New literacies – new media – new networks

Posted on March 15, 2008 by Judy O'Connell

Two questions from teachers this week set me on a new search for information – which of course included using the power of my professional learning community.

Question 1. Year 8 English is about to embark on an ICT unit where they will explore Youth Culture on the web? Could I help with theme, websites, ethics, nettiquette etc. Could I? I began to think about so many things, and so many ways to work on this that my mind began to spin like a top.

Question 2. Could I help them in Drama to work with Shakespeare in some new ways, using some of the tools I had mentioned at the Subject Co-ordinators meeting? Well, I didn’t actually mention many, but I did alert the group to new possibilities, trying to capture the interest of a few brave souls.

So I asked my professional network for more information. From Twitter came a reply from Laura Nicosia who teaches in these fields, being a professor of English and Director of English Education at Montclair State University in NJ.

Urrgh, I couldn’t believe it! (sounding like a kids story now!). Just that evening I had missed attending the launch of Angela’s book, and having dinner with her and a good group of friends passionate about these topics.

Never mind, let me promote Angela’s blog and her Youth Online book to you. Angela works at Sydney University English Education researching digital cultures, new media literacies, multimodal semiotics and digital narratives. Angela also teaches and conducts auto-ethnographic research in Second Life. Needless to say, Angela (Anya Ixchel) and I (Heyjude Jenns) sometimes get up to mischief in Second Life!

We are very fortunate indeed to have such expertise right here on our doorstep! I’m still waiting for my copy of the book, but I know it will be just what I need to help develop our work with the Year 8 English cohort.

Of course Laura went on to point out another excellent resource. The person launching Angela’s book was literacy expert Colin Lanksheer, who together with Michele Knobel co-authored a new release of New Literacies: Everyday practice and classroom learning. This book will also help us understand the real meaning of ‘new’ in ‘new literacies’. I’ll add this to my shopping list now!

Laura had dinner the night before with Michele – and I was supposed to have dinner with Angela! This six degrees of separation thing really is something!

From Colin and Michele’s blog, Everyday Literacies, I also learnt about the Folger Shakespeare Library, and a fantastic set of resources for enabling students to produce audio plays from Shakespeare’s work. These have been collated into a set of free, online resources titled: “Remixing Shakespeare.”

This set of resources includes an introductory video–and this is a must see! I have yet to observe a group of high school students more engaged in reading Shakespeare than the kids in this video. This introduction is accompanied by samples of students’ audio plays (brilliant!), a how-to set of tutorial guides, and a set of audio and audio editing resources. This is such a nice example of what can be done in schools within existing requirements and with digital technologies in ways that the students no doubt themselves find compelling and useful beyond school.

I grabbed the video and dropped it into my VodPod collection. It is vital that we teachers and teacher librarians take a lead role in showing students how to work effectively, legally and ethically to use materials in new mashups which allow for remix of original materials in creative and compelling ways to create wonderfully original works.

You know, I love my professional network 🙂 They give me so much knowledge and inspiration.

Oh, and Bec (from school) and myself are attending Angela’s Digital Literacy course. Can’t wait to have fun with machinima.

Virtual collaboration – with a little help from CISCO

Posted on March 14, 2008 by Judy O'Connell

Recently I have spent a great deal of time exploring and building in virtual environments in preparation for taking a group of our boys into Teen Life in the world of Skoolaborate. We’re gearing up for this to begin in Term 2.

In case you don’t know, Skoolaborate is a global project that uses a blend of technolocies including, blogs, an LMS, wiki’s and ‘virtual worlds’ for collaborative learning of both teachers and students. By providing a common place to learn and share ideas, educators can leverage the power of new media to engage students and provide opportunities that might otherwise not exist. Using a group of islands in SecondLife, Skoolaborate helps students to collaborate on social action projects that benefit students who are less privileged than themselves. These projects integrate curriculum and digital technologies into collaborative global actions.

So it was with much pleasure that I attended a Cisco Live event this morning (6am Sydney time) at the Cisco Bandwidth Stage. It was Time for a (Tech) Chat!

My wise colleague and friend John presented his talk on Learning 2.0: The Power of Learning in a Networked World. John says that the slides he used in the Second Life presentation are very basic – text-only – slides (actually they were great in SL!). Full versions of the presentation are available for download- one in Keynote (17.5mb), and one in Powerpoint (15mb). Also Cisco Live: Networkers Online will also have something available. I highly recommend downloading them and absorbing the content, or listening to John’s presentation when it becomes available at Cicso Live.

John very kindly let me come up on stage for a photo shoot! 🙂

Creative Commons

Posted on March 5, 2008 by Judy O'Connell

Thanks to Mark for this very nice presentation on Creative Commons. An excellent discussion starter with students and teachers alike!

Vegemite on toast

Posted on March 4, 2008 by Judy O'Connell

I learnt a few things today!

You can do stuff with vegemite and toast that I never dreamt of 🙂
If YouTube is blocked, you still might be able to check Youtube videos via another country. Here’s what I found at mx.youtube.com
Kids will always find a way around filters and blocks.

