Thanks to an invitation from Paul Allison and Susan Ettenheim, Doug Noon and I were guests on the Teachers Teaching Teachers webcast last week to discuss our global project, Spin The Globe, that we have worked on with our respective classes. It was great to chat and hear Doug’s voice at length after working with him for half a year and I think we covered some good territory. Catching up with an experienced hand in Joel Arquillos who has trialled these sort of global collaborations in his classroom was a bonus as well. I’m actually keen to listen to it again because every time I participate in these Skypecasts my brain struggles to remember anything I’ve uttered as soon as I remove my headset. I took the liberty of adding the webcast to the FLNW wiki as my contribution to that event but I know that several interested educators were unfamiliar with the Edtech Talk setup and had issues with connecting to the live audio stream. So, here’s the archived podcast - I’d love any feedback about any point that was made, either here or back at TTT.
This is a fictional post - any resemblance to real educators or this blog post in particular, are entirely coincidental.
Once upon a time, not so long ago, a bright-eyed idealist ICT (edtech) coordinator discovered Web 2.0. It was love at first sight and he then started his own blog. One thing led to another as these things do and before long he was publishing wikis and attending online conferences and bookmarking madly and commenting all over the place. And while his own learning took off at an unprecedented rate, he struggled to work out how to utilise these new tools and methodologies into his own classroom. But he stuck at his new web-enabled style of learning, eventually establishing himself as a C list edublogger. He read “The World Is Flat” and “A Whole New Mind” as texts of almost biblical influence and networked worldwide with Americans and Kiwis and Brits and Canucks and even fellow Aussies. Teachers at his own school snickered at him at first, skeptical about his time management skills because after all, what hard working teacher has time to poke around on the internet?
This year, the coordinator had a brilliant idea to leapfrog his students into the digital collaborative age - global projects. He’d seen wiki based projects and reckoned that they would be ideal for his middle school students focus on Communication. Being an educator with an inclusive conscience, he decided that it should be “Global Projects For All” in his four teacher block.
He sat down and outlined his brave plan to his learning team colleagues. They seemed keen, having experienced wikimania in the previous year when their students used wikis to collaborate within their classrooms. And they saw the logical extension from that venture - connecting and working with students elsewhere in the world. What better way could there be to explore the process of digital communication for a real purpose? The coordinator’s head swam dizzily with the possibilities - the students would grab this opportunity and make it their own, the teachers would experience first hand the power of global collaboration and the bridges of understanding between the citizens of the future would start to be built.
But the coordinator had a tight rope to walk - these projects needed his support to get on the path to success but at a certain point, he had to stand back and let his colleagues steer their own ship. He leveraged his online learning network and lined up high quality teacher/classroom partners from North America, Asia and the South Pacific. He led out in his own classroom ahead of schedule and modelled a similar approach for the other teachers in his building. Then he stepped away giving his comrades room to breathe and find their own way. Plus he soon became engulfed in the process of keeping his own Global Project afloat.
Back in his own classroom, his students worked hard with various digital media, building their wiki while the coordinator participated in email flurries with his global partner, anticipated and designed workarounds for the many barriers, made cross curricular links with the goal of getting the kids engaged in accessing primary sources of information to build their knowledge about a new part of the world. The coordinator checked in with his colleagues periodically to field technical issues and be supportive - but he assumed that if he wasn’t being pestered then the teachers and their classes were going well. After all, he had worked hard to provide cutting edge partners for their projects.
Then signs started to appear that maybe his learning team mates weren’t all that taken or driven by this concept. Inquiring emails from the highly sought after global partners started to appear in the coordinator’s Gmail box.
“Is the class at your school still involved?”
“I’ve sent three emails without reply and my class are concerned.”
“Is my partner class ready to start yet?”
