BETT 2010 Creativity

The power of the pentatonic scale

2010-01-15T01:10:00.000-08:00

Bobby McFerrin - the Power of the Pentatonic Scale from the 2009 World Science Festival .

Kiran Bir Sethi - inspirational

2010-01-14T11:06:00.001-08:00

Kiran Bir Sethi captured me with her passion and inspirational approach to teaching and learning . Absolutely wonderful stuff.

iPhone - Book ... BookPhone - PhoneBook

2010-01-10T04:45:00.000-08:00

A blended look at what's there - PhoneBook

Its all about passion ...

2010-01-10T04:40:00.000-08:00

My wife says that I am very passionate ... about children and teaching and learning.

So is Angela Maier

Augmented Reality

2010-01-10T04:37:00.000-08:00

Already may applications of the iPhone have this functionality ... Here it is ... how would you use it?

... and if you want to drive a BMW Z4 rather like the 'James Bond' idea ... try here.

If you want to try out a science context using augmented reality look here.

Where do you stand?

2010-01-10T04:35:00.000-08:00

WESLEY CHAPEL, Fla. -

Ariana Leonard's high school students shuffled in their seats, eagerly awaiting a cue from their Spanish teacher that the assignment would begin.
"Take out your cell phones," she said in Spanish.
The teens pulled out an array of colorful flip phones, iPhones and SideKicks. They divided into groups and Leonard began sending them text messages in Spanish: Find something green. Go to the cafeteria. Take a picture with the school secretary.
Leonard's class at Wiregrass Ranch High School in Wesley Chapel, a middle-class Florida suburb about 30 miles north of Tampa, is one of a growing number around the country that are abandoning traditional policies of cell phone prohibition and incorporating them into class lessons. Spanish vocabulary becomes a digital scavenger hunt. Notes are copied with a cell phone camera. Text messages serve as homework reminders.

"I can use my cell phone for all these things, why can't I use it for learning purposes?'" Leonard said. "Giving them something, a mobile device, that they use every day for fun, giving them another avenue to learn outside of the classroom with that."

Much more attention has gone to the ways students might use phones to cheat or take inappropriate pictures. But as the technology becomes cheaper, more advanced and more ingrained in students' lives that mentality is changing.
"It really is taking advantage of the love affair that kids have with technology today," said Dan Domevech, executive director of the nonprofit American Association of School Administrators. "The kids are much more motivated to use their cell phone in an educational manner."

Today's phones are the equivalent of small computers — able to check e-mail, do Internet searches and record podcasts. Meanwhile, most school districts can't afford a computer for every student.

"Because there's so much in the media about banning cell phones and how negative phones can be, a lot of people just haven't considered there could be positive, educative ways to use cell phones," said Liz Kolb, author of "From Toy to Tool: Cell Phones in Learning."

Even districts with tough anti-use policies acknowledge they will eventually need to change.
"We can't get away from it," said Bill Husfelt, superintendent of Bay County District Schools, a Florida Panhandle district of 27,000 students where cell phones aren't allowed in school, period. "But we've got to do a lot more work in trying to figure out how to stop the bad things from happening."

Seventy-one percent of teens had a cell phone by early 2008, according to a survey by the Pew Internet & American Life Project. That percentage remains relatively steady regardles of race, income or other demographic factors. Meanwhile, many schools are low-tech compared with homes outfitted with home networks, wireless Internet and a smartphone for every family member.

Most schools still have prohibitive policies curtailing cell phone use — often with good reason. At Husfelt's district, seven students were recently arrested after they got into a fight on campus that he says was instigated through text messages.
In other parts of the country, teens have been arrested for "sexting" — sending indecent photographs taken and sent through their cell phones. Students also use the devices to cheat: In one poll, more than 35 percent of teens admitted cheating with a cell phone.

But phones are so common now that seizing them is huge hassle for teachers.
"It's just a conflict taking them up and having to deal with them," Husfelt said. "It's too disruptive."

Teachers who have incorporated cell phones into their classes say that most students abide by the rules. They note that cheating and bullying exist with or without the phones, and that once they are allowed, the inclination to use them for bad behavior dissipates.

"Kids cheat with pen and paper. They pass notes," said Kipp Rogers, principal of Passage Middle School in Newport News, Va., "You don't ban paper."
Rogers started using cell phones as an instructional tool a couple of years ago, when he was teaching a math class and was short one calculator for a test. He let the student use his phone instead. Twelve classes, including math, science and English, now use them. Students do research through the text message and Internet browser on some phones. Teachers blog. Students use the camera function to snap pictures for photo stories and assignments.

