 The field of educational computing for the past 27 years, trying to help teachers make sense of the wonderful opportunities that are available to kids and provided by digital computation and communications technology. I've been teaching online for more than 15 years and 19 years ago I had the great good fortune of leading professional development at the first schools in the world where every kid had a laptop. So let me say that again, I've been working in schools where every kid has a computer since 1990. So I have a large breadth and depth of experience and information that I'd like to be able to share with you today and talk about the issues of where are we, where might we go and which ideas should sustain us as we try to create opportunities for kids that wouldn't have existed otherwise. The thing that excites me most about computing is not that it allows us to learn the things that teachers have always wanted us to know, maybe with greater efficiency or efficacy or comprehension or stickiness, but that it creates genuine opportunities for kids to learn and do things that would have been completely impossible just a couple of years ago. And yesterday I showed a number of these examples in a robotics context. I'll share a couple more of them with you today in a time that we have together, whether it's robotics or game design or software invention or simulation building or music composition. The computer is at best an intellectual laboratory and vehicle for self-expression. It allows us to do things that we wouldn't be able to do otherwise. So there are a number of resources that might be useful to you. I'm the executive director of something called the Constructivist Consortium and if you go to constructivistconsortium.org slash books, there's a large collection of resources that you might want to read and explore. There's a handout that contains the links to a lot of articles that I've written as well as materials you might want to use in your own teaching or in your teaching of teachers and that's at stagger.org slash cutter and there's information up front and in the lobby, the entranceway about an event that I'm running this July in the United States, if any of you can come. It's a four day immersive MinesOn Institute where you can learn and collaborate and mess about with technology and use it in creative ways and also interact with some of the great minds, some of the great thinkers and educational leaders of the last half century like Herbert Cole and Deborah Meyer. Okay, now there's a quote here on the screen that I think is really provocative and it says the phrase technology and education usually means inventing new gadgets to teach the same old stuff in a thinly disguised version of the same old way. Moreover, if the gadgets are computers, the same old teaching becomes incredibly more expensive and biased towards its dumbest parts, namely the kind of rote learning in which measurable results can be obtained by treating the children like pigeons in a skinner box. That's from an article called teaching children thinking that my colleague and friend Seymour Pappert wrote in 1971. I don't think there's a more, there's a better piece of thinking about computers and education that's been written in the last ten years as this document from 1971. And one of the big ideas of this presentation is that in order for us to innovate in education, we need to have an understanding about the attempts at innovation in the past, the current attempts, and we need to learn lessons of history. We need to stand on the shoulders of giants. We need not be hostile to theory as some sort of esoterica that's abstractly removed from the classroom, but rather it gives us a language for talking about what we want to do and what we want as a result children to learn. So I'm going to be in this presentation talking about some of what I think are the greatest education ideas in the world. This list is incomplete, it's entirely arbitrary, but the big idea here is that there are big ideas that we can build our future educational environments on. In fact, that future can begin tomorrow. That's all another way of saying that every problem has been solved somewhere. There isn't a single educational issue confronting Qatar or the United States or anywhere in between that hasn't been addressed and satisfactorily solved somewhere else. For some reason, we keep reinventing the same mistakes over and over again in education. It's as if bad ideas are timeless and it's the good ones, the good ideas that are incredibly fragile. Those little pockets of innovation that the system tends to crush very quickly, we need to understand that so that we can use technology in the ways that maximize our investment to create the greatest potential for students and allows for the greatest achievement that we would imagine. Having said all of that, it's worth thinking about technology as driving what happens in classrooms. It has always been the case that what you did in the classroom was based on the dominant accessible technology of that day. Whether it was a blackboard or handheld slates or pencil and paper, the curriculum reflects that dominant technology. So it should come as no surprise that if kids have computers in their shoes and servers in their bedroom and handheld devices and expectations about the world in which they live that don't match up with school, that school ought to reflect some of that technology. What concerns me, there's been a lot of discussions about what's going on in the UK in which every classroom got this interactive whiteboard and I put interactive and inverted commas because it's not quite clear to me what's the interactive part other than sort of smacking it or pointing to it. I think the best interactivity happens between your ears. But the policy was we're going to buy one of these things for every classroom in the country because they're big and they look like the future and politicians can get their photographs taken in front of them and then we will invent a methodology for using them. We'll invent some reason to have them. Now I'm not saying that there is no practical constructive use of an interactive whiteboard. Some teachers might use it in a terrific fashion. They should have them. But the notion that everyone should get the thing because some bureaucrat thought so or because some salesman made a good pitch I think is a really bad idea. And it's a bad idea for the following reason. It's a pre-Gutenberg technology that turns a teacher into sort of a priest who's chanting to the monks who are taking dictation. And my concern is that a lot of these classroom technologies wrongly reinforce the dominance in the front of the room and as a result are creating a greater gulf between the teacher and the child, the teacher and the learner, not just physically but intellectually and emotionally as well. And what I'm finding in my work in schools all over the world is an increasing number of teachers who haven't even had it occur to them that they could sit next to a child and work on something that was mutually interesting and beneficial. That if the technology could do anything, it should break down these power structures of I'm on the stage, you're on the floor, you should listen to what I have to say and create opportunities where we can work and learn together. So I'm going to share with you a number of what I consider some of the best ideas in the world. As I said a moment ago, this list is entirely arbitrary. Some of these ideas don't use computers at all but I'm going to then share with you ways in which the computers can be used to model those approaches, to augment, to enhance those approaches and in some cases the technology use is the powerful idea in and of itself. So some of these include personal fabrication, the regio-amulie approach from Italy, student robotics, kids being engaged in video design and computer science, the learning theory of Papert's constructionism, generation yes, one laptop per child, the Venezuelan youth orchestra and these are all ways in which computers can be used as intellectual laboratories and vehicles for self-expression. Now in order to decide how we're going to transform schools or how we're going to even operate schools and how we're going to use technology in them, it's increasingly important that we decide what it is we believe as educators, what is our stance, what is our view on teaching and learning, what's our view on the role of computers and I find that this sort of breaks down into three thinkers. And the first one is Alfred Bork and Alfred Bork was a computer science and physics professor in the United States who passed away a couple of years ago and since the 60s he was speaking at conferences and presenting papers in which his central thesis was teachers are stupid, they have the lowest test scores of any professional group and we have a shortage of them. So his solution was we could design teaching machines that would replace the teachers, that the solution to the problem would be to put computers in charge of delivering a curriculum. Then you had my friend Tom Snyder who was a software developer, he was an incredibly creative teacher who became a software developer in the mid 1980s he was trying to figure out a way to keep his business afloat, he looked around at the landscape like any good entrepreneur would do and he realized that every classroom particularly in western countries had a computer in it. So his company designed software for the one computer classroom and the computer was a prop, the teacher was an actor, the classroom was a stage and the computer was used to simulate role playing activities and such and keep the teacher at the center of all activity and have the kids to sort of buzz around and orbit the teacher. And then there's Seymour Papert who beginning in the mid 1960s started talking about every kid having a computer and a computer being the space where you can mess about with powerful ideas and where you could learn mathematics in a natural way as if you would learn French by living in France as opposed to sitting in a classroom and being taught French. This is all a way of saying you need to decide who has agency in your classroom. Who has the power? Is the responsibility for learning on the learner? Is it a result of being taught? Or is it because some bureaucrat in the ministry somewhere has decided what you need to know on a particular day and time? And there are products being sold primarily for those bottom two. At any educational technology conference you go to in the world, the top one is using a computer as sort of an as an open platform on which you can invent and create and