As you may have read in my previous post, two of my pet hate phrases are “do research” and “make a PowerPoint”.  Whenever I see these two phrases in the same sentence I can almost guarantee that we’re looking at a fairly low level task that focuses more on recall and summary of facts than it does on authentic learning.  I’m also wary of any time I see students “making a PowerPoint” that simply gets handed into the teacher for marking, rather than being used as a presentation platform since it is usually a sign that it’s being used as a glorified note taking tool; a place to write text complete with the distractions of bright colours and annoying graphics.  Don’t get me wrong… It’s not that I’m against the use of PowerPoint as such, but unless you use it for what it’s designed to do – namely to providing a set of effective visuals that support a speaker as they present persuasive ideas – then I think it’s use is probably leading us down the wrong path.

In previous years, the PowerPoints made by the students displayed some good computer skills, but I had the feeling that the technology was there as an add-on rather than an integral tool for completing the task.  The teachers also felt that the students had trouble collecting and synthesising information from the web as the level of most information found online was simply too difficult for the students to deal with.  I also pointed out that taking information from the web and simply rewording it onto a PowerPoint slide was not a big benefit to the students and I questioned the value of such a task.

After a bit of group brainstorming we made a few subtle but important changes to what we asked the students to do.  Firstly, recognising that the language on most webpages were too difficult for kids of this age, we started a wikispaces wiki and created our own pages of information in language pitched at the right level for Year 2.  It was a bit of extra work to create these summaries and took us an hour or so to do, but it meant we now had a permanent set of pages that were exactly what we needed.  The use of a wiki was relatively new to the teachers but they picked it up very quickly, adding text and images. I had my laptop open and I was creating pages and helping cleanup pages if necessary, as the teachers worked on the IWB to brainstorm together what content needed to go on them.  It was actually quite an energizing experience, and in that planning session of an hour or so I think we all enjoyed the buzz of coming up with a better idea and taking immediate action to make it happen.

The nature of the PowerPoint that the students were being asked to create got an overhaul too.  Rather than just submit the PowerPoint file, I convinced the teachers to reallocate their class time to allow the students to get up in front of their peers and actually present their finished work.  I also suggested that we needed to somehow introduce an opportunity for the kids to create and invent, and to use their imagination rather than just retell facts that others have already provided.  To this end we decided to scaffold the PowerPoint into three slides only (I suppose four if you count the title slide).  Each child’s presentation was about a particular invention, and slide one would be about the past history of that invention, slide two about its present and slide three about its future.  We also agreed that the students would only be allowed to use pictures on the slides, no words.

So, slides one and two would tell the story of the invention’s past and present, and this information would come initially from the students looking at the summaries created by the teachers. Naturally, because the teachers had vetted those summaries for both content and language, it was reasonable to expect that the students would be able to identify and deal with the information appropriately. The visuals for these slides would come from images the students found online that captured the past and present of the various inventions.  All the other information about the inventions would have to be delivered verbally by the student when they stood up to give their presentation, since there were to be no words (and therefore no slabs of text and no bullet points!) on the slides themselves.

But slide three was about the future, which clearly hasn’t happened yet. For this, we would ask the students to create a drawing of what they thought their invention might look like in the future. They were free to be as imaginative and creative as they liked (and it was amazing what they came up with!)  Their drawings were scanned or photographed and added as the picture on slide three.

Remember, we are talking about 7 year olds here.  I think what we did to improve this task was to effectively scaffold it, stripping it down into the really important components and providing a guide for the students to work with, while giving them opportunities for creative, imaginative thought as well as researching existing knowledge.  We simplified the technology requirements and realigned the task around the content we wanted them to learn.  The technology became the environment for what they produced, and not the focus for it.  I was quite please with what we did.

I then suggested that, if the students were going to get up in front of the class and present their work, it would be a shame to not share their presentations with a wider audience. To this end, I suggested that we use UStream to create a live broadcast to the web so that parents and relatives could watch the children present live over the Internet.  The Year 2 teachers were really receptive and excited about this idea.  I told them I’d do a bit of testing for them to make sure UStream would work smoothly through our network, and I’d investigate how we could control the broadcast and perhaps just limit it to parents and invited viewers.

That’s often the other big part of my job, to not only come up with ideas that push the teachers’ use of technology, but to do the leg work to make sure the technical aspects of those ideas are actually feasible. After a few days of trying various configurations and running a few live tests, it was clear that it was very feasible and would in fact work really well.  I then worked with the Year 2 teachers to draft up a letter to parents explaining what we were doing, when we would be streaming and the passwords required to watch it. (Let me know if you’d like me to email you a copy of that letter)

The finished results were really very pleasing.  The work that the students did to create their presentations was very good (and importantly, we were now referring to what they were doing as “presentations”, and not “PowerPoints”… I thought this was a great sign to indicate that the focus was off the technology, and instead was on what the technology was enabling)

The final live broadcasts, which ran over several days, were a lot of fun!  I rigged up my Macbook Pro so the webcam was broadcasting the video, and we hooked up a very nice Rode Podcaster mic on a stand in front of the students so the audio was actually pretty good too. Although the actual media stream was quite good, we unfortunately had trouble getting UStream’s backchannel chat to work through our proxy.  But UStream does at least tell you how many people are watching at any given moment, and after each presentation the kids would all turn around and ask “How many people are watching now?!”  There’s nothing quite like an audience to spur kids’ enthusiasm and willingness to do their very best!  We did the presentations in a number of sessions over the course of the week, and I eventually started tweeting out to my PLN before we started broadcasting… this added to the parent watchers and raised the audience numbers considerably, and it also provided a sort of backchannel as well. At one point, we had more almost 50 people watching the stream… that was more than double the number of people in the actual classroom! The kids were really excited by it all, and as we got encouraging tweets back from schools in other parts of the world, the raised level of commitment to doing a good job with their presentations was a joy to watch (some even insisted on doing theirs a second time because they felt they could do better!)

