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The Internet – what’s happening in our world?

Lately in my classes, I’ve been more consciously trying to promote the openness of the internet. Partly in response to the challenges posed by Berners-Lee and others on threats to net neutrality and partly because I’m a huge believer in student-centredness, enquiry- and problem-based learning, I think the internet is the ultimate metaphor for learning: open, accessible but without straight-jackets of specificity.

As a classroom teacher, I can’t overstate how important it is for kids to have time to ‘surf the net’ in the context of the topics they are studying. Webquests, social bookmarks, online courseware, learning management quizzes and so on all serve valuable purposes in giving kids structure and direction whilst online. However, sometimes it’s easy to forget how infinite the possibilities can be. Maybe we need to spend less time constructing quizzes and more time helping kids find pathways and signposts through the content on the internet? Thinking on this, I thought I’d cook up a couple of weekly strategies for my junior and senior English classes.

1. Share the Love Day

With so much out there, maybe we need to spend more time sharing our love; love of literature, music, great thinkers, big ideas, life-changing stories! I’ve decided to use five minutes of my Wednesday classes for all students – one each week for the rest of the year – to share their love of something they discovered on the internet. Inspiration can be infectious, and sharing something that you found inspiring is a great way of reminding others just how we all benefit from the openness of the internet, the generosity of others and the wealth of content out there.
2. One Inspiring Story

My junior class has recently been unpacking the concept of human spirit. As an opening activity, I asked everyone to “find an inspiring story that shows the beauty of the human spirit.” After only 25 minutes, I was amazed at what the kids found: stories of profound selflessness, humans coping with all kinds of adversities and living examples of real heroes.

While it’s great to find stuff, it’s even better to share it. I asked the kids to buddy up in pairs and, without using the original story, share the inspiring moments with their buddies. I then asked buddies to present the stories to the class and had the whole class complete a running concept map of key ideas.

Activities like these remind us that as teachers, we aren’t always the ones to find “the material.” They also remind us that we have a lot to learn about the world around us and we can gain a lot from the interpretations and passion of the kids we teach. I love to be reminded as often as possible that I’m ultimately a learner first and a teacher second – perhaps that’s the ultimate inspiration?

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With surveys, you learn what you teach…

Despite a fiendishly frantic term, I’ve been lucky enough in the past few weeks to benefit from my own technology lessons in the classroom. Teachers are both blessed and cursed with the realisation that sooner or later you learn what you teach.

No truer has this been than in a recent series of student and teacher seminars I’ve been involved in focusing on the use of Google Docs to generate online surveys and populate the results in a spreadsheet for analysis. I’d like to briefly mention two applications of this at relative ends of the learning spectrum: first, with my Year 7 Connected Learning class; and, secondly, with the staff at my school.

 

1. Student Success with Surveys: Ownership in the Real World

As part of a unit I’m teaching on self-esteem, I was keen to see my students become researchers in issues of interest to them, using surveys to find out what their peers thought about what mattered most in their lives at this point. Having formed hypotheses about all kinds of issues related to self-esteem (acne, older sisters, going to church, boyfriends and girlfriends, religion, sport and so on), my kids developed a series of statements to test their own hypothesis, survey others, gather the data and analyse the results. Throughout the whole process of survey design, construction and delivery, we’ve had focused discussions on what makes a good, ethically-grounded survey. As a class, we’ve worked out that anonymity, optionality and clarity in purpose and the use of the data are all  crucial to ensuring that a survey emailed to others is ethical and benefits both the surveyer and the respondents.

Tomorrow, they’ll write a 45 minute “letter to the editor” in which they promote a broader understanding of the issues and make detailed reference to their own survey findings. What makes me feel good about a summative test at this end of the term is that it’s informed by real choice, along with real questions on real problems.

If you’re interested in seeing/hearing more about how I promote survey design, construction and delivery for students, you might like to check out this video tutorial that I made, covering all the aspects that I’ve mentioned above.