collaborate. Now, I realize this slide violates all the laws of PowerPoint, but it really captures the essence of what I believe computers can mean in the learning process. It's from a computer scientist named Danny Hillis, and I'm just going to read the last two sentences. Hillis says, the amazing thing to me is not that a computer can hold the contents of all the books in the library, but that it can notice relationships between the concepts described in the books. Not that it can display a picture of a bird in flight or a galaxy spinning, but that it can imagine and predict the consequences of the physical laws that create these wonders. The computer is not just an advanced calculator or camera or paint brush. It is a device that accelerates and extends our processes of thought. It is an imagination machine which starts with the ideas we put into it and takes them farther and we could ever take them on our own. Now, I think this is an intensely human view of computing. This isn't about turning children into machines. This is about using machines to augment human potential and to create opportunities that wouldn't have existed before. And the examples that I'm going to share with you are in that spirit. All of these examples share common principles. The respect for each individual learner. The need for authentic problems. Kids being engaged in work that matters. Having access to real tools and materials. You know, the internet access at this institution isn't a real tool. It's a toy. It's a cardboard cutout of the internet. It's it's it's a it doesn't it's not even a facsimile of what children use outside of the institution. And as a result you create a greater gap between teacher and learner when you when you use artificial tools and pretend that it reflects the world in which the kids live. We have expanded opportunities. We that one of the principles is that learning is natural. That learning isn't something you need to be tricked or coerced or threatened into doing. It's something you do all the time because it's part of being human and it's and it's rewarding of itself. We have to believe that every child is capable. That there's a sense of urgency that drives our work. I know this might not be the case in cutter. You may subtract a few years from what I'm about to say, but there have been micro computers in schools for close to 30 years. Which means that if we're still trying to find a way to beg bribe cajole trick coerced threatened teachers to use this stuff, we've got a problem because we've skipped more than a generation of children. In fact, it's a generation and a half of children who have been cheated of the learning experiences that they're entitled to. The last big idea is related to that, that we should be using the technology and everything we do in a classroom should be committed to expanding social justice and democracy. The first example comes from Neil Gershinfeld. Neil Gershinfeld is a professor at the MIT Media Lab. He runs something called the Center for Bits and Atoms. He thinks and predicts that there's a lot of evidence to suggest that he's right. The next major innovation, a revolution in technology, will be in personal fabrication. The idea being that instead of going to a shop and buying a watch, now you can go online and you can order the watch and it arrives in the truck in a few days. Well, he suggests that in the not too distant future, you will actually find the watch you want online, modify it or design it yourself, and then have tools on your desktop that will allow you to make that watch. That we're returning to a culture of artisans and people who can create and solve their own problems. That instead of finding ways to teach Somali children how to use Excel, we'll teach them how to use technology to build the technology they need to solve their local immediate problems. And Gershinfeld teaches a class at MIT called How to Make Almost Anything. And in that class, he originally thought he would only get advanced engineering students in it. And he found that art majors and literature majors and people who wanted to learn to make things. Knitting is going through a resurgence in popularity. There's something innately human and beautiful about being engaged in creating something. And kids in his class invented things like the clock radio that when you hit the snooze alarm, it runs away and hides. That's a product now called a clocky. You can actually buy one. Or one of the students made an invention called the scream bag. And it looks like, if you will, a knapsack or backpack that you wear on your front. And when you're sitting in an insufferable meeting or a talk like this, you can lean down into it and scream. And then when you walk outside to the car park, you can squeeze the bag and it will release your scream. And people laugh when they hear about it and they think it's a ridiculous idea and then they see it and they want to know if they can buy one somewhere. So Gershinfeld suggests that we're only a couple of years, maybe a decade or two at most from personal fabrication and that we're currently at the sort of price point of when an institution like this originally got a computer. When an institution like this got a mini computer, it cost about $20,000 to $100,000. And then the prices dropped dramatically and the same will happen here. So the first little video clip I'm going to show you is Gershinfeld talking about this work with the TV actor Alan Alda from a television show in the United States. And then I'm going to show you some examples of what children do that's in this spirit. Creating and manipulating digital information, words and pictures. Pretty much the only actual thing I can make myself is the printed page. But what if this printer were instead a little factory capable not just of printing paper, but of manufacturing objects, being able to make things, you know, things like well, bicycles, for instance. We're on the campus of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology outside the media lab where much of the digital revolution was pioneered. And it's here that today what Neil Gershinfeld believes will be the next revolution in personal empowerment is being explored. Did you make this in the lab? This is an all printed bicycle. This is basically a complete bicycle made from two dimensional polycarbonate cut on a water jet cutter. This machine costing hundreds of thousands of dollars uses an incredibly powerful jet of water to cut through materials ranging from plastic to steel. Fabricating in a few moments objects designed on a computer. It's just one of the machines available to students taking a course Gershinfeld teaches called how to make almost anything. If I had one of these machines at home you could email me this bike. My sister actually was emailed this bicycle in Sydney and she's riding one around. You're kidding. No, seriously. Isn't that incredible? So wait a minute. So that means that if I order a bike from a company someday it won't come in a truck. It'll come. Everybody will have one of these machines and a lot of what we order lamps, furniture, bicycles will get emailed to us. We'll have it a few seconds later. The only thing wrong in what you said is it's not when you order the bicycle it's when you design the bicycle. When you design the bicycle. Did you recognize what this is? This is actually a model of Matisse's Blue Nude number two. You can see the leg here, the hind leg, another leg here on the thigh, the arch of the back, the head and the hand holding the front wheel. In this how to make anything project it's not just that students learn to make a bicycle they learn to make their bicycle. Every bicycle is different and part of expressing yourself in the bicycle you want is what this is all about. This is an exciting idea because as we're talking I just thought of two things I want to make. I remember one thing I came up with an idea for something and I wanted to make a model of it and I went to the art store and bought cardboard and I got so so bollocks up and trying to get the cardboard to stick together. I just threw the whole thing away and it's a good idea and I'd like to see it made. This sounds like I could make it. So I'm going to stop that right there but you know this isn't something that's all that futuristic. You know he Saul Griffiths who incidentally runs a wonderful website for kids called HowTunes H-O-W-T-O-O-N-S which has sort of science fair projects for kids to be engaged in every day is you know talks about how he actually sent the bicycle via email to someone on the other end of the world and if you think of the implications as a teacher we need a whole lot more art instruction in schools. We need kids doing hands-on science experiments not just replicating ones that scientists did hundreds of years ago but asking their own questions and solving their own problems as the norm rather than the exception to the norm. Kids need to be engaged in more field trips etc they need to be creating and paradoxically and far too many schools that's the stuff that's being cut. So let's look at some some other ways that this has ramifications for education. That's a photograph of me in the mid-1970s when I was about 12 years old when I was 12 years old I had the good fortune of being in Mr. Jones's class. Mr. Jones taught a seventh grade computer programming class. Once again this was 1975 or 76 when I had Mr. Jones. The expectation was that in that nine-week class every kid would learn how to program a computer. Mr. Jones was a great teacher he had to be because first of all we only had one terminal in a room connected to a mainframe system and he had to find a way to keep us all engaged and I suspect that he was so good because he was learning this stuff slightly ahead of us. You know we talk about you know kids knowing more than their teachers and teachers having to catch up and it was clear clearly the case in some ways even though kids didn't know anything about computers at that point that Mr. Jones had to been learning this a little ahead of us and that we learned about learning because his enthusiasm and passion for what he was learning was infectious. And for the first time in my my life I felt intellectually powerful because I didn't know what was impossible I thought everything was possible that I was able to use the computer to make something that had never existed before. I could thrill and amaze my friends. I could teach them in clubs after school how they too could program computers. I could ride my bike to the next town and buy a copy of Creative Computing magazine and type tens of thousands of lines of computer code into a computer and have them never