Monthly Archives: February 2006

My recent post, Is It Possible To Have Self Directed PD? attracted some quality responses via comments and pingbacks which confirmed my ideas could and have worked before. Thanks to all who have contributed either to provide examples or additional thoughts. I would highly recommend downloading the pdf file that Doug Johnson provided. Titled "The 21st Century Educator", it is a highly developed professional development program with rubrics, growth targets and exemplars. Although it would need a fair bit of Australianisation, what I really like is the structure it would bring to what would essentially be a "just in time" program for my colleagues.

I'm confident that my principal can see value in my proposal after an interesting ICT Committee meeting on Friday. We were talking about the increased pressure on valuable work time when our very capable network manager (who also has quite a few other admin responsibilities) is treated by a lot of our staff as the on call help desk. Sometimes, I attract that sort of requests for help as well. The requests, which all take time and goodwill, range from unjamming printers to showing someone how to do an e-mail attachment to printing off a class list to troubleshooting unplugged cables. Ann, my principal then said that it sounded like a lot of staff needed "just-in-time" skills training so that they could solve these problems on their own and allow the admin time to be well used. Bingo! I gave a thumbnail sketch of my proposal and we also agreed to draw up an ICT technology skills register of staff members so that we all could be become each other's help desk instead of relying on the goodwill and expertise of one or two people. These skills acquisitions are different to my self-directed learning proposal and need to be kept separate but the value of people starting where they are and looking at mapping their way forward is exactly the mindshift us 21st educators need to take.

My day in dot points:

  • Started cautiously at my local coordinators' cluster meeting where my frustration at the lack of direction, domination by loudest voices and general lack of commonality has been brewing for the best part of the year. Thankfully, thanks to a visit and offer of support from one of our district's Learning Band Coordinators, some direction was established and a suggestion that coordinators across the cluster provide free training for all schools was squashed. It wouldn't have fitted my still to be finalised PD model for our staff. But I am sick of hearing about standardised testing as being the way of the future and how progressive and forward thinking schools who are into data crunching are supposed to be. (Here's the worrying bit - my son's school is one of the keenest at pushing this particular barrow!)
  • My comments woes are now fixed thanks to the diligent efforts of the wonderful James Farmer. For at least three days, comments were closed on my site but trackbacks and pingbacks were getting through. (Someone at Xplanazine reads my stuff!) James thought it was my theme initially but it turned out to be the gatekeeper - I think James has closed the loophole now as it probably affected other blogs - it's just that I'm a whinger. Thanks also to Doug Johnson, Al Upton and Artichoke who noticed my plight and e-mailed their comments to me. Thank you - I took the liberty of posting your comments myself. And yet another big plug for edublogs, James isn't in this for the praise but this is an awesome service for the whole edublogging community. If you agree and still can't believe it is still blocked by the filters in Australia, then head  on over to nonscholae.org where James' efforts are again leading the way.
  • One of the busiest starts to the year so far - I'm only in the classroom half time but so far we have started Bike Ed., holding our parent acquaintance night where I am going to try and be a bit more transparent and next week we're off on camp in the Adelaide Hills at Arbury Park. Add to that planning for the start of the PBL program - I hope I find time to blog.
  • Finally, a couple of noteworthy edubloggers are seeking greener pastures. Will Richardson has announced his plunge into the uncharted waters of professional blogging and it will be very interesting to see where that takes him. I love reading his blog and draw lots of inspiration from all of the tangential offerings he posts constantly. His comment on one of my early posts really got me stoked about the power of the Read/Write web, to use his words. So, good luck, Will - maybe he's a chance to be a big drawcard at the CEGSA conference in July. I'd be in the front row for sure.
    And Leigh Blackall is headed off to Kiwiland where he has a new job at Otago Polytechnic in Dunedin. I'm sure that he won't mind a consistent wage for a change and hope that he can still keep his finger on the pulse of the Australian edtech scene. I say Leigh is one of the best edubloggers going and if you have never read his work, it's a must-add for your Bloglines. Just watch the sheep and underarm cricket jokes, Leigh!

