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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.
Monday, 26 September 2011
CoETaIL Course 2 - AUP Redesign
As part of the second course of our COETAIL program, our challenge was to review our school's Acceptable Use Policy for technology and make any improvement that we deemed necessary. As we have a fairly large contingent of NIST staff participating in the course, we had to balance the "many hands make light work" with the "too many cooks in the kitchen" to come up with what turned out to be an interesting project and definite improvement on the existing policy.
With our current document being a combination of a waiver form and an acceptable use policy with straightforward bullet points like, "don’t do bad things to/with your data/account or school computer," there was room for improvement. Ultimately, to address the needs of our 1:1 program, we decided to separate the damage waiver and created more positive statements under the categories of "general use;" "use in class;" "online behaviour;" and "health." Below you will find a copy of the document we propose to be implemented next school year which students will need to sign at the beginning of the school year.
In our brainstorming for this policy, our group of NIST educators came up with the idea of making things more visual and Adrian Watts and Jago Gazendam really ran with the idea, scouring the net for fantastic Creative Commons images to support the plain text AUP. The idea is that these can be printed and displayed around the school or can be viewed as a presentation (as seen below) to promote discussion with the students (and, quite possibly, staff).
With our current document being a combination of a waiver form and an acceptable use policy with straightforward bullet points like, "don’t do bad things to/with your data/account or school computer," there was room for improvement. Ultimately, to address the needs of our 1:1 program, we decided to separate the damage waiver and created more positive statements under the categories of "general use;" "use in class;" "online behaviour;" and "health." Below you will find a copy of the document we propose to be implemented next school year which students will need to sign at the beginning of the school year.
In our brainstorming for this policy, our group of NIST educators came up with the idea of making things more visual and Adrian Watts and Jago Gazendam really ran with the idea, scouring the net for fantastic Creative Commons images to support the plain text AUP. The idea is that these can be printed and displayed around the school or can be viewed as a presentation (as seen below) to promote discussion with the students (and, quite possibly, staff).
Wednesday, 21 September 2011
Picking a Side of Your Line
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About ten days ago, an unknown number rang through on my mobile phone (thankfully on silent at the time) during my houseroom. I ignored it and it rang again. My complete lack of desire to answer this call, from a local mobile number, wasn't seeming to sink in for whoever was on the other end of the phone as no matter how much I ignored it, they ignored my ignoring and persisted to call me. Eventually, with my students not in any dire need of my attention at the time, I apologized to the class, relented and answered the phone. There was a recorded message with the voice of an American sounding woman which, part way through the message, got spliced with an Australian sounding woman. The general gist of the message was that they wanted me to push '1' to pay 60baht (~$2) to hear something or press '2' to decline. I pressed the red button on my screen and hung up.
The calls stopped for a little while but later that day started back up. I ignored it again and again and by the time I had gotten home, I had about 17 missed calls from this unknown solicitor. It was astoundingly frustrating. I had even spent about a half an hour trying to call the mobile phone company's customer service to see if there was a way to block calls from that number. Every time I called, the line was busy. Right as I was going to sleep, the number started ringing again. The harassment was driving me crazy. I turned my phone off and went to sleep, hoping that it would cease. The next morning, I had gotten an email back from the mobile phone company with a way to block the number. Annoyingly, there was a nominal fee (30 baht per month) but I decided to try to subscribe to the number blocking service. All attempts to activate this failed. The calls continued for a few days but grew less frequent and it has been a few days now since they've tried calling. I'm hoping that this means it has ended but time will tell.
The reason I recount this story is because I grew up in a time before mobile phones or internet were available everywhere and anywhere. I'm on the cusp of Generation 'Y' and Generation 'X' so I'm old enough to remember times without technology but have still been around it enough to have a pretty reasonable understanding of it. One thing I thankfully never had to put up with when I as growing up was cyberbullying but this situation gave me a timely experience with how it might feel; unwanted solicitations from an unknown person or entity. My recent experience is admittedly pretty light in terms of seriousness but I was amazed how worked up I was getting over this unrelenting caller. If such a reasonably insignificant, non-personal act could wind a person up so much, it got me thinking about how traumatizing cyberbullying must be for a student when the attacks are more directed and vicious.
As part of my CoETaIL course, I've been keeping my eyes open for thoughts, opinions and news with regards to cyberbullying. I've spoken with teachers and counselors from my school and from other schools around South-East Asia and, from what I've found, cyberbullying seems to be something that many teachers have heard of happening in their schools but few have had personal experiences with. During an unconference discussion at the Learning 2.011, one of the consensuses we reached was that schools need to be proactive in defining what exactly entails cyberbullying and what role does the school play in cases of cyberbullying. If there is no policy in place, then it will be quite difficult to respond effectively when an incident inevitably occurs.
