Tag Archives: digital

PD

Digital Scavenger Hunt PD

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HaystackOver the summer holidays I spent quite some time thinking about how best to use 3 upcoming whole-staff professional development sessions planned for my school. In the past I have found that no matter how charming, funny, well prepared or handsome I try to be, PD sessions never come out as well as I hoped. It’s not that people don’t learn, it is just that they are never as good as the lessons I delivered to my students.

As I pondered this I wondered what would happen if I took one of my better lessons, and adapted it to fit the needs of teachers. The original concept was an online treasure hunt, and whilst it was centred around Sherlock Holmes, a lot of the tasks fitted with an area I really wanted to develop in our staff: basic web literacy skills.

What evolved was a digital scavenger hunt in which teachers collaborated in small groups to problem solve their way towards a final solution. Along the way, they would be exposed to the following skills:

  • Link Shortening – using bit.ly, goo.gl or tinyurl.com to turn long links into short links. This is useful when people need to write down a link, or if you want to track usage of a link.
  • Text Search – simply using Google’s web search functionality to answer a question, such as “second digit used in binary counting systems”.
  • Image Search – drag and drop an image into images.google.com to search for images based on an image, rather than on text. Very useful for identifying logos, art work, etc. Google Goggles is an Android app that does this, but not as well as the web site. Does not work well with Safari (this is a great teachable moment about browser foibles)
  • QR Codes – creating codes with links, pictures, text, etc, using a QR code generator (I like http://www.qrstuff.com, but there are tonnes). Scan codes using a mobile phone with appropriate scanning app (I like QRDroid for Android), or using a website such as webqr.com (as long as it is not blocked, only works with Chrome).
  • Google Street View – getting students to step out of the classroom into a real life setting and look for clues. Make sure you test it ahead of time to make sure things have not changed if the Google car has been around and updated the area.
  • Steganography – hiding a message and make students search for it. Use hidden ink, or the HTML equivalent of setting the background and foreground to the same color. This should work with word processing as well.
  • Music Search – use Shazam or SoundHound on a phone or desktop to identify a piece of music, and then search online for a lyric or piece of band trivia.
  • Twitter Search – use a popular hashtag, and hide a tweet instead a stream of other tweets. Beware of inappropriate content outside of your control.

Each of these skills can be applied in the classroom to make learning more interesting, whilst most of them also offer the benefit of allowing teachers to work smarter and faster online.

The first time I ran this session, the teachers got very caught up, to the point where it really felt like having a group of my regular students engaged and learning together. The feedback from the session was very positive, and led to teachers being encouraged to integrate some of these ideas into their classrooms.

This leaves me with the awkward question of how to top this and make use of my 2 remaining in-house PD session.

If you are interested in running this same session, or one similar, check out the complete documentation. Everything is available under a CC license, so feel share to reuse, remix and share.

Update: thanks to Janice Dwyer for taking this work, adapting it for Year 6 Maths, and sharing it back here.

Credit: Haystack image via Wikimedia Commons, under PD.

Thoughts

Digital Savages

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SavageMarc Prensky’s work on digital natives represents a watershed in educational thinking, and seems to have been behind much of the 21st Century pedagogical approach. Whilst Prensky shares some interesting ideas, I believe the concept of digital natives has done education more harm than good. The premise that children born into a digital world are “digital natives”, seems to have lead many to the conclusion that they are experts in all things digital. Whilst this might seem to be the case at first glance, such as when an adult sees a child operating an iPad in a very confident manner, dig a little deeper and you will see that there is often very little substance, and almost always no true breadth, in terms of knowledge. The result is that many schools are no longer teaching ICT effectively, as they believe students already know “enough” about the digital world. The result is a growing number of users who have little understanding of how to behave online, how digital technologies work, or how they can stop relying on others and build solutions of their own.

Whilst I am all for models (they are after all powerful tools for communicating ideas and knowledge), the more I think about it, the more I don’t like the digital native model we seem to be stuck with. The question is, then, what might replace it in such a way that we can refocus some of the educational discourse around children and technology?

Although I have not been thinking about this issue consciously, it has obviously been fermenting in some inaccessible recess of my brain, for seemingly out of nowhere came the fully developed idea of students as a “digital savages“. Now, for some, the word savage is laden with colonial, imperial and racist baggage from generations past, but the image I am trying to invoke is not this at all, but rather the sense of an untamed animal.

  • Localisation –  a savage beast has an amazingly intimate knowledge of its local surrounds, but knows little of the wider world beyond. It can navigate with great efficiency in a small area, but change the environment and it is not able to function. It does not understand the limitations of its habitat, nor its relationship with the wider world. For example, many students are extremely proficient at using certain web sites, but struggle moving on to sites with a different type of interface or structure. They generally also have little understanding of how these sites are powered by the Internet, who runs them and why, and how reliable they are.
  • Specialisation – like many wild beasts, children tend to specialise in certain types of knowledge and skills. For many, this takes the form of gaming and social networking. Whilst these are valuable skills, they do not automatically translate to ability in other areas, such as collaborative writing or programming. Often, teachers and leaders base their judgement of student ability on their strongest area, and never see that there are whole, vital skill sets which students lack.
  • Flocking – in the exact same way that birds of a feather flock together, many young Internet users run in herds of relatively homogenous users. Reddit provides a great example of this, with its largely young, male demographic, often spouting misogynistic memes that appeal within but not always without. The danger here is one of living in an echo chamber, where what is believed to be true becomes true, and the balancing opinions of outsiders don’t matter.
  • Viciousness – William Golding’s Lord of the Flies famously captured the wild, untamed savageness of young boys, given a chance to break out of conventional social structures. Internet culture, at times, seems to be the modern stage for this very tale, with users of all ages performing wicked deeds under the cloak of anonynimity. Any teacher with an interest in student behaviour will be able to attest to students behaving online in ways that would be unimaginable in the real world.

