rhinotion

HKA Primary NEWS

2011-12-13T13:39:00.006+08:00

I have been busy building primary websites and working within a more closed system here at my school. Unfortunately this means I cannot share many of the things that I do, at least automatically, however I have started up a recent project with some volunteer grade 4 and 5 students. We have the aim of putting a news show together every 2 weeks. Here is the first 3 shows that we completed in our first six weeks.

Show 1

Show 2

Show 3

Online Learning Through A Class Website

2011-05-29T22:24:00.003+08:00

In developing this assignment for my Masters, I have had to take into consideration current needs within my school and how I can address them through this task. I have decided to focus my presentation on one of the areas discussed by Hargis and Schofield (2007), that of class websites.

There is a need for a learning management system within the school, especially at the middle and high school level, however, a previous attempt to setup a Moodle site was not successful. Having myself set up a learning management system within a school, StudyWiz, I understand the importance of bringing the faculty along on the journey and making sure they are ready for this type of implementation. It is important the faculty thinks through what an LMS is and what it needs to do, Clarey, J. (2011).

In elementary school I see the need to look at communication strategies and look to new tools to enhance the communication that already happens. Currently a classes main way to communicate is through a class newsletter every month, email or a newsletter to introduce a new unit of inquiry. These are stored on our FirstClass system which combines email with a file sharing system. The FirstClass system does have potential but is currently very underused and out of favour with the staff.

The fact that Moodle was unsuccessful and our communication system is not liked, leads me to look for new directions with our communication. I have as a class teacher set up and run a class website and blog over the last two years. At the same time some class teachers in elementary school have also set up their own sites. This gradual adoption of a technology, even though not implemented by the school, lends itself to utilising current staff interest and expertise in a crossover to a blogging platform as our main tool for class communication. The presentation below highlights some of the main benefits of using blogging as a communication platform within a class and rather than explain them here I will allow the presentation to explain why I think a blog is a good addition to a classroom's communication strategy.

One area that is not considered in the presentation, but is touched upon at the end, is that a website can be so much more than a static object. It can become an extension of the classroom learning environment and incorporate a wide range of resources that cater for different learning styles. It can also be a place where students can revisit resources or links, along the lines of 'any-time, any-place, any-path, any-pace learning.' (Young, J., Birtolo, P., & McElman, R. 2009). Teachers will be able to add an 'opportunity for rich interactive collaboration among students and teachers' Cavanaugh, C., & Clark, T. (2007). This is also a discussion that will need to be facilitated with the staff, but it can be different in each classroom with each teacher deciding how best to create their own environment that meaningfully integrates with their curriculum.

Resources

Clarey, J. (2011) Wait. What? I can buy an LMS with a credit card? Retrieved from: http://www.bersin.com/blog/post.aspx?id=c65d21b9-493e-4f3a-ae02-e545dc7d494f

Cavanaugh, C., & Clark, T. (2007). The Landscape of K-12 Online Learning. In P. Adamson, B. Adamson, & N. Clausen-Grace, et al (Eds.), What Works in K-12 Online Learning (Chapter 1, pp. 5-19). Eugene, OR: International Society for Technology in Education.  Search using the Education Research Complete database by the article's title.

Hargis, J., & Schofield, K. (2007). Integrating Online Learning into Elementary Classrooms. In P. Adamson, B. Adamson, & N. Clausen-Grace, et al (Eds.), What Works in K-12 Online Learning (pp. 33-47). Eugene, OR: International Society for Technology in Education.  Search using the Education Research Complete database by the article's title.

Young, J., Birtolo, P., & McElman, R. (2009). Virtual success: Transforming education through online learning. Learning & Leading with Technology, 36(5), 12–17. Search using the Education Research Complete database by the article's title.

Online Learning Through A Class Website

2011-05-29T22:24:00.000+08:00

Reaching and Engaging All Learners Through Technology - Reflection

2011-04-24T18:36:00.001+08:00

This course has introduced me to Universal Design for Learning and given me some new strategies for Differentiated Instruction. Understanding my students as diverse learners means that I need to bring a wider variety of tools, techniques and resources to support my students. I have realized that often I differentiate by outcome and that I need to look closer at the resources that I am providing for my students. I also need to strike a balance between these resources and how much my students interact with them as opposed to static learning. Having a digital environment allows for a wide range of resources, but I need to give students time to learn along constructivist lines, rather than being passive recipients. Matching content to my learners (Smith & Throne 2007) through understanding their readiness will enable me to provide relevant resources. In some subject areas, such as math I collect a lot of data about the students and set up informative pre-assessments. In other subjects, such as social studies, I need to develop relevant pre-assessments to guide my instruction and resource allocation.
I also want to open my classroom up more around interest centers. I find it interesting that as I have moved up higher in elementary grades, I have made less time for interest centers and adapting this within our units of inquiry. As part of this course I adapted two math lessons, revisiting skills with students' focusing their attention on areas they needed more practice with by controlling their own learning and revision. This was highly successful and students mentioned they enjoyed these lessons and taking the test. They excelled in challenging themselves in what previously might have been concepts that they struggled with and the class average seemed to be higher, with lower ability students making the biggest gains. The success of this was really made clear to me at the end of our next unit when students asked for revision activities to be set up like this again.
I feel that it is important that I take a step back and look at the ways that I can give students a chance to revisit things learned within class and make new connections. I believe that this, along with the resource focus, should be where I aim to make the biggest changes in the learning environment that is created within my classroom.

References
Smith, G., & Throne, S. (2007). Differentiating instruction with technology in K-5 classrooms. Belmont, CA: International Society for Technology in Education.

Universal Design for Learning

2011-03-23T20:05:00.004+08:00

Welcome to the presentation for my masters week 4 application. This presentation outlines Universal Design for Learning with links to online resources.

The presentation was made in Keynote, but unfortunately I could not export it into a format that works online with the links and keeps the animations. I have created the presentation in two parts. One is the video with all the animations and timing working. The second is a pdf which allows access to the links which are underlined throughout the presentation.

Video

PDF

UDL presentation, 2011

View more presentations from rhinoab.

Reflecting On My G.A.M.E. Plan

2011-02-27T20:16:00.002+08:00

My Goal, Action, Monitor and Evaluate (GAME) plan, was to focus on two ISTE indicators from standard five, 'Engage in Professional Growth and Leadership (ISTE 2008)';

a. participate in local and global learning communities to explore creative applications of technology to improve student learning.

b. exhibit leadership by demonstrating a vision of technology infusion, participating in shared decision making and community building, and developing the leadership and technology skills of others.

The action that I undertook was to take part in the 21st Century Learning conference in Hong Kong and present a workshop on blogging in an elementary classroom. The workshop offered me an opportunity to critically analyse the benefits of blogging, and quantify them in a way that others would understand. This made me look hard at my practice and the improvements that I saw in my students work. I also had to look at the way that I integrated them into my classroom practice over the course of a whole year. How I set up good habits, taught the practicalities of blogging and devised assessment tools. This enabled me to collate my resources into a central location, breaking down the benefits into what I perceived as five main categories. I was also able to see how my expectations directly impacted my students and through discussions with them, listen to their thoughts on the benefits and the problems.

I also came to understand the role of supportive technologies within the classroom to enable the integration of the blogs into the classroom. This ranged from the class web site, the projector, the computers and the blogging platform itself. Each of these were used in a way that complemented each other and added value to the reflective environment that the blogs supported. I also needed to think about the journey that I had taken as a teacher to arrive at the use of blogs. What I had used previously, such as word processors, web sites and other tools, along with mine and the school expectations. My knowledge of certain technologies enabled me to operate my classroom in a certain way.

Putting myself into the position of the participants before my workshop, enabled me to look at many different ways that I could structure the experience and create a collaborative experience. When I met the participants I soon realised that they were looking to me to share my knowledge and due to their lack of experience with blogs, were unable to bring many resources to share. This then made me look at it from the position of someone who is a beginner, to a more advanced user. I also came to see a need for change with the conference set up. Often presenters do not know what level their participants will be at, and after some discussion with other presenters it seemed that many people in the elementary strand were discovering these tools for the first time. This is fine, but I wonder how an event like this could encourage more experienced practitioners to attend and support teachers taking the conversation further, rather than running beginning training sessions. There needs to be a place for educators with experience of certain tools and their understanding of the implications for pedagogy, to get together to share best practice, work on refining strategies and develop good practice. This is where I see my next G.A.M.E. plan developing from. Connecting with educators who have more experience with these tools, helping to develop conferences that differentiate within strands, offering conversations with groups of five not twenty participants and make the use of 21st Century Learning pedagogy within the conference itself, not just talk about it.

References

National Education Standards for Teachers (NETS-T) located at http://www.iste.org/Content/NavigationMenu/NETS/ForTeachers/2008Standards/NETS_T_Standards_Final.pdf.

Blogging Workshop GAME Plan

2011-02-16T21:40:00.002+08:00

I am now two days away from presenting my workshop and I have decided upon the structure and created my tuning in presentation. At the moment I don't know how many people will attend or at what level they will be. This presents me with somewhat of a conundrum, but in this sort of setting I would assume that this is normal. What I need to do is create an environment that allows for sharing, discussion and is all tied together with a few tools to help people collaborate.

I have chosen Wiggio to be the main tool that I will use. This was introduced to me through one of the course readings by Vicki Davis and has a host of features. Access to the group and all resources can be gained here. When everyone has joined the group I will activate a chat which can to form part of the backchannel of the workshop. It will also included folders full of my resources and useful links to other blogging resources on the net that I have found and participants can share any they have.

For the backchannel people are welcome to use any other tool but I hope they will choose this one which I can archive. I will also use a page on my website to bring together some other resources. These include a typewith.me for collaborative notes and another typewith.me for questions. As the workshop progresses I can view the questions to see which directions the workshop may progress.

I have created my presentation in GoogleDocs to make it embeddable and allow all participants to be able to access it and follow it at their own pace or take notes from. This is also embedded into my webpage to bring all the pieces of the workshop together to allow for cohesion and a one stop shop for any new technology users who may feel overwhelmed.

I believe that I am prepared and hope that the presentation will be the jumping off point into lots of good discussions for the participants. Hopefully I will have some feedback through my pre workshop questionnaire to help me fine tune it further.

Reference
Laureate Education, Inc. (Producer). (2009). EDUC 6713 Integrating Technology Across the Content Areas. [DVD]. Spotlight on Technology: Social Networking and Online Collaboration Part I. Vicki Davis.

Setting Student GAME Plans

2011-02-16T19:51:00.002+08:00

The process of setting Goals, Action, Monitoring and Evaluating is critical to the success of any project or process. We often have different ways of explaining this to our students, but I like the simplicity of this acronym and think my students would respond well to it. I think that I would like to work this into the structure of the class in a way that they use this to tackle almost any problem they face. I do use other inquiry and action processes, such as the design cycle, but this is one that could be used right at the start to springboard an idea or action.

The GAME plan links in with standard four of ISTE's NETS-S, 'Critical thinking, problem solving and decision making'. Using this structure to plan an inquiry and help explore solutions would empower the students to analyse their own actions and fulfil standard four. I look forward to introducing this to my students and seeing how they guide their learning.

References
International Society for Technology in Education. (2008). National Education Standards for Students (NETS-s). Retrieved from http://www.iste.org/Libraries/PDFs/NETS_for_Student_2007_EN.sflb.ashx.

Inquiry on the Web

2011-02-08T18:55:00.002+08:00

There I was working on my masters and whilst I found something I needed, I found this poster, which nicely summed up my inquiry technique.

Still Implementing The GAME Plan

2011-02-07T21:46:00.001+08:00

This week I have been revisiting some of my course material and articles that I used for research during my previous masters course. During the introduction to educational research I decided to focus on blogging for my literature review. I also questioned what were the main functions of a blog as I undertook this process. Revisiting these course materials has allowed me to ground my thinking and presentation in solid educational research and decide on the focus areas for my initial presentation to kick start the workshop. These areas are what I believe will be the provocations that start a conversation with the participants and can then lead on into other discussions.

I also wonder if I need to start with some bigger questions, perhaps some such as:
Why do we write?
Why do we ask students to write?
What is the writing process?
How does feedback improve writing?
Who do your students write for?

This is now crunch time. The workshop is just over one week away and I must have my presentation ready by this weekend. With all of this weeks course requirements and this to do, I feel somewhat under pressure. Sometimes pressure is what we need to perform our best and I hope that this is the case for me this week. I realise that for my masters blog post this week I am supposed to set myself new goals and critique my current ones. This is not the place I am at this week, but I'm sure that fourteen days from now I will have much to say about this goal and my workshop.

Am I Being Effective?

2011-02-01T10:57:00.001+08:00

It is always interesting when I ask myself this question, especially when I am trying to work on the computer. In today's world we hear people talking about the benefits of multitasking and the disadvantages of it. As I undertake my GAME plan to create my workshop I find myself wondering if I am multitasking or being distracted. I am currently trying to put my ideas together for the content of the workshop. These are areas that I believe need to be covered and I am pulling resources together to support their discussion in the workshop. Areas such as; tools that can be used for blogging, blog categories, examples of assignments, authentic audiences, blog topics and finding a blogging voice. As I find my own resources, or look on the web for them, I often find myself being sidetracked… distracted… multitasking??

