Paul Baumgarten

Clearly this written blog isn’t working out for me at the moment, so I’m going to start having a go with vlogging.  I’ve got my YouTube channel, I’ve got a friend helping me with the graphics for an intro (thanks Matt!), I’ve started writing scripts and I have some ideas for my filming studio that I want to build.

The plan is to use the channel as a conduit for flipped learning with my AIT class next year.  No doubt I’ll also use it for some other matters as well – commentary on educational matters, and probably a few personal vids for friends and family.

Time will tell if I have more success with the vlog than the written blog.  In any case, stay tuned to Mr B TV!

In my new role, I find myself giving the odd speech here and there. The following is a speech I gave at a whole school assembly on August 1st 2011.

Good morning and welcome to the start of third term.

Third term has a lot of important events in it. Later this week we have the Performing Arts showcase where the Dance, Drama and Music students get to share their talent and their preparation with you as an audience. If you don’t have your tickets for Wednesday night yet, I suggest you drop into Student Services at recess to get them.

Next week is the Upper School information night for Year 10s and their parents. An important evening to learn about how Year 11 and 12 is different to lower school. We have a parent/teacher night, Inter House athletics, the Year 11 camp, and the Year 12s have their end of semester exams. At some point during this term, we will also get to move in to our new gym.

But for all these events, and the many others I haven’t mentioned, Term 3 is about learning. The events help add spice and flavor, but the meat and potatoes of why we are here is to learn.

My personal opinion is that never has the time been so important to make sure you get the most out of your educational opportunity.

A WORLD OF CHALLENGES

Our world is filled with challenges, the scale and complexity of which, it has never had to face before. Globalisation has achieved its goal such that the world is now one interconnected, interdependent global system. A problem in one location doesn’t take long to produce a ripple effect across the rest of the globe.

Two quick examples:

If you follow news coverage (and you should), you may know that there is a big political battle occurring in the United States over something known as the debt ceiling. Basically, the US has maxed out it’s credit card and is arguing over whether or not to increase the limit – rather than figuring out how to start paying it off.

The thing is the US economy is in very poor shape at the moment. Regardless of what happens this week with the debt ceiling, the US has an economic wake-up call waiting for it sooner or later. Economic trouble in the US means less money to spend buying goods made in China, meaning China will have less need for our mines, meaning trouble here. Globalisation’s interlinking means when the economy suffers in Washington, we will feel it here.

The other example of a challenge facing the world is sustainability. Whether you believe in man-induced climate change or not, what is not in dispute is the unsustainability of the practices of the Western world. Our world simply cannot keep up with the current pace of resource exploitation. We are not just digging up our share of the raw materials, but those belonging to people in developing nations and those of future generations. There is a website that upon completing a quiz, will tell you how many earths it would take to support your lifestyle if everyone lived that way. Completing the quiz last night, 8.5 earths was the answer for me. Clearly this is not a pattern that can continue for the long term. Globalisation’s interdependence means we will all suffer.

A WORLD OF OPPORTUNITY

Don’t despair, however, for with challenges also come opportunities, and this is true of the state of the world as well. Some of the industries expected to boom in the coming decade include:

Clean energy technology
New methods of recycling
More efficient food production
New methods of transport
Bio technologies

Technology that is becoming smaller, yet more powerful, is creating new ways of solving old problems.

QUALITIES THE FUTURE WILL SEEK

So what are the qualities you will need to possess to make the most of our rapidly changing world? It won’t be information recall, rudimentary mental tasks or physical tasks.

In other words, there is no point in trying to remember so much that you become a walking Wikipedia. Knowing the capital of Russia or your “12 Times Tables” won’t be the basis of your future work – as machines will be able to answer these needs faster and more reliably than you. The real question is, once you know this information, what will you do with it? What will set you apart from the machines of the future or the low paid uneducated workers in developing countries?

