This is why I love what I do. The following quote is a direct copy of an e-mail sent to me today from a teacher whom I worked with yesterday.

After talking to you yesterday, this morning I have changed my desk configuration of each group of 4 students to have access to a computer at the end of their desks, AMAZING, students immediately started working collaboratively, sharing ideas and recording their ideas ( see our wiki- I wonder questions about the Christchurch earthquake). We then put this immediately onto wiki.
My management of the class has immediately changed, I know longer need timetables of when they will get their turn- as they manage that as a group, I am also thinking of more ways to use the computers in a collaborative way.
Thanks for the discussion always is refreshing and stimulating.

I describe myself as a change agent, I put ideas in front of talented and creative teachers.  I make the case for change, they interpret those ideas and act upon them. The subsequent actions of the teachers then stimulates children.  They start to engage at a different level, they think deeper, they find the work authentic and relevant.

In this particular case all a teacher has done is move the furniture, just like David Jakes illustrates in his presentation that I featured in an earlier post, suggests. You can see the results of this change on the class wiki and I am sure there will be more evidence as the days and weeks unfold. http://2010pvsrm04.wikispaces.com/Topic

In my latest article for Interface Magazine I make the case for e-learning sustainability, principally around the notion of IP.  The true cost of the IP locked in a skilled teachers head has huge financial implications for schools.   I believe the impact on a school from the loss of IP, especially e-learning IP,  is not fully appreciated or even understood by many schools.  It is not only the financial impact it is also the momentum loss that also severely hinders and even kills e-learning initiatives.  Creating a climate of sustainability, actively creating strategies to add to a growing database of skills and knowledge are key for maximising the financial return on the massive investment that schools are making in e-learning.  Actively protecting IP in an organisation also creates a resource for new inductees to the school and helps to inculcate an e-learning philosophy within the school that is robust enough to withstand any member of staff, including the SMT leaving.

If maintaining your IP and e-learning momentum is important to you, I am happy to advise you on how you can go about this.  Please contact me.

image ref: http://cr.ucdavis.edu/images/iphone.jpg

Earlier in the week I Tweeted an article from Wired Magazine, it was their cover article which procalimed that the WWW is in terminal decline.  Subsequently the article has also been given a reality check by technologizer’s article which reminds us that life is not quite so black and white and that the screaming banner headlines are just that.

However the app based reality envisioned by the Wired article got me thinking.  Talk of the digital divide has subsided somewhat over the last couple of years, the proliferation of cheaper tools to access the internet has seen to that.  Palfrey and Gasser in their book Born Digital argue that the digital divide was never about equipment, but about skills.  The skills required to effectively work with the exponential explosion of information that the Internet gives us access to and the ablility to make sense of that whilst working collaboratively with our physical and virtual peers.  The key here is that we all have equal access to the information and resources on offer on the Internet.   The Internet has become the great leveller and videos like Karl Fisch’s Did You Know, highlight the potential issues confronting all of us competing on a globally leveled environment.

So what of the app based reality envisioned or predicted by the Wired Magazine article?  This potentially puts access to and control of content back in the hands of the providers and producers. To date making money out of the Internet has been a difficult thing to master.  Wired magazine itself has just made an iPad app for their magazine and Rupert Murdoch is trying to charge for his news content.  How long will it be before the only way to read Wired online is through an app - subscription payment model?   Apps are marketed as code that works, a classic case of “it does what it says on the tin.”  My fear is that if the app based predicitons become reality, then education and e-learning will be the poorer for it.  It will bring back the user pays bad old days, which creates divides, creates information walled gardens, which education will be on the outside of, unless they pay.  The beauty of the open, unfettered net is that creative teachers can design and implement packages, experiences and stimuli catered to the needs of their children.  An app based internet reality will either bypass education completely as the returns are not high enough for developers to spend any meaningful time in that sphere or the apps themselves will be created for mass market appeal and not terribly educationally relevant.  The solution?  Educators should jump on the app band waggon and start to develop apps for schools, either that or the net should remain open to all.

To follow on from yesterday’s post I have been working in Wakaaranga School today and one teacher shared how she is managing the e-learning experts in her class.  She has not created an experts wall, rather she has made the display the students themselves!  With a collection of lanyards lying around from old conference registrations, she has got the students to make their own experts badges in the vein of the image below.  This is a brilliant idea.  The more expert you are the more lanyards you wear.  Which one of the students in her class will be the first to resemble the 80’s A-Team icon “Mr T”?

I have already shared how Mel at Westmere has taken my suggested idea of class experts and has created her own experts wall.  She even went to the trouble of creating and sharing a template for others to use.  I have been promoting the great progress and innovation that Mel has been achieving at Westmere and it is obviously paying dividends. I was in Buckland School yesterday working with their lead teachers from the cluster and they took me to one of the rooms that is powering ahead with e-learning.  To my surprise and delight, there was Mel’s experts wall template and my experts idea thriving on a class wall that neither of us have had input into.  Proving that great ideas need spreading.  The slide show above shows the images from Buckland.

