Moving at the Speed of Creativity

Milton Chen has a great article in the latest EduTopia titled, “Curing Nature Deficit Disorder.”

Like Milton, my wife read the book “Last Child in the Woods: Saving Our Children from Nature-Deficit Disorder” by Richard Louv, the same book that inspired him to write this new article. I have written on this topic myself several times, including the post “Let’s Fight for Recess.” I am putting this post in my “Luddite” blog category, because thoughts along these lines can be perceived as anti-technology. I don’t view this line of thinking as anti-technology per se, but more BALANCED in the approaches we take toward education, child development, and life in general. Milton seems to share this view. He writes:

Fortunately, there are many organizations, including science centers and museums, zoos and aquaria, local, state, and national parks, environmental-education groups, and 4-H clubs, whose mission is to help children understand the world around them. Although Richard Louv doesn’t address it, the media and technology he blames for contributing to nature-deficit disorder can also be tools for learning about nature. Science and environmental educators have long promoted the use of student versions of the same tools scientists employ, such as temperature probes connected to laptops, global-positioning and geographic-information systems to track species, digital cameras and microscopes, and statistical software to analyze data.

Milton includes links to a good collection of websites and organizations that embody this ethic, like Globe, whose descriptive website subititle is “An exciting, worldwide, hands-on education and science program.” I linked to all of these with a new social bookmarking tag: promotingnature. Milton also has a good list of resources on page two of his article.

Any teacher worth his/her salt knows the practical need of differentiating learning: Kids are not the same! Yet unfortunately, the ridiculous political culture in which we now live has imposed requirements on teachers and administrators that attempts to deny this reality. Environmental education can help bring out abilities, interests and aptitudes in students which might otherwise remain hidden. Milton writes:

Projects that take students into nature allow them to shine in ways that would have been hidden to their teachers and classmates inside the four walls of the schoolroom. As Fritjof Capra, founding director of the Center for Ecoliteracy, says in GLEF’s documentary on the Edible Schoolyard, “The kid who is brilliant in math or science or language will not necessarily be brilliant in gardening. Somebody who is not very articulate but is very good with his or her hands will be very happy in the garden and will gain in prestige in the class community.”

Virtually every article I read in Edutopia is like a breath of fresh air to me, as an educator and a parent. Yes… other people get it! There IS such a thing as authentic and engaging education, and GLEF does a great job highlighting it through their articles, videos, and other publications. But it is up to us, the educators in the field, to implement these ideas and replicate best practices in other parts of the country and the world!

I love nature: I love to be in it, to camp in it, to study it, to be still in it. We need to help our students in school develop these loves as well. Sound impossible? Hardly. We just need to get our priorities back in line. And that is something we CAN do, because it involves instructional and curricular choices. I’m a staunch advocate for curricular autonomy for classroom teachers for this precise reason. As a society, we must again place our TRUST and our FAITH in professional teachers to care for and nurture our children. High stakes testing can’t and won’t produce a nurturing learning environment for my children or for yours. Only a great teacher can do that, who is empowered and supported in his/her ability to make good instructional decisions for students every day.

So let’s take a field trip! Do you think it might be something our students will remember? Chances are good. But whether or not the experience is worthwhile hinges a great deal on the TEACHERS that are involved– not just the technology or the curriculum.

Every community needs visionary leaders who see future trends and work hard to bring related opportunities to their town or city. Two recent cases involving community wifi networking projects hightlight this contention.

Floydada is a small community near Lubbock, Texas, and is the only participanting district in the Texas statewide technology immersion pilot project to extend laptop immersion beyond grades 6-8, to also include students in grades 9-12 with local funds. According to yesterday’s article, “Floydada’s wireless venture grabs attention of other towns:”

Floydada ISD built out its [community] wireless system with the help of Blue Moon Solutions and the Reese Technology Center, which hosted a half-day conference Tuesday for 20 South Plains towns that are investigating a wider regional rollout of the high-speed Internet technology. The Blue Moon/Reese partnership is now making use of a 600-foot tower at the former U.S. Air Force base, which will eventually make it possible for rural West Texas communities to travel at highway speeds across the Internet.

Marty Hale, chief executive officer for Blue Moon, said deploying Wi-Fi to these small towns could be as big as the discovery of oil and gas for some.

“This is about as revolutionary as it comes. We’re out there now building an infrastructure that will support school districts, police and emergency medical services while saving them money,” he said.

Just as railroads and highways in the industrial age paved the way for commerce and prosperity, so too will the road of economic development for communities in the 21st century be paved with high speed Internet connections. Small towns like Floydada are not the only ones moving toward municipal wifi. According to Arstechnica today:

AT&T has decided to get in on the action [of municipal WiFi networking], signing an agreement with Springfield, Illinois to develop and deploy a WiFi network that will cover the 25 square mile area around the city center. Residents outside that zone will be able to connect to the network via external antennas. While the network will initially use 802.11g, plans are in place to incorporate WiMAX over the next couple of years as that technology becomes more widely deployed in the US.

Springfield residents will have their choice of free, low-speed access and faster, paid access. As is the case with other municipal networks, the free access will be ad-supported. The faster tier of service will be available on a daily or monthly basis, with pricing undetermined. AT&T will also market the service as an add-on feature for its DSL customers.

Are the leaders in your community talking about a municipal WiFi project? If not, they should be. Do you want your town to end up like Radiator Springs, in the movie “Cars?!”

For more on this, see my post from earlier this month: “More cities and towns considering municipal wireless” as well as my past posts on Floydada ISD and their 1:1 laptop learning initiative.

Many people mistakenly seem to equate the terms “courage” and “bravery” with an absence of fear. This is not the case. I remember free-fall parachuting five times to earn my jump wings in the Air Force, and there definitely WAS a fair amount of fear involved in those experiences! People who are brave are not fearless– that would be a superhuman quality. What brave and courageous people are able to do is manage their fears and act in intentional ways in spite of those fears. As Rudolf Giuliani said in reference to 9-11:

Courage is not the absence of fear…It is the active management of fear.

Quoted by D D Ganguly.

I introduced some students and teachers at Greenville School today in south-central Oklahoma to the classroom blogosphere using a customized Google Earth KML file I named, the “Classroom Blog World Tour.” (This requires Google Earth.) I let students take turns “driving the mouse” on my laptop, connected to a LCD projector, while they literally “flew” us around the earth to the cities of different classroom bloggers. After “flying” to the city, students clicked the embedded link in Google Earth and viewed the classroom blog, first in a smaller Google Earth window and then full-screen in a web browser. This “world tour” currently includes 11 classrooms in North America and Australia. Yes, I know I need to include Scottish bloggers, Ewan! Which others need to be included?

I hope to eventually make this a dynamic KML file which is updated from a mySQL database of classroom blogs. For now a static file will suffice, and the kids REALLY loved this today. If you’re looking for a very engaging, “sexy” way to share a tour of classroom blogging voices spanning the globe– check this out.

I have the KML file and other KML / Google Earth related links on a new KML resources page.