MY ONLINE LEARNING CHALLENGE - PART 1

I confess; I spend too much time online. Or rather, I spend too much time procrastinating online. Not always of course: writing emails, ordering materials for school, researching lesson plans; my inner police officer accepts all that. Then the officer takes a hike and I find myself engrossed in the latest episode of Mad Men or the Mentalist. These series are more addictive than cheese and onion crisps. Last night I watched the final episode of the Mentalist. Yes! I finally know who Red John is, I know what happened to Lisbon and Patrick, I need not to watch any longer - I am released...

So now what? At school I am continuously promoting digital technology; how wonderful it is! The things you can learn! The open educational resources! So why do I turn into a series-zombie at home?! My inner police officer won't allow it any longer. I need a challenge. I want to use the online technology to my disposal, in order to learn a new skill. But what? From the corner of the guest room, my sadly forgotten and dusty guitar is calling my name. She's done that before, but her rusty call was never loud enough. Until today; I am going to learn to Play the Guitar. Today it is November 9th, the first day of my online learning challenge.

TUNING
My 30 year-old guitar first needs tuning. I must have learned this a long long time ago, when I was about 12. I remember I'm supposed to play something like a chord that has to sound the same as another chord, or something like it. My guitar lessons being ancient history, there surely must be an easier way nowadays...? I first tried YouTube, tuning my guitar listening to the correctly tuned strings on one of numerous free YouTube websites, such as http://www.guitarforbeginners.com/Lessons/Tuning_Your_Guitar_By_Ear.html by a friendly sounding guy called Kirk Lorange. You have to have a pretty good ear to tune your guitar this way, but I thought I was doing rather well. After having done exactly as Kirk said, I thought I was ready for the next step. I found another website by Marty Schwartz, called Beginner Guitar Lessons - that sounded just about right. Upon trying the very first chord, the simplest of basic chords called E Minor, I realised that my E Minor sounded very different from Marty's E Minor. I had the right fingers in the right position, but my cat looked at me like I was stringing up his next-door feline mate.

I needed serious tuning assistance here; what I wanted was someone or something to give me real-time feedback. I looked for an app and found just the right thing - yes, for free! It is called Guitar Tuna, and after I gave the tuna permission to use my microphone, I found myself tuning each string to perfection, helped by a kind of Geiger teller kind of graphic, that goes into red whenever I am out of tune (too high or too low) and that emits a satisfied little noise whenever my pitch is just right. It actually worked! Now I was ready for the next round.

I went back to Marty Schwartz's Beginner Guitar Lessons. The guy sounds amazing and he makes it sound so easy to do what he does... I wanted to follow him straight into 'Let it Be' by the Beatles. Marty says it's only four chords, played in various orders. I can surely do that. Then I realised that this Beginner Lesson was not Beginner enough for me, as Marty didn't even stop to explain what on earth a C chord was. I stopped the video and rewound, trying to make sense of his finger positions. I couldn't see whether that ring finger was pushing down on one of the strings or simply hovering above it. Rewind... and again.  Then Marty played another chord and again another one. Whoa! I lost track. Ok, I really needed to rewind and first get to grips with some basic chords - literally.

I typed in Basic Guitar Chords for Beginners and that brought me straight to http://www.cyberfret.com/guitar-chords/7-basic-guitar-chords-for-beginners. Just what I needed!
It teaches the first basic chords, and more importantly it showed me how to read guitar chord charts, such as the one on the left for E Minor. the strings coincide with my guitar strings, left to right being top - down. the numbers below correspond with my fingers, the first being the index finger, the second your middle finger, third is ring finger and fourth is your pinky. When it says 0 no finger touches that string. One mystery was solved, when it says X, that string is not played. I got the basics covered! After that I learned my first two chords. E Minor and C Chord.


