Category: Kids and Learning

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Simon Says the Planet is Flat

Flat Planet Project If there was ever a doubt that the tools of Web 2.o are dramatically simplifying the way we can embed digital technologies into our classrooms, let me point you towards a neat little project run by a couple of amazing teachers who decided to dabble with the possibilities of a wiki. This wonderful piece of web collaboration was put together by Neil D’Aguiar from Richard Challoner Secondary School in New Maiden, Surrey, UK, and Simon O’Carroll from Holy Trinity Catholic High School in Oakville, Ontario, Canada. It’s a great example of how something as simple as a wiki can be used to develop a sophisticated web project that works simply and easily across the boundaries of time and place. The site can be found at flatplanet.wikispaces.com.

I first met Simon when I was on a teacher exchange to Canada during 2006. We shared a workroom (and occasionally chicken wings) and became quite good mates. As a teacher of Religion, Simon was a relative newbie to the integration of technology into his classroom, but during the year he enrolled into a part-time Computers in the Classroom course. Each day after his course he would come and have a chat to me and ask questions about web technologies, and I really enjoyed our talks. It was fun to watch him get more and more fired up about the uses of ICT in his classroom, and in particular the things that Web 2.0 was making possible. We spoke about blogs and wikis, podcasting and social networking. Simon started to blog regularly, and still has a nice little blog happening at http://mrocarroll.wordpress.com/. He played with a number of different blog engines like WordPress and Blogger. Then he started to investigate wikis, playing with Wikispaces and PBwiki. He’d come into work each day and tell me about some new discovery he’d made on the web, or ask for my opinion about some new technology. It was really exciting to see the web through his eyes.

Not long after I got back to Australia, Simon wrote to me to tell me about the Flat Planet Project that he started with Neil from the UK. It’s humbling to realise just how easy it can be to start a project like this, because it is was simple as just making contact and asking for a partner, as he did with Neil. It’s such a beautifully simple idea… connect two sets of students from two schools in two countries, give them a common task and provide them with the tools to work across the web. No wonder the site was chosen as the Wikispace of the Month for April! As I look through the pages they have created, you can just tell what a great job the kids did, and from all accounts they thoroughly enjoyed working on it. You can see the positive benefits of this collaboration, and just how much more meaningful this task was because of its authenticity. This is what the new web makes possible!

I wanted to highlight the work done by the kids at Challoner and Trinity, and the great work done by Simon and Neil in leading the kids through this project. Education can be stiflingly conservative at times, so it’s wonderful to see teachers stepping out of their comfort zones and extending both themselves and their kids with projects like this. Good on you Simon, Neil and all the kids who took part!

I’m hoping to interview Simon and Neil very soon on The Virtual Staffroom Podcast, so keep that RSS feed tuned in!

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DigiKids

Here is a wonderful article by Dale Spender that I found in the Sydney Morning Herald this week.  It talks about the changes taking place in our schools and while Spender’s work has always been unashamedly pro technology for education, it’s nice to see a piece like this being printed in the mainstream media.  We certainly need to be having this discussion.

The full article can be found here, but here is a snippet..

Contrast this with the confident “digital natives” who are now the students in our schools. These are the children of the information age for whom the screen, not the page, comes first. Far from being passive recipients of existing knowledge, digi-kids have learnt by doing – by trial and error, and problem solving. It is not the right answer that they want; it is the right question they are after as they fearlessly try any of the new gadgets or applications. They are completely at ease with computers and the internet, and with accessing, creating and distributing ideas and information.

The members of the digital generation are also physically active and often noisy as they collaborate, send messages, do podcasts and wait for replies (or fan mail). The youngest of them coolly click the mouse to search out the Wiggles and solve puzzles and problems; they create new words and signs, and scan their screens seeking friends, experiences – and information.

The point is that literacy itself has changed.

Yes Dale, that is the point… that’s the point exactly.  Thanks for the article.

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Questions are the Answers

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If you’ve been involved in education circles for any length of time, you would no doubt be aware of the work of Jamie Mackenzie.  Jamie is probably best known as the creator of the Webquest concept, but also does a lot of great work with higher order thinking, and the use of deep questions to deal with complexity and encourage kids to really think.  I was fortunate to be invited to attend a two day CEO workshop with Jamie Mackenzie over the last couple of days and I found it really worthwhile.  Like a lot of good information, you find yourself marvelling at the sheer simplicity of his ideas but still wondering why you’ve never thought of this stuff yourself.  It was great to meet the guy in person after having heard and read so much about his work over the years.

His workshops focussed on the use of deep questions to encourage deep thinking, with some great hands-on examples of using primary sources of information to investigate suppositional questions about interesting topics.  We also looked at a lot of great ideas for developing visual, textual and numeric literacies.  It’s amazing how things change when you use Jamie’s simple approach, especially the way all the concerns about plagiarism just become suddenly irellevant!  It’s so true that if we don’t want kids to have a cut-and-paste mentality then we as teachers have to rethink the way we ask kids to do things.

We also had a few workshops about some “hot topics” like podcasting, smartboards and Web 2.0.  It’s clear to me that there has been a major shift in committment to technology within the CEO… well, not so much a shift for the technology itself – that committment was always there even if it was not always well executed – but there was a real sense, from the top of the organisation down, that the times they are a-changin’, and that there was a real imperative for schools to change as well.  I heard a lot of good talk coming from the bigwigs of CEO, as well as a lot of enthusiasm from the teachers, so I was very encouraged to see some fundamental thought shifts about education taking place.  It was one of the reasons that I left the CEO schools a few years ago, that lack of vision.

It’s good to see it’s finally starting to appear!

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