Lucacept – intercepting the Web

April 12, 2013

School’s out Friday

Aahhh…Google. They do it well. Take delight in their clever advertising campaign about Search. If only all advertisers understood that a good story, cleverly told, is the most powerful tool at their disposal.

I’ve been Googled today. Not in the search sense, but in the Google Summit sense. I’m in Maroochydore tonight, which is close to Buderim where the Google Apps for Education Summit is being held at Matthew Flinders Anglican College. Today was the first day of their two day conference, and I was very pleasantly surprised that there was so much learning to be had today!

My twitter stream is literally flooded with information and links that I shared. If you care to, take a look at #gafesummit on Twitter and you’ll see some of the great tips and ideas that were shared today. I’m very interested in Chromebooks and their potential for use in schools and tweeted that I had to get my hands on one to check it out. Suan Yeo, the head of Google Enterprise Education efforts, saw my tweet and replied asking me to find him out to talk about that. I did during the next break, and he gave me a Chromebook to try out for the day. Very cool! I was very impressed. A Chromebook is a thin client device – it contains no hard drive and relies on the Google Chrome operating system and obviously an Internet connection. I was using a Samsung Chromebook. It was very light and had a USB, SD Card and HDMI port. You’d be relying on your Google Drive account and the Chrome App store for creation tools, but that’s pretty achievable these days given the options available there. I think I’m going to invest in one of these in the near future and see how it goes in a school setting. At around $350, the price point is good. Given the demise of netbooks, this is looking like a viable alternative for schools with the infrastructure that can support them.

I’m going to Storify my tweet stream and try and write a halfway decent blog post about the summit on the plane journey home tomorrow night. I need to take the opportunity to write in the air, because that kind of dedicated lack of distraction time doesn’t come my way all that frequently these days.

I’m looking forward to tomorrow and the learning to be had. Better charge those devices in preparation!

April 5, 2013

School’s out Friday

Now I know some of you might be looking for some high brow thoughtful video that might cause you to involuntarily smirk with appreciation at the wit being shared, but I’m here to disappoint you tonight.

Instead, you need to delight in the presence of Grumpy Cat.

Yesterday was Grumpy Cat’s first birthday. Last September, the 12th to be exact, her owner’s brother posted photos of ‘Tard’ to Reddit (see above – hard to miss!), where they were up-voted by the Reddit community more that 25,000 times in the first 24 hours. How do I know this? I know this because I know about ‘Know your Meme‘, a site that tracks Memes that are shared across the Internet. The Merriam Webster online dictionary defines a Meme as the following:

an idea, behavior, style, or usage that spreads from person to person within a culture

Believe you me, if you know your Memes, you have hit an entry point into the lives of the students you teach and you just might find yourself able to converse in their language and maybe even improve the teacher/student relationship in the process. Knowing the Memes that are out there has improved the relationship between myself and my children. We’re often laughing together uncontrollably while my husband looks on in confusion. That’s a power position to be in my friends. Take my advice – read ‘Know your Meme‘ on a regular basis.

In the meantime, delight in the presence of Grumpy Cat. I’m tempted to order a Grumpy Cat coffee mug, so I can smile at work every time I look at it.

Have a great weekend. Beautiful weather forecast for Melbourne. I’m intending to make the most of it. I hope you do too, wherever you are and whatever the forecast is. 🙂

April 2, 2013

How an internal Teachmeet can help forge a professional learning community

One of the things I set out to do when I took on the role of Director of ICT and eLearning at my school, was to find ways for our staff to share what’s happening in their classrooms. Despite the fact that we often are working in environments with large numbers of staff working within very close proximity of one another, teaching can be an isolated and sometimes lonely profession. Very often, we’re unaware of what is happening in peoples’ classrooms and it’s difficult to find moments where we can get together en masse to share.

In our meeting schedule, we scheduled a Teachmeet as our last staff meeting for the term. I love the idea of Teachmeets, but I’ve yet to attend one. They are informal gatherings of teachers where strategies, new approaches etc are shared and most of them take place on weekends in locations close to the city. I find it really difficult to get to them given the demands of family life and the sheer fact that I’m pretty tired from the working week and need the weekend to recuperate (and do the washing, vacuum the floors etc etc). Last year, when I attended ISTE in San Diego, one of my Australian friends shared how they have Teachmeets with their staff so I thought this would be something we could replicate to bring people together and help to build our professional learning community.

