THIS BLOG HAS MOVED!

Due to the ridiculously long url address of this blog it is moving to: richlambert.edublogs.org

Please click on the link to go there and read some great practical updates as I blog about launching wikis with my grade and how I am beginning to train the kids to make their own podcasts and digital stories.

Our book, "Action Stations: Digital Storytelling" is up to the final proof stage and will be going to print on the 15th of May, so it was necessary to move address now or stay for good!

Edublogs offers a few more features, a better layout, and a much better domain name! See you there!

The Digital Natives/Digital Immigrant Myth

My role as a Leading Teacher around the area of ICT provides me with the opportunity to work with other teachers to help facilitate various technologies being used effectively in their classroom. One thing that I find particularly frustrating and unhelpful has been the way some teachers have latched onto Prensky's 'digital natives' vs. 'digital immigrants' dichotomy and almost cling to it as an excuse for their lack of awareness/knowledge/skill around the use of computers or anything technological.

Before I go on, let me qualify this by saying that I appreciate that a lot of teachers have found Prensky's theory helpful and have felt that it has made sense of their experiences with new technologies. I can fully understand that view, but overall I think that for someone to consider themselves a 'Digital Immigrant' and their students 'Digital Natives' is unhelpful and simply not accurate.

My main frustration, and one that constantly reoccurs in my role, is that as a 'young' teacher I am expected to know "all about that stuff" (ICT) merely because of my age. I am a 'digital native', and therefore technologically literate.

This brings me to the main issues I have with Prensky's theory.

Firstly, I find this idea insulting. I work hard to gain the knowledge that I have around new technologies, as do many other 'young' teachers (and a lot of more experienced ones too!) I do an immense amount of reading every night and spend many hours 'playing' with new programs to figure them out and work out how they might fit best into a classroom. I did not get to where I'm at because of hours playing Kings Quest and Prince of Persia on our family 286 growing up.

Secondly, this idea that students are 'digital natives' is most unhelpful in my role as someone who tries to help teachers understand the skills students need to be taught in the digital age. Teachers that are happy to be resigned to the idea that their students "know more about this stuff than I do" are showing a distinct lack of understanding about where our students really are at.

Just because our students are able to use Google to find free games on the net, use a Myspace, download music, or even use proxy servers to look up rude stuff while at school, it doesn't make them 'digitally literate'.

In fact, the opposite is often true. Our 'digital natives' are often severely lacking in many key digital literacy skills. Yes they can Google information. But how many of them give any time to questioning the sources they grab the information from? How many of them even check that the information is relevant to the task at hand, other than having the same subject heading as their project topic?

Once I set a student the task of finding out the answer to a question. The topic we were studying was World War 1, the question was: "When did the war end?" To find this out she promptly typed "when did the war end?" into Google and clicked on the first response. The web page she landed on had black and white pictures, talked about war, and contained a date - this was enough to check all the boxes in her mind and she scribbled down the date ready to hand to me.

I believe our students are, more often than not, very poor uses of technology. They know very little outside of what they use for their own entertainment or social life, and even in this area their knowledge is often very limited. They are lacking in critical literacy and 'thinking' skills, have little or no knowledge of networking in an intelligent and purposefull way to obtain information, and even struggle with basic skills, such as emailling (beyond fowarding mindless chain letters to each other.

The following is taken from an article by Bennett, Maton & Kervin (2008):

"...questions must be asked about the relevance to education of the everyday ICTs skills possessed by technically adept young people. For example, it cannot be assumed that knowing how to look up ‘cheats’ for computer games on the Internet bears any relation to the skills required to assess a website’s relevance for a school project. Indeed, existing research suggests otherwise. When observing students interacting with text obtained from an Internet search, Sutherland-Smith (2002) reported that many were easily frustrated when not instantly gratified in their search for immediate answers and appeared to adopt a ‘snatch and grab philosophy’ (p. 664). Similarly, Eagleton, Guinee and Langlais (2003) observed middle-school students often making ‘hasty, random choices with little thought and evaluation’ (p. 30)."

25 years after computers first hit schools, there's no way any of us in the teaching profession should still be hiding behind the "I didn't grow up with it" excuse. I didn't grow up with the technologies I'm using in the classroom either. None of us did. Most of them have only been around for a couple of years, at most.

No, instead, if we are serious about educating children and preparing them properly for life after school, we all need to put effort in to stay up with the latest technologies. It's harder work for some of us that may not be naturally interested in these sorts of things, but that isn't helped by labels such as 'Digital Immigrant' being invented and proglamated.

More thoughts on Literacy in the Digital Age

"Learning how to type is more important than learning handwriting."

Wow. The statement slipped out of my mouth before I'd really had a chance to think about it.
Someone had asked whether I thought teaching the kids to type was important. I guess I have a habit of making big statements to get my point across, and this statement certainly was 'big' and possibly radical to some of my fellow teachers.

Once I started I couldn't stop.

"The children we are teaching today will never use handwriting in a professional capacity. There is not one child here that will use handwriting in their life for anything other than scribbled notes to himself or a friend."

