Making My Job Redundant: Using Technology to Work Smart, Not Hard

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Since starting the COETAIL program, I've been converted to being a big supporter of Creative Commons (CC) as a licensing method (see: 'Why Wait!?' and 'Free to Take? Free to Give!'). As such, I've taken the time with my classes to talk about what it means, how to find images, how to properly credit images and assuring them that it is, in fact, Creative Commons and not Creative Comments. As with anything in teaching (or, perhaps more accurately, in learning), concepts are easier to understand when they're part of a tangible experience. For my Year 7s, they are doing some Presentation Zen styled presenting using CC images and my Year 8s are using image editing software as part of their unit which means that it is easy to teach about CC in context of their units.

[caption id="" align="alignright" width="384" caption="CC Logo from creativecommons.org"][/caption]

The challenge I've encountered is that explaining all of this takes a fair bit of time and I know that some of my lessons when teaching about this have been a bit directive and lacking in activities to keep the kids interested.  Granted, I'm lucky that most of the students I teach are pretty attentive and eager to learn so these lessons still go reasonably well but despite this, I still don't get that feeling of complete satisfaction that I've taught what is not only a useful lesson but also a fun lesson for the students. The other problem with using CC images is that even though it's fairly simple, the fact is that it is a new concept for most students and it takes practice to get used to it. Inevitably, I regularly end up having to repeat the steps of how to reference a CC image or remind the students what each of the different licenses mean.

So I decided that a bit of hard work up front would actually end up being less work in the long run and I did a screen recording about how to find CC images; what all the licenses mean; how to insert images into a Wordpress blog; how to insert images into Powerpoint; and finally how to credit them in either of those media. What I had was about an eight minute video which taught everything that used to take me four or five times as long to teach at the front of the class. At first, I thought, 'Great! I can post this to Screencast and I've just cut my lessons down by at least a quarter!' But then I started thinking beyond that initial instruction lesson and I thought about students that just wanted to be reminded of the licenses or who only wanted to know how to credit an image in their blog. Did I really want them to have to filter through an eight minute video to find the information they needed? More importantly, would their attention spans allow them to bother scanning through an eight minute video? I decided the video wasn't good enough to actually solve the problem of me having to repeat the same thing over and over again.

I took some digital scissors and cut the video into three smaller, more digestible episodes: one focused on how to find the right image and understand the licenses associated with them; another video about adding and crediting in a Wordpress blog; and another video about adding and crediting in PowerPoint (I'm sure most Keynote users could find some value in that too). To help to better explain the licenses, I whipped up a quick FLash animation to focus on the four licenses the students would likely encounter and added that to the first video.

As my video tutorial had now become a short series of interrelated videos, I decided that Screencast might not be the best avenue for distributing these and I decided instead to post to YouTube so that I could take advantage of their easy annotating feature to make sure all the videos were effectively linked to each other. I began by posting the video about finding images and understanding licenses (shown below) and adding links at the end to either the Wordpress video or the PowerPoint video so that it suited my students regardless of whether they were making a presentation or writing a blog.

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZOJYnbK2wbA[/youtube]

I used this first video in class a couple of days ago with my Year 7s. Not only did it take much less time but when I saw that class again today and reviewed the information from last lesson with them, they even seemed to retain the information better. It also came in handy when students were asking how to insert and credit the images in their presentations that I could just get them to follow the link to the video for adding and crediting images to PowerPoint from the class page on our school network. This freed up my time to sit and focus on helping the students who were struggling a little bit with understanding the assignment while those that understood but had simple, clarification questions could easily find their answers through the video. I haven't field tested the video for inserting and crediting in Wordpress but I'm guessing it will yield similar results.

There are definitely some things about the tutorials that, given more time, I would change or improve. Some of the timings are perhaps a little rushed but that's solved easily enough by just rewinding and watching it over. The voice over is far from being up to a Lee Lefever standard as I wish I had had more time to rehearse and record a more solid soundtrack but the ultimate goals - of cutting down teaching time and giving my students a resource that they could return to when needing clarification - have been met so I'm generally happy with the results so far.

Please feel free to use any of these videos with your students (or staff!) and if you notice any glaring errors, please let me know so that I can get them fixed! Happy sharing!

So You Think You Can Tweet?

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Today with my Year 9s, we took a look at Twitter and what makes you want to follow a Twitter link or not. As an example, we looked at the @mashable account as the content was relevant to our Social Media unit and Pete Cashmore and his team are generally quite effective at promoting their articles through Twitter. Typically, ignoring the endless parade of retweets, any given Mashable article is likely to be tweeted at least twice through the official Mashable Twitter account. This is where I started with my students.

