The way I see things, in the school of the future there will either be a building where everyone meets to engage in learning, or there won’t be. Let’s look at both possible scenarios.

Scenario 1: A building.

A far less radical scenario than the one to follow, let’s imagine for a moment that the school of the future is still actually a school. Meaning a physical structure of some kind where students meet at the same time to engage in learning. Now, just because the students all meet in a building, does not necessarily mean that instructors need to be in that building with them. To begin with I will use the school building that I work in as a frame of reference and comparison. The building that I work in was built in the 1950s, and all of the technologies that exist in the building had to be retrofit. This has lead to some less than desireable situations. For one thing, our servers are housed in a tiny closet behind the cafeteria. When the servers were initially installed there was no cooling, and without any windows the tiny room was quite balmy. To list all of these instances would simply take too long and be a bore, so what have I learned. The school of the future needs to be built from scratch with a purpose in mind. I think that the process we apply when writing lesson plans needs to be applied when schools are constructed, namely, what are the desired outcomes, how will we reach them, how will we asses whether or not they have been reached?

Let’s get the technical stuff out of the way. I believe that the school of the future needs a scalable LAN, that should be divided into sections around the building so that if a part of the building experiences problems, those problems are localized. Data lines throughout the building, and out to the world should be fiber optic with gigabit terminations. There. Basically you want data flying around as fast as possible, leaving room for whatever future applications might come along.

That said, what should the building look like? How should the rooms be laid out, how large should they be, what shape should they be, what color? Should there be chalkboards in the front, Smartboards, or nothing at all? What if all of the rooms were round and there were only padded chairs, and each student was given one of those laptop tables with the squishy material underneath so they could work on their school issued laptop. What do you think? You have a blank slate, and a blank check, how would you design this building?

Scenario 2: No building.

This scenario is harder to predict, but almost as likely I feel. As state and local governments tighten their belts and search frantically for ways to cut costs, having students attend classes online begins to become appealing. I have already been asked to look into the plausibility of this issue by my administration and my school is far from the school of the future. So how would this work? Would kids just logon in their jammies and do coursework on their own time asynchronously and never meet their classmates or instructors in person? Would they use virtual meeting technologies like Skype and Elluminate to attend classes at the same time? Would there even be an instructor? Look into your own crystal balls. Is this scenario too radical, or more than likely?

Is there a scenario I am over looking? What do you think the school of the future will look like?

After generating a little interest in this series and a some scorn, I need to answer one question for myself before I continue this fantasy. That question is, why waste your time daydreaming about the future when the present state of education is in such disarray? The inquiry is a fair one to be leveled, and I answer in this way. The average, hardworking classroom teacher knows that the emperor has no clothes, but is either two frightened, powerless or disenfranchised to take any action. I know this from experience. The few colleagues who cared about the issue would come into my room after the students had left and plead with me, asking me if I was as frustrated as they were and why I wasn’t doing anything about it. I would always reply that the only thing any of us could control was what happened within the four walls of your classroom between the bells and that any energy spend outside of that was wasted. I still feel that way to a degree, and believe that this is always what classroom teachers should spend the most of their energy on. But now that I have made so many connections with like minded educators from all over the country and the world, I feel like it might not be such a stretch to believe that my sphere of influence could extend beyond the four walls of my classroom. Maybe if enough people read my ideas, or share my ideas, eventually someone with power will hear them, or ideas like them, and actual change will happen. So thank you for indulging me. It is precisely this ‘daydreaming’ that will keep us all sane. Now on to the next post in the series.

I am taking certain things for granted even discussing funding when it comes to the school of the future. Mainly, that education will continue to be mandated by the federal government. I certainly hope that as a society we continue to value education and require it of all our citizens, but when thinking of the future maybe this won’t be the case. So let’s just say that in terms of mandated education that things remain the same, well that is not the only thing that has the possibility of altering the way education is funded. If the school of the future is not held in a central location that will change the need for funding, and if location is changed then the teacher to student ratio will certainly change. But those are discussions for later in the series.

The way I look at it, there are really only two main ways to fund education: either you pay for it, or your government does. If the objective of education is equity then we really can’t even consider the former option, right? Or can we? Nope, I don’t think that we can. While being forced to pay for your own education might yield short term results such as students who have more of a stake in their own education, the long term results of that scenario are a nightmare for society at large. So if we discard paying for your own education as a means to further financially stratify our society, what we have left is public funding. Any one of us working in public education in America knows that the way public school is funded doesn’t work. The property tax as inequitable as paying for education yourself. Consider the school that I work for. The major property owner in my school district is the State University of New York (SUNY), because they are a state institution they pay no tax. The second largest land owners in the district are family farmers who own a lot of property. Anyone who has any experience with family farms knows that just because they own a great deal of land doesn’t mean they are growing wealthy on all of that land. So my district is left with a very small tax base, which is filled in by…wait for it…state aid. When state aid goes up, property taxes go up even more, and negative sentiment for the educational system increases.

