What to talk about over Christmas: Australian schools doing very well

The highly reputed Pisa tests for 2009 were published this week and despite what you hear in the media, Australia continues to do very well. The overall results for Reading, Mathematics and Science show the pattern. The chart results on the left are just the overall mark for Reading for the top 26 countries, and light blue indicates 'significantly above average performance' of the 60 or so countries and darker blue is 'average'. Australia is clearly in the top league, and well above Britain, USA, France, Germany. For the full summary results, see here. For links to all the reports, see here.

This is what all chalkies should berate their relative with over Christmas. Last time I told some friends that Australia performs well in international terms, I was met with disbelief. After I yelled at them about actual tests, such as Pisa, they thought for a while, and then said, "You education people have clearly done a poor job of promoting school achievements." The press coverage has largely been along the lines of: 'Australia beaten by countries x, y and z, and Australia slips in Reading.'

Pisa is highly respected because it pays due attention to how student use knowledge, and apply it. The common belief that Asian students mainly learn by rote is clearly wrong.

How school systems get better - Minister, please read!

McKinsey have just released a follow up report for the OECD titled How the world's most improved school systems keep get better. Their 2007 report How the World’s Best Performing School Systems Come Out on Top was widely respected. In the new report they they did not just look at school systems at the highest levels, but good performers at each of the stages of development. For example, a school system in West Cape, South Africa is just moving out of basic standards of schooling in a very poor community.

McKinsey found that there are six common interventions that all good systems undertake.
"Our research suggests that six interventions are common to all performance stages across the entire improvement journey:

• building the instructional skills of teachers and management skills of principals,
• assessing students,
  
• improving data systems,
• facilitating improvement through the introduction of policy documents and education laws,
  
• revising standards and curriculum,
• ensuring an appropriate reward and remuneration structure for teachers and principals.

Though these interventions occur at all performance stages, they manifest differently at each stage."

The most interesting thing to me about this report is what they say next; that the in building a basic system, central control with a strictly managed curriculum is appropriate, and when a system is moving from Good to Excellent, this central control should give way to schools and teachers having more autonomy. And this is for a very believable reason, that when a system is at the 'good' level, teachers have the necessary skills to be more autonomous.

Their message for Australia is clear, Minister, that we are at the middle to advanced levels overall, so it is not appropriate for rigid testing and comparisons of schools to be in the forefront. We should have some of that, but be focusing on building the professionalism of teachers.

The also found that spending lots of money is not necessarily a pathway to system improvement.

On the link above there is an executive report and the full report.

By they way, how well have we done the 6 steps in my experience, in SA?

• building the instructional skills of teachers and management skills of principals - not in a systematic way, except for the occasional splurge
  
• assessing students - not in a systematic way in primary schools, until the last few years, and still focused too much on basic skills; rarely in a way that links back to item 1.
  
• improving data systems - improving in recent years, but needs much more work.
  
• facilitating improvement through the introduction of policy documents and education laws - quite a bit of this; got lots of policies
  
• revising standards and curriculum - not much in measurable standards, but the national curriculum is heading there, maybe?
• ensuring an appropriate reward and remuneration structure for teachers and principals - very little reward for teachers and principals based on actual student performance.

Technology (video) rescues teacher improvement

There is a very interesting story in the NY Times about a major initiative in the US, funded by the Gates Foundation, to use video extensively in observing and improving classroom teaching. Teacher Ratings Get New Look, Pushed by a Rich Watcher There is a considerable likelihood that the initiative will be ruined by too much focus on policing and not enough on professionalism, but here's hoping. Digital video might be coming to the rescue of a very sad history of teacher observation and self improvement. It can allow observation to be relatively unobtrusive, and provide an objective record of what happens in a class. Video is relatively cheap now, and small cameras can record vast amounts of vision and sound, all with precise time tracking. A problem is that single camera covering a whole room does not provide the ability to focus in on detail as a human viewer can do. This means that an effective system is relatively expensive. But then so is ineffective teaching.

iPads and the business of reading

I am a news nut and so have been waiting eagerly for the arrival of the great ipad newspaper apps that make news worth paying for. The experience has been interesting.

In the beginning there was the New York Times with its standard web site. (All of the images are from an iPad.) A very good newspaper site. It looks a bit like a traditional newspaper, but each story has just a headline and a few sentences to provide an introduction. Lots of stories on one screen, and lots of small images and some video.

