Bloggers Cafe at Ulearn08

Getting back on the horse

I haven't been blogging as much as I used to. I seem to have hit a wall. The problem is I have changed focus. I have stepped out of the classroom and I am wondering what to focus on. I still work with teachers as an ICT Facilitator however, in this new cohort, I don't think any of them are blog readers (yet!). So they are not the focus for my writing (yet). In my other new job I spend most of my time in front of the computer being the online editor for the NZ Curriculum Online website. This means that I feel less like being on the computer during my down time.

But I miss blogging.

I still read all the feeds in my feedreader. I still listen to the podcasts in my itunes. But I seem to find it difficult to be a producer. As a classroom teacher I could eagerly write about the exciting things happening in my room. However as the editor of a website it seems like promotion to write about the cool things I have put up online. For example there are some fantastic arts resources developed around the curriculum which I was so excited about I sent them to my colleagues in an email but I didn't blog about them. I spent some time interviewing educators in Canterbury for an article I wrote which I was very pleased about and thought contained some inspirational content, but I didn't blog about that either.

I have now :)

I suppose I have to still see that this blog is about what I find interesting and hopefully will be useful to others. It is about my thoughts and opinions and not those of my employers. It is the virtual record of me.

So I suppose that means I'm back. I am going to continue writing in this new phase of my career and see where it takes me.

PS... check out these cool things I've been playing with:
Glogster - a 'sooooo' cool (according to my daughter) site to make posters with web interactivity
Miro - after playing with it, it seems to be an app that lets you store all your videos plus search and download from different places (including Youtube etc) to build up your own channels. One click and you are in good quality full screen.
Capzles - This excellent site lets you build a timeline and embed audio and video etc. Would be fantastic to build a timeline of a student's reading over a year with a picture of them holding the book and the audio of them reading. Imagine this going home as a Christmas present for mum after you have used it for assessment :)
Moourl - this site is a tiny url creator which can live on your browser toolbar. But it is cute :)

Iphone frenzy in Dunedin

Don't get me wrong... I love my Mac. I have been criticised for my preference for mac over PCs. But I had to weigh in on the hype over the iPhone.

Today, at 9am, the iPhone was released in Dunedin. I had read about the frenzy in Apple stores in the US. I had to take a look at what Dunedin had to offer in the way of Frenzy...

I apologise I took a photo but it was a bit blurry. So imagine this. A line of people outside Magnum Mac in Dunedin ... 10 people.

That's right 10 people. That's what constitutes a frenzy here in downtown Dunedin.

Either that or they are the only people who can afford the outrageous plans for the phone ! $80 per month for the cheap plan up to $250 per month for the expensive plan. Needless to say, I wasn't one of the 10 people lining up. :)

Wordle and the New Zealand Curriculum

I am really enjoying playing with Wordle. It gives a different view on things, looking at a text as a word cloud. I thought I would put in the text from the New Zealand Curriculum document. So here goes...

Vision
ValuesPrinciples
Key CompetenciesI have even made a word cloud of the latest assignment I have written, which really highlighted what I was giving emphasis to in my writing.

Digital school stories (Playing with Google maps)

I have been playing with Google Maps to make a map pointing to all the digital story content we have on the New Zealand Curriculum Online website. I thought I would embed it here as I am playing with building the content.


View Larger Map

Ulearn 2008

Ulearn 2008 is fast approaching, this year it is being held in Christchurch from 8th to 10th October. This is a quality conference, I have attended ULearn for the last 4 years and have found it a dynamic experience each year. The Keynote speakers this year are Will Richardson and Sheryl Nussbaum-Beach from the USA, Steve Carden and our very own Derek Wenmoth, Director of eLearning at CORE Education.

I am presenting three workshops so far :

The first presented with Jane Carroll, speech and language therapist:

How does "oral language" fit into the ICT world?
In this highly interactive workshop we will examine oral language development and how and where oral language fits in the New Zealand Curriculum and other new resources coming out of the Ministry of Education. We will demonstrate how ICT can develop oral language skills, critical thinking and reflection in your classroom.

