Learning in Sydney

Sydney is a great city. As well as being visually stunning, there is always something interesting going on. The Vivid Sydney Festival launched last week, which is definitely worth checking out.

With my work at EdTechTeam I love being part of the crew that runs Summits all over the world, but as a proud Sydneysider I get especially excited when we bring the Summit to Sydney. And this year I’m especially excited about the Summit because of a few extras it brings with it, which I wanted to tell you about.

First, the actual Summit itself is being held in a NSW public school for the first time. We’ve run the event in private and Catholic schools in the past with some wonderful host schools. But I’ve always wanted the public sector to be able to share the Summit experience too, so I am thrilled that this year EdTechTeam is able to partner with the NSW Department of Education and Anzac Park Public School to host the 2017 EdTechTeam Summit featuring Google for Education. The NSW DET has made Google GSuite available to every public school across NSW via the DET Portal, so there are a lot of teachers and students in these schools who will soon discover just how amazing these tools are and how they can change the way our schools operate.  I think that’s exciting!

Anzac Park Public School is a brand new DET school in North Sydney. It features modern learning spaces and an open design, and the DET was especially keen to showcase it as a great example of their future schools. I know it will be a great place to host the 2017 Sydney Summit and I’m sure those who attend will enjoy spending time there.

Of course, whiel I’m excited that more public schools can join us for the Summit this year, the event is open to ALL teachers in every sector – public, Catholic and independent.

Find out more about the 2017 EdTechTeam Sydney Summit here

In addition to the actual Summit on July 4 and 5, there are also two more awesome events on either side of it.

The first is a PreSummit workshop for anyone wanting to prepare for their Google Level 2 Certification exam. It’s being run the day before the Sydney Summit on July 3, also at Anzac Park, you can take part in a full day bootcamp workshop that will not only be a great hands-on deep dive into the GSuite tools, but also get you ready to sit the Level 2 exam and get certified in them. If you’re after the certification and would like some support in getting it, this is for you.

Find out more about the Level 2 Certification Bootcamp Presummit here

Then following the Summit on July 6 (at a venue still to be announced), EdTechTeam Press will be offering a full day masterclass with the authors of three amazing books about educational change – Trevor Mackenzie from Canada, author of Dive into Inquiry, Lisa Highfill from the USA, coauthor of The HyperDoc Handbook, and Holly Clark, the coauthor of The Google Infused Classroom. These three authors will take you on deep dive into the concepts discussed in the books, and help you apply the principles in your classroom/ It’s like a book club on steroids! There is also the opportunity to extend that learning with some pre and post discussion group activities online, and I think this is a great opportunity to try something different for your PD needs.

Find out more about the EdTechTeam Press Masterclass Booktour here

Three great PD opportunities for one great city!  Hope to see some of you there!

Image Credit: Wikimedia Commons via Destination NSW CC BY-SA

Push Me, Pull Me

It’s an interesting sign of how this connected world we live in actually works when I see people coming back to revisit an idea that was floated months earlier, still mulling it over and willing to come back and re-clarify things again in their own head, which in turn helps others (like me) to re-clarify things in mine. I’m referring to a post called Unlearning, Relearning, Learning by Graham Wegner, who was in turn responding to an earlier post written on this blog back in May this year.

The conversation had basically turned to the idea of how people learn. Graham referred to another post from Dean Groom, where Dean talked about the idea of people being able to learn on demand, when they need it, by accessing the wealth of available online resources that are scattered across the Internet, produced by the millions of members of the online community. This mass-sharing has produced what Dean referred to as “the scattered manual”, where the instructions for doing pretty much anything can be found and reassembled in order to learn, if only you have the skills to do so. I hadn’t heard that idea of the “scattered manual” before, but I really like it because that’s pretty much exactly what it is… a collective knowledge of many people scattered right across the network. When one has the skills and ability to decode, reassemble, aggregate the parts of the “manual”, then that elusive “independent learning” becomes a real possibility for anyone who wants (and knows how) to get it.

