Please Mr Andrew’s, let us remote teach…

I know, it has been a long while since this blog was use. All my subscribers have left. Life got in the way, as it so often does.

I live in Melbourne. I teach at a wonderful Government school here in the Eastern Suburbs. I have been there 5 years a bit now and love my job. Not as much as I used to, because I can’t actually do my job at the moment, due to the global pandemic (you may have heard about it……..). The Job I am doing is making the best of a situation, but it is beginning to feel like I am being sacrificed and unnecessarily risked.

The news over the last few days have made me physically ill. Literally, I am so stressed and worried my stomach is playing up. The idea of returning to school, under these circumstances has made me too things; outraged and terrified.

  • The idea that the government is so willing to risk my health and those of my family, by making all schools go to remote learning, to achieve the purpose of making it “fair” for year 12s is absolute bullshit. Guess what Dan, the scores are not going to matter, as the Uni’s have already lost 50% of there enrolments due to no international students; there will be spaces if you bloody well fund them! You want to talk about fair, think of my kids who could lose a parent (as we are both teachers) or a sibling because we were forced back to work, when it was something we could do from home, like you keep saying – if you can work from home you must work from home.

 

  • Social distancing at schools is not physically possible – you built the schools that way, look at your own blueprints. Ask any damn teacher who was there last term, and it was a joke of a concept, we couldn’t truly enforce, which is why the government said, “social distancing does not apply to students while at school”.
    1. Yes, kids appear to be resilient to the virus, but teachers are not – we are adults and like other adults – we should be avoiding contact with everybody for fucks sake, as per the advice previously mentioned.

 

  • Remote teaching worked last time. It was painful. It sucked. It sucked for teachers, it sucked for parents, and it sucked for teachers who were parents (probably even more). I hated every minute of it. It was not the job I signed on to do and not something I would ever do again, unless necessary. It was hard – I worked harder than I every have. My wife and I will testify to this in court if need be; we spent 8 hours a day remote teaching, managing a 7-year old’s remote learning, providing childcare for our 18-month-old, plus normal household duties. Then after the kids were in bed, on average, we would each spend another 3 or 4 hours doing the work we could not do with our own kids under foot – marking, providing feedback, prepping lessons etc.

 

  • We tried remote teaching from onsite for two weeks before the students came back. All it did was make me depressed and worried; raised my general anxiety levels to new heights; cause me immeasurable stress; and overall made me worse at remote teaching and less productive in general.

 

Look this is a rant, but I need to express my feeling and thoughts about this. I want the world to return to what it was; I want to teach again, in the classroom, not worrying about getting sick or making my family sick. BUT that is not possible at the moment, we are in a global pandemic. That is the reality of 2020 and life for the immediate future.

What do I want moving forward? I want to do my job, without be lied to or being asked to do something that endangers my family. I work as a teacher. Not a doctor, not a nurse, not a soldier and not a cop. I am not a babysitter, though often treated like one. I am an educator. I should be able to do my job without jeopardizing my health or safety or that of my family. I want to remote teach from offsite, so that I can do the best job I can, working with the least amount of stress and fear possible; I want to keep Mickey and Lachie safe. I do not think it fair that I will have to risk them in care, when we have other options, that worked last time.

Please let us teachers go back to remote learning, Mr Andrews. Let us do the jobs you pay us for without risking our health and that of our family’s.

My Meandering Thoughts on Curriculum for Digital Technologies 2018 – Part 1

As 2017 begins to wind up, I am begin to plan 2018. I am looking forward to 2018, I have a new curriculum project; Year 8 IT under the Victorian Curriculum. This just seems completely and utterly ordinary, until you take into the consideration that this course is for a group of year 8 that spent half of last year learning to coding.  I know, I know…………. Still not really something to be excited about. But I am!

The 2018 Year 8s will be the first cohort of students I have worked with that already have done a significant amount of coding and are not necessarily starting at a zero knowledge starting point. The downside, is I am writing an entirely new course from the ground up, but that is not new to me. I have energy around this piece of curriculum development.

As an aside, I also am reworking my year 9 Game Development Course, my Year 10 Visualisation and Web Design course, and my Year 10 Software Development Course, but these are more tweaks and will retain much of their cores.

But at the moment,  I am thinking about Year 8 and playing with a few ideas !

I am lucky enough to be at a school who is a member of the catchment for the first Victorian Tech School Centre to open, taking my classes to complete many design challenges over at YRTS (Yarra Ranges Tech School). I have been involved in the development of their programs and have worked closely with their team from a teaching and learning perspective. I’m a member of their Educational Consultation Committee. The programs they are running and developing are great, and have influenced my perspective on how we can engage students in Computing.

