Physical vs. Virtual

 Some rights reserved by szczym

At a conference last weekend I had some fun with google cardboard, we could go places we couldn't go on our own, I saw the surface of Mars and went to different museums.  As a virtual opportunity (aside from some initial discomfort) it was pretty great.  Interestingly enough though the presentation I was leading was on environmental education.

My goal was to get people outside with their students. Often as teachers we don't give students enough time to think about who they are and where they are.  This can deeply affect their understanding of themselves and others. I want students to be more present in the "real" world.  But I was at a tech conference, so I had to think deeply about the effects of virtual manipulatives.

In maths, or language, how can we harness the power of the virtual world to connect students. When using math manipulatives is there a difference between virtual and physical for learning? All these questions were popping up.

With a colleague we decided to start up a podcast, and this is going to be our first dive into it.  What is the difference and does it matter to understanding? I'm not sure we have answers, but it will be interesting to talk about.

Sharing ideas through video

This has been an incredibly busy week, but I am trying to focus on making one blog post a week and this week I've been thinking a lot about training, and sharing and how amazing video is at this.

 Some rights reserved by Brian Metcalfe

This week I've created two videos for training purposes for my teachers.  Recently I've had to go to four or five classes and set certain things up.  While I love spending my time with teachers, I really want my job as EdTech Coach to be focused on learning conversations.  In order to liberate some of my setting up with teachers time I've made videos and shared them with teachers, this way they always have access and they can learn at their own time (and not have to ask me which I think some people try to just coast along until we realize that they aren't doing what's expected).  The videos have been easy to make using Camtasia2 my coworkers use another program, but I think this is pretty easy to use. 

I've been in a number of classes this week working with students making videos.  I just returned from one class that is working on documenting the systems they use.  The students take a video of the system they want to talk about and then use Explain Everything to narrate. 

The quotation above is great, we need students to be making videos (especially the younger students) to fully understand what they know and honour how they can explain it.  It empowers the students to share their knowledge in any way possible. 

This week in the #enviroed chat we've been talking about nature and technology and Ranger Ridley led me to this link regarding crowd sourcing natural understandings. It's amazing how videos (and photos) can lead others to see what new natural things are occurring, and what is happening to our natural systems. 

My focus on the next couple of weeks will be bringing video into more of my lessons, and hopefully in more of my teacher professional development.

Consuming or Creating or Both

 Some rights reserved by barbourians

I was reading George Couros' blog today about "work phone mentality", while I always enjoy his blog posts, this one really got me thinking.

At my previous school, before we introduced iPads to the classroom we gave them to our teachers for six months.   The first two months were playing, and like Couros mentioned, not everyone played. Some people used it for personal communication, some looked into how they could use it with students, but I guess everyone who used it thought about how they could use it to enhance their teaching (which is great).  But I don't think anyone used it to try to create something (myself included).

Consuming
I don't think we were solely consuming (or we were aware of solely consuming), rather I think so much of what we know as educators is to consume and adapt. Rarely are we asked to create change, or stimulate change (well in our students yes, but in the system? I don't think so).

For the past two years as an EdTech coach, I've been asking teachers to create rather than consume with their learners.  And I fully support that idea today, but I think I've missed out on some of the benefits of consuming, or I've been using the word improperly or just leaving off the creating aspect from consuming.

Consuming, creating and the commons

 Some rights reserved by The Daring Librarian

While I often think of the potential of creative commons, I don't always think of it as a tool for both creating and consuming (although now that I think of it, I can't actually imagine it any other way).  Coming from a constructivist view point, I believe we build on from our previous knowledge, besides direct experience and then consumption (reading, watching, listening, interacting) to other people's experience, I don't know what other ways we can acquire knowledge.

As I head into my classes on digital citizenship, and crediting sources this week, I really want to highlight this opportunity to consume and create for our whole learning community. 

Making Parent Communication Folders

Screen Shot by Maureen

This week our team has been focused on creating a presentation for delivering information to parents.  Before we sent out numerous links for parents, but most of our parents received and email on their phones and clicked links to access the information.  Their phones opened many new tabs which made browsing difficult for them.  So we decided to use a different approach this year. 

Since we are using Google Apps for Education, we decided to create folders where parents can view the information being sent out through one main folder.  When they open the folder they get subfolders which will bring them to curriculum, media and single subject teachers. 

As a tech team, this seemed pretty straightforward, but we all learned a lot when trying to share the message to administration and grade level teams.  While sharing settings were easy to manage and control with a small group of people, it was more difficult when using the same folder in multiple drives (for our grade level teachers), we worked with the sharing settings making people editors for a short period of time and then making them viewers only. This way we could manage how the drives were organized.  

