Category Archives: Teaching

Stories and musing about teaching

Change, Teaching

Fear

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Fear
Fear

If you’ve been around the ed-tech universe lately, you’ve probably heard’em all:

  • it is imperative we change education from the industrial revolution paradigm to a more creative, collaborative, connected endeavour
  • digital technologies afford us to do it so easily – just look at us and so many kids doing this ‘Web Two Oh’ stuff and flourishing
  • standardised testing is cancer of education, death of learning
  • we can learn anytime, anywhere like no other time in human history
  • it’s about personalising learning, connecting, constructing together
  • we need the political will and leadership to make these changes
  • we can’t ignore the fact that kids today send bazillion text messages a minute, friend thousands and Skype their grandma across the world at the drop of a hat … but they ‘power down’ when they come to school
  • social media is the new way of communicating, learning, working together
  • creativity is the new currency and schooling kills it
  • tech is the great leveller
  • pro-ams, long tail, cognitive surplus and flat world are becoming the norm, maaan
  • so many teachers just wouldn’t listen, refuse to engage and frankly, are poor learning role models for the kids in front of them
  • add so on …

Add a few more, find a couple of nice pictures to go with it (all kosher with Creative Commons, of course) and you can charge yourself out at a nice speaking fee. Many ‘gurus’ do.

Now, I am not cynically dissing something I have been a part of for many years now. I love it. I DO think it is the way of the future and the future may be a little brighter (especially if you are with the ‘in’ crowd…).

In this discourse teachers, the much maligned and much adored creatures, favourite topic of pundits (Presidents, Prime Ministers, obscenely rich and other ‘dignitaries’ included)  are the source of inspiration and frustration. But the bulk of teachers are pretty much still plugging away as they have for the last few decades.

“Why haven’t things changed, why aren’t teachers more creative, passionate, wanting to learn about what they do?” often goes with the undertone of grinding teeth in disbelief at practice of some of our colleagues. Well, I have a hunch …

I tweeted this earlier today:

What’s holding education ‘stuck’ isn’t lack of creativity, passion or knowledge of teachers but fears. Can you name some? Thx #edfear

and got some great responses, most of them tagged (on Twitter) with #edfear hashtag :

  • Teaching stdnts wrong stuff not backed by authority. Stdnts not learning formal.critical thinking. They are my personal ones #edfear (@sirexkat)
  • 1. Fear of failure 2. Fear of job loss 3. Fear of Criticism 4. Fear of Success 5. Fear of being the only one (@weemooseus)
  • #edfear being sacked, learners with ego problems, frightened administrators, poor curricula (@philhart)
  • #edfear: fear of doing something that is too new/innovative to have any academic research to prove its worth (@malynmawby)
  • the usual fear of the unknown not all educators are adventurous and keen to dive into a new technoworld #edfear (@playnice_nz)
  • not sure the teachers with the biggest fears will be on twitter. #edfear (@kanemayhew) 🙂
  • Fear from parents that their child will be missing something essential. (@bonitadee)
  • What’s holding education ‘stuck’ …Fear of missing something…we must cover it all #edfear (@bonitadee)
  • fear of change, being ir/relevant, keeping up – infowhelm, time to maintain/update skills #edfear – see Cloudworks too (@k8tra)
  • Is the number one #edfear the loss of the self-perception as ‘giver of knowledge’? (@irasocol)
  • Is the number two #edfear the identity hit which comes from understanding that you’ve succeeded in a terrible system? (@irasocol)
  • fear of failure, change, conflict, ostracism – and all of these are from ‘the lizard brain’ (@mrwejr)
  • key fear is ‘what if it goes wrong’? Also not all leaders are creative…many just want a steady ship #edfear (@dmchugh675)
  • school leaders fear vocal parents who believe that the things that worked for them in their education should still work today.#edfear (@dmchugh675)
  • Creativity Fear – Fear that if I introduce creative activities I won’t be able to adequately compare or assess their work. #edfear (@funcreativity)
  • #edfear fear of failure? fear of wasting time? fear of inertia? (@tokyoedtech)

… and hopefully more to come. Thank you all who have replied (and if don’t follow these guys yet, a good list to connect with!)

