 Hello, hello and welcome to our Learn With The Expert, our discussion tonight with Dr. Ruben Puentadora. Excited to have you joining us. You should be able to turn on your camera and microphone as you're joining us. So feel free to do that because tonight really, we get to or today, depending on where you are in the world, we get to have a discussion, welcome. So glad to see you, is it Juliette? Yes, it is, I am in Australia. Welcome and Juliette, where are you joining us from? Brisbane, Australia, Brisbane Queensland. Awesome, welcome. What time is it there? It's probably the morning, tomorrow. It is, it's 10.30 tomorrow. It's wonderful, this thing about time is fantastic. I have got a question. In the session the other day, we were talking about you discussing chat GPT, but I can't find any links to that. Ah, okay, let me remedy that by giving you that link one second. That's wonderful. You have no idea how much your work is influencing mine because I'm educating educators, helping them to learn how to apply the summer model because in Australia, we don't seem to have, yeah, there's a lot of talk around using technology and it's being used extensively, but getting teachers to a mindset where they're willing to take risks and coaching them through, your model has been fundamental to that and also taking them up and down through it, seeing it as a liquid, like being on the lift, you can move according to what your need is. And I think that so many times people have shown it, the summer model as a hierarchy thing, not realizing just as you blend physical teaching with crayons and books and letters and all sorts of things and experiential, it's a blend, it's a movement through. So I just want to say thank you on a personal level because I've been 33 years in the classroom and I've been now into a situation of teaching teachers. So it's fantastic. Thank you, Julia. You did the best intro that we could have done for our event for sure. So I know that we have a few other people and I want to encourage them also to join us with their cameras and microphones. If they feel comfortable, if you don't, we totally understand and feel free to use the chat or the Q&A that's on the right-hand side of your screen at the bottom. If it's not open, you can click the little button to open it up. So feel free to turn on your cameras and microphones if you want to to join us. And Julia, I loved that introduction and the impact of the summer model and just Ruben's work has definitely seen a lot of different places. So tonight we just, or today I keep on saying tonight, but wherever we get to join right now and ask questions to Ruben. It's kind of an open time for us to have these discussions. So please feel free to throw your questions in the chat or unmute and ask them as well. And we can start with your question, Julia, and I'll let Ruben respond. And before, sorry, I just want to do a quick introduction. My name is Tracy Purdy and I am the Training and Professional Development Manager at Seesaw. And we're just really excited to be able to bring Ruben here to have this discussion and hopefully you were able to join us over the last couple of days for his talks. If not, those will be available to you in a follow-up email so you can watch them at another time. So take it away, Ruben. Welcome. Thank you. Well, thank you again for the welcome and listen, Julia, thank you so much for your very kind words. I have to add one more thing, which is Brisbane is an amazing city. It's been very kind to me. Every time I've been there, I've had wonderful experiences working teams there. So I'm very, very happy indeed to hear that you're using the SAMR model and the research to work with educators. So thank you so much. Regarding chat GPT, your question, I've just put in the chat, the link. It's in the future of Education Forum. And I've linked all the sessions that are currently in plan, but mine is the second from the top and you'll have all the links, scheduling, et cetera, information there. And again, part of what I'm going to be talking about is not just chat GPT, but also generative AI in general, as well as the bigger panorama of AI and education. Because I think there's a whole series of questions that have been opened up here and they're worth discussing. I think it's more than just an immediate well, good, bad, so the press reaction has, I fear, not been terribly thoughtful in either direction. So I really want to discuss how these tools play out in education, yes, where they play out relative to SAMR, what can be a thing now for the future. What I might be looking at. So that's what's on the menu there. Thank you. Thank you. My pleasure. And again, if you have other questions, please, as well as anybody else. And as we already have, there's eight other people right now. So please join us on stage. Again, this is intended as a conversation. There are topics I'm happy to cover, but view this as an open discussion session. I really, we had one session, which was primarily with people from the teaching side of work and education. The other session was primarily with people from administration and leadership. And I'm hoping that we can also get some conversations among the groups happening, because I also feel that that's a crucial piece of the puzzle to make things work. So, oh, so good evening, Hortens. Welcome. Again, feel free, please, to join us on stage and or ask in the Q&A, whatever you feel most comfortable with, please. And I'm curious, you say you're a homeroom teacher, joining us from where today? And Juliette, what did you say your role was? Oh, you're muted, you. Yeah? Let me go back there. Sorry, no, sorry. I was fiddling with the settings to try and give me a background, while you're not looking at my kitchen. Sorry, I was in the classroom for 33 years and I was in high school and I was not an IT teacher. So everything that I've done has been self-taught to some extent and then directed by other people because I think mentors are really important, which is why you're so wonderful, Riven. But I'm now in a situation where I'm an education innovation specialist for Datacombe, which is a company that understands that in order for our students to be able to enter the knowledge economy, they need to have the skills, but they're not going to get the skills if we don't get the skills to teachers. So by addressing and supporting teachers in the classroom to become more confident and competent and comfortable with different tools and their applications in a very sound, pedagogical way, that's going to have a filtering on effect with the students where they can learn agency and they can learn to have self-confidence and they can learn ownership, but they have to be taught it. And if we don't teach the teachers and show them how to step through and develop their skills and learn how to be tolerant to ambiguity, being willing to try new things but it's not going to happen. I'm terribly sorry about the noise, I'm