Schools | Betchablog

9May/1211

In None We Trust

I wonder how many teachers would be prepared to gather all their students together at a school assembly sometime and say the following to them ...

"Look, we just need you all to know that we do NOT trust you. We've talked about it, and we think that given the opportunity, you will all get up to no good and make poor decisions. Because of this, we plan to closely monitor your every move and to make sure that you don't get away with anything, ever. We plan to prevent you from doing common tasks that are probably perfectly fine and safe. However, since we are, after all, assuming that you won't be able to make your own good decisions about those things, we have taken the liberty of making those decisions for you.

Essentially, we think you are all a bunch of thieves, cheats and liars with no sense of morals or ethics, and you probably spend all your time looking at pornography anyway. We have no intentions of assuming anything other than the worst... as I said, we really just don't trust you.

Thank you, that is all. You may now go to class."

Nah, we'd never do that to our kids, would we?

Now, here's your locked-down school-supplied laptop. Have a nice day.

Popularity: 14% [?]

Filed under: Kids and Learning, Schools, Security 11 Comments

17Mar/124

I remember being at a university Open Day once and walking past some girls, obviously in their final year of high school, trying to decide what course they should enroll in at uni. I couldn't help overhearing their conversation about how they planned to choose... one was considering study based on the likelihood of getting a job from it, and her friend was considering her future choices based on which career paid the most. While I suppose these are both somewhat relevant factors, the idea that young people would be making choices about their life direction based on which had the shorter job queue or which helped them buy their first car quicker made me a little sad.

I often think that the conventional wisdom we give kids amounts to "go to school, get a good education, get a good job and work real hard", and it's something that has always bothered me. As adults, parents, and especially educators, we talk a lot to our older kids about the idea of "getting a job", and we prepare kids really well to be employees. We teach them at school how to write a job application letter, and how to prepare for an interview, and about the expectations that employers might have of them. We tell them to be careful about what information they put online about themselves because it may one day be Googled by a potential employer. We build a paradigm in kids' heads that we are preparing them to be outstanding employees. And whether we talk to our kids about having a job, or a career, or a vocation, so often it's still couched in the general idea that they will be working for someone else, operating on someone else's goals and priorities, relying on a paycheck from someone else. In most schools we manage to build "good employee" mentality really well.

What I think we don't do so well it to build entrepreneurial thinking. We often don't do a terribly good job of preparing kids to follow their dreams in any sort of independent, entrepreneurial way. We focus so heavily on teaching them to be good employees that we almost never teach them to be business owners. We teach them how to write a resumé, but not a business plan. We teach them how to sit for an interview but not how to create a start-up. I've never heard a careers adviser tell a kid to start their own company. Despite the fact that we educators talk a lot about developing "independent thinkers with a love of life long learning", it's quite amazing how well we train them to be compliant rule-followers that are good at fitting in to the expectations of the system.

For many students, the $20,000 it costs them to get a undergraduate degree would be better spent as startup capital in a venture that allowed them to follow their passions. But most of them never even consider that option... we do a pretty good job of educating that out of them.

I'd love to see kids leaving school with a greater understanding of the real options that lie before them and more of a sense that they should be following their dreams and their passions, and that doing that might not always mean further study or going to work for "the man".

PS: This post started out as a comment on a blog that my principal recently started writing. Pop over and take a look at the post that triggered this one at http://paulburgis.com/?p=54. I thought I'd repost my comment here, but do check out Paul's original thread and help create some traffic over there. Ta!

Image credit: http://www.ineedmotivation.com/blog/2007/08/what-motivates-an-entrepreneur/

Popularity: 13% [?]

Tagged as: employment, entrepreneur, lifechoices 4 Comments

7Feb/1233

Be Better

I want our schools to be better.

I believe that the biggest improvement we can make to our schools is to be fussier about who we allow to teach in them.

I look forward to the day where the teaching profession is non-unionised, and underperforming teachers who have lost the passion and spark that our students so deserve are able to be relieved of their duty.

I hope we find ways to identify those teachers who cannot teach, or have lost interest in doing it well, or who see what they do as a paycheck rather than a calling, and find ways to respectfully but firmly move them on, as they have no place in today's classrooms.

I want to be a part of a teaching profession where you need to reinvent yourself every year, where having interests and skills outside "the system" make you better at what you do, and where we don't confuse "20 years of experience" with "1 year of experience, repeated 20 times".

