Crossing the finishing line

[caption id="attachment_283" align="alignright" width="434"] Too good to be true?[/caption]

"Guys! You're the BEST band I've discovered this year!"

Last week, I received this email which momentarily got my heart beating faster. You see, when I lived in Zambia, some friends and I played music together. We recorded a performance at someone’s party and, in the spirit of the times, I put one of the songs (“See the world as the camels do”) up on social media. On myspace. Well, it was 2004; there was no Twitter and Facebook was still confined to Harvard.

‘Stardom beckons!’, I inform our drummer, Antos. But of course, fame and fortune is not the end of this story. I wasn’t taken in; I’m pretty sure if you did grab the bait, you’d soon get to pay Caroline some money to be promoted on her website. If Caroline even exists.

Between CoETaIL and my involvement in our school’s committee, I’ve spent a lot of time recently thinking about social media. How, once you post something, it sticks around and could come back to haunt you. How there are people out there who will prey on your unsuspecting nature. How it can add spice to life.

In other words, to get the most out of social media, you need to be smart about it. Our school has kept it mostly at arm’s length, but we are aware that we must take more seriously our role of educating all of the community about its relationship with social media.

So, when I was invited to join, I asked if I might use the social media committee’s journey as my final CoETaIL project. The learners would be the members of the committee (teachers, students and school leaders).





The project appealed to me because the learning goal is authentic: we actually do need the policy. Our success would be a real-world achievement. SPOILER ALERT: we haven’t got there yet.

One of the features of a goal which is not pre-determined is that you don’t know exactly what it will take to achieve it. Our six week project was not sufficient to ‘achieve a school-wide social media policy’, nor ‘a review process for the guidelines’. So we missed goals #1 and #4, but I believe that we are doing quite well on the other two goals.



But don’t just take my word for it. As you will see in the video, several members of our thoughtful and diligent committee communicated their thoughts. That has allowed me to look at what they may have learned.

On the principle of ‘show don’t tell’ I decided my story could be related without a voiceover. This seems to be in line with the idea of simplicity encapsulated in Presentation Zen. Moreover, as the media are all my own, I haven’t availed myself of Creative Commons. Belatedly, I have made a CC licence for the music:

Attention Deficit by DJ Gearbox is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License. Based on a work at https://soundcloud.com/dj-gearb/sets/attention-deficit.

[youtube]https://youtu.be/8fa1kLQroLo[/youtube]

If you can't see the video, you may have to click in the address bar.

WHAT HAS THE COMMITTEE DONE SO FAR?

“... a foundational understanding of what [the school] could do ... a wide range of people involved... including students, which is fantastic. We brainstormed in a variety of ways to eventually come up with our unique model for social media guidelines” David

WHAT WOULD YOU LIKE THE COMMITTEE TO ACHIEVE?

“A document we can work with as a school community ... find a way, once we have the document, to promote it, educate...” Katy

“If it’s not shared by the community, then what is it worth?” Lauren

“... you want a policy that allows you to continue to use social media and doesn’t scare people away from using it.” Gemma

There was no pre-testing of understanding, only afterwards, so I can’t know that their insights resulted from the activities we did. But I do have access to other evidence of learning: my own. I have been, in fact, an action-researcher, both participating and reporting.

It has been a very interesting experience, most notably because the course that we have steered has been determined, meeting by meeting, by the outcome of the previous one. We came up with some excellent ideas, such as relating social media guidelines to the DQ digital intelligences model. Most recently, however, with our eye on the available time, we have resolved to break down our goals into more manageable pieces. Thus, we are now responding to the most pressing need for, as one teacher plaintively informed a committee member,

“a piece of paper in my classroom that just tells me what to do”

In our discussions, we have cast our net much wider, which has provided many interesting ideas, but now we know what we must do in the short term. At our next meeting, which will be the final one of this round, we will consolidate the ideas and form of the requested practical ‘piece of paper’ and the process to implement it.

I have learned that I should have given the committee a clearer remit from the start, but I did not appreciate early on that we would have to limit our scope to produce promptly something tangible. I have also learned that our intensive 30 minute meetings, based around Thinking Routines, are an effective way to make progress, but I know that any repeated format suffers eventually from diminishing returns, so I think we should soon pause and consider a variety of ways we could go about our work.

I hope people who want to know what we did will watch the film and leave a comment.

So, of course, I am not going to get famous. But far from being dismayed by someone using my many-years-old relics on MySpace in a blatant attempt to exploit my ambition, I celebrate how social media allow us to preserve and propagate our creations. I believe, with common sense and education, we can learn to use them to our great benefit.

