Two for the road

Two great sites out this week I noticed – a nice (and perhaps not banned) Word visualiser called WordItOut and a more positive site from the government that has perhaps been over shadowed by the MySchool spanking – Cybersmart. Both are excellent examples of resources that TEACHERS should be free to choose – without being judged by some bureaucrat or network administrator – who thinks they are implementing policy — when in fact they are making it harder for teachers to do exactly the things that Gillard is demanding in her bizarre, public way.

Cybersmart is a brave effort – though obviously very conservative. In one section it says “The Schools Gateway offers a wide range of accessible and engaging resources to assist primary and secondary schools to develop and implement a holistic approach to cybersafety.” – the problem here is that there is no focus in the curriculum for it. Its another thing to teach – which means something gets cut out. In the new era of high-stakes testing and public reporting, I often wonder why these things are produced as value-adds — when in fact they should be foundation courses.

The League of Ordinary Teachers

I am declaring that in order to create a manifesto for sustainable school change in Australia. I am founding (but don’t want to own) the ‘League of Ordinary Teachers’.

A movement of teachers to share and exchange ideas on professional practice AND make firm, fair and friendly representation of what teachers want – to government. (After all, the government seems to happy to make public statements about what parents want).

The draft manifesto of the League is to be created by it’s members.

I hope there will be regional TweetMeets in schools for both parents and teachers. If that get’s banned, lets just get coffee and do it anyway. The rest we can figure out as we go.

Please add one item you would like to see on the manifesto – as an ordinary teacher. Here are 3 I came up with (as no one wants to go first, everyone likes to watch blah)

please vote or add another at the LOOT uservoice poll here.

Right now we are a thousand teachers, doing a thousand things. Join the League, combine efforts and make sustainable change with a peer developed manifesto that pressures policy.

Please RT the forum and add a link in your blog. Comments welcome and appreciated.

http://loot.uservoice.com – LOOT (League of Ordinary Teachers). Follow @AULOOT on Twitter. I hope you will support the League and help get it off the ground.

Penzu 2

I wrote a while ago about trying to use the original Penzu in DET Primary. Unfortunately, following PD with teachers it was blocked and didn’t get un-blocked, so we did something else.

Never the less, I would like to continue to rave about Penzu – and now Penzu 2, where they are worked the API to allow it do even more clever things.

Penzu is very very simple. It looks like paper and lets kids write entries in a journal without getting all pretty-minded about their avatar or profile. Its point and shoot writing for many purposes.

By default the work is private. This is something I am beginning to favour in learning. It should be the creator who chooses when to share with the teacher, and not actually work in a fish-bowl all the time. Comment happy teachers can be a little off-putting to some students. It autosaves their work -  getting kids to save their work to a place where they might find  it again is often very problematic. Pictures can be added via Flickr and entries kicked to Twitter.

What I really like however is the privacy considerations for the learner. Their work is private until they are ready to share. They can then share with their teacher or peers via an email invitation. They are very much in control of the process. Glass-bowl writing can be very intimidating for students – even under-grads wince at the idea of wiki-fied learning. It teaches students to take greater responsibility to take care of their work, and to ask questions. Personally I like to keep my work under semi-wraps as I produce it. I do ask questions and discuss elements, but the body of work I prefer to compile in a degree of privacy.

Penzu have done a fantastic job here, as comments can only start to happen once an entry has been shared. With search, file management and deletion – this seems like a great way of giving students very simple writing tools and application management with their teacher.

Few student productions are so glam that they demand the constant power of more sophisticated blog-engines. When we think about stock-ICT activities, Penzu easily facilitates – and puts the learner in control and re-balancing the huge transfer or personal-space in Web2.0 classrooms – where the teacher becomes the all seeing eye – even out of school.

Penzu cuts out bloat-ware and overkill-ware, that often serves to distract students.  Penzu 2 is bang on the money. For a tiny fee you can get even more features!

Peer Assisted Learning and SackBoy

I have strayed from the path – and this post I returns to the games and – professional development of teachers. Yey!

In this post I want to look at why teaching Twitter is problematic. I also want to talk a little about why using games in learning grabs the attention of learners (adults included). Hopefully, you might be able to use some of the thinking in your own PD sessions.

Peer Assisted Learning

Much is written about the value of Twitter as a personal learning network — aka PLN.

For those presenting in workshops, one of the hardest concepts to explain is how a mass public access social network fits into education.

