Top 100 Tools for Learning

Looking for tools to assist teachers to stay up to date and connect online?

Jane Hart, using the input of learning professionals from around the globe, compiles a list of the top tools for learning each year. Jane is the CEO of the Centre for Learning & Performance Technologies based in the UK. I suggest you organise an RSS feed from her Pick of the Day blog to keep up to date with new online tools. There’s also a guide to social media at her site.

Here’s the 2009 list:

The emerging list for 2010 has twitter way out in front.

You can follow Jane on twitter and there is a Facebook page too. Finally, here’s her list of 100 featured learning professionals you can connect with online.

Yammer

Yammer is a microblogging service that has become popular with NSW DET staff in recent months as a great way of communicating with colleagues. Yammer is like Twitter, except, only people with the same employee email are networked together. In other words, you have to have a verified @det.nsw.edu.au address to join the NSW DET Yammer.

It is clear that a range of people in our organisation are sharing expertises, resources, contacts and generally being supportive of each other. You can upload files, provide professional details and generally participate in the conversation. There are quite a few DPs already joined and it is highly recommended.

You are able to have mobile phone apps and a desktop client to access Yammer. Both have improved my user experience.

Check out Yammer when you have a chance.

UPDATE

There is a DP community HERE and Ben Jones has written a A BEGINNER’S GUIDE TO YAMMER (updated) that will help ‘newbies’.

How to use the ‘Conference Ning’

The neverending stream of silly names for excellent online tools peaks, for many of us, with the word ‘ning’. However, do not be fooled, a ning is an excellent tool for collaboration, especially for a conference delegate.

At this particular style of social networking site delegates are able to interact before, during and after the conference. Each delegate has their own page at the ning but the key features are the ‘forums’ for discussion and the ‘events’, which are, in our case, the keynotes, workshops and sessions. Presenters are able to upload their presentation materials, which is particularly useful for when you have multiple workshops you wish to attend at the same time. Photos and video can also be uploaded by delegates.

Discussions at the ning tend to help delegates interact with colleagues after the event and lead to great sharing and collaboration. For me personally, the conferences with a ning and many delegates using twitter to network, have been particularly stimulating in recent years. It has led to enhanced professional networking and friendships.

If you are attending the conference, sign-up for the ning here. There is also the link from our website. It is good to upload a picture and post a message after you do this but don’t worry too much about spending any time until closer to the conference. It is important that you recognise this is a experiment for 2010, lets see how it goes and we’ll evaluate formally.

In an attempt to ensure that we use all the functionality of a ‘ning’, I have purchased a new book for my Kindle to learn more about administering this tool. Tips, hints and any action at the ning will be drawn to your attention via newsletters, email or the blog. Other posts to support our use of the Conference Ning will follow.

Has anyone had experience with using a ning? Please help out and tell us about the challenges and advantages.

Paradigm

What follows is a ‘Guest Post’ by Mark Treadwell, a keynote speaker at our last annual conference.

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Test scores in maths, science reading and writing have remained largely unchanged for almost 50 years despite billions, if not trillions of additional dollars being poured into education. Why is that? Robert Branson suggests that we have reached an upper limit of efficiency and effectiveness within our book based, text centric, learning system we have been journeying on since the Renaissance period.

We need to briefly reach back into our past to the Renaissance period to learn from that experience and then leverage this knowledge to reach into our future to fashion a world that can not only sustain itself but also one that can offer everyone the chance to apply their gifts and talents and play their very necessary role in the creation of solutions to the numerous challenges that we face every day.

The setting:

“Historians have long speculated why it was Europe, and not Asia, that launched the industrial revolution in the 18th century.  How could China, India in the near east – all homelands of great ancient empires – be so outclassed, technologically and economically, during the second half of the last millennium?  [1] Steven Carden

The invention of the printing press, coupled with the reformation and a raft of other societal changes initiated a tumultuous change which then spawned the Renaissance period. The pivot point for these changes was the invention of the printing press and the popularity of the printed book.  This was a big deal because fundamentally the printed book made learning dramatically more efficient and more effective.  Da Vinci no longer had to make house calls!

