LT Thought of the Week – When it comes to Technology, teachers need as much scaffolding as students

Technology a funny beast. In recent years, the rate of change leaves many of us spellbound and, at the best of times, feeling like we’re on some colossal treadmill running as fast as we can and only barely managing to keep up with the change. While I like to pride myself on being more up-to-date than many, even I get to the weekend feeling like there’s so much more I need to know to be an effective practitioner in the C.21st.

This week’s post comes from Mark Gleeson, a primary teacher who uses his practical experience with technology in the classroom to inform his own research and regularly reflects on his work. In the post “When it comes to Technology, teachers need as much scaffolding as students,” Gleeson argues that one of the biggest shortcomings of the education system is “the lack of a systematic framework for developing teacher capacity and competency in teaching with technology.” In arguing that, more often than not, “technology is just thrown at us and expected to magically stick to us and develop,” Gleeson highlights a fundamental problem in his own system that clearly needs addressing. When we think about it, he has a point: how many of us have been in the situation where we’ve felt out of our depth when a brand new technology is just pushed out? In the sessions that I’ve run over the years, I know that I’m as guilty as the next LT leader in the next school or system of spruking something new and hoping that it catches on. Of course, it often does – and this is a testament to the awesome teachers that we are – but I’ve often had another reaction to the effect: “this is really great, Michael, but when can I get the time to properly figure it out and work with it?”

Gleeson suggests that the key to solving this problem is the following:

1. PLTs dedicated to Technology integration into our teaching practices
2. A constant focus on Technology throughout lesson and unit planning
3. A restructuring of the role of ICT Leaders/teachers in schools
4. A greater focus on Technology in Teacher Training programs
5. A commitment to Technology Professional Development courses on an equal footing with Literacy and Numeracy Projects.

I recommend reading the post, which goes into some detail on each of these points and offers some tips for schools to tweak existing structures and practices to support teachers more effectively. In saying that, I think we all need to acknowledge that the teacher has enormous value in terms of the investment made when it comes to technology professional development. When we invest in really empowering a teacher to use technology, that has a net effect on the lives of hundreds – and thousands – of students over many years. Of course, I remain committed to doing what I can to support those around me. .

On the Shoulders of Giants?

Ask anyone who happens, say, to be a jazz musician, neuroscientist, marine biologist or anthropologist to big-note themselves. “It’s hard,” they’ll probably tell you. Why? because like anyone in a well-established field, it’s impossible to really set your achievements aside from those highly respected experts that have gone before you. As R.E.M singer Michael Stipe puts it, this is the perennial challenge of coming up with “a main idea to call my own” while “standing on the shoulders of giants…”

It’s often said that we can’t properly understand the present without acknowledging – and properly learning from – the past. At the same time, institutionalised education seems to frequently suffer from a collective form of amnesia. This is no truer than in my field, Education Technology, where both teachers and students are continually bombarded with buzzwords, flashy new gadgets and supposedly “best practice” approaches that will “revolutionise education” – and all too often, the people pushing are not trained educators but represent the interests of big business. Pop catch-phrases taken out of context from the research do further damage: while students are still hailed as the “digital natives,” teachers are badged the “immigrants,” whose classrooms “resemble those of the 1950s.” Technology is often touted as the best way to transform staid and uninspiring teaching, with many teachers told to simply “get with the times.”

So what of the technology? Most of it comes from factories in China where millions of underpaid workers work in abdominal conditions to keep prices down and maximise profit for the people who will probably never set foot in such factories. When there’s profit to be made by deploying technology in schools, you can believe that this represents real value to big players in big business. Further, when you consider the money motivating the decisions, the deals done and the agendas being pushed, quite often the supposedly educational “excitement of the moment” is used as justification to ignore how things have been done in the past. The approach that seems to apply here is – “let’s push the technology and we’ll work out the teaching and learning later,” and there’s plenty of situations where schools, systems and even governments have done just that; witness the thousands of relatively useless laptops rolled out over the past four years by the NSW Department of Education. Of course, when technology is pushed out – sometimes with very little foresight – it falls onto the shoulders the teachers and students that end up using it. When the same technology falls short of really making a difference to our learning? It’s our fault for not being “open to change.”

As a teacher, I can honestly say that every other teacher I know does use technology in the classroom and is open to change. Quite simply, they do the best with what they’ve got, in the time that they have, for the students they teach. In the eyes of people that really matter, this work has enormous value. But in light of a profession that has been steadily de-professionalised in recent years, the average teacher in the eyes of big business has very little value (especially when control is in the hands of the system) and that translates into what may end up as badly-made decisions that have far-reaching consequences.

So are teachers and students helpless in all of this? It’s hard to see economic, political and power structures which play such a huge part in the work we do and not feel helpless. But we can change the rules, and the key to that is properly understanding the past. As Philosopher George Santayana put it, “those who cannot learn from the past are condemned to repeat it.” Technology is a tool in the toolshed, so to speak – one that we use to support us as professionals. Teachers and students need to be the ones in the drivers’ seats, deciding what has value, while learning from, and supporting, each other through what we understand best: people and how they learn. To that end, learning from the past is as much about recognising and keeping the good things that other educators and students have achieved as it is about learning from the mistakes made.