Now back to the real work that awaits me.

I've been pondering a rethink of the ICT training and development opportunities that I might provide my staff in 2006. Part of my role description here at my school calls for me to provide T&D to improve skills and confidence for my onsite colleagues. So in previous years, I've run courses on FrontPage, digital cameras, saving files to our network, trouble shooting where I've designed a step by step approach with handouts, examples, personal support and explicit demonstration. Has it improved the overall skill set of our staff? I'm not convinced. For example, my FrontPage course started with 10 participants which dropped to 8 the following week when a couple of junior primary teachers couldn't see the relevance of designing web pages for them. A few more dropped out halfway through when they acquired the basic skills they were after and eventually two continued to the bitter end. One staff member moaned that I responded to the loudest voices when they wanted help, some others wanted handouts with step by step instructions and a couple needed to start from the beginning of every session. Clearly, the one size fits all model doesn't work with learners, especially adults who have their definite preferred learning style and who, like kids, all have different levels of confidence, experience and expertise. So, inspired by my own experiences in the edublogosphere and Leigh Blackall's concept of Networked Learning, I am trying to draw up a plan that would guide my interested staff members towards self directed professional development. It's still embryonic so naturally I'm gonna put what I've got here and if anyone [please!] wants to give me feedback/suggestions/ridicule, I'm all ears. Here goes:

2006 LNPS Staff ICT Personalised Learning Program
Proposal for regular T&D opportunities on Tuesday afternoons.
Rationale: We are in the business of lifelong learning - developing this in ourselves will help us to facilitate this mindset in our students. ICT and e-learning have developed to the stage where we can personalise our learning experiences - new technologies are constantly providing us with better ways of connecting to others, documenting our own practice and developing our own content.
The IWB program needs to be supported with a regular time set aside for (1) the practice and use of the IWB, (2) planning and designing of own resources and lessons, (3) finding, reviewing and bookmarking of relevant/useful online resources, (4) professional reading and connection and (5) personal professional reflection.
Teachers may also wish to develop other skills related to specific software applications (desktop and online) by accessing online tutorials and courses to work through. The goal is for teachers to become self-directed, self-paced "just in time" learners, so that they can acquire ICT knowledge and skills from multiple sources and modes of instructions.
In my role as Coordinator, I would assist teachers to put together a Personalised Learning Program (as the guide on the side). Each week, a limited number of slots would be available for closer personal assistance while other staff would work in a more independent mode, using each other and a network of outside educators developed over time via social software (bookmarking, blogs, forums). Time spent would be documented and count towards DECS professional development hours requirement.

 Does it even make sense? Any suggestions? Help!!!!

As I read more and start thinking about the year ahead, I find that the blogs engaging my brain are quite different from my original Top Five list. Leigh Blackall would still be there as his posts really challenge - even though he is based in a different sector of Aussie education to me, his thoughts are always relevant. I certainly admire his "say it as I see it" style and wish I could inject more of that into my own blogging.
But the two blogs that keep hitting my relevance button are NZ's own Artichoke and Doug Noon's Borderland. Part of my role here at my school is the implementation of a Problem Based Learning program. I consider myself to be one of those creative types who can set up meaningful and engaging learning experienes but documenting along the way and really assessing what the children have learnt. So this year my partner in crime, our teacher-librarian, have resolved to get the model right with time set aside to plan with teachers, following closely the PBL model we have chosen, allowing students enough time to solve the problem and tying it all together with a meaningful assessment of the solutions and the skills and standards displayed along the way. So, in timely blogosphere fashion, Artichoke's post about inquiry learning really got me questioning about the effectiveness of my previous PBL units and what I could possibly do now in the initial stages to get it right. I don't really want any of the classes I'll be working with to be lost in a tunnel of goats. Artichoke points out:

Inquiry learning is an attempt to get students involved in Chris' "work that matters" or "work that cuts it".

