ULearn07 Conference

Thank you for your welcome. This is the main ICT in schools gathering for the year, and it is a great opportunity for me to share with you the exciting direction our education system is going.

I enjoyed being here last year when I talked with you about personalising learning. It’s obvious that these ideas are gaining currency given your theme for this year’s conference: “Personalising Learning in a Digital Age”.

You know, it wasn't very many years ago when Maurice Williamson, my colleague from the Opposition, was the ICT guru in Parliament. He was the computer geek, the gadget man. It became a bit of a standard joke that Maurice would say "before long we'll be able to talk to our fridge and tell it what temperature we'd like our beer to be in the next 10 minutes." Well Maurice's "listening fridge" is old hat.

The kind of future you are preparing your students for will be unimaginable – but then all futures usually are. Science and research are making breathtaking advances that read like science fiction. Nanotechnology is one example. Students at school today may find themselves in middle age having the cholesterol cleared from their arteries by nanobots, robots that are one billionth of a metre in size.

With the interaction between genetics, neuroscience and information systems developing, the possibilities are endless. Ken Robertson talks about the possibilities for extending human memory and speculates that “…if you have an important exam coming up you might in future be able to pop down to the shops and buy another 60 megabytes of RAM. Or it may be possible to have a language implant. Instead of spending five years learning French you can have it implanted in time for your summer holidays.” It may seem farfetched, but so was the listening fridge.

So these changes are what I’d like to talk about today, and I’ll begin with a brief recap of the big picture.

The education system is developing in an exciting way. That’s clear from my visits to schools and from talking to educators like yourselves. Those developments aren’t being driven by me, or by the Ministry, but I’m trying to raise awareness of them, and talk about how we can encourage and foster those changes.

If I Google New Zealand History, I’ll get linked to more than 50 million pages. There’s more information available in seconds than could be found in any textbook.

We can’t cram students' brains with all this information. Knowledge and technology are changing too fast, and there’s simply too much knowledge around.

What’s more, we wouldn’t want to. The information is there, at their fingertips, if they know how to find it, know how to consider it critically, and know how to use it. This is our task. How do we prepare out students for this? It's not just about giving students knowledge. With so much information, it's about them accessing, using and creating knowledge to develop ideas and solve problems in the real world.

Personalising learning

Personalising learning means recognising and responding to students’ distinct strengths and needs, rather than using a one-size-fits-all model. The system must respond to students, rather than expecting students to fit the system. It means setting the foundations for lifelong learning, rather than treating learning as a one-shot exercise that ends when a student leaves school.

So what are the key elements of personalised learning? There are six main components:effective teaching, assessment for learning, a flexible curriculum, engaged families and communities, professional leadership, and the final component is ICT – it is increasingly being used as a medium for teaching and learning – as witnessed by your presence here today. Effective teachers know how to get the most out of ICT for learning, assessment, collaborative work, and innovative curriculum delivery. ICT is also a great way for the education community to share information and research about 21st century teaching and learning.

So how can ICT support effective teaching and effective learning?

ICT is a tool – a tool that can make learning more responsive to the interests and talents of students, that can give real effect to assessment for learning, and can better facilitate engagement with parents and communities.

With the right leadership, ICT can facilitate all the elements that make up personalised learning.

Competencies to participate in the digital age

Technology is central to the way New Zealanders live and work. That’s why technology is one of the eight learning areas in the new curriculum.

To develop technological literacy, students need to experience and explore a wide range of technologies in a variety of contexts.

They need to gain competencies in technological practice – where they use, and critically reflect on, the use of technology.

Students need to gain competencies in technological knowledge, understanding products, systems and environments. This includes the way things work individually and together as part of an overall outcome.

They also need to gain an understanding of the nature of technology – the characteristics of technology as a field of human enterprise. This means understanding historical and contemporary technological developments and their implications – socially, technically, environmentally and intellectually. It means understanding the relationship between technology and values, beliefs and ethics. And it means grasping how knowledge is integrated and transformed through technological development.

