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Purpos/ed: encouragement and opportunity

I’ve been asked by Doug Belshaw to add my voice to purpos/ed. And I keep coming back to two words.

Encouragement.

Opportunity.

Encouragement and opportunity. Easy words to say, but encouragement and opportunity can be hard to come by. With them, we can be more than we ever anticipated. Without them, we may still get there, but it’ll be a harder road to travel.

When I cast my mind back to my own education, and I think about the role I’ve played in the education of others since I began teaching 23 years ago, I think about encouragement and opportunity. I think about minds being opened, I think about seeing other points of view, I think about social interactions that might have had little to do with curriculum, but plenty to do with being human. I think about having and providing encouragement and opportunities.

You see, the institution that is a school is a very important cog in the societies we live in. I’m a firm believer in sending kids to school, in trusting in our education systems to nurture and guide, in those systems helping our young people to learn with and from others. I’m disappointed when I hear of education not delivering all that, but I hold onto the ideal that it can and must.

I grew up in a less than affluent area, and the committed and inspiring teachers I was fortunate to cross paths with provided opportunities for impassioned debate and thoughtful reflection. They believed in me and actively encouraged me to strive for an academic path through life. I remember a teacher sharing the story of a student at the school who had never entertained the idea of a university degree. His teacher encouraged him to think beyond the life he had imagined for himself. That student is now Associate Editor of ‘The Age’ newspaper, one of the most prestigious newspapers in Australia today. Would he have had the opportunity to pursue that career without the active encouragement of that teacher? A person who could see possibility and seed the idea that there was more out there than what that young man visualised.

A moment in my career stays with me. A Year Seven class, and students working in a computer lab. One young girl couldn’t get access, so instead she sat with me while others worked, and we talked about what was happening in her life. For me, it was an incidental conversation, one of many I share with my students. A couple of days later, the same young girl submitted her workbook. On the inside cover was a note;

“Dear Mrs. Luca,

Thank you for talking to me the other day. When I went home I felt really good.”

A few years later I took a call in the staffroom. It was that same young girl. She had just given birth to her first child, and wanted me to know. She was seventeen. She was seeking my encouragement, and I gave her that. Life had not provided her with an academic career, but she remembered someone who had taken an interest in her, and she sought me out when she was facing what was, without doubt, a daunting task at a tender age.

Not all of our students ride the busy motorways of life and reach the dizzying heights of career success, some take the quieter laneways. Their journey is no less important. All of them deserve our encouragement and their eyes opened to opportunity.

So, all of you out there. Do your job well. Do it well so that you can motivate others, spark a desire within them to reach for their dreams. Never underestimate the power of your words and actions to encourage and provide opportunity. You never know who it is that you are influencing, who out there is remembering the kind word, the supportive comment, the friendly smile, the nudge to extend themselves beyond what they thought they were capable of doing.

It’s the purpose of education; probably the most important thing we can do.

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School’s out Friday

The TED Conference is being held right now in Long Beach California. This year’s TED Prize winner is JR, an artist from France, whose incredible artwork has been seen in the slums of Kenya, in Brazil, in India and even in Israel and Palestine. Here’s what they say about JR on the TED site;

Working anonymously, pasting his giant images on buildings, trains, bridges, the often-guerrilla artist JR forces us to see each other. Traveling to distant, often dangerous places — the slums of Kenya, the favelas of Brazil — he infiltrates communities, befriending inhabitants and recruiting them as models and collaborators. He gets in his subjects’ faces with a 28mm wide-angle lens, resulting in portraits that are unguarded, funny, soulful, real, that capture the sprits of individuals who normally go unseen. The blown-up images pasted on urban surfaces – the sides of buildings, bridges, trains, buses, on rooftops — confront and engage audiences where they least expect it. Images of Parisian thugs are pasted up in bourgeois neighborhoods; photos of Israelis and Palestinians are posted together on both sides of the walls that separate them.

JR has been awarded the prestigious TED Prize. His wish? To use art to turn the world inside out.

His work has such appeal he just might be able to inspire people to run with this idea. Imagine if our schools connected, and we worked cooperatively to make an impact on issues our world faces using art as our impetus.He has started Inside Out: a global art project. I think it will be amazing.

“INSIDE OUT is a large-scale participatory art project that transforms messages of personal identity into pieces of artistic work. Everyone is challenged to use black and white photographic portraits to discover, reveal and share the untold stories and images of people around the world. These digitally uploaded images will be made into posters and sent back to the project’s co-creators for them to exhibit in their own communities. People can participate as an individual or in a group; posters can be placed anywhere, from a solitary image in an office window to a wall of portraits on an abandoned building or a full stadium. These exhibitions will be documented, archived and viewable virtually.”

