A Christmas ICT Teaching as Inquiry Wish

There are a lot of resources out there online for teachers to use. There’s so many that sometimes the time spent looking for exactly what you want isn’t worth (and sometimes as satisfying) as creating something yourself. And it’s not just resources to use in the classroom either. Thanks to ongoing funding from the Ministry there are a heap of great support documents for teacher professional learning, TKI, NZQA, Down the Back of the Chair, the Senior Secondary Teaching and Learning Guides and the NZ Curriculum page just to name a few.

So we’re rather well resourced, resource-wise but there’s another ICT I’d really like for Christmas. A resource that gives me access to the learning and effective practice of other teachers! A store (if you will) of the amazing professional learning of colleagues from all over Aotearoa where I can access the findings of teacher’s Teaching as Inquiry inquiries. Somewhere where I could read about the context that a teacher had found themselves in and the specific needs of the students in front of them. Not just a stab in the dark guess at the picture of student needs but a rigorous process (as rigorous as we can manage given the craziness of teaching) of developing theories or readings of the learning context of students who have the greatest need. A focussing inquiry process that is improved by querying data and the analysis, critique and questioning of multiple colleges and students. Then, after the focussing inquiry, a teaching inquiry that is informed by research, further conversations with colleagues (online or face to face) and students. Then a go at some different teaching and learning from what’s been done in the past followed by a solid analysis of the learning outcomes of the interventions or practice changes the teacher tried.

Imagine a place we could go to read about these rich kinds of professional learning journeys! Where our problematic mental models were challenged and we were able to question the things that aren’t working and make sustained, meaningful changes in practice helped improve outcomes for students! It’s unlikely we would take anything wholesale from a context that is different from our own and our students’ but golly, we’d sure learn a heap about quality teaching and learning. And if we were looking for something specific for our own inquiries, and this fancy ICT came with a useful search function, we might also be able to find useful information and learning and subsequently help improve our students’ learning. Teaching and learning is a super complex process and while this complexity isn’t always obvious to start with, sometimes resources that don’t take into account contextual complexities aren’t always going to help us. Having access to the quality professional learning of others however, might be just what we need.

Well, that’s one thing I could do with for Christmas! Although to be honest it’s pretty unlikely I’d be actually reading it on Christmas day. But for the rest of the year, that’s a massive “yesssssssssss” from me.

Amazing BYOD process for teachers to evaluate and offer ICTs to students!

So how long was it before you were brave enough to ask about what BYOD stood for? I can’t remember exactly how long it was for me but I’m pretty sure I would have blagged my way through the first few conversations before I finally went to look it up. While BYOD isn’t a particularly helpful term for teachers as it doesn’t really have all that much to do with teaching and learning, taking a quick look at its origins can give us a helpful lens for considering how we respond to it in our schools.

BYOD, as a term, originally came from the corporate sector where employers recognised that if employees were able to use their own devices at work (instead of provided ones) they could be more productive. This increase in productivity was largely because they’d be using already existing expertise to operate their devices and in some cases (the research indicates) view their jobs more positively. Despite the security tradeoffs, many employers were willing to be ‘BYOD flexible’ instead of mandating and supporting a single device for employees. It’s perhaps a little ironic then, that as teachers we find it challenging to offer the same flexibility over devices and, more importantly, the apps we want students to learn how to use.

Here’s two reasons for why we might look for ways to provide the original BYOD flexibility for our students in app and device choice:

1) Students know quite a bit about their devices and own learning preferences and strengths. Despite the overstated digital native effect, even if you do know more about using technology for curriculum learning than that game-crazed kid with the nervous wrist-twitch in your class, we’re at least better off with more brains than just our own out there on the hunt for ICTs that help with learning. Just because we’ve come across an amazing ICT that we think will work for every student we’re responsible for, that doesn’t mean there’s not a potentially better alternative out there for a particular student with their own set of learning needs.

2) And more importantly (in my opinion) we have a responsibility to model the selection of ICTs and technology depending on the needs of the job. With the fast, ongoing development of new hardware and software coming at us from multiple fronts, it’s far better for our students if they are able to:

-analyse the needs of a particular problem,

-figure what their skills and capabilities are already,

-investigate what options there are out there,

-identify how much time it’s likely to take to up-skill with them,

-and then decide whether it’s worth it or not.