LT Thought of the Week: Global Digital Citizen —The Role of the Teacher

In recent years, we’ve seen an increasing focus on the concept of digital citizenship. As many of our life experiences are now shaped by our relationship with others online – and the fact that the online world is one that transcends traditional geo-political boundaries – it’s wise to really give this concept due credit and understand where we fit in as teachers.

This week’s LT thought comes courtesy of Andrew Churches who describes the digital citizen as follows:

They are respectful and protective of themselves and other people as well as intellectual property. They are proactive and intolerant of abuse, standing up for the rights of freedom of expression and communication while condemning excesses and bullying. They communicate fluently in different mediums and operate in a world without borders or censors. They understand and celebrate the cultural differences and subtleties that flavour the diverse world they live. It is a world potentially without restrictions except for the moral and ethical values that underpin their immersion, shape their interactions, and guide their decisions.

What these kinds of descriptions and discussions often point out is the central idea that this kind of citizenship isn’t really about technology per se – it’s about navigating the world in which we live through ethical and moral principles that embody the best qualities of humanity. I also think that being a global citizen is about really trying to understand the kind of connectedness that the internet offers and making the most of that connectedness to better ourselves and others around us.

So what role does the teacher play? Churches suggests several areas where we can play our part in guiding students towards becoming effective digital citizens: (1) mentoring; (2) monitoring; (3) mediating; (4) teaching skills and knowledge beyond the subject; and (5) by being skilful practitioners. The article explains each of these areas and offers some insights on how teachers can work with them.

At the end of the day, I would suggest that we’re all global, digital citizens regardless of how we interact online or use technology.

Ideas that Matter?

Stuck at home this weekend while sick, I’ve been further exploring the extent that learners engage with their ideas and one another in online spaces. As the academic meat in the sandwich, I’ve been mentoring my Year 12 students in the writing of their Hamlet essays while emailing back and forth revisions of my latest Education Masters thesis to my supervisor (and mentor). Being a learner in the middle has its own unique advantages – and I think I’m well-positioned to understand the way that online interactions enhance learning on a number of levels.

The tools I’ve been using include:

• pen/paper
• my scanner
• comments features in both Google Docs, Open Office and Word
• track changes
• integrated email accounts on Mac mail
• revision history snapshots
• my mobile (for those rare occasions I’ve been out)

What’s emerged from my dependency on these tools is a better understanding of how ideas evolve through web-mediated dialogue and, most importantly, that education rarely has to involve either/or relationships with different communication media. What’s more important is generating meaningful connections and being open-minded about the form that these take. There shouldn’t be a one-size-fits-all approach but all too often the face-to-face classroom coupled with the necessity of performing well in high-stakes tests seems to encourage the “sheep dip,” where students are treated as exam numbers and it’s our job to churn them through the system.

At the end of it all, what do we remember? We remember the ideas that mattered and how others allowed (and even encouraged) us to connect them with the world.

LT Thought of the Week: Thinking Smarter

 

In my school’s  ICT groups this term, we’ve been exploring the notion of “learning in the cloud,” the idea that much of technology-enabled learning taking places in the classrooms reflects the shift away from device-centric computing towards cloud computing, where a lot of our applications, tools and data reside on vast servers all around the world. Sound scary? It can be! How do we make the most of the affordances these technologies offer? Watch this space and talk to colleagues – our ideas on how to meaningfully use technologies in the classroom matter!

This week’s post comes from Mitch Joel, whose blog Six Panels of Separation explores marketing dimensions of social media. In this post, however, Joel examines his own informal learning in a technology-rich world. Some of the insights can really be helpful for articulating the changed nature of learning with cloud-enabled pedagogies. Joel points out a very simple truth about the idea of internet-mediated informal learning:

People will often tell me that they can’t wait to go on vacation so that they can catch up on their reading. They’ll also talk about the sabbatical that they’re taking to spend time learning. Here’s the truth: you can’t catch up on reading and you don’t need a sabbatical to learn.

Sure – we’re all short on time and if you’ve managed to get this far in the email, you’re doing well considering the time-poor pressures we all face as teachers. At the same time, using technology to “think smarter” and invest more time in our own learning does make us better teachers in the long run. As long as we keep exploring, using, sharing and experimenting, we’ll all end up winners.

 

 

Create, Curate or Consume – A Critical Choice for Future Learners

2011 has been such a busy year – for me personally and for the whole world. Reflection in the face of such adversity and there is always barrage of events that grip us, challenge us and occasionally swallow us up and spit us out. In 2011, I experienced all of these things and more and I’m glad that I’m a better person for it.

 

As an educator, it’s my job to help make sense of a world that I so often struggle to understand for myself. In recent years, my classes have been polarised – as a Connected Learning teacher in Year 7, senior (Years 11-12) English and several teacher groups for ICT, I see the ends of the secondary school spectrum and like to think I have a good perspective on learners from a wide range of ages. I see at both sides of the spectrum the innate desire to understand our world and find our place in it. This is never easy, but technology helps us if we know how to use it – and I wouldn’t be able to understand the world as I do without it.