In the past week, I have revisited the aims of the Digital Technologies Victorian Curriculum

The Digital Technologies curriculum aims to ensure that students can:

  • design, create, manage and evaluate sustainable and innovative digital solutions to meet and redefine current and future needs
  • use computational thinking and the key concepts of abstraction; data collection, representation and interpretation; specification, algorithms and development to create digital solutions
  • apply systems thinking to monitor, analyse, predict and shape the interactions within and between information systems and the impact of these systems on individuals, societies, economies and environments
  • confidently use digital systems to efficiently and effectively automate the transformation of data into information and to creatively communicate ideas in a range of settings
  • apply protocols and legal practices that support safe, ethical and respectful communications and collaboration with known and unknown audiences.

 

This revisit adjusted my perspective and thinking it seems. New terms become more prominent; my interpretations have been tweaked or changed. I think I have been too focused on the technical aspects from the scope and sequence, and not enough on the aims.

This adjustment has changed the contextual curriculum focus. To me, Digital Technologies is no longer just a technical subject, but a subject that is about application of the technical in order to do something tangible with it. I know that sounds like the same thing, but it really is not, at least in the meandering thought process that I am currently exploring. I will attempt to explain.

 

Digital Technology needs to be about designing solutions to problems; taking the technical tools of coding and applying them to a problem to create a solution. It’s about creating digital solutions while at the same time expanding a student digital tool box to allow them to develop their solutions. It’s the old chicken vs egg argument; which came first? We need to develop skills to solve problems by looking at the problems that need skills for solutions. We need to both develop the solution and learn the tools needed at the same time.

My thinking so far has taken me down the road into the realm of incorporating a range of robots into the year 8 course. Consumer lever robots, like the sphero, mbot or ringo2, allow you to access coding at a level that is very basic, but can be extended to a very complex level, while the whole way providing a platform that has tangible results at regular intervals. I’m thinking of making the course (or at least a part of it) a team challenge exercise – they have to research and design a solution to the challenge.

I think robots, can potentially provide the platform that bridges the digital to physical classroom gap. It can take coding to a place where it becomes “real” in a way that is difficult to achieve.

I shall have to think, and write more on this at it develops. What out for Part 2 and beyond!

 

Teaching Old Dogs New Tricks

 

(or why the Head of [ insert faculty] is going to my hit me in the back of the head)

I have been prepping recently for my first every presentation at a conference. I have been lucky enough or maybe crazy enough to be giving a presentation at Digicon 2017 (http://digicon.vic.edu.au/).  It seemed like a good idea at the time (still does, just with a lot more trepidation and anxiousness), but I thought it would be fun to share with my colleagues, what I am doing with ICT at my school. Thus I came up with this (caution, self-promotion in hyperlink below);

BUILDING ICT TEACHING CAPACITY FOR THE VICTORIAN DIGITAL TECHNOLOGIES CURRICULUM

At Mooroolbark College, when the new Victorian Curriculum in Digital Technologies, was introduced we realized that there were two major hurdles to overcome. Firstly, a knowledge gap in terms of coding/programming; the 7-10 curriculum is based on students having completed the F-6 curriculum, which won’t happen for the next 3-5 years effectively. Secondly, where are we going to get ICT teachers from, that can teach this curriculum? This presentation is about one school’s solution to this dilemma; how we are training teachers to code so they can teach year 7s and 8s confidently and effectively, so they are curriculum ready by year 9.  This is my and Mooroolbark College’s story about this so far, and hopefully a forum to share our experiences with others.

http://digicon.vic.edu.au/sessions/building-ict-teaching-capacity-for-the-victorian-digital-technologies-curriculum/

I wanted to call my presentation “Teaching Old Dogs New Tricks” but was told that, despite being funny, it is not professional to ever refer to colleagues, even metaphorically or as an idiom, as “Old Dogs”, even if I love dogs. Despite this, the name still lives in my head, and now due to this blog, on the internet. LOL.

A week of holidays has passed, and I will admit that I am nowhere near ready yet. I have put in a few hours of work and thought on this, but I am struggling finding the words. My principal recently told me that sometimes, when it comes to ICT, be it pedagogy or teacher practise, people have trouble getting their heads around the concepts or ideas that I am trying to explain.

She advised me, that it is not that I speak to fast or use too technical language, it is that they (those who I explaining too) often don’t have the ICT knowledge or experience to put things into a context where the ideas make sense. The whole “context” thing is a new challenge for me. I guess being at the bottom of the change pile not the agent of change that I have become (not my words, but I will steal them Rach!) has given me a tendency to forget that not everyone has the same context when it comes to ICT in education. This contextual difference, is what has me stuck at the moment.

