Second Life October 15, 2007
Posted by davidit in collaborative, Education, Inquiry Model, Second Life, student engagement, thinking skills, ulearn07, Web 2.0.Tags: collaboration, communities, Second Life, Ulearn 07
3 comments
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…
E-Cast September 21, 2007
Posted by davidit in collaborative, Education, Education 2.0, ICT Integration, Inquiry Model, thinking skills, Web 2.0.add a comment
I attended one of those promo events last night that masquerades as a training seminar. Fortunately it was an event that was well worth attending and that was not just because the flat whites were free and there was brie and biscuits on hand too! The seminar was held at RED (Renaissance Education) in Onehunga, Auckland. This post is really a heads up for New Zealand schools. A product is about to hit the market that has huge potential for those of us dabbling with the inquiry process, fully immersed in it or even for those of us constantly on the search for fantastic resources. Well this is one of them. A company called e-cast has spent the last couple of years putting a service together and a considerable amount of time in dark rooms negotiating with lawyers to get this product to market.
What they offer is this, 37 channels of TV from all over the world for you to download any of their broadcasted programmes to your school and then you can do with the content as you wish, so long as you do not then republish it beyond your school. Not only that, you can create your own videos and submit them to their servers. This means that if your students wanted to research the impact of bottom trawling on Pacific fish stocks, they could search the library of recorded documentaries from all around the world, download the relevant programmes, edit the differing content and publish on your own networks. If they then create their own original content they can then upload their videos, for the rest of us to access. Not only that you can select and book upcoming transmissions that you might want to use, these will be recorded and you can then download them to your school after transmission.
For schools such as mine, where bandwidth is a major issue and a service like this would knock it over in about 2 seconds flat, they also have a service, yet to be tested, but coming, that utilises the spare bandwidth on a geo-stationary satellite for schools to download their content. How cool is that?
I have been so impressed with the content and the service that I have signed our school up today for a free trial and have also put my hand up for consideration for the satellite trial. I know that when the demo is set up in school it will really impress the staff as it impressed me. One of the channels is NASAtv. As we were waiting last night we were watching the live stream from NASA. They have over 40 years of archived footage for us to use, we may yet be able to put the did they go therory to bed!
I was very apprehensive that such a cool system would cost the earth. They have two cost structures a pay as you go download system and a fee based on your EFTS. The second option was so reasonable it really is the only option! The good news for Australian schools is that they are currently looking to move their service their too. However, even though they claim that this is a first, services like Joost from Skype will also soon be on the horizon for all of us and as these services proliferate we will be spoilt for choice from the differing video archives from around the planet.
More Preaching to the Converted August 16, 2007
Posted by davidit in Education, Education 2.0, ICT Integration, Inquiry Model, learning continuum, student engagement, Web 2.0.2 comments
I have been working on developing our inquiry model for most of the day. I am completely over all the philosophy behind it now and just want to produce a practical model that I can take to the staff so that they can start to see what the model for our school might look like. I have tentatively called it the “Umbrella Inquiry” model and is loosely based around Ian Jukes’ 5A’s model. The model has five strands to it, with Literacy and Numeracy on a sliding scale of teacher intervention and two srands of thinking tools and what I call ‘thinking landscape’ These last two have a sliding scale for student expectations too with more expectations the older they get. The fifth and final strand is the inquiry model itself. I have to say that at this skeletal stage I am quite pleased with what I have done so far. Even if the staff tear it to bits, it is at least something for them to bounce against, just so long as we get the ball rolling.
Not sure if any of you noticed the Teacher Tube site was down this week? Initially the site said that they were down for routine maintenance, but after 6 hours I had the feeling that something major was going on, coupled with the fact that when I could logon my videos had all disappeared! They have all now come back, but the ‘viewed’ data is all wrong, shame really as one of mine was always on the most viewed list, it was getting lots of hits a day and still is. So what is the point of all this? Well I have to say that I panicked when the videos had all gone, it made me wonder what the implications might be for the future if we put all of our stuff online and one day it was all gone, a kind of Skynet (Terminator) and Die Hard 4.0 scenario, not good!
