Chris – Page 84 – Chris Betcher

November 7, 2009

A Decade of Global Learning

I was browsing through some old files this week and I stumbled across this wonderful piece of video that brought back some great memories for me. It’s just over 10 years old and is an interview with a group of students I taught back then, just after they had been awarded third place in the 1998 AT&T Virtual Classroom Contest.

The Virtual Classroom Contest, for anyone that remembers it, was an amazing web-based global collaboration project that linked kids from across the world together. Over 300 schools took part each year, forming 100 teams made up of three different schools that had to be located on three different continents. The project ran for over eight months, starting with the use of forums and email to debate and discuss ideas for a theme, and then a massive collaborative push to turn their ideas into reality. We were fortunate to be teamed up with two other amazingly dedicated schools – Percy Julian Middle School in Oak Park, Illinois, and Fuwa Junior High School in Japan, and we produced a collaborative digital novel about time travel through our three countries called “Once Upon a Time Machine”.

I can honestly say that working with these kids, and the experience of working globally, across timezones, overcoming language and cultural barriers, to produce a true piece of creative, collaborative work is without doubt the thing that kept me in teaching. Working with these kids doing these sorts of projects opened my eyes to what real learning could be about, and what the truly important values of education were. These students, as well as their teammates who weren’t in the video, worked so hard that year and were so dedicated and committed it was astounding. You only have to watch them and listen to them speak to realise that what they learned was nothing that could be found in a school textbook. This project was not about “playing school” to keep a teacher happy. This was about rising to a challenge, chasing your passions, and learning because you wanted to, because you actually found it interesting. All of this work was done outside of regular school work; it’s amazing what students are capable of, in spite of school rather than because of it.

I hope you take the time to watch the video and to listen to their answers, because I think they embody everything I want education to be. When I asked them what they learned, I got answers like “teamwork”, “leadership”, “tolerance”, “committment”. This was all unscripted and unprompted. These kids really were as genuine as they appear in this video. As I watch it now, I’m still quite amazed at the maturity of these students who at the time were only about 14 or 15 years old.

I’m also pretty proud for what we were doing way back then, over ten years ago. Web videoconferencing. Online discussion forums. Website building with Flash and Javascript. Kids thinking in terms of timezones and learning to pass files around the world for others to work on. This was all pre-Web 2.0, and we did things the old fashioned way with HTML editors and FTP access. I don’t think I realised it at the time, but I guess it was pretty sophisticated stuff for 1998/99. It was just what you did if you wanted to make this stuff happen.

Many of these same kids entered the Virtual Classroom Contest the next year and managed to help their team take out the overall first prize, earning a trip to Hong Kong to meet their virtual team mates. It was, as you can imagine, a wonderful experience for a group of teenagers to know that they were the “world’s best” at something.

The Virtual Classroom Contest was discontinued in 2000 due to cost cutting at AT&T, but was resurrected in 2005 by the Give Something Back Foundation. I find it equally impressive and humbling that my friend and partner in crime from Oak Park, Janet Barnstable, has continued with the revised Global Virtual Classroom Contest every year since then and has mentored her kids to either first or second place each time. If you ever wanted evidence that the quality of the teacher can have an effect on the quality of the learning, there it is.

To all the kids I had the joy and privilege of working with back then, thank you for teaching me much more than you’ll ever realise.

November 5, 2009May 7, 2011

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?

October 28, 2009

Finding New Things to do with an IWB

The following post was originally written as a reponse to a thread about interactive whiteboards on the www.iwbrevolution.com Ning. One of the thread participants there made a statement about needing to see IWBs used in new ways.

I’m interested (read desperate) to see the revolutionary value adding aspects. I have an IWB, I love using my IWB, but I need to grasp the ideas and strategies that move people to describe it as a ‘revolution’ in learning. Show me an idea that is actually new!!!

While I appreciate where he’s coming from, I think the question is somewhat flawed. In responded to the post, I found myself “thinking out loud” about the value propsition of interactive whiteboards. For what it may be worth, here’s the post. As always, your thoughts and feedback are welcome in the comments…

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I used to own a mobile phone, an iPod, a digital camera, a video camera, a GPS, and a voicerecorder, and I often carried many of them with me at any given moment. I also used to carry photos of my kids in my wallet. Gradually each of these devices has become subsumed into devices that could combine many of these functions – at first, my mobile phone gained a camera, and then my next phone had a camera, and a voice recorder. I still needed an iPod if I wanted to have my music with me, and I still needed a GPS if I wanted to know where I was going. I could maybe carry 3 or 4 photos of my kids at most.

