Reflections on the Hardie Fellowship

Throughout the Hardie Fellowship I visited numerous tech industries and schools as well as attending and participating in numerous conferences, workshops, meetings and professional learning programs. I have learned a great deal from this experience, though there are a few key ‘take away’ points that I found to be reiterated throughout numerous experiences. Some references included are through Hardie contacts and others are through ongoing personal research into issues of transparency in education and female engagement in STEM (I have addressed female engagement in STEM in a prior post).

In implementing STEM the key aspect is the need to design and develop solutions to a real world problem. For STEM to be successful students must see a link to an issue relevant to them in order to provide a sense of purpose and give context to the learning situation. An example of this would be from altSchool in San Francisco where students have been designing, prototyping and evaluating solutions to help minimize the effects of the drought in California. The other aspect of this is to foster communication and collaboration with the community, so that students may develop broader perspective of relevant issues and gather context from which to then generate ideas for problem solving. One of the emphases of the MIT course in Mastering Innovation and Design-Thinking, was the notion that the more context that is included in a design, the more relevant and useful the design will be.

In addition to working on solving real world problems, providing students with a choice is crucial in their engagement. The idea is to have two or more options to choose from to learn the same skill (this is reiterated in Harvey Mudd’s course design as discussed in a prior post). We saw this in Tracy Rudzitis’ class at The Computer School. Students were being asked to use the block based programming language StarLogo Nova to create behaviour change models to demonstrate either an epidemic model or a prey & predator model. Students had to choose which model they wanted to work on, then they created the model so that a graphical representation was visible over time, then had to provide a real time graph of the model and finish with an explanation of what they had done and how it worked. It was impressive to hear Year 8 student discussion regarding how and what affected the infection rate of an epidemic, and not in the form of a text book answer.

We also need to be mindful and creative in the design of tasks that are open-ended enough so that students may come up with solutions previously inconceivable. They need to have some freedom to take responsibility of their learning, and we need to encourage them to make innovative use of the tools, technology and otherwise, available to them. Eric Rosenbaum, inventor of the Makey Makey and member of the MIT Scratch team, believes that a tool should be designed in such an open-ended manner that the user of the tool can come up with uses for the tool that the designer never thought of. To support this, we ourselves need to be innovative and creative in our use of technology. There are many tools available for use; for each tool we must consider carefully, how it can be used and whether it can be used to improve and expand the learning opportunities of the student. Technology for the sake of technology is not beneficial to student learning. In addition to determining genuine purpose for the use of a tool we must also consider its availability and integration within standard classroom practice. For example, we don’t want to ask students to sign up to too many different websites/tools because that becomes an annoyance to the student rather than a clear benefit; we must also consider age restrictions, as an example student must be over the age of 13 to use Instagram; and we must factor in school policy to determine if the site/tool we wish to use is considered appropriate by our educational institution.

While it is not ideal to have dedicated technology/STEM integration support staff due to resourcing limitations and the potential risks of limiting expert knowledge of one staff member, I do feel that it is an important intermediary step to effectively implementing STEM. A technology/STEM integration support staff member would work with teachers on a one-to-one basis when they want to make use of a new tool or piece of technology but don’t feel comfortable tackling it by themselves. The support staff would work with them to a level appropriate with the teacher. It might be a five minute discussion or it might be a side-by-side project developed together and presented together. By having access to someone who is knowledgeable and experienced, who has time dedicated to the task I feel that some more teachers would be willing to try things they may previously have been unwilling to try. It also saves them the time and effort to find out about the tool/technology themselves, which is often a determinant factor for implementing new strategies.

