Games for Change Symposium and an Interview by the Ed Tech Crew

Recently I attended the Games for Change symposium at Macquarie Uni. The event was run by Dean Groom and colleagues with Dean presenting and MCing. It was a great day with the likes of Derek Robertson skyping in regarding Game Based Learning, Annabel Astbury presenting on the Virtual History Centre and Jo Kay and several kids playing and discussing Minecraft. One of the highlights was actually meeting the Ed Tech Crew in person: Darrel Branson (The ICT Guy) and Tony Richards (apparently it was only about the 6th time they had been in each other's company after 175 podcasts!?!).

by colmmcsky

Darrell and Tony are great guys (with impressive kit!) whose podcast series is really inspirational with some great guests each week. They covered the Games for Change event, filling up a whole episode with the keynote presentations, interviews with kids and exactly 5 minutes of fame for myself! The podcast in full with notes and links can be found here. For those who are interested my personal snippet is below. Thanks again to Dean, Darrel, Tony and the presenters and kids for a great day, enjoy!

Creative Commons (and eLearning in Creative and Performing Arts)

At the bottom is my Prezi for the recent eLearning in Creative and Performing Arts workshop. Inspired by Judy O'Connell, and obviously with the nature of Music, Visual Arts and Drama, I really wanted to address 'Creative Commons' as an opportunity and moral imperative (timely, went to a Michael Fullan seminar today). To this end I set about gathering and attributing images licensed under Creative Commons, as described in Judy's post Find Free Images Online!, to model to the teachers in attendance. As we all do I wanted some catchy image at the start, and in using Prezi I wanted something to zoom in and out of with effect. Whilst searching I came across Charis Tsevis' awesome photostream on Flickr. I found his Steve Jobs mosaics and wished to use one of them in particular as this was timely with the recent death of Jobs plus iPads are almost de rigeur at the mo'.

by tsevis

(This was incredibly easily to embed and attribute simultaneously using ImageCodr as outlined in Judy's blog).

However, I wished to use this as the background yet I noticed the Creative Commons licence was 'No Derivative Works'

i.e.

This left me in a potential quandary as I would essentially be modifying the image by adding text, images, links and YouTube on top of it within Prezi.

The solution was found at CreativeCommons.org where is stated:

Waiver — Any of the above conditions can be waived if you get permission from the copyright holder

That said, I contacted Charis via Flickr to seek his permission. Charis was more than happy to help out. Having already been assured that I would attribute him all he asked was that I share my work with him: win-win! This was a fantastic, collegial and collaborative exercise! Simple, effective, I've added another great person to my PLN and feel good for operating ethically and making a positive digital footprint. This is also a great exercise for students to do. A few years back some of my Physics students contacted Sneaky Sound System to use their music in a video competition - they graciously agreed. The students were not only stoked that they had permission but also that they received a letter back from one of their favourite bands!

As a postscript, Judy mentioned that I should include the great Kiwi Creative Commons video. Enjoy and enjoy the prezi below.

Creative and Performing Arts eLearning Day 2011 on Prezi

eLearning in HSIE (Social Sciences)

Here is my Prezi on eLearning in HSIE (the social sciences)

eLearning in HSIE on Prezi

Stimulating a Staff Meeting Debate

Building on an earlier post 'Rattling the Cage' - Stimulating A Staff Meeting Debate (or perhaps 'A Stimulating Staff Meeting Debate') and for the benefit of the Leading a Digital School Conference (#iwbdig11), at which this was presented, here is a Prezi on Stimulating a Staff Meeting Debate:

Stimulating a Staff Meeting Debate on Prezi

e-Maturity

Below is my Prezi on 'e-Maturity' from this year's Leading a Digital School Conference (#iwbdig11). I first came across the term e-Maturity in Becta's Harnessing Technology Review 2009. e-Maturity is defined by Becta as the capacity of a college or learning institution to make strategic and effective use of technology to improve educational outcomes with the emphasis being on the school rather than individual teacher efficacy.