I’d suggest that in many curriculum areas (other than perhaps technology) it’s rare that students get the chance to consider ICTs in this way. If we can provide these opportunities however, our students will be far better equipped for the future when many of the ICTs we’ve showed them in class will be obsolete. Self selecting ICTs based on needs rather than thinking they can only use one thing just because it’s the ‘industry standard’ or because someone else told them to, much better enables students to be discerning and critical users of technology.

While there can be some risks around manageability in giving students options with ICTs in class, providing a resourced default option for students is one way of supporting them and giving options at the same time. Identifying a default option and further possibilities is particularly easy if we have developed a clear learning outcome first. Students are then able to use the outcome(s) and potentially some further criteria around the capabilities of an ICT to research and select other options if they choose to.

So, given all that, here’s an actual process you could use for selecting an ICT for teaching and learning in your class, provide students with choices and enable them to develop critical thinking skills around technology. With this kind of approach it doesn’t matter if you are or aren’t in a school that has mandated a particular type of device or platform either.

1) Find an ICT with potential! Keep a lookout in the usual places: success stories from other teachers (perhaps from someone’s Teaching as Inquiry) online educational communities, students etc.

2) Analyse your students’ learning context. This is a regularly over-looked step but vitally important! Just because one ICT has worked really well in another context doesn’t mean it will work well for your students. What are your students needs and which part of the curriculum are you presently tasked with delivering?

3) Develop a learning intention that the ICT can help with. Hopefully, if you’ve discovered the ICT in another teaching and learning context and someone else has described their learning intention, you’ll have a head start here. This also needs to be shared with students for the later steps to work.

4) Resource students to use the ICT. Remember, this should be different from the learning intention. This is more about picking up the nuts and bolts skills of using the ICT itself. If the ICT is one that does lots of different things, you might be focusing on particular capabilities. This step is important but can sometimes obscure the learning intention around an ICT if it’s not carefully managed. You don’t need to be the expert here necessarily either especially given how many great online tutorials and resources there are out there. It’s more important that you understand the teaching and learning capabilities of the ICT itself.

5) Give students options by providing opportunities to identify other ICTs that could do similar things. This step is only possible if you’ve done step 3 well and your students have understood how the ICT will help with the learning intention you have in mind. Perhaps your students will even find an old school method like pen and paper that might do the same job! Keep in mind here that what they find may well set you up to better provide other students with opportunities in the future as your list of useful ICTs grows.

6) Monitor outcomes. Did the ICT assist with the learning intention? Was there any other unintended learning intentions it provided? What other ICTs were discovered that might offer other advantages and/or cons? This step can be easy to miss out, particularly if it’s a real whizz bang ICT and the students are enjoying using it or conversely, the time it took students to skill up caused some initial anxiety as they came to grips with the required skills.

So that’s it! While I might have oversold things a little with the word “amazing” and as we know with any abstract process it may happen a little differently in real life, it’s still worth keeping these steps in mind. If we can establish clear learning intentions with an ICT and ensure they’re not obscured for our students by the process of learning how to use it, we are better able to give them the skills they need to evaluate other ICTs in the future and potentially learn the resilience and critical thinking skills needed to use technology well. In a sense, we’re offering them the best of the front and back end of the New Zealand curriculum.

Minecraft - What's Wrong With These People?!?

Crikey!!! What exactly leads people to put the kind of time in necessary to create this?!? The sheer commitment necessary for building all of the land of Westeros (from Game of Thrones) in Minecraft almost beggars belief. (If you’re a Game of Thrones fan and have a copy of Minecraft you can wander Westeros yourself - the project is hosted on a joinable server.) Of course this is just one project among many, many projects in Minecraft where people pour mad amounts of time into creating things in a virtual, blocky world. Though don’t be fooled by Minecraft’s simple look and anyone who tells you it’s a simple game because it isn’t. Like anything that is well designed, it hides its complexity well so that anyone can jump in and start making things without too much trouble. Digging holes is pretty jolly simple. Creating a fully working computer with redstone circuits is a bit more complex. Digging some iron ore, building a smelter and creating a minecart, tracks and a simple rollercoaster is a slightly more time consuming while some people get a bit crazy building, highly complex, automated minecart systems.