Many previous encounters of the digital kind have been designed for educational environments. Attendees have never needed to adapt any commercial offering to an edu-instance before. It has been provided at the institutional level – WebCT, MyClasses, Blackboard, Moodle and the all powerful Portal. Your audience is not motivated, but questioning – as you churn through your slide-deck of choice.

Your audience will be confused by notions of ‘networked learning’ - where learning happens formally between participants, inside a walled-garden, and have been told to value privacy and security.  As their conflicted minds and folded arms try to reconcile the impact (to them) of adopting and adapting your ad-hock, public communication — they are in fact deciding critically whether you are are a genius or a lunatic – challenging their belief.

It is advantageous to align Twitter academic ideas around peer assisted learning (PALS) which is widely accepted as a sound learning strategy. PALS develops a trust network … and your audience has absolutely no need for what you are offering them, unless you have created that value proposition for them.

Ideas need selling, not just explaining.

“Twitter is an example of a peer assisted learning platform, that connects people with similar interests and goals. It offers ad-hoc communication entirely at the users discretion.  Participation requires us to send and receive information presented by trusted peers. Success requires on-going and meaningful discussions with global peers on key issues in practice”.

If you ping the Twitterverse live – it looks impressive, but so would pulling IWB out your ear. It says that you have a magical power they don’t.  You can bling up your powerpoints all you like – but don’t miss the under pinning reagent needed to get the change in behaviour you are after.

Why kids use PALs to play games.

Think about games and MMOs – they run on peer assisted learning. PALS is at the heart of the motivation that game designers understand so well. The initial stages of play are semi-autonomous with the game provides guided instruction. Very quickly, players gain the basics and start to work together to solve their first problem – with little ‘in game help’ … very soon, they rely on each other to help them overcome new challenges – that are un-predicted. (Isnt’ that how we use Twitter? – Part learn, part belonging and part fun)

Pre-school, primary and secondary learners have a constant exposure to PALS with technology.

Watch 4 and 5 year olds with their NintendoDS, they immediately look to co-opt. It’s a human instinct to find collaboration and belonging. Strength in numbers or a friend in need. Ever wondered why a 4 year old is happy to watch an 8 year old play a Wii for 3 hours – they are learning and supporting the player — their turn will come. Mobile phones provide the same function – but at a more sophisticated level. This is why 4th graders can reach Level 80 in Warcraft, or nail a new console game in a weekend – peer assisted learning is central to today’s digital-learner.

Using Sackboy to explain PALS

If you want adults to ‘get’ PALs, let them level for an hour using Sony’s Little Big Planet. Teachers don’t engage in collaborative learning with technology – so it is no shock they don’t do it in class. If you play a game that required them to use PALS then you they are actively re-thinking their belief. Little Big Planet is great for this on PS3, but you can do it with Nintendo DS and a cheap quiz game too. Let them figure out what to do, how it works, how to hook 4 players into session … after 20 minutes they will be able to reflect on it - even more so if you record them playing and highlight teachable moments.

Once they accept that PALs is a viable teaching strategy – then you have a meta-cognitive basis upon which you can now start to explain Ning, Elgg, Twitter – or anything else.

Thanks SackBoy.

What’s right with this classroom?

This is a photo of a virtual world. I’d like to highlight some of the pedagogical features of this room. Firstly, the IWB and projector is off. The teacher is not standing in front of it as the conduit between information and learning. Secondly the students are not using small netbooks, and using desks with a high degree of ICT-friendly ergonomics.

On the desks are pens and paper, so presumably the teacher has prepared some structure, instruction that requires writing and brain-mapping. The more tech-savvy observer will notice students are using Quest Atlantis – individually – yet collectively exploring a virtual world.

A year or so ago — this classroom, this pedagogy — this learning experience didn’t exist. The thing that changed is a teacher. Not a teacher attending some PD or being told to use some application — but a teacher who wanted to be better and took it upon themselves to invest the time and effort to learn. More amazingly – this teacher completely changed their subject and role – taking on a challenge that a year before wasn’t even something under consideration.

We do not need league tables, websites with statistics or netbooks sans-pedagogy – we need to recognise any teacher or school who does this for students – because they want to. This is the missing-website that the government is unable to conceptualise let alone make and spend millions promoting.

This classroom didn’t cost millions of course – Quest Atlantis is free, safe and pedagogically sound. It is blended learning with critical thinking and shared reality — motivating and compelling.

We need a website for ‘the league of ordinary-teachers’ in Australia, kicking-new ideas and leaning new skills — despite crap workplace conditions and Ministerial spankings.

A motivated movement that highlights the issues being faced – from poor training, lack of access and  OH&S issues that demand refurbished learning environments and new work practices.