I am not offering any definitive answers here, deliberately so. I do have a hunch (I’ve even sent a draft proposal for a PhD proposal looking at this sort of thing today, *gulp*) but I am ‘fishing for ideas’ … in a fine connected manner 😀 . So, that tweet  again:

What’s holding education ‘stuck’ isn’t lack of creativity, passion or knowledge of teachers but fears. Can you name some? Thx #edfear

I would love to hear from you, comments or @ replies (@lasic, tag #edfear) all fine. Many thanks!

Moodle, Professional development, Teaching

Moodle Wizard?

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Today, I have been closely following the #mpos10 Twitter tag from the 2010 Moodleposium in Canberra. The next best thing to being there (but then again, I get to ‘go’ to many sessions simultaneously…)

This afternoon, I found an absolute gem that I just have to share – a course called ‘Translating Learning Outcomes in Moodle‘ by Srinivas Chemboli, Lauren Kane (@l_kane) and Lynette Johns-Boast from Australian National University in Canberra (presented and available as part of the 2010 Australian Moodlemoot I happened to miss 🙁 )

This resource speaks to the educator and Moodle fan/user/improver/researcher in me, particularly after the recent conversation(s) with Mark Drechsler (see the post, presentation & comments) about Moodle course design, key features of a ‘good Moodle course’ and a long standing distaste for ‘technocentric’ thinking (as Papert explains in his seminal paper). I have been banging on ‘people and learning first, technology last’ for, huh, some time now (strangely, I still have a job with a software maker 😉 ). This course/resource fits the bill very, very nicely.

I invite you to have a look and explore at the course yourself. In a nutshell, it starts with ‘what do we want to learn’ down to ‘what Moodle tool(s) to use’. A very nice, diagrammatic flow that would complement Joyce Seitzinger’s excellent Moodle Tool Guide for Teachers poster. But it is more than a flow in a sense that the user actually gets asked some questions along the way. And that’s the reason for the title of this post…

Imagine Moodle standard shipping out with a ‘wizard’ (for lack of better word…) that guides the teacher or whoever we choose in the course as a community to create activities, resources and other? A wizard based on the insights of Srinivas, Lauren, Lynette and their team at ANU that starts with a problem, idea, learning/teaching goal and ends up (!) in choosing the appropriate Moodle tool(s) for the job, in the very context where it is used.

Imagine the delight of ‘tech integrators’ in changing their role to ‘learn-with-tech integrators’ (which is what they really are most of time but titles often betray 😉 ). Imagine educators seeing Moodle not as a piece of software but a way to help and encourage meta-thinking about teaching and learning needs of people they work with. Or as Punya Mishra aptly states:

“Learning about technology is different from learning what to do with it”.

A word of caution!

Whatever the ‘wizard’ and its qualities, it will never, ever, ever, ever be a panacea, an all-fitting solution or perhaps even a substitute for great teaching. Or as another apt line, this time by Tony Bates, goes:

“Good teaching may overcome a poor choice of technology, but technology will never save bad teaching.’

Teaching and learning (the separation of these two terms is so superfluous sometimes…) has always been a bricolage, endless contextual adjustment of things, not an automated process because it is/they are essentially some of humanity’s biggest and oldest ‘wicked problems‘.

But sometimes we just need a little bit of helping hand to set us off on our exploring, moodling ways.

Thank you Shrinivas, Lauren and Lynette!

Teaching

Panic button

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Panic Button

Source: Panic Button http://www.flickr.com/photos/trancemist/361935363/

A story from this morning’s paper, in response to a recently publicised assault on a teacher by a student recorded on a mobile phone camera.

…”State School Teachers Union president Anne Gisborne said measures were needed to ensure an urgent response when teachers were in danger. “In circumstances such as that school, there might need to be phones in each classroom, that makes it easier to contact, there might be an emergency bell,” she said.

Education Minister Liz Constable said all options would be looked at. “But again you have to be in the place where that panic button is, don’t you, when the incident occurs,” she said.”

‘Hard to get to’? ‘Need to be in the place where the panic button is’? ‘Might need phones?’ (Another) ‘bell?’

I had to read the passage twice to check and thought: How about that device called mobile phone? You know, the most commonly used, instant, ubiqutous communication device, banned from most classrooms these days.

