webinar screencapture ece

Webinars for Professional Learning in ECE

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“PLD in my Pyjamas”
The possibilities afforded by webinars as a professional learning platform for the ECE sector.

The background stuff

te whāriki early childhood curriculumIn partnership with the Ministry of Education, the Professional Learning and Development (PLD) programme to support the implementation of the revised and refreshed early childhood curriculum Te Whāriki began in May 2017. Alongside face-to-face workshops and facilitated communities of practice (Kōtui Ako) across the country, part of this implementation support has been to provide webinars. These webinars have been designed to both complement the other elements of the programme and to reach more kaiako. I have been very privileged to have been part of this programme, from the rollout of the initial workshops to the development of the webinars designed to continue the discussion in the ECE sector about our treasured curriculum.

Ten webinars have been prepared and are being delivered on 10 different areas of content associated with Te Whāriki, with each of these webinars being presented 10 times (100 in total). At the time of writing, webinar 10 is being delivered. The uptake has been incredible with over 9000 having participated in the webinars, and a further 3000 viewing them online!

Being an absolute newbie to webinars, helping to develop this series has been an exciting part of my role, but it has not been without its challenges. It has not been easy to narrow down possible content, choosing what we believe to be the most important ideas for the sector to engage with. It has been even harder to condense this content to an hour! But it has been worth it, providing PLD through a webinar platform has opened up a world of possibilities for both the presenters and the participants.

While there have been pockets of professional development for the ECE sector provided via webinar, there has never been such a large-scale use of webinars to support kaiako professional learning before. From the very beginning, and (I admit begrudgingly) much to my surprise, this platform of learning has been embraced by ECE kaiako across the country. Overall satisfaction has been very high — 88% of participants have rated their webinar experience as 4 or 5 out of 5. Not bad for a sector where the majority of participants (in the first few webinars, anyway) had NEVER participated in a webinar before!

Part of this particular model of webinar presentations has been to send the recording of the webinar to each person registered, including a transcript of the chatbox. In addition, a ‘clean copy’ was recorded (without participants and chat), and these have been uploaded onto Te Whāriki Online, so kaiako who were unable to register for some reason, are able to view the full series online. Another added bonus has been the opportunity afforded to us to bring renowned ECE experts directly to the sector.

Professor Carmen Dalli (Victoria University of Wellington) engaging directly with ECE kaiako through a webinar.
Professor Carmen Dalli (Victoria University of Wellington) engaging directly with ECE kaiako through a webinar.

ten trends 2017While the power of webinar is new to me, as it is to most of the wider ECE sector, CORE Education Tātai Aho Rau has been running webinars and commenting on the use of digital platforms and media in PLD for quite a while — most recently in the Ten Trends identified in 2017. Many of the possibilities and advantages I have discovered myself, and through feedback from the participants in this programme, reinforce some of these ten trends, in particular, Learner Agency, Communities of Learning, Virtual Learning, and Collaboration.

Unsolicited feedback

While it has not been a question in the evaluation form completed at the end of the webinars, I was really interested to discover that many of the participating kaiako felt moved to comment on the effectiveness (or otherwise) of the webinar platform to support their professional learning. Again, for a significant majority (77%) of those compelled to comment, their experiences have been positive. Digging deeper into their responses, I have found that the reasons for kaiako support for the webinar model CORE is using came down to the following five areas:

  1. convenience and accessibility
  2. simplicity of use
  3. networking with other kaiako from around the country
  4. supporting team engagement
  5. the ability to revisit their learning.

I will dig a little more deeply into each of these areas.

“PLD in my pyjamas”

Convenience and accessibility

In relation to convenience and accessibility, kaiako really appreciated:

  • the ability to choose which webinar session they would access
  • the relative shortness of the initial presentation
  • the fact that they could access learning from the comfort of wherever they happened to be.

This form of Virtual Learning provided them with the Learner Agency to choose when and where to access the PLD and what PLD to access.
Unlike teachers in the compulsory sector, ECE kaiako do not necessarily have the ability to get together as a team regularly and for enough time to generate deep and meaningful conversations and learning. Many early childhood services are open from 7 in the morning until 6 at night. Professional learning at the end of a very long day has sometimes proven to be less than fruitful for the kaiako involved, particularly when additional travel has been involved. For many kaiako, webinars have proved to be a convenient, accessible, and comfortable form of professional learning.
Their appreciation can be summed up in these quotes:

  • “It’s great that it was only 1 hour. I can make time for 1 hour, not for 4 or more :-)”
  • “We are a small isolated Community Kindergarten. Good PD is sometimes difficult to find without travelling lots of kilometres to a city”
  • “…loving listening in my own time from my own home, as it makes it feel homely and my own focus, rather than a super long day at work — like a staff meeting or after work PD, thank you!”

