“For it is in giving that we receive.” – Attributed to Francis of Assisi This afternoon I spent close to an hour and a half providing some one on one PD, around some new software that is being utilised in the school. I had indicated in conversations that I was familiar with the software, and after my colleague was left feeling overwhelmed by the quick training session offered by the vendor’s local representative, I was approached and asked if I could spend some time this week helping this teacher learn their way around the software. Thank you to Nicole Mockler Part of the reason that I write these blog articles, record the instructional videos for my colleagues each week and am active with Twitter on a professional basis is that it is an investment in my own professional development. The opportunity to consolidate my own understandings on a variety of topics and skills, to reflect on my practice, to engage in networking, is invaluable and is an investment in my own continuing professional development. However, an additional reason is that is also an investment in my colleagues. Thank you to Andrea Stringer A school is a community (1), a sentiment we see often in the narratives around education. When you hear about successful schools, you often hear that the teaching staff have a high level of collegiality. Harris and Anthony(2) concluded that “providing teachers opportunities for continued development as they practice their profession is crucial for meaningful change in any educational system.” Additionally, they wrote that the ongoing development of skills and self-confidence in students is impacted by the personal and professional development of their teachers’ than anything else within a school. Thank you to Paul Hamilton The ongoing publishing of this blog, production of instructional videos and engagement with Twitter are an opportunity to invest on the school community, at the immediate, local level, and then also further abroad, to the wider school community of teachers everywhere. I invest of my time as I want the best for my students, and that means that not only my practice needs to be top quality, but so does the practice of my colleagues. If society is to continue to develop and improve, then the broader community of teachers need to do the same. I invest of my time, as it is an opportunity to do my part to develop teachers. While I certainly do not believe myself to be a paragon of teaching practice, I know that I can offer something to the teaching community. Thank you to Amanda Gibson I happily gave of my time to my colleague this afternoon. This person is in the twilight of their career, yet is still incredibly passionate for their craft, and has been outspoken in staff meetings around the need for further investment in technology in the school in a range of areas. They always have a kind word and time for a chat, and have invested their time in the development and mentoring of younger teachers, including myself and others in the school, both temporary and casual. I am not able to offer something to every teacher, I still very much feel that I am a developing teacher, and am only in the very early stages of my career. This person still desires to learn and increase their skill set in order to improve their own craft. If I can offer something that will benefit this person, I can think of no good reason to not do so. Thank you to Mitch and Trish Investing time in my colleagues is not just that. It is an investment in my students, in the teaching profession, and an investment in myself. Knowing that I have been able to help a colleague learn something new has a similar effect for me, mentally and emotionally, as seeing the “a-ha” moment in my students. As a new teacher, who feels like he has daily struggles in a range of areas, who is very much discovering my teaching identity, and finding my place in the school community, the value of a thank you from a more experienced teacher cannot be understated.I feel valued, I feel appreciated, I feel worth while and it reminds me why I teach. Thank you to Linda and Nessie With the recent news that nearly forty percent of new teachers are walking away from the profession (which is not necessarily a revelation), I felt that it was a timely reminder. If a colleague has invested of their time in you, whether they are more, less or equally experienced than you are; higher, lower or equal to you in in your local hierarchy, whether they are in your local and physical professional learning network or in your online professional learning network thank them. Let them know their time, knowledge and experience is valued and appreciated. I have not even remotely thanked everyone who has invested their time, knowledge and experience in my professional development, but I have included throughout, a small few who have, and I cannot thank them enough. Who has invested time in your professional development? (1) Redding, S. What is a School Community, Anyway?, The School Community Journal, 1:2, pp.7-9. Retrieved from http://www.adi.org/journal/fw91%5CEditorial-ReddingFall1991.pdf October 14, 2015
(2) Harris, D.L. & Anthony, H.M., Collegiality and its role in teacher development: perspectives from veteran and novice teachers, Teacher Development, (2001) 5:3, pp.371-390http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/13664530100200150
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“It is important to remember that educational software, like textbooks, is only one tool in the learning process. Neither can be a substitute for well-trained teachers, leadership, and parental involvement.” – Attributed to Keith Krueger Good morning everyone, it is an early post today, getting in before I head off to school in order to get the latest FTPL video up for everyone, as I did not get it the video recorded until last night, well after I would normally post it. Next week will see a return to your regular programming, with the FTPL video returning to Monday afternoons, and the new series of articles reviewing of Invent to Learn, continuing in its (soon to be) regular time slot of Tuesday afternoons. In this video in the FTPL series, we continue looking at how we can utilise GDocs in the classroom, specifically, how to use the live-feedback feature. Please ensure you have watched Video Five in the series before watching this video. As always, I would appreciate any feedback or questions in the comments. Click here to see the full list of videos in the FTPL series. Ordinarily, Monday afternoon is the day that I post a new FTPL video, such as this one, and ordinarily, I would open an article with a quote that has either some relevance to the article topic, or education in general. Not today. You may recall that I recently wrote about my troubles with engaging with reading for professional development and that I would begin reading Invent to Learn by Sylvia Libow Martinez and Gary Stager. I have read the introduction, and I have begun writing an article based on that portion of the book, but I felt that the last page of the Introduction was deserving of an article in its own right. If you do not yet have a copy of the book (a state you may rectify by clicking here), the Introduction concludes with a poem, which I have found online and included in full, below. The Hundred Languages (1) I showed this poem to Mrs C21 this afternoon and asked her for her impressions, wanting to find out if they echoed my own. She replied “yep, that was school” which was essentially my own initial emotional response to the poem. It is a sad indictment on our education system, I believe, that the above poem is an indicator of what schooling has been reduced to. It is a narrative that we have seen play out in the nightly news and the election cycle over the last few decades as schooling gradually moved towards the data-driven standardised-testing focus mechanism that it now appears to be. Many teachers do work hard to include facets of tinkering and play in their teaching, and I believe, I hope, that we will see a balance found between the need for data to drive the political cycle, and the needs of our students and their futures. I am looking forward to diving into this book over the coming weeks, and to challenging my own perceptions and beliefs about tinkering, the makerspace movement, its application to education and education in general, and would very much like to hear what your thoughts and responses are to the poem above. (1) Loris Malaguzzi (translated by Lella Gandini) as cited in Libow Martinez, Stager (2015), p. 8, Constructing Modern Knowledge Press. Retrieved from http://www.innovativeteacherproject.org/reggio/poem.php 12 October 2015
“All the world is my school and all humanity is my teacher.” – Attributed to George Whitman Many of us, I hesitate to say all, would be familiar with the slogan learning; any time, anywhere and how it is often applied to contemporary pedagogical* movements as a type of panacea for education and improved learning outcomes. I write that as someone who has said and written it, acknowledging that that particular outcome of contemporary pedagogy is valid in its own right. At the same time, I acknowledge that it has always been the case (as evidenced by the saying every day is s school day but that our idea of what learning is and how it occurs has changed over the last twenty years or so. I made the choice over the break, upon reflecting upon the skills and concepts that I had yet to cover with my students, to focus on learning one skill or concept very well for this term, rather than attempting to get through everything for the sake of covering all of my program. It seems to make sense to myself, and the students, on the whole, agreed with me when I have explained the situation to them over the course of yesterday and today. For Stage Three, we are looking at research skills, specifically, the ability to take good quality notes, a skill which I do not recall ever being explicitly taught, yet which is an assumed skill in both secondary school and definitely in tertiary education. This term I am attempting to provide my Stage Three students with skills that will help them avoid the mistakes I and many of my classmates in both high school and university made, in frantically trying to copy down every single word, in not having any sort of structure to the notes, other than, perhaps, indented dot-points. I went so far as to bring in and show my students a copy of my Honours Thesis, explaining how long it was required to be, and then showing them the notes that I had made in doing my research of the literature. We talked about the benefits of good note-taking skills, not just in academic terms, but in the way that it helps to organise your thoughts and ideas. This week was an introduction to the layout of the Cornell Note-Taking Strategy, how you set out a page, what each section is used for and a discussion of the various ways that we become more efficient note-takers through the use of abbreviations and acronyms that are contextually appropriate. I found that some of my students were struggling to understand the purpose of the left hand column, the cue word column and I was working to formulate a different explanation of the use when one of the students put it to me like this: "Is it like how when I read something for a project, I just write down the main idea of each paragraph?" Such a simple explanation, and when I used that explanation with the next class, a large number of light bulbs flicked on. It reinforced to me that even though I am the teacher, I am still a learner. This Year Six student handed me another way of explaining a skill that I had not thought of, that enabled a number of other students to engage and understand the concept that I was teaching.
