Ed Tech | Betchablog

9Mar/1110

Speaking Clearly

Dragon Dictate This is an experiment. I'm using DragonDictate, a program for the iPad that lets you talk directly into the computer as it turns your words into text. A teacher at school today asked me about using dictation and word recognition software for her students that had trouble with learning.

I think it's a great idea, although the problem will probably be that in order to have speech recognition recognise your voice you do need to speak really clearly in the first place. For many kids, especially the ones that struggle with learning, speaking clearly can be almost as difficult as writing. Still, I think we will try the experiment because, well, the software is free and it would be interesting to see just how well it can handle the students voices.

I'm dictating this blog post into dragon and I'm going to publish it pretty much as it was recorded mistakes and all if you see mistakes in this you'll know why. And if you don't see mistakes in this then you can assume that DragonDictate has done a pretty good job of changing my speech to text.

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Tagged as: dragondictate, speech2text 10 Comments

27Feb/115

Coincidence or Connection?

One of the things that my American friends are always very proud of is that they claim to live in a country where dreams can come true and where everyone has an equal opportunity of success. They call it “The American Dream” and all over America young children are told that anyone - even them - has the opportunity to grow up and become president one day.

Of course, if you’re a young American, the reality is that while anyone can potentially become president, the probability of it actually happening to you is somewhere around 1 in 307,006,550 (which is roughly the number of people living in the USA at the moment). So while you possibly could become president, it’s far, far, far more likely that you won’t be!

If you did happen to somehow end up as the President of the United States, the odds get even more staggeringly unlikely that your son or daughter will also become president. Mathematically, the chances of two people from the same family both becoming President of the USA are around 1 in 9.42530217 × 10¹⁶, or, as my math teacher friend Darren Kuropatwa likes to call it, zero. While both people may have the same opportunity as anyone else, the statistical likelihood that two people from the same family will both end up holding the office of president starts to become so unlikely that you might as well call it impossible.

Yet, we all know that this has indeed happened in the past. George Bush Sr held the top US job between 1989 and 1993, and then his son George W Bush held the same position from 2001 to 2009. The odds of two people from the same family both reaching the office of President are very, very unlikely, yet it happened.

And this is not the first time it’s happened. Back in 1797, John Adams earned the US presidency and then his son John Quincy Adams took on the same position in 1825. And let’s also not forget William Henry Harrison, who became president in 1841, and then 41 years later so did his grandson Benjamin Harrison. What’s going on here? How can something so unlikely keep happening multiple times?

It’s not just politics either, it happens in other fields of endeavour as well. In sports, the Williams sisters, Venus and Serena, have done a similar thing, with both of them being ranked as the number one female tennis player in the world at various times. The statistical likelihood of getting to be the world’s best at anything may seem unlikely, but the chance of two from the same family should be nearly impossible.

Australian readers will remember the Waugh brothers who played cricket for Australia back in the 90s. Like becoming president, becoming an elite athlete is hard work and requires a great deal of focus, dedication and effort. Rising to a world class level is highly competitive and although many try to get there, few actually do. And yet Mark, Steve and Dean Waugh bucked the odds when all three brothers from the same working class family in southwestern Sydney ended up representing their country in cricket. The chances of one of the brothers playing cricket at the elite level is slim, but you’d imagine that the chance of all three of the boys doing it would be near impossible.

And yet, these things do actually happens far more often than you might think. You don’t have to look too far to find plenty of examples of people from the same family, group, team, organisation or school achieving significant unlikely success together. If you just look at it from the perspective of statistical probability, getting multiple people from the same family or group or school to succeed at a high level might seem unlikely to happen, and yet it does happen with surprising frequency. So what’s going on here? Are some people just in the right place at the right time? Are they just lucky? Or is there something else going on?

When you stop and think about it, it actually makes a lot of sense. Although it may seem almost paradoxical at first, the notion that your own performance can be raised up by the associations and connections you create with those around you in the same field is really not all that surprising. When Venus improved her game, it probably spurred Serena on as well. When Serena learned to improve her serving technique she probably passed on some of that learning to Venus. Being around other people who are achieving excellence doesn’t reduce the likelihood that you’ll learn from them, it dramatically improves it!

