Teaching-with-Technology

When I went to South Korea earlier this year to run a workshop in Intel Teach Thinking with Technology I remember talking with one of the participants about the notion of ubiquitous technology. At the time I really had no idea what he meant and he explained that it was the notion that technology will become such a part of our lives that it will sit in the background working for us; available to us at anytime, anywhere.
The reason I thought of this conversation is that I am presently travelling on a school bus with Year 8 students from Wedderburn College going down to the Pixar 20 Years of Animation display at ACMI in Federation Square. While travelling I’ve logged into the internet via a wireless connection which means that I can do a little bit of work (or blogging) as we head to Melbourne. Every second kid on the bus is texting friends and family and we are listening to music via an FM transmitter that one of the kids has brought on their Ipod.
Serendipidously (it seems to happen to me alot) I was reading John Pearce’s blog and one of his posts was about m-learning called Today Two Years is Tout d’abord in which he discussed in part his progress along the continuum of ICT capabilities. He concluded that in some sense he wasn’t as far along as he thought when comparing himself to Alex Hayes a senior Education Officer with TAFE NSW who writes about m-learning in a very interesting presentation that he is presenting at a conference in Canberra very shortly. According to WikiPedia as of August 22nd 2007, M-Learning is “learning that happens across locations or that takes advantage of learning opportunities offered by portable technologies”
Check it out here:

But Alex’s point made me think again about the fact that ubiquitous technology, m-Learning or whatever you want to call it is changing the way we work, think, communicate, share, talk, learn, manage, reflect. But has it yet changed the way we teach???? I think in your case John, the answer is a resounding yes.

This morning I went into the Grade 3/4 classroom. We began yesterday by setting up a wiki for the kids to create and post their ideas and reflections about what they are doing in class. In planning for this session I had a chat with Tanya, the class teacher and she told me that every Tuesday afternoon she challenges the students to be more creative by having them design, create, problem solve and produce an article or plan that addresses a particular problem or issue that she poses. For example she has asked them to design the best handbag for a teacher, or a farmer or a carpenter. They have designed and planned the best holiday for their family. They have designed the ideal spot for them to spend three hours relaxing and thinking.
As she was telling me about this I firstly thought- what a fabulous teacher- someone who values creativity and expressive thought and gives it the due time that it needs. It’s no surprise to me that Tanya was once a pre-school teacher. But I also thought about how we could use the wiki as a repository for their ideas. We could scan the ideas that the children draw. We could have students descibe and explain their plans and upload the audio files. We record students demonstrating their inventions. I’m really excited about what we could achieve with just a little bit of effort and imagination.
Serendipidously I was reading a blog entry from Cherie Toledo this evening and she commented on a video presentation by Tony Buzan on creativity. He says “creativity is the engine of all curricular” That it’s not about what we learn but HOW we learn. and that is the challenge for us as teachers. Not to teach facts and knowledge (although he says we have to do that) but to teach HOW to learn. By teaching and allowing for creativity we are unleashing the potential of every student, every brain.
check it out here:

This week we are beginning a really exciting new project with a school in Andale Kansas. The opportunity arose through some funding that I received through the Knowledge Bank. My idea was to create a connection with a school overseas and to develop a problem based project that used the Intel online Thinking with Technology tools So I approached a fellow Intel Senior trainer, Dyane who is a curriculum consultant in Andale. After about three months of planning we have finally started with our Year 8 students here and Year 7 students at Andale.
We did our planning via Google Docs which was a fantastic way to collaborate and share . We have set up a wiki using PB wiki for both teachers and students.
Beginning with a viewing of An Inconvenient Truth and a skype interview with Dyane and our students, the main task is that students will work in cross country teams and will research an issue that has some effect on their community. They will compare and contrast the differences between our two rural communities and prepare an environmental action plan.
The task after viewing the movie was to reflect on it in the wiki on a shared page for each group.
This is what one of the students said.
After watching ‘An Inconvenient Truth’ I was surprised at how bad the problem actually is. I never realised it was that disastrous, especially the part about the melting polar ice caps. It was a very confronting film. The statistics shocked me. It made me want to take action.

I am looking forward to learning about my American group members. I want to know how they look and what their personalities are like.

Another two students wrote their response together
The other day we watched an Inconvenient Truth.

It was really surprising to see all of the changes that could occur to the world if global warming continues at the same rate as what it is now and. What surprised me a lot was the amount of people and animals that would be affected by this. For example the polar bears drowning was a fact that reached out to us. Also that whole country could be submerged by water and the central town of Wedderburn might just be on the beach.

Also the increasing temperature and less rainfall was a concern to us as Ashleigh lives on a farm. But we have run out of time so we have to go Bye.

Tomorrow our students are going to calculate their own ecological footprint and add that to the wiki. I think it’s going to be a pretty exciting time for us all.

This last 5 days I have been in Melbourne training another wonderful group of Master Trainers in the Intel Thinking with Technology program. I ran the program at Soundhouse at Debney Secondary College in Flemington, Melbourne. What a great set up they have there. Equipment ranges from a piano, drums and other musical instruments to a fantastic lab that has equipment set up for creating animations & film, audio & electronic music and I’m sure lots more that we didn’t get to see. The lab itself was perfect for the training of the teachers and we were very well looked after. As I have done during the last 4 training groups we used a wiki to support the learning. It was used as a repository for information as well as a place where the participants could reflect on their own learning and share ideas with each other. Once again I chose wikispaces as the most convenient and easy wiki to use. Intel has now also just released a new assessment workspace for teachers to collect and store assessment tools such as rubrics and checklists. This new workspace is very similar in design to the Thinking with Technology workspace and provides a very convenient online repository for accumulating lots of examples of assessment artifacts.

