I think that we all need to learn something everyday. Actually, more to the point, I think we all do learn something everyday, we just need to pay more attention and realize that we did.  At any rate, today I learned a few things from @dougpete.  Go figure.  I learned that Windows Live Writer for blogging is actually a good tool.  I’ve seen it before in the Live Tool list, and it was actually installed on my Windows desktop machine with 7 when I updated a few weeks ago.  Never bother to look at it.  I guess I assumed it was only for Windows Live blogs.  But nope, it connects to a whole slew of them including WordPress.  So I’m using and trying!  So far I like it.  That’s what I learned today.  A good product, and not to be so quick to judge with pre-conceptions.

Along that train of thought, here’s what I learned two days ago via this video.  Sort of the same idea, only in the icy water of Antarctica.  Be careful what you assume. You very often are wrong.

Tweet Totals: 2 days of STAO and 1 day of ECOO

So what?

I can hear some of you now. What’s a tweet? What does it matter?

I think it matters a great deal, and it speaks to some of the issues that I think we are having in education in general, and in science education in particular. In one of the sessions today at the STAO conference, a presenter was discussing how we are facing a crisis in recruiting new students into science and technology in post-secondary education and on into industry and research. We are not alone in this. This is a trend that is all across North America. The question is why? I think that the answer has multiple levels to it, as its a complicated one, but the one that occurs to me today is the disconnect in the way we teach science, and the way that students interact with science in their lives.

Look around you. You see the impacts of science and technology everywhere. You’re reading this on a device that is the result of over 100 years of progress in physics and chemistry, from the electricity generation stations, to the circuits in the device to the materials that house everything inside. Its all a result of science. So what do we want more than anything as classroom science teachers. A new set of text books. We tell students that they are not allowed to use any of the technological devices that they bring with them to class so that we can use a book to learn about the science that led to these technological devices. What? Why do we do that?

We close the door to our room, and then discuss the impact of global warming on the planet. We use the internet to pull up a picture of a polar bear on an ice floe. But we balk at the idea of having kids use the internet to speak face to face with someone who sees polar bears regularly, and lives in the arctic. Why are we so scared of the technology? There was a session I attended at STAO and it was done via videoconference. A group of three teachers were visibly surprised that it was done that way. The chatted and talked audibly for about 10 minutes (and the presenter could hear the noise) and then got up and left. Why didn’t they see that kind of interaction as valuable? It was great. The presenter was in Minnesota and did a great job of the presentation and then a short Q&A at the end. Just like a regular presentation. Only without the expense and carbon footprint of flying to Toronto to do a 1 hour gig. Cool.

Which brings me to Twitter. At the same dates and times in two parts of the same city, two conferences were occurring. One science teachers association and one educational computing organization. You’d think we’d have lots in common right? You’d think that the science teachers would love to be with those that love to use technology to teach? Right? Apparently not.

In my non-scientific analysis of the available data. Over 2 days of the science teachers conference there was a total of 25 tweets sent out with the #stao hashtag. 14 of them were by me. 260 tweets were sent out of #ECOO in just one day!

Oh.

I was very happy to jump into the Twitter stream and read what people were saying as I sat in my sessions in a conference across town. In a lot of ways it was like being in two places at once. I was learning about science education here, and clicking links and getting quotes from speakers across town about using technology to assist in improving education. It occurred to me that we all needed to be together! We’re doing the same things!

So what? What does it mean? Well, I think it means that science teachers are not yet plugged in to the concept of professional learning networks. I think that we as a whole system are not used to the idea of sharing thoughts and having professional conversations with others using technology. I think we need to be. I’m realizing that I missed an opportunity to advance this with a presentation at STAO. Maybe next year. My hope is that we wouldn’t need to have it presented to us. My hope is that we do better at online collaboration and sharing and being open.

Don’t get me wrong. Science teachers are awesome. I think that I’ve realized that the type of connected teacher that attended ECOO and went to the TwECOO meetup is not the average teacher that is in our classrooms across the province. But we’re starting, and we’re growing, and we’re breaking down the barriers and the classroom walls.

We just need to continue. And maybe speed it up a bit. The students aren’t slowing their pace of learning, why should we?

I think it was driven home by @msjweir when we were chatting via Twitter this evening.

Can’t we all join in and continue our conversations? Isn’t that how we learn?

Ok, this could get messy. I apologize in advance for those that I’m about to annoy.