If you know someone who has reached the top of their chosen field, and you spend a lot of time with that person, it usually makes it more likely that you will succeed, not less. You get to share their passion and their enthusiasm, which often drives your own passion and enthusiasm forward as well. You get to learn from them, which helps you avoid some of their mistakes while benefiting from their experience. You can get caught up in their competitiveness, which often drives you to be better, to try harder, to practise a little longer. Despite the apparent odds of more than one person succeeding at an elite level, it would seem that associating with like minded people who share your passions dramatically improves your own chances of success. As any sports star will tell you, the best way to improve is to regularly play with other good players.

How does this principle apply to you as an educator? What are the associations and connections you surround yourself with? Who are the people you associate with and learn from? How do you get to be part of an “all star team” that can drive your own learning and professionalism forward?

I’d suggest that the analog for committed educators is to development a strong Professional Learning Network, or PLN. I’m sure that those of us who are connected through tools like Twitter, the blogosphere, Skype, etc, can attest to the remarkable difference it makes. Not just a little bit, but an enormous amount. Being connected to the right people, being part of the right networks, sharing ideas and conversations with the right people… I would rate the idea of being a “connected educator” as the single most crucial thing you can do for your own ongoing professional development.

This all struck me as I was sitting in a meeting in Melbourne today with a group of leading Australian teachers. Many of them I consider to be some of the best educators I know. Many have enormous wisdom about teaching, about learning, about education, about schooling, about educational technology, about being an effective and fluent citizen of the 21st century. In short, these were a bunch of fine educational minds. At one point, it was noted that although many of us had never met in person before, we already shared many connections and the fact was cited that nearly all the people in the room were active members of the OzTeachers List (one of the longest running and most active educational online communities in the world).

Someone commented that it was quite a coincidence that, in a room full of leading educators, so many were all OzTeachers members. To which I would respond, it’s not a coincidence at all. In fact, it’s more likely the whole reason we were there in the first place. This was not a room full of random teachers who, surprise, surprise, all happened to belong to the same online community. Out of this “random" group of teachers, virtually everyone there could claim to be part of numerous shared networks of connection; ADEs, GCTs, Edubloggers, Classroom 2.0ers, Twitterers... The room was full of people who already knew each other from online networks. Coincidence? I think not.

This was a room of teachers who were already connected in numerous networked ways, and it was undoubtedly these connections that were the very reason they were asked to be there in the first place. It’s through being connected, belonging to shared communities of practice and being part of each other’s professional learning networks that makes leaders, not the other way around.

It drives me crazy when I meet teachers who continually resist the idea of belonging to online networks of like-minded educators. Like so many others in that room in Melbourne (and around the world in many other networks of connection) I know the undeniable value of being connected to others, of sharing ideas, of speaking a common language. I know what an amazing difference it makes when you expose yourself to a steady stream of innovative ideas, resources and people. Being connected to other passionate people exposes you to more good ideas in a single day than most unconnected educators will stumble across in a year. I honestly believe that being connected to others is the single best thing you can do for yourself and your own professional growth. As Steven Johnson says, “Chance favours the connected mind”.

So if you’re already a connected educator, congratulations... I’m sure you can attest to what a huge difference it makes in your own professional life. If you’re not, then maybe it’s time to finally bite the bullet and do it.

I’m sure Venus and Serena would agree.

Photo by emmettanderson

Popularity: 18% [?]

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 9:01 — 10.3MB)

Tagged as: chance, connectedness, leadership, pln, usa 5 Comments

18Nov/102

Ideas for End of Year Slideshows

It’s that time of year when I start to get a lot of teachers at school asking me for assistance with creating an end of year slideshow of photographs of their classes, often with an intention to create a DVD that can be sent home as a memento of the year.

It’s a lovely idea, and I encourage it. The kids love it, and it’s a lovely way to finish the year.

To assist with this, I thought I’d offer a few tips and suggestions on making slideshows...

