Schools | Betchablog

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: 15% [?]

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

Tagged as: copyright, creativecommons, slideshow 2 Comments

23Sep/102

Good Morning Vietnam

After leaving Shanghai the other day I traveled south to Hanoi, Vietnam. My Sydney school has an "arrangement" with a Vietnamese school here. The school is called the Vietnam Australia School, or VAS Hanoi, and the arrangement is that as well as the school offering a standard Vietnamese curriculum it also offers a scaled down and modified Australian curriculum focusing on English and Commerce. This Australian component is taught by native English-speaking teachers, using courseware and textbooks developed by staff back at PLC Sydney, and the goal is to get the kids leaving school with qualifications in two languages and two countries. I've been keen to get to VAS for a while to see what it's all about, so when I asked my principal for permission to attend Learning 2.010 in Shanghai he suggested that I drop into VAS Hanoi on the way home and do some training and support for the staff here.

So for the past few days I've been at the school, seeing how it operates, talking to staff, meeting the kids, and generally trying to offer some support where I can. There are certainly places where that support is needed, so it's rewarding to be able to offer it. Now that I have a clearer understanding of what's going on here at VAS Hanoi I'd like to visit again at some point to really follow through on a few things. For now though, that's a decision that's out of my hands.

I can't say I've fallen in love with Hanoi though. Don't get me wrong, it has a definite charm, if charm is the right word. Perhaps 'character' would be a better word. The city of Hanoi is celebrating its 1000th birthday this year, so although I don't know much else about its history, 1000 years is a long time, and it's had plenty of time to cultivate that character. The people are generally friendly, the food is excellent and inexpensive, there's plenty of interesting culture, and the Vietnamese women are amongst the most beautiful in the world. So what's not to love?

While I'm enjoying seeing a new place and experiencing a new culture, there are a few things about Hanoi that I simply couldn't deal with long term. The obvious one is the traffic. It's crazy. I mean, seriously crazy. It's one of those places where people can tell you it's crazy, but until you see it for yourself you just have no idea. I made a little video below to give you a look at what I mean.

The traffic also creates another problem... air quality. The pollution from all those millions of bikes is frightening. I've had a hacking sore throat from almost the minute I stepped off the plane. At times it's been hard to speak and hard to swallow, and I really don't think I could live here for an extended period because if it. In heavy traffic, the swarm of bikes also kick up a cloud of dust that further dirties the air. I just couldn't live with it long term.

The other thing that tarnished Hanoi a little for me is the fact that my iPhone was stolen the first night I got here. I went for a walk along the streets to do some sightseeing, and a couple of rather pretty local girls pulled up on a motorcycle and asked me if i wanted to go for a ride around the block with them. Naturally I said no... I wouldn't jump on a bike with total strangers in a city with sane traffic, but especially not in Hanoi! One of the girls was standing next to me, and started to rub me on the arms and shoulders and was trying to convince me to get on the bike, while the other talked to me. I basically said thanks but no thanks, spoke them to them for another minute or so, and then started to walk away. As they rode off, I reached into my pocket to see what time it was, and there was no iPhone in my pocket. I was so pissed off!

Luckily, I'd taken out travel insurance for this trip. I don't normally take insurance, but it seemed like a good idea for travelling in South East Asia just for the medical coverage so I ticked the box for that option when I booked the plane tickets. I was a little less pissed off when I remembered that I had the insurance because it meant that the phone would probably be replaced, probably with an iPhone 4, so given that the insurance cost me all of $10, I'm very glad I took it out! However, what won't be replaced is the data added to my phone since the last sync, including a few very special podcast recordings and photos, etc. Gone for good! So annoyed!!!

The insurance company said I needed to fill out a police report before they could process the claim, so I went to the local station, conveniently just across the road from my hotel. What a pack of losers. I'm told there is massive corruption in the police force here, and while I can't personally vouch for the truth of that, I can certainly say there is massive unprofessionalism. The police on duty were a bunch of slobs; dirty, lazy, slow, unsure about how to fill out a report, and they treated the whole thing as a bit of a joke. They seemed more than a little put out that I was actually making them do some work instead of leaving them alone to sit and watch television. Of course, they didn't speak a single word of English, so I had to go back across the road and get the hotel concierge to come over and try and translate for me; this seemed to annoy them even more, since when they thought there was a language barrier they figured they could just fob me off. I think the concierge did an ok job of the translation, but really, who would know? Overall though, if that's the level of service and professionalism you got from official bodies like the police, I could never enjoy living here.

The other big reason I'm probably not enjoying Hanoi as much as I should be is just the fact that I'm on my own here. Shanghai was fun because I had so much to look forward to, meeting people that I was genuinely excited to be hanging out with. When you're "hangin' with your peeps" things are always lots more fun. In Hanoi I don't really know anyone, so it means eating meals on my own, sightseeing on my own, spending time on my own. Not a whole lot of fun really. At this stage I'm just really looking forward to going home to my Linda.

