The Story of Anne Mirtschin

A few weeks ago, I invited teachers to relate how their lives as teachers had changed due to engaging with other educators online, and to relate how this change has flowed to their students.

I received the following response from Anne Mirtschin. Here is a quick teaser of what is to follow:

 

As for me, I am classified a ‘baby boomer’, have loved using technology. It has reinvigorated me in my final years of teaching, so much so, that I do not want to retire for many years. I have ‘refound’ my passion for teaching and learning. I am no longer an ‘out the front’ of the room teacher, but more a facilitator working in amongst the students as their needs arise. 

Anne's blog is http://murcha.wordpress.com/ and her Twitter ID is @murcha.

I have added in headings to what Anne wrote:

Recount your journey

The Beginning:

My journey began three years ago, when few
students in schools in Victoria or Australia were blogging. As our grade 6
class was developing podcasts for the nearby volunteer run Volcano Discovery
Centre and as we were to use web2.0 tools as part of the Rich Picture Case
Studies grant from our Education Department, that enabled this project to
continue, blogging sounded like a good tool to use to document our journey. So
my teacher blog was started and a class blog called ‘Our Backyard” 

A Mentor

At the same time Heather Blakey of Soul Food Café came to our school to run
some professional development, and she became my great mentor, introducing me
to her global contacts. The students had an immediate authentic global audience
and hence our entrance into the wonderful interactive world of web2.0. My
school is a prep to year 12 rural school and is geographically and culturally
isolated, Soon all students from grades 5 to 11 had the own  blog.

Growing Relationships

The next step, was to become a member of
classroom2.0 where further valuable contacts were made mostly on a global
basis. This led to the wonderful world of wikis, social networking and global
projects. Twitter was just starting to become mainframe and after a puzzling
start, Sue Waters, now the editor of the Edublogger, adopted me and introduced
me to 20 valuable contacts who in turn led me to make further valuable
connections. A fabulous personal learning network was established. Soon we
heard about and became part of the amazing Flat classroom projects. All these
social networking tools have had an amazing impact on my teaching, classroom
and community.

Busting Open the Classroom to the World

Russia

It means that I can work interactively and
in virtual teams with those who have similar passions to mine. Here are some of
the many stories from my classroom. My students have appeared on Russian TV
news when we videoconferenced with a school in Soglasie Russia. (I met the
teacher Ekaterina on classroom20.com). 

Antartica

Our whole school was online from prep to
year 9 linked up in a  direct
videoconferenece with a research scientist whilst in Antarctica researching the
Adele penguins. 

Earthquake in Java

We have spoken directly
using skype to students in West Java, Indonesia within 6 hours of them being
hit by an earthquake at the end of last year. They were still under tsunami
warnings. We heard the fear in their voices, heard what it was like to
experience an earthquake etc. The bell went but students did not hear it but
were still researching the internet for full evidence of the extent of that
earthquake.

Germany, China, Anywhere

Students from their homes at 9pm at night with proud parents
watching, enter 'Elluminate', virtual classroom software, to join a class with
their fellow classmates from Germany (who are at school) and classmates from
Beijing China to work out their global projects as part of the flat classroom
project. My backchannel through twitter are on hand to immediately answer our
questions eg how can we convert an xtranormal video into mpg or wmv format.
What games do you use in your classroom? Could you fill in our survey forms
etc. .  It means my students can learn
anytime, anywhere with techn-how. Students have learnt the techniques of
cybersafety, netiquette, responsible online learning and digital citizenship.
They have started their digital footprints in the global world that is theirs.

Students

My students are motivated, engaged, excited,
empowered, willing to return to school virtually at night time to work with
global classmates and most of all have ‘fun’ whilst learning.

Conclusion

As for me, I am classified a ‘baby boomer’,
have loved using technology. It has reinvigorated me in my final years of
teaching, so much so, that I do not want to retire for many years. I have
‘refound’ my passion for teaching and learning. I am no longer an ‘out the
front’ of the room teacher, but more a facilitator working in amongst the students
as their needs arise. I can teach anywhere, anytime, 24/7/365. At nighttimes I
run online PD sessions for teachers targeted at Australian teachers, but have
found the audience can include educationalists from many countries including
Africa, India, Europe, Asia etc. They come from all levels of education
including pre-school through to university and adult educators all with the one
shared passion – to empower learning and bring education into the 21^st
century.