Things to be going astray for the coordinator. His comrades didn’t seem to see the same importance of the venture as he did. One teacher took some personal leave but the message back to the global partner didn’t get there leaving them in the dark about the status of the project. Another also took leave (but informed their partner) and the other teacher scored a new job. All of a sudden, the coordinator was juggling four global projects with different goals and various stages of progress. He was starting to realise that equity in this situation was a fallacy, that his lofty (and not always well thought out) ideas weren’t shared by everyone and issues (and their possible solutions) that were as plain as day to him were puzzling and bewildering to others.
“We’ve done some photo stories but they won’t upload to the wiki.”
The coordinator sighed.
“You’ll have to upload them to Teacher Tube first and then embed them in the wiki.”
“What’s Teacher Tube? Perhaps you could do it for us.”
“But it’s the last day of school tomorrow…”
And as always, the coordinator gritted his teeth, eyed off the list of priorities on his to-do list, glanced across at his own waiting class and conceded some ground.
“If I get some time, I’ll see what I can do. “
Next year, he’ll scale it all down.
Next year, the teachers can find their own global partners. Let them spend hours on the web making their own online connections, he thinks uncharitably.
But maybe there’s the small moral hidden in this unremarkable tale. How can teachers appreciate the magnitude, the networking, the collegiality of the teachers already online, the sharing and the whole deal if some schmuck does the hard yards for them? How can they be totally committed to creating a unique learning opportunity for their students if they themselves haven’t invested some virtual blood, sweat and tears?
Leigh Blackall’s excellent post To facilitate or to teach is a great platform to tie together several ideas that I’ve been pondering. I really admire where Leigh is trying to go in his battle to lose his “teacherly” voice in the running of his online course. He explores the tensions between his perception of facilitation and the differing expectations and frustrations of his students as they grapple with the expectations of self directed networked learning. Because he is willing to open up his practice and expose his own developing thinking, the resultant comments are as informative and insightful as the post and something that can be applied to any classroom situation. Leigh outlined his own personal guiding beliefs in his introduction:
The biggest challenge I am finding is the expectation for a teacher or instructor while everyone talks about a facilitator. I don’t think someone can be both, primarily because a teacher inherits a significant amount of power and traditional roles that counter act the more neutral and passive presence of a facilitator.
His battles are interesting to me because he points out that “almost everyone who is involved has experienced this type of schooled learning“. The way things have always been done are a significant factor in Leigh’s situation. And the battle between enabling learners rather than instructing them can be applied to any classroom situation, not just the uniqueness of facilitating an online learning community.
But in the comments section, we find that not everyone thinks that teacher/facilitator is a either/or scenario. Derek Wenmoth points out:
“… I think that much of the discussion leading to the idea of a teacher—facilitator continuum stems from perceptions of teaching activity that, for many people (in the areas I deal in at least) are no longer really the case (ie teaching activity that is already quite facilitative and less didactic).”
Konrad Glogowski, a Canadian middle school classroom practitioner posted an excellent comment where I found the following to be particularly meaningful:
“I realized that losing the teacherly voice has nothing to do with losing the voice of an expert. You see, I’d thought that, in order to be a co-participant and a co-learner, I had to learn along with my students. Nonsense. I discovered that they need a figure of authority, someone who knows the topic well, who is an expert and can offer advice, support, and assist them as they engage with the material. The facilitator still needs to be the content expert. That is why people come to us - because they want to learn from us, not with us.
And so, the challenge is that when I try to divest myself of my teacherly voice I need to remember that this process is not about losing the voice of the expert but about losing the voice of the authoritarian.
I admit, this may have very little relevance in your class, with a group whose expectations, career goals, and age are so vastly different from my group of 14-year-olds. I do believe, however, that what everyone looks for in a teacher or an instructor, regardless of the type of educational setting, is that they be an expert and project that air of confidence and expertise. They do want to learn from us.
And that’s why this whole process of building communities of learners and losing the teacherly voice is so hard. It is hard because we tend to think that what we need to create is the impression that we’re all in this together, that no one really is an expert in the classroom. The students won’t respond well to that. They pay their fees because they want access to experts, because they want to be taught, not because they can’t wait to be part of a virtual community of inquiry.
