Grade 4s Express Themselves using Photography

We are now in the final week of the How We Express Ourselves unit in Grade 4. This unit has been slightly different to the others I've supported this year in that each of the Grade 4 teachers was responsible for one area of expression, and the students spent a week with each teacher. I decided to give IT support to Heidi, the teacher who had chosen to do photography with the students, throughout the entire unit.

Each week for the last 5 weeks, Heidi and I have had one of the Grade 4 classes for the whole of one afternoon and the following morning. Luckily the change to a flexible schedule for me at Christmas has meant I was able to plan these large blocks into my week. We started giving the students an introduction to what makes a good photograph, with the emphasis on composition, texture and colour. We asked questions like "Why do people take photographs?" and "Are photographs art?" We also showed them the Kodak Top 10 Tips for Great Pictures website and discussed why some photographs were better than others.

After this introduction we took the students outside on a walk around the school grounds and along the lane towards the farms further up the hill. The students had already discussed the need to get down and move in close to their subject, and we also noticed some of them moving the objects they were photographing around in order to avoid a distracting background. We had discussed the rule of thirds and the need to take some vertical pictures and we were pleased to see how enthusiastically the students embraced these ideas - some of them even getting right down in the snow to get their close-up shots.

Over the 5 week period we have had very different weather in Switzerland - some weeks it was thick snow, other weeks it was cold and damp and some weeks it was sunny. The photographs of each class were therefore very unique - different from all the others.

We spent about an hour outside, then it was back into the school to transfer the photographs onto the laptops so that we could edit them in iMovie the following morning. We showed the students how to crop the photos for effect and how to adjust the various levels - the exposure and contrast, the shadows and highlights, and the saturation. We also showed them a couple of the effects such as black and white, sepia and blurring the edges. We told the students they would eventually be choosing 3 photos to print, one of which would show composition, one would show colour and one would show texture.

We talked to the students about how to frame their photos - this is easy to do from the print menu of iPhoto, so we showed them the various themes, background and borders available. We stressed the need to make sure the frame complemented the photograph and was not a distraction to it.

We were very, very impressed by the beautiful photographs the students ended up printing out for their art portfolios. Each student printed out their "best" three - though many had a hard time choosing as they were all so great. I absolutely loved doing this unit with the students and am looking forward to more photographic projects in the future.

You can view a slideshow with more of the Grade 4 photographs by clicking here.

Photo Credit: All photos were taken and edited by Grade 4 students: Katie, Mads, Jack B, Lucy, Jordi, Soma, Struan and Zsa Zsa.

Thinking in the future tense

Back to school today and Day 1 of the new flexible schedule. Most of the day was spent in meetings trying to work out what IT support teachers want for their current unit of inquiry and when they want it. I found myself in the situation of constantly questioning where teachers want their inquiries to go and how we can work backwards from there to where we are right now, and then planning on how we move forward from the present so that they can achieve their aims. It's a bit like being a footballer, not thinking about where the other players in the team are right now, but where they are going to be in a few seconds so you can kick the ball to the place they are going to be. It means taking on board that the present is nothing more than the past of the future. It's also vital to get this bit right - as Yogi Berra once said "If you don't know where you're going, you'll probably end up somewhere else".

Thinking of the big picture, not just where the students are going to be in the next 2-5 weeks, teachers are also expected to be able to prepare students so that they can operate in the world of tomorrow, for the life they will have to live once they leave school. Again this is thinking in the future tense - or in the words of Project Zero and Understanding by Design "starting with the end in mind". We have to constantly ask ourselves what skills and knowledge students will need to be successful in the 21st century and then consider how this impacts on our teaching today. For example we already know that what we are teaching now will not be enough to ensure our students are well prepared for the future as the amount of information is increasing all the time - learning is going to have to be continuous and it will not be confined to a specific place or a specific time. Our students today need to be "just in time" learners to cope with their predicted multi-career lives. Future trends are also pointing towards this learning being more of a collaborative nature, interacting with others around the world. The lower order thinking skills of memorization and understanding are going to have to be replaced by higher order thinking skills which involve real-world problem solving.

So what I'm wondering today is how is technology going to play a role in that new learning. Lessons from the past seem to show that just throwing lots of new technology at students and teachers does not lead to improved student learning. The problem is not really the equipment that is being used, but more the whole mindset of the people using it - I am still seeing teachers who believe that just using technology is enough, when in fact what they are really doing is just doing old things in new ways. They are focused on technology, but not really on how this tool can be used to enhance the learning, develop thinking or solve problems. They seem to think that somehow, perhaps through a process of osmosis, students will pick up 21st century skills just by using the technology. What I am trying to nudge teachers towards is to focus on the teaching, not on the technology. Rather than asking what the students are going to do in the IT lessons, they have to ask how the technology can help them incorporate decision making, problem solving and critical thinking throughout the entire curriculum.

