Turning the Supertanker

It has taken a bit of effort to organise, but I think that the end result is worth it. The latest buzz tool to go around the blogsphere is Voicethread. For those of you who have yet to discover the delights of this programme, you need to see my tutorial on the ‘How to…‘ page of this blog.

Today I decided that it was time that my blog practiced what I preach and have decided to make this space my own Grand Central Station (personally I would prefer to call it Paddington, for obvious reasons but that is not the location of the well known metaphor) for all of my initiatives, including the video tutorials that I create for my cluster. I digress.

Over the last few weeks i have been setting up with two classes here on the Supertanker and with two classes at Woodford Junior School in Plymouth, a questioning initiative. It works like this. We have sent head and shoulder photos of each other and they are now displays on our respective class walls. We have exchanged names but the names and the photos do not correlate. Each child has been paired with a random student from the other school. Their job now, through careful observation of all the photographs and careful questioning, is to work out who their partner is. The questions posed have to be answered by the partner and the word picture built up will then help, through reasoning, the students to identify each other. As this process continues the students will glean additional information and this additional information will be included into a combined Inkscape artwork that the children will shuttle backwards and forwards to each other as they work on the same work in opposite time zones.

On Tuesday I worked with both sets of students in New Zealand and in England. Already the project is highlighting all kinds of assumptions that students make about those around them. As the students in the UK were recording their questions to us and listening to their own partners questions to them a whole raft of challenges to the accepted norm arose. The first was names and how to pronounce some of them, the second was accent or dialect, more and more of these little issues will arrive. We started to explore these issues last year with our “My world through your eyes” initiative. Trying to explain to Kiwi kids what a pastie was or what or where Bodmin was, was an interesting exercise as was Tip Top Corner and Te Kuiti to the UK students! We all make assumptions about our immediate environs and those that are not privvy to that local knowledge listen to what might as well be gibberish as it has no connections to their own collective consciousness.

Helen and I are quite excited about this latest collaborative project. The questions and responses are being collated on our voicethread, check out the initial efforts of the students this week:

Meadowbank / Woodford Voicethread

The latest installment of our remote teaching, ‘dial an expert’ initiative has just taken place and how different this lesson was from the last four.  How far the students have come, how more relaxed we all were at using this method of instruction.  Helen and I have spent the last couple of Friday evening/mornings (depending on which time zone we were in!) ironing out the wrinkles in my real time teaching experiment, where the students would not only hear and see me and me them, but see the program being demonstrated in real time too.  We still have have a few image quality issues to resolve, but in essence we have proved, even if it is a little clunky that we can teach via this method.  It just needs refining a little more before we launch the procedure on a live class.

Tonight’s lesson was a cracker.  We had to use the method that we developed last year, but that was not a hinderance.  The students by now have got used to the whole method of me teaching them from afar, although the music teacher who came in to claim a few students was amazed that this kind of teaching could happen at all.  It helps that by now the students have mastered the basics of Inkscape and tonight we were able to push on and do some more interesting design work.  You can see the resources used in tonights lesson at my latest skrbl page.  What really impressed me most about tonight’s lesson was the students.  They were coming up to the microphone and webcam and asking questions and further supplementary questions just as they would to a physical entity in their class.  Crucially I asked them to give me feed back, ie come back to the camera to let me know that what I had told them had worked and that they had understood it.

Virtual teaching will never replace teachers in classes, but it does have its benefits.  Virtual teaching will not enable the education of masses of students for the price of one teacher, but what I hope that it does blossom into, is the whole ‘dial an expert’ model.  If you have a skill, why should it be locked up into your classroom so that  only 30 or so students are exposed to that skill at any one time?  If you have a skill, be it musical, artistic, whatever and you want to share beyond your current class/ school/ district/ country then let me know, I am sure that we can set up a directory of skills and teachers that can be accessed to benefit students no matter where they are….  Oh and the best bit, I was eating ice cream as I taught!  Try doing that in the class!

I have long advocated that every class should have a Lego robotics kit in it, be it the RCX blocks or the new NXT. I have used these robotics tools in my classes in England to great success and again last year in my G+T classes here in New Zealand. Some of the problems my students have solved have included designing a program to enable a robotic vehicle to negotiate a supermarket car park, get pairs of robots to dance in time with each other and the music they are grooving to, solve environmental issues such as collecting rubbish and sorting and opening and closing doors on command.

The ‘programmable bricks’ seem to me to be the perfect inquiry learning tool; students can postulate a question, research some potential outcomes, develop a theory, test the theory, evaluate the results, refine the initial theory, re-feed their evaluation into the cycle until a satisfactory answer falls out. And all this without an exercise book not only that the students are highly motivated to solve the problem of their own design.

Gary S. Stager has done some wonderful stuff with disaffected students, students at risk and youth offenders with this educational tool. His students have produced some truly amazing machines; the ones that come to mind are the fax machine and the log sorter. His site provides some excellent starter points, however, your students will find this tool so motivational you will not find it difficult to come up with ideas. On the contrary, often it is necessary to reign in the enthusiasm!

I think that not only is this tool a perfect inquiry tool that is an essential tool for every classroom, it also has the potential to create community links. Later this year I will be working with my students and the robotics kits again and this time they will be making a simple robot, no skills there, they can even follow the manual to do this. The variation will be that this time I will want them to create a program that will draw a sketch using three colours using board markers, what they draw and how they solve this is entirely up to them. I am intending to make this a collaborative project with other schools. Helen in Plymouth wants in and has just purchased her first NXT kit. Anyone else interested? We can mail our programmes to each other for evaluation and enhancement, we could even split the colour elements of the programmes up, now that really would be collaboration to ensure success! Of course we will be filming the robots creating the final art work and posting it to You Tube… Watch this space.

