Mumbai is dirty! There are piles of refuse and waste littering the streets, the waterways are black and their banks littered with plastic. Its Hot, sweaty, smelly and crowded. There seems to be no plan in how the city has developed.

Mumbai is a city of contrast, with extremes from “wow!! to whoa!?”. From poverty to riches.

But I look at Mumbai from my western perspective.

I was driven past slums and my first western glance was these are sad places, people are suffering, are abused and used, and it is abject poverty. Its not right! Its unacceptable! Its wrong! I think most of us would associate them with lack of choice, disease, filth and poverty.

The teachers attending the economics workshops here, had the opportunity to do a slum tour. I did not have the chance to go and I regret this as an opportunity missed. I suspect that I would have gone in with a preconception of the slum based on my limited experience and sheltered perspective. I know from talking to the workshop leaders and the participants that these pre-conceptions would have not been changed they would have been shattered.

Those who went saw a vibrant community, where every one had a job, where people shared and community was central. The slum they visited was incredibly productive, generating over 100 million dollars per annum. The people they saw had a happiness quotant that was higher that most people in the western world. The families there were close, with positive relationship, supportive and caring. Many of the people in the slum chose to live there. There were airline hostesses, lottery winners and people who owned apartments in South Mumbai. There were businesses exporting to Europe, including a very interesting bakery producing pastries for a major retail chain.

Yes, the slum was disorganised, ramshackle and dirty. Is there poverty and disease Yes. Yes, some of the industries there were unsafe and dangerous and Yes, people there were (in some cases) be exploited. Its not perfect, but it is also not what it appears on the surface from our, often limited, perspective. many choose to live, many happily work there to. My driver from the hotel, immaculately presented and bueatifully spoken, lives in the slum.

I was guilty of using a broad brush to paint my opinion. The conversations I had have caused me to step back and reconsider what I have believed and the assumptions I have made.

Interesting Huh? I wish I had gone on that tour.

My time in Mumbai has been frantic. Over Friday, Saturday and Sunday, I ran 12 one and half hour long sessions on the ITGS syllabus and assessments. It was intensive, demanding and immensely beneficial.

I frequently refer to Dale’s learning cone in my presentations and consider it as I teach, but this workshop reinforced the accuracy of this research. The best way to learn something and retain it is to teach it. My level of understanding of the ITGS course has improved dramatically. This experience has been, on a professional level hugely beneficial.

One of the expectations set for me as a workshop leader was to model appropriate teaching techniques within my workshop. This is a dilemma in many ways as with any course of fixed and limited duration (we only had 18 hours), and a vast volume of content we had to cover, the first port of call for conveying this information is “The lecture”. I have to be honest, for some of the sessions it was a chalk and talk approach. But I tried to build into each session interactive elements, often collaborative to reinforce concepts and processes, to illustrate and elluminate, I tried to model teaching techniques I had used successfully with my ITGS students to stimulate the delegates. Providing different styles of media, varying tasks from butcher paper to wikis and wordle, providing video stimulus material and engaging in delegate presentations and reviews marking examination and assessment material to writing specimen questions and publishing these on the wiki. These thing help to provide variation for me and to engage those learners.

18 hours seems like a huge amount of time at first glance. It seemed to me as I approached and prepared for the workshop to be a lifetime, but the reality is that it is too short a period of time if you are going to engage in more than just lecture style, chalk and talk teaching. If you want you participants/delegates/students to learn by: doing, demonstrating, or by teaching; if you want them to participate, engage, consider, question, practice, experiment, attempt, reflect, evaluate, debate, argue, disagree, critique, support and contribute then 18 hours is too short a timeframe.

One challenge is to pick what is essential and to deliver it in a mode that maximises it value for the participants. I was provided with access to my participants via email for weeks prior to the workshop and I was able to get from them an indication of what they wanted from their learning experience. This combined with the goals and objectives of the workshop made the job easier. My role was easier still by the commitment of the participants who works happily through out the 3 days.

The second challenge is to not sit back and just recycle the materials I have when I next come to present a workshop, to learn from my experiences and to change and modify my approaches as a result. But this is how we should approach teaching too. It is not acceptable to develop a course of work, or a unit of learning and deliver it verbatim year in year out. Our teaching practice and our curricula should be living things changing, adapting, maturing and evolving.

The last two weeks have been filled with preparing the 12 x 1.5 hour sessions for the workshop I am running. I had thought that my knowledge of the IB ITGS course was pretty good, but it is fair to say that its has grown considerably.

One thing we have been asked (told) to do is present and teach our delegates as exemplars of good teaching practice. Given the volume of work and material I have to cover in the 3 days this is a challenge. I have to cover the syllabus, all aspects of assessment, Theory of knowledge, extended essays, general information about IB and then more. It would be easy to resort to the traditional chalk and talk or perhaps slide & talk. But we will see, I have tried to vary the approaches I use.

Dale’s learning cone has again proven itself accurate as what I thought  I knew and how much I have learnt as I prepare to teach are leagues apart.

So 4 days in Mumbai and then straight back home.