So what would meet that criteria? Is a problem that gets kids to design a pamphlet or website warning citizens of Adelaide what to do if a bushfire/tsunami/earthquake struck going to "cut it" or is it roleplay beyond the maturity of a primary school aged student? Or does the problem have to focus on what our students could realistically have some influence on - how could we support a refugee child starting at our school? Maybe both ideas are valid. But Artichoke has already done some of the research hackwork for me and summarised a solid consideration to take on board when we meet to discuss and design:

It was only when the problem oriented learning activity required students to compare and contrast quite different cases; to look for similarities and differences across dissimilar and apparently unrelated problems that students showed transfer of knowledge and dramatic learning gains resulting from the activity.

One post back on Artichoke's blog, I find a potential starting point for our middle school students. How about a re-mix of the final paragraph?

I might start with explorations of Search Engines. And reckon Blogbar the free search engine bar you can include in your own blog or website will be useful in that it is going to allow students (remix insert) to easily play with, and compare a range of major search engines [Google, Yahoo, MSN, Ask Jeeves, Exalead], and major blog search engines like Technorati, Google Blog Search, Yahoo! Blog Search, IceRocket, Blogpulse, Feedster, and Del.icio.us.] And I think I might follow up with explorations of The Question.

The question could be something along the lines of, "Which search engine easily and efficiently produces the most accurate and meaningful results?" From this question stems many other subsidiary Jamie McKenzie style questions that can be covered either explicitly or by investigation and students are (hopefully) gaining relevant and necessary information literacy skills by exploring the way that information is delivered to them.
However our first cohort of students for this term's PBL program are much younger (Years 2 - 4 / 8 & 9 year olds) so the planning and thinking has to be different and provide much more support.
So where am I going with all of this? I'm not too sure but fast forward to Borderland where Doug has extracted his own useful take on Artichoke's observations.

Artichoke questioned the uncritical application of inquiry approaches to classroom learning, and recommended that teachers introduce relational and extended abstract thinking challenges into inquiry tasks. She left a link to an article called Using the SOLO Taxonomy that I found useful for answering a problem I’ve been pondering for about 9 years. The article provides a framework for teaching to levels of thinking that are appropriate to a student’s specific background and needs. The SOLO taxonomy defines levels of learning competence for students. With Vygotsky’s zone of proximal development in mind, maybe I can use this model to find challenges that are just right for my students.

This is the great thing about blogging. We all interpret written language from our point of view - so I might read Artichoke's post and go, "Aha, that's what she's on about!" But Doug has pulled alternative meaning from the same post and reading his post Herding Goats helps me to see and read the original post in a new light. And by following the link to the SOLO taxonomy, I now have a great tool to assess the quality of the students' solutions to the set problem without being dazzled or disappointed by their use of ICT's in the research or presentation side of the PBL process. I'm taking this along to the planning session on Friday as well as the process. I'll post here after the planning session. And Arti and Doug, I'd appreciate your uncensored thoughts - now, then, anytime.

I've conducted a Technology Survey of my 5/6 class here at school (10/11 year olds) to see how digitally native they are and to see if there was any sort of digital divide that might be barriers in my increased use of Read/Write technology. (We started a class blog the other day - when it gets a bit more organised, I'll post a link.) So I've tallied up the results in a spreadsheet and it makes interesting reading. I got 28 surveys back out of 29 students and all have a computer at home and all but 3 have internet access.

Ownership of mobile phones and mp3 players is split pretty evenly but that would be a different number than from two years ago. 18 out of the 28 homes had more than one game console system with one boy listing 6 different systems at his house! I also provided an internet activity section based on the Pew Internet Survey where online games and entertainment websites led the way - interestingly, at this age, Web 2.0 has yet to make a difference as only 2 students said that they used the internet as a place to write their opinions. Perhaps that is still to explode - or more the domain of high schools kids. Anyway, as it is anonymous, I've uploaded the survey to my rwlo.org site so anyne who is statistically minded and wants to see the technological grasp of Adelaidean tweens, check it out.