The Year 2 teachers were really quite amazed at how it all came together, and especially to think that there were more people watching from outside their classroom than there were inside the classroom!  We also had an unexpected visit from the principal, who had heard about the project and dropped in to watch a few of the presentations, It was really cool to have him there, sitting on the floor being king of the kids.  Overall, I have to say it was a much better experience than simply submitting a Powerpoint file to the teacher for marking!

From my perspective, I was really pleased with what we’d done.  We took a task that I thought was a little mundane, a little dull, and quite frankly lacking in higher order thinking, and with a few simple tweaks we redesigned it into something that everyone felt was a much better, richer, authentic and more meaningful experience. I felt we shifted the use of technology away from being an end in itself, to being an enabler of richer learning.  I thought the quality of the presentations was really good. Again, was it all perfect?  No, there are things that we can improve next time, but that’s what it’s all about… learning and getting better.

Here’s a video of one of the presentations…

People sometimes ask me whether all this effort to integrate technology into our classrooms is worth it, and whether it really makes any difference.  To answer that, let me share part of an email I received from one of the Year 2 parents the next day…

“It was such an enjoyable experience for my husband and I to be able to watch our daughter in action from the comfort of our office and home respectively. Extended family members logged on later that evening to view  the recorded event, which sent a ripple of excitement through the family.  Our daughter was thrilled.

Upon reflection, it’s been made apparent to me that our daughter is not just being taught basic skills, but that talking and listening, reading and writing can have a purpose and an audience far greater than their teachers and peers. What an amazing learning experience.  How wonderful it was for mothers and fathers to at last be the fly-on-the-wall in our daughter’s classroom and to see the girls use technology so innately and with such confidence.”

Related posts:

1. Redesigning Learning Tasks: Part 1
2. Making Powerful Points
3. A Letter to Teachers about Learning

Our Year 9 Geography class work on a project each year about natural hazards (bushfires, floods, earthquakes, etc). Over the last few years the students have been given a task that requires them to do “research” on one of these phenomena and “create a PowerPoint” about it.  I tend to put those terms into quote marks because I find that “research tasks” presented “in Powerpoint” are usually just a formal excuse to get kids to plagiarise (especially when they just hand the PowerPoint file in… they don’t actually present it to the class). When I looked at the task as it stood I was struck by the fact that most of the questions being asked could easily be answered by simply going to Wikipedia and doing a cut and paste.

I tend to use Blooms Taxonomy as a means of getting a quick overview of the quality of the tasks we ask our students to do.  It’s not a perfect tool, but it’s nice and easy to apply and it gives a pretty good insight into the degree of higher level thinking that might be involved in a given task.  When I looked at the existing task I got the impression that it was made up of fairly low level recall skills.

As an ICT Integrator, one of the questions I always try to start with is “What can we get the students to actually MAKE?” If  the word “create” is at the top of the Blooms pyramid, then I reckon that starting with that question is a good way to begin pushing upwards into higher levels of thinking, since making things, by definition, is creating.  The term “doing research”, unless it is followed up with actually making something based on that research, rarely takes students much beyond simple cut and paste thinking.  To be fair, the other part of the task did involve creating in the sense that the students were “making a PowerPoint”, but it was really just a PowerPoint summary the “research”.  Is it any wonder our students tend to plagiarise when we give them tasks like this?

So when I got a request, as the ICT Integrator, to simply visit these classes to remind the kids “how to make a PowerPoint” I felt a little underwhelmed, and I tactfully tried to suggest that perhaps we needed to rethink what we were asking the kids to do, and to come up with something a little more challenging. That’s what I mean when I say I often have to cross the line between just offering ICT support to teachers versus helping them rethink their actual pedagogy.

Anyway, we did end up redesigning the task, and I think that in the end everyone agreed it was a better, more interesting task that made good use of ICT while also covering all the necessary learning outcomes.  The students were put into groups of three and their task was to produce a 3-5 minute audio news report about a natural hazard of their choice. (It wasn’t technically a podcast, since we didn’t wrap it in an RSS subscription enclosure, but the recording part was the same general idea as a podcast.)

I suggested that the three students should take on three different roles, each focusing on a different aspect of the natural disaster.  The first role was the newsreader, and her job was to announce and describe the key facts about the disaster – what it was, where it happened, and some information about the causes for it… the newsreader essentially set the scene and gave the background about this particular disaster.  The second role was that of on-the-scene reporter, and this person was responsible for giving the detailed information about the disaster – who was involved, describing what the scene looked like, how it was being handled by emergency crews and so on.  The reporter then conducted an interview with the student playing the third role, that of a victim.  The victim’s job was to talk about the human impact of the disaster, and how people were affected. They were to give an insight into the human cost of natural disasters.  Together, these three roles would cover all the important aspects of natural disasters.  I think it’s important to recognise that all of these aspects are outlined in the syllabus for this unit, and so doing it this way was not just a novelty but a way for students actually engage in the prescribed content in a more interesting, more engaging way.

Of course, in order to play these roles the students needed to write a script.  For this, we used GoogleDocs and I taught the students how to write collaboratively using the shared writing tools in GoogleDocs.  I should point out that our Year 9 and 10 students are now 1:1 and every student has their own laptop.  This is a fairly new thing for our school as the 1:1 program just started this year, so I wanted to ensure we build authentic technology skills into these tasks.  Most of the students had never used GoogleDocs before and had never seen the collaborative, shared writing function. I spent a lesson with each class teaching them how to share a document and work on it together, something that they picked up very quickly. That’s the thing about our alleged “Digital Natives”… they actually don’t know a lot of this stuff, but once shown, they tend to pick it up pretty quickly.  Once they got the hang of how it worked, they used GoogleDocs as a shared writing space to work on a script together.  It worked really well and the students worked in groups of three, all collaborating on the same document, adding, editing and creating together.  I think they found it a very valuable tool.

