RJ Stangherlin

Keystone Technology Integrator and STAR Discovery Educator

This site is for Mrs. Stangherlin's classes at Salisbury High School.

MEGACONFERENCE, JR. 2007

Megaconference Jr. is just that: a twelve-hour videoconference “for and by students of the world.” Our Period 4 class collaborated with students from Lakeview High School in Battle Creek, MI in a joint service project presentation.  We “met” through an earlier videoconference with Gerda Weissman Klein.  Through MAGPIs coordinator, Heather Weiss, we made the connection to work together, showing the world our two projects to “help make the world a better place,” as Mrs. Klein had asked.  Our class made a wiki, Teens Helping Teens--In Different Scenes to help teens deal with the issues they face.  The class believed that often teens are reluctant to speak to adults, but they might reach out and search the Internet.  We wanted to be there to help. 

As luck of the weather would have it, once again we had only two days to practice for the big event.  But what a group they are.  Because Megaconference is a K-12 event, we decided to present Grades and Homework, since that is an issue all students experience.  With only two classes to practice, the team was fantastic.  You can view their archived presentation here.

Teaching in High Definition

They drove into the snowstorm, father and son, so that Dan Lebo could present at PETE&C in the Student Showcase on Tuesday.  Dan’s project was a German film he made with a team of students in Frau Clauser’s German 4 class. Recently, Dan began working with high definition, and that’s what he taught for 2 hours.  Active word: taught.  As always, he was engaging, intelligent, fascinating, and way over my head with technology knowledge.  So, I took a crash course in high definition filming.  Although the weather thinned the crowd, those who stayed were totally engaged, and almost everyone watched the entire video.  One student actually filmed Dan’s film. 

For me, an experience like this one is why I teach.  It’s about social networking one-to-one, but I am not discussing laptop initiatives.  It’s about face-to-face networking with some of the best people in the business..  Scott Kinney spoke to Dan about using his team’s Integrated Project on Lincoln as an example of digital storytelling.  Since the project was featured in the Discovery Education Resource Guide in the January 2007 issue, the Discovery group was familiar with the project.  Dan is sending Scott a DVD of the project, and the German video is already in Scott’s hands, ready for use in his next Digital Storytelling presentation.  Dan also got to meet Hall Davidson, who gave him some sound advice about a career in film making.  Does it get any better, networking students to their future. 

As the morning came to a close, I must admit I was counting the snowflakes, worried about getting home.  As luck would have it, Mr. Lebo grew up in Palmyra, exactly one town away from Hershey, so I followed him through back roads to my turn off for home [bypassing the 16-hour jam on I-78].  It was a wonderful two days, watching students at their best, actually making all the buzzwords of 21st century learning visible.  The power of Discovery: it was being inside of the story.

Being Inside of the Story

In Christian Long’s The Future of Learning Manifesto and Scott McLeod’s mashup, both state that when it comes to technology, it’s really “about being inside of the story.” The meaning, the interconnectedness, not the tool.  Or so I interpret.  Today’s keynote speaker, John Caruso, also spoke about being inside the story.  He said, “We are the stories we tell ourselves we are.” We define ourselves in many ways, and our stories, like what we buy, define us.  A story is really a mental connection, a mind’s search for meaning, driven by our contexts and our need for meaning.  Think of it this way.  I overhear a conversation.  He says, “I saw a deer in the woods today.” The other guy says, “It was an eight pointer.” I think, that guy’s a hunter.  You’re thinking, what does this have to do with a technology conference.  Very much, actually.

Tuesday I felt very much like I was inside the story.  Or at least close.  Students from last year’s IP Stock Market came to PETE&C to present in the Keystone Poster session.  They delivered, despite technical difficulties with the movies in their PowerPoint, and were interviewed [twice], They got to show and tell their stories, and it really wasn’t about the technology.  More about the learning curve of who they were then, who they are now, and who they will become, shaped by their search for meaning in their contexts.

The New Permanent Record

Nothing beats a DEN PETE&C Pre-Conference Day.  What else could draw 130 educators to Hershey for a full-day venue on a Sunday.  Our keynote speaker, Will Richardson, gave an encore of an earlier DEN webinar: A Web of Connections: Why the Read / Write Web Changes Everything.  His answer: reams and reams of digital paper that is writeable 24/7.  Long story short: students engage in global connectivism and social networking, making learning transparent and classrooms virtual.  But it was Richardson’s three questions that kept me engaged: how do teachers learn, how do teachers make their learning transparent, and who models transparent learning for your students?  I actually have answer for these questions, but that will come later.

