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.

2. For the history educators – this site is looking at “the man behind Hitler” Joesph Gobbels – http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/amex/goebbels/ and some of the propaganda he produced – http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/amex/goebbels/gallery/index.html

3. From History on the Net http://www.historyonthenet.com/Nazi_Germany/nazigermanymain.htm This site looks at Nazi Germany

4. Open Chemistry - http://openchemistry.co.uk/ this is an open chemistry site producing free resources availzable to all. Another good one for chemistry is http://periodictable.com/ and also http://www.periodicvideos.com/

5. Crime mapper - http://maps.police.uk/ this is a UK police tool that mashes data from various sources with maps to produce interesting results – searchable by area. This is a great tool for Humanities and information technology.

6. Commoncraft show – Cloud computing in plain english http://commoncraft.com/cloud-computing-video This is another BRILLIANT resource from Lee LeFever and the guys at Commoncraft. This is a very useful professional development resource and resource for teaching computing and computers.

7. Firefox turns 5 – http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-ULDH90H530&feature=player_embedded This is a video celebrating 5 years of Mozilla’s firefox browser. The video is fun and raises some interesting questions from its unique perspective. This is another great resource for teaching computing and professional development.

8. Darwin, a naturalists voyage -http://www.cnrs.fr/cw/dossiers/dosdarwinE/darwin.html This science, biology and history themed site provides an interesting insight into the Journey of Charles Darwin. Click on the link and watch the animation and listen to the sound track.

9 And finally from a blog I subscribe to – Information is beautiful – http://www.informationisbeautiful.net/2009/interesting-easy-beautiful-true/

Here is my weekly catch from the net.

1. Alternative to – http://alternativeto.net/desktop this website is present you with alternative application to common or popular software and web based tools. This is an excellent tool for those of us with limited budgets.

2.Science visualisations – http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2009/08/visualizations/all/1# This is a wired science sumamtion of the best visualisation videos of 2009. This is an excellent resource for science teachers and can add variety into your teaching program. This opbviously appeals to the visual learner

3. How are maps made up from aerial and satellite images – http://qanda.encyclopedia.com/question/topographic-maps-created-aerial-and-satellite-photographs-78979.html – this is an article I found recently which explained how topo maps use images. very interesting and useful for the humanities students and particulalry the geographers.

4. What browser – http://www.whatbrowser.org/ this is a useful resource site for IT classes and also for explaining about a web browser. This site looks at trhe web btrowser youa re using and provides you with some insights into it. For those who are interested it also links to a time line for web browsers - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_web_browsers#Graphical_Timeline

5. e-Glossary http://www.glencoe.com/apps/eGlossary612/grade.php this site produced by McGraw-Hill provides a useful and age specific glossary of mathematical terms. A useful learning aid for teachers and students alike.

Hope these are useful – As always I ave posted these to my Del.icio.us account - http://delicious.com/achurches

The clip shows the students engaged in various actvities using their OLPC’s as the report wanders around. Its great to see and it raises a number of questions/statements for me.

1. Why are we not seeing more of this? I would love to see more examples of OLPC’s being integrated into schools. The OLPC site has a link to countries with the programme embedded – its a google map. If you look at the list of countries utilising this its not that extensive. They include: Peru, Uruguay, Mexico, haiti Rwanda, Afganistan, Nepal & ethiopia and some others – there are (excluding the USA) 27 countries.
2. While many third world countries are unable to provide such facilities and rely on charity, why are we not seeing more 1st world nations embedding portable technology programs?
3. Some people are adopting these programs and on a wide scale – New South Wales announced its Netbook program.  200,000 units to every year 9 student in the state. WOW! This is a great start, but I started to read some of the fine print on this and I did have concerns with the hardware spec and the software pack. A Netbook with 1Gb Ram Running MS Office and The Adobe CS4 suite. These are serious software packages. This raises the questions for me about suitability. With my students I teach them to design products that are

• suitable for the audience
• suitable for the purpose

Is the hardware they have selected suitable for the software they have choosen? Don’t get me wrong on this. I am very pleased that NSW has taken this step!. Each product is a winner in its own right, but I wonder if its abit like giving the kids a single lane mountainbike track (a netbook) and providing them with a high performance road racing bike (The software). The two seem mismatched.

4. Another NSW Question.  What were the educational goals and objectives defined for this program and how did the Netbook  with this software load match these drivers? I would hate to see a paradigm breaking program like this damaged by technical barriers.

The two strands of this post are tied together really with this question of suitability for audience and purpose. In both the OLPC and NSW Netbooks there is a need that is being met or attempting to be met. Each component is in its own right educationally powerful, enabling, transformative and useful. But I do wonder about the selections being made. With the OLPC the software is selected and deployed with a focus on cost and functionality. With the NSW netbook, the software selected is not, I believe well matched to the hardware platform. I would hate to try Photoshoping an image on a netbook with only 1Gb of ram or working with multiple documents and embedded images and media. or…

“Using this software, students will be able to create videos, edit photos and make presentations for class assignments and projects,” Rees said. “Students and teachers will also be able to set up video conferencing and collaborate on assignments using the built in Web cameras and software within the department’s secure network.”  Source: http://www.computerworld.com.au/article/297696/nsw_education_drops_150m_267_000_school_notebooks

I have to say OLPC gets a tick the netbook with Office and CS4 gets a X. Each in their own right is good but together…well….