The “Partnership for 21st century skills” identifies three key skill sets that tomorrow’s citizens and employees will need:

Creativity and innovation

Critical thinking and problem solving

Communication and collaboration

These are the skills that can’t be replaced by Wikipedia or Google, or a manufacturing robot on an assembly line, or an uneducated low paid worker in a developing country. These are the skills that will be needed to solve the big problems facing society. These are the skills that you should ensure you develop over your time at school.

TAKE RESPONSIBILITY FOR YOUR EDUCATION
So I say to you, it is time to take responsibility for your education. You have an opportunity here that many in the world still do not have.

It is time to stop expecting your teachers to spoon fed you, to spell everything out. To develop problem solving skills, you have to be willing to face problems you haven’t been equipped with the answer for. To develop communication and collaboration skills, you must be willing to get together with others to discuss a problem and work it out together.

RESPECT YOUR TEACHERS
Work with your teachers, respect that they know what they are doing, and let them guide you. A good teacher will let you discover something for yourself. If a teacher’s job was simply to pump information into you, we could just have you reading Wikipedia all day.

We have teachers instead of Wikipedia, so that you can have lessons that lead you to solving problems. By discovering your own solution, you not only gain a better understanding of the concept in question, but learn how to solve problems.

A good teacher will force you to think for yourself. Get used to it.

There are also three things that I would urge you to start practicing on your own, independent of anything to do with school. These three things, old fashioned though they may seem, will go a long way to developing those 21st century skills I spoke of.

READ
1. Read. Of your own accord. Read the newspaper, read books. Not just novels, but books about “things”, books about the world. It may sound old fashioned, but it is invaluable for enriching your understanding of the world and how it works.

WRITE
2. Write. Again, of your own accord. Journals. Thoughts. Develop arguments. Write essays expressing your point of view. Develop your thinking skills by writing argumentative essays or speeches. Perhaps start a blog, or bring in your writings to a teacher you trust to get feedback on.

BE CURIOUS
3. Be curious. Start asking yourself big questions. Curiosity lead to the exploration and settlement of colonial world. Curiosity lead to the discoveries of science and medicine. Curiosity will start to answer the big questions facing the world today.

YOUR CHALLENGE FOR THE TERM
There is a saying that Success = Preparation + Opportunity. The point of this saying is that opportunities will come your way, what will affect whether you find success or not will be determined by your preparation.

Take ownership of your education. Make deliberate decisions to start stretching and challenging yourself mentally. You are blessed to be living in a first world country with educational opportunity that many in other countries can’t even dream about: don’t let it go to waste. Make the choice today that you will make the most of these 5 years of Secondary schooling. Be creative, be bold, read, write, think, ask big questions. Develop these skills, and you will find yourself in high demand in the society that is coming in the not too distant future.

Term three is about learning. Make the most of every opportunity.

Thankyou.

So it is almost a year since my last blog entry. I have thought about posting many times but have never quite seemed to get around to it. That said, maintaining a blog is a professional discipline I would like to maintain to some degree. Reagrdless of how many or how few people actually read it, I think it is still a useful exercise to put one’s thoughts about one’s profession to print.

In the past year, I have changed roles from a Head of Department/Learning Area to the Dean of Curriculum. This change has presented some interesting challenges to ponder. For instance: the desire to move the College towards a progressive pedagogical approach with a focus on developing “21st century skills” verses the reality of “working the system” so our graduating students gain acceptance into the university courses of their choice. To some extent these two goals compliment each other, but in other ways they most certainly do clash.

Even though I haven’t been blogging, that doesn’t mean I ceased reflecting upon numerous articles, books, speeches, and conferences. I will endeavour to record thoughts on some of these in the near future, if for no other reason than to provide myself with a reference from which to find them again!

Regards, Paul.

It looks like the mainstream press is starting to discover the change in pedagogy sweeping through education.  The following is from an article in UK Telegraph:

Teacher Karl Fisch has flipped teaching on its head – he uploads his lectures to YouTube for his students to watch at home at night, then gets them to apply the concepts in class by day.

