Sharing the Addiction

Well, here I am back at home again after a very busy week in Christchurch last week. In between rendering video clips in Final Cut of the presentations, I thought I’d dash out a quick blog post.

Basically, this year was a very different experience with wearing a yellow lanyard and working with the kids media team. Being a person that misses working with kids now that I am in a largely administrative role, I had a ball with the team. We had a good mix of younger and older students and they were all incredibly quick to pick stuff up and had brilliant skills before they arrived. One of the younger kids instructed me on the frame rate that we should export for putting video on the web – I was happy to bow to his superior knowledge! There were lots of kids who could edit in iMovie and had a range of technical skills. The students were also great at approaching teachers in order to get video and photos for us to use.

When you go and check out the media team wiki , you will see the newsletters uploaded that the kids put together (with the support of the adults). I want to stress that the writing in the newsletter pretty much all came from the children with VERY little input at all when it came to drafting and editing. I was really impressed at the high standard of writing from the kids! An example of this is when coming up with a title for the piece on Twitter. I suggested ‘The good, the bad and the ugly’ which didn’t sit exactly right. The girls took this suggestion and reworked it to be ‘The good, the bad, and the off-topic’ which I consider to be very witty and insightful. The level of vocabularly and quality of writing style of the students (two girls in particular) was very high. Some of the younger boys struggled to get their ideas down but they worked at it until it was finished and I was impressed with their perservance. I have included some clips that are available on the wiki here to give you a taste – make sure you do go and check out the wiki and sign the guestbook or leave a message for the team on the Voicethread.

I didn’t get to see any presentations this year, I am now getting to watch all the Spotlights as I edit the videos for them. The is some great content in these Spotlights (so far I have particularly enjoyed listening to Julia Atkin talking about effective leadership) and when they are up online, you should definitely check them out. You will need to have a login for the site associated with a person who attended the conference to view them.

I also presented twice this year. I did a full day pre-conference workshop and then an hour and a half interactive presentation in the ‘graveyard shift’ (last breakout).  Both of these went really well (though I think I may have bambozzled some in my full day – we certainly packed a lot in!) I hope to do more workshops in general going forward to next year as I enjoy these chances to interact with other teachers. In preparation for these workshops, I revisited a lot of web 2.0 tools and found some new ones. All of these can be found on my new wiki at http://learningweb2.wikispaces.com. I plan to write a series of blog posts highlighting some of my favourite tools from this wiki so watch this space!  OK – it looks as if the video clips have just about rendered – back to work

Tags: ulearn08

Here I am in Rotorua again. It has been a good conference so far despite some issues with the internet connection. Here is a pic with Rachel Boyd, Amanda Signal and I at the Blogger’s Cafe.

The keynotes this year have been quite theoretical. We started off with Jeremy Kedian as the opening keynote who focused on what learning is and what it might look like in 2020. He talked about form and function in a school. The function is to facilitate learning but often the form (organisation, timetables etc) dictates how this learning happens and can imped new innovations. He then looked ahead to a time when the domination of form over function might be reversed.

The next day we had Julia Atkin who took us on a journey into Eastern philosophy (which was slightly over all of our heads) before ending up with the main message that schools need to be more holistic and start with development with the whole self and self in society and then the learning areas and values are the vechicles you do this with. This is replacing having the learning areas at the centre and developing the child as a side issue. More to come.

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.

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

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.

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.

Three times in one day – Unheard of

I’ve just watched a Ted talk by Sir Ken Robinson and felt I had to share it. Fits in very well with Multiple Intelligences. Sir Ken is a natural speaker and had me laughing out loud in a number of places.

My thoughts on the TUANZ conference

I attended the TUANZ conference today and found it a useful exercise. I thoroughly enjoyed the keynote presentation. Some key thoughts that I took away were:

• Teachers of today will be the last to have the prerogative to decide whether or not to teach using modern ICT tools.
• We are the first generation of teachers to be preparing children for jobs that don’t even exist yet.
• You have to own something before you can give it away – in other words, teachers need to be using the tools such as blogs and wikis themselves to be able to give the knowledge and passion to kids.
• All knowledge content is often no more than two clicks away so why are we still focusing on getting children to learn content instead of showing children how to evaluate content, establish networks and think creatively.
• One of the criteria that Microsoft employees are judged against is to ‘Manage Ambiguity’. We often we spell out every aspect of what we want children to accomplish and give them carefully managed resources to work with. How is this training them to deal with ambiguity?
• From the connection with the teacher in the US via Skype, I have realised that it is possible to take a workshop from a distance – you don’t always have to be there in person for it to be powerful.

I also really enjoyed the discussions I had with two other teachers at during the workshop on “The Agonies of Access” with Gillian Eadie. As a primary school teacher, I was grouped with a secondary teacher and the technician from the same school. It was really interesting to have these different perspectives. I think there are not enough chances to have discussions between primary and secondary staff.

Finally, it was my first time presenting at a conference. I put together a wiki with the all the resources I talked about during this session which I plan to continue adding to as an ongoing resource. This wiki on educational software and web 2.0 tools can be accessed by clicking here. I think the session went fairly well though I may have tried to pack too much into the short time slot.

tuanz2007 TUANZ2007