Managing BYOD at Albany Senior High | Notes from PoriruaNet

[This is cross-posted to/from the Enabling e-Learning: Leadership group]

A couple of weeks ago, I was invited to the PoriruaNet Cluster conference, to facilitate a couple of workshops on Enabling e-Learning and blended professional learning for schools.

It was great to see four schools coming together to explore the way they were using technology for learning – and the day was kicked off by Mark Osborne (Albany Senior High School – see picture) who explored several aspects of how his school has integrated technology into their curriculum and learning philosophy.

Managing the challenge of inequity in BYOD

At Albany, for students who have any device, they can bring it in and the school will make sure the network is available. But their vision for students means that they should be able to learn in the way they wish – which may not involve technology. We should remind ourselves that learning is a social activity, so screen time needs balancing with peer work, and their suggested optimum ratio is 1:3 around a single device.

All information in the cloud

The goal at Albany is for any browser to be able to access the web, using any device, anytime, anywhere. This requires huge commitment to the network and infrastructure. 400-500 devices are on the network during the day.

Open source – Open access

For every personal device that comes in, a school computer is freed up for a student who needs it. Software access can also result in inequity, so they chose to use open, free, powerful software that anyone could access. E.g GIMPinstead of Photoshop; Open Office, instead of Microsoft Office. To download new apps, the library offers QR code-tagged apps to take students to relevant download pages.  In terms of storage and security, the school provides personal lock-ups, with power points, managed by the students.

e-Portfolios

Recording and reflecting on their own ‘Impact’ projects (e.g. Students monitoring waterways, starting bands, designing rockets, creating art) can be challenging for teachers who also have to support rigorous assessment. How to assess fluid, self-chosen learning? e-Portfolios allow for flexible conversations around learning, amongst students, parent and teachers.

Wikieducator, Google docs, and social networks

Collaborative, peer-tutoring can occur in the cloud. Mark described the power of Google docs, citing an example of over 40 teachers using them at the ULearn11 conference to collate notes during a keynote. These tools allows for differentiated approaches, peer review, structured and scaffolded approaches, and tracking for individual involvement. Many classes use Facebook pages, often administered by both teacher and students, focused around different topics and questions

Akō

Mark quoted Bishop, and the importance of tuakana-teina. All good teachers keep learning. He advocated for active reciprocal learning (touching on the Learning Pyramid).

At the start, Mark reminded us of Papert’s quote - ”Of course technology doesn’t work. Technology doesn’t do anything; people do.” – and asked us to consider the challenges in our classroom that we are hoping to solve. It was a good reminder to set aside the shiny tools and focus on a clear vision and learning goals for our students.

The keynote was a really useful set of touchpoints for BYOD, that put the learning and the curriculum in the foreground and spoke strongly to the importance of clear vision and strategy.

The e-Learning Planning Framework: Leadership dimension might be a good starting point for other schools looking to review the way they interate technology with their curriculum.

Thanks to Mark for sharing Albany Senior High’s experiences, and to PoriruaNet for hosting us:-)

Online professional learning: Punch above your weight

Here’s a story:

Sally is a primary teacher, who has had some exciting shifts in the way two of her students are learning to read. She rushes down the corridor to tell a colleague in the staffroom. Her colleague listens, is pleased for Sally, and spends a few minutes reflecting with her on both of their classrooms and how they teach literacy. Occasionally they return to the conversation over the following weeks. The end.

I use this as the start of an activity in the sessions I am running throughout this year on how blended/online approaches to professional learning can change the ending of this story. Sally’s story is the ‘BC’ version (before connectivity), although I know that it is still the norm in many schools.

I have been exploring why and how the social web, when it’s used strategically by educators, can make Sally’s story go further so, as a group, we can:

• build a shared articulation of practice
• make visible for others our reflective inquiries around ‘what works’
• create spaces for a collaborative approach to inquiry
• offer opportunities for professionals to make connections with each other, using visible online networks
• curate learning to build a lifelong digital portfolio, against which to reflect and discuss
• create expression of our practice to enable comparisons with others, to clarify what the key stories of effectiveness look like.

I am facilitating these sessions as part of the CORE Education breakfast series throughout 2012, and also at the ULearn12 conference in October.