So, what do we do? I believe that it is important to lose the authoritarian voice, the controlling voice, but not the voice of an expert who chose to teach because of his passion for the subject. The students need to see that the instructor is someone who lives and breathes whatever it is that they’re studying, that they have in their midst someone who has a wealth of expertise. They are in that classroom because they want a piece of it.”
The other voice I struggle to control when working with my class is the ”Guess what the teacher is thinking” line of conversation. That is so limiting and doesn’t give any scope for my students to develop their own thinking or to describe their own processes but it is so easy to slip into this default mode. I like what Konrad describes in his classroom and it is directly applicable for my own situation because my students are similar in age range. Another interesting factor is that my students have to be in my classroom - they don’t have the option to walk out if they feel my style and their learning needs don’t gel. Leigh’s working with adults who (presumably) have chosen to be part of his course and have the option of bailing out if they find the coursework is irrelevant or inaccessible.
I’m wondering if learning as Leigh describes it being “individually responsible and self motivated” can be more successful in his adult learner setting if his clientele had experienced more learning in that vein throughout their primary and secondary schooling. Now, I’m still not sure which side of the fence I sit in regards to the concepts of “deschooling” and “reschooling” (or even maintaining the status quo) but in the hands of progressive teachers there are models that can work in terms of giving students opportunity to be more in charge of their own learning. I like to think that are structures in my own classroom (and many others) that certainly reduce the “authoritarian” and get away from the “one size fits all” model. South Australian state primary schools have composite year levels that force the teacher to cater for individual needs as you just can’t follow “grade level” curriculum - it needs to differentiated because of the age and ability range in any group of primary age kids. They start school poles apart anyway in terms of whether there is a culture of reading at home, where they sit in terms of their sibling order, whether English is a secondary language amongst their family or just plain maturity levels. I’m in awe of how our best junior primary teachers handle these little people and work hard to engage them and keep their progress moving in laying the foundations for literacy, numeracy, thinking and social responsibility.
The concept of student-initiated curriculum is an important one in the middle years of schooling but can be very badly implemented at only a lip-service level. Inquiry learning also has much to offer in offering students opportunity to follow their own path through particular concepts or skills – but again, as Artichoke has pointed out in the comments section here on my blog before, is something that requires a lot of work on the teachers’ part and can be easily mismanaged for minimal gain. But both approaches (and sometimes in combination) are a powerful option for the teacher to step out of the instructor role and into the facilitator role. Then the students hit high school and quite often, it’s all thrown out the window in the name of subjects that must be kept pure, lines that must be followed to lead to certain options like university courses. They’re all timetabled into fixed time blocks and the plasticity and ability to explore and discover is severely throttled back.
I’m aware it sounds like I’m blaming high schools, which is not true but their very structure ultimately creates the adults that demand the teacherly voice when they front up for Leigh’s course. Of course, there are plenty of primary school teachers who step up and command their class’s attention from go to whoa, centring themselves as the foundation of all knowledge, making sure that the teacherly voice is the only one their students will hear for the entirety of their formal education. But primary schools here in this part of the world have that flexibility where the teacher can consciously step out of the role of instructor and create exciting learning opportunities for their students, with or without the help of technology.
Maybe, it’s only deschooling that might produce the learners Leigh wants to interact with in his online community. Again, I’m as puzzled by the problems and potential solutions to really know what I think is the best solution – we’ve certainly heard about the concept of “learning to learn” a lot in our sector here – but it still has a way to go before these self motivated learners become commonplace and demand autonomy in their chosen education.
A vibrant exchange with Al Upton in the comments section here on this blog had me challenged with his point about educators being involved in “rich ongoing online learning that is reflected in their students’ learning.” What does that look like in the classroom? My classroom? Any classroom? Al was open about his class’s efforts:
[My class blog and the kids’ individual blogs (although often a struggle with the basic aim to provide an initial exposure to online networks … 8 and 9 year olds) is my attempt as a teacher in an open sense. Our explorations of Quest Atlantis - a MUVE … a bit like SL but with built in learning quests and missions for 9-12yo is my attempt in a virtual 3D game like learning environment … in a walled garden sense :]
So while I’m swanning around cyberspace, twittering this and networking that, building up connections near and far, what benefit has it brought the students that I teach? It’s time to document my efforts at global digital collaboration for my class - warts and all.
