Tom’s Work

SCECGS Redlands

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It’s nice to return to Redlands, Sydney Church of England Co-educational Grammar School.  I had the pleasure to work with the staff and ICT Integrators at the end of 2008 and return to share some new ideas regarding what I’m seeing as the four piece puzzle to truly supporting the 1:1 digital learning that is often available at school and almost invariably from home.

A Closer Look

  1. A Culture of Collaboration – Welcome to Wikicademy
  2. Rich Routines and Smart Online Spaces – The Edge-ucators Way: Look to Learn, ClassPortals and WebQuests & WQ 2.0
  3. An Empowered Vision of Curriculum – Disintermediate me?! and The Greek Sculpture Question
  4. A Framework for Student Self-managed Learning – CEQ•ALL (Seek All) rationale and Rubric (pdf)

Some Examples

Look to Learn:

ClassPortals:

WebQuests

Resources

Tutorials

Collaborative Tools

Task #1

  • Beyond Cut & Paste
  • Essential Questions
  • Assessment Criteria
  • Look to Learn
  • ClassPortals
  • WebQuests

Caroline Chisholm continued

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Ongoing work with Caroline Chisholm Catholic College in Melbourne focuses on 1:1 learning and their Notebook program.  A special CCCC blog has been set up with sample look to learn activities, links to ClassPortals and WebQuests as well as an 1:1 ICT Skills survey.

Working with St Joey’s

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Welcome!

Today I get to spend the day working with the staff of St. Joseph’s College in Hunters Hill, Sydney.

The main focus will be on supporting their 1:1 MacBook pilot and roll-out.  The challenges in such an endeavour and great, but even greater are the opportunities.  I have come to see that four key pieces must fit together to make the puzzle work.  These are:

  • Rich Online Routines
  • A Culture of Collaboration
  • An Approach to Self-managed Learning
  • An Empowered Vision of Curriculum

Ignoring any one of these will jeopardise success.  In fact, delete any one of them and technology may become the problem, not part of the solution.

My job is to persuade that this is true, to offer effective and rewarding strategies for each of the key factors and to encourage staff to create interpretations that will work at St. Joeys.

After the whole-staff presentation, groups will form by choice around the five main Digital Challenges I’ve put up for discussion.  Their ideas will be posted on a wiki that we will visit and can be a launchpad for future conversations and task teams.

Later, I will meet with a core team.  In anticipation of the kind of things that might come up in this session, I’ll offer the following links.

Resources

Working with Caroline Chisholm Catholic College

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Welcome!

It is indeed a pleasure and honour to work with a school and its staff who have so dedicatedly focused itself on serving its students through continuous reflection and improvement.  My goal is to share some questions, ideas and strategies, then work together to see how well they fit with a culture that is already successful.

The main question is:

“how does teaching and learning change when all students at a school have their own laptop?”

My main suggestions are that three elements are required for a successful outcome:

  • A New vision of Curriculum
  • Online Learning Spaces
  • A Self-managed Learning Framework

Download this handout packet as a guide to the day and here is a full screen Flash version of the slides or a movie version you can download.

Online Resources and Examples

Look to Learn:

ClassPortals:

WebQuests:

CEQ•ALL

Creating ClassPortals

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Introduction

Workshop

  • Create new blog at WordPress.com (from your current account)
  • Brainstorm and Choose YOUR topic for a ClassPortal (see sample?)
  • Create a Diigo Bookmarks Group on your Topic
  • Add at least one Look to Learn Post
  • Copy and paste the Web 2 Tools Panel?
  • Copy, Edit ClassPortals Feeds Pageflakes and add a link to a Pageflakes feed page
  • Add Core links (search engines, collaborators, core tools, etc.)
  • Adjust Sidebar Widgets
  • Write your About page to describe your classroom integration plan
  • Produce content (Podcasts, Videos / YouTube Channel, VoiceThread, Dipity timelines, Flickr streams, etc.)
  • Leverage the  CEQ-ALL (“seek all”) – personal learning framework? (download)

Resources

Works in Progress

ACEC – Workshop

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Welcome

Thursday, 8 April 2010 4:00 – 5:30 in room 207

Use Typewith.me to post questions, interests, issues, etc.

Here’s the Workshop blurb: This session follows on from the keynote “It’s broke, so fix it” and details the main strategies discussed. Find out how Web 2.0 tools and rich media can be integrated into a research based framework that finally makes the shift from teacher-directed to student-managed learning that spans a student’s school years and results in greater achievement and preparation for their futures.

Take a targeted Self-assessment for skills related to the strategies below: Digital Learning Skills List Checklist (doc)

Here’s a snapshot Roadmap for  integrating Web 2 tools into these three strategies.

Look to Learn

ClassPortals

WebQuests

A New Take

Readings

Background

ACEC- Melbourne

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speaking-at-acec2010_0Many of us in the EdTEch world in Australia will spend much of this week in Melbourne at the Convention and Exhibition Centre to attend The Australian Computers in Education Conference 2010. I’m looking forward to seeing many colleagues and friends, including Alan November, Lynn Davie, Jenny Luca, Greg Gebhart, Geoff Romeo, Adam Elliot, Trudy Sweeney and Sue Urban.

Tom March Sessions

Wednesday, 7 April 2010

Thursday, 8 April 2010

You can download a handout of links for the sessions.

