ITSC 2010. It all begins.

So, here I am on the beautiful (but currently rainy) Gold Coast.

I arrived this evening to spend the weekend at Gold Coast ITSC 2010, the annual Innovative Technology in Schools Conference run by Apple.  It certainly sounds like it will be fun, and I’m rather humbled to have been asked to give the keynote address. What’s more surprising to me is that Apple asked if I’d do not only this one, but the entire Australian ITSC series, so over the next month or so I’ll also be at the Adelaide, Sydney, Perth and Melbourne events as well.  It came as a complete surprise to be asked, but I’m really thrilled to be able to be a part of them.

Apple is using a different approach to the ITSC events this year that sounds like it will be really good. It’s all very unconferencey.  Beyond the keynote, there will be lots of opportunity to mix and share and socialise and learn together. I think that’s great, and it’s certainly the best part of most conferences I’ve been to, so it’s cool that we are seeing more conferences these days that try to focus on the conversations and encouraging the serendipitous aspects of this kind of learning. I like it.  There is also going to be a focus at ITSC on actually making something, creating something to take away back to our schools that will help drive the shift.  It sounds pretty cool.

Anyway I better get back to putting the finishing touches on this preso. It’s an honour to have been asked to present, and I’d like to do a good job of it, although I’m always concerned about what I can actually add to the conversation. It’s a bit daunting, but I’m looking forward to it.

If you happen to be going to any of the ITSC events over the next month or so, please come and say hi!

Popularity: 22% [?]

VSR 32: Be Very Afraid

In this new episode of the Virtual Staffroom podcast I have the great pleasure of enjoying a casual chat with the enigmatic Professor Stephen Heppell.  With a story for just about every occasion, Stephen is a absolute mine of great insights and perspectives about the future of education.

Be Very Afraid is one of Stephen’s many educational projects.  It brings together students from all over the UK to showcase some incredible ICT related projects. There is some truly amazing learning taking place here.  In this episode we get to hear some of the backstory to BVA as well as a few of Stephen’s personal insights about it.

We finish with a chat about education in general and some really wonderful insights into getting the best from our students.

PS: As usual this recording is posted over at the Virtual Staffroom site, but I’m going to start crossposting them here too, just to make them a little simpler to access.

Popularity: 11% [?]

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

Life is Risky

Silly me. I was mowing the lawn the other day and I stupidly managed to get my big toe caught in the mower blade while it was running at full speed.  The blades ripped right through my shoe and mangled the tip of my big toe.  Needless to say, it really hurt! I was home on my own, and had to figure out what to do next… there was blood going all over the place, I felt myself going into shock, as I tried to figure out how to get myself to a doctor.  It was not a lot of fun. The good news is that despite smashing my toenail off and slicing the end of my big toe, it could have been a hell of a lot worse.  Fortunately, the bone was not broken and I still have all my toes so apart from a bit of pain and inconvenience I think I’m pretty lucky.

It highlighted to me – in a very real way – that lawnmowers are bloody dangerous things! With their sharp, rapidly rotating blades, they are obviously capable of doing some real damage to the human body. Naturally, I never intended to get my toe in the way of the blades, but it happened regardless.

So I ask the question… are lawnmowers simply too damn dangerous? Does having an accident like this mean I should get rid of the mower and never mow the lawn again? Should I be campaigning for all mowers to be banned, as I am now clearly able to prove that they are dangerous things capable of causing serious injury.  Should my local council be stepping in and confiscating the lawnmowers of my neighbours in order to ensure that nobody else can ever have a similar accident?

The answer to the these questions is obviously no. While mowing your lawn can be a potentially dangerous activity, full of inherent risks and sharp rotating blades, it’s still something that needs to be done, and is done, by people all over the world every weekend.  Of course, mower manufacturers do what they can to limit the risks; the rotor is covered by a large protective guard so the blades are not directly exposed to fingers and toes. Within reason, lawnmowers are designed to be as safe as possible, but no design is 100% failsafe.  There are still significant risks, in fact over 60,000 people are injured by lawnmowers each year in the US alone, and many of these injuries result in amputation.  With such obvious dangers posed by lawnmowers, I can only assume that people must enjoy the value of having a nice looking lawn more than they are worried about the risks of using a mower to get one.

