IWBNet Pty Ltd

supporting digital classrooms, digital schools

Real Concepts in a Virtual World

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In 2018 my class was lucky to be a part of a Channel Nine article showcasing the New Minecraft EDU platform for schools in SA. What a wonderful experience it was. 2 hrs with a full bustling computer room, several students chosen to speak, official department spokespeople present and everyone ready to get the main sales pitch across.

It was a great lesson for all. The 2 hour session was edited down to about 2 minutes but all kids that were prepped, spoke on the article and I managed to make myself look slightly better than ordinary. It amazed me how little the department and Nine News actually cared about talking about the cross curricular units of work and the ways in which the students were being submersed in a virtual world. Actually, I had just taken part in an advertisement.

National 9 News Article

The next day, everyone was happy, parents were proud, kids were walking tall and teachers commented over the morning break. The clip was being watched by a lot of people and my students were telling me everytime we passed another 1000 hits. As we hit 15000, I smiled and decided to have a look at how it was being accessed. Unfortunately, my innocent interest turned to intrigue when I noticed the 100+ comments posted…

….and then that intrigue quickly turned to frustration!

comments like:

Sarah J – ‘Yep see how this will educate our youth who are already lazy and rude!’

Carmen F – ‘Whatever happened to teamwork out on the play field or with a board game?’

Brett L – ‘So we’re paying school fees for our kids to play games and teachers want a pay rise ha ha they must think all parents are stupid.’

Tom H – ‘Haha team work isn’t really teamwork when one person has headphones on!’

Why is it that these people presumed that the use of a digital sandbox platform meant that we were decreasing the learning possibilities? Why did they react with such negative force? What was the cause of people feeling they needed to comment in such a way as though my teaching was merely putting a child on a game?

I began to really question my practice and approach to all the digital resources at hand and think more about this. Was I using Minecraft as an educational tool or was it merely a new age colouring in book.

This was late in the year and our major unit was wrapping up. The students were now functioning in their virtual class city (Shichi Hachi Muchi – Room 7 & 8). We had turned the creative mode off several weeks before because the students had developed their businesses based upon requests submitted that demonstrated a clear understanding of the supply and demand needs of the city.

The journey on this unit had students using digital technologies for design, collaboration, communication and data. It enabled the students to lead and look after real world issues in a virtual setting for Civics and Citizenship. The students maintained a personal budget that also assisted students to monitor their learning progress and personal goals. It crossed 6 curriculum areas and had a 100% finish rate for the unit.

I have since continued to improve the unit of work, with incentives for extra work, and self monitoring being two large changes. In 2019 we are completely using Minecraft EDU, and my Minecraft minions have been working really hard to get our new and improved future city ready for the first home owner.

The experience has made me realise that there are many people that will try to look for fault in everything we do and that we must continue to work hard to use technologies where they can enhance learning. People will use technologies as the new age colouring book but I am not one of them. I want more, and simulations, virtual worlds, transparent templates, cloud sharing and so many other technologies are making my classroom an amazing place to be.

If you want to know more about my units of work and approach to teaching with digital technologies, please join me at the Leading a Digital School Conference at Crown Melbourne in August where I will be running two workshops; Minecraft across the Curriculum and Make Learning Real.

Steve Whitehead
IT Coordinator

Learning: Blended? Online? Face to Face? – The importance of pedagogy before technology in a digital landscape

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Many schools are introducing or improving their online offerings in the K-12 education space.  Whilst online and blended programs have been the norm for a significant amount of time in the tertiary sector we are playing catch up in terms of supporting our students to access learning anywhere anytime in the K-12 school environment.

Technology, like educational theories, continually evolve with time. This evolution creates opportunities for improvement in classroom practice for the betterment of the students in our care.

One such opportunity is online learning. An online learning approach allows students to access learning resources in an online environment and while this approach has some benefits for Haileybury students, it lacks one key feature; regular face to face interactions with an experienced teacher.

A blended learning approach combines tradition face to face teaching and learning with the directed use of online resources. Blended learning describes a learning environment that uses a range of learning activities and resources to enable the students to achieve their academic potential.[i]

Features of a blended learning environment include, but are not limited to, face to face teaching, pencil and paper, hands on materials, individual activities, group work and online resources and activities and resources. When a teacher combines these approaches, they are utilising blended learning with their students. It does not mean that effective teaching practice should be ignored in favour of moving students to an online environment if it is not appropriate.

