Monday, November 11, 2019

Creativity Crisis in Our Schools: Time and Value

Time? Yeah, in the sense that schools make time for what they consider to be important. So, the issue really is more one of valuing Student Creativity... and that, is largely related to understanding it - understanding the need for it, the possibility of making it part of the instructional program and more...

Mark

Below - a very worthwhile article form EdSurge https://www.edsurge.com/news/2018-12-18-the-greatest-enemy-of-creativity-in-schools-isn-t-testing-it-s-time

" Assessments

The Greatest Enemy of Creativity in Schools Isn’t Testing. It’s Time.

By Stephen Noonoo Dec 18, 2018

Creativity is one of those ineffable skills that’s important—especially for jobs of the future—but hard to pin down. We know when we feel creative, and we know what creative work looks like. Measuring and assessing such work in a way that keeps kids inspired is another matter, though, and schools aren’t known for being good at it. For years, personalities like Sir Ken Robinson have taken education systems to task for actually testing the creativity out of students.

Author and educator Katie White, who’s something of an expert on the creative process, may have a practical solution.

She argues that creativity actually has a very visible side that can be nurtured. “A lot of people think it’s very formless, but the case that I’m making is that it’s actually very observable, and there’s plenty of things that would indicate creativity,” she says. That means teachers can both tease it out and measure it—provided they know what to look for.

A former art teacher, White is now an education consultant who criss-crosses the continent giving workshops, coaching teachers in her local Saskatchewan district and writing books. Her newest, “Unlocked: Assessment as the Key to Everyday Creativity in the Classroom,” serves as something of a blueprint for schools aiming to spark the creative process in the classroom while staying grounded in a reality that requires them to follow standards and assess students regularly.

White recently spoke with EdSurge about what creativity actually looks like, practical ways teachers can inspire their students and the biggest enemy of the creative process. The interview has been lightly edited for length and clarity.

EdSurge: What does a good formative assessment around creativity look like?

White: There are a few. Depending on the context in which kids are engaging in creative processes, there will be the layer of assessment that relates directly to the content. If they’re exploring various ways to solve various mathematical problems, for example, you’ll have a layer that’s pretty specific. Often you’ll get those criteria from the standards and the outcomes, and teachers and kids can make sense of that work together. That’s sort of the vehicle that’s getting them to the creative process.
But then there’s the criteria for creativity. In other words, “how does creativity look when it’s being lived out?” Well, we want to see kids asking lots and lots of questions. We want to see students who are struggling with ambiguity and are feeling comfortable taking risks. We want to see them recover from mistakes and show engagement and investment in their products and performances. Those will be the same from class to class and experience to experience. But the context that drives creativity will be subject-specific.

Experimentation or risk-taking in a writing class means that students generate an idea they haven’t used before, or come up with new perspectives or opinions. In a science class, risk-taking might be making a hypothesis that goes beyond the surface level and thinking about what might happen and then committing to that idea. Or it might be using less-familiar materials. This risk-taking skill looks different depending on the context.

In your book, you talk about “the four stages of creativity.” Can you describe what this process looks like?

The stages I talk about are a synthesis of the work of lots of other people. I sort of rename them so they’re easier to understand. I talk about introducing kids to creativity through a catalyst or a critical notion: I call that the exploration stage. It’s a time when kids are asking questions and invited into learning experiences that create curiosity.
The second stage is elaboration, where students will mess around with their initial questions and their engagement with materials. They will deepen their understanding and their questions might shift a bit.
The third stage is expression, and that’s where kids and teachers decide together how to share their thinking with other people. It could be with parents or other students or just sitting beside someone and sharing a solution to a problem. The fourth stage is reflection and response. It’s a little different from self-assessment, which happens in all stages. Reflection and response is that really deep longitudinal thinking about creative processes and which strategies worked for kids, which environments made them more creative and how they’d like to apply it to their learning.
Layered over that is the notion of thinking about assessment in new ways. People most often think of the final summative event where we verify learning. But the kind of assessment I talk about most is dialogue with others, or feedback, and then dialogue with self, or self-assessment.
In order for children and adults to move through these stages, we need to invite them into the kinds of assessment processes that allow them to think about what they are trying to achieve, the degree to which they’re being successful in that moment and how to plan for future engagement—like what they’re going to do next.
Where in those stages might students get tripped up and not able to move on to next stage?
If we let kids free with great materials and good catalysts, I don’t know that they get tripped up. You have to provide physical space, emotional space and time for kids to try things and experience either success or failure. In a school environment, we’re often marching through a very content-heavy and skill-heavy curricula, which makes teachers feel pressured to move through things as quickly as possible.
You might go through the exploration, where children are invited to generate their own questions, but then they don’t get the chance to fully search for answers and experiment and experience the creative process. We rush to the answer too quickly.
Or maybe they have a chance to do some exploration and elaboration, but there isn’t enough time for them to express and share their work with meaningful audiences. Often their expression is in the form of handing something in to the teacher.
And then the stage that gets most short-shrifted is reflection and response. Because this is how teachers and kids can connect their creative personality, and who they’re becoming as creative individuals. They can connect past tasks to future tasks and future creative endeavors. We rarely have the time to do that reflection. The biggest enemy of creativity is time.
You’ve written before about using observation as an assessment tool—where the teacher is almost like an Olympic judge. Why do some teachers feel more comfortable than others using observation?
Well, I can only speak from my own perspective. I’ve taught every grade, K-12. When I was teaching the early years [i.e., young learners], we accepted that, developmentally, children aren’t ready yet to commit their thinking in a written form. So we’re willing to have children represent their thinking through images or sounds or puppet shows. There’s lots of ways kids can express their understanding.
The same is true in highly performance-based environments like physical education and practical and applied arts. We would never ask in a P.E. class for children to sit down and write about every time they’re learning a new skill. It’s perfectly acceptable for teachers to observe that, and it’s very powerful because it’s really authentic.
But in some subject areas—science and math and English-language arts—the older kids get, the greater the emphasis on written documentation of understanding. Part of that is justifying a grade. It’s easier for me to justify it if I have visual evidence that I can speak to. Another part has to do with confidence: “Did I really just see what I thought I saw?” And finally there’s the perfectly legitimate reason, which is that we need students to be able to express thinking in a written form by the time they graduate because our society is very text-heavy.
But the power of observation is really critical to creative development. There are a lot of things that we need to see and hear to know that it’s happening. I’m talking about things like engagement or investment, or kids being curious. These are often expressed orally. We need to be able to listen and document. We need to be able to sit back and observe kids trying new ideas on and listen to them confer with others. All of that is really important in a creative environment.
At the very least, in the book I try and make the case for the triangulation of evidence, or the notion that observation and conversation are just as important as student artifacts. Looking at many sources of information would tell us what kids are thinking and feeling about their work.
What are some practical things teachers can do to heighten the way they assess creativity?
Sharing assessment with students is a critical first step. Teachers should be willing to open themselves up to having conversations with kids, about what they’re trying to achieve, what their goals are—both short and long term—and about the decisions they’re making. This helps kids understand that assessment is a process to help determine where they are right now, where they are headed and the space between those two things.
In my workshops, I invite participants to engage an a creative act and then I ask them to co-construct with me criteria for the product. In other words, what needs to be in the finished product? And then we co-construct another set of criteria around what creativity might look like in this context. What would we see if someone was engaging in creativity?
Having that criteria up-front, we can invite students to consider how successful they are. We can actually do a self-assessment feedback session. Teachers can also create a chart with student names along the left-hand side and the criteria for creativity along the top. And when they’re doing observations, they can be formally looking for those things being lived out in the classroom space.
Creativity requires students to make their own choices, but it also requires some structure. Can you talk about the push and pull between free choice and structure?
I've taught art classes in the community since I was 17-years-old, so for a very long time. I feel like I’ve tried everything under the sun in terms of getting kids to engage in creative processes.
For a number of children, when you place a blank canvas or a blank page in front of them, because there’s no criteria or structure to guide their thinking, it almost requires of them a spontaneous creativity. And that’s really difficult for people who aren’t experienced in terms of their own creative inclinations.
Structure can come in the form of any number of things. Giving kids a question or a series of objects and asking how they might go together provides enough structure to unleash creativity. It’s not so daunting when there’s a framework. It’s easier to think outside the box when there’s a box. We need to know what’s there so we can figure out whether were pushing beyond it.
In art classes, I've said: “Here’s a blank canvas. Create whatever you like, but you need to have two straight lines, three curved lines, a geometric shape and an organic shape.” For some reason, those guidelines really help kids move into that creative part. It seems to inspire them more than just giving them a blank canvas.
But the bottom line is that we do have outcomes and standards we need to work toward. I want teachers to understand that we don’t have to make a binary choice between creativity and curriculum. We can do both..."