I like the way the home screen has a large number of stories on it, and there are also section headings, so you can scroll down the long home page and browse, or you can go to sections.
Then came the long anticipated iPad app and I find it boring, sterile and without much life at all. there are only a few images and an awful lot of text. There is a section menu that can be opened and the same material is there as on the original web site.

This is the front page of the Top Stories section, like a front page, but I find it dead. Maybe they are going to launch an attractive and interactive app early next year when they ask readers to start paying.

The Sydney Morning Herald has taken a very different approach, pending Fairfax's launch of its 'proper' iPad app. They charge 65 c a day for this version, and it is simply a page by page view of the print edition. It has been overwhelmingly condemned by the reviewers because it is not a real iPad app, with different layout, links and nifty navigation. I love it, and read it from front to middle every morning.

The iPad view is sufficient to read the headlines and some of the text, and to get a clear sense of what the main stories are, and how the editor has placed them regarding prominence. You get the result of a hundred years of experience in laying out a newspaper, and slightly less experience as a reader. To read a story in detail, simply pinch out on the page and you zoom in to normal size text. [right] The images look great. The experience is very similar to reading the paper version, but a little more convenient.

My next experience is of the Economist magazine which is an A4 size news magazine which looks very similar on the iPad. This has been my most satisfying experience of reading on the iPad. The view is very similar to the paper product but with the advantage of better navigation, illumination and clarity, and it is reproduced on one's iPhone almost as well. A major bonus is that the whole magazine is available in audio, so the reader can jump from reading to listening at the press of a button. This is particularly useful for iPhone users. It has proved surprisingly useful because it you read or listen depending on what you are doing. I prefer to read because i concentrate better, but if doing a menial chore, I can just keep 'reading'.

The cost difference is striking. An annual subscription to The Economist is $345 for 52 editions, but the iPad version is only $135, and it arrives three days earlier.













I don't think there is any doubt that eReaders are going to be as common as mobile phones in the near future. In fact, many of them will BE mobiles. But it is clearly going to be a difficult learning experience for publishers and readers to work out what format and presentation type suits them. The biggest surprise for me has been to discover the attractiveness of switching so easily from print to audio in one product. And I am a regular podcast listener, but it had not occurred to me that it is so appealing to switch back and forth. I expect there will be lots of surprises for all of us.

Wired for distraction

There is a very good feature article in the New York Times title Wired for Distraction that reasonably - without hysteria, outlines problems some students are experiencing in balancing their online lives. It describes how some students are almost obsessed with maintaining frequent contacts with friends via Twitter and Facebook or games to the point that they cannot focus on other tasks that are not so immediately fulfilling. Unlike many popular press articles on this topic, they point out that this only affects a minority of young people, but is nevertheless a significant issue. For those involved with secondary students in particular, it is a good read.

The answer, it seems, is that teachers (and parents) need to help students find balance and manage their priorities. Surprise! Who would have thunk it?

Google Apps in education: widespread, simple, powerful, cheap

Some indications of the take-up of Google Apps and other cloud computing services in education.

• "10 million Apps users in education" Oct 2010 [source]
• "New York City, today [1/11/10] announced that it's moving to "Google Apps for Education," providing cloud-based email and collaboration tools to the entire university community. This announcement comes just weeks after New York State created an initiative to bring Google Apps for Education to their K-12 schools. With students and faculty across New York now using Google Apps, it looks like the Empire State has fully embraced the cloud." [Source]
• In Australia, a struggle is underway for university cloud computing between Microsoft's Live@edu and Gmail. Many universities have switched, with Live@edu ahead at this stage. Gmail has 1.5 million student users in NSW DET schools. [source]
  

Universities and schools are finding that the predictions in the Horizon Report that 2010 - 11 is the time when 'cloud' computing will have a major impact, is being borne out. One factor is cost. Another is that the cloud systems come with lots of very appealing ancillary tools, like the ability to collaboratively edit files from any location.

The occasional voices of paranoia that used to be heard are being overtaken by a more realistic perspective. The fear that the FBI can monitor email under the US Patriot Act is one of these. Why schools should fear this is not clear to me. Australian intelligence agencies have similar powers, as they do over intercepting mail or tapping phones. Universities which deal with serious issues of intellectual property and research have apparently been satisfied that their data is appropriately secure. Why a police agency would target student online projects or the staff meeting minutes escapes me.

Real threats to student and staff security are much closer to home. The most real threats are much more mundane: careless forwarding of private information, insecure passwords, contacting strangers and bullying.

Why schools don't need ICT

This is the title of a provocative, brief and, I think, sound argument here by Ian Yorston about the failure of ICT to improve learning. He says we are smothering the digital revolution with rules.

