Tech Transformation

Testing is dead - RIP

2012-01-29T16:58:00.000+01:00

Our school-wide goal this year is assessment and as I'm thinking about this goal in the light of 21st century skills it's clear that there is very little place for standardized testing where one student is compared with another. When I was at school testing was something to be feared. The first real test I took was the 11+ and it was to decide who would go to the grammar school and who would go to the secondary or technical schools. There were a set number of grammar school places, so regardless of the general ability of the students taking the 11+, the same number each year ended up going to them. I believe the same was true of the O'levels I took at 16 and the A'levels I took at 18, though I do believe that by the time I was at university this was changed so that it was possible for many students to be granted a First Class Honours degree one year, for example, but only a few to be granted it the following year depending on the students. All the previous exams before this seemed to be a way of sorting out "the best of the bunch" who could go on further - and this "best" was entirely decided by the number of places available.

In the 21st century it seems traditional testing can no longer assess the new skills we want our students to develop. We know that some students do better with extra time, some students do better when they collaborate with others, and most do better when they know the assessment task beforehand - things that were considered "cheating" in my day but nowadays we realize give students fairer opportunities to show what they know, understand and can do. But today, I think, we need to be assessing more than this. If the skills we are trying to develop in our students are those of collaboration, creativity and inquiry, we need different ways of assessing. Just as important as finding out what students know, understand and can do is finding out what students have done to go further in their explorations and the new questions they are asking as a result, what new knowledge they have created and what actions they have taken as a result of using the knowledge or skills they have developed. If our assessments don't take account of the skills that we say we value for the 21st century, aren't we just giving students and their parents the message that these skills are not really very important?

Creativity by its very nature cannot really be tested. It often involves collaboration and this is difficult to assess too. Collaboration involves listening to and taking account of multiple perspectives and it involves sharing our ideas with others. In the PYP we talk about action being one of the five essential elements - it's the way students apply their learning and the action that students take as a result of their learning may well happen out of school. Again it's very difficult to assess this, we may never actually see it or perhaps it might only be apparent after the event. So as we continue to work on our assessment goals this year at school I'm asking myself the question: what new ways of assessing are we exploring in the light of the skills these students will need for their futures?

Photo Credit: Taking a test by Renato Ganoza

Give and Take

2012-01-29T11:37:00.000+01:00

Because we are about to launch into our action research about blogging soon, I've been thinking some more about sharing. As Silvia Tolisano writes on her blog, we are investigating the benefits of blogging on three different levels, for the teacher, for the student and for the curriculum. The idea behind this action research is that we are all giving of our knowledge and experience, our time, our lessons, our comments and reflections but we are all going to take something out of it as well that hopefully will make us better educators and learners. We are setting ourselves high expectations and we are hoping that when the expectations in our community of bloggers is high, that our students will live up to these expectations. To get the full learning benefits of this process we will need to give as much as we take.

Today I went and tool at look at the National Council of Teachers of English website where there is a definition of 21st century literacies. There it states that "literacy has always been a collection of cultural and communicative practices shared among members of particular groups. As society and technology changes, so does literacy. Because technology has increased the intensity and complexity of literate environments, the 21st century demands that a literate person possess a wide range of abilities and competencies." I think that 5 of the 6 literacies outlined by NCTE are particularly relevant to our Quad Blogging action research with primary students:

develop proficiency with the tools of technology
build relationships with others to pose and solve problems collaboratively and cross-culturally
design and share information for global communities to meet a variety of purposes
create, critique, analyze and evaluate multi-media texts
attend to the ethical responsibilities required by these complex environments

With just 4 more weeks to go before we start, I'm exciting and counting the days!

Individual and social

2012-01-29T11:13:00.002+01:00

One of the trends that I've seen in learning over the past few years is that it is becoming more individualized. On Friday, for example, I was helping a class of Grade 2 students to tune in to their new How the World Works unit of inquiry. Some of the students were looking at the BBC Weatherwise website, some were looking at a world map showing different temperatures around the world (I was interested to notice that even at this stage some students were able to see a pattern in this and others not), some were looking at a weather forecast of our local area for the weekend and seeing if they could use the symbols to predict what the weather would be (we are meeting again first thing tomorrow to see if they were right), some were looking at a graph that had bars representing rainfall and lines representing temperature and seeing if they could read the graph and some were using a paint programme on the computer to find clipart and made a graphic organizer about how weather affects us. All these different things are giving the homeroom teacher and myself information about what individual students already know, and how we can deepen their understanding. We know that some children may need more help with their data handling skills, others may need to have more support in other areas.

Later in this unit of inquiry I'm hoping our students will be able to be more social as they move into the finding out phase of the inquiry cycle. That they will be able to use social networking tools to contact other students around the world who can help them with their investigations. So what I'm seeing in this unit is that learning is both individual and social. I'm interested in the social side of learning. How will we find these people with whom we can learn? How will they find us? How will we assess the people that we are in contact with and the information that they will give us? How will we share the understandings that we create with others who will find this useful?

Today I've dipped into Will Richardson's chapter "Navigating Social Networks as Learning Tools" in the book 21st Century Skills where I came across the statistic that 80% of high school students publish online - this includes text, photo, audio and video and is mostly on social network sites. Recent studies I've read have shown that students are reading and writing more because it is so easy to read and write more using Web 2.0 tools. What they are doing is not necessarily learning - they may be just updating their Facebook status for example - but learning can come about as a result of the connections that they make. Students are not writing in a vacuum. They are writing because they assume someone else is reading what they are writing and responding to it. Since we know that students already like to do this as individuals, then surely it's an easy step for us as teachers to use these social networks to encourage others to interact and collaborate with us.

Linkability is the connective tissue upon which learning networks are built (Richardson)

For myself, although I write as an individual I'm very aware that what I write is being read by thousands of people around the world each week. I write in a very transparent way, though I have removed all references to the name of my school after the administration objected me blogging. However the URL of my blog includes my whole name as does my email address. I include my photo on my blog and on Twitter - at conferences people come up to me because they recognize me from these photos. At times the things I write reflect not just on my own experience, but on that of my family and at those times I try to balance privacy with transparency. I think people who have never met me in person see me as a human being. Last summer when my son was going to Hong Kong for a summer school at the university, I contacted one of the members of my network to ask if he had any volunteer positions at his school that my son could do. I had no hesitation in doing this because I also saw him as an individual, an educator, a family man, though our only contact has been through Twitter. In the same way, when I was looking for a job I posted my professional portfolio online. This basically condensed into one place the myriad of links to myself that would have appeared if any prospective employer had Googled my name. I'm happy with my digital footprint being public, though of course I have no idea who all the readers of it are or how they have come to find me. However I truly believe that for me and for my son and for the students that I teach, the results of what people find when they Google our names are our online reputations and will play a large role in our successes. Will Richardson writes:

Future searchers ... will have an expectation of finding creative, collaborative, thoughtful and ethical results to peruse. An empty Google search will beg the question, "What have you been doing with your life?"

It's a two-way street. For every school that I considered working at I also Googled the name of the school and key administrators there. I checked out the school websites very carefully: how much information were they actually sharing as I think sharing is important - if I'm prepared to share large parts of myself online then I expect to find things about the school and the people I will be working with online too. There were some schools that were very "locked down" - I could only find the external face of the school, the marketing and public relations, nothing about the people, their ideas, nothing at all that they had published online. Having made that mistake once I knew I would never again work for anyone with an empty reputation. There were other schools that openly published their strategic plans - I could see where these schools were going to be in 5 years time and how they intended to get there. I could envisage what my role would be in that process. I could see the communities that these teachers and administrators are involved in, I could see if they had presented at conferences and read what they had published. So I think that what I have seen has been a blending of the individual and the social. As an individual I had very specific criteria of what I was searching for in a new school and I think I have very specific qualities that I can offer in return. However I feel that it has been social media that has helped me in searching for the best job in the world for me.

Photo Credit: Join Our Team by Craig Taylor

Flying -v- going with the flow

2012-01-29T10:04:00.000+01:00

Sometimes children say the most powerful things don't they? When I read this I could immediately visualize a butterfly flying happily from one flower to another and then sadly reaching a flower that tried to make him go backwards, to clip his wings, to try to push him into a skin he has outgrown. And I started wondering if as teachers we sometimes do this to our students, if we want them to stay in one stage for too long, even if they have outgrown this - perhaps because as teachers we are not ready to move on. Isn't this what schools are doing when they have a cellphone ban? When teachers insist on a 5 paragraph essay? When students are not given the choice of what to investigate, what tools to use to investigate and how to show their understanding? When they feel that they come to school and "power down"? And then I became even sadder because I started to think of all the teachers that I've seen this happen to as well, who have ended up in a school where the administration don't want them to fly because they can't control where they are flying to, who want them to remain passive on a leaf and to conform and be the same as everyone else. What a waste! Even a dead fish can go with the flow! However it takes a live one with courage to swim upstream against the flow.

10 Web 2.0 Tools for Recording Learning

2012-01-28T13:35:00.000+01:00

At next week's staff meeting I'm running a session for all the teachers who are not involved in maths planning - these are basically the specialist teachers who are teaching subjects such as PE, music and German. This session will look at what Web 2.0 tools these teachers can use for recording student learning. It's quite a diverse group so I want to come up with different tools that will appeal to them all.

I first started to think about what these teachers might be doing now to record learning, and then thinking of some ways that technology could transform this. For example with the music and language teachers I would think that being able to make an audio recording of the children speaking or the music that they compose and play would be interesting, whereas with the PE teachers they might be more interested in recording movies of the students doing something in the gym or outside. Here are some ideas of what I think the teachers might like to do, with some of the tools that I think could help them.

Photos + Audio: I could imagine this would be useful for all the specialists so that they could photograph the students doing something and then record the students reflecting on what they were doing. Tools that I will suggest to them will include VoiceThread and Fotobabble.

Graphics + Text: I've used this with our German department before with the students making comic strips and adding speech on as text bubbles. I think a great tool for this is Bitstrips.

Animation + Audio: Again I think this might be very useful for our language teachers so I will suggest a text to speech tool such as GoAnimate. I know there are a variety of accents - not sure about German though.

Presentation + Video: Many teachers might take short videos of the students performing something. This could be a particular movement in gymnastics, a musical piece they are playing on an instrument or some kind of skit in German. I'm interested in how the teachers could then have the students send these to our school's iMovie account in order to embed these videos into some sort of presentation tool. Good examples of tools that are easy for them to use might include SpicyNodes, Prezi and Glogster.

Video + Text + Audio/Music: Perhaps the teachers might like to make a video of photos that they can add text to and even voice-over or music in the background. Recently our Grade 2 students used Animoto to put all their art pieces together with the music they composed in GarageBand together. Another example of a tool we're about to start using with our Grade 4 and 5 students is WeVideo as we are having them make book review movies based on their literature circle books.

So that's 9 tools. What do you think I've missed out? What else would you recommend me to introduce to our specialist teachers so that they can better record student learning?

Photo Credit: Rainbow in my living room by Daniela Hartmann

Synergistic thinking: engaging the intellect to deepen understanding

2012-01-28T13:05:00.003+01:00

This morning I was reading a discussion on the PYP Threads Ning about whether we should give students the central idea at the start of a PYP unit of inquiry or whether we should encourage them to come up with the central idea as a result of their learning. A link on this thread led me to the video that was filmed at the IB Africa, Europe and Middle East Regional Conference a few months ago. Like many teachers at my school I wasn't able to attend this conference, however the power of technology is such that I'm able to "attend" this session by Lynn Erickson from the comfort of my own settee.

Lynn Erickson was talking about synergistic thinking. Synergy comes from the Greek word that means working together. It describes two or more things working together to produce a result that is not obtainable by each individually and in this case she is referring to facts and concepts working together. She talks about how great teachers prompt their students to think about the conceptual ideas but that they must use facts to support these ideas. The interaction between the factual and conceptual levels of thinking produces synergistic thinking which should be our goal as teachers for developing students' intellects. Concepts are the way we organize the facts - they are the way we prevent information overload of "in one ear and out the other", and only at the conceptual level do we have the transfer of knowledge.

Listening to this I'm definitely coming to the belief that we shouldn't always tell our students the central idea at the beginning of the unit. Perhaps we need to wait until nearer the end to see if they can come up with the central idea themselves. I'd love to try this out, though not having a class of my own it's not something that is very realistic. But I'm loving the discussion and I'm really interested in hearing more from teachers who are actually give the students the opportunities to come up with their own concepts, generalisations and central ideas.

Photo Credit: If it wasn't for the work of the weavers by Maureen Crosbie

Pre-K play in the street

2012-01-28T09:56:00.003+01:00

A quick update. We have changed the movie so that a street scene is playing on Infinite Looper and projected onto the wall of one of our Pre-K classrooms. At our Thursday meeting one of the Pre-K teachers was talking about how this had encouraged the students to explore some of the construction tools in the classroom - in particular she said that it had previously been hard for the students to add wheels onto the constructions that they made, but that last week she noticed them doing this fairly easily in front of the wall of cars.
Here's the link to the Infinite Looper movie that we used - though since the actual footage lasts for an hour it's probably not necessary to loop it: Street Sounds.

Building Education on a Solid Foundation

2012-01-27T13:34:00.000+01:00

A guest post by Joseph Baker

Whatdid you want to be when you grew up?

Ican tell you without any hesitation that I wanted to be a paleontologist. Likemost kids, I was interested in dinosaurs. I had books and toys, but in 1993,something happened that changed my life. JurassicPark came out. Watching the T-Rex chew through an electric fence andterrorize kids only a bit older than me through the sun roof of a custom FordExplorer made it clear: dinosaurs were awesome.

As Icontinued to grow, I carried a passion for the Paleolithic through gradeschool, but in middle school it became clear (after some tough science classes)that perhaps it wasn’t my knack. Not only that, but Jurassic Park 3 left a bad taste in my mouth and possibly killed myenthusiasm for archaeology.

WhenI finally did grow up, after the tumult of college and “finding myself”, Idiscovered a career in the creation of rapid prototypesand thought, “perfect”. Now I had the chance to work for clients thatreproduced dinosaur skeletons, so I could ply my elementary expertise in dinoarchaeology while getting in my artistic druthers.

AlthoughI didn’t end up becoming the new Dr. Alan Grant, my parents, teachers andeducators supported this. Teachers would let me walk out of school with books,assign me Jurassic related book reports and foster my thirst for knowledge.

It’smore important than ever to facilitate a rich, worthwhile early education foryoung kids. Years ago, when Race to the Top was nabbing headlines, but recentlyMinnesota was awarded with the $45 million in federal funding in recognition ofthe hard work of teachers, parents, and administrators who strived to createpositive and effective learning atmospheres in schools. Art Rolnick withMinnesota Public Radio writes about the importance of early education on the MPRblog:

“…research shows that when kids start school far behind they don't catchup. Many of those kids drop out of high school and are much more likely tostruggle in our society. Indeed, criminologists claim that they can predict theneed for prisons in the future by the number of children who are not proficientin reading by the third grade.

However, research also shows that high-quality early childhoodeducation and development, starting as early as prenatal development, can go along way in assuring that children thrive in school and succeed in life. Thequestion, then, is how to create an early childhood education system that iscost effective, high quality and can readily be brought to scale. “

TheRace to the Top program came under some fire at inception due to the perceptionthat it placed states in contest with each other and held a carrot in front ofa famished education system. Widespread cheatingin Georgia is often cited as a result of this dangling – forcing wholedistricts, counties and states to fight for salvation in a desert of finance.

Whateverthe case, the funding will certainly benefit those schools that foster earlyeducation.

Learning from -v- learning with

2012-01-26T20:20:00.001+01:00

Over the next couple of months our students will be given opportunities to connect with other students in a virtual global classroom. One class of our Grade 4s will be involved in Quad Blogging action research to see how student blogging can be used to teach quality writing - this class will be connecting with other students in the USA, the Czech Republic and Thailand. I'm also keen to have our Grade 2 students connect with other students worldwide as they investigate how the weather and climate affects us. Our students will be involved in global learning that will be based on the connections that myself and the homeroom teachers are building through our personal learning networks. We have come to realize that knowledge is distributed widely across these networks and that instead of learning from others we are now hoping to learn with others through inquire and the co-construction of knowledge.

This is a wonderful opportunity for our teachers and students to develop a new form of literacy: network literacy. Learning in networks and online communities will require new pedagogies and practices. The vast majority of our students do not yet see their teachers as being connected to these networks and taking advantages of the learning possibilities that these networks provide: currently they do not see these learning connections being modeled by teachers and therefore many students are not learning how to use online networks in safe and responsible ways. I'm hoping that the students will come to see the power of technology for creating virtual classrooms and learning communities with other students whom they have never met offline and that these first steps will lay good foundations for them becoming responsible digital citizens and being able to create their own networks and learning communities in the future.

Photo Credit: If I Only Could Make a Deal with God by Bethan

Act on what you learn

2012-01-25T14:56:00.002+01:00

Action is one of the essential elements in the PYP. In Making the PYP Happen it states: action should be seen as a voluntary demonstration of a student's empowerment. Basically they should act on what they learn - the empowerment doesn't happen in the learning but in the actions they take as a result of their learning. Recently I've been thinking that action can also be a demonstration of a teacher's empowerment and since my aim is to explore the impact that coaching can have on teaching and learning in the second half of this year I'm thinking about what actions I might see our teachers involved in. I'm hoping to see teachers:

trying out new things, experimenting and stepping outside of their comfort zone. I'm always happy to see teachers questioning the whys and the hows of what they are doing. I know that one grade has pledged to try out team teaching at least once before our February break so I'm interested to see how this turns out. It's exciting to see that they have decided to learn from those around them.
seeing themselves as learners too. Reading, thinking, connecting with experts around the world, maybe even taking online courses.

For me I think it's also important to act on what I'm learning. This is what I've done as a result of what I have learnt:

I'm more able to identify my strengths and weaknesses and events of the past few months have definitely made me question and then reaffirm my values, ethics and principles. Having realised that these don't match with those of my current school, my action is to move on. You have to believe in what you are doing in order to put your heart into it and be able to make a difference.
I've also come to see that different people have different standards. One person's definition of excellence is not the same as someone else's. If you are trying to attain someone else's definition of success then you will just be disappointed and dissatisfied, even if you achieve it. You need to own your own definition of excellence and measure your achievements by your own standards.
I've seen how important it is to have the freedom to make choices (up to now this has been limited by my need to support my children through school), but I've discovered that I also have the freedom to choose how to interpret what happens. This year my choice has been to welcome change and to look for new opportunities, and I've discovered that when you are open to new opportunities then they come to you. I'm overly excited about moving on to a new school, new country, new culture and new challenges. Just as I'm excited about our teachers exploring new ways of doing things here, I know that I need to explore too. I need to be in a place that is constantly investigating new ways of using technology, of teaching and of learning.
I've thought a lot about where I want to be and who I want to be with and I've discovered that I need to be with people who dream the same dreams but even bigger than I do and who have even more passion for what they are doing than I have. This energy is infectious! I read recently "The people around you create who you are. If they inspire you, you'll be inspired. If they depress you, you'll be depressed." Therefore my search has also been for people who will inspire and empower me and for a school that is modeling excellence, for people who don't say "that's impossible" but who ask "how can we make this possible?"

Several ideas in this post have been influenced by the Live Your Legend site.

Photo Credit: Pasqual jump sequence by Felipe Skroski

The I and the C

2012-01-24T19:52:00.000+01:00

This evening I was talking to a friend who was asking me about what sort of ICT vision she should be looking for in the schools where she is considering working. We talked about the fact that in the ICT, it's the first two letters that are important - with the vast amount of Information that is available, students need to know how to search for what they need and they also need to know how to Communicate with the rest of the world. In Technology Rich, Information Poor, Chapter 12 of 21st Century Skills, Alan November writes:

If we wanted to prepare our students for the global economy we would immediately turn every classroom into a global communications center linking students to authentic audiences around the world. We would be providing professional development for teachers to redesign their assignments to be more rigorous and authentic. We would be laser-beam focused on redefining what it means to be literate.

