Teacher PD | Betchablog

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 No child should have to put up with out of date learning experience just because their close-to-retirement teacher is "taxiing to the hangar".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

6Apr/1127

Tiny Bursts of Learning

Despite the fact that I know many teachers who would rank Twitter as the most valuable and powerful networking tool they have access to, there are still many more who simply don't "get" the value of Twitter. I've been to lots of conferences over the last few years where the enormous value of belonging to a Personal Learning Network was being touted, and Twitter is nearly always being suggested as the ideal tool for building that network. At one recent conference I asked for a show of hands for who was not yet on Twitter, and many hands went up... my response was "Why not? What are you waiting for? How many times do you need to hear people say that Twitter is the most valuable tool they have, before you actually try it for yourself?"

I spoke to a group of preservice teachers recently who were basically told by their lecturers that they needed to join Twitter. Despite the fact that it was being promoted to them as a powerful way to learn and network with others, most of them seemed to join up simply because it was part of their assessment requirement. Because they joined Twitter "under duress", I don't expect them to actually buy into it, use it well, or continue to use it past the mandated requirement to use it. And that's a bit of a shame.

In contrast to all this is the general sentiment among many teachers that "we need more PD!", or the always-amusing "How can they expect us to learn new things if all we get is a few PD days a year?"

If you still believe that professional development is what happens on those two or three days each year when you sit in a classroom and have some expert "deliver" it to you, I have bad news. That model is no longer sustainable and the days of PD as something that is done "to you" by "experts" a couple of times a year are over.

Learning needs to be ongoing. The world is changing. There are new tools that can help students learn, new ideas about learning, new brain research, new emerging technologies, new social structures, and so on... to think that you can maintain a professional outlook by attending two or three PD workshops a year is almost laughable. To keep up with new learning, you really need to be plugged in to an ongoing source of professional discourse and resource sharing. It needs to be something that happens regularly, at least several times a week. Like so many other aspects of the 21st Century, some of the "ways we've always done things" don't really cut it anymore.

So how can something at simple as Twitter possibly be used to stay professionally current?

How I use my Twitter PLN to learn

I've been keeping an eye on my Twitter stream for the past 10 minutes or so. Using the Twitter app for Mac, it sits in a narrow vertical window on the right side of my screen and as the people I follow add their tweets they flow by in a steady stream that updates every few moments. How fast this flow happens is obviously dependent on how many people you follow... I follow about 2600 people, so it tends to be a pretty steady stream of tweets, but yours might be more or less. Occasionally I glance at this "stream of (networked) consciousness" and spot little gems that look interesting.

For example in the last ten minutes I've spotted the following things...

A great quote about writing from Bud Hunt
A link to a promising new open source 3D animation tool
A good article on landing your dream job in a networked world
An interesting question about URLs posed by Jim MacMillan
News about Twitter's new advanced search features
A link to a thought provoking article about game based learning
A great teaching idea from Penny Coutas about using Xtranormal for language learning
An link to interesting article about the relevance of the social sciences
A student work sample of an excellent global collaborative project
A link to a list of the top 10 lazy email habits
A link to an article about the effectiveness of online learning for young students
A link from Alec Couros to a 5 minute video called "Cultural Differences"
A fascinating article about Facebook scams

...to name but a few.

In the same 10 minutes worth of tweets, I also responded to a couple of questions from other people that I felt I could help them with, saw a funny story about Moodle, watched an amusing exchange between some people I know, and ended up getting invited into an Elluminate session about developing Moodle courseware.

Just ten minutes. Even just skimming through that list of things would give me more relevant PD than most teachers get exposed to in a whole year. And those of us who use Twitter in this way are able to tap this stream of information any time we like.

(I hope you also noticed that I still don't know what Ashton Kutcher had for lunch, or what crazy antics Charlie Sheen is up to. I don't care about that stuff, so I don't follow those people, so I don't see those tweets. Twitter works because you get to make choices about who is part of your network. You create relevance for yourself.)

Now, before you assume that I spend my whole day getting sidetracked by Twitter, let me assure you that's not the case. I'm telling you about this 10 minute slice of time to make the point that Twitter, when you build a network of relevant people, is an amazingly rich sources of ideas, inspiration and connections.

