Teacher PD | Betchablog

12Dec/094

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

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

I remember the first time I saw Photoshop.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Popularity: 2% [?]

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

11Dec/090

Vote Early, Vote Often!

Yes, it's that time of year again! The annual Edublog Awards are in full swing, and after a few weeks of people making nominations for various blogs, tweets, wikis and social networks across a really broad range of categories, I'm extremely honoured to have had not one, but two of my online projects - Betchablog and The Virtual Staffroom - mentioned for an "Eddie" this year.

These awards (which are great to be considered for, but hopefully not to be taken too seriously!) aim to highlight and recognise some of the great work taking place in the online educational sphere. Education is certainly one sector that seems to have really embraced the use of blogging as a tool for reflection, sharing, helping others and generally assisting teachers and students to "find their voice". I know that I've personally found the act of blogging to be critical in helping me "think out loud", processing ideas in a public space where they can be exposed to the scrutiny, support and suggestions of others. Having a blog has certainly helped me find my own voice and given me a platform from which I can share easily and freely with the world, whether it's some resource I've found, a tutorial I've made, or just some vague idea that's been floating around in my head looking for a place to be expressed. I blog for myself first and foremost, and the idea that someone else might also find some value in any of it is just the icing on the cake, although it is certainly very tasty icing! I really do value the sense of community that my blog has created for me and although I say that I write just for myself, I must admit that it would be quite a hollow experience without the wonderful support of those who read, comment and engage with me.

To those that nominated Betchablog or The Virtual Staffroom this year, thank you! To those that might consider casting a vote for either of them, thank you to you too. But mostly thank you to everyone who reads (and subscribes) to some of these things I've been doing online over the last few years... you are the ones who make it all worthwhile for me.

Popularity: 2% [?]

Tagged as: awards, betchablog, edublogawards, virtualstaffroom No Comments

7Dec/095

Staying On Message

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Popularity: 2% [?]

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

1Dec/092

K12 Online Conference starts today

Of all the conferences and professional development events I've taken part in over the last few years, the K12 Online Conference is the one that I think has had the most impact. Not surprisingly, because unlike many "one-hit" conferences that are over at the end of the weekend, K12 Online rolls out over an extended two week period, releasing several presentations each day on a wide range of topics. These presentations are all in some multimedia format, usually a video, but they could be in whatever format the presenter chooses, and they live on permanently beyond the actual conference itself. It really is, as they say, the conference that never ends.

The K12 Online Conference started in 2006 as the brainchild of a couple of North American teachers. If you want the full story of the conference and how it started, you might like to listen to episode 16 of the Virtual Staffroom podcast where I got to interview those who started it. Ever since that first year, I've looked forward to K12 Online each year. There's an incredible effort behind it... I can vouch for that, as I volunteered to be on one of the organising subcommittees in 2007 and 2008, and I've also contributed presentations in 2008 and 2009. So I can tell you from first hand experience that there is a huge amount of work that takes place behind the scenes, from many passionate and committed educators, to make this all happen.

Anyway, the 2009 conference, with the theme "Bridging the Divide" was officially opened today with a pre conference keynote from the fabulous Kim Cofino. Like everything Kim does, it's full of passion and insight into what it means to be an effective teacher in the 21st century. I'll embed it here, but you should probably head over to the K12 Online site and check out all the other stuff going on there.

Once you've watched it, go check out the schedule of stuff that will be released over the next few weeks. There's something for everyone.

Then once you have seen the schedule, make sure you grab some of the presentations for this year's conference. Heck, why not subscribe to one of the RSS feeds and get them as they are released. You won't regret it.

Popularity: 3% [?]

Tagged as: k12online, k12online09, keynote, mscofino 2 Comments

27Nov/0919

This is Not Amazing

Amazing (adjective) astonishing, astounding, surprising, stunning, staggering, shocking, startling, stupefying, breathtaking; awesome, awe-inspiring, sensational, remarkable, spectacular, stupendous, phenomenal, extraordinary, incredible, unbelievable; informal mind-blowing, jaw-dropping

Sometimes I find myself dealing with people in circumstances that are completely unconnected, but which seem to have some kind of bizarre synchronicity that causes them to mirror each other.

