Archive for the tag “technology”

08 Dec 2020

Professional Standards

Tomorrow is my last day as Technology Learning Area Leader at St James College. When I started twelve years ago I was head of Information Technology. Then they made me Head of Technology. Which meant I was in charge of Woodwork and IT. Then they added Food Tech.

To make it feel more like a team, a few years ago I spent the year having Barry Wood (woodwork teacher extraordinaire) to teach all the Tech teachers some basic wood skills. My wood products were rubbish.

I wanted to thank my team for twelve years of Technology so I thought I would make cookies.

My wife pointed out the flaw in the plan. Food Tech teachers are built to critique food.

I am so glad that I am just an IT teacher next year.

I started with a recipe that asked for 4 oz of sugar, and 4 oz of butter, 8 oz of SR Flour and an egg. This led to a rabbit hole about what an oz is, and how butter and sugar can both be measured in ozzes. I went with one cup of flour, half a cup of sugar and 125g butter. The egg was easy. Let me know if I was very wrong.

I should have been worried when the dough stuck to the baking paper and my heads looked like Darth from his death scene.

But I was spurred on by the first batch. They came out nicely brown. The second batch went in…

I am not sure how I burnt two right in the middle. It seems implausible. But I had a few working pairs to turn into jam filled delights.

Oh but wait. I ran out of self raising flour. Online it says a cup of plain and two tsp of baking powder will get the same effect. The above picture gives lie to that statement.

With the ones that looked least deviant, I filled them with jam and then worked on the icing. Next problem: no icing sugar. But you can get icing sugar by blending caster sugar… not that it helped.

So now I need to take these in and hand them out to the staff, including the two Food Tech teachers.

I should have just bought chocolate from Haighs

It’s probably good that I am no longer head of two technology methods that I can’t do. Luckily I am good at the Digital Technologies side of things.

Posted in food, School, Success, Teaching and tagged cookies, Darth Vader, technology | Leave a comment

04 Sep 2017

End of Year Magazine article

We have to get in early to write our end of year College magazine article. I like what we’ve accomplished at St James this year. Here’s my article. I’ll add in some links to make it more relevant.

Technology 2017

What a year! I set the bar low this year: better than 2016. And man, did we deliver.

bbvtp0406 The college production War of the Worlds, although not being specifically part of the Technology department, had sets built in Woodwork, moving gears powered by the Year 7 Engineering and Design course and animations coming out of Year 8 DigiTech.

The first year of the Breakfast Club before school on Tuesdays and Thursdays was incredibly successful and the new Apprentice program being run through the Wednesday program was a huge win. And again, in the background, the Year 9 Digital Technologies course was working to digitise the order system, ready for 2018.

STEAM was the buzzword for 2017 and St James College demonstrated that we are well and truly STEAM-powered (I am never going to get over that pun).

This is also the first year that the Year 10 Game Design class took to the skies, programming drones in preparation for our inevitable takeover of East Bentleigh.

All in all, it was a spectacular year. I’m not sure how we’re going to top it in 2018.

To specifics:

Year 7

Paige Mitchell joined me in Engineering and Design this year. She took to the robots like a mechanical (and waterproof) duck to water. Her class programmed the NXT robots, built some spectacular robotic dragsters and evaluated the St James Spheros. They were so excited about the project that a number of them brought their own in. Here’s Paige:

The Sphero is a small spherical robot that is capable of rolling around on different surfaces and controlled by a tablet. Over the course of the semesters, students have had the opportunity to have a go at using the Sphero’s. The students were asked to design an obstacle course in the classroom for the Sphero to travel around, have a go at using the Sphero and controlling it via their I-pads, we then created a competition to see who could control their robot the best around the course. Students were amazed at how fast the Sphero could travel and how hard it was to control.

