A Smorgasbord of Ideas for the Classroom from EduTECH 2014

As well as the keynotes, there are sessions at conferences where you just need to balance them by finding some solutions that just might work in the classroom to make some of the big picture stuff glue together.

Think of them as the "but what will I do Monday period 1?" answers.

So this post just takes some ideas from a few of the sessions I attended and mentions them as places to go, apps to try or ideas worth exploring.

1. Microsoft OneNote Setup Tool for Teachers - now that OneNote has versions for PC, Mac, Surface, iPad, Android then this app has to be considered for some of the content creation, sharing, collaboration and feedback options. Now, I have to admit that if all Microsoft's products, OneNote is the one that I really think is pretty cool. It's more functional on a PC than a Mac or an iPad, but it still has some cool features on most platforms.

I stumbled upon a session that showed how this add on for OneNote in the Office 365  'store' allows you to construct complete workbooks for yourself, your course and your students and then deploy them automatically through OneDrive. The tool let's you customise the workbooks for students and then by default you can see all of theirs in your version, but they only see their own and any content that you have pushed out. It's new and it looks really cool. Can't wait I see if it works as they showed. 

2. Much talk around the power of programming or coding and it's place, or at least, it's lack of place in current school curricula. It is suggested that every student should know how to code to some degree. Those proposing this state that it is part of the natural flow to digital literacy, that students should know how to control the device and the network for their own creativity, rather than solely rely on using someone else's apps. So there were great examples in Gary Stager's session that showed the awesome art that comes from applying simple mathematic concepts using programming languages such as Scratch and presumably whatever the current version of StarLogo is. The stuff Gary showed was certainly cool. He was big on Turtle Art 

3. The Maker Faire concept. Again, promoted by Gary Stager, but his push on this came from his own passion that kids learn by making stuff. Of course, Gary was a student of the great Seymour Papert and Seymour of course was a firm believer that mathematics education in particular is need of a major overhaul. Gary talked about the recent Maker Faire in San Francisco which was attended by 150,000 people. 

He showed 'awesome Sylvia' and wow - be prepared to be blown away by this now 12 year old girl who was only 8 when she started her website. There are all sorts of ideas here.

You get a sense of how wonderful kids are when you see this from them ... this video from super awesome Sylvia was posted in 2010 ... as Stager says "this is what 8 looks like".

Now, just in passing, I wonder to myself at the use of language, technology, art, mathematics, science that is being shown here... lots of rhetorical questions spring to mind!

4. 3D printing. Build something useful. For the first time we can actually do this. Get kids to explore this. As Gary pointed out, often these 3D printers are tucked away from the 'main stream' classes where they are only seen by the 'dumb' kids in tech classes. (Ian McCrae from Orion Health says exactly the same thing!)
Gary referred to his book "Invent to Learn" and he also has a couple of new books due soon on 3D printing and featuring Super Awesome Sylvia!

5. Augmented Reality. Not too much going on here, but did attend a session by someone using Aurasma with school wide events. Worth exploring more as both teaching resource and letting students have voice. Can be used easily with QR codes if you are in to those or with any kind of trigger.  The guy I saw had used in conjunction with a 3D manipulation tool called Augment. Again, worth exploring. I've used Aurasma before and it's time I revisited it.

6. Chris Betcher is someone I first met at a show in Auckland several years ago. He's an enthusiast and always has good ideas. He ran through a potpourri of simple ideas, often iPad apps to do with image manipulation and photography. But he tried things and he has several ideas worth following. I particularly liked his repurposing of a politician's speech using Audacity and GarageBand. Chris is currently half way through an ambitious project of creating something new every day for a year. Check out his site at mydailycreate.com. His concept with this is that he might just uncover a few things that can be deployed in his classrooms as creative stuff for kids. I'll leave it to his blog to tell you about the apps and ideas that he has already done so far this year.

And as Chris says - "create is a daily activity'.

That's about it as a roundup from the "practical, doing" stuff. 

Change comes from the ground up.

How to change education : from the ground up.

Readers of this blog will know that I am a big fan of Ken Robinson. But this time he goes that little bit further, IMHO, and starts to touch on those aspects that we, as teachers, can actually work on to see change - the change that we've all been on about for the past 10 years ... As usual, the Knight says is better than anyone - so listen to this carefully ... and then I share some other thoughts below.

