Computational Thinking: A Digital Age Skill for EVERYONE

I just came across this video that really makes me feel good about where we’re going with things on our campus. I just had to share.

Rethinking How Students Learn: Howard Gardner

One mind is not enough. It takes five minds to be successful.

This according to Howard Gardner, author of many books, including Five Minds for the Future. Gardner was selected to write the first chapter of 21st Century Skills: Rethinking How Students Learn. I found his comments very interesting, and look forward to reading his books in the not-to-distant future. Here are some of the stand-out points I gathered from this selection.

How can we create well-rounded citizens of the future? Howard Gardner says we can give them Five Minds.

Gardner says that there are five minds that educators should strive to cultivate in the future:

1. The Disciplined Mind
2. The Synthesizing Mind
3. The Creating Mind
4. The Respectful Mind
5. The Ethical Mind

The Disciplined Mind. Gardner states that there are two connotations in play regarding this mind. There is discipline, as in art, craft, scholarly pursuit, or profession. And then there is discipline, referring to a continuation of practice and hard work to remain at the top of one’s game. Interestingly, he stresses four disciplines for precollegiate institutions to focus on: math, science, history, and at least one art form. It’s not about mastering the content of these disciplines, but rather the skills. Can you think like a scientist? Do you analyze like a historian? Can you appreciate fine art? Gardner says that in previous times, mastery and refinement of a single discipline may have sufficed; however, in today’s world, “mastery of more than one discipline is at a premium.” Bottom line: We must help our students learn to think in different ways.

The Synthesizing Mind. In the Age of Info-whelm, our students are bombarded by information 24/7. As Gardner says, “Shrewd triage becomes an imperative.” Those who develop a synthesizing mind will rise to the top. Synthesizing is not a one-time process according to Gardner; “new information must be acquired, probed, evaluated, followed up with, or sidelined…there is constant reflection and tinkering.” Good synthesizers always keep an eye on the big picture while securing and arranging the smaller details in useful ways; “one must know what works for himself and for those who make use of his synthesis.” Bottom line: We must help our students learn to make use of information and media in meaningful ways.

The Creating Mind. In order to truly acquire a creating mind, one must first develop an adequate level of disciplinary mastery and some capacity to synthesize. Gardner states, “You can’t think outside the box unless you have a box.” Creators must take risks, tackle the unknown, fail, and then fearlessly try again. Creators are motivated by, and keep their eyes on, the prize. Educators must pose challenges, obstacles, and boulders to their students. According to Gardner, if the Disciplined Mind involves depth and the Synthesizing Mind entails breadth, the Creating Mind features stretch. Bottom line: We must help our students learn constructively and in innovative ways, to solve never before seen problems.

The Respectful Mind. Gardner says, this mind “starts with an assumption that diversity is positive and the world would be a better place if individuals sought to respect one another.” Bottom line: We must help our students appreciate the ideas, methods, culture, and values of others in the world.

The Ethical Mind. According to Gardner, a person who has an ethical mind can think of himself or herself abstractly and ask questions about their own quality of life. What kind of worker do I want to be? What kind of citizen am I? What would the world be like if everyone too the stance I do? What happens as a result of my decisions or actions? Bottom line: We need to teach our kids to think abstractly, make predictions about outcomes, and weigh their options against what they know is right or wrong.

In conclusion, Gardner names the Synthesizing Mind as the most important for the 21st century. He goes on to states that integration of all five minds is more likely to occur, and more quickly, when role models – parents, teachers, coaches – regularly display aspects of discipline, synthesis, creation, respect, and ethics.

The (Ultimate) Bottom Line: Show your students how you use all five of your minds.

a fly tech tool in the classroom: Shutterfly.com

My favorite tool I have used by far has been Shutterfly. Shutterfly is used in many ways! Primarily for Kindergarten, it is used by parents more than the students. Aside from e-mail, Shutterfly is my line of communication with parents. Updated weekly, our Shutterfly class website contains calendars, photos, videos, curriculum, important info/forms, and general info about our classroom and Lower School as a whole. This password protected site has been invaluable in keeping parents completely connected with what is happening in the classroom.

