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Learning Spaces/Learning Futures forum at Bialik College

Today, Bialik College hosted a Learning Spaces/Learning Futures forum for their staff and members of other school communities. I was asked to sit on a forum panel at the end of the day and address questions posed from participants. I’d like to thank David Feighan for the invitation; it was an enlightening day and I was able to take away many ideas for our new library that is currently under construction.

Jon Peacock, General Manager, Learning Environments at the University of Melbourne, shared with us reasoning behind new generation designs of learning spaces. Considerations such as social inclusiveness, functionality for collaborative learning, comfort and even retention of students were all factors that have contributed to furniture selection and configurations of space. For someone who has this at the forefront of her thinking at the moment, it was fascinating. Jon shared with us the thinking that the University may not replace desktop computers when they reach a three year turnover if it is evident that students are bringing their own devices with them. They have student interns who act as facilitators to connect devices to networks; they look for students who have strong communication and mentoring skills as they are often catering to international students who are grappling with language barriers. This kind of thinking would bode well in many of our schools today; accept student owned devices for learning purposes regardless of platform, and encourage our student population to offer peer support with technology. An interesting idea was the University’s IT Pitstop, a place where students go to do printing, photocopying, quick searching and charging of devices. Interesting name; maybe something we could utilise. Jon shared with us many visuals of learning spaces at Melbourne University; it’s very impressive, and I’m thinking it will be worth visiting to glean new ideas that we can apply to the space we will be developing.

Dr. Leon Sterling, Dean of the Faculty of Information and Communication Technologies at Swinburne University of Technology, spoke about the changing nature of new technologies and their potential impact for education. He drew heavily from the Horizon Reports from the the last three years and made some interesting comments about opensource courseware like that provided from places like MIT. Leon was unsure that students would access such resources. I’m pretty sure they will, but I don’t think they’re going to stumble on these kinds of resources without being alerted to them first. I recently came across Khan Academy via a twitter link, and think I’ll be pointing students towards it. Here’s what it says on the site;

The Khan Academy is a not-for-profit 501(c)(3) with the mission of providing a world-class education to anyone, anywhere. Despite being the work of one man, Salman Khan, this 1600+ video library is the most-used educational video resource as measured by YouTube video views per day and unique users per month. We are complementing this ever-growing library with user-paced exercises–developed as an open source project–allowing the Khan Academy to become the free classroom for the World.

Interesting philosophy, one that marries quite well with the intentions of Students 2.0. I ran a series of sessions in that space about the tools of social networking, but we failed to see student participation. Is it just that the kids aren’t interested, or is it that they just don’t know the possibilities that exist for self directed learning today?

Leon mentioned that Swinburne University will possibly be offering a Graduate Certificate in Teacher Technologies, designed to assist teachers in getting up to speed with new ideas for teaching and learning. A great idea, and something so necessary today. This was something I discussed in the forum at the end of the day. My concern lies with the human capital we have in our school systems today. Many of us dealing with new technologies are the product of self directed learning. We have skilled ourselves up without being sent to expensive professional development. We have immersed ourselves in learning communities and many of us are attempting to educate others by sharing our knowledge. But how many people are there like this, and is the spread enough to ensure the school system has access to this kind of skill set? My bet is there aren’t too many, and this is the challenge facing our governments who need to ensure we have workers armed with the skills necessary for working successfully in a knowledge economy. Something like what Leon was suggesting will be worth it, but how much will courses cost, and will our systems fund teacher participation? I’ll be very interested to see the outcome of upcoming election. My hope is that a Labor Govt. is returned. I want to see the vision they have for the digital revolution unfold, and a large part of what is promised is teacher professional development. It is key if we are to see real change realised.