From this movement would come a better Bored of Studies and a truly authentic Virtual School – delivering advice, content and learning where is it needed most. The cost of doing this is zero. The number of bureaucrats and politicians needed to run it is also zero. Right now the legal, ethical and social debate of the HSC often rages unseen – yet the HSC itself is getting spanked over the way it operates.

This classroom — and this story, illustrates why spanking teachers and focusing on one exam undermines the very system that politicians are attempting to score capital from.

They should be talking about what kids are learning in a small town in Montana – because of one teacher. I just had to share this photo – it should be happening in all those schools who just got spanked.

What a totally depressing week in edumacation.

Class vs Metaverse Pedagogy

Teachers pay a lot of attention to their point of view and interests. Most usually know exactly how to teach their subject, what they like and what they don’t. Kicking new ideas to a teacher is harder than creating a teacher it seems. Many are paying no more interest to educational technology than their students pay to the notes being written on the bored.

People cant’ be forced to pay attention — especially to chalk and talk classrooms (powerpoint is still chalk and talk), let alone hope that they remember it.

Many students want to know what the information is for – is what you are telling me going to affect my grade. If it is not in the test – then I’m not learning it — I’d rather update my FaceBook status or do something I like. If you won’t let me do that, then guess what – I’ve not paying attention.

Without doubt there are some highly inspirational, smart and charismatic people talking about technology in the classroom. I see continuous dialogue in social-streams though the metaverse. I am interested and part of my brain is wired to the metaverse. Creating ’school networks’ or barring students from the metavers is purely a risk/security policy for most administrators. They see the metaverse and life as mutually exclusive. Our curriculum doesn’t have outcomes for the metaverse – just the HSC, so presents a clear and present danger.

In the novel Snow Crash, Hiro, the lead character is a Hacker. He describes himself as the ‘greatest sword fighter in all the world’. His metaverse avatar is controlled by the auctions of his physical body. So he does fight, in the metaverse. He dispatches avatars – but standing a parking lot, wielding a sword on his own – against a virtual enemy – is no longer the stuff of cyberpunk novels.

Reputation and existence in the metaverse is as normal as McDonalds burgers to most kids today in our society. We have to accept that students use the metaverse as a Third Space — and that changes their interests and attention massively.

Avatar Movie introduced millions of adults to something billions of kids already kn0w. A part of life IS  now played out in the duel-reality of today’s metaverse. In this reality reputation and authority is not assigned though current notions of qualifications and patriarchal status. You can be unknown at work — and a god in the metaverse (literally).

3G provided cheap, convenient and fast access to social networks as well as content. I’d rather my kid pings a friend in Montana about Maths than Google’s the question quite frankly. So why is it taboo?

Mobile phones and personal access represents a far higher threat to students (sexting, bullying, content, games, networks) than any school network could. We can’t simply make a policy that says ‘we banned them and told you, so if you get into meta-grief we can’t be held accountable. It is also about authority. My kids are 2/3 years off a mobile phone. But when they get one – it will be on the internet all the time, and I doubt they’ll be texting at 25c a throw either.

Having your own private world is rather exclusive. In the industrialist mind – it undermines much of the social structure that schools and exams teach – how to comply, succeed and submit to the interests and views of those with more power – your employer. You are paid to work, not surf the internet. How many thousands of hours went into banning websites from employees? I worked in a place where only nominated people had web-access – and then when you needed something – you had to go to them for it, and they watched you. Sounds stupid? Not really — this is how classrooms work in the bubble.

Game designers (people who present more content to students that anyone else) believe experience is the best teacher. Thinking like a game designer, not a teacher means thinking about ‘motivation’ centred learning – not student centred learning. Most teachers fear nothing more than student-social-networks in ‘lessons’. Going online will mean they are not paying attention to the teaching.

I’m not claiming Messenger and Facebook are not distracting — but if you’re not putting anything more compelling in front of them, that is not their fault, any more than it is there fault they live in a world that is intersected by technology — and the metaverse. Step one of changing anything is accept that there are other alternatives to the current view and interests. Managers are no change-agents – so don’t blame the local administration – the people who MUST change are the politicos – who right now are spending money, but yet to come to terms with the metaverse itself. We’d better not let them read Snow Crash then.

Meeting ISTE NETs – Using World of Warcraft

Blood Elf Paladin

World of Warcraft is an online massive multiplayer game with a free 10 day trail. Here’s how to align it with ISTE NETs and meet your own standards/outcomes – though assessment. This is for those teachers who ‘get’ the Web2.0 concepts of participation, collaboration and shared reality. It’s not a post about whether games are a good idea – they are.