Why couldn’t the school of the future be funded by a flat tax? Or an income tax. It isn’t perfect, but I think it is more fair. At least people and districts would no what to expect in terms of their responsibilities. What do you think? How should the school of the future be funded?

My PLN and I spend a great deal of time talking about the future. We often bandy about phrases like 21st Century Skills, Digital Citizenship, Digital Native and others. We also spend a great deal of time bemoaning the current (undeniably broken) state of things in the educational system. After many conversations I started thinking, ‘what does this magical alternative’ look like, how does it work? So I would like to embark upon an exploration of this very topic with the few readers I have. I would like to break the conversation into pieces, since the traditional system is my only real frame of reference, that is where I will begin, although it is quite likely at the end of this discussion that things will look quite different.

Here are the systems within the system I would like to explore. Each one will have its own blog post:

• Funding — how is the school of the future paid for?
• Infrastructure — what does the school of the future look like, inside and out? Does the school of the future even have a physical location?
• Administration — what is the administrative hierarchy of the school. Is it even a top down system?
• Teachers — what do the teachers in this school look like, what can they do? What do they believe? How much are they paid?
• Curriculum — who creates it? What’s in it?
• Students — how do students interact with this school?

Is there anything I am missing in this exploration? Would any of you be willing to be a guest blogger on any of these sub-systems?

OK, because of some helpful suggestions I will be adding a couple of subjects to the exploration. The first will be assessment, which I will separate from curriculum. Secondly, I would like to examine exit outcomes for students (what do they need to know before they leave the school, and why).

This looked fun at first!

A number of posts ago, I felt compelled to defend Google’s (then) newest tool against a barrage of what I deemed to be hasty criticism. Feel free to refer to that post for some context if you wish. The crux of my argument was that because we were teachers, we were used to just making things work and that we had already developed solutions to the things that Google Wave was supposed to solve. Well, some time has passed since I wrote that post and I have actually had the chance to work with, or attempt to work with the Wave. Much to my dismay I find myself doing the exact same thing that I wrote about in the last post, developing work-arounds to make Wave work the way that I said it was going to in the two hour introduction video. Let me give you an example. Recently I have been trying to collaborate on a project with a couple of colleagues from the PLN. All of us are in different time zones, and I wanted to insert a calendar into the Wave so that we could come up with common planning time that we could all be available. This should be simple right, Google also has a great calendar program that we all use, these two software programs come from the same family tree, I should just be able to embed a calendar into the Wave. I mean I can embed a calendar into any website with just a simple snippit of code, this should be easy, right…WRONG! Google does not make a gadget for the Wave that embeds Calendar, and the third party ones I tried not only did not work, but were laden with ads. So what do I end up doing? Creating a Google Calendar and sharing it, just as I would have done before the Wave even existed. How has the Wave helped me in this circumstance? There are a number of other examples of this exact experience, including the work-around for using Google Docs in a Wave, which essentially involves inserting an iframe into the blip and embedding the Doc in that. A solution, by the way that is just essentially sharing the Doc the traditional way but on another website.

I wouldn’t bring this up now, but Google just released the new, new thing this week, while Wave is essentially the exact same tool it was when it was first released. Oh, wait I forgot, now you can make public Wave’s read only. I was hoping after Google’s acquisition of Etherpad that there would be an influx of new features, but that was a while ago and it hasn’t materialized. The main reason that I am griping about this is because I believe that Wave is a tool with enormous potential for helping people collaborate and get some work done. I know that Google wants to compete with Facebook with Buzz, but the bottom line is that Facebook is so entrenched in society and commerce at this point that if they changed there logo to a baby punching a puppy, people would shrug there shoulders, create a group denouncing the new logo and continue to recruit people for their mafia families. So Google please, continue to develop great and free tools that all educators can use, forget about social networking, and fix Wave!

Its fourth period, about 10:45 in the morning. I have been at school for about three and a half hours and taught three classes. I ease into my desk chair as the last of my students file out of the room and into the hallway, with a mind for being as productive as possible in the 40 minutes I have without students. I no sooner uncap my trusty pen to begin marking, when my email alert chimes and I begin to read it. As I begin to read the email that has come in while I was teaching, Tweetdeck conveniently alerts me to a new batch of tweets from the people I follow. It turns out that there are some really interesting links in those tweets, which of course I click.