Anyway, here's a bunch of photos I took on my walk tonight if you're interested. I took them with the new Nikon S4000 I picked up duty free as I left Sydney airport, and for a camera without any manual controls (and the fact that I didn't have a tripod with me) they aren't too bad for night time shots. The traffic is particularly bad because today is the day of the annual Mid-Autumn Festival celebrations, so it's somewhat crazier than usual!

Oh, and here's the video...

Popularity: 4% [?]

Tagged as: hanoi, motorbike, Photography, traffic, vietnam 2 Comments

3Sep/1011

Public Visibility

I have an RSS feed set up that automatically scans the Google news feeds for the phrase "PLC Sydney" or "Presbyterian Ladies College", so anytime either of those phrases appear in a news publication worldwide I get notified of it. (Which, if you want to monitor your school's online public image, is a useful thing to set up by the way!) While I do get the occasional mention of other Presbyterian Ladies Colleges such as the ones in Melbourne or Perth, and occasionally the abbreviation PLC Sydney turns up some non-related stuff, having the RSS feeds scanning the news for mentions of your school is handy.

Recently, I spotted this article in one of the local papers. It was a project that I didn't even even realise was taking place in the school so I was surprised when I spotted it. (I also like the idea that some of our teachers are now doing interesting projects that use ICT and they don't need me to make it happen! Yay! The good kind of redundant!)

What I find amusing is that the newspaper has published the name of the school and the full names of the students, along with a photo... three pieces of information that the cybersafety experts will all tell you should not be made available online. I suspect that if one of our teachers got their students to do an in-class online project that published their full name, school and photo, they would get a stern talking to. However, there is still a belief that, because it was published "in the paper" (which also happens to be online) then it's ok.

We do, in fact, have a "Do Not Publish" list of students, which is derived from a form that all parents fill out at the start of their enrolment at school. On this form they give advance permission - or not - for their child's photo and name to be used in school publications. We keep a record that covers both print and online separately, and before any child's details can be published we check the Do Not Publish list. In reality, out of a school of 1300 kids K-12, we have maybe less than 10 whose parents have elected for them to remain unpublishable.

Personally, I think that the benefits of getting some press for the students, either online or in a more traditional format, is enormous. Sporting achievements, success in interschool competitions, musical events, academic successes, etc... these things are all worthy of celebrating and telling the world about. The boost that these kids get to their self esteem, their reputation and their public visibility is a positive thing and these sorts of publications can start to form the basis of their longer term footprint, digital or otherwise. While we have to respect the wishes of parents who choose not to allow their children to be published (and sometimes those wishes are based on valid reasons and sometimes it's just paranoia and fear) the kids who do get published "in the paper" really love seeing themselves there.

In a world where being "in the paper" also means being online, this opens a real can of worms. We tell the kids one thing as we drill cybersafety into them - don't give away details like your name or school - yet we gladly celebrate them being published online in other more traditional forums using all of these very same details. It's an interesting double standard. The local paper is published to the open web with no passwords, no restrictions, yet we baulk at getting kids to publish the same information about themselves to other formats that are equally as open and public.

Thank goodness that all those fears about online safety are so blown out of proportion or this might actually be a real problem.

PS: By the way, if you haven't seen it, the students' final work is online at http://plcvasproject.blogspot.com and is worth seeing. I'm sure they'd love a comment or two if you get a chance.

Photo embedded from the Inner West Courier

Popularity: 5% [?]

Tagged as: cybersafety, plcsydney, safety 11 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

30Jul/1018

Redesigning Learning Tasks: Part 2

Our Year 2 classes do a project each year called Great Inventions. The students learn about various inventions and how they have changed over time, and over the past few years they have demonstrated that learning by producing a PowerPoint file that summarises the history of these inventions.

As you may have read in my previous post, two of my pet hate phrases are "do research" and "make a PowerPoint". Whenever I see these two phrases in the same sentence I can almost guarantee that we're looking at a fairly low level task that focuses more on recall and summary of facts than it does on authentic learning. I'm also wary of any time I see students "making a PowerPoint" that simply gets handed into the teacher for marking, rather than being used as a presentation platform since it is usually a sign that it's being used as a glorified note taking tool; a place to write text complete with the distractions of bright colours and annoying graphics. Don't get me wrong... It's not that I'm against the use of PowerPoint as such, but unless you use it for what it's designed to do - namely to providing a set of effective visuals that support a speaker as they present persuasive ideas - then I think it's use is probably leading us down the wrong path.

In previous years, the PowerPoints made by the students displayed some good computer skills, but I had the feeling that the technology was there as an add-on rather than an integral tool for completing the task. The teachers also felt that the students had trouble collecting and synthesising information from the web as the level of most information found online was simply too difficult for the students to deal with. I also pointed out that taking information from the web and simply rewording it onto a PowerPoint slide was not a big benefit to the students and I questioned the value of such a task.

