Program or be Programmed

I've taken my title from Douglas Rushkoff's talk and book who says that if you are not programming you are, by process of elimination, one of the programmed. As a teacher that is forever expounding the powers of programming I find this point of view intriguing.

Along a similar line, I had an interesting discussion with one of our music teachers at school. I had sent her a link to a website called ujam - a cloudapp that allows a user to sing into a microphone to a metronome beat.

The app will then suggest a chord progression to accompany the melody line. It also allows you to choose the style of your composition and the instruments and you can convert the singing line to an instrument as well. I thought it was a powerful and engaging way for young musicians to experiment with musicality and composition. Unlike the Aviary.com app Mynah it uses the student's own melody line and then helps them to find the harmonic sound they are looking for for the accompaniment. The music teacher didn't agree. She said that it had caused a heated discussion in her household because she and her husband are musicians who held the position that this kind of app takes all the musicianship out of composition and her children (teenage girls) didn't see the big deal because they could create music without all the fuss of writing it out. There is an immediacy which appealed to the younger generation but which slightly appalled the parents because it seemed to oversimplify the problem.

The retelling of her family discussion allowed me to consider my own position. I have often bemoaned the use of Microsoft Publisher and PowerPoint in the classroom. Many teachers use these tools to add a sense of presentation and fun to the gathering of information. That's a good thing. It's admirable to try to add fun and design to basic tasks and technology is very good as an overlay to add this to the classroom. I do think, though, that often the use of this technology is just used to replace other classroom activities such as "Present to the class with visual aids", "Create a poster" or "Create a flyer". In fact, the old fashioned way of creating a brochure with coloured pencils and paper had more educational benefit than using Microsoft Publisher to create a brochure in most cases. Similarly, "Present to the class with visual aids" required more thought than create a PowerPoint. The finished product might look better if it has been created using a computerised template but it will also look much the same as the other student in the class who used the same template. This will always happen if we don't teach our students the principles of visual communication as well as how to use the tools to create visual communication.

I think that in this world where non-textual communication is so important, all subject areas should be teaching students how to get to the crux of their point and communicate using the visuals and the colours to form part of the persuasion.

I'm a computing teacher. I teach IST to juniors and IPT to seniors and I am capable of teaching Software Design but we don't currently have enough classes for me to teach it. Some of my colleagues think that students should learn skills with PowerPoint and Publisher in my classes but there are a few problems with this. Firstly, these subjects are elective. Not every student goes through them so not every student would gain these skills. That would be like suggesting that students can only learn to communicate visually in Visual Arts or that students can only learn to present in Drama. These are skills that are bigger than a subject field. The second problem with all students learning how to use these skills in computing is that they are not explicitly taught anymore. My department can choose which applications to use to deliver the core and elective syllabus content and I haven't used Microsoft Publisher in any classroom. I do try to teach what makes a good PowerPoint and how to communicate when presenting but these are not application skills, they are communication skills.

I think these discussions of tools disguise the main point which is that we need to determine what goal we are trying to achieve in each class activity. If we are trying to get students to present a group's findings from a survey with reference to imagery found on the web, then PowerPoint is a great tool to use. If we are trying to get students to quickly create a theme song for a TV commercial, convincing an audience to buy a product then they should be using ujam or aviary to create the theme music. If we are trying to get students to simplify the tenets of the Nazi party into something that could convince people to join the resistance then they could create a brochure in Publisher (but I would require that they not use any of the theme sets because they're horrible).

I think that if your focus as a teacher is to get the students talking and learning about non-technology subject matter then you should use a tool that has a very small barrier to use (that is, neither you nor the students need to read a manual to get started). We need to trust that the students who have a passion for music will study music where they learn the musicianship to make compositions properly and well; students with a passion for visual representation will study art and students with a passion for how all this stuff works will hopefully choose computing.

That said, there are a number of very cool apps that make doing stuff manually look hard and cumbersome. I have listed some of these here. Of course we don't design the educational experience around the tool but use a tool to support the educational experience.

bubbl.us A brainstorming tool that allows collaboration. It's great for very quick and easy mind maps

voicethread A tool that allows students to textually and vocally comment on images or powerpoints

Aviary A suite of adobe-like clones. Image editing, music editing, and vector image creation.

Museum box a tool that focuses on finding and displaying visual representative information rather than text to tell a story

Storybird from the website: short, art-inspired stories you make to share, read, and print.

