Category: Teacher PD

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Using Lego to Drive Learning

As much as I would have loved to have been in Melbourne all week for ACEC 2010, it just wasn’t on the cards for me. A pity, because it sounded like there was a lot of really interesting sessions to attend, and one that particularly caught my eye was the Lego Robotics one with Chris Rogers, a professor of engineering from the Centre for Engineering, Education and Outreach at Tufts University in Boston.  I’ve been a Lego fanboy for a long time, and have worked with kids to do some pretty awesome stuff with it over the years, but unfortunately my current school doesn’t really do very much with Lego. (In fact, computer programming in general gets a pretty rough deal at PLC, something that I’d really like to see change)

However, we do run a Computer Club every week in our junior school and we’ve decided that we will introduce programming to these kids to start with.  We’ve begun by getting them going with Scratch, with a plan to get some Lego Robotics gear and maybe even try to put a team in RoboCup.  The kids – mainly Year 5 –  have really taken to Scratch and are starting to do some very cool things with it.  We also have plans to do something for Scratch Day this year as well.

But back to Lego. Just before school finished for Easter I received an email saying that Chris Rogers would be running a 2 hour Lego workshop at Sydney’s Macquarie Uni. Because I couldn’t get to Melbourne for the first few days of ACEC, naturally I jumped at the chance to do this one in Sydney with him, even if it was on Easter Monday!

I was really impressed with what Chris got us to do; it was an excellent example of just how the open ended nature of Lego can cover so many angles of our existing curriculum in a spirit of real constructivist, collaborative learning.  Working in pairs, Chris started us off with a very simple non-robotic building project – each team of two people had a small bag of Lego bits on the table in front of them, and our job was to open it and construct the tallest tower we could out of those parts. Just to make it interesting, we only had about 5 minutes to do it and we had to limit ourselves to only using only our non-dominant hand! Of course, this made teamwork and communication very important.  At the end of 5 minutes, he stopped us and asked us to look around at what we and the others had done. Important lesson 1: everybody built something quite different and clearly demonstrated that there is often no single “right” way to complete a task.  Important lesson 2: You learn far more from failure than success, and the process of “fixing your mistakes” is where the true learning happens.

With that small but important introductory exercise done, our next task was to take the Lego NXT controller brick and, using another limited set of parts, build a “car”, or at least something that had motorised wheels and could drive in a forward direction. (Also worth noting that no two “cars” were the same either. Everyone took a different approach, yet everyone made something that did what it needed to do.  I think there is a hugely significant lesson for educators contained in just that simple idea!)

Once our car was built, Chris showed how to create a very simple NXT-G program that simply ran both motors for 1 second in order to drive the car forward.  That’s it.  It took him no longer than 30 seconds to “instruct” us.  Now that we had a car and knew how to make it move forward for 1 second, he told us what we had to do…

On the floor was a “starting line” made of masking tape, and a long ruler to measure distance.  We were to program our “car” to travel for 1 second and then accurately measure how far that 1 second would make our car go. The we were to modify the program to run for 2 seconds, and measure how far that took us. Then modify for 3 seconds, measure, and so on.  He gave us about 30 minutes to build our car, write the program and then do all of our testing to establish how far our cars would travel for various motor-on timings.  At the end of that time, he said, we would be given a specific distance and we would have to figure out, from the data we’d collected using our car, how long we had to run our motors for in order to stop exactly at that distance.  To make it interesting, we would place a little Lego Person at the specified distance and our cars were to just “kiss” them – not stop short, and not run them over.

The excitement and buzz in the room as people built and tested their models was quite palpable. And people took it really seriously too!  There was some real competition to get it right on the mark.

As we worked through the process, we had to address a number of really valuable learnings and skills.  Building the model required some engineering and science skills, and of course a whole lot of teamwork and cooperation skills too. Measuring the distances taught us to be accurate, to learn how to collect data in a consistent repeatable way, how to measure and record distances.  As we worked, we had to think about the best ways to record the data.  This got us using valuable mathematical concepts including the creation of a graph (which turned out to be a fairly linear graph – a great discussion starter for a maths lesson)  Overall, it was amazing just how broad and deep the learning was, and how we had to construct our own knowledge as we completed the task.