The second and third presented with Christina Ward and Jenny Keeton, CORE Education:

We are suggesting a pedagogy where the participants in the learning interaction become involved in the process of collaboration, in the process of mutual storytelling and re-storying, so that a relationship can emerge in which both stories are heard, or indeed a process where a new story is created by all the participants. (Bishop and Glynn, 1999)

The New Zealand Curriculum Online is an environment designed for schools to share their developing knowledge, challenge thinking and effect change. In this hands-on session we will explore ways you can use the rich resources available on NZC Online to help you collaborate within your own school community, and to connect with the wider education community as you implement the NZC.

If you want to build a boat, do not instruct the people to saw wood, stitch sails, prepare tools, and organise the work... but rather, make them long for setting sail and traveling to distant lands. (Antoine De Saint-Exupery)

What's online that can help you with curriculum implementation? This lively, hands-on workshop is designed for those who haven't yet had time to explore the rich resources available and opportunities to share and discuss online.

There are also a selection of 13 pre-conference workshops offered on 7th October. I'll be supporting Mel Stopford of CORE Education in the workshop "You can lead a horse to water..."

As you can see there is plenty in this conference for everyone. You can find all the details on the website at http://ulearn.org.nz.

And of course... I look forward to seeing you all at the blogger's cafe... However, for this conference I'm proposing a "Twits" cafe, I have many more Twits I would like to meet face to face.

See you at ULearn.

I'm having a learning!

I am reading the best evidence synthesis on professional development:

Timperley, H., Wilson, A., Barrar, H., & Fung, I. (2007). Teacher professional learning and development: Best evidence synthesis iteration. Wellington: Ministry of Education
http://www.minedu.govt.nz/goto/bestevidencesynthesis

I absolutely love this illustration in the forward to the synthesis by Carolyn English. It sums it all up... I'm having a learning.

Making change happen

I have been running professional development for teachers for a while now and I was thinking about the four types of teachers I usually work with.
1. The excuse maker
2. The holiday maker
3. The dream maker
4. The change maker

The excuse maker is the teacher who cries, ‘this is the way we’ve always done it’! I have seen these innovations come and I have seen them go, they are just the same old thing with a different name. What I have been doing has worked well enough and I’m not about to change now.

The holiday maker is the teacher who grabs hold of any and every new idea and zealously implements it. Then after a while returns ‘home’ back to business as usual. These teachers do not embed the theory behind the practice and therefore the practice doesn’t stick.

The dream maker is the teacher who understands the theories behind new ideas but does not implement them, doesn't know how to make the dream a reality. This teacher may purport to believing in collaborative structures but this is not evident in their room. This teacher may not be aware that their actions do not back up their beliefs or they just might not know how to align the two.

The change maker is the teacher who successfully aligns their beliefs with their practice. They see the value in new ideas for the learning of their students and set about making changes to their practice based on reflection and research.

These are the teachers I come across in my travels and the ones that I try to help engage with ICT and see its value for their students’ learning. Since I have become aware of these traits within the teachers I can see how to work with teachers more effectively.

Can you see yourself in any of these categories? I know that I can see bits of each of them in myself throughout my time as a teacher. What I want to know now is how to help everyone become a change maker, to make thoughtful changes based on learning needs which embed both theory and practice.

The Art of Facilitation

This past week I have been at the Art of Facilitation course run by Joan Dalton and David Anderson of PLOT PD.

This amazing course delivers exactly what the title suggests, a very good grounding in the elements of effective facilitation. It is intensive and I feel as though I have been through five days of therapy! I have had a major 'aha' moment during the course as I reflect on myself as a facilitator. This is the fact that there is often a long distance between perceptions and reality, or to put it another way, our actions may not reflect our learning theories.

I hold to a constructivist and co-construction theory of learning with connectivity theory thrown in for good measure. In other words, to put it simply, I think we construct our realities through our interaction with others and the world around us. With this as my perception you would think the reality would be that I facilitate learning with my adult learners by helping them construct their learning and engage in opportunities to learn with, thru and from others. I have found however that my perception and reality do not meet. To be honest I have considered myself as the expert giver of knowledge, fixer of problems, motivator of action and basically indispensable help on hand. My actions do not support my beliefs.