After a bit of group brainstorming we made a few subtle but important changes to what we asked the students to do. Firstly, recognising that the language on most webpages were too difficult for kids of this age, we started a wikispaces wiki and created our own pages of information in language pitched at the right level for Year 2. It was a bit of extra work to create these summaries and took us an hour or so to do, but it meant we now had a permanent set of pages that were exactly what we needed. The use of a wiki was relatively new to the teachers but they picked it up very quickly, adding text and images. I had my laptop open and I was creating pages and helping cleanup pages if necessary, as the teachers worked on the IWB to brainstorm together what content needed to go on them. It was actually quite an energizing experience, and in that planning session of an hour or so I think we all enjoyed the buzz of coming up with a better idea and taking immediate action to make it happen.

The nature of the PowerPoint that the students were being asked to create got an overhaul too. Rather than just submit the PowerPoint file, I convinced the teachers to reallocate their class time to allow the students to get up in front of their peers and actually present their finished work. I also suggested that we needed to somehow introduce an opportunity for the kids to create and invent, and to use their imagination rather than just retell facts that others have already provided. To this end we decided to scaffold the PowerPoint into three slides only (I suppose four if you count the title slide). Each child's presentation was about a particular invention, and slide one would be about the past history of that invention, slide two about its present and slide three about its future. We also agreed that the students would only be allowed to use pictures on the slides, no words.

So, slides one and two would tell the story of the invention's past and present, and this information would come initially from the students looking at the summaries created by the teachers. Naturally, because the teachers had vetted those summaries for both content and language, it was reasonable to expect that the students would be able to identify and deal with the information appropriately. The visuals for these slides would come from images the students found online that captured the past and present of the various inventions. All the other information about the inventions would have to be delivered verbally by the student when they stood up to give their presentation, since there were to be no words (and therefore no slabs of text and no bullet points!) on the slides themselves.

But slide three was about the future, which clearly hasn't happened yet. For this, we would ask the students to create a drawing of what they thought their invention might look like in the future. They were free to be as imaginative and creative as they liked (and it was amazing what they came up with!) Their drawings were scanned or photographed and added as the picture on slide three.

Remember, we are talking about 7 year olds here. I think what we did to improve this task was to effectively scaffold it, stripping it down into the really important components and providing a guide for the students to work with, while giving them opportunities for creative, imaginative thought as well as researching existing knowledge. We simplified the technology requirements and realigned the task around the content we wanted them to learn. The technology became the environment for what they produced, and not the focus for it. I was quite please with what we did.

I then suggested that, if the students were going to get up in front of the class and present their work, it would be a shame to not share their presentations with a wider audience. To this end, I suggested that we use UStream to create a live broadcast to the web so that parents and relatives could watch the children present live over the Internet. The Year 2 teachers were really receptive and excited about this idea. I told them I'd do a bit of testing for them to make sure UStream would work smoothly through our network, and I'd investigate how we could control the broadcast and perhaps just limit it to parents and invited viewers.

That's often the other big part of my job, to not only come up with ideas that push the teachers' use of technology, but to do the leg work to make sure the technical aspects of those ideas are actually feasible. After a few days of trying various configurations and running a few live tests, it was clear that it was very feasible and would in fact work really well. I then worked with the Year 2 teachers to draft up a letter to parents explaining what we were doing, when we would be streaming and the passwords required to watch it. (Let me know if you'd like me to email you a copy of that letter)

The finished results were really very pleasing. The work that the students did to create their presentations was very good (and importantly, we were now referring to what they were doing as "presentations", and not "PowerPoints"... I thought this was a great sign to indicate that the focus was off the technology, and instead was on what the technology was enabling)

The final live broadcasts, which ran over several days, were a lot of fun! I rigged up my Macbook Pro so the webcam was broadcasting the video, and we hooked up a very nice Rode Podcaster mic on a stand in front of the students so the audio was actually pretty good too. Although the actual media stream was quite good, we unfortunately had trouble getting UStream's backchannel chat to work through our proxy. But UStream does at least tell you how many people are watching at any given moment, and after each presentation the kids would all turn around and ask "How many people are watching now?!" There's nothing quite like an audience to spur kids' enthusiasm and willingness to do their very best! We did the presentations in a number of sessions over the course of the week, and I eventually started tweeting out to my PLN before we started broadcasting... this added to the parent watchers and raised the audience numbers considerably, and it also provided a sort of backchannel as well. At one point, we had more almost 50 people watching the stream... that was more than double the number of people in the actual classroom! The kids were really excited by it all, and as we got encouraging tweets back from schools in other parts of the world, the raised level of commitment to doing a good job with their presentations was a joy to watch (some even insisted on doing theirs a second time because they felt they could do better!)

The Year 2 teachers were really quite amazed at how it all came together, and especially to think that there were more people watching from outside their classroom than there were inside the classroom! We also had an unexpected visit from the principal, who had heard about the project and dropped in to watch a few of the presentations, It was really cool to have him there, sitting on the floor being king of the kids. Overall, I have to say it was a much better experience than simply submitting a Powerpoint file to the teacher for marking!

