Stephen Heppell in Melbourne

Today I was lucky enough to attend a Policy & Research Forum and hear Professor Stephen Heppell talk about 21st century learning.  Lucky, because I suspect that I was one of very few practising classroom teachers at the event.  I sat amongst a bunch of principals, and I think that most of the other people there were bureaucrats or consultants.  I am lucky that my principal thinks it’s important for teachers to attend things like this.  

Anyway, it was an inspiring opportunity to listen to a visionary.  He began with a proposition: he thinks that something has changed in the world, because everybody wants to learn.  I think he’s right.  In my 30 years of teaching, we have shifted from a situation where kids couldn’t wait to escape school, to kids who love it, and adults who choose to engage in education in formal and informal ways throughout their lives.

I liked the way he began with a question: what’s a literate teacher?  According to the kids, it’s being able to

• Edit a Wikipedia entry
• Choose a safe online payments site
• Upload a video to YouTube and make a comment
• Subscribe to a podcast
• Manage groups in Flickr (and be able to spell Flickr)
• Turn on or off predictive text on a phone

(I can do all of these except the last one.  My phone is a bit of a mystery to me…)

Prof Heppell is on a campaign for learning.  What’s the most common method of teaching reading?

• Copying from books or the whiteboard ( 52% .
• Listening to teacher talk (33%)
• Taking notes (25%)

And how do students prefer to learn?

• in groups (55%)
• doing practical things(39%)
• learning with friends (35%)
• with computers (31%)

These preferences are not just what the kids (predictably) want, there are also all kinds of adult experts who confirm that these methods are the most effective for learning: World Bank recommendations, the Head Honcho of Education in Britain, Corporate types and so on. We know this already.  We’ve included some of these ideas in charters over the years, and Web 2.0 is in our new strategic plan because our in-school research showed us that the kids are way ahead of us with IT.  But, system-wide?  It’s all so slow to change!

The wishlist was long and I didn’t write it all down, but here’s some of it:

• stage-based not age-based learning
• 24 hour access to learning (Ten years ago I had an article about this – and 7 days a week schooling – published in The Canberra Times!)
• more all-age schools
• multi purpose spaces (no more long corridors)
• learning by doing
• assessment as a guide to learning strategies
• creativity and entrepeneurial activities
• collaboration not competition
• assessing ICT using latest technologies (i.e. not essays that nobody does once they leave education – unless they write for The Monthly or Quarterly Essay!)

Already knowledge industries surpass manufacturing in the US, and if it isn’t the same here in Oz, it ought to be.  Exporting things in expensive carbon-emitting ships is not the way for our country to prosper in the 21st  century: we should be selling ideas and innovations on the net.

I also like Prof Heppell’s insistence that assessment practices in Oz should not follow the mistakes made in Britain.  Teaching kids to regurgitate knowledge they’ve ‘already met’ is silly when what we really want from our education system is to teach our kids to be able to respond to situations they’ve never met before.

And lest we felt gloomy about how far we have to go, he reminded us that we are very lucky here in Australia.  We have a culture of literacy here in Melbourne (We’re a City of Literature after all!) and we have the potential to be world leaders in education.

What would be my measure of success for an education system of the 21st century? A huge increase in the number of bright and brilliant young people wanting to take up teaching as a profession and join in the adventure.

Recommended sites to visit are ThinkQuest, NotSchool, Teachers TV and Prof Heppell’s own sites: Heppell and CEMP.

Knowledge Bank Online Conference Session 2

Steve Hargadon

The keynote speaker today was Steve Hargadon from the USA.  These are some of my notes that I took from the presentation but for more info, do have a look at Steve’s blog because he explains it much better than I do.

He thinks that Web 2.0 is as powerful a change agent as the phone or the car because it involves a new publishing revolution.  We are no longer recipients of information on the web as we were.  Web 1.0= recipient mode; whereas Web 2.0 = the read/write web  involving contributing,  collaborating, & creating.