A Day In the Life of Booralie Island, our School's Virtual World

A typical day in our virtual 3D island:

At lunch each Friday we all meet to build, swap ideas, and so on.

I noticed one student - a boy in Year 8 - had built a little ANZAC memorial in front of his shop:

In Australia it is 'ANZAC day' in a couple of days from now - where we remember Australian and New Zealand soldiers and their sacrifice in World War 1.

The sign needs updating, of course :-)

Then, some of the Year 9 girls said they had built a recording studio. Here is one small part of it:

They have programmed the drums, keyboard and guitar so that it looks like you are actually playing them, i.e. it's animated.

When I arrived home from school, I thought I'd log back into Booralie Island, and found some students working on a Coliseum - style arena. Some other students were logged in and were chatting:

Booralie is a great 'equaliser' in social interactions, partly because of the social codes and culture we've established, and I think it helps that students have pretend names too.

Just another day, where as normal I am highly impressed at students from my school and what they are creating in our little virtual world!

Sydney Teachers, Send Your Colleagues to Me!

This is a quick post, mostly relevant to teachers in Sydney, Australia.

On Friday May 21st I will be running a full day of training at my school. The title is "Real Audience Project: Student Web Publishing". 

It is the first day ever of our new PD initiative. It is going to rock! "PD Like No Other"! 

 What this means, is helping teachers getting a website running where their students' work can be published for the world to see.

I am guessing that if you are the sort of teacher who reads blogs, i.e. is reading this right now, you probably know how to set up a blog already!

But I am also guessing you have colleagues who might just be willing to give it a go, if they had a whole day with a lovely person like me holding their hand!

 I am not reluctant to describe myself like that. I am a patient, gentle person, (ironic photo to your right) perfectly suited to assisting teachers get from:

 Point A (like the idea but sounds out of my depths) 

to 

Point B (oh, I can do this; this is going to work.)

I have enormous confidence in the concept. Once up and running it requires little effort but impacts very positively on students. 

You are an English teacher? Your students can publish short stories, poetry, essays, reflections, and so on. (see http://hmac56.wordpress.com/)

History teacher? Your students can publish 'point of view' pieces, their own interpretations with evidence, a day in the life stories, and so on. (see http://electinghistory.wordpress.com/)

Science teacher? Students publish their understandings, experiments, results, and provocative questions. (See http://stage3science.wordpress.com/) 

Language teacher? Maths teacher? We have teachers from Kindergarten to Year 12, across KLAs, who publish their students' work. The websites are easy to run, and invariably gain 1,000s of views with weeks or months, as well as comments from other students and teachers around the world.

Student web publishing remains for me among the easiest, most high-impact applications of the internet to revolutionising the experience of your students: their motivation, their perspective, their engagement, and the quality of the work they produce.

So whether you want to come along yourself, or can pass this blog post to a colleague and encourage them to come along: COME ONE, COME MANY!  

The workshop day is just the beginning - participants are invited to optional follow up conference sessions over to Elluminate to troubleshoot, vent, celebrate, and nourish the connections they make the people they meet on the day. On the day, participants will meet students and teachers implementing the ideas. In fact every PD day that I run will be a potential window into that 'whole new world' of online engagement that time and time again transforms teacher energy, perspective, purpose.

Click on this image for more information:

 Click here for the registration form: http://scil.nsw.edu.au/register

Meeting Other Teachers in Virtual Worlds - a Brief Get Started Guide

I write this post with the aim of providing some simple, brief, specific steps for teachers who are curious about virtual worlds, not for students (in this instance!), but for teachers.

I suggest you 1. read instructions below and get up and running RIGHT NOW and then 2. attend the Newbie session on the 5th of May 2010.

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All you need to know to benefit from a virtual world as a teacher are these basics:

A virtual world is a 3D online space that you can see on your computer screen and move through by walking or flying around. "You" are represented by a walking figure on the screen - a figure whose appearance you can change and adapt, and this representation of 'you' is called your 'avatar'. As you walk around the world you can see other people (in the form of their avatars), you can text chat with them, sometimes voice chat with them (with a headset). 

The benefits of bothering are:

1. You can network / conference / connect with / share ideas with / debrief with colleagues in rich and psychologically compelling environment, from the comfort of home. 

