Well, it is that time of year again where I think about how to collect data from my teachers. I have just paid to upgrade my Survey Monkey account again for the month which is a very reasonable $30 US. By upgrading, I get access to a far more comprehensive set up options such as having branching surveys (where respondents get different questions as a result of their answer choices) and the ability to filter responses by questions (eg look at results by filtering by school). I can also have more than 10 questions which is one of the limits of the free account.
Having used this tool at the middle of the year, I was amazed at how much easier it was to focus on the analysis of the data I collected rather spending hours collating it. I reverted back to paper evaluations for our cluster Expo thinking this might be easier for some cluster teachers and soon realised that this was not something that I will want to repeat again. The number of hours I had to spend on data entry was into the double figures which does not help you to gain any insight from the data. It seems a no-brainer to use Survey Monkey where the tools do all this for you.
A couple of classrooms are experimenting with Survey Monkey to find out information from other students in the school during Social Studies and Health topics. It is a free tool for up to ten questions and the exercise of designing questions correctly to get the information you need is certainly a higher order activity. We are always wanting to have our children spend more time on analysis of data and this is how ICT can provide a wonderful way to do this.
Well, I have been having a lot of fun with this tool. You can load pictures into Fotoflexor from your computer or from a number of online photo sites where you have photos stored such as Flickr. You can add a LARGE number of special effects to the images. This has to be one of the most comprehensive free image editors that I have seen. It can also work in layers with transparency and has clever tools for selecting part of images. In the picture above, I cut out a photo of my husband from another picture and added the trees as a background. I then blurred the trees slightly to give the picture a ‘depth of field’ effect. I then put in a picture of myself using my built-in webcam and was able to add that picture of myself to some ready made faces. In the above picture, I decided to be the face of Paris Hilton (I look a little purple because I took the photo of my face at night under tungsten lighting). I was able to scale my face to fit hers and move and rotate it until I was happy. I then removed the background of the photo and added it to my scene. This is just a small taste of the many tools that are on offer.One final feature that I really liked is the ability to send the picture back to online libraries such as Flickr or to download the pic to my computer. By saving it as a png, I was able to keep the transparency. It did take quite a long time to save so be patient. Very cool image editing!!
One final note about Ulearn and then I have a great tool to share. I just wanted to talk about the thinking bear idea that was mentioned by Karen Boyes in her workshop on 21st Century learners. The class she described have a toy bear that they keep next to a poster that says what thinking bear does – eg thinking bear remembers learning he has done before to help with a new problem. If a child approaches a teacher for help, the teacher first directs the child to the learning bear and the poster. The child reads what thinking bear would do, picks up the bear and tells it the problem and then the bear (ie the child) says back an answer. The bear is there to help the child to learn self-talk and to find their own solutions to problems. Eventually the children are told to think the problem to the bear and then the bear thinks it back. Finally, children are told to do this without the bear at all.
The point of this is to not let children develop ‘learned helplessness’ by constantly asking for help without having run themselves through some strategies to help themselves. I think of all the times I have said, “See 3 before me” and I realised listening to this session that I just shifting the learned helplessness from me as a teacher to other children in the class. From now on, I will be encouraging children to talk to themselves before talking to anyone else!
As for the after Ulearn workshops that I went to, I have written about these in my cluster newsletter which you can download a copy of by clicking here.
I was looking through Daniel Pink’s blog and found this technique for encouraging better presentation techniques by speakers using Powerpoint or Keynote. Having done a presentation course not so long ago and presenting myself quite frequently, I was struck by how simple the technique is and yet how effective it would be to keep a talk disciplined and to time. Bascially, the presenter has exactly 20 slides (no more, no less) and each slide is only shown for exactly 20 seconds which is a complete time of 6min and 40 seconds. The slides are set to advance automatically and the speaker does not control this during the presentation. Basically, this means that slides need to be very visual and the explanation of them concise. If this doesn’t happen, you get out of synch with the slides appearing on the screen. The video below is an example of Daniel using this technique to talk about intelligent signage (which is interesting in its own right!).
While I was skipping through some links from George’s talk, I came across this site by Chris Corrigan about what open space meetings were and how to conduct them. I think that this way of running a staff meeting would be so much more efficient! You wouldn’t have to sit listening to the viewpoints of others on topics that you don’t really care about either way. The people who ARE passionate about it could go off to discuss it while you could focus on another issue you do have an opinion on. What do you think of this model? I have taken this information directly from the site.