These moments, or shall we call them tangents, are something that I need to take into account with my instructional practice and help teach my students ways to focus their attention without lots of intrusions from the electronic world. This is also something that we need to think of when setting any task on a computer, we need to define the purpose and a timeframe. This relates to blogging just as much as to any other task on the computer, our students can be distracted by the computer and it's myriad of functions, opportunities and automated events. I realise that as I present my workshop I may need to discuss how to manage a 1 to 1 laptop environment and not only the teaching of the technological tools, but also how to approach the using of a tool. Just as I need to define my task on the computer, such as writing this blog post, I need to help my students do this too.

This brings me to the idea that I should also model for the workshop participants how I set up and run a blogging lesson and the setup I use to do this. Currently we are on our Chinese New Year holiday in Hong Kong, returning to school on the 7th of February. One of the lessons on the first day back will be for the students to write a blog post about their holiday. This lesson gives me the opportunity to capture data, video and 'a teaching moment' for my workshop. Whilst blogging is under the umbrella of the more traditional title of writing, these things together need to show how a blog moves our students on from journal writing to something else where the technology helps provide added value. If it is just about the writing, then why does it need to be a blog? Why can't it just be on Word or another word processor? I ask myself these questions because at my workshop I want to convert the skeptic, the person who wants me to define the why in a way that shows the educational context and added value of using blogs. Undertaking this Masters has been about trying to define those answers for myself and I believe that I have taken many steps towards being able to do this. Now I need to synthesis all of this and, just as I may ask my students to publish to an audience, prepare for my own authentic audience.

Monitoring my GAME plan - The Workshop

2011-01-25T21:34:00.005+08:00

The video is now posted and I am now committed to presenting the workshop. Not that I wasn't before, but this somehow makes it feel more real. I am now thinking about how to structure the workshop and what tools I may use. I realise that I may have a wide range of abilities in the group, and just like I would for a group of students, I will need to differentiate. I also want the workshop to be hands on and incorporate 21st Century learning styles and embed technology in a way that encourages collaboration, inquiry and a sense of communal purpose. This purpose I want to come from facilitating the workshop, as opposed to leading. I will need to bring ideas with me and start off with an initial presentation, but I want to create a workshop that could have simultaneous areas of discussion within which I am the guide.

There is a need to try and get to know the attendees before they arrive in the room, what questions they have and what experience they bring with them. To do this I think I will need to ask people to fill in a questionnaire before they arrive to try and tune me into their needs and think about the flow and structure. At the moment I do not even know how many attendees there may be, but I see a need to try and connect with them beforehand. There are plenty of online tools to help me do this. I could use Surveymonkey or a Google form. Either one of these would provide the necessary feedback. Perhaps Surveymonkey might be better because of the way that it publishes results. I could allow the attendees access to the results so they can see what other people are asking and see if the workshop is for them.

I also need to find a way to connect people in the room. I found a new website called Bigmarker that may suit one of my purposes. This site allows me to set up a conference room within which I can allow chat, sharing of resources and even streaming of my desktop. I will need to be wary of the capabilities of the network as conferences such as these are notorious for slowing down, or even crashing networks, however as this is a 1 to 1 school I would expect their network will be robust enough. Note to self, must check though. I also have resources on my class website and a wiki page that I have begun developing. These are also two places that I can use to share resources to the group. I also hope that people in the group will also bring resources that can be shared with each other, to do this it may be best to have a wiki site. However there is a conference ning site and this may be the best place to collect these resources. It is always best to try and keep things in a central location and hopefully the conference attendees would be familiar with this site.

Next week is a holiday for me and on my to do list is to really sink my teeth into this workshop and work out the different ways it could go, creating a framework within which discussions and inquiries can be supported by relevant resources.

Workshop Video 21st Century Learning Conference

2011-01-22T09:48:00.001+08:00

Here is the 90 second video that I created to advertise my workshop for the 21st Century Learning conference in Hong Kong.

Andy Birch: Blogging as a New Communication Tool Workshop Trailer. from Jane Harris on Vimeo.

Carrying Out A GAME Plan

2011-01-18T20:52:00.004+08:00

This week I have been thinking about the message I will communicate as part of my GAME plan and presenting the workshop at http://21clearninghk.ning.com.

The first step is to make a 90 second video. I have realised that this video needs to be my learning objective. I need to set this out clearly to the potential participants to make a decision about whether this workshop is suitable for them. It also needs to be a message that creates an insight into blogging and leaves an air of expectation that any questions a person may have, could be answered.

I have made many videos using a wide range of editing applications and I need to choose the right tool for the job. I also need to make sure that the message is not lost in digital razzmatazz. This is where I weigh up my options with the time frame. I need to decide on the complexity, if I want a simple shoot and click video depicting me talking into the camera, integrated media or something else. This selection of the tool is always an exciting part and often this is when I have dived into a new application to use it for a project. This is how I learn and a way that I try to model in the classroom with my students, giving them projects supported by new tools.

I interviewed my students today as we were working on our blogs and e-portfolios. Whilst I have found blogs a great motivational tool and a powerful platform to incorporate into the classroom, I haven't directly asked the students what they think about it. The responses I had were very positive and after videoing them I thought that perhaps the message needs to come from my students. As educators there can be nothing more motivational than a student telling you how much something means to them, or a change they have been able to make for the better. The workshop should encompass this big picture thinking and I want it to scaffold up organically into a workshop that provides meaning as well as content. It is this message that I need to come through about the workshop and whilst I hope that many teachers attend are new to blogging, I also hope that some current practitioners who have started using blogging or have been for a while, will come along to share ideas, resources and create the bigger picture together. Now, how to put this in a video by Friday?

GAME Plan - 'Engage in Professional Growth and Leadership'

2011-01-16T19:21:00.002+08:00

I seem to have started off my GAME plan a little behind the eight ball this week. I should have had my goal posting up onto my blog by Wednesday this week, but here we are on Sunday and I am only now posting. My apologies to my instructor and fellow students, this week my reports were due and I thought I'd be okay undertaking my application on the Sunday when they are normally due. This just happened to be the week when this routine has changed and I have been caught out by that.

My goal has also been something that has taken up some of my time this week. The ISTE indicators that I have chosen to focus on are from standard five, 'Engage in Professional Growth and Leadership (ISTE 2008)';

a. participate in local and global learning communities to explore creative applications of technology to improve student learning.

b. exhibit leadership by demonstrating a vision of technology infusion, participating in shared decision making and community building, and developing the leadership and technology skills of others.

My goal is to become more involved in sharing my technology skills and connecting with others to enhance my own teaching. This is something that I have been gradually building towards and this week saw me take another step along that path. Seventeen months ago I was lucky enough to attend the 21st Century Learning conference in Hong Kong. This conference helped sparked many ideas that I have been trying out in my class. Since that conference I have kept in contact with some of the people I had met and continued to meet and discuss technology in education. In one months time there will be another conference and a workshop proposal that I had submitted on blogging has been accepted.

http://21clearninghk.ning.com

On Thursday I met up with the other primary strand presenters and we discussed what we were aiming to present and looked at the timetable. I have been given an hour and a half to run my workshop, and whilst I was only expecting 45 minutes I have decided that I can put something together for that amount of time. Now I am deliberating how that time will be structured. I need to be able to model 21st Century Learning within this workshop at the same time as presenting content on blogging and starting a conversation between the participants.

This week I have to put together a 90 second video to introduce my workshop so I will begin to think about how this workshop will be run and what tools I will use during it. This is not a workshop that I have run before so everything will be created from scratch, although the content that I will be discussing, the blogging I do in class as a teacher and with my student, is there on my class blog and within the student blogs. This is by no means a finished product, the student blogs and my blog will be there for the participants to see, warts and all, but what I decide to use and cherry pick is what I will be thinking about this week and my first action step.

References

National Education Standards for Teachers (NETS-T) located at http://www.iste.org/Content/NavigationMenu/NETS/ForTeachers/2008Standards/NETS_T_Standards_Final.pdf.

Transitioning from Knowledge to Synthesis - Reflection EDUC - 6712I - 2

2010-12-25T00:54:00.003+08:00

I work within a school that teaches a constructivist inquiry curriculum. We as a faculty discuss what good inquiry practices are and endeavor to use the framework of the curriculum and the process orientated planning to help us immerse our students in the inquiry process. We have not had conversations about what that looks like in a digital world and what literacies the students need to be able to critically review and understand this content. We do, however, ask our students to utilize a lot of digital content and have access to a lot of technology within our school. We have not asked ourselves the bigger questions. What is the point of this technology? What are the skills the students need to utilize this technology? How does an effective inquirer transfer their skills across to a digital medium? How can we empower our students to be safe and ethical users of this technology?

This course has shown me many areas that I need to consider when teaching my students and question how we as a school are holistically approaching them. We know that newly developing literacies enhance ways of knowing and have an impact that extend to the sociopolitical fabric of students’ lives (Tierney, Bond, & Bresler, 2006). How can I as an educator make sure that I am making the most of this opportunity and resource within my classroom, whilst keeping my students safe?

I have begun to focus on the teaching of critical thinking skills within my classroom, looking at all areas of student interaction with digital mediums. Using resources such as the ABC’s of website evaluation as presented by Beth Phillips (2009), I am making this explicit and reinforcing these skills though clearly defined activities and resources. I want to help the students choose their content and information carefully and not just pick without analysis (2010a). As my grade five students are in the first year of a one to one laptop program I want to give them a solid foundation of new literacies that they can take forward with them into middle school as computer users. I aim to do this by embedding this process into their online e-portfolios, asking them to think carefully about their online practice, make appropriate decisions about content and be safe.

I have begun this process, but I need to utilize some great resources such as http://www.netsmartz.org, http://www.digizen.org/ and http://cybersmartcurriculum.org/, creating a school curriculum that focuses on all of the main areas. To do this I need to engage in conversation with other members of staff, asking for a group to get together to discuss how this is approached throughout the school and what areas of concern we have. This will eventually involve all the stakeholders such as students and parents, but my first step is to collaborate with my immediate colleagues to decide on what our focus is with regard to new literacies and cybersafety. I believe that we as a school are assuming too much when it comes to student ability and conduct on the internet, and I want us as teachers to question our assumptions and ask ourselves to be critical thinkers about our practice.

References
Phillips, B. (2009). A teachers perspective: Evaluating information online. Laureate Education, Inc.

Tierney, R., Bond, E., & Bresler, J. (2006, Fall). Examining literate lives as students engage with multiple literacies. Theory Into Practice, 45(4), 359–367.

The Tyranny Of Choice. (2010a, Dec 18). The Economist, http://www.economist.com/node/17723028

21st Century Learner

2010-11-19T15:47:00.002+08:00

It has been quite a while since I blogged on here. I have been busy on andysclassroom.com integrating lessons and google docs. Here is a well filmed thoughtful video.

The end of Xmarks?

2010-10-01T10:02:00.002+08:00

I have been using the bookmarking syncing service called Xmarks for quite a while now. Xmarks syncs between all of my browsers and is a valuable service. It has until now been free, but now they either try and find a way to make the service pay or close down. This is one of my must have services and saves me so much time. I would gladly pay the $10 to $20 for this service.

Effective Bridging of Technology and Instruction

2010-08-22T19:08:00.004+08:00

In the first week of my current masters course, "Bridging Learning Theory, Instruction, and Technology," with Walden University, I was asked to summarize my personal theory of learning. After some deliberation I wrote my theory as, 'it should be a child centered inquiry based model that engages students through meaningful study, looking for enduring understandings and educating the child holistically.' As I reflect back on my theory and the knowledge that I have accrued over the past eight weeks, I have found that I have a more solid understanding of my personal theory of learning and a stronger belief in it. I am currently working within a 1 to 1 laptop classroom and also see a need to consider some of the principles of connectivism as defined by George Siemens to integrate into this. These particular principles merge the boundaries with social constructivist theory, focusing on social activities in which meaningful learning occurs (Orey, 2001).

One of the principles of connectivism as outlined by Siemens, is that learning and knowledge rest in diversity of opinions (Orey, 2001). To facilitate this within my classroom I will be using VoiceThread and blogs. VoiceThread allows for conversations to be created around various artifacts. These artifacts can range from a picture to a video tutorial. With VoiceThread I will be asking the students to share their artifacts with the class, eliciting responses and opinions, responding to these then reflecting on what they have learned and others' perspectives. This is very similar to what I will be asking the students to do through their blogs. The VoiceThreads that they create will also be able to be embedded into their blogs, creating another layer of interaction with the commenting ability of blogs, and also bringing together to compliment each other two technology tools that enhance social interaction.

These tools have the added benefit of allowing nonlinguistic forms of representation to be added to them, and with VoiceThread, manipulated during a conversation. This will enable students to create mental pictures of what they are learning to represent and elaborate on knowledge (Pitler, Hubbell, Kuhn, & Malenoski, 2007). The blogs will become a learning artifact for the students, a place where they can connect specialized nodes or information sources that they find on the internet (Orey, 2001). The blogs will also enable me to nurture connections within the class community in a way that the students may not have experienced before. I believe it is important that the students begin to perceive the person behind the blog, or the digital information, asking themselves why someone has written or created what they have. Through creating a class community of blogs students will create a connection between an online presence and an actual human being, who in this case is one of their peers. This community will also encourage the development of learning networks and constructive feedback and collaboration to aid understanding.