*I refuse to call it twenty-first century learning anymore. That particular phrase, to my mind, was something that implied forward thinking and being ahead of the curve. We are now fifteen years, coming up to sixteen years into the twenty-first century. If you are not doing twenty-first century teaching and learning, you are likely behind the curve. I also acknowledge that some of what is considered twenty-first century learning is actually what was old, is once again new. The skills, such as critical thinking and problem solving, listed as being twenty-first century skills are not, in fact, modern at all. They are skills that have been taught in a variety of formats, often implicitly for many years, but have been done without being explicitly taught as critical thinking, or explicitly taught as problem solving. I do realise the apparent juxtaposition of that statement given my Twitter handle and the name of this blog, however I view those more as a statement of when rather than what I am teaching. “The best advice I ever got was that knowledge is power and to keep reading.” – Attributed to David Bailey As a child I would read at any opportunity, even if it was only a few lines, I would grab the book of the moment, read the few lines I had time to read and then keep going. This often occurred, much to my mothers frustration, in the morning when I should have been getting ready for school, and would conveniently forget that fact, and become absorbed in the story. I grew up with a plethora of solid Australian authors to choose from, with my two favourites being John Marsden and Morris Gleitzman. Mum introduced me to Jeffrey Archer, Wilbur Smith, Frederick Forsyth, Robert Ludlum. Eventually Timothy Zahn re-introduced fans world wide to the Star Wars universe with the release of his Heir to the Empire trilogy, which for me served as a re-ignition of a much loved saga.
Somewhere along the way, between then and now, my reading habits changed. Growing up, I was a voracious reader and would often fall asleep with an open book late at night. At some point, my habit of reading for a while before bed every night changed to a habit of reading if I had time before bed, which evolved into it being too late to read, maybe tomorrow night. I still read, just not as often. I found that I had fallen too far behind in the release schedule of the Star Wars novels and I did not know where to start in order to catch back up. I dived into Middle Earth, reading The Hobbit, The Lord of the Rings, The Silmarillion and the various titles in the Unfinished Tales from Middle Earth series. Then I got to university, and my reading habits changed again. I had to read. The texts that I was required to read in order to complete tasks were often written in dry and dense language that is often associated with academia, and I began to churn through three of four journal articles a day, purely for the purpose of completing the assignment. Though I (occasionally) found the various texts I was reading interesting in themselves, they often simply served to aid in the completion of an assignment. Reading for pleasure became something that I did not have time for. I had long disdained e-books, I am not entirely sure why, other than a love of the smell of books and the feeling of holding a book and turning the page, but I had not engaged with Kindles and the like at all. I then discovered, quite accidentally, fanfiction.net and turn to it for five minute bouts of reading while I ate breakfast. I have, over the last twelve months, made a conscious effort to return to ensuring I read for pleasure. I have worked through the Magician series by Raymond E. Feist, and I have read through each of the immense books that George R.R. Martin has published thus far in the Song of Ice and Fire saga. I was left with a dilemma. I had engaged in various avenues of ongoing professional development; attending FutureSchools in March of this year and participating semi-regularly in various education chats on Twitter however, I had not made any effort to engage with literature for professional development. Something about the nature of reading journal articles for university assignments had deadened an enjoyment of reading for professional development, and though I had skimmed a handful of journal articles, I had not engaged fully with any form of professional development through reading. This term I am making a commitment. I purchased a copy of Invent to Learn by Gary Stager and Sylvia Libow Martinez whilst at FutureSchools, and had started to read through it on the train ride home that afternoon, yet having just been offered a temporary contract, I began to focus what spare time I had on developing a program to suit the specific role I had been assigned, and had, unfortunately, not returned to it. I also recently purchased a copy of Hacking Education by Mark Barnes and Jennifer Gonzalez, which I have not even opened. So in order to return to reading for both pleasure and for professional development, I commit to reading through a chapter a week, beginning with Invent to Learn, and using this platform to solidify my learning, the ideas and inspiration, the challenges and the professional avenues I wish to explore, as a result of the reading, with one blog article each week, beginning next week, devoted to the previous week’s reading. “We need heroes in education. Educators to be household names just like sports have Cathy Freeman and the law has Geoffrey Robertson.” – Matt Esterman paraphrasing Dr Keith Tronc Welcome back, everyone, to a new term, and what a scorcher it has started out with. I believe the temperature reached the mid-thirties here today, and there were red-faced students aplenty at the end of recess and lunch.