But mobiles are not a panacea. They are simply extension of human power to do wonderful and stupid things alike.

On the same day, I saw a former colleague bullied on YouTube (I won’t give you the link because I do not want to give this or similar clips any oxygen). It is cruel, ignorant bullying of a teacher out in plain view, recorded on a mobile. Good teacher or bad teacher – it doesn’t matter. It is a sad and disturbing case, bringing out what REALLY sometimes goes on in our classrooms. A person got hurt. Period.

Some would argue at least it’s in public and the perpetrators can be brought to account, some would be horrified at the prospect of having something like that aired publicly, to the pleasure or horror of Anonymous. Then again, I hear many pundits already saying “it’s those damn mobiles, ban the lot in class, they have nothing to do with learning”.

They do and they don’t. Why?

To me, three best things a teacher, parent, or a school can model and encourage are: a) resilient love of learning, b) sustained attention and immersion with a meaningful learning task, and c) ethical discernment when things are appropriate or not.

Apart from some amazing individuals I’ve worked with or heard of, your regular downtown school sucks at these: a) is quashed by grades, b) goes out the window when the bell goes, and c) is usually talked about AT students or staff, not WITH them, because everyone needs to “mind their own role (in the hierarchy) and do their job”.

When mobiles (mostly all sophisticated net devices these days anyway) help us find things, communicate, connect, understand and expand in a matter of seconds like never before (or perhaps help the safety of staff and students…) – use them (a). When mobiles become weapons of mass distraction – turn them off (b). But talk with (not AT) the kids honestly and challenge them when it comes to ethical use (c).

Kids know a lot more about the use of mobiles, appropriate and inappropriate, already than Education Minister or Union President (not hard that..) but they either have little say in things or they are, yes, plain immature. Now there’s a chance to give them a chance at real responsibility to mature.

Outside of school walls there are times we ignore mobiles – we discern, make choices.  I’ve sometimes joked with kids in class saying: “Would you respond to a call, txt, tweet or friend writing on your Facebook wall when you are about to kiss the guy or girl you have been wanting to kiss for months? Why not?”. There are times we multitask and we need to and so on… There are times for things and there are reasons for them.

So, mobiles (much as violence against teachers) are not a  technology issue or at least something technology will help us instantly solve. They are an opportunity to discuss ethical issues.

By knee-jerk banning mobiles, we may be eroding the very things we could do the kids and ourselves as educators and parents the biggest favour with – examining our own and each other’s ideas and change them if necessary, not just imposing the values and making sure that the ones carrying the biggest stick win, no matter how stupid they actually are.

Hard? Yes. Worth it? More than a lot of other stuff taught.

Change, Teaching

Three shakes

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scream
Scream

Image source: http://www.flickr.com/photos/dariuszka/374750916/

Shake one – Friday afternoon

A beer with “Michael”, a friend, teacher at (one of) the most ‘exclusive’, expensive, ‘high-achieving’ girls school in Perth. I have just explained what I do at Moodle these days and touched on my deep conviction against spoonfeeding students and instead giving them real responsibilities, real problems, real chances to fail and succeed.

Me: “I hate it when they look up to me to give them the answers as some kind of oracle. At 15! “Go away and don’t bother me because you can’t be bothered to figure it out  on your own, with your classmates or a person on the other side of the world – but wake me up in the middle of the night if you want to learn more or tell me I am wrong somewhere.” This is why quite a few kids, majority (wannabe) ‘high achievers’, never liked my teaching style and philosophy. But that’s life sunshine! What am I setting you up for?”

Michael: “Oh mate, you would struggle at our school. That’s exactly what I’ve been telling them for years. But… the school is all about academic results, that’s all they are really interested in. And the kids? “You are here to help us get the top marks so just tell us” It drives me mad sometimes, what are they going to do when they get the top marks, what are we really teaching them?”

Shake two – Sunday morning

A visit to another friend, another teacher and former colleague (yes, I do have non-teaching friends too 🙂 ) Let’s call her Dina.

Dina really wanted to do a bit of emerging curriculum with Year 8 kids new to school. They looked at a documentary, then a mockumentary to pick differences and the kids really ‘got’ the genre and the idea. Then it dawned on her that the kids could actually try and make one. They jumped at it! Kids were asking their teachers if they could they leave their class early so they could come to Dina’s class and work on their doco. The two AEO (Aboriginal Education Officers) assigned to her class as support remarked “you don’t need us, these kids are doing amazingly well!”