Classes often work in groups in case some students don't have phones.
In Pulaski, Wis., about 130 miles north of Milwaukee, Spanish teacher Katie Titler has used cell phones for students to dial and record themselves speaking for tests.
"Specifically for foreign language, it's a great way to both formally and informally assess speaking, which is really hard to do on a regular basis because of class sizes and time," Titler said.

Jimbo Lamb, a math teacher at Annville-Cleona School District in south-central Pennsylvania, has students use their phones to answer questions set up through a polling Web site. Instantly, he's able to tell how many students understood the lesson.

"This is technology that helps us be more productive," he said.

Exciting isn't it?

2010-01-10T04:33:00.000-08:00

No teacher left behind ...

Every teacher matters ...

Some other ideas/things/tools/games you might not have come across:

Flockdraw

My artistic attempt ... here

This is what they say about themselves:

When you start development on a project, all you have are a few ideas and a long road ahead. As time progresses, you get to watch the concept become reality. Little steps contribute to the bigger picture.

Through the course of development, you hit roadblocks and stumble. Unseen problems become evident. You must adapt.

But you don't give up. You innovate. You conquer. You continue forward and exceed your own expectations.

We've put a lot of love into this, and we're proud to release it to the world.
We hope you enjoy it. This one's for you.

BBC Pinball - PINBALL is here to help you kick start new ideas, to get your thoughts flowing freely, and to develop your creative talents. Bounce your ideas around by using these fun and simple tools, and who knows what ideas might pop up.

Hong Kong with super technology

OOo4KIds

The idea is to provide a 7-12 years software, based on OpenOffice.org source code, say, extremely simplified.

The BBC have produced a new, exciting History site for Primary History
It includes sections on Ancient Greeks, Romans, Anglo-Saxons, Vikings, Children in Victorian Britain and Children of World War 2

Wordsift

This is what the developers say about it:

WordSift was created to help teachers manage the demands of vocabulary and academic language in their text materials. We especially hope that this tool is helpful in supporting English Language Learners. We want WordSift to be a useful tool, but we also want it to be fun and visually pleasing. We would be happy if you think of it playfully - as a toy in a linguistic playground that is available to instantly capture and display the vocabulary structure of texts, and to help create an opportunity to talk and explore the richness and wonders of language!

WordSift helps anyone easily sift through texts -- just cut and paste any text into WordSift and you can engage in a verbal quick-capture! The program helps to quickly identify important words that appear in the text. This function is widely available in various Tag Cloud programs on the web, but we have added the ability to mark and sort different lists of words important to educators. We have also integrated it with a few other functions, such as visualization of word thesaurus relationships (incorporating the amazing Visual Thesaurus® that we highly recommend in its own right) and Google® searches of images and videos. With just a click on any word in the Tag Cloud, the program displays instances of sentences in which that word is used in the text.

Rockford continues to Rock !

New Read Along Section on the Rockford's Rock Opera website. So you can now, literally, Read Along with the whole story!

The Big Picture

Deep Zoom ... it will blow you away HardRock Cafe zoom

What fun with evolution ... Devolve me

Build Yourself Wild

What is it that you haven't found yet ... click here if you dare ... it will/might/should/has the potential to ... change your life

Choosing

2010-01-10T04:32:00.000-08:00

When you decide to paint a room (incidentally ... I have never, ever done that) you get a set of charts and try to choose the colour you want. You choose from the vast array before you and eventually decide ... but you do have a vast array to choose from.

In making the decisions about using the technologies to enhance teaching and learning what does your personal 'chooser chart' look like?

For example ... you all know about Google don't you ...

How do you know what you don't don't and how do you find out?

What does your personal learning network look like and how do you grow it?

Are you tethered by your geography?

Hard questions ...

Collaborative Learning Networks

From the Clever Sheet via Twitter (my thanks for this)

While each of us has an individualized way of interacting with co-learning colleagues, Dave Cormier's recent post and intermittent tweets have led me to regard the term Personal Learning Network as slightly 'oxymoronic'. My contributions to a group experience might be qualified as 'personal', but I would never use the word as an adjective to describe a team, a committee, or a class to which I belong. Maybe it's time to reconsider the use of the term PLN?

Personalized Learning & Participation
Each person's learning network is certainly unique. The tools we use to interact with our networks are chosen to suit our personal tastes, and the types of information we share among our colleagues varies widely; but the name we've come to accept for this inter-connected learning: Personal Learning Network, implies individual ownership and control.

Whether or not you subscribe to the theory of Connectivism, you likely realize that our networks are chaotic and self-organizing all at the same time.