Alan November goes on to write that possibly the most important 21st century skill is Collaboration. An important aspect of the 3 IB programmes is international mindedness and Alan November writes "In an interconnected world our students will need to learn how to understand various points of view and how to work with people in different cultures. In this regard we need to globalize the curriculum."

I think focusing on the I and the C and not the Technology leads students to become more independent and gives them the control of and responsibility for their own learning. What this means is that the teacher's role has to change because if we redefine the role of the learner then we automatically have to redefine the role of the teacher too. If we are talking about ICT merely enhancing the curriculum, or just supporting what teachers are already doing then we are focusing on the T and simply using technology to do what we have always done in other ways. Alan November addresses this in the last paragraph of his chapter:

The opportunity before us is to redesign the culture of our schools to empower students to take more responsibility for managing their own learning and to work collaboratively with classmates and people around the world. Asking the right questions about the design of an empowering culture of teaching and learning is more important than bolting technology onto our industrial model of education.

Can we get from here to there in 7 steps?

2012-01-23T21:20:00.004+01:00

I've been thinking a lot about how schools prepare students for their future, and was reading about innovation through technology today in Chapter 11 of 21st Century Skills. In this chapter, Cheryl Lemke, president and CEO of the Metiri Group, writes about the framework the group has come up with to gauge readiness of schools for 21st century learning. Below I have summarized the areas the group considers:

Vision: does the school have a forward-thinking common vision for 21st century learning?
Systems thinking: are all educators and staff thinking and acting systemically to embrace innovation in ways that enhance the vision?
21st century skills/learning: has the school adopted 21st century skills for research-informed learning strategies?
21st century learning environments: is the vision of 21st century learning coming to life?
Professional competencies: are teachers, administrators and staff ready to facilitate, lead and assess 21st century learning among students, the community and parents?
Access and infrastructure: is access to technology/infrastructure sufficiently robust to support 21st century learning?
Accountability: Are learners and educators held accountable for making progress? Are they provided with support?

I have thought and thought about the above and how it applies to where we are now. I know that it all has to start with a vision - and a shared or common vision at that. This is where I think we need to do much better. I think a lot of teachers feel we don't have a vision or that if there is one they haven't been consulted or informed about it. I think there would also be questions about access and infrastructure.

The way forward, suggested by the Metiri Group, is for leadership to encourage a culture of openness to new ideas, encourage risk taking and encourage the spread of creative ideas to "tip and ripple" to challenge and change current assumptions.

Photo Credit: Footsteps on the Wall by Tom Rolfe

Pre-K play on the beach

2012-01-23T20:48:00.001+01:00

This might sound like a strange thing to write, but today in Switzerland some of our Pre-K students played on a beach. This wasn't a normal beach - it was inside in their classroom. A couple of days ago I wrote about the plan of the Pre-K teachers to use technology in their classes in a completely different way. Their idea, to support their Who We Are unit of inquiry which is about how we use our senses to explore our world, was to project a scene onto the classroom wall as a visual stimulus with sound that the children could interact with.

Today I arrived at one of the classrooms eager to see how this was working. I'd already found the YouTube video Perfect Sunset, which I'd added into Infinite Looper and shared with the teachers. Today one of the teachers used her laptop attached to a beamer to project this 30 minute video onto a classroom wall. In front of the wall she had a big plastic box filled with sand, shells and stones. This was just one area in the classroom where the children could play. Other areas were set up with building blocks, some children were working on the classroom computer, some children were painting and others were investigating light objects inside an area of the room that had been hung with black curtains.

As I sat at the "beach" I noticed the children had taken off their shoes and socks and were really interacting with the sand and making patterns with the shells and stones. When I asked what they were doing they told me that this was a beach. They could hear the sound of the waves all the time, and as the sun went down, the area got darker. At this point an interesting thing happened. One of the girls had taken on the role of "Mummy" and one of the others was "baby". At the point that the sky got dark the Mummy told the baby it was time to go home - they then left the area and walked over to do some painting. However because the other children wanted to carry on playing what we did was to replay the video from the start again. The whole movie lasts 30 minutes, but the most interesting skies and the part where you can actually see the waves lapping on the beach happen in the first 15 minutes (note to self - change the slider to shorten the movie).

One thing that I noticed is that all the students playing on the beach were girls. Perhaps this was just a coincidence. However I'll be interested to see what happens when the movie is changed and we project a street scene with lots of cars onto the wall.

Gradual Release of Responsibility

2012-01-23T02:00:00.000+01:00

As a parent and as a teacher I've often thought in terms of a gradual release of responsibility. For example as I parent I moved from driving my children to school, to having them walk to school by themselves and eventually to the moving off to university by themselves. As a teacher we move from walking our class from one special to another and then back to the homeroom, to letting them go somewhere as a class, through to letting them go somewhere in pairs and eventually going alone. Does this model also work with teachers?

As I've been preparing myself for leaving my school at the end of the year I've been considering how I haven't yet released this responsibility much for the teachers. In my previous two schools I certainly did this. Each year I handed over the responsibility of one of the six units of inquiry to the teachers to lead the technology, which meant that after 5 years in one school and 4 years in the second the teachers were pretty independent users of technology by the time I left. For a variety of reasons this hasn't happened at my current school. Therefore during the final few months I'm really making an effort to release much more responsibility for the use of technology onto the teachers. This year instead of posting student work on our student website I have supported the teachers as they have set up their blogs and posted various things the students created onto their blogs. I have moved away from the extensive support that I gave them in the past 2 years so that I am now sitting with them or even just sitting in their rooms as they are blogging in case they need me. I am also trying to build up the support that the grade level teams can give each other, but I feel I'm racing against the clock. The 4-year plan that I originally had has turned into a 3-year plan, and I'm worried that by the end of the year we're not going to be where I wanted us all to be. We can't move forward any faster - there are already way too many demands on the teachers' time - but I keep asking myself: can I do more to support them?

Photo Credit: Reaching out by Andrew and Hobbes

Prohibition

2012-01-22T20:48:00.003+01:00

Today I've been reading the chapter in 21st Century Skills by Nancy Frey and Douglas Fisher who write that schools need to revise their technology policies. By not allowing students to bring and use their own devices at school they felt they were doing the students a disservice as they were not developing the skills needed by global citizens to understand and responsibly use technology. They argue that most students have mobile phones, yet at the same time most don't know how to use them as learning tools. They also write that schools can be a place where students can learn both responsible and respectful use of technology and how to avoid dangerous and inappropriate behavior. We need to teach the students how to use their technology in ways that are appropriate for the environment.

Photo by Drift Words

Form Follows Function

2012-01-22T14:56:00.000+01:00

In the early days of the PYP, before it had been bought by the IBO and when it was still the ISCP, the teachers and administrators who were involved in developing the curriculum met to come up with a consensus about the key concepts that would have universal significance, regardless of time or place. The idea was to agree on a set of transdisciplinary concepts around which the new curriculum could be structured. Two of these concepts are form and function.

Form asks the question: What is is like? When we look at the form of something we are able to observe, identify, describe and categorize it. Function asks the question: How does it work? When we look at function we are looking at the purpose of something. When we look at what something is, we often think in terms of nouns. When we think of how something works we often think in terms of verbs.

A shift between nouns and verbs has occurred in Bloom's taxonomy. The original Bloom's taxonomy was a way of moving from lower to higher order thinking and the terms were all nouns. Knowledge was at the bottom, evaluation was at the top. The new version of Bloom's taxonomy describes what students can do so is written in verbs. Below I have reproduced a graphic from Mary Forehand at the University of Georgia, who herself based this graphic on Dr Richard Overbaugh's website from Old Dominion University.

As a technology teacher/facilitator/coach I've thought a lot about how this applies to technology. My aim is always that the focus is NOT on the technology, that it fades into the background. That we are not focused on the tool (noun), but on what the students are doing (verb). My emphasis is on function/purpose rather than form/tool.

This is where I think many schools are still going wrong. They insist on making statements like "students will use technology as a tool to support what is being done in the classroom." This leads to discussion focusing on what tools need to be bought and it leads to a fixed mind-set when the school buys-in. For example I first went to visit a Dutch school using a SMARTboard almost 13 years ago. I could immediately see how having the teacher and students touch the board in order to demonstrate what to do on the computer would be much better for our younger students who couldn't often relate to the teachers moving a mouse on a computer that was on a trolley at the back of the room, while they were looking at what was projected onto a screen at the front of the room and listening to the teacher giving instructions at the same time. We decided to try out one SMARTboard and installed it in the lab being used by our youngest children. It was a great success because I think we were focused on the function of the board and how that was better than the technology we already had (computer and beamer on a trolley). We certainly didn't propose a roll out of boards to every classroom in the school, regardless of their needs.

But in some of the schools I've been in since, the focus has been on the tool. On equipping all classrooms with the same tools and then training the teachers how to use them regardless of the needs of the teachers or students. These ideas don't come from the teachers or the students, but from some misguided one-size-fits-all policy. Indeed, in the years since I first used a SMARTboard I've seen many better options, for example connecting a computer to a projector and controlling it wirelessly with an iPad which apart from being cheaper is also much more flexible as teachers can use it for many more tasks, and in addition it has more potential to impact students. It's a shame that some schools get locked into a 3 or 5 year purchasing programme to equip each class with X, Y or Z. Halfway through this programme something new and better invariably comes along. Considering the amount of money that has been invested in half-equipping a school with the "old" technology, it's a brave school that switches to the new.

What functions are our students requesting? They are asking to be able to communicate and collaborate, to access information and in particular their own documents anytime and anywhere, and to be able to create using a variety of media. They are less focused on the tool, than on access. When I'm teaching students I always focus on the function - this of course is helped by the new document from the IBO "The Role of ICT in the PYP" which defines the 6 strands: investigate, organize, communicate, collaborate, create and be responsible digital citizens. During any one unit of inquiry I will be showing them different functions of the tools for investigating and organizing, for example, so that they can choose the best tools for themselves in the finding out and sorting out phases of the inquiry cycle. I will be showing them other functions of other tools when they are wanting to present their understanding.

Douglas Fisher and Nancy Frey write:

Humans need to communicate, share, store and create. As a species we've engaged in these functions for centuries. There's really nothing new about them. What is new are the forms, or tools, that students use to meet these needs ... we're excited to learn alongside students as they teach us tools and we help them understand functions.

Our Grade 4s are in the last week of their unit of inquiry about belief systems. For the whole of next week they will be presenting using Prezi, Spicy Nodes, GoAnimate and Animoto and - I hope - any number of other tools that I have not shown them directly how to use but that they have investigated for themselves. The function is presenting. The form could be anything at all.

Photo Credit: Form Follows Function by Luca Barcellona

How We Express Ourselves - using technology

2012-01-20T18:39:00.002+01:00

Today was our Grade 2 Art Exhibition. Since November the students have been investigating the central idea Art is an expression of human feelings and ideas and is open to interpretation. The students have visited museums and been able to look at the artwork of older students in the middle and high schools. They have had lessons in the computer room where they have been able to explore different ways of creating online art and also had a music lesson in the lab where they used GarageBand to compose music to go with the art they created.

The first thing that all the students did on the computers was to create a graffiti version of their name. We discussed form or shape, color, line and texture and then let them design their own names. Several of the options on the Graffiti Creator website have sliders so that students can adjust the amount of red, green and blue light to create different colors. We had a mini-science lesson where we noticed that all three colors of light used together created a white color on screen, and that black was created by an absence of these colors. The students combined various strengths of colored light to make the colors they wanted to use in their graffiti name. Some of the classes then imported the graffiti names into Fotobabble and had the students record a pre-assessment of the central idea of the unit - what did they understand about art and the way it is used by artists? Many found this difficult - we will go back and record their thoughts at the end of the unit too, in order to see how much their understanding has deepened.

Right at the start of the unit students went to a gallery and looked at the paintings of Kandinsky. In the computer lab we supported this by showing the students how they could use over 40 different styles of brushes in Brushster from the National Gallery of Art. The students were given the opportunity to experiment and to create several different paintings in this style, exploring the different effects they could create with the different brushes. Another popular style of art was impressionism and in some classes the students painted their own impressionist-style self-portrait using PixelFace. At the same time in class they were painting Picasso -style self portraits.

A couple of the classes also wanted to do some art in the style of Piet Mondrian. We talked about Mondrian's life and had a look at his paintings and how they represented his interpretation of real life - for example the painting Broadway. We looked on the internet for photos of Broadway and talked about how Mondrian's painting incorporated the colors of the red and blue neon signs and the yellow lights of the cars. We then showed the students some other photographs of New York and of Paris and asked them to paint their own interpretations of these using the software Pixie. Throughout this whole unit we gave the students many opportunities to interpret and reflect on their own and each others' art. We wanted to make sure they could respond critically, but in a tactful way and that the way they interpreted a piece of art might differ from someone else's interpretation.

During another lesson we looked at other styles of painting. For example we looked at paintings by Van Gogh, Salvador Dali, Pablo Picasso and M.C. Escher. We then used various backgrounds in Kerpoof to see if the students could create impressionist, surrealist and cubist paintings as well as the impossible constructions Escher.

Last week it was time to put all the art and music that had been created on the computer together. We introduced the students to Animoto. They chose the presentation style and uploaded their pictures and music. Within minutes they had created wonderful videos that the homeroom teachers embedded on their class blogs.

During today's exhibition students brought their parents to the computer lab and showed their parents their work. Many were amazed that 8 year old children could create such professional looking movies. Many were also amazed at the way the students had created their own music in GarageBand to match their computer art. I also used this time to talk to parents about how to write quality comments on their child's video on the class blog.

I love this unit of inquiry and every year I am completely bowled-over by the quality of the students' work and the comments they are able to make about their peers' artwork. I feel there has been a lot of learning going on during these past 6 weeks.

Using technology to explore Who We Are

2012-01-20T14:12:00.001+01:00

Our Pre-Kindergarten students don't come to the computer lab for lessons and they only have one desktop computer in each classroom, so finding a way of using technology with them is a challenge at times. At our meeting yesterday the teachers asked if I could find a way of helping them create a "moving wall" of images (with sounds) on the classroom wall to bring the outside world into the classroom as the students explore the central idea of their Who We Are unit of inquiry:

We explore and connect to our environment through our senses

The aim is that children will have the sights and sounds of different places projected onto the classroom wall and that they can interact with what they see and hear as they play. The teachers had some ideas of what they wanted to be able to do, and they wanted my help to do these. Initially they thought the best way to create this environment would be to download movies from YouTube and loop them.

As I listened to what they wanted, it seemed there was a much simpler solution - Infinite Looper and I then set about finding some movies with sights and sounds that might interest the children and support their central idea. I like the way that Infinite Looper has a slider so that it's possible to select the only those parts of the movies that we want to loop. I looked for scenes from different places (for example I found street scenes of San Francisco and Dakar, Senegal) and also natural scenes such as sunsets or just a running stream. I'm excited to see how this ideas works when the students actually start to play in front of these "moving walls".

Below are the links to the scenes we are going to explore:
San Francisco Scenes, Sights and Sounds
Relaxing City Sounds - the image stays the same, but students will be able to hear the different sounds
Street Sounds and Sights of Dakar, Senegal - we loop this after 3.35
Cars - no real need to loop this as it lasts an hour
Water
Perfect sunset

Another of the teachers' ideas is also to use a modified version of the "I See ... I Think ... I Wonder" Visible Thinking Routine. They are going to try to do "I Hear .... I Think .... I Wonder" with the students. We are going to explore some websites where there are audio files which we can download into an iTunes playlist for the students to listen to. More about this in an upcoming post.

Photo Credit: Beko by Tanakawho

Collaboration, Cooperation, Conflict, Challenges and Creativity

2012-01-19T22:08:00.002+01:00

I'm about half way through the book 21st Century Skills and have recently read the chapter by David Johnson and Roger Johnson about how cooperation and conflict resolution are essential 21st century skills. I'm interested in how developing these skills in students in the classroom, in face-to-face situations, will transfer over to their behavior both online and out of the classroom. I'm also interested in how developing these skills will support both the IB and individual schools' mission statements.

The chapter opens with a discussion of the benefits of small group cooperative learning, for example working on shared goals and developing a mutual responsibility for both the group's and the individual's success leads to higher achievement. Cooperative learning has also been linked with "more frequent use of higher-level reasoning, the more frequent generation of new ideas and solutions, greater motivation, greater long-term retention, more on-task behavior and greater transfer of what is learned within one situation to another." Moving from the academic to the personal level, cooperative learning also leads to better quality relationships between the people in particularly greater social competencies, self esteem and the ability to cope with adversity.

Some students don't naturally work well together. In the years that I was a homeroom teacher I often put students together that I knew wouldn't automatically get along because the way they managed to sort out their differences and develop their interpersonal or communications skills was also a valuable experience for them. In the PYP we focus on the students' development of transdisciplinary skills, for example social skills such as accepting responsibility, respecting others, group decision making and resolving conflict. Students often have to be encouraged to develop conflict resolution skills such as listening to others, compromising, and being fair.

When groups are given problems to solve, the members of the groups need to talk together, make decisions and eventually come to an agreement. David and Roger Johnson refer to these problems as constructive controversies and they occur because students' ideas, theories or opinions differ which means they need to discuss the advantages and disadvantages of different courses of action to solve the problems. Constructive conflicts are cooperative, where students seek compromise and agreement. Destructive conflicts are usually competitive, where there are winners and losers. Through working together on constructive conflicts students are learning important problem-solving skills in a fun and enjoyable way, and these skills will be carried forward with the students when they leave the classroom too.

Each week I do two lunchtime duties in our Early Years playground. Conflicts often arise and as teachers we try to encourage the students to solve these themselves rather than running to us to sort things out. For example one student may want to ride on the small bicycles but there may not be one free. Another student might to play but nobody wants to have him join in. Someone else might complain that another student has been playing too roughly. We tell our students they need to explain how they feel and describe what they want to happen. For example "I don't like it when you push me, I'd like you to stop doing that." or " I would like to ride the bicycle now, please could you let me have a turn." In a small way, these young students are learning about conflict resolution and developing strategies that can help them in the future.

At my last school the mission statement was to inspire and empower each student to enrich the world. The IBO mission statement aims to develop caring young people who help to create a better and more peaceful world. Today's world is one characterized by global interdependence - technical, economic, ecological and political. Global interdependence is a double edged sword - it increases development and living standards, but it also makes us vulnerable to "internal" events in other countries. For example the financial crises with the euro in countries such as Greece is having a wide impact throughout Europe, even in countries that don't have the euro. Other events such as drought, hunger, population growth, terrorism or environmental issues are also not limited by national boundaries and therefore need international solutions. Understanding how to manage such challenges and conflicts of interest in a constructive way are essential for future world citizens - learning how to do this starts at school.

This past year has seen the "Arab Spring" with popular uprisings against dictatorship, corruption and human rights violations. These events have gained worldwide support as a result of the rapid communication of information through technology, for example social media such as Twitter and YouTube. There are predictions that in the future the number of democracies will increase while the number of dictatorships will decline. Johnson and Johnson write that "a cooperative learning group is a microcosm of a democracy... a system in which citizens work together to reach goals and determine their future ... individuals have the right to express their ideas ... All group members are considered equal. Decisions result from careful consideration of all points of view."

Being a good collaborator can also lead to students developing their digital citizenship skills. As we have seen, social networking is leading to openness and sharing among numerous communities. As social networks are becoming an essential part of our lives students need to learn to use technology in safe, legal and responsible ways.

