Again, not much time in between nattering to all these enthusiastic Welsh people, so the links from both sessions coming on Thursday.
Languages
June 27, 2007
June 23, 2007
June? eTwinning? It must be podcasting...
I met up with a lovely bunch of French teachers (from France) and teachers of French (from Scotland) last night and this morning I'm helping them discover the wonderful world of the podcast. It's also been a great opportunity to update a few links on where languages teachers can go to get help and resources for podcasting.
I'll not have much time so I'm just showing how you can produce a regular 'learning log' podcast of what goes on in your students' world à la Radio Sandaig, and how that can develop into something more explicitly around assessment for learning by plugging Adam's kids' Rate My Mates two-stars-and-a-wish.
Your royalty free podsafe music is brought to you today by Incompetech and the Google search phrases "sheep bah mp3" (which leads to these great animal sounds) and "traffic noises" (which leads to some worryingly wide ranging car crash sounds). Freesounds.com is also one of the easiest ways to get great sound effects (thanks, Oscar). I'm also going to be reminding us all how important it is to right-click everything to save it to your computer first, before importing to your radio show or podcast in Audacity. The group you can see above took my guidance on reducing background noise in a vibrant classroom - turn the underneaths of desks into your recording studio.
I'll be suggesting that they use the eduBuzz support pages on podcasting as well as the MFL specific guidance on the MFLE.
I'm hoping there'll be time at the end to talk about how this is going to look in the classroom, how collaboration is going to take place. It might all happen on the eTwinning TwinSpace (podcast on how to use it on the MFLE) or on a more ad hoc basis through a Google Doc or wiki. Above all, the role of the teacher has to be made clear. The teacher isn't clicking, cutting and generally getting in the way. The teacher's standing back, suggesting good ways of developing things further, sharing tips and learning from what the kids might have to offer.
For those wanting to get going straightaway without installing on the computer you can use Portable Apps or the French versions at Framasoft and Framakey (thanks to Phillipe for that). You'll also want to check out your French legal stuff for getting parental permission for podcasting.
June 16, 2007
"Leading from behind" to empower learners
A day with Stephen Heppell in East Lothian
09h04 - Gullane Primary School
[view pictures from this visit]
We drew up to the school to
immediately noticed the wind turbine. And while this school might be
self-powered with solar and wind energy, meeting Head Teacher Maureen
Tremmel again reminded me that there is some very human energy driving
this school forward. The main theme in this school for us: leading from
behind. Maureen gives her staff a lot of slack to try out 'new' ways of
working which might go against the current grain and her staff are not
possessive of 'their' ideas and techniques. There is constant sharing
of strategies, constant 'stealing' and adaptation of good teaching and
learning. Some of the highlights:
Perceptions of what is important: We were immediately
impressed by the solar energy and wind turbine; the kids less so. When
asked about the readings of the solar panels and wind turbine a kid said: "That? I don't
look at that. But if you lie down under the turbine it looks like it's
going to fall on top of you". What seems one objective for us is often quite another for our youngsters.
Gaming for learning: The P7 P6 students have been using their own Nintendo DSes and Dr Kawashima Brain Training
games (about seven out of 23 kids) for over a year now in their Friday
morning 'Golden Time', to help improve their memory and their maths.
When I asked whether they would share them for some of that Friday
morning time every child immediately said 'yes'. Do we need to buy in
gaming consoles for schools? Maybe not so much if we can empower kids
just to do what feels natural.
Leading from behind leads to innovation: The school has
several potential 'gurus' in digital media, active learning and
critical skills work - but they have successfully resisted the
temptation to keep their 'secrets' and that guru status. An impressive
number of age groups, from first year elementary students through to
those about to leave into High School, had created digital video and
animation to illustrate their learning, even though this kind of work
had perhaps sprung from one teacher's desire to innovate. We witnessed two classroom assistants working in the Infants Library with three primary six children filming three primary one children on their experiences of being the youngest ones in the school. The whole thing was organised by those very Primary Six students, too.
Critical skills and rich tasks: The P7 (11 year old) class
we saw had an exceptional understanding of their own learning journey,
where their skills and weaknesses lie and they showed an incredible
confidence in planning tasks and allocating roles without the need for
teacher intervention. Their classroom teacher, Kathy McGrane, has
helped them train themselves up in the skillset
that allows them to now do this while she simply facilitates learning
with quite complex challenges and projects.
The current project, around
creating an innovation business and product, involved business planning
around a product of the students' own invention. Within the next few
weeks we'll see a train window that can be changed to show the
environment you wish to view, an organic water purification tool... A previous project had been on religion and there the kids had innovated in their homework by producing a Google Sketchup Mosque. That's a skill it would be good to see reappear on some of the current innovation project. I hope the young lad who made the mosque teaches his classmates how to use Sketchup to produce their prototypes.
Some über confident kids gave a presentation on the hoof about what critical skills has meant to them and, while clearly well-practised for the many visitors from other schools in the Authority, they had clearly learnt to present in an engaging and informative manner, self-organising and allocating their tasks.
