Making new spaces for learning

The exponential changes happening in education at the moment are unprecedented. Global connectivity, information networks and social platforms are rapidly changing the learning landscape. Students today have the collective knowledge of mankind at their fingertips. Connectivism, “a learning theory for the digital age” (Siemens 2005) posits that learning is now more critical than knowing. It emphasises technology's effect on how people live, communicate and learn in networks. Are schools taking full advantage of this new wave of learning? How can schools best utilise e-learning, educational technology and networks to improve learning outcomes? The following is an overview of some of the approaches and successes we have experienced at St Columba Anglican School Port Macquarie (SCAS).

Global connected classrooms 

Education 3.0 (Lengel 2012) goes beyond the boundaries of our country. It utilises global experts and innovators in the learning process. Studying volcanoes? Why not video conference with a vulcanologist? Learning about space? Let’s talk with astronauts on the ISS in real time! Video conferencing with real world experts dramatically increases engagement and learning. 

The most commonly reported student outcomes in e-learning studies are motivation, engagement and concentration (for example, Moos & Azevedo, 2009). A few also document progress in academic outcomes (Burt, 2007; Lewin et al, 2008). 

Skype in the classroom (https://education.skype.com/) is an excellent platform for inspiring learning and taking it global. With skype, students can collaborate with other international classes, speak with expert guest speakers and participate in online excursions. Google connected classrooms(http://connectedclassrooms.withgoogle.com/) is another excellent platform for bringing the world into your classrooms. Both of these systems are easy to utilise and are free. All you need is an internet connection and a webcam. 

Makerspaces 

Makerspaces are creative, hands-on spaces for tinkering, hacking and making. The last 10 years has seen the rise of the “maker movement” (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maker_movement) with its focus on DIY, innovation and experiential learning. The global maker movement has gained such momentum that the inaugural world maker faire launched in 2010 (http://makerfaire.com/). 

We recently developed and opened a K-12 makerspace at SCAS. As part of our library to learning commons evolution we designed a makerspace. A colourful and fun learning lounge where students could come at any time to tinker and make. The space resides upstairs in the Dawson Hub (our new name for the library). We run classes in the space and it is open for students to come and use any lunch or recess. I designed the space with my office included (glass wall partition) so I could facilitate the space.

Our makerspace includes: a makerbot 3D printer (5th generation); a 3D scanner (digitizer); raspberry pi (small kit computers); chromeboxes (cloud computers); Leap Motion (3D physical controller); Oculus Rift (virtual reality goggles); old computers and phones to take apart and reassemble; GoldieBlox (engineering kits for girls); lego mindstorms and numerous other things to hack, tinker and play with. Except for the 3D Printer all these technologies are relatively cheap to acquire. 

Current student projects in the makerspace include: gaming development for the oculus rift (using Unity3D); collaborative inter-school 3D print minecraft museum (students share virtual models of their 3D creations in a shared minecraft ‘museum’); combining the Leap Motion and Oculus Rift with a 3D designed and printed mount; building a raspberry pi controller for a radio controlled car; designing and 3D printing our own VR headset system using a mobile phone as the screen; making a virtual map of our school that you can virtually ‘walk’ through (think Google street view) and numerous other mind-blowing student devised and directed projects. 

The immediate success and popularity of the makerspace has been astounding! The space is usually full to capacity. Common sights include students teaching each other (and teachers) how to use technology, excited collaboration and inspired learning! Being allowed to tinker, play and make with creative technologies in a non-structured environment is highly engaging for numerous students. A great sense of school community is also evident in the makerspace. The students own the space. 