Well while I was on Teacher Tube today I stumbled upon the following video. The video was made in 2005 and is interviewing University students in America. I know that University education is not relevant to what we are doing on the Supertanker, or is it? I found that what these students had to say had resonance with what our inquiry model is trying to address, but it also had some chilling throw away lines. The students all complained that all that they were getting was regurgitated knowledge from one person, that the system was not flexible to their needs and learing styles. One student noted that employers wanted flexible, creative thinkers, yet the university system was anything but that. They all said that they were all visual learners and that they were wired for the web, but university was not. One student said that what he was having to endure to get his degree was simply not relevant and made the point with fees being so high, why bother with a degree? Perhaps most chilling of all was the throw away statement that you have to listen hard to hear, was when one of them complained that the careers that university is preparing them for have all been outsourced.
If these statements are not the basis for a manifesto bring about a root and branch change in the education system, I do not know what is. When outsourcing means that 1.3 billion people can undercut your salary system and career structure. When access to a computer and Google gives everyone access to the same information, what is the point of difference? An individual’s ability to think creatively, problem solve and create new learning from the common body of knowledge is the point of difference. It is imperative to develop these skills within the students that we teach. We need to change and change fast, but you already knew that!
Currently I can not get into Teacher Tube to embed a link for you! However if you search for ‘digital students @ analogue schools’ you will find the video. When the site comes up again, I will put the link here. You see, technology, you just can’t trust it. Bring back the wax tablet I say! Nope, I went to You Tube and found it. Long live technology!
Sleepwalking into the Blogmire August 11, 2007
Posted by davidit in class blog, Education, Education 2.0, ICT Integration, Inquiry Model, thinking skills, Web 2.0.6 comments
I have been vexed of late, something has been chewing away at me and I have been like a bear with a sore head around those that love me. I must be insufferable when I am like this. At 04:00 today I had an Eureka! moment and have found the cause of my pain. To quote the Joker in Batman “I have given a name to my pain…blogging.” So here I am at my computer, the house is in darkness, with pages of scribbled notes in front of me trying to get the stream of thoughts into some sort of coherent logic. The sun has yet to rise, so here we go, appologies this could be a long post…
I recently commented that on the Supertanker we were experiencing something of an explosion in blogs. Blogs are popping up all over the place and some are being used for entirely the wrong purpose where a wiki would be more appropriate, but such is the Missionary zeal for this new tool, I have been reluctant to dampen spirits. For the record, I believe that blogs are a fantastic tool for classrooms, teachers and students, but of late I have become increasingly apprehensive about their use on the Supertanker.
With all of my work to do with preparing the ICT PD cluster proposal I have been diverted from researching blogs and wikis for information, but this week has seen some kind of return to normality and I have been researching again. Two sites have come to mind that have helped me to crystalise my unease. The first of these sites is that of Ian Jukes, he has some interesting things to say and in particular this pdf caught my eye, an extract from that pdf is below. In addition what Lynne Crowe has to say on one of her recent posts ties in with my unease.
Ian in his pdf is discussing the quality of skills needed to use any tool and the resultant quality of the outcome. It is a classic case of the bad workman blames his tools…
The desire to be more than we already are has always been with us. In the old
days, levers were used to lift something that couldn’t be lifted by human effort
alone. Now most levers plug into walls, use motors, or require batteries. Consider,
for example, a guitar amplifier. An amplifier is merely an updated version of lever,
designed to take advantage of modern power sources. What happens when you give
a bigger amplifier to a good guitar player? It’s magical because the amplifier
magnifies the skills of the player.
Conversely, what happens when you give a bigger amplifier to a bad guitar player?
Not pretty is it. The amplifier simply magnifies the skills, for better or worse.
In recent weeks we have had a wave of crewmembers on the Supertanker abandon ship into a sea heaving with blogs. As a result there has been an increase in stress and much confusion. On the Supertanker we have our own Fender amplifier, running with all the dials turned up to 10, indiscriminately amplifying the good the bad and the ugly. Unfortunately the result has been anything but magical. I have long held the view that teachers, with their heavy workloads and snowed under with the paperwork of accountablility have reached a state I call ‘initiative fatigue.’ By this I mean that many teachers now sail under a flag of convenience called tokenism, especially when it comes to new initiatives. Teachers want to provide a quality learning environment for their students, but really do not have the time to sit down and truly contemplate what that might mean or how it might work in their class. In order to save time and provide that quality learning environment, all that they seek is a photocopiable resource that can be presented in class and ticked off a list that says initiative met or implemented. Blogging on the Supertanker has become just that. In essence blogging has been grabbed at by several teachers who want a quick fix solution to mask a bigger problem and therein lies the problem.