work. But that was okay because then I would have to find my bug or I'd have to fix the program or I'd learn something along the way anyway that I could reintegrate into my own experience. And the habits of mind I developed in Mr. Jones's class served me every day of my life whether it's hacking my way through an airline voicemail system to get a human being on the phone or get my car out of a locked parking garage. The ability to look at a problem from different perspectives to put myself in the beaker with the with the molecules to view the world from lots of different perspectives really serves me well. And that guides all of my work with children whether it's at the Cutter Academy or it's in Sydney or it's in the South Bronx that we're using the computers to make things that didn't exist before to push our own intellectual boundaries. Now a few years ago Mr. Jones passed away after teaching for more than 30 years and I got a phone call asking me if I wanted to take his job and while I was honored to be asked I didn't want to move across the country to teach the seventh grade computer class because I wondered what the heck could you be teaching in that class today. We keep hearing kids are digital natives they have handheld devices they have computers in their shoes they're the digerati to clickerati the n generation the at generation the now generation we've probably heard six more of those terms at this conference. What could you possibly teach them in a seventh grade computing class and remember this wasn't gifted and talented or school to work or vocational education this was in the rotation between making a tie rack for your dad and baking a souffle. Every kid was expected to learn a program in that nine weeks in seventh grade and the result is that today the curriculum in that classroom is keyboarding which means kids are now being taught where the spacebar and return key are as if they're a complete and uttering competent morons. This is by by any measure a diminution a lowering of standards. We talk out of both sides of our mouths we talk simultaneously about how so clever kids are and then we deprive of any rich experiences as if Seymour Papert said as a matter of policy we have declared that children are to have no understanding of the technology that's so critical to their lives. You could read seven billion pages of Bechda or ISTI documents and not find the words computer science or programming once as if being in control of the computer has no role in the social sciences in the hard sciences or in the arts when we know that that's a lie everyone wants their kid to make Bill Gates money we just don't put any systems in place where they can develop the skills that Bill Gates has and in fact I wasn't alone in having an experience like the one I enjoyed in Mr. Jones's class that's a photo of the teletype that I learned how to program on and if you zoom out that's Bill Gates and Paul Allen the founders of Microsoft having almost exactly the same experience I had at almost exactly the same time where they too attended a school that had some terminals connected to a mainframe system and some wise adults who said here kids see what you can figure out lock up when you're done and it served Mr. Gates pretty well hasn't it and yet we're teaching kids where the return key is when they have a computer before they can speak all this is a way of saying that making things is better than being passive but that making good things is even better and it's important to remember the educational computing isn't about the hardware it's about software because software determines what you can do and what you can do determines what you have learned so here's an example I showed yesterday for those of you who've seen it before I apologize but this is an example of something built with programmable Lego and motors and sensors and a laptop where a five-year-old little girl decided she wanted to build a ballerina and she wanted to bring that ballerina to life so do it what do you think of it now you know the teacher asks a question like and you've done this with your computer the kid looks at it like she's out of her mind of course I did this is what I do on five I can program robots you know at a time where the curriculum for five-year-olds is typically right and left and she's not done it in some sort of futuristic context she's you know she's done it completely five-year-old appropriate context where the dress is made out of a napkin and magic markers and the hair is pipe cleaners and when she's moving her body around there she's modeling what what John Piase called the Synthonic Body Geometry she's relating her own motion to the motion of the world to the geometry of the world you may have also noticed there was an 11-year-old classmate sitting there observing her work because I was teaching it a multi-age environment and when I talk about having multi-age classrooms people always say well but but but aren't there like different levels of kids and do you mean that like the older kids teach the younger kids I said well except in that example where the younger kid is teaching the older kid you know school is the only place where we group people by similar levels of incompetence no one asked you your age before you walk into this room and made you sit with people the same age and again if you want models of this in school you can create them but you could also look to things like orchestras where kids have been working together collaboratively for ages it's not that extraordinary so here's another example instead of playing a video game kids can design their own so here's something created in micro worlds by a student I worked with and it's called Sim Middle Ages some of you are familiar with Sim City and Sim Earth and all those simulations well here the idea was could you build a simulation of life in the Middle Ages so you had sliders for the number of plots of land the number of laborers etc I can't remember all the variables and then you randomly determined how much rainfall plague pestilence taxation you were responsible for and then the simulation told you whether you lived or died in Middle Ages and if you died you could go back and change a variable and maybe you would live now I don't know what the algorithm is for surviving in Middle Ages because I suspect if there was such an algorithm people would still be around but the fact is kids here are using mathematics in a really powerful way to simulate historical phenomena that they're not just playing with a simulation having something happen and trying to guess at the causality because they're in control of the entire system here here's another example that's a wonderful piece of software called the Geometer sketch pad and if all of your high school students were using it it would be a dramatic improvement it's a way of playing with with Euclidean geometry Cartesian coordinate geometry on the computer and yet being a kid who didn't do so well in high school math if I pull perpendicular bisector off a menu something happens on the screen I may or may not understand what happened however again using micro worlds students can do things like this and build their own so here's a list of some of the terms it knows and if as a teacher I provide a couple starting points as a scaffold like how to drop a point on the screen and how to tell the distance between two points from there kids can build an entire geometry curriculum and more importantly they can build the tool for learning about geometry and for doing geometry so that if you can drop up if you can find a distance between two points it's not hard to drop a midpoint you can drop a midpoint you can find about area and altitude etc and as you add a tool and add functionality to your environment you're able then to learn more geometry and if you find that it doesn't behave in a way that you like you can add the tools or modify them to support your own style and your own needs this is dramatically different from the way that computers are typically used to program children here's an example of me stop go back at the sound up sorry about that the next example is a machine created by a 13-year-old who it was incarcerated at the time I spent three years creating an alternative multi-age high-tech construction is learning environment for teenagers who are in prison in a in the state of Maine in the United States and we had an environment where not only did every kid have a computer we had a lot of rich constructed materials for them to work with but the governor of the state and the secretary of education freed us of all curriculum and assessment requirements because they were smart enough to understand that if you wanted a different outcome with children who had been perennial school failures you couldn't just do the same thing louder and as a result kids worked on extraordinary projects and learned a great deal because we took the kids from where they were and move them forward if you want quantitative data if you're interested in results I'll give you the following piece of data in three years we didn't have a single child who had to leave our classroom for discipline reasons can you say that in your school and I'm not talking about the best kids in the society I'm talking about the worst kids in the society we created an environment where they had meaning and respect and wanted to be there and wanted to continue to learn and grow so this machine was created by a 13-year-old alright what my machine is supposed to do is record the temperature overnight the gearbox makes it so it pulls pulls the paper out very slowly and then this motor moves the pencil so it writes back and forth on the paper depending on the variable of the temperature sensor so you get the idea there's a temperature probe and the machine is geared down heavily so that the roll out of machine tape can last several days and it can graph fluctuations in temperature so now he's putting in a cup of snow and there's a misconception of his thinking that's about the urge. Now I put it in a cup of snow to make the temperature sensor drop and now I'm putting it in my sweatshirt to make it so it gets warmer. Okay so what's the misconception? It's confusing heat and insulation. Now you would never identify that with a paper and pencil exam and the problem with paper and pencil exams isn't that they're designed to inform practice because they rarely do. The problem with pencil paper exams is that they're created to rank and soar and punish children and the evidence of that is one kid holding a camera even a cell phone and another kid talking about their work and a teacher watching it creates a teachable moment where a