Sins of omission

I am really sorry I don't have more time to surf the net in search of websites managed by colleagues and containing ideas about the link between the net and teaching. Really interesting suggestions can be found.

For example, in his "The Thinking Stick" blog, Jeff Utecht offers some important notes about something few teachers and school managers have understood over here. Students are on the net, have their own social presence, do talk, even about the "XY School", even about their teacher John Doe. If they are the only ones to do so, all that will be found online about the "XY School" or about professor John Doe is what students write...

Is it necessary, then, to "occupy" spaces, to use one's name in a massive way so that the information we want to be visible can prevail on the students' chatter? I don't know, but personally I think that if not necessary, it is at least important. Surely being aware of the situation is good. Not taking care of one's name on the internet can become an unpleasant omission with no significant belated remedies.

But there is another kind of omission, in my opinion, regarding us teachers from even closer in our relationship with our students. A very good way to be on Facebook or other social networks is garrisoning. There are, unfortunately, those (even colleagues), who misuse or abuse these channels. Direct personal experience. To be there means, beside a lesson in style, a form of moderation of potentially harmful situations for our students and for the images of our schools. Certainly we can pretend we are not there. But we know perfectly well that we wouldn't be quite honest, and besides, vices and virtues are often seen collectively, and rarely the faults of one don't reverberate on the others. Rightly so.

On wikis again

To speak some more about wikis, I found that Kristen Fouss produced a nice mathematical wiki.

The introductory page specifies that this wiki, a collection of notes or a summary of the content of some courses, was made by the members of her classes.

When I saw it first, I was quite dumbstruck. And to imagine that I spent two hours (network slow, someone not remembering his email password, someone else not remembering his wiki password, two sharing the same computer, one kicking the power supply cord and switching off someone else's computer, the evacuation test, the assistant passing with some notices...) in the lab just to make sure that all the students of a class could subscribe the wiki they were going to use... How long could it take to produce a wiki like Kristen's? And the exercises? After devouting a whole month's time to create a kiwi, are the students capable to solve all the exercises they are supposed to solve by the syllabus?

Then, after a moment's depression, I go back to my practical philosophy, and repeat my mantra: a wiki is a tool serving didactics, it is not the heart of what you are doing. Which, in this case, means: if you succeed, it's ok, if not, it's ok all the same.

In this post I summarized the conclusions of a survey among the participants of my four classes to the wiki work last year. In my opinion there are some important points in favour of it being a fruitful way of working.

1. First of all it's interesting to notice that all students found positive, motivating aspects in the wiki activity just done.
2. A greater part of the students, besides, appreciated the collaborative work that wikis make possible. This, actually, is not a necessary feature of wikis, but rather of the work organization behind it.
3. Also interesting is to see how some students were able to reflect about their own learning with this work: some did express opinions about the usefulness of this didactic methodology in the different kinds of learning involved.

I think that, by themselves, these three objectives are worth pursuing as priorities and justify the adoption of a didactic methodology, independently on other reasons: if I have tools capable of 1) motivate students in their study, 2) lead students to live building knowledge in a collaborative way and 3) raise their attention about the state of their learning, a critical capacity towards their learning, I would say that these tools are to be used.

I am perfectly aware about the fact that a wiki, by itself, is not the solution of the problems of didactics. And I am equally aware about the fact that there are other tools capable of leading to the same objectives, even a much-despised frontal lesson, if well prepared and managed. And this last thing actually comforts me in particular, seen the sometimes awful conditions of ITC facilities in some of our schools.

Nevertheless, I maintain that working on a wiki, today, is an excellent learning experience, both for students and for teachers. I have no problems admitting that, knowing only marginally the use of wikis prior to this experiment, after it I installed on my computer a local wiki (Mediwiki), which today I widely use both form my school and home stuff.

And the same might happen to students. The added value is not in a better organization, but in being able to transfer what they learn at school in their daily life, to integrate working, researching, cooperating, elaborating, building, analytic and syntetic methods in their daily actions. These are all things that OECD-PISA will never be able to measure, but that, in my opinion, are worth double the amount of the notions that are received and soon forgotten in our schools.

Blog

I've decided I am going to experiment on blogs at school this year.

It seems to me that a blog, as a personal (I like this "personal" more than "individual") mean of expression, is fit for working outside ordinary contents, delving and internalizing knowledge.

Technically, I visited the Scuola-ER portal managed by my regional school authority, and probably with one of my classes I shall try using it. Anyway I find blogger easier and more suitable for its user management options.

For now I have launched the thing with one out of my three classes. I was too curious and I couldn't wait to be back from my paternal leave next month. With the other two classes I will probably wait until I am back, also seeing what happens with the active one.

In any case, the blog is hidden, accessible only to me and the students of the class. I wrote the parents (as I had done last year for the wiki) to explain my intentions and reasons. Tomorrow we'll start working on it.

Being first of all a personal work, I am quite curious to see how much the students will let themselves be "caught". I will keep you updated.        

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Wind blowing

School educational board, programming for the now starting year.

Asked by the Principal to speak about the school web site, I end my improvised talk saying: "ah, and well, should anyone be interested in experimenting anything in the field of web applications in education, I've read and done some little things and I am available to share and work together...".

The Principal: "Well then it would be really good if we could organize an internal personnel-update course for those teachers who are interested in these topics!".

How can you not like a school like this?

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Wikis with fifteen-sixteen-agers

Just to get back in activity with the blog, I'm updating the last post.

Wikis with fifteen-sixteen-agers. We finished them and the wikis are (almost) ready and eventually I was able to sort the final questionnaires and put them together.

Four classes, four wikis, one about electrization, one about lightnings and two about equilibrium in fluids.

