Archive for the 'Personal Reflections' Category

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The Right Blend

Published on August 7, 2011 in Personal Reflections. 3 Comments

So, stepping into this new Assistant Principal role has been a full on experience for me; that’s for sure. A school that is just over six months old not only in facilities but in culture means that I might have missed out on some of most of the hard work in getting things up and running, but I’m still finding that there is plenty of teething issues that require my attention and hard work. We actually have the official grand opening this week with the State Premier, the Minister of Education and many more important guests in attendance. Something else to put down as a first in my career.

The frantic pace, the steep learning curve has put the blogging on the backburner over the past fortnight. I’m also thinking carefully about how much I want to blog about my new school anyway. I have new collegial relationships to build, a very multicultural student population to get to know a lot better and new systems and circumstances that require time and contextual insight to fully understand. I’m inclined to blog on the side of caution. So, if you only read good news stories involving my new site, it is not because I’m wearing rose coloured glasses or trying to “spin” a one dimensional viewpoint. I’m just trying to be respectful.

I am taking some of John Spencer’s advice for beginning teachers and remixing it for my new leadership role. It goes something like this:

Be bold. Be humble.

It’s become my mantra as I approach the start of the school year [my new role].  It’s the paradox that keeps me in a place where I can serve my students [colleagues] with confidence and lead my students [colleagues] with humility. It’s not a middle zone, either.  I don’t “take down” the boldness by being humble or “take down” the humility by being bold.  Instead, it’s a sense that I should be completely bold and completely humble simultaneously.

I like what this translates for me. To be an effective leader and someone who will work with a whole bunch of educators all at various places in their own educational journey, I need both of those qualities – boldness and humility. The boldness to ask the questions that will uncover what I need to know for the decisions I will need to take, the confidence that I bring ideas and experiences that will push the school in the direction it wants to go. But equally important is the humility that my colleagues will know a lot more about these students, this community, this new-born facility than I will know. I need to listen to their complaints, their fears, their opinions and their advice. Humility alone will give the message that I don’t know what I’m talking about. Boldness alone will alienate staff who’ve been in these trenches longer than this new boy. But with the two combined together, I just might be able to make a difference.

Can’t Shake That Classroom Teacher Feeling

Published on July 24, 2011 in Personal Reflections. 1 Comment

It’s a weird feeling to be changing schools and positions mid-school year for a number of reasons. I’ve had to whittle down a stockpile of nearly 4000 emails that documented my history of the past eight years down to the essential five hundred or so that I’ve forwarded into a Gmail folder, complete a handover list and even popped out to my new school to pick up a laptop and some timetables. But until I actually start tomorrow and get my head totally around the new role, there isn’t anything urgent to be done over this weekend.

And that’s weird because for the previous twenty odd years, the weekend leading into a new term has meant a planning frenzy, time spent plotting the learning for the term, a more sequential plan of attack for the first week and a detailed outline for the first day. In recent times, this planning has been posted up on the learning team wiki where my colleagues and I have collaborated for our classrooms. But my new role does not include a specific classroom. So this weekend has left me with that strange feeling, almost a form of guilt, that I should be doing something school related. I know the new job will soon gather its own momentum and I’ll have plenty to pore over in the evenings ahead. So, I’m going to try and enjoy this free evening. Tomorrow will take care of itself.

Screen grab of a random day on the wiki.

A Change In Direction

Published on July 14, 2011 in Future Directions and Personal Reflections. 7 Comments

I’ve made a change in my professional life. From next term, I will be the Assistant Principal in ICT & Admin at Woodville Gardens School here in Adelaide, moving on from my position as the Teaching and Learning Technologies Coordinator at Lockleys North Primary School. It’s an upward step and a significant change from what the last eight and a half years have been like. People who know me well know that I’m not an impulsive person and I usually err on the side of caution in most aspects of my life. So, many of my colleagues were surprised to find out that I had applied and won this particular job for the remainder of 2011. After all, Lockleys North is an excellent school with nice kids, parents committed to their children’s learning and many great programs. I’m not being a sycophant by pointing out that the school has one of the best principals going around and I’m not being a braggart in stating that I have been a fairly big influence in the school’s forward movement in the use of technology. But the time seemed right for a new challenge and this opportunity appealed to my restrained sense of ambition and sense of social justice. I’m a proud advocate for public education, and it will be good for me to put the expertise and experience that I have put under my belt to improve the outcomes for a population of students here in suburban Adelaide who in general don’t have life as easy as the kids I’ve been working with.