Start by gathering all the photos you intend to include into a single folder. It’s much easier if all your assets are already gathered in one place before you begin working with them.
Use a piece of software well suited to the task. Although PowerPoint is often suggested, it’s a bit of a dog when it comes to putting these types of presentations together. PowerPoint is the right tool for slideware presentations, but it’s actually not very good at doing “slideshows” with music. The end product of PowerPoint is, well, a PowerPoint file, and it requires PowerPoint to view it, so it can’t just be “played”in the same way a video can.
Instead of PowerPoint, try a tool like Photostory. It’s much easier to get your photos in the desired order, add music and narration soundtracks, add titles, etc. Plus, it gives you an actual video file at the end so everything is nice and self contained. It’s the right tool for the task, and does a much better job than PowerPoint!
You could also try a web 2.0 service such as www.animoto.com, which makes amazing high definition slideshows with only a few mouse clicks. Feed it your photos, choose a template and you’re done! Both myself and the school have Animoto Pro accounts, so you can use this to make your shows if you like. Just see me if you want the login details.
You can copy the final slideshow file onto a disk, either a CD or a DVD, as a way of distributing it. However, getting your video onto a DVD – that actually plays in a DVD player, as a DVD – requires several more steps and some more specialised software. Ask me for more details if this is what you want to do (and be prepared for more work to do it!)
If you want to make multiple copies of the finished disk, there is a CD/DVD duplication tower up in IT Services. If you take your master copy up there, and a stack of blank disks, that’s the fastest way to make lots of copies.

Then there is the thorny issue of copyright for the music... (sigh)

Please respect copyright when you choose your music! If you just want to make a slideshow with a music backing track, you are in a very grey area (copyright wise) if you just rip commercially available music from a CD, or download it from the web. If you were just using it in class, then you’d probably be fine, but if you intend to make multiple copies and distribute them to parents... well, personally, I think you’re taking a big risk.
While you may never get caught for flaunting copyrighted music, you never know whose parent just happens to be a copyright lawyer. And you’re certainly not modelling good ethical use of media to your students. If they see you ripping commercial music from CD, or downloading illegal music files from the net, then you’re just encouraging them to do the wrong thing. Is that really what you want to do?
There are plenty of free and legal music sources you can use, where the music has been released under a Creative Commons license, or some other Open License. Sure, it’s not going to be Top 40 stuff, but there’s lots of great musicians out there making amazing music that they quite willingly give away for free use. Why risk a copyright violation (and worse, set a bad example for the kids!) when there are plenty of legal, ethical alternatives you can use. Do you REALLY need a soundtrack by Pink?
For copyright free music, take a look at www.jamendo.com or www.freeplaymusic.com. It’s amazing what’s out there.

Photo Credit: Slide Viewer by bcostin
NB: This post is based on an email I sent to all the staff at school

Popularity: 11% [?]

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 3:31 — 4.1MB)

Tagged as: copyright, creativecommons, slideshow 2 Comments

26Oct/1020

Teaching Kids To Think Using Scratch

I've been teaching Scratch to my students lately, and it's made me remember just how much I enjoy dabbling with programming. I'm really not much of a code monkey, but I do enjoy writing programs, telling the computer what I want it to do, and then having that feeling of mastery when it actually does what I tell it to do!

I heard a lot about Scratch before I actually started using it myself... people kept telling me how good it was, but for some reason I never really got around to trying it myself. When I finally did take a look at it, I couldn't believe I waited so long to check it out! It's a GREAT piece of software that all kids should spend some time learning how to use. I'd encourage you to NOT make the same mistake I did, and wait so long before looking at it.

I taught myself to write computer programs back in the 80s on a second hand Commodore Pet computer. It used a form of BASIC, the same language used on the original Apple II computers, and I thought learning to program was the coolest thing ever. Being able to write instructions into a computer and get it to do stuff was a real buzz for me... a geeky buzz to be sure, but a buzz nonetheless. :-)

Over the past 20 years I've taught quite a lot of programming to children and without fail it's something they get a real kick out of. They really seem to engage with the big ideas of programming - problem solving, thinking mathematically and using logic and reasoning. It's the practical application of those ideas and the creative thinking required to solve authentic problems that forms the basis of a truly engaging learning experience. While I don't believe that everyone necessarily needs to become a computer programmer, I do think that everyone would benefit from learning the basic skills and mental gymnastics required to write simple computer programs. I've found it to be an incredibly useful skill, and the underlying understanding it gives into computers and how they do what they do has come in really handy over the years.

Scratch takes all of the essential programming constructs like sequencing, conditional branching, control structures, data manipulations, etc, and wraps them in a very friendly, very easy to use environment that even the youngest students can use with just a little knowledge. It's quite intuitive to learn and you can do simple things fairly easily, yet there is really no limit as to how far you take it. Don't be like me and hear about it but do nothing... download a copy now, give it to your kids and watch the magic happen.

For this year's K12 Online Conference I did a presentation about Scratch, called Teaching Kids To Think Using Scratch. It's trying to squeeze a lot of stuff into a small space, since the presentations are capped at 20 minutes, but I think it's a reasonable introduction to some of the key ideas behind Scratch.

