When is out of date, out of date?

A couple of days ago I was exploring a link to a wiki created by a class in New Zealand. It was posted to a mailing list to illustrate a good example of educational use of a wiki. And it was an excellent, genuine example. However as I was reading it, I noticed that the last entry was posted in about June 2007. My immediate reaction and consequent action was to stop reading and to move onto something else. Why?
When I thought about this, I realised that the more I read information and ideas on the web, the more I expect the posts, or entries to be 'fresh'. Why, I wonder. I would have no qualms about reading a non-fiction textbook that might have been published 10 0r even 20 years ago. What is different about the web?
Speed is also a need. I find that often I'll read something and if it doesn't 'grab' me, I'll either move on or at the very most, tag it and then move on.
I wonder what it says about me as a consumer? I wonder what this need for immediacy or action might say about our students as consumers?

VITTA Conference

Today I presented at the VITTA conference in Melbourne at the beautiful Flemington Racecourse. It's an amazing venue and certainly adds to the ambiance of the conference.
Over lunch, I had a lovely chat with Renee Hoareau, Executive Officer of VITTA. I have known Renee since her myinternet days (now Editure). She shared some visions that she has for VITTA and also mentioned that VITTA aims to continue to lead the way in Australia as a very active organisation for teachers of Information Technology. Renee is certainly one of the leaders of ICT in Australia and I think VITTA is in very good hands. If the conference is any guide this conference is certainly a leader in Australia and I venture to say the world.

I wonder though if we are hopefully seeing more and more of the 'ordinary' teacher who is interested in integrating ICT into their curriculum rather than the IT specialist at these sort of conferences. I hope that is the case but then I'm a little biased towards the all round teacher who has a passion for learning all sorts of things including using internet technology.

After my session Teaching Thinking with Technology, in which I addressed the Intel thinking with technology tools and cool and geeky things that teachers can use from the web, I also met with Jim from Editure who very excitedly mentioned that they are investigating the use of Web 2.0 applications and have received a government grant that will allow them to research across Australia, New Zealand, South Africa and Asia.
I think it's great to hear that companies such a Editure and Intel are recognising that many of these Web 2.0 tools make teaching and learning via the internet much more accessible to the 'ordinary' teacher who is not necessarily skilled in all things to do with information technology.
By the way by 'ordinary', I mean extraordinary. I mean the teacher who is not necessarily a specialist but a generalist, who is a seeker of new learning, not one who stays in the same groove year after year; who recognises that the world of teaching and learning is changing. And that we better be there or be square. :)

The Beauty of Flexibility and the wonder of technology

I have a routine at the beginning of each IT lesson to always have my laptop connected to the interactive whiteboard, data projector and internet whether I plan to use them or not. There have been many instances when we have been discussing something as a class where we have wondered about an issue or an idea and then quickly googled it or gone to Visual Thesaurus Googlemaps or Wikipedia to check something out immediately.
The other day we were just about to start our class when the students noticed the Skype icon pop up as one of my Skype friends logged in and naturally being curious they asked what it was.
Well I couldn't resist, so out the door went the lesson plan and in came a quick lesson on Skype. A minute or so later we were Skypeing with Chris Betcher and his daughter over in Canada. Chris had his webcam on so that added another excitement for the kids as they could see as well as hear Chris and Kate. It was fantastic and we had other teachers come into the room to see what was going on.
Chris has blogged about this as well on his blog. The wonderful thing as Chris said was that it took no time and was a really powerful opportunity to make links across the world. What I saw was total engagement, every student was totally engrossed. Many went home and checked out Skype for themselves. But I think the best thing was the chance to talk to Chris and Kate about their experiences in Canada and the opportunity for us to spontaneously (if only virtually) spread our wings into the big wide world. It's certainly something we will do again. In fact we are already planning another skype opportunity with some students in Phoenix, Arizona.

Thinking about where to next with IT

This year has been my first year of teaching a Year 7 and a Year 8 class for Information Technology. As a primary trained teacher who hasn't been fulltime in the classroom for the last 5 years it was exciting yet challenging at the same time. Particularly as I had to rethink my ideas about assessment, class structure, class management etc.
For example, as primary teacher I am used to having extended blocks of time where as a class we could go off on a tangent or run with an idea that the students have come up with, or explore something deeply and make up for lost time later. The absolutely most frustrating thing I found about teaching secondary students was the time limit. 48 minutes periods in an IT class is a ridiculously short amount of time to ensure that we had the time to talk and think and learn before getting to the computers. And of course the kids always wanted to get to the computers straight away.
It also meant that the end of lessons were often chaotic with shouts of SAVE your work as they were rushing out the door to the next class. This was instead of the lovely "okay everyone lets come together and think and talk about what we have learnt today" that I was used to as a primary teacher.
Teaching older students also came with the delightful "why do we have to do this" "this is boring" responses- not that I didn't get that as a primary teacher although I did mainly teach elementary students so it was rarer.
Having said that though I was somewhat surprised sometimes as I really tried hard to provide some (what I thought) were pretty stimulating lessons and activities.
But that's okay, it just challenges me more.
I actually did a survey with the kids last week and asked them things like what did they enjoy the most, what did they least enjoy, was there anything I could have done better, did they understand my instructions, was I approachable when they had difficulties.
On the whole the comments were very positive. But one interesting thing was that almost all kids said they hated blogging and they loved creating their digital portfolios.
So that got me thinking that maybe what I should do is think more about using wikis as a way to have the kids document more of what they are thinking (blogging) but make it more possible to express themselves like they like to do in their digital portfolios.
The Cool Cat teacher blog has some great ideas for ways to use wikis that I think I might try.
I'm thinking that this might be the way to kill two birds with one stone....maybe.

Going to try this idea tomorrow

As a result of an oz teachers post that mentioned a really cool little video on Youtube called Free Hugs, I decided that I would try to use the video as a way to have students think some more about the way the internet and Web 2.0 is changing the world-or is it?
So what I have done is downloaded the videos using a great little add on in Firefox called FLV download which enables the videos to be loaded onto my computer. (Youtube is blocked at school so I can't make a direct link) and then I'm going to use Sandy Thom's song, "I wish I was a punk rocker" to get them to think about the different ways that one person might change the world. I bought it the other day on Itunes so hopefully I'm fine with using it.
The question is Can one person change the world?
For these students I have been using a blog - Wedderburn 7/8 Blog to write up my lessons and here's the post. I find it's a good way to keep a record for myself and also hopefully gives kids a chance to think a little more about what they have to do.
I think the addition of music will also help. We generally have music going in the classroom when we are working anyway although I'm guessing some will love and others will hate the Punk Rocker song. I think I'll try to find the lyrics to the song as well as that will add another level of understanding.
will report back tomorrow on how it went.