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So motivating you can't stop them learning

A few days down south in Shropshire and Oxford have rounded off two months of pretty much non-stop conferences and workshops. I've worked with around 1500 teachers over that time and, considering each one might have an average 80 students a week (between primary and secondary), that's potentially 120,000 kids that might see a classroom near them change, even just a bit. Add to that around 24,000 uniques to the blog, and 1700 subscribers, the slightly surreal fatigue I'm experiencing this weekend is, I hope, worth it. It's not quite over yet - April's got its fair share of kms - but I thought I would leave some notes of what I've learned through doing this over the winter of 2007.

The changes I have been proposing are small steps. We need to pick one or two pet projects and really make a difference through them and then, just as we get comfortable, it's a good idea to share that with colleagues and move on to the next thing ourselves. That's because most of these teachers are the potential innovators - they chose to come along to conferences on new technology. You/They are the ones that'll make a difference.

Four things that hold us back from innovating, or that make us get innovation a bit wrong:

1. "Thin-slicing"
   Malcolm Gladwell's Blink gave me plenty of parallels in education to think about. Thin slicing is the Pepsi Challenge effect, where we see a guy at a conference talking about something new for a couple of minutes. We then make up our minds: "I love it, I'll just jump into it" or "I'm too old for that/the boss will never go for it". Taking a thin slice of a more complex process makes us less likely to succeed in both these scenarios. Most of the things I've been proposing this last wee while are simple initially, but require more complex thinking about the role of the teacher.
2. Fear = loathing?
   When we fear things we decide not to take the jump. But if we can decide that failure might actually be a good thing then we can start to play a lot better. Making purposeful play something that both learner and teacher do will help make that learning so much more effective.
3. Over planning
   I'm not saying that we should stop planning our lessons, but rather that we need to leave room for happy accidents to happen, for those tangents to be developed. This might mean throwing out the annual planner for a week, just to go off on a tangent that might lead to something more interesting or relevant to the kids' own experiences. It might be a false lead, it might be the lead that makes that period of learning 100 times more worthwhile.
   
   With ICT we tend to overplan our lessons. This might be a starting point, if we can start to see technology as opening tangents ("how could we do something other than PowerPoint to make the task more demanding cognitively and less demanding technically?") rather than closing them off ("we don't have all the equipment we need to do that").
4. "Why bother?"
   Kids are changing. The 16 year old in 2007 is entering the employment market with only internet-age experiences on which to rely (the internet came into being in 1991). The six year old entering elementary school expects the web to allow them to publish and share their views with the world.

Five elements that have changed outside school and which need to change inside school

1. Audience
   • How many people read or hear the work of your students? Do you project the work of your students onto exterior walls of the school or County Hall? Do you publish their work on school blogs for all to see, in the same way that their "stupid and useless" videos attract 154,000+ viewers. Do you know how?
2. Creativity Unleashed!
   • Student creations can be conceived and published in the same place, whether that's in photographic, video or audio forms . Find out how to do all this. Channel the creative energy and ideas of your students - teacher as guide, not fount of knowledge - and you can turn those silly YouTube aspirations into something much more powerful.
3. Differentiate... by raising the bar
   
   • Students' favourite elements of learning are often the most difficult, if my quotes are anything to go by.
   • If students have persevered to create somthing valuable share it in formats that they can relate to and use: mobile phones, iPod and gaming formats. Then mum and dad can see it straight away - and anyone else. Bluetooth is a really easy free way to transfer stuff around the classroom through kids' phones.
   • You can assess and be creative at the same time. Take a look at formative assessment in action in Modern Languages et in English.
   • Why make students write to express their views all the time? Why not use photography and notes on Flickr?
4. Authentic goals (for students, not teachers)
   
   • Create real audio guides for the city in AudioSnacks.
   • Keep a learning log of what is going on in class or on a school trip .
5. It's not about the teach, it's about the tech
   • Use the technology that is in your students' bags and pockets - mobile phone ideas; iPod  use (listen to education material on iTunes Podcast Directory; xBoxes let you speak with fellow players around the world; the games played by kids on their Nintendo DS or Wii (I'm playing one at Steve's here) can often be put into multilingual modes - never has brain training been so draining.

The tools we use should not get in the way of the far bigger question - what is your role in your classroom now and will new technologies integrate with it? The chances are they won't, unless you integrate (i.e. change) with them. The main release these tools will offer the teacher is the extension of the classroom beyond the 'nine-to-four': collaborative tools like these offer free and flexible ways to claim back some of the 200 minutes spent online by our kids each night.