I’ve spent the last 2 days at the STAO Conference, which is a great conference for science teachers to learn new things, get new resources, share the best teaching ideas and go back to their schools energized and ready to do the best possible for their students. The trouble is, I’m not sure that is what is actually happening. I see the faces of the people in the presentations, I hear their comments and I listen to the angst in their voices when they ask the pointed questions that start with things like “I hear what you’re saying, BUT, you don’t have my class and… ” At that point, my heart sinks for the presenter who just did a great job at showing how inquiry in science classroom can work and what it can lead to in terms of student engagement and enjoyment of science. Imagine that, students enjoying their class experience. What a radical idea.

I don’t know what the answers are, but I know that students are not going to enjoy things that are just done the same way that the system has done them for 100 years. It seems to me that too many teachers are just looking for a magic trick to keep the kids in their seats, or a shiny new toy to amuse them long enough to not have them do anything annoying in their class before the end of the semester. In my opinion, that’s not engagement, it’s coping and avoiding dealing with the bigger issues like the fact that many students don’t learn the way we teachers learn. We became teachers because, in many cases, we were really good at the school system. And that’s how we now teach. But the system is not in the same decades it was when we were in the desks. The students have different tools, different expectations, different ways of accessing information.

I hear variations on the “but I have to cover the curriculum.. ” argument in virtually every session where there is a new and exciting idea put forth. Why is that? Why is it that as science teachers, we’re so afraid to try something new? That’s what science is for cryin’ out loud! Is it because as teacher, we’re really not engaged in the process of science? We’re engaged in the process of education aren’t we? Treat it as a science. Take a chance. Run an experiment in your classroom. Try some open ended inquiry. Let the kids decide their path. Get messy. And revel in it. With the new Ontario curriculum documents, there is flexibility. All we have to do is show that we’ve ‘covered’ the 3 overall expectations in each unit and you’re golden. As for the 5th unit (unit 1, 20% of the course) it’s all skills and processes of science. Use that to your advantage. Have some fun! Let the kids follow their questions! Don’t expect or even want to know all the answer to the questions they ask. Support them as they try and discover how to find the answers themselves. The likely truth is that long after they’ve left your classroom and moved on, they will not remember that great note you put on the board about Ohm’s Law, but if you let them answer the question that they come up with on their own, in their own way, I can guarantee that’s something that they will more likely remember.

I’m getting tons of ideas and energy out of the presentations at the conference, I only hope that others are as well.

Day 2 of STAO had a weird start for me. I woke up intending to run up to ECOO for the day, as there were a number of session that I wanted to attend. Unfortunately I didn’t feel very well. I actually started to drive up the 401 HWY to get to the other hotel, but decided that it wasn’t a good idea, so I turned and came back to my own hotel at STAO. A few hours later, when I woke up, I felt a bit better and went down to attend some more sessions. I’m glad I did, as there was some gold in them thar rooms.

Susan Staples from Parks Canada introduced us to a website she has developed that serves as a one stop shop for teachers looking to find resources on the PC website. There is lots of great info and ideas there, but it’s all scattered over their various web areas. Her hard work has resulted in 300+ Links to Science. This website that is a starting point for easily finding great resources for class applications. Good stuff this. Parks Canada also has a Youtube Channel and videos are appearing there on a regular basis. Kudos to them for embracing these media.

Biology Bob (Bob Roddie) gave a session that outlined how he uses inquiry in his science classroom to engage students in the scientific process. Starting with basics, he slowly takes away structure for the students and in the end has them doing very open-ended inquiry where they are picking their problems, and find out how to find out their own solution. This is a huge area in science where I personally feel we need to improve upon and Bob is a great resource to have in the field. One of the lines he used was “Inquiry is only as big as your or your students’ imaginations.” I like that.

I ended the day with 2 more sessions from the folks involved in Smarter Science. One was 2 teachers who discussed how they applied their inquiry framework to a senior physics class with great success, and the second was a tour of the website that will achieve full functionality very soon and be able to have teachers register and start to develop lessons based on the Smart Science framework. As I said in the last blog post, I’m very excited by the things that are developing here and can’t wait to explore them further.

Another great day of science and thinking. Its wonderful to know that there are people out there pushing the envelope and doing great things with and for students. I truly think that education as we know it now is changing, as it must, and that that some of the ideas we are hearing about today will become the mainstream teaching methods and styles of the next few years.

Oh, and as I was in the parking lot heading out I saw this license plate on a vehicle. How could I not snap a pic? My kind of people.

Thursday was the opening day of STAO’s annual conference for Ontario Science teachers. Its a great conference and always has lots of great sessions to chose from. I thought I’d give some highlights of some of the sessions I attended.

