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Edcamp Tokyo 2017

The experiences of organizing and participating in Edcamp Tokyo in 2014 and 2015 have been so inspirational, I wish to share them with all of my colleagues and teacher friends. The best way to do that is to organize an event.

Last Fall, I approached my administrators about empowering teachers within the elementary school to self organize one of our own professional development days. Strictly speaking, the event was not Edcamp, because it was a limited to our own staff. However, we followed the Edcamp model and the results were fantastic.

‘Creative Connections’ group at Edcamp @ KIST via Instagram

The only logical step was to offer to host the next Edcamp Tokyo here at my school. The process began as usual with assembling an organizing team, surveying the local community for optimal dates.

One change we made was to move the organizing team away from seemingly endless email threads to Slack. Slack is a slightly ironic update to the ‘chat room’ circa 1994. However, for facilitating communication and collaboration in a team, it is far superior to email and has the potential in my opinion to supplant social network ‘communities’ as a space to organize around events, ideas, and movements.

Community involvement

Industriousness is one of the hallmarks of Edcamp, so I utilized Twitter’s polling function to gather votes for this year’s theme. The initial ideas were gathered from the organizing team and then put to a vote.

The winner was ‘Make learning personal’. As an organizer, it is also heartwarming and exciting when the #EdcampTokyo hashtag begins to warm up on social media.

Astounded that I hadn’t made it sooner, I created an @EdcampTokyo Twitter handle, which can also be integrated with Slack to stimulate interaction and ‘buzz’. This will be useful in the future, as the login details can be easily shared with other organizers and hosts.

Given the current global political and social climate, it was also heartening to read an announcement of a new anti-harassment policy from the Edcamp Foundation.

The day arrives

Hosting and Edcamp has plenty of joys and the greatest among them is meeting curious and passionate people. Our event attracted approximately fifty participants from thirty different schools and other organizations.

Browsing and voting for sessions at #edcamptokyo! #edu

A post shared by Bart Miller (@bartlmiller) on Apr 7, 2017 at 5:42pm PDT

Student panel

One fantastic idea this year was to include a session with a panel of KIST students to provide perspective on issues from bullying to technology in and out of the classroom.

What most surprised me about the students’ perspective was how unenthusiastic they were about technology, as though only Generation X and older people are excited by carrying a supercomputer in our pockets.

Critical thinking

I was happy, in between relaying messages and ushering late arriving guests, to stumble into a Critical Thinking session which I would characterize has having a theme of ‘making the complex simple, but not simplistic’.

The most stimulating feature of Edcamp is diversity of perspectives. When many points of view focus on a conceptual topic like critical thinking, the conversation is certain to be enlightening.

Viral On Twitter

It’s a fact that Edcamp itself was born on Twitter, as was Edcamp Tokyo. Consequently or coincidentally, it’s also our favorite social network and the #EdcampTokyo hashtag hosted a fair amount of chatter around this event.

This kind of backchannel interaction is fun and provides another channel by which people, including those not necessarily in attendance, can participate.

Looking ahead

Hosting or organizing professional development is usually a different experience than participating in it. Fortunately, this year I had such a helpful organizing team and KIST hospitality team that I was able to engage in discussions without being overly busy with logistics and problem solving.

In the future, I would like to see Edcamp Tokyo grow into a community which includes more local Japanese educators as well as more enthusiasm from the international schools.

In terms of the organization, I would like to see our function transform into an advisory role empowering teachers to organize and host their own Edcamp Tokyo events with the support of our expertise and promotional tools.

Data evolution & revolution

The past

Data has been an undercurrent in my teaching since my first classroom in 2007. Of course, in that year, I struggled to gather data and there was virtually no chance of utilizing much of it to inform and enrich instructional planning. For good or ill, data is not essential to the survival of a first year teacher.

Each year after, I slowly improved, including a variety of experiments like the one shared in the post Student Empowerment | COETAIL final project. I tried different forms, organizers, notebooks, etc, until finally unveiling an integrated digital system last year. I shared it as a presenter at the GAFE Summit 2016 in Kobe, Japan, and used it for the school year to publish students’ ongoing assessment data, and other key information such as website usernames and passwords, directly to them as web pages. After celebrating and discussing the system, I felt that it was terribly unsatisfying.

The present

Inspiration came in the form of media such as Jack Norris’ keynote presentation from Strata + Hadoop World in San Francisco, Let’s Get Real: Acting on Data in Real Time, embedded below.

