Creating that personal learning network is so important in the field of education.  Having other professionals that are engaged, pushing the envelope, and challenging the status quo are necessary for me to become a better educator.  I love sharing my ideas, but I also love hearing about others who give me new thoughts or challenge my preconceived notions.

I salute the EDUBLOG AWARDS for recognizing those in education who use Web 2.0 technology to improve their craft and share their ideas with others.  To that end, I nominate the following sites for their contribution to the educational enterprise.

 Best New Blog:  http://teachdigital.org Matthew Worwood, an Apple Distinguished Educator, shares his innovative approaches to digital media instruction and inspiring ideas centered around creativity.

 Best Group Blog:  http://blogcea.org  The Connecticut Education Association not only keeps us abreast of political/legislative action in Connecticut, but they share the positive stories that show the power of education and those who have dedicated their lives to the profession.

Best Educational Use of a Social Network http://www.facebook.com/TheQualitativeReport The Qualitative Report has become one of my favorite qualitative research journals because it is so practical for educational researchers and those engaging in qualitative research.  TQR does a great job with its social network via Facebook, email blasts, and websites. Best of all, this peer-reviewed journal is online and open access.

Best Free Web Tool.  http://wordle.net  Wordle, unquestionably, is a tool that has so many practical applications for literacy, research, summarizing, and big ideas.  Best of all IT IS REALLY ENGAGING for students.  If you haven’t used this tool with your students to examine writing, communicate ideas, and share learning, you’ve missed a great opportunity.

 Lifetime Achievement.  http://speedofcreativity.org  Wesley Fryer really is an amazing individual and I can’t tell you how much I’ve learned from him over the years.  I had the pleasure to speak on a panel with him in 2006 for the Discovery E-School News Blog Awards and I continue to learn from him every day.  He is a prolific writer – always sharing new ideas and thoughts.

My daughters and I built a lighthouse for The Maritime Aquarium’s Festival of Lights. It is amazing to see the talents of the local artists. The lights are on display until mid January. If you go, vote for #15!  Feel free to click on the link above to view the set and see the full pictures!

Now to some thoughts on education, creativity, and expertise .  .  .

I’ve heard of the lighthouse competition before, and thought it might be an exciting project for my daughters and I to participate.  We love the water and lighthouses and the kids have been to the aquarium. (One of the perks of the contest was a year-long membership to the aquarium.) There were several pictures of “past winners” both on the aquarium’s website and in the promotional flyer.   We elected to build one of our favorites: the Black Rock Lighthouse on Fayerweather Island in Bridgeport.  I decided we would do a scale model and we were pretty precise with measurements, angles, colors, dimensions, and the lot.  It was a challenge to decide what materials to use, how to best represent the light, and how to incorporate all of the subtle details.  We did make a few minor changes, mainly to the top portion of the light due to our inability to make certain objects with the confines of the materials we used.  Nonetheless, if you look at a picture and look at our model, it looks extremely similar. Our model is clean, representative, and majestic.

What I learned, from looking at the other models, is that ours doesn’t really tell a story.  Some of the other lights have an underlying story in their model – a scene, an imaginary sense of wonder, a connection to the viewer.  I can make a connection to those lights on an emotional level – I am drawn in to explore the story and examine its details.  This speaks to the idea of creativity and expertise.  With experience, levels of expertise develop more, and, in turn, increase the creative potential of the artist (or insert other domain here). My children and I have already begun brainstorming ideas for “next year.”  No doubt, our experience building our own model coupled with opportunities  to view other high quality work has inspired us, but also provided us with relevant background knowledge that will make us better producers on the next go-around.

We can’t underestimate the importance of giving students opportunities to produce – whether it be writing, science, music, or whatever . . . When they are producers, they increase their creative potential because they add to their experience and that expertise makes their work more innovative, higher quality, and more imaginative.

