Teaching-with-Technology

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 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.

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.

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

OzTeachers is the most prolific and supportive mailing list that I have ever seen. It is amazing how generous and supportive the teachers are who belong to it. I honestly don’t think I would have learnt a quarter of the things I have learnt over the last few years about computer technology and now Web 2.0 without the wisdom of all these wonderful educators. I have just been reading a really interesting discussion on the list about the use of social bookmarking in schools and in particular the popularity of delicious. It seems that there are a few teachers out there who are using delicious as a very effective bookmarking tool for students and teachers when researching topics required for school projects. I wonder however how much those who contribute so prolifically to the list are not the norm. I suspect so. I think we are still a long way from seeing the use of these tools as part and parcel of the reportoire of a student’s or a teachers for that matter researching strategies. I guess it’s our challenge to start making inroads.

I know that I have written about PageFlakes before and raved about the convenience and value of it as a personal homepage and repository for regularly visited webpages, links and much more. This morning I opened up my pageflakes to see that it’s been revamped again with lots of new widgets and flakes and a whole new look. There is even a flake now called Anything Flake which is one that anyone can use to design and create for themselves.

“The new Anything Flake lets you add any type of content from text to images or even build custom HTML applications. This Flake can be used to personalize pages and Pagecasts even more fully.

For non-technical users, its WSYWIG editor lets users write text, add images, or grab URLs or other content from the Web and drop it in. Essentially, If you can use Microsoft Word, you can make a Flake. For example, a new mom or dad might copy images from their digital camera and paste them into their Pageflakes page or Pagecast.

Advanced users can take the Anything Flake much further using HTML and Flash components.

COOL !!!

It seems that everywhere we turn these days someone is mentioning YouTube and the incredible way good videos on YOuTube can be spread across the world by work of mouth (or email) in a matter of what seems like minutes. In my experience most teachers still do not use the power and the ease and the accessibility of video to support, teach, enhance, influence, engage etc etc in the classroom. I have blogged before about Teacher Tube and the great things that are on it. Today I came across another site called VideoJug that is basically life explained on video. vidoes are tagged according to group or topic. e.g. How to clean your house the green way or How to put out a candle without blowing it.
People can even post requests for things that they would like to know and they then hope that someone will post a video to answer the request.
There is a whole section devoted to education with some amazing historical footage Check out in particular the section on learning.

I have been struggling my health a little bit lately, hence the blogging has suffered. But each time I think about it and not post, I realise that I’m losing the momentum. And I don’t want to do that. The stream of thought that comes with blogging is really important.
So to keep things going I’m going to be a little kind to myself and rely on the generosity ( and brainpower) of others to ensure that I have something reasonably interesting to post.
Chris Betcher recently blogged about Bryn Jones 11 Things that make a difference in using ICT to improve learning.
Briefly they are
1. Emotional Support
2. A shared pedagogical understanding.
3. A constructivist philosophy
4. At least 4 computers per classroom
5. Help to access appropriate material
6. Just in time technical skills and support
7. Reliable infrastructure
8. Access to professional development(but not necessarily participating in it)
9. Links from home to school
10. Leadership
11. Flexible Learning Space
All of these factors ring really true to me in my role at school. For me personally I would add another couple. One is persistence. Most days I try to be like the blow up clown that is weighted at the bottom so that no matter how hard you hit it, it will keep bouncing up. I must admit lately I have really felt like staying down. But any change takes a long time and so in my role I have to accept that I just have to keep bouncing back, presenting ideas and encouragement over and over again until someone takes up an idea. (or until they are so sick of me they do it to shut me up)
Another is time. I am extremely lucky in my job to be able to devote a lot of time to learning and exploring exactly what is out there. (and I get paid for it!) If I was a full time classroom teacher I know I would still be passionate about technology but I wouldn’t have the time to learn as much. I know I’m slightly twisting Chris’s intent here but in Chris’s post called The Challenge of being a Life Long Learner he talks about the relentless aspect of lifelong learning. And it’s true. The nature of the web makes it even more so. So what teachers need is time to explore, to learn and to practise.
I’m sure there are lots more but that will do me for now. Thanks Chris and Bryn. You don’t even know it but you are helping me through a rough patch.

Years 7, 8 & 9 students all have their wikifolios created and I believe the biggest challenge now is how to support teachers in our school to feel comfortable and confident enough to create opportunities for the students to populate their wikifolios with examples that they have chosen that illustrate their thinking and learning. Last week in a PD meeting we brainstormed ideas of how we might do that. Teachers came up with lots of great ideas but the biggest challenge is still (I think) the organisation and preparation that goes with using technology. At our following staff meeting on Monday I tried to support that concern by showing some links on our school wiki to a couple of very useful and easy to use applications that can be embedded in the wikifolios. One is called SlideShare and it allows students to create Powerpoints, to upload them to the web and then embedd them into their wikifolios. And the second is called PhotoBucket. It allows students to create simple pieces of video and mash them with images, audio and text to create a cool little video which can also be embedded into their WikiFolios.

I have been thinking about the power of blogging and the way we use it in schools and as a reflective tool and collaborative tool for teachers and students. But I have been grappling for a while with the dilemma of where to place my blog. Until now I have been using blogger and have been very happy with the tools and ease of use. But my problem is that in many schools blogger is blocked and I wonder if this is not going to be an ongoing problem.
Edublogs on the other hand, is unlikely to be blocked in the near distant future and so I’m wondering if I should move over to edublogs. But what happens to all the posts that I have made up until now. What about the cool little add ons that I have on my current blog such as the flickr widget and the clustrmaps. I really love those things and would want to know that I can have them as well.
I think maybe the best thing to do is to contact a few of the regular edublogs users and see what they think about the value of edublogs and then do it. If you are reading this post and you have some thoughts I’d appreciate your input.