Getting Ready to Geek!

On Wednesday we held our 3rd Annual SpeedGeeking session (previous post here). Like I said in an email to all the teachers, this is my favorite day of the year! SpeedGeeking is an opportunity for our teachers to learn, celebrate, socialize, and hopefully get inspired.

In the past, speedgeeking has been a highly orchestrated affair, involving different rotations, various groups and multiple locations. At the end of it, there were a lot of teachers with glazed-over eyes, scratchy throats and full brains! This year, we decided to simplify: 18 presentations divided into two rooms, groups were made at random and on-the-fly (the ol’ pick-a-number-out-of-the-hat trick) and each group only went through one room. Each presentation was 7 minutes long with about 20 seconds to rotate to each new station.

After a delicious mid-afternoon snack, we had about 45 minutes to just sit and digest, both the food and what we’d just seen! In addition to all the great ideas they had just seen, we were able to talk with our colleagues about what happened in the other room. We’re hoping this can help spark conversations for months to come.

A huge THANK YOU! to all of the presenters who shared a small bit of their teaching practice with us. Without you all, an event like this could never be successful!

Below is a list of all 18 presentation topics. If you were a presenter and would like me to link to anything, let me know. If you want to learn any more about any of these topics, the presenters are good people to start that conversation with!

• Research Better with Social Bookmarking (Diigo) – Kelsey G.
• Using Edcanvas as a presentation tool – Jan H.
• Flubaroo – Neil F.
• Mixcraft with Elementary students – Sally O.
• Coach’s Eye – Mel H.
• Class sites with Google Sites – John G.
• Class blogs – Jen P.
• Digital Ads using Photostory – Jennifer K.
• G8 Drama animation/movie – Anne Marie D.
• VoiceThread/Animoto – Abigail L.
• ThreeRing in ECC – Andy D.
• Scribble Maps – John H.
• Using Prezi – Simon N.
• Pecha Kucha w/ students – Susan C.
• Copying and Copyright in the Creative Classroom – Michelle W.
• Learning Numeracy (and Coding) using Scratch – Mindy S.
• Robotics – Mags M.
• “Cutting out Kids” with Photoshop – Chris F.

The #vtc2013 participants

Back in September 2011, I was sitting in a hotel lobby in Shanghai with Gary Bertoia and we asked each other: “What if schools in Vietnam were to create a local #edtech conference?”

Almost 16 months later, we have!

The past two days have been the culmination of months of work and collaboration between UNIS Hanoi and Saigon South International School to organizing the Vietnam Tech Conference (#vtc2013). It has also been the product of 95 Vietnam-based teachers who were willing to share, teach, learn, mentor, collaborate and network with one another in  a way that has never happened in this country before!

Some of the goals that we had for the conference were to create a dynamic learning environment for the teachers that was high quality and relatively low cost; to have maximum impact on student learning; to maximize teacher participation by

The Organizing Committee

The organizing crew took the best bits of some of our world-class regional technology conferences and combined them into two intense days. We had a day of structured workshops (I even managed to squeeze in a session on Digital Citizenship) combined with a day that was more participant-driven and progressive, featuring two rounds of SpeedGeeking and two blocks for Unconferences. All in all, I think it came together quite well. I’m looking forward to sitting down the conference feedback information and getting a more in-depth feel of what the participants thought.

Saigon South International School did an amazing job of hosting the conference. Robert Appino, David Perkin, Theresa Flaspohler and the entire SSIS crew thought of just about everything and pulled off the weekend without a hitch! I’m a little sad that I won’t be at UNIS Hanoi next year when #vtc2014 is hosted there, but I have no doubt that they will match or exceed this year’s organization!

As with any course, I don’t know how much of it I will retain unless I use my Google-Fu on a regular basis. But it is cool to know some new tricks. Two of my favorite finds are the inurl: operator and the “specify a number range” operator.  And if/when I forget them, I know I have the skillz to just google them!