Managing your own site can be quite a challenge.  Recently, my learning management system, moodle (http://moodle3.labanca.net) crashed and I spent hours trying to rescue the database and reinstall the platform.  It eventually worked on the third iteration, but the entire database did not transfer.  However, at $7 per month, versus the $3K my organization pays for web-based operations – there’s a difference in service.  I’ve always argued that good instructional technology should be about the content, not the form – teachers are teachers, not web designers, and therefore should spend their time sharing good content.  However, sometimes it just becomes the case that you have to spend time on form – making that darn system work.

This WordPress account also has some technical difficulties – for some reason the system locks up when I try to upload a pic.  Long time readers might have noticed that I haven’t put a picture up in a long time (unless it’s embedded media).  I’ve been anxiously awaiting a WordPress update, because I’m pretty sure that it’s this installation, not the WordPress software. I guess I’ve been able to live without pics here, but I would really like to see some again soon and after my moodle debacle, I am hesitant to make an aggressive move.  Time will tell . . .

This past week in my graduate leadership class, we were discussing problem solving and used the app “Cut the Rope” to spark the discussion. Later during the class, I showed a video of Dan Meyer presenting at TEDxNYED. Ironically, Dan just made a post on his blog, dy/dan about the app “Angry Birds” and approaches to problem solving. Read it here:

Five Lessons On Teaching From Angry Birds That Have Nothing Whatsoever To Do With Parabolas

My graduate class and I attempted to distill the essential features of problem solving on our class last week.  We superficially compared our results with Newell and Simon’s (1972) model.  Since they have had time to incubate the ideas, I am wondering what they think of the relationship between the two. (P.S. – is my list what we discussed?)

cryhavok.org

On October 15, 2011, I facilitated a workshop for the Connecticut Science Fair entitled:

Where do good ideas come from?  Techniques for Developing creative potential and idea generation

Below, please find video segments for the workshop.  Here is the accompanying handout

Part 1:  Intro

Part 2A:

Part 2B:

Part 3: Brainstorming

From the Hartford Current:

Courant.com
New State Schools Chief Begins Today, Declaring ‘We Are Tired Of The Lack Of Progress’

Rick Green

4:57 PM EDT, October 6, 2011

The heralded and long-awaited arrival of Stefan Pryor as Connecticut’s new education commissioner — he begins work Friday — is a bitter reminder of how little progress we’ve made solving our most persistent failure.

We talk endlessly about our economic future, and yet tens of thousands of children in urban schools are still falling behind, not learning and dropping out. There are few, if any, larger obstacles holding Connecticut back.

What, I wanted to know when I met with the commissioner-to-be this week, could Pryor possibly do that governors, previous commissioners and hundreds of educators haven’t already done to tackle what is the nation’s greatest achievement gap?

“I think there is a recognition that this is a special moment,” Pryor responded, explaining that it his good fortune to be working for an impatient governor who has promised an education agenda during his second year in office.

“The sense I get from everybody — the education associations, the union leaders, the advocacy group leaders, the legislators, the state board members — is that we are tired of the lack of progress. We are ready for a shift forward.”

Though Pryor was cautious and guarded during our chat, it was still clear that education policy under the 39-year-old Yale graduate may shift seismically in coming months. This is a man, after all, who made an early name for himself as the founder of one of Connecticut’s most successful charter schools, the Amistad Academy in New Haven. More recently, Pryor was a top aide to Newark Mayor Cory Booker.

Above all, Pryor was brought here to create change. Some important highlights emerged from our conversation:

•A streamlined state Department of Education, one that focuses more on the fundamental problems of struggling schools, will emerge. Shifting from a regulation-and-compliance bureaucracy focused on paperwork to a more nimble agency that exists to improve learning will be a top priority.

•School districts that succeed can expect new freedom. Schools, experimental or traditional, that show results will be held up as models — and replicated.

•Teachers who achieve will be rewarded. Whether students actually learn must become part of how educators are evaluated. In particular, getting the best teachers into the lowest-performing schools will become a top priority.

•Student achievement, measured by indicators like standardized tests, will continue to be a critical metric for evaluating schools.

“At the moment, when there are national dialogues about which states are moving in the right direction, you don’t hear Connecticut’s name,” Pryor said. “The unit that parents think about … is the school. We as a department need to think about the schools of our state and how to improve them.”