I wonder whether the accessibility of these webinars exploring Te Whāriki provided the impetus for kaiako to ‘feel the fear and do it anyway’. It would seem that they were pleasantly surprised with the result!

Simplicity of use

The simplicity of use was also an area appreciated by kaiako. Research and popular media have reported that many teachers have expressed fear and anxiety when faced with learning through ICT. I have had many teachers express these fears to me as well, often worried that it will be complex and they won’t have the skills to participate fully. In contrast, the simplicity of this webinar format was worthy of comment by some. Examples of these comments include:

  • “Webinar was easy to get into, easy to hear the speakers, easy to follow the content. Links provided [are] relevant. Excellent webinar.”
  • “The webinar is really good from the perspective of the chat room and how efficient that is at getting everyone’s input so easily which is not possible in a face to face situation as you have to wait and take turns, so I find that really good.”

CORE Education also identified collaboration and communities of learning as two of the Ten Trends for 2018, and these results would back these up. Networking was identified as a particularly positive outcome for the kaiako participating in the webinar series. They appreciated being able to share their ideas with, and get feedback from, kaiako from all over the country — moving them beyond their teams and immediate communities.

  • “Getting feedback from the other attendees also is very enlightening. It gave me the opportunity to reflect on and revamp my dealings with children.”
  • “With our Centre being located in the northern region, I appreciate access to the cyber-space classroom with over 111 online students.”
  • “It is great being able to join in with others and get many new ideas that you would never think of on your own.”

Networking and team engagement

The collaboration and development of online communities of learning occurring through the webinar series is not only supporting networking amongst geographically dispersed kaiako, participants have also indicated that the webinars are a useful tool to grow team engagement within discrete early childhood services too!

  • “Often we go on PLDs individually so it was nice to do this together learning from each other as well as other Teachers sharing in the comments box.”
  • “The webinar was a great way for me and my team to come together at the start of the day and be inspired for our future practices.”

Revisit the learning

I was really pleased to note that many individual participants expressed a desire to share both the webinar and their changed thinking with their colleagues and/or the people they lead. The availability and accessibility of the webinar recordings (as well as the opportunity to attend more than one session) supported participants to revisit and grow their learning as individuals and collectives.

  • “Kaiako are revisiting the videos of the webinar and the chat pdfs — great resources.”
  • “I will be reading all the links you provided to remind/get further prompts for my own and the team’s practice.”
  • “I have just gone over all 5 webinars and I have been able to take more in without the pressure of what is/ about to/ has happening.”

So what?

The data and trends emerging from this small piece of analytical work indicate an increasing acceptance of, and appreciation for, the use of webinars as a professional learning platform for ECE kaiako. Alongside other learning opportunities, I believe PLD provided through webinars is providing the sector with meaningful and accessible professional development that has the potential to keep an over-stretched profession informed and motivated to critique and transform their own practice.

Let’s keep it up!

Bibliography

Ministry of Education Te Tāhuhu o Te Mātauranga (2017). Te Whāriki He whāriki mātauranga mō nga mokopuna o Aotearoa : Early childhood curriculum. Wellington, NZ: Author.

Image Credits:

Te Whāriki Early Childhood Curriculum,Ministry of Education Te Tāhuhu o Te Mātauranga, ISBN 978-0-478-16926-3

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Going back to the Island

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Diving deeper into the cultures our students carry into the classrooms.

