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So it's been a pretty busy month or so for me and professional development. I've been doing regular PD through my COETAIL course; a couple of weeks ago, my school did some useful curriculum mapping; and last month, I got to attend Learning 2.011, which I had attended the previous year as well. When I left that conference, my mind was swimming with new ideas and outlooks to bring back and implement in my teaching. It quite literally took a few days before the buzz wore off but I still remained keen to make changes in my teaching to incorporate those new ideas. I spent much of the next few weeks making changes to the units I teach to reflect these new ideas. As this past weekend approached, I was looking forward to my MYP Technology workshop in Hong Kong so that I could take all of the ideas I'd been putting together and hopefully hash them out with more thought into effective curriculum documentation and maybe hear some ideas from other Technology teachers.
If you hadn't guessed by the previous paragraph, I teach MYP; a program which is often described by outsiders as wishy-washy. While there are certainly things that could be improved, personally, I feel that it's a fairly progressive program that focuses on getting kids to question and inquire in order to approach and solve problems. It tends to emphasize student initiated learning and encourages risk-taking in learning. Regardless of content or factual information, these are universal skills that serve students well throughout their lives, regardless of what they choose to do and where they chose to do it. So when I got to the workshop and the session trainer began reading off an MYP-provided PowerPoint slideshow, I couldn't help but wonder if I'd somehow gone to the wrong conference. How could an organization which is responsible for a progressive thinking program offer such dull, dry training methods?
As the three day course progressed, despite some efforts by our trainer, Matt Plummer, to make things a little more interesting, the mandated, stagnant approach of the workshop seemed to kill the whole purpose of getting together in person with professional peers. Here we had a classroom full of interesting and interested Technology teachers but the chances to learn and share with each other seemed few and far between. Just when things seemed to be picking up and ideas started to flow, it seemed as though we needed to get back to reading words off a PowerPoint slideshow.
It would have been a more useful for the slideshow to have been a document that participants could read before attending the workshop which would then allow the workshop participants and leader to use their face-to-face time to collaborate, share, and explore new ideas and <GASP!> actually DO something. Like the flipped classroom idea, why not initiate a kind of flipped professional development model where some research and reading is done before the workshop and then, once people have traveled their hundreds or thousands of miles to interact with other teachers, they can actually 'unpack' (a word, we did notice, that the TOK course of the IB Diploma seems to love) the content and delve deeper through sharing of experiences.
[NOTE: From the time I began writing this to the time I finished and published it, I have come across an article about flipped PD by David Truss, that is far more informative than this post. It really does a fine a job of summarizing how I feel about my 'good' PD of late. I recommend you read it.]
I know that I am lucky to work in an international school and, after this weekend, I feel even more lucky about working at NIST. Our school's focus over the next couple of years is "Walking the Talk." Overall, I think that my school does quite a good job of walking the talk (or, if you prefer a simplification, leading by example). It's about time that the MYP start doing the same. If they want to truly encourage an inquiry based teaching system that teaches students to be critical thinkers and problem solvers, then it needs to take a like-minded approach in its training of its teachers. Time to 'walk the talk,' MYP.
Wednesday 19 October 2011
Thursday 13 October 2011
Thinking Outside the (Automatically Inserted Text) Box
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As the trimester winds down and I try to get those dreaded marks pulled together for reports, I decided to use the remaining lessons to tackle two seemingly simple skills with my Year 7 students. Namely, online searching and creating a presentation. For this assignment, students are responsible for researching technology within a particular topic or focus (e.g. written communication or entertainment) and are meant to compare how today's available technologies compare with what was available to their parents when they were their age. We spent one lesson learning and practicing some search strategies and looking at do's and don't's (those are incredibly awkward words to type, btw) of presentations (primarily, at this point, focused on simple but effective slide creation and not presentation content). We used a number of resources that I solicited through my PLN of tweeps including Google's 'How Search Works' video (seen below), the Google for Educators site, World's Worst Powerpoint, and Garr Reynold's slide creation tips from his Presentation Zen website.
