On Wednesday April 29th, over 100 teachers converged on the Google Buildings in Pyrmont for #TMgegsyd! What exactly is #TMgegsyd?! The 'TM' part stands for 'Teach Meet', an informal professional development experience where educators share quick ideas with others. The 'gegyyd' part stands for 'Google Educator Group Sydney'. This is a group of teachers from Sydney who share a love of Google and it's million and one uses in education!

I presented a 7 minute session on Kahoot! Instead of having a bunch of slides that explains what Kahoot is and how it works, I decided to put together a quiz with 20 questions to show how it all works! The questions started off about general popular culture to get people into the game and then the questions were revolved around how Kahoot works. We had over 100 players - the most I have ever had - all educators of some description. The excitement of the game led to people standing on chairs, cheering and carrying on - just like a class of excited kids - the perfect demonstration of the power of Kahoot!

Since the session ended I have received some great feedback from teachers who enjoyed the session and have used Kahoot in their classrooms already. I grabbed a handful of tweets using the 'Twitter Curator' Add-on in Google Docs - always nice to keep these things for those days where you think that nothing is going right!!!

Day 2 of the EduTech GAFE Summit started with a keynote address from Holly Clark. Holly is an amazing educator from San Diego who has changed the lives of many students and teachers that she has worked with around the world. Holly’s keynote was titled 'Disrupting Education' and was based around the whole idea of making changes that create a bit of havoc in education. Throughout her presentation, Holly talked about how technology has changed our lives and made people look for the ‘adjacent possible’. How can we do things differently with the introduction of technology in our classrooms to provide our students with the skills that they will need to survive and thrive in the future?

A clever way of looking at what may happen if we don’t try to move forward with technology was this great video. It used humour to look at the once popular business of renting a movie from the video shop, which is pretty much a thing of the past with the introduction of services such as NetFlix and the ability to hire movies from iTunes.

For the first regular session of the day, I hosted my ‘Driving with Dashboard’ workshop. During this session I explored the use of Google Drive to create interactive booklets for students that can be distributed through Hapara’s ‘Teacher Dashboard’. In particular, we explored Google Docs which provides a whole range of possibilities when creating a paperless classroom. For example, you can create bookmarks for easy navigation, add hyperlinks to direct students to outside resources, use Add-Ons to increase the functionality (mind-maps, thesaurus, word clouds, etc) and use the ‘Comments’ feature to provide feedback to the students as you go.

Teacher Dashboard is an amazing piece of software that allows teachers to detach themselves from the photocopier and distribute work to students almost instantly (obviously depending on network). Each student can be provided their own copy of the work to make their own or students can be shared a common document that allows for collaboration. I love Teacher Dashboard as it has allowed me the freedom of not needing to collect 30 student workbooks, not have to line up at the photocopier or printer of a morning and to reduce the clutter on my desk!

We also explored going paperless for record keeping using Google Sheets. I shared with the attendees another fun tool that I recently learnt about ‘Yet Another Mail Merge’, which is an Add-On for Google Sheets. By using this Add-On you can send personalised emails to groups of students/teachers/parents with a few clicks of the mouse button. I have used this to provide students with feedback of their class work and to distributes marks with ease.

I really felt like this session was a great success. The feedback I received from the participants was positive and everyone said that they left having learnt something new and with a few ideas of things that they would like to try in their own classes. So all in all, I think that’s a win for me!

Today I finally got to see Zeina Chalich at work in her 'iSolve - Using GAFE to support Authentic Learning' session. I missed Zeina’s session on the first day as I went to explore screencasting and the participants in her session almost broke Twitter they were feveriously Tweeting, singing her praises! Today was no exception. Zeina shared with us the way that she uses Google Chrome Apps and Extensions to create authentic projects for her students. In particular, her students have used these tools to complete a project exploring a trip to Japan. The students needed to use the tools to find prices for flights and accommodation, research things that they could do and see in Japan, find out about the weather and work out what to pack, all the way down to finding out the time difference so that they could see what time it was in Japan whenever they wished.

