One of the best workshops I attended at Ulearn during the holidays was not even directly related to technology. It was a presentation from Rose Hipkins from the NZCER, on the New Zealand Curriculum and assessment. I have been wanting to touch on a few of the issues it raises for soemtime, so here goes…

I have embedded Rose’s PPt above, which she kindly gave me permission to do. Have a good look through it as it is very good and is a nice sequel to Rachel Bolstad’s presentation in an earlier post.

The main thrust of Rose’s talk centred on how we provide coherence in curriculum design and the implications for how we assess. Much of the focus was on the key competencies which Rose sees as integral to providing the links betwen the front and back end of the curriculum. The back end of the curriculum is nothing more than a condensed version of the pervious curriculum, with AO’s relating to the different learning areas. It is the part of the curriculum that most teachers are familiar with. The front end is a totally different beast and it is here that we see the possiblity for transforming schools (especially secondary). Rose suggested that the key competencies “might be the glue” that ties these two together.

One of Rose’s major questions was one that many educators are asking – Should we assess the key competencies? In short the answer was no, but the outcomes of these comptencies might be assessed. I am in toal agreement with this – it makes little sense to try and assess the competencies themselves. Many will probably want to, but we already have too much of a focus on assessment without adding to it further. And it would be extremely difficult to asses them anyway. How do you quantifiably assess “participation” for example?

Earlier in the presentation Rose talked about how a holistic approach was need to curriculum design and that a coherent curriculum was vital. I was interested in her ideas about how this coherence might be achieved (check slide 7). At the top of the list of possibilities was ICT and how ICTs could be used to foreground an aspect of learning and/or knowledge construction, not just for information retrieval. Another that I had already considered was the use of future focussed themes, such as citizenship or sustainability. To me if you are going to build a coherent curriculum then you need to pull the learning areas together. You need to contextualise learning for the students and build this context across subjects. I am a big fan of thematic learning and I hope that more secondary schools start looking it as a way of building a relevant curriculum.

Slide 17 was an interesting one for me. It was a snapshot of the results of the NZCER’s recent engagement survey. An article featured in the Press recently commented on the same thing. What it shows is that the majority of year 9 and 10s admit to often being bored in class. This is a worrying statistic, though it doesn’t surprise me in the least. This is one of the big reasons schools need to change. If a student isn’t engaged they will find it difficult to learn. And engagement doesn’t mean they have to be entertained. Engagement is about being sucked into learning, it’s about relevance and its also about challenge. Schools need to develop a curriculum which is relevant to students and to what learning means in the 21st century – not sitting them down in rows, facing the front, and ramming content down their throats. Fortuntately many schools have already begun making this change.

Now where does assessment and NCEA sit with all this? Well first, we need to start including students in the assessment process far more. Get them assessing themselves and each other. In fact, if a student is going to become self-managing they need to be able to evaluate their own progress. I know many teachers and schools use self assessment in their programmes, but how much of it is actually meaningful? Is it a quick check-list or it a tied into their learning on an ongoing basis?

Secondly, despite much of the media and some teachers views, NCEA is not the root of all evil in secondary schools today. In fact NCEA provides enormous flexibity in assessment. Teachers are no longer tied by traditional programmes, and can provide flexible pathways for students. Unfortunately many schools haven’t grasped this opportunity, but the NZC means that it will be difficult for schools to avoid it.

NCEA shouldn’t be about rigidity, it should be about flexibiltiy. Sure, many of the standards will need to change, but that is all part of the alignment process which is going on at the moment.

As I have said before, these are exciting times, but it is up to schools to grasp the opportunity…

Yesterday I travelled to Twizel Area School to deliver the first of eleven presentations to Cantatech schools. What we are trying to achieve is to sell an idea – that is the educational possibilties of online technologies. Our main focus for that is the Cantatech Moodle site, but there are numerous web 2.0 technologies that are extremely useful for engaging learners. I (obviously) love the use of blogs and think they offer so much with so little effort.

As I said, the main focus is to introduce Moodle without going into the details. Anyone who is interested can get on and investigate, but we are saving the PD push for later.

Only half the staff were there, because of sporting trips, but it was well received and there was some excellent discussion. There is no doubt most staff are very keen to learn, but the perceived stumbling block is time . The very keen ones will find a way to learn and progress, but a significant block of school time should be put aside for learning these technologies and how they can be used to engage learners.

The English teacher had a chat with me for an hour after the presentation. He was very keen to try something new to freshen up his teaching and was keen on blogs. I suggested a few ways he could use a blog with his students and pointed him in the direction of edublogs. It will be interesting to see how he goes.

When I do a presentation I try to make it visual, with clear ideas and little text. I also enjoy using movies, because I think they can give the same message in a far more interesting way. The presentation was made using open office, but I decided to convert it to a quick movie as well. This was mainly because an embedded PPT is not going play the movies. Unfortunately I need the movie to get it under ten minutes so it fits on Youtube – so here is the embedded presentation instead.  A few movies would play at various points and the final thought came from Ken Robinson.

Anyone got some good tutorials or links for teachers new to blogging?

The highlights for me was the afternoon spent on questioning techniques. It was very thought provoking and it was good to rehearse the ‘difficult conversations’ which may come our way.

One thing I learnt about myself was that I now find it very difficult to spend extended periods (a day) sitting in the same spot doing a lot of listening. I am a very self-directed learner who enjoys finding things out for myself (with direction) and collaborating with others. Which is sort of what we are aiming for with our students these days isn’t it. Why do teachers insist on talking for so long then?

So, all in all a very worthwhile experience, but not the challenging one the PDPC people said it would be. What was great about it was how much closer together it brought all the eprincipals.

Below is one groups vision of what is means to be an eprincipal.  (A rather androgenous one at that)

On Wednesday I travelled up to my old stomping ground in Blenheim. The Marlborough ICTPD cluster was running a jumbo day in which they had all sorts of workshops running. It was good to see so much Web 2.0 stuff on offer and great people running them as well. I would have offered a workshop on elearning / web2.0 / blogging, but thet were well served in that area.

So instead Giles (one of the facilitators) asked me to do hot potatoes. I started using Hot Potatoes around 2002 and really went to town on creating all sorts of quizzes for my website at the time. While they are not what I would call high end learning, the students do love them. I don’t see the problem in using them for revision and tacked onto the end of a lesson, but I have moved away from using them over the last year or two. I would prefer my students using their creative skills than just recalling knowledge. While refreshing myself over the week I did realise that they could be used in far more creative ways than jst recall type questions, especially with the integration of movies and music.

The interesting thing was that it was one of the more popular workshops which only reinforces to me that many teachers are still stuck on knowledge recall. Mind you who can blame them when many parents and senior managers judge teachers according to exam success!

Anyway back to the workshop. The keynote speaker was Greg Gebhart, an Australian educational expert in the field of internet safety. He spoke on web2.0 technology and was thoroughly enaging. Much of it I was familiar with, but there were a few tools I hadn’t come across yet. Have a look at this page to investigate for yourself. I think it is vitually impossible to keep up with new web 2.0 technology. I can’t anyway!

Thanks to Sandy and Giles for asking me along. It was great to catch up.