Schools of the Future

The ISTE experience has become one of the highlights of my personal professional development.  I enjoy meeting people from around the world, and visiting with them about effective classroom instructional practices.   I had the blessing of helping in the Digital Storytelling Network Playground, and presenting a poster session about Makerspaces.  In a time span of just thirty minutes, I could visit with educators from multiple countries and ten or more states.  My co-presenter had the blessing of meeting a teacher from New Zealand who Periscoped her class about the Bloxels kit we had on display during our poster session.

My top takeaways from ISTE 2016:

1.  It's time to change the culture of schools.  We have been working in a model that prepares students for the 1950s.  Jobs of the future require creativity, imagination, and experience.  Our education system needs to catch up, then prepare to lead the way.

2.  As educators, we need to take a bigger part in preparing students to work in STEM related fields, by providing students opportunities to create, iterate, problem solve, code, and think critically.  I visited with a COO of a tech company, and he indicated they had engineers that were high school dropouts and engineers that had their PhD from Yale.  It didn't matter how employees knew what they knew, as long as they knew it.  When their company interviewed potential applicants, they asked prospective employees to SHOW them what they knew, not tell them.  Applicants brought in projects they had been working on to demonstrate their expertise.

3.  Encourage your students to imagine future possibilities. Don't limit them to things that seem realistic.  Science Fiction movies and books?  Those technologies are being developed in the labs of today.

4.  Classrooms must become labs for social change.  We need to defy politics as usual, and teach students to develop the quality of their relationships.  Empathy is the core for solving problems.

5.  Inequality is engineered.  Think it's better for the present? Better for whom?  Carefully consider whose version of the good life is being promoted.  Who are we leaving out?  Look at it from as many perspectives as possible, and continue to reconsider your thinking as you encounter new information.

6.  "The battle over real power tomorrow begins with who gets to dream today."  ALL students need to be a part of innovation.  ALL voices need a role in creating our collective future.

7.  If we can hack tech, we can hack the underlying codes of social society.  Guide students in working together to change the operating structure of society.  Talk about the current social code, then get busy rewriting it.  Just because something has always been done a certain way, doesn't make it right.

8.  Have students tell you their questions, not just their answers.  Questions are more important than answers.  Q > A.

9.  Educators are cultural workers.  Do your instructional practices change the story or keep it the same for your students? Are you empowering them or stifling them?  Correct the micro-inequalities or instances of unconscious bias in your school. Treat everyone with respect.

10.  Tech can become the #plottwist that reaches a struggling student.  Each child deserves a better story.  Search for apps, extensions, websites, and tech tools that can help rewrite a child's story.

11.  Make it real - real tools, real problems, real science.  Use project based learning, STEM/STEAM challenges, flipped lessons, and flexible classrooms.  Connect with the community, mentors, and world.

12.  It's not a question of are you good or bad at it, but are you willing to learn?  It's how you respond to failure that defines who you are as a person, not the successes you have.

Work hard.
Create bravely.
Keep wonder alive.
Stay humble.

ISTE

One of our Makerspace sessions this month is a poster session at ISTE in Denver.  I attended ISTE for the first time last summer with an eLearning team from my school district.  Of all the professional development opportunities I have experienced in my twenty year career, ISTE has had the biggest impact.  Twenty thousand people convened in Philadelphia in June of 2015 to learn more about technology in education, and I was fortunate to be one of them.  

The ISTE format is the ultimate "Design Your Own PD" experience.  You can mix and match from a variety of formats to best meet your learning needs: lectures, panels, research papers, snapshots, forums, interactive lectures, poster sessions, learning academies, playgrounds, and workshops.  And, you choose the content that is most applicable to you.  

I had the best time at the playgrounds (STEM, Maker, Digital Storytelling, Creativity, Mobile Learning, Games and Virtual Environments, Ed Tech Coaches, and InnovativeEducation), where you could listen to short "how to" presentations, then try the tech out yourself.  I gleaned lots of information from visiting with presenters at the posters sessions, where you can sweep through the room and gather perspectives from across the country on a featured topic.  

One of my most memorable sessions was a littleBits interactive workshop, where I worked with a team of seven to complete a challenge.  We grouped ourselves together randomly, and my small group represented educators from three countries and four states.  It was exciting to be part of a team gathered for just thirty minutes, that represented seven different grade levels/subject areas, and had such global diversity.  We talked about what education looked like in our part of the world, and how we could integrate littleBits into our specific learning environments.

I am excited/scared/nervous/anxious about presenting next week.  I love that we will be part of the Makerspace Poster Session environment.  I will learn so much from the other presenters in the session who share my passion for maker environments.  I will learn so much from those walking through to visit with us about how the Makerspace concept works in our setting.  And, that will just comprise two hours of a four day conference.  So much learning!