And why this urgency to adopt new and changing technology? Because new technology tends to push us into new practices. Take a look at the Scottish Inspectorate's report or the Becta New Tech report to see what I mean. Some ideas will work, some will not. Do you have the desire to try and maybe make some mistakes? Will you blog about it so that others needn't make the same mistakes?

Computer Education Society of Ireland

I've had a cracking if incredibly work-heavy time in Dublin this past 24 hours. I'm just about to head off on the plane but wanted to leave some quick links to the parts of the talk. The podcast will take some time to edit down.

1. Why people react in funny ways to innovation and creativity
2. Five things that make innovation and creativity through social media a good thing in the classroom
3. Five things to look out for when you are going about innovating in the classroom

I haven't covered all the points I want to, for sure. It's a varied topic on which I could go into ridiculous detail. However, over the next week I'll be thinking about what we've done more specifically in East Lothian to get some degree of relative success in integrating new technologies to many of our classrooms. I'll also be considering some of the drawbacks when, as Heppell mentions in his innovation cycle, national education agencies want to harness things quickly, "to catch the wave". It can be a Good Thing, but how do we convince those who maybe don't share our passions not only that it is a Good Thing but also that it's an Even Better Thing when done in a particular way?

CESI: Challenges to innovation in the classroom and shaping attitudes

So, you're enthused and you want to blog, podcast, publish video, audio and text on a website which can be found by people easily. You want to be the most Googlable school around so that students take pride in their online work and readership. But a number of things, which are perceived wrongly as barriers, have to be dealt with first. Most of them come down not to equipment, money or resources (other than time) but to attitudes, and how well you can change the attitudes of those around you.

I picked up on a slight sense of resignation to the "powers that be". This needn't be the case. Teachers are the only people who can make decisions about what goes on in their classrooms, if those decisions are to stand any chance of success, that is.

1. Safety
Safety's important, but how we approach it more so. The wooden egg box is an excellent device to stop the egg's contents leaking all over the kitchen when the box is dropped. It is, however, hopeless at preventing the egg being broken in the first place and provides no flexibility when you want to fit a dozen into your shopping bag. So, we come up with the novel idea of the plastic egg box, moulded to each individual egg to hold it in, hug it close and, in the process, increase the price of the eggs without making them taste any better. Finally, some bright spark came up with the idea of the cardboard egg box. Flexible enough to bend, strong enough to resist and thus stop egg-breaking, cheap enough to mass produce. It's not the safest - the egg will still break given enough pressure, but no-one would be silly enough to press too hard on the egg box. Or if they were, it would just be malicious in the same way cracking the egg on my head would be.

Web safety in the age of the Live Web is pretty similar - the machine doesn't have a brain so please use your own.

2. Security
Keep your web security closed enough to keep the viruses up, open enough to let people in. If they're not welcome in your living room, chuck 'em out. But if you fill in all the windows on the house then we can't see outside.

3. Simplicity
If you're thinking of bringing in a piece of new tech, then keep it simple. What do you want it to do for you that existing means could not? Why is this a better/simpler/more efficient/more fun way of doing things? Does it help maintain or increase the attainment of your kids? Yes? Brilliant. Now think about what your users (parents? fellow teachers? students?) are going to want to do. Publish video? Work out what tools you can use in school. Publish audio? Make sure that the blogging platform you use for showing your work can handle big files and lots of use. etc etc. If in doubt, ask someone who's done it.

4. Flexibility
Make sure the work you are thinking of allows the kids to breathe, to make mistakes, to go off on tangents. That means your role as teacher changes: you are delimiting the resources they can use to start off, giving them a broad stroke from which to pick a narrower band, giving them suitable space(s) in which to work, finding the technology and encouraging them to use anything they ahve of their own. If you're going all out on building a blog system from Wordpress then make sure you can expand it on demand. Before they are needed, find the ways that teachers can include Bubbleshare slideshows on their blogs, calendars and the like. Just providing them in East Lothian has led to people using them - kids even make unprompted digital stories for their homework.

5. Findability
Blogs we like. Websites à l'ancienne are hard to find. Get some Googlejuice.

CESI: Why should we innovate?

This is a follow-on run-through from the start of the talk I delivered today to the Computer Education Society of Ireland. You can read the beginning, perhaps, before reading the middle.

