Showing posts with label skills. Show all posts

22 November 2021

The 10 Commandments of Word Processing

This has to be one of the most commonly used ICT skills, even be the most tech reluctant, but unfortunately as most of us are self taught, there are quite a few aspects that have been poorly learned, are poorly practised, and are now inevitably poorly taught...

The good news is that once you know what you don't know, it's easy to fix, the chances are, no matter how long you've been word processing, you will find a few surprises in this list:

Thou shalt use spell check (but don't rely on spellcheck—homophones much?).
Thou shalt use the built in thesaurus (and use 'Command+F' to check for repetition!).
Thou shalt not ignore the grammar/proof reading tool—if it's got a squiggly line under it, check it!
Thous shalt not centre text by tapping the spacebar, use the centre align icon on the formatting bar.
Verily the same is true for tabbing, use the tab key to indent, not the spacebar (also useful for adding a new row to the bottom of a table).
Thou shalt not do things manually that can be done automatically; like adding page numbers, numbered lists, or creating a table of contents.
Thou shalt use the 'paste unformatted' or 'paste as text' option to avoid reformatting all the text you paste in. Every. Time.
Thou shalt use the styles menu to structure your document with headings etc (and you can't use some automatic features without this).
Thou shalt insert a page break if you want a new page (don't just repeatedly hammer the return key).
Thou shalt not hammer keyboard keys— NEVER press a space bar more than once, or a return key more than twice.

All of the above are true regardless of the tool you use for word processing, from MS Word, to Pages, to Google Docs. The last of these is arguably the most practical in our context, so here's some specific pointers:

Google Doc formatting like a boss...

Use the templates to get a head start, these also function is great 'mentor texts' for students to see how formatting using Styles looks and works. Instead of creating a Doc within Google Drive, click on the Google Grid and select Docs—Voilah!

Inside any Google Doc, the Styles menu allows you to format your document with a couple of clicks, you can even customise this menu so the Styles use the fonts and formatting you prefer, these will be available in any Google Doc you create or edit.

Once you've formatted your document using Styles, you can add a Table of Contents with a couple of clicks, just go to Insert > Table of Contents. All the formatting, and page numbering all done for you, you can even choose a more screen friendly version that makes all the headers hyperlinked.

Can you show me?

Google have an online guide that will step you through all of the above, and this article has a similar guide to the skills I've outlined above, but specifically tailored to Microsoft Office, and with lots of nice pictures! The key takeaway is that these skills are conventions that apply regardless of the platform, device or application you use, from MS Word, to Pages to Google Docs, they all utilise and provide these features.

Last but not least, here are some video tutorials I made a few years ago, this is in the older version of Pages, but as is often the case with tech, not much has really changed, these fundamentals of word processing are pretty much unchanged in over two decades!

To Skill or not to Skill?

Teaching ICT skills ...

Pickering (2007), found that a focus on skills and fixed knowledge to be acquired was criticised by the teachers in his study, although Daly et al (2009), citing his findings, conceded that:

“Clearly, ICT use demands that teachers acquire certain generic skills (p 27).”

Understandably, there is a general hesitancy* by tech integrators to embrace ICT skills teaching, as it tends towards,

“superficial, one-off and ‘box-ticking’ approaches which emphasise the development of functional skills and relegate pedagogical development to teachers’ ‘spare’ time (Daly et al, 2009, p 41).”

Now, somewhat ironically, the situation seems to be becoming reversed – with the emphasis very much upon the development of pedagogical skills and the relegation of ‘functional development’ (skills) to teachers’ ‘spare’ time.

So teachers are now effectively expected to acquire skills,

“by studying manuals, talking to each other, talking to the instructor, and seeking out other locally available experts” (Mishra & Koehler, 2006, p 1038).

The problem is this ‘grappling experience’ (ibid) or ‘productive failure’ (Kapur & Bielaczyc, 2012), while a powerful way to learn, if not managed carefully, can become a tedious, frustrating process. "Good pedagogy should challenge not frustrate" (ibid) but it is difficult to judge when it is better to let people ‘wrestle’ or to mitigate the potential tediousness of a long process of discovery, by providing a ‘short cut’. The challenge of managing this ‘zone of proximal development’ (Vygotsky, 1987) is significant, the distance between the actual developmental level as determined by their need to engage in independent problem solving (trouble shooting) and the point at which they know they cannot proceed any further without ‘expert’ guidance, or collaboration with more capable peers, a 'knowledgeable other' (ibid) – or even, or perhaps more likely, students.

Frustration is common with digital technologies,

“any given technology is not necessarily appropriate” (Mishra & Koehler, 2006, p 1040).

The plethora of software available to do even the most basic of tasks, means that even choosing an inappropriate tool can turn a task from a challenge to a crisis, like attempting to using Photoshop for image cropping, which is tantamount to using a Ferrari to deliver milk. What is likely to occur, is a situation where,

“teachers were so caught up in learning how to use the tools that they lost sight of the design tasks.” (Angeli and Valanides 2008, p 10).

The “cognitive load” (ibid, p 9) imposed by learning how to use the tools was so high, that teachers were left without enough “cognitive resources” to attend to the actual exercise.

Although skills training is clearly vital to being able to integrate technology into teachers’ practice, more often than not teachers are plagued by an unconscious incompetence - they ‘do not know, what they do not know’. Despite the proliferation of literature expounding the virtues of an integrated model, mention is rarely made of any consideration of a prerequisite skill set, one of these rare examples follows:

“The model assumes the existence of ICT standards [...] At a basic level these would include: basic ICT literacy, such as familiarity with and confidence in using the Windows operating system, basic word processing, PowerPoint and data software such as Excel and SPSS, software installation, and knowledge of the Internet such as how to use the Internet for resource searching, downloading and uploading files, communication via emails, video calls or web cameras.” (Hu & McGrath, 2011, p 54)

Balance is clearly critical here – one where an articulated skill set is defined that can be acquired within an authentic, integrated context. How much teachers know about technology makes a big difference in their uses of technology. Once technology is truly integrated, teachers and beliefs and knowledge are changed as well (Fisher et al, 1996). New pedagogical knowledge and practices emerge from the integration of technology, but only when teachers reach a certain level of technological understanding.