As you know we have spent 2007 developing an inquiry model of learning for our students. We have decided to take this step in the light of the new curriculum document and in order that we can better prepare our students for the rigours of the information economy and the workplace of the C21. Fundamental to this model is the requirement for teachers to undergo a pedagogical shift in their teaching style from teacher to facilitator. We are in the midst of a fallout from the paradigm shift as argued by Mark Treadwell. When a tool is used with a low level of skill then the outcome according to Ian Jukes’ analogy is not a good one and conversly when done with consumate skill the outcome is sublime. The trouble comes when tools, such as blogging, are grabbed at indescriminately. A tyre lever won’t fix a flat battery, in other words an incorrectly selected tool used for the wrong job will make a mess of the whole.
In its current guise on the Supertanker blogging is bound to fail. The failure will cause huge amounts of stress and generally create a negative impression of the ablility of ICTs to reduce workload and improve student outcomes when used by these teachers. Many of the self same teachers who have heard the amplified clarion call from the Fender amp to use blogs in their classroom are the self same teachers who have yet to regularly contribute to our staff blogs. They will not contribute to these staff blogs, because they:
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Can’t remember their usernames and passwords
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Can’t see the benefit of blogging
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Don’t know how to use a blog
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Think that paper is a better way to record and share progress
These are genuine statements (objections) made by staff members who are now happily adopting the blog as a tool for their classrooms! That they can not see the irony in this beggars belief.
So what is the problem? The problem is the lack of planning, of contemplation, of reasoned consideration. Not one single teacher of this new crop of bloggers that I have spoken to has a firm grasp of why, how or for what purpose they will use a blog in their class. It is as if the bus is leaving and they are scrambling to get on, without knowing the destination. Just being on board is enough for them. Even though as Director of IT at school I am glad to see this sudden interest in the use of an ICT tool, I can also see that failure and disappointment is on the horizon.
In all reality how can a teacher, who has not got a system in place to rotate students, on a daily basis, through the limited number of computers in their class, irrespective of what else is going on in the class, expect blogging to work? More to the point if there is no genuine and compelling reason to use a blog, why use it? Before a teacher can implement a new strategy into their class, they need to know how to use it. It was my belief in the power of blogs in the classroom that was the reason that I set up our staff PLC blogs at the start of the year. The intention was that in a safe and non threatening environment, through familiarity of use, teachers would see the benefits of and learn how to use a blog. These self same skills would then be transferable to their classes. For a sublime output teachers need to know how to skilfully use the tool. For blogging to work teachers will need to have addressed the following classroom issues:
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What purpose they are using the blog for?
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How are they going to manage access to the blog in class time?
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Why are they using a blog?
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What benefits are there for them and their students to use a blog in their class?
Finally and perhaps most crucially we come to the point of Lynne’s post, sustainability. Students can smell tokenism from a mile off. If they have no stake in what they are doing, they quickly get bored of the initiative. Lynne was discussing how to sustain student interest in a blog. For me this comes down to the centre of the whole purpose of the inquiry model. Students need to have ownership of their learning. Once they do, then motivation is inherent, the purpose defined and sustainability almost guaranteed.
It is not the tools that are at fault, it is the level of skill and understanding of their use that needs to be improved. Teachers on the Supertanker must invest time in contemplating how they are to manage the tools in their class, how their pedagogy has to adapt in addtion to learning to use the tools appropriately. Teacher pedagogy and ICT skills need to develop in tandem. Pedagogy can evolve and develop without an increase in ICT skills. The successful use of ICTs within a class however drives change and for success to happen, teachers have to want to change their classroom pedagogy and management. Until they recognise that fact, they will continue to be stressed about ICTs in their class and continue to experience failure.
The sun is well up, I have a new plan. Thanks for reading!
Prove it! August 7, 2007
Posted by davidit in Education, Education 2.0, ICT Integration, Inquiry Model, Web 2.0.4 comments
I was reading the latest and I have to say rather melancholy post from the Artichoke site today, what stired me was this quote:
What is it like to attend school for year after year after year without leaving “an impression along the verge”?