“The idea behind the videos was to flip it. The students can watch it outside of class, pause it, replay it, view it several times, even mute me if they want,” says Fisch, who emphasises that he didn’t come up with the idea, nor is he the only teacher in the country giving it a try. “That allows us to work on what we used to do as homework when I’m they’re to help students and they’re there to help each other.”

When he puts it like that, you want to slap your forehead at the idea’s inexorable logic. You wonder why more schools aren’t doing it this way. That’s the power of flipping. It melts calcified thinking and leads to solutions that are simple to envision and to implement.

I like the “inexorable logic” bit

Edit: A quick search on youtube and I found his channel here: http://www.youtube.com/user/karlfisch

It’s been about three weeks since I’ve posted so I thought I should let everyone know I am still alive and kicking! Truth is it has been a rather busy period. The planning for our student laptop program, in particular, has been consuming a lot of time.  Our parent launch is now only a week away!

Rather than finishing one of my half-written articles, I thought I might offer a review on some of the web tools listed in my wiki that I have had students experiment with.

• Animoto – Love it, love it, love it. And free for educators. Enough said. Verdict: Definitely use.

• Voki – An A/B year 11 student couldn’t get it to work properly for a long while, then once he had managed to create one, it was impossible to save. I had a look at it for him as well and still couldn’t get it to work properly. He ended up giving up on a couple of hours work. Verdict: Don’t bother.

• Screen-cast-o-matic – I had already fallen in love with this tool for its potential to create vodcasts, but I was interested to see how students would go with it. I’ve had 3 or 4 year 11′s give it a go and they’ve all been up and running and achieved success quite intuitively. Verdict: Great for students to design instructional tutorials or for recording evidence of their ability to perform a task.

• Glogster – I thought students would really engage with it and enjoy the concept, but it fell flat with a big thud. It might be more attractive to younger students but my Year 11s (age 15/16) really didn’t think it was much fun. Verdict: Disappointment.

• Titanpad (same as iEtherpad and a few others) – I love the concept that this offers and gave it a go with my Year 12 students. The main problem we had was technical: students kept being disconnected from the service.  When they were connected, the lag time grew as more people were accessing it to the point that it wasn’t really usable.  I’ll be keen to give it another go once our College gets its connectivity upgraded.  The software is also open-source so we could theoretically install a copy on our own systems which would undoubtedly also help. Verdict: Optimistic that it could be a successful tool in the future.

There are also a couple of new sites that I haven’t added to the wiki yet that I am keen to get some students to test drive.

• Jaycut – Free online video editor. Works with mp4 video which is useful as Windows Movie Maker does not, and yet that is what the flip cameras save their videos as.  I’m skeptical as to how fast it can be (since everything needs uploading/downloading) and am so far unaware of what limitations there may be such as maximum video size/time.

• Creza – Another site with several applications hanging off it (similar to Aviary in that regard).  It has a movie editor, audio editor, cartoonist and mind mapping tool.  Haven’t used any of the tools as yet but it does look good.

One of the pedagogical ideas that I have discussed with fellow teachers at my school is that “what was classwork should now become homework, and what was homework should become the classwork.”  This is a paraphrase from one of the points Alan November made during his ACEC2010 keynote.  Traditionally school environments have taught theory during class time and assigned the problem solving work that builds on this theory as homework. Alan’s premise was that instead of spending the valuable and rare commodity of teacher-student class time on delivering theory, students should be absorbing these facts at home, away from the distraction of their peers, and the priority for class time should harness the benefits of having the teacher and fellow students present by focusing on collaborative problem solving.

This evening I discovered the wonderful work of Jonathan Bergmann and Aaron Sams – Two high school Chemistry teachers in Colorado who have embraced the idea of Educational Vodcasting and embody the vision that Alan cast before us at ACEC.  Students watch vodcasts at home and class time is spent in engaging hands-on activities and directed problem solving.