teacher can help the kid overcome a misconception as opposed to them just sort of passing along or waiting until the test score comes back if in fact any other correction is made. Chances are we've moved on to another topic by then. So now we don't have to just be building things out of with computers. My colleague John Stetson in the prison had a kid come up to him at one point say hey do you know how to make guitars? I'd like to make a guitar and John said no but he then went and found himself a luthier who we apprenticed with. Now I want teachers like that because if you wanted kids to be a good carpenter you would have their apprentice with people who are good carpenters. If you want kids to be good learners it should follow that you want kids to be with people who are learners themselves and a teacher if you remember back to the greatest teachers you had the teachers were most memorable they're always passionate about something it might have been deep sea Yugoslavian folk dancing it may have had nothing whatsoever to do with the curriculum but their their ability to learn their passion for learning their quest for knowledge was was something you wanted to emulate and it was something that rubbed off and you learn from so John decided to learn how to make guitars and then how to think about how to teach kids to build guitars and these kids who we were told over and over again had impulse control problems could spend five or six hundred hours building a guitar and then once you've built the guitar just like if you've built the temperature plotting machine then you can conduct other experiments if you built a guitar what do you want to learn how to do you want to learn how to play it then you want to learn how to read music you want to play with others so let's change gears slightly and talk about another powerful idea that doesn't get enough attention I don't think in discussions of school reform there's a small municipality in Italy called Reggio Emilia and after World War two they decided they want to rebuild their community by heavily investing in the education of very small children and henceforth has become something known as the Reggio Emilia approach which shares some principles with Montessori but I think it's more child-centered and more and more democratic first thing you need to understand about Reggio Emilia is it's not a system you can't buy it somewhere and just put it into a school it's it's an approach that's built on what they call the defense and promotion of the rights and potential of children now that's a really big set of objectives for what education should be about they use authentic and deliberate materials and tools what do I mean by that I mean a few things like if you walk into a Reggio Emilia classroom of three year olds it's not uncommon to see kids smashing piles with a sledgehammer or sawing wood or using a box cutter to cut cardboard the sorts of things that we don't let high school students in the United States do and the notion here is that if you want to do real work you should use real tools if you're in a supportive culture where you're taught how to use the tools appropriately and where you have mutual respect no one puts a nail through their foot the kids use the tools appropriately and safely they wear safety goggles etc if you serve kids lunch on paper plates every day they never learn how to handle glass and china and silverware or the quorum associated with having a meal so they they use real materials when they when I talk about deliberate materials they might leave rocks in the classroom or rain gutters on the playground because kids will start to experiment with those materials in predictable ways that create teachable moments they use authentic problems that are rooted in what kids want to know one of my favorites was a teacher asked a sort of traditional question what did you do this weekend and one little kid raised their hand and said we went to the carnival and the teacher said how was it and the kids had crowded and it so the teacher said what's a crowd so the kids had to define and they talked about any discussed and they argued and debated and they said a lot of people and she said how many and they said 90 she says can you make a crowd and the kids went running off and some kids drew crowds some kids made them out of clay and a group of kids who decided to make a crowd out of clay quickly realized that making 90 people was hard and invented the assembly line where they sort of divvied up the work one group of kids drew a picture of a crowd and and another kid looked at the picture and said hey some of those people don't have faces and the kid who drew it said not everyone faces the same way in a crowd that's the back of their head so so the problems are appropriate for the age level and for the context but they're authentic and they're rooted in the experience of the kid they talk about appointments not schedules if you need more time to learn something that's fine except at a certain point lunch is ready it would be rude not to be there but they're not driven by a schedule or a calendar they're big on the role of documentation now you might just simplify this and dismiss it as portfolio assessment or e-portfolios or keeping track of kids work but a poor but documentation is a lot more complex than that in a regio classroom documentation is a visual representation of what a child is doing it's a drawing or a digital photo that's put on the wall for others to see now why is it displayed like that well it's public relations the parents get to see what the kids are doing and they can talk to him about it it's a way of teachers seeing what a kid is thinking and working on so the teachers can meet regularly in dialogue about what does that kid know what I need to know next what sorts of materials or activities can we create that would help the kid have deeper understanding but the best thing of all is it makes private thinking public it allows other kids inside the heads of each other so if a kid is having a problem a classmate might have a solution but also a class might be inspired by what another child has done and integrate that knowledge into their work there are two privileged teachers adults in a regio school one is the Atelierista who is the studio art teacher it's the person who prepares the art materials and teaches the kids how to use them so that they can express themselves because if they're pre-literate that's the best way of expressing themselves and then there's the pedagogista and I'd like to see this person in all schools the pedagogista is the learning theorist the person who helps the teacher see inside the head of the child and helps teachers talk about next steps and reflective practice Loris Malguzzi who is the father of the regiomilia approach talked about the classroom being a thousand laboratories that supported the hundred languages of children the multiple ways in which they could represent their knowledge and art is one of those principal ways of representing that knowledge so let's look at there's a little video clip here that I'm running without sound that's really important you know we talk about problem-solving or project based learning in schools and often the problem is either trivial or way too complex for the kids to engage in I go to countless conferences where the stage is set up like this behind me and a group of the best advanced placement students or IB students in the school are on the stage and are asked by the moderator how would you invent schooling or reinvent schooling for the future and the answers are almost always the same I want to come in later go home earlier have less homework and a better salad bar and then if you ask a group of teachers how they would improve school you get oddly the same answers and they might come in later have go home earlier have less homework and a better salad bar and that's because the problem is inappropriate it's not a problem that a fifteen-year-old can answer they don't know anything about education reform or running so they know about their experience and the problems need to be geared to that so the video that you've been seeing comes from the approach that the regio Amelia educators take which is not to say to a three-year-old how would you make the world a better place but rather say to a group of three-year-old hey can you build a park for the birds who come to visit and as a result the kids can draw and design and plan and measure and test and refine and engineer and paint and decorate this thing that works that has fountains and stuff for the birds to play on and captures the light and make shadows and is a source of pride and beauty that by extension makes the world a better place now last you think that I'm only talking about preschoolers I'm not this is an approach that we could all be learning from and I recommend there was a book on the last side called a hundred languages of children which is sort of the best overview of the regio approach but you would have to be you would have to be a complete neanderthal not to be able to generalize some of those principles to whatever grade level or age of students that you're teaching the idea that we start from the interests of the child and their capabilities and we build upon them to allow them to learn and do and express their knowledge in ways that wouldn't be possible otherwise so here's a technological example that I'm gonna share with you some of you are familiar with at Christmas time in the United States and in England and countries such as that often you make gingerbread houses which where you take biscuits and you glue them together with some sort of icing and you decorate them with candy and lollies and it's in cookies and as a result you create this sort of beautiful thing that you eat after the holidays and we wanted to do that with the kids inside the prison just to give them a nice treat and my colleague Dr. Pappert said surely there's a way to get a computer in there and to this day I don't know if he was joking or not but we took him at his took him up on his challenge and it's the result now think about your computer lab and policies when you look at kids using computers and icing together where's the break well see it work lights flash the tree inside here inside here spins around and it plays jingle bells so in that case the Christmas tree is a heresy kid's lights kids had a program to play which had to convert musical notes the frequency at some kids had burglar alarms others had outdoor lighting some had doorbells some had beds that when the alarm rang it sort of tossed you out of bed and this is just sort of a playful whimsical way of exploring computer