I want an educational system where students experience the joy of learning from teachers who are still themselves joyful about learning.

I want my own children to be taught by passionate, caring teachers who lose sleep at night wondering how to be better at what they do. And I want to be one of those teachers for other people's children.

I think we owe these things to the next generation.

Popularity: 29% [?]

Tagged as: qualityteaching, rant, teaching 33 Comments

29Nov/110

My Edublog Award Nominations 2011

2011 has been an interesting year for blogging.

I feel like my own personal blogging has been really suffering lately, not just from being really busy at work, but also from the endless distractions of Twitter and Google+ which, if I let them, could easily become my sole places for sharing stuff online. Certainly, there are some people, like Mike Elgan, who use Google as their sole online presence and funnel all their other online stuff into G+. It's a potentially intriguing strategy, as the engagement factor on G+ is certainly very high. You could also argue that Twitter has replaced a great deal of sharing that was one done via blogs, and there's little doubt that between the "Big Three" of Facebook, Twitter and Google+, the nature of blogs and blogging has shifted considerably since I first started using them back in 2005. I'm blogging less, for sure, and it definitely leaves a void that I miss filling.

However, this was also the year when I introduced a whole bunch of new bloggers to the wonders of blogging. At my school, I encouraged the teachers of Reception, Kindergarten, Year 1 and Year 2 to give class blogs a try. It's been resoundingly successful, with the Reception and Year 2 classes in particular really running with it.

Then, our Year 6 teachers, librarian and kids took part in a well-structured blogging project as part of an AIS-funded AGQTP Action Research project. The Year 6 teachers got time away from classes to learn about the culture and skills of blogging, and then they shared it with their students, who each got a blog and used it quite extensively during the latter part of the year.

Our junior school librarian also jumped on the blogging bandwagon too, and created both a Junior School Library blog which she regularly updates with library news and information, as well as a Book Review blog that is growing in popularity.

All in all, it's been a busy year of blogging for many people I work with!

My Nominations

I would love to recognise some of these school-based blogging efforts that have emerged this year by nominating some of them for an Edublogs Award. Bear in mind that these are all brand new bloggers, people that have never done it before and were willing to get in and give it a go. I really admire their willingness to try something new and learn some new skills. I'd love to see their efforts rewarded with some recognition, and of course some additional traffic. I think they really deserve it.

So, my nominations are...

Best Class Blog: From Little Things Big Things Grow: The PLC Reception Class Blog, by Sophie McKendry and Jaclyn Casella - In their simplest form, blogs make brilliant journals, and this Posterous blog has been a fabulous journal of the year's activities for this class of 4 and 5 year olds. With 39 posts over the course of the year, they have added photos, audio recordings and writing to document the many important classroom events from 2011. The reaction from parents has been overwhelmingly positive.

Best Class Blog: The PLC Year 2 Blog by Catherine O'Doherty, Lisa Case and Katrina Avery - This blog has been used to connect, collaborate and communicate with our parent body and the world, and has generated an enormously enthusiastic response from the teachers, parents and students alike. It contains student work samples, photos, audio recordings, scans, and writing. It also documents the adventures of Cocoa, the class mascot. The blog has had 147 posts during the year and over 11,000 views. It's an amazing first attempt at blogging and deserves some recognition.

Best Library Blog: Library Matters by Sandra McMullan - I think this brilliant new library blog deserves lots of recognition. It was started by our junior school librarian, Sandra McMullan, as a way to showcase the many great things that happen there. It contains posts, photos, stories and booklists, all designed to encourage greater dialog and exposure to what goes on in the library. It's a stellar first effort at blogging, and really think it deserves some recognition. In addition, Sandra started a second blog for book reviews which links of the front page of her main blog.

After a fairly full-on year of introducing blogging here at PLC Sydney, there are lots more blogs floating around (including a blog for every student in Year 6). While they are all interesting, I think the ones listed above have been the real standouts, and deserve to be nominated for a 2011 Eddie.

Now please go vote for them!

Popularity: 18% [?]

Filed under: Blogging, Ed Tech, Libraries, Schools No Comments

24May/1140

You Don’t Have To Like It

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

Technology in schools is NOT a new thing.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Popularity: 85% [?]