The work was arranged as follows:

1. researching infos to answer some questions raised by observing some phenomena
2. information accumulation, skimming, group rewriting processes, ending in a single document for every student/group containing all information deemed pertaining, necessary and sufficient to describe the subject
3. choosing key-words and mind-mapping
   
4. assigning key-words to students and writing of individual encyclopedic entries about key-word
5. wiki population with
   
1. texts
2. images and graphic elements
3. links according to the mind-map and more
   
6. reading and mutual peer editing of the encyclopedic entries
7. self-assessment about the quality of own work, teacher's assessment about the quality of work, classwork on contents with a questionnaire about appreciation

From a scientific point of view, this should only be the beginning of a methodologic process that should lead to experimental verification in lab of the explanations found to the phenomena.

For me, it is anyway a starting point. The interesting thing that I want to share are the results of the appreciation questionnaire. The question was:

Question 3: With the wiki activity we worked in quite an unusual way: try to balance the books about this methodology, expressing in particular your opinion about:
a) is it or is it not useful to learn more (and, in case, which kind of thigs can you learn better and which can you learn worse?)
b) is it or is it not useful to motivate you to study
c) which aspects of this work do you find more positive and which more critical
d) suggestions, various thoughts, your ideas about what we have done.

The results are interesting. 37 students took part. The answers were free and of various length, some following the scheme, other more original. Here is a summary of the answers.

Pros

• you can learn ICT (32)
• you can learn physics (22)
• it makes studying physics light (21)
• you get motivation from the fact that you are creating something (20)
• you learn to use the net in order to study and learn (14)
• you get to cooperate with your school mates, even when they live far away (14)
• it's different (13)
• you can go in depth with unknown words and concepts (10)
• you learn a method of work that will be useful in future (8)
• you share ideas (8)
• you are forced to pay attention to the connections between concepts (8)
• you reach plenty of specific and detailed information (7)
• you get motivated by using computers and the net (6)
• you can study in a creative and constructive way (5)
• you learn to cooperate (5)
• it facilitates theoretical learning (5)
• working so much on shared information you get to understand its contents (4)
• the product grows with everybody's contribution (4)
• it's accessible everywhere and always (3)
• you get to interact directly and at any time with the teacher (2)
• it makes your school innovative (2)
• you become curious about the final result (2)
• you are responsible of what you write (2)
• you produce your own studying materials (2)
• you can work alone or in a group (2)
• you improve the net (2)
• you learn how to evaluate and improve your and other mates' work (2)
• you share working methods (1)
• it motivates students who like working in groups and share (1)
• you get to use the school's ICT labs (1)
• you don't write with a pen but on a keyboard (1)
• you learn to express yourself in an appropriate way (1)
• it's easier than learning on books (1)
• it forces you to read everybody's work (1)

Cons

• it's difficult if you don't have a computer or an internet connection at home, or if the schools computers are slow or malfunctioning (16)
• technically editing isn't too easy (5)
• sometimes the information you find is not correct or appropriate or adequate or reliable (4)
• some can work more and others less, coordinating is not always easy (2)
• working in the PC room is distracting (2)
• sometimes you end working alone anyway (1)
• little practical learning (1)
• there's a risk that someone's contributions are mishandled by others (1)
• you go in too little depth regarding physics (1)
• someone can be unable to study on a PC (1)
• the topic wasn't interesting (1)
• you learn well your own contribution but not the others' (1)
• not enough time to absorb the contents (1)

Suggestions

• work like this more frequently (30)
• use this method in other subjects or topics (4)
• make the wikis accessible to everyone, not only to our classes (3)
• keep changing groups (2)
• build a social network (1)
• build a gaming site (1)
• improve graphics (1)
• the school should provide tools for everyone to have an experience like this (1)
• choose better topics (1)
• insert exercises (1)
• insert summaries (1)
• insert lesson notes (1)
• use IM services (1)

Feels like it's a good first time. Although I have some corrections and steerings to think of for the next time. In a next post I'll focus on these.

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Some delays...

May: the end of the school year is behind the corner, and with it a whole set of small or bigger pseudo-bureaucratic jobs.
Correcting classworks, remaking schedules so that the last things can fit together with opportunities to make up for those students who didn't work during the year...
Plus this year being a bit more alone in some home and extra chores, because of the soon-to-come new little family member.
In short, I am trying to justify my absence from the blog during these last few days.

The question that arose right today is this: how is it possible to divert the students' attention from marks and address it towards learning?
Right today, maths classwork, subject "parabola". One of the students, one who is usually a bit polemic, says he will get 4/10 but he'd deserve 9/10 because he completed the part of the classwork about the parabola in only 20 minutes, but of course if in the exercises you also put the straight line and in a way that without knowing it you can't progress further...
And all the rest of the class, calculating: here I'm gonna get 4/10 but I had 7/10 in the previous, so, prof, do I get 6/10 at the end of the year?

Let's remove marks from our school furnishing, as they are suggesting to do in Germany these days?
Probably not. So, what? Can Web 2.0 help in this direction? I would like this was the case, although I wouldn't know then how to dive into it without conflicting with a didactic practice a century old...

Who knows...

Who's afraid of ICT?

One of the big electoral slogans, here in Italy a few years ago, was about the "three I's" ("inglese, informatica, impresa", English, ICT, enterprise) to be injected in our schools, something many teachers (including myself) considered either ludicrous or scary, according to the moment.

Probably we are there again. So we'd better deal with it.

One of the three "I's" was ICT. Why should we find it ludicrous or scary?

