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Just Not My Type

I’ve been a but sporadic here on the blog lately.  I’ve got all this stuff in my head that I want to write about but to be honest, I guess I just haven’t felt much like the physical act of typing lately.  I’m actually a pretty lousy typist, despite the fact that I’ve tried, seriously tried, to develop a good typing technique over the years.  I’ve had typing lessons, I’ve used computer typing tutor software, and I’ve tried to force myself to use the right touch typing technique.  But all of that, and I still can’t really type all that well.

When I was at school as a student, I actually did a proper typing course.  In fact, I’ll digress for a moment and mention that my school offered something that I’ve not really seen in too many other schools since… every Thursday afternoon we did “activities”.  We all got to choose from a wide range of activities to do for a few hours every Thursday. Some students went off to play sport, running around the basketball field or ripping each others’ heads off playing football.  That was never really my scene.  I was one of those other more nerdy and anti-social children, who pretty much avoided sport wherever I could.

There aren’t all that many things I actually remember about school, but a couple of things stand out.  I remember going off to the AGL gas company in Hurstville where we did cooking lessons on Thursday afternoon.  I thought it was neat, being a 14 year old kid, jumping on a train to go the two stations up the line, finding the big AGL building, and having some other adult besides my regular teacher showing me how to cook a different meal each week.  At the time, learning to cook didn’t quite have the same prestige as being on the football team, but over the long haul I know which one has been most useful!

Back to the typing story… the other memorable Thursday activity (call me weird) was doing a typing class.  I remember being taught by our library assistant, Mrs Sobb.  She was a older lady and boy could she type!  I remember going through all the usual finger training activities – asd, asdf, asd;lk, dad, sad, fad, gad – and so on. I particularly remember that she had a set of large white mens hankerchiefs with long thin ribbons attached to each corner.  She’d tie two ribbons together behind our neck and the other two ribbons were tied to the typewriter (yes, you heard it, typewriter!)  The hankie would then be suspended like a square hammock between the typewriter and our bodies so we couldn’t see the keyboard.  We just had to place our hands on the home row, by feel, and bang out our lines of sad dads.

Anyway, enough wandering down memory lane. Suffice to say, sometimes as much as you try to learn the “right” way to do something it doesn’t always stick. But even as a “bad” typist, I’ve still written a book of 60,000 words, and a quick back-of-the-envelope calculation suggests that since I started this blog I’ve probably typed well over 300,000 words here as well.  Add in the other blogs, wikis, emails, discussion forums and various things I’ve written (typed) over the last few years and it’s interesting to consider that someone can be fairly average at something but still produce something relatively worthwhile.

I guess the lesson is that sometimes it’s more important to actually just DO something, rather than worry about doing it perfectly.

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IWBs are no Silver Bullet

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Should Students Learn to Write HTML Code?

I saw an email from someone today suggesting that they would be starting next term to teach their students to write HTML code from scratch, so the kids could make their own webpages. My initial reaction when I read this message was to ask “Why?” Why would anyone bother to learn HTML coding from scratch when there are so many great editing tools around? Surely, in a WYSIWYG world, learning how to to actually write HTML code is a complete waste of time? With so many great web editing tools around, isn’t learning to write raw HTML code a pointless exercise?

In once sense, these are valid questions. There’s no doubt that the majority of websites these days are created using a templated approach and an “engine” such as WordPress, Drupal, Joomla, Squarespace, etc. It’s also true that for any really customised web work, it would still fall to a workhorse like Adobe Dreamweaver or something else, such as excellent free tools like KompoZer or NVU editor.

However, on reflection, I think there is a great deal to be said for being able to understand basic HTML code. Take using Moodle as an example… as much as I would like to tell my teachers at school that Moodle has a wonderful WYSIWYG editor, and that it will automatically format all the text and images for you just by cllicking on the little buttons in the editing bar, the fact remains that I still find myself hitting the little <> button on the Moodle editor bar to dive into HTML code on an almost daily basis just to fix little quirky things that are going on.

It’s also true that, although you can use the buttons on the editor to align text to the left or right (which in HTML, behaves quite differently to how it behaves in, say, Word) knowing a little bit about what those buttons are actually doing on a code-level makes it much easier to predict how things will actually look. Being able to manually write a link to a URL, being able to strip out some rogue heading level text, fixing paragraphs that have gone askew because of a stray tag, and so on… these are all things that I find myself doing fairly regularly, even WITH access to fancy WYSIWYG editing tools. I taught myself the basics of writing HTML nearly 15 years ago now (well, to be completely honest, one of my students taught me!) and I can’t even begin to tell you how handy it has been and how often I have used that knowledge. Although I would like to think that we are living in a world where it SHOULD be completely unnecessary to know how to write HTML source code, the truth is that over the years it’s proven itself to be a damn handy skill!

Even being able to use the provided code to put an YouTube video or a Google Map into a wiki or blog, for example… sure, you CAN do it without having the slightest idea of how it all works, but if you want to make a minor adjustment such as changing the width or height of the frame, just being unintimidated by the code makes a big difference to your general level of technological fluency.

I’m not saying that everyone should be able to write heavy-duty CSS code or be able to create complicated PHP script, but HTML is dead simple… and for the number of times I find myself rescuing a page because of a relatively simple adjustment to the underlying code… I gotta say, I can’t think of anyone who would not benefit from knowing the basics.

So, should this teacher spend time teaching his kids to code? Some may disagree, but I say yes. My advice would be to teach kids to write a fairly simple webpage. They should know the core structure of html, head and body. They should understand heading levels (and depending on the age of the students, how these can be tied to style sheets). They should know how to manually write (or at least understand) the code for a hyperlink, for an image, and for an embed. It’s good to know these basics. I guarantee you those kids will find them useful at some point in their future.

For the majority of your students, that’s probably all they need to know. Then, once they have a grip on the basics, switch over to a decent visual editor like Dreamweaver or similar… some tool that lets them switch back and forth between code view and output view. Output view will make SO much more sense once they see the relationship between code and output!

And who knows, just that small exposure to the underlying code could make all the difference to that one kid in your class. It could open them up to a whole world of coding and being interested in what really makes a computer tick. In this WYSIWYG world, God knows we need more kids like that!

And if nothing else, you’ll at least understand why the picture that goes with this post is so funny! 🙂

What about you?  Do you think teaching kids to understand HTML is a useful skill, or a waste of time?

Image: ‘html tag italicized‘
http://www.flickr.com/photos/30127486@N00/346483297