Now I'll spend next week practicing, because I urgently need to grow some callus on my fingers; they hurt by now! Still, this feeling of actually having learned something new really beats watching the final episode of the Mentalist. Oh well, it's a tie :-)

Help! I am a Connected Educator

Technology for teaching -  I love it - but it is not alway the easiest solution for educators (or anyone struggling with online resources for that matter!) For weeks I've been toying with the idea to create a new blog for our class, to keep the parents in my class informed. Informed parents are happy parents who tend to stay out of your hair. Well, generally - you will always have the odd know-it-all-and-aren't-teachers-just-the-laziest-and-stupidest-people-on-earth-parent. But I'm digressing. The idea was to create a password-protected website, so that I could post all the pictures and videos I wanted without worrying over privacy issues. Password-protection turns out to be a premium feature on Weebly, you have to pay to keep those kiddies safe online, so that was step 1. I got my credit card and filled out the details; then it turned out I already had a website under this particular email address. What was it?? I spent 20 minutes trying different usernames and passwords, then asked for a password reset. For this I had a message sent to my phone. As the battery had just gone flat, i had to first charge it. Where was that cable again? After having retrieved the info, I could continue with the sign-up process for the premium service. The classroom blog was a reality shortly after that. Well - in theory. Now all I had to do was build it. As all my classroom and project photos are on my phone, I wanted to send them to my Google email account, so I could access them from the iPad I was working on. It appeared that I could only access one of my google accounts, not my school email account. Why? No idea, one of those online mysteries. I thought Chrome would be a better browser, as I use so many Google products, and so went to get the Chrome app. After signing into the App store, Chrome was downloaded onto my iPad. By now I spent 90 minutes online without having written one single word on the shiny new classroom website yet. I guess I will send another traditional email update to the class community next. But first publish this text on my Blogger account... Who said that connected educators are saving time?

Teen life online

My thirteen-year old is at home on the Internet. She speaks social media language, simply because she grew up with it. A few months ago Amazon delivered a rather scary looking hair mannequin that she had been wanting for a long time. The life-sized doll's head with real hair (where from? Who? How?) has been groomed and braided numerous times since then. My daughter took pictures of the french braids and  dutch plaits and posted them on Instagram, as millions of people do every day. Pictures of cats, nails, beaches and mountains - they need to be shared apparently. Yesterday I realized that she is doing a bit more than just posting: she is hosting. She finds braided hairstyles of her liking, then she removes the background and posts them thus in similar layout on her account, which she calls 'braidinginspiration'. The name is sounds cheerful and tells you what to expect. She posts her own stuff as well as other people's pictures. When I ask her if she gives credits, she retorts "of course! What are you thinking?!" It seems that her generation follow an unspoken code of conduct online. You give credit where credit is due, you use an alias, you reply to comments, you like what's to like and you engage with your audience. When her account hit the 300 followers mark, she created her first contest, using Instagram Academy to easily put 6 photos of different braiding styles together, and asking her followers to choose their favourite. Closing date  3 days later. She got 24 votes  and a lot of new followers. She seems to like her followers and feels responsible for them, but she is not obsessed with gaining new followers. I am impressed; she simply shares what she likes and puts a rather professional touch on it. Her thumbs race across the shiny screen - she is congratulating the winner of the contest. The award? Daily mention on Braidinginspiration,  for a week. When I asked her just now, she showed me that she now has 443 followers,  compared to 400 only three days ago. She is not obsessed with her follower count, but it seems like I am. That is a difference between us, I write and post on Twitter and Blogger mostly for myself but am aware of the online environment. She posts for herself and others, but she sees her platform as her natural habitat: she feels at home.

