Job news

I cannot remember a period as busy as the one from which I have just emerged.  Over the last four weeks I have been inspired by the ADE Institute orientation in Bali, been bowled over by the temples in Siem Reap, and flown 14000 miles attending an interview in England.  The ADE Institute was, as I have said before, amazing.  Now I am thinking about a related project that I need to complete by 23^rd May so that is very much on my mind.  Siem Reap was eye-opening, and truly a slice of ‘proper’, authentic Asia.  Very impressive temples and I am so pleased that we were able to take our children to see the likes of Angkor Watt.  The interview – well, the flight over to England was stunningly complicated and exhausting, beginning with a cancelled flight from Brisbane to Abu Dhabi, and result in stopovers in Singapore, Abu Dhabi, Bahrain and 48 HOURS after departure, eventually London Heathrow.  Wired on coffee and doubly jet-lagged, I somehow made it through both days of a very challenging SLT interview, and the great news for me is that I now have a new job to look forward to in August.  Such a relief for all of us.  

ADE Institute Bali 2013

The last few days have been shrouded in secrecy.  The reason for this is that I have been attending my first Apple Distinguished Educator conference in Bali, and it was the single most valuable professional development I have ever attended.  The reason for the secrecy is in fact because there were over 300 educators in attendance for five days, each carrying an average of three Apple devices, and security was tight.   In addition there have been a few announcements that we still need to stay tight-lipped about – none of which are trade secrets but they will involve further announcements to other ADEs around the world.  

I have come away from this with many things, including an incredible amount of insightful comments about a wide range of topics, and a profound sense of community amongst fellow ADEs.  Many topics discussed had very little to do with Apple products themselves, such as Challenge-Based Learning, the SAMR model, TPack and flipping the classroom.  The conversations I had will have  many direct consequences on our recent 1:1 iPad trial with students and many teachers, and for that alone I am grateful.  It truly did open my eyes to the notion that there are thousands of other teachers in the world who are also pushing boundaries and coming up with new models of assessment and teaching and learning and ways of integrating technology into the classroom.  Inspirational stuff.

Ed(mo(o)d(le)o

Nine years ago I was asked to looking into some upcoming new software platform called a VLE for Tanglin.  We looked at a few different solutions at the time, including Blackboard and Sharepoint.  Then we came across the open-source delight of moodle.  Thus was born a relationship with moodle that has continued for me right up to this day.  When I joined Oathall in 2006 it was the VLE of choice for West Sussex, and in fact I delivered some county training on moodle to interested teachers.  Coincidentally it was also the VLE when I joined GIS, and we are still using it.  And I still think it has a place.


But oh dear I have just come across edmodo (late to the party on this I know) and it is just so....simple....slick....easy.  None of these words can be applied to moodle - which is like the bigger stronger, more boring and plainer brother to ed.  So I am feeling the same sort of pang that I felt when I crossed over to the other side from my HTC smartphone to an iPhone 4S - almost an existential IT geek anxst because I have found something that does similar things but just does them better than the old way.
Sigh.  For the record, moodle, you are very, er, useful.  In many ways.  But for my new iPad launch with a bunch of hoppingly excited Year 7s, I am using the Facebook-esque patina of edmodo, and the edmodo app is installed and gleaming with anticipation and ready to go.  And they cannot wait.

IT skills and employment

An article on the BBC caught my interest today, in which Will.i.am discusses how he is taking coding classes in order to learn more about the mysterious world of computing.  This is on the back of a research project by the Prince's Trust, which revealed that one in ten British youths are unable to fill in an online cv, while a quarter face the prospect of doing so with dread.  17% of the respondents stated that they simply did not apply for jobs that required even the most basic of computer skills.  What I do like from this is the response from the Prince's Trust - staff from the Science Museum will visit Prince's Trust clubs in schools to try to re-engage students who are at risk - or already are - underachieving.  Also catching my eye was a comment from Valerie Thompson of the E-learning Foundation, who noted that the pupil premium funds could be utilized in order to give disadvantaged student increased access to computers.  The incredible thing here is that this generation of youths are the ones who teachers tend to dub as the 'wired' generation, with an intuitive feel for technology.  Clearly this is not the case.  Clearly we are back in the territory of the digital divide.  And clearly we need to do something about this.

