Learning, Teaching and ICT

These are notes to myself about my ’booked’ CPD courses (until March 2009) requiring preparation time …. time management is now at the top of my CPD agenda : )

• Supporting Nursery Staff in using the new Schools- Online websites
• Introducing the use of vodcasts (audacity and windows movie-maker) to assist enterprising education
• Supporting SMT in schools to introduce innovative ICT activities to engage pupils and parents (e.g. using flickr tools to share themed photographs of school life)
• Supporting teaching staff to become familiar with the new ‘Think Quest’ facilities – including how to set up and maintain pupils’ sites
• Supporting ancillary staff to use facilities in the new Schools-Online websites such as uploading documents (newsletters, etc.) and to access and use the calendar facility
• Familiarising myself with the benefits of the Go-Animate programme, supporting Cassie in its use, preparing suitable CPD course material to enable staff to use the program creatively to improve literacy at all levels
• Supporting schools in CPD events to improve maths teaching (specifically collaborative problem solving activities ) by making it more active and cross curricular (real life maths). Adapting my own ideas used in class previously and developing a CPD activity for Primary school teachers at all stages.
• Developing up-to date CPD materials to help teaching staff make children aware of steps to take to protect themselves when using on-line environments
• Spending time familiarising myself with Front Page in order to prepare for scheduled CPD activity for staff whose schools are using this type of website
• Preparing CPD material to introduce staff to the concept of ‘Online Storytelling’ by using activities such as windows movie maker and ‘photobucket’ to improve literacy
• Familiarising myself with already prepared CPD material that I’m asked to deliver as a ‘stand in’ for other team members who are unavailable
• Preparing material to deliver a requested ‘sharing of good practice’ CPD event
• Familiarising myself with Smartboard use to improve the teaching of Modern Languages (looking at existing materials and up-date them for 2008/2009 delivery)
• Preparing resources for planned Cpd courses to introduce teachers to freely available online tools (animoto, slideshare, myplick, voki,etc) and to demonstrate how they can be used creatively to improve learning in literacy and in a variety of other curricular areas.

Planned self-study activities consist of:

• Liaising with teaching staff who are already using methods I’m not familiar with – podcasting hosts, the use of hand held games in education, voting tools
• Continuing to work on improving delivery and presentation skills of previously delivered courses (e.g. blogging courses, podcasting courses)
• Attending (when possible) Smartboard courses offered by other team members
• Attending In-service Day course on CPD Find by LTS (to help with vision for VTC!)
• Attending In-service Day course on Comic Life
• Attending the BETT conference and selected presentations – as well as the associated TeachMeet event

I also plan to build in time to enable the upkeep and continued (what I think are) important changes to the Staff Area of the VTC!

This has been put on hold during October / November so that in-school visits to all primary school co-ordinators (50 schools, I think?) can take place.

It has been known to visit 3 schools in one day – a time-consuming, but valuable exercise …..in my opinion

Phew !!!

It’s official! The Carronshore Blog has received it’s 10,000th visitor!!

It was brought to my attention by Cassie …. who has now provided her Primary 5 class with their own wiki space

In her post, Cassie wrote:

….. I am also hoping that I will begin to see the kind of online community that I witnessed with 7V last year beginning to develop. I know it won’t be the same as they do not have blogs but I’m hoping it creates a community that in turn will be a real audience for their writing.

I’ve been pondering the benefits of giving pupils their own on-line space and have reviseted the Byron Review.

I think that the statements included here, taken from that review, point to giving pupils access to online spaces (Blogs / wikis, etc.) so than they can be educated to use them in a responsible manner under teacher guidance. By doing so, they will be more prepared for eventual exposure to popular teenage sites such as MySpace and Bebo.

• We should empower them to manage risks and make the digital world safer.

• There is a generational digital divide which means that parents do not necessarily feel equipped to help their children in this space

• While children are confident with the technology, they are still developing critical evaluation skills and need our help to make wise decisions.

• Children and young people need to be empowered to keep themselves safe – this isn’t just about a top-down approach.

• This is no different to how we think about managing risks for children in the offline world, where decreasing supervision and monitoring occurs with age as we judge our children to be increasing in their competence to identify and manage risks.

• We cannot make the internet completely safe. Because of this, we must also build children’s resilience to the material to which they may be exposed so that they have the confidence and skills to navigate these new media waters more safely.

Just a thought

To follow on from Yesterday’s Post ……… John commented:

I guess this might be different on a class/group blog, I hope so as I’ve commented on a few. My own class always seem encouraged by adult comments on their class blog, I’d not thought through the difference with personal blogs, but it it is an important point I think. (Liking the new blog look and title, John!)

This has got me thinking about some more issues. I think that when you set up a class blog and then give the children their own space linked to that, you are in fact setting up a mini online community. The children from my own school, the children from AllStars, from Sandaig, from Loirston and from Dingwall … along with their teachers …. automatically became part of our online community.

Very rarely do the children receive comments from outwith that community. If children post to their individual blogs, they are either from our own school, or one of the ones mentioned previously.

John’s comment reminded me of one other incident maybe worth noting.

