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.

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.

Carolyn Marino, Principal of Westmere School, reflects here on the impact of e-learning upon the school and students as a whole in 2010.  In this discussion she raises some interesting points that will need to be un-packed in the weeks and terms to come.

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These two videos represent the final two interviews of 2010.  Jenny and Vashti have been integrating e-learning into their classrooms in 2010 and you an see and hear their reflections in these two videos.  Vashti has also recorded student reflections and once she has posted that video I will link to it here.

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I was working at Westmere School today it is a school where e-learning has really taken off in the last year.  I have been working with the team for about 18 months now and in this school you do not just see isolated pockets of e-learning passion, it is rapidly seeping its tendrils into every aspect of teacher planning and into every class of the school, even the SMT are experimenting with social media as an effective communication tool.  The school vision for e-learning states that:

“By 2012 Westmere School will project a philosophy and school culture of e-learning from the front door to the back gate.”

They want you to know from the moment you cross the threshold, something special is happening in school.  Today a great leap was made towards that goal.  I have been working with Mel all the time that I have been associated with the school and I have highlighted her great work before, you can see her e-learning innovations on her class wiki http://room14discovery.wikispaces.com Today Mel invited parents and grandparents into her year 1-2 class.  Nothing unusual here, parents in class is normal.  The difference here is that they were coming to learn.  The students were going to teach their parents and grandparents how to use wikis, customise their computers, use Pivot Stick figure animator, Photostory3 and more.  It was very powerful to watch and it was very empowering for the children.  They were witnessing life long learning, the parents were engaged wanting to know about these tools and where to get them from.  The students wanted the parents to know particularly about how to add content to the wiki as this has become a central plank of the student’s learning environment and they want their parents to be part of it, to engage with it.  The embeded video shows the students in action, the audio quality is not good, the video was taken on my iPhone and the student voices were not strong, but the visuals tell the storyeloquently enough.  These students are in charge of their computers and software and are empowered by it, empowered enough to be effective teachers.  Long may this role reversal continue to be valued at Westmere, it was powerful stuff.

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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…