One of the long term goals that I have directly relates to the two tools that I have mentioned above. As my students have more of an online presence it is important that I educate them what that means. To operate in a more public way on the internet means they need a good understanding of cyber citizenship, cyber safety and this information needs to be conveyed to their parents. This also needs to be coordinated by the school and addressed directly with the parents and students in a way that they can make informed choices, feel empowered with the ability that they have and resourceful with the knowledge they have attained.

My second goal is to develop these tools in a way that makes them part of the students long term learning. Students will commit a lot of time and energy into their blogs which I will use as their e-portfolios, and I want to make sure that when they leave my year group they can still access them. If learning as described by Siemens is to reside in non-human appliances, then these appliances need to have longevity and if in their extended network form part of the understanding of our students, then they need to be preserved in a way that matters to the evolution of our students learning. By this I mean that at the end of the year the artifacts created by the students should be carried forward into their next year. As the students progress up the school this becomes increasingly important. It will also help to reinforce that digital resources do have longevity and can be meaningful later on. Just as a student who creates a Mandarin VoiceThread to aid their understanding of colors may want to revisit it two years later if they want to practice their pronunciation, a student should be able to revisit specialized nodes or information sources that they linked to in a blog post a year or two ago if they wish to use it as a resource. This is a conversation that I have already begun to have with my school and one that I think it is important for us educators to think about if we wish to extend the idea that knowledge and understanding is not just contained in books, essays and tests, but is something that evolves.

References
Orey, M.(Ed.). (2001). Emerging perspectives on learning, teaching, and technology. Retrieved from http://projects.coe.uga.edu/epltt/

Pitler, H., Hubbell, E., Kuhn, M., & Malenoski, K. (2007). Using Technology with Classroom Instruction That Works. Alexandria, Virginia: Ascd.

Connectivism and Social Learning in Practice

2010-07-28T17:48:00.004+08:00

This week, in Using Technology with Classroom Instruction that Works, we explored cooperative learning. The many tools that were explored in the book allowed students to collaborate and communicate with each other and connect up with experts. One tool that really allows students to communicate, especially during the research process, is collaborative organization through social bookmarking. There are many different tools available but the one that I personally use and I want to set up to work with my students, is the bookmarking tool Diigo.

I call Diigo a tool rather than just a site because when fully used it can become an extension of the browser, allowing multiple people to have discussions about a webpage, highlight and annotate different sections, sharing their research and ideas in real time.

Diigo becomes part of the process of learning as stated under connectivism learning theory in which, "Learning is a process of connecting specialized nodes or information sources" (Orey, M. 2001). Within Diigo different focused groups can be created and joined, creating networks of people to research and discuss specific areas of knowledge, with some of these being more knowledgeable others helping to guide others in their pursuit of knowledge through their zone of proximal development.

References
Orey, M.(Ed.). (2001). Emerging perspectives on learning, teaching, and technology. Retrieved from http://projects.coe.uga.edu/epltt/

Pitler, H., Hubbell, E., Kuhn, M., & Malenoski, K. (2007). Using Technology with Classroom Instruction That Works. Alexandria, Virginia: Ascd.

Voicethread Assignment - Class Website

2010-07-28T09:43:00.003+08:00

I have embedded a Voicethread below for my latest masters assignment. In the assignment we were asked to consider a need, problem or situation that we are faced with, communicate this with our classmates and ask for feedback. As the new school year quickly approaches I have posed the question, 'What should I include on the front page of my class website for the beginning of the year?' I look forward to any ideas or feedback.

Constructing a Community

2010-07-21T21:25:00.005+08:00

During this week Masters assignment we visited constructivist learning theory and viewed many examples of constructionist teaching such as project-based, problem-based, inquiry-based and learning by design. These examples and the readings helped me to understand more about the PYP curriculum that I teach that is based around constructivist/constructionist learning theories. From the many examples that I saw I began to question how I could improve the first unit that I teach my students. This unit, Communities, which I have with other teachers been developing over the last few years, is evolving into one of the most engaging units for the students and now plays a pivotal role in setting up the inquiry model within my classroom. It empowers the students as learners and inquirers, helping them discover a degree of autonomy that asks them to engage, manage and guide the learning activities.

The unit fits under the How We Organise Ourselves transdisciplinary theme and the central idea is 'Individuals and communities work together to meet their goals.' The students are asked to think about a community that they may want to setup and run. The community can be run external from the school, at weekends or after school, there is no restrictions on what they can do. They do however need to think about where it will take place, who will supervise, what the goals are and so forth. The process is outlined in the booklet that is embedded below. The process of researching, planning, designing and creating the community takes around six weeks. At the end of the six weeks the students then advertise their community at a booth during a school assembly. From then on the students try to run their community for as long as possible. There is no time limit on the community and it is possible for a community to run all year as some did last year.

However some communities don't take off even after having other students sign up at the assembly. This helps these groups learn some important lessons about group dynamics, expectations, good planning and so forth. The benefit of a unit such as this for an exhibition class cannot be underestimated. Many students learned important lessons during this process that they took forward to the exhibition and showed good personal growth when choosing their exhibition problem, and it also allowed us as teachers to reflect with the students on this unit and their choices. One of the issues that arises is that during this unit many of the friendship groups decide to work together. This included last year a group of boys who wanted to set up a rugby club in elementary school. Whilst the boys had their hearts in the right place, the group of individuals were good friends and not always the most motivated of students when together. It was no surprise to us that they found the process challenging, finding it difficult to work together and unable to organize themselves and their ideas to make their community a success. When we were preparing for the exhibition and these boys were thinking about what problems they wanted to focus on, they for the most part actually thought about the problem rather than trying to form a group with their friends. They had been given the chance to work with their friends previously and could reflect on that unsuccessful experience realizing that it may not be in their best interest to do that for the exhibition. The fact that the students did not run a successful group should not be seen as a failure. In fact for those students it was a success of sorts, one that through reflecting on the rubrics and in conversations the students were able to understand themselves as learners and their motivations.

Whilst I would like to discuss more the outcomes from this unit, I realize that my focus should be more on next year and how I can improve it using the ideas that I have found from the other constructionist examples I have visited and solid constructivist theory. This leads me to some improvements that I should make:

1. Rubrics
I was disappointed with the rubric that I used and the way that I did not revisit it often enough or use it as a learning tool. By the end of the year I had successfully used many different rubrics with the students and I should have used this one more successfully. With the booklet providing a framework it would also be possible to work with the students to create the rubric that we would use for assessment. I also think there should have been two. One for the initial six week planning and implementation stage and one that the students can use a few weeks after their community has been running and at the end of the year.

2. Concepts
The PYP is a concept based curriculum. In the booklet the concepts, form, function, connection and responsibility have been added in as headers. These also need to be utilized more in the conversations with the students and is something I need to consider more when facilitating the students through this process.

3. Wikis
During the exhibition the groups used wikis to coordinate themselves. When we did the communities unit at the beginning of the year I wanted to use a different tool, Stixy, to coordinate their groups. I realize now that I should make wikis one of the main tools within my classroom and this unit should be the students first introduction to them. This will also support the exhibition later on in the year and help us to scaffold the tools that the students will use. The wiki also has many of the same features of the students E-portfolios that they will be using and they will complement each other.

4. Modeling
This improvement is something that I am in two minds about and is something born out of a personal interest and is as much about adding value to the unit as it is a personal project, although that is not to discount what I think could be great added value or the positive impacts on a class of a teacher showing their interest, enthusiasm or modeling in general. I am in two minds because I am unsure about whether to start this process, although I feel that I am 80% sure that I will give it a try. My idea is that at the same time that the students as a class develop their communities, we as a class community connect up with other classes around the world to decide on an issue, charity or so forth, taking action, raising money or whatever is decided and collaboratively as a global community following our central idea 'Individuals and communities work together to meet their goals.' The aim of this is to see how the power of the group and connections using technology can make a bigger impact. This would be along the lines of raising money for Room to Read. This may also help to connect the class with more classes around the world who may wish to join later on with our exhibition collaboration, blogging exchanges and so forth. This would be coordinated through a website, communicated through teacher communities and follow the inquiry process.

Hopefully these improvements above add value to this unit and the students learning experience. Constructivist/constructionist learning theory is something that I am very thankful that I have the opportunity to be involved in with my students on a daily basis. The students motivation, enthusiasm, learning and growth benefits enormously from this approach and whilst it should not be the only tool in a teachers toolbox is one worth bringing in to a classroom.

Communities Booklet 2009

Komodo Scuba Diving Trip

2010-07-20T20:12:00.003+08:00

One of my passions is scuba diving and most holidays I can be found trying out new dive sites and looking for some of the fascinating creatures that live in our oceans. Last week my wife and I traveled to Bali where we set sail on the liveaboard Queen Scuba to the island of Komodo to walk with dragons and dive its many dive sites. We have previously traveled with the Queen Scuba in the Similians and once again were treated to outstanding service and great dive guides. Many thanks to Michael and the eagle eyed Mike.

We were lucky to dive three times with Mantas at the aptly named Manta Alley, rode the strong Indonesian currents at Rollercoaster, found a wunderpus on a muck dive and had an all round fantastic diving experience during our 20 dives. Being upgraded to the master cabin was just the icing on the cake!

I had brought some new underwater video gear including a couple of Ikelite Pr0-V8 LED lights and a FlipHD with housing and a wide angle lens. It took some getting used to and whilst it has difficulties in the low light with pixelisation compared to higher quality cameras I was pleased with the results. This setup also needs a macro lens and that is next on my list, filming the nudibranchs was tough and the pygmy seahorses all but impossible. On the trip I made an MTV edit video of the footage. I'm not sure if I'll get around to making a longer video with all of the footage, there is still plenty more decent footage, but never the less I'm happy with this video. Enjoy!

Behaviorism in Practice

2010-07-06T13:21:00.002+08:00

In this weeks readings for my masters course 'Bridging Learning Theory, Instruction, and Technology,' we looked at specific examples relating to reinforcing effort and how "research shows that the level of belief in self-efficacy plays a strong role in motivation for learning and achievement' (Pitler, Hubbell, Kuhn, & Malenoski, 2007).

Ideas and case studies were presented about how to reinforce the idea of effort using a rubric and spreadsheets to collect data. The technology was used to help students see a correlation between effort and achievement through tables and graphing. It also supported more immediate feedback, feedback that allowed the learner to make connections and encouraged the students to learn from observation. Over time the data would provide reinforcement of the behavior and students through the rubric could understand how their attitude affected the outcome, all key components of behaviorism.

This led me to thinking how I could implement this into my classroom, what type of activities would be conducive to providing the right sort of data whilst being ongoing and if possible on a weekly basis. In the reading it suggested that the power came from data that is collected over a long period of time and providing regular feedback to students. I realized that my weekly spelling test offers the perfect opportunity to trial this strategy. One of the reasons that I believe this fitted well is how the spelling test is structured and how the rubric could also ask students about their choice of spelling words. Each week the students are given five spelling words and have to choose five of their own. These five that the student choose also give an opportunity to look at the correlation between choices they make, effort and achievement. It is important that I don't create a situation where I'm looking for too many correlations and making the system overly complex, but many students learn about responsible choices and setting themselves high goals just through choosing five words of their own.

The collection of data will need to be coordinated in a way that it is visible both to the student and teacher, with perhaps access by other stakeholders such as the students parents and even peers. Over the last year I have been trailing a similar system of feedback with the students for the reading continuum through their e-portfolios, it seems that this strategy would also fit well within this system which proved very effective at providing feedback and focus. The students would create a page in their e-portfolio for their spelling results and embed a google docs spreadsheet into it. The student and myself would then have access to the spreadsheet and only we would be able to update the scores. The student would perform a self assessment using the rubric at the end of the spelling test and input their data into the spreadsheet. The spreadsheet would then take their data and keep track of it automatically in a graph. Using a Google docs spreadsheet would mean it could be embedded into the e-portfolio and the data would only need to inputted into one place but be accessible from the centralized location of the e-portfolio. This would also allow the student to easily link to it through their blog as they reflect on their results in blogs posts.

I have created a draft rubric and results template to see how this would work and embedded it into my website. I am pleased with the results and can see how this would be a powerful tool to provide the students with feedback. I also use many rubrics which the students become very adapt at using, this would help reinforce the role of rubrics and reflection.

Overall I am very happy with this idea and look forward to seeing how it goes at the start of next year. There will need to be a discussion with students about sharing their results and supporting any students that would rather keep it private from their peers. This is something that I focus on a lot, especially though our blogs, with the concept of authentic audience and setting goals for themselves. There are ways to hide it within the e-portfolio and just share the spreadsheets with a select few. It will be interesting to see how this feedback system which includes many aspects of behaviorism theory supports the students learning and understanding themselves as learners.

References

Pitler, H., Hubbell, E., Kuhn, M., & Malenoski, K. (2007). Using Technology with Classroom Instruction That Works. Alexandria, Virginia: Ascd.

Free Fall

2010-07-05T22:32:00.005+08:00

This incredible video was filmed by two free divers over the course of four days. Whilst I won't be creating anything quite so breathtaking I'm looking forward to a holiday in Indonesia diving around Komodo with my new underwater video system. Hopefully I can capture some great shots and put something together that is half as good as this whilst refining my imovie skills.

The g-portfolio

2010-06-24T20:10:00.002+08:00

The g-portfolio

This name comes from an article by Will Richardson on his blog weblogg-ed and the idea behind it should be discussed when talking about web based open portfolios.