There’s something in that, and considering the art faculty of our school were thinking of including the work of JR in the curriculum, maybe this is something we need to discuss next week!

Enjoy your weekend. Spend some time on the TED site and get inspired. : )

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Creating a Library for the future – Part two!

Recently, I wrote about our new library and how we had tried to create a library for Toorak College that would meet the future needs of our school. There are lots of photos in that post, but most were taken before our furniture had arrived. I thought I’d provide an update with more pictures and discuss some of the furniture choices we made.

Making spaces flexible was always a motivating factor behind our choices. We have flip tables on castors in our large conference space. The chairs are incredibly comfortable and are on a sled base. (We are still waiting for our full complement of chairs. In the photo above you can see some loan chairs that will be replaced with the orange 3D chairs once the next shipment arrives) The sled base makes them really easy to move around. We are constantly reinventing this space to meet the needs of large groups and special functions, so easy movement of the furniture is important. It’s not back breaking work sliding chairs and wheeling tables away! You’ll notice a portable interactive whiteboard off to the side in the picture above. We have three of these in our library and they can moved to where they are needed. Floorboxes dot the floor and have power and data points within them. They are constantly in use as our school is a 1:1 laptop environment and access to power is critical. There are large sliding doors that can close this room off, and we are finding it’s getting constant use.

What we’ve been really excited about this week was the arrival of what we call our ‘Snake Lounge’. This is a very large signature piece that winds its way through what we call the Learning Commons part of our library. It’s been enthusiastically embraced by students and staff alike. Seeing people’s reactions to it when they see it for the first time is incredibly rewarding. We are thrilled with how our vision was translated by the furniture craftsman, Abbas, who listened to what we described and built something that probably has surpassed our expectations. Judge for yourself from the following pictures.

 

It is beautiful! Watching the students use it is so gratifying. Today, during lunchtime, every part of it was being used. Some students were relaxing and talking while others were working at both the attached tables and the benches. The ottomans serve as both stools and tables for laptops and books. Once again, they can be easily moved around -the ottomans that is! The Snake lounge isn’t going anywhere -it’s a permanent fixture. I’m not about to go breaking my back moving that one!

Our Multimedia room has been fitted out with desktop Mac computers.

I included this picture in my last post about the library, but it remains one of my favourite spaces, although it’s probably tied with the Snake Lounge now! We called it the Presentation Room, but our students have coined it the Beanbag room, and that name has stuck. It gets constant use, both with classes and as a relaxed space for students during recess, lunch and after school.

All of these spaces require teachers to rethink their use of the library. Our previous building had clearly designated class spaces that mimicked classroom configurations of the traditional classroom. This new library is very different, and students find spaces that work for them. Quite often a class is not contained in one space; they spread out and use breakout rooms, couches and tables. We are seeing our senior students gravitate back (they have their own senior centre) and they especially enjoy the small breakout rooms that allow them a quieter space for study. (You can see the breakout rooms behind the Snake lounge in some of the pictures above). That’s another thing I am pleased about having; the quiet spaces that we never had in our previous library. There are some who crave quiet, and others who are content with ambient noise.

I am so pleased with how this building has turned out. We still need end panels for shelves and some more relaxed seating options. The end panels will arrive in the coming weeks, but other new furniture options may be on the backburner for awhile. Vinyl lettering and designs for our walls is something else we are putting thought into. It’s exciting to be involved in a project like this, and truly wonderful to walk into work every day and see a vision realised.

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School’s out Friday

I’m off to a wedding tomorrow, and I’d love it if it went something like Brian and Eileen’s Wedding Music Video. What a great way to remember such a special day. Better reliving the day watching something like this rather than a two hour extravaganza of the whole box and dice.

Before the wedding though, I’m off to work to await delivery of a custom built piece of furniture that will (hopefully) be the signature piece of our new library. I hope it looks as good as I’m expecting it to, because I’ve built it up to such an extent amongst staff and students that it’s going to be a massive letdown if it doesn’t live up to expectations!! According to the furniture supplier, it’s pretty specky, so look for a post on Monday with pictures so you can make up your own mind.

Enjoy your weekend. Hope there’s something special in it for you. : )

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CPL workshop – all systems go!

