Day 6 of the ACCE Study Tour

Our last day in New York included two visits to businesses, BrainPop and the Apple Executive Briefing Center.

BrainPop

Educators started BrainPop in New York City in 1999. It was started from a children’s point of view, in order to engage children in learning. BrainPop has approximately 150 staff worldwide, with 80 in their New York Office.

We met with Maya, who manage International Business Development. There are three version of BrainPop: BrainPop, BrainPop Junior and BrainPop ESL. They also provide a website called BrainPop for Educators.

Within BrainPop there are 21 free videos, but numerous other free activities and games. A subscription provides many more resources. It is set up in a way that a teacher can create classes and then get access to feedback on student engagement and results.

A BrainPop topically typically provides a short video, roughly 3 minutes, a quiz, perhaps games, a concept mapping tool, further reading and lesson ideas. The interface is fun, colourful and interactive, which I see as a bonus for engaging children (and adults). The short videos maintain student attention and are presented in an easily digestible manner, and are great for introducing or revising a topic.

BrainPop Educator is completely free and has a fantastic feature that allows you to search for resources and filter the information based on what country you come from, the grade level you teach, subject content and also to check what standards it meets.

BrainPop is a product I have used previously for myself. I find it a fun way to learn new snippets of information about a whole range of topics. Just this morning I watched the video of the day and completed the quiz about American Indians. I don’t like that only 21 videos are free (aside from the video of the day), I find the subscription cost too great for myself. Pricing models for schools are a bit better.

Overall I like the product but am not confident that it would be applicable to my own teaching, and without a subscription I am unable to check many of the videos to see whether or not it would be worthwhile for my class.

Apple Executive Briefing Center

At the Apple Executive Briefing Center we met with Melissa Fox, Scott Josephson and Paul Facteau. Very generally speaking their roles are to liaise with clients to answer questions and provide support in the form of resources and contacts.

We had very constructive discussion about education, learning and the use of IT. Much of which is challenging to summarise, but I will go with what I found to be the key messages.

One was about the style of learning and in order to encourage deep, meaningful learning experiences, we need to have more challenge based learning – designing solutions to real world problems, case based learning and project based learning. This is a concept that has cropped up basically everywhere we have been so far.

The other main take-away for me was about technology integration, the use of staff members to assist other staff members in the powerful use of technology to assist deep learning experiences. Another concept that has been raised multiple times at multiple places, that I discussed in my previous post.

We did also get a bit of a demonstration of how iTunes U can be a powerful teacher tool. While it was a fantastic demonstration of the capabilities of iTunes U, I would have liked to ‘get under the hood’ by working through how I, as a teacher, would actually create a course.

Day 5 of the ACCE Study Tour

Scarsdale School District

Scarsdale is roughly 30 mins by train from New York City, that was founded in 1701 by the British. It is an affluent area (possibly the wealthiest suburb in the USA), with a very well supported and well-funded school. The school doesn’t receive Government funding, but receives funding through the local taxes. Many people move to Scarsdale for the duration of their children’s education to make use of the fantastic schools.

It is worth mentioning that the Scarsdale school district is very well resourced based on it being in such an affluent area. The amount of financial resources enables Scarsdale to investigate and implement innovative ideas as well as support them with the technology, however this doesn’t mean a less-resourced school cannot implement the same strategies.

We met with Jerry Crisci who is the Director of Technology at the Center for Innovation of the Scarsdale Schools District. The schools have a very strong focus on innovation, designing and making, learning through exploration and the integration and use of technology to solve problems.

With a strong desire to transform the teaching and learning, Jerry went to the board to request a budget for investigating and implementing innovative teaching ideas and to create a Center for Innovation. He was given $100,000 to do this and was advised “If some of your ideas don’t fail, then you are not pushing yourself hard enough”. This reiterates the idea that I previously mentioned, failure is seen as success. In fact I have now heard multiple times that failure is referred to as iteration, perhaps a term with less historical negativity and an implication that the process is not complete.

