Tag: education

The ZPD: something all those people critical of teaching have never heard of, but it’s where teachers live all day every day.

If your teacher-craft is good you are a natural differentiator, going to great lengths to provide each student with what they need.  Teachers are the pressure point between a system trying to do things as cheaply and generically as possible and individual students all learning from their own context.  That stretch is why replacing teachers with elearning systems or creating enormous classrooms will result in a substantial drop in pedagogical effectiveness.  You need a trained professional to attempt to bridge this enormous gap in a reasonably sized class, at least if you want it done well.


In an optional course like computer engineering this is stretched to extremes.  In the same class I will have functionally illiterate students who verge on being developmentally delayed sitting next to gifted students who so aggressively pursue the work that they are operating well beyond the expectations of the grade or even the curriculum.  I’m the mechanism that tries to make sure both those students (and the other twenty-two in the room) are all in their zone of proximal development, and yes, it’s exhausting at the best of times.


On top of that, because I’m teaching high school students I get to attempt this stunt with kids whose brains haven’t yet developed the ability to forecast the consequences of their actions.  When their amygdalas finally develop in their early 20s their executive functions will come online and their post-secondary instructors will get to enjoy a more complete human being, but we never see them in high school.  Most of the general public are also oblivious to the brain research teachers keep up on.

Because all of that isn’t enough, Ontario also likes to Victory Lap students, allowing graduates who have already finished to come back for another year at great public expense.  The system used to enjoy the extra financial injection that these students brought with them, but cuts have meant that schools aren’t being funded completely to support these students properly any more.  This week I’m spending more attention on two victory lappers than I am on my other 70 odd students who are actually supposed to be there.


I’ve had mixed experience with Victory Lappers.  In some cases that extra year was just what they needed in terms of maturity to prepare them for post-secondary life, but too many times it’s a privileged kid enjoying an easy year in a fish tank they’ve outgrown instead of taking the big step into the unknown.  That this is now happening in an unfunded and overly stretched system is causing stress cracks to appear where they didn’t before.  Maybe a way forward in this is to only allow students with individual education plans the opportunity to victory lap, but whatever we do, it needs to have been done several years ago.  If we could stop playing politics and actually manage Ontario’s education system effectively, we could find cost savings in something like this immediately.

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There is a strong undercurrent of animosity about what teachers get paid and a lot of misinformation about teacher average pay. Like anything, it’s more complicated than it appears. Here’s my stab at trying to explain how Ontario teacher pay works, though the people complaining about it probably aren’t interested in any facts:

The latest Ontario secondary teacher salary grid from my board:

http://www.d18.osstf.ca/-/media/districts/d18-staging/ugdsb-occasionals/2017_2/central-agreement/1-electronic-collective-agreement-signed.ashx?la=en-CA
To get your foot in the door on this grid you need to have spent 4 years in an undergraduate degree and then another 2 years getting your bachelor of education. If you’ve ever had any trouble with the law you’re already out of contention. You need to have a clean criminal record to be a teacher.Your average cost for a university degree in Canada these days is about $6500 a year.
https://www.topuniversities.com/student-info/student-finance/how-much-does-it-cost-study-canada
So you’re about $40,000 in debt before you even get a whiff of that ‘super’ teacher pay. Ontario is (of course) one of the most expensive places in Canada to get your post-secondary education:

It takes the typical Canadian student 10 years to get out from under student loan debt, so I put that in too – but didn’t count the ongoing debt required to pay for your teacher training.

Remember that salary grid? To get up the sharp end of it you need to have an honours degree in what you’re teaching and then take additional qualification (AQ) courses after teaching experience to earn your ‘honours specialist’ and get into the top ‘level 4’ section of the salary grid.
https://cpl.oise.utoronto.ca/public/category/programStream.do?method=load&selectedProgramAreaId=18104&selectedProgramStreamId=18599
https://www.oct.ca/members/additional-qualifications/prerequisites

A number of teachers never get there because they don’t have the university background or aren’t willing to spend thousands more dollars when they aren’t teaching to get additional qualifications. You can look up any teacher on OCT to see what their qualifications are and whether they’ve spent more of their own time and money to get additional qualifications.
https://www.oct.ca/Home/FindATeacher

So, to get up to the top end of the teacher’s salary, currently $96,068 in my board, you need to have dropped at least fifty grand on university degrees plus another couple of thousand on honours specialist additional qualifications. Most teachers don’t stop there and get other AQs in other specializations as well (I have 2 other subjects I’ve AQ’d in as well as my honours specialist).