Let me state my starting point, so that I am not misunderstood: I consider the main part of my teaching profession to be helping students to develop some behaviours that are transversal to the subjects I teach, but which, thanks to these subjects, can be learned by the students. Here I am talking about things like: critical attitude, curiosity for culture, autonomous learning, introjecting universal values, consistency with said values, ability to listen, cooperate, interact hierarchically... Such little things. And I used the adjective "main" to mean that I belong to a school of thought for which if a student develops these behaviours but is not capable of integrating a rational function, I am very happy all the same. Maybe I can't grade him very high, but nonetheless he will be quite aware of my esteem for him.

Well, starting with this, why doesn't the "I" of ICT scare me? As a matter of fact, I am not convinced of the absolute usefulness of ICT in learning maths and physics: I am a bit of a traditional guy here. But I am convinced that I can use ICT to build critical attitude, curiosity for culture, and so on and so on.

Paradoxically, sponsoring a frontal attack of ICT in schools can mean that a technicist education prevails, based on notions and work-oriented more than person-oriented, but it can also mean its exact contrary. Easily. As usually, reforms travel on the legs of those who work in the field, and tools are ambivalent. If students will have less "cultural" subjects classes, if they meet the right teachers, they will also have more classes where culture pass through more modern media. And, who knows, perhaps students will be more attracted to it.

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Wiki, didactics and assessment

As I wrote in a previous post, I decided to experiment using didactically a wiki with my four 14-16ers classes.

This experience, that's proceeding with some labour but, for now, in a satisfactory way, is teaching me a lot. First of all it teaches me that a wiki is just a tool. Finding colleagues who are so fond of technology in education that they miss its goal, is easy today. So, a wiki is a tool serving didactics, let me write it down clearly so I won't forget even if right now I adore wikis.

This, to me, means that, more than its practical usage (that has still some educational values in a school environment), its worth is the side-work. Preparing texts and materials, building the conceptual network, organizing the work, timeliness, accuracy: these are, in my opinion, aspects that must get through in a wiki-related project, perhaps even as assessment indicators for the completed project.

If our idea is to help our students to learn how to learn (repetition is on purpose), we would do well if we provide them with methods, in order to lead them without doing the work for them. For this I think that a good organization of a wiki-related project is necessary: so students can take advantage of the wiki both in learning the subject-theme the wiki is about, and also, and especially, in reflecting on the methods and tools of technologically assisted collaborative learning.

Publishing a wiki is not the end of the project. The "dry-run" publication phase must lead to improvement of the finished product, before its possible "www" publication. So all students must explore the conceptual network represented in the wiki, be able to intervene improving and augmenting the contents already present or suggesting options to their authors for more radical changes, which, in turn, the authors must be able to accept or refuse giving reasons.

Commenting on a post of hers, I asked Talia to suggest how one can assess e-learning in the classroom. I don't want to be lazy, so I'll try to give my contribution, in spite of my confused feelings and not being an expert in the field. I think I can safely say that a wiki per se is un-assessable, in the sense that it is a collective product and it's impossible to partially assess individual contributions. What can we assess, though?

1. in the initial phase (pre-wiki): participation, quality and quantity of information found, timeliness, respecting tasks...
2. in the publication phase: care of contents and of links
3. in the final phase (post-wiki): the level of interaction and understanding shown in discussions about possible variants and corrections, the depth of the methodology and meta-subject reflection about the work done
4. in the summative phase (extra-wiki): specific learning of the subject-theme as shown in a suitable classwork.
   

Of these four phases, the first two seem open to self-assessment by students, or peer-assessment, while the last two are more traditional and require expert and competent eyes of the teacher. The way to organize self-assessment or peer-assessment can depend, in my opinion, on the age and maturity of the students. It can be an anonymous matrix where each student marks his/her own and his/her mates' behaviour relatively to the indicators, or a grading list. One must pay attention that the assessment is specific, maybe even giving reasons, about the project and regarding only aspects contained in the indicators. For this, it can be limited to a self-assessment and to an assessment of mates belonging to the same work group.

I think that in a collaborative activity such as this, it's useful that

• not only contents are assessed
• not only the teacher assesses

I find it's even more useful for a teacher to experiment, be it only once, on an activity whose analysis and assessment levels are necessarily so complex. It motivates, it helps to refocus one's objectives and expectations, it opens one's mind, it forces reflection. In a word, it's healthy.

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To Talia about teacher-student interaction in e-learning.

Let me post here a comment I left on this Talia's blog post.


Hi Talia. Congratulations for your excellent blog and the great ideas you give through it.
I completely agree with you on this one: establishing an e-learning environment doesn’t decrease the teacher’s workload, on the contrary!
Somehow the teacher allows students to access information, tasks, projects… even when the teacher is not there. But they will do it only if they see that the teacher is there anyway, if they understand that they are not alone, that their effort is being followed.
One of the main reasons I am exploring this field is that I want my students not to think of the subject I teach only on Wed evening because on Thu morning we have a class, something we know is not conducive to great learning, but that happens more and more frequently in my corner of the world. A virtual classroom is something that can be exciting because it resembles things students do on the net, but with a different purpose; it can help motivation, give different keys to learning… But an empty virtual classroom is as empty as a real one. Students want people to be there. Students (and parents) want their (advanced and brave) teacher to be there, always. Or at least when they are needed there.
One point I would like to hear your opinion and tips about is evaluation and assessment in e-learning. I feel a bit… clueless about this one.
I’ll keep in touch.

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Where to start?

I imagine a hypothetical colleague who got curious because of hearsays and would want to understand what technology can do for his/her teaching job. What could s/he start with?

1. (First of all, a good knowledge of English is not wasted, since most tools, at least the most recent ones) don't have an Italian localization -yet? - )
2. Find a colleague who, being a bit more experienced, can be his/her tutor, can advise, direct, technically support.
   
