
Networks change everything. Networks have changed things for business. It is always learning, always working, 24/7.
Kids are network to the underground digital network. They go home and connect and lear how to use new things.
Clay Shirky's book. Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations.
Innovation is about trust.Innovation is people centered, not technology centered.
We have creative kids who go home after school and create!
Do we encourage creativity, the prototype culture in school? Is it because it might not work, it might fail? How to we encourage that learning from mistakes to find the better answer or better solution?
We need to try, we need to fail, we need to try again with something else or different until it works.
Afrigadget is a blog.
http://www.afrigadget.com/We have failed to re-imagine education for our time. How do we re-invent ourselves and our classrooms. A failure of imagination!
Get out of the way of our students! This is in response to blogging and students wanting to publish at night for their audience in Australia who are just waking up.
Clarence started a project with schools internationally and had the kids decide the project.
All kids worked on Google Docs and created a script, use all the pictures, then pushed this out to the web. Using free tools, kids globally created a project. The student project, Poverty. This was an eye opening project, the kids in Snow Lake considered poverty not having the latest tool, in Kuala Lumpur, the poorest of the poor have nothing. It put poverty in perspective.
New project Thinwalled classroom. connecting a classroom, bookclub online, 3 kids from Snow Lake, 3 kids from LA.
The kids set up a moodle chat for discussions. The chat crashed, so the kids moved to another chat and contacted the teacher with the copy of the other chat. Thinwalls.edublog.com
He has a wiki studying societies wiki which is the social studies book that the students create. He builds on it and keeps it around. This came about because the students were using the same social studies book he had when he was in school. It even had his name in it.
Classroom as a studio for artists, architects,to create, shape and re-shape, lots of time with ebbs and flows. Teacher is the network administrator, the network in and outside the classroom, the information network.
