“Here in the UK we use the term “ICT” — Information and Communications Technology — rather than “educational technology”, and in many schools it is taught as a discrete subject. So what is it that makes an ICT lesson excellent?
In this list, I have tried to suggest some of the characteristics that may be present — although I hasten to add that one would not expect to see all of them in the same lesson!
This is taken from a much larger list that I published in my newsletter, “Computers in Classrooms”, back in December. You can download the newsletter from here, if you wish to look at the whole list. Look at the list below and tell me what you think:
The lesson forms part of a unit which forms part of a scheme of work. There is a good starter activity, one that gets the pupils settled down and in the right frame of mind to do the work the teacher has planned for them.
The teacher spends time at the start letting pupils into the secret of what the objectives (intended learning outcomes) of the lesson are, ie what is intended to be achieved by the end, and how this lesson fits in with the preceding and following lessons
Pupils are given open‑ended tasks (as far as possible), or at least not tasks with a glass ceiling. (Even lessons designed to impart a set of skills can still be more interesting than “drill & practice”).
There are plenty of resources for the pupils to use, enabling the teacher to give quality guidance, ie not confined to explaining how to save the document! Such resources will include “how to” guides and posters, on‑screen help (which the pupils will have been taught how to use), and each other.
Ample time is allowed for the plenary, thereby allowing it to be somewhat more useful than the POLO model: Print Out and Log Off. The plenary is an essential part of the lesson, used to check what learning has taken place, consolidate learning, and prepare pupils for the next stage. In fact, a lesson might have two or three plenaries rather than just one at the end.
Homework is set in order to consolidate and extend the pupils’ understanding of the work they have been doing in lessons.
Pupils are given plenty of time on the computers, with the teacher helping individuals and small groups.
Work is set at an appropriate standard, taking into account the pupils’ prior learning and attainment, and what is expected of their age group in terms of national standards.
There is a lot of questioning – probing questioning – and assessment for learning techniques are in evidence.
There is a good range of material to provide for differentiation (higher attainers and children with special educational needs) and personalised learning.
The teacher is aware of individual pupils’ needs, such as their individual education plans – and makes use of the assessment and other data she has – remember: data only becomes information if you do something with it!
Not all work takes place at the computer: there is ample opportunity for discussion and reflection. What is important is not the use of technology per se, but the appropriate use of technology.
Pupils respect the equipment and the room. For example, they do not leave discarded print‑outs on the floor.
Pupils are happy and confident enough to try out things which the teacher has not actually shown them: they ask help from each other or look at the posters and manuals that are available for them.
Pupils keep looking at the clock on the wall, because they want to get to a certain point in their work before the end of the lesson. They have a sense of urgency.
Pupils want to work at lunchtime and other non-lesson times.
Pupils want to show off little tricks they have discovered, such as keyboard shortcuts.
Pupils ask questions that the teacher is unable to answer.”
I feel bad because I have taken Terry’s post in it’s entirety to post here. I do so because it is such a great list and I identify so much with his points and I want to encourage people to read it who may not necessarily follow my encouragement to click and read. Posted with permission from the man himself- thanks Terry.
Again through my Twitter network via @Murcha from Aussie and @MrKp from the UK I found a link to a fun website, Feedjournal.com, that makes your most recent blog posts via the RSS feed into a newspaper
To see what it looks like click on the above link or the graphic. Great if you’re not fond of reading on line. A thought ran through my mind as I re-read the newspaper- without this blog I would not have the motivation to write at all- and I have written and shared quite a bit over time!
And then to finish off I uploaded it to Issuu an on line publisher to give a cool little page turny look to the whole thing. To see it in a better size click on OPEN PUBLICATION.
It’s not like I don’t have plenty to do but I keep getting sidetracked by new finds and interesting conversations. The school holidays are great.
The writing of my first cluster milestone is starting to weigh heavily on my mind. I suppose its a bit like writing school reports- a necessary evil.
Good for Animoto for sharing their educational account so that teachers can now create longer than 30 second videos for free and download them for playing and keeping on your computer- great for playing and sharing if your internet is slow and spends a lot of time buffering.
As Ewan McIntosh says- it takes zero skill levels to create great videos. To access the educational side of Animoto use this link and ask Rebecca for an educational registration key. She does ask to be kept in the loop as to the kinds of things you are creating.