Read the full article at its source: https://www.edsurge.com/news/2018-12-18-the-greatest-enemy-of-creativity-in-schools-isn-t-testing-it-s-time

Tuesday, October 15, 2019

Making Art the Focus of Elementary Education...

WONDERFUL piece from KQED Mind/Shift...
https://www.kqed.org/mindshift/54370/how-art-can-help-center-a-students-learning-experience

"How Art Can Help Center a Student’s Learning Experience

https://od1.kqed.org/anon.kqed/radio/storiesteachersshare/2019/10/ThirdGradersCanShowWhatTheyKnowThroughArtQC.mp3

When I visited Maya Lin, an elementary school in Alameda, California where art is at the center of learning, third graders were in the middle of a multi-week project on climate change. Pairs of students had chosen climates around the world and researched them to learn about the weather, flora and fauna.

In art class, they created artistic representations of their climates using either a torn-paper collage technique or oil pastels. They also wrote books about how climate change will affect their climates and the animals that live there. In the process, they learned what fossil fuels are, where they come from, and how they’re extracted. They studied how the greenhouse gas effect works and made a visual model of it.

ne boy, John, showed me his model and described the science behind it.
“I made a project with one of my friends about the greenhouse effect and how the sun’s heat rays go in, and the heat gets trapped inside the atmosphere and heats up the earth,” said John.

asked him about the artistic techniques he used to create a blotchy effect on the sun.
“I saw a picture of the sun to try and draw it and there were spots where it was really really bright. So I drew those spots in and then I put tape over it and then I dabbed the paintbrush so it looked like spots, and then the spots where I put tape were still paper white,” he explained. He’d also used collage to create a translucent effect for the atmosphere.

I was struck by how much John could tell me both about the iterative creative process he went through, and the science his work represented. He described several early attempts at creating effects that didn’t work – at first, he wanted his sun to be three-dimensional, but couldn’t get it to stay up. He says he was frustrated, but he pushed through those feelings and tried something different.
John’s persistence – and the sheer number of hours he was allotted for artwork during school hours – stood out to me. At a lot of schools I’ve visited, art is relegated to a separate class once a week. The fact that students were showing their knowledge of science through their artwork here struck me as unique.

Over the past two decades, policies focused on math and reading test scores, along with a global recession, have pushed many schools to cut what they considered to be “extras.” In many places, that has meant visual art, music, drama, and dance. These subjects became afterthoughts as school leaders put pressure on teachers to raise kids’ scores in the ‘focus’ subjects – math and reading.
Now, many educators are starting to realize the folly of these practices, backed up by an increasingly robust body of research about the power of art to improve learning.

Johns Hopkins University professor Mariale Hardiman published a 2019 paper in Trends in Neuroscience and Education describing the results of a randomized, controlled trial she conducted in fifth grade science classrooms. She and her team found that arts integration instruction led to long-term retention of science concepts at least as successfully as conventional science teaching. Arts integration was particularly helpful for students with the lowest reading scores.
Studies like this one have led to a resurgence of interest in arts integration, a pedagogy that uses art as a vehicle for learning about any subject. This isn’t a new idea – some educators have long believed in and used art as part of their practice – but now there’s more research to back it up, including work out of Harvard’s Project Zero. Several schools have led this movement, going all in on art at a time when many schools around the country were slashing their arts budgets. Maya Lin is one of them.

