maplesugar

Jobs on computers in schools

2011-11-05T17:14:00.000-07:00

From the New York Times, 5 November 2011. I guess it does take more than a computer for learning to take place.

Even Mr. Jobs, Apple’s co-founder, turned skeptical about technology’s ability to improve education. In a new biography of Mr. Jobs, the book’s author, Walter Isaacson, describes a conversation earlier this year between the ailing Mr. Jobs and Bill Gates, the Microsoft co-founder, in which the two men “agreed that computers had, so far, made surprisingly little impact on schools — far less than on other realms of society such as media and medicine and law.”
The comments echo similar ones Mr. Jobs made in 1996, between his two stints at Apple. In an interview with Wired magazine, Mr. Jobs said that “what’s wrong with education cannot be fixed with technology,” even though he had himself “spearheaded giving away more computer equipment to schools than anybody else on the planet.”

The Blame Game

2011-09-04T01:05:00.000-07:00

Add Steven Brill's Class Warfare to the propaganda machine laying ALL the blame for the problems in American education at the feet of teacher unions. [Note that I emphasize the word ALL because the problems in schools are deep enough that every stakeholder has part to play in fixing them.]

Thank you to Richard Rothstein's piece in Slate picking apart Brill's newest addition to the smear campaign against public school teachers.

Chimp vs. Room 318

2011-01-29T18:10:00.001-08:00

Currently, the Grade 6 Humanities classes are studying early humans and the development from early bipeds such as Sahelanthropus tchadensis all the way to modern Homo sapiens. An underlying and constant question has been, "What makes us human?"

On Friday, 28 January 2011, Room 318 (my - Mr. Denby - classes) and Dr. Everett's classes took part in an experiment pitting teams of Grade 6 students vs. a solitary chimpanzee. The goal? To get a single peanut out of a deep graduated cylinder without moving the cylinder.

The results? Well, watch and find out to see how things played out.

What if Reading On the Computer Means We Don't Get It?

2011-01-17T04:56:00.000-08:00

After having recently read The Shallows by Nicholas Carr, I decided to do an experiment with my students. According to the research described in the book, reading comprehension is highest with traditional paper (book, article etc.).

I have been trying to minimize my environmental impact both in my personal and professional life for many years. Since joining ISB, I have been able to make great strides towards reducing my/my students’ paper consumption because of the availability of electronic texts. I post articles on my class blog for students to download or read online.

Knowing that reading is often not enough to come to a deep understanding, I teach my students to use tools like the highlighting and note-taking functions of Preview (on a Mac), diigo.com and coda notes (to name just a few). These allow users to make notes, highlight and mark up webpages/texts just as they would with paper and pen.

Like most people, and like most of my students, most of my reading for information happens on a computer these days. I read the news, read scholarly articles for my Master’s research project and find class texts online. I feel like my comprehension is excellent. So, when I read The Shallows and the research it references about the difference in comprehension with paper reading, I was truly skeptical. I believed, if anything, that the difference came down to individual reading/learning styles and decided to test it myself.

I chose three different articles that are about the level that I would normally assign for current events, two of them from the New York Times. For Grade 6, this can be a fairly challenging reading level. Each article was followed by five questions related to comprehension of the key information from the article. The subject of each article was familiar but the information was ‘new’ to the students. I did the experiment with both of my Humanities classes – about 40 students.

For article one, students read entirely online. They could take notes on paper or using an online tool.

For article two, students read a pdf version stripped of all ads (using the ‘READER’ function of Safari). They could then take notes on paper or using Preview (which allows them to take notes and highlight the text easily).

For article three, students received a paper copy of the article and could write on it if they needed to. If I am being honest, this article was in fact the longest and most complex.

The results?

For the first article (reading online), the class average was 68%, a D+.

For the second article (a pdf version that allowed note-taking), the class average was 72%, a C-.

For the final article (a paper copy), the class average was 89, a B+.

I shared this information with my students and I am sharing it now because we all need to know how we are most successful. So far, I am not printing all new readings for my students, but I am encouraging them to print them if they need to. I make pdfs available for all readings and encourage students to print them if they find them difficult.