 

2. Teacher Success with Surveys: Professionalism and Transparency

Over the past week, I’ve been extremely tense about what amounted to a very well-received, engaging and (hopefully) empowering presentation at a staff meeting yesterday afternoon. For many teachers, using surveys to evaluate our practice, the content of our lessons and the strategies we use is daunting in the least. In an age of high accountability, I remain concerned about how any whole-school initiative with course evaluation surveys will respond to issues around:

  • the wording of questions and how they are interpreted by students;
  • the focus of the survey – whether on the individual teacher, department or whole-school;
  • how the data is used and whether or not it is published;
  • the potential for surveyers to consciously or unconsciously connect names with responses and possible implications;
  • the levels of privacy for individual teachers and students; and
  • the overuse of surveys, particularly badly designed ones.

All of this said, I feel that surveys which ask genuine questions and express genuine interest in the opinions of students are extremely empowering, and as one colleague remarked at the meeting, success with surveys is ‘as much about how you “talk through” a survey with the kids as it is about the survey itself.’

Of course, course evaluation is now a tried and true tradition in many universities and perhaps it simply needs to become more a part of the furniture in secondary education for us to properly navigate what can at times be turbulent waters. At least if I’m showing what the technology enables, pointing out the steps, raising concerns where I need to and guiding teachers with advice from one professional to the next, I can say that I’m doing my job to the best of my ability.

Or can I? Maybe I should go and develop a survey to find out! 🙂

If you’re interested in teachers on designing, constructing and delivering course evaluation surveys with Google Docs, check out my teacher video tutorial.

 

 

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Bridging Digital Divides – Our Biggest Tech Challenge?

(Flickr image courtesy of: KaCey97007)

It’s been a frenetic start to the school year as always, with precious little time to reflect and even less time to write. Nonetheless, working with such a diverse range of students and teachers to support their use of technology never leaves me without something to write about – so sometimes the biggest challenge is just letting go of perfectionism and airing my thoughts. It’s also heartening to read in so many of my favourite blogs that education bloggers the world over struggle with finding time to say what they need to say.

Taking control of what matters most

I had a really rewarding session earlier last week teaching some of the teacher leaders in my school about the value of RSS feeds accessed via the Google Reader accounts available to us through our school’s partnership with Google Apps for Education. What I enjoy most about teaching RSS feeds is the concept of intelligently controlling our access to information: by essentially selecting on the sources of frequently updated web-enabled content we want to access, we depart from the happen-stance nature of an over-reliance on traditional web search engines. I think for many this departure is a very necessary one and represents, for me, one of the main pillars in overcoming the digital divide.

The good news is that regardless of whether or not the teachers with whom I work actually adopt RSS as a regular-use technology (in reality, probably very few will and RSS generally remains somewhat of a niche technology), at least they will understand that the web is about much more than simply searching for information and such information being largely subject to a simple search string and Google’s algorithms rather than independent, critical thinking.

The same kind of control can be exercised in many other ways, including the people we follow on Twitter, the time we take to learn how to do an advanced search, the system of tagging we adopt to catalogue our research and the like. While Web 3.0 promises much in terms of intelligent semantic linking of concepts, I think the need for users to master many of the Web 2.0 tools that enable better organisation of one’s own learning and thought processes will still very much be there.

Exploring the ‘Digital Divide’

I’ve come to believe that any discussion on mastery of tools like RSS, Twitter and the like brings into question the true nature of what is commonly termed the ‘digital divide.’ Such a term is usually explained, at best, anecdotally, along the lines of Aunty Mavis doesn’t really know how to use Microsoft Word, whereas little Jane does. There is a digital divide between the two.

What are the problems with this kind of thinking? Over-simplification of concepts like this one risk misconceptions occurring where they can ill-afford to occur: in the classroom, where students have the opportunity to really delve into what it means – ethically, practically, economically and so on – to be a digital citizen in the twenty-first century. At the same time, too many of us are happy to latch onto anecdotes and analogies as a way of explaining away these concepts without properly engaging with them and thinking through the implications of our actions on the internet.

So, in the end, what exactly is the digital divide and how can we better understand it? Perhaps the best answer to this question is to think as broadly as possible and be aware of all the implications. This is a divide that is separated not only by age (as in the Aunty Mavis/Jane example), but also class, national boundaries, language, demographics, access to the internet, literacy (in the broadest sense of the term), parenting, lifestyle and anything else that separates two or more groups of people in society.

