Graham Wegner – Open Educator

After reading an extract from a new Nikki Gemmell book about her Australian childhood memories and the contrast with her own children’s lives, I  decided to think back to my own life as a kid in the seventies in rural South Australia. Here’s what memories come floating back to the surface.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/blundstoneboy/1357568029/

Icy poles after swimming lessons at the Booleroo Centre pool, Sunday roast chicken with mashed potato and boiled vegetables and playing cricket in the farmyard with my sister and brother (we used a real Kookaburra cricket ball; no pads or hats). Firing a slug gun at a friend’s tenth birthday party, being the only kid in Grade Five at the local rural school and summer tans that ended at the ankles due to the constant wearing of elastic sided Blundstone workboots on the farm. Minding sheep on the roadside for hours to give them a “free feed”, sitting in the car after church waiting for my parents to stop talking to the other parishioners and wading for a kilometre at Port Germein beach to get to waist high water.

Golden North icecream with stewed apricots, stomping down bales of wool at shearing time in July and chopping out thistles in the home paddock. (It was always the neighbour’s fault that there were so many thistles because he let them go to seed and blow across the fenceline every year.)

http://www.flickr.com/photos/sellerto/2448636450/

Meat pies from the local bakery where you could take the top “lid” off and let the gravied mince cool for a while, watching the Top Ten on Countdown every Sunday evening. Learning to crack a whip at the cows and getting a whack on my bare calves when I got it wrong. Sitting in the wheat truck with my father on the way to the Port Pirie siloes hoping that the queue would pit us outside the Sportsman’s Tavern so my dad would get a lunchtime schooner of beer and I would would get an ice cold lemon squash made the old fashioned way – lemonade with a dash of Bickford’s lemon cordial.

I could go on … but I won’t. What about you? What are your essential childhood memories?

It would be no surprise to regular readers of this blog to find out that I’ve been struggling for motivation to write reflectively here of late. I seem to be surprisingly resentful of those colleagues who seem to find the time to vege out in front of the television, read a favourite book or other non-digital and non-education related pastimes.

Don’t worry, I’m sure it will pass.

So, instead of drafting insightful missives or spreading the comment love, I’ve been delving into online music. I’ve been listening and viewing clips from artists who I’ve had a passing interest in from years past but didn’t spend much time listening to at the time.

I like alternative music – artists who are not mainstream (but still popular enough to have a significant body of work) and my tastes are probably hard to categorise. So, I stumbled back into the music of Eels and followed a bunch of links across YouTube, Wikipedia, the official band site and ended up at the Eels MySpace site. So, for your enjoyment (and definitely mine) here is a really nice version of “In My Dreams” performed by the very talented frontman, Mark Oliver Everett.

EELS “In My Dreams” from The MySpace Transmissions

MySpace Transmissions | MySpace Video

This song is a couple of years old but I’ve rediscovered it via Triple J’s Hottest 100 list and YouTube. Together with Aussie hiphop crew, The Herd, it is good to see good political music didn’t die when Peter Garrett became a Labor MP.
Blue King Brown … awesome.

Ann, my principal, sent out an SOS email tonight in preparation for a presentation she has to give at a regional meeting. The questions she sent were good reflective ones so what better place to actually answer them than here. Any feedback always appreciated:

1. In what ways are you gaining as a professional by the way you work with others at LNPS ?

2. What are the skills and qualities you have appreciated in those who have supported you? You may give examples if that helps.

The co-planning teams that we work in to design our inquiry units have really helped me to improve the quality of the lessons I present to my class, become much better at effective assessment and really honed my focus in sticking to curriculum and lesson design that refers back to the skills and understandings identified as part of the required outcomes. In my role, I get to work with nearly everyone in the school and every conversation sheds light on how others tackle similar objectives. Every time we add another piece to the professional puzzle at LNPS, it opens up an opportunity to work closely with experts in various aspects of learning. In the last few years, I’ve got to work with Toni Glasson, Kath Murdoch and Mark Treadwell. I’ve had the opportunity to workshop with Jay McTighe in Melbourne to really come to grips with UbD. Like many of the staff, I’ve been fortunate to be trained in PLOT as well.

I also gain when my fellow professionals are prepared to take on my own initiatives and ideas enabling new ways of working to become commonplace at our school. Where else could I plan collaboratively using a wiki and a chatroom, have social bookmarking site delicious as the “glue” to save and group digital resources and have others lobbying for access to normally blocked sites like Wikispaces, Ning and YouTube so they can be embraced as effective tools. But I think that what helps our school to work well is that we really do have a form of distributed leadership where everyone can bring different strengths and expertises to the table, take in turns to lead at the front and basically, share.