What is it like to be anonymous to the institution, the department, the teachers, and to the other kids?
What is it like to be the kid that your secondary school subject teacher cannot identify without reference to the mark book even with the enrolment photograph for reference?
What is it like to be the kid who transferred after the first week but still receives glowing comments about how they were progressing in physical education in the term 1 report?
What is it like to be marginalised and ignored by the institution?
It was a sad indicment of life for students in many schools. I can recognise those kinds of wallpaper children in primary schools, the lack of personal impact upon an institution is not the sole preserve of secondary schools, although it is easier to not be noticed at a secondary school. Really what struck me where the school leaver statistics further further on in the post. These statistics indicate the level of irrelevance that many of our students see in the institution that they are forced to spend 40 weeks a year in. I suspect that this sentiment is not the sole preserve of New Zealand students either.
Pam suggested that a possible solution was for students to have a total number of years education credit, so that those students that opt out early can come back into the system, at a later point and not be financially penalised because they voted with their feet. A good plan. At the heart of those statistics is the lack of relevance, sustained interest and inclusion that those early leavers evidently feel. It is very rare that when you go to the cinema, another very passive one way interaction, that you see anyone leave before the end of the show. I know that it is a trite comparison, but it has a kind of relevance. The audience does not leave because they are to some degree engaged and their interest is being sustained, kind of! Clearly schools do not perform as well as a B movie in this respect! Most of us have sat through a compellingly awful movie, that on reflection was simply dire but despite this, still felt compelled to stay to the end, just to see what happened! How many invisible students can say that of their schooling?
To get back to schooling it would seem to me that students are voting with their feet. The school system is not meeting their needs, it is not engaging them and often seems remote and irrelevant to them, so they leave. So what does this have to do with the Supertanker? Well we are just a term into our project of ICT enriched classrooms (we are struggling to find a phrase that best describes them! C21classrooms is my preference, but currently I have no takers!) already we are having to find proofs that the investment is proving to be worth it, that the numeracy and literacy standards are not dropping for the students lucky enough to be in one of these ICT enriched rooms! Rather alarmingly we also have to demonstrate how significantly better this investment in equipment is proving to be for student attainment. One of the teachers in the project has taken the bull by the horns and has started to develop comparative excercises called paper and digis to see just what the positive impact might be. You can see her results so far here.
What alarms me is having to justify with graphs and charts the finacial spend for improved student attainment. I understand that we have to do this to get more money to invest in more classes with more equipment. The trouble with all of this is that you only have to go into these classrooms to witness the joy and energy on the children’s faces, the way that they are going about their work, the energy and enthusiasm they are universally displaying towards their work is obvious. It is almost as if they are saying, ‘finally someone gets it, school work is no longer boring, school work is fun and I now have a stake in what I learn. Thanks guys!’ You can’t quantify this kind of anecdotal evidence in a report the the Board or to auditors, but the evidence is obvious, the students are engaged, motivated are willingly working at home to get more work done. In short they are loving working in this kind environment, it is their world, their expectation, their technology. I believe that it is their motivation that is the point that we should building from to then assess their attainment and not the other way round.
The student reaction is in part due to the inquiry model that we are developing, it is true that if you follow an interest then you will be motivated to work. Inquiry models of differing flavours have been around for educational eons, but it is the ICTs that are making the difference. Ownership is the morticed deadlock and access to quality ICT resources, at the point of learning, is the key to unlock student motivation. Students with their blogs, wikis, flickr accounts, bubbleshare sliders, youtube videos, skrbl pads etc now have a myriad of ways to access information and present their learning. They can bring what they do for fun at home into school. Pretty soon they will no longer have to don the conformist, institutionalised practices of school at the school gate and discard them again at 3:00. Students who have ownership of their learning will soon not only be making an impression on the margins, they will move from the margins and into the text!
ICT PD Cluster Proposal July 25, 2007
Posted by davidit in Education, Education 2.0, ICT Integration, Inquiry Model.2 comments
For the last several months I have been involved in preparing a proposal for what we believe will be the last round of ICT PD funding in its present guise. The reasons that we have not taken the Government’s money earlier are due to circumstances that were beyond our control. And for what ever reasons, now seems like the right time to do it. However if this is the last round of funding, then the desire to get this proposal right has been an intense process. Finally last night I put the finishing touches to the proposal and hope that, couched in Ministry speak, the enthusiasm and latent determination and excitement of the cluster for our project shines through.