Chris Betcher is celebrating his 1 year anniversary of blogging and he pondered about why he blogs and why it is important to him. I actually started my blog on October 12 2005 although it took a while to get into a regular routine. I’m not as prolific as Chris (he has written an average of three posts a week) but I have written 84 posts most of which have been written in the last half of 2006 and 2007. I remember writing a few posts about the topic of blogging last year. And I guess I haven’t really changed my mind over that time. I still write to keep a record of what I have been thinking and doing mostly at school. I like the fact that it’s there for me to go back to. Not that I do very often though.
I do like to think that it keeps me in track professionally though. I have even used my blog as a record of my personal professional development and have presented it as evidence of progress in our Performance and Development process at school.
Like Chris I’m not sure that there are many people who read it and unlike Chris’s, I don’t think mine is terribly insightful or clever. But for whatever reason I still do like to see my words in print even if I am the only one who reads it. Even so I do like reading other blogs and it’s often where I get ideas to think about. It’s all very social and friendly and a wonderful way to keep in touch with some pretty amazing educators.

We recently had a discussion at our school about the value of Reading Recovery as an intervention program for students in Grade One who for whatever reason have not learnt to read as expected. As an ex Reading Recovery teacher I was very disheartened to hear that our region is reducing the level of support provided to schools to run the Reading Recovery program by changing the training of new teachers to every second year instead of every year. I’m not sure what this means for RR teachers who are already trained and working in schools. Traditionally they have a 6 weekly meeting called Continuing Contact where they meet with their RR tutor and discuss the progress of their students.
Today I came across an interesting article at the What Works Clearing House – a website that provides scientific evidence of what works in education. The article, entitled Beginning Reading discusses reading interventions for students in grades K–3 (or ages 5-8) that are intended to increase skills in alphabetics (phonemic awareness, phonological awareness, letter recognition, print awareness and phonics), reading fluency, comprehension (vocabulary and reading comprehension), or general reading achievement. According to the studies done so far Reading Recovery is the only one that has shown effectiveness in all four of the above areas. It simply reinforces what I have believed all along. The Reading Recovery program really does work. I have seen it in action and I know of many ex students who have continued to soar once they have been through the program. Without it they may have been in the too high percentage of children who slip through the cracks and end up without a functioning literacy.

Today I was working with a Grade 5/6 class. They are building their Digital Portfolios in Powerpoint and while they have learnt lots of technical and practical skills the impressive thing are the ideas and thoughts that many of them are adding. But what blew me away today was a conversation I heard between three students. One was showing the others some images oon his DP of his pet lizard. The conversation went something like this. Student One: this is my pet lizard Lucky. Student Two: what is that other picture of a lizard? Is that Lucky too? Student Three: I don’t think that is Lucky. I think you copied it from the internet. Student Two: What about copyright? Remember we’re not allowed to just get pictures from the internet if they are copyrighted. Student One: Hmmm okay I did copy it. I’ll delete it and get another real picture of Lucky from home.
All this happened without the kids knowing that I was listening. I was pretty rapt as earlier this year we did some lessons around copyright but I wasn’t sure whether it sunk in. At least it did with these three!

Maybe it is a smaller world than we think…in the last couple of days I have been tagged by two ‘bloggers’ that I regularly read. Thanks Cherie and John. The challenge is of course to then tag another 8 bloggers and I presume without tagging the ones that have tagged me. Now that’s a bit of a challenge because when I read who they have tagged they are ones that I might have tagged as well. Tricky, you see.
But the task is first to follow the rules:
1) Post these rules before you give your facts
2) List 8 random facts about yourself
3) At the end of your post, choose (tag) 8 people and list their names, linking to them
4) Leave a comment on their blog, letting them know they’ve been tagged

1. I live in Charlton, a small town in North West Victoria and have lived here almost all my life.
2. I have travelled to Switzerland; Portland, Oregon; London; Seoul, Sth Korea; Cook Islands; New Zealand; sometimes for work and sometimes for pleasure
3. I have two children, Hannah and James.
4. Of five siblings, I am the only one who has remained in my hometown. My brother and sisters live in Bendigo, Brisbane and Zurich, Switzerland.
5. I teach at the school where my husband is principal. We have worked in schools together for most of our careers and seem to manage this very well.
6. I taught my daughter Hannah in Grade 4. The only thing she tells me she didn’t like about it was that I never chose her for anything. I guess I didn’t want to be accused of favouritism.
7. My great uncle, the later Gus Parish was once manager of BHP.
8. I grew up on a wheat and sheep farm.

And I’m not going to be able to tag as many as 8. I hope that people don’t mind me doing it. I found it much harder than I thought because I know that a couple of you have been tagged in recent days. Not sure what this means for the progress of this tag but anyway here goes…

Now for the tagging
Vicki

Tom

Chris

Darrel

Adrian

I just came across this great website http://mashupawards.com when I was looking for a definition of mashable content on the web. That led me to bookr - the winner of today’s award. What a cool little application. I can see how we could create lovely little books for kids to read on the web using images that we have taken and posted into flickr. It takes no time at all to put something together and then to embedd it into a blog or a wiki. Put as many pages as you like .

This isn’t a great example but you’ll get the idea.

Blogged with Flock

I’ve just been skyping with Chris Betcher, chatting about this and that…mainly school and webby stuff. He’s been raving about Flock lately in his blog and mentioned it again tonight so thought I’d check it out. Just quietly, I think he might be right. It looks pretty cool. I think I’m going to have fun playing with this new browser. In fact this is my first post using the Flock “create a new post” button. It says only one click to post and it’s right. COOOOL !

Blogged with Flock