So, if a school is committed to such noble things as Individual Learning Programmes, Assessment for Learning, portfolio assessment, “just in time”, as opposed to “just in case” learning, etc., how would this be evident to someone who had access to the school portal?

I am interested in your thoughts.

Photo: Inquiry http://www.flickr.com/photos/23346165@N03/2304444220/

This is a bit of a lofty and academic sounding title but I really do recommend that readers who struggle with why the educators and institutions that you deal with sometimes seem reluctant to embrace the use of the technology that is reshaping the world as we know it, consider putting it on your reading list.
One of the great take-aways for me was thinking about the vision and the energy that must have been a part of the teams that Alan Kay worked with in the early days of shaping his Dynabook vision. In today’s world of amazing technology being thrown at us every “marketing quarter”, design for obsolescence in a few short years, pursuit of the latest gadget and amazing web tools seemingly landing each day, It is a very easy trap to fall into being blasé about a device that Kay would still like to see used as an “instrument whose music is ideas”.

The other amazing thing is just how far-sighted Kay is about the transformative power of the technology. Even though a lot of what Kay was thinking and writing about back in the 70s is now commonplace in terms of the availability of the hardware, it is clear from reading this that we have a long way to go to take onboard the way that Kay sees technology being used with children. I loved this quote:

Kay’s enthusiasm and unbridled romanticism is captured in his best-known quotation: “The best way to predict the future is to invent it.” Kay’s future included children, personal computers, and a new kind of literacy.

Such a large, far reaching document is impossible to summarise here in a short blog post. I urge you to consider putting it on your holiday reading list.

Photo: Looks like an Ad, No? http://www.flickr.com/photos/crystalginn/115479869/

I am currently out of Hong Kong working in Australia but I know that the many of the schools in Hong Kong have closed down due to the Swine Flu Pandemic. There is a lot of talk about how the students can still do work online. I am wondering how effective it is and, if it still follows the inquiry model?

Given that many of the schools say that they have been prepared for this to happen for some time now, it should be easy to see how schools have used these tools effectively. I, for one, am curious to know if it is possible to see 21st Century Learning in evidence on a portal? It is easy to direct kids to a website to do activities and write reports or submit results but what would we see on the portal if the students are engaged in communication, collaboration and creative endeavors leading to innovation?

I would appreciate your thoughts.

Photo: If the leaders don’t get it.. http://www.flickr.com/photos/mcleod/2919154475/in/pool-858082@N25

Storage on the machine was not possible and things like networking or the internet were not even on the horizon. What was there, however, was an excitement about the possibilities and a hearty discussion about the possibilities partly fueled by Alan Kay’s Dynabook Vision which I think anyone interested in making education more relevant had read. As a result, there was not a single notebook programme that I was aware of that did not have tools for creativity on them, in spite of their clumsy interfaces and problems with loading the programme into the memory from floppies. The result was that companies like LCSI, JASC, Inspiration Inc., and Lego moved very quickly to modify pricing models and support their software on disks for student laptops.

What this naturally lead to was a lot of staffroom discussion about the use of these tools in core subject areas. Admittedly, it was a lot of hard work to get the very traditionally oriented chemistry/physics teacher or the senior literature teacher espousing the “smell and touch of books” to embrace the possibilites of making some interactive exercises to demonstrate understanding of a principle in Microworlds or to construct a mindmap prior to a book review focussing on characterisation but the conversations were taking place. Given that this was taking place in the early 90s, it is bringing a tear to my eye to read a lot of the discussion on how Australian schools should use the government money to put computers in front of students. This sort of post is typical of a focus on the machine and what IT can do. Note the absence of any comment about what students should or could be doing with it.

I was recently asked to join a meeting of School Leaders at a school that wanted to discuss the planning for a 1:1 programme at the school. Interestingly the primary (elementary) section of the school had employed a facilitator who was also an Apple Distingushed Educator. Regular readers will know that I am not a great fan of the “you promote us, we promote you” programmes of big corporates like Apple, Google, Microsoft, etc., but the teacher in question is a very professional, knowledgeable and caring educator and had clearly conveyed a well thought through argument to the leaders in the section of the school that they worked in. On the other hand the teachers in the secondary section clearly had not thought through what they saw the students doing with the tools. I could tell  from the email exchange prior to the meeting that this was the case so I tried to set them up a little better in the meeting by making comments like these:

Given that the emails that I was being copied in on were continuing to be about the network, the infrastructure and the clients that might access all of this, I decided that the only thing I could do was try to leave them with something after the meeting to reflect on and, maybe, assist them at a later date. To try to achieve this I created the attached document to which I added the following comments:

Some comments about the attached checklists if I may.

1.      This is the sort of list I put together when I was initiating
the discussion about what we needed on computers in every student’s hands
when I was responsible for the 1:1 program. I intentionally went as far to the
creative, collaborative open-ended side of the spectrum as I could. Some
of the teachers would have lists including such things as Math textbooks as
PDFs and extensive English literature extracts to be read verbatim on
the screen. I welcomed this as it lead to a very robust discussion which
really helped us clarify what we saw the students doing each day.
2.      The support team who worked under me would add their list of
capabilities for the machine and the ensuing document would be turned
into a checklist which we used to evaluate whether a vendor could assist us in
helping us get to where we wanted to go. (In Australia, every notebook
vendor supplying to schools offered curriculum materials, professional
development and conference sponsorships. Very different to Asia.)

I hope this helps.

learning tasks discussion paper

By the way, here are a couple of resources about schools that went with tablet PCs based on the analysis above. The first is from Paul White formally of NIST Thailand and now with the ESF in Hong Kong who talks about a tablet programme supported by wireless projectors in classrooms in this video. A more recent podcast from June 2009 has Bill Campbell, Associate Director of Technology at the Dwight Englewood School share his experiences at a Tablet PC School.

I would be very interested to get some comments from some of the educators whom I know read this blog and are in schools considering 1:1 programmes for the new school year. Are you having these sort of conversations about what learning on these machines looks like? Are you just looking at a machine that enables access and then seeing where it goes from there? Are you being seduced by the vendor that promotes the “creative notebook” and thus falling into the “iMovie project in every classroom” trap? (Had a great reference for this but can’t think how I tagged it!)

Comments, as always very welcome.

Photo: Teaching is not Rocket Science http://www.flickr.com/photos/shareski/2942564830/in/pool-858082@N25

I was behaved and kept my mouth shut (uncharacteristically) but I really wanted to scream out “Why are we hamstringing kids with such primitive tools in 2009?!” The argument of the presenters, who were from the US, was that every student would not be able to present with a computer so why not make the most of the computers in their pocket? I really want to take issue with the first part of that statement. Surely in an age where every professional in even the most basic of desk jobs uses a computer, why are we still wondering if they might be of use in schools?

Graham Wegner recently reflected on this failure to move ahead in schools in a recent post he called Immunity. Whilst governments make decisions to try to find funding to put computers in front of kids in poor and remote communities, it amazes me that schools who can afford the technology are still wondering if they should do anything with technology in classrooms. We know that getting students to create, the top level on the new Blooms Revised Taxonomy is what we should be aiming to do and yet, we still think that using mobile phones, essentially tools for delivery of content, might do the trick in schools.

Shouldn’t we at least be saying that there is a minimum spec tool that first world economies should be insisting on for students, especially if we want them to be used for creation of digital artifacts that demonstrate that our students are creators, collaborators and all round thinkers?

Photo: Netbook http://www.flickr.com/photos/ekosystem/3153286618/