Category: EdTech

Objects in the mirror

As we enter week 4 of online learning (and week 5 for me of the supporting and setup) a few musings on the process.

I chose today’s title because a lot of what we do is like trying to drive a car in reverse over a long distance for a long time with only a side-mirror as any view on reality. The other reason is that things are both distorted and exaggerated.

My mantra has always been that it’s not about tech, it’s about people. And that seems even truer if possible now. Students (and teachers) who were struggling in real life classrooms are struggling now. In some ways it’s just more obvious and exaggerated now. Those with a great rapport with students are re-creating that rapport albeit online. And the people who thought the usual rules and ways of doing things didn’t apply to them still think that – only it’s really messing up students ability to find what they need to do and to do it on time, so maybe, just maybe they’ll be sanctioned.

This week I wrote a blog for our parent EdTech blog forum about maintaining social relationships during online learning. What I didn’t say, because it wasn’t appropriate in that forum, was what my son said to me when I asked him what his advice would be. Besides saying he was just doing what he always did usually and that he had mates whose sleep/wake patterns were so messed up that he knew he could have contact with them no matter what the time was. He’s quite a perceptive kind of kid, and comes out with great one-liners, like this one: “the sad thing is that suddenly some kids are realising that they don’t have friends. They hang around in some amorphous group at school where they have the illusion they belong, but this just highlights they don’t have one real friend”.

It’s a time of learning so much about oneself. Like I’m usually a highly structured person with great habit-stacking and very regular when I wake up, exercise, work, read, learn Chinese, etc etc. This usually even includes holiday time when I always have great learning goals which I usually achieve (more or less, say 60-80%). But trying to be available for everyone all the time has truly messed me up big time. This weekend is the first one in five that I’m refusing to look at my emails or teams or WeChat (except for posts from friends). I’ve started refusing meetings starting at 3am-6am. And trying to force myself to bed on time (since last night). Because no proper rest means that I’ve become a bit of a brain-dead idiot myself. Even my reading has been suffering – I remarked on twitter to someone the other day that I was incapable of reading my school book club book (Down Girl) because I didn’t have the mental capacity for anything besides series of mediocre historical crime fiction and popular nonfiction (thanks Bill Bryson for “The Body” – yup that virus you predicted has come to reality, and I’m working my way to an early death right now).

So what works?

Having systems and structures and routines in place: When I originally read “When Adults Change” I thought it was a “nice idea” and something that would be “nice to have”. I’m beginning to think it really is a “need to have” at this point. Off line there is considerable room for ambiguity. Lots of opportunity to improvise and make things up on the spot or change direction 180 degrees. Online is less forgiving. Especially for people under stress. If you say that students can find their daily check-in and work for the day in place A, if it is not there about 80% of the students will assume there is no work for the day. About 10% will go hunting around using intuition and some kind of savvy and about 10% will bother to ask the teacher and/or EdTech person or their parents will do so. That means at any one time in any subject a lot of kids are missing the boat.  Having one daily entry point solves a lot of that. 

Simplifying instructions to the point of no-ambiguity: When things aren’t clear you can see on people’s faces that you need another way to explain things. That you need to rewind. That you need to do things one step at a time. Online, even in conference calls the nuances of facial and body expression are reduced to caricatures of themselves. Ideally you should only be delivering one message at a time. In clear simple language. With illustrations / marked up screenshots and screencasts. You need to say what you mean and mean what you say.

Eliminate and refine channels of communication: I tend to be quite private and don’t generally have colleagues on my personal social media, even if they’re my friends. In China WeChat has resulted in significant blurring of those personal/professional boundaries. Luckily in MS we’ve said the WeChat is not an acceptable channel for teacher/student communication. Unfortunately it is still so in HS, something I don’t support as a parent of a HS student – even if he thinks it’s ok. But I still regularly have people trying to contact me on school Tech matters on WeChat, while my order of assistance is email, teams and then finally about 4 or 5 hours later I may get to WeChat – because I still see that as my “personal space”. I’ve had to communicate that clearly to people at the risk of them feeling it’s unkind of me.

For students I’ve recommended that teachers eliminate one-on-one communication by email as much as possible for “communal” issues. If students post a problem in a communal forum, the chances are (a) more students have that issue / misunderstanding (b) some student has already resolved the issue and can help the others (c) everyone sees the issue and the solution. So anything from two to 60 one-on-one emails are eliminated. On the other hand it’s good to have one-on-one (with another adult in the room) mentoring sessions to make sure that students are no isolated and are feeling supported.

Knowledge management – Curate and publish FAQs & Issues: Thank heavens for Libguides * at this stage of the game. I’ve always been a fan, but now I can not only “can” responses but also point people to a central place where they can (hopefully); help themselves. I have a central one that points teachers, parents and students into more detailed pages. A couple of things I see happening are well documented in EdTech lore – the “waves” of adoption and understanding. We have the early adopters (along with the EdTech team) who already were tech savvy and quickly work out the tools and issues. So their questions become valuable in setting up the FAQs about your basic LMS, they then move onto experimenting with other tools, and gaining and sharing expertise and issues in these (like Teams). Besides this there are some amazing groups on WeChat China Tech who’ve been experimenting and documenting and helping each other (Thanks James Rong – the Teams Guru) Then the bulk of teachers start having the same experiences, and if you’ve had time to document things you can point them to this.