A couple of years ago, I would speak at staff meetings and I could see eyes raising and people looking at one another with that, ‘here she goes again’, body language happening. Experiences like that have made me wary of staff presentations. In fact, I’m more comfortable presenting to a room of 200 strangers than I am with the people I work with on a day to day basis.

Yesterday I ran a whole day workshop at my school for Toorak College’s Continuous Professional Learning Seminar series, and the majority of participants were people I work with. I was more than a little anxious I have to admit. Firstly, it was a whole day, and that’s a whole lot more daunting than a one hour presentation, and secondly, I was putting my ideas out there to people who I found my most difficult audience.

Well, I’m pleased to say, my fears were unfounded. It was a really great day. I had plenty of content to keep the day humming along nicely; too much in fact. We were racing a bit towards the end! I’m pretty chuffed to know I can single-handedly lead a successful workshop, and hope I get the opportunity to do it again. Best of all, my audience was responsive and open. Open to ideas, open to thinking about social media as something that we need to explore in our classrooms. It was affirming for me. I feel so much more positive about enacting change in our classrooms and working cooperatively with staff who want to see how they can reinvent their practice to suit the times we are living in.

And that’s what’s made the change I think. The time we are living in. Social media is far more pervasive in our lives than it was three years ago. I joined Twitter three years ago; I was making connections and could see then the powerful communication device it was for sharing and learning. I’d speak about it in glowing (evangelical?) terms to people I worked with, and I could see they just didn’t understand. To them, it was a time waster, a place where people told one another what they’d eaten for breakfast.

Today, Twitter is mainstream. It’s referenced on news bulletins, popular morning TV news programs share reporters’ Twitter user names and they use hashtags to encourage online conversations around a topic. Yesterday, we talked at length about Twitter, and visited hashtag results pages for Libya and Christchurch, where we could see aggregated tweets giving us real time information. Some participants joined up, and I hope they make efforts to follow people and make connections that will inform their teaching practice. I know that every day Twitter takes me to places that extend my learning and I would never have located those places without its help.

It’s this pervasiveness of new media in our lives that made all the difference yesterday. Now it’s important to understand new technologies and people are ready to listen. To those of you reading this who have been immersed for some time and have felt discouraged in your schools, I think we are seeing the tide turning.  Social media is mainstream, and our skills are necessary. We can lead others and we need to do so.

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Lord David Puttnam delivers a message everyone needs to hear

I’m delivering a whole day workshop at my school tomorrow, and I’m starting the day with the words of Lord David Puttnam, delivered at Learning without Frontiers in late January. David is a former independent film producer with many award winning films including Chariots of Fire, Bugsy Malone, Midnight Express and the Memphis Belle. Since 1998, he has focused his work on education and the environment. Unfortunately, I won’t have time to show the entire video, but I hope participants will take the time to watch it for themselves later. David delivers, in 24 minutes, a message that all educators and education administrators should hear. We can’t afford to ignore the technological shifts happening around us; we must find ways to professionally develop our teaching workforce, and reward teachers who are leading the way.

Sometimes it’s hard leading change. Especially when others around you don’t see things in the same way. Watching this has renewed my energy levels, and made my resolve stronger. Watch it with my highest recommendation.

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ViewPure – your saving grace

I don’t very often find myself writing about new tools much anymore, but this one is worthy of a post, simply because it is going to make some teachers’ lives so much easier.

ViewPure promotes itself as;

“Pure video viewing – Watch YouTube videos without comments, suggestions, or the ‘other’ things.”

It does just that. Look at the following screenshot to see what it looks like in action;

Our school permits access to YouTube, and teaching secondary students about the nature of content that appears on sites like this is part of our Digital Literacy teaching in my opinion. I do know that many schools block YouTube because of the potentially controversial content that can be found there, and many Primary School teachers would probably be quite uncomfortable with the related video content that appears, some of which has seemingly no relation to the educationally appropriate video you have just watched.

This is where ViewPure will be so useful. If you are a teacher wanting to use the video, but you don’t necessarily want to download a copy, just open up ViewPure in a new tab and enter the url of the video you want purified! The site has ads on it,  and the one I’m looking at at the moment is for Russian girls looking for you! Rest assured, your purified video sits in a window by itself, and is safe for your class to view.

Pretty handy little web app in my opinion. Hope it doesn’t disappear anytime soon.

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School’s out Friday

Aaahhh…. another joyous flash mob moment to lighten our hearts and remind us all that good exists in our world. This time, two schools joined together for a flash mob performance to deliver the message of acceptance in honour of International Anti-Bullying day. Very nicely done.