I’ve been very fortunate to have fifteen teachers from across the school volunteer (with a bit of coaxing!) to be eLearning coaches, and seven of them, along with myself, agreed to run a 7 minute information sharing session about something they’re doing. We ended up with a line up that included the following:

Infographics and how to use and create them

iPad/iPhone apps and their use in a Maths classroom

Using Edmodo as a virtual learning platform for your class

Backing up data – what are the options

Flipping your classroom and using a blog to share information (two teachers demonstrated what they’re doing using these methods)

Using Skype to connect with other classrooms and Ning as a platform for teacher resource sharing

Scootle and how to use it to support Australian Curriculum implementation

In my email to staff about the event, I said the following:

There’s a requirement that this will be a fun event, so bring along your good humour, great catching skills and supportive smiles as your peers share their practice with you.

The great catching skills were needed for the lolly throws that took place between presentations, and the supportive smiles were absolutely necessary to help staff present in front of their peers. I don’t know about you, but I’d rather address an audience of 200 strangers than I would the people I work with on a daily basis. I think we were all feeling a degree of stress about the afternoon, but it was unfounded. Our peers were very supportive and got into the spirit of the afternoon. Lollies were caught, laughter was shared, music was played in between presentations and sessions provoked discourse between participants.

The feedback from the Teachmeet has been fabulous. In the hours after I received emails from staff saying how much they’d enjoyed the meeting and that it was fun and engaging. This continued throughout the week when people approached me saying how much they’d taken from it and how the format was perfect for a positive end of term meeting celebrating what’s happening in the school. Our eLeaning coaches who presented have been approached by staff who want to know more about what they’re doing and want opportunities to learn from them.

Sometimes we neglect to explore the expertise that exists within our own staff. We send people out to expensive external professional development where they hear from others when it’s quite possible similar expertise is being played out in classrooms next door to them. Becoming a professional learning community within the walls of your school means finding opportunities like internal Teachmeets where people can discover the experts among them, and build the rapport and professional dialogue with peers that can become a model for others to follow.

Schedule an internal Teachmeet with your staff next term – I don’t think you’ll regret it. They’re becoming a permanent fixture in our school calendar!

March 29, 2013

School’s out Friday

Milk Run from Josh Soskin on Vimeo.

I like this film by Josh Soskin. Sometimes you want the mundane to surprise you, to take you somewhere unexpected.

The start of the Easter Break has meant a day of sublime rest. I’ve even taken the liberty of watching two movies – one after another! Unheard of for me of late. It felt so indulgent to just sit and immerse myself in other worlds. My mind needed it – this term has been frantically busy I’ve felt like everything has been on fast forward. I’m looking forward to a few days of rest and maybe more time to just sit and do very little.

Enjoy the Easter break and eat plenty of chocolate. You no doubt deserve it – that’s what I’m telling myself, anyway. 🙂

March 10, 2013March 10, 2013

The road less travelled…the difficult conversation

When you’ve been a teacher for a long time, there are two paths you can follow. You can remain in the classroom and be responsible for the classes you teach. There are pluses and minuses to this path. The pluses are that you are fairly autonomous . Yes, you’re often working with a team of teachers, but when all is said and done, you control the environment you teach in, and if you’ve established a climate conducive to learning in your classrooms, this can be a very positive experience. The minuses are that you carry a heavy teaching load, and you have to deal with the correction load that follows suit.

The other path is to take on managerial responsibilities, be it as a Head of Faculty, Head of Year, or other roles that remove you even further from the classroom such as Deputy Principal. With these roles come the responsibility to manage people. Quite early in my career, I took on the role of Head of Year and did this for three years or so. For the most part, I managed the pastoral care of students, and spent my days working with kids and parents. Of course, I worked with teachers too, and sometimes I was pulled in different directions as I felt the need to support staff, but could see occasions when it was their actions that were contributing to the issues they were having with the children they taught. In more recent years, I changed tack and became a Head of Faculty, and am now Director of ICT and eLearning – roles that have required me to directly manage staff who report to me. It’s these managerial roles in schools that often present us with the dicey subject of the difficult conversation.

