Please Mr Andrew’s, let us remote teach…

Posted on by Dave GN

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

Posted on by Dave GN

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

Posted on by Dave GN

 

(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.