Two things Pryor spoke repeatedly about — giving more freedom to school districts that achieve, and promoting successful individual schools as examples for the state — are particularly noteworthy. Significantly, we have no shortage of high-achieving schools and districts in Connecticut.

It would be revolutionary if Connecticut’s state Department of Education became known for helping good ideas grow and for getting out of the way of districts that are already succeeding.

“What can the state department do for higher performing districts? Get out of the way,” Pryor said. The big idea, he told me, Is to “spend more time with this districts that need the help.”

Pryor warned me — repeatedly — that he was not arriving as an acolyte of the charter school movement, which is often pitted against traditional education and unions. Charters play a very small role in the education of children in Connecticut. Like other model schools, they can be an example, he said.

“Effective schools will play a large role in this new era,” Pryor said, whatever the design or governance structure. “My goal will be … to promote those schools, to expand those schools, to replicate those schools that show effectiveness.”

Teacher evaluation, a favorite topic of seat-of-the-pants school reformers, must improve, but by working with all sides, particularly the unions, Pryor said. Significantly, this must include a career path that rewards and promotes effective teachers.

“It is essential that student performance be an element of evaluation and companion in our system,” he said. “That is something that we are going to engage as a very healthy, very full conversation with all of the stakeholders.

“We need to ensure that the teaching profession provides for ways for outstanding faculty members to advance in their careers. And advancement includes increased compensation over time.”

Pryor, who has a reputation as a workhorse, said he plans to begin his job with a listening tour of schools, classrooms and towns around the state.

“I think it’s possible to map out an approach that people agree upon. Will there be conflict? You can count on it. The place to start from is what do we agree on what do we want to accomplish,” he said. “People are hungry for that.”

The more I examine and think about “CHANGE,” the more I realize it happens in the evolution of dated individual teaching and learning philosophies of education to constructivist thinking.

I am writing this post because, I think it is important to be self deprecating sometimes.

I don’t yet know all of my students names in my graduate class and I haven’t set up a good system to learn them.  I, of course, have my list but I don’t have all of the names-to-faces.  It’s my own fault, of course, and I know my students are going to read this, so they too can see my ill-guided fate.

However, interestingly, I don’t think they all know each other’s names either.  (Some may have it, but I’m not sure . . .) I’ve watched their interactions and have seen quite a number of personal pronouns used instead of proper nouns when I would think the opposite would happen, based on the context of the discussion.

This graduate program is a cohort model, meaning these students will be grouped for the next 5 years.  Of course, they will come to know each other well – but now is the time to form those important bonds to create a culture of collaboration and partnership.

Anyone have any good team-building activities that we can try next class?  Help a poor unfortunate soul out.

I distributed an article to my graduate leadership class that I am teaching.  It was a fairly challenging article to read in general – a meta analysis.  However, to the neophyte researcher, it was probably extremely challenging.  Being a research article, it had the typical parts:

• abstract
• introduction
• methods
• results
• discussion/conclusion
• references

My experience tells me that you don’t necessarily read a research report from start to finish, but rather use the subheadings to guide your search for information.  However, not everyone knows that, and there certainly is an art to the process based on expertise.  However, teaching that class, something else stood out – some students clearly didn’t understand some of the concepts and were (afraid?) (shy?) (lacking confidence?) (thinking they should, when really they shouldn’t?) to ask questions, or to verify their lack of understanding to me.

It gets me thinking . . . you really have to be confident to be willing to stand up and say you don’t know something.  That’s a real challenge.  As an educator, it’s my responsibility to create a culture that promotes confident questioning.   After all, I am working with educators and that’s where their expertise lies, not necessarily in educational research.  But as this cadre builds their knowledge – becoming a good consumer of educational research is critical, because after all – that’s what leads to being a producer of educational research.

I am proud to announce a new publication that was just released in The Science Teacher entitled “The 21st century oral presentation toolbag.”  Link is here.  You can see the article if you are a member of NSTA.  Others can send me a message, and I will be happy to email a copy.