While I think the core messages need to be about the pedagogy as opposed to the tools, I thought I would put together a few of the tools that I think would be of most benefit teachers who are just starting out on their digital journey.
1. delicious (or other social bookmarking tool) – a simple way to share and find web based resources with others. Create networks and subscribe to key words so you collect everything from the web that you want without having to go looking for it. Here are my PDHPE links as an example.
2. google reader (or other RSS tool) – have the web come to you. Instead of returning to quality sites to see if they have changed, get them to send you all of their new stuff with an RSS feed. Can collect from blogs, wikis & webpages that displat the little RSS symbol (and any other pages with ‘add to rss’ or similar).
3. pbworks (or other wiki platform) – wiki’s are a great way to collaborate with others and a simple way to create interactive webpages. Yr 12 PDHPE Wiki and 9 PASS wiki as examples.
4. google docs – I could really separate each document as they all have great features but again, the ability for more than one person to interact on the one document has some great potential benefits. The spreadsheets application is one of my favourites as it can be used to create online surveys that are automatically entered into a spreadsheet. Great for surveying students and creating quizzes. The word document is useful for faculty programming and group tasks.
5. Wordpress (or other blogging platform) – great tool for webpage creation, reflective writing, publishing and sharing student work amongst other things. Example of Yr 7 PDHPE and Sport Coaching Blog used with students. Lots of great PDHPE blogs around if you have a look about!!
6. Google calendar – keep organised and productive with google calendar. Send free sms or email reminders for events and organise your work and personal life.
7. slideshare – loads of great powerpoints and resources here and a great place to share and store student presentations. Ability to embed them into your own blogs and wikis to showcase student works.
8. youtube/teacher tube – lots of great resources here and the potential to post up the work of students to add to your wiki or webpages. You can keep them private if required and have a place to store your video’s online.
9. Twitter – while I rarely ‘tweet’ myself I do come across a lot of resources from the people I follow who seemed to have slowed down on the blog posts and amped up the twittering.
10. google search – I almost don’t consider it a tool because I use it so regularly and it is such a natural part of using the internet. Can’t go past it though.
Lots of others I could easily slot in but all of the above deserve their place (for the time being!).
I am getting more and more excited about the digital education revolution that is happening in NSW DET Schools, and not just for the great opportunity I see this providing for students. I think part of its greatest potential is all of the reflection on learning that will occur amongst teachers over the next few years.
Conversations have already well and truly started and will continue as teachers grapple with a new aspect to teaching and learning. I am sure it will encourage many with its great potential but also trouble others who have difficulty with, or resist its use for a wide variety of reasons. It is the conversations that will come about because of this that I see have such great potential. Teachers will be forced to re examine their practices and think about the ways we currently do things and whether there are better ways of doing them. I am sure that initially there will be people who strongly oppose the laptops, and those who are strong campaigners for them and to me this will be healthy for the debates that will arise over how, when and why laptops can be effective learning tools.
A lot of these conversations will take place in spaces where others will have access to them and while they may be locked down behind DET walls, DET teachers will (should) all have the opportunity to take part in these conversations. In the past these may have taken place in faculty rooms, network meetings or executive areas, but they were largely constrained to the people and spaces in which they took place. We now have the means for these to take place in online spaces which can be shared and accessed anytime, anywhere with internet access. To me this is powerful and will help us as teachers develop and reflect on current practices, which will hopefully benefit students in all of our classes.
I have been using bubbl.us as a prefered mindmapping tool with students for a while now because it is so simple to use. Students don’t have to sign in and a 30 second demonstration can have the students off and running. I find this to be a fairly common feature of web based apps – they are designed to be very intuitive and simple to use. Students also seem to like the visual design and the way the bubbles explode when you delete them. Funny how the small things can make such a difference. The students actually want to understand the work so they can create more bubbles and join them together etc which was an unplanned benefit of using computer over paper. The fact they can make mistakes and fix them and produce a nice looking product at the end encourages them to experiment as they go and not worry too much about making mistakes which I quite like also.
