Rob Sbaglia

Etherpad discussion with Pru

Hi Pru,

Click here to access our etherpad.

Cheers,
Rob.

Blogging PD – Macedon Ranges ICT network meeting

In our workshop today, we talked about the following ideas for blogging:

For students

• Journals
• Book reports, literature circles
• Creative writing assignments, short stories, poetry
• Display and discussion of student art work/photography
• Student portfolios
• Class discussions, current events
• Class archive
• Role playing
• Class newsletter
• Collaborative projects with another class
• Science experiment notebook

For teachers

• Post class assignments, upcoming assignments, project help, calendars and more
• Class suggestion box
• Communicate with parents
• Journal for teacher researcher projects
• Tool for collaboration with colleagues anywhere

What other uses can you think of for blogs?

100 educational technology blogs

Making Me Nervous

I feel I’m a constant disappointment to people sometimes. For example, being an Ultranet coach, people expect me to be interested in and capable of fixing technical problems. Sadly for these people, my version of solving technical problems looks at little like this:

(image courtesy of thereifixedit.com)

Similarly, as I sit here on Melbourne Cup day, I realise that not only do I have no interest in horse-racing, but really in any sport since I was in my early twenties. This makes conversations with fellow males rather difficult at times. For example, I follow the Brisbane Lions in the AFL, nominally at least, due to a tragic love affair with Fitzroy since the age of eight.  When the conversation turns to footy, as it invariably does when meeting new people of the heterosexual male persuasion, they attempt to engage me in analysis of Brisbane’s new recruits, how we only won those premierships becuase of salary cap concessions, blah blah blah. This is where I nod and smile weakly, whereas the truth is that I don’t care. Seriously. It’s like this – it’s nice if Brisbane wins, but I realised I wasn’t a true supporter because of the following two observations:

1. If you offered me the choice of a Brisbane Lions dynasty, consisting of winning each of the next ten premierships, including narrow Grand Final heroics over the filth that is Essendon, Richmond, Carlton and Collingwood, OR a really nice meal, I would take the nice meal.
2. If you offered me a really nice meal, but the consequence would be that the Brisbane Lions would lose every match by fifteen goals for the next ten years, I would still take the nice meal.

So please, don’t presume things. Don’t presume I’m interested in WAPs and suchlike because I’m an Ultranet coach. And please don’t presume I’m interested in football, or any sport really, because I possess a Y chromosome.

Another presumption that I don’t like is that, given the opportunity, kids will use technology for evil rather than good. The fallacy of this presumption was illustrated to me rather neatly last week. I was demonstrating etherpad, a real-time collaborative document where users can see each other add content to the document in real-time. This has the advantage over a wiki of being able to have multiple users edit the same document at the same time, and has the advantage over a googledoc of being able to  easily identify user contributions thanks to a handy colour-coding. Other interesting features include being able to export the etherpad as a Word document or PDF, or a curious Time Slider, where you can see exactly how the collaborative document “evolved”.

Anyway, the task set this particular Grade 5/6 class was to use etherpad to collate all the data they could find about their current topic, the Solar System. Some of the information they already had discovered, but some they had to research to complete the task. Below is a screenshot of what the kids produced.

You might notice that in the bottom right hand corner of the screenshot there is a little chat window. Now, the kids had not been told anything about the chat window – how to use it, or that it was even there. One could easily assume, though, that upon its discovery, the kids would waste  their time saying “Hi” to each other ad nauseum. On closer inspection, the kids actually seem to be using the technology to help each other complete the task by operating as a team rather than simply collecting together their facts. One student asks for sources of information about Pluto, and the others provide weblinks (below).

What role do you think the task set moulded how the kids used this technology? What other examples do you have of students using technology spontaneously to address a problem?

(The title of this blog post is from the album “I don’t know what I’m doing” by Brad Sucks).

Speranza

If it weren’t obvious from my writing and physique, you should know that I love food. And there aren’t many foods I love more than pizza. Indeed, on a recent trip to Italy, I visited my favourite pizzerias.