They’ve made an introductory video that explains how and when to use the vodcasts for their students – which is also a great clip for teachers looking to understand how it works.  This is the time students are taught how to use the vodcast: Listen, take notes, pause the video at appropriate places.  It is made very clear to students that they can’t be doing 15 different things at once, the vodcasts require undivided attention and the importance of pausing and rewinding to review sections they didn’t understand immediately is stressed. Former students are shown telling new students “watch the pod casts, take notes on them, or you will fail”

Understanding that not all students are self-motivated enough to diligently watch their vodcasts before class, the students must take notes on the vodcasts which they must then show to their teacher – and the taking of these notes is worth marks toward their course result.

The typical lesson:

So Bergmann and Sams have “flipped everything on it’s head.”  The vodcasts aren’t watched in class, there is other stuff to do then!  This time is now used put course theory into practice.  So, how do Bergmann and Sams use their class time?

Before vod-casting:

• 5 min Warm up activity
• 20 min Go over home work
• 30-45 min Lecture new content
• 20-35 min Practice or lab activity

After vod-casting:

• 5 min Warm up activity
• 10 min Q & A on the podcast with chemical demonstrations
• 75 min Practice and/or lab activity

Of course, the change was just as significant for the teachers as the students, but ultimately they decided that what was in the best interests of students had to trump all else.  “One thing that we have had to get used to is that the role of the teacher has completely changed. Instead of being the “sage on the stage,” we play the role of a coach … This has proven to be a very successful model of using technology in the classroom. Students are doing better and learning the content faster. Content is being covered faster and with more understanding than in the past.” (link)

Some additional benefits according to Bergmann and Sams:

• Students who were absent never really missed a class
• Less time tutoring students after school
• Amazing tool when teachers are absent
• Lessons going out to the world

Some practical matters:

• “Recording is done live. We simply record as we teach. So as long as the podcast is how long we use to make them. Editing them after the fact we have found is a pain so we try and do them right the first time.”

• “We tell our students that when they don’t watch a vodcast they essentially are skipping class. If a student has not watched a podcast I won’t help them on a particular topic. If they are still struggling after they watch the podcast I will gladly help them. After all I am not always the perfect presenter. But they must first take responsibility for their own learning before I will help.” (link)

• Technically, what tools are they using?  Snapkast or Camtasia software, a Wacom tablet, and a microphone. (3)

In conclusion:

This was such an exciting find!  It is great to see teachers out there putting these ideas into practice… and achieving success with it. I’ve started experimenting with vodcasts a bit this semester – I’ve made some screen capture videos for my year 12s using screencast-o-matic.com and the results were impressive.  The students picked up the quite advanced Flash skills I was asking them to absorb with relative ease.  Last year, teaching these same students Flash was such a painful exercise (for them and me) that I really wanted to try and avoid it – but a change in delivery technique and an amazing turn around was the result.  I’ve also been using other tutorial videos I’ve found with my year 10 students with similar success.

After discovering the work of Bergmann and Sams, I am now very keen to extend this into video “lectures” to deliver the theory components of my courses.  This, of course, will also have the added benefit of freeing up my class time for practical project work in the computer lab! I know one of the immediate objections from teachers will be about the amount of extra time it would take, but after reading about the experience of Bergmann and Sams, I don’t think it has to be that bad.  One idea would be to have a students in your class operate a flip camera to record your lessons – these could then be uploaded to the web for them to use for revision, and available as pre-viewing for the following year’s group.

I can’t wait to go down this path even more!

So I’ve just discovered a rather interesting sounding documentary analysing the UK education system, “We are the people we’ve been waiting for”. I’ve just ordered a copy of the DVD and will be sure to share my thoughts with my vast readership after watching it (the mail will likely take several weeks).

According to the excerpt, the documentary “explores the education system in the UK and asks whether the current system provides young people with the opportunity to develop their talents. High-profile figures sharing their personal experiences and views include Sir Richard Branson, Germaine Greer, Henry Winkler, Bill Bryson, Sir Ken Robinson and a wide range of education experts from around the world.”

