I've been involved in initial process of getting Year 12 students to be considering leadership positons for 2012 and have shared these quotes which I like:
If your actions inspire others to dream more, learn more, do more and become more, you are a leader - Quincy Jones
A good leader inspires people to have confidence in the leader, a great leader inspires people to have confidence in themselves" - Eleanor Roosevelt
I particularly like the second one!
Thursday, October 6, 2011
Nearly a year?!
Yikes, my last blog entry was 8 October 2010. Why have I not been doing anything, I ask myself. From being a big believer and participant in a twitter/blog PLN I've really dropped off the radar (and boy do I miss it). Then I sit their thinking I need to get back on board but with so many ideas buzzing around my head where do I start again, where do I put my focus? Then I get side-tracked and another week has gone by.
I was just raeding the latest Interface and the page on twitter with "The five excuses for not using twitter"
a. ...because I don't have anything to say
b. ...can't say anything meaningful in 140 characters
c...I don't have time to use twitter
d....I'm not interested in hearing what people are eating for breakfast
e. ...it's a waste of time.
What's my excuse? I feel like I've just fallen out of touch, time being the convenient excuse, but I need to get back on board because I miss the learning, miss the people and feel I am not growing as I should as a consequence.
I was just raeding the latest Interface and the page on twitter with "The five excuses for not using twitter"
a. ...because I don't have anything to say
b. ...can't say anything meaningful in 140 characters
c...I don't have time to use twitter
d....I'm not interested in hearing what people are eating for breakfast
e. ...it's a waste of time.
What's my excuse? I feel like I've just fallen out of touch, time being the convenient excuse, but I need to get back on board because I miss the learning, miss the people and feel I am not growing as I should as a consequence.
Friday, October 8, 2010
Key Note - Stephen Heppell
Stephen Heppell (@stephenheppell) starts early acknowledging the importance of experience over expertise, acknowledging the importance of action research, reflective practice and the art of the teacher practitioner.
Interesting throwing out the idea of 3 teachers taking a large class - one teacher leads, one manages differentiation, one intervenes for remedial repair work. He says, when one teacher does all this it is often serial when a team do it, it is parallel, learning occurs a lot faster.
"We've put stabilisers on learning" - Nice anaology with bike stabilisers and the use of a balnce bike for his two year old granddaughter which enabled her to be readied for when she got a bike with pedal at the age of 3 she rode it immediately without any problems. The challenge is how can we provide 'balance bikes' for our kids that then enable them to go for it independently, rather than put on the restraints on have them 'stabilised'.
Embarrassed to have not come across google translator and google earth timelines - which show the historical development of cities/paces over years.
Note to self, check out Matt Locke's blog channel 4, behind the interesting Mapumental.
Interesting throwing out the idea of 3 teachers taking a large class - one teacher leads, one manages differentiation, one intervenes for remedial repair work. He says, when one teacher does all this it is often serial when a team do it, it is parallel, learning occurs a lot faster.
"We've put stabilisers on learning" - Nice anaology with bike stabilisers and the use of a balnce bike for his two year old granddaughter which enabled her to be readied for when she got a bike with pedal at the age of 3 she rode it immediately without any problems. The challenge is how can we provide 'balance bikes' for our kids that then enable them to go for it independently, rather than put on the restraints on have them 'stabilised'.
Embarrassed to have not come across google translator and google earth timelines - which show the historical development of cities/paces over years.
Note to self, check out Matt Locke's blog channel 4, behind the interesting Mapumental.
Breakout 6 - Derek Wenmoth (Future Focussed Schools)
Derek Wenmoth presented a challenging talk (available on slideshare) on future focussed schools. OECD future schools sceanrio produced six possible sceanrios:
1. Status Quo - bureucratic systems continue
2. Status Quo - meltdown scenario
3. Re-schooling - schools as core social centres
4. Re-schooling - Schools as focussed learning organisations
5. De-schooling - Learning networks and network society
6. De-schooling - Extended market model
Of course, the likely outcome is a combination. However, if you could start from scratch, without constraint of inherited plant, existing buildings and dedicated real estate, you are pushed back to first principles and if you could do this what would you do? Knowlsey had an interesting approach worth reading about with their 7 schools, shutting them all down on Friday and reopening 4 community learning centres.