The quick example I made celebrates my first term as ICT facilitator for Discover IT Tasman.
Here is one just for Kiwi Primary Schools! Today I got a few requests for Twitter followers and two of them were from the guys at Selwyn Ridge School in Tauranga. Through these links I found out aout the Movie and Digital Excellence Awards for NZ students. They say…
“The MADE Awards were started from a collaborative exploration of finding ways to celebrate student achievements in community settings by Tahatai Coast School and Selwyn Ridge School.
Students love to use digital media to discover, explore and communicate learning. Much of the fantastic work completed by students has an audience limited to their class peers, sometimes a school assembly, and occasionally to a proud parent who has popped into class.
The MADE Awards seeks to establish an outlet that enables students to show their work with a much wider audience, to be proud of their efforts and to share their learning. The MADE Awards, in partnership with business sponsors, seeks to reward the best efforts of entrants with fantastic ICT equipment which will further enhance the place of ICT in the learning world.”
I need to get back in a classroom to have go in one of their categories- commercial, music video, storytelling, curriculum and static image. Hope they do it again next year!
They will be judged in three ages levels to give everyone a go- Year 1-3, Year 4-6, Year 7-8.
The second to last week of term I facilitated a very powerful tour of local Nelson schools. We picked up a mini-van full of Discover IT Tasman teachers and prinicpals and headed for town. First up was Brightwater School- just humming. Brightwater principal, Janice Gulbransen, and her staff have embeded the inquiry approach and the use of ICT into daily programmes of work. Children are engaged and are able to articulate their learning. They use the Mark Treadwell inspired KnowledgeNet extensively as a hub for their on line activities and all classes are actively creating content on the web.
We visited Liz’s class and saw children locating on a world map where people are who make comments on their blog. Great learning in a meaningful context. It was great to be able to wander the school and have children able to tell us what they were learning and why they were learning it.
Next stop was Henley School. Henley is a large urban school. We were in awe of the art works abounding in the school and had a good chance to have a look at how teachers were using interactive whiteboards and see their computer suite in action.
We then broke into smaller groups to have a look around Nayland Primary and Broadgreen Intermediate where they had a limited FM radio station in action.
It was very powerful for us to get out of our classrooms and schools to see how others are going- it was affirming for us to know how others are implementing the curriculum and building on learning experiences for children enhanced through the use of ICT.
Last night when I was checking out Twitter (as you do). @BrianCaldwell from Plasq twittered that he was keen to give away some registrations for Doozla- first in first served. I like everything Plasq does so I went for it. Doozla is a vector drawing programme for the littlies. It is interesting that Plasq has a Twitter log in so you can subscribe to updates and news about the application. A good idea I think.
Uploaded with plasq’s Skitch! You can colour in, add to a pre-drawn background, add to your photos taken on your iSite camera and just straight draw.
I liked it in that it automatically smooths your lines as you draw them and gives your etchings a nice even look.
I liked the little extra prompts as you chose the colours- happy sounds. The littlies would love it I think. Worth a play for the little tackers. You can play with it through a free month’s trial like Comic Life.
So it’s pretty much official with a visit yesterday from Brenda Frisk from NextSpace in Auckland. I have been invited to be an Adobe Educational Leader and have registered for the Adobe Educational Leader’s Institute in San Francisco. There are 118 others globally so it is quite an honour. We fly out in July for a week of fun, learning and frivolities.
I have been invited to join my fellow AELs at Adobe’s San Francisco office as well as San Francisco State University’s Multimedia Studies Program (MSP) for hands-on work with the latest Adobe technology and open discussions on best practices in teaching and learning with technology.
Take part in focused instruction on Adobe creative solutions.
Learn new ideas for integrating digital tools into the curriculum.
Talk with product managers and provide them with crucial feedback.
Hear the latest about Adobe technology and what it means for teachers.
Network and collaborate with fellow AELs on the latest innovations in teaching and learning with technology.
For a small town girl who has only ever been over the Auckland Harbour Bridge once it is a pretty big deal. It would never have happened if I had not opened my classroom walls and let people in through the power of Web2.0- blogging, wikis, podcasting, collaboration, networking and on-line creativity.
I couldn’t resist the temptation to play with Microsoft’s Australian piece of software- Marvin before I got taught. I was looking for something new to do while I couldn’t use the internet much as my broadband allowance for the month is all used up and I have five days left of dial-up before I can be set free again.