Last year, I was fortunate to go back to my home island of Atiu, in the Cook Islands. It is the place where my father was born, before the Cook Islands even became a nation (the nation of the Cook Islands is only about 50 years old plus change). I went there with Pounamu Media as the focus of a documentary where they were looking at Māori (my mother is a Ngāpuhi) who also had whakapapa connections elsewhere, and, in my case, Pasifika. The focus is on the connection to a tīpuna. I chose my grandfather, so, not someone who had passed a long time ago, but within living memory — I figure you become a tīpuna once you’ve passed on. You can still view the documentary here.

going home to the island

The journey there made me think of how being Pasifika is different depending on where you are and changes over time. As a semi-frequent visitor to the Cook Islands, like many, I try and go back when I can. We refer to the specific islands where our parents were born as our home island and, although I spent some time there in my childhood on Rarotonga (the main island), my experience of being Pasifika has been through the lens of our migrant community here in Aotearoa. Between the 1960s–1980s, being Pasifika meant you were one of the people who got off the boat or plane from the islands. We were relatively easily definable with our common community experiences of seeking employment and education opportunities. In the 1980s I did not know many kids who had both Māori and Pasifika whakapapa, however, today — in 2018 — you’re Pasifika if you got off the plane five minutes ago from the islands or you are the culmination of decades of cross-cultural interactions in melting pots like South Auckland or Porirua. What that diversity of experience means is that my experience of being raised as Pasifika minority in a predominately Palagi population, I could have more in common with say a Niuean kid from Otahuhu than, say, my own relatives born and raised on our home islands, despite our close affinity. (I say Niuean kid in Otahuhu because, yeah, I’ve had this conversation with some Niueans about my age from Otahuhu.)

Atiu

My “home island”

Atiu is an island 187 km northeast of Rarotonga, in the Southern Islands group of the Cook Islands. It is a raised volcanic island surrounded by a reef from which rise 6-metre-high (20-foot) cliffs of fossilized coral (makatea). The makatea cliff forms a one-mile-wide (1.6-kilometre) ring round the island, creating a virtual plateau. The low swampy land consists of taro plantations, marshes, and a lake, Te Roto. This fertile area also grows bananas, citrus fruits, pawpaws, breadfruit, and coconuts. The ancient name of the island was, Enuamanu, meaning, the island of insects and animals. The population is approximately 200. There are significant populations in New Zealand and Australia along with a village called Patutoa in French Polynesia.

Fun Fact: Adrian Orr, the new Governor of the Reserve Bank is also from the island of Atiu. His grandfather migrated to Aotearoa in the 1930s.

What does this mean for educators?

So, what does all this mean for educators here in Aotearoa?

It means we shouldn’t pigeonhole Pasifika students. We shouldn’t assume they all go to church or like sports. Cultures are organic, so our shared attitudes, values, goals, and practices as Pasifika peoples also change over time and context. Because of this, we can assume that each student will have his or her own singular experience about what it means to be Pasifika. There is a rich diversity in what it means to be Pasifika.

I had the privilege over a number of years to work with Ruta Mackenzie, and she would often start her workshops with the following saying:

O tu, aganu’u, ma agaifanua a le tamititi o le a le mafai ona ulufale atu i le potuaoga sei vagana ua fa’atauaina ma faaulufaleina muamua I le loto ma le agaga o le faiaoga.

The culture of the child cannot enter the classroom until it has entered the consciousness of the teacher.

A perfect reminder to have an open mind when working with our Pasifika students, and that we have to go beyond merely pronouncing names properly (this is the basics, guys!). We can take a closer look at how we are meeting our learners’ needs by developing further inquiry into best cultural, inclusive practice. While most schools acknowledge cultural responsiveness in their school charters and strategic plans, this doesn’t always translate well into practice.

This is also what the research tells us:

Alton-Lee (2003) stated “that effective teaching requires teachers to take responsibility for every student’s achievement, to value diversity, have high expectations, and build on students’ experiences. For Pasifika students this requires teachers to understand their day-to-day experiences, their cultural background and the dimensions that make this up including language and cultural values”. (Education Counts: Quality teaching for diverse students in schooling)1.

It’s about creating environments with students at the centre, where Pasifika students have the focus and learning support they need to lift their academic achievement patterns.

In an earlier blog post, Anthony Faitaua showed it like this:

Level One: Surface level — greetings, pronunciation
Level Two: Environmental — the walls reflect diversity
Level Three: Curriculum — a diverse range of texts and authors are represented
Level Four: Pedagogical — teaching style is varied to reflect diversity and to cater to specific cultural needs
Level Five: Assessment — students are assessed in culturally diverse and appropriate contexts

 

We need to appreciate our students with the fullness of cultural diversity that they bring with them when they step into the classroom. It is a cultural diversity that encompasses Aotearoa as a Pacific nation where Pasifika identities continue to grow as they did back in our island homes.

