Kids And Learning | Betchablog

8May/1010

Lifelong Learners?

I got interested in computers and their potential uses in teaching and learning way back in 1982 when I was at Art School/Teachers' College. I met a guy named Colin who worked in the media center at the art school who had taught himself how to program in AppleBasic on the original Apple IIe machines. He was doing all sort of really interesting stuff with these machines, writing his own programs for randomised poetry, creating graphics, creating maths problems, etc. Colin and I became good friends and I asked him to teach me how to program too. It was INSTANTLY obvious to me that computers and technology generally could be used to support, assist, extend and just generally make learning a whole lot more interesting, and even as a preservice teacher in the early 80s I was always trying to come up with interesting ways that computers could be used to make school more interesting.

Like most colleges at the time, the college I attended didn't offer any computer-based courses. I went and had a chat to the Dean and asked why. I still remember the conversation... he didn't know why, he just assumed that a computer was used for administrative stuff, keeping lists of students and managing who paid fees, etc, but hadn't really thought about their use in education. After some fast talking, I managed to convince him to let me vary my course units for the next semester to do an off-site computer programming course and have it count towards my regular course credits. And so once a week for the semester I traveled across town to a different college to do a three hour programming course.

The following year, I managed to convince the Dean that such a course should be a standard offering for everyone planning to be a teacher. To cut a long story short, the college did start to offer a course called "The Computer and the Art Educator" held offsite at another nearby university, and counting towards our regular course credits. This course used primitive graphics tablets, graphic software and programming skills to explore how computers could extend themselves into classroom use. It was 1983. I was rather pleased that I was able to play a part in helping other people see what appeared so obvious to me.

Funnily enough, there were many of my college friends who could not see the point of computers at all, and would argue with me that they had nothing to do with what happens in a classroom. They just weren't interested in learning about something that didn't interest them.

Since that time, I've worked with a lot of teachers to help them see how much better learning can be with the wise use of technology. I've tried every approach I can think of, and at the end of the day, I still don't know why some people just "get it" and some just don't. To me, it's so darn obvious! Having taught in a technology rich environment for over 20 years now, I have seen over and over how the use of technology can motivate, engage and inspire students to learn better and to be better. I've seen kids just "switch on" when they learn with computers. More than that, I've seen how the use of technology for learning can actually change a teacher's practice and pedagogy for the better. I've seen the effects of increased student motivation and engagement, and I've experienced the evolution of my own teaching to take a more student focused, more choice-driven, more differentiated approach to my teaching.

Ok, so having said all that, it drives me crazy when I see other teachers who simply don't "get it". I've experienced the frustration of working with supposedly-intelligent adults who appear to be unable to move beyond the ability to cut-and-paste. I even had one colleague at a previous school admit that she had been avoiding technology for years, and I found out that she did not even know how to use basic mouse functions. How do you even function in a school these days without these skills! The frustrating thing about these situations, for me, is that part of my role in this particular school was doing technology support for the staff and despite every effort to provide support for these sorts of people, they always managed to avoid any help that was offered to them. No matter what model of technology support we tried they managed to avoid taking advantage of it.

They remind me of the people in this video clip... as soon as the external forces stop, they stop too and then seem incapable of moving forward for themselves.

So that's at one end of the spectrum. At the other is people like you and I who probably just need a bit of guidance to get started and then we assume some responsibility for our own learning. We accept that if we want to learn something new, then taking on the task of learning it is actually up to us, not someone else. Any assistance we get from others is seen as a bonus, not a requirement.

I will go so far as to say that those teachers who actively avoid learning about (and teaching with) technology are abdicating their basic responsibility as teachers because they are failing to model and live out the basic quality that every teacher should have - curiosity and a sense of lifelong learning.

Every school's prospectus I've ever seen talks about how they aim to produce students who are "independent, lifelong learners", but so many teachers continue to display an embarrassingly low level of responsibility for their own ongoing learning, and are therefore poor models of what they expect from their students. I find it frustrating that so many teachers willingly accept that there are certain unavoidable parts of their job, and yet they steadfastly resist adopting the use of digital technologies and act as though they are free to pick and choose what parts of their job they are willing to enact. Why is the embracing of technology for learning still seen as so optional by so many?

