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Will Richardson (2008) states that networking is a new type of literacy that all students will need to succeed in a global economy. “In the Web 2.0 world, self-directed learners must be adept at building and sustaining networks”.

Richardson suggests that younger students need to see their teachers engaging experts in synchronous or asynchronous online conversations about content, and they need to begin to practice intelligently and appropriately sharing work with global audiences. Middle school students should be engaged in the process of cooperating and collaborating with others outside the classroom around their shared passions, just as they have seen their teachers do. And older students should be engaging in the hard work of what Shirky (2008) calls "collective action," sharing responsibility and outcomes in doing real work for real purposes for real audiences online.

The Internet can provide Virtual Learning Communities providing an environment for people to connect with and learn from others through collaboratively participating in the construction of new knowledge.
A great tool for connecting with experts for the Internet is Skype. Skype will let you text chat or video or voice conference with others for free over the Internet.

"Knowing is literally something which we do."-- John Dewey

Shana Oliver (2011), the school's academic facilitator, of Cochrane Collegiate Academy, in Charlotte, North Carolina feels that there should be limited lecture time in a class period. After 12-15 minutes of lecturing, you should engage your students in some type of activity, even if it's for only a few minutes. In her experience, students can maintain their attention span only for the number of minutes equal to their age plus two or three, so the lecture must be chunked. When that amount of time has elapsed, teachers must stop and have students do something different. Once students have completed a two- or three-minute activity, the teacher can go back to lecturing for another chunk of time. For example a student can talk to their neighbor, draw a picture, write a few sentences that summarize or describe the lecture, finish an example problem, or get in a discussion with their group.

ePals allows schools to connect on international projects through Safely connect, collaborate and learn using our leading protected email and blog solutions for schools and districts.

The Buck Institute has great resources for project based learning.

The web makes it easier for students to have authentic audiences to share their work. The audience can be their peers or even a worldwide audience.

Blogging is a great way to provide an authentic audience for students. In her blog post, Ten Steps to  better student engagement, Tristan de Frondeville (2009) suggest that you have student encourage and  focus their writing with a prompt, such as "The Muddiest Point and the Clearest Point: What was most
confusing about the work you did today, and what new thing was the most clear?" Use this approach to  guide future lessons and activities. Consider writing responses to student journal entries in order to carry on a conversation with students about their work.

Another great way to provide students with relevant real world projects is by having them collect and share real world data sets. The Bucket Buddies Project or Journey North are great examples of this.

Today’s learners are highly visual learners, preferring to process pictures, sounds, and video rather than  text (Hart, 2008). Combining both audio and visual learning tools in the classroom has proven to  increase student engagement because it adds variety to the learning environment (Lanley, 2011).

There are a number of tools that make it easy for you to add video to your lessons. Examples include Screener, Xtranormal, and Voki are Web 2.0 tools that make it easy to create and embed a video into a lesson.

iTunes also has tons of free content available for education that can be used to spice up a lesson.

It is also important to remember that today’s learners have short attention spans. They prefer bite-sited chunks of content.

 The more students are engaged in their work, the better they like school and the more they succeed. Studies show students become more disengaged from school as they progress from elementary to middle to high school. By high school as many as 40% to 60% of students become chronically disengaged from school. This statistic does not include students who have dropped out and is true across urban, suburban, and rural school districts. Studies have found that student engagement at the classroom level has found it to be a positive predictor of desirable outcomes: graduation rates, grades, satisfaction with school regardless of socioeconomic status.

Today's students use digital media in ways that are very different than how we do. They want to use Web 2.0 technology and the social and collaborative approaches that they bring in all aspects of their life including learning.  Over the next few weeks I will be sharing ten strategies educators can use to improve student engagement in their classrooms with the use of technology.

This question came up in a recent phone conversation. As districts move toward more blended, hybrid, online and flipped classroom models of instruction old models of how students meet graduation requirements really don’t fit anymore.

So for example, in the old model schools have to ensure that students have a certain number of face-to-face hours to meet graduation requirements. School administrators are asking the question of how does this translate to blended, hybrid and online courses. The answer they receive is you need to count the number of instructional hours, but it can’t be hours doing homework.

In traditional face-to-face classrooms the division between homework and instruction was easier to define. Instruction was what happened in the physical classroom when the teacher was present guiding learning activities. Homework was what happens outside of the classroom when students do assigned activities without the instructor present and often in isolation of other students.

Technology is blurring the lines between homework and instruction. It allows students and teachers to communicate and engage with one another outside the physical boundaries of time and space.  So if a student posts to a discussion board the teacher has assigned students to do outside of class and other students comment to that students’ post and the teacher facilitates the discussion board by asking deeper questions and commenting on different postings is that homework or instruction? I would argue that it is both.

