Deep Learning

A recurring theme of articles on this site is the question of what our goals should be and a clear element of this is a desire to go beyond a recall of facts and encourage deep learning. Whether this be as a result of asking non-googleable questions, encouraging students to evaluate ideas that matter and create original content while applying a mix of thinking skills and habits of mind, the aim is to evolve our students into deeply reflective learners.

Katrina Schwartz on Mind/Shift reports a study into Deeper Learning that raises some interesting points on how this may be achieved. The study reported six competencies for deeper learning; 'mastering content, critical thinking, effective written and oral communication, collaboration, learning how to learn, and developing academic mindsets.'

The report discusses a range of strategies that promote deeper thinking including careful design of the questions students are asked to engage with, the inclusion of opportunities for students to be hands on and build things and for them to deal with real world problems.

Allowing students to have a voice in the design of topics that genuinely engage their interests is one strategy offered. At Redlands students during their final term of Year Six engage in a 'Personal Passion Project'. Students design this project in collaboration with their teachers and are able to pursue any topic as long as it is personally relevant and designed in a way that will require them to use their high order thinking skills. This means that students are encouraged away from topics that require only recall or curation of facts easily found on Google. In practical terms this often involves a minor adjustment to the wording of a project; a process assisted by the use of verbs applicable to Bloom's 'High Order Thinking Skills'. Over the years we have run this project the one consistent element is that student engagement goes through the roof, the quality of thinking is very high and the results are amazing. In recent years students have made a laser engraving machine from old printers, explored low cost recycled insulation materials for emergency housing and evaluated programmes for training netball players at an elite level. At the end of term students present their works to an audience of parents and teachers from our Senior School. Access to a real audience is an important part of this process and ensures students see the relevance of their learning, not to mention the importance of the positive feedback provided by an impressed group of adults.

The report touches on the importance of developing mindsets that will allow student to achieve success with four beliefs identified as crucial;  

  • I can change my intelligence and abilities through effort, 
  • I can succeed, 
  • LI belong in this learning community, 
  • This work has value and purpose for me.

These mindsets closely resemble the Positive Thoughts identified by 'Lifelong Achievement Group'. Developed by Andrew Martin 'The Motivation and Engagement Wheel' groups factors that promote and block success into four categories; Positive Thoughts, Positive Behaviours, Negative Behaviours and Negative Thoughts. Positive Thoughts include, self-belief, valuing and learning focus while Negative Thoughts include uncertain control and anxiety. Read more about the 'The Motivation and Engagement Wheel' at lifelongachievement.com

Deep Learning is identified as an emerging trend for Education in the '2014 NMC Horizon Report' where the maturation of existing technologies in schools is predicted to see an expansion in the use of this to fuel deeper levels of engagement with challenge based learning linked to real world scenarios. 

As technologies such as tablets and smartphones now have proven applications in schools, educators are leveraging these tools, which students already use, to connect the curriculum with real life issues. The active learning approaches are decidedly more student-centered, allowing them to take control of how they engage with a subject and to brainstorm and implement solutions to pressing local and global problems. The hope is that if learners can connect the course material with their own lives and their surrounding communities, then they will become more excited to learn and immerse themselves in the subject matter. Read 2014 NMC K-12 Horizon Report

Read the article 'Beyond Knowing Facts, How Do We Get to a Deeper Level of Learning?'

by Nigel Coutts

25 Things Skilled Learners Do Differently

One of the reasons we teach the Habits of Mind is that we understand these are the habits of both successful people and learners. We blend the Habits of Mind with Thinking Routines because this provides a tool kit for students and teachers to use as they seek to increase their application of the habits. But is this the sort of process skilled learners do that distinguishes them from those who struggle?

Saga Briggs writes for Open Colleges and describes '25 Things Skilled Learners Do Differently’. In this comprehensive list with succinct descriptions of what learners do one can identify many of the Habits of Mind and also situations where skilled learners are applying worthwhile thinking routines. Saga identifies that the things skilled learners do are learnable and sees the list as a set of strategies we can teach. I would suggest that a useful way of attacking this challenge from multiple angles is to use a combination of Habits of Mind and Making Thinking Visible or Thinkers Key style thinking routines.

What are the 25 things skilled learners do differently?
See how the Habits of Mind and Thinking Routines work together.

by Nigel Coutts

Inquiry Based Learning is dead, long live inquiry.

In the ebb and flow of educational theories and approaches to learning one can see many commonalities to the world of fashion. A good idea emerges, becomes mainstream, is appropriated by a wide number of educators who blend the essential elements into their methodology and over time the once good idea becomes an oversimplified or slightly misunderstood model of what it once was. In no short time another idea emerges and this takes the place of the last. The link to the fashion industry is that most educators know to keep their old resources, as what was out of fashion in one decade will be the darling idea of the next.

And so some are saying that this is the case for Inquiry Based Learning. The logic of this claim lies in a report by Liem & Martin (2013) on the effectiveness of Direct Instruction over alternative instructional methods. This report, based on a meta-analysis of existing studies dating back to 1996, showed that Direct Instruction was the most effective means of instruction for a wide range of students across a mix of factors and resulted in the highest levels of achievement. "a bulk of evidence supports the benefits of DI and its key instructional practices relative to minimally guided or unassisted instructions."

Before we get too far into this discussion it should be made clear what is meant by direct instruction. 

"Direct instruction (DI), which originated in the work of Engelmann and colleagues in the 1960s, is a systematic model of teaching that focuses on a sequenced and incremental mastery of curriculum- based competence and a capacity to apply generalizable skills to tackle other similar questions/problems (Adams & Engelmann, 1996). DI is implemented through carefully planned lessons in which students are provided with substantial, and yet gradually reduced, guidance (i.e., mediated scaffolding).” (Liem & Martin 2013) 

The implications of the report are that teachers can facilitate learning for their students by applying a DI model that; ensures students see the task as achievable and manageable, provides a clear sequence of well thought-through instructions, by teachers posing questions and modeling the use of problem solving strategies and providing students with opportunities to deliberately and purposefully practice the skills and knowledge they learn. This model when looked at on both a small scale lesson to lesson basis or on a learning journey across multiple years of education makes sense and is in keeping with the practice observed in many classrooms at one point or another.

The report is clear on additional points that should not be ignored. "However, this is not to dismiss the constructivist view of learning–which is often believed to be supported by minimally guided instructions–because DI principles and practices are indeed useful to promote the process of knowledge construction.” Andrew Martin has also spoken of the need to avoid a dichotomous approach to DI vs. Inquiry or Problem Based Learning; the best results can be achieved by using the right approach for the desired outcome rather than being guided by dogmatic beliefs. What the report is not advocating is a teacher centric classroom in which the students are the passive receptors of information provided by the teacher with all aspects of the lesson delivered lecture style. Reducing a DI framework to ‘Chalk & Talk’ is not the intent of the report although an appropriate measure of this will occur.

What the report does not touch on is the question of ‘What should we teach?’ 

If you have listened to any of the recent TED Talks by Sir ken Robinson, Sugata Mitra, Ian Jukes and others, you will understand that education is facing a radical change as we move to preparing our students for a post industrial revolution era. Ian Jukes outlines a world already emerging in which the repetitive cognitive tasks so common in offices of western nations today will be replaced by machines or unskilled workers in emerging nations. You will have heard that as a result of the growth of the Internet, teaching students isolated content is a fruitless task. What is needed is an educational system that teaches students to think, imagine, create and solve problems that do not yet exist. Not that this is a truly radical idea, Einstein understood this and stated ‘Education is not the learning of facts, it’s rather the training of a mind to think’. What our students will require is an ability to be inquisitive, solution focused problem solvers who are able to apply their imaginations towards creative endeavours and to do this in an environment of collaboration.

David Perkins, a founding member of Harvard Project Zero offers insights to these questions in his book 'Future Wise: Educating our Children for a Changing World’. Perkins conducts research on creativity in the arts and sciences, informal reasoning, problem solving, understanding, individual and organizational learning, and the teaching of thinking skills. He advocates that teachers and curriculum administrators rethink what gets taught in schools. 