With the budget provided the school has had the chance to implement many innovative ideas as well as continue to develop others, along the way also finding a means to give back to the local and wider community; providing free newsletters and creating apps that can benefit others.

Together with Jerry we toured the high school, one of the elementary schools (there are 5) and middle school in the district. It was fantastic to see some the spaces. I would like to mention two of those.

Firstly, there was a work space in the library that had triangular desks on wheels and chairs on wheels. The idea behind this is that for students to be able to work together effectively, they need to be able to negotiate the space around them in order to form their own groups. Movable furniture (sometimes referred to as reconfigurable spaces)encourages and facilitates discussion. It is also important to mention that each student has is assigned a chromebook to support their learning for the year.

Secondly, the makerspace was brilliant and the staff allocated to it were just fantastic. The makerspace is a teeny tiny room that is choc-full of resources and inspirational posters. Students have access to cardboard, coloured paper, timber, metal, soldering irons, 3D printers, and electronics kits such as LittleBits, Makey Makey, Pico, Ototo, Hummingbird and loads more. The idea is for students to design for a purposeful audience, this improves engagement, attitude and outcome.

As it was the end of the school year we didn’t get the opportunity to see kids at work, but we did see at least one product constructed by a student, an interactive story book (similar to the idea we had seen at the Computer School but a more advanced product). There is huge importance placed on coming up with an idea, thinking it through and prototyping it before beginning development. We were able to see the prototype of the storybook, the finished book, the code and then I was able to interact with the book. It was very well done!

The makerspace not only allows students to explore solutions to problems, it also allows them to develop and refine thinking routines. In approaching a project they need to cycle through: looking closely, exploring complexity and finding opportunity. This process that can be applied to many aspects of life, and is a good, real world skill to develop.

Observation of the day

Many schools have teachers/staff whose role is technology integration. Not specifically the integration of technology into the classroom, but more focused on supporting a teacher to integrate technology into their teaching to benefit the learning of the student. Teachers aren’t left on their own to find technology resources and figure out how to use them. They are very well supported to whatever level they need and/or want.

In my own teaching experience I am always left to find my own ways of using technology, I need to trial them myself and I don’t feel supported in that, encouraged, but not supported. The idea of teachers being buddied with a technology integration staff member is fantastic, the tech integration person knows who has done what in which classroom, whether it has worked, different ways things can be done and so on. Letting each person figure things out for themselves is like reinventing the wheel, creating work where it is not necessary. Unsupported teachers don’t know how to make powerful use of tech to create and support meaningful learning experiences.

I feel that if teachers are unsupported with the tech, they are much less likely to be willing to use it – I suspect this is a contributing factor to the infrequent use of laptops in my school despite our 1:1 ratio of devices:students.

Day 4 of the ACCE Study Tour

The Computer School

Tracy at The Computer School made the segue into teaching later in life, after working as a computer programmer for a number of years. As a teacher she is a FabLab Fellow with Stanford’s Transformative Learning Lab. She has a passion for computing and its integration into teaching and learning. She has a very dynamic classroom and at lunchtime runs makerspace sessions with an open-door policy.

We were able to join Tracy for two classes, a free session and half of her lunch time makerspace session. As with any standard non-elective class there always students who aren’t super keen or interested in the activity. On the whole though, I found that the majority of the class was engaged in the activity and working proactively on the task.

Aside from students who had finished the work and had moved on to something different, all classes we saw were working with the coding environment StarLogo Nova. They were creating adaptive behavior change models. The students had one of two options, to model predator and prey or an epidemic. They had to create a model and plot the results on the line graph. It was amazing to see such fantastic work from the students working with a high level concept.

Students who weren’t working on the modeling project were working on other activities. One of whom was working on programming a wearable device. A small jacket for a toy giraffe had an arduino lilypad, speaker and button sewn on. When the button was pressed the lilypad was programmed to play old macdonalds farm. A pair of students who arrived during lunch for the makerspace session were using a makey makey to program an interactive book. You were able to touch the relevant page to trigger a short video on the computer to play the page that you had touched. All pretty awesome concepts!