The kids love taking pictures in class, so it is the best way for me to share them with their families. Through Shutterfly, you can order prints or photo books of the pictures you love! (fees apply via Shutterfly.com) I often receive emails raving about the website and how wonderful it is to get photo and video updates of our classroom!

One of my favorite features, drum roll please….SIGN-UP SHEETS! That’s right, sign-up sheets online. It’s amazing. You don’t have to worry about posting forms outside your door or for parents to find time to sign up for various opportunities in a timely manner. Parents log-in with their own email and have complete access to sign up for volunteer opportunities, conferences, etc whenever they want! I love it and so do the parents!

You can design your own class website however it suits you best. You can put as little or as much information on it. For those that don’t need a website for communicating with parents, it is a great website for kids to design their own websites. Are you a history teacher? Let’s say you have a student studying WWII. He or she could design a [free] website displaying what is learned! Within the website, he or she could have different tabs or pages titled: important battles, key figures, timelines, causes and outcomes, military strategies, etc. Within each section he/she can layout information in a variety of ways. Not to mention, other students could log-in and give feedback on what has been posted. He/she could also upload photos to help share the information.

As far as I can see, there are endless possibilities with Shutterfly! It is a free website, however, should you choose to upgrade, there is a fee good for one year. This gives you more memory storage for video uploads, etc.

What a great way to exemplify the fluencies of 21st century learning…creatively displaying information in such a way that engages others, sparks feedback potential, and a safe and educational way to post info on the internet. Oh the possibilities!

Shutterfly, you get an A+ from our Kindergarten class!

thinking outside the cube: creative fluency

My kindergartners have been exploring patterns. Patterns were introduced in a variety of ways, one of which was using uni-fix cubes. After my students came to the conclusion that a pattern is something that repeats over and over again, they were able to identify a pattern (for example with 2 colors) when they see one. Being able to create a pattern was a whole new experience. My students used their red and blue cubes to design a pattern. Quickly they discovered alternating colors in an “ABAB” pattern was the answer to creating a pattern. Until, a new question came up: “How many patterns can you make with 2 colors?”

You could almost see their minds spinning! Many kids wanted to give up and say there is nothing more they could do. A few kids thought could switch their pattern and alternate the 2 colors in the other order, which technically is a new pattern. Then, one of my thinkers had an idea! I heard him say “I can use 2 reds!” This idea started to catch on and those cubes got to moving! I encouraged my students to “record” their patterns on their paper so they wouldn’t forget the ideas they’ve created.

Creative Fluency is “the process by which artistic proficiency adds meaning through design, art and storytelling.” I’m going to stretch it and say designing with cubes is an art form!

Here’s where I feel the creative thinking really stepped in. One of my students noticed that the American Flag in our classroom has a pattern: red and white stripes. I asked, “Do any of you think there could be more patterns hiding in our room?” My students were so excited to find out. The ideas started flowing: our blue and yellow tile is layed in a pattern, the days of the week repeat over and over on our calendar, the row of “5s” on our 100s chart looks like a pattern, my shirt has stripes, the timer beeps in a pattern… The list went on and on! One girls even said, “Everyday is a pattern! You know, the sun and moon keep switching places over and over again!” Something that really struck me, was that my kids didn’t just notice color patterns, they noticed sound patterns and patterns related to their lives. This was a fun extension to patterning.

To me, creative fluency is being able to “think outside the box” because when you can think differently and on your own, you can take ownership of your ideas and creations. I felt that my students showed a sense of creative fluency with this because they did not just need the initial red and blue cubes. When we out to recess, they were on the look out for outdoor patterns. While some kids noticed color patterns on the “big toy”, other kids picked up leaves and put them in a pattern. It all works for me! All I did was let them explore their interest in patterns and facilitate the discussions. Certainly for all ages, and most definitely in Kindergarten, I feel it is crucial to allow kids to think on their own, even when it sounds silly, and let them go as far as they can.