The roadmap is not the road

[caption id="attachment_251" align="alignleft" width="168"] Further on up the road[/caption]

"At the end of nine or ten nights he realized, with a certain bitterness, that he could expect nothing from those students who accepted his teaching passively, but he could of those who sometimes risked a reasonable contradiction." (JL Borges in Labyrinths)

My students are working on their most important project in the IB Theory of Knowledge course - the final externally assessed essay. They must choose one title from six, such as #6 below.

The titles beg some questions (what could 'robust' mean in this context?). I tell them to try to explain their ideas to friends or family and if they can't make themselves clear, it's probably because they haven't properly got their head around it yet.

I had the same experience, of failing to communicate my ideas, when telling my colleagues what I was going to do for my Course 5 project for CoETaIL.

It took a little while for me to realise it, but their incomprehension is explained by the fact that I had not myself figured it out properly. As this post sets out, I was hoping to use our school's pilot project for the new LMS as a medium to apply my CoETaIL learnings. In practice though, as we implement the program, there are too many unknowns in the early stages. Initially, the teachers will be dealing with practical considerations and these don't lend themselves to my plan to apply, before Christmas, George Couros' ideas for Today's Classroom. Thankfully, another idea was waiting in the wings.

 

[caption id="attachment_249" align="aligncenter" width="550"] Imagine, aged 17, having to answer this question in 1500 words![/caption]

 

During Course 2, my collaborative project with Stephen in Milan and Valerie in Zurich was to plan a roadmap towards implementing social media guidelines in our respective schools. At the time, the eventual implementation was hypothetical, but the school where I work is now feeling a pressing need for guidelines for using social media. A committee has been formed and I have some freedom to influence how it goes about its work. This is not an orthodox teaching project, but I have found that I can fit it easily into the UbD template if I assume that the travellers along the road are on a learning journey. Instead of lessons, we shall have meetings; we will demonstrate that we have learned about social media within our community by proposing guidelines and inviting feedback; ultimately, our achievement will be assessed by its acceptance (or otherwise) by the school management.



This brings me back to "robust knowledge". In the context of the quotation, I think it is knowledge which is not easily gainsaid. The title is suggesting that in order for a community to know something, the knowledge must be tested to ensure it is robust. There will be areas on which the group has consensus and these can form a basis; but without the challenge of a disagreement, the knowledge will not be required to defend itself against criticism. I'm sorry, that's the convoluted way we are expected to talk in ToK, as if knowledge were a commodity and we agree what it is.

The challenge for the committee, therefore, is to make sure that it tests its proposals for using social media at school. There is a strong human tendency to seek consensus and to avoid disagreement because it feels like conflict. We must make sure that we do not fall into that pothole. The approach we have planned for the first committee meeting next Tuesday is to ask participants (who are students, teachers and managers) to use techniques which generate a multiplicity of ideas (more than we need) so that to formulate the guidelines, we must decide which ideas are the best ones. Between the meetings, we shall continue to research, curate and debate.

The project rubric applied

We shall communicate our guidelines with Visual Literacy strategies appropriate to the different constituencies of our community. (My Course 3 post: A Great and Vibrant Language)

By gratefully acknowledging the sources of our inspiration (at least five will be considered in the first meeting), Copyright will be respected. (C2: I Finally Renounce my Life of Crime)

The project is fulfilling an Authentic need and its Assessment will be whether it is fit for its purpose.

I have long been inspired by the ISTE Technology Standards. In this case, the Citizen category for students and educators are particularly relevant (C1: Taxonomy Domine)

• 
  

  "Educators inspire students to positively contribute to and responsibly participate in the digital world." (ISTE, 2017)

  
  


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  "Students recognize the rights, responsibilities and opportunities of living, learning and working in an interconnected digital world, and they act and model in ways that are safe, legal and ethical." (ISTE, 2016)

  
  

Although this will be a committee meeting, we shall need skills of Classroom Management.

The committee will be put in Active Learning situations in which members generate their own ideas and reflect on their experiences of social media.

It is important that the Use of Technology is not gratuitous. Most of the activities in our committee will encourage face-to-face communication; the dialogue and curation, which will continue between meetings, will be facilitated by technology. (C4: What the 1 to 1 classroom has taught me)

We shall be successful if robust guidelines emerge from our consensus and our disagreements.

Catalysts for understanding

If you watched the video, you now know that the Earth spins because it formed from rotating dust and nothing has stopped it so it just keeps on going. It's got nothing to do with forces, centrifugal or otherwise, nor does gravity make the Earth spin. Many former students of Physics can spout Newton's First Law of Motion, but Derek Muller's videos go beyond mere repetition of knowledge and, by first focusing on misconceptions, achieve greater understanding.

