Educational Technology and Cognitive Development, tech as a literacy tool, project based learning mindsets and methods.
Frank Banker is author, news producer, former teacher, and present teacher trainer. In addition to the mass of open source materials he produces, and his political activism in support of Media Literacy in schools, he wrote a book called Media Literacy in the K-12 Classroom. In this session, recorded in December of 2019 he promotes media literacy in schools and in society at large.
Serbest Salih created Sirkhane Darkroom, a mobile darkroom that provides workshops for children in the border are between Turkey and Syria. His project received global media attention after the publishing of the book, I Saw the Air Fly, a collection of children's photographs. Serbest's mission is unique in that he was once a child seeking refuge across the same border. His goal, through the slowness of film photographic processing, if for children to construct meaning of their experiences and their world.
Josh Burker runs the Maker Space at New York City's Marymount School. Here he makes the case for why he teaches with Turtle Art across all grade levels and walks through the kinds of projects his students engage in. Most importantly he discusses the kind of learning happening when students make as a community.
Dr. Tal Slemrod has been collecting data on what students and teachers prefer in regards to different forms of remote learning. Now, during Omicron spikes where the narratives are emotionally charged and Reality is quickly constructed according to cognitive bias, Dr. Slemrod reminds us of how data can counter policy loaded with politics. A great listen for anyone affected by the school closures of late.
School board meetings have become politicized, teacher unions and mayors embattled, and teacher have been called unprintable names. But what happens when it is the students who decide to fix what they perceive to be a dangerous environment. Ayleen and Ximena organized a district wide petition for students to strike by not showing up to school if demands for a safer environment are not met. Student agency and advocacy in Oakland, California.
John Thill explains cycles of planning for systems and phases through the Covid_19 period, the challenges of balancing ongoing research, anecdotal evidence, and local, stated, and national politics. John details innovations such as door step book delivery, online programming, and becoming what is needed during the pandemic.
Hugh Gash calls educators to encompass the mystical experience in teacher reflection, an acceptance that much of how learning happens cannot be known, and in that acceptance lies hidden epiphanies. Gash also discusses "Radical Constructivism" including circularity, social, and embodied experience in learning. Gash's concepts are refreshing to an increasingly edu-corporate approach to learning design.
Before we all were participating in the Covid_19 pandemic social experiment of living like astronauts, Arnab Chakravarty had already embarked on his own journey into his own circadian rhythms. His ITP (Interactive Telecommunications Program) thesis was the culmination of months living "off the clock". In this session Arnab delves into moving away from a monochronic mindset.
Dr. Scott McLeod of Dangerously Irrelevant has been interviewing educators from around the world during Covid_19 crisis, and blogging about the crisis in school leadership during the pandemic political plague in the U.S. Here he discusses openness to teaching and learning innovation and the plan to continue learning online until school reopenings.
Dr. Jenae Cohn discusses multimodal communication, taking the students' pulse, broadening bandwidths, call and response content creation, strategizing synchronous and asynchronous time, onboarding the tech stack, online course design, and the new ethics around tech and student privacy. An amazing discussion bridging the current hybrid learning design challenges from K-12 to higher education.
Meredith Dodd of the University of Chicago Dewey Lab School talks about the mindfulness of tool within a Reggio Emilia environment applied to our hybrid digital and physical world. While we set out to discuss SeeSaw, Zoom, and mobile devices with early childhood, we quickly wander into what the digital world offers in deepening metacognition and working cooperatively with others.
Andrew Quitmeyer lives in Gamboa, Panama running DinaLab, a center for Digital Naturalism. He works to change the way researchers interact with their data collecting by moving the lab to the floor of the rainforest. The implications of his ideas go way beyond scientific study, it seems similar to Francisco Varela's "Embodied Cognition" only with Arduinos, LED's, and laser cutters. Confused? Good, that is a good state of mind to begin this podcast.
John Fallon and Pual Darvasi discuss alternate reality gaming in the classroom. In their breakdown of "Blind Protocol" they discuss how teaching English Language class turns into an exercise in holistic literacy where knowledge becomes, in the Deweyesque sense, actionable upon the context of the immediate environment. Fallon and Darvasi are gaming pioneers who, impatient with the slow rate of change in education, create a way to mix physical and digital sensory reality with that of mental representation.
Wiktor Przybylski and Jakub Kowalik run Hackerspace Krakow and here they discuss the freedoms of learning in a Hackerspace compared to work and school environments.
M. H. Rahmani explains the prolonged space of problem defining in the process of making. His thesis project, reFrame, serves as an example of making as a long process for investigating scientific, psychological, philosophical inquiry. John Dewey called for "Art as Science". This talk breaks down interdisciplinary "technologies".
Sylvia Martinez discusses the need for teacher time and continued development of theory of knowledge, the updated Invent to Learn 2019 edition, and the upcoming Constructing Modern Knowledge make space she and Gary Stager host every summer.
Dr. Robert Sommer, author of Personal Space, the Behavioral Basis of Design discusses his seminal work. Dr. Sommer elaborates on learning spaces and the multitude of perspectives with a single learning space.
Dr. Stephanie Cox Suarez discusses her experiences with documentation with the Project Zero Making Learning Visible project and her work with the Reggio Emilia approach. Here she touches on themes of the importance of documenting group learning, using repeated viewing of documentation, and stresses not the capture of the learning artifact but the unpacking. Learningeducationlearningdesigndocumentationpodcastlearningspaces
Yoon Jeon Kim, research scientist from MIT Playful Journey Lab joins Journeys in Podcasting to discuss her work with Playful Assessments, methods for keeping formative assessment a co-construction between teachers and students.