Inasmuch as these dividers sound esoteric or at least very theoretical, there are plenty of hard examples that illustrate just how big the divide is in many different contexts. In countries like India, for example, the killer combination of IT skills plus an international language has meant, for many, the difference between abject poverty and a livelihood. While examples in the west are not so extreme, there is now enough evidence to suggest that the digital divide is growing, and happening to be on the wrong side of it really limits one’s opportunities in life.

I like thinking in these terms, not because I feel as if I’m ever going to redress the divide in any large, meaningful way (there are plenty of others that already do a brilliant job at this). But I like to know that, at the end of the day, I do make some small difference in bridging things over. Hopefully I can start to challenge others to do the same.

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Blogger’s Frustration – the Technology or Us?

Having spent the past few days in Fiji, I thought I’d share some of my frustrations – and hopefully insights – about the perennial choice between netbooks and tablets for productivity and consumption with technology. As I’m now fully grappling with some of the strategic decisions regarding which device to recommend for my school’s 1-1 implementation later this year, I thought it would be an interesting experiment to take along my ASUS eeePC 901 and Apple iPad for the holiday and see which device would prove the best for which situation.

My typical uses for these technologies included:

– RSS reading
– Checking, posting and replying to emails
– Social networking (LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter)
– Updating this blog (WordPress)
– Updating my travel blog (Blogger)
– Drafting blog posts with Google Docs

My eeePC usually runs Ubuntu Linux but as part of the experiment, I installed Windows 7 to see how it would fare with some of the more proprietary programs I like to use (iTunes, Word, Excel, MobileMe, Evernote, etc.) I currently use an Apple bluetooth keyboard with my iPad that I purchased in the US a few months ago.

It’s interesting to note that with just a few days of milling around in my spare time and trying out all of the above on each device, it’s very clear to me when each device comes to the fore as the best device for certain tasks (granted, many people have already written on this but it helps to experience the difference for yourself). All of this said, there were a few issues that really complicated things and need to be noted first, especially given that they apply to many people around the world (including many of the kids I teach):

1. Many applications and/or operating systems are not geared properly for offline-use or use with slow and/or patchy internet connections. This especially applies to circumstances where there is no good alternative to web platforms such as Facebook – which needs to be constantly “on” and is very data intensive (side note: Facebook used to have a “lite” edition that worked very well with poor internet connections – where did that go?)

2. Blogging is especially difficult where the internet connection is patchy and slow. Although there are some good offline blogging platforms, very few properly utilize a WYSIWYG approach to editing, especially when it comes to including and manipulating images as I frequently need to do in my travel blogs.

3. We are so often restricted by proprietary affiliations between different applications and/or software-as-a-service (SaaS) solutions – such restrictions stifle creativity. For example, when using Windows Live Gallery to manipulate images, the user can only upload images to certain services like Facebook with a mandatory MSN account. On Picasa, ‘Blog This!’ only works with Google’s Blogger.

In any case, I found the following:

1. The iPad – Powerful and Slick (but on Apple’s terms)

The iPad quickly showed its power as a superb email device, RSS and ebook reader, handy tool for social networking and reasonable device for drafting the text for my blog posts. Not having a SD card reader adapter, however, I immediately hit a wall when it came to importing/editing photos, having to rely on Windows Live Gallery instead (although I usually run Picasa on Ubuntu) through the netbook. Nonetheless, with my bluetooth keyboard, and unified inboxes on the iPad’s email app, I was easily able to stay in touch with friends and family. The email app also works very well when wifi is patchy, saving a message to the outbox and sending it when the next connection becomes available. Apps like the very successful Yoono also allowed me to quickly stay in touch with all of my social networks on the one screen. As for RSS reading, MobileRSS has now become my indispensable go-to application for staying in touch with all my never-ending feeds.