I don't read every tweet. I don't follow every link. I let most of the tweetstream just flow by me, only dipping into it if I get a moment. If I spot something interesting I hit the star to favorite it and come back to it later. If anything really good turns up in the stream and I miss it, it gets retweeted over and over so the chance of me seeing it is still pretty good. But mostly it's just there, flowing by, ready for me to dip into it and pull out a few gems whenever i have a moment. Do that every day and pretty soon you have a substantial body of PD building up.

I understand why people find it hard to get their head around Twitter. I understand why people are still skeptical when they hear others say things like "Twitter is the best PD you can get!" It sounds like complete hyperbole... How on earth can a random collection of short messages from strangers possibly compete with professionally organised training and PD sessions?

It competes because it's more relevant, more timely, ongoing, interactive, daily and personal. Traditional PD just can't offer all that.

If you're one of those people who resist Twitter because it just doesn't seem logical, please just suspend your doubt and give it a go. Don't just join and do nothing; give it a proper go. Follow a bunch of relevant people - at least 50 or 60 - get a decent Twitter client, and open yourself to the possibilities of what a network offers. You won't regret it.

Popularity: 100% [?]

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 6:04 — 7.0MB)

Tagged as: learning, networks, pd, Twitter 27 Comments

20Sep/105

Totally Unorganised

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Popularity: 11% [?]

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

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

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

11Apr/1024

Stager takes the Stage

The main keynote on the Friday of ACEC 2010 was Gary Stager, a man who has a reputation for calling a spade a "bloody shovel". He did a morning keynote, as well as a "soapbox" session in the main hall where he held court and treated anyone who would listen to the world according to Stager.

I'm not totally sure what to make of Gary Stager. I heard him speak for the first time at ULearn last year and I was pretty impressed by what he had to say. That probably shouldn't sound so surprising since the guy has a long history of working with schools to do some pretty innovative and constructivist things. He was a consultant at MLC Melbourne, Australia's (and the world's) first 1-1 laptop school. He was a student and personal friend of Professor Seymour Papert, in my opinion one of the world's most influential educational thinkers. And he has some really forceful opinions about what works and what doesn't work in education. I admire his intensity and his conviction.

This intensity and conviction can sometime comes across with a high and mighty arrogance though, and his talks can sometimes feel like being bludgeoned with a blunt axe. There is often a sense of sensationalism in the things he says, and there is rarely any gray between his black and white viewpoints. He seems to have a handful of things he feels really passionate about and is like a dog with a bone in promulgating them, often to the exclusion of everything else.

On the one hand, it's a good thing because it is confronting and makes you think about the issues. Although his arrogant approach tends to piss people off a bit, sometimes people need a bit of pissing off to force them into getting off the fence and taking a side. A keynote speaker probably should be a bit confronting and prod people with ideas that force them to think and evaluate things that perhaps they haven't thought much about. In that sense, he does a great job.

On the other hand, some of his sweeping black and white statements can be very dismissive, even outright rude. If something is not part of Gary's world view, he tends to sweep it aside and treat it with absolute contempt. At ACEC especially, he was very vocal about any idea that didn't fit with his version of how education should work. It gets a little tedious after a while, and you end up feeling gloom, doom and a sense of hopelessness about, well, almost everything. Name a topic outside of Lego or programming, and it's likely that Gary will dissect it and strip it to pieces, telling you why it's rubbish and is counterproductive to education. It really is a bit wearing after a while. I came away from his keynote feeling like nothing we are doing at school is any good at all (which is nonsense of course).

I like many of the things Stager has to say, and I think he has some powerful insights. I totally agree that there are many things about school that need to be rethought and reinvented. He's right about a lot of things, but he also seems pretty narrow minded about a whole lot of others. He spins a good conspiracy theory, and clearly hates certain technologies, especially IWBs. But he also chooses examples that highlight the poorest possible uses of these technologies and then holds those up as some sort of "best practice" to be critical of. Sure, it's easy to be critical of something being used poorly, but that doesn't mean that the thing itself is bad, just that the given example is one of it being used badly. One could probably find poor examples of 1-1 laptop usage, poor examples of students working with programming and so on.

I could cite an example of almost any technology being used poorly and an equal number of examples of it being used really well. Like Gary, I also see the enormous value of learning with constructivist tools like Lego, the value of students learning to program, the value of students learning about computing science. But I also believe that there is room for a wide range of technologies for learning. There is no one single answer, no single technology for helping kids learn.