I thoroughly enjoyed the break from school and from the various frustrations that teachers face, and while it was great to spend time my wife, with my friends, giving the house a proper spring clean (and thereby satisfy my itch to move house for another year), it was equally nice to be back in the classroom with students again today. I did nothing relating to school for the entirety of the school break (with the exception of a visit to SCIL, which I will cover in a separate article). I went away for a weekend with the wife and some friends, tore the house apart (figuratively, of course) giving it a spring clean when Mrs C21 went back to work at the end of week one, started pre-season training for refereeing, and spent some time reading for pleasure (I have finally finished the current book in the Song of Ice and Fire series), gaming on both console and computer, had a catch-up dinner with friends from university, and generally pottered about the house. No planning, programming, Twitter (though I did miss some excellent #SatChatOC sessions), blogging…..nothing to do with school until I worked out what I was doing today, last night after dinner. Oddly enough, I actually felt guilty for it. I did have grand plans of getting a few things in particular done, and it just did no eventuate. I could not summon the motivation to do anything. It was not until I had a conversation with my sister-in-law and a few teacher friends who said the same thing, that I decided that it was okay to take a break, an actual break. Mentally, I think I definitely needed it. For our won well-being, we, as teachers, need to dis-engage periodically to refresh and revitalise. For our sake and for our students’ sake it needs to happen. Particularly given the intensity of day one of a term. The first day back for the term is an interesting one, as an RFF teacher. Whereas a single-class teacher (i.e. someone with a permanent class of their own) has the whole day to re-engage with the students and get the class functioning smoothly again after a two week separation, an RFF teacher has a much smaller amount of time. For me, I have thirty minutes (Kindergarten to Year Two), forty-five minutes (Year Three and Four) and sixty minutes (Year Five and Six), and that is all I get. It presents quite the conundrum, and one which I do not feel like I faced in Term Two or Three, for some reason. I ended up doing a brief round up of what each student did on their holidays (“tell me one awesome thing you did”) and was pleasantly surprised and happy with the responses (no-one said “nothing”), a brief recap of what we did last term, and the overall plans for this term, and for my year five and six classes today, we engaged with the next lesson in the sequence of the current unit, after reviewing what we had done thus far. It seemed to work well today. My students left with smiles on their faces, excited to be back and looking forward to when I see them next. I hope you took time out for your own well-being, to spend time with friends and family, to engage with some guilty-pleasure reading, get housework done, gardening or whatever it is that you do to relax and disengage with teaching for a few moments. “I’m a minimalist. I don’t really need much to enjoy a good holiday – just my family and the bare essentials.” – Attributed to Jean Reno Today is the last day of term for me, and what a term it has been. We have had Education Week Open Day, Book Week Character Parade, the 2016 Kindergarten Transition process has started, Peer Support Training for Year Six and Peer Support Groups on Thursday afternoons, various sporting teams have competed in their respective knock out competitions, the Zone Athletics Carnival (from which we have had a few students progress to represent the Zone at the State Athletics Carnival), the Lip Sync Battle….it has been an incredibly busy term.
I had planned to sit and reflect on this term via this article, but I need more time to process the events, look back through my day book, re-read the articles I have published this term, and reset mentally. With that in mind, I plan, currently, to publish something during the latter half of next week. Mrs C21 and I are going away with some friends for the weekend and I will be without any internet access for the majority of the time, which will be a fantastic break. I plan to take some time to unwind, and relax until I return home and get back into planning mode. I am hoping to catch up with my friends from university during the break, as well as catchup with the Central Coast members of my PLN. I am visiting the Sydney Centre for Innovation in Learning (SCIL) to explore what their open learning spaces look like and to find out more about how they function in preparation for the move to those spaces when our school rebuild is completed, and to plan for next term. A teacher’s life is certainly not nine to three! I will be taking some time out to spend on myself and plan to get stuck into pre-season training as well, ready for refereeing again next season. Until I am back online, have a safe and happy holidays. “I know what I have given you… I do not know what you have received.” – Attributed to Antonio Porchia Some time ago I was contacted by Allison, co-administrator of the @amuseEd Twitter account and asked if I was interested taking a slot as host of the RoCur Twitter account, @EduTweetOz. I was rather interested. I had followed the account with my own Twitter account some time prior and found the concept very interesting. Some hosts appealed to me more than others, and there were some great conversations that I had participated in due to the host of the time sparking my interest with something. Indeed, a conversation one weekend around initial teacher education (ITE) sparked a five-part blog series (Part One can be found here). I have grown my own Professional Learning Network (PLN) immensely as a result of the conversations initiated by various account hosts, and been challenged, inspired and motivated to continue to push myself to develop as a teacher. I was rather fearful, however, of a few things. Firstly, Dr Inger Mewburn (@thesiswhisperer) published an article in 2011 (though I am sure I recall reading one more recently, but was unable to find it) that made mention of something I felt in relation to hosting the account: Fear of being ‘found out’ as fraud, not really knowing enough/being smart enough to be Phd student (@orientalhotel) Though the quote above is specifically in relation to being a PhD student, I felt this way about hosting the account. As a teacher in my first year out of university, I did not believe that I had enough knowledge or experience to be qualified to host the account. This was in spite of believing that I would be able to generate some interesting conversations. I was also concerned that I would put something out there that would turn out to be completely wrong. My other concern was time management. I was not entirely sure that I had the time I felt that hosting the account would require to give it ‘a proper go.’
