Jenny Ashby, the founder of the Bendigo Education Apple Users’ Team (BEAUT), is based at Epsom Primary School in Victoria, Australia. She conducts teacher professional development in using Information and Communications Technologies (ICTs) and researches the uses of strategies such as podcasting with primary school students.In this interview Jenny challenges educators to think differently about teaching young people and shares some of her strategies for encouraging teachers and students to engage with ICTs.
This interview was conducted over a satellite connection, on a rare rainy evening in Bendigo, so please forgive the occasional distortion. Text versions are provided.
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Thinking beyond pen and paper
Interviewer Jo Murray
Jo: Welcome to The Knowledge Tree Everyone. Today we’re speaking with Jenny Ashby, a teacher from Epsom Primary School in Victoria, Australia. Now Jenny you seem to wear lots of hats, as most teachers do. You’re a Grade 1 classroom Literacy teacher, but you also specialise across the primary school, as a Librarian, a Reading Recovery teacher, and an Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) coordinator for the Bendigo region. So welcome Jenny…
Jenny: Hi Everyone.
Jo: So Jenny, I understand you are also the founder of a group called BEAUT. Could you start by telling us how you got into the work you’re doing with BEAUT in the first place please?
Jenny: BEAUT stands for Bendigo Education Apple Users’ Team, and I guess this has evolved from one of my passions – and that is, using the Apple platform for education. So I decided to form a group (because there were quite a few of us), but we don’t tend to get a lot of professional development aimed at Apple users, so I decided to form a group, and put together the web page and am having two events every term (where people actually come face-to-face), and then making the website, deciding where the events would be. And lastly I’ve started producing podcasts for busy teachers to enable them to be able to listen to a lot of what might be going on at the events.
Jo: Thanks Jenny, so this organisation called BEAUT, can you tell me a bit about the goals of that organisation?
Jenny: Yes, we have four aims of the group. The first one is to develop a team of educators who are willing to share and learn new users of ICT in education. The second one is to lead other-educators in the uses of the newest technologies. The third is to be innovative with the use of ICT. And the last one, which I think is most important is to embrace the current real-world uses of ICT in the community, and especially with our youth to engage them in education.
Jo: Okay, so I understand that you’re involved in some research as well at present, Jenny, so can you tell us a bit about the project you’re involved in?
Jenny: Yes, I’m also doing a case study for the Knowledge Bank (which is with the education department in Victoria), and our case study involves using the podcasting in the classroom. And we are wanting to see what happens when we use podcasting in the classroom with children, whether the children become more engaged, and basically enjoy what they’re doing more then with pen and paper. The project that’s involved at my school is a ‘living history’ project – the children are interviewing past students, pupils, and teachers, and other people who’ve worked at the school over many years – and they are creating podcasts that will be on in our website, eventually – later in the year for our 125th anniversary.
Jo: How are you finding the children are responding Jenny?
Jenny: Well I recently emailed them to find out about their thoughts, and I thought if I emailed them they could individually send me their thoughts and not be worried about what other people thought. And out of all the responses I got, there was only one, that wasn’t negative, but just said they didn’t want to talk. But all the others were so positive about podcasting.
Jo: And what ages have you been working with?
Jenny: This project is working with Grade six children. The ages would be eleven and twelve year olds.
Jo: And what did they say they liked about podcasting?
Jenny: They like ..um…recording their voices, and adding music to it. They like working with their friends. They like adding artwork, ‘cos we do enhanced podcasts. And for other podcasts that they have created, they have also had to find Web links – so they have enjoyed doing all of those jobs.
Jo: So what implications do you think this has for the professional development of teachers who will be working with these age students in the future?
Jenny: I think they need to see podcasting as a way of children publishing their work –they’re going to need to think past pen and paper.
Jo: So what sort of professional development does that mean will need to be provided to those teachers, do you think?
Jenny: Not only do they need to learn some new technical skills to use software that’s available, but they also need to be thinking differently…. to be thinking well above the use of Powerpoint or something like that…using technology as they do.
Jo: Let’s go back to the teacher professional development issue, because given that’s one of your goals of BEAUT and trying to get teachers to use technologies the way our youth do, have you come up with any more effective ways of engaging teachers in that long term project, I guess, of getting comfortable with ICT? Have you found any other ways of engaging them other than the standard professional development strategies that are around?
Jenny: Well, last week I just attended a peer coaching course, and we’re hoping to use this method of professional development to create a culture where teachers consciously choose to try and improve in their teaching, and use a peer coach to help them improve. This type of professional development will give them support when they come back from an intense ICT training program, whereas I think they come back now and they’re just left by themselves. So the peer coach goes into the classroom and observes what the teacher wants us to observe, and then gives feedback – so they might be wanting to know if when they’re using the computers for a certain activity - they might want us to observe are the students becoming engaged? or are the students off task? when the task was presented to the students, was it presented in a logical format? They might even just want us to observe how they respond to children’s answers to questions, and in actual fact the teacher decides what they want us to observe – teacher driven professional development.
