Views of Knowledge

I am freshly back from the Virtual Professional Learning and Development (VPLD) conference in Auckland.  It was an awesome hui, a great chance to catch up face to face with my mentees and mentors alike.  Two days of celebrations of  personal journeys in educational contexts and lots of learning for all.                  

As with all meetings,there is a lot to digest and mull over for the next few weeks.  The VPLD is where I grew my "learning with digital technology" wings.  It is a supportive and empowering community and I have enjoyed presenting at each one over the past four years.  This year, I facilitated a short session on Future Focused Learning.  his blog post is about my reflections from that presentation.
I have blogged about these 6 themes of future-oriented teaching and learning before, as they resonate strongly for me about the power of transforming learning with digital technologies.

As part of the session, I asked the group of about 70 educators to reflect on what each of the themes could mean in their classrooms.  I gathered responses via a google form (answers are collated in a spreadsheet) and this give me the opportunity to see how well people understand the concepts.

The theme which was least understood was about using knowledge to build learning capacity. So I thought I would revisit this concept and try to clarify my understandings, and as always, look for further comment and discussion around this theme.

From Curriculum Update 26 comes these words " learning can happen through collaborative knowledge building" and "disciplinary knowledge provides context within which students' learning capacity can be developed".  What I understand from this is that as students grow their knowledge, they should also be growing their capability to learn more.  We need to provide supports and scaffolds to ensure that they learn to understand how they learn and build their knowledge.  This in turn will allow them to become more independent, self directed learners.
Sometimes this just means having a model for learning - like the many inquiry learning models I have used and seen around the country.  These provide students with the framework to reflect on the way they grow their knowledge.
Just by chance, I spotted this poster in social media yesterday, about some attitudes which will support students build their capacity for learning. I am not sure where it came from but it really does reflect the kinds of things I believe we should be teaching our students.  Guy Claxton also  talks about "learning habits".  So as our students widen their knowledge base, we should also be instilling these habits and attitudes, which will enable them to be lifelong learners.
Knowledge is important.  Students should be able to use knowledge to help them build more knowledge.  But knowledge is now growing at such a rapid rate that it is impossible to be able to able to claim that what you know now will be relevant or even true in 10 years time.  (In my day, Pluto was a planet.  It was knowledge that I learned for my exams.)
It makes perfect sense to me now to use knowledge to build learning capacity now..... how do you feel?

It would be great if you could contribute to this answer garden for me.... you should be able to see all the answers, too.


What is the biggest obstacle to learning with digital technology... at AnswerGarden.ch.

Using Google Sites for Registered Teacher Criteria

Here is an introductory video for those New Zealand Teachers wanting to use Google Sites for their eportfolios of evidence against the registered teacher criteria. In the true tradition of flipped learning, it is warts and all.

Hynessight: And here are the slides from my Google presentatio...

Hynessight: And here are the slides from my Google presentatio...

Please use and enjoy these slides from my Google Summit presentation.

And here are the slides from my Google presentation....

Google Apps for Education Summit in Auckland

I am looking forward to the opportunity to present at the Google Summit in Auckland (29th and 30th April) about the many apps, add-ons and extensions to Google Drive and Chrome.  There are so many awesome extras that many GAFE (google apps for education) and even casual users of Google docs do not know about and I am looking forward to sharing some of my favourites.  
Google Drive is cloud based.  That means you might need some of the many apps, add-ons and extensions to enhance the functionality in the cloud.  Luckily you can add these and customise your Drive and Chrome to suit your own needs. 

Drive Apps (- add to your Drive by pressing the Create button, then " Connect More Apps," choose the app you want from the many available and allow it to have access to your Drive).
Here are some of my favourites.

• Pixlr Photo Editor - allows you to readily edit your photos and save them to your drive.  Has many fun options for your photos. 
• VideoNot.es allows you to watch a video from Youtube or Vimeo and some other platforms while taking notes at the same time.  The notes that you take are timed so you can look back at your notes, click on the relevant note and go to the correct time in the videos.  An awesome app for getting the most from your video.  Could be used in research or with older students to analyse videos.  Notes are saved in Drive and you can share and collaborate.
• MindMups - a mind-mapping tool, so easy to use and the mind maps are saved in Drive as well. Awesome for all age students who like to brainstorm collaboratively.  You can add images and links and re-organise your mindmups easily.  Saved in Drive also.
• MoveNote - quickly make a screen-cast using your personlised instructions from the camera, and photos, documents or slides from your computer or from your Drive.   Send the link to the Movenote to others or embed it in a website or blog, or you can save back to Drive as an mp4 file.
• Kaizena - voice comments for google docs.  Easily and quickly add in voice comments, and send them back to the people who are collaborators on the document.   When the collaborators look at their comments, they are redirected to Kaizena where the voice, text and links are accessible by clicking on the highlighted section. Great for commenting on student work.  You can also add in text and links to resources if you want to. 
• Templates  There are thousands of templates which are available at the push of the Create button.  You can make your selection from those listed as educational or any of the other categories.

