by Michael Valentine

For 150 years, from farms and rural communities across our vast state, boys have come to Hale School in Perth, Western Australia to meet city-based schoolmates and begin life as boarding students.

They come from country schools that might be large, small or perhaps have a population of less than 30 children. They come from regions where generations of the local townspeople have worked the land or mined the resources that lay beneath it. Some arrive after an hour’s drive by automobile, while others require a lengthy plane flight.

Their transition to a big city school and a boarder’s life has for generations been supported by Hale, and wonderful relationships between the school and rural communities have been forged. In 2013, we have taken a new step to ease the shift from rural educational settings to our vast, highly academic, technology-rich independent school. We have designed a programme, known as Hale@home where the boys enroll in our 1:1 Tablet programme and undertake a weekly synchronous connection with the Hale@home teaching team (the two of us!) while still living in their hometowns.

We are doing this in the year prior to the boys leaving home. The programme is currently engaging with 16 boys who will be boarding at Hale School for Year 8 (12-13 yr. olds) in 2014. It is proving to be an initiative that will change the face of a complex traditional transition experience, so familiar to boarding schools and boarding families across the world.

The Hale@home approach

The boys are still attending their local school but are connected and engaged with Hale School 24/7 through access to our portal and flipped resources. They can also e-mail or phone me for assistance any time. The Hale@home curriculum offers teaching and learning experiences designed to create opportunities for the boys to explore how technology can be used to personalise their learning and ultimately enhance their optimism about their prospects for academic life at Hale School next year. They are also working in our connected community with their future roommates, engendering a sense of “learning and preparing together” for their transition to the city.

Before the school year began, the Hale@home boys gathered at a two-day Induction Camp on the Hale School campus, where we introduced them to their “virtual classmates” and their computers. Then they headed back to their home towns for their last year in local schools.

The Adobe Connect 9 platform allows us to create a dynamic virtual classroom context where the boys become presenters and reveal their weekly findings and creations to the whole class online. The boys see and hear each other as they take turns to display their individual responses to the literacy and numeracy tasks, which are as unique as the landscapes outside each boy’s bedroom window on any day.

Our project-style curriculum invites the boys to present video, audio, artistic, graphical, written or verbal responses to tasks which have a weekly theme. Their individual progress with basic technical skills and verbal presentation has been significant in this first term of the programme. [Editor's note: school begins in January below the equator.]

A lack of full-developed skills in these areas has been a significant issue for previous generations of rural boys as they struggled to cope in the first months of a massive change in their personal lives. Academic priorities can be overwhelmed by personal issues among 12-year old boys so far from home. We can already see that their progress in technical and verbal skills is building their confidence.

A closer look at one lesson

The most recent work completed by the boys is a good example of the structure I employ to ensure each lesson is engaging and provides the boys with opportunities to demonstrate their unique interpretations and responses to literature. In their paper “Handbook of Emerging Technologies for Learning” (March 2009), Siemens and Tittenberger suggest teaching and learning activities fall into four categories; Dissemination, Discussion, Discovery and Demonstration. I use these four categories to plan a balanced learning experience.

The Dissemination category is regarded as potentially the most distracting and mundane. To avoid wasting valuable synchronous time online distributing key material and introducing new concepts I now “flip” this component. I create and record a 10-minute background presentation which the boys watch by logging into the portal sometime prior to our weekly lesson. We are then ready to move straight into the teaching and learning tasks and responses. Further responses to tasks are prepared independently by the boys during the week following the lesson and put on their OneNote files — ready to demonstrate to their peers in the next lesson.

Seb presents his video response. His family’s farm stretches out behind him.

“I Am David” is Anne Holm’s celebrated novel depicting a young boy’s escape from a World War Two prison camp and the subsequent adventures he experiences in his quest for freedom. As is the case for all of my English work, the unit involves reading and responding to only a short extract from the novel, in this instance it is Chapter 1.

The core question the boys had to respond to involved them being asked to explain why David had requested to take a bar of soap with him as he prepared to escape the camp. They had to prepare a one-minute video response. The boys responded strongly to the further request that they be seated behind barbed-wire as they presented their thoughts. Some boys sat behind their farm fences while others created their own barbed-wire and placed it in front of the computer’s camera lens. They were asked to provide three valid reasons which explained why David might have wanted to take the soap with him.