Many of the professional learning sessions I have attended in my role as a teacher in Tasmania haven’t been as useful as I would hope. While I feel there were good intentions, I feel that they have been too broad to be truly effective. Most professional development sessions have addressed the whole staff, which doesn’t enable targeting of required skills, interests or educational vision. The keynote presentation at Stanford highlight the key aspects of effective professional development to be: driven by a vision for classroom; helps teachers develop knowledge and skills; mirrors methods to be used by students; builds a large learning community; develop teacher leadership; link to the system and be continuously assessed. In order for the professional development to be transformative it needs to: create cognitive dissonance; provide opportunities to resolve dissonance; connect these first two to the teacher’s students; develop a repertoire of practice to support new understanding; and provide support for cycling back through all prior steps. This needs to be an iterative and ongoing process in order to contribute to growth.

A structure for professional learning which I have seen implemented in schools and workshops in the U.S. is an unconference model. The unconference model is one that was used to support participants in the Constructing Modern Knowledge workshop and is one used widely among makerspaces and EdTech professionals. My version of the model is slightly adapted from the unconferences that I have participated in and heard about. The way this would function in a school is that you have a noticeboard of some description where people can write down, as a heading, what they want to learn or what they can teach. Anyone who wants to learn the same thing or knows how to teach something someone wants to learn, will put their name down on the sheet. Then informal sessions are scheduled for the interested parties only. This provides very targeted professional learning sessions that are always run by people who have genuine and relevant knowledge in a specific area.

I feel that the tech/STEM integration support staff and unconference models would work well together to make STEM integration more manageable in our schools, not to mention that it would provide more meaningful and applicable professional development opportunities for teachers.

From all my experiences there were two additional aspects of teaching and learning that struck a chord with me. They were the issues of transparency and supporting technology.

Transparency is something I have always felt strongly about and I found it reassuring to hear this reinforced through numerous schools that we visited. By transparency I mean student, teacher, parent and administrator access to assessment records and progress indicators. If students have ready access to their results, they are more likely to take responsibility for their learning and achievement as they strive to meet their own targets. Students studying at pre-tertiary level are aiming to get to university, and that means they need to achieve a certain result in their subjects. If they are able to keep track of their records through an easily accessed on-line record, I believe it would reduce their stress levels, as they aren’t worrying about not knowing how they are doing and when they fall behind they know exactly where more effort is required. Mathern[1] has found that “keeping the doors of communication wide open between the home and school has improved student achievement”.  If teachers increase the level of transparency, they are being open and honest about how they work and assess. This level of honesty and openness assists students in their willingness to ask questions about their results and their learning activities. I feel that increased level of transparency of assessment is crucial for the student taking responsibility for their own learning and also in understanding and accepting the teachers’ processes. A study by Ahern[2] found evidence linking student achievement and assessment transparency, as well as the additional benefit of increased communication and collaboration between teachers. I feel that this increased level of transparency has the potential to have a profound effect on parent involvement in their child’s education. Studies presented at Stanford also highlight the need for transparency in teaching practice in order to improve teaching practice.

The technology used by teachers particularly in and around routine tasks such as administration, attendance, assessment, reporting and other such tasks should be a natural extension of the teachers workflow. Any tools or software used should be designed by teachers for teachers. Inefficient and non-user-intuitive software and hardware design makes many tasks more time consuming for a teacher, which affects their willingness to engage with it and this may in turn affect feedback to students, parents and administrators. In my own experience, looking up student information in order to be informed about their progress habits, and other relevant information to then call home for a discussion with parents requires the use of three different web applications and the information I can find is limited and takes many mouse clicks. Something that should take 5 minutes takes 15 to 20 minutes and unless there is a major issue I am not likely to go through this time consuming and frustrating process. Schools like altSchool in San Francisco have recognized this issue and have their own hardware and software engineers to buddy up and work directly with teachers to understand their workflow so that dedicated resources can be developed an iterated upon to improve teacher effectiveness and workflow. Tools and tech should be an extension of natural workflow rather than an interruption to it.

Overall one of the biggest ‘take-aways’ for me was the need to celebrate failure. You can’t really learn unless you are willing to try and willing to learn from your mistakes so that you may further develop your skills and ideas. I like that the makerspaces in the U.S. all promote the idea that failure is a good thing on the way to a better thing. I know I am often scared to try things for fear of failure and this stunts my development personally and professionally, this is one thing I most definitely aim to focus on for the benefit of my students, my colleagues and myself.

