Some 'Killer Apps' for Android

I do quite a bit of work with Android tablets with Tablet Academy. One of the issues with Android, lets be honest, is that they are forever being compared with iPads. Perhaps this is inescapable as the iPad is held up as the 'Gold Standard' of tablet devices, however, Android is catching up fast.

I came across this blog post recently. It lists 101 great Android Apps for Education. have a look....you might be pleasantly surprised...

Where are the killer apps?

If, like me, you are an Apple fan who works with both Android and Windows 8 platforms as well, you often find yourself in the comparison game. Its not a good place to be. I'm a firm believer in making EdTech choices based on need (see my last blog post for more on this) and so I have no problem working across all three major mobile operating systems. I've worked with both Apple and Microsoft and I'm really impressed with what they both have to offer and with their commitment to education, be it through the Apple Professional Development programme or Microsoft's Partners in learning and Excellent Educators.
I've also done a bit or work with a fantastic Android device supplier and know that Android is catching up fast.

If I'm honest though, my iPad mini is the best piece of tech I've ever actually owned. For me personally, it does everything I need a mobile device to do. Thats not to say that other devices don't have their own places or niches. There are some great Android functions and apps and Windows 8 devices have this interoperability with desktop machines that is a real advantage for those who are a bit less tech savvy than others - its the simplicity and familiarity factors coming into play.

But in education, the Apple IOS offering is still ahead of the game when it comes to apps. The killer three really set the iPad apart from the competition. BookCreator, iMovie and GarageBand are the killer three when it comes to schools. The creativity goes through the roof when kids are set free to work on these apps and its a wonderful thing to see. My good friends at Apple in the UK have introduced me to some incredible individuals and schools who are making fantastic use of these three apps.

Android and Windows 8 are pushing Apple all the way for market share in education tablet device use. To me,what they really need to work on are the killer apps. Where are the Android and Windows 'killer' three to take on the Apple triumvirate? get this one cracked and we could see the battle for market share really hotting up

Leading from the middle?

So do we still need teachers in this age of heutagogy? What are the necessary checks and balances, if any, to the notion of knowledge grazing?  Sugata Mitra takes it to the extreme  with his notion of the hole in the wall computer and self organised learning environments  but is this the way education is  going or is it more a case of a journey with many different  potential routes and destinations? Will there even be a final destination (in the form of an  exam or exams) in this age of lifelong learning where learning 'bites' can be rewarded with  badges evidencing achievement.

 Well, I believe we still do need teachers, because society is by its nature a structural paradigm and one   of the structures underpinning society is this concept of  'getting an education'. We rightly value        education in present day society just as much as we ever did. It is seen as the way out of poverty in the  developing world, it is valued as a prize to be achieved. Ask most people how they obtain a better job  or status in society and they'll tell you that doing well at school is possibly the biggest single factor  leading to such an elevation in status.  But is it still school that can deliver this? Two particular current authors of books about education certainly doubt this. Guy Claxton asks the question, what's the point  of school?  And Clayten Christensen posits the disruptive technology paradigm, so might the more  self directed heutagogical alternative to traditional schooling be a sort of 'disruptive technology' to    traditional schooling?

The glue which might stick all of this together for me is formative assessment. One of the biggest influences on teachers of my generation was Dylan William and Paul Black's work on formative assessment and the concept of Assessment for Learning, because it reminds us what great teachers can achieve, not by transmitting knowledge (of which they are not even the gatekeepers anymore) or by drilling facts into memory, or even to its most radical extent, pointing or signposting the way to set 'versions' of knowledge, but by directing the learner towards a path of self fulfilment and lifelong continuous achievement.

Society does need teachers and it perhaps needs to realign the concept of education to better fit an evolving understanding of the value of learning as an adjunct to development rather than the be all and end all. The days of passing exams to get through stages in education are probably coming to an end, at least in compulsory schooling. But what, if anything, do we replace them with?

