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In this Flipped Teacher Professional Learning video, I show you how to ensure that comments are included when you force a copy to be made people click on a Google Doc link. If you missed the video on how to force the copy of a GDoc, you can view it here. For more FTPL videos, click here.
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"What if, instead of avoiding social media in school altogether or focusing solely on the negative aspects, we teach students how to leverage it to connect in positive ways and build a digital footprint that reflects their best selves..." - Susan M. Bearden Digital Citizenship and how to teach our students to be careful, critical, and safe users of the internet is a hot topic at the moment, particularly in the wake of the tragic suicide of Dolly Everett here in Australia. How do we tackle this challenge to make children realise the impact that they can have on others in this age of internet anonymity?
There are a number of resources and tools that are available and I want to outline three of those in this article. Office of the eSafety Commissioner The website of this Government Office has a range of resources, both for classroom teachers, for parents and grandparents, and for a range of online activities for children to work through. There are also links for those who are struggling with cyberbullying through social media, a link to Kids Helpline, and a link to report offensive/illegal content. If you are a parent or educator, I would recommend having a look here. The eSafety Commissioner also has active Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube pages for you to engage with. Interland Interland is a website put together by Google that gamifies four aspects of using the internet: Reality River is about awareness of the credibility of news and information, Mindful Mountain is focused on responsible sharing, Tower of Treasure targets having appropriate password and being aware of privacy settings, while Kind Kingdom is about treating others as you want to be treated. It is aimed, quite clearly at younger students, up to around eleven or Twelve years of age, perhaps a young thirteen year old. The games themselves can be a bit clunky, but it is a reasonable resource to utilise for primary-aged students to encourage awareness of these concepts. There are teacher resources to go with the games (available here) and it is worth checking out to help you get started with considering how to teach these concepts. TeachHub Jacqui Murray wrote an article for TeachHub outlining the specific topics that she sees as being included in the broad category of digital citizenship (nineteen topics in all!), but then also breaks down an easy to follow suggestion for when and how to introduce these different concepts to our students, starting with Kindergarten and moving forwards from there. Links to different resources used with different ages students are included throughout. The subject of digital citizenship is not going to go away, and simply banning phones and other devices from our children is a strategy akin to sticking our heads in the sand - the world is not going away and doing that sets our students up for failure when they do leave us as adults. Realistically, whatever we are trying to shield them from, they are likely seeing or hearing with their friends. We should be proactive and work with our children from the beginning to understand how to be responsible online just as we do to teach them to be responsible off-line. We also need to stop referring to off-line as the real world. Online is as real world as off-line, the impacts are just as real, the friendships and social networks are just as real as those in the offline world. In this Flipped Teacher Professional Learning video, I show you a tool that I can see being useful and fun with Geography and Visual Arts where yo draw a line on the screen and the program matches it to a line of a similar trajectory from a satellite image. This could be utilised a stimulus for visual arts (I am seeing Mr Squiggle in my mind at the moment), or it could be used as a quick fire engagement task in geography with students having to identify the type of geographical formation. For more FTPL videos, please click here. In this Flipped Teacher Professional Learning video, I show you how to do a reverse image search using Google Images. This can be helpful for finding alternative sized versions of the image or determining where it came from. For more FTPL videos, please click here. In this Flipped Teacher Professional Learning video, I show you a tool that is part of the Google Maps tool, Google Maps Space. It will be useful for any units relating to space and the solar system as it provides you with easy to access imagery relating to the celestial bodies in our solar system as well as the ability to do a virtual tour of the International Space Station. For more helpful FTPL videos click here. In this Flipped Teacher Professional Learning Video, I show you useful and easy to use tool for showing students time-lapse imagery of different regions of the world. Lots of uses in history and geography across all year groups to help reinforce how the environment has changed over the last thirty or