Another 21st century skill is that of being able to think creatively. Cooperative learning in schools can foster creativity and depth of thinking as larger numbers of diverse ideas are shared. Johnson and Johnson write:

Research shows that cooperative learning, compared with competitive and individualistic learning, increases the number of novel solutions, results in the use of more varied reasoning strategies, generates more original ideas and results in more creative solutions to problems.

Students who are involved in cooperative learning feel more enjoyment, involvement and satisfaction in their work. They also tend to be more open to the perspectives of others, which enhances the way they empathize with and support other students. This behavior of often carried into their online lives too - research has shown that online relationships are built from mutual goals and common purposes. For example almost every person I follow on Twitter is an educator and our collaborative communities can be defined by our hashtags. For teachers as well as for students, the more skilled we are at communicating and cooperating face-to-face, the more successful we will be online.

Online groups tend to be large. While I would say I have a few close friends that I relate to one-on-one and a larger group of acquaintances and colleagues that I relate to in groups or meetings, online I interact loosely with hundreds of people simultaneously and while we are in the same PLN we have a great diversity of perspectives. Communication and cooperation skills are important in this community and I've found that I've built up positive and supportive relationships with many people that I've never met in person. These people give me a different view of myself - they definitely shape my identify and self esteem. While I've met everyone who is in my Facebook network I have met very few of the people I interact with in Google+ or Twitter. Yet I still feel I know them - I know them through their writing, through their responses, through their views and insights, through their contributions. The past few years I've faced many challenges and my online relationships have pulled me through many of them.

This is what I'm finding: collaboration and cooperation help students (and teachers) to deal with conflicts and challenges and to become more creative thinkers. As time goes on, and with our increasingly interconnected world, these skills are necessary for survival in the 21st century.

Photo by Tantek Ã‡elik

Curiosity - one of the PYP attitudes

2012-01-17T21:34:00.000+01:00

Curiosity is a word that crops up in many different places in the IBO publication Making the PYP Happen. It's one of the PYP attitudes and as teachers we should encourage students to be curious about the nature of learning, about the world, its peoples and cultures. It's also mentioned in the IB Learner Profile as inquirers develop their natural curiosity through conducting inquiry and research. There are many different forms of inquiry and they are based on students wanting and needing to know more about the world (science) and understand how it is changing (social studies). Enthusiasm and curiosity are also seen as essential to language development, promoting the desire to read. Basically curiosity leads to students wanting to learn.

Problem-based learning can be one way of fostering a child's natural curiosity. For teachers this involves rethinking the curriculum so that units of inquiry are designed around authentic problems that incorporate the concepts we want students to understand. Since students are inquiring, it's important that these are complex problems that don't have one "right" answer. In order to address the problems students need to develop good questions, conduct a full investigation, think about the problem critically and from different perspectives, analyze findings, make decisions and reflect on the outcome in order to arrive at a solution. In doing so, students are thinking like professionals: like historians or scientists or economists, for example and are engaging in the sorts of thinking that they will need to be successful throughout their lives.

In 21st Century Skills, the key elements of problem-based learning are outlined, many of which I've seen successfully embedded into the teaching of the PYP units of inquiry. For example:

students inquire into key concepts that are a part of real-world problems
students have a choice in the content, the ways they learn and how they share their understandings
students are engaged in higher-level critical thinking and decision making
students often collaborate in small groups to share their knowledge with their peers
students receive feedback from peers as well as teachers
students have plenty of opportunities to revise their thinking throughout the unit
students are involved in planning their work, monitoring their own progress and reflecting on their findings
units are designed to include pre-assessment, formative assessment and summative assessment and students may themselves draw up the assessment rubrics
teachers and students share in the decision making so students feel more responsible for their own learning

The summative assessment, which we discuss right at the start of our planning process for each PYP unit of inquiry, provides the students with many different opportunities and ways to demonstrate their understanding of the central idea and concepts. Rather than just one "product", for example a game or a poster, our ultimate aim is that students are encouraged to communicate their understanding in many different ways. Some students may choose to make a presentation using a variety of different Web 2.0 tools, others may decide they would like to record an interview, make a movie, write a newspaper report or create a piece of art.

I think curiosity is a powerful thing: when inquiries are based on the students' own questions that have arisen as a result of them being posed real-world problems, it is their curiosities that drive the thinking and problem-solving that emerges.

Photo Credit: Curious Roy by Stefano Mortellaro

Teachers as Leaders - part 3

2012-01-15T18:27:00.002+01:00

Shortly before the Christmas holidays we were involved in an assessment workshop at school. In the session that I attended we were shown the above movie about motivation. I've seen it before and have also done a workshop with Dan Pink at Munich International School a couple of years ago, but at that time I focused on motivation and how it applied to students. This time as I watched it I wasn't thinking about motivating students, but I was thinking about motivation as it applies to teachers.

In my experience Dan Pink is absolutely spot on when he says that the 3 things that motivate people are autonomy, mastery and purpose. These are what lead to better performance and to more personal satisfaction - and of course this is relevant as we think of students owning their own learning but also in terms of how satisfied teachers are with their own roles. Teacher leadership is also a way of providing all 3 of these, but this involves changing the culture of schools that are management top-heavy. As Dan Pink says management can get in the way of autonomy and therefore engagement. If people are given more autonomy then they are more likely to devote their own time to getting better at something. Most teachers, after all, entered the teaching profession because they wanted to make a difference to children's lives and most teachers want to work in a place where they feel inspired and empowered. They don't necessarily want to become principals or administrators, but want to remain in the classroom connected to students and to have some autonomy and purpose there.

Providing teachers opportunities for taking on leadership roles gives teachers more of a sense of purpose. According to the Teacher Leadership Exploratory Consortium - it "encourages teachers to engage in, contribute to, take responsibility for and become accountable for what is happening in their schools. Promoting collaboration, support and teamwork among teachers will create a culture where all members share a strong sense of community and collective responsibility for student success. In turn, success in improving student learning will contribute to teachers' sense of accomplishment and professional satisfaction."

Suggestions for giving teachers more opportunities for leadership could involve creating new "hybrid" roles for teachers so that they are part-time in the classroom and part-time coaches, facilitators and mentors to other teachers. Other teachers who may be more interested in policies or curriculum may find a shared or distributed leadership structure could provide opportunities for them to get more involved in leadership roles. Teacher leaders are experienced professionals who are respected by colleagues and students - they have the skills to work with other teachers to improve student learning but they need time, space and scheduling to be changed to support this collaboration. Another suggestion for encouraging teachers to try out new ideas an innovative practices is to promote school and classroom-based action research. Sharing this with colleagues in other local schools is also a powerful form of professional development and again contributes to the sense of mastery and purpose.

Educating the iGeneration

2012-01-14T20:54:00.001+01:00

My mother prefers to talk on a landline. She has a mobile phone but carries it for "emergencies" and has never sent a text message or an email or used a computer and she's never even heard of Twitter. I use a mobile phone all the time, but mostly for texting, taking photos, accessing information and sometimes for listening to music. When I speak to my mother I Skype to her telephone. I send a lot of emails. Twitter is my lifeline - I use it to communicate with hundreds of other educators daily. My daughter doesn't use her phone as a phone at all. It's simply a mobile computer that she uses to send thousands of texts every month, to access her Facebook account and to let all her friends see where she is. She only uses email to send assignments to her teachers and thinks Twitter is pointless. Her Skype is on all the time and she's constantly video chatting with friends in other countries - these friends are so visible to us that it often seems like they are living in our house too! We're three different generations and we communicate with each other in 3 different ways.

Today I was reading Welcome to the iGeneration in Psychology Today. This great article by Larry Rosen outlines the different characteristics of the different generations. My mother, born before 1945, belongs to the Silent Generation (she isn't silent, but she doesn't often use technology to communicate).
Baby Boomers are those born between 1946 and 1964 - I'm one of these. They prefer face-to-face communication, talking on the telephone and emailing. Generation X are those born between 1965 and 1979. They communicate using mobile phones, email and IM.

The Net Generation are those born between in the 1980s and early 1990s. Both my son and daughter fall into this category and this name recognizes the impact of the internet in the lives of those born between those years. The education of my two children, especially their secondary education, has been dominated by the internet - they consume online media for hours every day - according to studies this generation is using media for more than 20 hours each day - though this is a total amount based on all the media they are using - often simultaneously - which shows how much they are multi-tasking. In fact studies report older teens aged 16 - 18 like my daughter can multi-task up to 7 different things at the same time - almost twice as much as can be done by the Baby Boomers like myself! As well as consuming media they also produce it - on social media sites such as Facebook and YouTube. They Skype, IM and above all else they text. The iGeneration are those born since the mid-1990s and who have been most heavily influenced by mobile technology. Our son, born in 1991, got a mobile phone when he was nearly 14. Our daughter, born in 1993, got hers when she was 11 but these were the first mobile devices they had. Now I even see toddlers and pre-school children playing with iPads and iPhones - their whole world is mobile.

Our schools are now filled with the Net Generation (secondary) and the iGeneration (primary). They are used to consuming and producing media and are great at multi-tasking. They are social, connective and creative. They write more than any previous generation and read more too. Online they are highly motivated, though this doesn't always carry forward into the non-mobile classroom. Clearly, looking at the new generation of students, there is a need to change our teaching in order to best meet their preferred learning and communication styles.

A wake-up call for the status quo

2012-01-14T15:20:00.001+01:00

You can't wait for success, you have to kick start it - Michael Fullan

I've read a lot recently about how education needs to change so that students can be successful in the 21st century, but it's equally true that teachers need to change to be successful too. There's no point in just planning opportunities for our students to develop 21st century skills - teachers also need to be experiencing and then modeling what we want the students to be able to do. Teachers as well as students need to be given opportunities for collaboration, critical thinking, problem solving, new ways of communicating and so on. If teachers are to become facilitators of learning, they must be empowered to be learners themselves. The culture of schools needs to change and it needs to change now so that schools become "laboratories of innovation".

Photo Credit: Innovation by Thomas Hawk

Teachers as Leaders - part 2

2012-01-14T03:00:00.000+01:00

Yesterday I wrote about the Teacher Leader Model Standards that have been developed by the Teacher Leadership Exploratory Consortium. As I've been looking to move more into a coaching role with our teachers in the second half of the year I've been interested to read through these standards and reflect on how they can help me to be more supportive of individual teachers' development. Below is a brief description of some of these standards that I feel are most relevant for me to consider as I move forward in the second half of this school year:

Fostering a collaborative culture to support educator development and student learning: in order to develop the teachers' skills so that they can effectively lead the ICT in their lessons to support their units of inquiry, it's important to understand the principles of adult learning. Another very important factor will be continuing to develop a collaborative culture and a collegial environment based on trust and respect.
Accessing and using research to improve practice and student learning: one of the most exciting conversations I've had in a long time was with Silvia Tolisano (@langwitches) yesterday evening. It was about the lack of research into the impact blogging can have on student writing - and therefore how we should engage in some action research to investigate this. Research creates new knowledge and should inform policies and practices. As a teacher leader in an inquiry based programme it's important to model inquiry as being important for teachers' ongoing learning and development.
Promoting continuous learning for continuous improvement: a teacher leader knows that education is changing at a rapid pace as a result of new technologies and that it's therefore important to design and facilitate job-embedded professional learning.
Facilitating improvements in instruction and student learning: a teacher leader shows a deep understanding of the processes of teaching and learning and is therefore able to advance the professional skills of colleagues. It's important for a teacher leader to be a continuous learner and to model reflective practices.

In a school that is characterized by micro-management, teacher leadership is probably not going to be valued and so it will be difficult to bring about such a transformation. In upcoming blog posts I'll be considering what needs to change in order to transform schools into organizations that support teacher leadership. How can we create a climate that values change, so that good teachers become even better?

Photo Credit: Summer Sidewalk Chalk Rainbow by D. Sharon Pruitt

Teachers as Leaders - part 1

2012-01-13T06:00:00.000+01:00

When I'm thinking about all the really important changes that are happening in schools these days, when I'm thinking about global projects such as Quad Blogging or the Flat Classroom project or countless others, these have all been initiated by teachers not by government ministers making new policies. Teachers as leaders are changing education.

Today I started dipping into the Teacher Leader Model Standards from the Teacher Leadership Exploratory Consortium. There's a lot to think about which is why I'm breaking this up over several posts. This group started in 2008 examining the research about how teachers as leaders are contributing to student and school success through collaborative teaching practice and improved decision making. These are the teachers who are creating a dynamic teaching profession for the 21st century.

The Teacher Leadership Exploratory Consortium has designed standards aimed at encouraging a professional discussion about teacher leadership and how it differs from administrate leadership in supporting student learning. The Consortium recognizes both formal and informal teacher leadership and that there are different routes to developing leadership: professional experience and mentoring, for example, as well as formal training or advanced degrees. Some teacher leaders never get a formal leadership role in their school, but instead choose to stay in the classroom and lead informally from there. Others may be selected by principals and given these positions as a stepping stone into administration.

Here are some questions the Consortium has asked:

Do you have to be a great teacher in order to be a teacher leader?
Can every teacher be a teacher leader?
How do we support teachers in leadership roles?

Let's start first of all with a definition of teacher leadership:

The process by which teachers, individually or collectively, influence their colleagues, principals and other members of the school community to improve teaching and learning practices with the aim of increased student learning and achievement. (York-Barr and Dale)

Here are some characteristics of teacher leadership:

Teacher leadership differs from other school leader roles: rather than having a position of responsibility, many teachers become true leaders in their schools simply through the respect of their peers. This could involve being continuous learners, being approachable and having the skills to influence the educational practice of their peers through the modeling of effective practices and working in collaborate teams.
Teacher leadership can enhance the capacity of the principal: it's actually a two-way thing as teacher leaders need the support of their principal to be truly effective, however a principal cannot be truly effective without the talents and expertise of the teachers.
"Collective leadership" has a positive effect on student achievement: this is to do with the influence that teacher leaders exert on decisions in their schools. Key findings are that collective leadership has a stronger influence on student achievement than individual leadership.
Teacher leadership requires a shift in the culture of schools
Teacher leadership necessitates new organizational structures and roles in schools in order to successfully meet the needs of 21st century learners: high performing schools are those where there is a culture of collaboration and professional inquiry.

One of the most interesting things I read today is that teacher leadership opportunities increase the retention of teachers - I would assume this means both in the school and in the profession. Teachers welcome opportunities to participate in decision making rather than being dictated to from above. This participation leads to a positive and supportive school culture and encourages teamwork. It also means that attention is being given to effective collaboration and communication.

The Teacher Leadership Exploratory Consortium has developed 7 standards for teacher leaders and I'll be exploring these more in an upcoming blog post.

Photo Credit: Leadership by Ed Gaillard

Learning Environments for the 21st Century

2012-01-12T18:30:00.000+01:00

The first time I was ever asked to give input into the design of a school was when I was in Amsterdam and the school was moving to a brand new campus. Teachers were able to look at 3 different models and eventually were able to give input into which building they thought best fit their needs. Once an architect had been chosen we met with the architect and gave a wish list of what we wanted. This included things like having all the classrooms of a particular grade arranged around a common area, and having the whole school build around an inner courtyard/garden that could be used as an outdoor learning space. I have to say the finished building was absolutely wonderful and it was a joy to teach in such a well designed space.

In Chapter 6 of the book 21st Century Skills of Bob Pearlman writes about the three ways students work: they use computers, they talk with other students and they make things - and these require different learning environments: a focused work environment, a collaborative work environment and a hand-on project work environment. In new schools, or schools that have been redesigned, students don't work in "classrooms" anymore. They work in studios, plazas and home bases - in fact they can work anywhere as 21st century schools are involved in project-based learning using mobile devices on a wireless network. Wireless internet has meant that all school spaces are now learning areas.

My school in Thailand had a 1:1 tablet programme in 2005, and it was interesting to see students working everywhere - in the corridors, on the steps of the gym, in little wooden huts outside in the play areas. Most of the time these students were working in groups, collaborating with others using their tablets to research their projects and to construct knowledge. They continued to use their tablets to show their understanding by making movies, models, podcasts, websites and so on, and published these on their digital portfolios.

During the time I was in Thailand, my school was constantly being rebuilt. There was a new gym, a new creative arts building, a new early years centre, a new high school building, a new library and a complete redesign of the elementary school by knocking down all the interior walls and then thinking about how this new space could be best used. When I arrived at the school, the Year 1s were just having a new floor added onto the top of the Early Years centre - these were all open classrooms with no doors between them and completely open access to a central area. In this area was also a special space for music and for art.

At the end of my first year at school the IT department took over the old music classrooms, knocked down all the walls turned them into 3 areas with glass between them. We actually couldn't do as much remodeling as I'd wanted because we knew that the entire building was going to be completely gutted within a couple of years, but we did turn an empty corridor into a place where students could drop in and use the desktop computers that we put there. When the carts of laptops were introduced to the primary classes, students had a lot of choice about where to use them. Some wanted to sit at a desk, others preferred to sit on cushions on the floor. I'm not sure what happened with the furniture when the school was redesigned (I'd left by then), but I'm sure that these new spaces would have had more flexible furniture that could be grouped in many different ways.

What I'm seeing when I read about schools that are redesigning their learning spaces is that there are spaces for individuals to work, for small groups and also for large groups - that these areas are often very flexible with moveable walls. I'm excited about the idea of moving to such a school - about the idea that architects are listening to what students and teachers want so that they can design the best spaces for them to learn in.

Evaluating the impact of technology on learning: the importance of the right resources – ITEM part 6

2012-01-12T12:57:00.000+01:00

The International Technology in Education Mark developed byNaace and Advisory Matters identifies many factors that impact on theintegration of technology into the curriculum and how this can improve studentlearning. Other important aspects toconsider are resources and the physical environment.

Many schools were built at a time before digital learningwas commonplace, therefore they are often made up of learning and teaching spaceswere not designed to reflect the place of technology in the curriculum. The ITEM rubric asks to what extent thephysical environment has been adapted or reorganized to reflect the school’svision for ICT. Are there flexible workareas to enable varied approaches to teaching and learning with ICT? Is there a wide range of high-qualityresources which meet students’ needs whenever and wherever learning takesplace? Have the digital learningresources significantly changed the learning culture both within and beyond theschool?

Technical support is also seen as playing an important rolein the effective use of ICT for improved teaching and learning. In my experience I have seen that this canbe make or break in a teacher’s willingness to use technology. Where technical support and maintenance isinadequate it’s likely there will be many technical problems that may take sometime to fix – this will obviously have a negative impact on how technology canbe used to improve student learning.

The procedure that the school goes through to purchase newresources will also be important. Arethe currently available resources evaluated for their quality and suitabilityfor improving student learning? Are newpurchases based simply on available funding, or are they perhaps heavilyweighted towards some areas of the school? Is the purchase of new technology in line with a plan based on theschool’s vision and does it take into account the current and future needs ofthe students?

I think that the various parts of the ITEM rubric can providea really useful tool for assessing whether or not technology is being usedeffectively to improve student learning. How do you assess success in the integrationof technology at your school?

Ideas in this post are based on the ITEM framework byNaace/Advisory Matters

Photo Credit: Scrapbook Sunburst Background by Webtreats

Evaluating the impact of technology on learning: the importance of professional development – ITEM part 5

2012-01-11T12:56:00.000+01:00

In the previous 4 posts, I’ve looked at the InternationalTechnology in Education Mark developed by Naace and Advisory Matters in anattempt to answer a question that was put to me recently about how we canassess the impact that the integration of technology is having on studentlearning. As well as considering the directimpact on student progress, the framework also considers how technologyleadership, collaborative planning and the explicit teaching of responsibledigital citizenship play a part in improving learning. None of these, however, will be veryeffective without professional development that encourages teachers to beinnovative and consider new and emerging technologies and practices and to pushthe boundaries of technology use with their students. Any rubric that assesses the impact oftechnology on student learning, therefore, must take account of theopportunities that teachers have for professional growth.