For teachers at Maya Lin, integrating art throughout the curriculum and the school day is about making learning fun, multi-disciplinary, connected and creative. It gives students a way to think about the world differently, to make connections, and to contemplate their place within it. Thinking like an artist helps them develop habits that they’ll use no matter what they go on to do, and it has helped inculcate an ethic of perseverance, challenge, and craft to everything students do.

“At its core, arts integration is social justice,” Maya Lin art teacher Constance Moore told me. “It’s a way of creating equity, it's a way of looking at the world and thinking about different perspectives, and centering ideas and people who have not been in the center. Art is such a great way to do that for kids because it makes it accessible to them.”

Before it was called Maya Lin, this school was known as Washington Elementary. Back then, Washington served a mostly low-income population and over a third of its students were designated English language learners. And, like many schools, it was a mainstay of the local community with many committed teachers. But the school’s test scores weren’t great, and enrollment was low, so when Alameda Unified School District started feeling the pinch of the recession in 2009 and 2010, Washington was a prime candidate for closure.

A dedicated group of parents and teachers fought hard to stop the district’s closure plans and to keep a school in the community. They applied for an innovation grant from the district, emphasizing that if they won, they would build a school centered around art. Students would learn all the required standards, but art would be a critical way for teachers to evaluate what students understand. The district accepted the proposal. Washington Elementary closed in the spring of 2011, but reopened again as Maya Lin School in the fall of 2012 with a new focus on arts integration.

District officials told the principal, Judy Goodwin, that she could hire her own staff. She first invited the teachers at Washington to join the project. About half of them did, and the other half were transferred to other jobs in the district.

Maya Lin’s new teaching staff, both the former Washington staff and new hires, went through the Integrated Learning Specialist Program (ILSP) at the Alameda County Office of Education. They learned how to build arts-centered projects collaboratively with other teachers, how to assess learning through art, and they figured out ways to integrate state standards from disparate disciplines – like science and social studies – using art in everyday learning and the habits of successful artists to guide the way.

“The arts provide an access point for everyone,” said Caitlin Gordon, a third grade teacher at Maya Lin. She has found that when art is at the center of the learning experience, it evens the playing field for kids with learning disabilities, or those who are still learning English, or who have less background knowledge about a topic.

“I think it's a way for kids to take some really meaty and intense concepts and process them. I think it allows children to learn about how the process of something is just as important, if not more

Gordon is always impressed by how thoughtfully her students approach their own work and that of their peers. They ask good questions and are willing to stretch when a concept doesn’t come easily.important, than the product. I think it just really helps create more of that well-balanced,
critical-thinking person that we want for our future.”

Maya Lin's Journey to Arts Integration Was About Equity

The art teacher, Constance Moore, is grateful for that collaborative spirit. She says usually the art teacher is relegated to an out-of-the-way classroom where no one bothers them. Teachers are grateful they can send their kids to her for awhile, but other than that, what happens in the art room is separate from other learning.

“But this is completely different. I'm just fully woven into the fabric of the school,” Moore said.

For example, Moore helped plan the climate change project. The three third grade teachers, Caitlin Gordon, Brian Dodson, and Sharon Jackson, developed this project together with Moore’s artistic knowledge guiding them. They discussed the learning goals, developed a thematic through line, and mapped out the science, social studies, and writing standards they’d be covering. And they talked through how students would demonstrate their understanding through art.

Tackling Climate Change Through Art

Some of the work takes place in their classrooms, but it often crosses over into the art studio, where Moore makes sure students are learning specific artistic techniques, the life and history of the artists themselves, and most importantly the Studio Habits of Mind.

The habits are:

develop craft
engage and persist
envision
express
observe
reflect
stretch and explore
understand art worlds

These practices aren't only used in the art studio at Maya Lin. They are the basis of all academic work in the school, providing a language students use to talk about their learning. One third grade girl explained that she has to “stretch and explore” in math class, especially when learning fractions, a concept that’s been confusing for her.

Or, when John spoke about the setbacks he encountered making his climate change project, he said even though he was frustrated, he “engaged and persisted,” and he did a lot of “envisioning” to come up with new ideas. Everyone at the school uses that language.

In teacher Brian Dodson’s classroom, students were in full-on creation mode when I visited. Some spread out into the hallway and others worked on the floor, while still more were huddled around desks pushed together into pods. Out in the hallway, two girls were working on a large painting inspired by Sean Yoro, a Hawaiian artist. Another girl, Clementine, was busily painting a trash can. One side featured pristine ocean, the other side had trash floating in it.
“I wanted to paint on a trash can because I wanted to show if we don’t fill up the trash can, it’s better for the ocean,” said Clementine. “My essential question is, why are the coral reefs dying?” she said. She went on to explain that trash in the ocean suffocates the coral, which is a problem because the coral reefs provide oxygen. “If we keep this up we could have a little bit less oxygen,” she said.

Read the full article at its source: https://www.kqed.org/mindshift/54370/how-art-can-help-center-a-students-learning-experience

Sunday, November 4, 2018

Defining Student Creativity: Make, Learn, Succeed

What does creativity actually look like in the classroom?

by Dr. Rod Berger

Mark Gura went to public school in New York City in the ‘50s, and he says it was very much about compliance and conformity with very little tolerance for kids exploring and using their imaginations. “Kids like me tended to explore our creativity under the desks, so to speak,” Mark says. I recently sat down with him to talk about teaching creativity to students, the subject of his new book Make, Learn, Succeed.

Mark ended up spending over a decade and a half teaching Visual Arts in the New York City Public School system before moving up into senior leadership positions. He has the experience and gravitas to form an accurate definition of the different types of student creativity. When he talks with someone about creativity, they usually conjure up in their mind the legend of Archimedes and his hot tub “Eureka!” moment. They view it as some inspired bit of genius like a lightning bolt that strikes suddenly and unexpectedly, and not as a talent or power that can be consciously engaged and used at will. Teaching students about inspiration and how to tap into it on demand requires a different definition of creativity than most people accept and understand.