Becta made reference to a survey tool that was used to measure a school's e-Maturity. After a lot of digging around I unearthed this in the Measuring e-maturity in the FE sector Technical report, 2008 (made even harder to find after Becta was disbanded). The survey questions used were grouped under 6 umbrellas:

1. Strategy and Policy
2. Professional Development
3. Online Learning
4. Integration of eLearning
5. Use in Assessment
6. Impact of ICT and eLearning
   

In a simple manner I copied, pasted and edited 41 of these questions for my schools' context in a Google Doc Form. An exemplar survey that readers can copy and edit for their own purpose can be found here.

A recommended exercise is to issue an e-Maturity survey to a staff team and present back the findings so that they take ownership of the profiles and identify where the strengths and weaknesses lie. Following on from this it is recommended that the school executive completes the survey and checks the similarities and differences in profiles with the staff perceptions then discusses the comparison at executive level and acts accordingly.

Becta assigned schools one of four e-Maturity labels:

• e-enabled
• enthusiastic
• ambivalent
• late adopters

(Personally I find the term 'ambivalent' unhelpful). In order to provide a score and hence self-rating for our schools I developed a simple algorithm to calculate e-Maturity based on the survey responses.

The scores and ratings are arbitrary and unimportant outside of a school community. However, this is a tool for school self-evaluation and to help inform strategic planning within individual schools. Hopefully some of you will find it of use. At the very least it is a good exercise in modelling the use of Google Doc Forms as a survey tool to a staff team.

e-Maturity on Prezi

Welcome to the Future ...Today

Yesterday I was fortunate enough to be invited to speak to the staff at Hennessy College and afterwards the civic leaders (Principals from nearby schools, Parents and Friends, local business leaders and student leaders) of Young, NSW. The Prezi below is an amalgamation of those two (very similar) 'Professional Conversations'.

The title 'Welcome to the Future ...Today' was trying to highlight the fact that many of these 'futuristic' activities are already happening in society and in the classroom. The main topics covered were Augmented Reality, Mobile Learning and Game-Based Learning (all highlighted in the 2011 Horizon Report) plus Collaboration. In Collaboration the emphasis was on the ability for students (and teachers) to work together anytime, anywhere using tools like Google Docs. In particular, for teacher collaboration, the power of Twitter and the PLN plus TeachMeets were emphasised (all covered in previous blog posts, follow the links).

Much inspiration was drawn from Dr Peter Webster and the fantastic staff and students at Hennessy College plus the work of Justin Hodges and as ever Tom Barrett. When the students say "This is what we want!" you know you're doing something right.

The big message is how important it is for teachers to connect. As Peter put it "geographical remoteness is no longer a reason or excuse for teachers or students to learn in isolation".

Welcome to the Future ...Today on Prezi

TeachMeet2

On the back of the success of our first ever TeachMeet the second one was held on the filthiest night of the wettest July in 60 years. Despite the weather, 70 teachers gave up there own time to travel from far and wide to yet again share ideas around their use of technology and contemporary teaching and learning in (and out of) the classroom. We heard about everything from Year 1 students using digital cameras to stimulate and blend into artwork to using Flubaroo to automatically mark tests, using iPads as dataloggers in Science, Google+ (beamed in from Belgium!) and much, much more. The presentation materials should gradually be appearing here.

Yet again though the real beauty of the day was the networking between the teachers. There were Kindy teachers sharing will HSC Physics teachers, first-year-outs conversing with Principals (yes Principals turned up too!) along with visiting teachers from other parts of Sydney and other school sectors. It was amazing to witness the collaboration and collegiality and an absolute pleasure to be a part of it all. We are already planning the next TeachMeet as we have some real momentum here a lot of buzz.

Many thanks must go out to Domremy College for their exceptional hospitality and to everyone who attended. Particular thanks to those behind the scenes: @pvlies, @timdoyle1, @acoure and @mickprest. TM3 here we come! Please join us or follow on #ceotm and hopefully UStream again.
(Slideshow below courtesy of @timdoyle1)