3. Spend some hours on the net, getting caught in the linkwork, maybe starting googling Web 2.0 or technologies in didactics.
4. Subscribe some online communities, possibly those didactics oriented or edutech oriented, and take part in the discussions.
5. Try different tools, those that make him/her more curious, creating the necessary accounts. For instance: open a blog, create a wiki, do some social bookmarking, create a network of contacts...
6. Choose a simple teaching project where s/he can experiment, and decide which web 2.0 tool is most suitable for the chose project. Having an expert's opinion could be useful for a well-aimed choice.
7. If students are mature and expert enough, they could help him/her in discovering and exploiting the chosen tool's features, while working on the project.
   
8. Verify the results in terms of learning, participation, and whatever other assessment indicator s/he deems important for the chosen activity. Probably for the first experiments, a real assessment table must be very flexible or even built in itinere.
9. Share results and reflections with his/her network and school colleagues.
10. If possible, keep repeating these points, maybe together with somebody else or as somebody else's tutor.

This is in part what has been/is happening with me, in part what I would like to happen in my school.

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E-learning in the class and learning styles

Talia Carbis has an interesting blog with a lot of resources for Moodle users.

In one of her many worth-reading posts, Talia explains how e-learning can be successfully used in the classroom. In the classroom, no only for distance learning, as it is usually thought.

The reasons Talia gives of these opportunities (which I won't repeat, just go  here and find them), are based on something that I, although I am probably not alone in this, often forget: each person learns differently. If you read the post, you realize that Carbis thinks and writes in terms of people who learn visually, aurally, kinesthetically... That is a classification proper of some learning theories, that distinguish three main styles: visual, aural and kinesthetic.

Going beyond theories, which, I believe, are not always too on-the-spot, meaning that each author has his/her own theories often conflicting or not too well blending with the neighbour's, I think an attention to the cognitive and learning patterns and styles of our students is an attention that we rarely take the trouble to pay, but that would save our students, and consequently ourselves, a lot of effort in our daily learning-teaching job.

This said, I think Talia is right: multimedia, the potentials of the net and of e-learning can be useful for every learning style, and facilitate everybody's work, provided they are used well. The problem is, as usual, to change our mental habits...

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Building learning communities

In Sarah Weisz's TEN blog I found a post that caused some reflections. Building professional learning communities simply tells about Will Richardson's idea that many teachers don't understand how technologies can facilitate learning, and invites to join a discussion opened by a TEN member in the site forum.

Is it really so in Italy? Don't many teachers realize about the potentials?

With some effort (VERY ironic here) I think I could agree, even if maybe things are changing a little. The effort that is being made in introducing technologies in didactics is certainly big. What are the obstacles?

• Teachers feel unprepared to use computers (and probably many of them really are);
• teachers feel unprepared to use ICT in the classroom (and certainly many of them really are);
• teachers feel introducing technologies as something "more", not as a different way of thinking and doing;
• teachers have no clues about what can be done with technologies, because they don't know them and don't practice it;
  
• teachers are focused on syllabuses, abilities students must reach (for tradition or to pass the final exam) and don't have any time nor will to try anything new;
• teachers have no will to try anything new;
• teachers have no will.

I believe that the first step is to show teachers that doing something is possible. Show them finite products, even if the quality is not supreme, to let them know what it's all about. I think it's up to the curious ones, to those like me, to open the way so that in our Italian schools something new is tried, if it's worth it.

And I want to underline this element of prudence: if it's worth it. Experimenting is always a little game on our student's heads, and it doesn't mean improvising, and above all it means having the intellectual honesty to admit when something hasn't worked.

I am trying to do something. The project is going on, although, between election days and new labs to be baptized, we slowed down a little. Our next step is to publish the wikis...
I am also using a wiki to prepare an environmental education project in cooperation with other schools nearby. I hope it works. If nothing else, some more people will know that wikis exist.

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Visitors

On Jon Becker's blog there is a debate (not particularly passionating) that made me think.

Why this blog? I don't exactly know.

First of all, the desire to experiment something new and to sample its possibilities.
Then, I think, the chance of expressing myself, independently on the audience.
Maybe also the hope of getting in touch with people I have experiences in common with without directly knowing them

But then I rediscovered, and probably the value of this discovery is greater today for me than the other three motivations, that to communicate something you need to have it clear in your mind, or at least to have some clear good questions about it.
I think this is the true value of this blog for me, beyond the fact that someone might read and find it useful, or even respond and join a conversation.
Everything more than my clearer understanding of what I write about is a surprise gift.

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OECD and schooling

Translation of today's post "L'OCSE e la scuola" on "Il deserto dei tartari 2.0".

OECD (Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development) published in 2001 and then republished more recently a document that's quite interesting because it tries to describe the possible scenarios for the future of schooling.

The scenarios described are six, divided in three categories: "Status quo", "Re-schooling" and "De-schooling".

Obviously anyone is free to get his or her own idea about these. From a quick check, I think the de-schooling is more appreciated in the USA.

Personally I find myself more on the reschoolng lines, although I am aware that the real outcome will depend locally on many factors and will probably be a hybrid among the different scenarios

The Status quo model seems to me invariably the Italian sentence, among half reforms attempted by a government and punctually erased by the next one...     

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Letter to parents

Translation of post "Lettera ai genitori" of April 1st 2008 on "Il deserto dei tartari 2.0".

Today I showed my principal (and the "Liceo" coordinator) the letter I intend to send to my 14-16 students' parents, to explain what the heck they are doing on the net and what we are going to do in the next few weeks.

The necessity for this comes from the decision of using a wiki with my students, on wikidot.com, and to do so it's necessary to create an email account. Since our school is not provided with this service, we shall probably have to open external accounts (I don't know, gmail o yahoo) for those students who don't already have a personal email address.

