Ulearn Conference - Anne Tolley's Opening Address

Beehive - Ulearn Conference

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You can't run, you can't hide - there is no option:
"We have some schools that are racing ahead, some that have developed local solutions, some that are still trialling ideas, some who have experimented and given up, some who have made mistakes and learnt from them and some who are possibly hoping it will all go away. I have a message for them - this is not going away. Hiding from, or ignoring e-learning is not an option."

That's a pretty strong message - how is this going to happen? Not on the back of fibre connections & improved infrastructure alone, ICTPD provision also has to develop new models than the current clustering system to meet the needs of all schools. It used to be that within an organisation you should match the same amount of funds spent of infrastructure into staff support & training. How would this balance with the projected investment of millions into infrastructure - hmmm i don't think we would measure up anywhere close to that equation. A plea to the Minister be careful about putting your technology cart before the horse and invest in people to support the coming changes.

"We need to put together our collective knowledge and experience and structure a coherent, rollout of broadband and ICT to all schools. We cannot afford to continue to drift on in a fragmented fashion. It is time for schools to be seen as ICT leaders and to encourage innovation and development."

I most definitely agree - a great place to start would be within the MOE where the right hand doesn't know what the left hand is doing. There was many mentions of the VLN & it's various activities during the Minister's speech. She then goes onto talk about a National Education Network trial & extending that trial out to more schools. Helloooo we have a National Education Network that has been active for the last 6 years - its called the Virtual Learning Network and it is going largely unsupported by the MOE. Again networks are about connecting people & schools and not just about fibre & wires.

Connected Secondary Schools

PPTA ICT Taskforce – Paper to be tabled at upcoming PPTA Conference

This paper is very supportive of the VLN, eteachers & ePrincipals :-)

Summary

This paper considers the inconsistencies that have plagued the digital revolution in secondary schools. It identifies the barriers that devolution of school management, a competitive ideology and funding constraints have put in the way of a coherent and effective information and communications technologies (ICT) network for schools.
As well as giving credit to the many boards, principals and teachers who have contributed to the enhanced learning that ICT offers, including the Virtual Learning Network (VLN), the paper also acknowledges those policies that give cause for optimism, including the laptop scheme, central purchasing of software and hardware, funding for network upgrades and the $1.5 billion investment in broadband.
Against this, the paper identifies continued problems with funding and coherency (including the threat posed by the digital divide), health and safety issues, the need for technical support, burgeoning electricity demands, teacher workload and the short-sighted decision to cease funding the VLN e-learning principals.

Recommendations

1. That the report be received.
2. That this conference call on the Ministry of Education to undertake a consultative review of funding and staffing to better support collaborative practices in secondary schools.
3. That this conference urge the government to recognise the innovative work of the VLN by restoring funding for e-learning principals.
4. That this conference support continued central purchasing of software and selected hardware (switches and routers) for schools by the Ministry of Education.
5. That this conference urge the Ministry of Education to extend its present range of central purchasing to include copyright licences.
6. That PPTA develop a campaign to encourage all secondary school boards to pay for teacher laptops.
7. That this conference call on the Ministry of Education to develop a plan to ensure that all students have access to appropriate hardware and software at home and at school.

A Day in the Life of a DLO

  Trevor & Vicki (VLN ePrincipals) attended “A Day in the Life of – Digital Learning Resources” Conference hosted by MOE last week.

Thanks Trevor for sharing your notes with us:

“Due to fog at Timaru I didn't get to Wellington until lunchtime. A mini speech/introduction by Penny Carnaby, Chief Executive and National Librarian made me realise that much of the work on repository systems has already been done by the national library and Tertiary Organisations eg

http://www.natlib.govt.nz/services/get-advice/digital-libraries/introduction-to-digitisation

http://www.oarinz.ac.nz/index.php

We need to ensure that we gain maximum benefit from the $$$ and time that has already been spent by others.

Next was a speech by Yong Kim outlining a Korean Cyber Home Learning System that was a bit like the VLN but several orders of magnitude larger. Unfortunately the funding model was not obvious.

Repository talk by Brent Thomas http://repository.ac.nz/

Intersting talk about DLO metadata. They developed an NZ version of LOM, whereas the National Library use Dublin Core. If schooling uses the dublin core then alignment/merging of DLO's with national initiatives will be trivial (lol).