Timetoast create interactive timelines

DoInk create really easy animations

Wallwisher make a virtual noticeboard

Interestingly, after writing this up I found an blog post by Jeff Utecht talking about a similar thing with reference to Powerpoint. You can read it here.

Conference, Unconference, and Un-unconference

On the weekend I attended one day of the ICTENSW (Information Communications Technology Educators New South Wales)(@ICTENSW), formerly the CSTA (Computer Studies Teachers Association) mini-conference. It was held in the beautiful grounds of Tara Anglican School for Girls and was well attended with 130 teachers making the first day and 80 on the Sunday.

Historically, this March conference has been predominantly dedicated to the AGM of the organisation and wading through the previous years' Computing HSC papers (IT VET, IPT and SDD) to discuss where students fell over and how we can prepare our students better for future papers .

This year, they decided to run the paper analysis and AGM concurrently with a series of workshops. It's difficult to get this balance right and they have done this in the past but often teachers end up wanting to be in two places at once and have to choose which is best for their Professional Development. I was interested to see how it would work this year.

The short answer is that it worked well for me. I'd had three years of analysing the past papers and was ready for something else and joined the workshops and a micro-unconference during the AGM.

The first session I attended was Martin Levins (@martinlevins) and his "Data Visualisation for HSIE". This was a good workshop covering resources for teachers such as David McCandless's (@mccandelish) Information is Beautiful TED talk and online Data Visualisations, Dan Meyer's (@ddmeyer, blog) TED Talk on the future of mathematics and using multimedia in math teaching, an exploration of Hans Rosling's (@HansRosling) www.gapminder.org and a play with BBC's how big is it really?

These are all great tools and we briefly discussed using IBM's Many Eyes and Google Visualizations to assist our students to create their own data visualisations. These tools really allow students to conceive inconceivable numbers. I have used Data Visualisation using Many Eyes in my IPT class to simply and easily compare the bps of narrowband and different broadband technologies. We also compared the numbers of internet users in different countries and it's fascinating to see that there are many more internet users in China than there are actual people in USA (let alone Australia)

The middle session was an Unconference while the AGM was underway. As it turned out a group of us didn't find the bulk of the Unconference people so I suppose that made us an un-unconference. We discussed tools we were using in our classrooms that we loved and that were working for us. I have shared the resulting brainstorm Google doc here.

The final session for the day was Content-based Learning Design run by Jason Hando (@jhando) from utopiainternet. I didn't really know what to expect from this session but it piqued my interest and so I sat in. The contention of this workshop was that since kids go to facebook without being told to and put extraordinary amounts of time into maintaining their status and relationships, can we apply some of the benefits they get from Facebook to our own Learning Management System (LMS) design to encourage students to engage with the work they are doing. Jason had some very nice examples and very clear statistics on student motivation before and after LMS redesign. His slides are apparently going onto his slideshare soon. It's a very interesting concept that we should be considering marketing concepts when we design learning experiences to better speak to our market. An example of what he was talking about for younger students is called BrainPop (picture above)

Everyone I spoke to got something positive out of the day but it's a rare occurrence that you get such dynamic discussion as there was in Jason Hando's workshop. And as we all know engagement = learning.

Low-tech Path to Success

This weekend the Sun Herald printed an article entitled "Low-tech path to success". The article sparked some discussion in our staff room. Our school is currently investigating the addition of more technology to our programs as part of our strategic plan and at first glance this article appears to endorse the belief that students perform better on the National Assessment Program – Literacy and Numeracy (NAPLAN) tests if they have had no contact with computers in developmental years.

I believe that the article doesn't , in fact, argue that technology leads to poorer results. The article is just reporting on the My School website results and putting forward a league table for year 5. Whether these league tables have any statistical or even societal credence is still a point of fierce contention but leaving that aside lets look at the positions of the article.

1. Two primary schools that don't use technology in the classroom have made the top 12 list of primary schools in NAPLAN performance for 2010

2. Two primary schools that embrace unorthodox teaching methods are among the top performers for NAPLAN for 2010

These two statements are true. The evidence can clearly be seen on the MySchool website and is repeated at the beginning of the article for our assessment.

The other statements are quotations made by the schools themselves:

1. ''electronic media are believed … to hamper seriously the development of the child's imagination - a faculty which is central to the healthy development of the individual.''

2. ''young children need to communicate and learn without the mediation of complex technology"

These are complex statements that bear closer scrutiny.

