OPLS blog

I have just ordered a copy of Imagine Teacher for the Nintendo DS.  According to Play.com it allows you to:

• Teach your students writing, maths, biology, geography and history
• Develop their artistic skills - music, drawing and pottery
• Help organise school events such as organising parties for your pupils’ birthdays, an end of year party, and many more
• Encourage your students so they find their true vocation
• All your students have their own personalities and favourite subjects
• Position them carefully in the classroom to prevent them from chatting and distracting other pupils
• Buy or collect new items
• Upgrade your school
• Multiplayer for up to 4 players with a single game cart.

We’ve been having a look at some new developments in web-based technologies to improve and evolve the user experience of the browser.

One great example is PicLens by Cooliris. This transforms your browser into a full-screen, 3D experience for online photos and videos. It’s a small download, but once installed improves the user interface significantly and offers all sorts of possibilities when displaying content. We’re trialling it with Visual Arts folders for example. Highly recommended.

Another is Tag Galaxy. This is basically a cool way to display shared photos from Flickr. Just type in a keyword and wait for the results to display in a planet-like orb. Related tags are then displayed in a solar system arrangement. Great fun.

Just launched, as a proof of concept, is Aurora from Adaptive Path. The best way to describe this is that people, places and things are represented by objects in a three dimensional space. Closely related objects are clustered together and users can rotate through these as required. Try this video for more details (sorry about the link only - the embed code didn’t work in Wordpress)

Clearly, as more learning takes place via the web, anything that can be done to improve the experience and facilitate access to information will ensure that learners are, in turn, more inspired and engaged.

Tom Hemingway, over in Ankara (though not for much longer, sadly) has begun a wiki to help his successor quickly get to grips with coordinating the IB’s diploma programme in TED Ankara College.

He has very kindly opened this up to the IB community in general, so please take a look.

In his own words:

“This site is designed as a virtual handbook for IBDP coordinators at TED Ankara College, but coordinators
from other schools are welcome to take and use what they like. The site contents are listed on the left, and
are organized according to high school grade. If you’re new to this site, I suggest that you start with the Calendar page. You can follow the links in the calendar to relevant pages that explain the tasks.

This is very much a work in progress, but this project could lead to something of more general benefit to IB
programs in other schools. If you have suggestions for improvement, please click on the Discussion tab on
any page, or click on my icon at the bottom of this screen to send me a message.”

Thanks Tom, and good luck with your move back to the US.

Please find below a YouTube video B Nesbitt created to “inspire teachers to use technology in engaging ways to help students develop higher level thinking skills. Equally important, it serves to motivate district level leaders to provide teachers with the tools and training to do so.”

Paul Fairbrother and I used it at the most recent IBNA conference in San Francisco. It went down very well with school leadership who told us they will show it to their teaching faculty as soon as the new school year begins.

I hope it helps you too:

During a Will Richardson session at NECC 08, this blog, by 11 year-old Laura Stockman, was highlighted:

Laura started the blog in December 2007, after wanting to do something in honour of her grandfather who tragically died of brain cancer in 2005. He had been an inspiration to her over many years and so she decided, beginning Dec 1, to do 25 things that would make a difference each day leading up to Christmas. She decided to blog about what she had done in the hope that it would inspire others to do something similar.

It’s a wonderful example of how doing lots of small things locally can have a significant impact far beyond what was originally intended. Just take a look at the comments people are leaving and where they’re checking in from to see how widespread her readership now is.

Pedagogically, it’s also a great example of how a primary school student can reflect on her own learning on an on-going basis.

The blog reminds me of the key purpose of the IB community theme project, which encourages all members of the IB community to engage with some serious global issues, such as infectious diseases, the digital divide, peace & conflict etc, and actually do something about them - no matter how small that action might be. Two great examples are highlighted here:

“Make poverty history” a post by Sofia Thorell from a school in Norway describing all sorts of ways you can make a difference.