Computer pre-history

The Romans came late to seafaring.  Having vanquished all of the land mass of Italy with ease, the Romans happened upon  a stricken Carthagian quinquireme near Sicily.  This provided a template for Roman vessels to create a huge naval force, and after winning an epic sea battle against the Carthaginians tin 260BC, the Roman dominance of the Mediterranean Sea eventually led to it being referred to as a Roman lake. 

One such vessel was skirting the treacherous waters south of the Peloponnese in 70BC.  Its hold was swollen with antiquities, curios and innumerable treasures of golden artifacts - all condemned to centuries beneath the waves as the ship dashed against the rocks of Antikythera.

Yet this ship, and this priceless treasure, hid a secret that lay hidden for thousands of years after the wreckage.  The secret was a device of stunning complexity, of beautiful intricacy, and of such astonishing design techniques that it took the civilized English world a full 1,400 years to approach the same level of craftsmanship.

The device now bears the monicker of where it lay, undiscovered, for all of those centuries.  It is the Antikythera Mechanism.  The computer of the ancients. 

Universal Design for Learning

I have now received some more information that relates to my forthcoming ADE orientation session in March - released via iTunes U from the ADE Institute.  The nice thing about iTunes U is that it connects pretty seamlessly to iBooks and of course to standard websites.  So a couple of interesting looking iBooks have come my way, and also a website which I had never heard of, for the National Center (sic) on Universal Design for Learning.
The purpose of UDL is to design learner-centred materials that encompass Recognition Networks (the 'what' of learning), Strategic Networks (the 'how' of learning) and Affective Networks (the 'why' of learning).  Coupled with this are multiple means of representation (aligned to Recognition Networks), Action and Expression (Strategic Networks) and Engagement (Affective Networks).  This does sound like yet more edu-speak at first glance, but what I like is that the website links to a variety of research papers that explore the reasoning behind this methodology. Apple's take on this is to produce a variety of learner-centred materials that align with these three principles, and of course you can imagine how iBooks, iTunes U and a host of creative apps could plug into this.  So interesting times lay ahead for me in terms of materials that I will be producing.

Inquiry-based learning

I followed a link via twitter the other day about enquiry-based learning. It got me thinking about how I approach this with my own classes.  The link quotes Chris Lehmann as he reflects on the successes of challenges with this approach in his Science Leadership Academy.  Lehman identifies 3 key steps to success:

(1) Defining the meaning of enquiry-basd learning
(2) The changes that signal a shift towards that approach
(3) Potential drawbacks
(1) Lehmann takes an interesting look at the notion of personalized of project based or even collaborative learning sessions - and asks whether they actually lead the students into a truly inquiry-based state of learning?  He talks about adaptive software that might lead students through topics at the own pace set by their own abilities - but that this software fails to ask students real-world questions about that material, or to contextualise is, or to communicate these concepts with others.  Similarly he criticises collaborative projects that are bound by strict guidelines, in which the end-products are more or less the same across different student groups.  Lehman is at pains to note that an inquiry-based approach pays little heed to HOW the learning happens, and is more concerned with encouraging students to learn even more - even if they and the teacher themselves don't know the answer.

This is the key - that often there is a blank page in which the teacher and the students do not know what will happen next.   There also should be some sort of ability to publish content, through e-portfolios, blogs, twitter, good old-fashioned printed or handwritten reports, video - anything that suits the content.
Potential obstacles to an enquiry-based learning approach are that lesson are necessarily a lot harder to plan, that covering key content is sometimes harder to plot, and that assessing student progress is not a simple case of ticking boxes or marking homework.  The very essence of assessment is called into question here - what is it that we are looking for when we assess students?  What should we be looking for?