I found this video clip when reading a post by George Lucas, filmmaker and founder of The George Lucas Educational Foundation, publisher of Edutopia titled Education: the single most important job. In it he talks about the need for educators to harness the power of the Internet to experience a force that is revolutionizing education and offering opportunities to reach and engage diverse learners.

George asks "What is more powerful in education than a student who is guided by an adult who truly cares — someone who knows your name, who encourages you, and is committed to your success in life?", then points to this recent video from Edutopia which shows a once failing middle school in Charlotte, North Carolina, that invested in research-based teaching strategies and is now on the rise.

While the context is far away from where I live and work in New Zealand, the principles espoused by the teacher who is interviewed in the video ring true for me as I reflect on expeiences in the schools I've been working with in recent years. This young teacher identified four steps that she and her colleagues at the school worked through on their way to turning the school around:

1. Get the right people – "if you aren't here for the kids, then perhaps this isn't the place for you."
2. Look at what's happening in the classroom and why the students aren't getting it – in other words, reflect, gather data, critically review and be prepared to ask the hard questions about your practice. 
3. Change what you're doing – based on that reflection and research.
4. Create a professional development plan that is consistent and research-based, that caters for the wide range of needs of staff. 

I couldn't have thought of a better list – the central focus must be our teaching, and the building of releationships with our learners. 

The final piece of advice from this young teacher;

"You have to be intentional about building relationships wiht your students so that they'll want to be successful!"

What would be on your list of strategies for turning around a poorly performing school? How would you sum up your advice? Would it be any different to what this young teacher suggests?

Another edition of the annual Horizon Report has just been released, this one focusing specifically on the context of Australian Tertiary Education from 2012-2017. 

I had the privilege of being involved on the advisory board again this year, and found it once more a very stimulating and thought provoking experience – led capably by Larry Johnson who seems to have a happy knack for pulling lots of disperate threads together into a cohesive whole!

This year's report contains a lot of things that have appeared in previous years – not surprising given the nature of the field it is being examined, and there are some useful links to examples of what is being talked about that you can spend hours exploring to help gain an understanding of what it's all about. 

The thing I like about the Horizon Reports is the process of how they are developed. Certainly, the published report provides a 'stake in the ground' for those looking for indicators for the future, and who may be involved in decision making regarding where to invest etc. But the realy power lies in understanding that the report is but a snapshot, and is best read with a cursory eye cast to the past and across reports in other areas, in order to understand the 'trending' that is occurring and where the next 'new new' things might capture the minds of teachers and learners. 

The table below is from the publication, and is useful in this regard, to help see the commonalities (and differences) that have emerged in the different reports. 

For me, the most important (and useful) part of the document is in the second half, where there are lists of the Top Ten Trends and the Top Ten Challenges identified by the advisory board. Within these brief descriptions there are some extremely useful indicators that ought to be considered by education leaders when considering future directions for their institutions, their staff and their students. 

Something that's noticeable in this year's list of ten trends is the focus on people and behaviours, as opposed to a focus soley on the technology which has been more of what I've observed in the past. Specifically, the trends speak to the notions of ubiquity, choice and flexibility in terms of how we learn and what we learn with/through. 

The report can be downloaded here from the Horizon site (NB you'll need to create an account). 

A tweet from my colleague Karen this morning had me watching this video of Michael Fullan, Professor Emeritus at the University of Toronto, discussing the often-used strategies that do not improve learning in schools before describing the strategies that have been proven effective.

It seems very topical to me at the moment as I have been working on a response to the government's inquiry into 21st Century Learning Environments and Digital Literacy, and thinking also about  recent discussions I've been involved in regarding the future of NZ's education system and the interventions that are being suggested to address issues such as the 'long tail' of underachievement etc. 