"What’s conventionally taught may not develop the kinds of citizens, workers, and family and community members we want and need. The basic skills of reading, writing, and arithmetic, even if strongly developed, aren’t enough. The familiar disciplines in their traditional versions, sitting in their silos, constrained by regional perspectives, and taught to all comers for purely academic understanding aren’t enough. The universe of what’s seen as worth learning is expanding. (Perkins 2014)

David asks us to identify the learning that is “Lifeworthy, that is, likely to matter in the lives learners are likely to live”. He questions many of the lessons we as teachers believe as critical for all learners to experience using the infamous quadratic equation as an example of a concept taught to all but relevant to few. 
"Opportunity cost makes a fundamental point about decision making: when we decide in favor of one course of action, we forgo others that might have generated certain benefits. A cost of the path we choose is loss of benefits from the abandoned paths. With quadratic equations as with anything else, we have to ask not just whether they are nice to understand in themselves but what might have been learned instead.” 
David suggests that much of what was taught was useful in a world where the future that our students entered was similar to that experienced by their parents; predictable and known. Tomorrow’s world will not be like this and we consequently need to be more "future wise”.

This focus on a particular set of flexible adaptable skills is not intended to be at the complete abandonment of knowledge or content. 
"To be sure, it’s nice to know everything in those textbooks. We want to be careful about what we toss. Knowing a lot well at an acquaintance level— a cappella, cholesterol, zygote— is a hallowed mission of education still relevant today.”(Perkins 2014) 
The important part of this is the phrase ‘acquaintance level’. It is useful to understand that there were significant historic periods and probably useful to be able to name them, but for the non-professional historian specialising in renaissance life in the villages of southern France, a deeper knowledge is not required or beneficial. Knowing enough to provide points of reference and starting points for inquiry is in most areas of study enough. 

The next question to be answered then is how may we best prepare our students. What pedagogical approach will arm them with the skills required in this brave new world where they are the creators and shapers of knowledge and ideas. Clearly it makes sense that we teach them these skills and dispositions and provide them with opportunities to apply these. Doing this does not however require a classroom environment devoid of direction and guidance from experts. If our goal is to teach students to swim we would not do so by pushing them into the sea, but we would also not expect them to learn to swim without ever getting into the water. Yes we want our students to be able to independently inquire and solve problems but we also need to show them how. This is where much of the debate about the merits of Inquiry Based Learning vs. Direst Instruction falls apart as it should be our goal to produce students adept at Inquiry Based Learning but this should not dictate our methodology. Every student needs to be shown how to inquire, how to develop big questions, how to solve diverse and novel problems and how to be creative. We need to model these skills, allow time to reflect on their utility and provide tangible strategies to apply. Further to all of this our students need opportunities to apply this kind of thinking to problems that matter to them in a safe environment that is tolerant of failure and provides guidance when things go wrong and we do all this so that eventually they will do this without us.

Our students will learn in a multiplicity of environments and in a variety of individual and group settings. This has always been the case but today the tools enabling this learning have grown in potency. Every laptop is a billion volume library with an array of multimedia learning opportunities available that we as humble classroom teachers can not hope to compete with in terms of student engagement regardless of how colourful our whiteboard displays may be or how interactive our Smartboards are. New ways of learning, sharing, making and creating continue to emerge and the school day increasingly forms a small package of a child’s total learning. Acknowledging this and allowing students to bring this out of school learning into the classroom adds new dimensions to what is possible. It also provides new challenges as we lose control over what our students are learning, what they know and what they can do. One solution to this is for teachers to empower students as teachers, to take a step back and allow the students to lead. Sugata Mitra through his ‘Hole in the Wall’ experiment found that this style of collaborative learning could be very effective particularly when it is empowered by a non-expert mentor. He refers to this as the 'Role of the Grandmother’. In this model the teacher allows the students to share their knowledge and skill, to work together to solve a problem while the teacher interjects the well-timed encouraging word or question to re-shape their thinking. Building on from the strategies we have taught the students and the modeling of problem solving we have provided this model makes for excellent independent practice. Our goal remains as the production of talented inquirers and problem solvers but here too this is developed in ways that scaffold success.

A linked perspective on this and one that touches upon the ultimate significance of Inquiry Based Learning is presented by Chris Lehmann who writes "In a true inquiry-based model, how learning happens isn’t as important as whether that learning encourages students to try to learn even more." If we take this idea and see the success of our programmes in a mix of student engagement with the process of learning now and their desire to continue as learners beyond the constrains of our schools we are likely to have a different conclusion on which model provides the highest level of achievement but we are not freed from the question of how we will enable our students to be successful inquirers. 

So, maybe Inquiry Based Learning is dead. Maybe once we take a few moments to reflect on its passing we will be able to see that in truth we misunderstood its place in our classrooms and see it as our ultimate goal and not a methodology. Once we do this we can go back to trying to understand how we may best support our students achieve their potential and prepare for a world beyond our classrooms.

By Nigel Coutts

Read & Write for Google

Every day we expect our students to engage with a wide variety of texts as readers, writers, editors and researchers. For many of our students this reliance on text presents a real challenge that can stand in the way of them achieving other goals. For a student still struggling with handwriting or typing, a routine task that requires a written response can be an obstacle to their success, despite a detailed understanding of the content. A student with a difficulty in reading will encounter similar obstacles when a task requires them to access information from a written text and the demands of bringing a mix of ideas presented in a document from working memory into a coherent summary can challenge many learners.

For teachers looking to apply a Universal Design for Learning approach these obstacles to learning could be overcome by selecting alternative ways of engaging with or responding to the content or students could be guided towards using Read & Write for Google.

Read & Write provides a useful set of tools for students who struggle with text. It provides a text reader, speech input, highlighter and summary tools, dictionary and picture dictionary. It works with Google Docs, PDF, ePub and Kes bringing new functionality to each format. It is free for teachers and is well worth exploration.

Jason Carroll of Spectronics Blog provides a detailed introduction to Read & Write for Google - Visit Now 

 

By Nigel Coutts

EduTech 2014

In June I had the opportunity to attend EduTech 2014 in Brisbane. Billed as the largest Educational Technology conference in Australia and boasting keynote speakers such as Sir ken Robinson and Sugata Mitra this was an opportunity I was looking forward to. Looking back now on the week I can confidently say it lived up to expectation. It presented a vision for a future in which education has a key role to play but a model of education unlike that we are used to. 

The common message was that schools need to change, to move towards the development of skills applicable to life long learning in an environment where creative problem solving is valued. Schools will best serve their students by moving away from content delivery and by embracing an understanding of the tools available to the learner in a connected world. The speakers outlined a confluence of factors that make the chalk and talk model of the past obsolete. The rapid expansion of connected technologies, changes to the global career market, population pressures and emerging industries present new challenges and schools will need radical transformation if they are to remain relevant.

Sugata Mitra started the week off and presented well-researched evidence for why the students of the near future will learn in an environment fundamentally different to the schools built to meet the needs of the industrial revolution. He spoke of the lessons learned from his ‘Hole in the Wall’ experiment in which students who were provided with access to the internet were able to meet learning goals considered impossible. This research led to the SOLE (Self Organised Learning Environment) model which is becoming popular across the world and is evolving into ‘The School in the Cloud”.  

Listening to Sugata describe his research process was entertaining and compelling. He described setting up an experiment designed to fail in which he provided a group of students who only spoke Tamil access to resources for the study of gene replication. He hoped that as this was a sufficiently complex topic and as the information was provided only in English the students were destined to fail. Disappointingly they did not. At the end of the experiment they were able to describe in their recently developed English how genes replicated. What was perhaps most surprising was that despite this feat of learning they began their response with “We have learned nothing, except  . . .’ where the ‘except’ was a beautifully coherent description of gene replication. From his research Sugata concluded that the power of the Internet is the learning it makes possible in an environment of collaboration. 

