Derek's Blog

Following on from discussions that I heard taking place at the ULearn conference I was interested to read this morning (via eSchool News) a new report that concludes that when implemented carefully - with adequate attention paid to training, support, and evaluation - technology has been found to have a significant positive impact on student learning across all areas of the curriculum.

Produced by Cisco Systems and the Metiri Group, the report summarizes general trends and representative studies in areas such as television and video use, calculators, engagement devices such as interactive whiteboards, portable or handheld devices, virtual learning, in-school computing, and one-to-one computing. The report aims to provide educators with sound data about technological innovations that researchers say are working. Its goal is to help school leaders make better decisions about technology investments.

Key conclusions from the report include observations that...

• educators have been "overly confident that they could easily accomplish the depth of school change required to realize the potential technology holds for learning--not an easy task.

• educators did not make as much effort as they could have in documenting technology's effect on student learning, the way teachers used the technology, or how efficient it was.

Both of these findings ring true for me in the NZ situation, although I believe we are seeing the development of emphasis on a more critical approach to the use of ICTs and to the adoption of Action Research practices by teachers.

The report refers to and provides substance to the arguments made by Larry Cuban in his book "Oversold and Underused" - but in my view, provides a more optomistic view of where we could see things going, provided sufficient attention is paid to the recommendation that schools take a more critical look at what they are trying to do with technology, what their expectations of its use might be, and what they are doing to identify and document the impact that it is making in order to make informed decisions about its use.

I'd recommend this report as essential background reading for facilitators, principals, ICT coordinators and any teachers who may be doing research or completing studies in this area.

The full report can be downloaded here from the Cisco site as a PDF document.

Posted by Derek Wenmoth at 10:28 AM | Permalink | Comments (3) | TrackBacks (0)

Lisa Galarneau's presentation at the ULearn conference has certainly stirred up a lot of conversation about gaming in education - ranging from those who are inspired and enthusiastic to those who don't see any place for computer games in the classroom. A lot of this is fuelled, of course, bu the sort of statement that was made in the TV3 news item about Lisa's talk where the intro claimed that "games may be the future of education".

Such extravagant claims are, or course, intended to stir imaginations and evoke response - all of which is constructive as we seek to address questions about the future of schooling in a digital and networked age. I have three children still at school, and while I would not like to think that their future will consist of sitting all day, every day in front of a computer games console, I am continually intrigued by the ways in which their engagement with digital technologies and participation in the online world is contributing significantly to their disposition as learners - both in terms of how they learn and what they learn - as well as with whom they learn.

In response to what I see as an undercurrent of negativity and ultra-conservatism among some at this conference, I thought I'd record why I am a supporter of the use (and ongoing research into use) of games, gaming and game development in education. Here are my three main reasons:

1. Games are engaging - there is little doubt that games engage learners. As educators we are all interested in making learning engaging, relevant, delightful etc. There is much to learn from the whole area of games development that might inform the nature of learning activity that occurs in classrooms in the future. We need researchers like Lisa and others to lead us in this thinking - and we need to be engaging in conversations about how this can inform the nature of what happens in our schools and classrooms.

2. Games can effectively mediate experiences and events we've long recognised the advantages of direct, purposeful experiences in educaiton - theorists such as John Dewey and Edgar Dale have provided excellent frameworks to support this. There are some really useful initiatives going on at present to explore how the exisiting gaming engines may be used to provide pedagogically sound, educationally-oriented experiences for learners. Second life is a good example of an open, simulated environment that is being used by some educators, while simulations such as Darfur is Dying provide a more focused experience based on specified learning outcomes.

3. Game development is effective for teaching important skills - Games in education needn't be focused only on playing games. I believe there is a lot to be gained from providing students with the tools and abilities to create, construct and contribute to their own games. Using such tools students have the opportunity to develop and use skills that are going to be in demand in a digital world - including programming skills, graphical and design skills, collaborative skills etc. There is an increasing focus on the development of games that can be modified by the user (MODs) which fits this category also.

I could elaborate more on these ideas I'm sure, but for now this summarises where I'm coming from. I think we ignore the potential impact of games in education at our peril - and we simply can't wait for our politicians and policy makers to complete their "risk mitigation" on this - those who are already using, playing, making and modifying games with their students. We need to capture these experiences, share them and learn from them and eachother (and that includes the students). There's already a plethora of information available to us to support what is happening in this area, so let's just do it.

Posted by Derek Wenmoth at 10:30 AM | Permalink | Comments (8) | TrackBacks (0)

A great first day of the ULearn conference in Christchurch yesterday - over 1400 teachers gathering for the annual conference on ICT use in Education. A special feature this year is the involvement of some early childhood educators in the leadup to the implementation of professional development programme to support the implementation of the ECE ICT strategy, Foundations for Discovery.