Unfortunately with the pendulum swinging well and truly away from a skills focus, we are in danger of throwing out the proverbial baby with bathwater, an issue alluded to in the recent Nesta report,

“…the lack of emphasis upon [ICT] skills, is a concern (2012, p 55).”

When considering what teachers should know about technology, we must consider how much they need to know to even be able to begin.

Skills mapping and audits

"A potential barrier to ICT CPD is staff not knowing what the gaps are in their own ICT knowledge. Many schools have found an ICT audit mapped to the curriculum a valuable tool in helping staff to gain a clear indication of the ICT skills, competencies and pedagogies they need to have." (Becta, 2009, Point 81)

In order to avoid the skills element having a negative impact on learning, at the end of a unit of study, or even the end of the academic year, the teachers ‘traffic light’ the ICT core skills matrix to identify which skills have, or have not, been acquired, in order to determine which skills may have need to be focused on explicitly in other authentic contexts in the future.

Example of a skills audit - post reflection

This is not a question of skills vs pedagogic integration. Teachers and students need to acquire ICT skills before they can start to harness technological expertise for the purposes of student learning. This re-purposing of the TPACK (Mishra & Koehler, 2006) framework, ensures that the focus remains pedagogically centred, but balanced and facilitated by clearly articulated ICT core skills.

The continued reluctance to engage with this issue should be resisted, as Becta's contribution to the Rose Review (2009) emphasised,"[ICT skills] should be regarded as an essential skills for learning and life, alongside literacy and numeracy." (Point 91) With warnings regarding the possibilities of neglecting this vital area:

“… there are two significant dangers: the first is that young people will develop an incomplete and unreflective capability, unsupported by adult guidance, with risks both to their learning progress and their safety. The second is that a digital underclass, lacking opportunities for wide-ranging use of technology, will be permanently excluded from a world mediated by ICT." (Point 94)

NETS - are not enough.

While useful as overarching standards, I do not believe NET Standards are enough on their own - they are too generic to be of practical use in ensuring a broad and balanced curriculum; they are descriptions of (any) curriculum, not applications of digital technologies. Remove the token references to ‘digital’ and ‘technology’ and you're left with a description of curriculum, but nothing which in and of itself actually requires the use of ICTs, or more importantly, that could not be achieved without the use of digital technologies at all. For example,

“Students leverage technology to take an active role in choosing, achieving and demonstrating competency in their learning goals...”

(NETS(S) 2016, strikethrough mine).

To use the analogy of literary genres/strands (which I find helpful, but you could use science and mathematics strands just as easily) they need to be specific to the nature of the sphere of experience. Literacy genres are, NETS are not.

They need to be specific not generic. Yes you can argue that English literature is a 'subject' and ICT no longer is; this is just semantics. Who cares what we are defining them as now, we all know that just a few years ago 'IT' was a discrete subject, and it still is based on the definition of 'subject' it's just not 'discrete' anymore…

subject: a branch of (technological) knowledge studied or taught in a school, college, or university.

discrete: individually separate and distinct.

Vitamin D (VITAD)

Five Essential Domains: VITAD: video, image, text, audio, data - 'Vitamin D'

Just like all subject domains, tech has its own overarching domains or strands that are an efficient way to organise the essential skill sets needed for true digital literacy. We should not neglect opportunities to read and write, for example, realistic fiction, or physics or shape and space in Mathematics, I believe the same applies to what could be called the 'digital domains' or literacies of ICTs, such as, text, image, video, audio and data (with coding/control waiting in the wings) - none of which the NETS explicitly describe or mandate, thereby rendering them useless as a means to articulate the effective use of digital technologies.

Digital Illiteracy...

An easy easy way to recall these essential areas is with the acronym 'VITAD', 'vitamin digital', now when you're considering whether not you can consider yourself, your students or any 21st century citizen to be truly digitally literate, how do they measure up to VITAD?

Can they view, edit, create, compose with video?
Can they organise, edit, resize, manipulate, incorporate image?
Can they browse/read/search text? Are they proficient at word processing, commenting, curating texts?
Can the manage audio files, organise, edit, create, compose audio using multiple audio tracks/sound effects?
Do they know their way around a spreadsheet? Can they organise data efficiently, perform basic calculations, use functions and formulae, analyse, synthesise, and model data?

When, and only when you can confidently answer a confident yes to all the above, then, and only then can you call yourself digitally literate!

What gets monitored gets done

An article published in the ASCD makes this point quite powerfully,

What do we monitor?

In most organisations, what gets monitored gets done. When a school devotes considerable time and effort to the continual assessment of a particular condition or outcome, it notifies all members that the condition or outcome is considered important. Conversely, inattention to monitoring a particular factor in a school indicates that it is less than essential, regardless of how often its importance is verbalised.

"In Sweden, young adults ages 16–24 topped the charts in an assessment of technology skills that was administered in 19 countries. Participants were asked to perform tasks at three levels of difficulty: to sort e-mails into folders, organize data into a spreadsheet, and manage reservations for a virtual meeting room. Fewer than one-third of U.S. young adults could complete tasks more complicated than sorting e-mails, a performance that put them at the bottom of the list of performers from the 19 countries. The study underscored the need for equality of access to technology because major discrepancies were noted among the results for young adults from varying socioeconomic backgrounds.”

(March 2014 | Volume 71 | Number 6, Using Assessments Thoughtfully [paywall], p8-9, ASCD)

The use is not equity or access, it is ignorance. With the current neglect of skills teaching in schools, despite the proliferation of screens, less and less people are actually taught skills with any rigour or balance, a generation of students could find themselves proficient with Social media, web browsing, poster making and maybe image manipulation, and that will be it!

We have these mandatory strands in each of most (of not all) subject literacies that are carefully monitored because we expect all students to have multiple experiences with these domains during their time in school, ideally in each grade, scoped and sequenced properly. I can't see how a student could be considered to be mathematically literate if, say, they had never been taught how to multiply, or in science, never experimented with forces, or in literacy, never read or written poetry, or in terms of digital literacy, never learned how to edit or use video. None of the strands in these subjects are left to chance, or to ad hoc integration. We carefully design authentic ways to ensure they are all experienced, all I'm arguing for is that we do not allow exceptions, especially not for one of the core competencies of the 21st century.