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BNHR6IQJGZs&feature=player_embedded[/youtube]
This was meant to be a quick overview of everything and then follow ups would be set for the subsequent lessons, of which there are a total of four scheduled for researching, creating, and practicing the presentation. As the first lesson for research rolled around, I introduced the topic which they would have to research and explained that they would be making a presentation with the information they find. I explained that for this lesson they should focus only on researching their topic so that they could become mini-experts for their presentation. As I did the rounds of the classroom to check how the students were doing with their research, I saw quite a few students with PowerPoint open, Google images pasted in and bullet pointed lists beginning to fill their slides. Then, one of my students asked, "Can I just make the presentation and then figure out what to say?" My heart sank. I had obviously failed to get my point across effectively.
Making boring PowerPoint slides is not only ingrained in the students' minds, it's ingrained right into the software. PowerPoint (or Keynote for all you Mac users), with its prepared text boxes and bullets, makes it too easy for students (or, let's be fair, adults too) to just fill in the templates that they give you. People, especially most students, are very happy to take the easiest route when doing anything (if you have actual facts to support this claim, please let me know) and filling in a template is easy. The trouble is, like with so many things in life, the easiest way is not always the best or most interesting way of doing something.
As the end of the lesson was approaching, I decided that the easiest strategy for this was to do something a little strange in a unit devoted to creating a PowerPoint presentation...I banned PowerPoint. I told the students that I did not want to see PowerPoint on any of their screens for the rest of the lesson. This "solution" worked for the last part of this class but I knew that I would need to follow up with something to really help this all sink in the next lesson.
So the next lesson rolled around and I was able to 'borrow' Jago Gazendam's idea from our COETAIL session on Saturday and we walked through the idea of finding a Creative Commonspicture that represents the feeling of a word rather than a very literal interpretation of the word. After walking through how to do this with one example (including explanations of all the different kinds of licences of Creative Commons), I got the students to repeat this for the title page of their presentations and, compared to the previous lesson, the results were night and day.
[caption id="" align="alignright" width="400" caption="From Flickr by freeflyer09"]
[/caption]
The students chose visually interesting, subject appropriate, and licence allowable images and, from the examples I saw, they even managed to give appropriate credit to the image creators. I can only hope that this turnaround continues as they carry on with the creation of their presentations.
In reflection on these lessons this week, I've learned a couple of things. Firstly, I have, sadly, reached that point in my life where I'm more than old enough to be my students' parents. More importantly however, habits are tough enough to break on your own, let alone in other people. Sometimes, you need to take a big step back and look at something in a different way to see things in a fresh, new way. Time to start thinking outside the automatically inserted text box.
As the trimester winds down and I try to get those dreaded marks pulled together for reports, I decided to use the remaining lessons to tackle two seemingly simple skills with my Year 7 students. Namely, online searching and creating a presentation. For this assignment, students are responsible for researching technology within a particular topic or focus (e.g. written communication or entertainment) and are meant to compare how today's available technologies compare with what was available to their parents when they were their age. We spent one lesson learning and practicing some search strategies and looking at do's and don't's (those are incredibly awkward words to type, btw) of presentations (primarily, at this point, focused on simple but effective slide creation and not presentation content). We used a number of resources that I solicited through my PLN of tweeps including Google's 'How Search Works' video (seen below), the Google for Educators site, World's Worst Powerpoint, and Garr Reynold's slide creation tips from his Presentation Zen website.
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BNHR6IQJGZs&feature=player_embedded[/youtube]
This was meant to be a quick overview of everything and then follow ups would be set for the subsequent lessons, of which there are a total of four scheduled for researching, creating, and practicing the presentation. As the first lesson for research rolled around, I introduced the topic which they would have to research and explained that they would be making a presentation with the information they find. I explained that for this lesson they should focus only on researching their topic so that they could become mini-experts for their presentation. As I did the rounds of the classroom to check how the students were doing with their research, I saw quite a few students with PowerPoint open, Google images pasted in and bullet pointed lists beginning to fill their slides. Then, one of my students asked, "Can I just make the presentation and then figure out what to say?" My heart sank. I had obviously failed to get my point across effectively.
