i see tea

Hello Websense… don't BLOCK me!

I work in the private sector and as the Head of In-Curriculum ICT I have a large influence over what websites are blocked or not within out network. Recently I have reluctantly agreed to YouTube being blocked because it was grinding our Internet connection to a halt through casual (non-educational) watching of clips.

I use YouTube in my teaching. I don’t download the videos (NB interesting to know that this process contravenes YouTube’s terms and conditions) I stream them – buffering at the beginning of a lesson so it is ready to run. My pupils use YouTube in a website building unit and are terrifically motivated and pleased by the use of embed code in an HTML generated page to display their favourite clips. In the main it is interesting to note that pupil’s (at least those that I teach) are not familiar with the power of YouTube. They know they can upload stuff but not many of them actually do. In fact, very few of them have actually signed up for an account to subscribe to their favourites or connect to friends. The way they communicate videos with each other (have you seen this? bare funny!) is to say exactly what search words you must enter. Not very sophisticated or efficient. But they like it and use it a lot.

I demanded a solution be found so as not to disrupt this very successful teaching unit. We explored websense and discovered a bundle of excellent functionality that we were not previously aware of. Here’s some of it:

1. block a site for everyone and then unblock it for a specific user group (or one user in the case of an U6 boy applying for Music at Oxford who uses the classical music content)
2. block a site and then open it at certain times of the day (maybe lunch time or after school)
3. logs of sites that use the most bandwidth (we only have 2Mb connection for 1000+ users)
4. much much more

So, in our school which goes from 4 – 18, websense is now an important tool to vary who is exposed to what on the Internet. (NB there is no commercial interest here. I am sure other companies offer a similar filtering service)

I would like to declare my position on this issue in general. I always side with less filtering of the Internet. I think it is important that we allow our young ones to make mistakes in the well-lit classroom rather than in the darkened bedroom. As stated by Lisa Stevens in Theo’s original post:

“We make them, (children), aware rather than blocking. I use YouTube a lot in lessons. I like the fact that it not blocked and I can be spontaneous, but I always check before I show it to the kids.”

I am aware of the need for caution here but in my classroom I am responsible for the behaviour, be it good or bad; I want to be in control of what the classmates can do or not do in line with a wider school policy. I want flexibility, challenge and discussion.

To summarise, it is clearly the time for control of filtering to be reviewed and updated to match the tools that exist on the web and the increased power of filtering services. It is important that teachers’ hands are not tied by bureaucracy when they are breaking new ground in the classroom. Technology is here to stay in all walks of life.

Read these quotes from the press as blogged by Brian Crosby:

Students today can’t prepare bark to calculate their problems. They depend on their slates which are more expensive. What will they do when their slate is dropped and it breaks? They will be unable to write!”
Teachers Conference, 1703

Students today depend upon paper too much. They don’t know how to write on slate without chalk dust all over themselves. They can’t clean a slate properly. What will they do when they run out of paper?”
Principal’s Association, 1815

Students today depend too much upon ink. They don’t know how to use a pen knife to sharpen a pencil. Pen and ink will never replace the pencil.”
National Association of Teachers, 1907

Students today depend upon store-bought ink. They don’t know how to make their own. When they run out of ink they will be unable to write words of ciphers until their next trip to the settlement. This is a sad commentary on modern education.”
The Rural American Teacher, 1929

Students today depend upon these expensive fountain pens. They can no longer write with a straight pen and nib (not to mention sharpening their own quills). We parents must not allow them to wallow in such luxury to the detriment of learning how to cope in the real business world, which is not so extravagant.”
PTA Gazette, 1941

Ball point pens will be the ruin of education in our country. Students use these devices and then throw them away. The American virtues of thrift and frugality are being discarded. Business and banks will never allow such expensive luxuries.”
Federal Teacher, 1950

I sympathise with any attempt to make the Internet a usable school tool. I support anyone trying to protect children from the possible harm that the outside world can bring. Working together we should be able to make the classroom a dynamic place where learning can push boundaries and teaching can hold those same boundaries.