If we are condsiering future focussed schools five areas we could consider are:
1. Vision, planning and governance (there are competing philosphies e.g. instead of driving change technology enables, supports and accelerates change; instead of seeing education as broken we need to see it as an investment in the future, teachers are not a problem to be fixed but supported professionals, students are more than a future workforce...). "Organisations that are built to change have a clear sense of who they are and what they stand for" Lawler & Worley, 2009, p.193 (Built to Change). A book worth considering, an oldy but a goody, Beyond the Stable State - Donald A. Schon - the idea that once so and so happens/finishes then we'll be back to normal is a falicy.
Another great question is how do we become a learning organisation? They have five features:
1. awareness throughout the organisation,
2. environment - flatter structures with openness encouraged,
3. leadership - Shared and resources are committed to enable them to lead,
4. empowerment - locus of control shifts to workers,
5.learning - through learning labs which are small scale real-life settings (Again based on a book by Schon)
2. Curriculum - the effective pedagogies & key competencies are great but there are inevitable tensions with technology, cuuriculum, and pedagogy. Again work on TPCK explores these tensions.
3. Buildings and architecture - at the forefront, what are your learning principles and how do you want to learn? There are so many examples of new schools with craetive design approaches including Albany High School.
4. ICT infrastructure - should be flexible, agile, simple, reliable, sustainable, scalable - openness. Need to consider movement towards cloud computing, mobile technologies and personalisation of learning.
5... missed this, maybe it was interconnectvity with other groups?
Derek finished with a caution - dangerous enthusiasms, book reviewed by Otago University. It's not about going back and telling them the jobs they should be doing but instead inspiring them with the vision for the future.
1. Status Quo - bureucratic systems continue
2. Status Quo - meltdown scenario
3. Re-schooling - schools as core social centres
4. Re-schooling - Schools as focussed learning organisations
5. De-schooling - Learning networks and network society
6. De-schooling - Extended market model
Of course, the likely outcome is a combination. However, if you could start from scratch, without constraint of inherited plant, existing buildings and dedicated real estate, you are pushed back to first principles and if you could do this what would you do? Knowlsey had an interesting approach worth reading about with their 7 schools, shutting them all down on Friday and reopening 4 community learning centres.
If we are condsiering future focussed schools five areas we could consider are:
1. Vision, planning and governance (there are competing philosphies e.g. instead of driving change technology enables, supports and accelerates change; instead of seeing education as broken we need to see it as an investment in the future, teachers are not a problem to be fixed but supported professionals, students are more than a future workforce...). "Organisations that are built to change have a clear sense of who they are and what they stand for" Lawler & Worley, 2009, p.193 (Built to Change). A book worth considering, an oldy but a goody, Beyond the Stable State - Donald A. Schon - the idea that once so and so happens/finishes then we'll be back to normal is a falicy.
Another great question is how do we become a learning organisation? They have five features:
1. awareness throughout the organisation,
2. environment - flatter structures with openness encouraged,
3. leadership - Shared and resources are committed to enable them to lead,
4. empowerment - locus of control shifts to workers,
5.learning - through learning labs which are small scale real-life settings (Again based on a book by Schon)
2. Curriculum - the effective pedagogies & key competencies are great but there are inevitable tensions with technology, cuuriculum, and pedagogy. Again work on TPCK explores these tensions.
3. Buildings and architecture - at the forefront, what are your learning principles and how do you want to learn? There are so many examples of new schools with craetive design approaches including Albany High School.
4. ICT infrastructure - should be flexible, agile, simple, reliable, sustainable, scalable - openness. Need to consider movement towards cloud computing, mobile technologies and personalisation of learning.
5... missed this, maybe it was interconnectvity with other groups?
Derek finished with a caution - dangerous enthusiasms, book reviewed by Otago University. It's not about going back and telling them the jobs they should be doing but instead inspiring them with the vision for the future.
Breakout 5 - Cheryl Doig (Paperless Productivity)
Cheryl Doig's presentation is available on a live binder as a model for going paperless as much as possible. I've never heard of livebinder but this video tutorial may help open up some interesting uses. We looked at a bunch of different web2.0 tools
1. Dropbox - useful for sharing files (e.g. pdf) in a public way. It has the advantage of having permissions and synchronising both ways. Hot tip, the more teachers you can invite the larger the storage size made avaialable.
2. Google docs.
3. Tungle for scheduling, making meeting times and so on.
4. Stixy, not convinced.
5. Diigo. A more powerful bookmarking site than delicious. This is one thing I need to be exploring as I'd dismissed it earlier as another delicious (which I was happy with) but the snapshot facility and the sticky notes make it more powerful.
6. Evernote -a way of tracking things over time and not fogetting things.
Cheryl Doig's website thinkbeyond
Note to self - this invite to school of e-learning came via twitter while at Cheryl's workshop. Looks like a great collaborative space.
