Yesterday I was working in Maureen’s class. She wanted me to start work on several projects with her class. The first of these projects was using Sam Animation in her numeracy programme. She wanted the students to create an animation using concrete materials such as units, tens, hundred’s and Thousands blocks to explain the process, algorithm, technique for subtraction over a 10, 100 or a 1000. The students storyboarded the process, organised the materials in their groups to explain and off they went.

After a little while it became clear that although SamAnimation could do the job of recording, a camera and iMovie in her case or Photostory in a Windows environment would have been perhaps more efficient. However that said, the process illuminated to Maureen a very interesting point. The students could do the maths, but could not articulate the logic of the mechanics of how they understood the maths to work. In other words they each had an algorithm down pat, but they did not fully understand the logic of that algorighm and therefore lacked full understanding. By introducing an elearning element into the numeracy lesson, Maureen has now got some concrete formative assessment data that she will now focus on. This information was only really fully revealed because of the videos the students created.

As you know I have long been an advocate of capturing student voice and this example demonstrates why. We may set up concrete examples on our tables for students to scaffold each other, but without some form of a capturing that conversation, we only see the end result and not the process and the misconceptions or fallacies. As far as Maureen was concerned, based on the results of her class, they all understood the process and mechanics of subtraction, but the student videos yesterday eloquently showed that they know the process but lack the understanding of how this works. Without the understanding, children will find it difficult to apply the process to other situations.

I have been working with a teacher at Wakaaranga over the last couple of months and we have been planning and he has been implementing an open ended programming unit.  The students have been given the task of developing a game that will teach other students about some of the facts surrounding the Treaty of Waitangi.  Today was my first visit to the class and I was in ‘role.’  I had been invited into the class as “Mr Kingdom” an executive from EA Games who was to assess the appropriateness of the students plans, and embryonic games.  I spent some time emphasising how projects such as theirs rely on having good plans and good teams, who all know what they have to do.  I was really impressed with how the students reacted to my observations and “Mr Kingdom” will be returning in a fortnight to see just how well they have progressed.

I was working at Bailey Road School today and it is really pleasing to see how far the school has progressed with its integration of elearning into the daily programme for students.  Indeed I spent all morning working with students showing them how to create, edit, upload and embed videos.  How to add images, videos and voice to Wallwisher stickies and then working with their respective teachers to ensure that the teachers could harness these skills and integrate the learning potential these tools and skills offer into their planning.

I had the pleasure of spending a part of the afternoon in Nat’s class.  The school was running its three way conferencing and Nat has set up system where she is using Evernote with every child in her class and they are using Evernote as an LMS with every child responsible for uploading at least three examples of good work to their Evernote site every week.  In addition in their notes are their test scores their AsTTle results as well as examples of their own work, their goals and evidence to demonstrate that they have attained their goals.  The students then ran their three way conferences and were able to demonstrate to their parents what they had attained and where they were going next.  Each parent has also been given the link to the Evernote site related to their child so that they can continue to drop in on the results and progress that each child will continue to make throughout the year.  The beauty is that as it is a cloud based solution, each student can take their documentation to their next school.

An elegant solution, well done Nat.  The video below shows one of the students running their conference and speaking to their Evernote hosted resources.

Audioboo

Audioboo is not a new service or a new app, but it is a good app.  It is a great tool to use on your iOS devices and also as a web based service to capture student voice.  And for that reason it is a winner, it can be used everywhere and when you do you are in good company.  Stephen Fry uses Audioboo as does the BBC.

It is not necessary to set up an account with Audioboo to record your students’ voices.  However if you do all of your “boos,” as they are known, will be collated into one place and on the Audioboo site you can create your own channel.  If you use the same account on your iOS devices the students can simply record and upload in a matter of two or three clicks, the technology and the app become transparent, which is what makes for excellent blended elearning in a class.  I was using Audioboo in a class last week and the students were working on a range of devices with ease.

With Audioboo you can use it in the classroom in so many ways that they are almost too numerous to mention.  However I have used it as a running reading record for students and also as a resource for students to listen to their own reading and to set their own goals.  With only three minutes of recording time on the free account available to you, the students have to learn not to waffle or to pause their recordings.  It is a great tool to use to capture student thoughts, ideas and concepts and use these recordings to scaffold later work.

In short this app is what good elearning tools should be, greater than the sum of its parts, simple to use, transparent.  Oh and its free!

