Loisath-My ICT Journey

I started this post with a view to have the “Here Comes Learning” presentation below, support my staff Professional Development presentation about the importance of blogging. I’m sure a number of teachers still wonder why they should consider starting a blog. I spent some time working through the considerable information that Will Richardson presents in just the first twelve minutes (the rest of the presentation will have to wait for another post) and now I realise the question is much bigger than just blogging or wikis.

It’s not “Why should I blog?” but “Why should I be connected?”

Will Richardson is a renown author and leader in the field of Web2.0 technologies in education. He was a presenter at the NECC09 in Washington and I, fortunately, was able to attend the session. His message to teachers is that they must be part of the huge technological shift that is happening, that they must use and own the technologies so that they understand them and so that they will ready to teach students what they need to know about using web2.0 technology in ways that are effective for learning.

Here Comes Learning by W.Richardson and SNBeach

Here Comes Learning – Wiki with more links to this presentation

My summary of the Importance of Teachers being Connected by Will Richardson

• Students use the online world for social reasons but, also, increasingly to learn things -see the video about the bow drill which Will mentions throughout http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JuFsDN8dsJU&feature=channel_page
• Will quotes Clay Shirky when he says that the ability to form global groups about things we are passionate about which include all levels of expertise and the power of the group in an online world are part of signiificant change – a “Techtonic Shift.
• We have incredible access to raw data (see the Iran tweets, photos). We no longer depend on the traditional news sources to know what is happening. We need skills to critically analyse the information for importance and accuracy.
• These new technologies are having an impact on businesses. Companies monitor the conversation and how people form groups around their products. This is easily seen in Twitter when businesses follow and respond to those who use their product name in their tweets.
• Information Literacy has changed not just the way we write (Twitter and blogs) but the way we read and critically analyse information. New literacy skills are needed and suggested by the National Council of English Teachers :

Develop proficiency with the tools of technology Build relationships with others to pose and solve problems collaboratively and cross-culturally Design and share information for global communities to meet a variety of purposes Manage, analyze, and synthesize multiple streams of simultaneous information Create, critique, analyze, and evaluate multimedia texts Attend to the ethical responsibilities required by these complex environments

• Students are using the technologies Primarily to Socialise but now they are beginning to connect in interest based ways tapping into the millions of potential teachers, who are out there, when and where they need to do it

The problem becomes that many children/students have no adults that can teach them how to use technologies for ways that are effective for learning. Teachers need to understand these technologies, understand the shifts, own the technologies and make connections for themselves.They need to take time to immerse themselves in internet type environments to meet the challenge of providing students with the skills they will need in the 21st Century.

The second part of this presentation was concerned with the Professional Development model that will support teachers to develop deep seated skills and connections.

Why Do We Need to Have It?

When I find a blog that interests me I inevitably check the “About Page” of the author before I decide to subscribe. It’s the same for Twitter. I will not follow someone who doesn’t have a Bio of some sort, and preferably a link to their blog. Why is it important? I think it is about trust. I’m letting people into my Personal Learning Network and connecting to their network. I want to be associated with credible, interesting and talented people or at least people with similar interests and careers. The “About Page” is the social chit chat before you get down to business.

What Should Be On It?

Once you have shared a little bit of information about yourself – a balance of professional highlights mixed with smidge of personal interests – so that you start to create a connection with your readers, then it is time to move on to the  purpose of your blog and the sort of things you will be writing about.

Michele Martin from the Bamboo Project Blog has an excellent example of an about me post and a separate post on what to find on her blog.

Another interesting post written by Skellie  How to Write the Perfect ‘About’ Page (by Numbers) is quite helpful if you are at all in doubt about what to write.

And finally the QuickSprout blog lists 4 essential items for an “About Me” including a picture of yourself “no matter how ugly” you are!

It looks like I should take my own advice and update my “About Me”, which up until now has been a short paragraph in a text widget in my side bar. The text widget is a nice way to keep and extract of your bio but it probably should link to the “About Me” page which has all the extra important details mentioned above.

Photo: Flickr – Tony Hall

This is the final blog of a series about using Web 2.0 technologies in the classroom. This section looks at  our school’s “practice run” using blogs in the classroom and the lessons we learnt.