I spent some time chatting with Allison about my concerns and though I was still unsure, I very much felt like an imposter, and we worked out a timing. As I am attending OzFlipCon15 in October, I wanted to try and get in a week prior to that, in order to generate some discussion about Flipped Learning, and potentially network with some other attendees. Despite my concerns, I genuinely enjoyed the experience of hosting the EduTweetOz account. There were some excellent conversations, and it was interesting hearing about peoples concerns surrounding Flipped Learning. I made a number of new connections through the various conversations that I engaged with and my blog had one of its busiest weeks ever. My concern about time should, perhaps, have been about time management, and not investing too much time, to the potential detriment of other responsibilities and relationships. Mrs C21 (semi-jokingly) commented to me on the opening Sunday night that my week of hosting began “so, I’ll see you next weekend.” I do have a tendency to get fully invested in projects, and become somewhat oblivious to things going on around me, and I very much did that whilst I hosted. One thing which I had not anticipated was the speed at which the EduTweetOz feed would move. To read something which had been linked to, and then come back to either favourite or retweet it, I would need to open the specific Tweet; and there were a number of occasions where I went to favourite or retweet something, only to have the feed move and I ended up doing so to a completely different Tweet. I enjoyed being able to engage with a wider range of educators than I otherwise have access to through my own PLN, and the array of ideas that comes with such a large PLN. I was also able to showcase some of the learning that my students had been doing and build the connections with my Classroom Twitter account, @MrEmsClass. I will admit that I was mentally drained by the end of the week, and achieved very little that weekend that was on my to do list, That said, I thoroughly enjoyed the week and feel that the benefits of connecting with such a wide array of educators, engaging with a variety of conversations topics, and growing my own PLN far outweigh the minor inconveniences. I did make sure that I cooked an amazing dinner for Mrs C21 at the conclusion of my time as host though, to thank her for her understanding of my need to invest a significant amount of time in the experience. If you are unsure whether or not you want to host, i would definitely recommend it as a worthwhile experience. “Google can bring you back 100,000 answers. A librarian can bring you back the right one.” ― Attributed to Neil Gaiman Last week I published two articles (here and here) talking about how I planned to explicitly introduce students to the internet, and address misconceptions to ensure that they were all on the same page when it came to understanding the fundamentals of using the internet. I recently delivered the first lesson in the unit to a Year Four class and it went somewhere between poorly and average and was a good way of reminding me that I am not as good or as experienced as I sometimes think that I think I am due to how comfortable and settled I am in the school. I still firmly believe that the Google Search Engine Lesson Plans (GSELP) are valuable resources, but I think that I need to find a way of resetting my expectations as I move between classes. Being the RFF teacher is a difficult position, moving from class to class and age group to age group, I still get caught out on a semi-regular basis expecting too much of younger students, having just had Stage Three, or, as happened today, going from having Kindergarten to Year Four and adjusting my expectation back up, but adjusting them too far and still expecting too much. Looking at it now, I structured the lesson poorly and I am fortunate that the students in this class are, on the whole very polite with only a few overly exuberant students. I had the students work through a series of questions to get an understanding of their preconceptions about the internet, writing them down, and then used a class discussion to bring it together, which showed some interesting thoughts from students: After completing the Padlet, I then went through the presentation that had been put together, after getting students to stand up and stretch and move around. I think that I had effectively lost them by this point and It was not until we got to the Kahoot that I had put together as a summative learning that they perked back up and re-engaged, but it demonstrated that they had not understood what we had discussed, as many of their answers were incorrect.. I have more Stage Two classes tomorrow (as I write this) and I will deliver the lesson very differently to those classes. Just because I am the teacher does not mean I get it right all the time. I just need to be sure that I learn the lesson and get it right the next time.
Tomorrow will be introductory video first, then a slow work through of the questions one at a time, with students identifying their own pre-conceptions and then class discussion and explanation of the meaning before moving onto the subsequent question. I feel that this approach will be more effective and result in the students understanding the concepts more than my students did today. “Try to learn something about everything and everything about something.” – Attributed to Thomas Huxley This video introduces some of the features and ways in which Google Docs can be utilised in the classroom. As always, feel free to ask questions. To watch any other FTPL videos, you can either click here for the playlists, or here for the list of articles “Research is formalized curiosity. It is poking and prying with a purpose.” – Attributed to Zora Neale Hurston When I was asked to take on my current role, I was told that I would be responsible for teaching computer skills and research skills, two sets of skills which contain a vast and diverse array of sub-skills. Due to the vagaries of disruptions to school timetables, I am at slightly different points in my program with each class and while I have moved onto the research skills component of my program with two of my Stage Three classes, but will not be able to do the same with my other two Stage Three classes. The skill of taking high-quality notes is valuable, both for students (at primary, secondary and tertiary levels) and for the everyday person, requires critical thinking, the ability to understand and summarise, and is a critically important skill for any research, whether academic or social in nature. Yet it is, inexplicably, a skill which we do not often explicitly teach to our students. I will be spending the remainder of this term and some of next term filling this gap. I will be spending time teaching students how to summarise and synthesise information into useful notes, how to organise their notes, different strategies and when they might be useful using a variety of pedagogical practices and text types. All Stage Three teachers are conducting a unit of learning with their class around the Murray-Darling, and as a way of connecting the concepts and skills that I want their/my students to learn with what they are learning in their own classroom, I am going to utilise the Mekong River as a vehicle for learning about, practising and using the various research skills including note-taking, referencing and synthesis and understanding the various concepts including credibility, reliability and validity, which are also important skills for digital literacy. I am utilising the Mekong River for a few reasons. There are some striking similarities between Australia’s Murray-Darling River and South-East Asia’s Mekong River. Both play or have played a significant role in local trade and lifestyle at differing points along their lengths. Both have been seen as a resource for life, for money, for travel and both river systems are paying the price. Along with that aspect, this is an opportunity to expose my students to a range of Asian cultures and perspectives, a Cross-Curriculum priority under the current National Curriculum which they otherwise would not necessarily have an opportunity experience. As part of this I will be using a range of text-types, including documentaries about various aspects of the Mekong and the cultures along its length, showing the differences and similarities between the Murray-Darling and Mekong Rivers. Finally, it allows me to connect the skills and concepts with what students are already learning about without subjecting students to hearing the same thing multiple times, both in their teacher’s classroom and then with me, which is not fair on the students, and would create issues for me around classroom management that can be avoided by simply not making those pedagogical choices. One of the pedagogical choices that I have made regarding this unit of learning is to utilise Twitter as a way for my students to crystallise what they are learning and understanding, by giving them the opportunity to make a Tweet via my Teaching Twitter account @MrEmsClass, and already, some students have taken the opportunity, and have been quite excited by being able, to Tweet about what they have learned, such as Tahlia: Thank you for reading, and as always I would appreciate hearing people’s thoughts on this topic, particularly anyone who has set out to explicitly teach research skills in the classroom to Stage Three students, or to Stage Two students, whom I hope to begin the topic with in Term Four. If you are interested in what we are learning in the class, feel free to follow my teaching Twitter account, or search the hashtags #PCPS #notetaking or#researchskills “The Internet: transforming society and shaping the future through chat. “ – Attributed to Dave Barry Yesterday I wrote an article about how I had begun to explicitly teach my Stage Two students about the internet, some of the terminology they will hear, how to get the most out of doing searches and some other fundamental skills. Whilst doing some research for the unit of learning I am beginning with my Stage Three students last night, I stumbled across a resource that will make teaching my Stage Two students about the internet a great deal easier than it otherwise might be. Google has a series of Basic Search Education Lesson Plans broken into three modules, each with three lessons as seen in the image below: This series of lessons is nicely constructed and affords the opportunity to discuss some ideas that I had not even considered, including the very first part of lesson one; asking the students what a browser is. Whilst, yes, there is the presumption that all students are digital natives, and it is true in so far as they are born into a world where digital devices and technology are largely ubiquitous, in regards to their level of familiarity and ability with those same devices, there is a vast array of ability and comfort levels. It is not just those of the older generations who hold some fears of technology. Having spent some time reviewing the lessons, I think they are a very good fit for my students and a good starting point and will be using them, in conjunction with formative and summative assessment to check for my students’ pre-knowledge and misconceptions using a Kahoot quiz that I have generated based on the lesson. This is one of the things that I love about teaching now, as opposed to teaching twenty years ago; the internet makes the process of finding resources more efficient, and allows me to draw from a more diverse range of activities than my colleagues in decades past have had access to. “Getting information off the Internet is like taking a drink from a fire hydrant.” -Attributed to Mitchell Kapor I have spent a significant amount of time with Stage Two teaching them some computer fundamentals such as opening and closing programs and files, saving, renaming, searching for files, keyboard shortcuts that are considered ubiquitous such as cut/copy/paste and I felt that it was time move on. I want to begin to explore the internet with them, as part of the ongoing discussion about digital citizenship and online safety, but also to give them the fundamentals about how to use the internet. Despite the oft-used title of digital natives, its is my experience thus far that many students are most certainly not digital natives.
