So Much to Learn...So Little Time

A 2oh student's plea.

Sean The Bass Player has come up with some interesting thoughts in his latest Students 2.0 blog post. In short he would like not only to be taught to pass exams but to ensure that students are kept up to speed with technology. His thoughts were piqued by the Queen going all 2.0 by posting her latest Message to the Commonwealth on YouTube, along with a variety of historical films.

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He asks that if an institution as old as the monarchy can move with the times, why can't education?

I think this question is very valid. Why indeed does the education establishment not move and evolve more quickly. Well we all know the stock answer boils down to funding, or lack thereof; but unfortunately there also tends to be quite a lot of inertia in classrooms. If a certain way of doing things has got kids past their exams for the last10 years ago then it will jolly well do so now...if it ain't broke don't fix it.

The inertia thing is quite a difficult problem to deal with as it involves trying to persuade folk to do things they have no desire to do, and I don't wish to go in depth about that here.
But what about the other issue that crops up...funding. Many schools operate on networks that are long past their sell by dates. (My place has only just replaced the Windows '98 machines we were operating.) Now obviously updating these costs a heap of cash, but many of the very usable applications available on the net are free, especially to educators. I'm thinking of applications such as YouTube (or any video hosting site), Flickr, Animoto, Voicethread, Skype etc., etc. All these and more are free and are outstanding resources for educators and their students, BUT how many of us can actually access these sites in schools? Many are banned in the name of child protection, for (a very real) fear that kids will access inappropriate content.

This is where we the educators and students such as Sean ( and his 2.0 colleagues) need to step in by dealing with digital literacy on a daily basis; by educating and encouraging thoughtful, sensible use of the resources on the web. Then maybe, those who hold the keys to the filters may unlock them when they see that these tools are being used wisely and how useful they are to education. And then Sean et al  will feel that they are getting an education that goes some way to preparing them for a future that we cannot yet know.

Photo credit:  Dia 48 - School's Out, originally uploaded on April 18, 2007
by MëL

2 Big Questions

Over the recent 2 week October holidays we have here in Scotland I spent an inordinate amount of time watching and listening to various presentations from the K12 Online 2007 Conference.

The last day of the conference was devoted to a marathon 24hr live online discussion via elluminate which I was lucky enough to visit on 2 occasions; quite early on when I "met" Joe had a first verbal contact with Paul Harrington. I was enjoyable but there were too few participants to ensure a wide ranging discussion. I also joined later with about and hour to go and it was fascinating. There were educators from all over the world, all kinds of time zones, all talking about the wonderful world of the web.
This was great and I feel happy about my contributions...and shhhh maybe I'll get a few more readers.
However it really brought to mind a couple of big questions that have been turning around my head for a while. Questions to which I have my own ideas for answers but questions which I feel we should all be asking of ourselves and others.

1.    I love web 2.0 stuff and can see the advantages it can bring to education but how can I persuade the 30 year career teacher that it might be worthwhile (for the kids sake) to take a step out of the worksheet comfort zone  and take on the risk on potential failure in the classroom by trying something new?
The thing that just kept leaping into my mind whilst enjoying K12 was that whilst it is great to find same-minded people across the globe, where were the doubters, those that would force us to counter their arguments to help us prove our point. I think that the answer to this conundrum lies in Derek Wenmoth's presentation Holding a Mirror to Professional Practice. The persuasion will come I am sure when more and more of us seriously evaluate the work we are doing and prove to the doubters that this is not just another passing educational fad...like non-competitive sport.

2. When you look at the cluster maps posted on blogs you see swathes of red dots over North America, Europe, Australia/NZ and parts of Asia. The world is often still green across Africa, South America and large parts of Asia...Hmmmm I wonder why? Could this be the developing world? Not only do these parts of the world often miss out on even basic educational (and health) needs how far behind us are they going to be in the wonderful world of the web. (I have often thought about trying to help my brother-in-law in Cameroon set up a cyber cafe, but as he says there's no point, they only get electricity every other day...30km away from the capital city.)
How can our use of web 2.0 technologies help my little nephews and nieces "au village"?
Yes you all cry there's the One Laptop Per Child Initiative, which is a fantastic idea, but they are relying on governments, who struggle to ensure a simple basic level of education for all children, to purchase a huge number of units. If there is intermittent electricity there is hardly likely to be the capacity to create large bandwidth.
The thing I find most frustrating is that at the moment I don't think there is all that much we can do to help. Our governments and big multi-national corporations need to get serious...more serious. STOP ENFORCING ALL DEBT REPAYMENTS, STOP STEALING MINERAL RESOURCES, STOP BRIBING EASILY ENCOURAGED OFFICIALS. Then maybe individuals like myself and many of you out there in blogger world can kick in.