Making boring PowerPoint slides is not only ingrained in the students' minds, it's ingrained right into the software. PowerPoint (or Keynote for all you Mac users), with its prepared text boxes and bullets, makes it too easy for students (or, let's be fair, adults too) to just fill in the templates that they give you. People, especially most students, are very happy to take the easiest route when doing anything (if you have actual facts to support this claim, please let me know) and filling in a template is easy. The trouble is, like with so many things in life, the easiest way is not always the best or most interesting way of doing something.
As the end of the lesson was approaching, I decided that the easiest strategy for this was to do something a little strange in a unit devoted to creating a PowerPoint presentation...I banned PowerPoint. I told the students that I did not want to see PowerPoint on any of their screens for the rest of the lesson. This "solution" worked for the last part of this class but I knew that I would need to follow up with something to really help this all sink in the next lesson.
So the next lesson rolled around and I was able to 'borrow' Jago Gazendam's idea from our COETAIL session on Saturday and we walked through the idea of finding a Creative Commonspicture that represents the feeling of a word rather than a very literal interpretation of the word. After walking through how to do this with one example (including explanations of all the different kinds of licences of Creative Commons), I got the students to repeat this for the title page of their presentations and, compared to the previous lesson, the results were night and day.
[caption id="" align="alignright" width="400" caption="From Flickr by freeflyer09"]
[/caption]The students chose visually interesting, subject appropriate, and licence allowable images and, from the examples I saw, they even managed to give appropriate credit to the image creators. I can only hope that this turnaround continues as they carry on with the creation of their presentations.
In reflection on these lessons this week, I've learned a couple of things. Firstly, I have, sadly, reached that point in my life where I'm more than old enough to be my students' parents. More importantly however, habits are tough enough to break on your own, let alone in other people. Sometimes, you need to take a big step back and look at something in a different way to see things in a fresh, new way. Time to start thinking outside the automatically inserted text box.
Wednesday 5 October 2011
Overdue Reflections on Learning 2.011
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My trip to Learning2 this year was my second consecutive year in attendance so it was interesting to see the differences from one year to the next. Last year, I was new in Asia (as I had just joined New International School of Thailand as a Technology teacher about a month prior to the conference) and had so many new things on my plate with relocating continents, starting at a new school and all the accoutrement that accompanies such things. This year, I felt much more comfortable with my expectations of the conference and, as I have been involved in the COETAIL program here in Bangkok, I had been doing quite a bit of consideration and learning about technology from an educational point of view. While this helped me to participate more confidently in discussions, strangely enough, I actually feel I took a less active role in unconferences this year, which was a bit of a disappointment as I had quite enjoyed the unexpected learning that had come out of those in 2010.
My lower involvement in unconferences had little to do with my own desires and more to do with the changes that had been made in the organization of the conference. In 2010, I think that people spent so much time trying to understand unconferences and how they worked that this year’s organizers tried to compensate (likely based on feedback from last year) by having more structured sessions available. While these structured sessions were great, they took away from the spur of the moment unconferences which offered a chance to further explore areas of interest that might not be on offer in the structured sessions (or to delve deeper into the same topic for another session). After speaking with Jeff Utecht and others from the COETAIL program, this seemed to be a fairly widely held piece of feedback so I’m sure it will be taken into consideration before next year’s conference in Beijing.
While I had been putting a fair bit of consideration into how best to effectively use technology in education through the COETAIL course, Learning2 really amped me up and had my mind racing for days afterwards. It was a few nights before I could sleep through the night without visions of educational technology dancing through my head. While I learned countless new things, I think my biggest takeaways from the conference were expansion of my Personal Learning Network (PLN), the value of Creative Commons and, as a technology teacher, refocusing on what truly are the 21st century skills that my students need to have before they move on from secondary school.
A large proportion of my takeaways came through my cohort which was a relief as last year I was underwhelmed with my cohort with Kim Cofino and Darren Kuropatwa (which is ironic as I quite enjoyed sessions and discussions with them this year). My cohort this year was the Empowering Teacher Leaders & Personal Learning Networks with Alec Couros & Jeff Utecht. While I was quite familiar with Jeff through the COETAIL course, and had met Alec last year, I enjoyed the laid back, open approach from both of them and was able to take away some things that I have already implemented in my classroom.