As a blended learning approach can be make use of a variety approaches it is important to note that it is not a one size fits all model. An institution will need to decide what features they wish to incorporate into their approach.

So where do you start defining what blended learning means for your institution?

The golden rule with this is to start with the user not with the technology! Far too often when looking at technology we start with the tool instead of the user and the intended outcome.  If we start with the technology what we end up with is digitising education and learning instead of what we want to achieve which is the digitalisation of education and learning with view to a digital transformation of education and learning.

However what is the difference between digitisation, digitalisation and digital transformation?

In moving between these areas there are many models we can use to frame this up such as SAMR Model, Florida Technology Integration Matrix, and the TPACK model however it is imperative that we work with the students/users to ensure that we get honest feedback as to where we currently are along our digital pathway as a school.

I suggest the best place to start along this pathway is to shadow your students for a week.  During that week write down every time they interact with traditional and digital learning materials and note down how they interact with these.  This will begin to give a strong picture as to where your currently are and what the opportunities are at the different levels of digitisation, digitalisation and digital transformation.  I have included below and example of a shadowing exercise I did a few years ago.

Once we shadowed and interviewed our users we found that there was quite a lot of digitisation and not a large amount of digitalisation or digital transformation.  What was plainly obvious was the opportunity to link many of the digitised processes that we in place into one platform that enabled productivity and the user experience for students to be a lot cleaner and simplified.

This led us down the path of setting goals for our learning management system in conjunction with our users.  The biggest aspiration was that the platform was much more than a dropbox of files where students could access digitised handouts in one place.  We wanted the platform to a place where students could engage with learning whilst collaborating and communicating with each other and their teachers in a safe environment.

So once we had a vision we needed to build it… However we knew that whilst Kevin Costner truly believed that

“if you build it they will come”

this is not always the case with technology adoption.

We needed to ensure we designed with our students and teachers not for our students and teachers.

Design sessions were held with students and teachers and templates were made for each department based on their student and teacher needs.  What was clear from these design sessions was that students like a cohesive clear user experience.  Students wanted to know where to get resources easily and they wanted to see their teachers in educational resources.

What became very apparent was that students and teachers wanted their online space to be a social utility.  Our students knew that the internet is full of great “stuff” but they wanted resources to be curated to them.

In relatable terms this meant that we had to create the Michelin Guide for learning to our students.  In 1920 Michelin offered a guide that gave users the best restaurants and hotels on a given pathway.  In 2019 we had to do the same for learning with our students.

So we began the journey of working in teams to design this.  This meant mapping out what the learning experience looked like for each learning objective not just in a face to face model but in a blended model as well.  It involved the digital transformation of mindset to define learning as something that happens beyond face to face four walls model and into a anywhere anytime model.

In my next blog post I will write further about what we created and collated and the importance of clever curation and strong creation of resources by all users, students and teachers.

Please join me at the Leading a Digital School Conference where I will present a Keynote on this subject.

[i] https://www.education.vic.gov.au/documents/about/research/blendedlearning.pdf

Can I hack it? A reflection on designing digital solutions to authentic problems

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Written by my colleague, Megan Tubb

I didn’t realise I’d been hacked! After 12 years of teaching highly structured units of work, I found myself teaching in a way that forced me to loosen my grip on the reins of the curriculum. What started as a small discussion with my grade 6 students about the problem of litter in our playground had grown into something so much richer.

My 11 and 12 year old students were: 

  • driving the direction of our learning.
  • thinking of digital solutions to address a real problem in their environment
  • making strong connections to the adults in our local and wider community

The kids were empowered and full of pride! Meanwhile, I was struggling with self-doubt and fear. I had been pushed right out of my comfort zone to face each day with a level of uncertainty. It was innovative. It was challenging. It was exciting.

Could I hack this new way of teaching?

As the world continues to evolve, our education system is lagging behind. We know it is our imperative to develop our students to become active adults, well-equipped to fulfil their potential and find meaningful pathways for their future. Yet for so many teachers it is too threatening to step away from complete control of the direction of learning.

There are educators who are pushing back against old paradigms. Teachers who acknowledge that the old way just isn’t good enough. These teachers know the value of 21st century learning skills. They recognise that in order to equip students with these skills, they need to take a different approach that shifts away from teacher-centred learning. It requires educators to be innovative, creative and brave enough to value students as capable and contributing citizens – key players in the act of learning.

