Social Ed.

The Ottawa-Carleton District School Board is going boldly where few Canadian school boards have gone before – into the Google cloud. According to the board, it’s implementing Google Apps for Education across all schools in the district.  They began with 12 pilot sites this year and are looking at full completion by the end of 2013.  Several Google-certified instructors on staff are key to the project’s success.

Here’s what Google says about Google Apps’ main products:

Gmail for education offers 7 GB of storage per user, powerful spam filtering, integrated voice/video conferencing, and 99.9% up time…all hosted by Google – with no cost, and no ads for students, faculty or staff.

Google Docs provides web-based documents, spreadsheets, drawings and presentations that let users edit the same file at the same time so you always have the latest version.

Google Calendar enables users to easily schedule meetings, share event calendars, and stay organized – no matter how busy their days are.

Google Groups allows users to set up their own mailing lists, and easily share docs, sites, and calendars with colleagues. Administrators can control memberships if desired, and connect Groups to [learning management] and [student information] systems.

Google Sites is an easy way to create web pages for intranets or class projects. You control what’s public, and what’s private. No coding or HTML required.

I’ve got a call in to the board to find out which apps they’re adopting but whatever they’re starting with, I applaud their innovation and risk-taking. I also applaud the fact they’re modeling how to kill two big birds with one stone: providing their students with collaborative cloud-based tools to extend their learning – and saving money. Google Apps are free.

Students are already familiar with Google because 99% of them already use one or more of their free products such as search, YouTube or Gmail. However, they use them because they help them do what they want to do – find stuff, watch videos – and they’re dead easy. The question is, will students see apps like Calendar, Docs, Groups and Sites in the same way?

Google Apps are tools. Collaboration is a behaviour. Using Gmail and sharing a video on YouTube are not collaborating. Students must see how collaboration can help them do what they want before they’ll care how Google Apps or any tool can help them collaborate.

I will be watching closely to see how the OCDSB meets this challenge.

Tags: Google, GoogleApps
Posted in Education, Google | 2 Comments »

My post the Gamification of Social Media with David Nicholson, focused on organizations using online social game dynamics to engage people with their product, service or idea. I ended the post by saying that when I asked David Nicholson if he had any examples of education organizations using game dynamics online he said he didn’t.

Well, Komoka, Ontario educator Rodd “The Clever Sheep” Lucier has created one in the 31daygame.

The game is “is the first ever education Professional Learning Game. Where participants use twitter to “make a forced choice between the two competing [education themed concepts]. Which is the most compelling?” Over 31 days, the tournament takes place on twitter with the winner of each day moving on to the next round.”

The 2^nd game is now on and has 206 followers. Ben Hazzard interviewed Lucier about the benefits of the game for a recent post.

One benefit they didn’t mention addresses one of the main critiques of the net: people increasingly consuming only information filtered to fit their current worldview. The 31DayGame exposes educators to new content that might not make it through their filters – and engages them by giving them the chance to boot the content off the proverbial island if they don’t like it.

However, someone has to choose the content for each game and that imposes a filter of its own. Lucier highlights this initial curation and the voting throughout the game as one of the game’s greatest benefits. Curation on the net is, after all, something that increases in value in direct proportion to the exponential increase in info on the net. However, the 31daygame site suggests that a “guest curator” chooses the content for each game which could limit the range of content considered.  Perhaps a panel of three guest curators from different regions could broaden the initial offerings.

In any case, the game is another great initiative by Lucier so let the games – continue.

Tags: Education, Gaming, Twitter
Posted in Education, Gaming, Twitter | 2 Comments »

Ok, I know the whole “pioneer” thing is overused but it really applies here. How do I know? None other than World Wide Webster’s says so. According to Webster’s a pioneer is:

A person or group that originates or helps open up a new line of thought or activity or a new method or technical development.

Of course, on the web, the definition would require one tweek:

A person or group that originates or helps open up a new line of thought or activity or a new method or technical development – and shares it online.

All four people I mention in this post are doing exactly that by sharing the results of theirs and others’ social ed. experiments.

Wayne MacPhail teaches online journalism at Ryerson and is president of w8nc, a Canadian marketing and communications company specializing in emerging technology. He was one of the few attendees at my Podcamp Toronto session on social media and education and his contribution proved that, like Facebook and Twitter, it’s not how many you get – it’s whom you get. Wayne talked about striking a deal with Telus to equip his students with smart phones to report from the field using video, audio and text.  Wayne is also one of the people behind the innovative rabble.ca news site.

Zoe Branigan-Pipe, Rodd Lucier and Ben Hazzard are the three educators behind the Unplug’d (sic): Canadian Education Summit happening Aug. 5-7, 2011 in Algonquin Park.  The summit aims to “bring together Canadian educational change agents to share peer-reviewed success stories; to deepen relationships among participants [and] publish the collective vision of the group.” Pretty pioneering don’t ya think? (They’re limiting the Summit to 40 people so act fast if you’re interested.)

