I Am One Of Those People!

Ok people, I have a confession to make – My name is Ashley and I love sharing knowledge with others and having people share my knowledge with me. Now that we have gotten that out of the way, I was reflecting on this notion today.

People who know me know that I love to hear stories.  I love it when somebody shares something that they are doing in their classroom.  Even if I don’t think it ‘adds value’ to my life, it is still fun to hear.  I am also an ‘idea manipulator’.  I will see or hear about an idea that somebody else is implementing with their kids and modify it to suit my needs.

But my question is do we have a moral and professional obligation to share? I know that some people find this very difficult.  I feel that as educators we do.  We should be sharing out wealth of knowledge and resources to aid the wider educational community to have kids do great things.

I would be interested to hear people’s thoughts on this.

People being creative really amazes me, as I believe that I am the least creative person in the world.  Those who follow this blog are aware that I am a podcast tragic and one that I regularly look forward to is The EdTech Crew.  Last week they were lucky enough to have Eric Rosenbaum who works on some exciting projects at MIT.  I was truly amazed at his work.  If you haven’t already listened to the latest podcast, make sure that you do.  Here is a YouTube clip of one of his latest ideas:

Recently (as in the past 6 months or so) I have become more aware of the power of Twitter in regards to back channeling at conferences.  For those people who aren’t aware of what back chaneling is, my basic definition is people who are ‘live’ at an event providing countless tweets to us poor souls who are unable to attend.  These tweets provide non attenders with a feeling of actually being at the events and having an understanding of what is going on.  When used in conjuction with tools such as UStream, non attenders can virtually be experiencing the same learning opportunities as the people at the conferences.  But the key question is – Is it the same?

The reason that I thought that I would write this blog post is due to the fact that over the past couple of days, my Tweetdeck (which I love using and it is painful that it isn’t running well at the moment) has been straining under the number of # tag columns that I have been putting in it.  #Slide2Learn, #QSITE2010, #ISTE10 have joined my usual #eqelearn and #masterchef columns in providing me with so much content that it isn’t fun.  The #ISTE10 stream was actually out of control.  So many links were passing by me at a rapid rate.  I think that I added around 10 new blogs to my iGoogle (see my previous entry about my excitement) and activated my Diigo account and put it to work to bookmark some great content that I will use with my class this term.  I also joined the Slide2Learn Ning, QSITE Ning and ISTE Ning.  It really has been a busy couple of days!

But getting back to my key question – is it the same.  By the sounds of it, some attendees at ISTE10 actually didn’t go into key note addresses (and their has been a lot of thoughts about the opening key note and its lovely PowerPoint presentation) and sat outside and tweeted it up.  I have to question this.  If you could not get into the venue (eg it was sold out) that is one thing but I still would rather be there.  I know last year that I missed out on the first day of eLearning Innovation Expo due to the fact that I had to attend 5 days of compulsory literacy training.  I was only able to attend the second day.  I loved the tweet stream from the first day, but nothing actually beat being there.  I am really looking forward to this years eLearning Innovation Expo and am super excited that I am going to be actually meeting some of my PLN in person.  I love how the tweet stream from these conferences ‘adds value’ to content being provided by discussing points of view and providing links but I think that I would prefer to actually be there.

In summary, back channeling has revolutionized the way that content is provided at conferences and feedback for presenters.  If it is adding value, I think that it really is fantastic.  But I think that it is an easy decision – if you can be there, nothing would be better.

(Quick note: sorry for the length of time between posts – I know that my fans have missed me.  I have been super slack and won’t let it happen again)

Around 12 months ago, I found out about a thing that changed the way that I interact with the internet and find resources.  That was just a little thing called Twitter.  Under the advice of an educator that I have never meet (Mr Robbo) I signed up for this thing and jumped aboard the PLN train.  I have a bit of an addictive personality (as outlined in a previous post about my podcasting addiction) and started to become amazed at how easy it was to find out about new things from educators all around the world.

