Author: Chris

Teacher. Blogger. Podcaster. Asks way too many questions.
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Asian Growth

Nǐ hǎo! I’m currently in Shanghai, China for the Learning 2.010 conference, and that’s pretty exciting for a number of reasons.

Firstly, mainland China is somewhere I’ve always wanted to go. In particular, Shanghai is fascinating because of its almost incomprehensible growth.  Intellectually, I know that China is a fast rising star, rapidly moving from a developing nation to a developed nation. We’ve all heard the statistics about the size and growth of China, of how Chinese is destined to become the most used language on the Internet, of how China has more honours students than the US has students, and so on.  Seriously though, no matter how many times I see the “Did You Know” videos that tell me how fast China is growing, nothing can quite prepare you for the endless ocean of concrete and skyscrapers that simply didn’t exist a mere 15 years ago.

Perhaps more than any statistic, this is where China’s growth really hit home for me… I got picked up by Michael Weber at Pudong airport and we got a cab back to the hotel… thankfully, I’m still alive to tell the story of it.  The cab driver was clearly not an experienced driver at all, struggling with the gears and clutch in this beaten up, manual VW taxi she was driving.  She had no idea where to take us, and ended up stopping in the middle of the freeway (I’m not exaggerating, quite literally in the middle of a five lane freeway!) to punch the address into the GPS. Once she got underway, the trip was a scary series of swerving lane changes, a mix of very slow and very fast driving, and lots and lots of horn tooting. The notion of staying in one lane, using her indicators, observing a speed limit, etc, was clearly not part of the plan.  But what struck me most as I glanced across at Michael, who must have been able to tell what I was thinking, was when he said “you have to remember that most people here in Shanghai had never driven a car until 5 years ago.”  5 years.  When he put it like that, and you then see the number of cars on the road, the freeway infrastructure and so on, and you realise that all of this growth has happened in the last 5 or 10 years… well, it’s hard to comprehend.

Then yesterday I was on the 100th floor observation deck of the Shanghai World Financial Centre. As I stood there, standing on the second tallest building in the world, looking down on the Jin Mao Tower – the fifth tallest building in the world – just next door, and the miles and miles and miles of skyscrapers you can see (well, you could see, if not for the smog) in all directions, it was awe inspiring view. Just seeing this sight is incredible enough, but knowing that this has all been built in less than the lifetime of my two teenage kids is just, well, mind snappingly incomprehensible.  I’m glad I got here to see it for myself, because the growth here in Asia is difficult to comprehend unless you actually see it.

The second reason I’m excited to be here is to be one of the cohort facilitators for the Learning 2.010 Conference. It’s a conference that I’ve heard so much about of the last few years, and that I’ve followed on Twitter each year with great envy.  It’s going to be a great conference for a few reasons, but mainly because it’s focused on trying to deliver a conference experience that breaks the mold of what we’ve come to expect from conferences. It uses a very learner-centric model to make the participants active learners rather than just delegates who turn up to listen to people talk at them.  Philosophically, it’s the right idea because although we talk a lot about 21st century learning, so many education conferences are still run in “delivery mode” where the presenter talks and the audience listens.  That’s ironic for an education conference in particular, because the people doing the talking are usually telling the people listening that schools needs to shift away from being places where teachers talk and students listen.

At Learning 2.010, the goal of the conference is to make the participants active in the learning process.  Although the conference does have a few strands or themes to get started with, the actual content of the event will be directed by the needs and wants of the people who attend.  It’s run very much in an unconference mode, and even the themed cohort workshops are loosely structured so that they can provide the flexibility to adapt to the needs of the participants on the fly.  The event is being held at Concordia International School in Pudong, a pretty impressive school in its own right, and I’m teamed up with Melinda Alford, one of the middle school teachers from Concordia, to cofacilitate the cohort called “Fostering a Culture of Learning and Creativity”.  As cohort leaders, we’re going in with lots of ideas and plenty of experience, but with absolutely no idea where it will end up.  It’s risky, a little scary, and it’s harder to do, but I believe that it’s absolutely the right way to approach it.  Education conferences have to start modeling the sort of learning and risk taking that we keep saying we are all about. Kudos to the Learning 2.010 organisers for having the balls to run it this way.