Who hasn't searched for their name on the internet to see what turns up? All of that under your name that may or may not actually be you is your g-portfolio. Even those parts that aren't really you? Well yes, until you can show that it isn't you and create an online identity that people see is you. Your brand, image, online identity, it has many different names but none truly accommodate all of the different facets of you that will be included whether you want them to or not. But how can we control that? Should we? And what does that mean for us and our students?

But first, how does that work? Search engines employ programs called spiders to 'crawl' around the internet referencing sites, checking links and providing the information to provide a search. Any web page unless protected by a password or a specific piece of code is indexed and added to the search engines database, this then provides the information on the screen that appears when a search is undertaken.

During this indexing process information is gathered from any pages including blogs and retained as searchable material in the database. This can include any names that are used and is where we need to start thinking about the g-portfolio or digital footprint.

A g-portfolio is the collection of information about a person that can be obtained by performing a search using their name. The more unique a persons name the easier it is to refine the search and find their g-portfolio or digital footprint, all the things that they have published, created or joined on the internet. I say all, but this isn't quite correct, for instance it doesn't include some wall gardens such as Facebook and don't expect an adults bank details to appear, however the amount of details that can be found out is quite impressive.

So imagine in the future that a potential employer performs a search on your name. What would they find out? What should they find out? What would you want them to find out? What they find out is your g-portfolio. This is the part that you want to think about, the online identity and the snapshot of you that it is giving someone of a you that is….. a creative, knowledgeable person, someone with passion, ideas, a thoughtful web presence, or….. someone else? And what about all of those other people with your name appearing at the same time?

This is about a more proactive choice of controlling that g-portfolio, putting your best face forward and trying to bring the pieces into a more cohesive whole. How does the e-portfolio that a school sets up for a student fit into all this? Well maybe this is the first step in helping a student create it. The applications and technology are going to change, but the basic ideas of online identity, digital citizenship, branding, accountability, openness, cognition, reflective thought, learning, authenticity and a self-awareness of what being online means is not. These are what we should be aiming for with our e-portofolis, not a focus on the tool.

It is possible to create a walled garden for the e-portfolios and something to be considered by all of the stakeholders. The school could make them password protected to keep out the search engine spiders. It is also possible to include code that stops these spiders from referencing the site as well but leaves it open for a wider audience. More details about that is here.

What does that leave a student at the age of 18 leaving school as their online identity? Is it just all of those things that they signed up for and did on their own outside of school and nothing to show for their hard work at school? How about the portability of the system when a student gets to that age, should they be able to take their e-portfolio away with them from the school system?

There are some important considerations that need to be thought about by a school when undertaking a web based portfolio system. They should be analysed, discussed, researched and discussed some more before a decision is taken. It may be that a school decides to raise the walls and keep the students penned in, 'safe' and provide systems that keep this information within the school. I don't believe that this is responsibly preparing our students as digital citizens and making them knowledgeable about all of their online decisions. Will this stop them having a g-portfolio? Absolutely not. Everything they do outside of school will be up there front and centre. Should that be the first and only thing a person sees about one of our students?

…….

For the sake of keeping this blog post succinct as it is I haven't discussed the issue of first and last names being used on the internet, or even aliases that can become an identity. That'll be saved for another post.

E-portfolio Trial

2010-06-24T08:48:00.003+08:00

This year I have been focusing on e-portfolios and how they can be used in my classroom. It has been more of an evolution of implementation, rather than predetermined choices and application. Next year will be slightly different. With the backing of the school and some teachers I will be undertaking a more careful consideration of not only the Weebly platform, but more importantly the role of an e-portfolio and its setup. This website has been created to help define that process and coordinate the different stakeholders. Here is the first blog post.

Why Weebly?

One of the burning questions that needs to be addressed right at the start of this process is why Weebly and aren't there better alternatives out there?

The answer to this question is rather simplified and whilst I'll go into more detail below, it basically is 'right product at the right time.' Yes there are plenty of alternatives out there, I'm not sure if I want to say they are better or not, this is often a very difficult statement when it comes to comparing different applications. Often that decision is subjective, based on a perceived value or a list of features, dependent on needs, a person's current knowledge and skill set of a system and sometimes because everyone else says it is. The purpose behind this implementation is to not look at different applications or products, but rather through the trial implementation of one system begin to work out what that product should be and what an e-portfolio means to HKA.

That leads to two questions.
Why did I choose Weebly and why is it a good choice for this trial implementation?

Like I said, 'right product at the right time.' In the summer of 2009 before moving to Hong Kong Academy I knew that I wanted to set up a class website to coordinate all of my communication with my students and parents and set up an online portal and community for my students. HKA at the time had dabbled with Moodle in Middle and High school, but there was no system in Elementary school. I looked around the internet at different options. I built trial versions in Wix, Weebly, Ning and Google Sites trying to think about how I would like my class website to work. I knew I wanted flexibility with my site for it to grow and not just be a blog so decided against Edublogs and Blogspot as well. I also wanted it to be hosted online and not something that I needed to worry about the setup, running or maintenance of such as Moodle, Wordpress or Elgg. Some of these are still potential options for an e-portfolio system at HKA in the future, as is Mahara and more. These decisions can come later on after a look at what an e-portfolio is and the discussion about them this year. But less about what it shouldn't be, why Weebly?

Interface
To start with Weebly has an easy to use interface that allows you to customize a page by dragging and dropping elements into different areas. This javascript interface is so easy to use that my grade 5 students picked it up in no time at all. This also allows it be more dynamic than a wiki and content can be structured into columns easier than in Wikispaces or Google Sites. This interface also loads really quickly. Weebly have done a great job over the last year speeding up their interface and you often have to remind yourself that this is running on a server somewhere else round the world. The tab navigation of the interface is also very simple and clear. This doesn't mean it is lacking in features, but rather the interface has been well thought out and allows quick access to different pages through the pages tab or by clicking on their link in the navigation bar of the website if they are shown.

Blogs
A big plus for Weebly is the ability to create a blog. Not just one in fact, as many as you like within your site. There is a temptation to create too many blogs, but one or two extra blogs as repositories of work such as specialist teachers, as we used them last year in my class, allows you to use the power of the blogs categories to search its database and make that part of your site more interactive. The blogging platform keeps things simple, it allows you to easily update a website without spending lots of time building it. I've thought more about blogs and their significance for e-portfolios here.

Navigation
The website navigation is really straight forward to use. Creating a page or blog under the pages tab you are given a choice whether you would like it to appear in the main navigation, as part of a drop down bar or be hidden. You can then drag and drop the pages to reorder them and all links are retained. Choosing one of the pages and moving it slightly to the right will create a set of nested links under another link. Having built my own websites with dreamweaver I have to say that this ability is a huge time saver.

Security
Each class can have their own password to control access to see their blogs. There are positive points and negative ones to the way Weebly sets it up which I will discuss later, but access is an issue the school needs to address.

Web based
Access from anywhere and any computer. At HKA we use Macs, but many of our students also have Windows at home. Having a web based non-platform specific e-portfolio allows students to access it at home as well. It is also possible to create an authentic audience for the e-portfolio within the class, school community and around the world

Integration with....
...anything that provides an embed code can be integrated into Weebly. Weebly is also partnered with various services that you can use such as poll daddy, scribd and has direct links to flickr, google maps and YouTube.

Weebly for educationSetting up an education account allows a teacher to set up a class underneath their own account. You are allowed 40 students with one education account. Extra student accounts can be added by purchasing more. There are restrictions with a normal account, but adding pro for a very reasonable rate will enable students to upload audio, video and embed documents. Even now Weebly are thinking about education and activating new tools like assignment submission pages.

One year of useIt has to be mentioned that I have already been using Weebly successfully with my class for one year. During this process I have been able to answer some questions that I would like to know about before nominating a product to other educators. Some of these are:

* I have had a class of 20 all on Weebly at the same time via our wireless network.
* The students found it easy.
* There was very little down time and we could access it when we needed to.
* Great support from Weebly, every problem resolved or question answered in 2 or 3days.
* The ability to control the class via passwords, access and disabling editing
* Using deepvaccum I was able to successfully download and burn the e-portfolio to dvd at the end of the year. (Weebly's download tool doesn't currently support downloading the full blog).

Are there little problems with Weebly? Sure, there some little idiosyncrasies, can be hang ups with some of the droppable elements, not to mention a reset formatting for text button is needed. These are things that will need to be thought about in the adoption of a platform at HKA and addressed through this implementation. Overall the positives far out weigh the negatives.

On a personal level I found that Weebly fulfilled all of my criteria to run my own website. It also made me think more about content rather than the setup, style and intricacies of building and running a website. Not that this shouldn't be something that students learn, but that it isn't the focus when it comes to the e-portfolios, that should be the content and how the school sees it running. So on to the process....

Education and Revolution

2010-06-06T18:53:00.001+08:00

Reflection: Understanding the Impact of Technology on Education, Work and Society

2010-04-25T19:17:00.010+08:00

I am in the process of completing the third course for my masters with Walden University. This unit focuses on "Understanding the Impact of Technology on Education, Work and Society." In this blog post I will be reflecting on the course, my progress, continued learning and setting long term goals for the next year or so.

As mentioned in the title, the course is focused on technology in education. Through the application of technology in our classrooms and on a personal level, the course has aimed to help us understand the potential of technology to transform our learning environments. The main focus has been on wikis, blogs and podcasts. These are all technologies that I am very familiar with and had been using before this course begun. What the course has allowed me to do is understand the theory behind the use of technology and be able to quantify in more detail the changes that I see with my students and on a personal level based on research and studies.

Often there are words or phrases within education that through conferences, presentations, word of mouth and the echo chamber effect, can take on a life of their own. They can sway theory, practice and be on the tip of the tongue of educators involved with the debate. This is especially happening with the role of technology in education.

Not that these words or phrases don't have value, but rather that anybody using them should understand their full meaning and implications from a balanced perspective. Web 2.0 tools, our ready access to information and more integrated communication, allow ideas, knowledge and thoughts to permeate through society faster than ever before. We need to analyze, validate and understand (C. Dede, 2008a) these words and phrases ourselves, using the skills such as those outlined by The Partnership for 21st Century Skills, that we are discussing as valuable 21st century skills for our students.

This permeation is something that can work on a subconscious level, but is also understood in politics, media and business to be something that can be manipulated. This is shown in this internal memo from Philip Morris in 1998 titled 'The "Echo Chamber" Approach to Advocacy'. "The approach attempts to cause favorable information to resonate with and from various sources in order to increase its credibility with the target audience" (J. Scruggs, 1998).

One of these phrases that I had used before I understood it in its full context and had spent time reading from primary sources, is digital natives. The term digital natives was coined by Marc Prensky in 2001. In a more recent article, "Listen to the Natives," he discusses digital natives, talking about their engagement, motivation and educators creating more radical solutions to aid students in their learning (M. Prensky 2005). It is interesting that during many presentations and key notes I have heard that quote Prensky, digital natives is mentioned followed by the word multitasking, as if the words are synonymous with each other. In many of his articles Prensky does not mention multitasking as having the value that some educators have put on it. In a recent article he mentions aiming for digital wisdom with digital enhancements. These enhancements should be aimed towards improving cognition, to help us perform more complex analyses. "It is through the interaction of the human mind and digital technology that the digitally wise person is coming to be" (M. Prensky, 2009).

This course has helped me to look beyond the technology and guided by the course readings think about the 21st century skills more than the tools, and perhaps how I can become digitally wise. Rather than become enamored with the latest or greatest devices or applications, I need to focus on student progress. It is not about "doing things differently," but "doing different things" (D. Thornburg, 2008).

At the same time I do need to stay in touch with the progress of technology in education. Currently I am using twitter (@rhinoab) and tweetdeck to collate the great resources shared by educators all round the world. Using my diigo account I am able to bookmark and tag saving these resources for when I need them. Many other great resources are shared through teacher learning networks such as Classroom2.0, The Educators PLN and PYP Threads. Regularly visiting these sites and linking into their diigo feeds has helped to consolidate all of my resources into one place for easier access, and because it is searchable online and through a web browser I am often utilizing this valuable resource.

As well as the sites, applications and resources being shared, I am accessing many blogs on a daily basis. I use google reader to keep me up to date with all of the different posts, syncing this with iNews on my ipod touch to make them portable to read on the go. Staying abreast of the latest developments and seeing how others utilize technology helps me to see my own practice through fresh eyes and gain new creative ideas for increasing student achievement.

To help focus my thinking and technology use I have been asked to set myself two long tern goals to complete within the next two years. My first goal is to develop a digital learning environment for my students, helping them to become independent inquirers using the resources that I provide and aiding their use of technological tools. To do this I will continue to expand my current digital space andysclassroom.com. Using a wiki I want to bring together tools that explain the applications and programs that the students use. For each tool used a page will be created on this wiki that allows the students to revisit it and watch videos, listen to podcasts and read step by step instructions.

It is important that I engage with the students so, "students have a meaningful voice in setting school policy regarding tech use" (M. Prensky 2008). To this end I have begun a dialogue with the teachers and students in the middle school to make sure that we in grade 5 help prepare the students for the technology used in the middle school 1 to 1 program. I will also be engaging my students in this process asking them to help create this resource by adding in their own instructional videos, manuals and instructions. This will then become a learning artifact within the school that they can use as they progress through the school. The wiki in its infancy can be found here http://andysclassroom.wikispaces.com/.

