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.

[

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.

Have you heard the one about the C19th architecture, the C20th trained teachers and the C21st students they teach and how they are all mutually exclusive to one another? It is the, if only, argument. Teachers in old schools look enviously down the road at schools that have just been built and are therefore, in their eyes ideal C21 learning spaces. The reality is that an architect who endured 13 years of school in a box of four walls is going to be an expert on the needs of the modern education environment, right? Yeah Right! It is not necessarily true that a modern brand new school will provide the ideal space for the C21 curriculum.  The presentation above makes this point, but slide 28 says it all for me: “The right space does not guarantee success, but the wrong space can make success unlikely.”  This is a challenge for us all.  How can we adapt the physical environment that we have been endowed with to foster the right space dynamics for a classroom of the twenty first century?  Slide 36 says “School is no longer constrained to how far the bus can travel in the morning.  Schools will be the last to notice.”

Room dynamics can be changed as simply as moving desks.  Often we group and organise the furniture based on behaviour minimisation strategies.  Satisfied at our ploy of containment and suppression we then wonder why our pupils are not performing!  What would happen in your class if you designed your students’ desks arrangement around  a class philosphy of engagement, collaboration or interaction?  The last few slides are of  the same classroom, empty of all ornament except the desks and several configurations of the same desks.  You can feel the different vibes and energy from these desk arrangements, imagine the positive and negative impact the arrangement of your class is having on your students.  Over the holidays, move your desks around to create a vibe of engagement.

In a shameless attempt to share the ever growing list of free e-learning tools on my resources page, I thought that I would create an occasional ‘Delicious moments’ post.  The purpose of my post is to remind us all of the myriad of wonderful tools that are available for us to use.  It is also a plea to not continually follow the new, there is so much great stuff that already exists, that we could probably spend several lifetimes using all that does already.  This occasional post is also aimed at bringing awareness to my delicious account and the links that I place there, not all of those links are on my resources page, so you need to visit both.  Finally, the ‘Delicious moments’ posts are a chance for me to trawl through a range of the tools I have collected and collate them into similar groups.  This first post is music, not a strength of mine, but I am sure that there are many of you out there who will be able to make more of these tools than I ever could.

Freeplay music:  this site has thousands of tracks from different genre’s that are free for school use.  Please take the time to read their licensing page, as you can not publish their music in any capacity other than for school based activities.  Despite this, this is a great resource for schools and students to use.

Listen music:  This tool allows you to search thousands of music artists, even really obscure stuff, find their back catalogues, sample some tracks from albums and even listen to whole albums in some cases.  The site links you to the appropriate download sites to purchase the music and also has links to the biographies of the artists, album art and lyrics for every song.  A great site.

Mynah:  This is one of the suite of tools in the Aviary collection.  This tool is rather like Garageband in look and feel with pre-recorded loops for you to experiment with, multi track recording and mixing capabilities, except that this tool is on the net, enabling anywhere working and entirely platform independent.

Audiotool:  This tool must  be the best music creation tool on the net.  It allows you to create and mix your own music, generated from a range of tools that you select and plug in, complete with cables.  Each tool looks and operates like its real life counterpart, enabling great levels of control and creativity for your students.

There are many other tools for music creation and recording in my various repositories of data, I hope that this has whetted your appetite for more and to take some time to look through the lists and in the first instance spend some time with the four above.

I have been working in this school since the middle of last year and in that time some tremendous changes have started to happen.  E-learning is starting to put down some strong roots and is well on the way to being an integral part of a significant number of the classrooms there.  There is still plenty of work to do, but the images above demonstrate one of the techniques that I use to foster a climate of independence in students so that they can achieve their learning goals.  To manage the different rate at which students master different tools at their disposal, I encourage the development of a class experts system.

In this particular year 2 classroom the teacher has adopted this idea and  made a wall display where students can pin their own images against a range of skills that they have mastered, it is in effect a community bulletin board of the type that you see in a supermarket.  Look at the range of skills these students have mastered in the images above.  It is a visual guide for other students who need additional support, they know who to go to, other than the teacher, to seek help.   It is an e-learning equivalent of  the”See three before me” classroom management strategy.  The bulletin board process creates a conveyor belt of skills acquisition, so what happens when everyone in class can do the same skill?  The students take a photo of themselves with ‘thumbs up’ and pin that photo by the now redundant support service on the bulletin board, this particular solution was devised by the students in this class themselves.