Me: “So, what happened?”

Dina: “Well, I came one day all excited to the office and told our Head of Department [a ladder-climbing tick-a-boxer, my note] about it, expecting a “great job, how can we help” sort of thing. Instead, I got questioned and told off : “…I am concerned about this, ”documentary” is not in the Education Department’s ‘Scope and Sequence’ document for Year 8, only for Year 9.”

Shake three – Sunday evening

I had a long phone call with my brother in Slovenia.

His 6 year old son (my nephew) started Grade 1 in September. He enjoys school and learning activities, plays basketball a little and is generally a happy, yet quite an observant and sensitive child. He also carries a bit of extra weight. Recently, he developed a severe tick. It works out he has been bullied at school (won’t go into details but quite heinous).

My brother: “… and to top it all off, he comes home the other day all in tears because he made, for the first time, two mistakes in the maths test (!!!!) He came apologising, as if he somehow let me down. My heart broke I tell you.”

Excuse the swearing but have we gone fucking mental? THIS is what happens when real people are reduced to educational numbers, syllabus documents and grades.

I could write rantily or eloquently (or bit of both) on us becoming the bastards of ‘reason’ and ‘progress’ (John Ralston Saul wrote an outstandingly scathing and well-argued trilogy on this last decade, highly recommend) – but I won’t, not tonight at least.

Kiss your kids and tell them you love them. Often.  (Those who follow me on Twitter will have seen that line before and times I said it…)

Teaching

Provoke or inject

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Smith Family Ad
Sounds familiar?

This image, scanned from The Weekend Australian magazine ‘hit the chord’ with me today. I heard the lines written many times at my (now ex) school, I have seen kids who have fallen into this spiral and also seen the kids who stood up and resisted it well. It’s a great reminder of what really goes on in that place called school, and which can be so wonderful and yet so brutal at the same time.

But this post isn’t so much about the vicious spiral of disadvantage that we so often avert the eyes from. It is about the similarities between great advertisers and great teachers. If you think that is a shocking comparison between a commercial, money-making enterprise and a noble, free, human endeavour of education…well, you may as well read the rest.

A good friend of mine is a copywriter and creative director of a reputable advertising agency here in Perth. He often tells me stories about how important it is to know the audience a particular ad is ‘pitched’ to. Cut the story short, he spends about as much time, if not more, on finding out about them (audience, target market) than the production of the ad itself. Why?

Because my adman friend knows, just like a good teacher, that information is only a provocation of meaning, not the meaning itself. Unless it strikes a chord, and the chord being the experience, belief, ability, aspiration, background etc of the receiver, information about anything is… meaningless. We pretend that (most of) what we write, tell, show will be ‘injected’ into people’s minds exactly as we wanted them, and get upset if they ‘don’t get it’ (enter politicans declaring “every child MUST” while, if you ask any half-decent teacher they’ll tell you that “every child MIGHT” would be far more accurate).

We are so preoccupied in producing information: static, lifeless documents, pixels and scribbles (including this post, yes!), increasingly easy to duplicate and disseminate. Yet lifeless information only becomes the coveted ‘learning’ or ‘knowledge’ we speak of so much at the point of always tacit (Polanyi), contextual human interpretation. It is very easy to share what you think these days but it is hard as ever to share thinking.

By the way, I prefer the language of ‘what we learn’ and ‘what we know’ over ‘learning’ and ‘knowledge’ – the latter terms sound like what we learn and what we know (the always tacit subtleties of our thoughts, feelings, experiences etc) can be somehow captured and treated as ‘objective’ and explicit, a thing. Say, whose ‘knowledge’ is better: yours, since you got 15% more on the test about cancer, or mine, whose beloved grandma died from cancer ? Ridiculous isn’t it?

And what does the preoccupation with injecting information look like in schools? Well, in mainstream classes at least, how much time do we spend learning about the kids we have in front of us at the start of the school year (or any other time for that matter)? What are we forced to know more about – content, syllabus and admin procedures OR whom of the kids may have certain learning disabilities, who might have been severely bullied recently, or who might have overcome a major obstacle in life and now aspires to become a writer or something… How are we going to provoke meaning well, instead of trying to inject it, in the people we work with if we don’t know a darn thing about them?

