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Imagine a astronautical program in New Zealand- crazy #

Measuring the unmeasurable?

Sometimes it feels like we are trying to measure something too ethereal in education. Having completed my Mindlab assignment on self regulation in ILEs I was acutely aware that most studies relied in conventional data around the core areas to approximate its benefits. Surely the real benefits around self regulation and autonomy will be about, engagement, collaboration, perseverance and real outcomes. How do we really measure these? The collecting of traditional data we are at best a rough guide and at worst missing the real essence. It is after all just a statistical approximation. We had an interesting discussion on the morality of physically measuring student’s brain waves with sensors. It sounded a but too ‘1984ish’ but maybe we could get some real hard data on how engaged students are in learning. This piece of art is about measuring the unmeasurable.

New #playground markings

#playground

Tags and triangles #littlebarrier #tuatara

Had a great trip to Little Barrier. An example of a carefully maintained environment. Something we have to do in education. We just can't do everything. We need to make careful decisions about what is we believe and what is important.

#littlebarrier #tuatara

In Conclusion...

I’ve got to get this out before I go any further. I really don’t like the word ‘e-learning’. It’s like there’s learning and then there’s e-learning. We certainly have our fair share of new words that we use to awkwardly describe our developing educational landscape. Mobile devices, BYOD, digital citizenship, etc. but the term e-learning seems stuck in the web 1.0 for me. That said, we have to use something to describe the different world we are working in and Mindlab is a place that recognises and embraces this. I have enjoyed the course and applaud you for attentions. Big highlights for me have been the physical space, the exposure to technology, the opportunity to meet with other teachers and the chance to work collaboratively with them.

I am not sure that I would have got through the assignments without the support and wisdom of Margo who has collaborated with me on much of our work. (Criteria 7 - Fully registered teachers promote a collaborative, inclusive, and supportive learning environment.) This criteria of course, refers to the classroom but it is surely mirrored in the way teachers work together. Can you believe I went through university without really drawing on this collaborative way of learning and developing ideas?

I’ve learnt that collaboration is essential part of the learning process. It is not a strong part of our current school model. We don’t want to fall into the trap where collaboration becomes groupthink, where we go with the lowest common denominator. It is certainly not everyone doing the same thing, but collaboration at it’s best is a synergy people’s ideas and actions and that’s got to be good for education going forward. The thing that is clear to me is, we don’t have the knowledge, skill or energy to solve the many problems facing our sector.

One of our big ideas that we arrived at collaboratively was the proposed creation of a social media platform like Twitter that safely embraces the nature development stage of students. That is, students work in a bite sized world when communicating. Is this we social media is so used by the young? It is short, fast and flowing. Let’s embrace what works for students. Let’s not wait until we have written a huge report and received some reluctant and untimely comment from a tired and over worked teacher. (Criteria 6 Fully registered teachers conceptualise, plan, and implement an appropriate learning programme.) Let students be at the centre of this communication.

I listed to a great podcast which involved an interview with Gordon Poad. He is an educator who authentically uses the theatre as a context for meaningful learning. He realised that disenfranchised students needed to be exposed to real outcomes to ignite their learning. (Criteria 12- Fully registered teachers use critical inquiry and problem-solving effectively in their professional practice.) This has become the key component in my learning philosophy, that is, learning must be authentic and purposeful. How else can we create the rigor needed for a quality end product? This is something echoed in Mindlab’s problem solving approach to learning.

Gordon Poad points out that within the context of theatre lots of different and important concepts can be covered. You don’t just play at marketing, your play fails if you don’t market it well! This is one of my goals, the ongoing debate and outworking of quality versus authenticity in learning. The national standards model can tend to isolate out the teaching component to achieve quality. If you rip the heart out of our learning (the reason) what are we really achieving?

Adding my art to this blog has been a lot of fun for me but it has also helped me process my ideas. We have to give students meaningful contexts to work in and things that inspire and motivate them. When I read that I could add images, art and poetry to this blog I found a way in. We need to create ‘ways in’ for our students. That is another of my goals.

I hope my posts have been OK. I guess at the heart of this I have felt the blogging platform is about sharing my own opinions and ideas. I have loved the Mindlab experience. You guys are going great things. I loved the physical space that has been created but have found the last two online papers harder to get into. Keep up the good work. Maybe the online / real time experiences need to be rejigged. Let’s collaborate and embrace the digital world it has so much to offer the next generation.

