Creating a Student Resources Folder in Google Drive and Google Classroom

Quizlet for Teachers

Trying my hand at Daily Vlogging

Well, I needed to get more comfortable with shooting video on the new camera I bought for my Media Studies class next year (a Panasonic Lumix G7 if you're wondering) and I ran across this somewhat inspirational YouTube channel encouraging people to try vlogging - every day. So I thought why now give it a try. Damn it's hard. Shooting every day, downloading from camera, editing, uploading, creating thumbnails and descriptions! Gave me a serious appreciation for the efforts of YouTubers who vlog daily - it's a serious grind. Anyways, here's my efforts so far over the month of December. I'd have to say that even in the 10 days I've made it so far I've learnt heaps about shooting video, and equally as much about editing.

2018 School Leavers Video

For the past 4 years now the teachers of Waiheke High School have partaken in a tradition of making a teacher's music video for the Year 13 graduates. I helped out with this year's offering by doing some primitive green screens and offering up my machine for last minute editing. I've been using Kdenlive on Ubuntu now for the past few months and I'm really liking it. Finally a robust video editing platform for Linux! Anyways, here's this years teachers video. Enjoy.

Inserting Māori macrons into Google Docs

Couple of quick videos about inserting Māori macrons into Google Docs; firstly, with Easy Accent - an Add-on for Google Docs, and then using the native preferences of Docs and the automatic substitution option to replace commonly used words. As a New Zealand educator I often find myself using a variety of te reo Māori terms in my work so having this last option available is really time-saving for me.

Blockchain

There's a lot of talk about how blockchain will be used for monetary transactions, but we will also see them emerge as containers for credentials like educational qualifications.

Geography is Everything: the pervasive use of virtual reality may arrive sooner than we think

Virtual and omnipresent cyberspaces are set to quickly become a very real part of our geography. The surreal impact of this winter's Pokemon Go trend combined with an inevitable Christmas of affordable headgear would signal a generation fast emerging that will colonise virtual worlds like an empire with a religious imperative and a sextant.

I spoke to my daughter recently about whether she would like to live in Minecraft - a thought experiment that was met by an overwhelmingly positive response and lots of seamless chatter about how living like this would be. Games, in particularly those with extensive and popular narratives developed through vast amounts of user input, like Minecraft, The Sims, and various other game based worlds, are currently still three dimensional models in two dimensional visual spaces. But this is changing fast as the hardware is becoming readily available, especially with the combination of mobile phone plus a visor that seems to be an effective phase in the popularisation of virtual reality.

I anticipate that virtual spaces will collide quite dramatically with many aspects of contemporary society: with the very idea of the nation state, with entertainment paradigms, and ultimately with our most basic ontological categories (including race and sexuality). They'll crash into politics, parenting, commerce, and pedagogy with such an effect that in my opinion it would be insane for education to take a "nostalgic moment" further entrenching an "analog pastoralism" as my old neighbor from LA, Ben Bratton, has referred to it in his work on software, global computation, and sovereignty. What full scale adoption of new digital technologies means for educators is a continued and more open reflection on the varied and complex history of success and failures of the public education project. But debating whether the presence of personal technology in our, and our children's, everyday work and lives is a now a totally mute point. The questions of how we might use technology to contribute to, or detract from, developing concepts of citizenship (in existing, and new, geographies) is still a pillar of such an educational project in my view. My point is that debating the when is just to lose precious time when we need to be reinventing or at least "up-skilling" ourselves.
  

For the educational project, if “geography is everything”, as a geography teacher friend of mine is prone to saying, then the categories of geography like the the state, culture, location, and human-environment interaction, etc., are probably a good place to start. What are the implications when many people are extant largely outside of the many traditional structures of the state? What do non-disputable digital identities based on blockchain technology imply for an individuals' futures as they occupy, act, and behave in such spaces for their education, their employment, and their legal needs? Geography confronts a lot of these more head-on than many subjects of the high school curriculum.

There are a lot of questions, but to be sure we (educators, parents, and government) place a lot of emphasis on education as sort of buffer to total immersion. Our project as early educators are often tied to predictions of students' futures, of immersion in  "the real world" of work and careers, or higher education, or into the difficult problems of our world. Our youth are about to become significantly immersed in virtual worlds, and unless we are open to this, and can start talking about this in the staff rooms and online spaces of our profession as a pending reality we will be overtaken by it's tsunami-like change. 

