edna.edu.au

More iPhone fun and ethical challenges

The iPhone continues to entertain and amaze. This is the product of a new App - IP Camera, which is a simple App that turns the iPhone into a surveilance camera. Set it running and it sends a new photo to your computer on the same wireless network every 15 sec.  (Not a movie, just still shots)

Tags: camera iphone privacy
Posted at 10:17AM Oct 15, 2009 by John Travers  | 

Google Sites: a wiki with good sibling relations

I have been presenting a group of workshops recently showcasing a number of Web 2.0 applications and have used Google Sites as the starting point. From the speed with which teachers were able to set up a site and make it look presentable and funcitonal it is like most wikis, very easy to use. As I explored Sites more I found that it has some very useful features. One is that once you have a Google account - using any email as your identity, you can creat as many sites as you like. Different sites can have different acces right for a class of student to view, or edit, or open to the world. These can all be linked to a home site, so on the menu to the right, I was the sole editor of most of the pages listed, but Open Access is actually another site that could be edited by the workshop participants.

Another feature is a result of having some powerful siblings in the Google family, most of which integrate with Sites very well. You can view Calendars, Picasa Web Album slide shows, Google docs, and in the case of Forms, complete a suvey.

Many of the teachers immediately began setting up one or more sites for class use. The immediacy of wikis is very appealing to teachers, and the Forms from Google docs is an added bonus. This feature make creating a form, or survey a 15 minute task if you know what you want to ask and the resulting survey can be  viewed in Sites, or emailed to the participants. The image of a survey to the right  is how the survey appears when inserted into a Sites page.

A nice little feature is that when you go to the Insert menu in Sites and select a document to insert, you are taken to the list of files from you Google docs home page: Mr Google having taken the liberty of opening up the sibling site in the family. A single login to a Google account makes all of this very accessible and easy to use.

But really, most of these or similar features can be found in WetPaint or WikiSpaces and other wikis. The big news is that web publishing for students and teachers is available right now. What teachers really like and deserve is control of these applications. Teaching is an individual and often spontaneous art and teachers should not have to go through a middle-person to access these powerful learning tools.

If you would like to browse a site you can do so HERE.

Tags: google wiki cloud computing web2.0
Posted at 06:29PM Sep 26, 2009 by John Travers  | 

Names, children, internet identity and common sense

Today in a workshop on Web 2.0 applications we got into discussion about children's personal information and privacy and safety. Some teachers showed a deep-seated fear of children's identities being discovered on the internet and dreadful but unspecfied consequences occuring as a result. Obviously it is a good idea to be sensibly discrete about personal information, especially if you are young and not having developed the the set of sensible caution-antennae that is called adulthood. But after the workshop I called in at a local roasted chicken establishment, as one does, and waiting in front of me was a girl about 12 wearing a pullover with the names of all the year 6, 7s and 8s in her school on the back. So I can now tell you that Hazel McIntyre is in year 7 at St xxx School. Apparently there is something about internet personal information that is much more dangerous than old-media personal information. I can read in the local free newspaper that Lucy Liu is goalkeeper of the local school netball team, just below her photograph. The unthinking fear about exposing any child information on the internet needs to balanced against the way we routinely use similar information in the public arena without any apparent harm. Teachers need to be engaged with Web 2.0 tools on the internet so they can understand from their own involvement how to manage privacy and openness in a sensibe ways.

Tags: internet safety
Posted at 09:22PM Sep 24, 2009 by John Travers  |  Comments[1]

Real learning with Stratch

This is an image of my first bit of programming using Scratch, and I am interested in using it as a tool to practice and learn down to earth curriculum skills. In this case, mid primary exploration of what the main plane figures consist of: like equilateral triangles. The glorious animated version can be seen here - 7 seconds of maths glory.  Scratch is a delight to use. Very very simple and apparently powerful.