The other day, I found myself in one of these situations...

Firstly, I was asked by a colleague to help edit some video footage from a recent school trip. I don't mind helping with such requests because I quite enjoy the process of video editing, so I attached the camera to my MacBook Pro, sucked the footage onto the hard drive and began dragging clips together in iMovie. My colleague looked on as I dragged clips around the timeline, clearly never having seen non-linear video editing before, and, with a little gasp of wonder in her voice, she remarked "That's amazing the way you can do that with video!"

Later that day, I got a call from another colleague who needed help with a mail merge of some spreadsheet data into a letter she was writing. She was aware that such mail merges were possible, but wasn't sure exactly how to do it. So I dropped by her office to lend a hand, and in the process of trying to sort it out I noticed that some of the data formatting in the spreadsheet was a little inconsistent. One of the columns had data with stray spaces in the text... no problem, I hit ctrl-F to call up the Search and Replace command, typed a few characters into the search field, replaced them with the characters I needed to fix the problem, clicked OK, and the changes rippled through the sheet fixing the problem in less than a second. As my colleague looked on, she remarked "That's amazing the way you can do that with a spreadsheet!"

The last example was from yet another colleague who wanted to assemble a short end-of-year slideshow of her students to send home to their parents. She was envisioning a PowerPoint full of pictures set to music. Because I know how much work that can be to create, I suggested a better solution. I asked her to give me all the photos she wanted to include and I uploaded them to Animoto.com, selected a piece of royalty-free music from their online collection and pressed the Make Video button. A few minutes later I downloaded the finished video, an impressive little piece that took me about three clicks and near-zero talent to actually produce. Her response to the final slideshow was, you guessed it... "That's amazing the way you can do that with digital photos!"

Can we get something straight here? NONE of these things were "amazing".

Having these three events happen back to back like that made me stop and think about how often I hear the "that's amazing the way you can do XYZ!" comment. (And just to be clear, it wasn't that they thought it was amazing because I was the one doing it, they thought it was amazing simply because it could be done). They were amazed at what computers make possible... editing video, fixing numbers, manipulating sound and pictures, etc... these things are still amazing to many people and I got to thinking about how often I hear the "That's amazing!" line from people who observe technology doing things they didn't know were possible.

I'm not for one moment suggesting that it's good to be completely blasé about the things that technology can do. There are plenty of totally amazing things that technology enables these days. Separating conjoined twins at the brain with complete success is amazing. Ditching a passenger jet in the Hudson and getting all the passengers off safely is amazing. Crashing a rocket into the moon to stir up dust and rocks to discover water there is amazing. And the fact that the law allows a Japanese man to marry an Anime cartoon character is, well, kind of freaky, but I guess still amazing.

The point is that, yes, there are plenty of amazing things that happen in our world, and its important to retain our sense of wonder and amazement at them. No question about that.

But seriously people... editing video, fixing some numbers in a spreadsheet, or making a slideshow from some photos is NOT "amazing". We, and by we I am particularly talking about the teaching profession in general, need to stop being so "amazed" at things that really are quite mundane. We need to stop seeing the most trivial, mundane tasks as being "amazing" simply because they were done on a computer. Being amazed that a spreadsheet can work with numbers just makes you look a bit silly. Worse than that, being clueless about what technology can really do just sets the bar of expectation ridiculously low for students, letting them believe that they can produce any old rubbish and yet still impress their teacher, who thinks that the PowerPoint their student made is simply "amazing". I haven't even seen that kid's PowerPoint, but trust me, it's probably not amazing.

The reason this irks me so much is that personal computers have been around for over 30 years now, and have been a significant part of most schools now for over 20 years. Most schools and school systems have been trying to provide some level of professional development, training and support for teachers for most of these 20 years. Even if a teacher resisted technology back in the early days of the PC, there's absolutely no excuse for not having embedded the use of a personal computer into their daily work over the past 10 years.