So I took the opportunity for a moment of correctness and transparency, also because the net is full of references to similar procedures when it comes to accessing the net with minors.

I think it's also a good way of involving the parents and to further motivate the students, seen that their parents will be able to appreciate their innovative work (provided they let them see it!).

I'm curious...

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Parents

Translation of post "Genitori" of March 30th 2008 on "Il deserto dei tartari 2.0".

On Classroom 2.0 a few discussions about how to manage internet-worried parents are opening.

Looks like in the States some parents (especially of younger students, primary school level) are worried that using internet exposes their children to risks.

The answers I am reading are usually optimistic: teachers involved seem convinced that sooner or later the parents will understand that their children are exposed to risks anyway, and being educated to live in a responsible and ethical way on the net is much better than falling in it completely unaware.

An interesting line of conduct is to involve as much as possible the parents in using the net together with their children. I think this goes in the direction stated before: the net is as any other place children can go, and adults should accompany them as long as they feel reasonably sure about the children's autonomy.

However, I think this is an important point: parents must know about the use is made of the internet and about which security and privacy measures are taken during these operations at school, about which tasks their children are assigned for home work and which tools they are required to use. The information can be the more effective, IMHO, the more involved, or at least open, the parents are in/to the activities; if cooperating directly with them is not possible, at least the results of their children's work can and should be shown to them. A post on one of the forums above mentioned made me smile: think fridge! What do parents proudly stick on the fridge hatch? Their children's masterpieces. Can't seeing and showing that a small piece of the net has got their children's name, or the name of their class, on it, be reason for an equal pride?

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Physics on Classroom 2.0

Translation of post "Fisica su Classroom 2.0" of March 28th 2008 on "Il deserto dei tartari 2.0".

On Classroom 2.0 there is a new interesting discussion about which 2.0 tools can be more suitable for teaching physics. If you want to follow it, it's here.

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Moodle in a second year scientific studies "liceo"

Translation of post "Moodle in seconda liceo scientifico" of March 28th 2008 on "Il deserto dei tartari 2.0".

Last summer I had installed Moodle on my personal domain, just to see how it works and if there are potentials for its use at school. This year I tried using it with my 14-16 y.o. students. I see the students don't feel bad about it.

Now, getting close to the end of the school year and with the growth of my interest in Web 2.0, I decided to give throttle. So I started two modules in my second classes using Moodle forums. The modules are quite similar, only the theme changes (and not much either, since they both circle around static electricity).

• Introduction in class: visualization of a physical phenomenon (electrization of a pen by friction, attraction of small pieces of paper).
• Formulation of possible explanations by students.
• Formulation of "crucial" questions by the teacher, to allow verification or falsification of explanations.
• Internet quest about the answers to the crucial questions; answers are posted on a specific Moodle forum.
• Organization of the answers by the teacher; the information found are simply gathered and only material repetitions are eliminated.

This is where we reached so far. The amount of information found is impressive. I realized, though, that a tool like a wiki could be more suitable for a work like this. So the following steps could be:

• Personal work on the global information file, so as to have a personal summary for each student.
• Creation of a glossary (or of a wiki) on the basis of the already found information.
• Comparison in the physics lab of other similar phenomena: so what explanation can we give?
  
• Meta: reflection about the work done, about the tools used, evaluation of the obtained learning.

I'll try to keep the blog updated about the state of the project.

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Back to work

Translation of post "Si riprende" of March 25th 2008 on "Il deserto dei tartari 2.0".

Easter vacations are over and tomorrow I'm back to work (and with 4 staff meetings in a row!).

I promised myself to work more with my students in the ICT lab. I'm curious to see what I'll be able to do. Certainly the last weeks' reflections, catalyzed by opening this blog, opened my eyes to a whole new world.

On my Moodle I posted the following questions for my second year students (15-16 years old):

In what sense internet technology can help you learn more?
Which internet services do you know?
Which of these services can be of use for learning, even at school?

I hope they answer with interest and that they give interesting suggestions... For now, I wish myself and my readers a good return to school!

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Mind mapping

Translation of post "Mappe concettuali" of March 24th 2008 on "Il deserto dei tartari 2.0".

I've never used mind mapping, at least not calling them so. Probably it's because of my allergy to didactic "fashions".

Obviously I very frequently happen to draw schemes at the blackboard to graphically link concepts, organizing contents already dealt with and those still to meet, according to a certain logic (sometimes also following more than one logic at the same time).

In Kim Pericles's blog I found an enthusiastic post about a new internet service, called mind42.com (in a "public beta" experimental stage) for interactive and collaborative mind mapping, where the maps can be embedded in blogs or other multimedia presentation. There is also a link to her educational site, where she shows the service "in action": a mind mapping about natural disasters. Really the tool looks impressive, as well as Kim's work.

I'm grabbing the occasion given by Kim's great work to express my perplexity (or rather, my critical attention and curiosity): it is more about some possible ways of using mind mapping than about mind mapping itself, for the subjects I teach. It is very difficult to find a discriminating line between the freedom of logical organization of information that mind mapping allows, and that is connected to the different faculties and cognitive modes of each person, and logical anarchy, which is to be avoided especially in some subjects like the scientific ones: certain logic relations and relational patterns between concepts do exist and must be caught, independently on how freely and creatively organized a student's mind might be. It would be interesting to find experiences in this field.

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Del.icio.us

Translation of post "Del.icio.us" of March 22nd 2008 on "Il deserto dei tartari 2.0".

Del.icio.us is a social bookmarking service. It puts together all the "favourites" of the subscribers, it recombines them, it makes statistics of them... it draws a map of the net based on the preferences of those who contribute.

In Patricia Donaghy's blog there is a good screencast (actually, once you see one, you get another dozen) about how to build a network of contacts and widen one's webliography with del.icio.us.