Student reviews-

I had so much fun playing with the Sphero robots we could do jumps over ramps, play tag and we could race them on the basketball courts and in the class room over all I had great fun playing with all of the Sphero robots – Riley 7B

Playing with the Sphero robots was fun and exciting, sometimes it’s quite hard to control them because of invert controls but other than that it was a blast – Oliver 7B

The Sphero’s are a very fun and can be used for many things such as doing jumps and chasing people with. They are also very easy to control. They can do lots of tricks such as doing little hops and touchdown dances -Lachie 7B

Sphero’s are great robots for teaching. They are really interesting to use and have lots of features such as you can change the speed it travels, the colour of the robot and you can do jumps. I learnt a lot from using them and really enjoyed the lesson – Kristian 7B

Year 8

yr8gamedesign Digital Technologies this year was broken into 3D Design/animation and Game Making. There are some incredibly inventive students in Year 8. After creating a basic Catch the Clown game and a more complex Maze game, they finished the semester by preparing a game for the STEM Games Challenge. I assessed them on their preparations and a demo version of their game, but one group decided to complete their game and enter it into the competition, after working on it over the holidays and well into Term 3, so well done to Rad, Ed, Richard and Christian.

The students in second semester are entering their major projects into the ACMI Stream It Challenge. I’m writing this well before the due date, so fingers crossed that they won something.

Year 9

9digitech1 9digitech2 The Year 9s have been trialling a brand new subject called Digital Technologies and Web Design. The idea behind the subject was to create a web-based application that allowed students and staff at St James College to order food from the canteen online. The students had to learn how to use HTML, CSS and SQL, along with the FTP server to transfer everything onto the website.

First semester was a bit hectic, with technology teething problems being solved by the esteemed Matthew Marcos as they appeared. Second semester ran a lot smoother. We expanded our client base to include the Wednesday Program and the Breakfast Club and, at the time of writing, five budding web development companies are busily interviewing clients and putting together mocked up screen layouts. Once they’re familiar with SQL, they’ll program the back end and get some testers in to make it work.

Year 10

Mr Bell, sick of me stealing his best ideas for my Year 8 class, has again improved the Year 10 Game Design subject. Students are creating games completely using code within GameMaker. There are some very impressive games coming together at the time of writing.

The standout success for the semester was his drone programming unit. The students explored why drones are being used, before jumping in and programming one of the College drones to perform a task. It’s an excellent way to demonstrate sequencing in a real environment.

2018

Technology is expanding. Digital Technologies are spreading out like a computer virus through the school. Maths is taking on programming as part of the curriculum. The whole school will be filled with STEAM (there I go again). We’re running a DigiTech Projects course at Year 10 – an open-ended subject where the students choose the project and I focus on teaching them the skills to think through the problem like an IT Professional. Also, God willing, the Certificate II in Creative Industries will run again next year, giving students access to VCE Units 1 and 2 at Year 10.

The Come and See program this semester involved Food Technology, so my little family of subjects will grow, and a new generation of boys will go to university knowing how to do more than cook toast and boil eggs. Home Ec saved my life in High School. I still have my copy of Cookery the Australian Way.

And Materials Technology is an article in itself, so I’ll let Barry and David tell you about the triumphs carved in wood in 2018.

Posted in curriculum, ICT, perryperrysource, STEAM and tagged end of year, game design, magazine, technology | Leave a comment

03 Aug 2017

Pokemon Go.

damoball I’ve got another Pokemon Go article happening over at FindingDamo. I just wanted to look at it from an educational perspective as well, a year on from my last look at the subject.

A year later, my huge dreams have come to nothing. I haven’t created an AR scavenger hunt. I haven’t made the virtual St James College Paintball stadium.

But I’m still playing Pokemon Go.

It hasn’t lost its fascination for me. A year on, I’m still walking ten kilometres over a weekend to hatch some eggs (and to stay fit). I go on raids with total strangers to catch legendary monsters that I can’t fight by myself.

The concept is a good one. The merit of game-play that doesn’t rely on controllers or even being inside the house is excellent. Surely it is something we can use in an educational setting.

Imagine (and feel free to make these apps happen with my blessing):

What’s that bird?

You hold your camera up to a bird in the wild, it scans the shape and colour and if it finds a match, adds it to your Bird-watching field book. Gotta see ’em all!

Ghosts of the past

A virtual historical landscape that overlays our actual world. Hold the phone up and see what your block looked like one hundred years ago. There are apps out there like this already – the Vic Heritage app on iPhone shows you pictures of places around Melbourne when you get close enough – but it isn’t augmented reality as much as it is pop up photos using GPS.