Because of all these variables, calculating what the actual average teacher salary is in Ontario is a tricky business, which is why no one has bothered, but I’ll give it a go:

Your first year you’re teaching as an occassional teacher at the bottom of the grid. Let’s be optimistic and say you’re teaching six sections (full time) on a short term contract, but many aren’t. From years 2-6 let’s say you’re getting one contract section a year and are still able to fill up the rest of your time table with short term contract jobs (again, many aren’t). Let’s assume you’ve got an honours degree in what you’re teaching. In your third year you drop another couple of thousand bucks on getting your honours specialist and move up to level four on the salary grid and keep climbing year over year.

That eighty-three grand average is mighty optimistic.  It ignores the endemic under-employment in new teachers these days.  It also ignores maternity leaves and any other family or medical leaves that happen in people’s lives.  I’d estimate that the average Ontario teacher is making something more like seventy grand a year, with many making substantially less.Wild eyed conservative leaning reporters will bleat on and on about how the average Ontarian should rise up against these overpaid teachers, but when you look into statistics around pay and education level, the typical degree carrying Ontarian makes about $85,000 a year. Your average teacher salary is less than that:

https://www12.statcan.gc.ca/census-recensement/2016/as-sa/98-200-x/2016024/98-200-x2016024-eng.cfm

Playing that rhetorical game and equating people who have spent years of their lives and tens of thousand so their own dollars to earn a qualification with people who haven’t is a nasty bit of neo-con politics.  The people playing that game are trying to sell you on equality when they’re actually selling the opposite.  We live in a society that rewards dilligence, competence and effort, don’t we?  Maybe we don’t.

 

The benefits and pension piece are another angle that gets a lot of air play.  I pay almost eight hundred bucks a month into my pension.  If everyone paid that much into a pension plan, they too would have a good one waiting for them.  The only difference between teachers and everyone else is that we’re forced to do it.  My take home pay as a teacher only equalled my take home pay as a millwright in 1991 after fifteen years and tens of thousands of dollars in student loan debt.  I’ll have a better pension when I retire as a teacher than I would have as a millwright (though National Grocer’s millwrights were well looked after until they broke the union and fired them all).

 

I’m always left with the vague feeling that there is some good old fashioned sexism in conservative attacks on teachers.  Almost 70% of teachers in Canada are women, and there is no glass ceiling in it because we’re paid equally for the work we do.  I imagine this grates on the nerves of the manly conservative men who are looking for reasons to hate on the job and the unions that enabled this equity, but I gotta tell ya, most of those dudes wouldn’t last five minutes in a classroom.

 

If you’re able to handle the crushing student debt, the hatred of people who couldn’t or wouldn’t do what it takes to do the same job and have the resiliency to survive in classrooms (stats show that typically about 30% of people who do the degree work drop out of teaching), then teaching is a rewarding profession and one of the few remaining that let you lead a middle class life.

 

If you think you can handle all that and don’t mind being attacked and belittled publiclly by the very government you work for while producing educational outcomes that are envied the world over, then go for it, but don’t ever assume it’s easy money.  

 

I just spent most of the day making no money and walking the picket lines for better learning conditions for my students while we all struggle under an almost psychotically vindictive provincial government who seem intent on hurting the most vulnerable students in our system.

Some stats to consider:

Ontario pays less per student for education than most other provinces while producing results that raise us into the top 10 world wide – but this is Ontario so expect to be attacked for that.

         

Canada is close to the world average in terms of education spending as a percentage of government spending.  Again, Ontario is the largest single system in the country, so we wag that dog too, but expect to be attacked for it.

 

In terms of cost we’re pretty much neck and neck with the USA, but Canada is top 10 in the world, the US isn’t in the top 30.  If you want to be acknowledged and rewarded for a job well done don’t teach in Ontario.

There has been a lot of mis-information around Ontario teachers making the highest salary in Canada.  That’s not true either:  https://www.narcity.com/life/these-are-the-highest-and-lowest-paying-canadian-cities-for-teachers   Toronto is 4th out of 8 on this 2018 list.  Teachers get paid more in Nunavut, Alberta and Manitoba, and only make a couple of grand more than teachers in Nova Scotia and Saskatchewan.  I’m sure you can quickly figure out the difference in housing costs between Toronto and Halifax or Toronto and Saskatchewan…

Still want to earn that easy teacher money?

