Preparing for the future

This is just a very quick post: How are we preparing our children for the future?

I just finished reading Stephen Baxter's Flood and Ark (e.g. available at http://www.amazon.com/Flood-Stephen-Baxter-ebook/dp/B002VCR0AS/ref=tmm_kin_title_0), describing a possible future for our world and the decisions that people might have to make to survive themselves or to help mankind survive. This follows watching the video of +ClaireAmos speaking at the Festival of Education about "Realising the Future of NZ Education" (you can find her blog post and the video here http://feedly.com/e/fUwW6LzN).

What are we doing to prepare our children for an unkown but not un-imaginable future??? What are the ingredients our children need to cope with what the future might throw at them? What of the knowledge that we hold dear will be important to them, to their decision making - or maybe just to make them to what they need to be in the future?

The most important open space is your mind

Much has happened over the last few weeks that my little brain sometimes has difficulty catching up with it all, being a Tui chick and all, but all of a sudden some thought s are crystallising, please bear with my while I try to  get these thoughts on this virtual paper.

My first GAFE Summit last week was great at many levels, and you can read my post about this here. I learnt some new tips and tricks, made new connections and renewed old ones (e.g. by showering poor +Megan Croll with coffee... country bumpkin in the city comes to mind...), found new resources, had some thoughts, especially about myself, challenged. This was followed by the 1 year anniversary of +TeachMeetNZ, founded and very competently led by the fantastic +Sonya Van Schaijik. Presenters included @MissDtheTeacher @stephen_tpk@gingamusings @kaiako_nz @gmacmanus @chasingalyx. You can watch the recorded session on the TeachMeetNZ wiki, it is an amazing depository of mini presentations from NZ Educators about topics relevant for NZ education. This was the third TeachMeetNZ I have been involved in, and it has been fascinating for me to look back over my own journey through this time - from "how did I get into this awe inspiring groups of people" to "are you sure I can contribute something to the discussion" to "let me help you get your message out there". Sometimes I wonder how much our tall poppy syndrome, which even immigrants like me adopt very quickly, almost by osmosis, is standing in the way of progress?

In this Storify, once again from the super-onto-it +Marnel van der Spuy, you can see my and other tweeps' tweets about the event:

I had the privilege of hearing +Michaela Pinkerton presentation more than once (in the running up to it and at the event), and the quote that stuck with me the most was

"The most important open space is your mind". 

How open is my mind, am I a connected, life-long learner?

How can I as facilitator create open space for my learners, my schools, their leaders, teachers, students, whānau & community, to be connected, life-long learners?

Do learners need particular pre-requisites, scaffolds to be ready for such an open space, and what would that be?

What do you think?

GAFE Summit 29 & 30 April 2014 - Metaphors and Thoughts about Change in Education

It's the second week of the holidays, and 400 odd educators from around New Zealand got together at Albany Senior Secondary School in Auckland for the GAFE (Google Apps for Education) Summit (I have to mention that in the previous week the same event was held in Christchurch also and drew a crowd of South Island educators). What an amazing event!

The summit was organised by the EdTechTeam with support from various local partners and sponsors and featured international and national Googlers sharing their wisdom. On the one hand it was completely and utterly about Google of course, but not about the company selling product (GAFE is actually free for every school), in my opinion it was all about transforming learning and teaching. All this in the purpose-built MLE of ASSHS, it made quite an impression on me.

There was much googleness to take away for everyone, +Marnel van der Spuy collected the tweets about #gafesummit in two storfies which she kindly shared on twitter - please see them embedded at the bottom of this post. 

In addition to the actual tools and tricks, there were some thoughts I took away with me about change in education:

This metaphor was used by +iPadWells NZ in his session on How Google can move the un-movable Teacher. I have often contemplated why change in education seems to be so slow, and this metaphor seems to demonstrate it. I am a great fan of metaphors, and I used to read The Committed Sardine blog (which I have lost somehow? Can anyone help me find it again, please?) where the education system was compared to a swarm (school?) of sardines, which - against my gut feeling - would change direction quite quickly when approx. 20% of the sardines changed their direction (I would have thought it needed to be at least 50%). What part of the pencil are you? Which direction do you swim within the swarm of sardines?

Yet another metaphor came to mind (I told you I like them :D) when we visited Australia Zoo while on holiday last week. In their big animal show they explained why a saltwater crocodile is moving very slowly on land - the heavy tail is like a dead weight on land. In their 'natural' habitat, murky water, they rule. They come out of the water when there is a great incentive (food), but they will return into the water where they are most comfortable as they are not made for running after prey on land. What if we could take our educational crocodiles - who rule in their environment - out of the water and take the drag of the tail so that they could also rule on land? Maybe not the best metaphor as real saltwater crocs would be quite deadly - and we wouldn't want our students to be killed, would we - but it once again brought it home to me that some people need a dead weight taken off them in order to move freely in the new environment we are putting them into. (Or should we think about is as a kind of evolution where creatures either adapt to the changed environment or they become extinct - but that takes a looonnngggg time - do we have that much time in education?).

