Greg Whitby is surely one of the most forward thinking Directors of Education anywhere in the world. Fact. Even better, he kindly took time out of his fact-finding visit to LTS to speak to a group of learners and educators about some of the changes he’s made to Parramatta Diocese in Sydney and the 80 or so schools he is responsible for.

When you first meet Greg Whitby, you are struck by one thing. He’s tall. Very tall. I’m about 6′3″, and even then I found myself looking up to him… by the end of the afternoon, I meant that metaphorically as well as literally! He set out his stall by telling how, amongst many other achievements, he’d set up his own company to help connect schools because he was fed up waiting for the Australian Government/Education Department to do it… and that was the point that I knew how relevant what he was going to say was to us here in Scotland. For me, that is the situation we are in with regards to Curriculum for Excellence. Too many people waiting for someone else to do it for them… except, of course, that really means doing it to them.

Greg started his talk proper by pointing out that one of the greatest problems facing education today is the ‘disconnect’ of so many of our children… and as he pointed out, if you asked the kids why they’ll tell you it is because the majority of conflicts between the school and the pupils are caused by banning things. Especially if there is no good reason for the ban in the first place. Remember, we are trying to create confident individuals, responsible citizens — but we start complaining as soon as they demonstrate this ‘confidence’ by complaining about the fact that we don’t trust them to be ‘responsible’… and they have a point.

Part of the problem stems from the way we have designed and structured our schools. As this clip illustrates:

We start our childrens’ education based on an arbitrary age, a pre-defined cohort of peers, and a timetable that is designed to suit the demands of the teachers. Where is the learner in all this? What Greg appears to do, and do very well, is start by considering what do the kids need, and what do teachers need, to do their work. This is an apparently simple change in attitude, but it has profound implications for how we deliver education. As he went on to say… well actually, listen for yourselves:

The tool is never wrong. Or as the analogy highlights, ’school’ is never wrong… but of course, it is becoming increasingly irrelevant. What appeals to people is the ability to create mashups, to take what is there and make it personal and relevant to them — hence the appeal of Web2.0 tools. Now take that idea, and apply it to education. Instead of telling pupils what we’ve always told them, and delivering it in the same old fashion, we should start to look at what they need to know and find ways of delivering that in a relevant fashion. Analysing, evaluating, creating… in other words, hitting the top of Bloom’s taxonomy rather than plumbing the depths of remembering things to pass tests…

Greg told us about a friend of his in New Zealand who runs a Primary/Elementary school. Some of the pupils had been studying desert islands, so the head went to the local garden/building supplies, bought 40 tonnes of sand, dumped it in the school grounds and said “There’s your island…” Pupils and teachers then went on to make trees and sculpt and mould the island… you’d have to be a really poor teacher to not find some opportunities for genuine learning in a situation like that… and yet I fear that these chances are few and far between. I will have to come back to why I think that is on another day…

What was refreshing to hear was how Greg acknowledges that many many educators pay no more than lip-service to personalising learning. He also introduced me to an expression I’d not heard used in this context before:

Greg’s notion of de-privatisation sounded as though it should be political… but is actually the process of getting teachers to open up and share. Open the classroom door and share, open the filing cabinets and share, open your mind and share. For too long, and in too many classrooms, teachers have closed the door and hidden away. Too many poor teachers are still in a classroom wasting a child’s time at school because no one, except the pupils, knows what is going on in their lessons. This is obviously something Greg feels passionately about, and is quite brutal in his assessment of. Basically, if you don’t make the grade, go play in someone else’s sandbox. Except, I don’t know if it really is brutal because, as came across loud and clear, he wants people who are passionate and committed to making a difference and who will lead and teach their pupils to become true learners… and that is what I want my own children to experience.

There’s a lot more to be said about GregMeet. In my next post, I’ll take you through some more of the points he made, and also get some more of the videos posted… but if you want more from #GregMeet, you should check out Ollie Bray’s excellent post about the points made…

End of part one!

Got Milk?