“Education is a complicated business. If it was so simple, we would have solved it already.”

While we wait, enjoy the trailer on YouTube:

Here is a great idea I’ve just read about on Always Learning: Speed geeking! According to Kim Cofino, “SpeedGeeking is just like Speed Dating – a way to quickly introduce people to a wide variety of new ideas in a short amount of time.”

“Each table was numbered and had a specific group of teachers (linked on the agenda) selected to start there. Once one 4-minute SpeedGeeking session was finished, the group of teachers seated together at their first table moved together to the next numbered table in line.

Once we finished SpeedGeeking, we asked teachers to discuss at their tables anything that sparked their interest for about 3 minutes, and then had tables share back to the larger group (if they wanted to).

The buzz in the room was amazing! Teachers were visibly excited and energized by the discussion and it was obvious that everyone found at least one thing that sparked their interest in the 30-minute session.”

What a great idea!  This is one I’ll definitely use with our technology integration PD’s.

Professor Stephen Heppell is on his way to Perth for a couple of workshops on the day before the start of the ECAWA conference. This is going to be well worth attending!

From the flyer:

This is an exceptional opportunity for leaders in education, ICT, curriculum and school design to be immersed in the latest international thinking about learning environments and the innovative designs for learning and assessment that will better suit our current and future generations.

Stephen Heppell embraces the “constancy of change”, pushes the boundaries of design and challenges audiences around the world to rethink the possibilities for the future with respect to harnessing the incredible potential of technology in education.

Tuesday 28 September, 1:00 – 4:00 pm
Burswood on Swan, 1 Camfield Dr, Burswood
$50 AISWA Members, $80 Non-Members
http://www.ais.wa.edu.au/professional-learning/

Thanks to Whitehead Wonderings for drawing my attention to a paper by Denis Masseni, “Why schools are spooked by social media”. The paper has largely been developed as a result of a survey of Victorian school principals in June 2010.

Rather than discussing social media as a tool of curriculum, the paper focuses on the construction of a school community and the communication links between school, teacher and parent.  This is an area where most schools could be doing things a lot better.  Blogs, twitter, rss feeds, facebook pages are all tools that schools could use to inform and engage their parents.

The paper makes the point that modern organisations “recognise that to get their message heard they need to deliver it in a medium the customer wants not the way they want. So if someone is only interested in the highlights then maybe they’d prefer to follow you on Twitter. Another may want to be heard and would love the opportunity to comment, then blog it up. Do anything you can to engage your audience.” (p17)

It goes on to state that one of the major issues with the school newsletter “is that it’s being created using print based technology – Word or Publisher then converted to a PDF. Print based output does not present well on a computer monitor and is illegible on a smart phone. School newsletters need to move to an online optimised format. This is very important with the growing use of smart phones.” (p17)  With an abundance of pocket devices that are web-enabled, such as the iPhone, communication strategies should allow parents to keep in touch with school news through those tools.

In this 21st century, schools that fail to capitalise on the power of social media to build and engage their community will fall behind and lose their market appeal (and students) to those schools to who don’t just say they teach modern technology skills but that actually use them.  In other words: “If your communications strategy is confined to the cyclical newsletter and institutional website you’re almost already a dinosaur” (p18).

This week I discovered a real gem of a paper online, and immediately wondered why I have never come across it before.  I was doing some research further to the quote from Alan November and came across an entry on Lisa Nielsen’s TheInnovativeEducator blog that contained this quote:

“It is not giving out personal information that puts kids at risk. It’s not having a blog or a personal website that does that either. What puts kids in danger is being willing to talk about sex online with strangers or having a pattern of multiple risky activities on the web like going to sex sites and chat rooms, meeting lots of people there, kind of behaving as what we call an Internet daredevil.”