I was skeptical and am still not entirely convinced, but these results are pretty compelling. If it were just my little experiment giving these results, I would not take it as seriously, but my results reflect the result of large academic studies. The results are too important to ignore them. I still want to go paperless, but I believe that we should all know that how we do things has an impact on how successful we are. I want my students to think of that as well.

cognitive coaching (lower case intentional)

2011-01-15T01:55:00.000-08:00

Cognitive Coaching

Okay, I have to say it. Call me a cynic, call me a grumpy old man. Call me whatever you need to, but I still have to say it. You don’t have to convince me that cognitive coaching is worthwhile – I think it has tremendous potential just from my brief encounters with how it works. BUT, and this is the thing I have to say, the “Components of the Cognitive Coaching Model” on pages 6-7 is a little over the top.
To accept it at face value, we would have to accept that the cognitive coach is some kind of enlightened being, a pedagogical arhat whose enlightenment shines like a beacon in the educational wilderness. Given that this was written by someone who is a cognitive coach, I think it fair to say that someone forgot a bit about the “humility and pride of admitting that there is more to learn (p. 7).”
By the way, I am pointedly NOT using uppercase when referring to cognitive coaching. As a practice, cognitive coaching incorporates a set of beliefs in guiding its practice/implementation, but one tremendously powerful aspect of it seems to be its flexibility. Giving it the caps? Well, that (perhaps symbolically) gives it the weight of dogma and dogma has no place in educational practice.

First rant of 2011 is now over and I can proceed.
The distinctions between coaching, consulting, collaborating and evaluating are excellent. The table format on pages 14-15 also provides an easy reference point for side-by-side comparison. Understanding the distinctions between the four ideas would make it easier for me as an educator to feel safe being coached and to develop as a coach myself. Clarity of purpose leads to clarity of thinking.
Most importantly, the cognitive in cognitive coaching provides the time – the pause – to think and examine what we/I do. Somewhat like parents who learn the most about parenting from their own parents, as teachers I believe we are initially shaped most by our own teachers. For example, as a new teacher twenty years ago, I at first fell back on my experience as a student to inform my teaching. It took some reflection and time to examine what I was doing and come to see what I wanted to be as a teacher. I was lucky to have quite a few good teachers, but I wanted to be something different. In other words, I needed to “transform the…mental models, thoughts and perceptions” (p.14) of what a teacher is.
This kind of change is not a matter of learning tricks or curricula. Instead, it is an intellectual refinement, an enhanced clarity of thought about what we do and how we do it that comes best from time to think. Further, I believe strongly that talking with someone trusted provides one of the most effective times to think. Every year at back to school night I tell parents that it is the time to talk with others and to think that is the most important part of the classroom.

Professional Development

2010-12-25T19:36:00.001-08:00

It is immensely frustrating to know that actual research has been done relating to the efficacy of the professional development models. If research has shown that “neither importing experts nor sending teachers to conferences has shown itself to be particularly effective in improving instruction,” why then is this the model followed so often?

Particularly with a large and talented faculty like the one at ISB, it would seem to be a more effective model to allow teams to truly select goals, develop expertise through shared research, and then work to improve practice. As mentioned in my first post, context is everything and the ineffective model described by Powell robs professional development of context.

A recent consultant had to be reminded many times that the grade 6 team is not new to using computers extensively in the classroom. She is/was a tremendously talented educator with tons of expertise but, robbed of the context in which we work, she was not as effective as she could have been in meeting the needs of the people she was supposed to be helping. It is important to note that she was invited without input from the teachers she was to work with and a fairly significant effort had to be made to have her visit in any way tailored to the needs/requests of the faculty.

In the interest of being productive, I will stop ranting. This has been the model I have seen in just about every school in which I have worked. I also know that ISB has been making an effort to get away from this model, as evidenced by the recent PD day in which many teachers led workshops and, perhaps more importantly, conversations about teaching. When there is time, teachers seem to come together around issues they find in teaching; we are lucky to have so many teachers who love what they do and care about doing it better.

All complaining aside, I know that I tend to work in isolation in some ways. I get immersed in the tasks I have to do and rarely leave my classroom. This leaves few opportunities for the casual and organic conversations that are often the springboard for much more in depth conversation. I have been lucky in teaming with great people in the IS grouping of my Humanities classes, but I also know that both of my partners were, like me, always rushing to finish class related tasks. Within my team, I am active in working to make our curriculum and practice relevant and vibrant, but this tends to happen within meetings.

I am particularly interested in the model of cognitive coaching. In the Powell course here at ISB, we engaged in short practice coaching conversations and I found the model to be very effective. I saw, both as coach and coached, how the focus on one student had me examining my practice in the classroom. I visualized my actual movements in the classroom and re-enacted key moments with individual students and with the class as a whole. I was actively reflecting on better meeting the needs of individuals and the group.

This seems like a powerful way to achieve what we are seeking with looking for learning while also developing the kinds of relationships between colleagues that will create a learning community. I have been lucky to have a wife with whom I have this type of conversation frequently and several colleagues with whom it seems like a natural next step.

Best Practice?

2010-11-19T17:01:00.001-08:00

"Research and experience demonstrate that solutions are not necessarily interchangeable." Oh how true that rings. When we talk of best practice it sometimes makes me cringe. Every generation of teachers has heard about 'best' practice in some form or another. Every generation of teacher has seen 'best' practice change over time. Every generation of teacher has seen 'best' practices that do not suit the needs of the learners in their classrooms or the personalities of the educators.