Teachers are being increasingly told to ‘personalise, individualise, customise teaching to each student’ (with same or less resources that is, while technology is seen as the panacea for that…yeah right). At the same time, teachers are now being increasingly told to cut any ‘socialising’ with their students online (the world they increasingly populate), where they could really sometimes unearth kids interests, passions, aspirations, fears, concerns. It’s not all peachy, I agree (see my position on the issue written earlier this year) but aren’t we cutting off an important line to provoke, not inject meaning?

Finally, what could my adman friend learn from teachers? We are in a similar boat as far as provoking meaning goes. But …  our employer, parents, and every pundit out there wants us to get to ALL the people to ‘get’ what we say, teach, explain – not just the “15% of the market”.

And that’s tough. And worth it.

PS I may be out of class this year (working for Moodle) but you can’t get a teacher out of me 🙂

Change, Teaching

My f*#!%ing goosebump story (a reminder)

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Now on the new site, I am re-posting something I wrote as a catharsis in 30 minutes, a year and a half ago. This is the post I am most fond and proud of, and has always reminded me of two things: why do we teachers (with an ed-tech bend) do the things we do and why is it a good idea for any teacher to keep a reflective blog to share. The wonderful original comments (link here) spurred me on to keep writing, nearly two years on.

Here is ‘My f*#!%ing goosebump story”. Enjoy …

//farm1.static.flickr.com/252/520905761_44867e4caa.jpg?v=0

Before reading this post a word of warning. If you are easily offended by expletives or graphic descriptions please avert your eyes. If not – welcome to my world.

Our school carries a wonderfully bureaucratic euphemism – it is a “difficult to staff” school. We operate in one of the poorest areas of town. Many parents who send kids to our school have not been rewarded by the system of education and they hardly instil the values of importance of education in their offspring.

Last week, one of our students got assaulted by a former student of ours at a bus stop waiting to go to an excursion at a neighbouring university. I stopped the assault only to be assaulted myself. This afternoon, on the way to the bus stop I was called, loudly and in my face, a “fucking cunt” by a Year 10 student after calmly disposing of a piece of plastic hurled at me few moments earlier. He had sat in my class just a few hours before. This school term alone, I have lost track of the times I was told either directly or indirectly (but clearly) to either ‘fuck off’ or ‘piss off’, or was simply and completely ignored as a person, let alone some sort of person invested with authority and responsibility to care for and (forbid!) teach, role-model or ‘inspire’ as the quote garden would have it. About half of my Year 11 Economics class openly say that they are ‘dumb and don’t care about the grades anyway’. My colleagues could recount dozens of stories just like this or worse as part of their ‘regular day’. Yes, we have a reputation of a ‘bad’ school and, depending what measure you look at, we have numbers to prove it (hello bean counters and ‘performance managers’ out there!)

YET…

Continue reading My f*#!%ing goosebump story (a reminder) →

Change, Teaching

Sacred cows

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Miss Miller, Teacher of the Year.
Source: http://www.flickr.com/photos/34053291@N05/3953923181/

While thinking about my teaching plan and the challenge for 2010, I sent out a tweet this afternoon:

Conceiving & justifying a 2010 teaching plan… keywords: rhizome, Moodle, community, challenge, ‘sacred cows’, ‘we’. Excited.

I will post details another time, but let’s just the say the “rhizome” part is informed by the original ideas of Deleuze, outlined a lot more eloquently by Dave Cormier (link) and Erica McWilliam (Meddler-in-the-middle, Unlearning How To Teach) and is something I am passionate about, read about, think about and which I have, in parts, tried already at my old school (how time flies 🙂 with encouraging success. ‘Moodle” – the plan involves students creating and managing their own Moodle course, knowing just a couple of Moodle-basics that my old classes learnt in an hour. “Community, we” – gist of the rhizome, above. “Sacred cows” – some below. Will post, promise.

