Last week I attended the ULearn Conference in Christchurch, NZ with my principal, Jason Smallwood and two teachers, Gail and Rohan, from my college. It was our first conference together as delegates and presenters. Not bad for our first year as a college!
Initially I was going to attend on my own, having been once before in 2004 when it was co-organised with NavCon. Since 2004 I have met many new educators online through Classroom2.0, Twitter and Second Life. With a hectic year, both at work and home, I saw it as a great chance to regroup and refresh. So I submitted my presentation proposal to Sherry and Gwenny at CORE and was accepted.
From little things, big things grow
After an email to my principal with a suggestion of taking someone with me, we soon had organised our party of four Now there’s a little seed growing into something more. Registrations, flights, accommodation and sponsorship needed to be sorted. With the help of my business manager, ICTEV and my hubby we had things happening.
The conference trip was a great chance for the four of us to bond as a team and to discuss our thoughts about education from our own perspective as well as a global one. Not much time for this to happen in the school day.
We also met up with many of my Twitter friends at the Twitter dinner organised by Mel at Valentino’s, just around the corner from where we were staying. This was a great event to help my teachers and principal make connections with the wider educational community. Emails and other contacts were exchanged and overall a good time was had.
Over the course of the week we attended a range of presentations and workshops that both supported our thinking and challenged it. As a team we had varying experiences with education and the range of breakouts to choose from was excellent. My favourites were by Tony Ryan - Innovative Teachers, and Dr. Julia Atkins – Leading for Learning, Learning for Leading. I work closely with teachers at my college so these fitted with me.
On the last session of the conference we presented our workshop – “Preparing for a 1:1 Learning Environment – A pedagogical view”. As both Gail and Rohan were present it was a great chance to include them in the presentation. Gail shared her class unit on Cyber Citizenship and Rohan shared his unit on Copyright. Both fitted in beautifully with the theme on preparing the kids for 1:1 learning with laptops. The session was received well and we look forward to some visits now from regional Victoria, Sydney, Adelaide and perhaps educators from other areas.
On Monday, we are presenting a snapshot of what we have learnt to our staff, and sharing new ideas and ways of thinking within planning sessions with teams. As the Assistant Principal for ICT and Student Learning I am excited to see things already starting to take shape in both Rohan’s and Gail’s classrooms.
We will continue to share and learn together both locally and globally. Thankyou to ULearn for making our first experience a good one.
Increasingly these days, conversations about student learning, ICT and Professional Learning, have some references to social media. Whether it is about designing more engaging learning opportunities for students to connect and collaborate with other students, or for teachers to access professional learning when and where it is most convenient and purposeful, social media is on the agenda. Gary Hayes’ Social Media Count is a great visual tool depicting this rapid trend. For me it just brings home how pervasive social media is and how worthwhile it is for us, as educators, to embrace these technologies.
This week I was lucky enough to be invited to present at the Lynbrook PS ICT Conference. This was the second conference of its sort held at the primary school. I didn’t get to attend last year but this year I did as a presenter and a participant.
The day began with a live meet up with Marco Torres from US via iChat. Three main points that Marco made were – Think Big, Think Bold and Think Ahead. There’s a lot to be said about this as often we go gently, gently.
What I liked about this conference was that it was held on a school day. It was lovely to see real teachers (and students) presenting in a school using real examples of student work. From a list of many sessions I was able to attend one on Blogs and Wikis and one on SuperClubPlus. Both were informative and practical. There were many other sessions which also wish I had had the chance to attend. Lucy Barrow has taken some photos of the day here.
Whilst looking through some resources on the ePotential, I came across a video that was made about my classroom (as well as others). It was shot in 2006 and this was the last year I taught at Essendon Nth Primary School. Renee Hoareau, Executive Officer from VITTA was on the production team.
This year has been a wonderful experience for me. I have worked as an Ultranet Coach for the Department of Education and Early Childhood Development within the Western Metropolitan Region. Within this role I have worked with 28 schools and leadership teams, as well as a range a teachers who have participated in the ICT Peer Coaching Training that I have facilitated.
The work has been varied over the year but on a clear goal to support schools in using the Ultranet, an online learning environment that will be released over the next two years.
Some of the work has involved -
building awareness around the Ultranet initiative
introducing schools to the ePotential Survey and Resource
helping leadership teams unpack the data from the survey
guiding eLearning Planning
developing tailor made professional learning for schools
organising school visits for leadership teams to see best practice
planning and facilitating a region based ICT Peer Coaching Program
running hands on workshops on Web 2.0
running hands on workshops with Macs
leading curriculum planning with ICT in schools
embedding ICT across the school and curriculum
planning and running an online conference
presenting at conferences
I feel I have made a difference to these schools – some in slight ways and others as huge turn-around in the attitudes and mindsets of how ICT can be embedded in learning.
I have loved my job and enjoyed meeting so many teachers and leaders in the region. This is the last week that I am in this role and will be moving on to a new role as an Assistant Principal in a brand new school.
Since 2000 I have been dabbling in the use of digital portfolios with my primary school aged students. Back in 2000, the teachers at my school experimented with dubbing school events, such as excursions and special days, onto video tapes. Wow, was that an effort! Video recorders, banked on top of each other in order to save time. Argh!
We then started to redefine the purpose of the digital portfolios and develop some thinking about how to implement them. We wanted them to be a vehicle to not only showcase student digital work, but a place for students to reflect on their new understandings and challenges.