Comment on the Keynote, especially Wikicademy and iPademy

Alan November, Lynn Davie, Jenny Luca, Greg Gebhart, Geoff Romeo, Adam Elliot, Trudy Sweeney, Sue Urban
Tom March Sessions
Wednesday, 7 April 2010
1:30 – 2:30 Plenary Hall Choose Your Own Keynote: Tom March – “It’s broke, so fix it” – re-making education for our digital era
4:00 – 5:00 Soapbox Tom March on his Soapbox
Thursday, 8 April 2010
16:00 – 17:30 207 Tom March “It’s broke,so fix it” Tom March Workshop

New Millennium Learners

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NML
New Millennium Learners Conference
Brussels, Belgium
21-23 September

The OECD’s Centre for Educational Research and Innovation (CERI) launched the New Millennium Learners (NML) project in 2007. It has the global aim of investigating the effects of digital technologies on school-age learners and providing recommendations on the most appropriate institutional and policy responses from the education sector.

Tom will be sitting on a Roundtable discussing: The New Millennium Learners – Needs, Opportunities and Responses
If appropriate, he will share these slides. (7.5mb swf)

Here is a more comprehensive set of slides with a main menu to jump to main issues.

IWBnet Gold Coast Conference

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iwb-butt-finWelcome

The following links will support people attending or interested in my sessions at the Third National Leading a Digital School Conference – 2009.

First off – I’m doing a keynote I’m calling “The Future Began Last Year”.  A main point is that the world has changed around education and it’s in everyone’s best interest to invent the next model for learning in our new digital age.

Here’s the Keynote blurb:

We are entering an era when a student with broadband access to an unfiltered Internet can learn more than he or she could in many of our schools. At the same time, another student could use the same technologies to derail the course of his or her life. The key differences between the two involve intrinsic motivation, a disposition toward critical thinking and the ability to navigate this century’s digital environment. What role will your school play in support of students’ growth and learning?  Will technology enable students to “supercharge” and personalise learning or will personal technologies only disrupt last century’s assembly line schools? The important thing is that you get to choose the future you want.  The hard part is that we’re already a few steps behind. This brief session will establish the above argument and then offer a new framework to guide education’s transition from a culture focused on standardised outcomes and compliance to one that empowers students to achieve their full potentials. Perhaps ironically, such humanistic goals are best accomplished through a comprehensive integration of emerging technologies.

(Apple is putting together a composite of my talking head & slides so if it’s okay, I’ll link to it.)

Workshop: A Vision for the Future:  Building School 2.0 3.0

Session Blurb:

Blogs, wikis, podcasts and RSS?  Whatever happened to just “the Internet” and when did “Web 1” pass its use-by date? More importantly, how will your school grow and prosper in an era of YouMyFaceSpaceBookTube? Be reassured that the answer resides in developing educators into experts in pedagogy, not technology. This double session is designed as an engaging exploration of Web 2.0 technologies, the CEQ- ALL personal learning framework and classroom practices that promote the best of emerging technologies using strategies for today’s schools.

Pedagogical Foundations:

Session handouts:

Exemplars: Blog, ClassPortal & WebQuest

Activities

1 – Looking to Learn – Disposition toward Inquiry

2 – ClassPortals: Choice, Competence and Relatedness

3 – WebQuests – Flow & the Pursuit of Quality

Other Helpful Documents

10th Anniversary Clean-up Sale

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Tom March
G’Day All, It’s time for a little house cleaning…

After over a decade as a “Web-based educator,” I’ve accumulated a few too many things to look after myself. So it’s time to see if they can find a better home. Next month, I’ll share a few domains that are catchy, but that I’ve never used. This month, though, it’s time to see if any school district, company or association is interested in two of ozline’s most popular Web sites…
BestWebQuests for Sale

BestWebQuests.com

  • Launched in 2001, BestWebQuests is the only directory of fully reviewed directory of WebQuests that are really WebQuests.
  • Here’s an example review. Note the barchart. This is created automatically by adding and reviewing the site through BestWebQuests’ powerful Control Panel and comparing it to the BestWebQuests’ Rubric
  • Included in the site is all the coding (written in Active Server Pages – ASP), a comprehensive administration back-end and a database of over 1100 quality WebQuests.
  • Includes the domain bestwebquests.com and bwqu.com (for BestWebQuests University – the potential for an online course)
  • BestWebQuests can be installed on any Windows server
  • Offers over $15,000 considered – as is: The database suffers from my neglect over the past two years and a fair bit of LinkRot renders 404s for individual WebQuests. If the quality of the database is important to the purchaser, we will go through and update the links for an additional cost.
  • Development offers considered – if your organization wants grow BestWebQuests into a mecca of Web 2, Challenge-based learning resources, I would be happy to consult on such an enterprise.

Web-and-Flow.com for Sale

Web-and-Flow.com

  • Launched in 1998, Web-and-Flow was Web 2.0 in a Web 1 era. Teacher and librarians create up to six different Web-based activities from the Interactive software.
  • Includes a built-in Link Checker to assist educators to keep their activities fresh each year.
  • More than a Web-page maker, Web-and-Flow was lovingly written by me as online mentoring in curriculum design. Included are a host of Help pages and Tutorial modules. The Purchaser would retain copyright to the written content if they want to repurpose it.
  • Includes the domain web-and-flow.com
  • Successfully licensed to school districts and associations to foster a collection of educator-made learning activities.
  • Written in robust Perl, purchasers might want to develop a revision in something like php and AJAX. This would create a real killer-app for a start-up company or expand the reach of a current portal.
  • Offers over $25,000 considered
  • If the purchaser wanted to redevelop Web-and-Flow into its full Web 2.0 + potential, I would be pleased to serve as a design consultant as an additional contract.