NAPLAN online - where to now?

It is concerning that in 2017 it is still not possible for NAPLAN online to be trialed due to technology issues.  In the IT industry, on line testing has been a normal activity for more than 20 years.  As far as I can recall I sat my first pro-metric on line exam in 1995, it may have been even earlier.

I know Perth schools have been using online testing software for student bench-marking for at least the last 10 years.  I was part of the first trials of on-line WACE exams in 2012 and technology has surely moved significantly since then.

It seems to me the real challenge for NAPLAN online is not the technology but the whole idea.  We are using 21st century tech to replicate 19th century philosophy (everyone sits the same test the same day with exactly the same questions) to solve a 20th century problem (we need to benchmark in a single pass the entire education system from a single student to the nation as a whole).

What we need to do is use the 21st century technology and answer the 21st century questions with a 21st century philosophy.

NAPLAN should indeed be a bench-marking system and it should enable instant feedback to students, teachers, school leadership, parents, and governments.  It should also do that constantly and in ways that are adding value to the education system.  Indeed if NAPLAN was a testing platform able to deliver from a bank of thousands of questions in web based tests on an as needed basis the picture of how our education sector is performing would be far more accurate.  As Facebook, Twitter, and every other Social Media platform knows regular contact builds a far more accurate picture of the user.

Teachers should be able to use a NAPLAN system to quickly benchmark students as often as they please.  They should have to use the platform at least once a term for testing Math and English.

Until that is the case NAPLAN online will continue to be a huge technical challenge.  The need to use the same questions on the same day to the entire cohort on a technology platform which doesn't favour one school over another is in my view an impossible dream.

NAPLAN online risks having further negative implications on the education sector.  Teachers training students for the test instead of using valuable class time to develop skills will remain
the most significant criticism of that system.  The impact will be multiplied as NAPLAN online encourages teachers to teach typing skills to improve performance on the test instead of teaching the curriculum.
  

Is Tech a 'Toy' or a 'Tool'?

I started thinking on this topic from one side and finished up on the other side.  I was looking at how if not engaged with properly, Technology in the classroom could easily become a distracting 'toy' as opposed to being an engaging 'tool'.  This seems like a statement of the obvious, when a piece of technology is used for entertainment how can it become a serious teaching and learning tool?

I think back to our first years of running a 1:1 Notebook program when we banned teachers from allowing Notebooks to be used to play games in classrooms.  The assumption was that a game would always be distracting from good teaching and learning.  Could we have been more wrong!  The engagement from educational 'games' has been widely documented.  A blanket statement about the good or bad for any particular part of the technology picture is very much like any generalisation and shouldn't be used to rule out anything.

As I thought through the best way to describe my thoughts about the 'toys' versus 'tools' arguments I was planning an argument around books and how they're used.  I then realised as I reflected upon my own school life and how I was learning with books as I grew up, I could easily make a good argument that even when used for non educational / recreational purposes learning is often enhanced.  The reading of non-educational material was key to my reading skills developing.  I was hardly ever engaged by the text books we had to read as part of the curriculum.  However, when I was reading 'Biggles' (Note 1)for days at a time over the holidays I was more engaged with reading than I would have been otherwise.  I wan't reading with a vision to become a pilot or aeronautical engineer it was purely enjoyment of the story.

Is there a similar effect from entertainment or even social networking on technology?  When students take home their particular piece of technology and then engage with the technology to meet their entertainment needs they are still learning something.

Can non educational use of technology be seen as enhancing the skills needed by students in the 21st century?  Of course it can, the non classroom use of technology which will allow our students to better engage with the opportunities and benefits delivered by technology.  The responsibility for making sure the classroom use of technology is su
pporting teaching and learning remains with the teacher, the same way teachers would have to ensure I was reading supplied texts and not my Biggles books whilst in the classroom.

Technology doesn't cause problems and can't fix them. When engagement with technology is well designed, classrooms are transformed and that will deliver amazing experiences for students.