It's time to stop being so "amazed" at things that are just part of the technological and cultural landscape of life in the 21st century. It's not "amazing" that computers can edit video, manage numbers or manipulate digital images. It's not "amazing" that mobile phones can stream live video or GPS your current position. It's not "amazing" that you can make phone calls to the other side of the planet at no cost. None of these things are really "amazing" any more... they just "are". To be "amazed" at this sort of stuff is to fail to recognise the invisible role that technology plays in all our lives these days. To anyone working in education, working with young people, you need to realise that simple tasks performed with technology are not something to be "amazed" at, marveled at and gushed over. For our students, the use of technology as the enabler for such tasks seems as natural as breathing air.

I was in another meeting with some students and a teacher the other day, and the teacher was trying to show the kids about a Ning they'd had set up for a class project. The teacher was all effusive, gushed about the Ning's "amazing" features and wanting to show the students all the "amazing" things it could do... "Look! You can use it to leave messages for each other!", she said excitedly. One of the students confided to me later "I can't believe how worked up she was getting about that Ning... it's just a blog. It's like Facebook. Of course we know how to use it." It reminded me of that wonderful line from The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams, where the people of Earth were considered a bit of a joke for being “so amazingly primitive that they still think digital watches are a pretty neat idea.”

Don't get me wrong, technology provides as with some incredibly useful tools. The rise of Web 2.0 and the read/write web has changed the world forever. Mobile technologies just keep getting more and more impressive. But let's keep things in perspective.

Save the "amazement" for things that truly ARE amazing, and realise that technology is not some kind of unexplainable black magic voodoo... it just "is".

Image: 'iPhone Glee'
http://www.flickr.com/photos/45635774@N00/4135434552

Popularity: 4% [?]

Tagged as: amazed, education, notamazing, technology 19 Comments

5Nov/092

The Value of Thinking Out Loud

At the recent ULearn Conference in Christchurch, New Zealand, I was asked (along with many other educators, I hasten to add!) to be part of the EdTalks series. Naturally, I was thrilled to have been asked and readily agreed, although I must admit that in the flurry of preparation for ULearn I really didn't think about it very much until I got to Christchurch. Sitting in the foyer of the Chistchurch Conference Centre, quite by accident, I bumped into Matt Tippen, one of the brains behind EdTalks, who said "Oh, so you're Chris Betcher. Are you ready to record your talk?" I wasn't, but I did it anyway, and essentially just made it up as I went along.

EdTalks is a project of CORE Education, a leading New Zealand educational consulting and training organisation, and is described on their website as "a growing collection of videos featuring New Zealand and International educators talking about learning. EDtalks is CORE's contribution to your professional learning; a free database of short video interviews with leading educators and thinkers." It's one of those wonderfully simple ideas - use video to capture teachers talking about what they do, then sharing that with other educators on a completely open, accessable website.

Anyway, as I said, I wasn't actually prepared for it, and really hadn't given much thought to what I might talk about. The topic of interactive whiteboards came up, and next thing you know I was recording a piece about them (Curse that book! I'm getting typecast!) While I do think that IWBs have a worthwhile role to play, and I think I've given a fair amount of thought to how teachers might use them sensibly and effectively, I don't know that I really want to become known as "the IWB guy". Anyway, for what it's worth, here's the EdTalk I recorded.

The more I think through the arguments for and against IWB technology, the clearer I think I become about it in my own head. It took me a while to get to this point, but I do believe that IWBs are a worthwhile addition to a classroom. I also don't think that my opinion is simply based on having drunk the Kool-Aid of the whiteboard vendors, who too often promote the technology as an instant panacea. It's not. I think it's taken me a long time to get it clear in my own head just where the value proposition lies for IWBs, and where their true strengths are.

Of course, it's not just IWBs. The same process has applied to so many other area that I've developed a considered opinion about. It's really only been this process of "thinking out loud" in public spaces like my blog, my podcast, or in various other online forums like mailing lists and Nings, that I have managed to hold some of these debates in my own head and come to conclusions that actually make sense to me. There is enormous value in being challenged by others who hold contrary views and who will debate and raise the level of critical thinking so that the end result, at least in my own head, is something that I can feel happy with. You know what they say... if you don't stand for something, you'll fall for anything.