Tracy tries to avoid the standard ‘front loading’ teacher model of providing all the information and then allowing the students to do some work. She prefers to introduce a concept and let them tinker, filling in or assisting with knowledge gaps as required in order to solve the problem.

The real focus in the classroom is to use the computer to assist in solving a problem. The problem needs to be defined, planning needs to be done to determine an approach to solving the problem, all before touching the computer to start solving the problem.

Despite having very limited resources, not much administrator support and a subject that is not core, Tracy does a fantastic job of getting students engaged in the class, learning real world skills and developing fantastic solutions. Her passion and enthusiasm are inspiring!

Lunch with Dan Ingvarson

We had a lunch meeting with an Australian by the name of Dan Ingvarson. Dan works more with the student data and management systems. He is working on a product that will connect to a schools existing Active Directory for logging on, providing a single sign-on service that will also allow 3^rd party applications to connect to the student accounts but only allow those applications access to the data that they require in order to operate. This would help teachers some more freedom to decide what tools they want to use and just be able to use them.

In a noisy restaurant it was a little challenging to hear all the conversation, but this was the gist of the discussion.
Please Note, I may have made errors in my summary, as I wasn’t able to hear it clearly.

Promethean Interactive Whiteboard workshop at the Childrens Workshop School

After lunch we visited the Children’s Workshop School to sit in on a professional learning session to demonstrate the basic function of a Promethean Interactive Whiteboard. While the PL session wasn’t overly informative, as most of us are already able to use a Promethean board. The discussion we were able to engage in with teachers after the session was really good.

I haven’t mentioned it previously, but all discussions with teachers has come back to questions about common core standards and standardized testing. Every teacher we spoke with has found that the use of standardized testing as a measure of success is having a negative impact on teachers and students.

Curriculum ends up being delivered around the core standards and what will be on the test. This takes away the freedom and time to explore concepts deeply. It increases the stress on the student and parents because the score affects what schools they can apply for and get into, affecting their entire future. It affects the teachers because the overall result is a reflection on them, it can affect school funding, teacher employment and even the existence of a school. The Government can shut down a ‘failing school’ based on results.

Also interestingly, The Computer School and Children’s Workshop School are both examples of limited physical school resources. They both operate in a building together with one or two other schools. One school might have two floors of the building and another school another two floors. I find this quite a bizarre concept. I think they are doing a brilliant job of making it work, but I do find the situation a little worrying.

Dinner with Tracy, Dan and Karen

For dinner we met up with Tracy from the Computer School, a current leader in Design Thinking, Don and a teacher with a focus on technology integration, Karen.

We had some great discussions about design thinking, the process of designing a product and taking it through to production; the pros and cons of the maker movement; the difference between coding and programming; and similar topics. It was great to chat and share ideas in an informal setting and to form networks. They had great suggestions for things that were worth investigating and put us in contact with other relevant professionals in the STEM/Makerspace/Design Thinking areas.

By the end of the day I was more than overloaded with people and with information. It was a very informative day and one that I think my brain will be slowly processing over the days and weeks to come.

Day 3 of the ACCE Study Tour

Still in Seattle, our third day of educational activities included visits to a company called Intellectual Ventures and to the Boeing Aviation Centre.

Intellectual Ventures

At Intellectual Ventures we met with a computer hacker called Pablos. He got into computing (hacking) in the 70s when he got his first computer, he would take spend lots of time playing with it, breaking it and rebooting it to try something else. Which is essentially the learning model we are referring to when we talk about the maker movement. Pablos places a high level of importance on learning by exploration.

Intellectual Ventures is a company that raises capital in order to fund ventures, rather than start-ups. It’s about investing money in the exploration of ideas and creation of inventions. Their main idea is to accelerate invention by supporting inventors. So they employ people from all sorts of industries to identify problems and try to create solutions to those problems.

Sometimes they start with an idea and other times they start with a problem. Once they have a starting point they approach the problem as though it were a team sport. They assemble a team made up of people across all relevant areas, for example a chemist, a physicist, an engineer and a computer scientist, and brainstorm for ideas and solutions, before launching into their research and exploration of a solution.