Along with this, Zeina shared some of her resources and ideas for getting students coding. We explored Kodable as one possible program to allow students to explore this skills. This great video explores coding as ‘What Most Schools Don’t Teach’ and includes a range of now very successful entrepreneurs who started coding when they were young. Being able to explore coding helps to build skills in problem solving and creativity as students work towards solving problems or designing programs.

After refueling at lunch I headed to a packed session on the ‘Wonderful World of Add-ons’ run by Maggie Mattson. We were crammed into the room, a bit like sardines, but it didn’t matter as everyone was there to learn about these amazing things called Add-ons. Add-Ons are scripts that have been written by developers to carry out a wide range of jobs in the different Google Drive products. In this session we explored Add-ons for Google Docs and Google Sheets.

I could write about all of the Add-ons that Maggie talked about, but I will focus on just a couple that I think are the most useful in teaching. Firstly, ‘Texthelp Study Skills’ allows you to highlight text using a yellow highlighter (it used to allow you to highlight in 4 different colours, but this function has now been removed :(). This is different to simply selecting the text and then choosing to highlight it in the Formatting options! The great thing about this Add-on is that you can ‘collect highlights’ and the script will run and all of the things that you have highlighted will be put together as dot points in a new document! This is a great way for students to gather keywords from a text.

Secondly, ‘MindMeister’ is another great Add-on for Google Docs that can be used to help students revise and consolidate their understanding. ‘MindMeister’ will turn any series of dot points into a mind-map that you can then either copy into a new document or keep in the one that the dot point list is in. You can team ‘MindMeister’ with ‘Texthelp Study Skills’ by getting students to highlight keywords or concepts and then turn the resulting list of dot points into a mind-map! You can create multilevel mind-maps by simply adding indented dot points to you list.

This is what the mind-maps that you can create in MindMeister look like:

For our final regular session, we decided to head to Suan Yeo’s session titled ‘Q&A with a Googler’. During the hour Suan allowed us to ask him questions about anything to do with Google including what it’s like to work for Google, what things are on the horizon from Google (especially to do with education) and then a number of specific questions that people had in regards to implementing GAFE in their schools. This was quite an interesting session as it gave us a good insight into the mind of a Googler!

The final hour of the day was Kimberly Hall’s keynote, ‘Always Learning’. Kimberly started with an image of a PlaySkool toy phone that all of us have seen and no doubt played with when we were younger. She used the analogy of the changing complexity of mobile phone technology to explain how learning has changed from something quite simple to something now that provides us with access to so many things that are quite possibly beyond the realms of our imagination!

One key thing that came out of Kimberly’s keynote was perspective. Yes we are moving forward with technology, but what impact will that have on education? A beautiful video that she shared with us challenged each of us to change our perspective on students with special needs. Are they students with special needs or are they students with special talents?

I will have to admit here that after two massive days of learning, sharing, networking and presenting that I was pretty exhausted by this time so my mental capacity to retain information was pretty poor! Thankfully the world of Twitter and the #gafesummit hashtag will help to refresh my memory when I get around to going back through the Storify :)

Overall, the two days were another great opportunity to experience the wonderful world of GAFE and tech in general. I made lots of great contacts and learnt lots of new and exciting things that I have already been implementing in my classes in the first week of term. I would like to thank the Sydney CEO for giving me the opportunity to put forward my proposals to present and for providing a large number of other teachers with the opportunity to attend and learn in this great atmosphere.

Walk through any shopping centre and you will see children as young as 2 years old interacting with some form of digital technology. Children are using iPads or iPhones to interact with material, whether it be watching videos or playing games, before they are old enough to construct a sentence. These children are forming what Marc Prensky calls the ‘digital native’ generation. It is easy to assume that all young people are digitally native, however, it this can be dependent upon a number of individual circumstances such as class, race, gender and nationality (Hague & Payton, 2010).

With the introduction of these digital tools, we are seeing that everything is becoming connected. People, places and information are able to be interconnected through the use of these digital tools. These interconnections that are made help to enhance the reach and value of not just the information but also our relationships, creating opportunities for learning, working and collaborating (Smith, 2013). Our learning environments are also becoming connected. The connected learning environment is one that demonstrates integration, personalisation, interconnectedness and authentic learning experiences (Smith, 2013).