So if Minecraft is a game that people sink mad amounts of time into, what’s different about this to any other game and what’s this got to do with education? In recent years, games without any specific goal or end point have begun to pique the interest of gamers and non gamers alike. This is quite a big break from the traditional game design funded by large production companies which asserts that games need a goal if people are going to want to play them. The huge capacity that Minecraft has for creativity comes from a combination of its lack of a set goal or end point (which tends to restrict players somewhat in the long run) and the continued detail and complexity its creators, Mojang, continue to add to it. Players can choose to engage in the details of various parts of the game or not, it’s really up to them whether or not they’re interested in a particular aspect of it.

And this is where the educational aspect comes in. As teachers, we can lever off the incredible energy and enthusiasm the game typically elicits and can also use the game engine’s amazing capacity for creativity in ways that are relevant to our curriculum areas and learning intentions. If you think that’s a bit far fetched, check out this reddit which nicely covers the usual discussion-progression around whether or not games can be used in education. The first part is taken up with people asking how the heck Minecraft could be used in education at all until about three quarters of the way down, “furiant” points out the following: “Simply giving kids a computer with minecraft on it and telling them to go wild is probably a poor method of teaching. But Minecraft could be incorporated into many fields of learning. What's the first thing you do when you load a new world in Minecraft? Punch trees. But imagine your world not being an endless canvas. If you don't plant saplings from that tree, you'll soon run out of resources. This teaches renewal of nature. Got a building you no longer use? Instead of cutting down more trees, tear it down and reuse the materials in your next project. This teaches conservation and recycling. Redstone can be used to teach simple logic gates. Note blocks can be utilized to instruct basic music theory. As the game grows, more and more instances open up that can be used for education. It's all in how you apply it.” I’m not sure if furiant is a teacher or not, but he/she has certainly got a clear idea of one of the main roles for a teacher in the 21st century, well in my opinion at least - figuring out and levering the educational capacity and connections with technologies our learners are already using. And more often than not, these technologies might push the boundaries of what we traditionally think teaching and learning should look like.

At any rate, back to Minecraft and some specific teaching and learning possibilities. Exactly how these work might not make sense if you haven’t played or seen Minecraft so you’ll just have to believe my claims here:

• Maths (measurement and estimation, growth rates, statistics etc)
• Science (sustainability and ecology, food chains, agriculture etc)
• Social sciences (architecture, culture, mythology)
• English (creative writing – narrative, exploration, dialogue, scripting)
• Digital technology (programming, logic, binary and electronics)

And that list is far from exhaustive, it’s really just what I could come up with an internet trawl. That list listed, I’d actually go on suggest that dividing the potential of the game into curriculum areas might actuallydetract from the amazing front-end curriculum possibilities in the its demands for collaboration. In some of the larger projects in Westeros, nearly 100 builders collaborated on constructing the castles, islands, cities and landmarks from Game of Thrones. Some pretty intense coordination right there I’d imagine.

Another really, really cool thing about Minecraft (especially if you’re worrying whether you’ve got the prerequisite nerd skills to have a go at using it for teaching) is MinecraftEdu. The main programmer of this mod (who’s also a teacher) has created a version of the game that adds a whole bunch of functionality with education and teachers trying to assist a class full of students towards a learning intention(s) specifically in mind. They’re also even licensed to sell single copies of minecraft at half price to educational institutes increasing the potential for a whole class to get going on it. If you want an idea of what teachers are doing with Minecraft, MinecraftEdu have also listed some nice examples of teachers using Minecraft in education here.

Another reason you might want to think about taking a punt on using Minecraft in the classroom is that many of the teachers using it are just as crazy-prolific as everyone else and they’re sharing their content and experiences. Eric (click on the top post to expand) is one example of a teacher happily providing some absolutely amazing content in his mod “The World of Humanities.” Of course remembering that as always, we can’t just tell, “them [the students] to go wild,” in Minecraft. If we do, it’s unlikely they’ll engage with our learning intentions. We might need to also need to guide our students with something like the tools in MinecraftEdu, good planning and considered learning relationships to get the learning we’re after.