I’m pondering these ideas and thinking how they apply to the way most schools treat potential risks for their students.  While educators have a clear duty-of-care obligation to protect our students, we also have to balance that with the need to allow them to learn and to grow and to have opportunities.  Without being given a chance to fail and to make mistakes, they are missing valuable opportunities to learn from those mistakes. I think there has to be a balance between exposing them to risks and providing them with responsibilities.

Clearly, if the risk is a physical one that could cause genuine harm, injury or even death, then we need to err on the side of caution. If a student is likely to be injured or hurt then, yes, we probably need to place greater emphasis on protecting them from risk than providing a learning opportunity.  But if the risks are minimal, statistically unlikely, or have a relatively minor negative impact, then I think we should be encouraging our students to take a few risks and benefit from the possible opportunities.  You can’t live a life where you let the potential risks override the potential opportunities; if you do you’ll miss far too many wonderful opportunities.

I got thinking about this as I read through the comments on my previous post.  That post was about treating students with enough trust and respect to assume they will make good decisions for themselves if we provide them with enough opportunities to do so, and I finished that post by asking the question “What’s the worst thing that could happen?”  A couple of commenters pointed out that bad things certainly COULD happen if we don’t protect our students, and so we should continue protecting them by filtering, blocking and limiting access to web content that might be seen as “bad”.  As usual, the discussion revolved around the “what if we get sued for letting our children see/do/experience things that aren’t ’safe’?” line of reasoning.  While I agree we need to keep kids safe, I think that this the wrong reason for wanting to do it.  Deciding what we will or won’t do based on whether we might get sued for it is simply an awful way to go through life.

You know what? We can try to protect ourselves from risk for the rest of our lives. We can avoid doing anything remotely dangerous, just in case we get hurt.  We can wrap ourselves in cotton wool, cloistering ourselves away from anything we might find bad, distasteful, dangerous, offensive or disagreeable. We can live a life where we reduce all potential risk by avoiding all potential dangers, but in the process we miss far too many potential opportunities and I’d question whether that’s really actually living.

Many years ago I read the following poem by Kent M Keith that very much struck a chord with me.  I think it nicely captures what I’ve been trying to say in this post…

1. People are illogical, unreasonable, and self-centered.  Love them anyway.
2. If you do good, people will accuse you of selfish ulterior motives.  Do good anyway.
3. If you are successful, you win false friends and true enemies.  Succeed anyway.
4. The good you do today will be forgotten tomorrow.  Do good anyway.
5. Honesty and frankness make you vulnerable.  Be honest and frank anyway.
6. The biggest men and women with the biggest ideas can be shot down by the smallest men and women with the smallest minds.  Think big anyway.
7. People favor underdogs but follow only top dogs.  Fight for a few underdogs anyway.
8. What you spend years building may be destroyed overnight.  Build anyway.
9. People really need help but may attack you if you do help them.  Help people anyway.
10. Give the world the best you have and you’ll get kicked in the teeth.  Give the world the best you have anyway.

Oh, and I’d probably add number 11.  Mowers are dangerous. Mow the lawn anyway.

I think we owe it to ourselves – and our students – to create a life of true significance, where we decide to do things because they make our lives richer and more meaningful. It’s a very sad state of affairs when we start deciding what we will allow into our lives based on whether we might get hurt or offended or sued.

Yes, life is risky. Live it anyway.

Image Credit: Chris Betcher – CC BY-SA-NC
http://www.flickr.com/photos/betchaboy/4374316167/

Popularity: 27% [?]

A Policy of Trust and Respect

I’m a huge believer in the notion of trust and respect as the primary drivers in the relationship between student and teacher. People have occasionally told me that I’m just incredibly naive about this, but all I can talk from is my own experience, and in my own experience, building relationships of trust, respect and genuine care between student and teacher is the foundation upon which all “policy” rests on in my  classroom. I realise that school administrators will feel a need for something a little more concrete than this, but any policies, AUPs or guidelines that aren’t based on this first rule are  simply not sustainable in my view.

Take blocking and filtering for example. While school boards have the best of intentions for protecting students when they block access to web 2.0 tools and other social technologies, such policies fail the trust and respect test, because they start with an assumption that bestows upon the students neither trust nor respect.