To my surprise everyone seemed to agree! Someone even commented how outdated our focus on handwriting is. How over the last few years it had really slipped into the realm of being ridiculous.

After teaching grade 6 for so long, I'm struggling with the whole concept of how handwriting is taught in grade 3 and 4. Why are we still teaching students 'Victorian Cursive' and making big fusses over 'joining licenses' and 'pen licenses'?

I'm not sure what the situation is elsewhere, but in the schools I've taught in, typing is either not taught at all or has been a recent addition brought about by the frustrations of individual teachers. Typing is not being taught as a result of systematic school curriculum planning.

Surely typing is now one of the most important literacy skills we can provide our students with.

While I'm at it, why do we teach students to write a different alphabet than the one they read?

We put up letters of the alphabet in our room written in cursive writing, practice Victorian Cursive letter forms over and over, and then ask them to read print! I know there were originally reasons behind this, but are those reasons still strong enough in the digital age? How many hours of Primary School are dedicated to teaching students an alphabet and a form of written communication that is next to extinct?

Back to my Level 3 meeting. While I was at it, I thought I'd take a broadside at our spelling program as well. If our students will be doing the vast majority of their writing in life on electronic devices with spell checkers, why don't we ever teach them how to use one properly?

Why aren't spell checkers a major part of our spelling program?

The only time our students will need to spell accurately in their life without the aid of a spell checker is in school!

That's not to say students don't need to learn how to spell, they definitely do. You need to know how to spell to some extent to use a spell checker accurately. But if we consider that most writing will be done with a spell checker, how would that alter our spelling programs? What sort of things would we think were most important to emphasise? Would there be a bigger focus on homophones, for example?

It's time we reviewed these traditional elements of our school literacy programs in light of the explosion in digital devices in recent years. We need to ask ourselves, what do the most important aspects of literacy today look like? And what are they likely to look like by the time the students we are teaching are in the professional world?

The History of Technology in Teaching (click to enlarge)

Revolutions in teaching by richard1

Network Literacy: What does literacy mean in the web 2.0 age?

I've been tossing around in my head what it means for a child to be literate in the modern world. In my last post I talked about the need for students to understand the conventions of visual media texts, such as television, film and advertising. To have a true and useful literacy, children must be empowered to be intelligent and critical consumers of a full range of media texts, not just the printed word.

But where does this line of thinking take us when we reach the digital world? Will Richardson (weblogg-ed.com) talks about the idea of 'Network Literacy'. That is, he raises the question: what does literacy look like in light of the web 2.0 networks that our children are so much a part of?

To give an example of this, publishing used to be the end point of the writing process, in the web 2.0 world it is actually somewhere near the middle of the process. Once something is published on the web it can be commented upon, and then it could be changed or added to by the author in light of these comments. Or, in a wiki situation, once something is published it can be edited or changed by anyone that reads it. A published work becomes a collaborative process among people that could be 1000s of kms apart.

Therefore, literacy is not just about being an intelligent consumer of information anymore. Students need to be intelligent editors and contributors of information as well.

Last year I took a year 6 Australian History class. As it was the 150th year of Australian football I decided that we'd investigate the history of how the game was invented. It's a fairly contentious history, and so it proved to be a rich topic for the students to investigate, discuss and debate. I had planned for the class to create a shared piece of writing that explained the origins of Australian Rules Football and to enter it onto the Simple English Wikipedia site under 'Australian Rules Football: History'. I had checked the site before the unit began and there was no entry on the history of Aussie Rules, so we were all very excited that our piece of writing would be put up as the official entry on the subject in Wikipedia!

I was so busy thinking I was the greatest teacher ever coming up with such an up to date, ICT rich history lesson, that I failed to realise that I was thinking about this unit of work in a very linear, 20th century type way. I was still thinking in terms of litecacy being about consuming information and then re-producing it in a final published form.

I was soon jolted out of that perspective when it came time for us to enter our piece of writing into Wikipedia. You see, by the time I'd planned the lessons and delivered them, someone, somewhere, had already written an entry for the history of Australian Rules Football!

So here we were as a class with a piece of writing and nowhere to put it! That's when my History class took an inspired turn for the better. Instead of writing into a blank space and publishing our work (as my very 20th century brain had planned!), we used our collective knowledge to edit and improve the piece of writing that was already on the site.

This proved to be a far more valuable and life appropriate experience for my students. My students had looked at Wikipedia as an authoritative source, just as I had viewed 'proper' printed and bound encyclopedias when I was growing up. Never before had someone said what I said to them that day about a published source, which was simply: is this correct? Do you agree with what is written here? And even more powerfully: if not, let's change it! You guys should know this history just as well as whoever wrote this because we've just been studying it.

This was a revolutionary thought for a class of 12 year olds. All at once they sat up a bit straighter and keenly began to read what was on the screen.

Sure enough, within moments someone in the class had spotted a factual error in the text. The class filled with life again as we changed what was written to make it more accurate and then read on to find other small things that needed more detail or qualification. Of course, just as with any other good history writing, we had to state our sources for each major point.