Assuming that solutions/practices are interchangeable is simply another tweaking of the original factory/industrial revolution philosophical underpinnings of our educational system. Our students are not part of a closed system in which we can apply universal methods of 'production'. They are human beings.

Thankfully we have legions of researchers publishing their findings about effective teaching strategies and, increasingly, the actual function of the brain during learning activities. It is, however, up to us to apply the 'best' approaches to our classrooms. We are the field testers who must find what works best within the context of our classrooms, our student bodies, our institutions and our own personalities.

[As an example, I think of the KIPP schools in the United States. I would not think the regimentation of KIPP would be suitable to our community. Nor would I be presumptuous enough to say that the KIPP approach is 'wrong'. Further, I am self-aware enough to know that KIPP's approach would likely not suit my teaching style. I would not be an ideal teacher for a KIPP school because of how I teach and because of what KIPP wants/needs.]

This is where the true value of a reflective teacher and a reflective learning community come into play. A truly reflective community values the discussion of philosophy and practice. The community actually values QUESTIONING AND DIFFERENCE. The community actually values GOING SLOW because it recognizes that we must take think through our decisions and see how they apply within the context of our individual students, classroom and institutions.

We must also face the fact that there are powerful forces that work against this recognition of the overwhelming power of context. Corporations sell 'best' practices through kits/programs/texts/consultants. There is a lot of money to be made in identifying a 'best' practice.

Further, it is easier to choose a 'best' practice. It makes the job of planning, implementing and even talking about your program easier because it is clear cut.

Context matters.

Photo credit: Mike Defiant

Today a compliment

2010-05-02T22:54:00.000-07:00

It started in the oddest of ways but ended in the best of compliments.

Maryum asked me if I had any friends. I couldn't help but laugh and asked, "Why do you ask? Do I smell? Or is it that I am too boring?"

"It's just that you are so kind and nothing seems to bother you. Who has friends like that?"

Coetail Final Project: 27 March 2010

2010-03-26T16:48:00.000-07:00

Thanks to one of my teammates I implemented a new dimension to our book clubs last week. As I have mentioned before, students book club participation was quite good. I was impressed by their preparation and by their level of examination and analysis of their shared texts. However, they are limited by their age/experience and can't always get to some of the key issues in a novel the way they could with some teacher guidance.

During book club meetings, I have always floated and, though mostly listening, offered suggestions to deepen the conversations. This is interesting but limited in that I want to hear more and, in some cases, draw students' ideas out more. As a student I have never liked someone dropping in and adding their two cents to a conversation that has been moving along just fine without them, so I have tried to avoid doing it too much as a teacher. Nevertheless, a teacher can guide a discussion in a way that a group of 12 year olds cannot.

So back to the "new dimension". Following my colleague's example, I set up a chat on todaysmeet for each book club (after previously giving them play tim on the chat site the day before). I had explained the guidelines and why I was using chat with them instead of the usual format, so the day of the discussions we just got started. I was pretty happy with the result.

I was able to:

meet with individual groups for extended amounts of time;
participate when I thought it was advantageous;
participate with them without being a drop-in;
draw out bigger ideas from students who had the germ of an interesting topic;
just simply listen for a while without any interruption;
get a transcript of all the virtual discussions;
review those for topics for whole class discussion at a later time;
and get a better sense of the body of group's discussion.

It was a positive experience in many ways, but possibly the most interesting was the follow-up whole class discussion. I was curious about students' reactions to the format. In both classes, about 41 out of 45 students liked using chat. About 36 of 45 said we should use it occasionally (that was my suggestion because I would not use it exclusively in place of face-to-face). [This next one is most interesting to me because to me it shows they understand the different levels of communication offered by face-to-face interactions.] All of them agreed that they had better discussions about the important aspects of the novel face to face.

They cited the things you would expect...spontaneity, flow, limits of typing speed etc. All in all, though, I was pretty happy to have a new tool to use.

Coetail Final Project: 23 March 2010

2010-03-26T16:28:00.000-07:00

This, unfortunately, is the first time I have had occasion to write about a real disappointment with technology implementation in the classroom. The grade 6 team decided to do book clubs/literature circles. I created a website with links to synopses of all the different novel choices. After reviewing them independently, students submitted their choices to their respective humanities teachers and we placed them in novel study groups of 2-5 students.

As with most literature circles, students read independently and prepared for their groups' discussions by identifying important issues in the novel, interesting writing, questions about theme or plot etc. The discussions themselves went very well, in large part because of the kinds of discussions they learned HOW to have from our previous whole-class readings. Almost all students were active participants and brought interesting perspectives to their group's novel reading.

So where is the disappointment?