More than anything, as an EdTech team, but mostly I learned a lot about breaking steps down and differentiation.  One of the teams was very comfortable using Google Drive and blogs and they flew through the presentation in fifteen minutes mainly concerned with our privacy settings and size of the drive. Another group (much larger) took an hour to get set up.  Some of this was due to our prep, but some of it had to do with the comfort of using the drive.  I learned a lot about the importance of knowing your audience.  Since I'm new to the school, I had prepared a uniform presentation, but as I am getting to know the groups better, it's important to start changing how and what I present (all best practice really, I guess this is just pre-assessment). 

I have two more presentations to go, but I feel much more prepared for sharing the information, and hopefully making it more meaningful to the teachers. 

Next comes the parent step (well a week from now).  It will be interesting to see how well the information gets from one place to the next.  

Back to School

 Some rights reserved by BiblioArchives / LibraryArchives

Well summer was full on, read a lot but didn't create very much.  Going through the presentations we are giving this week and next week, our EdTech team keeps talking about the powerful learning opportunities with creation. Sadly, I've been out of that loop for the last couple of weeks. 

While we dive into all teacher training next week, the teachers new to the school are getting ready this week, figuring out systems, learning the school, interacting with each other, so far so good I would say. 

I bought some screen casting software recently, and want to take the plunge into offering more personalised learning opportunities for teachers, not just with content but with time. I've talked about this but at times teachers feel like there is not enough time. 

 Some rights reserved by Sergey Galyonkin

Part of what I see as my job this year as EdTech is to promote this idea of a "flipped classroom" using screen casting opportunities, an having my google calendar open, I hope will create a way teachers can either access me during the day, or access learning material in the evening, or on the weekends (not that I want people working all weekend, I just want them to be able to learn whenever they want to learn). 

 

Why Spy...

How worried am I about privacy? Depends on how I'm feeling I guess.  I go the total roundabout way to being concerned.  I know I don't like people tracking me.  I have some add-ons (Collusion) for Chrome that I use to see what's going on (and block known trackers).  Here's what I saw yesterday when I started this post.

I know when I'm online I'm connected, I know advertisers use this to collect data, I am slightly worried about how else that information gets used, but my biggest concern is data collection for advertising, because regardless of my deliberate actions I am helping someone make money by just looking around online.  I am very happy that the internet is relatively accessible and cheap (especially here in Cambodia for me). So if advertising is supplementing that, right on, I just don't want them to gather data about me, and sell it, especially since I purchase so many things online.

I read this book in January and found it incredibly interesting.

 Some rights reserved by screenpunk

The whole idea that nothing is private, is astounding (and mostly true).  But how much should we care about it.  The scariest thing for me in this book was the idea that you could only have one true identity online.  Right now I have three different profiles open on my chrome browser, work, personal, professional.  So I go to different websites based on who "I" am. That way, I'm using my data the way I want.

Which is what I tell my students... everything online can be made public (basically, unless you're on the deep internet, or have crazy settings, then why be social). So, use that public aspect to highlight your best self. I don't tell them about multiple profiles, but they know I have different profiles because they see my different browsers. I want them to know about privacy, not just facebook security settings and realize people want this data.  People want to see what people are buying and looking at.  Collusion (which I show them) connects all the little dots, so we can see where information is going, and as long as we're happy with our data going places, then right on.  Just be aware, and make decisions based on what you know. 

I guess I think privacy (or openness) should work both ways, I should know who has access to my data if they are going to take my data.  

What does it mean to be a digital migrant?

For our unit of inquiry on migrations these past two months, I wanted to add a digital citizenship component. We've talked about migrations before, but I was thinking about how often we forget about moving around between the digital world and the "real" world.  We have some different rules online, different expectations, and at times it can be hard to understand tone, etc.

 Some rights reserved by dkalo

  I worked with the teachers (in my role as tech coach) to start blogs with the students.  We discussed what we knew about migration, we interviewed our parents or grandparents about migration and posted this on our blogs, and then talked about digital citizenship and what it means when we migrate online.


Luckily I was taking this course while our unit was going on, we changed a lot of things, and have a better plan for next time we do the unit.  What was great for me, is that every teacher has now adopted blogging as a form of reflection, and they have asked to use blogger as their digital portfolio.  The students had people commenting (not just other students) on their blogs and were enthusiastic about the reflection process. It's been a great first unit in COETAIL, I learned a lot, and I'm looking forward to using my network to help me and my colleagues imbed tech a little more authentically.