A Collaborative Learning Network
The value in any learning network comes from the contributions of many individuals. No one member has ownership of the group, or of the work that's been collaboratively developed. Additionally, it's clear that if any one person fails to add value, then the net results are less striking.

Some key questions ...

Do you have a Personal Learning Network?
Do you have a Collaborative Learning Network? or
Do you have something different?

Are your children/students building PLNs and CLNs?
Are you helping them to do this?
How is the technology you have or will have this expanding this horizon?
Are your pupils tethered by their geography ?... their world will flatten and flatten

What do they know that you don't and how is your vision taking this into consideration?
Who are the teachers and who are the learners?
Is it always one or the other and how do the spaces created take this into account?
Is your school a building or a community?
How far does the community family extend its support?

And what tools do other educators use?

Top 100 Tools for Learning 2009

View more documents from Jane Hart.

Anything can happen .... and it probably will ... or will it?

2010-01-10T04:31:00.000-08:00

Ken Robinson in his wonderful TED presentation on the nature of Creativity delivered firstly in Monterey in 2006 (and elsewhere since) makes a clear statement about education for creativity. He also says that we can't predict what the future holds ... just think about the last year in the world economy?

We are the ones we've been waiting for ...

2010-01-10T04:14:00.000-08:00

We Are The People Weve Been Waiting For is a full-length feature film on education which was inspired and guided by Oscar-winning producer Lord Puttnam.

The film is supported by various sponsors including independent education foundation, Edge. The film follows the experiences of five Swindon-based teenagers. What unfolds during the course of the film is a very inconvenient truth about education.

It concludes that, while there are signs of spring, a transformation of the education system is vital if the UK is to continue to compete effectively in an era of globalization the world has changed enormously but our education system has not kept pace. We need to recognise that there are many paths to success for young people and provide the right support and opportunities for them to develop their individual talents.

PS
There is a web site for the film where comments can be left and more details can be found. Visit it here.

A free copy of the full length film was available in the Guardian on Saturday 28th November 2009

This is not a 2 minute or a 7 minute fix … you need to listen/watch it all … Here are a few of the things that caught my attention as I listened for the first time:

‘I want to do amazing things with my life’
Does school help you find your passion?
I’d like to be … flexible … happy
What if you have no goal … what if your prospects have been closed down?
People are different - education has insisted that they are the same
She has grown into herself … a fantastic young lady
I’d like to be … like … a lucky one
We need people who can question … schools have ‘over-served’ them
We programme children to be compliant We are not tapping into creativity we are producing little foot-soldiers
The preoccupation with reading and writing masks so many other things
Why have so many ’successful’ people failed in school?
They focus on what you can’t do not on what you can Policy makers focus on the curriculum and assessment
We use education as a way of disqualifying children
Education is about drawing out of children what is in them
Mental truancy … there - but not there
Anyone who doesn’t think that education is about the economy is not thinking
There is no long term strategy for education in the UK Education is being used as a political football
It is not a question of doing what we have always done but better … we need to do something radically different
There are people doing fantastic work … we need to share it We need to re-address basics … productivity needs to be tied to creativity
You are special High quality education …. designing new systems without building a legacy system first
Creative and proactive thinkers
Paint your picture … its yours
Masters and mistresses of practicalities
The debate about the curriculum is locked into either practical or academic
The connect between school and the ‘real world’ …
We need to revisit what school education is about
All the high performing systems recognise that they have to invest in teachers
There is no school on earth that is better than the teachers
Shouldn’t we be allowing students the luxury of learning from their mistakes
We can be more efficient by using technology
Technology can never replace the teacher but it can empower
We provide the student with the opportunities to learn in their way
Technology can provide the core to move away from
The curriculum will become student-centric … it will be mass-customised
It may be too late for today’s students but not so for their children
I want to make my family proud and I want to be proud of myself
… following something that will make him happy
We owe it to ourselves to plan for change .. to plan for transformation
If we don’t act then the world’s problems will exceed our capacity to deal with them

So what happens now ?

2010-01-10T03:58:00.000-08:00

The progression from Web 1.0 through Web 2.0 and onwards through Web 3.0 is exponential. From docs to blogs, pods, wikis and beyond, children, students and learners of all types are using the growing power at their fingertips to develop their ideas in exciting, stimulating and creative ways.

They are collaborating, creating, digesting, reworking, demanding, focusing, inventing and re-inventing!

They use their own internet connected devices and want to use them everywhere ... quite rightly and institutions need to consider how they can help and facilitate this.

The 'read/write' aspects that excited us with passion last year have sprinted forward giving new meanings to both parts… read and write.

Each day we find institutions besieged by the advances made, which they seemingly have little or no control over and today‘s person wants control! What price is a three to five year development plan when change is so fast?