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I was an early adopter into G+.  I was already getting the willies about Facebook back in 2011 and was looking for a way to curate links to thinkers and artists that wasn’t designed around monetizing my existing relationships.  Facebook serves a purpose – keeping you in touch with extended friends and family, but that echo-chamber doesn’t help you develop new ideas and perspectives, it tends to be a pretty insular place… even a petri dish for spreading fake news.  I know a number of people who have since radically diminished or backed right out of the increasingly caustic environment on Facebook, but I was looking for ways out way back in 2011.


That Facebook is an advertising company built around monetizing my personal relationships has always bothered me, so into G+ I leapt.  G+ allowed me to curate connections that Facebook wouldn’t.  Over the years I’ve developed links to thousands of people, almost none of them based on personal relationships.  Those links exist because these people are not mainstream (most celebrities don’t use G+, there’s no money in it).  G+ was my go to for intelligent, curated content that I wasn’t seeing anywhere else on the internet.  


Google recently announced that is was shutting down Google Plus under what everyone agrees are pretty flimsy circumstances.  While other social media giants are leaking data and monetizing fake news in tangible ways, Google is shutting down G+ because of a security vulnerability that never happened.  Why it’s really shutting G+ down is because it isn’t what social media is expected to be these days:  an efficient way to capture as many people’s personal information as possible in order to monetize it.  The problem with G+ is that it’s actually a social media network – people go on there to share ideas and often create long form discussions with each other.  G+ isn’t mainstream, doesn’t cater to idiots  and don’t produce easily monetizable lies that you can advertise from.


A G+ user recently posted this:  Educators, niche groups will miss Google+


“the people on G+ are just better at the ‘social’ part of networking” – true that.  I can expect a constant boil of political negativity and outright nonsense often based on outright lies on Facebook, which has established itself as the low bar for social media because it’s the one everyone is on.  We underestimate how many stupid people there are in the world, but Facebook hasn’t and it has become a giant catering to them.  It might have been smaller than other social media, but G+ was a carefully curated, rich source of content I wasn’t seeing anywhere else.  I’ll miss it.

The early 21st century attention economy feels a lot like robber baron capitalism of the 19th Century.  In that time industrialization was driving new economies in natural resource extraction and manufacturing in an entirely unsustainable way that produced obscene amounts of wealth for a small number of people.   Sound familiar?  The new resource these days is our attention.  If you’ve developed a low relative use (G+ had millions of active users, which isn’t Facebook’s billions) social media platform that encourages long form reading and benign, drama-free interaction between its users you’re not churning through the resource as efficiently as you could be.  As a result you’re not aggressively pursuing the marketing money like every other corporate social media platform is.


The upside of this is that the end of Google Plus has me looking for alternatives, and people like Tim Berners-Lee and others are trying to pry your personal data out of the tax dodging attention economy robber barons.  Think you could leave the Google mothership?  I’m trying.


Some alternate social media sites I’m trying:


GooglePlus users are pretty handy at self organizing (the best they could hope for from Google was benign neglect).  Many are working to organise the diaspora.


MeWe:  https://mewe.com/myworld 
Engineered with privacy-by-design, MeWe turns the table on Facebook and other social media companies with a revolutionary service that emphasizes privacy and social sharing where people can be their true, uncensored selves. No Ads. No Spyware. No BS. MeWe members are #Not4Sale and enjoy the protection of MeWe’s Privacy Bill Of Rights.


Pluspora:  https://pluspora.com/stream
A favourite landing spot of G+ users that offers strong user-focused privacy controls.


My next steps are to look into blockchain driven encrypted networks that offer adamant user protections from the powers that be…  here’s a link to some early research on that.


Eventually this will mean pulling up stakes at Blogger (Google’s blogging platform), but that’s a tricky business.  I’ve migrated to WordPress with Mechanical Sympathy and import blog posts from my three Blogger blogs (Dusty World, Tim’s Motorcycle Diaries and Kingfisher Imaging), but I’ve found blogging in WordPress to be needlessly fussy.  Blogger’s great advantage is it’s simple to use which is vital when I’m concentrating on writing.  If I can get WordPress to give me a WYSIWYG editing tool that isn’t so annoying when formatting text and inputting digital media I’d be looking at migrating there too.