In considering how technology can impact learning, schoolsneed to identify the needs of teachers and to plan professional developmentactivities which meet these needs. Planning for strategic whole-school PD is important, but even moreimpact will be achieved by planning a wide range of professional developmentopportunities that meet individual teachers’ needs. Coaching and mentoring have been found to be particularlybeneficial in supporting teachers’ professional growth, as has theparticipation in professional learning communities (both local and global) thatare exploring how technology can improve student learning. Even more impact on student learning has beendemonstrated when school leaders participate in such learning communities.

Individual professional growth is important, however the sharingof effective practice will amplify the effect on student learning as it willlead to a wider adoption of effective practices both within and beyond aschool.

Ideas in this post are based on the ITEM Framework byNaace/Advisory Matters

Photo Credit: One Click Or Two? by Kaptain Kobold

Evaluating the impact of technology on learning: responsible digital citizenship – ITEM part 4

2012-01-10T12:55:00.000+01:00

Along with assessing the impact technology is having onstudent learning, it’s important to consider not just what the students aredoing, but also how they are doing it – they should be responsible, safe andlegal when using technology. Schoolsneed to take responsibility for developing policies that take account ofintellectual property and copyright. Inmany schools more needs to be done so that both teachers and students understandthe implications of these policies and to ensure that they are adhered to. Safety and the legal and ethical use oftechnology is something that can be embedded into many different areas of thecurriculum – it should be planned for school-wide and not just left up toindividual teachers to decide whether to teach these aspects or not. In addition teachers and administratorsshould themselves be principled and should model responsible socialinteractions and good ethical practices, for example only using licencedsoftware, or using media with creative commons licences.

Ideas in this post are based on the ITEM Framework byNaace/Advisory Matters

Photo Credit: Compositing The Creative Commons by Thomas Bower

Helping to digitize the world's books

2012-01-09T21:11:00.003+01:00

My son sent me this TEDtalk today. I had no idea before watching this that authenticating yourself as a human by using the reCAPTCHA words was helping to digitize the world's books. The video goes on to explain about Duolingo which helps people to learn a new language for free while they are translating the web.

Evaluating the impact of technology on learning: the planning process – ITEM part 3

2012-01-09T12:53:00.000+01:00

In order for technology to have an impact on learning,teachers must be planning for ICT integration. Part of the ITEM rubric deals with this planning. Are teachers able to identify appropriateopportunities for using technology in their teaching? Are they able to personalise learning todifferentiate instruction and address different learning styles andabilities? Does the school have a policyfor inclusion and are teachers aware of and trained in using the resources thatwill help students with different learning needs so that all learnersempowered? Are teachers taking accountof and building on prior ICT experiences that their students have had?

Encouraging students to become more globally aware is animportant aspect of 21^st century education. Technology can play an important role in thisand assessing how teachers take advantage of or make opportunities for studentsto connect, communicate and collaborate with others around the world could beone way of evaluating the impact of technology on 21^st centurylearning.

One part of the ITEM rubric addresses the extent to whichtechnology is used for teaching and learning. It asks whether technology provision is teacher and/or curriculum areadependent with little use of collaborative tools to promote student reflectionor to reveal and clarify students’ conceptual understanding, or whether insteadtechnology is a frequent and natural part of learning and teaching for allstudents across all curriculum areas and grades. It also asks whether teachers are modelingreflection using online or virtual environments.

For me, over the past 2 years I’ve tried to think about theuse of technology in terms of the SAMR model. If technology is just used to replace traditional teaching approaches,it’s really just being used to enhance the learning. If, on the other hand, technology is beingused to transform the learning it will provide opportunities for students to becreative or to extend their learning independently and beyond the school. Being able to ask teachers, as part of thecollaborative planning process, where they are on the SAMR model when they planfor their students to use technology gives me a good indication of the impacttechnology is having on learning.

The SAMR model can be used as a basis for discussions oftechnology integration across the whole curriculum. If all teachers are aware of the technologyskills that students have, then can plan to use these skills in other areas anddevelop the curriculum appropriately. Students can also make informed decisions about when to use technologyto support their learning and can transfer their skills to new situations.

One important factor to consider is whether teachers arecritically evaluating the impact of technology during their collaborativeplanning sessions. If teachers rarelyconsider the impact of technology on their teaching and on student learningthen I would conclude that the impact is probably very low. When technology is having a real impact on studentlearning, teachers will be able to identify these benefits and may themselvesbe sharing this knowledge with colleagues both within and beyond theschool. In the schools where I’ve seentechnology making a real impact, teachers are sharing what they are doing withthe colleagues, regularly updating class or personal blogs, and connecting withother educators through a variety of digital tools.

Ideas in this post are based on the ITEM Framework byNaace/Advisory Matters

Photo Credit: Hair, Beauty, TAA, eLearning and PP by Michael Coughlan

Rethinking how students learn - part 2

2012-01-08T20:21:00.004+01:00

Sometimes the most amazing coincidences happen. This morning I was looking on the internet for details about the upcoming ISTE conference in June, and discovered it will be held in San Diego. This brought to mind the last time I was in San Diego, as a presenter for a new literacies pre-conference for the International Reading Association that was organized by Donald Leu in 1999. Then this afternoon I was reading another chapter in 21st Century Skills - Rethinking How Students Learn, and I came across a reference to the characteristics of "new literacies" drawn up by Donald Leu and his colleagues several years ago:

these include the skills, strategies and dispositions for the effective use of emerging ICT tools, applications, media and environments
they are vital to economic, civic and personal participation in a globalized society
they evolve with innovation in technologies
they are multiple, multimode and multifaceted

At this point I'm at Chapter 4 in the book which is comparing frameworks for 21st century skills. Various frameworks have been drawn up by different bodies, such as P21 and ISTE. P21, for example, focuses on core subjects, 21st century content, learning and thinking skills, ICT literacy and life skills. ISTE focuses more on the standards for technology use including creativity and innovation, communication and collaboration, research and information fluency, critical thinking, problem solving and decision making, digital citizenship as well as the technology operations and concepts. Throughout the past year and a half or so, I've also been working with the SAMR model at school. The aim of all of these models is to use technology in ways that would be unimaginable without it - not just as a substitute for or an enhancement of what is already being done.

My reading today took me to a different framework too - that devised by Henry Jenkins which doesn't focus on technology but on the intellectual activity that students use when working with ICT. As I've never seen these before I thought it would be interesting to reflect on them in today's blog post. Here is a summary of Jenkin's digital literacies based on new media with a few comments added on by me:

Play - experimenting as a form of problem solving - I know this is something I've heard discussed a lot at school this year. Our new Assistant Principal has certainly stimulated a lively debate around the value of play and there has been a big difference in the way our outdoor spaces have been used by our Early Years students who spend the first part of every day outside exploring various activities.
Performance
Simulation
Appropriation - remixing media content - again this is something that I've seen students doing much more of this year.
Multitasking - the ability to shift focus as needed - I'm really interested to see this included as a digital literacy since multitasking is often seen in a negative way as leading to not doing anything particularly well.
Distributed cognition
Collective intelligence - pooling knowledge with others - this has become a reality this year with many of my classes as they are using Google Docs to collaborate on their research.
Judgement - evaluating the reliability and credibility of information sources - something we have been able to working very hard on as an ICTL department now that the library and IT teachers meet as a department every week.
Transmedia naviation - the ability to follow the flow of stories and information across multiple modalities - in our case we are having students create stories in multiple ways too.
Networking - searching for, synthesizing and disseminating information
Negotation - respecting multiple perspectives - a very important aspect of what the IB refers to as international mindedness.

I'm really interested to see this list because it validates many of the things I've been trying to do over the past few years as ICTL team leader - it gives me confidence that we have been on the right track!

The above list was drawn up by Jenkins in 2007. As technology continues to develop we have seen an explosion of Web 2.0 tools for learning in the past 5 years. While 5 years ago my students were mostly using the internet for finding out, with me publishing the presentations that showed their understanding - nowadays the students are more involved with the co-construction of knowledge directly online. As teachers have used social media tools to create PLNs, students have been using these tools to create, collaborate and share within their classroom community and, just as teachers have noticed that their skills have been improving as a result of being part of a PLN, our students have also found that their learning has been improving as a result of being part of a connected classroom learning community.

Photo credit: plumnutz via photopin cc

Evaluating the impact of technology on learning: student progress – ITEM part 2

2012-01-08T12:52:00.000+01:00

Over the past year there has been a lot of interest in theidea of flipping the curriculum. Inorder for schools to take this on-board, they have to be aware of the accessstudents have to technology not just at school but at home. To make the best use of technology at home,students must be confident that their skills are sufficient to use the computerindependently when they are outside the classroom and not actually being taught. This involves them being able totrouble-shoot and apply their knowledge to new technologies and situations –for example we are a Mac school but many students will be using PCs at home(though much of what we do is cloud-based so it doesn’t make that muchdifference).

The ITEM rubric addresses student progress: a limited an inconsistent use of ICT acrossthe curriculum or lack of opportunities to use technology in different subjectswill have only a minimal impact on student progress. Dramatic student improvement will only occurwhen all teachers are promoting the innovative use of ICT to develop thinkingand learning skills.

A lot has been written about how the use of technology canlead to students developing more positive attitudes towards learning. In the recent document from the IBO about therole of ICT in the PYP, teachers are encouraged to use technology to givestudents the opportunities to investigate, organize, communicate, collaborateand create. 21^st centuryskills also stress the importance of using technology for problem solving andcritical thinking. It should be possibleto assess how engaged students are in their learning and over time to see ifthis changes with the introduction of more or different technology: are students interested and enthusiasticabout learning? Are they motivated? Do they show sustained levels ofconcentration? Are they taking risks and trying new things? Positive responses to all of these questionswould indicate that students are having quality experiences and that they areconfident in using a wide and challenging range of applications across thewhole curriculum.

Ideas in this post are based on the ITEM Framework byNaace/Advisory Matters
Photo Credit: NASA Visualization Explorer (iPad app) by NASA Goddard Photo and Video

Five Minds - revisited

2012-01-07T13:59:00.002+01:00

I read the book Five Minds for the Future by Howard Gardner a couple of years ago. Today I returned to the blog posts I wrote at that time as I'm currently reading Chapter 1 of the 21st Century Skills book where Howard Gardner writes about the five minds.

It's always good to come back and revisit something - this time my thinking about the five minds is going a lot deeper and I'm thinking about different things. For example only by reading Chapter 1 this morning did I actually come to see that three of the minds (disciplined, synthesizing and creative) are cognitive, while the other two (ethical and respectful) and more to do with our humanity/behaviour. I've also started to think more about our role as educators in developing these five minds.

For example, if we take the disciplined mind, Gardner writes that it takes at least 10 years to become an expert or master in a discipline - so certainly for many this learning will start at school. However, in order to remain a master it's necessary to continually practice and move forward - an expert is therefore a lifelong learner. Towards the end of the chapter Gardner writes that the mind that is most likely to be at the greatest premium in the future is the synthesizing mind. He says: "those whose synthesis makes sense to others will become invaluable teachers, communicators and leaders."

Over the past year I've read a lot about the creative mind. Both Daniel Pink and Sir Ken Robinson have written about how important creativity is for our future. Gardner links creativity with both the disciplined and the synthesizing minds. He writes "the disciplined mind involves depth; the synthesizing mind entails breadth; and the creating mind features stretch". He says creation is unlikely to emerge in the absence of disciplinary mastery and synthesis: "it's not possible to think outside the box unless you have a box". However too much discipline or synthesizing may inhibit creativity. In addition creators must be risk-takers and must be willing to fail and use this failure as a valuable learning opportunity. They must be motivated and resilient and the best way for educators to encourage those attitudes is to provide challenges and even obstacles for our students to overcome.

Can the development of a respectful and ethical mind also be encouraged by education? Respect will certainly be fostered by the attitudes of those around, for example the peers or teachers that a student is with for 6 - 7 hours each day. A teacher can also open up the walls of the classroom through technology to enable contact with others that have different perspectives from the students - showing diversity as being something positive. Students are also exposed to the rights and responsibilities of being part of a school and classroom community. If they see the adults they come across behaving in an ethical way and reflecting on the decisions they are making, if the atmosphere of these communities is an ethical one then the students will be more likely to become ethical themselves. For example at the start of every year we talk with our students about being responsible when using the computers. We want our students to be safe and to be legal. We explain to the students about intellectual property and about how to attribute what they are using correctly. As adults we need to be modeling this too: it would be counterproductive for us to tell the students that they shouldn't be using copyrighted images or music in their work, for example, if they are doing it on a computer with unlicensed software installed.

This past year I've thought a lot about being ethical. Although most people do want to behave ethically as a result of self-interest this doesn't always happen. Gardner goes on to explain, "it does not suffice simply to keep one's own ethical house in order. One acquires a responsibility over broader realms of which one is a member." We are responsible not only for what we do, but for what we do not do. With students we tell them that if they are a bystander to bullying they are part of the problem. As adults, if we see wrongdoing going on and remain silent we are also bystanders. Gardner writes that we are "member[s] of an institution or profession with certain obligations attendant thereto. The whistle-blower assumes an ethical stance at the cost of a respectful relationship with his supervisor." He writes about our obligation to speak up and that if this is futile the only ethical course is to leave the organization. This is often a difficult thing for individuals to do.

At one of my previous schools I participated in a multiple intelligences workshop with Thomas Armstrong, as well as attending the Harvard Project Zero summer school. Therefore I'm aware of Gardner's earlier work on multiple intelligences. In Chapter 1 of the 21st Century Skills book, Gardner writes about how the five minds match with the multiple intelligences. He points out that the disciplined and creating minds draw on any or all of the intelligences, and that respect and ethics draw on personal intelligences. Ethics is also built on a logical intelligence. In recent times Gardner has been exploring a new intelligence - existential intelligence - which could be the basis of synthesizing.

As I reflect more on what I'm reading I see how important good schools are in fostering the development of each of the five minds and that this development is most likely to occur when individuals are in families and schools that value all five kinds of minds. As teachers it's important for us to be role models and to regularly show our students aspects of the five minds: discipline, synthesis, creation, respect and ethics.

Previous blog posts about Howard Gardner's Five Minds for the Future:
Five Minds

The Disciplined Mind - STEM, STEAM and SHAM

The Synthesizing Mind - Disciplinary and Interdisciplinary Thinking

The Creative Mind - Marching to the beat of a different drum

The Respectful Mind - Respect, Motivate, Achieve
The Ethical Mind - Ethical Education

Photo Credit: Brain by Dierk Schaefer

Evaluating the impact of technology on learning: technology leadership - ITEM part 1

2012-01-07T12:49:00.000+01:00

In November I was in Lisbon for the ECIS ITPre-Conference. In one of the workshopsessions I attended we discussed how we could assess the success of technologyintegration in our schools. As I believethat technology can completely transform learning, I was extremely interestedin finding out about the experience of teachers in other schools in assessingthe impact of technology. What Idiscovered was that most of the schools there didn’t really have an effectiveway of measuring this either – the teachers were just like me, searching for agood method of truly assessing the impact technology is having on learning. In the weeks since the pre-conference I’vebeen thinking about this question and have done a lot of reading aroundit. One useful tool I’ve found is the International Technology in Education Markdeveloped by Naace and Advisory Matters.

The first section of the ITEM framework deals withleadership and vision for ICT – using a rubric it’s possible to assess how thisimpacts on teaching and learning: fromthere being no expressed vision from those leading the technology through to avision that embraces the wider school community, the school environment andculture and that looks to the future. Aswell as having a vision, the rubric goes on to look at who developed the visionand therefore who has ownership of it. Hasthe vision just been developed by a few staff and Board members or by the wholecommunity? Is it understood andsupported by all? And is there a processto review or develop this vision, and a plan to implement the vision andmonitor its effects?

Leadership is seen as being extremely important in this framework. It’s clear that a simple focus on hardwareand systems will result in a low score. A school would also not score well on the rubric if the responsibilityfor leadership of the ICT rests with just the senior leadership team, thoughobviously this team is important in nurturing a culture of continuousinnovation with technology. Operational leadership for ICT should bedistributed and coordinated effectively across the whole school. However this is not enough – curriculumleadership is seen as vital so that the curriculum can respond dynamically tochanges in technology practices – teachers need to keep abreast of thesechanges and the culture should promote curriculum innovation. The focus needs to be on the use of technologyfor learning and the evaluation of the impact of technology on teaching andlearning. This can only happen if thereis a well-planned and whole-school approach to extending learning through ICT –and I’ve seen such an approach in both my previous schools with administrators,teachers, board members, students and parents all being involved in suchplanning.

I’m back to the same question, however. How can we monitor, assess and evaluate theimpact of technology integration? Whatevidence can we look for to inform our planning? This evidence must come from assessing thelearning experiences, assessing the development of digital citizenship in all membersof the school community, assessing the development of 21^st centuryskills such as innovation and creativity and assessing the professional growthof teachers in using technology. Basedon the ITEM rubric, I’ll be writing about these in forthcoming blog posts.

Ideas in this post are based on the ITEM Framework by Naace/Advisory Matters

Photo Credit: Caution: Future World and Local Leaders at Work and Play by Wesley Fryer

Rethinking how students learn

2012-01-06T15:51:00.000+01:00

I've started reading a new book in the past couple of days and already I have so many new things to think about! The book is entitled 21st Century Skills - Rethinking How Students Learn and is edited by James Bellanca and Ron Brandt. In the preface to the book Ron Brandt explains why a focus on skills is so important. He writes "effective teaching involves students using skills to acquire knowledge" and explains how important it is that these skill are embedded into the curriculum and taught along with content.

In the Foreword Ken Kay, the President of Partnership for 21st Century Skills gives a good overview of how we appear to be at an educational "tipping point". On the P21 website and in the Foreword of the book, is the following graphic which shows how all the elements of 21st century education come together: 21st century skills, the core academic subjects, the 21st century themes and the support systems that are needed to be in place to support the education that is necessary for students' futures.

Outcomes are seen as vitally important - only when we have determined the outcomes can we build and reshape the supporting infrastructure. Outcomes need to be defined in terms of the knowledge that students will need and the skills they will need to acquire.

Many people ask why we need a different model of education for the 21st century. Aren't the skills we are talking about, such as communication and collaboration, the ones that have been important throughout history as civilizations have moved forward? And do we, only 11 years into the century, really know what skills our students will need for their future? The answer to these questions is that the past few years have seen a very different world than before, especially in the area of globalization, which has been encouraged by advances in technology. We have moved from the industrial age to the service age. When I consider the students who have taken my IB DP Geography classes in the past few years and who are now at university, I would predict all of them will end up in the service sector, and it seems clear that most of them will have jobs in many different fields over the course of their working lives. While we don't know what new jobs will emerge, these students will need to be able to learn new things and adapt to new situations as the world continues to change. They will need to be innovative and creative and will need to be critical thinkers and problem solvers.

The big difference between 21st century education and education that went before it is the embedding of the skills into the curriculum. In my mother's day, for example, and even when I was at school, we didn't do much problem solving or decision making. Those skills weren't seen as important because when we left school and went to work most of us expected to be told what to do - if we had a problem or if a decision had to be made we were expected to take that to someone higher up rather than make it ourselves. In today's "flat" world there is more scope for autonomy and decision making at every level - we are all expected to be self-directed and responsible for our own work and as Daniel Pink said in a workshop I did with him a couple of years ago, autonomy, mastery and purpose are the factors that lead to more personal satisfaction with our work and therefore to more motivation and ultimately a better performance.

The 21st century themes that appear on the Partnership for 21st Century Skills Framework, such as global awareness, financial, economic, business, entrepreneurial, civic, health and environmental literacy are not ones that were covered at school in my day (I suppose the nearest I came to any of these was doing A'levels in geography and economics). In my day academic rigor was defined by the "3 R's" and the coverage of a large amount of content - and knowing this content was more important than understanding it. Today content is not so important, as information is changing constantly, so today's students need the skills to be able to apply previous experience to new situations and they need the ability to be lifelong learners because they will need to keep learning as the situations they find themselves in change.