Or what about when a school tells students that their mobile phones will be confiscated if seen? Again, this approach treats students with neither trust nor respect.

Forcing students to complete work that appears meaningless to them, asking them to remember facts that seem unconnected or pointless, again treats kids with neither trust nor respect.

So, yes, when policy makers make policies, I believe they need to think about it in terms of providing an environment of trust and respect first, and then expecting students to work within guidelines that honour that trust and respect that they have been offered.

For example, having a mobile phone in school or in class is not really a problem if it’s use is bound by behaviour that treats the student with the trust to know when and how to use it the correct way, and the respect to assume that they will. Instead of jumping up and down and reading them the riot act if we so much as even see their cell phone, perhaps we need to expect that they are welcome to carry one as long as it doesn’t get used inappropriately… after all, isn’t that how most adults would wish to be treated? Imagine if schools confiscated cell phones from teachers.There would be an outcry and a resounding “Don’t they trust us to do the
right thing?!” from staff, as they felt a sense of violation at their employers assumption that phones would be used inappropriately. As teachers, we would feel as though we were not trusted, we were not respected, and that our ability to make sound decisions was in question before we’d even done anything wrong. I have never seen an employer make those sorts of draconian rules for their employees, but I hear about it happening from schools all the time with regard to their students.  I can only imagine how untrusted and unrespected our students must feel when placed in a similar situation. I’m not suggesting that that school policy should be a free-for-all where kids just do whatever they want. Far from it. I do however think that kids should be given the opportunity to prove they can do the “right thing” before we set up policies that automatically assume they won’t.

I see the same sorts of thinking when it comes to Internet access policies. Blocking access to the web becomes far less necessary if we begin with a fundamental assumption of trust that our students will do the right thing, backed up with the respect that they are capable and able to make those decisions for themselves. Instead of assuming the worst, how much better would the environment we create in our schools be if they were based on trust, respect, and a belief that students want to do the right thing if given the chance.

I really do believe that we get what we expect. As long as we create environments that are based on the expectation that students will do the wrong thing, they probably will. Funnily enough, if we start to create environments where we expect our students to do the right thing, they will usually do that too. They will give us whatever we expect from them, but mostly, school policies are set up to expect the worst.

Seriously, what’s the worst thing that could happen if we created an environment of trust and respect?

Image: ‘James,
I think your cover’s blown!‘
http://www.flickr.com/photos/23912576@N05/2962194797

Popularity: 34% [?]

What Libraries Need

Ah serendipity, how I love it.

We have a major building project going on at school right now.  The bulldozers are busily demolishing walls from our old library, and and we will soon have a beautiful new library Information and Research Center.  From the plans I’ve seen, it should be a great space.

I was asked today to come to a meeting next month and give a short talk to a group of parents and supporters of the new school library building project.  Many of these folks are still getting their head around the massive shifts in the way information is managed.  Many of them perhaps don’t realise that the term “library” no longer means what it once meant.  Information is different in a digital age, and so libraries need to manage information differently.  My talk to them needs to cover (briefly) an overview of how information and libraries and “books” are different to what they used to be.

So I thought it extremely serendipitous when I opened my email this afternoon to find this little video.  I’m sure I’ll be able to find one minute and twenty seconds to share this video with the group.  Should be a good place to start the conversation.

I have no idea how they managed to get this little girl to say all those complicated phrases! Thanks to VALA for making the clip, and to Tony Brandenberg for passing this along via OzTeachers.

Popularity: 26% [?]

Experiencing the Unexpected

This is the first time I’ve ever done this, but I’d like to welcome a guest writer to Betchablog.  This post was written by one of my work colleagues, Pam Nutt, and was actually the first part of her welcoming address to staff for the start of the 2010 school year.  I enjoyed hearing Pam deliver this address to our teachers so I asked if she’d mind posting it here for all to read.  As you’ll discover, it was based on some of her experiences in Alice Springs in outback Australia, and I liked the way she linked it back to kids and learning.  Enjoy!
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“You’re  so privileged,” some said. “Very few people see the Todd flowing.”  Others, with an almost  reverential whisper, said “Only 1% of tourists see water flowing from Uluru.”

The sign outside the Alice Springs Desert Park said it all: “You will never look at deserts in the same way again.” Indeed. Torrential rain. Enormous umbrellas that benefited little. Puddles that we gave up walking around and just walked through. Pathways that resembled miniature Venetian canals.

