How did your learners learn about Anzac?

Anzac came and went in the last week.  A time for reflection on our history.
It did get me thinking again about curricula in our schools in the context of the last week.  Schools need to examine very clearly what they want their learners to learn and above all why they want them to learn it.   Only then should they focus on how they should learn.
Anzac is a big "topic" in schools in the last weeks of the school term.  Why learn about Anzac?  What do they need to learn about Anzac and then how are they going to learn about Anzac?
Some answers to these questions may centre around the following.

Why?
Anzac is an important part of the culture of New Zealand. It represents a struggle of grit and determination against the odds which many of us should identify with. It links our past to our future - what will we do in the future based on what we did in the past?
What?
Our forebears went through hell for what they thought was the right thing to do.
They were so young.  There was so much suffering on all sides.
Poppies represent the blood lost by so many on foreign soil.
So many losses of our people in the field, fighting for a cause which may or may not have been remotely relevant for them.
The paradox of war - strength determining an outcome that may or may not be morally right, and the fraternisation of soldiers on opposite sides.
Many of our grandfathers and grandmothers and great uncles and aunts were involved in the Anzac battle, either directly or indirectly.  These were the people who suffered so much for what they believed was the right thing to do.
How?
No doubt you will have other learning intentions associated with Anzac but now focus on how your learners were able to take on board some learning around Anzac.  How did your younger children learn about some of the concepts associated with Anzac compared to your older children?  Did they draw pretty pictures of poppies?  What did they learn from that? Did they erect white crosses on the school lawn.  Did they fill in a worksheet about Anzac? Did they listen to an Anzac service or the mournful "Last Post" played on a bugle?  Is there a knowledge building from year to year?
Do you think that they learned any part of the "What?" listed above.  How could you have enlisted their creativity to enable them to really take on the learning? What did your students learn about Anzac and how do you know they learned it?  What is the visible evidence of their learning and how was it relevant to them?  And what are your learners going to learn about Anzac next year?

Google Photos -

Google Photos must be the best way to store your photos in the cloud for free, that I know of. You can synchronise all of your photos from your phone or ipad by installing the Google Photo App on your phone.   You need a google account (ie a gmail address) and the rest is easy.

Note: You should adjust the settings on your phone, so that you only synchronise photos to the cloud when you are on wifi to save your phone data.  Open the app when you are within range of wifi and it will synchronise as shown below in the latest (top right hand side) photo.

How big can your photos be?
You can store all of your photos for free if you choose the 16mb per photo option.   The i-phone photos should take a maximum of 8mb per photo so this works well.  You won't lose resolution on any of those photos.

Managing the photos is really easy.  You can create albums, share them on facebook, google+ or twitter or just share the link via email.

Searching the photos is simply the easiest it can be, and with Google able to recognise faces, it will group all photos of the same person together for you, as shown in this video below.

If you haven't done so already, give Google Photos a go.  I think it would be perfect for teachers, organising photos of their learners, as well.

Watch the video below for a few tips on how to organise and search.

No response came the answer.

In my last post I asked about alternatives to the 5 minute per teacher scramble that is secondary school parent-teacher evening.  No response.

If I ruled the education world, it would look like this.  Every student would have an e-portfolio.  A site or a blog.  The site or blog would cover all of the learning areas that the learner was involved in.

The learning intentions for every learning area would be very explicit.  The learners would know what they were learning and why they were learning it.  And then they would also know how they learned it.

The teachers would have commented on how well the learners have learned whatever it was they should be learning.  And they would have indicated what the next steps could be.  And they would have seen what the learners were learning in other subject areas.  And maybe they could all work together to make cohesive links in their curricula.

Wouldn't that be a grand thing?

Parent Teacher Interviews

It has been many years since I had to go to a parent teacher interview as a parent, so it was exciting that my daughter wanted me to go along to her daughter's first college parent teacher evening.