The capacity to transition to this new paradigm provided those countries that did so the ability to dominate the knowledge and creative economies of their time. For the very same reasons the current paradigm shift in learning from a text centric system to an internet (multimedia+ collaboration), based system offers the same rewards in the 21^st century to those that will take the risk and change an education system that has remained primarily unchanged for the last 150+ years.  

This may seem an overstatement but consider the lesson from history that took place during the “tumultuous time” around the first paradigm shift in learning (where the centricity of learning shifted from oral language to become book based) resulting in the Renaissance.

In 1435 (the Ming Dynasty), China had a navy of over 1680 ships and was the dominant global technological giant. China had developed sophisticated writing, the application of stirrups to horses (it took Europe another 300 years to import what seems a very obvious idea), the invention of gunpowder, sophisticated pottery, complex social systems, spinning machines, banking systems and they even introduced flying money (and early innovation of the cashless society which we are presently reinventing).  They had no contemporary in the world at this point in time (see http://www.1421.tv/ or the book/video 1421 by Gavin Menzies)

But China made a series of political decisions that would see their status as the global power evaporate in less than 50 years. They believed that they were above the need for goods, services or knowledge from other countries.  In fact China developed a tributary system where they gave away more than they received.

“The voyages became institution in themselves, designed to display the splendour and power of the new Ming dynasty. . . . .  The Chinese would not establish their own permanent base is within the tributary states, but instead had to make “the whole world” into voluntary admirers of the one and only centre of civilisation. . . .  The lopsided logic of the tributary system required China to pay out more than China had received. . . . . Daniel Boorstin

By the middle of the Ming dynasty China was experiencing difficult economic times[2] (Bosworth) and political tensions erupted and there was a change in power with a new emperor coming to the helm and suddenly the Chinese retreated from their ocean going ventures.  The new emperor saw commerce and trading as a political anachronism and promptly started banning sailing and by 1500 it was a capital offence to set to sea without permission. 

“The end of China’s treasure fleets gives us a clue.  Seven of those fleets sailed from China between A.D. 1405 and 1433.  They were then suspended as a result of a typical aberration of local politics that could happen anywhere in the world: a power struggle between two factions at the Chinese court (the eunuchs and their opponents) . . .  The latter faction gained the upper hand in a power struggle, it stopped sending fleets, eventually dismantled the shipyards, and forbade ocean going shipping.”[3] Jared Diamond

By 1525 the entire ocean going fleet had been destroyed and their owners arrested.  China had begun their 500 year period of introspection, based on the mistaken belief that they did not need to learn from anyone else; an intellectual arrogance that was to be their undoing.

In contrast to China, Europeans had struggled through the 10^th -14^th centuries but just as China was retreating from their technological supremacy Europe, borrowing heavily from the Chinese technology storehouse, was beginning its ascendancy.  A small group of Portuguese explorers entered into Bombay Harbour after rounding the southern tip of Africa in 1498.  The attitude of the Portuguese to learning couldn’t have been more different to that of the new Chinese emperor.  Portugal realized that they had to borrow new technologies from the East in order to learn, firstly through imitation and then by innovation.  The Portuguese returned to Europe after five years of learning from the Chinese and the traders from the east.

From here Portugal went on to become one of the great European superpowers of the next two centuries leveraging the technologies they brought back from China but also adding to that mix the catalytic power of the newly invented printing press.  The printing press was the technology that would underpin the first paradigm shift in learning through its dramatic capacity to increase the effectiveness and efficiency of learning by making knowledge dramatically more portable and reducing the cost of access to that knowledge.

By leveraging this new paradigm in learning, Portugal became a superpower and by shunning learning from others China lost its capacity to learn from others and iterate their knowledge and understanding. In just 50 years the world’s powerbase shifted from East to West. Once again, 500 years later the world is standing on a second pivot point in history. The internet is seeing the centricity of learning on the move again from being text based to becoming multimedia within a collaborative and open learning environment. The centricity of learning is shifting and no longer is the capacity to be able to manipulate and interpret complex text essential to further learning. Using YouTube and the numerous multimedia tool sets within the internet learning can take place via video, podcasting, Skype, chat . . .  at minimal costs. What we are witnessing in 2010 is a complex set of changes that are underpinned by a similar, single reconceptualisation; a second paradigm shift in learning that is being propelled by the communication tools and the collaborative, multimedia format of the Internet.