Wow! There is so much in these 24 minutes. What follows are my observations and thoughts - but I'll couch my comments now by saying that this video, plus what I read in the Herald today have given me further insight into my own position on learning and teaching and what should be done. So this particular post will have a couple of sequels ... so apologies if it seems a little disjoint at the moment. 

So - my key take always from this

• The basics of education are "why we do this", and not any particular group of subjects
• purpose of education 1: economic - but the economic environment now is vastly different than the one in which current systems of education were set up ... And today we need adaptability and creativity (IBM research). These are 'bottom line' competencies that business want today but they claim that our largely one size fits all system discourages.
• Purpose of education 2: cultural - in an increasingly global environment, we need to understand other cultures and perspectives well. Value systems are not the same. It's interesting to note that he refers to the Middle East dramas at present. I think you only need consider the changes in the likes of Egypt, Libya and the like over recent years - changes there have not been driven by the leadership in the country - it has been by the people in the street finally saying they've had enough.
• Purpose of education 3: social - and we need to engage. Our society needs to be 'rediscovered' by every generation - and we can't do this without open debate.
• Purpose of education 4: personal - education is about the individual. We know individuals are diverse, everyone has different talents, interests etc ... But a key driver in education today is still conformity.

Robinson then makes the point about governments in general ruling from the top down - the command and control position. And I think about our current environment here in NZ (by current I mean over the past 10 - 15 years) where it seems to me that the teacher unions and many of the teaching profession are in conflict with the Ministry of Education and the Minister in particular. "You cannot run a system by alienating the people who do the work."

 

So, if getting back to basics means getting back to the student/teacher interface, and don't clutter it with other stuff unless it adds to that relationship, then we will have to 'undo' a lot of the "institutionalised" structures we have built. I have maintained for a while that there is far too much 'compliance cost' in education these days - teachers are spending too much time doing everything but teaching - there is a form (or several) for everything. Then of course there is the incredible workload that is the assessment regime.

 

There are a few other points that Robinson makes in the last 5 minutes of his talk that I think might be in complete contrast with an article I have just read from Professor Elizabeth Rata from Auckland University, so I'll stop for now and revisit this is another post. I have the feeling that, for me anyway, there are a number of issues that are becoming increasingly clear about what we can do and where we should head, and I'm looking forward to trying to put all this together over the coming weeks.

 

 

 

 

Redefining School Part 3

Still at Northern Beaches.

So - how does the school organise professional learning for staff with the large classes, technology to enable and pedagogy to support?

Each Monday afternoon all staff attend PL. Staff request sessions via word of mouth or an electronic request system. These requests are prioritised by the senior teacher i/c of PL and each Monday anywhere between 5 - 12 sessions are offered. Teachers opt in and their attendance is recorded in a reporting system that delivers a report to the HoF each term showing what has been attended by whom. This then provides a degree of review for future PL planning and helps identify for HoF, teacher and PL organiser any issues at the respective levels.

Expectation is that all staff attend. Reality is that at least 80% do. And because there is a record of who attended it is easy to identify and follow up those who don't.

Sessions might be on Moodle (for the first 2 years they were pretty much all Moodle); pedagogy, teaching methods, innovations, spirituality.

This information then also feeds into the appraisal system.

Once each term all staff spend 3 hours on a Wednesday (3:30 - 6:30) on a PL intensive which gives them enough time to do something substantive.

Redefining School Part 2

Northern Beaches Christian School featured in my last post. This post looks at their middle school "Learning Matrix". The students talk about the "matrix" in almost as reverent a term as we do about the movie. That's where the similarity stops though!

Basically the matrix is a combo of Bloom and Gardner with a range of activities in the matrix that are either compulsory or voluntary. Students must do the compulsory and can choose a range of the voluntary. This is a basic graphic representation of the matrix for Year 7 for term 2.

Students work on their "matrix projects" for around 6 x 70 minute sessions every two weeks, though as a year 7 syndicate teachers also share some of their maths, english, science and history work in the matrix too. This term the verbal tasks were all from the history curriculum and students were building websites or creating travel brochures in the "creating" and "evaluating" sections of the matrix. 

Students work to achieve a certain "points total" for the term.