How can we utilise these pockets of innovation within schools to generate cultures of innovation across a whole school? One possible avenue is to draw on the Stanford d School’s principles of “hacking for school improvement”.  ‘Hacking’ has the following characteristics:

  • quick and fast with a bias to act
  • a culture of prototyping (just try)
  • using what we have
  • low risk

This model acknowledges that some teachers can be reluctant to try new ways of doing things because of a need to ‘get it right’. It aims to remove this pressure by grounding innovation in low-risk experiments that value and encourage a bias towards action. According to the Stanford d School:

“Since doing beats talking about doing, we embrace jumping into new, invigorating experiences. Sure, there’s some initial discomfort, but the reward becomes clear as educators stretch beyond their comfort zone to pick up new skills and mindsets.”

By taking a leap of faith and trying something new, rather than waiting for it to be perfect or right, teachers speed up their own learning process. In adopting a fail forward approach, they use their own valuable experiences and reflections to improve the practices they have experimented with.

Leadership at Taroona Primary School saw the initial litter work I was doing with my students. They applied ‘d School’ school improvement hacks to enable, encourage and support me. My experience not only built my personal capacity in the area of authentic learning, but it also served as a model for my colleagues.

Pushed by my principal, pulled by my students’ passion, I very quickly came to realise some of the benefits of bravely working in this new space.

Buy in

Students identified litter in the playground washing into the River Derwent as a problem.  The first thing that excited me was that the students were passionately connected to their learning. This created

Students installing the bird feeder they designed to keep currawongs away from rubbish bins

motivation, as they were invested in their efforts and outcomes. I realised that authentic learning is not only ideal for extending highly able students but also for students who are disengaged and difficult to motivate. There was buy in from my whole class!

Students are likely to think laterally, go left of field and dream big, rather than think something isn’t possible.

I had many projects on the go with students. Some worked, some didn’t. But what each project showed me was that with the naturally inquisitive, creative and uninhibited character of children, creatively solving real problems is a gift for teachers. Students are likely to think laterally, go left of field and dream big, rather than think something isn’t possible. And throughout all this, the significant community connections and learning that took place as a result of the journey, cemented my conviction that this was worthwhile, despite the uncertainties and challenges of working in this new way.

Digital Technologies

What also became obvious was the natural fit for digital technologies. Students intuitively considered digital solutions as part of their design-thinking approaches to problems. Our school had recently taken up the challenge of being early adopters of this curriculum area within the primary sector. It was so exciting to see digital technologies being organically applied within the authentic learning process. It brought alive our vision of ‘aligning and enhancing our current work with the digital technologies curriculum’.

My experience therefore served to build personal capacity in the area of authentic learning, as well as serving as a model for my colleagues.

We know from our own experiences that teachers are dedicated and want the best for their students. It’s what drives them to turn up every day. So why then is there a reluctance to adopt a culture of innovation that welcomes authentic learning? Why aren’t all teachers using the genuine and novel problems that exist within schools and communities to provide an opportunity for students to actively contribute as citizens in their own right?

Authentic Learning is Messy

Innovative, authentic learning can be a bit like what it feels like letting your toddler have a playdate with some friends. Even though as a parent you know the benefits of free unstructured child-led play, adults can be reluctant to just let kids go. As an adult, structured activities are easier. The adult knows that the fall-out following child-led play can be messy! And the mess can be both literal and figurative. For those who like to be prepared, organised and in control, this style of learning can be challenging. While pre-teaching and scaffolds are a critical part of the journey and are a requirement for student success, the open-ended nature of authentic learning means that it is not always predictable, the progress can be slow and the outcomes are often unknown.

Like a child-led playdate, authentic learning in a school setting provides genuine opportunities for creativity, collaboration, communication and innovation in a way that could never be achieved in a highly structured, adult-centred environment.

Many teachers like the comfort of having content areas mapped out for the year in neatly-defined lessons.  They may justify their reluctance to relinquish control by claiming loss of curriculum coverage. Yet the curriculum is firmly at the centre, incorporated in every aspect of the authentic learning journey. Will everything you try work? No. Will the failures be frustrating? Absolutely. The difference is, authentic learning allows the curriculum to come to life through the actions of engaged, contributing citizens who are making their mark within their school, community or beyond.

It is no longer an option to see schools as places that prepare students for “the real world”.  We ARE the real world!