The implications for teachers are huge: they need to be engaging students in more inquiry and project-based learning. They need to be encouraging students to develop higher-order thinking skills. Teachers themselves need professional development and support to be able to do this.

Does technology play a part in this? Obviously it can if the technology is used in such a way as to promote 21st century skills and to support 21st century themes. But just putting an interactive whiteboard into a classroom or giving a student a laptop is not automatically going to bring about the changes in learning that we so obviously need. We need to rethink how students learn and we need to rethink what they are learning. We need to ensure that 21st century skills are embedded into all curriculum areas, into all teaching, into all assessments and into the professional development of the teachers who are planning the new learning environments.

Graphic taken from the Partnership for 21st Century Skills website, used via Wikipedia with a Creative Commons license please follow this link for license.

Content –v- meaning: disrupting our thinking

2012-01-06T11:23:00.000+01:00

There are a lot of interesting ideas in The Shallows byNicholas Carr and today I’ve been thinking about how the Web affects ourconcentration, how it disrupts our attention. While I can appreciate thegeneral trends that Carr writes about, and while I feel I’m more alert to howthese trends may affect my students, I’m not really sure how relevant many ofthese are to me personally – though this may be because the whole of myschooling and half the time that I’ve been teaching happened before I startedusing the internet.

Today I’ve been considering content and meaning, inparticular as part of an inquiry based programme like the PYP which is conceptrather than content based and which involves students constructing their ownmeaning. We provide our students withboth online and print resources for them to use in their investigations, and ofcourse many of the online resources have links to other web pages too. Are we hurrying our students through thesepages? Do the links encourage them tomove on from the resource pages we direct them to? Has the way that I’ve taught students tosearch within a web page using the Command-F keys actually encouraged asuperficial reading of the page, as students go straight to the relevantsection which is connected with the content they are searching for? Am I also guilty of promoting the trend identifiedby Nicholas Carr when he writes: “The strip mining of relevant content replacesthe slow excavation of meaning”?

There is a lot of information out there. I’m wondering: do I need to give studentsmore time to reflect on it and go deeper with their thinking?

Photo Credit: Shadow existence by Daniela Hartmann

A vision without a plan

2012-01-05T21:38:00.002+01:00

Quite recently I remember hearing the expression "a vision without a plan is simply a hallucination". Therefore if my goal is to provide coaching to our teachers during the last 6 months of the school year, I know what I need is a plan as to how this is going to happen. As I've been thinking about this I've been reading Michael Fullan and Jim Knight's article "Coaches as System Leaders". In the article they write about the factors that limit the impact coaches can have on change and improvement in pedagogy:

Giving coaches the wrong work: this is mainly because the role of a coach is poorly defined and they are given work to do that doesn't help teachers to improve instruction.
Unclear goals for the professional development coaches are doing with teachers.
Lack of training for coaches.

These are obviously things I want to avoid. Training is going to be difficult in the last 6 months of the year, but hopefully I can find many online resources to help me.

One really useful article I've read recently is "The Year We Learned to Collaborate" by Janice Silva and Kathia Contreras. This explains the steps that one school in Mexico take when using collaborative coaching which involves teachers critically evaluating each other's teaching practice with the aim of enhancing it for all. The steps they go through are:

Plan - grade level or subject area teachers use their planning time to collaborate on designing a demonstration lesson. The demonstrating teacher shares the plan with colleagues who review it and give input. The demonstrating teacher may also ask for specific observation during the lesson, for example of how individual students are working together, or about whether all students are on-task.
Demonstrate and observe - all members of the team watch the demonstration lesson and complete a standard form with both positive and critically constructive feedback.
Debrief - this ideally happens on the same day as the demonstration lesson. The observers use their notes to give feedback and suggestions.

I was really interested to read the protocol that teachers go through at this debriefing session:

Clarifying questions - the observers ask practical questions about specific things they have noticed and the demonstrating teacher responds. After this the demonstrating teacher moves to a place a little apart from the rest of the group and observed the next 2 steps.
Warm feedback - the observers discuss together the positive things they noticed using the lesson, while the observing teacher just listens and makes notes. Observers only address other observers, not the demonstrating teacher, therefore they always refer to this teacher in the 3rd person.
Cool feedback - the observers discuss their critical feedback and give suggestions. The demonstrating teacher cannot respond at this point, but certainly is able to reflect on these comments.
Teacher's response - the demonstrating teacher rejoins the group and gives responses to the feedback.

When I read this at first I thought it might seem a bit of an uncomfortable situation to be in for both the demonstrating teacher and the observers but it seems that at this school collaborative coaching and learning is overwhelming seen as beneficial both in terms of professional development and also in terms of a new trusting and open relationship between teachers. I went on to read further about this protocol, which has been based on the Tuning Protocol devised by the National School Reform Faculty. The Tuning Protocol is based on teachers sharing samples of student work rather than actual observation of a lesson. As always, when I read something like this I'm asking myself whether this could be something that could be adapted by myself for using with our teachers.

I can see that classroom observation can be a very powerful way of developing collaborative coaching and it's definitely something I'd like to try - but it will only work with the support of my administration and the teachers in a grade level. It would mean having to get cover for the teachers who are observing the lesson and also having them make more time for the debriefing session. I'm not sure how feasible this might be as I sense that teachers are already snowed under with work and new initiatives that have been introduced recently, but I also feel that unless I actually ask the question the answer is always no. Possibly I might find one grade level that are willing to give this a go in the second half of the year.

Time is always an issue. Today I followed a link on Twitter to Zen Habits and read the following:

If you want to make your new year count, you'll need to be intentional - not by setting goals, but by making space in your life for what really matters.

I think this basically sums up my dilemma. If this is really important (which it is because it's my personal goal to investigate coaching during the last half of this school year) then I need to make the time and space for it to happen. There's no point in having a vision, without a plan to make sure that vision is achievable.

Photo Credit: I mean, I like her by Twmâ„¢

Multi-tasking: are we doing more or are we doing less?

2012-01-05T11:19:00.000+01:00

When we first moved to Thailand, seven years ago, my son wasone of the first students to be part of the tablet programme at our school. He’d had a laptop for three years before thisto help him with his work at his old school, but we hadn’t had wirelessinternet at home and there wasn’t really the issue of him multi-tasking or ofbeing constantly connected and constantly distracted. Once he had his tablet the expectation wasthat he would be using it at both at school and at home for almost all his workand as a parent I did initially worry about how being constantly online wouldaffect his concentration and the standard of his work – whenever I saw himusing his tablet I could see multiple windows open and all sorts of messagespopping up. In retrospect, these worrieswere completely unfounded.

In The Shallows, Nicholar Carr writes about how the growinguse of screen-based technologies has led to the development of ourvisual-spatial skills, but a weakening of our capacities for deepprocessing. He writes that what we aredoing when we multi-task is that we are becoming more skillful at a superficiallevel.

Actually I disagree. The IB diploma is probably the hardest programme for 16-18 year olds inany educational system around the world. I don’t think I would have coped well with the demands of it at thatage. It’s the sort of programme where todo well you have to be an all-round student, dedicated and hard working for theentire 2 years of the programme: thereare constant deadlines for internal and external assessments as well asstudying for the final exams. Theprogramme also requires time spent in action and community service, anawareness of the theory of knowledge and the writing of a 4,000 word extendedessay. I don’t think it’s possible togain the IB diploma if everything is just surface and superficial. Perhaps the tablet programme didn’t work forall the students who used it during their final 4 years of school, but for myson it did. Yes there was a lot moremulti-tasking, yes there was a lot more distraction, but there was also a lotof deep processing going on too. I thinkthe tablet did help my son to multi-task, and as I result I think he ended updoing more, and doing it deeper too, and definitely getting better results thanhe would have without it.

I’m seeing the same thing with my daughter too. While her school doesn’t have a 1:1programme, she’s online most of the time she’s at home and multi-tasking mostof the time too. What I notice is that she’sworking hard and thinking deeply. Withboth my children, I’m seeing that multi-tasking is something they are doingwith relative ease, and something that is leading to them becoming more ratherthan less productive. For myself, too,I’ve found that the more I multi-task the better I get at it. Often I’m not trying to do two things simultaneously(for example I couldn’t have a skype conversation at the same time that I’manswering emails, or read a blog post at the same time as sending a textmessage), but I do things in shorter and more focused bursts. For example I may read a blog article, then Imay check my Twitter stream, then I may check my email, then I may send a text– all in the space of a few minutes. Perhaps, though, this is “serial-tasking”, doing lots of short, singlethings one after the other, rather than true multi-tasking.

We have stripped out some of the things that did cause us tobe distracted while we were working (for example we don’t have a television andthat’s probably the single best things we’ve done to remove mindlessdistraction at home while we’re working - when we had a television wedefinitely did less – it was much more intrusive than always being online).

Therefore on a personal level I disagree with a lot of whatI have read about multi-tasking. Overthe past 5 years or so I’ve multi-tasked more than ever before in my life. I’ve read more than before too, and I’vewritten more. For me, I’m sure thatmulti-tasking has led to me doing more.

Photo Credit: My Second Eye by Jenny Spadafora

The BBC's Tech Picks for 2012

2012-01-04T21:12:00.000+01:00

At the end of 2011 the BBC asked a number of business technology experts what they predicted for the coming year. Here are a few of their predictions. This article was passed on to me by one of my colleagues (thanks Paul!)

More tablets (iPad, Amazon)
Open Graph technology becoming more widely used
Cloud computing - apps will continue to develop
Realtime content
Social TV
Social media and email becoming more closely integrated
New forms of energy
Security - biometrics instead of passwords
"Corporate springs" - customers have a bigger say in what companies do
Generic top level domains
Continued growth of smart mobile devices, including their use as transaction authentication devices
Location based marketing
BYOD
Further evolution of gaming environments

Read the full report from the BBC here.

Photo Credit: Lit Within by Justus Hayes

A technology of forgetfulness?

2012-01-04T11:23:00.005+01:00

On a school day, I usually start the morning by scanningthrough my Twitter stream as I eat my breakfast. I click on interesting links, which open innew tabs. During the course of the day Iwill read through these articles or blog posts, and the ones I want to save Iwill add to my Delicious/Diigo account. At the end of the day I might not remember every single article I’veread, but I know that the ones I want to read again can be pulled upeasily. However I'm wondering - does this habit of clicking on the Bookmark on Delicious or the Diigolet bookmarklet actually tell my brain that I don't need to remember it?

For example recently I came across a new Web 2.0 tool formaking a timeline – I didn’t need it right away but thought it might be usefulfor our Grade 5s later in the year as they move into their Where We Are inPlace and Time unit of inquiry. When thattime comes I’ll be able to find it again by searching my bookmarks for timelines and will beable to suggest it to the Grade 5 teachers, along with other online timelinesthat they might like to have their students use. But right now, for the life of me, I can’tremember what timeline tool it was. Iknow it wasn’t Dipity or Capzles or TimeToast, as I’ve used those before. This is a new one and I found it less than amonth ago – but having added it to Delicious/Diigo I’ve already forgotten it.

Perhaps I’m just getting old, or perhaps I’m now using theinternet as a replacement for my personal memory. Right now I’m asking myself, is memorizationobsolete? Is my memory just like anindex – pointing me to my Delicious/Diigo account whenever I want to findsomething? Am I just storing informationdigitally, and not storing it in my brain? And if so, should I even be worried about this, since recall is just alower order thinking skill and I don't need to overload my brain with remembering all these little things?

Before the holidays our Grade 4 students were doing a mathsunit on data handling. I showed thestudents how to use the spreadsheet in Google Docs and how they could useGoogle Forms to make a survey to collect information that could then be turnedinto a graph with a simple click. Italways amazes me how easy it is to create fairly complex graphs thesedays. When I was at school, it used totake me ages to make a pie graph. I hadto add up all the numbers, divide into 360, multiply each separate number bythis answer, use a compass and a protractor to draw the circle and divide itup, colour it in and so on. I don’tremember there being much time for actually analyzing or interpreting thegraph. Today, when creating a pie charttakes a matter of seconds, it’s possible to spend much more time on thesehigher-order skills, as a result I feel that our Grade 4s have a betterunderstanding of data than I had at that age. Using the computer to make a graph is definitely a way of creating more time to engage in higher-order thinking.

Is the same true of storing information online instead ofstoring it in my head? Does this give mybrain more time for thinking creatively rather than just recalling information? Many would argue that this is not the case –that we are now having information pop in and out of our short-term memorieswithout it ever becoming part of our long-term memories. The case with the timelines is typical: I can remember the timelines that I’veactually used with students over the past couple of years – but the more recentone that I found and stored ready to be used or suggested later I can’t recallat all – it’s left little or no trace in my mind despite the fact that I did set up a trial account and tested it out to see how easy it would be for studentsto use before then adding it into my Delicious/Diigo account. It’s a bit scary really how adept my brainhas become at forgetting, now inept it has become at remembering. However since I can retrieve this timelinetool just with a few clicks anytime I want it, am I crazy to be worrying aboutthis forgetfulness - what do you think?

Photo Credit: Des étoiles dan les yeux by Biscarotte

PYP Attitude: Appreciation

2012-01-04T11:03:00.002+01:00

I'm often looking for resources that I can use with students to reinforce the PYP attitudes. Attitudes are one of the five essential elements of the programme, along with knowledge, skills, concepts and action. The development of personal attitudes towards people and the environment and towards learning are seen as important elements in developing international mindedness and vital to the well-being of individuals and groups.

Appreciation is one of the PYP attitudes. It's defined as appreciating the wonder and beauty of the world and its people. As I was looking at the above TEDx talk this morning I was thinking about how I could use it with students to discuss appreciation.

Appreciation can be brought into a number of units of inquiry. For example one of the units studied by students every year is How We Express Ourselves which involves students in an inquiry into the ways we discover and express our ideas, feelings, beliefs and values. It also includes how we appreciate the aesthetic. With our Grade 4s over the past 2 years I've done a photography course during this unit and have always been amazed at the wonderful images the students create. I'm thinking I could definitely use this movie at some point with these students.

Louis Schwartzberg, the creator of this movie, explains that the message he wants to convey is that we should be grateful and also that we should give back to those less fortunate than ourselves. I think this involves empathy - the ability to imagine oneself in another's situation so as to be open-minded and reflective about the perspectives of others. Open-mindedness and being reflective are important attributes of the IB Learner Profile.

Louie Schwartzberg is an award-winning cinematographer, director, and producer whose notable career spans more than three decades providing breathtaking imagery for feature films, television shows, documentaries and commercials.

Everywhere, somewhere or nowhere?

2012-01-03T23:10:00.002+01:00

To be everywhere is to be nowhere - Seneca.

This Christmas holiday I’ve been in the UK with myfamily. We’ve been staying with mymother who doesn’t have a computer or internet connection, and therefore havebeen unplugged for most of the time. Usually during these 3 weeks I would have read hundreds of blog posts,tweets and online articles, I would have been in contact with dozens of friends,colleagues and other educators everywhere. Instead I brought one magazine with me (The October edition ofEducational Leadership about coaching) and downloaded one book, for ourupcoming reading group, onto Kindle Cloud Reader on the iPad (The Shallows byNicholas Carr) which I could read offline. I’ve therefore had a lot of opportunity toreflect both on coaching and on what the internet is doing to our minds as I’vespent the time reading about just these two things.

I have really appreciated this time where we have all beenunplugged and where we have spent our evenings playing games and talking toeach other. It made me appreciate howseldom we do this and just how valuable it is for us as a family. Often in the evenings at home we are all onlineon our individual computers and oblivious to what is going on around us – whatNicholas Carr refers to as “a mind consumed with a medium”. Our minds are everywhere – or nowhere – butthey are certainly not together! It mademe realize that I really need to work more on balance in 2012 and that I needto make sure that my family and I spend more time together somewhere without alot of external distractions.

However we’re back to being connected again and the next fewblog posts will be about my thoughts based on what I’ve read over the holidays.

Photo Credit: Plug Face by Jake Mates

Building Education on a Solid Foundation

2012-01-01T11:06:00.000+01:00

A guest post by Joseph Baker

Whatdid you want to be when you grew up?

Whateverthe case, the funding will certainly benefit those schools that foster earlyeducation.

Cultivators -v- hunter-gatherers

2011-12-30T13:28:00.002+01:00

We are evolving from being cultivators of personalknowledge to being hunters and gatherers in the electronic data forest. - Carr

This is another quotation from The Shallows that I've thought alot about over the holiday period. Froma personal point of view I disagree with this. There are times when I am a hunter-gatherer, for example when I want tobuy something. Recently when I decidedto buy a new external hard drive I searched online to see if it was better toorder it and have it delivered using Amazon, or if it was cheaper to drive to ashop and just pick one up. I alsosearched to see where the nearest store was that had them on special offer andthen used Google maps to find out how to get to the store. Just like the hunter-gatherer, this wassomething I needed that day. Theinformation didn’t need to be stored anywhere in my long-term memory – afterbuying what I wanted I was probably never going to use that information again.

Most of what I use the internet for, however, is connectedwith my role as a teacher. The peopleI follow on Twitter are mostly educators, the links I follow via their tweetsare ones that make me think deeper about teaching and learning, or they areones that point me to online resources or apps that I can use with mystudents. The blog posts I read push mythinking in new directions or offer me a different perspective. This is definitely a case of cultivating my ownpersonal knowledge. Nobody at my schoolis encouraging me to do this, so it is purely for myself and it has taken me deeper and further as an educator thanany other form of professional development in the past 3 years.

To me, what you get out of your online connections is verymuch determined by what you put in. Thehunter-gatherer doesn’t invest much in the local environment – he takes what heneeds to eat that day and probably roams around over a large area as he doesit. The cultivator on the other handinvests a lot into a small patch of earth. He’s concerned with the quality of what he grows there, he nurtures hiscrop. With a PLN it’s the same. You have to put something in in order to getsomething out. It involves giving asmuch as it involves taking.

Photo Credit: Sour Cherries by Audrey

Reflection, equality and choice: it's all about relationships

2011-12-26T17:16:00.003+01:00

I’m starting to think further about how to implement my goalof doing more coaching in the second half of the school year. Having worked with teachers for a number ofyears to improve their technology skills and build their confidence in using technologyto transform student learning, I’m trying to identify what has already beenachieved to create the right conditions for success in this area.

One of the important things that I think I’m always clear onis that while I may be the person with a greater knowledge of the technology,the classroom teachers are the ones with the deeper knowledge about their unitsof inquiry and their students. When weco-plan it involves dialogue, sharing our ideas and making decisionscollaboratively. In class the studentsknow which teacher will be most able to help them with their questions – it isa technical question about how to do something or is it a question about thecontent or how they can show their understanding? While the model used so far has been one ofco-planning, co-teaching and co-assessing rather than actually coaching, therelationships that we have already built up will be the foundation for movingforward in the second half of the year.

Over the past 2 years I’ve worked hard on givingchoices. Last year I encouraged teachersin a grade level team to think hard about the choices they were making abouthow technology could support what they wanted to do. Each teacher in the grade level wasencouraged to make his or her own choices. For some the technology was used more for the tuning in or finding outparts of the inquiry cycle, other teachers wanted to concentrate more on usingtechnology to help students sort out what they had investigated or perhaps toshow their understanding. Even when ITwas used by all students as part of their summative assessment, I encouragedteachers to give the students a choice of what they wanted to use. Again I think that handing over of thedecision making to teachers and their students has played an important role insetting the groundwork for the choices that teachers will be making as part ofa coaching process. When teachers feelthey are in control of their own learning, a coach is someone who can suggest differentoptions and it is up to the teacher to make the most meaningful choices fortheir students.