 

1 Ministry of Education Te Tāhuhu o Te Mātauranga. Education Counts. (2003). Quality Teaching for Diverse Students In Schooling: Best Evidence Synthesis Iteration (BES). Wellington, New Zealand: Author.

Image credits:
Photos taken from video of author: Pounamu Media
Photo of island beach scene: the author.

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Making a start with student data analysis

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Background

In my last post, I unpacked the Learning Management System (LMS) and the Learning Record Store (LRS). In it, I introduced the idea of capturing fine-grained student data using the Experience Application Programming Interface (xAPI) to inform programme, course, and module design. I felt it may have left many readers with a bit of a tall order, and in need of a simpler place to start.

That was the case for me back in 2010 at a regional polytechnic. With classes of 30 students, lectures to prepare, assignments to mark, at the same time developing an online community and resource, to also try to go deep into user data analysis would have been a bridge too far.

In this post, I plan to offer a starting place; some low-hanging fruit. It’s a complete starter pack for someone who has a course in Moodle and no idea where to start. I am sure it would easily transfer to any mainstream LMS.

Identifying students at risk

In your role as an online teacher (tutor, instructor, facilitator), the first thing you will want to do is identify those students who are at risk.

There is no greater risk for a student than not being present. In a physical classroom that is obvious; there are some empty seats. On the first day of the class, Sheryl and Tania are missing. The teacher wonders if they are aware they should be in this class. Perhaps they did not read the notice that said the room had changed. Perhaps they have discovered a clash with another class. After the class, the teacher has a duty to follow up and find out where these two girls are.

The same thing happens in the online world, but all too often the absence goes unnoticed. The teacher’s attention is focused on the people who are in, say, the introductory webinar — whose sound is not working, who have too many distracting questions. Especially if the enrolment is large, Sheryl and Tania may not be missed.

There are ways to resolve the problem, like recruiting an assistant facilitator, but that’s not our focus here; I was using it only by way of illustration. Let’s focus on Sheryl and Tania and use the tools available to us to determine if they are at risk.

By clicking on the link in the People block, Moodle displays not only a list of the people in the course but also when they last logged on. If it says “NEVER” beside Sheryl and Tania, then you know you have two students at risk.

data example

If that was all an online teacher ever did — follow up on the NEVERs — that would be good in itself. But, if you have an ounce of geek in you, then there is a whole lot more that you can do.

Exploratory data analysis

The thing about exploratory data analysis is… it’s exploratory. Think of your data as being like a territory, and you set out on foot to get to know it.

Whether you are a beginner, a journeyman, or an expert in data analysis you will always start by just considering the data. Look at it, shuffle it about a bit, make a cup of tea, ponder. Don’t rush in, you may miss something that is staring you in the face.

For example, look at these five email addresses:

john.smith@stjosephs.school.nz
mary.roberts@stjosephs.school.nz
lbooth@middlebeach.school.nz
quackers@hotmail.com
garyb@chchpoly.ac.nz

I won’t say anything for now, but we’ll come back to this list later in the post.

John Tukey

John Tukey is the father of exploratory data analysis, and he wrote a textbook of that title. Despite all the advances since he wrote it in 1977, it is still a good place to start your journey. If you are the textbook type, that is. You may prefer to simply learn by doing.

Let’s do a little Tukey-type thing now. He talks about, ”scratching down numbers”, and this method is called stem-and-leaf. It gives you a quick visualisation and, therefore, the beginnings of an understanding of the numbers.

scratching down the numbers

I’ll make that a little easier to see:

15 9
14
13
12 6
11 4
10
9 9
8 113
7 00953
6 3208473
5 501479001
4 622712541
3 3741011679
2 63224
1 3217
0 9800

Let’s say that you’d like to quantify a feeling you have that your cohort of 60 students is contributing quite well to the discussion forum. The stem to the left of the line is the tens column; to the right the ones. As you can see in the image above, two students did not post at all. You can explain this by looking to see if they are Sheryl and Tania. If they weren’t logging in, they won’t have been posting. Two other students did a bit better: one of them posted 9 times, and one posted 8 times.