Jo: And that’s obviously going to be broad enough to be applied any requirement for professional development, isn’t it, upon teachers – it needn’t be only for ICT, but you’re hoping to use it in that field as a trial, are you, and will you be evaluating that with teachers to see, you know, whether that peer coaching model works?
Jenny: For the rest of this year, I have to peer coach teachers at my school, write some anecdotal notes, and keep a journal of how the peer coaching is going. The teachers may choose the area, and it might not be connected to ICT. But we’re hoping we can start and then move in that area. Well we’re focusing in the areas that the teachers want us to look at, but we are allowed to make options for them in the future. So I hope we’ll be able to steer them towards using ICT in various ways in the classroom, but with them choosing it as an option – not being told “This is what you should do”.
Jo: So do you think directives are part of the reason why there’s a difficulty with teachers coming to grips with ICT – because it’s a directive rather than a, “Would you like to do this”?
Jenny: Yeah I think that can be some of the problem, in that it’s not given as a choice. And I mean, it should all be an option, sometimes when pen and paper is quicker.
Jo: Oh definitely, that’s always – well I’ve always thought it was, you know, technology needs to be used when it’s the best option.
Jenny: I had a really good example today of the use of ICT with a boy in Grade three.
Jo: Right.
Jenny: He’s a reluctant writer and yesterday I gave him an email address – I actually sent him an email before I went home from school, and by 8:30 I had emails from him. Today he was up at half past six sending me an email.
Jo: Yeah I think that’s been the experience of lots of online teachers, where students are just given that option of being able to communicate in a different way, and at their time and place – when they want to do it, and it does engage them and they do enjoy that flexibility of being able to write rather than talk or being able to email when, you know, after hours when it suits them. So, yeah, it’s great to see that happening, isn’t it?
Jenny: Yes, I have to tell myself sometimes – and remind myself that we have to think differently. We are so used to thinking pencil and paper…it has to be printed – so today after I had the class type up their opinions of why they voted for the Book of the Year, and print it out, as we do, I realized we should have made this as a podcast! So we quickly go the microphones and they recorded their opinions about why they voted for their special book – The Children’s Book Council Book of the Year.
Jo: Yeah it’s a really simple example, but it’s a very effective one Jenny, thanks very much. How do we find out more about your work – some of the podcasts that you’ve been doing both in professional development and with your students?
Jenny: I have my own BEAUT website, and the podcasts are available on there. So you can subscribe from that BEAUT site or you can go to the iTunes music store and look in podcasts and search for BEAUT. And our Living History projects are not on the Internet yet, and if you go to the Epsom website there’ll be a link in October. Talking about thinking differently, we were going to have a guest book where people could write in comments at the 125th anniversary, but I realized there are a lot of people who won’t be here – who are around the world, so it would make great use of a blogging page on the website. So we’ve got a blogging page attached to the ‘Living Histories’ where people all around the world that came to Epsom Primary can put their comments about the school.
Jo: Okay, well we’ll look forward to checking that out Jenny in October. Thank you very much for that fascinating conversation about how we can – well how we need to change our thinking about working with young people, and thanks very much for speaking with The Knowledge Tree.
Jenny: Thank you for listening to me, and one thing – the children aren’t afraid of using technology… they take to it like ducks to water.
Useful Links
Epsom Primary School Podcasts http://www.epsomps.vic.edu.au/podcasting/index1.html
Edition 11 Contents
Blogs and Community - launching a new paradigm for online community?
Nancy White
Blogging at the Chalkface
Alison Gotts
Moodling while mobile: an interview with Leo Gaggl
Thinking beyond pen and paper: an interview with Jenny Ashby
Book review: Mobile Learning: A handbook for educators and trainers
Ian Robertson
Jenny, I can appreciate everything you have said about professional learning for teachers. This is part of my role as well! Trying to engage students with ICT is easy - it is often teachers who find it hard to justify the use of ICT instead of insisting on pen and paper evidence of what students can do. Keep up the great work!
Thanks for your comments Yvonne. Yes it’s teachers who are so tied to pen and paper for everything. I cringe at seeing those projects on big pieces of paper and you ask about the topic and the student doesn’t know anything. In fact I myself hate writing and using pen and paper. Maybe it’s to do with being left handed.
Educators can no longer keep their heads buried in the sand. Time will leave them behind very quickly in the next 5 years. Who would have thought a year ago that I would be podcasting and giving online presentations to people from all parts of the globe? Infact what will we be doing in 2 years time or even 12 months time? No way did I have podcasting in this years plan of things last February. But then I like new adventures, I hate repeating anything which is why I dislike washing, ironing and house work. (sorry to get off topic)
So we keep on plugging and trying to win them over.