During the recent school holidays, Marg & I spent 3 weeks in Indonesia with A.E.F. For the first week, we spent a week in our partner school, the following week we participated in a Jakarta & Jogjakarta study tour and the final week we collapsed and recovered in Jogjakarta.
Here is the link to my travel posts –
What an amazing week we’ve just had here in Sydney for the Bridge Project. While we sit at the airport waiting for our flight, doing a last minute catch up with Erin and Mel who are also hosting 2 partner teachers from Medan, I’ll try to give you a brief picture of our full on 4 day training and development.
Marg & I first met our partner teachers, Pak Pahot & Bu Elizawati, in the breakfast queue at the Novatel. Pak Pahot is a year 2 teacher and Bu Elizawati is a year 6 teacher at a school called SDN 025443 Medan Barat which apparently is rated number 1 in Medan. Of the 400 odd students who apply to enrol each year, only 100 are selected!
Over the past 4 days there has been a strong emphasis on collaboration, planning and communication. Presenters recommended a variety of ways in which we can achieve all 3 successfully with our partner schools and time was provided to not only make a start on them but also so that we could familiarise each other with our school calendars, so that any planned projects avoid school holidays, religious festivals and national exams.
We also spent time discussing cultural differences. Our partner teachers have already noticed differences with punctuality, environmental pride, traffic and the differences between Indonesia and Australia with the use of right hands to pass items.
Thursday afternoon, we were given a challenge:
This was a brilliant and fun way for all of us to explore Sydney. The resulting photos on Twitter were varied and the shared experiences were vast. Check out #bridgeproject!!
Another fun outing was lunch at the local Giants stadium.
After lunch, 2 of the stalwarts (proud muslims) explained about the various programs they run which target disengaged youth and promote education. Very impressive. Afterwards, we enjoyed a tour through the facilities:
Presenters over the 4 days included Mike Bartlett & Danielle Leggo, education officers from from Sydney Olympic Park (SOP). The program they run there is truly amazing and caters towards both local and distance students. It largely focuses on sport, agriculture & sustainability and can be accessed either face to face or by video conferencing. Thirty thousand students annually access the ranger led Australian curriculum aligned activities learning about the local wetlands and other local habitats and there is also an online Koori classroom! One great suggestion from Michael was to set up a collaborative project to study the migratory birds that fly from Siberia to Australia, transiting Indonesia! For further information about SOP, regardless where you are globally, check out their website and youtube channel. They are currently searching for non Australian classrooms interested in an international 2015 netball challenge.
Joedy Wallis from AEF, divided the group so that the Australian teachers and the Indonesian teachers could each focus on their own curriculums to identify areas compatible for collaboration as well as identifying goals and outcomes for student learning. She pointed out the areas of the curriculum covered by the bridge project include:
literacy
numeracy
ict capability
critical and creative thinking
personal and social capability
ethical understanding
ICL (Intercultural Understanding)
which together create successful learners, confident and creative individuals and active informed citizens.
Joedy outlined some history behind the inclusion of the ‘Asia and Australia’s Engagement with Asia’ priority in the new Australian curriculum. The global shift which has lead to policy changes and the Melbourne Declaration, first signed in 2008 (changes advocated by AEF) provided the impetuous behind our Bridge partnership meeting this week. This promotes student acquisition of 21st century skills. all beneficial for Australia; socially, culturally and economically.
Joedy promoted twitter to all, encouraging all teachers to sign up and discover just how amazing it is for professional learning and sharing. She also promoted the AEF website (which is currently undergoing a huge update to become even bigger and better), the AEF newsletter and #AEFchat on twitter (details on the website) which currently run monthly but will happen more frequently if the number of teachers on twitter increases.
Julie Lindsay from Flat Connections presented on Thursday for 2/3 of our day focusing on the challenges connected with our partnership schools beyond face to face and how to sustain global connections and collaborations. She raised an important point about the need for deep global learning and the importance of constructing a legacy. Encouraging teachers to think deeply and creatively so that whatever project our students create, it will be their legacy.
