Category: Schools

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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…

  1. 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.
  2. There was nothing terribly special or even pedagogically sound about what I saw.  It was mostly just online games and digital “busy work”.
  3. 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.

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The Adobe Summer Institute Wrapup

I’m finally back home from a fantastic week in San Jose at the Adobe Summer Institute.  The Summer Institute is a 5 day conference/workshop event run by Adobe’s Education division for members of their global Adobe Education Leaders program.  I was inducted into the AEL program last year but was unable to attend the 2008 event in San Francisco. This year I was determined to attend the San Jose event and I’m really glad I went.

When you do in fact know a fair bit about technology and how to use it, it becomes harder to find professional development experiences that challenge and extend you. One of the reasons I was so keen to attend the Summer Institute was that I felt it would push me to learn more and build on some of the knowledge I already have.  Having been a Photoshop user for many years, and spending many hours inside programs like InDesign (and PageMaker before that) and having taught Flash and Dreamweaver to students, I’ve always been quite immersed in Adobe’s Creative Suite, but the nature of these tools always seems to be such that the more you know about them, the more you realise you don’t know.

The other AELs came mainly from all over the US, with quite a few from the UK and a handful from other places like New Zealand, Hong Kong and Belgium.  I was the only Aussie. We started the week on Monday evening with a Welcome Party at our hotel where we got to meet the other AELS and some of the folk from Adobe. It was good to meet new people and make new connections.

Tuesday started early for me with a Photoshop exam.  This was taken as part of the Adobe Certified Associate, a recognised certification for Photoshop users.  Happily, I passed the exam without too much trouble.  The rest of Tuesday was filled with meeting with the Adobe product teams, where we got to hear about future product roadmaps, learn about upcoming features and directions for the Creative Suite, and to offer suggestions for how we thought the products could be improved.  Parts of the day were done under NDA so I can’t really go into details, but suffice to say there will be plenty of exciting new stuff coming from Adobe in the next year or two.  Dinner that night was held at Saratoga Springs, a lovely camping ground in the hills surrounding Silicon Valley, and we had fun and games with some hilarious variations on team volleyball played with water-filled balloons.

Wednesday was filled with AEL to AEL sessions – workshops where we presented to each other many of the things we were doing in our own schools and districts.  Watching these sessions, it really struck me what an intensely creative and passionate group of educators this was. Although not everything was directly relevant to my own teaching situation, I still got tons of great ideas from the sharing that took place.  Collaborative projects, experimental ideas based on art, design and creativity, ideas for streamlining school administration, examples of how teachers do things in other parts of the world… we got all sorts of cool ideas from these AEL sessions.  After a full day of learning from each other, we regrouped in the Adobe Cafeteria for a delicious dinner and drinks, where more sharing and conversation took place in a relaxed casual atmosphere.  I was quite amazed as we watched the planes fly over the Adobe building, which was directly in the landing path of San Jose airport, seeming to clear the top of the building with only a few hundred feet to spare.  A few of us kicked on to a bar in downtown San Jose where the conversations continued into the night, only louder.

Thursday was another full day of learning, with a intense session run by Adobe’s John Schuman.  We learned many of the very cool features in the software tools, and in particular how to make them work together smoothly.  Our project required us to integrate our work across Photoshop, Dreamweaver, Flash, Fireworks, InDesign and Bridge as we roundtripped files between the various tools.  In each of the applications we discovered lots of useful workflows and there were quite a few new concepts that I hadn’t come across before. The last part of the day took us into a project using Flash Catalyst, a relatively new product still in beta, that makes it much easier for designers to create interactive content.  I’m still getting my head around Catalyst, but it looks like a great tool for rapidly designing interactive media without the need to know heavy-duty coding stuff.