Pasi Sahlberg, in his book, Finnish Lessons, might just point the way. In his re telling of  the story behind the success of the Finnish education system in recent years, he makes a  number of important points, but most of them can be traced back to societal shift. This,  when added to a realignment of the national structures governing education has driven  forward an agenda of huge improvement in the education (measured, it has to be said by  testing achievement in a way which is most un-Finnish: the standardised test). Trusting  teachers to assess rather than transmit knowledge has been a big driving force behind  this change. I saw this when I visited the country some years back, a focus on  continuous formative assessment forming the basis of almost every interaction between teacher and student. The professional status of the teacher in their society is high. There is much societal capital in being a teacher. It automatically conjures up the image of a highly educated child centred person in the mind of most Finns. It is something to aspire to being in the same way that being a doctor or lawyer does. The Finnish teacher education programme is built on the twin pillars of high academic achievement (masters level degree followed by excellent teacher training) and career long CPD

But it's rather more than just having excellent qualifications and top notch training. The system is free from external 'brakes' to slow down learning. Such things as external inspection and examinations are a thing of the past, replaced by trust and a willingness to keep faith with this excellent foundation of good people well educated and trained for their job. . The Finns have built in agency to their system as well as capacity, in that it is continually generating improvement due to the structures in place and the recognition of its importance to the success of their country in the world.

Assessment is why we need teachers. Not examinations, or even summative assessment, but assessment for learning. We need assessment to define the route map which can be followed so that kids can direct their learning toward their goals in life. We need teachers to question them on what it is they have learned, and how well they understand it directing them back and forth through their knowledge grazing journey. Teachers are needed to help them self assess their progress, and to help them reorient where necessary, not to tell them what to learn but to show them where to go on their journey through knowledge acquisition, and more importantly, skills acquisition.

It is generally recognised that there does need to be a curriculum of sorts I believe. Children do need to be literate and numerate and more than this, to be able to recognise that learning does need to have a direction, or set if goals if it is to lead to college, training, jobs or university based careers and professions. So there is still a place for school but not perhaps as we know it, for the Finnish lesson has been the disruptive paradigm pushing a change agenda.

Formative assessment might be the disruptive paradigm to traditional instructional models of schooling, and so this traditional model of schooling should be replaced by something more akin to real education. Badges are the disruptive paradigm to examination and summative assessment.

Good formative assessment signposts the way towards valuable achievement and attainment. Good teachers recognise that this is their skill-set and their evolving role. They can direct knowledge grazing toward fresh pastures without reining it in and keeping it in exhausted fields. This type of teaching encourages skills acquisition rather than knowledge transfer which is a redundant concept in this Information Age. Those pictures of Aristotle standing holding forth to a group of enraptured students are not what school is about. Perhaps having Aristotle sitting amongst the students subtly influencing the direction of their discussions is more apt if we are to transpose the image onto a more modern day vista.

Leading from the middle perhaps?

Is social Media disruptive in the classroom?

African Education Week, held in Johannesburg every year is the largest education conference on the continent.  This year, I was asked to give a short presentation and then take part in a panel discussion around the use of the social web in the classroom. The text of my presentation is below (and thanks to Ollie Bray for the idea of using the change slides from Karl Fisch ).

Is social media disruptive in the classroom? Yes…of course it is,and this is a good thing we need to embrace and nurture

When I was preparing for today’s session, I thought for a little while on the meaning, in today’s context, of the word ‘disruptive’. Now, it can of course mean disruptive to classroom learning, or disruptive in the sense we understand by the term ‘Disruptive Technology’. But actually, both need to be contextualised in a positive way because they can be one and the same thing.  

In Scotland they have had a national schools intranet since 2006. It was the first national intranet for schools in the world and…. It never really worked properly, at least,in the way teachers would have wanted it to work. It was in my personal view, almost out of date before it was actually rolled out….seriously.  I’ve just spent the past year or as a part of a small advisory group set up to examine and report on the options for it’s replacement. We've spent a lot of time trying to design something which is based upon Self organised learning, and the social web, and is as future proof as possible.