References

Engaging Reluctant Learners Through Theatre - Gordon Poad (Podcast)

https://itunes.apple.com/nz/podcast/rnz-nine-to-noon/id174829950?mt=2&i=363594891

Practising Teacher Criteria and e-learning

http://elearning.tki.org.nz/Professional-learning/Practising-Teacher-Criteria-and-e-learning

Isn't the koru a great symbol of a growth mindset. Not to mention a great flag. I don't think this issue is going away. #koru #art #newflag #newbeginnings

#koru #newbeginnings #art #newflag

It is the People

He aha te mea nui? He tangata. He tangata. He tangata.

What is the most important thing? It is people, it is people, it is people.

I was on an Apple tour in America a few years ago and every school we visited someone was picked out to give a gift and a speech. We did it in the typically systematic way where everyone shared the responsibility, everyone tried to think of something nice and meaningful to say. Towards the end of the tour a quiet but capable maori educationalist had her turn. She stood up and spoke in fluent maori following it up with a beautiful waiata, not only blowing the hosts away but all of us too.

We hadn't had an opportunity to actually hear her speak and while I didn't understand every word, the sentiment and emotion seem to just pour out. We all felt three inches taller being part of it. Of course, from then on, she became our chief speaker and we all stood behind her unified and proud. Maori has a wonderful oral tradition.

It has been pointed in our set resources that cultural is not about doing something because it is right or required. It is about acknowledging the essence of what makes us a collective. What gives us identity.

Our western approach to education has managed to separate knowledge from identity. Learning has been seen as a activity of the individual. It is so encouraging to see Mindlab acknowledging the importance of collaboration and actually out working it in the way assignments are done. National standards again puts the importance of education back on the individual. How can we measure your progress? Well, obviously we need to test you individually. Really this is a culture idea and one that needs to be challenged from and assessment point of view.

Our school has not had a great record with the development of cultural opportunities. Recently we have taken some steps to improve this. Last year we had a school wide powhiri welcoming local elders to our school using local iwi to guide us through the process. We also started our Kapa haka group and set up a specialist teacher.

This is not a strength of mine but there some elements here there really helped. One, was getting the right people in to help and support. This is from a teaching and support perspective. Two, committing school wide to the promotion and adoption programs such as Kapa haka and specialist teaching. Of course the danger with specialist teaching is that we start to rely on that knowledge and skill rather than developing ourselves. However, if we don’t have the knowledge and skill we have to get access to it somehow. Our school still has a long way to go to embed this ongoing development of culture.

So far I have been discussing our responsibility to maori culture but the truth is that Auckland and new Zealand are becoming increasingly multi-cultural. Recently my class had a focus on examining how cultures welcome guests. We compared Samoa, Maori and European welcomes establishing a criteria for a successful welcome. Finally we designed our own ceremony with speeches, waita and gifts. It was one of the most important things we ever did. Welcoming people become a real part of ‘us’ and our created ceremony always gave my goosebumps.

Some of the most moving experiences I have had have been on Marae visits. The experience of physically being welcomed to a place, going through a ceremony of welcoming, singing, speaking and even sleeping together in the wharenui can’t be replicated online. Maybe it is a part of this course that needs to be moved from the online space to a real physical /emotional space.

References

Superdiversity: Children lead the way as cultures combine - NZ Herald

http://www.nzherald.co.nz/nz/news/article.cfm?c_id=1&objectid=11531743

Promoting Positive Race Relations in New Zealand Schools: Me Mahi Tātou

https://www.educationcounts.govt.nz/publications/schooling/10022

He aha te mea nui? He tangata. He tangata. He tangata. What is the most important thing? It is people, it is people, it is people.

Maori Proverb #awesome

How to navigate our #digital #landscape #art

#art #landscape #digital

Successfully Navigating the Digital Landscape

In my last post I alluded to the current educational dilemma of opening up education through digital possibilities and the need to protect students by controlling it. Interestingly I arranged for Netsafe to visit our school last year and they spoke about an important change of emphasis for them. Previously they had seen their role as one of protection. That is, creating a set of rules or behaviours that protect students. For example ‘you must not post anything with permission’. They have changed that focus to creating responsible digital citizens. Really acknowledging that it is impossible to completely protect students from this rapidly expanding universe but rather teaching them how to navigate it. We need to produce responsible and wise digital citizens.