Very soon, I got a reply from Olaf Elch (a fellow moodler 🙂 ) in Germany:

My t-plan is similar to yours. I left out the rhizome and changed the “we” to “I”. (It makes it more likely to actually happen. ;o)

“But that kinda misses the crucial point of it Olaf…” so we started a quick Twitter conversation. Two lines by Olaf particularly raised my eyebrows in further conversation:

1) McWilliam makes some VERY big assumptions. “A T[eacher] who doesn’t add value will be bypassed.” How can a pupil bypass a classteacher?

and

2) If you turn a teachers from an expert into a meddler or co-learner you are taking away the chief selling point of the teacher role.

Olaf then expands on the expert part, saying that as a teacher, he needs to be an expert, that his students (adult and young) expect it and ‘demand it‘, and that some of his colleagues are stimulating but have ‘faulty factual knowledge’, which makes them ‘just as useless’ as experts who can’t teach [probably meant as stimulate, since Olaf recognised the importance of teaching of how to learn and engaging students].

I opened Olaf’s question to the venerable Twittendom full of very intelligent and caring people and got a bunch of replies which Olaf no doubt read too. Another Twitter-sation success, thank you all who chipped in.

OK, but let’s clear the air a bit here and shoot some sacred cows…

  • I am not against content knowledge. It helps to know the stuff we are talking about, have depth to it, see where it fits. I can’t ‘teach’ French if I don’t know how to say ‘Bonjour!’ and what it means (although Stephen Downes has something interesting to say on that). I am also not throwing the didactic baby completely out with the bathwater. But content knowledge to then ‘fill the vessel’ of those who don’t have it (oh, the deficit, the poor darlingsl!) – that alone is inadequate and unfair to millions and is depriving many creative, smart kids. Not to mention the implicit value of knowledge by “those who know’ (and those who don’t)…
  • A teacher who doesn’t add value SHOULD be bypassed. Let’s take a look around us… Isn’t that what networks of people do and have done for ever (just the range, speed and volume of networks has exploded in the last decade and we’re just beginning to used to it)? They do so sometimes foolishly too and it’s not always wise but … why not? Alternative? Interestingly, Olaf makes a point of people who are ‘stimulating but light on content’. Well, as far as I know, given a chance, kids would bypass those as much as the experts who drone. For now, kids resort to mischief or withdrawal, bypass of a kind.
  • On meddling. My most treasured memories of teaching were exactly the ones I was “the meddler in the middle”. We produced things that mattered to us. See our Web 2.0 Expo for the latest example. Knowledge transmission versus value creation. Chain versus network. Stable versus dynamic. Learning just-in-case versus learning-on-demand. Routine and known versus inventive and unknown. Error-avoiding versus error-welcoming. “I” versus “Us-ness”. I know where the world is heading, social, economic, educational (?) …
  • Having ‘an expert’ breeds dependency, the ‘just tell us’ attitude to learning (hm, learning?). Dean Shareski hits the nail on the head. I love the moments (much like Tony Searl, according to his tweets) where I am not the expert but the kids let fly, challenge me, teach me. I mentioned one such ‘incident’ of a colleague in my farewell speech. There were many!

Quick quiz: Which of these best describes the verb ‘to learn’: a) to be clear, certain, never fail,  b) to be confused, uncertain, fail frequently

A  breeds false self-esteem, steeped in extrinsic rewards, B is an increasingly common discomfort in our societies.  As McWilliam states “let’s take ‘lifelong learning’ seriously (or stop using it)” and not just as a nice gimmick.

And in that mess, ‘teacher’, valuable as we are, may become a placeholder for a name of a role that needs to and will change. And that’s OK with me.

Have something to say? (I) missed a/the point… Click ‘Comment’ and go for it

Change, Professional development, Teaching

Catch-A-Teacher Day

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Welcome!
Welcome!

It’s over! Our four day school Web 2.0 Expo extravaganza over the last few days of school year was largely (and I don’t use the word lightly) adjudged as ‘a success’, ‘eye opening’, ‘interesting’, ‘informative’, ‘fun’, ‘enjoyable’, ‘a bit crazy’, ‘unusual’ by a range of people around the school (eclectic and funky as our cover clip 🙂 )

For four days, three teachers (Simon Carabetta, Jaeik Jeong & myself) and about a dozen student-helpers (13 to 15 years old), put on a ’23 things’ of a kind for our school community to inform, teach and stir about ‘Web 2.0’ and its culture-changing potential that is starting to be realised in our societies yet (still) largely outside school walls.