You could sense that it almost felt rebellious to them, and as such was very exciting. Purely by accident I'd given my students a great lesson on being literate in the digital age. Of being editors of information, not just consumers.

Our temptation as teachers is to give our students the 'correct' information and ask them to
learn from it. Once they have learned the information, they reproduce it in some sort of publication of their own. Then we mark it based on how much it reflects what they've taken in from the original information that was provided.

But this model does not reflect how our kids will learn in their lives. It doesn't reflect the fact that in the real world our students will go straight to Google, or to a forum, or wiki, or social networking site to find out the information they need to know. And if we as teachers are still teaching in our 20th century way, who is teaching them how to do this in an intelligent and critical way? Who is teaching our students their 'network literacy'?

Critical Literacy in the Modern Classroom: Digital Storytelling

During 2006 we were awarded the Department of Education’s Excellence award for Most Innovative Curriculum for our ‘Movie Magic’ program. This program structures the planning and production of over 20 student films each year in our school by a group of around 120 year 5 and 6 students.

Before starting this program we had looked at some other school movie making programs (the term 'digital storytelling' was yet to become trendy) and we felt many of them were missing the key learning opportunities that making movies with students provides.

Too many teachers were happy just to give cameras to the kids and let them go thinking they were doing something new and innovative. Inevitably, shaky material of kids acting out a script that couldn't really be properly heard because of the poor sound quality was the result. These movies would be shown at the school and everyone would say "isn't it amazing what the kids can do?"

My answer to that is always: "No, not really". It is amazing to us older folk, especially when we think about what was available to us at a similar age. But now, it is no longer impressive just to create a short film. After all, it's very easy to make a movie these days. Anyone can press record on a camera and use one of the many simple editing programs available.

We decided to focus on the critical literacy skills that this type of learning experience can provide, and we did that by insisting on a quality end product. We set our students the challenge of making a top quality short film - no shaky cameras, no dodgy sound track, no half baked ideas. And if they succeeded? A huge film premiere night in the biggest cinema at our local Hoyts complex.

Students would learn about all the elements that make up a film: lighting, sound, camera work and so on. They would learn the conventions behind each different genre of film and television. And they would cement their knowledge by constructing a film of their own.

Learning about how media products are constructed to communicate with audiences is a vital literacy for our students, and it empowers them to become intelligent and critical consumers of all the media that surrounds and even targets them from the earliest of ages.

The power of students working in teams to create a genuinely quality product that they are really proud of, and then to show that product on the same giant screen on which they watch all their Hollywood heroes can not be overestimated. Imagine watching a film you've made with your mates in front of a sell out crowd of 400+ in a state of the art cinema!

Our program has now been running for 5 years, has won Education awards, been featured in international Journals of Education, has been written about on blogs and websites (including apple.com.au), and has spawned two books, the latest of which (Smart Teachers, Smart Classrooms: Digital Storytelling) is due for release shortly through the Curriculum Corporation.

What's this all about?

Welcome! My name is Richard Lambert and I'm a Primary Teacher from Victoria in Australia. The idea of this blog is to help support teachers of both Primary and Secondary students in their quest to be better teachers in the digital age.

I hope we are moving towards a place where we can take the 'e' out of 'e-learning'. That is, to talk about 'e-learning' as distinct from 'normal' learning is becoming more and more ridiculous by the day.

As long as the 'e' remains in 'e-learning' it is like a big advertisement that as teachers we just don't get where our students are at. It is one of many similar such phrases that we use as educators that work to completely alienate us from our students. Would anyone under the age of 18 go around thinking of what they do everyday of the week as 'e-learning'? Of course not!

Using technology to learn things or produce things is no longer new, distinct or different.

Once I got so frustrated with the inability of my grade 6 class to complete a simple task on time I told them about how easy they had it being able to simply log on to the internet to find information. I related to them how I use to have to get on my bike and ride down to the library to do research when I had to complete an assignment for school. There was stunned silence. I knew that this idea would be foreign to them, but just how amazed they were at this story from my childhood really caught me off guard.

These kids had never been anywhere but the internet when they had a personal need to obtain information, and were unlikely to ever need to unless it was specifically required of them in a school setting.

That is, the only place these kids hadn't used technology to learn something or produce something was at school!

Until we fully and properly understand that, for the students we teach, 'e-learning' is simply 'learning', then we must be failing to fully and properly prepare them for the world they will need to function within as adults.

This blog is all about my life as a Leading Teacher and ICT Coordinator at my school, the things I am doing in that role, and the things I am learning as I go along. I'll be talking about digital storytelling, blogging, making wikis, podcasts, vodcasts, class websites and so on. I am also a part time author and this blog will follow the progress of a book I have written with one of my collegues as it nears publication through the Curriculum Corporation.

The sharing of knowledge in blogs, wikis and similar types of ways is a fantastic device to improve our practice as educators. But more importantly, using these tools to make us more intelligent and knowledgeable in our everyday life puts us in the world of our students. It allows us to properly understand them, model for them, and teach them the skills they must have to operate in the modern world.