With the focus on STEAM and Digital Technologies, there is an excellent opportunity for keen teachers with time on their hands (ha!) to work with their students to create games that don’t just emulate stuff already out there in the world, but to create something completely new, with an educational bent.

How about virtual art galleries? I’ve been working with our Art department on trialling QR codes and AR hotspots to bring up explanations, rough sketches and videos relating to student artworks in the College gallery. Wouldn’t it be cool if you could lift your phone to an artwork and see it in sketch form? Or see a video of the creator explaining their process?

We’re only scratching the surface of the possibilities here. Mostly because any teacher interested enough to make something like this happen already has too much on their plate to take on something new.

But still, have the conversation. Delegate. Get the students to do it as a project. They’ll probably do a better job than you would anyway.

And keep playing Pokemon Go. That Lugia won’t catch itself!

PS. Check out TheSTEAMReport.com.au – I am editing this for Minnis Publications and you can subscribe for a monthly (soon to be bi-monthly) email newsletter containing bitesize articles for your STEAMy pleasure.

Posted in conversation starters, curriculum, ICT, perryperrysource, STEAM and tagged AR, art, gallery, innovation, PoGo, pokemon, pokemon go, STEM, teachers, teaching, technology, VR | Leave a comment

25 Apr 2016

Creators not Users

I usually talk about cyber safety. Today I say to you: the best way to be safe in the cyber-world is to be a creator and not just a user.

creators The new Digital Technologies curriculum is coming into place next year. ICT capabilities (using word processors, spreadsheets, answering emails, creating wikis) will be incorporated into the rest of the curriculum. It is now assumed that students will know these things but if a History teacher wants a Word document handed in, they’ll have to check to make sure that the student is using styles for headings and not just pressing space a hundred times to get the heading into the centre of the page. Ask yourself these questions:

Can you get Word to auto-create a table of contents using the headings from your report?
Could you create a budget in a spreadsheet program that automatically updates as your financial situation changes?
How would you find out what the Iranians called the Iranian Hostage Crisis?

This is stuff the students should know by the time they hit Year 7. Obviously, that means the teachers need to know it as well. That’s beside the point. We’re not teaching this stuff in IT any more, unless we need to as students hand in reports on the new DIGITAL TECHNOLOGIES curriculum.

The idea behind Digital Technologies is that in a rapidly changing technological world, teaching students how to use Word is teaching them software that will be outdated by the time they hit the workforce.

We need to teach them how to think. That’s the concept that underpins Digital Technologies. Students are going to become creators rather than users.

If you know how to break down (decompose) a problem into smaller manageable pieces, and then create a series of steps (algorithms) that can solve each of the steps in an ordered way (computational thinking), allowing for the possibility of change in scope, then little things like working out how to do a mail merge in Word become easy, because you know the steps to solve that problem (Google it).

This cartoon by XKCD sits above the desk in my office. It is guaranteed to turn anyone into an IT support person in seconds. Live by it. (link: http://xkcd.com/627/)

The easiest way for students to demonstrate computational thinking, decomposition and the creation of algorithms is to code. There has been a massive push in around the world to make sure the younger generation can code. It has finally made it to Australia and from next year (if they haven’t already started) students in primary school will be coding as part of their curriculum.

Where does that leave us? The secondary classrooms that haven’t been explicitly coding? We need to do some catch up. It might take a few years for us to be teaching the Year 7 curriculum. And that’s fine. It won’t take our students long to pick up on the concepts they missed out on.

And why am I doing this spiel on a blog? Because as parents (or teachers), you can help. Let’s get our students introduced to coding in a fun way before they need to do it in class. Start them on the basics so that they can take on the more structured lessons as they progress.

Here are some resources being thrown about at the high school level:

https://www.codecademy.com/ – This is a great resource we’ve been using with our Coding Club. It has courses in Javascript and Python – two very popular languages out in the world.
https://codecombat.com/ – learn to code while killing goblins and orcs! You tell your character what to do using code and learn while you’re at it.
http://Code.org/learn – The Hour of Code is a fantastic starting point. There are coding hours starring characters from Star Wars, Frozen, Minecraft and Angry Birds. Students can create their own Flappy Bird game, mazes and puzzle games as they progress.
https://bitsbox.com/ – good for Year 7s, but probably not much further on from there. You can subscribe for printed booklets with hundreds of little coding activities.