Finally, I thought I’d share my thoughts on what I think is Minecraft’s biggest drawcard - authenticity. Imagine students participating in the scenario outlined in this thread on the MinecraftEdu forum. Whenever we’re teaching in a classroom, we’re always challenged by devising and creating authentic contexts. Most of the time we’re making them up from scratch and without actually conducting a foray into the ‘real’ world with a field trip, most of our contexts are theoretical or at least fabricated to some degree. While Minecraft is obviously a virtual experience, I still get excited by the thought of a student not only learning some solid front-end curriculum skills while collaborating with others to grow their trees before moving onto their next island in the above scenario, I’m also imagining the excitement of exploration and adventure as students swim from island to island, unravelling the story as they go. And all this combines to what I’m guessing makes the chances of them remembering and understanding the concepts of sustainability and conservation far more likely than if they sat around listening to their teacher, or even some expert on a youtube video talking about it. The other really cool thing about this example (and if the 700 hours put into “The World of Humanties” freaked you out, you’ll like this) is that once you’ve got some basic building skills in MinecraftEdu actually creating the scenario that this teacher has outlined wouldn’t take very long at all. Exciting stuff!

So if you’re keen to give it a shot, book your computer lab, talk to the tech person and see how many students already have a copy of Minecraft on their own computers. If you can’t talk the relevant budget holder into getting a test copy of Minecraft you could always land your own copy for twenty euros. You never know, you might even enjoy the game yourself!

‘Embedded’ ICTs???

I often think of two categories of ICTs when I’m considering teaching and learning. Those that we use ourselves as teachers when resourcing and for our own learning and those that we provide to students in the hope that they will receive some learning benefit from their use. While the second category of ICTs is probably the one that gets the most press, I’d suggest that both are equally important in terms of learning gains for our students and that we can glean some interesting insights by comparing these two categories of ICTs.

Doing a quick tally of the ICTs I’ve used in the past, I came up with the following list. These are off the top of my head and the more I think back, the larger the second list in particular tends to get.

My ICTs - used for my own learning and resourcing for teaching:

• Electronic presentation tools: prezi, libre office present, tablet and VNC client for annotating texts
• Other resourcing tools: open office writer, google docs,
• Organisational, publishing and collaborative ICTs: dropbox, various LMSs, email and email lists, a plethora of task management tools
• Graphics tools for developing visuals for resources: GIMP, inkscape, tablet, scanner (for making hand-drawn stuff electronic)
• ICTs to find, take from and occasionally contribute to professional learning communities: Google search, VLN, Twitter, Various blogs, Google+

Student ICTs - delivered to students to help with their learning:

• ICTs for publishing, editing and collaborating on writing: google docs, blogs, microblogging clients, various word processors, e-portfolios
• ICTs for creating visual texts: GIMP, inkscape, various browser-based editers.
• ICTs for collating and disseminating online resources: Edmodo, livebinder, google docs, Edcanvas/Blendspace,
• ICTs for feedback/assessment: Socrative, mentimeter, a few random apps written in C#, various moodle plugins,
• ICTs for student to collaborate on resource development: Wikieducator, google docs, voicethread
• Learning resources for students: youtube, linked tutorials for various skills,
• ICTs for developing learning communities: LMSs forums/groups, facebook, e-portfolio, phpbb forum for students, microblogging,
• Game design for learning: (learning about ICTs and specific curriculum areas) scratch, gamemaker, Gary’s mod, C#, gamefroot, rpg maker,

Now this may be quite different for you but on comparing these two lists I found that I still use nearly all the ICTs from the ‘my ICTs’ list, while of the ones in the second list, ‘student ICTs,’ very few are used consistently across a whole year in my classes and many were used once or twice then failed to make their way into my programmes in subsequent years. I would say less than three of the ICTs in the ‘student ICTs’ list I’d consider as ‘embedded’ in my classroom and course delivery. In case this was because I’m totally out of whack with the rest of the world, I had a chat to a few other teachers and found varying degrees of the same phenomenon. It appears, at least from my flimsy attempts at researching it, that there are quite a few ICTs that we use ourselves consistently for creating things and our own learning but fewer ICTs that we deliver consistently to students to help them with their own learning.

Some possible explanations for this:

1. With the sheer number of students we have in a class, it’s difficult to consistently embed a single ICT in our students’ learning. Helping them to learn an ICT takes more overhead than we can often spare.
2. We don’t find enough advantages in many specific ICTs to use them regularly across a whole year with all students.
3. It may also be that ICTs are designed for specific uses and that these don’t often have relevance to an entire course.
4. Students don’t use a single ICT for long and pick up and drop them regularly as their needs and interests change.