Fullan's comments are derived from his paper titled, Choosing the Wrong Drivers for Systerm Form, published in April last year. In this he reports on what countries that have successful education systems have done to achieve this, and identifies four key things that in his view are the 'wrong' drivers:

1. Using system accountability as a 'stick' – Fullan argues that the various forms of external accountability and judgement that are being promoted at a system level simply don't work, but what does is greater a greater degree of what he calls 'transparency of openness'. 
2. Focus on indivdual quality rather than team development. Fullan argues that it is the collective that is important in terms of achieving system change in education. 
3. Over-reliance on technology - on it's own it won't fix anything, but used to support effective pedagogical practice it can be a powerful change agent. (Something I've blogged about before in pedagogically driven UFB and the Promise of UFB)
4. Fagmented change – rather than a coherent, whole of system change approach. Fullan points to the many examples of systems that focus on just individual elements such as literacy and numeracy in isolation, instead of taking a more coherent, bold approach. 

Fullan does identify five characteristics of systems that are successful in achieving change:

1. They focus on a small number of core goals
2. They put a lot of energy into the quality of the teaching profession
3. They make a large investment in school leadership
4. They create 'learning working conditions' for teachers
5. They use data – but in a non-judgemental way.

I see here a two-fold challenge for what is happening in NZ. Firstly, how to get our current government and MoE to take notice of such research and create a vision for change that is aspirational and systemic, Second, how to get wider acceptance from those in the system of the strategies identified by Fullan that work, such as greater transparency and openness, and greater use of data for example, both of which tend to be regarded with suspicion at present because of the perception that they could be used in a judgemental manner. 

At the beginning of the report there is a quote from Alan Daly, at the University of California at San Diego, who predicts that

"Education innovation will shift away from experts and capacity building to focus on networks… We have to start thinking about the expertise that resides in the system, and we have to be connected in order to make use of it. [Education] is moving away from large-scale prescriptive approaches to more individualized, tailored, differentiated approaches.”

This is a concept that is dear to my heart – the transformation of our current school system and its focus on the individual 'schoolhouse, into a networked schooling system, with its emphasis on the inherent strength of the network, on collaboration, sharing, synergy etc. 

Thus this monograph is less about the specific technologies and their particular uses in education, and more about their affordances as instruments of this transformation. The emphasis is less on how these technologies can be used as vehicles to 'deliver' the curriculum and improve student performance and more on how, in and of themselves, they are changing the very nature of the teaching and learning experience by enabling new ways for participation, engagement, and collaboration to take place.

After more than a year of planning and dreaming, the folks at TED are today launching their TED-Ed website, a new open platform for using video in education.  

It allows any teacher to take a video of their choice (yes, any video on YouTube, not just from TED) and make it the heart of a "lesson" that can easily be assigned in class or as homework, complete with context, follow-up questions and further resources.  The site is in beta, but there's enough there to show the potential of the new format.  

This whole process is explained really well in the video at the top of this post, ceated by the TED-Ed team, and a more detailed post explaining the thinking behind the site can be read here.

I had the pleasure a couple of weeks ago of attending the 2012 Graham Nuthall Annual Lecture at Canterbury University where I heard Guy Claxton present an engaging talk titled 'Can Schools Prepare You For Anything?' His abstract read:

Traditional education aims to raise standards by any means, but we are coming to see that preparing young people for tests, and preparing them for life, are different goals. How do we deepen learning so that it systematically builds the learning dispositions that the next generation will need? As work on ‘key competencies’ and ‘21st century skills’ evolves it is becoming clearer just what it takes to raise standards in a way that helps kids be ready for anything.

In Guy's typical provocative and well informed style, he challenged us to think more critically about many of the things we're carrying forward from our traditional education system, and to think more creatively about how we might conceive of and implement a truly 21st century approach where we maintain the focus on a future-focused curriculum as well as raising standards for learners.

As with all of these sorts of talks, there was so much to take in and reflect on, but thanks to the team at EdTalks we can all enjoy the change to view Guy's talk again and engage in a bit of 'rewind learning'!

Having watched my son spend countless hours creating all sorts of worlds in Minecraft I've become intrigued by what this virtual world enables users to do.

Minecraft in the Classroom is a recent addition to the field of game-based learning. It is a sandbox game where players can create and build, fight off enemies and explore vast landscapes.

His latest effort has involved creating a substantial virtual world that is "self-sustaining"; in terms of the automated processing of the minerals mined into various forms of fuel and energy.

How has he learned to do this? He and his small group of friends have shared the things they've learned through trial and error, and by following the online tips and support that are built into Minecraft's user interface.