The best thing about this week with Joan and David, exploring the aspects of effective facilitation is that I have aligned my actions with my beliefs. I have put a plan in place to ensure I foster independence in my adult learners to encourage sustainability in their learning. My role is to help people find the treasure that exists deep within, to explore their own expertise and enhance that.

I'll let you know how I get on ...

Tag cloud meme

Clay Burell has started an informal meme which I thought looked like a lot of fun. I saw Cathy Nelson's tweet cloud on her blog and was intrigued to have a go at making one myself. (It is interesting as an aside that Cathy's personal interpretation and commentary on her tweet cloud seems to have stirred up a pot of bother over on David Jake's blog!)

So to the meme, Clay did some interesting interpretation of his tweet cloud to turn random strings of words into poetry (that Clay sure does have a way with words!) So I thought I would have a look at what my tweet cloud had to say.By far my favourite is:
Away bad bed, better blog!
Followed closely by:
Feeds feel finally finished!

It is interesting what your tweet cloud can reveal about your (could I call it obsession?) conversations -
Exciting facilitating
Kids know!
Thinking time today tomorrow
Virtual voice
World writing year

What I have found the most interesting is that of the tweet clouds I have seen so far, (Allanah, Clay, Cathy and mine) all have one prominent word in common "Thanks".

Join in the fun, what does your tweet cloud reveal?

Podcasting in plain English

Fantastic! I now no longer need to run workshops on the basics in podcasting. The Commoncraft people have gone and done it for me!

Here is Podcasting in plain English

Blooms taxonomy and digital developments

With all the current technology available for teachers, they often struggle as to where the taxonomy of Bloom fits with the various digital developments. OpenEducation.net recently summarized the work of fellow kiwi, Andrew Churches and his concept of ‘Bloom’s Digital Taxonomy’. Check it out at:

http://www.openeducation.net/2008/04/11/blooms-taxonomy-and-the-digital-world/

Where are these digital natives?

Yesterday I gave a presentation to 3rd year University Education students. I gave the same presentation last year. I was amazed last year how little these students knew of ICT in Education or even in life. But I was sure it would be different this year. This year I would finally find these 'Digital Natives' everyone has been talking about. Surely they have finally come up through the ranks and I will be singing to the choir as it were.

These students must be 19 or 20 years old. And they had not heard of RSS, did not know the merits of delicious, did not blog, hadn't listened to a podcast or created a wiki. Second Life was a foreign concept and really, what on earth is Twitter? A few of them had used Skype and one asked if Bebo counted as blogging. I launched into my presentation of the wonders of Web 2 for education and was met by a wasteland of blank stares. (Really without understanding the concept of RSS everything else falls over!)

Where are these "Digital Natives" we keep hearing about? Is my particular education system not producing them? Or is the concept of these hyper-connected students just a figment of our imagination, a reality we can see as being possible but is not actually real?

I finished dazzling them with my brilliance (unappreciated I must say, either that or I was speaking a foreign language) and launched into a safer topic they would understand - how to use PowerPoint in interesting and innovative ways for education.

I was relieved though, when I got home, to find my own tween daughter and teenage sons engaged in more "native" like pursuits. One was working on his music network within Last FM; the other was perfecting his musical talents creating original music through music notation on GarageBand, watching and contributing guitar tutorials to Youtube; and the third was investigating the new virtual world of Panwapa. Maybe I still have a few years to wait until I will be standing in front of a University class of "Natives" ... This (so-called) "Immigrant" is restless.

Read about Ralph

I received a lovely email today from a teacher who was in my ICTPD Cluster for the last three years. She has set up her own blog for the class mascot and is very proud of her creation.



So head along to Read about Ralph and find out all the crazy adventures this mischievous cat gets on with his class of 5 and 6 year old Kiwi kids, and don't forget to drop them a comment.