Together means teachers, technicians, Headteachers, parents, local authorities and Government. Yes all of them. It is time to update some of the working contracts between these parties to reflect the demands of the modern school.

How Ed Tech will take hold, but sadly not this year

This post is a response to the blog post of Jose Picardo, an excellent languages teacher who loves his Web2.0 tools and his thoughts about ‘futurity’. See the original post and my comment here!

This is a wonderful insight into exactly what faces the teacher in the classroom – online pupils! Also a great starting place and rationale for anyone understanding that teaching is going online because that’s where their pupils are.

The problem outlined here is how much, by when and exactly what online tools should be used. A given is the use of the Internet to collate and distribute information about schools and courses; providing a hub for where and when everyone should be is going to be the driving force in learning and schools in general. The problem here is getting all teachers and admin staff contributing, in a web2.0 way, to the wider online program of the school and until it is understood and accepted that this is a much more efficient and simple way of collating a communities resources, the action that is required to make it happen will not generate.

The immediate answer is Headteachers driving the online facade of their schools whereby a communication hub is formed for information about activities in and out the classroom. One of the many problems is that people in general are scared that data is going to rule – test scores, effort marks, percentages, attendance, behaviour, exam grades – and that teacher judgement will perish behind a cloud of misunderstood data, a cloud of numbers. This is coupled with a similar opposition that identity cards provoke.

The longer-term answer is probably one of evolution – generational change. As teachers who work online become Headteachers they will champion their online community. As these Headteachers are successful, more successful than their paper-based peers, national change will become enforced as we are seeing with the expected/compulsary implementation of VLEs throughout ENG & WALES.

The bigger issue might be that people will continue to see the success of their classroom (good exam results) is because they prepared their lessons, and nagged their students and marked a lot of work very quickly in order to achieve that success. This was based on hard work and 1-2-1 F-2-F relationships in the classroom. Until teachers see how an online relationship reinforces the F-2-F one and increases the opportunities for 1-2-1 ed tech will be the ghost in the closet rather than the elephant in the room.

Learning 2.0: How students are using social software in their learning

Check out this SlideShare Presentation:

Steve Wheeler is Http://twitter.com/timbuckteeth – I recommend you follow him if you’re not already.

Great presentation looking at some of the intricacies of wikis and blogs in the classroom. It shows how wikis are quite likely a big thing for future education.

A response to Mindmeister post

Howard Rheingold (twitter) inspired me to write the MindMeister post in socialmediaclassroom.com and reposnded in the text I’ve coloured brown. My reply is in black!

Online instigator, educator, offline gardener.
Location: San Francisco Bay Area

1. Each week a different student team will work with me on co-teaching that week’s theme. I will have met with the team a week in advance, and each team should have at least two weeks to prepare. In response to feedback from the students, I am going to give the teams a little more structure by telling them what I believe the main points of each reading are. Their mission is NOT to present a team book report, but to engage, provoke, facilitate, catalyze discussion of the texts and issues.

This is a good idea – but getting them to do it will be tricky. If they define a node on a mindmap you can collapse it (hide it) and question the audience as to what’s coming next. But this isn’t really where you want the mindmap is it? that’s in the next section.

2. At the end of the semester, I’m devoting an entire 3-hour class session to mindmapping the key themes and texts from the course. At first, I was thinking of having each teaching team map for the rest of us the theme they had co-taught. But I see you had students work on material they had not already worked on.

The elephant in the room here (for me) is to make new groups with a member of each of the teaching themes in it (numbers allowing). However, this would only really structure individual work linked by a hub in the middle. The problem you/we face is to get every student at some point to address the work of another student; amend it, admire it, appreciate/evaluate it. How you do this is not straightforward because of the necessary chronological dynamics – you can’t map the same thought at the same time except in two different places – there must be an action (creating a new node) and a reaction (amending the node text or adding a sub-branch to that node or it’s father).

