Wearing two hats

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by Pinelopi Zaka (pinelopi.zaka@gmail.com, @paz11uc)

With the beginning of the new school year down under, teachers set their own new goals and many decide to apply some new strategies. For some this might involve using ICT and perhaps trying out blended online approaches that combine both online and face-to-face teaching and learning. In New Zealand and worldwide blended education is a fast developing area that is expected to continue growing, especially in kiwi schools with the rollout of UFB. This is an exciting opportunity to experiment with new tools and approaches, but also to motivate teachers to take one step further and investigate how they and their students experience the whole process, through research. Here are some of the reasons:

• Knowing yourself! Through the process of researching your own class you wear two hats – that of the teacher and that of the researcher. This twofold role helps you to continuously self-reflect on what you are doing as a teacher and why you are doing it.

• Knowing your students! Similarly to knowing yourself, through research you investigate your context in a more systematic way. You collect and analyse your data from your students, either through interviews, surveys or observations in a thoroughly designed way, preferably informed by the literature and other studies looking into similar topics.

• Improving your teaching! While you research your class you collect lots of evidence regarding the success or not of your approaches. It is an ongoing process where, at any stage, you can adapt your practices, change your approaches, use different tools or do anything else that you think might improve your students’ experience.

• Sharing your results and your learning journey! Nobody can deny how great the feeling of sharing is. Learning about what other teachers did, how they did it and what the results were is always interesting for educators who want to improve students’ learning experiences. A presentation at your school’s staffroom, a poster at a conference, or even better a published article in a research journal, are a few ways to communicate your class story to inspire others and contribute to the body of knowledge for the improvement of teaching and learning. Even if you think that your results are not that impressive, the learning journey you went through and your growth as a teacher is something that is definitely worth sharing!

Resources:

• Photo by Jonathan_W
• Educators sharing their stories through the CORE Education community
• Educators publishing their research in Computers in New Zealand Schools: Learning, Teaching, Technology
  
• New Zealand Council for Educational Research
• Enabling e-Learning - Research and Readings
• Riel, M. (2010). Understanding Action Research, Center For Collaborative Action Research. Pepperdine University
  

Education debate heating up

Private schools or independent schools are not administered by government therefore they retain the right to select their students and are funded in whole or in part by charging their students' tuition. They are free to choose their own curricula and select, for their students, the examination system they desire.

Charter schools are schools that receive government money but are not subject to some of the rules, regulations, and statutes that apply to other schools. While charter schools provide an alternative to other public schools, they are part of the public education system and are not allowed to charge tuition.

Public schools or state schools, generally refer to primary or secondary schools that offers all children an education funded by the government, and paid for, in whole or in part, by state taxes.


There is much in the news about the introduction of charter schools in New Zealand. And it seemed to be kicked off by the announcement:

National has agreed to a radical development in the education system - charter schooling - in a surprising part of its support deal with the Act Party.

There will be much debate over the issue and even in these early days there is a mix of opinion from stakeholders. Trying to pull the fact from the opinion is going to become something of a headache, as with all these things there are pros and cons to both sides of the argument.

Articles:
Pro:

• Press Release: Maxim Institute: Charter Schools A Positive Initiative
• Marlborough Express: Key defends charter schools  
• John Key defends school trial

Con:

• Press Release: NZEI
• NZHerald: Sponsored school sees charter plan pitfall  
• Charter schools no silver bullet, warns US expert

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Talking about pencils...

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by Pinelopi Zaka (pinelopi.zaka@gmail.com, @paz11uc)

A combination of Friday night excitement, passionate change agents, twitter and of course lots of humour: this is #pencilchat. Once again, education tweeps from all over the world united their voices in a twitter chat, but this time they added big doses of irony and sarcasm. The topic is simple and its message is deep: imagine that you living several years ago when pencils were beginning to be introduced at schools. What are the benefits? Most importantly, what are the implications for teaching, learning and schooling in general?

As much simple as this may look like for today’s world, it couldn’t be that simple back in the day... Now, replacing the word pencil with the tools of today’s world, computers, mobile devices and other innovations that still don’t have a natural place in most educational systems, this is how peculiar and funny the whole debate about using ICT in the classroom might look like in the near future.

But this is our aim as change agents after all. We want future generations to enjoy teaching and learning in an environment that is meaningful and relevant to the real world. We want them to find difficulty in understanding why there was so much debate regarding the blend of ICT in teaching and learning, just because the seamless implementation of all these tools will be a natural and undisputable thing to do for them. There will be a time that discussing about educational use of ICT will be as funny and weird as #pencilchat.