I am grateful for the learning opportunities that the Hardie Fellowship has afforded my colleagues and I, and I look forward to implementing things that I learned while learning more in the process.

[1] Mathern, M. S. (2009). The relationship of electronic grade book access to student achievement, student attendance, and parent-teacher communication. Seton Hall University). ProQuest Dissertations and Theses, http://ezproxy.utas.edu.au/login?url=http://search.proquest.com/docview/814799066?accountid=14245

[2] Ahern, S. E. (2009). Transparency in assessment through web-based communication: A study of changes in communication about assessment and teachers perceptions of assessment and student motivation for learning. Boston College). ProQuest Dissertations and Theses, http://ezproxy.utas.edu.au/login?url=http://search.proquest.com/docview/304843476?accountid=14245

Stanford: Transforming Teaching and Learning with Technology

For four days in early August I attended a course at Stanford University called Transforming Teaching and Learning with Technology.

The two instructors Shawn and Kim were very approachable, likeable and had genuine classroom experience, which I felt gave them authority on the topics they were addressing with us. Too often I feel that people teach teachers about ‘fantastic’ tools, but aren’t teachers who actually know how to use the tools in a classroom context.

We discussed and investigated a few main topics such as digital citizenship, the flipped classroom, social media for teaching, learning and professional development, student response systems, google drive for managing student work and mindful use of technology.

We didn’t just discuss these ideas and learn about tech tools, we actually applied our learning to small projects. One of the activities was to use the iOS app RoadMovies (or Android app SnapMovie) to create a 24 second silent movie introducing our team to the. It required a lot of thought and planning, because we had a 30 minute time frame in which to complete the task and it could only be shot as 24×1 sec frames, 12×2 sec frames of 8×3 sec frames. It was a really interesting task, it was challenging but engaging. It would be a great way for students to summarise their learning and present their understanding of a concept to a class. It’s certainly an exercise I would love to trial with my class.

Two tools I learned about that enable you to create complete and interactive lessons, which I am keen to try out, are Nearpod and Blendspace. These tools can be used to create and deliver lessons, they can be used to support a flipped classroom structure, and can be used to differentiate learning. The lessons can contain slides, videos, web links, polls, questions and so on. With nearpod specifically you can push a lesson out to the students slide by slide, so that you control the pace, or you can set it to ‘homework mode’ where they can control their own pace. These interactive lessons can also be shared with other educators, which I think is a fantastic idea for peer collaboration and encouraging interesting and diverse lesson design. These tools are completely platform independent, which I consider to be a necessity in this day and age, especially at a time where BYOD is becoming more prevalent in schools.

A great way to gauge student understanding of concepts is through quick polls. An easy to use classroom polling tool is Poll Everywhere. It could be used at the start of a lesson to take a quick poll of students understanding and recall of the previous lessons concepts. You can use the data to determine how much, if any, of the previous lessons content you need to re-cover. Or you could poll to determine students prior knowledge before starting a new topic. It’s quick, free, easy, platform independent and anonymous.

Another activity we did was a sort of Instagram walking tour. The task concept was based on an inquiry based activity developed by Dan Meyer. He says his most perplexing classroom moments have had two elements in common:

1. A visual: a picture or a short video.
2. A concise question: A question that feels natural and is one that people can approach first on a gut level, using their intuition.

So the task was to explore the campus and Instagram some pictures using the hashtag #ssti101qs, then post some questions on other peoples photos. To me, I felt like the task was fun, but didn’t have a clear goal. Though, I do feel that when applied to a specific subject area it has fantastic potential for learning – like the way we tweeted pictures for our MIT scavenger hunt evaluating and commenting on good and bad design in our environment.

