Where do we set the balance between protecting students from the evils of the Internet and the disruption blocked websites can cause to a lesson? As we know most blocking system overblocks and even if a teacher checks prior to a lesson there can still be issues. One high school I know of has removed all blocking from their system citing the time wasted constantly unblocking sites and the educational time lost through trying to access a blocked site as more important than the so called benefits of protective blocking.

My school is undergoing a period of IT renewal so as part of that process we distributed a survey to staff and students to gauge their opinions on what we now do and what they would like to do. The number one complaint from both groups was blocked websites. As one student put it to me “I am a responsible student, I don’t want to visit time wasting sites, I want to use the Internet to assist my education so why are sites I need to get to blocked?”

Three months into the trial the school I mentioned above is relishing in their new found educational freedom. Perhaps a lead that more should follow.

Education rather than regulation, deal with the transgressors rather than pronounce everyone guilty from the start.

Last year I made enquires about getting a cert IV in workplace training. Being a somewhat expensive and time demanding course I asked about credit for all my teaching experience only to be told that I could apply but I have only taught children, working with adults is much more difficult. I had to bite my tongue and never bothered to go any further. Any educator who has taught a wide range of abilities and age groups knows what really is harder.

Today I was at a presentation on Vocational Education Training for senior high school students, the presenters were from education and business sectors. They knew there material and spoke well but their lack of knowledge in using digital presentation tools was very apparent. They were connected to an IWB but didn’t even realise it, even when they did discover this fact they continued to ignore the board and fuddle around at their laptop.

Watching them made me realise how much more efficient their presentation would have been if they had simply known how to use the IWB or if the PowerPoints themselves weren’t so cluttered with text. Teachers are a critical audience as we do know how to present. Sitting there today I felt just like a student does when their teacher misuses technology in front of their class. Some points for at least trying but not a good experience for the audience.

Must have been because working with adults is so much harder.    ; )

When my kids were little be aquired a rather large teddy bear which was forever known as Big Ted.

The TED I really want to talk about stands for Technology, Entertainment and Design. With origins way back in the early 1980’s, it is a conference that brings together the world’s most fascinating thinkers and doers. Unfortunately until recently I had never heard of it. Guess I don’t meet the above qualification. Whilst most of us mere mortals may never get to grace the TED conference floor, we can view the material presented there by visiting the TED website. TED’s title banner promises “Inspired talks by the world’s greatest thinkers and doers” and it delivers just that. There is no education category but there is a lot of educational relevance throughout the site. I found “Do schools kill Creativity” by Sir Ken Robertson particularly interesting.

The files can also be downloaded in several formats.

My last post on this topic mentioned the origins of this term. There are many educators that take issue with Prensky’s use of the digital native / digital immigrant concept. Jamie McKenzie http://fno.org/nov07/nativism.html takes a severe swipe at Prensky. McKenzie’s comments are both logical and valid and well worth a read. Labelling an entire generation with sweeping statements seems to be what has raised the ire of many. However Prensky’s terms, and the term digital tourist (visits technology occasionally) still have merit.

I don’t view these as derogatory terms but rather as loose generalisations. Today’s youth are more digitally aware than previous generations. I base this purely on observation and experience. Each generation is different, society changes, people grow up with different experiences. This is why teaching methods must evolve to cater for new learning needs. Note: cater for not pander to. Educations must create meaningful learning experiences and an understanding of digital technologies and their usage is fundamental to 21st century schooling.

To come back to McKenzies thinking though, any lesson needs to be delivered using the appropriate context – sometimes that may be using digital tools and sometimes it may not.

At NECC a person from the Microsoft School of the Future in Philadelphia was part of a keynote panel discussion. It sounded like lots of good goals were being set within an interesting project with the aim of promoting digital learning. As a result I was keen to find out more about this project.

Just watched a Jim Lehrer “News Hour” report on YouTube. What a disappointment, in ten minutes there was not one remotely futuristic educational task being undertaken at this school. It was a $65m school with lots of techno whistles and bells but in the classrooms . . .

Students sitting in rows with teacher out the front demonstrating.

Every laptop screen view revealed screens full of text.