Being Microsoft of course I had to fire up Parallels so I could work with it on my Mac but that only took a second or two. The software is as intuitive as Microsoft ever gets but the end results are visually quite stunning. I see some great possibilities for digital story telling and a way to give voice to children using the product.
After adding the background and loading your avatar you can customise your creation by having it do a variety of actions and speech. I didn’t try to have it record my own voice- I wonder if that is an option? When compiled it can animate on your screen or you can export as an .avi and upload to your blog like I have done here for my class blog.
It is a pity it is only a 30 day free trial before it expires. When compared to a Comic Life registration for $4 I wonder if it won’t be a bit of a novelty which wears off after a bit. Has anyone published anything created with Marvin to convince me otherwise?
I thought the cloud generated by my tweets was interesting. I highlighted some of the most often used words- they emit a sense of what I want my interactions with my on-line network to be like so I am quite pleased.
I have been working with some schools learning how to take better digital photos and last week we were focusing on close-up photography. If you can touch it you can take a close up of it. We had six digital cameras to play with and achieved some stunning results to share and as our cluster website is still down this seems as good a venue as any other.
Also Jane from Ngatimoti showed this innovative way of using digital photography with her Year 7/8 children. She had the children take photos of each other from a not often used perspective- looking down from the top of the playground. The photos were then printed in black and white and children used their drawing techniques to shade and sketch themsleves form this new perspective thus avoiding the usual, ‘it doesn’t look real’ thing that older children seem to care about when drawing. To add further impact the drawings were then cut out and mounted in 3D so it really looks like the characters are reaching up- awesome.
At Upper Moutere we have been meshing their Topic “All Aboard” with use of Kid Pix and photography to make a stunning array of name badges.
Sheryl Nussbaum-Beach wrote an excellent post that reflects what has been festering in my mind since taking up the ICT Facilitator’s role this year. I have attempted to ‘make the shift’ in my classroom but how can I best encourage others to make similar moves in the way they learn and teach. She highlights nine principles needed to make a shift to 21st century learning pedagogies.
If I can quote her- “Real change, transformational change happens when there is personal ownership of the new technologies and concepts. Today’s new economy is all about human capital, which starts with the educators in a school and then extends outward to all members of the school community.”
People- change is best sustained if people are able to support each other on their learning journey if they can learn in supported groups- we are not islands and the collaboration we strive for in our classrooms needs to be modelled by ourselves as adult learners. This is where action research can be such a powerful tool. He aha te mea nui? He tangata. He tangata. He tangata.
Leadership- because any sort of change can be threatening the support and guidance of those in leadership roles can be critical- the process can be so un-necessarily difficult when classroom teachers are not well supported by those they look to for leadership.
Including all members of the learning community- everyone is part of the process- efforts need to be made to bring all on board- whanau, support personnel, professional colleagues, the wider community.
Developing a shared vision for how things need to be- the need to make sure that teachers together articulating the core beliefs. Our new NZ curriculum statement goes some way to addressing this issue.
Own it- this phrase has been very powerful for me since I first heard Sheryl say it at TUANZ last year. It’s good to use 21st technologies personally before ‘going public’. Become familiar with them, practise and become used to them. My first experiences with communication on line was through the use of email- personally with relatives overseas- because I could see the immediate uses of it I became better at using it.
Communication- we in NZ at the bottom of the globe can be as connected as anyone globally- geography has become less of an issue through UStream, Skype, Twitter etc. Communication with teachers and students outside of your classroom. I am able to communicate with people from UK, Australia, USA, Canada, Uzbekistan- all over.
Know your culture and try to anticipate trends- Sheryl says that participatory media has a tendency to ‘go viral’- we need to try and think ahead of the possible consequences of giving these tools to children. A number of children in my class now have their own personal blogs not moderated by me. I endeavour to have given them the skills and common sense to be safe on line.
We do not know what we do not know- new things will come along that are totally random- we can expect the unexpected. We will need to be able to run with these new challenges.
The power of collective wisdom- we all learn together. We are all learning and what each of us thinks matters.
Thank you Sheryl for insightful post. I encourage my readers to read Sheryl’s blog in its entirety as she is able to write in much eloquently than I but I wanted to write my own version to help me move my own thinking along by giving it my own ’spin’.