This article from the BBC shows people are starting to think abpout how to address this issue. But where will we be in comparison by 2012?

Let me know what you think.

Response to Derek Wenmouth's k12 Online 2007 Questions

More from me on K12 Online 2007.
I am so glad this conference has been taking place during our half term holidays because it has meant that I have given myself time to watch / listen to some of the presentations. I've got through about half of them so far and am still interested.
For the purposes of this post however I wanted to respond to the questions posed by Derek Wenmouth at the end of his presentation entitled: "Holding a Mirror to our Professional Practice".
This keynote looks at the issues surrounding the use of emerging technologies in the classroom, and ways of trying to make the use thereof as invisible as possible, but he looks particularly at how we should reflect on our use of these technologies.
It is all well and good trying to use blogs, podcasts, wikis etc but the outcome must be that students learn what they are supposed to learn, which is usually dictated by a curriculum.
At the end of his presentation Derek leaves us with a series of questions to enable us to reflect on our own practice. He asks us to chose the one question most appropraite to ourselves...I'm a swot and have answered most of them.

    •    What are the mirrors I am holding to my practice?

not enough at the moment. I think the time is approaching when I need to stop looking forward all the time and just take stock of some of the things I have done in class recently and try to analyse how effective I have been and how much the students have learned.

    •    Who are my mentors WHO I RELATE TO REGULARLY?

I suppose my mentors are my colleague language teachers when it comes to the actual teaching of the languages, however i feel as though there are few, if any, colleagues in school who could sufficiently mentor and coach me on how to integrate emerging technologies in the classroom. There appears to be very little discussion on, or use of these technologies in my school. Every one is waiting for an INSET on them...I am not a "dIgital native" as the generation we teach are supposed to be. I only started to use computers in 1995 when I started teacher training (but it wasn't part of the course). I have learned and developed through my own interest. No INSET or course can provide you with the training you need because the training as we know it doesn't exist. Most of my training and mentoring comes from my blog reading and comment writing and TRYING STUFF OUT...AND FAILING

What is my professional reading?

        Blogs, blogs and more blogs. I have to admit I was never a good reader of academic material...not enough crime or horror in it for my reading tastes, but since my discovery of blogs I have never felt more up to date and in tune with educational thinking. Blogs are immediate and I can, if I wish, comment on what is written. Until just over a year ago I honestly only really spent time reflecting on my practice when Annual CPD review time came about. Now I'm doing it all the time.

What communities of practice do I belong to?
The blogosphere I suppose


DO I HAVE A BLOG?
You're reading it

What about my rss feeds?
Numbers growing on a weekly basis as reading leads me to new people.

When was the last time I observed a lesson?
I have not done this in a formal sense in along time but I often observe my MFL colleagues at work  if I need to visit their classroom.

When was my last presentation?

Done 2 main presentations in last 8 months Communicate.07 and 'shire and city In-service. Really enjoyed doing them and actually felt I was contributing to other colleagues development (thanks to feedback received), but actually done lots of assemblies and such like recently.

Well that wasn't too bad. All of this reflection leads me to the idea that I should really get myself together and go for Professional Recognition with GTCS.

K12 Online 2007 - David Warlick

Have spent most of the day doing CPD on the lounge floor whilst kids played out in the sun.
Last night I subscribed to the video podcast channel for the K12 Online Conference 2007. I didn't know it existed last year and found out about this years via Vicky Davis' Cool Cat Teacher Blog.
So (in a Fast Show stylee) today I have been mostly watching David Warlick. Now I'm sure that for most of you who read this David Warlick is not a new name, but if he is click his name to find out more. Anyway his keynote was entitled Inventing New Boundaries and dealt with how teachers are in the strange position of trying to educate students for a future we are unable to describe...scary isn't it, but so true. Most students have very little idea about how they will make a living once they leave school.

