Community UFB access

Government announces that communities will be able to leverage off their local school ultra fast broadband connections

http://beehive.govt.nz/release/green-light-schools-digital-community-hubs

Opens up lots of possibilities

Constructing learning...

How often are laptops nothing more than $1000 pencils as schools move to their much lauded 1:1 programmes?

In our own school 1:1 programme we have been working hard to make sure that we focus on the learning not the hardware, and that we look at moving as quickly through the Substitution and Augmentation phases to the Modification and Redefinition phases of the SAMR model.

We have more and more staff using Google Forms as a mechanism for helping students to collaborate and construct knowledge, and as we were sitting in another planning team meeting discussing our own 'next steps' in our programme of development I recalled a very simple technique used by Alan November in a Master Class I attend with him in Brisbane earlier this year at the K12 Edtech conference.

Alan asked three members of the audience to each contribute to a shared Google Doc, each recording different aspects of his presentation from the day. With over 300 people (I think) in the Master Class it was impracticable to have everyone editing the document, but the document was shared with us all so that we each took away our own record of the day's proceedings.

This technique can quite easily be adapted for use in a school classroom, and with a slight tweak gains power over  simple record. Here's how I plan to do it next year.

The students will be allocated to a group of three. They will create and share a Google Doc focused on a specific class topic. The Google Doc will have two columns. The left column will be a 'record' of the content. In the right hand column they will record their key understandings of the content. This is where they will note 'aha' moments, or maybe their reinterpretation of the content in a way that makes sense to them. They might record their own examples that help them to make sense of the content.

Why?

1. They are working collaboratively to make good notes, and with the right group partners they can model note taking ideas, and effectively coach each other in this skill.
2. The collaborate in creating good notes
3. They share understandings of the material with their own examples and 'aha' moments
4. They have a record stored in Google Docs that is not easily lost and, putting it into their subject folder created by Teacher dashboard, their material is kept safe and easily accessible
5. As their teacher I can look at their notes and add helpful feedback in a way that is more difficult (but of course NOT impossible) with the traditional large A4 folder

Now this is not Higher Order Thinking at its best, and you could argue that it is still effectively Augmentation, but it does take us beyond the $1000 pencil in a way that focuses on collaboration and co-construction of knowledge.

I'm going to try it anyway.

The optimal parent zone ...

Lists of critical success factors for schools often include strong parental engagement. Hattie ('Visible learning for teachers: maximising impact on learning", Routledge, 2012) cites 'strong positive relationships with parents' (Page 151) as one of nine such factors supported by the metadata.

My experience teaching in state schools certainly seemed to support the contention at the micro level of individual experience. However I have also seen situations in which there can be too much involvement from parents. This might involve the 'helicopter parent' behaviour in which children are not allowed the room to be themselves, to make their own mistakes, and take the consequences of inappropriate choices. It might also include that situation in which parents involve themselves overly in their children's' learning, completing work for them when it should be the children's work.

A recent work experience showed that the ubiquitous characteristic of e-learning tools seems to facilitate this behavior even more than before, or alternatively makes the same behaviour more obvious or transparent. After all haven't there always been parents who have to some degree 'done' the project or homework for their children? This specific experience involved a parent making direct edits of a student's work on Googledocs. Thank goodness for the 'See revision history' function.

So it seems that it is possible to have both too little and too much parent engagement.

It simply struck me that there must therefore be an 'optimal zone' in which you want this support to operate.

How would we measure it? No idea, but it's an interesting concept, and one that should engage us as professionals working in education. I do believe that it is a function of:

• school culture
• the degree of approachability of all professional members of the school community, 
• the ways in which we report to the parent community (the frequency, the tone, the quality of commentary, the 'accessibility' of the language, and the layout of reports
• the friendliness, the sense of welcome at parent interview evenings
• the degree to which parents are made welcome at school functions
• The welcome that new members of the school community (students and parents) receive when they first approach or join the community

I think the list is much longer, but that will do for now.