going to get into business buildings going around me, so forgive me. Oh please, don't worry. Great, thank you for that, Juliet. Any, we would love to have any of the other participants either share in the chat just what your role is. And yep, Juliet, don't be shy, you can join us on the stage the whole entire time, we love having you, so anybody who wants to join us, please come on up, but we would love to have you share your role in the chat as well so that we know if you are an administrator or a teacher. Oh, good, you're back. Wonderful. I had to close the windows. I had to close the windows, that's not so noisy. Great, and welcome, Jenny Lamar. You are welcome to turn on your camera and microphone if you want. If not, it does look like we have a question that did come in. I think these can get us started, Ruben, and then we can have our participants answer your questions in the Q&A or feel free to just unmute your microphone and share. But one of the questions that we get a ton, and I'll maximize this question that we got here of, how do I push my teachers to get out of those initial steps of SAMR, so just out of substitution and augmentation and move a little bit deeper into that modification and redefinition phases? That's a great question. And one of the first things I always encourage people to do is to wait carefully the pros and cons of taking that step, right? Because I've seen some people get very enthusiastic and say, oh, now let's push forward and sometimes teachers aren't quite ready to take the step. So that's the first thing to do. You need to evaluate, are they comfortable enough with what they've done so far that they can move forward? Now in some cases, it's a question of having the teacher realize for themselves that in fact they are ready. But in other cases, you might be saying, well, okay, so what's the first step? Well, make sure that you sit down with them and you say, how happy are you with what's happened up till now? Where would you like to go next? So you can assess where they're at. And one of the key elements here then in terms of moving from substitution to an augmentation to modification and redefinition, is this is the point at which you're moving from enhancing an activity we're already doing to doing something that either significantly changes it or adds something completely new. So the second question to be asked here is, well, why would you like to change this? And if the teacher is saying, I'm actually perfectly happy as things are, then you may have a situation where in fact, it may not be the best candidate at least at this point to move forward. You might be saying, well, let's do this and say, but it's working well, why? And this is something I always mention. You know, I, for instance, mentioned, I read a lot of research papers in my work and there are a lot of tools I use to organize those and so on. But if I'm talking about the reading itself, at the end of the day, I'm reading them on very traditional e-readers. You could say that that aspect of my work is in fact occurring at an augmentation level because I do use some extraction tools for extracting quotes that I want, link data that I want to analyze, et cetera. But it's not really moving beyond that because it works well enough at that level. And in fact, I've tried some tools that say, well, look at this amazing tool for taking all your reading stuff and projecting it into 3D, it doesn't work very well. And it doesn't help me with that. So that's one of the key aspects. But let's assume that your teacher does want to do something that is not what they've been doing so far. So then what you want to do is talk with them about, okay, what would be a bite-sized project that you could undertake that would get you what you want in modification and redefinition, right? And I mentioned yesterday a couple of the options. One option is to say you're passionate about something. Can you convey that passion better or an aspect of your passion you haven't been able to convey before? I've had some wonderful experiences, for instance, working with arts educators that tell me they have a passion for how the art works. They work with introducing them to students and how they work with students to have them develop their own artistic practice. How they've always wanted these things to come together to fit together into bigger pictures. But they've done it, but they would like to do it even better so they can show what they see as the constellation of art. I had some amazing experiences talking with our teachers during the pandemic when they were figuring out saying, well, I can't be in the same room working same watercolor with the students. Can I bring more of my passion now that I can't just show them the beauty of what's happening on the paper and the pigments in front of it? And that was a good driver. A second one, as I mentioned, is when you have students that are getting stuck on something. And for instance, you see this a lot in some aspects of mathematics where you see students getting stuck on a topic on a particular concept and having great difficulty. And again, some of the traditional methods don't work very well, but if you can use the technology to construct alternative approaches, multiple ways of thinking about the math, think about it, that will again, significantly change things or add things or take into modification with definition. That's the type of tool that can take a teacher that says, I have so many students who get stuck on this and then really sort of struggle them or have difficulty keeping up or maybe they do okay, but they sort of become somewhat distance from the subject. Well, that's another good approach in terms of finding that with the teacher. And as I said yesterday, the third one is to say, well, what do you think your students really need to know about this to go into the next stage of learning or if they're older students going to the job market or going to higher ed, et cetera. And that's also a good place to look for it because if the teacher feels that, well, I've managed to cover but I haven't managed to focus on this. That's a great place to look for that. So as I say, first assess, is there a real need for this? And second, where that need will give you the maximum benefit. And yesterday, somebody, and I'm sorry, I don't remember right now the name of the person who brought this up, but brought up another option, which is absolutely true when a teacher is actively dissatisfied with how something has been working in the class. So this is not a case of students reaching a barrier, but a teacher feels that something has not gelled, that something has not been quite working. We say, well, let's focus on that. And all of these things have the advantage that they all have clear high cost to benefit ratio. In ours, you're asking the teacher to say, let's take a small step forward further in the technology or what could be a big payoff to you. So that's one