Resurrection by Untitled blue. CC BY

We’ve never suffered from a lack of resources as long as I’ve been here at UNIS Hanoi. We’ve been running a 1:1 TabletPC program for the past 6 years. All students in grades 4 – 12 have their own machines. And in the Middle and High School we’ve been running a (virtually) paperless environment with varying degrees of success.

But. as I’ve said previously, as a school we are becoming cranky teenagers. Instead of accepting what we are given with a “Thank you!” and a smile, we’re beginning to ask “Why?”

Why are we using this machine and not that one?

Why do we have to do that?

Why can’t we do this?

Why…?

Now, from my perspective, this is a great problem to have. Teachers and students asking “why?” means that they are thinking about the best ways to transform teaching and learning. I’m actually more concerned about the teachers and students who never question what we’re doing! It means they are passively accepting what is being given to them and not showing any critical analysis of our program or of their own learning.

To help spur the question of “Why?”, we’ve introduced Innovative Learning Grants. The central questions that we started with was “What is it that you want to do at but currently can’t?” and “How will this improve student learning and/or teacher pedagogy?”

The idea is that teachers submit a proposal documenting their interest and also noting some of the research that they have done on the topic. Once proposals have been selected to go forward, the teachers are responsible for documenting their work and submitting a written report at the end of their trial period. This report includes feedback on the outcome of the project as well as suggestions for scaling the project up to go beyond their individual trial. From this, decisions can be made about going forward. It is my hope that all of this – all grant proposals and the final reports/recommendations of the ‘winning’ projects – will be published to the entire community as examples of how UNIS is looking at staying on the cutting edge when it comes to learning.

In the first iteration, we received a quite a few grant proposals. I was amazed by the depth and breadth of the proposals that we received. In the end, we selected three to go forward. One is looking at the use of standing desks in the classroom. Another is looking how to adopt mobile technology into PE classes. And the third is looking increasing collaboration and lay through the use of a SMART Table in our Early Childhood classes. All trials will end before June and I’m looking forward to reading and sharing their final reports. [I will ask to see if any of the authors mind if I share their proposals.]

A quick note about the name: it was a very deliberate decision to use the term “Innovative Learning” and not mention “Technology” even though the funds are being put up by the Technology Office. As a school, our focus must continue to be on learning. Our focus on technology is not for the sake of having the shiniest bell or the newest whistle but to improve student learning. 99 times out of 100 Innovative Learning will involve the authentic use of technology, and by using the title “Innovative Learning Grant” we are keeping the emphasis where it belongs.

What is your school doing to encourage innovation in both teaching and learning? Do you think you could apply a similar process at your school?

The focus of the first day was less about Visible Thinking Routines and the Teacher for Understanding framework and more about discussing the need for making thinking visible and teaching for understanding. While they may seem obvious to any group of teachers (and who in their right minds would ever disagree with the need for teaching for understanding?), these concepts are sometimes not given the thought that they deserve. It was very refreshing to have an “outside expert” come in and say that we need to be a community of learners and that it is vital for teachers to provide opportunities, model and document the thinking that goes into the learning.

Like I said, nothing revolutionary in theory but great to hear…

I love the Visible Thinking Routines. I try to use them whenver I can as a reflection tool at the end of workshop sessions. As more schools are going 1:1 and beyond, I wonder if there is a way to update or revamp them to reflect the tech-rich environment that so many schools now find themselves in. Besides taking a picture of the work at the end, how can we visualize, capture and display thinking in our digital environments? Or, does that defeat the power and the purpose of these thinking routines?

What do you do to visualize thinking with technology? Which of the VTRs have you successfully updated to your digital/online learning environment?

Image: Master Learners by Clint Hamada licensed under CC BY NC SA

As UNIS Hanoi moves towards a school-wide blogging platform I’ve been looking for ways to make life easier for teachers wanting to implement blogging in class. One of the big questions I’ve had  has been “How can teachers get only the information that they want/need?”