The answer is probably that they don't yet see the benefits. They haven't seen the kids' eyes light up when they do something truly interesting with computers or technology. They still see it as another optional add-on to their already busy day. They see technology as something that has to be "bolted on" to what they are already doing, instead of something that can help them do what they already do even better. They might have experienced failure in the past because of something that went wrong, something that didn't work, and they don't want to look foolish again. Perhaps they just think that if they can hold out for a few more years, this will all go away, or they might make it to retirement. (although I think age has very little to do with it)

Of course, this is not true of all teachers, and there are many, many excellent educators that embody and model all of the traits of lifelong learning that they expect from their students. A lot of teachers are very good at this, but there are still far too many that don't. And frankly, I think that's unacceptable.

Image: 'I am still learning'
http://www.flickr.com/photos/47244805@N00/303567279

Popularity: 4% [?]

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 6:30 — 4.5MB)

Tagged as: change, learning, lifelong, pd 10 Comments

12Apr/103

Digigirlz

A few weeks ago, I got an email at work advertising a free technology event for teenage girls run called DigiGirlz. It was being run by Microsoft Australia and it's aim was to promote careers in the IT industry for girls. It's a good idea. Women are far too under-represented in IT in Australia (and probably other parts of the world too) so I'm all for supporting any initiative that can help attract smart, creative women into the world of technology.

The event sounded like it would actually be pretty interesting. It was being held at Microsoft's main Australian Offices at North Ryde and offered a chance to meet some of the inspirational women who work at Microsoft to find out what they do, and to have a chat with several Australian universities about the sorts of career paths that IT might offer. There was also a couple of hands-on workshops in Microsoft's Photosynth and DeepZoom technologies, as well as a chance to to see the new Project Natal gaming platform. It all sounded pretty interesting to me! However, we don't offer any IT courses at PLC (that's right, none! Something I'd like to see change!) so I wasn't quite sure who I'd ask to attend the event.

After a phone call to RSVP for the day we were offered 15 places at the event, so, using the Feedback Module in Moodle to collect details of interested students, I offered it to our Year 10 students on a first-in, best-dressed basis. 13 students responded positively and when the day arrived (March 24 - which was Ada Lovelace Day of course!) we all bundled into the PLC minibus and made our way up to North Ryde.

The folk at Microsoft went out of their way to try and give us a great experience and provide a range of things to see and do. They gave each student a goodie-bag with information, fed them with snacks and drinks, and then put them into groups and rotated them through the 4 sessions. We had a short address by a very dynamic female executive who works at Microsoft Australia and a few shorter addresses by several others.

The students then went off to their four workshop sessions, which they rotated through for the next couple of hours. Overall, I thought it was a useful experience, although I had a few suggestions for how it might be improved for next time...

While it was a lovely gesture to feed the students before they started the sessions, getting teenage girls all revved up on soft drinks and chips just before you then ask them to sit still and listen for the next few hours was not a great idea.
The discussion sessions with both the women from Microsoft and also the university people were informative, but too long. Kids don't want to just sit and listen like that, at least not for that long!
The hands on session in Photosynth and DeepZoom was pretty good, although there seemed to be a few technical hiccups in the session I saw. I'm still not really sure what to make of these technologies, and beyond a mild cool-factor, I wonder just how useful they really are.
The biggest disappointment was the session about the Project Natal platform. Natal is the next generation of the XBox 360, and takes gaming to a new level by enabling natural interaction without wires or controllers. It's been floating about on YouTube for a while now, but I was really keen to actually see it in action. Alas, all we got to actually see of Project Natal was a PowerPoint with a few videos (the very same ones that are on YouTube) Although we were told that Natal was getting close to release for this year, there was no working demo to play with. Despite the fact that we were being told about Natal by former FragDoll, Ashley Jenkins (who totally knows her stuff when it comes to games!) we didn't see any live game demos at all. I thought this was a big mistake by Microsoft, and I thought it odd that a product apparently so close to release would not be given a demo. It would have been good (even expected!) to see Project Natal in action, but even without the live Natal demo I thought we would have at least had some real live gaming action with Ashley, perhaps showing us what a really serious gamer is capable of on the regular X-Box platform. Instead, we saw a PowerPoint with a few product roadmap slides and a brief exposé of Ashley's gamer heros. To be honest, I was looking forward to this session the most, but I thought what we were shown was a bit lame under the circumstances.
It might be good in future events to include some sort of hands-on programming experience - kept fairly simple of course - as there would be many students who have never had a go at programming a computer before.