My latest device is an iPhone, and it has finally merged all of these tools into a single pocketsized device. I now no longer carry all these things around with as individual tools, but I still have all these tools in my pocket. They are now just one device. The phone, the cameras, the voicerecorder, the GPS, the iPod with all my videos, music and photos accessable whereever I go, combined with mobile internet access and the dozens of amazing apps I have installed for doing just about anything you can think of, has fundamentally changed the experience of interacting with these devices individually.

I find my iPhone to be “revolutionary”, not because it allows me to do anything I could not do previously with all these individual devices, but rather because of the way it has combined all these tools into a single device. The revolution has been in the convergence, not in each the specific tools. I could do all this stuff before – I just had to carry a bag full of devices to do it! It’s also evident in the way these tools interact with each other… the maps can talk to the GPS, which in turn can access the web to look up an address, which in turn can let me make a phone call to that address. There’s nothing terribly “new” about the map, the GPS or the phone. Individually, these are all old, existing tools, but combine them together and they produce an overall experience that is new, different, and dare I say it, revolutionary.

The argument I hear that “an IWB does not let me do anything I couldn’t do with xxxx” – pieces of cardboard with words on them, sheets of butchers paper and blu-tack, an overhead projector, a pair of real dice, a big wooden protractor… you name it… is a complete piece of misdirection about the real value that an IWB can bring to a classroom. It is NOT about whether an IWB can “only” be used to do something that was already possible using a different technology. The real point is that the IWB, by converging so many classroom tools into a single, digital, point of contact on a large shared screen that every participant of the classroom can see, hear and engage with, fundamentally changes a whole lot of things.

There ARE great examples of how IWBs can reinvent what happens in classrooms, but if the onlookers want to constantly dismiss them because they might be able to be done in other ways with other tools, then they will never see the value that convergence brings to these tools.

You say you are desperate to see something “new”, but what do you need to see before you class it as “new”? There are very few new ideas under the sun… if people are waiting for that magical moment where they see an IWB being used to do something that is so unique and special it has never been done ever before by anyone in teaching history, they might be waiting a while. Few examples exist.

However, many examples exist of IWBs enabling teachers to bring digital media, online video, rich learning objects and realtime data into lessons. There are lots of examples of IWBs being used to bring disparate resources together in ways that were cumbersome and awkward using disparate technologies. If you’ve ever tried to show students specific scenes from a DVD – or heaven forbid, several DVDs – in a class, you will know that juggling disks in and out of the DVD player and trying to find specific places in the movie can take up most of the classtime. The same lesson, where the relevant video clips have been pre-prepared and embedded into a flipchart is a totally different experience.

Likewise, the ability to have an IWB as a “window to the world” where not only is the answer to so many random questions just a Google search away, the important thing is that it is only a Google search away in a shared, publicly viewable, social space of a classroom. I would argue that classroom participants using the shared digital space of a large screen connected to the internet and able to divert a lesson into unexpected directions at a moments notice is fundamentally different to traditional classrooms. The ability to do this is, in effect, new.

Perhaps we should stop looking for these profound, earth shattering instances of how an IWB can be “revolutionary”, and instead see the whole picture. The convergence of tools into a shared space that can be instantly adapted into whatever digital tool that might be appropriate is a an incredibly fundamental difference. A large screen tool shared by the whole class that is a place to write, a spreadsheet, a video player, a photo album, a maths lab, a world map, a link to world libraries, an encyclopedia, a highlighter pen, a post-it note, a place to brainstorm, and so on and so on, is an incredibly valuable tool. The fact that these individual parts can be dynamic, realtime and interactive makes it even moreso.

Whenever I hear people saying that an IWB can’t add anything to a classroom, I ponder how they are using it. Are they using a narrow set of IWB tools or do they use it in a myriad of connected ways that build on each other to create a dynamic ecosystem of tools. Do they treat their IWB like a hammer or a Swiss Army Knife? Is it just an expensive highlighter pen, or is it an amazing pandora’s box of digital tools waiting to be combined in interesting ways by creative teachers and students?

That’s where you’ll find your new stuff.

The REAL trick to all this is to ensure that this potential is being realised by teachers who understand the world of possibilities their IWB offers. If a teacher cannot see the potential, then of course we will struggle to see genuine “newness” in the way the IWBs are being used. As always, it is the creativity and insight of a talented teacher that brings this potential to the surface. Let’s stop being so hung up about whether IWBs can add value to a classroom. They can. The real question is whether the teachers who work with them can make the most of that potential and use them to bring that “revolution” into their classrooms.