The 25 Hour Day

Excellent tools for developing cross-curricular and collaborative activity, as they link subjects in a meaningful way - some are more obvious, like history and geography, how about linking music and PE?

You can download, create and share mobile, location–based media called mediascapes. With a handheld GPS device and the mscape software you can move beyond personal navigation and extend your world with compelling interactive experiences that you control as you move around outside.

Exploratree is a free web resource where you can download, use and make your own interactive thinking guides. Thinking guides support independent and group research projects with frameworks for thinking, planning and enquiry.

 Ken Robinson’s latest presentation regarding creativity is available from Edutopia.

The embed code is available but I need someone to show me how to do it ….I can get the video frame but no moving pictures! Help!!

Yesterday, I attended the Sydney leg of the road show called the Digital Revolution Symposium. It was a smoothly-run affair aimed at informing us of the directions and decisions being made, by the government, regarding the Prime Minister’s technology-in-schools push.

Judy O”Connell has blogged an account of what we heard at Hey Jude, so I won’t repeat it here.

What is clear is that my College leadership team needs a big tick for having the foresight and fortitude to move us along the ICT continuum. Regardless of the planning and vision associated with these decisions, there will always be a degree of discomfort to be overcome or just lived with.

What we heard yesterday underlined the necessity of making the commitment and following it through. There were no dissenting voices from the 150 or so representatives of all educational systems.

I am thankful to be at a school that has begun the journey. There are many rude awakenings for the schools who will have their hardware delivered shortly. We all know that it is not really about technology at all, it’s about changing the learning processes inside the classrooms, and that is a long and stressful journey.

Good to see that the government recognises this with some financial aid for professional development. However, I think the PD needs to occur well in advance of the hardware being delivered. In fact, it shouldn’t be delivered at all, until a school can demonstrate readiness. The test should not relate to the ratio of computers to students.

What would a readiness test look like? And how would a school indicate they had achieved such a state?

After a recent topic test, where most of the girl’s did quite well, I had cause to speak sharply to one who was less-focused. She reckons I had expected her to fail the test. She proudly boasted that she knew the work because she had needed to “learn it all by herself. ”

Did she understand why I walked away smiling?

I’m reading this interesting book at the moment. It explains the thinking behind, and the development of, SimuLearn’s Virtual Leader. Aside from some interesting ways of defining leadership, I came across this

“The classic mistake of classrooms is to pile up huge amounts on un-internalised facts on poor students. Not able to confirm, modify or reject each fact, the students either go into record mode where taking notes becomes the end goal in itself, or they shut down altogether.”

This reminded  me of a previous post about note-taking which is still niggling at me.

Anyway, seems I might be ”rotated” into another class next term …..

representation of female thinking

I spent a 2 hour lunch today as a guest of an organisation who’s raison d’etre is the promotion of IT as a career for the fairer sex.I was one of only 3 males in a group of 150! Yeah, you guessed it, I had a great time! Aside from the interesting networking opportunities, great food and location, we were addressed by:

an award-winning IT journalist, an entrepreneur, a telecom executive, a Microsoft executive and a politician….all female.

This was not a heavy and passionate geek speak session. The focus was on life balance, using the “off switch”, and working from home. I have to say that these ladies seem to have it all together, and unlike their male counterparts, they actually talk about other stuff. Hmmmm ……think I could learn something here!

A couple of quotes from various sources …..

“The problem is that employers don’t know what they want either!” (In reply to my suggestion that schools were failing to provide for 21st century employment.)

“Us adults just need to let go; we have to get out of the way of the younger generation, and let them move forwards in their way. We need to stop telling them to do it our way.”

And after reading a long wish-list including such things as instant broadband, everywhere; on call help desk techies who always fixed everything …etc, etc, the lady journalist ended with her wish list which was simply a bottle of french bubbly and George Clooney!

They do come from another planet …………..btw, click on the pic above to see the original in detail

Wikispaces is giving away 100,000 free K-12 Plus wikis.

They say this

“includes all the features and benefits that normally cost $50/year - for free. No fine print, no usage limits, no advertising, no catches”.

Get yours from http://www.wikispaces.com/site/for/teachers100K

Well worth signing up for, even if you are using another solution at the moment.