The presentation of their films to each other created enormous discussion as they explored each other’s reasoning (and ability to construct barbed-wire!). The other task for this unit of work was to explore a map of actual concentration camps and after identifying the location clues clearly evident in the text, extrapolate which camp David may have been held captive. The boys then used online maps and the directions David was given to follow once he was free, to trace his initial journey to board a ship in Thessalonica during his first few days of freedom.

An ambitious teaching & learning dynamic

In its short history, Hale@home has already been celebrated as an example of 21st century teaching and learning. And it is. However, we knew when we began that we were not standing at the edge of a new and unexplored world. We were moving forward certainly — our teaching and learning landscape was evolving to utilise the opportunities now presented to us by the digital age — but we also knew that Australia has a long and proud history of distance education and the Internet is full of online school programmes.

What we were so committed to achieving was building an environment where we could conduct the most memorable lessons, just like we strive to do every day in our Perth campus classrooms, with our audiences of 25 enthusiastic (albeit captive) boys.

Hale@home was a good idea, but as former Head of Hale’s Junior School and Middle School, I knew the challenge was going to be designing an online curriculum that would capture the attention of boys who have already spent the day attending classes at their local schools. Late in the afternoon they are seated alone in a room with a piece of technology, bereft of the usual verbal and physical cues, and they do not have the benefit of the shared educational momentum that a campus classroom full of bright lads and a fine teacher can generate.

The boys were asked: “What is the smallest thing around your place? Include three photo examples of really small objects and estimate their size.”

Our vision for Hale@home was ambitious: to create a teaching and learning dynamic that would be memorably interactive, characterized by authentic learning, and certain to provoke unique responses from young students who were isolated but shared a common sense of purpose. We have pursued this vision in what is really the perfect educational paradigm: the needs of the boys determine the outcomes we seek, and as teachers we provide the discourse and the tasks which inspire the innovative thinking, structured responses and the skill development of the boys.

Boys of this age, wherever they are, require teachers with passion — teachers who project a sense of colour or theatre into their lessons. They require teachers who recognise that creative solutions and unique responses are to be celebrated and that rich interconnections, when identified, represent authentic learning. They need teachers who know learning can be demonstrated, even amplified, so powerfully using a computer.

The conclusion after our first term? We are building our perfect school! A staff of two, working at a distance with 16 adolescent boys, and no prescribed curriculum other than one we construct to suit the needs of our students. What a revolution!

The Hale@home experience for me has been overwhelmingly positive and reaffirming. As a teacher of long standing, I see 21st century learning evolving using the breath-taking technology available to us; and yet as we move forward, we also bring with us the very best of the past.

Michael Valentine is the inaugural Head of Online Learning at Hale School in Perth Australia and previously the Head of both the Junior School and Middle School. A leader in innovative curriculum design incorporating literature, research and technology, Michael has presented keynote speeches, designed workshops and given addresses across Australia and abroad. It is his conviction that “we need to interconnect learning across discrete subject lines and richly vary the methods with which students demonstrate their learning.”

The 100 available seats in Blackboard Collaborate were quickly filled (and refilled each time someone dropped off or had to leave early). In the audience were teachers and other educators from across the grade spectrum. We heard from folks in Australia, the Far East, the Carribean, South America, Great Britain and Europe, as well as Canada and the United States. Connected learning knows no boundaries!

Download tips & tricks here

Digital portfolio resources

If you couldn’t get a seat or missed the session for any reason, no worries. See below for the archive,  a copy of the chat stream (full of valuable links) and a free handout with additional tips and resource suggestions.

View the webinar archive

Get the chat transcript

Download Digital Portfolios: Tips & Tricks

Author Kathy Cassidy

And congratulations to Kathy for mesmerizing her audience for the full hour as she shared wonderful photos, links and student work samples from her Saskatchewan classroom. As the session came to a close, many attendees let us know that they were headed over to the PLP bookstore to buy their copy of Kathy’s eBook Connected From the Start: Global Learning in the Primary Grades. If you’d like your own copy of this highly interactive book, buy it today (only) and use the coupon code PORTFOLIO for a $2 discount off the $16.95 cover price.

Editor’s note: Previous image seen here was selected by English major.

We’re studying quadratics in my 8th grade class. Even the name can strike fear in the heart of the most competent adult. I didn’t want it to be that way for my math kids.

I wrote a good lesson plan and then I let students help me modify it. Essentially, they “taught” me how to teach them better through the interaction and feedback we gave to each other during the learning process.