What is the point of Twitter? Well, quite apart from the connectedness and sense of community with my fellow educators, sometimes it just makes me feel good. Especially when it only requires a couple of clicks to know you are going to put a smile on someone else’s face…

On Friday night, I saw a tweet go by wanting to know how much milk was where I lived. I followed the link and found myself at the blog for Room 8 @ Melville Intermediate School who wanted to know:

…how much milk costs in your country or location, and then anything else about milk.

I checked with Mrs W, then posted a quick reply.  I also thought I’d see if I could do a little bit more to help the class with their project, so I retweeted the request… and within a matter of hours, there were 20 replies on the school blog from all around the world, including one from someone who only drinks soya milk.

I’ve just noticed that the blog has been updated to reflect the number of responses. As the class teacher says:

If you are someone whose left a comment, tweeted or re-tweeted the original request then thank you so much the students will absolutely love it!

So, ask me again why I like Twitter? It’s because it really does make the world a smaller place and it really does connect people… and I also like to hope that for one group of pupils, there is the realization that the world they live in is listening to them after all…

Immigrants? Natives? Tourists? Ingénues? Genius? Put the word digital in front of any of these and you are thrust into the problem of trying to label where we are with our kids and their relationship with the new media landscape. Of course, in many cases, we’ve missed the point.

"MC Mechanic" ©2009 Shane Wallis. Used with permission.

David Warlick has just posted his opening description for the session he is proposing for ISTE 2010. As ever with David, he has provided a very astute in his reading of the conference theme: Integrate Technology. As David implies out in his proposal, we are already too late because for our students:

…it is merely the road ways of their daily and minute-by-minute travels and the tentacles of their nearly constant hyper-connectively.

I have never felt particularly comfortable with Marc Prensky’s Digital Immigrants or Natives (PDF Download). Something about the term has always struck me as not quite right, maybe the realisation that I wasn’t really seeing any influx of media savvy youngsters hitting the schools who showed a greater understanding of the power of the technology… but that aside, it has been a useful shorthand for explaining to those just learning about the new media landscape. The reality is that our pupils don’t see it as anything special: for them, it is just what they use. Our problem is that we see it as something fantastic we can use to enhance learning… but are thwarted at every turn from using. For the pupils and students, it is something that is so integrated in who they are that they can’t relate it to their learning because the average classroom experience we offer them is often a ‘technology free’ zone.

This is ridiculous! The societal change happening because of new means of connecting isn’t coming in the next few years. It’s here. Now! We’re right in the middle of it, except it doesn’t have a start and it doesn’t have an end so we’re not really in the middle either… it is the natural process of adopting and adapting to take account of new ideas. This is part of the problem. By trying to parcel up the changes into a nice little narrative with a clear cut Beginning/Middle/End, we try to control how this knowledge is handed out, and education appears to have a vested interest in keeping our children in the dark and in doing so, we leave them to make their own way through the maze of texts without any guiding along the way.

Or how about this. If we leave the children to their own devices (literally and metaphorically), they majority of them will see school as something separate from their ‘real’ lives. It is the place where they go and have to remember rather than the place they to to find out. It will be like visiting a kindly older relative who doesn’t really understand how the video works, let alone the internet.

Some people do realise this. In an interview published in the Observer, Mick Brookes, the General Secretary of the National Association of Headteachers, has called for a review of the ban on mobile phones in the classroom. As he says:

We have to recognise the world that children inhabit, not expect them to leave it at the school gate.

Unfortunately, he will face strong opposition from the likes of Chris Keates, general secretary of the NASUWT who replied by saying that:

Modern mobiles are so small that children can use them surreptitiously under the desks to text each other instead of concentrating on the lesson…
No one would disagree with Mick Brookes that we want technology to enhance children’s learning, but there are other ways of doing it.

Other ways of doing it? Like what? We learn by doing, by being shown appropriate and useful methods for harnessing the power in our devices. If we want our learning to be effective, we get the pupils to ‘do’, to create, to demonstrate what they have learned. In fact, if you look at Keates words carefully, you’ll notice he is talking about ‘enhancing’ pupils’ learning… which to me sounds awfully like another dose of interactive whiteboards being used to ‘enhance’ a lesson as opposed to the clear signal from Brookes that we should be teaching kids how to use it.

