Reinventing Project Based Learning pre-order from Amazon.com

Jane and Susie’s book will be out later this month in the US, the subtitle: “Your Field Guide to Real-World Projects in the Digital Age” really explains what it is all about. It should be excellent, not that I’m biased :-). The Classroom Displays Group and Classroom Displays Blog feature in one of the chapters and there are lots of other interesting examples covered. I’m really looking forward to reading it.

To get a taster have a look at the Usefulwiki Project Based Learning pages which were created during the NECC in Atlanta and check out the blog and the Flickr group.

Reinventing Project Based Learning at Amazon.com

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This podcast is a great introduction to Action Research in the school setting. (It made me quite nostalgic about my old learning community!).
Rachel has a great podcast on her blog all about her ICT cluster’s collaborative action research project:

Our ICT Cluster, Nelson City Schools, consists of nine city and rural schools; eight of which are primary and one which is an intermediate. We are in the first year of a three year professional development contract with the Ministry of Education.

Last week I interviewed our Cluster’s Director (and also my school Principal), Paul Potaka, and made a podcast on the action research process, reflection and development our ICT cluster has/is undergoing.

Paul’s contribution to the Time4Reflection Seminar is embedded below in podcast form… Sorry but I cannot locate the process diagrams that he references but it is still a very interesting interview in which you can see the journey our cluster has been on
…. oh, and you can also hear me struggling to produce my best “teacher voice” even though I have a cold!!!

Click here to get your own player.

I like the tools they’ve chosen to use to judge their success. Now I’d quite like them to start looking at children’s voice as well as student achievement. That feels like the riskiest thing to do but it’s also often the most powerful.

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Via Musings of an old Welsh dragon

86%

I beat him by 2%!

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Marcia McGowan’s first grade class used their self-portaits to create some online fun. She’s also involved in lots of internet exchange projects and I love her quote:

This is purposeful, authentic, engaging work that begins to prepare today’s learners for new literacies in the technological world of today and tomorrow.

Now I wonder if she blogs……and if she’s got any nice photos of classroom displays?

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I’ve added a new tag line to the blog:

Informal learning, Internet technology and Action research

This is taken from my degree title, of course, but as ever with the degree adapted to my own context! These are the main topics I blog about here so it seemed logical. I am also slowly, slowly, writing an About page like Andy Roberts and John at Sandaig. I can’t believe how quickly they’ve done it. Still, I’ve been busy writing an article so I might let myself off!

I’m currently updating the blog’s design so things might be a bit lumpy for a few days. In return for some research work Andy upgraded the blog to Wordpress 2.2 for me. This is a huge improvement and means I can start to use some of the techniques I’m used to having over at Classroom Displays Blog.

Still in order to make full use of the update I’ve had to change my blog design. After much swithering I think I’ve settled on MooPoint. It is very plain and functional which is what I want at the moment. I’m kind of tired of fussy blog designs. I suppose it might be a reaction to all the dark colours I was considering in my last post!

Having said that I will try to get a few more visual elements into the design, but I’m not sure how yet. I’m just enjoying the purity of the clean lines (lol - there speaks the daughter of a modernist architect!)

It would be great if people let me know what they think of the new design and any suggestions for improvements.

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Yesterday I came across Blackle for the first time. I wasn’t sure if it was a hoax or a real attempt to get people thinking taking tiny steps to reduce energy consumption. Google must be on people’s screens for huge amounts of time.
What if there could be a tiny energy reduction every time it was accessed?
As they say:

How can you help?

We encourage you to set Blackle as your home page. This way every time you load your Internet browser you will save a little bit of energy. Remember every bit counts! You will also be reminded about the need to save energy each time you see the Blackle page load.

Help us spread the word about Blackle by telling your friends and family to set it as their home page. If you have a blog then give us a mention. Or put the following text in your email signature: “Blackle.com - Saving energy one search at a time”.

White or other bright colours on black was a web design that I used to find very appealing. Even now, as a dyslexic, I find it easier to read sites with either a darker background or at least a colour other than white.
To return to the energy saving theme Piers over at monkeymagic found this from the US department of energy. It suggests there could be considerable energy savings if everyone set their desk top, and presumably web site backgrounds, to one of these colours:

I’m setting up a couple of new blogs (details later) and thinking of redesigning this one so this has come at a good moment for me. Food for thought….. What do others think?
Up Date: Loopzilla via email sent me this from the Numbers Guy

On LCD displays, color may confer no benefit at all. In response to my inquiry, Steve Ryan, program manager for Energy Star’s power-management program, asked consulting firm Cadmus Group to run a quick test by loading Blackle, Google and the Web site of the New York Times (which is, like Google, mostly white on-screen) on two monitors — one CRT, one LCD — and connecting a power meter to both. “We found that the color on screen mattered very little to the energy color consumption of the LCD monitor,” said David Korn, principal at Cadmus, which specializes in energy and environment, and does work for the government. The changes were so slight as to be within the margin of error for the power meter.