Back in 2003, I was given an opportunity as a green-behind-the-ears young classroom teacher to become the ICT Coordinator at LNPS. I had an abundance of enthusiasm, some ideas around how technology could make a difference to student learning and a whole lot to learn about being on the first rung of leadership. Being a coordinator in South Australian schools means still being responsible for a classroom as well as the leadership and management aspects of the wider role, and that is a much harder juggling role than being full time in the classroom. I also went from a school where I had access to a well equipped computer room whenever I wished, pursuing digital projects with my class without worrying too much about the whole school direction. I started off in my new role with one computer room with twenty computers and one solitary PC in the back of each classroom for a school of over 400 students. It was always going to be a long term job but I was not following in an incumbent’s footsteps and had the freedom to build up overall ICT focus of the school gradually. In 2005, we started introducing interactive whiteboards well before they became mainstream items in this state and in 2007, I got our wireless laptop program up and running. In 2008 – 2010, we were one of only four DECS schools involved in a lengthy Learning Technologies research project right before the State Government wound up that arm of the department. Late last year, I wrote the application that got our school into the 2011 Microsoft Innovative Schools program. Ironically, the final two Forums of that program are something that I am giving up to move to this new position!

So, I feel that I have achieved a lot in my time. I never did my job so well as to become redundant, but stretched between classroom commitments and other constraints, I feel that what I have contributed will continue and branch off in new ways without my input. I’ve mentioned some of the outstanding colleagues I have been lucky to work with – the rock stars who have embraced digital planning, real “just in time” use of technology and tasks that have pushed student learning into new places. These same colleagues encouraged me to apply for this new position when I wasn’t sure if I was the right person or if it was the right opportunity, and were the first to congratulate me when I got the news of my appointment.

So, why this new job? Well, Woodville Gardens is one of the sites dubbed as a “super school” by the South Australian media, formed by the amalgamation of three smaller schools. The school is brand new (well, six months old) and the notion of being part of building a new school culture is very appealing. The school is also a Category One with the greatest level of social disadvantage, so knowing that I will be working towards improving these students’ future means I have the potential to really make a difference. I also get to apply all of the experience and knowledge from my own time at Lockleys North into a new site and open myself up to new experiences to continually make myself into a better educator. The role also has more time built into working with staff, and influencing practice on a bigger scale is important too, especially if the mantra of “21st Century Learning” is to have any meaning at all. This new school is about re-defining the schooling experience for our less privileged students and it will be humbling and exciting to be in on the ground floor. I’ve seen how schools like Dallas Brooks Community, St Albans Meadows and Silverton (all in Melbourne) have become learning centres of excellence and hotbeds of exceptional practice – so I’m hoping that my new role can help lead out in a similar direction.

So, I’ve been lucky to be part of one of the best schools in this state. It’s time to see where this new opportunity goes. Wish me luck.

Games Aren’t What They Used To Be When I Was Your Age

Published on May 27, 2011 in Personal Reflections. 1 Comment
http://www.flickr.com/photos/visnes/176197434/

http://www.flickr.com/photos/visnes/176197434/

My two sons, seven and eleven respectively, enjoy games. They quite enjoy a game of Uno, Monopoly or Sorry, but their favourite form involves digital formats. They both own a Nintendo DS, we had a Nintendo Wii and an aging Playstation 2, plus they share the family Windows desktop where they are very adept at finding different forms of games to play. The portable DS systems go with us a lot – over to the grandparents’ house on a Friday or in my office or classroom when one of them is dropped to me while the other goes to swimming or speech therapy. The boys go through phases with games, feeding off each other’s choices with my younger, Joshua, usually leading the way and his older brother joining in when he feels he can see what the whole thing is about and whether there is an appeal for him. The phases sometimes tie to other media – last year, Joshua started getting into the Star Wars series of films where he started buying Star Wars themed Lego with his pocket money and we ended getting the Star Wars Lego Wii game that he promptly and systematically starting working his way through. Aaron never bit during this particular obsession but earlier this year, Pokemon became the new focus for both boys.