Using Slack in a High School Class

In the short time I've been teaching high school I've had hundreds of opportunities to witness students in my classes log into their email accounts. It's always quite shocking to see the multitudes of unread emails that wallpaper their inboxes, but I'm no longer surprised. The fact is that they don't like email. Email was very late in providing a friendly mobile experience; it's not really a format for synchronous communication; and its form is associated with an adult world of formalities. Plus the emoticons suck.

This bothers me because as a teacher, and particularly a teacher with a background in online technology and eLearning, I feel a strong need to be able to communicate via online channels with students, and up until now email has been my core communication tool. Email is embedded not only into my way of working but it is a fundamental feature of many of the other services we use in education. Google Classroom fires off an email for almost every interaction available to you.

So my dilemma has been: how to communicate with students online without hammering them with the message of "check your email, check your email"? I decided this year that I wanted try a space that would work for the both of us, rather than forcing them into spaces that worked for me. I entertained the idea of Facebook, but not for long. Not only are the teenage stats for Facebook declining, but I find the privacy settings to be quite confusing and I didn't want to use a platform that blurred the lines between our school lives and our personal lives that much. I considered Instagram and its new chat / group function, but the focus on pictures and almost no options for linking out or adding files dissuaded me. Snapchat? I asked #edchatNZ about that on Twitter and was quickly warned about the fact that the quick deletion of posts led towards an ethical quagmire around accountability. Part of me also didn't want to colonise another of their spaces with school stuff. They need spaces that are free from teachers.

Enter my experiment with Slack. Slack is an online platform partially promoted as a replacement for email for teams. Slack has many of the features of a social media platform: direct messaging, the ability to quickly create channels for unique discussion topics, and more importantly it has a seamless mobile experience and notifications. This last feature is possibly the most important one. Notifications are key. If it's not sending out notifications it may as well not exist. Our Year 9 English Slack team (that's what groups are called in Slack) is by invite only and you have to have an email from our school domain to join; this keeps us safe and creates a space that is private to us. I've integrated our class Google Calender into Slack so that reminders of upcoming events are sent into a channel, and I've added the Google Drive integration so we can quickly share docs from inside our Drives. Slack makes me available to answer questions from students from 8:00am to 5:30pm. I've set that time myself and told the class; after 5:30pm notifications are off, and my status is set to 'away'.^*

Not only does this class use Slack outside of class times, but we also use it inside of class as well. Our silent writing sessions (this is a BYOD 1:1 device class) are only silent vocal chord times. Having an efficient platform for quick communication allows us to maintain a quiet environment for writing or other study, but at the same time doesn't shut down communication completely. Students can ask me questions on Slack during this period, or they can talk to each other about work. They can create their own channels on the platform, invite who they want, then delete them when they're done. There are already a couple going that I've not been invited to (although as admin I can actually see them).

Here are the stats after 9 weeks of the use of Slack in our class of 31 students:

• Approximately 3,000 messages have been sent.
• 469 (16%) messages are in public channels (public to members of our team),
• the rest (2,500+) have been Direct Messages (DMs, private between individuals).
• 146 files have been posted. 

I feel as if that's a pretty good indicator of engagement, and I also wonder if the platform is enabling students who are a bit too shy to ask questions in class more opportunities to engage with me one on one.

There is a lot of potential for the use of synchronous communication tools and social media in education. Slack is working well for me in this respect and I will continue to use it in the BYOD class. The free offering of the platform is adequate for our current needs and we're still exploring and finding new ways to use it as we become more familiar with it. Plus, the emojis are awesome.

(I'm leaving talk of the slackbot for another post.)

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* I've modified this post since originally authoring it and I think it's worthwhile mentioning that here. Originally I had my 'office hours' set to be from 8:30am to 10:30pm - essentially the hours that I'm awake, but it's been suggested to me by an adviser at school that I reconsider this practice. He alerted me to ethical considerations around making myself available at night, as well as considerations about 'teacher burnout', etc. My rationale was that these are the hours that I'm online and that being a fully connected individual for the majority of that time I am available and willing to respond to student requests for help during these times. This has made some teachers quite uncomfortable as they see that it may raise expectations on them and the profession at large. There was also some discussion around the remunerative aspect of being available over this period, but the elephant in that room seems to be that all teachers are working far beyond the hours they are remunerated for anyways. But, for the time-being I've modified my 'office hours' to be more in-line with the normal work day.

What do you think?

George Siemens' Five elements for edtech

1. Does the technology foster creativity and personal expression?
2. Does the technology develop the learner and contribute to her formation as a person?
3. Is the technology fun and engaging?
4. Does the technology have the human teacher and/or peer learners at the centre?
5. Does the technology consider the whole learner?