To some, this might seem like a bleak assessment of young Internet users, and perhaps this is exactly what we should expect in a young environment with no rules and few norms. Whilst I love my students, and believe them to be generally good, positive and willing to learn, it would not be beneficial for anyone if I were to ignore the truth of how they interact with digital technology. For if we are not judicious in our delivery of digital citizenship, ICT and information literacy education, we run the risk of raising a generation of true digital savages. Instead, we need to build the structures, tools and norms to help our students become complete digital humans.

Credits: Lord of the Flies image by darth_philburt on Flickr, shared under CC BY-NC-SA.

Other Resources, Thoughts

Creative Commons: What Is It?

Edit: today (06/02/2015) I was discussing Creative Commons with some teachers who are new to it. I promised to share the article below, but realised it might need to be prefaced with a synopsis. So:

  • Creative Commons is a way to legally consume, share and remix media.
  • It provides an alternative to the usual school practice of ignoring copyright, and thus allows us to prepare our students for live outside the educational bubble.
  • It is a potent tool for enabling creativity and innovation, without needing to make everything from Scratch.
  • Some useful media for understand issues to do with copyright and its impact on creativity and innovation.

Keep reading below to learn more about CC…

 

http://www.creativecommons.org

I was recently looking through my archives to find a piece on Creative Commons (CC) to share with an acquaintance, and was surprised when I could not find one. Why had I not written something about one of the things I feel most passionate about? I don’t know the answer to that question, so instead of answering it, I will render it moot with this post.

I recently wrote of copyright that it is like a battle between content creators and content users, with each trying to find the best deal for themselves. The battle itself is umpired by the law, and all of these forces must constantly contend with changing technology in trying to find a balance. I believe that most current copyright laws are too strongly in favour of the creator: copyright terms are too long, fair use is not expansive enough and remix for personal use is not permitted. A common reaction to this problem is to simply work outside of the law and pirate copyrighted works. I can understand why people take this road, as it is perceived to be the only way to fight back against an unfair system. However, as a content creator myself, I cannot bring myself to simply steal the work of others.

The best solution to this problem is, as far as I can see, the one mapped out by Creative Commons, which was created by famed copyright lawyer Lawrence Lessig. The premise behind Creative Commons is to provide a simple way for content creators to control the use of their work. This is done through a simple licensing system, which uses 3 simple options to represent what can and cannot be done with a piece of work. Behind these options, which are represented by icons, sits a license which translates them into a legalese document. This means that instead of fighting against copyright law, the system works from within it. By applying a CC license to their work, creators are opting out of strictly prohibitive copyright, and empowering their audience to redistribute and reuse their work.

Whilst this might sound rather dry and abstract, it is in fact incredibly powerful and creative. Consider this example: say I am making a movie, and need some music for the soundtrack. Traditionally my options are to either break the law (pirate someone’s work) or work within it (pay a creator for their work). Usually, if I pay for someone’s work I am not even free to change it to meet my needs. With Creative Commons, however, I can use an online service, such as Jamendo to locate music whose creators have applied a CC license to it: depending on the options selected in the license, I may well be able to freely include that music into my work and make even make money from it. The effect of all of this is to reduce the barriers to the production of high quality, creative work, allowing the return to a culture that is created by individuals and not just large corporations. To me this is huge, as it allows us to express ourselves freely and thus forge a our own culture. In all of this, technology makes such creation easy, but Creative Commons provides the raw materials that make it free and legal.

As an educator, you might wonder why you should care about any of this. The reasons are simple. From a philosophical point of view, education is built on knowledge, which is created through sharing. Ergo, anything that promotes sharing is good for education. From a practical point of view, Creative Commons gives you access to literally millions of creative works, which you and your students can build on, legally, to create incredibly rich learning experiences. And finally, you can use Creative Commons to encourage your students to engage with the world around them by contributing their own creativity. A lot of people do not feel that their creations are worth sharing, but the truth is that you never know how other people might use your work to express themselves. Once you realise the true worth of your work within such an open system, the urge to share and connect is hard to resist.

Hopefully this post has given you an insight into what Creative Commons is all about, and perhaps even why it is something you might want to try. I am currently working on a follow-up which will contain far more practical detail on how you can use Creative Commons to enrich your teaching practice. In the meantime, the two following videos might help to shed more light on the beauty of CC:

A Shared Culture

(Original work, CC BY-NC-SA)

Building On The Past

(Original work, CC BY-NC)

My Resources, PD

Creating A Digital Hub: Website Creation for Teachers

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Recently I have been fielding questions from pre-service teachers regarding setting up their own website to support teaching and learning. I usually point people to a wiki (www.wikispaces.com ) or blog (www.onsugar.com ) service as a starting point, and show them how to integrate content from other sites and services. The video below aims to answer such questions in a thorough, easy-to-follow manner, so that teachers can help themselves.

Prior to watching the video it is worth noting that it deals with the creation of a wiki , but that the same principles can be applied to a blog. Many people are unclear on the distinctions between these two types of website: in general, a wiki is a relatively unstructured site that can be easily contributed to by a number of users, whereas a blog is a chronoligcal journal maintained by a single users. If you wish to develop a site that you alone run and others read, then a blog may be a better choice. However, if you want to invite other teachers or students to collaborate, a wiki may be a better option. Some sites, such as this one, blend elements of the two, and there are other structures which, for simplicity’s sake, we will not consider here. Your choice now determines what you can and cannot do with your site in the future, so it is worth considering.