So with this and much more on the cards for 2009 I thought I would start the year with a blog listing my aims and goals for 2009.

1) well number 1 has to be to blog more. I have allowed myself to fall behind on this site and often start a new post and never get around to finishing it. If you let a blog sit too long stagnet ot will quikly die… So 2009 is about striking things back up again!! That is the first thing I want to change.

2) I am very keen to start an educators podcast bringing together a group of leading educators regularly to discuss issues around learning technolgies. Something that can become a resource, a discussion forum and place to share experience with one another. If you think you would be keen to be involved please leave a comment and I will be in touch.

3) finally I am keen to organise my online world – all those web 2.0 services that I have signed up for an have resources stores at. It is quite a job to get these things organised and properly setup but once it is done you can start utilising them the way they were intended to be used.

Well here’s to a great 2009 – all the best to evryone and I look forward to
Connecting with you all!!

To finish look what I got for Christmas -or new year’s eve to be exact….

1) Trust is the basis of this connected community
2) What is appropriate content is clearly outlined to all within the community
3) Being connected is to be viewed as a tool for learning.

Trust is the basis of the connected community
Trust is an amazing concept that we are so poor at developing in schools. We use trust as a tool of blackmail or bribery. “If you work well inside the classroom, I will let you go outside to work tomorrow.” That is not trust, yet it is the concept of trust that we embed in our students minds. In this instance the student is thinking – “Great I will shut up this lesson and pretend to work so I can hangout with my mates outside next lesson.” I recently started a new subject here at school with a bunch of new digital equipment for film editing etc. I started the year by turning this idea of trust upside down. My students were given 100% trust with everything. I explained to them that they were to use the equipment, and explore the new avenues they could with this gear as often as possible. In fact I even requested to have an open wireless access point for the students in my class. We have not had any equipment damaged, no offensive sites have been accessed (we are monitoring everything) and students are coming to the classroom at lunchtime begging to come in and explore further. One student abused the privileges last week and before I could approach him to discuss what he had done wrong, he found me ready to apologise, asking that I didn’t punish the rest of the class for his mistake. First time the student in trouble has found me before I found him/her. ?

These students know that we can track what they are doing online (happy to share the technical if you want to email me) and they know that the tool is for learning (something I will discuss further in point 3). They have unfettered access to the online world. The key here was an open discussion about the online world and what was appropriate and inappropriate. We talked about access as a multi-facet tool. It is a tool of learning, a tool of social interaction as well as a tool for a range of harmful acts. We were open about the ability to access inappropriate content, talked about our responsibilities as citizens of this community and even dreamed a little about what it would be like if no one accessed offensive content. From this discussion we introduced the idea of trust in our class (our small community) a sense of relying on one another to do the right thing. My students found that there is power in having wide-open access. They know I monitor what they are looking at and there will always be accountability. Ideally for this concept to work I believe these principles would also need to be shared and encouraged by and with the parent community.

What is appropriate content is clearly outlined to all within the community.
This is a very hard task in a post-modern society that lives by the philosophies surrounding ideas such as – do whatever is good for you. It amazes me that we teach such ideologies in our schools then try and determine what is appropriate and inappropriate through the use of content filters. For me this is a challenge that becomes easier as I teach in a Christian school. For us we have clear guidelines on what is and isn’t appropriate. Students who come to our school understand that and therefore have no choice but to agree to the guidelines set in what is appropriate and what is not.

But how does this work in a general sense, because it isn’t always that simple even in my school. We all come from different backgrounds so therefore we create different levels of appropriateness. Is it ok for a younger student to have access to videos of medical procedures? Is it ok for the senior biology student to have that level of access? From the day students have access at school I believe we create in them a sense of ownership in the resources that access content. We must encourage them to think about what true learning is for their stage of development (socially, academically etc) and or areas of study. Discuss with your students what is appropriate content for the learning in your particular subject or class. My film students know that youtube is an invaluable resource for our class and that the abuse of access to that site only ends in the privilege being restricted. I don’t tell my students that they can’t use youtube to search for highlights from last week’s basketball games. I simply encourage them to use the resource for that in their own time. I have a small group of boys who come in at lunchtime to do that very activity. However, in class they use the same resource to further their learning. My students have learnt what is appropriate content and what is not. Here is a suggested activity for you… Get students to suggest youtube content that is appropriate for class, appropriate for leisure time and never appropriate. Give them some ownership in the discussion.

Ideally I would begin this by educating the entire community as to what it feels is appropriate content and what is not. We need to get rid of the control nazis that lock down our systems. Yes there are obvious sites that should be blocked but blocking a site that has some great content for learning simply because it also has a percentage of content that is obviously inappropriate is like saying we should never enter a 7-11 store because they sell some items that are inappropriate. Or I should never buy a car because it has the ability to go over the speed limit. Yet this is what we do with a site like google images or youtube.

Being connected is to be viewed as a tool for learning.
David Loader in his recent book “Jousting for the new Generation” identifies a disturbing trend in the use of computers in education. He says that the device that has the potential to be an amazing learning platform has become something very different.