Whenever Mark gets together with his art education peers, and the conversation turns to the subject of student creativity, he finds that the very definition has many answers and varied opinions.
Mark discovered a critical definition in one of the most pivotal of the many teaching jobs in his career in the New York City public schools with a group of very difficult students. A few months into a job teaching art in a school for youthful offenders, a few things became apparent very quickly. “I noticed they seemed to have a very small repertoire of responses,” Mark said. If a peer or classmate said something to them, up went the fists. If an adult said something to them, they would overreact and storm out of the classroom slamming doors. “It was just an automatic response that was so dramatic and exaggerated,” Mark says. “I got onto this idea that maybe I could make these kids more creative in their responses and their lives through teaching art.”

Mark developed a course of various creative exercises through visual arts to spontaneously create a unique response to a confrontation or critical comment as opposed to merely reaching into their little manual of two or three stock responses. While not 100 percent successful, Mark saw a large percentage of his troubled students broaden their horizons and learn to use their creativity to find emotional outlets to safely channel their anger and frustrations in a healthy way.

In his book Make, Learn, Succeed, Mark contrasts the different definitions of creativity with the team of designers at NASA and Apple. In Mark’s mind, that's very much the type of creativity we want to develop in students. It's collaborative, it's process-driven, and it's goal-oriented. “All of us are living in a world in which we have to be creative on demand already,” Mark states. “We just need to train ourselves to be creative continually as a way of being, rather than as a special event.”

Mark says we have a conundrum in education where we need a curriculum driven by creativity that has the unenviable task of teaching skills yet to be invented. He predicts that they are not necessarily skills that students are going to get from teachers, but rather, students are going to get them from an inquiry-oriented means to meet the wants and needs they see in society.

He warns that to achieve this, we as educators need to radically shift our mindset in measuring student learning and success. “We are in this mode in education where we want to have quantifiable results through standardized testing, and that's usually not associated with creativity,” Marks says. “We need to be producing problem solvers and innovators in our schools, but even in the standards I don't see much reference to creativity.” In other words, educators teaching student creativity have their work cut out for them.

About Mark Gura

Mark Gura taught visual art in NYC public schools for 17 years before becoming involved in EdTech. Moving beyond his own classroom, he continued as a staff and curriculum developer and Arts and Technology leader for New York schools, citywide, eventually becoming the Director of the Division of Instructional Technology for the entire New York City school system. Subsequently, he has written numerous books (6 for ISTE) on a variety of instructional themes, including technology and Visual Art, Literacy, Student Robotics, Developing Student Creativity, and Educational Leadership.

He has also written numerous articles for a variety of journals and magazine in the field, including Edutopia, Learning & Leading with Technology, Converge, T.H.E. Journal, and others. He also currently teaches graduate level Education courses for several prominent universities. Mark’s numerous blogs include Lighting the Fire, Classroom Robotics, and his personal blog, Mark Gura’s Blogspot. Follow Mark on Twitter.

Author

Dr. Rod Berger is President and CEO of MindRocket Media Group. Berger is a global education media personality and strategic influencer featured in The Huffington Post, Scholastic, AmericanEdTV, edCircuit, EdTechReview India and Forbes.

Audiences have enjoyed education interviews with the likes of Sir Ken Robinson, Arne Duncan, Randi Weingarten, Sal Khan along with leading edtech investors, award-winning educators, and state and federal education leaders. Berger’s latest project boasts a collaboration with AmericanEdTV and CBS’s Jack Ford.

Follow Dr. Rod Berger on Twitter.

Saturday, June 23, 2018

Make, Learn, Succeed: Building a Culture of Creativity in Your School: Lecture ISTE 2018 Conference

Make, Learn, Succeed: Building a Culture of Creativity in Your School

Monday, June 25, 3:00–4:00 pm CDT (Central Daylight Time)
Building/Room: Prairie (r)

Educators agree that Creativity is an intellectual skill set that students will strongly need and employ in their ongoing learning, and especially in their future work and living environments beyond school. Still, the extent to which creativity is made a focus in the educational experience students receive and the capacity our schools currently have to provide this, practically and meaningfully, needs to be expanded greatly.

Friday, July 14, 2017

Finding Real World Partners is Key to Real World Student Learning Projects Success

Wonderful piece from edutopia...

"Partnership Strategies for Real-World Projects

Students gain by taking on interdisciplinary projects with community nonprofits, businesses, and government agencies.

Giving students opportunities to tackle real-world problems is a surefire strategy to increase engagement. Yet many teachers struggle to design academically rigorous projects that connect students with the world beyond the classroom. How are they supposed to engage with community partners, recruit content experts, and enlist authentic audiences—all while attending to student learning goals?

Iowa BIG, a public high school in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, has taken the mystery out of real-world learning. The school’s competency-based model emphasizes passion, projects, and community rather than a packaged curriculum. Students learn across content areas by choosing to undertake interdisciplinary projects with community nonprofits, businesses, and government agencies.

In recent projects—all aligned to Iowa CORE state standards and Next Generation Science Standards—students have advised city officials on how to improve their use of social media, created a dance therapy curriculum to promote inclusion for people with special needs, investigated the use of drones for agriculture, and engineered a plan to redevelop an abandoned meatpacking property for recreational use.
To help grow this break-the-mold high school, which draws students and financial support from several districts in the region, XQ: The Super School Project has awarded Iowa BIG $1 million in grant support.

Engaging With Stakeholders

I had a chance to talk with the founders of Iowa BIG while researching All Together Now: How to Engage Your Stakeholders in Reimagining School.
Trace Pickering, Iowa BIG’s executive director and cofounder, and Troy Miller, the school’s director of strategic partner development, shared practical insights about building effective partnerships. Here are the highlights.

Bring partners into school change conversations. Iowa BIG came about through creative community outreach. Before even starting to design the new school in 2012, Pickering and Iowa teacher Shawn Cornally invited adults from the community to go back to school for a day and then discuss the experience. Some 50 citizens of diverse ages and backgrounds took part. Their unanimous conclusion: Traditional high school was leaving too many students bored while doing too little to prepare them with the skills needed for college, careers, and citizenship.

