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.

Tell me lies, Tell me sweet little lies....

".... tell me, tell me lies", so sang Fleetwood Mac in their 1987 hit song. The song is a plea from one partner to another saying they can lie as much as they want, as long they are together it's all that matters.

In many ways we as a society seem to have grown used to this sort of philosophy. We are confronted with so many contradictions in every walk of life that it can be hard for young people (or anyone for that matter) to judge exactly who is telling the truth.

I am reminded of the 6th February 2003. Picture the scene: America and Britain are hurtling towards invading Iraq and Colyn Powell appears in front of the UN with a tiny vial of white powder. The two newspapers with the biggest readership in Britain feature the same close-up of this esteemed man and the vial. However, the headlines could not be more different. The Sun says 'Gotcha' whilst The Mirror says 'Not Enough' - two strong opinions, but poles apart. From the same information, using the same photograph, two publications came to two different conclusions. So how on earth do people know which to believe? The Mirror's point of view becomes more obvious however, when one realises that they were running a high profile 'No War' campaign.


Anyway, in ICT we do our best through the National Curriculum strategy units, to discuss the 'Reliability, validity and bias' of information. And we mostly cover this in ICT by looking at web sites.

Last week I introduced this theme to my Year 8 classes by asking them to write a report on Boilerplate, the famous Victorian robot. This Year group have to carry out a large History coursework (thanks to the ingenuity of Mrs Anne Ratcliffe, my colleague and Head of History) in the next month or so, which requires them to use a wide variety of sources for research. Now if you've looked at the site you'll probably agree that it looks very impressive. The students had to write 300 words about this little-know marvel of engineering. In canvassing the students' opinions of Boilerplate, one said 'I think its fascinating to see what was possible even in Victorian times' adding, 'if you hadn't shown us that site I'd have chosen Boilerplate for my History project.'

Small wonder that Boilerplate is little known - the site is a work of complete fiction.

When I unveiled to my students this week that this site was completely ficticious, not one of the 64 students said they had worked that out. NOT ONE! Their response was to be angry (in a good natured way) with me for lying to them (which of course I had not done - at NO POINT did I ever say the site was truthful). Ah bless students put SUCH trust in us as teachers.

Having read the reports they wrote, they are lovingly written as many students had seemed to like the idea of a Victorian robot that might have saved the world. But what I find most interesting is their lack of investigation or observation. Not one of the 64 students had looked on any website other than the one I pointed them to, in order to find out more information about Boilerplate. They had implicitly trusted the information they were presented with. This shows how important this topic is prior to their big research project for History.

Secondly the instructions I gave the students were:

a) Use Google to search for Boilerplate
b) Choose the top hit and look at the official Boilerplate website.

And what I found MOST interesting is that the second hit that Google presents the user with, contains the words 'a fictional Victorian-era robot created as a hoax. Site include a wealth of humorous "historical" photos and fictional accounts of the robot's exploits in...'. But not one of my 64 students was able to pick up on this vital nugget of information.

My students learned from this exercise because they have realised how much they trust the information they are presented with on the web and how little they do to validate or verify the information they obtain.

In fact most seem deflated to discover the content was false, prefering me to 'tell them lies, tell them sweet little lies'.