Always wanting more

I feel like I have been trying to do this for awhile, and it is so difficult to get to where I want to be with global collaboration. As a technology coach I have heard teachers often say they have no time. 

 Some rights reserved by mag3737

This is always frustrating for me because I feel with technology we have the option for asynchronous learning, so we don't actually need common shared time we can use whatever time we have. 

In Davidson's article Collaborative Learning for the Digital Age  I often feel like she did when she saw the gorilla (and I think many of my students feel the same way).  Instead of having a legitimate reason for not really paying attention to the assignment, I feel like trying to focus on just one thing (counting the passes) makes us miss out on the larger systemic issues that might be happening.  If we are paying attention to something too closely we can miss out on other learning opportunities.  What we need to do as teachers (connectivist teachers especially) is to link our learners up (either digitally or physically) with people who see the world a little differently. 

The crowdsourcing idea for grading and learning and transforming learning makes so much sense to me, why should I be in charge of what is "good" or "passable".  Students might take assignments more seriously if their peers, or someone they looked up to were judging them. Again, like Clarissa says “It’s something I can do in my spare time, be creative and write and not have to be graded,” because, “you know how in school you’re creative, but you’re doing it for a grade so it doesn’t really count?"

Personally, I think it's pretty inspiring that companies like Apple work with schools and let school communities repurpose their apps and technology. I love the idea of App Smashing especially when thinking about how to collaborate.

Our Collaborative Plans

At our school we have been trying hard to work with other schools. We have worked with other schools on our blogs. It has been a decent journey so far, we have people communicating with each other, asking questions and slowly digging deeper. But I would really like to "prosume" with another school.

Right now I am working with an environmental educator Ranger Ridley to work with Ontario schools for our units on Sharing the Planet. Like Andrew Marcinek mentions in his article the purpose of using social media, or blogs should go beyond connecting, which leaves me always wanting more. I am doing okay at connecting students, but how can I reach the empowerment stage?

So our success doesn't look like this... 

 Some rights reserved by Matthew McVickar

Cultivating Geekdom

 Some rights reserved by birgerking taken from Flickr

Family Geekiness 

Growing up, I was outside most of the time, especially during the summer.  My brother however was almost always near a computer. He fully embraced his inner geek, and at the time I may not have appreciated it as much as I do now.  Most of his friends and community members were part of an online game.  I forget what it was called, but he spent most of his time in it, and just like the Living in New Media Report mentions he learned from it and made profound friendships on this site.  This scared my parents, and to be honest it scared me a little too.  It's strange not "knowing" who my brother's friends were.  My parents could see my friends outside, we would come in and eat, hang out in the kitchen or watch TV if the weather wasn't brilliant.  My brother's friends were rarely seen.  

I remember I was in University, my brother was in grade ten or eleven and he had been playing this game for three years or so, when one of his friends wanted to meet.  My parents knew they were older, like in their thirties, which made them really uneasy.  They were both travelling to the same place, coincidentally, and thought it would be incredible to see this person they had spent so much time working with (killing monsters, saving the world, establishing a community, to be honest I don't really know what they did).  

The agreement was my parents would be there for the meeting and introduce themselves to these people.  While everyone was a little tense at first the meeting went really well (I sadly was in school). My parents' fear slowly dissipated and their friendship grew even stronger.

Reading this report on geeking out made me wonder about my choices being younger. I loved being outside, playing around, learning more about myself and my friends, but did I miss a chance to dig deep into something and learn a specialized skill? Who knows/ 

Cultivating Geeks 

 Some rights reserved by See-ming Lee 李思明 SML

So now I wonder, how do I cultivate geekiness in my students.  Last year I tried implementing Genius Hour, or google time, or whatever you call it when you let students do what they want and explore their own learning. It was somewhat successful but I lacked the expert community connection that would make this time really powerful.  Their was no in-depth community for the students to reach (mainly because of lack of technology in the classroom). 

As a tech teacher now, and coach, I'm trying to start making those connections (thanks connectivism).  I've put some teachers on twitter to connect with NGOs taking action about what students are inquiring into. We've started classroom and individual blogs (already one of my students thanks to a facebook post has 500 views on one of his summative assessments Zeke's blog if you're keen).  I guess my wonder is, how do we cultivate geekdom? How do we get people into these communities, or is it like Clarissa says “It’s something I can do in my spare time, be creative and write and not have to be graded,” because, “you know how in school you’re creative, but you’re doing it for a grade so it doesn’t really count?"