What can we do to move the wood/ferrules/erasers, make the swarm of sardines turn or take the dead weight off the crocodiles on land?

• We need trailblazers (leaders and sharp ones, sardines swimming against the swarm) who trial new things and overcome barriers. We need support, resources and emotional, for the trailblazers, acknowledgement of their importance, and the opportunity for them to share with others.
• We need systems in place to support the wood and ferrules, the one-direction sardines, to incentivise the crocodiles to move out of their natural habitat. Just like for our students we need to scaffold, support, walk along side them, provide them with support and encouragement, with clear, high expectations.
• We can't allow the hangers-on and the erasers, the unmovable sardines and the crocodile to stay in their old habitats. We need to make it unacceptable to remain in a pre-21C mindset when we are in the second decade of 21C and are trying to prepare students, most of them born in 21C, for a life in 21C.

So what can we all do right here right now?

For our learners:

• What is your vision for your learners? e.g. lifelong, connected learners
• How will you go about this? e.g. by giving them the opportunity to share their learning with others
• What will you do? e.g. run a class blog for students to share their writing with the world

What does this mean for you as educator and your learning?

• What is your vision for yourself as a learner? e.g. as future focused teaching & learning shows us, understanding of learning has changed, I truly need to be a lifelong, connected learner myself.
• How will you go about this? e.g. I will connect with colleagues within and beyond my school, f2f and virtually.
• What will you do? e.g. join the VLN, twitter, Google Plus, or similar and learn to use it. I'll open my classroom and practise to other teachers and the community. I'll look for opportunities to learn more, go out of my comfort zone.

(Hey, I can get the Golden Circle into anything!) With 96,000 registered teachers in NZ, we should need just about 20,000 swimming against the stream to turn the swarm - are you ready?

So, what am I going to do after this GAFE Summit?

• Continue connecting on the VLN, Twitter, Google+ etc. and sharing my learning (just like in this post)
• Look for even more opportunities to create and share resources, esp. those that follow UDL principles.
• Share more of the opportunities I see coming up with my teachers so that they are aware of them. Walk alongside them, gently persuade them if they are reluctant :)
• Have clear, high expectations, make them obvious. Have high expectations of myself as I model for my learners.
• I want to keep learning more for myself, too, so my next step is to take some of the Google Educator Exams and apply for the Google Teacher Academy in Sydney in September.

(Interestingly, and following the concept of life-long learner and changing understanding of learning and of knowledge, Google qualifications need to be re-taken over time - understandably, as it is no longer about regurgitating fixed content!)

What change do you think our education system needs? Do you agree or disagree with the metaphors and my suggested actions? How will you go about making change happening?

__________________________________________________________________________________
Thanks again to +Marnel van der Spuy, here are the collated tweets from two days GAFE Summit!

Day 1 Storify




Day 2 Storify

Eduignite Rotovegas: Building your online PLN

A couple of weeks this call went out on twitter

Not only do I love helping out my friends +Annemarie Hyde and +Marnel van der Spuy, this was also an excellent opportunity to a) push myself a bit further and b) to progress with my inquiry of how to build capacity for blended learning for rural and isolated teachers - funnily enough in this case I presented from a rural location to a room full of teachers in Rotorua about Building your online PLN. 

+Sonya Van Schaijik, +Justine Hughes and I had a quick practise during the week with Sonya as usual very competently managing all technical aspects :) Looking back over the four online presentations I have given over the last 6 months, this time I felt the most confident yet. There is a bit to get used to when presenting online through a GHO (Google Hangout - or when it gets recorded, a Google Hangout on Air):

• You need to have your presentation ready to go, with consideration to bandwidth (amount and size of images, use of Powerpoint / Keynote vs. Google Presentation).
• Your technical setup needs to work (I tend to plug the ethernet cable into my laptop now - so that excludes presenting from my Chromebook or my MacBook Air) incl. microphone and headphones, you need to have the Google Hangout Plug-in installed
• Within Google Hangout you should explore the various settings and tools, e.g. Toolbox which allows you to show your name and an image at the bottom of your screen etc.
• What are you going to say? With TeachMeetNZ and Eduignite you have rules about length of presentation and are supposed to auto-advance slides every 15s, there isn't much your audience can see / read in 15s and not much you can say (especially when you have an accent like me:D). I must admit after talking with the lovely +Diana Wilkes I decided to print off my speaker notes - there you go, paper is still important!
• The one slightly disconcerting thing when presenting is that you only see your own screenshare (your presentation) and don't see or hear anyone else (all other cameras and mics get turned off to preserve bandwidth). It is challenging to present without having any form of verbal or non-verbal feedback!