How does it work? Every time I bookmark a website, this is added to my page. When I look at this page I see the list of my favourite web sites, but I also see that, for example, website such is also a favourite site of 20 other people. Not only: of each of them I can see the whole list of favourites and how he/she organized them. So maybe I find out that one of these has the same interests I have, and among his favourite websites has some that I already know, but surely also many more that I haven't seen yet. So I take advantage of somebody else's experience not to surf randomly, somebody else who has something in common with me.

So I can also add this person to my network. If I look at 'my network' page I see the names of those I chose as "interests neighbours", but I also see all their favourites, from the most recent to the least. I can also be useful to my network's members: when i discover a website I'm not really interested in (if I am interested directly, I just bookmark it and my network mates will see it anyway), but I know that somebody in my network could find this site interesting, I can forward it to him directly through del.icio.us.

Charmed by this thing, I immediately tried. From the first one of my "faves" three network members sprang out and three more faves to add... Looks like a fruitful way of knowing people and resources, and a timesaver too.

Let's think of using it in a class, for example during an online quest. The students can optimize times (obviously if enough motivated) and create each his or her own network of URL's, they will organize and use at leisure...

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An educational bloggers' directory

Translation of post "Una rubrica di siti educativi" of March 22nd 2008 on "Il deserto dei tartari 2.0".



Patricia Donaghy, author of a very interesting blog where she shows useful tools for the educational web 2.0, wrote to me about an educational blog directory.

Of course I joined Edubloggerdir with the first Italian blog, Il deserto dei tartari 2.0.

I am working a lot these days trying to find as much information as possible and blog it here. It is always true that rearranging my ideas on my own is always a good practice, but two heads work better than one, so... let's get networked!

Living in this world

Translation of post "Stare al mondo oggi" of March 21st 2008 on "Il deserto dei tartari 2.0".

"Notionism" is an "ism" that threatens the Italian school system, so compartmentalized in subjects and individuals, ever since.

The usual answer to this risk is that the task of the school system is not just give them some "ready-to-use" knowledge, notions to use or spend immediately or in the working life future, but instead some parameters, some reading keys, methods to interpret the world they live in.

A more balanced version is my principal's: to provide students with a wide enough collection of notions and abilities that each student can build, among many items, his or her own networked knowledge. Here the weight of notions is rated a bit more important than in the previous version, but personal elaboration and interpretation parameters still keep a central role, the power to glue together and to introject notions.

Without being too pragmatic, as sometimes the US/UK approaches tend to be, I too believe that the notions the school system must provide cannot be detached from the world the students live in. It's not a matter of giving them something "useful", but of giving them something they can relate to, because, IMHO, only in this way can notions become part of a personal patrimony. Let's take an example: Latin. Its usefulness (something students always ask about) is quite relative: three hours a week times five years' worth of Latin could be time better spent learning something more "useful" (but what for?). We should probably distinguish different levels of usefulness.

Let's change point of view: I don't think that Latin language is worth teaching and learning because of its "usefulness", but rather because it is "contextualizable", students can relate to it, in the Italian language, in the English language, in other languages' linguistic structures, in logic rules, not to speak of Latin literature itself and of many other countries through the centuries, in the arts, in the sciences... In today's world, knowing the Latin language can allow you to decode great quantities of valuable information of nearly universal purport.

And this holds true for many of the subjects we find in our schools.

There is a catch, though. And the catch is that many subjects don't come contextualized out of the box. Latin can remain a fruitless game of mnemonic rules, an empty translation exercise without content, a dead language with no interest. Why? Because it can lack the context where the subject gets a meaning. The context doesn't need to be one: each student can build his, but what is important is that there is one, because it is inside of it that the motivation to learn develops.

For this reason, a teacher must know the world the students live in, he or she must live, at least in part, in it, he/she must appreciate its potentials and risks. In other words, he must enter it, maybe even be at home in it.

This is why, IMO, today's teachers can no longer ignore the world of the net. Because more and more students, more and more of their students, consider it a part of their horizon. While the net remained just a source of information, it could have still been placed in the second row; but now it's becoming a place of interaction, of exchange, of elaboration of ideas and contents, it can become for many teen-agers a place of primary importance in building their identities and knowledge.

I have no idea about how this so-called Web 2.0 revolution will progress. I am sure that, at least, it has the potential to go far. The fact that here in Italy it hasn't fully blasted does not mean it won't do so soon, but it gives us teachers some time to get updated and make up for our shortcomings. It's possible it is just a bubble that's going to pop in a short space of time. But it's also possible that it's a tiger we either learn to ride or meet grounded. What is the best course of action?

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Screencast

Translation of post "Screencast" of March 21st 2008 on "Il deserto dei tartari 2.0".

Yesterday I discovered Hans Feldmeier's website; Hans surfs the web looking for interesting tools and apps.

I found there some reviews about slideshows and mind mapping tools. Among the things that made me curious is a service offering recording and hosting screencasts directly from the user's computer.

What is a screencast? It's a movie, a recoding of what happens on the recorder's computer screen, maybe even with audio and comments. How can this be useful? For example, screencasts are favoured by software or OS producers to show in a simple but direct and effective way how to install and use the product they want to talk about.

And in the educational field? Besides using it to show the functions of an educational website, for example, I can imagine movies one can take with Cabri or GeoGebra: I can create a geometrical construction, comment on it with a microphone and while doing so I can record it in a screencast that will be embedded in my educational website in order to make reproducing the task easier for the students. Using my screen as a blackboard, a screencast can be used to publish on the net what happens on the screen/blackboard itself.

Together with the podcast service (which, in turn, can be used to publish real lessons as videos), for which a videocam is required, screencast can be a useful technique to present contents in a technological and lively way.