My class is part of a primary school ( the North American equivalent is elementary) covering from 5 year olds to 13 year olds. We call ourselves middle school students because the school is divided into learning teams - junior primary, middle primary and the Middle Years Learning Unit (MYLU). Basically we form part of a 4 classroom block - usually made up of Year (Grade) 6/7’s but as all classes are composite (multiple year levels) and Australian classrooms are funded to be class sizes of 30 from Year 3 onwards, that’s how why I’m co-teaching a 5/6 combination with slightly younger kids mixed into my class.
Anyway, MYLU classes collaborate on several levels and co-plan for cross-curricular units of work. This past term’s over-riding theme was Communication and I floated the idea of covering this by setting up class global partnerships where they could actively work through the process of communicating about their respective parts of the world. Of course, I had to lead the way - both because my online networking and Web 2 tools skills would be required plus it was my turn to “lead out” on the unit of work. I knew it was important to convince my MYLU teaching colleagues that I knew what I was doing (even if it wasn’t true) and to be able to model some options as they got going with their classes. I turned to one of the educators I trust and respect the most, Doug Noon, to see if he’d be keen to work with me and to see if this concept could work.
We both figured a wiki would be a good rallying point for our collaboration and so SpinTheGlobe was created. There’s been several well publicised global wiki projects around that have been very successful - the Horizon Project wiki , initiated by Vicki Davis and Julie Lindsay, was one where I tagged in for a minor role as a peer review classroom - but I was keen to take a different approach and deliberately wanting to work in a low key and grassroots orientated way. This suited Doug as he also wanted to forge our own collective ideas rather than follow an established blueprint. He pointed out in one of our early e-mail exchanges about the possible gains for his students being that “These projects will involve my students and (hopefully) lead them toward a more global consciousness. That’s my larger goal. For Alaskan kids, especially if they’ve never lived anywhere else, the larger world is a big unknown.”
So, with the main idea being communicating how each other’s parts of the world works, it was time for me to “lead out”. I started the wiki, embedded some eye candy widgets to show location, time and temperatures of both locations and then got the class to brainstorm out what they already knew about our global partners a “spin of the globe” in Fairbanks, Alaska. It turned that they didn’t know a lot - but we documented that on the wiki as a starting point and Doug got his kids to do the same. Then the tricky part of making collaborative decisions about which way to go came into play.
There are quite a few hurdles to be overcome in order to get a global project (even a grassroots one!) off the ground. The first hurdle is timing - my class were well settled with half a year of school under their belt and used to my “let’s do this” approach to technology based learning while Doug was starting his school year with new kids, a new grade level and kids who weren’t necessarily tech-savvy in the way required to be using the web and Web 2.0 tools in an efficient manner. The next hurdle was time - finding the time to commit to the project, then filling the time between waiting for Doug’s students’ next contribution with related work that maintained the interest and purpose. Another hurdle was our own communication patterns - ironic that the people who may learn the most about effective communication may be the teachers involved! I totally forgot to make Doug a wiki organiser at the start which created problems when he wanted to get his kids signed up. One of us would fire off an e-mail asking crucial questions or suggesting important changes in direction and the time differences or workload requirements would get in the way of a speedy and useful response.
But we got started. My class started posing questions on the wiki and Doug’s started tagging Alaskan websites of interest in a del.icio.us account. Then my class started the same and using the Network feature both classes could look easily at each other’s sites as a way of “frontloading” the students on a part of the world they know very little about. In this way, both groups were introduced to the power of social bookmarking and an image on one of the sites has become my reference point for demonstrating possibilities to my class. More on that shortly.