I started thinking about the Pokemon factor in games and culture in general for kids when considering Digital Literacy for a presentation I was planning for the canned CEGSA/SLASA conference. It was easy to see as it quickly become part of the everyday conversation and paraphernalia around our home. It started with a DS game, Pokemon Diamond and a Christmas gift Pokepark for the Wii, and has currently expanded to a small collection of small plush toys, a couple of very complex Strategy Guide and Pokedex books and even ended up with the hardcore gamer action of pre-ordering the latest Black version of the DS game before its early March release. That was a strange feeling, standing in EB Games handing over contact details and trading in old games to build up credit to pre-purchase a game that would be sold out within a day and impossible to get quickly any other way. It has spread to research as well, as the boys have hunted down details of pre-DS games – Red, Blue, Emerald, LeafGreen and the list goes on.

“Awww, I wish I could play these games, Dad. They look cool.”

“Well, actually you can although it’s not really legal. The games you found listed on Wikipedia are all from a system called Gameboy Advance that you can’t buy in the shops any more. Fans of these games have converted these games into files you can play in an emulator on the computer.”

“What’s an emulator?”

“Just a version of the original game system that comes up on your computer screen. You search for these game files, called ROMs on different websites, download them and you can run them pretty much like the original game through the emulator.”

“I want those games now!”

So, old skool video games are easy to find and use. Leaving aside the ethical issues surrounding IP and the hold that multinational companies like Nintendo and Sony have on the minds of our young people, it is an amazing way hands on way to explore the history of video games and how the gameplay and graphics have evolved to become more sophisticated and rich in both narrative and challenge. It is interesting that the quality of the imagery is not all that important to my boys – what you do in the game and where you can go is vastly more important. Gaining experience, unlocking levels and gaining new powers and characters are the key components for them. I even had to take Joshua back to the store to use their wi-fi to pick up a virtual gift card in the game that would unlock an unique character only available for a short period of time (again a deal for those dedicated pre-ordering customers) because it would give him credibility back in the school yard when discussing prowess with his friends.

They both enjoy a variety of game sites online although I’ve had conversations warning them off certain sites that have very virus-y looking pop-up windows that they blissfully ignore. Joshua would already have five or six free memberships to online sites that contain some form of in-world interaction, ranging from the World of Cars site to the fun Poptropica. As with any popular game, user created content abounds in the form of FAQs and walkthroughs. When Dean blogged about Lego Universe, I told Josh that I probably allow him to join if the fees were reasonable but so far, Australia seems to be too small a market for inclusion. Again, creative enthusiasts are doing things like creating a US based identity, paying via Paypal etc, in order to gain access.

There are times when my wife and I worry that maybe the boys spend too much of their time on gaming but that could be just our own insecurities surfacing. After all, I’m not much of a gamer. My two favourites are actually Guitar Hero (despite having extremely limited musical ability) and Need For Speed (ironic for a guy who drives a Toyota) but I can see how engaging they are for my boys on a daily basis. It’s even more than that though – gaming is part of their culture, it forms a core part of their conversation and how they relate to their peers and offers pure no-strings-attached pure enjoyment.

From The “I Have No Answers” Section Of My Life

Published on May 21, 2011 in Personal Reflections. 0 Comments

A thought side-sparked from this article in our local paper:

How do we reconcile the adage “No-one is irreplaceable” when encouraged to not let work overtake one’s life with the desire to do something that has meaning in that work life? If we can just be replaced, what is the value or uniqueness of that work?

