I've long held a ravenous appetite for learning how the brain works and how those capacities can be leveraged to help kids (and me) learn. I recently bought the owners manual. A few days back Jeff Utecht tweeted about a Google Talk by John Medina, authour of the book Brain Rules. John is blogging and sharing some great stuff.

Garr Renolds adapted some of the Brain Rules for presentations. As I've blogged earlier presenting information is something teachers do every day and we need to learn a lot more about how to do it more effectively. So, for my own future reference, and yours if you like, here is John Medina's Google talk, Garr's presentation, and a seemingly unrelated presentation by Dean Shareski whose K12 Online presentation on Design Matters continues to push my thinking every day. Look at how this presentation of Dean's adheres to many of John Medina's Brain Rules; and Dean hasn't even read John's book yet.

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In future posts I hope to share how what I'm learning from all this is making it's way into my classroom. I'd love to hear how others incorporate these ideas into their work as well; in education or elsewhere. When we share these ideas and applications, whether they work or not, it helps us all learn.

UPDATE

Dean referenced this video at the end of his presentation; it's well wortht the 4 minute look:

Chris and I were invited by Cheryl Prokopanko, along with six of our students, to participate in a panel presentation at Canada's first Pan-Canadian Interactive Literacy Forum.

Preparing for today led to a collaboration that involved introducing my students to Box.net, where we shared our evolving presentation slide decks in a space where we shared access, and several skype calls with Chris.

Cheryl opened the presentation with an overview of Manitoba's new Literacy in ICT curriculum continuum which has evolved over the last several years (next year is the first year implementation is required by all schools in the province). It began with this video ...

Then Cheryl introduced Chris and I and our students. Chris and I bookended the kids presentations. Chris made some opening remarks, I made some closing remarks (actually, it was an invitation). But the highlight of the entire event was the kids. They so rock! Watch and see ...

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... and it continues with my students, then me, here ...

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We ended off with a question and answer session (Podcast: 16.8 Mb, 27 min. 55 sec. Now available as a slideshow with photos from the presentation) which you may find interesting. Some of it is hard to hear but there are some really great moments; like when one of the grade 8 students explains texting to a 63 year old member of the audience.

When it was all over the kids were swarmed by people who wanted to chat with them and hear their thoughts. Chris and I hung back and just left them to soak up all the well deserved accolades they collected. Each kid spoke for about 5 minutes and each kid must have spent over 5 hours preparing for it; and it showed. Chris and I are so proud of them.

I think being able to understand how different people understand the same idea is essential to deep learning. That's why having mentors work with my students has been such a critical part of how I orchestrate their learning spaces; their blogs.

My classes have been enriched beyond measure by the thoughtful, and thought provoking, comments left my students by visitors to their blogs. Lani Ritter Hall (Ohio), Roland O'Daniel (Kentucky), and Emina Alibegovic (Michigan) have each pushed my students thinking in different ways. Lani, as a non-math educational consultant, has always asked them to dig deep into their learning styles and motivation for success. Roland, as a former math teacher, has focused on both the motivation and the specific content of what they write. And Emina, as a professor of mathematics at the University of Michigan has pushed them to dig deep and explore their mathematical (mis)understandings to better understand what they are learning.

Last semester Alec Couros and I collaborated to have two of his classes of student teachers (Regina, Saskatchewan) mentor my grade 10 Consumer Math class. The experience helped my kids grow as learners and Alecs' students grow as teachers.

Some of my students have been mentored for three years now, having taken all their high school mathematics courses with me. And they're starting to pay it all forward ... and backward.

I've blogged before about the excellent work two of my students, Grey-M and Mr SiWwy, are doing with Clarence and Barbara's classes in the Thin Walled Classroom. Now Mark has begun another unique mentorship project with my current Pre-Cal 40S (grade 12 pre-calculus) class.) (I'd be grateful towards anyone who left m@rk a comment over there.)

Mark took Pre-Cal 40S and has already earned his grade 12 credit. He did really well and wants to upgrade his mark so he's taking it again. All he really wants to do is challenge the final exam. We discussed it. He decided it would be a good idea to take the class again. He's taking Advanced Placement courses that conflict with the timetable for my class. We've worked out an arrangement whereby he can stay on top of his work without attending every one of my classes (all a repeat for him) so he can pursue his Advanced Placement courses concurrently. So Mark is mentoring his classmates, who he doesn't see every day, and he's doing some really amazing work!! Like Grey-M and Mr SiWwy, he's leaving comments on the class blog and archiving them with some reflections on a separate blog in order to aggregate all the content he's producing in one place. This allows me (and anyone else) to easily follow his work. Also, it will be a concrete archive of his learning and teaching that he can take with him when he leaves high school.