At the heart of this models success is collaboration. The students learned from each other, sharing knowledge, testing ideas, putting together the pieces of knowledge they gained and together drawing conclusions. This aspect of his research throws into question the trend towards 1:1 tech programmes. The forced sharing and collaboration that came from a scarcity of resources needs to be built into systems where each child has their own device.

Sugata also spoke about the role of the right type of feedback and encouragement in this model describing the ‘Role of the Grandmother’. The feedback or encouragement from the non-expert encourages the learner to continue to explore. To facilitate this he has employed a team of ‘grandmothers’ who listen to what the students are doing, provide non-specific positive feedback and thusly encourage the students to continue their exploration. This is so unlike the feedback commonly given to students where they are told whether they are right or wrong.

Lastly he spoke of learning as an edge of chaos phenomenon. Learning is described as what occurs when one is faced with the unknown and needs to move forward. For this chaos to exist though teachers need to give up a degree of control. We may like a completely ordered system where all is predictable; however, if we set up a predictable environment how do we know we have predicted everything. In chaos new outcomes become available, new learning can occur and discovery becomes possible.

His research challenges notions of a need to spoon feed content to students. Learning in a SOLE does not always have to be obvious. The best questions might be ‘I wonder ...’ and the trick is to not have an answer or to pick a topic with no answer. With this in place and with access to the right tools students are able to Self Organise their learning, to collaborate, to evaluate and explore directions not otherwise conceived. The possibility SOLE offers educators is a model for a learning environment where the core skills developed are exactly those students will require in a post industrial revolution age. 

Anthony Scalcito – Microsoft - Daily Edventures Blog

Next on the agenda was Anthony Scalcito of Microsoft. He spoke of the need for a Holistic Transformation of Learning. Building on from Sugata’s SOLE model he described how learning has fundamentally changed – ‘your students are learning without you’. In the internet age kids grow up surrounded by learning.

Anthony spoke of the 1:1 movement and how too often educators start with the wrong questions about how to use the device not what we want to achieve for the students. He outlined how his research and experience shows that the best innovations are when the learning environment changes. By putting discussions about dynamic exciting learning on the table and talking about how we set up environments for learning and not focusing on what gets taught or what device it gets taught on is essential.

A key advantage of technology enabled learning according to Anthony is the opportunity to deliver enhanced levels of differentiation. Schools can achieve an A-E grade in the same way for all and at the same pace OR aim for an A grade achieved by all at their pace and in their way. Having spent time recently researching ‘Universal Design for Learning’ this ideas of adapting the learning to the learner, instead of trying to adapt the learner to the learning or allowing some learners to achieve less because the system does not suit them makes sense. Technology allows this shift so all students move on to the next step when they are ready. 

Anthony shared some tools Microsoft is developing to enable this enhanced learning environment.

·       ‘Office Mix’ is a set of tools for creating online courses from the familiarity of the Office Suite of applications. Easy to use and to create content

·       Oslo. Bringing content to you in a manageable form with tools for collaboration. 

From his classroom experience he shared the story of an innovative use for Skype. Mystery Skype is a game played between schools on a global level where classrooms connect with each other and through a Question and Answer process try to guess where the other school is located. The students seemed very engaged with the process and learned a good deal about cultures as a result. 

He spoke of the ‘New Pedagogies for Deep Learning Project’ as a potential source of ideas. This project is definitely worth further exploration. 

Lastly he spoke of the need to move beyond Data to Actionable Information. For schools the amount of data we have access to is ever increasing. Anthony made the point that we now need to be able to act on that data in meaningful ways and that for this to happen it needs to presented in ways that are meaningful to the end user. When we move to Actionable Information about our students we are able to better plan for and meet their needs.

Student Voices – Brett Moller (Moderator) Faith Ty & Leio McLaren (Students)

This session was handed over to the students. First up Faith described how she had used Garage Band on her iPad to produce a piece of music selected for the Tripple J Radio programme ‘Uneathed’. In front of a large audience of educators this young lady re-produced her track demonstrating her knowledge of music, her talent for composition and the potential of mobile devices. Her award-winning track recorded under her stage name 'Cypher' is worth listening to and clearly shows what our students are capable of when provided with the right tools and teachers who let them explore. 

Listen to Liar by Cypher

Next up was Leio who passionately spoke of the importance of all students learning to code. His story was one that would challenge many educators as his knowledge of coding and ability to learn it went well beyond that of the typical teacher. Leio learned in many respects in spite of the education system but he was lucky enough to have teachers who understood enough of what he was doing to not put barriers in his way. Leio has gone on to produce App’s that have been featured on Apples iTunes store and are already making him money. He is the founder of AppAppAway and is suitably proud of his achievements. He has moved beyond just making and selling simple Apps to developing his own App Development Agency. 

Digital Literacy – Jenny Luca - http://jennyluca.wikispaces.com/EduTECH+2014

Jenny Luca spoke about the skills students require as they navigate an online world beginning with three key areas – connect, collaborate and curate. Her presentation was fast paced and covered concepts from the Australian Curriculum to tools that enable learning. Fortunately her slides are available online via the link above and worth a visit. In particular her slides ‘Future Work Skills’, ‘Ten Skills for the Future Workforce’ and ‘Digitally Resilient’ deserve a second look. The concept of being digitally resilient is particularly relevant to teachers as we explore and sometimes test new technologies. Digital Resilience will allow the teacher to push past the roadblocks and problems encountered and persist with the implementation of a new idea. In Jenny’s slideshows you will find numerous ideas including tools for the digital classroom, simple timesavers and a well-researched approach to privacy. I would recommend anyone with an interest in online privacy and youth online read Deborah Boyd’s book ‘It’s complicated’ that describes how young people really are using the internet and social media and in doing so dispels many of the myths and fears around the topic. 

Panel Discussion

A panel discussion of ‘Future possibilities of the cloud for school’ presented some of the opportunities of cloud based computing and indicated some of the pitfalls that may be encountered along the way. Clearly this is the way computing is moving but while the panel covered the topic well, the panellists failed to go beyond the fundamentals. It was a fair introduction for those beginning to explore Cloud computing but not much for those already living there.

Judy O’Connel introduced the topic of Web 3.0 and described some of the potential of innovations in this area. Judy has shared her slideshow online and for those wanting to better understand the impact the World Wide Web has had over its 25 year history or to see how it may evolve over the coming years this link is worth exploring. http://www.slideshare.net/heyjudeonline/preparing-for-the-impact-of-web-30

Sir Ken Robinson

Sir Ken Robinson was undoubtedly a highlight of the two days. His mix of informative presentation and humour makes for a polished and convincing presentation. He spoke of the need for an ongoing transformation of Education with a focus on creativity. He summarised much of his writing to date and subtly mentioned his books on the subjects of Education and Creativity. In other talks, including his well watched TED Talks he has described the importance of creativity for schools and the sad reality that schools often stand in the way of this process. 

An interesting experiment he shared is based on student responses when asked to complete a drawing. Each group is provided with a piece of paper on which a triangle has been drawn. One groups is told they will be given points for correct answers the other is not. The first group mostly produced predictable drawings of a house with a triangular roof; the second group produced a great variety of creative drawing using more colours and a mix of themes. The results can bee seen below.

 

What differentiated this talk from Ken’s other presentation was his focus on a need for education to change due to increases in population that makes present models of delivery unsustainable. This was a new and compelling explanation for the need to change. If we are to meet the needs of an ever-expanding population we need to look for more efficient ways of doing so. 