For a while now, I have understood the power of Twitter as a resource for learning information from other, like-minded educators but after this conference, as I added more ‘tweeps’ and started to put faces to Twitter names and engage in some real world conversations with many of these people, I have gained much more value from my tweeting interactions. Shortly after the conference, I started to put some of my ideas together for restructuring what I am teaching my students (more on that below) and I solicited some resources on effective search strategies through some people on Twitter. Within one day, I had received enough resources that there was no way I could possibly use them all in my teaching. I’ve since filtered through them and narrowed them down to the most suitable ones and have already been using them with some of my students. Without my PLN and Twitter, there is no way I would have come up with such a range of useful resources and surely not so quickly. I really appreciate that my PLN helps me to ‘work smart, not hard’ and my next step, as I develop more resources myself, is to share back more by making my resources open and available for others to use.
That brings me to my second takeaway of Creative Commons or open-licensed creative works. When it comes to sharing school resources, I’ve always been more than happy to save another teacher the time of recreating the wheel by sharing my resources but this has tended to be on a more micro, within-my-school situation. Making these resources more widely available (and findable) online is near the top of my to-do list. While I’ve always been happy to share these kinds of resources, I’ve always been a little more apprehensive about sharing more creative things like videos and photographs but I’m starting to see the value in making these creative works more publicly available. As Darren Kuropatwa mentioned during his ‘21st Century Bricoleurs’ session; “without publishing, the information dies.” With that in mind, rather than letting my “works of art” perish in obscurity, I will soon start to contribute more to Flickr’s Creative Commons galleries.
On the note of Creative Commons (CC), Alec Couros shared (under CC license) a video of him and his daughter learning to ride her bike for the first time online which eventually got used in a UK advertisement for Nokia. I have shown this example to some of my classes and it has definitely served as a great jumping off point for getting students interested and on board with the idea of CC. This was just one of the changes I’ve made with regards to emphasis in my classes but, with a new trimester less than a month away, rather than coasting on what I’ve been doing and teaching all the same things over and over, I’ve restructured my units of work for years seven, eight and nine. Despite the extra work for me, I’m actually quite excited for the next semester to start as I feel a rejuvenated passion and purpose for what I’m teaching. That’s not to say that what I have planned is exceptional but I hope think that it’s going to make a more substantial contribution to my students’ learning. Hopefully my enthusiasm catches on with some of them.
As with most anything (other than maybe Keith Richards), the Learning2.011 conference had to come to an end but the spark of learning and the connections made will carry on. I’m looking forward to seeing how some of my new ideas play out in class and, while I’m not expecting to fall flat on my face, I’m pretty sure that not everything will go smoothly and to plan. And that’s ok. If I can’t model the willingness to take a risk with my students and show them how to fail gracefully, learning from the experience, then I’m not really setting my students up for long term success and enjoyment of life.
My trip to Learning2 this year was my second consecutive year in attendance so it was interesting to see the differences from one year to the next. Last year, I was new in Asia (as I had just joined New International School of Thailand as a Technology teacher about a month prior to the conference) and had so many new things on my plate with relocating continents, starting at a new school and all the accoutrement that accompanies such things. This year, I felt much more comfortable with my expectations of the conference and, as I have been involved in the COETAIL program here in Bangkok, I had been doing quite a bit of consideration and learning about technology from an educational point of view. While this helped me to participate more confidently in discussions, strangely enough, I actually feel I took a less active role in unconferences this year, which was a bit of a disappointment as I had quite enjoyed the unexpected learning that had come out of those in 2010.
My lower involvement in unconferences had little to do with my own desires and more to do with the changes that had been made in the organization of the conference. In 2010, I think that people spent so much time trying to understand unconferences and how they worked that this year’s organizers tried to compensate (likely based on feedback from last year) by having more structured sessions available. While these structured sessions were great, they took away from the spur of the moment unconferences which offered a chance to further explore areas of interest that might not be on offer in the structured sessions (or to delve deeper into the same topic for another session). After speaking with Jeff Utecht and others from the COETAIL program, this seemed to be a fairly widely held piece of feedback so I’m sure it will be taken into consideration before next year’s conference in Beijing.