Then you have the very long tail of people who have not been keeping up with developments and out of the blue want to use tools that are either obscure or have already been tested and failed.  That’s what we are experiencing right now.

Keep things minimal and simple: managing EdTech has always been a balance of having a few “old” tried and tested tools and giving teachers and the Tech team the freedom to experiment and try things out with the hope that something amazing is around that corner that will be a game changer. Very few new tools are truly game-changing. Even Microsoft Teams for Education, which is pretty good but still has a LOT of work to do before it’s ready to take over the learning space (I’ll write more on that some other time).

Now is NOT the time to throw new tools and edtech at teachers and students/families. See my point above about one daily entry point. It’s also not the time to expect students to use seven different tech tools to complete one piece of work, with the risk of failure to connect at each point. It’s also not realistic to expect your IT support staff to have to up-skill to be able to support all the many and various issues that may arise. That’s why it’s important to be able to either say “no” or “only if it’s proven to work in China and you’re on your own if things go wrong”.

Don’t create busy-work – remember your educational goals. This is really important. In the first week of closure I noticed at home with my own son (first year IB), the difference between the teachers who were in tune with the idea of online learning as an asynchronous experience that would be used to continue teaching and learning and those who saw it as a delivery mechanism for work-sheets and busy-work. Online learning is hard – particularly if no-one (teachers or students) signed up for it in the first place. It requires extraordinary levels of self-motivation. It’s far more “active” and “harder work” in the sense that generally in a normal school situation students can gain a lot of their education by passively going to classes and absorbing what’s going on.

Some of our students are discovering previously un-tapped resources of self-discipline and self-motivation. Many of our teachers are being amazingly innovative. A lot of very positive things are coming out of this experience. Both the positive and negative are just very magnified right now.

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* As regular readers of this blog know, I’m a huge fan of Libguides during this period they’ve become even more valuable than every before in information and knowledge curation. For their quite modest price they definitely punch above their weight in reliability and accessibility. And they’re not hard to learn – some of our teachers have jumped right on board and with a bit of training and help have created amazing guides – see this one for our G5 PYPx on Sustainable Development Goals made by @MrsBidder

Photo by Elly Filho on Unsplash

Ha, ha, ha bonk

That’s me laughing my head off at my thoughts two weeks ago on this same blog. It’s also me laughing at this article about setting priorities and using the “Urgent / Important” matrix. 

urgent important matrix

So we’ve just finished our first week of online learning and I’ve learnt a heck of a lot. One of the main things being that the only way to get out of box 1 is by working roughly 20 hours a day non-stop so that you can set up systems and structures to move things into normal operational mode.

The problem is that while I’m answering urgent matters with students and teachers I’m not setting up the structures.

What I’ve managed to set up so far:

It’s basically a triage system, but unfortunately it’s hard for people in panic mode to absorb so much information, so a lot of the time we do need to do emergency surgery. I must say that Microsoft Teams has come out the hero here – besides a brief all systems down last week, it’s been pretty robust and reliable.

Now I’m going for a walk, the sun is shining and the moon is full. Everything else is shot. No blogging, no Chinese, little reading of anything substantial, basic diet and way too little sleep, no schedule.

How is everyone else doing?

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Matrix by The Startup on Medium
Photo by Tim Mossholder on Unsplash

Digital onboarding

The other “half” of my role currently is technology integrator. I say “half” with irony as it seems I can only ever do 100% of one or the other at any one time.

I’m not sure how the digital onboarding process goes in your educational community. I’m talking about the students moving up into middle school and having laptops of their own for the first time. One thing is for sure, the idea of “digital natives” is definitely a myth. Yes, most kids take to computers / iPads with a fluency that appears to be amazing, but when you dig a little deeper, it’s a very superficial fluency. Something like the apparent language fluency of BICS (Basic interpersonal communication skills) vs. CALP (Cognitive Academic Language Proficiency). So our G6 teachers had been asking for a tech session to make students were upskilled and ready for learning in the things that would help them succeed in the classroom (as opposed to MMO and YouTube watching competency).

Last Thursday only the G6 students were on campus as the other two grades were on trips, and it coincided with a Day 9 (off timetable day) – so the ideal time to do something. The thing is how to make something like this engaging enough for the really competent students while upskilling the rest. In the end I decided on two sessions of 70 minutes, dividing the group into two sets of 65 students each and alternating with a “getting to know MYP” session with our MYP coordinator Stephen.