Those conversations informed the Iowa BIG model, which deliberately takes down content silos and removes barriers between school and community. Having stakeholders in on the conversations from the beginning has garnered broad support for bringing innovative ideas into public education.
Find the sweet spot for collaboration. “The new curriculum is community,” explains Miller. “Our community has enough problems and opportunities for students to have an endless number of things to do.”

Read the full article at its source: https://www.edutopia.org/blog/partnership-strategies-real-world-projects-suzie-boss

The Arts and Technology — Home Run for the Classroom

Nice piece from CSUF News Center (California State University, Fullerton)

Wednesday, July 12, 2017

All Grown Up, Edtech Is Ready to Show ‘Vanilla Ed’ How to Get the Job Done! Reflections on ISTE 2017

UNPACKING EDTECH | by Mark Gura

From: EdTech Digest https://edtechdigest.wordpress.com/2017/07/11/reflections-on-iste-2017/

I’m back home a few days now from San Antonio where I attended ISTE 2017 — the ever bigger, ever more energetic and optimistic annual edtech mega conference. This year even more than previously, the blend of high enthusiasm, collective insight, and first looks at next-level developments and offerings leaves me appreciatively well informed and thoroughly inspired.

Attempting to accurately summarize this cross between a Burning Man gathering of the tribe, and serious professional development for educators — would be impossible. What I’ll share here, though, is my own takeaway from four high-energy days of interfacing with the very best in technology-supported education. I’m beyond bursting with ah-ha’s that reinforce my confidence in the future of teaching and learning. What a great time it is to be involved in education—assuming one’s mind is open to the possibilities presenting themselves just now!

It’s a fluid and fertile field to be involved in, and there is so much growth on the near horizon.

Let me mention up front that I’ve been in the edtech field for well over two decades and in the general field of education longer than that. This was the 20^th consecutive ISTE conference I’ve attended. I want to state emphatically that it seems to me that this year’s conference marked the field actually having achieved the deep shift many of us have been awaiting for a long time. I saw evidence throughout the conference that edtech is no longer a niche area of the field of education, it is education; it is the most important thing going on in education.

I’m an ex-teacher, ex-instructional supervisor, and ex big-city school system director of Instructional Technology. Looking through those lenses, truly I can hardly see any best instructional practices that don’t use technology to present students with the very best learning experience possible! In short, edtech is the most impactful, and most important facet of contemporary teaching, learning, and school administration—and it is about to show what I’ll call “Vanilla Ed” (education that’s still going on its uninformed, oblivious, paper-driven way) how to get the job done, how to finally realize its own goals and reforms that, despite much discussion, have been elusive until now — through the application of technology. I found it abundantly evident throughout the ISTE 2017 experience, that while no formal announcement has been made, that shift has finally and thoroughly happened!

Okay, having gotten that off my chest—here’s some of what I saw and experienced that I’d really like to share.

Telling the Story
I ran into Richard Culatta a number of times, once almost literally as he whizzed past me while cruising around one of the conference poster session areas on a Segway. Mr. Culatta is the new CEO of ISTE and he brings great enthusiasm and youthful style to the job, something that added to the optimism one couldn’t help but feel at the conference. He spoke at the opening keynote and again to the smaller group assembled in the annual ISTE Board Member’s lunch where a number of kindred spirit ISTE members received the much coveted “Making IT Happen Jacket” award for outstanding work in the field (both Richard and I are former recipients). At the breakfast he hosted for media the next morning, he revealed his thinking about ISTE and its future. He spoke about increasing ISTE’s reach, how we need to impact and engage many more educators as we move forward. Among other points he made, three resonated particularly strongly for me: 1) that much needs to be done by ISTE in the area of Higher Education, in its role in teacher preparation, especially; 2) that the field needs to stress educator leadership, through things like ISTE’s PLNs (Professional Learning Networks), and 3) he expressed admiration for ISTE’s publications and stressed how that what’s needed is ‘telling the story’ of educational change through technology, something that I believe Thomas Friedman alluded to in his ground breaking book The World is Flat, opining that one of the new, crucial roles people must play in the emerging world is that of ‘Explainer’ and to that end, I’ll do my best with this article, Richard.

Happy
Speaking of Inspiration, I received a massive hit of it from Apple, a company that I don’t recall seeing at an ISTE Conference for years. Yes, they continued to be an important part of edtech all that time, no doubt, but it was so good to see them at the conference again—and with such sparkle! Perhaps the best part of this for me was that I didn’t see them releasing any new, paradigm setting devices, but rather, deepening our planetary body of best instructional practice with other sorts of refinements. As a longtime advocate of LEGO’s Student Robotics resources, I was pleased to see Apple’s Swift programming language applied to program them, something that I expect will strongly enrich efforts to teach coding and applications of it. I also got to see this approach to coding applied to a Parrot drone, making my alter ego (a dormant, twelve-year-old science nerd who hides inside of me), stand up and cheer.

But what truly got my pulse racing was the Apple group session I attended titled “The Power of Music for Learning: GarageBand and Tuniversity” in which, after not having worked with Garage Band for far too long (my bad, my bad, my most unfortunate bad!), I got a fresh look at this resource for making and recording your own music through a very engaging and easy to use graphic interface. This was part of an introduction to some of the magic of Tuniversity, a new education company co-founded by Pharrell Williams, dedicated to reinvigorating music education using iPad.

As everyone on the planet knows, Pharrell Williams is the composer, singer, and music video star of the Grammy Award winning song, ”Happy” — which coincidentally is the basis of Tuniversity’s first book, “Learn Pharrell Williams’ Happy A Modern Method for Writing, Recording, and Producing Music” — an instructional resource that uses audio, video, and technology tools (including Garage Band) to analyze the song “Happy” — helping students learn creative skills of music making and production.
What come across impactfully, is that this is an effort to re-establish Music (and by extension, Arts) Education as a vibrant, high-engagement, tech-driven phenomenon to recapture the hearts and minds of young people everywhere. It certainly captured mine! I actually started out my career in education (please don’t ask me how long ago!) as an arts educator, and I could see from the get-go that this is the real deal, one of those rare chemistry blends of the right insight, personalities, and resources to actually bring something crucial back from the brink.