The real crux (for me) of David's presentation came towards the end when he talked about the gulf of knowledge about using new technologies between students and their teachers. Apparently 57% of US students have produced original digital content and as a result communicate directly with their audience.
To my mind too many teachers are stuck in their traditional ways with little desire to shift out of their comfort zone...there ought not to be a comfort zone anymore, things move so fast. There are a surprising number for whom email is still an alien force with a mind of its own. More importantly there often seems to be a total resistance to change within our profession, in other words " i have been doing the same lessons the same way for years and I'm not going to change my lesson plan for nobody..." that kind of thing.

I am not saying every teacher must blog, podcast and spend hours, like me, checking out things on the web but surely every teacher must now start to make some kind of effort to get near the kind of learning landscape which our students inhabit. Did they all have lessons on how to Bebo? Who gave the YouTube homework? What was the Facebook NAB like? See what my point is? We all need to be pro-active in using new info and finding out about it.

I'm nowhere near as eloquent as David so let me quote his blog:

One question that I consistently get is,  “How do we train teachers to work with today’s information and communications technologies?”  I don’t quite understand this.  It’s probably my own very unique perspective, my outside the box mentality, my own success as a learner, and less success as a student.  But this just doesn’t seem like such a big problem to me.

It’s completely understandable that educators, with the institutional culture that we work in, would attack the problem by asking, “How are we going to teach this to teachers?”  But yesterday, I asked the audience, of almost 300, to raise their hands if they could say that they learned at least half of what they do with technology by teaching themselves — and almost every hand went up. 

The thing I am finding with much of this web 2.0 stuff as i go along is that it gets far easier to pick up the more you look into it and ideas for using the things come quicker...the big thing though is making sure there is educational value in using your chosen technology. As Ewan says

its the teach not the tech.

This month's SEJ

Thank you, thank you.

This months SEJ contains some interesting stuff, in particular because the articles relate to topics which I am interested in. Firstly let me send a big hurrah and thank you to Larry Flanagan (new EIS Education convenor) for his article on assessment. A few weeks ago I wrote about the ridiculous situation we found ourselves in with regard to our STACS results and how pointless I find the whole exercise...entirely my opinion by the way. Larry says he found it depressing faced with

...a set of decontextualised statistics [that] had been manipulated into various tables which, in many cases bordered on being meaningless

He goes on to say that it's not the stats in themselves that are not worthwhile just the purpose(s) for which these figures are sometimes used. In some cases they seem to become the be all and end all of a school's success.
I agree wholeheartedly with Larry's  assertion that it is not our appearance on a list which motivates teachers but our relationship with our students.  When it comes down to it each August we look at the individual results of our students and reflect on how they did basing our decisions on our relationship with and knowledge of said pupil.

 

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An Experiment in Action Learning

The posts linked below on RateMyMates  are the result of a wee experiment with my students in 1F. Instead of using the usual direct teaching methods to cover the topic of school I asked the students to work in groups to produce either a film or a radio show.
The aim of the production was to introduce German-speaking visitors to The Gordon Schools; to give an idea about its history, the subjects studied, give some opinions, some interviews etc. The only real guideline I gave them was to use the vocabulary from their vocab guides to ensure reasonable quality German. You can see/hear the results for yourselves but here is my own analysis of how the experiment went.

1. I allowed it to go on for too long, although much of the time was down to various disruptions
2. some level of direct teaching is involved beforehand to ensure some familiarity with the labguage to be used
3. I'm not sure how much of the language they have learned
4. there are some fantastic ideas in there which with a little tweaking could produce really high quality work, both language-wise and creatively
5. once again just when you are getting brassed off and you think they are taking the mick the students come up with the goods...in general.
6. the script is king, queen, emperor and general dictator all rolled into one
7. on the whole THEY HAD A BALL..look at the bloopers at the end of the films

Will I do it again? YES, but with the above in mind.

Please leave 2 stars and a wish-type comments on their work!!!