From my perspective, I was really pleased with what we'd done. We took a task that I thought was a little mundane, a little dull, and quite frankly lacking in higher order thinking, and with a few simple tweaks we redesigned it into something that everyone felt was a much better, richer, authentic and more meaningful experience. I felt we shifted the use of technology away from being an end in itself, to being an enabler of richer learning. I thought the quality of the presentations was really good. Again, was it all perfect? No, there are things that we can improve next time, but that's what it's all about... learning and getting better.

Here's a video of one of the presentations...

People sometimes ask me whether all this effort to integrate technology into our classrooms is worth it, and whether it really makes any difference. To answer that, let me share part of an email I received from one of the Year 2 parents the next day...

"It was such an enjoyable experience for my husband and I to be able to watch our daughter in action from the comfort of our office and home respectively. Extended family members logged on later that evening to view the recorded event, which sent a ripple of excitement through the family. Our daughter was thrilled.

Upon reflection, it’s been made apparent to me that our daughter is not just being taught basic skills, but that talking and listening, reading and writing can have a purpose and an audience far greater than their teachers and peers. What an amazing learning experience. How wonderful it was for mothers and fathers to at last be the fly-on-the-wall in our daughter’s classroom and to see the girls use technology so innately and with such confidence."

Popularity: 9% [?]

Tagged as: integration, learning, powerpoint, redesign, ustream 18 Comments

29Jul/108

Redesigning Learning Tasks: Part 1

In these next few posts, I'm going to try and describe some of the projects we've been doing at school lately. My role at PLC Sydney is ICT Integrator, and I very much see it as a role where I support, advise and consult with our classroom teachers about ways to enrich their lessons with technology. It's a hard line to walk sometimes, since it often forces me to cross that line between giving advice on how to use the technology and giving advice on how to teach. The nature of digital technology makes it a really good fit with the general principles of quality teaching practice... and sometimes that fit is so good that I find it difficult to suggest ways to use technology without also suggesting that the underlying pedagogy should shift to match it. Fortunately, I work in a school where most of our teaching staff are willing to take such suggestions on board, be it simply just regarding the use of technology, or to actually shift they way they approach the job of teaching.

Our Year 9 Geography class work on a project each year about natural hazards (bushfires, floods, earthquakes, etc). Over the last few years the students have been given a task that requires them to do "research" on one of these phenomena and "create a PowerPoint" about it. I tend to put those terms into quote marks because I find that "research tasks" presented "in Powerpoint" are usually just a formal excuse to get kids to plagiarise (especially when they just hand the PowerPoint file in... they don't actually present it to the class). When I looked at the task as it stood I was struck by the fact that most of the questions being asked could easily be answered by simply going to Wikipedia and doing a cut and paste.

I tend to use Blooms Taxonomy as a means of getting a quick overview of the quality of the tasks we ask our students to do. It's not a perfect tool, but it's nice and easy to apply and it gives a pretty good insight into the degree of higher level thinking that might be involved in a given task. When I looked at the existing task I got the impression that it was made up of fairly low level recall skills.

As an ICT Integrator, one of the questions I always try to start with is "What can we get the students to actually MAKE?" If the word "create" is at the top of the Blooms pyramid, then I reckon that starting with that question is a good way to begin pushing upwards into higher levels of thinking, since making things, by definition, is creating. The term "doing research", unless it is followed up with actually making something based on that research, rarely takes students much beyond simple cut and paste thinking. To be fair, the other part of the task did involve creating in the sense that the students were "making a PowerPoint", but it was really just a PowerPoint summary the "research". Is it any wonder our students tend to plagiarise when we give them tasks like this?

So when I got a request, as the ICT Integrator, to simply visit these classes to remind the kids "how to make a PowerPoint" I felt a little underwhelmed, and I tactfully tried to suggest that perhaps we needed to rethink what we were asking the kids to do, and to come up with something a little more challenging. That's what I mean when I say I often have to cross the line between just offering ICT support to teachers versus helping them rethink their actual pedagogy.

Anyway, we did end up redesigning the task, and I think that in the end everyone agreed it was a better, more interesting task that made good use of ICT while also covering all the necessary learning outcomes. The students were put into groups of three and their task was to produce a 3-5 minute audio news report about a natural hazard of their choice. (It wasn't technically a podcast, since we didn't wrap it in an RSS subscription enclosure, but the recording part was the same general idea as a podcast.)

I suggested that the three students should take on three different roles, each focusing on a different aspect of the natural disaster. The first role was the newsreader, and her job was to announce and describe the key facts about the disaster - what it was, where it happened, and some information about the causes for it... the newsreader essentially set the scene and gave the background about this particular disaster. The second role was that of on-the-scene reporter, and this person was responsible for giving the detailed information about the disaster - who was involved, describing what the scene looked like, how it was being handled by emergency crews and so on. The reporter then conducted an interview with the student playing the third role, that of a victim. The victim's job was to talk about the human impact of the disaster, and how people were affected. They were to give an insight into the human cost of natural disasters. Together, these three roles would cover all the important aspects of natural disasters. I think it's important to recognise that all of these aspects are outlined in the syllabus for this unit, and so doing it this way was not just a novelty but a way for students actually engage in the prescribed content in a more interesting, more engaging way.