No one enjoys the difficult conversation. You’re often agonising over it in the days preceding, going over what you’ll say again and again, rehearsing it until you’re wrung out like an overused dish rag. The nervous energy saps your mental acuity for anything else as you anticipate every possible outcome. You prime yourself and spend time doing what my mother used to say, “worrying about something that will probably never happen”. Over the years, I think my managerial skills have sharpened, but that doesn’t change the fact that I still find the difficult conversations just that – difficult.

Last year, at the Creative Innovation 2012 conference (click on that link to see the YouTube channel hosting 21 of the keynotes from the two days) in Melbourne, I was lucky enough to hear Steve Vamos speak on just this topic. His no nonsense, grounded in common sense ideas really resonated with me. I especially love his recount of his experience as a 19 yr old working at Liquorland – the lesson he learnt from someone who knew how to hand out advice while maintaining a person’s dignity has guided his interactions with people ever since. My suggestion is you listen to the seventeen minutes and take in the message. If you are managing staff, in schools or any profession, Steve’s ideas about feedback and respect will ring true.

March 8, 2013

School’s out Friday

Here’s one to test yourself on over the weekend – find your life purpose in less that five minutes. It’s worth a look to assess if you fit the happiness criteria set out by Adam.

Here’s the five questions Adam suggests we need to ask ourselves to determine our life purpose.

Who are you?

What do you do?

Who do you do it for?

What do people want or need?

How do they change or transform as a result of what you give them?

I presented today at the North Eastern Victoria Region Leadership Conference for Principals in DEECD schools. My presentation abstract follows:

Just what are we preparing our students for?

What will 2020 look like? What are the future work skills that will be expected from the students we are teaching today? How do we prepare them adequately?

Join Jenny in a discussion that will focus on projections for the future, the importance of effective pedagogy in our schools today to meet this future, and the marriage of this with meaningful use of technology to support learning environments that will assist in the development of mindful digital citizens.

I enjoy presenting to groups of teachers and sharing the thinking I’ve acquired from my immersion in networks. When I think about it, sharing my learning has become my life purpose in many ways, when you separate my commitment to my family out of the equation.

If I think about the last of Adam’s questions, I hope I can fulfil the following for teachers: I help people see a different way of doing things so that they can prepare students well for the future.

Adam makes the observation that two of the questions are about yourself, and the rest relate to your interactions with others. He speculates that most successful people focus on the people they serve, and that if you can make other people happy, then life teaches us that you will be taken care of.

So, there’s a bright future ahead for those of us who share in networks to support the learning of others!

Have a great weekend. It’s a long weekend here in Victoria. I can’t tell you how happy I am to know there are three days ahead of me instead of two. Maybe those dark circles under the eyes will disappear by Tuesday morning. Here’s hoping!

March 1, 2013

School’s out Friday

Have you figured out yet that I am madly in love with the mind of John Green?

Mental floss on YouTube. Just my thing. Those kind of random, weird, but strangely addictive pieces of useless information that make for the most interesting discussion fodder. I wish John Green lived next door to me. We’d have a lot in common. I’d invite him over for a cuppa or glass of wine and I’m sure we’d laugh into the wee hours. I’ll just have to get my dose of John Green via YouTube, cuppa or glass of wine in hand. I’ll laugh by myself, and maybe leave a comment on YouTube. If you’re anything like me, you’ll subscribe to Mental Floss on YouTube, and the videos might just be some of the most entertaining parts of your week.

Off to bed for me. I’ve just posted this tweet on Twitter.

Sometime, over the last week, I sent out my 20,000th tweet. The last five years here have been the best prof. develop. I’ve had. And all free.

Some of you might be thinking that I’ve wasted a lot of time on Twitter. Nothing could be further from the truth. The learning made possible from the network there has been a decisive part of my growth as an educator. I’m forever grateful to Clay Burell for introducing me to his network and supporting me in my early days there. You were very generous Clay – I am indebted to you.

Have a wonderful weekend. The weather looks good for Melbourne, and I intend to spend some time outdoors appreciating it. I hope you have a similar outlook where you live. 🙂

February 24, 2013February 24, 2013

Larry Lessig – Law, Leadership and Aaron Swartz

This is Larry Lessig, speaking at Harvard Law School as he accepts the Chair as Roy L. Furman Professor of Law and Leadership. As Dean Martha Minnow says at the end of Larry’s speech, this is a Chair in Law AND LEADERSHIP, and she can think of no better person to be sitting in it. If you take the time to watch this speech, and you should, then I’m sure you will have no doubt that Martha’s words are true.