To ‘walk the talk’, we not only set up stations, but also created the event’s wiki (largely student work!), even a Ning (well, sort of … 🙂 ), got a bunch of students to start up their blogs, Twitter, set up RSS readers, fooled around with Skype, Etherpad, Twiddla, Moodle etc.. We had a number of educators from around the world dropping in virtually via Etherpad (copy of excellent contributions here, thank you SO MUCH to all who have contributed), we had encouraging tweets from around the world … all in all, we were ‘doing’ Web 2.0.

But out of the four days of messing up, playing, teaching, learning, succeeding, working together, guessing and generally having a ball, the last day will remain seared in my mind forever.

Until the last day, we had very few staff that came to the expo. They would bring groups of students down but then (most of them) didn’t quite engage with the expo in any way. “That’s for the kids, not for us…” was the general sentiment, with few notable exceptions. With the whole thing PRIMARILY for staff, we weren’t making the dent. The matter was raised at our regular morning ‘war briefing’. We made the decision that the last day was going to be ‘catch-a-teacher’ day.

It was pretty simple really. Student-helpers were encouraged to approach a teacher, invite them to the expo, try to work out and ask what the teacher might be interested in to learn…then demonstrate, teach and help them learn (about) a particular Web 2.0 tool and how it could be useful to them (the teacher). We also asked our student-helpers to note down on the central ‘tally’ board what teachers they taught what.

Students took up the challenge very seriously and we had them literally chasing teachers down the halls to invite, talk to, teach the teachers. With most teachers agreeing to come (even if out of courtesy if not curiosity) it was an incredible sight.

Catch-a-teacher ... live
Catch-a-teacher … live
Catch-a-teacher ... come in
Catch-a-teacher … come in

And this is what the tally board looked like after only a few hours!

21 teachers, 10 different tools, 4 hours - ALL by students!
21 teachers, 10 different tools, 4 hours – ALL by students!

Yes, I repeat: teachers are far less likely to say no to a student than a ‘tech integrator’ with a resonable (tech) proposition for teacher’s problem/idea in class. It just works!

Another highlight of the day was the technically so damn easy yet so profoundly different (to ‘regular school’) Skype conference of our ‘helpers’ with a good friend Ira Socol. I saw Ira tweeting, hooked up over Skype and within seconds the whole class said ‘Hello” to Ira and his dog (“with a weird name Sir…”) in Michigan. We soon shared a screen with Google Earth on it where Ira literally showed us around his neighbourhood, place he works, we zoomed out to see and learn a bit about the Great Lakes (some of the kids watching have not been further than a few blocks from their place in their life!), cracked a joke or two and after a few minutes thanked Ira for his time. After the event Ira tweeted:

Damn right!

I read the tweet aloud to claps, cheers and hollers of approval at our post-expo ice cream ‘debrief’ (yes, we did treat the awesome crew 🙂

Yum! Well deserved.
Yum! Well deserved.

The sense of community, appreciation, working together, problem solving, the JOY of learning, particularly on the last day of our Expo was palpable. Many of our student-helpers ‘got off’ on it, dare say far, far more than many a lesson in the year just finished. There it was, a working rhizome of education I dream of, where roles/status/label/credit did not matter, only what we can learn, share, help, improve. Sure, it was quite an intense day, but one where the students saw the potential of what many of us have been banging on about for … years now.

Before we took our parting group photo, I asked the student-helpers is they would like to attend a school organised and run a bit like our expo – passionate, hard-working, following people’s interests, funny, a bit messy and unexpected, unclear at times but always valuing learning of all kinds: “Yes, sure, we’d love to…” I replied with just a line: “Demand it for your own kids.”

Just imagine! Or as a colleague quoted in his farewell speech yesterday: Logic will get you from A to B, imagination will get you anywhere.

And since I mentioned farewell speeches – I delivered mine yesterday too (copy here). I will miss the people of Belmont City College (and my first Moodle, my baby 🙂 ). They matter.

Thank you!
Thank you!
Moodle, Teaching

Moodle Monopolife

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Monopoly

Source: ‘Lucky Roll’ http://www.flickr.com/photos/chaehbom/2246451899/

It’s been a while since I wrote anything ‘moodling’ but after this morning’s class I can’t help but quickly share this little gem.