The Incredible Going Back In Time Facebook Machine

Published on April 9, 2011 in Personal Reflections. 1 Comment

I’m sure that people who friend me on Facebook are invariably disappointed because I don’t actually DO anything on there. I have a handful of people on my list who I was friendly with during secondary school but I’ve resisted adding anyone that I recognise in the same way I’ve avoided going back to any school year level reunions. I’m just not that interested in linking back with people who weren’t interested in me at that point in my life – thirty years on isn’t going to change that. Interestingly, I enjoyed hanging out with kids the year level behind me more than my colleagues in the Class of ’83 and it was from one of those connections (a guy called Ian “Bushy” Martin) that I ended coming face to face with a much younger me in the labyrinth that is Facebook.Picture 2

I’m figuring that the year is 1986. Please note the very eighties jacket with the trendy Kimba The White Lion t-shirt. The photo was taken at the Woodville Town Hall at a gig that featured the cleverly named “Punt Kaybal”, a band that featured the before mentioned Bushy Martin on drums and if my feeble memory serves me well, was the vocalist as well. Now I know that I don’t really have the right to poach a copy of this image as any copyright or intellectual property belongs to Facebook itself, thanks to the user agreement that signs those rights away.

Now if this image can come back to me from pre-web days to haunt me and be beyond my control, then it reinforces what I say to many of the parents of students in my classes over the past couple of years. Just because you don’t let your child use Facebook and manage to prevent them creating and maintaining a profile on there, it doesn’t mean that they aren’t on Facebook somewhere.

Whose Learning Should I Be Documenting, Anyway?

Published on February 6, 2011 in Blogging and Personal Reflections. 0 Comments

I started a blog post intending to reflect on the first week of the 2011 school year. I scrubbed that draft last night after staring at the first paragraph for about twenty minutes. It was forced reporting and there were no anecdotes that required documentation in digital format. Perhaps it’s too early … or maybe, this blog is more about my own learning and my ephemeral interests rather than my own impact on the students under my charge.

Daily, the blogs I subscribe bring me new avenues to explore and to connect to. I can browse art and design ideas, shake my head at the insanity that is US education reform or think through potential ideas to bring into my own classroom. I’m lucky enough to work at a school where the professional learning is of a high quality and sometimes, it is draining enough to do that justice without trying to pull in all of the exciting leads I get from the network. We’ve been implementing Assessment for Learning, are about to delve into mathematics curricular renewal using George Booker’s Teaching Primary Mathematics, have our department’s Teaching for Effective Learning document at the ready and continue to become better at implementing Inquiry Learning in our classrooms.

So when Dan Meyer points to an outstanding Maths resource, I am interested. But I have to weigh up the benefit to my own practice and the time it will take away from me coming to grips with my own school’s choice of maths direction which will be tightly aligned to the incoming Australian Curriculum. And I still owe Dina Strasser a properly worded response in the comments section of this blog post, but I need to delve more deeply and know what I’m supposedly using on a daily basis more deeply before trying to describe the contrasts between her own approach and an approach that we are trying to make an embedded part of my school’s operation.

So, if I find something interesting in what I have to come to grips with in my own professional existence, I’ll try and blog about it. I’d like to make more of an effort to participate in more online events like K12 Online or even ds106 and I need to be OK with the fact that it may be purely self indulgent on my part and that focussing on that is a viable thing to be documenting. The line between narcissism and sharing can be a very thin one.

http://www.savagechickens.com/2009/06/the-narcissist-test.html

http://www.savagechickens.com/2009/06/the-narcissist-test.html

Drifting Nowhere In Particular

Published on January 24, 2011 in Personal Reflections. 2 Comments

I’ve felt the urge to blog here over the past few months slipping away. It’s not that I’m not online – I am, probably excessively so – but I’ve been drifting through other people’s blogs, following little side alleys and having no particular purpose in mind. I can’t blame being busy, as Brian Crosby can. I can sympathise with Leigh Blackall to some degree as he considers the focus of his online priorities as well. I don’t just want to write about anything … so consequently, I haven’t been writing anything worthwhile of late.