Our final project was to create a blended technology lesson plan. I worked with three others (we called ourselves the Stanford Spice Girls) to create a lesson using nearpod that presented on the topic of ethical responsibility when using social media. It was an interesting exercise and it gave us the opportunity to integrate our new knowledge and tools into an engaging and interactive learning experience. It was a great way to interact with the tools for a purpose and see how we could use them in our own classrooms.

I found nearpod frustrating, but now know some workarounds to solve the problems I was having. Without having the classroom practice with this, I would never have had time to experiment or have learned the workarounds – so this is an example of where professional development on a dedicated topic with like-minded colleagues can be very beneficial to a teachers development and understanding of how to make effective use of tech tools in the classroom.

There were many other tools and ideas we discussed, but these are some of the activities that stood out for me. It was fantastic to have a professional development course that focussed more on when and why to use these tools rather than to use them for the sake of it. Every discussion and tool had a sense of purpose. This was something I felt that was missing from many other courses I completed over the summer.

At this point in time my period of study has concluded, and all that is left to do is depart Palo Alto and write up my final report. Whilst my study tour is over, you can still expect to read posts from time to time as I reflect back on my study tour, but also as I continue to learn and develop my ideas.

Lunch with Eric

Computer Science @ Rosny

Recently I had lunch with Eric Rosenbaum. He had been a facilitator at a conference I went to and I was keen to talk to him in more depth about his background.

Eric has a passion for Educational Technology (EdTech), he currently works at Google, but prior to that he worked at the MIT Media Lab while completing his PhD. While he has invented, developed and worked on many amazing projects the two I am most familiar with are Scratch and MaKey MaKey. So in meeting up with him I wanted to learn a bit about what path he took through education to get where he is today, why he cares about education and what the process was in designing, developing and manufacturing the MaKey MaKey.

Educational Pathway

Eric has a variety of interests including music and technology. He progressed from school to university finishing with a PhD; he…

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MIT: Mastering Innovation and Design Thinking

Mastering Innovation and Design-Thinking is a short professional development program run at MIT by Blade Kotelly and Joel Schindall. Many students of MIT and other universities develop brilliant technical skills through their studies, but since they learn to work with well-defined problems, many struggle in the real world. The course developed to teach strategies and approaches that can be applied to any design problem.

Ten steps of Design

No matter what the problem is, there are some steps you can take in approaching the design. Design is an iterative process so it’s important to realize you may go through the steps multiple times and not always in a linear fashion. The ten steps of design are:

1. Identify needs: What is the underlying problem?
2. Information phase: What can inform us about this problem?
3. Stakeholder phase: Who benefits from the design? How do you think about the users? What do users really want?
4. Boundary research: What can you do in the time you have, with the resources you have access to? What are you limited by? How can you overcome limitations?
5. Hazard analyses: What can go wrong for the user? How can we prevent user errors? How do we help users recover from errors?
6. Specifications
7. Creative design
8. Conceptual design
9. Prototype design
10. Verification: Testing for quality and usability.

Identify Needs

One of the first steps in approaching a design problem is to challenge any underlying assumptions you may have and first attempt to understand exactly what the problem is that you are trying to solve.

A suggested technique is to employ the use of the 5-why’s iterative questioning method. You ask the question “Why?” five times. Using this method you can come closer to identifying the root cause of the problem and determine relationships between different root causes of a problem. It’s also an easy method to implement.

Design phases

Creative design conceptual design and prototype design are tightly coupled phases. Some means of approaching these are through the use of:

• brainstorming
• reviewing research
• thought experiments
• physical experiments
• externalization of ideas
• down selecting based on previous criteria and prototype rendering.

Looking at these three phases we did an exercise in class with rapid iteration and sketching of a concept. An issue with design is that if you are given too much time to think it through in detail, sometimes you become attached to the idea and are less open to constructive criticism and less likely to adapt the design as a result. By quickly pumping out a few ideas, getting feedback, refining ideas, getting feedback for a few iterations, you get the opportunity to explore various concepts without becoming attached to any of them. Through the process of sketching, discussion and reflection we can see things from different perspectives and we can feel free to explore concepts without getting bogged down in the detail. I see huge value in this, particularly as a peer activity.

