Doing the Work

Reposted from sbaglia.com

It’s difficult for me to believe, on occasions, that it was back in 2010 when I started dabbling in getting students to contact experts outside of the school to support their own inquiry learning. Fast forward to 2013, and from Castlemaine via Maryborough I find myself at Crusoe College.

When innovating, the structures of a secondary school can make things more difficult than at a primary, where flexibility allows you to take advantage of more opportunities. If you want to do something new and different, invariably, the secondary school timetable is not your friend.

Yet, these are things that can be overcome, and secondary schools often provide opportunities that are absent in primary schools. For example, students at secondary schools are more likely to be already familiar with using technology, and often have mobile devices at hand that, rather than being a scourge to the teacher, can actually be used to their (and the students’) advantage. And dedicated science classes and laboratories excite most year sevens as something totally novel (“we’re heating water?!?! AWESOME!!!”).

My beliefs around teaching science have been pretty hard-wired for a long time. Having been a scientist, I know that science is really about not just finding answers, but finding questions. I fear we don’t tap into getting kids to ask their own questions, which almost instantly gets them more interested in the answer than if the question had come from the teacher. The difficulty for the teacher can be dealing with dozens of different questions, all requiring different levels of support.

One novel way I’ve tried to deal with this is to enlist an army of “Virtual Scientists”, who kindly give up their time to support students investigating their own questions. The main way they do this is through a dedicated science site, where students blog their progress in their investigations, and our scientists push their thinking and answer their questions. The site allows for public and private messaging, forums, and twitter integration to give all parties a chance to find what form of communication works best for them.

Recently, this plan has become a reality, as a small number of students have signed up and received feedback on their Coffee Cup experimental plans. And while the asynchronous nature of blogging and messaging suits busy scientists and awkward timetables, there’s nothing quite like some real-time, face-to-face discussion. So it was with a sense of excitement that our budding scientists Skyped with Tim Moore, an electrical engineer in Newcastle and all-round good bloke (he was part of the program in the early days at Castlemaine North Primary School) and Dr Melanie Thomson from Deakin University in Geelong.

As I told one of the budding scientists later, we want this to be a normal part of science; that when you got home and were asked “What did you do at school today?”, the answer “Oh, Mel and Tim helped me understand the data from my experiment” would not be unusual.

We’re on our way.

(If you’re a scientist reading this and this style of working with students appeals, you can read more and sign up here).

 

Six Months in a Leaky Boat

I’m embarrassed sometimes by the attitude some Australians have to our neighbours, New Zealand. Frankly, I’m a bit of a fan of the kiwis. They’ve given the world plenty, but for mine, their finest contribution has to be the Finn brothers…

One of the more mundane challenges of global learning, as I’m quickly discovering, is the lack of coordination in holidays between the northern and southern hemispheres. With most of the Writers’ Clubs’ schools located on the other side of the equator, they’re now frolicking in the warmth for three months, while we here in the south hunker down for a winter of mid-year reports and a brief mid-year break before the “premiership” term, term three.

I was suddenly aghast. What will happen to our Writers’ Club without some of our star performers? Will it go into hibernation, awaiting the spring and a new influx of students?

Fortunately, New Zealand has come to the rescue. Our group of Australian schools can now do some trans-Tasman sharing of writing before the tidal wave of northern hemisphere of schools comes online to join us. Pinehill School in Auckland have already signed up, and have taken to the community like a duck to water. Welcome!

You can check out their writers here. In the meantime, check out some more of the fantastic Finns…

Find and Be Found

I’m often asked what the point of the Writers’ Club is if you are already blogging. Surely having a global audience is not exactly revolutionary – all you need to do is to start a blog, and theoretically, you have a global audience, right?

Well, yes and no. The big problem I have found with blogging in the classroom is (a) finding the blogs of others, and (b) having your blog found by others. The result is your audience, and hence the number of comments you receive, are usually pretty small.

And I speak from experience. If you’re reading this on the *official* Rob Sbaglia blog, at sbaglia.com, you should know that this is my 112th published post, and once you take away replies I’ve made to comments on this blog, the total number of comments this blog has recieved is…. (drum roll)… thirty five. That’s an average of 0.31 comments per blog post, or not even one comment per three published posts. And I’m out there tweeting my posts, putting them on Facebook, reposting on nings and so on and so forth. I can only imagine what an average ten year old’s blog receives if they are blogging.

So how to give students an audience for their work? Some teachers take to twitter to get their kids an audience – there is even a #comments4kids hashtag for that specific purpose. But as Adrian Camm recently noted, this is somewhat artificial. And it’s not sustainable. I want my students being able to find and be found without the need for my assistance.

The Writers’ Club does this in a number of ways. First, it uses Buddypress, a social network plugin that goes “over the top” of the blogs. It makes it much easier to find the blogs of other student authors around the world, and to have your work be found by those same authors. It does this in a number of ways.

First, there is an activity stream that shows all the recent happenings across the site. You can refine this stream by seeing just the recent blog posts, comments, forum posts, and so on.