A very good start to the conference was given by Dr. David Galbraith, who talked about the life of Charles Darwin. He spent his talk discussing Darwin’s life, his family, his story that led him to be, well, Darwin. It was very interesting to hear about how he was sort of a lost soul in his younger years, dropping out of medical school, and not really knowing what to do with his life. His father paid a huge sum of money for him to go on the voyage of the Beagle, although the family was very wealthy. As well, it was neat to hear about all the mistakes that Darwin made in collecting specimens, as he was still learning to become a naturalist. His shipmates, having been trained in the navy as note takers and artists, kept much better records and it was result of these records that Darwin was able to save much of his work and make sense of it. It really outlined the fact that he learned as he went. There was no Eureka moment for him. It should the evolution of his ideas and how the hard work and effort eventually culminated in his results. Galbraith then finished his talk by describing how we can use Darwin’s life to discuss the importance of perseverance, hard work, trying and failing and trying again to students. Great message.

I then attended a talk by a group called Adventure Learning, Go North! They do polar expeditions every year and maintain an interactive website where students and teachers can log in and access the trip information and interact with the team as they move through the 3 or 4 month journey. This year, they are going to Greenland. I encourage science and geography teachers to check out their website. It looks pretty amazing!

I then attended a panel discussion on Smarter Science, which I talked about here. I think that this will be worth a longer post in the future, as I foresee great things in this particular group of educators and plan on joining them and being part of it. More on that later!

I finished the day with a talk by Maude Barlow on the global water crisis. I thought that I was pretty up on the water situation on the planet. Boy, was I wrong. Maude talked about things that I had never heard of, and some that were truly astounding and terrifying. Water quality and availability are set to be the next true global crisis.

She recounted lots of stories of water issues around the globe, and then outlined her 3 steps for staving off the crisis, or at least mitigating it. They are:

1. Create conditions for rain to remain in natural storage
2. Cannot continue to mine groundwater at rate greater than recharge. Extensive research into groundwater mapping and research.
3. Stop polluting our surface water.

She likened the Alberta Tar Sands to Canada’s Mordor. I like that analogy.

It was a very good day. I renewed some acquaintances and made some new ones. Lots of great things to think about.

I’m spending 4 days in a row at conferences. Today was SCCAO – Science Coordinators and Consultants Association of Ontario. It’s a meeting of school board science leaders from across the province. About 40 of us were on site 1 day before STAO begins in the morning. It was a really great meeting. There was lots to think about and ponder.

The day started with a workshop on Situational Leadership. This was a way to view the job that most of us do on a daily basis, and reflect on our leadership styles, and what we can do to get the most out of ourselves and the people we work with. It was likened to differentiated instruction for teachers when we can use different styles in different situations. Different levels of support and direction are required in various situations. It was very thought provoking and give me a new perspective on what I can do in my role.

Then we had a presentation from Smarter Science. This got me going! I’ve been working on a project that will allow our science teachers in our board to collaborate and work on lessons, ideas and anything else. Smarter science takes this idea to a whole new level. I’m not sure if it’s a great compliment to what I am planning to try and do, or whether its a better way to approach it altogether, but I’m excited to learn more. Its essentially a teacher driven, collaborative, social environment where we can post and share (via Creative Commons licensing) science resources to support the teaching in the Ontario Curriculum. They’ve also developed a partnership for mentoring with scientists via videoconferencing that looks to be an amazing development.

After our free lunch (who says there’s no such thing?) we had a series of updates and presentations from a variety of people. Ministry of Education updates on some things that are happening, particularly in the area of Environmental Education, vendor presentations, including Gizmos, Tomatosphere, Scientists in School and few others.

All in all a very productive, informative day for science leaders from the province to share ideas, and get to work together for a change. Now looking forward to STAO starting in the morning for the next phase of the conference circuit!

I’ve been using a Dell Mini 10v netbook for a few months now and I am now on the 3rd version of Ubuntu for it. I started with 8.04 which was version it shipped from the factory with. I had some issues with this version, as it didn’t seem to be smooth and some things didn’t work properly. I actually disabled the trackpad, as it was virtually useless. I assumed that this was a feature of the Mini 10v, not of the OS. I’ve since been using a USB mini external mouse on it.

Back in the summer, I figured out how to download, and install a new version, 9.04 Netbook Remix. This was very easy and straightforward to do, ever for someone who had never done this before. That OS was much better. The interface was clean and slick, and it was setup to work on one click rather than 2, as it had an iPod Touch like setup with different applications grouped on different pages. It also seemed to work much better with newer applications. Adobe Air and Tweetdeck installed like a charm, where I had to fight with the 8.04 version and never got it quite right.