so years.. For more FTPL videos, click here. In this Flipped Teacher Professional Learning video, I show you a simple way to access a timer, whether countdown or stopwatch to use in the classroom and which can easily be displayed on the main screen. For more helpful FTPL videos, please click here. In this FTPL video, I show you how to force someone to make a copy of a document rather than simply accessing your copy. This process works for all file types within GSuite. Please note - this is not the process to have each student receive a copy of a document through GClass. For the full list of FTPL videos, please click here. In this Flipped Teacher Professional Learning video I show you how to use the Restore Previous Version feature in Google Suite to recover previous versions. This feature is great for when you discover old editing errors that you've made, or for group work where there is accidental overwriting of information. For more helpful FTPL videos, please click here. In this FTPL video I show you how simple it can be to insert images into a Google Slide deck, particularly using the inbuilt search function that highlights images labelled with permission to reuse with modification. For more FTPL videos click here. In this Flipped Teacher Professional Learning video, I demonstrate the import slides feature in GSlides. For more helpful FTPL videos, click here. In this Flipped Teacher Professional Learning video, I show you how to add columns in GSheets and then update your sum and average formulas. For more FTPL videos click here. “The methods that will most effectively minimize the ability of intruders to compromise information security are comprehensive user training and education. Enacting policies and procedures simply won't suffice. Even with oversight the policies and procedures may not be effective: my access to Motorola, Nokia, ATT, Sun depended upon the willingness of people to bypass policies and procedures that were in place for years before I compromised them successfully” - Attributed to Kevin Mitnick Disclosure: My attendance at EduTECH 2017 is through a media pass provided by the event organisers. Friday. A day of rejoicing for teachers, and a day where the attendance at the afternoon sessions of a conference dwindle as people rush to make their planes and trains home. A day where you are often able to have good quality conversations with speakers after their sessions as the crowd numbers in the afternoons are lower. Friday at EduTECH 2017 for me will begin in the School Business Management congress with a panel discussion on facility management and sustainable resourcing. This promises to be an interesting start to the morning given the vast number of capital building projects I have seen going on at a wide range of schools this year across all sectors. Following this, I will be moving to the IT Directors and Managers congress where Professor Richard Buckland of the School of Computer Science and Engineering at UNSW will be presenting on cyber-security and the challenges that school IT Directors and Managers face. There are many challenges in this area, not least of which is students who like to challenge themselves and see if they can beat the school defenses. Beyond that, there have been a wave of high profile cyber terrorist attacks this year (such as the WannaCry attack on the British NHS system reported here) and there has long been discussion of concerns around privacy of student data and the implementation of NAPLAN online. In a complete thematic shift, the Future Library congress to hear Chelsea Wright speak on VR, AR, and the future of libraries is next on my timetable. This is an area of professional interest both as a teacher and as someone working for ClickView. I have toyed with AR in the classroom using Aurasma, and have heard a range of talks on the topic before (this one, for example) and while I can see potential for it as a genuine pedagogical tool, VR/AR is just not quite there yet; either in the resource and content or in the equity of access. A mental health / writing break follows Chelsea and then it is the mid-morning break for networking before heading off to the Tertiary IT Leaders congress to hear Robert Livingstone speak on the topic of protecting data from accidental data breaches and (deliberate) cyber crime. There will be, I suspect, some parallels between this session and the earlier session with Richard Buckland and it will be very interesting to hear what advise crosses over the congress-divide and is common to both. The issue of student privacy came to the fore recently when Google was sued by the Mississippi Attorney-General over the issue and criticisms of Google's opaque privacy policy when it comes to student data (such as this article). My understanding of this situation as it pertains to NSW Government schools (correct me if I am wrong, please) is that the agreement was negotiated such that the privacy of student data is maintained as the servers are held in Australia meaning they are governed by Australian privacy law and so the issue is when teachers go out on their own limb and create their own Google Class account etc., which is then not governed by the same agreement. It promises to be an interesting discussion. The final session before the lunch