I am interested in how to use a powerful tool like this for students to learn some nice measurable curriculum skills and understandings close to the heart of any teacher. Having just heard presentations at the CEGSA conference on Scratch is strikes me (again) that we often go out of our way to suggest the most complex ways of using ICT and then are upset when teachers do not apply our wonderful ideas. Everyone seems to see programming only as a problem solving tool that students use to initiate an investigation, work on it for a long time, and hopefully come to a rewarding conclusion. While this kind of project can be very effective and beneficial, it is just about the hardest kind of learning to manage, requiring particular attitues, patience, teacher skills and student perservearance. Why not think of ways to apply powerful technologies to quite rudimentary learning, like, in this case, Year 5s learning the characteristics of standard shapes, and becoming familiar with their construction and manipulation?

Watch this space for my next learning demonstration.

Posted at 08:45PM Jul 09, 2009 by John Travers  |  Comments[1]

What did they learn? Not a bad question for schools.

I have been working away for some months on researching a paper on professional learning, and some of my previous posts late last year reflect this. I have now published a fairly extensive report on what I discovered in this search and here it is: What did they learn? The title of the site suggest the main finding - that the focus of everything in a school should be directed to improving student's learning. This may seem to be a trite thing to say, but it has clearly not been the case. As a principal of a school for about 30 years I can say that we focused on lots of things in the '70s to '90s including school culture, democratic decision making, staff development and a hundred other things, and paid little attention to measuring student outcomes. We certainly cared about student learning, but we concentrated on achieving a good environment for learning and agonised about how to motivate, encourage, support and recognise good learning. But we didn't measure it in a systematic way and did not compare our measurements very much. We got into a huge battle for the last 20 years about external testing, and I was very active in this fight, and much of the criticism of testing is valid. This is reinforced by an excellent article by Ken Boston Our Early Start at Making Children Unfit for Work.

The trouble is, that in that fight we lost some perspective, and while condemning some testing we drifted into a culture in which no comparative assessment of student performance was acceptable. We developed a hundred reasons not to compare one teacher's results with another's. Teaching became secret teacher's business into which no one can intrude. The research into school improvement makes a good case for bringing these two extreme view closer together and achieving teacher professionalism and accountability for student performance. 

 

Tags: professional learning accountability school improvement testing
Posted at 11:14AM Jul 01, 2009 by John Travers  | 

It's curtains for filter-to-death school administrators

Yet another technical development suggests that school administrators who seek to manage all the problems of students accessing the internet by filtering it to death will fail. The alternative, of accepting the internet, managing it with moderation and educating students and parents and teachers in its responsible use is still there.

This article in the NY Times of 7th May describes a new service on offer by some of the big 3G telcos in the US. It is a tiny 3G wi-fi hub that works off the regular phone network and allows a small group of people withing a few meters of the device to connect to the internet via a $40 a month plan. It works anywhere there is a 3G network. The little gadget called MiFi (me-fi, get it?) stays in your pocket or handbag and will work on the train, in the garden or, most interestingly, at school. So it will be very difficult indeed to supervise access to devices like this. Maybe a better approach will be to make their use in school time unnecessary by opening up school networks to reasonable access.

Tags: mobile wifi filtering
Posted at 08:31PM May 07, 2009 by John Travers  |  Comments[1]

The Digital Natives Myth

One of the pervasive myths of the digital literacy landscape is that young people are generally 'in' the digital world and older people are generally struggling to engage with it. The catchiest term for this is that young people are Digital Natives (being born into the digital age) and the rest of us are Digital Immigrants (coming to in in later life). While this is literally true, the conclusions about the gap in engagement with ICT are frequently exaggerated if not simply false.

I have been teaching a group of 30 or so university students in a multimedia course for the last four years and the Digital Native notion has each year been demonstrated to be false. These have been students who chose a computer learning course yet about a third have quite modest skills in using computers, another third were competent and about a third were behaving as Digital Natives are supposed to behave - using blogs, social networking and generally being creative users.

This issue has been well researched by a project involving several universities and a collection of their reports is at Educating the Net Generation (Uni Melb.) and their large scale study supports my simple observations. See 'The Net Generation are not big users of Web 2.0 technologies'. They also demonstrate in another story that the gap in skills between university students and staff is not as great as generally reported.