The third reason I’m so excited to be here in Shanghai is the people. My PLN came to life in a whole new way yesterday as I got to meet in person an amazing group of educators that I’ve only ever known online.  I was sitting in a planning session yesterday, sharing the conversations with people like Kim Cofino, Darren Kuropatwa, Wes Fryer, Alec Couros, Jeff Utecht, Julie Lindsay, Tim Lauer, Liz Davis, Steve Hargadon… and it was a bit of an out-of-body experience really.  I know that our rock stars are not like your rock stars, but I think we were all as excited as each other to finally be meeting in real life. I also got to meet a whole lot of other people that I really didn’t know as well, who are equally amazing educators, and who will now become part of my growing PLN.

We all had dinner together last night in the Jin Mao Tower, then drinks afterward at Cloud 9, apparently the highest bar in the world.  Who knew?

I’m really looking forward to the next few days!

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Public Visibility

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Photo embedded from the Inner West Courier

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Redesigning Learning Tasks: Part 3

My role at school is all about trying to helping teachers leverage technology to come up with more interesting and engaging ways to help their students learn.  Some of our older students are in laptop programs which gives them fulltime 1:1 access to their own computer but many still do not, especially in the junior years. Which is a bit of a shame since there is, I think, so much scope in the younger grades to use technology in interesting ways that support the curriculum.  Unfortunately, with the way things are structured at the moment, our primary kids get scheduled into a single one hour lesson in the computer lab each week.  That’s not really my preferred option, as it’s hard to get technology integration working in an ongoing, embedded way when it involves trotting off to the computer room once a week.

Ironically, all our primary classrooms do actually have a small pod of four desktop machines in them, but unfortunately I don’t really see them getting used in any consistent, meaningful way.  Technology integration is still, by and large, reliant on that one hour a week of “computer time” in the lab.  However, whether I like it or not, it is what it is, and until the system changes it’s a limitation I have to work with.

Ludus - our school Blog ServerOur Year 4 students are doing a unit of work on Australia at the moment, so I started the term by having a planning session with the Year 4 teachers to look at how we might weave ICT into the unit.  A couple of years ago, the ICT component was – you guessed it – making a PowerPoint about Australia, but thankfully we’ve tried a some new approaches over the last few years. For the past two years we’ve been using blogs to get the kids writing about Australia, in fact I think we’ve come up with some good ideas for structuring the writing process when blogging.  We started off using Edublogs, but after having a particularly frustrating series of outages, the school decided to set up our own WordPress MU server and gave every student their own blog on that system. It took a bit of fiddling to get the feeds on the front page working the way we wanted, but that internal WPMU site worked quite well for us.  Because we run Moodle, we recently installed Mahara as well, which also provides blogs for students and so I guess we’re a bit spoiled for choice at the moment when in comes to school blogging.

Although the blogs had worked quite well for us in the past, for the unit of work on Australia the Year 4 teachers felt that they wanted to try something a bit different, so we brainstormed some ideas and came up with an idea that I think has worked very well.

For me, ICT integration becomes far more interesting when it involves lots of little skills used in a lot of different ways that student have to piece together into a finished product.  I like it that way because it give them a broader understanding of the way that technology tools fit together, and I think helps their understanding of how technology can assist them cross over into many areas.  I also like the idea of providing a structure, a scaffold, so that even our struggling students have a clear framework to work within.  However, surrounding that scaffold should be flexibility, options, choices, and a way for more able students to scale their work up and allow for that important differentiation.

What we came up with was a project called 25 Moods of Australia.  We brainstormed a collection of words (it started as 25 words, but grew to 50) that described various moods – haunting, hostile, creepy, effervescent, etc. Using a free wiki (where every student and teacher was given their own login) we published a list of all the words.  Working in pairs, the students then adopted a word from that list. There are 50 students in the two Year 4 classes, so working in pairs required 25 words.  The reason we came up with 50 was to give them a choice of what word they wanted to select, and to provide some extra words in case any students wanted to do a second one.