Tagged as: excuses, integration, pd, rant, technology 40 Comments

24Mar/112

The Right Direction

As a technology integration specialist my job is to help other teachers learn more about technology, but the real spillover is that I get to help other teachers to learn more about all sorts of stuff. Because of this I've come to a much better understanding of what it means to be a lifelong learner, to find true joy in learning for learning's sake, and to be curious about pretty much everything. I love learning, and I find it difficult to understand why others sometimes appear not to.

Many schools espouse the values of lifelong learning, but not all have teachers who live those values on a daily basis. We have a new principal in our school this year, and like all management changes it often comes with a great deal of conjecture about what might change, what new ideas will be put in place. Over the last few weeks I've been able to get an insight into our new boss and what's important to him, and to get a feel for where our school might be heading over the next few years. And for many reasons, I'm excited about it.

In particular, I was pleased to discover that I'm working for a guy who openly states that...

‎Learning to be a teacher is like all learning: it doesn’t occur in an easy linear fashion. All of us ‎are in the business of continual improvement.

Teachers are responsible to take charge of their professional learning.‎

You'd think that such statements are obvious, but so few leaders will actually say it. What a breath of fresh air.

Popularity: 13% [?]

Tagged as: pd, teacherpd, teaching 2 Comments

15Mar/110

Inventing the Wheel

Rob is a music teacher friend of mine who works in the NSW Southern Highlands, and he dropped me an email this afternoon asking if I knew of any schools who were thinking about using iPads. His school is moving forward with an iPad trial and he was wondering what resources might exist that would help them avoid "reinventing the wheel".

As it turns out, I've been seeing a lot of iPad related information lately so I thought I'd post a reply here on the blog rather than just reply to Rob in an email, just in case some of the information is of some use to others.

I'll preface it by saying that I think there are a lot of things in education that could certainly use some reinventing, and maybe this is a good chance to do it. There seem to be a lot of schools looking at how iPads might fit in so it may be a little early to avoid the reinventing and instead take advantage of the opportunity to do some inventing. While there are plenty of lessons about 1:1 learning to be gained from the last 20 years of laptop use in schools (and we should leverage everything we've learned from that history) the iPad is a different enough device that it's causing us many of us to stop and think about how we might do some reinventing of what it means for learners. I remarked to someone recently that it's interesting that nearly every school implementing iPads is still referring to it as an "iPad trial". We're all trying to figure this out. With it's unique form factor, light weight and slim design, the touch interface and thousands of apps to explore, the iPad seems like such an obvious fit in education, it's just a matter of fitting where. It's a classic "solution in search of a problem". It seems apparent that it ought to be an ideal device for educational use, but nearly everyone is still hedging about with a "trial", rather than just biting the bullet and going ahead with full scale iPad implementations. This "reinventing" isn't a bad thing, because it means we're thinking outside the box, looking for the right niche, trying to figure out how this clearly amazing little device will find the right fit in schools. Sometimes new wheels need to be invented.

We run a laptop program at my school and we had a meeting a few days ago to evaluate the progress of it. We all agree that students having their own device has caused some fundamental shifts in the way our kids learn, create and interact with content as well as the way teachers think about designing learning tasks. There's no doubt that it's a good - no, a great - thing and has opened doors to a different kind of learning for many of our students. Many students have remarked to me that the couldn't imagine going back to the non-laptop days. It's great to hear that, although I still don't think we've really begun to leverage the full advantages of being 1:1. We're still learning too.

But there are downsides to carrying technology around. The added weight of carrying laptops and textbooks (yes I know we should be able to get rid of textbooks altogether, and we will eventually, but change can be painful and we are still in transition on some of this stuff). The fragility of having a computer in your bag and the inevitable damage and breakages can be a problem. Laptop battery life is fine when the machines are new but gets steadily worse over time, which then opens a whole can of worms regarding charging once they can no longer get through a whole day on a single charge. Traditional laptops are fine, but if only they were lighter, thiner, more compact, more durable, with less moving parts and good battery life. Sound familiar? No wonder the iPad strikes so many people as an obvious solution in schools. It's has so much of what we're looking for in a device!

I love my Gen 1 iPad, but until the release of the iPad 2 I wouldn't have entertained the original iPad as a serious contender in education. It was the classic debate between it being a "content consumption device" versus being a "content creation device". I want kids to do far more than just consume content, I want them to create it, and iPad 1 lacked far too much in this area for me to take it seriously. However, with the recent addition of cameras, enough grunt to handle tasks like video editing and multitrack audio recording, display port mirroring and a number of other big improvements, it's getting to the stage where it could be a contender for a student's main computing device. Maybe.