I also started my kids playing with FlickrStorm as a way of creating photogalleries of the topics up for discussion. That also produced important discussion as some kids were able to use the tool to stay focussed on the task at hand and others got distracted by the power of the tool. I even used this example in a comment on Doug’s blog:
Working on the wiki for our “global partners”, I talked with the class about the idea of using photography as a way of communicating ideas about the Australian way of life. I let them loose using FlickrStorm to create a photo montage on a specific idea like Australian food, or money or sport. They had so much fun working out how FlickrStorm worked, using key words, adding images they liked to the download tray and then generating the final hosting page of images, that very few thought critically about the images they were choosing and what message they would send about our way of life. Reviewing these back in class as a group was very useful as we (the class as a whole, not just me) realised that the photo collections needed checking for validity and accuracy. Check the difference between the collection of Australian money images from one child who was able to keep the end goal in mind in contrast to the other student who got caught up in the moment. The class discussion when viewed on data projector was invaluable. What conclusions would someone draw when the US dollar features in the pics? But when I send the students back tomorrow in the computing room to review, fix and link in their image pages, I reckon the results will be much, much closer to achieving their goal.
We still haven’t decided whether these galleries are a key ingredient in this project. Another major frustration is when a tool with potential turns out to have issues related to the school environment. I started playing with VoiceThread the other week and immediately got excited - in fact, I was convinced I had found the key to the next part of our collaboration. To set the scene, I focussed my trial example on an element of an image from one of the Alaskan websites showing an inukshuk, which I had never seen or heard of before. I grabbed images from FlickrCC for my VoiceThread, then recorded questions with each image. I saved it and then the next day, caught Chris Harbeck on Gmail Chat during my recess break. He, too, loves VoiceThread and offered to check out my example and add a voice comment. He did, even ignoring my mispronunciation of the word inukshuk, and I was sold. I started imagining South Australian and Alaskan student voices posing and answering questions via VoiceThread then writing up what they had learnt from their primary sources back at the wiki. I was so excited I showed my class my VoiceThread up on the interactive whiteboard. “I can’t hear your voice very well, Mr.Wegner.”
Then it came to a grinding halt. My original example had been recorded at home and I soon found that VoiceThread doesn’t work well from within our school environment - the images wouldn’t upload and the record button took too long to activate and it basically bombed. I did find out from Chrissy Hellyer (during a chatcast for Kim Cofino’s parent Web 2.0 presentation in my lunch hour) that she had similar issues at her school but they were solvable by unblocking a specific IP address and a certain port on the server. She also emphasised the worth of pursuing a solution as VT has a lot of great collaborative potential. So that is something still to work on.
But it does bring up another thing to consider when “going global” in your classroom - don’t assume that your access to web technology is the same as your partner’s. Doug’s class hit the issue of student emails in order to create unique identities for student work on the wiki. At my school all students from Year 3 have an email address that is packaged up with their internet logon. Not so at Doug’s school. There may be other bandwidth issues to consider. Certain sites may be blocked or filtered at one end but not the other.
Still, I’m pretty pleased with our progress so far with our grassroots global collaboration. Why do I refer to it as grassroots? Well, both Doug and I are committed public educators (he’s a bit more vocal about it than me) and we weren’t shooting for any high concepts that seem to be the topic of flavour ’round the edublogosphere. Just because an issue is high priority in the networks doesn’t mean that our age students will be all that engaged. What they are interested in is themselves and how they might be perceived by others. So, if all Doug and I do is raise some awareness that yes, your way (the students) of acting and thinking isn’t the only way and to debunk some misconceptions about our respective parts of the world.
One of the things that intrigued (bugged) me after the Kath Murdoch inquiry seminar was her seemingly dismissive attitude towards students using the web as a resource in any kind of inquiry research. My principal reminded that I tend to view everything through a technology lense so I shouldn’t be too concerned. But I’ve worked out why the notion stuck in my mind - even an experienced educator like Kath was viewing the web as a view only resource. When she talked about the importance of students seeking out primary sources as part of their inquiry process, it clicked in my brain that was where Web 2.0 made a difference to the use of the internet. Web 1.0 was definitely a secondary resource but using wikis and social networking tools now allow students to connect directly to key sources and in that way, the web can facilitate access to primary sources of information. That’s what excites me about potential global collaboration projects - not exploring highbrow concepts as much as connecting students to others of like age, exploring the differences and breaking down the misconceptions about how the rest of the world works.