Of course, in order to play these roles the students needed to write a script. For this, we used GoogleDocs and I taught the students how to write collaboratively using the shared writing tools in GoogleDocs. I should point out that our Year 9 and 10 students are now 1:1 and every student has their own laptop. This is a fairly new thing for our school as the 1:1 program just started this year, so I wanted to ensure we build authentic technology skills into these tasks. Most of the students had never used GoogleDocs before and had never seen the collaborative, shared writing function. I spent a lesson with each class teaching them how to share a document and work on it together, something that they picked up very quickly. That's the thing about our alleged "Digital Natives"... they actually don't know a lot of this stuff, but once shown, they tend to pick it up pretty quickly. Once they got the hang of how it worked, they used GoogleDocs as a shared writing space to work on a script together. It worked really well and the students worked in groups of three, all collaborating on the same document, adding, editing and creating together. I think they found it a very valuable tool.

I also spent some time teaching the students the basics of recording sound using Audacity. Once they were shown the core skills of recording a track, then overlaying it with other tracks, music and sound effects, they were ready to get on with producing their radio news reports. Again, it was a skill that most of them had never seen or used before, but after a half hour of training they were all quite proficient at it.

Of course, behind all of this the students DID have to do considerable research. They needed to find out how bushfires spread, what causes cyclones, where droughts are most likely and so on. It's not that they don't need to do research - they certainly do. It's just that once they did the research the task required them to actually use that information to produce something else. The focus was not on the research, but what could be done with the research. Importantly, they were given some room to be creative, admittedly within a reasonably scaffolded framework, but there was still room to be creative... it wasn't all about just regurgitating the facts they had researched. They needed to take those facts and understand, manipulate and create with them. They were given an opportunity to engage with a range of new technology tools they'd never used before, and ones that will hopefully be of use to them in the future. They were being asked to use the media production capabilities of their shiny new laptops to collaborate and make something original, and not just use it as a glorified typewriter.

As we designed the task, I also made sure it offered the teachers a chance to learn new skills as well. We are really pushing the use of Moodle at the moment, and although most of our teachers are very good at posting resources like Word and PDF documents, the activities part of Moodle is still quite underused. I insisted that the final products of the students - namely a text document with the script and an MP3 file with the finished recording - be submitted as an Assignment in Moodle. There was initially some resistance to this idea, but it forced the teachers to engage with the assignment submission workflow that Moodle offers and exposed them to a number of Moodle features they were not aware of, like the gradebook and the ability to manage student results electronically.

Overall, I have to say the task was a great success. The students seemed to really enjoy the opportunity to work in groups, to make good use of their laptops, to be able to inject a bit of their own personality into the final product. They told me that they liked the opportunity to be a bit more creative and not just hand in yet another boring PowerPoint file or essay. The teachers told me they were impressed with just how engaged the kids were during the task, and that the quality of the finished products was generally quite high.

I'll put some more posts up in the next few days about some other projects we are working on at school, but at the heart of them I hope there is a common theme. That is, I hope we are getting better at rethinking what we ask our students to produce so they can show us not only what they know, but what they can do with what they know. I'd like to think that we're working harder to build creativity, choice, authenticity, collaboration and engagement into what we ask of them. I'm pleased to see their laptops being used in ways that leverage the things that digital technology can do, and not to just treat them as a fancy way to take class notes.

Can this task be improved in the future? Sure, but it was a nice step up from the previous task. I'd like to think that the ICT in this case was there as the appropriate tool for supporting a richer learning task, and not just there for the sake of using computers.

Below is a playable sample from one of the groups. I don't know if it was the best one, since I haven't actually had a chance to listen to them all, but I picked it more or less and random and thought it was pretty good. I liked the way they used sound effects and mashups recorded from the TV - it shows that they made a special effort. And I like the creative (and slightly humorous) way they introduce the story at the start of their bulletin.

Popularity: 9% [?]

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 7:07 — 6.5MB)

Tagged as: audacity, disasters, geography, googledocs, plc 8 Comments

7Jul/1016

IWBs are no Silver Bullet

I've just been watching a video online of someone doing an IWB demonstration at the recent ISTE event in Denver, and I have to say, I'm a little speechless.

IWBs are certainly a controversial technology and cop a lot of flak for being a waste of money in classrooms, and although I hate to sound like an apologist, I too often find myself defending them. I defend them because I believe that in the hands of a good teacher they can be valuable tools, and I get a bit tired of hearing the technology being attacked when it seems to me that all technologies are fairly inert until someone actually does something useful (or not) with them. As a concept, IWBs sound like a good idea to me... here's a tool that can support all manner of digital resources and is connected to the wider world via the web, but still has that human element that brings the class members together to discuss ideas around a shared, large-screen environment, sharing talking, making eye contact. That all seems like an attractive idea to me. Of course, in practice, none of that potential is realised without direction from a wise teacher who knows how and when to leverage the tool in some pedagogically sound way.