Sir Ken was as always inspiring and his speech was an experience that will stay with me for a long time. In some ways though he has perhaps become the iPhone of the Educational speakers, a great experience, the best available but maybe overexposed

Gary Stager - http://stager.org/news.html

Gary Stager started the second day and brought his passion and excitement for the maker movement to life. Gary is the author of ‘Invent to Learn: Making, Tinkering and Engineering in the Classroom’ a book I would recommend to anyone interested in the maker movement for education.  He showed the quality and breadth of learning that occurs in an environment that presents students with multi-faceted problems that engage their desire to learn. Gary is a master of finding tasks that are highly engaging, deeply challenging, academically rigorous and blend learning across the curriculum. He described a meeting in which he and his colleagues analysed a single engineering task involving students modifying a robot to complete a set course. In this one task they had managed to touch on a great array of Common Core Outcomes. Gary’s students must leave the classroom every day feeling they have had a day of play almost oblivious to the many outcomes they have mastered.

Gary is critical of much of the technology use in schools. He described how he is disappointed when schools celebrate their use of Chromebook’s as tools for note taking as though this is innovative. His answer is Making – starting with a computer and using it to make better things.

He spoke of a mythical place called Mathsland; a metaphor for learning mathematics in a land that speaks maths just as you would learn French better in France. He advocates for a new diet of mathematics and demonstrated Turtle Art as a tool for encouraging this. According to the Turtle Art website it:

TurtleArt lets you make images with your computer. The Turtle follows a sequence of commands. You specify the sequence by snapping together puzzle like blocks. The blocks can tell the turtle to draw lines and arcs, draw in different colors, go to a specific place on the screen, etc. There are also blocks that let you repeat or name sequences. Other blocks perform logical operations.

The sequence of blocks is a program that describes an image. This kind of programming is inspired by the LOGO programming language. It was designed to be easy enough for children and yet powerful enough for people of all ages. TurtleArt is focused on making images while allowing you to explore geometry and programming. 

Turtle Art is a good demonstration of Gary’s approach to learning. It is highly engage, challenging and yet achievable by students of all ages and with varying degrees of complexity to suit. It encourages collaboration and provides intrinsic rewards for effort. 

He shared the story of ‘Sylvia’s Super Awesome Maker Show’ as an example of how a wide range of STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering & Mathematics) outcomes can be explored and assessed through design and make tasks. Sylvia started publishing her online show when she was quite young but her knowledge of maths and engineering was already evident. For Sylvia the complex maths and science she masters is just a part of the fun she has in making things. Her high levels of intrinsic motivation, the relevance of her learning and that she is in control of it guarantees success and is the perfect model for learning in all our classrooms. 

To ensure even coverage Gary also touched on the importance of Literacy. As a result of technology students are writing more, writing better, writing differently, and with an ethos of sharing. He added that computer programming mirrors the writing process and that modern knowledge construction is inseparable from computing. 

Suan Yeo – Google -Social, Collaboration, Creativity: Empowering the Next Generation 

Follow Suan on Google Plus

As an opener Suan of Google Education, shared this image as a commentary on our engagement with Social Media. This led to a discussion of FOMO or ‘fear of missing out’ as part of an explanation for why we are so engaged in the online social world. It is of course this world that our students spend so much time so it worth understanding.

Suan described the challenges we face in teaching digital literacy to digital natives. He described the growth of computing and the speed of change that has occurred. A cute example of this is the YouTube video of ‘Kids Reacting to Old Computers’. 


A further demonstration of this is the infographic he shared that shows ‘The Internet in Real Time’. Developed by Penny Stocks this infographic updates itself in real time showing the expansion of key sites such as Twitter, Pinterest, Amazon and Google. It is amazing to watch how quickly the numbers increase.

He asked the question ‘If you are asking Googleable questions you are asking the wrong questions. What are the questions that are ungoogleable?’ Thinking about what this mean for the classroom and your teaching can be a little daunting, so much of what we ask students could be answered with a Google search. Combine this with some of the points made by Gary Stager on the use of Wolfram Alpha for solving mathematical questions and there is a real challenge for educators. 

Suan shared a great Blog by Steve Wheeler and pointed us to Googles Education page.

http://steve-wheeler.blogspot.co.uk

http://www.google.com/edu/

Tom Barrett – Creativity and the Australian Curriculum-http://notosh.com/ 

Tom Barrett spoke of dichotomies in designing learning, of Direct Instruction with its advantages of rigour, reliability but a focus on teacher led learning and the product of the lesson vs Inquiry Learning with enhanced creativity, originality and student led learning with emphasis on the process of learning.  As with all things it should not be one or the other.

He spoke of the need to understand the impact that direct instruction has on limiting opportunities for discovery, that tools that move us quickly from the unknown to the known spoil chances for deeper inquiry - Googleable vs. Non-Googleable Questions

Tom asked ‘How do we design learning to create inquisitive faces for our students? How often do our students look puzzled and it is a good thing?’. This sort of thinking was common to many of the speakers at EduTech and linked back to Sugata’s opening comments about the ‘edge of chaos’. 

He cited Bonawitz (2011) - "The double edged sword of pedagogy- instruction limits spontaneous exploration and discovery" a great idea to lead into the explanation of an analysis of the interactions between Direct Instruction and Inquiry Learning.  Tom indicated that ‘When we add a process to inquiry learning we gain the opportunity to include the rigour that can go missing in the sometimes fluffy world of Inquiry Learning’. 

Tom’s speech presented in Oslo and available online mirrors much of what he presented at EduTech in a slightly longer form. View Online

Chris Betcher  Creativity in the Classroom -  http://chrisbetcher.com/ & http://www.mydailycreate.com/

Chris took Ken Robinson’s call for creativity into the classroom and showed how it needs to become a ‘deliberate daily act’. He shared his project to do something creative every day for a year and spoke of how this forced creativity was changing his way of seeing the world. This idea became ‘My Daily Create’ a blog of daily creativity inspired by range of other ‘365’ projects such as http://365project.org/ . Through this project Chris has shared many great ideas for using technology in simple, creative ways. Each posting includes notes on the process and inspiration for the piece making this an archive of creativity and a resource for those seeking ways to include technology in the classroom. This has inspired Year Six at Redlands to take on the Homework challenge of creating four creative somethings every week. 


Margaret River Primary School - Sinan & Craig - http://mriverps.wa.edu.au/

Margaret River Primary School is located south of Perth and presented their approach to Inquiry Learning. There approach hinges on the establishment of an environment that supports inquiry, building inquiry into their scope and sequences and developing opportunities for staff to share and celebrate their success.

The school has borrowed the ideas and language developed by Stephen Heppel and others including ‘The Third Teacher’ for the development of a learning environment. This means they have created Fireplaces for small group collaboration, Watering Holes for sharing, Caves for individual or partner learning and Mountain Tops for celebrating success. Each space has a unique character that suits its use and can be implemented in a variety of ways to suit the wider structure of the classroom or school. Thinking about how these spaces can be created is the first step to modifying the learning environment to best suit the learners needs.

Another key idea shared by Margaret River was there regular WOW sessions. This is a time for teachers to share an idea that has worked with their colleagues and to celebrate success. This was seen as a critical step in driving change across the school. They shared a nice video that demonstrates the importance of first followers to institutions wanting to implement change. They described how by nurturing the first followers they have been able to bring about an irresistible movement towards becoming the school envisioned by their executive. 

 

Ian Jukes – Aligning Technology Initiatives in the Age of Disruptive Innovation 

Ian had the hard job of wrapping up the conference and ensuring that it ended as well as it began. Anyone uncertain of the message that Education needs to transform itself if it is to meet the challenges ahead was left in doubt after Ian’s passionate, fast paced speech. He described how many of the jobs we currently prepare our students for will be moved off-shore or to services such as oDesk and that to ensure our students find a place in the world we need to focus on ‘Long Life Skills’. 

Ian began by outlining the basis for his assertion that education needs to change. He shared a series of graphs that showed where the jobs are moving to, away from agriculture and manufacturing towards jobs that involve creativity. The move away from agriculture and manufacturing and its causes linked to mechanisation is well documented. The category of Service industries is also in decline or is at least plateauing. In the remaining category of the traditional office worker the importance of what Ian referred to as Routine Cognitive Tasks is also declining and moving away from countries like Australia.