Dr. Scott Bulfin, from the Faculty of Education at Monash University, spoke about rethinking the approaches to new media in schools today. Scott spoke of some challenging research he has conducted across 25 schools about the use of technology in education. His research saw students engaging in unsanctioned technology practices at school, and students complaining of being bored with school authorized work they were doing with technology. My take on this relates to my forementioned point. Teacher professional development is key if we are going to see teachers using the technology meaningfully in classrooms for teaching and learning purposes. People need to be exposed to a range of possibilities and make discerning choices about what they think may work with the students they have.

Mary Manning from SLAV was with me and the aforementioned speakers in the forum discussion at the end of the day. Questions from the audience were well considered, and saw us debating content knowledge necessary for VCE study, versus the skills needed for learning beyond the school years. It’s a vexed issue, considering that University entrance in Australia is underpinned by scores based on students ability to know content. Leon Sterling raised the idea that universities will move to interview format and teacher feedback to determine university entrance. How refreshing would that be, and wouldn’t it be the linchpin that could change the focus of education at the senior years of schooling.

I found the day very worthwhile, and applaud Bialik College, David Feighan and the school’s Principal, Joseph Gerassi, for organising some wonderful speakers and proactively thinking about what is important for students today. On their school website, Joseph talked of their foremost priority as being, “… to educate tomorrow’s leaders, by infusing them with the life skills to master the challenges posed by an ever-changing world.” Today was evidence of a school actively seeking to make that a reality.

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School’s out Friday

Here’s improveverywhere’s latest mission, a reenactment of the first Princess Leia / Darth Vader scene from Star Wars on a New York City subway car. I have written before of my love of the original Star Wars trilogy and I really enjoyed watching the amused faces looking on as this played out.

On a completely different note, the Gruen Nation took my eye once again this week with this ad that was created by Republic of Everyone to support the Greens campaign. It’s a great ad with a very simple human message being transferred. The Greens liked it so much they asked to use it, but the ABC couldn’t let them do that. Undeterred, the Greens have posted it on their site with this message;

But Greens supporters are “glass half full” kind of people – and just because we can’t show it to people on TV doesn’t mean that, with your help, we can’t show it to the same number of people online.

You can help by posting this video to your personal Facebook page or share it on Twitter using the buttons below (don’t forget to use the #gruennation and #ausvotes hashtags).

Take a look at the ad and see what you think of it.

Hope your weekend is full of fun, laughter and happiness. Enjoy it. : )

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Erica McWilliam – PD to savour

I had the pleasure of attending a session run by Professor Erica McWilliam last week. How refreshing to listen to a no nonsense presenter state some home truths about our education system and challenge us to think of what it is we need to do to make it better. Erica talked of our schools offering mandated learning for routine work. Not lifelong learning. Not teaching them skills that will make them successful in a 21st Century workforce.

Erica talked of us needing to reinforce that it’s the pleasure of the rigour of the work that is what we should be on about when we work with students. We should be ensuring that this is part of the Australian Curriculum, not the ADHD Curriculum we are being presented with where we have lots of content ensuring that most of it will be narrowly misunderstood. The fundamental skill of the 21st Century as far as Erica is concerned is knowing what to do when you don’t know what to do. How many of our students would be stagnant when faced with open-ended tasks expecting them to direct their own learning? Plenty, I’m sure. I found myself nodding in agreement as Erica articulated the concerns I have about the direction of our education system today.

What was most refreshing for me was Erica’s understanding of the role of the Teacher-Librarian in today’s schools. She described Librarians as existing in a hybrid space – a space where we have an invading species present. We as librarians, are often the first to  wrangle with new technologies and figure out how to colonise the new landscape.  As such, we serve the purpose of being the borderland force that can understand how we work in new learning spaces; spaces that often challenge the existing set up employed in many of today’s classrooms.

The difficulty many of us face (me included, as one who feels that she is a hybrid Teacher- Librarian, largely misunderstod by those hanging onto the old model) is that while we may have changed our mindset and are prepared and willing to charter the new landscape with our students, we are hampered by those who have yet to adopt the new way of thinking. How we overcome this is the challenge we face. We need the support of our administrations; we need those in positions whereby they can enact change, to appreciate our new skill set, and assist us in moving our colleagues with us. If that means mandated change to curriculum then so be it. I’m tired of offering to work with others but finding very few prepared to work in a co-teaching capacity. We don’t pose a threat; we pose an opportunity. An opportunity to expose our students to new ideas and open their eyes to what is possible.