And the competencies learned through studying technology are applicable to all fields. One technology student, Shannon, describes it like this: “I like being able to take a project home, something I can hold in my hand. Studying technology has taught me that if I need a solution to a problem, I know I can do it myself.”

ICT & professional development

You’ll be well aware of the value of on-the-job professional development that gives teachers time to reflect, to share their thinking with each other, to be learners themselves. Conferences like this are also great opportunities to be stimulated by new ideas and share good practice.

The sort of networks being developed offer huge opportunities for networked learning. Most of you at home will have access to the internet, on dial-up or broadband. Schools are now hooked up with pretty fast connections too.

And then there’s KAREN, the high capacity, ultra high-speed network which links our tertiary institutions and research organisations to the rest of the world at speeds 400,000 times faster than schools have now. We want to extend this network to schools. If you tried to download all the episodes of the Sopranos at home on dial-up, it would take you more than a fortnight – and your ISP wouldn’t like you very much. KAREN could do it in about 7 seconds.

Around the country those speeds will get faster and faster for all of us, and schools are among the first to benefit. The Loop project, from the top of the South Island, won the 2007 Computerworld Award for Excellence in the Use of ICT in Education. If we’re trying to catch a knowledge wave, as I discussed last year, the work of Charles Newton and his colleagues with the Loop is an example of the latest and greatest surfboard on the market.

It’s a community asset that has lead to increased collaboration and cooperation between schools, as well as different innovative approaches to learning, so for example students in room 9 at Brightwater School access their own KnowledgeNet Page and their own blog – ICT is a daily part of how room 9 learns.

The Loop harnesses the power of lightning-fast fibre technology and puts information and resources at the fingertips of teachers and students from Collingwood over near Farewell Spit, all the way to Blenheim.

Of course networking like this could occur without technology. Every couple of months, teachers from across the top of the South Island could meet and discuss these issues. But with the Loop they can do it instantly. The Loop is a tool that accelerates professional development and supports the development of professional communities.

ICT & effective teaching

This all this leads to more effective teaching and learning. It enables students greater choice of how, when and where they learn. Faster Internet connectivity enables learners to remotely access a great range of resources, tools, learning environments and support networks.

At Nelson College, they’re beginning broadcasting on local radio station Fresh FM using the Loop. I’ve been interviewed by student TV and radio stations around the country; they’re learning practical skills that, from my experience as Minister of Broadcasting, are cutting edge.

ICT & Assessment for Learning

The online learning environment means students can learn in the ways that best suits them. It allows students to self assess their progress, set goals and work hard to achieve them. It lets teachers, students and parents build a picture of what students know and how they learn best, and helps everyone find out what they need to learn next.

The ultimate goal is improving learning, personalising learning, and improving the quality and types of feedback available to learners. This is assessment for learning in action, and it’s key to personalising learning.

Other schools are also doing exciting things, and they don’t need to be on the cutting edge to use technology better. Here in Auckland a number of schools are joining up their student management system with their learning management system.

This means parents can go online and see their child’s work, what assessment they’ve had, what they think about their learning and what the teacher thinks. Students can ask their teachers and peers questions online, and parents can provide information immediately – giving permission for Sarah to go to the zoo, letting the school know Hoani is sick.

e-Mentoring

Another project that has just been completed is the use of e-mentoring as part of ARTS online to deliver music lessons in Canterbury. It’s further evidence of the power of networks as an educational tool.

It involved real-time, online tuition delivered through video-conferencing and website technologies to students in outreach areas, supported by some face-to-face lessons.

Apart from lessons, students communicated through blogs, calls and texts to their tutors. They contributed to decisions about how learning works best for them and they got a better understanding of how they were doing.

There was an obvious positive impact on student learning. Schools are now planning to continue music programmes, and extend opportunities for students, using these new methods. The students involved were all motivated by the experience.