Some NIST faculty, not coincidentally also members of our COETAIL cohort, have been looking over our school's Acceptable Use Policy recently and we've found some interesting things. One glaringly obvious thing is that procedures with regards to cyberbullying are not very clearly addressed within the policy or in other school policies. I will take a closer look at our acceptable use policy and other technology oriented safety policies in another blog post later this week. For now, I will leave you with some very clever wordplay in this award winning spoken word performance about how to be safe and responsible online...
About ten days ago, an unknown number rang through on my mobile phone (thankfully on silent at the time) during my houseroom. I ignored it and it rang again. My complete lack of desire to answer this call, from a local mobile number, wasn't seeming to sink in for whoever was on the other end of the phone as no matter how much I ignored it, they ignored my ignoring and persisted to call me. Eventually, with my students not in any dire need of my attention at the time, I apologized to the class, relented and answered the phone. There was a recorded message with the voice of an American sounding woman which, part way through the message, got spliced with an Australian sounding woman. The general gist of the message was that they wanted me to push '1' to pay 60baht (~$2) to hear something or press '2' to decline. I pressed the red button on my screen and hung up.
The calls stopped for a little while but later that day started back up. I ignored it again and again and by the time I had gotten home, I had about 17 missed calls from this unknown solicitor. It was astoundingly frustrating. I had even spent about a half an hour trying to call the mobile phone company's customer service to see if there was a way to block calls from that number. Every time I called, the line was busy. Right as I was going to sleep, the number started ringing again. The harassment was driving me crazy. I turned my phone off and went to sleep, hoping that it would cease. The next morning, I had gotten an email back from the mobile phone company with a way to block the number. Annoyingly, there was a nominal fee (30 baht per month) but I decided to try to subscribe to the number blocking service. All attempts to activate this failed. The calls continued for a few days but grew less frequent and it has been a few days now since they've tried calling. I'm hoping that this means it has ended but time will tell.
The reason I recount this story is because I grew up in a time before mobile phones or internet were available everywhere and anywhere. I'm on the cusp of Generation 'Y' and Generation 'X' so I'm old enough to remember times without technology but have still been around it enough to have a pretty reasonable understanding of it. One thing I thankfully never had to put up with when I as growing up was cyberbullying but this situation gave me a timely experience with how it might feel; unwanted solicitations from an unknown person or entity. My recent experience is admittedly pretty light in terms of seriousness but I was amazed how worked up I was getting over this unrelenting caller. If such a reasonably insignificant, non-personal act could wind a person up so much, it got me thinking about how traumatizing cyberbullying must be for a student when the attacks are more directed and vicious.
As part of my CoETaIL course, I've been keeping my eyes open for thoughts, opinions and news with regards to cyberbullying. I've spoken with teachers and counselors from my school and from other schools around South-East Asia and, from what I've found, cyberbullying seems to be something that many teachers have heard of happening in their schools but few have had personal experiences with. During an unconference discussion at the Learning 2.011, one of the consensuses we reached was that schools need to be proactive in defining what exactly entails cyberbullying and what role does the school play in cases of cyberbullying. If there is no policy in place, then it will be quite difficult to respond effectively when an incident inevitably occurs.
Some NIST faculty, not coincidentally also members of our COETAIL cohort, have been looking over our school's Acceptable Use Policy recently and we've found some interesting things. One glaringly obvious thing is that procedures with regards to cyberbullying are not very clearly addressed within the policy or in other school policies. I will take a closer look at our acceptable use policy and other technology oriented safety policies in another blog post later this week. For now, I will leave you with some very clever wordplay in this award winning spoken word performance about how to be safe and responsible online...
Thursday, 15 September 2011
Why Wait!?
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As a quick follow up to yesterday's post 'Free to Take? Free to Give!', I wasted no time in plugging the idea of Creative Commons (CC) in my classroom. With both a Year 9 and a Year 7 class, I asked them if they knew anything about Creative Commons and, if so, what did they know. There were some interesting responses like, "Isn't that the 'CC' at the bottom of a YouTube video?" but, perhaps most unusual was that there were more Year 7s that were not only aware of CC but also familiar with what it meant; at least to some degree. I suspect that if I looked closely at which class those students were in in Year 6, many of them would have been in Sam Sherratt's classroom. Whether my hunch is correct or not, kudos to the NIST elementary staff for their efforts in emphasizing this in the curriculum.