It’s the end of another busy week, one that saw our Year 7 students working on a wiki and embedding their Google My Map creations into it. They get it. They just need to be shown once, and off they go, ready to figure it out and make it work. It’s so confirming for me. Seeing them embrace the task (connected to their geography curriculum) and enjoying the work involved helps everyone to understand the need to adopt new technology and make it part of our school curriculum. When I canvassed the classes about how they and their family find their way to places it was overwhelmingly Google Maps and Navman GPS locators. No-one mentioned a paper street directory such as a Melways (a very Melbourne book of street maps). They really loved understanding Google My Maps and learning how to emded HTML code to enable pictures and video to appear. The following video from Google was really helpful, and even showed me a thiing or two I was unaware of.

This weekend I intend to spend a bit of time following the 21st Century Learning Conference from Hong Kong. The hashtag on Twitter, #21CLHK will help update me as to what’s happening. It’s not as good as being there, but it’s probably the next best thing. Already I’m gearing up to watch Stephen Heppell’s keynote, that has been loaded onto the conference site already. I can share it with you!

Have a great weekend. Get some sleep. It’s what I’m aiming for!

 

 

 

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Divided Attention Disorder – I think I’ve always had it.

I read an article written by Colm O’Regan tonight about Divided Attention Disorder. It was yet another one of those articles talking about how our brains are possibly changing as a result of our use of online information. We’ve heard similar arguments from Nicholas Carr, who wrote the article ‘Is Google making us stupid?‘ and has gone onto pen, ‘The Shallows‘. (It’s worth noting I think, that Nicholas is making a pretty penny cashing in on this message.) Colm’s description of the way he works sounds very much like me;

My Internet browser has 24 tabs open. Among them are three separate attempts to reply to the same e-mail. My online banking session has timed out, and in the corner of my screen a Twitter feed is a never-ending scroll of news and links. Which I click. And click.

People who work with me and students I teach are often incredulous at how many tabs I have open at any one time. It’s of no consequence to me; I know what’s there and why I have them open.  This is how I live now, and I’m perfectly comfortable with it. I don’t think my brain is being affected in any way. In fact, if I analyse my information seeking ways from the past, this is just part of the natural evolutionary process as I see it.

You see, I’ve always been an information junkie. When I was a young child, reading was my passion. I consumed books from my school library, and if I could get my hands on a copy of the Reader’s Digest, I was in heaven. I loved anything, television media included, that provided me with knowledge, any detail that helped me piece together the workings of the world. I would latch onto a topic, and explore it as best I could, with the resources I had at hand. Very often I was limited by the constraints of the age I was living in. If you were obsessed with ghostly phenomena in the late 1970’s, it was what was on your local library’s shelves that had to get you through.

I haven’t changed. I’m still an information junkie. What has changed is the world I’m living in, and the fact that the information is at my fingertips 24/7, if I choose to use a computing device and pay for an internet connection. Do I read books as much as I used to? No, I don’t. Do I think I need to? Only if they’re worth reading and can provide me with more than what I can access for free from online sources. Is my attention span different? Possibly. But once again, it’s the quality of the information that keeps me reading. If something is good, I’ll devote the time to reading it through. If it contains a hyperlink that has me wondering, I may leave the original source and investigate where it leads me. For me, this has become natural. Yes, I function differently to how I did five years ago, but it’s part of the evolutionary path an information junkie follows I figure.

It’s not for everyone. I had a conversation with a close friend last night about this very thing. We are different. She has no desire to spend hours looking at a computer screen and is content with the way she lives her life. I respect that. Do I think her life may change as more and more of how we access information transfers to the Web? Yes, I do. Will she be like me? I doubt it.

She’s not an information junkie you see, we’re a breed all our own.

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School’s out Friday

Apologies for this one! I’m not a huge Twilight fan, but I have been watching it on television for the last hour and a half or so, and was struggling to find a video for this week’s School’s out Friday. Hence, the literal version of the Eclipse trailer. I promise I’ll try harder next week. : )

I’m a tad disappointed right now (alright, more than a tad I’ll admit!), having found out today that I wasn’t accepted into the Google Teacher Academy being held in Sydney in April. I thought I had a lot to offer, but Google obviously thinks otherwise! Henrietta Miller didn’t get in either, and has written a great post tonight about disappointment and it’s offshoot, resilience. I’ve got plenty of that in store, so I’ll move on and do what I do do best; share my knowledge with all of you through this blog. : )

Have a great weekend. Find some sunshine.