Keynote speaker for day one was Lisa Galarneau with a talk titled "Welcome to the Future: What online games can tell us about the future of learning". Lisa's presentation can be downloaded from her socialstudygames blogsite .

I presented a spotlight presentation and another workshop in the afternoon. The spotlight was billed as an "environment scan", looking at a range of issues and ideas influencing the implementation of ICT in education. The presentation can be downloaded here.

The workshop was titled "Web2.0 and the school's LMS: what's the connection" and provided an overveiw of the sorts of things that schools need to be considering as the nature of participation and use of the online environment changes. This presentation can be downloaded here.

Posted by Derek Wenmoth at 11:46 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

I spent a morning at the Future Learning for a Networked World open seminar in Christchurch a couple of days ago at which I had the pleasure of meeting and talking with Stephen Downes about the whole idea of open content. He reminded me about the Directory of Open Access Journals that exists online, providing an amazing source of journals and articles that can be accessed free to support courses - instead of paying a premium for textbooks.

There are many good reasons for considering this - apart from the cost, textbooks and other traditional forms of published material are in danger of becoming increasingly irrelevant in our education system as emerging ways of creating, contributing, reviewing and using digital content become the 'norm'.

With this in mind I was interested to view a video-cast by Richard Baraniuk (pictured above) on TEDtalk dealing with this very topic as he talks about a project he is involved with called Connexions. Baraniuk is a Rice University professor with a giant vision: to create a free, global online education system. In this presentation, he introduces Connexions, the open-access publishing system that's changing the landscape of education by providing free coursework and educational materials to everyone in the world.

Baraniuk's presentation is very easy to follow and understand, and it presents a vision of a future that I'd rather like to be a part of! (thanks to Leigh Blackall for the heads-up on this clip)

Posted by Derek Wenmoth at 12:33 AM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

I've just been reading through some of the articles and papers that are a part of special issue of The High School Journal (December 1995/January 1996) that was developed on the Horizon site.
They can be found within the Projects page of the Horizon Site, under the heading Essays on The Future of Secondary Education.

There are some great reads here from authors including James Morrison and Andy Garvin who frequently appear on readings lists and links associated with the areas of education that I'm intertested in.

Three of the essays have particuarly taken my attention, the first being The Inquiry School: A Sketch of a High School for the Next Generation by David Marshak from Seattle University. This was of particular interest in terms of discussions we've been having in my workplace about the need to develop a disposition of Inquiry in students to prepare them for their future. Marshak bases his essay on the assertion that secondary schools are caught in a struggle between, on the one hand, a push for common standards for all students, and on the other, developing programmes that reflect the needs of learners in authentic ways. His solution is an Inquiry School:
a model for a high school that could bridge the polarity between these two perspectives and result in high school graduates who are both competent and knowledgeable according to a set of common standards and skilled, thoughtful, and lively self-directed learners.
In the essay Marshak outlines the six guiding principles for such a school, and even gets down to the detail of describing how the programme would operate, which includes two dimensions - a group programme and a mentor programme.

The second essay that caught my eye is titled Students as Producers: Using the World Wide Web as Publishing House by Richard Smyth from Hamline University. Smyth focuses on two cases to illustrate how teachers can assign collaborative writing assignments incorporating hypertextual principles of composition that require students to prepare texts to publish on the Web. There's an interesting quote towards the end of the essay where the author refers to...

Ben Shneiderman (1992) calls for both "engagement," which he defines as "interaction with people" (p. 18), and "construction," which occurs when "students create a product from their collaboration" (p. 20). reference included in the essay

A third article of interest is New Possibilities for Teaching Diverse Populations in Tomorrow's High School by Laurence R. Marcus and Theodore Johnson from Rowan College of New Jersey. This one has particular relevance in NZ where the focus on Diverse Learners is a key part of the Ministry of Education's Schooling Strategy. Marcus and Johnson suggests that the effective use of instructional technology, along with the reconceptualization of the role of the teacher, can help students to achieve their potentials within heterogeneous settings in the high school of the future.

Posted by Derek Wenmoth at 2:49 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

There is a lot of activity in NZ at the moment around the establishment of MUSH networks in local areas, providing linkage to the Advanced Network (KAREN) that has just been implemented. In the school's area in particular, there are a number of initiatives exloring ways of using these networks to share services and resource repositories.

Seems that the whole issue of digital storage is attracting attention, particualrly as the so-called Web2.0 technologies take hold. The key here is the fact that consumers are now becoming producers - and the more they produce, the more the need for this to be stored - and the more that is stored, the greater the need for what is stored to be able to be searched for.