In online learning environments the role of the teacher often changes from what it traditionally has been in most face-to-face classrooms. In online learning environments the role of the teacher often becomes more of a learning facilitator and sometimes even a co-learner.  Learning is often more distributed between participants as they engage with one another to construct meaning together around a topic.  This is often not done in isolation. Even work such as a paper done in isolation is often posted for peer review or technology makes it easier for teachers to give feedback and students can go back and incorporate these comments into improving their work.

 Technology also makes real time formative assessment possible. Often students have access to their own data on a formative assessment and use this to decide what they will do next- go back and reread something, watch the lesson again online, practice in an online game or try again incorporating the feedback they received. When a student decides to take action to improve their learning is this homework or instruction? How do you measure an experience that is so individualized in terms of clock hours?

The flipped classroom model where students watch the teacher teach the lesson at home and then do their homework at school while the teacher is present to help answer questions and guide them completely reverses the whole notion of instruction and homework.

My hope is that the change in instructional methods toward more blended, hybrid, flipped and online learning models will lead to redefining graduation requirements. Instead of counting the number of “instructional hours” a student “receives” (as if they are a passive recipient in this process) I think graduation requirements will need to be measured by students demonstrating proficiency of standards. Technology makes this easier as well with new tools such as course completion tracking, individualized learning paths, and real time assessments.

This week I read Ben Johnson’s blog post “How to Check for Deeper Understanding and Engage All Students”.  The examples in his post are a good example of how important communication patterns in a classroom are. Examined closely communication patterns used by the teacher are a strong reflection of their pedagogy.

The lowest level of communication patterns are primarily teacher centered. The teacher will often ask fact based questions based on known answers. Typically this is done in a face-to-face setting where the teacher asks a question, students raise their hand, the teacher chooses a student to answer and then evaluates what to do next based on the answer.

Transformational levels of communication are when teachers act more as facilitators. Communication patterns are more two way and teacher and student can act as co-learners together. The teacher will often ask questions to challenge students in their thinking and they may jointly decide what steps to take next.

Technology, especially when students have ubiquitous access to the Internet, can disrupt traditional communication patterns where the teacher is seen as expert and controls most of the communication that occurs. It can be used to create distributive learning environments where knowledge between participants is shared. Technology makes it possible for students can interact with real experts beyond the walls of the classroom or even act and be seen as experts themselves in authentic environments. Technology also makes it possible for multiple streams of conversations to occur as opposed to the one student at a time method often used in traditional classrooms.

While technology enables new forms of communication patterns in classrooms, a shift in pedagogy must also occur to make this possible. Teachers have to be willing to allow conversations to become more student centered. They need to be willing to admit that they may not know the answer to a question a student poses and be up for becoming a co-learner to discover the answer together. They also need to have a strong understanding of the content they are teaching so they can challenge students thinking through expert questioning strategies.

I recently had a discussion with a group of district leaders on how we are really in the Middle Place in technology.

For many school districts they are between two paradigms for how we deploy technology. One foot is in the old paradigm of computer labs and the other is inching toward mobile environments.

We have one foot in the old paradigm of computer labs. Some of the strengths of this model are that labs were easier to maintain and are more secure. Some of the drawbacks are that the computers reside in a location and students go to the lab that teachers have signed-out. Inevitably the lab was constantly signed-out and teachers who were working on projects with students might monopolize labs for weeks at a time. Another problem was NWEA Maps testing which could mean that labs would not be available for weeks at a time.

For these reasons and the increase demand for technology and all of the promised affordances to education, many school districts are beginning to experiment with mobile computing. Often devices are less expensive allowing every student to have their own device 24/7. In these types of environments, more differentiation, personalized learning, real time formative assessment and online learning outside of the classroom become possible.

Districts are experimenting with how to deploy devices in a wide variety of ways from 1-to-1 computer initiatives where the district buys laptops for students, to netbooks, chrome books, iPads, Smart phones and more recently Bring Your Own Devices (BYOD).

The movement toward mobile devices means that how we support and deploy technology to our students is shifting.  One of the biggest shifts is in how IT staff spend their time.  Especially in BYOD initiatives, IT time, and expertise is shifting from supporting devices to supporting a strong wireless infrastructure to meet user demands. Another shift that will need to occur is the shift away from textbooks to digital content.  Mobile devices such as the iPad should not be seen as a replacement to the textbook or we’ve under utilized this resource.

Another shift that is occurring is the shift to the cloud. Using applications such as Google apps and learning management systems lowers the cost and makes it possible for everyone to have a device. It also becomes necessary in BYOD implementations as the common denominator between devices. This shift often first brought on by cost considerations and creating a non-platform specific place to store and access files has lead to another shift. A shift toward collaboration. Collaboration is killer in education because in addition to increased efficiency it often leads to authentic places to share work. This in turn often leads to increased student engagement.

It will be interesting to see how rapidly these shifts will continue in 2012. At the beginning of 2011 BYOD were fairly infrequent. At the close many districts are considering shifting toward making mobile devices toward students. I wonder if by the close of 2012 computer labs will be almost obsolete.