Once the target distance was announced, a second masking tape finishing line was put on the floor.  People furiously calculated the required motor-run timing that they needed to program into their cars in order to stop exactly on the line, and the models were lined up.  On the starters orders we all pressed out Go buttons and tested our theories and our calculations.  It was a lot of fun and had so much embedded learning in it!

Some of the important reflections for me was a reminder of just how powerful learning can be when it is open-ended and focuses on the creation of a solution to an interesting and engaging problem.  It also struck me that a problem does not need to be particularly complicated in order to embed some really rich learning. And finally, it was a great reminder that the creation of rich tasks – whether they are based on the use of technology or not – are not an “add on” to what happens in a classroom.  We need to remind ourselves that it’s not about “covering the curriculum” and then hoping there is enough time left over to do some interesting projects. Getting students working on interesting projects should be the primary way in which we get them to cover the curriculum in the first place.

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Breaking the Cycle

I often ponder why systemic change is so hard to make happen in education.  Systemic change (and by that I mean not just change from a handful of scattered individuals but an all-in buy-in to create change right across a school system) is never easy, but it seems to happen with far less resistance in fields outside of education.  Schools just seem extra hard to shift.

I’m pretty optimistic about the positive effects that technology can bring to education.  I really do believe that the school experience for both teachers and students can be made richer and more meaningful with the wise use of technology.  Not just technology for technology’s sake, but by making intelligent decisions about what and how our students learn and supporting that learning with appropriate technologies.  I’ve never seen technology as an add-on, or just another thing that teachers need to somehow squeeze into their day, but rather as a deeply embedded set of tools, methodologies and skillsets that students should acquire in order to help them deal with the ongoing process of learning. 

Students are, or at least should be, seen as “knowledge workers” in the truest sense of the term. They spend 13 years at school essentially learning, manipulating, constructing and deconstructing knowledge.  Their “job” as a student is to create information products, and that could mean anything from conducting research and writing essays, through to creating sophisticated information products like multimedia presentations, collaborative group projects and persuasive written work. Unlike students in the past, today’s students need to develop fluency in not just textual literacy, but also in the multiliteracies of new media, multimedia and social media. They need to develop the skills of taking information from multiple sources and turning it into usable knowledge.  In the process of doing this they need to learn important things like how to express ideas clearly, how to influence an audience, how to work in teams, how to learn on demand, how to communicate, and so on.  

In essence, none of this is all that new, and good teachers have always done these sorts of things with their students.  But pervasive digital technology has an important role to play in how it happens.  Take the research process for example. Asking students to research a topic is fundamental to what happens in most classrooms and most teachers have always included the requirement for research in the learning tasks they set. But digital technology opens up many new possibilities for how a student might tackle the research process.  Use of live streams, real-time information, geotagged data, RSS feeds, socialgraph feeds, even advanced Googling, may all just be new ways to perform the age-old process of research, but if a teacher lacks basic fluency in these new tools themselves then how on earth can they help their students develop those skills. In my experience, most teachers have very little idea about most of these things, but don’t take my word for it.  Do your own poll… pick a random group of 20 teachers and ask them what they know about these things.  I suspect the answer will be very few. 

It worries me that so many teachers seems so woefully ill-equipped to provide these understandings for their students, but they simply can’t provide what they don’t have.  I know a lot of wonderful, dedicated, well-meaning teachers who care deeply for their students, but the gap, technologically speaking, between what those students need and what their teachers are actually able to provide seems to be widening.

Before you flame me for making such a comment, can I make clear what I’m not saying.  I’m not saying that these people are bad teachers. But I do think that the landscape of learning has experienced some deep and fundamental shifts in the last few years that many teachers have yet to even acknowledge, let alone adapt to.

In some cases, success can be the enemy of change.  I once suggested to a very good teacher that there were a number of ways that technology could be used to enrich her lessons. Her reply was that every single one of her students achieved Band 6 results in the HSC (for those outside NSW, that’s about as good as you can get), so why should she change anything? Trying to convince this teacher that technology might make the learning more engaging, more interesting, more rewarding was falling on deaf ears.  By her standards the students were as successful as they could possibly be, so why mess with something that was obviously working? That’s a hard argument to win, and makes it very difficult to convince someone to change what they do.

