Harriet Beecher Stowe House- Photo

Wikipedia requests the help of local Wikipedians to help improve the quality of the article about the Harriet Beecher Stowe House in Brunswick by providing a photo. Pablo Sanchez, a visitor to Brunswick, took this photo and shared it with the appropriate license but obscured part of the image with an inset of the cover of Uncle Tom's Cabin. I suspect that in this form it is not appropriate for Wikimedia Commons.



While Wikipedia rates this article's importance as low, I suspect that the interest in the Sesquicentennial of the Civil War will increase interest in it. Where can we get or develop the person power to create work like this? ITeam, Capstone Projects, ... ?

Capstone retreat and student participation

The Mt. Ararat H.S. Capstone Committee has planned an all-day retreat off-campus in order to focus on the development of resources necessary for the implementation. Unfortunately, the two student members of the committee expressed reservations about taking that much time away from school because of the challenge of keeping up with demanding course-work. The situation illustrates the challenge that students face in having to choose between two conflicting demands: during junior-year, when students are trying their hardest to establish exemplary records, conventional school work almost always wins. It is extremely difficult to introduce a new culture when the existing one is so firmly established and reinforced.

I wonder if some of the seniors that are doing pre-pilot projects might be available. They face some similar challenges but might be willing to come for part of the day and recruit a collaborator who would bring valuable perspectives, too.

InterroBang ?! - A network for student-centered learning?

We need infrastructure to support project- and challenge-based learning that we are doing in both MAMS ITeam and MTA Capstone. We have been exploring and doing action research using AppInventor to control NXT robotics as they roll out new features. We want to share our work with others who might be interested in it.

I learned about ?! (InterroBang: http://playinterrobang.com/) through a message that Jim Matthews posted on the ARISgames group (http://groups.google.com/group/arisgames). I investigated, created an account, selected a mission, created an entry based on current work, invited Ariel, one of our experienced ITeam members, to contribute and help evaluate the system. After we submitted our entry to the system, I wrote the following reflection on the wall of of my user page at InterroBang.

Stephen Spaeth [Note that this link will not take most users to the right page because you need to have an account to get access to this page.] Ariel joined our team and contributed to documenting the deed. She took the picture, wrote the caption, and added text to describe the continuing work we did today. She decided that we were ready to submit the mission and hit the button. Apparently, it takes the deed out of our hands and we no longer have access to the deed. I can understand the need to freeze it during the approval process but I'd still like to be able to see the preview. It is unnerving to loose control over our own creation.
about 18 hours ago

As more time elapses, it becomes clearer that providers of this service need to:

• Make the time-frame for approval process clearer
• Make it clear to users that they will loose access to their own creations
  
• Add the option to cross-post entries to other venues (e. g. to this blog for me) or at least the option to make the entry publicly accessible
  

Ariel thought that we should encourage ITeam members to use this service. I'm pretty sure that we don't want to do that until we resolve some of the outstanding issues.

Update: AppInventor developers and beta users are cranking out useful resources almost every day. For example, Liz Looney shared ShinyLegoNxt, a new source file to demonstrate the new NXT resources.

All for Good support

I added the All for Good widget to this blog and to my iGoogle page to support the Obama initiative for a summer-of-service. I wonder whether we can develop the capacity to serve MSAD 75 volunteer opportunities and have them rendered here and on the District's web site.

President Obama recognizes student intiative

The President speaks to congress
via Wikipedia

After President Obama's Inaugural Address, I spoke with iTeam members and wrote about the connections of our iTeam work to his messages. Last night, President Obama addressed a joint session of Congress and reinforced one of the ideas of the discussions with iTeam members. Identify things that need to be done and take initiative to do them or recruit others to help you do them. Here, he shares the story of a student who took the initiative to recruit the President's help:

And I think about Ty'Sheoma Bethea, the young girl from that school I visited in Dillon, South Carolina - a place where the ceilings leak, the paint peels off the walls, and they have to stop teaching six times a day because the train barrels by their classroom. She has been told that her school is hopeless, but the other day after class she went to the public library and typed up a letter to the people sitting in this room. She even asked her principal for the money to buy a stamp. The letter asks us for help, and says: "We are just students trying to become lawyers, doctors, congressmen like yourself and one day president, so we can make a change to not just the state of South Carolina but also the world. We are not quitters."