I knew nothing of Aaron Swartz until after his death. I wish I’d known of him before. He took his life on January 11th, at the age of 26, after being indicted for 13 counts by the United States Government after writing a script to download files from Jstor and store them on his computer hard drive after accessing an open cupboard serving as a server room at MIT and hardwiring his computer to it. He presumably had the intent of making them accessible to all, instead of being trapped behind a paywall system. A paywall system that means for the bulk of the population, these academic articles, funded by taxpayer money, are inaccessible to most of us, and accessible only to those who frequent institutions who pay the licensing fees guaranteeing you access. A recent article in the New Republic, provides speculation as to why Aaron may have decided to take this course.

In the last 20 minutes of this speech, Larry questions the state of things in the United States and asks “Is the United States America anymore?” An America where people who think differently, as Aaron did, are challenged by the Government instead of being supported for their divergent thinking. Divergent thinking that might actually make our world a better place for those who are not the monied elite and don’t have the financial means to advance themselves. My empathy qoutient is raised in this regard; I benefited from a free Higher Education model the Australian Government used to endorse and I’m convinced it provided me with a pathway to further education that may not have been realised without it.

Larry Lessig is obviously deeply impacted by Aaron’s death. There are moments in this speech where I wondered how he could continue, but continue he did, and his words are a more than fitting tribute to a young man who had ideals way beyond those who write code to power networks that provide people with opportunities for connection, but make them millions of dollars in the process. I saw Tim Berners Lee speak in Melbourne earlier this month and a large portion of his speech was dedicated to Aaron. Like Larry, he had known Aaron since his teenage years and like Larry, it was apparent that his untimely death had deeply affected him.

You may not be able to find a way to share the full contents of this speech with the students you teach, but if a moment presents itself, try and find a way to share Aaron’s story, and use the last 20 minutes of the speech with them. What Larry is positing it that we need more people like Aaron, and more people (and lawyers) willing to step up and do what is right. Larry shares with the audience that he was often seen as Aaron’s mentor, but in fact he saw himself as Aaron’s mentee. Aaron once questioned him on one of their many subjects of interest and Larry’s reply was met with, “yes, as an academic, but what as a citizen?” It’s a question that Larry says will help him to continue to fight what seem impossible fights. Fights like ‘dumb copyright’ that deny people the right to the benefits of academic research funded by taxpayer dollars.

It’s the moral compasses we set for ourselves that make our world a better place to live in. Aaron’s death will hopefully leave a legacy where those who think different, those who think for the good of the whole, will become champions and not pilloried for their actions. I have in no way here paid justice to the story of Aaron Swartz. If you know nothing of this remarkable young man, then do what you can to find out more. A recent piece of longform writing in Slate is a good place to start.

Aaron’s is a story that needs telling. And remembering.

Lessig’s Harvard Law lecture: “Aaron’s Law” (boingboing.net)
LARRY LESSIG: THE PROSECUTOR AS BULLY. Compare how Aaron Swartz was treated with how David Gre… (pjmedia.com)

February 22, 2013February 22, 2013

School’s out Friday

I’ve been lucky enough to visit Grand Central Station in New York and marvel at its beautiful architecture. The Improv everywhere team staged this light show to celebrate the 100 year anniversary of its construction. The images I like best are those of the peoples’ faces as their day is made that much more enjoyable because of the team’s efforts.

We need more of this in our world. People doing something for the pleasure of others and making them smile. Just think how much more enjoyable our days would be if we set about with purpose to make others feel good and smile. I ran a meeting today at work where we laughed, ate chocolate biscuits, shared some things we’re doing in our classrooms and enjoyed one another’s company. One of my colleagues stayed back to say it was the best meeting she’d been in all year – she felt connected to others and was energised about what we were talking about. Work needs to be like this more often. Let’s face it, sometimes the greater part of our waking day is spent there.

There’s a challenge. Set about with purpose to make someone’s life more enjoyable this weekend. I bet you’ll feel better for it too. 🙂

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