The conversations with each class were interesting and I introduced them both to the CC image search engine, compfight.com. Most promising though was in my discussion with the Year 9 class. When we started, very few were familiar with the concept of CC, let alone interested in taking part but after about 20 minutes, I would say that most students seemed to see the value in not only the taking of photos/information but, more importantly, the value in sharing your own creations. Once I felt I had most students at least understanding the value of sharing through CC, if not ready to jump on board, I ended the discussion with an example shown to me by Alec Couros at Learning 2.011 in Shanghai this past weekend.
Alec is a big supporter of CC and shares many, many things online through CC licensing including information, pictures and videos. One video he took of him helping his daughter to ride her bike for the first time caught the eye of the makers of this Nokia advertisement in the UK and they asked him for permission to use his video in their commercial. When I explained to my students that he was able to put a bit of money into his daughter's college fund just because he decided to share openly online, I think that spark a little more interest.
Anyway, I have more classes to bring on board but so far, so good. I'm starting with a strategy of using existing CC content with an appreciation for why it's there with a more long term goal of getting them to make informed decisions about whether they want to be a part of this movement and perhaps become contributors themselves.
As a quick follow up to yesterday's post 'Free to Take? Free to Give!', I wasted no time in plugging the idea of Creative Commons (CC) in my classroom. With both a Year 9 and a Year 7 class, I asked them if they knew anything about Creative Commons and, if so, what did they know. There were some interesting responses like, "Isn't that the 'CC' at the bottom of a YouTube video?" but, perhaps most unusual was that there were more Year 7s that were not only aware of CC but also familiar with what it meant; at least to some degree. I suspect that if I looked closely at which class those students were in in Year 6, many of them would have been in Sam Sherratt's classroom. Whether my hunch is correct or not, kudos to the NIST elementary staff for their efforts in emphasizing this in the curriculum.
The conversations with each class were interesting and I introduced them both to the CC image search engine, compfight.com. Most promising though was in my discussion with the Year 9 class. When we started, very few were familiar with the concept of CC, let alone interested in taking part but after about 20 minutes, I would say that most students seemed to see the value in not only the taking of photos/information but, more importantly, the value in sharing your own creations. Once I felt I had most students at least understanding the value of sharing through CC, if not ready to jump on board, I ended the discussion with an example shown to me by Alec Couros at Learning 2.011 in Shanghai this past weekend.
Alec is a big supporter of CC and shares many, many things online through CC licensing including information, pictures and videos. One video he took of him helping his daughter to ride her bike for the first time caught the eye of the makers of this Nokia advertisement in the UK and they asked him for permission to use his video in their commercial. When I explained to my students that he was able to put a bit of money into his daughter's college fund just because he decided to share openly online, I think that spark a little more interest.
Anyway, I have more classes to bring on board but so far, so good. I'm starting with a strategy of using existing CC content with an appreciation for why it's there with a more long term goal of getting them to make informed decisions about whether they want to be a part of this movement and perhaps become contributors themselves.
Wednesday, 14 September 2011
Free To Take? Free To Give!
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Creative Commons (CC) is a non-profit organization based out of California, founded in 2001. They have been the catalysts behind a movement to freely share creativity, especially through digital means like the internet. In internet years, this is practically an ancient ideology and yet, it still seems to be having trouble gaining traction in the general population.
This past weekend, I had the pleasure of taking part in the Learning 2.011 conference in Shanghai, China. The Learning 2.011 conference is a gathering of educators that share and discuss effective use of technology in teaching and, more importantly, learning. One things that struck me about the people at this conference is that they are not normal. Before any of you in attendance take offense, please know that I actually mean this as a sincere compliment. While it was certainly not normal that about 75% of those in attendance at the conference were using Mac computers (compared with about 12% of typical households), it's also not normal to see so many quality professionals give up the rights to their creative efforts. So this begs the question, "Why isn't this the norm?" and "What prevents people from sharing their creative efforts for free?"
The quick, easy answer that jumps to mind is 'greed.' When people put effort into the creation of something, traditionally, the expect to be compensated. This makes sense, as people do need to feed themselves and their families. But this is definitely an evolving concept. There is an iconic slogan used by technology activists that goes, "Information wants to be free." And while this slogan is embraced by this particular group, it is actually used somewhat out of context from the original quote from Stewart Brand which says, "On the one hand information wants to be expensive, because it's so valuable. The right information in the right place just changes your life. On the other hand, information wants to be free, because the cost of getting it out is getting lower and lower all the time. So you have these two fighting against each other." As you can see, there's quite a bit of context to the quote that changes the meaning but, in his book 'Free,' Chris Anderson summed it up nicely by saying that common information wants to be free and rare information wants to be expensive.