"The idea of understanding is surely distinct from the idea of knowing something." Wiggins and McTighe, Understanding by Design 2nd edition (p36)

More than just a manager

In 2018, all of the teachers in our school will be using a new learning management system (LMS). My ed-tech coach colleague and I have a full year in which to help our Upper School faculty, alongside their existing workloads, to become comfortable with the system. As a first step, we have envisaged a pilot of volunteers which will begin in August 2017. My hope for this LMS, with its myriad capabilities, is that it will not simply manage the learning, but that it will be a catalyst for change. More than simply acquiring new routines, we will explore the potential of the LMS for improving our students' learning.

We call it One to World

For nearly one year now, all of our students have brought a laptop to school every day. The learning curve has been steep, since most teachers and students had never worked in a 1 to 1 environment before. But the education has not changed very much, if at all. This is not to say that the computers are unused, rather that there isn't a strong culture of innovation. Don't get me wrong: no-one is suffering. As ever, Good Teachers + Good Students = Learning. Having gone down the road of computer-enabled learning, however, I think we should be better exploring technology's possibilities.

What should our teachers be able to do?

"The challenge is to focus first on the desired learnings from which appropriate teaching will logically follow." (p14)

The teachers will learn how to use the LMS and will know what the school wants them to do with it. Is that all? Surely there must also be understanding of how the system can support learning.

"To understand is to have done it in the right way, often reflected in being able to explain why a particular skill, approach, or body of knowledge is or is not appropriate in a particular situation" (p39).

Our teachers are not short on professional knowledge nor understanding; but many aren't familiar enough with how educational technology could help their students learn better. Our goal will therefore be to relate the mechanical processes of the new LMS to powerful educational concepts; in particular, concepts which can be enhanced by computers in the classroom.

And what might these concepts be?

[caption id="attachment_69" align="alignleft" width="300"] Image: Craig Badura[/caption]

George Couros has provided an excellent schema for how today's classroom could look. Crucially, although few of the ideas have a direct line to technology, they all can be enhanced by it.

When the Physics class used a wiki to comment constructively on each other's Energy projects; when my IB ToK students could submit any 'creative digital document' to demonstrate their understanding of Cultures; when Grade 6 students could see their Online Habits survey responses accumulate in real-time; on all of these occasions, I revelled in examples of Couros' ideas made concrete by technology.

A greater success, however, would be if they can use that knowledge gained in one situation and apply it to others.

"Understanding is about transfer... we can create new knowledge and arrive at further understandings if we have learned with understanding some key ideas and strategies" (p40)

How will we know what the teachers have learned?

What will be the evidence of learning? I'm not sure I know yet. The LMS has been purchased, but I haven't got my hands dirty with it so far. This one has a great reputation in schools. I do know that I want to use Couros' 'Today's Classroom' as part of the teachers' learning experience. There will be evidence of their Voice as they Reflect on the outcomes of their Self Assessment. I hope there will be evidence they have Thought Critically about the Problems they might solve and evidence they Chose to Innovate and to Connect with other learners.

What will be their learning experiences?

In UBD, this is the third and final stage of deciding, and since my knowledge of the evidence is incomplete due to inexperience with this LMS, I shall be developing the activities, with my coach colleague, at the start of the next school year.

On my CoETaIL projects page, I have embedded the UBD template. Being live, it will reflect the project at whichever time you read it. As I write, only the Desired Results are known, including:

Understand how new ideas (eg Couros’ ‘today’s classroom’) can be supported by the new LMS

More than knowledge, understanding will be my main criterion of success. The teaching will aim at understanding and I shall seek ways to gather evidence of:

"conceptions: that is, meanings that are general ... Without this conceptualizing, nothing is gained that can be carried over to the better understanding of new experiences" John Dewey, How we Think, 1933, p153

Paradigm Shift by the Dashboard Light (CoETaIL blog tour)

"We've got this new concept, the idea of cloud storage... it's become much more of an unremarkable thing nowadays for musicians to collaborate and be able to share their entire projects with each other across the globe." Todd Rundgren on All Songs Considered podcast.

Rundgren, who produced Meatloaf's Bat out of Hell album among many others, has been at the forefront of music technology for 50 years. From his studio in Hawaii, he uses Dropbox to work with artists anywhere in the world.

It's good to be reminded how far we have come.