In his own words:

"If you had to spend a million pounds, you'd really hope to have something to show for it."

"schools have finished up at the wrong end of the ICT revolution."

"...no money has been saved whatsoever...."

"Nor have we seen any obvious gains in productivity."

"The real curiosity is that, even when the newest, fastest, coolest computers have been purchased, heads promptly sit down to draw up policy statements that effectively cripple the machines before they have even been booted up."

"Now that we have finally built the Library of Alexandria — now that, thanks to Google, our students really do have access to all the world's knowledge in a curated and useful context, why would we want to limit their access?"

"We block Facebook and Twitter and YouTube. We denigrate Wikipedia and HowStuffWorks. We ban mobile phones and digicams. We even make our students write by hand."

"Schools don't need ICT. It's coming through our doors every day. We just need to adopt and adapt a little bit.

I think he is being a little ironic in his use of the word 'little' in the last sentence.

Computers in mathematics teaching = more math thinking

There is a very good TED talk (17min) below by Conrad Wolfram who makes a very powerful argument about how Maths teaching can be enhanced with the aid of computers. But it is very sad to read the initial comments on the TED site from the quite smart people who use TED. Most of didn't hear much of what he said. If you view the video you find that

Wolfram was at pains to say that Maths is about thinking mathematically, and its declining status in schools and broad aversion by many people is because the calculating (computation) part of Maths dominates what happens in schools and the other aspects are neglected. He says more attention should be spent engaging students with the three other aspects listed here. But the critics of changing the way things are done in the classroom often do not value the end point of learning. They think it is important for students to put in the hard work of learning how to calculate, remember, perform base level skills in the expectation that one day they will get a chance to apply these skills on real world problems.

For those interested in just one example of how this can work in practice, the Alice programming language is a wonderful tool to use from mid primary to advanced programming levels.

One-to-one backup salvation

A number of schools that are providing Apple notebooks for individual students are using automatic backups to make radical changes to how they manage one-to-one computing.

The students are provided with a backup hard drive that stays at home. They are required to use the Time Machine software to automatically backup the entire computer on a regular basis - possibly daily. Time Machine saves everything - settings, files, profiles etc. The Time Machine name comes from the fact that the hard drive saves each backup in series until it runs out of space. So a typical student may have 5 or 10 or more backups according to date. So if a computer is having problems, is lost or damaged, it (or a replacement) can be connected to Time Machine and restore to the latest or whichever backup version is desired. (If the problem appears to be caused by some new software, for example, go back to the backup prior to the software being installed). Everything is re-installed, so the only cost to the student is the hour or so that the restoration takes. There are backup systems available for PCs, so this is not just an Apple opportunity. The major issue here for a school is not technical but attitudinal.

The implications are very significant.

Maintenance: technical support demands can be reduced. Rather than tech staff needing to spend long hours trying to detect a claimed fault in a computer, the student can simply be advised to restore the problem computer from the backup. The storage and backup responsibilities of the school are greatly reduced.

Student Responsibility: The system places the student firmly in control of their own computer, just as they are currently responsible for their own paper based aids. This is highly desirable if students are to become responsible student and adult computer users. An important implication of this system is that students must have administration rights to their computer. Some schools find this threatening. Others, who have tried it, do not, because they prefer to deal with misbehaving students individually rather than constrain and limit what all students can to. A major benefit of this open approach is that a significant number of students will explore new software and potential of their computer, and pass this knowledge back to the school for the benefit of all. Parents who understand the procedures and responsibilities are generally very supportive.

The savings in unnecessary school computer administration are very significant.

ICT planning: real goals from a cloudy vision

Everyone agrees that school implementation of ICT into the curriculum is very complicated. And every one talks about goals and strategic planning. But there are dangerous distractions for school leaders taking their attention off what really matters. I think what matters is kids learning, and that we should focus most of our attention on this. But look at what gets in the way.
Here are the four strands that the Digital Education Revolution (DER) set out as the basis for school strategic planning.
Schools are reporting to DEEWR on their achievement of these four strands. However, there are many such lists of goals. Most ar similar, but they approach the task from different perspectives.
Here is another set of national goals for integration of ICT, alongside the DER four strands.

I have drawn lines to connect elements that seem to match. Clearly, the Making Change Happen set of goals is broader, and is focused more on student learning and outcomes.

But lists can be quite deceptive and cloud our vision because they imply that listed items are of similar importance. They rarely are. A more precise list of the elements would look like this:
But this is my judgment of their relative position. The original document does not tell the reader this information. But there is only a limited indication in this list of the relative importance of the 3 main items.