Student: “Now I can type up assignments at home”

The Principal was quoted as stating that “the real innovation is creating a kind of Microsoft corporate culture in the school” YIKES !

Sure the infrastructure was great but the rest was very unimpressive, unless it’s time warped and this is a school of the future from 1987.

After 10 minutes my only thought was “these people just don’t get it”. It included a clip of Bill Gates saying that American high schools are obsolete and not teaching kids what they need – so their solution is this????

I hope tht the narrow focus in this program was due to it being a “news” item and thus focused more on the technology than the learning, even though it should not have been. Otherwise this is a prime example of how to spend lots of money on technology and get it wrong.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2Mug66WnoSk

A lot has been said about iMovie ‘08 since it’s release, mostly condemning. Being likewise unimpressed with iMovie ‘08, when it came to running an iMovie session at ITSC I intended using iMovie HD. However, as it was said to me, we need to move forward so ‘08 became the number of the counting. The session began with a round table gripe about “where is this feature?” and “why doesn’t it do that any more?” This was going nowhere but downhill so during the break I asked all to purge their minds of iMovie and look on this as a completely new app.

Once we started to focus on 08’s strengths we started to appreciate it. One person in our group who had never seen iMovie at all summed it up with “I don’t know what you people are complaining about, this program is great.” Talking to Apple reps and other learned folk we came to the following conclusions.

1. This program should probably not have been called iMovie since it really isn’t a replacement for iMovie HD, so stop thinking of it as that.

2. iMovie ‘08 is for making simple quick movies, which it does really well, if you want to do heavy editing or something more serious then iMovie HD is still alive and kicking.

3. What it does really well: total control of Ken Burns effect, cropping (zooming) of clips, ducking, audio files snap to fit length of video and still clips.

4. What’s really lacking: no export to GarageBand or iDVD – very strange to have a iLife app that doesn’t integrate with the other apps. Prediction – watch for an update on this feature.

So, “no negative vibes Moriarty”. Look at iMovie’08 for what it is and you will enjoy using it a lot more. It really is great app for throwing together a movie very quickly.

Another ITSC has come and gone, round 2 for the new location at UTS Sydney. Having everyone in the same location this year worked well as did utilising the cafe area for food time. Wollongong Uni was a great location but UTS is far more convenient to get to and accessible to more accommodation and entertainment options. I thought bowling was going to be real dud but it was a great night, thoroughly enjoyed by all. Cocktails the following night was scrumptious with a great band but a little too loud (am I getting old here?).

It is easy to come away enthused and fired up to change the world, hopefully people will be returning to school environments receptive to the new knowledge returning.

Stephanie Hamilton’s opening keynote again provided much food for thought. Her student’s analogy that school was like an airline flight was very apt “Sit down, face forward, buckle up and turn off all electronic devices” and “if you are lucky the trip may be relevant”. Blitto’s blog has a detailed description of her main points. iTunes U is now up and running, although it is very University oriented. Browse over to the University of Florida’s Teacher Education section where they have some excellent K-12 podcasts available.

The feedback on the workshops was very positive as they catered well for the needs of the participants. It was great just getting to know people and picking up little ideas by talking to them about how their school operates.

The keynote to close the 3 day section was by Peter Sheahan, this bloke could talk under water for 10 minutes – even after he had already drowned. Very energetic and coming from teh business sector he provided an interesting point of view. He gave his view of the requirements of the classroom of the future – relevant, interactive, expansive and connected. Students need boundaries but their education needs freedom within those boundaries. He told an interesting tale of a confrontation he had with an employee, neither would give because both were right leading to a poor result for both sides. It is not a case of who is right or wrong but what is the most useful solution to the situation. That thought could apply a lot to our daily school existence.

The one day event was opened by Mike Anderson from NZ who entertained the crowd with his interesting perspective on ICT curriculum integration. His final points about overreacting by banning technology were quite interesting. If children verbally abuse others in the playground we don’t ban talking. We don’t put padlocks and passwords on books and desks. Yet we ban and limit access to highly useful digital tools.

In all a very stimulating conference, great to catch up with old acquaintances and puts some names to faces from the MacEd list. Also good to see Blitto do something besides FCP – perhaps a leopard can change its spots?