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We had a romantic Valentine’s Day evening after school on a Friday night at Canada Learning Code’s HTML/CSS Valentine’s Card coding night.  CLC offers a lot of coding experiences for people who haven’t done it before.  You get a room full of volunteer experts who code all day for a living, which I found particularly interesting because I wanted to see how they solved problems.


The majority of people in the room had never looked behind the webpages they view every day, so the presentation started off with explanations of what Hypertext Markup Language and Cascading Style Sheets are (you’re using them now to read this).  From there we all installed ATOM, an HTML/CSS  editor, onto our laptops and got stuck in.


Coding can seem like an all or nothing proposition to people new to it.  Unlike written language, if you have a single error in code the whole thing can become unrunnable with no clear reason why.  Imagine writing an English essay and if you have a single grammar or spelling error the whole thing is nonsensical.  That’s the challenge of coding, but there are some supports you can put in place that help you deal with this absolutism, and CLC introduces you to all of them.

The ATOM IDE (integrated development environment – like a word-processor for coding) colour codes your text as you’re typing and offers suggestions.  It quickly lets you add and change what you’re working on.  When you save your code in ATOM you pivot over to your browser and refresh your page to see what’s changed.  


While coding is harsh when dealing with errors, a good IDE and that iterative approach of being able to quickly try something helps you work around those error landmines, but getting people into that mindset is tricky, especially after school where we tend to drive students toward one-try grading (quizzes, tests, exams, interviews, performances, pretty much everything we do in education).  As a result students have learned not to iterate.  If it doesn’t work at first you’ve failed, which is a disastrous approach to coding.  Recognizing the value of the engineering process and iteration was the biggest single takeaway for me at this event.


At one point Michelle Mabuyo, the lead of the KW Chapter of Canada Learning Code, ran into a problem with the animations we were running on our websites.  Without hesitation she immediately attacked the problem using the same engineering process I continually drill into my students.  As she iterated attempts at fixing the problem she kept escalating her scale, eventually reverse engineering the error out of the code from a known good, working program.


Watching someone who is good at something turn it on and do their thing is something I really enjoy.  Michelle wasn’t aiming to put on an engineering show, this was supposed to be a gentle introduction to web development, but an error made her kick it up a gear and engineer a solution in real time.  My best seniors get to this point by the end of high school, and when they do I know they’re ready to tackle whatever post secondary is going to throw at them.


At one point Muhammad, a software engineer from Google who was volunteering at this event, came by to see how I was doing.  He doesn’t spend any time in HTML at Google, but once you understand how code works, you can move laterally into other languages quite quickly.  I was trying to do something with the falling hearts animations that was a bit beyond the instructions, so he said what I always say, “look it up!”  I told him about the Futurama Fry meme and he laughed because he has a copy pinned up by his desk… and he’s a software engineer!


That self deprecating piece is something that people who are good at something tend towards.  The cocky types tend to be way back in the Dunning-Kruger effect.  People who are good at something tend to be aware of how difficult it is and are more likely to take a more humble approach.


I really enjoyed our nerdy Friday night Valentine’s Day at Canada Learning Code.  I always doubt myself coming in to something like this (my comp-sci teacher did a number on me in high school), but coding (at least when you’re doing it as something other than an academic exercise) isn’t about mathematical perfection, though that was how it was portrayed in my high school comp-sci classes before I dropped them.  Coding is an applied process; it’s about an experimental, agile, iterative mindset and never taking your eye off the goal of a functioning solution.  From that point of view, coding is little different than tuning the carburetor on my motorcycle.


I have no doubt that I could get more fluent in coding, but it’s a small part of the many subjects I juggle when teaching Ontario’s vague and encompassing computer engineering curriculum.  In the meantime, I’ve got the agility and experience to quickly find solutions and modify them to work, and I need to acknowledge those skills.  From that I could quickly develop the familiarity with coding needed to do it with less lookup.  As a goal for my students, that’s an achievable, applied target, and not something to be ashamed of.


As we were wrapping things up another of the volunteers came by and commented on how much he liked the flip-card 3d effect in HTML.  I asked him how it worked and you can guess what he said… look it up!  So I did, and was able to get it working in about 5 minutes at the end of the session.