Richness and authenticity are much-sought attributes of “the road of excess” for the 21st Century Learner. They trump “educationally relevant” as a measure of what we should look for in a learning experience for a 21st Century learner that might lead to “the palace of wisdom”.
Relevant and authentic I do like but unless you discuss what the two words mean, they just become buzzwords with which to beat your enemies and to become complacent with your friends.
Relevant is relevant to the lives of your students, Myspace, skateboards, WoW. The students are the final judge of relevance.
Authentic is work with a real purpose, it’s a bit disappointing when your pottery is bound for the clay bin at the end of the lesson.
I just love it when someone can say something in a well crafted phrase that would take me a paragraph to evoke. Tony could be talking about any of the educational double talk that occurs in official circles or, dare I say it, on this blog or in the edublogosphere.
Just read a great post from Tony Forster who has a look at some interesting data comparing literacy/numeracy scores and problem solving scores from different countries. After looking at the stats, Tony offers this analysis:
Australia, New Zealand and Canada score significantly higher than USA despite sharing similar cultural backgrounds. I have noticed a significant difference, USA educators are more focussed on the transfer of knowledge than the development of problem solving skills through self-directed, problem based learning.
In an interesting exercise, Tony did some Googling of key words to back up his observations. Read the whole post for the total picture but for me, it highlights the danger of Australian education authorities taking their lead from US strategies and drawing conclusions and looking for solutions to our own issues from a wealth of US education data available online. We shouldn’t always assume that US-centric educational practices are the best, especially in the K-12 sector.
During this term, I have the pleasure of working with the Year 1/2 classes in our school as part of our Problem Based Learning program to develop an ICT product that showcases their learning. The problems are centred around Aboriginal Studies or animal environments (specifically desert and coastal) and the tools of choice for their final product are Powerpoint and PhotoStory. I just want to touch on the first lesson this week with the class tackling animals in desert environments and their foray with PhotoStory. Being young students (mainly seven and eight year olds) it is important to give them an opportunity to get to “know the software” in a safe, non-threatening way. I had to come up with a task that rehearsed the important components of PhotoStory so that when it comes to creating the knowledge product mid-term with the information gathered during research with the teacher-librarian, learning the software is not interfering with that process.
So, here’s what I did. I used the great Flickr CC tool created by Peter Shanks from Bathurst to quickly track down 10 Creative Commons licensed images of both cats and dogs. I downloaded them to a subfolder within the class folder on the network and showed the kids how to find them and insert them into the timeline in PhotoStory. They then had to add a title into the next text box and that’s about as far as we got in one lesson. The whole idea is that the students produce a quick story based on risk free material so that they learn the skills without the content interfering. That way when they do their story based on what they have researched, learning the quirks of PhotoStory is already covered and not a distraction to that creative process!
Image adapted from Flickr - Attribution: Image: ‘Bella ragazza‘ www.flickr.com/photos/35237098471@N01/19508832
The four MYLU classes have been coming to grips with the PBL wiki where we have been storing all of the learning “artifacts” of our unit on “What Does It Mean To Be Australian?” As they have gone about their task, I have been discovering quite a bit about what wikis can do and just as importantly, what they can’t do. Bear in mind that this is about 120 users working and making page edits over a 3 day period each week. So it’s not your usual wiki project - it’s a bit of an experiment - but please note the following.
All images uploaded must have unbroken file names - no extra period or spaces, kids normally name files like Aussie Inventions.jpg and forget to use an underscore to link the words.
Each image uploaded must have a unique name - a child from Learning Area 21 who uploads an image named Aussie.jpg on Wednesday comes back a week later to find their image looks different because the kid from Learning Area 22 uploaded another image and chose that same exact file name on Friday.