While all of those above statements are probably due to a degree, I don’t particularly think they present a problem that we need to solve. Although it does give some manageability gains, it’s not always in students’ best interests to have them all using the same ICTs across a year. Perhaps if I’d taught in a school where BYOD requirements mandated one type of device to make rolling out a single app easier I might think differently but even when I’ve seen teachers (and myself) roll out a specific ICT for a learning need, a few months down the track a number of students aren’t using it any more. A few are totally into it and developing the skills needed to use it even better, a few more use it for a while and stop and many only use it during the time it was delivered in class. I suspect, whatever the ICT was, it fitted the small number of continued adopters pretty well and so they’ve kept getting something out of it.

The fact is that new ICTs come and go all the time. Apps and new pieces of hardware are constantly being created and updated to suit new needs as they arise and better cater for existing needs as designers understand better what works for individual people. There’s so many possible ICTs out there we could use, it’s not a surprise that what an individual does end up using may vary significantly from another person. And there’s a common theme in the way our old mental models fail us when thinking about ICTs here too, we need to spend less time thinking about specific ICTs and tools (even though they’re tangible and marketing people would like us to be convinced one ICT will be perfect for all our/our students needs) and more time thinking about ways to help our students to learn the skills to:

• figure out what their needs are
• assess the potential of an ICT in the light of this
• develop the resilience required to learn complex ICTs so they can fully appreciate the possibilities out there
• compare ICTs and what they offer (despite all the marketing jargon and hype that makes this difficult)
• and decide on the ICTs that work best for them, given their needs at the time, own learning profile, strengths and weaknesses.

While I won’t go as far to say that mandating the use of a particular ICT for a class or school is a definite no no, I would suggest that we need to be both flexible about what this looks like in relation to individual students. And most importantly, that we carefully consider the benefits of an ICT and monitor what kinds of outcomes it is providing for our students and use this to inform our approach as we go.

To part with a couple of stories, a student in my tutorial was asked to use Springpad on his Ipad in science for keeping track of his learning. The great thing was that the teacher had taken the time to sit down with that student, have a look at what he was already using and engage him in a discussion around the usefulness of his present ICT arsenal and what benefits he might gain from taking up Sprindpad. So this approach to ‘mandating’ the use of an ICT works fine, just as long as it comes with some kind of best use analysis and discussion for students.

I also had the privilege of sitting in on some design and photography classes over the last few weeks. While my role was pretty inglorious, I was the printer-support guy who had to fix paper jams, check students were using the right printer settings and fix disabled printers from terminal (nerd points!!!) it did enable me to observe some of the ICT-use diversity in the classes. Some students were using GIMP, others were using photoshop, some were into a picasa app, others were using apps I’d never even seen. Across all this, a large number were using a combination of apps. While having students using whatever suits them (and in these classes it was a combination of computer skills and photography and design skills that dictated this) does provide some extra complexity for teachers, to me, it looked totally worth the effort. In this instance it enabled all kinds of students engage in a course in a way that might not have been possible if they all only had one option to choose from.

So then, flexibility and options with ICTs provide complexity for us as teachers but there are ways to manage this. And if we’re not providing it for students as much as we can in classes, one thing’s for sure, they’ll make decisions around best-use themselves in their own time regardless of what they have or haven’t learnt with us.

ICTs, learning and why cooking crystal meth makes you a bad person

Recently, as I was perusing the work output of my tutorial students, I came across one individual with two windows up on his laptop. In one he had a very nice piece of formal writing and in the other he was desperately trying to re-watch the first four seasons of Breaking Bad before the final aired the following week. Responding to this would have been a pretty simple decision for me a few years ago. The logic in my thinking was pretty simple: he should work solely on his formal writing rather than switching between it and ruminations on how the complex decisions facing Walter White, Jesse Pinkman and friends might make us further confused about what makes people good and/or bad. If he works solely on the formal writing he’ll get a better grade in English. There is clear evidence that switching between two cognitively complex tasks (conveniently ignoring the fact that some might argue that watching TV isn’t a complex cognitive task) leads to a lower level of engagement and quality with both. Not to mention the fact that tutorial time is for working! On school work I mean, not other work! And when I say school work, I mean minimal time on satellite stuff loosely connected with regular subjects and more time on really hardcore stuff like assessment work!