And I love the obvious flaw in Keates argument about misuse of mobile phones… After all, if teachers are encouraged to tell classes to take their mobile phones out and put them on the desk, then they can see them and know how they are being used. It’s very hard to use it ’surreptitiously’ if it is a tool with as much validity as a pen or pencil or calculator…

I feel as though I’m sitting in the eye of a hurricane. All around me, ideas, and thoughts and teachers and decisions are swirling while I sit in the relative calm and try to work out what is happening. As with all good hurricanes, this one has a name: filtering.

There appears to be a real impasse with regards to the issue of filtering the internet in schools. On the one hand, we have the teachers who are finding and using a wide variety of online tools that can enhance their practice and engage their learners, while on the other, we have the poor and vilified tech support people who are trying to maintain a vital school network and so they are often required to block sites as a matter of course. The impasse comes because all too often, there are no clear guidelines, or discussion, about what value a site/tool adds, or why a particular site has been blocked. It is too easy to slip into a simplistic ‘them’ and ‘us’ mentality, but all that does is allows the rather unsatisfactory status quo to prevail. We need to think afresh, and to be more pro-active… hence this post.

I am in a position where hardly a day goes by without one of my colleagues complaining about being unable to access a particular site or resource or tool… and I should point out that by ‘colleague’, I don’t just mean the teachers in my own school, I mean the educators from across the globe that I come into daily contact with through my blog, through twitter, and through professional forums like MirandaNet or even the TES. This issue is not a parochial, single school issue. This is a truly global experience. Filtering is a pain, but it is also a necessary pain for a variety of statutory and legal reasons… though it may interest those in Britain to consider this post about duty-of-care because all too often we over-exaggerate the fears through our own ignorance.

Ironically, given the nature of Web2.0 tools, I believe the heart of the problem lies in a lack of communication between the educators at the chalkface and those who are there to support them. I am as guilty as anyone when it comes to making glib comments about the problems of school filtering, but I am sure I am not alone in having never sat down and worked my way through what I want from the online world in my classroom. Just about everyone has seen the Karl Fisch “Did You Know / Shift Happens” presentation (Now up to Version 4 would you believe!), but the truth is, that when it comes to education, for many of us the Shift hasn’t happened! In fact, when version one of the presentation came out, most of us could probably still access Youtube in school… not now!

So… in an effort to get a real discussion and proposal put together, I’ve set up an etherpad document with the intention of getting people to chip in their own thoughts. What I’m trying to do is to put together a put together a policy document that can be put to the Scottish Education Department, Learning & Teaching Scotland, ADES, the HMIe, the GTCS, and/or any other body that might be able to progress the conversation. I also hope that what ever recommendations or ideas we come up with will be suitable for any educator, anywhere to take and adapt to suit their own situation. To this end, all submissions will be covered by a Creative Commons “Attribution-Non-Commercial 2.5 UK: Scotland” agreement.

I’ll let the etherpad document run for a week or so, then will be transferring it to a wiki to allow us to expand on the initial document by adding examples of good practice, links to research, and to use the forum feature of the wiki to engage in discussion of the document. This is an ambitious idea, and may come to nothing, but as there appears to be a lack of willingness from the any one body at the “top” to make a decision about how we are allowed to harness the online opportunities we have available, I thought I would take it on myself to get the ball rolling… Pretentious? Moi?

These are the starter questions/discussion points on the etherpad, but I hope you’ll add more as well as taking the time to chip in. I also hope you’ll pass the link on… this attempt will be more valuable the wider the involvement… and I would dearly love to see some of the support staff and those who do make the decisions about blocking and filtering get involved as well. This is meant to be an inclusive and positive discussion, so let’s stop wingeing, and start learning how to smile!

QUESTIONS, QUESTIONS, QUESTIONS!

Click this link to access the etherpad!

As I see it, there are four main things to consider here.
• Suitable tools
• Keeping kids safe online
• Bandwidth issues
• Free versus ‘Paid for’

At the moment, I have nothing but questions, I’m hoping you will start providing the answers! To get us started, here’re my initial ponderings. Feel free to add your own, in fact, I expect it!

1 – Is there an argument for allowing teachers access to a wider range of tools/sites than pupils, or is this hypocrisy?

2 – I am struck by the thought that as a teacher, I am treated the same as the pupils with regards to the internet — ie: not trustworthy. How do I persuade a school to trust me?

3 – Are there sound technical reasons for blocking some sites? (ie: bandwidth concerns for video streaming)

4 – Which tools should ALL teachers be able to access? Is it possible to have a common toolkit… or do different age groups need access to different things?

5 – Do you have a great lesson that is dependent on a particular online tool… and would you be willing to share it?

6 – Can you get a site/programme unblocked easily?

6a – (Associated question) Are you able to install necessary updates such as flash/java/etc…?

7 – Do you even know how to go about getting something unblocked in your school/authority?

8 – Does your employer/school/authority have a policy document on online tools/software, and if so, have you a) read it, and/or b) been involved in creating the policy?

9 – Are authorities right to avoid adopting ‘free’ tools? Is community support a viable model for education?

10 – How do we get our voices heard by those who have the power to make changes?

11 – Is this an issue that needs a National response rather than a local ‘authority by authority’ approach?

Click this link to access the etherpad!

and let the smiling begin…

Generally speaking, I avoid talking about politics — I respect everyone’s right to think and speak what they wish, as long as they don’t expect me to agree with them all the time. But sometimes, a politician will say something so completely wrong, that I have to speak out… the shadow schools spokesman, Nick Gibb, is such a politician.

Monday’s Guardian carries a report with the headline: Tories pledge return to rote learning and sets in schools. I’m sorry, but which world are they trying to prepare our children for…^[1] because it certainly isn’t the one we’re moving into. According to the report:

More Mindless Copying

Gibb said that young people ought to be able to automatically recite the times tables, and “you have to know the map of Europe. It’s the routine bits of knowledge that set you up for later life.”

He went on: “I believe very strongly that children are of different abilities and need tailored education. Some children can’t cope with academic lessons and flounder and misbehave. Other children become bored.

Quite apart from the irony of the Tories stating that “…you have to know the map of Europe“, they are obviously not too sure of the abilities of our young people. I can guarantee that my oldest boy does not know his times tables ‘automatically’, but he does know how to use a calculator… and he routinely carries at least two with him… and one of those can make phone-calls as well… and can access the internet to look up the countries of Europe… In addition, he is a dab hand at Scratch and is currently teaching himself Japanese so he can read and see Manga/Animé in the original Japanese…. I wonder if that will be a skill that will serve him well in the future? Not the speaking Japanese bit, but the willingness and ability to go out and find the learning he needs for himself?

As to pupils being bored, I would hazard a guess that bored pupils are the result of boring lessons… Strange, my memories of boredom at school all involve some kind of rote learning…

Actually, I do agree with Nick Gibb when he says that children are of different abilities, but that is the very reason that rote lessons, and hankering for the past in a “well-it-never-did-me-any-harm” [Though, he is a Tory — Q.E.D.?] sort of way is so wrong. Jeff Utecht has the right idea as he points out in his latest blog post: 1500 Students, 1500 Ways of being intelligent. Jeff is reflecting on his time at the International School of Brussels (ISB), and is thinking about the benefits of 1:1 computers, and the reasoning behind choosing the right tech at the right time — and sometimes the right tech is a pencil! For me, one of the key points that Jeff makes is that:

At some point we need to stop trying to learn it all and learn how to learn what we need when we need it.

Rote learning had its place, but the ability to go out and find things out for yourself is a much more valuable skill. To paraphrase the old “Teach a man to fish…” saying:

“Teach a child by rote and (s)he can pass a test, teach a child how to find information and (s)he can pass through life…”

BACK TO POST: Actually, why is it that the Conservatives keep hankering back to the 50s as some sort of Golden age? According to my dad, who lived through them, they were pretty dire in many ways. Actually, they were 50 – 60 years ago… when I was growing up, that would have meant hankering after the 1900-1910 era… ie: pre- TV, biros, sliced bread, the Somme… er…

This has been a rather hectic week for me. I’ve spoken at the Scottish Learning Festival TeachMeet, at the first eAssessment Scotland Conference, and took 10 pupils down to the Scottish Learning Festival to tell our Glow story and speak to people on the Learning and Teaching Scotland stand… Rather than try to cram all of that into one post, I’m going to spread my reflections over the weekend, so in this post, I’m going to concentrate on the fantastic TeachMeet.

Just in case you have no idea what a TeachMeet is, I’m going to let Tim & Moby (and Ollie) explain:

This fantastic video from BrainPop kicked off the evening in considerable style. Even better, the TeachMeetCamel had brought John Davitt along to make sure that the timings were (more or less) as advertised… so with that we were thrown straight into two and a half hours of intense CPD. I’d be lying if I could remember what everyone was talking about, but the presentations that did make have the greatest impact on me for wildly different reasons, were Tessa Watson’s clothes line (she was talking about the work she’s doing with STEP: the Scottish Traveller Education Programme), Stuart Meldrum’s DIY visualiser, and Con Morris‘ singing about CPDFind… actually, I’m going to need therapy to forget that last one…

The beauty of the TeachMeet format is that, there is always something to learn. The limited time available to speak, the absence of ’sales patter’, and the eclectic audience more or less guarantee a great night. The unifying themes being a great belief in the power of education, and the desire to be better at what we do. Where else could you find yourself in a discussion with a primary teacher one minute, an HMIe inspector the next, someone from the SQA, a really cheery Dane from the Danish Education Ministry, followed by a University Lecturer specialising in Games… who was handing out beers at the bar… Truly, there is nothing quite like a TeachMeet!

For my part, I had proposed speaking about “Getting the pupils to learn from themselves”. By all accounts, it was quite well received… although I did have to duck as the camel came flying at me on my last slide… I’ve posted my slidedeck to Slideshare for you to laugh at/download/etc, and after a wee bit of editing, I’ll add the audio so you can sip a beer/wine/irn bru and relive the whole experience — camels are optional!

Finally, I’d just like to add my thanks to Alistair and Clare at BBC Scotland Learning for hosting us in a truly magnificent setting, and the many sponsors who so kindly gave us the means to discuss education and the future until very late into the night!

My next post will be about taking my pupils to the Scottish Learning Festival to talk about Glow… expect it sometime tomorrow!

Picture Credit: The Camel appears courtesy of David Muir. I hope it had a sore head the next morning!

As the result of a conversation with Con Morris and Margaret Alcorn, I recently accepted an offer to become an Associate of the CPD Team looking at Continuing Professional Development (CPD). Before I go any further, I thought I’d be foolish not to tap into the collected wisdom of my network to consider what you would want from your own CPD.

While my primary interest here is how Scottish teachers will be able to access CPD materials through Glow, I think the questions I need to consider are much wider. In my (nearly) 20 years of teaching, I have seen CPD develop from being some pretty pointless centrally delivered courses with limited relevance to my own needs, to become a cornucopia of choice with courses on just about anything and everything I might wish to consider. The real problem I have now, is how do I find the course(s) that are going to be most relevant to me and my needs… and how do I identify what those needs are in the first place?

As I see it, my task is to make the process of finding relevant CPD courses and materials for all teachers easier and more logical. I’d also like to see if it is possible to group some of the CPD into themes and bigger courses of provision… I’m aware that in some senses, I am attempting to reinvent the wheel: many colleges and universities already offer well-structured and coherent programmes of study that, as well as counting as CPD, can lead to a professional qualification. However, it is the nature of online learning today, that there are many, many courses and development opportunities that just don’t fit into a ‘traditional’ course structure.

Learning is everywhere. Literally! We can find out CPD opportunities in Scotland through development opportunities run by bodies such as the HMIe, or Learning and Teaching Scotland, or we can point our browsers further afield to the likes of the K-12 Online Conference or the Connectivism and Connective Knowledge Online Course 2009 that begins tomorrow… CPD does not have to come from one single source, nor does it have to be based in our own Local Authority, and this is, I believe, where you can help.

Your Homework!

Where do you find your CPD? Is it all centrally sourced and delivered? Are you able to choose the content you want? Do you have any areas that you wish to investigate that aren’t served by current provision? Do you want to earn formal credit for your CPD, or do you just want to learn for the sake of learning?

I’d like to know your thoughts on CPD for educators. How can Glow help you find the CPD you need or want? And even better, is there any CPD you could offer to other teachers? Please leave a comment or a question if you have any thoughts on CPD and how it can be better delivered.

Click to visit CPD Scotland

This is a test

I’m just back to school after two fantastic days as the guest of the Scottish Qualifications Authority (SQA) at the Stirling Management Centre. I was, of course, singing for my supper by giving a presentation on some of the work our pupils have been doing with wikis and I promised the participants that I’d post the links so…

When I was first approached to be the guest speaker for the SQA Scottish Survey of Writing Recall Days, I was both honoured and delighted to be given the opportunity to show off some of the work being done at Perth Academy. Although I have had the opportunity to talk about how we are using wikis in the English department in the past, this was rather special because it gave me the opportunity to speak to a group of my peers… primary and secondary teachers of English. I had forgotten just how much I enjoyed being in the company of people who are all interested in the teaching of English, and it was a reminder of why I took a degree in the subject in the first place.

I’m planning on recording the session when I deliver it at the final recall day in Inverness next Tuesday. All going well, I’ll get an audio/slideshow up as soon as possible after that.

As well as the links included in the slides (embedded below) I also threw out a number of other links that I have found useful and that other teachers might also be able to use with their classes so, as promised, here they are… and please leave a comment if I’ve forgotten any!

Glogster: This is the ‘poster’ site that I mentioned, but it is so much more. You can embed video, sound, photos, text, and lots of other tools in your poster. Even better, you can embed the finished poster in a wiki. The education version also allows you to create your own class lists complete with IDs and passwords for complete control.

Wordle: This is the fantastic word cloud creator. Paste any text into the site, hit create and wait for the magic to happen! The only down side is that it can sometimes have problems running in school because of antiquated browsers and out of date java plugins.

Etherpad: This is the online text editor I mentioned that allows lots of people to edit the same text at the same time… you’ll either love this for a bit of whole class communal writing, or it’ll drive you up the wall!

Bubbl.us: This is the free online mind-mapper that we used to link the caves in the Caves of Mull.

We had the first of our two INSET (In-service Training) days yesterday and I was asked to give a very brief intro to online safety to the staff. It was a sobering lesson to me in just how much I take for granted and just how far many teachers have to come in adapting to the online environment that so many of our pupils inhabit.

I recently completed my CEOP Ambassador training and so was asked by Liz Angus one of the school’s Child Protection Officers to give a quick overview of some of the issues we face in schools and also the work done by CEOP. I immediately contacted Ollie Bray to ask if I could use and adapt some of the slides he used recently and was delighted when he said yes, so, suitably prepared, I did my bit. The session was very well received, and I had quite a few teachers coming up to me after and asking for advice and to say thanks… but one thing that was said by a handful made me realise that I do take some of the obvious safeguards for granted and that not all teachers are as safety-savvy as I thought.

As I was speaking, I made the point that pupils should not be allowed to use a computer in school without supervision. I thought this was a fairly basic and obvious point, but was a bit stunned later at just how many of my colleagues told me that they hadn’t thought of it. Like every other school in Scotland — and probably the world — there never seem to be enough PCs to go around and when deadlines loom it is all too easy to say to a pupil to use a PC in an empty room. The needs of the deadline blind many teachers to the inherent dangers of this. Fortunately, I had the chance to share and will soon be delivering ThinkUKnow training to the staff in the school as part of their CPD… but I can’t help but think how many more teachers need to be educated in this area. We’ll get there, but sometimes it’s good to be reminded just how far we have to go…

I’ve added the slides I ended up using on the day, but don’t forget that most of them are derived from Ollie Bray’s excellent Internet Safety and Responsible Use presentation!