Plus Andy scoffed at the whole notion of tiny actions making a difference but refused to take the bait and add a comment here!
So there you go - if you’ve got an LCD screen you can have any colour you like. As you were.

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Using Flickr photos from the Classroom Displays Group I made this in 30 seconds. Neat. It uses the Flickr slideshow format and you can post it to Facebook too.

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Following on from Will’s post comes a suggestion of another route to teacher and headteachers grasping the power of blogging.Monkeymagic

A different way, which might be easier, is to reverse that. By doing so, the teachers and staff can learn from the ways the children use the technology.

I think this can happen too, especially with teachers who have the confidence to let the children become the experts.

Piers (MonkeyMagic) set up a blog for the children at his school to use with litttle or no teacher intervention beyond a little initial “hand-holding”. He didn’t publicise the blog in any way but handed ownership over to the children. Wow - powerful stuff ownership Their byline “Our News. Our Views” says it all.

..one boy called Max had done a little ‘viral’ marketing campaign round the school. He printed out some stickers and stuck them on friends jumpers, asking them to pass them on to a friend.

The blog started to get comments from teachers, pupils and parents.
Now here’s the crunch:

By watching how the children were using it day to day, it was much easier for staff to translate research and factoids about social computing to ideas for integrating it into the classroom.
And the big result was one of Roberta Linehan’s comments.

“I think this is a great site! Can teachers have one too?”

Roberta happens to be the head teacher.

On a side note Piers also says:

Ali Lim, the art teacher, has begun to use Flickr as another way of displaying the children’s work.

I know! I know! I saw it when she first started posting. They just happen to be members of Classroom Displays Group too For a real treat have a look at the slideshow of their vision of London in 2057

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Weblogg-ed » Why is it so Hard for Educators to Focus on Their Own Learning?

Will is writing about teachers who just can’t quite grasp what blogging could really do for their own practice. This is where I came in One of the main reasons for setting up The Classroom Displays Blog was to influence positively teachers to start seeing how blogging could change their learning landscape. But it’s a slow process and we’re asking an awful lot of people who are already feeling hard pressed. Will says:

And even as I sit in this session with Tim Tyson at Building Learning Communities, one principal says “I want to learn more about these tools so I can help my teachers use them in the classroom.” I want to jump up and say “No! You are missing a step! You want to learn more about these tools for yourself so you can help your teachers learn from them too.”

Quite! Until people actually experience the power of connected learning it’s hard for them to grasp.
Will goes on:

So what’s that all about? Is it just habit? Is it just such a focus on curriculum delivery that “learning” is all about how to do that job better? Is changing the way we do our own business just too darn hard? Or is this such a huge shift, this idea that we can actually learn through the use of technology that most people just don’t think they have to go there, that they can just keep using it as a way to communicate without the surrounding connective tissue where the real learning takes place?

It is a huge shift and maybe people are being asked to do it in too much of a hurry. That head’s desire to ‘get’ it straight away sounds very familiar. There’s no time for teachers to learn this stuff themselves first. They assume they can just teach it, without going through the process themselves. How many times have we seen teachers asked to do this sort of thing before? Non-specialist teaching languages for example? How are they supposed to grasp that this is a paradigm shift after a couple of training sessions?
Listen to Ewan, see what John is saying in your comments. Have a look at what Scotland is up to and you might get a better idea of what is needed:

• Support, frequent, ongoing, online and face to face support from people who do ‘get it’,
• Time to pay attention to their own learning,
• Meaningful solutions to their day to day issues (like “What shall I do with that (*) wall this time?”)
• and ideally an element of playfulness to sugar the pill and stop them scrunching up their faces in agony.

Or, maybe it’s just me…

No, it’s definitely not just you Will and it’s not just the US either!

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John @ Sandaig Primary » Facebook
John is on to something -

Facebook seems exclusive rather than inclusive, closed rather than open. I am happy to vist but I would not want to live there.

I’ve been moaning on to Andy about how I just didn’t see that Facebook was much use to me. The main thing I’ve done with it so far is join a couple of fun groups and indulged my love for The Archers and I’m Sorry I Haven’t A Clue.
The thing for me is that you are dependant on having a wide circle of friends actually on Facebook to provide your community. Hierarchy is not flat, you are there with your profile and just the people you ‘actually’ know for company. Trouble is for me, and lots of people like me if John’s comments are representative, the people I know just aren’t there.

But it’s more than that. Some people are talking as if Facebook could replace blogging. I think that would be tragic. For me one of the best things about blogging was that I could comment on some expert’s blog and no one would say “Well you are just a teaching assistant - what right have you to an opinion?” Better yet some expert might read my stuff and actually tell me they thought I’d a valid point - or not That sort of thing can’t happen on Facebook. It’s for established friendships and it’s not even as open as Myspace in that there’s no culture of adding online aquaintances. Not realising that at first I tried to add a few people from my e-mail address book only to be rejected. Well I thought I did know them but they obviously thought I didn’t or that ‘online’ isn’t real.

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