"What do you want to find out about your teenager?"  I asked my daughter.
"I want to find out how well she is doing compared to all the other students," she said.
"Why do you want to know that?"
"So I can compare her with the other students."
"Why?"
"So I know if she is going to be able to compete with others to get where she wants to go."
"So why don't you ask what she needs to learn, what are her next learning goals and what learning outcomes are important?"
"Because I want to find out if she is going to do as well as other students."
"I think you have been brainwashed."  I said, and then added, "what makes your daughter special and different from other learners so that when she applies for a position or a place at university, they can see that she has expertise and interests in areas that others do not have?"
"Well she IS a great organiser, she is very creative, and she does get along with people and she can convey her feelings well."
"Right, lets start with the key competencies and also find out what she has to learn to do in each of her subjects."

And so we began the interviews.  We wanted to know what the learning outcomes were in each class. That was not easily available nor explicit.  Generally we learned a lot about the activities that she was doing and how she was behaving when she did them but not exactly why she was doing them.

We got a pretty good idea of where she was compared to other students.  I found myself wondering if there was a better way, for parents to understand what supports are needed for their children to develop into the best person they can possibly be, than a 5 minute scramble to see teachers that another 5 parents were waiting to see.

I have lots of ideas.  What ideas do you have?

To block or not to block - that is the question.

All educators and parents are concerned about the safety of their children.  There are policies and processes in place at most schools to try and minimize the risks for children working online at schools.
In some schools, there are so many blocks that it just creates barriers for learning.  Sites are blocked that can be so useful.  Youtube is one of the most commonly blocked for students.  Another is facebook.  Many teachers and parents believe that these sites are "too distracting" for the learners.  In these cases, teachers should be focused on the outcomes of the lessons - what knowledge or product is the child expected to create as a result of their internet work?  And how is that learning made visible.  If this happened more often then the students would have less time to be distracted as there would be consequences for not producing the work or showing the evidence of the learning.

A term came up at a recent conference as Lorna Earl from Ontario warned my colleagues and fellow educators to beware of "activity traps".  She said we do a lot that does not make a difference.  She is a co-author of "Building and Connecting - Learning Communities" by Katz, Earl and Jaafar.  I believe that there are many "activity traps" in a day at school.  Get the students focusing on achieving learning goals instead.

But getting back to my main point - to block or not to block.
It is important to remember that school is often the safest place in students' lives.  So when students go home at night, they are more than likely to be working with devices which have no controls or restrictions on them in many cases.  For this reason, I believe it is more important to teach learners that there are unsuitable sites and people out there in internet land, and teach them  why they are unsuitable and how to manage them when they come across them, instead of blocking access to each and every site which may hold dangers.

In addition, parents should closely supervise and be involved in their children's use of digital technologies, just as they are when they are on the beach or at the playground.  This includes occasionally checking up on the history of the sites they have visited and also when a child quickly closes a webpage, bring that webpage back up again to see what was visited.  You can do this on Google Chrome browser by pressing "control + shift + T" all at once.  Keep pressing it to bring up the latest history.
Just as you teach the learners about family and school values, teach about the contexts in which they will use these values - not only in every day life but also online.  And use the huge range of educational resources available online as much as you possible can.

Learning and Teaching in the 21st Century

I came across this video recently and thought it was one of the better ones I had seen because it could be a really useful video to show parents and whanau of our learners, who often yearn for an education similar to the one they received.  It really tells the tale of how different education needs to be in the 21st century.
It starts by questioning if the role of the teacher is obsolete.  Students can obtain facts, dates, content and formula on anything, anytime, anywhere so where does that leave the role of the teacher?

It goes on to explain that students need to be taught skills of handling limitless resources like skills for using search engines.  They need to be able to validate, (check the soundness of)  synthesise, (process and make sense of), leverage (take advantage of and use), communicate (translate into meaning for others), collaborate  (work together with others on) and problem solve with the information.