Here’s some of what it looked like

I create a scaffolding technique, but students helped me add, delete and amend it until it works for the way they think. In essence, we built the scaffold together.

Even if you don’t teach math, this strategy is a good one. I’ve done things like it in science and social studies, but it’s been awhile. I guess I’d just forgotten about using it.

The trick is to create a means for scaffolding and then let students help fine-tune it. As a bonus (trust me here), while you’re figuring out the scaffolding, you’ll learn a lot about the topic that would never occur to you otherwise.

We started off slowly using the geometric area model. Our textbook tells us that Greek mathematicians used this method as long ago as 300 BC. I think that sort of impresses students — the idea that they are following in the footsteps of ancient Greeks. We were also able to pair this ancient technique with modern-day technology using Geometer’s Sketchpad and an Algebra-Tiles sketch that was available in the software library.

From there we started moving into a more symbolic version of finding the “x” solutions, figuring out what this means in real life and how to even use an old kindergarten Valentine making technique. It wasn’t easy but they hung in there.

Here’s what I learned

I divided my SmartBoard into two areas: one side represented the problem we were studying and the other side represented the thinking someone would need to do in order to solve the problem. This helped tremendously and as we worked problem after problem, students helped me refine my thinking list.

• Look for GCF
• Look for a letter that could be factored
• Find both factors (it’s a multiplication expression after all): usually we write something like this to remind us —-> a product=factor * factor
• Solve for zero—finding both “x”s
• Set those “x”s equal to the x-intercepts
• If you need to find a min or max, find the line of symmetry — we would say “this is like when you folded the paper in two and cut out your Valentine heart” (and we always did the hand motions!)
• Use the line to find the “y” of that max or min

So all of this is on one side and then they use the other side to solve the equation. It’s scaffolding, and it helps them ingrain the process in their brain.

I’m not sure they realized how much they helped me think about their thinking, but student feedback helped me zero-in on what they needed me to “think aloud” for them. Throughout the unit, you would see students able to stop and look at the process list and go on. They could perform this procedure independently.

To enrich the lesson, we did a one-day mini-lesson that showed them the quadratic formula. It ties what the ancient Greeks did to another pretty old mathematician….Francois Viete. He was the French mathematician who published this formula way back in the late 1500s.

Here’s the second thing I learned. My students couldn’t use this formula on problems unless they were in the standard form of the quadratic. Again, I could scaffold this by simply writing the standard form and then helping them use the process.

I can imagine them in high school thinking all of this was foolishness. And it will seem that way then. But right now, where they are developmentally in building up their quadratic muscles, it is perfect.

The school year is wrapping up soon. You may be thinking toward the summer, and other than soaking up the sun and getting some much needed vacation time, maybe you’re considering professional learning and how to advance your teaching practice for next year. At Powerful Learning Practice, we know professional development for teachers. Over 7,000 educators around the globe have changed their teaching practice through our approach. But we’re letting the secret out – you can do it yourself.

We’ve discovered the 8-step process to do-it-yourself professional development and we want to hand you the keys in our new eCourse, Connected Learner Lite. It’s open for enrollment and filling up fast.

The new session is starting soon —June 10th. Register now

Budgets are tight and time is more valuable than ever. But today, professional learning and being on the cutting edge of technology as well as teaching is vital for educators like you and me. At PLP, we know PD. We know how to do it right, and how to use this 8-step process to build your personal learning network, be part of a community of likeminded educators, and bring your teaching practice into the 21st Century.

Now for the first time, we’re offering a guided, fast-track eCourse to do just that. It’s called Connected Learner Lite – 12 weeks of connected learning.

If you like the idea of DIY PD, but would like a helping hand to get started, this course is for you.

The Webinar Curriculum: Week by Week

You’ll get twelve 60-minute, synchronous, online webinars taking you from “What is 21st Century learning and why is it important?”  to “How do I create a 21st Century classroom or school?” In addition, you’ll work inside an online community of educators. This provides deep, engaged discussion, sharing what works, and examples for each step of the way.