I have to admit to a few churlish thoughts early on in that four and a half days of rain in the Red Centre. We were, after all, travelling with overseas friends, and the whole experience was meant to be postcard perfect – living, breathtaking Ken Duncan panoramas. And what was one of my first purchases in Alice Springs? An umbrella!

But it’s the surprise of it all that stays in my memory. The Todd not only flowing but breaking its banks in a spectacular display; the sound of it as well as the sight; the excitement of tourists and locals alike as we were all drawn down to the dry riverbed that had turned into an ever-expanding rush of noisy fast-flowing water.

And so the saga continued, with moment after moment taking us by surprise. Did it ever occur to you that you could be drowned in the torrent flowing down Kata Tjuta? That the road could be washed away in huge sections, barring your way to the MacDonnells? And to top it off, that Uluru should be shrouded in a mist that, rather than limiting our vision, enhances the mystery of the place.

Our final day at Uluru began with the obligatory dawn viewing – misty clouds on the top; subtly changing pastels beneath; the dawn of a beautifully sunny day and the sight of waterfalls glistening on the Rock. It wasn’t at all what I’d expected but it’s that sense of surprise, even awe, that remains with me. It’s a powerful and living landscape, not merely a postcard, and the fact that it was a shared experience enriched it further. Long live the experience of the unexpected.

It’s the unexpected that brings our experiences into sharp and memorable focus. I don’t wish to diminish events of unexpected horror and tragedy by not centering my thoughts on such moments. Rather, I’d like to reflect on the fact that out of our ordinary experiences come moments that can transform – the extraordinary behind the ordinary, as Patrick White observed. The power of the unexpected experience gives fresh meaning to the ordinary details of our lives.

Think of our classrooms. The fact that we have detailed programmes, desired outcomes and well-planned strategies clearly outlines what we expect in them. And these expectations are in no way to be derided, nor is the satisfaction that, at the end of it all, we’ve accomplished set goals. But I don’t ever recall being joyously excited by this. Satisfied. Happy. Gratified. Even relieved, perhaps. But what gives greatest cause for excitement are the unexpected moments that highlight the experiences of individual students. They’re often unexpected because they operate outside the formality of our written curriculum.

There’s the ‘A-ha!’ moment when a struggling student has suddenly grasped an elusive concept in terms that mean something to her.  It could be a moment we easily miss – the rest of the class has got it quite some time earlier and moved on. But suddenly, there’s a “This poem really says what it feels to…” or “Macbeth could be a today story!” or ‘There’s a pattern here that I can finally understand and apply. It makes sense!” Then you know that a student has reached out and grabbed an idea for herself, rather than noted what you’ve said in order to give it back to you in an assessment task, intelligibly or otherwise.

There’s the moment when a clever, ambitious  and articulate student quietly reaches out to spend time with someone who just doesn’t get it , taking joy from the shared experience of learning and celebrating what could seem to her to be a lesser achievement. There are the moments when students are prepared to laugh and talk with you, not just merely take down notes about what you are saying, or ask what they could have done to get 20/20 instead of 19/20. Or when a student from years ago meets you and says, “I remember in one of our classes…“ and they go on to tell you of something that they built into their life because of some interaction in a classroom.

There are the times when a group learns how to deal with accepting that not everyone is like them but is to be valued. Or the times when they understand why they are privileged, even though they’re not given everything they want. It’s a joy to see someone who rarely dips below an A sharing the moment with a student who’s excited about getting a C+.  In the rush and pressure of teaching, it’s easy to miss those moments. It’s a joy when we experience the unexpected and it brings us back to the things that really count – what kind of people we are, what we value, where our hopes lie.

At all levels in our lives, experiencing the unexpected can have a profound impact. Valuing the unexpected in our classrooms, for example, goes far beyond expecting certain outcomes in relation to some learning stage. And such an experience of the unexpected, whether it be part of an intellectual, emotional or spiritual journey, may well have begun somewhere in a classroom, both for the pupil and the teacher.

I’ll never look at these unexpected experiences in the same way again.

Words and Video by Pam Nutt
CC BY-NC-ND Image by http://www.flickr.com/photos/skemsley/204933908

Popularity: 35% [?]