Seeing classroom teachersas equal partners in a coaching model, and allowing these teachers to maketheir own choices is easy as our relationship is already based on mutual trustand respect. At our collaborativeplanning meetings teachers can express their opinions and also theirconcerns. Often when a teacher wantsto do something but has concerns about how it will actually work, trust is themost important factor in being able to move forward. I’ve had teachers who have initially beenskeptical about an outcome, but have trusted that it would work, and then beenenthusiastic with the results. Sometimesit’s just a matter of changing practice by trying something new and seeing howsuccessful it is, but in order to make that leap there has to be trust. Encouraging teachers to then reflect on whythese changes have been so successful, empowers them to learn from thisexperience and to plan on using technology in other new ways in the future. This way, the teachers have not only adoptednew practices, they have also made them their own.

Photo Credit: More than Pride: Equality, equal rights by Timothy K Hamilton

Coaching –v- Evaluating

2011-12-25T15:09:00.002+01:00

As one of my personal goals this year is to further explorecoaching and mentoring with our teachers, my first step towards achieving thisis to look at what the research says about different types of coaching. Today I’ve been reading the October issue ofEducational Leadership where Bob and Megan Tschannen-Moran write about theimportance of making a clear distinctionbetween the coach and the evaluator.

I was interested to read this in the light of my currentrole at school being redefined for next year for whoever is newlyrecruited. The updated job description contains an evaluation of teacher’s IT skills. When discussing it, I felt a little uncomfortableabout this change, but I couldn’t really put my finger on why. Surely an evaluation of a teacher’s technologyskills must be the first step towards supporting an improvement inperformance? However as I read todayevaluation can “provoke frustration, fear and a sense of failure. It can stimulate resentment and resistance,undermine self-efficacy and increase unwillingness to change. In short it can make performance improvementless, rather than more, likely.”

I’m interested to read about why evaluation typically leadsto little growth or development: that evaluation istypical of bureaucratic organisations based on a hierarchy of authority andstandardised work processes, whereas development, on the other hand, is typical of professionalorganisations that encourage inquiry and reflection. In bureaucracies “rules replace trust,communications become constrained, people hide problems, management becomesintrusive and cooperation is withheld.” Bureaucracies are described as unhappy “shape up or ship out” cultures.

Can coaching change this culture? Bob and Megan Tschannen-Moran argue that ifadministrators ask coaches for information regarding teacher performance thiscompromises the function of coaches. “Evaluation guarantees … agreed on minimum standards , coaching invites[teachers] to grow beyond those minimums” Carrot and stick approaches may lead to teachers meeting minimumstandards but it won’t encourage creativity or motivation. However trust will encourage a safeenvironment that empowers teachers to take on new challenges and be responsiblefor their own professional growth.

Bob and Megan Tschannen-Moran write that research shows that3 principles are important for coaching to succeed:

1. Teacher-centred: if the coach demonstrates, advises and teaches this undermines thelearning. Coaches need to ask questionsrather than give answers – they trust that teachers can be responsible for theirown learning and decide the best way to move forward.

2. No-fault: if the coach watches a lesson in order to evaluate and correct what iswrong, this can turn into performance assessment which saps motivation. Listening with empathy, however, can motivateteachers to be more engaged in their own professional development.

3. Strength-based: If the emphasis is on theproblems, the responsibility for changing these is on the coach. Starting with the positives allows teachersto build their own goals to build on their strengths.

Reflection

How can this article move me forward in my coachingrole? I’m glad that my current jobdescription doesn’t involve evaluating teacher’s skills, so I already feel thatmany of the negative possibilities are unlikely to occur. Looking at the 3 principles for success I feelI need to work more on the first one as I spend too much time demonstrating andteaching. As teachers move intoincorporating IT more in their everyday lessons, I see my role should beidentifying their strengths and encouraging them to build on these:

· ask more questions,

· listen with empathy to the answers,

· focus on the strengths,

· encourage teachers to be more responsible fortheir own professional development.

I think it’s achallenge to make a real difference in the remaining 6 months, but I’m going togive it a go!

Photo Credit: Pencil Sculpture by C. A. Muller

My 11 of '11

2011-12-20T20:54:00.000+01:00

Tonight is my last night of blogging in 2011. Tomorrow I'm heading to England to visit my mother who doesn't have an internet connection - so there'll be no more posts until 2012. So for my last post I'm going to link to my 11 favorite posts of the year.

I've come a long way in my thinking this year - as an educator and as a person and I came to realize that I have to move to a school where I can grow some more. I've been actively looking for someone who can mentor me and encourage that growth, who can make me the best teacher that I can be. I think I've done a good job where I am. I think the technology is seen in a completely different way than it was a couple of years ago. I don't think anyone will ever want to go back. I leave knowing that I've made a difference. But I'm excited to be starting a new journey and I'm impatient to start it too. I'm really looking forward to getting 2011 out of the way and starting on 2012!

Here's my 11 of '11. These are not the most popular posts, but I think they are the ones that I enjoyed writing the most.

January: An explosion of blogs
February: The importance of the right bus driver
March: I see, I think, I wonder .... about art
April: Making a difference
May: What's sauce for the goose is (not) sauce for the gander: giving students a choice
June: Using IT for assessment: For learning, As learning, Of learning
July: Tech-savvy leaders -v- Lead learners
August: What I've learnt about IT by climbing Swiss mountains
August: Evolution or Revolution, Reformation or Transformation?
September: Information literacy, digital literacy and digital citizenship
October: Digital gifts

Photo Credit: Indian Summer at the Gallery from the Art Gallery of New South Wales

Dissolving the boundaries

2011-12-20T15:27:00.001+01:00

Once information is digitized, the boundaries between media disappear - Nicholas Carr

Today I'm thinking about Chapter 4 of The Shallows, our upcoming bookclub read. As I read this chapter I reflected on my own journey using the internet with students and how during a few short years it matched the history of modern media played out over centuries. The first web pages I ever made with my class, back in 1995, were basically made up of just black text on a white web page as the students typed up their stories and saved them on floppy disks and our ESL teacher uploaded them to a Dutch server that hosted our work. This wasn't so different from the way the students would have written their stories for printing out on paper. This is what the first web pages we published looked like:

Later that year we discovered how to add photos (at first just black and white photos) and our site looked like this:

It's very basic, but at this time in 1996 our school didn't have an internet connection and we didn't have any web authorizing or design software so it was a matter of just adding simple codes to what we were doing. As we made more pages we experimented with scanning in pictures the students had drawn, we took more photos and we found images online that we wanted to use too.

The next thing we were able to add were sound files. This wasn't until a couple of years later when students were doing a project called Pole to Pole, based on the Michael Palin TV series, where each group of students chose a different line of longitude and travelled along it from the North Pole to the South Pole, investigating the countries on the way. We found freeplay midi files that we could add on based on the music of the countries the students were "visiting".

The next thing my students started doing was making their own movies, using iMovie. Again we were able to add these by putting them on the school web server and just making simple links to these. It wasn't possible to embed movies at that time.

When I moved to Thailand and wanted to phone back to Europe I started to investigate Skype. I didn't yet see the possibilities of using it with students, but I was grateful that it allowed me to keep in touch with my family. I remember being told I couldn't install Skype on my computer at work as it would "bring the whole network down". I tried it and it didn't so my next step was to get a web cam and balance it on top of the computer so that the people I was talking to could see me too. As well as my computer I had an iPod for listening to music, a television, a music centre that contained a radio, a mobile phone and a camera. I had no idea what was around the corner and that all these technologies were soon to combine in a smartphone.

These days I read that the average American spends at least eight and a half hours a day looking at a screen of some sort - a television or a computer or a phone. Clearly the time we have left to read print publications is now much less than previously - yet in general the trend is that we are all reading more than we did 20 years ago, before the internet - it's just that we're reading most of it online.

In the past the media we used was very specialized - text and images were found in books and magazines, but not sound or moving images. TV and cinema dealt in visual media, but not really in text. Radio and telephones transmitted sounds. We used a pocket calculator for our maths and looked up information in encyclopedias. However with the digitization of information, and with access to all this information on a smartphone, the boundaries between the different media have dissolved as many different kinds of information can be accessed and combined on a single device.

In Chapter 4 of The Shallows Nicholas Carr writes, "when old technologies are supplanted by new ones, the old technologies often continue to be used for a long time, sometimes indefinitely ... but the old technologies lose their economic and cultural force. It's the new technologies that govern production and consumption, that guide people's behavior and shape their perceptions."

The journey from the printing press to being able to access multi-media on a device small enough to fit into your pocket took many hundreds of years. My 11 and 12 year old students from 1995 are now in their late 20s. In just 15 years they have travelled through the whole history of media - from handwriting their work for just me to read, as people did before the days of printing, through typing up their work and publishing it for a larger audience, through audio and video to a point where they are now able to create mashups of many different types of media and to share what they have created with the whole world.

It makes me wonder - what is coming next?

Photo Credit: BlackBerry Storm Smartphone by Cheon Fong Liew

Can benchmarks limit learning?

2011-12-19T17:33:00.001+01:00

The above question came up in a discussion that we were having in a team leaders workshop on assessment recently. We were talking about assessment for learning and we were discussing whether or not some summative assessments give the message that we're "done" with learning once we've reached the benchmark. We talked about the importance of giving students feedback through formative assessment so that they are able to answer 3 questions:

Where am I going?
Where am I now?
How can I close the gap?

What we discussed most was this last question - and whether or not it might be better to simply ask: how can I go further?

In my last year of teaching at NIST I had a student who had been given an unconditional offer to an Australian university. She basically just had to pass the IB diploma, but was not given a number of points that she had to achieve. For a while I think she found this rather demotivating - what was the point of working for hours every day, when a simple pass would get her into the university of her choice with less effort? Eventually she came to realize that the only person she was cheating by this attitude was herself - in the end she wanted to get the best score that she could so that it reflected the effort she had put into her studies over many years. A student with a different attitude might simply have stopped pushing himself or herself with such an offer, however, and been happier with a lower score.

I'm particularly interested in this question at the moment as our daughter is applying to universities in the UK. She has received one offer already - it's for a score that she will easily achieve. I'm curious to know what the other 3 universities will offer, and I'm curious to know which of the 4 she will finally decide to accept as her firm choice.

Photo Credit: It seemed like a good idea at the time by Woodleywoderworks

Bridge -v- Barrier

2011-12-19T11:33:00.000+01:00

Last week I was asked a question about how an IT coordinator could be either a bridge or a barrier to effective technology use by teachers. I'd never heard of it in these terms before so I did a bit of investigating and came across this article by Doug Woods.

As I've been looking at a variety of job descriptions for tech positions recently, I came across one suggestion that the words "can walk on water" should also be added to these descriptions - as it is such a hard job. One of the requirements of such a position is to keep abreast of changes in technology and how they impact on learning. This involves not just been an expert in technology, but also having a knowledge of all the other subject areas that need to be supported as well and all the different ages/stages of the students. I'm in the unusual position of having taught all grades from Pre-School to Grade 12, all 3 IB programmes and a variety of different subjects (geography, English, health, homeroom in primary, IT) and yet I would still find it daunting to search out and test software or apps that could be useful for high school maths or science teachers, for example. Many all-school tech coordinators have probably only taught in one division of a PS-12 school, and probably only taught one or two subjects.

Doug writes about how tech coordinators can be a bridge:

embedding new hardware/software or ways of using technology into classroom practice
liaising with class teachers who want to change the way they are teaching
promoting a change in policy, philosophy or approach to the use of technology

He also points out that the success of a bridge involves regulating the traffic that crosses it - therefore one role of a tech coordinator as a bridge could be to check that there's not too many new things being introduced that could totally overwhelm teachers.

Doug goes on to write about how tech coordinators can be a barrier:

blocking the adoption of new technologies because of policies or budget
insisting on using the current technology rather than moving on to something new - for example running training in outdated software or old methods of working
being uncomfortable with new ideas - perhaps hanging back or holding back teachers who want to try out new things.

When I reflect on this a little more I can see how some tech coordinators can be a bridge - they are the ones that are focused on the LEARNING. Conversely, others can be a barrier - they are the ones who are focused on the TECHNOLOGY. Thankfully the job descriptions of many tech coordinators are changing. Many schools are redefining education and the focus is on using technology to transform the learning.

Photo Credit: Tower Bridge Wide by Marc Barker

The Turning Point

2011-12-18T13:05:00.002+01:00

Yesterday I read another chapter in Nicholas Carr's book The Shallows. Here is a paragraph that seemed to jump off the screen at me:

Technological advances often mark turning points in history. New tools for hunting and farming brought changes in patterns of population growth, settlement and labor. New modes of transport led to expansion and realignments of trade and commerce. New weaponry altered the balance of power between states.

I'm asking myself are we at a similar turning point because of the new technologies that we have come to use in recent years?

Photo Credit: Colours in motion by Bruno

Finding Tomorrow's School

2011-12-17T21:52:00.000+01:00

Last week I was on Skype with an old colleague who was telling me about the school she moved to last summer. What so impressed me about everything she was saying was the "can do" attitude that pervades the school. An environment that encourages educators to try out new things is one that inspires innovation and creativity. She talked about the way that having access to technology allows a more personalized learning experience for each student. She talked to me about the innovative practices that are occurring there and how the school is questioning and rethinking teaching and learning which involves questioning and rethinking the spaces that are used for teaching and learning. What an exciting time this is to be in education in a school that is focused on tomorrow!

Photo Credit Anek Rang, Ek Sang by Sanj@y

Orange

2011-12-17T20:38:00.001+01:00

Sometimes the alternative to black/white isn't grey - it's orange (tweet from Alfie Kohn)

I'm in 2 reading groups - in one we meet once a month and discuss a novel we have read, we take it in turns to host the meetings and it's always a great night out. The other is a professional book group with members from different local schools. This group meets once every 2 months to discuss a professional book we have all read. We meet in a wine bar and again it's a great night out. But somehow, for the next meeting of our reading group, we seem to have a bit of overlap. The book we are reading is not a novel at all, but a book called The Shallows by Nicholas Carr about how the internet is changing the way we think, read and remember.

For the professional book group I always read the book on an iPad. I download into Kindle Cloud Reader where I can annotate and read on any device (iPhone, Macbook or iPad) though I've only really read these on the iPad as I find the phone too small and I cannot highlight or annotate on the laptop. For the other reading group I always order "real" books from Amazon, but for the next group, because it's a non-fiction book, I have put it on the Cloud Reader too. As you can see in this respect with my reading I'm a bit of a black and white person and non-fiction for me is usually read electronically!

In the prologue to The Shallows, Nicholas Carr writes about the controversy that has occurred whenever a new medium has appeared. Even as long ago as the printing press, its supporters liked the "democratization" that came with giving access to more people, while others regarded it as the "dumbing down" of culture. Carr refers to this as an Eden -v- Wasteland attitude and I've heard the same arguments today regarding screens -v- books.

I wrote recently about how search empowers students to be in control of their own learning. Today Google has gathered up and sorted information and ideas from around the internet so that it's relatively easy to search for the answers to questions that students have come up with during their inquiries. However in Chapter 1 of The Shallows, Carr argues that skimming through the vast amount of information online has led to changes in our brains and in the ways we want to absorb information. He writes:

Once I was a scuba diver in the sea of words. Now I zip along the surface like a guy on a jet ski.

Whether we think this is good or bad, I think it's no longer in doubt that the internet has allowed us to find things out quickly and Web 2.0 has allowed us to share our ideas with a greater audience. Many would say the internet has made us more creative and informed. I know that several times a day now I visit the BBC website and quickly scan for news stories from around the world that I'm interested in. This past summer while I was at my mother's in England without an internet connection, I didn't use the BBC website at all but instead watched the half-hour news programme on television in the evening. Not having a television at home ourselves, I found it an easy, passive way to get informed about what was happening in the world, but I also became very irritated that there were no links I could click on for more information about the stories I was seeing and hearing, and no way of skipping past the ones (mostly sports and celebrities stories) that had no interest for me at all. Watching a news programme on the TV was very linear and took away my choice and I didn't like it. I also didn't like the fact that I was getting one person's (or organization's) view of what was important - I missed the diverse viewpoints I get on the web.

Students these days don't read a page from left to right and from top to bottom in the way I did when I read a text book at school or at university. Now they skip around and scan for the important information. I was recently teaching a couple of classes of Grade 4 and Grade 5 students to take good notes as part of their units of inquiry and I taught the students in those classes how to use the headings to help them skim and scan efficiently through books and web pages - later I realized that I hadn't once suggested that they read the whole thing. Afterwards I questioned whether this was in fact a good approach to suggest to the students - am I just adding to the trend that these students are experiencing in having information doled out in quick, short, disjointed bursts?

I am definitely a "digital immigrant" as I didn't use a computer at all during my schooling. However in Nicholas Carr's book I came across a new term that I think applies to me much better. He writes about Analogue Youth becoming Digital Adults - this is what has happened to me. What I've noticed is that although I still read novels and still get absorbed in a good book, I'm doing this less than before as I'm reading more non-fiction than I used to. I'm reading blogs and news stories and eBooks. I don't know if this is because my brain has now become rewired to more easily accept short chunks of reading, or if it's just a time in my life when I an questioning what I'm doing more as an educator and so choosing to read what other educators are writing more than I choose to read a novel. Perhaps it's simply a matter of my children growing up and leaving home and my focus turning more on my job and so I'm reading more about trends in education and technology as I want to delve deeper into how one can transform the other. For me I don't think it's a simple question of avoiding the extremes of black and white and coming up with a grey compromise somewhere in the middle. When I think of my life as a digital adult it is not grey at all - it's orange!

Photo Credit: Praying by Luz Adriana Villa

Proper Accessories

2011-12-16T16:11:00.000+01:00

A guest post by Joseph Baker

The iPad has blown up the world of education. Its sveltechassis, user friendly interface, storage capabilities and ubiquitous Internetconnection make it a prime choice for myriad uses. When you add newfunctionality to that and the ability to create third-party applications, it'sno wonder that many schools, students and textbookpublishers are eschewing traditional technologies and turning to Apple'stablet computer. Listed below are five of the most beneficial iPad appsavailable for students from grade school through university level, along withtheir respective benefits to students. Whether a student is writing a highschool environmental science paper on global warming or reviewing notes ontheir way to a construction management degree, having the right tools available can make the taskexponentially easier.

TED

Originating as an event tailored around technology anddesign, TED quickly became an important conference for all fields. Its focus on“ideas worth spreading” makes its archive of hundreds of presentations engagingand informative. The free TED app for the iPad makes accessing the wealth ofknowledge present in industry leaders – such as Bill Clinton, Jane Goodall,Gordon Brown, Larry Page and many other outstanding innovators – available tostudents of all ages for research, ideas and satiating simple curiosity. Userscan share their favorite videos with others through the built-in email, Twitterand Facebook features; they can also save talks on their device for viewingoffline.

Dictionary.com

Every student needs a reliable dictionary for researchingunfamiliar words. A thesaurus is also integral to education, helping studentsfind just the right word to express their thoughts. That's where the freeDictionary.com Dictionary & Thesaurus app comes in. Some dictionary appsfetch the requested data from their servers, making offline use impossible andincreasing response times. Dictionary.com's app, however, downloads the site'sentire 1,000,000+ dictionary and 90,000 thesaurus entries, making a wealth ofinformation available almost immediately. The app includes voice to textsupport, allowing students to look up words when they aren't sure of thespelling.

Pages

As part of Apple's iWork suite, Pages has been part of theMac OS X platform since 2005. In January 2010, Apple announced Pages for iPad,including an updated touch interface. As a word processor and page formattingapplication, Pages for iPad has most of the features of the desktop version,giving users fine-grained control over their documents. Users can create chartsand graphs, add pictures, embed spreadsheets and create templates. Because Pagessupports saving files in Word format, students won't have to deal withinteroperability issues and can focus on creating exactly the document theywant. For students creating or editing documents on the go, Pages is anessential app.