People in order

I have just come across this endearing and life affirming video. People in order is a video of  people aged from one to one hundred banging a drum and saying their age. The smiles on their faces are contagious. Seeing the difference in personality through one beat of a drum is interesting as well. I could think of many ways to use this video in a classroom to help kids think outside of themselves.  Enjoy.

Embedded Video

Blogged with Flock

Learning @ School day one

Well here I am again, my fourth Learning @ School. It is still just as exciting. Seeing over 1100 people in one place who all have a passion for leading learning and implementing ICT is great. I have heard two keynotes so far and it seems there is a focus on the new curriculum this year. Jeremy Kedian, during his keynote, made mention of the difference between managers and leaders which I liked. He said that managers know how to keep schools moving, leaders know how to keep schools moving somewhere.  Listening to his keynote made me think of a few things. Firstly he asked the question "what do you know about learning?" that is quite a difficult question to answer! I thought this would be a good question to use in a workshop and then have participants think about what type of learner they are in line with the new curriculum, key competencies, principals, values, vision and maybe with other thinking tools such as habits of mind. Jeremy Kedian asked "What makes a teacher?" and the answer was "They know about learning" (notice it's not teaching). 

Anyway that's the end of my notes for today. Will try to write some more. This is a very busy L@S for me as I'm attending in two different capacities and feeling rather split down the middle.

Split screen thinking

I read an excellent presentation written by Guy Claxton yesterday. He was talking about the importance of teaching students how to learn. He begins his presenation with these quotes:

‘The test of successful education is not the amount of knowledge that pupils take away
from school, but their appetite to know and their capacity to learn.’ Sir Richard
Livingstone, 1941

‘All skills will become obsolete except one, the skill of being able to make the right
response to situations that are outside the scope of what you were taught in school. We
need to produce people who know how to act when they are faced with situations for
which they were not specifically prepared.’ Seymour Papert, 1998

‘One of the core functions of twenty-first century education is learning to learn in
preparation for a lifetime of change.’ David Miliband, 2003

‘Pedagogy should at its best be about what teachers do that not only helps students to
learn but actively strengthens their capacity to learn.’ David Hargreaves, Learning for
Life, 2004

‘Effective teaching … should aim to help individuals and groups to develop the
intellectual, personal and social resources that will enable them to … flourish … in a
diverse and changing world.’ ESRC TLRP Evidence-informed principles for teaching
and learning: No 1, March 2006

This paper is well worth reading all the way through. There is a practical section where Claxton talks about split screen teaching and he had me so fired up I was ready to demand a class to teach to try out his ideas! I always think the best ideas are ones that when you read them you think, "why didn't I think of that?" Anyway, split screen thinking is when you keep two things in mind when teaching your lesson, both of equal importance. Firstly the content you are teaching, this is still important, but of the same importance is the learning to learn skill you are teaching at the same time. He tells the story of a teacher who was doing a lesson on electricity.Her learning to learn skills was questioning. She sent them off to explore the elements of electrical circuits as we usually do but set them the task to gather all their questions as they carried out their experiment. They then discussed the different questions a scientist might have about electricity than a mum, or a farmer, or an actor etc.

Another example he gave was when you are reading a novel to your class have them identify what kind of learner the main character is with examples. This idea led me think about something we were doing at Pine Hill. We had introduced the students to the Habits of Mind over the last few years. A way to revise these habits of mind would be to have the students identify what habits of mind famous characters use with examples. I have a set of cards with the habits of mind on them with explanations. I thought you could put students in groups with a set of cards for each group. Then give the group a well known character, say Harry Potter, the BFG or goldilocks. Give the group a few minutes to agree on a habit of mind they think that character uses with an example. Each group reports back and then you give them all a new character. This could be a quick 5 - 10 min activity to keep the kids thinking about thinking. If someone is lucky enough to give this a try please leave me a comment. I have been out of the classroom for one week and you can see the withdrawal symptoms are setting in. :)

Lester Flockton and the NZ Curriculum

A learning organization is an organization:
• where people continually experience their capacity to create the results they truly desire
• where new and expansive patterns of thinking are nurtured
• where collective aspiration is set free
• where people are continually learning how to learn together
(Senge 1990, The Fifth Discipline)

Today I spent a couple of hours listening to Lester Flockton talk about the revised New Zealand Curriculum at the University of Otago. It was a jam packed two hours and I have included some of my notes below. These are mainly pointers for school leaders looking at where to start when thinking about implementing the curriculum.

