And the Penny Dropped

I have been leading ICT-based INSET for my teaching colleagues now for about, erm, humpty years and its not all been plain sailing. No sirree.

As any fellow ICT Co-ordinator will know, the road to ICT literacy amongst your colleagues is, more often than not, paved with scold. OR, in other words, it can be a thankless task as expectations can be made of people in this role that are not there for anyone that teaches any other subject. French teachers are not expected to run language lessons for colleagues, nor are Technologists expected to run welding masterclasses. But the expectations for us ICT Co-ordinators is very high, something we just have to take in our stride.

Most recently I offered training in: Audacity, Podcasting, Mind mapping, Going Beyond Google and Webquests. Only to receive criticism from one colleague that my ICT training was 'completely irrelevant'! Who says Web 2.0 is alive and well in schools? Sometimes this role can be so frustrating!

But this isn't a blog post loaded with negativity. Oh no! I was reading this post on David Warlick's wonderful blog, in which he discusses the moments of 'wonder' or 'WOE! moments', as youngsters in a class he was observing were writing words using Logo, and I felt inspired to post about a similar experience I had in an INSET session a couple of weeks ago.

As Duke Special sings, its often the case that in this ultra-technological, Google-dominated, u-learning age its possible that it can 'steal your sense of wonder, innocence and flight', to the point that ICT users can become immunised to the incredible things that they can do with ICT tools. But there are still moments in which I have found the people I have worked with have been truly surprised and inspired by what they have learned.

(The dreaded) PowerPoint his widely used in my school and has been for quite some time. Nothing special there you may say - especially as it is either used mainly to create posters (because of its ease in handling images) or for linear, passive slideshows. But bear with me. I recently showed a group of Year 6 pupils how to use the drawing tools within PowerPoint and one bright spark noted that they could use this to create a mind map that they had just done with their science teacher on the subject of electricity.

I decided to show them a few further skills that I knew they'd need to know. Then, once they had created their single slides, I used the opportunity to see if they were ready to explore non-linearity.

They took to it like ducks to water - none of them realising beforehand that PowerPoint could be used in such a way. And they ran with it - producing some OUTSTANDING output.

They were so good at this, that I asked a select band to assist with my INSET on the very same topic the following week.

The next week came round and I introduced groups of colleagues to the concept of mind mapping (of course the term 'mind map' is now a registered trademark of Tony Buzan) and offered to demonstrate Freemind that we had only just installed on the network. To begin the idea of mind mapping I asked the Year 6 girls to lead the INSET by showing what they had done. And they were FANTASTIC! It was truly magical moment to see the 'penny drop' moment on my colleagues faces as they realised the potential of using slideshow software in such a way. No one of them had realised that slideshow software could be used like this.

The Year 6 students spent the rest of the session aiding my colleagues in the use of the drawing tools and hyperlinks to make a PowerPoint mind map.

And all was good.

Or so I thought. Until another colleague decided to tell me I had done a disservice - that mind maps were incredibly difficult to create and that I have misled colleagues into thinking they were so easy that Year 6 pupils could make them. It appears that they have to be made 'just so', in just 'such a way'. That's real blue sky thinking at play there - not!

But I am uplifted at the fact that - unlike most other INSET I have ever run over that past 15 years, this is the first time ever that colleagues have been so eager to implement what i have shown them.

Firstly, I've had at least four colleagues excitedly tell me they are putting into practice the mind map design skills I showed them. Secondly, I have been asked by two departments to provide extended training to show how to take this process a stage further.

So all in all it's proof positive to me that the purist may not like my application of 'mind maps' but it's great to see other colleagues have seen the potential and are willing to roll this skill out across their students in all years.

The Highest Apple

Just an apple tree, image originally uploaded to Flickr by kodama.

The prolific David Warlick made a recent Blog post requesting educationalists to Blog about their 'greatest challenge when teaching appropriate ethical use of web-based media to students'.