Having a Linux OS, I found a nice package to make screencasts: XVidCap. I hope I'll be able to take a demo screencast to post soon.

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Teaching or...?

Translation of post "Insegnare o...?" of March 19th 2008 on "Il deserto dei tartari 2.0".

An interesting lexical question.

Well, first of all I want to make it clear that I deem laughable many of the lexical fashions taxing especially the education world in Italy. A primary school is not different just because it's no longer called elementary, and so on.

But words also express the thought of their user, luckily, when there is one. In RashKath's post in educatorslogin, a blog of Indian teachers, I found a couple times this association: "teaching learning". For example, the author states that she is "exploring new strategies for teaching learning mathematics". Bravo for what she is doing, bravo for "mathematics" plural as in British English or in French and not singular as we Italians or American English speakers say. Bravo especially for this expression: "teaching learning mathematics". She does not teach maths: she teaches how to learn it.

Well, it's clear that if I teach you to learn maths, you learn to learn maths, but in the process you learn maths. Classic two birds with a stone. With the additional value that once I'm not there, if I taught you learning maths, you can still learn maths...

In my opinion this is worth some reflection. Also because learning processes, unlike our cement-cast syllabuses and curricula, change with time...

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366photos

Translation of post "366photos" of March 19th 2008 on "Il deserto dei tartari 2.0".

Wandering about the web I happened to find a Flickr group called 366photos.

The idea is (was, it started already) to take a photo a day for a year. I read comments of some participants and others who just look at the thing, that this way of doing, sooner or later, changes your way of seeing and thinking; it somehow pushes you in a world where the shot, and the search for a good one, has a priority position in how you perceive reality. Some bloggers do the same, forcing themselves to write a post a day, to get their minds accustomed to a way of expressing themselves that probably requires, for some people, some "conversion".

I found this idea (a bit less extended) in Darren Kuropatwa's blog; he is a Canadian teacher with lots of good ideas; for example exploiting flickr and its communities in an educational way... Think of how good it would be for a language teacher (I'm thinking of Italian Italian language teachers in first or second high school classes, where one of the learning objectives is analysing languages and forms of expression) or an arts teacher to be able to stimulate students' creativity, show them precious educational uses of their mobile phones or of the net, while s/he teaches them how to read an image taken by the students' themselves, or while s/he asks them to build images according to the content that must be read in them...

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Online and local wikis - technical notes

Translation of post "Wiki online e in locale - note tecniche" of March 19th 2008 on "Il deserto dei tartari 2.0".

I knew hardly anything about wikis. To learn more I tried creating accounts at a couple of web sites offering free wiki spaces (pbwiki and wikispaces) and to install locally on my laptop some wiki servers: tikiwiki, dokuwiki, mediawiki.

I found pbwiki simpler, more customizable and overall more attractive, between the two candidates for a work-wiki (and I already started using it).

About local wikis, the only one that didn't give me trouble instaling on my Ubuntu box was dokuwiki, which I immediately adopted as a (network) home collaboration tool. Too bad it doesn't iron.

One of the good things of these technologies is exactly this: being able to learn by yourself, simply reading here and there and trying hands-on.

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The tools that changed teaching?

Translation of post "Gli strumenti che hanno cambiato l'insegnamento?" of March 18th 2008 on "Il deserto dei tartari 2.0".

On "Classroom 2.0" a forum was opened about the educational tools that have become irreplaceable according to the participants, because of how much they changed their way of teaching.

Many answered: computers, internet, blogs and wikis, projectors and many others.

I feel a bit of shame: I should answer "the blackboard". Does this mean I need some fresh air? We'll see...

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Wikis and blogs

Translation of post "Wiki e blog" of March 17th 2008 on "Il deserto dei tartari 2.0".

In this wiki I found interesting ideas worth sharing.

Blog (from web log). An online diary where the writer (or writers) post articles or columns that are reachable, according to the settings, by anybody or by a selected group of users, and where readers (or a portion of them) can post comments taking part in a discussion. This site is a (rather poor, at present) example of a blog.

Wiki (from hawaiian, "quick", "fast"). It is a collection of structured information reachable by a set of people who can modify, edit, add to, the site's contents. Wikipedia is a (gigantic) example of a wiki.

What follows is just some night babbling of mine with no real supporting facts.

What educational uses could I find for these two lead characters of Web 2.0? The former is surely advisable for discussions, creative writing, somehow for any kind of activity where exchange and dialogue are central. Because of the journalistic form and the sequential line of posts, I think a blog could be useful for building individual distinct knowledges through sharing and discussing.

The latter is more useful in situations where there is a final goal to reach through successive approximations and in a collaborative way. Since many wiki services also offer discussion tools (for example about what a user modified), a wiki can be useful for cumulatively increasing a single unifiable collective knowledge, without a central role of chronology.

Focusing on the role of time, I notice a substantial duality of the two media: a wiki is a synchronic glance on a knowledge that is growing diachronically. A blog is a diachronic glance on different knowledges growing synchronically.

Focusing on the central element and the type of knowledge involved, a wiki is object-centered, and the object is singular (meaning that the content of a wiki is only one), whereas a blog is process-centered, and the process is plural (meaning that the knowledge-building processes are as many as the people involved).

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10 ways to use a blog

Translation of post "10 modi per usare un blog" of March 15th 2008 on "Il deserto dei tartari 2.0".

I found on the Edublogs site some suggestions about the educational use of blogs. Here's a paragraph-titles summary.

1. Post materials and resources.
2. Host online discussions.
3. Create a class publication.
4. Replace your newsletter.
5. Get your students blogging.
6. Share your lesson plans.
   