The company is working with some pretty cool ideas and is very well funded. A product developed by Intelletual Ventures that is making it’s way into most schools these days is the MakerBot 3D printer. A fantastic example of what people are capable of creating when they have an interesting idea or problem to solve.

Boeing Aviation Centre

At Boeing we learned some of the history of the company, before taking a tour of the manufacturing process. We got the opportunity to see the world’s largest building, in which they construct the Boeing 747-8, 777 and 787 (DreamLiner) aircrafts. Learning about the manufacturing process was way more fascinating than I had anticipated and I am in awe of the work they are doing. Manufacturing at such a large physical scale for such a high stakes industry is mind-boggling.

It did also reinforce the need for people to be willing to tinker with ideas, be willing to learn through failure and to learn along the way. Without tinkerers I am sure modern aviation would not be anything like it is today.

Day 2 of the ACCE Study Tour

After an early morning flight to Seattle we had two stops on the agenda: Tacoma Schools and Microsoft.

Tacoma Schools

At Tacoma Schools we visited Josh Garcia and Shaun Taylor. Tacoma made some ‘radical’ changes to the way they approach education and student enrolments and as a result are now recognized as an innovative school.

Tacoma have set a high bar for their students, all students are enrolled into high level (AP or IB) subjects. Most schools have an opt-in system, where parents and students need to opt into higher level subjects. By changing this to an opt-out system, you send the students the message to challenge themselves and the message that they are capable of achieving at that level. The result has been that students have stepped up and results have started to improve, with very few opting out of the challenge. The graduation rate in 2010 was 55% and has risen to 78% over a four-year period.

When selecting the subjects for the students, they had discussions with students and parents to discover each student’s interest and passion and enroll them in appropriate classes. I suspect this helps with the improved results, and it is a model I have always encouraged, particularly at the senior level where I teach.

To ensure all schools in the district are on par they created a very strict rubric, with 15 standards per subject. Each grade (such as A, B C etc) has learning targets and a student must achieve all targets in order to achieve that result.

Tacoma also negotiated with higher education to set an agreed benchmark for entry. So if students achieve a particular score or higher they have guaranteed acceptance if they choose to apply.

In terms of their student management and learning systems, they have developed frameworks that provide increased transparency for teachers, parents and students. This allows people to see exactly what is going on with the school as a whole as well as each individual student. This improved transparency provides a basis on which people can build trust in a system and a school. Nothing is hidden.

We asked Josh and Shaun, if you were to start a school from scratch using this new approach, what would be the three most important things to put in place:

1. Agree on what success is and be able to measure it (eg. The entry result for acceptance to higher education)
2. Have a clearly articulated accordion engagement/decision making process
3. Report results in a continuous (and I think it was also implied, frequent) manner

 Microsoft

Our tour of Microsoft was guided by an Australian gentleman by the name of Mark. Microsoft has approximately 140,000 staff, of which 5000 are based at the Redmond Campus. The Redmond Campus is absolutely enormous, so much so that it is basically it’s own town, with a postal service and shuttles to move people from building to building. The people on campus consume 2 million gallons of coffee annually!

At Microsoft we were given a tour of the Microsoft Envisioning Centre, while we weren’t allowed to take any photos, we found that if you went to their website you can see basically our exact tour online.

We got to see demonstrated a vision for future technology as it may apply to the workplace and home.

The major themes that influence their designs are:

• Connecting people
• Enhancing our intuition
• Natural flow

The demonstration had a big focus on collaboration and increased communication. Their ideas are much more centered on being always on, always connected and I guess that would imply always available. It was also leaning more towards voice and video remote collaboration and communication, rather than text or email. I also loved the idea of a ’shared whiteboard’ where both parties can contribute notes, pictures, links and so on, with it syncing in real time. No need to a disruption of workflow to send information backwards and forwards.