Here is my response:

There once was a little boy who lived in a farmhouse right in the middle of the countryside. He loved apples. He ate them all the time. Morning, noon and night. But one thing he didn't like was that he lived so far away from the nearest shop, so it was hard to buy enough apples to satisfy his need. So he wished and wished and wished for an unlimited supply of apples.

Then, one morning he awoke and looked out of his bedroom window. There in the middle of his garden was a tree that had never been there before. Not only that, it was covered with many, many apples. He jumped for joy and ran out out into the garden to pick some to eat for his breakfast. It was only then that the magnitude of his task became apparent to him for the tree stretched high, high into the sky. But looking around at the lower branches he thought to himself 'there are enough apples that I can reach'. So he picked a rather dull-looking one and took a bite. Yuck! He spat it out straight away - it had a worm in it! So he picked another dull apple and took a bite - it had a worm in it too. 'Hmmmmmmmmmmmm', he thought, 'so many apples but they are horrible'.

Then he noticed the apples a little higher were a slightly different colour and bigger, perhaps they'd be better. So he got a ladder and reached up to the higher branches, picked an apple and bit into it. Yuck again, no worm but this one tasted sour. So he went to his neighbour and borrowed a much larger ladder so he could reach higher. He took an apple from this higher level and sure enough it still didn't taste right, but it was much better than all the others he tried.

Next he called a building firm and got them to build a very high scaffold and that allowed to to almost reach the top of the tree. This apple tasted delicious but it wasn't as shiny as the one beautiful apple that was sitting at the very top of the tree. So he got out his climbing ropes and crampons and after an hour or so he reached the single rosy apple at the very top of the tree. He took a bite. It had the most exquisite taste of any any apple he had ever tasted before.

As soon as he took the apple he noticed that a few more took its place, this time they were not just at the top, but further down the tree too. He shinned down a little and ate another apple. More nice apples appeared on the tree. The more he ate the more shiny lovely apples appeared until the whole tree was covered with the nicest shiniest tastiest apples he had ever seen.

Story inspired byAn Ubhal As Airde (The Highest Apple) by Runrig. Which describes:

"The winds will blow
And the sun will shine
From generation to generation
Through the trees of the garden
But the day and the hour
Will surely come
To take the highest apple
From the knowledge tree"

I find that it is often the case that within my students there are many of them who want to use the Internet properly but they seek guidance and direction. It would be easy to just continue to allow them to copy work from the Internet verbatim and pass it off as their own, or to include work from invalid sources. It takes much more effort to educate young people that this approach is wrong, wrong, wrong. However, the benefits are that students realise that plagiarism is wrong and that they should cite their sources and the effort put into educating a few initally can quickly cascade to the others. Our Resource Centre Manager Lorna Cowburn has made it a major goal to educate young people as to the dangers and unfairness of plagiarism. Once they see it is wrong, they are less inclined to do so any more.

I used to spend a great deal of time to educate pupils about how to cite a source or how to use web sites for reverential reference not as resources to be plundered. A good illustration of this has recently taken place on a Devon beach where contents from the striken MSC Napoli recently washed ashore and 'beachcombers' came from all around to take the treasures they could find. They seemed to think this was okay, despite the police presence, until someone in Sweden realised it was their personal belongings that were being ravaged. It now appears that many of the people who took goods (some selling them on ebay) have realised rather late that they could face prosecution, or find the booty they took to be of no use to them, and they have left a shocking mess behind them. It has now occured to some of them, after the event, that perhaps the did wrong. To me this draws many parallels with copying someone else's work without attribution. The quaintly titled 'beachcombers' have now become 'scavengers'.

However, now I find I need to instruct my pupils less and less about this menace, as pupils have come to learn from themselves as to what is acceptable practice. That's not to say plagiarism et al is not still a problem. But I believe it is less of a problem in my school due to the time and effort spent addressing the issue rather than ignoring it or leaving it to solve itself.