By looking at the shape of the numbers you’ll soon see that most students are posting between 26 times and 79 times. However, more interesting than the safe majority are maybe the unsafe minority. The two who have not posted at all we have already noted. Six students have posted less than 20 times whereas most of the class have posted around 30 or 40 times. Equally concerning could be that far-outlier; the one student who has posted 159 times! Is he or she devoting enough time to other parts of the work, or are they starting to display obsessive tendencies?

In the real-world classroom, you may know Mister159 and you may have strategies for him. In the online space, it is too easy to forget that each of these avatars, these electronic tokens, represents a real human being with real needs. It can also be hard to learn those needs over the mediated channel of a computer network.

Brinkerhoff SCM

Robert Brinkerhoff’s Success Case Method uses impactful user stories to evaluate and later inform the design of educational interventions and programmes. To make a proper study of the method would be beyond the scope of this article, but I will give you the plain language guts of it here, and you can start using it straight away.

Here’s how:

  • Ignore the average and the median students
  • Focus on the outliers
    • identify 1 – 3 students who did exceptionally well on the course
    • identify 1 – 3 who did particularly poorly
  • Arrange to interview them
  • Document their stories.

Try to avoid surveying them with a set of standard questions. That practice is boring, and students may amuse themselves by skewing their answers, and it will miss some of the rich detail a conversation can uncover. Put those who did particularly poorly at their ease and explain that you are speaking with them in order to improve the course. Also, beyond the scope of this article is a primer on techniques of coaching, mentoring, and interpersonal communications that we will assume you have.

These are the stories we collected:

Mister159 had found the material easy and had self-appointed himself Helper of the Weak and Stupid (his phrase), a kind of unofficial assistant teacher. When we looked into it a bit more deeply by reading a sample of his posts, we found that he was sharing ready-made solutions to the problems!

The two students with 114 and 126 posts both really loved the subject. They collaborated on the work and were planning to study it in greater depth next year, continuing their collaboration. They were good friends out of school, too; high achievers.

At the other end of the scale, the orientation email had gone into Sheryl’s spam filter and Tania admitted she hadn’t read her email. We did a root-cause analysis on the latter to be sure we had not uncovered a case of cyberbullying. Happily, we hadn’t; she’d just not been focused.

The student who managed just eight posts said he found the subject uninteresting and he was thinking of changing his subjects.

As a result, the design changes the teacher might consider before the next delivery includes:

  • an optional section with some harder problems for those students who want extending
  • a once-a-week check on students who have not logged in
  • grading or peer upvoting of discussion posts that meet certain criteria.

Correlation is not causation, but…

That everyone who buys dried mangoes also buys sparkling water does not mean that the dried mangoes are causing them to be thirsty. From the shop keeper’s perspective, it doesn’t matter why, the fact is — they are. Therefore, he places a new line in sparkling spring water near the dried mangoes.

Between us, my wife and I have several decades experience as Moodle admins, and we have noticed that students who have silly Hotmail addresses very rarely complete. We don’t have causation here, only correlation. But, we do have a correlation, and it does work. Remember that list from the start of this article? Which student automatically goes on the at-risk list?

john.smith@stjosephs.school.nz
mary.roberts@stjosephs.school.nz
lbooth@middlebeach.school.nz
quackers@hotmail.com
garyb@chchpoly.ac.nz

This raises an issue of which we all need to be aware when we start profiling and working with student data to inform our course design and our interventions. Just because we’ve profiled quackers@hotmail.com does not give us the right to treat him or her differently to the rest of the cohort, that would be discrimination. But there is no law or moral code that says we can’t keep a watchful eye.

Designing for data collection

You can build a Moodle course with just two components: label, and forum. But, if you do take this streamlined, and dare I say lazy approach, you’re not going to be in a position to collect rich user data. The awesome power of Moodle is in all the activities it has built-in, and if you want to go down the plug-ins route, then hundreds more again.

Here are just a few ideas for how you can give your students interesting things to do in their learning environment.

Include the:

  • Choice activity to gather student opinion
  • Glossary activity to invite student contributions
  • Wiki activity to enable students to create exhibits
  • Blog activity so students can learn out loud
  • Journal activity for students to record their learning journeys.

How much more student data you can now collect to build a picture of their performance on and their engagement with the course.

There are some blocks you can usefully include in the sidebar design too.