I felt that the ideas were fantastic but over the last 13 years I have essentially seen the exact same ideas communicated in the same way, but with slightly more modern videos. The demonstration provided to us showed amazing possibilities, but it felt much too pre-recorded. I would have more faith in the products if I was able to interact with it and determine that it was a genuine functional product and not simply a pre-recorded showcase of ideas.

At a more practical level, in the current technological and educational climate, I felt this linked back to some of what the AltSchool were doing. Partnering technologists with teachers to design software and hardware to allow the educator access to the appropriate information at the appropriate time, in a time efficient and user intuitive way that integrates seamlessly with a natural workflow.

Observations of the day

Transparency of process, procedures and results is very important for student and school success. This is something I have always believed strongly, so I felt it was nice to hear it echoed by others.

Setting students a high bar and having the belief that they can achieve that level has an impact on student self-belief and success. By going into a model where they have the chance of taking an easy path, they will take it and avoid difficult tasks. So by making the easy road the harder option to pick, you force them to have a go. In this US system of celebrating failure as well as success, it really encourages students to try their best. You will never achieve a high result if you never attempt something challenging.

There is a need for greater, more seamless, integration of technology into a natural workflow.

Day 1 of the ACCE study tour

On this study tour we don’t muck around. The official first day included visits to Digital Promise at GSVlabs, Google, Aruba Networks and an unsuccessful visit to the Apple Campus.

Digital Promise

GSVlabs is a large company that bought up some office spaces and rents it out to smaller companies to create a large co-working space with some shared facilities, such as a slide and cafeteria. GSVlabs rent space to a variety of companies but mostly centring around four major areas: Sustainability, Mobile, Big Data and EdTech. The company we visited, Digital Promise, falls in the category of EdTech.

Digital Promise is at the intersection of educators, researchers and entrepreneurs to facilitate sharing and improving opportunities to learn. They work on both a local scale as well as developing global initiatives.

They have a few main foci that they are working on, such as closing the digital learning gap through increasing access to technology, increasing digital literacy and the ability to participate, and encouraging powerful use of the technology.

Many people are ‘shallow’ users of technology, we use it to type documents, browse the web, play games and so on. Powerful use is referring more to the use of technology to solve a problem; it’s a tool for problem solving rather than for entertainment. To do this devices firstly need to integrate into a student’s life, they need to be able to use it at school as well as at home, with the family. A way in which powerful use can be taught/encouraged is through challenged based problem solving, using the devices to come up with creative solutions to solve problems that are real to the students. For example, there is currently a drought in California, so many schools are using technology to investigate, discuss and design and prototype solutions to reduce the impact of the drought.

Communication and connectedness is another big theme at the moment, and Digital Promise is working on creating for facilitating Virtual Exchanges between schools to connect classrooms globally to for communication and collaboration across cultures. A recent example was having connected a school in Seattle wanting to learn Spanish, with a school in Uruguay wanting to learn English.

Something else Digital Promise were working on that I thought was fantastic, was adult opportunities. For whatever reasons numerous people in our society don’t complete their education. Having been removed from education, often for a long time, they might not see themselves as learners. So there is a need to design and develop technologies to help non-learners become learners; to help them see themselves as learners where they may not previously have had success. So it’s important to ensure you have designed systems that support different ways of learning, to keep adults engaged and supported once they have re-engaged with education.

Digital Promise are also working on decreasing the size of the gender gap and are working with the women’s innovation council. They are currently working to target 14-24 year olds to help them plan the steps they need to take to get to their ideal job, and supporting them in following that path. I thought that was a great idea, but we didn’t go into further detail.

Google

A guy called Adam guided our visit to Google. When we met him and I heard his accent, I was a little baffled and preceded to ask the questions of “where are you from? Where did you study? And why do you look so familiar?” We figured out that he was one of my first year tutors of Computer Science at the University of Tasmania.

As we wandered the campus it was really interesting to hear about Adam’s career path from University through to Google. He told us a bit about what it was like to work at Google and those types of things. We wandered the campus, visited the visitor center, the Android sculpture garden and then the company store. I ran around and took loads of fun photos, but at the end of that we ran out of time to have any really good discussions about what was going on with Google and education. Irrespective, I had a brilliant time at Google, I just wish I was allowed to go down the slide!