Journeys in Podcasting continues the theme of "Hacking Active Learning Spaces" by inviting Apple Distinguished Educator and author Monica Burns to discuss the potentials of augmented reality in the classroom. (from a 2016 podcast session) *audio glitches, recorded on Google Hangouts
Angela Stockman, author of Make Writing, Hacking the Writer's Workshop, and Hacking School Culture, discusses her experience mixing writer's workshop with maker centered learning. Angela talks about her visit to Reggio Emilia and the maker approach to early childhood. Note: internet connections were a challenge, the audio clarity is limited, but the ideas discusses are incredible. Music: the mini loop remix is from Snail Mail "Pristine".
Epunk of C-base, the mothership of hacker spaces dedicates a part of his afternoon to discuss the GDPR and data privacy issues, crowdsourced environmental pollution monitoring projects, and open source education outreach projects. Epunk explains the philosophy of the mothership, how hacker spaces are continuing a century old tradition of universities in keeping information free for all. This is a great introduction to the future of alternative learning spaces.
Rachel Fink is the co-founder of The Journey: Early Childhood Center in Tel Aviv, Israel. Here she explains the JECC's origins, the politics of "childhood", collective construction, Hebrew as a context for learning, tools of construction and wonder, documentation as a breathing organism, and the "signs" within learning environments.
Kay Stokes, Dan Pink, Stephanie Cerda, Mike Pennington, Austin Levinson, Juan Daza, Hadley Ferguson, and Noam Chomsky give commentary on the what drive teacher autonomy, purpose, and mastery in EdCamps. Members of Journeys in Podcasting host their own EdCamp and reflect on the experience.
CNG fourth graders remake The Fly. Before ISTE2015, HackEd collected voices on gamification - Michael Matera, Chris Aviles, Kevin Werbach, Marianne Malstrom, and Steve Isaacs. Jane McGonigal explains how games can make our lives better and James Paul Gee explains how game design will help us reform education in the redesign of learning environment.
The modern secondary orality is about engaging with text, remixing, co-creating mashups, sharing text across time and space synchronously and asynchronously, making thinking not just readable but visible, fusing text into transmedia events. Is this a return to a pre-industrialized polychronic communicative form, or a new era of literacy, a post-Gutenberg parenthesis? We talk to Tracy Clark, Silvia Tolisano, Lee Ann Tysseling, Thomas Pettitt, Amy Burvall, and have performance guests, Frank Reichlin, and CNG students.
Non-linguistic expression of content with models of the inner ear. Storyboards, movie design, need to know, student driven inquiry. Roman gods with simulations of archetype worshipers. Simulation design for learning space. Minecraft, Matt Ritchards, The Mind Lab, and the end of classroom walls.
James Hannam @thelearnmaker discusses iPads, school culture, and being an Apple Distinguished Educator Trainer. Post-graduate researchers and doctoral candidates, Ya-Huei Lu and Elisha Ding, walk us through multiple tech integration research projects and offer tips on best practices for documentation of integration within a school.
In House we discuss three case studies integrating iPads to record private speech as students approach poetry from multiple perspectives, a simulation into the human body, and student made movies in a poetry film festival. Beyond we talk to Daniel Kemp, app designer of Book Creator, and Brian Yearling, Tech Integration Coordinator in charge of a one to one program involving 14,000 students. (continued in Part 2)
Student critiques, prototype loops, feedback sessions... featuring our in house study with middle school teacher Caitline Kingsley's classroom where students use peer feedback forms and Google Docs to facilitate online and face to face collaboration. Dr. Ron Berger of Expeditionary Learning challenges us to contemplate the importance of feedback, rigor, products of excellence, and celebrations. Dr. Lisa Palmieri of the Ellis School explains some of the incredible work being done through Active Learning, Design Thinking, Maker Space, and space as collaborative tool.
Rachel Kreibich explains her experiences innovating with the SOLE project (student organized learning environments). Her inspiration was Sugata Mitra's research on The Hole in the Wall project. John Larmer of the Buck Institute explains how inquiry works within a project based model. Paul Curtis of New Tech Network explains the reasons for their success in developing project based learning schools.
In house we study a series of Socratic Circles from a project with Lynsey Tveit and Jessica Hertz and compare other methods and practices such as Circle of Knowledge and The Unquiet Librarian's experiences with Twitter backchannels during Socratic Circles. We interview Dr. Aaron Kuntz from the University of Alabama about his participation in the Disruptive Dialogue Project and the role of critical discussion in literacy development. Finally our fourth graders discuss pros and cons of Socratic Circles with author James Sturtevant's seniors.
Colegio Nueva Granada Math department walks us through their project on student created tutorials. iPad App Explain Everything creator Reshan Richards interviews with us discussing the design and intent of the app and its potential for cognitive development.
Journeys in Podcasting in a project designed by Natalia Leon (third grade teacher), Diego Lopez (technology integrator), and Chris Davis (technology innovation project coordinator). Podcasts center around an in house study of a teaching mindset or method present on our campus at Colegio Nueva Granada, and then researched beyond through discussions with experts in the topic. These audio casts are taken from screencasts and videocasts which can be found on our Google Community or Facebook Page, Journeys in Podcasting. Readings through our Flipboard (Journeys in Podcasting) and additional comment can also be found there. We are continuously designing casts for new topics and invite you to take part, either by interviewing with us on a theme, or through comments on our Facebook Page or Google Community. In our first Podcast of the year, Teachers and Coaches at CNG Elementary research within their school walls and then extend the inquiry beyond after a one month pilot of #steelcase equipment from #EZGO They critique collaborative spaces and collaborative tools - how the tools change the way students and teachers plan and collaborate. Reviewing Node Chairs, Mediascapes, #nearpod , #explaineverything , #GoogleClassroom , and #VideoNotes .