Visuwords – online graphical dictionary

Posted on March 2, 2008 by Judy O'Connell

Visuwords is a very pretty, very interesting dictionary and thesaurus!

Use the random button, or type in the word that you are searching for. Watch the swirl as the words and meanings emerge. A very nice tool to catch kids interest – and to show the connections and interlacing relationships of words in our English language.

Gmail hacks, tips and tricks

Posted on March 2, 2008 by Judy O'Connell

Oh, I like this one!

I use Gmail, for lots of reasons – all related to my online professional work, and as an alternative to my work email. Integrates so well with lots of things – in my case, especially well with Google Calendar, Talk and Docs.

Here’s an extensive and very useful list of Gmail Tips, Tricks and Hacks. There are many for your to explore. Lots are new to me …… and my favourite for its simplicity and value in managing my subscriptions is the one below. Sweet!

11. Mute a conversation

Ever found yourself subscribed to a mailing list and the current conversation has nothing to do with you? If you don’t want to unsubscribe, you can easily stop the friendly spam with the Gmail mute function. Select a message in the thread and hit the m key to auto-archive all incoming messages in the conversation. The thread will stay muted until you unmute it; it will also un-mute itself if your address appears in the To or CC box.

Photo: Gmail mailbox

I miss my friends, my conversations

Posted on March 2, 2008 by Judy O'Connell

New job, new challenges! Yikes!

My post Core knowledge and creativity for learning 2.0 has generated a bit of discussion – amongst my old friends with whom it is easy to have robust pedagogical conversations about learning in a Web 2.0 world. Read those conversations and you can see how we changed in a couple of years in our own thinking and our own classroom practice. Our students have been the winners.

Michael suggests that I am ‘biting my tongue’. 🙂 You might be right about that! Michael, like all my professional friends and colleagues in the Parramatta Diocese, knows how passionate I am about changing the learning opportunities for our students – bringing our classroom practice in alignment with their Web 2.0 world.

So now I miss my teaching friends a lot – because I have no-one with me yet with whom I can have these challenging pedagogical discussions. You know how it is – back to base one, only it’s worse when you have learnt so much with your friends, and you KNOW that things have to change, and change significantly.

At the end of the day, though, it’s deep knowledge and deep thinking that drives learning – Web 2.0 or otherwise. Engagement, even the engagement of Web 2.0, is only relevant where it promotes and commits our students to being reflective, critical thinkers, able to find and use information effectively and ethically, and able to absorb common and core knowledge in order to build and contribute to human knowledge and understanding. You engage learners in a Web 2.0 world by recognizing their multimodal way of thinking and being – not for the sake of the Web 2.0 gimmick but for the sake of attracting and absorbing the interest of our young learners. Deep thinking has always been around – from Socrates to the 21st century. It’s how we get to encourage deep thinking that has radically changed in our multimedia/multimodal world

Stay with me my old friends, as we continue our fantastic transformation as teachers in a 2.0 world. Come with me my new friends, join me on a glorious journey of rediscovery – because I think that’s what it is…rediscovering deep learning, connected learning, reflective learning, and much more – so much more!

It’s not just about the HSC any more. It’s about powering our students into their global futures in ways that none of us teachers ever experienced as learners. These kids, they’re so lucky – if only we’ll let them fly!

Let’s not forget – we talk about Web 2.0 as if its still something new. These kids – they ARE Web 2.0.

Photos: Valentine’s Day Sucks, Even though things could be better, Our schools are flat

The thing about books and maps

Posted on February 28, 2008 by Judy O'Connell

Spent some time working with a couple of Year 8 geography classes today. The work we did – or rather they did – stood in marked contrast to the ‘understanding’ of some teachers and the role of books in the learning of kids these days. They want books – old and new. But the students? what do they want?

Without going into details, the students were working on a research task, in pairs, on a country that they had chosen.

(Yes, I know, that is not a good research task, but stay with me here …)

What struck me were these key points:

Students did not want to or need to use a print atlas.

Mostly the students jumped onto Google Earth, and found their country and captured that image! Mostly they zoomed in on their country and checked out the terrain, and the cities, and the size of things. Sometimes they checked out the beaches, or how many people they could find. This was not what the teacher had in mind when she said ‘include a map of your country in your presentation’ 🙂 But it was the natural way for the boys to go check out a country.

Every boy automatically went to Google images for their pics – because they can, and no-one has ever told them otherwise.

Every boy automatically went to Wikipedia for their information – because they have never had any need to do it differently!

So you can see, its a bit of a challenge. This is about covering material, not teaching students to think. It’s also about being out of touch with the way students learn in their online world.

School subjects, taught in isolation, represent the worse of 19th & 20th century education models transposed into a 21st century environment. The mechanics of teaching information skills are easy when its about creating a learning experience that requires use of every bit of thinking skill a student can muster. But in the context of the lessons today it was a waste of time.

We can’t blame our curriculum or our students – we have to blame ourselves if our students are unskilled in using a full range of thinking skills to tackle issues straight out of the complex work in which they live.