Secondly, because everyone is a member of the one big community, there is no need for putting in email addresses or anything else to identify the person leaving the content. The account you use to write on your own blog is the account you use to comment on the other six hundred blogs that are on the site. This means that if you comment on my blog, I can click on your name and YOUR Writers’ Club blog automatically pops up. I can then go look at your work and return the favour.

Thirdly, there is a nice little plugin called “achievements“. This gives awards to students automatically based on their contribution to the community. Students get points for writing blog posts, commenting on the posts of others, responding to the feedback from others, commenting on blogs from other countries, and so on.

Is it working? Well, students are getting more comments on their blogs than I am. I think that’s a pretty good start.

Humanising the classroom

I was preparing a presentation for differentiating mathematics using technology recently, and ended up editing a TED talk by Salman Khan.

What struck me was Khan’s idea that technology can humanise the classroom – which, as Khan acknowledges, is in some ways counterintuitive. Indeed, when I talk to teachers about technology in the classroom, they have visions of a very inhuman scenario, where students have their eyes glued to the screens, interacting with noone. I’d argue that many things that currently happen in traditional classrooms are dehumanizing; however, we don’t see them this way because that’s how classrooms have always been. I’d also argue that technology can humanize these experiences. Here are four things I’ve invested time and effort into that have humanized the classroom.

Humanizing instruction

As Khan points out, the traditional classroom is predicated on the idea of teacher-led instruction. Teachers give a one-size-fits-all lecture; teachers choose when this occurs and around what topics. And teachers are the ones who decide when the class moves on to the next topic. This dehumanising experience can be humanised through the use of video. By allowing students to experience the instruction that they require for their own specific learning needs; by allowing students to pause and rewind instruction when they don’t understand; and by allowing them to move forward to a new concept in their own time depending their individual progress allows us to humanise instruction in a way not possible without technology.

 

Humanizing showing understanding

In a traditional classroom, the way students show their understanding is similarly one-size-fits-all. The worksheet, test, exam, essay, poster and other traditional methods of assessment restrict student choice and may alienate students without certain skills; for example, a lack of literacy skills may hinder a student showing their potentially excellent understanding of Mathematics. Technology allows students to show their understanding in new ways, gives them far more choices, and removes the dehumanising necessity for one-size-fits-all assessment.

 

Humanizing writing

The purpose of writing is to communicate. To communicate requires an audience. Writing without an audience is like public speaking to an empty room – a dehumanizing experience. Yet this is exactly what happens in a traditional classroom – students write in writing books where the audience is close to zero. Technology can humanize this experience of writing by providing an audience of hundreds or thousands, spread around the world, allowing students to connect to peers and be exposed to feedback and new writing styles and, at the same time, cultural understandings. Our Writers’ Club does exactly this, and has led to very real human interactions around the world. This is what real writing should be about.

 

Humanizing research

Technology has taken us from books to google as a source of information. However, anyone who has done research in the real world knows that research comes as much from other humans as it is from secondary sources. Nevertheless, we persist in ignoring this more authentic source of research for the reference books and googling. Technology can humanise research by linking students to real life experts who can assist students to use their research with greater purpose, and be a more realistic representation of research in the 21st century.

Hands on the Wheel

Being a new dad is easily the most amazing experience of my life. My little girl, now thirteen months old, astonishes me every day with her rapidly developing communication skills, and her mobility – she has gone from slow crawling to pushing her wheelie-bug around the house with abandon in what seems like the blink of an eye.

Her latest toy is a steering wheel, which has a horn, indicator lights, and so on. It reminds me of her developing independence – she’s gone from a baby, totally dependent on her parents, to a toddler, exploring the world on her own.

Giving students the steering wheel when it comes to the online world can be daunting. As teachers, we like to be in control of what’s going on, and can doubt the abilities of students to self-organise. While some students struggle with the idea of self-organisation, I do believe that many students ARE capable of it, and just require the leadership to be show how to do it.

A great example of this has been on our Writers’ Club. As well as providing students with their own blog, it also provides them with the ability to form groups and create forum discussions around particular topics. I haven’t explicitly made this a part of the Writers’ Club’s way of operating – it’s just kinda been there, and I’ve left it alone to see what, if anything, would develop.

Slowly, we are seeing students starting to use the forums to discuss things of real significance. Given the steering wheel, these students haven’t driven it off a cliff, as we might fear. They’ve driven into interesting new places, and taken control of their learning in a way previously unimagineable. For example, here is a conversation comprising of members from three different continents, discussing literacy without the direction from their teacher.

These students are showing what learning can look like within a vibrant online community. While structure is needed for student learning, there must be room within that structure for students to own their learning. It’s time to let them have the wheel.

Bahasa Bahasa

Since learning to speak a language myself, I’ve valued the role of languages in schools. One of the most life-changing periods of my life was when I went to live in the city of Perugia as a part of my PhD studies in 2000-2001. Immersed in Italian language, I went from knowing a few words to becoming close to fluent in three months. It was an astonishing transformation, one that has enriched my life in so many ways. I fell deeply in love with the city and my experiences there, and it always has a place in my heart.