Accordingly today I spent some time going through the basics of understanding the different components of an internet browser, such as opening a new tab, a new window, the difference between a search bar in a search engine and the URL/Address bar, also known as the Omnibox. I had students do a search relating to a particular topic they are learning about with their classroom teacher at the moment (so far I have had classes tell me Australian National Parks or Australian pre-history; as in the exploration and discovery of Australia prior to English settlement). As part of that we have also talked about the various search features of Google such as the search tools for the different search options. This has included a brief overview of how to refine an image search to show those labelled for noncommercial reuse, refining a web search by year, a book search by document type etc. I have also had a few teacher aides in the room at different types and they have indicated that they also have learned things through the lesson, which is another benefit. I feel like it is a good investment in time to ensure that the students in this age group have some of these fundamental computer skills as these basics of digital literacy will be assumed knowledge as they progress through their education “Everyone should know how to program a computer because it teaches you how to think.” – Attributed to Steve Jobs On Wednesday’s I have two of my four Stage Three classes, and last Wednesday (September 2nd) I had one of them that consisted of only seven students. Three were absent, four were at a School Leaders Day and the others were at a robotics training day. When their class teacher advised me of this, I knew this was a perfect opportunity to experiment with some coding. One of the apps on the school app list is Hopscotch, an app that teaches users to code in order to create a variety of games, simulations and anything else their imaginations and coding skills can come up with. With only seven students in the classroom it did not seem a valuable use of time to give those students the lesson I had been planning, given that more than half the class was not present. Knowing that those at the robotics day would be leading the class in robotics design and coding over the coming weeks and also being aware that Stage Three had not done any coding up to this point, I decided that it would be the perfect opportunity to give the students I had an open time to experiment with Hopscotch. I asked them to experiment and see what they could create, to watch whatever tutorial videos they could access within the app, which seem to be plentiful, and the students found a seat, and were engaged immediately. They were problem solving; one student identified that the instructions in a tutorial video she had just watched were not quite right, based upon the results, and was able to identify the correct coding to use to correct the error, they were collaborating, helping each other with ideas, problems and solutions and they had fun. We spent fifteen minutes at the end talking about what they had learned, the challenges they faced and how they overcame those challenges as well as giving them a chance to show off what they had created with their new coding skills. I also asked them to Tweet, via my Classroom Teacher account@MrEmsClass, something that they had learned. I felt that this would give them an opportunity to take some ownership over their learning as well as force them to crystallise their thinking into something concrete, a task which they seemed to genuinely enjoy. I include below some videos of their various creations which I have hosted via my YouTube Channel
I would love to hear from anyone else who is doing coding, and whether they have used Hopscotch or something different. As always, thank you for reading. “Live as if you were to die tomorrow. Learn as if you were to live forever.” – Attributed to Mahatma Gandhi Today I will be posting the next two videos in the FTPL series to make up for not having posted anything for the last few weeks due to various reasons. The videos provide you with a walk through of the main functions of Google Drive. As always, remember that you can pause and rewind as often as you need to whilst watching. If you have missed the previous articles in the FTPL series, you can find them here.
For the next week I will be running the Australian @EduTweetOz account, a RoCur (rotating curation) account featuring a different educator each week. Each week the EduTweetOz blog posts an introductory interview to allow users to get to know the new host. Rather then simply re-post it, I thought I would add in some links to various resources. Introducing this week’s @EduTweetOz host, Brendan MitchellPlease tell us a little about your background in education. Why did you decide to become involved in education? What are some of the roles you’ve had and what does your current role involve? I am a new graduate teacher in my first year out from university. I completed a B. Teach (Primary) / B. Arts with Hons Class I in Teaching through the University of Newcastle’s Ourimbah (Central Coast) campus in 2014. I did the rounds of visiting schools to drop off my resume and meet the casual teacher coordinator at the start of the year and was picking up four to five days a week work spread across three predominant schools, with the occasional day at other schools. Whilst I was at Future Schools in March I received a call from the Deputy Principal at one of my schools, offering me a temporary position for one term, which I naturally jumped on, with the remit to teach computer and research skills. The contract was eventually extended through to the end of 2015, and I am absolutely loving it. The position is technically that of Teacher-Librarian, however due to a large-scale building project at the school (all eleven demountable buildings will be gone by the end of it! Yay!) The library, though still there, is not operational for borrowing purposes. My position is an RFF position, and is Monday to Thursday, and I see all classes from K-6 in the school, barring those classes with their library sessions scheduled on Friday (those sessions are handled by the other RFF teachers). I am at various points in my program, and a long way behind where I wanted to be (being fresh and naive I had planned about a years worth of learning for three terms), but am happy with my students progress. With Stage Three, I am just beginning research skills, starting with note-taking; with Stage Two I am beginning to teach them about the internet and how to use it and what different things are called in an effort to clear up a lot of misconceptions they seem to hold; while with Early Stage One and Stage One, I am working on improving their ability to type and understand how to use features like spell check, how to save/open/close files and programs. As to why I became involved in education, I have written a blog article on that topic, and to quote from that article: “I teach for two reasons. I had two amazing male teachers in my own primary education. Both were strong men whom I looked up to, as both had a strong presence, as they were encouraging of my strengths and chiding of my weaknesses, pushing me to work on them. They were men who were able to work with all of my peers, challenging each of us at our own academic level. And though it wasn’t intentionally written that way, upon watching a recording of my delivery of the Graduate Address at my Graduation in July, I realised that it articulates, slightly differently, why I teach.