An assault on Sir Ken Robinson

Well worth the read...

http://julianadamson.sharedby.co/nclsm9

Love your work, but where's your evidence Sir Ken?

More on the 'knowledge' debate

Jane Gilbert in her own words, in response to the attack on schools for supposedly 'losing the plot' on knowledge.

http://www.nzherald.co.nz/education/news/article.cfm?c_id=35&objectid=11127235

Google simplifies the 'flip'

Checking out the Google Blog, I see that they have literally just made some changes to Google Forms that make the flipped classroom so much more accessible and useful.

Users can now embed video into a Google Form.

It  becomes much more practicable to follow the Professor Eric Mazur methodology of getting students to preview content AND do something useful/meaningful with it.

Responses can be collected analysed to look for common misconceptions, or  shared easily with students the next day to encourage co-construction of knowledge.

VERY powerful. Well done Google.

The fate of knowledge?

Over this past weekend I have read two articles in the New Zealand niggling in that 'under-mining' sort of way at the NZ education and qualifications systems are.

This article in particular got me going - "Let's bring knowledge back into schools"

I was staggered. By coincidence I'd just written the following as a part of my regular fortnightly 'Curriculum News' in our College parent publication:

The whole concept of knowledge has changed. In my student days, knowledge was still largely a matter of ‘knowing stuff’. Only at post-graduate level did it become important to be able to ‘do something’ with that knowledge. Today’s world is very different. Knowing stuff is still important, but today it is equally as important to be able to ‘do stuff’ with that information. In my opinion one of the great strengths of NCEA lies in the demands it places on candidates to take what they know and think deeply about it. In 2005 Jane Gilbert (NZCER) published a book titled ‘Catching the knowledge wave’, in which she “takes apart many long-held ideas about knowledge and education. She says that knowledge is now a verb, not a noun—something we do rather than something we have—and explores the ways our schools need to change to prepare people to participate in the knowledge-based societies of the future.” This is not the forum in which to discuss the implications for society and the economy, but it certainly reflects on the fact that the demands on your boys today are far greater than they were on many of us as students. In my own subject area boys need to ‘know stuff’ about economics, but more importantly they need to be able to ‘do stuff’ with that knowledge, to think critically, to explain and analyse, to create meaning. In this sense NCEA places far higher demands on secondary students than ever before.

Suggestions that secondary schools are not teaching knowledge are at best mischievous. As I said in my column, we teach thinking, but we cannot think in the absence of knowledge. Perhaps the problem is exactly what knowledge do we teach. The rate of increase in the world's knowledge is so huge that it is almost impossible now to say exactly what knowledge we should teach beyond certain basics.

For example, we would probably all agree that everyone ought to be able to read and write. By 'write' do we mean with a pen? A keyboard? Using voice recognition software? Or are we in fact talking about the skill of putting words together to coherently, accurately and effectively communicate meaning regardless of the medium that we use?

We would probably all agree that students need to be numerate.  What does that mean? Probably something different for an accountant when compared with a plumber compared with a games app developer. Do we try to prepare all students in case they want to be accountants or economists?

If I stop being facetious for a moment I think that we could all agree on basic levels of literacy and numeracy that are required, but whatever field of knowledge we discuss, reaching agreement about which parts everyone should know is probably more difficult than it appears to be at first sight.

So schools take a stand, they 'draw a line in the sand' about what knowledge is required, but more important than the knowledge itself is the ability to think about that knowledge. Schools endeavor to teach students how to think, how to 'do stuff' with the knowledge that they gain. You only need to investigate the 'Excellence' level demands in most (if not all??) achievement standards currently on the Qualifications Framework to see what I mean. To suggest that schools have focused on skills at the expense of knowledge is in my opinion wrong. Where is the evidence I'd ask.

What is true I would theorise is that as Jane Gilbert says, knowledge has become a verb rather than a noun, and too many people have failed to realise how fundamentally our world has changed in this regard.