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Helping create App lists that focus on skills not specifics

25/6/2015

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Helping VCE Staff explore, adopt and use iPAd apps beyond the subject specific

Working with schools I often encounter iPad programs that are developed, explored and built around primary and middle years programs. But what happens when those devices make it to the VCE?

Staff may need help identifying Apps that they can use in class, but at this level of study content is so highly specialised this can prove to be a challenge.  It is not uncommon to hear 

"We have so much content to get through I can't possibly add more to it!"
"Why waste time using technology to do things when we can just do it by hand?"
"The exams are still done by hand and we need t practice this"

So I thought lets come at it from a skills point of view, rather than a specifics point of view. What this means is we identify what things unite all VCE subjects in terms of what we want to develop in our learners and what skills are we really building in addition to content understanding. That way staff could develop their capacity to enhance these skills using technology tools. 

 To give you some context  the school I was working with already had a school wide Learning Management System that was used to access curriculum documents and resources.  Every VCE student had an iPad and another device  of their own choosing if they wanted to bring it, but there was very little evidence of the iPads in use in the VCE centre. There was no set Apps and if teachers wanted to use the iPads it was up to them to request the technicians to deploy the Apps.  Some PD had been delivered surrounding finding subject specific Apps, but no follow up or action had occurred. 

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So enter the Professional Learning Action Team Model and the creation of some digital champions. 

Calling for up to 8 interested staff members from any VCE faculty we met to establish what the key skills in each of our respective Study Designs were. Why any faculty? Because we wanted to gather a range of opinions and ideas rather than fall into the trap of becoming content driven. This also has a benefit later on as the tools can be applied by the teacher to their content, thus empowering the teacher to be an ongoing learner themselves. Using this information we identified a set of generic skills we all found ourselves using/developing in our learners.  These included;

Thinking
Revising
Presenting
Researching
Communicating 
Reading 
Up next was the deepening of teacher's professional knowledge . I came up with a set of Apps which fitted these areas and then we began training to understand how they work and then how they can apply to individual subject areas. This professional learning culminated with a call to action, the creation of a SMART goal  and the commitment to go and try something based on what we had learned.  

The final stage was to bring back and share the findings of the teachers and to document this. 

And the outcome? The school now has a staff selected list of Base Apps for all VCE subjects, a team of digital champions across faculties that can model and continue to innovate the use of these Apps and the school has a documented set of best practice examples that have been trialled.  
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NOT UNDERESTIMATING OUR YOUTH - SOME MUSINGS 

6/5/2015

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MY MORNING BRAIN DUMP - THINKING ABOUT COLLABORATION, CONNECTION AND ACTION

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As an educator the lessons I enjoyed most were not the ones I slaved hours over preparing, Those ones inevitably failed to be as great as I had envisioned - mainly because the lovely young folk I taught could not always understand why I wanted them to bask in my greatness and to feel the hours of works I had put into creating those resources for them... No doubt they left with some knowledge but it was knowledge I had isolated, crafted and homogenised into a single 48 minute lesson. My favourite lessons were the ones were I provoked the students - got them thinking, got the contributing, getting them excited, angry, passionate and they are the lessons we were empowered and remembered - and these collaborations often led them to more exciting art projects and even deeper, creative thinking. 

The best collaborations (lesson suggests  limited learning outcomes, collaboration suggests working together to discover and grow)  were those where I did not underestimate my students capacity to think, challenge and engage with relevant intriguing content. The best collaborations are those where students work with me and their peers to identify what they want to learn about and I help them explore this - making mistakes and learning along the way. As a professional I know what is in the curriculum and I know how to help students learn - when to provide help,  how to extend high achievers, how to ensure a text is accessible for a variety of learners, how to set up a task so learners of all ability can achieve, when to provide different perspectives - in short how to teach and to do it well. 

Being a VCE teacher I understand there is a lot of content to get through.  But if we could change up the way we did things using eLearning ideas, innovative resources and curriculum modelling that empowers learners,  we could cover the content but also foster curiosity, metacognition, appreciation of diversity, reflection, empathy, entrepreneurship and all those other things that make confident, connected learners. 

Yes -  sometimes you do just need them to know how to do something skill based or do need them to know the content, vocabulary, formula and this is the reality. As a professional you know what they need to know and strategies and ideas to help them understand that. But if we could actually foster an ongoing, genuine interest in the content we could provoke the next generation into thinking and action using our thinking, questioning and structuring skills.  What if the content was modern, drawn from real life and allowed for choice and scope in the topic explored and the depth required? I would argue the skills and content required can be crafted through genuine engagement and thinking around challenging ideas. 

Learning is empowering when focussing on relevant, inquiry based  questions we want to know more about, where teachers we set up the structures, the environments, the conversations, the challenges, the curiosity and act as a coach when needed, a collaborator when needed and a co learner with students. Learning is rad when all students have access to it, are engaged in it through thinking and creating and it is relevant to them - each one of them! 

