Planning for the Oxford Conference

I blogged about the forthcoming Oxford Conference in Sydney a while ago, but not it’s well and truly coming up and I’ve been thinking more about what to say, and how to get the message across. The key idea is to respond to the Australian Curriculum in English in new and innovative ways. New responses for a new curriculum, that kind of thing.

So, I thought I’d start with an overview of English (real quick) and a link to some of the online curriculum and curriculum resources available, then delve into what teaching (should?) looks like now, and then in to more detail about the kind of (flipped classroom) tools and tips and techniques that might help make that happen. Then, finish with a bit about building your own personal professional learning network online and not relying on school-based old style PD, with an emphasis on Twitter and all that.

Sound reasonable? I like presentations that are specific on tips and strategies I could walk away and try, so that’s the aim. Suggestions welcome! Hope to see you in Sydney. You can learn more about the conference HERE

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Change and continuity in teaching Literature

I’ve been trying to be more actively interventionist in my Literature teaching this year, inspired by some thinking about Personalised Learning I’ve been moved to consciously work on some ‘high impact micro-teaching strategies’ that might help student learning as a follow up to some thinking on formative assessment over the past couple of years.

So, I’ve kept the things that have been working pretty well (the wikis, using OneNote as the default teaching, presenting and note-taking tool) and the blog as the primary means of communicating class news and information.

But I’ve also tried some new things too. I’ve also been up front with the students about that, talking them through my thinking and what the intention/s are. They’re Year 12 students after all, 17 or 18 old most of them, well able to understand these approaches and generally just as keen to do well as I am for them to do well.

We began with a ‘no-hands’ up approach to discussions and I showed them a couple of bits of research about that, including this piece from the BBC.  This approach, coupled with greatly increased ‘wait-time’ has seemed to make the class more generally attentive and receptive. I haven’t had a problem getting discussion going with this group; they’re great about that, but the ‘no hands up’ means that everyone is involved potentially.

I also moved the room around a bit, based on some feedback I got from a couple of teachers who sat in one of my lessons for a ‘classroom observation’ project we’re trialling. I’m stuck with little individual ‘test-style’ tables and, yes I could bundle them into ungainly little squarish pods each lesson, but the next teacher would probably untangle all that and start again. So, I’ve tried a kind of horseshoe arrangement that I use for lots of meetings I run, where students can really make good eye-contact with each other in all the conversations. They’re still all facing the front where the data projector (and teacher) is, but it’s generally more conducive to a good collaborative atmosphere and, importantly, the other teachers who use the room, can mostly tolerate it and don’t shift things back.

I’m going to do more surveys too, shorter surveys more regularly. I generally do an end of semester student survey and end of year but, inspired by a young English teacher who’s been giving her students short surveys using Google Docs (I don’t even know how to do that) I plan to do more surveys online using our own school system.

I did the first survey this week and already it’s given me some good feedback that I intend on acting upon right now, rather than wait until the end of the semester. This is all about helping students improve as they go. I found that they haven’t much enjoyed the poetry cartoon tasks I’ve been setting, which is interesting as I wouldn’t have picked that. I liked them!

And they’re sometimes not so sure about how well they’re going, the kind of progress they’re making. So I want to work on more individual feedback more often, short, focused learning conversations perhaps.

I was also inspired by another teacher to try the “Icy pole sticks”. A simple technique, that you’d often do with younger students, of having an icy pole stick for each student, with their name on it, and selecting the stick at random and asking that student to answer the question. A kind of simple randomiser, and you can just keep selecting sticks at random, or move them from the big pile to a ‘used’ pile to ensure that questions are distributed around the room. I told my class about the idea and got them to name and decorate their stick with some iconographic aspect of themselves. Which was fun.

So, the icy pole sticks, combined with wait time, and the ‘no hands up’, has helped reshape some of the questioning that goes on in the classes so often. And helped make me more conscious of this approach even though, every now and then, I’m drawn to ask the keen student who I know is itching to say something.

Finally, the questioning itself has been sharpened by trying a technique called: ‘Pose, Pause, Bounce, Pounce’, where a question is posed, wait time is added, the question is responded to, bounced to another student, and then a third is asked what they thought of those answers. Sounds more complicated than it is and you can read about it at the Guardian HERE

I’ve just started to try to collect some of these techniques on a Diigo list HERE.  Suggestions are welcome, particularly focused on assessment for learning strategies.

Finally, some traditions are too good to change. Cake day, once every fortnight at the end of the day, is a student-inspired initiative that I’m happy to continue just as it is.