As a cluster of Principals (of which I am not!) we have already developed some interesting avenues of inquiry and potential collaborative projects. Should our application be unsuccessful we are determined to at least see these initial ideas come to fruition. We had a meeting yesterday to put the final touches to the document and have sent it off for final scrutiny to Pam Hook, who we hope, with her partner Julie Mills will be our facilitators should we get the funding.
The cluster have elected us to be the lead school and as the only ICT specialist teacher within the cluster I am looking forward to empowering the other teachers in the cluster as I have done with my target teachers here at school. Within the cluster there is only one Mac school and it is their stated mission to convert us all to their platform. Why Mac users are so passionate about ‘their’ platform I have no idea. They are after all only machines! I can’t imagine the same debate happening in garages about ethanol or Diesel powered machines, who cares so long as it gets the job done? Joking aside and I have have owned Mac’s in the past, Mac’s use of the Intel chip is providing and intersting opportunity to create dual platform schools. I digress, I am looking forward to empowering a wider range of teachers and introducing them to the panopoly of web 2.0 tools out there. It has been a real pleasure to see two of my charges, here at school, power ahead in the last few weeks. They are both currently exploring the potential of blogs and podcasting in class to empower their students.
We are about to plan for the second phase of our roll out of digital classrooms, for want of a better phrase for 2008. This next wave of teachers will be my next focus group for tooling up with the skills needed to experiment with integration of ICT into their class environments.
A Sea Change? June 14, 2007
Posted by davidit in class blog, Education, Education 2.0, ICT Integration, Inquiry Model, mathletics, partners.1 comment so far
I started this blog with the analogy that my role in encouraging change was that of a tug boat manoeuvring a supertanker, hence the title. Well in the last week or so I am almost optimistic about my chances. I hesitate to say that we are experiencing an epiphany here at school, but the indications here this week might suggest that our heading is starting change. Yes it is my pleasure to announce that my particular supertanker has started to change course from a heading of 180 degrees to that of perhaps 190 degrees. We are swinging to starboard ( To the right or to the green side for the less nautically minded!)
I have been beavering away here at school targeting certain members of staff and suggesting certain resources or ideas that might be of use in their quest to integrate ICT into their class programmes. At the same time from another tack several members of staff have been championing an online maths programme called Mathletics. There has also been an increase in chatter on our school PD blogs and these three courses of action seem to have created a confluence of positive energy in the last week and hence my optimism.
We have set up several plc (professional learning circles) here in school this year and each group has been charged with investigating certain aspects of the inquiry model. Each group has to contribute to their respective blog by adding links to resources that they have found as part of their individual professional reading. In addition they also have to post comments illustrating their thinking about the area of focus and their responses to colleagues comments. So far the comments posted have been rather dull and each post was lucky to attract three or so comments. In my own group there has always been a hard core of contributors, but at our last meeting it was evident that the group was in danger of polarising. Several members of the group are steaming ahead, implementing and experimenting with ICT ideas and initiatives. That week I posted several posts to the blog, one about Interactive whiteboards and the following quote, which I knew would provoke a reaction, it was a risk and one that I agonised over, but published anyway.
“ICT will not replace teachers BUT teachers who use ICT will replace those that don’t”
(Carrey, EQ,-Curriculum Corporation – Winter 2006)
It came though on a paper that I read as part of the BECTA ICTRN that I subscribe to. It had the desired effect. It provoked a reaction and caused a flurry of angry comments on the blog. One of my colleagues described the effect as lancing a boil! I prefer the uncorking of a Champagne bottle myself! As the angrier members of my blog commented the others dived in to suggest alternative points of view and slowly within the comments you could see the anger die and a more reasoned stance being taken. Within the individual threads you could witness philosophical movement by individuals. There is now talk of experimenting with ideas, of taking things slowly, of practical solutions. In short people have started to make tentative steps and not throwing up barriers. It has been great and I thank all of my plc group for being honest, scared, brave and professional. Long may this continue.