Where the iPad fell short – and where the netbook picks up – is in the limitations and restrictions of the apps and the highly restricted functionality of the up-to-now mandatory Safari browser. Writing in either Blogger or WordPress through the browser was next-to-impossible, with half a draft disappearing in smoke the minute the wifi signal dropped out. While drafting text is all well and good in Notes, Pages or the WordPress app, I needed to upload and manipulate images for my blog and to date, as far as I’m aware, this is simply not possible.

2. The Netbook – Highly Functional, Flexible and Open (if you can weather the lag)

As for being a reasonably full-functional and familiar computer, the net book shines, as long as you set it up properly and don’t expect the world in performance (this is precisely why I will never again run Windows 7 on an Atom processor!) Being a huge fan of customizing an OS, pimping out my browser and tweaking everything to be the way I like it, I’m also a fan of any device that truly lets me do this. Short of jail breaking, apps on the iPad are forever restricted to Apple’s approval which is, as we know, becoming harder and harder to gauge and even harder to predict.

While I got away with – and rather enjoyed – doing most things on the iPad, there was that familiar sense of joy that I got when firing up Firefox and having my favourite skins, toolbar buttons and plugins. There’s also a familiar sense of woe in accepting that such an open browser is unlikely to make a debut on Apple’s poster child any time soon.

So the verdict? Unfortunately I remain in two very divided technology worlds and two minds on the subject. While the CES convention has unmistakably touted 2011 to be the year of the tablet (and an Android one at that), the real test in my view will be the extent to which the device can be genuinely shaped to suit the needs of the user, by the user. These days, I have increasingly less time for being told how I should be using a device. While there’s no silver bullet (and probably never will be), there’s plenty of scope for putting pressure on the big players to collaborate, keep things open and listen to us. That much should give anyone cause for optimism, at least for now!

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Exploring the ‘why’ behind 1-1 Learning

Over the past week or so, I’ve kept myself busy, among other things, reading Pamela Livingstone’s 1-1 Learning – Laptop Programs that Work (link to the book on the Hawker Brownlow website) and thinking fairly carefully about how 1-1 is going to look for my school in 2012. As much as I enjoy reading this highly-detailed and frank account of the pitfalls and pinnacles of a 1-1 rollout, with each new page, alarm bells ringing in my head about a new piece of I’ll have to try, another conversation I’ll have to have with my school’s executive and another report I’ll have to put together in framing my advice.

Still, I find myself starting to answer some of the most fundamental questions around the use of technology in teaching and learning. Most importantly, I’m getting better at articulating why we should be using technology in the first place. Sounds ridiculous, I know – but unless we fully explore the WHY behind technology use and a 1-1 program, there’s every chance that such use will remain, at best, superficial, hit-and-miss and a “bag of tricks” to keep students busy.

Perhaps best of all, reading Livingstone’s work has given me a tidy arsenal of research weaponry to fire at many of the technology skeptics that point to limited correlation between the use of technology and the improvement of student outcomes. In my opinion, what’s the problem with such assertions? Well, both the technology and the outcomes – two of the most bandied-about concepts in education – are often defined as needed, by adherents to basic arguments on both sides of the debate (for instance, those for and against the use of Wikipedia for research). If we define the terms more accurately, however – say, outcomes in reference to high-stakes testing like the HSC and technology in reference to collaboration webs – well then, things start to get a little more interesting (answer: no such study has yet been done to show the effect of web-based collaboration on HSC scores). In other words, in the process of investigating the ‘why’ of technology use in the classroom, we need to be clear about the ‘what’ and the ‘how.’ It’s only in putting the three together that the research and how it is used in framing an argument becomes more meaningful.

I know there’s a million other questions in my head. For now, though, if I know why I’m doing what I’m doing (and how I’m going to do it), I’ll have a reason to turn up to work in 2011. That’s a start, isn’t it?

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Teaching How to Think

Yesterday, I received an email from a Year 12 student I have been teaching for the last two years before she finished her HSC in November:

Our classes were always a pleasure but most of all a privilege, [and] I’m very proud that every argument I used was my own in some little way, which you helped me articulate and develop. Teaching us how to think was priceless, and will never be forgotten.