Include the:

  • People block, so everyone can see who is engaging and who is at risk
  • Online users block to enable a real-time community of learners
  • Blog block to further develop the community of learners
  • Activity block to give easy access to everything there is for them to do.

The complete online tutor

I challenge you to change if you have not already done so. To be a great online teacher is not to create a whole mural of content and then stand back while the students admire it. To be a great online teacher is to create an interesting, safe, and supportive learning environment in which they can thrive. By measuring their progress, and encouraging them to make more, you will all have a wonderful experience. By knowing which students are at risk you can reach out to them and try and get them aboard your magic school bus.

Further reading

“The Success Case Method deliberately looks at the most, and least, successful participants of a program. The purpose is not to examine the average performance – rather, by identifying and examining the extreme cases…” Success Case Method at betterevaluation.org

If you are geeking out, then you might like to look at the Moodle database schema. You will soon see what you are and are not going to be able to harvest from what Moodle stores.

On the face of it, this TEDx talk by Ben Wellington is nothing to do with education. But it is a great, and amusing, lesson on how to make data useful and engaging through storytelling — in any field of endeavour. Recommended.

Follow the series

This is the second in a series of posts on online learning design. Here are the others in this series so far:

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The catch 22 of targeted support

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A while ago, I visited a small rural school that had introduced a range of literacy support tools in a systematic way across all of their classes. The school had recognised that much of the content shared and used in their classrooms was in written format and that this was creating a barrier for students.

Soon after implementation, staff were excited to note that one student in particular had started working in class and had answered some questions. The literacy support tools removed a barrier for her, and the success story quickly spread around the staffroom.

equality, equity, liberation
Removing barriers to learning – Liberation representing the concept of Universal Design for Learning, Interaction Institute for Social Change | Artist: Angus Maguire interactioninstitute.org madewithangus.com

One staff member talked to the student in question (let’s call her Jane) about her success using the literacy support tools. Unfortunately, the staff member did not realise that Jane was very sensitive to being singled out and made to feel different from her peers. The small act of talking to her had unintended consequences…. from that moment, Jane stopped using the literacy support tools.

Unintended consequences

This story, while very sad, has reminded me about the way we think of some students as having “additional needs”. We sometimes call them our priority learners; we recognise that they need more help than others to be successful in our classrooms, and we provide targeted resourcing for them.

But, if some students have “additional” needs, does that mean, by implication, that the rest have “normal” levels of need?

The very idea seems flawed when we consider the uniqueness of each and every student. When we embrace diversity, everyone has such a variety of individual learning needs that saying some are “additional” and some are not, no longer makes much sense.

Our traditional approach to supporting students like Jane is to identify their individual needs and provide targeted support. Hence, we design for most of our students and then differentiate or provide adapted resources to meet the “additional” needs of other students.

One of the unintended consequences of this approach is that it tends to focus on the student as the nub of the “problem” and any support they need as “extra” to everyday teaching and learning.

Another unintended consequence is that it can make students feel different or “under the spotlight” — this was the issue for Jane on this particular occasion.

The catch-22 for schools is that we want to continue to provide targeted resources where they are needed but the process of identifying needs requires a focus on identifying a student’s difference from the (illusionary) “norm” of others. Further, the process of identification can result in negative or deficit labelling of students.

That is why Universal Design for Learning resonates for me.

Why Universal Design for Learning (UDL)

He waka eke noa 1
A canoe for one and all 2
If someone is finding learning difficult, UDL asks, what we can do to design teaching and learning that works for everyone rather than what is wrong with the student. UDL aims to cater for a range of students first and foremost by offering flexible and personalised ways to learn rather than focusing on differentiating for the odd “different” student.

Developing strong, trusting relationships and knowing our students well and can help us be aware of how small actions on our part could lead to unintended consequences for our students.

In a recent visit to the school I saw students using a range of literacy support tools in their everyday work. The tools were not used widely but they were a flexible option that could be used when and if the students wanted or needed them.

Just as ramps and accessible toilets aim to make buildings barrier-free environments, the school I visited recently is continuing to identify and remove barriers using the principles of Universal Design for Learning (UDL).


Enabling e-Learning video: BYOD supporting inclusion

If you are interested in hearing more about UDL and Inclusive Design, make an inquiry to CORE Education.

