What a day. Our second Horizon Project has seen the 4 groups (7 students per group) make their “board” presentations. For a group of 13 year old students, overall some pretty compelling stuff. Now, their web sites are not quite complete, and a number of them haven’t put the Sketchup files in the way they were supposed, but we’ll get that fixed over the coming days. I’ll put up their presentations too, for those parents who were unable to be present.What struck me more than ever was the power of using voice to tell the story – in other words, to convey their learning. Of course, story telling is the most ancient form of transferring information – it’s just that using technology to assist story telling is just so compelling. So it was with much delight I came across this retelling of Red Riding Hood on Dan Pink’s blog. Sure, it’s a professional job, but it serves as an example of what might be done. I want to share this with others – it might just help spread a message … one that’s worth telling.
Three things happened today that pretty much sum up life at the moment. 1. Our firewall is successfully stuffing up Google Earth access to its servers, so kids can’t save their work. Great. Our fix no longer works, so more work needed to resolve this. 2. While investigating the Google Earth thing I note that a few students (like most of them!) have MSN running – so much for our filter! And then I see mass emailing of chain email …
I spent time dealing with those 2 things that I couldn’t afford, and that meant that I didn’t get the marking done that I needed to, nor enough time into the Horizon Project group that are on their final stages before the “board” presentations tomorrow.
Did I say 3 things?
3. And then the good stuff of course. Why I love this stuff. i) WolframAlpha - well, if this is the direction the semantic web is heading, bring it on. How much learning can now go on as the result of this fantastic tool. Sure – a lot of the current stuff is US and Europe oriented, but you can find enough with a New Zealand flavour to make some useful connections … and it’s not all about l’ilol‘ NZ anyway. I’ve been messing with it for the last couple of nights and can’t wait to show people what it can do, and to let students loose on it. So, thanks to Wolfram – like Mathematica, another triumph. ii) Earth Observatory from NASA. Just such a cool teaching tool. If you don’t subscribe to it’s fantastic images of the day, then do. There will be teachable moments everywhere.
Just as well there so much good on the web – I just don’t know why kids waste their time on junk … what an opportunity they have.
We run a 1:1 program (I actually hate that term – we really run a learning program) at our school. So I’ve been watching the development of the netbook closely, as no doubt have a number of our parents.
I have a Dell Latitude E4300 (same as this year’s student intake) and an HP Mini 2140 with 2 GB Ram and 160 GB hard drive. At a superficial level they have similar specs, and to be honest until last night at the basic stuff I was pretty happy with the performance of the HP Mini. Apart from the 576 pixels vertically, I could cope. Google Earth kind of runs, browsing is fine.
But last night I had the occasion to upload 7 x 3 minute videos from my Flip Ultra to Voicethread. And here was my first real negative. 49 minutes to prepare the files for uploading on the HP Mini, 11 minutes on the Latitude E4300. So, for me, while this is not necessarily a show stopper, it certainly supports the notion that a Netbook may have a significant achilles heel in our environment. My next test will need to look at video editting on the two – just some simple stuff, but our students do a lot of this stuff, so we need to know!
By the way, Flip cameras are awesome, I’ve had an Ultra for 8 months now – love it!
Something rotten in the State of Denmark? I think not. Maybe, just maybe, the message is getting through that traditional exams are not actually a good way of assessing these days …
Clay Shirky is someone I’m trying to read a bit more of. In an interview with the Columbia Journalism Review he talks about the demise of literacy as an outcome of television becoming pervasive, not the web becoming pervasive. He says that the demise was done and dusted by 1970, and that the advent of Web 2.0 technologies is actually bringing back reading and writing, it’s just that those rejoining this literary space don’t bring with them the richness of writing that Tolstoy engendered.
Shirky makes a lovely comment about half way through … “RJ: What’s your response to people who say that all this information that’s out there, all this knowledge that we’re producing is great, and there’s all this access that we didn’t have before. But we also risk information overload alongside, and we don’t— CS: Oh, those are the stupidest people in the entire debate because they, I mean, almost all of the people arguing that this is the Dark Ages are narcissists, because they’re essentially trying to preserve a particular piece of it.” I like this line of thought. Thanks Clay!
Blog number … oh, who cares. This is yet another attempt to try and get things right in the world.
For every time I’ve heard someone say that education is the way of the future I can show you a school that either hasn’t heard the message, has heard it but doesn’t know what to do about it, or has heard it and chosen to ignore it. This blog is my attempt to work through the issues.
Thanks to Wes Fryer for this link to Future Schools. Stephen Heppell makes a nice analogy towards the end of the clip about rail and road, linking school development to it.
Isn’t it wonderful how great the web is! We are in the early stages of developing a business school on our campus, and we have gathered a group of potential advisors to help guide direction at this stage. One of our key questions is “What is important?”. Well, wouldn’t you know it, the PartnerShip for 21st Century skills has just delivered “21st Century Skiils, Education and Competitiveness” – a great little 20 pager that gives, while granted an American biased view, a wonderful summary of just what the issues are. And while it would be great to claim these words of wisdom, this lengthy quote for me sums it all up.
“In an economy driven by innovation and knowledge … in marketplaces engaged in intense competition and constant renewal … in a world of tremendous opportunities and risks … in a society facing complex business, political, scientific, technological, health and environmental challenges … and in diverse workplaces and communities that hinge on collaborative relationships and social networking … the ingenuity, agility and skills of the American people are crucial to U.S. competitiveness.
Our ability to compete as a nation—and for states, regions and communities to attract growth industries and create jobs—demands a fresh approach to public education. We need to recognize that a 21st century education is the bedrock of competitiveness—the engine, not simply an input, of the economy.
And we need to act accordingly: Every aspect of our education system—preK–12, postsecondary and adult education, after-school and youth development, workforce development and training, and teacher preparation programs—must be aligned to prepare citizens with the 21st century skills they need to compete.” (page 3)
I don’t want to for one minute suggest I am as clever or illuminated as Karl Fisch – after all his “Did You Know” video is one of the most watched on the web, certainly in ed circles. His other videos are worth the look too. It’s not that we are both ex math teachers too. But for the past couple of years we have been wrestling at my school with just how we get authentic learning happening in our school. This year we made a bit of a move by creating a new inquiry/project based subject which we call DLL. We’ve done this at our Year 8 level and it has been wildy successful. But where to next year? We can’t accomodate a Y9 DLL, so after much debate we are launching a month long “cross curricular” or “integrated” project where the teachers of science, english, social studies, health and physical education, religious studies and art are going to collaborate on a project with the classes. Wow!
So it is so reassuring to me to see Karl grappling with all of these very same issues at his school. So, go Karl! I plan to update this blog with our experiences as we go. Already I’m planning on a trial with my Y8 class in our last term of this year starting early October. I’m working with one of my colleagues on our proposed theme tomorrow, so more on tis as we go.