BEGINNING BLOGGERS

We had a clear purpose, and support from the school leadership to move forward on the weblogs. Once we started our blogs, eleven in all, it became clear that we needed some guidelines to define the tone and purpose of the class blog pages. One of the surprising comments from teacher who looked at the work the others were doing but wasn’t actually a participant was that “this could be used by parents to compare teachers.” Clearly this wasn’t the tone that we wanted.

In retrospect and for the future the main philosophy /guiding principals should be:

• The class blogs are collective blogs to give you and your students a voice and a way to communicate with the local and global community. For example if you browse through “ejourney with technokids” you can see the opportunities that Web 2.0 has opened up for communicating and collaborating. According to the interview transcript shown on the blog, the students particularly enjoy talking to students in another country.
• The class blog is an avenue for students’ to construct meaning through reflection and sharing their learning with an authentic audience. TaNuj^’s Weblog is an excellent example of a student reflection. It is also for teachers as can be seen by Dean Groom’s response to the student blog.
• The blog can add impetus to the Inquiry Process through collaboration with experts in the field. [In M3’s blog on Sustainability the students each give their ideas in their own words adding to the knowledge of the individual.
• It is an opportunity to showcase your grade and the work that you and your students do, and to keep parents and the community informed.

However the impact was immediate. The communication about classroom work in the first few blogs was far more than had gone home in the past year. It was visual, informative and varied according to the class, just as each class is different each blog had an individual feel to it and the added bonus was that the first comments were from students.

Conclusion

My initial idea sounded like a simple solution to a problem. Now I understand how complex it really is and how much work there is still to do. I also understand that it was absolutely necessary to take this step…leap, …plunge into web 2.0. In fact I find it difficult to image a classroom that should not be using the web 2.0 tools in some way. I am inclined to agree with Hargadon when he said it was bigger than the printing press

One last example of web 2.0 in education, and perhaps my favorite, is an infant grade in Moose Jaw, Saskatchewan in Canada. The students have pre-service teachers as blogging buddies. The student teachers follow one child’s writing in Mrs. Cassidy’s blog throughout the year, responding to the child’s blogs, but noting the development in writing over the year. A win win situation all around. In an interview Cassidy explains what she does in her classroom and how each student has a blog, which is an online portfolio, and how blogging buddies work with her students. (Cassidy, WOW2 Show #91, 2008). Clearly Cassidy is an outstanding educator with very good technological skill. She has many awards to her credit, but Cassidy has shown that student age is no barrier to using Web 2.0 tools with students and how powerful it can be for communicating, creating and collaborating.

Additional Helpful Links
http://deangroom.wordpress.com/2009/01/24/the-3rs-are-now-the-3ts/

http://www.dangerouslyirrelevant.org/2006/09/posting_student.html

Convert Your Web Page to Web 2.0 and Your Staff Along with It. #1

This is the first in a series of blogs describing our school’s journey to using Web 2.0 technology in our classrooms . It includes the background research, reflection on a trial run, and problems and possible solutions.

Why Change to Web 2.0?

What is Web 2.0?

Web 2.0 is not a new invention but a shift in the use and capabilities of the World Wide Web. Previously the Internet was used mostly to retrieve information but now, due to changes in the software, users can easily and without technical knowledge participate as contributors, collaborate online and have access to online software.

“These concepts have led to the development and evolution of web-based communities and hosted services, such as social-networking sites, wikis, blogs, and folksonomies (the practice of catgorising content through tags).” (Stilton Studios, 2008)

Teachers and students who participate in Web 2.0 have powerful tools to construct knowledge, collaborate locally and globally and to be creative with many powerful and free online tools (think, communicate  and create).

Part 1: The People:

Since discovering web2.0 (blogging, online personal learning networks, wikis) I can’t help but feel all teachers should know and use these tools. I’m not sure if it is part of human nature that we have to share and bring others onboard to think the way we do because it is reaffirming or because we believe it is important and our duty to nurture our peers.  I feel there is an urgency to inform teachers about the educational online world. So much is going on in the “webasphere” especially in education, that if teachers are not connected then I fear they are being left behind and can only provide an outdated education program.

Part 2: Community  & Communication

The web site at our school is professionally designed and provides lots of information for parents and prospective families about the history of the school, the curriculum it offers, newsletters, contact details etc. However the communication is directed one way- out to the community. Even then only one or two people in the school have the technical knowledge required to upload information. Putting student work on the web page for viewing is limited by the time it takes one person to do it and without any avenue for feedback, one wonders if anyone even sees it.