Aruba Networks

Aruba Networks, recently acquired by Hewlett Packard, are developers of networking infrastructure and hardware. Their primary focus is on wireless technology. In regards to education they see the importance of anywhere, anytime reliable connectivity, and are working towards achieving it. In todays climate students are “always on” and if we want to make the best educational impact then we need to work with that, that’s what the students’ want and that is how they function.

So Aruba networks want to support education with the technology to enable more personalised and project based learning. They want to facilitate an optimised digital classroom with a collaborative, learner-centric environment with everyone connected to each other in a seamless fashion that enables effective real-time collaboration without the sending of files from one device to another being visible/noticeable.

I think that if we can have such seamless integration it will certainly improve the learning and workflow of students, as well as educators and the general population. As the technology does come closer to supporting this seamless integration I think we need to spend some more time on teaching students how to collaborate effectively. In my experience, even at senior secondary level, particularly in computing, students will avoid working with others at all costs. I think we need to work to change this attitude, to teach how to collaborate with others and how to do so effectively, before this technology can have the desired impact. Though perhaps if the technology was better, we would be more inclined to collaborate anyway, as it’s less of a chore to do so. That is food for thought for me.

Apple Campus

Getting a tour of the Apple Campus is seemingly impossible these days (I think you have to know someone well to be able to get a tour), so we planned to visit the campus from the outside and pop in to the company store. I was devastated to learn that the company store was closed due to renovation, but I still took the opportunity to run around like a looney taking photos of the signs of the campus address “1 Infinite Loop”. It was a blast! I am very hopeful that when I return to the Silicon Valley area in August that the store will have re-opened.

Observations for the day:

Major themes of the day were powerful use of devices and collaboration. Though I feel you cannot achieve powerful use without collaboration, so I guess they are two very tightly coupled concepts.

The Hardie Fellowship study tour begins!

I arrived in San Francisco on June 10th, a week before the scheduled start of the Australian Council for Computer Education (ACCE) study tour. I wanted to allow myself some time to adjust to the time zone and also take the opportunity to explore a new city. San Francisco is a fabulous city! During my short ‘holiday’ I did two Hardie related activities:

The Exploratorium

The Exploratorium is a museum on the San Francisco waterfront at Pier 15, which is all about learning through exploring. Throughout the museum are workstations that allow you to interact with various gadgets and devices to learn concepts by tinkering and doing. If you are a person curious about how things work, then this place is simply perfect for you. As a teacher studying technology and investigating the idea of learning by doing, this place was great. It gave me a number of cool ideas for ways in which different things can be taught. I also think that as a place for young people to visit, it’s almost like an educational theme park, loads of fun!

AltSchool

AltSchool in SOMA, San Francisco is a school that was developed to be student focused with highly personalised learning. The main goals are to improve learning personalisation and to improve transparency.

Most schools follow a set curriculum and use set tools and resources for learning, this doesn’t always give students the opportunity to explore concepts in a range of ways. AltSchool tries to model real-world learning through project-based learning and where appropriate experts are brought in from the community to collaborate and assist the students.

There have been times I have felt that education has steered away from the learner and has been more focused on the educator, what they are going to teach and how they are going to teach it, more than focusing on the learning. The idea of designing the education around the learner and their needs is fantastic, it allows for richer learning experiences to be developed.

The primary focus is very much on the student and the personalization of their learning and AltSchool has a huge team behind them to do just that. Something that really struck me was the way they design their own technology, hardware and software to improve the workflow of the educator. These team members will often be buddied together with an educator, they will observe lessons and see if they can figure out ways in which to assist the educator to make their job more efficient and also to improve educational outcomes. Poorly designed technology can inhibit a teachers ability to do their job efficiently and effectively, so having custom designed tools that emulate the way a teacher works naturally is a huge benefit and improvement to workflow.