“The computer is such a wonderful tool for personal learning. Then I had dinner with an old friend and he left me wondering. He agreed that the computer can be a wonderful tool, but is that what it is being used for? He told me that the primary use many in schools make of the computer is for delivery of content, assessment of students and increasingly for surveillance. Suddenly what had been heralded as a paradigm-shifting, personal learning tool has become a vehicle for platform teachers and Big Brothers.” (David Loader – Jousting for the New Generation)

Through our desire as teachers to control we have locked down the tools. We have not allowed the power drill to go beyond the 1st speed. There is still another 4 speeds on the dial but we are not comfortable to see what that can do. Our students already know what it can do and the more we lock it down the more frustrated they will become (and I think the more tempted they become to abuse it). Just have a read of a student blog over at iThink “Unnec*ssary Censorshi*” (Love the title – nice and cheeky!!)

Once again this links back to my point earlier about involving the community to make these decisions once they have been educated on the issues. Our “business client” mentality is destroying cutting edge education and learning because our “client” is ill informed and not educated on the issues. When will schools have the backbone to stand up to the community and let them know that we are professionals and demonstrate why these areas need to change? Involve the community and educate them on these issues so we don’t have to face the idea that we are some how responsible if a child accidentally or deliberately accesses inappropriate material. As long as the school is doing their best to block explicit sites that are obviously inappropriate, I believe they are doing their job and are actually taking off the padlock and letting learning occur. Today I had a student doing an assignment where he had to put together a travel itinerary and cost it up etc etc…. Our main server then blocked him because the site he was trying to access fell into the inappropriate category of “Entertainment” (it was a tour guide website). If someone stumbles across something that is inappropriate why don’t we turn that into a learning experience instead of worrying what the parent may think and blanket blocking everything?

There is obviously much more that can be said here and I plan to pan these ideas out further. I write this at the end of a busy day here at school. I welcome thoughts and feedback and look forward to an interesting conversation.

Sounds familiar to the reasons why we buy the latest gadgets….. We spend 10′s of thousands of dollars on the latest gadgets so we can be seen as being leaders in education. When in actual fact we fail to prove how any of this money being spent has improved teaching and learning.

In this country we are sitting on the cusp of possible revolutionary change in education. We have a new Government proclaiming we are about to have an “education revolution.” Folk at the conference last week were excited by this and were talking about the discussions to have laptops in the hands of students and teachers as positive and exciting potential changes. However, the skeptic in me can not see a bureaucracy really making a positive change. Why???? Well our education system needs change, but change that is headed by risk takers, people who see the need, know the how and are willing to do what it takes. Governments don’t like the idea of risk, they look for what is popular and change in educational thought is not popular. What is popular is tests, standards being met, declaring that no child will be left behind…. All the crap that gets spun by Government PR campaigns that aren’t worth the paper they are written on. In fact the change we require in our schools will not be popular, it won’t provide photo opportunities for politicians. It will require people that are willing to take a risk, stand up for what is right, make mistakes, learn from their mistakes and hold the needs of teachers and students as the focus of all that happens.

About a year ago I met a school principal who was intrigued by my willingness to express my opinions so publicly… I felt uncomfortable for a moment, thinking he was about to tell me that what I wrote was trash and didn’t do me any favours. In fact it was quite the opposite he was impressed that I was willing to take a risk and put my thoughts out there, and express the disappointment I had with different aspects of education. He encouraged me to continue as it was this kind of activity that encouraged him to seek what his staff were feeling about the profession. He continued to tell me how he ran his timetable each year. He sits his staff down for 5 minutes each and discusses where they feel they could best provide for the school and students. He then asks how the school can help them with PD, class structure etc etc. He then allows the staff to design their own teaching timetable. Actually allowing staff to design their timetable was a massive risk for him….. what if he couldn’t deliver? What if they needed more maths teachers and not enough people wanted to teach maths? Well he promised me that the risk was always worth it, and that it changed the mindset of teachers in his school as they could see they were valued and that the school cared about them as people and as professionals. If he couldn’t deliver on a teacher’s request he would negotiate and work them through the issues, often giving them extra support in areas they were not confident.

To me this didn’t seem like a big risk, but to the principal he knew what the consequence would be if he couldn’t deliver. What inspires me about this is that the attitude here is that while taking this risk may cause a number of problems, the eventual outcome is a change in culture that will be a long term benefit to the school community. The title of a great book I read some years ago sums this all up…. “If you don’t feed the teachers they will eat the students.” You feed the teachers by listening to them and rewarding those who have desire to take risks that will make them better educators and the school a better learning community. We need students to become people who are willing to take risks, yet we create an environment that does the exact opposite.

Unfortunately, I spend these holidays disenchanted by what I have to go back to. What was going to be exciting and potential for great change has been squashed by the system that suffers from serious tunnel vision. Our schools have been taken captive by Government requirements, timetables and other administrative items…. We refuse to encourage creative, risk taking behaviors and go to a system that tries to put everyone in a box. We work in a people business and think lastly of people, we proclaim that educators change lives, yet make sure that everything stays the same. Because I am someone who is capable of teaching mathematics I get given more maths classes…. Nobody seems to worry about the fact that my talents and abilities lie elsewhere. Why??? Because the system needs a maths teacher, the timetable needs a maths teacher and maths teachers are hard to find you know!! Since when does timetabling dictate teaching and learning? I realise there are administrative areas that are painful and hard, but seriously, must we destroy all creative thought that could possibly deliver a better result and generate a system that is dictated to by mere administrative task and procedure? Oh but I guess “If it don’t makes sense they’ll do it!!”