edutech :: Blog

I had the great pleasure to attend an e-learning conference at the NEAPC today.  Richard Millwood of Ultralab (LINK) delivered a presentation, the thrust of which was that, as educationalists, we need to balance productivity in the classroom with creativity.  Richard also impressed me with some software which can not only turn spoken text into subtitles, but will also allow for this text to be searched like a query.  Very powerful. For my own part I strongly believe that we should tailor the curriculum so that there are dedicated regular sessions where the students are able to creatively express themselves – for example using moodle facilities such as forums, wikis or glossaries.

Andy Tyerman from Becta also discussed the planning that goes into preparing a school for Personalised Learning and there was some interesting information regarding the pitfalls to avoid when trying to instigate such a level of change management.

Some ideas that I will be exploring in the near future in my lessons:

• Videoing lessons and using this video in order to reflect upon the content
• The use of audio recording
• The Making the News web tool (very good for an online school magazine)

All in all it was a very stimulating day and well worth the trip to sunny Crawley.

Web 2.0 is obviously getting bigger in the mainstream media - an interesting article appeared in the Guardian (Weekend 04/11/06) but a couple of things of concern leapt out at me.

Firstly John Lanchester's regular reference to users of this technology as 'geeks' and 'nerds' and secondly the notion that, when using a computer, you are in fact alone.

90+% of my students use social networking sites - and far from fitting the nerdy/geeky stereotype they are in fact a lively bunch of pupils who love writing about themselves and to other people. 

And his use of the word 'alone' bothers me.  Alone is a loaded word - it actually means that we are secluded from social contact with other people and that we are lacking in companions or companionship. When people are blogging, or flickring or digging what are they doing?  They are taking part in social networking sites - the very opposite of 'alone'.

 

Rumours of my demise have been greatly exaggerated.  I am now firmly esconsed in my new school in West Sussex, and as I write on this Sunday morning I am fresh from a relaxing holiday in Venice.

I recently read an article by Tim Rudd of Futurelab, who examines the notion of personalised learning in the UK.
Tim notes that 'new technologies' that enable users to acquire, retrieve, capture and disseminate information have so far been used as mere delivery tools for existing, pre-defined content; as opposed to support truly innovative and personalised learning.  He also notes that many school children use such new technologies as a matter of course in their leisure time, yet formal education has been very slow to embrace them.
I agree with Tim that much of the content delivered today is delivered with at least one eye on the political capital of attaining the highest possible grades.  In other words, the pedagogy is being overlooked, and the needs of the people who are central to this - the learners - are being ignored.  The very opposite of what personalised learning should be.

The article can be found via a link on the Learning Technologies website here.

Polycom delivered an interesting breakfast seminar session at Singapore's Oriental hotel on 18th July.  High on the agenda was the advances that have been made with video conferencing technology, and its application in the modern classroom. 

Andy Campbell of COSI Toledo spoke about how to break down the walls of the classroom by using highly interactive video conferencing technology.  COSI Toledo is a very hands-on science museum in Toledo, Ohio and they develop resource packs so that pupils can interact with the museum from anywhere in the world. 

Carol Daunt of LTUG held an interesting video conference and her overall message was to (sensibly) analyse the needs of your institution and then pick the technology that meets this need.  She runs a very good 'dialmlearning' blog which is worth a visit.

Finally, Microsoft were present and their half of the seminar therefore had a pretty corporate feel - for example Microsoft have developed links with Polycom and were pushing their MS Communicator 2005 software.  I did like the Microsoft description of the 'millenial' generation of people born on/after 1982 who were 18 at the oldest as we hit the Year 2000.  Microsoft noted that this generation tended to:

• gravitate towards group activity
• have a fascination for new technologies
• are racially and ethnically diverse

...In other words the generation that are currently in our schools have a different approach to completing activities (learning or otherwise) to the approach that their teachers might have had at their own schools when they were students.  You can read more about Microsoft's vision but give yourself a few hours and cups of tea to get through it...

I recently attended a seminar deliver by Marc Benioff of Salesforce.com.  Namechecking Thomas Friedman (of 'The World is Flat' fame), Marc was pushing the idea that the future of the web involves the concept of 'software as service'.  This 'business web' draws strongly on the more innovative aspects of the 'consumer web' - and many of his examples were of Web 2.0 technology.  For example he cited the recent offerings of Yahoo and Google as the future of email.  He also demonstrated google spreadsheet and writely - applications that eschew the traditional business model of selling DVDs of Microsoft-based software. 