There is always room for a bit of open-mindedness in education.

---

PS: I just noticed that @Steve-Collis has posted the UStream video of Gary's keynote, so here it is if you'd like to take a peek. Thanks Steve for recording it, and thanks Gary for allowing it to be recorded.

Popularity: 8% [?]

Tagged as: acec2010, stager 24 Comments

11Apr/102

Using Lego to Drive Learning

As much as I would have loved to have been in Melbourne all week for ACEC 2010, it just wasn't on the cards for me. A pity, because it sounded like there was a lot of really interesting sessions to attend, and one that particularly caught my eye was the Lego Robotics one with Chris Rogers, a professor of engineering from the Centre for Engineering, Education and Outreach at Tufts University in Boston. I've been a Lego fanboy for a long time, and have worked with kids to do some pretty awesome stuff with it over the years, but unfortunately my current school doesn't really do very much with Lego. (In fact, computer programming in general gets a pretty rough deal at PLC, something that I'd really like to see change)

However, we do run a Computer Club every week in our junior school and we've decided that we will introduce programming to these kids to start with. We've begun by getting them going with Scratch, with a plan to get some Lego Robotics gear and maybe even try to put a team in RoboCup. The kids - mainly Year 5 - have really taken to Scratch and are starting to do some very cool things with it. We also have plans to do something for Scratch Day this year as well.

But back to Lego. Just before school finished for Easter I received an email saying that Chris Rogers would be running a 2 hour Lego workshop at Sydney's Macquarie Uni. Because I couldn't get to Melbourne for the first few days of ACEC, naturally I jumped at the chance to do this one in Sydney with him, even if it was on Easter Monday!

I was really impressed with what Chris got us to do; it was an excellent example of just how the open ended nature of Lego can cover so many angles of our existing curriculum in a spirit of real constructivist, collaborative learning. Working in pairs, Chris started us off with a very simple non-robotic building project - each team of two people had a small bag of Lego bits on the table in front of them, and our job was to open it and construct the tallest tower we could out of those parts. Just to make it interesting, we only had about 5 minutes to do it and we had to limit ourselves to only using only our non-dominant hand! Of course, this made teamwork and communication very important. At the end of 5 minutes, he stopped us and asked us to look around at what we and the others had done. Important lesson 1: everybody built something quite different and clearly demonstrated that there is often no single "right" way to complete a task. Important lesson 2: You learn far more from failure than success, and the process of "fixing your mistakes" is where the true learning happens.

With that small but important introductory exercise done, our next task was to take the Lego NXT controller brick and, using another limited set of parts, build a "car", or at least something that had motorised wheels and could drive in a forward direction. (Also worth noting that no two "cars" were the same either. Everyone took a different approach, yet everyone made something that did what it needed to do. I think there is a hugely significant lesson for educators contained in just that simple idea!)

Once our car was built, Chris showed how to create a very simple NXT-G program that simply ran both motors for 1 second in order to drive the car forward. That's it. It took him no longer than 30 seconds to "instruct" us. Now that we had a car and knew how to make it move forward for 1 second, he told us what we had to do...

On the floor was a "starting line" made of masking tape, and a long ruler to measure distance. We were to program our "car" to travel for 1 second and then accurately measure how far that 1 second would make our car go. The we were to modify the program to run for 2 seconds, and measure how far that took us. Then modify for 3 seconds, measure, and so on. He gave us about 30 minutes to build our car, write the program and then do all of our testing to establish how far our cars would travel for various motor-on timings. At the end of that time, he said, we would be given a specific distance and we would have to figure out, from the data we'd collected using our car, how long we had to run our motors for in order to stop exactly at that distance. To make it interesting, we would place a little Lego Person at the specified distance and our cars were to just "kiss" them - not stop short, and not run them over.

The excitement and buzz in the room as people built and tested their models was quite palpable. And people took it really seriously too! There was some real competition to get it right on the mark.

