TeachNet Learning Blog

As a new school year dawns many teachers will return to their classroom to find some new piece of technology in their room, if they are lucky!  This might entail a new interactive whiteboard or a laptop computer + digital projector installed in their room.  This scenario should be occurring in many schools, as all primary schools received funding earlier in the year and similar funds have been promised to second level schools.  We can only hope that schools organise appropriate teacher professional development to ensure that these tools are used effectively – both from a technology and a pedagogy perspective.  By this I mean that teachers should receiving training on how to operate the devices in addition to receiving professional development on how to use the tools to support teaching, learning and assessment.  The goal of such professional development should be to integrate ICT into classroom activities in a seamless and effective way. 

But what do we mean by “ICT integration”?  Is there an agreed definition?  Most government ICT plans state that “ICT integration” is a key goal of their plan but few if any ever define what it looks like.  This intrigues me as they subsequently evaluate the programme to establish if integration has taken place and one has to wonder what criteria are they using to establish if it has taken place?

Then today I came across a recent blog post from Dr. Larry Cuban entitled, Confusing Technology Integration with Instructional Reform, and it got me thinking again.  The blog refers to a 2005 article by Dr. Judith Harris entitled, Our Agenda for Technology Integration: It’s Time to Choose, where she wonders why most-large-scale technology integration initiatives fail?  She offers two reasons: technocentrism and pedagogical dogmatism.  I would urge you to read both Cuban’s blog and Judith’s article as they offer an interesting perspective on this issue.  But you may have missed some of the comments posted at the end of the blog that caught my attention and I would like to share them with you.

Towards the end of the blog Cuban notes that many educators “tilt toward progressive pedagogy, now called in its various incarnations, constructivism” when integrating ICT into their teaching as if this is the only pedagogy to achieve ICT integration.  This is a question that has long intrigued me also and I was fascinated by his response to a comment posted to the blog:

• Dr. Cuban, I’m curious whether you believe that ‘progressive’ (defined, in your terms I believe, as ‘student-centered’) pedagogy is or is not what schools should be striving for in their instruction? You state above that there is a ‘bias’ toward constructivism, which perhaps implies that you do not see constructivist teaching as desirable?

  Reply

  • 

    larrycuban
    August 29, 2010 at 8:55 pm

    Dear Scott,
    I believe that schools and individual teachers should strive toward varying their instruction to fit differences among students (i.e., motivational, cultural, academic, and other factors). Such variations in pedagogies would mean that teacher-centered, student-centered, and hybrids of both would become appropriate, given the ages of students and the content and skills they are expected to learn. So I do not see any one pedagogy as “desirable,” only different forms of instruction that are tailored to students where they are.

I too believe we should use a variety of pedagogical approaches when integrating ICT into our classrooms and that there is no one size fits all.  It reminds me of a very interesting article by Daniel Pratt entitled, Good Teaching – One Size Fits all?, that also makes a similar case.

So what are your thoughts on ICT integration and do you think it can only come about if teachers are using ‘progressive pedagogy’? 

If you’re a regular follower of the TeachNet blog, you will have noticed that the blog has been quiet during the Summer. Our focus has been primarily TeachNet CPD, our online summer courses for primary teachers. We are delighted to report that this year’s programme has been extremely well received by participants, building on our success in summer 09, which marked our first foray into online CPD for teachers. As a result we have decided to offer our online CPD throughout the school year to interested teachers, beginning November 1st 2010. To find out more about the range of courses we offer, please visit www.teachnetcpd.ie or email us at cpd@teachnet.ie.

As of today our Learning Blog is back in action with twice weekly blog postings during the school year. Our regular podcasts are also returning shortly, with a very interesting discussion on copyright in schools.

We would be delighted to hear any comments or suggestions you have relating to our blog or podcasts so please post your comments below or email blog@teachnet.ie

Younger learners are sometimes forgotten as I look at ideas for this blog.
With this in mind I have two web resources that should appeal to pupils in Junior classes.
Moshi Monster is an adopt a "monster" concept.

Pupils get to choose their own monster from a selection of six cute critters.
Then they are able to create a colour scheme for their new monster.
Monsters make new friends, play games and develop personalities as they grow.
The basic Moshi is free; however membership is required to access "premium" features. "Adoption papers" for a Moshi require an email address.
Some basic ICT skills coupled with some screen shots copied and pasted into a word processor could lead to some interesting and creative Language lessons.