Recently, I've begun talking with Chris Lehmann (the principal at SLA) about having one or more of my students mentor one of the students at the Science Leadership Academy in Philadelphia who wants to pursue some advanced math on her own. Mark is the first student to volunteer to do this.

All these connections criss cross in all sorts of unexpected ways. It starts to look like network spaghetti:

Lani mentored my kids for almost three years. They pay it back by mentoring Clarence's kids and Lani starts a conversation with Grey-M and Mr SiWwy (my two student mentors) about effective mentoring in the course of their work with Clarence's and Barbara's kids. When Alec's student teachers come online and ask: "What does a good mentor's comment look like?" I point them to a comment Grey-M (my student) left one of Clarence's kids. So Alec's students learn the art of mentoring from my older students and pass that on to my younger (mathematically wounded) students all the while Lani and my two older students (Grey-M and Mr SiWwy) are engaged in this high level discussion (call it PD) about how to be effective mentors the results of which model good mentorship for the student teachers in Regina. Full circle.

And now m@rk is continuing this thread with his classmates on their class blog.

I suspect Al Upton will be having similar experiences; if he hasn't already. ;-)

We had a great night! There were over 60 people in the room, some familiar faces and lots of new ones too. My only regret was that I didn't get a chance to talk to and meet more of the people who were there. The real hero of the evening, IMHO, was Andy McKiel, the president of our provincial Ed. Tech. association, MANace. Andy organized the evening and made sure all the technology ran flawlessly. This never would have happened without him. At one point during the evening, all of us who were presenting were chatting; we unanimously shared how grateful we were for all of Andy's hard work. Thanks Andy!

Created with Admarket's flickrSLiDR.

I've just updated the Manitoba EdubloggerCon wiki. We had a live Twitter feed and UStream feed. All the videos of the unpresentations can be seen from the Manitoba Edubloggercon UStream account or the wiki.

The next day, yesterday, Chris, Clarence, Dean, John and I had lunch together to catch up and chat. Unfortunately, John had to leave early but as we lingered over the end of the meal, Dean fired up his laptop and started streaming video and audio on his Ustream channel. We were joined for lunch by over 20 people from across the world. We forgot to click the record button so we've lost the video archive but Clarence saved the chat which you can download from his blog or read directly on the MBEdubloggercon wiki (it's easier to follow the links off the wiki page). There was lots of interesting discussion and some good links shared. One of them led me to a voicethread archive of lots of math content that's giving me ideas for how I can use it in my classroom. That's also a resource I can link to and use in my Consumer Math 20S (grade 10, approx. 15 y.o.) class. (My daughter (7 years) and I watched this one this morning and left a comment on the last slide.)

Dean took some photos at lunch. I aggregated them into this voicethread. (I know Dean wants to hear lots of comments about the salad (slide 2) I had with my lunch.) I haven't had a chance to add any comments yet. Feel free to add yours before I do. ;-)

One thing that came out loud and clear (you can see it in the chat transcript) is that our ideas about what good professional development should look like have changed dramatically. It's not worth our time unless it provides an opportunity to engage with what's being shared by dialogging about it. And that dialogue should include global participation via twitter, UStream or some other way to access our learning networks. More than that, archiving the experience somehow is also important. The archive provides people who were there the opportunity to go back and reflect on what they heard/learned/participated in and offers other educators around the world an opportunity to participate vicariously after the event and add their voices to the conversation.

Having been immersed in "networked learning" for a while now, the power of the network to connect and amplify learning still amazes me every time. Even my 7 year old daughter got something out of all this. Thanks to an email I got from Brian Metcalfe (who attended the event on Thursday night) while I was chatting with Dean this morning we're talking about an idea that may make math a little more fun in classrooms across the world, in March ... on the fourteenth, to be exact. ;-) I'll share more about it here as we flesh this out.

Like I keep saying to my students, again and again, "Learning is a conversation. If you're not talking to someone about it, you're not learning it."

Thanks to the commenters (see comments) who have pointed out I have been hoodwinked. All that follows is a hoax. Now I know to always check stuff out for myself. Sometimes the people I trust get hoodwinked and pass that on. My mistake; you'd think I'd know better.