Overall though, despite these little criticisms it was a worthwhile experience and the feedback from students that I saw was politely positive (although I felt it could have been much more hands-on, practical and faster-paced to hold the full engagement of the students). PowerPoints and roundtable talkfests might be fine in the corporate boardroom but this style of presentation misses the mark somewhat with most teenage girls. I know that quite a few people mentioned this in their evaluation forms, so I'm sure that next year will be even better.

Thanks to Microsoft and especially Catherine Eibner for running the event. (And thanks also for the XBox 360 raffle prizes, one of which was won by one of our students. You were very popular for that one Catherine!)

Popularity: 3% [?]

Tagged as: adalovelaceday, digigirlz, itcareers, Microsoft, projectnatal 3 Comments

23Feb/100

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: 2% [?]

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 50:18 — 29.9MB)

Tagged as: bva, heppell, podcast, virtualstaffroom, vsr No Comments

14Feb/107

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: 6% [?]

Tagged as: aup, Policy, respect, trust 7 Comments

10Feb/102

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: 3% [?]

Tagged as: books, digitalnatives, information, Libraries 2 Comments

5Feb/102

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: 4% [?]

Tagged as: flood, rain, toddriver, uluru, unexpected 2 Comments

14Jan/1014

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: 8% [?]

Tagged as: perspective, profession, realworld, teaching 14 Comments

18Dec/092

Ways of Working

I hope you've all been following the K12 Online Conference this year. There have been some fabulous presentations coming out of this year's event and, as usual, there has been a diverse collection of topics and ideas with something for everyone. You can check out the entire conference at k12online.ning.com

I had the privilege of being able to contribute to the conference again this year with a presentation called Ways of Working. I must admit that it deviated a bit from my original submission idea, which was to create a movie that followed the processes used by three different students as they responded to a task from their teacher. I was planning on looking how each of the three students used the web and social technologies to take a slightly different approach to dealing with the set task.

As so often happens, the intention of what I wanted to do was quickly drowned out by the time and resources I actually had to make it happen, so the presentation morphed into what you see above. It's not exactly what I'd planned, but I'm still pretty happy with it... it still looks at most of the things I wanted to include, but just not in the way I'd originally envisioned.

It was an interested experience to hang all this stuff off a single focus point, in this case, the Sculpture by the Sea exhibition that takes place in Sydney each October/November. I particularly liked the idea of using SxS as the core for the presentation because I know of quite a few schools that do actually use it as the basis for a thematic unit of work for their students so I know that it really does have a "real world" use in education. I was also quite fascinated with the way that social media and web technologies have infiltrated and expanded the event over the last few years, and I think it offers a great example of how the web and the real world can collide in a good way. I also liked the notion that the use of technology in schools can (and should!) be used to support real live physical events, and that technology really can be used to enrich a real world experience. And finally, because K12 Online is such an international event, I wanted to take the opportunity to showcase a little bit of Sydney, this beautiful city in which I feel so lucky to live.

Hope you enjoy the presentation, and that you take the time to check out the other 79 or so presentations that have been part of the conference this year.

Popularity: 3% [?]

Tagged as: k12online, k12online09, sydney, waysofworking 2 Comments

12Dec/094

The more I know, the more I realise I don't know

Crossposted on the Adobe Education Leaders blog (http://blogs.adobe.com/educationleaders/)

I remember the first time I saw Photoshop.

I think it must have been about 1993 or so, when I got a free copy that came with a scanner purchased by my school. It must have been a "lite" version of Photoshop because I seem to recall that it didn't support layers. Even so, I really enjoyed playing with it, and I ended up installing it on all the computers in the school computer lab (license? what license?) and I started teaching the kids how to create stuff with it. They just blew me away with what they could do with it, even without layers!

It was around the same time that I stumbled across an unused copy of Aldus Pagemaker in an out-of-the-way cupboard, and I convinced the school principal that we should use it to do the school yearbook; his agreement to my suggestion saw me suddenly escalated to head of the yearbook committee, a job that rolled on for many years and many issues beyond that. Of course, once you start working in Pagemaker (and now InDesign) there is a fairly fundamental expectation that Photoshop is a key part of that workflow.

From these accidental beginnings, I developed a long standing relationship with Photoshop. In the late 90s I was working with students to build collaborative websites, and of course all the graphics were done with Photoshop. We discovered all sorts of interesting features like batch processing, we learned to do decent colour corrections, to crop and manipulate images so that they fitted our needs. We discovered, often the hard way, about important concepts like pixel depth, image resolution, colour gamut, and of course the one that catches every self-taught Photoshop user out at some stage, RGB vs CMYK. We made images for the web and for print, we built graphics from scratch and we did weird things to existing photos. I'm just a teacher, not a graphic designer, but I've lost track of the hours and hours and hours I've spent inside Photoshop over the last 15+ years.