Steve identified 10 trends in education – and I took beaut notes about his ideas, pasted them in here – and somehow lost them, so now all I have is my headings…

Trends

1. Ability to create content
2. Tidal Wave of Information – imagine when everyone is contributing to Wikipedia, eh?
3. Culture of openness
4. Culture of participation – Amazon reviews (and travellers rating hotels on Trip Adviser)
5. The age of the collaborator – the wisdom of the masses?  (I’m not so sure about this.  Who needs reality TV and tabloids anyway?)
6. An explosion of innovation
7. The World Is Getting Flatter and Faster
8. The Long Tail – this means that if the cost of something is too high, it’s not worthwhile for a retailer to sell it.  But if somehow the product does become available, an audience emerges for it.  50% of Amazon sales are for things that are never stocked in shops.
9. Social Learning Moved Toward Centre Stage
10. Social Networking – it’s not just My Space, Facebook and Orket, but social networks touch an emotional chord and bring us all together.

 What should we as teachers be doing?

• Learn about web 2.0
• Lurk – to familiarise yourself with what’s going on, until you feel confident
• Participate
• Digest This Thought:The Answer to Information Overload Is to Produce More Information.
• Teach Content Production
• Make education a new discussion
• Help build the new playbook

Knowledge Bank Online Conference Session 1

Last night when I got home from work I viewed today’s sessions from the Knowledge Bank Online Conference through Elluminate.  The first sessions was a really inspiring presentation from two wonderful teachers, Anne Mirtschin and Jess McCulloch from Hawkesdale P-12 College.  They have 10 minutes tech spot sessions at staff meetings, but I really liked their idea of WIWOW Walk in walk out Wednesdays…a little bit like what we have been doing at MPPS but more ongoing, and open to everyone.   Anne and Jess make themselves available after school on Wednesdays for buddying and trouble-shooting for learning Web 2.0 with other teachers, and now 70% of their teachers blog, and comment on student blogs, which is an amazing achievement.   Their maths and science faculties have their own wikis, and the LOTE department even has pages with pronunciation guides for students to practise at home with.  They started off with del.icio.us and with some social networking – which was immediately appealing as it has been with us at MPPS.

One of the presenters said that Web 2 isn’t a thing, it’s a state of mind, and I think that’s true – which is both exciting and problematic, because some people are not very willing to embrace it.  Jess and Anne used Teacher Professional Leave to get the project started at their school, and that enabled them to provide a lot of support.

These are some of the links I noted from their presentation:

www.eplanks.wikispaces.com

 www.podomatic.com/eplanks

www.technolote.com

www.murcha.wordpress.com

www.awesomeo.wikispaces.com

www.murch.globalteacher.org.au

www.backyard.globalstudents.org.au

They also talked about growing your own personal learning networks eg through Twitter and Classroom 2.0 - but I’m still not sure about this because a network that’s too large becomes too time-consuming.  I’d rather have quality networks that really relate to my practice.

Some of the applications they use are unfamiliar to me so I’m going to have to find out more about them: 

• MS Photostory for storytelling
• Skype used for internal communication just for fun
• Irfanview and digital photo manipulation

Students drive the blogs most of the time, and this is partly because teachers do respond to the blogs.  Assessment was raised as a topic, and Jess and Anne find it helpful that these  blogs are accessible at home.  They feel they’re getting to know the students better, and there are better learning outcomes because it shows students the teachers are interested in them, and the improvements in their writing.  In LOTE using 2.0 also allows for different learning styles, and allows the quieter student to participate. They like the visibility of thinking of the other kids – and think it’s challenging without pressure.  However,  they haven’t developed a rubric for marking blogs – and are not sure that they are necessary.  (I’m not so sure about that.)  The best thing is that it frees up class time for teaching – it’s non synchronous. There’s been a massive increase in asking questions because students aren’t embarrassed to do that online.  

I wonder a bit about the time commitment too… I’m enjoying playing around with 2.0 at home, but what if the enthusiasm of keen innovators becomes the expected norm?  How much of our evenings is going to be spent this way, or is there  going to be a time allowance to deal with it as the use of 2.0 grows?

I didn’t find the presentation about Meeting the Motherfish so interesting.  It was very much about the excitement of discovering new developments in paleontology, and not very much about 2.0. 

 

 

Learning Library 2.0

I have been having a wonderful time playing around on the Learning Library 2.0 eLearning course run by SLAV and the Yarra Plenty Regional Library. I use the words ‘playing around’ because that’s how it seems – exploring online tasks at my leisure and experimenting with all kinds of fun stuff online.

I’ve learned more about blogging, wikis, customised search engines, cartoonizers and mashups, and most of it is stuff that is going to be relevant in a classroom.  A 21st century classroom, that is, not some fuddy-duddy print-only place!  See Lisa Hill’s EdBlog for more about it!