Using Classroom 2.0 techniques and tools, teachers in ABPC's project are helping students gain skills and abilities that will be highly valued in a world dominated by digital technologies.

One person’s jargon is another person’s professional speech. A real estate agent might refer to a “wrap-around mortgage” without a second thought and then complain about “education-ese” upon hearing a teacher mention “curriculum mapping.”

The same holds true in discussions about digital technologies and Internet-based learning. New concepts require new labels. To get the most out of this special issue of Working Toward Excellence, you need to understand what’s meant by the expression Web 2.0. It’s not hard to grasp — and it’s a concept every professional working in education today should know.

When the World Wide Web first emerged as a global phenomenon, most of us defined it in 20th Century terms. It was a vast and amazing resource library. As more and more content appeared, we found we could discover something about nearly everything, and many educators naturally thought: “This could be a great teaching resource.” We were mindful, of course, of credibility issues. But what a library!

Many Web users, including educators, still think about the Web primarily as an information repository—even though there is ample evidence it has evolved into something more. Today, as we surf the Internet, we see endless examples of the Web’s ability not just to serve up content, but to empower us to share our imaginations, insights and opinions. 

Web 2.0 is all about this two-way or group communication. The Web is no longer just a place to search for resources. It’s a place to find people, to exchange ideas, to demonstrate our creativity before an audience. Today’s web technologies make it possible to build formal and informal communities and networks — using tools like blogs, wikis, and social networking software — that span our communities, our nation, and even the world.

Photo credit: www.ncrel.org/engauge/skills/exec.htm

The Internet has become not only a great curriculum resource but a great learning resource. And trailblazing educators in Alabama are seizing upon the unprecedented teaching potential of Web 2.0 to help their students acquire critical 21st Century skills and dispositions. They are, in fact, laying the foundation for Classroom 2.0. Consider these examples:

• At West Blocton Elementary, a Title I school in Bibb County, a fourth grade team created an website documenting their research of water quality in the nearby Cahaba River. They received help with the project from third graders in west Florida and the Slovak Republic, won an international prize, and their site is now being visited by schools all over the world.

• At Spain Park High School in Birmingham’s Hoover school district, photography students are using blogs to not only post their best images on the Web but to take part in a cross-critique of their work with other photography students at several schools across the USA.

EduTopia: A Great Resource for 21st Century Teaching

The Edutopia website describes itself this way: “Information and Inspiration for Innovative Teaching in K-12 Schools.” The editors are far too modest. This site supported by the George Lucas Educational Foundation is the premiere resource for teachers who are eager to integrate digital technologies and 21st Century skills into their everday teaching. You’ll find not only original “text” reports about innovative instruction but supporting video documentaries, chat areas, and links to other resources on the Web. The site is built around Priority Topics, which include assessment, community partnerships, the digital divide, emotional intelligence, parent involvement, professional development, project-based learning, school-to-careers, teacher preparation and technology integration. Bookmark it immediately! http://www.edutopia.org/

• At Paine Intermediate School in Trussville, students organized a project to raise funds so parents in Africa could obtain mosquito nets to protect their children from malaria. To find out more about the problem, the kids arranged a live Internet interview with a Peace Corps worker based in a small village in Senegal, which was broadcast throughout the Grade 3-5 school. Donations flowed in!

• At George Hall Elementary, located in a high-poverty Mobile neighborhood, K-5 students are creating documentaries about their field trips to places like the State Capitol and the Shakespeare Festival in Montgomery, or the firefighter school right in their own city. Then they load their stories onto the Web, where students anywhere in the world can see, hear and respond to what the Hall students are learning.

• At Cullman Middle School, students sharpened their writing skills — and their imaginations — by working on collaborative book projects at a free website that allowed them to edit and add to each other’s work.

• At rural Fayetteville School (K-12) in Talladega County, some fourth graders got so excited about black holes and deep space that they formed a “wiki club” and created their own web-based site to explore the topics further. “I gave them basic information but they were able to use the technology and the Web to explore space phenomena to their hearts’ content,” says teacher Amanda Spurling.

• At Challenger Middle School in Huntsville, faculty members who are learning how to use Web 2.0 tools in their classrooms can draw upon (and add to) a resources wiki developed by the school’s 21st Century teacher team, which shares ideas about how to teach with blogs, wikis, podcasts and other web-based technologies.

Mobile County's Calcedeaver Elementary School shared their plans for a Native American Heritage website at the ABPC Powerful Conversations Network meeting in May 2007.

• At Calcedeaver Elementary, in the upper reaches of Mobile County, students in the fourth, fifth and sixth grades spoke live over the Internet with a member of their close-knit community serving in Iraq. Using the free VoIP service Skype and webcams, John Byrd Jr. was able to see and talk to his daughter, fourth grader Lorin Byrd, and then answer students’ many questions about Iraq and the middle east. 