Sketching is a global common language which enables idea sharing. Some benefit of sketching include the 4 R’s:

• rapid communications
• revisable
• relationships between components
• relative hierarchy within a design, to see what’s most important.

“Context is King”

No matter what the design is, it will always have good and bad aspects, as everything is contextual. The more context you can factor into your design, then better you are able to think about a design and possibly the more effective the design will be. It is crucial that designs are tightly link to user experience and purpose. If a design doesn’t meet a user needs and/or is not user intuitive then it is not a good or useful design.

An interesting exercise we completed outside of class time was a scavenger hunt. We had a list of places and items to find and the tweet back to the group using the hashtag #2015MITinnovate.

Many things we had to find were examples of good and bad design eg. A good chair design and a bad chair design. The following day we looked at and discussed each of the groups shared pictures. This is a great way to highlight differences in interests, opinions and cultures.
In one scenario a group had shared a menu that they thought was great design, for me having been to that restaurant I had found the menu terrible. It made me anxious as a customer because it gave me no indication of how to order the food. The menu was designed for locals who frequented that particular restaurant, it was a good efficient design for that target audience. The audience context has a huge impact on the perception of the menu as a good or bad design.

Stakeholder Analysis

The user of a design is only one of the stakeholders of a design, while they are arguably the most important stakeholder, it is still important to take into account who the other stakeholders are. Through a stakeholder analysis we can:

• establish a global perspective
• understand how to make good decisions and tradeoffs, establish priorities and communicate effectively
• reveal hidden costs and opportunities

Presentations

Once we have developed designs, it is important to present them in order to:

• advocate to advance and get feedback
• inspire others
• make an idea real

When developing a presentation you should consider your audience, present to them a story that tells them why they should care (the why is crucial, Simon Sinek made a good presentation around the why), and then summarise your design in simple language with supporting imagery where appropriate. Make sure that you retain a strong sense of purpose and don’t overwhelm people with detail. Be sure to include three major benefits to the solution you are proposing. A powerful presentation gives a clear message, engages the audience intellectually and emotionally and is conveyed with confidence (be sure to refine and rehearse your presentation).

Summary

A lot of what was covered in the course is stuff you could learn from a text book, but working through the concepts as a team, discussing examples and applying ourselves to design problems was fantastic. It gave much more context to the learning process. I also picked up some interesting and constructive teaching tools/approaches to use in the classroom too.

Looking back at Constructing Modern Knowledge

In addition to our project work at Constructing Modern Knowledge we had guest speakers and of course, opportunity for conversation with the workshop faculty and our peers. Some of the guest speakers had things to say that resonated more with me than others.

Leah Buechley, designer of the Arduino Lilypad had some interesting points to make. She is a big supporter of the maker movement, but has noticed that the majority of makers represented in maker magazines (she specifically focussed a study around Make: magazine) are rich. old white guys. This unfortunately sends a message that making is for a specific demographic, which is not a good message to send. All schools are made up of students from a variety of backgrounds and a mix of genders, so it’s important that we as educators are open minded and inclusive in the way we implement and promote these programs.

In setting up and promoting a makerspace, some suggested strategies to help make the space different and to enable it to succeed in any environment are:

1. Think critically.
2. Ask Questions. Listen.
3. Tell lots of different stories.
4. Do lots of different things.

Leah believes that making is a fundamental impulse, and I would agree. Making comes in many different forms, and as a community we should nurture and support this. When people are interested and engaged, amazing things can happen!

This notion that amazing things can happen was evidenced by the success we had in our project, developing energy generating shoes. In a team where no one knew anything about electronics or energy generation, we were able to use our initiative,  ask questions, collaborate and learn by doing, to attempt something we had no idea we were capable of doing. A key factor in this process though is to allow some time to work through problems. I know that as a learner I can be quite lazy and when things get challenging I like someone to help me, maybe even give me the answers, but that doesn’t help me to develop as a person.