Each task (cell) is mapped to a range of outcomes from the NSW curriculum and teachers and students use a range of organisers to track their progress against these. These organisers range from printed sheets to Excel spreadsheets, but not many are done via Moodle - though I wonder if they will be able to use the Moodle rubric from 2.2 to make this more integrated than it is now.

Collaboration amongst staff is crucial here. The team/syndicate agree on the tasks and where they sit - after all, they all have to work with all of the students.

As a planning and curriculum coverage tool, this type of grid is useful in itself. Coupled with specific activities aimed at the various intelligences and taxonomies, it is even more useful. Linked to the LMS (Moodle) is yet a further strengthening of the entire process.

There is an element of gamification in the curriculum too. So while the tasks themselves are somewhat authentic, they also form part of the overall theme for the term which is usually related to some notion of puzzle/competition/investigative process. The students certainly seem to enjoy it. And that's important. In fact - the school believes that their behavioural problems have decreased by some 75% in the past 2 years as a direct result of the gamification of the curriculum where possible.

A Day in the Country ... or "Where the bloody hell are you?"

I had the pleasure of visiting a couple of schools about an hour north of home today. Both schools were primary schools and had small rolls compared to our school. I had gone with a few other teachers from our junior school to get an idea of why these two "rural" primary schools had chosen to invest in iPads and iPod Touches for their classrooms, rather than the traditional desktop or laptop, and how the students were going with them.

It was an interesting day with the two schools adopting quite different ideas, though their choice of technology was pretty much the same. The first encouraged their students to work independently, as being a small school, they have classes with students at Year 3 - Year 8 in the same room. So it makes sense that students are working on different projects at varying levels. What I hadn't expected to see was the level of engagement and independence that these students showed. They were highly engaged in organizing their own learning - they took pride in showing what they were doing ... From their favourite apps for various "subjects" through to their blogs. They impressed as highly articulate students (the ones I spoke to were year 5 and 7) and they arranged their day via a shared Google calendar with their teachers. It was very clear that these kids loved their iPads - and they loved their learning.

It was equally clear that the principal was the owner of the vision for how they were planning their work and their use of the technology to make the vision achievable. Reminds me of how important it is to have complete buy in from leadership.

The second school we visited had what I would classify as a more formal teaching approach. Here the students were still pretty engaged in their learning, but they tended to be all on the same task at the same time. A subtle difference in the classroom dynamic still saw students congregate around a desktop while there were still iPods and iPads available for use.

My lasting impression for the day was the students who took obvious pride in their work and were working on their own timetable to achieve what they had obviously negotiated with the teacher. This was exactly the type of classroom I want my kids to learn in - and exactly the type of classroom I want our high school to develop. I presume that the "personal" aspect to the iPads and iPods was a contributing factor to the success, but without the leadership and shared responsibility for learning ... the story would be different.

So I am again left with what I so often see when I look around - the technology is clearly "there"; the software is clearly "there"; the students are obviously capable of high degrees of ownership of learning. The teachers I saw were pretty much the "guide on the side". I'm left thinking the words of that horrible Australian tourism ad - "where the bloody hell are you?" when I wonder where our secondary teachers by and large are at across the country.

Making Science Cool

Get your students to spend some time looking at the work that these guys do ... make science cool. Thanks to the Smithsonian.

http://www.smithsonianeducation.org/scientist/

Japan Tsunami Wreaks Havoc in Antarctica

Sometimes I am in awe of the power of nature - and the way in which technology allows us to understand some of what goes on under the hood of nature is equally compelling.

I follow the NASA Earth Observatory on  a semi regular basis - they way in which they capture changes to the planet over time I find pretty cool. But today I was blown away with just how cool some of their stuff - and their people - really are.

We all saw those horrific pictures from Japan back in March. In fact, our school is currently hosting a number of students from Japan who have been badly affected by that event and what followed.

But who would have thought that the tsunami generated would be capable of ripping huge chunks of ice off the Sulzberger ice shelf in Antarctica hours later.

Sometimes I wish was a geography teacher. This is one of them!

Authentic Learning - Does this have a hope of working?