Because ‘Routine Cognitive Tasks’ are not location dependent they can be out-sourced to the cheapest bidder on a global scale or be completed by a computer. oDesk is a service that provides access to a pool of workers who can complete these Routine Cognitive Tasks through an internet based service. A company determines they have a need for a set task and then use oDesk to locate a person or small group willing to complete it. Consider the task of reading reports, instead of having a teacher in Australia do this a school could use oDesk to have the editing completed at a much lower cost by a worker in another part of the world. Because the task is not dependent on the person being based locally this sort of out-sourcing is easily achieved. This leaves students in countries like Australia unemployable unless they have skills to creatively solve problems. 

Our students will likely have 10-17 careers by the time they are 38 and so need to ‘learn, un-learn and re-learn’ at a rapid pace to meet changing needs. Ian pointed out that in the future we all need to understand that ‘If you want loyalty buy a dog. Don't expect from employers or employees’. Schools need to prepare their students for this world by developing these skills.  New opportunities for enterprise bring with them new challenges for schools e.g the birth and growth of the app developer. But this does not mean we teach app design in the same way we taught grammar, the skills needed now will be outmoded by next year or sooner, we need teach the mind set required for app design. What is needed is a problem solving, design process with inquiry skills and the ability to quickly learn and unlearn skills to suit the needs of the task.

Ian distinguished two types of skills and indicated that schools need to focus on the long life skills:

  • Short life skills are the ones that quickly become redundant or outdated.
  • Long life skills are creativity, critical thinking, collaboration, problem solving and social intelligence 

He asked the question ‘Are schools in the content delivery business? If that is so, then we are going to be out of a job soon’. According to Ian ‘Our present system is not broken, it is obsolete, outmoded. We cannot make little modifications, it is time to redesign’. He compared schools to Banks. If they retained their old model with antiquated operating hours, branch only access and a reliance on cash for all transactions they would be gone. This could be related to countless other industries that have faced or are facing radical changes to their business model. 

He concluded his very fast paced presentation with five key points for schools as they adapt to meet the challenges ahead. By understanding each point and its impact on what and how we teach we have a chance of remaining relevant. 

  • Connectivity is transforming knowledge
  • Why should we memorise basic facts when we have constant access to these. Relates back to Sugata's ‘back pack’ metaphor where the individual carries a supply of facts in their phone not in their brain.
  • Students are our customers and we have to compete for their custom. They have options and these options will expand and they will access to options that do a better job. It is not about doing what we do well but doing what is relevant.
  • Adaptive technology can replace much of what teachers now do.
  • Our students learn differently and so we need to teach differently, we must adapt our teaching to them rather than expecting them to adapt to our methods.

 

Three things

Here are three little things you might find useful from the land of little blue birds,

The first is a delightful piece of music by Weird Al Yankovic that captures perfectly how many English teachers feel when exposed to what passes as grammar in the modern world. This alone could replace every Grammar text.

Watch 'Word Crimes' on YouTube

The second one is a Graffiti Wall with a purpose. Set up a space on a wall where students can write and then invite them to add one quote per month, or maybe per book they read, just the one that they most want to share with the class. As they can only pick one they must be selective and be able to justify their choice. Once they have put their quote on the wall they can not remove it or add another so the choosing is important.

Read More 

Lastly an interesting reminder of why Finland is achieving academic success. By deliberately focussing on meeting the needs of every child, making Learning Support the norm for all learners, not the exception.

Read More

IBM predicts the future of Education

Given that IBM created Watson, a learning computer that was able to win Jeopardy against some of the games greatest human competitors, it is not surprising they are interested in Computer Learning. This is the theme of this year's '5 in 5', five predictions for what computing will bring in five years time. The first of these predictions has particular relevance to education and predicts a future where learning is targeted to the needs of the individual based on information gathered by teachers and their support network over years.

 

One of the difficulties teachers experience is the transfer of knowledge about our students from one year and one class to the next. IBM predicts a future where thanks to the application of 'Big Data' techniques the transfer of knowledge about every child is seamless and truly informative for effective teaching. Every teacher will have easy and timely access to a complete picture of each child's learning profile including strengths, weaknesses, interests, and history. Armed with this information the teacher will be better prepared to meet the individual needs of their students.

 

Read more about this prediction - The classroom will learn you

or watch the video for a clear description of the impact Big Data can have on education

 

A Classroom that Learns You

 

In five years, classrooms will learn about you, and personalize coursework accordingly. It's the end of the era of one-size-fits-all education, and the beginning of personalized learning. Every year IBM makes predictions about 5 technology innovations that stand to change the way we live within the next 5 years.

Chromebook Update

Back in March of 2013 I wrote about my initial experience with a Chromebook. Since then I have continued to use the device and in doing so have become increasingly impressed with it given the low cost of ownership. I have also enjoyed the benefits of a cloud based device and the multi-user experience this brings.

For me the advantages of the Chromebook are its lightweight, low cost and ease of editing and sharing documents. As mentioned in the previous post the experience of using services such as Evernote and Google Docs is excellent and I have not found a situation where the devices dependence on cloud storage has been an issue, after all I can always use my phone as a hotspot for WiFi. The Chromebook has good battery life for sporadic use and I am never that far from a power point. The screen is good enough for the intended purpose and the keyboard is nice if not spectacular. I like that it starts quickly, is not a burden to carry and that after a little tweaking go my Google profile it makes access to my digital life across devices seamless. It was the Chromebook that led me to discover the joys of Google's sync services and I am happy for that.

My class found the device intriguing from day one. It was not the typical laptop they were used to and thanks to the low cost I was happy to share it with them. A number already had Google accounts and used Docs and GMail. For these students using my Chromebook was just like using their laptop. They logged in with their details, had access to their files and their applications. Once they were finished they passed it on to another student and the Chromebook was instantly ready for them. Given the choice many of the students prefer the Chromebook to other computers, particularly smaller Netbooks but also the class set of slightly ageing iMacs. This is partly the novelty of using the teacher's computer but they also like how quickly it becomes their computer ready to use just they way they like. For those who have fully embraced the cloud lifestyle they even have access to their music and games and photos.

We have also enjoyed the ease of sharing that comes with our move to the cloud. A student working on a picture book can easily share his work with me before printing and I can see the edits and drafting as they occur. We can confer in real time on documents and will choose to do so in a range of ways empowered by us both having access to the document in question. As I speculated the Chromebook is well suited to users who are not tied to a legacy of Microsoft Office Documents, for the students Google Docs does exactly what they need with the flexible access option they need between home and school and across devices.

The little Chromebook has become such a hit that for some students it has become the birthday gift or preference and the class is graced with multiple Chromebooks now with others expected. For the parents the cost of the device is tempting as an initial outlay and with a reduced replacement cost should the worst happen. 

So after several months the Chromebook is increasingly earning its keep. Yes it is plasticky and it doesn't meet all my computing needs but it does do most of what I need and in so many ways makes sharing easy. Now if I can just get a small stack of them.

By Nigel Coutts

 

Read original post - Early Days with a Chromebook

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Personal Learning Shared

After listening to Tony Ryan speak about the importance of developing a Personal Learning Network and the benefits of being able to meet face to face, a group of three teachers met for coffee and conversation.

The three of us have a common connection in that we were members of staff at The Australian International School, Singapore. During the 00s. After a recent reunion, we decided we’d like to catch up once a term where we could exchange stories about our schools, our teaching and our own learning.

We decided to dedicate the first half (45 mins or so) to ‘talking teaching’ and the rest on more casual chat about our families and lives. As it turned out, the whole time was twoing and froing between our work and more personal things and I think we left feeling like we accomplished the mix really well. Actually with over 60 years of teaching experience between us – separating our work and our lives is really not possible – hence strictly no partners at our meetings.  

Here are some educational based discussions we had:

Book Week just ended and given that we are all interested in literacy and reading we soon found ourselves talking about our libraries and encouraging kids to read. Yvonne suggested some wonderful programs that seem simple and effective in their goal to get children reading and helping less fortunate children get access to books.