Week 1  | Kickoff and Orientation | We lay out the journey and get to know one another

Week 2  | Setting the Stage: Teaching and Learning in the 21st Century | We build a common language, look at reports, articles and research

Week 3 | Connected Learning Communities: A 3-Pronged Approach |We unpack a professional learning model for today’s educator

Week 4 |  Network Literacy | We look at strategies for Creating Personal Learning Networks

Week 5 | Becoming a Connected Educator | We explore the latest Web 2.0 tools for teaching and learning

Week 6 | Inquiry Based Learning: Who, When, Where, Why and How | We lay the pedagogical foundation for Project/Problem Based Learning

Week 7 | Inquiry-based Learning | We talk about using TPACK for lesson planning and Connected Learning as Curriculum Tools

Week 8 | Action Research and Collective Intelligence | We look deeply into development of action research plans

Week 9 | PBL: Getting Your Students from Start to Finish | We will unpack strategies for project, problem, and passion-based learning

Week 10 | Authentic Assessment with Cutting-Edge Technology and Tools | We look at how to use assessment for learning and not just of learning

Week 11 | Keeping the Momentum: Scaling the Work | We talk about next steps and how to use what you have learned back in your local context

Week 12 | Learning Showcase | You’ll participate in a culminating event where you showcase your action plans and findings for others from around the world

In the video above, Sheryl, the instructor and PLP co-founder tells us about this course and why you should spend your summer learning time right by reserving your spot in this 12-week program for connected learning! Watch the video, then head over to the course page to read even more and get yourself signed up. Hurry! This course will fill up fast.

Graduate Credit Available

After the course begins, graduate credit may be obtained through North Dakota State University. Get complete details here.

Driving alone on a long trip always gives me added moments to reflect on the happenings of my day and projects that await me back in my office. As I got used to the thunk thunk rhythm of the car’s tires rolling over seams in the cement surface of the highway, my thoughts turned to a presentation on Virtual Integrity that I recently gave to middle schoolers.

In my talk, I mused over the fact that we, as a society, are bombarded with moral decisions every single day. As I drove along, I wondered about decisions, large and small, that need to be made. “Is it moral to keep the speed limit or to ‘stretch’ the law and speed? Is it moral for me to throw out the trash from my window and leave it for others to pick up?”

Given my interest in social media and my work around tech integration in our Diocese classrooms, it’s not surprising that I also wondered: “Is it moral to stretch the truth with regards to our identity in the cyberspace? When this happens, is it the same as lying in a face-to-face conversation?”

In a society that proclaims freedom for all, how and who does the deciding on what is right and what is wrong? How did our founding fathers grapple with this question as they tried to build the foundation for a new country so many years ago?

As I write this post for the Voices blog, I am cognizant of the fact that I am writing for an audience that may not, on a regular basis, muse over questions of morality — of what is right and wrong. That doesn’t mean that personal actions or thoughts that were considered moral were not on the minds of our Founding Fathers. Thomas Jefferson wrote: “Man has been subjected by his Creator to the moral law, of which his feelings, or conscience as it is sometimes called, are the evidence with which his Creator has furnished him….” Moral truth – also described as the natural law – was indeed part of their vision.

Robert Bork, author of The Tempting of America, states:

[Natural law] refers to principles about ultimate right and wrong that transcend particular nations and cultures and are true for all people at all times. Most of us feel intuitively that natural law exists, though we differ, both as to its source and its content. For some, it is ordained by God; for others, it arises from the nature of human beings, even if we are evolutionary accidents; or it may simply express the requirements for anything recognizable as a society. Whatever its source, natural law’s content is discovered by reason.

So where am I going with all of this? Part of the Natural Law that Bork explained above deals with truth. When a person lives by truth and expresses truth in his/her actions or acts according to the values, beliefs and principles they claim to hold, that person possesses integrity (as defined by Wikipedia).

A digital footprint makes two impressions

Integrity is a key virtue, I believe, for today’s culture. One blogger I recently read (an internet marketer, in fact) listed five reasons why Integrity is Important. The headings come from the blog; the explanations are mine.

People only want to do business [work with] people they trust. In today’s world, each of us who has a digital footprint makes two “impressions”: one in the real world and one in the virtual world. The words and attitudes that we use in both arenas must match. When we achieve this, we become someone whom others can truly rely upon.

Future success depends on doing what is right now. Each and every decision that we make creates a reputation that either affirms or disintegrates personal integrity. Research proves that most contented individuals among us are people who not only respect the virtue of integrity but live an integrity-filled life. This means that whichever “world” (virtual or real) you find yourself interacting with others in, your words ring true and are full of respect.

People follow leaders they believe will get them where they want to go. What our society needs is daring leaders. Men and woman who will do the right thing even when it is difficult. This is where courage is the rubber that meets the road. We need gutsy leaders to model what integrity truly means for all of society.