As you can see in the unscripted footage of the kids towards the end of the video, they talk about solving their own problems and figuring out how to work things out for themselves... to me this is what real learning should be all about. Watch the clip of the two girls working out what the variables should be in order to make the sprite move exactly the way they want, the engagement on their faces, and the expression of triumph when it finally works the way they want... as Lexie says, "Scratch brings out your inner awesomeness!" I think she's right.

There was so much more I wanted to include in this video, but I simply couldn't squeeze it all in. Instead, I'm going to add some further resources at www.chrisbetcher.com/scratch, so drop by and take a peek at what's there (It's a bit of a work in progress, but it's an open wiki so feel free to add anything you think might be useful!)

Popularity: 45% [?]

Tagged as: k12online, k12online10, mit, programming, scratch 20 Comments

24Oct/108

Thoughts on the Sydney Motor Show

Visit http://ipad.io/QD5 to hear my latest ipadio phonecast

Or listen here:

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Filed under: Ed Tech 8 Comments

24Sep/100

Chance Favours The Connected Mind

Great video. Great message. I must read this book.

Where Good Ideas Come From, by Steven Johnson.

Popularity: 3% [?]

Tagged as: connecteness, ideas, stevenjohnson No Comments

20Sep/105

Totally Unorganised

I think I can safely say I've just been to one of the best conferences I've ever attended. It was well run, well organised and I believe provided content that was highly relevant to all the participants. The irony is that the day before it all started, it was completely unorganised and had virtually no content planned at all. I'm talking about the Learning 2.010 Conference held last week at Concordia International School in Shanghai, China.

I think it's really important to draw a clear distinction between being unorganised and being disorganised. Disorganised is when things are a complete mess, no one has any idea of what's happening, people are not getting their needs met and it leads to frustration for everyone involved. This conference was definitely not disorganised.

Unorganised, on the other hand, implies a understanding that learning is messy and that when we need to learn something we learn it best if we can learn it just-in-time, not just-in-case. When you put together a conference about learning, being unorganised means recognising that you can't meet someones needs until you know what those needs are. Being unorganised means that you don't assume that you know what's best for people, but rather, you ask them what they need. Being unorganised implies flexibility, adaptability, and a willingness to listen to what people really want, at the point when they want it.

It also implies a huge risk, since you are inviting people to attend (and prepay for) an event that essentially does not yet exist. It would be far easier, far safer, far less risky, to run a conference the way they are traditionally organised... Bring in some smart people to speak, get them to stand on the stage and impart their wisdom to the assembled masses, and perhaps preplan some added workshops on what you think people need. That's the accepted way to run a conference, the safe way, the "normal" way, the organised way... doing it any other way is a risk and a challenge to the status quo, and potentially a threat to people's expectations.

However, those with the goal of shifting and reshaping education know inherently that this traditional model of conference planning flies in the face of what we proclaim learning is truly about. It's ironic (and hypocritical) that conferences about contemporary learning should remain modeled on a structure that so blatantly contradicts the way we keep saying that learning should work in the 21st century.

The organisers of Learning 2.010 accepted this risk and, from what I could see, it paid off handsomely. The event was run on the basis of having two quite different component parts... the first was based on a cohort (team) of learners that gathered around a key idea and worked together to explore that idea in depth over the two days, and the second component was an unconference that ran 90 minute workshops in whatever content emerged from the participants.

The cohorts were led by a team of international educators who were hand picked by the Learning 2.010 organisers (or should that be unorganisers?) and I felt extremely honoured to have been included in this group. These are some of the smartest, most forward thinking, contemporary educators I've ever had the pleasure to work with, many of whom I already felt I knew well from their blogs and online presence. There were many that I've wanted to meet in person for a very long time and others I hadn't previously known of, but it quickly became pretty clear that this was an extraordinary group of talented educators.

As one of the invited cohort facilitators, I arrived into Shanghai the day before the conference started so I could be part of a brainstorming and planning session with the other facilitators about what and how we might make the cohort component of the conference best happen. Although we did have general themes to guide us, the exact structure of how we'd run the sessions, what resources we'd include, how we'd manage our cohort groups, etc, was all fluid... essentially, we had four 90 minute sessions over the 2 days and we could do whatever we wanted in them. Most themes had two cohorts, each with its own facilitator, that could be run independently from each other, or could be combined together, or some combination of these.