While these are words that I am unlikely to forget for many years to come, it’s the message that is most heartening. In a climate where success is all-too-often measured in Band 6s (which is the highest performance band a student can achieve in a standard NSW HSC subject), I’ve often grappled with the overwhelming disparity between high-stakes exam success and real learning.

While I remain, at heart, a pragmatist who believes it’s possible to think for oneself and achieve excellent results, I do often question my principles as an English teacher who steadfastly teaches students how to think and how to write, NOT what to write. As an HSC marker, I often see that the highest scoring papers are the most ‘prepared’ – with clear evidence of someone (the teacher, the parent, the tutor, the studyguide…) coaching the student in what to say.

How I reconcile this disparity is the ultimate challenge – one with both ethical and practical dimensions. For now, I think I’ll be grateful that students appreciate me helping them in any way I can to think for themselves, and that it’s this kind of help that best prepares them for life beyond the classroom.

Merry Christmas and New Year, everyone. I’d really like to take this opportunity to thank you all for the time you take to read these posts, for your support, links and comments.

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Trust Them

A few days ago, I had a welcome lesson of my own as I sat frantically marking late submitted work for a colleague in my Year 7 Connected Learning class. Not being able to ‘control’ the lesson, I wrote a list of activities on the board and explained to my kids that I’d be unable to answer any questions or look at their work.

At the end of the lesson, two girls handed me a USB stick with this video on it – their perspective on the importance of child sponsorship. Needless to say, for an hour’s work, I was fairly impressed. The whole experience taught me a lot about stepping back and giving the students control more often. How many times have I sabotaged a potential learning opportunity by thinking that my way is the best way?

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c8EkeCw8WVI]

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Leadership and Learning with Web 2.0

I just finished my final Masters coursework paper for the year. As a blogger, I frequently struggle with adjusting back and forth between my casual blogger’s if-you-feel-it-write-it approach and the academic vet-everything-before-you-even-think-about-it approach. It’s frustrating when you finish a post only to realise that you’ve made an ordinarily accessible topic overly academic, just as it is when you’ve completely missed the mark by writing a piece better suited to the blogosphere than the lofty halls of academia.

Nonetheless, I’ve been very privileged this semester to be able to explore my capacity as an ICT leader in building a Web 2.0-enabled learning design for my school and evaluate our recent efforts with Google Apps for Education and Moodle. The sum total is the following paper I wrote, which argues that where my system falls short is in compromising the leadership potential of e-learning teacher innovators with increasing managerial demands much better suited to professional IT managers than teachers like myself.

I’m a lucky one. Schools like mine have employed full-time IT managers for at least the last few years, letting me get on with the business of leading my staff and students to critically select and implement technologies in a way that creatively empowers the user to construct their own learning. The biggest challenge is asking teachers to re-think what it means to learn in the first place. Ultimately there’s little place for didacticism and teacher-centred transmission in my vision. Just as well I have the time and patience to work on making this vision a reality, eh?

[scribd id=41375173 key=key-u6q4bggvxzj81x4w61t mode=list]

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Open Source is the Answer

I’ve been in the lucky position of being able to trial a couple of iPads over the last term with some of the teachers and students at my school. At the same time, I was in the unlucky position of not being able to attend an ICT network meeting last week (thanks, HSC marking!) where technology leaders from schools in my diocese gathered to share ideas about the viability of iPads as learning tools.

It’s funny to see so much education buzz around the use of these devices so relatively soon after their launch just a few months ago. Perhaps it’s not really that funny, though. After all, Apple really have a knack for creating hype around their products and with the iPhone a runaway success, what’s not to love about its new big brother?

For my part, I was keen to explore the affordances of iPads (and tablets generally), noting that where the iPad really shines is as an e-reader and instructional tool. My stand-out app remains MobileRSS, a tidy little RSS app that integrates Google Reader subscriptions and keeps me up to date. I’m also very pleased at the way the iPad nicely converges multiple proprietary e-book formats into the one device – all with a nice-sized screen.

