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

Nevertheless, I’m quite excited about it, particularly from a writer’s perspective. Could I write my textbook and have it on the Apple bookstore without the intermediary of the publisher? Like musicians do now?  Could we break down the systems and empower good teachers and good teacher/authors and share their expertise more widely? And I’m definitely going to download the publication software.

But I have reservations, and they are more around the idea of the textbook in the first place. Maybe the textbook thing is bigger in the United States than here, or maybe because I’m an English teacher there isn’t generally the reliance on a textbook beyond the set novels and plays.

The video says they are going to change ‘one of the cornerstones of education: the textbook’. But is the textbook really that critical? How does this change learning? Or teaching? And, will replacing the traditional textbook with a ‘bells and whistles’ version change the classroom experience? Where are the collaborative tools, the feedback, the personalisation, the differentiation, the user-created textbook that we’ve talked about for some time.

There’s no doubt it will look pretty, it will save a lot of printing and heavy schoolbags for kids with iPads (oh yeah, how many is that right now?), they can be updated easily and they will be more engaging.  But every time I hear ‘engagement’ as an argument for new software and hardware I cringe a little. There’s got to be better reasons than that. We shall see!

Nevertheless, I give you the new Issues Book, in its glorious new livery.  The school year? Bring it on!

Available from all good bookshops or from Cengage Learning here (note, this appears to be last year’s edition)

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.

 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
I had one of those, ‘thank goodness that effort wasn’t  totally wasted’, moments a couple of weeks ago when doing some revision work with literature students to do with podcasting.
 
Teaching the poetry of Gwen Harwood earlier this year I was very keen to include as much audio as possible; after all poetry really lives when it’s spoken I feel.
 
So, I organized for each of the poems to have a definitive ‘reading’ by a student who knew the poem well. Hearing the poem is critical so I recorded each student reading in Audacity and saved them out as .mp3s which I put on the class wiki. I also recorded a series of mini-lectures on each poem, about five minutes each just talking through the poem like I would in class. So, each poem had a wiki page with a reading, a mini-lecture and the student contributions and notes.
 
 I didn’t think much about it, although to be truthful I was a bit disappointed that students didn’t see to see the value in the audio. So, in the very last lesson of the year I was pleased and surprised that a student from another class told me that she’d been listening to the audio and that it had been the most powerful thing for her own learning. That made it worthwhile somehow.
 

And justified me buying a new Yeti microphone in the recent Apple sale and putting it under the Christmas tree for a present to myself.
 

So, next year, more audio supplements to the teaching, more attempts to bring these works to life and maybe even a return to some of those rambling Ed-tech style podcasts I did a couple of years ago!
 

I enjoyed a short session this week UK educator, Stephen Heppell, under the heading, ‘learning:now’. It was a kind of meandering tour of projects he’s been involved in, with a particular emphasis on learning spaces and some key messages that resonated with me.

I liked the way he used his desktop as the presentation tool, (see his website image above for a sense of that) pulling up images and doucments and movies as he thought of them (or that’s how it seemed) and now a powerpoint slide in sight. It did mean that at times the talk lacked the dotpoint focus that comes with those tools, but it was a lot more interesting and engaging for it.

He showed lots of learning spaces he’d been involved in co-constructing with students, or he just thought showed the kind of surprise and delight that thoughtful spaces give us. I liked his image of the UK system of everyone stopping for lunch at school at the same time (‘the only place in London where you can seat 1000 people for lunch is the Dorchester and every high school’) and what that meant for how the day involved. He was all for immersive learning, teach the first week of February for a month, and time at task.

The classroom spaces he showed were ‘shoeless’ places, often where every surface is a writing surface and where the student work was celebrated and maintained. He wanted places where students could sit, perch, slump, lie (did anyone ever choose to sit up straight to read a book he asked?) And what was the point of staff rooms, he asked. If we’re all learners, why have a special space for old learners?