science and robotics and engineering using you know a tradition that everyone understood and this is something you would typically do with five-year-olds in school these were 15 to 21 year olds also doing it because it was whimsical and playful and in this you know in a spirit that was attractive to all learners so here's another example that comes from my summer institute that I ran last year we had a pre-conference event where I took folks to the MIT museum in Boston or in Cambridge to be precise and at the MIT museum there's this wonderful collection of kinetic sculptures created by the artist Arthur Ganson kinetic sculpture is a sculpture that moves sometimes you see them in airports with billiard bowls the roll and things that spin and that light is reflected off mirrored pieces etc maybe there's some water involved and it was this little box that looks sort of like a Japanese bento box and it was a crank on the outside of it and it was rice inside and when you turn the crank slowly the rice undulated it sort of danced in front of you and it was this human powered kinetic sculpture that was mesmerizing you would just watch the rice dance and I suggested to these very macho men from Texas that when they came back to the Institute the next day this might be something they could build but who wants to turn a crank when you could connect a motor to the thing and just watch it and and I did something I'm not sure you're supposed to do in a museum which was I reached into the rice to figure out how the machine worked and and they they built the following so this is the original machine video stop let's try this again that's weird multimedia is the Latin for doesn't work in front of an audience let's see if we can make this work my proper computer has as is in the hospital so I'm on a borrowed machine so oh is that it no there's the crack alright we have our five axles and then we geared it down 50 to one ratio because it's like you're down 50 to one and they put a little Lego person in it to look like they were drowning in the rice and I will I'll tell you the end of the story which was we're guys drowning there like I said what's okay so let me play this instead the so once they got the machine to behave like the one they had seen in the museum they felt pleased with that and like in any good project if you're successful you're inspired to try something more complex because the larger theory if you're unsuccessfully have to engage in some sort of debugging strategy to find an alternative way of solving the problem but in this case they were successful and this and observed that the rice sort of behaved like water and wondered if you built the machine on an incline would it behave like water sort of washing ashore and creating erosion and so they they tilted their machine they made some quick modifications to it and in fact it behaved in the predictable fashion that they had imagined and once observing that they realized that even though they satisfied their hypothesis and confirmed it it wasn't as beautiful as the original and they went back to the original and they let me left that going for a few days now that's completely in the spirit of what the regio educators do with two and three year olds but it was done by adults in the context of learning about using technology for learning now so here's some some photos from the environment that I worked in in the prison where my colleague John Stetson is working with the child to solve a problem that neither of them have an answer for the teacher is not pretending to have the answer until the bell rings and then springs it on the kid there's opportunities all around us especially in the increasingly complex world for us to learn together the top right-hand corner you see digital photos of a kid's gear ratio and annotations on it that went on the wall so other people could learn from it we need to be putting more stuff on the walls we need to be putting more stuff on the wiki but if you don't have a wiki use the walls and and I've got a video which I'm not going to show you for for time's sake but there's a kid laying in a beanbag chair and he's reading a book of speeches by Martin Luther King and to his right are some balls of clay and to his left is a robot and in this 30-second video I have this kid sort of spontaneously goes from reading this book to playing with the making something with the clay to reading the book to fixing a robot all at the same time we talk about kids multitasking it doesn't have to just happen digitally there's all sorts of activities they can be engaging in I was once having a conversation with a colleague and I wish I could cite the study but it turns out there's actually some research where five year olds or seven year olds had clay put on their classroom desks while they were doing other activities like the teachers talking at them and they actually found that comprehension increased while the kids had played and had clay to play with it's a way of sort of settling down and focusing so in order for us to be creating computer projects that are meaningful and efficacious in classrooms we need to really think about what is it that makes a good project what are the elements that were a good project and I want to share some of these with you one is that it has purpose there's a reason for doing it that we have sufficient time that it's personally meaningful that that the project is complex it's not simple it involves serendipity we can make connections to other things we can make discoveries that lead us in directions we may not have anticipated or if we run into a roadblock we find out a different way of of proceeding the projects are connected that they connect people they connect ideas they connect disciplines and they may be connected via the World Wide Web as well they're shareable this is critical why am I making this doesn't have an audience is someone else going to be interested in it doesn't have any value and if it's shareable that means that I can talk about it with someone else you know if you just had people come into your classroom they could be colleagues they could be parents who said to children hey that's cool how did you do it you would find that achievement would rise that having a reason and a vehicle for articulating your practice is critical for kids as well as teachers and they have access to constructive materials and we need to be able to ask questions in the spirit of regio like is this problem solvable can we get our heads around it at least maybe if it's not completely solvable we may learn that this problem is really hard and bigger than me and I need to take another class or I need to study hard or I need to practice more is it monumental or substantial schools love monumental projects by that I mean the 300 identical arithmetic problems on the worksheet if we make it 500 it's an even better project or we tell kids that they have three months to work on a five paragraph essay that's not a real substantial project that's that's just make work a real substantial project is a kind of project that burns inside of you that you can't sleep at night because you want to solve it it breaks my heart when I visit schools that have lots of computers even one to one schools where every kid has a laptop and they're surfing the web or they're playing flash games that means they haven't been inspired to do something more constructive what when I was in high school I would have problems in you know programs that I was creating that would bother me to the point where I put my hand up in biology class to take the hall pass pretending I was gonna go to the restroom run to the other end of the school fire up the mainframe which caused the building to shake and debug my program which I got caught doing once actually just hugely humiliating when you're 15 but I want kids to be able to have that sort of sense of of ownership of a problem that it really matters to them and we need to be able to answer the question of who the project satisfies and what they what can they do with that you know is a kid just being taught something because it's in a list of stuff we're supposed to teach them with the faint promise that some day they might use it or can it be used today to learn something else that's important to them and it's one of the great principles of modern teaching is that less is more that if we make connections between subject areas we have rich projects connects lots of things and we don't have to teach 1500 discrete skills we could we could focus on five or six things that kids really need to know and they'll learn everything else along the way now I often find that you know the kid who built that dancing ballerina or some of the other robotics projects or other computing projects that kids are involved in the first time they use the materials they're able to do extraordinary work and in case of robotics they're often able to to build something that kids much older than them or even college age engineering students might not be able to accomplish certainly more complex and sophisticated than you would get to be able to do if you followed a scope and sequence two-year curriculum in robotics in school and and you have to ask yourself then how is that possible how is it possible that in a four or six-hour workshop with teachers or kids I can have people create incredibly complex projects all by themselves in their community of practice and with and have the pride and sense of satisfaction associated with that when if I taught them robotics they wouldn't be able to achieve that result and that's led me to a theory that called a good prompt is worth a thousand words which says that with a good prompt challenge problem or motivation appropriate materials sufficient time and a supportive culture you're able to solve problems and achieve things that are much bigger than you thought you were capable of so again with a good prompt challenge motivating question problem that matters to you appropriate materials sufficient time supportive culture you're able to do things that you wouldn't be able to do otherwise and this is the truth I think for for any kind of teaching and and it's clearly brought to light when you see kids doing extraordinary things with computers one of the reasons why kids are better at this than adults is why they do it and knowledge is a consequence of experience it's amazing to me that educators find this to be mysterious that kids are better at using computers than they are because they sit around a conference is a complaint about the fact that kids are better using computers than they are while the kids are using computers it's a really simple equation and instead