The idea being that the cost of publishing information on the internet, be it a blog, a photograph, a video or anything else you can think of is quite an inexpensive endeavour but the cost of having a blogger or a photographer or videographer come and produce a custom tailored presentation or product for you is very specialized and thus a more valuable endeavour for the content provider. In this case, there is still a monetary valuation of the person's work however the stream from which the money comes has just shifted from many people paying a small sum for more general information to fewer people paying larger sums for more specialized and tailored information.
Some rights reserved by ryancr
To bring this back to an educational point of view, I must admit that while I have been familiar with Creative Commons for quite a long time, I have been hit and miss in my enforcement in it and it really comes down to laziness on my part. I can make all the excuses in the world (my favourite tending to be that I'm so pressed for time with the constraints of trying to fit all the MYP Technology criteria into just a trimester that I don't have time to teach creative commons properly) but really, I'm doing my students a disservice and I'm going to be putting a much bigger emphasis on CC and sharing or information within (and, in turn, outside of) my classroom.
I have made an effort so far this year to include more skill building (such as online searching, assessment of website reliability, etc.) but it has felt a little bit tacked on and not quite organically part of our units. If anyone reading this has had success with fitting in skill building seamlessly into the MYP Design Cycle, I'd love to hear more about it.
Creative Commons (CC) is a non-profit organization based out of California, founded in 2001. They have been the catalysts behind a movement to freely share creativity, especially through digital means like the internet. In internet years, this is practically an ancient ideology and yet, it still seems to be having trouble gaining traction in the general population.
This past weekend, I had the pleasure of taking part in the Learning 2.011 conference in Shanghai, China. The Learning 2.011 conference is a gathering of educators that share and discuss effective use of technology in teaching and, more importantly, learning. One things that struck me about the people at this conference is that they are not normal. Before any of you in attendance take offense, please know that I actually mean this as a sincere compliment. While it was certainly not normal that about 75% of those in attendance at the conference were using Mac computers (compared with about 12% of typical households), it's also not normal to see so many quality professionals give up the rights to their creative efforts. So this begs the question, "Why isn't this the norm?" and "What prevents people from sharing their creative efforts for free?"
The quick, easy answer that jumps to mind is 'greed.' When people put effort into the creation of something, traditionally, the expect to be compensated. This makes sense, as people do need to feed themselves and their families. But this is definitely an evolving concept. There is an iconic slogan used by technology activists that goes, "Information wants to be free." And while this slogan is embraced by this particular group, it is actually used somewhat out of context from the original quote from Stewart Brand which says, "On the one hand information wants to be expensive, because it's so valuable. The right information in the right place just changes your life. On the other hand, information wants to be free, because the cost of getting it out is getting lower and lower all the time. So you have these two fighting against each other." As you can see, there's quite a bit of context to the quote that changes the meaning but, in his book 'Free,' Chris Anderson summed it up nicely by saying that common information wants to be free and rare information wants to be expensive.
The idea being that the cost of publishing information on the internet, be it a blog, a photograph, a video or anything else you can think of is quite an inexpensive endeavour but the cost of having a blogger or a photographer or videographer come and produce a custom tailored presentation or product for you is very specialized and thus a more valuable endeavour for the content provider. In this case, there is still a monetary valuation of the person's work however the stream from which the money comes has just shifted from many people paying a small sum for more general information to fewer people paying larger sums for more specialized and tailored information.
Some rights reserved by ryancrTo bring this back to an educational point of view, I must admit that while I have been familiar with Creative Commons for quite a long time, I have been hit and miss in my enforcement in it and it really comes down to laziness on my part. I can make all the excuses in the world (my favourite tending to be that I'm so pressed for time with the constraints of trying to fit all the MYP Technology criteria into just a trimester that I don't have time to teach creative commons properly) but really, I'm doing my students a disservice and I'm going to be putting a much bigger emphasis on CC and sharing or information within (and, in turn, outside of) my classroom.
I have made an effort so far this year to include more skill building (such as online searching, assessment of website reliability, etc.) but it has felt a little bit tacked on and not quite organically part of our units. If anyone reading this has had success with fitting in skill building seamlessly into the MYP Design Cycle, I'd love to hear more about it.
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