Over at Practical Theory the other day I read Chris's entry about "A School I'd love to see". You should read his full entry, but the gist of it is in this quote ... 
"Imagine this high school:

Every morning, the first thing everyone did was read the New York Times for an hour. Now, imagine that they are using some kind of Kindle-style software so that they can annotate with ideas, questions, etc... such that at the end of the hour, the school community could see who had similar questions from the day’s paper.

And now, imagine what it would look like if the kids spent the better part of the day researching those questions and seeing where that took them, with the end of every day being a "share out" where kids shared what they learned across a variety of media..."

OK - so, having thought about this and identified with Chris all of the reasons NOT to do something ... late that night I broke open my iPad NZ Herald App and had a 3 minute look on the articles granny Herald deemed worthy of their iPad version for the day wondering if there was story content that might appease the scientists, the mathematicians, the english/literacy teachers ...

Here are some of the stories that took not much time at all to find ... I'll start with one of the lead stories ...

This is a little ripper to start with ... as a primary producer, NZ has much to be thankful for on the world stage - we produce a lot of dairy and is our biggest export earner by far. And we have a monopoly company in charge. So, with this one story alone I can see history, geography, economics, accounting, mathematics, statistics ... from the standard curriculum ... and then what a dream to use some of the content coming out of the research being presented digitally via some form of infographic.

So - after no more than a few seconds I have one story that I can swing a whole series of "lessons" out of.

But lets not forget the Arts - they had better fit too ... well, off to the entertainment section ... didn't actually read any of the articles - but I see there is something covering the tragedy of Amy Winehouse, there are stories of dance groups and other musos, there is a tattoo story (why do so many people have tats these days?) - so I reckon I can find something here without too much trouble.

Next maybe there is a story around the JK Rowling headline? As someone who has never looked at a Harry Potter book (and don't intend to) ... I suspect that most of my students have and so they could probably lead this one for me ... I'll just act as the guide where I can.

I'm sure that I can find plenty on the sports pages to spark discussions and activities around health and physical education - probably on the health pages too.

Poor Christchurch's bad run continued over the holidays with snow adding to their earthquake woes. Again, scientists, mathematicians and geographers can delight in the data and the stories around this.

And to finish for today - what about an ethical discussion about the perceived rights and wrongs of copyright and privacy laws in the information age. Maybe we might even learn a little about politics and leadership too ...

And my current thoughts ... I have spent 3 minutes reading Chris's original post - and another 3 minutes browsing for possible content on the Herald iPad version for the day. I have spend probably another 10 - 15 minutes thinking about what it might mean and 15 minutes putting these thoughts down.

Sure - there needs to be some more thought given to making something like this work ... that is IF there any value in this as a notion ... or should I just shelve it and return to the safety of my classroom and close the door again?

I think is was Einstein who said we'll never fix the ills of the day with the thinking and tools that caused them - something like that anyway ... when are we really going to address authentic learning.

What do you think?

What price 14000 resources for teaching and learning ... try free!

The PBS (public broadcasting service) has a track record of providing some pretty useful resources for teachers. I've used several resources (like the "Growing up online" resources) many times. Now PBS have made over 14000 resources available free of charge for teachers here.

As you can see from the image above the search options are pretty standard, and once your search is done you can see the type of resource (see below)

According to the PBS site ...

"This next-generation digital media service empowers PreK–16 educators to re-imagine classroom learning, transform teaching, and creatively engage students. It brings together the best of public media, produced specifically for educators, from PBS, WGBH, and 55+ public media partners. This flexible service includes high-quality content tied to Common Core and national curriculum standards. The service is freely available to educators as a basic service that can be enhanced with premium solutions for schools and districts-designed for seamless media integration and customization. The basic service offers:

• Unique access to best-in-class resources from PBS producers and partners and technology resources tied to Common Core and national curriculum standards
• A robust content library of thousands of digital core curriculum resources, designed with today's student in mind
• Carefully created, purpose-built media: videos, interactives, audios, lesson plans, multimedia, professional development, and more
• Ability for educators to search, save, share, and review content
• Cross-platform flexibility to display on classroom presentation tools to mobile devices."

and more ...