“Community and curriculum” a post by Randy McCord detailing how his economics students not only learned about development economics but actually experienced a much deeper understanding by putting it into action.

We now have over 2000 schools and 600,000 students. That’s a lot of small things adding up to a big difference. And as you’ll see from Laura’s blog and the examples outlined above, this difference can been sustained beyond the original “25 days”.

I was at NECC 08 recently and bumped into some interesting people. One of whom was Mark Wagner who presented on his PhD research into the use of massively multi-player online role playing games (MMORPGs) in education.

According to the literature review for his thesis, MMORPGs offer significant possibilities for rich social interactions and learning.  They include:

• Engagement and motivation
• Context-embedded learning
• Inquiry-driven learning
• Socially negotiated learning
• Reflection and metacognition
• Social change

Mark set about testing these via the Delphi method and, from his discussions with a number of experts in the field of education, learning and gaming, he concluded that these benefits were possible but that a good body of evidence needed to be further developed.

He does, though, have a number of recommendations for educators and these are as follows:

• Use existing commercial MMORPGs with students, particularly in relation to developing 21st Century Learning Skills.
• Support MMORPG play with dedicated, structured and frequent debriefing.
• Use MMORPGs to motivate and engage students.
•  Use MMORPGs as a context for student learning, including social learning.
• But beware infrastructure needs and logistical challenges.

We went through a few examples that he recommends, which I have diigo-ed.  You can find them here.  Please take a look when you can.

I’ve been meaning to post on this presentation Ewan McIntosh gave recently at the Tipperary Institute’s Education futures event, and now have time.

It’s an exposition of the power of social networking and how pervasive it is for many 21st century students. Given the audience, the time available to him, and the message he wanted to get across, it says a lot about what people are doing on Facebook and the like, but it’s a little light on the pedagogical relevance (he does more of that here). It’s worth a look and listen, though, and the challenge Ewan has for us to learn why students want ‘go to these places’ is an important one.

• Unleashing The Tribe: small passionate communitiesEwan McIntosh presentationtags: slideshare, web2.0, community, pedagogy, ewan_mcintosh, presentation, socialnetworking, collaboration

• Snackr

  An RSS ticker for Windows/Mac/Linux built using Adobe AIR and Flex.

  tags: rss, snackr, aggregator

A colleague (thanks Tim) recently alerted me to an interesting wiki Mike Shaw has created for the IB’s Learner Profile. Mike has linked the profile’s attributes with a series of ICT challenges for teacher professional development, eg risk-takers and the use of mobile phones in the classroom.

I particularly liked the links Mike has made with online translators and the attribute: Communicators. Not as straight forward as it sounds.

Take a look here when you have time and try some of the challenges for yourself.

Good work, Mike. Well done.

Barbara Stefanics, an ITGS teacher at Vienna International School, recently alerted me to a project her students are involved in with a number of their peers from Westwood Schools in Camilla, Georgia (US) and the Qatar Academy.

It’s called Digiteen and is a collaborative wiki project looking at Digital citizenship, which they define as “knowing how to behave appropriately and responsibly with regard to technology use”.

It involves approximately 50 students, who have contributed new media resources and their own thoughts around 9 topics identified by Mike Ribble and Gerald Bailey in their book, Digital Citizenship in Schools.

The students have collected together some great material and I encourage you to have a look some time and let them know what you think. I particularly like the Guidelines for Teens section at the bottom of each page.

If you’re reading this, Barbara, please pass on my congratulations to the students and colleagues for such an excellent initiative.  I have a couple of related questions for you though. I was looking to see what the students thought of the Creative Commons movement, but couldn’t find any reference to it (unless I overlooked it, for which I apologise). But, what do you all think about Creative Commons and its tools for licensing intellectual property and their derivatives? Do you think the tools help digital citizens become more responsible in their use/sharing/remixing of content published by others? Is it something you would consider using yourselves in a blog or wiki for example? I’d love to know what you think.