Open and Closed: the Eternal Question

While it’s all well and good to pay Apple due attention for yet another game-changer, I remain resolute in thinking that teachers need to be well aware of the dangers of closed technologies, especially ones like the iPad that lock the user experience into the restricted functionalities of proprietary apps. Don’t get me wrong, apps are great (well, once you get past the thousands of ‘fart’ apps that have made relatively instant millionaires). Apple has shown us, too, that when you take proprietary software combined with proprietary hardware, things have a strange tendency to ‘just work.’ But with HTML5 around the corner and so much innovation happening with Web 2.0, I think our real attention should remain on the learning affordances of the open web and open source.

 

I had to do a bit of a technology double-take when I set up a netbook for a colleague this afternoon with Edubuntu, an open source operating system with a completely free suite of pre-installed literacy and numeracy apps. After only a few clicks of the mouse, I had three menus full of apps that rivalled – and dare I say, beat – many of the apps that I’ve spent the last few weeks sourcing, downloading, installing (not to mention paying for) on the iPads. Gobsmacked for choice, I’ve decided to set up a few machines at school with this operating system, knowing that kids can use the apps freely and safely to hone their typing, memory, vocab, grammar, spelling and maths skills. Apart from being free, Edubuntu runs very nicely on older gear – a great way to recycle some old laptops which have become otherwise unusable.

Funny how with no money, a few clicks and a lot less fuss I can have access to some excellent education tools supported by a community of developers who believe in donating their time and talent to education all around the world. Shouldn’t that be what good teaching is about?

Perhaps the real freedom is in knowing that at the end of the day, very little in technology has to be either/or thinking – both/and thinking works just fine for me. Maybe open source is just the thing for an open mind? 😉

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Head in the Cloud

Over the past few days, it’s been very hard to contain my excitement over Google’s recent moves to add all the applications from standard Google accounts to Google Apps for Education. While the core suite of applications – Mail, Docs and Calendar – are extremely useful and have put my school on the Web 2.0 map, I’ve been so disappointed that other Google apps like Reader, Picasa and Blogger have been off-limits for so long.

Sure, students can create their own Google accounts, you say? Having worked with frustrated teachers and students who all-too-easily forget usernames and passwords, I’ve really come to appreciate the ability to control accounts as the school administrator and have kids quickly online and using the tools they need to get ahead.

Now when all of my students log in, they get immediate access to an incredibly powerful set of Web 2.0 applications without the need to enter a single name or additional password! Exploring these is going to take some time, but it’s great to know they’re there for anyone to use.

Some of the new applications I’ll be running PD on are:

1. Google Reader

Call it the nerd factor in me, but I have to say that hands down, Google Reader is the most remarkably simple yet sophisticated piece of the Web 2.0 pie. While many educators have consigned RSS feeding into the too-hard basket of technology education (installing feed readers, locating RSS feeds, keeping up to date, etc.), Google Reader makes RSS reading fun, social and very easy to get started. As far as I’m concerned, it’s a valuable teaching doorway into the vast world of internet content. I’m really looking forward to sharing feeds/articles and helping my students getting started with organising their reading on the web.

2. Picasa Web Albums

Google’s extremely generous web storage allocation (I know it’s now in the several gigabytes but have lost count) is incredibly good news for Google Apps Education students making use of this photo management gem. However, it’s Picasa’s easy integration with other Web 2.0 services like Blogger, Reader and Docs along with mobile integration and a very powerful photo management application for Windows and Mac that wins hands down.

3. Blogger

While not my blogging tool of choice (sorry Google, WordPress has the edge for now), Blogger makes blogging very easy and hassle-free. It’s great to know that my kids can get started without the need for another username or password, and I’ll be incredibly keen to explore this as a platform for electronic learning portfolios.

Pieces in a Web 2.0 Puzzle

It’s easy to see that already, Google is bringing to the web the same kind of integration that Apple brings through suites of applications like iLife and iWork that easily “talk to” one another  without the need to transcode data or switch out of one app and into another (just think about the “Blog this” buttons in Picasa and Reader  or the Picasa Web functionality  in Blogger). As a technology expert/administrator, I see this as a level playing field for all teachers and students. While not all of the tools will be used all of the time, making them available is the first step to transforming the curriculum and the way we teach with technology.