Read the full article here:
Is Education Technology Losing Its Humanity?

As if teachers' jobs aren't hard enough, they're asked to fix poverty, too

Panic and Pedagogy

Panic. There seems to be an awful lot of it in the staff rooms of schools these days. Either you’re a teacher panicking about the digital world, or you’re not. Not that panics are new. In the 1950’s people panicked about comic books - comics were destroying the youth. They were banned for a while, censored essentially. Before that radio was destroying youth; then TV, video games, the Internet, social media. Catholics thought the printing press was going to destroy their version of God. Do we really have such little faith in youth? Is media really the great destroyer? Age destroys youth. Most of us are still here. Un-destroyed? by media. Perhaps it’s just change that adults are afraid of. Youth isn’t afraid of change, they don’t have enough context to even sense it. It just is. Like Heraclitus said,“The only thing that is constant is change.” They live in the stream. Adulthood tries to set itself up against the flow. You “settle down”. You become a sort of rock, rather than a leaf. Eventually though it will wear you down. I’m trying to be a cork.

Digital Pepeha

Here are the Digital Pepeha that I've had permission to upload to YouTube so far.

Antonio Gramsci

"The history of education shows that every class which has sought to take power has prepared itself for power by an autonomous education. The first step in emancipating oneself from political and social slavery is that of freeing the mind. I put forward this new idea: popular schooling should be placed under the control of the great workers’ unions. The problem of education is the most important class problem."

Gramsci, cited in Davidson's (1977) Antonio Gramsci: Towards an Intellectual Biography. London: Merlin Press., p. 77.

See page for author [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons

Digital Pepeha: an enquiry into technology and tikanga Māori

Tangata Whenuatanga

Socio-cultural awareness and knowledge. Recognising that learning occurs within a cultural context. Knowledge of whakapapa; knowing who children are; where they are from and who they belong to. Our Identities, our languages, and our culture.

My enquiry consists of the planning, development, and teaching of a unit for Year 7 and 8 Digital Literacy classes where students will develop a “Digital Pepeha”.

The project acknowledges the worldview (whether Māori, Pākeha, or whatever Iwi) of our rangatahi (youth) and their digital realities. There is a naturalisation of sharing and the forming of social bonds (Manākitanga), often across physical distances, present in their lives as digital citizens. This enquiry aims to combine a contemporary aspect of their worldview with a particular piece of tikanga Māori - the pepeha.

The pepeha is a way to introduce yourself in te reo Māori. It delivers a brief historical, geographic, and genealogical overview of the speaker’s background. The pepeha’s narrative journey back in time culminates in the speaker’s name, and lastly his or her marae.

It is easy in a class focussing on Digital Literacies to be obsessed with the future. Such contemporary courses align well with our developing “future focus”, a pedagogical strategy embedded within a particularly Pākehā cosmology that privileges the future over the past. The Digital Pepeha aims to explore how digital literacies may intersect with an aspect of a traditional Māori worldview, particularly the tradition of walking backwards into the future, “Ka mura, ka muri.”?

81.5% of Māori know which “iwi” they belong to, indicating that whakapapa might still be a strong influence in the worldviews of most Maori.
http://www.putatara.net/2013/12/the-maori-worldview/

Where I’m at so far:

To accomplish this required me to explore and develop my own pepeha. To this end I have consulted with Whaea Te Ao Marama Hau, and Whaea Huhanna Davis regarding the pepeha form. I have also developed the Digital Pepeha Generator, a Google Form that enables students to enter the specific elements of their pepeha (maunga, awa, moana, etc.,) online in order to generate both English and te reo Māori versions of their pepeha automatically. We are currently compiling the text and images for generation of the final products.

My Pepeha (so far):

Tēnā koutou katoa

Ko te Whitirea te maunga
Ko Pipitea te awa
Ko te Titahi te moana
Ko Ngati Pākehā te iwi
Ko Simpson te hapu
Ko Roger tōku matua
Ko Thomas tōku whaea
Ko Glenn tōku tungane
Ko Jackson raua ko Georgia ōku tamariki
Ko Michelle tōku wahine
Ko Brent Simpson tōku ingoa
Ko Piritahi te marae

No reira, tēnā koutou, tēnā koutou, tēnā koutou katoa.