How do we match this in a world where earthquakes and the global 'crunch' have the capacity to change peoples' lives forever? How do we manage all of the information we now have? What effect does it have on us and ours? Who are the owners? Who are the buyers and who the sellers?

… So what happens now … let‘s explore the opportunities and take the risk of finding out

'The future is already here - its just not evenly distributed' William Gibson

We have seen it coming, we have used many elements of it and we all call it different things.

Is it ‘social software’? Is it Web2.0? Is it ‘New Generation’? The title matters not, but the operation is the difference between ‘push’ and ‘pull’. In our own social and professional lives as mainly digital immigrants (see the work of Marc Prensky) we have begun to embrace a new form of ‘living’. We have returned to older ways of finding out; we ask to know. But our asking is wider and involves interaction and debate. We have begun to embrace the technology to help us with this but its exponential change leaves us gasping at what we can now do and who we can talk to and, best of all, what we can say.

There is real power here for our own professional development that we have only just begun to tap into. We need to make a personal move from ‘immigrant’ to ‘native’. The latest generation of social software is evolving. That is part of its power and its excitement. In our schools we are dealing with digital natives (although, in his latest writing Marc is himself re-phrasing this).

This is their world and they have never known one that is different. If we do not make use of the power of their native technology in our work with them as educators then there is a high chance that they will want to bypass our system. The very essence of schooling as we know it is at stake here. Up until now the questions and the answers have been applied to older students working in our secondary schools but now the message is coming down the age range. Older brother and sisters have younger brothers and sisters who want to know.

They watch their older siblings deal with ‘MySpace’, ‘Facebook’ and ‘Bebo’; they use ‘Flickr’, ‘del.ic.ious’ and ‘Diigo’; the write on ‘Zoho’; they communicate on ‘Skype','Twitter' and ‘MSN’; and they ‘Google’ everything from calculations to maps and beyond.

They already know how to do it and they bring their skills and knowledge with them to the school education party.

What, if anything at all, are schools doing about making the best, most efficient use of this power to enhance teaching and learning? What are the strengths that we can latch on to and work with? Where are the weaknesses and the problems? Where will we find best practice? Have a quick glimpse into the future before you start ... we all could do with 2020 vision.

Written in 2003 in the time of 'Web 1.0' does it excite or ...?

The age group is falling and falling for the use of social software and we must all be aware and beware of that. It is our job to educate and support our young people in the educational and social use of the tools that they have available ... the distinction between the two aspects is, after all, our not theirs.

Beyond Engagement

2010-01-10T03:53:00.000-08:00

This is worth a read: Beyond Engagement studied the use of ICT to enhance and transform learning at KS2 in literacy, mathematics and science:

This report summarises the findings of a smallscale investigation focusing on the extent to which ICT is being used in primary schools to enhance or transform learning in literacy, mathematics and science. 21 schools were visited for a day by a DCSF School Standards Adviser. The schools were nominated by their local authorities as having at least good practice in the use of ICT and some were judged to be amongst the most effective schools in the local authority.

Recommendations:

1. To further the development of the ICT primary schools will benefit from focusing on:
issues of teaching and learning and not simply on the technology of the ICT application itself;
the potential of the ICT activities to move beyond pupil engagement to supporting enhanced and deeper learning in core and foundation subjects;
providing on-going CPD and support for staff in terms of collaborative working and sharing of effective practice.

2. Pupils’ experiences of ICT could be extended to support deeper and enhanced learning in mathematics – rather than, for example, just isolated practice/revision programs or teacher led demonstrations – by sharing more innovative pedagogical approaches of using ICT in the subject.

3. Schools should continue to build connections between the use pupils make of ICT at home to the approaches used within school. In relation to the further development of Virtual Learning Environments (VLEs), schools need further guidance on how these can best be developed to enhance pupils’ learning.

4. There is a continuing need for support for the leadership of ICT in primary schools. This support needs to encompass senior leadership as well as leadership at subject leader or co-ordinator level.

5. Providing an adequate level of dedicated technical support for ICT is a key priority. As more flexible hardware solutions are implemented, the requirement for expert support to maintain the ICT infrastructure In primary schools will become even more critical.

6. Schools could usefully develop their processes for monitoring pupils’ ICT capability through the key stage so that they can: * identify aspects requiring further development and next steps for pupils; * identify potential gaps in the scheme of work; * be clear about the ICT that pupils should be able to apply in other subjects at each stage of the year; * provide meaningful transition data for secondary transfer or change of primary school to support continuity and progression.