The idea of context is why I think, that metaphorically speaking, another Faculty Head is going to hit me in the back of the head. In all honesty, I work with a great team of Faculty Heads and I respect them all. They are fantastic people and great educators, without exception. But change is something that most teachers seemed to be a little bit hesitant with, especially when it comes to technology in the classroom. As I wrote this last sentence, I gained some clarity on the idea of context!

My context, is quite different to most of the people I work with. I am into Computers and Technology. They have always been something I have enjoyed, something that I have dabbled in. I am a geek and proud of it. I also find computers and software something extremely easy to learn and incorporate into everything I do; I look for digital solutions as a first stop to problems. I happily will spend hours “playing” with a piece of software or hardware. I haven’t read a physical book in a really long time, unless I was given it as a paperback. Every book I have bought for myself since the first Kobo reader came out, has been digital. Outside of ABC kids TV (I have a 4 year old son) and the occasional News, I stream about 95% of my media consumption. Coding is not mystical or magical, it just part of technology. My phone is used more for emails, messaging, forums and social media, than it is for phone calls. I have a relationship with technology, that has integrated it into almost every aspect of my life. In writing, this I have realized that I don’t differentiate technology from the analog; it is all a tool that I use with ease.

And it is not this way for many of the people I work with.

I guess I have some thinking to do now.

My Internet Addiction

A few months ago now, I had a lot of problems with my home internet connections, which is thankfully was resolved after a week. My phone was also being repaired, so I didn’t have it either. To compound the problem, or make it even more interesting, we also had been having ongoing issues with my school’s connection, but this was not as annoying as my home problems. For me, these issues have really highlighted how integrated the internet, and more specifically access to it has become in my life.

I use it for so much of my communication, work and entertainment that when it is not working, even if I don’t in fact need it to do what I am doing, I feel that something is “off” in my personal world, when it is not working.  I have been reflecting on this experience and these feelings as of late, in an attempt to understand why that is.

Lots of people have written on this subject, and I have read reasonably widely of them. There are lots of theories and different explanations of this phenomenon, which range widely and differ significantly. In my own head, I have amalgamated them into my own explanation; it my opinion and is what makes sense to me. I think it is due to the integrated nature of the internet into my life. It is something, like my phone or my watch, that I take for granted. I assume that it works and that I have it with me. I think about internet access in the same way.

Let me digress, and use an example involving my watch, to explain. I wear a watch every day. I have for years and years. I don’t wear it when I sleep for some odd reason. I always take it off when I get into bed for the night. It is just what I do. Somedays, rarely, I end up not putting it on and heading off to work. (Yes, I forget it. I am not a morning person and even with coffee I don’t operate on all cylinders first thing.) When I first realize that I forgot it, a cycle of looking at my blank wrist begins. It drives me nuts all day, especially when I am not on a computer with a clock starting at me constantly. When I don’t have it, I notice; when I do I am not even aware of it being there. And the internet has become the same.

I have known for a while, that my phone is not primarily a phone anymore; phone calls and text messages are my primary communication channels. Email, instant messenger programs and Skype are my primary means of communication at work and at home. Pretty much the only one who text messages me is my wife and occasionally other family members; my communication with friends is via the other mentioned services, which are internet dependent. When the network goes down, I feel a profound sense of disconnection to the world.

The internet in the last few years (if 10 counts as a few…) has become so integrated into my (and probably everyone else’s) lives that I must actively think about what is connected via the web and what is not. So many of my daily services are interactions need that global connection. At school our learning management system is not hosted on site; neither is our email; many of our regularly used services require internet access. I am a Dropbox user; every file I create for work or personally, lives in my Dropbox, which syncs them between my various computers. I don’t think I have used an USB to transfer files between my devices for about 2 years now. My system backups are also on a server somewhere, sitting in a data center located who knows where on earth. I read the news on websites instead of physical papers. Hell, I even stream the news nowadays as it means I can watch it when I am free to and want to, not when it is being broadcast.

In writing this, I have realized that I am in reliant on the internet, maybe even addicted to it. The brief week I had no internet at home and intermittent internet at work was stressful. I was unwillingly unplugged, and it really bugged me. It was beyond a mild annoyance or frustration, and almost seemed to be like a mild withdrawal. Admittedly, I have no idea what withdrawal is like. I don’t think the days when I miss my morning coffees count.

I think I can say I am addicted to the internet; not a site or activity, but the connectivity of the thing. It is a web (pun intended) that binds me to the world and connects the world to me. I am an internet addict and I am happy with that.