In a March 21 blog post, Rodd announced he’s collaborating to deliver an Apple sponsored iPod/iBook pilot in a colleague’s geography courses.  He says they’ll be getting the students to replace their binders jammed in their backpacks with online course binders.

To find out more about what these four are up to, to be inspired or just to get some concrete ideas to use in your class or school, check out Zoe, Rodd or Ben’s respective blogs (their names above link to them). You can find out what Wayne’s up to by connecting with him on Twitter or checking out rabble’s latest innovations.

Let the pioneering…continue.

ps. Zoe teaches with the Hamilton-Wentworth District School and is currently on secondment as an instructor at Brock University. Rodd is the London District Catholic School Board’s e-Learning contact and Student Success Teacher. Ben is a program consultant for the Lambton Kent District School Board.

Tags: Ben Hazzard, Education, Rodd Lucier, Social media, Wayne MacPhail, Zoe Branigan-Pipe
Posted in Education, Social media | 2 Comments »

I’ve been watching lots of TED talks these days and, as usual, they inspire me and give me ideas how to change my life – and my world – for the better.

I recently watched Sugata Mitra’s amazing Child-driven Education talk where he talks about his education experiments with kids in Indian slums. One involved embedding an internet-connected computer in a wall and filming what the kids living in the slum did with it. His experiments often involve him giving kids a tool and basic instructions – and then leaving. 

The incredible results got me thinking about educating my own kids and Canadian kids in general. What if we did what Sugata did with our own kids: gave them the tools and left? What if we let them use all the great, freely accessible tools (like Facebook, YouTube, or Twitter) and/or the great restricted, secure tools (like ePals or Radiowaves) and basic instructions – and then left?

I’ve been checking out the ePals network and one of the cool things it offers is collaborating with classes with similar interests around the world. So what if, instead of struggling with your kids to get them sit down and drill times tables, you encourage them to find a kid somewhere in the world and do it with? Or what if, instead of our kids standing in front of the class and presenting their project on, say, India, they hooked up with an Indian student via Skype and let his class ask them questions?

Just some food for thought  – and experiment.

Tags: Education, Social media
Posted in Education, Social media | 7 Comments »

First, let me give credit where credit is due. Though I wish I had come up with the great phrase, “Teaching Screenagers”, I didn’t. It’s the title of the Feb. 2011 edition of the magazine Educational Leadership which is all about educating the “iGeneration” (I can’t take credit for this one either. I got it from Larry D. Rosen, author of Rewired: Understanding the iGeneration and the Way They Learn. Rosen’s Teaching the iGeneration is the flagship article in the Screenagers edition).

This subject hits close to home because I have two young boys I have to prepare for the future. Now, to do that,  it would really help knowing what the future will look like  20 years from now. However, at today’s rate of change, we don’t know what things will look like next month let alone next year. So what’s a parent to do?

Well, since we don’t know what the world’s going to be like by our kids’ next birthdays we can focus on what we do know: it’s going to change a lot. We can follow the old saying, “The only constant is change”  and focus on helping our kids develop an ability to creatively adapt to constant change.

One of the most articulate proponents of this idea is England’s Sir Ken Robinson who spoke passionately about this at the TED ideas conference and also in this great little video.

Sir Ken gives the what and the why. I have decided to focus for the immediate future on the how: using the technological tools that are as natural and ubiquitous as water and air to our kids. 

Online social tools can help teachers and students teach and learn (if it’s not clear who’s doing what that’s on purpose as both do both).

The two main reasons I hear why schools don’t use more social media are teachers aren’t comfortable doing it and the Internet isn’t safe for the kids.

On the second point, I recently learned about two companies providing secure social networks for schools. My own kid’s school uses ePals which bills itself as ”the leading provider of safe collaborative technology for schools to connect and learn in a protected, project-based learning network”, and says it’s in classrooms in 200 countries and territories. The other is UK-based Radiowaves an ”innovative network of free school websites where pupils broadcast video, radio, podcasts and blogs, harnessing safe social media within education.” It boasts 20,000 students.

I have just started playing with both and will report back on my findings. In the meantime, for those in schools not ready to adopt a whole new network, here are some tips from Screenagers:

• Find yourself a knowledge broker to help you find online resources. This can be one of your students, an older college student or a parent. 
• When possible, give students multiple ways to access content (video, podcasts, text, multimedia) so they can choose the one that best fits their learning style.
• Instead of showing a video of, say, the first act of the latest Shakespeare play you’re studying, tell the kids to find and watch it on YouTube and then spend class time discussing it.
• Post assignments on Facebook - you can create a Facebook Page for your role as teacher that is separate from your personal profile. I heard on a recent podcast that Facebook lets teachers create professional profiles (different from Pages) separate from  their personal profiles but I haven’t confirmed this.
• Text your kids a question and challenge them to answer it collaboratively.

Any more ideas? You know what  to do.

Tags: Education
Posted in Education | 9 Comments »