Time Magazine has just awarded the iPhone this honour made more special by the list of inventions that were beaten into second place. I was lucky enough to be in Miami when the iPhone was released and hogged the use of one in an Apple store for an hour exploring the iPhone’s features (it won’t be seen in Australia until sometime in 2008). It really is quite an amazing piece of technology. As I left the store I realised that I had been so engrossed in its many features that I had not tried to make a phone call on it!

Time liked the look and feel of it, the fact that it will set a standard for other phones, that it is far more than a phone and that it can only get better (think about how the iPod has developed).

The iPhone sets new ground in digital convergence by packing so any features in such a small device and could really become a seriously useful educational tool. Based on the This Day in History widget, the good folk at MacKiev have created a version that runs on your iPhone. This is a step from running World Book on the iPhone which is a step away from using it as a powerful reference tool apart from its wen browsing capability. It has the potential to become the first truly educationally useful handheld computer.

In another development the article also mentions that last month Apple opened up the iPhone to anyone who wants to develop apps for it. Watch the iPhone take off like podcasting.

Following on from my last post, this was the title of an article in today’s Australian newspaper on film producer turned British politician David Puttnam’s comments regarding digital natives and the chasm opening up between students and teachers over ICT usage. As he has a number of educational credentials and was addressing the Curriculum Corporation conference in Sydney I will assume that he knows the correct meaning of digital native and digital immigrant, I’m therefore assuming that the reporter messed up the quotes on that matter.

There is nothing wrong with being a digital immigrant, indeed it is what we who are not digital natives should aspire to be.

I was impressed that he made the exact point that is a catchcry of mine, namely: teachers (and schools) that fail to embrace digital technologies will be viewed by students as irrelevant.

He made an interesting point by comparing “the standoff between education and technology to the plight of the British clergy in the 17th century, who greeted with furore the first publication of the bible. It meant they were no longer the old fount of knowledge because people started to read the Bible for themselves and challenged the orthodoxies.”

He may be branding teacher too widely here for most teachers at least recognise the value of technology as a teaching and learning tool, they are just not sure how to best utilise it. The main problem is that there has never been enough funding for PD. There is a strange assumption that teachers will know or find out what to do – not so.

What really irks me is teachers (and schools) who think that browsing the web and typing in Word (with the odd Powerpoint thrown in for creativity) is utilising ICT. Rather, this is merely utilising technology at a very low level and something I’ll address in greater detail later.

The article ended with another interesting Lord Putnam quote “Steal the technology, steal the ideas, use the energy and inventiveness but protect the values you are teaching.”

Food for thought . . . . . . . . .

This term was coined by Marc Prensky several years ago to describe the great majority of today’s students who are growing up in homes and a society where technology is embedded in the fabric of that environment. In Prensky’s words “Our students today are all ‘native speakers’ of the digital language of computers, video games and the Internet. ” (http://www.marcprensky.com)

This makes a lot of sense to me and is reflected by the behaviour I have observed in today’s students. I am surprised by the number of educators who have still not heard of this term, but when I explain it (and the term digitial immigrants) to them they do understand and agree with the point. A Wikipedia article on Digital Natives makes an interesting point that it was actually digital immigrants who built the Internet, but then continues to make some statements that appear to miss the point Prensky was making. The article is open for editing so it will be interesting to watch how it evolves.

This week, five 5th Grade students on a television show were asked “What type of software are Internet Explorer and Firefox examples of?” Now these were intelligent students and prime examples of what a digital native is supposed to be, however, only one student gave the correct answer Web Browser and one other gave an answer that was close but not quite correct. Only one in five digital natives knows what a web browser is? Later in the same program they were asked “What is a graphical representation of a person?” and they all gave the correct answer Avatar. Hmmm, now this would appear to be a much more technical question than to identify a web browser.

Here we have an example that supports the digital native concept. If the students were asked to describe the functionality of Firefox et al then no doubt they would have done so easily. All you do is click on an icon and browse the web, nothing actually comes up to say You are using a web browser, so the term is logically not familiar to them.

You don’t just click on an icon and get an avatar, they need to be created. Progams where you create an Avatar would use that term repeatedly therefore the terminology becomes known.