Session summary:
John’s forte was the development of Learning Games, based on Powerpoint and some more sophisticated Flash based content. He took attendees through some of the games including “Battle Of The Sexes” (useful only in co-ed schools), “Millionaire” and several others. He also talked through the use of these games as templates for students to create their own versions, easily tying these platforms to whatever learning was current in their classroom. There are a number of examples on John’s website at My Interactive Classroom. He also talked through his pedagogical stages of IWB use – which you can find here in a comment on Lauren O’Grady’s blog.
Presentation format:
John let his games do his talking for him by getting audience members involved in the games. He was witty, informative and flicked onto a new example before the audience could get bored, which is an excellent tactic for any classroom.
Summing up:
In my mixed bag experience at this conference, John’s session was a standout.
I got back Saturday from the National IWB conference (referred to as IWBNet09 as the event is run by IWBNet) tired and glad to be back in quiet old Adelaide. I went with a group of colleagues from my school along with Dr. Trudy Sweeney and Cate Berden from Learning Technologies in DECS. Our main goal was to get some sort of idea about the national picture, to gauge how we are travelling as a school compared to others and bring back leading edge ideas and experiences to share with our staff to keep our own technology use moving forward. I was quite excited about the two day conference, having volunteered to be a part of several presentations but hoping to catch enough other leading practitioners in action to help inform my own journey as an effective educator.
But now I’m back, I find that as a conference experience, IWBNet09 was not what I was hoping for. For me, there is still too much focus on fancy equipment, software solutions, too much basic click’n'drag demos. I’m sure that people could say the same of my own presentations – I was reasonably happy with the flow of my Effective Design presentation (much better than than the ramble I presented at CEGSA) and I think that choosing to cover Social Bookmarking in a presentation format was not the best idea. Talking at people for fifty minutes about the benefits of online bookmarking isn’t ideal – but only having nine people in the session meant that questions were freely asked and I could track around my initial pathway to address these ideas.
I’ll pick through my notes and publish my take on some of the sessions I did attend, but I guess what I felt was missing was the conversation about student learning in the classroom and how teachers are using technology to help facilitate that. I kept wishing for more in the sessions I did attend, with the exception of John Short who tied some pedagogical purpose to his Powerpoint Learning Games. I suppose when one attends a conference that purely focuses on one piece of technology, then said piece of technology takes centre stage. I think that I’m more interested in a conference centered around learning and technology’s potential role – and not the other way around.
I quite enjoyed the first day of training for the Intel Thinking With Technology course today. A small group of ten educators who are being trained to take this course back to their sites made for an engaging time as we whipped through the first two modules, led by our expert Senior Trainer Steve Nicholson. I plan to reflect in more detail as the next four days unfold but I just wanted to document this realisation before it fades.
We had time this afternoon to start using the planning template the program offers for designing a unit of work. It has a number of similarities to the Understanding by Design influenced unit planner my schools currently uses, so it was very user friendly to work with. Steve had time set aside for us to work on designing of a unit of work for future use in our classrooms, and with the gift of time, I looked at the school’s Inquiry Scope & Sequence to determine which of the inquiry units that my colleagues needed planned before the year’s end. I started on the last one currently titled “Does Music Make The World Go Round?” , cutting and pasting SACSA outcomes into the template before I had a major attack of the doubts and emailed my colleagues at school (Kim, my tandem teaching partner and Maria, our next door co-planning buddy) for counsel in where I should start, especially as our next actual unit of inquiry centres on Health outcomes in the dreaded “growth and development” area. Kim answered during her lunch break, correctly calling me out for being cowardly and avoiding this unit and so in the afternoon when we had some more time, I started again.
So, as I pored through the outcomes and SACSA examples to get my head around what the unit should be about, I realised that this was not how I plan for learning in the classroom any more. I needed my colleagues’ input, the conversation that hones in on the essential understandings, and the shared understanding of where we want the students to go during an inquiry unit. We do all of this together in our co-planning time, in the evenings on the wiki chatroom and through email exchange. Occasionally, we break the planning up into segments for individuals to work on alone but these are always pieces to the bigger puzzle.