I love the learning that comes from these sessions. It was great to hear from Sonya about the origins of TeachMeetNZ - which will turn 1 in May! If you haven't done so, please go and visit the TeachMeetNZ site and listen to the recordings from previous presentations. You can also contact Sonya (@vanschijik) if you would like to use this platform to run your own event. Justine very passionately spoke about how she does not give homework anymore but instead has her students 'prep for learning'. I definitely want to find out more about this, and I will go back to her presentation and follow the links from there (I have never been in favour of giving homework as a teacher, back in my days as music teacher I used to say to the students practising your instrument / voice is enough homework). I wish I could have stayed online to listen to the presentations in the room, however, I was able to read the twitter stream and joined in some of the learning that way.

Where does this fit in with my inquiry: The presentations have all been recorded and are available individually (thanks Sonya!) on the TeachMeetNZ site. Anyone can go and rewind them as many times as they like. You will also find the respective presentation embedded into the individual pages. Teachers can now go and listen to these in their own time. Where my inquiry comes in is to help teachers find such recordings when they need them - otherwise we are simply preaching to the converted, aren't we? A typical 'Kiwi thing' stands in my way, I don't really like to blow my own trumpet; while I don't mind presenting f2f to groups of people I know or groups of strangers, I find it much harder to tell people "go and listen to my recording" - it's much easier to say for example "go and listen to Justine's recording, and by the way, my recording is on that site, too". That will be my next little hurdle to get over I suppose...

Blended Learning for Teachers

I have a huge passion for learning and teaching in rural Northland - this is the only place I have ever taught, so I claim no expertise for learning and teaching in urban areas. One of the beauties and the challenges of working in rural schools is the distance from cities, but with this comes a lack of access to some of the provisions that schools in urban centres enjoy.

Working in a PLD programme that is running from year to year, one of my major foci is how to both achieve sustainability of the programme within a school and build capacity for teachers to access learning beyond what they might already access, not just f2f but also in blended ways. In my initial scoping work some of the teachers remarked that their rural location diminished access to PLD. As we are talking about relatively small schools, even within a schools teachers can be isolated, there might just be one Music / PE / foreign language teacher etc. within a school, and they can find it hard to find people with a similar interest to bounce ideas off etc. within their immediate surroundings.

My inquiry this year will look at how I can support the schools I work with to connect with PLD in blended ways. Questions I am looking at are: Why do we undertake PD? What are different forms of PD, why use blended learning? How do I pick the right PD for myself as teacher, and what do I need to make it happen? What do I as facilitator need to do in my practise to build capacity in my schools for accessing blended learning for teachers when this is the right tool? With the introduction of N4L schools will be in a better position in relation to infrastructure to access blended learning, which should make things a little easier in that regard.

At the Digital Horizons Conference in Whangarei last Friday I held a workshop about Building you Online PLN which I think is one of the ways of how I can build this capacity. What else could I be doing? What else would you find helpful?

You have something worthwhile to share - your turn!

What a week in education in New Zealand! The Festival of Education was the most visible event this week, but there were also lots of smaller happenings around the country such as FarNet's Digital Horizon Conference in Whangarei, Connected Rotorua Meeting 'Let's Talk Google', Educamp Dunners. Somehow I ended up playing a part in a few of these this week...

My personal and professional highlight was presenting at TechMeetNZ on Saturday morning as part of the Festival of Education. Under the expert guidance of the ever-patient +Sonya Van Schaijik with superb support from +Marnel van der Spuy and +Kathy Scott a group of 7 NZ educators presented on a topic of their choice for 3min each, live streamed on air - with actual face-to-face audience in the room with Sonya at the Festival of Education. Sonya had asked me earlier this year to take part and I was happy to, only realising fairly late into it how much additional attention might be attracted by it being part of the Festival! It was nerve wrecking and fabulous at the same time!

As part of my role I am used to presenting to groups of people on various topics, and I have used my TeachMeetNZ topic "Supporting Universal Design for Learning with Google Apps for Education" before as a trial run for Saturday. Where this differed though was that when presenting in a live Google Hangout, there is no verbal or non-verbal feedback from the audience. On top of that, the clock is ticking, and it can be a challenge to say everything within the 3min and still make sense!

I was first up, and everything went well. My co-presenters +Diana Wilkes, +Justine Driver, +Myles Webb, +Juliet Revell, +Manu Faaea-Semeatu, +Emma Alaalatoa-Dale were so knowledgeable, it was fantastic to hear their presentations, I want to go away and study each of their presentations again as there is much to learn from all of them! You can find them here, just click on their names.