The ABPC-Microsoft Partnership

These examples are among dozens that have emerged during a pilot project organized by the Alabama Best Practices Center and supported by a two-year grant from the Microsoft Partners in Learning Mid-Tier grants program.

Allyson Knox, director of Microsoft's Partners in Learning Mid-Tier grant program, shares thoughts about 21st Century learning with members of the Powerful Conversations Network at a May 2007 meeting in Birmingham. The Microsoft Mid-Tier grant program funded ABPC's 21st Century Schools project.

The project, which combines live online professional development, an email-based virtual learning community, and several face-to-face gatherings, has helped nearly 40 schools and more than 200 teachers and principals move beyond keyboarding, word processing and LCD projectors to exploit the teaching/learning potential (as one 21st Century educator has described it) of the greatest technological innovation since the Gutenberg printing press —the Internet.

April Chamberlain, one of 10 teachers from across the state who served as Fellows for the 21st Century project, described the power of the project model, which engaged small groups of 5-6 teachers at each school in an intensive professional development experience.

Chamberlain, who serves as a technology teacher leader in the Trussville City Schools, used TCS’s Hewitt-Trussville Middle School as an example. “I think the 21st Century team here is getting the knowledge they need to build Classroom 2.0 and they are beginning to pull in other teachers to design work that will engage the students.”

“From this the ripple will spread,” Chamberlain believes. “This is our only school that has a 21st Century team, and they’re able to talk the talk and walk the walk, and others can see that. There’s no question that having a team of teachers who get professional development together and work on this together has really accelerated the process.”

“This opportunity has changed the whole way I think about 21st Century learning,” says Amanda Spurling, an elementary teacher at Fayetteville School in Talladega County. “When my principal asked me if I'd be on the technology team for this program, my first thought was, ‘oh yeah, we'll get lots of cool gadgets!’ We haven’t gotten any gadgets. Instead, we’ve received so much knowledge about how to use what's available for free on the Web, and that's so much more valuable.”

“I now understand,” Spurling says, “that teaching with technology is not just about me, the teacher, controlling a space on the Internet. It’s about kids sharing their work and talking about the content we’re studying. Before it was just resources—now it’s about communication, and that’s certain to increase learning.”

Liz Reints, an achievement specialist at George Hall Elementary in Mobile, says “the 21st Century Learning project has pushed us into taking a big leap in learning with our students. When we began two years ago, our teacher technology team was more about us, quite honestly, than it was about the kids.”

“We had a lot of growing and learning to do,” Reints says. “When we first learned about using web tools, we really thought about them in a teacher-centered way — how students would use what we put on the Web in their classwork. But the 21st Century Learning project pushed us to go beyond that.”

“In our second year,” she says, “we had to focus on actually developing a project with our students, giving them the opportunity to be content creators with a worldwide audience. That’s made a huge difference in their engagement and how they think about school. They are coming to understand how exciting learning can be.”

Making the Case for Classroom 2.0

The teachers and administrators in our 21st Century Schools project are, as one district superintendent puts it, “facing the brutal facts” about education in the Digital Age.

Through a process of study, reflection and experimentation, these educators are coming to see that the teaching methods and curriculum goals of past generations are insufficient to produce high school graduates who have the skills, knowledge, and habits of mind to thrive in a global society where digital technologies are rapidly redefining not only our jobs and our communities, but our very concepts of time and space.

These Alabama educators understand the ninth grader in a recent national survey who said, “When I go to school, I have to power down.” They have examined their own schools and see the truth in Microsoft chairman Bill Gates’ recent comments to a Congressional panel, when he warned that “our current expectations for what our students should learn in school were set fifty years ago to meet the needs of an economy based on manufacturing and agriculture. We now have an economy based on knowledge and technology."

Gates pointed a finger at schools, especially high schools, that “have simply failed to adapt to this change.” However, as he noted, children have not failed to adapt but are “fully immersed in digital culture.” As a result, he said, “while most students enter high school wanting to succeed, too many end up bored, unchallenged, and disengaged from the high school curriculum.” They are “digital natives" caught up in an industrial-age learning model, he said.

Closer to home, Trussville City superintendent Suzanne Freeman echoes Gates’ concerns: “The world where our students are going to work and live as adults is quite different than it was 20 years ago. Now we have to prepare kids to be responsible self-starters who can organize and complete tasks. More and more, companies are turning to employees and simply saying ‘you and your team get this done.’”

Successful schools today must assure “that kids not only know the content but that they can analyze and synthesize,” Freeman says. Educators are lowering standards for students when they limit their focus to teaching the facts and having students “regurgitate” them on tests that are often assessing for industrial-age skills.

Freeman and others cite studies indicating that by their senior year, barely one-fourth of today’s students agree that school is meaningful or their courses are interesting — and less than half believe that what they learn in school will have any bearing on their success in life.