As you watch this video try to imagine if this had happened in your class, you can almost hear the questioning the probing of ideas, the set backs, the triumphs and most importantly the immense satisfaction of ownership on behalf of the students. Check out the video…

What a wonderful and inspiring day today has been.  In the space of 15 hours I have taught in three different countries, without the use of a passport and international travel.

Today I have taught, as usual in New Zealand, but this afternoon I tutored a teacher in the use of Audacity.  I showed her how to download, install Audacity, record and export an audio file.  I then showed her how to  send that file via Skype to anyone that she chose to send it to; naturally she sent her first recording, via Skype, to me.  Nothing odd about that, except that she is in upper New York State!  She left that session buzzing as did I.   Sandi is a specialist music teacher and has now seen the potential of this program to be used as an assessment tool to gather evidence on the musical ablitities and progress of her students.  A free program that she did not know about has now provided the initial impetus for her to further explore the limitless possibilities of ICT and to integrate ICT into her daily lessons and crucially, completely without pain!  The possibilites for peer tutoring like this are limitless, forget dial a pizza, dial a peer!

It is now 11:16 pm and for the last hour I have been teaching graphics to a class of Year 4 students in Plymouth in the UK.  You can see the resource that I used in conjunction with a video Skype call at my skrbl pad I also recorded my end of the session using CamStudio and will post the finished video to You Tube later.   The students loved it.  The session had quite an entourage, the Principal of the school and several members of the Board of Governors were there as were the local press.

The most bizarre aspect of the whole event was having my picture taken via Skype by the lcoal press photographer!  Very odd indeed, but very global and proving that we can move beyond the boundaries of our four walls in class. With a little planning and effort we can access peer support and expert advice from all over the planet.  Our students deserve this and we should, as Captain Picard says. “Make it so.”

I have long been intrigued with the whole notion of online collaborative gaming and its potential for education.  Shoot ‘em ups, although strategy games, are still blood baths and not really suited to pre-teen education, I can see the letters from parents now (note not e-mails, what does that say?)!  As a result, I have been intrigued but have not persued it further.  Second Life, on the other hand, I immediately saw as having huge potential in the education sector, but how?

I recently embarked on an experiment with Helen in the UK to see how we could exploit Second Life to enhance our learning partnership and to really develop a sense of community between our two schools.  I wondered if we could not work together on a collaborative construction project as devised by the students.   I envisaged many student avatars all working collaboratively to create some edifice and leaving instructions and queries for the next shift as we sailed through time zones…

Helen and I both created our Avatars, mine is a hopeless representation of me!  I tried to be honest about my appearance and my efforts ended up looking like some ring worm suffering alopaecia sufferer!  Anyway our experiences on Linden as newbies were enough to put us both off!  Helen was bored to tears with some overbearing architect with too much too say.  I guess that if you are a bore in your first life you bring that imprint with you into Second Life!   I just jumped straight in and clicked on the first ‘popular’ tag that seemed to be in the centre of Linden and promptly ended up in a strip club!  Now I could definitely not only see the letters from the parents if I let my students loose here, but my resignation letter too!  My only defence being that it would have been genuine discovery learning!

My interest in Second Life was re-kindled at the recent Ulearn07 conference, when Tony Ryan talked about not only our Second Life, but our Third and even Fourth lives.  Since then the I have seen the following:

 http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/7038039.stm

http://rampoislands.blogspot.com/2007/09/need-more-evidencee.html

I have come to the conclusion that there is too much here not to be used by students, but still the un-restricted access issue is one that has to be wrestled with.   Not least the fact that Second Life is filtered on School Zone and I have a sneaking suspicion that the ports that it communicates on are locked by our tech support company,  just as Joost is (an easy fix but an irritation non the less). How do we protect our students from the adult aspects of Linden?  If a 10 year old were to attempt to walk into a strip club in our First Lives, they would be prevented from doing so by the moral imperatives of the  adults in or around the establishment, not to mention the legality of the situation.  Second Life has no such moral or legal imperatives, it is the wild west and that, for many, is its appeal and I for one would not want to restrict or control that, for adults.  Second Life is a masque ball, we can be who we want to be, the assumption is that all around us are voters and tax payers, ie adult.  Our Avatars have and give no visual clues to the genuine age, gender, ethnicity and identity of those whom we meet.  That is Second Life’s appeal for adults and its Achilles heel for students to use it.  So how do we get our students into Linden without invoking the wrath of parents?

I have been discussing this idea with Fiona and she has come up with a fantastic idea that we are going to be working through this term with my G+T students.  The students will be observers of Linden, by proxy though our Avatars.  I think that this has potential and am looking forward to it.  We will be the guides and as such can teleport our students to  resources and experiences suited to their needs.  This however will not enable the students to ‘experience’  and explore unfettered the environment of Second Life.  What is needed is an island that is the sole preserve of educators,  who  will be able to allow their students to roam freely.  Until this happens or some other solution is devised, our students will be passive observers of a world that is not meant experienced passively.  In the mean time resources such as the ‘International Spaceflight Musuem’ are too good for education not to utilise.  I will keep you posted of our progress. If you would like to be part of this experiment, let me know and I will work out a way to include your or your students.  I am planning to do this on Friday mornings at 11:00, but will keep you posted.  If you want to find me in Linden I am ‘Alban Sicling.’  If you see me in a strip club, it is not me, but my identical twin, honest…