You get the idea. Soon, the plans that I had for the period have gone by the wayside and students are once again pouring into the room.

Certainly the positive and detrimental effects of multi-tasking have been discussed, and there is no doubt that in this case my productivity has been diminished. But today I made an observation about myself that I found alarming: its not just that I can’t just do one thing at a time any more, I can’t even just think of one thing at a time any more. Lately I have been catching myself checking email or Twitter while I am playing with my two year old son. I frequently will have multiple applications running on my laptop while I am watching the television. What’s worse is that even if I am not actually doing something else, I am thinking of doing something else. This issue reached a tipping point for me today when I caught my mind wandering to a future presentation while a student was delivering a speech in my class.

What happened to the quiet mind?

Something has changed in my mind, and I would be willing to bet that this is happening to others. I was once able to focus on a novel deeply enough to become completely immersed in it for hours. I have a distinct memory of reading Thomas Harris’ Hannibal in eighteen hours, stopping only for emergencies. Now I feel anxious after thirty minutes, wondering if there is something else that I should be doing, or my mind wanders to a blog post or website that I have recently seen. What does this have to do with education you might ask? Well, I am 34 years old. The Internet was not a truly viable thing until I was a sophomore in college, and this has happened to my mind. My students have never experienced a world without it, will they ever know a quiet mind? But maybe because this is all they know they don’t miss it like I do. How can this knowledge affect my teaching? Are there certain techniques that I can use and that I can teach my students to help with focus? Or perhaps it is me that needs to learn to cope with a mind filled with storms, and learn to effectively multi-task.

There are some software solutions out there to help you to concentrate on single tasks, here are a few highlights. All of these programs are for the Mac, sorry Windows readers.

• WriteRoom ($24.95): WriteRoom is a word processor that blacks out everything else on your computer screen. More than that, it only types. It won’t add borders or images, it is minimalist in the best way possible.
• Think (free): Think is similiar to WriteRoom in the sense that it blacks out what you are not working on, but it is not quite so single minded. While it is running, Think will highlight your current application but other applications are still allowed to intrude. Also, unlike WriteRoom it does not eliminate distractions that occur within the application.
• Concentrate ($29.00): Perhaps the most intense software of the bunch, Concentrate will force you to concentrate by setting time limits, and blocking distractions (set by you). You may also launch applications or webpages from the software if you need them to accomplish a particular task.

Although these programs offer excellent support, the essential question still remains: will any of these things quiet my mind?

In this golden age of global communication and collaboration I sometimes forget that I teach in a very small district (except of course during gloomy budget meetings), with really great people. On Friday I did something that I have been meaning to do for a long time, but have continued to put off for one reason or another, I attended a class right in my own building. During my planning period I asked if I could sit in on a class that my neighbor, Mr. Sherwood was teaching about economics. Mr. Sherwood was very hospitable and enthusiastic about me sitting in and immediately the students took notice of my presence. It was great for me to see different content and teaching styles. This experience was so positive that I plan to attend at least on class per week if my fellow teachers will allow me to. I will even do the coursework when I can. Maybe I will learn even more than I intended to.

Here are the benefits as I see them:

• You get to see what other teachers are teaching, and how they are teaching it.
• You get to build closer relationships with your colleagues.
• You can help your colleagues by offering possible technologies they could integrate.
• You model lifelong learning for students.

Here are some possible pratfalls to avoid:

• Don’t over participate. After all the students are there for a grade. Contribute to the lesson when it is appropriate.
• Be careful about offering too much advice to colleagues. Here is where you are going to have to feel the situation out. The real purpose here is to build better relationships with your fellow teachers, not to make them do it your way.

Be sure to thank whoever it was that let you participate, and then follow up with them at another time, and then don’t look now but you are talking about pedagogy. So I challenge each of you to try to do the same. If you have already done this, or if you plan to please share your experiences.

Almost enough for that 1:1 project

I often bemoan, if not openly criticize the seeming slowness with which administrators are leading (or not leading) the charge to transform our schools. From my perspective as a teacher, they are an easy target, having voluntarily placed themselves squarely in the bull’s-eye after all. But just the other day I had a conversation with my superintendent that gave me pause. My superintendent has been holding small, informational meetings outlining the status of our district within the current New York State budget crisis. He explains how New York has filled budget holes with federal funding that will expire in another year, and that when that funding is gone our district will have nearly a half a million dollar hole of their own to fill. He continues to outline the choices the district (he) will have to make if the governor follows through on his threat to withhold promised funds for the spring. These choices include whether or not we can afford to have any spring athletics at our school, and whether it would be better to cut two assistants back to half time positions, or to cut one completely. In a district of this size these are people we know, who’s kids are friends with our kids.