CoETaIL course 2 aims to give us "the experience of a globally collaborative project". From Luxembourg, I linked up with two other colleagues working in Europe: Stephen in Milan and Valerie in Zurich. Every few days for two weeks, we met online and planned guidelines for using social media in international schools. The tools we worked with have become very familiar: Skype; Google Docs; email; phone, tablet and laptop. While sitting in our own homes, amongst our families, we worked face-to face, simultaneously on the same documents; then we made agreements and commented asynchronously, at times which suited each of us, on the others' plans. Social Media are Changing who we are is my blogpost about our project (and about my screen-free vacation that it inspired).

When, by chance, we all attended the same international conference last month, I felt I was greeting longtime friends.

It's easy to overlook how incredible this project would have seemed to teachers a generation ago. Such a collaboration could have been achieved only with plane tickets; high phone bills; envelopes and stamps.

And now, these tools are in our hands; in our pockets; in our homes; 24/7, if we allow them. Our project "Guidelines for Using Social Media in Schools" addresses the concerns we all should have about ubiquitous digital tools. Equally, it employed those same tools to blend our own ideas and experiences with the opinions of experts. Driven by our participation in CoETaIL, we experienced, as educators, what we desire for our students: the modern miracle of global collaboration.

Learn design theory - then follow your heart

It's so easy to create your own new blog or website: a handful of clicks to give it a cool name, choose a groovy template, create some pages or posts and suddenly you are an author publishing on the web. I've done it many times, but I sometimes later regret my initial aesthetic decisions. Maybe I went with the defaults and my blog looks too much like all of the others; alternatively, perhaps I threw together a palette of colours which I later feel doesn't marry with the message I want my audience to take away.

[caption id="attachment_153" align="alignright" width="300"] The blog before I changed it[/caption]

In a previous post, I described how I initially decided on the look for my Knower's Arc blog. Now everything has to change: function, layout, appearance and content. It's nice when you get it right at the start (which I didn't). Otherwise you need to intervene and fix it. Here goes.

a new function

There are two ways in which I generate material for my Theory of Knowledge course: I create online slideshows to support the teaching and I collect online stimuli to inspire student presentations. I would like to curate all of these materials in one place. Thus, the blog needs to acquire pages where my resources will live.

[caption id="attachment_154" align="alignleft" width="300"] Now it's a blogsite[/caption]

a new layout

I considered a few alternatives (Google sites, Wordpress, Weebly, Wix, Wikispaces, Squarespace...) but eventually decided to stay put on Blogger rather than re-build the site from scratch. Beside the existing blog and tag cloud, I have created pages to house resources for each of the main topics (about 20). It's pretty text heavy, but that seemed to me the most efficient way for all of the links to be on the homepage. The categories are based on the course organisation which all of its users understand. You can't tell, maybe, but there were many versions of the layout before I arrived at this which works best for me. I also changed the picture but I couldn't say why I chose the new one. It looked right.

a new appearance

[caption id="attachment_155" align="alignright" width="300"] Goethe's wheel connects colour and emotion[/caption]

Leonardo, Newton and Goethe all had theories which expressed their beliefs about what colour is and the emotion it evokes. They did not agree. None of them knew anything about hexadecimal colour codes which reduce all colour to a logical system understood by websites. Nonetheless, it is generally agreed by modern designers that colour and emotion are related. Do all cultures react the same way to colours though? Some research suggests not. So maybe someone's colour theory tells us more about the person than about colour itself. If you're going to break the rules, though, it's better to know them.

My first colour scheme combined colours from van Gogh's paintings. I suppose I thought that one of art's great aesthetic sensibilities couldn't be wrong, but why should that work for an entirely different purpose? Time to try something different. I'm not going to use someone else's palette. I'll make my own.

[caption id="attachment_156" align="alignright" width="300"] Paletton.com's wheel is based on logic[/caption]

Paletton.com is an amazing free tool. This is my chance to play with it. I used it to make some themes.

1. Monochromatic blue based on a tone in the banner photo which I sampled with the excellent ColorZilla Chrome extension.


2. Triad yellow based on van Gogh's sunflowers + two adjacent colours chosen by eye).


3. Triad purple based on the colour of my Physics website + two distant colours chosen by eye.


4. Tetrad of colours separated by Golden Ratio.

Flick through the slides to see the four schemes I tried.

In this process, I have learned a lot about colour; triads and tetrads; brightness, saturation and hue. In the end though, I will use the green theme just because it looks right to me. The colours are quite restful which I think may be due to their proximity in the wheel (but it's an emotional rather than a rational choice). I am too close to the result to judge whether it is actually an upgrade.