I think there are two very different and distinct aspects of learning something… one is obviously the learning, and that seems to be a “pull” activity initiated by the learner. Learners need to assume responsibility to pull information to themselves when they feel they need it.

The other aspect is teaching, and that seems more like a “push” activity, where information is pushed towards the learner, usually by a “teacher”, or someone who already has the knowledge, skills or understandings that the learner does not yet have.

As much as we talk about reinventing education by doing away with “teaching” in favour of “learning” (usually as a reaction against the industrial model of education where teachers taught and students were supposed to just absorb it, and in doing so restore learning to its rightful place) I think we need to be careful that we don’t push the pendulum too far the other way and marginalise the act of teaching altogether.

My feeling is that good teachers know when to actively teach, and when to allow students to independently learn. Good teachers know when to push and when to allow pull. They know when to say to a student “this is how you do it”, versus saying “you need to go away and think about this for yourself”. It’s not that Teaching should take precedence over Learning, or that Learning is somehow less tainted with the stink of the 20th Century than Teaching, but rather, we need to know where the balance point is, in various situations, for different students, and apply that balance dynamically so that every student is always right there on the edge of their Zone of Proximal Development. A learner’s reach should always exceed their grasp, but only by the appropriate amount, and perhaps the teacher’s role is to keep that gap at the appropriate amount.

As a teacher, I want to have the wisdom to know when to say to my learners (including when these learners happen to be other adults), “You seem to be struggling, let me help you”, and conversely when to say “I will not do this for you, as it only deprives you of the opportunity to learn it for yourself.”

I don’t think you should ever do for someone what they can and should be able to do for themselves. The “scattered manual” exists so readily that to deprive learners from the opportunity, and in doing so absolve them from the responsibility, to learn for themselves just shortchanges everybody in the long run.

You Don’t Have To Like It

I just read a post on a mailing list where the topic touched on teachers that struggle with technology.  The phrase that really got me going was something about making allowances for teachers who don’t like or understand technology (whether they are new grads or close to retirement) and how this is all a bit hard for them. This is something I feel really passionate about so I have to say it…

Technology in schools is NOT a new thing.

I just cannot accept excuses about technology being optional, whether it’s from someone who is new to teaching or others who are close to retirement. There are children in those classrooms every day who deserve the best education we can offer them, and it is completely unfair if that education is less than it should be because someone wants to pick and choose which aspects of their job they feel are important.  No child should have to put up with out of date learning experience just because their close-to-retirement teacher is “taxiing to the hangar”.

Computers started appearing in classrooms back when I was still at teachers college more than 25 years ago. There has been an expectation from EVERY school, school system and government policy that I’ve worked under in the past 20 years to embed and integrate technology into the education process.  Using technology in the learning process, and having some understanding of it and what it enables our students to do, is NOT something that was dreamed up in the last few months, or that appeared suddenly with the DER/BER/<insert acronomyn here>.

I’m so tired of having the integration of technology into learning overlooked because it’s “too hard”. As educators – actual professional educators, who actually go into classrooms every day and teach for a living – we do NOT have the luxury of choosing whether we should be integrating technology, or whether we want to learn more about it, or whether we think it’s relevant to the learning process.  It is, it’s part of the job and if people don’t think so, then they ought to be getting a copy of the Saturday paper and looking for a something else to do where they CAN be selective about what part of the job they are willing to take seriously without it impacting on our future generations.

Your government, your state, your diocese, your school system, your school, have all been mandating this technology integration requirement for at least 20 years that I’m aware of. Every school I’ve ever worked for has dedicated many hours and dollars to providing professional development, training, resources and equipment to make it happen.  The fact that we are STILL having this conversation about teaching professionals who are not up to speed with this stuff after all this time is downright embarrassing to the profession.

It makes me crazy when I hear people talking about using technology in the classroom as  being “hard”, as though it’s also optional.  Every job has hard bits, but if they are part of the job, you just learn to do them.

You don’t have to like it, you just have to do it.