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Back to school apps

Somehow, I still get the feeling that I always got when I saw the Officeworks ‘Back to School’ catalog in the mailbox in old media days. NO, not  yet!

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What is e-learning now?

Yesterday I got the opportunity to speak again at the Chisholm Institute ‘Ripple’ Conference at the Mt Eliza Business School, overlooking Port Phillip Bay; this time with a focus on what e-learning looks like to me  now and how can help support teachers through change.

Last year I focused on the students who were coming in to tertiary institutions from k-12 schools and what that meant for learning environments. This year my focus was more on the teachers. It was a beautiful spring day, maybe the first real spring day this year, and the conference was well run with a group of teachers who wanted to be there.

Below is a an abridged version of the slideshow with some of the key ideas. There’s also an annotated list of the resources I used on Diigo here: http://www.diigo.com/list/warrickw/ripple-2010

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Two weeks with an Ipad

I’ve had an ipad on loan for the last two weeks and it’s been different to what I expected. Of course I want one, but I’ve been through a range of feelings about it, from dismissing it as a toy, to seeing some potential for students esp in early years to seeing it a great tool to travel with, to wondering exactly where it fits.

So, after two weeks of waking up to read THE AGE on the ipad and using it to check the rainfall radar before a bike ride, here’s my impressions:

It’s entirely personal = it’s not that shareable
Borrowing someone else’s ipad is not entirely satisfactory. It hasn’t got my apps on it and it’s power and effectiveness are diminished by that. Sure, I can check the BOM site or the ‘Guardian’ online but my favourite apps (see future post coming soon) are much more personal than that. I’ve got an ipod touch with about fifty apps that I have carefully selected and chosen for my own taste. An ipad would be different if it had all my own stuff on it, but it hasn’t. And, it made me think what that means for students. Are we going to give them access to a shared ipad with the official school apps on it, or is it going to be their stuff. There’s a big difference.

It doesn’t replace anything
This is a new category. You need a computer as well. You also still need a smart-phone or a PDA.

It doesn’t replace a laptop
The ipad is light, cool, funky, but in the end it’s not all THAT different from having a notebook computer on your lap. In fact, a laptop sits nicely on your … lap. It sort of has its stand built in. If I could only have one of these items, there’d be no question that I’d take the computer any day. Did I mention a handly little input device called the keyboard?

It feels great
It does feel nice. It’s smooth, sculpted, gorgeously thin. I feel smart holding it, and I imagine I’m in some kind of sci-fi movie with such a beautiful, uncluttered object. My notebook computer feels like a big grey brick in comparison.

Battery life
9 or 10 hours they say. I don’t know. I haven’t used it that much so it’s got close to running out yet. I could read a book on it, check my mail, take it down the street for coffee and snuggle up in bed to watch the late news and still never think about plugging the thing in. In comparison, my notebook, even with a flash drive, maxes out at about three hours.

Screen
I’m not sure why, but for some reason the ipad screen is 1000 times more gorgeous than my computer screen. Why is it so? It’s clear and glossy and, maybe because I’m using a tablet pc, my screen looks dirty and muddy by comparison.

It’s strangely small
For some reason I thought this was going to be bigger than it is. It’s pretty small. Bigger than my ipod touch sure, but the ipod touch font size is not much different. I wonder if Apple will come up with different sizes eventually.

So, after two weeks, would I buy one? Maybe. But I’m probably going to wait for version 2 and I don’t think it will be a device that’s going to be critical. If I’m working, I’ll have a full powered notebook computer. If I’m in the car of down the street I’ll stick to an iphone, smartphone or ipod touch with wifi. So, ultimately the ipad is a device that’s best for between those two scenarios; best for reading in bed, or in front of the telly.

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Ipad as a tool for students?

Of course I’m going to get myself an ipad sometime in the forseeable future and enjoyed StephenFry’s piece on this new tool in TIME last month. Maybe for me it will be the second generation version, when the bugs like wireless dropping out have been fixed, but I must admit I wasn’t really seeing the ipad as a tool for students in the classroom.

As a long time proponent of the 1-1 computer version of learning, I couldn’t see the point in giving kids a relatively under-powered device that lacked the content creation facilities of a decent notebook computer. Our students get the full version of Office, large chunks of the Adobe Master Collection including Photoshop, Illustrator and Acrobat Pro along with a suite of other software like Inspiration, Photo Story and some tablet-specific things like Ink Art. We’re looking at flash drive based machines running Windows 7 that start up quickly and can multi-task with ease, as the students can too!