The last paradigm shift and the ability to grasp its significance saw a small country become a global leader and a vastly technologically superior country, disappear from view. Where does Australia stand within this vast landscape of opportunity?

The question we must ask next is:

“Which governments are adapting their learning systems in order to adopt this dramatic efficiency in learning and using it to improve the capacity of their country via this internet based paradigm shift?”

This paradigm shift coupled with our new understanding of how the brain learns via its two distinct learning systems (rote and concept), prompts 5 key questions for governments, communities, schools, educators and learners (all of us).

1. What is the purpose of school/learning?
2. What competencies underpin effective learning?
3. What virtues and dispositions do we collectively value in each other?
4. How do we foster the desire for lifelong learning capacity in every citizen?
5. What concepts do all learners need to understand and be able to apply creatively/innovatively?

The national goals for education in Australia are consistent with a country looking to leverage this second paradigm shift in learning and see Australia develop its people so that can enjoy a quality of life others countries can only dream of. The challenge then is whether the Australian national curriculum will be the vehicle to translate these goals into an architectural learning framework for schools to outwork those goals. The nature of that curriculum is probably the most significant education debate for the last 100 years and it needs to be debated by a well informed education community and an informed public using the collaborative tools that are powering this paradigm shift – the internet.

What is learnt and how that is learnt and applied in schools, businesses and communities throughout Australia will pave the way forward for Australia and define its future. If Australia’s future is be driven by an innovative and creative culture then than culture must be deeply embedded within its entire learning culture.

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[1] Carden, Steven; New Zealand Unleashed; Random House; 2007 P136

[2] Bosworth, Michael; “The Rise and Fall of 15^th Century Chinese Superpower” ; http://www.basicrps.com/chine/histoire/china.htm Accessed June 2009

[3]Diamond, Jared; Guns, Germs and Steel: The Fate of Human Societies; W. W. Norton & Co 1997; P412

DPs blogging

Colleagues,

It is with pleasure that I link to our colleague Michelle Sapsed’s first blog, Technology for school leaders on ‘p’ plates – for those who dream of being tech savvy 

I am hoping that more DP blogs will appear on the right hand side of our association blogroll.

Why don’t you post a comment here and/or at her blog to show support.

Enjoy the term 2 everyone!

Social Media Explained Visually

Vodpod videos no longer available.

more about “Social Media Explained Visually“, posted with vodpod

 

Are all your eggs in one basket?

A guest post by Ben Jones from the DERNSW team:

A tale of the same meeting in two schools:
School A:
About 8 people are presented representing all levels within the school and regional support. Whilst there was an agenda with names allocated the flow of discussion naturally moved between various members of the team. All knowledge, skills and leadership was openly shared under the vision of the principal. Anyone could have been absent and there spaced would be filled by natural diffusion.
School B:
1 member of executive represented the entire school; some admin staff where briefly introduced but had no impact on knowledge. I was clear this one person owned the vision, skills and knowledge. If they were absent there would be no way to replace them.

About this post

The aim of the following points is not to tell school leaders how to suck eggs, they have been doing succession management for leadership for a long time (in my view NSW schools do it exceptionally well). Rather this discussion is to consider how succession management could evolve in this digital age, the new succession issues that the digital age creates and how they can be managed in a digital way.

Access:

A quick survey of school accounts and passwords in an average school could be far more extensive than may appear on the surface have you considered all these:

1. School moodle admin
2. School shared drives server admin
3. School Facebook account for Alumni
4. School youtube account
5. Teachers class blogs, wikis, web2.0 tools (this could be a very extensive list)
6. Wireless access passwords
7. School Zoomerang account
8. School website
9. The list goes on and on and on

Who holds the passwords, what happens if they are no longer around and access is required, what if it’s critical?

Solution: A password protected OneNote file could be created that all Senior Executive can edit. As part of school procedure when a new account in any online application or server is created the OneNote file is updated.

Skills:

If a school has decided to set up their own network, servers or moodle installation how many people know how to manage the setup in your school? This can be off the radar for many leaders, if you not sure of the impact get a few quotes for a third party vendor to reconfigure your entire installation, it won’t be cheap.

Solution: A technicians (teachers, SASS or vendors) must document everything about their installation and configuration, this should be clear in there roll statement. A team should be responsible and they should all be equally skilled and knowledgeable about the installation and configuration.

