Jumping Puddles

Turning a Corner

2010-05-14T07:47:00.021+08:00

Sitting at the traffic lights last night on my way home from work I looked at this and suddently felt "Yes we have turned a corner". After 9 years at my school here in Hong Kong I finally feel that I've had an impact, I'm making a difference and that learning is turning a corner because of this. As this photo suggests a little colour is appearing in our grayscale world.

What has given me this optimistic view? Working with a faculty yesterday on moving from their well favoured booklets to developing an online learning course. As our Year 7 students now all have their own laptops we're looking at ways of them utilising these with our new online Learning Environment WISdom (moodle based). I think what sold the idea to this lovely (yet very traditional) teacher was that we could cut down on her marking! Over the course of the year she teaches all 180+ Y7 students the same material, from her booklet we could make 8 of the 10 activities self marking - and give the students immediate feedback on their progress. Now what teacher wouldn't see this as a win?

Another positive from this is that the Head of Faculty is going to give us admin support! As this teacher isn't up to speed on making a Quiz, the Faculty tech will do this for her! Win!

Trying Out The Mobility - Where can this take us?

2009-10-02T11:53:00.005+08:00

Alan and I are thinking about IEA Award and blogging

The above was sent from my iPhone today whilst Alan and I were working on supporting students of the IEA Award. The chain of thoughts that this has set of has left us now both in overdrive. Imagine a group of students on an excursion contributing photographic evidence to a common blog.

What could we do with that? More importantly how do we get buy-in from other faculty areas? How do we prove what we suspect is possible?
The Quest
Our idea is to hold a cross-foundation Quest. Use game-based theory to get students involved in using mobile blogging technologies. The backstory to the Quest is that you have gone into an old secondhand bookshop in Hong Kong where you find a diary belonging to a resistance fighter from WW2. Unfortunately it is very damaged and you need to use the clues provided in the diary to find out the missing pieces. Students then need to send a photo of themselves at the place in Hong Kong to the Quest blog. Bonus points in the quest can be achieved through uploading other media to the shared online folder.
What's Next?
Where we go now with this is organising the technicalities. Once we have completed the quest we need to put together a presentation about what happened, interview with students that participated and highlight the 21st Century Skills the students have used/learnt. We can then use this video at a staff meeting to show teachers from other faculties what is possible with mobile blogging, ease of use, links to curriculum etc.

Mobile at Last

2009-09-29T12:11:00.001+08:00

Let's see if this works

Lee-Anne

Going Mobile

2009-09-29T12:09:00.002+08:00

I'm in love with my iPhone... there I finally said it - I find myself playing with it several times during the day. I love the connected feeling when I have it with me. It is so much better than a laptop. Even my husband has been converted!

Now for the final frontier... Mobile blogging. I'm hoping that having my iPhone linked up to this blog will mean that more of my "wonderful blog ideas" don't escape into the atmosphere.

Let's see....

Taking IT out of the Classroom

2009-03-19T22:45:00.000+08:00

On Wednesday I joined our Year 7's on their annual Geography Field trip. With my aim to "Move IT Forward", my volunteering was with totally self-serving reasons... to try out some Mobile Learning Technologies.
So into the fray I dived. I didn't let a little thing like not using the hardware myself daunt me. Only one way to find out the issues... give it a go (on a small scale) and deal with the problems as they arise.
I nearly gave up...before we left the building. The last 24 hours were a comedy of errors and madness. On the day though the only evidence was the dark bags under my eyes signalling a lack of sleep on my part.

The Wicked Plan:
Take a group of 16 Year 7 students (av age 11years old) and arm them with a PDA, digital camera and GPS. Take them up to The Peak in Hong Kong and then march them down the mountain to IFC in Central. Along the way students were to do traffic counts, pedestrian counts, landuse survey and interviews with people at 3 different sites.