Powerful Learning starts at the Basis

Being a teacher brings with it the privilege of long summer holidays. That quite some teachers are not idle during that time, becomes clear when you read the great number of posts on the online 'Future Classroom Scenarios' course I am taking currently, by European Schoolnet Academy. I started this course while on holiday in Italy, and trying to connect to the EUN site proved very difficult. Wifi is sporadically available here, and very unreliable. I repeatedly have been kicked out of the site, only to find that my half-written posts have disappeared in some cloudless space. It reminds me of our school situation, and serves as a practical reminder that our utopic classrooms where freely roaming students interact, create and research online, are quite some broadbands away. Until the day that connectivity is as basic a provision as sidewalks, teachers have to improvise in order to be as effective as possible. Start with the basics, such as 'write offline, post online'. In the mean time, we need to focus on the pedagogy and didactics involved with, for instance, BYOD, while the technicians (read; wired teachers) work on practical solutions. I teach a bilingual English/German class at an international primary school and am lucky to have 2 classrooms and a fantastic co-teacher, enabling us to work in smaller groups whenever there is a need. Keywords in our school are collaboration and student-led learning. To organise this better, we are looking to replace our awkward and huge square tables that were devised for 'chalk and talk' teaching, with round tables that could fit 4-6 children. According to the self-organised learning environments (SOLE) theory by professor Sugata Mitra,  four kids are ideal for group work. But again, in order to achieve those noble, higher-end goals, we have to start with the basics: where to find round tables that are suitable for the classroom? Recently I saw the perfect set-up at a highway McDonalds, but we decided against that big M in the centre - so if anyone has any ideas?

Telegram, Threema or Whatsapp?

In medialand things change constantly, so it may not have come as a surprise that the telegram underwent pretty drastic changes. A telegram used to be an oral message laid down in written format, sent via a post office. It was usually shorter than a tweet and faster yet more expensive than a letter. Now Telegram is back, as the rapidly growing alternative for WhatsApp. 'Mail me' turned into 'text me' turned into 'whatsapp me'. The service grew as big as 465 million users and caught Mark Zuckerberg's roving eye. Facebook acquired WhatsApp for 19 billion dollars. As Whatsapp is a free service which only charges one dollar after the first year of usage, it will take Mr Zuckerberg quite some time to redeem that money - even when they double in size, as Business Insider estimated last February. It makes you wonder what the real reason for the acquisition was. After Whatsapp's take-over, many people seemed fed up with the ever-growing Zuckerberg imperium and its NSA-like tendencies, and started looking for alternatives. My German friends massively flocked to Threema, a messaging service from Switzerland. Jawohl! Reliable, non-US based, so worth the €1,59 fee. Its userbase doubled from 200.000 to 400.000 in the first 24 hours after Whatsapp's take-over and kept growing against the backdrop of NSA schandals and ongoing data protection issues. Bye bye Whatsapp, hallöschen Threema. From my 30 friends currently on Threema, 29 are German. The odd one out is a fellow Dutch geek, who probably just wanted to check out the service. On the other hand, many of my international contacts either still use Whatsapp or have moved to Telegram, which seems to be gaining foothold, especially among younger users. It may not play the same safety cards as Threema, but its functionality is very similar to Whatsapp and, most importantly, it is free of charge. My son tried out several options, but still prefers Whatsapp because 'everyone has it' and at his age this is an important factor as group chats are all the rage. So - Telegram does well in the 15-40 age bracket, the responsible and savvy communicators who don't wish to store their data in US-based clouds. Until they realise that Telegram is owned by Pavel Durov, the Russian millionaire responsible for VKontakte,  the large social network that is popular in many former Soviet countries. This leaves us with a rather classic question: are Russian clouds safer than American ones? Or not that classic: Durov, who lives in the US, was dismissed as CEO last week, coincidentally after refusing Vladimir Putin's demands to hand over information on opposition leaders. However it may be - perhaps those damn reliable Swiss aren't such a bad alternative after all. 