I was lucky enough to be teamed up with Melinda Alford, a teacher at Concordia (the host school) on the topic of Creating a Culture of Learning and Creativity. Originally from Atlanta, Georgia, but having now worked in Shanghai for the past six years, I'd not met Melinda before... in fact she was one of those teachers that wasn't even on my PLN radar. But after working with her for a few days I have to say she is one of the most talented natural teachers I've ever met and it was a real joy to be able to work with her. It's so nice when you get to work with someone who is really on the same wavelength. who shares so many of the same ideals about learning and education and is so easy to work with.

As we started to plan how our cohorts would operate, we decided not to run in two groups, but rather to combine them into one. Our general plan was to facilitate a guided conversation about the ideas of creativity and curiosity in learning, follow it up with some ideas and examples and strategies for developing creative opportunities for students, and then allow our group to organically break up into small teams based on interest and need, and produce something to share with the whole group in the final session. The "something" was open-ended, but was basically a resource, an activity, a plan, something, that could be put to use the next week in their classroom. We wanted to challenge the thinking of our cohort, but be practical and get them to actually create something they could use. We were also very focused on the idea of creating a learning environment for our cohort participants that modeled the type of learning that we were expecting them to create for their students... open ended, flexible, learned centered, challenging, hard fun. Our plan was to facilitate, not lecture. Share, not teach. Encourage, not demand.

We spent part of that first planning day tossing ideas around and creating some visual prompts. One of my big beliefs about the notion of creativity is that it should come from both sides of your brain. We were both very keen to encourage the idea that creativity is not something that just applies to "the arts", not something that you only find in strange "arty" types who dress in strange clothes, not something that is applied to problems occasionally in a superficial way... we wanted to get the idea across that creativity is a critical thinking skill that applies to all disciplines, in all sorts of ways, all of the time. Melinda and I both had backgrounds in the creative arts as well as science and engineering, so we found it easy to weave this into our planning. To make the point, at the social event held the evening before the conference officially started, we got up on stage to promote our cohort sessions, me dressed in Elmo pyjama pants and a set of large donkey ears, and Melinda in a giant chicken outfit. At least we got noticed!

So, in a 24 hour period, we went from having a cohort session with no structure, no content and no ideas, to having a session which was highly personalised, based on meeting the needs of the participants and built on the strengths of the facilitators. I might write more about the cohort sessions later, but I felt like it was a great success.

The other component of the conference was the unconference. Again, the problem with traditional conferences is that you sometimes don't learn what you'd really like to learn, and it treats the "presenters" and the "audience" as two groups. If you believe that learners and teachers can have a much flatter relationship that that, the unconference model makes a lot of sense. At the first social event of the conference, participants were encouraged to write on a large sheet of paper a topic that they'd like to learn about. Equally, they were also encouraged to write down a topic they'd like to share about. These pieces of paper were then sticky-tacked to the wall and people could add a vote to the ones they were interested in the most. The ones that had enough votes then ran in the next unconference session time.

So, for example, I offered to run a session on teaching kids to think using Scratch, since I've been doing a lot of work on this back at school. So, I offered the topic, volunteered to be a presenter for it, people selected it, and it ran successfully. Conversely, someone else added a request for a session about Photoshop. They were not willing or able to run it themselves, but they were very interested in learning about it. Because I'm a bit of a Photoshop guy, I was happy to add my name to that as the presenter, and the session went ahead.This is really the spirit of an unconference. It's about flexibly and dynamically connecting learners together to learn about the things that interest them. You can't plan that sort of thing in advance because you have no advance idea of what those interests will be. An unconference only works if you place your trust in the wisdom of the crowds, if you believe that none of us is as good as "all of us". If you believe that someone in the crowd will have the expertise to share with others, and the humility to accept that that expertise can come from anywhere, then learners become teachers and teachers become learners and our learning environment becomes flatter and less hierarchical. It goes from being about teacher and student, moving away from being about "us and them" to just being about "us". And this is so much more reflective of the way true learning actually works.

Of course, you can see why this is risky. If participants turn up as empty vessels waiting to be filled, who see professional development as something that is done "to them" by someone else, then this is all destined to fail miserably. What I like about the unconference model is not just that it's a far superior way to learn - because it is - but that it works on the underlying assumption that people are inherently good. It's based on the fundamental ideals of sharing and teamwork, and the belief that most people are just as eager to give as to take.