---

I just received this in email from a reliable source. Please feel free to copy and redistribute this post and image. My answer to the last sentence below is: "Yes. I would."

My 15 year old boy, Evan Trembley, is missing. He has been missing for now two weeks.

Maybe if everyone passes this on, someone will see this child. That is how the girl from Stevens Point was found by circulation of her picture on tv. The internet circulates even overseas, South America , and Canada etc. Please pass this to everyone in your address book. With G-D on his side he will be found.

'I am asking you all, begging you to please forward this email on to anyone and everyone you know, PLEASE.

It is still not too late. Please help us. If anyone knows anything, please contact me at: HelpfindEvanTrembley@yahoocom

I am including a picture of him.

All prayers are appreciated! ! '

It only takes 2 seconds to forward this.

If it was your child, you would want all the help you could get!!

I've recently joined (and created) a few ning social networks; mostly as a result of different projects I'm involved in. The networks are typically small; made up of people I know or people whose work I'm familiar with. In most cases we've been invited by a third party to collaborate.

Anyway, shortly after becoming part of these networks I started getting "friend requests" from different people on the network. Now in these small groups that we're working in, where some of us are meeting for the first time, working together on a larger project, it sort of makes sense to me that everyone is just being friendly and wants to be friends with everyone else. I like that. I like working in collegial environments.

Some of these invitations to friendship are from people I've never come across which is kind of flattering. The thing is, one of the invitations came from a person who, in their profile, said that they know nothing about the network they had joined. They just wanted to see what develops in the space. When I look at the profiles of some of the folks inviting me to friendship I see 500, 600+ friends in their personal network. 500 friends? Who has 500 friends? Maybe my definition of "friend" is too restrictive but, as a friend of mine pointed out the other day, these folks may just be building mailing lists. (Smells like spam.)

I suspect this is the sort of group Graham was talking about a while back. There's also a distant echo here from Bud's recent post.

... are these meaningful, two-way partnerships, or are we lowly teachers being taken advantage of a little bit?

Finite players play within boudaries. Infinite players play with boundaries. Finite and Infinite Games by James Carse

Building on my previous post, I've been thinking about ...

• » Clarence's work with the atelier method of teaching and how he sees himself as a network administrator.
• » George had mentioned the work of John Seely Brown at dinner last week. So I listened to this podcast.
• » I have mentors for my students (Lani and Emina) but I'd like to develop mentorship amongst my students. I believe they learn deeper when they have to mentor someone.
• » The Flat Classroom Project. Julie and Vicki have posted the podcast they did with Terry, Jeff, Jo and I. They are thinking hard about how to make the project replicable, scalable and sustainable.
• » Chris left a comment on my earlier post to which I replied saying we could make this work across grade levels.
• » A while back, Robert Jones' kids from Scotland were leaving comments on my kid's blog and my students reciprocated. Robert and I talked about collaborating but one thing led to another and we didn't follow up on it.

In order to move the Developing Expert Voices assignment beyond my classroom walls I don't need another class of students. Each of my students needs at least one partner in another class somewhere. If there is a critical mass of teachers on board with this idea then, between us, we work the network to find partners for each of our kids. So, in one of my classes, my students might collectively be collaborating with 10 or more classes from all over the world. Moreover, partners do not need to be in the same grade or studying the same material; as their network administrators we align the curricular content along thematic lines.

For example, let's say a grade 7 student (12 years old) partners up with a grade 10 student (15 years old). The topic is operations (add, subtract, multiply, divide) on rationals (fractions). The grade 7 student develops content using integers. The grade 10 student does exactly all the same thing using algebraic expressions. Together, they put together a presentation that is published online using free tools and aggregated on a blog somewhere.

Working with other students from elsewhere and publishing their work online for a global audience motivates kids to learn hard; to do their best work and make certain it is error free. The older student may know more math, the younger student may know more technology tools. (At least, this is what some of my students tell me.) The kids make curricular connections across grade levels and the mentorship experience grows both kids in ways beyond just learning the math.

The boundaries between classrooms blur.

The boundaries between teachers blur.

The boundaries between grades blur.

The boundaries between students blur.

Learning crystallizes.

Any takers?

Update - February 2, 2007
Just built a wiki to help organize this over at wikispaces. If you're serious about participating add yourself to the list. ;-)