Having holiday breaks is one of the great perks of the teaching profession – I will never deny that. At this stage of the year, it’s a great chance to get some of the jobs done around the house that have been put on hold for a few months. It gives me a chance to work flexibly on planning for the final term of the year while spending some time with the family – you know, playing board games, going to the movies and indulging in a bit of fast food with the kids.

So, this morning, we went out bowling and when we returned home, there was a box from Amazon on the front doorstep. It is no secret that I am a lover of comic strips – starting back as a kid who loved the classic Hanna-Barbera characters to the antics of the Dog in Footrot Flats, and now my latest obsession with Pearls Before Swine. After stumbling on this comic during an English focus on humour, I’ve even managed to get my fellow teachers hooked on this little strip that constantly bends the rules of this particular media type. We’ve even used some of the strips in the classroom – teaching social skills and the use and mis-use of words to convey messages!

I still think that it is amazing that I can discover something new and exciting (and very funny) using this connection of the World Wide Web, and then have my own copies of several Pearls treasuries delivered to my doorstep.

Of course, my youngest son doesn’t see this as a big deal at all. It was, however, a great chance to nab a handy sized box for his latest creation.

One of the greatest problems with text as a form of communication is that it can be so easily misinterpreted.

Of course, one of the greatest strengths of text as a form of communication is that it can be so easily re-interpreted.

In the first instance, this can be a frustrating from the writer’s perspective as I can see via the comments or from blog reaction that my intended message can be seen in a totally different light to my original intent. But, on the other hand, as a reader, the freedom to take someone else’s words and view them through my own lense is actually a huge positive. I can take these ideas, sometimes with very little context, and manipulate them to create my own message, my own innovative path forward and create something new beyond the original text laid down by the writer. I like to think of it like the difference between reading the book and seeing the movie. Reading “The Lord Of The Rings” allows the imagination to run wild – but once I saw Peter Jackson’s cinematic version, I can only picture orcs and hobbits in one way now.

Meet Gray Jyraffe.

He’s a Noob in Second Life. He’s been hanging around Jokaydia, ISTE Island and freebie shops scavenging around trying to work out how to teleport, fly and strike up conversations with impressively physiqued and impeccably attired avatars. Gray has even been to a few events now, settling into custom bean bags and listening intently to talented educators detailing their innovation (both virtual and real world exploits). He even went to his first Jokaydia Unconference on the weekend – not as much as he was hoping, as his real world alter ego had issues that interfered (families, sleep) with a fuller participation schedule. But he did get to meet (virtually) one of his blogging heroes, Konrad March (aka Konrad Glogowski).

He has a lot in common with his alter-ego – me. Like Gray, I’m an ordinary person who is constantly in awe of the talent that is so easy to connect with online. What Jo Kay has created in Second Life is totally amazing – and a massive leap of faith in the potential of this online education haven. Build it and they will come, indeed. I’m not quite sure yet what this space has to offer me and its relationship to my current work – but as I (whoops, sorry), Gray noted last night at the beach side after event celebration, sometimes the deepest learning occurs in the space where I am doing something new and challenging, but feeling out of my depth.

The talent I can connect to via these avenues – my Reader, twitter and now Second Life – is unbelievable. Sometimes, I think that my main talent is recognising others’ talent and being able to stream and subvert their innovation for my own purposes.

A week ago, I was still in sunny Sydney with my colleagues waiting to get some taxis out to the airport after the giant prize draw at the end of IWBNet09. My group did OK in that regard – one colleague won a year’s subscription to some form of software and another won a class set of ActivExpresssions (she was from DECS Learning Technologies but assures us that our school can borrow them at some stage) – but that is a bit of a worrying trend that I wasn’t that fond of. I know the drill about conferences can’t survive without vendors and vendors pay the bills and that the vendors need to get value for their time and dollars but my parting memory of this conference is the big prize giveaway of “complete literacy programmes”, “essential IWB software” and “student polling devices”. Normally rational minded educators had played the game as well, gathering stamps in their vendor hall booklet, hearing every single sales pitch just for a chance to experience the “The New Price Is Right” atmosphere at the end.

I’ll have to admit that I only saw part 1 of Martin Levins‘ keynote as my nerves told me to go and set up for my Saturday morning session. (An unusual concept – a two part keynote over two days which meant that I never really knew what he was leading up to.) He did point to this Saturday Night Live sketch which was good for a laugh – but maybe a more powerful keynote for challenging thinking would be someone like Jason de Nys. (Note to self – reflecting on one’s own ICT journey over several decades does not make for enthralling listening.)

So what did I make of the sessions I did attend? Here is a quick summary.