Five Simple Skills

There always seems to be a lot of talk about the need for more teachers to embrace “21st Century skills”. Of course, there’s a lot of discussion about what these “21st Century skills” actually are. Many people have debated and discussed this issue, asking the question of what exactly should today’s learners know in order to function in the “21st Century”.

I’m sure there are a whole lot of really good answers to these questions that dig deeply into effective pedagogy and the deeper philosophy of education. This post is not about those things.

Instead, here is a list of simple, easily-learnable skills that I think would make life as a teacher in the 21st Century simpler and much more productive. While they’re not exactly earth-shatteringly profound in terms of the big issues of education, they are greatly useful skills to have… and in my experience they are also skills that all too few teachers seem to actually possess. I find that possession of these skills is often a reasonable indicator of a teacher’s progress along the “21st Century teaching” pathway – if they can do these things, they often “get” the bigger picture about technology and its role in modern learning.

Actually, I think I’d go beyond just calling them just “skills”… I’d tend to see these as entirely new types of literacies, because the ability to do these things is beginning to define our ability to function with fluency in these times we live in.

• Learn to search. It’s amazing how many people cannot do even a moderately complex search, using some sort of boolean thinking to narrow search results. What’s even more surprising is the number of people who do not even think to use a web-based search engine to find answers to questions that puzzle them. I find it astounding that so many people wonder about the answers to questions that are just a quick Google search away, but they never think to do it. Learn to use a search engine to find a simple answer, a fact, a quote, a statistic, a song lyric, a recipe, a price, or any other useful snippet of information. The time taken to learn this simple skill will pay for itself many times over.

• Learn to resize and crop a digital photo. Being able to crop and resize a digital photo is an incredibly useful skill that has applications in so many areas. There’s not a lot to it, and it doesn’t require any particularly exotic or expensive software. It’s useful to understand issues like how to make an image suitable for use in print versus the web. We live in a very visual world and once you know how do simple image manipulation you will find uses for this skill everywhere.

• Learn how to edit video. I once heard Hall Davidson say, given the right 2 minutes of video footage, you can teach anybody anything. Video really is shaping up to be the next important literacy, and for a teacher, the ability to manipulate short chunks of moving images is extremely valuable. Video editing is quick and easy to learn these days, and has many, many applications. Spend a little time with free tools like iMovie or Movie Maker and work out how to edit and remix video footage. You won’t regret it.

• Learn to use a HTML Editor. If you want to participate in the 21st Century you need to know how to create content for the web. And while there’s no real need to know how to write raw HTML code, it’s hugely valuable to be able to competently use a web-based HTML editor. Every web-based environment has one, whether it’s Wordpress, Moodle, Wikispaces or something else, and every time you add content to a site you need to interact with the rows of buttons above the text input field called the HTML Editor. Beyond just making things bold and italic, it’s really worth understanding the function of other tools for adding tables, embedding web media, adding images and so on. If you believe that the web has an important role to play in our future, then learn how to create simple content for it with a HTML Editor.

• Learn to think in hyperlinks. I was going to include this in the previous item, since a HTML Editor is where you’d normally create hyperlinks, but I think this skill is important enough to have its own category. Hyperlinks ARE the web. In a world that is becoming more and more reliant on the web for every aspect of our lives, you really do need to know how to create these links that help us tie ideas together. For teachers, connecting students to ideas is what we do, and the ability to create a hyperlink should be a fundamental skill. Hyperlinking totally changes the way a reader interacts with text and is therefore an important new literacy, yet so many teachers have still not come to terms with the importance of explicitly teaching their students to read using hypertext. Hyperlinking is easy to do, but it requires a different mindset to constantly think in terms of hypertext. Learn to link!

So there you have it. Five simple, easy-to-learn skills (or literacies) that will help you function better in “the 21st Century”. How many do you possess? And are there any others that you think should be on the list?

http://farm1.static.flickr.com/39/93821899_b34651822b.jpg

Popularity: 60% [?]

So What Should We Be Amazed By?