One bad apple can spoil the bunch. Being a person of integrity does not mean that one is perfect. On the contrary, a person of integrity admits when a mistake is done and tries not to cover it up but make it right. There is a huge difference between the two.

Take a stance in what you believe or others will influence you and decide for you. Deciding not to do or say something is a decision. Define what you believe in, what you value, and what you respect. Reflection is key, I believe, to essential self knowledge — to creating a personal “report card” on your growth as a person of integrity.

Personal integrity is not about what “I” think is right or wrong. It is a stance, a perspective of life, a mode of living that is true for everyone in all cultures in all ages. What is right is right. What is truth is truth.  It is natural law. Online, offline, all the time.

Hundreds of educators have purchased Kathy Cassidy’s new interactive book Connected from the Start since its release April 10th. A dozen of those readers have posted 5-star reviews at our book site. We are so excited that the book has been met with such enthusiasm!

To keep that momentum going, and to celebrate the Kathy’s book, we are hosting a free webinar and virtual Book Launch Party on Thursday, May 16th  at 7pm EDT. Join author Kathy Cassidy along with PLPress leaders Sheryl Nussbaum-Beach and John Norton for a free webinar about Digital Portfolios.

Buy the book now and save $2 at checkout with coupon WEBINAR. Expires May 16, 2013.

Digital Portfolios:  For Primary and Beyond!

Digital portfolios allow students to showcase their learning for a wide audience, demonstrate their growth, and gather feedback from family, friends and educators beyond their classrooms. There are safe and effective ways to do this. We’ll look at age-appropriate tools and apps that elementary kids can use to create their first digital footprints and show the world what they can do.

There will be time for questions and answers, as well as fun giveaways and prizes. After the webinar, we’ll send you an archived copy plus a free takeaway tip sheet for incorporating digital portfolios into your classroom.

It’s sure to be informative, fun, and exciting!

Spread the word

Tell all your friends to join us. Spread the word with these Tweetables:

Join me for a free webinar about digital portfolios for students with @plpnetwork & @kathycassidy! Details: http://bit.ly/pFolios

May 16, join me in celebrating @kathycassidy’s book plus get free tips on digital portfolios from @plpnetwork. http://bit.ly/pFolios

A connected coach uses techniques like appreciative inquiry, essential questions, and other cognitive coaching and deep thinking methods to help individuals and teams self-actualize in online spaces. Connected coaches are the social artists that help people think deeply about the learning that is taking place in the shared online environment.

Our 11-week, practical Connected Coaching eCourse will prepare you to serve in the role of an online coach.

This course starts June 10th and space is limited!

An interview with instructor Lani Ritter Hall

In this interview, Lani explains what Connected Coaching means to her, who should take this course, and what the participants can expect.

Who is the ideal learner for this course? Any educator– teacher, administrator, curriculum or professional developer, face to face instructional coach—who is interested in facilitating change and improving communication through an inquiry, strength-based approach is welcome. While many learners go on to work as connected coaches primarily with adult communities such as Powerful Learning Practice, K12 teachers also find they apply much of what they learn in their classrooms with students. As well, current F2F coaches appreciate the opportunity to explore and learn from the model.

That said, the ideal learner is an educator who has a well-developed online voice, who is comfortable in using a variety of social networking and Web 2.0 technologies, and who holds the belief that every person has the capacity to grow and improve practice. Read the full interview here.

What they’re saying

“As well as being a rich learning experience full of strategies and information, this course has validated how I view learning, supporting others, valuing contributions and walking with others (educators) to help them set their own path rather than me telling them what to do. The group that have done the course with me have been a wonderful community. I’m amazed by the openness, depth of reflection and comfort to share of self and journey, and to be challenged in a that has been part of our interactions. I’ve been challenged to take my thinking much deeper than I expected and I don’t think that this would have been possible without such a group… My one word for this experience is PROFOUND…” – Amanda Rablin, Education Consultant, ICT & Pedagogy, Australia

Is this course for you?

If you would like to coach for Powerful Learning Practice as a connected coach, this course is for you. We will be hiring additional coaches for upcoming communities.

If you’d like to extend and broaden your knowledge around coaching and examine a new approach for online spaces that can be leveraged for blended experiences, this eCourse facilitates your doing just that.