Now comes 9.10. I saw that the upgrade was available, but didn’t think that it was worth the effort to bother with. Then I saw @dougpete blog about it and his post got me thinking maybe I should look at it. Rather than do a clean, fresh install like I did with 9.04, I thought I’d take a chance on the Updater that runs within Ubuntu. I clicked the button, and waited.

It was seamless. I download, installed and rebooted with only a few clicks, and the new OS popped up. All my files, apps and settings were intact. Cool. The new version of the desktop is pretty cool and the interface seems snappier, quicker to load. It works very well.

I still was using the external mouse, so was surprised to notice that after a few days of using it, when I checked the settings that the trackpad had been re-enabled, without my noticing. It’s unusual because part of the reason that I disabled it was that it would cause cursor jumps and edits while typing. The new setup includes a feature that disables the trackpad while typing is occurring. This is a nice feature! It pretty much eliminates the jumping and annoying issues that the pad used to have. Nice.

More and more, I’m seeing the advantage of an OS that ‘just works’. With this version of Ubuntu, at least I have that and I don’t have to pay for it.

I had the distinct pleasure over the last 2 days of participating in a conference that was put on by the Ontario Teachers Federation (OTF/FEO) which featured guest Will Richardson. I had been asked several months back by the conference organizers to be a ‘helper’ on the first day, and on the second day to facilitate a workshop on using Photoshop Elements 7.

The event started for on Thursday night when the team assembled at the hotel and had an organizational meeting about how the event was going to run. As is typical of my professional life now, many of these folks had become key online contacts in education in spite of never having met face to face. The ease of conversation and ‘meeting’ these people was wonderful.

The Friday session was led by Will Richardson. He led the 100 or so educators through a great introduction to many of the web tools that have become part of our lives. Twitter, Delicious, Diigo, RSS, Google Reader all were explored and discovered by the group. It’s safe to say that some were left shell shocked at the sheer volume of information. But it was a great day, and I think all present took lots away from it.

On Saturday, myself and my colleague @techguy1717 facilitated 2 workshops on Photoshop Elements 7. With a program of the power of PSE7, it was a struggle to decide what to demo and what not to. At about 10 PM on Friday we finalized our plan of attack, and went at it. I really enjoyed the 2 workshops, and I learned a number of things about the software as we worked through an introduction to some of the basic tools like cropping and colour and light adjustment. We also had a chance to work with some of the neat PSE7 tools like making panoramas and slide shows with a few clicks.

For me the 2 days solidified my enthusiasm for creating and interacting with an online PLN. It was through my PLN that I was able to go to the conference in the first place, and it was an amazing experience to connect face to face with educators that I felt I already knew.

We all went away energized and ready to go back to our respective boards and continue to plod away at making changes that will benefit our students, and ourselves, in the long run.

A debt of thanks to the organizers (inside and outside of OTF) for making it happen. Nice work folks!

What follows is a post that I wrote for my the first course towards my M.Ed. at UOIT. The course is online, and we’re posting in blogs using WebCT. I thought that I’d cross post on here, and see if it will spark any conversation outside the classroom as well. We were asked to blog our personal definitions of teaching, learning and knowledge in preparation for the rest of the program

Being asked to provide personal definitions of teaching, learning and knowledge can perhaps be likened to trying to define work and energy in physics. If you’re not familiar, the simple definitions are that energy is the ability to do work, and work is the change from one form of energy to another. Like Frank sang “You can’t have one without the other.” It’s a circular kind of reasoning in a way in which each concept is dependent on the other, and it is very difficult to define them as completely separate.

Teaching, learning and knowledge can be viewed in much the same way I believe. If there is teaching then there is learning (we hope, but more on this in a moment) and if there is learning, then what are they learning? It’s got to be some form of knowledge. If could also be a skill, which has somehow become a distinct entity in education as well, as if skills and knowledge are two different things. If you have a skill, do you not ‘know’ how to do something? What’s the difference? Is knowledge internalized as a bit of information and a skill is something that can manifest itself in some real, tangible way in the physical world, rather than the mental one? For the purposes of this discussion, I feel that knowledge can be simply defined as the internalization of a piece of information. This information could be a defined fact or some skill that can be demonstrated. In my mind I’m already coming up with examples that some might define as knowledge that I would have trouble with, so there’s perhaps a discussion point there as well. I’m referring to the intangible things that humans often state as knowledge such as “I know that UFO’s are alien spacecraft that visit the Earth.” (to pick a suitably strange example) when the reality is that they cannot know for certain if this is true or not. They may think it, but it doesn’t make it knowledge. In my mind, a definition of knowledge must be narrowed in its description to those things which can be, at least in so much as is possible, verified or demonstrated.