Coding is an opportunity to take risks and not worry about failing because iterating your way out of a problem is the solution.  I only wish more computer science teachers would take that approach in Ontario classrooms.





If you get a chance, go to a Canada Learning Code workshop.  They have specific meetings for girls, kids, women, teachers and teens, so you can always find a comfortable fit.


At the end of this particular meeting they also offered some pathways for people looking for a career change, which is a whole other angle to this.  Coding familiarity is a vital employment skill these days.

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Just over three years ago I stumbled across the inaugural CyberTitan Student Cybersecurity Competition on ICTC’s webpage while looking up statistics for the information and communication technology job market.  I managed to convince four of my seniors to take a swing at it.  We got better and better round over round as we honed in on the expectations of the US CyberPatriot competition that CyberTitan works from.


In the competition students are given a virtual machine image (imagine a computer operating system like Windows operating inside a window).  These images are broken, with improper settings and things installed that shouldn’t be.  If you’ve ever had to try and clean a school laptop after a student has used it, you know what sort of messes can occur.


We were already pretty good at IT & Networking and CyberTitan offered us a way to exercise those skills while also discovering a newly emerging aspect of computing:  cybersecurity.  I found that our expansion into CyberTitan directly supported our Skills Ontario preparation – the two things are symbiotic.


We surprised ourselves by getting an email inviting us to the first Canadian National Finals in Fredericton, New Brunswick in May of 2018…

That success made some noise and the next year we had three teams of six students each.  While standing at the student photo for the 2018 finals, Sandra Saric, then VP of Innovation with ICTC, said under her breath, “where are all the girls?”  I took that and ran with it, encouraging my strongest grade 9 girls (I barely keep any of them into senior computer engineering classes) to form an all-female team for the 2018-19 season.


The girls did fabulously well, often chasing down our senior team on points.  Our junior team, the Cybears, also got us into the top tier of the competition for the first time before getting eliminated in the state finals.  The Terabytches offered me an inside look into systemic sexism in education as well as technology and made it clear why so many girls don’t pursue technology pathways in high school and beyond.


The Terabytches won the top female team in Canada wildcard spot for the 2018-19 National Finals in Ottawa and did a lot of press which I think (hope?) opened up the possibility of ICT and cybersecurity careers to more girls.

While 2019 was definitely the year of the Terabytches, it was also a good year consolidating our skills and building capacity.  For the first time in 2019/20 we had students returning who were no longer rookies in the competition (our first year team had all graduated).  For the 2020 season I encouraged the most experienced and engaged students to make a senior team with the intent of scoring higher in the competition than we’d ever done previously.  The team consisted of one of the Terabytches from the year before and the junior team who had gone platinum.  They re-branded themselves Kings Guard and tackled the 2020 competition with a focus that can only come from experience.  


In previous years we were usually the best of the rest, getting beaten by specialist, urban schools from the big cities across Canada.  This year Kings Guard beat all but two of those teams for a third place finish in the semi-final round.  We went top-tier platinum and then proceeded to land in the top quarter of the best teams in the world.  We’d never breathed the air up here, and it tasted good!


The Terabytches experienced some turnover, but with three veterans and three  rookies,

consistently beat their national champion scores from the year before.  Our two junior teams also scored well, with Altron in particular punching well above their weight.  Both junior teams made it to the gold tier semi-finals and produced strong results.  Altron finished top 12 in the world out of thousands of teams.  Seeing our little, rural school (it is literally surrounded by farm fields) on a list with some of the top cyber-schools in North America never gets old.


We’re waiting on CyberTitan to announce the Canadian finalists for this year’s competition as I write this, but regardless of the outcome this year’s students have produced outstanding results which point to a way forward for educators across Canada who want to engage their students with a subject that frankly freaks people out.


We aren’t magic.  What got us into this was an opportunity to explore an emerging field in technology and make our program more relevant.  If you’re curious and willing to give it a whirl, and can find students with the same curiosity, you can get involved with CyberTitan and begin to build capacity in this vital 21st Century fluency too.

Krista Sarginson, who teaches at St Leonard in Manotick near Ottawa, took the plunge this year and had an epic rookie season, finishing second in Canada in the middle school division.  As more teachers get involved with CyberTitan, the network grows, as does the support.