Here is another beauty from Paul Harrington- Adobe Photoshop Express for the poor! You register and upload your photo and use simple versions of the fixes available in the paid for Photoshop to fix your photos.
Uploaded with plasq’s Skitch!
There are some great features that are simple to use. The one that I used most here is ‘get rid of the annoying people in the background that spoil my wonderful prowess as a salmon fisherperson!’
The correct was a little blurry because I got a little carried away but you get the general idea.
Other available editing tools are crop, rotate, auto correct, exposure control, red-eye removal, touch-up, colour saturation, white balance, sharpen focus and a variety of cool effects. For children I like the crop and straighten tool because it imposes a thirds grid on the photo to help children see where the thirds are. (We are doing a bit of that sort thing at the moment in some of our sessions).
You get 2GB of on site storage as well which could be handy. When you’re done you can email the photo, make a public slideshow or do what you want with it.
It has been a while since I have played with Art Rage but since I am busy migrating from my old computer to my new I thought I had better get the latest upgrade. What a wonderful Kiwi made product.
There is a free version of Art Rage to download which is fully functioning but has access to less of the drawing/painting tools than the paid version. Good to play with until you get hooked. Last year Art Rage offered Kiwis licences for $1 each you can’t get any better than that so we bought 25! It is available now on PC or Mac for $25NZ.
There is a really good forum linked to their website for sharing your finished work and collaborating with various users’ nominated themes.
I am a pathetic artist but managed to create this masterpiece by using a photo from iPhoto (it meshes like any other Apple product) and used it as a template to grab colours and textures from. Seeing I took the original photo and painted the textured layers you can probably say it was the best art work I have ever created.
You can bet it will be one of the first things I will play with when I get a Mimio interactive whiteboard to play with for the year.
Thanks to Paul Harrington et al for this little quest. Questionaut is a fun quest as it attempts to get your brain to think logically and go exploring! At first play I found it rather frustrating until I realised that there was a rhyme and reason to it all. There are eight levels in the quest and at the end of each level you get asked a variety of science, maths or English questions.
For example in this level you have to put an icicle in the test tube, open the box of matches, open the LPG gas, strike the match, light the burner and turn the gas up to boil the melted icicle which forces steam onto the fan, which lifts the plug hole to let a wee man out to ask the five questions which you have to answer correctly to fill the fuel to get you on to the next challenge.
Yesterday was a big day with a very early start to drive over the Whangamoa and Rai hills to the Marlbourough Colleges’ Cluster Day- it was a major undertaking- they had closed the colleges for the day and given the kids the day off- the day before Easter Friday. 160 or so teachers came along to hear Greg Gebhert speak followed by two two hour workshops. With lessons learnt from the previous Lead Teacher Day I heard little of Greg’s keynote as I was busy making my computer behave and connect to the network before feeling comfortable that everything was going to go smoothly. I was presenting sessions on blogging with newbies- two hours was a good length- long enough to spend some time showcasing what a blog can be used for then long enough to actually play and make one.
I used our Moturoa class blog and our Blogmeister blog as examples and my Bling4yrblog blog resource with pdf handout on how to get started and how to add a few extras. The sessions were really humming along and I got a good buzz from the groups which was superb.
Then it was off the Warren’s place for help with a migration of my 12inch Apple G4 iBook that I had won in a radio competition to my brand new nearly all paid for 15 inch Mac Book Pro with RAM to burn! Things did not start out well and there was a few nervous moments as disks failed to be recognised but it all came right in the end and after a drive home in the dark I spent till 2am playing! Not to worry- the long Easter weekend looms.
The sensible path was not to migrate the applications downloaded off the net but to re-download the latest versions with Leopard fixes and the like. Everything is going smoothly and I am re-populating my dock. Only a few little question marks- KidPix and Microsoft Apps to replace. Click on the photo if you want to find out what made it back to the dock and what missed out!
Skitch did give me a little grief until I remembered our slight change to the SYSTEM PREFERENCES- NETWORK- AIRPORT-DNS settings of the additions of these two numbers!
Kudos to here for help to do this and to the soon to be departing Chrissy who pointed me to it last year and to my Delicious who let me store my bookmarks on any computer which made it very easy to re-locate that much needed web reference.