Not Underestimating Our Youth - Some Ideas link 
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Flexible, fulfilling feedback

12/4/2015

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Taking Hattie's ideas and making a practical, free and accessible tool for teachers, students and peers to collaborate with 

There is much exploration and focus on feedback in schools at the moment - and for good reason. Feedback should be what drives learning and teaching, the direction learning takes and should help refine our practices and methods. Recently prompted to think about this by Assistant Principal and thought provoker extrodinaire Margo Edgar, I got started with these two resources;
The art of giving feedback
Left - John Hattie's Tedx Talk, Why are so many of our teachers and schools successful? November 2013 


Above - Link to STILE blog post The art of giving feedback: how knowledge transfer isn't our job anymore March 2015 
From this I established the key points Hattie was talking about;
  • We still have teachers to act as mentors, facilitators,  inspiring co-learners, curiosity prompters to help learning happen and helping learners understand learning 
  • Expertise has the biggest impact on learners - those that work collaboratively and those that understand impact rather than delivering content and working towards test scores are those that shine  
  • Students and teachers who know what success is , work on tasks fed by feedback and who get multiple attempts at success signify where good learning happens
  • Feedback should address: Where am I going (goals & success criteria), How am I going ( on/off task behaviour) and What do I do next (steps to develop deeper understanding and self regulation)
  • Importantly feedback needs to empower learners to indicate how confident they are with their answer and use this to guide the type of feedback provided
  • Feedback which praises effort rather than praises the students is more powerful in motivating learning 

What type of feedback? 

New task - feedback should centre on the task and how it is done
Developing understanding - feedback should look at strategies needed to perform
High degree proficiency - feedback should look at self regulation to foster independence and less dependence on teacher 
Which got me thinking - how can I help my peers and learners use feedback to help drive what next? How can I make the classroom inviting to come to and relevant? I started using feedback to help this. There are large amounts of Apps which help do this, though mostly this was one way feedback or right/wrong success feedback. Also it was on the spot, so how do students look back on where they have come from? Learning Management Systems (LMS) like Edmodo and Schoology allow for feedback dialogue between students and teachers. But I wanted to coach teachers and students to work together to build feedback linked to Hattie's suggestions. Thus the Google Form and Spreadsheet was formed! It allows students to input feedback based on prompts suggested once they indicate their confidence level. Then the teacher can respond as well based on the level of mastery and what they want advice on. Importantly it logs the conversations/reflections for future use. 

I found it works best when each student sets up their own template (publish the template to the gallery and students download it and rename it to include their own name) and shares it with the teacher - that way their feedback is a dialogue between the learner, the teacher and in the future peers they allow to access it. If you want access to this Google Form please contact me and we can add it to your Google Apps for Ed account. 
View live feedback form
View live summary of feedback
Please note the live versions above are just trials - no student data is visible 

What next?

I think it would be great to simplify this model - to make a quick 1 minute format that allows students to provide instant feedback - a Google Form would work but it would need to be simpler - with one click and short text responses. Also using it with learners highlighted the ongoing need to foster understanding of why, when and how we use feedback with students. I am also thinking about developing a 1 page infographic for teachers regarding feedback for those using platforms like Edmodo so they can still apply Hattie's thinking but to a feedback loop they have already established.  
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3 carriage train - reflection

26/3/2015

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Thinking about ray nashar's leading innovation clip 

This short animation created by Ray Nashar is an inspirational clip that explores the role of an eLearning guru's role - or in fact anyone's role -  in transforming and leading innovation. 

Just like Ray the person, I found the animation to be thought provoking and engaging which led me to reflect upon his musings. As a rad side note, the animation was made using Keynote, a free iPad App - a creative idea of a powerful tool! 

You can download the ePub used with the clip here;
http://bit.ly/MyGox8. 
CONNECT - "It's not coming up with the ideas, it's spreading them" is the point that resonated with me. I have so many ideas about how eLearning could be used to enhance learning and teaching, reporting, the delivery of curriculum, the process' we use in schools and the list goes on. And what is a priority for some staff is varied from another - how do we enable all staff to grow in their eLearning at the point they are ready to? How to get others on board with this is always an important question,  so it's not just powerful, connected eLearning for some but for all students.

EXTEND - The notion of occasionally dipping into the top carriage made me realise this can be done using ICT - why not set up a learni.st board for those top users to tap into when they need inspiration? What about a PD twitter feed for those keen to find out more? What about a monthly Techie Breaky aimed at top users and advancing their skills - or even better supporting them to present their ideas as well? This would work especially well at multi-campus colleges. 

CHALLENGE - The next challenge that springs to mind is once you have people moving into those first few carriages how to you ensure you continue to challenge and grow their capacity - essentially rearranging the carriages again?  The dynamic, behaviour and norms will have shifted  but how to sustain that is interesting and exciting. Another challenge is how do you celebrate the courageous first middle car movers  to encourage and "..influence but not directly" without alienating the other 2 carriages? It highlights the importance and value of peer sharing and peer modelling aside from having just the eLearning leader as the expert. 
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SAMR - not the same redone 

11/3/2015

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For those familiar with the SAMR model this  narrated Prezi outlines how I go about using this model to help start discussions with staff about implementing technology in the classroom and maps one task through the stages. SAMR is not about working a task through each level, it is about thinking about what level matches the learners and task requirements, how it impacts on all learners and what the learners think about the task.  Importantly it is not simply transforming a task and leaving it at that - it is asking what is next in terms of refining the task for future learners and not staying the SAMe just Redoing the task year in, year out. 

View the Prezi (without narration) below.  


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Showing a cat video to 400 people 

6/3/2015

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In January 2015 I was fortunate enough to find myself at the Melbourne Town Hall showing a cat video to 400 Girl Guides volunteers at the Girl Guides National Conference. Granted there was a speech that accompanied this cat video but let's be honest, cat videos are internet gold.  You can watch a summary of the speech in the prezi to the right. In short I spoke about the fact we can use digital technologies to enhance female voice, leadership opportunities , to inspire and to empower young women, Importantly it was about igniting the need, the passion in the volunteers to try something new in the digital realm and to affirm that they don't need to know everything, but to start having a go along with the young people they are guiding. 

40 mins, January 2015 
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    Shelly Casey
    Curious.
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    iLearning 

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