Armed with their chosen words, each student pair started by creating a new blank page on the wiki for that word. Then they had to find a clear, concise definition for the word (so that they understood it) and they then added that definition to the wiki page.  They used both regular paper dictionaries as well as online dictionaries. It was useful to compare the two.

The next job was to use Flickr to find a photograph taken somewhere in Australia that they felt captured the meaning of that word.  This was quite tricky… the Flickr search engine is not as sophisticated as Google’s and so to find a photo that both described their word and was taken in Australia required some thinking.  It involved looking carefully at the images, at the tags, at the captions, and using a bit of detective thinking to find photographs that met all the criteria.  To make it even trickier, we had a talk about copyright and the use of other people’s photographs without permission, which led to an interesting discussion about Creative Commons.  The students picked up on this idea very easily, and now know how to use the Advanced Search feature in Flickr to find photographs that are free of traditional copyright restrictions.  (I was feeling very encouraged to hear from their teachers that they are also now being much more mindful of copyright in other areas of their school work, and they’ve been observed looking for Creative Commons images for other projects as well! I consider that a major win!)

Once they found an image they like, they then used the All Sizes selector in Flickr to find the 500 pixel, medium-sized version of the photo and they copy it to their desktop. They also copy the URL of where they got the image so it can by pasted into the photo caption as an attribution, required by all CC licenses.  Once the photo is copied to their computer, they then upload it into the wiki (we used Wikispaces) and insert it into their page.

The next job is to go to Google Maps and find the location of where that photograph was taken on the map. This is also tricky, since not every photo makes this clear.  Some photos are geotagged with the exact location of where they were taken, but many are not.  We talked about geolocation.  We learnt to look at the tags, the keywords, the captions, the other photos in the Flickrstream, and to look for clues that might give us an idea about where the photo was taken.  And sometimes, when their were no clues, we had to make educated guesses about where the photo could have been taken.  Once we decided on a location – either a definite location based on real clues, or an imagined location based on common sense, the students found that place in Australia on the map.

Using the Link option, they then generated the embed code for the map, copied it, went back to the wiki and created a widget. They pasted the embed code into the widget and saved the page to reveal the embedded Google Map of their best estimate for the location of the photograph.

The last step is for the students to then write a couple of paragraphs talking about their photograph and why they think it represents their focus word. This can be quite a challenge, as they have to think very carefully about how exactly they will justify their selection, describing the photo and linking it back to the key ideas in the definition of their word. They also need to write about the map location and explain how they knew (or guessed) that the photo was taken in that place.

As you can see, it’s a task that contains a LOT of small pieces.  It contains lot of ICT skills and techniques and understandings in a number of areas. It is a task of small pieces loosely joined.  It’s also not a task that can be plagiarised.  It’s not a task where there is a “right answer”, as any answer could be right if it was justified well enough.

Remind yourself, these kids are 9 and 10 years old. And they have shown themselves to be perfectly capable of moving information around, remixing, repurposing and restructuring it in fairly sophisticated ways.  They quickly pick up the ideas of bringing all the pieces together to make something new. I think they are using some reasonably advanced information skills, as they learn to search, evaluate, synthesize and create with the information they find, and then add value to that information by interpreting and summarising and justifying it.  In short, I’ve been really impressed with what they can do. And even more impressed with what they can’t do, but can learn to do.

You can visit the wiki at http://ausmoods.wikispaces.com, although at the time of writing it is still a work in progress.  The final stage, when everything is complete, will be for them to use the discussion tabs on the individual pages to leave comments and feedback for each other.

I think it’s been a really good task, with plenty of really worthwhile ICT skills built in, as well as an integrated use of literacy, writing, geography, thinking and reasoning, collaboration, and so on.

If only we had more than an hour a week to do this stuff…