Put simply, if we believe that articulating a coherent scope and sequence of essential skills in the domains of language and mathematics are necessary, then how much more so in what is arguably THE prerequisite skill set of the 21st Century?

For a Google Doc version of our Primary School ICT skills scope and sequence matrix that you can copy, click here, but please include acknowledgement of UWCSEA as the original owner if you do :)

An example of a section of our skills matrix

Here are some other great examples of ICT skills matrices that run K-12:

Common Core State Standards K‐12 Technology Skills Scope and Sequence

TASIS Technology Skills Scope & Sequence

*Another reason for a 'general hesitancy' is the acceptance of the myth that technology skills are changing to quickly to bother with, fueled in large part by fundamentally flawed quotes like this:

...the rapid rate of technological change ensures any knowledge gained about specific technologies or software programs would quite quickly become out of date. (Mishra et al, 2009, p 151).

The subject of the myth of change in the domain of digital technology skills, see my other post, Keeping Pace with Technological Change - Futile, or Fundamental?

[Originally posted in 2013, updated in 2018. Changes to the matrix in the interim? Very few, which just goes to show, skills don't change that much or that quickly, people do.]

Traffic Light Highlighting

Highlighting texts that we read is a commonplace strategy utilised by many people especially when working with more complex/academic texts that are generally more difficult to understand, and are often being read with a specific focus in mind usually one that will result in some sort of academic reflection in the form of a written report of some kind. Unfortunately the research on this is less than favourable to put it mildly.... specifically that highlighting as a strategy is extremely ineffective despite its popularity...

Improving students’ learning with effective learning techniques: Promising directions from cognitive and educational psychology. (2013)

“Students already are familiar with and spontaneously adopt the technique of highlighting; the problem is that the way the technique is typically implemented is not effective.
...
Given students’ enthusiasm for highlighting and underlining (or perhaps over-enthusiasm, given that students do not always use the technique correctly), discovering fail-proof ways to ensure that this technique is used effectively might be easier than convincing students to abandon it entirely in favor of other techniques.” p21, Donesky et al (2013)

This of course begs the question as to exactly what an effective technique for highlighting could look like, fortunately the authors of the study are happy to help (emphasis mine):

“Marked text draws the reader’s attention, but additional processing should be required if the reader has to decide which material is most important. Such decisions require the reader to think about the meaning of the text and how its different pieces relate to one another (i.e., organisational processing; Hunt & Worthen, 2006)
...
More generally, the quality of the highlighting is likely crucial to whether it helps students to learn, but unfortunately, many studies have not contained any measure of the amount or the appropriateness of students’ highlighting. Those studies that have examined the amount of marked text have found great variability in what students actually mark, with some students marking almost nothing and others marking almost everything.” (Ibid)

So the key here is “discrimination between important and trivial information” and to highlight as little as possible, as it’s the criticality of the selections that facilitate effective engagement with the text. An effective strategy will “improve student retention of knowledge as essential for reaching other instructional objectives; if one does not remember core ideas, facts, or concepts, applying them may prove difficult, if not impossible.” ... “the important interplay between memory for a concept on one hand and the ability to comprehend and apply it on the other.” (Ibid)

Experience

When I first encountered this research I was somewhat taken aback as this didn’t jibe with my own experience, anyone who knows me knows that I have a reputation for remembering what I read, and I read a great deal, particularly academic articles, but the reason I remember what I read it because I am an avid notetaker, but those notes are very much structured around a highlighting strategy. But when I read into the research it is apparent that what I’m doing isn’t what they are criticising... The strategies are use when highlighting very much represent the types of efficacy outlined above, so please allow me to introduce to ... (drum roll please) Traffic Light Highlighting.

Traffic Light Highlighting

As you read, make critical selections of text using either yellow, green, or red highlighter. *

Green for content you strongly agree/resonate with, red for the opposite of that, and yellow for content which is interesting/useful/informative.

In terms of engagement combining this highlighting with note taking is essential, this is particularly true of text highlighted in greens and red.

Stanford professor Candace Thille has some very helpful advice in this CNBC article,

“Just highlighting something doesn’t commit it better somehow to your memory.”

Instead of mindlessly underlining something you want to learn, Thille suggests finding important information and paraphrasing it in language that makes sense to you.

"If you thought that point was important, try and restate it in your own words," she says. "Try and make sense of out it because you're not really trying to commit it to memory, you're trying to extract meaning out of it."

So where there is green text I am summarising what it is about that text that I find to be so helpful. But it’s the red text that causes my students the most confusion—they just cannot understand why I would want to focus so closely on information that I don’t agree with; but as I explain to them, that kind of content is arguably the most useful, particularly when you’re expected to demonstrate critical thought about the text.

For critical thinking it’s important to seek out information that is not in alignment with our current views, this is where the questions lie, where the opportunities for learning are the richest. At the very least it ensures that you’re not just constructing and maintaining your own 'filter bubble'. The red text assists with embrace uncertainty, seeking out the complexity of disparate perspectives.

Depending on the nature of the paper that you’re reading you should find that red highlights should be relatively rare—few and far between. The example I have included below is from a paper that I found to be particularly contentious, but as a general rule I would expect in many papers not have any red text at all and where there is red text, it’s probably one or two sentences in the entire paper.

Notice the notes.... that's engagement.

Green - Judgement: agreement endorsement
Yellow - Factual/informative/interesting/noteworthy
Red - Judgement: disagreement/contention

Blue?

Some of my students have adapted this highlighting strategy for their own purposes, something I enthusiastically encourage. One student in particular uses blue text; they use this to highlight text which they personally find difficult to understand—primarily because of their lack of familiarity with the content. This is an interesting perspective, and one I think still lends itself to the kind of critical engagement that the experts encourages in order for a highlighting strategy to be truly useful.

References

Dunlosky J, Rawson KA, Marsh, EJ, Nathan MJ, & Willingham DT. (2013). Improving students’ learning with effective learning techniques: Promising directions from cognitive and educational psychology. Psychological Science in the Public Interest, 14(1), 4-58.