Krista described the competition early on as techy and quite particular, but it didn’t take long for her to get a handle on the process and, as you can see from her team’s results, they very quickly got good at it!  What could happen next?  Hopefully her Cyberlions all head off to middle school (St Leonard is a k-6 school) and encourage them to participate next year.  Those vets are likely to clinch a national title!  Meanwhile, Krista is encouraging and engaging other teachers in her board.


What does your school get out of CyberTitan?  It teaches students and staff hands on about best cybersecurity practices and raises your digital literacy in meaningful ways.  Your board’s IT department will love your participation in it as it helps raise awareness around cybersecurity and promotes a healthier digital infrastructure.  The media glow around it is also very positive.  We’ve had a lot of attention from local and provincial media who are also very aware of the cybersecurity shortage we’re living in.  I won’t mention the swag students and coaches receive that includes t-shirts, all sorts of technical support, access to Cisco’s Netacademy, along with medals and awards.


You can find lots of statistics on how behind we are on cybersecurity, and education can play a big part in that.  The CyberTitan/Cyberpatriot competition offers students and teachers a well supported and engaging introduction to this exciting field of study, you should give it a go!

This is what nearly 600% growth looks like – it’s gone from a niche activity to a culture…

CyberTitan is only in its third year and has seen growth similar to our own, with over 200 teams from across Canada participating this year.  It’s my hope that by 2022 there are over 500 teams competing and the national finals is expanded to include three middle school teams who will duke it out for their own national title.


If we’re going to depend on ICT infrastructure to run our critical infrastructure (and we increasingly are), then we owe it to ourselves to take securing that infrastructure seriously.  ICTC’s CyberTitan helps raise cyber-fluency in our education system which will in turn make for a safer, more secure Canada.

***


Wondering how to support CyberTitan from industry?
https://www.cybertitan.ca/index.php/about/partners-and-sponsors/become-a-partnersponsor/


Wondering how to support CyberTitan from government?
https://www.cybertitan.ca/index.php/about/partners-and-sponsors/national-program-ambassadors/


How CyberTitan works:
https://www.cybertitan.ca/index.php/competition-results-2018-2/how-the-competition-works/


This is the US CyberPatriot competition that CyberTitan works with:
https://www.uscyberpatriot.org/Pages/About/What-is-CyberPatriot.aspx


Here’s the presentation I’ve been doing around Ontario education for the past two years:
https://prezi.com/h4kf8yfkdtyr/?utm_campaign=share&utm_medium=copy

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One of my strengths as a teacher is my overdeveloped sense of empathy.  It’s also why I’m often exhausted at the end of a day.  The recent state of affairs in Ontario education has gotten to the point where I have to time my exposure to this negativity as it infects my thinking elsewhere.  I’m trying to balance the need to make political noise to stop the sociopaths in government with my own mental health.


The end of semester one happened and I came home one day hanging on by my fingernails.  As is typical in most Ontario classrooms, I have a staggeringly wide range of students.  My recent grade 9 class contained students who were functionally illiterate with others who are already operating two grades ahead of where they should be.  I’m somehow supposed to deliver meaningful, differentiated instruction to all twenty five of them.  This reaches peak pressure as the semester ends and these grade 9s, who have never learned in a semestered system before, struggled to understand that the course is ending and I won’t be their teacher any more.  When my wife saw the state of me she said, “you’re a sponge” soaking up all of this stress and negativity.


Chasing the strays and getting marks in is exhausting, and often simply an exercise in damage control rather than a learning opportunity.  Marking exams was also interesting.  I share all the theory tests we did throughout the semester online and can see when students make use of them in studying.  The vast majority of my grade 9s, 10s and 11s spent less than 20 minutes reviewing for exams.  Our class averages typically landed at about 60% with 1/4 of each class failing.  Even when you hand the actual exam questions over to students, a frustrating large number of them can’t be bothered to lift a finger to review it, though they all expect a good mark for it.


This is partly to do with the fact that we’re forced to do academic style exams to protect the academic style exam schedule, even though we’re an applied, skills driven course, but it also has to do with how modern students accept responsibility for their learning.  They are repeatedly conditioned not to take on this responsibility.  Attendance has become entirely optional – I have two students away on extended vacations at the beginning of semester two and I had many students with more than three weeks of absences in semester one.  In addition to lax attendance expectations, students know that wherever possible their learning is done for them, often in line with standardized testing.  This learning is neither individualized nor differentiated and does little to foster the life long learning that would genuinely assist students in the world beyond our classrooms.