2. Plenty of teacher conferences are held in a virtual world, and the best face to face conferences run a parallel conference in a virtual world - i.e. the speaker broadcasts their voice through a microphone to the people in the physical room with them, and into the virtual space too. This means you can attend conferences you have neither the time, money, or approval to attend in real life, from home. And if it's boring you can unplug! (Can't do THAT at a face to face conference!)

In particular, there are lots of unConferences - an unconference is a get together of teachers where anyone who wants to can share what they've been up to. It's a conversation rather a presentation, on the assumption that we are all experts through virtue of practical experience! Why learn from one official expert when through conversation you can pick the brains of many?

3. It's a heck of a lot of fun. 

So let's get specific - what to do if you want to dip your big toe in?

There are various communities of educators in 3D environments, but for simplicity let's look at "Jokaydia", and how to access Jokaydia.

STEP 1; First, go to the Second Life website and click join now - you'll get an account and a chance to download the Second Life program, which is what you use to go into the 3D world.

STEP 2; When you run the Second Life program for the first time you get taken to a tutorial space where you can learn the basics of moving around in the world. To finish the tutorial you end up leaving the tutorial space by 'teleporting' to the 'mainland'. Once you've done that, you're free to go where you want.

STEP 3: To get to "Jokaydia", either do a search for Jokaydia from within the Second Life program, or just click here: SLurl: http://slurl.com/secondlife/jokaydia/108/159/23 

Jokaydia is a series of islands built by, and frequented by, a bunch of motivated educators, especially from Australia. Drop in, and you may well find people there - approach them and type in "hello I am new here!" and see where things go from there!

Jokaydia was and is pioneered by educator Jo Kay for whom I have profound respect and admiration. Now that you have access, have a look at upcoming events: http://jokaydia.com/jokaydia-events-calendar/

You'll see there is a "Newbie Session" on Wednesday the 5th of May 2010 - this would be your perfect opportunity to get basic advice and make some contacts!

http://www.flickr.com/photos/jokay/ / CC BY-NC-SA 2.0

There are also plenty of other events coming up, including an 'unConference' you can attend later in May.

Other Universes:

For the record, 'Second Life' is not the only virtual world system, and Jokaydia exists in other virtual world systems too. It is pan-dimensional!!! There is "ReactionGrid" and also "JokaydiaGrid" - both easy to access, and functioning very very similarly to Second Life. Jokaydia Grid in particular has the advantage that you can take groups of students into the space, for free! No rush at all, but if/when you're ready, there are instructions for accessing these worlds here: http://jokaydia.com/venues-and-resources-on-the-islands-of-jokaydia/jokaydia-reactiongrid/ (for Reaction Grid) and here: http://jokaydiagrid.com/signup-for-jokaydiagrid/ (for Jokaydia Grid). 

This is easier than it sounds - it's like belonging to multiple websites... this is multiple virtual universes! 

Also checkout http://wiki.jokaydia.com/page/Main_Page for much more information!

See you in there!

The Best Bits of my Crazy School

Here are the 'Best Bits' of my school that might spark of your own ideas for your own teaching/learning context. I'm suddenly getting about 150 visitors to HappySteve per day, up from my normal 20 or so, so I thought I'd throw an overview out to you all of the ventures that have me so damn excited about working where I work. 

Technology is not the point. Some projects below use technology heavily, but the million dollar question is are students engaged and extended?

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'The Matrix'

 Known by various names, this program runs in Years 5, 6, 7 and 8 - we throw all students from that academic year into one large space with few walls, or no walls, for a cross-curricular program lead by a cross-curricular team of teachers, where the students self-select into a matrix of activities ranging from simple to complex, and a wide range of multiple intelligences. In Year 7 students spend most of their time in this sort of environment.

The result is a sight to behold! Teacher collaboration and openness rather than territoriality. Student motivation sky high as they become educational entrepreneurs rather than passive recipients. A sense of movement and momentum towards the creativity end of the learning spectrum. An almost zero level of conflict / disengagement.

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The Real Audience Project

 We want every class to have a publishing presence online. No matter what the students are producing, the teacher ought to be redirecting their creative creations to the web for the world to see and comment on. We call this the 'Real Audience Project', and have set up www.realaudienceproject.com where ALL of our students' publishing projects will appear.

The Real Audience Project includes basic web publishing such as http://nbcsnews.wordpress.com (12,000 visitors now!! The students can imagine themselves on the stage of a stadium, and this fuels the care and attention they give their writing).

