TPACK & Social Media at Bloomfield Hills

by | Monday, November 15, 2010

I spent a two days a couple of weeks ago with the faculty and leadership of Bloomfield Hills School District. The first day was a workshop on teaching, technology and creativity with the faculty of Model High School and Bowers Academy. Leigh and I had been invited there by Bill Boyle, the principal (read his blog). We spent the day exploring ideas of TPACK and creativity and it was great fun (see poems and images below).

Two days later I was back again, this time invited by the district Superintendent, Rob Glass, working with the entire school leadership on issues related to social media and what it means for schools and school districts. The morning was led of by Social Media guru, Shel Holtz, who talked about how social media was transforming the world of work and learning. [You can download his presentation here, though I must say that it is a 175MB download.] Building on Shel’s presentation I facilitated a series of brainstorming activities with all the administrators about specific things they could do in their schools and classrooms to meet these challenges. At the end of the day we had a series of key action items (short term and long term) for a range of different contexts.

All in all it was an extremely productive and fun day.

I am including below some of the stuff that emerged out of that meeting. The first is a slideshow of photographs from these two days.

Created with Admarket’s flickrSLiDR.

And of course whenever I do a workshop on creativity can bad poetry be far behind? So here are some of the poems (and a rap song!) that emerged from the first workshop on creativity.Enjoy.

1.
There once was a professor whose goal

Was to teach that creativity is whole
Effective and new
We’re making a stew
Of technology, content, pedagogy and soul

2
Some teachers on PD
Learned about creativity
They found creative products are new
From our pasts came only a few
for their own students they hope this won’t be

Deanna Vetrnone, Geoffery Parkinson

3.
Whole, roll, jellyroll
Effect, Defect, and reflect
Novel Pavel Datsyuk

Peg Pasternak, Bruce Kezlarian, Cullen Murphy

4.
There once was a girl from Nantucket
Who was so bored she said *@%& it
She developed something N.E.W.
To away her blues
And forever vowed to think outside the bucket

Matt Autha, Rosalie Burnett, Bill Boyle

5. PD Rap

I can’t believe the of change
It makes my brain feel deranged
It has my whole body freakin’
But now I’ll start my creativity tweakin’

Rapping to you in rhyming couplets
Rain my words like drops in a bucket
Like the girl on Nantucket
Who looked around and just said f%$# it

Suffering from deep amnesia
Out of lots of inertia, a little fantasia
While waiting for lunch from La Marsa.
Thinking about the old days
With nostalgia.

When we had pencils and chalk
Things moved slow
Now we start to balk
But it’s go go go
But no we know technology’s just a tool
We’ll keep up, won’t be no fool
And our whole school will rule!

A few randomly selected blog posts…

Barriers to Innovation & Inclusion

Leigh Wolf just sent me this video created by the Johnson Space Center on Barriers to Innovation & Inclusion. A Google search led to this description: Last summer, Johnson Space Center senior management coordinated a center-wide, cross-generational effort to explore...

Wordplay

Wordplay

Just some visual wordplay that I have indulged in, just for the heck of it. Nothing really special, though I am partial to the "Explore, Create, Share" design. That was the motto of the MAET program at MSU that I directed for years.  Innovate 2 on Creativity...

Blogging has been light

the past few days, primarily due to "beginning semester" blues. I hope to get back to full strength pretty soon... there are bunch of things I would like to blog about just a question of finding the time 🙁

TPACK (and friends) in T.H.E. Journal.

Matt Townsley sent me an email this morning informing me about a TPACK sighting in THE journal. Well... actually it's a journal whose title is THE journal! Does that make sense? Anyway, T.H.E. Journal (Transforming Education Through Technology) has an article by Dian...

The death of the university?

Zephyr Teachout (supposedly an associate law professor at Fordham University, a writer, and an online entrepreneur) has a great article on bigmoney.com, titled Welcome to Yahoo! U: The Web will dismember universities, just like newspapers. His essential argument is...

Death & Taxes

I am always on the lookout for new and interesting visual representations of complex data and just discovered Death & Taxes, 2009: "is a representational poster of the federal discretionary budget; the amount of money that is spent at the discretion of your elected...

Designing for anticipation, Teaching for anticipation

In a couple of previous posts I had talked about the idea of postdiction (see the posts here and here). The argument being that good teaching (among a long list of other good things) is postdictable, i.e. it walks the line between predictability and chaos, and most...

YouTube & Research

In a previous post I mentioned a new study on children and the internet recently completed by Warren Buckleitner for Consumer Reports Web Watch. Anyway, towards the end of the post I mentioned how the final report includes links to YouTube videos of the actual data...

Value in an age of free…

What happens when an economy "built on selling precious copies" suddenly confronts the world of the Internet - a world based on the "free flow of free copies?" Kevin Kelly confronts this issue in a recent post titled, Better than free. As he says, "how does one make...

1 Comment

  1. Holly Marich

    Punya,
    I am specifically interested in your post today, although I do appreciate the potential reflection opportunities regarding “fiveness” and pentagons in nature you spoke of in your last post :), I want to learn all I can about the impact of social media and teaching and learning. Social Media guru, Shel Holtz, must be a name I should become familiar with! Thank you for sharing the download link to his presentation. I’m wondering if my S L O W computer will be able to capture such a large file! Any suggestions to other links, contacts, etc to continue my investigation of social media’s impact on education and the concept of the digital learner? Thanks so much! Holly

    Reply

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