Pizzeria Spera, Firenze

Pizzeria Mediterraneo, Perugia

Pizzeria Sorbillo, Napoli

Pizzeria Capri, Perugia

With such a strong spiritual bond, I find the pizza an excellent source of analogy. However, I can’t go past Leon Krier, the Luxembourg urban design critic, who likens the absurdity of suburban zoning, where residential is separated from commerce, education and office areas, to the absurdity of eating a pizza – one ingredient at a time. First you eat the cheese, then the tomato, then the anchovies…

(Cartoon courtesy of Leon Krier)

Sometimes I see the division of learning into compartments (science, maths, english, history, etc etc) in a similar way. The pizza tastes better when all the ingredients are with all the other ingredients, and eating the ingredients separately seems contrived. It seems particularly so in maths; fortunately, there are many opportunities to integrate mathematical skills and ways of working into broader contexts.

I’ve always thought Scratch represents many opportunities for transdisciplinary learning. Currently I am working with maths teachers who are striving to use the engaging project of creating their own computer game to explicitly teach mathematics. So far, we have identified x-y coordinates, angles, algebra, chance (through the random number function), and basic functions such as addition, subtraction, multiplication and division as all concepts that are fundamental to creating a computer game using Scratch.

We’re beginning with the teaching of using the x-y coordinates to describe the location of a point. For this, using the x-y grid background can provide an aide to transferring knowledge taught explicitly to the students’ own computer games.

So our task this week is to make a simple game based on x-y coordinates: a simple game where you get a point for clicking on a fast-moving object that moves to a random position every second. Can you limit the movement of the object to a particular quadrant?

Hopefully, by linking the understanding of how an x-y coordinate can identify the position of a point on a two-dimensional plane (abstract) to the creation of a computer game (tangible), the common lament of students, “when are we ever going to use this” will be answered. And our pizza might just be tastier.

Artificial Sun

In a former life, I used to be a research scientist. I gained by PhD in Medicinal Chemistry from the University of Queensland. The title of my thesis was “Molecular Characteristics of Agonists and Antagonists of two G Protein-Coupled Receptors”, and I would highly recommend reading it if you suffer from insomnia.

I rarely miss being a research scientist. Becoming a teacher was one of the more intelligent decisions I’ve made in my life, for a whole number of reasons. However, I find that sometimes I still think like a research scientist. In particular, my belief in needing  to rely on evidence rather than intuition is very strong. In fact, if you have twenty minutes, the following talk by Dan Ariely elegantly demonstrates how, when scrutinized by evidence,  our intuitions that seem based on solid ground don’t seem to hold up.

This particular way of thinking of mine extends to teaching. When I was a research scientist, I saw first-hand how technology revolutionized the way we worked. Where once upon a time we had to decend into vast, dusty libraries to find publications on the synthesis and purification of imines in the Journal of Organic Chemistry, now we can sit at a computer and access any paper published since the mid-nineteenth century. Our access to knowledge, as scientists, had opened up seemingly overnight. And in any discussion about the merits of running a particular experiment, these publications needed to be used to support whatever we did.

So coming into teaching, I found myself wondering, “ok, teaching is kinda like science. If I find the publications that tell me what works and what doesn’t, I’ll use these to tell me what I do and don’t do in my classroom, and I’ll be a great teacher”.

Of course, teaching isn’t so simple. Nevertheless, I knew there were educational researchers out there. How could I get at what they had published?

The dollar’s rise against the British Pound (57.37 pence to the dollar at the time of writing) has made buying books quite cheap at the moment, thanks to The Book Depository, a site based in the UK that charges no postage anywhere in the world. With such a strong Aussie dollar, I purchased a few educational books. One of them is Visible Learning by John Hattie.

This book is what I had been looking for. It is a meta-analysis of meta-analyses, looking at pretty much every variable there is in education, and seeing exactly what works and what doesn’t. Naturally, the first part I read was that describing the studies into how ICT affects learning.

Hattie reports that the news is positive, though not overwhelmingly so. He concludes that technology has a “medium” positive effect on student outcomes, with an effect size of 0.37. The meta-analysis looks at nearly 5000 papers, using results from nearly 4 million students.

What did he find? There were six key findings Hattie reported that were necessary conditions for ICT to enhance student learning. They are:

1. There are a diversity of teaching strategies. This means that ICT is not the only way you try and teach your students.
2. There is teacher pre-training. Hattie found that around 10 hours of training is needed, spread over about four weeks.
3. There are multiple opportunities for learning. This one I found hardest to get my head around. What Hattie is referring to here are the learning opportunities the technology presents. For example, some websites are great for skill-and-drill. Some applications involve lots of creativity. What Hattie is suggesting here is that the technology itself must provide more than one way for the student to learn – it can’t just all be about skill-and-drill.
4. The student and not the teacher is “in control”. One I think we’ve known for a while. If the student can control how, when and at what pace they use the technology, student outcomes go up.
5. Peer learning is optimised. Hattie reports the optimal number of students at one machine is two.
6. Feedback is optimised. If you want outcomes to go up, some feedback must be provided by the technology. Either the technology itself provides the feedback, or the teacher and/or peers do.

