Learning On The Job

After the UNIS Unconference in January, I received a comment from Ivan Beeckmans, the Technology Integration Specialist at NIST in Bangkok. He told me about the weekend PD workshops he was organizing for the teachers there and we discussed how the unconference format could be incorporated as a way to empower teachers to be learners and leaders.

One thing led to another and Ivan invited me to join the NIST staff at NISTech 2011 last weekend. Considering the similarities between NIST and UNIS – Tablet PC program, SharePoint portal, IBO World School to name a few – and the proximity – Hanoi is closer to Bangkok than it is to Ho Chi Minh City – I jumped at the chance!

The weekend was full of great conversations by a group of teachers committed to learning. Julian Edwards, the secondary school principal, made the important distinction between dialogue and discussion at the beginning of the weekend. We weren’t here to prove that we were right or to win any debates; our main purpose was to talk with each other and explore ideas.

It was interesting to be the only non-NIST teacher at the event. It gave me a different perspective on things, even with all of the commonalities. It was great to see and hear how students and teachers are using similar tools to achieve similar objectives in different ways. It was also reassuring to hear the same concerns surrounding effectiveness, time management and student learning that our teachers at UNIS voice.

I managed to get in and facilitate a few sessions on blogging with WordPress, OneNote and Creative Commons. I even managed to geek out a little with Jay Priebe, the Tech Director at NIST, over SharePoint and Veracross.

I’m hoping that NIST and UNIS can continue to build a strong cooperative partnership between our two schools. At the very least I’m hoping to be able to reciprocate the hospitality that was extended to me by Ivan, Jay, Julian and rest of the great staff at New International School of Thailand.

The launch of the 1:1 tablet program at UNIS has coincided with a move towards a paperless school. I don’t know if this move was part of the grand vision 5 or 6 years ago but it is certainly a reality on campus. Students in the Middle School/High School do not have access to any printers on campus. They aren’t even given notebooks or binders, for the most part, so teachers don’t give out physical worksheets. All handouts are printed from Word or PDF files into OneNote and then edited/manipulated with the keyboard or with digital ink. For many students, the only work that they do on paper are end-of-unit summative tests. There is also still the odd notice that get printed and sent to parents and, of course, our reports are still laboriously printed for parents to keep in their ‘permanent records’.

Because of this, we expect students, over the course of their stay at UNIS, to collect and create hundreds – possibly thousands! – of documents. How can we help them keep track of them all?

From the beginning, we’ve instituted a naming convention that should be used on every instructional file. The goal is for you to be able to recognize immediately the general contents of that file before it is even opened! The generic convention looks like this:

Subj – Unit – Assignment Name

As a teacher, I might create the following documents:

• Math08 – Linear Equations – Graphing Slope-Intercept Form
• Eng07 – Folktales – Writing My Own Folktalk
• Physics – Nuclear Physics – Fission Experiment

There should be no doubt what you will find when you open any of those documents. As the student has downloads the document to the correct location, she only needs to add her first and last name to end of the file name.

By doing this, it is easy to see when a file is out of place or misnamed. For the students who choose not use some sort of folder structure, this ensures that files from each subject are automatically grouped together when sorted by name. It also makes it easy to search for a file since we know what it should be called.

What do you do to help your students stay organized?

After a relaxing summer, it’s been right back into the thick of things at the start of this school year!

As of 3 days ago, our entire Middle School and High School is 1:1! We rolled out tablets to the last two grade levels (grades 6 and 7) on the first day of school and there is no looking back!

A quick recap:

• In August 2007, about half of the teachers received tablets.
• In August 2008, all teachers and students in grades 10 and 11 received tablets.
• In August 2009 all teachers and students in grades 8 – 12 (three new grade levels) received tablets.
• In August 2010 all teachers and all students in the Middle and High School received tablets. (In additions, students in grade 5 will be receiving tablets as well but that is not my area of responsibility.)

This is a process that has been a long time in the making and I am very excited about it! It’s also kept me quite busy, both to end the year in June and to begin this year.

One of the things that we decided we could improve as a school is giving more support and training to students from the get go. We’ve always done a basic training session and then let the students go straight to class. While this maximizes class time, I also found that many teachers were spending a lot of time teaching the same tech skills in their classes. That’s not a bad thing, mind you, but it was getting in the way of the learning.

So I came up with a plan. All students in Grades 6, 7 and 8 have been on a modified intensive technology curriculum for the first three days of school. Instead of math, science, english or humanities, they have been learning how to use their tablets, learning how to use OneNote 2010, having lessons on cyberbullying and cybersafety (thanks to the CyberSmart.org curriculum!) and having lessons on using NoodleTools and MLA referencing.

It was a bit of a nightmare trying to coordinate the schedules for 9 homerooms (3 at each grade level) but the middle school teachers have been great. I’ve been alternating between helping to deliver lessons, lending support as other teachers deliver lessons and just watching. By all accounts, the students are doing a great job of adapting. Of course, we always knew they would.

Now comes the harder part: getting the teachers to adapt to and implement a new learning environment!

By Pieter Mustard, licensed under CC BY NC ND

“It’s not about the technology.”