My crude and simple solution to this problem was to allow my students instinct to develop a separate area of the map each, and then get them to switch areas for the adding of other material. This could be formatting, flags and number points, more nodes, less nodes, URLs of relevant websites, image links. The emphasis would be on the latter two because undisputably SOME learning would take place when searching the web for relevant info. The ultimate aim being the learning that is likely to take place at the final stage. I plan on asking them to then rate their work with numbers 1-5 on quality. 5 for a great link that shows interesting or importantevidence relevant to it’s node. Indeed, you could get yet another student to do this but we don’t want to over-egg the pudding.

There are many things you could do. I would try and find some principles to stick to. Get them bouncing off each other rather than just off the external resources. That way they have to work for each other; this motivates and stimulates activity. People behave themselves online.

Mechanics:

1. each student needs their own account – quick and easy to create
2. you are limited to the number in a group because too many means not enough to do
3. there must be some rules – in my classroom this is governed by small groups of four starting the maps in class so F2F discusiion can decide who is doing what
4. if there are stages to the work like I have outlined above then they need to be set out at the beginning or someone might go and do it all upsetting the balance you are nurturing
   

3. I have the notion that after making the hierarchical map and breaking out all the themes, key ideas, links, that we would then make connections.

Ideally, I would like to let the students run freer with their mindmaps but they are not yet clever enough (16 & 17 years old). What would be a challenge is to break up everybody’s different map and bring them together as a final outcome. Potentially very exciting as you weigh one node against another and discuss which is more valuable.

Hope this helps. I am no expert, just exploring the learning that might be done with these tools.

Collaborative MindMapping with MindMeister

thanks to leoncych (twitter) for posting my presentation from MirandaMod here on Learn4Life blip.tv channel. Much more content to follow so remember to bookmark (rss) leon’s site!

I don’t consider myself an expert on mindmaps or concept maps in any way but I have used them in the classroom with my 16 year olds. I have the luxury of working in a computer room and was therefore able to model the process to the students. The content for A Level ICT is quite dry and students are asked to prepare notes from text books on a certain chapter we would be exploring the following week.

mindmeister was on a tweet (http://twitter.com/daibarnes) and I decided to use it as an alternative to note-taking. After a couple of students lost the maps they had started through some network blip, I shared mine with them so as to keep them engaged. Then I sat back and watched my screen as the map started to build with the students determining their own area of the map to work on. I asked them all to share their maps with each other and then complete overnight. The next lesson the students came in singing mindmeister’s praises and flaws. From around the school site they had been collaborating on their homework via mindmeister and hit some obstacles when too many of them had tried to edit the same node, and the node had deleted. There was a buzz going on surrounding the conversion of textbook material into their material.

This is the original screencast that shows students building the mindmaps over a 14 minute period.

On Mindmeister you can rewind the mindmap to see how contributions were made. You can analyse exactly who did what. You can make contributions of your own.

I was aware, however, that the learning wasn’t improved. So, looking a little deeper into this web app, I discovered the facility to add URLs and icons to each node. This prompted me to develop the mapping one stage further, and, once the bare bones of the material had been mapped (this ensured students had read a section of the material in depth and typed it out), set another activity to develop the mindmap by sourcing, on the web, relevant examples and images for the nodes. I would have to co-ordinate this so students would develop the map for a different section to the one they had originally built. This caused them to become more intimate with the material. It meant another type of visual memory would be engaged hopefully improving the capacity to recall the material in an exam answer.

The students are not 100% happy with mindmeister but they tried mind42 and bubbl.us as well. Neither of these services had the muscle of mindmeister to support collaboration. They didn’t work on our network when individuals found they were logged in as another classmate after using it for a few minutes. The other didn’t offer collaborative editing features. However, there are many mindmapping tools out there and it is possible they might have more functionality than mindmeister.

The important things to learn here were the introduction of real collaboration into the classroom. It engages and motivates the students. It presents a different platform for them to develop their material and thinking. It’s easy to assess work has been done, who made what and when. Mostly I am impresssed by the dynamic nature of the work and how it enables me to shift the culture of working in and out of the classroom.