It makes me wonder... I know many people who don't/won't take their thinking into a public space and expose it to the scrutiny of others. How do those people decide where they stand on controversial issues if they don't blog or write about or somehow share their thinking with the wider audience?

Popularity: 2% [?]

Tagged as: core-ed, edtalk, iwb, ulearn, ulearn09 2 Comments

26Oct/096

Getting an Ad-Free Ning

Quite a few teachers at our school are starting to see the advantages that a Ning community can offer. We have been using Nings this year with several classes, and I'm finding them a really good, really easy way to get teachers interacting with technology in ways they might not have done otherwise. Ning provides a visually rich, yet secure, environment for students to collaborate and socialise in, with a range of tools that are both useful and fun to use. Because Ning offers many of the same kinds of tools that Facebook offers - discussion, video, pictures, chat - students find it easy to adapt to. It also provides a few things that Facebook doesn't - blogs, music and page customisation - so it allows teachers to modify the Ning toolsets to meet their individual educational needs.

Although Nings are proving incredibly useful for educators, the Google ads that appear on the right-hand menu are problematic for many educational purposes. As good as the Ning environment is, with the ads in place (and in a new Ning the ads are often for inappropriate things like weight loss, online dating, work from home schemes, etc) Nings become largely unsuitable for school use. While it's possible to pay to remove the ads, the cost and red-tape involved in doing this in a school setting also make it less likely that educators will pursue it as an option.

Realising this, the good folk at Ning very generously offer an ad-free option for k-12 educators. Simply ask to have the ads removed, and they will remove them for you.

The problem is that the instructions for getting the ads removed are not obvious. They require you to write to them and ask for it; a nice personal approach, but not just a matter of clicking a simple checkbox in the same way that Wikispaces offers ad-free wikis for educators. With Ning, you need to know where to direct your request for ad removal, and that information is not all that obvious. If you Google "removing ads from a ning" you will find instructions to do it, but I've found that the instructions can be out-of-date or do not always match what you see on your screen... it can be a little confusing.

I just applied this morning to have a Ning made ad-free, and managed to work my way through the confusion. If it helps anyone else, here's how I did it.

Go to http://help2.ning.com/AskUsAQuestion
Fill in the URL for the Ning you want made ad-free
From the "Select a Topic" dropdown, choose "General Question"
In the "Describe your Question" field, write a short request for your ads to be removed... as an example, this is what I wrote... "Hello, I'd like to request that the above Ning be made ad-free for education. Our school is doing a collaborative project with our sister school in Japan and would like to use the Ning environment for these exchanges. Our students are aged between 13 and 17 and the Ning will be used only for educational purposes. Thanks!"

They say it takes about 3-4 days to get approved.

Thanks Ning-guys! Hope you get a great big serving of Internet karma as reward for your generosity!

Popularity: 2% [?]

Tagged as: ad-free, advertising, free, k12, ning, web2.0 6 Comments

6Oct/091

ULearn 09, Day 1

Photo by @allanahk

So here I am in Christchurch, New Zealand for Ulearn 09, certainly one of the biggest Ed Tech conferences in NZ, and probably one of the biggest in the southern hemisphere I would think. It's a education conference that I've wanted to attend for the last few years, having only ever heard good things about it, but for whatever reason I just haven't been able to get here for it. This year was different, and after hearing how good it was from my work colleague, @sirchriss, I was very keen to get here. Fortunately, a number of Australian educators were sponsored to attend the event this year and I was lucky enough to have my presentation submissions accepted, so here I am.

It really is a beautiful part of the world, and Christchurch is a very attractive city. The conference itself is quite large, with close to 2000 delegates, 400+ workshops and presentations, 150 support staff and over 60 vendors. The logistical effort to plan and host a conference of this scale is significant and the organisers do an amazing job.