It is interesting to ask why such ideas as the Natives-Immigrants gap are accepted so readily in many forums. I think it is because it is an idea that Henny-Penny Optimists enjoy. The Henny-Penny Optimists are experts in ICT who promote a nicely contradictory point of view that, a) the world as we know it is ending, everything is changing, revolution is at hand, young people's brains are being re-wired by use of technology, and b) the future with ICT is liberating, collaborative and totally wonderful. Like the original Henny-Penny, these people create a lot of alarm and unnecessary panic. When the HPOs promote the Digital Natives idea, they alarm many teachers and administrators, particulalry those who have low ICT skills about the impossible and widening gap between themselves and their students.

The reality, as usual, is much more complex and not as exciting as simplistic generalisations like Digital Natives suggest.

Tags: professional learning digital literacy
Posted at 08:47AM Jan 16, 2009 by John Travers  |  Comments[1]

The simple formula for successful school systems

The OECD commissioned a report from McKinsey & Company on successful school systems and the report was published in 2007: How the world's best-performing school systems come out on top . The report concludes that there are three unremarkable things that high performing systems do consistently:

1. They get the right people to become teachers (the quality of an education system cannot exceed the quality of its teachers).
2. They develop these people into effective instructors (the only way to improve outcomes is to improve instruction).
3. They put in place systems and targeted support to ensure that every child is able to benefit from excellent instruction (the only way for the system to ready the highests performance is to raise the standard of every student).

The top systems include England, Finland, Singapore, South Korea, Boston, Japan. The report is very readable and basically hopeful because the answer is not just money or extraordinary leadership, but consistency and determination focused on some basiclly straightforward targets. Take teacher quality for example. The report says that all but one of the top systems filter teacher training applicants before University, and then again on entry to the profession. They achieve this in part by restricting the number of teacher training places, which raises the standard of those accepted. They set beginning salaries a little higher, and flatten later salary rises. Most low performing systems have relatively open admission to teacher training, consequent lowering of standards, then there are many graduates for each teaching position, leading to a generally low morale and status for teacher preparation. There is more to it than these measures, but a few smart policy  measures have a large impact and, the report claims, prove that the calibre of graduate teachers can be significantly improved at little net increase in cost.

The top performing systems invest great effort in developing their human capital, creating a culture of permanent review and improvement, focused on student performance, for which teachers and schools are accountable. The major point here is that developing human capital is the goal and accountability measures are one of the means to achieve this. Not the other way around. The McKinsey report makes a key point regarding improvement under the heading:

• Individual teachers need to become aware of specific weaknesses in their own practice. In most cases, this not only involves building an awareness of what they do but the mindset underlying it.
• Individual teachers need to gain understanding of specific best practices. In general, this can only be achieved through the demonstration of such practices in an authentic setting.
• Individual teachers need to be motivated to make the necessary improvements. In general, this requires a deeper change in motivation that cannot be achieved through changing material incentives. Such changes come about when teachers have high expectations, a shared sense of purpose, and above all, a collective belief in their common ability to make a difference to the education of the children they serve."

It is difficult to imagine how these can be achieved without a 'learning community' approach to professional learning. This is an environment where teachers can safely consider 'weakensses is their own practice', test things in 'authentic settings' and find 'a shared sense of purpose'.

A dominant message from this report is that top systems are overwhelmingly consistent. Everything fits together aiming at the three ingredients: teacher quality, instructional focus, everyone learns.

Tags: school development sictaswork sictas
Posted at 03:02PM Dec 15, 2008 by John Travers  | 

Mike Lawson: It's about what teachers do

Mike Lawson made the following interesting and quite lengthy comment on "Professional standards Trump 'loose coupling' so I have posted it here to make it more visible.

John: We hear our politicians now argue that one of the most important factors affecting student achievementis teacher quality.  In this case I think they are right.  There is now strong evidence that the most important influence on student acheivement is teacher quality.  This is why in school effectiveness research the between-classroom differences are more powerful than the between-school differences.  In the OECD publication 'Teachers matter' (OECD, 2005, p. 26 etc) it is put like this:

"The broad consensus is that teacher quality is the single most importantschool variable influencing student achievement...Students of the most effective teachers have learning gains four time greater than students of the least effective, which accumulate over time".