Student Tech Support 

After we launched our BYOD program at SCAS two years ago, the number of devices on campus rapidly increased. We did not specify a particular device. As long as a device can hold a day’s charge and access the internet we allow it. The diversity of devices, operating systems, apps and technologies at SCAS presented opportunities and challenges to learning. To help support our school technology and systems we launched our student tech support system (called the Tech Ninjas). Basically, the Tech Ninjas are technically inclined students who help with tech support in our learning community. Tech Ninjas are identifiable by the Tech Ninja stickers on their devices. Tech Ninjas assist their peers with common tech issues. Teachers also utilise Tech Ninjas if they have an issue (e.g. internet connectivity, device connectivity etc). The Tech Ninjas have made a real impact on the smooth running of our numerous systems and devices. Tech Ninjas exhibit improved self-esteem and self-efficacy. Teachers utilise Tech Ninjas in their class and receive timely assistance. The Tech Ninja program has benefited teacher/student relations and communication. The benefits of elearning and educational technology to enhance relationships between teachers and students has also been documented in recent studies (Alexander, 2008; Ballantyne, 2004; Mitchell, 2007). 

“The principle goal of education in schools should be creating men and women who are capable of doing new things, not simply repeating what other generations have done; men and women who are creative, inventive and discoverers, who can be critical and verify, and not accept, everything they are offered.” Jean Piaget

References 

Alexander, B. (2008). Web 2.0 and emergent multiliteracies. Theory Into Practice, 47(2), 150-160. Ballantyne, L. M. (2004). In what ways could ICT teaching and learning take place at Orewa College?: Osmosis, Integration and/or specialist subjects? Masters Degree, Massey University Burt, D. (2007). The lure of podcasting. EFellows: Research for teachers by teachers. Summary document, Wellington: Ministry of Education. Retrieved May 13, 2009, from http://www.efellows.org.nz/index-reports 

Lengel, J. (2012) Education 3.0: 7 Steps for better schools. Teachers College Press. New York. Lewin, C., Somekh, B., & Steadman, S. (2008). Embedding interactive whiteboards in teaching and learning: The process of change in pedagogic practice. Education and Information Technologies, 13(4), 291-303.

Mitchell, L. M. (2007). Using technology in reggio emilia-inspired programs. Theory Into Practice, 46(1), 32-39.

Moos, D. C., & Azevedo, R. (2009). Learning with computer-based learning environments: A literature review of computer self-efficacy. Review of Educational Research, 79(2), 576-600. Siemens, G. (2005) Connectivism: A Learning Theory for the Digital Age, International Journal of Instructional Technology and Distance Learning, Vol. 2 No. 1 

ISS project in the news

Makerspace in the news

Virtual reality, mobility driving future of learning at Port Macquarie school

Article published in CIO June 2014

Digital Citizenship - A challenge, responsibility & right

This was published in Australian Teacher Magazine June 2014 Edition

Who is a Digital Citizen?
“A digital citizen refers to a person utilising information technology in order to engage in society, politics, and government participation.” wikipedia
I like this definition. It surpasses the narrow interpretations of digital citizenship that have dominated educational discourse. It is a definition that touches on the true potential and importance of the internet. It raises issues such as equity of access and voice. It is a definition that challenges us as participatory members of our community, nation and world. I am going to use this definition as a springboard to engage in an exploration of contemporary issues and the implications of digital citizenship.

Information Technology
According to Moore’s Law, I.T. transistor counts double approximately every two years. This observed trend has continued for more than half a century. I.T. devices are getting smaller and more powerful at an exponential rate. Many of my childhood fantasy sci-fi technologies are now realities. 3D printing, virtual reality, wearable technology, invisibility cloaks, augmented reality, robots, robotic suits, self driving cars, quantum computers, genetic engineering, nanotechnology and artificial intelligence are all realities today. The fantasised sci-fi future of my childhood has arrived. The technological singularity, as Mr. Kurzweil predicted, truly is near. And the greatest catalysing advancement of our times; the I.T. primordial soup that spawned these diverse technologies, is the internet.

Networks
ICT & social networks are changing the world. News disseminates directly between and through citizens rather than being filtered (or constructed) by sanctioned mainstream media channels. Communication is instantaneous and constant. Video conferencing in real time with someone on the other side of the planet is common place. Political and social awareness has rapidly increased. Governments have risen and fallen due to information shared/leaked online. The Higgs Boson “God particle” was found by a global network of online scientists collaborating (thousands of them). Learning is now available to anyone with a connection. The information age has enabled the age of learning.