We are not quitters.

These words and these stories tell us something about the spirit of the people who sent us here. They tell us that even in the most trying times, amid the most difficult circumstances, there is a generosity, a resilience, a decency and a determination that perseveres; a willingness to take responsibility for our future and for posterity.

What will we do to identify needs and take the initiative to do them and recruit help from others that can assist?

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• President Obama invites us to help (scspaeth.blogspot.com)
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Half an Hour: Should All Learning Professionals be Blogging?

Colorado Communities for Justice and Peace via Wikipedia

Stephen Downes makes the case for one of the roles I model in the district:

Half an Hour: Should All Learning Professionals be Blogging?: "the difference represented in the shift from traditional classroom based learning and network learning. The idea of the latter is that learning occurs when the learner immerses him or herself in a community of pratice, learning by performing authentic tasks, learning by interacting with and becoming a member of the community.

But this only works if the members of the community share. It only works if they are prepared to make talking about what they are doing a part of doing what they are doing. As Arruda points out, there are good reasons why they should do this. But I would add, it's the only real way to effectively incorporate large numbers of new members into the practice. By doing and showing, practitioners can as effectively teach as teachers teach by telling (indeed, I would argue more effectively). And they can do it without having to establish a special infrastructure and institution."

How can we expand the practice? Downes identifies one of the barriers is people's perception of lack of time for an add-on. He identifies a solution- substitute more effective practice:

What needs to happen is that the normal note-taking that happens in the meeting - whether by an official recorder or by attendees (or, ideally, both) becomes the blog. The process of having the meeting is the process of creating the post. The result is that the creation of the blog post takes no extra time, and so both the group leader and other staff save a lot of time.

How will we change our practices? Terry Hanna and I experimented with this approach using the District's learning network in Elgg at the last Service-Learning Leadership Team meeting.

Tech support for community- and service-learning

Can we grow service like this?
by SCSpaeth via FlickrNancy Scola proposes an approach to a problem that the District Service-Learning Leadership Team has considered: Could a "Craigslist for Service" Actually Work? She considers several pros and cons for this strategy. She solicited Craig Newmark's opinion, too:

That's enough from me. Let's hear from an expert: Craiglist founder Craig Newmark. I asked him for his take:

Many people in the US want to do more to help other people, not just the new "civic generation" but people across all ages and background. I feel we need both top-down and bottom-up means of getting people together to do so. The bottom-up version would involve online tools which would get people together to spontaneously connect, possibly via existing social networking tools. We're all busy, but now and then we have free time, and a good grassroots, local tool would be great.

Nils Peterson supports Scola's idea:

Light-weight volunteer organizing can work

Nancy
You are on the right track.
Mid-way down this post are examples that are already underway or show promise.

http://www.nilspeterson.com/2008/11/10/implementing-obama%E2%80%99s-100-...

Further, our experience with these ideas at Washington State University, is that courses can be re-designed so that the learner-volunteer taps the resources of the class (faculty, peers, materials) to apply them into an authentic (and personally motivating) problem.

We discussed this issue at the last Service-Learning Leadership Team meeting and observed that Brunswick has made progress on developing the desired culture:

Mary recommended Brunswick High School's implementation of Community and Service-Learning and pointed to its web-based support: BHS Community Service. Barb noted that the Brunswick community has developed a culture around service so that students are looking for opportunities with support from the community.

But we also noted that the database needs updating.

Learning through service

Curriculum in and out of school via WikipediaNils Peterson writes about plans for expeditionary learning at the Palouse Prarie School in his post Implementing Obama's 100 Hours of Service Plan.