Two people can’t work on the same page at the same time on two different computers. It doesn’t work! I originally thought it would.
Images linked to at home display as desired but can be blocked by the filter at school resulting in those ugly “This image cannot be displayed ” boxes.
Kids are shocking with passwords and requesting an e-mail remainder doesn’t always work.
Apart from those few things, we (students, teachers, me!) have learnt a lot about how wikis work and whether they are a good vehicle to unpack Australian Identity on. We certainly boost wikispaces traffic on certain days peaking at No.2 for page edits (currently number four today - see graphic) last Thursday. A few weeks to go and it will be interesting to see if it all becomes on unreadable, unnavigable mess or a relevant document on our learning open to the world.
During the latter half of last week, we started our Problem Based Learning program with the Middle Years Learning Unit (MYLU) students. As our teacher-librarian was away in Melbourne at a PBL conference, it was decided to get the students started familiarising and using the cutting edge technology of the wiki before the introduction of the problem. Each class had approximately two hours in the computing room with me and Peter, our extra support teacher for the term. I had already set up the PBL wiki ready to go (or so I thought) with all of the relevant pages set up - the problem, Learning Area pages, sandbox pages, examples, information about wikis and even a link to a Copyright page for kids (poached from Doug Noon’s del.icio.us links). I had my plan, use the IWB in the classroom to explicitly walk the kids through the wiki, discuss what a wiki was, touch on the aspects of adding “stuff” to a wiki - text, images, wiki links, outgoing links, navigation, creating pages. I also tried to explicitly show the kids how to join Wikispaces, go to the PBL wiki and request membership to that space. I first worked with my own class although Natalie (my co-teacher) was officially in charge and they had already played with a wiki in a previous lesson. So that went OK - Nat is a very web-savvy teacher and got the kids easily into acquiring space membership and then we tackled the section of the session designed to give them real opportunity to acquire some skills. I had concocted an Internet Treasure Hunt with a page dedicated to it on the wiki where the kids had to track some various web items and put them on their page - links, images, slabs of information. Away they went with varying success. I had also cunningly made all of the items to be tracked of Australian origin so that the kids would already be tuned when we started the problem. I also figured that as I started each new session, my delivery of the lesson and concepts would be smoother and the kids later in the week would be able to get going quicker and achieve more in the two hours. How wrong I was. The spread of wiki-awareness across all of the classes was extremely wide with some of the youngest students being the quickest to create accounts, read the instructions, create their own team page for the Hunt and add content while a lot of the Year Sevens were a bit lost. I also learnt a fair bit about wikis as we went along. For instance, two people can’t have a page open for editing and work at the same time because the changes don’t update on the fly and whatever is on the page when the SAVE button is hit, it is what is saved on that version. I think it will smooth out as the students gain confidence and they spread the tasks and work on more than just one page at once in their group.
In the three classes that hadn’t worked with me before, very few kids had even heard of a wiki and it was interesting that not one of my fellow teachers knew how Wikipedia was constructed. I certainly raised their awareness and I am sure that they will use Wikipedia with a different frame of mind in future. It all depends on your view on “trusted sources” but the kids were really great in identifying the advantages of the Wikipedia system - always up-to-date, links to other resources, many more articles and interactive multi-media extras.
So, in the end, all of the students registered as wikispace users (using net safety aliases, of course) became members of the PBL wiki, created a team page for the Hunt, linked that page back to their Learning Area navigation page and made a start on the Treasure Hunt. It certainly was obvious that the kids and the teachers need more “play time” using this new tool before it is used for the solving of the Problem but I am glad that everyone feels that using a wiki has great potential.
I have to finish with this great little anecdote. In one class, the numbers were odd so one boy had to pair up with his teacher to create a team. That was great - the teacher felt it gave her a chance to get into the task, learn the application and get to know her student a little better. The student? He was fine BUT he was concerned that he was at a disadvantage because he had a teacher as a partner and she might not pull her weight!!
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Posted by Graham
The four MYLU classes have been coming to grips with the 
