Figures I have recently heard from a number of sources, mainly anecdotally, is that if you look at any gaggle of educators in the Western world, engagement in using ICT tools is at about 20%. What is occupying a lot of attention is how to engage the other 80%.
One of the frustrations continues to be the slow uptake of ICTs by those who were not early adopters, or even in the second wave of “converts”.
It is generally recognised that the engagement of at least a large proportion of the 80% is the key to real change in what is happening in our classrooms, at whatever level of education.
The upcoming edna workshops, about to launch next Friday in Perth (March 28) focus on helping teachers who have not yet started their digital journey get started, those who have started develop further, and those who are well on the way, to share and network.
Here are the sessions:
Keynote: Framing your digital footprint
The keynote session will provide an overview of the paths Australian educators are travelling online, and the issues they face in their personal and professional learning journeys. Participants will be challenged to consider what impact read/write culture is having on educators, and how they are sharing creative content, commenting, reviewing, rating and learning from each other online. What is your digital learning footprint and where are you headed?
edna and me
An overview of edna services, navigation and networks to provide a context for concurrent sessions.
Hands on me.edu.au
A short introduction to the concept of personal online social networking spaces using me.edu.au as an example. By the end of this hands-on session participants will have an understanding of me.edu.au, its functionality and its potential use for them as an educator.
Getting started in e-learning: baby steps
What is e-learning? How can it benefit my learners? How can I manage assessment, moderation and facilitation online? Launching into the use of technology to support your teaching and learning practice can be daunting. This session will discuss how to get started using manageable steps. It will explore introducing elements of technology, the differences between working online and presenting face-to-face, simple tricks and traps to support your online practice and where to find resources and support.
Follow that theme
In this hands-on session you will take a teaching or professional development topic and explore and subscribe to themes of interest. Learn new ways of collecting and connecting by tagging, describing and aggregating the results of your exploration for easy reference. Discuss how your students find and organise information, and experiment with tools to improve their information management and collaboration skills.
Embedding multimedia
Whether you deliver teaching and training face-to-face, online or in blended mode, bringing concepts to life with images, audio and video allows for a richer learning experience for students. In this hands-on session, participants will consider their target audience and how best to use multimedia resources. Find and identify freely available images and how to optimise them for use on the internet. Find and identify available video files and learn how to embed these files into an online environments such as edna Groups or a blog. Brainstorm workarounds for access issues to multimedia resources.
Digital literacies
This presentation considers the literacies, learnings and links required to ensure Australian students and teachers are well equipped to navigate the digital landscape. Participants will discover ways edna can link them to resources and communities that discuss the significance of information literacy, critical literacy, visual literacy, media literacy and games literacy, plus strategies for teaching about collaborative content, advanced search, information ethics, filtering and online safety.
edna Groups for newbies
edna Groups is an online environment for promoting communication and collaboration between members of the Australian education and training community. In this session participants will experience and play with some of the popular online tools found in edna Groups. Participants will learn how to chat online to other edna Group members, complete a choice activity, add discussions and replies to a forum, create a glossary entry and edit a wiki.
Learning without borders
This session challenges participants to embrace the communications aspect of ICT, move beyond the walls of their institution or system and immediate community, and engage in the global education community. Participants will take a hands-on tour through issues facing our world and ways ICT is being used to enhance learning in areas such as languages, values, communication and social justice. Opportunity will be given for participants to focus on an area of interest such as the global education website, online projects, virtual worlds, global wiki projects or initiatives such as the One Laptop per Child programme.
New tools in edna Groups
This session is for those interested in what tools Moodle-based edna Groups or edna Sandpit Groups offer beyond forums and file upload. A number of plugins and external tools can be used to enhance the collaborative nature of your group. Which tools are good to use as icebreakers? How can you use course management tools such as assignment and feedback to enhance collaboration? How can you use a group blog to share? Among other tools to be covered: Glossary, Choice, JPG slideshow, and embedding video and frappr maps.
edna tools for your site
Build dynamic content into your website using the edna toolkit and the magic of RSS. This session is useful for participants at a beginning to intermediate level wishing to be introduced to RSS technology and ways to add dynamic content to websites, intranets or learning management systems using edna tools and content. Participants are encouraged to bring along a thumb drive and save their work for future reference.