Who or what keeps you inspired and motivated in your work? Given where I am in my career trajectory, I am still fresh-faced, keen, naive, and excited to be earning a living for doing something that I enjoy. I have also been told in no uncertain terms that after four years of not having an income that I will be enjoying the education system for a few years to come! That aside, it’s seeing the look on a students face when the dots connect, of seeing those students who struggle with the little things have success, of being able to get kids excited about learning. I am blessed to have some highly experienced, and still engaged and passionate teachers in my school whom I look to as mentors and their passion and willingness to try new things is something that I find motivating and inspirational. There are also a handful of younger teachers who went into teaching straight out of high school, and I find their experience and energy infectious and motivating. I also enjoy watching Kid President’s Pep Talk on those days when I feel tired and lethargic as there is something quietly motivating about him. What do you see as some of the biggest rewards and challenges for people working in education today? The biggest reward is seeing a student move from saying “I have no idea”through to being able to show others how to do something, or confidently explain it to you. The feeling of pride at seeing the growth is almost intoxicating when it happens. The biggest challenge I think is time. There is so little time and so much to do. More and more social and moral responsibility seems to be pushed onto teachers as being our job when much of it should be the responsibility of parents. The other challenge I see is inequity and that is a societal issue that needs greater focus. If you had the ability to make changes to the education system in Australia, what would you do? I think I would ensure that those making the decisions had current teachers giving the advice. A panel of teachers, nominated by teachers as being experts in the various education sectors, providing advice for a (two/three/four) year period before returning to the classroom and making way for the next rotation. I can’t take seriously the comments of Mr Pyne or Mr Donnelly when they either ignore or cherry-pick research to suit their agenda. What role do you see EduTweetOz playing on the education scene in Australia and what are your hopes for the account this week? A very interesting question given some of the conversations that happened during the #satchatoc chat on Saturday (5th Sept) morning. @EduTweetOz provides an opportunity for someone like me, fresh out of university, keen and bright-eyed and naive to the politics of funding and professional development hierachies an opportunity connect with other teachers, both like-minded and not, and learn from their experiences, their ideas, their mistakes. The phrase learning any time, anywhere very much comes to mind, and I see EduTweetOz as a focal point for new Tweachers to join the online PLN. This week, I would like to explore the topic of Flipped Learning, hear what peoples conceptions, fears, thoughts, ideas and experiences are about the topic. It is a pedagogical practice I only learned about last year and have been keen to follow up on. I attended a Flipped Learning master class with pioneer Jon Bergmann (@jonbergmann) at the FutureSchools Conference, and am attending #FlipConAus15 on the Gold Coast in October and am excited to hear and learn from those who are putting it into practice. I would also appreciate hearing from anyone who has or is teaching digital literacy and digital citizenship concepts and skills to students and the pedagogical practices and tools used to do that, particularly the incredibly complex concept of copyright/piracy. Is there anything else you would like to add? If you want to connect with my in the classroom, I utilise @MrEmsClass to tweet with my various classes and connect with other classrooms, whilst I use my @C21_Teaching account for personal/professional Tweeting. I’m looking forward to an exciting week and lots of learning. “There’s nothing better when something comes and hits you and you think ‘YES’!” – Attributed to J.K. Rowling From time to time in life, you experience an epiphany, that moment where the light bulb suddenly turns on and you get it, whatever ‘it’ is. I had this earlier in the week midway through a lesson with around note-taking with some Stage Three students, when I noticed they were struggling with the task that I had asked them to complete. I was attempting to discern where I had let the students down; was the task too difficult, had I not explained things clearly, and I suddenly realised that I had completely failed to model the task for them.
I am not sure how it happened, but upon reflecting back over the last few days of lessons I realised that I had done this a few times and that it was becoming something of a habit. I am working on breaking that habit, and have redone that session with the classes affected, and it has gone much smoother. I am still working on getting the flow smoothed out, as I am not particularly happy with that aspect of the session, but it is a work in progress. I went through the session in question with a Stage Three class this afternoon, and I am reasonably happy with how that went. I think that I have found a balance between talking and doing, and the engagement reflected that, as did their responses at the end of the session as we reflected on the learning. On that note, I found it interesting how excited they got when I explained that they were going to decide on the top three ideas they had learned that session and post them on my classroom Twitter account. Students discussed what they thought were the three important ideas from the session, and then I asked a student to Tweet that idea out. When the first student hit the Tweet button for the first one, the room erupted into cheers and applause. Will they remember that session? Will they remember the ideas? I hope yes to both, and I will check with them next week when I see them if they remember what we talked about. Thank you for reading, and if you are using Twitter in the classroom, please follow me using your classroom account, and I will follow back. I would love to make some connections nationally and internationally with other classes as a vehicle for talking about global issues, digital citizenship and other topics. “Make it a habit to tell people thank you. To express your appreciation, sincerely and without the expectation of anything in return. Truly appreciate those around you, and you’ll soon find many others around you. Truly appreciate life, and you’ll find that you have more of it.” – Attributed to Ralph Marston A fair bit has changed since I last posted an article. I have spent the year traipsing from class to class, pushing the trolley of laptops before me; have trolley, will travel was the mantra for a while. Due to the school rebuild that is happening, classes have been shifted around in order for demountable buildings to be moved to new positions according to the structure required to allow the work to take place, and the most recent shift meant that library was no longer being utilised as a classroom, nor will it be used as a classroom again until, it looks like, mid-way through Term Four. To that end, I have decided to utilise it as a home base for as long as I am able to do so. I spent all of last Tuesday, and a significant portion of last Wednesday getting it organised into some semblance of usefulness. It had been used as a classroom by a total of five classes prior to me, two of which were unexpected due to the storm damage the school suffered at the beginning of Term Two this year, and accordingly, the library was quite a mess. I put my primary students to work getting things arranged, tidying the books back up returning resources and books that belonged to the teachers who had been in here previously and getting things usable.Today when I had those same classes, the first thing that I did was thank them and tell them how much I appreciated their efforts last week, and they way they got stuck into the tasks without any grumbling, with a genuine willingness to help. This week is the The Children’s Book Council of Australia Book Week, and there are a variety of activities going on this week to celebrate that. Along with the traditional Book Parade, which I am looking forward to dressing up for on Thursday (photos to come!), teachers are volunteering ten minute blocks to read from their favourite children’s book to any students who wish to hear, which has been quite popular thus far and the Premiers Reading Challenge has just concluded, with many students in the school reading more than normal. I look forward to returning to more regular posting, and will return with a new gratitude challenge article last this evening, and my more regular articles from tomorrow afternoon. “Technology is just a tool. In terms of getting the kids working together and motivating them, the teacher is the most important. ” -Attributed to Bill Gates The NMC Horizon report has been around since 2004, published by the New Media Consortium (NMC) which is a community of hundreds of leading universities, colleges, museums, and research centers. The NMC stimulates and furthers the exploration and use of new media and technologies for learning and creative expression. Its purpose is to provide an overview as to what is on the near, medium and far horizon in regards to trends in the education sector, and is broken into three sections; they key trends, significant challenges and important developments in educational technology. Each year, the report is prefaced by something similar to the below (which has been pulled from this years Report. What is on the five-year horizon for K-12 schools