The relationship between storage and search is that more digital content requires more digital storage, and cheap storage stimulates consumer and enterprise proliferation of digital content. The more content that's stored, the more important search functionality is. The better the search functionality, the more people will use it. And so the cycle continues.

All of this brings us back to the importance of digital storage. An interesting blog post titled Future of Online Storage, 40 points to think about by Jeremiah Owyang provides a really useful insight into this area for those who may be considering where to next in their network. Some of his points will challenge the traditionalists in this field, for example, the idea of viewing thinking about Peer to Peer storage and the prediction that By 2010 all Media will be 50% consumer created.

Posted by Derek Wenmoth at 10:42 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

There's no doubt in my mind that being a teacher nowadays is a far more demanding and complex task than it was when I began my career over twenty years ago.

I've just been spending a few days travelling with a group of Malaysian educators, discussing issues associated with the professional development of teachers, and the problems associated with transforming what we do in schools in order to keep up with changes in technology, changes in student demographics and the competing interests around curriculum and measuring student achievement.

This morning I read through a news release from the Educating Schools Project which highlights findings of a major report on the state of teacher education in the United States.

The report titled Educating School Teachers begins with Majority of U.S. Teachers Prepared in Lower Quality Programs; Report Issues Recommendations to Reform What It Calls the "Wild West" of Teacher Education.

The release contains some challenging statements, including:

Despite growing evidence of the importance of quality teaching, the vast majority of the nation's teachers are prepared in programs that have low admission and graduation standards and cling to an outdated vision of teacher education,

, and..

{The report} identifies several model programs but finds that most education schools are engaged in a "pursuit of irrelevance," with curriculums in disarray and faculty disconnected from classrooms and colleagues. These schools have "not kept pace with changing demographics, technology, global competition, and pressures to raise student achievement.

A list of woes that resonate with what I see in NZ is identified, including low admission standards, lack of quality control, and a huge variability in the amount of time spent in practicums, some as low as 30 hours.

The report includes a comprehensive action plan to improve teacher education in America. Recommendations include:

• Transforming education schools into professional schools focused on classroom practice.
  
• Closing failing programs, expanding quality programs, and creating the equivalent of a Rhodes Scholarship to attract the best and brightest to teaching.
  
• Making student achievement the primary measure of the success of teacher education programs to gauge student progress from the start of school through graduation and to judge the quality of education schools by the performance of their graduates in promoting student achievement in their classrooms.
  
• Making five-year teacher education programs the norm and designing them to ensure that students have an enriched major in an academic subject area rather than a watered-down version of the traditional undergraduate concentration.
  
• Shifting the training of a significant percentage of new teachers from master's degree granting-institutions to research universities.
  
• Strengthening quality control by redesigning accreditation and by encouraging states to establish common, outcomes based requirements for certification and licensure.

I'd suspect that if similar research was done in most areas of the world, including NZ, we'd find similar things. Perhaps it's time to establish a global "best practice in teacher education" exchange where experiences can be shared from some of the "break the mold" programmes from around, such as one at Southern Oregon University that I have visited where the entire programme is based on an action research model.

Seems to me that the huge amount of effort and expenditure that is going into teacher professional development int he moment needs to be matched by what is happening in our pre-service programmes so that we're not continually addressing the "ambulance at the bottom of the cliff" situation that we're creating for ourselves.

Posted by Derek Wenmoth at 7:48 AM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

Have just been playing with Alice again at the Picton conference, preparing for a workshop with some teachers. There's a great little feature in the program that allows you to save the file as a website.

Here's a link to a nifty little "Penguins Game" that was created by Phillip Carroll, the 10 year old son of Greg Carroll, one of my colleagues at CORE. It's impressive how the whole thing works together - although the instructions at the beginning of the animation haven't embedded in this example, so to have some fun with it when it comes up on screen, you'll need to try pressing the following keys to see what happens:
P and Q move the penguin's heads.
L and A make them bob up and down
Space bar ends the game.

Well done Phillip - not bad for just 45mins introduction to the program!

Posted by Derek Wenmoth at 11:32 AM | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBacks (0)

We've had a great day at the Top of the South conference for ICT PD cluster staff from all over the Nelson/Marlborough area. This conference is now in its sixth year, and the growth in confidence, skill, knowledge and capability of the teachers in the region is really evident.

Greg Carroll is with me, and has been blogging about the conference with thoughts and reflections from the keynote and the workshops. Teachers here have had the opportunity to work for a lengthy period of time to achieve new skills and develop new ideas for the classroom in the workshops - all in all a really productive conference.

Here's a link to my Powerpoint Show(abbreviated version) from my presentation.