Wayne Mackintosh. Some people are inspirational, fewer of international importance and even less visionary. Wayne Mackintosh is certainly visionary with his aim of providing free educational resources for the whole world by 2015. The wikieducator project

http://www.wikieducator.org/Main_Page

is still under development but is one that I whole heartedly support.

If we can get teachers and schools to collaborate using wikieducator then this will be a significant gain.

Drinks and nibbles. As ever, the real conversations happened here. I had a long chat with Wayne Mackintosh and Jim Tittsler, sys admin for wikieducator about the work that jim has outlined here:

http://wikieducator.org/User:JimTittsler/Sandbox/OO-WE

One of they key ideas about sharing resources is that of contextualistion for repurposing. I have never found a resource that I didn't want to change in some way. We need to make resources easy to change and develop for local use (contextualisation), so when we develop resources for sharing it is important that we remove reference to /local/ stuff - we decontextualise them. I also think we need more formal policies on copyright and resource creation by teachers and that perhaps the MOE needs to take a lead here.

Summary: great one dayer. I wish you all could have heard Wayne Mackintosh.”

Education is the Future - What is the Future of Education?

Thanks to Inka for sharing this info about an online conference for students 14+ on 23rd April

The topic for discussion at conference is Education is Future - What is the Future of Education?

Will be interesting from a teacher's perspective to listen to Student Voice on this theme.

I will be encouraging my students to attend & hook in myself to check out what students have to say & their recommendations on the Future of Education.

http://www.agenda21now.org/

This is a UNESCO Associated Schools Project Network

 

On the same theme of is our NZ Secondary Futures Project Worth a visit if you haven't been there before.

 

ULearn08

http://www.flickr.com/photos/robynwills/2922454397/

I have had a number of years coming to conference, including Ulearn. ePrincipals attended to hold their own pre-conference meeting and  were presenting a number of workshops there.
I think its really important to connect f2f, at least on occasions, with the people you work with so these conferences are valuable opportunities for this. For classroom teachers they are a huge PD event and one that i have seen have great impact on their thinking & ultimately to greater or lesser extent (depending on the individuals) their practice.

Sheryl Nussbaum-Beach showed this graphic in her shared keynote - I felt it represented our Mahi Tahi group so well as a Community of Practice. Read more about COPs on Conor's Blog.

The Ulearn media team interviewed a couple of ePrincipals you can see their interviews here

DEANZ Conference

ePrincipals provided a presence at DEANZ conference this year in  a conference that has traditionally been mostly populated by Tertiaries, academics & the Correspondence School.
It was interesting to rub shoulders with others in the field of Distance Learning in NZ but I left conference feeling generally underwhelmed and unchallenged by much I had seen there. Perhaps I am becoming desensitised to ideas surrounding innovative change (real or rhetoric) that I just don't get so hyped up anymore...

Michael Barbour presented a workshop that would be useful to use with our eteachers:
"about designing instruction for an adolescent and early adult audience and how the interactive can be used to help facilitate learning in this largely unsupervised environment."

Marilyn, lead teacher Waitara High School, attended Dr Ken Stevens presentation "Extending learning opportunities for high school students in rural communities: The replication of a NZ model in Canada". This was relevant for Marilyn as she has just returned from Canada where she was looking at some aspects of distance learning in schools. Here are some excerpts from her notes:
"We did it first! Ken explained how he used the NZ model from Cantatech and the Taranaki Experiment of the one-teacher primary schools from Strathmore to Taumarunui to introduce distance learning to New Foundland. Because rural schools are not able to provide high-class teachers for all of the subjects they would like to offer, distance learning is the method used to help rural schools survive. It requires collaboration!
In Canada, as in New Zealand, rural schools are struggling to attract the high quality teachers they need for all of the different subjects students want to study, and to prevent the exodus of students to larger city schools, distance learning has been introduced. Ken ran a programme in New Foundland for two years before the Canadian government intervened to find out what was involved, and then took on the programme and developed it into the nation-wide system used now.
Physically small schools have become large institutions via internet and virtual space.
Virtual classrooms are connected and collaborative, onsite and online instruction is given, open teaching and learning,
M Teacher – onsite mediator – we call then VC co-ordinators or DL co-ordinators
E Teacher – teacher of an online class."

Conor also presented a workshop session on behalf of the ePrincipals about the VLN following on from Dr Ken's presentation.