Julie suggested a variety of online tools through which this could be achieved:
1. Ning.com (not free) which is a multimedia networking tool was recommended highly by Julie for asynchronis communication if both schools can not be online at the same time.
2. voicethread.com – highly recommended. students can record their voices along a given video/photo
3. Wikispacess – where students and teachers can collaborate on projects
4. blackboard collaborate – students present for 1-2 minutes about their learning to an international audience.
5. globalyouthdebates.com asynchronous global debates between classrooms
6. wevideo
7. Animoto
8. Edmodo – private; great tool for creating discussions)
9. Hangouts
10. Skype
11. Padlet – a private forum for groups to share
Before any actual planning, it is critical all teachers agree on a cyber safety policy and have in place an agreement to monitor all students.
Projects could be based on a range of activities:
interpersonal
research (joint?)
problem solving – kerja sama tentang kebanjiran?? find something in common and explore issues!! eg rivers, sea,
artifact and co-creating (eg making video alone or by collaborating with partner students)
connect
communicate
collaborate
create
Most of the suggested project ideas would be entirely undertaken in English which would create opportunities for deep ICL for classroom teachers. Julie suggested students take the learning home (al la flipped classroom style although she didn’t name it!) which gave me the idea of tasking students to record themselves teaching their parents ‘siapa nama’ & ‘nama saya”. Could create a funny yet educations video about specific target language!
Other flipped ideas that arose over the 4 days included a flat Stanley project whereby students make a puppet of themselves and then send it to their partner school who then takes it with them in their every day life photographing everything and creating a journal which is then returned to their partner school either digitally or by snail mail. Another idea I really love which would be perfect for a look and discuss activity is called, A View From Your Window. Tasking students to take a photo from a window at home and then writing a caption about it.
Julie’s presentation was chocker block full of suggestions with little time to fully explore and trouble shoot. Most teachers felt totally overwhelmed and this confirmed for me just how fortunate we are at PEPS to not only have had a ICT Coordinator for the past 3 years but to have someone of Kathy’s high expertise and dedication in the position. Teachers were also concerned about poor tech support on return to their schools, which again for Marg & I, is rarely an issue!! Our highly capable tech team of Darryn & Kathy is second to none! What they don’t know isn’t worth knowing!! One principal told us about a class set of computers still in boxes at their school because they only get 2 hours of tech support per week!!
The second part of Julie’s time with us was task based. We had to create a digital story with our partner teachers. I quickly wrote a script which I then typed up in Pages and emailed to Marg, Pak Pahot & Bu Eliza. Using Puppet Pals, we quickly made a film entirely in Indonesian about the transport we used in Sydney yesterday which Pak spiced up with some evil laughs!! We uploaded it to Youtube and then pasted the link on the Bridge Padlet to share with everyone.
Pak Donny, the Indonesian translator and coordinator, constantly stressed in his translations, that the partnership is all about our students and should benefit them not the teachers and that all projects must keep that in mind! There was also a huge push to encourage Indonesian teachers to review their learning style (methodology) so as to adopt more western aspects. I can see that encouraging students to ask questions, to be more confident in exchanging opinions has benefits but it is a huge cultural shift and with it comes other aspects of western culture. Other factors which must be considered is that class sizes at our partner school are enormous. Classes range from 34 to 46, Class rooms too are not large and school furniture is also not conducive to more ‘creative’ styles of learning. I can see benefits in encouraging a methodology shift but would like to explore ways in which it can be done that are more sympathetic culturally. It makes me feel like a missionary rather than an educator.
It had been an amazing week, meeting teachers from almost every state. We have swapped email addresses and Skype handles as well as following each other on twitter so that we can keep in contact and help each other with any upcoming challenges this year as well as sharing our successes. Marg in particular was brilliant with this. She has already arranged a Skype call with Mel & Erin this coming Friday!! Another teacher has offered to set up a Facebook page for us all and Aaron will create another Padlet too. The September study tour will be a reunion for those of us who sign up for it!