The technology being developed is not just to assist the educators but also to improve the experience of the students and parents, who are regularly consulted for feedback on products and ideas. As well as teaching students to reflect on their learning and the tools around them, it helps students and parents feel that they have some influence on the education experience. Providing tools accessible to all parties also increases the transparency of educational processes and student learning. The AltSchool teams work with the feedback to make changes where appropriate so that they can improve the experience for all stakeholders.

We were able to observe some students from middle school participating in a summer school program. They were tasked with the use of a makey-makey, a laptop and general construction materials to create a gong. There are two things I love about the activity:

1. The kids get to design, create, prototype some really cool stuff. Along the way they need to have an understanding of designing, converting designs to products, some understanding on electronics and creating circuits, electricity conduction and what materials are conductive, they need to prototype, test and refine their designs and so on. These are 10 year olds!!! They each designed different and awesome products, most of which worked (some didn’t work and were still being refined, others weren’t yet complete)
2. The gongs were to be used throughout the summer school to celebrate the successes AND failures along the way. I love that they celebrate failures! It encourages kids to give things a whirl more than worrying about getting it right first go. Failure is not a negative thing, it is something we learn from and it is not often enough celebrated.

A general observation so far…

Something I have noticed here in the United States through my observations and discussions is that failure, as well as success, is celebrated. Based on my own experiences I feel that we don’t often celebrate failure as it’s own type of success. We do often encourage students to try things out, but particularly at senior secondary level I find we simply don’t have the time to really tinker and play with concepts to develop our own learning and deeper understanding. The other side is also that many students are often too scared to fail or acknowledge any failures. This will be one of my own focus points, both for my own attitude towards learning and for my students.

Why am I the guru of Computer Science?

A couple of months ago, a colleague from another college sent me an email to say he’d heard I was the guru of Computer Science, he would be teaching the subject this year and didn’t know what to do, could I help?

This got me wondering how I had earned the reputation of Computer Science Guru. I look at my fellow Computer Science teachers in the state, I’m certainly not the best, the most knowledgeable, nor the most experienced – so what had earned me this reputation?

After some thought I have figured out that it must be related to my openness.
I am always willing and will make time to help out a colleague, I am open with the processes I use in preparation, teaching and assessment and I make all of my resources publicly available to anyone who wants to use them, including the video tutorials I put on YouTube to cover every concept we learn in class (I’m thrilled to know that people worldwide use these and I have had regular comments/messages of thanks and with requests for further explanations).

What has me baffled is why many teachers are unwilling and/or uncomfortable sharing their resources with others. The creation of your own resources is time-consuming and what you make may or may not work. I can appreciate that by putting a great deal of time and effort into something, you don’t always want to give it away. But in my opinion, teaching is about sharing. Sharing with students, sharing with colleagues and sharing with the community. We became teachers so that we could teach, to help others learn; so surely the more we pool ideas and resources the better the potential outcome for our students?

I feel very strongly about making education free and accessible to all. While I think many teachers may feel this way as a concept, I don’t always see their actions reflect this. So I have wondered why am I different?

I suspect there are a few factors contributing to my view, perhaps my age is one, the fact that I grew up with a mother who is a teacher and was always there to help others with their teaching practice and resources also helps but I think another factor is my background in Computer Science.

In Computer Science (predominantly programming) there are few trends or principles that underpin a lot of what we do. Something that is reinforced time and again is ‘don’t reinvent the wheel’: if someone has created something that works and is effective then you shouldn’t waste your time doing it again, your time can be spent on other useful and productive tasks. The other very strong current running through Computer Science is participation in the open source community, which revolves around collaborating with others, sharing software and ideas in a public forum for mutual benefit.

I want to encourage others to work towards supporting a freely available education for all. You might be self-conscious about what others will think of your work, but honestly in sharing ideas we can only benefit our students and each other.

What are your thoughts on this? Should we share resources? If so, should we do it within our school, within the state/private school system, with our whole state, or publicly with the world?