And here's the thing about Photoshop. Heck, here's the thing about pretty much all of Adobe's products... the more I know, the more I realise I don't know. Every time I learn some new technique or skill, the self-satisfied smug feeling of cleverness lasts about five seconds before I realise that there is just so much more I could know about it, that I could do with it. Whenever I taught kids a unit of work on Photoshop I used to conclude it with an in-class practical test, where I'd give them some images and a problem to solve - it might be to produce some CD cover artwork or a magazine cover, usually with a few constraints or requirements to make them have to think about it a little - and they'd just astound me at what they'd come up with. "Creative Suite" is a good name for these products, because they really do force you into creativity mode. Most of the time after one of these class tests, I'd spend the next few lessons getting the kids to deconstruct what they'd done, to teach me how they got certain effects. In my Photoshop classes I may have been the teacher, but we were all learners.

When I was offered a place in the Adobe Education Leaders program, I was thrilled to be part of it, and felt relatively well qualified to be part of it given that I'd spent over 15 years teaching Photoshop, Indesign, Dreamweaver and Flash to students. Of course, mixing with other AELs and seeing the fantastic things they do is a great way to reinforce just how little I do actually know, but it's still been an incredibly valuable association for me.

I got thinking about this lately because I've been checking out the tutorials on the newly redesigned Adobe TV. It's an awesome resource, with every application now having a Learn series, a set of basic tutorials that teach the essential skills required to get up to speed quickly... I wish this had been around when i started playing with Photoshop! As well as the Learn tutorials, there are a bunch of more advanced tutorials that delve into some of the trickier and more esoteric concepts.

And Adobe TV is not the only resource I turn to when I want to know more. There seems to be plenty of other places to learn the how-to stuff for Adobe's products. Some of my favourites are the Layers TV podcast with Corey Barker and RC, the Creative Suite Podcast with Terry White, Creative Sweet TV with Mike McHugh, Instant Indesign with Gabriel Powell, The Russell Brown Show... the list goes on. I subscribe to all of these through iTunes and they just drop onto my iPhone for later watching. It's a great way to learn. I'm sure there are many other fantastic resources for learning this stuff... perhaps you could leave a note in the comments about some of the resources you have found useful for learning.

Finally, I just wanted to mention a book I bought recently about Photoshop that is quite simply one of the most amazing Photoshop guides I've ever seen. It's simply called Creative Photoshop CS4 by Derek Lea, and I'm just stunned at how incredible this guy is when it comes to Photoshop. I've been working my way through some of his exercises and have been discovering something new on almost every page. When you can use a product for over 15 years, and still constantly discover new things, it says a lot about the depth of the product and the open-ended nature of what it lets you do with it.

I realise more than ever that there is so much I don't know about Photoshop (and most of the other Adobe products!) But I love that feeling of learning, of discovering, of digging deeper and just discovering that there really is no "bottom" to hit.

Popularity: 2% [?]

Tagged as: adobe, photoshop, podcasts, tutorials 4 Comments

7Dec/095

Staying On Message

Over the last year or so, I've been invited to present at a number of conferences, including a couple of keynotes. It's been an enriching experience, and one I enjoy immensely, although I do always end up feeling like I'm "a mile wide and and inch deep", to coin a well-worn phrase. I feel like I know quite a bit about a lot, but not a lot about anything. Despite the fact that I like to dabble in lots of stuff, I'm not sure I'm really a master of any of it.

This afternoon, I was asked to run some workshops for another Sydney school, to talk with some of their staff as they prepare to launch on a journey of 1:1 student computing next year. I took a workshop session with a small group for an hour, then presented a keynote to the whole staff for 45 minutes, followed by facilitating some planning and goal setting with a small group of teachers. I took an approach with today's sessions that I rarely do... I prepared nothing in advance. Normally when I present, I spend hours beforehand, collecting resources, planning what I want to say and figuring out the best way to say it. I assemble a presentation, set up a wiki page and so on, and go into the presentation fully prepared.