Whilst I still believe in the power of the PLN, recently I have been thinking about revisiting an old friend and its name is iGoogle.  In my BT world (before Twitter) I used to live and die by my iGoogle feeds.  I remember with excitement reading a post from Sue Waters at the Edubloger about this exciting thing called RSS and how it would bring content to your rather than you having to open each website individually and hope to god that you haven’t wasted your time.  I was amazed by this and really thought that it was amazing.  I added so many things to my feeds, it was ridicioulus.  I have the usual feeds about sport, school etc but I also added stuff about Harry Potter (which is really sad for a 34 year old grown man)

But then Twitter hit and I started to become amazed by how much information was passing by my finger tips every day.  I thought ‘Who cares about RSS when I have Twitter?’  I lost track of my feeds and they just sat there.  I actually deleted a whole bunch because I arrogantly thought that Twitter would do the trick for me and I wouldn’t need it anymore.

But recently I have been thinking about my feeds and due to Twitter, I am constantly adding new people to my PLN and they are posting links to their blogs.  I really want to go and revisit some of their old work and it is fantastic.  But what happens if I loose something in the ‘Tweet Stream’?  I had a revelation in my head (it doesn’t happen often but when it does it is quite profound) and decided that if I liked their thoughts, I would add their feed to my iGoogle.  It has been an empowering decision and I am glad that I have made it.  I actually now have so many blogs from following # tags on Twitter (and a blog will come out about that soon) that I had to ‘sub categorise’ my ‘School Stuff’ tab into smaller sections.

I am glad that I have found you again iGoogle – I will never leave you out in the cold again!

For some reason the other day, I was reading Tom Barret’s blog, who I follow on Twitter.  Tom seems to have a bit of a following out there in the Twitterverse on the way he uses tools within his schooling environment.  He encourages educators to use Google docs and other collaborative tools to reflect on their practice and tools they can use to help them achieve quality educaitonal outcomes for thier students. 

For some reason, I scrolled down and checked out his blog extensively for the first time and I found this little gem called ‘How to bookmark Twitter links’.  I know that I feel very overwhelmed by the sheer volume of Twitter links that pass me by every time I log in. 

Packarati.us links your Twitter account to your Delicious account automatically and bookmarks links you place into your Tweets.  This process of automation certainly seems to be helping my Delicious links grow and it is so much easier than manually entering each one. 

Packrati.us seems to be doing the job for me so far – hopefully it will for you as well!

As some of the readers of this blog may be aware, I am currently undertaking the exciting journey which is called the Digital Pedagogy Advanced License which my employer encourages through it’s Smart Classrooms Professional Development Framework.  As a part of this journey, we are required to do certain things each week and produce a portfolio of evidence outlining projects which show leadership in the field of ICT within the wider educational community.

Our task this week was to explore Transformative Learning.  We had a series of readings / videos that we needed to consider and reflect upon them within our particular context.  One of the base readings that we needed to consider was Shane Roberts summary of his understandings of this concept.  Within his synopsis, Shane outlines interpretation of the major aspects of the underpinning concepts behind Transformative Learning.  They are:

1. Learners learning to think for themselves.
2. Freedom from unquestioning acceptance (negotiation of learning, practice and assessment).
3. Teacher as a model learner.
4. Reflection.

Within my particular context as a year 7 teacher in a 1-1 laptop environment, I can easily identify some of those aspects that I embed into my class on a daily basis easily, whilst others are quite difficult.  The biggest challenge that I have had with my students this year is the concept of reflection.  It just seems as though this important aspect of student learning has not been focused on and questions such as ‘Why are we bothering with this Mr Proud?’ or ‘Are you serious?’ were commonly heard in my classroom at the start of the year.  Now, reflective processes are incorporated often and the feedback from the students is that it actually helps them think more about what they did and how they would do it better next time. 

The other concept that my learners are working hard to develop is learners learning to think for themselves.  As I stated in an earlier blog post, I feel that throughout most of my primary educational career (wish I made some money out of it!) I was a passive recipient of content / information and the educator in front of me was the ‘Grand Pooba’ and his / her word was right.  Once again, I was surprised at the start of the learning journey with my kids this year on the lack of higher order thinking skills my students possessed.  I have always encouraged my kids to explain themselves, ask questions and enquire about concepts covered within our learning environment.  My students are now starting to develop these thinking skills but it has been a very hard slog. 

Jodie Riek left an interesting comment on Shane’s blog entry about Transformative Learning.  She stated:

‘As an early years teacher, I truly believe that we teach kids out of being self thinking and risk taking learners’. 

She also adds:

‘They want to EXPERIENCE the answers. They want to think for themselves, come up with theories, test them out, and discover results. They want to learn by doing. But somewhere early in their journey of learning in the school system we train them out of this innate need to experience the answers and we mould them to understand and perform as required in our system.’ 