Development of the new curriculum:
A curriculum stocktake was held which highlighted that the old curriculum was overcrowded, inflexible, difficult for parents to read, teachers weren’t involved in the curriculum; achievement objectives (AOs) were artificially structured; curriculum levels were arbitrary; teachers were less creative as they were dependent on the AOs; assessment practices undermined teaching and learning; ERO used AOs as audit tools where as teachers saw them as planning tools. This stocktake led to the revised curriculum document.

The previous curriculum was a model of accountability founded on the AOs. The new curriculum is a co-constructed curriculum, which is more professionally embracing and received overwhelming support during the draft consultation phase. Over 15,000 people took part during online and face to face consultation in the construction of this curriculum and over 10,000 responses were received during the draft consultation phase.

Underpinnings:
The goals of the curriculum project are:
1. Clarify and refine curriculum outcomes (AOs)
2. Focus on quality teaching
3. Strengthen school ownership of the curriculum
4. Support communication and strengthen partnership with parents and communities.

The new curriculum document must be in use by all schools by 2010. Lester cautions us to get our thinking right and not to rush into things. There are two years to implement the curriculum and schools that are doing good things may not have much to implement. The key is in making the principles, vision and values of the curriculum explicit.

Lester states schools could address the implementation in three stages. Firstly schools need Clarification – what does the curriculum mean for that school. Next Exploration – think the curriculum through, critically review it in your context. And then Decide – which direction will you take. The key to this process is to continually be reviewing.

The principles from the curriculum document should underpin all school decision making. ERO should look for these principles infused in the school curriculum and we need to become better at talking about them in our schools. We need to be able to provide evidence through practical demonstrations in our school community of the existence of the principles.

Lester was part of preparing a package for schools called From NZ Curriculum to School Curriculum. This is available for download from the Curriculum online site on TKI.

New Zealand Curriculum online

Well, I have had two days in my new job. It is exciting to be doing something different and it is challenging to take a risk and step into the unknown. I am starting to get my head around what I'm supposed to be doing but I'm sure it will all become much more clearer as I get further into the year.

I have spent some time today working on the NZ Curriculum share and discuss site. On this site you can share stories of how your school has begun to implement the curriculum. You can also read about other school's experiences. Today I set up a page where you can find some strategies to use when talking about the curriculum with your staff in your school. These strategies will be added to in the near future and there is the option for you to post about successful strategies you have used and would like to share with others. The other section I set up today was a page for people to share what they are going to do on their 'curriculum day', the day the Ministry has funded for schools to work on the curriculum. It would be great for schools to share their plans for this day to spark ideas for other schools and to engage in discussions.

If you have a school story, are looking for an implementation strategy, or want to share what you will be doing on the curriculum day, then please follow the links and share your experiences and expertise with the rest of us. I look forward to reading your contributions.

Bloggers' Cafe at Learning @ School

Hey all you NZ edubloggers out there, want to put a face to the blog? The NZ Bloggers Cafe is happening this year at Learning @ School. Come along and engage with other bloggers in some lively debate about life, the universe and everything. This would also be a great place for 'budding bloggers' to come and learn some tips and tricks from 'blooming bloggers'. The cafe will be open during morning tea and lunch breaks so come along and join in the discussions. The venue will be advertised in the conference handbook.

We will need people to help man the cafe during these break times, the idea for the cafe is twofold. The first is so that we can all get together and meet in person the minds we have been reading. The second is to be of help to other bloggers just starting out and who would like some tips and tricks.

The bloggers' cafe was a big hit at ULearn with virtual friendships turning into face to face friendships, and new names added to our aggregators. A few visitors to the cafe have started their own blogs with a guaranteed readership and a lot of online collaboration has happened. So new bloggers and old, come along and join in the fun at the cafe.