Of course this is no simple task and my big wondering is whether this needs to take precedence over some other ‘academic’ goals. We are, as I’ve mentioned, gripped with the ‘national standards’ approach where moving students to higher levels is seen as paramount. One obsession is writing, and students are getting to write persuasive and explanatory texts until they come out of their ears. We want great writers but, my belief is that we should be focusing on accurate and meaning posts, checking the validity of internet information, understanding how to respond to a negative comment, thinking through the repercussions of posts that are created and quickly posted in the volatile head of an impulsive teenager.

Where do we go with this? How do we walk this precariously new line? Safety versus exposure? I was working with an American school a few years ago. Our class were sharing our experiences of school via our class web page. We talked about what we ate at school, what and where we learnt and played. It was a really interesting exercise but one of my lasting memories was the american school’s website that featured lockdown instructions as the most prominent visual on their website! It was terrible, like this was the most important information they felt they had to get across. We can’t just ring fence students from this world that they are already immersed in.

What is a dilemma that students are likely to face? Well, there are lots. I fact I think things are changing so fast that we don’t even know the technical details of the problems they will encounter. You post something on Snapchat and it doesn’t disappear. Where are selfies often taken? With a mirror and where is the mirror? Do we really want to associate ourselves with a toilet? To me, the of the most important things students are going to have to do is manage their digital lives. Branding themselves carefully and thoughtfully into the person they want to be and project. This won’t just be about writing, it will be about our whole lives as they become increasingly digital.

Kevin Honeycutt talks about getting alongside students. Mentoring them as they digitally and morally navigate.

Students have the potential to say anything they like, to anyone. We need to teach them to look a little bit further into future. Our new digital landscape is recording everything we post. We need to put digital citizenship much higher on the priority list. It will certainly be higher on my priority list.

References:

Netsafe - The Netsafe Kit For Schools

https://www.netsafe.org.nz/advice/education/

Kevin Honeycutt - Collaborate, Innovate and Educate (@22 and 30 mins)

http://edtalks.org/video/collaborate-innovate-and-educate

Edutopia - Digital Citizenship

http://www.edutopia.org/article/digital-citizenship-resources

Social Media

I have a blog to promote devices in our school and what they can be used for. It’s called ‘The iPadpod’. You can see in the link an experience I had when I sent a cartoon via twitter to the well known educationalist Steve Wheeler. He then sent it to his followers and for a brief time I found myself being retweeted more than I had ever been before. It was great. I felt like I had an audience! I also attended a Google Education Summit and low and behold one of the keynotes pulled up this same cartoon. Unlike Steve Wheeler he didn’t give me credit. (but it was still nice).

The experience highlighted a few things for me. Firstly social media has a huge potential for capturing and sharing ideas. Are we dealing with the modern day coffee house that created this meeting of minds in a physical space? (Steven Johnson - Where Good Ideas Come From).

Secondly creating an audience is very important. We all want to be heard and we all have things to say. The endless growing of platforms like, Facebook, Snapchat, Instagram suggest that our desire to tell our story seems to be insatiable.

Making something digital however does not automatically achieve this. Just creating a blog may not work. Looking at the SAMR model for technology, are we just replacing a blog for a book and, like a book, a blog can remain lost in some website backwater just gathering digital dust. Even parents don’t seem consistently interested! We have used Knowledge net, Ultranet, Wikispaces, Blogs and now Yammer. What a lot different platforms! All suffered from requiring time and not being regularly read! At least Yammer allows you to see who’s looking but it’s usually only 3 or 4 parents at best!!!

This blog may fall in this category, that is, creating something with no real audience and a contrived purpose. I think it would be a good idea if you required people to comment on other blogs. We could be part of an interactive process to refine our ideas. I know for a fact that at least five of my friends doing this course have not submitted their blog links and I would love to have had the opportunity to read through their ideas.