The highlight of the conference for me was listening to Marcus Akuhata-Brown speak in the closing keynote. He spoke of realising the potential in ourselves and others, removing barriers to achieving success (often our own self-belief & the perception of others) and having courage and instilling that courage in others to take on new challenges. Very inspirational. Marcus would be a great advocate for our students as we work with initiatives such as Ka Hikitia and here in Taranaki schools Te Maunga Tuu

Windwand Sharing

A VC was scheduled for today for TaraNet teachers to share ideas & resources from the windwand miniconference last week. Unfortunately i was the only one to attend this meeting. How frustrating being an ePrincipal - it is so much like being the invisible woman. Because you are not physically in peoples faces all the time it is easy for them to 'forget', make an excuse or just let things go. This is something i have always battled with from eteachers to TaraNet Principals. Next term we will have more f2f workshops for lead teachers - maybe a more blended approach will get some more commitment to the cyberside of our activities.....

Links from our TaraNet wiki here.

An interesting one - Identity 2.0 Dick Hardt

Windwand ICTPD

8 teachers from all our TaraNet schools attended a PD day in New Plymouth organised by New Plymouth Boys High School & Francis Douglas Memorial College ICTPD cluster. It was disappointing for the organisers that Wellington airport was fogged in all day and a number of workshop presenters couldn't get here.
I presented a workshop on Flickr & one on Blogging. I really wanted to present about the virtual learning network and the opportunities we are able to offer our students with distance learning and video conferencing. But was turned down as this is not what they want to hear about they want to hear about Web 2.0. Though I did take the opportunity when introducing myself to do a quick promo for the VLN & direct them to the website ;-)

I have set up a wiki page for our teachers share their ideas & resources from the days PD.

Energizing the Learning Landscape

I'm tagging along on the last day of the NZEI Rural Principals Conference in Palmerston North. NZEI President, Frances Nelson, started the day by repeating the message given by Karen Sewell at the beginning of the conference: schools need to look for ways to be more creative with the money that we have and stop looking for more to solve our problems. "Schools told to innovate and quit grizzling" No matter how much money you throw at a 'problem' you will never achieve a silver bullet solution and the best way to move forward is to take an innovative and collaborative approach. I think this is where we need to go as a cluster - how can schools fully support TaraNet & the VLN and achieve sustainability without continually going cap in hand to the MOE. I know there are creative ways to do this "If you had a school of 2000 students what curriculum could you offer" & how could you staff and resource this.

On another note Chris Carter was keynoting as well. His speech was mainly a pep talk, lots of discussion around the budget & questions and answers from the floor.He promoted World Environment Day (WED June 5th) by talking about a VC launch yesterday, of a website aimed at partnering schools globally to participate in WED "Environment website links world's pupils"

Here's a great opportunity for some VC learning opportunities with other schools.

Networking with Delicious

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Rachel did a fantastic job in introducing a group of classroom teachers to social bookmarking with Delicious. Within an hour she had everyone in the room signed up with their own class accounts, bookmarklets on their browsers and all networked together - Wahoo! Getting people started in a practical sense makes all the difference and she really sold us on the power & potential of using social bookmarking. No Digital Holidaymakers in this room.... :-)

ULearn 07 - Standing Room Only

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A tight squeeze @ ULearn this morning for the opening keynote with Ewan McIntosh. You have to be careful where you lean on the wall as you could possibly be leaning on the light switches! ;-)

I liked the way Ewan talked about identity and what is public & private online. Who are we and what are we doing here???? It reminded me of Derek's discussion of Boundary Workers - yep that must be me... Someone doing lots of different things, with lots of different people - just on the boundaries of the mainstream and much of it in an online environment. Definately not a 9 to 5 workday - and often not even feeling like work at all. Must be why i love my Boundary Work so much :-)

Ewan also outlined a framework for Web 2.0 which i found quite interesting as this is where i do a lot of my work & play inside these different spaces.
He defined these spaces as:

• Secret (IM)
• Group (Bebo)
• Publishing (Blogs)
• Performing (Second Life)
• Participation (Time4Online)
• Watching (YouTube)

Time 4 Online Conference

Time 4 Online Conference kicks off tomorrow & I encourage you all to get along & involve yourself in someway over the next couple of weeks. My presentation is finally completed as usual done at the 11th hour :-)

Connect, Communicate, Create, Collaborate @ Tuanz

Sheryl helps Lynley give birth to a new blog :-)
What a great keynote Sheryl very stirring & passionately delivered. I think all of the teachers in the room today would have been inspired to change the way they teach using technology OR think about early retirement…(which maybe not such a bad thing for our kids ;-) The future is not only just on the horizon, it is here already & the kids that are starting out in our schools now were not even born in the 20th C they are truly 21st C children. The need to change the way we teach is urgent – open up your eyes to the incredible changes and opportunities that are happening now and use them to extend the learning horizons for our children. We have a responsibility to engage them using the technology of our times. We particularly have this responsibility to help close the digital divide for our children who don’t have the same level of access in their homes. These are the children who have the most to gain from the world of opportunities just a click-beat away.