The Kit:
So what was on the PDA? I loaded it with 3 programmes:
1) iCount - this is a programme developed by David Kennedy at HKU. It enables the students to do a count of the different items and save each directly to a .csv file. This is then uploaded to a computer on returning to school for importing into a spreadsheet for analysis.
2) Create-A-Scape - this is a programme from FutureLab in the UK. You load up a map, create hotspots, synch to a GPS and as you enter the "Hot Zones" you are given instructions. As you move there is a little blue person that indicates your position on the map. Very cool.
3) Phototate - this is a programme also from David Kennedy at HKU that enables you to annotate photos taken with the PDA. The annotation can be written or a voice recording.
So What Could Possibly Go Wrong with such a Wicked Plan?
As anyone who has ever used technology can attest to something will always go wrong... it seemed that in the weeks leading up to the Field Trip that just about everything was going wrong.
1) Making a Mediascape: the way that I'd been taught to create-a-scape was to take a screen shot from Google Earth of the area, mark and then get the UMS co-ordinates of each corner, trim the image and import into mscape before loading the hotspots. Easy enough - I've also experimented with this using an image of my local area. Worked great on my PDA with my GPS.
Problems Encountered: Google Earth gave my a trapezium not rectangle - this would have resulted in the GPS possitioning us in the wrong place on the map. Cause? The elevation change between The Peak and IFC - over a relatively short horizontal distance the vertical drop is around 300m. How to Fix? PLN Rescue #1 -- after an emergency phone call to Matthew Bristow (guru with MScape) in Singapore (thankfully he is still in the same time zone!) I find out that my suspicion is correct and the best way forward is to get the ordinance survey map from the map shop in Quarry Bay, and use the UMS blue lines as my 'cutting' lines in creating the map.
2) GPS devices not talking to the PDAs - this is (apparently) a simple step. Turn on GPS. Connect via bluetooth to PDA. Activate the GPS tool on PDA to connect via bluetooth connection to GPS. Simple! Yeh right! My GPS worked. Of the 5 that I collected from ESF only 2 would work! Great!!
3) eTrex devices disappeared from ESF - no one had any idea where these have gone to in the last 6 months (changing of guard). This device was to track our position as we walked from The Peak to IFC so we could superimpose it on Google Earth. At the 11th hour a new one was purchased. Of course no one knew how to work it - PLN Rescue #2 - so another emergency dash across HK to the school where Peter Woodhead now works to stand out in the carpark at his school (between parent interview for him) and try and get a satelite fix and work out how to use.
On The Day:
So being up until midnight, creating the new mscapes, reloading them onto the PDAs, making sure all PDAs had the right software, standing out on my basketball court trying to get satelite fixes to set up the GPS/PDA relationship (only 3 worked).... I was ready to tackle the trip. We ditched the mscape about 200m down the track from The Peak when we lost the satelite under the canopy of the trees. The kids loved the iCount -- until Des Vous Road where the pedestrain count got up to over 380 in 5 minutes.
Follow Up:
What we now have to do is work in class with the kids and the data that they have collected. Some of the classes will have the 'old fashioned' tally charts, but in the end they will all have to use the track plotted on Google Earth and the pictures they have taken to create a presentation on which of the three sites is the most suitable location for their business.

Worrying Signs

2009-03-09T22:17:00.000+08:00

Today was a day of contrasts for me - on my way to work I was listening to the latest Seedlings podcast, an interview with Michael Horn - one of the co-authors of "Disrupting Class".So inspirational. So many ideas. Later today I received a link to this newspaper article above "Seeing No Progress, Some Schools Drop Laptops" where a school in New York is abandoning their 1:1 laptop initiative after 7 years. Why? What is happening to education? It seems like one step forward and 2 steps back.
I decided that I needed to listen to the podcast again on my way home, one of the quotes that stuck with me is to not use technology for the sake of using technology. It got me to wondering if anyone is doing research into why laptop schemes fail in schools. The article in typical sensationalist reporting tells you all of the bad things that the kids are getting up to, but what had the teachers done? Were they trying to do the same old thing - but just with a computer? Had they developed a VLE with something worthwhile for the students to connect to? Did they have objectives for their laptop scheme from the outset? What sort of planning and professional development did they give their teachers?

