Category Archives: Brian Crosby

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Nevada Education Technology Leadership Conference

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Update 2-28 / 10:30pm
Link to my conference Wiki.

This weekend is our state technology conference. Ian Jukes is the keynote speaker Saturday. From the conference website:

The theme of this year’s conference, Technology: The Great Connector , suggests the wide range of influence technology has on learning. Sessions and workshops will reflect this. Topics will include –
Connecting to Curriculum: student use of technology in design: robotics, art, buildings; integration of technology resources into classroom activity
Connecting to Leadership: preventing student plagiarism (defining it and preventing it through use of online websites such as turnitin.com), implementation of technology plans; becoming “highly qualified”
Connecting to Creativity: student productions (yearbook, newspaper, etc), innovative uses of PowerPoint, ActivBoards, and other tools.
Connecting to Each Other: blogging, using online resources such as think.com

I’m doing 2 presentations – a 60 minute presentation Saturday called “Tales From A Model Technology Classroom” (the classroom is a model – we might get there later). And Sunday I’m doing 2 hours on “Blogging and Other Web 2.0 Goodies.” I’m hoping to have a wiki for both presentations done in the next few days.

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Delayed Start

Well it’s our turn here in the high desert. We had snow yesterday and last night (3 – 14 inches depending on the exact location – 4 to 6 feet up in the mountains around us), so we are starting school 2 hours late. Since we are starting CRT testing today it should be interesting.

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Not A Good Sign!

You know you really need that upcoming 3 day weekend when you find yourself standing outside your classroom door pressing the button on the key to your car that unlocks the car doors, and then for an instant wondering why the door isn’t unlocking, and then you hear a car horn beeping out in the parking lot and … well, you get the idea.

8:00 pm update: I guess this isn’t my day. After school I was prepping some Flickr samples for a presentation the staff at my school HAS REQUESTED (be still my heart). I had just sent a magazine cover and trading card to print, I pushed back on my chair to stand up and the next thing I knew my head was making contact with the corner of the concrete block wall behind me – an ambulance ride and 3 staples later I’m home feeling foolish but fine.

2-15-07 update – OK this is getting ridiculous – today I got a call that my wife had fallen at her school … hurt her knee … meet us at the hospital … x-rays show knee is broken …. URG!
Did I mention that my 3 year old Powerbook laptop died this week? (if it was a car it would have 500,000 miles on it) – it is in at Apple being fixed.

Teaching is messy!

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Top 5 of the Year

The top 5 most read posts in my first 10 months blogging at Learning Is Messy: . . .

1) Paper, Pencils and Books May Not Boost Student Achievement 

2) Too Much Time For Change To Happen? 

3) Hoping To Make a “Web 2.0” Difference In A Child’s Life – Part 2 

4) Working, Breathing, Reproducible, Intriguing Models 

5) Society May Be Willing To Invest In Children If They Are Seen As An Immediate Value To Society 

Learing Is Messy

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5 Things You Wish You Did Or Didn’t Know About Me Meme

Doug at Borderland sucked me into this:

1. I was going to be a professional photographer – I had been accepted to a photography school when I was asked by a friend to shoot publicity photos at the Outdoor Education camp he ran for 6 to 16 year olds. I went planning on staying for 2 days – I stayed for 4 weeks and the next 2 summers – hiking, rock climbing, rope swinging, rope bridge building, survival training, nature interpretation – changed schools – became a teacher.

2. My last name is Crosby and I actually am related to Bing Crosby. Not a very close relation – my Dad’s grandfather and Bing’s grandfather were brothers. My dad and Bing worked at the same logging camps owned by their uncle Lloyd in Washington and Oregon during the depression – Bing didn’t last long, found something else he liked better.

3. I like doing projects around the house – building a deck, landscaping (not necessarily good at it, just like it) – I also like visiting national parks – so last summer when we “inherited” a large number of redwood boards I combined these 2 interests and built a boardwalk around one side of my house like you see in national parks. Have some overdue landscaping projects to do this summer after a trip to the East Coast.

4. I have taught now for 26 years, starting in Oregon, then California and now Nevada. I’ve taught in private religious schools and public schools – both in very high socio-economic schools and very low socio-economic schools. I use technology a lot with my students, but if I had to make a choice I’d rather have the money for a bus and take field trips about once a week to places like a grocery store and a farm and a large office building and the house around the corner where someone has a vegetable garden they are proud enough of to talk to the kids about, and on a boat in the middle of Lake Tahoe and to the top of a mountain peak and to a big city, and a sandy-hot desert and a redwood forest when it is dripping wet from a heavy fog (and lick banana slugs) and a ball game and more. But then I’d want the technology for the photos and video and journals and audio recordings and a way to share them and my students’ learning.