of talking about digital natives or digital immigrants how about we talk about tech insurgents because they were waiting 30 years to use a computer there's something wrong with that adult every other aspect of society every other professional is using a computer it's just not just teachers that aren't there's somehow allergic to electricity or something and if you're not talking to the teacher next to you if you're not collaborating if you're not learning and sharing from your colleagues in your own school building if you're not working with kids in your classroom good luck with your online project with you know the classroom in Belarus why are we looking for online projects we don't collaborate our own community when we don't learn from the people next to us why are teachers talking about web 2.0 breaking down isolation where is this isolation coming from why are they isolated if we don't solve that problem the technology is not going to address it now we should look at projects through a better lens than we've typically been using a rubric if you will instead of ticking off boxes for curricular objectives we ought to be thinking about the sort of dichotomy that Seymour Paperoff and wrote about of walking past an art classroom where children are carving sculptures out of soap and they're making these things that they're proud of that they actually brought home that their parents liked not just because the kids created it but because it was actually beautiful and they kept it for years or the painting the kid made where the parents framed it or put the story in a scrapbook compare that to an algebra 2 class now how many kids get to school early to hang out with their algebra teacher and how many parents frame their worksheet and pour put it up on a refrigerator we ought to be raising our standard for for what we expect from student work and some of the ways that I think we ought to we ought to evaluate it would be the ways that an artist or an art critic would is it beautiful is it thoughtful is it meaningful is it sophisticated doesn't respect the audience or does it waste their time you know everyone's excited about kids making digital movies or podcasts but I find in my experience of going to schools all over the world to be assigned in every classroom where kids are making media and assigned to have two rules on it the first rule should be your movies should be shorter and the second is it should be edited at least one more time or as we would say in northern New Jersey where I grew up why should anyone have to sit through that crap we're so enamored by kids using computers that you know having them fart or burp at the voice thread you know gets them a gold star and her teacher gets to speak at national conferences we suffer from something pepper called verbal inflation where we're terribly excited about so very little that doesn't mean that kids can't do extraordinary stuff I expect them to do extraordinary stuff but when they sort of pop off about some topic for 30 seconds that they've never thought about done no research for into the computer and we're so somehow impressed because they've done this I'm unimpressed I expect the kids can do that you ought to be able to create stuff that's beautiful and boring and sophisticated so you know there are lots of ways we can use materials so you're thinking about robotics for example you can use the materials to teach a specific concept like gears friction multiplication of fractions work force torque you can have a thematic project like we're going to build a theme park or an amusement or a factory or an airport and study the systems involved in those themes we have a curricular theme like identify a problem in in Sub-Saharan Africa and build a machine for solving that problem or we can just use the stuff as part of our bag of tricks that allows us to be more expressive and to learn things so that we can use it like we would use pencil or paper Papper talked forever about you know we don't have a pencils in the curriculum conference we don't buy one pencil for a school and then have kids sign up to use it every two weeks like we do in way too many classrooms we ought to be able to use this stuff in a transparent fashion okay another great educational idea Sylvie Martina as a president of generation yes is at this conference generation yes starts with the assumption that the only renewable resource in school is children that by them contributing to the to the operation of the school the school benefits and so did the children as well not just in a service learning context but also in learning how to communicate what they know with others so they use different models and have curricula to support teach students who learn to use technology and then for their culminating activity they partner with a teacher in that school and teach the teacher how to use the computer to solve to teach the other kids or to solve their own problems and as a result you have this renewable professional development resource because there's always new kids and it's and the numbers work in your advantage if a teacher needs help every year those kids know who that teacher is and it the kids volunteer to help that teacher and as a result what's the teacher going to say no I don't want help I'm going to know some kids not to be able to do their work because I'm going to be stubborn no the teacher gets help and as a teacher gets help the teacher becomes more proficient or the students provide tech support or peer mentoring for others that you build this community of practice that includes not just your colleagues but treats children like colleagues as well and gives them a say in the operation of the school and allows them to produce and contribute in ways that are valuable gives them a sense of accomplishment and also helps them develop their own sort of ability to teach and share and communicate their knowledge with others now this is negligent Nicholas Negropanti who created the one computer one laptop per child computer what's also known as the hundred-hour laptop and he's been working in the area of of technology for for solving all sorts of the world's problems for years over the last five years or so he's been committed to this notion of every child in the world having a personal computer because it's a way of connecting them to the world and it's more importantly a way for them to construct knowledge in a meaningful modern way so I'm going to back this up for a second and let him speak for a moment about a vision that we share about using this computer not just to connect not just to look things up this picture is taken in 1982 just before the IBM PC was even announced Seymour Pappert and I were bringing computers to schools and developing nations at a time when it was way ahead of itself but one thing we learned was is that these kids can absolutely jump into it just the same way as our kids do here when people tell me you know who's going to teach the teachers to teach the kids I say to myself what planet do you come from okay it's not a person in this room I don't care how techy you are there's not a person in this room that doesn't give their laptop or cell phone to a kid to help them debug it okay we all all need help even those of us who are very seasoned this this picture is Seymour 25 years ago Seymour made a very simple observation in 1968 and then sort of basically presented in 1970 April 11th to be precise called teaching children thinking what he observed was that kids who write computer programs understand things differently and when they debug the programs they come the closest to learning about learning that was very important and in some sense we've lost that kids don't program enough and boy if there's anything I hope this brings back it's programming to kids it's really important using applications is okay but programming is absolutely fundamental so often when I talk about kids programming computers someone in your audience will say or at least they're thinking well Gary really suggested every kid should learn the program to which I like to reply well we decided that every kid should haiku we've made all sorts of decisions about it who was at that meeting by the way where we decided that every kid needed to haiku show of hands right no one was at that meeting we've made thousands of decisions about children should learn somehow we've decided that in 12 years of schooling they shouldn't even have the experience that I had in the mid 70s of having agency over the computer and one of the things that's most exciting about the the one laptop or child project is as Negropati says in a video that comes with actually three environments for programming so that kids can solve their own problems without having to be consumers that if you're in Sudan or you're in Somalia or Rwanda or Nepal where the average per pupil spending is forty dollars a year you don't have to wait for some company to sell you software you can build the thing you need and that's in the tradition of the other stuff that I've been talking about today you know it's a durable low-powered computer with a great display with mesh networking which means that every machine can share what they're working on with every other machine whether you have a network or internet access or not if I'm working on a piece of writing I can invite Rebecca to contribute to to work on the same document at the same time and one of the concepts that people don't understand about the one laptop or child project is that it's not a school project you can't talk about this without people whining about what about the teacher training what about the curriculum the question is why shouldn't every child in the world have access to what my children have that's what it's about it's about children having the computers and if the kids happen to bring those computers to school maybe they'll help their teachers figure out what to do with them and of course they've seen all over the world this sense of urgency come to life where teachers realize that these kids are capable of such extraordinary things and it's infectious and teachers want to support that I was talking with some teachers from Colombia then the country of Colombia and they were going to be buying hundreds or thousands of these computers for for an area inside the tropical rainforest and they had some real problems they have the same sort of problems we have here in the United States like the teachers don't want to do it they had a problem that it's hard to have computers in a place with no electricity so they were sort of brainstorming what could we do about this and they said well you could you we can't have a generator because