Firstly, I don't have anything against Rudolph Steiner and his teachings. Actually, I think that some of the Waldorf Education Principles , including self-led learning are valuable and should be utilised in orthodox education.

Let's look at the article's own statistics to argue some of these points. Firstly, Mumbulla School suggests that electronic media hamper the "development of the child's imagination" and by extension the "healthy development of the individual". No NAPLAN test can measure the healthy development of the individual but the literacy test can go some way to judging the development of the child's imagination. Of the 10 schools in the article's list of top primary schools, that are not Rudolph Steiner schools, all 10 use computers as part of their curriculum delivery and 2 (Dubbo School of Distance Learning and Sydney Distance Education Primary School) use technology to deliver a majority of their content.

The second quote says that "children need to communicate and learn without the mediation of … technology" I would argue that they need to learn to communicate and learn to learn without the mediation of technology because communication and metacognition are part of their humanity. But technology is a tool - a tool used in many different facets of our lives - and it would be remiss of us as teachers to neglect to prepare our students for how the world works. Not to mention availing them of the wonderful and fulfilling opportunities technology makes possible for them. The second quote specifically targets "young children" and as I'm not an early learning specialist I will avoid commenting on the best thing for our very young children and I have read that pre-verbal children can have their communication skills hampered by any screen time (including tv and computer). But Year 5 cannot be considered very young children. They are in the final stage before high-school and should be treated accordingly. They need to be prepared for the world of high-school and then by extension the big wide world in which technology is the foremost method of communicating.

Finally, this is not a controlled assessment. There is no way of determining the causality of the lack of technology at primary school to the NAPLAN results. It may just as well be affected by having a higher proportion of parents who care about their child's education and spend more time with their children in reading to their child. It could also be affected by teachers who are more passionate about their work or who have smaller class sizes. It could be a gifted cohort. The results are also not controlled in that we have data that the children do not use computers in the classroom but have no data as to whether these children use technology outside the school environment.

These two schools should be very proud of their NAPLAN results for 2010. Their success, however, should not encourage the rest of us to discard years of research supporting the link between technology use and engagement and technology use and results. There are good reasons to use technology in the classroom and 10 out of twelve of these schools agree and embrace this use. But technology use or no technology use there is no replacement for good, interactive, adaptive teaching.

What I learned from West Wing

I was in love with The West Wing. I was actually a late comer to the show but caught it from time to time and although I enjoyed it on TV I found it difficult to keep up with the stories as I missed episodes when the network moved it around. So, my husband and I borrowed the seven series from the library over a matter of weeks and watched it from beginning to end and we were both hooked. I loved the punchy dialogue and the sense of dynamism that came from most conversations being held on the move. Some series were better than others and the first three were definitely my favourites but as die-hard fans we needed to see it through to the new administration. If you haven't seen it I highly recommend you source the discs and give it a go. It's well worth a watch.

In today's post I thought I'd bring some of the lessons I learned from The West Wing series. These are applicable in life but here I've applied them to the administration of ICT projects in school.

Lesson 1: Know the opposite argument as well if not better than you know your own.

Before any debate or difficult policy launch president Jed Bartlett would sit in the press room and be hammered with difficult questions from staffers to try to prepare him for the opposing arguments in order to solidify his position and galvanise his positive arguments. Why? Because if you know the arguments your opponents are going to present you can formulate responses in a calm unemotional way. You remove the defence response.

This is very important in ICT projects for two reasons. Firstly, it seems the arguments against any ICT innovation are adamantly held and there is often an emotional response by those who propose these arguments. Secondly , there is an "us vs them" attitude to ICT projects in that staff and parents believe that "them" - the ICT integrators and strategy makers - those that use and understand ICT - do not understand "us" those who find ICT difficult or invasive or "more work". Requiring those in positions of power or influence in ICT to know, research and understand the opposing arguments to the implementation of ICT programs into school in order to develop empathy and prepare unemotional arguments for these positions.

Lesson 2: Never respond to bad PR

In one episode assistant chief of staff, Josh Lyman, finds a website dedicated to critiquing him. Against all advice he starts to post to the site to try to explain his position and straighten out misconceptions. He was flame bombed by the members of the site.

Responding to bad opinion is dangerous because it can often devolve into emotional and irrational exchanges. Keep the objective in sight. Push out information about positive goals and positive feedback and expect that the bad PR will dissolve as results are seen and

Lesson 3: Post hoc ergo propter hoc - "After it, therefore because of it."