But the biggest challenge to the whole project from it’s inception back in the early noughties to the present day has probably,if we’re honest, not been the intranet,or the idea of an intranet,  but rather has been resistance to change..from educators mainly.   The kids are all saying come on…bring it on…no problems fromtheir perspective.In fact, they welcome technology with open arms, embracing it, subverting it, using it for their benefit.It’s the world they live inand it needs to become one we as educators and teachers at least join in and try to become equal partners with the kids in.The balance of power in learning is shifting away from the traditional transmission model of teaching.

Education systems the world over have always had a resistance to change. Anything new or unknown, anything which challenges the current understanding or hierarchy. I bought a few examples of this with me today

Thanks to Ollie Bray for first showing me these slides in one of his presentations a few years ago

So you see….. change has always provoked fear and resistance. But we are living in a world which is going through another revolution. We’ve had the agricultural revolution in the C18, the industrial revolution in the C19, political revolutions in the C20 and now we are in the midst of the information revolution. And this cannot bypass our classrooms as if they were islands in the stream resisting the current of progress. I agree with Steven Heppell when he said that we just spent the whole of the twentieth century perfecting a nineteenth century model of education for the industrial age. I believe that it’s just not fit for purpose anymore – this idea that we can churn out compliant and malleable individuals who will fit into traditional hierarchies without kicking back at all – it’s an absolute nonsense.

Ken Robinson,in a recent TED talk put it this way. He said…  

‘Our children are living in the most intensely stimulating period in the history of the earth. Yes,,, really! They are being besieged with information and calls for their attention from every platform. From computers, from Smartphones, from advertising hoardings, from 100’s of television and radio channels. And we’re punishing them now for getting distracted.  From what? Boring stuff. At school, for the most part.

Now, most great learning happens in groups. Social media enables this collaboration. If we explode these groups of kids into individual parts we separate them from their natural learning environments.  In school, we tell them there is one answer, and its in the back of the book so don’t look. And don’t copy. In the outside world, this is called collaboration. ( If you’re not familiar with Ken, check him out….on YouTube)

Kids today are ‘Screenagers’ and they are completely comfortable with web 3.0 – the creative web. Many of us are still coming to terms with web 2.0…the consumptive web. There is the real tension. They come into school and we expect them to ‘power down’. Why… Why…why… must they stop communicating and collaborating just because they happen to be confined between four walls *we* call a  *classroom*

Now Sir Ken has more to say

   ’But its not all bad news.. Many countries globally are trying to create classrooms that challenge traditional models and reverse the hierarchy, allow young people to communicate and collaborate, that provide an authentic audience for children’s work’

This is what social media is all about. It’s simply another more culturally relevant tool for facilitating learning.The frightening thing for many teachers is that they can’t control it.  I think this is something we have to help our teachers let go of

Young people are engaged when they are learning about things or with things that they can relate too or that are relevant to them. Social media is highly culturally relevant at the moment for young people and harnessing these tools for education can develop really powerful contexts for learning.

Do you remember that aircraft which took off from La Guardia Airport in New York flew into a flock of birds suffered a double engine loss and glided to safety landing on the Hudson River back in 2009? Those images of Captain Sullenberger the pilot walking on the wings of his 737 guiding his passengers to the safety of waiting boats after pulling of what must truly rank as one of the most spectacular aircraft landings ever. This story hit the world first via twitter before the traditional media channels had got their acts together. Imagine if you’d had this happening during your class? What an amazing learning opportunity?

 So Social media is also highly relevant across society as a whole. For example in the UK in 2012 eight out of the ten most popular search terms were directly linked to a social website. Facebook was the most popular search term. And you tube was the second most popular search engine. Young people today don’t look in books for answers on how to do things if they have a choice…they go to you tube and watch someone actually doing it. Our world is evolving. New ideas will spread the whole way around the world in less than 48 hours. That’s the power of the YouTube video clip!  It’s even less time on Twitter.  Social media is global and ubiquitous. This is evolution, but not as we’ve previously understood the word. Now the term evolution is used to describe changes which occur much more rapidly than Darwin could ever have dreamed about. 