As we worked through the process, we had to address a number of really valuable learnings and skills. Building the model required some engineering and science skills, and of course a whole lot of teamwork and cooperation skills too. Measuring the distances taught us to be accurate, to learn how to collect data in a consistent repeatable way, how to measure and record distances. As we worked, we had to think about the best ways to record the data. This got us using valuable mathematical concepts including the creation of a graph (which turned out to be a fairly linear graph - a great discussion starter for a maths lesson) Overall, it was amazing just how broad and deep the learning was, and how we had to construct our own knowledge as we completed the task.

Once the target distance was announced, a second masking tape finishing line was put on the floor. People furiously calculated the required motor-run timing that they needed to program into their cars in order to stop exactly on the line, and the models were lined up. On the starters orders we all pressed out Go buttons and tested our theories and our calculations. It was a lot of fun and had so much embedded learning in it!

Some of the important reflections for me was a reminder of just how powerful learning can be when it is open-ended and focuses on the creation of a solution to an interesting and engaging problem. It also struck me that a problem does not need to be particularly complicated in order to embed some really rich learning. And finally, it was a great reminder that the creation of rich tasks - whether they are based on the use of technology or not - are not an "add on" to what happens in a classroom. We need to remind ourselves that it's not about "covering the curriculum" and then hoping there is enough time left over to do some interesting projects. Getting students working on interesting projects should be the primary way in which we get them to cover the curriculum in the first place.

Popularity: 3% [?]

Tagged as: ceeo, chrisrogers, Lego, robotics, tufts 2 Comments

26Mar/1011

Breaking the Cycle

I often ponder why systemic change is so hard to make happen in education. Systemic change (and by that I mean not just change from a handful of scattered individuals but an all-in buy-in to create change right across a school system) is never easy, but it seems to happen with far less resistance in fields outside of education. Schools just seem extra hard to shift.

I'm pretty optimistic about the positive effects that technology can bring to education. I really do believe that the school experience for both teachers and students can be made richer and more meaningful with the wise use of technology. Not just technology for technology's sake, but by making intelligent decisions about what and how our students learn and supporting that learning with appropriate technologies. I've never seen technology as an add-on, or just another thing that teachers need to somehow squeeze into their day, but rather as a deeply embedded set of tools, methodologies and skillsets that students should acquire in order to help them deal with the ongoing process of learning.

Students are, or at least should be, seen as "knowledge workers" in the truest sense of the term. They spend 13 years at school essentially learning, manipulating, constructing and deconstructing knowledge. Their "job" as a student is to create information products, and that could mean anything from conducting research and writing essays, through to creating sophisticated information products like multimedia presentations, collaborative group projects and persuasive written work. Unlike students in the past, today's students need to develop fluency in not just textual literacy, but also in the multiliteracies of new media, multimedia and social media. They need to develop the skills of taking information from multiple sources and turning it into usable knowledge. In the process of doing this they need to learn important things like how to express ideas clearly, how to influence an audience, how to work in teams, how to learn on demand, how to communicate, and so on.

In essence, none of this is all that new, and good teachers have always done these sorts of things with their students. But pervasive digital technology has an important role to play in how it happens. Take the research process for example. Asking students to research a topic is fundamental to what happens in most classrooms and most teachers have always included the requirement for research in the learning tasks they set. But digital technology opens up many new possibilities for how a student might tackle the research process. Use of live streams, real-time information, geotagged data, RSS feeds, socialgraph feeds, even advanced Googling, may all just be new ways to perform the age-old process of research, but if a teacher lacks basic fluency in these new tools themselves then how on earth can they help their students develop those skills. In my experience, most teachers have very little idea about most of these things, but don't take my word for it. Do your own poll... pick a random group of 20 teachers and ask them what they know about these things. I suspect the answer will be very few.

It worries me that so many teachers seems so woefully ill-equipped to provide these understandings for their students, but they simply can't provide what they don't have. I know a lot of wonderful, dedicated, well-meaning teachers who care deeply for their students, but the gap, technologically speaking, between what those students need and what their teachers are actually able to provide seems to be widening.

Before you flame me for making such a comment, can I make clear what I'm not saying. I'm not saying that these people are bad teachers. But I do think that the landscape of learning has experienced some deep and fundamental shifts in the last few years that many teachers have yet to even acknowledge, let alone adapt to.