I also spent some time teaching the students the basics of recording sound using Audacity. Once they were shown the core skills of recording a track, then overlaying it with other tracks, music and sound effects, they were ready to get on with producing their radio news reports.  Again, it was a skill that most of them had never seen or used before, but after a half hour of training they were all quite proficient at it.

Of course, behind all of this the students DID have to do considerable research.  They needed to find out how bushfires spread, what causes cyclones, where droughts are most likely and so on.  It’s not that they don’t need to do research – they certainly do. It’s just that once they did the research the task required them to actually use that information to produce something else.  The focus was not on the research, but what could be done with the research. Importantly, they were given some room to be creative, admittedly within a reasonably scaffolded framework, but there was still room to be creative… it wasn’t all about just regurgitating the facts they had researched.  They needed to take those facts and understand, manipulate and create with them. They were given an opportunity to engage with a range of new technology tools they’d never used before, and ones that will hopefully be of use to them in the future. They were being asked to use the media production capabilities of their shiny new laptops to collaborate and make something original, and not just use it as a glorified typewriter.

As we designed the task, I also made sure it offered the teachers a chance to learn new skills as well. We are really pushing the use of Moodle at the moment, and although most of our teachers are very good at posting resources like Word and PDF documents, the activities part of Moodle is still quite underused. I insisted that the final products of the students – namely a text document with the script and an MP3 file with the finished recording – be submitted as an Assignment in Moodle.  There was initially some resistance to this idea, but it forced the teachers to engage with the assignment submission workflow that Moodle offers and exposed them to a number of Moodle features they were not aware of, like the gradebook and the ability to manage student results electronically.

Overall, I have to say the task was a great success.  The students seemed to really enjoy the opportunity to work in groups, to make good use of their laptops, to be able to inject a bit of their own personality into the final product.  They told me that they liked the opportunity to be a bit more creative and not just hand in yet another boring PowerPoint file or essay.  The teachers told me they were impressed with just how engaged the kids were during the task, and that the quality of the finished products was generally quite high.

I’ll put some more posts up in the next few days about some other projects we are working on at school, but at the heart of them I hope there is a common theme.  That is, I hope we are getting better at rethinking what we ask our students to produce so they can show us not only what they know, but what they can do with what they know.  I’d like to think that we’re working harder to build creativity, choice, authenticity, collaboration and engagement into what we ask of them.  I’m pleased to see their laptops being used in ways that leverage the things that digital technology can do, and not to just treat them as a fancy way to take class notes.

Can this task be improved in the future?  Sure, but it was a nice step up from the previous task. I’d like to think that the ICT in this case was there as the appropriate tool for supporting a richer learning task, and not just there for the sake of using computers.

Below is a playable sample from one of the groups.  I don’t know if it was the best one, since I haven’t actually had a chance to listen to them all, but I picked it more or less and random and thought it was pretty good.  I liked the way they used sound effects and mashups recorded from the TV – it shows that they made a special effort.  And I like the creative (and slightly humorous) way they introduce the story at the start of their bulletin.

Related posts:

1. Redesigning Learning Tasks: Part 2
2. A Letter to Teachers about Learning
3. Using Lego to Drive Learning

When I was at school as a student, I actually did a proper typing course.  In fact, I’ll digress for a moment and mention that my school offered something that I’ve not really seen in too many other schools since… every Thursday afternoon we did “activities”.  We all got to choose from a wide range of activities to do for a few hours every Thursday. Some students went off to play sport, running around the basketball field or ripping each others’ heads off playing football.  That was never really my scene.  I was one of those other more nerdy and anti-social children, who pretty much avoided sport wherever I could.

There aren’t all that many things I actually remember about school, but a couple of things stand out.  I remember going off to the AGL gas company in Hurstville where we did cooking lessons on Thursday afternoon.  I thought it was neat, being a 14 year old kid, jumping on a train to go the two stations up the line, finding the big AGL building, and having some other adult besides my regular teacher showing me how to cook a different meal each week.  At the time, learning to cook didn’t quite have the same prestige as being on the football team, but over the long haul I know which one has been most useful!

Back to the typing story… the other memorable Thursday activity (call me weird) was doing a typing class.  I remember being taught by our library assistant, Mrs Sobb.  She was a older lady and boy could she type!  I remember going through all the usual finger training activities – asd, asdf, asd;lk, dad, sad, fad, gad – and so on. I particularly remember that she had a set of large white mens hankerchiefs with long thin ribbons attached to each corner.  She’d tie two ribbons together behind our neck and the other two ribbons were tied to the typewriter (yes, you heard it, typewriter!)  The hankie would then be suspended like a square hammock between the typewriter and our bodies so we couldn’t see the keyboard.  We just had to place our hands on the home row, by feel, and bang out our lines of sad dads.

Anyway, enough wandering down memory lane. Suffice to say, sometimes as much as you try to learn the “right” way to do something it doesn’t always stick. But even as a “bad” typist, I’ve still written a book of 60,000 words, and a quick back-of-the-envelope calculation suggests that since I started this blog I’ve probably typed well over 300,000 words here as well.  Add in the other blogs, wikis, emails, discussion forums and various things I’ve written (typed) over the last few years and it’s interesting to consider that someone can be fairly average at something but still produce something relatively worthwhile.

I guess the lesson is that sometimes it’s more important to actually just DO something, rather than worry about doing it perfectly.

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IWBs are certainly a controversial technology and cop a lot of flak for being a waste of money in classrooms, and although I hate to sound like an apologist, I too often find myself defending them.  I defend them because I believe that in the hands of a good teacher they can be valuable tools, and I get a bit tired of hearing the technology being attacked when it seems to me that all technologies are fairly inert until someone actually does something useful (or not) with them.  As a concept, IWBs sound like a good idea to me… here’s a tool that can support all manner of digital resources and is connected to the wider world via the web, but still has that human element that brings the class members together to discuss ideas around a  shared, large-screen environment, sharing talking, making eye contact.  That all seems like an attractive idea to me.  Of course, in practice, none of that potential is realised without direction from a wise teacher who knows how and when to leverage the tool in some pedagogically sound way.