worldwide? Which trends and technologies will drive educational change? What are the challenges that we consider as solvable or difficult to overcome, and how can we strategise effective solutions? These questions and similar inquiries regarding technology adoption and transforming teaching and learning steered the collaborative research and discussions of a body of 56 experts to produce the NMC Horizon Report > 2015 K-12 Edition, in partnership with the Consortium for School Networking (CoSN). The NMC also gratefully acknowledges ISTE as a dissemination partner. The three key sections of this report — key trends, significant challenges, and important developments in educational technology — constitute a reference and straightforward technology planning guide for educators, school leaders, administrators, policymakers, and technologists. It is our hope that this research will help to inform the choices that institutions are making about technology to improve, support, or extend teaching, learning, and creative inquiry in K-12 education across the globe. View the wiki where the work was produced. The 2015 NMC Horizon Report K-12 is now out, and as always provides for some interesting reading. To download the full report (free), please click here. If you are disinclined to read the full report, I have included below the summary video that has been released to provide an overview f the findings in this years edition of the K-12 NMC Horizon Report. I would encourage you to at least watch the summary video, if not read the report, and I would very much like to hear your thoughts on it. This is not just for those working within the education sector. I believe that awareness of these issues will be important for parents as they think about where they want to send their children to school over the next decade as each of the areas identified in the report come to fruition. An interesting and relatively easy to understand graphic is included on page two of the report, which I have included below. In regards to the developments in technology, I can easily see the predicted timelines playing out, as many schools have already joined the vast number of early BYOD adopters, with my own school in the process of adopting it.Makerspaces are also something that has seen a large number of early adopters both within Australia and internationally. 3D printing, which is shown in the mid-term adoption frame is on the cusp, with a small number of schools already on board (including one which I wrote about here as part of my review of the FutureSchools Conference back in March) while Adaptive Learning Technologies is something that I have heard discussed, but not in any detail. The two far term developments are thing that I would expect to be seeing in a few classrooms dotted around the world in the next two years, with widespread adoption over the next two years. The challenges that are listed up the left hand side are thing that will play a large role in determining the success or not of the implementation of the various technologies in the classroom and those issues will play out across the next few elections at State and Federal levels, with the politicians blithely promising the world and providing crumbs. They will also play out in the conversations that are held in school staff rooms around the world, as the culture of the school will play a part in whether or not various technologies are picked up and tried out, or fully implemented. I would very much like to hear what my readers think on this topic, as the use of technology in the classroom is something that I strongly believe is not going to go away, as technology becomes ubiquitous in our daily lives both at home and at work, and we need to ensure that our children are equipped to be responsible and respectful digital citizens as much as we work to ensure they are the same in the non-digital world. “Once you’re halfway home, you know that you can probably get the rest of the way there. -Attributed to Janis Ian Today is Wednesday of Week Five which means we are halfway through the current term, and that many teachers are silently cheering that they are now on the homeward stretch. There is no small amount of tiredness and fatigue this term, as many teachers find themselves staggering under the burdens laid upon them by all of the additional extras that are currently the expected norm in the teaching profession. The after school meetings, the various clubs and groups that run during lunchtimes, the various intra- and inter-school competitions all take valuable time from a teacher’s day and add varying levels of stress and work to a teacher’s already busy and crowded timetable.
Personally, I am find myself alternating between incredibly tired and worn out and strongly motivated and energetic. On the one hand I am really happy with the progress that some of my students have made this term, particularly in infants, where we have been focusing on some fundamental computer skills, particularly typing skills. The self-efficacy that various students are showing now when compared to the beginning of term two, or even the beginning of term three, is vastly improved. In stark contrast with that, I feel like, in many ways, I am taking two steps backwards for every one I take forwards. I feel like I have not achieved anything this term, and this is backed up when I look at my program. However, I have spent a significant amount of time working on some fundamental computer skills which I identified as lacking in my primary students, and have needed to devote a significant amount of time to working on those skills, as they are part of the foundation of digital literacy. In that frame of mind, I feel like it has been a valuable investment in time for the long-term result, which I likely will not see, particularly for my Stage Three students. it is a reminder of the oft-quoted remark by German military strategist Helmuth von Moltke, which is that “No battle plan survives contact with the enemy” which can be converted, I believe, into “no teacher’s program survives the term unchanged.” There are also a large number of interruptions in the coming weeks, with Book Week (which I do in fact enjoy and have already organised my costume for the book parade), the zone athletics carnival, Infants athletics carnival, Father’s Day stalls, and the swim program for Year Two and Three students which spreads across two weeks. Looking at what is left to cover in my program this term and comparing that to the amount of teaching time I will have access to with the various interruptions, I do not think that I can complete my program for this term without sacrificing the attainment of conceptual understanding and deep learning by my students, a compromise I do not want to make. This program was also my first, and I was aware going into it that I was perhaps biting off more than I could chew in regards to what I set out to achieve. I do need to sit down and update my program with the various changes that I have made, and notes of what did and did not work in various portions of the program. I would very much like to hear how you manage your program and keep it up to date with what changes and modifications you have had to make, both impromptu and planned. “People don’t buy what you do, they buy why you do it.” – Simon Sinek Last year I wrote two articles examining the SAMR model (part one, part two) where I wrote, rather naively, about what I understood the SAMR model to be and how it could be implemented within schools. Yesterday I received a tweet from a fellow teacher and Twitterer, Aaron Davis (@mrkrndvs) with a link to an article that he had written, Did someone say…SAMR. The article prompted a proverbial dive down the rabbit hole, as I read through a few additional articles linked within his original article, and also watched a very interesting TEDTalk by Simon Sinek. I would rather you read through Aaron’s article yourself, and I will not be posting a recap here of it, as I believe it to be an important article for anyone who considers themselves au fait with technology in the classroom as it may change the way you think about the way it is used, and more importantly, the why of its use. Also within Aaron’s article are a number of other variations on SAMR and models for thinking about why technology is used in the classroom, which are well worth examining in their own right. In addition to the article, I would encourage you to read the article that Aaron wrote regarding Simon Sinek’s TEDTalk, which can be found here.. The video included the video of Simon Sinek’s TEDTalk here. An interesting article to read in tandem with Aaron’s is An End to “21st Century” Learning Tools by Richard Wells, a secondary teacher in New Zealand, which discusses the separation of digital learning and learning. Richard challenges us to stop thinking about twenty-first century learning tools and to think simply about learning tools, and to stop thinking about digital learning tools with modern learning technologies and instead to think about learning tools with learning technologies. “Once you stop learning, you start dying.” – Attributed to Alfred Einstein. This second session of FTPL demonstrates The primary method of accessing the suite of Google Apps for Education (GAFE) through the Department of Education Portal, as well as the secondary method, directly through Google Drive. For the full list of FTPL videos, please click here. As my regular readers would be aware, I have been utilising a short burst of creative writing, called quick writing to provide my students a more engaging way of practicing their typing skills. The students have been overwhelmingly enjoying the time. I have been trying to find a way to make it a more rigorous learning opportunity and to encourage them to improve their creative writing as well as their typing.
