Sir Ken Robinson outlines 3 principles crucial for the human mind to flourish — and how current education culture works against them. In a funny, stirring talk he tells us how to get out of the educational “death valley” we now face, and how to nurture our youngest generations with a climate of possibility.

Creativity expert Sir Ken Robinson challenges the way we’re educating our children. He champions a radical rethink of our school systems, to cultivate creativity and acknowledge multiple types of intelligence.

Source: Ted Talks

Quotes by Ken Robinson

• If you’re not prepared to be wrong, you’ll never come up with anything original.
• All kids have tremendous talents — and we squander them pretty ruthlessly.
• Creativity now is as important in education as literacy, and we should treat it with the same status.
• I believe this passionately: that we don’t grow into creativity, we grow out of it. Or rather, we get educated out if it.
• You don’t think of Shakespeare being a child, do you? Shakespeare being seven? He was seven at some point. He was in somebody’s English class, wasn’t he? How annoying would that be?
• Very many people go through their whole lives having no real sense of what their talents may be, or if they have any to speak of.
• “The dropout crisis is just the tip of an iceberg. What it doesn’t count are all the kids who are in school but being disengaged from it, who don’t enjoy it, who don’t get any real benefit from it.

Seems like almost every week our national newspaper will post articles about using technology in school. Turns out Norway is the country in the wold with most technology in school. The question to ask is what are we getting out of this? According to the ESSIE The Survey of Schools: ICT in Education report Norway has the most computers pr student, the best high speed internet connections and the most digital cameras. And yet we only score right above average when it comes to the use of ICT in education.Norwegian teachers should be among the top 5 when it comes to using ICT in education.

Norwegian teachers should be among the leading experts in the world. We should be well used key note speakers and work shops leaders. I don’t think we are! The question to ask is why not? We have the most computers pr student, the best high speed internet connections and the most digital cameras. Even so we only score right above average when it comes to the use of ICT in education.

Connected learners

My class has recently been occupied writing a book about this and if we were to share one take away from the way we have been working with technology this year it would be this; work and learn together, collaborate online, find others online to learn from and share your work. Too many students are using their personal computers with emphasis on the fist word, personal. Sure, most students in Norway are sharing online. Facebook, Skype, Snapchat, Instagram, you name it. But they are not sharing their learning. And if they are, they are not sharing enough. That is where the teacher has to step up. If the teachers start sharing their work, the students are more likely to do so too. Teachers need to show them how to. Teachers can do this by writing  on blogs, sharing ideas on Twitter and writing in Notebooks with the students.  Share documents on Google and share videos on how to learn. Make your own videos or use some of the thousands of videos out there!

VideoNot.es

As usual I find a lot of useful links following “Free technology for teachers“. The latest is VideoNot.es. You can use this if you post a video on YouTube for your math instructions. (Flip the classroom.) The students log on to VideoNot.es and take notes while watching the video. The document with the video and the notes is saved to your Google drive. You can share it with your teacher with your questions, or you can share it with fellow students and ask them to contribute as well. Have the whole class add notes to the document. When you write down the notes they are tied to the exact location in the video. Pretty smart! Look at the illustration below to see what kind of videos you can use.

There is a change in pedagogy in the lower grades these days. In Norway many preschools are using iPads and tablets to teach digital skills and to learn. In the lower grades at school many teachers have started using Smart boards and tablets. To really make the change in your classroom I recommend that you read this book and share it with your colleagues! The shift to connecting your classroom is not that hard if you know how to do this. If you already have a Smart board and computers online, what are you waiting for?

In her new book Connected from the Start: Global Learning in the Primary Grades, primary teacher Kathy Cassidy makes a compelling case for connecting our youngest students to the world, using the transformative power of Internet tools and technologies.The 120-page eBook is the first in a series of solo-author works published by Powerful Learning Press to support teachers and school leaders as they make the shift to digitally infused, inquiry-driven teaching and learning, fueled by students’ own passions and creative interests.

Tweet about Connected From the Start! Join Kathy and Powerful Learning Practice CEO Sheryl Nussbaum-Beach for a one-hour Twitter chat on Sunday, April 14 at 7pm EDT. Use the hashtag #plpnetwork to follow along and participate!

I found this story on my Facebook page today and I think if fits in nicely with our latest project at school, writing a book. My students laugh when I say we can sell a lot of books, not really believing, but I think the message from Brad Meltzer’s TED-Ed is a good one:

1. Dream big
2. Work hard
3. Stay humble

If we all can follow these three simple rules and be creative, believe that we could actually change history!

Even famous change-makers — like Martin Luther King — had concerns like everyone else. They worried about failure and were lonely sometimes, but that didn’t stop them from changing history.

To follow these seemingly simple bits of advice, people must fight through failure, continuing to work hard even when the first attempt at a big idea doesn’t work. And, perhaps most importantly, good ideas often require other people’s help.