Belinda Anderson – All Things Google.

Shovel an excessive amount of people into one classroom and have someone talk and demo their way through the four Google tools. Listed as a vendor session – would have been better as a workshop where delegates would have a chance to play. Belinda herself was bright and breezy but I had to squeeze out of the room to set up for my session on Effective Design.

Sally-Anne Walton – Catering for Different Learning Styles Using the IWB

I’d just finished off my session on Social Bookmarking in the same room so it was amusing to see people turning up for this one grabbing a copy of my handouts on their way in. This session proved to me that one must read the abstract as well as the title before choosing a session to attend. There was very little link made to learning styles in this session from my perspective – and it seemed to be  massive show and tell grab bag of IWB use. The first five minutes were spent talking about how to choose the right position for an IWB in your classroom and I must admit, I lost interest from there very rapidly. The presenter showed that she had embedded video footage from a digital camera on her IWB – but failed to tell us why – what were the learning goals and how did the video footage help to reach those goals? It finished on a note with the presenter’s colleague plugging a vendor’s teacher amplification system and proclaiming that the ActivStudio library was the premier place to find digital resources (what about the internet?)

I do feel a bit unsporting to airing a negative review but these are my honest responses and I’d hope that someone would make a similarly honest and challenging assessment of any of my presentations. We don’t improve if tips and tricks are portrayed as innovative practice.

Moodle On The SmartBoard – presenter not on my original list.

IWBNet09 had what were titled vendor sessions each day where the vast majority of sessions in that time period were from, well, vendors! As I’d already spoken at length with Bryn Jones about Atomic Learning late on Friday afternoon, I decided to skip his session which I had planned to attend, and went along with two of my colleagues to the above mentioned session at the last minute. I’ll have to admit here that my professional conduct here was very poor, as I started talking to Trudy throughout the session in low hushed tones. We were hushed by a gentleman in front who was genuinely interested in seeing how to embed a worksheet screengrab in a Moodle to be displayed on a SmartBoard being operated by a tablet. I should have voted with my feet and followed Dan Meyer’s five minute rule.

Enhancing Literacy Through An IWB – Kel Hathaway

Now, Kel is a very nice guy with an entertaining manner, and his session held his audience captive. But I couldn’t get past the fact that it was a literacy focussed Tips and Tricks session, one of the most proficient I’d ever seen. There were “Ooohs” and “Aaahs” on almost every turn of his flipchart page where he covered everything from Wordle to spelling with Flickr to downloading magic erasers from Promethean Planet. He’d make a great trainer for Promethean, for sure but I’m sure there is greater depth to his expertise and knowledge than what this session permitted him to cover. My notes showed my mindset as I sat through this session – How could I use this file or idea to help my kids? Can this be used independently of the teacher? How about the kids creating instead of all the various incarnations of flipchartery promising many long nights for teachers as they created these “engaging” digital masterpieces?

I do feel like a pariah for feeling unsatisfied with IWBNet09. A quick look at the tweets from the #IWBNet09 hash show that many people thought it was great – and queried my less than enthused demeanour. I guess I wanted to spend more time talking about the learning and actually “pushing the boundaries”.

Q: How can you tell if a plane is headed for Adelaide?

A: There are nearly as many boxes of Krispy Kremes on board as passengers!

Photo credit: http://www.flickr.com/photos/giveawayboy/382879098/

(Starts with foreboding music)

“Spoon feed me”  – that’s the expectations of the teachers who are on holidays.

The Assessment villians – no one knows how to assess technology, exams and numbers don’t tell a kid what they have learnt , grades are good for politicians, kids are good at playing school.

Got to ask the right questions to get the right answers (shows scene from Bueller’s Day off) and we haven’t moved on in the context of school.

What we need is pedagogical leadership – teaching is about feedback and making connections with students, learn from the wisdom of the crowds.

Need to exploring virtual communities, not just read blogs, your peers may not be in your school, share your stories online.

3 R’s – realism, relevance & resonance.

Knowledge on the web is “healed”  – information is always “in flux “.

Conferences and f2f  is about affirmation and connections to people.

School + Home + Mobile + Internet + People = Learning Environment.

We can’t measure a person’s success by their exam results.

What can I do with (Insert technology here) in my classroom? Teach a teacher one or two new tools and you will expand their repertoire by up to 50%.

Game based learning  – Wii,  DS, PS3 etc.  Consoles that connect to the internet go beyond games. In gaming , reputation is authority. To succeed in World of Warcraft, you have to be able to access and contribute information.

21st Century learning outcomes  – Planet /People /Participation – Syllabus learning outcomes.

Don’t use anything you can’t assess.