I have just completed a project to integrate 2D animation into the curriculum.  I have organised the resource by curriculum area and in year bands in order that teachers can see the kinds of activities they could contmeplate undertaking with their students, in particular curriculum areas.  The resource caters for students from Year 1 through to Year 10.  In this first iteraction of the document I have just concentrated on Literacy, Numeracy, Science, Social Studies and Te Reo.   I have no doubt that I will be adding more ideas to more strands of each curriculum area and to other curriculum areas over the coming weeks!

The screen shot above shows how a teacher of years 7 and 8 might want to use animation in a science lesson.  In the resource I have sometimes given  a simple over view of the ideas for activities (as above) and then in other cases more complex and detailed ideas for activities.  Each idea has been graded by level and curriculum strand as well.  In addition I have listed the kinds of tools that would deliver the outcomes stated in the activites as well as stating where the students should save their work to and how a teacher might then re-use the resource created by the students for futher learning.  Finally I have indicated where each activity might have other curriculum area integration potential.

Now that I have done this document I will be turning my attention to other elearning activities such as integrating digital cameras, video camears, capturing student voice etc and how these can be integrated into each curriculum area and year level.  Watch this space.

The second edition of the Edudemic Magazine has been published this weekend. To read the magazine you will have to download the app and then either subscribe to the magazine for 6 months or purchase individual articles.

I am delighted to announce that the article I submitted a couple of weeks ago is the subject of the front cover. What is more I have been asked to submit another article for the March edition, although at the moment I have no idea what the focus for this next article is to cover. This month’s issue of the magazine has the following articles:

What Apple’s Education Initiative Really Means for You - Terry Heick

Technology: Changing the Expectations for Individuals with Disabilities - Dr Robin Parker

How Technology has Education on the Cusp of Revolution - David Kinane

iPads and Classrooms: Towards Meaningful iPad Integration - Francisco Nieto Salazar

Technology Versus the Student - Jesse Langley

New Web Tool Amps Up Google Docs and Turns Collaboration up to 11 - Erin Klein

Why All Ed Reform Fails - Terry Heick

All in all a good read.  And just to whet your appetites, here is a snippet from my article, but to read the full transcript you will have to download the February issue.

The evolving app based world we are currently entering into is enabling educators to cheaply create bespoke suites of tools that meet the personalised needs of their students. What is more, many of the apps that appear on their mlearning devices have a web based counterpart. Often the app is free as is the web based service. The benefit to learning is that students have multiple modes of access to the tools that enable them to demonstrate their learning, in this case to capture and publish their voice. The opportunities for sharing learning are becoming ubiquitous, location and time independent. School is always on, open and accessible as a result.

Enjoy the read!

I have spent the day with the students of Upper Harbour Primary. We have been looking at using tools such as the iPad to capture change over time using apps such as those highlighted here.  They will be using their iPad or iPod’s next year to capture this kind of change over time.  The web cams in their computers can also be used to record time lapse videos really easily by downloading and installing the free version of Sam Animation from Tufts University.

The following site has some good examples of time lapse in the wild, to get students thinking about what they could make the focus of their time lapse work.  However, speeding up the world of the slow in the class or the school environment is made easy with the techniques I demonstrated to the students today.  Once I got home  I set up my camera and took the following study of the clouds.

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:

[

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.

The guys at Google Labs have just released this great tool to enable SWF files to be converted into HTML5 format, which means that flash videos can now be played on i-devices such as ipod touch, iphone and ipad. What is really cool however is that as part of the service a QR code is created so that these self same devices can scan the code and link to the resource to be viewed immediately as a test, the link only lasts 15 minutes however.  Once you have ascertained that the conversion has worked, you can download the new HTML5 file and then upload it to your chosen site. This will prove to be invaluable in an e-learning situation. I am now going go away and devise some scenarios where this facility can be used efficiently.

Check out the QR code I have created, using the AddThis plug in for Firefox, above and play the SWF animation on your i-device courtesy of the HTML5 conversion.

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.