The first one – ‘Mystery Book Challenge’ came from one of us mentioning the issues with Premiers reading challenge where students are restricted to certain titles, some we agreed are not particularly good quality. I had that conversation with Kathryn during book week.  MBC involves taking some of the old classics from 70s,  80s and 90s, (we had fun brainstorming old favourties) wrapping them in brown paper and string and putting them back on the shelves in their original spot. Titles from Gilllian Rubenstein’s, Colin Thiele’s and Ruth Park were examples. Students were then free to choose and ‘unwrap’ their book on guarantee that they read it from cover to cover and give a short review as to why this book was considered quality in its day and whether it still has any relevancy today. Bookmarks were a reward for attempts to revisit and find the magic in popular books written before they were born.

I said how much I love Sonya Harnett’s, Silver Donkey after a discussion of our visiting illustrator of Simpson’s Donkey, which led into a discussion on Harnett’s new title – Children of the King which Yvonne highly recommended and expressed excitement of it being made into a movie which then led to a shared love of, The Book Thief by Marcus Zusack’s. We wait in anticipation of  the movie being released with Geoffrey Rush. Perhaps our next meeting will be a movie night to see it?

Book Swap involves bringing in 5 books to donate to a second hand book sale. Students then buy a book for a gold coin and the $ and remaining books are sent to indigenous schools. This sequayed into my telling of Boori (Monty) Pryor visiting Redlands and a discussion on My Girragunji and the importance of exposing our kids to  Aboriginal stories and story telling.

I asked Zannah about the new library at Ravenswood as I remembered it being showcased in a PD session. She said it has taken on the Learning Resource Centre model and has changed the entire orientation of the school. New reception, new address new way of looking at what was once the traditional library.  She described first level of open design classrooms, second as reception and ICT hubs and the top resources and study nooks.

The inevitable chat about computer programs came up where it was explained that Ravenswood are about to begin a  0ne to 0ne , three year turn around program, Rose Bay are a Mac School and have no shortage of ipads and ibooks (apparently a very active parent body for a public school raising funds for maintaining programs) and I mentioned that Redlands had just employed  a new ICT manager who will hopefully help us solve what’s been a ‘strained’  program in the Junior School. 

And drawing on the glass in the LRC at Ravenswood? I remember that from a video at the PD early this year. This began the happy chat on the whiteboard’s return and the relief we all felt from the whole focus on Smart Boards. Quite a lot of anxiety justifying their cost and We all agreed that  there was a lot of pressure for a few years solely on creating whole units on creating literally 100s of slides and that perhaps it was not getting the balance right in terms of using a variety of tools when teaching. Great to have and in daily use but sometimes the old white board marker served us (and students using mini boards) just as well if not better. Striking the balalnce and undersatning that teachers don’t have time to reinvent wheel. If there are websites with slides already made, utilize those. We also acknowledged those staff who have become so  proficient that it may well be as effeicient and easy for them to continue to heavily base visual aspects of learning using the Interactive Board.

So that was our 90 minutes. As we were leaving Zannah suggested next meeting to have a chat about the National Curriculum. My cloud was ‘do we have to?’ but knowing that it will be pre movie as we line up for popcorn, I think I have to admit that I might even be looking forward to that one!

By Catherine Swinton

Empathy: the most important 21st Century Skill

Looking Ahead

Alan November relates a discussion with the head of London-based HSBC Bank. Engaging him in conversation, Alan asked, “What’s the most important 21st century skill?” Alan admits that he was unprepared for the response: “Empathy.” It was counterintuitive. While we in education had been espousing the importance of such critical skills as creativity, collaboration and adaptability in a 21st-century global information economy, here was the head of one of the largest banks in the world citing a completely under-emphasized virtue. Alan readily admits he grappled with the idea for a while, but in the end he concluded it is true. Empathy is the most important of skills we should be imparting to students as we prepare them for life and work in the 21st century.

Empathy - the ability to identify with others - takes on a heightened role in an age where we are gradually merging to form a single global community. The Information Age is only going to bind us more tightly together as people, nations and economies. Empathy does not require us to give up our own perspectives, but to be able to integrate others’ perspectives with our own. Even fairly recently this was not a priority in conducting business and getting things accomplished. It was 1982 when Tip O’Neill declared that “all politics is local.” The world was segmented into smaller communities then. We had impact where we lived and worked. Events happening in other regions of the world seemed distant, even remote in their impact on our daily lives. But the geographical distribution of society has changed. Through global communication and collaboration we now network internationally on personal and business levels. Events such as the attacks on American soil on September 11, 2001 forever changed our perception that we are hemmed in by political and geographic boundaries that offered protection and detachment from the events of the greater human community. Today O’Neill’s notion sounds parochial and out of touch. Today politicians are moving in droves to social media tools to garner support and expand spheres of influence. Everyone contributes to the progress we are making not just in our local community, state or nation, but as global citizens.

Daniel Goleman’s work demonstrates how empathy fuels intrinsic motivation and effective problem-solving. In his theory of emotional intelligence, empathy is critical to social awareness. It allows us to intelligently build stronger interpersonal relationships that lead to improved informed decision-making. People who empathize well make others feel that their work is respected and worthwhile. Goleman identifies three distinct kinds of empathy:

Cognitive Empathy - knowing what others might be feeling and thinking

Emotional Empathy - intuitively sensing what others are feeling and thinking

Compassionate Empathy - combined cognitive and emotional empathy providing an understanding of others’ circumstances and feeling inclined to help

When Alan speaks of empathy as a 21st century skill, he refers to global empathy: the ability to perceive and appreciate personal and cultural differences across humankind. Certainly this requires a cognitive understanding of what is encountered, and to be truly effective there must also be an emotional sense of what others are experiencing; but compassionate empathy encompasses the true notion of global empathy. Compassionate empathy not only validates another’s background, experience and perspective, it also prompts a response – a call to action – that necessitates that we reach out and connect with others where we can jointly make a difference in the world.

Stepping back to consider this concept, it becomes clear that all our aspirations for our children in the Information Age are contingent upon their ability to empathize with those with whom they come in contact. We are moving away from self-centered and culturally-centric views of the world to embrace our global partners as open, receptive, willing, engaged, empowered counterparts who are ready to move forward together. Efforts to communicate, collaborate, create, innovate, problem-solve and transform will not be successful without global empathy. So how do we pass this on to the next generation?

Empathy is not something we teach, it is something we instill. How? By modeling, coaching, facilitating, moderating and promoting it across all areas of the curriculum. It begins with the empathy we experience one-on-one in our most immediate relationships and builds from there: friendships, small groups, teams, cohorts, classes, networks and beyond. It is not that the traditional geographic and political boundaries no longer exist, or that regional and national identities are not still valued. We embrace these unique identifiers even as we bridge across them to make higher level connections - empathetic and empowering connections - that move us forward as communities and societies and as a common global civilization. 

 

Read more by Walter McKenzie on ASCD EdGe

What questions shall we ask?

Presently I am reading Patrick Rothfuss’ novels comprising the ‘King Killer Chronicles’, the tale of a young intellect searching for answers to a personal tragedy. Kvothe, as the main character is called, is guided by life’s events to the ‘University’ and at an early age begins his study of the ‘Arkane’, a mix of science and magic. A key figure in his study is the enigmatic Master Elodin, a ‘namer’ who is able to control many things by knowing their true name. Those who love a good story and enjoy fantasy should seek out the books and discover the complex world that Patrick Rothfuss has created, for now I am most interested in an epiphany Kvothe has while contemplating why he likes questions.