Today we have started the process. There are no more fixed IT lessons. Students will come to the labs, or we will go to their classrooms, as and when the technology will help them develop the skills they need for the future.

Photo Credit: Future or Bust! by Vermin Inc

If a tree falls in a forest ....

If a tree falls in a forest and nobody is around to hear it, does it make a sound? Or to put it another way, why am I blogging?

On my return to school after the Christmas break I go onto a flexible schedule. This schedule will allow me to work in classrooms with the students, supporting the entire curriculum. It will also enable me to work with small groups of teachers to help them develop their own 21st century skills. I've decided that with this group of teachers I am going to start with blogging - after all we already have our students blogging, therefore surely it's time for the teachers to get on board too! Our blogs will basically be reflections on our practice as teachers, our questions and wonderings, and we will comment on each other's blogs and support other colleagues who are moving in this direction.

Earlier this week I was reading a blog post by Kelly Tenkely, a technology integration specialist and instructional coach for elementary teachers. In her blog iLearn Technology she writes about how she started blogging about technology in education and sharing links to great educational resources. She goes onto say:

I believed that I was doing something worthwhile and decided that I didn’t care if no one seemed to notice. Blogging did something else for me, it made me a better teacher. I understood the learning process better because I was engaged in it on a daily basis.

Kelly goes on to say how blogging led to her developing her own Personal Learning Network as a result of the educational discussions she has had from reading others' blogs and from people reading hers. She says:

I have been surrounded by greatness and others who are passionate about learning and teaching others to do the same. I have become convinced that those educators that I connect with virtually are among the smartest, most innovative people on the planet.

My own learning journey has been the other way round from Kelly's, though I would agree absolutely with her last statement. As I've mentioned a couple of times already on this blog, my PLN has given me more professional development in the past year, than I have probably had in my entire 28 years of teaching! The only thing that comes close to it was some years ago while I was teaching in the Netherlands and was involved in a European-wide project for teachers on reflective practice. I had partners in Norway, Sweden, Denmark, the UK and Spain and we met up probably twice a year. This programme was organised through Comenius with the following aims:

COMENIUS contributes to enhancing the quality and reinforcing European dimension of school education by:

• promoting transnational cooperation and exchanges between schools and teacher training establishments;

• encouraging innovation in pedagogical methods and materials;

• promoting the transnational dissemination of good practice and innovation in the management of schools;

• developing and disseminating methods for combating educational exclusion and school failure, promoting the integration of pupils with special educational needs, and promoting equal opportunities in all sectors of education;

• promoting the use of information and communication technology in school education and in the training of staff working in this sector.

I was part of a dynamic group of teachers for 6 years (3 of them actually working on this project) and am still in contact with these teachers today. We discussed things like student motivation and how our curriculum differed between the various countries. We looked at how we passed on our knowledge as teachers to those coming newly into the profession.

Sometime after this, at a different school in Asia, I then started to use Twitter to connect, first of all, with other educators in Asia that I met at conferences and workshops. This later expanded to take in some of the educators that they were following too.

While I have been blogging on a personal basis for quite a while now (for family and friends who wanted to share our Asian adventure and then also our move back to Europe again), it has taken me a long time to get into blogging as a professional. While I was quite happy to read others educational blogs and even to comment on them, I kept asking myself what good it could do to write yet one more blog and who on earth would want to read it when there were so many other great ones out there. Finally I have come to realise that I am blogging for myself and my new colleagues, as well as modelling blogging for my students. Actually I enjoy writing - it helps me to sort out my own thoughts, reflect on where I have been, where I am now and perhaps plan for where I want to go in the future. And hopefully, at the same time, it leads to me becoming a better teacher too.

The Tech Transformation Starts Here

The final week of our term, four months into our school year, and at today's staff meeting the technology transformation has finally got the seal of approval: when we return from Christmas holidays the IT department will start on a flexible schedule. Welcome to the 21st century!

I've been at my new school since the summer. I moved here from NIST, one of the top IT schools in Thailand and knew it would be a real challenge to implement changes and move the IT forward. My first few months have been spent building relationships and modeling new ways of approaching teaching and learning. My aim was not just IT integration into the units of inquiry, but that IT would be totally embedded into the entire PYP curriculum, transforming teaching and learning. For many months I have been hungry for change, knowing that it would be difficult to move forward with the traditional model of classes having one 40 minute period of IT each week.