Shidonni is a similar concept; however instead of monsters, children can create their own animals.
Shidonni should appeal to many teachers as the site also includes a set of Lesson plans.

Interview with  digital storytelling guru Jason Ohler
www.jasonohler.com

In this podcast TeachNet’s John Hurley speaks with Jason Ohler on the topic of digital storytelling.  Jason prefers the term new media narrative and stresses the need for students to be able “to write what you can read”, particularly in a digital world.  Jason stresses the need for teachers to have fun with their students when creating and digital storytelling and stresses that the role of the teacher is not as a “tech magician”.  Teachers have a key role to play in helping young people create good stories by providing critical feedback and urges the need to avoid giving an “A for anything that moves”.  Jason provides good practical advice on the process of creating good stories by using tools such as the “Visual Portrait Tool” so that young people create interesting stories.  Be sure to check out Jason’s website, http://www.jasonohler.com/, where you will find a wealth of interesting resources that will assist you in your classroom. 

Duration:   File Size: 19.1 MB

Download | Subscribe | iTunes

We would be delighted to hear any comments or suggestions you have relating to our podcasts so please post your comments below or email blog@teachnet.ie

I was browsing the Microsoft Education website the other day and came across Songsmith – which is a very clever application that will develop a soundtrack to accompany a singer’s voice. Songsmith will allow the composer to choose from thirty different musical styles from Rock, Hip Hop, Dance, Techno, Jazz and Blues. Users can download a free trial which will work for six hours of actual use before purchase online from the Microsoft store (it costs $25 or €29)  is necessary. However there is even better news for educators and schools. Microsoft offered it free of charge to educators in the UK some time ago and following on from the positive responses from teachers there, they extended the free offer to the US and other countries. In order to avail of this free offer all you need to do is sign up for a Windows Live account and download the Academic version from http://partnersinlearningnetwork.com/Resources/Pages/ArticleViewer.aspx?listname=ToolsAndPrograms&itemid=13
(If you find that clicking on the link above doesn’t work, copy the shorcut and paste the link in again after signing into Windows Live)

Songsmith will run on a pc with Windows XP with Service Pack 2 or higher, Windows Vista or Windows 7. It requires 1gb ram and a cpu of at least 1ghz. I found that I had no problem running it on an older XP machine with a 1.8 ghz cpu and 1 gb ram. It requires that the Microsoft .NET version 3.0 is installed but will prompt you to download and install it if required.

I am looking forward to playing around with Songsmith during the holidays and trying it out in school with pupils next year. Not only does it have great potential for the Composing strand in the Music curriculum but it could also liven up lessons in other curricular areas such as Gaeilge etc. when children write their own songs, advertisements and poems and add a music track to them. I see it as another great creative tool for the development of oral language in the  primary classroom which could be used not only in langauge lessons but also in other subject areas. How about getting children to record their own tables rhymes in Mathematics?  To find out more about Songsmith and view some videos visit the Microsoft Research Sonsmith page at http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/um/redmond/projects/songsmith/index.html

I have been a teacher for 30 years, and have both attended and presented many CPD events (known as “courses” in the olden days!). Most of these have been devised and presented to teachers, who attend, participate to various degrees, evaluate, and leave. Evaluations almost always highlight that people like learning what other teachers are doing, and sometimes the most valuable part of the course is the informal social learning that takes place during rest breaks!

I was stopped in my tracks and caused to reflect on this recently. A tweet from @mhallissy pointed towards a Weblogg-ed blog post by leading 21^st century edublogger Will Richardson (@willrich45). He spoke of teachers and learning communities, who were “directing their own learning”. This concept wasn’t new to me, but the acronym he used to describe is was one I found remarkable – DIYPD!

On reflection, I realized that most of my own CPD in the last two years has been totally DIY. There are four places I have found my teacher education (areas of interest – science and ICTs) has taken place, in a mixture of virtual and face to face, formal and informal learning. One thing they all have in common is that they are a two way street – you can get and you can give. Here they are, in the order in which I encountered them…

CESI-list: This Google Group was set up by the Computers in Education Society of Ireland as an open forum for its membership. Membership is drawn from all levels and areas of education, so the variety of question, answer, argument, ideas and information is terrific, mostly useful, and at times highly entertaining. I receive the postings as emails, so whenever I check my email I usually learn something new and interesting.