So with this in mind, think about this concept…. I call it  ’Knowledge Grazing’. Just looking at something on line, or searching for something specific takes us on a self organised but still very messy journey through learning. Try going to a Wikipedia page for a topic or subject which interests you. Can you defy the psychology which makes clicking on hyperlinks almost impossible to resist?

This is a heutagogical approach which could see a return to a more focussed and user-centred project- based learning, but this time, with projects directed by the individual learner.  As educators, all we need to do is set the parameters, then work individually with our students, helping, providing advice, and yes, even teaching them that it’s not just ok to recycle and mash up knowledge, but that the real goal is to reboot it, make it work, and truly own it.  By this I mean evaluating what is discovered,  properly crediting the work of others and commenting on how relevant it might be to the project, whilst benchmarking it against the set parameters. We’re not just looking for old-style factual regurgitation. Those days are long gone, left behind by the post industrial information age. We should be in the business of helping learners to become consummate knowledge Rebooters.

It’s not what you know but how you use it. 

So to sum up…yes, social media *IS* disruptive in the classroom

Yes,  it disrupts traditional models of teaching (information transmission)

and honestly, if something is able to be disrupted, than it deserves to be disrupted.

Pedagogy, as we’ve traditionally understood it is being replaced by heutagogy, or Self Directed Learning.

Social Media has re energised learning. We live in the Soundbite generation. Use it, … because I tell you this….. if you dislike the change,  you’ll like the irrelevance even less.

And after all,  as  someone else once said …. aren't the best teachers are those who show students where to look but don’t tell them what to see? 

African Education Week 2013 (pt 2)

Thoughts on African education week -day one session two

I felt rather sorry for the panel chair during this session. Leading education technology expert, Kobus Van Wyk must have felt like he'd been transported back twenty years to an education conference in the last century, such was the appalling standard of presentation. I must qualify this first though, because it would be fair to say that the first and last presentations were fantastic, with Fred Baumhardt of Microsoft giving us a futuristic look at what should soon be everyday use of touch projected technology, and Headteacher Ansie Peens giving us her experiences of a 1:1 tablet roll out programme in her state school.

However, these two fascinating talks bookended three appalling sales pitches from vendors set upon using existing technology to do existing jobs. The future of content provision is not photocopying sections of textbooks for kids who forgot to pack their schoolbooks (I'm not even going to validate the presentation from the photocopying salesperson with a discussion), and neither is it in digitising existing or pimped-up copies of existing textbooks with a few hyperlinks and interacties bolted on. These three sales pitches were poor because they were so misplaced. They add to the very real risk that the potential from increased access to devices in schools via tablet provision will be squandered due to use of downloaded and expensive static texts.

As Microsoft's Fred Baumhardt showed us, the future is in user-generated and searched for content, freely available on the web. Open Education Resources are the now and the future, not these expensive digitized textbooks or photocopies of notes and worksheets. If schools are suckered in by the text-book publishers instead of trying to effect *real* transformation of learning by shifting the focus away from prescriptive texts and moving to a looser messier student-centred approach. Text books are a comfort blanket to an approach that can descend into little more than a teaching-by-numbers regime.

Kids today are ‘Screenagers’ and they are completely comfortable with web 3.0 - the creative web. Many of us are still coming to terms with web 2.0…the consumptive web. There is the real tension. They come into school and we expect them to ‘power down ’

We need to be spending education funding much more carefully. Resources should be concentrated on fast reliable Internet access and wifi. This gives every classroom a window to the world. The world is the new classroom, not the tablet, smartphone or other device or the content it contains, and if we don't help our kids to enter this world-wide learning space, we prevent them from not only consuming content, but creating and sharing their own. This is what the speakers in the middle slots failed to grasp and unfortunately, this failure hampers school leaders like Ansie who has made such an incredible leap of faith into the future with her technology provision programme. Using tablets just for purchased digitised content is just doing old things in new ways.