Pity the poor school administrator who is looking for a quick overview of what to focus on when planning school ICT development. No one needs to tell school principals that ICT infrastructure is costly, complex and urgent. Unless one has a clear view of direction, the urgent will tend to displace the important.

Smartphones overtake PC and notebooks

A remarkably detailed presentation Internet Trends by Morgan Stanley, just published, has some very striking things to say about the mobile world taking over the internet. They predict that sales of smartphones will overtake combined computer sales by 2011 (in Nth. On the graph, smartphones is the green bar. Also notice that desktops have leveled off and notebooks have been ahead since 2009. A bit sad to note that some secondary schools are still purchasing large numbers of desktops.

It seems that they have not included iPad type devices in the graph, which are neither a phone nor a notebook. I think they classify more as a mobile device than not, and their amazing take-up will make the changes all the more dramatic.

The move to mobile devices has a message for schools, surely, though the well practiced habit of education in holding itself at least 5 to 10 years behind societal trends will continue, no doubt. But when students can pull out of their pocked or their bag, a small device that is more effective in accessing the internet than what the school has to offer, guess which one they will use?

Strategic planning for school ICT - there be dragons there

Strategic planning is a well meaning strategy for school to manage the very real complexity of change. It creates a nice logical structure, but hidden within the process are some very real dragons that can smite well intentioned school administrators setting out on this voyage of school improvement.

Here are the typical stages for strategic planning for the use of ICT. First, the happy scenario without the dragons.

1. Assess where you are
A small team of leaders and special interest people review what happens in the use of ICT, maybe surveying staff and consulting teachers.
2. Identify where you want to be
The planning group explore reasonable next steps for development based on what exists and what is desired.
3. Identify actions
The planning group in consultation with staff decide on actions to improve the program.
4. Document the plan
The details of what is planned are documented and distributed.
5. Implement the plan
The teachers and others involved in the implementation proceed with the agreed plan.
6. Review what you have achieved
The planning group or another group survey, measure and and assess how much improvement has occurred the the cycle of improvement starts again.

When dragons exist, and they usually do, they smite the unsuspecting sailor who is simply trying to get from A to B. This is what might happen to the strategic planning process.

Stages 1-4
The planning group of leadership people and enthusiasts for ICT may not have the same perspective as that of the average teacher and so may proceed without understanding the impediments. They may be influenced by technology enthusiasts in the planning group rather than the curriculum leaders. Dragon 1, experts leading the way. Planning stages 1-4 assume that the planning group and those they consult with actually know the direction the development should take. There is a sense of confidence about actions to take that is not justified. Dragon 2, a false sense of clear direction. Planning by a small group of people with a mission can easily become too ambitious and complex as the planning process takes on a life of its own. Dragon 3, excessive complexity. This dragon is particularly dangerous because its existence is used to justify a planning group doing most of the thinking because it is too complex to interest normal teachers.

Stage 5
This may be the first time the general teacher population are really engaged with the changes, and they may not be happy or committed. Dragon 4, disengaged teachers.

Here are some steps that will help avoid the dragons.

Dragon 3 - excessive complexity
Settle on a small number of objectives that are directly related to student learning. For example:
Primary benefits of technology in learning: students achieve higher levels of: [from the Florida Matrix]

• Active engagement in learning - choosing, selecting, pursuing topics
• Collaboration with peers, experts, near and far
• Constructive activities to build understanding, sharing, publishing
• Authentic learning engaging with real world issues beyond the school
• Goal directed planning, monitoring, reviewing - metacognition

I think these five elements adequately sum up how ICT can benefit learning. Teachers understand them all. They are widely accepted and are unlikely to change very much, and are not dependent on any particular technology.

Dragon 1: experts leading they way
Listen to experts by all means, but test their input with teachers all the way along. Last year's solution might not work now.
Dragon 2: a false sense of clear direction
Test innovations in the classroom before adopting them, gaining supporters along the way. Gain commitment to it being a learning process for classroom practice, not simply the implementation of a set procedure.
Dragon 4: disengaged teachers
Involve teachers all along the way in change they can observe in students.

To the unwary, the six step strategic planning process is a risky way to plan a voyage into unfamiliar territory.

Image: Baylee46

Planning for school improvement (and avoiding strategic planning)

The short video (3min 30 sec) explains some of the limitations of strategic planning for ICT development in schools. Then it outlines an alternative approach - emergent planning.

See the next post for more on strategic planning.