Last session Darcie received a comment from a teacher who had left our school a year previously. The teacher was interested in setting up a class blog and had found Darcie’s blog and left a comment on a post.

 It can be viewed HERE.

 The children were unexpectedly bewildered by this, and had difficulty coming to terms with how the blogs were discovered by this teacher. Although all the children were aware of search engines, and had personal experience of using them, they still could not quite grasp how this visitor had stumbled upon one of their blogs.

Visiting children, on the other hand, did not surprise them at all.

They appeared to have had no real conception of what it means to publish to the ‘world wide web’. Their perceived audience was themselves and their peers. 

It re-emphasises the views of Stern (2007) who stresses that knowing that their personal sites are publicly accessible does not lead most young people to envisage a broad audience for their online works.

(Owen et al, 2006) reveal that there is growing emphasis on the need to support young people, not only to acquire knowledge and information, but also to develop the resources and skills necessary to engage with social and technical change.
 

Today’s RSS blog reads led me to the Danah Boyd at HHL08 presentation on Alan Stewart’s blog.  I enjoyed listening to her talk, but I particularly enjoyed the ‘any questions?’ section at the end. What she said reminded me of my readings for the Literature review section of my dissertation. I’ve included bits and pieces here:

In a study involving young people’s use of blogs, Stern (2007) found that knowing that their personal sites are publicly accessible does not lead most young people to envision a broad audience for their online works. Despite their recognition that virtually anyone with Internet access can pore over their sites, most adolescents, by and large, cannot imagine why “some random stranger” would be interested in visiting. Rather, the typical audience that young authors visualize as they deliberate what to post online are those people that they know actually visit their sites and those whom they have directed to visit their sites.

Buckingham (2008) states that recent studies suggest that most young people’s everyday uses of the Internet are characterised, not by spectacular forms of innovation and creativity, but by relatively mundane forms of communication and information retrieval. The technologically empowered “cyberkids” of the popular imagination may indeed exist, but even if they do, they are in a minority and they are untypical of young people as a whole. He argues that there is little evidence that most young people are using the internet to develop global connections, and that in most cases it appears to be used primarily as a means of reinforcing local networks among peers.

In addition, he maintains that in learning with and through these media, young people are also learning how to learn. They are developing particular orientations toward information, particular methods of acquiring new knowledge and skills, and a sense of their own identities as learners. In these domains, they are learning primarily by means of discovery, experimentation, and play, rather than by following external instructions and directions.
 
There is, however, growing concerns about the safety and privacy of young people using these media. Adults worry that, by displaying personal information, young people are putting themselves at risk from predators who may take advantage of the anonymity and unbounded nature of the internet to make contact with young people.  An article in The Times Online (18/1/2008), entitled, ‘Parents Don’t Understand Risks Posed by Internet’, quotes Byron as saying that new technologies have created a generation gap between parents and children:

“Parents are worried about online predators, but children are more concerned about bullying and they don’t differentiate between the real world and online. It starts in the classroom and, when they get home, it’s all over their MySpace page,”

Green and Hannon (2007) found that there are some powerful myths that inform the way people think about youth culture. The main finding from their research was that the use of digital technology has been completely normalised by this generation, and it is now fully integrated into their daily lives. The majority of young people simply use new media as tools to make their lives easier, strengthening their existing friendship networks rather than widening them. Almost all are now also involved in creative production, from uploading and editing photos to building and maintaining websites. The authors argue that the current generation of decision-makers – from politicians to teachers – sees the world from a very different perspective to the generation of young people who do not remember life without the instant answers of the internet. They maintain that schools need to think about how they can prepare young people for the future workplace. They state that, rather than harnessing the technologies that are already fully integrated into young peoples’ daily lives, schools tend to make it clear that these new media tools are unwelcome in the classroom.

Green and Hannon (2007) state that their research suggests that the blanket approach of banning and filtering may not be the most effective safeguard. The children they interviewed were on the whole aware of potential dangers and adept at self-regulating. Where children found it easy to bypass the rules set by schools and parents, they were dependent on their understanding of what constituted inappropriate or risky behaviour.

I think I might have witnessed a bit of what’s been discussed here when I ‘chatted’ to Danni when she was having difficulties getting a Voki to appear on her blog. Danni had already left Carronshore and had no way of contacting me for help apart from leaving a comment on the Carronshore blog. She’d seen that we’d been including Vokis on our edublogs venu, and was having difficulty doing the same on her edubuzz site.

I was able to gatecrash her site, and managed to help her to get the Voki embedded successfully. She left a Thank You post. She received a comment on that post from an ‘unkown adult’  (to her, anyway).

 David Gilmour had been watching the precedings and had left a comment on her blog. When I saw it, I suspected that Danni would have been suspicious that someone outside our circle was leaving comments. It happened on another occasion, too. 

Now, I know that David is a trusted adult – and was able to re-assure Danni the next time we met

There were other times when adults left comments on the pupils’ blogs. This one was left by the owner of the picture that Andrew had ‘pinched’. Once again (even though I had investigated the comment author) lots of re-assurance was necessary.

It was apparent that comments from strangers were only acceptable on their own personal blogs if they were from children their own age