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.

Remember Wordle?  The following site is like Wordle only pumped.  You can add words or link to sites or RSS feeds and you can arrange your tag cloud into a range of masks.  The example here is has been created from the resources page of my blog.  Simply go to http://www.tagxedo.com/app.html Once you have created your tag cloud you can then save your work as either a .jpg or .png for downloading and saving.  No bothersome screen dumps and image editing as was the case in Wordle.  Thanks to http://digitalgoonies.com for the link.

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.

A couple of websites have come out recently that when combined with each other make a perfect storm of potential outcomes for geographers and historians alike.  Whilst some of them are not that old, they may be well known, but it is the combination of all three that has the greatest potential.  The first of these tools that I became aware of was http://dipity.com a grate time line tool that enables a user to create a linear set of events from pretty much any resource at their disposal on the internet.  Then came http://scribblemaps.com which enabled a user to overlay their own content onto a Google Maps page. Here the user can create shapes that might illustrate the phases of development, the alignment of troops on the battlefield overlaid on the modern topography.  In addition the user can then add their own text and images to the map.  The final tool in the triumvirate of tools is the newly launched http://historypin.com this tool encourages users to upload, link historic images of locations and places into a map and pin them to their actual location on the map.  These images can then be compared against the current Google Street view image (where possible) in order that a comparison or an evolution of images can be compared against the present.

Now using the different tools a user can not only put objects in a 2D space of a map but represent that same data in a linear time line and embed all of that information into one source such as a wiki.  Great for cause and effect and making links between information in space and time.  A perfect storm of tools.

The video here is a prototype, but the infrastructure shown to use it is low tech and therefore accessible to schools.  Just imagine the educational collaboration possibilities with such technology.  Judging by the article this came from it might not be that far away either…

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.

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.

The final day of these events is always grueling.  Usually made the more so because the final day usually follows the conference dinner the night before and ACEC2010 is no exception.  Before the final keynote presentation there was lots of auditorium chatter about the excessive exploits of the delegates at the dinner.  I did not attend this dinner so can only speculate on the excesses, but there was evidence of plenty of sore heads and a finish line mentality.

Gary Stager gave the last keynote (you can watch it here.) and said in advance that he was going to be controversial, and he was in equal measures both controversial and entertaining.  He provided no solutions but posed lots of questions.  In one particular salvo he stated that Schools in the form of organization and systems get in the way of what computers can truly do for students and as a result we celebrate the mediocre student outcomes as the work of genius.

Time and again at this conference presenters and delegates alike have all agreed that what is powerful in student use of computers is that content is king.  I am not sure that I have heard the word e-learning in any presentation.   Students need to create content and produce new material of their own and publish it.  This is such and obviously elemental statement it begs the bigger question, why are we not succeeding at this?

Chris Betcher in his presentation said that school should be like Mythbusters, what a great idea, it should, what stops us from creating these kinds of learning environments universally in our classrooms.  I know that some do, but these enlightened ones are the rare exceptions.

This has been my first ACEC conference, but it will not be my last, I thoroughly enjoyed the stimulation that the keynotes and breakouts provided.  As I have said no answers, no solutions but lots of challenging questions that I am going to convert into solutions and answers for our students in New Zealand.  Perth 2012 and the next ACEC conference can not come soon enough.  I may even throw my hat in the ring to share back to the community.

Written offline - 7 April - Hotel has no Internet!

After a grueling day one at ACEC2010 with two keynote presentations and seven breakout sessions, a common theme has made itself abundantly clear.  The key to e-learning success is not based around increased capital outlay on the latest and greatest technology, rather successful integration should be based on a rather more mundane and fiscally more attainable target, sound pedagogy.  However, therein lies the problem.  Schools are finding it easier to purchase new technologies that promise to deliver the e-learning nirvana of integration rather than attack the pedagogical issues of delivery.  Alan November reminded us of this early in the day, saying that we need to ensure that the plan for teaching and learning that currently exists within schools is the right one, before we layer on the technologies, which can then mask the inappropriateness of the underlying pedagogy.

Whilst this message is not new to me, it has made me think all day long about the approach that I should be taking in a school as a facilitator.  I am working on a post as alluded to in a previous post based on a conversation that I had whilst flying over the Melbourne and reflects the kinds of conversations that I have regularly in schools as a facilitator.  The conversations are loosely based around the following kind of statement:  “Well we have purchased the equipment, now what? What is e-learning and how can I make it work in my class?