In this environment, very little PD funding is allocated to workshops or conferences around using ICT in the classroom. The vast majority of PD funding is allocated for IB workshops, reading, language and ESL support programs based around traditional approaches. Having attended a great many of these myself, I can assure you that they are a long way behind still in embedding ICT in the workshops. Even the IB, which every school in the region seems to be rushing to take up, has very little use of ICT in the workshops showing teachers how to teach via this “new and updated” curriculum.

Given this low priority for ICT in the region which is changing but sooo… slowly in spite of investment in the hardware tools, it is quite a risky venture to try to host a conference in Hong Kong unless we can attract some of the bigger, truly international schools in the region to Hong Kong.

As per the Shanghai initiatives, we would need around 500 or so teachers to make the conference viable. Give that we were able to attract 200 or so in May, I am sure that we can do this easily. We need a venue. This should be no problem as there are a number of large schools in HK with good wireless access.

I would also consider changing the format as I feel that we know the big picture. I think we need to be moving onto the “digital artifacts”. I would set it up with some streams with one being students and teachers showing what they are doing. Real “in your face stuff”.

I would like to pitch for it for Hong Kong.

Comments??

Given that most of us did not have the chance to input to the summit, the best that we could hope to do was read the comments on the summary reports here.  As an educator, the one of most interest to me is the one titled “The productivity agenda - education, skills, training, science and innovation”

This is the one that I am being asked to give some input on. Like many places in the developed world, my native country is making a lot of noise about educating its citizens to be creative, connected and collaborative. Naturally, ICT is hearalded as a great enabler for these lofty outcomes. Deputy Primeminister, The Hon Julia Gillard MP, who, among other things has the federal ministry for Education as one of her portfolio responsibilities, gave this address at the recent Australian Computers in Education Conference. In it she refers to the Digital Education Revolution Better Practice Guide. I must say that I find very little here that is new as I referred to guides like this 20 years ago when I was doing my Masters research and writing applications for funding for my schools. I can only hope that we can shift the agenda a little more in this term of government.

Anyway, I have set up a wiki for sharing ideas here. It is an open wiki so if any of you reading this want to post a comment on it, feel very free to do so. As soon as I can set aside some time to write some ideas down I want to comment about teachers being valued and supported by their “colleges” for their overseas teaching experience. Currently, their is no such thing as an associate membership for my College, WACOT. This means I either pay the full $A70 per year for each year I am out of the country or let it lapse as I (and the majority of teachers in WA have I believe) and pay an additional $A100 or so in fees to go through the registration process again! And this is so that my teaching qualification awarded by the University of Western Australia, the most respected Uni in the state, can be certified as being appropriate for me to teach in the state of the same name! This needs fixing right away!

I would also like to try to set up some network of Aussie teachers outside of the big brown land. I my experience, these teachers are generally innovative, resourceful and highly valued but in no way connected to a community of other teachers at home. EDNA would seem to me to the be the best place to set up a link but it needs some offerings to allow teachers to buy in.

Check out the wiki later for more.

Comments, as always, welcomed.

Here are some of the tweets from my sessions.

Have admin read Leadertalk. Kim’s admin staff are here at the conference. Great way to get them onboard! Wonder about HK admins??

How to shift a school hosted by Kim we have David Jakes and others. Mentions the “Tipping Point”. Good ways to move folk.

Jakes talks a lot about leadership. Not interested in isolated pockets. Interested in Systemic Change. Administrators have to be onboard. Listening to the feedback from the breakouts. Some good ideas coming out from the sessions. “literacy is ongoing” PLNs!

Four hour work week is a great book for time management. Could you outsource your adminy tasks as a teacher and still be effective. Good concept: demand that you have this time to be a professional every day. If you see blog posting as a part of your PD then write it in

tubetv is another one recommended for downloading files from YouTube. From Jeff. Hearing about downthemall. This is a great way to download a heap of pdf files at once.

Now doing a break-out on blogging. This is about finding some tools to allow you to do a lot quickly. Scribefire is one that is mentioned. Great discussion from Jakes about ensuring that the learning is to the fore.At the ed blogger con at Shanghai. Great conversations! There is a lot of discussion on kids and classrooms. Great Stuff!

