eduBuzz reflections

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One of the key benefits from the use of the web in schools is its ability to turn artificial, “pretend” learning activities into authentic, relevant experiences. For example, writing for a real, potentially world-wide audience is more engaging than writing in a jotter for an audience of one or two people.

This video, from Alan November, takes this idea further than I’ve seen before. He starts from the gradual erosion of the contribution historically made by young people to their community, and then shows how this property of the web can be exploited to enable learners in classrooms to now become contributors by taking on jobs such as global communicator, global researcher, tool builder and internal collaborator. These, of course, are exactly the sorts of skills now being identified world-wide as important to 21st century societies, such as the “four capacities” of Scotland’s Curriculum for Excellence.

Via Frank Crawford

How many inspirational teachers do we block if we block YouTube in schools?

My son showed me this video tonight, in which 30-year-old urosbatagelj from Slovenia teaches the use of Autodesk Inventor, a 3D mechanical design package he uses in school. It’s bizarre that although the video is clearly inspirational, just like the best classroom teachers, web censorship systems would make it impossible for staff, let alone students, to view it in many schools wordwide.

In East Lothian schools YouTube access was enabled for all staff and students last year, and the reaction has been overwhelmingly positive. Videos like this one show why.

What might schools do to help students find employment during a recession?

Charlie Hoehn’s e-Book “The Recession-Proof Graduate” has been getting a lot of readers since it caught the attention of Seth Godin.

He includes this frank perspective on the value of being able to use typical productivity applications in today’s job market.

If your skill set on your resume consists of “Proficient in Microsoft Office”, then you have no marketable skills. Knowing how to create a document, format a PowerPoint, or organise a spreadsheet are not things you can brag about — those are things every employer expects, like knowing how to pronounce your own name, or remaining continent during office hours.

So, if those skills are taken for granted, what does Charlie think does matter? His examples include:

• using Google Reader as a learning resource
• learning to craft good blog posts
• learning to work remotely (i.e. working virtually, without supervision)
• learning skills that are in high demand, and slightly difficult to learn (e.g. from free web tutorials)
• creating a blog, so that prospective employers “Have something positive to look at when they Google your name”

Schools could help with developing these skills, but we’re certainly not there yet. How do you teach a student to create their personal blog, or craft blog posts, for example, if blogs sites are banned by your school’s web filters?

Maybe, though, starting to flesh out a set of “recession survival” skills and finding ways to integrate them into learning activities through Curriculum for Excellence outcomes and experiences,  could be a worthwhile direction to take?  Who knows, the urgency of helping students get through the recession might just enable us to dismantle some of the current barriers.

What is it about blogging that matters so much to education? Seth Godin explains.

Via David Gurteen, via Will Richardson.

If technology has a key role to play in the future of school learning, how big a part should it play in Initial Teacher Education?

Today in East Lothian this year’s probationers, as part of their induction, attended a short session where they were introduced to some of the on-line tools they might encounter in our schools, and that they’d be able to use to support their teaching. During the session, of 75 minutes, we mainly covered Glow and the edubuzz.org blogs, with a brief mention of edubuzz Google Apps at the end. (The day also included a session on internet safety from Ollie Bray.)

Those of us involved in presenting the sessions couldn’t help but be struck by the low level of awareness amongst the groups of some of the opportunities now presented by these technologies. Many of the new teachers were clearly surprised that it was as easy to publish to a blog as to send an email, for example. Very few had any idea what Glow offered. In most groups, none were aware of Google Documents and its collaboration possibilities. This wasn’t due to lack of interest or enthusiasm; they just simply hadn’t encountered these tools before, and many soon had great ideas for using them to support their teaching.

If, though, we now know that technology has huge potential to improve learning through, for example, improved personalisation and engagement, it becomes important that new teachers know how to integrate technology in their teaching.

This diagram (source http://tpack.org) shows a current framework which is gaining ground as a way to think about the kinds of skills teachers need to have.  In 1987, Shulman¹ developed the idea that teachers needed not just content knowledge and pedagogical knowledge, but specific knowledge (pedagogical content knowledge) of teaching approaches suited to the content.

Now that idea has been developed by Mishra and Koehler into the TPACK model shown.  That model, though, suggests that technological knowledge - in particular, in the context of content and pedagogy - is now a key part of the skills mix.