 

1 http://www.maori.cl/Proverbs.htm

2 The use of this whakataukī here is to support the ideals of inclusivity.

Image credits:
Removing barriers to learning – Liberation representing the concept of Universal Design for Learning, Interaction Institute for Social Change by Angus Maguire, interactioninstitute.org madewithangus.com (used by permission).

 

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Hey, let’s be careful out there – How to legally reuse images from the internet

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unsplash-photo-bird            Photo by a-shuhani on Unsplash

Whether you’ve briefly time warped back to the 1980s and are sitting in a moment of Hills Street Blues nostalgia, or you have no idea there is a backstory to this seemingly innocuous phrase, brace yourself for an abrupt segue.

Sharing is caring — or is it?

neon heartsPhoto by DESIGNECOLOGIST on Unsplash

As educators, we can find ourselves overwhelmed and challenged when using the Web to curate a dynamic and engaging kete of teaching and learning resources for our students. With our world full of ubiquitous connectivity, mobile-device overload, and social media excess, sharing and reusing other people’s content has become a regular part of our daily digital diet.

We are overloaded with content, which, upon first glance, appears to have the potential to share, reuse, and repurpose culminating in us cutting, pasting, and screenshotting other people’s creations to curate and make resources that support our students learning. Add into the mix the undeniable fact that most readers will agree to always being time poor! Checking for a statement that gives permission to reuse an image or resource or scrolling down to the bottom of a webpage to check the details of a website’s copyright statement, can fall by the wayside as meeting the immediate needs of our learners takes priority. Unfortunately, the consequences for using other people’s content — even just a single photo when the creator has not given permission for reuse — can be expensive and involve a whole lot of legal headaches.

Creative Commons licenses and websites that curate openly licensed content offer
all educators — teachers and librarians — the perfect opportunity to role model and bring to life best-practice examples of how to ethically and legally use, reuse, and share digital content created by others.

In this blog post, we’ll mainly focus on finding and reusing photos for teachers, librarians, and students to reuse in their work, resources, and communications.

A picture says a thousand words — for free

photo of a photo
Photo by Rachael Crowe on Unsplash

Thanks to the incredible generosity of talented photographers sharing on sites like Unsplash, Pixabay and Flickr, we have an abundance of legally reusable photos at our fingertips.

Unsplash
https://unsplash.com

All Unsplash photos are shared CC 0, which means the creators of the photos have chosen to give up their copyright (anywhere in the world) and their photo is now gifted to society for any sort of reuse — even commercially. How generous is that!

public domain image

Just like we say “thanks” when given something because it’s good manners, we give attribution as an internationally recognised way of simply saying “thanks” to the creator of the resource we’re reusing. Attribution is you saying: who made what you’re reusing, providing a link to them and their work, and stating what Creative Commons licence it’s offered under. Even though it’s not strictly legally required to give attribution when using something with a CC0 mark, it is best practice, and everyone likes people with good manners!

Unsplash makes things super simple and does the attribution for you. As soon as you download an image, an attribution statement appears for you to copy then paste under the image you’re reusing. It doesn’t get much easier than that!

acknowledgement

Sign up to Unsplash and receive a weekly email of incredible eye candy to liven up your slides, school newsletter or projects.

Pixabay
https://pixabay.com

Last count, this stunning site had 1.3 million images, also videos, vector graphics (for a great alternative to clipart), and illustrations. Pixabay also licenses its content with CC 0.

pixabay illustration
Pixabay illustration.
Moon by thanh262K via Pixabay shared with CC 0

Sign up to avoid the need to prove your human-ness each time you want to reuse something, and you’ll also receive a weekly email with a selection of beautiful new offerings.

Flickr
www.flickr.com

“Tens of billions of photos and 2 million groups” — Flickr

 

alice in videoland
Alice in Videoland by librarypaula via Flickr licensed CC BY-SA 3.0

Flickr is a website that hosts amateur and professional photos and videos.

This site presents great opportunities for students to share their work in conjunction with learning about using and contributing to the commons of free and legally reusable content generated globally. This is a fantastic opportunity to embed citizen-generated content into a digital-citizenship programme and could be part of an offering from your school library that holistically supports teachers, students, and whānau alike.

Much of Flickr’s content is licensed with a Creative Commons license, which means the person who created the photo or video is letting you reuse it, with certain conditions. Let’s look at this a little closer.