On Friday, a young lady happened to mention that she had seen a report that in the not too distant future computers would be available for all students, in all classrooms and that it would be the norm, rather than the exception it is today. She was smiling and happy because;

• she knew she was ahead of the game
• she felt that what we have been doing was OK
• she no longer felt like a lab rat
• perhaps I knew what I was doing after all

Now I hope this was not part of the hype associated with our PM’s program of throwing hardware at schools, but regardless of the veracity of the report, perhaps more stories about technology in schools will generate higher levels of interest. It will surely make our lives much easier if our students, and their parents begin to see technology-enriched learning as “normal”.

Yesterday I sent the following email to all teaching staff ….

…….we could be advertising some of the great things that are going on in our virtual classrooms and workspaces. So I need your help to promote your sites, if that’s what you would like to do.
All you need to do is to provide access to parents and College Staff (as read only) and let me know that you are happy for your site to be “selected” as a site of the week.
I’m sure our parents will appreciate being allowed to see how you are using technology to facilitate learning. There are many interesting sites that we could show, but I need your permission and agreement to open them to our community.

I received one reply, very quickly …..

In theory this seems a good idea. However, one thing that needs to be considered: if we open virtual classrooms to parents, what is to stop those of them who are teachers copying materials that we have developed and using them as their own?

Does anyone else have a similar problem? Can anyone suggest how I can help the teaching staff over this conceptual difficulty?

I mean, what is the problem here?

    (origin unknown)

I have just found some conference notes from 3 years ago on an external drive that was "lost". It’s interesting reading back over these hastily written snippets from some of the presentations. Here are some of the best bits from two of the better known presenters

Samuel Papert

• We are in a “make the system work” mode rather than change the system.What are we feeding our kids?
• What is a good intellectual diet? No-one is quite sure except it is probably not what it has been up to now.
• A concentration on test scores to prove the benefits of 1:1 slows progress because the tests used are based on doing things related to the “paper methods” developed over the last 200 years.
• The impact of paper on education has been dramatic – forcing students to sit in one place to learn. This suits certain (few) personalities.
• Current curriculums are dictated by how they can be taught in a paper environment (paper maths) – these are not about ideas, they are dictated by the need to write on paper. Current teaching methods (eg Maths) are chosen because they are suited to paper.
• The current education system is similar to the Soviet regime just before it’s downfall – everyone said it would last forever too …..

Angus King (ex- Governor Maine)

• Two quotes that get to the central issues –
• Charles Darwin - the species that survives is the one that is most adaptable to change.
• Wayne Gretsky (when asked why he was so successful) – “It’s easy, I always skate to where I think the puck is going to be, everyone else skates to where it is”.
• The laptop is a two-for-one solution – it covers the classroom and the home environment equally well
• The laptop was essential because it promotes digital literacy (Michael Jordan did not practice for one, 42 min period/week); it is an equity tool (everyone has the same)

All still relevant comment isn’t it?

Are we moving forwards? Have we listened to statements such as these?

Why haven’t we?

I have read a number of posts recently about grading and thought it worthy of comment.

A few weeks ago I was faced with my first PT meeting for my science class, who I had not known long and for whom I had no “formal” marks. I knew the parents would want to know how their daughters were going (compared to everyone else) and so I decided to fall back on the tried and tested method of good, old gut instinct. I listed some of my criteria for good studentship (is that a word?) and gave each kid a score out of 10……. and these I published to our class learning wikis ( which only the student, her parents and me have access to). For example ……

This allowed me to graph each students “performance” within the class based on the sorts of behaviours that I think are relevant to performing well in more formal tests and assessments. The graph that I showed the parents (with names removed) was this one,

So, OK all but two of the parents were happy with this and seemed to grasp what I was getting at in terms of assessing their daughters on what they were actually doing and how they were doing it in class. And I did stress that these were my perceptions only, and that in many cases I was sitting on the fence because some kids were not giving me enough evidence yet. One parent accused me of using “new-fangled learning stuff”, but there’s always one isn’t there?

I have finished marking their first formal assessment task now, so thought it would be interesting to compare the actual performance in this  research task with my perceptions and predictions. The graph now looks like this,

The coloured columns are the ones I got quite wrong ……. but they represent two different things. I got quite a few right, especially at the top and bottom ends, but perhaps they are the easiest to pick ……its that vast middle group that are easily overlooked and misinterpreted.

Anyway, what do you think? Are the assessment grades any more useful than my perceptions (which will get more accurate as the evidence mounts)?

I wonder which “mark” should go on the all important school reports that I have to write later next term.