At the same time and almost in tandem, there has been a growing clamour within school about this online Mathletics programme. Now I have to confess that I have deliberately kept myself ignorant of this product. I reasoned that if I got in on this initiative from the start, my mere presence might be enough to put some off for life! I treated it as a Trojan Horse and to date my strategy has not failed me! There is a buzz about this programme. It was introduced into one class initially and has quickly spread in almost a viral way to a third of the school. It is highly likely that the vast majority of the school will be using it in some form or another by the end of term 3. Because it is online, the classrooms that have adopted it have by default begun to wrestle with some of the integration of ICT issues and solved them, without realising that they have begun to integrate ICT into their daily programme. ICT has moved to the centre in one aspect of their day!
Our plc blogs have also had spin offs. A couple of members of staff have now created their own blogs for their students to use and are getting great results. What has happened is that student motivation has increased, parents can comment on student work, not only that one blog has been set up to link several schools together so that students and teachers from different parts of the world can contribute. You can check out the blogs here:
The year 4 blog is a project that I have been instrumental in. It is a partnership with a school in England. This partnership has been built throughout the year, it too has taken time and energy ensure that it could flourish. At first it seemed as this link would whither away, but to the credit of my partner in England she has stuck at it and we now have a great partnership that is gathering momentum between us and is now spreading to other classes in both schools. Currently we are co-operating on podcasts, classes are e-mailing each other and now this blog. This project has the potential to really explode. Motivation of teachers seems to be a real sticking point and then creating genuine authentic learning opportunities for the students is the other. At times these two elements seem to be almost mutually exclusive, but when the synergy is right change is almost instant and oh so gratifying.
The nut has not been cracked, the heading is still largely against me! But progress has been made, it now has to be maintained and extended to others and as momentum builds the pace of change will quicken! This week I love my job!
What’s The Relevance Kenneth? June 3, 2007
Posted by davidit in Education, Education 2.0, ICT Integration, Inquiry Model, Web 2.0.1 comment so far
To paraphrase REM’s single What’s The Frequency Kenneth? many students and educationalists are asking this very question about the education system that they are in. They are not only questioning the relevance of the curriculum and its content, they are also questioning how education as it stands, prepares students for the world of work beyond school. There is much anecdotal evidence to suggest that the overwhelming sentiment of students is that school just is not relevant to them. A well known t-shirt slogan says:
“I’m not ADHD. I’m just not listening.”
This is a wry observation of school and students’ attitudes to the institution they endure 6 hours a day in, but I contend that we ignore it at our peril. A former Principal that I used to work for, often used to say that he feared that students learned in spite of us and our input! What does that say about the state of current schooling practices?
I have made much about the case for change and at my current school we are slowly working towards a goal of creating a curriculum based around student needs. We are aiming to create an environment where students learn through following their own passions and interests. This is a path that is strewn with challenges and the most vociferous of them are the bastions of traditional pedagogy! Teacher led instruction, assessment regimes, sacred curriculum content etc!
Take a look at this video. Listen to what the students are saying, especially about reading and books. How does that challenge what you are doing in your class? How can you change what you deliver to be relevant to the students in front of you? Do the students in this video read any less? It could be argued that they communicate more and more effectively through a multitude of media than we ever did or do! If this is true then our students are already more adept at communicating, gathering information, re-interpreting and publishing than we are. Is it any wonder then that they are increasingly feeling that school is irrelevant? For me lots of what these students are saying has echos of the comics are not worthy reading arguments of earlier decades…
Further on in the video, one educationalist emphatically states that we need to have a big discussion about the future of education. I bet that his statement implies that only big people, ie teachers, elders and betters, would be part of that discussion. In education:
discussion+new fangled ideas=inertia! (And by that I mean inertia factorial)
We do not have time to discuss we need to act. Our students are not waiting for us to catch up, they are forging ahead in spite of us. If we have to discuss, then our discussions must include our students. Once we ask them what makes them tick? What do they want to see in their school day? We will have opened up the door to genuine inquiry learning.