Collaboration rules! Where Creative Commons fits in

Creative Commons licenses let you tell others that you’re happy to share what you’ve created, and the way in which you’re happy for your work to be reused.

Creative Commons licences work on a Some Rights Reserved philosophy — offering creators a spectrum of choices between retaining all rights and relinquishing all rights (public domain), whereas Copyright works on an All Rights Reserved approach used by owners to indicate that they reserve all of the rights granted to them under the law. (Creative Commons, 2018)

some rights reserved
When using Flickr, you will see a variety of usage statements. Don’t panic if these are unfamiliar and look like some secret and mysterious code — there’s a simple way of breaking them down to figure out what they mean.

Creative Commons Licenses are made up of four elements, and when these elements are combined there are six possible licences. Look at the elements below and read what they allow. Once you’ve done this, you’re well on your way to understanding the next Creative Commons licence you see!

The four license elements (from the Creative Commons website):

(For those using screen readers, click here and move to License Elements. You will need to come back to this page to continue.)

creative commons license elements Creative Commons Licenses Explained by Creative Commons Aotearoa New Zealand licensed with CC BY 4.0

The six Creative Commons licenses:

(For those using screen readers, click here and move to The Licenses. You will need to come back to this page to continue.)

the creative commons licenses Creative Commons Licenses Explained by Creative Commons Aotearoa New Zealand licensed with CC BY 4.0

Check your learning

The Alice in Videoland photo above is licensed:

CC BY-SA 3.0

Let’s break this down:
CC        = Creative Commons
BY        = If you reuse this photo you need to give attribution to who created the photo.
SA        = If you reuse this photo you need to share what you make with the same license
3.0       = This is the version of the Creative Commons license.

So, translated CC BY-SA 3.0 means:
If I reuse this Alice in wonderland photo, I need to say who created it and share anything I make using it with the same Creative Commons attribution / sharealike license.

Extra for experts

When you find digital resources that a creator has given permission for reuse, an easy way to remember how to give attribution is with the mnemonic TASL.

How to provide attribution

The six main Creative Commons licences all require users to provide attribution when they show, distribute or otherwise reuse someone else’s work.
A good attribution needs to provide at least four basic pieces of information — if the creator has made them available to you.
TASL:
Title —The title of the work (this is not always available)
Author — The author of the work
Source — A link to the source, so that others can find the original work
License — The Creative Commons licence it is made available under.
Using a CC Licensed work by Creative Commons Aotearoa New Zealand licensed with CC BY 4.0

Some facts about copyright and Creative Commons licenses

Fact

If you create something — a photo, piece of music, short film and put a
Creative Commons license on it, you don’t give away the Copyright
to what you have created.
The Copyright is yours (or your estate’s) until 50 years after your death
(if you live in Aotearoa !).

 

Fact

A Creative Commons Licence sits on top of Copyright, it’s not one or the other.

 

Fact

The Creative Commons License lasts for as long as the Copyright does.

 

Fact

In Aotearoa, you don’t need to register the Copyright on something you’ve created.
As soon as it’s in a tangible form, you, as the creator, own the Copyright.

Creative Commons Aotearoa New Zealand resources

Resources from Creative Commons Aotearoa New Zealand

Creative Commons Kiwi from Creative Commons Aotearoa NZ on Vimeo.

 

the end
Photo by Al x on Unsplash

Congratulations!

You’ve made it to the end of this post, and, hopefully, are feeling better resourced to reuse digital images and content with the suggestions provided.

This is part one of a series I hope to run this year in the lead up to uLearn. We want to support educators across Aotearoa to produce and share content at uLearn that others can learn from and build upon — and is legally sourced.

CORE Education is a passionate supporter of Creative Commons. We have staff who have recently completed the inaugural international Creative Commons Certificate programme, and are ready to support schools, kura or Kāhui Ako to create board-approved Creative Commons policies and understand how to reuse information and created openly licensed education resources.

We believe that publicly-funded research and resources should be available to the public that help fund them, and work to enable and empower educators to find and create openly-licensed content to support their learners and which others can benefit and build on.
If you would like to explore anything related to this blog, please email the author.

Extra, extra for experts (extra resources)

 

Paula is speaking at a coming CORE Breakfast in Auckland:

“What’s the domino effect of your library?”

Paula is available for consultation on school improving school libraries. Contact her now.

 

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