Interestingly, Hattie singles out writing as a way that ICT enhances outcomes for students. In a meta-analysis by Torgerson and Elbourne, it was reported that when using ICT for writing, students write more, better, do more revisions, are more motivated, and make fewer errors, particularly for lower-achieving students.

As ICT becomes more and more a part of teaching and learning, we come across those that have their doubts about its effectiveness. While expressing doubts is useful, we must have evidence to back up why we are choosing this particular path. Without evidence, we rely on intuition; as Dan Ariely shows, that intuition can often let us down.

(Today’s blog post title comes from the title of a song on the album Ugly Armyby Fresh Body Shop).

Ultranet team – I salute you!

One of the pleasures of doing this job has been the opportunity to work with my fellow Ultranet coaches in the Loddon Mallee. If you didn’t know, they are:

Darrel Branson – based in Mildura

Di Davies – based in Swan Hill

Neville Borger – based in Rochester

Marc Blanks – based in Bendigo

And of course then there’s me – based in Bendigo but working in the Macedon Ranges and Goldfields network.

As you can see from the above locations, we’re spread across a pretty wide area. Nevertheless, the wonders of modern technology allow us to communicate regularly. One such way has been through listening to the EdTechCrew, a podcast put together by Darrel and his colleague Tony Richards. I listen to these podcasts as I drive south to my schools, and have been a great way for me to keep in touch with the latest tools to come out, and listen to some really interesting interviews. The one with Will Richardson was a cracker. I’d recommend to any teacher interested in using technology in their classroom to give the podcast a listen.

Most of the time though, its Darrel and Tony chatting amiably about a whole bunch of links to interesting websites, which I’m very grateful for, as they do a great job of trawling through the internet so that I don’t have to! In this way, I can claim (somewhat legitimately) that while I’m driving around I’m receiving professional development. Anyway, in episode 99 recently, Tony asked Darrel a question regarding whether he thought these netbooks we’ve been using have been a ‘watered-down’ technology solution. I couldn’t have answered the question better than Darrel’s (unscripted) response. Listen to the four minute discussion below, which Darrel has graciously given me permission to extract from the podcast and put up here.

I thought this was a very timely topic, considering many schools are now seriously considering maintaining the momentum created by the netbook trial this year and funding their own solution. My own view is that the netbooks, while not perfect machines, have allowed such an incredible range of things to have been achieved by teachers and students, and that sacrificing access (assuming that if schools buy more powerful machines they won’t be able to buy as many of them) for computing power that might not be needed would be to dilute the potency of having each child being able to choose when and how they use a computer to engage, explore, explain, elaborate and evaluate their learning.

As Darrel said : “end of rant”. What do YOU think?

This amusement never ends

I hope everyone had a great holiday. I managed to get away to Hobart for a week. We stayed in beautiful Battery Point. I love Battery Point because it represents a rare urban form in Australia – mixed use. Between houses and flats are cafes, pubs, restaurants, and many other things that make living in a city worthwhile.

Indeed, I have a bit of a ‘thing’ for living within walking distance of amenities. We chose where we live in Bendigo based on being able to walk to pretty much everything. Aside from the civic pleasure of walking around an architecturally beautiful city and interacting with it in a way impossible in a motor vehicle, we also prevent emission of greenhouse gases by walking, and get some exercise at the same time, although this is surely negated by the volumes of chips I eat every time I go to the pub.

So imagine my delight when education, civic design and web2.0 applications come together with the Walkscore site. Using this site, you can evaluate how walkable a place is. It works by using Google Maps to calculate the distance from the place in question to various amenities. Where we live got a score of 85 out of 100, as can be seen below.

How does this fit in with education? In many schools over the past term, there have been many students designing ’sustainable houses’. Yet surely this sustainability relies on where these houses are located – you’ll be using alot less energy to get around if you can walk.

Pop in your own address and let’s compare Walk Scores. Can anyone beat 85???