You can follow and contribute to #pencilchat anytime. The community is growing with thousands of tweets sent over the last three days! Here are some of my favourites:

Resources:

Photo by jimmiehomeschoolmom
Why #pencilchat may be the most clever education allegory ever by Liz Dwyer
How #pencilchat started by John T. Spencer
Why do you like twitter? by David Coffey
A head teacher writes... by Steve Wheeler

An Evening with Dame Alison Holst

CANCELLED

Join the Napier Central School PTA for a fabulous night with Dame
Alison - she will be talking about her memoir, A Home Grown Cook. Bring your Friends, Neighbours, Aunties, Mothers, Grandmothers and make an evening of it. Tickets are only $20 and include home-baking and $10 off her book. There will also be raffles and the chance to win a bakers dozen of Dame Alison's Cookbooks. So come and support Napier Central School and meet the Queen of the New Zealand Kitchen

We are excited to be able to support this event and Beattie&Forbes have plenty of her books for you to buy - a great Christmas present for only $30.

Tickets from Ticketek - Please Tweet or like and get the word out as this all goes to support the school. Tweet

What is your vision?

by Pinelopi Zaka (pinelopi.zaka@gmail.com, @paz11uc)

Some people like change, some others don’t. As educators we are often trying to make a difference as change agents in our own organizations. Sometimes it is easy, but not always...

Everett Rogers, a sociologist, writer and teacher introduced his theory on the diffusion of innovations in 1962, explaining the rate of adoption. According to Rogers, each innovation has five attributes and it is the individual’s perceptions of these attributes that will determine the rate of adoption. The five attributes are:

• Relative advantage, referring to the benefits that people identify in adopting an innovation.
  
• Compatibility, which is the degree to which an innovation is consistent to people’s values, experiences and/or needs.
  
• Complexity, referring to the perceived challenges of adopting an innovation.
  
• Trial-ability, which is the degree to which people can experiment with an innovation on a limited basis before deciding whether or not they will adopt it.
• Observability, referring to the degree to which people can directly observe the results of using an innovation.

Reflect at your own situation. When was the last time you were in a position to decide whether or not to adopt an innovation? What advantages and challenges you could identify in adopting it? Were the innovation’s characteristics compatible to your needs/values/experiences? Did you have any opportunities to try out the innovation before deciding? Were the results of using it relatively easy to observe? You may find that for different innovations there are different attributes that have greater impact on our decisions.

Looking into a learning organization such as a school, it is not only the teachers’ perceptions on these five attributes that will determine the rate of adoption of an innovation. It is also the students, sometimes their parents, but most importantly school leaders whose perceptions will have a big impact. When an innovation is introduced in a system where its members have different roles, needs and perceptions, things might become more complicated.

For a teacher for example, considering that implementing some Web2.0 tools in the classroom will help them to provide students with more opportunities for independent learning and collaboration, might be an important advantage they identify. For them, challenges related to learning how to use new online tools might not have a negative impact to their decision, due to the relative advantage they see. Perhaps this teacher had already had the chance to experiment with some tools and maybe they started to observe changes in students’ ability to self-direct their learning and collaboration. However, another teacher, a student, a school leader, a parent, whose priorities and goals are not the same might have different perceptions.

Building a shared vision among the members of the school community (Segne, cited in Smith, 2001) is very important , in order to “foster genuine commitment and enrollment rather than compliance”. This way, when introducing an innovation, members of the system will have a similar reference point when assessing its usefulness, as well as when they are working towards effective ways to implement it. Look at your own context again. Change is not easy. Investigate. What are the priorities of other individuals at your own institution? What is their vision? What is your vision? How can the innovation you want to introduce address yours and others’ vision? How can you build up a shared vision?

“As people talk, the vision grows clearer. As it gets clearer, enthusiasm for its benefits grow” (Senge, p.227, cited in Smith, 2001).

Resources:

Photo by David King
Rogers, E. (2003). The diffusion of innovations. (5th ed.). New York: The Free Press.
Smith, M. K. (2001). Peter Senge and the learning organization, the encyclopedia of informal education.

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NZC Online

NZC Online has a newsletter which comes out regularly. I have identified a few lead stories but there is far more contained within each newsletter than I can reproduce here.

School stories

The NZC Online team interviewed educators at Learning@School 2011 in Rotorua about the curriculum based workshops they were presenting at conference.
Willowbank curriculum map
Jane Danielson and Julie Cowan explain how they used a map analogy to guide their curriculum development, because on a map you can go to different places, get to different points, take detours, and take different ways of travelling.