If you’d like to read more of what Erica has to say, access her monograph ‘Schooling the Yuk/Wow Generation‘ from ACER. 30 minutes well spent in my opinion.

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eT@lking – Creative Commons and its impact for education

Last Wednesday night I presented a session about Creative Commons for eT@lking in elluminate. These sessions are very ably moderated by Anne Mirtschin and Carole McCulloch, and feature some fine speakers who are interested in sharing their knowledge and moving people forward with their own learning. (Sounding a bit like Julia Gillard there, aren’t I!).

I uploaded some slides to support the presentation, and I’ve added them to Slideshare so that they can be of use to other teachers and students. They contain the six different Creative Commons licences, and some screenshots of sites that are useful for learning more about copyright and where you source CC licenced material. It’s not earth shattering stuff, but it may prove useful if you are starting the discussion with people in your school.

The session was well attended and there was some interesting discussion in the chat. Anne Mirtschin has included many of the links mentioned and questions posed in a post she wrote about the event.

You can listen to the recording of the session here.

Thanks Anne for inviting me to present, and thank you Carole for moderating this week’s session.

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School’s out Friday

Yes, we’re still in the grip of an election campaign here in Australia. This is the ‘Moving forward remix‘, put together by radio station Triple M. Julia Gillard has copped a few knocks this week (just as she did last week) and seems to be lagging behind in the polls. With two weeks to go, it will be interesting to see if the Labor Party can re-ignite their campaign and win back ground.

It’s been a busy week for me. So busy, that I’ve had no opportunity to get anything posted. There are a couple of posts brewing from some professional development I’ve been involved in this week, so hopefully I’ll get something up over the weekend.

I have to finish writing a journal article this weekend, so it’ll be head down for me for quite a bit of it. Hope you get to see sunlight, and hope I get to see a little bit too. That’s of course, if it ever stops raining here. Been a tad gloomy in Melbourne this week. Spring can’t get here fast enough really!

Rest up, relax, enjoy. : )

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School’s out Friday

School might be out this evening for most of us, but for the politicians of Australia, it’s nose to the grindstone 24/7 for the next 3 weeks. It’s election time here. We’re in the midst of a hard fought political stoush here in Australia, with some touting it as the dullest campaign ever. For the first time ever we have female leader of the Labor Party, Julia Gillard, and she’s battling criticism over the size of her earlobes, her dress sense, and what did or did not transpire in the party room when she challenged Kevin Rudd for leadership of the party. A political heavyweight, journalist Laurie Oakes, has really targeted her throughout this campaign, so much so that I think he’s starting to win Julia the vote of more than a few women out there who see it as a vendetta against her.

In terms of advertising, it’s been pretty dull. Perhaps both parties need to adopt these adverts, developed for the ABC program, ‘The Gruen Nation‘. I particularly like the Julia Gillard one, and the idea of a nightly forum answering the questions of the people. I think they’re onto a winner there! I didn’t see the actual program, but my friend Helen recommend that I try and locate these for School’s out Friday as we enjoyed a meal together tonight. We were both speculating how useful these would be in our classrooms as we try and convey to our students the impact the media has on our lives.

So while the pollies slog it out on the hustings, I’ll be slogging it out at the gym and the grocery store, and then I might do battle with the washing machine. There was a time in my life when I contemplated entering the world of politics, but right now, I think I’m content with my small scale domestic duty conflicts. After seeing what Julia has had to endure, I doubt my self esteem would survive the intense scrutiny of a politician’s life today.

