Monthly Archives: May 2012

I ran a PD session today as part of our weekly staff session focussing on awareness raising around online tools for professional self-learning. I focussed on the potential of Twitter, Diigo, delicious, Google Reader and touched on Edmodo. It feels weird to be introducing these tools that so many in the edtech field see as standard fare that has been around for quite a while and I know that many on my staff have known about these tools but still many regular classroom teachers are unaware of the potential growth and access to great ideas and resources that social bookmarking and feed aggregation can produce.

Anyway, I tried to strike a balance between the show-and-tell that is required with some choice and free time for my colleagues to explore. I used Dan Meyer as an example (again) as his output and sharing is second to none, and he really comes across in his videos and blog posts as someone that everyone can like and relate to even if he is operating at this hyper-extreme productivity level of video production, blog posting and curriculum development that no one else I know in my day to day life could keep pace with. I showed a couple of my dy/av videos and pointed out how and where he shares his thoughts, ideas, resources and insights across the web before offering them a challenge based on his own fingertip analogy from way back in 2010. If you subscribe to Dan, you may remember this one:

Let me urge you to consider that question under the following fictional constraint: every time you tell a teacher to download a new application or set up an account with a new web application, the teacher loses a fingertip.

Bracket, for a moment, the grossness of the scenario. I'll let you decide how the teacher loses the fingertip. The point is that y'all don't understand that you're a bunch of freaks. Someone links up some new online Photoshop knock-off and on muscle memory alone you're entering in your e-mail address and a password and clonking away at your new toy.

Real people aren't like that. And you give them too much grief, sometimes, for their unwillingness to sign up for ten different web apps to service ten different nuances in their learning which you have judged to be equally essential.

So: fingertips. Be careful here. I would give the fingertip off my right ring finger for Google Reader. I would sacrifice a second fingertip for Delicious.

So, with the metaphor firmly in place, I figured that bribery and encouragement works better than guilt trips about how teachers need to get with the program and be connected for their students' sake. I threw the following slide up on the screen:

The reward is a chocolate like the KitKat pictured - as KitKats can be broken into fingers (get it!) - and I remarked that I could potentially be up for an expensive purchase of choccy bars as staff signed onto the tools and tweeted or friended me as evidence they were on their way to embracing connected self-learning! A colleague then said that I maybe should have wagered with someone else that I could raise thirty or so new followers on Twitter in a day, and I could have funded the reward!

So, Dan, I'm sorry if I keep mentioning you and your work from a year or so back as a starting point for others but you are an ideal role model because you weren't a tech head like the majority of us whose day job involved tech integration into student learning. But if I tell the whole story that you show on your website that shows where you've gone since those days as a beginning mathematics teacher, they may well be overwhelmed and intimidated into not giving this a go. But if someone like me is making a useful contribution, then it can't be that hard.

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Here's what I plan to present in my 7 minute presentation at the Adelaide TeachMeet on Thursday afternoon.

TeachMeet Adelaide Presentation Script - "Innovation + Leadership = Change "

Hi, I'm Graham Wegner. I'm currently an Assistant Principal at Woodville Gardens School B-7 with a focus on Learning Technologies and Admin but prior to this appointment, I was the ICT Coordinator at Lockleys North Primary starting in 2003. My current school is fortunate enough to be part of a DECD Innovative Learning Environment project group which is an interesting experience in itself. The schools that are part of this project are all doing things that fall outside the bounds of what other schools think is possible or permissible within our state education system, or in the case of the three PPP (Private Public Partnership) schools or "super schools" as we've been dubbed by the media purpose built with a view to doing things differently and encouraging innovation. There are lots of aspects of our school's physical designs that move teacher thinking away from the isolated classroom approach to education, and we have been set up well with an excellent wireless network but innovation that leads to meaningful change doesn't just happen because the physical environment suggests it. Another interesting aside is that all three PPP schools in the project (Blair Athol North, Mark Oliphant College and us) all serve complex, lower socio-economic communities so it could be interpreted that there is a realisation that the way school has always been done hasn't served these communities well and that the magnifying  effects that disadvantage can have on student learning outcomes needs innovative thinking to effect change.