It’s been called the deprivatisation of practice where teachers open up the closed door to their classrooms and create better learning through conversation and planning. But it is truly how I work best now. It is how this whole online networking thing works best – learning from each other and creating better learning experiences for our students.
I’ve hanging around a few Nings of late and even kick started one to give some of my staff a first hand experience of social networking walled garden style. One that I’ve just joined recently is part of an online conference run by my education system and focussing on Learning Spaces. What I find interesting about this is the chance to contrast the thinking and experiences of educators within my system with other points of view out on the open web. For instance, Vicki Davis recently pointed to this video from Bob Sprankle’s presentation at the recent BLC conference in North America.
Now, the concepts and ideas that Bob raises are worthwhile, don’t get me wrong. Many teachers can articulate what their ideal classroom could look like if someone was actually funded to build it. But there’s the rub. Even with the Federal Government getting stuck into the biggest building initiative in decades via the BER initiative, I don’t think much of that is going into future proofed classrooms and buildings. Schools are being handed templates of current buildings with minimal opportunity to rethink the way a school or even a classroom could be designed and function.
So when an idea like Qantas Club model classrooms was floated in the second Ning that I’ve been frequenting, I can feel a collective sigh from all of the teachers who just know that their classroom space is not changing any time soon. They quite pragmatically see that fantasy talk around learning spaces that are tailor made for these 21st Century Skills is not their reality. After all, they still have to shoehorn 30 odd students into their allocated area, connect to less than reliable networks, juggle limited budgets and still meet the rising demand for data driven accountability.
Of course, if we can allow the connection to the web in our schools to be less restricted and of sufficient bandwidth to be useful, then these new online learning spaces for the everyday teacher have much more chance of being achieveable. Even here, we run the risk of stumbling into fantasy territory again. You know the dream, the one of kids using their own devices to connect to the school network so that connection to the rest of the world is right there on the kid’s desk. But then we’d need top notch technicians to ensure a robust and flexible network – and I know in this state, there isn’t enough funding to keep the sort of talent in this area that we need for that dream to come true.
I have this gut feeling that even primary school education is going to dramatically change – some how, some time – before my time in this system is up. But I’m realistic enough to know that the physical facilities that people describe as pushing towards a more ideal learner centered classroom don’t come cheap and it will take a better government (State or Federal) than what we’ve got right now to make that investment.
Don’t get me wrong – we are seeing welcome investment in education that is a long time coming. I have to keep my cynicism in check and my network helps to keep me from assuming negative outcomes.
e.g.
Darcy1968: Windows 7 is RTM so we may be advantaged by getting our laptops later rather than sooner #DERNSW7:09 PM Jul 27th from twhirl
grahamwegner: @Darcy1968 I’ll bet there’s a few teachers quaking in their boots re: DER laptops – or planning to ignore so business as usual.7:18 PM Jul 27th from Twitterrific in reply to Darcy1968
grahamwegner: @Darcy1968 That’s good to hear – it would be easy to be cynical (like me).7:34 PM Jul 27th from Twitterrific in reply to Darcy1968
Darcy1968: @grahamwegner we have all just been empowered to make a genuine difference and I buy into the once in a lifetime opportunity notion.7:36 PM Jul 27th from twhirl in reply to grahamwegner
We can make genuine change in classrooms exactly as they are right now. Waiting for the ideal learning space may never happen but as Tom Woodward’s great photo illustrates, schools will be eventually forced into change whether they want to or not.
Along with a group of teachers from my school, I am heading off to the National IWB Conference in Sydney in late August. Despite having used one in my classroom since 2005 and being one of the prime movers in getting them installed in our school, my opinion on their effectiveness waxes and wanes constantly. I am presenting at the conference as well – twice in solo presentations on the use of social bookmarking and on effective presentation design, citing expertise from Meyer, Shareski, Elias, Mercer and Woodward along the way. I am also appearing in a support role with my co-planning buddy on “IWB and Inquiry Learning.”
In between these commitments I hope to catch a variety of sessions in an effort to gauge what is being touted as best practice, how our school measures up in a national picture and whether there is any real transformation going on. I hope I can keep my cynicism on check as my one day jaunt to the 2008 IWB Conference was …. ahem … a bit underwhelming.
