The Plane organisation in Australia have just posted this.  In the post is a video by our very own Mark Tredwell.  In the video Mark argues again that as educators we are at the confluence of three major global shifts and that it is our duty to prepare students for this paradigm shift.  Mark says that there has never been a better time to be an educator, I agree.  As we go into the summer vacation this video should be something that we should all watch and reflect on.  Then we should consider what changes we need to make to our pedagogies to ensure that our classrooms provide the environment where we create the life long learners that Mark talks about.  Make 2012 the start of your transition.

I came across a post on the Upside Down Education blog today that discusses the effect that furniture can have upon elearning pedagogy in a classroom http://upsidedown.edublogs.org/2011/11/06/learning-spaces/ In my Building a 5th Wall in Your Classroom  I suggest how this can be done by simply moving furniture around.  The presentation is below:

I was inspired to make this conclusion having seen the excellent presentation by David Jakes who describes how the layout of furniture in a classroom has a direct impact upon the learning that it can facilitate, it is well worth a look. http://www.slideshare.net/djakes/would-you-want-to-learn-here-3015221

I have been working with Helen from Woodford Schools, Plymouth, UK for a number of years.  Back in 2007 we started to collaborate between our schools in New Zealand and England.  We used tools such as Skype, Dim Dim, Skrbl to collaborate and I spent many late evenings remote teaching her students in the UK from my desk via web cam here in New Zealand.  The students were not at all phased at being taught in this manner, it was the adults in the room in the UK observing this who had the hardest time!  The collaboration only worked because the two of us at either end of the asynchronous communication plan had energy, vision and drive to see it through.  We had never met, but decided to write and present a paper on our collaboration.  We presented at the VIASL IFIP3.5 conference at the Charles University, Prague in June 2008.  You can read about that here. We wanted to prove that remote teaching and asynchronous collaboration between students could work in a meaningful manner.  I have always been and remain fascinated by the potential of remote learning to reach out to students in remote locations to enable a rich, bespoke and meaningful curriculum for them.  I am currently working on a side project to facilitate such opportunities for students, I am currently dubbing it a school of passions.

I am now about to embark on another round of  remote collaboration with students.  Again I am working with Helen and this time Megan from Wakaaranga School in Auckland.  Our aim this time is to see if students can collaborate, negotiate, design and construct a game in Gamemaker.  They have already been organised into teams of four, two students from the UK and two from NZ.  This team of four will be designing and collaborating asynchronously.  A wiki has been created for them as a staging post for them to share their work.  It is from here that the students will collaborate.  The students will work on their Gamemaker program once they have agreed the objectives and plans for the game, locally on their computers, then usin tools such as Jing or Cam Studio they will take screen shots of the work they have done and submit those to the wiki.  They will then communicate with each other using Talkwheel to monitor what the other groups are struggling with, to share ideas and successes.  However, rather than typing their messages the students will be recording their messages using Audioboo so that they will in effect be leaving ansaphone messages for all to listen to via a hyperlink.  The project is all prepped and is about to commence.

I have to say a big thank you to Patrick at Talkwheel who has been very supportive in setting up student accounts for us and providing me with some training and also to Kate at Audioboo who has offered her help towards this project too.

One of those exercises we are sometimes asked to do is to think of those teachers who inspired us when we were students.  Often we can think of one or two really brilliant teachers who inspired us.  Of course we can also remember those teachers who we do not have such fond memories of.  But the vast majority of the teachers of our memory are grey, bland anodyne half remembered amalgamations of the system that processed us.

I have been giving a lot of thought recently to the issues surrounding student engagement and e-learning.  I have come to the conclusion that it is about time that we as a profession start to ‘market learning.’  Students want to know the relevance of what they have to endure. They want to know that the tasks are authentic to them and most of all engaging. If they do not regard what they are being asked to do as authentic, relevant and engaging to them, they tune out and as a consequence under perform. I beleive that there is a direct correlation between disruptive behaviour and student engagement.

I have said before that students do not NOT want to learn. They most certainly do, but are we helping? With instant access to the  exponential growth of information at their fingertips via Google, they are, I fear, cutting out the middle men, us.  This is why I believe that we as a profession, as an institution, we need to start to market learning.  Why should students want to be in your class, to sit through your prepared course work?  How does what you are asking them to do relate to their world, their future? Is the information you are making them ’soak up’ something that could be found via a Google search inside a couple of minutes? Is your method of delivery speaking to or past the students in front of you.  “You shout and no one seems to hear..”Does that have resonance with your own classroom experiences?