Make the most of your weekend. They seem to go by pretty fast these days. At least we’ll all probably be nabbing a few more hours sleep than Julia and Tony will.  : )

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Nurturing their Digital Footprint – lessons for Year 12

As part of our continued push to acknowledge the importance of Cybersafety instruction at my school, today I delivered a presentation to our Yr 12 students about how they can nurture their digital profile. Just a month or so ago, we delivered presentations to our Yr 10 and 11 students about much the same thing, but on this occasion, we created an entirely new presentation. There was a need to. Facebook privacy settings had changed, and this group are on the verge of adulthood. Very soon they will be moving into tertiary education or the paid workforce.

Quite a bit of material used in the presentation came from Jefferey Rosen’s excellent article in the New York Times, ‘The Web Means the End of Forgetting‘. I’d highly recommend that you take up the free subscription offer from the New York Times to gain access to this fine piece. It certainly helped to pull together a presentation that I think had meaning for the students present. In fact, I received an email 15 minutes after the presentation had ended from one of the students. Here’s what she had to say;

Hi Mrs Luca J
Just wanted to say I thought your lecture this afternoon was fantastic.
Walking out of the lecture theatre,  everyone was talking about their (sic) going straight home to change their facebook settings!
So yes, thanks for an interesting lecture,

It’s not often you get positive feedback like this. It certainly made me feel like the effort required to put the presentation together was worth it. If you’d like to view it, go to the wikispaces site I maintain.

Helping our students to understand the importance of a positive digital profile is ongoing work for us. I firmly believe that probably the best way to enable our students to appreciate its importance is to encourage them to publish their work online, so that they can be building the profile that will be of most benefit to them in the long run. As Seth Godin said;

“Everything you do now ends up in your permanent record. The best plan is to overload Google with a long tail of good stuff and to always act as if you’re on Candid Camera, because you are.”

I have my students working with new technologies and encourage them to publish the good stuff. The hard thing is convincing others that this is something we should be working towards in our schools. They deserve to know how they can make the best of the Web and themselves in the process.

(*Frustratingly, once again, the Sliderocket presentation will not embed into this post.)

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School’s out Friday

One of the things I have to do this weekend is prepare a presentation for our Year 12 students about how they nurture their social resume. It’s pretty important stuff for those 17 and 18 year olds. (Hopefully they’ll see it from the same perspective!) They’re on the verge of adulthood and about to undertake tertiary education or a foray into the world of work. We prepared a presentation for our Year 10 and 11 students last term, but already we need to update it. We were dealing with Facebook privacy settings prior to their recent changes, so some new screenshots will be in order so that we’re up to date with what’s happening.

I’m thinking that using this parody of an apology from ‘Mark Zuckerberg’ will help to get the message across. I’ll also be using detail from a New York Times article from Jeffery Rosen that was published this week. ‘The Web Means the End of Forgetting’, is 8 pages of very informative reading about the state of the internet and privacy today. Read it if you can. (You will have to register with the New York Times – for free – to gain full access to the article).

But first, a sleep in. My eyes are closing as I type this. I really need a good night’s sleep. Soemone said to me this week,  “It feels like Week Five, not Week Two.” I totally agree.

I hope you have something exciting planned for the weekend ahead. Can’t say there’s anything spectacular on my horizon, but I’m sure I’ll enjoy it nonetheless.

Have fun!

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“It’s what we know.” Helping our students understand Google Search

Most of my teaching career has been as a classroom teacher. I began working as a Teacher-Librarian, but after a few years, the lure of the classroom won me over. I really love the ownership that comes from teaching a class; those kids are your audience, and if it works, it’s because you’ve made it work. It’s a bit like being your own boss. I moved back to a library setting when the internet was just showing its promise. I was excited; knowledge was moving into new spaces and I saw that as something that would reinvigorate the profession. Finding knowledge in new environments is a challenge and not something that necessarily comes easily. Digital Literacy understanding needs instruction. Becoming a critical thinker and searcher is not necessarily intuitive.