Meanwhile, here’s me giving an overview of this trend, created for the 10 trends series:

[Image source:  Beverly & Pack]

Social media: Digital dialogue with DK

Yes, he’s a mate and a colleague….and so, having declared my interest, I’ll say, without feeling at all ‘promotional’ that the CORE breakfast session this Friday morning with DK on social media was spot on. Here’s why:

• Social media was foregrounded in the bigger picture, the context of the development of the web, all the way from the O’Reilly’s brain through the ‘happy ugly’ of MySpace (great video from Ze Frank) to the exciting possibilities of today’s social web for both learners and teachers.
• Great images: always more powerful to use a visual metaphor than a bunch of bullets.
• Big, fat philosophy. Open, sharing, enthusiastic advocacy for the power of the collective. Social media as digital dialogue that can be efficiently managed so we can choose to hear our favourite signals amidst the noise.
• Humour. Laughs. Wry self-deprecation.
• Great collection of tweets all the way through…

More, please.

I Facebook, therefore I…

Apparently, I am more likely to be female, over 35, trusting, politically active, to have close relationships, and more social support. Is it because I am friendly, sociable and gullible?

Or it is because I am on Facebook?

These are the assertions of a recent Pew Report – Social networking and our lives (Hampton, Goulet, Rainie & Purcell, 2011), which surveyed 2,255 adults to explore “how people’s trust, personal relationships, and civic and political involvement are connected to their use of social networking sites and other technologies”.

The paper seems to fly in the face of the usual media suspects who often claim that social networking leads to narrow, superficial, stunted relationships, lacking in diversity. On the contrary, the survey seems to suggest that regular involvement in social media sites is reflective of the opposite – civically engaged, connected, social beings. There is even an interesting discussion about MySpace and ‘perspective taking’, which might suggest that such spaces are not the closed echo chambers that we might assume.

And apparently it doesn’t make us dumb, either. When exploring how strong  the relationship is between internet use and the diversity of people’s overall social networks, they concluded that:
“Education is the best predictor of a diverse social network. Each year of education is associated with 1.5 additional points on the diversity scale. From this perspective, internet users have a boost in network diversity that is equivalent to about two years of formal education, bloggers have a boost of about four years.”

So all that blogging does pay off.

But I am still left wondering: is it the technology at play here – or are those people who are active in these networks those early-adopter, more socially-brave types that would have wide, active networks anyway?

Can you ‘do’ social media if you’re not very social?

[Image source: http://www.freedigitalphotos.net/images/view_photog.php?photogid=2125]

Make social media WORK for you

8.30am, and according to the research, the 300+ audience of students should still have been asleep in bed. However, the 2011 Tech Hui saw hundreds of bright-eyed, keen folk turn up to Te Papa to hear a few of us, mostly old(er), folk share our thinking about all things technology.

The annual Wellington event is student-run, a huge achievement in itself. I was invited to speak about the way students might extend their uses of social media beyond the ‘social’ to enhance the way they learn. It was a whistle-stop tour, but I managed a whole room, real-time Twitter example (without touching an equipment!), explored some examples of how they might explore their learning passions (Shakespeare on Facebook! Chat to Stephen Hawking on Twitter!), and emphasised the importance of cybersafety and of being a digital citizen with integrity.

It was a pleasure to be invited, and to watch such a slick operation get underway. Many thanks, and well done, to the TechHui team and to those in the audience.

[Image source: http://www.techhui.org.nz/

#eqnz

The Christchurch earthquake – and the tragedy unfolding in its wake – has stunned us all. But, in between the stories of bravery, local heroism and national response, there have been occasional moments where something has caught my attention because it is odd or unusual.

For me, it was the moment in Parliament on Tuesday 22 February, when Bill English asked people to stay off the phone lines and use texting instead. And it was the moment when a bizarre email from a friend made me think something had happened – and Twitter was my first source for immediate news. Both were, even at the time, in the midst of the devastating news, an odd reminder of the way technology is part of how we communicate.

This infographic from Mashable highlights the way online networks are now firmly centre stage during times when news is breaking; when the person in the street is at the heart of the story; when good, and bad, news travels faster than ever before.

If anyone still doubts the power of an online community, a social network or 140 character messages to have real impact on people’s lives, they have only to look at the messages coming through on the day of the earthquake, and still streaming through in the days afterwards, to be persuaded otherwise.