It assumes the best from people, and that's always a better environment to work in.

Popularity: 11% [?]

Tagged as: learning2010, learning2cn, shanghai, unconference 5 Comments

26Aug/108

Redesigning Learning Tasks: Part 3

My role at school is all about trying to helping teachers leverage technology to come up with more interesting and engaging ways to help their students learn. Some of our older students are in laptop programs which gives them fulltime 1:1 access to their own computer but many still do not, especially in the junior years. Which is a bit of a shame since there is, I think, so much scope in the younger grades to use technology in interesting ways that support the curriculum. Unfortunately, with the way things are structured at the moment, our primary kids get scheduled into a single one hour lesson in the computer lab each week. That's not really my preferred option, as it's hard to get technology integration working in an ongoing, embedded way when it involves trotting off to the computer room once a week.

Ironically, all our primary classrooms do actually have a small pod of four desktop machines in them, but unfortunately I don't really see them getting used in any consistent, meaningful way. Technology integration is still, by and large, reliant on that one hour a week of "computer time" in the lab. However, whether I like it or not, it is what it is, and until the system changes it's a limitation I have to work with.

Ludus - our school Blog Server Our Year 4 students are doing a unit of work on Australia at the moment, so I started the term by having a planning session with the Year 4 teachers to look at how we might weave ICT into the unit. A couple of years ago, the ICT component was - you guessed it - making a PowerPoint about Australia, but thankfully we've tried a some new approaches over the last few years. For the past two years we've been using blogs to get the kids writing about Australia, in fact I think we've come up with some good ideas for structuring the writing process when blogging. We started off using Edublogs, but after having a particularly frustrating series of outages, the school decided to set up our own WordPress MU server and gave every student their own blog on that system. It took a bit of fiddling to get the feeds on the front page working the way we wanted, but that internal WPMU site worked quite well for us. Because we run Moodle, we recently installed Mahara as well, which also provides blogs for students and so I guess we're a bit spoiled for choice at the moment when in comes to school blogging.

Although the blogs had worked quite well for us in the past, for the unit of work on Australia the Year 4 teachers felt that they wanted to try something a bit different, so we brainstormed some ideas and came up with an idea that I think has worked very well.

For me, ICT integration becomes far more interesting when it involves lots of little skills used in a lot of different ways that student have to piece together into a finished product. I like it that way because it give them a broader understanding of the way that technology tools fit together, and I think helps their understanding of how technology can assist them cross over into many areas. I also like the idea of providing a structure, a scaffold, so that even our struggling students have a clear framework to work within. However, surrounding that scaffold should be flexibility, options, choices, and a way for more able students to scale their work up and allow for that important differentiation.

What we came up with was a project called 25 Moods of Australia. We brainstormed a collection of words (it started as 25 words, but grew to 50) that described various moods - haunting, hostile, creepy, effervescent, etc. Using a free wiki (where every student and teacher was given their own login) we published a list of all the words. Working in pairs, the students then adopted a word from that list. There are 50 students in the two Year 4 classes, so working in pairs required 25 words. The reason we came up with 50 was to give them a choice of what word they wanted to select, and to provide some extra words in case any students wanted to do a second one.

Armed with their chosen words, each student pair started by creating a new blank page on the wiki for that word. Then they had to find a clear, concise definition for the word (so that they understood it) and they then added that definition to the wiki page. They used both regular paper dictionaries as well as online dictionaries. It was useful to compare the two.

The next job was to use Flickr to find a photograph taken somewhere in Australia that they felt captured the meaning of that word. This was quite tricky... the Flickr search engine is not as sophisticated as Google's and so to find a photo that both described their word and was taken in Australia required some thinking. It involved looking carefully at the images, at the tags, at the captions, and using a bit of detective thinking to find photographs that met all the criteria. To make it even trickier, we had a talk about copyright and the use of other people's photographs without permission, which led to an interesting discussion about Creative Commons. The students picked up on this idea very easily, and now know how to use the Advanced Search feature in Flickr to find photographs that are free of traditional copyright restrictions. (I was feeling very encouraged to hear from their teachers that they are also now being much more mindful of copyright in other areas of their school work, and they've been observed looking for Creative Commons images for other projects as well! I consider that a major win!)

Once they found an image they like, they then used the All Sizes selector in Flickr to find the 500 pixel, medium-sized version of the photo and they copy it to their desktop. They also copy the URL of where they got the image so it can by pasted into the photo caption as an attribution, required by all CC licenses. Once the photo is copied to their computer, they then upload it into the wiki (we used Wikispaces) and insert it into their page.