I use my own IWB daily when in the classroom but I struggle with this whole concept of interactivity. I helped my wife construct her first own flipchart the other day as part of the training package her school got with their IWB purchases from late last year. She had to construct a table on basic shapes (she is teaching five year olds) and hide her selection of objects from the library in a layered box so the kids could “pull” them out of the “magic box” and then place them in the appropriate column on the flipchart. So what does pulling the objects out of the box achieve? Does this really enhance the learning process or is it just a visual gimmick?
So these sort of questions keep bugging me to the point where I am not sure whether the IWB is a lifeline or a barrier to effective classroom learning. Maybe to stretch the mangled metaphor a bit more, maybe IWBs just add digital cement around age old established practice. So, in the spirit of querying my own (constantly changing) perceptions, here is a comic for you to consider.
If we want our students to understand why certain groups of people from around the world chose to leave their home and end up in Adelaide (my students’ home town) , then an overall sense of modern world history is needed to gain that understanding. This becomes a classic example of how skills and knowledge are intertwined. Content without skills is mindless but skills without meaningful content is just as hollow.
So here’s what I’m trying to find in the fire hydrant that is the web. I’m hoping that someone has created a multimedia piece that covers the important events from a world perspective of the last century (there’s plenty with an overly American bias which is not useful for this inquiry). I’ve hunted through YouTube and the best I can find is this creation below:
I still think that this is too complex and requires far too much prior knowledge for twelve year olds although we have one student who is a history buff who could probably take on the role of narrator for both classes. After all, not every child can excitedly talk about having stood on the exact spot in Sarajevo where the assassination of the Archduke Franz Ferdinand sparked the Great War. But unless, I find something better, this might be the best way to give the kids the sense of events that pushed people, sometimes their own families, to seek out a better, safer place to call home.
Just a quick reflection on a tuning in activity I did with the class this afternoon. We’re starting a new Inquiry unit titled “Why Is The World Coming To Adelaide?” which has a focus on examining the impact multicultualism has had on this city over time. So, the starting point is to help define “the World” with the students. Yesterday I had the kids pore over a unlabelled world map to see how much geographical knowledge they collectively possessed. We finished up that session with a discussion around reasons why some countries were easier to identify than others.
Then I gave them a simple homework task.
Pick a media source and gather some statistics from a news source (television, newspaper, web) about which countries were mentioned and how often.
The efforts ranged from a quick glance at the local paper to one enterprising student who recorded three different news programs on the family HD recorder and then scanned through them all to gather her stats. We then dropped those results into Wordle to generate this image:
So, I finished the lesson by posing the following questions to the class. “So, what does this tell us? Why do some countries feature so prominently in our news sample? Why are some countries barely mentioned or not noticed at all? What theory do you have?”
Any other classroom teachers elsewhere in the world who’d be willing to try this quick exercise and share the results with me and my class?
You’d think that I could make up my own mind about things by now but I’m as easily influenced as I ever was. Except now my influences seep in through digital connection as much as face to face.
I went down and upgraded my mobile phone today at the Allphones store at our local shopping centre. I went with a new iPhone on my old plan which turned out to be a good deal as it includes a monthly data allowance of 1G which my old plan didn’t have. My choice was heavily influenced by the numerous educators that I have read praising the iPhone as a device. I read in detail on this forum too about some of the issues that I might face with my carrier (3) after a warning tweet from Dean Groom. His past experiences led me to a greater understanding of roaming networks and whether my new upgrade would be a decent deal.
Consider my network as a pretty big influence in that decision. It’s also the reason I plan to purchase and salary sacrifice a Mac laptop later in the term. I no longer have to rely on the salesman’s pitch – I can gather intelligence from users already using the products I am interested in. I even tweeted a request out to ascertain the need for the Apple Protection Plan and got useful advice from Rachel Boyd, Isaak Kwok and Paul Luke.
Then tonight I watched the first episode of a DVD set that was my birthday gift, purchased way back in March. (A$13.99 a Season, good value.) The series is “The Wire” which I’ve never seen on Australian television but came higly recommended from another node in my network. Thanks, Dan.
Maybe somewhere my own bits of digital content help to influence and shape other people’s choices in a positive way. Wisdom of the crowd, indeed.
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