Open Space operates under four principles and one law. The four principles are:
Whoever comes are the right people
Whatever happens is the only thing that could have happened.
When it starts is the right time
When it’s over it’s over
The Law is known as the Law of Two Feet:
“If you find yourself in a situation where you are not contributing or learning, move somewhere where you can.
The four principles and the law work to create a powerful event motivated by the passion and bounded by the responsibility of the participants.
Essentially an Open Space meeting proceeds along the following process:
Group convenes in a circle and is welcomed by the sponsor. The facilitator provides an overview of the process and explains how it works.
Facilitator invites people with issues of concern to come into the circle, write the issue on a piece of quarter size flip chart paper and announce it to the group. These people are “convener.
The convener places their paper on the wall and chooses a time and a place to meet. This process continues until there are no more agenda items.
The group then breaks up and heads to the agenda wall, by now covered with a variety of sessions. Participants take note of the time and place for sessions they want to be involved in.
Dialogue sessions convene for the balance of the meeting. Recorders determined by each group capture the important points and post the reports on the news wall.
All of these reports will be rolled into one document by the end of the meeting.
Following a closing or a break, the group might move into convergence, a process that takes the issues that have been discussed and attaches action plans to them to “get them out of the room.”
The group then finishes the meeting with a closing circle where people are invited to share comments, insights, and commitments arising from the process.
I have just been listening to a very interesting talk about Connectivism and Web 2.0 in education by George Siemens. Here are some of my takeaway points:
I liked the three viewpoints about knowledge. It made me me question what my beliefs are around knowledge construction. While I do subscribe to a constructivism approach, I think there are times that all three viewpoints of knowledge described here come into play for me personally as a learner.
Knowledge is ‘out there’ and objective and we just have to align ourselves to it
Through exposure to information and viewpoints, we construct knowledge that is partially objective and partly subjective due to our interruption of the information.
Knowledge is constructed so even if people are exposed to the same information they will gain different knowledge from this based on their own personal constructions of this knowledge.
I often talk about processing information being important in a complex world with huge amounts of information available but George takes this a step further and says that it is not the processing that is important but recognition of patterns within the information so that you can make sense from the it. From my perspective as a classroom teacher, this is the higher level thinking that we are trying to encourage in our kids. If we can design the learning experiences in our classroom so that children are able to start discovering the underlying patterns in information, then they will be able to use this knowledge to solve problems and have an understanding of the ‘bigger picture’.
I agreed with his point that we can have networked knowledge building where we can’t ‘hold on to’ all of the information that we come into contact with and so put it out to a network to continue the building knowledge. I know that people within my network are building on information that I have located for the network while I have moved onto other areas. The great thing in our networks today is that I will benefit from this sharing when the results of this are shared back to me. I don’t need to be the repository of all information for my network anymore.
I found his point about all content having started with connections very interesting. In education, we have tended to start from content and build learning experiences to transfer that content but in a networked web 2.0 world, we have the chance to start from a connection or connections that challenge our learners to make sense of these viewpoints and content knowledge is one of the outcomes rather than the starting point. George talks about the fact that we all have our own perspective of the information in our own networks (from our own node in the network) and it is the connections with others that help give us a more complete picture even if we do not agree with these perspectives.
I agree with him that one threat we have to seeing all of these viewpoints in a web 2.0 world is that we tend to only subscribe to the writing, podcasts and sites of others that we basically already agree with rather than subscribing to content that we don’t agree with or that challenges us so that we then only get our own viewpoint reflected back to us. When I glance through my Google reader subscriptions, that is certainly the case! However, I wonder how many teachers making use of new technologies are teachers that I WON’T find something in common with. I know that I need these viewpoints from like-minded people because in my role of facilitator, I certainly come across many educators who don’t share my passion for ICT in education and I think I get plenty of the opposing viewpoint from these teachers (which I try to listen to and recognise even if I don’t agree).
Anyway, I think this talk is well worth listening to and made me think about my own ways of thinking about knowledge in relation to Web 2.0.
Well, it has been a busy week. Three days of Ulearn conference and then two further days of workshops: one with Sharon and one with Ewan. This post is the first in a series to look at my impressions in-depth.