Why, indeed, go to the trouble of purchasing, installing and maintaining Microsoft Exchange or Lotus Notes, when you can plug into entirely web-based services that deliver email just as well?  Mashups are another interesting proposition, and still very immature from a business point of view - however flickrmaps is a good demonstration of the combination of multiple web applications.  The beauty of the salesforce software is that it provides the platform to run these web applications, using an appexchange tool which allows the user to download additional widget-style applications. 

What I like about this is that it provides an environment that could pull together all of your online spreadsheet, word, powerpoint, email, messenging, blogging tools.  At the moment I am trialling/using elgg, google spreadsheets, zoho, moodle, gmail - all of these systems need to be logged into and I would like a single area (used to be called portals!) that would allow me to pull them all together.  I like the look of the web-based desktop application goowy and it has many nice features including 1GB of file storage through box.net (nicely integrated although at beta stage at the moment).  goowy also pulls together email accounts from hotmail/gmail/yahoo and has a 'minis' area which could conceivably evovle into a whole raft of applications like the aforementioned appexchange.

With software like that of salesforce.com and goowy I can see a time when the traditional hegemony of DVD-distributed Operating Systems is challenged.  Couple this with thin client computing (getting fashionable again) and we could have real movement away from the desktop and towards the network.

Marc's vision is that users will be soon creating, running, integrating and delivering documents via the web not just as consumers but in their day-to-day business transactions.  Salesforce has had its fair share of negative reactions to outage, but if business does evolve this way - and it looks as if it might - then there is an even greater need to equip pupils for such a future.

Thanks to Dai Thomas for the contribution below and recommendation of the Coming of Age book to which he contributed - an interesting look at what educationalists are doing with Web 2.0 technologies.

I note from the hallowed pages of techcrunch that Myspace - now standing at 75 million global users - was the most visited site by US users last week, ahead of the normal yahoos and googles.  As the article points out, for many people this is not just another part of the web, it is the central element of their internet experience.  Myspace cannot (yet) be truly thrown in with Web 2.0 technologies (no RSS for example) but it has certainly created social networks where a couple of years ago none were anticipated. 

As educators we have a challenge - to plug into this experience and move away from teaching children how amazing PowerPoint is.

There are many exciting technologies out there which are likely to impact upon teaching in the next 3+ years.  The technology of Web 2.0 has at its heart a social constructivist approach to learning - all about collaboration and social context.  At my school in Singapore, the use of moodle (which is very Web 2.0 with its wikis, forums and chats) has, in the best lessons, engendered a different approach to teaching by the teacher, and may bring about a different approach to learning by the learners.

I can see a lot of potential in blogging in terms of giving children a true audience - however there are many potential pitfalls to chats/blogs for a would be teacher and it is very important to have a clear Acceptable Use of...erm, Internet Technologies (?) policy, which parents and students understand.  

I have spoken to my pupils about such technologies, and they all extensively use myspace, bebo, flickr and even zoho (One thing that the students had not come across was goowy - a web-based virtual desktop - very interesting).  The big thing to note here is that pupils are using these technologies, whether their parents or teachers know or care about it or not.  It is, on other words, 'the future' and the sooner teachers become aware of these technologies, the better.  What we cannot - must not - do is ignore these technologies because either we do not understand them, or do not understand how to use them.

We are not a great leap away from having a pedagogic model which has at its centre a Vygotskyian social constructivist approach, noting that the intellectual development of children springs from the social communities of which they partake.
This approach could incorporate Assessment for Learning, with its drive to assess the 'how' of learning, and a Personalised Learning perspective which acknowledges the fact that the pupils of today are very different to the pupils of 20 years ago.  In particular pupils of today are constructing their own social communities using technology such as the web or mobile phones.  The needs of these pupils are very different to those of the 80s, and it looks as if they are learning in a different way to how I did as a child, and certainly to how my father did.
This model recognise the importance of the learner as well as the knowledge being transmitted, but it would also stress the vital role of the social context and of the community in which learning takes place.  This community will extend beyond the four walls of a traditional classroom and we must acknowledge and embrace this.

The big question for me is - how do we approach this coherently? How does it fit in with the future of education, assessment, whole-school initiatives and nationwide policy?

 

Two years ago David Milliband commissioned a report to consider the issue of learning. The main aim is to examine how to make students more effective at learning. The report noted how children learn at home and that they form a common sense view of learning due to the early years experiences. However at schools learning is often highly organised and shaped by teaching - and it is vital that what happens in school enhances the capacity and motivation of students to learn. One thing that is needed is an agreed vocabulary and of course AfL is making strides to achieve this. The report emphasis the vitalitity of 'learning to learn' - in particular about meta-cognition. Meta-cognition in this sense means "…the capacity to monitor, evaluate, control and change how one thinks and learns…" and again AfL is addressing this.