I don’t usually look at the grades students are getting in other classes and without knowing I’m usually grading them similarly to their other grades in the building, but this semester I did look.  Grades are up across the board.  You’d be hard pressed to find a teacher that fails a student because they tend to get passed anyway in promotions meetings or given absurdly reduced expectations in a credit recovery class, so why pick the fight?  That sense of helplessness is becoming an epidemic in Ontario education as a remorseless political group with dwindling popularity continues to attack a system most of them never participated in.  I’m still ruminating on the connection between teacher efficacy and student learning outcomes.  I suspect countries like Finland (and Canada before this neo-conservative press) offer a high level of teacher efficacy which leads to higher standards and stronger students.  When the system thumps efficacy out of teachers, as it is right now, standards drop.  It’ll be interesting to see if the data supports this in the coming years.


The crushing weight of all of this squeezes the life out of me at semester’s end.  When it’s happening between intermittent strike days and the guy in charge of education (who was never in public education himself) repeatedly saying that we’re greedy and selfish, it all knocks me down yet another peg.


When I’m pressed under this kind of emotional weight, it colours my ability to assess the world around me.  Things that probably aren’t that bad appear to be, but it’s hard to see that.


Last month I wrote a piece trying to work out teacher pay.  I’m usually happy if a Dusty World post hits a thousand page views.  For a specialist blog on education, I think that’s a good result.  Easy Money is currently at just over thirty thousand page views and speaks to the curiosity that people have around the misinformation being spread in this political climate.  That our Ministry of Education produced these misleading numbers is yet another layer of frustration.  Teachers are still teachers if they are part time, on short term contract or away on sick leave, but our Ministry ignored all that and gave their political masters what they asked for – a misleading statistic that promotes their politics.  I wrote Easy Money to wrap my head around a more nuanced and detailed understanding of the subject.  That moment of over-attention chased me off blogging, which I’ve never done for views.  Some of the things people say to you if you dare to challenge their politics is truly nasty.  Dusty World has always been a place I can come and work out my thinking.  If others benefit from that then great, but its function is to help me reflect on my own practice, not generate page views.  Maybe in taking that back Dusty World can keep the darkness at bay in an Ontario drowning in deep blue rhetoric.

Being quiet while mad men try to burn down your profession and a vital public resource shouldn’t be an option for any Ontario educator. Speak up, there are lots of ways to do it, but also look after yourself too.

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I’m just wrapping up this conference in Toronto and it’s another week before we’re back at it in class.  This is a small conference where you get to meet and talk to many of the participants.  By the end of the three days you’re familiar with a lot of faces, which doesn’t happen at the bigger events.

I was invited to demonstrate virtual reality research my students and I have done in class over the past year.  Bringing all the kit involved in setting up multiple VR sets is like bringing all you’d need to project a movie… in 1930.  These are the heaviest, most awkward VR sets people will ever experience and it took a car load of tech to set up two headsets.


This ‘state of the art’ technology that is a pain to set up and far from perfect might seem like an odd choice to bring to a teacher technology focused conference.  Where everyone else is showing off cloud based software tools or simple electronics, I’m here with this astonishingly complex and expensive technology that clearly isn’t for everyone, but that’s why I brought it.

If you’d have shown up at an education technology conference in 2008 with a touch screen tablet that could run apps, create digital media and replace 80% of the work you do on a desktop computer, you’d have looked a bit mad.  Everyone there would wonder why you’re showing off this stuff from Star Trek since it’ll never be used in a classroom.  Eighteen months later Apple would produce the first ipad and everyone’s mind would change.


When I first tried the latest evolution in virtual reality last spring I was surprised at how accessible it had become.  From bespoke systems that cost tens of thousands of dollars we suddenly saw Oculus and then HTC Vive appear with thousand dollar headsets that would run on a decent desktop computer.  It’s not often you see an evolutionary leap that drastic and effective in computer technology (think ipad levels of advancement over a PDA).  The prices have since dropped again to under $600.

Bringing VR as it is now (big, awkward, complex) to an educational conference on technology was an opportunity to show people where we’ll be in the next five years.  Heavy, hot, wired and expensive VR sets with lots of setup and complication won’t be how many people first experience VR, but it’s important for educators to be ahead of mass adoption and think about how media is evolving so that we’re able to effectively harness it when that ipad moment happens.