I got up early enough this morning to attend the Powhiri, a kind of Maori welcoming ceremony. I'm constantly struck by the energy and pride of the Maori people, and think it's wonderful that the two cultures of New Zealand, the traditional and the contemporary, exist together in such harmony and respect for each other. This is a country that really values their indigenous people.

But mainly, today has been full of meeting people. Many of them for the first time (although I felt like I've known many of them for a long time.) I bumped into @janenicholls at the Powhiri, and then during the day I kept meeting more and more people who looked just like their Twitter avatars. "Hey, you're @moodlegirl!" or "Hey, you're @keamac!", "Hey you're @dwenmoth!", etc, etc. Then of course there was the reconnecting with people I have met before, people like @rachelboyd, @allanahk and @dragon09. I also attended the unconference session in the afternoon at Boaters, where I got to meet many others and to take part in some powerful conversations. I really enjoyed the unconference - really just a very informal gathering to chat about whatever topics came up - and I got a lot out of it.

After the unconference, I met up with Matt from Core-Ed to record a short video interview as part of the Edtalks series. This is another terrific NZ initiative, and involves recording short video interviews with leading teachers about some of the things they are doing with technology to make learning more engaging for the kids they teach. Over time the Edtalks video library has grown to become a valuable collection of good ideas and best practice for other teachers, and it was a bit of an honour to be asked to make a contribution to it.

Tonight, I went to the dinner with about 40 other conference folk, where I met still more people that looked a lot like their avatars. More conversations, more great ideas exchanged, more opportunities to hear about how other people approach this incredible job called teaching. Likewise, I had a few people say to me today, "Hey, you're @betchaboy!" as though there was almost a sense of celebrity to it for them. It's really, really weird. After having a day full of these "Hey, you're @that_person" moments, it made me think about how funny it is that we have these little "celebrity" moments when we meet someone that we've only ever know from the online world, especially if it's just from reading their blogs, following them on Twitter or hearing their podcasts. I mean, we are all "just" teachers, and yet there is that glimmer of excitement when meeting each other for the first time.

It reminded me of an Intel ad currently screening on TV back in Australia, where Ajay Bhatt, the co-inventor of the USB, walks into a room full of "fans". The ad concludes with a great one liner that kind of sums up the experience I had in meeting people today... I won't ruin the line by telling you what it is, you can watch it for yourself...

Andy Warhol once said that everyone will get their 15 minutes of fame. Maybe with the rise of global social networks, extensive personal learning networks and the notion of "celebrity" now existing way out on the edge of the long tail, we'll all just want to get our 15 minutes of obscurity instead?

Looking forward to Day 2 tomorrow...

Technorati Tags: ulearn, ulearn09

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Filed under: Blogging, conferences, Ed Tech, Friends, Humour, Teacher PD, Twitter 1 Comment

6Oct/093

Copyright or Copywrong?

I was in a staff meeting at school last week where we were given a presentation outlining 10 common myths about copyright. I thought it not a bad summary of what many teachers just assume to be true. Ironically, I'm reproducing it below basically word for word as it was presented to me, but I'm told on good authority that the original creator has authorised its use for reposting.

The other thing I really would have liked to have had included in the conversation was a little more talk about what the alternatives are. It's one thing to talk about what you can't do legally, but unless you provide a list of workable alternatives, simply making "though shalt not" pronouncements is a bit pointless. Copyright has a place, but in a digital world that place is changing dramatically. There is an obvious tension between the inputs and the outputs of copyright... if you are a content creator, you want the output of your work to be protected so others don't simply steal your stuff, however, unless you can borrow and remix content from others, you will have very little to work with in the first place.

If you've not seen it, take a look at an amazing comic book produced by the Center for the Study of the Public Domain at Duke University. Issue 1, entitled Bound By Law, looks at the copyright issues faced by documentary filmmakers, and is an extremely insightful look at the pros and cons of copyright and how it can often unintentionally stifle the very same creativity it is supposed to be protecting. I think it explains it very well, and it should be read by all high school students (and teachers!). You can download a copy (Under a Creative Commons licence of course) from www.law.duke.edu/cspd/comics.