For example, a school could set a goal to harness the interests and expertise of the school’s community (students, staff, parents and alumni) to address real world problems encountered by communities both locally and globally. Its curriculum would be designed to collaborate with community members - institutional, local, or global – to identify a problem, explore solutions, develop a plan, and then take steps toward implementing that plan. Students would engage these challenges as service learning. The outcomes of their work would be readily documentable using ideas like Gary Brown’s Harvesting Gradebook. But more than just documenting the student work, the process would have transformative impacts on the educational institution also, far more profound than the Collegiate Learning Assessment (CLA) or the No Child Left Behind (NCLB) standardized testing.

MSAD 75 iTeams are using similar strategies but don't have the advantage of having the entire curriculum devoted to the approach. iTeam members seem to be engaged by the approach. Barb Swisher, a Middle School teacher, reported that Brunswick's community service program has become part of its school and community culture even though it is only a part of student experience.

Students serving and learning

I wrote about the Middle School iTeam serving their school district community:

They are helping staff in the Tech Department to get the Teamboard working properly with their machines and will help peers and teachers to learn how to use it when they find a solution to the challenge.

Zemanta used my writing and found the story linked below. It helps to answer the question that I posed earlier today, How can we help students connect their work with President Obama's invitation to serve in his Inaugural Address. The embedded video includes and inset video of the kind I have been exploring for our Sharing Our Learning Project.

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• Middle schoolers as citizen reporters

Obama invites us to help

President Obama invites us, iTeam members in MSAD 75, to join with him to help make stronger schools and communities:

Visit msnbc.com for Breaking News, World News, and News about the Economy

Our challenges may be new. The instruments with which we meet them may be new. But those values upon which our success depends -- honest and hard work, courage and fair play, tolerance and curiosity, loyalty and patriotism -- these things are old. These things are true. They have been the quiet force of progress throughout our history. What is demanded then is a return to these truths. What is required of us now is a new era of responsibility -- a recognition, on the part of every American, that we have duties to ourselves, our nation, and the world, duties that we do not grudgingly accept but rather seize gladly, firm in the knowledge that there is nothing so satisfying to the spirit, so defining of our character, than giving our all to a difficult task.

When he says "every American" he means middle school and high school students, too! Obviously he did not take the time to identify us by name but I'm sure he meant us. So, how will we respond? What will we do?

iTeams and Obama's Inaugural Address

When I listened to Obama's speech, I heard references throughout that connect to our work on iTeams. He invited all Americans to commit to serve. So, shortly after students finished hearing the speech, I asked them what they heard. They didn't connect what they heard with our efforts with iTeams until we held up a lens together. I really wanted to share selected clips.

After we finished our meeting, I looked for video of the speech. At MSNBC.com, I found more than I had anticipated. They provide a very useful tool that includes a transcript of speeches and keywords in the transcript. The transcript must be time-code referenced because the tool supports selection of text in the transcript and the tool generates the embed code for that portion of the video. Obama's speech has not yet been processed. See what it looks like for Clinton's Second Inaugural:

[2009-1-21: Removed the clip because we now have access to President Obama's Address.]

Powerful stuff! I tried to copy the transcript text in order to include it in this post but I could not copy the text.

President Obama Leads Service

The President Elect raises people's awareness of the need for service.

THOUSANDS JOIN OBAMAS FOR DAY OF SERVICE
It looks like Barack Obama’s national community service day was a big hit. Reports of thousands of volunteers are appearing in newspaper pages from New York to Philadelphia to San Francisco. Did you participate in your own community?

What can we do to make this a part of our work? We are serving. How can we share it?

A global essential question and our responses

Bob Herbert, an editorial writer for the NY Times, asked an essential question for the nation in his recent editorial "Where's the Big Idea?":

The essential question the candidates should be trying to answer — but that is not even being asked very often — is how to create good jobs in the 21st century. Thirty-seven million Americans are poor, and roughly 60 million others are near-poor. (These are people struggling to make it on incomes of $20,000 to $40,000 a year for a family of four.)