In my current school a year 2 teacher has taken a look at her writing programme and has adapted it. She now uses a blog for the students to use as their free writing books. This has proved to be a mini revolution in her class. She has not abandoned any “sacred educational cows” she is merely doing the same but different. The difference is that she is laying foundations for future teachers to use web technologies in their programmes and make learning in their classes more relevant. So what has the revolution been? At its most basic, the students are writing for an audience, their parents. The parents can see what their child has written today and can give feed back via the comments and they do! The writing has relevance to the children, because they have an audience beyond the class, the programme has its own inbuilt perpetual motion. In the future the students will then copy and paste their initial posts and edit them, so that the teacher has evidence of progression. It is all the same stuff, just done differently. It is a simple idea that has far reaching consequences. The good news is that we can all do it.
I hope that this video makes you think about what you can do to change, to adapt, and to adopt new technologies in a meaningful way in your class.
Interactive Whiteboards May 21, 2007
Posted by davidit in Education, ICT Integration, Inquiry Model, Interactive Whiteboard, IWB.2 comments
I have long been a fan of interactive Whiteboards (IWB’s). I have been lucky enough to teach with one for the last 6 years. My board of choice is Smart Board. I know that like the Mac/PC debate IWB users can quickly polarise over models. Let me say that I have used the Promethean/Activ boards in the past and I am not a fan, I guess that if I had used the ‘hard board’ technology first then I may now prefer those, but my basic gripe about the hard board technology is the requirement for the user to have to use the pen to interact with the board and being interactive is the name of the game with this technology. I found that I ended up playing ‘pass the pen’ with this technology. With the soft board technology of Smart Boards every child can approach the board and can use their fingers to interact, this makes the whole process more fluid and immediate, especially for the younger ones who have less fine motor control. In fairness the soft-board technology does have its drawbacks, only one point of contact is allowed on the board surface and the younger students can find this tricky to manage at first…
Enough said, I am still a fan. The boards are so immediate, they make demonstrating ICT skills and concepts so easy, I have found that students pick up skills faster when a board is used. I model then get the children to feed back by demonstrating what they have learnt on the board, it is so visual, collaborative and immediate. I also use the Smart Board software, which anyone can download and install (see Resources) to create ‘how to’ lessons using the Smart notebook software. This software allows me to publish on our school intranet a range of skill based lessons that users can refer to as they need to. As the lessons grow in number and variety they are becoming a useful induction tool for new staff members and students. Smart notebook software allows you to export into pdf or html formats. I have also taken to using their recording software to record entire lessons, the resultant AVI files are very large, but this means that as part of the A3 protocol, my lessons, in theory can be re-visited at anytime, by anyone anywhere. The free to download program CamStudio can convert these large AVI files into smaller SWF format for publishing on the Internet.
As I have said earlier this blog has been set up to chart my school’s progress towards creating an inquiry learning model and ICT’s role in that process. Well in the last few weeks we have taken a good step towards that goal. We have installed four Smart Board SB680’s into four classrooms. Needless to say each of the designated teachers is delighted with their new resource as are their students. Each of them has approached their new equipment in different ways. Mostly all have taken time to assimilate the new technology into their classes and the model they are using has been teacher modelling with little or no student interaction. However, over the last week or so, I have begun to witness a change as the teachers get more confident with the hardware and software they are starting to experiment with how they utilise the equipment in their classes. I have asked them to make little steps to plan for interaction by the students and they are now moving down that line, some are more advanced down that track than others, having had prior experience with IWB’s. What is good to see is the willingness to experiment and some really good resources are being planned to be created. This however highlights one of the issues of new technology; isn’t new technology meant to make life easier not harder? What is needed are more repositories of Learning Objects for IWB’s so that teachers can download already created files that they can use to demonstrate the concepts they wish to teach or for students to use to consolidate their learning. (This is why it is good to download and install the latest Smart Board software on all computers, so that students can use these resources too!)
The following links have a good range of Learning objects that can be used on IWB’s
Smart Technology has a lot of resources for you to download and many are country related, the country related material can be accessed via the Notebook software once you have installed it.
Gareth Pitchforth’s site: Primary Resources has loads of Smart Board and Promethean learning objects as well as Flash and Power Point. It is based on the UK National Curriculum and is a teacher collective, they welcome any resources that you wish to share, so upload your own examples.
Thanks to Fiona Grant of Team Solutions for the following links and an enlightening session at the Lead Teacher Numeracy Symposium in Auckland on Friday 18 for the links below.
Te Ara Encyclopedia of New Zealand is a great repository of multimedia resources about New Zealand.