Image from The New York Times Article

Sometimes Things do work out for the best...

2009-03-08T14:02:00.001+08:00

I’ve just had one of those weeks where the planets have aligned to bring total chaos to my life – you know the one, you have 6 million things to do, have everything organised and then someone/thing throws a spanner in the works by trying to re-organise your tightly controlled coordination. I thought that I had everything sorted: Friday afternoon – facilitating at CITE symposium, Saturday morning facilitating again, lunch in town, meet daughter/husband at speech and then go to swimming lessons.... oh no it was not to be. I was beginning to wish I had stuck to my NO answer for this symposium and not ‘volunteered’ to ‘waste” my time facilitating.

The Great Spanner Thrower (aka husband) suddenly has to go back to China (again) and won’t be back until the 6pm ferry... no problems I finish at 5:45pm can pick up on way home. Because he was in China 2 days his email box is full – he can’t send/receive mail – and the idiosyncrasies of his work system are such that you can only archive email live on the system, not via the VPN. So last night husband announces that he has to go into work. This is ok until I also realise he has a Dr’s appointment later in the morning and great spanner thrower has a hissy fit over how this will all work.

To a woman juggling all these things comes naturally – and as I sit here typing this today has gone like clockwork – despite husband's worring about how it will all work out. And I’m also over feeling as though facilitating was a waste of time as it was great. I have walked away from all 4 presentations with something; from weblinks to share with colleagues, ideas for classroom practice, to an express line on my research for dissertation. Here is a snapshot of the 4 paper presentations I facilitated at the CITE Symposium 2009.

1. PDAs in Incidental Language Learning – Song, Yanjie: in the past research had focused on the referential use of PDAs for learning language – this research showed that the affordances that a PDA offers are much wider and longer lasting. What does this mean for the classroom? Use mobile phones or PDAs for language learning. Imagine a student who is sitting in your classroom listening to you explain something and you write up a word on the board that they don’t understand. Do they get out of their seat and get one of the 3 dictionaries in the classroom or do they struggle on not understanding? What if they have a laptop/mobilephone with which to look this word up on the internet dictionary, would they do it? The research says yes and that this type of learning is super beneficial to EFL students in the English medium classroom.

2. Near Miss Traffic Analysis – some first year students at HKU had to do a knowledge management project – they decided to investigate near misses and their causes at a black spot in HK. What did I take away from this? Well these students integrated the technology at their disposal taking photos, video and doing animations on PowerPoint that weren’t pointless. I also learnt what a couple of the traffic signs in HK mean ( I never knew there was one just for black spots for instance), and I was heartened that they came up with relevant, feasible results that the local council seem to be listening to.

3. Is there Gender/Age bias in e-Learning readiness of HK teachers? – this research feeds straight into my own dissertation so I was very interested to listen to Dr Teddy So. He has taken e-Readiness models from business and adapted them for use in education. His findings for HK show that for in-service teachers there are definite biases based on age and gender. If you are a female teacher over 31 then you are less likely to be e-Ready than your male colleagues. This is damming in a profession that is a) aging and b) dominated by females! The good news is that when he surveyed pre-service teachers neither bias were found. So we either have to wait for our old female teachers to leave teaching or target professional development at them.

4. Using Videos to improve Oral Presentation – Action Research – Paul Lip reported on a self-evaluation exercise he did with his students. The discussion at the end of his presentation was really engaging as other teachers in the audience gave suggestions of how he could embedd this pilotting work into his everyday teaching. One suggestion stuck with me; filming only 1 group (for each series of presentations) and getting the class to do a peer evaluation and self targeting exercise based on this reflection. Each group of students is to be filmed in turn, but only filming 1 group each time cuts down on the work for the teacher, gives authentic A4L opportunities for students and gets students to relfect on how the "video doesn't lie".