Today I didn't. I just rocked up, opened my Macbook and essentially asked, "what would you like to talk about?" There were reasons for that... It was partly because I wasn't given a lot of notice for these sessions, so I didn't have any time to put together something super organised. The other reason is that the brief was pretty open-ended, without a really firm outline for what needed to be covered. But mostly, I went in there ready to fly by the seat of my pants because I've come to understand that I can. I do actually have a good enough overall knowledge of technology, of education, of what I think is important, what I believe matters in education, and a pretty good mental catalog of what resources I have at my disposal. I find it relatively easy (and I quite prefer) to "make it up as I go along", just me and a web browser. Conversations can't be planned in advance, and I wanted these sessions to be more of a conversation than a lecture. In fact I started the workshop by opening a Google Doc, and asking the group "what do you want to talk about today?" Their responses - the differences between Web 1.0, 2.0 and 3.0, the use of blogs versus wikis versus discussion forums, and useful Web 2.0 tools for the classroom; these were not things I would have predicted in advance, but were apparently what this groups wanted or needed. We explored a number of other ratholes, including an exploration of Wikipedia and how it works, along with some simple ideas for developing a PLN. I thought the session went well, and the feedback was positive.

But it was during the keynote that I actually learned a lot about myself. Again, I didn't prepare anything in advance, but simply had the topic "ICT in my school: Lessons learned" as a starting point. My reasoning for not preparing was that I live this stuff every day... I shouldn't need to "prepare a talk" to give this talk.

Having listened to a lot of presenters at a lot of conferences over the last few years, I've noticed that many of them have a consistent message. A theme. A common thread. Some, even almost a mantra. There are influential people within this ed-tech sphere that have their own important message to share, and they become almost synonymous with their message. They talk about all sorts of stuff, but they manage to stay "on message" all the time. I'd often wondered to myself, as I shotgunned around all sorts of interesting but largely unrelated ICT topics, "What's Chris Betcher's consistent message?" What is the one thing that underpins all the other stuff I'm interested in? It's easy to be a dabbling dilettante and be interested in lots of different things, but it's harder to have some sort of consistent structure that it all hangs off. I had no idea what mine was...

And here's what I learned about myself as I talked to this group today with no particular agenda. I do have a message. There were consistent themes I found myself coming back to over and over, themes that are really at the core of what I believe education is all about.

Trust in people. I honestly believe that, by and large, most people are good people with right intentions and will naturally do the right thing if given a choice. This belief has implications on how you treat those around you - colleagues, students and others. It affects how you manage your schools, how you build community, how you interact with your students, how you design learning tasks. My basic belief in people permeates every decision I make in every interaction with others. I was asked by a teacher today for strategies to help deal with kids in a 1:1 environment, and my answer, without even thinking about it, was "Build trust". I don't think it's the answer she was looking for, but I honestly believe that it was the best answer I could possibly offer. Trust your students. Trust that they will do the right thing because the work you give them is interesting enough and they want to do their best at it. Trust that they would much rather do the right thing than the wrong thing. I know that there are many who think this is a Pollyanna attitude; that you should plan for the worst rather than budget for the best, but that has never worked for me.

Have high expectations. I also believe that kids are far more capable than we usually give them credit for, and that by and large we present them with fairly small-minded tasks that require fairly small-minded efforts. We ask them to write a few paragraphs when they are capable of writing a short novel. We give them tasks that are too uninteresting, too unchallenging, too mundane, and we too often short-change their potential to be great. We need to set the bar high, expecting greatness from them, pushing them to exceed the capacity they, and we, often mistakenly believe they have. Trust that they will meet your expectations. I always expect the best, especially from kids, and I usually get it.

Understand what a teacher is supposed to do. I don't, and have never, believed that the role of a teacher is simply to "teach" students by imparting a fixed body of knowledge. We are so much more than that. Our job is to know our students well enough that we can find interesting things for them to do, things that help them see their world in ways that they have never thought about, then provide them access to the resources, tools and ideas they need to explore those interesting things, getting out of their way enough that we don't impede their own natural progress, yet available enough to help them when they require it. I truly believe this is my job. I'm not there to do it for them. I'm not there to watch them fail. I'm there to connect them and their interests to a world of possibilities they have not yet discovered for themselves.

I don't think teaching is all that difficult, and I suspect we usually overcomplicate it with a whole lot of stuff that just clouds the issue. There are standards and outcomes and requirements for graduating, sure. But the real focus of education is pretty simple. Help your kids find their passions. Trust that they can. Believe that they will. And get out of their way while they do it.

That's my mantra. That's my message.

Image: 'Slide'
http://www.flickr.com/photos/11705469@N07/2047419687

Popularity: 2% [?]

Tagged as: believe, lesson, mantra, message, teaching, workshop 5 Comments

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