Month: February 2008

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Did you ever wonder? Did you know with an environmental edge.

Thanks to Clay Burrell at Beyond School for the alert to this video. Just as ‘Did you know?’  became a viral video with an enormous viewing audience, the hope is that ‘Did you ever wonder?’ will reach similar viral proportions. The video was created by Bill Warren from ed4wb.org (education for well-being). On his about page Bill says, “Education For Well-being was started as a response to what is happening (and not happening) in schools today. There needs to be a rethinking of the purpose of education–one that moves away from students as support systems for economies–to one that moves toward education as an instrument of well-being…………Ed4Wb seeks to foster, through the collaborative nature of the Web, the notion that education should help improve our ability to live well, not degrade it.”

The video highlights the notion that we need to be conscious of our responsibility to educate our students that the focus shouldn’t be on economic growth to the detriment of sustainability of earth’s resources; resources being people and the environment. It’s a good message and one that would compliment studies of Globalisation and Global Warming in our schools today.

Thanks Bill for creating another useful tool that can be used as the springboard for lively discussions in our classrooms.

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Ustream – catch Wired Wednesdays

In my last post I highlighted the great work being done by Justin Medved and Dennis Harter at the International School of Bangkok. One of the proactive things they are doing for their staff and the wider world is an initiative called Wired Wednesdays. In their words, Wired Wednesday is, “a discussion based session around the philosophy and direction of education, technology, and learning. Usually inspired by a video (think mwesch), we then just talk and then hopefully redirect the conversation into the blogosphere and classrooms.”  The wider world can participate as they broadcast on Ustream. Wired Wednesdays broadcast from 2.15pm Bangkok time. If you can’t tune in you can catch up with the rerun on their Ustream channel.

We are currently investigating how best we videotape lectures that occur in the school. Perhaps Ustream is worth a look.   

With Ustream you can create your own show. Here’s how you do it (from the Ustream site);

Create your own broadcast! It takes just minutes…

1. Create Your Ustream Account

Sign Up!

2. Log in, then select “My Shows”

3. Type in the name of your show, and just click Broadcast Now!

4. Plug in your cam

5. When asked, “allow” the broadcast widget to access your video camera or webcam.
    You are now LIVE!

  

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What are the needs of the 21st Century Learner? Dennis Harter and Justin Medved are leading the way.

Dennis Harter and Justin Medved are doing some fantastic work at the International School of Bangkok and are sharing their thinking with the world.  Justin created the Curriculum 2.0 video that began this entry, and their thinking is helping me to clarify my own thinking about learning and where technology fits in the teaching happening in our schools today. It’s the learning that is important and that’s what needs to be the focus of any discussion about the use of technology to support learning.  Their school uses Jay McTighe’s Understanding by Design to develop their units so they approached their planning with the idea that they needed to formulate essential questions identifying Information Literacy for a 21st  Century Learner. Below are their questions represented as a diagram.  

maindiagram.jpg

They then developed a new literacy wiki that became the discussion forum for these five essential questions and what they termed Curriculum 2.0. Out of this they fine tuned their five essential questions into what they termed, ‘three focused roles of technology in 21st century learning.’ Venn

They then evolved to the following understandings and the development of three new questions. What follows is directly from their fifth blog post on this subject – I hope they don’t mind me inserting it here but it is best understood by reading their words. 

“From this starting point and as a result of much discussion and collaboration, we all agreed that our ideas and five essential questions could be refined further down to three new questions.

  • How do I responsibly use information and communication to positively contribute to my world?
  • How do I effectively communicate?
  • How do I find and use information to construct meaning and solve problems?

With these questions we then proceeded to flesh out the enduring understandings that went with them. It was our feeling that these should always be evolving to address the changing face of communication, collaboration and information. The curriculum frameworkwould be in constant beta. A testament to the ever expanding nature of the skills it was attempting to map.”

Click to enlarge

They’ve blown me away with the scope of their discussions and the framework they have provided. I can now see a way forward to implement discussion and change in my school. My best advice to anyone reading this is to visit either Dennis or Justin’s blogs or visit Dangerously Irrelevant where they were guest bloggers this week. Great work guys and thanks for sharing your thinking with the world. It’s a brilliant example of what is possible for our kids if we give them the scope to write for a global audience.

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School’s out Friday

Time for the weekly dose of School’s out Friday. Here’s David Lee King singing his Web 2.0 song, ‘Are you blogging this?’ I think my friends who don’t get blogging are getting sick of me mentioning my blog! Perhaps I’ll annoy them further by singing this loudly around them. Enjoy your weekend – make the most of it – Monday seems to arrive way too soon!

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Supercook!

Here’s something that I need. I can’t tell you how often I get home and am totally unprepared when it comes to putting together a meal for my family. I get in a rut and make the same thing on a weekly basis until I kill it and no-one will eat it anymore! I’ve got to the stage where takeaway is too often an option. Maybe the solution lies in Supercook -the intelligent recipe search engine. This is a search engine that finds recipes for you based on the ingredients you have available in your kitchen. When you get to the site you add the ingredients you have available and recipes display on the screen that you can make. Tags suggest other ingredient options you could include to expand the recipe options available. It’s a bit of fun but could also be useful if you have a busy life and find planning meals a chore. It could be a useful teaching tool for those teaching food preparation.

Amazing what you can find on the Web these days! Thanks to Emily Price from Download Squad for the alert to this site.