Just one of those days that you thought would be bad... but in the end everything works out fine.
Solar System image from Royalty Free Image Collection on Flickr

Critical Challenges from the Horizons Report 09

2009-02-03T10:42:00.000+08:00

Just for the fun of it I put the text from this years Horizon's Report into Wordle - just the Critical Challenges section. The words that pop out to me are New Learning Content and Students. When reading this section my favourite quote is "students are different, but a lot of educational material is not". Whilst the technology around us is changing the way we work and communicate in our daily lives why don't all teachers take this into the classroom?
Recently I queried a teacher who is reluctant to use her new laptop in the classroom. When I asked her if she could live without her mobile phone she said "No!" I asked her why then she expected kids to learn without technology, when it permeates their lives so much......

Critical Challenges indeed.

Filling the Bucket or Lighting the Flame?

2009-02-01T14:37:00.000+08:00

Yesterday I was listening to David Warlick's most recent podcast from the TRLD conference in San Francisco. He was talking to people at a workshop on Podcasting about "What is Learning?" and "What is the purpose of Education?" One of the quotes from a member of the workshop has stuck with me "Are we filling the bucket or lighting the flame?" I love it. It encapsulates so much of what I'm trying to achieve with my role as Learning Technology Coordinator, in that I want students to use technology as a vehicle for their learning, not just learn about word processing and spreadsheets etc...

One of the problems with our content driven curriculum (yes we suffer from this in HK as well) is that we are driven by the 'need' to cover the curriculum and prepare students for their examination. Yes we can always use the exam as a cover for not changing our pedagogy -- but the research is out there: students that learn to think do well in exams! They are able to apply their knowledge, not just regurgitate the content that they have covered. We don't have to wait for assessment to change we can start lighting the flame now!

Flickr Image: Closer to the Flame by mscaprikell

David Warlick has a Zen of an idea -- Method vs Approach

2009-01-05T22:30:00.001+08:00

2¢ Worth » Method vs Approach - Annotated

David Warlick makes an association between Reynolds Presenation Zen Method v's Approach and the way we approach technology professional development

tags: blog, technology, teaching, David Warlick, literacy, presentation zen
- how we use technology and how we teach it
  - Warlick has articulated what many have struggled to say for so long. Students are not afraid to approach technology in a more investigative way, unlike those of us from the older generation that want the right way to do things everytime. - post by leekevp
- You operate these devices natively, by approaching it with a certain frame of mind, not by method.
- to kids who are at home accessing and interacting with the world from their pockets — there is a disconnect that may well be a big part of why so few of our children are interested in pursuing technology fields
  - Unfortunately many students are not encouraged to take this method of learning into the classroom. We remove the association so that they are acclimatised to learning in a more method way by their secondary education. What are we doing? - post by leekevp
- as educators, need to began to picture ourselves as master learners, and to project that image of ourselves to the community. If we become enthusiastic learners, then we are modeling the concept and process of life-long learning.
  - As technology coordinators/integrators this is what we model. How many teachers within our schools also see themselves as fullfiling this role? - post by leekevp

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favourite links are here.

Teacher Banned by Facebook

2008-12-19T10:10:00.000+08:00

One of our teachers was recently banned for 1 week from using Facebook.... by Facebook! They got really upset with her because she was "using Facebook to chat"

If it wasn't so funny, I'd Cry. What is the world coming to when teachers are kicked off Facebook for talking to their students? The teacher in question had set up a group where her examination class could ask her questions just before their Mock exams. Now unlike some students - her class actually were studying and preparing for their exams. So much so that the teachers activity caught the attention of Facebook Big Brother.... she was warned.. she ignored them... she was banned for a week!