I have included a quick video showing a few of the features and how it works and have attached a link to some of the students work. I uploaded their mindmaps to flickr and the next step will be for the students to go in and critique the mind maps using some of the features on flickr that allow students to comment on the images.
The ICTEV conference is being held down in Melbourne today and I have just checked out Jarrod Robinson’s presentation on using mobile phones in the classroom. He is doing lots of innovative things around implementing ICT in the classroom and his afternoon session on his use of the nintendo wii in his classes is also a great program with lots of potential.
I also stumbled across this great little video made by year 6 students on mobile phones and I can see this would be a great little activity we could do in PDHPE. It is based on the video “mankind is no island” which was the winner of tropfest NY in 2008.
There are lots of areas in PDHPE you could have students create a similar style video and it is an activity I think would engage students and get them thinking deeply about an issue to try and construct their movie.
My classes have greatly enjoyed using google docs as a way to share information and complete class activities and I have just read a post by Jarrod Robinson who completed this activity in a similar way. He has taken a screencast of the activity and this provides a great visual as to the way the google spreadsheet works.
Essentially, using google spreadsheets allows all students to input their data simultaneously and the graph will update live. It is interesting to see the data turned into something meaningful in real time and this in turn is quite motivating for the students. I have used a ‘google form’ to enter the data also but this does not allow for the instant updating of the graph so I prefer to enter straight into the spreadsheet.
If you have not already come across Jarrod’s blog I recommend having a look around as there is lots of great stuff over there and his post will provide further insight into how you can run the activity.
I recently put together some of the important data from the 2008 AIHW report that is regularly used in PDHPE into a google presentation. I did this to use in class and also so it can be uploaded to our wiki. I like google docs because if I decide to add anything to the presentation then I do not have to worry about re uploading it anywhere as it will be automatically updated everywhere it is embedded. Just another little benefit of google presentations.
The digital education revolution strategy announced by the federal government aims to put laptops into the hands of all Australian students over the next 6 years.
This presents a wonderful opportunity for students and teachers and will take some pretty intensive and well delivered PD to teachers to make it work well. I think this presents a great opportunity for PDHPE teachers and some centralised planning and development could make it all work much more effectively.
My ideas would revolve around a few key areas.
Professional development of staff is the key – (I think the teacher becomes more critical for effective teaching and learning with technology invovled).
1. Face to face & online professional development courses to help teachers understand the range of technology and tools available and how it can be used in the classroom. This could be module based with online learning for specific tools such as blogging, wiki’s, podcasting/vodcasting etc and resources to assist with implementing these in the classroom. The online courses should be accredited and contribute to the institute of teachers and be allocated release time for the teachers involved.
2. A range of competitions organised and funded by the educational authorities to encourage teachers and students to participate in using these tools and help ensure they are used in powerful ways. Well thought through learning actvities could be developed by the educational authorities, with student work being shared amongst all participants. Students could also play a role in evaluating the entries and participating in peer assessment beyond their own school.
3. A common place to share and publish student work so students can see what is happening in other schools and learn from other students. An example may be a youtube style channel for students to publish health commercials or videos made in class, or flickr style space for images/posters etc to be shared. These should all be tied together at a central webspace/wiki (see next point).
4. All of these spaces should be tied together in one place where students can go to access other students work samples and where teachers can go to access teaching activities and resources to assist implementing these activities into the classroom.
The digital education revolution allows a lot of the learning for both teachers and students to take place online. I would think it essential that the early PD and initiatives allow for success and provides activities and learning that is motivating and engaging for teachers and students, has a low skill requirement and is easily accessible for all.
Underpinning the success of the whole program will be the bandwidth available in schools. With cheap computers with minimal processing power (update – looks like the DET schools will be working with quite a powerful machine that looks pretty handy allround – scratch the initial comment), cloud computing apps will be critical and without bandwidth these become almost useless also.
An internet connected laptop is by far the most powerful learning tool to students have ever had access to and I think will change the nature of teaching and learning in schools over the next 10-20 years. A move away from recalling content to students creating, collaborating and constructing their knowledge in more practical and powerful ways.