I think that we have become lazy, if not lazy then perhaps complacent.  The nub of it is that in the state run school system we have chosen to be in the classes we preside over. It has been mandated by local laws however that students have to attend or classes, our schools.  They have no choice, they are there in front of us becuase the law says that they have to be.  They may be there in body, but are they there in mind and spirit?  Becuase our students have to be in school, we do not have to do anything to keep them interested or engaged.  They simply have to turn up and we can regurgitate the same old stuff to them year after year. However, if I had to market my lessons to entice my students to be there I would have to work hard to convince them to come into my room.  My lesssons would have to  sparkle. I would have to be better than my competitor just down the hall. I might even have to offer special discounts or extended warranties to keep them.  Students would be weighing up the pros and cons of similar courses on offer, it would be akin to a decision to purchase a Galaxy SII over an iPhone4, each has their pitfalls and each has their killer apps.  In the end it would come down to personal choice on behalf of the student.

Students know who the good teachers are in a school, they have a ranking system, they know the classes where they are engaged and they know the classes where they can bunk off, sleep, disrupt or do whatever.  If your students were given free choice today, without you being able to market your lessons to them.  If they were free to move to the classes of their choice, to build a curriculum around what they regarded as relevant, authentic and engaging to them, how would you fare?  Would your class be brim full of keen students waiting for the next inspirational lesson, or would the proverbial tumbleweed be rolling through your empty classroom?  Are you one of those inspirational teachers who will be remembered clearly 30 years later, for the positive reasons?  Or are you one of the grey ghosts who is biding their time, regurgitating the same course material year after year?

We have to market learning.  Yes there are sacred cows in each curriculum that are not negotiable, but we do not explain why they are so to the students and how these sacred cows will have relevance to them in the future, if not now.  If we can not make this argument, then maybe they are negotiable.  What is true is that we are talking past our students.  They do not get, why we do not get technology.  On the whole we do not use the technology, resources and methodologies that are the very fabric of our students’ existence.  If we did we would stand a good chance of re-engaging them in their learning.

There were two articles in the New Zealand Herald yesterday that caught my eye. One was about student disengageent and what can be done about it and the other was about e-elearning and how e-learning can be used to improve student engagement and learning.  It was all very depressing really and has sparked off more questions than answers.  These articles instantly reminded me of Stuart Middleton’s statistics from his 2010 Learning at School keynote.

Out of this I am again reminded of the following quote I heard but can not recall the source: “Of all the governmental,  commercial and industrial sectors, education is the only sector that commissions its own independent research and consistently fails to act upon the overwhelming evidence for change.”

The internet has been and continues to be, a massively disruptive technology.  Look at what is happening to industry sectors such as news, music, books etc.  They are all undergoing massive changes and education sails on mostly oblivious or conciously ignoring the societal changes happening around it as a result.  It is as if we are saying; if the education system of my father’s generation worked for me, it is damn well going to work for you! (despite the fact I was bored too!)

We know that there is massive underachievement in New Zealand schools.  Students do not suddenly disengage in year 10, therefore every teacher in the system from pre-school to Year 13 is part of a process that produces this disengagement.  Yet, collectively, we do nothing about it. Do we believe that it does not happen in our school, but the school down the road?  Both of the Herald articles point to e-learning as a tool to re-engage and make authentic learning opportunities for the students.  Yet, overwhelmingly,  teachers still resist changing their pedagogy.  Why?

Is complacency at the heart of this?  Subliminally are we as a profession saying to the students in our charge; I choose to be here, but you have no choice, so get used to it?  I hope not, but we do a pretty poor job at marketing learning to our students.  Maybe we should put a little more PR spin into our lesson planning, making the efforts we are asking out students to make a lot more explicit.  Sounds like relevance to me.  Are we also not walking the talk we espouse in class?  We want our students to be innovative, to be life long learners, to collaborate, to be resilient.  Do teachers really demonstrate that in their classroom pedagogies?  When it comes to integrating e-learning teachers tend to be resistant to change, insular, and traditional.  Why?

We keep seeing articles about disengagement, we see class disruptions increasing.  I think that the two are related.  Students do not not want to learn.  With the wealth of information at their fingertips via the Internet they have started to cut out the middleman, us.  In an agrarian export economy such as New Zealand’s we need to ensure that our next export boom is the innovation potential contained in the brains of our students.  It is up to teachers to start to be the change, not to wait for permission from the torpor at the top. We need to re-engage our students in their learning by making it engaging relevant and authentic to them.  E-learning is the key to that innovation.

This is yet another clarion call for change.  But is anyone listening?  Who amongst you has the appetite for change, to be challenged, to re-engage all of our students for the benefit of us all?  Ultimately the failure of our students is a societal failure, one that will make us all the poorer morally and financially.