I’d heard that IWBs were a bit of a circus at ISTE 2010, and that, as usual, IWBs were being hawked by vendors as the silver bullet for making your classroom a better place. (By the way, have you noticed that the demonstrations of IWBs by vendors at trade shows usually consist of showing Youtube clips or playing tictactoe on the board?) However, I assumed that in the non-vendor sessions – sessions that were run by practicing educators who should know better – the importance of sound educational pedagogy would be emphasized over the fancy bells and whistles.  So, I was a bit shocked as I watched this video of a teacher demonstrating how to get the most out of an IWB, as the demo was nothing more than a collection of “interactive” websites that were found online.  In this demo, the teacher showed site after site after site of cutesy examples filled with cliched animations and canned audio that did very little other than provide yet another way for kids to consume some pre-made Flash-game rubbish on the way to rote memorising a bunch of facts.  To make it worse, the entire demo was done from the computer, not the board, so there was absolutely no benefit in the IWB apart from being an expensive projection screen. The whole demo was a collection of everything I think an IWB should NOT be used for, and I think was a perfect example of why there is so much hostility from some people towards IWB technology.

Look, there may be a time and a place for the occasional naff Flash game.  There probably are some useful websites that can be used to help a teacher unpack a tricky concept in a more visual way.  I’m sure that having a bit of colour and movement to help engage students attention is a good idea.  And having access to an onscreen simulation can be a useful tool when doing the real thing is too difficult, expensive or dangerous.

But come on! Teaching effectively with the assistance of an IWB should, hopefully, mean doing a whole lot more than just having a collection of garish websites and predictable, premade content up your sleeve!  Surely we can do much better than this! I don’t want my classroom to have an IWB if its sole use is to allow my students to consume shallow, crappy, poorly designed web content made by other people. What made watching this video worse was watching the backchannel conversation, seeing the participants lapping this up and asking for the URLs for all these sites!

There are some great sites out there on the web, and there’s no denying that many of them work stunningly well on an IWB. But teaching is not (in my opinion anyway) a set-and-forget activity where finding a cool website that the kids think is “engaging” and then simply using it on an IWB somehow qualifies as “good teaching”.  It doesn’t.  I was truly stunned to see a bunch of poorly designed websites being projected on an IWB being held up as an example of worthwhile IWB use!  I would be less surprised to see the vendors doing this, but not a practicing teacher! Maybe the critics are right.

And yet, in the hands of a good teacher, when the IWB is seen as having a supporting role in the classroom, rather than being the star attraction, they can be a truly amazing technology.  Their ability to allow a good teacher to explore concepts visually, stimulate classroom discussion with rich digital media, follow interesting ideas that arise in the course of the lesson, and so on, is undeniably powerful. When used well, I’ve no doubt that IWBs can be revolutionary tools.

One of my mantras about IWBs is that it’s not about what happens on the board.  It’s about what happens because of what happens on the board.  Good teaching and learning is not about some stupid Flash game, it’s about the discussion and conversation and the ability to stimulate deeper understanding about an idea because of the stupid Flash game!  The minute that the content on the board becomes the focus of learning, I think we’re in very shaky territory.  As IWB-using educators, we need to always be thinking about how to leverage that onscreen content to challenge, support and extend the thinking of our students, and not simply to “edutain” them.

In their defense, I think IWBs can be used to provide an amazing “window to the world” in our classrooms.  I think they can provide easy access to an incredible array of rich digital assets that can be used to engage, inform and stimulate learning.  I think that their use can become embedded into our teaching and learning environments in ways that become seamless, where the technology disappears but the benefits are tangible. With a little thought, there are lots of great ways that interactive technologies can be built into the daily DNA of teaching and learning.

But to get there I think we need to let go of the idea that finding some “cool website” where a daggy animated character says “well done!” for adding 2 number together is something to get excited about.  We need to realise that using some rudimentary drag-and-drop activity that reinforces the notion of learning as “who can remember stuff the best” is not the high-water-mark of teaching with interactive technology.  We need to stop being dazzled by pointless animations, shallow activities, rote-learning dressed up as a game, and so on.  We need to slap ourselves upside the head when we catch ourselves treating the board as nothing more than a screen.  As intelligent educators, we need to be critical of the role that an IWB plays in our classrooms, yet we also need to be creative about looking for ways to leverage the power of this tool. We need to be smart enough to know when an IWB is the right tool, and when it isn’t. And we need to realise that the IWB is neither the sole domain of the teacher, nor just the plaything of the students, but rather a place to host a shared meeting of the minds where important ideas can be explored together as partners in learning.

Image: ‘bullet‘
http://www.flickr.com/photos/7729940@N06/3341338252

Related posts:

1. More than just Dazzle
2. Tossing the Chalk
3. Finding New Things to do with an IWB

In once sense, these are valid questions. There’s no doubt that the majority of websites these days are created using a templated approach and an “engine” such as WordPress, Drupal, Joomla, Squarespace, etc. It’s also true that for any really customised web work, it would still fall to a workhorse like Adobe Dreamweaver or something else, such as excellent free tools like KompoZer or NVU editor.

However, on reflection, I think there is a great deal to be said for being able to understand basic HTML code. Take using Moodle as an example… as much as I would like to tell my teachers at school that Moodle has a wonderful WYSIWYG editor, and that it will automatically format all the text and images for you just by cllicking on the little buttons in the editing bar, the fact remains that I still find myself hitting the little <> button on the Moodle editor bar to dive into HTML code on an almost daily basis just to fix little quirky things that are going on.