Hardie Fellowship

STEM focussed Hardie Fellowship group 2014-2015: Philippa, Cat, Ken, Neil & Marie

As a senior teacher within the Department of Education, my skills and advice are often sought after by others to assist in making use of technology in the classroom. My skills and interests were recently officially recognised and I have been given a fantastic opportunity to further develop my own teaching practice.

I, along with four others, have been awarded a Hardie Fellowship. This fellowship will allow us to travel to the USA to investigate best-practice models in STEM (science, technology, engineering and mathematics) education and curriculum delivery to promote higher levels of engagement and achievement.

Our group will travel to the USA in June 2015 for approximately 6 weeks to pursue this investigation. Each group member has a slightly different focus point as we each come from different teaching backgrounds. My own study focus will be around the role of Digital Technologies in STEM; Software Engineering, design, development and evaluation of educational technologies, and female engagement in Computer Science.

As a group we will all participate in the Australian Council for Computer Education study tour which includes “school, authority & industry visits culminating in attendance  at the International Society for Technology in Education (ISTE) conference in Philadelphia.” From there each group member will attend university courses and/or workshops that centre around their individual study focus points.

At this stage the majority of universities are yet to release their summer program dates, so I check daily for news of courses that are just perfect for me.

Crazy levels of excitement at this opportunity!

The Hardie Fellowship is an amazing opportunity that will be loads of fun and plenty of hard work. It will be a fantastic learning opportunity. It will allow us to benefit the students and staff in Tasmania, to inspire greater innovation in the classroom and hopefully assist students to achieve better outcomes in their education.

What am I learning now?

I love to learn, and I have a strong interest in online learning and teaching. What better way to learn different ways in which online learning can be implemented than to engage in it as well as engage in courses that teach it!

So… what am I learning?

I have (today) enrolled in a course that sounds like it is right up my alley – Design and Development of Educational Technology. This is an online unit offered through MITx as part of the edTechX series. The course looks at how people learn and how their learning can be more effectively supported by technology to increase engagement and deeper learning. As a teacher of IT and a general nerd, I am always looking for different ways to use technology to make learning more fun, more engaging and more meaningful for my students, and also to keep up with the times. My students have grown up with computers and the internet, and it is important that my teaching reflects the way they like to learn. The use of educational technology also provides more opportunity to address the learning needs of the different types of learners in a class.

I have also recently enrolled in an online unit at the University of Tasmania (otherwise known as UTas), Foundations of Technology for Healthy Living.
This is a fully online unit, so that will enable me to observe, and engage with, the way it has been implemented so that I can form my own opinions as to what I see as effective for engagement and learning. The other aspect that grabbed my attention (aside from receiving a free fitness tracker – fitbit) is that a focus of the unit is on the effect of gamification on motivation.

IT is often associated with the stereotype of a sedentary lifestyle; I think that pulling activity tracking technology and gamification into the mix makes the idea of exercise a little more appealing. I feel as well, that many of my students may see me as a role model, and I would like to model healthy behaviours for them. In addition to the online learning and technology aspect of the course, I am personally working hard to develop and maintain a healthy lifestyle, so the unit content also aligns with my interests in that regard.

In addition to these courses, which I guess you could class as semi-formal since they have start and end dates; I am also working through tutorials on front-end web development technologies; HTML, CSS, JavaScript through Codecademy and Udacity.
These sites allow me to work through the material at my own pace at a time that suits me, at no cost. Codecademy uses a bit of gamification by giving me badges for completing tasks; working through the course material you apply each new concept you learn as soon as you learn it, before building on it with a more complex concept. Udacity doesn’t gamify the learning in this way but it does a great job of breaking down the learning into digestible chunks; through the use of short videos, quizzes along the way and programming tasks to practice what you learned. Both courses scaffold the learning really well and they use quizzes or tasks to gauge your understanding before you progress to the next concept.

Web development is something I am really into at the moment and understanding how to develop web sites is something that relates back to the development of educational tools for online learning.

These courses partner well in their focus on educational technology; you can expect updates in the coming months on my experiences and findings in these courses as well as some commentary on what ed tech I have implemented in my class and what ed tech I have designed for upcoming classes.