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!