It’s also true that, although you can use the buttons on the editor to align text to the left or right (which in HTML, behaves quite differently to how it behaves in, say, Word) knowing a little bit about what those buttons are actually doing on a code-level makes it much easier to predict how things will actually look. Being able to manually write a link to a URL, being able to strip out some rogue heading level text, fixing paragraphs that have gone askew because of a stray tag, and so on… these are all things that I find myself doing fairly regularly, even WITH access to fancy WYSIWYG editing tools. I taught myself the basics of writing HTML nearly 15 years ago now (well, to be completely honest, one of my students taught me!) and I can’t even begin to tell you how handy it has been and how often I have used that knowledge. Although I would like to think that we are living in a world where it SHOULD be completely unnecessary to know how to write HTML source code, the truth is that over the years it’s proven itself to be a damn handy skill!

Even being able to use the provided code to put an YouTube video or a Google Map into a wiki or blog, for example… sure, you CAN do it without having the slightest idea of how it all works, but if you want to make a minor adjustment such as changing the width or height of the frame, just being unintimidated by the code makes a big difference to your general level of technological fluency.

I’m not saying that everyone should be able to write heavy-duty CSS code or be able to create complicated PHP script, but HTML is dead simple… and for the number of times I find myself rescuing a page because of a relatively simple adjustment to the underlying code… I gotta say, I can’t think of anyone who would not benefit from knowing the basics.

So, should this teacher spend time teaching his kids to code? Some may disagree, but I say yes. My advice would be to teach kids to write a fairly simple webpage. They should know the core structure of html, head and body. They should understand heading levels (and depending on the age of the students, how these can be tied to style sheets). They should know how to manually write (or at least understand) the code for a hyperlink, for an image, and for an embed. It’s good to know these basics. I guarantee you those kids will find them useful at some point in their future.

For the majority of your students, that’s probably all they need to know. Then, once they have a grip on the basics, switch over to a decent visual editor like Dreamweaver or similar… some tool that lets them switch back and forth between code view and output view. Output view will make SO much more sense once they see the relationship between code and output!

And who knows, just that small exposure to the underlying code could make all the difference to that one kid in your class. It could open them up to a whole world of coding and being interested in what really makes a computer tick. In this WYSIWYG world, God knows we need more kids like that!

And if nothing else, you’ll at least understand why the picture that goes with this post is so funny!

What about you?  Do you think teaching kids to understand HTML is a useful skill, or a waste of time?

Image: ‘html tag italicized‘
http://www.flickr.com/photos/30127486@N00/346483297

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In case it’s of any use to you, I thought I’d share an email that I sent to all the teachers in our junior school (R-6) yesterday.  It’s an outline of how I plan to be delivering ICT professional development to them next term.  I’ve found that this model seems to work best for our staff, and it seems to give the most effective results.  I think this is because it’s delivered in a real situation that is authentic to them and also places a good deal of responsibility onto the staff to embrace the use of ICTs for themselves.  (one of my beliefs is that you should never do for somebody what they can, and should, be able to do for themselves) Perhaps most importantly, our teachers seem to like  this PD model and they seem quite enthusiastic about what we’re doing together… so this is what I said to them…

Dear teachers,

Although the focus of what I do here at PLC is technology integration,  it has always worked so much better when you allow me to help you link this technology integration directly into the things you plan to teach as part of your day to day activities… in this way, the use of technology can richly support and extend the learning for the students.  Over the past couple of years I feel that we have all worked together to make technology less of an “add-on” to the curriculum, and it has become more of an embedded tool for helping engage and enrich our students. Together, some of the techniques and strategies we have tried in the Junior School over the past few years includes podcasting, blogging, live webcasting, digital mapping, digital storytelling, web 2.0 tools, video news reports, social networking, manipulating digital images, and so on.  In the process, your students have come into contact with a wide range of technology tools that are an increasingly important part of the world in which they live.

In working with the Junior School staff, I have tried a number of different models for providing professional development in these tools, from offering before and after school workshops, holding lunchtime sharing sessions, shared planning time, and so on.  With the incredibly hectic schedules that most of you have, some of these PD models have been more successful than others.

Starting in Semester 2, all staff will be required to undertake specific ICT professional development each semester.  In the Junior School, we all agree that the best way to deliver this PD to you is in your actual classroom situation.

The most successful PD model for our teachers seems to be when we create time for collaborative planning time with the ICT Integrator. Under this PD model, I meet with each year group three times per term in order to plan and facilitate the integration of ICT into a classroom project.  We meet early in the term to plan a unit of work together, meet again midterm to monitor the progress of that work, and again at the end to evaluate and assess the work.  Of course, if you need extra assistance with delivering an ICT project then I am more than happy to come into your classes and assist, or to help out with computer class time, but I feel that the core of my ICT integration support is best done by assisting you to develop the skills and knowledge you need to deliver your own classwork with a rich ICT component.  The recent Year 2 “Great Inventions” project is a good example of how I see this working.

Starting in Term 3, we will resume this PD planning model that we’ve used before as it seems to prove the most successful with Junior School teachers.  After looking at the Junior School timetable, I’ve listed some suggested dates below that we could use for meetings in weeks 2B, 5A and 8B of next term.  These all take advantage of times when specialist teachers have your students. Please take a look and let me know ASAP if there are problems with any of these dates and offer some alternate dates that  are more suitable for you in these weeks.

(I’ve removed the actual dates listed here, as they aren’t relevant to anyone reading this post…)

Ideally, in our first meeting (Week 2B) we will look at a task or theme or topic you plan to teach that ICT might lend itself to, and then we can come up with a plan for how we might integrate ICT into that unit.  We will look at modifying or creating activities for the students that leverage ICT skills, and if necessary learn those skills ourselves.  I would encourage you to think about how we can make the tasks we design highly student centric, providing your students with higher order thinking skills and open ended opportunities for creative thinking.

Our second meeting (Week 5A) will be to follow through on how the project is going, what can be improved, what can be tweaked, and also to ensure that any ICT skills are being delivered to both you and the students.