At Amuri Area School, the experience prompted the students to start a school choir.

Garreth, a Year 9 student from Greymouth High School, was bought a drum kit by his parents - let’s hope they don’t regret that decision!

The opportunities for e-mentoring and professional discussion across many locations at once are enormous. Students can mentor students at the other end of the country. Experts, like artists, can work with schools and teachers no matter where they live, or how remote the school.

Another example of e-mentoring is the Digital Conversations website run by CWA New Media Ltd; students are able to videoconference with experts from around the world.

So I saw Dr Jack Bacon, a NASA research scientist, talk with Opunake High and MacKenzie College students about the importance of education and the pursuit of scientific understanding of the universe, and about New Zealander’s who’ve changed the world.

Equity of access is the founding principle driving innovations such as these. This could mean that no student would miss out on an opportunity to learn a musical instrument. The potential is there for any subject. It’s tailor-made for oral history; it’s prefect for learning languages.

We have just seen some examples of creative and innovative use of ICT. And as I travel around the country I am delighted to see many such examples where effective teachers are focussing on using ICT to work in partnerships to meet the learning needs of their students.

So it gives me great pleasure to announce the e-Learning Teacher Fellowships for 2008. This is the fifth year of the fellowships being awarded, so receipients can be released from the classroom for up to a year to further research and develop their use of ICT.

The fellowships recognise the importance of building teacher capability through supporting teachers as researchers, and reward teachers who have demonstrated an innovative and creative approach to improving students' learning through ICT.

Past e-Fellows are to be found working as principals of schools, like Indira Neville; in senior management roles like Gill Gibbs; and as leaders of curriculum and learning and teaching in their schools, like Maurice Alford, Liz Stephenson and Kerry Hall. Others have gone on to wider sector influence as in-service school advisers, such as Blair Giles at Team Solutions or Jenny Charteris at ERO, and professional development contractors, like Mel Stopford at CORE Education.

The fellows for 2008 are:

Toni Twiss from Waikato Diocesan School for Girls, to evaluate the use of mobile phones and personal digital assistants to support learning programmes of learners with specialist learning needs;

Nicholas Rate from Russell Street School in Palmerston North, to explore the opportunities offered by e-portfolios to create a community of learning between students, families and schools;

Matthew Tippen from Isleworth Primary School, Christchurch, investigating the effects of using short, high-impact physical activities, created by students using a range of ICTs, on learners’ motivation, health and engagement;

Mark Callagher of Wellington College, to examine effective models for combining virtual learning environments and social software with face-to-face classroom teaching, focusing on the impact on learners’ literacy and thinking skills; and

Michael Fenton from Inglewood High School, Taranaki, to investigate the cognitive and motivational benefits to learners of using mobile sensor technology to gather data for use in problem solving, question formation, assessment tasks and interactive games.

These are all exciting projects and I look forward to hearing about the outcomes as they are implemented.

Conclusion

ICT has an important role to support personalised learning – all the elements of it. It has the potential to radically transform education, and I want New Zealand to be at the cutting edge.

And it’s clear that this is happening. But it’s happening in pockets, and we need to maximise the benefits that technology can offer to all students and teachers.

And, of course, technology is critical for New Zealand’s future, for the economic growth and sustainability of our country.

The rate of change means we have to be constantly on the lookout, making sure our national Digital Strategy is up to date in its vision for ICT, and enhances all aspects of New Zealand society.

That will begin with the Digital Future Summit in Auckland in November. It will explore how we can maximise "being digital'' to address the challenges of becoming a high-tech, high-value, creative economy and society – with the goal of refreshing the Digital Strategy for 2008 and beyond.

That means education too. The knowledge wave is breaking on New Zealand’s shores, and we have to ride it. I’m confident that with conferences like this one, and the Digital Future Summit, we will.

Thank you. I wish you a productive and challenging conference.