It really struck a nerve with me to hear Sheryl echo what I have said before about the difference between primary & secondary school teachers. Secondary teachers will say they teach English or maths (subjects) and Primary teacher teach students. Without wanting to put down my Secondary colleagues (I know I work in both sectors) I think they face a whole other layer of barriers which we don’t find in our Primary Schools. Our Secondary schools are most fertile ground for change.
Content is not king anymore we have to redefine what it is important to learn. We should focus on the learning process and the skills involved: numeracy, literacy, information literacy, media literacy and I think most importantly social literacy as more and more we are interacting with others in an online global learning community. Our kids need to learn how to be socially responsible global citizens. It was interesting to hear Sheryl’s perspective of Web 1.0, 2.0 & 3.0. 3.0 being the virtual worlds we inhabit that cross over into our real world through our social networks, work & school and now have an economic life that is growing. (for example Second Life) I see this happening already with my own kids, Sophie especially inhabits a number of virtual communities & shes still only 10!
Other pearlers from today was Suzie talking about Generation C – a perfect fit for the 4 C’s Connect, Communicate, Create, Collaborate though I am sure you could add to this list or express it in different ways. A starter for discussion was this video taken on a student cellphone of a Krumping battle at school & uploaded to YouTube.

The discussion never really reached the point I thought it could have gone & seemed to revolve more about behavioural standards & management in schools and not so much the creation of media online and the potential issues surrounding this. Maybe this next clip might have woken them up to this idea. Here we have another Krump battle in a NZ school this time a teacher arrives on the scene probably still ignorant to the fact they are making a cameo appearance in a You Tube video. More food for thought.

It's a Wrap

L@S conference bites the dust for another year and a good one it's been too. For a great tongue in cheek read (i think ;-) read Arti's reflections.
My highlights:
Catching up with all my friends as these are the only times we get to f2f and of course making new friends :-)
Meeting David Warlick who inspired me as a beginning blogger some time ago and also meeting Tom for the first time - someone who i have had many conversations with through our blogs.
Keynotes were very good though i really thought Jennifer's (www.takingitglobal.org) was telling the same story that Michael Furndyk told @ ULearn05. The only breakout i attended was Derek's 10 Trends. The rest of the time (not) i was sitting down the lake front watching the waka go out - another highlight.
One more - Conor Bolton - dedicated eTeacher & Volcanics eLearning cluster facilitator running round town trying to find some VC gear to deliver his scheduled L2 Accounting class. The class was rescheduled for the next day and he ran his VC class in the trade hall from the Asnet VC stand in front of crowds of other teachers. I didn't witness this but heard about it. I was very impressed that Conor had the courage & the confidence to share his teaching practise in front of his peers and in such a forum - good on you Conor :-)

Scary Moment
Well I've already blogged this - not being able to connect to my Wiki site with all my presentations on...Well i think it all worked out ok in the end - nobody asked for their money back anyway ;-)

Looking forward to ULearn07 with Ewan keynoting. David lit the spark here - not that we haven't been trying ourselves but i guess there is nothing like a 'celebrity' blogger to make teachers sit up & take notice - especially one with such a lovely southern drawl. I am equally anticipating a great accent from Ewan and for him to fan the flames of the sparks that were lit in Rotorua.

Wikis Gone West?!!

Well here i am today in Rotorua presenting 3 workshops all prepared and ready to go on http://bardwired.wikispaces.com and wouldn't you know it i can't get on only through my own laptop and only running explorer.....aaahhh!! (it keeps timing out from the wikispaces server even when i have removed all firewalls hhmmmm)

I can't get into the main page of my blog either - Explorer keeps wanting to save it as a document --- very strange? I can see i will be flicking backwards & forwards between Flock & Explorer all afternoon.