I'm still hedging a little and saying "could be" a contender, because I think it still depends what you want to do with them. With an iPad as your primary computing device you'd still need to be able to live without Flash (which admittedly is becoming less and less of an issue thanks to HTML 5) and the limitations of mobile Safari and the very ordinary way it renders some pages. Safari doesn't play nicely with our Moodle LMS because, being Webkit based,the browser don't show the toolbar buttons in Moodle 1.x. I'm sure 2.0 fixes this, but right now, it's a problem for us. I also find Safari does some weird things with forms and text fields. Overall, I'd really struggle with it as my main browser.

There are some issues with the way some third party iPad apps interact with school firewalls and, unless your school runs a transparent proxy, there are likely to be many apps that simply cant get through to the web. This is likely to be a problem. I also have doubts as to whether the pseudo-multitasking is really good enough to be used as your primary computing device, and there are plenty of time when I feel very unproductive because of it. Sometimes, I just want a "real" computer.

There's also licensing issues to consider as Apple haven't been very clear about just how apps can be shared and deployed on a school basis, as well as a lack of what you might call enterprise-level imaging tools. There are quite a few nuts and bolts issues like this that need to be thought through if they are to be used on a school-wide basis. Apple's own view seems to be that iPads are not really an enterprise device, they are a personal device and they aren't designed to be "managed" in the same way that laptops would be.

However, all that aside, there are still enough intriguing things about the iPad, and enough potential advantages, that I totally understand why schools are running "trials" to try and figure out just where the real limitations lie and just how they might be made to fit into a school situation.

So, with that little preamble of thoughts about the iPad, here are a few resources for Rob. Hope you find them useful, mate...

Kerry Smith's blog provides a list of schools running iPad trials in Australia - http://smik.posterous.com/ipad-trials-in-australia
iPads for Learning, a website run by the Victorian government with information about iPad trials in Victorian schools - http://www.ipadsforeducation.vic.edu.au/
Slide2Learn, a grassroots conference held in April for educators interested in sharing ideas about learning with iDevices - http://slidetolearn.ning.com/
In Their Hands, an online document full of suggestions, ideas, app recommendations, as well as pedagogical models, and implementation advice. Seems like a worthwhile document to use as a starting point - http://asp-uk.secure-zone.net/v2/indexMobile.html?id=639/684/1619&lng=en#1
There's An App For That, a Virtual Staffroom Podcast episode I recorded with three teachers in schools running iPad trials. I think it's worth a listen - http://virtualstaffroom.net/2011/02/vsr40-theres-an-app-for-that/
A post by Ronnie Burt on The Edublogger about what can be learned from an exemplary iPad program - http://theedublogger.com/2011/03/11/what-we-can-learn-from-an-exemplary-1-to-1-ipad-program/
There was a really interesting thread on the OzTeachers List earlier this month about iPads. It was started by Brett Clark (zedman350) and raised a great deal of passionate debate about what we should be looking for in school computing devices - http://lists.rite.ed.qut.edu.au/pipermail/oz-teachers/2011-March/thread.html (scroll down the page a little)
I also hear that Trinity Grammar is running a fairly significant iPad project too, with all of their senior students now carrying the devices. Might be worth chatting to the Director of IT at the school... I think you know him. ;-) (For other readers, this just happens to be Rob's brother)

Hope that helps a little. Let me know how it pans out for your school, and how that wheel gets invented. You might let Kerry Smith know too, and she can add you to that list of schools running trials.

CC Image: 'iPad with Dandelion'
http://www.flickr.com/photos/68217628@N00/4675262184

Popularity: 12% [?]

Tagged as: Apple, ipad, rob, trial No Comments

28Jan/117

Schooling vs Learning

I was at the always-amazing ULearn conference in Christchurch last year and got asked to do a EdTalk. These short video clips are done by the good folk at Core Education, where they essentially just sit you in front of a video camera and let you rabbit on about education and your own educational perspectives for a few minutes. My buddy Jane Nicholls was working the camera and she kept telling me to just talk about whatever I wanted to talk about. When she sat me down and said "go" I still had absolutely no idea what to say. I just did a brain dump and quite literally blurted out some of the stuff I was thinking about at the time.

Popularity: 9% [?]

Tagged as: Creativity, davinci, innovation, pirate, ulearn10 7 Comments

9Jan/112

Beautiful Growth

Pat's Cactus I was pottering about in the garden tonight and thought about a little story that I wanted to share.