For the Tech-Spectacular session we had 6 stations of 12-15 minutes each. Each station was worth a potential 100 points and had around 10-12 students at a time, and there were prizes for the top 5 students in each session.  The prizes were given after a Kahoot slamdown in the theatre (station 6) with the top 5 in each session pitted against each other with the rest of the students competing in groups of three.

In order to set up the stations I had conversations with different G6 teachers and the counsellors and watched a few students in action in the classroom. Common issues were disorganisation; not saving files; too many tabs / applications open; messy desktops; not knowing how to create and save a document; not knowing good email etiquette; not able to find files; not able to quickly go to school sites; not using an online or offline calendar/agenda etc. fairly basic things that were getting in the way of learning optimally and taking up a lot of classroom time and energy.

Taking all that I decided to have a few stations with each dealing with an aspect of the issue. The intention was to get an initial status for the student and then help them to be better organised in that area. After the sessions, students with additional needs were identified from their score cards and teacher feedback and they’ll be helped in one-on-one sessions.

This is how the stations were set up:

Station 1: Laptop Maths

Calculate your points as follows:

  • Add laptop battery %
  • Minus – Number of files not in folders on desktop x 10
  • Minus – Number of desktops open x 10
  • Minus – Number of tabs open x 5
  • Minus – Number of apps open x 5

Station 2: Microsoft Word & communication etiquette

  • Open Word
  • Create a document of a book you enjoyed following the format shown (30)
  • Save it as “Yourname D9 Book Enjoyed” (10)
  • Open Email
  • Send an email to xxxx@wab.edu telling me that you’ve attached a file of what book you have enjoyed from the Middle school library. Remember to have a subject, to politely address me, use full sentences and to sign off your email. (30)
  • Attached the Word document to the email (20)
  • Send the email (10)

Station 3: Calendars and schedule

  • Open outlook Calendar
  • Add MS Calendar (20)
  • Add G6Assessment Calendar (20)
  • Bookmark Calendar (20)
  • Open Powerschool (20)
  • Find your schedule (20)

Station 4: Folders and OneDrive

Folders are a way of keeping your work organised
OneDrive makes sure all your files are backed up

  • Create the following folders in your OneDrive:
    I&S; Design; PHE; Maths; L&L; Arts; Language; Sciences (50)
  • Put any stray files from your desktop into the right folder (50)

Station 5: Bookmarks

Collect 10 points for each item you have bookmarked

  • WAB email
  • WAB calendar
  • MS Moodle
  • MS Blogs
  • MS Library Guide
  • MS Library Catalog
  • MyTime
  • Noodletools
  • Yammer
  • MyWAB

Station 6: Kahoot

An overview of the main points of the day in a quiz format to check for understanding using a Kahoot.

In each case the station was manned by one or two middle school teachers who were familiar with and comfortable explaining the necessary tool / functionality. In some cases this also created the opportunity for a mini-teacher PD to get them up to speed. We also had our two IT people on hand to deal with any technical problems.

 

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Reflection on the activity

The good:

We have some great teachers who helped to run this, and the new upstairs learning lab is a wonderful space to break out into different groups with different goals. Students were generally motivated and keen to do the activities. Most said they’d learnt new things.

When I looked through the ISTE Educator standards I was a little concerned that this was a rather basic activity setting up some fairly foundational skills that didn’t involve very much creativity, or design thinking on the part of students. Then when I related it back to the ATL skills framework I realised that one has to start somewhere fairly basic in order to have something for students to build on in order to success for the more sophisticated use of technology.

Can be improved:

For most of the students the 5 stations during the sessions was too much for 70 minutes. Students take a while to get from station to station, settle down and be ready for instructions. Teachers reported back there was not always enough time to get across both the “why” and the “how” of the activity.

The idea of saving and backing up to OneDrive is still under-utilized in the learning community and students were concerned that their files were “gone”. The way to get around that is through putting the “alias” on their desktop to reassure them it wasn’t missing. Just teaching files, folders, saving, renaming and storing of files in itself was probably enough for a whole session.

ISTE Standards for Educators

7. Analyst
Educators understand and use data to drive their instruction and support students in achieving their learning goals. Educators:
a. Provide alternative ways for students to demonstrate competency and reflect on their learning using technology.
b. Use technology to design and implement a variety of formative and summative assessments that accommodate learner needs, provide timely feedback to students and inform instruction.

ISTE Standards for Students

6. Creative Communicator
Students communicate clearly and express themselves creatively for a variety of purposes using the platforms, tools, styles, formats and digital media appropriate to their goals. Students:
d. publish or present content that customizes the message and medium for their intended audiences.

ATL Skills

Self Management:

III. Managing time and tasks effectively

  • Plan short- and long-term assignments; meet deadlines
  • Keep and use a weekly planner for assignments
  • Bring necessary equipment and supplies to class
  • Keep an organized and logical system of information files/notebooks
  • Use appropriate strategies for organizing complex information
  • Select and use technology effectively and productively

Research

VI. Information Literacy

  • Evaluate and select information sources and digital tools based on their appropriateness to specific tasks
  • Understand and use technology systems