This kind of thinking will hopefully turn over into the creative thinking for problem-solving. One of students last week couldn’t seal an envelope, when he saw that my tape dispenser did not have tape, he went and found a sticker to seal the envelope. I found that to be very creative thinking and he didn’t even ask for my help on how to solve his problem. My hope is that all of my students will develop this kind of thinking.

Out of Our Minds: Standards & Creativity

I just finished reading Ken Robinson’s Out of Our Minds: Learning to be Creative. The book definitely lived up to my expectations. As I was reading I’ve been putting post-its when something jumped out at me. I’ve got about 40 post-it’s on everything from creativity, 21^st century learning, world history, & economics. His specific, but meandering style makes it hard to summarize his complex tapestry into a “nut shell.”

One of his threads that I was most interested in was how we use standards in education. In an era where NCLB can make or break schools, and students & parents are willing to pay thousands of dollars for ACT prep classes I don’t think many would disagree with how important tests/standards have become. Oftentimes policy makers and even educational leaders can be very shallow. I cringe when I hear leaders promote ‘raising standards.’ Robinson seems to agree:

“standards should be high….There is not much point in lowering them.”          -p. #50

As Robinson points out, the more difficult questions are how do we chose good standards, what policies & teaching methods will actually help students reach them and how do we know when students meet standards? Instead of approaching standards as some sort of mythical silver bullet, Robinson takes a more objective approach. While standards will certainly be a component of 21^st century learning, their current negative effects almost outweigh their value.

As science person, I obviously value the sort of reasoning, logic, & objective knowledge that standards and testing tend to emphasize. As a teacher though, the “so-called ‘soft skills’…[including] being able to understand and express personal feelings; being able to get along with other people, to communicate clearly and with empathy for the listener” (p. #175) are no less important to me. The unintentional damage standards have done to the arts & extra curricular actives is well known. I don’t believe education is a zero sum game. For students to understand physics doesn’t require they give up theater.

As Robinson points out, there’s no more reason we can’t be building interpersonal skills and creatively in physics as mathematical reasoning in art. Unfortunately, physics has this reputation for being a rule-book laden algorithmic nightmare. Nothing could be further from the truth. Even when there is only one correct answer to a question in physics (which is often not the case) there are always at least 5 unique ways to reach it. One of the standards I hope my students reach is seeing physics not as an equation list, but as an elegant puzzle.

Digital Tools Make for Creative Students

This is both a follow up to my creative fluency lesson from a few weeks ago and an introduction to some new digital tools we’ve been using this week to translate our written ideas into the visual through websites and movies.

First of all, let me just say that as we progressed through the written portion of the utopia assignment, more and more students started to take ownership and come to me with their own ideas of how they could add creativity. One student (usually quiet and reluctant to participate) asked if instead of writing a journal entry as the assignment asked, he could write a series of twitter posts showing what a day in the life of a community member was like. He made the very valid argument that nowadays, people don’t write in journals or diaries, they share their lives in 120 character soundbites posted live throughout the day. This was exactly the kind of creativity and initiative I was hoping for.  Other students helped illustrate the kind of thought process I was hoping a creative assignment would solicit. One student, struggling to write the rules for his community, realized that if he wanted to allow his people to be completely free, they could end up doing something dangerous. This led to a discussion of what are different kinds of  freedom (freedom from or freedom to)and how do we balance limitations and freedoms in a society. Another student later in the week, while trying to write her declaration of independence, commented that the founding fathers of the US had a really hard job because she was tempted to just make herself dictator but realized she couldn’t do that if she really said she believed in equality. These represent the kind of “aha!” moments that I love to watch my students experience, especially when it doesn’t come from me preaching at them.