Time as a Resource

In the turbulent, chaotic, eventful times that are known as “End of Semester Report Writing”, on occasion, I have been thinking a lot about what I could do with additional resources. Not money (which would be excellent) or Sleep, but the simple idea of time. I have come to think of time as my most important resource. I have discovered (at least on a personal level) that time is resource I need the most, as it can provide solutions to all other resource shortfall; well at least the resource shortfall that are not consider insurmountable such as lack of air.

I have found, that given enough time, I can work around most problems I run into while teaching. The obvious ones are things like lack of sleep, work life balance, health, lack of patience and so on. All easily solved with time; typically, easily solved with sleep, but that is not the point. I have been more thinking along the lines of things like classroom resources – Money for materials and equipment; an ever-escalating work load; marking; classroom preparation. If I have the time, I typically find a work around to the challenge that I faced, or on rare occasions an actual workable solution.

Time has become a critical resource. I never seem to have enough. Far too often I must preform metaphorical triage on problems, applying band-aid solutions that are only short term; always promising that when I have time I will fix it properly; that close enough is good enough for now. While writing this I realized that we teachers often use future adjectives constantly; things will be done. I’ll get to it later. We’ll look at that next term. See me after………

We constantly are trapped in the now, which is full, so we push stuff in the future. Our time is spent before it even happens far too often. We are always looking for more and ever have enough.

This brings me full circle in my thinking; back to my original point. What could I do with more of this resource called “Time” (now with a capital T, since I’m going to treat it as a named object). To steal something, I remember from a piece of poetry or philosophy, source long forgotten in the cobwebs of my mind.

Time is infinite and finite; It is unlimited, but you can never have enough of it.

I have found that I am always time poor. I must prioritize and choose what comes first and what get my time. I always have more to do than I have time to do it in. I constantly decide what is important and what is not, not based on their true value of importance, but on how much time it will take to do, and how soon I need. This has resulted in ideas being shelved, projects being abandoned and things being left by the wayside. So what would I do with more Time?

First, I would sleep. Yes sleep. It is something that I have found as the semester ends I never have enough of. The candle gets burnt at both ends, with late nights and early starts the necessity of life. It would be wonderful to be able to get enough sleep and have time to do all the other things. Next, I would finish some of the things I have left unfinished; the projects that are good enough but not truly done. Those little things I am always working on, because they are interesting but externally a side project. For example, my research/exploration into VR as a classroom tool; the concept of gamification and applying it to the classroom; learning a new programming language; writing that app I want to make.  All those little side projects.

The final thing, would be spend more time with my family. Slow things down, and not cram in all the fun into brief hours, but actually have quantity and quality time instead of one or the other.

All in all, Time is something that seems to something I am wasting thinking about it. Which, all in all, not a bad thing. Best thing about time, is even wasting it can result in something.

Teaching Outside of Your Method

I was reading this article, discussing how many early years’ teachers are teaching outside of their teaching methods. It talks about the statistics around this, touching briefly on the need due to timetabling. It doesn’t really seem to get into the meat of the matter, as it is article based on a report which was looking at the numbers, not necessarily the reasons behind them.

I have been teaching 4 years, with a year off between my 3rd and 4th years to be a stay at home dad. I have taught outside my methods, almost every year until recently. When I started teaching I had English and Information Technology as official methods.  In my first 2 years of teaching I taught; English, History, Geography, Information Technology, Religious Education, Automotive, and VCAL. And these were across the range of 7 to 10, with the exception of VCAL and RE which were year 11 subjects.  I should note, these were not as a CRT, extras or short contracts, but subjects I had for at least a term or two.

I was happy to give them a go, as I was young and ready to take on any challenge. I may have been naive as a fresh faced graduate, but I wanted to teach and would have said yes to almost any subject that would of but me in the classroom. I was not in a position to say no to work, and felt that I could take on any challenge. Some of them were big asks; Auto especially, which was luckily for a term and all theory and design. It was hard work, I was lucky enough to be “old” (I was 32) by first year teaching standards, and had no desire to have a social life beyond watching some TV with my wife. I devoted myself happily to the preparation and work that I needed to do to deliver these subjects. I never felt pressured to teach anything, but could see how you could easily be pressured into doing that, especially as an early teacher, who is desperate to just have a job.