"There are five types of media resources in the service: Audios, Documents, Images, Interactives, and Videos. Many resources include supplemental materials such as lesson plans, discussion questions, and background essays.
To view a media resource, first click on the media resource title or thumbnail image of a resource from your search results. This will open the resource page identifying additional information about the resource. Click on the large image to play an audio, video, or interactive, or, to enlarge a document or image resource. Videos can be enlarged to full screen by clicking on the four arrow icon to the right of the volume control below the media image.
The service includes individual resources and groups of resources designed to be used with one another. Group resources include a "Group Index" on the right side of the page. To view an individual resource within the group, click the resource within the index. It will appear on the left side of the page."

To me, this looks like it should be part of every school's repertoire of online resources.

DESMOS - new tool for the Maths student

There are lots of pretty cool maths tools out there these days. Another has arrived, and works in a browser. It's pretty cool. Have a look at the video intro below




Desmos is easy to use, very easy to use. Students will love it. Head to here to use it. 
Here's an example of the output.

Teacher Challenge - a great site for PD

Over the past week or so I have been reading some of the entries in this "30 tools in 30 days" column from the Teacher Challenge blog. What a cool way to introduce 30 cool web 2.0 tools for teachers to learn about! This site is introducing a new web 2.0 tool each day in a simple and concise way that may help a lot of teachers get to feel more confident in their knowledge of some of the tools that are available to them at no cost.

What I like about the format of the 25 entries so far is that they have a simple format for each entry which shows you what the tool is, how to use it and has both the link to the site to register for your account and some suggestions for further use.

What tools are there so far?

plus #24 "Wikipedia" and today's #25 "Jog the Web".

While there aren't many that I haven't used or known about (a couple of these are new to me) - it is great to see ideas of how other people are using some of my favourite tools. Livebinders has been on my list to use for some time now since I created my first one ages ago and haven't been back since!



 Jog the Web and Wetoku are both new to me. And I am wondering if Little Bird Tales might be something I can use with my own 4 and 5 yr olds at home for a bit of father/kids time? 

If you have yet to try some of these tools, then you will find this site a source of great fun - both for you and your students. There is a lot here - easily 30 weeks of PD for those who have yet to experience any of these fantastic tools.

Enjoy the site!

New Resource for NZ Teachers

It's been some time now since TVNZ7 first announced they were making a DVD available to schools - and nothing arrived. Until today - when an email arrived announcing that the DVD would soon be here along with the announcement that the TVNZ7 Learning Hub was to go live today.

Here's what the website has to say ...

The TVNZ 7 Learning Hub explained
Welcome to TVNZ 7's Learning Hub, a destination for teachers, parents and students offering quality education resources based on popular TVNZ 7 programmes.

Through partnerships with other organisations we have compiled education resources to suit the New Zealand curriculum. All of the resources link through to our TVNZ OnDemand page where you can view the accompanying episode.

So, what's available? Well, not a lot at the moment - there are a dozen or so episodes of the Ever Wondered TV series - I had a look at one on astronomy (just because I'm interested - sad eh?) and was pleasantly surprised to find a pile of links through to resources and student activities on ScienceLearn . 

One thing I did find was that it was easy to get lost in the standard TVNZ7 website and from there to TVNZOnDemand - and end up watching missed episodes of Coronation Street and others. 

But - all in all - a welcome addition to local content - let's see how it develops over the coming months.

IWB Conference, Auckland, Day 1 and 2 : Best of the rest

The second IWB conference here over the past 3 days did not for me have the same impact as last years' conference. That's not to say it was poor - it just seemed to me that it was possibly a little smaller than last year and the trade show was a little smaller ... And perhaps there were not for me as many stand out sessions as there were last year.

That said - yes I got some value out of it and here are some of the highlights for me.

Craig and Tania Lineham are a husband and wife team from James Hargest College at the bottom of the South Island. They gave a thoughtful presentation about how they are charged with training and support of teachers in their school, and then they both had separate sessions - Tania is Head of Science and Craig head of Health and PE. More about Craig's session later.

In this joint session they shared their observation chart they use when they drop in to asses how their whiteboards are being used in class - accountability it would seem is alive and well in their school. They run drop in sessions each Wednesday after school for staff too - we used to do this several years ago but stopped it due to lack of interest - they say sometimes they have no one turn up, but they still offer them.

They are big on Blooms revised taxonomy - good to see that a school has a clearly identified pedagogy and that it keeps coming up in what they do.

I can't help but think that so much of what these guys are showing reflects the buy in that their school has - it's clear that their school has a culture of learning that their staff share.