In my Year 9 and 10 classes (both deemed ‘lower end’, damned labels…), I am trying to teach research skills, critical thinking skills and a bit of critical pedagogy to boot this term. It’s my last term at this school so I thought I’d go out with a bang 🙂

Last night, I created a monopoly board in a Moodle wiki. Nothing fancy, just a simple table in wiki’s HTML editor (no HTML knowledge required, just a bit of tinkering with 13 x 13 table in the enlarged editor). I entered the correct colour fields, nominal values of fields, utilities and stations. I then created a wiki page for each student by enclosing their names with hard brackets on the main wiki page (eg. [Matthew] ) and  copied the table with instructions into each personal page. This way, students simply click their name of the main wiki page, click ‘Edit’ and go for it. If you are not so handy with Moodle wikis, here is a “2 Minute Moodle” on it.

At the most basic level of the task, students have to find median house prices in Perth suburbs and enter them accordingly on the board, as well as find names of train stations and utilities. Basic internet search demonstrated – easily, but not for all.

They have to create 10 of their own Chance and Community Chest cards that need to reflect the realities of life in our city – more digging around and seeing what kids know, value (and not).

If they choose to do so (commensurate with higher achievement too), kids can come up with their own monopoly topic/theme – eg. Swan River (main river in Perth) and write their own ‘values’, cards and rules. But they need to ‘keep it real’ and back what they write with info they find.

Because this whole thing is in a wiki, kids can share and help each other out at any time. All boards are easily printable, exportable and of course – ultimately playable.

We had our first run this morning and I sent out a tweet: I wish I could bottle this engagement & open it on a bad day.

While the kids are beavering on their own game, I’m creating my own version – but with a twist. The idea came from a passing comment by a student, while brainstorming for open ended questions about Monopoly a few days ago:

“What if Monopoly was like real life. You sort of get your chance card when you are born, don’t you?” (who says kids aren’t great philosophers)

We have done a little bit of work of chances and choices in life and the difference between them. In light of that, my Chance card will have a theme “chances” in life, Community Chest will be “choices” in life. The cards will have statements with NO assigned further action (eg. none of the ‘Get $100). A Community Chest card may be “You fail to graduate from high school”. I will design a few sample cards, the rest will be decided by class before we settle and design our ‘Monopolife’.

The statements will (I hope!) lead to an open ended discussion and negotiation between players how far should the player go forward, backward, penalties, advances etc. And it is this discussion I am most interested in, to see how kids reason, argue, feel, value on their own terms.

I am hoping for a discussion with questions like: What can we do with choices in life? What about chances? Should we simply give up? Why are choices and chances (not) the same? What if you were really rich/poor and had different chances? etc.

Those are in no textbook I have seen but they are life. A life where chances of those with the most are often presented as universal choices, breeding resentment, stress and, so often misery. And vice versa. And all in between in all its messiness, through lack (and oversupply) of understanding and care.

We may not ‘succeed’ in everything planned with this game, but if we enjoy next week or two in class, develop some valuable life skills, and see each other as fellow, struggling, hoping human beings – our work will be done.

Pass’n’Go ! 🙂

Change, Teaching

No Child Left Blind

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This week, I showed the series of classic clips ‘A Class Divided‘ in my Philosophy & Ethics class. At certain points I paused the clips and asked questions like: Does this sound familiar? Is this you? Anyone you know? And pennies dropped…

I wanted to show that fighting any form of discrimination (in this case racism) is not just a matter of throwing more information and exposing the fallacy of harmful, deeply prejudiced and logically flawed ways of seeing things. It is a matter of bravely ‘touching the soul’ too.

Watch the little kids turn nasty, watch them lose faith in their abilities while others flourish when seemingly better, then ask yourself: Is this what we (are asked to) do, overtly and covertly, in our educational system? Broader society?

Take a few minutes to watch the first two parts of  Jane Elliot’s classic ‘Brown Eyes/Blue Eyes” exercise in its original version with her 3rd grade class and share what I’ve shared with my class today. Jane, thank you!

Sorry dear American friends, I couldn’t resist the calamitous pun.