But I was talking to an educator yesterday who was pretty enthusiastic about the Ipad as a learning device, particularly for younger students. And that was something I hadn’t thought about, concentrating as I was on students like my senior Literature class who have been using OneNote as their note-taking tool and collaborating on multiple wikis.

So, I was pleasantly surprised to this post by Will Richardson, which has a video conversation with NY TImes columnist Warren Buckleiter, who talks enthusiastically about the potential of the ipad for younger students: the power of its tactile nature and the growing range of possible apps. The conversation is here:

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English Teaching is IT (*new blog)

You don’t have to dig too far down the blogroll links to see how immersed I’ve become in the digital world: blogs, wikis, nings (x3), websites, twitter …

So, it was with some deep thought that I got involved in yet another blog, but I did! This idea came about on a bike ride a couple of weeks ago, chatting to another  English teacher named David Baxter about some of the ideas he’d been using in the classroom and talking also about what I was doing. He’s the teacher I blogged about a little while ago in m provocative Tale of Two Teachers post (it was the best of times, it was the worst of times)

Anyway, we thought it might be good to collaborate on a blog aimed at English teachers looking to use technology in the classroom, a blog that would be more practical and tips based than the meandering theorising that mostly goes on here, but looking at things that work, and some that don’t. Hence English Teaching is IT was born. It’s on WordPress, its up and running, and I hope it’s useful for English teachers and others too. I hope you’ll take a look and maybe even subscribe.  While I  expect there’ll be some cross-over with what I’m writing about here, the focus of the new blog is on the classroom, and tools that work for English teaching and beyond.

English Teaching is IT

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The Kindle

Had my first touch and play with the Amazon Kindle eb0ok reader, now available in Australia. At first glance it’s smaller and lighter than I imagined, more the thickness of a magazine than a book, and lighter.  Not super cheap at $269AUD and the screen wasn’t quite as clear as I was hoping: I’d need to sit down and read a couple of chapters of a book to see what the reading experience actually was like.  There’s other objections too; black and white!, a lack of flexibility in the format that can’t read PDFs and needs a special format conversion to take something from your own PC to the kindle format.  For a traveller I imagine this would be a great device, light enough not to get you fined for excess baggage and still have plenty of books on hand.

But what about for the student? I’ve heard a few people arguing that the ebook reader might spell the end of textbooks, but haven’t we heard that before? Many of the textbooks I see around the place include a CD of the contents in PDF format, and lots of students have notebook computers, but I don’t see many of them replacing textbooks in this way. Or is that teacher choice rather than student choice? And, if a student does have a notebook computer what advantage is an ebook reader over reading the text on their own computer?

There’s still some way to go I think, but I can imaging that we’re going to see big progress in the technology in this area. Let’s hope that open standards prevail, that publishers can all come on board and real choice, including Australian small press publishers, is there for the readers.

 

 

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Palm sized computing

I must admit I’ve always been a fan of the full sized (notebook) computer.  Forget weight issues (I’m a strong lad)  the bigger and more powerful the computer the better: a decent hard drive, widescreen and especially a full-sized keyboard for those of us who learned to touch-type in the heady days when the Public Service typing pool seemed a job for life.

So, I’ve generally argued against netbooks, PDAs and mobile phones as replacements for ‘real’ 1-1 computing solutions except in cases when the $200-$300 price difference makes a critical difference in getting the program going.  And, while I stick to those guns, I must admit being pretty impressed so far with my new 64GB Ipod Touch with full wireless capacity and the ability to work with all the downloadable Iphone applications.

It’s not going to replace my computer, and I’m not going to write my thesis on it, but I can quite happily read emails, check my calendar,  work with Twitter and quickly move through my rss feeds via Google Reader. I can make Skype calls with the headphone microphone plugged in, read from my EverNote account and read the Age or the NY Times. I can record voice memos, or my cycling training and probably play a bizillion games I’m too nervous to download in case I get addicted.  When I was walking around lost in Salem recently I could stop for coffee at a wireless cafe and fire up the Google Map and figure out how to get back to the ferry.  And did I mention it’s got ALL my music on it?  With voice control so if I say ‘Play artist Neil Young’ it does! And I say that a lot!

It’s a powerful little hand-held computer and it’s got potential which I’ve been busily exploring as I download lots of little applications for it.   The big drawback remains that it’s hard to create on it; to write much, to draw, to brainstorm, to produce. But you can access information with ease and I can see, with this user interface, how hand-held mobile devices might have a bigger part to play than I thought.