I like this way framing the issue because it reflects good principles of design. We use a similar approach in our efforts to improve learning and assessment based in part on the work of Wiggins and McTigue: Understanding by Design. The idea is simple- start with the goal in mind and plan backward to identify what is required to achieve that goal. Implementing that simple idea can be challenging but usually worth the effort.

Personally, I search for answers to this essential question through our efforts to find ways to use technology to support improving teaching and learning. Suzie Boss, an author of the recently published book Reinventing Problem-based Learning, asks, "What's missing?":

American teens are plenty confident that they can solve the world's most vexing problems with the help of technology, according to the latest Lemelson-MIT Invention Index. There's just one not-so-small catch: more than half of today's high school students feel unprepared for careers in technology and engineering.

What can we do to help teacher candidates help their future students and colleagues to answer these global essential questions? Suzie's answer includes more support for project-based learning. MSAD75's (Maine School Administrative District) district-wide commitment to expanding service-learning opportunities show how schools can engage in this work.

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Note: I tried to find a brief introduction to the ideas behind the term "essential questions" at Wikipedia but did not find an entry for it. I'd like to see a group of pre-service candidates create an article as an authentic performance of their developing understanding of this important idea.

My MLK Day On

Last week, I wrote about the movement to make today's Martin Luther King, Jr. Day "A day on, not a day off". I knew that I wanted to participate but at the time, I did not know how. On Saturday evening, I met Billy P. and I discovered my way to celebrate Dr. King's life of service. I didn't meet Billy in person, rather I met him as the lead in the documentary film "Billy the Kid". Jennifer Venditti, the film's director, and her colleagues are screening the film in selected locations and filming Q&A sessions that may become part of the final release on DVD. They played to sold-out shows for the hometown fans.

Toward the end of the film (trailer), Billy says,

“I’m not black, I’m not white, not foreign … just different in the mind. Different brains, that’s all. I walk alone like a lonely soul, …”

So, today I'm spending my day on learning from Billy, Jennifer Venditti, and our community about our different selves.

BILLY THE KID - Public Service Announcement

Add to My Profile

MLK Day: Make it a day on, not a day off.

Monday January 21, 2008 is the national celebration of Martin Luther King, Jr.'s life and work. UNE plans several activities in support of the celebration. I encourage our students to participate in those activities. Since I believe that learning and technology both play essential roles in helping us to move toward King's vision, I find irony in the university's choice to cancel classes on that day. I hope that students will choose to "make it a day on". The National Service Corporation cites the Helping youth to use technology project as an effective practice:

Technology access to youth in underserved areas has long been a concern for those seeking to bridge the digital divide. An organization in San Diego teaches "technoliteracy" so that youth can use media in ways that are meaningful to their lives. While youth express themselves by authoring online magazines and producing visual art for gallery exhibits, they are empowered and connected to global issues.

For my day on, I plan to go to the Technology Lab and work on building our capacity to sustain our efforts in service-learning.



Organizers of the MLK Tech Scholars project have a similar vision:

In Chicago''s West Town community, the NTRC will launch the Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Technology Scholars Program (MLK Tech Scholars) for students in grades 8 - 12. To bridge the "digital divide", this program will link 25 local students with area businesses, churches and organizations to increase awareness and lend their technology expertise in areas that include web site development, database creation, and word processing. Participating youth will attend an eight-week pre-service training that will refine their technology experience, and orient them to the significance of service-learning. After the eight weeks, each youth will complete a four-week, on-site technology project with a partner organization.

Michael W. Smith Calls on Americans to Serve on King Day 00:00:42
Musician Michael W. Smith calls on Americans to make the upcoming King Holiday a "day on and not a day off" by coming together to participate in volunteer projects that improve life in their communities. Smith is a member of the President's Council on Service and Civic Participation.