5. I have always dreamed of visiting Antarctica – fell in love with it when I saw a TV special about the race to the South Pole when I was about 10 years old. I even applied to go there through the “Teachers Experiencing Antarctica“ program the last year they had the program – I still haven’t been : ( – but I have walked on glaciers in Alaska, Montana, California and Canada.

But, enough about me … tell us about you.

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What’s Happened To Meaningful, Instructive, Constructive, Respectful Discussion?

I have been a contributor to a discussion about the role of teachers, styles of teaching and accountability on another blogger’s blog this past week. It is unfortunate that the discussion became just another example of how discourse has become contentious and too often therefore meaningless and non-productive.

In this case a few that contributed comments late in the discussion misrepresented themselves as just wanting clarification on sentiments that were voiced. These contributors never identified themselves as having an agenda or the fact that they support a specific program for teaching. The comments they posted became condescending and shrill. Eventually the blogger was fed up with their use of his blog to push their agenda and attitudes and he attempted to cut them off. Next they used their blog to name call, bully and smear – and encouraged others to do the same.

This so obviously mirrors what is going on, mainly in politics, but increasingly also into daily discourse on many subjects these days about not having real discussion – but instead a tendency to attack and bully if someone doesn’t agree or shift their opinion to yours. This has dark implications in my opinion for fruitful discussion about important topics – for me as a teacher of course, discussion that could lead to meaningful changes and attitudes about what it means to teach and learn.

This brings me back to Stephen Downes post – Sameness – that I posted about awhile back.

“It seems to me that one thing educational theory has been unable to address is the possibility of multiple theoretical perspectives, the possibility that there is no one taxonomy, set of standards, methodology, etc., that will define The Way to do education.

Certainly, any approach to learning theory that suggests that an experiment can be conducted in (say) a double-blind model in order to test hypotheses in terms of (say) achievement of learning outcomes in my view demonstrates a fundamental misunderstanding of the nature of the enquiry.

We need to move beyond consensus, beyond sameness.”

Learning is messy.

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Newsflash! You Can Go Back In Time, I just Did!

We attended Back-To-School Night at my oldest daughter’s high school last night. She is in the pre – IB program so all her classes are basically advanced placement type classes. It was interesting to say the least in light of the recent spate of posts in the edblogosphere about the turtle-pace of change in how school is done. We spent 10 minutes in each of her teachers’ classes to hear about what they would be doing and their expectations.

Out of 6 classrooms 4 had whiteboards (non-digital) but 2 classrooms, including the room where Formal Geometry is taught, had blackboards and they all had 20 year old overhead projectors. The geometry teacher lamented that she is almost out of the colored chalk she bought, and she is hoping she can get whiteboards installed “…maybe this year!” because the chalk is cracking the skin on her hands and markers have more vibrant colors. So here is a high school math teacher in 2006 excited about POSSIBLY getting a whiteboard installed in her room so she can use markers! To her that is a technological advance. The biology teacher did have a 19 inch TV hooked up to his new desktop computer so he can show Powerpoint presentations and video from his computer which he proudly demonstrated for us. (This demonstrates the fallout of Nevada always being 49th or 50th in per pupil funding in the country).

Ian Jukes tells about his father returning to his high school for his 50th reunion and finding it hadn’t changed – he even found a desk with his initials carved in it – he would have been at home here.

This school is very diverse which we really appreciate, but it also concerns me. Our daughter has wireless access with a laptop at home and parents that have a fair amount of tech savvy. But many of the students have zero access. The one theme that ran through the night was that the school invested in new desktop computers and PDAs so that teachers can keep their “Edline” accounts updated so parents have access to how their child is doing – which is great for us. But what about the students that have parents that have no tech savvy, no tech access? Many of these parents have no significant school experience so that even if they did have access to this constantly updated information about their child’s progress, they don’t have the parenting skills, general knowledge or resources to use the information to really help their kids.

The teachers were not seemingly concerned about the lack of access to technology (or the lack of knowledge about educational technology) and they feel they have a great program – and my sense was that all the teachers we met seemed very competent overall. But I couldn’t help but feel that this lack of knowledge of educational technology and the implications of that are like someone who has cancer, but doesn’t have symptoms yet.

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Blogs Are Conversation, But Conversation That Varies In Intensity And Purpose

So I write a post to clarify my understanding of just what kind of a conversation blogs are supposed to provide – and admittedly I probably came across as disappointed in the lack of quality conversation that I have noted on at least edublogs at times – and I end up with a post that is among the best blog conversations I’ve had.

As a disclaimer I want to let you know that I am not following up my last post about not following up on posts to make a point … it just happened. Well no actually I felt compelled to say thanks to everyone that commented – great ideas and points and truly clarified for me what blogs are about as conversation. Thanks to all!