you can't get fuel to the school because it's in all the rainforest there's no way to get petrol to the place and then they thought about solar panels and that might work except they'd have to get the solar panels several hundred meters in the air above the rainforest canopy and that would pose a serious engineering challenge and then I kid you not these two women looked at each other shrugged and said we've got a river and they ordered the computers and I bet you within 12 months they were getting power from the river a lot of people look at this and say why would you be giving computers the places where they don't have clean water well they don't have clean water for political reasons not because of any sort of innate reason and it's funny a funny thing happens whenever kid has a computer electricity tends to follow and clean water tends to follow that people the adults in the community the politicians start doing the right thing and stepping up they build the computer the network from the child up I was talking with some educators in the United States who were getting these devices and they were well meaning people who really wanted to do the right thing by the kids in their community and they said well we'll run our filter and our firewall and our gradebook system and our Novell network and our proxy server and I said no the answer is no their computers for the children not for the system and if you want to provide internet access for every kid in the community you can ask all the business owners and people with routers in their homes to please take the passwords off of them and then you have instant ubiquitous access to the internet and if you're thinking about and worrying about the future you ought to be able to answer the following question what will your school or university other institution do when every kid has internet access on their person for how many years after that point which is in the very very very near future will your school still be hiring people to protect the computers from their users and as I said to ICT Qatar when I was here in November it is perfectly reasonable to protect children it is completely unreasonable to protect computers they're just damn boxes and the notion that the users are going to do terrible things you know if if I could actually check my email while I was here a person has been using a computer for 33 years and has a PhD if I could actually check my mail then the evil doers would win who puts these policies in place they're moronic you can walk into an internet cafe anywhere in the world and every computer works and you walk into a school and there's a high probability that they don't work at all and they worked a lot better when they came out of the box than after the IT department got done fixing them so the question is are we buying computers that allow people to compute and think and collaborate and create or are we buying sculpture if we're buying sculpture then we should keep these people in place who tell you what you may not do and treat teachers and children like imbeciles and felons or we should embrace the technology and the opportunities that exist already one of the reasons why I tell schools that they should be thinking about one to one computing is because it provides a few years of training wheels for the adults in that building because it's never been a question of if every kid will have a computer it's only been a question of when and the adults need to sort of start embracing that idea so they see the wonderful possibilities and they can put policies and practices in place that will build upon the availability this technology and the kids usefulness of it so let's sort of get to one last big idea and then I'll wrap up this may come as a surprise I think one of the big ideas in the world is something called the Simon Boulevard Youth Orchestra that's in Venezuela and you may have heard of it it's referred to as LC-STEMMA it's a project that's been running for since the 70s where hundreds of thousands of the poorest children of Venezuela are taught to play instruments and perform in local, regional and national symphony orchestras and it's committed to the notion of social cohesion of having people work together in a democratic setting where the individual is featured but the individual is contributing to the good of the whole and computers can play a huge role in elevating the arts and arts education experiences for children it is complete baloney that art and music programs were cut because we bought computers art and music programs were cut before we had computers they continue to be cut and they and they're cut because they interfere with our ability to drill useless facts into children that you know the president the former president of the United States Bill Clinton was interviewed recently in the United States and he said if he hadn't been in the band he could have never been president of the United States and that that's why he worked so hard to benefit a charity called Save the Music which tries to raise money and start school music programs well you know I just wanted to grab him and shake him through the television and say it's your policies that killed the music it's turning classrooms into the kensian sweatshops where all you cared about was you know regurgitating answers the questions nobody cared about standardized tests and reading and writing an arithmetic that created this context in which children were deprived of these rich arts experiences and if you want to think about the future I suggest you think of it in the following fashion if computers and interactive whiteboards and cell phones are technology so too is the school the school is this technology of 25 little desks one big desk in this concrete rectangle and we ought to be thinking about in the future what is it that's the affordance of school what kind of benefit do we gain from being in that box with the 25 little desks one big desk well I think the answer to that question is that that's where you have the orchestras and the pottery kills and the science labs and the field trips and the drama productions the things that gain benefit from us being together and we get away from walking into a classroom and the kids being told turn to chapter 13 and read it and it's no better to have a teacher say open your browser and read this web page that sort of stuff can be done outside of school and the reason why people come together is to gain benefit from being together so it's the stuff like orchestral programs music art dance drama science real experiences in the world that are collaborative maybe even multi-aged or intergenerational that that school should be about and the looking stuff up getting answers to questions memorizing content if you will can be shifted outside of school now let's look at what this means and he's only been playing the trumpet for a year but it's already had a profound effect so you're going to hear in a moment a piece of music can composed by some students in the United States I teach us online course called learning a technology and I changed everything about it because I wanted to model online the sort of constructive child centered regeral Amelia like environment that I would like to create for people in a face-to-face setting and I figured why not try to do this with graduate students so I could talk about this methodology for an hour I've written papers about it it's on my website but the idea was instead of talking about assignments I wanted to remove the coercion from the classroom and I have learning adventures and that's not just a change of terminology I don't grade their product at all I look at their participation so every week the students are confronted with a new learning adventure it runs the gamut across a million disciplines they change every year and I want the students to have the experience and reflect upon it and the feedback for the product comes from each other if there's 20 students commenting on each other's work it doesn't matter what I think why is it matter what I think I'm there to keep the conversation going and particularly when I'm working with educators to help them be reflective about what they learn and compare that to the observations of what their colleagues learn so one of the learning adventures that I often start off with is download a piece of software called finale notepad which is a free music composition package it's not free anymore it is almost free we'll find an alternative but anyway the kids the students adults mid-career professionals like ourselves would download the software and I say okay you've got five days compose a piece of music and the great thing about teaching online is that I can't hear the screaming because inevitably there are people in the class who never done anything with music there's some people who have great experience who have taken piano lessons or cello lessons or music theory classes in high school or college but within a few days everyone is able to compose a piece of music and what they learn from that experience is that in a community of practice with distributed expertise we can help one another when I ask them to debrief the experience some people will say well I look things up online when I needed help or I looked at the online help or asked my classmates for help or I joined the community of finale notepad users or I listened to my colleagues music and that inspired me to try something or one student said I just move the balls and sticks around I got something that sounded good another said I was interested in putting notes on the score at random and I googled random music and found out about serial music and I bought a CD by Schoenberg so I made all sorts of connections I would have never imagined but all the examples that the students gave me were informational they use the computer to look something up to get an answer to a question and they missed the forest for the trees the powerful idea here and in most examples I've shared with you was not that they were getting answers to questions but that they were composing music that they were composers they were engaged in the exact same activity that great composers through time had been engaged in so I threw my my students this September into this crazy learning adventure and a young teacher in Colorado named and Smith said walked into her 10th grade English class the next day and said my nutty professor wants me to compose a piece of music so guess what that means that means you compose a piece of music and the kids panicked in exactly the same way the teachers in my class do and one of them said but but but but what is the music supposed to be about and she said how