Hess A. (2017). These 5 hacks can help you learn anything, according to a Stanford professor. CNBC. Retrieved October 19, 2020, from https://www.cnbc.com/2017/10/17/5-hacks-to-help-you-learn-anything-from-a-stanford-professor.html

* I personally prefer to use a digital tool for this as it avoids printing (especially for the paper eyesight to support this post which was in excess of 50 pages), and affords me the range of colours I require, but also allows me to easily clarify the meaning of certain terms which especially with academic papers is quite common. An added bonus is that it’s also very easy to view a synopsis of all the content in the paper that has been highlighted or annotated at a glance, and the search function is particularly powerful when referring back to research that you may not have read recently and need to review.

30 July 2013

Trickle Down Training

'Trickle Down Theory' is an economic idea which more or less states that decreasing taxes, can act as a stimulus. It's not popular. According to trickle-down theory proponents, this stimulus leads to growth and wealth creation that benefits everyone, not just those who pay the lower taxes—but what has this got to do with pedagogical technology?

Well it's my belief that a very similar approach is extremely effective (arguably more effective than the economic application) in terms of increasing the 'wealth' of tech expertise in a team of teachers, a wealth that benefits everyone, especially the students they teach.

How do we 'tax' our teachers tech skills? By having overly narrow definitions about what constitutes 'educational' technology. I believe we should encourage any sort of technological practice, yes even the sort that is likely to get you a slap on the wrist, yes Facebook, and online shopping I'm looking at you.

Tech needs to be personal

For teachers to implement changed pedagogies that integrate ICT, they must be at the centre of their own learning (Schibeci et al, 2008). Teachers benefit far more from informal, home based activities (Hustler et al, 2003), so when they (somewhat guiltily) request assistance with personal uses of ICT, they are often pleasantly surprised to learn that it is precisely this ‘self-centred’ use of ICT that can provide a synergistic, symbiotic ‘cascade effect’ or 'trickle down effect' on the development of their own ICT skills, such as for creating a home movie, or cropping an image to use for their social network profile. This kind of CPD, based on personal interests, takes account of how adults learn, and recognises the importance of individuals taking ownership over their own personalised learning journeys.

Trickle down in effect

This approach has proved to be particularly effective with the teachers I work with. For example one teacher repurposed ‘dabbling in stocks’ at home into a Maths activity where students used a stock App and spreadsheet to track and manage their virtual investments using an artificial currency.

Another teacher learned how to use online web albums (Picasa) for sharing photographs with her extended family—this in turn gave her the confidence and understanding of the technology to repurpose the same tool with her students to create online albums of their respective families in a unit they were doing on migration.

There are many more.

Sometimes the greatest barrier is the operating system itself, and the challenges with navigating and organising this effectively. Once (again purely for 'selfish' reasons) they start to make inroads in this they feel a great deal more confidence in using these tools with their students, in particular the use of email for managing communications with both students and parents, and more effective use of image libraries as teaching resources.

Perhaps the most profound, for many teachers, is the transfer of the video editing skills they acquired in the context of editing home videos, to embracing video editing as a powerful tool to use with their students.

Disempower Techphobia

This strategy has been the most effective with the teachers who are the most resistant. Let's take a teacher (hypothetical of course...) who has no interest whatsoever in using ICTs, never mind to teach with, give him a laptop and it will just languish in a desk drawer. Why? Simple; if he can't see any use for it, how could he see any use for it for his students? It needs to be at the centre of his own experience. The Goose/Gander factor*, if he has coped all of his life, why can't they? The way in for this teacher was Facebook, he wanted to be able to stay in touch with his family, especially his two daughters—that was the key. Trickle down learning included:

Taking a digital photo
Cropping the photo
Resizing the Photo
Uploading the image to his Facebook page
Basic Keyboarding and navigation (Status Updates)

That was it, he was hooked. In the weeks that followed he was like a child with a new toy, making excited discoveries on a daily basis, JITT (Just in Time Training) was all he needed to keep him going, just 5 minutes here and there. Within a month he was:

Using iPhoto and Picasa to build a library of photographs (to share on Facebook)
Adding Captions
Organising his images into albums
Scanning his favourite images
Writing Personal Messages—which inspired him to get and use an email account

He's already started asking about slideshows ... next step, video?

Instead of discouraging teachers from 'wasting' their time on Facebook—maybe we should be leveraging this as an opportunity for learning?

It is my belief that these skills and technologies have a habit of 'going viral' technology is contagious, it's about time we harnessed this potential instead of complaining about it.

*What's good for the goose is good for the gander.

26 July 2013

Keeping Pace with Technological Change - Futile, or Fundamental?

For many teachers that I encounter in the day-to-day of teaching digital technology/tool integration, the answer to this question, is something like—

Futility.

Why? Because they hear of, or read things like this:

"Technological Knowledge (TK) Technological knowledge is always in a state of flux—more so than content and pedagogical knowledge. This makes defining and acquiring it notoriously difficult. Keeping up to date with technological developments can easily be-come overwhelming to time-starved teachers. This also means that any definition of technology knowledge is in danger of becoming outdated by the time this text has been published." (p 398)

Judith Harris, Punya Mishra, and Matthew Koehler (2009). Teachers' Technological Pedagogical Content Knowledge and Learning Activity Types: Curriculum-based Technology Integration Reframed. Journal of Research on Technology in Education 393 Copyright © 2009, ISTE (International Society for Technology in Education)

Or...

"...the rapid rate of technological change ensures any knowledge gained about specific technologies or software programs would quite quickly become out of date" (p 151).

Mishra P, Koehler M J and Kereluik K (2009). ‘The song remains the same: looking back to the future of educational technology’, TechTrends, Vol. 53, No. 5, pp.48−53.

These kinds of quotes highlight an issue that has been bugging me for a while, the gist of it goes... "What? Learn ICT skills? What's the point? It all changes so fast, by the time we learn how to use one application it will be obsolete. So, why bother? which usually translates as ... "Let the kids do it, but ME? Me, I'm sticking with tools that I know from the 19th Century."

If theres's one thing I've learned about digital tools/technologies since I first started using them in earnest in the late 1980s, it's this:

... in truth, it's the beginning of nothing.

And nothing has changed

Everything has changed.

David Bowie - Sunday

The more things change, the more they stay the same.

Jean-Baptiste Alphonse Karr

So digital technologies develop at a pace of change that is impossible to manage/keep up with?

Really? How?

How much has the way we USE digital technology really changed though? Speed, capacity, availability, yes, but use, not so much... Anyway, the same could be said of planes, trains, automobiles - more capacity, greater speed, more availability than ever. Changing capacity is not the same as changing capability.