VR is evolving so rapidly that it has reached a kind of critical mass with research and development support.  Money that used to go elsewhere is being focused on VR development which is further accelerating an already hot technology sector.  This means you’ll be using VR in your classroom a lot sooner than you think.  Wouldn’t it be something if teachers knew something about it before that happens?

I had a lot of people walk up to the station and ask me what company I’m with, even though this was a Minds on Media event and that means it’s run by teachers for teachers.  There is a lot of subtext in the question.  The assumption that I had to be some kind of engineer with a VR company comes from a place where teachers assume they aren’t experts on tech, but many are and we should make a point of recognizing those skills as they are a key to improving technical fluency in Ontario education.  The other assumption became apparent when people asked me how I could possibly have put this together in an Ontario classroom.


I’m lucky there.  My school board makes a point of exploring emerging technologies with the Specialist High Skills Major program.  Without that support my expertise as a former IT technician is wasted, but with that support we have an example of an Ontario classroom exploring the leading edge of emerging technologies.  The first thing we did after figuring out how to get VR working (and this was a team effort with myself, our board IT department and my senior computer engineering students) was to begin building and setting up VR sets for other schools.  This capacity building led to one of my students returning to his elementary school as a coop student and assisting them with their VR research which in turn led us to becoming an ICT SHSM program for the first time.  There is a virtuous circle when we enable the technical skills of Ontario teachers and use it to actively engage with evolving educational technology rather than waiting for it to surprise us.

I tend to shy away from turn-key digital substitutions of existing class work.  If it is relying on computers and networks you’ve introduced so much complication into something that achieves the same learning goal more simply that I don’t bother.  If a poster making session in class would do it, why bother going digital?  But there are moments with technology where it offers you something so profoundly different from what you could do in an analog classroom that it begs you to use it.  VR did that for us with an opportunity to build digital 3d models and design software for VRspace.


Running Tiltbrush for art teachers from elementary to senior high school always prompted the same result.  Artists get excited by a new medium and this is that.  If you’ve never sculpted with light before, you can in VR.  Using something as immersive and tactile as VR is much better than explaining it.  After explaining VR many asked me what the point of it was.  After trying VR most of them were lit up by it, suddenly imagining all the possibilities, and that’s what I was there for.  I’m not selling you on a platform, or a company, or a carefully designed analog replacement, I’m offering you a glimpse into the future.  If you left full of excitement at the possibilities, and pretty much everyone did, then my job was done.


VR offers 3d, immersive interaction with a digital world we’ve only been able to peer through a 2d monitor at before.  This will change everything, again.

Dozens of links and lots of information on how to get started in VR in your classroom, check it out!

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I’ve been thinking about an Appalachian ride, but didn’t get around to it this year.  So here is a nice travel idea for an end of year ride before the snows fall…




Saturday, October 20:  Ride from Elora to Hotel Crittenden in Coudersport, Pennsylvania (~350kms)
Sunday, October 21:  Cross Fork/Snow Shoe/Jersey Shore loop (~360kms)
Monday, October 22:  Liberty/Hillsgrove/Williamsport (~350kms)
Tuesday, October 23:  Coudersport back home to Elora (~350kms)




Hotel Crittenden is a lovely four star hotel with a pub/restaurant on site.  At this time of year it’s only about $150 Canadian a night.  What’s nice about returning to the same spot every evening is that I can leave the luggage behind and ride light on the loop days, enjoying the twisty roads without the weight and faff.


The two loop day rides through the Appalachians were generated in Google Maps from Motorcycleroads.com’s northern New York State maps.  It’s a good site for locating twisties anywhere you want to ride in North America.


All told it would be about 1400kms in four days, but any of the loop days have opportunities to extend or cut short the ride if conditions require it.


One thing to consider when riding this late in the year (within 8 weeks of mid-winter solstice), is that the days are short and getting shorter.  Sunset in northern Pennsylvania in mid-October happens around 6:30pm, so you wouldn’t be pushing for 500+km/12 hour days in the saddle  unless you wanted to be out on unfamiliar, rural, mountain roads after dark… in hunting season.


Pennsylvania has some of the largest northern boreal forests in the world.  Most other forests this far north get too coniferous to be colourful in the fall.  From Ontario down through northern New York State and into northern Pennsylvania, it would be a very colourful few days racking up motorcycle miles before the end of the always-too-short Canadian motorcycling season.

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