This is a quote from evidence offered to the US Congress’ Internet Caucus Advisory Committee on 3/5/2007 by Dr Finkelhor.  Who is Dr Finkelhor?  Well, according to page 1 of the transcript, “He is the director of the Crimes against Children Research Center and the codirector of the Family Research Laboratory at the University of New Hampshire. Professor Finkelhor is also a professor of sociology there. He’s dedicated most of his career to the issues of victimization, child victimization and family violence. He’s been working on this in this capacity since 1977. He’s literally written a book about some of these issues. Along with his colleagues, he has written perhaps the most authoritative and comprehensive pieces of research that we know of with regard to the instances of child victimization and exposure to inappropriate content.”

This evidence was given to the US Congress three years ago and still the predominant message we hear is that letting students publish or put any information online is *bad* or *dangerous*.  I argue it is time to bring some perspective back to the discussion, and this transcript of testimony to the US Congress is an excellent place to start.

In this testimony, he also states “we have to go way beyond the kind of bland warnings that have been typical to so much of the prevention that we’re doing, that you shouldn’t be giving out personal information.”

Another witness, Dr M. Ybarra states: “we need to put data in perspective. One victimization is one too many. We watch the television, however, and it makes it seem as if the internet is so unsafe that it’s impossible for young people to engage on the internet without being victimized.” (p6)

“And we’re learning that it’s not the sending and posting of personal information that increases one’s risk for victimization online, but rather engaging in sexual conversations they know only online, harassing others online. These behaviours seem to be most strongly associated with increased risk for victimization.”

On the topic of online bullying, Dr Finkelhor has this to say: “A concept that’s turned out to be very useful in combating bullying and also date rape is the mobilization of bystanders. It turns out that there are generally people around when bullying is going on or when there’s a threatening sexual situation who sees something, but who typically don’t do anything about it. … I don’t think we’ve thought enough about how to mobilize bystanders on the internet. (pg 23)

Finally, as far as the US Congress testimony is concerned, I found this quote on how students communicate online to be interesting: Interesting because it actually implies that young people have moved to social networking communication tools because they are actually a safer and more personal experience than (for example) email.   “Young people aren’t using email like we did. They don’t like it. They think it’s filled with spam. They don’t – it’s just blah. They don’t – it’s all spammers, phishers, marketers, parents, authorities, adults. There are no friends there. They don’t want email. The primary communication for peer to peer has moved to a combination of IM, SMS, and social network sites, as the way of peer to peer communication because it’s seen as less filled with crap.” (Danah Boyd, p31)

This all has significant ramifications on us in education. We have being making the same mistakes in our well intentioned attempts at teaching internet safety.  It also has enormous potential for allowing policy makers to loosen the strangle-hold on publishing to the internet as a legitmate educational activity that motivates students and equips them with skills they will need in the 21st century.

I will close out by going back to where I started this post and will quote from Lisa Nielsen’s blog where she quotes Mitch Resnick director of the Lifelong Kindergarten group at the Media Laboratory at Massachusetts Institute of Technology.  He says “that being able to create is at the core of becoming a creative thinker. Sadly, much of this important creating can not happen inside of schools, because students are banned from doing so. Resnick explains Digital fluency should mean designing, creating, and remixing, not just browsing, chatting, and interacting. Authentic publishing with tools such as his Scratch allow us to democratize digital expression, though all too often schools stand in the way of this and educators are accepting this helplessly while children (who are dropping out in droves) suffer through an education that to most seems irrelevant and meaningless.”

Further down in that same article Lisa writes: “Digital ethnographer, Michael Wesch explains it this way. While some educators have come to refer to students as digital natives, the reality is that many students, even those who seem fluent in using technology aren’t quite literate and they need the support of adults. They can read, but they can not write. As innovative educators we need to support the next generation so they become creators and makers. We need to enable students to create meaningful things to express their ideas in many different ways.