What I have learned about resources which are created online is that they are never finished. If you look at the KA blog today, you will probably see a different version from the one below.

[caption id="attachment_159" align="aligncenter" width="1335"] The final version for now[/caption]

Enjoy That Amazing Cloud Moment

Many times I have seen people during their Cloud Moment. This is the instant when it dawns on them that storing files online can change your working life for the better. Suddenly they see:

• It's just a link, not a heavy file!


• Only the latest version of the document!


• Everyone's copy updates instantaneously!

And when you've had your Cloud Moment, you never go back again. At a workshop in Hong Kong several years ago, I attended a session about using wikis in education. It all made immediate sense to me. As soon as I got home, I started a wiki for my Physics teaching resources. When I told my son I was looking for a good name, he said: "Just make sure it's nothing nerdy".

[caption id="attachment_131" align="alignleft" width="120"] Babette Weatherell made the logo of my first wiki[/caption]

So my first website was born. One fortuitous decision I made right at the start was to organise the pages exactly as the IB and IGCSE Physics teaching syllabuses are structured. This means that students have an immediate understanding of where to find things. I also created all the pages ahead of time so that when I came across a resource which I would only use in six months, I knew where I could embed it to find it again.

Many wikis, websites and weeblies later, I am thinking hard about my latest online project. The IB's Theory of Knowledge programme has a strange effect on many of its teachers: we see materials for lessons everywhere. So I started Knower's Arc, a teaching blog on which I report about the resources I have found and want to share. I've made a reasonable start, but now I'd like to review my design decisions and build it out to include webpages.

Decision 1: I decided not to use any of the default suggestions from Blogger; rather, to make the blog distinctive, I adapted the Simple template with my own aesthetic choices.

Decision 2: No Ariel font, obviously. I felt that Cherry Cream Soda was a bold choice. As Claudio Guglieri advises: "be playful and consistent when using typography".

Decision 3: I read a great blog post about some prize-winning websites. One of them was inspired by Vincent van Gogh's colours which I hoped would convey his emotional values to my readers.

Decision 4: Although there are many better photographers, I prefer to communicate a personal tone by using my own images. For the banner I cropped a photo of buffalo I took last year in Wyoming. Some of the colours in the scheme I had chosen were repeated in the image.

Decision 5: My main organising principle was to use a limited range of tags related to the ToK course so that visitors to the site could search for posts connected to their particular interest.


But do they all work together?

"Symphony...is the ability to put together the pieces." (Dan Pink quoted by Reynolds)

What I tried to do was to discern simple principles with which to make my design choices. I am conscious that aesthetic decisions have an emotional component and have tried to embody a confident and calming yet inspired vibe.

It's not really for me to say whether my whole exceeds the sum of the parts. Is the font a little bit crazy? Is the title text too pale? Have I been too seduced by the idea of magnificent buffaloes and accepted a blurred picture? The creator is often not the best person to critique the creation. In the next two weeks before I work on my re-design, I'll seek advice from teachers, students and my CoETaIL cohort (please let me know in the comments!).

In his blogpost about presentations, Garr Reynolds recommends starting on paper.

"It's during the preparation stage that you slow down and "stop your busy mind" so that you may consider your topic and your objectives, your key messages, and your audience."

[caption id="attachment_132" align="alignright" width="215"] A site for sore eyes[/caption]

It's perfect advice, in my opinion. I have learned that an analogue medium is more flexible and reactive when one is throwing around ideas to see what works. On the right is a representation of the site as it is now so that I can re-imagine the elements. I'm also planning to expand its purpose to a website built around a blog.

[caption id="attachment_134" align="alignleft" width="201"] My initial thought shower[/caption]

I brainstormed that idea (left) and will let those thoughts simmer for a while now. My previous experience taught me that you've got to get the structure right before investing time in the content.

FINAL THOUGHT

Last week our Grade 7 students finished their infographics project. They did a great job and produced a lot of clear visual explanations. Something I noticed, however, was that in 100 infographics, although they had clearly cited what they had appropriated from other sources, not one student had used an original photograph or image. And the topic of the project was Luxembourg (where we live).

The Presentation Zen blog is a fund of great advice from which I have learned and which I shall pass onto my students. A school project is not a business presentation, however, and does not require the same production values. Our students have recently discovered that with Pixabay they are not even required to attribute what they have used.

Rather than capitalising on new creative possibilities, we are slipping into a world of lazy re-use (albeit perfectly cited). I am making a determined effort for myself and my students primarily to use original images in our blogs and presentations. They won't be as beautiful as the defaults, galleries and templates permit, but there will be more of ourselves in our work.