Grit, or perseverance, is the biggest determining factor of success. As an educator it is important to refrain from jumping in to help students too soon. Learners need time to experience some frustration and struggle, to attempt a few different solutions before receiving assistance. This is something I know I struggle with an educator, as it is painful to watch people struggle. It’s important to remember though, that at the end of the day if given some* time to work on it themselves they are going to learn resilience and problem solving skills.
* I want to stress that they need some time, not loads of it, struggling for too long is detrimental to their learning.

Constructing Modern Knowledge

Constructing Modern Knowledge is a hands-on workshop run in Manchester, New Hampshire by Gary Stager and Sylvia Martinez (authors of the popular book Invent to Learn). They have a supporting crew of loads of people with a background in education, edTech and making things. Some of whom include Cynthia Solomon, Eric Rosenbaum, Brian Silverman, Dan and Molly Lynn Watt, Brian Harvey and Brian Smith.

CMK is unlike any conference or workshop I have been to before, the aim is for people to engage in experiential learning by being thrown into a project and engaging problem solving and collaboration skills to develop an idea. The ideas people came up with were all kinds of crazy.

Being a fan of clean energy, I chose to work on the Energy Generating Shoe. Our project team was made up of Tracie, Kurt, Mindy, Craig, Bri, Doug and I (Rob worked with us for some of the time before choosing to work on a project more in line with his interests). Our collective backgrounds included elementary and middle school teachers and an amazing librarian who has a really cool makerspace. Though we had some people with experience in science, math, programming and making, none of us had a background in electronics, which certainly set the tone for the challenge to come.

We started with some sketches and a MindMap. We also spoke to some of the support staff to gather some ideas. We had two main ideas for generating energy: the use of a coil and magnet and the use of piezoelectric (drum kit) transducers. We tested the coil and magnet idea but were not able to generate any energy; in addition it wasn’t a practical solution for a shoe. The piezoelectric drum kit components were small, flat and round and responded to pressure – perfect for taking advantage of the heel strike of someone walking or running.

Once we discovered we could generate energy we needed to look at how to capture the energy. After discussion and more research we developed a diode bridge to allow the electricity to pass through to a capacitor, without any of the electricity flowing backwards and getting lost.

From that point we were attempting to program the arduino boards and lilypad boards to create funky led light presentations to use the generated energy. But after two days with very limited success (part of the problem was that some kits had been muddled up and we had the wrong cables and other such issues), we ran out of time and simply wired the shoe to a small switch and led lights.

Honestly we felt fairly lost for the majority of the project and it was very slow going. With help from the internet and the people around us (not to mention a quick phone-a-friend to my electronics teacher friend Charlie) we managed to exceed expectations and produce a functional prototype.

Despite knowing we had tackled a hard project, we felt a little inadequate that we only had something small to show for all our time and effort, so we painted our shoes sparkly colours, we bought some gloves and gave them some bling too, including a very basic sewable set of LED lights. We blinged our presentation with sparkles and a Michael Jackson style dance performance.

The experience taught me that I can achieve more than I think when I put my mind to it, but I found it a very uncomfortable place to be. Most of the time I felt useless and wanted to run away (and some people did leave the workshop early). It’s not a learning style that I feel comfortable with. I prefer more guided instruction, but what kind of a teacher would I be if I didn’t give it a whirl and put myself in the shoes of a student.

One of the key take aways from this experience is that it’s important for students to try and figure out solutions themselves, to have challenging goals and learn how to persevere with a problem. To learn how to research and collaborate with others to achieve a goal, without receiving the direct instruction that encourages rote learning rather than understanding. While my friend Charlie has explained concepts of electricity and circuit design to me a million times before, none of it made sense until I had to construct something that used the concepts. I do feel though, that if I was to attempt something similar, I would provide mini-sessions for how to get started with things, certainly things like arduino boards.

In addition to all the challenging learning experiences, I made fantastic new friends and brilliant contacts with passionate educators that will enable collaboration, to benefit learners globally.