I also find that what Kelly Christopherson wrote late last year to be very poignant.

From my experience, if you can sum up your contributions to the school and learning in quaint little anecdotes, little stories about touching tales and quips about snippets of days, then you really don’t get it. See, for the most part, I can’t share what happens in my days because it’s confidential, too difficult to describe and, really, there’s no quaint way to tell the story.

Yet I find what someone like John Spencer can recount as being valuable in my experiences as an educator. I wouldn’t call his posts quaint though – but I do share Kelly’s issue in that recounting my own anecdotes directly from my immediate worklife is fraught with issues because some people are reading who have too much context and the intent gets overwhelmed by their insider or close community perspective.

So, I’ve let things drift. Then thanks to John the other day, I found the perfect song to describe my current malaise. Enjoy.

2010 Wrap It Up

Published on December 31, 2010 in Digital Convergence, Future Directions and Personal Reflections. 0 Comments

So, 2010 is just about done and I thought I would just throw a few thoughts down about the past twelve months and things I’ve noticed from a personal perspective. I don’t watch much television and very rarely read paper based books any more but I’ve enjoyed sitting down in the evenings since school ended a few weeks back with no particular goal to be achieved and to indulge in some DVD watching. I’ve decided to re-watch The Wire (all 5 seasons if I can manage it) and there are also a stack of Big Bang Theory DVDs to watch which were Christmas gifts when I decide. I’ve steered clear of too much online participation and not being approached to be part of any PLP cohorts over summer this year has meant that I’ve felt extremely unobligated to any online conversation. I’ve also been playing with an iPad for the first time, trying it out to see whether I feel it has potential in our school. I’d have to say that at this stage I’m underwhelmed by it but it was nice to have web access when visiting the folks up in the mid-North before Christmas in their internet broadband black hole. My parents had never seen Google Maps before and looked at me like I was performing witchcraft when I showed them Street View right past my brother’s farm. My father still has a fully functional IBM 386 computer running Windows 3.1 that he does his tax calculations on, complete with matrix printer so the iPad is so advanced as to seem not quite real to my parents.

Looking back, it’s been a full on year work wise as I’ve juggled part time classroom responsibilities with the bits and pieces that make up my Coordinator role. For the first time, I didn’t go to any big conferences. That will change next year as my school has been accepted as one of 20 Microsoft Innovative Schools in Australia – this means a few trips interstate for 2011 including Canberra, where I’ve never been before. So perhaps, I’ll need to trade in my iPhone for a Windows phone although maybe I’ll take my son’s Ubuntu netbook along for taking notes instead.

Here’s one thing I’ve noticed over the year – a big increase in my consumption of music thanks to the ease of iTunes as a way of managing and accessing music. I’ve always enjoyed listening to rock music (mainly) and still have a huge collection of cassette tapes from my late teens and early twenties that would be cool to digitalise. Having kids over the past ten years has really sapped my music interest and listening – time to sit and listen to music when being involved with young kids seemed to go out the window, plus blasting my peculiar taste in the house was always a touch too selfish on my behalf when kids are napping or playing. Having the iPhone has brought back my personal music interest right back where I could listen walking, in the car or even when working on my laptop. I’m finding myself walking around stores like Sanity and JB Hi-Fi more often, buying CDs after a decade of hiatus at very cheap prices. I have CDs from the mid-nineties with $30 on the price label while now I won’t buy it unless there is a twenty per cent discount or it’s below fifteen bucks. After tiring of the screechy sounds of the white earbuds that are standard on Apple products (which are still better than most ear bud products out there) I even lashed out today for a lightweight pair of Sennheiser headphones for a better sound experience. I had a pair of yellow padded Sennheisers back when I was at teacher’s college in the late eighties that were great (from memory) and I think I’d listen to an album or so in the dark before going to sleep. While my 2010 music resurgence hasn’t quite got back to the same extreme, I can credit digital music and its affordability and convenience for it.