TeachMeet online: These Scottish-born semi-formal unconference events can be attended in person, but they really have become DIY lately – one can sign up and attend online. The short and snappy presentations are by teachers who highlight what’s going well for them in class. Most TMs concentrate on use of ICTs, but more recently have been organised around subject areas. Attending online is a surreal experience at first, but gets to be good fun when the back room chatting begins between online attendees. Recently I signed into a TM in Blackpool – mainly because they had Professor Stephen Heppel as a presenter. Over the evening I (i)“met” a UK colleague who also teaches second-level science – immediate learning for me as we began to swap links and ideas in the chat room (ii)learned how other teachers use favourites such as StoryBird, Wordle, PhotoStory, PoissonRouge, PowerPoint, Scratch and Alice with their classes and (iii) found many brand new ideas, all free, to try out – the most arresting being from a primary teacher who uses myebooks to allow students to build their own online books as they learn. TeachMeet events are flagged here.

CESI Meets: CESI has taken the TeachMeet formula to Ireland, tweaked it slightly, and the result is good. Short presentations (2 or 7 minutes) by teachers for teachers, and a great social occasion thrown in. I have attended (in person or online) all four CESI Meets to date which have been presided over by @magsamond, @johnmayo and @annemcm  in various venues – Maldron Hotel Tallaght, Digital Hub, Heritage Hotel Portlaoise, Anner Hotel Thurles, and I certainly have learned a lot at each one. Those links will give you a flavour of what goes on. Rumour has it there may be one in Kerry in the Autumn term.

Twitter: The ultimate DIYPD tool if ever there was one. I have found that it is like having a whole team of researchers who don’t asked to be paid. I’ve already mentioned a few teachers I follow above, others are @lismiss, @seomraranga, @simonmlewis, @joedale, @ncteireland, @teachnet, @tektweets, @physicsteacher and @ted. These generous souls share with others what they have found useful for the classroom. Sometimes that’s all a busy teacher wants to know!

So, CPD for me is no longer something handed down from on high and passively received – and I am so glad to know I am not the only one. To happily mis-quote the song: “teachers are doing it for themselves”. Come along and join in.

Last chance to have your say!

The National Council for Curriculum and Assessment (NCCA) is exploring the issue of curriculum overload. A short-term response to the issue is to make the current curriculum content objectives more accessible and navigable for teachers.

To date, NCCA has developed eleven different sets of curriculum re-presentation materials. These have focused on English, Gaeilge, Mathematics and Science. You can, for example, view the content objectives from Junior Infants-Second class for a strand unit in Science on one page. The English strand units have been set aside and the objectives have been grouped according to user-friendly headings such as story, poetry, questioning. There is also a curriculum overview wall-chart that teachers have indicated is very useful for whole school planning.

In the case of Mathematics the materials include ‘bridging materials.’ These include a content document that shows how the maths strands and strand units in fifth and sixth class are continued into first year in post-primary, as well as a mathematical glossary to promote the common use of terminology in both primary and post-primary schools.

The support materials that have been developed have been very well-received by those teachers who have used them. Multi-grade teachers in particular have reported that they found them to be very helpful for planning.

NCCA would welcome your feedback on the re-presented curriculum via a short online survey before the end of June. Your feedback will be used to further develop the curriculum materials to meet your needs and to help the NCCA respond in a meaningful way to the reported challenge of overload.

The link to the survey is available at: https://www.surveymonkey.com/s/curriculumoverloadsurvey3

Tá leagan Gaeilge den suirbhé ar fáil ar: https://www.surveymonkey.com/s/forualachcuraclaim

Please view or download the materials at www.ncca.ie/curriculumoverload.

We have been busy putting the finishing touches to our online summer courses for primary teachers which kick off on July 1st.  A lot of effort has been put into making these courses as interactive and as interesting as possible for teachers.  Thanks to the TeachNet mentors who developed the course tutorials, we are delighted with the high quality materials developed over the past few months.  All of our tutorials use audio and visuals.  Participants can log in to our courses at any time and the system will remember where they left off.  Throughout the summer, we will be here to facilitate and support teachers .