But it’s not really that simple, is it? If you’re writing me off as a bleeding heart liberal at this point, please bear with me as I do my best to outline how this once simple decision has now become a deeply complex and angst-ridden internal conflict. Well not quite angst-ridden but definitely a little more complex. Student S (as we’ll henceforth refer to him as) will potentially do really well with that piece of formal writing, regardless of whether he’s switching between writing it and watching Breaking Bad during tutorial time. The fact is, that he’s got more than enough time to get a pretty convincing excellence before the piece is due. Of course this adds some complication around consistency if another student without the same skillset isn’t able to finish theirs because they’re also watching Breaking Bad. I could, I suppose, argue that Student S’s piece of writing won’t be as good if he multi tasks for the next half an hour but to be honest I’m not even sure that’s true. On the other hand while it’s not all that likely he’ll decide to become a drug dealer (he isn’t taking chemistry, physics is more his thing) I can see how engaging with the complex and layered characters in Breaking Bad might, in fact, give him some ideas for his own final piece of creative writing later in the year.

My response to this complex moral conundrum could be to tell Student S that he can’t watch Breaking Bad on the premise that it would make a difference to his final formal writing grade or that it isn’t equitable if other students aren’t able to do the same thing. The latter argument might hold some weight with him but probably not the former (Student S does have a reasonable social conscience.) Another option might be to push for a school-wide ban on the watching of films or TV series during tutorial, thus taking the responsibility of the decision away from me altogether. Although I’m not entirely sure I like the idea of being an enforcer more than that of a being a philosopher. The option I took in the end was to try and convince him that watching Breaking Bad would make it difficult to engage in his formal writing and that if he really wanted to enjoy the entirety of the first four seasons, he’d be far better off doing it at home on a decent-sized screen without sub-standard earbuds for sound.

It seems strange to me that I’ve only recently considered how many variables there are in a conversation with a student on what learning is the most important for them at any one time and why. There is the student’s complex list of priorities, my list of priorities (not all of which will be based solely on Student S’s best learning interests), the learning interests of the other students around Student S and finally there is the overarching consideration of what’s going to be the most useful to all of those groups in the future. And once we get into thinking about the future, anything I say about how useful a piece of learning might be will always involve some degree of speculation. And crikey, if there’s one thing that makes it obvious I’m not the fount of all knowledge, it’s an admission that some of what I’m saying might be speculation.

Perhaps in the rare times questions around the utility and value of the learning we’re delivering did used to come up, we might have been giving the curriculum a read over and seen those learning area justification sections. For the most part, students arrive in our class at the beginning of the year and they’re stuck with us for however long and regularly the timetable says they should be, and also with any decisions we make on what learning is the best for them. It’s not that we’ve never had to justify these things before it’s just that we haven’t had to all that often.

Given how technology is changing the face of learning however, it seems a risky proposition to go on ignoring what makes a particular type of learning valuable to an individual student or engaging with these questions in a surface manner with responses such as: students must alway work on what I’ve timetabled in exactly the order I’ve specified because that’s what’s best for them. In a world which continues to be changed by technology at a fairly rapid pace, engaging in conversations with students about what learning is valuable along with why and how it might help in the future seem pretty jolly important. We don’t need to pander to every whim of every student all the time, but we do need to help model the process of thinking about the importance and relevance of learning and engage in this actively with students. These conversations can be pretty intimidating especially when we’re already pressed for time or by the knowledge that students do need to pass assessments on a clearly specified set of skills. Not to mention the fact that we’re not even totally sure our individual beliefs on what’s important are even going to be that much more helpful for them than arbitrary rules with flimsy or non-learning based reasons for their existence. Still, we don’t have to worry about knowing it all now either. If they want more ideas on what particular piece of learning is important and why, they’ve always got the internet to go searching for other opinions!

So while after nearly having finished watching Breaking Bad myself I’m still pretty clear on the largely negative moral implications of cooking crystal meth. I’m still sadly a bit unclear, however, on my ethical responsibilities when it comes to directing what students should be working on. But maybe like Jesse, Walt and Vince Gilligan, I’ll just keep doing my best to respond and develop stuff as I go along and hope everything turns out OK. Just as long as I can get it sorted in time before the future arrives…