Throughout my research on connected learning I came across a number of images that help to summarise the main concepts behind the idea. One that I thought summed up the process of connected learning quite nicely is below. It shows how an individual is centered amongst all the different sectors of their life – especially looking at academics, interests and peer culture.

In order to ensure that our students are able to deal with these increasing interconnections in the world around them, they need to be able to develop skills that belong under the umbrella of ‘digital literacy’. It is said that to be digitally literate you possess the skills to not only access a broad range of resources, but also to be able to critically engage with and analyse the information and to be able to communicate and represent knowledge in different contexts to different audiences (Hague & Payton, 2010).

A great YouTube video that discusses digital literacy in a succinct way can be seen below. The video looks at how there are many different forms of literacy that our students will face and providing them with the skills that fall below digital literacy will prepare them for our rapidly changing future.

Digital literacy and connected learning go hand in hand as students are using the wide range of digital tools available to them to explore these connections. The use of Web 2.0 tools allow students to collaborate and create interactions beyond the classroom as well as providing students with opportunities to create and critique knowledge (Starkey, 2011). A focus on digital literacy in the classroom can help students to expand their use of technology for creativity, self-expression, communication and collaboration as well as allowing them to develop their understanding of the complexities behind the digital tools they are using (Hague& Payton, 2010).

When developing students digital literacy it is important not to focus simply on how the digital tools are used in the curriculum. Considering how digital literacy supports subject knowledge can help teachers to make sure that the use of technology in the classroom enhances the development of the curriculum rather than simply becoming an ‘add-on’ (Hague & Payton, 2010).

Digital literacy can be seen as a series of interconnecting dimensions. These dimensions include developing skills in communication and collaboration, critical thinking and evaluation as well as cultural and social understanding. By developing digital literacy in specific subjects we can support our students and help them to become effective, competent, critical students of that particular subject in the digital age (Hague & Payton, 2010).

Starkey (2011) describes the ultimate goal of teachers developing the digital literacy skills of their students is for them to be able to share knowledge through a Web 2.0 learning environment. Due to the functionality of these particular tools, this sharing of knowledge may lead to students critiquing each other and an assessment of the value of the knowledge found can be explored. A pedagogical approach that includes collaboration and interaction beyond the classroom would be necessary for developing a flexible curriculum in a Web 2.0 environment for students to develop these digital literacy skills.

References:

• Connected Learning Infographic | Connected Learning. (n.d.). Retrieved March 28, 2015, from http://connectedlearning.tv/infographic
• Gardner, Traci. Connected Learning In Education. 2014. Web. 28 Mar. 2015.
• Hague, C., & Payton, S. (2010).Digital literacy across the curriculum. Bristol: Futurelab.Retrieved fromhttp://futurelab.org.uk/sites/default/files/Digital_Literacy_handbook_0.pdf.
• Smith, S. R. (2013) The Connected Learning Environment. Educase Publications, July 2013. Retrieved from http://www.educause.edu/library/resources/connected-learning-environment
• Starkey, L. (2011). Evaluating learning in the 21st Century: A digital age learning matrix. Technology, Pedagogy And Education, 20(1), 19-39.
• What is Digital Literacy? (n.d.). Retrieved March 30, 2015, fromhttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ESSIcLO3Z_Q

An affinity group is defined as a group of people linked by a common interest or purpose (“Affinity group”, 2015). Gee (2005) investigates a number of learning principles that good games can incorporate into learning when our students are functioning as a part of one of these affinity groups. Two of these principles are focused around the idea of building a socially inclusive classroom. They are Smart Tools and Distributed Knowledge and Cross-Functional Teams.

The Distributed Knowledge part of the Smart Tools and Distributed Knowledgeprinciple discusses the idea that students share their expertise in a variety of ways. This can take the form of forums, discussion boards, the creation of walkthroughs and narratives that assist other players in developing their understanding of the gameplay (Gee, 2005). This can be modelled in the classroom through a number of learning strategies such as the ‘Think-Pair-Share’(Reading Rockets, 2013) and ‘Jigsaw’ (Reading Rockets, 2012) cooperative learning strategies where students share their ideas amongst others.

