Take a moment and think...

Something that concerns me with integrating digital tools into classrooms is making sure that they're used for more than "show". I hear a lot of stories about how awesome a tool is at engaging students...then disppointment strikes when the activity it's used for doesn't help students work towards learning objectives, it's an "add on", a carrot, a reward. There are times I have to admit that it's really hard to look the teacher in that situation in the eye and say "what a wasted opportunity."

As I take on more and more of a leadership role in terms of digital pedagogy in my school I've been looking at ways to ensure digital tools are being integrated authentically and to enrichen learning. I've found reflection tools to help educators measure how their planned activities fit in a scale of transformative learning and higher order thinking skills (one of my fav has to be the 'Technology Integration Matrix' from Florida).

But facilitating effective ICT rich learning experiences takes more planning and thinking then this. There's all sorts of things to 'manage' and admittedly, over the years some of these I didn't even know about until I was half way through an activity and something came up and surprised me. As I lead and support other teachers on their journeys I want to help make their journey a little less stressful and far less lonely than mine has been so far. So I want my colleagues to know about some of the "surprises" that have taken years off my life and damaged professional connections because of their timing and implications. Just being aware of things like relevant department policies, copyright (yours, mine, ours, theirs), digital citzenship concerns (cybersafety, data management) - to name a couple of things - puts a whole new level of thinking into my planning around the integration of digital tools. And now @shanetechteach and the comments on his post are opening a whole new layer of thinking and considerations..it's making me wonder if this is all worth it, I mean surely teachers think of this stuff...

That's what led me to start thinking about some sort of "risk assessment" scaffold for digital tools. It was my drama background and the management of physical activities (clowning's quite dangerous you know - and I won't even mention stage fighting) that made me think in those terms. Having come up with the idea I turned to a couple of my "gurus" and asked for their input, @shanetechteach has been my sounding board with a lot of this and it's been interesting to read the impact my questions and idea has had on his thinking, which he discusses in his latest blog entry here.

What I'm trying to develop isn't a "risk assessment" tool anymore, it's a thinking and planning tool. It's all well and good for teachers to find a fun tool they want to use in their classrooms, but they also need to ensure it's being used validly and in an informed way.

Ignorance is not an excuse, and the reality is that, as @cnapi5 points out in his reply to @shanetechteach's post, there is a murkier side to the internet and technology that we don't often discuss. My challenge at the moment is coming to terms with how I encourage my colleagues to integrate digital tools while also ensuring they've considered all aspects of authentic digital tools, digital citzenship, copyright, data management, and the complicated waters of conforming to departmental policy.

Honestly, at first I thought it would be easy - turns out it's not. I'm in version two at the moment (and two versions couldn't be much different and still orginate from the same idea if I tried) and I'm not content with it yet. I'm hung up on a couple of worries - how to shape it so that despite the seriousness of these concerns it doesn't just see teachers go "too hard, not doing it" (in relation to the tech or the document); how to give it the scope it needs (cause you can lay money on there being something I haven't even considered).

I admit there's also a degree of hesitation in putting forth the idea of a tool like this - I'm worried colleagues may see it as insulting to their professionalism, as though they don't plan effectively. It's not that, it's just that so many of us (and yep, I've done it) have no idea about some of this stuff, where do you even start thinking and planning for these things? I would like to give them a tool to help them start, to encourage them to pause for a moment and think about it...

Image: 'Pause and Think' by mabar @flickr.com

Hypertexts in the Rearview Mirror

A couple of weeks we sat down as a teaching team and reflected on the Year 11 Hypertext unit as we moderated the work produced by students. Moderation meetings are one of those things that scares a lot of teachers - they're long, they can be controversial as marks are debated, and they can be confronting as your students' work is on the table and the inevitable fear of "Did I teach it right?" crosses your mind.

Despite all of that our moderation processes are an invaluable part of our processes in my Academy. It's where we get the opportunity to look at the whole cohort of work and reflect on our original objectives for the unit, as well as share our failures and our success stories.

Essentially it gives us a chance to connect beyond our classrooms and timetabled lines.

As a group we were impressed with the quality of the narratives crafted by our Year 11 students - their confidence in experimenting with story-telling techniques and the maturity of so many of their writing styles often left us speechless. There are two which have lingered with me after reading them and I still want to pull one character away from the risk she's about to take and another I feel heartbroken for as the student took us on a journey into the mind of an alzhemier's sufferer.

But writing a good narrative wasn't all this unit had been about. It was also about the students carefully selecting where to place hyperlinks within the narrative in order to invite their audience to learn more about the narrative through different perspectives or additional information (expansions) before returning to the main narrative. This was the hardest part of the task because it was much more subtle in its management than most of the students thought it would be.

At first we had a lot of students link words like "rain" to and image of rain with an expansion such as "it was raining hard that night." As we got deeper into the unit and students became more confident with the potential of the hyperlinks they started to play more and they began to take advantage of them to position their audience towards characters and events. One that stands out is how one student used the main narrative to tell one side of the story, but then explored the reactions of other characters affected by the main event.

So, in terms of writing and 'mastery' of a new genre the students (and the staff - most of who had never heard of a hypertext before this year) did well.

It's a given that people are going to roll their eyes when I talk about this unit (probably not my lovely PLN members who are big nerds like me :P). I get a lot of comments like, "How would you do it with limited computer access?", "Blackboard is too painful to work for a project like this.", "Wouldn't the kids just copy each others?", "What if someone leaves a nasty comment for another student?", "Our staff don't have the skills to teach this."

And yes, these were all challenges. But, you know what? We overcame them and it was an awesome feeling to have so many 'A' grades compared to 'D'.

How did we manage the issues?