If you are wondering about the variety of tools that are infused into learning — wiki, Voicethread, Ning, blog, Audioboo, Blackboard Collaborate are some examples. The tools change, the approach to learning does not. If you have significant experience navigating the web and are comfortable creating accounts, uploading images, and using web 2.0 tools, then your tech skills are a good fit for this eCourse.

If you are a self directed learner, wanting to set your own goals and outcomes for your learning, the course expectation that each learner create a learning contract aligns well with your perspective.

If you want to explore deeply communication in online spaces that enables rich learning, you should join us.

Enroll now! Space is limited.

Our next course starts June 10th.

I recently read an amusing but instructive article entitled “PSA: Don’t Let Salami and Google Images Get You In Hot Water.” It tells the story of an eleven-year-old boy who posted an image he found online of Salami on a class blog. Shortly thereafter, the school received a “Cease and desist” letter from the content creator threatening legal action. While the ridiculousness of the claim is amusing, it also highlights a rising concern for educators and students, as well as creators of content, about copyright and copyright infringement on the web. What can you use freely for education and what requires a fee? How do you cite material? What limitations might be placed on material that you can use?

In my classroom, we use a lot of image-based content. Most recently, my students are working on a Digital Storytelling project (you can see a highlight of the project in this article: “My First Attempt at Employing Digital Storytelling in the Classroom”). I work every year to teach my students about copyright and proper use of content. However, I know that it’s a learning experience for me as well.

One thing we have learned to look for is material with a Creative Commons License. Educating your students about the details of Creative Commons licensing is a prime example of incorporating Digital Literacy into an established classroom curriculum.

“A Creative Commons license is used when an author wants to give people the right to share, use, and even build upon a work that they have created. CC provides an author flexibility (for example, the author might choose to allow only non-commercial uses of their own work) and protects the people who use or redistribute an author’s work, so they don’t have to worry about copyright infringement, as long as they abide by the conditions the author has specified.” - Wikipedia

There are literally 10′s of millions of images on the Internet specifically covered by one of the six copyright licenses currently established under the Creative Commons protocols. You can read more details at the CC website, which notes that “Every license helps creators — we call them licensors if they use our tools — retain copyright while allowing others to copy, distribute, and make some uses of their work — at least non-commercially.”

If you and your students rely on images covered by Creative Commons licenses — and learn and observe the license variations — you won’t be bothered with “cease and desist” emails over a sausage slice. And you can use several search tools to help you identify non-CC materials that are also free to use in your own work.

Finding Creative Commons & license-free material

This year, I have gathered (sometimes with the help of students) a number of ways to search for License-Free or Creative Commons Licensed content. Here are a few of the best:

CreativeCommons.org - Just what the site says, it focuses on purely Creative Commons Licensed products. You can use CreativeCommons.org to license your own material. You can use their website to search for material on a myriad of sites (on the homepage, look under Explore and click on “Find CC-licensed works”).

Google Advanced Image Search - Google’s Advanced Image Search allows users to search using a filter for various kinds of “free to use” licensed content.

Fotopedia - Great for humanities, Fotopedia has a repository of images from around the world. What makes it so amazing is that it is entirely user built. So those photos you took during that vacation to Rome years ago? Make sure that you upload those to the site and build their library!

YouTube Creative Commons - While searching YouTube videos specifically for creative commons content is best done via Google Advanced Search or CreativeCommons.org, it does merit mention here that YouTube has a strong video collection of Creative Commons content. Even more so, I greatly encourage that when you upload your own videos to YouTube, you check that “Creative Commons” License box!

Wikimedia Commons - Wikimedia is similar to Wikipedia except it is a database of Creative Commons and Open Source Licensed images, videos, and sounds. If you are a creator of content, this is a great place for you to show off your work!

Compfight – Compfight provides a myriad of images that are licensed for use on blogs and other publications and research (not for profit). They have been screened by humans and tagged in useful ways. Be sure to click on “Creative Commons” in the left margin so you just see the free licensed material. (A few rows of stock photos for sale appear at the top of your search.)

Pixabay – An amazing collection of public domain images free to use and share.

Edupic – A repository of images for educators and students to use free, designed by a teacher.

Pics4Learning – Another free-images site designed specifically for use by teachers and students.

Flickr - One of the most popular online tools for storing and sharing images, Flickr also expressly has a “Creative Commons” element (above) in their advanced search feature. Again, upload those vacation photos or drawings of your own and be sure to check that “Creative Commons” box to support education and creativity! (This page sorts Flickr CC images by type of license.)