By introducing the idea of games into these kinds of activities, students may be more willing to share their expertise as it is an area that they are passionate and motivated about. This is evident as when the students become passionate, they will be inspired to play and then go discuss, modify, research and explicate everything about the game that they are playing with others (Gee, 2012)

Gee (2005) also explores the principle of Cross-Functional Teams. In cross-functional teams, individuals are highly skilled experts in a wide range of areas, however, need to understand all the roles of the other individuals in the team in order to meet a primary goal (Gee, 2005 & 2012). This is the overall goal of all collaborative learning strategies. The introduction of games seems like the one of the most sensible choices to help build these skills for the students in traditional classrooms.

Through her use of game design with her students, Katie Salen has found that one of the two big ideas that have shone through is the development of the 21st century skill of teamwork and collaboration (Edutopia, 2013). Students with specific expertise in a particular field have to talk to other members of the class who have different expertise in order to be able to design and build their overall project. This is modelling Gee’s principle in the classroom.

Alongside Gee’s principles, the idea of using games to develop a more socially inclusive classroom has been identified in other literature. Turkay, Hoffman, Kinzer, Chantes, & Vicari (2015) have identified that engagement of students with others in their classroom can facilitate a stronger learning experience. Higher levels of development can be gained through the development of a community of enquiry. A community of enquiry is an educational environment that fosters careful argument, conceptual dialogue and thoughtful reflection (Bramall & Williams, 2012). Such learning communities can foster a productive learning environment by encouraging social interaction and participation amongst students (Turkay, et al., 2015)

The overarching theme that was evident through the readings for this module is that the introduction of gaming into classrooms produces skills in students that are opposite to the original thought that video games were ‘naughty things that naughty boys play in the dark… and breed anti-social behaviour’ (Jennings, 2014). Sandford, Farcer and Williamson (2011) have stated that the changes in games over time have made it hard for them to be identified as promoting anti-social or negative behaviours. These changes in attitudes towards games has helped to make it easier for them to be considered as potential educational tools and has helped parents to see the positive attributes that they can provide.

References:

Affinity Group. (2015). In The Merriam-Webster Dictionary. Retrieved from http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/affinity%20group

Bramall, S. & Williams, S. (2012). The Community of Enquiry. If… Then? Retrieved from http://p4c.com/if-then/issue-1-community-inquiry

Edutopia (2012, March 21) James Paul Gee on Learning with Video Games [Video file]. Retrieved from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JnEN2Sm4IIQ

Edutopia (2013, July 30) Katie Salen on the Power of Game-Based Learning (Big Thinkers Series) [Video file]. Retrieved from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wk_OfUHpCbM

Gee, J. P. (2005). Good video games and good learning. Phi Kappap Phi Forum,85(2), 33-37.http://dmlcentral.net/sites/dmlcentral/files/resource_files/GoodVideoGamesLearning.pdf

Jennings, J. (2014). “Teachers re-evaluate value of video games.” Sydney Morning Herald, Retrieved from http://www.smh.com.au/national/education/teachers-reevaluate-value-of-video-games-20141130-11jw0i.html

Reading Rockets (2012, February 16). Jigsaw [Video file]. Retrieved fromhttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mtm5_w6JthA

Reading Rockets (2013, January 29). Think-Pair-Share [Video file]. Retrieved fromhttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-9AWNl-A-34

Sandford R, Facer K & Williamson B (2011). Constructions of Games, Teachers and Young People in Formal Learning. Freitas, Sara De., and Paul Maharg. Digital Games and Learning. London: Continuum International Pub. Group, 2011. Print.

Turkay, S., Hoffman, D., Kinzer, C. K., Chantes, P., & Vicari, C. (2015). Toward understanding the potential of games for learning: Learning theory, game design characteristics, and situating video games in classrooms. Computers in the Schools, 31(1-2), 2–22. doi:10.1080/07380569.2015.890879