Had a great day yesterday, two presentations to deliver and both went well.  I took a bit of a punt on my first breakout.  I have had poor experiences with the internet connectivity when I have presented in Rotorua before, admitedly this was at a Learning at Schools conference and not at a Ulearn.  However, it was still a punt, I invited Patrick from TalkWheel to Skype in from San Francisco to tell the audience about his product and to give a short demonstration.  It went really well.  I had wanted a small intimate room, but got the theatre and 110 delegates!  Apart from the lack of a working mic and the lack of round tables, it went well.  Presentation is below:

The annual Ulearn conference has started with pre-conference workshops happening today and the main conference starting tomorrow. I am presenting all day on Thursday and am looking forward to the networking opportunities that this conference always offers to delegates.  If you are not attending you can follow proceedings on twitter by using the #ulearn11 tag.  I will be updating regularly via Twitter, Facebook and here.  It is always fun, stimulating and exhausting in equal measure.  Due to the 2011 earthquakes in Christchurch the conference is being held in Rotorua for the first time.

I have just updated my Twitter badge for the duration of the Ulearn conference in Rotorua to the one above.  If you would like to add the Ulearn badge to your Twitter icon you can download the image from this link here You will need to be able to add it to your own image in an editing programme that allows you to add layers.  http://aviary.com would be a good online solutio, using the Raven Vector editing programme.  Let’s see how many avatars we can change at Ulearn this year.

I discovered from one of my various feeds yesterday about the new ‘Helicopter View’ option in Google Maps.  So I tweeted it out yesterday:

Today I have had a play with the feature, it is great especially when combined with Jing, so that you can capture the video of the virtual journey.  I would have uploaded an exmple, but the screen shot will have to suffice, the journey I captured with Jing was 916mb in size… To activate the Helicopter view is very simple.  All you have to do is to put in a start location and a destination point in the get directions option of Google Maps, once the route has been calculated, a small “3-D” graphic appears to the right of the first direction, simply click on that and the animation plays.  Depending on your internet connection it may take some time for the information to load, but it is worth the wait.

This is a great feature from Google and I can see so many practical uses for it on websites, in the classroom etc.

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.

I have been working with the Intermediate team at Waiau Pa School all year and in term 2 and 3 they have been building an epic marble run that runs around the entire class.  The class was split into four teams and each team had was responsible for the marble track on that wall.  They had to design a track that linked in with the other tracks on the adjoining walls.  This is their end product:

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My latest article for Interface Magazine has just been published.  The online edition has been out for a couple of days, but the hard copy landed today.  You can read the article here:

You can also collect some principals from my Twitter list.

This post has been written by Lindsey Wright

As technology continues to make its way into classrooms, some
teachers and administrators push back and resist changes that in the
outside world have long been accepted. Advances in technology,
particularly the Internet, have made permanent changes in almost
every sector, mostly to nods of approval. With the exception of some
outstanding examples like online college courses, education is the
only sector that maintains strong resistance to these developments.
Why is this?

Traditionalists as Teachers

The education system is one of the last strongholds of a very strong
sense of traditionalism. While teachers new to the field are more
open to the integration of technology in learning, it’s important to
remember that these new teachers are part of a generation who grew up
with computers and digital technology in their daily lives. When they
graduate and begin teaching, they’re met by a vanguard of teachers
and administrators whose own first contact with technology may have
been chastising their own children for wasting time on video games.

Thanks to continuing cuts in education funding and elimination of
teaching positions, the newest teachers are often the first ones to
be cut, leaving older teachers who view technology as a time waster
rather than as an educational opportunity. These same educators are
likely to also put education on a pedestal, and see it as something
above and separate from all other sectors, something to remain
unsullied by the perceived taint of technological advance. No one
contests that teaching the next generation is an extremely important
charge, the reality is that with technology playing a crucial role in
every other aspect of our lives removing it from the education
process does our children a great disservice.

Researchers in Belgium recently conducted a study that looked at how
teachers’ beliefs impacted the use of computers in the classroom. The
researchers stressed that most teachers’ beliefs and attitudes are
established before they ever see pupils of their own. In fact, a
great deal of their attitudes about teaching and learning are set by
their own experiences as students. If teachers’ beliefs about
teaching are rooted 20 years in the past, how can we break through
and embrace the realities of today’s technological advances and the
potential they have as teaching tools?

Additionally, and partly thanks to cuts in education funding, some
teachers fear being replaced by technology. Some may have concerns
about promoting technologically facilitated learning for fear of
becoming expendable and even superfluous. After all, if learning can
be outsourced to a computer, what need do we have for human teachers?
Truthfully, these teachers have nothing to worry about. No computer
can replace human understanding and, while a computer may be able to
successfully administer a math test or proctor other simple quizzes,
it can’t help personalize math teaching to each student or grade
interpretive essays.

Getting Past the Traditionalist Mindset

How can we get traditionalist teachers onboard with technologies in
classrooms? As teachers who’ve been in the system longer retire and
are slowly replaced with teachers who grew up using technology, the
system will eventually even itself out. However, this is a slow
process and not one likely to benefit today’s children. Instead, we
need to focus on encouraging our current educators to become more
comfortable with the technology that’s already available. By
promoting workshops to give teachers a chance to interact with the
tools in a hands-on manner and present a strong focus on the benefits
these tools provide, we can convince more of today’s educators.

By demonstrating the positive learning outcomes technology can
facilitate and what benefits it can provide students (especially
those who don’t respond well to more traditional teaching methods ),
teachers may be persuaded to move past limiting traditionalist views.
It’s important to emphasize to teachers and administrators that
adding technological tools to schools is not simply for the sake of
promoting technology, but because students need the opportunity to
learn the skills that will be a part of their lives as beyond school.
The benefits of educational technological tools are countless and
traditionalism for the sake of traditionalism is just as problematic
as technology for the sake of technology.

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.