Great message to inspire our youth. Source: Mindshift

I just heard on the news today that the government is planning a more rigorous action against schools who separate students according to ability. They are afraid of students being stigmatized and want to prevent the establishment of elite classes. That is my guess anyway. In reality students know very well who master the different subjects and are for the most part aware that students have different abilities, interests and learn accordingly.

I just participated in a workshop for school leaders in Bergen with guests from Alaska Highland Tech High. There they have a system for grouping students in according to ability and moving them up separately when they show mastery of a certain set of standards. This means you could study 7th grade math 8th grade English and 9th grade science the same year. You can move on to university level in science while you are doing 8th grade level in English, just as an example. You can find the standards on their web-site and the rubrics they use to assess. Their slogan is: Education for Leadership, Educating for Life.. I think it is important to remember that school is there for the students. Students’ voice is important. Let the students decide how and where they want to learn. In big groups, small groups, groups the progress quickly, groups that give you time to process what you learn, alone or with their friends. Together with the students monitor their learning and discuss the alternatives. How can we help you master the different subjects and move on to the next level? We are here to help you in your learning!

Listening to the minister of Education on the radio this morning made me think of the RSA Animate - Changing Education Paradigms by Sir Ken Robinson. Sadly I do not think Norway is the country that will be in front in that area. Nothing to be proud of because considering our resources, we certainly should.

How then do we organize our schools?

Schools are still pretty much organized on factory lines. Ringing bells, separate facilities, specialized into separate subjects. And we still educate children by batches. We put them through the system by age group. Why do we do that? Why is there this assumption that the most important thing these kids have in common is how old they are. Is this the most important thing? The date of manufacture? As Sir Ken Robinson, we all know kids who are must better than other kids at the same age in different disciplines. Or even different times of the day. Or better in smaller groups or in larger groups. Or sometimes they want to be on their own. If you are interested in learning you don’t start with this production line mentality, that is all about standardization. I, as Sir Ken Robinson believe we have to go in the exact opposite direction. That is changing the paradigm.

Students loose the ability to be creative after spending 10 years at school where they are taught that there is one answer, and that they can find it in the back of the book, (but don’t look. and don’t copy), because that is cheating! And outside schools that’t called collaboration. We have to recognize that most great learning happens in groups. Collaboration is the stuff of growth, if you atomize people and separate them and judge them separately, we form a disjunction between them and their natural learning environment.

Take time to watch this video and discuss it in your class!

“So I’m wondering if you’re ready to let your students assess themselves. Not as some experiment where you end up grading them apart but where you really give the reigns over to them? If not, is it about trust? Is it about readiness? Fear?

I’m thinking that even 6 year olds should be able to assess themselves. If we give them the tools and expectations.” Dean Shareski

You have to begin to weigh formative versus summative assessment.” 

We have to be clear that we are talking about summative assessment here.  Formative assessments are on-going assessments, reviews, and observations in a classroom. Teachers use formative assessment to improve instructional methods and student feedback throughout the teaching and learning process. Dr. Robert J. Marzano details the specific benefits of formative assessment—assessment that is used during instruction rather than at the end of a course or unit in his book “Formative Assessment & Standard based grading“

Continuous formative assessment in the classroom led by the teachers,should in my opinion lead to students being able to assess themselves. This is something they should learn at school and as Dean says, probably from year 1. Another point he makes is that we should stop calling what we do ”life long learning” if we’re not going to empower our students to think, learn and assess for themselves.

Different ways to assess

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In a traditional school we have tests with pencil and paper. Even if the students are equipped with laptops, they are not used for tests because it is an easy way to cheat. Using notes taken in class is considered cheating by many teachers. That means one of the qualities we are testing is the students’ ability to remember facts and numbers. Even if the teachers allow the students to use the computers during the tests, most likely the teachers made the test and the questions. Why? Shouldn’t the students be allowed to decide when they want to be tested and how? Shouldn’t they be allowed to show mastery in many ways, not just during a test? Do they need to be tested all the time? Could we even relieve the heavy burden of grading papers for the teachers this way?

If the students were to decide what would they say?

In preparation for the book we are writing in class we have asked students how they want to be assessed. It comes as no surprise that students who do well in traditional tests would like business to go on as usual. But if you questions your students and give them some alternatives, then you get an interesting discussion. One size fits all? Hardly, perhaps by offering more choices you will avoid teachers like our example above. Here is what the students in my class have to say. Perhaps you could encourage your students to take part in the discussion as well?

Dylan Williams

Students do not learn what we teach. No matter how carefully we prepare and deliver our lessons, it is impossible to predict with any certainty what students will learn as a result. That is why the most effective formative assessment does not happen after the learning. It happens within and between lessons. In other words, it is embedded in the minute-to-minute and day-by-day practice of teachers. Video about this here

The filter bubble (Photo credit: mirindas27)

I recently read the FIlter Bubble, how the personalized web is changing what we read and how we think by Eli Pariser. It’s a book I’ve been planning to read for a long time and a topic we are addressing in the book we are writing in English class this semester. My English class is writing a book about using social media to connect and learn.