For the more complex things, they've watched instructional, videos that have been uploaded to YouTube by other users, and by reading the blogs and help sites created by the user community. This is the essence of a highly performaing, informal learning community!

During the recent holiday period my son and  his friends even formed themselves into a team to develop instructional videos which they intend to upload onto YouTube to share what they've learned, in particular, their attempts at 'modding' the environment to create the specific features and components they want in it – thus they've becoming contributors to the community of users as well. 

This morning I came across this post titled Ideas for using Minecraft in the classroom, from Edutopia. In it, Andrew Miller suggests four ways in which Minecraft can be used in the classroom:

1. explore real life buildings
2. practise ratio an proportion
3. learn about survival
4. visualisation and reading comprehension

As the interested parent of a young user, and as an educator, these ideas resonnate with me – and I'm sure there are a number of other things that people could come up with as well. For me, Minecraft is a welcome addition to the field of virtual worlds, and a welcome alternative to the first person shoot 'em up sorts of virtual world games that have been so popular in the past (and still!).

I'd be keen to hear stories from anyone who is actually dong the sorts of things suggested by Miller in the Edutopia article -seems we have a lot to learn from each other in terms of harnessing the potential of these sorts of environments, and of how to accommodate the contribution of informal learning that is going on among many of our learners. 

Today I had the opportunity to make a presentation to the NZEALS conference being held in Tauranga. I was in Wellington at the time, participating in the DEANZ conference, but took the opportunity to make the link to Tauranga via video conference (thanks to the folks at asnet). 

The NZEALS committee had asked me to share my thinking about the future direction for education in NZ, focusing on blended learning, the role of online communities of practice in this, and the emergence of networked schooling models.

The essence of my message was that we must move our thinking beyond the autonomous, self-manging schools model of Tomorrows Schools, and look to a system model of Networked Schooling if we're to achieve a future-focused education system that is robust and responsive to the needs of 21st Century learners. I outlined how this is already happening in New Zealand with the emergence of school clusters using video conferencing and other technologies to share classes, resources and staffing, but that this activity has now reached the point where it needs more systemic support in terms of policy change and changes in leadership style and approach. 

Back at the DEANZ conference we were having some similar discussions, with the establishment of a schools special interest group (SIG) within DEANZ which will aim to focus attention on supporting the development of open, flexible and distance educaiton practices in the various school networks and clusters that are emerging here – and linking with similar initiatives in Australia through our links with AADES there. 

I've just been reading this new guide published by Edutopia, titled A parent's guide to 21st Century Learning. As with much of the material published on the Edutopia site, this is a really useful collection of tips, ideas and links for parents and educators alike (and I qualify on both fronts

The ideas in the booklet are grouped according to the age of the students, and use the “4Cs” from the Partnership for 21st Century Skills as a framework for emphasising the educative value of the learning resources that are shared.

• Collaboration: Students are able to work effectively with diverse groups and exercise flexibility in making compromises to achieve common goals.
• Creativity: Students are able to generate and improve on original ideas and also work creatively with others.
• Communication : Students are able to communicate effectively across multiple media and for various purposes.
• Critical thinking: Students are able to analyze, evaluate, and understand complex systems and apply strategies to solve problems.

Each resource is briefly described, followed by a section on 'how to get involved', providing practical suggestions for how to engage with and use the resource with you children. 

The resources provide a range of engagements, from projects that promote particiation in social change and the development of digitial citizenship, to using online games and social media to promote collaboration and support project based learning – plus everything in between. 

I like the section at the end titled Ten tips for bringing 21st century skills home which provides sompractical tips and links for parents wondering how to foster the 4Cs at home.

If you're not a member of the Edutopia site, here's a good reason to do so – it costs nothing to sign up, and the resource is free tod ownload to members. 

Diana Oblinger will be in New Zealand to participate in the Distance Education Association of New Zealand's (DEANZ) biannual conference, being held in Wellington from 11-13 March.

Event details…

Date: Wednesday 11 April, 2012

Time: 6.00-7.00pm

Location: Renouf Foyer, Michael Fowler Centre, 111 Wakefield Street

Price: $40 + GST

Download the flyer for more information, or register online for this event.