Here is a simple look at how to develop a game based learning project – using World or Warcraft. There’s more to developing a robust project, but this should give you some idea of how to blend games into your ICT powered classrooms. (13-16 year olds).

Design a project that meets 2 outcomes and 4 ISTE’s NETs.  6 outcomes, 5 hours of game-play and about 10 hours or other work around it. — 15 hours over 2/3 weeks. This is using game based learning – so you have to plan well ahead — have a number of activities that are not obviously connected, and tasks that students must achieve which in part require using Warcraft. The students are then able to choose how to set about it. You will immediately notice that hands will raise with questions – as students are so used to being given the steps and spoon fed the content – that they will be disorientated. That is not Warcraft, that is the shift to inquiry based learning practice. Don’t hand out the answers … make them grind them out.

We start with the end in mind. Which are the outcomes/standards we want — and how are we going to assess it? It is critical to be able to align ISTEs standards with activities in games and standards/outcomes. This to me is where most teachers fall over. Their ICT repertoire is so small, they simply cannot do it with Web2.0, let alone games. Someone has to lead and help build these things — just as someone used to write the ‘teachers text book’. Let’s not assume that all teachers stepped outside ‘off the shelf’ lesson planning in the first instance – and games are a further step removed from Web2.0 — and it is MOTIVATION that games bring in abundant quantities.

Remember Warcraft is the activity - not the outcome or the assessment. Students would have to sign up for their 10 day trial – and do so in a timeline that will allow them to complete the project – so it’s not going to be end endless grind-fest. You are going to design your project to allow them to choose when to play, and when to do the other things you are asking for. This means you will not be in a linear classroom, and will have to deal with the idea of not actually ‘teaching’ at all, but helping them -  ask good questions.

If you don’t play WoW, then some of this might be a bit brain-missing to you– but trust me, it’s basic stuff.

Level 1-10 type activity associated with the free-trail. On the left is the ISTE Standard, the middle is with WoW activity and over on the right is a rough idea of how I might align those with some additional classroom activities (meeting the curriculum outcome). In that last column, you can also add a activity — write a narrative, create a blog, use a spreadsheet … this is the assessment you need. You have to be clear about what activity in project is going to allow the outcome to be reached – and how it will be evidenced and assessed – both for ISTE and your curriculum. In doing this you can create blogs, wikis, art, role-plays, narrative, movies, music — Warcraft is the motivator. You are not assessing how well they play or level.

View this document on Scribd

In Australia, out ICT outcomes are so low, most pre-schoolers would pass — and teachers skills are so low that they’d fail the year 10 computing skills test in spectacular style.

Game based learning — is not about what you learn by playing a game – but how the game can be use to to foster inquiry skills, critical thinking and evidence student learning – in part though exploration, error and play. Many people seem to think game based learning is the Magic School Bus type of CD-Rom and can be easily ‘gamed’ by students. We see this in may online children’s edu-flash games. They are just boring. game. These things are very instructional, but very linear. They don’t allow for unexpected outcomes. Today, social games are teaching kids more ICT skills that you can shake runed-sword at.

If you want kids to go nuts with ICT, then find a motivator … and start thinking about designing your own projects – Ms Frizzle is not going to cut it.

‘Grats to Mr8 – who attained Level 80 this weekend!

Smile for the camera

This is not me but someone whom I knew at  school who I now ‘talk’ to in Facebook. He left the UK not too long after this photo was taken.

We talk again now thanks to technology and even played a bit of Warcraft over Christmas too. He’s now a Night Elf.

Here we can see a typical 70s latch-key kid in the hallowed place of education, complete with a detailed equine book that he couldn’t read. When I saw it, I remembered having the same photo, as did everyone else.

This photo is full of pride, represents ‘the learner’ in the school system: tie; grey shirt;arms folded, and sitting to attention. This kid grew up and now lives in Detroit. He rides a kicking Harley, an advocate for Autism.

It made me wonder how the office-seekers and policy trolls in public office see my kids – top left or bottom right?

It seems stupid to keep using this modality to represent kids simply to keep the patriarchy comfortable. Clearly the learning environment is completely different today – immersive, social and virtual. Not at school of course – that looks the same.

Parents are increasingly – teachers – some better than others I grant you - but most (I know) are immersing their kids in digital media from the age of three to one extent or another.

These photos are 35 years apart – but obviously the brain-laggers in high office have set their profiles to [ignore]. Their strategy in K12 seems to me to be more of a patriarchal retirement plan than a digital revolution. New blood, new ideas please. We can’t wait until you retire, seriously.