The Learning Age
The days of the Industrial education system are numbered (over). The bell tolled for ‘chalk and talk’ the day the internet was born. The new ‘ism, Connectivism (a learning theory for the digital age), posits that learning is more critical than knowing. Connectivism holds that learning is a process of connecting specialised nodes or information sources. Learning occurs within a network and is socially and technologically supported. In our current education system, many standardised tests and assessment procedures focus on memorisation of information that (in the real world) can be accessed at any time from the internet. With facts a click or a voice command away, should we now be focussing more on the innovative use of those facts? On critical thinking, innovation, collaboration, networking, creativity and real world applications? The ecological, social, economic & political problems facing coming generations need innovative thinkers and makers. “The principle goal of education in schools should be creating men and women who are capable of doing new things, not simply repeating what other generations have done; men and women who are creative, inventive and discoverers, who can be critical and verify, and not accept, everything they are offered.” Jean Piaget.

Question Everything
How do we discern reputable sources of truth? Australian media ownership has been described as one of the most concentrated in the world. 11 of the 12 capital city daily papers are owned by either News Corp Australia (Murdoch) or Fairfax Media. How does this type of ownership concentration affect freedom of information and news coverage in Australia? The recent March in March (15 -17 March) attracted tens of thousands of Australians who gathered across the nation's capital cities demonstrating a vote of no confidence in the current Abbott Government. The event however went largely unreported by Australia's newspapers (including The Herald Sun and The Age) and mainstream Australian television. This is concerning. Conversely, social media networks such as twitter and facebook prolifically communicated pictures and news from the march directly between attendees, supporters and their networks. Turkey’s Prime Minister Tayyip Erdogan on March 20th this year blocked access to Twitter after it was used to disseminate leaks implicating his inner circle in corruption. The block was later overturned by Turkey’s Constitutional Court for violating free speech. These examples demonstrate the power of social networks to bypass censoring mainstream media channels and bring important information to the public. Social networks can also propagate disinformation however. Just as we should question mainstream media, we should employ critical thinking when engaging with online information. Researching an article’s sources and stakeholders is a good place to start. Google recently launched its Digital Literacy and Citizenship Curriculum. This is an excellent resource; providing lessons for students that target critical thinking, managing online identity and identifying online scams. Class 1 in the series, titled “Becoming an online sleuth” provides activities to guide students in evaluating the credibility of content online.
Find it here: http://www.google.com.au/goodtoknow/web/curriculum/

BYOD and Digital Citizenship throughout the curriculum
Facilitating focussed digital citizenship sessions for students is great. Embedding digital citizenship throughout your curriculum is even better. At my school we support BYOD (Bring your own device) for years 3 -12. We allow students to bring their personal devices to support learning. We support any brand and operating system. To enable this we migrated our teaching, learning, administration and communication systems to Google Apps for Education. The benefits of this cloud migration have been tremendous. Learning anytime/anywhere, flipped learning, project based learning and collaboration are all much easier with BYOD and Google Apps. The number of devices at school exponentially increased overnight. We provide school devices for those who cannot bring one. Communication, creativity and collaboration increased. Paper handouts decreased. In our planning for cloud migration, faster networks and BYOD we foresaw the need to support our technological evolution with a Digital Citizenship Program (DCP). Having more devices connected to the internet and the wealth of information available is awesome. The potential for bullying and online scams is not so awesome. So we developed a program of digital citizenship and literacy that was embedded in our curriculum. We created a Google Site and constructed courses that linked directly to curriculum and school goals. We purposely created the program to be easy for teachers to facilitate within their time and curriculum restraints, organising it into key learning areas and linking resources relevant to subjects. The program covers topics such as critical thinking, access, commerce, communication, identity, health, law, ethics, literacy, security, rights and citizenship. In the two years we have been facilitating BYOD and digital citizenship we have experienced very few bullying or other internet related issues. Our program works. In fact the program was so successful that we decided to run a Digital Citizenship conference. The first digital citizenship conference was run at St Columba Anglican School Port Macquarie in July 2013. Various schools (Public, Catholic and Independent) sent delegates to learn how to create programs at their schools. The success of that conference led to us running the conference again in Sydney at St Andrew’s Cathedral School in November. The demand for school based digital citizenship programs is growing. Meredith Ebbs (eLearning Integrator) and myself now work regularly with schools helping them develop and facilitate programs. For more information visit peic.com.au