My second goal is to continue developing digital portfolios for the students. This year there was some trial and error before we settled on the Weebly platform for grade 5. The school does not have any long term plan for digital portfolios throughout the school. I hope the work that the grade 5 team have been doing will enable the school to see the full benefits of digital portfolios and the way they can be used that promotes meaningful learning and reflection by the students. I have previously blogged about the role of portfolios here, and along with some other educators began setting up a wiki http://ade2010digitalportfolios.wikispaces.com/ to share digital portfolio resources and think about their role within a school. I will continue adding to this wiki and inviting other contributors to share their thoughts and ideas, reflecting on my own practice and experience as I develop the grade 5 portfolios.

Next year my grade will be fully 1 to 1 and I want the digital portfolio to become the learning space that coordinates the students online learning. Rather than "herd" the students, I will develop "1 to 1 personalized instruction" (M. Prensky 2005), focusing on social interaction between students and teachers, something that some people think will be lost in the world of online learning (A. November 2009).

There are many challenges with these goals, but I think that this year I laid some good groundwork to be able to complete these goals by developing my own learning artifact, andysclassroom.com. There is no doubt that this course has empowered me and helped fine tune my focus through readings and discussions with my peers online. This has all been made possible by online learning and I hope to take this amazing tool and empower my students with it.

References:

Dede, C. (2008). Transforming the Classroom with Technology:Part 3 [DVD]. Understanding the Impact of Technology on Education, Work, and Society. Baltimore: Laureate Education, Inc

Prensky, M. (2005). Listen to the natives. Educational Leadership, 63(4), 8–13.

Prensky, M. (2008, March). Turning on the lights. Educational Leadership, 65(6), 40–45.

Prensky, M. (2009). H. sapiens digital: From http://www.innovateonline.info/index.php?view=article&id=705digital immigrants and digital natives to digital wisdom. Innovate 5 (3). http://www.innovateonline.info/index.php?view=article&id=705 (accessed February 4, 2009)

Scruggs, J. (1998) "The "Echo Chamber" Approach to Advocacy", Philip Morris, Bates No. 2078707451/7452, December 18, 1998. Retrieved from: http://legacy.library.ucsf.edu/tid/xiz37c00.

Thornburg, D. (2008). Technology and Education: Expectations, not Options [DVD]. Understanding the Impact of Technology on Education, Work, and Society. Baltimore: Laureate Education, Inc

November, A. C. (2009). Empowering Students With Technology (Second Edition ed.). Thousand Oaks, CA: Corwin Press.

Teaching Yourself The Tools - iMovie 09

2010-04-17T14:13:00.004+08:00

I have found that the best way to learn any of the tools that I want to use with the students is to use them in a meaningful context in my own life. This parallels the use of technology in my classroom, using it in a meaningful context. Moviemaking has been a hobby of mine for many years and once I became proficient at Adobe Premier Pro and Final Cut I found that I didn't want to use more basic video editors to make movies.

This has meant that I haven't used iMovie 09 and it's new interface as much as I would like to be able to use it in my classroom, and give the necessary support to my students on their upcoming movie project. It is easy to get set in our technological use and it is important and keep refreshing our skills.

On my recent scuba diving holiday to Tubbahata reef in the Philippines I decided that I would only use iMovie 09 to create a holiday video from footage I filmed on my canon S70. I found that I began to like the iMovie interface, and whilst I miss having multiple layers I am very pleased with the video I made below. I also found this great website with creative commons music that I could use. Well worth a visit.

Many thanks to DiveBilly for the photos that I used in the video.
Music: Antony Raijekov When Waves Trying To Catch A Marvel

Podcast - Student Technology

2010-04-03T06:22:00.005+08:00

This podcast was created for one of my masters assignments through Walden University. In the podcast I interview my students and look at their technology demographic, how they view technology, what they use and the amount of time they use it. Many thanks to the students who took part.

Digital portfolios - #ade2010

2010-03-25T20:22:00.001+08:00

There was a lot of discussion at the ADE conference about digital portfolios. Four separate groups ended up focusing on digital portfolios and working together to help their understanding of what a digital portfolio maybe.

It was clear from our discussions that digital portfolios mean different things to different schools and there is no one fit all solution. Many tools can be used to create portfolios, but before deciding on the tool to use there are some guiding questions that schools should ask themselves. Our group split these into 5 areas on a wiki that was created to help collaboration and discussion between schools.

1. School expectations
2. Teacher expectations
3. Student expectations
4. Role of the portfolio
5. Tools

School Expectations
Portfolios should have a purpose. This may be led by the school administration and differ depending on the ages involved. Members of administration need to think about how they view a portfolio, what sort of consistency they may wish to see, expectations of content, what parents may expect and the progression of the portfolio in the school. The infusion of technology throughout the school needs to be considered and if the expectations are attainable with the technology available in the school. The curriculum and teaching philosophy of the school may also guide the portfolio along with 21st century skills. They should take into account all of the different stakeholders, the teachers who have to implement it who may need specific tech support or training and keeping it simple to begin with.

Teacher Expectations
Teachers may have different views on the role of portfolios within their classroom and need to be considered in the process. They also need to be guided by the school in the role of the portfolio and understand why it is being done. Teachers will also look for a way to make the portfolio relevant to students learning and something that allows students to reflect and understand their own learning. The amount of time that a portfolio may take and commitments involved should also be considered. This will vary between different teachers and they may have different strategies and learning engagements to help their students build their portfolio.

Student Expectations
This may change from year to year as students move up the school and become more technologically literate. The purpose or size of a portfolio may change. If students are engaged with their portfolios and it serves a wider purpose they may wish to have a portfolio that can be taken away with them when they leave school or move up year to year.

Role of the portfolio
All of the stakeholders in the portfolio need to have a common goal and understanding about the portfolio. The portfolio could be a showcase of student work, exhibit a process or a combination of both. What is possible may be linked to the choice of technologies used within the digital portfolio and tech knowledge of the teacher and students.

Tools
There are many different technologies that can be used. Some of these are part of LMS systems, others on the web or available to be installed on school servers. Things to be considered are bandwidth, storage, access, capability, platform and support available. Will the portfolio be available for students when they leave the school?

In our discussions as a group we realized that there are many answers for a school and perhaps we should work towards providing a questioning framework to help three development and implementation of digital portfolios. The beginning of this can be found on the public wiki at http://ade2010digitalportfolios.wikispaces.com/.
This is an open wiki that anyone can add content to.

Clicktual

2010-03-24T23:55:00.004+08:00

This week I have been at the ADE conference in Singapore. I'll be writing more soon about the conference, but I wanted to share a video. The video is a poem that I wrote during a 'branding' exercise. The purpose of the first day was to understand ourselves as a brand and how we create an identity. There were many tasks and I ended up developing a poem. On Monday morning I emailed it to my class in Hong Kong to ask for their help with the poem. After a little more tweaking they then recorded the sound for the poem and emailed it back to me. I created a poem video using imovie, livetype and final cut express as an ode to the ADE's. Here is the video.

Voice overs: Matthew, Ella
Music:
Artisit - tryad
Album - public domain
http://www.jamendo.com/en/album/1003

Free music for professional licensing

Apple Distinguished Educator

2010-03-21T13:21:00.001+08:00

This week I am lucky to be taking part in the Apple Distinguished Educator workshop in Singapore. During the 5 days I will collaborating with educators from all over Asia and learning new tools and collaborative ways to use various technologies. I'm looking forward to the experience and along with others will be sharing on twitter #ade2010.

Partnership for 21st Century Skills

2010-03-20T15:30:00.008+08:00

During this weeks assignment I have been visiting the The Partnership for 21st Century Skills website. This partnership advocates 21st century readiness for every student and breaks down what it believes 21st century readiness means.

At the core is the integrating of the 3 R's and what they call the four Cs (critical thinking and problem solving, communication, collaboration, and creativity and innovation). In documentation provided on the site, such as the 21st century curriculum and instruction document, the partnership also realizes that 21st century skills can mean different things and takes time to share some of the opinions of educational researchers about what these skills could be. Robert Sternberg of Tufts University calls these the three other r's Reasoning, Resilience and Responsibility. Curriculum & Instruction (Partnership for 21st Century Skills, 2007).

The partnership does a good job of providing documentation to open up discussion will all stakeholders in education. Among the documentation there are examples of how these skills can be incorporated into the curriculum within a school. The partnership is aimed at providing support, guidance and documentation for states, districts, schools and educators to inform their practice and begin to address the need for educating students within a 21 century framework.

There are some important questions asked by the partnership with relevance to current educational practices by schools and curriculums. One of the areas that needs to be considered in the change over to 21st century pedagogy and curriculum, is the role of assessment within a school. Depending on the school, it can often be that decisions are mandated to a school that affects the ability of the school to adopt 21st century practices and curriculum, and these in turn are controlled or reinforced through the assessment procedures that the schools are expected to follow.

A recent documentary by Dispatches in the U.K. highlighted this. In the documentary a school in Bristol in the U.K. was under performing at national mathematics SAT tests. The school decided to bring in a mathematics expert to help analysis their mathematics pedagogy and help raise scores. During the first few months the consultant was in the school the students understanding of maths improved. This is documented through various interviews in the program. The school then had to begin to prepare students for the SAT tests. This eleven week process meant that teachers could no longer engage students with this new approach to maths. This highlights a problem when we are teaching to a test, when a working pedagogy clashes with the need for assessment which takes time out from actual teaching.

This is not to say that there shouldn't be any accountability within schools. There should be. How this is done and the importance of the summative as opposed to the formative assessment procedures is something that schools need to question for themselves. The 21st century partnership provides an interesting document on the role of assessment within the framework of 21st century skills, offering examples of how it can be implemented. I especially liked their idea that formative assessment should, 'make thinking visible by revealing the kinds of conceptual strategies a student uses to solve a problem' Assesment: A 21st Century Skills Implementation Guide (Partnership for 21st Century Skills, 2007).

There are some statements by the partnership that I agree with, but it is worth considering that these are written in terms of the American public education system, and very broad. Applying these across every school would not do justice to the work of many educators and schools.

'a profound gap exists between the knowledge and skills most students learn in school and the knowledge and skills they need for success in their communities and workplaces.' FAQ (Partnership for 21st Century Skills, 2007).

Reading what the partnership thinks 21st century skills are reinforces my belief that the IBO PYP concept driven inquiry curriculum that I teach is meeting many of the targets that the partnership sets. However it is important that I assess my practice and look at how assessment fits into my class and the standards that I am teaching to. This involves looking at the documentation that the school has created and lining it up with units of inquiry that I teach. My assessment should also 'provide useful information about student achievement by measuring the comprehension, absorption and application of higher- order concepts,' whilst being, 'valid , reliable and fair.' 21st Century Skills Assessment (Partnership for 21st Century Skills, 2007).

S.M.A.R.T. vs S.M.A.R.T.S.

2010-03-18T20:16:00.004+08:00

Our exhibition team have been busy discussing with students the idea of taking action. Action is an integral part of the PYP and throughout the programme teachers look for opportunities to highlight when students take action. This action is supposed to be self directed, fitting within the framework of the PYP's five essential elements including the learner profile, attitudes, transdisciplinary skills and concepts that shows the student growth as a lifelong learner.

In the PYP handbook Making The PYP Happen, action is defined as "responsible action," that is used "in order to make a difference in and to the world," and "it is intended that the person taking the action will grow from the experience, and that the process of taking action or not will contribute to each student establishing a personal set of values"(2007).

This action is an important part of the PYP and therefore integral to the exhibition, the culmination of the PYP. But how do we as teachers define action and help the students understand what action is, making the right choices when they are selecting their problems and potential solutions?

Our central idea for the exhibition which comes under the transdisciplinary theme, 'sharing the planet', is: "We are an inquiring community trying to resolve global issues by taking action locally."

The students have decided on their problems, now through the inquiry process they are beginning to focus on their solutions. To help them make the choices for their problems we used the concept of S.M.A.R.T. to guide them. This is a concept that I originally used many years ago with Anya Dalais during another exhibition at BISS International School and have tweaked a little for this one. The areas, Specific, Measurable, Actionable, Relevant and Time-bound, help the students to make good choices when selecting their problems. But what about their solutions?

It was as I was reading Thomas L. Friedman's new book, Hot, Flat, and Crowded: Why We Need a Green Revolution—And How It Can Renew America (2008), that I realized that perhaps we were missing an important component to help focus our students on a more social responsibility tract. Early on in the book Freidman brings up the concept of sustainability. He argues that people should be inspired to embrace sustainable values and then live with them (2008). This is an important global issue that may have a place in the exhibition to help us teach students about action. Action that the world and our communities are beginning to realize has to happen because on our current path our lifestyles are unsustainable. When we ask students to consider their action from a S.M.A.R.T. perspective, perhaps we should ask them about S.M.A.R.T.S.? Is their solution Specific, Measurable, Actionable, Relevant, Time-bound and Sustainable. What is the future impact that their decision will have? Is it possible for it to be sustained within the community and have a lasting effect, something that within the community that they are in, whether that is the global, local or school community can be sustained and help to foster sustainable values?

We are now into the third week of our exhibition and may choose to use S.M.A.R.T.S.. You can stay up to date with the process on our wiki.

Friedman, T. L. (2008). Hot, Flat, and Crowded: Why We Need a Green Revolution--and How It Can Renew America (1 ed.). New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux.