No time to figure it out with 2 more workshops running soon. So the main link for my next workshop is here.
Blogging On

Hitch a ride to ULearn06

How does this social software stuff work?? Sometimes it really feels like smoke & mirrors 2 me. I blogged & posted some photos to flickr earlier today ooops yesterday & with daylight saving & a head full of ideas robbing me of sleep am just flicking thru some stuff online and have found this very interesting site HitchHikr - now i sort of have heard of it on a podcast somewhere but never really looked at it till now & still not sure how it works (if you know plz comment) So i come across this page on hitchhikr that has got lots of recent blog posts and flickr photos (the ones i posted earlier) Thnx David Warlick for making us so connected we don't know where we begin or end! I think it is all to do with tags - i used to think rss was the glue that connected us all together but i really am thinking tags are the thing! I am going back to make sure my previous posts are tagged :-)

ULearn06 Timed Out

Good blogging intentions fell by the wayside as every day i tried to update this is what i got - grrrr. So what was i going to say?...
Yep - a great pre-conference workshop with Richard on the first day sharing our novice expert skills with a keen group of would-be webmasters. Hopefully we didn't send them away with suckier sites than they had before but maybe they have built some more on their skills and confidence. Workshop notes can be found on the ULearn site under presenter's material or you can get it here.

One of the highlights for me was taking a large group of teachers with us, many who had never been to conference before. It was disappointing not to be able to get them into the workshops they really wanted to do as they all filled up so fast but they definately had plenty available to challenge their thinking. Aaron stepped up to the challenge by making the connections between what he heard in Julia Atkins workshop, Adam Lefstein's keynote and study he had previously undertaken. He didn't quite elaborate to me at the time what those connections were but i am sure they were very deep and meaningful and will make a difference to his classroom practise :-)
For me conference is a great time to f2f with all the people i have contact with throughout the year and never get to see & also to tatau tatau e by presenting workshops & lots of informal discussions with colleagues.
You can check out the Bard Wired ULearn06 pics on flickr.

ULearn Today

I've just been in Derek's workshop "Web 2.0 and the School LMS? What's the connection?" A great introduction to 'web 2.0' but though i know all that stuff i just love listening to Derek because he always reminds me 'it's all about the kids!!!' And there are no better kids than our own to illustrate that point. I would just like to know tho how I could get my sons to be more like his daughter and actually do homework as well as all the other stuff they do online - their multitasking abilities don't seem to stretch that far...

Yesterday at the Art Centre coffee shop i had an interesting interlude with this young man as we took each other's photos - again a great reminder that it's all about the kids. Don't forget that this week @ ULearn.

And the final reminder are from our own little helpers @ ULearn Liam and Michael who say check out their cool web sites:

www.yabu.co.nz and www.michael-griffin.com

ULearn 06

Counting down already to ULearn06 in Christchurch in September. There won't be much of a break for our 13 BardWired delegates who take off the day after school finishes for the term - phew! So if you are one of our team and you haven't registered for your pre-conference workshop yet - get over there and do it now! Richard & i have sort of started planning the pre-conference session we are running: "Take Back Control of Your School Website." It was interesting to sit down side by side with Richard the other day and see how differently we make our sites - i use tables, he uses? (i've forgotten already); he makes his navigation bar & links in Fireworks - I learnt how to do this the other day & I've forgotten already...ok i didn't really learn it then did i? We both start with creating a site - which is a good idea, optimising images is another important feature. So a few things we need to start planning to make sure we are telling the same story at ULearn :-) Another thing we need to get confident with before ULearn is doing all of this on Apples! I can't see this should be a problem - i hope.
So why would anyone want to learn how to make their own school website? There are so many free tools online to create an online presence (blogs & wikis etc) & you need no skills to be able to use these. There are also a quite a few businesses that specialise in making your school website for you. I think it's a really useful skill to have to know a little html, even if you use blogs & wikis - it just gives you a bit more understanding about what you are doing & helps you do cool things with your template. Also it is about control - it makes me cringe to think of schools who pay for someone to do something as simple as updating the newsletter. It's great to have someone on the staff too who can update pages when new items come to hand (even the same day) instead of waiting and paying for a specialist to do it. I think that the age of the IT Guru has passed and anybody with a little skill & interest can create great webpages.

TUANZ Wanganui

Well i usually write about things after the event - but this has been such an event just getting prepared! But i am prepared now (sort of) though very last minute.
Here is my presentation - you may be accessing it during my workshop or maybe afterwards as you explore a bit further.
Check out also TUANZ on Centre4.