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Without spoiling the story, Kvothe is asked to explain why he enjoyed the impossible questions his father would pose to him. This questioning had started with riddles but Kvothe found these too easy, so his father told him nonsensical stories and asked him to explain what they meant. He describes this to another character who views this as a cruel way to keep a child quiet, but Kvothe disagrees and responds as follows,

'It's the questions we can’t answer that teach us the most. They teach us how to think. If you give a man an answer all he gains is a little fact but give him a question and he’ll look for his own answers. That way, when he finds the answers they’ll be precious to him, the harder the question, the harder we hunt, the harder we hunt the more we learn, an impossible question . . .'

At this moment in the story Kvothe understands the odd behaviour of Elodin, he sees that the Master’s desire has been to ask these impossible questions and by doing so force his students to discover new learning, to think beyond the obvious and to learn how to think. I don’t teach magic, or naming but I do most assuredly want my students to think and to be able to create new ideas. So, ‘What questions shall we ask?’

For anyone familiar with the ever-growing Internet it is clear that finding ‘little facts’ is increasingly less of a challenge. A learned person can no longer be defined or measured by the facts s/he can recall. I met recently a person who could in moments recall the key facts of almost any event in human history, her name is Siri and she lives inside my phone. It is interesting to consider the proportion of questions we ask students that could be answered by Siri and maybe in contemplating this we arrive at the answer to why so many schools prohibit the use of phones in class. Fortunately there are many questions for which Siri has no answer and conversely many questions yet unanswered.

I am often amazed by television, sadly not the content but the very idea that an image can be beamed to an antenna and appear on a screen in my living room. I know enough about how this works to recognise that I really have no understanding of the process. To me it is most interesting to consider the questions that were asked prior to its conception as a possibility. Today I can readily ask questions that will reveal how television works but at some point in time neither the answers or even the questions existed. This is the point where true innovation occurs, when an individual or team begins asking questions for which there are not answers and for which the very asking of the questions create new realms of possibility.

With two colleagues I have been studying Harvard’s ‘Making Thinking Visible’ course. Most recently we have investigated the ‘Cultural Forces’ required to promote thinking within a school. To provide our students with opportunities to think we have been contemplating the types of questions we ask. As Kvothe’s father did, we seek to ask questions that will allow our students to think. Our goal is to find those questions most central to our disciplines and then pose these in ways that will promote exploration. The challenge is to ask the questions for which the answers are most hard to find or that have not yet been found.

In asking big questions that challenge even experts in the field we play a careful balancing game. We want our students to have opportunities for complex high order thinking while also being able to experience a high degree of success. To complicate things further our students will only experience a feeling of success if it is achieved through opportunities that demand complex high order thinking. David Perkins advocates that to achieve these goals teachers look towards ‘playing junior versions of the game’. By this he means they are engaged with tasks that have genuine purpose and require complex thinking patterns but that they do so at an achievable level. Our Year Six students engage with ‘Big Ideas’ but ultimately the demands placed on their thinking and analysis by the questions we ask are not as rigorous as expected of University students dealing with the same ideas. Regardless the opportunity for even the most complex thinking is there.

Complex questions set by the teacher are all very well but how do we teach students to generate new questions? In his revised Taxonomy Benjamin Bloom places Creating at the top of the ‘thinking pyramid’ as the highest order of thinking. This needs some degree of clarification as clearly the sort of creating that went into the invention of television is not of the same magnitude that goes into a child’s artwork. Creating new knowledge and being creative are not directly equivalent terms. If we wish to promote this highest order of thinking in our students we cannot leave it to ‘happy accidents’, we will need to offer a set of strategies within a culture of creative thinking.

Using a combination of Habits of Mind, Dimensions of Learning and making Thinking Visible a small groups of teachers that I have the privilege of working with offered a set of questions and strategies to promote creative thinking. They can be used as a toolkit to guide students towards asking the right type of questions and when linked to areas of exploration that the students are passionate about offer the potential to generate amazing new ideas. They are provided below written from the learner’s perspective:

5 TOP STRATEGIES:

  1. Let your imagination run wild every now and then, but keep track of its ideas and make use of the best ones.
  2. First think of the obvious solutions, write them down and then discard them, now you are in the realm of the new ideas, the creative and different.
  3. Train your mind to think differently. Consider everyday things and imagine how they could be improved with a few modifications. Add something, make a part larger, replace a part with something else, combine one every day object with another.
  4. Keep a journal of your ideas and reflect on it often.
  5. Remember Edison's advice, 'Genius is one percent inspiration and ninety-nine percent perspiration'. Work at making your ideas great and then work harder to turn them into that thing that changes the world.

5 QUESTIONS TO ASK ABOUT YOUR THINKING:

  1. How can you transform a good idea into a truly unique idea?
  2. What inspires you? What do you find exciting? That is your starting point, now innovate.
  3. What habits of thinking have you developed? Identify the habits that are limiting your creativity and make changes.
  4. Reflect on the thinking that results in your best ideas, this is the key to repeating it.
  5. How will you evaluate the benefits of your idea?

 THINKING ROUTINES FOR CREATING AND INNOVATING

  1. Options Explosion - Begin by listing the obvious solutions or Options. Now brainstorm all the other options, generate as many options as you can, combine ideas to create more, allow your creativity to run wild and tap into  your sense of wonderment and awe. Review the list of options and identify the ones that are most intriguing. Use the ideas generated to consider new possibilities and new solutions.
  2. Creative Questions -  A good routine for developing ideas and for training your mind to think      differently. Use it to generate creative questions to explore by following these steps:
      3.  
    • 1. Pick an everyday object or topic and brainstorm a list of questions about it.       Transform some of these questions in imaginative questions such as: Select a question to imaginatively explore. Write a story, draw a picture, invent a scenario, conduct a thought experiment or dramatise a scenario 2. Reflect on your thinking and the new ideas you have generated. 3. Develop those which seem most useful.
  1. Does it Fit? -  A strategy for evaluating options by applying clear criteria. As you apply      each criteria keep the ideas that are consistently the best fit. Does the option Fit the ideal Solution? Does the option Fit the Criteria? Does the option Fit the Situation? Does the      option Fit you Personally?
Thinking Routines adapted from Harvard's 'Visible Thinking Resource Book'
More ideas for developing Habits of Mind - redlandsyear6.net

By Nigel Coutts

3D Printing

In 1984 Hewlett-Packard launched the first commercial Laser Printer at a price of $3,495 US. Along with similar devices from other manufacturers the laser printer was a device that began life as technological marvel but quickly became a device we take for granted as a piece of office furniture. Today a B&W laser printer can be picked up from your local OfficeWorks for as little a $35 with colour models from $144. 

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Although the true history of 3D printing can be traced back to the early 80s in many ways the technology is just emerging now into the collective conscience. Possibly most alike to the HP Laser printer of 1984 is the Replicator 2 product of Manhattan based MakerBot. This miracle of modern engineering can be purchased for $2,199 and brings 3D printing into the reach of many consumers and small businesses. For those willing to explore the DIY approach PrintrBot offers kits starting from $300 for a flat-packed 3D printer. (Read Business Week Article)

In another move towards 3D printing becoming mainstream, UPS (United Parcel Service) has just announced a trial of in-store 3D printers that would allow a customer to walk in off the street and leave with a physical version of their new idea. Alternatively a digital rendering of an object could be sent via the Internet for pickup in store. How long will it be before you are able to have a part scanned in one country and beamed for pick-up in another. UPS is not the first to offer such a service, Shapeways has done this for some time, as has Staples in Europe. The model train pictured below was printed using the Shapeways service. What makes the UPS service of interest is that this is a service offered by a courier that could in essence see the need for sending physical goods rendered obsolete. (Read Forbes Article - Popularizing 3D Prinitng)

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It is worth noting that at the time of release the first laser printers were considered a threat to global currencies and a counterfeiters dream device. Similar fears exist for 3D printers with fear of all manner of copyright infringement. More newsworthy has been recent reports of downloadable plans that allow a 3D printer to output a plastic gun. Although the reality is that this is a device of very limited use, plastic guns tend to self destruct quickly, there is enough threat to these stories to cause concern. (Lateline report 3D Printer Guns)

Despite limited negatives the future for 3D printing is certainly bright. This series of TED Talks highlight some of the great breakthroughs we can expect to see in the near future, ideas that are truly worth spreading. From bespoke chemistry kits, artificial limbs and even internal organs, 3D printing is set to bring big changes to the way we think about the physical world.