This is the popular refrain that we hear constantly in the blogosphere and at conferences devoted to technology and education. And I agree: the purchase/use/integration of technology, in and of itself, does not imply learning any more than the purchase of books implies reading or the purchase of pencils and paper implies writing.

Adrienne is working on this cool Master’s program and, even though she is thousands of miles away, she’s keeping me thinking. In a recent post on OneNote in Schools, she comments

However, I like you, I am not sure about OneNote in terms of a learning tool. Sure, it makes some things easier. But transformative? Notsomuch.

Part of the problem, as we discussed it, is that these tools are not designed for education: they are really productivity tools for the business world whose purposes have been re-articulated to fit into an educational setting. I think this is what the EduPunk meme was all about: a revolt to the use of office-tools in the educational environment. The irony is that the education we are trying to provide using these tools is to enable students to work in fields that extend beyond the typical office!

Unless a tool/system is designed with educational pedagogy in mind it will almost undoubtedly fail to be transformative. All educational pedagogy interested in authentic learning must include, at a minimum, the following facets:

• Collaboration, because societies do not function in isolation.
• Connection, because this is now an immutable fact of life.
• Construction, because the real world requires you to make your own conclusions.
• Reflection, because learning doesn’t happen during the test; it happens before and after.

As I think about what tools we are using in my school in this manner, it’s clear to see that few if any of can have a transformative effect on education and student learning. It’s also clear why “It’s not about the technology”: because the technology is not about education!

The transformation of education is just itching to happen. But it is being delayed by the nonexistence of systems and learning environments – not tools – that will allow students and teachers to truly harness the technological power that we possess. These systems will not come from Microsoft or Apple or any other developer who is focused on the workplace. These systems must come from educators who understand that improving efficiency does not imply improving student learning.

Keri-Lee Beasley was wondering about the use of Microsoft OneNote as a teacher. Here’s what I got off the top of my head:

For Teaching

1. Keeps all of your class notes together in one place. I have my actual teaching notebooks for the last 3 years easily available if I want to refer back to how I did something.
2. Your OneNote pages can be saved as .pdf files for students who do not have OneNote.
3. Connected to a data projector, this becomes similar to an interactive whiteboard. Students would manipulate your tablet rather than the board.
4. Other files can be embedded into a OneNote page as attachments. You can pre-load all the required documents into your pages and have them in one place. You can then distribute those pages to your students and they will also have copies of the documents. Any changes made to the documents are saved within the OneNote page.
5. Combined with Cam Studio, OneNote is a great way to make screencasts.
6. Small groups (we’ve had problems with groups larger than about 6) can live share a section of a notebook. Live sharing is exactly what it sounds like: we are working on the same pieces of ‘paper’ simultaneously. At the end of the session, all participants have a copy of the work. For example:
   • Each student is assigned one math problem on the page. They benefit from ‘watching’ the others being solved as they try to figure out how to solve their own. At the end, they’ve each done one problem but have 5 or 6 solutions to study from.
   • Students can edit a document (a poem? An exemplar essay?) together.

 

For Planning

1. Notebooks can be shared on the network between teachers to facilitate co-planning. Notebooks are synced every few minutes.
2. The clipping tool allows you to capture screenshots and easily insert them into your page. It even includes a hyperlink to the original source.
3. Templates can be created for lesson/unit planning.

For Students

1. Students download a pre-made notebook (Grade 10 Math Student Notebook) with all the start of the year info. This also serves to give their notebooks structure, particularly important for younger grades.
2. Students can embed record voice or video files. This is can then be sent easily via email (if you use Outlook too) to teachers for a check of understanding. A good tool to use in Second or Foreign Language classes.
3. OneNote Notebooks are searchable. It even searches the text in screenclipped images (using OCR) and can also search audio and video files for words (if you index them).
4. Students can share pages easily via email. This is great for students who were absent or who take poor notes.
5. Tags can be used by students to help with their revision. As a math teacher, I helped my students create custom tags. As we encountered interesting/difficult problems, the students tagged them as possible test questions. When it came time to study for the test, they only had to search for that tag and all of those questions were found. At the end of the year, they could search the entire Notebook for that tag and they instantly created a cumulative review sheet.
6. OneNote plays very nicely with Outlook. Tasks that are assigned in OneNote show up in your Outlook task list as well. Emails and appointments can be sent to OneNote, where it is easier to take notes.

Other

• A lot (most?) of the things on this list are just new salt on an old cracker. Yes, it might make me more efficient and it is definitely cool, but I am still looking for some truly transformative ways to use this in the classroom.
• I would be interested to see how it works when teamed up with an IWB. It was actually on my “Geek Things To Do” list: use Johnny Lee’s Wii-mote hack to create an IWB for my classroom. But then I changed jobs.
• I created a “Getting to Know You” scavenger hunt type activity to be used with teachers and students to introduce them to what I feel are some of the key features of OneNote. Feel free to have a play and adapt it for your staff/students. (Warning: Some of the links may not work because they point to locations on our intranet. But you get the idea.)

Okay people. Your turn: how do YOU use OneNote at your school?