What we were left wondering was how the kids and teachers might capture this so that the impact can be shared beyond those lucky enough to make the journey to their classroom physically. I'll be working with the school, thankfully, to capture some of this in our forthcoming new interactive service on Learning and Teaching Scotland's site. But, having seen how engaged the other classmates were by the video that the class had produced earlier in the year, I think that the answer lies in media production from the kids for their very own blog.
Gullane is an open source management, open plan school - even if the teachers do refer to "visitors at the 'door'" when there is clearly no door to be seen. In the same way as the teachers in the school have benefited from the open doors of their open plan school to share and learn from each other, it would be good to see some electronic open doors to share this amazing stuff even further. That said, it's not stopping an amazing number of people applying to work in this hive of creative activity.
May 23, 2007
Game making for non-linear storytelling
Judy Robertson and Cathrin Howells are both working on the Learning and Teaching Scotland games design project, and are presenting today on how game making can lead to successful learners.
Using Neverwinter Nights, a cheap game which can be bought off the shelf, Judy and Cathrin looked into how their research on how the game could improve on literacy could be applied to a real life classroom in deepest, darkest Dundee. Because Neverwinter Nights is not just a game, but, like so many of the games we play today, it comes with a game maker attached.
Making a game
We're now making a game, choosing our landscape from a huge list (a forest), giving it a name (Murrayfield Forest), choosing the size of the forest (small - too big, and kids tend to get lost in their own game!). Now, we're taking our first aerial views of the forest, spinning around so we are standing on the forest floor. We've added a stream through the forest and a small lodge.
Choosing a character from amongst the dragons, shapeshifters, wizards and gouls is exciting, as we can view our 3D, animated creations before plonking them into our world, checking, of course, to see whether we are choosing an evil, friendly or commoner dragon. We can now make them say certain things in response to what the player asks them, as many variables as we, the game creators, want to add. Each of these then has its own consequences. Before we know it, we've started writing tangent after tangent in our non-linear story.
In this demo we are making it up as we go along, but done in a planned way, through discussion between learners, the possibilities for creating some truly amazing plots, built one on top of the other, are huge.
What the kids said
The thing the kids liked the most was the fact that this was a hard activity, much in the same way as the medical students with numeracy problems enjoyed the significant challenge of Dr Kawashima's Brain Training in use at Bournemouth University and my borrowed students at St Thomas of Aquin's enjoyed the difficulty of podcasting. Also, the students wanted to do these difficult tasks independently, they wanted the teacher to leave them to get on with it (their learning):
He...insisted I show him what he was doing wrong rather than doing it for him.
Really interesting was the role of the learning environment on how children worked (or didn't work) collaboratively. On one class it quickly became the natural norm for kids to share their tricks and tips for making better games, better stories, while in the classroom next door it was incredibly difficult for the staff to foster this kind of sharing. There it was seen more as 'stealing', so this has to be borne in mind when developing similar projects in your local authority or school.
Gains of game writing over paper writing
Kids were found to be editing and improving writing more and better through the game than they normally would on paper for standard 'writing' tasks:
"Well, I wrote a story and now I'm transforming it and making it better."
"It's a better way of learning like, better sort of language work, cos it's more fun and it helps you with computing as well... it helps you with your conversation... you think about it a lot more to make your game better."
To make it work...
Judy believes that if you don't take a constructivist approach to learning and teaching already, i.e. you take an instructivist approach, then you're not going to find it easy to make a success of game making (or anything else in the Curriculum for Excellence, for that matter).
On a hardware basis you do need PCs with adequate graphics cards and memory - it's a practicality, and one that can be sorted out relatively easy, but it needs done before you start.
Game making is a hugely complex activity without being complicated, something which is a huge asset for learning and teaching.
May 22, 2007
May 10, 2007
April 20, 2007
March 31, 2007
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:
- "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. - 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. - 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"). - "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
- 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?
- 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.
- 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?
- 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 .
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?
March 30, 2007
My first (and last) teaching position at Oxford University
OK, not quite true. In about an hour I'm speaking to languages teachers at Languages World, run by the Association for Language Learning. It's at the University of Oxford's examination schools, with signs everywhere informing me that I am not to take photos. Well, I did. Maybe they're called disruptive technologies for a reason ;-)
As I wondered down past University College and all these bastions of knowledge (I passed the house of the guy who invented to microscope and therefore saw the first cell) I felt that it was slightly cheeky to be informing people here, of all places, that content was no longer king, but that connectivity and social space were.
I'm hoping to show quite a large crowd that emerging technologies work better than just 'ICT' - because emerging technologies lead to emerging practice, where consumption of the textbook and cassette become less important than the creations of students themselves. It's only when we try things out (and sometimes fail) that we can hope to find a way to build on what we are doing (assuming, of course, that what we're doing in the first place is any good - Shimon Peres might have a word to say on that).
Hopefully this year might lead to a few more teachers take many more risks for better results and happier kids learning languages. Notes to follow along with poor old Shropshire's.
Ewan McIntosh
I help create the most beautiful schools in the world, inside and out
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