of the other things that helps. So make sure that you're not forcing people to move faster than they're ready to move. Make sure they're moving with something that actually does make a difference that you're not accidentally damaging something that's already working just fine as is. And then finally, something in these slides, or again, many other options that could come has a high benefit for a low cost of how you enter into this field. Those are some of the ways I found work well. One last thing, I mentioned this yesterday, but again, I want to emphasize it, the more you can build a community of practice among teachers, the better off it will be. This is really quite central. Somebody, there have been many articles written on the isolation that many teachers feel in their classroom walls, that they feel that they themselves are alone in their classroom and while they have colleagues in their day to day work, they may meet for meetings and so on, but really they're on their own. And if you can shift out of that mode, if that's where you're at, or even if you have a good community of collegiality, but it still isn't a community that works together, building a community of practice that has at least two key components. They discuss what they want to do and then they trade tokens of what they wanna do. And by this, I mean people coming in and saying, hey, I use this tool for X and it's working for me or I use this tool for Y and it's not working. Have any of you tried this, et cetera? So this is important because sometimes you'll have the conversation, but absent the tokens of practice. Okay, and some people think that you mean a physical object, not necessarily, it can be a conceptual object, how I use this tool to achieve this goal. But that's the other key component of a community of practice. And if you have the slides from yesterday, and again, anybody who needs them, please, we've made them available, but if you don't get it, just let us know and we'll make sure you get them. You've got the references from Labian Bangor in terms of how to build communities of practice. And again, I found that this is a very powerful way because people suddenly don't feel that they're on their own making the shift from SA to MR by itself. Okay, we're all kind of pulling our expertise, our knowledge and in a way moving together. Some people will move faster, some people will move slower. It's not, you know, people sometimes assume a community of practice is monolithic. That's not necessarily the case at all. In fact, it usually isn't. But it is supportive of the community's efforts as a whole. Wonderful. Thank you, Rivet, very much. Thank you. Is it Janine that you joined us? Hi, Janine, welcome. Did I say it correctly? Oh, it looks like now you're muted. There we go. Hi, yes, you did say it correctly. Wonderful. Good, and you're joining us from Dodea and you're a district educational technologist. Wonderful, welcome. Thank you. You can either ask questions here. I don't want to put you on the spot, but if you have any, you can either put them in the chat or just jump right in and ask those questions. And anybody else who is joining us too, just know that either turn your camera on or microphone or ask them in the chat or Q&A. Thanks, I know our district is working on digitally enhanced student led discourse. And by trying to add that student led discourse component with a digital tool in, we are looking at ways to leverage that to move people from beyond an S to the AMR levels. And I think a lot of things that were just mentioned really hit home with communities of practice. I think that's a great suggestion to get more buy-in from lots of different avenues. So that's something I definitely want to pursue after that. But we've been focusing also on trying to give more students a voice. And it seems like the minute you incorporate those student led discourse tools in a digital manner, it typically will bump you above an S. The big part is trying to make sure that we allocate the right time and resources to help people meet them where they are so that they can make those incremental changes. And I'm also just looking for more tips and resources on how to kind of, I guess, market those ideas for growth and pushing forward no matter what level you feel you're at because I do think we need to meet people where they are and make things more interesting to people based on what you said, like their passions, their interests, their roadblocks that they want to overcome. So that's why I joined today to get those ideas. And again, community of practice sounds like a wonderful way to really get people to talk. Thank you. Absolutely. No, thank you. And you're absolutely right. When you start bringing in that student voice in meaningful manner, you do indeed tend to push towards the upper levels of SAMR. So let me give a couple of additional suggestions that might be useful. Again, in terms of scaffolding the process, a lot of teachers will say, well, it's one thing when I have students meeting face to face in my classroom, I can see them around the table or whatever the space may be, maybe it's outdoors, et cetera. But I'm not quite sure how to handle it. So one of the ways in which I find that you can scaffold this rather nicely is when you start to say, well, let's build up what the community interactions are like. So an easy place or relatively easy place for teachers to start is in two aspects. One of them synchronous, one of them asynchronous. Insynchronous, any type of peer to peer interactions, peer learning that are peer oriented or very small group oriented. So let's talk for instance about peer oriented activities. You have a think-peer-share type of discussion processes, right? Where you have introduced a question, you break up, there are several ways of doing this, but you introduce a question for discussion by students in pairs to resolve, to address the issue. Again, there's several different paths you can take here and then you have them report back briefly to the group in terms of what you're doing. That type of pair-wise interaction works also very well synchronously if your platform permits it online. And it's an easy one to look at because teachers can see, for instance, if you have, whether you have the room or the type of more chat oriented interface both exist, of course. It allows them to say, oh, okay, I can see what's going on. I can, you know, if any students are sort of stuck, I can help with the process. But it's also something that is conceptually proximal to what they might have been doing physically in the classroom. So that's an example of a synchronous activity that helps this type of transition. And an asynchronous activity that I strongly encourage people to use is blogging. But blogging with what I would call intentional groups. What I mean by this, it's easy to ask students to say, well, instead of writing a paper for me, et cetera, just post what they were interested in