If we reflect back to the ‘dawn’ of TEL in school in the 1990s, there were five overarching domains of computer use:

Text | Image | Audio | Video | Data

Text, image, audio, video, data. A sixth, ‘control’ was a core element of the ‘IT curriculum’ back then, but proved more difficult to integrate successfully. Ironically, two decades later, based on the recent alarmist rhetoric around a dearth of ‘coding skills’ it would seem control is back, albeit with a slight name change.

So, back in the 1990s when I first started teaching with computers there were 5 domains* of computer use, and here we are 2 decades later, and what do we find? The domains remain the same, the skills have evolved, but not much, and the conventions and tools? Identical, to the point of being nonsensical to this generation... A floppy disc icon to save? Really? An hour glass for wait time in Windows?

The truth is change in Tech happens more slowly than you might think, sure there are people out there attempting to, for example, rethink the design of the ubiquitous save icon, but these conventions have over two decades of embedded use, people like you, people like me, and even the generations who never used floppy disks know what the save icon means, despite its incongruity—so to say change is relentless, in this context, is nothing but misleading.

http://dribbble.com/shots/506722-the-save-icon-redesign

CDs and DVDs are now almost obsolete, arguably with the recent advances in voice recognition, keyboarding could be next, but they're not dead yet, they are still hanging on... When digital tools change, they change gradually, incrementally, and obsolescence, while inevitable, happens sloooowwwllly.

Even 'professional' applications like PhotoShop evolve very gradually, with key conventions remaining virtually identical:

Nevermind the day to day icons we use for navigation...

Granted, computers are getting smaller, while their capacities grow larger, along with their processor speeds, drives are smaller [physical size], yet bigger [capacity] and faster than they've ever been, but all these changes do is make what we've always done EASIER, not OBSOLETE.

Big. Difference.

Change in terms of ICT skills are far from relentless, in fact, if anything, they are relentlessly, frustratingly, languorous... The domains are the same, and the core skills are virtually unchanged after 2 decades of relentless computer use, design and development. Think about it for a minute—mouse skills? Keyboarding? Even overarching conventions like drag and drop, desktops, drop down menus, clicking on icons to give commands... Here's some skills from a document that was used by a school I worked at in the year 2000, see anything that is obsolete? Not much.

'IT Works' (Folens, 2000)

And that's about the only out dated reference I found in the entire scope and sequence, other than a reference to CDs and Laserdiscs, that was about it... So are the core ICT skills that are a prerequisite for success in the 21st Century changing too quickly to bother to learn, or teach? No. But there HAS been change, oh yes, I'd argue the biggest change is:

Ease. Of. Use.

It's never been easier to use ICTs, or to learn them. Time was, to edit video, you'd need a specialised machine, dedicated hardware and software, designed for professionals, with a learner curve steeper than Mount Everest. With advances in internet speed and connectivity from dial up to BroadBand, a lot more can be done online than before. But they are the same things! Thumb sticks have replaced floppy discs, but they are still 'drives' that are inserted, read and written, and ejected, and ... lost.

Not. Any. More.

With the advent of 'Web 2.0' all four of the five domains can now be practised right in a web browser, no software installation needed, and they are (by and large) free. Video is a little tougher to edit 'in the cloud' but it's coming, YouTube already provide basic editing tools, and services like WeVideo.com are pushing back the boundaries of web based idea editing every day.

Instructions vs Conventions

The problem here is is not with the tools, it is with the teaching—teachers who focus more on instructions, or specific software, than overarching conventions and procedures. Don't teach kids how to use 'Word' teach them how to word process. Don't teach them how to use 'Safari' teach them how to browse. Again this is nothing new, we wouldn't think of teaching 'Harry Potter' as teaching 'reading' we might use a text like Harry Potter to observe overarching conventions and concepts—it's the same for ICTs.

Classic icon conventions—any change here is purely aesthetic.

Focus on conventions not instructions

Catch up vs change

The fact is that many, maybe even most teachers pretty much ignored the tech revolution that gradually unfolded since the 90's, it hasn't actually changed much in those intervening couple of decades, but the fact remains that 20 years of cumulated skill is a lot of catching up to do. THAT is the problem, not the rate of change, the considerable amount of catch up required. Catch up and change are not the same thing.

So let's stop whining about the futility of learning ICT skills and get on with it, they've stuck around since their inception, I dare say they'll be around for a little longer. The question is not WHY learn ICT skills but HOW? A subject I have written about here.

Mode vs Medium

I am not saying that digital tools do not present a unique challenge, when compared to their traditional counterparts, say... a pencil or pen and paper etc. Regardless of change, the sheer AMOUNT of digital tools are overwhelming, and increasing at exponential rates every day, to an extent that completely and utterly dwarfs the range of options and tools that would have been available to a teacher even 10 years ago. But, and this is worth repeating, I would still contend that regardless of their proliferation, the vast majority of the 'revolutionary' tools on offer stay well within the comfort zone of the 5 domains I have outlined above (6 if you include control/coding). Sure they might dress the context up a little more effectively, or introduce a clever mechanic, say ... touching instead of clicking, but the fact remains that while the mode may have changed, the medium has not. The same transferable conventions, the same iconography, the same procedures remain, regardless of the form factor of the device, the speed of the processor, the storage capacity, or indeed the sheer availability of these machines in recent years.

Dealing with the Deluge

So, the time invested in mastering or at least embracing core ICT skills and conventions are as relevant as ever in the face of this onslaught of pixelated promises. What is also important is to have an effective filter to manage the phenomenal proliferation of digital tools—on, literally, a daily basis, more tools with funky and not so funky names emerge into a market place already filled to overflowing with a veritable cornucopia of competitors. If you're fortunate, your school hopefully already has a dedicated tech integrator to stand between the teacher and the tsunami wave of digital applications, utilities and all sorts of 'Apps' boasting their pixelated promises to 'save you time' etc.

And if you don't? Then by all means ignore these 'wonders of the web' until you do. Yes, sometimes lurking in the sludge of similarity (and revolutionary? not really...) is the odd golden nugget of greatness, but it's not going to terribly affect your teaching to miss out on those. If that is not an option for you, then arm yourself with some effective filters and, like the prospector who wades through the mediocre, seeking to root out all except the most worthy, you can then bring the odd truly terrific tool triumphantly back to your team. Not that they will be as excited about as you will be. Yet.