Surely the time has come for us to use technology to do new things.

African Education Week 2013

THOUGHTS ON AFRICAN EDUCATION WEEK DAY ONE- FIRST SESSION.

This was my first time at African Education Week. This conference is southern Africa's biggest annual education showcase, featuring keynote speakers, workshops, panel debates, and trade exhibitors.  I arrived in Johannesburg of an early morning flight from Cape Town, taking the brand new 'Gautrain' shuttle (built for the Football world cup in 2010) to the Sandton Convention Centre and making it just in time to hear the first speaker, Dr Mamphela Ramphele open the conference. 

Now, Dr Ramphele is a long time critic of the current ANC-led South African Government and she wasted no time setting about them. Her assertion that "textbooks are the money laundering tool for the politically connected- that's why schools don't have textbooks"  caused a ripple of applause around the conference hall.  As did her assertion that the Education portfolio in government always seems to be encumbered with the weakest of the political elite in Africa.

She then criticised the current state of South African Education, particularly it's lack of technology, poor standard of teaching and professional development, and reliance on printed textbooks, promising a whole raft of improvements in the manifesto of her political party, Agang, at the elections in 2014. You can read her speech here

 Dr Ramphele is a controversial figure in South African Politics and she certainly lived up to her reputation in her speech. I'd put in a note of caution to Dr Ramphele here- education is a big conversation. You can't just announce policy, you must first join the conversation.  Particularly with regard to testing and assessment. It's not enough just to talk in raw scores and the raising of so-called pass mark levels..

I have to admit the next speaker left me a bit cold. Businessman and 'motivator' Kelly Ritchie appeared to spend his twenty five minutes shouting and taking his clothes off, even managing to forget his mic clip in the process. I'm still not sure what his message to the conference was really all about. I think others around me shared that view, judging from their bemused expressions.

 Luckily, Louise Van Rhyn rescued the morning with a thoughtful presentation echoing her Cape Town TED talk earlier this year. The message of school improvement by the community and business is similar to the ABCD approach developed by Cormac Russell . I'm not sure I agree with her thoughts on the quality of educational leadership though...I believe there is tremendous capacity to lead in our education system with talented people keen to step up and realise their potential. I know from my own management experience in industry that the skills required to lead in business are not always the same as in education and style can definitely be very different. Whilst business leaders can bring much to the table, what is really needed in order for South African Education to better realise leadership potential is good quality targeted professional development in education leadership and management.

Gavin Keller was brilliant, for me, the star of the morning. A real example of South African Educational leadership talent in action. Inspiring and culturally relevant, he held the conference hall in the palm of his hand- one educator to a hall full of others. A great presentation on responsibility and leadership with a nod to neurobiology. Change is too slow because teachers don't feel 'worthy' . Confidence is a key factor in effective leadership. I agree. I'm pretty sure he's a fan of Andy Hargreaves too... The take home message for me is that we need to nurture the emotional capacity of our educators in schools if we want to encourage change and success.

Johannes Cronje spoke next about leading change in a digital age. In a fantastically engaging presentation with much of it off the cuff, he took the audience on a journey of how he's kept up with the changing digital landscape. Making the point that with SMS and WhatsApp, as well as twitter and Facebook, our students probably read more than they ever did before.  His talk covered some of his experiences with his own students and you can see his presentation here.

Interestingly, both Johannes and Gavin took pot- shots at the humble pencil. I'm not sure I agree with this, indeed I think the demise of the pencil has been greatly exaggerated, to paraphrase the famous quote. I do agree with the thrust of both these speakers and Dr Ramphele in reinforcing the tablet agenda. Anything which gets rid of the annual text-book beano has to be welcomed, however, I'd strike a note of caution here as the eBook publishing vultures hover poised to push their wares onto unsuspecting schools flush with their shiny new tablets. Think before you buy- the age of Open Education Resources is well and truly upon us, and materials for learning and teaching are available....for free. 

