Sunday 29 August 2010

Stephen Heppell: 21st Century Learning and its Environments

I'll put up my observations from my day with Stephen Heppell progressively, because they are in note form at the moment. First up are Stephen Heppell's top practical tips for enabling learning in today's environment

Think about how you celebrate learning, so that learning is on display. Create a sense of a place of learning:
  • Label the trees with their names – more like a campus
  • Get the children’s work on display – on screens, on screens leading up to the school, some schools take out billboards in the local town.
  • Run a school radio station 

 Listen to the voice of the learners.
  • Ask students how they learn better - they often have a very good idea.
  • 21st century learning is ‘fuzzier at the edges’. “All the edges are a little softer”
  • Harnessing kids’ capability to teach staff
  • How can we work with others in the global community and hear their voices? simple eg - video screens up in the playground streaming live video to and from a sister school in Japan.
Make the learning space more playful, more personalised.
  • Important to think about the physical environment - makes learning more memorable. Colour is great, in secondary or primary. 
  • Don't stick stuff to glass. Look on the walls - not just in the classroom - and make sure they aren't covered in lists of things you can't do. 
  • Get rid of projectors. For the same price you can have multiple flat screens that can be placed around a learning space, and have the option to give kids control over what they see. 
Display the process of learning in a way that invites you in. 
  • Show the learning as it is happening, and invited feedback. 
  • Display drafts.

Think about the exterior learning spaces too.
  • How can the bus turning area be used pedagogically?
  • Label the trees
  • put screens around outside
  • Use video capture outside – places where you can easily capture – still camera that captures you as you go past. Great for sport.

Friday 27 August 2010

Stephen Heppell: Learning is escaping from its boxes

I worked with Stephen Heppell for two days last year. More accurately, I listened in to Stephen talking to a group of high school teachers, and then walked with him around their school as he visited classes and stuck his head around corners. I enjoyed myself immensely, and I've been thinking again about some of the things he said, in light of Marco's ideas last month. The time in classrooms with the students showed how well  Stephen, and the students themselves, were tuned to the students' needs - especially their need to be engaged with learning. Some of the teachers read this as 'learning needs to be fun', in opposition to 'learning needs content and learning content is hard work' - there was a fair level of opposition to Stephen's ideas and I thought he addressed their concerns brilliantly. I'll have to see if I can post some of my notes here.

Anyway, this post was sparked by a recently posted video of Stephen:




Stephen Heppell, like Marco Torres, emphasises that the challenge, and the imperative, around new technologies is asking the right questions. We have to think about how learning can change now that we have these technologies, simply because this is the world now. The genie is well out of the box.
A switch off device is a switched off child, and maybe the devil makes work for idle thumbs. If we don't give them things to do with their phones, they'll think of things, and maybe the things they think of aren't quite as smart as the ones we might have suggested.

Wednesday 11 August 2010

Teacher training

I've just been invited to assess high school students' applications for a university-taught teaching program. The students have to explain why teaching appeals to them as a career, what they think it involves, and what it means to be a good teacher. Not easy questions - and I'll have to answer very similar ones when I apply to study teaching - but the students have some great answers. Many of them mention passion, organisation, effective communication, getting and sustaining students' interest, integrating ICT, and discipline. Some appear to have reflected deeply, mentioning things like identifying what some students need more help with than others, assessing their own delivery style, continuing to learn, aligning ICT and pedagogy (one of them notes that computers and ICT are much more effective when they are there to support the teaching - sounds good to me), and learning from their students.

Tuesday 10 August 2010

Marco Torres: Good learners are givers

A couple of weeks ago now I spent a day with Marco Torres, sometime education advisor to Barack Obama, and (even more impressively) occasional director of Mythbusters. He spoke about how important it is for learners to connect with others, in order to share and co-create knowledge to solve real life, real world problems. The end product is evidence of their learning, but these connections, made through communicative technology, leave a digital trace which is also evidence of their learning.

Some points that I took away from the day -

Problems are bigger than institutions, and so are the solutions
You need a critical mass to make a difference, but it doesn’t have to be big or at your school - it can be across the world. Your colleagues don’t have to be in your physical space. US Department of Education is funding ideas not schools.

Marco was working with the World Bank. At the World Bank conference, even though it was not an education conference, all speakers said that solutions must come from kids. Adults have hang-ups that prevent them from taking risks and moving faster.

Sharing is learning, sharing is evidence of learning, sharing is evidence of passion for learning.
Using connective technologies to learn and to share learning leaves a digital trace. This can be very powerful as evidence of learning. The more hobbies you have the more iPhone apps you have, the more social networks, and the more blogs, YouTube etc you take part in, the more evidence you have that you are a continuous, self directed learner. The question that prospective school employees should be asked is, what is the evidence that you learn? If a prospective employee is really great, they don’t need a resume. Resumes are a list of nouns. It is important to hire based on verbs. Prospective employers look on the internet for what you are actually doing.