With knowledge defined so precisely (!), where does that leave teaching and learning? Again, can you have one without the other? In a classroom setting, there are classic examples of students having been taught something, but not having learned it. Is this even possible? With apologies to the tree in the forest, if a teacher teaches and the learner doesn’t learn, was anything taught?

The more I thought about this, the more I became convinced that to attempt to separate the two is impossible. They are two parts of the same process. When a learner acquires some new bit of knowledge, either through transmission, or facilitation, or support or guidance, then there was teaching also going on. Then I realized that some learning could be done without the presence of a teacher. And by teacher it didn’t have to be a physical connection, as in a classroom, but some sort of transmission. I can learn from a ‘teacher’ who died centuries ago by reading their books. So in that way, teaching and learning is still part of the same process. However, I now think that some learning can and does happen without explicit teaching, as in the experiential learning done by a child when they touch an icicle for the first time, and learn its temperature. In most cases however, learning and teaching are connected and intimate. It can be the exchange or transmission of a bit of knowledge, or it could be the facilitation and guidance of the teacher such that the learner can be supported in the acquisition of such pieces. So then, if knowledge is the internalization of a bit of information, then learning can be defined as the process that leads to that internalization.

Where does that leave teaching? As shown above, there are many different forms that teaching can take, but if we stick to the definitions of learning and knowledge that are outlined here, then teaching can be broadly defined as a process by which a learner is supported in the process of internalization of knowledge. This support could be in concert with the learner, such as in a classroom setting, or remote in space and/or time, such as the relationship between author and reader.
So have I nailed it? Is this the definitive answer? Of course not, but as I’ve constructed this short post, my mind has been mulling over and finding holes in my own thinking as go. I’ve started to write down statements and then was able to find exceptions to the statement even as I saw it appear on the screen. There’s a lot more thinking to do, and this is only the beginning. I think that as educators, it is a valuable process to undertake and continually refine.

Now that the Arctic 2009 trip is behind me and I’ve had a week or so at home to process and consider the experience, there’s a few things that have occurred to me that I think I’d like to share.

The experience for me had several levels. On one level, there was simply the experience of being a learner. Having never traveled to the Arctic before, there was a lot for me to learn. I’ve read and watch photos and videos of the ecosystems and landscapes, but I’m not sure it prepared me for the reality of it all. One word the kept coming up in my mind was simply ‘big’. Everything was big. Ocean, cliffs, fiords, sky. All big. As a science teacher, I was fairly well versed in the academic view of the north, but the reality and boldness of it took me a little bit by surprise. I can see how people get attracted and get ‘pulled’ to the region.

Another level of learning and interest was watching the logistics of the journey unfold. As someone who had taken students on canoe trips, I know how difficult logistics can be. Students On Ice is a machine when it comes to dealing with the difficulties of an expedition like this, which are magnitudes higher than anything I had ever dealt with. It was quite a thing to watch develop, and I learned just how good they are at doing it, since for the most part, it was never obvious what the staff were dealing with, but I know that the behind the scenes experience was far different sometimes. Kudos to all of the SOI team!

The greatest impact for me was as an educator and watching the students develop as a group and as individuals. As someone who has worked and taught environmental education for a number of years, it truly was a joy to behold the process that the SOI experience led them through. The days were absolutely packed with activities and experiences that were all focused on the goals and outcomes of the journey, which is to awake and ignite the fires that are in all of the students. It didn’t matter what the passions were, although environment is obviously a common theme, each student was given opportunities and encouragement to develop skills, knowledge and abilities that they may have had before, or may not have known that they had.

It was sheer joy for me as a teacher to watch and help students as they talked, discussed, wrote, blogged, painted, sketched, played or simply watched the world around them. It firmed up my belief in experiential education, getting students outside and the purpose of education as a whole. It energized me to take these ideas forward and attempt changes in my own practice and to develop ways of supporting others.

Post trip, it’s been fun as the students have continued the conversations and have posted photos and videos on their shared Facebook group. I’ve posted my journal entries, and about 200 photos on Flickr for all to see. I’ve read most of the student journal entries on the Students On Ice site, as well as blog posts that my roommate Mike was making from the ship.

We know that we live in a super-connected world and it was good for a time to be in a ‘quiet’ zone and offline. It’s also great to watch the conversations and sharing continue between the students and the staff, as we all move forward and support each other in whatever activities we pursue now that we’ve returned from the Arctic. It’s fun to watch that too!