 

Despite the old analogies of digital “natives” and “immigrants,” I see twelve year olds who struggle endlessly with technology just as I see learners over 60 whose use surpasses my own in sophistication and understanding. More than anything, I see my job as a connector, helping the right person to find and use the right tool for the right job.

 

While technology is changing rapidly, it’s important to take heart in a few constants. For me, life with technology is unpredictable, being both stressful and empowering; both frustrating and liberating. At the same time, I see very little change to the way that we as a global society make use of technology and our use boils down to three basic verbs: to consume, to curate or to create. Having done all three in various combinations, frequencies and sequences over the years, I remain convinced that in order to value and maintain an open society in which learners can genuinely become the people they want to be, we need to promote all three of these approaches in education.

 

The problem seems to be that we too often emphasise consumption at the cost of both creation and curation. Without all three, we can’t live sustainably. Endless and mindless consumption of the world’s resources – whether ideas, media, food, resources or values – fails to create anything new or value-adding, including solutions to the problems of our own making.

 

So, for 2012, I’d like to promote a better balance in my own teaching and help my students to:

1. be better critical consumers of resources;
2. become curators of what helps us to help one another and become the people we want to be; and
3. create our own expressions of self sustainably and compassionately.

 

I’m excited about technology for education and what it holds for this year and into the future.

Show me what you know 2.0

Last week my Connected Learning team finished a PBL assessment task for our Worlds Together, Worlds Apart unit, which explores issues related to present-day Afghanistan and our relationship to these issues as Australians, including the war, gender-based inequality, religious intolerance and the impact of terrorism on the lives of Afghanis and those throughout the world. Given that much of what’s happening in Afghanistan changes all the time, our teaching of the unit – now in its third year running -changes to reflect this.

The PBL explores the idea of a young Afghani-American woman, Stephanie, who journeys from LA into war-torn Kandahar to adopt her niece and return safely. Students work in groups of four assuming the roles of Geographer, Cultural Expert, CIA Expert and Travel Advisor, all advising Stephanie on a whole range of issues and considerations.

As a product, we had students distill their “brief” into a five-minute screen recording, taken with the latest version of QuickTime. Screen recordings are an excellent way to allow students to show what they know, opening up the potential for students to meta-analyse their own web-based research through audio commentary and other screen techniques like multiple tabs, zooming and different websites and applications that reflect a wide variety of research tools currently available to students.

In the following sample, one of my students informs Stephanie about security concerns facing a young western woman travelling to Afghanistan by discussing the websites she’s used, her findings and interpretations.

Head in the Clouds – Cloud Nine!

Just had my first academic publication, “Head in the Clouds: a review of current and future potential for cloud-enabled pedagogies.” Aside from being over the moon, I’m indebted to my supervisor, Professor John Hedberg, who guided me through the process of writing, submitting, editing and publishing work in the field of technology education. John is a great mind when it comes to disruptive pedagogies and autonomous learning and I’ve learned a lot throughout the process.

I’m also lucky to be working, studying and living/breathing the ideas that I explore. I’m now looking forward to continuing this journey and taking things as far as I can, supported by mentors and amazing colleagues and beautiful friends and family.

 

Twitter for Professional Learning

This afternoon I’ve been busy spending an hour with different teachers from diocesan schools in the Parramatta area on the use of Twitter for professional learning. Although the session was designed for beginners, an IT colleague and I decided to go to explore the session from the perspective of trainers working in schools to disseminate new ideas. I find social media to be largely unchartered territory in my school (and many schools that I know), largely a result of blocking, slow take-up, misunderstanding and technophobia. Putting technology into the hands of teachers and making a positive difference means understanding some of these issues and really engaging with some of the concerns non-users have.

From this point of view, social media also represents one of the cliffaces of the digital divide. As Lisa Nash, the facilitator of the session points out, the value of Twitter is in tapping into the thinking of people – experts, professionals, educators and the like – and then using those ideas to change the way things are done. For those with no interest or inclination, relying on traditional face-to-face and print-based professional development seems almost professionally self-defeating in the twenty-first century!

I find sessions like these both interesting and heartening. It’s great to see teachers, leaders and administrators getting in and getting their hands dirty. I’m hoping that this session sparks some future learning opportunities beyond the confines of 9-5 face-to-face.

 

 

Marking 2.0

This week I’ve just finished marking a PBL project with a team of very talented Year 7 teachers. As part of the marking, I suggested we experiment with a Google Spreadsheet. Given the many assessable components to the project, a collaborative spreadsheet shared amongst the teachers enabled all teachers to:

-see each other’s comments and marks

- work in a centralised place

- easily export the data to electronic chronicles and mail-merged reports

- check totals and averages with easy (and automatic!) fomulae

- check data against previous years, averages, etc. to gauge improvemnet

Google’s ability to get data out of one place and put it into another makes Google Spreadsheets a very effective teacher marking tool. In this case, I was able to use the marks teachers had entered to generate slick PBL reports that we’re returning to kids in record time. It’s great to see technology really enhance the feedback process AND make teacher’s lives easier! Shouldn’t we all be experimenting with open tools that enable more effective marking 2.0?