1. Were aware of what the (major) potential problems were going to be - nothing took us by surprise as an issue during this unit and as issues came up we rolled with them and worked as a teaching team to solve them.
2. We gave each student their own wiki, set so that only they could edit it - even if another student did copy someone else's narrative we'd be able to look at time stamps and in conjunction with normal proceedures for plagarism we'd be able to able to deal with it (we did have one case of plagarism, but not from another student).
3. Comments - before we "went live" with the wikis students were shown exactly how we could track everything in the Blackboard and reminded about appropriate and inappropriate behaviours (and that the College's Code of Conduct extended to this space as well) and that any breach of these expectations would see students face serious consequences. (We didn't have any inappropriate comments left - a couple of narratives with...interesting...content, these were locked from viewing and, again, normal proceedures followed).
4. Blackboard not handling it - this one I did stress about...big time. We're only allocated 20MB per Blackboard at the initial set up, we're able to request an extension of this if there is a need. Before we even began the unit I requested a significant increase given the unit and the sheer number of participants (175 students approximately and five teachers), closer to the due date of the hypertexts I requested a further increase ("just in case") and again it was allowed. So, Blackboard handled it just fine and I have to say a big shoutout for the support of the project I got from the eLearning team who oked my requests.
5. Limited computer access - up until two weeks before the due date we had incredibly limited computer access in our classrooms. We're a new school and had just had our next phase of buildings opened, we also had a massive intake of students at the beginning of the year, and while the new rooms got settled and the new students were absorbed into our cohort EVERYTHING was stretched (even now there's no such thing as a "free room"). On top of that the distribution of computer access was undergoing massive restructure to lessen the damage to our laptop trolleys and to take advantage of the federal government's funding to increase student:computer ratios in secondary schools. It was stressful and it did require a great deal of patience and team work, and we were starting to get creative.
   A lot of students were happy to work on their wikis at home and that did ease a little of the pressure...still, imagine our delight when the restructure happened sooner than predicted and the tech fairy left us all ten brand new laptops in each of our rooms (we're spoilt and so lucky).
6. Teacher's comfort levels...this was fun...not. Of the six teacher team we had everything from highly confident to open refusal to begin with. In the end with support, coaching and a fair bit of hand holding we got everyone over the line...just.
7. We did have 1-2 students who couldn't even figure out how to log into the Blackboard and who somehow missed their teachers' attention during the drafting process. Out of 175 1-2 aint' bad in my eyes.

Overall the unit was a success. What will I do differently next year? Honestly, I'm not sure, maybe spend more time talking about skills such as image sizing to save space (we touched on it, but really due to variations in teacher confidence the focus was on the wiki skills) and leaving productive comments (we had a lot of "this is great!" without any offers to extend the conversation). Actually, I'd love to have students do more of the 'teaching'.

I mentioned in today's earlier post that this unit has impacted on other subjects. As teachers gained confidence with wikis they started to see how they could be used in other subjects and we saw wikis become common in Geography, Humanities, English Communication, Year 10 English and Ancient History. Some of these are just starting to play with the potential while others are way out in front.

I think that covers that reflection in sufficient depth to bore you all to tears.

Sorry...

Figuring out the Puzzle

Image: "World Spins Madly On", by emma.c @ http://www.flickr.com/photos/7262596@N08/2207748365

I've watched in awe as the work of Lucy's students has crossed my path online - the book in a day project where Year 9 students wrote collaboratively using google docs around themes drawn from the novel, "Animal Farm" was just amazing. And I'm really excited to hear more about her next project, collaboratively planned by teachers from around the world using the power of the network.

Through following Lucy's project I came across Tanuj's, a student of Lucy's, blog and have since become a regular reader - his insight into the work his teachers are doing and the observations he makes about the potential and benefits of PBL are refreshing - especially since they're from the horse's mouth so to speak.

In part, this is a shout out to both Lucy and Tanuj - thank you for sharing your experiences and helping to inspire others to stay the course when comes to pushing the boundaries of our education systems.

For some teachers the idea of PBL has sat in the "too hard" basket for a very long time, and it's something I'll admit I've struggled with many times in the past - especially in the Drama classroom (which in my opinion lends itself naturally to this style). I've tried many different projects and had mixed results.

As the cyberdrama project wraps up with students completing their formal assessments this week I feel like I've put some of the bits of the puzzle together this time.

Yesterday I collected the journals tracking my students' experiences and pulled apart their own cyberdramas (I'll talk more about why I didn't do these as eportfolios another night). I was gobsmacked when I saw them. In past drama journaling has inspired a lacklustre response from students, sort of done at the last minute, barely meeting standards. This time...the majority of the class obviously loved this activity:

There are PAGES of detailed reflections, hundreds of pictures tracing their journey through this project, incredible examples of how visually and textually these students think (feathers, glitter, jigsaw puzzles, card, colour) It's going to take me weeks to do their efforts justice, and honestly I'm loving the thought of getting lost in these, I keep picking them up and just flicking through them, they're a drama teacher's dream come true. More than that what teacher doesn't want their students to say things like:

"I think this term has been an amazing one. I have actually learnt so much and I feel as if we've all grown through producing these cyberdrama's."

The key phrase in there that makes me even prouder than I already was - "we've all grown". This project has meant more to them than class work or assessment, I couldn't ask for more.

When showing the principal the work produced by the class last week she asked what I thought had allowed them to fly so high. Honestly, I think I gave them room and I trusted them - they were ready and the "norm" would have held them back. And the success of doing so has my heart and mind bubbling with new ideas and plans for the future. Dean asked in a comment whether I'd go back to "traditional" instruction after this - my answer in short...no way, how could I?

It's with a heavy heart that I await to hear my timetable for next year, I highly doubt I'll be working with this group for drama next year. I just hope their new teacher is ready for them...