As a "connected" teacher, I realize my role has to change. That means perceptions of my role have to change as well. Do I need to get rid of grading to make learning authentic in my classes? I wonder what the next steps are to help students reach their potential in a meaningful way for them.

How do you know when you stop messing around?

Messing Around

In the Living with New Media report messing around involves experimenting and exploring and doing things just to learn more.  It is more of a tinkering culture, a figuring things out, something I feel is where I am almost stagnant at least in some aspects of tech.  I've been playing around with code, but I definitely haven't geeked out.  I've been working on the blog, but again, more tinkering and exploring.

 Some rights reserved by 1lenore

Tinkering and Connectivism

Tinkering fits nicely with a connectivist viewpoint.  Connectivism as George Siemens describes it is a fuzzy process which involves tinkering and no longer just happens at school or just from humans.  We can tinker with things, or converse with people and our knowledge grows. 

The ability to see connections between things, and create connections is a valuable skill according to Siemens. We need to help our students make those connections, and technology is one way we can connect people to sources of information. 

  

Tinkering with things allows us to experience, which we can then share with others to not only consume knowledge but to produce it.

 Some rights reserved by ell brown

Slow Down

For me, slowing down and seeing or making the connections is an important step in the process. Slow education involves making those connections and deepening our understanding, maybe even "geeking out". We are sharing our process together, so we need to take the time to develop our community, learn together, tinker together, wonder together.  Connectivism doesn't see our learning as dumping information, it is a process of looking for connections, meeting people, learning more, and directing ourselves. As Siemens said we need the opportunity to plug into knowledge when we don't have it, but sometimes I think it's important to slow down and see where the outlet actually is. 

I think we stop messing around when we start to dig deeper into things.  Slowing down, looking at systems and making connections is a great way for us to start making these connections. 

Who chooses our hangouts?

AttributionShare Alike Some rights reserved by Jeff McNeill flickr

Creating and connecting communities. It's one of the reasons we are here. When I'm thinking about what we do as teachers, how often do we give power to students to create their own communities.  We're lucky... we chose to be here, well at least I imagine we all chose to be here.

Will Richardson in World Without Walls suggests that most of the meaningful teachers we meet are of our own choosing.  For us, as educators, to fully empower students Richardson pushes us to challenge our understanding of what it means to be a teacher.  No longer are we "content experts" first instead we think of our primary focus as "connectors".

While reading the "Living with New Media"  article the authors discuss how youth have always been negotiating what it means to be a "friend".  While we are online, this creates different opportunities and challenges, but it is still something we are always doing.

This idea that we as teachers and learners, have to be open to change. Open to new ideas, and make our own connections is something that resonates deeply with me.  Creating this COETAIL community is something I've been wanting to do for a year.  Creating meaningful learning experiences is powerful for me, and I'm looking forward to learning more about how I can enable my students to enhance their learning through technology.

Enhancing

Yesterday was a bit frustrating, when I got home I thought about the whole tech world and teaching... I reflected about the conversations I had this week where tech had enhanced student learning.

 Some rights reserved by kev_hickey_uk

One of my biggest finds this week was using OCR-image to text. Some of my students have reading struggles and this app has helped them have access to any book.  Often teachers are constrained to digital books, or audio books, but students can use this to capture the text, and then using the accessibility features of the iPad have it read to them.   Is it perfect, nope, is it pretty amazing, yeah for sure.  It has put huge smiles on the faces of these students.

Nature and exploring the outdoors is a passion of mine, and earlier this week I found this site on twitter.  14 Apps That Will Revolutionize Your Walk in the Woods. Again, I felt that at times our tech could enhance, not just what we do at school, but what we do everyday.

These apps can help us develop our passions.

This week has been three way conferences, and traditionally the parents have not often talked to the tech teachers.  This year has been different, and the conversations I've had with parents about apps, programs, and hardware that enhance learning has just been incredible.

Permanence and student data

  by  jonny goldstein 

We've been digging deep into the idea of digital footprint and permanence this week while blogging.

Some of our discussions have revolved around what photos are always going to be there, what comments will stay, how can we delete things we don't want?  There is a wonder about what will happen if someone impersonates another person, how can we delete that data.  I've been stressing this idea that some things are very, very hard to delete.

And then...

One of my students left, he had been collaborating with other students on a slide show, and his googleapps account was deleted by us.  All of his information and work was gone... wild, no longer any access for those people who had been collaborating with him.

I've done the google admin test, and I thought ownership was transferred over to someone else, obviously I was wrong.