Our final meeting (Week 8B) will be used to evaluate and wrap up the project.  We can evaluate it, look at what worked well, and work out how we might modify it to use (or not use) next year.

Hope these dates suit you.  Looking forward to working closely with you all next term.

We’ve used this PD delivery model in the past and it seems to work quite well.  I start by checking out the teachers’ timetables and working out when they are free (mostly when their students are with specialist teachers for Music/PE/Languages/etc) and then I propose a list of times to meet, asking them to check and confirm that these times work for them.

Anyway, just thought I’d share that in case you can make use of it.  My next few posts will be sharing some examples of how we have made this work in various classes.

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If you ever want to run an unconference, there is plenty of advice online about how you might do it, but when it’s all boiled down, the “rules” for an unconference could be summarised as…

1. The people who come are the best people who could have come.
2. Whatever happens is the only thing that could have happened.
3. It starts when it starts.
4. It’s over when it’s over.
5. The Law of Two Feet (“If you are not learning or contributing to a talk or presentation or discussion it is your responsibility to find somewhere where you can contribute or learn”).

My first real unconference experience happened in Christchurch NZ last year at the ULearn event.  It was organised – or rather, unorganised - by a small group of volunteers, and it’s notable feature was the lack of any rigid structure.  A few tables were set up, people joined in conversations taking place at the tables and then just moved around the room whenever they felt they wanted to move on.  We had some really great conversations about all manner of things that really made a difference to what I took away from the main conference.

MCloser to home, my partner Linda was recently part of an international team of people who planned an unconference event for the IABC World Conference held recently in Toronto, Canada.  So I’ve seen first hand just what’s involved in planned a great unconference event.  While there is definitely a lot of planning involved, on the actual day it works best if there is a great deal of flexibility in how people interact with the event.  People give what they can give, and they take what they can take.  That’s the spirit of an unconference.

Which brings me to the main point of this post. I spent most of today at MoodleCamp Sydney, an unconference-style event for people interested in the open source learning management system called Moodle.  It was organised by Sydney Moodler Jason Hando, a guy I’ve known online for quite a few years, although we only met in person recently for the first time.  I got an email from Jason inviting me to the MoodleCamp event and I signed up right away, with an intention to not only attend but to contribute something from my own school’s journey with Moodle over the last few years.  Jason also emailed me a few days before the event and asked for some extra assistance with the design and creation of some certificates of attendance for the participants, as well as asking if I’d help out with facilitating one of the rooms on the day.  Naturally, wanting to be helpful, I agreed to both.

So today, I turned up at the Sydney Distance Education High School at Wolloomooloo to join my fellow Moodlers to learn lots of cool stuff about Moodle.  For a variety of reasons the event didn’t really hit the mark for me, partly because the organisation of it was not particularly like an unconference, but mostly because of a very public falling out with Jason Hando over an issue in which I thought he was being particularly obnoxious and belligerent, and which escalated into a very ugly situation for everyone.

The first concern was with the way the event was organised.  And ok, maybe I’m being picky, but for an event that was constantly being promoted (positively) as “unorganised”, “unofficial”, “ad-hoc”, etc, right through to the way participants were being referred to as “unparticipants”, when push came to shove it was just as traditional as a normal conference event.  I’m sure Jason had put a lot of time and effort into making the event happen, including providing a rather good looking lunch (I never ate any of it, so I don’t know how it tasted, but it looked good). The venue as very nice, and the potential was there for it to be a really good event.  However, as the day unfolded it turned out to be not so much an unconference, but rather just a series of short traditional presentations, mostly given in a fairly transmissive mode from speaker to audience.

The day was split into 20 minute sessions, and while I understood the reasoning for this, I didn’t think it was really in the spirit of the way an unconference is meant to work… it was simply too structured. Just as I found myself engaging with ideas that were raised, it was time to move on to the next session.  Most of the speakers (including myself) were just trying to get through all they wanted to say in their 20 minute slot, so there wasn’t nearly enough time for questions, conversations and actual sharing.  I felt that just as things got interesting, the “bell would go” and it was time to move to the next lesson. On the flipside, some sessions would drag on past the point at which I was finding them useful, but we kept going anyway because our 20 minutes wasn’t up yet… so much for the Law of Two Feet. For an event that was constantly promoted as being somewhat counter-cultural, it was surprisingly traditional.  Even the layout of the room was surprisingly traditional… the main part of the room was set up with rows of chairs facing the front, where “the front” was a stage with a lectern on it, a projector screen and plenty of PowerPoint/Keynote slides full of bulleted text.  The two breakout rooms were also set up with rows of chairs facing the front, with a screen and a place for “the teacher” to talk to “the students”.  The best parts of the day were the breaks between sessions where the conversation flowed freely and people were sharing ideas and showing each other things on their laptops… but in an unconference, this is what the sessions are supposed to feel like, not just the breaks between the sessions.

The other big issue I had with the day (and which possibly coloured my entire experience of the event) was the very public dressing-down I got from Jason Hando over an issue that he and I did not see eye to eye on.  It’s a long story and I don’t want to embarrass the other person involved, but the belligerence and unreasonableness from Jason was completely over the top.  Another participant arrived at the event – someone I know quite well and whom I consider a friend – and apparently Jason took exception to both his presence at the event and what he planned to present.  This person is extremely active and well known in the Moodle community, and has a reputation for being generous with both his time and his considerable expertise. To contribute to the event, as well as running a very valuable session, he wanted to donate some Moodle books as prizes and also to host a quick Skype call to a surprise guest Moodler. I’m sure that both of these things would have been exceptionally well received by everyone at the event.