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Sorry to our indigenous people

February 13th 2008 was an historic day in Australia’s history. Today our elected Government said sorry to our indigenous people, the Aboriginal population. This is our Prime Minister, Kevin Rudd, and part of this historic speech to the nation. Thanks to crikeymedia for uploading it to YouTube. Many students across Australia watched the apology live, but if you missed it, this would be useful to use with your students.

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Technology in Education – what should we be doing?

  

Todd Ritter from Download Squad attended the Pennsylvania Educational Technology Expo and Conference and heard David Pogue speak. He was amazed by the reaction of the audience to ideas David expressed about technology he feels would be usefully applied in educational settings. Todd made this comment about audience participants;

 “it became clear from the audience gasps and collective jaw-dropping that educators are not keeping up with technology changes. Demonstrations of technologies that have been around for more than two years were causing the educators to feverishly put pen to paper so they can take things like Skype back to their schools to use in the curriculum.”

While I think it’s true that many classrooms are not exploring technology to its full potential, I wouldn’t be so damning in my criticism. Many teachers are flat out trying to meet curriculum demands and the emotional needs of their students. While I agree that new technologies can make the learning experience more engaging, many teachers do not feel confident enough to try new things out. One of the things I’m trying to do with this blog is to highlight some of the new technologies available and empower teachers to feel confident enough to tackle something new. I had a wonderful experience with a colleague today. Our Electronic Services Librarian had set up a Wiki for her class and I was helping my colleague learn how to edit pages and link text to websites. I then suggested we find an appropriate YouTube video and embed it in the Wiki. We clicked on the plugin button and selected insert YouTube video. We copied the embed code from the YouTube video and pasted it into the box that had appeared on our screen. We clicked save and voila! YouTube video embedded in Wiki. She was thrilled and felt empowered. This was a teaching opportunity for me and my colleague will pass this on to her students. Winners all round! This is what we need to be doing to support our colleagues in feeling comfortable with new technology. Once they realise things aren’t so difficult to do there will be more uptake and our students will have the opportunity to learn technologies that will assist them in becoming the lifelong learners they need to be.

Todd Ritter suggests Five ways to improve technology in education. Read his post – he has ideas that I think all educators should be considering.

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Information overload – get a Google reader!

I’m constantly amazed by the changes I have seen in myself over the last two and a bit years. They’re not physical (not to say that I’ve been unaffected by the ravages of time!), but more attitudinal. As I’ve become more familiar with technology, I’ve noticed a shift in my reading habits. I’m a Teacher- Librarian and English teacher, and have a deep love of the written word. I love eloquent, simple language that can evoke feeling and move me in some way. I love being so completely immersed in a novel that it transcends all else and I can do nothing but turn the pages. I love sharing the reading experience with my students. But I’ve noticed a change in my reading habits.

As I’ve developed my interest in what is possible with the Web, my love affair with the novel has waned. Maybe it’s just that I’m reading the wrong books, but I’m finding it more difficult to become engaged and commit the time needed to complete a novel. Two years ago I felt overwhelmed by the wealth of information flooding from the Web; today, not so much. I think this is because the type of reading I am doing has changed.  An essential part of my reading today is via my Google Reader. Here I access the latest feeds from people who write blogs that are of interest to me. Most of these are people involved in education from various corners of the world. These people are filtering the information overload that is the Web for me,  and I, in turn, am doing my bit by writing this blog and adding to the filtering process. By being part of this community I am helping to manage my own professional development and hopefully am assisting other people with theirs.  

What’s led me to this moment of introspection is a post from Will Richardson. He refers to an article in the Christian Science Monitor by Thomas Washington, a School Librarian. He discusses student reading habits and the perception that students dislike reading and have an aversion to it. He speculates that it is not an aversion, but rather a reaction to the information overload that is our modern world. He says, “For them, and now maybe for me, moving on to something else is an adaptive tactic for negotiating the jungle that is our information-besotted culture of verbiage.”

As much as I recognise a shift in my reading habits, I hope that I never tire of the pleasure that comes from total immersion in a story that moves me in some way. A large part of my job is to encourage students to read for their own enjoyment. I’m pleased to say that at my school there is a strong reading culture and we have many readers accessing our fiction collection, along with our biography/autobiographies and high interest non-fiction. One book of late that has had that special immersion factor is Meg Rosoff’s ‘What I Was’. I can’t tell you what it is about – it’s one of those novels that you spoil if you reveal too much. Meg’s novels are always interesting with unexpected plot twists and turns. Give it a go.   

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Can my students explode walls too?

When I watch Mr.Mayo’s class discuss their exploding walls project I get excited. What they say echoes my feelings about education and the power that can come from allowing our students to explore the possibilities beyond the classroom walls. I know how motivated I feel about writing this blog and how empowered I feel when I realise that people are reading it. Hopefully the people reading are learning something too. It makes me think that the students I teach would feel equally empowered. So what’s holding me back? I’ve made connections with a teacher in Shanghai and my students are excited by the possibilities of communicating with students in another part of the world. What’s holding me back at the moment is the time factor in setting up a multi user blog and getting permissions organised so that my students can participate. I’m going to have to bite the bullet and get moving. I’ll keep you posted – structural damage could occur soon!

Thanks to Jim Gates and his Tipline blog and kjarrett for the alert to this YouTube video.