2008 edna and me workshop tour
- Adelaide
- Saturday 5 April 2008, Hallett Cove School, 2-32 Gledsdale Rd, Hallett Cove, SA
- Brisbane
- Thursday 1 May and Friday 2 May 2008, University of Queensland, St Lucia campus
- Canberra
- Friday 11 April 2008, Copland building, Australian National University, ACT
- Darwin
- Tuesday 5 August 2008, Palmerston Library Community & Training Rooms, Goyder Square, the Boulevard, Palmerston NT
- Hobart
- Monday 21 July 2008, Conference Centre, The Hutchins School Sandy Bay, Tas
- Melbourne
- Thursday 22 May 2008, State Library of Victoria, 328 Swanston Street, Melbourne, Vic
- Perth
- Friday 28 March & Saturday 29 March 2008, Schools of Isolated and Distance Education, 164-194 Oxford St, Leederville, WA
- Sydney
- Tuesday 29 July 2008, Macquarie ICT Innovations Centre Building C5B, Balaclava Road, North Ryde, NSW
2 Comments
The Future World Leaders And Scientists Are In School Right Now.
The world is a small place. Rapidly expanding and almost instantaneous transfer of information, we are reaching parts of the world that were, until a few years ago, impenetrable. Previously a dearth of knowledge led us to believe that such countries were different, alien and held disparate views on life. Perhaps the greatest surprise once a door is opened is the amazing similarity in the aspirations and fears held by parents for their children. Paramount, irrespective of race, creed and colour are concerns over the health and education of their children. Despite the development in technology, the removal of many barriers to freedom and the realisation of a global market, schooling of children remains an international and fundamental concern.
Learning starts early and involves parents playing educational games with their children. The element of fun is a fantastic stimulus that should be present throughout life’s learning journey, but is largely lost as children go to school.
Parents in Fairfax County USA have the same fears and aspirations as those in Australia, New Zealand, South Africa, Singapore, Taiwan, Japan and the UK. Our knowledge base and influences are becoming international rather than parochial. Globalisation is instigating vast changes in our society, for example just flip over the nearest manufactured object and see if it is not made in China.
If parents view education as a global concern, expressing concerns with current schooling standards why are we unable to correct falling standards. The English language could achieve the status of a global first or second language within a generation thanks in no small part to the spread of the internet. Should we therefore consider a global curriculum with international investment? Vast sums are wasted in localised attempts. Britain as an example invested 22 billion of pounds Sterling over the last 10 years is witnessing falling standards in numeracy and literacy. Many children inadequately equipped to progress from primary to high school subsequently fail to thrive.
The world’s population is expanding yet the number of teachers is not. Stress, changing attitudes in society and pressure to achieve influence many to leave the profession early. So how do we overcome this mounting issue? Whilst computers have infinitely greater processing capacity than three years ago, and many life saving drugs have been developed, academic achievement fundamental to the progression of this cycle is not improving at the same speed. Educational experiments have failed and we are re-introducing teaching techniques contemporary during the lunar landings.
The scaling benefit of a global curriculum would reduce resource costs and widen the application. Perhaps it should also encourage parents to take an active part. Educational games are still fun, stimulate learning and play a crucial role as a teaching resource in school. But they can be used with additional impact at home to replicate the lesson at the pace of the child. The mobilisation of vast numbers of parents providing this additional focus can help overcome the fall in educational standards, and as the saying goes; many hands make light work.
Alistair Owens
Kerrie,
You’re right about the significance of the challenge we have in engaging the other 80%. I’m pretty confident that the edna workshops play an important part in addressing that challenge.
The world most certainly is a small place – it took just a little more than two days for Alistair to reply to your post with his thinly-veiled promotion of the educational games he sells from his website. I found his reply full of the usual hyperbole and half truths that one expects from a vacuum cleaner salesman. It only goes to prove the age-old adage that, on the Internet, nobody knows you’re not being altruistic.
I guess the bigger issue for collaborative online educational environments is how the online community deals with people who put their own interests ahead of everyone else. We only have to look at the antics of some people in editing Wikipedia in the lead-up to the last Australian elections to realise that caveat emptor applies as much on the Internet as it does everywhere else.
And that will have an impact on how we prepare our teachers and our students to work and live online. The irony is that to do this effectively, we need an environment where Alistair is free to post his biased and self-interested messages. We also need an environment that is free from heavy-handed content filtering; but that, as Rudyard Kipling was want to say, is another story.
Cheers,
Garth Newton
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