This phrase is used ironically to represent the fallacious belief that because an event follows another event, it happens because of it. This can be used within ICT projects to add a sense of perspective when analysing the results of a program or pilot. Ask yourselves the question… "Was the perceived change of student engagement or success BECAUSE of the program or just AFTER the program?" It's important to design data collection and analysis to take this into account when assessing a pilot or program.

Lesson 4: Crackpot Day

The West Wing had a day each year called "Cheese Day" in which the public and special interest groups were allowed to voice their opinions to the staff and the staff, in turn, had to listen to grievances. The day was called "crackpot day" by some of the characters and was greeted with vitriolic lack of enthusiasm from the staff. In ICT strategy it's important to have our own "crackpot day" but maybe we can call it something more complimentary.

It's easy to get caught up in our own research, exchange of ideas, PLN (private learning network) and forget to let other, less technology savvy, people input into strategy. This is valuable because the free exchange of ideas engenders enthusiasm for the resulting programs and staff and students have great ideas or may be using resources in a way not expected by those who understand how things "should" be used. Design every ICT strategic team so that there is regular input from those not in the group and each new idea needs to be fostered and enjoyed and discussed rather than immediately dismissed. Through this exchange schools and strategy grow.

The last and possibly most important lesson I've learned from the West Wing series is that green apples smeared with peanut butter are a taste sensation. Seriously, try it!

Half Baked Idea

I have an idea!

There's a lot of hypothetical talk at the moment at school. We're investigating a 1:1 laptop program and so a lot of thought, research and discussion has been dedicated to this possibility even though it is as yet only a possibility.

One of the directions of the thought, research and discussion has been a possible pilot program with a small group of students. How best to launch the new paradigm? How to train the students, excite the students and encourage them to really put the laptops to the test to make the pilot worthwhile?

I have had a brainwave. It started as a small kernel of the possibility of an idea which involved teams and a task based competition of some kind and now it's growing into a half-baked idea.

What if we could get a day? An incursion day for all the students in the laptop pilot program. We could break them into small workgroups or teams (possibly along house lines, definitely mixed ability) and run a game.

There's a lot of talk lately about MMO (Massive Multiplayer Online) games for learning. The Horizon Report 2011 mentions it and IBM and the Smithsonian have launched their own for children. My idea is similar to the Smithsonian Pheon idea in that the students will have a menu of tasks to complete from which they have to choose a set number but not the whole list.

I'm going to slightly diverge here as I expound upon the menu. It would be an interesting idea to grade the tasks according to difficulty to give teams an incentive to choose tasks that might take more time in order to get them closer to their goal.

OK, back to the tasks; I have brainstormed a list of tasks that might suit the requirements for the launch of the pilot. It's important that the tasks explore the capabilities of the laptops and the wireless internet. They should also introduce them to the concepts of digital collaboration and project work.

Here's the initial list I came up with. It needs some serious fleshing out. Please feel free to comment with any additions.

• Use Google earth and geo tagging - might need to ensure there are enough phones with geotagging - maybe we can get them to triangulate GPS coordinates
• Video your team performing a cheer you created
• Take a picture of your team in a human pyramid - can change this pose
• Draw and label a diagram of an invention idea - must use stylus
• Complete a long division show all working use stylus
• Plot a graph
• Crack a cypher
• Research a great scene from history and recreate a still life of it.
• Write a poem and record it to a beat
• Create a piece of music - aviary.com
• Create a cartoon character and illustrate a cartoon strip

We'd need teachers to assist with supervision and checking off tasks but this should be manageable as these students will be off other classes for the day.

If this ever comes off it's going to be fun!

Introduction Post

I'm Amanda Hogan (a.k.a @hogesonline) and I have just had some brilliant news. I have been invited to join the inaugural Google Teachers Academy Sydney on the 20th and 21st of April. This has made me think finally that I could probably squeeze a blog into my otherwise busy life.

I've been a consumer of others blogs and twitter streams for a very long time without feeling the need to be much of a contributor but I am an integrator and have ideas and skills to share and maybe those should be shared in a macro rather than a micro sphere. Recognition by Google does that.

I feel extremely proud and privileged to be offered a place at GTA Sydney and thought I'd showcase a couple of the other application videos as a virtual knuckle-bump to my fellow Academy members.

from @davein2it

from @betchaboy

And @fionagrant

There are heaps more but these piqued my interest. See you in Sydney!