7. Integrate multimedia of all descriptions.
   
8. Organise, organise, organise.
9. Get feedback.
10. Create a fully functional website.

Obviously this is just for advertising Edublogs services. But, as a beginner blogger, I find quite interesting seeing all these possible situations when a blog or a blog-related service is suggested...

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How to become a 21st Century Literate Educator

Translation of post "Come diventare un insegnante alfabetizzato del XXI secolo" of March 14th 2008 on "Il deserto dei tartari 2.0".

In his blog, David Warlick suggests a twelve-step path to become "a 21st Century Literate Educator". I interpret that this century needs some instructions, a learning path for teachers born and raised in the previous one.
To summarize the twelve points:

1. Create a group of teachers to work with.
   
2. Have support from the school technical (ICT assistant).
   
3. Subscribe some edu-bloggers feeds.
4. Share work with your group.
   
5. Read, study, discuss books.
6. Plan regular group meetings.
7. Open a social bookmarking account.
8. Open a wiki for notes, links and directions.
9. Join a specific Ning social network.
10. Open your personal blog.
11. Start experimenting in your class.
    
12. Share your results.
    

The post ends with a recommendation I completely agree with, well beyond technological aspects. Start becoming a master learner.

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The utopian classroom

Translation of post "La classe utopica" of March 14th 2008 on "Il deserto dei tartari 2.0".

I happened to visit a rather interesting blog. Jabiz Raisdana, a US teacher in this post speaks about the 21st century utopian classroom. Obviously everything is based on technology and the use of the most recent advances in the classroom. I like the basic idea: the world has changed, students live a different reality from the one their teachers grew up in, this reality is what the students need to be equipped for, and this is one of the tasks of education.

On the other hand, reading more posts on the same blog, I found out that Jabiz Raisdana was made resign from his teaching position because in one of the blogs he used with his students there appeared a link leading to his personal blog. An expensive forgetfulness, that, in my opinion, suggests some reflections on the public-private dimensions relationship for a teacher, on privacy and on limits to set to the pursuit of privacy, on professionalism and being a human person.

I add some lines for the non-Italian readers: in Italy such a thing would be considered outrageous and/or laughable. Nobody can ask a teacher to be a professional without being a person, with his private life. But I do not doubt that, unfortunately, we shall get there too: we seem to pick all the worst from other countries quite readily, whereas when there is some good practice to copy we never seem to be able to decide...

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What is Web 2.0

Translation of post "Cos'è il Web 2.0" of March 12th 2008 on "Il deserto dei tartari 2.0".

It is perhaps a good thing if I state what I intend with Web 2.0, since this is one of the two legs of this blog.

I refer to Hargadon's post already mentioned in a previous post.

If Web 1.0 is internet as we have known it here in Italy at its first mass diffusion, that is a place where it is quite easy finding content, less easy selecting them, but much more difficult and expensive creating them, Web 2.0 is the "natural" and interactive evolution, that is internet as it is getting more and more used (especially among young generations): easy creation of content, personalisation, community and interaction tools, collaborative work and sharing tools.

Youtube, Facebook, Flickr are among the "champions" of this small or large revolution. This blog itself is an example of Web 2.0. It took me five minutes to open it. Any time I want to post I only need to open a window in my browser, write and push a button to publish directly. The limitation (but probabily this is just the crucial point) is only my creativity and productivity.

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Steve Hargadon

Translation of post "Steve Hargadon" of March 11th 2008 on "Il deserto dei tartari 2.0".

Steve Hargadon is one of the promoters of Ning, a web 2.0 service allowing, hearken, to create whole personalized social networks.
Inside Ning there is one social network, created by Steve Hargadon, Classroom 2.0, whose topic is the use of Web 2.0 tools for educational purposes.
Why am I mentioning him? Because one of the reasons that led me to get involved in these matters is precisely a blog post of his, "Web 2.0 is the future of education". It's a post worth reading and discussing, at least to understand the perspective difference between our Italian way of seeing education and the US one.
Let me get this straight: I am very attached to our dear wrecked Italian education system. But I am also convinced that, from time to time, looking somewhere else can only be good.
Have a nice time reading Hargadon's post!

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Objective or means?

Translation of post "Fine o mezzo" of March 11th 2008 on "Il deserto dei tartari 2.0".

A colleague of mine, teaching literary subjects refuses any right of citizenship to ICT in schools. In fact ICT is there (or should be there) in many situations, even if we (she) doesn't see it.

Let's take it as a fact: for some reason ICT is in our schools. Why? How can we interpret this presence we might sometimes feel, frankly speaking, uneasy with?

As a first approximation, I'd say that a way of seeing it is as an "objective": we must teach our students some technological abilities (probably because these are needed in the enterprise and corporate world) and the ICT periods at school are directed to this aim.

In some technical or professional school studies this is certainly the case: there are ICT contents the students have to learn, like programming or systems building or admin'ing. In other cases, I think you will agree with me, we've lost before starting the race: "they know more than we do", our students are the digital natives while we are just immigrants, to use a metaphor that's quite fashionable today.

Or we can consider ICT as "means", a "medium" (or "media") to reach something else. I like this perspective more, because it opens up a question: to reach what? I am provoked by this question: which abilities/competences are reachable through technologies, by means of them? In my opinion this might help us to give an answer to the question about the dignity of technologies in schools, too.

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Let's open (again!)

Translation of post "Apriamo!" of March 11th 2008 on "Il deserto dei tartari 2.0".

This blog means to be an attempt at opening a discussion.
The discussion is about the use of technology in didactics, in particular about the so-called Web 2.0, more in particular in Italian high schools, even more in particular for scientific subjects.
The title of this blog suggests my expectations about the level of interest of the average Italian teacher.
And yet perhaps waiting will not be vain.
Welcome to all who want to have a chat here, in this fortress.

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