More and more schools are equipping all the teachers and students with laptops or other devices and searching the net is one of the main activities when looking for information. The questions we should be asking ourselves are; do we teaching our students how to be net-smart, how to specify their searches and teach them where to look? Do we talk about online tracking and how advertising companies can track what you view? And perhaps even more importantly; do we offer any thoughts to what kind of information we share on social media and how it is used? Facebook user share 25 billion items a month! Who owns this material, who owns the pictures you post? What happens when you delete the picture, what if someone already copied it?When you ask your students to be on Facebook you need to know how Facebook works!   These are some of the questions we should be asking in class and these are some of the topics we cover in the book we are writing.  For more info about the book see here. We are inviting educational experts, teachers and students from all parts of the world to offer their opinion and answer some questions, we would love to hear from you as well!

The Filter bubble

First of all the filter bubble surrounds us with ideas with which we’re already familiar (and already agree), making us overconfident in our mental frameworks  Second it removes from our environment some of the key prompts that make us want to learn. The filter bubble doesn’t just affect how we process news, it can also affect how we think. “Learning is by definition an encounter with what you don’t know, what you haven’t thought of, what you couldn’t conceive, and what you never understood or entertained as possible. This kind of filter that Google interposes between an internet searcher and what a search yields shields the searcher from such radical encounters. The personalized environment is very good at answering the questions we have but not at suggesting questions or problems that are out of our sight altogether  It brings to mind the famous Pablo Picasso quotation: “computers are useless  They can only give us answers”. Eli Pariser, The Filter Bubble. 

What should you do?

This infographic below explains what happens when you search online and offers 4 actions you might take:

1. Install an ad blocker
2. Change your cookie settings
3. Turn off referers
4. Install HTTPS everywhere.

Infographic

This infographic was made by BackgroundCheck.org with this graphic.

Learn about a new “superpower” that isn’t being taught in 90% of US schools. Why aren’t more students training to be programmers? Interesting thoughts from successful people in the field of programming. Who wouldn’t want to be the new “Mark Zuckerberg”! 

Starring Bill Gates, Mark Zuckerberg, will.i.am, Chris Bosh, Jack Dorsey, Tony Hsieh, Drew Houston, Gabe Newell, Ruchi Sanghvi, Elena Silenok, Vanessa Hurst, and Hadi Partovi.

Sunday, 6/23/2013, 7:00pm–8:30pm
Ann Michaelsen, Sandvika vgs, Norway 

I’m pleased to be able to attend ISTE again this year. Here is what I will be talking about and below you can read more.

Learn how to use Twitter, blogs, and Skype to get in contact with students and teachers from other parts of the world and build a global classroom.  Recommended by ISTE’s SIGOL

Purpose & Objectives

Purpose: Show participants how social media like Skype, Twitter and the writing blogs can be used to get in contact with students and teachers from other parts of the world. By using examples from my own class I will show how my students communicate and learn from peers in the outside world using social media. By modeling own practice from the classroom I hope to encourage the teachers to start this when they get back to school.

Objectives: To be able to use Twitter, Skype and blogging as tools to connect. And to introduce new material to the students on personal blogs using authentic material like videos from Youtube and TED-talks. Curriculum goals are the basis for learning, not textbooks, and students learn how to cover the curriculum goals using different tools and by connecting with students, other educators and experts on those specific fields. Questions and challenges are set by the students with help from teachers, not the other way around. Students offer feedback to fellow students. The goal is self-paced differentiated learning where every student can progress individually and the teacher can keep track of this. We explore how it is possible to use digital age learning in an authentic real-world practice, modelling real-world problems.

Why Double Entry Journal?

This is a great task to use in class after the students have read their novel. Every student should be able to do this task. It is a lot more challenging task then just writing a summary or answering questions that you find in a textbook or you as a teacher give the students. Using the double entry journal the students are forced to reflect on their reading and to give examples of sections in the book that are important and explain why they think they are important.  This will also test the students’ understanding of the text.

How to write a double entry journal

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  miss peregrine’s home for peculiar children / ransom riggs (Photo credit: sonyazombiee)

  Use a table function to make two columns. You can do this on your blog as well.

• In the first column, students should choose a quote/paragraph from the book that relates to a certain topic given by the teacher.
• In the second column, students should write why they chose that particular paragraph, and explain its significance.

Lesson plan:

1. Write an entry on your blog. Call it my reading of…..(name of book)
2. Make a table and in the left hand column write 4 different paragraphs from the book from each of the following topics: Theme, setting, plot and character development.
3. In the right hand column write why you chose that particular paragraph and its significance in the book
4. End the blog post by writing a small summary of your impression of the book! Make it out as a review and post it on Amazon! Would you recommend this book to others? Link to the review on your blog.
5. Use this rubric to self-assess and grade your performance RUBRIC FOR JOURNAL