The next step in our Creative Fluency project was to add some technology. We did this in a couple of ways: First, using a very easy to navigate website designer at www.weebly.com, my freshmen English students began creating websites to showcase the utopias they wrote about earlier. The goals here were to not only get them to showcase their ideas through a different media, but also learn how to problem solve as they encounter the kinds of challenges (How do I make this look like that?  How do I get X to do Y? Why won’t this work!?) that every new digital tool they every attempt to try the first time will present them. Through weebly, students were able to create blogs and community forums to show what life is like for the members of their utopia and how they interact, they can show what their community would look like by creating photo albums (using photos found on www.creativecommons.org–another lesson in copyright laws thrown in just for fun!), and add other pages that detailed community rules and how the community got started.

Then, just to add a little spice to the assignment, we also created movies using the moviemaker at www.xtranormal.com. Again, this is another very user friendly site that allows kids to choose a variety of animated characters, voices, camera angles, gestures, settings, and sound effects to create a monologue or a dialogue. Students had the option of taking their written journal entries and transforming them into video diaries, or take their written transcript of a townhall meeting and translate into a dialogue between two “actors”. These movies are then published to youtube and posted on their weebly website to enhance the reality of their utopias.

As we were working on this, another student told me about Minecraft and how he could create a 3D image of what his utopia looked like, take a video of it, and place it on his website.  Another student wanted to act out a video, post it to Youtube, and download that to his website. Other students went above and beyond by creating national anthems for their utopia or welcome videos inviting new members to take a tour and meet the founder. Keep in mind, none of my students knew how to use weebly or xtranormal before we started. In fact, I would argue that I have a good number of students who struggle with simple copy and paste commands and don’t know basic terms like “browser” and “desktop”. But those that did know helped their struggling classmates, I learned from them just as they learned from me and others, and in the end all of us walked away with more skills than we started with.  That to me is the beauty of trying new digital tools with my students. Yes, there were plenty of places to trip along the way, but the best lessons come through the journey itself (detours and all), not just upon arrival at an end destination.

Creative Fluency

from http://www.fluency21.com/fluencies.cfm:  “Creative Fluency is the process by which artistic proficiency adds meaning through design, art and storytelling. It regards form in addition to function, and the principles of innovative design combined with a quality functioning product.Creative Fluency extends beyond visual creative skills, to using the imagination to create stories, a practice which is in demand in many facets of today’s economy. It is widely regarded by many successful industries that creative minds come up with creative solutions.There is tremendous value in the artistic creation of items in order that they may transcend mere functionality.”

So today I introduced my students to their creative project for the semester: Build Your Own Utopia. I thought this would be something fun for them–a chance to flex their imagination muscles but still demonstrate an understanding of the ideas we’ve been discussing all semester long. Yet I heard over and over again from students: “This is HARD!” or “This requires me to think!” (insert shocked expression). The assumption on their part was that something creative should be easy and thoughtless. Maybe one way of understanding this is by looking at the difference between imagination and creativity.

Oklahoma‘s recent National Creativity World Forum 2011 (www. stateofcreativity.com), explains on their website that “ Imagination is the capacity to conceive of what is not yet present or manifest. Creativity is imagination applied (“imagination at work”) to do or make something that flows from the prior capacity to conceive of the new.” My students have imagination (they can come up quickly with some off the wall zany idea never heard of before), but when it comes to applying that imagination (creativity) they realize that its not enough to just come up with an idea, it has to be made meaningful and requires a lot of problem solving that they didn’t anticipate.

I’ll let you know how it goes.

Patient Problem Solvers

This TED talk about alternatives to “plug-and-chug” math & physics is very neat. Dan Meyer shows how easy it is to transform boring and shallow textbook problems into engaging real world dilemmas. His ideas are practical, creative, and obviously effective. When I’ve attempted problems like this it’s not always clean, but my students get super excited and I feel like it has been very effective. The 10 minute clip is well worth it for any math or science teacher!