Stephen Heppell speaks about the innovation cycle: change will always be happening, just a question of jumping on, and jumping off (no-one tells you that part). The successful innovator knows when to jump off and when to keep on just in case. Teachers don’t need to be the ones innovating: students can do that, too. Take a look at this innovative kid, left, talking through her "Private Garden", where the stems move with each incoming and outgoing email, chat, text message, phone call... It's a 21 Century kid doing the innovation, not the teacher, not the school.

Innovation is not something the teacher makes the decision to do, it just happens around us. All the time. Continuously. Not all innovation will lead to better attainment, more fun, more motivation, better learning - some of it is the equivalent of the Pepsi sweetener. Other innovation needs to be drunk by the can - it's not until you've gone through, learnt the hard way and failed a good bit along the way that you and the kids get the benefit.

I use five arguments to justify why there needs to be some evolutionary change in the way we use ICT. We've forgotten the 'C' part (Communication) for too long. The communication doesn't always need to take place through the technology, but can take place Face-to-Face thanks to the technology in a collaborative film-making activity in class, for example, where the communication comes not just from the message in the video but also the collaborative activity (negotiation, role-allocation, instructional language...) taking place in the making of the film. It's difficult to have that level of collaboration between 30 people if one person, the teacher, wants to maintain constant, uncompromising control on each decision, outcome, next step or tangent. The tech is going to change the teach.

1. Audience
I always harp on about this, but if my kids produce some work I'd like to think it was interesting enough to share with at least one other person. Parents, peers, other teachers, other countries, the local community - how are you going to let them know about the work your kids are doing, the processes they've gone through to get there, the failures they've overcome...?

In the 19th Century classroom...
...the average audience for student work is one (two for a conscientious student who bothers to read their own work). Even in whole school display I'm not convinced the whole school becomes avid viewers of their peers' artwork or essays. When I was at Musselburgh I stood in the corridor for weeks at breaks and lunchtimes, looking to see who stopped to observe student work on the walls. I was surprised quite so many did, but they were all from the class to whom the display 'belonged'.

In the 20th Century classroom...
...there have maybe been some missed opportunities for kids to communicate with their local communities. With more abundant projectors than ever before why are two or three of these not pointed window-wards to project that day's best artwork and sculpture from the school? Passers-by in the community could observe the work taking shape and then, at the end of term, see the final products in their full glory. You could even take things to extremes at certain points in the year, doing what they did at Rouen Cathedral with a couple of Monet prints.

In the 21st Century classroom...
...we invite children to redraft work in its entirety in jotters, workbooks and foolscap paper (it's called foolscap for a reason ;-) In three clicks I can publish whatever I want - this text, links and photos, for example - to whoever wants to read it. Because it's a blog people can subscribe to the content so that every time I write something new they get it in their inbox (find out how to do that). That means that I have an instant audience of around 1200 people for everything (and anything) I pop up.

We don't need to rely on a staff to run our print presses anymore, we can do it with one finger and an internet connection. And we don't need permission - kids are already encyclopedia editors and self-publishers on the net. How many English teachers are there who have published work? Hmmm...

Writing on a blog means that your content is frequently updated which means you have great Googlejuice. The location of today's talk was Coláiste de h-Íde, whose traditional school website has been knocked into second place by RateMyTeacher - RateMyTeacher doesn't even have a 'feed' (wee orange button that replicates the content elsewhere on the web for you, helping others find you) in the same way as a blog does, so the school would find it really easy to create a better web presence just be handing over the school blog to the kids to update daily.

2. Creativity Unleashed
Taking a digital photo is quite creative. Preparing it for publication more so. Publishing the photo and commenting on other photographers' work is highly creative. Publishing the already highly creative work undertaken in schools means that creativity is truly unleashed.

Take the Five Frame Story or Six Word Story based on one photograph. Besides being a creative enterprise, with thought of storylines, aesthetics and meaning, publishing the photos on Flickr adds an additional creative element: students can leave comments on pictures, so each member of the class can write alternative elements to stories under each photo. Not being able to publish pics of kids may not be such an issue if you let them work around that rule: Play Mobil and Lego can take on a life of their own in a photo story.

What about adding some notes to a photo to explain the history of art concepts from that trip to the museum? You can't do that with one printed photo or a textbook.

Comments from these kids as they made a podcast on their city show that simply publishing their work made them work harder and better.