It is really gratifying walking into a school and to see your suggestions, visions and ideas in action.  It has happened to me a couple of times in the last week.  The first was at Westmere School where I work on alternate Thursdays.  I have been working with Mel all year and she has been making great progress on a number of fronts, infact she is leading the e-learning drive in school.  Perhaps it would be better to say that she is driving the e-learning!  She has been using a number of tools that I introduced her to, she has been experimenting with a range of them until she found what she considered a best fit for her and her students.  The tool of the moment and probably for a while to come is http://vocaroo.com I love this tool.  It is so instant, so easy.  The mean time for PD and Vocaroo mastery is about 30 seconds.  Don’t believe me?  Try it for yourself.  If you can copy and paste you already have the required skills!  It is the potential of this simple tool that gives it its educational power and Mel has put it to good use on her classwiki.  She is currently using http://vocaroo.com as a reading running record.  In addition she has got students to reflect on work they have created.  Mel’s site is well worth spending some time on as she has also got the students to reflect on their individual e-learning progress this year.  This class and this teacher and eventually this school are only going to go from strength to strength with their e-learning.

You can visit room 14 here:

Many of you know about and read Interface Magazine.  Many of you will also know that I write for them regularly and this year this has become a more formal affair.  I have just spent the morning writing my latest article for the magazine, which is going from strength to strength.  It recently won magazine of the year, so it is nice to be writing for a magazine that gets that kind of accolade.  For those of you who do not know about Interface, take some time to visit their site.  They publish most of their articles there.  I thought that I might also link to the articles that I have written for the magazine this year from this blog post.  So for your edification and delight here are the 4 articles that I have written this year for Interface magazine, magazine of the year 2010.

Issue 22 term 1 - 2010

Issue 23 term 2 - 2010

Issue 24 term 2 - 2010

Issue 25 term3 - 2010

Slide 21 from David Jakes’ presentation “Would you want to learn here?”

The title of this post is a quote from a principal of a school that I used to work with many years ago.  His statement was voicing a gut feeling that he had about a sense of disengagement displayed by students from the learning environment he and his teaching staff were creating.  The integrated learning model he was developing was designed to to do the exact opposite and engage and enthuse his students.  At the TED Global conference in Oxford this week Professor Sugata Mitra would seem to give some weight to this principal’s statement.  Professor Mitra has been conducting experiments with students and computers in education for the last 10 years, working with porly educated slum children in India.  A report of what he shared at TED Global can be viewed here. In essence he has shown that when students are allowed to learn in a truly collaborative manner, they master computers and knowledge rapidly, without teacher input.  This has huge implications for education and e-learning.  Professor Mitra said that when a teacher was present, or if the students were in a traditional class setting, these inputs acted as an inhibitor to their learning, but when the students were free to collaborate without a teacher present and not in a formal class setting, they shone and solved problems collectively, quickly and with great success.

“I think we have stumbled across a self-organising system with learning as an emergent behaviour,”

If the above statement is true, then what are the implications for teachers in mainstream schools?  It would seem that genuine collaboration, focussed on what the students want to learn and discover is key.  We as educators have known this for a long time, but what do we do about it?  I love the image above, it could be seen as a metaphor for the average classroom set up in schools all over the planet.  One PC to cater to the needs of 30 plus children.  Conventional teacher wisdom says that nothing of any worth can be created with just a single PC in a class, the current trend is for small student to computer ratios and ideally 1:1.  But look again, this image oozes collaboration, the seating and layout is the key here and is a model that should, I think, be copied in classes everywhere.  Create collaborative learning spaces with the computer as the central enabling tool to facilitate this.  Interestingly Professor Mitra says that his project…

” …doesn’t work if you give them each a computer individually,”

The NZC states that students learn best through shared activities in an environment where there is a community of learning where even the teacher is seen as a learner.  Professor Mitra’s students succeeded because they wanted to work collaboratively to solve a goal, not becuase they had been told to do so.  The desk arrangement above would only be successful if the students were working on something that they had a vested interest in.  Ask yourself these questions:  Does your computer layout enable collaboration?    Does collaboration in your class mean that students work on the topics you set?  In New Zealand we are lucky the NZC has given us the lattitude that we need to address these issues, but how many of our colleagues are still frozen, possum like, in the headlights of tradition?  As I wrote earlier this year,” it is the pedagogy. Stupid” Classroom mangagement, and a fundamental shift in teacher pedagogy and not the perpetual search for the e-learning tool silver bullet is the recipie for e-learning success in a classroom.

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I have been working with Lesley for term 2 of this year.  When we first met she admitted that she was not a power user of computers or any e-learning equipment for that matter, but knew that they had potential for positive outcomes in learning.  I was working with Lesley today, reviewing her e-learning work for the term and planning ‘where to next’ for next term.  As part of this review and forward looking  process, Lesley started to reflect not only upon the tremendously positive impact that the use of Glogster has had upon her students and their learning outcomes.  She also shared the tremendous impact that integrating e-learning has had upon her own teaching pedagogy.  She almost went as far as to say that her pedagogical shift has been a renaissance in her teaching practice.  I was so impressed by the passion and energy that she has shown, that I asked her if I could video her and get her to say to camera what she had shared with me.  If you need to use this video to inspire your reluctant staff, please do.  I think that Lesley is an inspiration.

If you have been inspired to have a go at changing the layout of your class in time for the start of the new term/academic year, as a result of the slideshow I highlighted in my last post then this tool might be just what you need.  Using this tool you can play with your space and the furniture within it, from the comfort of your computer and not have to get all hot bothered moving furniture until your design is just right.  http://classroom.4teachers.org/ allows you to do this.  You can create a scale model of your room (imperial units only) and once you have arrived at a design you are happy with, save it and print it off.  Let me know how you get on and share images of your new design layout and the impact it has.