For me the centerpiece was a video recorded especially for this session, in which Pharrell speaks directly to educators, explaining his passion for music and commitment to what he feels is a new sort of education in which students are brought into the process of making music with digital resources. Afterward, I briefly chatted one-on-one with Brent, one of the book’s authors and Pharrell’s guitarist for many years. I was much impressed with the level of expertise and commitment that he and his partners bring to this effort. I pretty much floated out of the room.

MicrosoftMicrosoft, too, had a great presence at the conference. Both upstairs in its designated area for giving demos and PD sessions, many of which were well attended with folks lining up and waiting to get a look at Microsoft’s ideas and offerings. Also, out on the exhibit floor, where some very exciting Microsoft Partners APPs were on view, a variety of ways to “Spark Creativity” — including different approaches to student robotics — vied for attention. One that caught mine was the Virtual Robotics Toolkit. Throughout the conference, Microsoft had a great deal to share with today’s forward thinking educators; a few session examples were: Minecraft Education Edition with Code Builder; Office 365 for Authentic Assessments; and Creating engaging projects and presentations with Sway (MS presentation resource).
Richard Langford, a Microsoft Senior Education and Solutions Specialist at the conference, graciously gave me a bit of a Microsoft education overview, sitting with me for a lengthy conversation in which he fully grabbed my attention.

Beyond any of the many things that MS does to contribute to the educational landscape and possibilities horizon, he gave me some great “ah ha’s” that I left the conference with. By that, I mean an understanding of how one of the really big providers sees things these days; how its posture and culture have been shaped by, and is shaping — the landscape of edtech. He explained that today’s company reflects a change in which MS has come to see education as an inseparable, major element in its vision and mission — and keeps it absolutely up front in all the things it does. Products are conceived with education in mind, not adapted for education later on. Further, many resources are developed with school needs paramount in consideration, so that resources like OneNote can interface with the Student Information Systems when schools use popular platforms like Schoology or Edmodo. The experience feels to local level educators as seamless and easy; no disincentives, like labor-intensive class setups.

Saving time for teachers, Richard related, is a very high priority for Microsoft and it’s a way that MS is making a difference: “We value teachers. We’re not focused on replacing teachers in any way. What we want to do is empower them to teach” —and from where I view it all, I think that’s a great position to take.

One of the things I took away from this conversation and others I had with representatives from the big providers is that they seem to be focused on maintaining their own vision of what the world of education needs. It’s not a situation of who will compete best in an already defined and limited field of possibilities. While a degree of competition is inevitable, what I’m seeing more of is each provider bringing its own special body of offerings to a malleable market. I particularly appreciate this because, where we’ve been headed, and where I think we’ve already landed, is a new world in which the universe of personalized resources and approaches to use them is ever changing. The world of standardized, hardcopy resources in which consumers had just a handful of viable choices is receding into the far distance. As was explained to me, if the focus is on what teachers want to do to provide students with a great learning experience, then there will be opportunities for providers who cater to that. As Richard put it to me, he and his colleagues frown on “Bake Offs” — in other words, situations in which everyone comes to the market with more or less the same cupcakes or cookies (my analogy), leaving the customer to compare price or size or minor flavor enhancements. We are looking at a market, I think, in which there are more and better choices, much more variety and personalization through response to district, school, teacher, and student needs. Further, astute providers seem to have come to the conclusion that today’s winner may be tomorrow’s partner; it’s a fluid and fertile field to be involved in, and there is so much growth on the near horizon.

Googling Along
At the very large and strategically placed Google exhibit, I decided to sit down among a group of teachers who finally had a chance to test drive Google Classroom and see for themselves what all the buzz is about this resource, described by GOOGLE as “mission control” for teachers, connecting the class and enabling them to track student progress. The effect on those next to me struggling to wrap their already overstuffed minds around this “digital learning platform” was impressive. I bore witness to their maiden voyage at the helm of a popular solution to that great problem for teachers to have: how to manage students, as they guide them through a plethora of assignments, content, tools and resources. Sparks were flying faster than fingers on keyboards as the realization that the overwhelm of herding digital cats could now be easily side stepped on the way to far better teaching and learning. It was another of the many glimpses I got into just how sophisticated edtech has become — how ready it is to transform education.

Surrounding the GOOGLE Classroom area were small tables at which various partners’ resources were highlighted. I stopped by the table manned by Piotr Sliwinski (my apologies, Piotr, for not having a Polish keyboard to do justice to your name). Like offerings at the other tables, this one featured an exciting resource titled, Explain Everything (offered through the Google Creative Bundle for Chromebooks), a versatile interactive whiteboard app that can be used for sharing knowledge, building understanding, personal productivity, and much more. As the author of a recent ISTE book on Student Creativity, I quickly recognized here a tool to facilitate and spark thinking and expression as well as to capture, communicate, and collaborate around it. I very much hope that today’s kids have a glimmer of understanding about how the possibilities of what one can do in school have been expanded by technology. Well, actually, as someone who was a classroom teacher for nearly two decades, I won’t get my hopes on that one up too far—just let them use all this, and make some magic with it!

Gamify the Classroom
I reconnected with Shawn and Devin (Young) of Classcraft, an increasingly popular “gamification” platform. Classcraft is one of a small group of absolutely paradigm-shifting resources that young educators are adopting passionately. Far beyond simply introducing gaming into one’s teaching practice, it enables teachers and students to literally “Gamify the Classroom,” and I love the audacity of deconstructing the structure of traditional school organization for instruction and recontextualizing it this way to render a highly relevant, re-conceived school experience that is easy to view as an improvement.