The other thing that makes it incredibly difficult to create systemic change in education is the “revolving door” nature of school.  We all know what school looks like and how it works, because we all went to one.  So when someone decides to become a teacher, it’s usually right after spending 13 years in a school as a student, then spending 4 years at teachers college and then going right back into the same environment they just left a few years earlier.  Of course they know what school is like! They probably feel like they’ve never left it. Whatever they might learn in teachers college has to fight for attention against the 13 years of day-in and day-out seeing their own teachers model what it means to “be a teacher”.  Even their lecturers at teachers college often come from a similar experience.  It’s incredibly hard to break the cycle.  Education needs significant change and new approaches, but it’s damn difficult to make that change happen when the steady stream of new teachers are just recycled students who feel like they already know what they need to know in order to be a teacher. 

I’ve done a little bit of work with pre-service undergrad teachers, and to be honest I was quite shocked at their general level of apathy about the role that technology might play in their lives as future teachers.  Not all of them mind you… there have been some good ones, but the number who openly admit to disliking technology or not relating to technology or not being interested in technology just scares me. These people will be going into classrooms as teachers in the next few years, and instead of being the much-needed catalyst for systemic change, many of them will just fall into the same old establishment that they experienced themselves during their own school life. No wonder it’s so hard to make the shift happen! 

Let me finish with a story.  I was having lunch in a little café in Newtown a while back, and when the waitress came with the bill at the end of the meal I paid for it with my Teachers Credit Union credit card. When she looked at the card she remarked on it and asked me if I was a teacher.  I told her yes, and she asked what I taught. I told her that was a technology integrator, to which she asked “What’s that?”

I meet lots of people who have never heard of a technology integrator, so I replied with my standard answer.  “I go into classrooms and work with students and teachers to help them use technology in more meaningful ways.” 

“Really?” she said. “I’m in third year at teachers college, and I’ve never heard of anything like that. So do kids use computers in schools much?  Is technology, like, important?”

Third year teachers college. “Is technology, like, important?”  This woman could be teaching your child in the next few years.  OMG.

I’m sorry if I seem crotchety and snarky about this, but to me, this is just not good enough.  How on earth will we ever break this cycle? We keep getting technologically clueless teachers incubating the next generation of technologically clueless teachers, and so on.  We live in a world that is changing so rapidly, but the teaching profession seems to be stuck in some sort of endless Groundhog Day loop.

Image: ‘Magic Revolving Door‘
http://www.flickr.com/photos/32916905@N05/3074941476

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ITSC 2010. It all begins.

So, here I am on the beautiful (but currently rainy) Gold Coast.

I arrived this evening to spend the weekend at Gold Coast ITSC 2010, the annual Innovative Technology in Schools Conference run by Apple.  It certainly sounds like it will be fun, and I’m rather humbled to have been asked to give the keynote address. What’s more surprising to me is that Apple asked if I’d do not only this one, but the entire Australian ITSC series, so over the next month or so I’ll also be at the Adelaide, Sydney, Perth and Melbourne events as well.  It came as a complete surprise to be asked, but I’m really thrilled to be able to be a part of them.

Apple is using a different approach to the ITSC events this year that sounds like it will be really good. It’s all very unconferencey.  Beyond the keynote, there will be lots of opportunity to mix and share and socialise and learn together. I think that’s great, and it’s certainly the best part of most conferences I’ve been to, so it’s cool that we are seeing more conferences these days that try to focus on the conversations and encouraging the serendipitous aspects of this kind of learning. I like it.  There is also going to be a focus at ITSC on actually making something, creating something to take away back to our schools that will help drive the shift.  It sounds pretty cool.

Anyway I better get back to putting the finishing touches on this preso. It’s an honour to have been asked to present, and I’d like to do a good job of it, although I’m always concerned about what I can actually add to the conversation. It’s a bit daunting, but I’m looking forward to it.

If you happen to be going to any of the ITSC events over the next month or so, please come and say hi!