Moving on, my first session, Director’s Cut, featured the irrepressible, ever-enlightening, and always entertaining Hall Davidson.  Using Adobe Premiere Elements and a green screen, he showed us some of the coolest cool tools for putting anyone inside a video with some clever special effects.  This session alone could motivate me for the rest of the year with endless ideas for engaging students in self-directed learning through film making.  And for those of you students who ask if you can trust anyone over thirty to get you where you need to go--well--Hall is one of my answers--he is the definitive poster adult to show you how.  Second session: Podcasting with Jannita Demian, my favorite west coast girlfriend.  Proving that learning can be fun and laughter is conducive to learning, Jannita took me to the next level of podcasting with her out-of-the-box ideas for podcasting in education.  Lunch and then session three with an all-time favorite presenter, Steve Dembo.  He’s an awesome blogger, which is actually how he got his job at Discovery: he created an online resume with his blog, teach42.  His session featured the 10 best FREE Web 2.0 sites.  Definitely worth the visit.  I use Steve to gauge my digital IQ; I knew and had used 9 of his sites, so I am improving my digital immigrant status for sure.  My favorite new find: picnik, online photo editing made fun and fast.  Session 4: back to Hall and Megamedia in Your Pocket.  Last year, Hall was the keynote for PETE&C, and he spoke with passion about the need to teach students with the tools they carry in their pockets.  This year, Hall did the best show-and-tell ever about the iPod video.  After this presentation, I knew that every teacher and students should have one.  Gigantic flash drive, movie player, photo album, PowerPoint player--I’m glad I made a wiki for this conference because the uses were infinite.  If anyone can invent new uses for an already cool tool, it’s Hall. 

When it comes to bookending a conference, no one does it better than Lance Rougeux.  Putting Steve Dembo as the closing keynote brought more than closure to the Discovery day; it made important connections.  Steve’s presentation, The New Permanent Record, carried an important message for STUDENTS.  His three points about internet use: NOTHING is private, EVERYONE can see EVERYTHING, and DELETE does NOT MEAN GONE.  There, I’ve said it.  Be careful what you post.  Steve said that through ethers, you can find residual traces of anything.  Then there are programs that can recover material deleted years ago.  Deleted does not mean gone.  It should be a mantra.  But more importantly, Steve stressed that teachers must teach online appropriate use of social networking tools.  Myspace could be your online resume, if constructed properly.  He also thought that all teachers should have a myspace account and their students should be their friends.  He noted that myspace is the generic like kleenex = tissues, so he is not a commercial for myspace.  I know that, because he has a facebook and he is my friend.  I have a facebook, and yes, some of my students are my friends.  I’d like more of my students to be my facebook friends.  Why?  Because they can only learn.  I get RSS feeds to my facebook from some of the best writers in the blogosphere.  As my friend, you access their wall posts, notes, social networks.  And that fact begins to answer the three questions Will asked as the keynote speaker this morning.  So does this blog [and my DEN blog and my postings on Salisbury21].  And my wiki. And my new website, which happens to be a blog.  Thanks to Randy Ziegenfuss and countless hours of his expertise, I finally have a website that reflects transparent teaching and learning.

So, how does your teacher learn?  If you click this link, then click “View in Google Earth,” you will find yet another answer to how I learn.  I’m on the map, and I am clickable.  I learn by collaborating with my students, commenting on your blogs and working on your wikis Through 4 videoconferences and Megaconference, Jr.  Podcasting with you.  Next question: How do you make your teaching transparent?  All of the above, and more.  By presenting at conferences with your students.  By teaching your students to be teachers.  By publishing and posting.  I really believe you lead by doing.  Next question: Who models for your students?  Loaded question, many answers.  Global connectivism models, and that is good and bad, which makes the answer loaded.  If the models are good, then students learn ethical and appropriate use.  If the models are bad, students learn that too.  Steve Dembo’s point that spoke to me big time was about blocking sites.  What does that teach students when wireless is everywhere--Starbucks, strip malls, everywhere.  He felt that if districts write policies, they should not be about restricting but enabling, about modeling what is positive rather than saying what may not be.  Our job is to mke students cognizant of what they do online, so they can take control of their new permanent record.  He makes so much sense, and I guess that’s why I respect him so much, read him every day, and trust him as someone over thirty [though not much over] to get me where I have to go for my future.  Next question...

Getting on the Map

Ever hear of a meme? I looked at this word and thought, a new technology: “me me.” Works for me.  A meme [rhymes with theme] is a unit of transferrable cultural information.  Old technology actually, derived from scientific investigation.  I just discovered it a week ago when Randy Ziegenfuss tagged me, so I could “get on the map.” You can too.  Lucy Gray made a meme with a twist: she used Google Earth [use headphones for Google Earth link] and her project is the fourth most popular outgoing link in the world.  So, do you want to get on the map?  Just follow the directions listed in this link.  If you click this link, then click “View in Google Earth,” you will see who’s on the map.  Post a comment to this blog when you “get on the map.”