I attended several sessions that were specific to Promethean's ActiveBoard - the software that comes with their boards. In reality there seems little difference between this software and Smart NoteBook. Perhaps the ActiveInspire software interface is a little more cluttered?

Without question the highlight for me was the session Craig Lineham, HOD Health and PE from James Hargest High School. His session had little to do with interactive whiteboards and more to do with ICT in health and physical education in general. For a great example of using technologies in PE, he was inspiring. Some of his ideas...

1. Orienteering - students create the courses they taken their cell phones with them and photograph evidence that they had actually done the course - they show the photos to their peers when they return as proof that they did the course.

2. VisibleBody.com have a great subscription based web service for anatomy - $20 per license for 6 months.

3. They use MentalCase to create flash cards for student cell phones - then key messages they want students to learn they save as a series of jpg files.

4. Mindjet Mind Manager Pro for mind mapping.

Overall comments:

1. there are a lot of activities that you can do well on an iwb but that take time - a lot of time - to develop. But as Craig Lineham has said though - it is an investment. An investment in the future.

2. One nagging thing - the term interactive whiteboard used to refer to the fact that to use the board you had to interact with it. More and more over the past year or so I hear that the interactive part comes from the way that a "well used" board promotes interactivity within the students in the classroom overall. I can't help but think is this true, or is this a way of deflecting the fact that maybe these boards don't deliver everything they promised in an interactive way?

3. Not withstanding what I said in 2), put a tool like an IWB in the hands of an already good teacher, then they will do some pretty amazing things with it.

- Posted using BlogPress from my iPad

IWB Conference, Auckland, Day 1: Setting the Scene

Here are my notes from the sessions I attended today.

Keynote 1

Delivered by Peter Kent from Australia. Before a few of Peter's comments, one from the Prinicipal of host school Westlake Girls ... "Remember that we were all there once"... Alison Goernhoffer in reference to new entrants into the tech workplace. Worth remembering - not everyone comes to the classroom with all of the skills they might want to have as far as digital technology is concerned ... To this you can add pedagogy and practise too!

From Peter's talk, I guess the prime message he was giving ... "If you try and teach without technology ... it's a fools errand - you won't be successful."

Do I agree with this? Like everything ... It needs to be taken in context. John Hattie's research doesn't necessarily support this if you take it at just face value, but if you dig deeper ... What Pete is saying (I think) is that there has never been the array of tools for teachers to make teaching such a compelling thing to do as there are now - and of course this is only increasing at a rapid rate. Kids are growing up with this stuff, so we'd better join in.

Pete points to UK Research that struggles to find a relationship between technology spend and use and student outcomes. He cites the BECTA (RIP) research between 2000 & 2007 to support this. But why would we expect otherwise is my question. We have these terrific tools and the web, so called 21st Century tools, but we bring an assessment regime steeped in the industrial model to our classrooms still and to be fair in secondary classrooms we still teach to this assessment regime - so why would we expect anything different?

Hattie says good teaching makes a difference and his research shows that feedback (relationships and opportunity for reflection are included in this I guess) is high on the agenda of good things. But how many of us use the technologies available to us to better facilitate these fundamental things?

"Success is not always strategic" - I can vouch for that I'm sure!


Pete's final words ..."As a teaching professional - what is our responsibility?
We have the tools that no other teacher has had before ...."

So that's the keynote - some food for thought - nothing really new here - but always good to hear that we're on the right track.


- Posted using BlogPress from my iPad

Selling a product to people that don't want it - the future of maths in schools?

"I sell a product to people that don't want it but are forced to have it by law." These are some of the opening remarks of Dan Meyer, a maths teacher from New York. In an 11 minute TEDx talk he goes into his method for making math problems more meaningful and realistic for students. He makes the case that text books and their approach to problem solving are "buying you out of your obligation" to be a successful maths teacher.
This short video is worth the look - and if you are a math teacher and you have access to some technology in your classroom, then try and take up the challenge. It might be worth it - especially for those who struggle a little.



You can get an idea of some of the stuff Dan has tried from his blog - the general address is here.
For some specific approaches to curriculum try this link.