Licensed for reuse - http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Commons:Bots

We've learned a lot as a tech group this week about google docs about permanence.  We've "lost" some files that were really placed somewhere else by an author.  We've had some hiccups with organization of our drives, but we had never really lost anything before.


Now our plan is to make a accounts which aren't linked to humans.  For me this is hilarious because I've been talking to students about their blogs and how most of the traffic that comes to them is from non-humans.  They wonder about why people would do this, and now I have a very relevant reason for doing this, keeping our googledocs around.  For group projects we are now going to transfer ownership to nonhumans if someone is going to leave.  That way all of their joint accounts will go with them., making it easy to keep our projects safe.

I love the idea of Google Take Out which can keep our data ours, but I'm glad we now have a strategy for keeping shared data safe.

Citizenship

cc licensed ( BY NC SA ) flickr photo by MaRS Discovery District: 

I'm in the middle of blog lessons, and as we start talking about what and how we will write we are delving into digital citizenship. So far what has impressed me most about my student's interpretations of this idea is that good digital citizenship is basically good citizenship, they just see it as an extension of their normal community.

Thankfully this allows me to talk about integrating good global citizens into my lessons this week. We can talk about what responsibility means to us in a digital and natural world, and how often those things are connected.  Most of my students know what it means to treat their classmates with respect, making that connection to posting pictures of others online makes sense to most of them.  Making the extension that these actions (both positive and negative) last longer online then they do in the classroom can be a difficult concept, but we have looked up the first website, and that makes it possible to see how long things last online (even if they are no longer as relevant as they once were). 

Responsibility to a community is something I feel we need to highlight in these lessons, and I can talk about our responsibility to the natural world as well.  Citing sources is like where we get our resources from. We need to be aware of where these things come from and treat their origins with respect.  Thinking about how we interact with others is extremely important in order to help our community reach its full potential.  

When I think about permaculture principles (the ones we made for the kids, Earth care, People care, Fair Share) I think it is easy to put these ideas into our digital citizenship classes.  I guess what I'm really wondering is how Digital citizenship is different from citizenship, any ideas? 

Sustainability and Tech

It is budget time and as I ask for more devices for my students, I wonder about the social and environmental cost behind my request. I've seen the videos and heard the horror stories of the "recycling" plants in China and around the world. I worry about the personal cost to people in these situations too, and wonder what is being done about it.

Since our school has started an iPad program I thought I would look into how Apple was thinking about sustainability. Apple says they are committed to transparency and are a member of different third party organizations to confirm this. I started reading their report on sustainable practice.

I guess I realized that everyone wants to be committed to sustainable practice but actual action is harder to take.  From their report it looks like Apple firmly believes in helping their workers (including third party workers) gain fair wages, working conditions and success.  I think all these things are true, but I do wonder about third party monitoring.

Going back to earlier post ideas, I wonder about recycling and design process.  How can we start designing computers and tablets, and whatever else to be fully repurposed.  I heard a program (forever ago it seems) on the CBC about tech designers looking at how the companies would have to be responsible for the waste (it would be included in the price or something) they then started talking about renting equipment.  The point was you could pay the company (Apple, Samsung, Motorola, etc.) for a specific package, when the time to renew that package came up the company would take the phone and hopefully reuse the different components to make a new phone or tablet, etc.

Cradle to Cradle has been a focus for me these last couple of weeks, if it doesn't show.

Cradle to Cradle

This week I've been thinking a lot about the holiday season, gift giving and how those thoughts impact the environment.

Aitana Leret Garcia » DP2.- Cradle to cradle: Waste = Food : taken from - http://www.eoi.es/blogs/aitanaleret/2011/12/16/dp2-cradle-to-cradle-waste-food/http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/3.0/es/

So I bought a back pack for my travels around with this philosophy.

I got it from kickstarter if you want to check it out  http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/mijlo/a-better-backpack-sustainable-design-sustainable-f.

Anyway, with my focus on permaculture the last couple of weeks as an individual and my focus on design as a teacher this cradle to cradle philosophy has really got me wondering about how we can teach students more about the ideas behind sustainable design.

Taken from Amazon.com

I read this book three years ago, and was really concerned that tech people weren't buying into this philosophy.  So I want to make lessons that incorporate this idea.  I love the idea of publishing ebooks rather than wasting paper, but we're still using important resources in order to produce the tech to make the ebooks.

How can we bring the cradle to cradle philosophy to class?

I think a lot about my implicit and explicit teaching.  When I work with students how can I reinforce the idea of sustainable design explicitly and through my implicit actions?  This is my focus for this week: being really aware of how I promote sustainable design.  Any help is more than welcome.