BYOD and Social Networking Policies
Another key ingredient of our school evolution has been the creation of effective and explicit policies covering BYOD and social networking. With the advent of mobile networks the old school I.T. control paradigm crumbled. Mobile devices with (3G/4G) have direct connection to the internet that bypasses school filters and firewalls. Policies can prohibit use of these networks but policing such policies is problematic. Also, you can have the tightest, most restricting network at school, but at home (for most students) the internet is unrestricted and filter free. Are locked down school networks in place to protect students from harm or to protect schools from the threat of litigation? We need to help students develop into discerning online citizens who can make good choices regardless of whether they are at school or at home. As an educator, I feel it is within my duty of care to help students become responsible and safe digital citizens. Good policies enable schools to ease up on overly restrictive network filters and allow students to better utilise the benefits of the internet and the information it offers.

Learning Communities
Our digital citizenship program is collaborative. Teachers, students and parents all contribute to its development and evolution. We run parent eLearning and digital citizenship sessions every term. Our school blogs and social networks encourage communication between everyone in our learning community. Digital citizenship is a challenge, responsibility and right for everyone. Not just students.

Citizens stand up
Developing critical thinking and an online voice is one of the great challenges of our time. Current issues such as security agencies spying on citizens without permission (Snowden leaks), the Trans-pacific Partnership (TPP) which increases corporate control and threatens our rights and environmental destruction for profit all deserve our attention and action. Sir Tim Berners-Lee (the inventor of the world wide web) believes a global bill of rights is needed to preserve an open and neutral internet. Now more than ever we need to question everything and start working for the benefit of all humanity, including future generations. Australia and the world is facing some daunting problems. With the help of technology, the internet and online collaboration perhaps we have a chance at fixing them. If you want to continue the conversation you can find me at google.com/+MattRichards

chromebooks - portals to learning

This article was published in Australian Teacher Magazine - Technology in Education Nov. Edition 2013

I remember first hearing about the Chromium OS open source project back in 2009. I was working as the eLearning Leader at a small Catholic school in Melbourne. The concept of a web based OS made perfect sense to me. It was just before the Microsoft Windows 7 release. Perhaps I was feeling jaded by Vista. Maybe I just liked the concept of a web based OS after spending hours with my tech (Kieran Nolan) imaging laptops. I remember we actually pulled all-nighters setting up class sets of Windows laptops back then. Oh the madness.

 We decided to have a go at installing Chromium OS on some (previously) Windows based laptops. The early builds were experimental and buggy, but the potential was obvious. We were using Hexxeh builds. We experimented with both virtual machines and native installs. I was a long time fan of Linux and I think this added to the charm of the linux-based chromium OS. After testing numerous builds and configurations we decided that Chromium OS wasn’t ready as a daily driver. We shelved the project and waited for a better build or the ‘real’ Chrome OS to be released.

 In 2012 I moved schools (and states). I was hired as the Director of eLearning & EdTech at St. Columba Anglican School (SCAS) Port Macquarie (Approx. 1000 students & 100 staff). I was given management of both I.T. and eLearning departments and tasked with bringing the school ‘into the 21st Century’. The first step in this evolution was overhauling the school’s network infrastructure and internet connection. After months of haggling with ISPs (and eventually laying our own fibre) we achieved 100/100 with Optus. We also installed seamless Aerohive wifi. Having a reliable and fast network is an important prerequisite to any cloud migration including chromebooks at school.