For another lucid overview of the real issues behind copyright law, you really can't go past the TED Talk by Larry Lessig (founder of Creative Commons) called How Creativity is Being Strangled by the Law. His final summation of the tensions that exist between the extremist viewpoints of "Let's protect everything" vs "Everything should be free" is excellent, and he makes it very clear that, while the law might not be the ass we sometimes think it is, the notion of copyright certainly needs a good injection of balance and common sense if it is to remain relevant and workable.

Anyway, for what it's worth, here are the 10 myths about copyright, as presented by my school last week (and specifically applied to Australian copyright law)

1. It’s OK – I found it on the net

The fact that something is on the internet doesn’t mean that it’s not protected by copyright or that you can use it as you wish. Material on the net is protected to the same extent as anything on paper or in any other type of format. In many cases, however, copyright owners put a statement on to websites stating how people can use the material – the permission they give can often be quite extensive, but don’t assume that it will cover what you are planning to do with the material.

2. We can use it – it doesn’t have a copyright notice on it

While it is recommended copyright owners should put copyright notices on their material, it is not compulsory, and it doesn’t affect whether or not something is protected. We will have a compliance issue to deal with whether or not the material has a copyright notice on it.

3. We’re non-profit so it’s OK

In some narrow cases, the non-profit statues of an organisation can affect its ability to rely on exceptions. However, there is no general rule to the effect that it’s OK to use copyright material for non-profit purposes.

4. It’s all right we’re attributing the creator

If you’re using copyright material, you do generally have to attribute the person or people who created the material. This is a general moral rights obligation. However, you’ll still have copyright issues to consider; attributing the creator doesn’t change this.

5. We only need to worry about copyright if we’re charging money

In some narrow cases, the fact that an organisation is charging money can affect its ability to rely on exception to the general rule that you need permission if you want to use copyright material in one of the ways reserved to the copyright owner. However, there is no general rule to the effect that you don’t have to worry about copyright if you’re not charging people for the material you are using.

6. The copyright owner should see this as good promotion

Whether or not a copyright owner sees your use of their material as good promotion is their decision, not yours, and you can never be sure they’ll see the situation in the same light as you do. Also, even if the copyright owner does see your use of the material as good publicity, don’t assume that this means that they’ll give you permission to use it for free. Many copyright owners make their living from the licence fees they charge, and they will often want to know beforehand how you want to use the material. If you don’t get a clearance when you’re supposed to, you’ve still infringed copyright – which may, for the College, work out as bad publicity.

7. It’s OK – I’m using less than 10%

There is no general rule that you can use less than 10% without permission. If you’re using any ‘substantial’ part of a copyright owner’s material – whether you’ve made changes to it or not – you’ll have to deal with the copyright issue. In the context, a ‘substantial’ part is any part that is important, distinctive or essential. It doesn’t have to be a large part to be ‘substantial’ in a copyright sense.

8. It’s all right – I’ve changed it

There are two common, but wrong, beliefs in this area. First, there is no general rule to the effect that it’s OK to use copyright material if you change it by 10% or more. Second, there is no general rule to the effect that you can use copyright material if you make five or more changes. As noted above, if you’re using any part that is important, distinctive or essential, you have to deal with copyright issues.

9. It’s OK – we paid for it

The fact that the College paid a contractor for something – such as a report or a series of photos – will have a bearing on how we can use it. However, this is not by itself a guarantee that we own copyright in it, and can use it as we like. Similarly, the fact that we own a physical item – such as a painting or photograph or a DVD – does not mean you can use it as you like (such as copying it or screening it).

10. No one will ever find out

If you know, and your colleagues know, why mightn’t the copyright owner – or the collecting society that represents them – get to find out too? Organisations that infringe copyright are always at risk from disgruntled employees, let alone the other people they come in contact with. Also, copyright owners have six years to take action for an infringement – that’s a long time for information to come to light.