Der_BJKKM_Shau

Die_Gordon_Schule

Ein_Tag_in_der_Gordon_Schule

Technology Gap

Is there now a technology chasm between the developed and the developing worlds?

For a while now something has been bugging me about all this wonderful web-based technology and these fantastic, new, freely available whizz-bang applications which could have an amazing effect on the education of our children. Don't get me wrong all these ideas really are superb, and there is a serious amount of work being put in to analyse the effect web 2.0 etc can have. BUT I am worried that all this stuff is being done for a generation for whom education is no-longer seen as a right with the accompanying responsibilities but as a mere disruption for 5 days a week; a generation to whom huge amounts are given yet relatively little is asked (that should be DEMANDED) in return.
Turn that around, what effect could all these resources, technology have on kids in the developing world, for some of whom school is an unattainable goal. Why shouldn't they be able to download free resources off the net to help them learn. Imagine if they could freely access learning resources instead of buying pre-loved text books (at close to brand new price). I, and many other fortunate people in this country, have experienced African children's desire to learn...over 200 students used to turn up to my Saturday morning classes.
If we could get this content to them the educational gaps which currently exist would surely shrink along with cultural misunderstandings. But here's the rub, HOW? I really wish I had an idea how something like this would work but I don't. Would pre-loaded mp3/4 players be an idea (a la DoBe)? How can countries whose telephone network barely functions bring it up to the necessary quality to enable high speed broadband...at an affordable price?
To be honest I would think using landline technology in somewhere like Cameroon would not work. But what about mobiles. Africa is the fastest growing mobile market in the world. Mobiles have completely changed how Africa communicates with itself. Would mobile phone companies allow for example educational resources to be placed on their portals and to be freely accessed by subscribers? Obviously requiring the necessary capacity on their networks? But then that would bring in the old chestnut of censorship...SMS has been disabled on the Ethiopian networks because anti-government protesters organised themselves via text during the last elections!!! Unfortunately I don't know the answers to these questions, but I am sure there are folk out there who do...and who will probably make a fortune out of the poor as usual.
Lets hope Nicholas Negroponte's One Laptop Per Child idea manages to work out and overcome Intels Classmate.

A top 10 minutes

Had one of the best ever meetings today. 10 mins at break time, 3 buttered pancakes and a cup of coffee...BUT. Someone who wanted to hear about some of the stuff I've been doing, who sounded genuinely excited about it and who thought my latest idea (see below) was rather interesting. Thank you Tracey Stewart from she Determined to Succeed...and thanks to Fiona for letting me know she would be in school.

As a result I have now spoken to Louise McDonough from DoBe about the possiblity of providing some content...could be interesting.

ECML WEB JOURNALS IN LANGUAGE EDUCATION WORKSHOP

Here I am at another multi-cultural conference. Teachers and teacher trainers from all over Europe.

About 30+ teachers and languages being represented. Simultaneous translation in both French and English.

Already networked with Denis Cunningham who is President of the International Federation of Language Teacher Associations...why is SALT not a member???

Check out what the ECML does.

This is the BLOGS project we will be working on.

Izzy, wizzy lets get busy

This week I have been doing mostly everything...and getting it all done.
I'n't study leave great.

No I'm not trying to make up an educational version of The Fast Show.
Very busy but extremely productive week so far. I have...

• recorded and (almost) edited 5 new vocabulary guide podcasts for the homework blog
• organised, planned and arranged our tree planting ceremony to celebrate both World Environment Day and our Connecting Classrooms Partnership (the Welwitschia partnership)
• made a good start on the above mentioned partnership's wiki page
• done all the wonderful and really necessary paperwork for Friday's activity day (we are going out into Huntly to make a film...)
• taught some good lessons (for once)
• got the car repaired
• had a filling done
• checked and submitted our partnership plan and budget for Welwitschia
• almost decided on some resources for the department to use during Refugee Week.

Now all that remains is...

• get my trip to Graz organised
• attend markers meeting
• mark tons of scripts before 21st June
• tweak my Welwitschia presentations for assemblies at school
• ditto for staff meeting
• muck around with my kids
• RELAX.

Just the average working week then.
Had to laugh at myself when I decided to try to fill in my CPD record. 35 hours logged before end of first term, and I wasn't even busy then.

Ho Hum.