Instead of welcoming this person and valuing the great contribution they might be able to make to MoodleCamp, Jason saw this person as a threat and told them to leave and that he was not welcome.  When I found out what happened I tried to act as a voice of reason to settle the disagreement, and I managed to get both parties in the other room to try and sort out what should have been a minor misunderstanding.  Instead, I got a hostile, antagonistic diatribe from Jason about why this person’s motives (which I KNOW were pure) were unacceptable to him. Jason was upset that this person had not contacted him in advance to advise that there would be free books and a Skype call taking place. I explained that I disagreed, that the whole point of an unconference was to be spontaneous, and that no one should have to “clear things” with the organisers if they were obviously in the interests of all participants. Jason expressed concern that this other person would somehow try to commercialise “his” event and he took exception to the fact that this person wore a shirt with a Moodle logo on it… he somehow saw this as a indication that someone from Moodle was “checking up” on him. (For the record, the shirt was one that any active member of the Moodle community is entitled to wear). When I disagreed with Jason’s view, he started ranting about how I was “in bed with” this other person and that I was clearly part of the problem.  The illogical nature of Jason’s reasoning got more and more surreal, and the conversation got more and more heated.  When we were finally joined by Jason’s offsider Danielle, who also spouted the same unreasonable nonsense as Jason, I threw my hands up and exclaimed in absolute frustration “You’ve got to be fucking kidding!”  Jason and Danielle both immediately switched the focus of the issue to the use of the word “fuck” and started carrying on about how offended they were because I swore at them.  Just to be clear, I didn’t swear AT them, I swore NEAR them.  Danielle went off her head about it, and her and Jason started telling me I wasn’t welcome and that I had to leave.

To say I was pissed off is a massive understatement.  I was pissed off at the ludicrous argument that Jason proposed as to why giving away books or wearing a shirt with a particular logo on it was inappropriate at an unconference.  I was pissed off that he had such unfounded, unreasonable suspicions about the motives of one of the most generous people I know. I was pissed off that he was acting like a completely spoiled child who wanted to take an “it’s my unconference and I’ll do whatever I want” attitude to it.  And I was pissed off that he was taking the democratic, free speech ideals of the unconference concept and micromanaging and filtering it in a way that would make even Steve Jobs cringe.

So, having been asked to leave, I left.  But as I walked back to the car, I thought to myself “Hang on, I came here to learn. I’m not going to let some upstart with a bad attitude ruin that”.  So I went back into the room and sat down.  By this point, Jason was standing on the stage, welcoming people and thanking everyone who helped make the day happen.  He then had the audacity to list me as one of his helpers (which, until that point, I was) then he paused, pointed a finger at me from the stage and said “Didn’t I just tell you to leave?”

“Yeah, but I came back.”

“I want you to leave.  You’re not welcome.”  Then he addressed the entire audience who were present and relayed his distorted version of what happened in the back room.  Not the whole story mind you, just the fact that I said “fuck”. In fact, according to Jason I said it 5 or 6 times, which is actually untrue.  He also said that I directed the swearing at Danielle, which was also untrue.

So he then asked me, publicly from the stage, to leave.  I said no. He said he would not continue talking until I left and he walked away from the microphone. I said I was staying. Long pause.  I then suggested that he stop carrying on like a belligerent child and move on, but he refused.  It was embarrassing.  Not for me.  For him.  His puerile behaviour made him look like a complete jackass, but I was certainly not impressed with the very public airing of our dirty laundry.  To have a disagreement with someone is one thing.  To have it escalate into an argument is unfortunate, but we could have dealt with it.  But to air that argument in public, in front of a room full of people, giving only his side of the story, and to make it seem like the core of the issue was because I used a “bad word” is quite another thing.  In the end, I made it clear that I had no intention of leaving, and he eventually continued, but only after demanding a public apology for what he saw as the issue. He was embarrassingly immature in front of the whole room of people.

Let’s be clear. The issue was not the swear word.  The real issue was Jason’s totally unreasonable attitude towards a conference participant who he clearly had a longstanding beef with. The real issue was the fact that, even when he dragged me in as an “adjudicator”, when he didn’t get the agreement from me that he wanted, he turned nasty about it. The real issue was that he acted like this was “his” event, and not the participants’ event. The real issue was the “right of veto” nonsense he tried to pull when he felt that someone else might pick up some consultancy work as a result of the day (something which is very clearly in competition with his own business goals)  The real issue was the massive dummy spit he had when people didn’t share his views, to the point where he felt he could order them to leave.  Jason’s business is doing Moodle consultancy and there’s no doubt in my mind that MoodleCamp was a way of expanding his own customer base.  Reading between the lines, the thought of someone else coming along who might be seen as having more expertise, and therefore being a threat to his business, was too much for him and he snapped.

For the record, I approached Danielle afterwards and offered my apology if I caused her offence, and pointed out that my frustration was not directed at her.  I also, despite the fact that I really didn’t feel much like making any contributions at all after that, still presented a session since that’s part of the reason I came in the first place. And as for the “free lunch”, maybe it’s just cutting off my nose to spite my face, but there was no way I was going to take anything from someone who feels it’s ok to publicly embarrass me like that.

I don’t normally take my disagreements public but since that’s what Jason decided to do from the stage, I’m not going to take it lying down.  As another delegate confided to me later, “I can’t believe what an idiot he was to do that.  Of all the people to do that to, he should know better than to do it to you.”  Publicly embarrassing a blogger?  Bad idea.

The comments are open.  I’m quite happy to get an apology from Jason.  Otherwise, bring it on baby, because I’m filthy dirty about the way I was treated.

Related posts:

1. Such a thing as a Free Lunch
2. Becoming a Moodle Dude

Not long after that I heard the infamous John “Mad dog” Hall speak at a computer show in Sydney, where he passionately and logically espoused the virtues of open source software as a legitimate alternative to commercial software such as Windows and Office.  I recall he made some really compelling arguments because I came away from that talk determined to get this Linux thing working so I could try it. I stumbled across a set of SuSE Linux CDs and tried again to install it, but again without success. At about that time, one of my Year 10 students mentioned that his dad worked with Unix and so volunteered his dad to come give me a hand.  Despite the fact that this guy knew Unix (and by extension, knew a lot about Linux, since that’s where Linux evolved from) we still could not get it working.  We kinda, sorta got it working, but the screen was all weird and there was no sound and definitely no networking. There were all sorts of driver issues, and since I was a relative n00b at using the Linux command line, I really didn’t get very far with it.  However, I did at least try to learn some Linux commands which, although I’m hardly an expert, have come in very handy at various times in my career working with computers and networks.