National Library of New Zealand has lots of digital resources for you to access and use as part of your lessons
If you are a New Zealand School then the Digistore has over 1200 Learning objects for you to use, these are only available via a username and password. Your Principal or head of ICT should have this information for you.
There is also the EPIC data base which is also for NZ schools only and uses the same username and password as the one above.
In an effort to not continually re-invent the wheel, if any of you have any links to other freely available Learning objects for use on IWB’s I would love to hear.
Web 2.0 Assets and the Classroom May 21, 2007
Posted by davidit in collaborative, Education, ICT Integration, Inquiry Model, thinking skills, Web 2.0.add a comment
When I first saw the following video, it really blew me away, it opened my already open eyes to the potential of the web as a fantastic educational tool. In a burst of evangelical zeal I busily sent links to all my friends, encouraging them to show everyone. One of them rather sagely said that if you showed that to the staff at school I would probably confuse them at best and completely alienate them at worst! And on reflection she was probably right. I expect that many of you have seen it, but it is still worth a second look, for what it did for me was make me think how can we harness that genuine communication and collaboration power of the Internet in our classrooms. We constantly search for authentic learning opportunities and genuine collaboration and with the newly emerging Web 2.0 tools there is much that we can already utilise to ensure that this can happen within our classrooms.
Knowing quite what web1.0, as it is retrospectively known, is or quite how web 2.0 works is not relevant and in many, if not all circumstances only serves to confuse and alienate the TT’s amongst us (see below). However, it is important to know that there are some fantastic tools out there that can be used easily in the classroom, between classes and between schools. The key word perhaps to bear in mind when thinking about using web 2.0 tools is collaboration. What the proliferation of web services like Youtube, Flickr, Bubbleshare Net Vibes, Skrbl etc allow is collaboration and interaction on the behalf of the user. The user/viewer is no longer passive but is an integral part of the Internet process. Sharing information on the Internet is no longer the preserve of the nerd or the geek, we can all communicate and share. So what is there out there that teachers can use to help collaboration happen?
If you have tried to get students to work collaboratively on a Word document you will know that it is not really possible and track changes is not the most user friendly Office tool to use, especially for seven year olds. It is just an alien concept and if you used it in your class you would probably resort pretty quickly to butcher paper and marker pens for a collaborative document! Now this is fine in a class, but it does not meet the demands of A3 learning (A Cubed or Anyone, Anytime, Anywhere). The reason is that the original source document stays in class and once the school bell has gone at the end of the day no one has access to it, so students who wish to continue working on it at home can’t. This is where the new Web 2.0 tools come into play.
Google Docs: Google Docs is just like word or Excel, but it is on the Internet, the big difference is that the document can be shared, so that it can be accessed after hours, it is simple to use and only requires that the users have an e-mail account. Its main advantage is A3 access. This is an example of asynchronous communication/collaboration, but if you are working with other schools in different time zones, this drawback is negligible and could even be considered an advantage.
Skrbl: This is my current favourite synchronous on-line tool, it is an on-line whiteboard where you can post images, or files to share with others. You can write text or even draw (in a limited way). All contributors can comment at the same time, it can be chaotic, but everyone gets a chance to say or scribble what they want. It is simple to use and great fun, but also has a real purpose. Everyone can brainstorm and the brainstorm can be seen by anyone, anywhere anytime.
Talk and Write: This is a Skype tool and is really aimed at the commercial market. It is just like Skrbl only more sophisticated, the tutorial videos are easy to follow. As with all things Skype there is a free version, but your board time is limited to 10 minutes. The fees are not exorbitant for the full service, but before I paid out for it, I would use Skrbl first in order to create a habit of use.
These three collaborative tools lack one thing, partners to collaborate with. We are using these tools in a small way within school across our network, but to fully utilise the potential of these tools and to make the learning authentic we need partners. As we start to develop our inquiry model our students are starting to look beyond their classrooms and beyond the school for other students to work with, share information with and crucially collaborate with. We are bursting with ideas and programmes such as Gamemaker, Lego Mindstorms, MSW Logo allow us all to collaborate, test and evaluate projects. If you would like to collaborate with our classes, please let me know via the comments and I will mail you back.
The future’s bright, the future’s Web 2.0!
Turning the Supertanker 