                                                 (The lights are on but there's nobody home )

A pretty good first session. Some interesting thoughts on leadership and school improvement, however, whilst Louise's project moves one school at a time onto the agenda as one way forward, as ever, the practical application of the words and presentations needs sound and thoughtful political leadership as well. It would have been good to hear from the Government  minister responsible for South African Education,  however, the lack of any representation from this quarter was particularly notable this morning.

One big gripe though...there was no free wifi available to delegates. Quite frankly, in this day and age for an international conference  not to have a free wifi facility is nothing short of appalling!. Perhaps there would have been higher level of outward engagement through social media if this had been the case, because out of over a hundred delegates in the hall, less than ten percent were using their own 3G for live tweeting. 

 If African Education Week wants to take it's place amongst the leading education conferences of the world, this glaring omission really must be rectified for next year's event.

A back to basics idea for Teachmeet...

This is a post I wrote for EdchatSA site. Check it  out when you can - there are loads of great things over there...I've cross posted it here to kick things off. 

The teachmeet concept, which started in a pub in Edinburgh, Scotland in 2005 has spread pretty much around the world in only a few short years. The first teachmeet (I wasn't at that one…but I was at the second and subsequent ones) consisted of four or five colleagues sharing ideas, and quickly developed into the format we know today from the ‘official’ wiki.

• 7-minute presentations on classroom experience or tools used
• 3-minute nano-presentations on brief ideas or useful websites/tools
• Round table discussions on agreed subjects recorded and published in some way
• No sales pitches (apart from a nod to the sponsors and maybe a very short spot)
• Absolutely NO PowerPoint presentations.
• Amusing and witty MC not afraid to stop folks who've reached their time limit.

Now the venue was always less important than the ‘unconference’ ethos. Teachmeet was an antidote in many ways, to the sterile and un-engaging CPD delivered to teachers rather than involving them. Teach-meets usually (and preferably) take place away from schools, colleges or other formal institutions. This was a deliberate attempt to separate from establishment or organised CPD ).

And, it worked. Sponsors quickly saw the value of associating with the concept and therefore a venue was usually found, equipment sourced from participants, and drinks and nibbles purchased. The events were usually followed by an even less formal Teach-eat in a local restaurant or pub where the discussions continued far into the night…The concept quickly spread out across the UK from its birthplace in Scotland, and then was exported worldwide. It probably reached its zenith at the now-legendary Islay unconference in 2009. You can read about this event, Education 2020 here and here.

However, recently, there’s been a shift away from some of these guiding principles. Some teach-meets are now scheduled as in-school activities at the end of the school day, and in school itself. The original idea of 7 minute presentations has been axed in favour of shorter 3 minute shots. I think this in itself is a bad move as the 7 minute slot allowed you to cover a something in a little detail. 3 minutes leads to some shallowness at times. There needs to be a balance of sound bites and deeper experience re-telling.

The shift to using teach-meet as a formalised CPD offering held in a school in my view defeats the original ethos of independence and disestablishmentarianism.(!).

Whilst it’s great to see the format changed and adapted, I'm uncomfortable with this shift towards incorporation into something which is delivered to teachers, instead of being crowdsourced *from* them. Even if it’s only five folks in a pub using a laptop to share ideas, it is in my view, better than a shift to adoption by a hierarchy, and subsumation into that hierarchy.

Could we get back to the original idea, and replicate it in SA? I live in Cape Town, and would love to attend a teachmeet like this somewhere in the area. Is there the appetite from Mother City teachers and educators (and the surrounding environs, of course) for a back to basics teachmeet?

(Image from http://olliebray.typepad.com/olliebraycom/)