Always give credit!

These sites are a great place for educators and students to get started. I’m sure that there are several other places to find Creative Commons or Open Source material. Please share in the Comments if you’re an educator and know of good places for classroom use.

And, even with Creative Commons, be sure to always cite the original piece! Even if you are allowed to use, distribute, and modify someone else’s work, you and your students should always give them credit. We all like credit.

Image credit: Matthias Mehidau, Creative Commons

Sheryl Nussbaum-Beach, 2013 ISTE Board Member

We want to send out a hearty congratulations to our very own PLP co-founder and CEO Sheryl Nussbaum-Beach. The International Society for Technology in Education (ISTE) has announced its 2013 board election results, and Sheryl is among seven education leaders from around the world who will serve on the board in 2013!

The seven new board members will join nine continuing board members to lead ISTE as it advances learning and teaching through the innovative and effective use of technology in education.

Newly elected to the board are:

• Mila Fuller, Deputy Executive Director, National Council of Teachers of English, Urbana, Ill.
• Matt Harris, Ed.D., Head of Learning Resources, German European School  Singapore
• Sheryl Nussbaum-Beach, CEO, Powerful Learning Practice, Virginia Beach, Va.
• Mia Williams, Ph.D., Associate Professor, University of Northern Colorado, Greeley
• Janet Zanetis, National Education Advocate, CISCO Systems, Pyrmont, New South Wales, Australia

The new board members will take office in June at a meeting held in conjunction with the ISTE 2013 conference in San Antonio.

All of us at PLP are very excited to see where Sheryl and the other new board members will steer ISTE in the coming year. Congratulations for a well-deserved honor, Sheryl!

A few weeks before the break, I spent time in our art gallery enjoying the display of student work. The works were grouped by course, with common themes apparent in the dizzying display of individual experimentation and interpretation. When I went into our Learning Management System to read and better understand the requirements for the work I saw on the wall, I was struck by the limits within each assignment.

In one unit, students were “to interpret an image of choice using positive/negative, first in black and white, then in high contrast complimentary color. Free choice of media. Assessment based on demonstrating the true dominance of one color over the other.” Each student worked within the pre-determined limits and discovered immense space for exploration and expression. Were these students being creative or simply following directions?

Creative limits

Is creativity license to do as one pleases? Teachers work within limits as well as students. We have a calendar, a schedule, a time period. We have school mission statements and departmental outcome expectations. We have school imperatives: everyone will use the LMS system, everyone’s grades have to be in our database system by a certain date. Ingenuity and inventiveness find expression within limits.

Our seventh graders have been spending the year learning about the confluence of creativity in problem solving and the checks the physical world places on what is possible. For instance, they created wonderful Rube Goldberg machines to pop balloons. They had a piece of plywood, scrap wood from the wood shop, hammers, nails, matchbox cars, glue and thumbtacks. They also had a deadline. Each team created a unique machine; each operated on different principles of how levers work and popped balloons in varied ways.

I wrote here sometime ago about teachers teaching creativity through modeling creativity in their own choices, work, and shaping of their courses.

More recently, I have been thinking about pursuing creativity from within limits. I want my students to create new meaning for themselves, to take risks in their thinking and in their utilization of sources and evidence to develop and defend their ideas. And yet, I want them to learn to research effectively, write thoughtful blogs, engage in successful discussions (online and in-person), and yes, write effective, analytical essays well supported by evidence.

Within this paradigm the challenge becomes the space we allow for students to pursue interest within an assignment – to shape passion within constraints. I have had times with my own students when one will come to me and say, “I have no ideas. This time period or topic is so boring!” After some discussion, we often find a way into the project that stretches the boundaries of the assignment almost to the breaking point (usually in topic choice), while still living within the limits I have imposed.

License, not permission

I almost wrote that students need permission to approach an assignment in this manner, but permission isn’t the right reference. Students should come to see each demonstration of learning as an opportunity to create something new for themselves and their audience. Rewarding students for taking risks and rethinking approaches to constraints within a project takes practice and courage. It takes some license too.

Paradoxically, students need the freedom to explore the possibilities within a set of constraints. Otherwise, they are only learning to mimic existing forms and media rather than exploring them for their creative potential. Our challenge as teachers is to develop in our students the license to explore within the limits as an almost automatic response to any problem or task.

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