I had begun to provide four images as options, to allow for those students who did not connect with the initial image that was provided, and this has helped a number of students engage with the process and enable them to write more than they had previously, and those students whom are more advanced writers have an opportunity to extend themselves, through the challenge of connecting two or more of the images. What I have been noticing with the writing that students have been doing is that although they are writing at length, their output is quite surface-level, with very little detail enabling the reader to visualise the scene they are writing about. The engagement of the students has created a situation where I have been able to sit and join them in completing some creative writing, something which I have not done in a great while, and have missed. Yesterday I listened to a few of the students read their writing out, as I have been doing, and decided to model to them what I meant when I have been asking them to provide more detail in their writing, and read out a few paragraphs of what I had written. Having done so, I asked the class if they could visualise the scene in their heads, and then we had a discussion about the use of language to paint a picture for the reader, and how the use of language can play a role in determining the interest level of the reader. The challenge was then put back onto the students to revise their writing, to use their language to paint a picture of the scene and the characters they were describing. For a number of them, it was a light bulb moment, and they immediately dove back into their writing to improve it, and I hope that this segue will pay off in the long run with higher quality writing. The other challenge I laid down for them was to remove the boring words, such as said with more interesting vocabulary, and we had a brief discussion about how to find more interesting vocabulary. Thank you for reading, as always, and I would like to hear from anyone about how you have encouraged students to make their writing more interesting and more visual, while removing the boring words. “Success is not built on success. It’s built on failure. It’s built on frustration. Sometimes its built on catastrophe.” – Attributed to Sumner Redstone Sometime as a teacher you decide to try something different from the norm. On occasion it will work, but just as often it does not. Yesterday afternoon I had a Stage Three class for the final hour of the day, straight after recess. The class teacher asked me to give his class fifteen minutes to work on their spelling as they had run out of time before going to recess to get to it, which was fine.
Tuesday afternoon is note day in our school, and I have gotten into the habit of having the notes given out as soon as they arrive, so students put them straight into their bags so that neither they or I forget to hand them out. This works well, and only takes a few minutes. In this particular classroom, packing up the room for the end of the day involves all the chairs being stacked over to one side of the room, and the desks over on the other, the process of which takes some five to ten minutes depending on how messy the room is according to what we have been doing. I decided, yesterday afternoon, to try changing the order around, and had the class pack up the room for the end of the day before we began the learning activities I wanted them to do for the day. I gave the students the time as requested, handed out the notes and then had them pack up the room and return to the floor so I could give out the next set of instructions. The class had already started the work set by their class teacher when I arrived at the start of the session, and so I had not had an opportunity to have a conversation with them as a group. Not having seen them since the announcement of the Stage Three Lip Sync Battle, I asked for a general show of hands for who was going to, or who had, entered, to bring the class in after they had packed up the room for the end of the day. I am astounded at the level of excitement about the competition. Of the class of thirty, only two or three students are not entering the competition, and many are entering in both the individual and the group categories. On top of that, where I was expecting that students would be using only recent songs that they knew, there is, going from the discussion, going to be a broad range of both newer and older songs, with some students indicating they are planning on using songs from the eighties and nineties. This, while engaging the students and getting them excited about their songs, it left us with only about ten minutes in the day by the time I was able to draw them back in. The learning for me from this is that bringing up something that will get them as excited as the prospect of the Lip Sync Battle should actually be left for a conversation at the end of the session, not at the beginning to draw them in. That said, packing up the room for the end of the day before beginning the learning, in this particular class, works quite well, as we can go through right to the bell with students able to simply put their iPads in their school bags and leave, as everything else has already been packed up. “I believe arts education in music, theatre, dance, and the visual arts is one of the most creative ways we have to find the gold that is buried just beneath the surface. They (children) have an enthusiasm for life a spark of creativity, and vivid imaginations that need training – training that prepares them to become confident young men and women.” – Richard W. Riley, Former US Secretary of Education Wikipedia describes the origins of Lip Sync Battle as a spin off from a segment on the Late Night with Jimmy Fallon Show, based off an idea hatched initially by Stephen Merchant , and which Jimmy Fallon then developed into a regular segment wherein himself and one or two celebrities, depending on the night, would lip sync two songs each, without knowing the sings that the other had chosen, with the crowd determining who ‘won’ the lip sync battle. The segment was developed into a weekly TV show in its own right, and has been quite popular in many countries where it has aired. I have been watching it and wishing that I had a class of my own so that I could bring Lip Sync Battle into the class, as there are a number of skills within Lip Sync Battle that make it a useful alternative vehicle for teaching particular skills and concepts as well as improving students’ self-efficacy. The competitors, as they are lip syncing, express the emotion and energy of the song through their body language, facial expressions and their energy, which are all skills taught through the creative arts strand of drama. Competitors also need strong resilience and self-efficacy to put themselves up in front of peers and lip sync, which are both key characteristics for getting through life in modern society. There are music skills involved, as the competitor needs to know the lyrics and timing of the song in order to successfully and realistically lip sync it, as well as have an understanding of the timbre of the music as that will influence their body language and facial expressions. A conversation with one of my colleagues last week has created a situation where we will be running a Lip Sync Battle for our Stage Three students in a range of categories; Battle of the Sexes (boys v girls), Individual Championship, Age Before Wisdom (Year Five v Year Six), and the option for a Team Event if there is sufficient interest. I would also like to see a Teacher Competition but I am not sure whether that will happen or not. We showed the below trailer to Stage Three students on Friday (July 31) to generate some interest, with the promise that more information would be forthcoming. Rather than have every battle as a live version, the first round of battles will be pre-recorded videos that have been submitted. All performances will be recorded, and if students give their permission and have publishing permissions, then their video will be uploaded to YouTube. I will utilise the hashtag #PCPSLipSyncBattle on any videos or tweets that I make for this competition. I would love to hear from you if you are doing something similar with your class, or even across the Stage group or the school, what the reaction has been from students and teachers and the wins and difficulties you have faced.
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