Middle schooling

Once Upon a School is a site designed to collect stories of how individuals engage with their local schools. This is a global project, inviting people to share their own stories of how 'private' individuals connect with 'public' schools.
EDtalks: Using teaching as inquiry to guide an eLearning action plan
Claire Amos is Director of eLearning at Epsom Girls' Grammar. Claire talks about how the school is using a 'teaching as inquiry' cycle to inform the eLearning action plans that will be implemented by professional learning groups in each of the school's curriculum areas.
Youth Mentoring Network - He Ara Tika
He Ara Tika is a programme that mentors Māori students, and is run by the Youth Mentoring Trust. A Gisborne secondary school has picked up this programme and, instead of using it to focus on Māori students, they have used it to give all students from year 10 upwards a teacher mentor. These mentors become the first port of call for parents, and follow the students right through their schooling.

Secondary

Secondary Education Gazette stories
These articles have a secondary focus and are published in the New Zealand Education Gazette. Each link will take you through to the story on the Education Gazette website.
Secondary Literacy Website
The new secondary literacy website has been launched on Literacy Online. It provides literacy in the learning area; leading literacy in your school; professional readings; links to Literacy Progressions, NZC, ELLP; NCEA and literacy; and much more.
Understanding NCEA: A relatively short and very useful guide for secondary school students and their parents
New from NZCER, this book explains the NCEA system in plain language and includes stories drawn from the real-life experiences of students who have followed different NCEA pathways.

READ MORE...

Things to do:

Please share this newsletter.
Encourage your colleagues to sign up for the updates.
Join our NZCOnline FaceBook  page for updates.



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Using Youtube in the classroom

Engaging the class, the parents and the wider community has been the place for websites and blogs for sometime. Youtube, Teachertube or schooltube can be the place for supporting videos.
Youtube has added a number of new annotations and features which allow greater flexibility in the use of video. One teacher below has put these to great effect to have students show their thinking in Maths.

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Ultra-fast Broadband is set to save NZ Education

According to Steve Joyce says “ultra fast broadband to schools will transform the education system by enhancing the way teachers teach and children learn”

"Over the next five years, 97 per cent of schools will receive ultra fast fibre enabling speeds of 100 Mbps plus. The remaining 3 per cent of schools, which are in the most remote locations, will receive a high speed wireless or satellite connection - a tender process for broadband provision to these schools will get underway next month. No schools will miss out."

This sounds monumentally transformative and within 5 years all these schools will be ‘wired’ as Anne Tolley calls it.

I begin to wonder about the hardware in school that students have access to. How many classrooms have a significant number of computers. How many does it take to qualify as ‘significant’. One-to-one laptops is great in theory but the expense associated and the current nature of curriculum delivery means it is far from necessary.

• How many machines do you think is sufficient for a classroom?
• Are we going to dicuss the relative merits of a MAC when compared with the initial outlay?
• Can someone input here a explain the nature of government subsidy and school resourcing that will mean that hardware provision in school will support the UFB initiative in the given timeframe?

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Lane Clark Speaks about Teaching and Learning

Lane Clark spoke very powerfully at ULearn10 about the need to acknowledge how we educate being more important than what we educate about, and that we need to work with students on how to learn, how to think and the relationship between the two.

To support this Spectrum Education have a limited offer on Lane’s Books.

Where Thinking & Learning Meet  - Lane Clark

Book and CD Rom

If it is our goal to see an increase in student levels of engagement and levels of high school retention, an improvement in student performance standards and learners skilled and ready to contribute to their world, then we have got to rethink what we are doing, and how we are doing it, in our schools.
We've got to teach our kids how to think and how to learn.
In Where Thinking and Learning Meet, Lane Clark challenges our individual and systemic educational beliefs and practices. She offers an approach to re-thinking and re-engineering how teachers teach and how learners learn.

Where Assessment Meets Thinking and Learning - Lane Clark

Book and CD Rom

A symbiotic relationship exists between thinking, learning and assessment. Criteria, void of thinking, result in little more than ‘quantity' statements or statements of subjective ‘quality' language. Neither stretches the learner in their performance, and the latter results in confusion and often a need for moderation.
When a learner is provided with criteria, but is not given the opportunity to develop knowledge and understanding of their elements, its use is compromised and the end result disappointing. This book is about the thinking and learning process. It's about the relationship between assessment, thinking and learning. It's where assessment meets thinking and learning!

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Staff PD is now cost effective

CORE Education are responding to a need schools have for accessible professional learning and development (PLD).
Far too often the shrinking time and budget puts pay to professional development but CORE Achieve seeks to address this problem with their innovative, flexible courses.

The internet provides a range of delivery methods, both synchronously and synchronously, which CORE have tapped into.

The courses are modulor and can be delivered to individuals or a whole staff via the online environment.

“Achieve allows individual teachers to study their choice of topic at a time and place suitable to them, with the focus being on participation, collaboration and interaction rather than just delivery.”

Don't forget to register.

Things to do:
Discover CORE’s approach to PLD
Find out more about cost effective PLD
Register with CORE Achieve.
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