Future of Learning Manifesto

Check out the Future of Learning Manifesto put together by Christian Long and posted by Randy Ziegenfuss on 1-07-07. 

Or you can download and ponder the PDF version put together by Scott McLeod.

I wonder what our students would think of this? You may add your thoughts by clicking on the Comment link at the end of the post.  How about you?
Posted by Randy Ziegenfuss in • Change • Teaching & Learning

Flat World

Just finished reviewing my blog notes from David Warlick’s Flat World, Flat Web, Flat Classrooms Webinar, and am still struck by the control issue that we as educators seem unable to relinquish if we intend to prepare our students for their unpredictable futures. Undeniably this statement does not pertain to all educators, just too many. We, and I include the emerging students teachers in this statement, are trained to be the disseminators of knowledge with our students as receivers--a very passive voice approach to knowledge. We lecture, they listen. Of course they have options to participate, but we are in control. We teach the way we learned, and because it was good for us, we assume it is good for them. We often are too busy to notice that the educational landscape has changed, and that we need to change with it. Our classrooms are far too often flat, while our students live in a round world. Take social networking, for example. Students understand, embrace, use, and pioneer social networking. They’re clickable; are we? What we need to consider is that we are no longer prepping our students for an agrarian, industrial, or informational job market. Globalism’s impact has changed our economy; should it not affect how we prepare our students to enter a changing world.

If Warlick is correct--and I believe he is--that we teach in an age of information saturation and instant access to facts, then our roles as educators (deliberately choosing educators v. teachers) needs revisiting. Will we not become managers of content, teaching our students to edit and evaluate. Should we not pursue authentic real-life learning with project-based experiences. Cannot students take control of their learning environment with structured choices. Why can’t we provide authentic assessments that show us what our student know, rather than what they do not know.

At a recent meeting, I mentioned my tenth grade students’ participation in an international videoconference. We were asked to create a memorable introduction for the keynote presenter, and memorable it was. Our subject was living history, a living hero. And the students loved the rush of preparing a multimedia introduction in way too short a time frame. They took control and went with the assignment, dividing into groups based on what they could do best: research, audio/video editing, script writing, recording. They selected their teams, and the lab was a buzz of on-task excitement.

Long story short: I was asked how this videoconference connected to curriculum. Having learned a long time ago to answer a question with a question, I asked them how it didn’t. What part of the PA Reading, Writing, Speaking, and Listening standards did we not address. For that matter, we certainly covered a slew of NETS benchmarks as well. Were we crossing curricula, working independently. Did we not have an authentic task with an audience of our international peers. Can you hear my smile right now....

And that, as I see it, is the real problem. Nothing wrong with being tied to curriculum; much wrong if we have not yet discovered different ways to deliver it, relevant ways for lifelong learning. Why are we reluctant to embrace emerging or out-there-in-your-face-been-there-done-it technology integration. This much I do know. Years ago when I jumped headlong into technology, I knew what I didn’t know about it, and that was significant. So I made a partnership with my students. I asked them if we could share what we know. I managed the content; my students taught me the technology applications. It’s just that easy. I asked them one day how would they design an assessment that could showcase what they learned. Could they design an authentic testing tool. You can guess the rest: it went digital.

In any good argument, with self or others, there’s that “ahaaa” moment we reach for, live for. My ahaaa--long, Southernesque “ahaaa,” where each letter becomes at least two more syllables--came when I realized who the real winners were-- --who could control their learning environment, make choices, present, and publish in three different places. Then, they were invited to collaborate with three high schools from the same videoconference to present at the Megaconference Jr. twelve-hour videoconference in February, 2007. Not bad for two class periods and two study halls.

Did You Know?

Definitely worth watching.

Karl Fisch’s Did You Know?

Karl Fisch’s What If

Karl Fisch’s 2020 Vision

Jennifer Dorman’s Adaptation [with permission of Karl Fisch] of Did You Know?

Definitely Worth Visiting.

The Fischbowl

A Web of Connections: Why the Read Write Web Changes Everything

Just finished an amazing webinar with Will Richardson on A Web of Connections: Why the Read Write Web Changes Everything.  Long story short: because the web is both read and write.  The write aspect of the web profoundly changes how we learn: in social networking communities.  Richardson’s thesis is simple: today’s students are digital natives who create their own learning environments where they make global connections.  What, as educators, Richardson says we need to come to terms with is the issue of control.  Students are engaged in connectivism: building and maintaining social networks where connections hold as much [or possibly more] relevance than content.  Digital natives build communities of independent learners, unlike the way most educational systems work: on dependence [of students’ learning to teachers’ knowledge].  Richardson suggests that whether we like it or not, the web has made learning transparent, and teachers need to move forward as connectors of information inside this educational mindset. 