What stuck in my mind was a comment that I heard in passing back at Learning 2.010. Somebody (who???) mentioned using Google Spreadsheets to build RSS feeds. Since most school URLs are predictable, that sounded easy enough. It turned into my own personal Fermat’s Last Theorem though. What seemed easy turned out to take me a few years to solve and then only with the help of my aforementioned smart friend.

@zomoco has rigged up a Blog Importificator for me. Here’s how it works:

• Teachers create a class list using Outlook contact groups and send that to me. (In the future, this information could also be pulled out of our student information system.)
• Teachers also tell me what category they want the students to use in their blog posts (grades 6 – 10 use MYP subject related categories that have been pre-loaded on each blog; grades 11 and 12 create the category they are going to use) as well as what grade level the students are in (our blog addresses are dependent upon graduation year for ease of maintenance).
• I erase the header from the text file they sent me so there are two columns of data: student name and student email/username. I then upload this text file to the Importificator, fill in the category slug, the folder name and the graduation year.
• The Importificator spits out an OPML file that can then be imported into Google Reader, Outlook or just about any other RSS reader.

From the time I receive the class list to the time teachers are subscribed to all of the blog posts in that specific category: about 2 minutes!

While this particular version of the Importificator is very UNIS Hanoi specific, @zomoco has released his code over at GitHub licensed under ASL and CC BY NC SA. If you use it, please be sure to drop him a tweet and say thanks!

One day, after a few more lessons at Codecademy, I hope I’ll be able to modify the code myself!

Is there a better/easier way of doing this? What do you do at your school to help teachers with their blogging students?

Some rights reserved by mag3737

One of the power features that I’ve always loved in Microsoft Office is the ability to merge data from Excel into individual Word documents. I used to use this extensively with my Excel Gradebooks when I was a classroom teacher: writing comments for each student in a column, recording the various criteria scores, and then merging all of that data on to a template that included the original assessment criteria and task-specific clarifiers. It took a bit of time to set up, but it was powerful assessment data.

As I’ve made the move to Google Docs, I’ve often lamented the missing ability to merge data. I put it down to ‘one of those things’ that I would have to live without in order to use the collaborative power of GDocs.

Yesterday, in our weekly tech team meeting, we were discussing how we handle the reporting of loss or damages. This is an area that has caused much angst amongst all parties involved: students, parents, teachers, admin, technicians. What could we do to make the system more user-friendly and more efficient?

The idea of students filling out a Google Form came up. While it is a great way to collect information from the students, it’s not a great way to view all that data. Cells and cells of text in a spreadsheet is not my idea of a good time. What we needed was a way of getting all of that information on to a document – an individualized report for each incident.

Back to the idea of merging data…

I started searching for a solution. I asked Twitter. I asked the IT teachers if they thought they could write the java script necessary. Finally, I decided to check the script gallery on Google Spreadsheets. Jackpot.

autoCrat by Andrew Stillman does exactly what we need.  Amazingly, it was updated just a few days before I searched for it!

Here’s what I’m hoping to set up in the next week or so:

1. Students will come into the Tech Office and use a dedicated computer to fill out a Google Form to report loss or damage. That information automatically gets sent to a Spreadsheet.
2. autoCrat will automatically generate a Doc for each entry as it is created, pulling the information from the Spreadsheet. This document will be emailed to both the student and his/her parent.
3. The Doc will be created in a folder that is shared by all technicians, using a naming convention based on the name of the person filling out the form and the date it was created.
4. As the issues are resolved, technicians will write in how and when the problem was resolved and the Doc will be transferred to another shared folder for archiving. The ‘how’ and ‘when’ will also be copied back to the spreadsheet.
5. Because all of that information is in the spreadsheet, I’m hoping to be able to easily collect stats about the types of problems that have been fixed, average turnaround time, etc.

While this is more of a systems implementation, I can see autoCrat being used in the classroom. I’m not sure how yet, but I think it can be used to collect and share formative assessment, for students, parents and teachers.

How do you think you might be able to use autoCrat?