The best learning happens when you are creating as part of a community, and it is important to help students cultivate creative communities. Educators and learners need to realize that copying is not cheating (when credited). It’s an honor to take someone’s work and extend it (as I’ve done with this piece of writing (as have I as well! – PB ). Schools need to move from helping students being passive users of technology to becoming active shapers. It’s not just about trying what others have done, it’s about making your own. In the end if we don’t allow kids to interact and connect beyond the face-to-face then as educators we are contributing to their irrelevance. Students need to be creators and work in community of creators. It’s the only way they will be able to become critical thinkers and full and active participants in society.”

We have a significant challenge ahead of us as educators. We all want our students to be safe online – that is a given, though clearly we have been misguided in our message.  I also want my students to be equipped to take their place on the world stage. I see no reason why we can’t have both: teach our students to be safe online – and be creative online.  The evidence examined above does not paint a picture where that would be contradictory – in fact, if anything, we aren’t doing a good enough job of teaching internet safety – simply because the message taught is the wrong one. Unfortunately, our misguided good intentions of “keeping the students safe” have produced the unintended consequences of limiting our how we educate our students to be the creative and critical thinkers of the 21st century.  How refreshing and liberating it is to know that we can enrich our students with the motivating and valuable opportunities that come from being able to publish one’s own work for the world to see (just as I am doing with this blog) – and keep them safe at the same time.

Every now and then “big corporate” comes up with an idea that is actually pretty cool – and usable in education.  A couple of weeks ago I discovered The Fun Theory, a campaign from Volkswagen that is “dedicated to the thought that something as simple as fun is the easiest way to change people’s behaviour for the better. Be it for yourself, for the environment, or for something entirely different, the only thing that matters is that it’s change for the better.”

It’s an interesting idea for a class project. Not in terms of entering the competition that Volkswagen ran (because it is finished in any case), but the premise of changing something for the better by making something more fun.  Entries profiled on the site dedicated their attention to causes as diverse as obeying the speed limit, encouraging children to clean their rooms, recycling of soft drink cans, and the wearing of seat belts.

This is my personal favourite:

I haven’t had time to add this to my ‘Tools for educators’ page but it is worth a post until I do: Aviary – what a discovery! Free web2.0 based tool that is like an online equivalent of Photoshop (Aviary Phoenix), Illustrator (Aviary Raven), Soundbooth (Aviary Myna), Garageband (Aviary Roc) and more. It’ll come in very handy for our student laptop program as our Adobe licensing doesn’t extend to student take-home laptops so we’ll definitely be making extensive use of this site next year. Like all social/web 2.0 style tools, content authors can publish and share their creations for all so check out some of the samples.

Alan November’s Building Learning Communities 2010 conference has just finished up in Boston. Unfortunately Boston was a little out of my reach, but it has been good reading about the sessions through twitter and various blogs. Here is one little quote that I thought I’d reproduce from twitter as something to stir the pot a bit before we start a new term: “At some point we have to get over our fear of letting students publish – Alan November #blc10″ (link)

Concerns over the unsavoury elements on the internet have led us to shy away when what we ought to be doing reclaiming the internet for the good and positive uses it offers. Yes, we must protect our kids. Yes, we must teach them safe behaviours, and teach them to protect the safety of others. But we must also enable, empower and equip our students with the tools that motivate and lead to success. For education to remain relevant, we can not be an ostrich with its head in the sand any longer.

Let the term begin.

I’ve been having an eye opening experience the last few days as I’ve discovered some amazing blogs by classroom practitioners doing creative things with their students. I’ll add them to my blog-roll for all to enjoy, but this was one project that I just had to share: Brian Crosby, a year 4 teacher in Nevada teamed up with the local university and as a class project sent a balloon with temperature sensors and cameras to a height of over 107,000 feet (or 32 kms in our language!).  All the kids had to record their progress on their blogs, and the photos on flickr are amazing.  Checkout his blog for more about the project and the involvement of the kids.

It just goes to show what is possible when we allow ourselves to be creative.

Can I go back to the 4th grade and do this?!