Three Unwritten Laws Of Twitter

Having recently rediscovered Twitter as a tool for Professional Development, I woke up my snoring account to share my thoughts on education and technology. Well, to share great resources if I could help it. I even gained some followers, which made me keen for more (it seems there is a power-hungry dictator hidden in each and every one of us social networkers). Let's just say I like an audience, as it makes my learning experience more authentic (well, this is what we try to convey to our pupils, right?!) Some days Twitter sent me several messages a day that 'so-and-do was now following me!' (the exclamation mark came from Twitter). When new followers looked interesting, I followed them back. Then something interesting happened: I lost followers. Twitter never mentioned those. No exclamation marks here, they simply pushed a button and detached themselves from my world. Lost in space. I felt betrayed. I started paying attention: plus three one day, minus 2 the next. Or worse, the other way around. If the number of your followers still lies within the two digit range, you are actually happy with +2... and sad about -3. Right? So this had become my sad life: chasing my socalled Twitter fanbase. And what an unfaithful and unpredictable fanbase it turned out to be... But why? After a while I figured it out: it is the unwritten Twitter Law of Reciprocity: "I Follow You if You Follow Me - and you've got 24 hours to respond!" Is this why some people have 4.539 followers and follow 4.526 people? What's that, my single reader? Is this me being jealous? Hell no, I am proud of my 91 followers - oh that is 90 now. That must be because of unwritten Twitter Law #2: Don't Talk about Numbers. Pretend numbers don't count, because everyone knows they do anyway. Unwritten Twitter Law #3: Be There All the Time. Even if you have to set a timer to rehash old tweets and blog posts every other month - even if this results in posts like 'Great Tools for Thanksgiving' in March or 'the one that I saw today; 'Summer Vacation is here - What Are You Up To?' It is February.

Good, that makes three Unwritten Rules Of Twitter - I can sense a tweet coming up.

The Importance of Being in Pre-school

In Berlin, babies go to the Krippe and toddlers go to Kindergarten. Ever since Fröbel and Pestalozzi discovered the importance of playing for the development of young children's motoric and academic skills, the Germans take this part of the pre-school curriculum very seriously. Extremely seriously. Playing in Kindergarten is a must. My children went to a solid Evangelische Kindergarten, where they walked around butt naked in the hot summer months. They built huts in the garden and fed the rabbits. They played football and tag, went on trips to the municipal pool and the adventure playground. They sang songs and slept and did tons of handicraft projects, called 'basteln'. They played until they were blue in the face. Learning the alphabet and counting were not included in the Kindergarten routine; that was for school. When they went to school, the teacher complained about some kids' lack of basic number and letter skills. Those children got homework, so their parents could get them up to speed. My oldest son just did his work experience project at a Kindergarten, which was divided into many different rooms. They had a relaxing room, a craft room, a building room, an eating room, a school room. In his written report my son described those rooms. His comment about the school room was; 'I haven't had the chance to see this room, as it was always closed.' This seems to be the way to do it in Berlin. Let them play until they go to school - until reality hits. Why this gap? Why can't there be a more playful entry into school life? This is what they do in the Netherlands; toddlers go to school when they are four years old - school life still involves lots of playing, but there is an active exposure to letters and numbers. Senator Sandra Scheeres: please re-introduce pre-school - and let educators know that it is ok to mix business with pleasure.

The Best Education is Marketing

Steve Jobs has said; "The best marketing is education". Turn that around: the best education is marketing. Sell your message, wrap it up nicely and grab your audience's attention. If we want engaged learners, teachers should not be too afraid or lazy to reach out. 

The best teachers aim to inspire. 

I remember a wonderful math teacher back in my hometown The Hague, called Bart van der Meer. We called him Bart until he turned vice-principal. One day he came to class with a frying pan, a small gas burner and an egg. He cracked the egg and held it high above the pan. The egg came running down in a straight vertical line - as you would expect. His point? To vividly demonstrate how the Y-axis runs, compared to the vertical X-axis - Y having the same sound as 'Ei' meaning egg. I learned that day that teaching is about inspiring, that a good teacher goes the extra mile to grab his students' attention and that visual imagery can be very powerful. 

O yes, and I have never forgotten that the Y-axis is the vertical one.