* If anything at least one domain that has been and gone is back and currently experiencing a renaissance - computer coding, anyone?

25 July 2013

Team Teaching—With Your Own Students [Techsperts]

Yeah, I'm not crazy about the name either, but that's what was in place when I got here, known as Techexperts at our sister campus (What? Isn't that 'tech-experts'?) So I've stuck with it, albeit with a slight adjustment.

Regardless of the name, it's an attempt to define a role in the process of teaching tech skills that includes students, and it's better than some others I've heard.

Many students are quick to learn many of the skills and potentialities of digital tools, what Mishra & Koehler (2006) call technological knowledge (TK), yet are not necessarily skilled at, for example, sharing them. The involvement of students through skilled facilitation (Ruddock, 2004) creates a collaborative ethos that harnesses the time spent in the classroom as time for ‘training’ by taking advantage of the students’ natural facility with digital technologies, while also harnessing the pedagogical content knowledge (PCK) of their teachers—their unique perspectives based on many years of experience. This is a repurposing of Mishra & Koehler’s model (2006) I describe as TK + PCK = TPCK. However, this approach requires the teachers to allow the students’ a certain degree of autonomy, for example, Jill struggled to establish this model with her students, complaining that her students,

… get themselves stuck because they haven't followed the instructions. Re-tracing their steps to sort out where they went wrong is what I find quite challenging at times - but this depends on how 'new' what I have taught/explained to them is also 'new' to me.

Students as collaborators

The students were struggling because they were not being given autonomy to learn independently, through enquiry, because their teacher was more comfortable ‘teaching’ them how to use the technology didactically, step by step, or more accurately, literally, click by click. By shifting her approach from that of ‘instructor’, towards that of ‘mediator’ she was better able to bring together facilitative strategies, modelling a collaborative ethos—her organising influence as the teacher was still highly salient, albeit a form of leadership that was more ‘fluid’ (Peachey et al, 2008). The teachers found different ways to incorporate this model into their teaching.

Another teacher used a strategy I call “I teach you - you teach two”—each student teaches two others, and so on until the whole class has been covered. Knowledge and understanding are gained through combinations of the students’ and teacher’s co-constructing, acting together through ‘distributed cognition’. This creation of a supportive, problem-solving classroom community is essential to the development of these digital literacies (Beetham et al, 2009; Twining 2009).

Let kids lead [when they can]

The third of the teachers in my case study was eager to embrace this approach. During one of our interviews we set up a class website for him to use for class organisation and collaboration, he then designated one particularly keen student in his class to take on the day-to-day management of the site. As teachers became more comfortable with the awareness that students are going to be able to teach them, their contributions could be smoothly integrated into the fabric of a lesson. The previous teacher described how she felt this had ‘flipped’ her perspective on technology; she now feels comfortable “not knowing everything” and “letting them work it out”, which makes the prospect of using ICT much less daunting.

'Teachable Moments'

Scenarios become commonplace whereby a student finds a new way of doing something or makes a discovery that the teacher has never come across before, but rather than feeling threatened by this, the teacher facilitates this and turns it into a “teachable moment” (Crook et al, 2010). In this case the teacher could give the student control of the screen, via an IWB, to guide the class (and often the teacher) through the process. The student focus group interview highlighted their approach to technical problems, an approach with a notably positive bias,

"I don't really need to have technical support and when I have trouble with the computer, I don't avoid [it] that much. I just keep going on."

That, or they just don’t see technical issues as a problem at all,

"Computers have never failed [me] in my work."

The students appear to have a natural sense of determination and perseverance when faced with technical problems; even though they accept that these problems happen, they see this as an inevitable aspect of using technology - not an exception,

"Even if they [computers] go wrong, I still use them. […] In many cases it’s probably something I did wrong—not the computer."

The less you know, the more you can learn

This perspective contrasts considerably with that of many of their teachers, who, when faced with technical problems, tend to blame the machine, whereas the students are more inclined to assume the fault lies with themselves, in the way they are using it.

This way when a problem arises, rather than being a potential threat, it becomes a learning opportunity; if anything, an issue to be wary of is with teachers who are highly skilled with ICTs being too quick to offer solutions, instead of encouraging the students to find someone else in the room who has worked through that problem, so they can tutor one another. Seen this way, lacking technological expertise can be seen as a kind of enabler.

However, this can also lead to teachers who effectively ‘opt out’ of technology altogether, preferring to abdicate the responsibility for the use of ICTs entirely to their students—this raises the question of how effectively any teacher can effectively ‘mentor’ or guide their students if they have absolutely no idea what the available technology can do—teachers should at least familiarise themselves with the basic capabilities of the tools their student’s use, even if they are unable to use these themselves.

24 July 2013

Stress Free Slideshows in Minutes on a Mac

Sure you can spend hours constructing a visual masterpiece in Keynote, Prezi, SlideRocket, or even, if you insist, PowerPoint...

If you do want a slide show with images and video, import it all into iPhoto and run the slideshow from there.

But what if you just want to create a slide show in a few minutes, no transitions, no titles, no fuss, no faff?

What if this slideshow can contain all sorts of visual media, images of course, but also PDFs, text documents but ... not video. Well not yet.

So, you have a folder stuffed full of the slide show content, (including content in sub folders) how does this magic work?

Easy, open Preview if it isn't open already - Grab the folder and drop it on the Preview icon in the dock.

Or, if you're drag and drop dysfunctional, go to Open, and browse to the folder you want to use, just click on the folder (not its contents) and click open.

Now all you do is choose View > Slide Show from the main menu.

If you have got something you want to include in the slideshow that Preview does not like, eg an Excel spreadsheet - just 'print' it and save it as a PDF. Sorted.

To loop a slideshow, and include video.

Dump all the media (video/image/pdf) in one folder (no sub folders)

Select it all, and press the spacebar to launch Quickview

Then go to full screen and press play.

Finally, make sure any media you want to use for a presentation is on your local hard drive (on your computer), not on a shared drive/Internet, unless you like the spinning beach ball of death to become the main feature of your presentation.

Keynote simplicity

If you really want to use Keynote, this can be quite painless as well—not as quick as the methods outlined above, but maybe only few minutes longer...