International Baccalaureate Organization (2007) Making The PYP Happen, UK: Antony Rowe Ltd, Chippenham, Wiltshire

Exhibition Video Part 2

2010-03-16T19:07:00.002+08:00

This animoto video captures the next stage in our exhibition process. We have been selecting the problems that students wish to tackle for the exhibition. The students have now started researching to help guide how they are going to take action.

The Exhibition,

2010-03-15T23:02:00.005+08:00

I wanted to share a piece of writing that I just did for a discussion for my masters that I feel encapsulates some of my thinking about the exhibition that takes place at the end of the PYP curriculum. With the exhibition in full swing it is no surprise that my mind continues to swing back to the process that is the exhibition. Apologies to my classmates who have seen this in the discussion, but I wanted to bring my thoughts out to a wider audience, perhaps to engage other PYP practitioners.

'Post an analysis of the changes taking place in the business world and in your own classroom.'

The Exhibition,

Within many companies it would seem that the power of "human capital is being unleashed" (Tapscott, D., & Williams, A. 2007, March 26). We as educators as shown by Jeff Houston (2009) can also unleash the power of human capital using wikis and other tools.

Over the last eight months I have attempted to apply some of the changes that are happening in the world of business to my classroom. Not that I want to prepare my students for a life in business, but as shown by changes in major companies such as IBM, Sun, Infosys and others (Friedman, T. 2005, April 3), the sharing of knowledge and collaboration offered by the current convergence of technologies, allows us to empower people to collaboratively create new ideas and improve old ones.

I am lucky that as an educator I have a lot of professional scope with the lessons that I teach. There is no formalized state wide testing at my school with runs the PYP International Baccalaureate curriculum. Following a philosophy and curriculum model created by the IB we focus on what are very similar concepts to what are considered 21st century skills. This constructivist inquiry curriculum allows us to create projects like the exhibition which I have just started. The exhibition is the culmination of the students elementary years in the school. We don't give a grade for the exhibition. This has empowered us as teachers to be creative and look at ways that we can engage our students in meaningful learning. This is what the exhibition asks us to do. Not to say that this doesn't happen anywhere else, just that we are given more freedom than many of my peers here. This is one reason I left my own national system.

It makes it easier to adapt to new concepts and ideas. Our current wiki, started two weeks ago to help glue together the process, brings together many aspects of what has been called the "workflow revolution" (Friedman, T. 2005, April 3) Thinking has become distributed within the classroom (Dede, C. 2008), which is allowing us to engage our students within a creative and critical workflow. The students are asked to be adaptable, critical inquirers who consider the world as a whole and our class is "an inquiring community trying to resolve global issues by taking action locally."

Technology is changing business and many of those same technologies are applicable and useful in our classrooms. But if there is a new division of labour as mentioned by Dr. Dede, perhaps we need to look first at how to foster "expert decision making and complex communication," (Dede, C. 2008) in our teaching, and then how technology can support them.

Dede, C. (2008). The Changing Work Environment: Part 2 [DVD]. Understanding the Impact of Technology on Education, Work, and Society. Baltimore: Laureate Education, Inc.

Friedman, T. (2005, April 3). It's a flat world, after all. The New York Times. Retrieved from http://www.nytimes.com

Hof, R. (2007, August 20). The end of work as you know it. Businessweek.com. Retrieved from http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/content/07_34/b4047426.htm?chan=search

Houston, J. (2008). Spotlight on Technology [DVD]. Understanding the Impact of Technology on Education, Work, and Society. Baltimore: Laureate Education, Inc.

Tapscott, D., & Williams, A. (2007, March 26). The Wiki workplace. Businessweek.com. Retrieved from http://www.businessweek.com/innovate/content/mar2007/id20070326_237620.
htm?chan=search

Travel Writing

2010-03-11T18:26:00.004+08:00

Blogging is done for many reasons and whilst a good blog posts have certain characteristics there is still a place for journaling within the classroom. Depending on the format of the blog that is being run by the students it may be possible for them to journal another part of their lives in a separate blog. This student of mine has shown remarkable commitment to his holiday blog. This blog area which has been set up with the permission of his parents now helps to chronicle their holidays abroad.

I have been working with him to add more varied content and this is still something I need to work on along with links to places he is talking about. He is actually an ELL student and has improved so much through committing to his writing.

It can be problematic checking and editing all of this writing, but through rss feeds I can stay up to date using netvibes, we also have a system of edit buddies to help. This has been a big success and students encourage each other adding to add more posts and make changes.

It is worth having a discussion with administration about their view on finished work. In some schools there is an expectation that all work should be perfect before being published. Whilst there is value in work being checked for errors and having high standards for published work, it can also stifle the students writing by slowing down the process and taking some of the ownership of their work away from them. It is a fine line to walk and needs discussion between staff, administration and parents to make sure that everybody understands the motivation behind using the blogs and the work that will be published.

Blogging vs Journaling

2010-03-09T21:42:00.005+08:00

I have been busy reading Will Richardson's book 'Blogs, wikis, Podcasts, and other powerful web tools for the classrooms'. This book is a course text for my masters and is an engaging read that looks at how blogs can be used within a classroom and the pedagogy and practice involved with blogs. I have realized that it is important, especially for first time bloggers, to distinguish between the different types of weblog posts, or as Richardson puts it "journaling vs blogging" (Richardson 2009). Blogging in its truest form is a cognitive exercise that "links with analysis and synthesis that articulates a deeper understanding" (Richardson 2009). Within the blogging community that I have set up for my class there have been a range of activities that try to engage students in analysis, but perhaps I have not been encouraging this enough. Our blogs are more like journals. The blog that I run that students read daily is not in its current form a true blog. It is also more like a journal or message board that allows me to connect my classroom community together. I don't think that this is not worthwhile, it has proved very useful, but in its current form perhaps needs to change or occasionally model more reflective thinking.

There is also another opportunity for me to scaffold the blogging experience for my students. I also run a class blog on my website. This blog, which is a separate blog from the main blog, is a place which I use to exhibit student work, looking for more reflective thinking and including exemplar work from students. This is an area that I could also blog on, creating posts that show synthesis and analysis and act as a model for my students. There is no doubt that blogging has engaged many of my students far beyond my expectations and has had a positive impact on their writing, not to mention the conversations within the class. What I now need to do is look beyond the journaling for the insightful, reflective thinkers.

Richardson, W. (2009). Blogs, Wikis, Podcasts, and Other Powerful Web Tools for Classrooms (Second Edition ed.). Thousand Oaks, CA: Corwin Press.

Being Safe

2010-03-03T18:43:00.003+08:00

I have been thinking a lot recently around my role in educating my grade 5 students about being safe online, appropriate use, privacy and respecting each other when in a digital environment. I have used videos to do this, to help them learn these important concepts and looked at resources such as cybersmart. But I know I am not where I want to be with my resources. I seem to have too many pieces floating around and not enough focus on what should be included. Jeff Utecht has a recent blog post that discusses this and has some interesting comments from high school students undertaking an activity based around these issues. These opinions offer an interesting perspective and have me thinking about how to go about this.

There needs to be some form of school wide agreement on these issues. This needs to be clearly documented and supported by administration. Also when these issues arise it is left to the IT department to sort them out when in fact they often are discipline issues that should be addressed by current school procedures.

Appropriate resources need to be made available and shared within the school. I have found a few and I'm interested in finding more so post any you may know below.

Parents have to be included. We want this to be a holistic message and both the school and parents should have a common understanding about what the issues are, and what the responsibilities are.

Teachers need to have an understanding of these issues and receive training appropriate to these issues. This should be one of the first places that a school should start in becoming 1 to 1, and in elementary school talk about COPPA.

These are just some of the things I think need to be done. I'll be adding more and setting up my own resource area when next year I begin to address this, especially with parents in a more proactive way.

The Machine is Us/ing us

2010-02-28T19:14:00.002+08:00

Wesch, M. (Producer). (2007). Evolution of web 2.0. United States: YouTube.com.

New beginnings

2010-02-28T18:34:00.000+08:00

It has been a while since I have added an entry to my blog. For the last month my attention has been focused on my class website www.andysclassroom.com, my students' blogs, creating an exhibition community, creating new tech training wikis for teachers and students, starting a focus on digital storytelling and becoming an Apple Distinguished Educator. It has been a busy start to the year, but now this blog is to get a new lease of lifethrough my masters program with Walden University. The focus of my masters is integrating technology into the classroom and after the first two courses which focused on professionalism and multiculturalism respectively, the third course now focuses on technology. This blog will become one of the focal points for that and I will be blogging about the course and using the blog for assignments. I look forward to this new focus on this blog.

Socrates and the PYP

2010-01-01T18:45:00.003+08:00

It was whilst reading this article in The Economist that I thought about the relation of the PYP and the IB to cultivating a train of thought, or rather the thinking process that the PYP through it's inquiry, attitude, concept based curriculum utilizes in it's pursuit of education. This is not something that I am an expert in by any means, far from it, this is an area of thought that I have only touched upon in educational theory and until starting my masters, that was a few years ago. This is more about articulating myself through this post how I connected the PYP to the Socratic dialectic that the article mentioned.

The PYP is based upon a constructivist inquiry curriculum, one that aims to develop higher order thinking skills, reasoning, deduction, interpretation and understanding. My role within the framework of the PYP and even guided by some explicit teaching strategies such as the concepts of form, function and so on, is to help my students research originally, putting their thoughts forward and gaining understanding through inquiry.

This is not necessarily about finding the right answer. It is about undertaking a journey that ennobles the individuals taking part in it, a joint search that aims to dispel ignorance and confusion. In a world of increasing rhetoric, where media often amplifies rhetoric we need to empower our students with the ability to look through to the what and the why.

What about the individuals undertaking this learning journey? Does this make them nonconformist? An idealist searching for absolute virtues? In this world of increasingly conformist attitudes in education where everyone should fit in the same mold and through standardized tests and so forth know their place, is this a good thing? I have chosen this as my career path and do believe the PYP to have value and be something that will enrich the life of any individual undertaking it's learning journey. The irony is that for many parents this is a bitter pill to swallow as they juggle what they believe is the best for their children and a society that wants them to know their place. Who are we to question?

I have to once again thank the Economist for stimulating my thinking with their Arguing To Death article in their December 2009 issue.

Did you know?

2009-12-16T22:52:00.004+08:00

This video has been around a while, but worth revisiting, especially as Facebook passes 300 million according to checkfacebook.

I'll now be spending some time offline scuba diving in Thailand. If you ever want to dive in the Similians, Malaysia or Indonesia agentliveaboard is worth visiting for good dive boats and an excellent booking service.

Collaborative Drawing

2009-12-08T20:41:00.003+08:00

Two of my students decided that they wanted to create a book review using a computer. They wanted to collaborate using computers and use one of either two presentation programs once they had created their pictures, diagrams and slides. The only issue is that they both wanted to work on the drawings collaboratively and had now run out of time to work on the project in class. They would have to work on it at home and over the holidays.

They could have emailed pictures back and forth but they didn't know if they had the same programs on their computers. This is where a great web site called flockdraw comes into it's own. Flockdraw allows users to create their own collaborative drawing area. There is no sign up, all that is needed is to create a board and share the url or embed it into a web site. My students decided that they wanted to create 10 pictures, so we created 10 boards embedded into their own personal web sites. A trial board is available here. Now they can collaborate on the pictures from home without any issues about programs or access.

Converting document formats

2009-12-01T18:29:00.003+08:00

A lot of online documents and course materials I am sent are often in pdf format. Whilst I like the size of this format when mailing files, for the purpose of studying, activities such as note taking, highlighting and commenting become harder to do within the pdf document format. I have found that it has been inconveniencing me so much that I am now converting files into Word format to be able to highlight and so on. I'm not sure how this viewed within the framework of use for some of the documents, but I am lots more effective using Word and Openoffice. I have tested lots of applications and online converters, but without a doubt the best website is Zamzar. Not only is the conversion process very quick, but it also keeps the document formatting as well. There are more advanced options for the site, but I have not found that I needed to use them.

Top 100 Tools For Learning 2009

2009-11-30T13:07:00.002+08:00

Jane Hart has compiled this great list of tools for learning.

Top 100 Tools for Learning 2009

View more documents from Jane Hart.

Managing a Masters

2009-11-29T17:12:00.004+08:00

This is isn't about caffeine, to do lists or time allocation exercises, it's about finding that elusive program, application or piece of technology that can help make undertaking a masters easier. A few weeks ago I spent a long day looking at all of the options out there.

I wanted to find a program that could track all of my reading and research, cite sources, allow me to take notes, and connect them all together. This would include offline reading, accessing a university library, documents and web pages. Of course I knew that I could do this myself by setting up different documents to meticulously collect this information, but I wondered if there was a tool to help me through this process, a tool that could even automate some of the tasks and perhaps add extra functionality that I hadn't even thought of. I'm pleased to say that I have found a very impressive tool called Zotero produced by the Center for History and New Media at George Mason University.

Zotero works as an extension to firefox. It sits within the browser and can extract data from the site or resource that is being used. Within it's library it is possible to create subcollection folders that use the same structure as the course e.g course 1, module 1(welcome). Resources within this folder can also be shared to other folders without the multiple copies of the same files being created. Within a folder many types of resources can be collected and added. For each of these resources it can be considered a parent item and have subitems. For instance paper A can have notes A1 and A2 automatically linked to it. This does take a little working out but once you have mastered how to use these folders and parent items it really keeps your resources and notes well organised.