I first introduced a flexible IT schedule when I was working at the International School of Amsterdam about 7 years ago. The purpose of this was to increase students' understanding and adapt to their needs using both a flexible schedule and more collaboration with my colleagues who were classroom teachers. I had become concerned that time was the driving force of the IT programme as lessons were based on a rigid schedule, planned as one lesson per week for the duration of a unit of inquiry. This meant that at times students had to do an activity before they were really ready for it and some projects seemed to last indefinitely. As well as that it seemed that IT was viewed as an independent subject by both the students and the teachers, rather than a tool to support learning. Sometimes forced connection were being made between the IT skills and the content covered in class. A main concern of mine was that students didn't necessarily transfer skills from one area to another and that students didn't see the connection between IT and their learning. I also noticed that some classroom teachers would feel at a loss or overwhelmed during the IT lessons, especially if there was pressure on these teacher to be "ready" content-wise for the IT class. On other occasions I noticed that these teachers did not know that IT could make the students' task easier and therefore they did not think of bringing the students to the lab or booking out the laptops for them to do it.

Following a Harvard Project Zero summer school, I started working with a small group of teachers at ISA to pilot a new way of approaching IT. We started with many questions:

How can we better integrate IT?

Who is responsible for what?

How can IT support students’ needs and learning as well as the curriculum?

How can we find a balance between the classroom needs and the IT curriculum?

How can we efficiently communicate between ourselves?

How can we get the students to see computers as a tool to support their learning and expression?

How can we implement change?

How can we support teacher’s own understanding of IT so that it positively impacts their use and teaching?

The first change we made was the introduction of a flexible schedule for those teachers (one per grade level) who volunteered to try this out. Lessons were not timetabled but scheduled based on the students' needs. This meant that classes could go for periods of time without any IT lessons, but would then have longer or more frequent lessons when they were needed. This allowed us to focus more on curricular and student needs and allowed for more individualized work. I met with the class teachers regularly, but often on a more casual basis, to discuss what was needed - this became a better use of meeting time as we were focused on immediate needs and this led to more mutual trust and appreciation between us. Now that we had a shared responsibility for the lessons there was much more co-planning, with each of us focusing on our particular area. At the same time I worked on empowering the classroom teachers so that they could lead at least one of their units of inquiry in the computer lab and could independently continue work done in the IT labs back in their classrooms using laptops, or they could have the students apply the skills learnt in the IT lessons back in class in a different context. We moved onto collaborative assessments, designing rubrics that we were both responsible for completing though with different areas within the assignment for each of us. The IT activities started to show more students' understanding.

At the end of the first year we assessed where we had come and what the impact had been on student learning. This is what we found:

• IT was used according to need and not according to a fixed timetable.
• Students had become able to determine when using a computer was appropriate. We constantly asked them "Is this the best tool for the task?"
• Students' attitudes had changed: IT was seen as a tool.
• The new way of teaching allowed students to get to higher levels of thinking.
• There was a better balance of time. Some teachers reduced the amount of time spent in IT lessons because the activities we did directly related to the curriculum, others increased the amount of time spent in IT because they now saw the relevance of it
• Lessons were better done when the students had the understanding they needed - sometimes this was at the end of a unit of inquiry as they worked on a summative assessment, sometimes it was at the beginning of a unit as IT was used for tuning in and finding out.
• It allowed for an authentic and growing curriculum.
• Students became more accepting of differentiation through IT.
• It allowed me as the IT teacher to think from a macroscopic view instead of a microscopic one.
• I had become responsible for the IT development of both students and teachers.
• I had started to explore new boundaries with the aim of integrating and further enhancing understanding.
• Assessments were more meaningful as different lenses were being used to look at the students, and as a result we were more able to appreciate each child's development.

This journey has not always been a smooth one - over the years I have seen tensions and growing pains. For example there have sometimes been problems when classes in the same grade have been doing different activities, in particular some of the teachers who were not part of this process became insecure and wondered if their students were being "neglected" as the perception was that the teachers involved in this project got more support in general. The teachers involved could also get frustrated when having to deal with the inflexible structure others were using. Some teachers initially found it difficult to let go of the weekly lesson routine, others had a problem with time management.

Seven years on, and now in my 3rd school where I am about to introduce a flexible schedule, I feel I have learnt a lot along the way and that this journey will, this time round, hopefully be easier. Now, as well as introducing the flexible schedule I am also introducing more Web 2.0 tools and 21st century literacy skills. I often think that is one of the best things about being an IT teacher - everything is constantly moving forward and I almost never have to teach the same thing twice! I am looking forward to exploring new ways of doing things and developing the students, teachers and myself all at the same time.

Photo Credit: Ghost in the Machine by ehoyer