I wrote a blog post a little while back called This is Not Amazing, and the basic thrust of it was that, after more than 30 years since “the personal computer revolution”, more than 10 years of living in a post-Google World, and now almost a full decade into the 21st century, that we should stop being so amazed at things which are simply just part of our normal world.  The post gave a few examples of things that are, quite frankly, pretty average tasks that can be accomplished on a personal computer and it relayed the story of how I had a day where I kept getting told how “amazing” these rather mundane tasks were, by people that were, in my estimation, too easily impressed.  I tried to tie that all together by observing that we probably do our students a great disservice by being easily impressed by technologically ordinary things, since this is pretty much just the world they live in. I think when we ‘ooh and ahh’ over things that are simply just a regular part of our kids’ worlds we make it all too obvious that we are a little out of touch.

The comments on that post were a very interesting collection of responses; from those people who nodded their heads in total agreement, to some who felt I was being a bit condescending and impatient.  That certainly wasn’t my intention.  I must apologise for not responding to some of the comments at the time… It was the end of the school year, I had a few personal things happening at the time, and I got sidetracked in moved the blog to a new server shortly afterwards. In all of that, I didn’t properly follow up on the ideas raised in that post, and I feel I really missed the opportunity to engage in more discussion about it.

For reasons that I’ll tell you about later, I’m interested in pursuing a further response that blog post.  In particular, I’m wondering what sort of things you think SHOULD be “amazing”?  For the record, I truly believe that the world is a wonderful place with lots of incredible things going on in it, and that we should most definitely retain a childlike sense of wonder, curiosity and awe when we see things that amaze us.  I just think we need to be careful about being too awestruck by things that, really, are now just a standard part of our digital landscape.

I’m trying to build a better understanding of what people think deserves to be “amazing” (and maybe what doesn’t).  If you wouldn’t mind, could you drop a comment here about anything you’ve done with your students that you think really does fall into the “That’s amazing!” category.  I would really appreciate it.  Thanks!

Popularity: 41% [?]

Seeing with Different Eyes

Earlier this year, I had a visitor from South Africa contact me to ask if they could drop into the school at which I work while they were visiting Australia.  She was were here as part of a study tour, and had heard some good things about PLC Sydney.  In fact, her school in Johannesburg was a similar sort of school – independent, all girls, similar size – and she was interested in comparing a few ideas.  Her school was also using IWBs extensively, and was keen to see how our staff were using them.

On the day she visited, we chatted for a while in the main staffroom, shared ideas about education and various resources for learning, before finally heading off on a little tour around the school.

Because I knew she was coming, I sent an email around asking for volunteers who wouldn’t mind us coming into their classrooms. Several responded positively, so I organised to expect us to drop by their classrooms, however I wasn’t specific about times since I didn’t really know when we would be coming by… I suggested that they don’t try and come up with anything special, just do whatever they would normally be doing at that time.  I was pleased that I ended up with a cross section of year groups too, right from our very young students all the way up to some senior classes.

As we wandered about the school, we saw some wonderful teaching in action. My South African friend kept remarking on the quality of the teaching she was seeing, and how expertly these teachers appeared to get the best from their students.  And she was right – there really were some wonderful things going on in these classrooms. There was great creativity, engagement, enthusiasm and learning taking place in every class we visited, and it was very obviously driven by the dedication, passion and commitment of these teachers.

Something that occurred to me later that day was that every one of these classrooms we visited were all of teachers who had not always been teachers.  Every single one of them had done other things in their lives besides being a teacher.  For example, the Year 2 teacher had originally trained as a teacher, but then spent several years as a professional opera singer with the Australian Opera. The Year 6 teacher used to be a corporate lawyer before deciding to retrain as a teacher.  The maths teacher we visited in the high school was originally a computer programmer before he started his teaching career.

I thought about other great teachers I knew, and I could think of many examples of where this pattern seemed to consistently continue.  The number of really good teachers I knew who had done other things outside of teaching was quite astounding.  Whether they had originally done something else before discovering teaching, or whether they had started out as a teacher then left the profession to do something quite different before returning, the nexus between having out-of-school experience and being an outstanding teacher seemed incredibly obvious.

Before you jump on that last statement, I’m NOT saying that there is anything inherently wrong with teachers who have always been teachers.  Not at all.  There are many wonderful educators, many of whom have only ever been teachers, who do a fantastic job of teaching kids.  But I’d still argue the case that to be a good teacher you need to have some level of broader interaction with the wider world, and whether that comes from involvement in something extra-curricula like being active in a club or organisation, having a part-time job, doing volunteer work, helping your spouse run their business, or even having your own small business “on the side”, there really needs to be some other way of gaining exposure to the world outside the classroom.