As I chatted with Devin, one of the two brothers who conceived and developed Classcraft, he explained to me that much of his attention these days is on further developing and refining those aspects of the resource that enable teachers to easily access Classcraft in concert with their standard LMS or digital learning platform; to have student performance information that it generates be part and parcel of a teacher’s overall student data use, and for all of this to work across platforms in a seamless, interoperable, and above all, highly user-friendly context and experience.

Today’s educators are well equipped to provide a compelling and effective learning experience to their students.

Such work makes resources like Classcraft suitable and appealing for big providers like Microsoft and Google, increasing the body of resources they can stand behind and offer to tech-consuming educators, without having to develop or acquire them directly. And from the perspective of those small developers, often young people who are passionate and astute about the ways technology-driven resources can transform education, this approach allows them independence while assuring much greater reach and access to the audience they want to address. Looks like edtech has entered another favorable period of win-win-win!

My Own Panel
Heading up ISTE’s Literacy Education PLN (Professional Learning Network), I, and my network colleagues, had the privilege of inviting some of the very most promising digital resource providers, currently, to join us in a panel presentation to explain their offerings to ISTE members. As always, this session was full and much appreciated. Small wonder as what we put together was truly a powerhouse group of resources. We fortunately managed to present the following groups in one setting in just one short hour of concentrated focus on how technology is positively transforming what we see as one of the very most important missions of edtech, Literacy Learning. With this small aggregation of resources, much of it free, today’s educators are well equipped to provide a compelling and effective learning experience to their students. The body of resources our group highlighted this year included (I’ll let quotes from their respective websites speak for them):
Newsela – “When textbooks dream, they dream of Newsela – Join our community of 1,300,000 Newsela educators and counting.” This resource provides relevant, up to date content for students.
Listenwise – “The Power of Listening – Listening comprehension advances literacy and learning for all students.”
Quizlet – “Simple tools for learning anything. Search millions of study sets or create your own. Improve your grades by studying with flashcards, games and more.”
Discovery Education – “Transforming Teaching & Learning. We ignite student curiosity and inspire educators to reimagine learning with award-winning digital content and powerful professional development.”
I managed to sit with Stephen Wakefield of Discovery Education later to discuss the powerful content that Discovery continues to provide through both its Techbook (think textbook reconceived as a digital resource for 21^st Century learning) and Streaming video collection. Just as I appreciate Tuniversity coming from the world of entertainment to develop classroom resources, the same can be said about Discovery (is it Shark Week, yet?) being the origin of Discovery Education’s high motivation content for learners. We’ve fully arrived at a point in education’s evolution that reflects the new reality of the availability of highly motivating, “just right” content … in abundance. And it’s provided in ways that make distributing it to students easy and learner-friendly. Discovery offers both the digital send-up of the classic textbook, and a powerful collection of videos as it demonstrates to today’s learners just how interesting content can be.

Technology is About Reading Books
I stopped by the Follett booth to see what they were offering this year. Glad I did. Any notion that technology is doing anything other than encouraging and supporting kids to fully understand and commit to the richness of books needs (IMHO) to be tempered by a look at Follett’s Lightbox, a fully interactive, multidimensional, supplemental solution for pre K-12 educators looking to improve engagement and literacy skills. There’s a great deal here, including classic novels and interactive Lightbox titles, as well as activities and assessments. But while students using this resource are very likely to learn to understand and value books, they are doing so in a truly 21^st-century way. The digital interface they are presented with offers them ways to work with books that allow them to focus on things that they need and appreciate as they do so; direct access to things like audio, video, web links, slideshows, maps, and on and on. This, I think, is a rich, up-to-date, relevant approach to literacy instruction.

Hey, I’m always one to boldly go looking for some excitement. And out there on one of the leading edges of edtech, I found some.

The Leading Edge
Hey, I’m always one to boldly go looking for some excitement. And out there on one of the leading edges of edtech, I found some when I spoke with the folks from Voyager Sopris who gave me a view of what’s happening on the edtech event horizon, the already-here future of education. This is the realm of Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning applied to teaching and learning.

Seriously, I enjoyed wrapping my mind around this group’s ‘Velocity‘ solution, one of the more sophisticated applications of the power of technology to the eternal work and joy of teaching and learning I’ve seen.

Is edtech ready to redefine what’s possible in education? I don’t think that there’s any hyperbole in citing Velocity as proof that what was inconceivable a short while ago is already in implementation.
In Velocity we see a literacy intervention resource that is ‘adaptive’ in a sense of that word that I feel is authentic and genuine. At the heart of Velocity is an engine that learns how the student learns best. One result of its work is the creation of the content needed by the student to learn, content created on the fly as the student uses it. However, built into the student experience is reward for productive struggle, something that rings true to me. Teachers are informed in real time where each student is at in the learning process.
Throughout the conference, I heard repeated the concept of personalized learning. And here, it seems to me, we have an item that has taken aim at offering the sort of personalized learning that our struggling learners need badly; in literacy learning, a very crucial area of the curriculum, at that.
Velocity appears to be an important step forward, adaptive learning that doesn’t call up items from fixed, predicted paths, but rather accounts for thousands of variables and that works with the student to produce the unique way forward through the learning experience that he or she needs. Scaffolds and supports, hints and multi sensory variations are provided to students who are engaged through their various dimensions as learners.