Goodbye Sydney!
Thank You so much to everyone involved for such a memorable week and in particular to Pak Aaron, Ibu Bonnie & Pak Donni.
Last term, the middle primary classes continued their focus on our school with the aim of creating a digital book about PEPS for our sister school. After listening to recommendations from other teachers about the best app to use, I settled on Book Creator for several reasons. A main one being that one of the teachers who recommended it was also using it, so it made sense that we explored it together.
Each of the 4 classes had specific areas of our school to focus on, to ensure that each area was covered. Then, from those, students could chose one for their own writing. Each class then brainstormed for ways in which to incorporate a verb in a very simple sentence about school areas. I wrote them all down and then as a class, we translated each of the sentences. Most classes ended up with a sentence similar to, “I like playing in the gym” which translates nicely: ‘Saya suka bermain di aula’. Each class then voted on the sentence they preferred and they then had to write a sentence about their area using the model that they had both chosen & translated! This worked very well because it gave the more capable students scope for imagination and creativity and for those struggling with aspects of literacy, provided them with a sentence they could either use entirely or change very slightly.
I then introduced the iPads that I had bought with my grant monies. With the first class, I walked them through the basics of Book Creator, but luckily the following day we had a student free ICT focus day where we discussed how students can develop 21st Century skills by working it out by all themselves. So with the next class, I gave out the iPads and the only heads up I gave them was the name of the app and what had to be included in their book – a front cover, their sentence written in English & Indonesian and a recording of them saying their sentences. I encouraged them to firstly try themselves, if that failed, then to try 2 more things before asking a friend. I was the absolute last option – mainly because I was also learning how to use it. For the first Book Creator lesson with each class, I finished the lesson with the students all sitting on the floor in a circle with the iPads. This allowed those still working to continue working while listening. In this forum, students who either were still stumped on an aspect had the opportunity to ask publicly or even better, for students who had discovered something really cool, to share it with the others. I remember vividly one class where a student had worked out how to enlarge the text, change the font and change the colour of a page and as that student shared, everyone was following along and experimenting with their own ‘book’! It was so exciting.
Students very quickly grasped the finer points of Book Creator. Students originally were in teams of 2-4 as there are only 5 iPads in the Indonesian classroom. I did this mainly to encourage collaboration, but with a task such as this was, more than 2 students to an iPad meant that the waiting time was too for some of them, so I ended up borrowing the recently purchased bank of 8 which improved the student/iPad ratio significantly.
It wasn’t till the holidays that I had a chance to look at the final products. I then learned that one of the features available in Book Creator is that the books can be combined, so I had this great idea where I could amalgamate all the books into one large book, but this great idea was disbanded very quickly when I discovered that to combine books, all books had to have the same page format and be on the same iPad. I also discovered that to combine, the first book has to include the front cover for them all as all subsequent front covers are not included.Still, it is a great idea and one that could be very useful.
Following are some of the things I love about using Book Creator in the classroom:
– If project has sound, it can be exported entirely to ibooks, the camera roll or even emailed (the quality deteriorates with this last option)
– airdropping to another iPad’s camera roll is possible & very easy
– If exported as a PDF, sound is lost
– Not only can students record their voices, they can also video themselves and import that into a project!
-Students can import photos or draw pictures
– to add to a blog, upload straight to Youtube!
If I could change aspects of Book Creator, all I would do is:
-To export projects from iPad to iPad so that projects can be combined
Finally here is a note to self for the next time I use Book Creator in the Indonesian Classroom:
1. Remind students not to use their surnames
2. Have students using the same iPad to use the same page for each project, so the combine pages is an option.
3. The title of a book must reflect the content of the book and the title and author names also need to be written underneath each project.
4. Each project would look finished with a back cover – maybe incorporating a kenalkan!
Have you used Book Creator in the Indonesian classroom successfully? My students all absolutely loved it and have repeatedly asked when we are next using iPads again!
Indonesian Teacher Reflections 