School 2.0 in SA

How can we use ICT to address the gap in performance of learners going into secondary education?

This is a quick idea that we brainstormed in an effort to come up with an ICT intervention. The idea of an e-portfolio was explored as a way for teachers (school communities) to help smooth the way for learners and address the “performance drop” from primary to secondary school. If teachers have easier access to information in the form of an e-portfolio they will possibly be able to assist learners with problems.

Questions:

• Privacy: who will have access to what information?
• Who will control the information that go into this system?
• How will you incentivize pupils and teachers to contribute to the system?
• Has anythging like this been done elsewhere?

I was scanning over Sherman Dorn’s blogpost on Co Creating with Web 2.0 which resonates with my dream project of getting teachers to co-create learning objects to enrich the curriculum here in our country. But of course, we are currently still in a place where we do not even have a culture of sharing learning materials and co-creation is, at this point in time, just a far away dream.

But I do take encouragement from Sherman’s vision: “Co-Creating may become one of the most powerful engines of change and innovations that the education world will experience. Co-Creating with other educators across the nation is like tapping a knowledge pool of similar interest, a reservoir of creativity that may emerge through an enthusiastic wealth of talent producing warehouses of digital curriculum.”

This statement does however,  ring a slight warning, though. Warehouses of digital curriculum, does not turn me on. We have in the past, even here in South Africa, been hard at work in creating just that. Think of the Thutong portal, which I am glad to report is starting to morph into dedicated spaces where teachers can upload (much improved) and discuss resources. Discussion is the first step to co-creation. If teachers could collaborate in setting tests and exams, just think of what value and time saving mechanism that could turn out to be!

Maybe co-creation could be the missing link? It has been my main frustration to get teachers to share, never mind discuss resources. I know the issue of time is a distinct barrier, but if we could go straight into co-creation, it could address the time issue as well. It is worth a try. With the prelims coming up, maybe we can give it a shot? Any volunteers?

I have been playing with a few new tools. “Wordl is a toy for generating “word clouds” from text that you provide. The clouds give greater prominence to words that appear more frequently in the source text. You can tweak your clouds with different fonts, layouts, and color schemes. The images you create with Wordle are yours to use however you like. You can print them out, or save them to the Wordle gallery to share with your friends.  Here is a Wordle cloud that I have made from my del.icio.us tags:

Another tag cloud generator is Tagcrowd, where you can also choose the colours scheme for your cloud presentation:

And last but not least, Tagcloud creator is tagcloud-generator, where you can also choose which tags to keep and which to loose: http://www.tagcloud-generator.com/index.html

Of the three, I thought that Worldle generated the most effective, visualy stimulating cloud! Which brings me to the question, why would we want to create tag clouds? The answer for me lies in more than just visual appeal. Pasting a piece of text into any one of these tag cloud generators provides us with a quick visual summary of the important (most used, most of the time) keywords and concepts contained in the text. It gives us a quick overview of what has been highlighted within the text and it can sometimes be quite a suprising way to see if the idea that you wanted to get accross where the one that are being visualised.  A very ahndy tool indeed!

 Here is a little worksheet from Pam:

Validating data in a classlist

I am still at the conference in PE and had one of those WOW moments this morning at one of the presentations. It was also one of those really humbling experiences.

Yesterday one of the teachers from rural KZN came to my collegue, and told her that she was doing a presentation on “How I teach”. Her words were “How do I get this into the computer“. She also wanted to have a PowerPoint presentation to accompany her paper, but has never ever even touched a computer.

So last night my colleague sat up till midnight making a PowerPoint for her. I was quite dubious that it would work as we did not have time to teach her how to use the equipment and the programme, even if we could get it “into the computer“. I was tasked to assist her with the presentation. Quite frankly I hoped that she would look at it and decide not to use the slides as I had only 10 minutes to explain it and go through it with her. But she was adament. She had to have her things “Up there“. I asked her if she wanted me to stay with her in the front and help her and she assured me that she was okay. I hovered around the front row ready to “save the day”.

The room was packed with about 100 delegates. She started off by reading her presentation from her paper and completely forgot about the laptop presentation. Then she remembered and frantically pressed too many buttons, which happened to catch the presentation up to where she was. Then  she relaxed and swapped over to the PowerPoint’s pace. It was poetry in motion. It calmed her down and she followed and talked to the slides. Like the professional she was!

Then came question time. One of the delegates asked her to go back to one of her slides as he wanted to ask her something about it. My heart froze. I almost jumped accross the desk to help her, but I froze in my seat as she calmly hit the back button till she got to the correct slide.

Not only did she gave a great presentation, she used the technology like a pro. Considering that it was the very first time that she has ever touched a computer, I suddenly was filled with hope for the future. I watched as new bounderies were crossed and I now know that I am not wrong when I say that the digital devide can be crossed- we just have to allow people to be brave!