He talked a lot about a classroom space at Lampton, UK, that the students had designed: mood lighting, writable surfaces, skype enabled but, signficantly, the students didn’t want the room filled with technology. We’ll bring our own, they argued, and plug in. That way it will be up to date! He drew a lot on the idea of family, showing us a school that had a bread oven near the entrance so that students could smell that fresh bread cooking as they arrived and talked in this way of ‘a learning family, not a learning factory’ and schools that moved beyond placement of students in age-related groups to peer support and peer learning. He argued for ‘in-betweeny’ time, keeping the day fresh and inviiting and playful ways to do the hard stuff.

He was in favour of social technologies like Skype and Twitter (he tweets here) and flipping the classroom, so that the routine work was done at home and the interesting and challenging stuff done collaboaratively at school. He showed us some slides of stupid things that schools ban, mostly mobile phones which were often the most powerful computers in the room, turned off or banned completely.

And he DID have some key messages that resonated with me:

• Listen to the students
• The most risky thing you can do as a school or a system is to do nothing.
• Teachers needs to lead this discussion – the future competitors to our schools will be Pearson
• If you can astonish kids with the place you create and the expectations you bring, they will astonish you

I’m usually reluctant to write about articles that I can’t immediately share with a quick link but Charles Leadbeater’s most recent piece Rethinking innovation in education: Opening  up the debate, published recently by CSE, seems only available as a purchase.

So I must have really liked it to be writing about it, and I did.  He uses some modern technology comparisons (the App Store, Pixar Studios) to talk about what constitutes effective cultures of innovation and what that means for school systems, including the necessity for sustaining innovation: ‘leading innovation means creating and then leading a creative community, around a cause.’

He talks a lot too about a growing consensus, partly from insights into brain-based learning, about what constitutes effective 21st century learning, something I’ve written about here at times too. He writes, ‘to put it simply, the core of this consensus is that people learn most effectively when they are mainly learning WITH others, and sometimes BY themselves, and less frequently when the are having things explained FOR them or knowledge delivered TO them. Increasingly, to make learning effective we need to design it as a WITH and BY activity, rather than something tat’s about doing FOR and TO us.’ (his emphasis through the caps)

He then lists 10 main ingredients (I love recipe lists!) about that emerging consensus coming out of a range of sources (which he lists)

1. Learning is an active and engaged process
2. Engaged learning is impossible unless the learner feels motivated
3. To be motivating, learning has to be personal, rather than standardised
4. As well as feeling deeply personal, learning needs to be highly collaborative
5. Mastering knowledge and skills is not a process of memorising content and regurgitating it in a form for a test; learning is about application
6. This kind of learning thrives on feedback
7. Learning needs to be stretching and challenging
8. That kind of learning is a structured process, not a free for all. Learning should be hard work but rewarding and fun.
9. Learning should take place in a wide variety of settings, not just at school or in a classroom.
10. Designing the conditions for this kind of learning is hard; we will need perhaps fewer but more skilled, creative, master teachers.

If there’s one thing that struck me about the Vietnamese people in my recent trip to Vietnam (and there were many things, especially the friendliness of the people) it was their intense desire and capacity to learn.

In Hoi An I got talking to a young woman spruiking sales outside a restaurant. She spoke good English, enough to tell a joke, understand nuance and understand the power of communicating with these new tourists who are coming into the country nowadays. That’s where the future might be.

When I asked her where she’d learned English she told me that she’d learned it herself, from talking to tourists and soaking it up. She was desperate to learn more, asked me some finer points about pronunciation and was back out on the street, drumming up business for the family restaurant.

She was typical in lots of ways. Kids go to school and then go home to do some more work. And often have extra classes on the weekends. And a family business they’re working in. The two things that seem most critical are family and learning. In learning environments that we’d despair about there seems to me a quiet determination to learn.

Earlier on, at Ha Long Bay, we’d been taken on an excursion to a ‘floating village’, where fishermen and women supplement their precarious incomes now by showing boatloads of tourists around their ‘village’. There was a school in session too, recently bolstered with funds from a visiting Sydney school (Killara High School)  and as I guiltily poked my head in (what teacher wants a stream of foreign visitors gawking around) I saw a purposeful, quiet collective effort of learning. There wasn’t a piece of technology in sight. And it was quietly inspiring.