Educating the Digital Generation

Last week, I wrote about why WordPress is a great option for teachers who want to quickly create a website. Today’s post explains, step by step, how to get a WordPress blog up and running. The goal: to create an interactive, useful and attractive website in under an hour.

Are you ready to begin? Keyboards at the ready…. Start your stopwatches!

Step 1: Create an account with WordPress.com

The first thing you will need is a place to host your website. Unless you are very technically-minded (or want to maintain complete control) it is usually easier to let someone else do the hosting for you. Many hosting companies will charge you a fee, but the good folks at WordPress.com will allow you to set up a basic blog free of charge. Simply visit www.wordpress.com and click the big button marked ‘get started here’.

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For teachers who want to conduct a global education project with their students, setting up a website can be a daunting experience. This is because it is usually one of the first steps in the project and takes place when the teacher’s knowledge and confidence are at their lowest. Moreover, many teachers see web design as an arcane technical activity that requires a high GQ (geek quotient) for success.

It doesn’t need to be like this. Setting up a website can be quick, cheap and even fun. If you can use a site like Facebook, you can create a website for your class project (More about Facebook later….)

Over the next few blog posts, I will walk you through the steps that I am taking to set up the website for my 2012 global education project. The goal is that you should be able to get a similar website up and running in only a few hours, with the students then doing the bulk of the work to populate the site with interesting content.

As with anything in life, planning is key. It is essential that you decide, in advance, what you want your website to look like. So, spend a few minutes exploring some education blogs and note the things that you might want to include in yours. Consider colours, fonts and graphics. Most of all, take a moment to write down all of the things that annoy you when you are surfing the web. That cute flashing graphic might appear cute on the first visit but your aim is to have visitors return again and again and again. If in doubt, keep it simple.

Next, create a mockup of your website. A big piece of butcher’s paper will work just fine. However, I have enjoyed using a nifty little iPad app called iMockups. This is a tool which lets you quickly create a ‘wireframe’ version of your website. Unlike a piece of butcher’s paper, however, iMockups let’s you move elements around and experiment with different colours and proportions until you find a look and feel that you are happy with.

Here is my current mockup for the EarthShaker Project’s website:

iMockups includes a realistic preview mode which allows you to visualize how visitors will navigate through your site. Of course, the one thing it doesn’t do is create your website for you. That will be the topic of my next post: creating a website using WordPress.

Time: 1 hour
Cost: $A 7.49 (cost of iMockups from iTunes App Store)

I learned the importance of branding in a previous project, Podkids Australia. People may forget my name or the name of my school but they always remembered the Podkids. Retailers have long known this —-  a catchy name and a memorable logo provide a shorthand way for the community to remember a product. If schools want to build an authentic audience for their students’ work, then they cannot ignore the principles of marketing.

So, when planning the EarthShaker Project, one of my first tasks was to design a logo. I liked the fact that the name of the project abbreviated to ‘ESP’ and I started playing with these letters to see how they would fit together. Here’s what I came up with:

I am not a graphic designer but one trait I do have is a willingness to explore, learn and play. So, I downloaded a free vector graphics program called Inkscape. Inkscape is one of those dream apps that every school should have. It is powerful, cross-platform (Windows / Linux / Mac), open-source and completely free!

I had never used a vector graphics program before but by reading the online documentation, I was able to quickly create a  more polished version of the logo.

The idea was that the blue circle represented the Earth while the letters represented our students, their project and their efforts to make a difference in the world.

Then the fun began. Inkscape includes dozens of free filters that allow you to change the look and feel of your image without changing its underlying structure. I experimented happily for almost an hour trying different colours, textures until I got the look and feel that I was after.

All up, this took almost three hours. However, I learned an enormous amount and had a lot of fun along the way. Opportunities for creative play (and the associated professional growth) are yet another wonderful side-benefit of projects such as these.

Expect to see this logo all over the web in 2012.

Time spent to date: 3 hours
Money spent to date: $0

I have just started the planning stages of my 2012 global education project. It’s called the EarthShaker Project and is inspired by Alan November’s concept of a digital learning farm. Alan’s work really resonated with me. I see it as the perfect way to integrate values education, digital literacy and global awareness with the traditional curriculum.

One common complaint about projects such as these is that they take up too much teacher time and require a level of technical expertise that most teachers don’t possess. So, I have decided to document each stage of my project to demonstrate that projects such as these are achievable for any teacher with a dash of enthusiasm and a willingness to move outside of their traditional role.

Over the coming months I will be keeping track of the time (and any money) that I spend setting up this project. Hopefully, this will provide my fellow teachers with a useful guide to the benefits, shortcuts, pitfalls and joy associated with running a global education project.

I hope you come along for the ride.

Photograph by Alec Couros, used under Creative Commons licence.

School is not preparation for life. School is a part of life. Children spend some of their most precious years in this place. And into these school years they pour their dreams, their hopes and their unimaginable potential.

Yet we continue to tell children that we are preparing them for the ‘real world’ — a place which, by definition, must lay beyond the school gates. We tell them to pay attention, that the information they are learning now will be important to them later on. We tell them to sit still, to wait patiently, to play the game of school. Without meaning to, we send the message that what happens in school is not real. Only adults can have an impact in this world.

For 2012, I want to challenge this assumption. I want to prove that a class of primary school students, operating in the 21st century, has the capacity to change the world.

My project for 2012 is called ‘the Earth Shaker Project’. In my Year Six class at Landsdale Primary School, I want to empower my students to change the world for the better.

I have already identified a number of ways in which this is possible. These include:

Most significantly, this project will be owned by the students. They will choose the projects and they will do the work. And don’t doubt for a second that there will be plenty of work! However, it will be real work for a real purpose carried out in the real world.

I can’t wait to see what they accomplish.

(Draft plan for the Earth Shaker Project)