 The second step in our ‘school in the cloud’ migration was improving local tech resources. The standard of school devices was quite poor when I arrived. The school had acquired some small laptops with DER funding a few years prior. They connected to the school’s network via Active Directory and ran Windows XP. The students called them “bricks”. They were slow and unreliable. We decided to try the new Dell Chromium OS build on them. Success. The “bricks” became usable machines! We set up a class set and students began using them. They started up quickly and linked the students to their school Google accounts.

 By late 2012 we had successfully migrated the school to Google Apps for Education. Chromebooks were already being sold in the US and used in schools at this stage. I remember engaging in an animated conference call with Samsung & Staples (during our staff Christmas party). I expressed how keen we were to get some chromebooks for our students. Our order was made and we went on Christmas break excited by the prospect of chromebooks in the new year. Early in 2013 SCAS became the first school in Australia to deploy chromebooks (Samsung model XE303C12-A01AU). We acquired them through Staples and enrolled them in our Google domain with the assistance of Cloud Sherpas. 2013 is also the year that we went BYOT (Bring Your Own Technology) Years 6-12.

 We utilise the chromebooks in two ways. We have class sets in trolleys that roll between classes and we use them as ‘loners’ to supplement our BYOT program. We use technology to support learning. Teachers and students decide what learning needs to occur then choose the technology that best suits that learning. Our bookable school devices include iPads, Macbooks, iMacs, Dell laptops, desktops, android tablets and chromebooks. With these devices supplementing our student BYOT devices we have a smorgasbord of technology to best support and enhance learning processes and goals.

 If you are a Google Apps for Education (GAFE) school chromebooks are awesome. All of our staff and students have their documents, mail, calendars, presentations, notes and videos in the cloud. This means that whatever device they are using (as long as it has internet access) has all their stuff. This is great in a multi device/platform environment such as ours. Chromebooks take this portability to the next level. We have set our chromebooks to autowipe/reset on shutdown. You select this option in the Admin Console under Chrome Management Settings. When one of our users starts a chromebook it asks for their Google credentials. This is their school email address and password. After entering these details the chromebook immediately links to all their Google docs, apps and settings. In effect, the machine is intimately theirs for that session. No data or files are lost, ever. Google Apps also provide revision history so you can restore any previous version of a document. Apps travel with the user on chromebooks. This means that if a student installs a web app on the chromebook they are currently using it will be available on any chromebook they use in the future, immediately. Apps travel with the user account.

 The days of pressing the power button on a computer and waiting minutes for it to be usable are over. The speed of chromebooks is one of their best features. Students open the chromebook and they are operational in seconds. This is invaluable in the context of a lesson. Battery life on the Samsung model is also excellent. They easily last a school day. Google recently released chromecast (currently only in the US, hopefully soon in Australia). This is a small HDMI dongle that allows media streaming and mirroring from any device with chrome browser to TVs and projectors. The capacity to wirelessly ‘cast’ to a screen is awesome in class for teachers and students. At SCAS we have been doing this for awhile with Apple TVs but it is nice to finally have a cross platform solution for wireless mirroring. 

The thing I love most about chromebooks is their capacity to disrupt established educational paradigms. At SCAS we skipped the 1:1 mindset. We chose the cloud and diversity instead. Teachers don’t need to know how to use every device or app in their class. In many cases the students teach them. Teachers don’t need to be content experts anymore. We have the internet for that. Teachers don’t need to be techies to improve learning with technology. We are finally getting to a place with educational technology where teachers can refocus on the learning objectives, not the tools. Chromebooks are catalysing this pedagogical shift. They just work. They get out of the way and let the learning happen. And in most cases the apps they use are free. They are true portals to learning.

School in the cloud - Strategy, Infrastructure, Migration & Change Management

AIS 2013 Presentation