Posted by Derek Wenmoth at 5:22 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

I'm about to drive up to Picton to give a keynote and workshop at the Top of the South conference for ICT teachers in the Nelson-marlborough region - but as i prepare I came across this very useful site from K12 Handhelds which provides a really useful backgrounder and how-to about podcasting.

The article contains numerous links to information about podcasting and its use in education, examples of school podcasts, podcasting software and how to publish your podcasts. This will be useful to pass on to the teachers in Picton I'm sure!

Posted by Derek Wenmoth at 2:22 PM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

Article in a recent edition of Wyoming's StarTribune.net titled Virtual School Hits Obstacles tells of the efforts of a local school district to open a 'virtual elementary school'.

It's an intriquing tale involving a commercial company who have developed the curriculum materials, the district that is promoting the use and the department of education who are opposing it. There is the predictable tug-of-war over students, with the district claiming they're targetting home schoolers, and the department saying they can't support the "poaching" of students from other districts.

Within the article itself however, two quotes made me think about where we're at in NZ in the development of virtual schooling:

Defending the intention of the virtual school, a local principal is quoted as saying:

"We felt there was a real large number of students, whether they were home-school based or students in families that had mobility issues, that needed to have a consistent and high-quality education, and we wanted to provide that for them."

This sounds a very plausible reason for starting such a school - similar focus on quality and opportunity that underpins the intentions of the efforts here in NZ. My comment would be, while these are laudable goals, the next move must surely be to provide evidence to support the "feelings" that are expressed here. For the promise of virtual schooling to be realised we've got to move past what we think is a good idea and begin gathering hard data to support the notion that students are receiving a better education and better educational opportunities as a result.

And on the matter of supporting the virtual school into the future, an official from the department is quoted as saying:

"For the school to continue in future years, the Legislature will have to pass a law allowing the Department of Education to fund virtual schools, and the department will have to write rules on how these schools are to be run."

Here's the real rub - the "rules" that govern how our existing (face to face) schools operate were developed in an era before virtual schooling was even conceived of. In New Zealand the regulations around how schools receive funding for students, and how staffing entitlements are worked out are all premised on the notion of schools as physical places of instruction, with students in classes taking courses in full year programmes etc. In my experience, any attempts so far to change or adapt these "rules" have been reactive, and approach virtual learning as problematic, rather than taking a more 'green fields' approach that truly tries to align a new set of 'rules' that will encourage and support the aspirations of virtual schooling as articulated in the previous quote. Let's hope that is the approach they'll take in Wyoming?

Posted by Derek Wenmoth at 9:05 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

When I visited Wellington last weekend I had my 9 year old son with me. We were fortunate enough to be in the right place at the right time to experience flying a 737 aircraft from within a fully decked out flight simulator. Watching my son so quickly adapt to using the controls as he listened to the flight instructor reminded me of just what a powerful learning experience such simulations are. One thing that impressed me a lot was the quality of the computer generated graphics that we were viewing through the cockpit window - all based on actual geographical data of the Wellington airport and environs.

I couldn't help but think of that experience tonight when I read of a Los Angeles company that has developed software that renders the exact physics and topology of the moon in a 3D game, letting players drive the lunar surface, gaze at the galaxy or study objects that were left by NASA astronauts on real missions.

I was in my first year at high school when the first moon landing occurred - and 1300 of us were crowded into the assembly hall to listen to the radio broadcast of the event through a single speaker! How things have changed - read what this company have developed:

Virtue Arts, a Los Angeles-based software developer, has used NASA data on the topology and physics of the moon to build a 3D application that lets kids and adults explore the lunar surface. The software, called Lunar Explorer, works with standard PCs and lets users gaze at the galaxy, walk around the surface of the moon, and study rocks that are actually there. Lunar Explorer will be released this month and will cost $39.95.

Virtue Arts' Lunar Explorer software also depicts objects that were left by NASA astronauts on real missions from the '80s and '90s, thanks to data from the space agency. Point a cursor over an object like the satellite shown here, and the software will educate users on how and when it got there.

Virtue Arts, through its content company VirtuePlay, also has created a lunar buggy game, called Lunar Racing Championship, which is expected to be released next June. The buggy is much like a spacecraft, according to Virtue Arts' chief technology officer, because it must work within the physics of the moon to operate. It has rocket boosters and a reaction control system, which is typically found on spacecraft, to stabilize itself in the event of spinning out of control.

Lunar Racing Championship, which will sell for $49.95 next June, is a networked application so that two kids can race each other from two different PCs. The application can run on a standard consumer-grade PC with a graphics accelerator.

News item courtesy of CNet News.com

Posted by Derek Wenmoth at 10:59 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)