Your online activity is also evidence that you love what you do. This is important because people who love what they do work faster and also have higher levels of innovation. This is how Google hires, and how Google works.

Adults are mostly takers in an online environment. Kids are givers. Good learners are givers. Somebody who is a voracious learner is a voracious sharer: they take the information to create something. This thing that they create is evidence of their learning, and so is the process if they capture it.

This is different - it may cause discomfort. But when people are uncomfortable they have reason to learn.

Problem solving is key for 21st century learning. The important thing is to ask the right questions
Given the technology that we have, the important thing is to think about the kinds of problems we can solve.
Marco gave the example of a team challenge, in which every table was given a sheet of ‘logic problems’ e.g. ‘16 O in a P’ → 16 ounces in a pound. Marco used his iPhone to solve the problems, and finished first. Some other teachers there said, ‘That’s cheating!’ But how was this cheating? The process was not actually problem solving: the solution rested on how many people at the table had already learnt the information and could recall it. Marco just had a bigger table. Actual problem solving would be the setting of more problems.

The good questions that should be asked, that technology makes it possible to ask, include comparative analysis questions (where you have to compare data that are now easily available, or creatable - see below). These are crucial questions for today. For example: Civilian vs soldier deaths in WWI, WWII, Vietnam, Iraq - what do these tell us? If you could choose who was on your money, on what would you base your choices? If you could plan cities where they are, now, would the rules be the same as they were when they were built?

Creating data through the use of connective technology - after the New Orleans floods, Marco asked the question: Are levies wider in richer neighbourhoods? Students took the pictures and video, and created a rich database in very little time. When using connective technology, Marco notes that we need more time for reflections to get great questions.

A teacher told kids to go on YouTube and find a village that needed help. They found a village in Bangladesh that needed water. He challenged kids to solve the problem: how do you get water to the village?
Solution: They designed and created a 60 gallon barrel with hooks to drag the barrel.
Problem: They had also had a tapeworm problem.
Solution: Another school developed a tablet that kills the tapeworm as the water is rolling along in the barrel.
Problem: you can’t eat the bits of the tablet that come off in the barrel - it makes you sick.
Solution: kid at a third school stole tablet holder for putting a detergent tablet in the dryer, and adapted it for the barrel.
→ 3 schools solved the problem through the global issues network
http://www.global-issues-network.org/

Look for questions that are both creative and enable better citizenship:
A linking theme coming through the above points is that these activities also enable students to become better, more active citizens of their communities and of the world. Humanitarian design came out of challenge based approach. This involves taking maths and science to solve humanitarian problems.

The questions for challenge based learning (from KeyNote slide):
1.What can you do to solve a real problem? What does the evidence look like?
2.How can you involve students? What can happen if they plan with us?
3.What are some relevant tools strategies to solve it?
4.How will you publish the product and process?
5.What can you do to help convince the yes buts?
6.How will you market the leaning and schooling that just occurred?
7.What is a quick project idea that you could do tomorrow to head in the right direction?
8.Barriers? What are they? How can they be beaten? Problems are perceived not real.
What role does technology play in this journey?

For example: "Say you had the opportunity to make an app for the iPhone – any one you like – what would you create?" Here are some examples of good apps – they are good because they give information that is tailored to the user, and they allow the user to solve problems and to become a better citizen:
MyCongress – wherever I am (based on my gps) it tells me who are the elected officials fo that area. In the past I would have had to go through google. Now it is reformatted for me, for where I am. Everything is there. I can be a better citizen.
Citysourced How do you find the person you need to call e.g. for an abandoned car or broken pipeline or graffiti? Citisourced recognizes that you’ve taken a photo of an abandoned car, and tells you who to call – it can even send them an email, or lots, until the job gets done. Otherwise, because of lack of problem solving, problems remain. Kids can look for the problems and solve them to get points on the app. They become better citizen because of this.
wikiplace Helps find where you are, and connects you to everything you need to know about everything that is around you. eg take a photo of anything and it will tell you about it. The content is provided by users.

Association is key
The number one sign of innovative leaders is their ability to associate. This is association between people, association between ideas, etc. Schools need to promote this.
e.g. a photography assignment - if you tell kids to take a photo of a hat or a tree, they are learning about how the camera operates and how to take good pictures. But tell them to take a picture of sadness, or loneliness, and this increases their figurative language. This is increasing their ability to associate ideas, even if they don't have the skills to write an essay about it.