Posted in curriculum, education, ICT, perryperrysource, Uncategorized and tagged coding, digital technologies, programming, teachers, technology | Leave a comment

03 Aug 2015

Digicon15

DLTV DigiCon 15 (the #digicon15 summaries)

Twitter is a marvellous beast. We can only go to one session in every slot during a conference, but thanks to Twitter (and the teachers using it) I have resources from dozens of sessions that I couldn’t make.

Over the two days, we discussed a number of technology issues and heard from some very clever and entertaining educators. I’m going to philosophise about a few things and post some links about the things we found out as I try to unpack all of the information shoved willy nilly into my brain. Please feel free to add to/dispute any of the information I place on here. And enjoy.

First up, something I picked up from my first VITTA conference: Storify. I typed digicon15 into the search bar, pressed SHOW MORE about a hundred times and then stuck all 2000 tweets into a storify article. From that point, I could start to order what happened over the two days and create:

https://storify.com/DamianPerry/dltv15#publicize

WHAT I LEARNED DURING DIGICON 2015.

Teachers in general are a risk-averse bunch. And fair enough – we are providing a product to parents and we are accountable for our stuff-ups to a number of different groups. However, technological innovation is all about risk taking. And surprisingly, people rarely die from taking risks in this arena. So go for it.

Similarly, we are scared of letting our students take risks. But we need to relax and let them free. Just make sure you’re a member of the union first. Wrapping your students in bubble wrap means that they are ill-equipped to deal with the outside world.

Don’t tell your kids “Be risk takers!” and then “…but don’t do this because you might get hurt!” Schools have too many rules. Set them free. If they fail, if they get hurt, they’ve learned something and will do better next time.

On the subject of failure, Anne Edmonds performed for us. She’s a very funny comedian and she extolled the virtues of failure as a learning device. Risk and failure = success (eventually). But only if you learn from your failures and don’t let them beat you down.

Hamish Curry played games for us, ate a banana on stage and was from that point on part of #bananagate, which I still don’t completely understand. During his keynote, the sales of Duet, Paper Fox and Monument Valley shot through the roof.

When you’re planning lessons, Corrie Barclay (@CorrieB) introduced us to the 3 Russian Brothers and their cousin:

Morov, Lessov, Ridov and Tossin.

What do you do that works that you can do more of (Morov)?

What do you need to do less of (Lessov)?

What do you need to completely get rid of (Ridof)?

What else can you toss in (Tossin)?

He made some excellent points about authentic assessment and enquiry learning. His Doomsday website shows what students can come up with when they aren’t limited by teacher expectations.

The philosophy of being a teacher came up over and over. One of the better quotes that popped up on the screen during keynotes and Spark events was: There is no such a thing as a teacher or a student; there are only co-learners. Especially in IT, we learn as much from our students as we teach them, and the successful teacher is the one that is willing to take the new on board and have a student explain it.

As for the venue, Swinburne is a great place to hold a conference. The wi-fi was flawless, which is usually where these days fall down. The food was delicious and plentiful. Winthrop provided us with free “real” coffee for the two days. And apart from getting up way too early on a Saturday morning, the public transport was a doddle.

And I reinvigorated my company pen collection:

Specifics

ICT v Digital Technologies

My instructions

Digital Technologies = Producer. ICT = Consumer

In one of our sessions, we made the distinction between DigiTech and ICT by making paper planes. I had to make a plane, write down the instructions, post the instructions to Twitter. Then I found instructions from someone else and followed their instructions to make a plane myself. Digital Technologies involves the creation of a product. ICT involves using a product that someone else has created. This activity allowed us to do both.

Implementing Digital Technologies presents the age-old problem of where to stick it. Do we create a separate Digi-Tech class at a year level? Or do we break it up and stick it into a number of different classes?

The instructions I had to follow.