Knowledge:

Some questions about knowledge and information in your school:

1. How well is the knowledge of technology (resources, links, professional learning events, frameworks, online tools, etc) shared across your school.
2. Is information filtered?
3. Is information only accessible from a gate keeper?
4. Can all information be accessed anywhere anytime?
5. Does your school have an internal communications strategy?
6. Do all staff know where they can access school/community/district/region/state procedures and documents

The knowledge is what affects most teachers every day, not knowing where to access or knowing it has to be accessed from a specific person becomes a barrier to effective practice. Rather all knowledge can be stored in a wiki designed under the principles of ‘organic design‘. All teachers can contribute and refine, so as a resource is discovered it can be shared leading to shared engagement and ownership of knowledge which is when knowledge become very powerful. This article explains how a university library transformed is procedures by moving to a wiki.

blogED

Schools trialled blogED, a blogging tool soon to be available to all DET staff and students, during 2009 with great success.

This tool will enable staff to quickly and easily establish blogs for each student, in every class, generated using ERN.

There are extensive tutorials and good support is available, making this tool a great resource for students who have been issued laptops. Opportunities to learn about good digital citizenship by exploring the requirements for using original, student created material or following the creative commons guidelines at the blog abound.

Here’s a video tour of the tool you can access via the intranet.

How does my school get involved?

Read everything you need to know about the blogED tool on page 3 of the latest CCP bulletin #30.

Updates regarding blogED can accessed here when connected to the Connected Classrooms intranet.

Encouraging your principal to be ‘provisioned’ for AMU Learning Tools access from the 15th March by emailing blogED_access@det.nsw.edu.au will assist you to get students and staff, especially stage 5, composing and blogging quickly at your school.

 

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How can the school help students to use social media safely?

Deputy principals regularly deal with conflicts that arise from misuse of social networking sites like MySpace and Facebook.

There are countless useful sites about cybersafety and you are likely to already have many of these in your favourites, like Cybersmart, The Alannah and Madeline Foundation and Click.

A great resource to assist your school with the important task of educating students to play safely in an online world is the Manager of the Department’s Web Filter Unit, Elaine Talbert‘s Delicious tags. Elaine has collected and tagged a wealth of sites, showing us how Delicious can be effectively employed.

 

STRATEGY

The more informed and positive the whole community conversation at your school is, the more likely students are to become good digital citizens. It is important that students are not tarred as irresponsible and poor digital citizens in general conversation. This will only lead to more inappropriate usage. Most, of course, do the right thing.

A few ideas:

1. Talk positively about the ‘good digital citizenship’ of students at the school, especially of Year 10 who have the laptops, explaining what this actually means. If the school frames the conversation positively it allows misdemeanours to be the exception rather than the rule. Give the students real narratives of ‘how’ a peer dealt with a cybersafety issue, as this will assist others to ‘know’ what to do when a challenge arises in their online world.

2. Run parent information sessions that give positive strategies for managing student usage at home. Do not spread fear and anxiety but concrete strategies for cybersafety. For example, screens are best located in shared areas of the house not isolated in bedrooms.

3. Have a clear school policy on the actions and steps students and parents take to address issues of cyberbullying and regularly publish in the school newsletter and other forums.

4. Celebrate the students savvy use of technology whenever possible to build a positive atmosphere. Praise their sensible use of mobile devices.

5. Educate the staff about bluetooth, 3G access to the internet from mobile devices, social networking and the school’s policies.

There are many other strategies and ideas that you use at your school. Please share links and ideas by making a comment here at our blog.

For example, this teacher has made a useful blog post about their experiences, with useful links here.

Delicious

Everyone knows the feeling of working on multiple computers –  work, home, their laptop – and not having their bookmarked, favourite websites available when they need them. Delicious is a social bookmarking site that allows you to save your favourites online, tag them for ease of reference and collaborate with colleagues by linking accounts.

Here’s a short video explanation.

Try searching my Delicious tags for 1:1 laptop use and OneNote. Useful?

Signup here. You will need to use your Yahoo email address (or get one) to join. Most DET people add their professional email when prompted to include a ‘secondary’ address.

Thoughts, question, issues?

Please comment if you use Delicious or successfully establish an account.