These were some of the important considerations. We wanted them to be -
With each of these headings we brainstormed some of the possibilities for adding to the digital portfolio. What I found really interesting, and so did the students, was that the same topic/activity could be grouped under different headings. For example, a claymation about ‘Acid Rain’ could be added to the Creative Me, Organised Me or Investigative Me. Therefore, the students needed to justify why they were adding it to a particular section. Now that was powerful! Students would say things like -
‘Well, I had look up the information and find out things.” Investigative Me
“I had to make sure I was organised and on time.” Organised Me
The digital portfolios were are big part of the ongoing learning for the students, and built into the weekly planning by teachers. The students took great pride in their portfolios and were burned to CD for them to take home.
I wonder now how the Web 2.0 will impact on the purpose and implementation of the digital or e-portfolio?
This week a 2nd Bloggers’ Feast was organised. Unfortunately the turn out wasn’t as big as the last, but the company was great and the conversations fun and interesting. Jo McLeay organised the night and invited Andrew Churches whilst he was here in Melbourne visiting schools with his colleagues.
It was a great opportunity to catch up again with Jo, who inspires me with the work she is doing with her students. I learnt on the night, that Jo has been blogging with her students now for three years. Wow, that is fantastic and a what a great positive role model for those just starting out in the field. I know that I will be tapping into her experiences and expertise more this year.
Andrew was a pleasure to meet f2f for the first time. I have been chatting with Andrew on Twitter and via our blogs this year. I can’t remember exactly how long, but do know that his work on tweaking Blooms Taxonomy of Thinking into the Digital Blooms was what caught my attention in a big way. It supported the work I was doing in my region with helping schools integrate technology and providing some good example of high-level thinking and learning with technology (and not just for the sake of it). So wow, got to meet the guy who wrote it. Awesome. And a great fun guy too.
IWBs were brought up on several occasions. Both these educators have a lot to offer in their beliefs and practical knowledge in the use of the boards for ages P – 12. A great rubric was discussed that was created for the use of Interactive Whiteboards by Juliette Major (Education Services, Catholic Education Office of Canberra and Goulburn). This is certainly a way for teachers to self-reflect on their use and generate discussions in our (WMR Ultranet Team) IWB forum coming up this month.
Professional Learning for teachers can take many different shapes and forms. There can be workshops, presentations, action research and peer coaching. Most recently Online Learning Networks have emerged through the Read/Write Web allowing teachers to learn anytime, anywhere.
In their research Joyce and Showers (pdf) tell us that Coaching (Peer Coaching) is the most effective way to ensure skills and knowledge are transferred to the classroom. We all know how easy it is to lose IT if you don’t use IT!
As a classroom teacher myself for many years, I fully appreciate the need to have the real person right there by your side or just around the corner to call on for support. However, I also see the great advantages of the read/write web and that there are many opportunities to call on support in an online world.
So I am very excited about the possibilities of Peer Coaching and developing Professional Online Learning Networks – especially in the area of embedding ICT across the school and the curriculum.
I am running training in the Western Metropolitan Region this semester and look forward to meeting many teachers from both primary and secondary levels.
Training dates :- August 26th and 27th, September 12th, October 20th, November 10th, December 4th
Can we make a difference to student learning through the use of ICT? As a classroom teacher who has loved using ICT in her class for many years, I have to say YES! However, it has always been difficult to articulate why I have felt this.
Is it because students are more motivated? Or engaged? Or is more than that?
Is it because they are interacting more with each other, analysing their own and peer’s work, collaborating and creating products as a response to other learning? Reviewing, revisiting, rewriting? Reflecting and questioning?
Tonight I am reading an article by Carole Kimble, Ed. D called The Impact of Technology on Learning Making Sense of the Research 1999(pdf download). It reminds me of some of my previous posts here on my blog about the way ICT is integrated or embedded into learning. Kimble explores the notion of doing more than just teaching the skills of technology. She highlights higher order thinking skills and problem-solving as way to maximise learning with ICT.
I recently had a comment on my blog by Jo McLeay about the way I think of ways that students can use new Web 2.0 tools to help them learn. I think as teachers we do this. However, not all teachers are on the same page with the use of ICT or with teaching and learning practices. And I guess the assumption that we all know how to effectively teach with ICT just because it has landed in our classroom, is one of the problems facing us now with so many advances in technology in such a short time.
Kimble writes, “Care must be taken to focus future research on understanding how learning and instruction should change to best use technology…”
As teachers or leaders I think we can make a difference to the learning of our students and each other. The ideas and the research explored in Kimble’s paper are certainly worth considering when I embark on delivering Peer Coaching training in my region this semester, and generally the work I do in schools.
This week there has been a fair bit of talk about Wordles. What this website does is take a bunch of words, or body of text and create word clouds using all the words. The more frequently the word is used the larger it is in the cloud.
Sue from Tassie wrote about Wordle in her blog, Ms. W and her SmartBoard and ended with the question – “How could doing this help you when studying for an exam or test?”
I was intrigued so I hopped on to Wordle and created my own word cloud. I chose to use my Delicious tags to create my Wordle cloud so that I could see at a glance my most popular bookmark tags. I was able to edit my Wordle by choosing alternate colour schemes, different fonts, and layout.
As I played around with the different layouts and colours, I began to think about Sue’s question.
As teachers we are often trying to give our students strategies and tools to Visualise their Thinking. I can see how Wordles could help students -
Now there’s a little seed growing into something more. Registrations, flights, accommodation and sponsorship needed to be sorted. With the help of my business manager, ICTEV and my hubby we had things happening.