Just select all the media (including PDFs, but it will only display the first page) and drag and drop it into the navigation panel on the site. Keynote will place each separate item on it's own slide, it will resize large images to fit, but smaller images will be left at original size.

22 July 2013

To Skill or not to Skill?

Teaching ICT skills ...

Pickering (2007), found that a focus on skills and fixed knowledge to be acquired was criticised by the teachers in his study, although Daly et al (2009), citing his findings, conceded that:

“Clearly, ICT use demands that teachers acquire certain generic skills (p 27).”

Understandably, there is a general hesitancy by tech integrators to embrace ICT skills teaching, as it tends towards,

“superficial, one-off and ‘box-ticking’ approaches which emphasise the development of functional skills and relegate pedagogical development to teachers’ ‘spare’ time (Daly et al, 2009, p 41).”

So teachers are now effectively expected to acquire skills,

“by studying manuals, talking to each other, talking to the instructor, and seeking out other locally available experts” (Mishra & Koehler, 2006, p 1038).

Frustration is common with digital technologies,

“any given technology [tool] is not necessarily appropriate” (Mishra & Koehler, 2006, p 1040).

“teachers were so caught up in learning how to use the tools that they lost sight of the design tasks.” (Angeli and Valanides 2008, p 10).

The “cognitive load” (ibid, p 9) imposed by learning how to use the tools was so high, that teachers were left without enough “cognitive resources” to attend to the actual exercise.

Although skills training is clearly vital to being able to integrate technology into teachers’ practice, more often than not teachers are plagued by an unconscious incompetence - they ‘do not know, what they do not know’. Despite the proliferation of literature expounding the virtues of an integrated model, mention is rarely made of any consideration of a prerequisite skill set, one of these rare examples follows:

“The model assumes the existence of ICT standards [...] At a basic level these would include: basic ICT literacy, such as familiarity with and confidence in using the Windows operating system, basic word processing, PowerPoint and data software such as Excel and SPSS, software installation, and knowledge of the Internet such as how to use the Internet for resource searching, downloading and uploading files, communication via emails, video calls or web cameras.” (Hu & McGrath, 2011, p 54)

Unfortunately with the pendulum swinging well and truly away from a skills focus, we are in danger of throwing out the proverbial baby with bathwater, an issue alluded to in the recent Nesta report,

“…the lack of emphasis upon [ICT] skills, is a concern (2012, p 55).”

Change? What change?

A common objection here is that digital technologies develop at a pace of change that is impossible to manage/keep up with, and so any focus on skills is futile. However, if you consider this carefully you have to ask yourself how much has the way we USE digital technology really changed though? I have written about this dubious assumption here, but the truth is that yes, of course aspects of ICTs like processor speed and storage capacity have/are changing relentlessly yes, but use?

Not so much.

The same could be said of planes, trains, automobiles - more capacity, greater speed. Changing capacity is not the same as changing capability.

So, having decided that we do need to consider what teachers should know about technology, we must consider how much they need to know to even be able to begin.

Skills mapping and audits

"A potential barrier to ICT CPD is staff not knowing what the gaps are in their own ICT knowledge. Many schools have found an ICT audit mapped to the curriculum a valuable tool in helping staff to gain a clear indication of the ICT skills, competencies and pedagogies they need to have." (Becta, 2009, Point 81)

Example of a skills audit - post reflection

The continued reluctance to engage with this issue should be resisted, as Becta's contribution to the Rose Review (2009) emphasised,"[ICT skills] should be regarded as an essential skills for learning and life, alongside literacy and numeracy." (Point 91) With warnings regarding the possibilities of neglecting this vital area:

“… there are two significant dangers: the first is that young people will develop an incomplete and unreflective capability, unsupported by adult guidance, with risks both to their learning progress and their safety. The second is that a digital underclass, lacking opportunities for wide-ranging use of technology, will be permanently excluded from a world mediated by ICT." (Point 94)

An impoverished generation?

Unfortunately I often, in fact usually, see students, teenagers, the so-called ''digital natives' using their state of the art machines in ways that are, quiet frankly surprisingly rudimentary. Attempting to construct a table of content manually, using a calculator instead of a spreadsheet for managing multiple interrelated calculations, relying on MS Word for, well nearly everything, except for when they are using Keynote—poorly. Why? Because no one has taught them the fundamental skills they need to use these beautify shiny machines they've been given.

A broad and balanced range of ICT competencies that span the domains of text, audio, image, video, data (and possibly control/coding) are in danger of becoming the proverbial baby thrown out with the bathwater. Practices to mitigate this must be carefully managed so that authentic opportunities for the acquisition of core ICT skills are planned for that are pedagogically centred, and concept driven not skills driven, but that do not neglect these skills.

"In Sweden, young adults ages 16–24 topped the charts in an assessment of technology skills that was administered in 19 countries. Participants were asked to perform tasks at three levels of difficulty: to sort e-mails into folders, organize data into a spreadsheet, and manage reservations for a virtual meeting room. Fewer than one-third of U.S. young adults could complete tasks more complicated than sorting e-mails, a performance that put them at the bottom of the list of performers from the 19 countries."

(Educational Leadership, 2014)

In the 'bad old days' classes of students were taught a broad and balanced set of ICT skills, within the confines of a lab, in entirely contrived contexts, that were inauthentic, but were successful in at least teaching the students the basics. Now, with the understandable shift away from skills based lab teaching, to the far more appropriate integrated model, there is a very real danger that in so doing we will accidentally impoverish an entire generation of students, by expecting them to acquire foundational ICT skills through a process of little more than exploration and serendipity. Sure, we have an authentic context, but no understanding of the competencies or types tools that are necessary to function within them. To further compound the problem, this process is managed by teachers who are often less competent with ICTs than their students, in contexts where the main stakeholders are unaware of the key ICT skills they need to work effectively, and where there is no one who has the expertise to bridge the gap between ignorance and expertise.

This is not an approach to skills development we would countenance in any other area of the curriculum, and yet, in what is widely regarded as the most essential form of literacy, digital literacy, (alongside language and numeracy) it is. Yet another barrier to authentic integration looms, the barrier of a generation of students with an under developed ICT skill-set, ironically, despite the proliferation and availability of screens. Surprisingly, even those who should be the most likely providers of ICT skills teaching, tech integrators like me, are often the most reluctant, due to their paralysing fear of a return to the ‘bad old days’ of skills teaching in isolation, they opt instead to restrict the skills sets of their students, to those learnt through a process of exploration and discovery, oriented around word processing, social media, and web browsing.