Audioboo

Audioboo App

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The Hunger Games - Suzanne Collins

Last week I was working in a school where they had asked me to help them integrate elearning into their class programme, specifically focussed around literacy.  I was working with two year 8 teachers who wanted to collaborate together on something over a long period of time, like a term.  As part of my usual ‘interrogation’ I learned that they had ordered a class set of “The Hunger Games” by Suzanne Collins for their classes to read.  And that was all I needed to come up with a plan for elearning in their respective classes.  By the end of the planning, the work had stretched out to two terms but the teachers were so excited about the learning and literacy potential of the unit,  I have no doubt that it will be a success.  I can not wait to get back to the school next term to review their progress and to tweak the plans accordingly.

This whole unit is based on the BIAM challenge, which is traditionally held every November.

The unit of work unfolds like this.  The students will read the book as a class set, we have even ordered an audio copy for those that might be challenged by the level of the text and have also purchased copies to be read on the tablets in the class via the Kindle app.  Pretty standard stuff at the moment.

However what I have proposed is that the two classes then plan and write their own fan fiction extension, back story or parallel story to the Hunger Games.  They will have to collaborate between classes.  This will mean that both classes will have to story board the work carefully to ensure that all are clear on the progression of their story, the characters, their attributes, mannerisms and style of speech.  All of this will be researched out of the original as they read it in literacy activities designed by the teachers and I.  Plus, this same planning rigour will have to be applied to any new characters they want to introduce to their story, again we have planned a series of language based activities to enable the students to have a large lexicon of descriptions, vocabulary, moods and settings to populate their story . As the students flesh out their ideas they will put all of these on a collaboratvie mind map using Mind42.

Running parallel with this planning work,  they will have the chance to read and review other fanfiction work related to the Hunger Games.  Fanfiction has a massive following, the Hunger Games itself has 13 618 stories posted to the Fanfiction site for those fans who do not want to see the series end and want to keep the stories and characters alive.  This will provide an almost limitless resource bank of teen generated written content, which the teachers can use with their students to hone their own editing skills and also their feedback and feedforward skills, as the students will be encouraged to give feedback to other fans on the site about the work they read.

To ensure that the students collaborate, their fanfiction variant of The Hunger Games will be made up of 10 chapters, with five groups in each class being responsible for writing one chapter.   The twist is that one class will write the even numbered chapters and the other class writing the odd numbered chapters.  Therefore, to ensure that there is an overall consistency the students will have to collaborate with each of the groups writing the preceding and following chapters to ensure consistency of style and plot.  I have even suggested that for those less enthused by the writing of this fanfiction genre, these students could create their own graphic novel, using tools such as Comic Life or ToonDoo.

I have also proposed that the teachers use the fanfiction site as a space for the students to launch their draft and completed work, in order that they get feedback and comments from a genuine audience that will know the work they are studying inside out.  They will have a authentic audience  for their work and the feedback will help them to improve the work as they write it.

Finaly when the book is complete, we have planned a J K Rowling style public reading of the first chapter, and not only that the completed book will be self published to the Kindle store where anyone will be able to download and read it for free.  Our students will become published authors.

Watch this space!

I have been working with Tanya at St Joseph’s today.  Most of the day has been focused around integration of iPads into the curriculum.  Consuming content is easy on an iPad, and there are a plethora of paid and free apps that enable you to do just that, passively consume content or never get past enrichment exercises.  The trick with the closed eco system of the iPad is to find quick and easy ways for students to create content that demonstrates their understanding and to post this work to a public space rapidly.  In all of my research with apps for the iPad this is my focus, can students create content easily and how easy is it then for them to share that learning on a wiki, blog, LMS or website of their choice.

Today I worked with some of Tanya’s class to show them the ShowMe app, a free screen capture and annotation app that enables students to write and speak their thoughts and ideas on screen.  We captured a block of text from a book in the library and then had them identify the text features on the screen.  The app is easy to use and within seconds the students were proficient at the tool and were demonstrating their learning.  Now Tanya has a record of what each student knows and this work has now been embedded into their wiki page.  The ShowMe site is a whole community of teachers and you can follow the videos of others, so if you want to scaffold students through concepts that they find tricky there are lots of videos up there for you to choose from and to passively consume.  However it is better to be the ones creating the content in my opinion and sharing it with the wider ShowMe community.  Below is a video I took of the students at work.

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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