or posted a blog. The trouble is that if you just say post to a blog and that's it, it's no different than turning in a paper via email. And if you say post to a blog and then just say in general, well, just have a discussion around it. I can tell you right now that tends to be a place where things don't flow very smoothly unless you have an educator who's already very experienced in moderating and stimulating online conversations. It tends to be a lot of students saying, yep, or good, or I agree, and not much else, right? So what you want to do is you have, and for instance, a CSOR has actually a very nice little blogging tool that allows the students to say, hey, I'll post, but use and say, well, it's not just a generic conversation. You say, okay, you're going to be in reading groups. And typically I do groups of four, I find works very well. And you break up your students into groups of four and you say, in this group, you are all going to be reading each other's blogs, but you're also going to be responsible for posting something that's an addition or a response, a significant response to a blog. It can be use of X. Based upon X, I would like to add Y and Z. Or it could be use of X, but I sort of disagree and I think it's beta or use of X and I don't quite understand. Could you explain this because here is my question. In other words, you ask them to engage beyond this simple approval, disapproval, like this, like level. And that becomes part of the task. And of course, the response to a response becomes part of it. What happens is here, you build students very quickly from just presenting, here's my work, that's it. I'm done with it, whatever grade I get, I grade. And that's it, to being groups of writers and readers. And that's important. That's important because it gives them a meaning to the task because they're all relating to each other. It also gives them a practice of how they interact. And I've seen amazing results, frankly, in terms of classrooms of students that work, not terribly engaged with the materials and become very engaged when they're in these small groups responding to each other. And that's mostly an asynchronous activity. So that's why I said you have one synchronous, one asynchronous to build a path. And then finally, in a mode that can be both simultaneously asynchronous and synchronous to build out, but I recommend that you build out from one of these smaller activities. It's when you build out a genuine or authentic audience for your students. So this is where your students are interested in biology. And one of the things that has always, to me, seemed frankly problematic at points is when you bring in the expert that they give a talk to the students in the class saying, hi, I'm a biologist, I work in ecosystems. They answer a few questions and that's it. But there's no way for a student to really follow up on their interest or say, this is what matters to me about my community, the world I live in, et cetera. Let me show you what I made, what I did. So this is where you can build out a broader community by having students. And again, this is where some people say, well, I'll just put it out there. No, you have to separate the process. And there is some work involved in this. And it can range from in some areas, for instance, for writing there are good online groups to discuss bringing together students from different cultures and ways that go beyond the traditional pen pal for this type of interaction. In communities like the sciences, particularly these days with climate change, you'll find some very good groups. I'm talking right now with a group that's hopefully, it's very, very early history, but it got the backing of UNESCO to bring some of these, move some of these conversations forward among students. So you have, again, an environment that is scaffolded by groups of people that have both an interest and a responsibility in an area and really get into this. Oh, Joe, write the world, absolutely. Excellent platform, thank you. I agree. Very, very good example of this. So this type of scaffolded process gets students to, this is where you really begin to move into MR because these are audiences they normally would not have had, these are audiences that they normally wouldn't have been able to reach. And yet, when they can, it's transformative really in terms of what the students understand and what they see as their own sense of agency. This to me is a, you've hardly say this on both sessions, but the idea that students need to have a sense of agency, even very young students, you know, it's to me very interesting to see the difference. Just when you go with, even if the activity hasn't changed all that much, but the student suddenly realizes, wait, the way I'm doing it, I have more choice. I have more of a decision orientation in terms of how I can do this can make a huge, huge difference. And it's not really just for older students. I've seen this, for instance, with pre-K and kindergarten students. Some of the most fun I've ever had has been working with kindergarten students where they are doing robotics projects and using them to tell stories. And suddenly it's kind of, well, it's not just, okay, everybody make the robot, the ladybug move from one end of the room to the other and pick up the ball along the way. It's a, sure, they are learning how to do the basic coding and robotics, et cetera, to do it. But it's because the ladybug you see is actually, this is a story I was told, it's actually a robber. And the robber is being chased by cats, the protective, and it was the most amazing story. I was like, wow, can we get this kid a script writing job in TV, this is much better than what I hear normally. It's much more fun. So even for a very young student, this sense of agency can make a huge, huge difference in terms of what they can accomplish, how they can accomplish in their engagement in a real sense with the test. So to, sorry, to get back to your point, these are the types of ways in which I recommend scaffolding exactly the type of process for what you were discussing. And I'm very happy to hear that that's the path you're following because it's been incredibly fruitful in my experience. Thank you for... Thank you for that. Your work. Yes, thank you, Jeanine. Claire, welcome. We wanna make sure that you have an opportunity to ask your question if you have one. I don't wanna put you on the spot. And Valerie, welcome too. You can either join us or stay off camera. Either one is great. So if you have a question, jump on in or else put it in the Q&A. Either one is great. I can help you unmute if it's hard to unmute, but just let us know. Looking here to see if, let's see. Just scroll quickly through the chat to make sure. We see you talking and it looks like your microphone is on, but for some reason we can't hear you. Yeah, just a second. I actually have a question for you as well. Being a former fourth and sixth grade teacher, I was a