Perhaps, for those of you who may not have participated in a webinar, I should give you a figurative screenshot.  Think of a webinar as a videoconference without the video.  What you see is a screen that the presenter controls [content] with audio via teleconferenciog.  But that’s only the beginning.  The sidebar discussion [imagine a chat room smaller screen insert] is often as exciting as the presentation, and just as lively.  Then picture many of the participants also Skyping [yet a second chat room, but separate from the webinar host].  Let’s count: webinar, sidebar, Skyping.  Add to that taking notes and blogging.  About this point you are losing your Digital Immigrant status.  And to this most students would add texting with cell phones, working on facebook, myspace, or fanfiction, and editing their wikispace.  Definitely Digital Natives.  This is our community.  This is how they learn, or would, if we let them. 

Richardson believes that within the next five years, the face of education will change exponentially.  We seem to have choices: move with it or be moved by it.  I think of our group as change agents, working collaboratively to provide the best possible education for our students.  With that in mind, here’s Will Richardson’s webinar wiki:

A Changing World

Some statistics.
*1 billion people on the Internet
*China will soon be the largest English speaking country in the world.
*China has more honors students than we have students.
*Name this country
*“None of the top 10 jobs that will exist in 2010 exist today.”—Richard Riley, (Former US Sec. of Ed.)
*57 million blogs, 1.7 million posts a day.
*We can all be community journalists.
*Millionaires in virtutal worlds.
*Mark Zuckerberg, the soon to be teenage billionaire
*The problem is not change...we’ve always had change. The problem is the speed of change, and that change is cultural now. Because of that it feels like our kids are leading the way with technology

Many more questions than answers.

The Web is Changing How We Learn

*Learning is not about acquiring knowledge as much as it is about building networks. (Articulated by George Siemens.)
*We are at times teachers and at times learners. Our roles shift with each interaction.
*My blog, Weblogg-ed is an example of network creation. It’s where my most powerful learning has taken place. Here are a couple of examples: “Dear Kids, You Don’t Have to Go to College” and “Owning the Teaching...and the Learning.”
*The power of being “clickable” is that teachers can find you. (Google search)
*My good fortune is that I have potential teachers visiting from around the world.
*Our kids are already creating their own networks. Fan Fiction is one site where “affinity groups” meet.
*And like it or not, MySpace is another example of kids creating their own networks.
*But so are student role models, (Meg Cabot)

*Millions and millions of people are participating in the new social networking services. (Wikipedia)
*But we can help our kids to start creating their own networks as well and work with people around the world. (Nata Village)
*Wikiville (John Bidder) is another example. And Skype is a tool that we can use to maintain our networks.

*And networking doesn’t just have to happen through text. (ClipBandits)
*We can also build networks in virtual worlds. (Second Life)

The Web is Changing our Assumptions About Knowledge, Information and Literacy

*It’s not as much about content anymore as much as it is about context. Knowledge and information used to be scarce...that’s what our was built upon
*But today, I can learn anything, anytime, anywhere providing I have access. Knowledge is no longer scarce. (MIT)

*And we tend to look at knowledge as hard or unchanging...but these days, knowledge is soft. It’s constantly changing. (Wikipedia)
*In this world, we cannot only seek information, but information seeks us. (Pageflakes)
*But in a world where anyone can create and publish information, how do we know what to trust? (Dove Beauty)

*How do we teach our students (and ourselves) to make sense of a much more complex literacy regarding who to trust as authoritative sources. When we can be manipulated or be the manipulator.
*We can no longer be “just” readers...we must be editors as well.

*And reading is no longer a passive, linear activity that deals simply with text. How do we read multimedia and hypertext? (A Tank of Gas)
*In this world, we must read with an ear for writing and responding, engaging and interacting.

The Web is Changing our Assumptions about Classrooms and Teaching

*If teachers are no longer the arbiters of knowledge in the classroom, our roles need to change.
*Now we have the opportunity to be connectors, to bring our classrooms to the world in a variety of ways. We can find other teachers who may know more than we do. (Secret Life of Bees)

*We can also connect our students to other students around the world so they can learn together. (Flat Classrooms Wiki)
*And in a world where all of our students can be content producers as well as content consumers, we need to re-envision the work we ask them to do.
*Our students can teach in powerful ways. (Pre Cal)
*As Marco Torres says, students’ work ”should have wings.” (Buckle Up)

We Need a 2020 Vision for Education

*How do we learn to help our students leverage the technologies they are already using instead of have them check them at the door? (Especially when our students can get around our efforts anyway.)

*How do we change? How do we re-envision teaching for a vastly changed world?
*How do we the use of these technologies in our own practice?
*It starts with one small step

*******
Let’s take that one small step.