Reflections on the Cognitive Coaching Course – Day 5

Since last at the Cognitive Coaching course, I have developed my ideas around my role as a coach and have really attempted to use the maps to structure conversations with teachers. For example, I have tried to open as many discussions as possible with “so, when you think about ICT being used really effectively in your classroom, what would you like to see?”. Even if the response is “I don’t really know what’s possible” at least it provides a point for us to start from, and keeps the focus on teaching and learning. I get frustrated when we deviate too much or too early from the map – it seems like I try really hard to stay on track but we often get into nitty-gritty ICT stuff too early on. Sometimes its my own fault – I get sucked in to the “consultant” role too easily.
Away from the maps, I have become more aware of the importance of trust and rapport. I recall a specific, long conversation with an older teacher around her passion for teaching and kids. It made all the subsequent coaching conversations much more powerful. I hadn’t considered that aspect before.

An architectural rant (and some stuff about ICT in teaching and learning)

I hate ugly architecture. I have a particular intolerance to it that few other people seem to suffer. For example, check out this monstrosity – located not in some far-flung industrial park, but across the road from one of Bendigo’s most significant civic buildings – the Town Hall.

I have a rather unfashionable view that architectural beauty is not simply a matter of taste, but of criteria – criteria that have been developed over the centuries. Criteria that specify how a building is proportioned, its relationship to the street and to other buildings around it, and what it communicates to the passer-by. What would the above communicate, aside from the importance of office supplies?

Believe it or not, this rant is going somewhere. I do like the idea of criteria – a way that something can be quickly assessed and, more importantly, how it can be improved. It is with this love of criteria in mind that I developed the following tool that we can use to assess how well we are incorporating ICT into teaching and learning:

ICT Evaluation Tool

Basically, the way it works is it has the VELS domains across the top, so we can assess how broadly we are incorporating ICT. It also has the e5 instructional model down the side, so we can assess how deeply we are doing the same thing.

In the blank squares, you try and think of how you’ve used ICT in that VELS domain and it what way. For example, I might use an online survey to evaluate my students’ understandings in Science, so I fill in that box. An example is below:

ICT Evaluation Tool Example

The idea is not to fill in every box. The idea is to gain some insight into what parts of the currciulum you could target for improving how you use ICT, and gaining insight into how you use it. For example, looking at how I filled out the grid above, I can see I don’t use ICT in economics, so I might want to try and find some ways to involve ICT when I teach it. I can also see I use ICT for engaging my students, getting them to elaborate and evaluate, but I could investigate ways for my students to use ICT to explore and explain their learnings.

It also takes the focus off the technologies. Notice how not every box has something unique in it – you can see I have used “peer assessment using blogs” covers quite a few boxes in the evaluate row. In this way, I can identify ICT tools that are more useful, and rather than learning how to use more ICT tools I can focus on using them better. I can also see how ICT fits into VELS and e5, and by doing this activity, I found myself looking more carefully at the e5 model and the VELS level 4 documentation – surely not a bad thing.

Is this tool of any use?

Happiness is…

Some people are into cars. Some people are into big houses. Some people want lots of money. For me, my dream was to have an open fire. And finally, I have one:

So while sitting in front of my fire I have been reflecting on some of the amazing stuff that’s out there on the internet, and I wanted to share a couple of things I’ve come across recently.

The first is the TED talks, which I’ve been listening to in the car on my way down south. You may be familiar with the TED talks through this thoroughly amusing yet powerful talk about schooling and creativity by Sir Ken Robinson:

But in addition to this, I came across this fantastic talk by who would be the ideal music teacher, Benjamin Zander. Again, simultaneously powerful and funny.

So the TED talks are an incredibly diverse set of talks, and in recent weeks I’ve heard talks on everything from literacy support disguised as pirate shops(!) to why you should go bar hopping with a slightly uglier version of yourself if you want to be popular with the opposite sex(!!).

What is my point? Do indeed I have a point? Yes I do – it’s that if we want to understand better how technology fits into the education of the children we teach, then perhaps we need to strive to find a place for technology to fit into our own self-education. It doesn’t need to be stuff related to education, but I believe that through expanding my horizons in terms of how I use online tools to help me learn, whether it be through podcasts on Urban Design or interviews about Philisophy, I have come to appreciate how this technology fits into the emerging lives of students as well.