I'd heard that IWBs were a bit of a circus at ISTE 2010, and that, as usual, IWBs were being hawked by vendors as the silver bullet for making your classroom a better place. (By the way, have you noticed that the demonstrations of IWBs by vendors at trade shows usually consist of showing Youtube clips or playing tictactoe on the board?) However, I assumed that in the non-vendor sessions - sessions that were run by practicing educators who should know better - the importance of sound educational pedagogy would be emphasized over the fancy bells and whistles. So, I was a bit shocked as I watched this video of a teacher demonstrating how to get the most out of an IWB, as the demo was nothing more than a collection of "interactive" websites that were found online. In this demo, the teacher showed site after site after site of cutesy examples filled with cliched animations and canned audio that did very little other than provide yet another way for kids to consume some pre-made Flash-game rubbish on the way to rote memorising a bunch of facts. To make it worse, the entire demo was done from the computer, not the board, so there was absolutely no benefit in the IWB apart from being an expensive projection screen. The whole demo was a collection of everything I think an IWB should NOT be used for, and I think was a perfect example of why there is so much hostility from some people towards IWB technology.

Look, there may be a time and a place for the occasional naff Flash game. There probably are some useful websites that can be used to help a teacher unpack a tricky concept in a more visual way. I'm sure that having a bit of colour and movement to help engage students attention is a good idea. And having access to an onscreen simulation can be a useful tool when doing the real thing is too difficult, expensive or dangerous.

But come on! Teaching effectively with the assistance of an IWB should, hopefully, mean doing a whole lot more than just having a collection of garish websites and predictable, premade content up your sleeve! Surely we can do much better than this! I don't want my classroom to have an IWB if its sole use is to allow my students to consume shallow, crappy, poorly designed web content made by other people. What made watching this video worse was watching the backchannel conversation, seeing the participants lapping this up and asking for the URLs for all these sites!

There are some great sites out there on the web, and there's no denying that many of them work stunningly well on an IWB. But teaching is not (in my opinion anyway) a set-and-forget activity where finding a cool website that the kids think is "engaging" and then simply using it on an IWB somehow qualifies as "good teaching". It doesn't. I was truly stunned to see a bunch of poorly designed websites being projected on an IWB being held up as an example of worthwhile IWB use! I would be less surprised to see the vendors doing this, but not a practicing teacher! Maybe the critics are right.

And yet, in the hands of a good teacher, when the IWB is seen as having a supporting role in the classroom, rather than being the star attraction, they can be a truly amazing technology. Their ability to allow a good teacher to explore concepts visually, stimulate classroom discussion with rich digital media, follow interesting ideas that arise in the course of the lesson, and so on, is undeniably powerful. When used well, I've no doubt that IWBs can be revolutionary tools.

One of my mantras about IWBs is that it's not about what happens on the board. It's about what happens because of what happens on the board. Good teaching and learning is not about some stupid Flash game, it's about the discussion and conversation and the ability to stimulate deeper understanding about an idea because of the stupid Flash game! The minute that the content on the board becomes the focus of learning, I think we're in very shaky territory. As IWB-using educators, we need to always be thinking about how to leverage that onscreen content to challenge, support and extend the thinking of our students, and not simply to "edutain" them.

In their defense, I think IWBs can be used to provide an amazing "window to the world" in our classrooms. I think they can provide easy access to an incredible array of rich digital assets that can be used to engage, inform and stimulate learning. I think that their use can become embedded into our teaching and learning environments in ways that become seamless, where the technology disappears but the benefits are tangible. With a little thought, there are lots of great ways that interactive technologies can be built into the daily DNA of teaching and learning.

But to get there I think we need to let go of the idea that finding some "cool website" where a daggy animated character says "well done!" for adding 2 number together is something to get excited about. We need to realise that using some rudimentary drag-and-drop activity that reinforces the notion of learning as "who can remember stuff the best" is not the high-water-mark of teaching with interactive technology. We need to stop being dazzled by pointless animations, shallow activities, rote-learning dressed up as a game, and so on. We need to slap ourselves upside the head when we catch ourselves treating the board as nothing more than a screen. As intelligent educators, we need to be critical of the role that an IWB plays in our classrooms, yet we also need to be creative about looking for ways to leverage the power of this tool. We need to be smart enough to know when an IWB is the right tool, and when it isn't. And we need to realise that the IWB is neither the sole domain of the teacher, nor just the plaything of the students, but rather a place to host a shared meeting of the minds where important ideas can be explored together as partners in learning.

Image: 'bullet'
http://www.flickr.com/photos/7729940@N06/3341338252

Popularity: 20% [?]

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 6:54 — 4.8MB)

Tagged as: iste10, iwb, rant 16 Comments

25Jun/104

Finding the Right Model for ICT PD

I guess many readers of this blog would know that I work as an ICT Integrator at a large independent girls' school in Sydney. Large chunks of my day are spent working with our teachers and our students to help them understand a little more about technology and how it might be used to make teaching and learning more engaging and effective. Of course, teachers always seem to be very busy, and one of the difficulties in trying to deliver some form of ongoing PD is simply getting them to find the time to do so. I've tried a number of different models for delivering PD; some work quite well, others not so much. It usually comes down to finding time, and making it meaningful.