The next job is to go to Google Maps and find the location of where that photograph was taken on the map. This is also tricky, since not every photo makes this clear. Some photos are geotagged with the exact location of where they were taken, but many are not. We talked about geolocation. We learnt to look at the tags, the keywords, the captions, the other photos in the Flickrstream, and to look for clues that might give us an idea about where the photo was taken. And sometimes, when their were no clues, we had to make educated guesses about where the photo could have been taken. Once we decided on a location - either a definite location based on real clues, or an imagined location based on common sense, the students found that place in Australia on the map.

Using the Link option, they then generated the embed code for the map, copied it, went back to the wiki and created a widget. They pasted the embed code into the widget and saved the page to reveal the embedded Google Map of their best estimate for the location of the photograph.

The last step is for the students to then write a couple of paragraphs talking about their photograph and why they think it represents their focus word. This can be quite a challenge, as they have to think very carefully about how exactly they will justify their selection, describing the photo and linking it back to the key ideas in the definition of their word. They also need to write about the map location and explain how they knew (or guessed) that the photo was taken in that place.

As you can see, it's a task that contains a LOT of small pieces. It contains lot of ICT skills and techniques and understandings in a number of areas. It is a task of small pieces loosely joined. It's also not a task that can be plagiarised. It's not a task where there is a "right answer", as any answer could be right if it was justified well enough.

Remind yourself, these kids are 9 and 10 years old. And they have shown themselves to be perfectly capable of moving information around, remixing, repurposing and restructuring it in fairly sophisticated ways. They quickly pick up the ideas of bringing all the pieces together to make something new. I think they are using some reasonably advanced information skills, as they learn to search, evaluate, synthesize and create with the information they find, and then add value to that information by interpreting and summarising and justifying it. In short, I've been really impressed with what they can do. And even more impressed with what they can't do, but can learn to do.

You can visit the wiki at http://ausmoods.wikispaces.com, although at the time of writing it is still a work in progress. The final stage, when everything is complete, will be for them to use the discussion tabs on the individual pages to leave comments and feedback for each other.

I think it's been a really good task, with plenty of really worthwhile ICT skills built in, as well as an integrated use of literacy, writing, geography, thinking and reasoning, collaboration, and so on.

If only we had more than an hour a week to do this stuff...

Popularity: 7% [?]

Tagged as: Australia, mapping, Photography, wiki, year4 8 Comments

28Jul/102

Just Not My Type

I've been a but sporadic here on the blog lately. I've got all this stuff in my head that I want to write about but to be honest, I guess I just haven't felt much like the physical act of typing lately. I'm actually a pretty lousy typist, despite the fact that I've tried, seriously tried, to develop a good typing technique over the years. I've had typing lessons, I've used computer typing tutor software, and I've tried to force myself to use the right touch typing technique. But all of that, and I still can't really type all that well.

When I was at school as a student, I actually did a proper typing course. In fact, I'll digress for a moment and mention that my school offered something that I've not really seen in too many other schools since... every Thursday afternoon we did "activities". We all got to choose from a wide range of activities to do for a few hours every Thursday. Some students went off to play sport, running around the basketball field or ripping each others' heads off playing football. That was never really my scene. I was one of those other more nerdy and anti-social children, who pretty much avoided sport wherever I could.

There aren't all that many things I actually remember about school, but a couple of things stand out. I remember going off to the AGL gas company in Hurstville where we did cooking lessons on Thursday afternoon. I thought it was neat, being a 14 year old kid, jumping on a train to go the two stations up the line, finding the big AGL building, and having some other adult besides my regular teacher showing me how to cook a different meal each week. At the time, learning to cook didn't quite have the same prestige as being on the football team, but over the long haul I know which one has been most useful!

Back to the typing story... the other memorable Thursday activity (call me weird) was doing a typing class. I remember being taught by our library assistant, Mrs Sobb. She was a older lady and boy could she type! I remember going through all the usual finger training activities - asd, asdf, asd;lk, dad, sad, fad, gad - and so on. I particularly remember that she had a set of large white mens hankerchiefs with long thin ribbons attached to each corner. She'd tie two ribbons together behind our neck and the other two ribbons were tied to the typewriter (yes, you heard it, typewriter!) The hankie would then be suspended like a square hammock between the typewriter and our bodies so we couldn't see the keyboard. We just had to place our hands on the home row, by feel, and bang out our lines of sad dads.