When the meeting concludes I hang back for a moment as I usually do to chat about the status of technology in the district. He asks me how things are going and about the progress of a couple of projects that are going on. As I am about to leave I say half jokingly: “Is this a bad time to bring up my 1:1 laptop program idea?” He grins and I follow up with: “What is your opinion about these programs?” He says in my aha moment of the day: “I haven’t.” Then he points back to the pie chart projected on the screen, that spells a possible doom despite its pastel colors.

It was only later upon reflection that I realized the gravity of that instant. How can we expect our administrators to be thinking about whether or not our students are learning 21st century skills when they are trying to figure out how to pay for heat? My Superintendent used to be a teacher, and from the little I know a good one. I know that he would rather be talking about these intellectual ideas with me but he just can’t when the futures of people we know hang so precariously on every decision he makes. Until the day that public schools are funded in a more equitable way situations like this one will continue to exist. Administrators, especially in small schools will be too preoccupied with counting beans to look much beyond the following year. So consider giving your administrators some slack. I know I’m going to.

What are the other two kids doing?

Summer break has ended; you are feeling refreshed and renewed, ready to tackle the New Year and all of its new challenges. You enter your room after your morning meeting to discover an interactive whiteboard (IWB) hung neatly in the front of the room where your white board used to be. The district is involved in a grant to integrate technology into the classroom.

Immediately your mind begins to whir: “think of all I can do with this.”

Move forward in time to January and the IWB hangs there, appearing slightly tarnished. Oh sure, you begin your lessons with it, posting critical thinking questions for the students to ponder, and indeed they gaze at it longingly each day. You show them interesting things like sweet websites, or educational games. You have kids come up to the IWB to make sentence corrections or review for a quiz, you circle important parts of maps, or cells under a microscope, students move pictures around like the parts of the puzzle.

But somewhere something is eating at you, and you realize that your class hasn’t really changed all that much.

Last night #edchat returned to Twitter with a warrior’s cry as hundreds of educators from all corners of the globe debated whether or not IWBs were interactive. The debate spanned the gamut, from the perpetual class war that exists in public schooling to the very nature of interactivity. Many of my colleagues argued passionately against me, and my stance that IWBs were not interactive.

Here is where I stand.

• IWBs are a great tool, but they are a traditional tool. Make no mistake; there is nothing revolutionary about what an IWB does for your instruction. IWB simply enforce the antiquated notions in education that have always existed, of one or few acting while the rest react.
• IWBs are a good tool to get student engagement (which we all know is fleeting), but they are not interactive! Even the best technology will only allow two points of contact upon the board at a time. What are the rest of the students doing while one or two interact with the IWB. This is where my #edchat colleagues argued that the other students were brainstorming or doing other activities while one or two were using the IWB, and I reply loudly – then what do you need the IWB for?
• In these times where public schools are crunched for money I would argue that an IWB is the last thing that districts should buy. Although they are something that is easy to take a picture of and put in the paper, they are not revolutionary. If anything they are holding us back.

The end of anything is always a good time for reflection, and the end of a year is the most obvious time for these considerations. Every year I set goals in my personal life, some I am able to meet, many I am not (mainly those associated with my expanding waist line). Curiously enough this is not a tradition that I have kept in my professional life. Perhaps this is because the school year does not change with the calendar year, maybe it is because we are asked to reflect formally in our annual performance review. But this year, in conjunction with my teaching twenaissance its time to shape up.

While I was writing this post Patrick Larkin (@bhsprincipal) posted a tweet that I found particularly apropos:

Resolution 1: I will renounce my passive-agressive behavior towards my administrative duties. I hate paperwork. I think that paperwork actually prevents men from doing the work that I love. But paperwork is another part of being a professional and my behavior is affecting the work of other people who probably hate paperwork too.

Plan of action: I will read every piece of paper that is delivered to my school mailbox and employ GTD principles right there on the spot, using tools to help me meet the deadlines I need to meet.

Resolution 2: To be more prompt with student evaluations. The excuse that English teachers are slow with everything is no longer a valid excuse. I need to find a feedback balance that will allow me to provide students with enough feedback to improve, but also allow me to get the work back to students in a timely manner.

Plan of action: I will no longer plan in school during my planning period. Instead I will use any time in school for grading and move my planning time to time at home. I will set goals in terms of quantity, and if I don’t meet them in school I will need to meet them at home (sorry family).

Resolution 3: To reflect more by blogging.

Plan of action: I will write at least one blog post per week. I will plan and draft all week and publish every Sunday.

It feels good to have a plan, much better than a resolution. I am counting on my PLN to keep me accountable, and I will keep you up to date on my progress.