I found Jodie’s comments very insightful.  Learners enter the school system eager to tackle the world and believe that they can solve / figure out anything.  At the beginning of each year, I openly encourage students to take risks and I truly believe that this is the best way that we learn.  Our practical example of this is the use of ICT within my class.  For some tools / software items, I just say to my kids ‘Go for it, figure it out and then teach me’ is such a powerful learning experience for my kids.  They learn by doing, not just passively watching me demonstrate concepts at the front of the room. 

Having students experience solutions to problems is such a powerful experience for both the student and the teacher.  The teacher feels enriched because the students ‘get it’ and they are engaged.  The student is feeling like they are on top of the world and eager to learn, which is half of the battle one.

In summary, Transformative Learning has a place in a primary school classroom but traditional expectations of primary school students need to change for it to be effectively implemented.  If we keep have the same expectations of students, a transformation of practice will never take place and we will be failing to prepare the students under our guidance for the journey called life!

Excuse my rambling on with my thoughts.  I really need to nut this out further.

Okay.  Before we begin, I have a confession to make:

My name is Ashley and I am a podcastholic.  I am addicted to them and my life is so so much different now that they are in it.  How could I live without them? 

Now that is off my chest, lets begin to discuss one of my favourite forms of listening to audio – podcasting.  My journey with podcasting only began a couple of years ago.  Before I knew about them, I thought that the only way you could access podcasts were by downloading them to your iPod or mp3 player.  I had neither, so I didn’t worry about this new trend and thought that it would either: a) go away and fade into nothingness or b) I would eventually figure it out and decide to explore it.

Two years ago, I made the big step.  I was over at a friends house and they had iTunes on their laptop.  I was looking at it and they were exploring how they had access to audio content, not just their own music or music they purchased.  I thought that this was pretty cool and decided that I would jump into the iTunes world and downloaded it to my laptop.  I thought I would check out the ‘Podcasts’ section and hunt around and see what I could get for free.

The very first podcast that I subscribed to was Hamish and Andy.  I thought that this was fantastic because I got to listen to these two guys (who crack me up) without being having advetisements or music interupting my listening pleasure.  This was fantastic and I was well 0n my way to becoming addicted.  Then I decided to venture in and look for some podcasts on another thing that I enjoy – Harry Potter!  It is very sad that a 33 year old man loves Harry Potter so much.  I think that I have read the books over 20 times.  The first podcast that I got into was called Mugglecast.  It was basically a whole bunch of people sitting around talking about Harry Potter.  This was fantastic to me.  I finally realised that I wasn’t alone and my addiction to the world of Harry Potter was shared by others.  Then some how I stumbled upon the world of Harry Potter fan fiction.  Fan Fiction is an interesting concept and I was a bit sceptical at first.  I then stumbled upon Spell Cast – the ultimate Harry Potter Fan Fiction Site.  It was awesome.  I didn’t even have to read the story, it just came through to my computer.  Finally, I looked into basketball podcasts (another passion of mine) and found out that there was an awesome Australian basketball podcast called ‘The OT – with DJ Rod and John Rillie’.  This was heaven to me.  My world was becoming more complete. 

Then a brain wave hit me (they happen about once a year!) Would there be any educational podcasts out there that I could use to aid my teaching or stimulate / give me new ideas?  At first, I was disappointed.  I found lots of things under ‘Education’ but nothing overly relevant to me and my setting.  A lot of the podcasts that I found were very American and I was just about to give up. 

Then I stumbled upon two podcasts that I follow religiously and do not miss an episode.  The first one was Ed Tech Crew with hosted by Darrel Branson (The ICT Guy) and Tony Richards from itmadesimple.com. They discuss all things digital in education – technologies, issues, great websites, web 2.0 and much, much more!  The thing that I love about it is that they content they cover  is relevant and they have guests who are usually real teachers from out in the field. 

The second one that I found was The Virtual Staffroom hosted by Chris Betcher.  Chris states the purpose of his site is to provide those of us involved in educating young people with the opportunity to engage in conversation and dialogue which explores the impacts that these new technologies will have on our classrooms.  I really enjoy listening to his podcasts as well.

I have used podcasting extensively with my kids in class and I will share my thoughts on that at a later date.  Just remember – next time you suspect somebody is a ‘Podcastholic’ be sympathetic towards them.  It is a real disease! 

