Innovative Teachers

Following is a report that I wrote to Microsoft, LAUSD, and LATTC after I attended the Microsoft Innovative Teachers Workshop at Microsoft Headquarters, Aug 19 - 21, 2002:

Revelation from Redmond   by Joseph Auciello

In short, it all came together -- how to train Teachers and create Virtual Classrooms! The “Right Stuff” is in place! The Courseware Authoring Development system is up and running!  It is called “Virtual Classroom Tour” -- and it is Hot!  It is effective; it can and hopefully will be taught To all 35,000 xxxx teachers! I fell in love with it – You will too!

It is easy-to-use, and intuitive: Here are its attractive features:

1. Seamless integration with other MS applications -- Write docs in WORD, spreadsheets in EXCEL, presentations in PowerPoint, HTML in FRONTPAGE -- this creative body of work that the empowered teacher does "seamlessly" folds into, becomes part of the Virtual Lesson!

Imagine having WORD, EXCEL, FP, PP as Creation / Authoring tools! Not to mention the ability to create quizzes quickly!  You can even get almost- instant “poll-type” survey information back from the Students! This will speed up the process of making courses “High Quality”!

(If everything I write ends in an Exclamation Point, it is exactly because I am exclaiming! This was originally written at 5am in Redmond, now revised coolly in SoCal at my home.)

Let me break that down a bit: In most schools, an Instructor has to get his own domain name, and an ISP to host his Virtual Classroom!   The Virtual Class Tour (V-C-T) enables the teacher to “upload” his “smack” immediately! The Virtual Classroom space is almost literally his blackboard, his Bulletin board, his mimeo machine, and his assignment list!  The stuff he writes on his Word Processor is “saved” to his space on the class server that is Internet Accessible!  Say “Farewell, Adios, and Thank You to FTP!”

"What You Write Is What You Post!"

2. After tThe teacher creates it, triple checks it in compliance with quality and curriculum standards – This in nothing new -Teachers have been “locally” publishing for a long time – it is uploaded to the Web!  Herein is a concern! -- When it is
‘public”, it competes with other professional Presentation Quality material – So creating materials at the level of World Class Presentations has to be part of the Virtual Teacher Training.

It is posted on what Microsoft calls the “Class Server." A server dedicated to giving students access to the body of work of the Teacher!

3. The instructor authors material, makes tests, assigns material, gives quizzes, takes surveys -- in every way parallels physical classroom behavior -- including tracking students. Lessons are "published" on the Web instantly: The teacher is in “almost immediate” close, "cyber-nurturing" contact with his / her students! The old problem of "impersonal" contact disappears! The more skilled the student and the teacher, the more contact they have!

Access Creates Contact Which Supercharges Learning!

This "closeness" of contact is a result of being quickly able -- call it "Rapid Instructional Development" -- to create lessons, publish them, have students who are usually online, looking for messages from their teacher – finding their assignments and knocking them off before returning to their other online activities!
It puts the teacher on a "level playing field" with the student who is on the internet most of his waking hours! 

Did I say that it gives the teacher the tools to be creative, to "author", to "craft" his or her lessons?  This is exactly what we have been looking for ! The V-C-T is the instrument by which the classroom teacher is "Re-invented into a Virtual Teacher"!  It is the paradigm for operating a Virtual Classroom!

Again, let me repeat, every MS application will run under it -- and everything on the WEB can be included.  This includes Virtual Reality rooms where students take on a persona and learn by virtual immersion what life was like in Imperial Rome, or in Alexandria, or wherever!  Gadzooks!  Then, they come back, and take a quiz, write short answers to questions, or takes a computer – graded quiz whose results are instantly available and can be “tracked and mapped” and whose discriminators can be discerned and analyzed for improvement!

This technology – the Class Server, the V-C-T that runs all the Microsoft Applications – will usher in, in my Opinion, a "Cyber-Renaissance"! A new golden age of Learning, of communication! I have seen the tools in action, talked with other authors, and met the MS principals and managers! I can make this excellent system work at xxxx, or even for my colleagues and myself!  And market our own Online Courses!