Ideas over application

As mass production has obviously departed our shores followed by the information worker, I have to wonder what my kids will do when they leave school. So what should every teacher be doing in order not to stagnate or repeat last years lessons.

Have a look at Jonathan Coulton, a guy who 2005 I left his day job writing software to pursue music full time. To keep himself busy he released a new song on his website every week for a year in a project called Thing a Week. Check out the video below – produced using World of Warcraft. How did he get here? By realising that the world changed.

eCreativity is something we must become great at. We need to be right-brainers not no-brainers. Rather than oblige the Draconian syllabus’ intentions to ‘design a webpage’ – which really is not a skill worth learning at school — how about developing a theoretical iPhone application.

Introducing iPhone Mockup - a great free site that allows anyone to knock out a mock up of an application. For a fast lesson in creativity – in any key learning area – this site allows a student (or group) to quickly come up with plausible designs and ideas. Working around a simple online tool – the meta level discussion and thinking potential makes for eCreativity. This probably won’t work if you like to stand at the front and lecture, but if you’re into enquiry and experiential learning — this is a great tool.

Give no quarter to anyone who says ‘they can’t’ in 2010. They can, they just don’t want to. Everyone is a n00b once, everyone starts at the beginning and each persons datum point is today.

This is something you can do in Stage 1. By the time kids are in stage 5, they should be writing apps.

The scary thing is that they’ll probably still be asked to make HTML and Visual Basic 6 and that will be enough as the patriarchy continues to exclude new ideas and new people – who can model and lead change. Yeah, I’m looking at you HR goons. You are not only excluding people, but losing the ones you have — still as long as your job is safe, keep sending those letters.

Oil in the water

Photo: iliveisl

For those who don’t know. I’m somewhat odd. I love all things game-tech, but when it comes to cars — I prefer them simple, retro and functionally escapist. You’d think I’d like BMWs iDrive … but actually I can’t think of anything worse. I like simple, functional, and a degree of brown in my motoring, but to get where I am going — you bet I use a SatNav.

Thanks to @middleclassgirl – for “Why playing in the virtual world has an awful lot to teach children” which highlights the widening hole in the educational metaverse.

There is a lot of blah about games and virtual worlds written by old media, who generally miss the points Chatfield makes in the Observer.

He comments “If we are to understand the 21st century and the generation who will inherit it, it’s crucial that we learn to describe the dynamics of this gaming life: a place that’s not so much about escaping the commitments and interactions that make friendships “real” as about a sophisticated set of satisfactions with their own increasingly urgent reality and challenges.”

Now think about kids goofing off in a locked down ICT classroom — there the internet is either for Googling or scraping images into Powerpoint. This isn’t every classroom — but it is still the depressing norm. They will invariably turn their attention to … anyone … anyone … ? … Paint, the one application that kids use when banned from everything else.

Why Paint and not Word or Excel. Because paint is self-creative and experimental — it’s the most fun you can have if you’re disconnected from soliloquies and sermons in class. Chatfield describes content that extends from games …

Visit any website devoted to hosting player discussions of games like World of Warcraft, for instance, and you’ll find not hundreds but tens of thousands of comments flying between players who debate every aspect of the game, from weapon-hit percentages to mathematical analyses of the most efficient sequence in which to use a character’s abilities. It will range from the sublime to the ridiculous, and will be riddled with private codes, slang, trolls, flames, and everything else the internet so excels at delivering.

Even if you don’t believe games have a place — it is impossible to deny that what Chatfield has identified the missing classroom link – communication and conversation between groups seeking to learn or teach. You can’t do either in the 21st Century if you are not connected. Effective teachers and learners are connected to conversational content. We may work alone, but we are mindful of the spirits in the wires. We are a click away from any number of communities, from Volkswagens, Education, Music, Cooking … whatever we are interested in, and whatever we are doing at the time.

We can’t argue for this tool or that, we have to argue for conversation and accept that kids today do not look, sound or act as the did in Nesbit’s Railway Children, yet we operate as if they do.

“You know it’s bad manners to read a paper when someone else is reading it,” said his father. “Don’t they teach you manners at school?”

“No. They think we learn them at home,” said Roger, cheekily. [Stella]

There is a time to use simple strategies for explicit teaching – because that works best and others where virtual worlds or at least two-way conversation works better. Professional development has to be about illuminating how to align outcomes with activities and assessment – and the activities today mean game-based, problem-based and conversational.