Please leave a comment below.  I am interested on finding out some more educational blogs and would love to add them to my iTunes account!

So as a new term dawns after Easter, I am once again in charge of 24 eages year 7 students who are attempting to make meaning of the world that they live in.  They were are so eager to get back to school (I had students emailing me during the holidays telling me that they had found this blog and it was to ‘wordy’ for them to read!) and it was great to see that they all are eager and as engaged in their learning after the holidays. 

But a number of significant challenges face the class (and me!) over the next term.  The biggest challenge that we have to face is the hot topic in education at the moment – NAPLAN!  For those who have been out of the loop, please check out this article.  This is not really the forum for to be outling my personal views on this topic, but I will still be preparing my students using various resources such as this one so that they can achieve the best possible results that they are capable of. 

In one of my previous posts, Joseph Perkins left a detailed and thought provoking comment.  He stated:

What are your goals going to be for Term 2? What do you hope to achieve by the end of the year? How do you know when you get there?

He also went on to say:

There is so much you could focus on, perhaps it’s best to really drill down into one aspect of eLearning (in alignment with what your vision is) and get that right.

This detailed comment (and I really thank him for it!) really got me thinking.  I feel that during term 1 we did a lot of things really well but we could have done certain things better. 

For example, in the last two weeks of term 1, we worked really hard to provide students with flexible learning opportunties that put them in charge of when they did things.  They need to engage with various forms of digital content, work offline, work together and work through simple board work ‘drill and practice’ tasks.  This concept, whilst simple in nature, really blew the kids away.  I told them that it really doesn’t matter what order they do things in, as long as they get the job done. 

Another aspect that I want to drill further into is the concept of flexible assessment.  Our major piece of assessment this term requires students to produce an educational resource on their favourite SOSE topic – government.  You should have heard the groans when I told them that we would be doing it.  Last year, some of my students produced some great assessments showing their understanding of concepts covered throughout the unit.  I think the students from this year will take it a step further.  I have already had a number of kids ask me if they could produce a podcast (watch out for my next blog entry on my podcast obsession) or design webpages.  I am looking forward to what they are going to produce.

So I guess that the fun has just begun!

 There is a lot of resistance to change in teaching as I am of the pesonal opinon that we are all control freaks in our own ways.  I know that I certainly am and like things to be done in certain ways.  In my previous blog post, I outlined what I have learnt throughout this term and how the journey in my 1-1 environment has been going so far.  As I am sitting here on a pupil free day, I guess the questions that many of my peers in the staff room is ‘Why are we bothering with using technology in our classrooms?  Can’t we achieve quality educational outcomes without the bother?  Is there any computer stuff on NAPLAN?  Why bother then?’

My journey with ICT in my class has been ongoing process that is constantly evolving and changing.  My answer to all of these questions come back to this key message: We need to educate 21st century kids using 21st century methods for the 21st century.  If we do not do this, my opinion is that we are failing to give kids the skill set that they need to function as a productive member of society now and in the future.  That certainly is a mouthful but I truly belive that this is to be the case.  Our Digial Natives deserve the best learning experiences that can be delivered and they don’t know any different. 

This does not mean that I think we should ‘chuck away’ all of the old methods.  As a 33 year old man, I was educated in an environment that was not very technology rich.  I remember the first time that I saw an old ‘Overhead Projector’ and my teacher pulled out an OHT and projected it up onto the big screen.  As a 7 year old, this was the most amazing thing that I had ever seen.  I remember ‘ROTE’ learning number facts etc and this whilst it was a boring experience, I still learnt.  But was I an active participant in my learning?  The answer to that question is ‘sort of’.  I had some fantastic teachers who inspired me but I was a passive recipent of information and reliant upon the person at the front of the room providing me with the ‘stuff’ I needed to survive and thrive in the world that I lived in.

So why do I bother?  I bother because I feel that I have a responsibility to the students to prepare them for the world that they live in.  I feel that technology enhances the learning experiences of students and motivates them to question / reflect / investigate their environment.  The reluctant students in my class seem to engage better in their learning by using technology.  If technology wasn’t integrated across all key learning areas, I am positive that they would not attempt to participate in the classroom environment at all.  I am sure that they would disengage and look for avenues to vent their frustrations. 

Technology helps engage and empower all students (even the reluctant ones!) and we need to look after our 21st century learners to the best of our abilities. 

Feel free to add a comment.