In some cases, success can be the enemy of change. I once suggested to a very good teacher that there were a number of ways that technology could be used to enrich her lessons. Her reply was that every single one of her students achieved Band 6 results in the HSC (for those outside NSW, that's about as good as you can get), so why should she change anything? Trying to convince this teacher that technology might make the learning more engaging, more interesting, more rewarding was falling on deaf ears. By her standards the students were as successful as they could possibly be, so why mess with something that was obviously working? That's a hard argument to win, and makes it very difficult to convince someone to change what they do.

The other thing that makes it incredibly difficult to create systemic change in education is the "revolving door" nature of school. We all know what school looks like and how it works, because we all went to one. So when someone decides to become a teacher, it's usually right after spending 13 years in a school as a student, then spending 4 years at teachers college and then going right back into the same environment they just left a few years earlier. Of course they know what school is like! They probably feel like they've never left it. Whatever they might learn in teachers college has to fight for attention against the 13 years of day-in and day-out seeing their own teachers model what it means to "be a teacher". Even their lecturers at teachers college often come from a similar experience. It's incredibly hard to break the cycle. Education needs significant change and new approaches, but it's damn difficult to make that change happen when the steady stream of new teachers are just recycled students who feel like they already know what they need to know in order to be a teacher.

I've done a little bit of work with pre-service undergrad teachers, and to be honest I was quite shocked at their general level of apathy about the role that technology might play in their lives as future teachers. Not all of them mind you... there have been some good ones, but the number who openly admit to disliking technology or not relating to technology or not being interested in technology just scares me. These people will be going into classrooms as teachers in the next few years, and instead of being the much-needed catalyst for systemic change, many of them will just fall into the same old establishment that they experienced themselves during their own school life. No wonder it's so hard to make the shift happen!

Let me finish with a story. I was having lunch in a little café in Newtown a while back, and when the waitress came with the bill at the end of the meal I paid for it with my Teachers Credit Union credit card. When she looked at the card she remarked on it and asked me if I was a teacher. I told her yes, and she asked what I taught. I told her that was a technology integrator, to which she asked "What's that?"

I meet lots of people who have never heard of a technology integrator, so I replied with my standard answer. "I go into classrooms and work with students and teachers to help them use technology in more meaningful ways."

"Really?" she said. "I'm in third year at teachers college, and I've never heard of anything like that. So do kids use computers in schools much? Is technology, like, important?"

Third year teachers college. "Is technology, like, important?" This woman could be teaching your child in the next few years. OMG.

I'm sorry if I seem crotchety and snarky about this, but to me, this is just not good enough. How on earth will we ever break this cycle? We keep getting technologically clueless teachers incubating the next generation of technologically clueless teachers, and so on. We live in a world that is changing so rapidly, but the teaching profession seems to be stuck in some sort of endless Groundhog Day loop.

Image: 'Magic Revolving Door'
http://www.flickr.com/photos/32916905@N05/3074941476

Popularity: 4% [?]

Tagged as: breakthecycle, pd, teaching 11 Comments

5Mar/1011

ITSC 2010. It all begins.

So, here I am on the beautiful (but currently rainy) Gold Coast.

I arrived this evening to spend the weekend at Gold Coast ITSC 2010, the annual Innovative Technology in Schools Conference run by Apple. It certainly sounds like it will be fun, and I'm rather humbled to have been asked to give the keynote address. What's more surprising to me is that Apple asked if I'd do not only this one, but the entire Australian ITSC series, so over the next month or so I'll also be at the Adelaide, Sydney, Perth and Melbourne events as well. It came as a complete surprise to be asked, but I'm really thrilled to be able to be a part of them.

Apple is using a different approach to the ITSC events this year that sounds like it will be really good. It's all very unconferencey. Beyond the keynote, there will be lots of opportunity to mix and share and socialise and learn together. I think that's great, and it's certainly the best part of most conferences I've been to, so it's cool that we are seeing more conferences these days that try to focus on the conversations and encouraging the serendipitous aspects of this kind of learning. I like it. There is also going to be a focus at ITSC on actually making something, creating something to take away back to our schools that will help drive the shift. It sounds pretty cool.

Anyway I better get back to putting the finishing touches on this preso. It's an honour to have been asked to present, and I'd like to do a good job of it, although I'm always concerned about what I can actually add to the conversation. It's a bit daunting, but I'm looking forward to it.

If you happen to be going to any of the ITSC events over the next month or so, please come and say hi!