Photos of the project are on Flickr.

ISTE: Expo Hall

Aside from all the presentations, workshops, lectures etc at ISTE there is an enormous Expo Hall. In the expo hall are over 3000 booths where people are there to present their educational resources, software, hardware etc. I mostly found the expo hall overwhelming, so I didn’t chat to heaps of people.

Google Booth

At the Google booth they were running mini-sessions. I got the links to three of the mini presentations, but was actually only there for one.
The first session, which I missed, was Tips for Using Chrome to Support Reading.
The other session I missed was Digital Differentiation using Google Forms – I really would have liked to see this one, but actually there was a mess-up with the presenters. It was supposed to be forms, but someone turned up and started presenting about Google Expeditions.

The session I did catch was Spice up your browser with Chrome Extensions, otherwise known as Pimp your Browser.

The presenter had a ‘big five’ extensions that he would recommend, the starred ones are the ones I have since installed and would also recommend:

Move It – it allows you to create alerts to get your class to get up and move at set time intervals. We all know that blood circulation stimulates the brain. It also helps restless kiddies cope with longer lessons.
One Tab – condenses all your open tabs into one page. The page provides all your URLs listed in order, it can also be shared as a web page. This could be really useful in a class setting when you have done group brainstorming. It’s an easy way to share all the sites with the students. Also for yourself when doing research, it’s a great way to just dump all your open tab links into one place.
Google Dictionary – Adding the dictionary to your browser allows you to highlight and look up the definition of words you see in a web page. It’s a handy quick reference tool.
Google Docs Quick Create – This allows you to create a document for your google drive in a single click form the toolbar. It means you can create documents quicker with less interruption to your natural workflow ***
Bit.ly – bit.ly allows you to quickly create a shortlink for any URL. ***

They aren’t anything fancy, but they are certainly useful for improving and supporting natural workflow.

Microsoft Testing Center

In the expo hall was a Microsoft testing center where you were able to complete Microsoft certifications for free. While I otherwise don’t really feel a need to have any kind of Microsoft Certifications, since it was free I was keen to give it a shot. So I booked in my free exam, and 45 minutes later I came out a Microsoft Certified Educator.

I don’t really know what it means to be an MCE, but i’m sure it provides some evidence that I know at least a little bit about education and it will look good on my resume.

Oculus Rift

Quite some time ago, I spoke to my computer science students about a cool VR headset that was in development called the Oculus Rift. At the Expo Hall I got the opportunity to give it a whirl.

I’m not interested in gaming myself, but the technology as a concept is quite interesting. I was impressed with the overall experience, it wasn’t particularly laggy and was quite cool to be able to look around you in all directions and have the images track based on your movement. I can imagine it would be awesome for a gamer to have an immersive experience.

The only thing I found is that you can’t wear glasses at the same time. Also some people experience motions sickness. So for me using it without being able to focus properly, after three minutes I was feeling a bit woozy and disoriented. I’m certainly glad I gave it a go though!

ISTE Overall

My experience at ISTE was overall quite a positive one. I learned some stuff and I made some new contacts in education as well as some new friends.

I will say though that I was rather shocked and disappointed with many aspects of the conference. I felt that there was a lot of hype and a lot of hoo-ha, but actually very little depth. I regularly experienced moments of ‘this is a really cool tool you can use it your class’ without any justification for how it should be used or what the actual educational benefit was. I have resources galore but little suggestion on how, when and why they should be used in order to improve the learning experiences of the students. Shouldn’t this be a primary focus for educators? We shouldn’t be using technology for technology sake – everything we should do should be linked to the educational outcomes of our students. I feel that this concept got lost somewhere along the way.

I feel that considering it is one of the worlds biggest EdTech conferences it really needs to step up – focus more on pedagogical improvement rather than the lure of shiny new toys.