The library of documents is saved within Firefox but it is possible to change the location where this is saved. Version 2.0 which is currently in Beta has some extra functionality and most importantly allows you to sync your library between multiple computers. This gives you the piece of mind that all of your research and notes are safe, backed up to the server, desktop and laptop. At the moment there is a limit of 100 mb but according to the web site there will be the option to pay for more space. At one point there was even a test of a service that would allow a user to log into their backed up library online via a web browser or a mobile device.

Where Zotero really begins to shine is during the writing of a paper or assignment that utilizes the notes and sources collected within Zotero. At this point it is important to make sure that the necessary fields are filled in. For instance for a book that you want to cite that is not electronic, all necessary data such as authors, publisher, date and so forth will need to be manually entered. It is possible to set up metadata detection for some electronic documents such as pdf's but this will affect the speed of a library. Once all of this data is collected and up to date it is time to decide which word processing package that you want to work with. Zotero has plugins for Word, Openoffice and Neooffice. These plugins allow you to create dynamic bibliographies that will automatically change as you work on your paper and add in sources from Zotero. Zotero comes with many different bibliographic styles and includes the American Psychological Association (APA) style that I need to use for my masters with Walden.

Zotero even integrates some web 2.0 tools, allowing people to collaborate with group libraries and even see their library as a web page. There are many possibilities for Zotero's use within education even at the high school level, but that aside it is a tool that I would recommend for anybody undertaking research assignments.

Collaborative Tool

2009-11-28T17:23:00.007+08:00

There are many different ways to collaborative online, but recently one way I have used with my students has proven to be very successful. I often team teach with the other grade 5 teacher and mix the students into different groups across the classes. These groupings are often based upon the students own inquiry goals.

We wanted to find a way the students could continue their inquiry at home, see current research and collaborate at the same time in the same virtual area. This area had to be secure, but if possible would not need the students to log in using an email address.

We found a solution using stixy. I set up an account under my name. I then create a public stixy board for each group that the students can collaborate on but restrict access by password protecting each board. The password is only known by the members of that group. The students don't need to sign up for anything, but now have their own collaborative area. Here is an example board. A link is then provided to the students through the class website resources area.

Widgets for notes, photos, documents and todo lists can be dropped into the board from an area at the bottom of the screen.

This drag and drop is very intuitive to the students who use macbooks in the classroom, although documents and photos can't be dropped directly onto the page from the desktop but need to be uploaded.

The options within the board are relatively limited, but in this instance suit the needs of the students. You can change the colour of notes and hyperlink them creating levels of organization within the stixy.

I came across this interesting link about setting up a stixy as an embedded desktop background. I haven't found how to do this in windows 7, or on a mac yet, but the idea is very interesting and in my quest to sync everything across lots of computers would be a good way to keep track of lots of things and to do lists.

Stixy is still in Beta phase and has been there since it came out of private test in 2007. Who knows what it's future is or even how it's making any money. But whilst it's free and available I will definitely be using it.

Class Web Site

2009-11-24T20:08:00.004+08:00

Over the last two months I have been spending all of my online energy working on my class web site. I have been, as mentioned in my last post, been trying to integrate many meaningful uses of technology into my students learning. I will over the next few posts outline some of the things that I have found out that were good, and some that were not so good.

My web site is located at www.andysclassroom.com and I am always willing to hear opinions and thoughts.

I will now be commenting on this blog regularly. One of the reasons is the new Masters in Education that I have started with a focus on Integrating Technology In The Classroom. My masters is through Walden University and after much searching online I settled on Walden after finding favorable reviews online in places such as classroom2.0. I had thought that I would never undertake a fully online masters due to too many time constraints, but after my move I have found that I can change how I prioritize my time focus on it. Moving to a new school also frees me up from many of the 'extra' areas that I seemed to be involved with in my last work place. Not that I regretted them, but I found they stretched me thin and meant that I wouldn't be able to focus on a masters as much as I wanted or needed to.

New things, new site

2009-08-26T18:55:00.005+08:00

It's been a while since my last post. One of the reasons for the long break has been the issue of getting around the great firewall of China which blocked blogger. Now I have left China I'm able to easily access the blog and going to try a new focus.

I've left my old school BISS and moved to HKA in Hong Kong where I'm now teaching Grade 5. One of my aims is to fully integrate as much tech into my teaching in a meaningful way using the curriculum the school has. I'm going to use this blog to keep a track of how all that goes and post things I find out, both good and bad.

Currently though I'm snowed under, and have been working mainly on what type of web site I want for the class. After much testing I have settled on the weebly interface, which I have found so useful and easy to use that I have even gone pro. One of the first times that I have. I tested many, many free ones, and some that weren't but if you want to try a web based interface this one gets my vote.

My web site is up and running here, and has some of the integration running. I'm trying to make full use of google docs to coordinate myself and the students. More on that next time.

virtualization

2009-04-16T21:09:00.003+08:00

One of the benefits of modern computers is their speed to run different operating systems at the same time. I have switched to Mac after many years on a PC, and there is some software that I'm really comfortable with such as Paint Shop Pro 7. I've tried different ways to run XP in Leopard but found some of them resource hogs and slow such as parallels. I do use boot camp, but that's with a stripped down version of XP especially set up for VJing and don't want to be logging in and out of leopard.

I have now been introduced to a new program that runs a virtual environment and it's free. Virtualbox comes from Sun Microsystems and when combined with a copy of Tiny XP is lightning fast.

Now to get linux running.

plagiarism - turnitin

2009-04-08T18:20:00.004+08:00

It's been a busy month. Randomk(e) the band I work with as a vj (live video mixed in realtime) released an album. I was technical director for the school play Once Upon A Time and I've been planning a move. All in all very busy, but surely I should have had time for a post or two.... well yes, but these things happen.

And onto plagarism and a new feature of the StudyWiz platform which I am growing to like more and more. Whilst I'm sure there are other good Elearning platforms out there this is the one that we have committed to and have a great staff trying to make it work. We're not looking at the short term but over the course of a few years. So would I recommend it? An absolute yes. It won't do everything you may want, but it's close.

We also recently found out some more features. In particular the ability to link it to turnitin. If you have a school account with turnitin, you can have all the students work checked automatically through turnitin if they submit it to you via StudyWiz.

Other interesting things are the talks between Studywiz and google, especially in relation to gmail. Hopefully this will enable StudyWiz mail, which is only within the system, to be converted easily into an external gmail account. There are also talks with Microsoft and sharepoint integration. In three years this product could be the market leader and fully rounded for all a schools needs.

Storytelling

2009-02-25T21:47:00.002+08:00

Over the last few weeks I have been teaching my class one of my favourite units, authors and illustrators. Each student produces their own book as well as the class collaborating on a class story which last year was 12,000 words and 100 pages long. I couldn't have undertaken such a story writing endeavour without technology, especially the projector which allowed the story to be quickly reviewed and collaborated on. A tablet PC also allowed quick story maps to be drawn and rough visualizations created to allow the class to picture the scene, develop plot and paint a picture from which to extract adjectives and descriptions.
Some of the students have written stories in excess of 2000 words and I have found myself very dependent on the reviewing function of Word, which has stimulated much discussion in peer reviewing sections as students also enjoy adding comments on each others work.
All of this has also hinged on our Elearning deployment StudyWiz which has allowed the students to mail work home and to me, and through them submitting their work every few days I have a historical record of the drafting process whilst reducing the classes carbon footprint.
I have also enjoyed the illustration side, for which we have been using flash. Out of all of the programs that I have used for students to draw over the years, many offer little flexibility and stifle creativity. Flash as a vector based drawing and animation program has empowered the students to create some unique illustrations. I have been very surprised that after a few animation tutorials from Atomic Learning and some 'free time' to explore flash the students have created little animations that have surpassed my expectations. I have often heard that flash is not for young students, but I have to disagree.
I will be making physical books with the students for them to take home and a set to show in our library. But a recent great discovery has been issuu. After a quick test with the other Grade 4 classes story, I have to say I am very pleased with the results. I would like to know how to make a flash book like this myself and I will continue to search for a template and a way that I can host them locally on our Elearning server, but for the moment this will be good enough.
I am half toying with the idea of taking all of this to the next step. I have made a few short movies with my students in previous years, including blue screen escapades where the students were shrunk and had to have an adventure within the school. I may do this again. But I do want something that will allow the students independently to create there own stories in a more dynamic way. I may have found it, but it will need more testing, now I need to get my head around which of the following sites, xtranormal, goanimate, animasher, and comeeko may be best suited for the class.
As I sit down and animate my own story I'm once again thankful that I'm in a creative profession where discovering lessons can be so much fun. Now what shall I do with that Ninja??

Online Collaboration Simplified

2009-02-17T19:51:00.004+08:00

There are plenty of tools on the Web that help us with online collaboration. As I'm exploring these further I am reminded that whilst I need to look forward I also need to look at the simpler applications. This was recently brought to me by the great success of three googledocs and the way that they are generating conversations already for our second week. They have proven to be a powerful tool amongst our teachers, but what about for the students?

We currently have a Group4 science collaboration project using them and the teachers are impressed by what is happening. I will publish links here soon. Google have created a page to help teachers take advantage of Googledocs and there is some interesting reading that is worth perusing.

I'm going to leave now with a quote from Stephen Heppell in 2001 that a teacher recently sent to me:

“Computers are everyday tools for us all, seen or unseen, but their value in learning is as tools for creativity and learning rather than as machines to “deliver” the curriculum. These tools, in our children’s hands, are forever pushing the envelope of expertise that previous technologies excluded them from: they compose, quantise and perform music before acquiring any ability to play an instrument, they shoot, edit and stream digital video before any support from media courses, they produce architectural fly-throughs of incredible buildings without any drafting or 2D skills, they make stop frame animations with their plasticine models, they edit and finesse their poetry, they explore surfaces on their visual calculators, swap ideas with scientists on-line about volcanic activity, follow webcam images of Ospreys hatching, track weather by live satellite images, control the robots they have built and generally push rapidly at the boundaries of what might be possible, indeed what was formerly possible, at any age.

Little of this was easily achieved in the school classroom ten years ago although the many projects emanating from Ultralab over that decade offered clear enough indicators of what might be possible. The challenge here is to criterion referencing. So often the cry of the teacher “that work is better than my degree exhibition piece!” reflects a substantial step change in both the age at which a creative act can be enjoyed and the quality of the tools supporting that creativity.”

Spontaneous Order

2009-02-14T19:52:00.003+08:00

At the end of a long tech week and over 70 tech sessions completed, I met with staff who were involved and had very positive reviews of the process. Most seemed to be empowered and were introduced many new things that they wanted to know more about.

If I compare it to a one day PD session, which in terms of time can equal or involve more teacher time, since all the staff are doing the same thing, and the cost can be a lot higher, I am confident that this week did a lot better job of PD by allowing ideas to pass between staff members and people to learn at their own pace. Not being forced to follow a set of exercises to learn a new program but being allowed to choose empowered the faculty.

This PD week made use of peoples ability to spontaneously order themselves and focus on what is relevant to them. All it took were three blank timetables that people could fill in. The amount of organisation on my part was very little, and the fluid nature of each session and the fact that the numbers were small at each one, meant that the sessions were differentiated and staff were allowed to explore real life applications of the technology they were presented with. Isn't this what we try to do with our students? It seems strange that often our staff PD often does not reflect what we consider good educational practice.

Sometimes we often feel that we know what should be the next thing taught in terms of PD, and yes there should be focus for each year or semester, but we should not assume that all of our tech users are at the same level and ready for what we think they need to know.

Going forward from this week I hope that the staff take more responsibility for their tech learning as life long learners, and they realise that if they wait to be taught today's technology, tomorrows will come along. Many are now familiar with AtomicLearning and the videos that they can use to help them learn. Through the survey that the staff will fill in I hope that I can continue to engage their needs in my PD sessions by responding to what they want to focus on. I also hope that small learning networks have been created within the school and people actively share good ideas.

I would hope that the tech week appears again next year. In fact I would try do it twice. Once for staff to reengage with technology and learn some new tools, and a second to consolidate what they know, share good practice and push the boundaries of tech use.

This first tech week at our school involved our secondary teachers. In a week it's time for elementary's tech week. It will be interesting to compare the two weeks, and see where this next one leads to.

Communication Complacency

2009-02-11T21:09:00.005+08:00

Over the last three days I have run around 10 hours worth of PD with different teachers in the school. This has ranged from Podcast sessions, RSS feeds, StudyWiz and Email.

It has been interesting to engage with a wide range of IT users and see how they are using our new Macs and various IT applications. There have been some great discussions, and it is helping us to develop our Elearning environment's structure and set it up based on teachers needs. Many teachers are excited about it's potential.

An interesting development has been seeing how the staff use a computer in their daily lives and how my assumption that it helps make everything easier and faster isn't necessarily the reality.

Leaving aside the educational benefits of computers for the moment and all it's potential, it became clear that we need to not overlook the basics such as email and communictaion. So much time is spent on email, but do we necessarily know how to handle all of the information that comes our way?