Docs and Spreadsheet Add-Ons
The add-ons are now part of the dropdown menus of Docs and Spreadsheets and once you allow permissions, they are available for you to use every time you create docs and spreadsheets.  Simply click on Add-ons, then Get add-ons from the drop-down menu and browse through to find what suits you.

• Easybib allows you to get referencing in APA format - great to teach students how to be digital citizens by referencing their work.
• Thesaurus just highlight the word you want a word for and click on the thesaurus add-on and you will be given a number of word options to choose from.
• Open clipart - quite often teachers and students want to use a bit of clip art just to jazz up their presentations.  Of course it is preferable for them to create their own images but this alternative offers hundreds of open sourced clips when they are in a rush.
• Maps - when you put an address into your document and highlight it, this add-on allows you to highlight it and get a map to quickly insert
• Flubaroo is a great script which is now an add-on for sheets and can be used to set up self-marking quizzes.  It is easy to use, just follow the instructions. (I tried it, it works) Hurrah for anything that saves time for teachers.

Chrome Extensions - these go hand in hand with Google Chrome browser which I find definitely the best browser and getting better all the time.  Chrome extensions are great because once you have set your preferences, they follow you to every computer that you use, as long as you sign in to Chrome.  Chrome is so easy, even your preferred theme is saved so you always feel at home.  Some of the extensions that I find most useful are here:- 

• Snagit - a Techsmith extension to capture and annotate your screenshots and store them in Drive.
• Clearly which will take out all the ads and other page "noise" on websites to give you a nice clean document that you can read easily, or save to Evernote for later reference.
• Evernote clipper - will take parts or all of pages and save them in Evernote. You can annotate and edit the clippings.
• Diigo - social bookmarker - I have another blog on this fabulous feature
• Feedly - a reader which collects all your favourite blogs and websites and allows you to access them and read in one easy place to find.

Other apps can be accessed through your New Page Tab.  Some of the ones that I use are 

• Readium - for reading (ePub) published books 
• Gifpal - for making Gifs that you and your students can embed in your blogs and or websites, like this one of my dog Sally.
  

There are thousands more of these apps, add-ons and extensions which are so great for working with Google and Google Chrome.  All I can say is get out there are try some!

Goldilocks can teach educators about learning.

I learn about hundreds of new things every week.  I peruse a list of items, articles, how to's and latest news on my reader "Feedly".  (It used to be Google Reader but sadly they dropped that.)  When perusing, the trick is to filter out what is not immediately useful, and store other stuff somewhere (usually in Diigo) for future reference in the hope I can remember it when the time comes.  Tags are great.  They help you search for stuff that you may not immediately remember what it was that you are thinking of.  Does that even make sense?
Another trick in my job is not to overload other people when it is not useful.  This is called "PD just in time."  You are much more likely to remember stuff when you have to use it for some specific purpose.  The same applies to learning with students.  Too much stuff becomes boring and pointless unless you are going to use it.
Our school curriculum in New Zealand is great.  There is so much scope to choose contexts that will be relevant for every student.  To personalise the learning, we need to use digital technologies.  This allows students to learn along their own pathways but it does add to the teachers' burdens.  When is "not enough" guidance, when is" too much", when is it "just right?"
I have been mulling over this question this morning, in response to an educator, Kevin Schindel, who in his blog on A New Class Project reflects whether some educators trying to develop 21st Century skills rely too heavily on the technology to be able to take over the role of the teacher.
I also read a blog by Charlotte French on "Student Agency vs Student Anxiety" this morning which really asks the question 'How much should a teacher really let go?'.  Her year 13 students want the right answers rather than having to construct the answers themselves.  Of course, they are preparing for NCEA assessments, so of course they want the 'right' answers.  Just how much does assessment detract form solid learning.  Another similar vein was raised by Heather Eccles in her blog "Good Results Do Not Necessarily Mean Good Teaching" and I could not agree more.  I just have to share this video.

Probably the 5 minute university is just not quite enough.  But how much is too much?  Are we expecting too much of our teachers?  Their roles as facilitators of learning requires them to be educated and trained in their fields, adept with digital technologies, and really overseers of the whole class of learning pathways every single year.  That is a pretty big job, don't you think?