ABPC'S 21st Century Learning Wiki

Here’s the central repository of information about our 21st Century Learning initiative, including samples of curriculum and professional development activities, conference presentations, projects completed by school teams, and other cool resources. http://abpc.wikispaces.com/

By engaging students through technology, project-based learning, and a curriculum focused on the skills and knowledge students will need in the real world, we can turn these statistics around, Freeman believes. To truly meet students’ needs in the 21st Century, she says, Alabama educators must adopt the attitude toward students that “it’s not enough to just give us half your brain—we want all of your brain.”

A New Kind of Student

Veteran English teacher Jennifer Barnett, who spends most of her time with teenagers, says there is no question that today’s students have embraced the Digital Age. “A huge number have some sort of social networking going on, whether it's that they blog often, or they have a MySpace or Facebook page, or whatever. They're all very familiar with one another.”

And despite parent and societal fears, says the Fayetteville High teacher, “most kids are out there looking for interesting, positive, stimulating things on the Internet. And what's even more interesting and fun is that they look for ways to create those things themselves.”

“The whole Web 2.0 thing is perfect for today’s kids,” Barnett believes, “because they would rather spend their time looking at student-created content that's not slick and professional, but that's done by somebody like them. Anytime I show them stuff like that, that is so much more interesting to them than the videos I order from a catalog that tells me ‘this will engage your student.’

“It doesn't engage them nearly as much as what somebody else their own age has to say about it. And letting them know they have a voice and somebody's listening to it? Golly. That's what kids really need.”

Barnett’s thoughts are reflected in a comment by Liz Reints, the George Hall Elementary achievement specialist. “The Internet offers so many ways to have kids peer-review each other’s work, through commenting in blogs or wikis, and so forth. Kids really care more about what other kids say than they do about what we say. And when they know they have a peer audience, they do more and take more care with what they do.”

A New Kind of Teacher

What then is the teacher’s role in a world where students have instant access to information and no longer have to rely solely upon a teacher to read and judge their scholarship, ideas or opinions?

Barnett, Reints, Freeman and other forward-thinking educators we interviewed argue that while 21st Century teachers may no longer serve as the chief dispensers of information and ideas, they will continue to provide the most essential service of professional educators — creating learning opportunities that help students develop the skills, motivation and discrimination that produces successful life-long learners.
 
“Our students are growing up digital,” Barnett says, “but even though they are immersed in technology, kids don’t automatically see the need for many of the tools and skills we want to teach them around 21st Century learning. For example, they don’t see the ability to work in teams and collaborate as all that important to their futures.”

In part, she says, the teacher’s job is to “manage discovery” — or to use a media analogy, to be “producers” of learning. “You have to create opportunities for students to discover the need for these skills in order for them to want to do the work.”

“If I just go in and say, here is an assignment, it’s worth so many points, and I want you to collaborate, now go do it — well, that’s nothing more than me handing them a worksheet and saying, ‘Do this.’ If they don’t know why they need to know how to do it, then they might as well not do it. Our job as teachers is to help them discover the ‘why.’”

In order for teachers to integrate not only technology but these new ideas about teaching into their practice, many will need to go through a discovery process of their own.

“As long as it’s perceived as somebody else’s stuff — something they’re being ‘told’ to do, teachers aren’t going to change,” says Barnett, who is considered a technology leader in her school. “We won’t get buy-in by just talking to them. They have to try it and see its value. They’ve got to be the one doing the walking — not being carried. It can’t just come down from the top.”

“And I can understand how people are confused,” she says. “Because there is so much talk, there is so much jargon, there are so many details.”

Helping schools find the path to 21st Century learning

Cathy Gassenheimer, president of the Alabama Best Practices Center, says ABPC’s two-year partnership with Microsoft has been aimed at addressing just such concerns.

“Our goal has been to help a group of interested educators get past the jargon and the initial uneasiness about using tools that are often more familiar to their students than themselves,” she says. “We wanted to show them what some trailblazing teachers were already doing to excite and engage their students using digital tools and the Web. In a variety of ways, we have encouraged them to take the plunge and create their first Web 2.0 products.”

The Best Practices Center also wanted to help teachers “make the connection between these new technologies and other teaching strategies that have been shown to be highly effective,” says Gassenheimer.

“Our Microsoft project has not been about technology, it’s been about using technology as the medium to pursue the kind of best-practice teaching we’ve been exploring in our Powerful Conversations Network, or that we see in the Alabama Reading Initiative, or Working on the Work (WOW),  or Learning by Doing, and other programs that emphasize problem-based learning and higher-order thinking.”

Gassenheimer says the 21st Century Learning pilot project “has been a revelation for us and to many of the teachers and principals who have participated. We all see much more clearly the imperative to help students master the skills needed to succeed in the Digital Age.”

“We’ve also learned so much about the best ways to build teacher learning communities around this issue. Our project schools are clamoring for more — and we are hard at work looking for the support to make that happen. Best of all, we now have a cadre of teachers who have embraced the big idea of Classroom 2.0, and we would love to engage them as exemplars and mentors in spreading these ideas to many more schools.”