Thursday night was good fun, with a night out to a local San Jose pool hall.  By this stage we had gotten to know each other a little better, so it was cool to hang out, shoot some pool and have still more conversations about learning and life. The night finished while it was still young, as the pool tables were reclaimed at the stroke of 9:00pm.  A few of us wandered across the road to another party that looked like it would be fun.  I turned out to be an Open Source party, sponsored by Source Forge.  With free drinks (free as in “beer” – I thought that was hilarious at an Open Source event), tatoos getting done in the basement (no, I didn’t get one), as well as Twitter stations, free T-shirt giveaways from the good folk at ThinkGeek, guys playing with Star Wars light sabres, people wearing infra-red night vision goggles, etc, it was a truly geeky event…  I loved it!

Friday morning was the last day of the conference and I’d arranged to do another certification exam, this time in Dreamweaver.  Although I’ve used Dreamweaver a lot in the past, I hadn’t used it much lately so wasn’t feeling too confident in my ability to pass this exam.  However, I did pass, and since I had a bit of time to spare at the end I decided to have a crack at the remaining exam for Flash.  This one I really wasn’t too confident about, since I haven’t used Flash much in the last 12 months and there are some big changes to the CS4 version.  Even so, I surprised myself by passing the Flash exam too, so I was feeling pretty pleased that I managed to get my certification in Photoshop, Dreamweaver and Flash all in the same week.

The rest of Friday morning was a general wrap up of the event, with feedback and a debriefing session between the AELs and the Adobe folk.  It was kind of sad to have it all come to an end, but we eventually said our goodbyes and all went our separate ways.  The sessions were all recorded with Adobe Connect, as well as a ton of Twitter, Flickr and Delicious resources all tagged with ael09, so at least there is a decent electronic record of the sessions.

I didn’t have to be at the airport until quite late so myself and Saiqa, another AEL from London, decided to rent a car and do some Silicon Valley sightseeing.  We dropped in on the headquarters of Apple and Google, then headed in to San Francisco for some last minute sightseeing around Fisherman’s Wharf before getting back to SFO airport for our late flights.

Overall, a great week and one I’d be keen to do again. Thanks Adobe for running and hosting the event, especially to Megan Stewart and her team who did a great job of making sure the program went off perfectly.  Great conference, can’t wait to get back next year!

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Footsteps

If you’re not blogging in this day and age, are you at a disadvantage?

I can see a day in the not too distant future (if it’s not already here) where your “digital footprint” will carry far more weight than anything you might include in a resume or CV.

It’s perhaps not so relevant (yet) in the public education sector where the criteria for employment is not always  based solely on a meritocracy, but in the independent sector there is a definite awareness of an individual’s digital footprint as a way to gauge their involvement, passion, engagement and understanding of their chosen field.

It may not yet be happening in the public sector because of unionisation and the existing promotional structures in place, but in the outside world where people are employed, promoted and recognised by their actual contributions and not just by the amount of time they have been in a given role, the notion of knowing about an individual because of the trail of ideas they leave behind them in their online networks will play a larger and larger role.

I’m certain that almost EVERY employer these days has Googled you before they call you for an interview. Many people in the private sector (and I’m not just talking about education) are being offered positions or getting headhunted because of the presence they have created in their online spaces.

Having a blog, a Twitter account, even a Facebook… these things are not just about giving you a place to talk about mundane and trivial stuff that no one else interested in… they are in fact building your “personal brand”, as the marketers would say.  You can say that’s pretentious and that you want no part of it, but the fact is that the online persona and online presence you develop by creating this digital footprint is playing an increasingly important role in defining who you are (or at least who you appear to be).

Unfortunately, NOT having an online presence says a lot about you too.  If I was staffing a school where a passion for education was valued, I would be very dubious about employing someone who could not show any evidence of an online presence.  If I couldn’t find any record of them being part of online communities, being involved in online projects, contributing to the global conversation about education, I’d be extremely doubtful about whether they were the right people for the kind of school I wanted to staff.

This is one of the reasons why we need to not block kids from accessing network resources… The question is not whether they will have a digital footprint…  they will.  The question is whether it will say positive things about them or whether it will portray them in a negative way.  We have a unique opportunity to provide our students with a digital footprint that says wonderful things about who they are, what they can do and where their passions lie, but unless we actively teach them how to make it positive it may not be the case.

And if we don’t actively understand and engage with that process ourselves, we will most likely do a pretty ordinary job of helping our students do it right.