On the Exhibition Floor
My initial disappointment at the state of the exhibition floor soon mellowed into appreciation for what I take as a clear indication of growth of the field. By that I mean that as someone who came to edtech from being a classroom teacher, I always look for instructional resources when I venture out into the exhibit and this year the first thing that struck me was the amount of hardware and infrastructure oriented items on display. And while I don’t feel the need to investigate those much, the sheer number does show that there will be much more in our schools soon on which students and teachers will run all of the instructional stuff that accompanied the equipment I saw. By the way, I was fascinated to see Chinese companies in the house. I spoke with Mr. Chen, of Shenshen Yue Jiang Technology, provider of DOBOT education materials, which impressed me as combining good features of robotics, 3D printers, and maker resources—good stuff!
As I ricocheted from one booth to the next, I found some items that I’d like to share:

Pie Top – Pie Top was one bit of hardware that intoxicated me with that variety of EdTech Caffeine for the tired school that I’ve come to rely on ISTE for. Pie Top is a kit-oriented, build-your-own connected device item for kids that makes use of the now near ubiquitous Raspberry Pie processor at its core. The coolness factor on this one is undeniable.
Tiggly – Tiggly is one of those hybrid items that cross over between educational toy and full-press instructional resource. Kids pick up real, palpable shapes (think instructional manipulates of the past) that, when pressed to the screen of an iPad (or a Chrome, Android, or Kindle device), activate the digital magic inside. Young learners become immersed in a rich learning environment in which the real world interacts with the digital world, both coalescing into a learning experience guaranteed to engage and provide stimulation and cognitive supports as they play, work, and learn their way to literacy and numeracy. In my mind, a good example of how technology-supported learning has got to offer something more and better than what came before.
FreshGrade – FreshGrade is a digital portfolio and grade book resource guaranteed to make portfolio/authentic assessment easy. Kids share their work through a digital portfolio—one more example of how technology, the great enabler, has made a long-held goal of progressive educators, portfolio assessment, doable and within the grasp of the average teacher and class.
Parrot – So great to see Parrot drones join robotics and other related resources to provide a context and platform for coding and STEM efforts.

Start Up Pavilion
Always inspiring are the offerings at the Startup Pavilion where, at little mini booths, new hopefuls entering the field share their vision for how they are expanding the envelope of edtech possibilities. There were many there this year. I visited quickly with a few notables:
BITSBOX: coding projects for kids. With Bitsbox, children as young as six years old learn to program by creating fun apps that work on computers and gadgets like iPads and Android tablets. The Bitsbox.com website provides each child with a virtual tablet and a place to type their code. The experience starts with lots of guidance, first showing learners exactly what to type, then quickly encouraging them to modify and expand their apps by typing in new commands.
Video Collaboratory. Former dancer and choreographer Sybil Huskey was sitting there with her colleague Vikash Singh demoing the very interesting Video Collaboratory, a web-based application designed for group collaboration around video documents. Beyond simply viewing video, the Collaboratory is equipped to allow students to mark up, analyze and discuss videos. As the old saying goes, “Find a need and fill it!” and I think these folks have done just that. Online learning gets richer all the time.
Common Lit. CommonLit delivers high-quality, free instructional materials to support literacy development for students in grades 5-12. Resources are: flexible; research-based; aligned to the Common Core State Standards; created by teachers, for teachers. And oh, they are free!
Poster Sessions
While my head was wrapped firmly around the things mentioned above, my heart was warmed, as it always is, in the playgrounds and poster session areas where real educators and real students show what they do. A few items that took me by the heart and wouldn’t let go were:
Instituto Rosedal Lomas in Mexico City’s project. Student Renata Susunaga showed me how the Physics students there created a data analysis project in which they used Facebook as a data gathering engine, later analyzing and representing findings in large graphics. I thought appropriating a ubiquitous and data sensitive resource like Facebook was clever and effective, just the sort of thing today’s kids benefit from.
Guiding Reluctant Teachers Through the Shallow End of the Technology Pool. Presenter Melissa Henning showed those of us gathered around her presentation table a raft of simple ‘win over those reluctant teachers’ activities, all of which use free and hyper user-friendly, web-based resources. Just the right touch for the difficult, but essential, job this approach takes aim at.
Misty Simpson and Wendy Boatright’s session, “Cross-Curricular Centers to promote Creativity and Engagement” in which they explain why Learning centers are a great way to inspire and engage students to be creative with technology; all while meeting the standards and learning objectives. They showed how they integrate Social Studies and ELA centers with vocabulary, journals, digital stories, brochures and more, employing the powerful WIXIE resource from Tech4Learning.
And, of course, there was more—so much more!

One of the wonderful things about attending the conference is the near certainty that you will cross paths with respected colleagues and friends who’ve traveled this path with you over the years.

Ubiquitous, Necessary, and Invisible
One of the wonderful things about attending the conference is the near certainty that you will cross paths with respected colleagues and friends who’ve traveled this path with you over the years. I was happy to spend a little time with Chris Lehman, founding principal of the Science Leadership Academy, a nationally prominent school located in Philadelphia and a noted education innovator. I asked him for an impression of the conference and he explained that he was excited by how many people he heard were really talking about school reform and educational change, not just about specific technology items.

Reacting to my reflection that technology now dominates best practices in teaching and learning, Chris reminded me of the old truism that “school technology should be like oxygen; ubiquitous, necessary, and invisible.” Astute, as was his thought that we don’t need to be talking about technology so much; it just needs to be part of what we do.

This I take as more confirmation that the shift from the traditional classroom to digital learning environment is already well in effect. While far from complete, there is already much ubiquity in technology in our schools, and the presence of so many vendors in the exhibition hall indicates that this is increasing rapidly. And now, I agree, it’s time to stop talking about the digital platform for learning that’s been a quarter century plus in the making, and take further charge of it and further use it for the transformation in education that we now have the power to bring about.

Edtech is like the kid who’s all grown up, but still sees himself as ‘Junior.’ And, of course, there is much more growing and maturing to be done—but let’s take a good look in the mirror, shall we? Edtech is what’s happening in education. It’s education’s strongest suit, the only one that can truly transform ‘Vanilla Ed’ to better prepare today’s kids for the era they are learning to learn in, and in which they will live and prosper. This is such an important moment and I can’t think of any place more appropriate for it to have declared and revealed itself than at ISTE 2017. I’m proud to be a member!
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In addition to being a member of ISTE, Mark Gura is an Advisory Board Member and Contributing Editor of EdTech Digest and the author of the recently released book, Make, Learn, Succeed: Building a Culture of Creativity in Your School published by ISTE (International Society for Technology in Education). Mark will be serving as a judge for the 2018 EdTech Awards—recognizing edtech’s best and brightest innovators, leaders, and trendsetters (click here for an entry form).

Lighting The Fire