OK - I'm trying to wipe the smile off my face... but I do think this is funny. It also brings to mind the saying "not every tool is a hammer" -- choose the right tool for the right job. I've put said teacher onto Ning - here's hoping that she will take the right action. I don't want to get into a discussion of why the teacher is not using the school learning platform - I'm working my way up to a post on that.

Facing the Divide

2008-11-16T22:43:00.000+08:00

Sad news this week with the death of one of our students. Her death and her illness aren't what I want to blog about however. What I want to talk about is how the students at school found out about it and are dealing with their grief.

I was talking to a group of my year 7 students - and one of the questions they had for me was "Have you ever lost a close friend?" When I said yes that one of my friends had died when I was in Year 11, they then asked how long it takes to 'feel better' (my words as I can't remember the exact wording). When I was explaining to them what had happened to my friend and how I found out their faces were unbelieving. At first I thought it was because of the way my friend died, but as we talked more it dawned on me they were surprised about how I found out. I found out thru a news report on the local radio - and then had to wait at school as all my friends arrived to see who it wasn't/was.

They were surprised that I didn't know before I went to school.

They were surprised that I had to wait for people to arrive at school to find out who had died.

They had the answers to all of these questions within hours of our student dying.
I had come face to face with the digital divide.
Finally I had concrete proof that it existed -- that it wasn't just something that people write about to get their name up in lights.
Whereas my friends and I had to wait and wonder, my students this week knew and started their grieving process.
Whereas my friends and I had to wait for the funeral to say goodbye, my students this week were leaving their messages on a Facebook group -- they started their goodbyes so much earlier than we did.
This is one of the times when we need to say thanks to SMS, Facebook, email etc. Whilst they will never forget their friend, I'm hoping that today's technology will spare them some of the pain that we went through in dealing with our grief.

MacKenzie wants us to think in the classroom

2008-10-28T15:57:00.001+08:00

In his november posting for FNO "Getting Attention in the Laptop Classroom"

tags: laptop, dissertation, professional_dev, mckenzie
- - need to get a copy of this and read for dissertaion. also give to clt @wis - post by leekevp
- chart on the white board
- teachers being able to see the students' screens when they are working on challenges and tasks assigned by the teacher
- teacher who ignores landscape in laptop classrooms is likely to encounter difficulties with classroom management
- Authentic discussion of alternatives is often blocked by the egos of so-called visionaries who are intent on imposing their ill-considered dreams on others

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

What does your horizon look like?

2008-10-22T20:25:00.000+08:00

Have just finished reading the Horizon Report 2008 as part of both my dissertation and group assignment for uni course. What I find interesting is the emphasis that has been placed on each of the chosen technologies.

I found it very interesting that "collective intelligence" is relegated to the mid-distant horizon... 4/5 years away... weird as this is the one that I see most people using and is one of the easiest sells in my role as a LT co-ordinator. So many people are using wiki's and blogs in their classrooms as a way for students to collaborate and construct knowledge, so why the long time frame? The bigger question I suppose is how we value this type of knowledge construction. Is the use of collective intelligence just replacing pens and paper for taking notes? or is it making a real difference in the way we collect and value student work? Is the wiki the process or the end product?

The report looks at collective intelligence as more than just a wiki - it looks at how the open source approach to a problem means that in the business world collective intelligence is used to solve problems in a way that is quicker and more cost effective. It also looks at collective intelligence as having 2 subparts; 1) the wiki or explicit collective intelligence where students can contribute as well as consume (something that I think is already often used in education settings), 2) Implicit collective intelligence where data from a wide variety of sources is combined and analysed to reveal patterns that lead to new learning.

I think that the explicit is easy for us to get our heads around, easy for us to see uses in our everyday learning in the classroom. The implicit by definition I think will be a little harder - at least until the tools to make it accessible to the everyday teacher (read tech-phobic) are as easy as YouTube.