break will be spent in the IT Directors and Managers congress with Michael O'Leary speaking on the current trends in eLearning. Given the nature of ClickView, this session is of professional interest; however, as a teacher who has experimented with a range of eLearning and LMS arrangements over my teaching career, it will be very interesting to find out what is currently being viewed as best practice in this space. Jared Cooney Horvath will be speaking about neuroscience and specifically, about what lessons can be taken from neuroscience and applied to education within the VET/RTO Leaders congress. I am particularly interested in this session as there has been a lot of conversation on social media in the last six months around whether or not neuroscience that has been pulled across into education does actually have a place in education or whether the results in the laboratory belong there. Given the abstract talks about memory and learning processes, I am very curious to hear where cognitive learning theory comes into play and the relationship that Jared sees it having with education. Well-being and stress is next on my timetable, with a session presented by Dr. Caroline West as part of the Workplace Learning congress. This is a phenomenally important issue in education with the annual Australian Principal Occupational Health, Safety and Wellbeing Survey results released in February 2017 indicating that instances of sleeping problems, depression, burnout, and traumatic stress among the nearly two-thirds of all School Principals who responded, are all around double the incidence of the general population, with some research, noted in this document by the University of Western Australia, indicating that "[t]eachers report the highest level of occupational stress in Australia, the United Kingdom, and America." It is an area of great need and there is arguably an impact on student learning outcomes when they have highly stressed teachers. I very much look forward to hearing this presentation. The final presentation before the closing plenary session will be in the K-12 Leaders congress with Professor Richard Telford speaking on about the cost to our children of the under-prioritisation of physical education. The abstract refers to randomised controlled trials, that holy grail of research methodology, and the evidence stemming from research of that nature. I do not think that there many teachers who would disagree that physical education receives less time than what it should, however, there are requirements to adhere to teaching times vis-a-vis how much time is dedicated to given subject areas (in NSW Government schools at least), and PE only receives two hours despite the purported health and academic benefits therein. This is another session that I am looking forward to as the growing issues around obesity are going to cause significant problems for our country's economy in the future unless we arrest the issue now. The remaining sessions are back in the plenary setting with presentations from Philip Heath and Jan Owen AM. The title of Phillip's presentation, Darkingjung Barker: a lesson in closing the education gap, very much gives me the impression that there is a focus on Aboriginal education. I am intrigue to hear about this, particularly if there are meaningful strategies that can be taken away and applied in the classroom. I have attended a staff Professional Development workshop on Indigenous Craft and embedding Indigenous culture within the curriculum which was led by an Aboriginal woman and it was genuinely fantastic, one of the most engaging professional development sessions that I have attended. She made a comment which resonated with me that (paraprhasing) the feedback she hears is that many teachers do not engage with Aboriginal culture in the classroom because they are afraid; of getting their information wrong, of offending someone, of using the cultural knowledge inappropriately. This rings true for those with whom I have spoken to and, if I am being honest, my own feelings.
Closing out proceedings is Jan Owen AM on Embracing the New Work Order. Given that the title is the same as the presentation she delivered at FutureSchools earlier this year, I suspect it will be the same content. I have reviewed that presentation here, however, I will stay for the talk to ascertain if it is different. After that, a train trip back to Gosford to see my wife and daughter and a weekend to recover from the tiring nature of EduTECH. I look forward to meeting up with you if you are going to be there (let me know on Twitter), and watch for the live-Tweeting from each session; it will, as always, fly thick and fast. I will endeavour to storify each block of sessions, as much for my own sanity as anything else, and I hope to get my articles written and published quickly while people are still talking about EduTECH. If you have missed any of the articles in the EduTECH 2017 series, you can find the full list here. “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:  Overview of Google’s Basic Search Education Lesson Plans retrieved from https://sites.google.com/site/gwebsearcheducation/lessonplans on 06/06/2015 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. |
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