 

When your 13-year-old joins Facebook

Finally.

I have found a great post that articulates really sensibly the role that a parent could – should? – take to support their child’s developing understanding and awareness of digital citizenship.

I was struck by the way the author, Molly Baker, embraces the benefits, and takes a pragmatic approach to the potential challenges. She acknowledges the bigger picture, the world of technology in which our children are growing up and the way. Her analogy of teaching children to ride a bike, that we need to give them ‘training wheels’, is spot on. Sensible woman.

On the other hand, the comments underneath that post reveal a whole other side to her argument, one that often sees technology as a harbinger of danger, predation and a dumbed-down view of life.

Here is the original post:   Why I finally gave in and let my 13-year-old join Facebook

(Thanks for the tip, via the blog Might be of interest; image via Freefoto.com)

My Principal tweets: A report on leaders and social networks

We know that when leaders get involved in professional learning – when they walk the talk – their staff and community are much more likely to follow and be inspired to join in.

The report  - School Principals and Social Networking in Education: Practices, Policies, and Realities in 2010 – highlights the importance of school principals getting hands-on experience with social media tools, like Facebook and Twitter, in order to understand how it might support collaborative and networked learning.

The key findings of the report include:

• Principals who have active and personal experience of social media are far more likely to be strong advocates for its educational potential, and for e-learning in general.
• Many principals believe that there are possibilities within social media – but their schools do not have a strategy for its use.

The report recommends three key actions:

1. Greater active involvement in social networking is required for school leaders – and sites like EdWeb, ASCD Community and Google for Educators can provide a context that offers obvious benefits quite quickly if Facebook and Twitter don’t strike immediate chords.
2. Models of good practice are needed to show the potential of social networking in education
3. School policies need to be more effective and based on real-world contexts. They should extend beyond whether sites should be blocked to incorporate students and community in authentic digital citizenship conversations.

Schools look to their leaders for guidance and inspiration. What are they seeing at the moment?

Original link for report: http://www.edweb.net/fimages/op/PrincipalsandSocialNetworkingReport.pdf

43 decisions: Setting your privacy settings on Facebook

43. That’s the number of decisions you potentially have to make when you review your Facebook privacy settings.

And even if you’re a ‘digital citizen’, who fully understands the implications of your choices, it’s still hard.

Many young people find it much harder – and that’s why they need the support of parents and teachers.

This privacy chart for teens is part of a Parents’ Guide to Facebook. It steps you through each decision that you make as you set up or review your settings. And A Parents’ Guide to Facebook can be downloaded here.

And once you’ve done that, run the Scan for Privacy from reclaimPrivacy.org.

Because any platform that asks you to make at least 43 decisions about what you want to share, and what you don’t, needs to be handled with care.

Social media gives students a reason to write

How can social media support students’ learning? We all know we should be looking at ways to engage students using real-world contexts – and goodness knows, social media is part of the background of our daily lives – but does using it as part of a communications programme actually have an effect?

I have been interested to find about a successful pilot course, run by Andrew Davis (from the Worst Kept Secret) with a group of students in a London school. The students were borderline C/D, and it is (unfortunately) typical in the UK to target those students who might achieve the ‘C’ and thus improve the school’s position in league table rankings.

This course, ‘Social Media Fundamentals’, resulted in raised student achievement (in terms of GCSE grades), increased student engagement, and motivation. It is now a model that is being used by the exam board edexcel, as they develop a new course, Digital Communication in English.

Why was the (four week!) pilot course so successful?

- It met the needs of the students, and the school. It was evidence-based, drawing on the students’ needs, and the course learning outcomes;

- It was ‘real world’ – real-world tools, involvement from outside businesses, authentic assessment contexts. Persuasive and creative writing was channelled through the use of social media tools.

-  You could also argue that focused mentoring of individual students will have affected the outcome, plus, perhaps, the feeling of being involved in something ‘special’ – and, dare I say  it, fun:-)

No matter. I think this illustrates quite powerfully that, be it social media or otherwise,  a context that is ‘real’ for students is incredibly powerful. And why wouldn’t you use today’s communication tools in a class exploring effective communication?

Image: jscreationzs via www.freedigitalphotos.net