about Lady Macbeth and you'll hear in a second on it as I like to point out as often as possible it's as good as anything John Williams ever composed and this all attempts at humor aside in order to compose this piece of music these kids had to share their own knowledge because again there were some kids who knew about music and others who didn't but they had to actually explore what it meant to write a piece of music that brings Lady Macbeth to life and they then blogged about the experience and the level of insight on the part of these students was extraordinary and I sort of I was invited to join in discussions and I said to them you know what do you think about this crazy English teacher asking you to compose music in English class and how could you have possibly composed music when she didn't teach you how to compose music and it really was a rich discussion about learning and teaching as well now all sorts of opportunities like this exist because of the technology or I want to go back a slide where students regardless of their talent oh that's bad I've got something my clicker has gone haywire I'll wrap up in a second let me just want to share a couple quick examples with you I apologize for that so I was working in a school where every kid had a laptop and this is a young lady she's an extraordinary pianist, composer, singer and she goes into this room in a moment where she's using what in the late 90s cost twenty five twenty five thousand dollars this digital recording box that allowed her to be all the instruments and over the voice drop instruments out and transpose and such now every kid has this in your laptop she was in a school where every kid had a laptop beginning about 1993 or 1994 there was a commitment to sort of student pluralism and learning and project-based learning and such but you know even though she has extraordinary musical ability and talent the technology allows her to go further if you could have on her own and it's one of those happy stories where you lose track of a student over time and it turns out that her name is now Missy Higgins she was Melissa at the time if you go to Missy Higgins dot com or her page on the iTunes music store you can buy that song that she composed in year 11 she won the equivalent of five Australian Grammy Awards a couple of years ago so her music has been on television shows she's appeared on major shows in the United States now you can't connect the dots between her being in school with laptops and having a successful music career but the point here is what Hill has said at the beginning which was with the computer it amplifies our human potential allows us to go further and we could have gone on her own here's that quickly and Alan Kay the person responsible for inventing a personal computer said that the computer is simply an instrument whose music is ideas and when you think about music and art the computer is an instrument that makes music and art accessible and possible for more children I had a great lot of attending a high school and professional music teachers on the faculty and I had four years of music theory class with very few kids ever in history United States had four years of music theory and yet if I wrote something for cello or bassoon I never got to do my work before if I wrote something for the piano it was too complicated for the teacher to play which is everything you write when you're 14 you never got to hear your work before even when I went to university I was in a jazz program we wrote the strings we were told that none of the string players will be allowed to perform our music so now with a fifty dollar mini keyboard and with a laptop we have the ability to be composed to be performers you know there are countless examples of children writing musicals performing in for the community and designing sets and costumes in fact you're not the design is that you could project it and the second change so that we have these opportunities to bring the performing arts to life in ways that we're never imaginable this is the old way of saying how we have this this amazing construction material that allows us to not only invent but to invent things that weren't be possible otherwise and the barometer we should use the metric for evaluating success of music computers in school should be what do the kids do with them do they do things that dazzle and amaze us truly that live up to their potential or merely deliver the curriculum we need to you know be able to move from routine activities to transformation like there is a future center to learn center and come up with activities for using a computer in which the computer is not only integral but for plays a critical role that wouldn't be possible otherwise well in the most cases we're sort of centered somewhere in the middle there this is the old way of saying a conclusion that the technology matters I go to a lot of conferences like this probably 38 years all over the world where some blowhard like myself gets up on stage and says it's not about the technology and to that point I look at my watch and think to myself and how come I'm not at the Montessori conference it has to be about technology maybe we're just not very good or articulate why is the technology matters and I think the technology matters and I've been saying over and over again because it allows kids to have a quality of experience and solve problems that they wouldn't have otherwise it allows them to be mathematicians and filmmakers and composers and photographers and chemists and geneticists and video game designers and on and on you want to think about the role of teachers in 21st century I'll end with this example you know it's a Saturday morning and you total week and you're exhausted and you go to make a cup of coffee and you reach for the milk and you're out of milk and you think oh and you have to run out to the shop and you throw on a hat maybe an overcoat you run out to the shop and you congratulate yourself as you're leaving with your quarter of milk or leader of milk you're graduating yourself for for having gone unnoticed at which point a former student sees you from the corner of the parking lot and they come running towards you with their arms open wide and they want to give you a big hug which you want to avoid because you have impressed your teeth and you're having a bad hair day but they give you a big hug and they want to reminisce and they always say you remember that time we and the rest of the sentence is never I assure you crammed for the graduation exam or used all of our vocabulary words in a sentence the the thing they want to reminisce about is some project that you did with them at whenever young and that's what creates memories and if you want to think about being a great 21st century educator I think your primary responsibility is to make memories I think about like now let me just go back to the slide in one second I'll end with this example and finish up so I'm working in this prison a kid comes to us named Tony 17 years old he's about six feet tall he's wearing an orange jumpsuit which many had tried to escape he and he fell in love with building cameras and talk about F stops and apertures he built pinhole cameras to develop film and turn negatives into positives and then turn them into digital images and he had plans in his notebook for building a hot air balloon that would take an aerial photo when an ice cube melt in a release to shutter and when I asked me if he thought I would work he was furious with me to question it he said he had tested all the pieces he just had a time to make it fly and we thought he was leaving the next day but he ended up staying a few extra weeks and it was fortuitous for the purposes of my research because he said that since he had been in this environment where every kid at a computer where we're built upon the sort of progressive educational traditions of Dewey and Pat Burt and John Holt and Deborah Meyer and Dennis Lidke and Herbert Cole and put the kids needs and passions and experience and expertise ahead of some arbitrary list of stuff from some bureau of studies he thought about the world in a different way and he built a vehicle that became known as gopher cam to investigate what was down the ground hog holes that were all over the campus and I'll let him speak for himself. I think about like doing something totally different now like I looked at the groundhog hole I wanted to go down it and before I just look at it as a hole it's like a stick down it. Well what makes you want to go down it? Because I can. Because you can. Yeah. Well I want to. Yeah why do you think you want to? I just feel it's down there. So you think you're more curious? Yeah. Tony was 17. Tony hadn't shown up at school until since he was 12 and he said that neither had anyone he could think of in his peer group and yet he was able to excite the imaginations of everyone in this facility where he was able to engineer this machine that he could send down a gopher hole and find out what's down there and he didn't learn a lot about the gopher hole but he learned the sorts of lessons that NASA scientists learn when they don't convert Fahrenheit to Celsius and their probe burst into flames. So if he worked for three days on something and a twig busted his machine apart he learned a lot about engineering challenges. But imagine if our goal for children graduating from our schools was that if they saw a hole in the ground or the seas ahead or the heavens above and they had a question about those natural or man-made wonders in the world around them that they possessed the confidence at least to begin to answer that question for themselves. Maybe just to learn that that's a really complicated question and I need to learn some more stuff or maybe to solve it completely. But imagine if that was our goal and I end with a quote that reinforces this idea. This comes from the great American broadcaster Edward R. Murrow who gained notoriety and fame covering World War II for radio in the United States and in 1958 he told the National Association of Broadcasters the following. He said this instrument can teach, it can illuminate, yes it can even inspire but it can do so only to the extent that humans are determined to use it to those ends. Otherwise it is merely wires and lights in a box. It's up to each and every one of us to raise our game to think about computers in more child-centered, creative, socially collaborative ways and then all of the problems that we think we're dealing with sort of just fade by the roadside. And with that I thank you for your time and patience and good humor and it's been an honor to be with you once again. Thanks folks.