Just because you have been to a venue to check that you have a wireless connection don’t assume it will be fine when you go to use it.
Just because you can access the internet don’t assume that you will be able to access the Movie Making wiki you had laboured over to ensure that everyone had access to the resources you intended to use during the Lead Teacher Day.
Don’t assume that because you had jacked up a Skpe Video Call to talk about digital storytelling with Anne Mirtschin in Aussie that you will be able to actually speak!
Don’t assume that because you previously accessed Twitter that you will be able to five minutes later to tell Anne that I couldn’t get Skype to go.
Don’t assume that Lead Teachers have used movie editing software before.
Don’t assume that when you put a nearly full bottle of milk in the boot of the car to bring home that the lid would on tightly enough to keep all the milk in the bottle- I have spent the last two hours cleaning up a litre of spilt milk that had soaked into the boot carpet and down into the spare tyre well. No use crying over spilt milk but some valuable lessons were learnt today.
I have had a very busy week and realised I haven’t introduced you to the last of my 14 schools- Mapua Primary School.
Mapua is an Apple School so using their wireless system was a breeze. The school looks very styly with a mixture of older buildings, shade trees and a new administration block.
I was rather nervous this week at the prospect of spending a couple of days helping individual teachers at the high school with specific ICT needs. As a primary school teacher I was concerned that the secondary teachers would need answers to questions that I didn’t know how to answer. I found out that their needs were very similar to ones faced in primary schools. I had never been inside Moodle before but the interface looked fairly familiar, with a few twists but we were able to work things out. Helping adults is very rewarding as they see the immediate benefits of putting the new tools to use so we spent the days blogging, Moodling,Photoshopping, recording, exploring Delicious, making Powerpoint sing and validating websites. Plenty of variety to be going on with.
Uploaded with plasq’s Skitch!
People have been asking me what this Twitter is all about? Today I was able to show them! I was at Tasman School showing them ‘Possibilities’- some of the incredible things you can do with a little imagination, a little skill and a little time- via the internet. We looked at blogging, wikis, podcasting, linking Skype, collaborations- the works.
I mentioned Twitter in conversation- not really meaning to go into it but got asked about it and found it hard to explain without a demonstration so put out a quick tweet asking for a hello. Within seconds I had received tweets from Brisbane, Sydney, Shanghai, Washington, Vancouver Island, Regina, Winnipeg and Wellington! Awesome stuff guys. Thank you.
On another Twitter related moment. Last night I got an iChat request- did I know how to get rid of the outside link you get when you upload a Powerpoint to Slideshare? No I didn’t!
I posted a Tweet asking for help. Simplyarun from Slideshare caught the tweet and gave me a hand to look good! He posted a fix for the problem within minutes. Awesome stuff, Slideshare. Well done.
Uploaded with plasq’s Skitch! Chrissy Hellyer tagged me for this Passion Quilt Meme through Miguel Guhlin- the idea is that you post a photo of something that you feel passionate about children’s learning. For me this is developing connections between children globally and sharing our learning with our global community.
This photo is a mash-up of our collaboration between Paul Harrington’s class in Wales and my own Moturoa class at Appleby. Over the year we had been building links between our classes- so much so that children felt a personal connection with Paul and his class. The children were familiar with each other via our blog posts, podcasts and Skype conversations. The connection became face to face when Dino and his family spent time in Paul’s class while on a family holiday in the UK. We came in to school late at night so we could talk to Dino and his Welsh buddies directly via Skype video. The virtual friendships become real.
The photo credit from the Welsh end of the conversation goes to the Times Educational Supplement that did an article on how classrooms use Skype to link up globally.
3 Simple Meme Rules:
Post a picture from a source like FlickrCC or Flickr Creative Commons or make/take your own that captures what YOU are most passionate about for kids to learn about…and give your picture a short title.
Title your blog post “Meme: Passion Quilt” and link back to this blog entry.
Include links to 5 folks in your professional learning network or whom you follow on Twitter.
Via Creative ICT I recently came across Quickmaps- a Google Earth looking mash-up which lets you easily trace your travel paths. It would be interesting to add it to a Voicethread
Here, in blue, are the paths I travel in my working week. I feel a bit like I am burning dollars for petrol money but there is no chance of car-pooling or public transport owing to the varying timetable and no public transport any way.