Interestingly, the report advocates caution over adopting the 'learning styles' approach of treating pupils differently according to their learning style, partly because there is not yet enough evidence of the efficacy of adopting a learning styles approach in the classroom, and partly because it can lead to poor practice. Many teachers still vie learning styles as fixed and innate, and this will almost inevitably lead teachers to label students as having one particularly dominant style, and of providing resources that address just that one particular style. Students will then internalise this label and this could in fact damage the learner's overall development, especially if they are considering their own learning needs using AfL. Similarly, Howard Gardner's Multiple Intelligences theory has been embraced by so many practitioners - without true thought of how best they can be applied - that Gardner himself has become alarmed.

The report advocates a push for giving students greater independence in how, when and where they learn. This is the critical element of personalised learning - the meta-cognition element which turns learners into autonomous and intelligent beings, who can recognise different parts of curriculum material and adapt to it, who are ably to critically evaluate their progress and their understanding, and how learn when it is appropriate to seek help from the teacher - having already tried a number of different strategies to solve the problem. As the report notes, pupils who are lacking in meta-cognitive skills tend to be very demanding of a teacher's time because they seek help almost immediately upon encountering a problem. Pupils with meta-cognitive skills "...become co-constructors with the teachers of the process of teaching-and-learning, and progressively transfer the role and function of the teacher to themselves." This sounds to me like the behaviour pupils adopt when learning for their own sake - learning how to operate a PSP, or how to play a new computer game. I know of no pupils who would ask their parents or a teacher how to operate a PSP - they would figure it out for themselves, or they would ask their peers. Many classrooms are still managed very closely by their teachers - the teacher chooses the learning objectives, manages the time and looks at the outcomes for the learner. This places great emphasis on the teacher and is not going to foster independent learning, and as pupils mature they increasingly need this independence. Indeed as technology advances, as LEAs push VLEs and as we all take a good hard look at Personalised Learning, we need to give pupils such opportunities to be independent in their learning styles.

For the full text of the report visit http://www.demos.co.uk/catalogue/aboutlearning

Having now considered various different theories of learning, and come to the conclusion that I favour an approach which celebrates a social, collaborative learning environment, how should that impact upon my practice as a teacher of ICT? Margaret Cox can help me here.  Margaret was my course leader on my PGCE in ICT at Kings College back in 1996. In her report on ICT and Pedagogy (2004) she cites evidence which shows that when teachers use their knowledge of both the subject of ICT itself, and the way pupils understood the subject, their use of ICT has a more direct effect on pupils' attainment.
This effect is greatest when pupils are challenged to think and to question their own understanding. Cox also notes that teachers need to understand how to incorporate the use of ICT into their lessons and that this may require them to develop new pedagogies. However Cox also pointed out that 'very few' teachers have a comprehensive knowledge of the wide range of ICT resources which are now available.
This means that there is a whole batch of 'web 2' technologies out there, including VLEs, wikis, forums, blogs like this one and many more besides, which are not being used. Moreover, Cox found that many teachers are still wary and fearful of some forms of technology, with the majority using ICT to simply add to existing practice, rather than formulate entirely new pedagogies.
And who can blame them? Most teachers are thrilled to think that they could use technology that would genuinely impact upon the teaching/learning that takes place in their classroom. Some teachers take the easy option and throw a word processor at a class. Yes the class can then type up their homework, copy and paste something they found in wikipedia and drop in some clip art. Is that effective use of ICT? No. Young young children are capable of typing, copying and pasting and inserting clip art - this is no great stretch for them.
However a large number of teachers still consider this to be 'good' use of of ICT, or at the very least consider that it 'covers' ICT sufficiently that their HOD will be satisfied. So FIRSTLY let me tell the teaching profession that the above example is not necessarily a good use of ICT from a skills point of view. SECONDLY, it completely ignores the pedagogic advantages that proper use of ICT can bring about.
Margaret Cox bemoans the teachers - and this would include the ICT teachers - who believe that good ICT teaching is learning how to use a piece of software, prepaing a worksheet on it and then using it in lesson. In fact a major part of effective use of ICT lies in the planning, preparation and follow up of lesson, and should consider the pedagogical thinking that underpins the lesson. Things have improved in the last 20 years and Cox notes "a steady growth in the number of innovative and experienced teachers able to use specific ICT resources to improve their pupils' attainment."
What I am interested in is how we take this to the next level and how our pedagogy can improve by using technology in innovative and relevant ways.