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Tagged as: copyright, creativecommons, dukeuniversity, lessig 3 Comments

1Oct/092

More than just Dazzle

I'm in Auckland at the moment for the first New Zealand National IWB Conference. As some of you may know, I co-authored a book a while back with Mal Lee that was all about IWBs and interactive technology in general, and I learned a fair bit about whiteboards and their various uses in the process of writing that book. I've presented at the last three Australian IWB conferences, another in Napier earlier this year, and now this one in Auckland. Plus, since the book came out I get asked quite a lot to run IWB workshops for schools, where I get to I talk to lots of teachers about the things they do with their IWBs. (Actually I've always talked to lots of teachers about their IWB use, but I think I ask much better questions these days). All of this has given me - I think - a reasonable perspective on the current state of IWB use, so I just thought I'd blog a couple of reflections about it.

When I first saw an interactive whiteboard, I really wasn't very impressed with what I saw. I remember touring through a school in southwest Sydney about 5 years ago that had installed them in every room. As I wandered around looking at how they were being used, a few thoughts struck me...

I couldn't see anything special about "the board". It seemed that everything I saw being done could have been done with just a projector on its own equally as effectively.
There was nothing terribly special or even pedagogically sound about what I saw. It was mostly just online games and digital "busy work".
I wondered if these people had given any thought to how much their ongoing costs for replacement projector bulbs would amount to!

Shortly after that, I was asked if I would help develop some digital teaching resources for teachers using IWBs. I recall it was myself and another teacher who were commissioned to create this package, and I think we had 5 days to work on it, but I spent most of the first three days arguing with her about how stupid some of these whiteboard activity ideas were. Mind you, I was a high school teacher and she was a primary school teacher, and were both coming at it from completely different paradigms. Eventually we did come up with some good ideas, but I felt like the process of arguing and questioning the value of the IWB actually brought us to a far clearer realisation about what exactly these IWB things were all about. Or at least what they could and should be all about.

When I was teaching in Canada, my school adopted Smartboards. I was lucky enough to be selected for the original "pioneer group" of teachers there, and we got some excellent training directly from the trainers at Smart. Over the last couple of years I've read a lot of research papers and blogposts about IWBs, listened to a lot of IWB specific podcasts, watched a lot of teachers work with them, had many, many conversations about them with all sorts of teachers. And, of course, I've co-written what has turned out to be a pretty comprehensive book on the subject.

There are still some people who have some pretty negative opinions about IWBs. They claim that interactive whiteboards are a backward step. Coming from my originally skeptical position, I totally understand the controversy surrounding IWB technology. However, I also feel like I'm reasonably well qualified to have some sort of considered opinion about them, so here's a few thoughts...

I feel like the general attitude to IWBs and the approach to using them seems to have matured somewhat over the last 12 months. In the early days of IWBs, many teachers were clearly impressed with the "wow factor" and were not giving a lot of deep consideration to the actual pedagogy for their more meaningful use or thinking about how they might become seamlessly embedded into the daily routine of teaching and learning.

These days however, I'm pleased to say that most of the conversations I hear about IWBs seem to have a much more pedagogically focused outlook. More teachers seem to be thinking intelligently about how they might be used to improve learning, or at least raise the student engagement factor in some sort of sustainable way. They want to know about how to use the technology to deepen understanding and to promote higher order thinking skills. They genuinely want to become more proficient in their use, so they can get the technicalities of using them out of the way and focus on the real issues of "how will this help me teach better, and how will this help my students learn better?"

It's becoming much harder for vendors to dazzle educators with fancy animations and meaningless drag-and-drop activities. It seems to me that the IWB-using educators I'm meeting these days are much more discriminating and thoughtful about how they use the technology. They also have a far more suspicious view of outrageous vendor claims about the instant impact an IWB will have on their classrooms. For way too long, vendors promoted IWBs as though they were some sort of magical panacea for classrooms. "Just add an IWB to your classroom and student excellence will automatically follow!" seems to be the claim.

From what I've seen lately, that claim is being increasingly seen for the lie that it is. Intelligent teachers know that while interactive whiteboards might be a powerful addition to their classroom, expecting them to be more than that is just naive. Great teaching is still the catalyst that makes powerful learning possible, but used wisely, IWBs can certainly enrich that environment.

Technorati Tags: iwb, pedagogy