The Avant Gardist
April 26, 2010

Jerelyn Watanabe
Assistant Registrar

The volcano of ahi tartare arrived at our table literally smoking from the dry ice hidden in the base. Rob’s eyes widened. He dug in.

We all devoured our meals, sitting at a small street-side table in downtown Mountain View, the heart of Silicon Valley. Men and women dressed in suits held business meetings at nearby tables. Every make and model of fancy sports car drove down the street.

So how do Myron B. Thompson Academy teachers fit in to this scene? More on that later, for now, I’d like to share a little about how curriculum is cultivated at our school.

Hours of conversation and shared insights from books and educational papers all led to the idea of a revised 7^th grade curriculum. This new curriculum would help transition a “brick and mortar” or home-schooled student into online learning at Myron B. Thompson Academy. Students would learn to use the latest in technology and tools while deepening their understanding of the core subjects of math, social studies, language arts and science. UNESCO (United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization) goals guided the development of our student outcomes but there was a missing piece.

That’s where slide:ology: The Art and Science of Creating Great Presentations, written by Nancy Duarte, entered our discussion. We needed our students to work in teams even though they might be geographically separated, perhaps even living on different islands. We hoped that students might communicate their ideas using the latest technology and tools in the most effective format. The slide:ology Workshop promised to show us how to create a really effective presentation (after all, Duarte Design helped Al Gore with his slideshow on global warming). We felt hopeful that we could then teach our 7^th grade students this skill.

We lived slide:ology for two days, one day attending the workshop and the next day completing a project for the school using the slide:ology ideology. During the two days we heard stories (after all, isn’t that what a presentation is?) and told our own. We used hundreds of sticky notes. We put ourselves in a “bathtub” to think (a variation of thinking outside the box) in loaned conference room at Duarte Design. We learned how vitally important visual elements are to a presentation. And we went to lunch in downtown Mountain View.

The slide:ology Workshop provided us with tools to create compelling presentations for our students, their parents, and for other teachers. This experience helped us all feel more comfortable taking risks in order to communicate our ideas. This in turn helps us become more effective as individual teachers and collectively as a school.

For the record, after eating his volcano of ahi tartare Rob tried tofu for the first time.

The Avant Gardist

April 5, 2010

---Diana Oshiro

Principal

SHARE, REMIX, REUSE – “LEGITIMATE PLAGIARISM?”

I returned from a three day conference held on the shores of California’s beautiful Monterey Peninsula with a renewed commitment to transform education. Thompson Academy, an active member of the National Repository for Online Courses, has been working with colleagues from other states to further expand our collective knowledge of online learning. It is quite evident that online courses and web-based technologies are transforming education. So what will be the new role of our teachers and expectations of our students in this new environment? Will we be held hostage by online curriculum providers who will not allow the teacher to customize, individualize and differentiate instruction using the set content? Will our teachers be able to create courses, share content and redesign assessments that can be distributed to anyone?

Open Educational Resources (OER) and Open licensing are hot topics in technology and education circles today. The OER movement has increased tremendously from 2005 when the first collaborative content creation projects were funded by the Hewlett and Shuttleworth Foundations. Open educational resources are educational materials and resources offered freely and openly for anyone to use and under some licenses to re-mix, improve and redistribute. Open educational resources include:

• Learning content: full courses, course materials, content modules, learning objects, collections, and journals.
• Tools: Software to support the creation, delivery, use and improvement of open learning content including searching and organization of content, content and learning management systems, content development tools, and on-line learning communities.
• Implementation resources: Intellectual property licenses to promote open publishing of materials, design-principles, and localization of content.

Are we possibly doing something illegal by taking available content, re-mixing and then redistributing to anyone who wants it? Does this practice border on “plagiarism”? No, not if everyone agrees to share. This movement may be a new and better way to capture the strongest content, best instructional practices and highest performing students. As our community of learners begins to recognize the importance of shared knowledge, every learner and teacher will collectively benefit and grow. Perhaps this can be called “Legal Plagiarism.”

Thompson Academy has always engaged in innovative, “cutting edge” opportunities that informed new instructional practices and transformed educational environments. Another such opportunity has presented itself. I believe Thompson Academy should play a major role in creating and using OER to improve learning while maximizing and extending resources. This year we provided students from 28 public schools with courses for credit recovery or acceleration toward graduation. This is done without cost to student or regional school. If we share our resources, our teachers and instructional content with all students desiring our services, perhaps we will begin to see how external circumstances like lack of resources, furlough days and derelict facilities will no longer matter. So, what should be our next steps? Developing a plan and strategizing ways to redesign courses, remix content and share it with everyone in the form of credit courses for students or professional development for teachers is the first step. This will not be an easy task but can be done. We’re all about “proving the concept” and Thompson Academy will attempt to “prove this concept” in the near future.