I can’t help thinking that teachers who have this wider experience beyond the classroom, who have had to deal with that dreaded “real world” we hear so much about, add an important extra dimension to what they bring to their classrooms and to the experiences they offer their students.

We can all recognise the value of work-experience programs for students, and most people would agree that it’s important that kids get to see what life is like outside of school. But I’d like to see some sort of “real world experience program” for educators.  Perhaps teachers need to do a work experience program just as much as students do? Maybe we need an arrangement where teachers can choose to spend part of a term away from the classroom every few years, working in “the real world”?  It would help them understand the world their students are preparing for, it would give them a far more rounded perspective on life beyond the classroom, and overall I really think it would make them better teachers in the long run.

What do you think?  Have you noticed the same thing with teachers who have done other things outside teaching?  Would some sort of a teacher work experience program help make us better at what we do?

Image: ‘Visionary‘
http://www.flickr.com/photos/70405662@N00/1204637477

Popularity: 100% [?]

A Fascination with Migration Information

Warning! Geek talk ahead.  If you aren’t into the techie stuff, you may want to skip this post…

A few people asked me about what themes, widgets and plugins I decided to use on the new blog site, so I thought I’d just give a quick rundown of what I’m using, bearing in mind that it’s only been a few days and it’s almost inevitable I’m likely to continue changing my mind about a few more things. One the whole though, I think I’ve got the blog running mostly the way I want. For now anyway.

The site is running the latest version of Wordpress (currently 2.9.1) and PHP5.  It’s hosted with GoDaddy using their Hosted Wordpress plan running on a Linux server.  The domain name www.chrisbetcher.com is managing the actual DNS records for the site, but there are other domain names such as www.betchablog.com and www.betchablog.net that simply forward to it.  The benefit of that is that there are several paths to get to the real site.  These domain addresses used to point to the old Edublogs page, but I’ve just redirected them all to the new page.

The RSS feeds for both posts and comments have been created using Feedburner. The FD Feedburner Plugin was used to map all the hardcoded Wordpress RSS feed links to the Google-hosted Feedburner feeds.  The beauty of this system is that I just need to go to Feedburner and change the real feed URL for the new site and Feedburner remaps all the feeds to their correct location. This means that anyone who subscribed to the old site using Feedburner (which should have been pretty much everyone, since I set it up quite a while ago) will get an uninterrupted flow of RSS feeds from the new site. That was important to me, and one of the things that I was very conscious of getting right in the move to a new server.

As I mentioned in the previous post, I’ve tried to make every decision about the new site in light of providing the best user experience for readers.  As well as trying to keep things simple and easy to navigate, I’ve also tried to choose plugin features that help improve functionality and make it easier to interact with the content.

Here’s a list of some the other plugins I’m using and a short rundown of what they do…