ICT skills do not have to be an either/or choice, using reflective practices, and building awareness of the prerequisite tech skills that are foundational for all learners in the 21st century, we can avert an impending crisis, by providing our students and teachers with screens and a broad, balanced range of skills to use them effectively.

The NETS are not enough

“Students demonstrate creative thinking, construct knowledge, and develop innovative products and processes ~~using~~ ~~technology~~” (NETS(S) 2007, strikethrough mine).

To use the analogy of literary genres/strands (which I find helpful, but you could use science and mathematics strands just as easily) they need to be specific to the nature of the sphere of experience. Literacy genres are, NETS are not.

They need to be specific not generic. Yes you can argue that English literature is a 'subject' and ICT no longer is; this is just semantics. Who cares what we are defining them as now, we all know that just a few years ago 'IT' was a discrete subject, and it still is based on the definition of 'subject' it's just not 'discrete' anymore…

subject: a branch of (technological) knowledge studied or taught in a school, college, or university.

discrete: individually separate and distinct.

ICT is a 'subject' that is now integrated - and should be subject (see what I did there?) to the same rigorous checks and balances of any other 'subject'. The same argument can easily be made for English language, or Science, or Mathematics - these are core competencies that are applicable and a prerequisite for success in any domain in the 21st century. So call them what you like and distribute them how you will - but a broad and balanced education requires that the essential elements of these subjects are not neglected.

We should not neglect opportunities to read and write, for example, realistic fiction, or physics or shape and space in Mathematics, I believe the same applies to what could be called the 'digital domains' or literacies of ICTs, such as, text, image, video, audio and data (with coding/control waiting in the wings) - none of which the NETS explicitly describe or mandate, thereby rendering them useless as a means to articulate the effective use of digital technologies.

To put it another way - we're talking about students becoming holistically literate, that literacy has to incorporate 'multiliteracies' including language, scientific/methodological ways of thinking, mathematical literacy and of course digital literacy. ALL of these can be defined as 'subjects', all of these could also be (and arguably should/could be) taught in an integrated way. Just because we've chosen to integrate a subject, does not mean it should be treated less rigorously - integration should not mean invisibility - at least not for teachers. (I'd argue invisibility would be great from a student's perspective, but so would it be for maths and science et al - they don't see it as a 'subject' it's just another natural (for them) way of thinking and working)

So we have mandatory strands in each of these literacies that we expect all students to have multiple experiences with during their time in school, ideally in each grade, scoped and sequenced properly - I can't see how a student could be considered to be mathematically literate if, say, they had never been taught how to multiply, or in science, never experimented with forces, or in English, never read or written poetry, or in terms of digital literacy, never learned how to edit or use video. None of the strands in these subjects are left to chance, or to ad hoc integration. We carefully design authentic ways to ensure they are all experienced, all I'm arguing for is that we do not allow exceptions, especially not for one of the core competencies of the 21st century.

Put simply, if we believe that articulating a coherent scope and sequence of essential skills in the domains of language and mathematics are necessary, then how much more so in what is arguably THE prerequisite skill set of the 21st Century?

For a PDF version of our ICT skills scope and sequence matrix, click here.

An example of a section of our ICT skills matrix

Vitamin D (VITAD)

Five Essential Domains: VITAD: video, image, text, audio, data - 'Vitamin D'

Digital Illiteracy...

Can they view, edit, create, compose with video?
Can they organise, edit, resize, manipulate, incorporate image?
Can they browse/read/search text? Are they proficient at word processing, commenting, curating texts?
Can the manage audio files, organise, edit, create, compose audio using multiple audio tracks/sound effects?
Do they know their way around a spreadsheet, Can they organise data efficiently, perform basic calculations using functions and formulae, analyse, synthesise, and model data?

When, and only when you can confidently answer yes to all the above, then, and only then can you call yourself digitally literate!

Digital literacy and digital competency

Essentially what I am advocating for, is an expansion of what we mean when we describe someone as 'digitally literate' in much the same way as we would when we describe someone as 'literate' or 'numerate'—we don't mean that we expect them to write like Shakespeare, or calculate like Einstein, in the same way digital literacy doesn't impose a skill set like that of Bill Gates, all it should mean is that, they are competent. For example, by the time our students complete their primary school education they should be 'literate' in language, number, and with digital technologies. That is why the skills matrix stops at Grade 5, by that point, if they have mastered all of the skills articulated within the matrix, they are digitally competent, competency meaning they have acquired knowledge of the key tools available in each domain, from word processors to spreadsheets, and the skills to use them effectively:

"In contrast to a view of 21st century skills as general skills that can be applied to a range of different tasks in various academic, civic, workplace, or family contexts, the committee views 21st century skills as dimensions of expertise that are specific to—and intertwined with—knowledge within a particular domain of content and performance. To reflect our view that skills and knowledge are intertwined, we use the term “competencies” rather than “skills.” (Pellegrino et al, 2013, p3)

Having established that foundational set of competencies, they are now well equipped to develop them further, with guidance or independently, but most importantly they are equipped, they know what they know, and they know what they don't know, and they have the capacity to extend their competency further in any of the domains should they need to or wish to.

When & How do we teach/learn these skills?

Any attempts to make time after school for any form of CPD are likely to be ineffective. ‘Training’ and ‘Courses’ do not really take account of the actual needs of teachers,

“there can be no one size fits all training (Hu and McGrath, 2011, p 50)”.

When teachers can see the explicit relevance of the technology to enhancing their practice, their motivation increases, along with willingness to make the effort and to find the time to change (Daly et al, 2009). A core set of ‘little and often’ strategies are all you need; 4 strategies that are described here.

ICT skills have never been more essential, and learning these are far from futile, they are fundamental—but the mode and medium you use to facilitate the acquisition of these skills by teachers is critical*.

*Whatever you do, don't try and teach these skills in didactic after school 'courses'.

Pellegrino J W, & Hilton M L (Eds) (2013). Education for life and work: Developing transferable knowledge and skills in the 21st century. National Academies Press.