The V-C-T should be part of the curriculum in the Virtual Teacher Training proposal that I am writing!

4. Summarizing, so far, to be sure that I have not missed anything,  Powerful authoring tools, everything integrates and articulates -- it is literally "Where do you want to go today?"   What do you want to do today? It all resides on the
server-side, so teachers and students access a Workspace on a Server!

There is authoring, tracking, testing, feedback, polling, everything --you can add instant messaging and video. Add to this, the idea of the $100 internet terminal and students carry this book-sized instrument with their books, and connect from home, school or library!  Can you say “Learning Anytime Anywhere!”

On the deepest level that I am capable of -- I want to share that this is the EDUCATIONAL BREAKTHROUGH THAT WE “TECHIES” HAVE BEEN WAITING FOR! We now have the tools to create the colossal culture-shift to Virtual Teaching that we need!

5. Let me add that in terms of Science and Technology curriculum, that this medium will be most effective. I envisions 'simulations' and on-line experiments, with teachers as "learning partners" -- And I have not even gotten to the part of the "Virtual Community" – where everyone is both a teacher and a learner -- the actualization of Bill Gates's Online Learning Community!

If we have students who are “hacking online, 12 hours a Day”, the teachers now have a way to channel that energy into instruction. Teachers now can turn all that
energy into meeting academic and critical-thinking goals!  Does the reader get, as I get, that we are entering a new "Golden Age of Learning"?

6. I have a lot of ideas on using Visual-Virtual-Reality in learning -- I plan to add some of our research in Visual-Virtual-Reality, VVR somehow 'fast tracks' new, severely under-represented population segments in Science and Tech. And it will all run under the new Virtual Classroom software and on the CLASS SERVER!   I AM JAZZED!

7. I am going to look for grants / support to start year 1 of the huge project to train all xxxx teachers in this technology.

With a careful, quality plan -- starting with a vanguard Of 612 teachers from 58 High Schools –using this course-ware -- we can convert all xxxx teachers into facilitators of hybrid, virtual classrooms!  I will work on that!

I "got" the vision of how to do it -- of how creative, empowered teachers, let loose, sponsored by enlightened, supportive administrators -- with these marvelous tools and servers – can break down the walls of the stifling classroom and take learning to a new virtual level!

The courses developed by other Innovative Teachers are such high quality -- let me share that the Web has a quick way of pushing quality to the top -- that they will inspire other "magum opi" , bodies of work, by all teachers in whom the desire to teach and communicate has thus far been barriered by lack of entry to the Virtual World!

Please, start contacting me -- by email at cyberprof@hotmail.com or cyberprof@auciello.net  -- I "get" that we are on the portal of a huge educational breakthrough!  Come join me!

In closing ... "No child left behind" government funding and this courseware fit
hand-in-glove. A student is in constant, monitored, read "immersive" contact with
his/her teacher. “With feedback, there is communication. With communication, there is learning!  With virtual computer interaction, there is optimum Learning!”

These tool are about "feedback" --  24 x 7 feedback! This puts “All Kids on a Level Learning Field!”

It is 6 am in Redmond, WA (and every where else on the Pacific Coast!) I will do this. Jump in and help me! It is the greatest stuff!

Joseph Auciello. Best regards, Be well. Out. JA

Post-script notes:
You can "nag" your students in cyberspace. Goad them, push them based on their responses.

You can individualize lessons for students or groups of students, just by selecting names from the class list.

This is a heavy concept -- the amount of interaction between student and teacher will double or quadruple!  Due to this contact, almost a "cyber personal" contact.

ANEMIC ONLINE COURSES WILL DISAPPEAR IN THE FACE OF THIS ROBUST
TECHNOLOGY!

THIS SOFTWARE IS IMMERSIVE, "GET IN YOUR HEAD" COURSEWARE, WHERE THE TEACHER CAN "MENTOR" INDIVIDUAL STUDENTS!

Hyper, cyber teachers will write lessons 16 hours / day that run 24 hrs / day!
Knowledge-hungry student will meet and exceed class requirements in days, not months!

JA. OUT