And it is this idea of innovation linked to change that I'd like to discuss in the time I have here this afternoon. In general, throughout the world, innovation drives change, with the goal being that this change is for the better, be it better ways to communicate, better ways to solve crime, to entertain ourselves, to cure or relieve ailments and so on. Education has been labelled, fairly or otherwise, as an institution that is slow to change and is in fact, a very difficult way for innovation to take place and flourish. However, we are at a point in time where the advancement of technology, the product of innovation, is forcing change throughout the world - some of it political as we can see in examples like MySchool and teacher accountability measures, some of it social in examples like Facebook and YouTube - and there is a real societal backlash landing back on schools as a result. And large systems like DECD aren't well equipped to be nimble and adaptive to external change pressure - and we as educators cop flak about the bad teachers, the worthless SACE subjects, the social media entanglements that our students get involved in, the lack of male teachers and are painted as this conservative bunch who shut the classroom door each day and forget that the outside world exists.

Except that doesn't really happen. There are plenty of innovative educators out there and it wouldn't be a stretch for me to generalise that all of us here tonight at this TeachMeet are innovators of sorts, or at least, see ourselves as agents of change. We are the first to try things out at our respective sites. We are the ones who change things for our students - and we find it enormously frustrating that others, sometimes the considerable majority that the media must be referring to when the profession is slammed in the papers, don't see the urgency or the opportunities that we see as being obvious.

A quick disclaimer then a quick example. When I portray myself as innovative, I know that it is all contextual and relative. Since becoming a networked learner who relies on the internet for self learning opportunities, I know that most of the ideas I've trialled in my classrooms have all been done before by other trailblazers scattered around the world. So, I'm referring to innovative in terms of the status quo for South Australian schools not as compared against other innovative ideas from around the world. Anyway, onto the example which has two parts. In 2006, I posted a presentation for the K12Online Conference titled "No Teacher Left Behind: The Urgency of Web 2.0" - a pretentious title for a pretentious topic. It was a rallying call for progressive educators to get on board with internet based tools and start networking with other educators to become better learners. Well, I could pull up the same presentation five and a half years later, and not a lot seems to have changed in classrooms in this neck of the woods. In 2008, I started student blogging at Lockleys North with my class and last year left a program being run by my immediate colleagues who saw the value in the innovation and made the change in their practice to offer this learning opportunity for their students. But upon my arrival at Woodville Gardens, I found that student blogging was a concept that hadn't hit classrooms yet and I realised (although I always susupected) that my participation in something innovative in South Australia hasn't translated to a change across more schools than the one where I first took up the innovation.

So, innovation can push towards change, but there is a missing ingredient that I believe that the collective "we" are responsible for - leadership.

Leadership can look like many things. It can be a formal role like the one I have now. But we all know that formal roles don't automatically translate to change either. I'm sure you all know of principals who believe that their job is to keep things running exactly as is - unless the department tells them otherwise. And it is no fun trying to be the innovative teacher in one of those schools either. But in a formal role, I have a better shot at influencing more educators compared to when I was the classroom teacher and could only influence the teachers next door to me. As a coordinator I could make inroads into a team or targetted group but those of us who are or have been coordinators know the difficult task that role can be. But as an Assistant Principal, I have the authority to determine school directions that can turn innovative ideas and programs into progressive more commonplace practice.

But not everyone wants an official leadership role. So leadership opportunities can be found elsewhere - and the most innovative space to do so is online. There are countless examples o f people who started an online presence from their classroom who wield enormous amounts of influence because they put their practices, their innovation in a place where anyone or everyone could find them. Try throwing these names into Google and see what you find - Brian Crosby, who works out of a classroom in Nevada who ended up presenting to international school educators in a major conference in China, international school leader Kim Cofino who posted about that 2006 presentation of mine pondering my advice and now is someone who I aspire to be like in terms of vision and getting real learning change happening. Try Dan Meyer, who was a young high school Maths teacher who started a blog for fun, is now doing a PhD and has worked for Google and Pearson, but still sees his blog as the best personal professional growth he could ever have - and for one closer to home, New South Wales high school teacher, Bianca Hewes, whose innovation in using Project Based Learning combined with student social networking tool Edmodo got her a trip of a lifetime to ISTE last year as Edmodo's featured blogger!

So, in closing, the problem with being innovative is that while you are always looking to improve things, it is hard to move on knowing that your initial innovations have not become commonplace. As I tweeted last year at one of the ILE conferences:

You can't have everyone being innovative 'cos it can't be innovation if everyone is doing it! #DECD_SA

So, my challenge to you all is to find your leadership niche so that your innovation can become positive, meaningful change. Thanks for listening.