1. Storybird – http://storybird.com/ This is a collaborative digital story creation tool. worth a visit.

2. Multitasking research. This is some interesting research out of Stanford university. Not suprising but interesting – two links here

• http://news.stanford.edu/news/2009/august24/multitask-research-study-082409.html
• http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/8219212.stm

3. Horizon report – Australia & New Zealand edition. http://horizon.nmc.org/australia/Main_Page

I had the privilage of being a contributor to this report. Its a great read, looking at the trends in education for the next 5 years. Myself and Derek Wenmoth were the NZ contingent of this report.

4. Seven things you should know about series. These are great info sheets produced by Educause. There are two links here

• 7 things you should know about telepresence http://www.educause.edu/Resources/7ThingsYouShouldKnowAboutTelep/179124
• 7 things you should know about Data visualisation http://www.educause.edu/Resources/7ThingsYouShouldKnowAboutDataV/176803

5. The Principles of Good web design - this is a three part series looking at good web design. A useful set of resources for teachers, students and web publishers alike.

• http://inspectelement.com/articles/the-principles-of-good-web-design-part-1-layout/
• http://inspectelement.com/articles/the-principles-of-good-web-design-part-2-navigation/
• http://inspectelement.com/articles/the-principles-of-good-web-design-part-3-colour/

6. Monster Fact Site – http://www.factmonster.com/ This is a great site for kids who love facts

Need more links? Try my delicious feed – http://del.icio.us/achurches

1. Clickable Mummy: http://www.akhet.co.uk/clikmumm.htm Interested in mummies an interactive site they can learn about the process of mummification. Source: http://www.freetech4teachers.com
2. 50 States: http://www.50states.com/ Learning geography can be a little more interactive with this site that lists tons of facts about each of the states. Source: http://www.freetech4teachers.com
3. Maps.com: http://www.maps.com/funfacts.aspx?nav Not only can you find regular old maps here to use in class, students can also engage with map games to make learning a little more fun. Source: http://www.freetech4teachers.com
4. CIA World Factbook: https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world-factbook/ From maps to flags, this site will help kids learn about every country in the world. Source: http://www.freetech4teachers.com
5. EyeWitness to History: http://www.eyewitnesstohistory.com/ Get a more personal perspective on history through this site that engages kids with first-hand accounts of historical events, photos, audio and more. Source: http://www.freetech4teachers.com
6. Countries of the World: http://www.theodora.com/wfb/abc_world_fact_book.html Use this site to find out information about countries around the world from studies done by the U.S. government. Source: http://www.freetech4teachers.com
7. Visible Earth: http://www.visibleearth.nasa.gov/ Take advantage of these NASA images to show kids what the world looks like from an elevated perspective. They’ll be able to see a wide range of geographic features. Source: http://www.freetech4teachers.com
8. Today in History: http://www.scopesys.com/anyday/ Put in any day in the year and find out what major events happened on it through this helpful tool. Source: http://www.freetech4teachers.com
9. The History Beat: http://history.searchbeat.com/ Need a timeline? This site is chock full of them. Source: http://www.freetech4teachers.com
10. LOC American Memory: http://memory.loc.gov/ This site is loaded with photos, primary documents, audio clips and in-depth information that can be a valuable tool to helping students understand American history. Source: http://www.freetech4teachers.com
11. History Games and Animations: http://www.besthistorysites.net/Multimedia.shtml Check out this list of resources to find tools that will help you teach your students about everything historical from ancient times to the present day. Source: http://www.freetech4teachers.com
12. ABCya http://abcya.com/ this is a site filled with interesting sites and resources for primary students and teachers.
13. the ebook store – http://ebookstore.sony.com/download/ Download sony ebook software available in mac and pc formats.
14. Pew Internet article on the threat of autonomous machines - http://www.pewinternet.org/Media-Mentions/2009/Machines-in-control.aspx
15. Great quotes about learning and change – http://www.flickr.com/groups/858082@N25/pool/ this is a Flickr pool from some great contributors Like Scott McLeod, Will Richardson, Dean Shareski and more

Students are asked to engage in discussion and debate about the social and ethical issues arrising from these technologies and  there impact on society. Here are two great articles for starting this debate.

1. Autonomous tech ‘requires debate’
By Jason Palmer
Science and technology reporter, BBC News

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/8210477.stm

2. Call for debate on killer robots
By Jason Palmer
Science and technology reporter, BBC News
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/8182003.stm

The increased development of robotics, autonomous systems and artificial intelligence is continuing and proceeding unchecked. We already have the use of robots in warfare, the home, hospitals, pharmacies, warehouses, industry, space, security and so more. Robotics and Ai have increased well beyond the realms of Azimov’s “I, robot” but his three laws of robotics

1. A robot may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm.
2. A robot must obey any orders given to it by human beings, except where such orders would conflict with the First Law.
3. A robot must protect its own existence as long as such protection does not conflict with the First or Second Law.

Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Three_Laws_of_Robotics

Source: http://www.freedigitalphotos.net/images/photos/steel_2.jpg

Resources:

http://www.govexec.com/pdfs/072309kp1.pdf

The information in the video is stunning. Much of it is well know but it is portrayed in a clean, well constructed manner. This is an excellent starting point for discussions with students and staff alike.

http://socialnomics.net/2009/08/11/statistics-show-social-media-is-bigger-than-you-think/

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sIFYPQjYhv8

I asked my students to summarise one aspect of this using a visual tool – comic life. Here are so me exemplars of their summary: