2012 in review

The WordPress.com stats helper monkeys prepared a 2012 annual report for this blog. It’s a bit affirming to think that there were 10,000 views this year.

Thanks everyone! And Happy New Year.

Here’s an excerpt:

600 people reached the top of Mt. Everest in 2012. This blog got about 10,000 views in 2012. If every person who reached the top of Mt. Everest viewed this blog, it would have taken 17 years to get that many views.

Click here to see the complete report.

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Sharpen those pencils! School is back

After the intitial fear and trepidation about leaving holiday mode behind and moving to the routine of meetings, timetables and multiple agendas, it’s actually quite nice to clear the desk, un-clutter the inbox and sharpen the pencils for a new year. It will be even better when the students come back next week.

Good luck and best wishes to everyone for a great teaching year, especially new teachers entering the profession.

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This year in blogging

The WordPress.com stats helper monkeys prepared a 2011 annual report for this blog.

Here’s an excerpt:

The concert hall at the Syndey Opera House holds 2,700 people. This blog was viewed about 8,500 times in 2011. If it were a concert at Sydney Opera House, it would take about 3 sold-out performances for that many people to see it.

Click here to see the complete report.

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2010 in review

Good old WordPress sent me an email today, with my blog stats for the year, which I share below. I was surprised (and pleased) that I blogged on this blog about once a week, in a busy year of teaching and learning. That’s about as much as I can manage I think.  I was totally surprised at the Gilligan’s Island interest; I’ve got to blog more about 60s television shows I think!

The stats helper monkeys at WordPress.com mulled over how this blog did in 2010, and here’s a high level summary of its overall blog health:

The Blog-Health-o-Meter™ reads Wow.

Crunchy numbers

A Boeing 747-400 passenger jet can hold 416 passengers. This blog was viewed about 5,600 times in 2010. That’s about 13 full 747s.

 

In 2010, there were 66 new posts, growing the total archive of this blog to 428 posts. There were 59 pictures uploaded, taking up a total of 11mb. That’s about 1 pictures per week.

The busiest day of the year was August 21st with 122 views. The most popular post that day was Teach for Australia (revisited).

Where did they come from?

The top referring sites in 2010 were digg.com, annasnextadventure.blogspot.com, warrickwynne.wordpress.com, twitter.com, and google.com.au.

Some visitors came searching, mostly for gilligan’s island, teaching and learning with technology, gilligans island, gilligan island, and human ingenuity ib.

Attractions in 2010

These are the posts and pages that got the most views in 2010.

1

Teach for Australia (revisited) August 2010
4 comments

2

UbD meets improving student learning (one teacher at a time) March 2010
1 comment

3

Teaching Generation Z August 2006

4

Human Ingenuity: An Overview of IB Thinking April 2009

5

Creative Ingenuity – Core competencies of the 21st Century April 2009
1 comment

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Tale of two teachers

Above: : I stop at the local hotelier on the way home to relate my marvellous tale.

I met an English teacher from another school at a conference last week, who startled me by proudly stating over coffee that he banned computers from his classroom, ‘I want them writing, not typing!’, he proclaimed as if that was a great line.  I must admit I was nearly shocked and must have showed it.  I asked him why, particularly since his school and the parents  had invested a fair bit of money in ensuring that every student had a notebook computer which they could use in all their subject, except this one of course.

I said all the usual things you might expect, that wasn’t the computer a great tool for writing?, that surely the creative and collaborative opportunities might just interest you a bit?, that this was a tool that students generally enjoyed working with and seemed particularly useful in an English classroom? Wasn’t he interested in student’s blogging, or redrafting easily, or sharing their work with others online? I probably should have let it go but I persisted; what was it about the computer that so offended him that it’s very presence should be cast out?

In the end it seemed it was three things (I simplify):  that a computer is a typewriter and students don’t type their final exams, they handwrite them. That some students were playing games on their computers when they should have been working on their English. That some students were paying more attention to their computer than their teacher (lookatmoi!!!)

If you’ve been reading this blog for more than three nanoseconds you’ll know how well that went down with me and I think I might have even said something like, ‘I wouldn’t want you teaching in a school I was in’ or something to that effect. And this man is probably a good teacher, well liked and respected by his students. We parted company soon after, going our different ways across the biscuits and Nescafe.

I know another English teacher, from another school, who has taken it upon himself to lead and develop the other English teachers at his school. He began using OneNote as an organising tool for himself about five years ago, and then with his senior English classes. He used his tablet PC to annotate and review student work and email it back to them and he started blogging for them, and sharing his blog with students from other schools, gathering thousands of ‘hits’. Late last year he started producing some audio podcasts for his students on key aspects of the course. He’d get the students to download them to their computer and some would put them on their ipods to listen to later. This week he sent me a link to a screencast he’d created using Screencast which was a visual and audio overview setting up the structure of an essay for his senior English class. He’s been playing around with Camtasia too, as a tool for helping students build skills.

It’s not the done thing in the education profession to criticise other teachers. It’s anti-collaborative and just helps to push people into extremes of perspective and hide-out with their ideological pals in the staff-room or the computer room.  (See my earlier post about identity!) Any talk of teacher appraisal or performance quickly has to answer to questions about team-work and the importance of teachers learning together, not competing with each other.

Fair enough too. We’re not cookie cutters and getting into quantifying what a single teacher has contributed to a student’s learning journey is a slippery slope. Still, I know which of those two teachers classes I’d like my own children in.

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The waves in the bay

I hope everyone likes the new header on this blog; a detail from a picture I took of tiny little waves lapping on the shores of Port Phillip Bay last week, and taken with my new Canon EOS 450, which I’m loving.

It seemed a more summery kind of image than the cloudy looking shot of the Snowy Mountains. You can see the full size original pic on Flickr HERE

Above is another shot from an afternoon on the beach at Mornington in the last week of the holidays. I’ll come back to that photo for sustenance later in the year!

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Beginning of a great adventure

Or so said Lou Reed, in his (best) album, New York.

But, after seven years of blogging this doesn’t feel like much like a new adventure. Moving this blog from edublogs.org to wordpress.com isn’t an exciting thing to do, or particularly adventurous. It took me about an hour and a half to find a new blog name, export my posts from my old edublog and import them here. It didn’t work too well first time, it did the second.

And why? Well, Edublogs had gone ad-happy, and while I won’t labour the point, they were in-text style ads that appeared in your blog content, unless you upgraded. Edublogs has been my preferred platform and my recommendation of choice to other educators for the last three  years or so. But Edublogs had some performance issues earlier this year and I began to worry about being so reliant on one independent service in these increasingly economic times.  And them came the ads.

So, here I am world. I’m not excited. I’ve been blogging too long to think that anything I say here is going to change too many things out there. But I write because I think and feel. And that’s still an adventure.

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Snowy Mountains

Last day at work for the year today, and heading up to the Snowy Mountains for a few days to do some walking, breathe some air and slow down.

Looking back at some of my posts over the last month or so I do sound a bit tired and jaded.  It was nice to get the VCE results yesterday and see some fulfilment and purpose in all that activity. I’m going to try to come back rejuvenated with the joy of teaching and leave the politics alone for a while. I’m not even going to blog about the increasing advertisement presence on edublogs or where that might go, and are we all just a little vulnerable in these hard times to one great blogging platform?

I hope all my reader has a great Christmas and Santa brings some cool technology gadget, with batteries included!

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Is this the archetypal myspace blog post?

I stumbled across this blog post on my space while searching out a musician I like (Josh Rouse: for some reason musicians have stuck to myspace!) I though it might very well qualify as THE classic myspace post; the one that defines the genre:

HeY eVeRyOnE!!!

How are you all? Well life for me at the moment is ok i guess…It could be better but hey its not perfect all the time. School starts soon and can u believe it im actually looking forward to it. These holidays have been so boring!!! I went and saw stick it today. lol. It was good ..hehe…Ne ways…hows everyones love lives going???coz mine is confusing:-S…Ah well i just need to give it time.

Ok well I have to go now

I Love Everyone sooooo Much!!!

Mwah

xoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxox

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Ordered for closure

Just coincidence? Or something darker that I read today of two edublogs being closed down by the institution where the teachers works. In his blog Teaching Generation Z, Graham Wegner pointed out Al Upton and the minLegends 08 which currently reads:

Order for Closure

This blog has been disabled in compliance with DECS wishes (Department of Education and Children’s Services – South Australia)

It seems that this blog in particular is being investigated regarding risk and management issues. What procedures should be taken for the use/non-use of blogs to enhance student learning will be considered.

Please note … I am greatly comforted by the support from many of my parents/care-givers, the staff & leadership at school and the Learning Technologies team at ‘headquarters’.

I absolutely value the support and wisdom given to me from my global social and learning networks – and isn’t that what the whole thing is all about?

Best of all are the kids .. without their enthusiasm, love for blogging and collaboration … well this blog would never have existed .. and now, would not be closed.

Cheers, Al

And, at the same time, a colleague pointed out Intrepid Teacher, which was closed due to complaints from parents, and the teacher subsequently resigned. That blog opens:

To Prospective Employers:

If you are reading this post, then you have most likely already read my cover letter, perused my resume, and now are probably left asking yourself why such an experienced, passionate teacher would resign from his current position. Below you will find my explanation:

As a Language Arts teacher, I try to inspire kids to think, reflect, analyze texts, and express themselves through writing and other media formats. I focus on these skills because I believe in the inherent power of literature and art to transform individuals and society. I believe that it is through communication and identification with other people ideas that we best learn how to become global citizens. I could go on and on, but let me just say that I practice what I teach-I believe in writing, so I write. For the last few years, I have been storing this writing on my personal blog.

Now, to be clear, it seems that these two blogs are under pressure for very different reasons, and the blogs themselves were serving very different purposes. And, I haven’t gone back and tried to read these blogs in detail to see what kind of things parents or principals might have found objectionable, if anything.

However, it’s interesting and sad to see these attempts to incorporate the most powerful contemporary learning tools foundering at the outset. Who is going to teach these skills otherwise? I do think that student blogging, in the first example, needs to be really thoughtfully considered and planned, but it’s surely worth doing? And the second example, where the teacher’s own creative life comes into contact or collision with their professional life, is one that might have occurred anyway, but the internet and its ‘to find out more, click here’, just makes more likely.

Some educators have opted for the ‘walled garden’, the in-house blogs that don’t get read outside the community, others argue that this isn’t ‘real’ blogging. Some schools are reluctant to put any of this data on external servers, even if they’re password protected and ‘secure’.

It’s corporation think. There was a good article in the AGE last week by Nicholas Carr called ‘Ready for the next digital revolution‘ which talked some nonsense, ‘Computer systems are not, at their core, technologies of emancipation. They are technologies of control’. I’d argue that they are, in fact neither.

Anyway, Carr makes a good point when he describes the dilemma companies have now as they (like the school bloggers) have to decide do they stay with traditional in-house control, or move to ‘cloud computing’, another term I don’t like!

Carr writes:

While smaller companies have strong economic incentives to embrace the full utility model quickly, most larger companies will need to carefully balance their past investments in in-house computing with the benefits provided by utilities. They can be expected to pursue a hybrid approach for many years, supplying some hardware and software requirements themselves and purchasing others over the grid.

One of the key challenges for corporate IT departments, in fact, lies in making the right decisions about what to hold on to and what to let go.

In the long run, the IT department is unlikely to survive, at least not in its familiar form. It will have little left to do once the bulk of the business of computing shifts out of private data centres and into “the cloud”. Business units and even individual employees will be able to control the process of information directly, without the need for legions of technical specialists.

For ‘It department’, substitute ‘school’. And think about it, not in terms of how much money the company is making, but something a whole lot more important.

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