The first day of ASB Unplugged was devoted to classroom visits, student showcases and discussions by some of the various R&D groups that are functioning at ASB. During that time, quite by chance, I found myself sitting around a table that included Jeff Plaman, Andrew McCarthy, Simon May, Aaron Metz and Adrienne Michetti. What happened over the next 90 minutes was PURE GOLD.

The focus of conferences, for me, has changed. It is no longer about sitting in a room and being told about/shown the  ”next great thing” in education. It’s now about sitting in the hallways and in the common areas and leveraging connections that I have already made through Twitter and other aspects of my PLN into deep and meaningful conversations.

In those 90 minutes, we bobbed and weaved through three major points of discussion:

1. Ownership and Exit Strategy – I’ve written about it a long time ago and it still sits somewhere in the back of my mind. How do we balance the needs and wants of teachers to create curriculum materials in spaces all over the internet with the need for the school to have continuity in that curriculum delivery? With such a large amount of transience in international schools in particular, how can schools encourage teachers to create amazing, lasting digital curriculum material that can continue to be used by both parties when that teacher moves to the next school? Related to this, what are we doing as a school to create an “exit strategy” for teachers, helping them to collect all of their digital resources to bring to their next school, ensuring that those resources are available to subsequent teachers? I’d be curious to know if there are any schools with effective checklists for the end of year related to Google Docs, WordPress blogs, and any external wiki platforms that are used. How do you keep track of all the great things that are going on in the classroom on the weeblys and wikispaces and tumblrs and…?

2. New Teachers – Transient teachers mean lots of training. Last year, there were 44 new teaching and admin staff at UNIS due to staff turnover and school growth! We spent a lot of time discussing ways in which we run our various orientations and inductions. CISHK runs a course through Moodle with teacher-created content that is accessible by their new staff prior to their arrival. Included in the course are some short ‘assessments’ on skills. If they can show mastery prior to showing up on campus, then they can skip those training sessions at the beginning of the year and spend time doing other things to prepare for the start of the year. I love this idea. I wonder if we could use Google Forms and Flubaroo as a means of creating self-assessed quizzes for incoming staff to show their understanding?

3. New Students – Student turnover is pretty constant at UNIS. Just this month I’ve seen 4 or 5 new students as they prepare to start in their new classes. Because we are a technology-rich school, students need to feel some level of comfort with the machines and the systems before they can be effective in classes. What’s the balance? How do we effectively and efficiently get these students ready to participate in classes? One things that is working very well this year in the middle school  is the idea of a tech buddy. New students attend a 60 – 90 minute orientation with their tech buddy (who is also their buddy for other things, I believe). Instead of me leading the students through some of the basics of their new computer, I get the buddy to do the brunt of the work. I think this idea has great potential but I’ll need to work with the teachers to ensure that the skills that they feel are necessary from day 1 are being addressed.

I’d love to hear any ideas that you have about any of these three points. The more perspectives the better!

Images:

EXIT: cc licensed ( BY NC ) flickr photo shared by zilverbat.

Leadership and Change

The future of schools: a community of learners, top to bottom. #asbunplugged #ldrshp

February 24, 2012 10:28 am via TweetDeckReplyRetweetFavorite

@chamada

Clint Hamada

How do we shift agency and responsibility to the learner (any learner! not just 'our students')? #asbunplugged

February 25, 2012 12:52 pm via TweetDeckReplyRetweetFavorite

@chamada

Clint Hamada

If you make simple things easy to do, you make complex things possible. #asbunplugged

February 25, 2012 11:24 am via TweetDeckReplyRetweetFavorite

@chamada

Clint Hamada

School shouldn’t be based on the banking model: it’s not about withdrawing knowledge later. #asbunplugged