Technological Innovation

I attended a session about getting students out of school using technology. The idea is that one a couple of days each year, or semester, whatever the school is comfortable with, the students stay home from school and the teachers present classes digitally. There are a great number of reasons why this would be a good idea. Just as many reasons not to do it, especially in our risk-averse teaching society. But it’s an interesting concept.

The teachers at Nossal High School send their students home twice a year for a school free day. The teachers timetabled on for that day teach their regular period via online teaching. They use webcasting, pre-recorded content and online assessment to present and assess their classes.

This was a daunting task for a number of teachers, but through collegiality, a bit of courage and a good implementation plan, the program worked – and continues to work – well.

I’m not saying that we should all send our students home for the day twice a year – I think our parents specifically would have a kitten over the idea – but there is definitely merit in using a collegiate approach to upskilling the teachers in our schools and getting them to embrace technology. Maybe a Digital Day twice a year where students take classes digitally at school. Something to think about.

Coding

I didn’t make it to any of the coding sessions, but I got a great deal of feedback from the other teachers from my school, as well as a friend of mine and of course the multitudes of Tweets.

Some of the better results:

Coding = repetitive failing until you get something that works. – @rissL

Programming, or “coding”, is simply making a list of instructions and having them executed.

I saw someone “coding” a human being. This sounds like a great introduction to the concept.

3D

A 3D scanned me.

The 3D offerings at DigiCon15 were phenomenal. The ideas I saw put forward will completely change the way I run the curriculum next year. There’s too much to go into here, so I’ll put up a separate blog post on the subject (and link to it when I’m done).

Questions without answers

How can we shape lesson and curriculum design that keeps us as teachers engaged, creative and innovative? – @CorrieB

So many benefits for teaching students the Arts. How can we make schools value this more? – @wongmichy

Links

Corrie’s session: Redesigning Curriculum for the 21^st Century.

DigiCon15 on Youtube

And finally, the teachers at Northern Bay being superheroes for the sake of education:

Posted in conversation starters, education, ICT, perryperrysource, productivity, tech tips and tagged computers, DLTV, flipped classrooms, innovation, programming, risk, technology | Leave a comment

04 Jun 2015

Differentiation

I’m writing reports. I’m too tired to go and find all of the tired tropes teachers traipse out every time they talk about differentiation.

Wow, massive alliteration bomb right there.

a bird, a monkey, a penguin, an elephant, a fish in a bowl, a seal and a dog in front of a man saying "For a fair selection everybody has to take the same exam... please climb that tree."

Einstein and his tree-climbing exam comes to mind immediately.

The focus for our school in the upcoming years is differentiation, and the first goal is to explore the concept and see what comes out of the dialogue. I’ll dialogue later. I’ll monologue now.

Like an evil villain. Mwahahhahahahahahaha!

See? Tired.

And I worry that, if I create a different lesson plan for each and every one of my students, and then have to mark each one differently to allow for their special abilities, that I’ll be a lot more tired later. Of course, if I spent more time marking work and less time writing blog posts, I might be less tired. But, what can you do?

Here are some thinking points:

Most schools do a great deal to try and raise the grades of students on the left hand side of the bell curve.
What are schools doing to extend those students at the upper end of the scale?
Bored geniuses are… genii? Grant me wishes? I’ll look it up. Bored geniuses (obviously not me) are often discipline problems. They tune out because the work isn’t challenging, or isn’t relevant.
Extending the high achievers definitely involves more work for teachers and will be a bone of contention in planning meetings, even if nobody says anything out loud.
A lot of current educational methods are being made redundant by new technologies.

I’m not offering solutions just yet, just offering points to think about.

If you’re making students answer questions from a text book, differentiation will be difficult. Luckily, this isn’t such a prolific practice as it was when I was younger.

OK. Enough rambling. What are the solutions?

First up, look at the questions you are posing in your assignments. Are you asking students to do something that they can cut and paste from Google?

“What were some of the effects of World War 2 on the world economy?” can be typed into your favourite search engine verbatim, and students can pick and choose a variety of answers to submit as their own. There is no reason to extend myself as a student. My answers might be better than the lower kids’, but I don’t have the motivation.