Here’s how I’ve organised my Ipod so far; three screens. I’d love to hear how you’ve set yours up and whether you’ve found the perfect application to go with it.

The GMAIL App works seamlessly with Gmail accounts as does Evernote, Tweetdeck and Skype. Everyone needs a shopping list and To Do list right? The cycling log is a bit specialised but does the job nicely.

Screen 2 is less commonly used apps; a couple of Melbourne public transport specific apps and the ubiquitous ‘AppBox Pro’ and it’s bag of tricks (I would have loved to have had the ‘Tip Calculator’ when I was in NY recently) Urbanspoon is a restaurant finder and very cool. iTwitterPro I bought, but it isn’t as good as Tweetdeck.

Screen 3 are web slices; direct links to web pages I read a lot. Sort of visible bookmarks. The Google Reader is an application that makes reading your RSS feeds a breeze.

Screen 4 is apps I don’t use, but can’t delete. I haven’t got any stocks and the ‘Music’ button is much better than the iTunes one.

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New Tools

I’ve commented on Twitter about a couple of these things but I thought it worth detailing here some web 2.0 tools that I’ve been impressed with lately and that have become party of my daily work on the web.

NING

Ning is a tool for you to create your own social network.  I didn’t get it at first. I thought: what for? Do I really want to compete with Facebook? I envisaged maybe using it as a site to connect the extended family. I tried once to set up a multi-user blog on WordPress for the family and half of them failed the login test! So I turned to myfamily as an easier alternative.

But recently I started using NING in a couple of different contexts; a group of like-minded cyclists first up, then in a network of learning technology teachers. It began to make sense. Forums, multiple blogs, pictures, videos, even chat. You can set up a network in a few minutes, and teachers are beginning to use it with their students.

NING describe NING like this:

Ning empowers people to create and discover new social experiences for the most important people and interests in their lives.

Ning was started with a simple premise: when people have the freedom to create a new social experience online, uniquely customized for the most important people and interests in their lives with no effort, no cost, and infinite choice, the world is a better, more colorful and certainly more interesting place in which to live.

With Ning, people are creating new social experiences that are:

* Infinitely customizable
* Beautifully designed
* Easily created and moderated

By providing people with a better way to discover and stay connected to the most important people and interests in their life, Ning represents a new chapter in how people create, organize, and communicate online.

Tonight I joined Classroom 2.0 Ning, ‘the social network for those interested in Web 2.0 and collaborative technologies in education.’ I thought I’d give them support and join in; then realised they have 24,000 members in that network already! Okay, maybe I was wrong about Ning.

Transferr

Transferr is a pretty way to organise your favourite web sites as icons on your start up screen. They say:

Transferr is an online application which allows you to add your favorite websites as icons to your own personal page. You can customise your icons with colors, share them with friends and drag and drop them to keep them in order. You can also organise your icons into tabs which allows for your own organised system

Okay, I know that Safari and Chrome do something like this by default, but it’s only the sites you most often visit, not necessarily the ones you want to keep in your head. And what about the tabs you can create with pages on things that interest you? Note below I’ve got tabs on cycling, shopping, tek, curriculum etc. To be honest, I tried this out thinking it would last about a week. But it’s been over a month now and I’m still using it.

A long while ago now I created my own start.htm page using Dreamweaver, based on the simple Craigslist template. A couple of colleagues along the way have asked how I did it and wanted one themselves, but couldn’t be bothered with the html. I can now show them this.

Jing

Over the last few weeks I’ve had the need to create some screencasts and went out looking for the best tools. One of the wikis I’ve been working on has as its audience member of the public often with very low tech skills. I needed to SHOW some users how to edit a page, insert an image, link to other pages.

Jing is a great solution. A free tool that allows you to create screen shots or screencasts up to five minutes long.

They say:

Elegant and simple, Jing’s minimal feature set keeps the focus on instant sharing. We think it’s the perfect companion to the casual, fast-paced online conversations we all have every day.

It works beautifully, has a pro version if you want more features, and links to Camtasia if you really want to get into editing it all. But,  as a simple tool for capturing screenshots or movies, it’s hard to beat.

There’s a number of YouTube videos around showing how it works. (search JingProject) This is one:

I would talk about Feedly too, a Firefox extension that works with Google Reader to create a magzine like start page, but I’m not qualified. I just started looking at it today. I love it already, and will talk about that some other time.

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