In case it's of any use to you, I thought I'd share an email that I sent to all the teachers in our junior school (R-6) yesterday. It's an outline of how I plan to be delivering ICT professional development to them next term. I've found that this model seems to work best for our staff, and it seems to give the most effective results. I think this is because it's delivered in a real situation that is authentic to them and also places a good deal of responsibility onto the staff to embrace the use of ICTs for themselves. (one of my beliefs is that you should never do for somebody what they can, and should, be able to do for themselves) Perhaps most importantly, our teachers seem to like this PD model and they seem quite enthusiastic about what we're doing together... so this is what I said to them...

Dear teachers,

Although the focus of what I do here at PLC is technology integration, it has always worked so much better when you allow me to help you link this technology integration directly into the things you plan to teach as part of your day to day activities... in this way, the use of technology can richly support and extend the learning for the students. Over the past couple of years I feel that we have all worked together to make technology less of an “add-on” to the curriculum, and it has become more of an embedded tool for helping engage and enrich our students. Together, some of the techniques and strategies we have tried in the Junior School over the past few years includes podcasting, blogging, live webcasting, digital mapping, digital storytelling, web 2.0 tools, video news reports, social networking, manipulating digital images, and so on. In the process, your students have come into contact with a wide range of technology tools that are an increasingly important part of the world in which they live.

In working with the Junior School staff, I have tried a number of different models for providing professional development in these tools, from offering before and after school workshops, holding lunchtime sharing sessions, shared planning time, and so on. With the incredibly hectic schedules that most of you have, some of these PD models have been more successful than others.

Starting in Semester 2, all staff will be required to undertake specific ICT professional development each semester. In the Junior School, we all agree that the best way to deliver this PD to you is in your actual classroom situation.

The most successful PD model for our teachers seems to be when we create time for collaborative planning time with the ICT Integrator. Under this PD model, I meet with each year group three times per term in order to plan and facilitate the integration of ICT into a classroom project. We meet early in the term to plan a unit of work together, meet again midterm to monitor the progress of that work, and again at the end to evaluate and assess the work. Of course, if you need extra assistance with delivering an ICT project then I am more than happy to come into your classes and assist, or to help out with computer class time, but I feel that the core of my ICT integration support is best done by assisting you to develop the skills and knowledge you need to deliver your own classwork with a rich ICT component. The recent Year 2 “Great Inventions” project is a good example of how I see this working.

Starting in Term 3, we will resume this PD planning model that we’ve used before as it seems to prove the most successful with Junior School teachers. After looking at the Junior School timetable, I’ve listed some suggested dates below that we could use for meetings in weeks 2B, 5A and 8B of next term. These all take advantage of times when specialist teachers have your students. Please take a look and let me know ASAP if there are problems with any of these dates and offer some alternate dates that are more suitable for you in these weeks.

(I've removed the actual dates listed here, as they aren't relevant to anyone reading this post...)

Ideally, in our first meeting (Week 2B) we will look at a task or theme or topic you plan to teach that ICT might lend itself to, and then we can come up with a plan for how we might integrate ICT into that unit. We will look at modifying or creating activities for the students that leverage ICT skills, and if necessary learn those skills ourselves. I would encourage you to think about how we can make the tasks we design highly student centric, providing your students with higher order thinking skills and open ended opportunities for creative thinking.

Our second meeting (Week 5A) will be to follow through on how the project is going, what can be improved, what can be tweaked, and also to ensure that any ICT skills are being delivered to both you and the students.

Our final meeting (Week 8B) will be used to evaluate and wrap up the project. We can evaluate it, look at what worked well, and work out how we might modify it to use (or not use) next year.

Hope these dates suit you. Looking forward to working closely with you all next term.

We've used this PD delivery model in the past and it seems to work quite well. I start by checking out the teachers' timetables and working out when they are free (mostly when their students are with specialist teachers for Music/PE/Languages/etc) and then I propose a list of times to meet, asking them to check and confirm that these times work for them.

Anyway, just thought I'd share that in case you can make use of it. My next few posts will be sharing some examples of how we have made this work in various classes.

Popularity: 5% [?]

Tagged as: ictpd, pd, teacherpd, teaching 4 Comments

18Apr/103

Reshaping Conferences

<understatement>I've been to a lot of conferences lately.</understatement>

The Champion Schools Conference in Wellington. ACEC in Mebourne. ITSC on the Gold Coast, then Adelaide, Sydney and Perth. They've all been very good and I've gotten something from all of them. They've all had slightly different angles and focuses, but it's pretty clear that any worthwhile education-based conference these days tends to have the same consistent underlying message, one that most active members of the edtech community would have heard many times before... The world is changing, technology is helping drive that change, and schools need to move with that change if they are to remain relevant. That's it in a nutshell. Of course, there are many much deeper conversations we need to keep having about the how, why, what, when and where of enabling these changes, and we need to keep pushing the message out to those teachers still unaware that these fundamental changes are shifting the ground beneath them.