While the “software for schools” deal does provide a basic productivity suite for computers in schools and an OS it is a very limited selection of the tools that many learner need and use regularly. Here is my list of some of the tools that I use: (NB some require registration, and others like Comic life will require purchase but are well worth the investment)

I don’t want to enter into a debate about the pros and cons of Zoo. Unfortunately, they are in many cases the last bastion of some species and without them (the zoos) where would we be.

Here is the URL of the Photostream – http://www.flickr.com/photos/67064663@N00/sets/72157622107540590/

I have been playing with a new tool I came across called fotosketcher. This tool will convert into pencil style images your pictures. Here is a before and after example. http://www.fotosketcher.com (sorry its PC only)

This trip has been thought provoking and has challenged many preconceptions I had.

Yes, I did meet a couple (and only a couple) of “red neck” teachers, but the majority of the teachers I met were profoundly foucsed on doing the best for their students. They were a hugely enthusiastic and passionate group. They cared!

When we were doing group work, and this was after four days that left us as facilitators exhausted, they were on task. They were focused. They were passionate. They got it. They understood where we were heading, the value of contextual learning ratrher than teaching for the test; rather than delivering content.

They entered the scenario development with enthusiasm, spoke publicily to their peers with confidence and participated fully. This group of teachers were the most motivated and on task group I have ever had the pleasure of working with.

Some other observations:

The importance of leadership. Matt, the district superintendent attended all 5 days of the workshop. Not some of the workshops, not the opening and closing keynotes, not visited for 5 minutes and left. He ATTENDED and PARTICIPATED. The Principals of the schools attended the entire program. Their support staff were told… “unless the school is burning down do not disturb me”. This had a profound effect. This is role modeling. This is leading by example.

I did go and work with the elementary school staff for 3 or 4 sessions. The elementary principal is very new to this position, and in my first session he sat at the back of the classroom we were in, behind a teachers desk, behind a laptop and observed. The tone of this session and the message he portrayed were poor. His lack of engagement weakened the process. Later in the week he was engaged in activities, he faciliated learning, coached staff and worked one to one with his staff. He removed the barrier and the tone of the session was bright and fun.

Leaders can not sit on the edge, they have to be engaged and involved, but not to the extent of micro-managing. I suspect for this young principal he will fluctuate between these extremes from aloof and remote (to the point of seeming arrogant) to so involved that he is smothering and  micro-managing; before he reaches a balance that works for him and his staff. I hope for him that this journey is one he learns from because the lessons are going to come thick and fast; the learning curve will be steep.

This is fun. The project is focusing on getting the teachers to have the students construct their learning. It is project based learning with a twist that is innovative and exciting – the problem that form the project comes first and the learning is scaffolded and student directed towards achieving the project and therefore the learning outcomes. Students become increasingly independent, self directed learners.

These guys are great. The reflective buzz sessions are yeilding brilliant insights and reflection. The staff are confident in speaking to the whole teaching body and they don’t run away from microphones. They are engaged!

ENGAGED Learners are motivated learners. Motivated learners will learn. They are enjoying this.

The starter sheet is available from: http://edorigami.wikispaces.com/Starter+Sheets

The Morning saw Lee present a pair of stunning presentations on Understanding Digital Kids and Living on the Future Edge. Both of these were brilliant. The content was exciting and dynamic. The afternoon was mine.

My focus was looking at Learning styles and then matching this to learning tools. I discussed briefly what I believe are the 4 aspects of a person that contribute (there are more than this) :

• Sensory learning (I use Neil Flemings VARK Model)
• Personality type (Myers-Briggs)
• Gardner’s Multiple Intelligences
• Technological learning style – Neo-millennials, digital Natives or Net Gen

The Model I focused on was Fleming’s VARK because it is a manageable tool for the classroom. VARK stands for

• Visual
• Auditory
• Read Write
• Kinaesthetic

However, for me the hardest part of this process was developing this for an Audience that was exclusively Apple. This was fun and there are some great toys for Apples. But its worth noting that there are also a large number of tools that I use on a PC that are also available for the Macs. I take my hat off to the developers of FOSS tools that create both PC and Mac version.

Source: http://images-1.redbubble.net/img/art/size:large/view:main/3082851-2-eye-collage.jpg

The process of getting here has been quite long, but I had yesterday (saturday) to recuperate in Memphis. We went out last night to BB Kings house of Blues and had 4 hours of brilliant blues.  ZDA the princess of Beale st was the star act. (Thanks to Lee and his iPhone for the Photo)

We got over to Cherry County today and had out initial briefing with the district superintendent. This was insightful and fun. Its great to see an administrator with passion and care & concern for the education of the students.

We had a look around the elementry & secondary schools. The Elementery school is new (opened this year) and each student has a desk (no suprises there) but the desktop has a clear glass panel and underneath this is a 17in monitor, a pull out draw for a keyboard and mouse and a Mac Mini.  THIS IS EVERY STUDENT FROM K-4, beyond that they have laptops.

This is exciting, they have a traditional appropriate size and height desk with which to learn in a traditional paradigm and incorperated into this is a powerful and user friendly computer. Not one or two computers but one for every student.

A major part of our focus is project based learning. Building problem solving,  supported and facilitated by technology, into a a K-12 curriculum. This is a cool project and exciting.

I can’t wait to start.