digital learning specialist for a while, we would always talk about the SAMR model as a swimming pool. And I'm really curious to hear your reflection on that and whether you agree with that or not. I know you talk about it more as like a ladder going up and down and we talked about it as a swimming pool of like dabbling in the shallow end of that S and sometimes swimming to the deep end, but when you're swimming, you're not always in that deep end. And so I mean someone who told us to a lot of different teachers, I would absolutely love to know your opinion on that. I'm absolutely fine with the swimming pool metaphor. And I don't view it as contradicting the ladder metaphor. It's a question of context and which metaphors work better in different senses, right? So the ladder works better when you're talking about saying, well, let's start with the easier things that some of the things are more proximal to your practice and gradually work away from them. The swimming pool metaphor works better when you're trying to say, well, let's think about what's appropriate to a given level and realize that sometimes, sure, you're going into the deep end, but sometimes you're in the shallow and that's fine too, that it's not necessarily, you can't, you don't always have to be swimming at the deep end of the pool and there's absolutely nothing there's much to be gained from swimming in the shallows as well. So if I would either metaphor, and again, I do want to emphasize something I've mentioned, there isn't necessarily, when I talked about yesterday, for instance, the idea of saying, well, when you're working with people developing at the start of their integration of technology units using SAMR and saying, well, start with the grounding knowledge at S, then the development of the unit at AMM and then the culminating experience at R. There's nothing magical about that, okay? It's something that I found works well for people who are starting out, but as you develop your practice, please feel free to go anywhere you want in the spectrum. It has to be what works. It has to be what's appropriate to what you're doing. And one other thing I always mention is sometimes you can do some things because you incorporate the technology that do not necessarily require the technology but you couldn't have done without it. And let me show you again, I showed this little model the other day, but here we go, okay? This is 3D printed. And one of the things I've found is it's very interesting to see what you can do in the arts or in architecture or in social studies by allowing students to play with a range of simulations. So this particular little model is associated with an experiment I'm running in terms of understanding how cities and communities might change, particularly in the context of climate change. How you can view that as representing all sorts of information in terms of a community as well as where people live. So you start to get into what some people have called the hidden structure or the hidden life of cities where you're talking about, well, it's not just here's a house but how do people get to and from that house? Where do they go for entertainment? Where do they go to relax? Where do they go for work, et cetera? Or do they work at home? All of these things start to tell you something about cities. And as I say, I've been working on this. But the interesting thing is that I find that there's a very interesting ping-pong that you can do in these domains where you experiment with lots of virtual things on screen. A subset of those get printed out or made into a physical object. And then you go with the students and you do activities in the world that may not use the technology directly at all. They may simply use, let's now walk in our city and let's talk with each other based upon the understanding those models that we printed out, et cetera. What did we see when we were able to explore those virtual or theoretical patterns? What are we looking for now in the physical world? And maybe there, so maybe you're taking a few pictures or something like that, but at the end of the day, the activity is physical. But that activity to have been very difficult to do or do as meaningfully if you didn't have that world of exploration preceding it. So this is the other thing I encourage people to do. Sometimes you even get out of the pool altogether so to speak, but you go to a new, can we, let's take the pool metaphor and run the poor thing far further than it should be run. Okay, but you're going to a different part of this sports or gym or park or recreational complex, whatever it is that you never would have gone to before. But because by swimming in the pool, you develop both an interest and the skills to be able to explore this part of the complex. Now you can do so. So a little bit of an overextension of the metaphor, but you get where it's going. I love it. I love it. That's great. Thank you. So yeah, Claire, Valerie, welcome both. Thank you. So let's see, Valerie, I just noticed that. Right, yeah, exactly. And again, I always keep going back to why are we doing this? Because that's ultimately the goal, right? What do we want our students to get? What do we want them to experience to think about to be able to create to deal to the side for themselves, to be able to think about what they would like next in their lives and so on. And as I say, that's exactly it. The possibilities for the technology when you're exploring these far away places, as you're saying, right? It's the idea of saying, how does a far away place become a place that becomes not just, hmm, I saw that and that's it. It becomes something that the student can communicate with, relate to and perhaps revisit their own communities, thinking about what they saw in those far away places in those virtual visits. It really can be extremely, extremely powerful. I'll give you one more example that I've seen with a different type of visit. All the different sites that have set up scientific instruments of one sort or another worldwide or pointing into space, et cetera, that again, make for an experience that sometimes students have not had. So a student that lives in a large city, the night view in sky even on a very, very good night is tends to have a lot of light pollution. But when they can cook into a camera or a telescope that's somewhere out in an area, say in Chile or in Arizona or one of the areas that is not like blue and they can suddenly see that sky. I'll be honest with you, I've heard so many just, oh wow, I never realized, you know, without stars it was one, two, you know, the few that are not obscured by light but seeing something that milky, you know, the milky way as a thing, it shows up in textbooks, in literature, but it's out that lives in a large city with lots of light pollution and really hasn't had many opportunities to move beyond that environment has never seen it as such. So that's yet another experience of exactly the type