1. Dropbox - useful for sharing files (e.g. pdf) in a public way. It has the advantage of having permissions and synchronising both ways. Hot tip, the more teachers you can invite the larger the storage size made avaialable.
2. Google docs.
3. Tungle for scheduling, making meeting times and so on.
4. Stixy, not convinced.
5. Diigo. A more powerful bookmarking site than delicious. This is one thing I need to be exploring as I'd dismissed it earlier as another delicious (which I was happy with) but the snapshot facility and the sticky notes make it more powerful.
6. Evernote -a way of tracking things over time and not fogetting things.
Cheryl Doig's website thinkbeyond
Note to self - this invite to school of e-learning came via twitter while at Cheryl's workshop. Looks like a great collaborative space.
Thursday, October 7, 2010
Breakout 4 - Tony Ryan (Solutions)
Tony Ryan - Rather than talking about problems, let's start thinking about solutions.
Here's a range of suggestions:
1. Fun theory - take a problem and get kids to suggest a solution to it.
2. Elizabeth Gilbert, on TED talks, on nurturing creativity.
3. Get rid of small talk: Mindless banter, gossip, inconsequential comments' often use the word 'but'. Get into Big Talk, proactive dialogue, solution focus, challenge, paraphrasing. Teaching kids to paraphrase is a really valuable exercise - using "so...what you're saying that...".
4. If you want to get into solutions with kids, use student voice. Soundout.org has a whole range of ways of doing this and getting schools to measure their use of student voice.
5. Kids have to have good strategies, they also need to know how to use them in particular contexts. We need to teach them to self talk and to think about their thinking (to be cognisant of their thinking - metcognition).
6. Use of thinkers key cards, to get kids thinking.
7. Reflection - what did I do well? What can I do differently? (reflective journals).
8. Another interesting way of getting kids thinking is to photocopy a whole bunch of famous people in shots, or people in different situations, then put speech bubbles above them - get kids to enter dialogue into speech bubbles. Must be plenty of ways of doing
9. Celebrate - we need to do this more. Love the idea of 1000 Awesome things blog.
Now putting this into practice - can I answer these questions...
1. What are three concepts/processes you are most likely to put into practice?
2. What could you do with it?
3. What will you do with it?
4. What will be the process of implementation?
5. How will you keep it going?
Here's a range of suggestions:
1. Fun theory - take a problem and get kids to suggest a solution to it.
2. Elizabeth Gilbert, on TED talks, on nurturing creativity.
3. Get rid of small talk: Mindless banter, gossip, inconsequential comments' often use the word 'but'. Get into Big Talk, proactive dialogue, solution focus, challenge, paraphrasing. Teaching kids to paraphrase is a really valuable exercise - using "so...what you're saying that...".
4. If you want to get into solutions with kids, use student voice. Soundout.org has a whole range of ways of doing this and getting schools to measure their use of student voice.
5. Kids have to have good strategies, they also need to know how to use them in particular contexts. We need to teach them to self talk and to think about their thinking (to be cognisant of their thinking - metcognition).
6. Use of thinkers key cards, to get kids thinking.
7. Reflection - what did I do well? What can I do differently? (reflective journals).
8. Another interesting way of getting kids thinking is to photocopy a whole bunch of famous people in shots, or people in different situations, then put speech bubbles above them - get kids to enter dialogue into speech bubbles. Must be plenty of ways of doing
9. Celebrate - we need to do this more. Love the idea of 1000 Awesome things blog.
Now putting this into practice - can I answer these questions...
1. What are three concepts/processes you are most likely to put into practice?
2. What could you do with it?
3. What will you do with it?
4. What will be the process of implementation?
5. How will you keep it going?
Breakout 3 - Teaching as Inquiry
I was keen to get into thinking about Teaching as Inquiry as I see it as an important next step for our school and a critical part of teaching practice, being constatntly reflective. I've always done that, to varying degrees, but I like the way the NZ Curriculum puts it there as an effective pedagogy reinforcing the fact that this is important for improving kids learning. Notes from the workshop is available on the softwareforlearning wiki. Got introduced to the idea of TPCK (Technological Pedagogical Content Knowledge). Knew of PCK and I suppose this is a logical extension of it - the importance of teacher TPCK in how to effectively incorporate technology in their teaching. Also having a good opportunity to explore TKI, which I honestly need to spend much more time investigating, there's good learning here for teachers, for example these snapshots of teachers inquiry experiences using different ICT tools.
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