Fast forward 11 years. I’ve gone from research scientist to secondary teacher to primary teacher to eLearning coach. And the Writers’ Club continues to evolve and expand. But now, a new frontier has opened up. We recently welcomed a school from Indonesia to the site. This changes things, as Indonesian is the language taught at our school. Through our contact, we linked up via Skype this week.

So now this has me thinking – this has the potential to bring a whole new dimension to our language program. The Writers’ Club enables students to blog, but blogging in a foreign language (for both schools) could be asking a bit much. Do the students start a pen-pal relationship using the messaging function? Do they use forums? How does Skype fit in?

My head is spinning. I can see the tremendous value in this, but my lack of knowledge of how to teach languages is stifling my ideas. I am pleased though that this is yet another way for the Writers’ Club to facilitate connections around the world.

Advice?

Ownership

This photo is of my brother and I in 1994. This is our first car, which we shared ownership over. If you can believe it, I’m the guy on the left! The colour of the car, if you’re interested, is “Cypress Metallic Green”.

If there’s one thing I’ve been acutely aware of since working with teachers, it’s making sure I don’t rob teachers of a sense of ownership. I think this is because I know how I feel when I am doing something I perceive I don’t have ownership over. I’m someone who really needs to be involved in something or else I disengage in it.

This raises some interesting questions for the kind of work I do now. Often I am leading the use of technology in classrooms – which means I am usually creating something : communities, websites, tutorials, ideas… which I assume others will find of benefit to them. But always gnawing at the back of my head is, “how do I give people ownership over the things I create? How would I feel if I was on the other side of the fence?”. On the other hand, I feel that sometimes you DO need someone to take the lead and kick things off, and I do acknowledge that not everyone is like me, and some teachers do indeed appreciate being given strong direction.

This issue has been raising its head with our Writers’ Club. The idea is that I create blogs for students of the teachers that join, and they instantly become part of a global community. Which is fine for those who have never had their kids blogging. But what about teachers who are already blogging with their kids? Do they need to abandon their work to join our community? And does this then represent a lose-lose situation, where we miss out on being involved with teachers who already have significant expertise with blogging and global education, and they miss out on being part of a vibrant community?

For a long time, I wrestled with the idea. I talked at length to my colleague in Shanghai, Toni Olivieri-Barton, about it, and I came to the conclusion that, eventually, the audience factor would win, and teachers would be convinced to start afresh on the Writers’ Club.

But this ignores the need for the teachers to have ownership.

So when Denton Avenue from New York joined, ready with their blogs, I decided to give them accounts but let them have their own blogs as well. And it works. The students with their own blogs simply put their blog address into their profile, so that when their profile is clicked on by a Writers’ Club member, they see the student’s blog address and can visit and comment on their blog, outside the Writers’ Club. The security of the site is still maintained, the students with their own blogs benefit because they are able to participate in the community and drive readers to their blogs by doing so; and the current members of the Writers’ Club benefit by having new things to read and have a greater audience for their own work.

It’s not ideal – it would be simpler if everyone had a blog on the Writers’ Club. But if I can convince those teachers already doing great stuff that this work won’t replace what they do but enhance it, and I can bring even more students from around the world together, then it is for the best.

Everybody’s doing something; we’ll do nothing!

I feel like George Constanza at times, trying to explain the premise behind the Writers’ club:

There are heaps of global collaborative projects around – just take a cruise around The Global Education Ning if you are looking for something specific. However, in terms of global collaboration, we’ve taken a slightly different route at The North School.

Most of the global education projects out there have specific goals or themes : discussing certain books, historical events, cultural themes, and so on. While these are great, we have found that it can be hard to align what we’re teaching (which is often tied to whole-school planning) to a global opportunity. And the lifetime of these connections can be limited. So rather than having a specific theme for collaboration, we’ve gone for the most general thing we could think of.

Writing.

All students write. So we thought, if we could offer students a chance to have their writing read and commented on by students from around the world, that might motivate them to write more, and they might find out more about their readers at the same time. We also thought that because writing is pretty much an everyday activity, it means that interacting globally would be an everyday occurrence.

We also wanted to encourage as many schools as humanly possible to be a part of this site. The reality is that global education through technology remains something for the ‘outliers’ of education – it is far from mainstream. We wanted to lower the barrier to participation as much as possible to encourage schools and teachers that aren’t outliers to get their feet wet in global education.

How do we lower the barrier to participation? Well, there are few restrictions on the site. Students get a blog, and can put up writing as often as they like – they can write every day, or they can write once a year. They can write about anything they like – stories, persuasive pieces, information texts… anything at all. And a teacher can have their whole class on, or just one particularly passionate writer.

And with only loose boundaries, who knows what a bunch of passionate writers will inspire each other to write.

Join us.

Cross-posted at sbaglia.com.