CMK16 Wrap-up: Finding our People

The Constructing Modern Knowledge summer institute wrapped up two days ago. I'm back home in Barrie with my family, happy to have had a day to rest and reflect before writing this post.

Thursday afternoon (day 3) we were treated to a panel discussion with Gary Stager, Carla Rinaldi, and Edith Ackermann. It wasn't easy to draw everyone away form their projects, but it was worth stopping for an hour to spend more time thinking deeply about students and their learning experiences. We were treated to some more beautiful examples of documentation, in particular a series of photos illustrating the iteration that took place when students tried to draw people playing 'Ring Around the Rosie;' not a trivial task and rich with evidence of student learning. Documentation, learning as a group, iteration, playfulness, and caring were at the forefront of the discussion. You can read tweets from attendees here.

After a break for dinner, we were all invited to return to our project work. Facilitators made themselves available throughout the evening to help us with our projects. During this late-night work session there were lots of celebrations in the room as different groups achieved success with different parts of their projects. We had to make the difficult decision at this point to give up on our goal of having our Weasley Clock refresh positions of family members based on GPS or Twitter data. With the tools available and the technological limitations (particularly with the Wifi) we had to accept that our clock would need to work manually rather than 'magically.' Jim rewired our project using a new breadboard so that everything was neat and tidy and we had potentiometer inputs for each of the Weasley family members. The groups worked together on the final touches for the clock itself with incredible attention to detail. Although we did not achieve our pie-in-the-sky goal we learned about several technologies we could use to achieve a working Weasley clock. The SparkFun 'Blynk' board is one I would like to investigate further.

We finished up our project on Friday morning. This slideshow contains a number of images we took to help document our journey. The final version of our Arduino code is available here; we ran it on Arduino IDE and are simply using Codebender to share it with you. (I'm not sure that the NeoPixel library was working on Codebender). I will update this post if we upload a video to Vimeo.

On Friday afternoon we had about 2 hours to share our project and explore the other groups' projects. The one word I would choose to describe the sharing time is 'delightful.' I can't believe how much the other projects caused me to smile. Here is a small sample of projects:

These readouts are from moisture sensors placed at three different heights in a tower garden:

The lights in this blanket change colour based on time of day to let a child know when it's time to get out of bed:

This is an interactive 'etch-a-sketch.' One person draws while the other person controls the size, shape, opacity, angle of rotation, and colour:

This is a garbage/recycling can that celebrates when people put something inside it:

This tree is an interactive history of The Blues:

You can explore more projects on the CMK Vimeo account. The variety of ideas and technologies was astounding.

At the end of sharing time, we were asked to disassemble our projects. After four days working hard on them, it was amazing to see how quickly they came apart. Although we all had invested a great deal of time and energy in our projects, I think the ease with which we took them apart speaks about the true value of the experience. Our collaboration, conversation, and learning is what we were taking home with us.

The final reflection at CMK was some how wistful and celebratory. Many participants shared that they felt they had found 'their people.' This certainly was a case of bringing together like-minded individuals, but although we all share similar educational values we each brought different perspectives and experience to the conference. One difference that was evident throughout the week was the type of schools each of us came from. I met teachers from public schools, exclusive prep schools, private schools focused on learning disabilities, and other unique schools like The Blue School. We cannot ignore the fact that the type of quality of resources available to us and our students' families are extremely varied. I think CMK helped show that there are a wide range of materials and resources available for teachers who believe in learning through making; not all of them are expensive. Public schools have a role to play in ensuring that we are not increasing the disparity between rich and poor.

At the end of the reflection, when it was time to say goodbye, Gary Stager reminded all of us that we are the only ones standing between our students and 'the madness.' I think Gary is referring to a number of things when he says this - standardized testing, prescribed curriculum, defining worth based on grades instead of learning - in the end it does not matter what exactly he means by this. I think that the important thing is that teachers and students trust one another. Students need to trust that we are doing right by them. Teachers need to trust that students will learn and thrive when we create the right conditions.

Thanks to everyone at CMK for your help, patience, rich conversation, smiles, and celebrations. I don't know if I'll ever be back, but the experience certainly grounded my thinking and validated my work with students and teachers. It was certainly a conference unlike any other.



Click here for reflections on days 2 and 3 of CMK.