Organising emails, understanding rules, creating folders or adding colours / categories is not something that people will necessarily know. In the sessions that I ran on emails, showing people how to create folders allowed some people to clear out their inbox and feel that they were more in control of their emails. I realise that there is a shift beginning to happen with organising files, even with email, which can be seen with gmail, a shift that is a away from folder structure to fast searching with keywords just as Leopard runs Spotlight by indexing the computers contents on a Mac.

Whilst this may be the future, it is not in reality practical across the systems that our teachers are using, from networked resources to their personal computer to online systems. These demand organisation. What can and did help staff, because they know where the information is saved, is creating clear folder structure. There is no doubt that much time is wasted trying to find files, and as I focused on keeping emails in an organised folder structure, the teachers came away with smiles and comments that showed that emails have become a big issue but now they felt they were more in control.

So what are the main points for good email and communication within our organisation?

1. Teach staff to set up groups so they are selective with their emails and the number of emails for everybody is reduced. Actively encourage these groups.
2. Use folder structure to store emails and the attached files. For instance put all of the yearbook emails in a dedicated folder.
3. Rather than keep an email as a reminder for a meeting, transfer the meeting onto a calendar and set reminders and alarms. Delete the email.
4. Assign categories or colours. Use visual cues to know which emails are more important.
5. Have an appropriate use policy for email or similar. Staff should be selective with what they send and be careful that the 'tone' of their email is what they would like it to be.
6. Begin using our Elearning environment to contact students directly rather than emailing all teachers or homeroom teachers to contact students.
7. Have a daily Ebulletin email that gives out daily announcements and reduces general information emails.
8. New staff must get email orientation at the start of the year and occasional email PD offered to all staff throughout the year.
9. Unless you're a pack rat and want to keep all of your emails (yes you know who you are), delete, delete, delete.

We have some of the above in place, and some to work on. But if we follow all of them I'm sure that our staff will spend less time on emails and have more time to teach. Communication is a skill and it's important not to become complacent about it.

Tech Week - Teachers Teaching Teachers

2009-02-08T18:06:00.004+08:00

This week I've started a new initiative at our school, a teachers tech professional development week or tech week for short. Each of our secondary school faculty has been invited to offer one or more technology sessions for other teachers to attend. These fall under two categories.
The first as an instructor or 'expert' in a technology capacity and sharing a resource of set of skills, such as googledocs, leopard OSX, photoshop or rss feeds.
The second, a 'discovery' session involves a group of teachers getting together to collaboratively explore some area of technology that they are not totally comfortable with or they see could have more impact on their teaching.

I had originally looked into bringing in one or two consultants or trainers to the school from overseas, but as I spoke to our faculty it became apparent that what they wanted was time to explore technology and we already had a lot of good technology people who needed time to share what they know. There was also the expense, and how much does one or two professional days work? That issued was raised at this blog.

As I'm sure with any educational establishment we have a wide range of technology abilities. As we move into our 1 to 1 program teachers have the ability to harness many different areas of technology. I believe that teachers will be exploring and utilising a far wider range of technology skills than most other professions. Whether this is web 2.0, photo imaging, video, sound or office applications, almost any technology can have a place in a classroom.

Some people have found so many different applications overwhelming, but this week we now have over 60 sessions being offered, which for a staff of 34 teachers is impressive. Two supply teachers are being brought into the school and teachers can book them out to cover their class during the week so they can attend or present sessions.

All of this is coordinated by three googledoc spreadsheets. One is a session timetable that staff add their sessions to, including a brief and location. If people are interested in a session they can add their name to a session to let that person know they will attend. The other two are to book out the supply teachers. The response by the staff has been extremely positive and due to the collaborative way that the googedocs work it has meant that apart from booking the supply teachers and two Apple Distinguished Educators (ADE's) there isn't that much preparation involved. I added the ADE's as an extra resource for our staff to bounce ideas of on two separate days. Our Elearning portal also has a collaborative area set up so staff can add resources and hopefully during the week a great resource will be built that staff can refer back to.

But what outcomes are hoped for?
1. Staff are given the time to explore different educational technology applications.
2. Staff are empowered as technology leaders.
3. Staff set up new learning groups with other teachers.
4. Staff take more responsibility for their technology learning and utilise PD resources such as Atomic Learning and our Elearning system.

I like to think that just by looking at the number of sessions offered and attendees, this week is already a success. If each member of staff discovers or begins to use one application with their students regularly, then it will have been a success. I currently run three after school professional sessions a week and I hope that I can use those sessions to build on this week over the next few months, and help teachers make meaningful connections and explorations with technology.

This week I will add feedback here each day on how it's going.

Diigo first attempt, let's hope the 2nd attempt goes smoother

2009-02-03T22:14:00.004+08:00

In an example of how technology lessons don't go according to plan, my first attempt to attempt to harness the power of social bookmarks ran into an early road block. I had been using Diigo all day and testing some ideas and it had been working very fast. In fact I'm trying to use it 100% for all my bookmarking and web site organisation. Then there was the lesson that didn't go according to plan...

The idea came about after chatting to our art teacher. After a powerpoint presentation on the history of the human form, the students were tasked with researching the human form starting with The Venus of Willendorf. Initially each student would have researched it on their own drawing facts from various sites.

This type of research is usually done in isolation, my aims were:
- Using Diigo students would collaborate through a forum dedicated to The Human Form in an art group.
- Starting with the wikipedia page all students would add a sticky in response to a fact or idea on the page. This would be shared to the art group created in Diigo.
- Students could share websites in the Diigo group.
- As students researched more they would encounter stickies created by their peers on art web sites that they may wish to respond to.

The aim was to foster open discussion during the research process that would enrich the information gathering experience for the students.

Having never worked with this class before I needed to see how they all worked with the computers and the internet. First they had to open their email ready to register Diigo, then perform a search for The Venus of Willendorf. All students used Google, not one used any other search engine out of a group of 16 students, which I think is worrying in itself, but more in another blog post later.

The first page that they all looked at was the wikipedia page. This was by their own choice, but it was actually ranked number one on google and they all choose this.
So far so good. It was when I asked everyone to access Diigo that things started to go wrong. The first two or three computers started to load up then the web site wouldn't load. I contacted IT and they assured me that there was no problem with this web site, the network or our ISP. They even came down to help.

In the meantime I tasked the students a copy and paste exercise to select information from wikipedia that they wanted to comment on in a word document. Five minutes later Diigo still did not work. It didn't work for another hour.

We checked with the ISP and everything was fine. We could still access wikipedia and other web sites, but Diigo was now unavailable. I'm not sure if this is a China problem, or possible Diigo responding to lots of computers from the same location. I can theorise for ever about this problem, I will check as much as I can, but it is frustrating never the less.

As the lesson evolved away from it's goals one of the students asked the question that I dread, but hear often. 'Shall I print what I've copied and pasted'. It was then that I changed tact and got all of the students and the teacher using the reviewing function in Word, a very powerful yet mainly overlooked feature of Word and Pages. Find out more here.

As for that Diigo network problem, time to check with IT and the Diigo help forums.

I must note that I wanted students to create their own diigo account and hadn't encountered the Diigo educator account, which might be just what I'm looking for.

COPPA - why don't I know more?

2009-02-01T15:17:00.009+08:00

Over the last two years I have started bumping into the Child Online Privacy Protection Act, COPPA (wikipedia) and have come to realise that this is something I should be paying more attention to as an K - 12 ICT Coordinator, and our Elementary teachers should know more about.

Whilst attending the Learning 2.0 conference in 2007 I first came into contact with a social network tool called ning that Jeff Utecht had set up for the conference. I decided to work with two Grade 5 PYP exhibition teachers to set up a class ning site. This site became the main information and collaboration conduit for the exhibition. Groups met online, documents and ideas were shared and teacher mentors and parents were also part of the site to help enrich the experience.
It was a great success and at the beginning of this year I looked forward to setting up more ning sites with our Grade 4 and 5 classes.

I contacted ning directly as I had the previous year to have all of the adverts removed from the site. This time however they would not remove the adverts as they now complied with COPPA and would not host a site for students under 13.
During the sign up phase members of a site are required to put their age and if they are under 13 they are told they are too young and cannot join the ning community.

This has taken away a great resource, and on the flip side has got me thinking more about COPPA. How are our students under 13 interacting with the net and are they putting their personal information online, and what is our responsibility as their teachers, and especially mine as the ICT Coordinator? This also includes the students parents and how much they know about COPPA, and what their son or daughter is doing online.

This leaves me with lots of unanswered questions that I will need to go away and think about, research and discuss with our teachers and administrators. But I can't help wondering how many school are blindly wandering around the web with their students in tow without a sense of direction or the necessary safety lines.

To be continued......

*Footnote*
I have already taken some steps to make our students learning environment more secure and begin to address this issue. The first has been to set up an internal Elearning system called StudyWiz which coordinates classes and student information and collaboration. I've also looked into Gaggle as secure email, and seen Elgg a ning style platform that can be hosted by the school to set up social platforms. This is being well used by our two grade 5 teachers. But as of yet we have no policy or guidelines for staff and students.

Organising, organising, organising

2009-01-27T20:28:00.003+08:00

I pride myself on being fairly well organised. Some might say I use excessive folders when organising my emails, but it works for me and I am able to find things that I need fairly quickly. The same applies for my files and the 3TB of data that currently resides there. However my bookmarks have defeated me. They are scattered through two different bookmarking services, a couple of computers and fairly unorganised.

Two years ago I began using delicious but now I'll be changing to Diigo. The main reason is the ability to make lists. Whilst I do tag all of my bookmarks, I find that I like organising things in lists, a throw back to file organisation in folders. I know what works for me and I'm now reorganising all of them. The feature that really has me excited is the ability to share those lists with select groups and create rss feeds for each list.

As I group these resources and find new ones I will be sharing them via rss feeds to different places. I have some set up for colleagues at work via our sharepoint intranet as web objects for specific areas such as Elementary School or mathematics. These will appear on the front pages next to our notices. I'll also be sharing these to a couple of places in our Elearning environment, a training area for teachers and one for students.

This is all about sharing the information and trying to make great websites more visible to others.

Accessing my blog and school network security

2009-01-27T19:44:00.003+08:00

I currently have a problem accessing my blog. This isn't a new problem. I chose this blogging service knowing that my current location in China at my wife's home city meant I couldn't access it at all. Hopefully when I'm back in Beijing this will change, since Beijing is a little more open in terms of internet access. This was also the case for other blogging services that I signed up for when testing them.

Having no access to the biggest blogging providers didn't deter me. There are ways around these things. Since I'm in China but I figured that this is a great firewall of China issue. I've learnt to circumvent this through proxy servers and other programs. You can even add some of these as addon's for firefox and there are many more. If I can do this with a National firewall, how easy would it be for students to do this to our network. After some tests I have found that I can too.

I understand that some schools block a lot of web sites. My school is currently not doing this. Yes we filter for inappropriate content and monitor the network. Some inappropriate sites are blocked, but sites such as Youtube are accessible and students can instant message if they choose to. In some subjects this is actively encouraged. We are focusing on appropriate use and our students being responsible users.

And this is where I feel we need to rethink our policies. We are trying to foster an ethos of ethical and relevant use at my school. Focusing on the positives and not the negatives. (Although we will are ready to deal with these).

Technology is constantly evolving and it's difficult to keep up. Myself and another teacher using some new apps on the itouch and their websites managed to get full access to our network from home. This is something that hasn't been set up at our school and supposedly 'impossible' according to our network administrator.

In a smaller school where a lot of decisions are being made by people without the necessary experience or knowledge, creating a secure environment is a challenging task, while still allowing the creative collaboration avenues of any network to be used. As we enter a 1 to 1 environment we have more cause for concern and need to address these issues.

The Future of Education

2009-01-26T21:51:00.001+08:00

A lofty title, with a lofty thought. At this time many educators are asking themselves the same question. What is the future of education? This blog is not about an answer but more a rethink of my best practice and how this affects the students that I teach.

I believe that the IB curriculum is working towards a more inclusive view of education incorporating the necessary skills for 21st century learners and I'm pleased to be a part of it. Although I do feel that schools need to look at other areas and have more of a focus on information literacy and plan this as a subject with a curriculum, scope and sequence and an understanding and direction of how information literacy is infused with all subjects.

But that aside this is about a seed, a thought, a notion and starting point from which to move things forward. This has come to me in the form of an article from two years ago that has an interesting premise. It is a good spring board and I intend to look at a lot of the resources mentioned. I wonder if international schools are the places where the seeds of the future of education are being sown.

In the beginning

2009-01-26T20:22:00.001+08:00

So here I am starting my first blog and rather than introduce myself, I wanted to clarify for myself what it is I want to get from my blog and why I’m starting it. This blog is not about publicity or championing my cause. As the name states it’s about a notion: Definition

1. a general understanding; vague or imperfect conception or idea of something: a notion of how something should be done.
2. an opinion, view, or belief
3. conception or idea

I have a need to organise a lot of reading that I am doing and hopefully through a blog, lend this deluge of information some type of order and try to give myself a tool that acts as an extension of my thinking.

For me this is about sorting, organising, sharing and exploring new information. Taking a moment to focus my thoughts and thinking, reflecting and critiquing myself as a life long learner.

I read a lot of different blogs, and whilst I’m not ready to add my voice to the crowd just yet, I hope that this blog is the beginning of a conception or idea and can one day join the discussion. As for when that will be, let’s not get ahead of ourselves, this is after all the first entry…. now where is that post button?