Educating the Dragon

Latest update from the world of ICTPD Flaxmere…..

• Flaxmere ICT conference will be held on the 1 Nov so put it in your diary now. Not sure yet as to how it will run, and the breadth of the audience (geographically now) so if you want to come leave a comment and I’ll find out more.
• Flaxmere is having a kids conference, where the children will have opportunity to share some of the things they have been doing this year with the interactive whiteboards, skype, wikis, blogs, digital movie making, etc etc. Not sure who the keynote speakers will be for that, but again you’ll know when I know.

Well done Russell, if it were your idea, the kids conference is genius because at the end of the day its all about what they are learning and their educational journey. Good on you.

I bet David Warlick or Vicki Davies would think this is a great idea. I wonder where in the world something like a ‘kids ICT conference’ has happened and what it looked like.

Listen to this cast here

I met Peter Kent back last year at the Sitech conference in
Hamilton, way back before I could even blog about it. He was the key note speaker, a Deputy Principal in
Melbourne, Australia. If you want to know what went down at that particular conference you’ll have to check the archives on my friend Chrissy’s blog, December 06 will be the date you have to check.

Anyway, that’s where I met Peter. He took particular interest in my skypetalkandwrite presentation, back when it consisted of a powerpoint, some smoke and mirrors. As a result of that we began a dialogue to start Skyping trans-Tasman. Which incidently is yet to begin. Me and my tangents, get on with it Simon.

The long and short of it is that he very kindly put my name forward to participate in the IWB conference on the Gold Coast. I had a good Skype with the organiser a gentleman by the name of Malcolm Lee. And I’m going. I need to get some more details, and there is still a lot to organise but he invited me to attend, and of course with it being the Gold Coast and all I had to think about it for a very long time!

So, thank you Malcolm, and thank you Peter for the introduction. And those of you who are possibly reading this because of the link on my site, Welcome to the conversation. Please comment and let me know who you are, where your from and I can pretend I’ve known you all my life when we arrive in August. You you blog about talk&write tag it skypetalkandwrite and it’ll get fed to the wikispace www.skypetalkandwrite.wikispace.com

I’m very excited about this trip, not least because it gives me an opportunity to expand my thinking about skypetalkandwrite and how it fits into the curriculum of a digial classroom. Plus how does that then assist a school looking at School 2.0.

The current list of people associated with the wiki is so far quite short, but given the opportunity to expand the children’s experiences beyond
New Zealand I hope will encourage others to give serious consideration to the use of Skype technologies in the classroom setting.

This was so cool! I just have to blog about it.

Chrissy and I had meeting tonight. We skyped each other because we were trying to get our talk and write wiki up and running. So we had that page open to as we discussed how to embed RSS feeds into our Wiki. It was the session I missed at Learning@schools with David Warlick so I was a little non-plussed. But as I added and made amendments to one part of the site chrissy was on another and then we discussed our changes as we went along. I managed to capture some of that conversation but homelife encroaches. Help required to upload .wav…anyone

Skyping on Vimeo

Thanks Rachel for your assistance. if I’ve stuffed it up… let me know.

I’ve begun to read ‘Growing up digital by Don Tapscott, as recommended by both David Warlick and Jennifer Correiro. But I must confess that even as I read the first few paragraphs my mind hit overdrive, and as is my way I began processing all over again the thoughts and ideas I had heard about telling a new story and the Net Generation. I thought about the kids in my school, in my class. I thought about the trouble John Key got himself into over the ‘underclass’. In
New Zealand, you see there is no class system. It is a classless democracy with the shining bright lie that, in fact there is a class system, doesn’t work in the conventional sense but it is there all the same.

I digress….

“…there is a dirct relationship between family income and access to computers and the Net. This correlation also exists between the higher- and lower-income schools… our research shows that the digital divide is actually widening, not disappearing. As the new technology trickles into poorer neighbourhoods and schools, the better of children are leapfrogging others- getting not only better access, but a wider range of services, faster access, ther best technology, and, most importantly, increasing motivation, skills and knowledge. This not only exacerbates the fluency gap but also the gap in different economic classes’ capacity to learn and have successful lives. Have-not become know-nots and do-nots.”

David spoke of his schooling and how 80% ish of his class went to work in the mill to do repetitive work, closely supervised. It got me thinking about what are we preparing our students for, are we assuming, and grooming them accordingly, they will be working at Watties. Yes these are Net Gen kids but to be honest, because of their socio-economic position are we not in danger of ‘writing them off’ in a “Look at their dad to see their future” sort of way.

Funding is different for decile 1 schools, and rightly so. But I ask the question, is it enough? If we are hoping against hope for these kids to be ‘successful’, whatever that looks like in the future, we’d better be supporting them in their learning Web 2.0. For whatever their future holds, straight up, it’ll be measured in gigabytes.

Those key competencies are great, and they have their place, just like the subjects, but there is a whole lot of digital literacy et al. out there that needs to be grasped and utilised if these kids are to be Life-long learners.

Well it actually worked, I can,t really believe it. And I wouldn’t if it were not for the fact I was stood right there when I said.

David was taking about the LEVEL BOSS at the end of video games and that the kids are having to beat the level boss…here’s what i did with my 7 year olds- xbox, playstation gurus all.

It was the beginning of my writing lesson this morning and they have been writing a proceedure about crossing the road. They’ve been working on it all week and they were up to the editting part where they have to underline possible spelling errors and write them in their ‘1st try/2nd’ book (dumb name i’ve always thought- but that’s what it is) Anyway…

A couple came to me and said- “Haven’t got any mistakes”- And they haven’t.

What’s gonig on here i think. So I stand up and address the class. I tell them that even I make mistakes in my writing(anyone regularly reading these posts can testify to how terrible it is at times-please don’t) and I say Writing is like a game. We’re at level one now and level two is where you are able to use some really big words like compelling or Fantastic or anticipate, the level boss needs to be defeated and the way you get to the end of the level is to attempt to use, in your writing some descriptive words, adjectives, adverbs that you are trying out and you haven’t used before. i said the level boss needs to be blasted and your only ammo are the words you are trying. it’s ok because you have the cheat book right in front of you. (waved   ’1st try/2nd try’ book in the air0 Isaid its fairly empty and the moment but i’ve got all the cheats, the right spelling in my head and i can put them in your cheat book after you’ve had a go yourself.

I am now the Games Master and they possess a cheat book. They lapped it up. now they all want to be on level 2 writing really cool stories to share with their Skyping buddies.

I am well chuffed.