• Akismet is the industry standard for managing comment spam.  It matches blog comments against a massive database of known spammers and pretty accurately targets any comments that look spam-like. I used to moderate all comments, but I expect that Akismet will do a good enough job of looking after spam that I’ve removed comment moderation to provide a better experience for users.
• Blubrry PowerPress is an advanced podcasting tool for Wordpress.  It allows media files to be added to any post, either as standalone media inclusions or as part of a proper podcast feed.  It integrates directly with iTunes and other podcasting libraries, and does a great job of integrating media into a blog.  You’ll find the occasional Best of Betchablog post with an audio version delivered by this plugin.
• Comment Ratings adds the ability of all blog users to rate any blog comment using simple like/dislike buttons.  At the end of every comment are little thumbs-up or thumbs-down icons where participants can have their say and vote for what constitutes a good (or bad) comment.
• Creative Commons Configurator adds a text block containing the relevant CC information at the end of every post, as well as to the RSS feed.  It also adds the necessary machine readable code to the blog headers so that search engines can clearly identify the blog content as being licensed under Creative Commons.  I really like this one.
• Flickr Widget adds a widget for including an RSS feed of my latest Flickr photos.  I’m in two minds about this one, and whether I should actually leave it there or not. It doesn’t look all that elegant, and really, does anyone other than me care whether I have my photos on the page or not.  I may take it off…  I haven’t decided yet.
• Google XML Sitemap optimises the code for the blog by adding XML sitemap data to make it easier for search engines to find the site content and keep it regularly spidered.  Users will never see any obvious evidence of this one, but the site should get picked up in searches much more reliably.
• PageLinksTo adds a blog feature I’ve wanted for a while. I was after a page menu tab on the blog which would take you to my wiki hosted at Wikispaces, but a standard Wordpress blog can only have page tabs that point to internal pages. By adding this plugin, the page menu tabs can now point to any URL, including external ones.
• Popularity Contest generates the list in the sidebar that ranks the popularity of content, creating a list of the top posts. It uses a definable scoring system to rank content and can take into account the number of page views, number of comments, number of permalinks and trackbacks, etc to determine overall popularity.  It also give a ton of useful statistics in the dashboard.
• Search Everything modifies the code behind the standard Wordpress search tool, making it more accurate and letting me decide what gets searched and what doesn’t.  It makes the search work much better.
• Sociable adds a row of user-definable icons at the end of each post to provide one-click access to social services like Delicious, Digg, Diigo, Twitter, Facebook, MySpace and so on, as well as some more standard functions like Print, Email and PDF.  It helps people share things they enjoyed reading.
• Subscribe to Comments adds the ability for a visitor to subscribe to a particular comment feed so they can monitor the activity in any threads they take part in.
• Ultimate Google Analytics adds Google Analytics to the site.  It tracks it all in the background, so that I can get all sorts of interesting usage statistics without inflicted it on readers.  I did include a few basic stats in the main sidebar using Clustmaps, Sitemeter and some basic subscription and Twitter stats, but these are well below the fold and much less intrusive than they were at the last site. I do like looking at the stats and find them quite fascinating. You can’t get much more detail than what Analytics offers!
• WP Favicon is just a nice simple way to add a custom favicon to a Wordpress blog.  You’ll notice it in front of the URL in the address bar.  It also get included in any tabs in the browser, making it easier to identify the site from amongst a series of inactive browser tabs.
• WPTouch adds code to a Wordpress site that helps it be identified by mobile devices. If a mobile browser is detected trying to access the site, this plugin will deliver a mobile-optimised version of the blog. The site now looks really functional, readable and usable on a mobile device… just try loading the blog in Safari on an iPhone.  It looks pretty good I think!
• YARPP, or Yet Another Related Posts Plugin, adds a list of related blogposts to the end of each post.  It’s helpful if you’ve read something and want to see other stuff I’ve written that may be related to it. I’m still fine tuning how it arrives at its recommendations, but it’s a nice way to encourage people to discover older content that’s been buried over time.

Hopefully, this combination will work nicely together to help make it a better overall experience for readers.

Finally, the theme I’ve chosen is a nice simple one called Librio.  It’s got a bit of a Mac-ish look to it, and it adds a very obvious search bar and RSS link right at the top of the page.  It’s possibly a bit plain, but I think it has a very clean appearance.  Perhaps I’m just really fussy, but I looked at many, many themes for the new blog and although they all had some nice features, I found it incredibly difficult finding a theme that had everything I liked.  Some would have a wrong font (I really don’t like serif-based fonts online), or the text was too small, or the spacing of the text in the widgets was too big or too small, or the graphics were too garish, or not garish enough.  It was harder than you might expect trying to find a theme that had a relatively wide main text area – so many WP blog themes have a too-narrow column for the main text, making it hard to include graphics the way I like to include them. There were other considerations too, such as how comments were displayed, how colour was used in repeating elemants, and so on.

If I was better at CSS I could just take something close and hack it to suit but I really didn’t have the inclination for that at the moment.  Maybe something to play with later.  For now, this one will do.  It errs on the plain side, I know, but it makes it easy to see what’s what.

Anyway, that, it for now.  I’m sure I haven’t finished with it, but it’s functional, reasonably sharp looking and it does what I want.  The goal was to make it a better user experience, both at the actual website, via the RSS feeds and on mobile, and I think it does that,

OK, geekfest over.  We will now resume normal programming…

Image: ‘Stereotyping‘
http://www.flickr.com/photos/23701579@N00/1347052621

PS: Technorati, this is for you. 7PDMG5YASHWK

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