Teachers need to ask students to create their own knowledge.  This could include creating a podcast or a blog, animate, plan or record, design or programme.

There are a whole lot of other ICT skills as well.  

• Bookmarking - so to find resources again easily
• Paraphrasing - rewording to show understanding
• Mashing - using a number of apps together
• Experimenting - taking risks
• Attributing - not stealing others work
• Subscribing - allowing easy access to useful resources
• Posting - exposing opinions and creativity in a safe context
• Uploading - sharing work to the world
• Editing - adjusting, trimming, adding value
• Reflecting - a metacognitive activity to really show deep understanding
• Locating - sorting through millions of resources to find the right one
• Tagging - adding a label to enable easy searching later
• Twittering - using the power of 140 words and mixed media wisely
• Commenting - being positive and aiding understanding
• Searching - finding exactly what you want online
• Integrating - mixing one medium with another
• Networking - finding and knowing the right people at the right time
• Linking - making connections

Do our learners know how to do these?  And can they do them reliably, responsibly and with integrity?   Do they know how to be professional - to avoid plagiarism, pirating, and slander?  Do they honour copyright, crowdsourcing and confidentiality?

Our roles have certainly changed from being the sage on the stage. We need to be able to gather data from a whole new set of resources - facebook, twitter, RSS feeds, crowdsourcing and online surveys, be able to assess its reliability.  

Students need to be able to create and collaborate in new ways.  We need to be able to provide multiple forms of representation, engagement and expression and action using the UDL principles.

The video gives some examples of kinds of problems that could be put to students to answer in many different ways.

• How many grains of sand on the average beach?
• What is the current relationship between India and Pakistan?
• Which organisation would you give money to for hunger relief?
• Where would the best place in the earth be to live according to data?
• What are the top rated jobs in your country and what are the common skills for those jobs?
• Which is the best presentation programme?
• What are the key ideas in Youtube's terms and conditions?

The video also addresses the idea of behaviour management when using devices.  This is a favourite topic of mine as I often see teachers trying to manage behaviour through removal of "privileges" of using devices.

Managing devices (laptops, phones, ipods etc) at school should be the same as managing all the other tools available in the past (books, pens, pencils and paper).  You don't remove those tools when students misbehave.  If learning is engaging, relevant and challenging, then issues of distraction and temptation rarely arise.  The devices are not there to entertain, but to engage our learners in learning.  

In summary, the video exhorts us to make changes. The responsibility lies with us, as teachers, to take risks and move into 21st Century teaching by up-skilling, collaborating and trialling and asking ourselves, what does it really mean to teach?  I do think the video will help whanau and communities understand what this means as well.

Are you in the right profession?

So here is a bit of a miserable post.  A reflection on some challenges that I have faced over the years.

Teaching is a great profession.  Teachers are passionate, committed to their students and their learning, and, they are hard working - in the main.  There are a few exceptions as with every profession.  I do meet them in the context of my work from time to time.  They exhibit signs of

• not wanting to improve or shift their practice
• being satisfied with mediocre
• negative energy towards their leaders
• negative energy towards their students
• disruptive behaviour that they would not tolerate from their students
• lacking in perseverance
• unprepared to challenge themselves

Embed from Getty Images

In their behaviours, I sometimes see myself as the disruptor in earlier years when I was feeling dissatisfied with the status quo.  Sometimes all that is needed is a quiet word in their ears - just saying I have noticed that their behaviour is that of a non-engaged participant.    Sometimes I just to ask them what they do with a student in their class who is disruptive/ apathetic /unengaged when they throw their digital tools out of the cot.   This often brings the change in behaviour that I desire.

As a facilitator, it is my job to engage these people in much the same way as a teacher would strive to engage a reluctant student.  I look at my practice and the language that I use.  I  ask myself how they have got into this state - which is a bit of deficit theorising, but I do also often ask myself - have they asked themselves if they are in the right profession?