While I had been putting a fair bit of consideration into how best to effectively use technology in education through the COETAIL course, Learning2 really amped me up and had my mind racing for days afterwards. It was a few nights before I could sleep through the night without visions of educational technology dancing through my head. While I learned countless new things, I think my biggest takeaways from the conference were expansion of my Personal Learning Network (PLN), the value of Creative Commons and, as a technology teacher, refocusing on what truly are the 21st century skills that my students need to have before they move on from secondary school.
A large proportion of my takeaways came through my cohort which was a relief as last year I was underwhelmed with my cohort with Kim Cofino and Darren Kuropatwa (which is ironic as I quite enjoyed sessions and discussions with them this year). My cohort this year was the Empowering Teacher Leaders & Personal Learning Networks with Alec Couros & Jeff Utecht. While I was quite familiar with Jeff through the COETAIL course, and had met Alec last year, I enjoyed the laid back, open approach from both of them and was able to take away some things that I have already implemented in my classroom.
For a while now, I have understood the power of Twitter as a resource for learning information from other, like-minded educators but after this conference, as I added more ‘tweeps’ and started to put faces to Twitter names and engage in some real world conversations with many of these people, I have gained much more value from my tweeting interactions. Shortly after the conference, I started to put some of my ideas together for restructuring what I am teaching my students (more on that below) and I solicited some resources on effective search strategies through some people on Twitter. Within one day, I had received enough resources that there was no way I could possibly use them all in my teaching. I’ve since filtered through them and narrowed them down to the most suitable ones and have already been using them with some of my students. Without my PLN and Twitter, there is no way I would have come up with such a range of useful resources and surely not so quickly. I really appreciate that my PLN helps me to ‘work smart, not hard’ and my next step, as I develop more resources myself, is to share back more by making my resources open and available for others to use.
That brings me to my second takeaway of Creative Commons or open-licensed creative works. When it comes to sharing school resources, I’ve always been more than happy to save another teacher the time of recreating the wheel by sharing my resources but this has tended to be on a more micro, within-my-school situation. Making these resources more widely available (and findable) online is near the top of my to-do list. While I’ve always been happy to share these kinds of resources, I’ve always been a little more apprehensive about sharing more creative things like videos and photographs but I’m starting to see the value in making these creative works more publicly available. As Darren Kuropatwa mentioned during his ‘21st Century Bricoleurs’ session; “without publishing, the information dies.” With that in mind, rather than letting my “works of art” perish in obscurity, I will soon start to contribute more to Flickr’s Creative Commons galleries.
On the note of Creative Commons (CC), Alec Couros shared (under CC license) a video of him and his daughter learning to ride her bike for the first time online which eventually got used in a UK advertisement for Nokia. I have shown this example to some of my classes and it has definitely served as a great jumping off point for getting students interested and on board with the idea of CC. This was just one of the changes I’ve made with regards to emphasis in my classes but, with a new trimester less than a month away, rather than coasting on what I’ve been doing and teaching all the same things over and over, I’ve restructured my units of work for years seven, eight and nine. Despite the extra work for me, I’m actually quite excited for the next semester to start as I feel a rejuvenated passion and purpose for what I’m teaching. That’s not to say that what I have planned is exceptional but I hope think that it’s going to make a more substantial contribution to my students’ learning. Hopefully my enthusiasm catches on with some of them.
As with most anything (other than maybe Keith Richards), the Learning2.011 conference had to come to an end but the spark of learning and the connections made will carry on. I’m looking forward to seeing how some of my new ideas play out in class and, while I’m not expecting to fall flat on my face, I’m pretty sure that not everything will go smoothly and to plan. And that’s ok. If I can’t model the willingness to take a risk with my students and show them how to fail gracefully, learning from the experience, then I’m not really setting my students up for long term success and enjoyment of life.
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