CourseNotes

Created as a dedicated note-taking app for the iPad and MacOS X, CourseNotes is the ultimate in note organization forstudents. The app allows students to organize notes by class and subject,eliminating multiple notebooks and with it the chance that the student willbring the wrong set of notes to class. Words can be highlighted within notesand given specific definitions that can then be browsed via the Lexicondatabase. In addition to notes, to-dos can be created to remind users ofupcoming tests and assignments, which will be displayed as sticky notes in theapp. With the addition of the ability for students to share their notes withothers via Bluetooth or Wi-Fi, CourseNotes quickly becomes a go-to app for allstudents.

Official Museum Apps

Though not a specific app, any official museum app is agreat addition to a student's academic arsenal. These apps are usually providedfor free by the organization itself, though the data students can access throughthem is priceless. Museum apps allow students to view pictures of exhibits,sometimes including interactive elements and 360-degree views. Additionally,they'll provide further information for each exhibit, giving students access toofficial museum information that can be used on papers or to illuminatepreviously unclear topics.

The Coaching Process - asking questions

2011-12-15T21:08:00.001+01:00

This year in my final year at my school I decided my personal goal would be to become more of a coach to our teachers. I've often mentioned that the library and the tech department are at the heart of any school that is focused on inquiry, but that calling ourselves the IT department or the Library may detract from what we are really doing. The I and the C stand for information and communication. The T and the L don't stand for tech and library, but instead stand for teaching and learning.

The rationale behind shifting my role comes from the need to provide authentic learning experiences that encourage collaboration, creativity and innovation. Many teachers want to create technology-rich learning environments but don't really know how to use technology to effectively promote student learning. Coaching could be one way of reaching all teachers with meaningful professional development so that they are able to use technology as an effective tool for their own learning as well as to improve student learning. As students are reaching out with their class blogs to other classes around the world, so our teachers are also starting to form PLNs to collaborate with other educators and share ideas.

For the first few months of the year I've wanted to investigate different coaching models. In particular I'm interested in the difference between coaching heavy and coaching light. Another model that was shared with me recently by one of our administrators was the 5 Step COACH model:

Connect - building a safe environment of trust and openness
Opportunities - helping teachers to set goals
Action - planning the actions and the resources needed in order to succeed
Challenge - understanding the potential barriers that could prevent the goals from being achieved
Hear again - recap on what has been agreed and how and when to move forward

The important thing about coaching for me this year is that I want to get our teachers to the point where they are not just working with me to plan how technology can transform student learning, but that they are more self-directed and taking action themselves to embed technology in the learning.

One of the things I'm coming to realize is that coaching is about asking questions, not about telling people how to do things. Teachers have to come up with their own answers and solve their own problems for coaching to be successful in improving student learning in their classes.

Photo Credit: Questions by Russ Allison Loar

Rethinking Curriculum

2011-12-14T22:45:00.001+01:00

Recently I was visiting some friends who are also teachers who got me thinking about the words "21st century skills". It's interesting to question whether, at this point just 11 years into the 21st century, we really know what skills student will need to be successful in the future. My friends asked me if 100 years ago, in 1911, teachers could have predicted the skills that their students would need to be successful at the end of the 20th century. I thought that probably they could not have done this. This year the oldest person in my family died at the age of 98. She was born in 1913 and certainly wasn't given at school the skills that she developed in the last years of her life to use a computer or a smartphone. Something else kept her going, however: curiosity, open-mindedness, adaptability and the courage to try new things. These were the attributes she developed as a young person at school in the 1920s and these are the same skills that nowadays we are labeling as "21st century"?

The first half of the 20th century was marked by a very fast pace of technological inventions. People flew in the first airplanes and helicopters, they started to own their own cars. Motion pictures, radio and television were invented. New materials such as stainless steel, nylon, plastic and teflon became commonplace. In the 1950s, just halfway through the century, televisions started to appear in many homes as the dominant media, which changed people's ideas of entertainment, and people started to go into space for the first time. It's almost unbelievable to think that at the beginning of the century, when human flight was unthought of, anyone would have predicted that men would be able to walk on the moon or live in space. In an age where many people's working lives were spent in local small businesses or factories, who could have predicted the rise of the multi-national corporation?

In the final chapter of Curriculum 21, Arthur Costa and Bena Kallick write:

Our students are in the 21st century and they are waiting for the teachers and the curriculum to catch up.

They refer to the changes that need to be made such as:

open-mindedness, flexibility, patience and courage. Changing curriculum is about changing your mind first and then forming some new habits and routines as you abandon old ones.

21st century skills have been defined in many ways and include the following:

critical thinking
problem solving
collaboration
leadership
agility and adaptability
initiative and entrepreneurialism
effective oral and written communication
accessing and analyzing information
curiosity and imagination

As I looked over this list I asked myself, were not these also the skills employed by the Wright brothers as they designed and tested their first airplane, or by Albert Einstein when he published the theory of relativity, or by Thomas Edison, one of the most prolific inventors in history?

Costa and Kallick have defined 16 habits of mind necessary for success. These are:

persistence and perseverance
managing impulsivity and thinking before acting
listening with understanding and empathy - being able to perceive another's point of view
thinking flexibly and being able to change perspectives
metacognition - being aware of your own thoughts and actions and how they affect others
striving for accuracy and precision
questioning and problem posing
applying past knowledge to novel situations - using what you have learnt
thinking and communicating with clarity and precision
gathering data through all the senses
creating, imagining and innovating
responding with wonderment and awe
taking responsible risks - living on the edge of your competence
humor - being able to laugh at yourself
thinking independently and being able to learn from others and work together
learning from experience

Costa and Kallick point out that these habits are never fully mastered, instead learners must continually practice, modify and refine them.

How does this impact on the 21st century curriculum? Costa and Kallick write that today several mind shifts are needed:

from knowing the right answers, to knowing how to behave when the answers are not readily apparent. In curriculum terms this involves changing from valuing knowledge acquisition to valuing knowledge production.
from transmitting meaning to constructing meaning. Humans don't just get ideas, they make ideas, often collaborating with others to share knowledge. The curriculum needs to change emphasis from having learners acquire our meanings to having their construct shared meanings which may not necessarily be the meanings we wanted them to construct.
from external evaluation to self-assessment - if we are focus on the process then we cannot just measure the product. The new purpose of evaluation is to have students learn how to become self-evaluative.

21st century teachers need to let go more. They need to be comfortable with the uncomfortable. As Costa and Kallick write:

Growth and change are found in disequilibrium, not balance.

Photo Credit: Worlds Afloat by Michael Feist

Questions -v- Answers

2011-12-08T18:32:00.001+01:00

As today is a public holiday, I've spent several hours on skype catching up with an old friend of mine from NIST. The amazing thing about this was that even though she is in a different continent, the hours that we spent talking cost us absolutely nothing. We can connect across time and space in a way that has never been possible before and these connections bring us up-to-the-minute answers to the questions we are asking.

The ability to find information quickly is what is leading students to demand a change in the way we are teaching. This was addressed by Bill Sheskey in Chapter 12 of Curriculum21, the current book we are reading in our professional reading group. Sheskey writes:

It is the greatest time in history to be in a classroom because learning technology is changing at an exponential rate, and our students can thrive with it.

I think for me the most important word that springs to mind when I think about how technology is transforming the learning in many schools is the word empowerment. Technology now empowers students to be able to find the answers to their own questions - which is actually the opposite of being taught. It allows learning to be personal. If knowledge is power, then searching for the information that you need to answer your very specific question is empowering. Of course, this relies on students knowing how to ask the right questions, being able to communicate and collaborate with others who may have separate pieces of the answer, and being able to synthesis all this information to extract the answers they are looking for.

Intelligence is being redefined: at one time intelligence was measured by how much knowledge we could recall. Now that's not important as we don't need to recall much - we have instant access to almost anything we want to know. What we need today is a knowledge of how to find the information and then we need to apply it. Being able to ask the right questions, being able to apply the answers and problem solving are now the new ways we need to think about intelligence. Sheskey writes:

As answers become devalued, questions become more valued.

The schools that are leading the way in the 21st century are those that are redefining knowledge in this way. If a school is concerned with testing, all the students are doing is "learning answers". Technology, on the other hand, empowers students to inquire - and as a result transforms the learning.

Photo Credit: Question mark made of puzzle pieces by Horia Varian

Courageous Leadership: Sailing into the Unknown

2011-12-04T10:41:00.001+01:00

Courageous leadership was the theme of last month's ECIS Conference in Lisbon. Right from the start, with the opening remarks before the first keynote speaker, it was clear that this theme fitted perfectly with the location of the conference. The Portuguese led the Golden Age of Discovery in the 15th and 16th centuries. Starting with Henry the Navigator, courageous explorers sailed out into the unknown and explored first the coast of Africa and then eventually rounded the Cape of Good Hope and reached India. Ferdinand Magellan led the first voyage around the world and the Portuguese were the first to sail to Brazil and Japan.

Why did they do this? Why did these Portuguese explorers set off into the unknown? Was it something to do with dreaming of a better world and a belief that they could make this happen? Is this a belief or a dream that we, as teachers, share today. We have no real idea of the future we are preparing our children for. We, too, are sailing into the unknown.

At an international schools conference, it's clear that teachers have many questions about what it means to be international. In a previous post I reflected on the fact that an international teacher is not necessarily a global educator. That many teachers who have never left their home country are now reaching out with the help of the internet, smartphones, iPads and so on, to people in other countries with different ideas. These teachers are also global educators.

Hans Rosling, the keynote speaker on the first day of the conference, talked about how, with the rate of population growth accompanied by an increase in health and wealth, this is already an Asian world. The "Old West" will only make up 10% of the estimated world's population of 9 billion in 40 years time. Our world view, still dominated by the North/South divide from the 1970s and 80s, needs to change. Asia is the world - probably the most exciting changes are taking place there. Are we educating our students for this new reality?

Just as the past explorers set out with their navigation devices - the cutting edge technologies of their day - so we as teachers are setting out with our new digital technologies as we sail into the unknown. We know we need to shift to more future-focused schools - we are leading this change in the best ways we know. Arne Bieber, Director of the International School of Prague and outgoing Chair of the ECIS Board of Trustees, talked about the main thing getting in the way of these teacher leaders: time. He spoke about the way that Google has given its employees 20% of their time to think big and reflect and said that schools need to give teachers the time to think and empower them to experiment and take risks.

There are schools that are redefining learning in the 21st century. There are teachers who are doing this one classroom at a time. I'm excited about what the future will bring with these courageous leaders.

Photo taken at Belem, Lisbon

10 of the best: Technology as a tool, skill or goal?

2011-12-02T22:33:00.001+01:00

Here's another post in the 10 of the best series, where I reflect on past posts that have received a lot of readers. Today I decided to repost this one after a number of conversations I've had with teachers about the role of technology. Is it just a tool? Should it just enhance or reinforce what teacher are already doing. I think not! This was first posted last May.

Today I had a conversation with someone at school today who told me that technology was "just a tool". I know it isn't, but found it hard to sum up what my objections were to this phrase so I sent out a tweet asking how I should respond. The first response I had was this: "oxygen is only an element" from @librarydonna. Of course it is - oxygen is everywhere but we can't live without it, and as I have read before technology should be like oxygen: ubiquitous, necessary and invisible. But I'm also asking myself why I feel so strongly that technology should not just be considered a tool. Here is what I have come up with:

a tool is something that carries out a particular function, perhaps it has one or two things it can accomplish (for example a pencil, a hammer, a flute) whereas a computer, laptop, iPad, iTouch, Smartphone etc have thousands of different uses - for research, brainstorming, writing, collaborating, publishing, multimedia, viewing, problem solving, communicating, organizing and so on.
If we say technology is not a tool, it's how you use the tool that is important, we are then talking about skills. If we take the analogy of a flute then the skill would be being able to read music and knowing how to play the notes. The skills involved in using a computer could be wordprocessing, data handling, file management or accessing a database.
If we are not talking about technology as tools and skills, but we are referring to what we can do with the computer we are talking about goals. If we take the analogy of a flute then the goal would be to be able to use it for a musical performance, perhaps alone, perhaps in an orchestra or band in collaboration with others, perhaps even to be able to compose music that communicates an idea or an emotion. The goal is to create something. When we use technology in the PYP our goals are that all students should be able to use technology to investigate, organise, collaborate, create, communicate and be responsible digital citizens.
The power of technology is not just using it as a tool or a skill. When teachers focus on these things it downplays the importance of technology as a goal, as a way of doing things that were inconceivable before. When technology is used as a tool this is what Alan November calls automating, what in the SAMR model we refer to as enhancement of the learning. When technology is used to create new learning environments this is using technology as a goal. It's informating and transformative. A tool and skill is what we can use the computer for now. A goal is looking at the potential - what we can possibly do with technology in the future and how it can transform teaching and learning.

Photo Credit: Rachel Playing by Dave King

Looking for my tribe

2011-12-01T20:39:00.001+01:00

As I've been thinking recently about what I'm looking for in a new school, one of the things that springs to mind is that I'm looking for a good fit with the people that I will be working with. I'm looking for people with the same vision of how technology can transform learning. I'm looking for a "can do" attitude that encourages trying out new ideas and challenging the status quo in order to improve student learning. I'm looking for people that I can learn from and that I respect. I'm looking for mentors who can make me into a better educator. I think this is something that Seth Godin would call looking for my tribe. Seth explains that the idea of a tribe is to connect people and ideas and that the power of the internet is that it connects individuals so that ideas can turn into movements. I'm feeling that recently the internet has connected me with those of a like mind - educators I would never have come across without this technology. Actually this time round, the internet has been a powerful thing that has helped me to search for my tribe - it has certainly been better than going to a job fair.

It's not always easy or comfortable to challenge the status quo - sometimes it's downright dangerous. But not challenging it can be dangerous too. One thing my mother taught me is that hard work doesn't kill you - it's stress that does that. Stress comes from being undervalued and from having to suppress your feelings in order to maintain the status quo. Having to push your ideas and feelings down, having to settle for mediocre and lowering your standards is selling yourself short and simply leads to frustration, resentment and bitterness.

Last May the oldest person in my family died - she was my Auntie Josie who was in her 98th year and who managed to live independently up until a month before she died. One of the things I respected most about my auntie was that she was true to herself and did what she wanted, not always what people expected of her. Being born before the First World War and being a woman, it was probably hard for her to honour her dreams, but she struck me as being a person who didn't compromise much. She did what she thought was right - and that was probably what kept her going for so long.

I was thinking about my Auntie Josie last week as I read a blog post entitled Top Five Regrets of the Dying. One of these is "I wish I'd had the courage to express my feelings". I think what was written here was important:

We cannot control the reactions of others. However, although people may initially react when you change the way you are by speaking honestly, in the end it raises the relationship to a whole new and healthier level. Either that or it releases the unhealthy relationship from your life. Either way you win.

When I think about the teachers that I work with, and the way they have moved forward with using technology over the past two years, it has been because of having honest conversations about what they were doing and why. I think that initially some of these teachers didn't like me questioning the way they'd been doing things, but I think most of them have come to see that things are better now as a result of these conversations - and I can see that these conversations have been positive ones because of the trusting relationship that we have built up.

I need to go further though. I need to go faster. I'm excited that I've set off in search of a new tribe and I'm excited that it's the internet that is helping me to find it.

Different roles

2011-11-29T20:13:00.001+01:00

I've had a number of conversations recently about what exactly I do in my current role. I was employed as a teacher and then as a coordinator, but there are many other roles that it's necessary to take on to successfully transform student learning through technology.

A collaborator: collaborative planning is at the heart of the PYP and I work with teachers to plan, teach and evaluate student learning. My job has to start with being a collaborator - without this I couldn't do any of the rest of it.
A finder of resources: often as a result of the discussions we have during collaborative planning sessions, teachers come to me with questions about how to do things and I try to find resources to help them. As well as this I try to help them find resources to support student learning. These could be YouTube videos, websites, Web 2.0 tools or apps.
An innovator: as a way of carrying out the previous role, I often try out new things. If teachers want to do something, I ferret out a few different tools or apps, try them out and report back to the teachers on which ones I think will be best suited to their needs. I'm constantly looking for better ways of doing things. I like finding creative solutions to problems that the teachers have.
A learner: I love to learn. Technology is constantly changing, and as I'm always saying "even if you are on the right road, if you sit down in the middle of it you will get run over". I like to learn about new ideas, new ways of doing things and new ways of thinking. I believe teachers should model lifelong learning for their students, and I think that technology teachers/integration specialists/coaches should in turn model it for the teachers they are supporting.
A provider of professional development: sometimes I think that every lesson I teach provides professional development to the teachers, as if the technology or the tool or the app is something they are already familiar with then they don't need me in their lessons. I'm only there to push the learning forward. I've tried many different models of professional development, but the one that makes the most difference to classroom practice is one-on-one coaching.
A teacher: I've put this one last as I think I'm gradually moving away from this, but in some ways it should be first as I spend more time doing this than any of the other roles mentioned above. I work with students in their classrooms, in the lab and in the library to help them become digitally literate and responsible digital citizens.

Photo Credit: More glowstick fun by Sharyn Morrow

A November Day

2011-11-29T19:13:00.001+01:00

Today I've got to Chapter 11 of Curriculum 21 and it's by Alan November. I'm lucky to have meet Alan in person, many years ago at an ECIS IT Conference, and I always enjoy listening to him speak or reading what he writes. This chapter is about how students often have to power down when they go into schools as many things are blocked or forbidden. Of course smartphones, skype, social media and other tools can be very disruptive to education - or at least to classroom management - but they can also be used to transform the learning experience for students.

Alan November writes:

This is the first time in history when many children are learning to use powerful tools outside the range of adult supervision. What concerns many of us is that our worst fear of students abusing these tools has a much higher change of happening without teachers and parents providing appropriate role models .... What about if we were to transform the culture of teaching and learning to adapt to the power of these tools? After all, our children are growing up at a time when they have instant access to the Web for information and global communication in their back pocket. And it is nearly free.

This is something that educators should be talking about and planning for. Several years ago I often gave advice to parents to have their computer in a family room, not to let children have it in their bedrooms where they could access anything completely unsupervised - both good and bad. And then in 2005 my own children started with a tablet programme at school and this advice seemed redundant - they had their tablets with them all the time. They used them for their homework - which they did in their bedrooms. Suddenly it became imperative to talk with them about the use - and abuse - of these devices. Our conversations were not about what they should not be doing - we turned the conversations around to how to be responsible digital citizens.

This year we stared a 1:1 programme with our Grade 4 and 5 students on one of our campuses. It's interesting to compare the different campuses, one of which has carts of laptops that are shared between a whole grade and the other where the students have their own laptop in their classroom. I was talking with the campus head today about how empowering it is that the students all have their own machines. I'm interested in the fact that it's on this small primary campus that the greatest leaps forward seem to be being made.

A couple of days ago I was looking at an acceptable use policy for another international school and discussing it with one of my colleagues. We noticed that there were many rules about what not to do and the consequences that would happen if these rules were broken. I started to think about something I was told when I first started teaching: to talk to students about the behaviour you want to see, not the behaviour that you want to stop. For example if a student is talking loudly and distracting others, the positive thing to say is "please talk quieter". If a student is using a laptop inappropriately, I'm not sure that taking the laptop off the student is going to change that behaviour (though it will obviously stop him/her doing it during that lesson). Perhaps a better way of dealing with this is to give the student something positive to do with the laptop - a role or job that is valuable for the rest of the class, for example a scribe or a researcher. At the end of this chapter Alan November also writes about this. Rather than asking students to stop using certain things or blocking certain websites, we should be asking how we can empower students to be more responsible for their own learning, how we can encourage them to contribute to the learning community. To do that we need to change the culture of teaching and learning away from one of control and towards one of empowerment.