Running in tandem with this in class initiative, other students within the school have created their own ‘Yellow Pages” adverts and have put them into a binder.  These adverts again advertise which e-learning skills an individual student is willing to offer support for.  The key difference here is that this binder is displayed prominently in the staffroom.  These adverts are aimed directly at the staff and staff are seeking help from their students.  The benefits of this role reversal can not be underestimated where learners become teachers and teachers become learners.

http://www.sonyclassics.com/layercake/index_flash.html

As I work in schools with a wider and wider range of teachers, my ideas for the layer cake are starting to crystalise.  I was working in a school recently and the teacher I was with had an “Aha!” moment.  She had made a pedagogical, if not that then a conceptual breakthrough about e-learning and how it might look and be delivered within the space she teaches in.  It is her quote that is the title of this post.  I am still working on the full variant of the Layer Cake post, but do not want to release it too early, until I have fully ironed out the wrinkles myself.  However, in parallel with the Layer Cake e-learning methodology that I am developing I am also developing support materials in the form of templates, resources and rubrics etc to support teachers once I am not working with them.  I shall be devoting more time to this entire endeavour in the coming days and weeks, but work is un-relenting at the moment, which is good!  It is also clear that there is a desperate need for retro fitting the new paradigm/pedagogy/methodology, call it what you will that is e-learning to good many schools and teachers alike.  All new inquiries welcome.

Today I had my first play with an iPad.  I have been building up reservations about it in the days prior.  Comments from Fiona in the last post pointed out that the unit is a content reciever and not a content creator.  Content creation and publishing  is what we want for education.  The chatter seems to be more about what it can not do and what it is lacking, rather than what it can do. Today I tried to use tools such as http://vocaroo.com and http://fotobabble.com and the lack of an Adobe Flash facility on the iPad rendered these sites useless.  However, on the fotobabble page I was prompted to download the fotobabble app from the app store.   Online tools such as Vocaroo and Fotobabble are brilliant  for students to create and publish content quickly and would be the kind of utilities that I would want to use with a tool so mobile as the iPad.

It is the locked in nature of it that worries me, all programs to be installed on the iPad will either be created or vetted by Apple.  Today as part of the discussions about its functionality for education purposes, or lack of it, we were developing workarounds using Drop Box etc.  These solutions are clunky at best.  The iPad can not surf freely due to the Flash embargo, maybe I am missing the functionality point here and am wanting to bend the device to meet a need it was never intended to meet, but still, not supporting Flash?  I have heard that Google docs can be viewed but not edited, what is the reasoning behind this?  I had hoped that this tool would prove to be a boon for education, but in this first iteration it is too locked down, why I am not sure, other than pandering to my dark Orwellian marketing theories that I could entertain on behalf of Apple.

If the machine can enable content creation, if the installation of third party software via the Internet is enabled,  if open surfing to Flash enabled sites occurs, if it gets a camera and a USB port, the iPad still has the potential to be a real winner.  As you can see from my images it is smaller than an average NZ school exercise book and almost as thick, it is light and very intuitive to use the tools and apps we have been allowed to install were fun, but not educationally significant, early days I know.  I liked it.  I liked its feel, weight and interface.  It lacks the educational substance, and freedom that I personally desire.  But who knows by the time the 3rd black sweatered and overly orchestrated launch comes round it might be a tool that has education potential without clunky work arounds.

I am working in two different schools tomorrow.  In the morning I am working with teachers on an induction programme I have developed to get new staff up to speed with the systems and technologies specific to that school.  The aim of the programme is to ensure that the individual teachers get up to speed as fast as they can, to ensure that students do not experience a time and service delivery lag as one teacher swaps out of a class and a new one walks in.

In the afternoon I start working with a new client.  We will be working on their e-learning initiatives for the rest of the year and specifically focusing on 2011.  We will be starting the ball rolling by getting the e-learning policies and proceedures in place.  Getting the foundation right is critical for e-learning success and again I have developed a range of tools to guide senior management through this process.

However, our afternoon is likely to be hugely overshadowed by the new iPad that the school has just purchased via the US.  The school and I are very keen to see how we can exploit this tool for the education market and we believe that we are the first school in NZ to implement this tool.  I have already been approached by an iPhone developer who is keen to also develop apps that can be distributed via the app store education specific software tailored for the iPad.  Tomorrow should be fun.