February 25, 2012 10:15 am via TweetDeckReplyRetweetFavorite

@chamada

Clint Hamada

It's no longer "evolove or die". It's now "revolutionize or die". #asbunplugged

February 24, 2012 9:54 am via TweetDeckReplyRetweetFavorite

@chamada

Clint Hamada

Technology empowers us to become relevant. #asbunplugged #ldrshp

February 24, 2012 10:23 am via TweetDeckReplyRetweetFavorite

@chamada

Clint Hamada

Students

How often do we get "lost in false complexity?" #asbunplugged

February 25, 2012 12:59 pm via TweetDeckReplyRetweetFavorite

@chamada

Clint Hamada

Are we in the business of limiting the things that kids can do? #asbunplugged

February 25, 2012 1:01 pm via TweetDeckReplyRetweetFavorite

@chamada

Clint Hamada

"I was fully formed as a programmer by 17." - Bill Gates. What are we doing to cultivate passion and intensity? #asbunplugged

February 25, 2012 11:32 am via TweetDeckReplyRetweetFavorite

@chamada

Clint Hamada

The best projects bump up against the persistence of reality. #asbunplugged #pbl

February 25, 2012 10:41 am via TweetDeckReplyRetweetFavorite

@chamada

Clint Hamada

"No one washes a rental car" - Negroponte. Make the technology *personal*! #asbunplugged

February 25, 2012 9:52 am via TweetDeckReplyRetweetFavorite

@chamada

Clint Hamada

Resources

@mcleod's resources for Leadership Institute: http://t.co/rSHNUSo5 #asbunplugged

February 24, 2012 9:33 am via TweetDeckReplyRetweetFavorite

@chamada

Clint Hamada

Resources for @garystager's #PBL institute: http://t.co/xbDyuuNy #asbunplugged

February 25, 2012 9:46 am via TweetDeckReplyRetweetFavorite

@chamada

Clint Hamada

Over the weekend, a lot of my tweeps were at 21c Learning Hong Kong. If I were going, one of the main reasons I would have done so would have been to see Punya Mishra from MSU. He is a driving force behind TPACK. During Mishra’s keynote, Jabiz tweeted:

We get there through playful process! @punyamishra #21clhk

February 17, 2012 4:06 pm via TweetDeckReplyRetweetFavorite

@intrepidteacher

Jabiz Raisdana

This immediately reminded me of Messing Around. In their whitepaper, authors boyd, Ito, et al. write the following:

When messing around, young people teachers begin to take an interest in and focus on the workings and content of the technology and media themselves, tinkering, exploring, and extending their understanding. [p. 20]

It is important to recognize, however, that this more exploratory mode of messing around is an important space of experimental forms of learning that open up new possibilities and engagements. [p. 23]

we see [messing around] as a necessary part of self-directed exploration in order to experiment with something that might eventually become a longer-term, abiding interest in creative production. One side effect of this exploration is that youth teachers also learn computer skills they might not have developed otherwise. [p. 25]

(Obviously, the strikethroughs are my edits!)

In my role as technology facilitator, I spend a lot of time with teachers, either in a one-on-one, small group, or workshop setting.  While there is an obvious willingness to learn something new, that desire to ‘mess around’ is usually missing from the teachers. There’s a huge list of legitimate reasons why this is the case: lack of time, too much marking, planning, other  meetings, to name a few. I get that. But as teachers, we must be willing to the behaviors that we want to see most in our students: curiosity, self-reliance, inquiry, stick-to-it-tiveness. To me, that is what ‘messing around’ is all about.

As teachers, we all have expertise. We know our content areas (Content Knowledge) and have been trained (or have learned on the job!) in teaching pedagogy (Pedagogical Knowledge). Historically, the best teachers have been the ones who lived inside the intersection of those two realms of knowledge.

With the increased pervasiveness, ubiquity and infusion of technology, there is a third realm that defines the best teachers: Technological Knowledge. The TPACK model of technology integration helps teachers think about the intersection of these the knowledge areas when developing and delivering meaningful learning experiences for students. I believe that it is only through ‘messing around’ and discovering new possibilities within the context of one’s own Content and Pedagogical Knowledge can teachers begin to truly harness the transformative power of technology in learning.

How much ‘messing around’ do you do? When do you find the time? What keeps you from doing it more?