So what do I take away from this? There are lots of great things happening in NZ education at the moment. Individual educators are happy to share with each other and the world in a rewindable way (the recording is available here and be available on the TeachMeetNZ wikipage). +Juliet Revell made some great points in her reflection, and the main thing I read in there was every day we ask our students to put themselves out there, push themselves beyond their expectations. Do we do the same for ourselves? Do we practise what we preach? I can honestly say, this weekend I did.

Would I do it again? Definitely, not just in the TeachMeetNZ format, but I am also thinking about flipping my teaching in other ways. To go with my UDL theme, I am thinking about revamping some of my resources and tutorials and maybe presenting them as voice or video recording - what do you think?

One other thing I learnt over this last week is to get over some of my self-doubt; I am in awe of these amazing educators I have been presenting with at TeachMeetNZ, of the people I am in touch with on twitter, on Google+ etc. but I sometimes doubt that I am meant to be there, that I have got something to say that is worthwhile for others to hear. The support, feedback and love from everyone I have worked with this week, at the LwDT hui in Auckland, at Digital Horizons in Whangarei, at Connected Rotorua, at TeachMeetNZ and everywhere else, means so much to me so that I am saying to myself - like I have often said to my students - you have something worthwhile to share. Now it's your turn: How and where will you share?

Challenging Conversations - at the receiving end

Recently I went to a school with a colleague who gave me feedback after my session there. It was really good to get some constructive criticism, though admittedly it has been a challenging conversation with me at the receiving end.

As part of the session I used this whakatauki:

He pai te tirohanga ki nga mahara mo nga rā pahemo engari ka puta te māramatanga i runga i te titiro whakamua.

It's good to have recollections of the past; however, wisdom comes from being able to prepare opportunities for the future.

When I prepared for the session, the meaning made total sense to me and I felt it fitted at this place in the presentation. However, I am notoriously shy about speaking Maori though my pronounciation is not too bad, and at this occassion, with a Maori colleague in the room, I felt even shier than usual and only referred to the English translation. In this way, it almost became tokenism on my part: Why use a whakatauki when I am not prepared to say it in Maori?

My colleague asked me some very good questions: Where does the whakatauki come from? (I found it on the internet). Who is it by? (I don't know) Has it meaning for the school where I used it? (I don't know).

This really made me think; I understood the whakatauki as "we need to know where we come from, who came before us, what made us who we are right here and now, but unless we prepare opportunities for the future, such as personalising learnging etc., we will not gain true wisdom" - is this what the author meant it to mean? If not, is there a problem with me interpreting it in this way?

As my colleague pointed out, a native speaker of te reo could have challenged me in in the use of the whakatauki at this place, in the translation of the whakatauki and the point I was trying to make could have been completely lost.

In fact, what point was I trying to make? Did I need to use a whakatauki to do so and why? I have actually taken the slide out of the presentation I had shared with the school now, I no longer feel confortable leaving it there.

Where to from here?

• I could just avoid any whakatauki completely as I do not have a deep enough understanding to use them meaningfully - but this could look very culturally un-responsive because not everyone would know why I was not using them, people might think I am only thinking about the culture I most closely align with.
• I could make a real effort to gain an understanding of a handful of whakatauki that are relevant to my work and use them at (hopefully!) the right occassions.
• I could check with the schools I work with about the whakatauki that are part of their school culture, ask them / their students to teach me about them.

I think I should persue both latter points - what do you do?

My colleague raised a couple of other points, praising without knowing if praise is due (I had been told this years ago by my subject advisor! - is this an ESOL issue or just the way I work with people I wonder?), and assumption of people's technical understanding (after my ULearn experience I tend to under, rather over-assume - I'll have to watch this). 

So what did it feel like to be at the other end of a 'challenging conversation'?

Not that great lol - I would much rather be told I am perfect! Seriously though, I really appreciated the constructive criticism, and it really made me think. If I keep on harping on about cultural responsiveness, how can I express this in my work that it doesn't become tokenism?

What made this conversation less challenging?

We have known each other for several years, she straight away got to the point and then left it at that and we talked about other things (except when I brought it up again). She asked questions, then made her point as an observation of a fact, talked about the possible consequences and in no way I felt I was being personally critised, it was my practise we looked at - and she was right :)

What can I learn from this when I need to initiate a challenging conversation?

Having a relationship helps. Critique the fact, the behaviour, not the person. Ask questions. State the facts, point out consequences. Offer solutions if asked. I need to go back to my notes from Joan Dalton's workshop, there were more things she said, but this is my little summary of this experience.

Thanks +Moana Timoko!