The recommendations are interesting:

Point 1 Bullet 1 is significant as it seems to be commenting on the integration of ICT into context rather than the teaching of the 'nuts and bolts' ... excellent!!

The idea from Point 1 Bullet 2 that ICT is an empowering tool that can have really far reaching implications in all subjects beyond the usual ideas of motivation and enjoyment is excellent and needs to be reiterated into the strategies!

This is exemplifies in Point 2. Point 3 comments that schools should continue to build connections ... rather many should actually begin this process and not see it as a voluntary add on.

Point 5 emphasises the fact that this level of use of technology can only be successful if the right technical support is available to make it function and to develop. All too often the technical support is curtailing the development of creative use of ICT rather than supporting it. The expert support must be sympathetic to the aims of the use!

** Thanks to Anthony Evans, Redbridge Primary ICT Consultant, for pointing me in this direction.

Have you kept up with your reading?

2010-01-10T03:42:00.000-08:00

Now I know of, and have read, the Williams Report on Maths,the Rose Review and the Cambridge Review ... so what happens when, in the not to distant future, there is a general election? (check out the odds here)

Any views or ideas on this would be appreciated ... check out the Conservative Party, Labour Party and the Liberal Democrats policy documents for enlightenment.

Cast some light on things for me ....

"The time has come," the Walrus said, "To talk of many things ..." and I hope that you had your say so let's hear it for ICT as it enters the 'core' .

PS

Also have a read of the 2009 Horizon Report and check out where people thing that the innovation is going to take place over the next five years.

These are the things to become familiar with if you wish to be at the cutting edge of things:

Mobiles. Already considered as another component of the network on many campuses, mobiles continue to evolve rapidly. New interfaces, the ability to run third-party applications, and location-awareness have all come to the mobile device in the past year, making it an ever more versatile tool that can be easily adapted to a host of tasks for learning, productivity, and social networking. For many users, broadband mobile devices like the iPhone have already begun to assume many tasks that were once the exclusive province of portable computers.

Cloud Computing. The emergence of large-scale “data farms” — large clusters of networked servers — is bringing huge quantities of processing power and storage capacity within easy reach. Inexpensive, simple solutions to offsite storage, multi-user application scaling, hosting, and multi-processor computing are opening the door to wholly different ways of thinking about computers, software, and files.

Geo-Everything. Geocoded data has many applications, but until very recently, it was time- consuming and difficult for non-specialists to determine the physical coordinates of a place or object, and options for using that data were limited. Now, many common devices can automatically determine and record their own precise location and can save that data along with captured media (like photographs) or can transmit it to web-based applications for a host of uses. The full implications of geo-tagging are still unfolding, but the impact in research has already been profound.

The Personal Web. Springing from the desire to reorganize online content rather than simply viewing it, the personal web is part of a trend that has been fueled by tools to aggregate the flow of content in customizable ways and expanded by an increasing collection of widgets that manage online content. The term personal web was coined to represent a collection of technologies that are used to configure and manage the ways in which one views and uses the Internet. Using a growing set of free and simple tools and applications, it is easy to create a customized, personal web-based environment — a personal web — that explicitly supports one’s social, professional, learning, and other activities.
Semantic-Aware Applications. New applications are emerging that are bringing the promise of the semantic web into practice without the need to add additional layers of tags, identifiers, or other top-down methods of defining context. Tools that can simply gather the context in which information is couched, and that use that context to extract embedded meaning are providing rich new ways of finding and aggregating content. At the same time, other tools are allowing context to be easily modified, shaped, and redefined as information flows are combined.

Smart Objects. Sometimes described as the “Internet of things,” smart objects describe a set of technologies that is imbuing ordinary objects with the ability to recognize their physical location and respond appropriately, or to connect with other objects or information. A smart object “knows” something about itself — where and how it was made, what it is for, where it should be, or who owns it, for example — and something about its environment. While the underlying technologies that make this possible — RFID, QR codes, smartcards, touch and motion sensors, and the like — are not new, we are now seeing new forms of sensors, identifiers, and applications with a much more generalizable set of functionalities.

Preamble

2010-01-10T03:38:00.000-08:00

Welcome to this session which will explore some ideas behind the creative use of technology in teaching and learning with reference to where we are now and where we might be going.
We will talk about many things including a wide range of tools I have come across and have used but mainly we will talk about the changing world of learning and that collaboration is king but creativity is the essence.

Jean Piaget had a view on education and creativity.

I hope this blog will provoke you to add your views and ideas so that others can share.
The posts will provide links to things that I say and some that I don't have time for ... please use the poll to let me know what you think.

This blog is at http://www.bett2010creativity.blogspot.com/

Thanks