Photo: Shanghai Skyline by Keith Marshall

It was a great opportunity to come and share ideas in an open environment full of keen people wanting to see open source applications take off, both for their livlihoods and for the betterment of others.

Unfortunately, I was late getting there due to commitments with Trailwalker training.

My first thought when I arrived was one of “Oh My God!” when so many people were milling around a board with tiny file cards stuck to it to see if they could find an appropriate session and its correct room. Fortunately I spotted one on Open coursware for education so that was me away!

It turned out to be an open discussion forum so it was great as I was able to contribute and network a little, even if I really did not learn very much. I did pick up very quickly that people were just coming here to share and enjoy and that there were not a lot of hidden agendas.

Next I chose a session on twitter visualisation.  I took some rough notes which I have copied below but I found a better post on this session Another Barcamp bites the dust fromYelotofu.

For what it is worth, here are my notes:

Twitter session.

Napoleon from http://www.webwednesday.hk/ This looks interesting.

Mentioned a tool called flowgram http://www.flowgram.com/ . This seemed to be the tools that he used to do the presentation on.

Showed some good presentation tools for twitter. Twitscoop, tweetclouds twitscoop twitstat twit(url)y, etc.

Some good tools to track what is going on in the world.

Perspectv was a good look visually at what is going on in the world and what people are talking about.

The we feel fine site Cool!

There is lots of info that can be gleaned from this site. Looks great!

My next session was a Drupal session.

I have to say that this one was more on technicalities and less on application so it was not as good for me.

Drupal Session

Started with the groups.drupal pages.

Talk about the Knight Drupal Initiative.

I have seen this and would love to learn more.

This guy has developed themes. They look pretty good. The theme is about a presentation layer.

There is a theme engine. This handles the styles etc.

The final part of the day were the start-up Lightening talks! Each person with a start-up idea had 4 minutes to pitch it to the audience. The winner gets an Xbox 360. I wish I had of put my name down earlier as none were as good (naturally!) as an idea that’s been brewing in my mind for months! I did get some contacts so I may still manage to pull this off!

Finally it was to the pub for some free drinks!

What a great day!

Now if only we could get a successful grass-roots conference idea going for Education in Hong Kong!

There’s a challenge!

Chris Betcher from the school in the article writes far more intellegently about the programme in his post “The Truth is Out There”

I am interested to see how they are going to expand this to all subjects as we found it very difficult to get the maths and science teachers in particular, to redesign assessments that measured the outcomes of the courses that they taught in a way that allowed for collaboration.  Chris mentions this as well in his post when he comments about “what sort of tasks were best suited to this approach”. I know as a former maths and science teacher, that it was tough to design assessment tasks that were suited to a collaborative approach as the course outcomes did not allow for all of the great social discussion about issues in science that should have been there.

Anyway. Great food for thought. I really think that those students with the critical literacy to effectively access, synthesise and be creative with the “entire sum of human knowledge”, will be most in demand in a knowledge economy.  Giving them adhoc access is a great place to start, but actually fostering the development of critical literacy is still the most important part.  What an exciting to time to be born with an inquiring mind!

Photo: Old Bakelit Phone by aussiegall

Someone else who has a love-hate attitude towards Gary is Doug Johnson. This recent post about an article by Gary is very telling. The post itself is well worth the read if you have time.

I have to hand it to Gary for having the guts (as we aussies say) to organise the sort of Professional Learning opportunity that I have dreamt of running.  Called Constructing Modern Knowledge 2008, Gary had contacted me about it a couple of months ago.  It sounds like the perfect way to throw educators in at the deep end of really embracing 21st Century Learning in a constructivist framework. This fabulous description of the session comes courtesy of Silvia Martinez who runs the Gen Yes programme in the US.

I don’t think that there are many, if any schools in Hong Kong who have staff ready to go quite this far yet. But then, I might be wrong!

Do you think your staff would happily embrace someone coming in an leading them through an open-ended professional learning session or would they complain and ask for the content, the “real meat” of the workshop?

I am interested in your thoughts.