Our courses are very much focussed on the practical and integrated use of ICT in the classroom.  They include:

1. Getting Started – Computer Basics for Teachers
2. Getting Started – Photos and Music for Teachers
3. Getting the Most from your Projector and Laptop
4. Getting the Most from your Interactive Whiteboard
5. Getting the Most from your Promethean Interactive Whiteboard
6. Getting the Most from your Smart Interactive Whiteboard
7. Being Creative with Blogs, Podcasts and other Web2.0 Tools
8. Developing Literacy through Digital Storytelling
9. Creating Digital Resources for the Primary Classroom
10. ICT and Special Education Needs
11. Effective e-Learning Planning for your School
12. Cloud Computing to Support School Planning

All of our courses qualify for 3 EPV Days and cost €99. 

Special Offer: Where 4 or more staff members sign up for any one of our courses, we will reserve a free extra place for the school.  If you are interested in this offer, give us a call on 01 4806208 or email us at cpd@teachnet.ie.

If you are still looking for a course this summer (or know of someone who is), why not take a look at our TeachNet CPD website. 

A common question for those who administer websites is that of how to make their site more interactive and increase the functionality of it. Depending on the infrastructure you are using for your site, this can be a relatively easy process or it can be more complex. For instance, if you’re using a powerful Content Management System such as Wordpress, you can make use of plugins and widgets. But if you are using a hosted install of the CMS you may be limited to what plugins you have available to you, or even if you do have full access to the server on which the CMS resides, you may not be confident in installing and configuring extra plugins. However, the sites which are most limited in what they can do in terms of ‘interactivity’ are ’static’ websites which, by their nature, are usually limited to displaying content which is manually inputted by a web editor and which can usually only occur in one place at one time.

One solution for web editors who are seeking to introduce extra functionality to their site might be to take a look in the Google Gadgets directory. Google defines gadgets as ‘miniature web objects that you can copy & paste into your own webpage, for free’. The process of adding a gadget to your website is easy.

First, browse the Google Gadgets directory (divided into categories or just browse the full directory) or else use the Search facility to seek out a particular gadget. Once you have found the gadget you want to use in your website, click the ‘Add to your webpage’ button. Most of the gadgets will allow you to edit the display settings (size and colour) so as to best integrate into your website (most gadgets can also be easily resized by dragging the window from the bottom right corner). Click to ‘Preview Changes’ button to check that you are happy with any changes you made to these settings, and when you are just click ‘Get the Code’ button to generate the HTML. Copy and paste the HTML into your webpage’s source code and the gadget should now appear on your webpage.

There are literally thousands of Google Gadgets available in the directory. These range from extremely useful and practical gadgets such as calendars and diaries, to those which are designed to keep the site changing through use of random images and text such as ‘quote of the day’, to games which are just there to add a bit of fun. Here’s a few of the more practical (but very useful) ones that you might want to take a look at:

• Google Translate my Page: Allows for easy, one-click translation of your webpage when you syndicate this gadget on your page.
• RSS Reader+: Display an RSS feed on your website. Customise elements such as font, number of links, colours, etc.
• Date & Time: Embed a clock and calendar into your website.

Every year, Educate Together organise a conference for its principals and we get to meet and learn from each other.  It’s always a brilliant conference and one of the best sessions, this year, was when three principals spoke about a certain aspect of their school.

One of these principals has done something amazing.  Fintan McCutcheon, the principal of Balbriggan ETNS runs a “principal blog”.  Every so often he writes articles about things that interest him in his school and in his community.  For example, Fintan discusses how his school uses his pupils in decision making around hiring teachers and reasons why they offer after-school clubs.  Effectively, he has opened up his own vision of education to the world.  So, what is the effect of this?

Fintan explained that he is now engaged in really interesting discussions at the school gates with parents who have read his blog.  Even the postman reads his thoughts and chats to him about them.  In fact, some of his posts give perspectives of issues that are difficult to find elsewhere.  For example, Fintan explains the differences between Educate Together schools and the new VEC primary schools being piloted.  It’s very hard to find this information on the Internet and Fintan has found himself engaged in more interesting conversations as a result, especially as a new VEC school is opening in September in Balbriggan.

However, perhaps poignantly, the death of Toyosi Shittabey earlier this year, has opened Balbriggan Educate Together to a wider community.  Although only 3 people publicly commented on the blog, Fintan said he has been approached in person by many many people he has never had the opportunity to speak with before.  It has opened up his own school community in a massive way.

I would love to start up a principal blog in my own school.  I am inspired by what Fintan has achieved with broadcasting his own thoughts and involving the wider community in his school and his town.  It would be great to see other principals doing this.

To read Fintan’s blog visit: http://balbrigganetns.wordpress.com