[caption id="attachment_61" align="alignleft" width="300" caption="Mashable Tweet 1"][/caption]

We looked at two tweets from November 18th. The first tweet was a pretty straightforward, factual approach to reporting the 25 most commonly used passwords whereas the second tweet took a more emotive approach to promoting the same article. When I polled one class of Year 9s about which link they think would be more enticing to follow, they were split almost 50/50 as to which one they would follow. Interestingly enough, the second class (of the two Year 9 classes I teach) was almost unanimously more intrigued by the second approach which listed some of the top 25 most common passwords right in the body of the tweet.

[caption id="attachment_63" align="alignright" width="300" caption="Mashable Tweet 2"][/caption]

After some discussion about why Mashable might tweet the same article in different ways, the main conclusion that the classes reached had to do with different people having different interests and therefore Mashable was trying to appeal to many different kinds of people. With a little prompting, about where Mashable's 2.5 million followers are located, some clever students realized that Mashable also has a global reach and therefore would send tweets to increase the chances of people in different time zones being exposed to the tweet/article.

The students' next challenge was something that, going into the activity, a lot of them didn't think was actually challenging. Split into four groups of four, each group was assigned a recent Mashable article to read. Once they had read it, each student needed to condense the content of the article into 120 highly interesting characters (140 character Twitter limit minus room for a link to the article) that would encourage a reader to follow the link which would be part of the tweet. Once each person had created their tweet, we posted them anonymously on the front screen and, using Kwik Surveys (worth a look if you're looking for free, online surveys with more features than Survey Monkey), we had the class rank the tweets in order of how likely they would be to follow a link associated with the given tweet.

As you might expect, there were some discrepancies in the quality of the tweets. Some students struggled to understand the character limit (one student submitted a lengthy 265 character tweet). Some students perhaps didn't fully read the article or understand the full meaning of the article and therefore were a little off the mark with their tweet's description of the article. Overall, though, the tweets were reasonably well done.

In one Mashable article, Sarah Kessler writes about Facebook's recently revealed user-tracking secrets. The article describes such Facebook practices as how they install cookies on users' computers; how they keep tracking data for 90 days; and what browsing behaviours it logs. Here, unedited, were the four proposed tweets from this group of students:

1. Facebook keeps logs that record your past 90 days of activity


2. Facebook revels their secrets on user- tracking.


3. How Facebook tracks its 800 million users!!


4. Facebook tracks users by installing cookies on computer.

[caption id="" align="alignright" width="350" caption="Cookies: Too Technical for the Average Person (Photo from Flickr by Sifu Renka)"][/caption]

When polled, 75% of students in this class selected option three as the tweet that would most interest them to follow the link to the article. When we discussed what made that tweet more intriguing, some of the key points that came from the students were that it used a fact; it quoted a large number that added to the amazingness of the information; and the exclamation marks added a sense of urgency as if you needed to see how Facebook is tracking you by following the link to this article. Tweet four was the least successful and when asked why students thought that was, most of them didn't understand the concept of a cookie (mental note: fix that) so the technical terminology got in the way of the communication.

As we looked at the other articles (Demi/Ashton's divorce; Annoying Orange TV show; smartphone dating etiquette), the students started to realize that there is, in fact, a skill to composing a concise, interesting and informative tweet. Some key advice that the students decided upon was as follows:

1. Know your audience

• If you want followers that are not just your friends, you should try to keep your tweets 'professional'


• Carefully consider how grammar, spelling and slang will affect how people perceive the message being tweeted


• Use language that is suitable for your followers

2. Know the content

• Sometimes the most interesting part of the article is in the middle or at the end; make sure to read the whole article to make sure you understand it


• Make sure your tweet effectively reflects the article; you don't want to disappoint someone when they follow the link expecting something else because you will lose their trust to follow future links


• Make it clear what the article’s about but don’t give away the whole story in the tweet (‘leave them wanting more’)

As the class wound down and we debriefed and reviewed what had been learned during the lesson, I gave an informal exit poll about writing tweets. Despite their attitude at the start of the class, most of the students agreed that writing a tweet is easy but writing an interesting, informative tweet that attracts a reader’s attention is quite a challenging skill. Communicating clearly and effectively is a challenge for anyone and Twitter is a great proving ground for cutting to the core of the information.

Flipped PD: Walking the Talk

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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.

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.

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 21^st 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.

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).

NIST AUP ICT (For COETAIL course) NIST Sep 2011 - V4

View more presentations from Jago Gazendam

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...

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