Backyard

I’m sitting at Terrigal listening to Marco Torres presenting to the Inner West APs at their conference.

The refreshing outlook he has to “taking it outside the classroom” and the challenge to make our stuff relevant to the kids. Marco challenges with a broad sweep and it is easy to dismiss him as unrealistic but he speaks the truth. It is always great to be challenged by a breath of fresh air with some passion in it!

It is good for our people to have the  chance to think about this stuff. It is great that it is on their agenda!

The first round of the DER (Digital Education Revolution) has hit our schools today and is likely to occupy a lot of our attention over the next couple of years. While it is wonderful to see so much money flowing into Education (at last!) there are lots and lots of issues. See Graeme Philipson SMH for a non-schoolie comment.

Our system (Sydney CEO) is opting for the initial round to be used to provide laptops for all the kids in Year 9 (to take home ideally) and is already committed to providing funding to help schools install the infrastructure to put a managed wireless system in place to cater for the increased load.

No doubt I’ll come back to this issue pretty often in the future. Right now I just want to clarify my thinking about just what is required and/or can happen as I am bound to be caught up in a number of discussions soon.

• schools fell into this round of funding if their overall computer/student ratio was less than 1:8 in Year 9-12.
• This first round is expected to lift these school into the 1:2 range so the implication is that they will have to buy machines of some kind.

The issues are all covered in the Q&A on the Govt page .

Some questions:

• staffing to support the presence of the laptops in the school?
• do you have to buy new stuff? can you save money by buying good ex-lease e.g.

I was given David Nettlebeck’s book recently. Some of the strategies really seemed excellent applications of technology to real teaching. I am recording them here mainly for myself so that I can come back to them easily.

Among the ideas were:

• Using Mindmapping in a variety of subjects. Lots of good simple examples.
• Using “Callout” in Word to assist close reading of texts and to easily ascertain if kids understood stuff (even easy to mark!!)
  • • also used “Comments”
    • Inserting the text into a table
    • Responding with inserted graphics
    • Callout boxes sized to reflect themark value of the answer.
    • annotation of cartoons seeking understanding.
• Useful “Powerpoint” tips
• Word Organizational Charts to sequence ideas (even Maslow tyoes!)

What are effective ways to help teachers increase their skills in ICT??

Notwithstanding the fact that the real agenda is about learning and pedagogy, just helping teachers to take the time to learn “new stuff” is not easy.

Some of the things that seem to work:

• ICT “integrators” working alongside teachers
  • • this costs a fortune! Rich schools do it!
• “Just in time” or “point of sale” learning
  • • how can you be sure to be there at the right time (see point 1)??
• Giving each teacher their own laptop and broadband connection at home.
  • • Expensive
    • Lots of wastage
    • Accountability??
• Empowering the “early adopters”
  • • What about the other kids?
• Changing school structures - block timetabling, open plan spaces, extended day, team teaching
  • • Requires vision from the “top” - not often found
    • High demand on staff - sustainability in long term?
    • Meshing with “traditional” structures (e.g. external exams)

With the many demands these days good teachers and their Principals are reluctant to have people out of the regular classroom.

One model that has really worked for us this year is to pay teachers directly to use their own time (in holidays or weekends) to develop their skills and work on curriculum projects that they will then use within their school program.

This raises the issue of teachers being paid to do “extra”. If I get paid for this why not for attending the Year 7 camp? etc.

This need to be negotiated but also need sto be looked at. One of our schools has five projects being worked on by teachers in their summer vacation using this model.

A couple of reflections from a recent school visit. Every now and again I am forced to realise that this landscape changes despite our attempts to control it!!

The school is a large secondary school with a network that is pretty locked down. Inevitably the growing tensions between curriculum demands and network “safety” protocols leads to much frustration on both sides ….. a couple of creative workarounds.

•  Annoyed by the fact that “relevant” video is so hard to show in the classroom for lots of reasons (plugins not loaded, no codecs, youtube blocked, network too slow) one young teacher simply plugs his iPod into the TV (or projector) and shows what he wants!!
• The HSIE department wants to use Google Earth on their smartboard but the Network Guy says it sucks too much bandwidth and everyone will want to use it (correct). Unbeknowns to anyone else, the HSIE department have their own Telstra 3G wireless usb account and stream directly into their classroom!!! No filters to worry about too!!

Nothing like the promise of money to get everyone buzzing!! Everywhere I go (in the Carbon or the Silicon world) people have an opinion on what should be done… Let’s hope they listen to some of those who know the issues!!

A couple of things have happened to me in the last week or so which have made me more aware than ever of change and how it creeps past us. (I’m just recording this mainly for myself)

• Knowledge/Information is no longer “something..somewhere”. Knowledge is around us but changing (or at least increasing) so quickly that the role of a teacher is to
  •  
    • be able to direct people towards what they need to know
    • be able to help people evaluate and  compare
    • be able to help people connect and collaborate with others for whom the same knowledge is relevant at that time
    • be a peer learner - my growth may be in different areas but the process is similar
    • realise that others have probably done what I am trying to do and that while re-inventing the wheel will certainly teach me a lot often my role is to be aware that someone has already invented a (similar) wheel
• Some of the experiences which helped make me feel I needed to think:
• David spending an hour writing our instructions for other teachers, failing to realise that the associated wiki had many excellent lessons including video!
• I realised that when I did Physics at Uni I went into a “place” where others held the “secrets” I absorbed these, held  them dearly to myself and spent much of my life handing on these “secrets” to others. Even when new knowledge (e.g. astronomy) my role was to read the books, absorb the knowledge and pass it on so that it could be understood. I realised that I don’t do that any more. When something new comes along (e.g. podcasts) lots of people know something about it. Others hear about it. I like understanding new things so I “sniff out” others who say interesting things and learn from them while thinking how this new stuff applies in my world. I share my knowledge with whoever is interested because it is relevant to the world we all live in.
• I listened to some great teachers sharing projects they had worked on during the year and was struck by how much work could be done by someone trying to create “content”. This “stuff” is obviously important but at this time in our growth I feel teachers should more “connect” as I said above. We need more freedom from external imposed curricula which often seem to demand specific “content”

More later I hope …

May be of use at the Inner-West Principal's Conference!!


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Yard.jpg, originally uploaded by mickprest.

I’ve have just finished listening to the keynote for the K12 Conference - it was  alot better than the keynotes at Navcon!!

 My Navcon stuff

http://www.iwest.myinternet.syd.catholic.edu.au/home/mick/

Information on the upcoming on-line conference. Just the thing for those cash poor Catholic school teachers whose Principals never send them to conferences!!

 I haven’t “been” to this conference before but my three reasons for “going” are:

• it comes at the right price!
• some of it is in the holidays so I can participate (last holidays I listened in to a great international conference on WOWand learnt a lot and felt part of a wider group)
• there is always something to learn!