I have a friend who used to work in the newsroom of a major television station. He once explained to me how, when a really big story broke, the newsroom's job would be to tell that story over and over for the next few hours or even days. There would be the initial newsbreak, but then it would get spot coverage each hour, followed by continuous newsbreaks, a piece in the nightly news and then again in the late news, and so on. I once asked my friend why they saturated the media so much with news stories like that, and questioned whether it was overkill to keep reporting the story ad nauseum, to which his reply was "In a newsroom, we know that when we are thoroughly sick of hearing about a particular story, the general public is only just starting to understand what it's all about."

So, as much as I might keep hearing the same fundamental messages being relayed over and over at most of these conferences, it's still true that there are lots of regular classroom teachers for whom many of these ideas are quite a revelation. The impact that digital technologies are having on our students, the need for a shift in the way we approach the design of learning tasks, the imperative for offering students choices and options as a means of maintaining engagement, and the general idea of teaching less so students can learn more... these are still totally new ideas for many educators.

While conferences might try to promote these ideas through the lens of educational technologies, the true importance of them is firmly rooted in pedagogy, not technology. While we talk a lot about how digital technologies are a useful tool for "21st century learning", technology just happens to be a powerful enabler for these new pedagogical approaches. It may appear that we edtech types are constantly promoting the use of technology just because we happen to like technology, but it runs deeper than that. We promote the importance of technology because, if you have been embedding technology into your teaching for any length of time now, you've seen first hand just how effectively it can start to shift the way your classroom operates. You know it can increase engagement, raise the quality of the work, make the learning more authentic, more on-demand, because you've seen it. And while you might value the role of technology in enabling all these things, you also realise that it's not really about the technology, but rather the learning.

One of the great frustrations for those of us "in the echo chamber" of edtech is that, while we can see the value that technology brings to our work with kids in classrooms, we sometimes appear to just be enthusiastic about technology for the sake of it. We implore our colleagues to try blogging with their students, or to give wikis a go, or consider allowing that boring essay task to be submitted as a podcast. And so often our enthusiasm for the power of these tools is all too easily perceived as technological zealotry, and the promotion of technology as a solution to every problem.

So, back to these conferences, and their intended purpose of shifting the participants understanding of 21st century education. It's been really interesting to see the lights come on with many of the participants. It's really gratifying to hear teachers say things like "I've never even considered many of these ideas before, but I'm going to take them back to classroom and give them a serious go". For at least some of the people I've been meeting at these conferences over the last few months, they left excited about the possibilities and felt inspired to learn more and to apply their newly discovered ideas back in the classroom.

One of the ironies of most conferences is that they are so often based on the idea of having someone stand on the stage or at the front of a workshop and simply talk at the participants... ironic because that's usually the very model of teaching that the speakers are saying we shouldn't be perpetuating. (For the record, I stand accused... as someone who has delivered some of these talks, I'm as guilty as the next person) In slight defense of this sage-on-the-stage model though, in some circumstances it's still the most efficient way to share ideas with a large group. It's just ironic that we still design conferences to help us learn what a 21st century classroom should look like by doing exactly the opposite.

It's not all like that though. One of the standout conferences I've attended is the Innovative Technology in Schools Conference run by Apple. While it still has some elements of people standing in front of the whole group and talking at them, it also has a significant "unconference" component, where teachers work in small organic groups on passion projects that deeply engage them as learners. It's been great to see a conference attempt to model itself on the principles of open discussion; of offering choices, options and highly personalised learning pathways; of forming groups based on the interests of the participants; of giving the necessary time to allow participants to create and change. And of course, of enabling all of this with the rich use of technology. In short, of treating the conference participants as actual 21st century learners rather than just attendees. The ITSC event stands out to me because it tries to actually BE the way it claims education should be, and in doing so it offers the participants a chance to actually "walk the walk", rather than just "talk the talk". Quite a few participants remarked to me that the penny finally dropped about the way education could be different because of the way the ITSC conference itself modeled how that change might actually look.

There was also a real focus on the creation of an appropriate learning space for participants. Rather than the typical conference situation of having rows of chairs all facing the front, ITSC had a range of flexible seating and working arrangements, with lots of round tables, leather couches and beanbags. It had large plasma TV screens around the room where groups could gather and share. It had powerboards on every table, reliable open wifi, and a wiki server for participants to create collaborative digital workspaces on demand. These are the sorts of things that we know 21st century classrooms should look like, and can really help create an environment where the learning really hums along.

Importantly, participants were also asked to actually make something during this conference that they could both share with the group and also take away with them. Even more importantly, they chose what they made based on their unique interests and what would be useful to them. They chose who they teamed up and worked with. They decided what they needed to learn to complete their task and they learned it on the fly. They used technology in authentic ways to enable the process. It was genuine 21st century learning in action, and it was quite a powerful conference experience.

There are lessons in the ITSC events for all conference organisers.

Popularity: 5% [?]

Tagged as: 21century, acec, conferences, itsc, sitech 3 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!)