Learning 2.0 Overload

2008-09-19T21:01:00.000+08:00

In the past 3 months I have attended 3 big conferences on the use of Learning Technologies.... today I hit complete overload... my cup runneth over as my Dad used to say. Where to start... I have to start articulating my ideas after my own self imposed 'quarantine' as the ideas for workshops for teachers just keep flowing - and I'm bound to forget them if I don't get them down on 'paper' soon.
This weekend I'm in Shanghai for Learning 2.0 08. Great invited speakers, great attendees, lots of conversations. This conference is a little different as it is very informal and the focus is on having conversations and jump-starting our own learning. So far I've been impressed with the following on twitter - people from Australia, US and across SE Asia are participating - not just the 570 here in Shanghai.
What has my mind in overdrive?
David Jakes and Visual Literacy... now I'm thinking about how this can be linked to the IB Learner Profile and helping students develop their skills as communicators. Students need to be able to articulate their thoughts and the concepts that they are trying to convey in a powerful way - and the informed use of visuals can make this so much more effective.
Brian Lockwood - the use of Web 2.0 tools to improve the way that we work in schools. Should we limit the tools that students use or model ourselves more on Google and the way that they allow employees to choose their tools... should we be using mobile devices such as iPhones, gaming consoles, laptops etc. What affordances do online applications like Drop Box, Evernote, Skitch, wikis, twitter, facebook and self directed blogs give us as teachers.
Chris Smith - good to see Chris again after all these years - his work with Shambles is inspiring for life after The ESF. His International School Island in Second Life is fantastic - the possibilities for education are great, however what to do about the age restriction on Second Life and Teen Grid make things a little difficult. Virtual field trips, extension materials for older students.... this needs much more thinking about and inquiry to see the validity. I don't want to be encouraging students to enter Second Life under false pretenses and this is a valid fear given the number of underage students in Facebook.
Ewan McIntosh - Thinking out of the (x)Box - the use of gaming as stimulus for creative writing. This was an amazing presentation - the possibilities for MFL, English, SEN and EAL are there for the picking. The work that has been done by Tim Ryland with Myst and Kim Pericles with Samorost. Linking this to DeBono's Thinking Hats is a great way to start lessons.
So where to start? I'm still looking for a 'fool-proof' way to distribute my Learning Technology Newsletter to staff - I refuse to go paper based, I need to make these workshops catchy, linked to the Learner Profile and relevant... not a big ask.... really!!

Getting the Quarantine Right!

2008-06-23T21:32:00.000+08:00

Dangerously Irrelevant in his recent blog is talking about how those of us in the ed tech field should place ourselves into self imposed quarantine whilst we 'get it right'. As someone who has been guilty of launching the latest great thing before it was ready I have to whole-heartedly agree with this concept.

Recently I've been flat out working on 2 major projects. One is an interface for our SEN department so that they can integrate IEPs onto our learning platform. The other is consolidating the work I've been doing on podcasting via our learning platform and the affordances this brings to learning and teaching. I finally feel that now this is where it needs to be. Our SEN co presented the IEP interface at a conference here in HK recently and it's generated so much enthusiasm that I'll be training most schools next term in this. Did another pilot/test with a primary school today and I'm now confident that this is a scalable use of the technology... my big test.... because in the end if it requires people like me to do all of the implementation the projects won't out last me... which is what they're supposed to do.

I think that I'm nearly ready to come out of quarantine!

Safe Havens

2008-03-02T16:36:00.000+08:00

The love of my teaching life at the moment is my Learning Platform. I love it because it encompasses everything that I believe a platform should be. It enables me to create that "Safe Haven" for my students to explore and utilise the new Web2.0 technologies that abound on the internet.
How am I doing this? Those lovely words "embed code". We have a Learning Platform that is flexible enough that it allows us to embed much of the internet - without taking students outside of the classroom. Yes it is easy to hyper link to websites like YouTube - but they have so many distractions for students that it is so much better to embed the YouTube video inside a classroom activity page.
What can I do with my Learning Platform - well the list keeps on expanding but so far we've been able to:

Blog - students can create their own blogs and decide who their audience (within the school community) will be. We are using blogs for students to reflect on their learning and extend their learning
Podcast - the latest discovery is that our Learning Platform can broadcast a Podcast - both publicly and privately. Yeh!!! no ftp, no file size limits, no format limits and the students can also create their own podcasts - it doesn't have to be teacher centred-- very satisfying. I've also discovered a wonderful web2.0 application called Feedburner that enables me to make a lovely interface for all of this
ePortfolio - yes it's a catchphrase at the moment but we've been working on digital portfolios at a district level and come up with some templates for both primary and secondary students. One of our main findings is that the tools you use need to be flexible and allow students to direct the outcomes (with guidance) - we're incorporating blogs and web pages as part of the reflection and analysis process.
wikis are coming to our learning platform - great!!! just in time for next terms project with Year 7!! Again they are within our school community so security is not an issue and you can allocate different wikis to different groups of students to create... I'm so looking forward to experimenting with these.
Tasks - you can assign tasks to a group of students, they can share their work, you can have private or public conversations with students about their work, you can see what and when they uploaded files. No more emailing work, no more saving and filing documents from students!! Love it. The best thing is that you can create a task that has embedded internet content, add a couple of files and also has teacher notes so if you share the task with several classes the teachers can have instructions or support materials that the students don't see!

My aim this year was NOT to use the photocopier - I think so far I've only made about 100 copies - the Learning Platform is not only letting me create the safe learning haven for my students - but is helping me to stay green!

How Do You Get it?

2008-02-28T14:32:00.001+08:00

I'm doing my Masters at the moment and this is giving me much cause to reflect on both my practice and the leadership in my school. The one question that I never seem to be able to answer is "why don't they get it??" - why do seemingly intelligent people, who I know read widely about education and the changes taking place in education - why don't they get what it all means???

They don't get that putting computers in the classroom isn't "Job Done". They can't tick the box. They can't move on. They don't get that having me run 1 workshop on "using the learning platform" won't make people suddenly say "hey I'll use that tomorrow"

They don't get it!!

And I don't get why they don't get it.... it is so bleedingly obvious to me!!

This week we looked at leadership issues and ICT - all of the research that I'm reading points to several key facts:

vision - the leadership team of a school needs to create, articulate and get solid support from staff for a vision for the school
understand the big picture - you don't need to be an expert - but you must understand where you are headed and why you are going there
allow people to take risks - change is risky, change is challenging, allow people to experiment, have the no blame (not no responsibility) zone
collaboration shouldn't be limited to our students - encourage and promote it amongst the staff.

Based on all of this I'm trying to come up with a Professional Development proposal for next year. Something that builds on the experience of my past 6 years here and the research that I'm now doing. I wonder if they'll get that?

Why Jump Puddles?

2008-02-27T15:55:00.000+08:00

I remember the joy of my childhood in rural Australia in the 70's - after a big rainstorm my sisters and I would rush to put on our gumboots and head out to jump puddles. With joyful abandon we would go from one to the next all afternoon splishing and splashing. Sometimes the puddles were too big and we'd land in them, sometimes they were too deep and we'd get really wet (didn't my Mum love that). The point however is that we had fun, we were adventurous and yes we did get wet - but we sure learnt how to judge the size of a good puddle to jump.

Where am I getting with all of this nonsense? Using technology in your classroom is sometimes like jumping puddles. Sometimes you pick too big a project and you'll land yourself right in it, sometimes you get it right and sail right over the top of it, landing safety on the other side (of the lesson). But every time you need to think this is an adventure.... it's ok to take risks... it's ok to make mistakes... it's ok if it fails and you end up wet and muddy.

My Mum never got too mad. She was just so proud that she had 3 adventurous kids that liked to take risks... Wouldn't it be great if all our Principals and Leadership Teams had the same attitude?