Speculation on Education

Pieter Brueghel the Elder (1526/1530–1569) [Public domain or Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons

speculate: to invest money in ways that could produce a large profit, but that also involve a large risk. Can also be used in the sense of to form theories, or conjecture on something without any firm evidence. The combination of these two definitions is the backdrop to the phrase, "put your money where your mouth is."

There is risk in speculation. 

We need to know where our mouths are. Often they're in the same place, repeating the same stories; a broken place where our deepest passions like science, governance, and education are just big problems in need of fixing.

The Conversation, Arnold Lakhovsky [Public domain or Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons

As this blog nears 10 years (a fact pointed out to me by a student in Genius Project) the Pedagogy of the Compressed still consumes me; but now my speculation on transformation is gaining it's mouth and it's money. If I invest in this, what will profit look like? What would the risk entail?

Is public schooling an outdated concept? What does divorced from the workplace mean? Are examinations as assessment a relic of modernity? How do we continue to "lift all boats"?

Genius Project is go!

Genius Project at Waiheke High School was inspired by Daniel Pink’s book ‘Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us’ which promotes the concepts of Autonomy, Mastery, and Purpose as key factors in human motivation and performance. The name Genius Project comes from Genius Hour, a school version of  the original '20% time' pioneered by Google and 3M. The Google and 3M 20% time gave engineers and other employees one day a week to work on whatever took their fancy. This approach has resulted in the development of Gmail and Google Earth for Google, and Post-it notes for 3M (one of their most successful products), and it has been credited with increased productivity and employee satisfaction.

The project has been adapted for schools worldwide and allows students 1 hour a week in class (usually 20% of that class time) to work on a project of their own making. Caroline Crow, a maths teacher, and myself, now an English teacher, are running Genius Project on Friday at 5th period in her year 11 mathematics class. This is the last period of the school week. What better time could you get! For more information on our Genius Project check out the class Google site: WHS Genius Hour and take a look at the student blogs to see what kind of projects are going on. And please comment on student blogs if you see something you like. It would be great to get some global feedback going.

Autonomy

I spent the first day of the term in my Year 11 English class talking about the idea of autonomy and how I would to endeavor to create more of an environment for facilitating greater autonomy for the rest of the year. The easy way forward was to provide greater autonomy over student selection of the content we were studying for a variety of the NCEA standards. I suspect that for most of my students' schooling teachers had decided what the content was to be studied, and if they weren't actually outright dictating the content, they were providing a limited selection from which students could choose. I had done exactly this my first term and students, rightly so, didn't see it as real 'choice' - they saw it as "you can pick what you like as long as you pick one of what I give you."

My sole reason for focusing on autonomy is to try to increase student engagement. I was inspired by the book by Daniel Pink called Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us. This text, and many others, argue that greater student autonomy (although the benefits of autonomy are not limited by any means to just students) leads to higher levels of engagement, while on the other side of the spectrum high levels of control leads to compliance.

But the problem I see now is not just student autonomy, it is also teacher autonomy. The sheer amount of assessment and reporting that is required by government education agencies forces teachers into compliance mode, teaching for the test, timetabled, fordist curriculum routines, and one-size fits-all teaching. It's difficult to teach autonomy from a position that is so controlled and it can result in a level of disengagement by teachers. If we want autonomous and engaged students, we also need autonomous and engaged teachers. 

How can we change this? That's probably another blog post (or two, or three), but I think we need to start discussing the power and trust we have given over to politicians to influence education. We need to start asking the hard questions before we scramble for solutions to problems that are not really at the core of the tradition that educators know best; problems that are created by the media, by electioneering, or by the untrained, unexperienced with tall soap-boxes and hidden agendas. Whether politics hinders or enhances our educational system must be a core enquiry. 

Most Likely to Succeed

I hope that this doco comes to New Zealand. We need to get on board faster than we are.


Most Likely to Succeed Trailer from One Potato Productions on Vimeo.

ChangSchoolTalks 2015: Stephen Downes

A very condensed overview of the thoughts of Stephen Downes on future learning. In New Zealand/Aotearoa we still seem to be in some sort of design mode; we talk about iteration, enquiry, and we amplify structural problems by throwing computer power or better WiFi at schools. The challenge is deeper; it's actually a societal question that must in some part transcend the politics of the day, but politicians are too embedded in our secondary education system, they're implicit in it, and their neo-liberal logic means schools are the babysitters of capitalism, not cauldrons of intellect or innovation. I believe we can change this, but we need to think on it more like Downes and less like Hekia Parata.

John Hattie interview

John Hattie talks about his Visible Learning programme.