View TED Blog Post - 7 talks on the wonder of 3D printing 

By Nigel Coutts

Inspiring spaces without a remodel

It would be nice to have an unlimited budget, a talented architect and a large construction crew at our disposal to design the ultimate learning space. Unfortunately the reality is most teachers have tight budgets, restricted spaces and little chance of changing the structural elements. For most we are restricted to what we can do with imagination, craft skills and reams of paper.

Despite these restraints there are some amazing room designs out there and with a little tweaking you could have a space that will inspire. Check out the images shared by 'The School Supply Addict' and let your creativity run wild. Better still, let your students take over the room and see what amazing spaces they can create.

Visit The School Supply Addict’s Blog to see Amazing Rooms

 

Backup Plans - The forgotten cybersafety

Our digital lives are great and offer all sorts of new opportunities. Digital cameras have made it possible for us to take photos of all manner of things without a cost per image and a trip to the photo lab. With our smartphones we can capture and even edit video or record sounds. Our music collections are no longer a dust collecting assortment of CDs stacked in a corner but are a library of computer files available on many devices. Our working life is documented in files from Word and Excel and we have countless other files that are important to us. You get the idea, we have a whole heap of stuff stored on computers and all of this is why IBM calculates that we are producing 2.2 million terabytes of data everyday. That would be a line of 1Tb hard drives 323 km long.

All this digital living brings with it one BIG problem, what happens to all that data that is of personal value to us when the computer it is stored on stops working, is lost, stolen or destroyed by fire or flood. These digital files represent not just countless hours of work but are the repository for our valued memories. Photos of our children and loved ones that can never be replaced. We would once keep wedding albums in a safe now these images are on hard drives. So what is you plan for when it all goes wrong? and at some point it will.

Sadly the experience of a drive failure is what prompts most people to develop a backup plan which is a little like realising you need home insurance the day after a house fire. Typically the victim turns on their computer to do some mundane task and instead of seeing their files load happily across their desktop are greeted with an error message. At this point the many stages of digital grief kick in beginning with panicked attempts to restart the device, a sinking feeling that all is not good, anger at how this could have happened, a sense of loss as you realise all that was on that device and finally an acceptance of what has occurred and a resolve to not let it happen again.

I had this experience quite recently when the hard drive that stores my music collection failed. I should have seen its icon on the desktop but it wasn't there. I re-started the computer but the result was the same, it was becoming clear that something had happened to that drive. I must admit that a sense of dread was felt at this point but for me this was short lived. I have backups, multiple backups. Within twenty minutes I had swapped out the drive, replaced a few tracks downloaded since my last backup from iTunes and I was back in business. For me the cost of this drive failure was the price of replacing the drive to ensure I still had multiple backups.

How likely is it that a drive will fail? Manufacturers measure this as Mean Time Before Failure. For consumer drives this is often 300,000 hours, which means that across that time span half the drives of that age will have failed. Google undertook a study of some 100,000 drives and found the actual failure rate was up to 50% higher than this and that 3 year old drives present a significant failure risk. What consumers need to take into account with these figures is that there is nothing in any of this to suggest that your drive will last 300,000 hours, it could fail after one hour or anywhere in between, you could be lucky and have it last twice as long.

Alex Lindsay of the Pixel Corps, 'a craftsman's guild for a digital age' advocates a policy 'that no file exists until it exists in three places'. Alex is a veteran of digital creativity having worked with Lucasfilm on the original Star Wars. He now works with digital artists across the world and manages many large data sets of great value. His policy means that for any file you can't afford to loose you need to have three copies of it each in a different location, one of which must be off site.

To meet the requirements for a 'three places' backup you will need to have a means to save your files on to two locations external to your computer. A backup of a file on the computer is a nice way of avoiding accidental erasure or replacement of an old file with a new version but will do nothing in the case of a malfunction or other disaster. The off site backup is also essential. Too many people store their backup drive next to their computer at home or in the bag with their laptop. Great for convenience but what happens if the house burns down, is burgled or the bag is accidentally left in your favourite cafe? This is when you need that offsite back up.

So how should you backup your data?

There is no single right way and what one person does might not suit your situation. Your plan needs to suit the amount of data you have, how much of it you need access to on a daily basis, how often it changes or is added to, how fast your connection to the internet is and how much data you can send over that connection. I use a mixture of methods that looks like this:

  • Multiple external hard drives are used to store photos, images, music, video and longer term backups of documents
  • One set of drives is stored at home in case of a failure, the other is stored at a relatives house nearby but in another suburb in case of disaster (fire, flood, tsunami)
  • I use Carbon Copy Cloner to create exact copies of the drives I use, it does incremental backups so although the initial backup takes hours, after that only the changes need to be made and it is a quick process. It also means I can swap a new drive into my system and carry on working. I use naked drives for the at home set and USB drives for the off site set. There are many similar options for Windows. (Clonezilla, ToDo Backup - I have not tried either but they have solid reviews)
  • For files used on a daily basis I use the cloud service DropBox. This ensures my work files are always backed up and are accessible on any computer. (See below for protecting against user error)
  • With new photos or videos the files stay on the SD card until they are safe in three locations. I do the same when traveling, one set on the SD card stored safely in a pocket and always with me, one set on a laptop, and one set on an external USB drive stored in a suitcase away from the laptop.

For the files I need access to everyday and on both laptop and desktop I use DropBox. This prevents all sorts of user errors from becoming a problem. I don't have to remember to bring a USB Thumbdrive with me thanks to this service as it automatically syncs files across any number of computers and even lets me access files over an internet connection on any computer. It has also saved me from 'dumb' mistakes. I recently managed to delete a folder from my laptop and as luck would have it this was the folder that contained the files I needed for a presentation that afternoon. Losing that file on that day would have been very bad but thanks to DropBox I was able to go back in time and access the files I had deleted.

There are many options for this sort of cloud storage. SkyDrive offers integration with Microsoft Office, Google Drive integrates tightly with Google Docs and makes sharing and collaboration easy, Apple has iCloud which is becoming a more useful service after years of neglect. There are also services aimed at just backing up large data sets such as Carbonite or CrashPlan. All these services provide you with online backups but rely on an internet connection which means you will need to consider how much data you can send over your internet plan and how quickly you will need to restore that data after a problem. This sort of storage is also not really an option for your Boot Drive, the one that stores your operating system and programs.

Any online, cloud based service brings up issues of privacy. You need to consider who has access to your files and what is the cost/risk to you of someone else gaining access to those files. No service can claim to offer complete protection. The publicity around Edward Snowden and PRISM reveals that government agencies can access all of our online data and that this is particularly relevant for non-US citizens. It is true that due to the inner workings of the internet much if not most of the worlds internet traffic goes through the USA at some point in its journey from computer to computer. It is also true that most people are not saving data that is worth being spied on so the level of fear need to tempered against the reality of the risk. Put another way, no one especially no one in the NSA, wants to read your email or look at your holiday snaps.

As teachers we should be teaching our students to backup their data as a part of cybersafety. Most students are unaware of the risks involved and while they are perhaps more likely to have commenced the move to cloud based computing ahead of us, they will still have to develop a backup strategy. We all still have files stored locally that we need and cloud services have a nasty habit of being shut down. We all need a plan for how we will recover our files from a service that is about to go away.

Lastly don't forget that you probably have valued files on your portable devices too. Smartphones, iPads, Tablets etc all have important files and are all easily lost, dropped or washed. Your backup plan should include these devices and in most cases needs to be part of a daily schedule. For these devices you will probably find that some sort of cloud-sync is available and provides the level of protection you need.

So, go now and check you backup plan, don't put it off. The drive in the computer you are reading this on could be about to fail.

 

by Nigel Coutts