The basic principle is still that we need to write to a real audience and/or create an audience. In our assignment for DLC we proposed an educational version of twitter. It would have the closed safety of Edmodo but have a character limitation like Twitter. The thinking behind it this was that Twitter works because it is created in small digestible and searchable chunks and this format is better suited to the development stage of students who often naturally think, read and create in small chunks. Children are natural sprinters and maybe we need to cater better for them. (see DCL assignment)

The key change I would like to make to my practise is the embedding of the twitter style writing proposed in our DCL assignment. Perhaps a student’s biggest audience is their own peers and we need to digitally harness this with effective writing and real audiences. Is social media at the very heart of a big education dilemma at the moment? The past versus the future? Is it about opening up education for students or protecting them? This is something to be addressed in the next post.

References

The iPadpod

http://theipadpod.blogspot.co.nz

Steven Johnson - Where Good Ideas Come From

http://www.ted.com/talks/steven_johnson_where_good_ideas_come_from?language=en

DCL Assignment 3 Lean Canvas

Max Brown, Margo Thorpe and Jason DeForge

Ruben Puentedura on Applying the SAMR Model

https://www.commonsensemedia.org/videos/ruben-puentedura-on-applying-the-samr-model

There’s some truth in this...

Global Trends

We may have retained our old flag with its references to a bygone colonial era but we are part of a worldwide culture of rapid global change. It really is quite undeniable. A parent offered to talk to our classes the other day about his work with data and mobile technology. At an aggregate level (He was very clear in pointing this out) cell phone companies are able to track movement of cell phones. An example he gave was the Chinese Lantern Festival. The company were able to look at the movement of people to see how long and where they stayed. They could tell generally where phones came from and went. It was a bit of an eye opener and if you park the privacy question to the side, potentially very useful. Imagine if you were planning a big event and could pull out last years data. How accurately could you plan and predict for this crowd?

One key figure to come out of the global trends information is that 90% data available has been created in the last two years. That’s an incredible figure. Technology is creating all sorts of data as we use and rely more and more on digital tools. As David Wiley points out, if Amazon can use this data to tailor our online experience with them why isn’t it happening in education?

We certainly have a focus on data in our current model for student improvement. That is, measuring student’s ability, identifying areas of need, targeting those and retesting to see if the teacher has made improvements. Students are measured, schools get measured but this is all applied in a top down model. I wonder if students, nationwide, have much ownership of this process and teachers are too responsible.

My question is, how do we get this data into the hands of students? This is not about measuring school it’s about creating clear learning pathways for students. EROs (quote) report identifies three key things.

Issue One: The need to shift the focus to student-centred learning.

Issue Two: The need to knowledgeably implement a responsive and rich curriculum.

Issue Three: The need to use assessment information to know about, and plan for, students’ learning.

I would argue that the third issue is really about students knowing or owning this data. The data currently collected by schools in fact often creates issue two, that is, in our desire to move students we focus on content and a explicit and barren curriculum. Is this just me, or are we seeing a lot more explicit, out of context lessons?

If data isn’t directly helping students then what are we collecting it for? I think hundreds of hours of teacher and managament time had gone into data analyse.

My challenge is to get this data to students. PATs can now be conducted on online. We should give that feedback directly to students. Gamification gets this. Unless you engage your gamer, the product will never sell. That kind of market pressure just doesn’t exist in education.

A second global trend concerning me is the aging population. This has serious consequences for us economically as fewer younger people are forced to support a large retired population. The now inverted pyramid is precarious and unsustainable. Surely this is a huge opportunity for the education sector. How can we harness this capable and available workforce? Looking at the work of Dave Eggers was inspiring and how he sort to connect students and people keen to help. There is a staying that it takes a village to raise a child. Last year I had some wonderful grandparents helping us repaint our sandpit (it was an inquiry project).

So, reflections for me are, one how do I put data in it’s most useful place i.e. where students can see and own it and two, how can I provide access to people who can help enrich our curriculum and lives?

References

http://www.ero.govt.nz/About-Us/News-Media-Releases2/The-three-most-pressing-issues-for-New-Zealand-s-education-system-revealed-in-latest-ERO-report

TED talk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5ytjMDongp4

Dave Eggers: My wish: Once Upon a School

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5ytjMDongp4

https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2013/05/130522085217.htm

#newzealand #waves

Global influences...

#waves #newzealand

You can do anything you set your mind to. Just look at me: 100 posts.

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