If you teach long enough you eventually collect a whole lot of really lovely stories about the kids you teach. Every teacher can probably tell you about those lovely moments where a student has said or done something that makes everything worthwhile. A little note at the end of the year, a quiet word about how you've made a difference to them, or just doing something that reminds you of why you became a teacher.

Quite a few years ago I worked in a catholic boys school in Sydney where I was the head of IT. I happened to have my own office (in the same room as the servers of course) but I tried to make it a bit homely by bringing in a few plants to brighten it up. Not being the greenest of thumbs, I killed most of them. I'd replace them, but then kill the replacements as well. As a gardener, I really don't have the knack of it.

Like many teachers, I had a group of kids who liked to hang around me. Because of my role as the geeky IT guy, the kids that liked to hang around always seemed to be the slightly geeky, slightly eccentric kids that have lots of personality, and I really enjoyed their company. Many of them would just come to my office at lunchtimes and hang out. One of them, a boy named Patrick, often remarked on my appallingly bad gardening skills and noted how I seemed to kill every plant I had. I had to agree and we had a good laugh about it.

One day, Pat came to my office and presented me with an unexpected gift. It was a small plastic punnet of baby cactus plants, small enough to fit in my hand. He jokingly told me that he wanted to give me a cactus because they require almost no attention and they were probably the only thing I wouldn't kill. We had a laugh about it and it sat on my desk in pride of place, right next to my computer monitor.

Well, time marches on, and Pat eventually graduated and left the school. I eventually left the school too and moved on to other jobs, other schools. I took my cactus with me though, and put it in the garden at home where it actually started to flourish and do ok.

That was many years ago. Here I am, 10 years, 4 schools, 3 houses and 1 divorce later, and I still have my little "Pat Cactus". Except it's not so little anymore. It's grown. Like we all do. I've grown. I'm sure Pat's grown. The "little cactus" has grown and split and been repotted many times now. It now fills several large pots and a few small ones. It gets stronger and greener and every time I look at it I think about how special it was to be given something like that by a student and how special it is that it still grows stonger every day. I hope that's symbolic of many things.

In what I think is a rather nice twist to the story, I discovered recently that Pat lives in the same area as me, in fact only a few streets away. So, a little while ago, I took some of the smaller offshoots of the now-large cactus, planted them in a small pot and took them down to Pat's house as a gift for him, along with a note that said "I told you I wouldn't kill it!". It was my way of closing the loop, and, symbolically at least, keeping that wonderful circle of life going.

The story means a lot to me, because as teachers we start lots of ripples that we might never get to see build to waves and break on distant shores. As the cactus continues to flourish, I think about the hundreds of kids I've had the great joy to teach over the years and hope that they are flourishing just as well. Even if I've only ever had one student give me the gift of a plant that has grown and flourished, I'd like to think that the many students I've taught over the years have all given me the gift of knowing they've grown and flourished.

Thanks kids.

Popularity: 6% [?]

Tagged as: cactus, gifts, teaching 2 Comments

9Jan/117

To be an ADE

I've always aspired to be an Apple Distinguished Educator, but I've never actually done anything about applying for it. As far as my own personal computer use goes, anyone who knows me knows that I am most definitely a Mac guy, but I assumed that I wouldn't be able to apply to be an ADE because most of the schools I've worked in have been primarily Windows schools. As they say, one should never assume.

While it's true that many - probably most - ADEs work exclusively in Apple schools, apparently it's not always the case. While chatting with someone from Apple a while ago I mentioned this, and they replied that the ADE program is aimed at recognising teachers, and does not necessarily focus on the type of computers used in the school that teacher works at.

To become an ADE you obviously need to be active in certain ways that help spread the message about technology and it's value for education. You need to be passionate about the ways that digital technology (and pretty obviously, Apple digital technology in particular) can make students more engaged and creative. You need to demonstrate some degree of innovative practice and a reasonable level of experience in the classroom. I hope I can do all these things. And you need to fill in the appropriate forms. I'm pretty sure I can do that part.

Oh, and you also need to make a short 2 minute video that gives a bit of an insight into who you are and what you do and what you might bring to the party. Apparently the video is pretty important. I gave it my best shot.

Anyway, I finally got my ADE application in for this next intake of teachers (a few days before the deadline too! Woohoo!) so my fingers are crossed. If you're interested, here's the video.