Category Archives: CHANGEd: What If…Weekly

What if schools learned from tourist spots, museums, and other sightseeing locations? #WhatIfWeekly #GroundedCampus

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Schools could learn from tourist spots, museums, and other sightseeing locations
(a 3:02 podcast by Bo Adams)

[The link above will take you to a podcast that I created on Garageband. A transcript of the podcast is pasted below (please excuse conventions errors, as I only made the script to record the podcast!). This marks my first foray into recording a podcast on Garageband, which I have been wanting to learn for quite some time. Today, I learned by doing, and I spent about 90 minutes crafting the podcast. Interestingly, I spent about three times that long trying to figure out how to embed the podcast with a media player directly into this blog. Still haven’t discovered how to do that. Any and all feedback and commentary is welcome – on the content of the podcast, as well as on the production of the podcast. I am learning, and you might be my best teacher for how to do all of this better…from the thinking about schools to the creating of a multimedia podcast that can be embedded in WordPress. Thanks for reading, listening, and viewing.]

Schools could learn and integrate a lot from tourist spots, museums, and sightseeing locations. For example, just take those multi-media, information boards that aquariums, historical sites, and zoos use. I can imagine student-generated information boards – full of pictures and narrative descriptions – in several locations on a campus…explaining the history of a building, the flora and fauna counts of a nearby woods or stream, the recent sports news highlighting the athletics teams of the school. These information boards could possess some static information, but they could also utilize QR codes so that different classes from year to year could update the more dynamic information. They could include short podcasts like the QR codes at Rock City – one at each of about 50 stops along the enchanted trail.

Students could label shrubs and trees on campus with botanical descriptor signs. These could include QR codes, too. Can’t you imagine a video pieced together by a collaborative of students in which various teams trace and track the seasonal lives of adopted flora. Through something like a time-elapse video, viewers could see the maturing of a tree compressed from years into just seconds. Student could narrate the short mini-features and update the QR codes at the signs from year to year.

On a weekend trip to Chattanooga, TN, I was also impressed by the sidewalks at the North Shore, just across the Walnut Street pedestrian bridge. Dance steps had been included in the concrete pours, and our vacation group enjoyed frequent stops during our stroll to learn the Cha Cha, the Waltz, and the Foxtrot. What if student groups designed the walkways at a school with such similar action-generating artifacts? I can imagine a student committee ideating, designing, and processing through how to make such a concept reality on the pathways that crisscross a school’s campus.

Other student committees could curate special exhibits based on their research and creations. At the Tennessee Aquarium, we marveled at a small exhibit comparing various turtle shells to a host of architectural designs and features. Students are perfectly capable of doing this typically-adult work. Through the projects, students could integrate learning and understanding that traditionally gets siloed and subdivided into departmentalized subjects. What’s more, the student committees would learn invaluable design, communication, and curatorial skills as they readied their public displays and exhibition details.

Tourist spots, museums, zoos, and other sightseeing spots seem expert at getting us to interact with what we are seeing and learning. School campuses could be such interactive destinations, and students could create, design, and implement the possibilities.

Also, @occam98 sent me this fabulous and closely related article:

The Grounded Curriculum
How can our courses and teaching capitalize on the benefits of a physical campus?

By James M. Lang

Murmurations on Schools of the Future #WhatIfWeekly

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Openness. Schools that embrace it and welcome it will thrive. Schools that resist it or imagine that they can control it will struggle significantly.

In sequel to yesterday’s post, I offer this #MustWatch TED Talk by Don Tapscott. Brilliant! In 17 minutes, Tapscott summarizes the essential path points to thriving as a school of the future:

  1. Collaboration
  2. Transparency
  3. Sharing
  4. Empowerment

From the admin to the teachers, from the students to the parents…from the interior to the exterior, from the past to the future – the four principles above will define the schools of the future and the future of schools.

If you are serious about enhancing and improving education and school, watch Don Tapscott’s TED. Be a part of, not apart from, the murmuration.

What if our schools adopted and engaged with open source, makers, etc.? #WhatIfWeekly

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The thing we call “School” is in a state of change. Not too long ago, school was pretty much the “campfire” around which a community would gather to spread knowledge and know-how. Of course, school continues to serve as such a community campfire. However, the monopoly that schools essentially had on such a central gathering place for knowledge transfer and generational training is evaporating. People can access learning “anytime – anywhere” with minimal effort, as countless “teachers” share in myriad ways what they know and know how to do.

Are you inviting those teachers into your learning spaces? Or are you locking them out of the places we continue to call school? Young learners – those we call children, students, etc. – can and do access the myriad teachers who reside in virtual time and space. As for me, I would prefer that our students access these amazing teachers with the face-to-face teachers with whom they interact at that place called school. While I worry a bit about online safety, I think I worry even more about dis-empowering our students to learn responsible and respectful wisdom gathering. I worry about those schools that try to shut out the outside world because I think that they risk driving our students to explore that world without much, if any, adult guidance and shepherding. Students will engage the outside-school-walls community. We should try to accompany them and serve as wise Sherpas and co-pilots.

Have you seen this TED talk yet?

I watch a TED talk everyday, and this one by Massimo Banzi is one of the most thought-provoking that I have seen. It is well worth the watch…ESPECIALLY by school-based educators. Did I know of open-sourcing before? Yes. Did I know of the Maker Movement before? Yes. What struck me at this viewing was the disruptive nature that such open-sourcing and maker-ness can have on the places we call school. Banzi shares SO MANY examples of open-source development of the Arduino. Our students are doing this amazing stuff – with or without us. How cool would school be if we would embrace this disruption and integrate such innovative thinking with the schedules and structures of school? Our students should be building those earthquake detectors, pet feeders, and satellite experiments – and they should be doing these things as part of that thing we call school.

I imagine a hybrid – a new place called school blending the invaluable community campfire that demands that we share time and space with each other face-to-face with the invaluable open-source community that understands that expertise and passion exist in geographically dispersed settings that can be connected virtually.

Are you opening your students’ minds to the world and its amazing wonder, or are you shutting out the world…a world that they will access without us if we don’t go with them?