Essays such as this should be put to rest. Anything that can be Googled needs to be removed from the curriculum. Try this: “Create a radio news broadcast from a specific day in 1946. Include local and world news, sports, business and weather reports”

They can Google the information but they still need to use it in an original way. You’ll have already taught them about how to be web-search literate, finding accurate and relevant information from authoritative sources. They’ll rationalise their choice of information in their updated bibliography.

They can be assessed on ICT knowledge, History knowledge, speaking and listening in English and hopefully group work.

Secondly, create tiered assignments based on your knowledge of the students. Each tier should have opportunity to stretch themselves, allowing the teacher to move them up for the next work task.

My Engineering and Design class is called The Evil League of Evil. Students start off as Minions, and work towards becoming SuperVillains. The first tasks have them following instructions and showing me that they can gather evidence. It also allows for a variety of responses, allowing those with higher skills to show this. The boys create Lego robots, designing and planning before creating, and finally evaluating their own and others’ creations.

The second task is split into three. They can Build a Robot – if they still need more help – using instructions and continuing to record evidence. They can Design a Robot – Henchman level work that gives them some autonomy but still working on a task I’ve set them. Or they can Invent a Robot – the Villain level work which lets them create a bot from scratch with no intervention from me.

From there, I can shift boys up and down the ranks, depending on how they respond to challenges. They know where they are at all times, and have the impetus to try and reach that highest level.

And of course, we finish the semester with an all in Robot Battle Royale, for those who have achieved a high enough level. Once reports are done. To keep them going for the last two weeks. There are prizes. It’s great.

I know people are thinking “But yeah, practical subjects like that lend themselves to differentiation! And think of all the extra work you just did!”

First up, I’m using Stile, which I love. It allowed me to simply copy the activities into different classes, and I could simplify the language for the minions and add a couple of bonus activities for the Villains. So, not so much extra work.

Secondly… Well, sure, you might have a point. Differentiation is easy in practical subjects. But I can come up with dozens of ways to differentiate an English or History lesson off the top of my head.

Leading to my final point in this mad ramble. One that I’m sure you’ve heard from me before: Collaboration. Nobody should have to do all of this work alone. I have a great team working with me in Technology, so assigning tasks and year levels is easy and the results are fantastic. Use your team. Have a regular spot in the morning briefing, in every staff meeting. Have one staff member share a success story in differentiation. It doesn’t have to be subject neutral. But it could give the rest of the staff that spark that lets them do the same in their classes.

I want to go into depth here. I’ve been working with differentiation for over 10 years. But I also want to keep this under 1000 words (or one picture). So I’ll stop and add more later.

Five words to go! Whoo hoo!

…Damn.

Posted in Differentiation, education, perryperrysource and tagged Differentiation, history, ICT, robots, stile, technology | Leave a comment

21 Apr 2015

Technology and Distractability

I’m writing this at parent teacher interviews. As an IT teacher, I’m not in as high demand as the English and homeroom teachers. Most of the students in my class are there because they want to be. So I have time.

I can mark work, prepare lessons and write articles.

When I do manage to talk to a parent, sometimes they’ll find out that I had a lot to do with implementing the iPad program at the school and invariably I’ll get the comment: “How do I stop him from wasting time on the iPad?”

There are a few options here, depending on how diplomatic I’m feeling. For the most part, these work both in the classroom and at home.

1. Not at all diplomatic: You’re the parent. You rule the roost. Put some rules in place that mean that he doesn’t do things he’s not meant to do.

2. Slightly more diplomatic: Have a conversation with your wayward child. What are they using the iPad for? How important are the various different activities? How much time does he realistically need to properly stay in touch with friends and have some leisure time? And then come up with a mutually negotiated timetable for class use versus leisure use. And of course, if the timetable isn’t upheld, you stop being diplomatic and go back to step 1.

all the wonderful things an iPad can do.

3. Very diplomatic: If the work your son is required to do on his iPad isn’t challenging enough or hasn’t been explained properly, then a confused student is a student who ends up on social media. Tablets are incredibly powerful machines. With the proper motivation, students could be inspired to create a movie, make an interactive app or design a scavenger hunt. With no motivation, they can Google the answer, copy and paste work into a Keynote and hand in a Pages document called Blank 43 (which is probably very accurate).

