Welcome to NCS-Tech!

Good morning all,

We’re officially on Spring Break, so I won’t be posting every day like I usually do, though I hope to have some updates periodically from my adventures in New York. I did however want to tell you about this site / project, it’s unlike anything I’ve ever seen and it’s totally worth sharing!

Ocean of Know is a research project involving children in New York City schools and Young McDonald’s Farm, a tele-robotics aquaponics research facility belonging to Rutgers University. I learned about it after being invited to present at Students and Electronic Media: Teaching in the Technological Age in Princeton next month. I’ll be presenting on a panel with Dan McVeigh (from this organization) as well as Vicki Davis on innovative uses of technology in the classroom. The conference is FREE and oriented towards educational leaders (in instructional and administrative capacities) in New Jersey, New York and Pennsylvania. Click here to register!

Ocean of Know uses videoconferencing and Internet-based monitoring/control systems to connect kids from NYC schools to this research facility. Once linked, kids and teachers learn through a series of projects and routine farm maintenance – as if controlling an aquaponics facility via the internet can be considered routine! You only have to spend a few minutes on this site to see how creative and engaging the lessons are. I recommend the ‘How We Do It’ and ‘Under the Surface’ pages (I’d link them directly but can’t grab the URL for some reason).

Founded nearly 20 years ago, this organization has been conducting serious research while preparing teachers and students for their careers and real life. So much of the content on the site is so compelling, I would just quote it all if I could, but that would miss the point. These folks were focusing on 21st century skills WAY before the term came into widespread use. Collaboration, problem solving, visual, numerical and textual literacy, use and manipulation of technical equipment to gather data, and to top it all off, now they’re learning programming with Squeak. The essence of this project is captured in this quote from the ‘How We Do It’ page:

If you’ve followed closely the story of Dory Finn and her fish, you may have noticed that teachers seem to have played a very small part in these lessons. That’s because Dory’s teachers have learned their lesson: that a teacher is a guide and a mentor, a resource for their students. Our teachers learn that the best use of their most limited resource—their time—is to prepare their students to function independently.

Talk about a ‘hook’! (Ow, bad pun, this is a fish farm after all.) I can’t wait to meet Dan and learn more about his project … and help him explore some of the latest Web 2.0 technology and how it might be used by program participants.

Hope this helps,

-kj-