Anyway, enough wandering down memory lane. Suffice to say, sometimes as much as you try to learn the "right" way to do something it doesn't always stick. But even as a "bad" typist, I've still written a book of 60,000 words, and a quick back-of-the-envelope calculation suggests that since I started this blog I've probably typed well over 300,000 words here as well. Add in the other blogs, wikis, emails, discussion forums and various things I've written (typed) over the last few years and it's interesting to consider that someone can be fairly average at something but still produce something relatively worthwhile.

I guess the lesson is that sometimes it's more important to actually just DO something, rather than worry about doing it perfectly.

Popularity: 3% [?]

Tagged as: Blogging, typing 2 Comments

4Jul/1017

Should Students Learn to Write HTML Code?

I saw an email from someone today suggesting that they would be starting next term to teach their students to write HTML code from scratch, so the kids could make their own webpages. My initial reaction when I read this message was to ask "Why?" Why would anyone bother to learn HTML coding from scratch when there are so many great editing tools around? Surely, in a WYSIWYG world, learning how to to actually write HTML code is a complete waste of time? With so many great web editing tools around, isn't learning to write raw HTML code a pointless exercise?

In once sense, these are valid questions. There's no doubt that the majority of websites these days are created using a templated approach and an "engine" such as WordPress, Drupal, Joomla, Squarespace, etc. It's also true that for any really customised web work, it would still fall to a workhorse like Adobe Dreamweaver or something else, such as excellent free tools like KompoZer or NVU editor.

However, on reflection, I think there is a great deal to be said for being able to understand basic HTML code. Take using Moodle as an example... as much as I would like to tell my teachers at school that Moodle has a wonderful WYSIWYG editor, and that it will automatically format all the text and images for you just by cllicking on the little buttons in the editing bar, the fact remains that I still find myself hitting the little <> button on the Moodle editor bar to dive into HTML code on an almost daily basis just to fix little quirky things that are going on.

It's also true that, although you can use the buttons on the editor to align text to the left or right (which in HTML, behaves quite differently to how it behaves in, say, Word) knowing a little bit about what those buttons are actually doing on a code-level makes it much easier to predict how things will actually look. Being able to manually write a link to a URL, being able to strip out some rogue heading level text, fixing paragraphs that have gone askew because of a stray tag, and so on... these are all things that I find myself doing fairly regularly, even WITH access to fancy WYSIWYG editing tools. I taught myself the basics of writing HTML nearly 15 years ago now (well, to be completely honest, one of my students taught me!) and I can't even begin to tell you how handy it has been and how often I have used that knowledge. Although I would like to think that we are living in a world where it SHOULD be completely unnecessary to know how to write HTML source code, the truth is that over the years it's proven itself to be a damn handy skill!

Even being able to use the provided code to put an YouTube video or a Google Map into a wiki or blog, for example... sure, you CAN do it without having the slightest idea of how it all works, but if you want to make a minor adjustment such as changing the width or height of the frame, just being unintimidated by the code makes a big difference to your general level of technological fluency.

I'm not saying that everyone should be able to write heavy-duty CSS code or be able to create complicated PHP script, but HTML is dead simple... and for the number of times I find myself rescuing a page because of a relatively simple adjustment to the underlying code... I gotta say, I can't think of anyone who would not benefit from knowing the basics.

So, should this teacher spend time teaching his kids to code? Some may disagree, but I say yes. My advice would be to teach kids to write a fairly simple webpage. They should know the core structure of html, head and body. They should understand heading levels (and depending on the age of the students, how these can be tied to style sheets). They should know how to manually write (or at least understand) the code for a hyperlink, for an image, and for an embed. It's good to know these basics. I guarantee you those kids will find them useful at some point in their future.

For the majority of your students, that's probably all they need to know. Then, once they have a grip on the basics, switch over to a decent visual editor like Dreamweaver or similar... some tool that lets them switch back and forth between code view and output view. Output view will make SO much more sense once they see the relationship between code and output!

And who knows, just that small exposure to the underlying code could make all the difference to that one kid in your class. It could open them up to a whole world of coding and being interested in what really makes a computer tick. In this WYSIWYG world, God knows we need more kids like that!

And if nothing else, you'll at least understand why the picture that goes with this post is so funny!