Well, I think this post confirms that my thought patterns are running pretty shallow at present. I could also mention that this year has seen me purchasing stuff online more often and that I’ve even gotten into some Wii gaming in a minor way. I’m always a bit behind the times for a technology lover, with my spendthrift Lutheran upbringing tempering too many impulse buys throughout the year. Anyway, have a great New Year and hopefully, this blog will continue to be a useful place for reflection and documentation.

Reputation

Published on November 24, 2010 in Blogging, Middle Schooling and Personal Reflections. 5 Comments

I was on yard duty on Tuesday and a Year 3 student came up to me.

“I saw you on the internet last night.”

I smiled. “That’s not hard. I have plenty of stuff on the internet. How did you find me?”

“I typed in the school’s name and your name came up in Google.”

Writing in this blog means I think about the potential readers scattered around the globe who might find my posts interesting or useful. But I forget about the people closer to home who might also be also reading – parents, students, even my teacher colleagues. My reputation as an educator goes beyond my words and actions within the school environment.

Reputation is a funny thing. At my previous school, I had developed a reputation as one of the better teachers in the school. I taught the older kids – the Year Sixes and Sevens who other teachers openly shied away from teaching. I had parents who requested that their child be placed in my class, that I keep their child for an additional year and the vibe I got back in general from the parent community was one of respect. Students were happy when they found that I was to be their teacher, and saw that the opportunities that Lindsay, my team teaching partner, and I offered meant they would be in a challenging and interesting classroom. I had eased into that position over the previous eight years after moving back to Adelaide from country South Australia.

But I didn’t start at the upper primary level. I arrived as a young country teacher and was given a Year 4/5 class in a squashed up space in the middle of an open space unit. I had no reputation to speak of at my new school. But it didn’t seem to matter that much back in 1995. After all, I wasn’t teaching the big kids. So, after a few years, the reputation built up and I slotted into the Year 6/7 arena comfortably with content parents and engaged students. Reputation was what smoothed the path in 2001 towards Lindsay’s and my most innovative and ambitious two years teaching together. We moved into the old library at the school which was a strange building and not built for two traditional classes at all.  We had the Year 6/7 classes and we had this weird space that had a large teaching area, a former librarian’s office and a low ceilinged area for the bags. Upstairs was a L shaped area which could squeeze in a class for instruction – just. We had to design how our classes would interact, what the various nooks and spaces could be used for and challenge the students with the notion of how a primary school classroom could operate. But our reputation meant that no parents queried our approach or the suitability of the space for learning.

But when I won my current job and moved into a Year 6/7 class with a new offsider, I forgot that my reputation didn’t automatically travel with me. The parents were suspicious of ideas and programs that a year earlier had been been given a supportive tick of approval by a different community. I had forgotten that over a long period of time in a school, students develop a strong notion of who you are, what you will and won’t tolerate, what your expectations are like and that forges together into a reputation that goes some way to dictating how they respond to you when they come under your care. And I also forgot that adolescents are a tough audience to crack. They like reputation because they have some sense of how they will be treated, the sort of learning that will be valued. But you have no worthwhile reputation when you are new to the school and most importantly, new to them. Younger kids are less judgmental and more easily enthused.

But the silver lining in my first year as a coordinator was that I did have another aspect to my role in the school. I was “the computer guy”, the teacher who would come into their classroom and help their teacher get logged on, or show them some new ways to use their computers or interactive whiteboards. Now, it is just as important that my reputation with my colleagues is solid, that they trust that my ideas for using technology in their classrooms, with their students. As I encourage them to make their way online, my reputation is built on the posts I write, how respectfully I describe my interactions with them to the wider connections of the online educator network, how tactfully I re-tell anecdotes from the classroom and as well, the connections I recommend that they make. The choices I make matter.

That means your reputation is important, too. Because as my little friend on the play equipment pointed out, it’s easy to find me on the internet. Some of you guys are even easier to find – and your reputation spreads wider, too.