3. Differentiate by raising the bar
Differentiation doesn't mean that you have to produce a million multi-coloured worksheets. Differentiation might involve a new skill (creating a radio show or podcast) which is in itself quite challenging, but which allows the weaker pupil to stretched in that area while practicing, drilling their basics. Meanwhile, more able pupils get the motivation to produce something for a real reason (why not add your city guide podcasts to a real city guide site?).

Making the work of kids digital, even if it is just taking a picture of display work, means that you can also make it portable. Audio, video and visuals can be transferred via Bluetooth to mobile phones - just transferring one example of a 'good talk' or your teacher-made podcast on the life of the Potato Famine to one mobile, you can have a class of thirty spread this video amongst themselves within a 40 minute class. Take the stuff of viral marketing that works so well for Mentos and CocaCola and make it work for learning.

That means, like the PiE Language Project has done, that the teacher acts as guide, encouraging kids to create their products and publish them in a variety of large, medium and small file sizes that can be read on PSPs, DSs, iPods and mobile phones.

What if you're an English language teacher or the project you are working on just involves more words than it does pictures. You could take a leaf out of Adam Sutcliffe's RateMyMates, a weblog where student work is displayed (PowerPoints, text, MP3 audio recordings) and then commented upon by students in the same class and those from other schools, even. Formative assessment in a manageable and fun format, designed with the kids and not the curriculum-makers at heart.

More lengthy text can be seen developing from scratch in the creative writing process blog, Progress Report. From a short first paragraph full of comma splice and cliché, to a finely tuned finished version, built up over six weeks, the student eventually got a huge jump of grades in a seemingly impossibly short period of time. The difference between her and the rest? She blogged her writing bit by bit, and made the process of creative writing more efficient than was being done in the classroom.

It's also just more efficient and, well, greener. Take a look at the amount of paper wasted on producing folios for English language and you see what I mean.

4. Authentic Purpose
I feel that publishing for an audience is already an authentic purpose for a task - the need to interest, inform or entertain the public with what you are learning brings with it inherent authenticity. The next time a kid asks "Why do we have to do this?" will you secretly answer "Why do we have to do this?"? If you do, what could you do to make that task more authentic, where you could publish the kids' work to make it worthwhile? Why write a 'pretend' newspaper article when they can make the news for real by publishing it on a blog for real people?

5. It's not about the Tech, it's about the Teach. Yes, but...
...the tech will change the Teach. This leads to its own batch of concerns and desires to learn. That's for the next post... In the meantime, do you see a change in the role of the teacher in all this?

CESI: Why people (not you) dread Change, Innovation and Creativity

People seem happy with this morning's keynote although, as usual, I'm left with the bitter taste of never ever being able to meet the expectations of Government officials, curriculum managers, ICT researchers, independent bodies, teachers and Conor's eleven year-old son. At least with a blog post I can try to cover some of the things I didn't have time to say or which, in the excitement, I forgot. This is just the first part. I'll try to chunk posts and link back and forth.

The main message (for those who can't be bothered reading to the bottom)? Teachers are the decision-makers in education and only they can advise on what is required in their schools. Others will have valuable input from the community, from expert research and technical groups or from Government offices, but, in the end, the teacher is more powerful than he or she probably believes.

The Computer Education Society of Ireland seems to have three main challenges which it can overcome with relative ease, if the will is there, if I have indeed identified real challenges which actually exist and if my proposed solutions fit the cultural contexts. I can but try:

• Lack of infrastructure: from the pre-keynote talks Jerome Morrisey, Director of the NCTE, pointed out that connectivity is not what it could be. Scotland spent centrally about 60m euros on infrastructure plus probably the same locally. With 200m euros budget to be spent in the next five years, Ireland's got an amazing opportunity to get on some of the fastest web in the world.
• Lack of hardware: There appears to be a lack of regular, planned spend on devices which can connect to the internet. Once you've got the web, though, you can start to look more laterally for solutions which lie under your nose: buy more computers for schools, use kids' Nintendo DS and PS2s (they have wifi)
• Frustration: I felt it, some admitted to it. Frustration is normally borne of feeling out of control in a particular situation. Is there something simple CESI could do to amplify its members' voices? Is there something the members can do to amplify the voices of their peers? Is there a way to get to the people who need to listen? The answer is 'yes', and I hope to look into that later.

What do people make of innovation or change?
The fact that people are often resistant to change is easy to say, difficult to know why.