What I really loved about Jennifer’s post, however, was that she went on to mention how you can set up groups of students to work on web 2.0 tools such as Voicethread, Bubbl.us, Pageflakes, etc using teacher and student accounts on Gmail. Here is how Animoto describes the way that you do this:

You can register at Animoto numerous times using your own e-mail address by doing this:
emailaddress+1@gmail.com
emailaddress+2@gmail.com
emailaddress+3@gmail.com
emailaddress+4@gmail.com
emailaddress+5@gmail.com

All activity at our website under these accounts will be sent to your original, derivative e-mail (i.e. emailaddress@gmail.com). This way, you’ll be able to
give each student a unique Animoto account, while also being able to monitor
their account’s activity.

Sounds a really cool way to monitor a group’s activity on a web 2.0 site.

Hope this is useful.

Our strategy has been a multi-pronged approach where we are trying to educate our students as to appropriate behaviour which I’ll elaborate on below but I should also mention that as we are a boarding school the banning of games was not really deemed practical as boarding students should be allowed to use games as a form of entertainment (within reason). This also informed our decision on sites like Bebo, Facebook, etc.

1) We have layered our network so that each lab is on its own subnet.
This means that unless the network traffic is specifically addressed to somewhere beyond the lab (eg. the internet) the traffic stays on the lab subnet. Since we implemented this we have seen a significant improvement in our network performance across the campus even ignoring games and the like.

2) Our students are prevented from installing programs on our lab computers (using domain group policies). This is just standard business practice anywhere.

3) Students are allowed to play games, including Flash games, on the understanding that they do not play games in class and that if they are using a computer during lunch and another student is wanting to work on that computer then they are required to give it up. They also know that excessive noise will also get them kicked off.

4) We have a proxy server that authenticates all of our students. Each student has been given a generous monthly quota of data downloads and, if they require extra for any reason, they need to visit the front office to pay for extra usage.

5) The same proxy server allows us to block sites completely if needed, or for sites that require excessive bandwidth, we have blocked them during school hours and opened them up for boarders out of hours (this includes Bebo, Facebook, etc.). Students also know that if they are caught using a redirection sites to get around our security then they face immediate suspension of internet access, detention, etc. Continued use of such sites will get them placed on a whitelist. Our proxy server also cuts off internet access from late at night to early morning for the boarders since we had some problems with international students staying up all night.

6) We try to educate our students as to safe internet access re:
privacy, passwords, etc. with limited success so far (they still keep sharing passwords)

7) Finally, I actually teach a unit to our Year 8 Technology class on making computer games using GameMaker (mentioned in another reply). As part of that unit I have a Moodle course set up where I have links to free games that I feel to be innovative in design (and relatively simple to create) as well as a Hall of Fame where the best games from previous classes are placed for students to check out. Since I started this unit, I have had a number of students who have come in as often as they can during lunch and recess in order to work on their games. It has also allowed some of the academically weak students to produce a good quality product and have a real sense of accomplishment.

I also like the idea mentioned earlier of getting students to nominate games with education in mind and having to justify their nomination.
Having students engage in critical thinking in this way is exactly what we would all like to see in our schools. Personally, I also feel that educational games is one area where there is a great deal of potential.
I’m not talking about games where students are trying to simply regurgitate facts, etc. but games where there is a real world application of skills they are learning. For example, ASIC (I think it
is) has an online stock market simulation where students trade shares using real share prices in the simulation. I also know of one large company that has professional development where they train their non-business staff in basic business practices by playing a game where they need to manage and expand their business. To succeed they have to know how much raw product to buy, how much to produce, make judgements on marketing avenues and costs, as well as learn how to balance their books to be able to see how and where they have succeeded. It requires learning various terms and experimenting with what is the best way to grow your company, and there is no one guaranteed method for success! My background is in software development and I really feel that there is a real need for good quality software designed to reinforce concepts and higher order thinking skills in secondary students.

Richard Eagleton
All Saints’ College <http://www.saints.nsw.edu.au> Eglinton Rd, Bathurst, 2795 Australia

Photo: gaming by Michael Heilemann

I was very interested and did a lot of searching at the time but could not find much on the game. Fortunately I read about its release this morning in eSchool News.

The game is called Zon. From the site:

Zon is an unique interactive massively multiplayer online role playing game for learning Mandarin Chinese.

By interacting in the Zon environment you will be exposed to Chinese language and cultural knowledge in a new and exciting way.  Everything that you do in the game is another chance to learn new words, phrases and cultural info about China.  Never before has learning Chinese been more fun.

Whilst I haven’t had time for a play myself yet, it looks like something teachers here should know about.