I really wanted to like Linux. I principle, I really like the concept of an open source operating system, built by a community of users and freely released to the world.  I like the ideology behind Linux, for much the same reason that I like the ideology behind Wikipedia. The world is a better place when we openly share with each other and together we are better than any single one of us.  But no matter how much I wanted to like Linux, the fact remained that I just simply could not get it working with any degree of satisfaction on any hardware I owned. Either the network wouldn’t work, or the sound wouldn’t work, or the screen would only show at 640×480… but I never seemed to be able to get a fully functional system that presented a credible threat to the commercial OSes.

Gradually though, things began to change, and I watched Linux take a big hold in the server space. I ran a school network for a few years and we had a number of Linux servers running various parts of the network. These servers were doing backend webserver work and ran without the need for a GUI… they were ridiculously hard for me to work with (I guess I’m just not that geeky!) but they were totally bulletproof as servers. They often ran for months without any issues and really showed me that Linux was a powerful, stable OS, even if I did find it quite unfriendly to work with.  I just found that terminal a little too intimidating and hard to use, and although I could work out the commands to type in when I needed to, it was clear that I was just not ready for Linux in my day to day desktop existence.

Things really started to change when I saw Ubuntu.  The wonderful Pia Waugh showed me Ubuntu in a workshop and it was a massive improvement over any previous Linux distribution I’d seen. It had a drop-dead simple installation process, lots of apps included and had a GUI that was quite intuitive to use. I installed it on a few machines and it was almost, nearly, but not quite there. I still had minor issues with getting wireless to work, and a few other little things, but mostly it was clear that it was a massive step forward in ease of use.  By this stage, I’d dumped Windows from my day to day computing existence and had moved back to a Mac. The Mac’s ease of use, reliability, speed and performance was like a breath of fresh air… everything, as the ads say, just worked.

I still love my Macs, and along with the iPhone and iPad, Apple are obviously producing some very impressive, game changing technologies these days. But the more I hear and see about the closed world that Apple operates in, the more I’m feeling troubled. I get it, I understand what Uncle Steve is trying to do, and really I don’t think there is any intention to be evil about it. I realise that Apple’s thinking is to produce a platform that just works and is as reliable, stable and functional as possible, and I get that the only way they can truly do that is to control the experience from end to end. When you make the hardware, and the software, and the services and the content… well you get total control over the user experience.  That’s the genius of Apple’s approach. They can give you an elegant, robust, delightful usability experience because every piece is designed to work with every other piece.  It is the reason why I found Linux so damn difficult to use back in the early days, because the environment of Linux was a complete free-for-all, and there was never any guarantee that any hardware or software would play nicely together. It explains why all that early Linux experience was just a painful series of missing drivers, incompatible hardware, a confusing array of software choices, and lots and lots of of frustration.

Having said that, Apple’s approach does bother me a little because it conflicts with my core philosophy of openness and my belief that there should be certain freedoms in what I use and how I work.  Despite the incredibly good user experience that OSX provides, I do sometimes feel the frustration of working within the limitations (or is that the safety?) of the Apple cocoon.  The world grew very sick of Microsoft when it tried to own the entire game. Apple may be working on a much smaller scale than Microsoft was, but it is more aggressive at the same tactic.  Unless they soften their approach a little I’m concerned that here could be a real backlash against Apple as their market share grows.

Overall, I’ll probably stay with my beloved Macs for a while yet since they I still think they are the best overall choice of computing platform.

But back to Linux for a moment. Maybe it’s old news to some people, but I’ve just lately discovered and have become quite impressed with a Linux distribution called Jolicloud.  Jolicloud is a project started by Tariq Krim, the original founder of Netvibes, and is a Ubuntu Linux-based OS made especially for netbook computers.  Jolicloud is completely optimised for netwooks and just goes to show that those underpowered little laptops can actually be useful little computers when they have the right operating system software on them.  I’m running it at the moment on my Lenovo S10 netbook, which until recently was running Windows 7. Jolicloud seems much better suited to the purpose, and runs faster and snappier than 7 did.  The user interface is based on the Netbook Remix Project, but is tweaked in all sorts of added ways for better performance.  I particularly like the “cloud” concept behind it, with the Jolicloud App Directory playing a key role in the overall ease of use. You can browse the App Directory for extra  software (there are hundreds to choose from!) and with a single click they are added to your computer.  All the updates are automatically taken care of through the cloud service too.

The installation was super easy, just download the Jolicloud ISO file, along with a small USB key creator file. Although the ISO took a while to download (it’s about 690MB), once you’ve got it the bootable USB key is made within minutes. Insert it into the netbook, restart and boot from the USB key and the system is installed in less than 15 minutes.  Best of all, every device on the computer works like a charm… sound, screen, network, webcam… everything just worked right out of the box.  I added a few apps (well, ok, over a hundred so far) and it’s turned my netbook from being a device that was easy to carry but painful to use, into a computer that could competently become my regular travel buddy.  There are even two different modes, a Netbook Remix interface, along with a more traditional desktop menu interface.  I think it has great potential. And of course, it’s 100% free.  Free as in beer AND free as in speech.

It’s really shown me just how far Linux has come as a computer for the average person. My mum doesn’t know much about how to use a computer, but I think if she was interested in having one, I would probably give her a Linux based Jolicloud computer in preference to a Windows machine.  She’s probably find it more intuitive, more stable, and overall much easier to use than Windows. And that is a claim that I don’t think I could have made 10, or even 5, years ago.

Linux, you’ve come a long way baby!

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