ISTE: Interactive Infographics

Exploring Interactive Infographics was a short session run by Linda Nitsche and Erin Van Guilder. The aim of the session was to look at the visual and interactive communication of data through the use of infographics. Because our brains are visually wired, infographics are an easily digestable and engaging way to deliver content without overloading the brain. While there are many types of infographic, they generally fall into one of three categories:

• Practical
• Editorial
• Social

When designing an infographic (or evaluating one) then you need to consider the following aspects:

• the data in it
• the sources of data and whether they reputable
• the story that is being presented
• the flow through the data to conclusions (this is crucial to providing understanding of the content)
• the design style
• color and size of the infographics as a whole, as well as individual components
• the icons used
• the diagrams and charts used to present the data
• whether it is static or interactive and how that affects the overall impact or message being conveyed

These factors contribute to the overall effectiveness of the infographic. Certainly to achieve educational benefit from the use of an infographic it needs to be very well thought and planned. I think the key is ensure that you convey messages through images and graphs/charts more than text. So the text you do use needs to summarise the concepts in a very succinct manner, only conveying the important parts. Infographics are something that I personally really like. I don’t enjoy reading large blocks of text and find it difficult to focus, so I find it much easier to get a large amount of information from a well presented infographic.

Some good websites that can be used to develop infographics and interactive images are:

Thinglink – this is for interactive/clickable images
Piktochart – this is for infographics
ManyEyes – a cool aspect of this one is that you can upload data sets and it can generate some guiding questions based on the data

ISTE: Why Games? Why Now? Game Design in Schools 2014 and Beyond

Why Games? Why Now? Game Design in Schools 2014 and Beyond was the last pre-booked sessions I attended, and it was presented by Al Doyle.

Since I didn’t have much time when I was booking into sessions, I suspect I possibly didn’t read the session description properly. Based on the name, I had anticipated some discussions on when and why to use games to foster learning and how to design a game that supports the learning goals of the subject. When I got to the session however it was blatantly obvious that this was not what I was going to get. The presenter talked a great deal about playing games, demonstrated some games that he and that his students had made, none of which I saw educational value in.

We were provided with a handout that has loads of links to sites where you can create your own games, so I guess this was a positive. For me the session was otherwise irrelevant and I left one third through the presentation.

ISTE: Creative Coding with Functions

Creative Coding with Functions was run by Jean Griffin and Arta Szathmary.

The session was quite short but worthwhile. We learned a bit about functions, which I already knew, but through the explanation and resources provided I got some good ideas for ways in which I can teach the concept to my own class.

We had a look at the differences between block-based coding and text-based coding. Many teachers have found that the students (probably at the prompting of their parents) feel that block based coding is childish, it isn’t realistic and they aren’t learning anything useful. This started a useful discussion on how you can address that negative attitude. Believe it or not, block based coding is actually used right through university to teach computer science at some universities in the United States.

Block based coding looks easier, and it is, but it abstracts you from the syntax so that you can get the bigger picture. My own personal view is that if you can understand program flow and constructs, then once you move from block-based to text based, you are to learn the syntax for a concept you already understand. This is easier than learning the concept and the syntax at the same time.

I have felt for a long time that by teaching only text-based coding to students with no prior knowledge it makes the concepts much less accessible. I see real benefit in abstracting the syntax from the program flow and teaching them separately, as a progression. I also feel strongly that there should be a lower level, lead in, subject to the high level computer science subject that I teach. (I have roughly a 15% drop-out rate early in the year, based on the level of difficulty of the course, this rate has been decreasing, but is still alarming)

Through discussions with fellow computer science teachers, I did notice that I am basically the only one that takes a flying leap straight into coding with no prior knowledge. All the others I spoke to have a progression of increasing difficulty over a number of years.

In block based coding for lower year levels, such as through middle school, a recommended progression of learning is to start with Hour of Code activities as a taster, then move through to Scratch, progress on to Snap! and then engage in high level activities using MIT App Inventor.

For people wanting to learn Python, then Grok is actually pretty cool, free and Australian!

So all in all, I found the session was good, but the most useful aspect was in the discussions I had with fellow teachers.