(Note 1) - http://www.biggles.info/

Technology may be too good to be true!

I have been concerned about the degree of 'Due Diligence' being carried out by schools since teachers started developing their own programs using amazing online resources such as Google classroom, Edmodo and OneNote Classroom.  I worry that much of the fine print on educational sites and in apps is ignored as they are such fantastic resources.  

Is the responsibility for ensuring the suitability of sites and apps is purely left at the teachers discretion? There is a huge potential for problems with inappropriate management of student information and activity if that’s the approach schools are taking.  

I’ve worked with a school Integration Team to create a process ensuring the School approves of the educational resources for teachers to use.  This should be seen as vital in all schools to ensure acknowledgment of the risk web and app based activities could present for teachers and students in particular.  

The process decided on means the school, through the Integration Team, takes responsibility for assessing and documenting appropriate education resources for teachers to use in their classrooms. The first stage is making sure any teaching resource provides an educational value which is not being met by other systems already in use.  The system is then assessed to ensure the technical, legal and ethical values of the School are met before any educational resource can be used in the classroom.  This standard is then applied to any service or system which requires a student identifies themselves.

When we started developing the standard it quickly became apparent this was going to be a significant undertaking.  As soon as we started looking at the fine print in those user agreements, which sometimes were very long and not necessarily written in easy to understand English, it became obvious that this was something which was badly needed.

The most important part of this procedure was defining responsibility for assessing all of the important decisions ensured teachers didn't have to assume someone else had looked at it.  I feel sometimes the assumption that all apps and web sites are compliant with Australian privacy legislation is a very dangerous starting point.  

It seems to me that all schools and governing bodies need to take far more responsibility for the implications of technology programs.  The online services and apps deemed as appropriate for teaching and learning need to be better understood before schools push them to student devices or send student there as part of their learning.

The Rise of the Four Letter Acronym

I remember in the later part of the 20th century when everyone in IT was searching for new Three Letter Acronyms (TLA).  Every project need to be reduced to a new TLA, IT became ICT, DR became BCP and we used to have challenges in meetings to see who would use the most meaningless TLAs.

To prove it is 25% better than ICT, the education sector seems to be caught up in a spiral of Four Letter Acronyms (for simplicity I will reduce that to a TLA of FLA).  The rise of BYOD and STEM in the language of education has emphasised the influence ICT is increasingly having in this area.

To quote Pauline Hansen "I don't like it".  The use of catch phrases is incongruous with these terms being adopted to suit a message and that has a huge influence of the meaning of these terms.

For instance the much maligned (by me) BYOD, has attempted to be morphed into BYOT, BYOX, and just about every other BYO? possible.  All of these are trying to express something which would be far clearer in plain English.  I believe calling a 'parent supplied iPad program' just that, to be much clearer than 'BYO?'. Is there a problem with calling a schools Notebook program "Parent Owned Notebook program" rather than a 'BYO? program'.  Those terms will both explain and differentiate the concept correctly.  If you are implementing a true platform agnostic device program there would be far less confusion if the terminology for the program reflected your educational expectations not use a trendy FLA.  If you really need a FLA for your bring any device program I suggest you call it a Device Agnostic Learning Environment (DALE) and then the acronym will mean something.  By the way one of the problems I have with the term BYOD in education is that not many students want to use their own device for learning it is far more useful for socialising and gaming.

So on to STEM, or if you are really smart STEAM, once again these terms seem to simplify the complex but in reality confuse the masses.  What does STEM really mean?  It means we need to make some of the dryer (Math and Science) subjects seem to be important above the humanities and creative subjects.  This seems obvious, as technology advances these subjects should be where we need to concentrate the 21st Century learning.  Unfortunately, from my experience and following on from some significant reading and listening, this is not the case.  It seems the only jobs we are going to do better than machines in the mid term view are based around humanities and creativity.

Admittedly a lot of that creativity is going to be in the Scientific and Engineering areas but the key differentiation is still human imagination.