1. Thin-slicing:
In the Pepsi challenge people were given a sip of Pepsi and another cola. They always preferred Pepsi - it was sweet, it was more-ish, people like sweet things. But when faced with a can of Pepsi or a can of CocaCola hard sales show that most people prefer CocaCola. It is less sweet so, surely, fewer people would like it. However, too much sweetness made people feel icky, they don't want to drink any more.

The same principle of thin-slicing can be used in education to describe two things. The first is how people use technology. One of the reasons Interactive Whiteboards are not really delivering significant educational returns is because people don't see how to exploit them in the long-term for what they're good at: collaborative, student-led activity. After the initial sugar buzz (a sip of Pepsi) they are left feeling icky, not wanting any more. What we end up with is teacher-centred uncollaborative work. Had they taken the less attractive, slightly bitter taste of changing the way they had taught all along (teacher-centred, from the front, look at my PowerPoint) to something more collaborative (the kids, not them, touch the board each lesson) then the rest of the drink would be more palatable in the longer term (CocaCola).

2. Fear = loathing?
Teachers do fear new technology - the 15 year-old bass player says so:

He then asked me, "What's a Blog??"... My only thought after that was if only he knew. If only he had discovered. Not just what a Blog is, but what a Wiki is, what an RSS or and Atom feed is. How it could benefit him. If only he had been taught... There are those people who don't know about Web 2.0, what it is or what it could do for them, but there are also so many people out there that fear the whole Web 2.0 or school 2.0 idea, there are even those who still fear the whole concept of the internet. But why? Well, like I said in my last post, people fear it because they don't know the facts, the benefits or the potential. This is human nature, people fear the unfamiliar. So why aren't people made aware?

Exactly.

3. We assume all sorts of things:
What can be changed? What can I change? What can we do with those teenagers ("If I let them use their mobile phone to video their science experiment then they'll start happy-slapping each other. Yes, dear colleague, it really is the phone's fault..."). The problem with assumptions is that they are nearly always wrong, an arrogant solution to an often non-existent problem. In the mobile phone example, we teach students what is not allowed and what is allowed. If they break the rules we deal with them. Truancy. Bad. Not doing homework. Bad. Chewing gum under desk. Bad. Hitting others. Bad. Filming it. Bad. Filming science experiment. Excellent. It's not that hard, is it?

4. We plan too much in advance:
Prince II is a management structure that must be useful to someone, somewhere. To someone working with 180 different faces a week, using technology that sometimes works, sometimes does not, and trying to innovate, it is really pointless to write, and stick to, an annual development plan. I work in three month maximums. If I were to do a PhD on blogging would it be of use by the time it was finished? Probably not. Liberate yourself by letting the students take the lead. Get a toolbox of skills and, more importantly, ideas, that allow you to respond quickly and guide your learners towards something worthwhile. It might not be the same worthwhile something you had planned six months previously, but it's probably better.

Irish iEyes - Casting the net in 2007

  Computer Education Society of Ireland 
  Originally uploaded by Edublogger.

Tomorrow morning I'll be offering a keynote to the Computer Education Society of Ireland, looking at what they might be able to pull from the Live Web successes of Scotland and, importantly, why all this is something they might want to pursue. This was the blurb:

Casting the net: what can change our classrooms in 2007?

The number of Scottish educators using social media to facilitate learning is taking off. Why is it that blogs, wikis, podcasts, social bookmarking and other social media are helping to enhance the educational landscape in this small country? What changes in the nature of teaching and learning have taken place to allow for this and what can Irish educators learn from the highs and lows of this Scottish (r)evolution?

I'll navigate through five principles of change to reveal how we might change the shape of the classroom in 2007.

As far as I can pick up from one of the conference organiser's blogs there is a general frustration at the lack of action centrally to give a lead on teaching and learning that adapts to the 21st Century kid. What an opportunity for the teaching profession, though, to make changes from the bottom-up, as it were. This, I feel, is what kicked things off in Scotland, getting some senior figures on board part of the way in to bolster what the groundswell felt was right. Stephen Heppell's innovation curve was spot on in this respect, where "hero innovators" come up with the goodies while governments and large corporations jump onto the bandwagon (bringing loads of cash - good thing, sometimes - and, depressingly often and as if it really mattered more than anything else, even more content).

I'll be popping up my picto-slides to the CESI Flickr set later on today, and tomorrow morning will post the outline of what I said (or, at least, meant to say). I've brought the new toy, too, so I might be able to podcast the thing straight after, too.