The difficult thing for any Teacher Librarian is getting access to classes so that we can work with students and teachers to assist them with Digital Literacy understandings.  Not every teacher out there is comfortable working in a team teaching environment. I really do think there are plenty of teachers out there who are fearful of criticism and unwilling to open their classrooms for others to observe, let alone work with them.

The ideal way to impart understanding is in the context of a course of study. Just in time learning does work. Unfortunately, getting opportunities to work directly with students as they research doesn’t always happen for Teacher Librarians, and sometimes you just have to grab the opportunities that come your way. I’m not sure about you, but when I talk with students and observe the way they navigate the Web, most of them default to Google as their search tool. We had the opportunity to work with all of our Year Seven students last week, so we decided to focus on how they could become more adept at using Google.

We started with this video, featuring Matt Cutts from Google explaining how the search engine works;

It had their attention with its animations and subtitles that helped them follow the explanation provided by Matt. We then went onto demonstrate the new features of the Google search results page using the left hand side bar. Many of them had not yet twigged it was even there! If you’re not up with recent changes, take a look at the following slideshare presentation by Conectica;

Using Google search tips sourced from Dumb little man, we wound up our discussion about Google. Our discussion then moved into ‘What other search engines can you use?’ It was very interesting to hear students offer Safari and Firefox as search engines. The discussion moved into an explanation of the difference between a browser and a search engine. Sometimes you forget to start with some basic understandings; often, I think, we’re guilty of assuming our students have knowledge, when in fact, things need to be spelled out or introduced to them.

I know, some of you out there will be beseeching me right now and saying that this kind of teaching needs to be embedded in what is happening in the classrooms, and you’re right. It should. But sometimes you need to explicitly teach something. I see no harm in direct instruction, as long as it’s part of your toolkit and you vary your teaching methods to suit circumstances and what your learning intention is for your students. Even the teachers who were present in the session came out telling me they had learned something. To wind up the session, we introduced the students to SweetSearch -a search engine for students.  Mark Moran, from Finding Dulcinea – Librarian of the Internet, has helped develop this search engine. It “searches only the 35,000 Web sites that our staff of research experts and librarians and teachers have evaluated and approved when creating the content on findingDulcinea”

When we asked our students why they primarily use Google, one student said, “It’s what we know.” How true. You use what you know. Hopefully our session helped them to understand how they can use what they know better, and maybe it’s opened their eyes to what they don’t know. That just might make them realise that the Teacher-Librarians are in command of a fair bit of practical knowledge that will help them to find their way around the Web. I hope so.

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School’s out Friday

You’re probably one of the nine and a half million people who’ve seen this parody of the BP Oil Spill disaster. I used it with my students this week (and yes, I muted the last words from ‘Kevin Costner’) and they found it very funny. But not only that, after watching it, they were able to articulate their understanding of the real life crisis that’s been unfolding in the Gulf of Mexico over the last three months. It was a great way of beginning a lesson with a giggle, but then moving into complex discussion and analysis of a world event. Thank goodness, news reports today indicate that their efforts to cap the leaking pipe have been successful (at this stage, anyway!).

Working with my students has helped lift the heavy feeling I was experiencing on Monday. First lesson of Year 9 saw one of my students begin the lesson saying very loudly and enthusiastically,

“Mrs. Luca. Great book!”

as she held aloft her copy of ‘The Running Man‘. Plenty of others then joined in to echo her sentiments. How wonderful to hear students say this was the best book they’d read that had been set as a class text. Better still, 90% of them had done as I asked and read it over the school holidays in preparation for this term’s unit of study in English. (The other 10% were well on their way to completion). If that doesn’t help lighten a teacher’s load, then I don’t know what does! I’m very lucky; I teach wonderful kids.

I’ve been on a bit of a health kick this week, so I actually feel pretty good heading into the weekend. Not a skerrick of chocolate or sliver of a potato chip have crossed my lips! Amazing, considering both are my worst vices. I even clocked up 3km on the treadmill tonight. I hope you’re feeling energised and can make the most of the the time we get for family and friends.

Have a great weekend. : )