Ulearn highlights
Tony Ryan – Rules of Engagement and Innovation 2020
As I said in a previous post, it was great to see that many of the things Tony talked about are happening at some level in many schools. These included giving kids clear messages on what they are learning about and why, using mind tools such as graphic organisers, providing children with rubrics (or having them create them) and using cooperative learning techniques such as donuts. I liked the way he builds up kids ability to self talk by having them practice out loud first and then learn to internalise this. I also liked his reference to green light thinking. Teachers need to stop moaning about the system because we ARE the system and move into positive problem solving instead. This slide is one from his presentation that is available online. I also enjoyed his talk on looking to the future. I can be guilty of feeling a little worried about the future but I really liked the fact he emphasised that we need optimism for the future and the kids coming through need to have the skills and attitude to believe that they can tackle the hard questions. Therefore, they need to be taught problem solving through tools such as Tony’s thinkers keys and De Bono’s thinking hats. What I found really interesting was the emphasis Tony placed on the sequencing of these tools to suit the situation rather than each hat or thinking key in isolation. Tony suggested that kids have the hats or keys on their desks and are asked to select and sequence these to solve particular problems rather than being which ones to use so that the kids embed this behaviour rather than it just being something they do with that particular teacher and it falls away afterwards. I also liked the way Tony, in his keynote, talked about teachers stopping this constant feeling of guilt that they are not doing enough and instead looking at what they ARE doing well and doing more of it.
Tanya Thompson’s Action Research Presentation This presentation was one of the highlights for me and very useful as our cluster looks at bringing in action research next year. Some of the most important tips for me was that at least three staff meetings a term need to be set aside to focus on action research where teachers discuss readings (such as from Formative Assessment book) distributed prior to the meeting. Discussion leaders are selected from the teachers to lead these discussions in small groups. A ‘critical friend’ goes into your classroom about every fortnight just to ask how it is going. What really impressed me is that the school all seems to be talking the same talk and Tanya was able to share how this approach to PD had recultured the entire school for the better and had given staff greater confidence that what they were doing DOES make a difference.
More to come but I think it is bedtime now! Next it will be more on Karen Boyes, the new iWorks 08, thoughts on the keynotes and post Ulearn workshops.
Thanks to Ewan (involved in a full day workshop with him today) for showing this great resource. Click on the photo above to be taken to where it is on Flickr. The photo has a number of notes on the image that give you ideas on how to use Flickr and have a number of really useful links. This Flickr user has a number of great ideas in his photostream so have a play through some more of his photos. I have a lot more ideas on how I could use Flickr after today.
I am here on Day Two of the Ulearn conference. Day one started off with an introduction by Steve Mahary. While he may have arrived a little late and gone overtime but I still found it really heartening to have the Minister of Education for this country ‘talking the talk’ and obviously very well informed on the place of ICT in education.
Following that, Ewan McIntosh came to the stage. I knew that Ewan was a bit of a Web 2.0 guru but he was also very watchable with a well developed sense of humour and very useful content. I am often trying to ’sell’ the message of Web 2.0 to the teachers in my cluster and I find it can be quite difficult to pass on the passion. I could see that the audience at Ewan’s presentation were quite inspired and ‘got it’ a little more by the end. I am looking forward to working more with Ewan during a full day workshop on Tuesday next week.
After a very nice lunch, it was time for my workshop on demystifying blogs and wikis and online publishing. My introductory presentation seemed to go well (you can view a summarised version of this presentation on my wiki) but we had all kinds of problems with the internet connection which does cause issues when your entire workshop is based on a wiki. People were able to add photos and embed media on the workshop wiki pages but it took ten times longer than it really should have and meant that we didn’t get to complete the workshop as planned. Luckily, people were very sympathetic and many said that they would finish the workshop using my notes at a later time. I think that people will hopefully have a go with blogs and wikis as a result of the workshop.
I headed to Tony Ryan workshop on engaging learners after that. What I found heartening about this session was that many of the techniques he mentioned are happening in many New Zealand schools. I really liked his idea of having children in teams deciding on whether they are arguing the yes or no for a topic BEFORE you give them the title of the topic. The example given was Golilocks is a delinquent. They then have to research their side of the argument (and go around room to other teams to shop for great ideas from other teams). After this, each side of the argument has time to present their ideas without interruption from their partners. After this, you get them to switch viewpoints and they are able to recycle arguments from their partners ideas. Finally, they have to talk as a complete team about where they sit against a continuum in relation to the topic. I think this would be a great way to encourage higher level thinking about topics!
The day ended with drinks and a very social night out! More about day two at a later time.
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