Hilary Purdie and I are presenting two sessions together at the Leading a Digital School Conference being held in Melbourne at the Crown Promenade Hotel on 8, 9 and 10 August 2019. Our sessions are Bias to action – using hacks to create a culture of innovation and Pump your PL – why mindset alone is not enough for teacher transformation, please come and join us.

Innovation in Action (Rapid Prototyping)

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Rapid Prototyping……Moving from our presentation on Teaching Innovation to the practical of Innovation in the Classroom, cuts into many areas.  As teachers and students, it can be difficult to cram these into a crowded curriculum and assess them against standards. Innovation as a concept requires measurement of some concepts and ideals that are difficult to quantify in the short term and difficult to measure against sensible / meaningful grades.

Some of these ideas include collaboration, creative problem solving, communication, critical thinking.  Wrapping these in the broader social ideals of global citizenship, entrepreneurial literacy, environmental awareness and ethics we start to provide a very broad place to operate within, one where we can focus on what students do; actions here are important.

In our workshop, Innovation in Action, at the Leading a Digital School Conference 2019 we will unpack some of these, as well as how to introduce students in a process of evolutionary innovation that follows a framework that fits into any problem solving methodology.

  1. What problem are we solving

    • why and who – we observe the the world and ask questions

  2. How can we solve this problem

    • what tools / skills and resources  do we have that might help, what do we need.
    • What are we actually going to do to solve the problem.
    • This is often the ideation stage.

  3. Plan and build

    • Prototype the solution

  4. Test and Evaluate

    • Did our solution work? (If not we can re-prototype)
    • How do we know it worked? (testing)
    • Did we deliver the product / service we said we were going to?

These fit most problem solving methodologies and are flexible enough to be adapted.

Our workshop will take attendees through a rapid version of this, where you will be expected to look at the world, discover a problem, come up with a solution, prototype the solution, and evaluate the solution.

We will use peer evaluation and presentation of solutions to evaluate this and most people will be able to take their prototype away with them.

Our workshop can be scaled and can be adapted to most year levels, and we provide concrete examples of differentiation.  What we won’t talk about is how we assess this, to find out why we don’t formally assess Innovation in Action, you will need to attend our presentation on Teaching Innovation.

Jon Roberts and Matt Zarb

Use curiosity to reach every student!

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I have always been attracted to unusual things. When I see something that looks interesting to me, I always try my very best to figure out the what, why and how. After I became a mother, I continued to be impressed by my daughter’s curiosity. For example, my daughter sees a penguin as a duck. To figure it out, I carefully examine the features of penguin and duck and eventually gain some knowledge in ornithology. After that, I started to realize how powerful the role our curiosity plays in our learning.

Here are some strategies that I find useful to spark my students’ curiosity.

Strategy 1: Flipped learning videos

Traditionally, flipped learning videos have been used as wonderful tools to reach every student. When thinking of a flipped learning video, we often consider videos with teachers’ direct instruction. However, I have found that flipped learning videos can be more than that! Starting this school year, I changed the way I use flipped learning videos and have received amazing feedback from my students. I make my videos with interesting scenarios and animations. Without directly teaching the students, I try to spark their curiosity and arouse their interests in learning.

Picture 1: a glance at a inquiry-type of flipped learning video

A glance at a inquiry-type of flipped learning video

Strategy 2: Trigger students’ observation

Activities like “Notice and Wonder” fit perfectly for the role to spark students’ curiosity. Have you ever noticed that Target’s sign is red in the United States and black in Australia? Same company with different branding. How about an emu and an ostrich?  How similar and how different are they? Trying to answer simple questions triggered by our curiosity can lead to a huge difference in learning.

Picture 2: Can you tell which one is Target Australia and which one is Target USA?

Can you tell which one is Target Australia and which one is Target USA?

Strategy 3: Look for a pattern

I love looking for a pattern. A well-known Californian teacher Fawn Nguyen created a website called “visual patterns.” Not only my students, but I would also spend minutes and minutes on the website trying to find the general rule for a set of visual patterns. By looking for a pattern, my students and I gain excitement and achievement by accomplishing the mystery of the pattern.

Picture 3: Visual Patterns created by Ms. Fawn Nguyen at www.visualpatterns.org

Visual Patterns created by Ms. Fawn Nguyen at www.visualpatterns.org

Curiosity is such a powerful tool for us to engage our students. Almost all people are attracted to unusual or unknown things. If you are looking for a way to reach every student, why not considering trying to spark your students’ curiosity.