Locally Ken Rowe of ACER argues: "When all other sources of variation are taken into account, including gender, social backgrounds of students and differences between schools, the largest differences in student achievement are between classes. That is, by far the most important source of variation in student achievement is teacher quality." ( Ken Rowe ).   How could we improve teacher quality?

We have to work on the quality of what the teachers knows that influences how the teacher acts - all sorts of actions. (The importance of action is suggested by considering whether you could teach if you were totally paralysed. Soon as I begin to teach I act - make a sign with my hand, say something, write something, etc. As soon as i start wotk on my poetry lesson plan I am acting.  When I start to speak to introduce my lesson on poetry I am acting, etc. If you could help me improve my poetry knowldege, and help me improve my lesson presentation actions you would be likely make a positive impact on the quality of my teaching. You could check this out by observing myplanning and teaching and then by checking out the quality of the
knowledge and learning actions of my students. Of course I might need some more time to do these things, so my principal or VC would be improving the quality of their leadership if they set up conditions that supported this, and the curriculum designers would be improving the quality of their curriculum design if they set up conditions that allowed me and my students time to construct the powerful knowledge that would enable us to solve the important problems identified in the curriculum. This doesn't sound like rocket science, but there is some science to support it.  What's more I see some small signs of encouragement that some principals and curriculum designers are acting in the way I suggest (Not sure about the VCs!).

Last week I heard Barry McGaw talk about the National Curriculum. Encouragingly he seems
determined to take note of the evidence on the sense of spending more time covering less content in the curriculum.  I also heard a principal talk about the timetabling of space for teachers to work on their projects designed to improve the delivery of the curriculum using ICT. These moves seem to me to be in right direction.

Yes, and I wonder if this focusing of the curriculum on a smaller body of content may complement the focus that leading school reformers are placing on the art of  instruction. (JT)

 

Tags: sictaswork professional learning school improvement teaching
Posted at 12:14PM Dec 15, 2008 by John Travers  | 

Professional standards trump 'loose coupling'

John Travers
I recently read an article written in 2000 by Richard Elmore that has severely dented a concept that was important to school education in the English speaking world during most of my career as a principal.  He wrote Building a New Structure For School Leadership to explain why large-scale 'standards-based reform' is critical to the survival of public education. The shocking aspect of this paper for me was his criticism of the concept of 'loose coupling' which I widely touted in the '80s and 90s. Elmore blames the notion of loose-coupling for much of our current troubles. Loose coupling was not a term on everybody's lips, but the concept was widespread.

He then accurately describes the dominant culture of schools in the west for the last few decades where principals were promoted on their ability to do everything except focus on student outcomes.


We did everything we could to develop a culture and environment where students learnt successfully, but as Elmore explains, much of our work was to provide a buffer behind which teachers could engage privately in the mysterious business of teaching and learning.

Elmore then point to the groundswell of community demand for improved school standards and this has become obvious even in Australia since 2000. But he advocates a strong emphasis on accountability for teaching not as a weapon to punish poor performing schools, but as an accompaniment to a rigorous staff learning program.

So Elmore makes what I think is the best case for school reform that I have seen over many years. It is: build the human capital in the school on a large scale basis, remove the privacy veil from teaching and use rigorous assessment of learning to guide this process and demonstrate the  teachers' and the schools' achievements.

• Maintain a tight instructional focus sustained over time.
• Routinize Accountability for Practice and Performance in Face-to-Face Relationships.
• Reduce Isolation and Open Practice Up to Direct Observation, Analysis, and Criticism.
• Exercise Differential Treatment Based on Performing and Capacity, Not on Volunteerism.
• Devolve Increased discretion Based on Practice and Performance.

Elmore R, Building a New Structure For School Leadership, 2000 Albert Shanker Institute ,

Tags: sictaswork sictas professional learning school improvement
Posted at 02:04PM Dec 09, 2008 by John Travers  |  Comments[1]