One of the conversations that I have with school leaders is how they can engage with e-learning, without becoming experts in the tools.  As the most stable element of a school community, principals tend to stay a while; it is imperative, I argue that principals have more than an overview of the whole e-learning plan in their school, they need to actively manage it.

In the past I have seen principals simply delegate the whole project to a keen lead teacher in school, who then has all of the intellectual property for the project.  In time this lead teacher gets poached and then leaves!  The school looses momentum and has to start again.  I argue that the mere fact that a school invests in training and equipment is not enough. The sum of money invested in equipment plus the sum of money invested in teacher training does not equal two, it equals an awful lot more.  It is the value of the ip that is locked into a teachers head as a result of this investment that needs to be actively farmed and protected in order to build a sustainable e-learning model in a school.

Principals and the entire SMT need to see their role in managing e-learning as central to the sustainability of the integration of e-learning and the pedagogical shift that then follows.  I often hear principals say that they do not have the time…  This article from the Connected Principals blog is a timely reminder that all stakeholders need to get on board with e-learning and actively manage it.  This article helps by defining what they regard as the 7 golden rules for technology in schools.

I would want to add that schools should create systems where ip is actively farmed and resources created to build a CPD programme for new and existing staff.  I would also say that an induction programme for new staff is imperative.  With the long lead in time for new staff to arrive it is possible to insist that staff get up to speed with your systems and programmes prior to arrival in school.  An intranet/lms with video tutorials and resources in place for staff to access from outside of school would facilitate this.  Interactive tutorials provide an accurate and timely blueprint of training that is created for new staff.  This releases existing staff from having to sit along side new staff once they arrive  Finally as staff leave then a robust exit strategy needs to be put in place in order to ensure that as much of the ip owned by the school is retained by the school.

All of the above are financial checks, management systems and procedures that a management team can implement.  They can be implemented without having to get into the specifics of e-learning, but will ensure that e-learning capacity and momentum are maintained within the institution of the school.  It will ensure that staff can come and go without the school loosing momentum and ensuring that the significant financial investment that schools are making is not dependent on the passion of one or two members of staff, but can be shared with all members of the learning community that is a school.

Recently in several schools where I am working, staff have raised the issue of appraisal.  As they integrate e-learning into their programmes, they are finding that they and their students are publishing more and more work to the virtual 5th wall in their classrooms.  The publishing of this work online is having an obvious effect on the amount of work being ‘displayed’ on the physical walls of the classroom.

Students like to know that there is a genuine audience for their work and prefer the virtual wall space to share their work, to the physical.  The 5th wall also creates a virtual window for parents into the class of their child which allows them to be part of the learning process of their child and their child’s class.  This clearly assists in the strengthening of the pupil, school, parent triangle.

There is however a dichotomy in all of this.  When it comes to appraisal time many teachers are complaining that they are getting feedback from their SMT that their physical environment is not as ’stimulating’ as it once was, that there is less student work on the wall.  To combat this they have taken to printing off the online 5th wall content and have started to display this on the walls of their classroom.  This is clearly a time consuming exercise for the teachers and a gross waste of paper and printing resources.  It is interesting to note that in these same schools the SMT are complaining at the increased printing costs that e-learning seems to bring, without recognising  their role in this increased cost.

It is clear that whilst teachers in individual classrooms are making the pedagogical shift to e-learning and embracing the change enthusiastically and also reporting that student motivation and attainment is increasing.  However what is also clear is that over the same period the SMT of those same schools have not made the same pedagogical shift.  If e-learning is to be a sustainable initiative in schools it is time for school leadership to shift their thinking and pedagogies too.  Work published on the internet by students has to be acknowledged with equal importance to the work in their exercise books and of that on the wall of their classrooms.  The focus of the stimulating learning environment, like so much else has moved from the physical to the virtual world and appraisal procedures need to keep up and give equal credence to the online world that teachers and students are adding content too.

The latest issue of Interface Magazine is out - issue 29 Term1, February 2011. In my article I discuss some of the issues covered in my Building a 5th wall presentation. So for those of you who did not get to see my presentation, here is some text that can accompany the slides of the previous post:
http://www.interfacemagazine.co.nz/articles.cfm?c_id=32&id=941

The presentation suffered from the morning after the night before and from those who are in Christchurch with other priorities. However, to the 30 of you who turned up so early after the conference dinner the night before, thank you for making the effort. The reaction to the presentation was overwhelmingly positive. It is all about empowering teachers to make the change today as Scott McLeod implored us to make on Wednesday. The presentation is below:

Carolyn Marino, Principal of Westmere School, reflects here on the impact of e-learning upon the school and students as a whole in 2010.  In this discussion she raises some interesting points that will need to be un-packed in the weeks and terms to come.

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