Sir Ken Robinson Interview on TED

Sir Ken Robinson has become a bit of a folk hero in educational circles over recent years. His inspirational TED talk from 2006 on schools "killing creativity" is as close to I guess an education video will get to going "viral" - if you haven't seen it before - here it is - take 20 minutes to watch it - you won't be disappointed.


But what I found today was that Sir Ken, again via the TED website, has answered a number of questions about his talk and these questions and his answers are posted on the TED site here.

You will find some good questions and some very detailed answers, including his advice for what teachers can do to make a difference. Perhaps this is best summed up by a question that ends with "

"So what three things should I do in September to foster creativity? I'm talking about definite, in-the-one-hour-lesson things I can do to my classes to change their experience." and the first part of the reply ... "To me, the heart and soul of education is pedagogy. There are three components to education, as I was saying earlier. There is curriculum: what students are supposed to be learning. There is pedagogy: the actual teaching. And assessment: the process by which we form judgments about how well they're done, where we make comments about student's progress. But the heart of it is pedagogy." He goes on to give some practical solutions - which is great. But bringing the focus down to the individual teacher is important - plenty of research points to the importance of what the teacher does and the rapport with students.

So, if you are not a Ken Robinson fan, or have never heard of him, and you are a teacher - then after watching his talk and reading the interview, I would be surprised if you weren't motivated to change. And soon!

Key Competencies

The Ministry of Education has launched a new web site dealing with the "key competencies" as outlined in our new curriculum documents. "Key competencies matter because things have changed" says the first line or so of the "Why are key competencies important". What I found interesting though was the short into video by Karen Sewell, our Secretary for Education. In this she alludes to many of the issues raised in the original (and many versions since) of Karl Fisch's "Shift Happens".

Why do I find this interesting? Well, I guess two apsects to this.

1) it gives credence to Karl's work and

2) if the Secretary of Education is making these noises, then maybe, just maybe, the messages are slowly getting through.

We are at the "mother of all inflexion points" that Tom Friedman talks about in his "The World is Flat". In Papert language, we are in the stages of fundamental change ... it's just that we don't often talk enough about just what constitutes fundamental as far as what we teach and what we learn.

Just in case anyone reads this and are not from NZ, the NZ key competencies are:

1. Thinking
2. Using language, symbols and text.

3. Managing self.

4. Relating to others.

5. Participating and contributing.

At first glance I like what the site is trying to do - provide information and support for teachers (and leaders) trying to implement the new curriculum, and build in the KC's to classroom activities. The following is a snap from the page exploring what the KCs might look like in teaching.

The highlight is mine - the teaching profession in our country is aging, and for a good number I wonder just how long it will take them to adopt these two "fundamental" changes in the classroom practice. Over the coming months we have the opportunity to really try and make a difference in education in our school and in NZ I suppose. I hope we are up to it.

A letter to the teacher ...

"Dear Teacher

I am writing to you today following the publication of the White Paper Your Child, Your School, Our Future: building a 21st century school system."

So begins a letter from Ed Ball, Minister of State, to teachers in the UK today. Head teachers got their version. Boards of governors got their version. Support staff got their version.

So, you've got to think that probably the white paper is reasonably important as far as schooling in the UK is concerned. I've had the chance to read the teacher letter and skim read the 18 page summary version of the white paper. Yep, on a quick summary, it looks pretty significant.
Here's a couple of the highlights so far ...

1. Pupil Guarantee - a 4 page document outlining the rights and expectations that pupils have. eg every pupil will go to a school where there is good behaviour, strong discipline, order and safety; and how about this one - every pupil will go to a school where they are taught in a way that meets their needs.

There's more, much more, like the Parent Guarantee, but this is a good place to start. I'm sure there isn't a school in our part of the world, or the UK for that matter, that wouldn't have something like both of the above points as part of their vision/strategic plan. But how many of them mandate them and have them as part of a student "guarantee"? A published one for all to see and be held accountable to?

Another part that appealed ... teaching seen as a Master's level profession with a new Masters in Teaching and Learning with associated professional development, oh, and the accountability part ...

So far I like what I read. Leighton Smith on ZB this morning was on about the Herald editorial supporting league tables for NZ, same in Aus, and so it's interesting that the planets are aligning with the UK going to publish school scorecards and faciliate league tables. Maybe some of the education leaders in these countries are talking to each other ... or maybe not. I'll look more at the UK plans in the next few days.