If that’s the case, perhaps courses offered to new teachers could be improved by including not more technology for its own sake, but as a context for learning how it might best be used to support particular pedagogical approaches to teaching particular content?

Ref:

1. Shulman, L. S. (1987). Knowledge and teaching: Foundations of the new reform. Harvard Educational Review, 57(1), 1-22.

Yesterday I was pleased to see that an ex-P7 student had deal with an incident of email bullying in a textbook manner. Of course, there’s no way to prove that the student’s response was as a direct result of internet safety training in school, but it was encouraging none the less.

A parent had called about some abusive emails his child had been receiving from a classmate. After investigation, with the parent’s permission I was able to dig out the evidence, and forward the emails to the school involved for follow-up.  It was clear that the problem had extended beyond school email and had included use of text messaging.

What was really encouraging, though, was the discovery that the child had not only raised the issue with his or her parents, but had also:

• responded calmly to the abusive emails, and not made things worse
• sent an email to the class teacher to let her know

The end result of the student’s commendable action is that positive action is now under way to resolve the situation despite it being a month or so until school resumes.

The case also highlighted for me a potential new issue for school internet safety arrangements. As new technologies facilitate out-of-school communication, do we need more joined-up arrangements to provide reliable cover of internet safety issues during holiday periods?

Image Creative Commons licensed by Drive-By Times Blog

Glow Meet could soon be enabling new links between schools and industry across Edinburgh, thanks to Edinburgh Chamber of Commerce’s Education Policy Group.

At today’s meeting of the Group, chairman Ray Harris of Edinburgh’s Telford College identified the development of school / industry links as one of the key themes to be progressed this year. This links strongly with the Curriculum for Excellence principle of Relevance.

Children should understand the purposes of their activities. They should see the value of what they are learning and its relevance to their lives, present and future.

Earlier discussions on this had flagged up that many of the barriers to developing links were associated with the overheads involved in organising the physical travel and supervision.  Not only does this present difficulties for schools, there are similar difficulties for organisations faced with hosting school children on their sites. Glow Meet offers the possibility of developing virtual links at much lower cost, so I’ll be meeting with Roger Horam of the Chamber to explore the possibilities and get a pilot link-up organised.

Possibilities discussed included:

• Link-ups with a experienced professionals, to allow students to find out about their jobs
• Link-ups with recent school-leavers, to find out what was and wasn’t useful from school
• Link-ups with specialised people, of interest to only a few students, which could be advertised to schools Edinburgh or Scotland-wide
• Recording of these Glow Meet sessions for future careers staff use

It was also agreed to set up a blog to record progress, which will be set up on edubuzz soon.

Now that netbooks offer low cost, portable computing - and will only get better - how can schools best exploit them?

That’s the question behind a new East Lothian project starting this term.  There’s been a lot of discussion of the potential of these technologies over the last year or so and we now aim to make a start on learning about the real-world possibilities. We’re deliberately trying to push this as far as we can beyond what we already do to improve the chances of identifying new benefits - and force ourselves to learn our way past any barriers that emerge. That’s why the project willinclude, for example:

• a focus on web-based collaborative working, using services such as Glow and edubuzz
• issuing netbooks on a one-to-one basis to every child (92) in the Primary 5 cohort
• giving children ownership of the devices, and allowing them to take them home
• encouraging connection to home or other wi-fi networks, such as in libraries, where possible
• encouraging multimedia use through provision of a few Flip video cameras in each class

We have been fortunate to have full support from our IT department for the project. The arrangement is that they will enable wireless network access for the netbooks in the school, but cannot offer software support - if any configuration problems arise, the devices will simply be restored to factory settings by the teacher.

Today Elizabeth Cowan and I met with the Primary 5 teachers at Kings Meadow Primary who will be involved to make a start on planning.  The day included an intro to Glow from Ian Hoffman of the Glow team which included useful examples of work going on elsewhere.

• Wagn.org: Documentation
  (tags: wiki)

If you - or your school - has an account with the Flickr photo-sharing website, you might want to set it up so that you can post photos directly from Flickr to your edubuzz blog(s).

In Flickr, go to Your Account, Extending Flickr, then add the blog to Your Blogs. There’s a test, which will post a message like this to check it’s working:

This is a test post from , a fancy photo sharing thing.