The concept of ‘data agility’ through converged data and processing appealed to me because what I sought a tool which would organize all assessment data in a way that could be searched, shared, and analyzed. Over the years I had been introduced to many ‘tracking systems’, only to discover that they were utterly unmanageable at scale. Ticking boxes on scope and sequence documents or highlighting learning objectives almost arbitrarily seemed like a show at best. In fact, a colleague who shared such a system with me admitted that at the end of a term, due to a lack of hard data, he would simply choose outcomes to highlight on every student’s document regardless of their actual progress or learning. To quote Mr Norris, I wanted my data to ‘get real’.

While designing my own system, I became somewhat of an amateur data scientist. The implications of the article Putting the science back in data science got me thinking about the flow from data entry to visualization and publishing. A quote from the post Can Small Data Improve K-12 Education? helped to clarify the objective for the project.

‘Small data observes the details or small clues that uncover large trends. The idea is that by honing in on the elements that make up relationships and narratives in schools, education can be enriched.’ The Edvocate

What I wanted to do was bring transparency to the relationships between myself, students, parents, and administrators. Further readings within the big data and data science trends like Data Quality Should Be Everyone’s Job  by Thomas C Redman directed my attention toward the purpose for the data. Before data is collected, it should already have a purpose, and that purpose dictates the design of the collection, publishing, and analysis tools.

 

screenshot-5
Copious data entry (lots of dragging)
The next piece of the design puzzle was my school’s Assessment Handbook. In it were the categories, criteria, and descriptors on top of which my system would function.

 

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Student data visualization via Google Sheets
Utilizing a system of Google Sheets, data is entered and student progress viewed in potentially real time, depending on the efficiency of my data entry. As we began using the system I shared a video, Tour of your data book, embedded below, which illustrates the details of the user experience much better than I can describe in words.

The future

This system has been remarkably effective and unlike last year, I only plan to make minor tweaks, especially to the user interface. Feedback from students and parents revealed, as I expected, that there are too many graphs and that it’s difficult to know which are more or less important.

Another feature I plan to add is a Google Form which mirrors the data entry document which would allow teaching assistants, specialists, and even parents or students themselves to contribute data to the system.

If articles like The Three Ways Teachers Use Data—and What Technology Needs to Do Better by Karen Johnson and 7 Steps to Becoming a Data-Driven School by Eric Crites are any indication of the direction that data utilization is heading in education, I’m glad to be along for the ride.

Service in action: ESRC

Action

Action is the one component of the IB Primary Years Program that is expressly difficult to implement and document. When I started at KIST, there was an opening as the Elementary Student Representative Council facilitator. Although I was reluctant to take on extra roles in my first year at a new school, my background in service learning motivated me to volunteer.

Since then, I have slowly transformed the culture of the ESRC into an authentic service learning experience.

Service design

One of the initial changes was to change members every quarter. This was done in order to provide opportunities for four times as many students per year to participate. I view each quarter as an iteration of the design thinking process, or more specifically, service design.

Service design process

1 Communicate with peers
2 Seek & identify service goal
3 Make action plan
4 Assign duties
5 Implement plan
6 Reflect on outcomes

The process begins by raising questions and surveying the elementary student population about their views on how the school might be improved. ESRC members speak with their own classes, and older representatives visit younger classes. Their suggestions and concerns are discussed in a subsequent meeting to identify a service goal.

In addition to speaking with their classes, each iteration of the ESRC conducts at least one meeting with the Elementary School Principal. The format and purpose of these meetings will continue to evolve, but their efficacy in promoting confidence and sense of purpose is invaluable.

Details of all meeting notes are kept in an Excel workbook with a new sheet added every quarter.

Responsible Communicators

In the article Community Service Ideas for Youth: Why Giving Back Matters by Marilyn Price-Mitchell, PhD, the focus for elementary students is on learning to be responsible. However, the ESRC at KIST is voluntary and the expectation of responsibility is made clear to prospective members before they join. Our focus is on growing as Communicators.

Members use a private email group to communicate with each other and a public (within the school) group to stay in touch online. I found that the emphasis on communication whether through meetings, speaking to large groups, and creating posters and other visual media, shifts the students’ attention from ‘learning to be responsible’ to needing to be responsible to take and illicit Action.

Our successes have included helping a Grade 2 student to persuade the school administration to install a Friendship Bench and sponsoring a Pink Shirt Day.

Future plans

Perhaps as our routines become established, I would consider developing a portfolio and badging system like the one described in Adam Hill’s post, Action and Service Volunteers.