It is an easy thing to forget, that secondary teachers are trained as specialists. We know our methods; we know the content and the pedagogy that surrounds those methods. We know about classroom management and general pedagogy. We typically are pretty limited outside our methods though! For example, I myself have 5 teaching methods; Information Technology, English, Humanities, Food Technology and Business Management. I admit that this is unusual and due to having too much time on my hands playing stay at home dad for a year, combined with my circuitous route to teaching. I can confidently teach in my methods. I’m also pretty comfortable teaching junior media, religious education, economics or accounting. Beyond that, I have pretty much no clue; there are some areas I won’t know where to start teaching in. I won’t say that I could not learn the content and how to teach them, but if you dropped me in cold, into a class out of my method areas tomorrow, I would have countless hours of work to take on the challenge. And the truth is, I would not be the best person to be teaching the subject. Take math for example. I am ok at math. I work with business math and computer math fairly regularly. I still actually use algebra, but I am not mathematically minded. I don’t understand it at a level that lets me see the how things are done. I cannot explain it in different ways; I am not a math teacher. No matter how much time I spend training and studying, I don’t think I will ever be a good math teacher; it is not my specialty or within my personal capacities. On the other hand, I am an English teacher. I understand English; the structure and function; the complex rules; the different styles and methods of writing. I can explain them in many different ways, and if needed figure out new ways to help a specific student understand what I am on about.

At a junior level, 7-9, there is a valid argument for everyone teaching everything. At year 7, most of us will have enough general knowledge to teach most subjects, except maybe math and LOTE (and the new IT curriculum, but that I’m saving for another post all by it lonesome). Through in PE and Technology subjects and the list starts getting long, but that is why we have specialist teachers; secondary education is about developing mastery in subjects not general learning.

I don’t think there is anything wrong with teaching outside your area, but I for one have never said “yes” to teaching something that I could not really teach; I’m not a math or science teacher; nor a PE or art teacher; I can’t teach wood, metal or plastics; don’t even ask about a language other than English or textiles. I know I cannot teach in those areas, because they are so far out of my personal context and skill set that I would do students a disservice in attempting to teach them. But this is me, not you. Some of the best teachers I have ever worked with or had, were in fact teaching in an area that wasn’t their method, but something they loved anyhow.

Revisiting The Digital Divide

Someone I follow on twitter, re-tweeted a post by @LeungAsh which brought up this topic the other day and got me thinking about it again. Back in 2009 while studying to be a teacher, I ran across the idea of Digital Natives and Digital Immigrants (Prensky 2001). This then lead me to Dave White’s (@daveowhite) concept of Digital Visitors and  Digital Residents (University of Oxford 2009).

In 2009, he presented his ideas in a video on the Tall Blog for Oxford University. In 2011 when I stumbled upon Dave White’s ideas, I had already drunk the metaphorical cool-aide and wore my badge as a Digital Native, despite being born in 1979 (I was an IT teacher, damn it!). I proudly adopted adopted the badge of Digital Resident and continued on my way, thinking (and probably writing ) about it. I about to graduate from being student teacher to teacher and was intent on teaching Information Technology and changing the world (well a little tiny section of it, as my wife had already been a teacher for the last 4 years, and I knew what the reality of it was, or so I thought).

Then life got in the way; I jumped into the trenches of teaching, which was the followed by having a child. I became focused on developing my teaching in a hands on, why are they not listening to me way. I finally got a handle on that (on good days) when parenthood shook up my universe. 5 years on in 2016, I find myself once again exploring the education theory landscape. Ash Leung’s twitter post (@leungAsh) yesterday really got me asking myself “how has this idea evolved in the last 5 years?”

So as any resident or visitor would do, I did a google search. Dave White seemed to of answered my question;

In 2015 Aaron Davis  wrote a great piece called Mapping the Divide: Visitors and Residents on the Web. I found the above video there. He (Aaron Davis) summed up movement from the idea of Natives and Immigrant to Resident and Visitors elegantly.

I did notice something though, much of the information and discussion on this topic seems to have changed little in the last few years. I actually don’t feel like I have missed the last 5 years of this idea evolving and growing. I think that, my growth as a teacher and digital resident has kept me in the loop somehow.

Our technology has evolved and has become more integrated than ever before, but as people there actually hasn’t been much change in how we engage with the web. Yes social media is everywhere, but it it does not feel anymore prevalent now than it did five years ago, there is just more variety.

And this got me thinking. In fact it has triggered a whole lot of thinking. For me thinking leads to googling, which leads to reading, which leads again to thinking and so on, until I decide to write some of thoughts on this blog. I want to know how this idea fits into my school and how others approach integration of technology into the classroom. For me, it is seamless and without thought; I choose what will engage my students and achieve my desired learning outcomes. For others, it is a burden and makes things more work than before. The idea of Residents and Visitors, is very applicable to teachers; we quite literally can fall into these categories; there are those who use it when they have to and those who use it as an extension of what they are doing.