Part 3: The Solution:

To solve both problems I believed we could convert the web page to weblogs and by giving the staff ownership of their own class blog they would begin to learn about web 2.0. This sounds simple, but of course there are many complications and responsibilities when you combine publishing material to the wider community, students work, and multiple teachers with a wide range of skills and knowledge.

•    Student safety and privacy,

•    school integrity, and

•    teacher’s professional image

…all have to be considered and protected. And this is a big change in the underlying philosophy of a school, which until now has had almost complete control of material that was published or written to the school community. The school now has to consider the “digital identity” that it is creating.

The Australian, Victorian Department of Education has links to documents, advise and help guides for schools and teachers who want to start their own web 2.0 pages. I have linked to some of the material below.

Documents School Must Have

Internet Acceptable Use Policy for Students

Student Images Agreement

Acceptable Use Policy for School (or Department’s) ICT Systems

Documentation Teachers Should Read

Copyright Information Sheet for Schools(National Copyright Unit, 2008)

Student safety and blogging(DEECD, 2008)

Global Teacher – Blog Directory and Web 3.0 Community(Global Teacher)

It is important to have the essential cyber safety rules and protocols in place before starting weblogs to protect student online identity. For example

• Student photos if the student can be easily recognized will not be used
• Only first name and grade, or initials, or an online name will be used
• All comments will be moderated by the teacher before appearing on the page

In our trial period we decided to follow the Department’s(DEECD, 2008) advice with becoming “proficient with your own teacher blog” (DEECD, 2008) before creating any student blogs. From my own experience the best way to understand how blogging can facilitate learning is to have your own blog and this is one time in teaching ICT that I think it is important for teachers to have prior learning before introducing it to their students.

References

DEECD. (2008, Oct 21). Teacher > Global > Blogs. (S. o. (DEECD), Producer) Retrieved Nov 12, 2008, from Department of Education and Early Childhood Development State Government of Victoria

Stilton Studios. (2008). Glossary. Retrieved November 12, 2008, from Stilton Studios: http://www.stiltonstudios.net/glossary.htm#w

Below are the links to the sites I have made so that you can compare them for yourselves. Leave me a message and tell me what you think.

Scratch and MicroWorld’s sites
Blog – http://loisath.wordpress.com/
Wiki – http://scratch-n-microworlds.wikispaces.com/

IWB@BLPS
Blog – http://loisath.globalteacher.org.au/
Wiki – http://berwicklodgeps-iwb.wetpaint.com/?mail=1124&t=anon

The following site gives a summary from some students’ perspectives that I think sum up the key differences.
http://coolcatteacher.blogspot.com/2006/05/my-students-compare-and-contrast-wikis.html

“Synopsis of their posts
The most meaningful point that they have brought out for me is that they see wikis as a place to share information and they see blogs as a place to share opinions and discuss.”

MY EXPERIENCE
It was while I was completing my major project that I started to realise the WordPress blog site was not quite what I wanted. I didn’t so much want a blog that would be mostly my ideas but a place where all teachers could contribute equally. By this time however (because I was quite excited by the new found possibilities) I had already started a second blog for the Interactive Whiteboard Team at our school. This time I was using a blog for educators – globalteacher.org.

Increasingly I was becoming frustrated with trying to upload files. The first blog was difficult to upload video files, the second refused to upload Smartboard notebook files. SO I decided to try out a wiki instead.

It wasn’t difficult to copy and paste the blog pages into the WikiSpaces wiki. I was in fact very pleased with how easily all the files transferred across. WikiSpaces doesn’t look as flash as the WordPress site but it was very user friendly. Now that I was confident that wikis’ were the way to go for collaboration, sharing, and uploading I decided to transfer my Globalteacher site to a wiki as well. This time I thought I’d try a WetPaint wiki. I had just happened to see one at the ICTEV conference, that another teacher was using with his students. This time copying and pasting wasn’t quite as easy. There were some pages on the WetPaint template that I would like to delete and can’t. I’m not convinced that the WetPaint Wiki is as flexible and user friendly as the WikiSpaces.

Of course there are still new wikis to try. It is amazing what is out there for free especially for education. If you email the administrators of the wiki sites they will take the ads off your pages as well.