The reality is somewhere between all of that. You are the parents, and you do have the ability to place restrictions on your child’s use of technology at home. The teachers at school are in a similar situation. Any restrictions placed on a student should be made in conjunction with the student, to limit the amount of resentment and rebellion involved.

Your job as parents is to be aware of what your child is meant to be doing and what they’re actually doing and modify the ratio between the two so that the work gets done.

Our job as teachers is to make sure that the work that they do on their tablet is valuable and stimulating and not just busy work that we don’t want to mark as much as they don’t want to do it.

Sorry, did that answer the question?

Posted in conversation starters, education, ICT, perryperrysource and tagged control, discipline, ipads, students, tablets, teachers, technology, time wasting | Leave a comment

26 Jul 2014

1 Comment

Parents and Social Media

This post comes out of a conversation I had on Twitter. I made the comment that parents need to have Social media accounts so that they can have a meaningful dialogue with their children. The quote I stole from the presenter I was listening to was “You wouldn’t take your kid swimming if you couldn’t swim.”
I thought it would be just one more tweet in the Twittersphere – ignored and moving on. But it gained a bit of attention, and started a lively discussion.
I’m going to paste the conversation here, because Twitter is a hard place to have a good conversation. Feel free to weigh in. I’m also going to post it, and then edit it when I get to a proper computer, so that I can add in some pictures and links to yesterday’s presentation from the AP at Kilbreda.

Here goes, in some vague order but with no guarantees:
Dan: what! Thats not true surely…I cant swim but take my kids to swimming lessons …
Fiona: But are you the one teaching them to swim? 🙂
Dan: no of course not …. but will get in the water with them… I am an esafety advisor btw for ceop and afp

Emma: No you dont. Dont need to be a swimmer to teach swimming. Dont need a SN account to understand SN
Emma: dont agree you need SN account to protect kids. You need to supervise your kids’ account #havetheirpassword
Fiona: Spying on them? No thanks.
Emma: it’s called parenting.
Emma: How else would you recommend parents see what their kids are doing online?
Dan: hiya, not sure what you mean ..how do they see?
Emma: suggested having passwords was “spying” on kids. Wondered how she suggests knowing what kids are doing
Fiona: just developing an open, honest relationship with them
Emma: That is definitely important, but also not enough. Abuse is not always because they did something wrong. More often because someone else did. Keeping tabs on their account aids watching other people. dealt with so many abused kids whose parents thought they had good open honest relationship

Dan: not all teachets on twitter or social net… thats also an issue
Emma: Why do they need to be on twitter. What if their kids are on Whatsapp or Snapchat? Do they have to create?
Dan: I agree.

Dan: I put a free site together http://t.co/yUtnJLB96Y and its got a parenting section
Dan: Why do they need to be on twitter. What if their kids are on Whatsapp or Snapchat? Do they have to create?
Dan: having done loads of presos to parents in uk and aus ..same issues everywhere for them.
Emma: Yep. Usually the knowledge gap between the two and a fear or lack of motivation by parents to close it

Dan: I agree but parenting is complex… lots of analogies. . Analogies are mostly stupid. Need to focus on the issues.
Dan: fr example do you need to be a football player to coach football
Damian: you need to have played football to coach it ^properly^… Surely
Emma: No, you need to understand the sport I have seen coaches who have clearly never kicked a ball in their life

Emma: I have never used snapchat or Instagram, but am well versed in problems therein and what parents can do.
Dan: absolutely I use most but but not all of them

—
Ok, that’s the conversation so far. Excuse spelling and grammar errors. I’ve just copied and pasted directly from the Twitter feed.

There is a lot more in this, but not during keynotes. I’ll write more about it tomorrow.

Two final tweets from me:
I can’t talk to my students about Scrillex. I haven’t listened to it. Likewise I need some experience with SM to have a dialogue.

Parents who make decisions about their child’s SM use w/out experience can make judgements based in fear rather than knowledge. #DLTV2014

Posted in conversation starters, education, net safety, perryperrysource, School, Teaching, tech tips and tagged cyber bullying, Cyber safety, DLTV, fear, learning, parents, social media, technology, tweets, twitter

Finding Damo

The story of a man, his job, two cats and the meaning of success.