I know what they know

Well, we are in week 3 of hour alternative schooling...home school, f2f and online all in one! It's been an interesting adjustment, but not a difficult one. We usually start at 7:30 am and finish by 1:30 pm. Then, we scoot out for gymnastics, sailing, the library or a trip to the beach.

Homework is usually very little -- just stuff that didn't get done in the day, rather than more of the same busy work, worksheets.

Best of all, I know what my kids are learning and what they know. No more random grades on a report card, or graded worksheets with letters or percentages of correct/incorrect items. Now, when they get something wrong, we correct it right away by working through it again. We don't wait for weeks or months for the report card to show up to tell us we didn't know what we were supposed to know.

In K12.com curriculum, history is an important element, as is all the usual cast -- math, science, language arts, etc. But history has a special place and is well presented in a manner is fascinating for the kids. They are anxious to learn about the past and happy to discuss how it is or isn't like their lives today.

Working side-by-side, we can make connections on the spot. We can reason through something that doesn't make sense, or pop online if we need more info. We don't have to wait to go to the computer lab to do research, nor do we need to wait our turn to check out a book to give us more information.

Art is part of our weekly learning, where we not only learn about and practice art techniques, but we learn how to discover art, how to interpret art, and how to appreciate it. And there is always some interesting tidbit of information about the artist and his/her life.

Spanish is delivered online through fun, interactive stories and activities. We can then chat about words, ideas and phrases and practice them whenever and wherever the occasion presents itself.

We have P.E. every day. Sometimes we ride bikes, play soccer or go to organized sports like gymnastics, football, sailing, etc. Most days, we jump in our pool to play Marco Polo and to cool down.

The down sides,well, there are a few. No recess with all our buddies. No side chat in the back of the room with classmates. No assemblies. However, we are looking forward to starting the f2f part of the Hawaii Technology Academy, where we believe some of these down sides will be appeased.

Moving my kids and myself from traditional to alternative ed

This summer has been one of bold changes. Since we thought we were going to be moving to Europe (husband is in the Navy, which means lots of moves), we prepared ourselves for big changes. For starters, I decided to leave my teaching job at St. Anthony School so that a new teacher could step in the first of the school year. I will only be managing the grant project for the school. The grant, called Schools of the Future, is to help schools transform from traditional schools to schools of the 21st century, read -- schools that practice critical thinking, problem solving, collaboration, communication, etc. This parring down of my responsibilities will also give me more time to focus on my kids' education and to complete the last few courses for my PhD in educational technology.

Now, the biggest move has been to take the kids out of St. Anthony School, a very traditional Catholic school (it has yet to "transform") and to put them in a hybrid charter school called Hawaii Technology Academy (HTA). This school is quite the model for alternative schools -- at least for 2009. It combines online, face-2-face and home schooling for K-12 students. It uses a recognized curriculum called K12 (K to the 12th power) as its base. Students get the best of all 3 learning scenarios.

This move has already been a great learning experience for me too. I now play the role of "learning coach" for my kids (8 and 6). I am looking forward to this experience as a way to discover alternative education for K-12 -- I will compare it to all that I have read about needs of the 21st century, disruptive innovation, etc. More details to follow!

Future Studies - Post from 6/20/09

This past year has been an incredible journey into the “futures”. It all started with a seminar class where I, along with my cohort, were introduced to Dr. Jim Dator’s futures class. I was fascinated by the presentation given by 2 futures doctoral students who showed us how futures theories and methods are practices for forecasting and then planning for preferred futures.

It occured to me — why don’t we educational technologist ever engage in futures practices? Why do we always seem to be playing “catch the technology” and then figure out how to use it? Why aren’t we more proactive about considering technologies on the distant horizon and why don’t we plan for their implications instead of waiting to deal with them when they arrive (and usually they arrive in the hands of our students before making way into our classrooms)?

I decided I needed to learn more about this futures stuff and so I took Dator’s Futures in Education course in the fall of ‘08. It was one of the most intellectually challenging and stimulating courses I have ever taken. It included doc students from political science and the school of architecture. The course was team taught by Dator and Ray Yeh, accomplished campus architect and former dean of the school of arch. It was truly an interdisciplinary course, which was centered around a problem-based learning project. Our task was to engage in a deep understanding of the historical perspectives surrounding higher education and then to apply futures theories and methodologies and architectural design methods to construct four alternative campus scenarios for UH Manoa in the year 2050.

I am presenting the outcomes of this project at the 2009 EdMedia conference this June.

We are in fact continuing on with this project to refine our scenarios and to present them to an international panel of futurists this fall 2009. Our research group is called the Alternative Campus of the Futures Research Group and we are based here at the School of Architecture.

Stay tuned for more!

Ongoing Questions - Post from 6/20/09

Ever since I started this Ph.D. journey I have had the same question on my mind….how do we keep our children grounded in our physical world, when we keep shoving digital spaces and tools

at them? How dare we accuse them of becoming obese, lazy, uninterested in “reality,” when we are the ones creating these virtual worlds for them to get lost in! What are our responsibilities to see that their futures are happy, real, safe?

I hope I can find a way to discover the answers and possible solutions to these questions! More on this later.

Where have I been? Post from 6/19/09

It’s been a while since I’ve updated this blog. That is mainly because edublogs keeps screwing with my password! Needless to say, I get so frustrated trying to fix it that I rarely come back to update. I am updating now because…well it’s time…and my 698 class has inspired me to revisit old thoughts!

A Pirate Store for Tutoring - Post from 7/9/08

This short video clip includes Dave Eggers at the TED Conference discussing his non-profit tutoring center in San Fran. It’s not just your average tutoring center…but I don’t want to give the story away. You must see it to be inspired. One of the most interesting aspects of the center is that it shows us what education in the future may look like, feel like, and operate. All, very simple, all very community. All very inspiring.

Here it is: http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/dave_eggers_makes_his_ted_prize_wish_once_upon_a_school.html

Eureka! I finally found one! Post from 6/19/08

After reading

dozens of articles on game play and learning I have finally found one article that discussed “transfer.” Stevens, Satwicz and McCarthy (2008) address this concept of transfer from game play to “the rest of kids’ lives” as a plea of sorts encouraging gaming researchers to consider the importance of ethnographic studies of gaming and transfer. Their goal was to describe how in-game activity is tangled up with in-room and in-world activities (in-world meaning their daily lives). Their ethnographic study included thirteen children between the ages of 9 and 15. They observed how the children interacted during and after the games and discussed their in-game, in-room and in-world interactions. They concluded that the children did in fact transfer some of their moral in-game practices to their in-world thinking. What was most interesting to me was the fact that these researchers are encouraging the focus of gaming on transfer, not just on learning and how games are not just good for learning because they contain well-designed principles of learning, but rather because they provide the setting for children to interact and share their knowledge, thus empowering them. I hope to contribute to this seemingly new area of interest in digital gaming as it applies to real life. Therefore, I will continue to focus my attentions (for now) on how environmental or science based digital gaming may effect how children interact with their surroundings.