Photo Credit: I took this photo at the end of the day from the staff room, before leaving school to drive home. It doesn't really fit with the post at all, except that it was a beautiful November evening, and as I'm leaving the school this year I treasure the one day a week I spend on this remarkable campus with an amazing set of educators. The photo was taken on my iPhone using Pro HDR.

Three Coaching Models

2011-11-28T20:47:00.001+01:00

As I read further in the ISTE publication Technology, Coaching and Community, I'm reading now about different coaching models.

Cognitive Coaching
This type of coaching is targeting ways of working that lead to shaping and reshaping thinking and problem solving. This model was originally developed by Art Costa and Bob Garmston. The section that I read on this was interesting but I don't think I'm really going to be involved much in this type of coaching.

Instructional Coaching
This type of coaching targets teaching practices that impact on how students learn. Specifically this type of coaching focuses of classroom management, content planning, instruction and assessment for learning. I found this section more useful as using technology in the classroom certainly requires a different way of managing the classroom, and I feel that during our collaborative planning meetings I do have an input into the content, instruction and assessment. However it is the third sort of coaching that I find most relevant to what I'm attempting to achieve this year.

Peer Coaching
This involves training teachers to help their colleagues integrate technology. I think I like this model the best as the focus here is on collaboration and on the needs of the teachers within their teams. We don't much time for professional development, and this way the coaching is embedded into the job that teachers are already doing and the people who are already in their teams.

In my first year at my school I ran "Techie Breakie" sessions for one teacher per grade level. These teachers were ones who had already shown an interest in using technology more effectively and who were prepared to be a mentor to others in his or her grade level. On reflection I feel this was a bit of a slow and indirect way of transforming the use of technology at school and perhaps some of these teachers were not really ready to fully jump into the social media tools that I was showing them - now though, two years later, I find they are using many of the tools that I introduced to them during these sessions and advocating their use to others in their teams. Over the past 2 years the culture of the school has changed so that Web 2.0 is just seen as a normal tool of learning.

Further on in the ISTE publication are the words that made the biggest impact on me:

Learning with technology is more important than learning about technology

Teachers who are starting to use social media as a form of professional development are already learning with the technology as they collaborate with others around the world. This is much more effective than me running "How to" sessions about the use of different software, hardware or Web 2.0 tools - and they do get professional development in these with their students during the time I am supporting their classes.

Another tip is to share your progress. It would be great to have time during staff meetings for teachers to do this, but unfortunately our schedule is already very heavy. Sharing is more likely to happen within teams, but I feel it would be even more powerful if it could be across teams - with teachers seeing what is happening in many different parts of the school.

Photo Credit: Arrow found the target by Melilab

Digital Portfolios

2011-11-27T16:03:00.001+01:00

Last week I was in a couple of meeting where portfolios were discussed. From an IT point of view, the only portfolio I really find useful for my students is a digital one. It's not possible to print-out an audio file or a movie or an animation, so it's not possible to put many of the multimedia projects the students have created into their paper portfolio that gets sent home twice a year.

A digital portfolio, however, is a great way to collect the work students have done on a computer or using Web 2.0 tools as it is a multimedia collection that provides evidence of a student's knowledge, skills and understanding. A digital portfolio can be continued by a student from one school year to the next. This year our Grade 4 students who moved up into Grade 5 "took" their blogs (which are similar to ePorfolios) with them and continued to add on their work - this means that now the digital portfolios are also demonstrating their growth through time.

In Curriculum 21, David Niguidula writes:

When done well, a digital portfolio outlines a student's learning journey in much the same way that a curriculum map describes a teacher's teaching journey.

He goes on to ask the following questions, which are at the heart of all portfolios, both paper and digital:

Why do we collect student work?
What audiences are important to us?

These questions in particular are important for helping students and teachers to focus on what they want to collect and select for their portfolios.

In an international school setting, it's great for students to be able to share their portfolio with their extended families. Often it's hard to do this with a paper portfolio, but again this is where ePortfolios have a decided advantage. Students can send the URL of their blog or ePortfolio to their friends and relatives back in their home country.

Many schools still rely on paper portfolios, however, so how can we get all the great multimedia projects our students are creating into them? This week I saw a great solution - turn the URL of the student's work into a QR code, which can be printed and then added into the paper portfolio. When families receive these paper portfolios at home they can then scan the QR codes and be taken straight to the Web 2.0 projects the students have made.

Eventually I'm sure that all student portfolios will become digital, but for now this seems a good solution that allows both paper and electronic work to be collected and displayed in the students' portfolios.

Photo Credit: DSC07282 by Phillip Torrone

Connecting coaching, community and technology

2011-11-26T19:26:00.001+01:00

Since my goal setting meeting last week I've been reading the ISTE White Paper on Technology, Coaching and Community. The introduction to this paper states that effective professional development most often occurs as teachers connect and collaborate with colleagues in an atmosphere of trust to solve the problems they are facing in their classroom. In my experience it's certainly true that teachers will be more willing to use technology when they know they are being supported by a coach or mentor as it allows them to try out new ideas in an atmosphere of trust and mutual respect where they feel comfortable. I respect the teachers' knowledge of the subject matter and of the individual students in their classes, the teachers respect my knowledge of how technology can transform the learning.

The White Paper goes on to quote from Harry Wong:

Coaching is customized and focused on providing instruction on what needs to be accomplished. Coaches tailor support, assess each teacher's progress with observations, use interviews and surveys and have follow-up visits. Teachers feel more motivated and responsible to act on new skills because coaching makes them personalized and customized on an ongoing basis.

Effective coaching has 3 components: context, relevance and ongoing. In previous schools I've coached teachers to take a leading role in using technology within their units of inquiry. The coaching happens during the planning stages where we have discussed what might be possible, immediately before the lessons so teachers feel comfortable with the technology and tools they are using, during the lessons when they are using the technology with their students and after their lessons as we discuss what went well and what could be improved upon next time.

Teachers who use technology for their own professional learning are more likely to use it in their classrooms to improve student learning, so another aspect of my role since coming to the school has been to try to connect teachers with one another using social media (mostly through blogging and micro-blogging) . Social media is a powerful tool for professional development: building a community with others who have similar interests, perhaps teachers who teach the same grade level or subject or teachers in other PYP schools who are doing similar units of inquiry, is powerful professional development.

As I read through the White Paper I'll be blogging more in the next few days about my ideas on how I can provide more effective professional development to our teachers through coaching.

Photo Credit: 23rdian by bitzi ☂ ion-bogdan dumitrescu

A Five Year Building Site?

2011-11-26T10:32:00.001+01:00

After being in Thailand for a year and a half where we lived in a 9th floor apartment, my family moved to a house. On our soi (street) most of the old Thai houses had been knocked down to make way for large apartment blocks, hotels, serviced apartments and so on. We were lucky to be able to rent one of the few remaining houses. When we moved in, there was building work going on right behind our house, renovating the Dream Hotel. We only chose to move there because we knew the hotel was almost finished and we wouldn't be living next to a building site for long. It was a good decision - within months the hotel was finished and as the neighbours of the hotel we were able to use its facilities such as the rooftop pool. We'd definitely not have chosen to move if we'd expected the building work to go on for years.

I'm thinking of a conversation last week about how long it takes to change a school or to build a new culture - the figure mentioned was 5 years. This is a really long time. It's twice as long as the time that I've been living in Switzerland, it's longer than the entire time we lived in Thailand. When I think about my children, 5 years is over a third of their school lives and I think that's way too long to wait for change. For myself this reminds me of my decision about moving to a house in Thailand. I was happy to put up with a bit of short-term discomfort to reap some long-term benefits. However I would not have been happy to live for 5 years next to a noisy and dirty building site. In the time we lived in our house, far more of it was pleasant than unpleasant. Now let's think about schools: if the average turnover time for an international school is 5 years and changing the culture of a school also takes 5 years, how many international teachers would be prepared to go to a school that was at the start of the building and changing process, knowing they'd probably already be moving on before seeing light at the end of the tunnel?

The more I think about it, the more I question how accurate this time frame might be. Schools can change, for good or for bad, in a very short period of time. I've lived through one such change at a previous school, which moved from being fairly average to being excellent, and it didn't take anywhere near 5 years. In my own subject I think that change in fact can be rapid as most teachers are keen to take on new things. The IT departments I left after 5 or 4 or 3 years were completely different from the ones where I'd started - the philosophies, the hardware and software, the visions of how technology would be used, the schedules and so on. I have also seen schools completely turn around with a change of just one person. An inspiring Head, who values his or her staff, can have a real impact on morale in just a matter of months.

This morning I read a post from the ASCD which was about avoiding teacher burnout. One of the things recommended was to take a long view of your teaching career and to look at the trends. Don't judge your career by your mistakes. Look at the mistakes you made and see how much you have learnt from them and then move on. Living a few months beside a building site eventually led to us having a better life than staying in a high-rise apartment building. Spending a couple of years in a school that is changing and building can also bring some valuable lessons though it might not be a comfortable place to stay for much longer than that.

Photo credit: Construction site by Tanakawho

Leading -v- Coaching

2011-11-25T21:22:00.001+01:00

I've been in two very different meetings this week and have been trying to clarify in my own mind what I believe the next steps for me are. The first meeting I was in was one for team leaders and I sat through that meeting feeling fairly uncomfortable by the mismatch between my vision of what team leadership could be and the reality of what we are expected to do or be. I definitely agreed with the sentiments expressed by one of my colleagues in the meeting that what we really need as leaders of our teams is empathy with those in them. Change is not easy and many are struggling. For me I find change exhilarating, but I know that others find it stressful. While I understand that as leaders we set a certain tone, so shouldn't walk around complaining about things, it's also no use being overly upbeat and negating the feelings of others.

The second meeting made me feel totally different. In this meeting I was discussing my goals for the year. This year I'm focusing on coaching, on empowering all our teachers to take on the ownership of technology. I feel a sense of urgency in this as I know I only have a few more months until I leave and I want to give our teachers the confidence and skills to go forward by themselves in empowering students to use technology. As this feeling is at the base of almost everything I am doing these days, it was good to talk about how this could happen. I know that for many teachers, the year they decide to leave is a fairly "dead" year with very little of their energies invested in a school whose future they will no longer be a part of. In my case I feel totally the opposite. I feel a total commitment to the teachers that I work with. As my time with them is getting shorter, I'm investing more and more into what I do with them. I'm trying to make every single day count.

Only a couple of weeks ago I was reflecting on one grade level this year that didn't yet have class blogs. Yet during the past week, three of these teachers have started blogs and have independently posted student work on them and designed them in ways that uniquely reflects them and their classes. I'm really excited by this. I'm really proud of them.

Getting back to my goals: since technology is now at the heart of our daily lives, I'm concerned that students will miss out if technology isn't effectively integrated into all aspects of teaching and learning. Students need to be prepared to be productive and responsible digital citizens, they need learning experiences that will encourage collaboration, creation and innovation. My goal this year is to support teachers to design technology-rich learning environments. In the past I've tried various methods of professional development, from techie-brekkie sessions, to scheduled classes and drop-in sessions, but it's very clear to me that the most powerful form of professional development has happened one-on-one, in the teachers' own classrooms, during the school day. The majority of staff have moved forward with a simple explanation or demonstration by me, and then me just sitting back, encouraging and watching them use the tools. After that I need to give them time to play and experiment with technology and practice their new skills and then I need to come back and check to see how they are doing. Do they need some reinforcement or a recap, do they need to be taken further to the next level? This form of professional development is powerful and leads to lasting change. It gives teachers ownership of the learning opportunities for themselves and their students.

At the end of the year, when I'm actually at the point of saying my goodbyes and leaving, how will I measure success? First of all I will know I've achieved my goal by seeing teachers using the technology they have as effective tools for their own professional learning - learning they will carry on with independently regardless of whether I am there or not. I will be seeing teachers making choices to use technology to improve student learning. I will see them connecting with other teachers in professional learning networks to share their ideas and to get new ideas to take student learning forward.

At my goals meeting this week I was given a lot of support and ideas for how to move forward, and also resources to help me. One of these was started me thinking about the difference between self-focused leadership and people-centred coaching. I'm sharing these now and reflecting on them.

Often the focus of leaders is on themselves, whereas the focus of coaches is on others:

Leaders often want to do things their way - they are the boss and their way is the right way. All too often I've heard the expression "if you don't like where the bus is going, then you need to get off the bus."
Coaches often want to support others to do things their way but do them better. They are more willing to listen to others' perspectives, or perhaps to move people forward at a more individual pace.

Leaders are often very task focused and tell people what needs to be done.
Coaches often ask people what needs to be done and try to get everyone aligned to the vision.

Leaders are often very competitive which means they may keep a lot of things to themselves.
Coaches are more likely to share best practice and to collaborate.

Leaders often have the answers and don't like being questioned.
Coaches often encourage others to come up with their own solutions by using questioning techniques.

I'm not sure all of the above are true - or maybe it's only true of poor leaders! However throughout much of my teaching career I've been lucky to work with wonderful leaders. When I think of these people they were definitely more like coaches. I've been blessed to have been mentored by great leaders who have been supportive and encouraging, who have actively questioned what they were doing and the direction the school was moving in and invited others to question it too. These leaders are the ones who have made me into a better teacher. If I'm going to be a leader, these are the people I'd like to model myself on. But if I'm in a school where the leadership style is one that I don't want to emulate, in those cases I want to be a coach.

Photo Credit: *marguerites*daisies* by âœ¿ nicolas_gent âœ¿

Driving Forwards, Looking Backwards

2011-11-21T19:54:00.001+01:00

We drive into the future using only our rear view mirror - Marshall McLuhan

Recently I was reading a blog post about the things that get in the way of technology being used to transform learning. Now I'm using this to reflect on why I feel we are not often moving forward in the most appropriate way for our students' futures.

Lack of vision: Cathleen Norris and Elliot Soloway cite this as the number 1 barrier to tech transformation. This past weekend it was such a delight to meet up with tech teachers, coordinators, facilitators and coaches from schools that do have a vision - and not just a vision but who are putting that vision into practice. I'm heartened to see the number of schools that now have iPads in every classroom. It was wonderful to attend workshops by educators who are putting iPads and other mobile devices into the hands of their students, who realise that this is not the future, this is the here and now for our students. I am still struggling to understand why 20th century tools with a 20th century pedagogy have a place in our 21st century classrooms when there are better and cheaper options available that would place more technology into the hands of the students. To me it feels like some schools are trying to drive forwards, but are looking in the rear view mirror the whole way.
Lack of leadership: this was the number 2 barrier to tech transformation but in my experience it is tied with the first barrier. If there is no vision, there can be no leadership. In the past few months I've talked with schools that are creating new positions as they see the need for a different role for their tech teachers. I've talked with teachers, tech directors, principals and directors. Any school that is still teaching set IT lessons every week doesn't even make it onto my shortlist of a place I want to be. Any school leader who cannot articulate how they want technology to be used for learning doesn't get onto the shortlist either. Right now I'm questioning whether I can seriously consider working at a school that I've not seen with my own eyes, or a school leader that I've not met and spoken with at length. What I'm looking for in a school leader is someone who is walking the talk and modeling the best practices they want to see in others.
Lack of money: Most of the time it's not really a lack of money. What I've found is that the real problem is how the money that is available is spent and who makes the decisions about how it is spent. Is the decision made by people who are not in the classrooms and who are not using the technology, or is this a joint decision in which many people have a voice: students, parents, teachers and administrators?
Lack of PD: The "old" ways of "doing" PD need to change. Workshops on specific tools that might at some point be used need to go. Effective PD needs to be ongoing, and often one-to-one. It doesn't neatly fit into an hour after school or an in-service day.
Lack of time: Most teachers would cite this as being the number 1 reason why they don't embrace new technology or change the way they do things. They need more time to play with technology alongside their students.

Photo Credit: July 7, 2011 by Mike Demers

500, 100,000: Design, Re-sign, Resign

2011-11-21T17:29:00.001+01:00

Today I'm writing my 500th post and by coincidence this is the day that the readership of my blog has passed the 100,000 mark. It's been an interesting journey over the past two years, one which has enriched my life tremendously. Earlier on this week I started to think about what I wanted to write about for my 500th post but in the end I decided I'd just change the design a little instead. What I really want to say, though, is a very big thank you to all the people who have supported me through the various posts, and who have pushed my thinking in new directions. It has been so tough to continue to write my blog at times while working at a school that has actively discouraged it, but the rewards have more than made up for it. Being part of a community of bloggers who think, and then write, and then rethink has been wonderful. I would never have connected with these exceptional educators without my blog. Reading their blogs and their thoughts, following them on their journeys, has been the best professional development I've ever received. Thank you all - your thoughts and words have made me a better teacher.

How do I know what I'm thinking, until I hear what I say? (Irish quotation)
As I've mentioned before, the number 1 person I write my blog for is myself. I have lots of ideas milling around in my head, and of course I talk about these ideas with the many wonderful colleagues I work with, but these ideas only really become something I can act upon when I write them down. Writing them down gives them structure and helps me organize them, helps turn the thoughts into actions. Feedback on my thoughts from those people who I don't work with and most of whom I have never met, lets them develop in a deeper way. It gives me new perspectives. It shows me there is light at the end of the tunnel. It gives me hope that even if I can't make a difference and move forward where I am right now, there are plenty of other educators out there who believe what I believe and are moving in the same direction as I am. It shows me that there are better ways of doing things. That there are educators who value reflection and critical thinking and that there are schools where I can really make a difference - schools that will encourage me to become the best educator I can be.

At the end of a teacher's first contract at our school they are asked to re-sign. This changes their contract from a temporary one to a permanent one. This is the time of year when teachers are thinking about whether they want to re-sign or resign. It's strange that these words, which mean totally the opposite of each other, actually sound the same. That when I hear a teacher say "I've decided to re-sign/resign" I have to ask if this means they are going or staying.

For me I'm definitely going. I'm happy and excited about the future, even though I don't yet know where I'll end up. I'm ready to move onto something new. I want to be somewhere different and do something different, and I'm really excited by all the new IT jobs that are coming up in schools that are not just looking to the future but who are actively embracing it. I want to be part of it, not just someone watching from the sidelines. I feel like I've been away from the cutting edge of technology for far too long. I'm very happy to be setting sail, even though I don't yet know what's over the horizon.

On the move: sharing the journey

2011-11-21T14:27:00.001+01:00

This past weekend I've been at the European Council of International Schools (ECIS) Conference in Lisbon, Portugal. This was the first time I've been to Lisbon and I enjoyed it a lot. It's a place where, hundreds of years ago, many famous explorers and navigators set sail into the unknown. One of these, Vasco da Gama, wrote:

We know we are on the move - we are not sure of our destination.

It's a similar situation with technology.

I attended the Pre-Conference facilitated by John Davitt. His opening presentation struck a nautical theme: he said we haven't yet found our digital longitude, though technology does allow us to cover great distances. He asked, do we want to just talk about what is technically possible, or do we want to surf the waves of our connected possibilities?

I made a presentation on Saturday afternoon about the role of ICT in the PYP. I'd made this presentation before at the ECIS IT Conference last March, but this time the audience was more diverse with classroom teachers and teachers of different subjects. I'm embedding the Prezi I used below for the participants (or anyone else) to use back at their schools. In this I have tried to chart the personal journey I've taken in the 3 schools where I was teaching IT, from using technology as a set of applications or tools to where we are today using technology to investigate, organize, collaborate, communicate and create.

One of the things I took away from John Davitt's presentation was that ephemeral is OK. Things don't have to last forever. The tools we are using, that we are building our curriculum on today, probably won't exist in their current form in 5 years time. There will be new opportunities. We have to move on, even though we are not sure where we are going. It's good to be able to share this journey with others along the way.

It is not the strongest of the species that survives, nor the most intelligent... It is the one that is the most adaptable to change. Charles Darwin

Photo: Discoveries Monument (Padrão dos Descobrimentos), Lisbon