Also audio publishing in projects like http://wordsworthreflections.wordpress.com, where students ring a local number from their phone and what they say appears instantly (over 4,000 visitors), http://youtube.com/frenchfm, and our radio station (open: http://209.119.13.39:11300/listen.pls in iTunes to listen in). 

Also print book publishing at http://stores.lulu.com/realaudienceproject - we have had 80 or 90 sales now at our little book store. People order the books and they arrive via mail. It's great for our students to be able to say they are published authors, and again, the care they put into their work is due to the publishing process.

Also, teacher publishing at the real audience project dot com you'll find our teacher tweets and blogs. The benefit for them is the same as for our students - publishing sharpens your mind, raises your standards, and rewards you with recognition. Step 1, get your teachers to blog - it's the launchpad for a learning journey.

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Virtual Worlds

 Since the start of 2009 we have had a virtual island that students can access from school or at home.Our students have build and coded the world themselves, and they teach each other the expertise they acquire. Teachers also use it in class to target specific skills. We use 'Second Life' for our original island, but now have a much cheaper second space which we run with a free program called 'Open Sim'.

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Beyond Borders

 I launched Beyond Borders in 2005 to provide locked, moderated web spaces where students from multiple schools could work together on collaborative projects. We've had well over 3,000 participants 

from all over the world. It's a great way for teachers to help their students lift their horizons beyond the claustrophobic perspective of their classroom.

Beyond Borders is the main reason why those lovely people gave me those lovely awards. 

Yes you can participate, for free! (I run full training sessions too). 
 

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Online Study

In 2006 we started offering HSC (the last two years of High School for ages 17 & 18) courses in an entirely online mode. Some teachers, including me, put their hands up to set up and teach these courses. We now have over 300 students from all over the state doing one or more subjects with us, and  it turns out they perform better in the HSC than face to face students. When a student owns their own learning, and is able to learn according to their own rhythm and preferences, they do better than when plonked in a classroom in front of a boss who tells them what to do and when to do it. 45% of our 2009 students scored in the top two bands of the HSC.

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Moodle for Everyone

  

All our classes have a Moodle page equipped with learning
resources, assessments and communication tools. Our online infrastructure is of
benefit to all our students. This is exerting strong pressure and influence on
our face to face classes. Teacher roles are shifting, as well they should in
the information age, from source of knowledge to coach/mentor.

Here is our Primary age Moodle site.

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And finally, a concept I can't recommend highly enough to leaders of other schools:

  the Sydney Centre for Innovation in Learning (SCIL)

It's just a name. By giving something a name, it exists, right? Back in 2005 our principal labelled it, and it existed! SCIL is a label that gathers a whole range of innovative practices around the school. It 
mobilises, supports, and rewards teachers for taking risks. Teachers trying new ideas and talking online about them have access to the title SCIL Associate which is a career aspiration, a map for understanding what the school is on about, and an easy way to open doors to conversations with other educators.

Five years later we also have a building called the Sydney Centre for Innovation in Learning. See some photos of it here: http://scil.nsw.edu.au/scil-building/ As you view the photos, note that this is where our Year 8s often spend their time learning. Notice that there is no obvious 'front' of the class for teacher talk? There are, however, enough seductive and varied learning spaces to cater for the 140 inquisitive minds who are thrown in their with 6 cross-curricular teachers. Among these are a camp fire, a cave and a wateringhole , metaphorically speaking, spaces designed to facilitate mythically universal modes of learning.

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Post Script: We've now launched a teacher training institute, under the auspices of the Sydney Centre for Innovation in Learning, driven by the very teachers who have been instrumental in the above initiatives. Our motto for this is "PD Like No Other". Attendees at ACEC2010 will know how I feel about traditional PD!!! If you want to replicate some of the ideas above, come and spend the day with me or my colleagues - you can see the ideas in action with the students, and we'll work with you step by step to adapt the ideas to your context.

Come and visit us! Book up for next term! What ya waiting for?

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There are plenty more, but the projects I have mentioned are some the more mature initiatives. Our informal motto is "Do, then think!" (our official mission is "Excellence in Education, Christianity in Action") and these are some of the projects that have survived, while in background we have plenty of other risky initiatives that may succeed gloriously or fail dismally.

See the reactions of previous visitors here.

I am going to reorganise my blog as soon as I get the time so instead of having to trawl though the archives or click on some messy 'category' links, you'll get a clean table of contents so you can get further information on the various initiatives I've had a personal hand in.