that you're talking about Valerie and believe me, I've heard suddenly the interest and the joy of, oh, I see why somebody would want to become in this particular case, you know, any type of astronomer or, you know, stay scientist to understand this more or even just simply the beauty and the joy of the experience. I'd love, I think it's working now, is it? Can you hear me now? Yes, I'm sorry, I've had some serious tech issues over the last couple of days. So if you lose me, I apologize. I wanted to ask whether you have any tips on how, I think one of the biggest challenges post, if I can use the word post pandemic, I guess to a point we are now post pandemic, is capturing that learning and capacity of the teachers who really learnt without realising they were learning and redefining how they were teaching, but now have gone back into that four walled classroom. I see everyone else is nodding. You've all got the same issues. Do you have any fantastic tips you could share or with us on how we continue to capture that learning and build on it, but also in a way that allows those teachers to gain the confidence because I think as soon as they walked back through that classroom door, they'd lost all of that confidence and probably didn't even realise just what they'd learnt in the process. And it's very easy to go back in this context. So I'm going to do it this way again now. And I know with some of the stuff I've been working with, I struggled to maintain that momentum and we've gone back. Have you got some pearls of wisdom to help us with keeping that learning going? It's an amazing question and thank you for bringing it up because I agree wholeheartedly and I've seen exactly what you described. The person that was doing these things that they said, well, I can't retry this, but what if I try this? Oh, they tried, it was wonderful. And it's got, well, okay, guess I'm back in the regular classroom and that goes, yep, the snapback, unfortunately. That's right. And it's a question to me of saying, hold on, let's not lose this. Let's both honour and value the work that people put in because there's another thing I have to mean. This is something that I don't think people realise the amount of work, the amount of rapid change that everybody in education went through across the entire spectrum of different school contexts, ages, everything. I mean, I'll give you just one little anecdote from one school I work with. The problem of saying, okay, we've got, we managed to get devices, in this case, it happened to be iPads, so I'll do the students. So they have the connectivity, we've managed to get information to those students that didn't have broadband access on how they can access it. So we've managed all of this, but now, how do we get tangible objects? And it won't be, the teachers putting together these kits of physical objects. And yes, it was the head of the school, getting in their car and driving over the huge range of where all the parents and families live, dropping off little boxes, waving. I actually saw them waving from under the eaves as it was pouring rain and so on. And figuring out, okay, we got to get this, and okay, but this is interesting. The students are doing physical experiments with these little kits that the teachers put together and on the fly, because there wasn't a lot of time, there wasn't huge sums of money waiting to be picked up to buy equipment. In fact, a lot of this had to be pieced together from what was available and so on. And they did some pretty incredible things. So let's not lose that, because to me, there was both ingenuity, but also thoughtfulness in this. And there was a creativity and some things did not work. And that's fine. Listen, we were all improvising at one point or another. I can certainly, you know, I'll speak to my own experience with a colleague, we decided, oh, this type of resource will be very useful for teachers during the pandemic. We very quickly found out that, in fact, the particular questions that we thought teachers would be looking at and these had to do with some issues around broadband and some situations, they weren't looking at that at all and stuff. Right, we might have thought that was a good idea, but clearly not what people needed at that point in time. And I think we all had experiences like that as well, but it's important not to lose what people had. So to your point, a couple of things that we found help. One thing I'm working on right now with Tula Dlamini in South Africa, we are doing a qualitative project where we're conducting interviews with educators who were through the pandemic in different contexts. We've completed a test run. This is also being done under the auspices of the shaping review project at ASU, but we will be completing the analysis, putting this out there with the hope that more people will be able to use the tools. And what we're trying to do is do two things. Document what happened, but also document people's experiences relative to what happened. So we're not just talking about saying, well, I did this in the classroom, okay? Or I did this as a school leader, or I did this as an ed tech specialist, et cetera. But also to say, well, how did you respond? What worked for you? What didn't work? We're trying to also get at some of the intangibles that unfortunately frequently go lost, such as how much time did it take you to do this? And we all realize, again, emergency situation, that's not necessarily the same amount it would take regularly, but we want to document this. And we're trying to find patterns, things that work and things that didn't work. Patterns behind them, brands around them. Because, okay, I can point to a lot of the work. I mentioned this, a lot of the data I have already points to, okay, these things were at the higher levels of SAMR, the things were at the lower levels of SAMR, but there are other types of patterns that tell us how did people respond to context for different subject areas, different age groups that are also worth documenting. So that's one aspect. As I say, so in terms of how to do this, I recommend that people who have the resources or the time or know somebody who does do exactly this. Short interviews, keep it short. I strongly recommend a cup of coffee tea, water, whatever your favorite orange juice, whatever your favorite beverage is to not have it be a dry conversation, so I can resist the pun, but to be able to document this, record it. This is one place where other transcription systems are your friend. Used to be that you needed somebody with lots of time and a very good transcription pedal. I still have some work here and Old Olympus recorded with a little pedal so you could go back and forth and transcribe as you were doing your tapes for quite the analysis that's no longer needed, but so you can use all the transcription services, ranging from free ones to pay ones. That's not the issue. And then document, analyze, start to look for patterns. And this has, as I say, a double effort. If actually, one is it documents it for others, but it also helps those people realize, all right, I did something worthwhile, I did something important, I did something good, it deserves to be shared and do that. So that's one. And the other is to use the community of practice approach I mentioned earlier and to also incorporate that and to say, hey, let's get the conversation going. And when we get the conversation going with what happened during the pandemic because you already have that on the table. And again, encourage people. I just saw G.L. Poon out saying, absolutely having the time and the freedom to fail and giving people the realization that, well, of course we all accepted because it was emergency situation, but you know what, in day to day work, we also need time and freedom to fail. We need to figure out how to do it responsibly in certain contexts, how to try experiments, what to do when they don't work, right? And that's why I think I mentioned with the summer ladder approach, it gives you a certain freedom to experiment at the upper end and to be able to say, well, that didn't work, but that's okay because everything else up to that point built upon this. So this is the other place, you know, as I say, one is the narratives, the qualitative analysis to both hear that but also make people realize for themselves that this is of value. But second, the community of practice to say, well, no, no, no, this isn't going away. Let's take this and let's move it forward. So those are two thoughts relative to your question, which again, thank you for bringing up. Thank you, that's fantastic. I think too, it's also about building people's confidence in their capacity as well to allow them to keep going. And if the pandemic did anything for us, it gave us that opportunity to fail because it's much easier to fail behind a computer rather than fail in a classroom full of 25 children that you're trying to control at the same time when your lesson doesn't quite go as you hoped it was going to go. It's a bit easy when they're all on mute. Absolutely. Yeah, thank you very much. That's great. Thank you, Claire. And I know Juliet said some of that in the chat as well. Valerie, it looks like you have your hand raised. Do you have a question? Yes, yes. And I'm happy to be here today. My question is or comment just on the conversation that we were just having. Not only allowing people to fail, but having these, as you stated, documenting some of these great successes because teachers were not different. Preparation time. We were, I don't know about you guys, but we were online just, we were out like Thursday or Friday. By Monday, we were in the classrooms online, Google classroom, face to face. I mean, well, virtually conducting class. So many teachers didn't have a lot of preparation time at all. So, and one of the things that, one of the reasons why I was taking this particular class is I actually, I'm working on a master's thesis. And on my thesis, I'm preparing a virtual, well, a classroom, a computer classroom or computer lab in a school that does not have one in an elementary school. You know, many of the high schools have them, but a lot of, not as many elementary schools have computer labs. Some of them, some people were working with carts and things like that, prior to the pandemic, where when the pandemic happened, all of the students needed a computer or some type of device at home. So even schools that usually may not have had a computer for every student, somehow they were able to do that and provide a computer for every student. So, but I'm setting up a computer lab, but at the same time I was getting, I'm getting input from different teachers and administrators and on different levels, not just on the elementary level, but on the college level and or on the middle school through high school level also of how a computer lab could come in handy because not only were we not, were the teachers not prepared, the students and the parents were not prepared even more because they didn't have lessons on appropriate use of the computers. I mean, you know, you knew you weren't supposed to do certain things, right? You know, you take it for granted, we all know, they all know, but appropriately, if they were in the classroom, when they're at home, they were possibly two or three windows open. So they were doing other things. And, you know, so those controls were not available. You couldn't see your student doing all of that, you know, playing games instead of paying attention, you know, so there's a lot of factors involved that now that we are looking at it in hindsight, we can kind of see our 2020 vision now, looking back, we can see some of the things that if we ever, we can actually utilize because we're, we've only had to use virtual and I'm not gonna take up a whole lot more time, I do apologize for being so long with it. But we can use a lot of this, we've only used virtual time when I live in Michigan, so when the weather's bad and we have to close down, we've had virtual classes, right? So the school, instead of having a snow day, if you guys have never heard of that, depending on where you live, instead of having a snow day, we go virtual again, right? So I think there should be some planned virtual days, period, because there were some wonderful things about this virtual learning that can actually work in the future to actually enhance learning and become a part of the whole platform. So during some of that time, maybe utilizing some virtual learning as part of the curriculum. Absolutely, I couldn't agree more. I mean, you're absolutely right. The whole domain where this is getting discussed is what's sometimes called high flex for hybrid flexible learning. And there's some... The original meaning is exactly what you described. Some people have started to expand the meaning or I'm a little worried that it's getting so diffused that isn't this side. It becomes all forms of online learning. Well, okay, hold on. High flex is more closely associated with what you're talking about where you say, well, no, we have a definite need for X amount of hybrid time and that needs to be accommodating to certain needs which may not be the traditional schedule needs. So it might involve families it might involve other contexts as well. So I think there is very definitely a case to be made for. It's not, oh, well, we are no longer in this situation we were before in the earlier days of the pandemic. Therefore we don't do this. I agree with you. In other words, I think that using the hybrid experiences using the mix of remote to face to face in different ways than might have been as you said correctly, the snow days. I'm very familiar with snow days. I live in Western Massachusetts in the mountains. So yes, we can have, I'm sure a conversation has to... So what's the very worst snow day you ever had, right? But I think you're going to be that every time the old policy of lake affects snow. But so anyhow, but the key thing is that there's a whole range of opportunities beyond that. And again, I think we also wanna think about other contexts. You mentioned labs, for instance. To me, that can be very interesting because people always think of, well, you have the individual device and the mobile individual device is very powerful indeed. But that doesn't mean that having a meeting place or a meeting locale that is particularly set up in some ways that can leverage computing power. It's not a worthwhile thing. And I'm seeing, for instance, some work, I was just in Arizona in Phoenix at ASU. And of course, their students routinely use mobile devices and so on, but they also have lab spaces for specific types of purposes. Some of them are oriented more towards multimedia. Some of them are oriented towards making, maker spaces. Some of them are oriented towards just social discussion. And some of them, particularly now that we're seeing communities that prior to the pandemic did not have access to broadband come into this world, be able to say, well, how do we work with people who have not had the experience of being in these tech-enabled worlds and both help them not just get up to speed, but actually again, once again, take agency. So whether it's the parents of our students, the other people in the community that our students inhabit and so on, these labs can become indeed sharing points. And once again, starting to think richly about the mix of hybrid and in-person experiences is a very good way to look at it. So thank you and I'm very curious by way to hear where your master's thesis is going to go. It's a great topic. Yes, thank you. Thank you. Thank you, Valerie. I know we're getting towards the end. We have about five more minutes slotted right now and I know Juliet, you have your hand raised. So we would love to have you jump in and ask your question as well. It's more of an observation. I was just thinking about Valerie's comment about the idea of having non-school days because I know in the senior school, I taught high school for 33 years. So much time is actually lost because the students get caught up in the social aspect. Their attention isn't in the right spots. So if it were to be a hybrid situation where students were in the school for certain areas, flipping your learning to some extent, actually using and teaching students how to use the technology in a way that's empowering for them. They're going to be doing this in the world they inhabit beyond the classroom. I think that that's really important and these skills are really important in that context. But we do have a massive exodus of teachers in Australia and I think it's probably quite a global experience because teachers were burned out very quickly and stressed and then going back into a situation where they didn't know what to do or how much support they were going to get. You know, I think that we're moving into a space where virtual academies will become quite the norm. We have so much anxiety with students who have school refusal or we have a lack of teachers. So therefore by having virtual academies, if we can leverage our teachers and build their skills, they can come from situations where they don't want to go into a physical classroom again because they are so done with that. But we're not losing that expertise. We're not losing that incredible content knowledge and that culture and that learning culture. So I think that the gift that you're giving us Ruben is a gift that is and has a very long legacy and an incredible reach far beyond these Black Swan events you mentioned the other day. And I just want to again, I just want to thank you but I just think it's very interesting to see how nuanced your discussion is and how it helps us to anticipate what's coming. But for us to also engage with that, again, I keep saying it, the tolerance of ambiguity. I think that's kind of key. It's one of those skills that we need to have because it enhances our learning disposition and our willingness to engage. And I think we need to get teachers to celebrate that rather than fear it. That's true. Thank you. I agree. Wholeheartedly. Absolutely. I mean, Julia, you brought us in with a great welcoming statement, bringing us out with a great closing statement too. Thank you so much for sharing your expertise as well. And Ruben, I mean, what a great hour spent for me sitting here listening in this discussion. I learned a ton and it was just great to be a part of it with all of you. Thank you so much for joining us, being willing to jump in on the conversation. And if you have further questions, just please let us know. You can pop in the Q&A quickly and Ruben can get back to you, but we really enjoyed the evening and or send them to pdsx.me as was just put in the chat. So send any of those questions, we'll get them to Ruben and he can answer those questions for you as well. But as we close Ruben, any final thoughts or advice for this group that joined us tonight or today? You know, Claire just put a great statement in the chat, which is the idea of global teachers. And that to me is really important because that's yet another thing that we gain with the pandemic, right? I mean, many of us, you know, have been in conversations with people around the world for many years, but what the pandemic did was really open the doors even wider in that sense. And I strongly encourage people to reach out around the world right now. It's both an opportunity, but also frankly, a need. We need to get, it's not just a question of saying we have expertise, but there's also a need for communities to come together to talk to each other, to use the resources to really come to better understand each other and to create jointly and share what they create jointly from that understanding. So I think that to me is frankly, thank you, Claire because that's a beautiful sentiment and it's what I indeed would encourage people to explore. How do you become to use your term global teachers? So thank you. Well, great. Well, thank you, Ruben. Thank you everyone for joining us. And we hope that you'll, there's a feedback form that you can give us some feedback in the chat. It will also pop up when you leave. We would love to have that feedback. And we just hope that you'll join us again and keep sharing your experiences with us here at Seesaw. And Ruben, once again, we just thank you so much for joining us this entire week and sharing your expertise. It is something that is very needed right now. So I hope everyone has a wonderful rest of your day or a wonderful evening depending on where you are in the world. And thank you for joining us. We'll see you soon. Thank you so much for coming. See you all. Just going to give you the heads up. The feedback form came back with internal error. Okay, wonderful. It will pop up when you, it will pop up when we leave right now. Awesome, thank you very much. Thank you so much.