My dream had been to have cross classroom collaboration and it just didn't really materialize. Each book club had a counterpart in one of my teammate's classes, so there was definitely opportunity for discussion, virtual or face-to-face, and on projects. I even had ideas for projects on which we could have collaborated - fiction, research, character analyses - and so did my colleagues. It never panned out, however, because we didn't have (didn't make) enough time for the front-end planning. We ended up with different pacing for the book clubs, so our reading schedules didn't match. We had different reactions to the book clubs themselves, so we ended up going in different directions with the clubs. Meanwhile, I had thought that the powerful opportunity offered by our virtual and literary connection was organic enough that collaboration would materialize.

In the end, the book clubs worked in the most important ways (for the readers), but the added powerful dimension of collaboration will have to wait for next year. The nice thing is that this was our team's first year doing this and we all learned from the experience. All aspects of the implementation, on the technology side, will be better next year. I have a better sense of even the sites/tools I will use and of how I will plan with my team. All was not lost.

Coetail Final Project: 12 March 2010

2010-03-13T05:02:00.000-08:00

We just finished up conferences and I found a new way for technology to play a part. I have used digital tools in conferences for several years, mostly in the form of students electronic portfolios. Blogs, videos, audio recordings and wikis have provided a great reference point for students' discussion of their work and progress.

During today's conference, however, I hit upon a new use. I have a particularly outstanding student from Korea whose mother doesn't not speak English fluently. She relies on her daughter to translate much of what I say. From past experience, I know that this exemplary student is also exceedingly modest. In the first semester conferences, it was obvious that she did not fully translate the praise I heaped upon her. She blushed and giggled but her mother did not react in the way I would have expected given how highly I regarded her daughter's academic prowess. Clearly, something was being (deliberately) lost in translation.

This time, I decided, I would not be similarly foiled. I typed several select phrases in google translator and watched as her mother grinned in delight. The student, not surprisingly, blushed and laughed but looked thrilled to have her mother 'hear' what I really had to say. In the end we finished the conference in a very good mood.

그녀는 놀라운 학생이다.

난 다행 회의 완료됩니다.

I hope that's right. In the conference, several things did not make sense but the gist got through. When my Spanish students use it, it is OBVIOUS.

Coetail Final Project: 11 March 2010

2010-03-10T20:28:00.000-08:00

Digital Native: Part 2

Anyone from the Coetail class will know that I have a strong reaction against the term digital native AND the notion that our students somehow have an innate understanding of the digital world and digital tools. To summarize, I believe that most of our students entering our classrooms have an understanding of a narrow section of the digital world and only a surface level understanding of digital tools. This is one reason that I believe I/we should incorporate them into my/our teaching. The immense potential will go untapped unless we use them/teach them/explore them.

[This is changing/improving all the time as more and more teachers integrate technology in meaningful ways.]

Anyway, grade 6 students recently wrote memoirs relating to their trip to Kanchanaburi. To give the memoir more depth and especially to help students begin to realize the potential of online publishing, I asked that they include photos and links to related topics (much like a slate.com article providing background).

I had taught students how to insert links and photos many times between August and February. For most it was a simple, easy process. One student, however, had not added either element 2 weeks after the deadline. I showed her at school privately, but still after two weeks both elements were missing. Finally, one day I saw that she was online (through her gmail status) and started a google chat.

One thing that this student was quite adept at was chat (and chat spelling, but that is another story). She was very excited to chat (even about her project) and I began to talk her through the process of adding the photos and links. In order to guide her and to imagine the windows and prompts, I asked if she was using Mac or PC. To my great amusement, she replied, “i dont no.”

After I stopped laughing, I asked if there was a big Apple somewhere on the computer. “Oh,” she said, “it says samsung.” After all her time using computers at school, elementary and middle school, PC lab and Mac lab, this little concept had escaped her. That was in addition to a basic element of blogging that had been covered many times before this year and probably last as well.

Thankfully, I was able to talk/chat her through the process and it worked. Problem solved and, with luck, lesson permanently learned.

This was the first time I had given a student online tech support (though I had done it with my family). It was a great reminder for me that my students are really learning about technology’s application and potential at school. This is so important for me because I really strongly believe that they will only begin to explore what they can do if they see it in action somewhere. For most of them, school will be/needs to be that place.

The most basic example of all is facebook. Only because of Green Panthers, CarrotMob and a teacher (Kerry) did students see that there was a power to facebook. This is why I want computers in my students’ hands.

If digital native is anything like being a native of a country and not knowing who your Prime Minister is, maybe I could come to love the term.

Coetail Final Project: 10 March 2010

2010-03-09T21:46:00.000-08:00

When we (Robin and I) began thinking of a technology oriented project for the course, we began to think outside the curriculum of our respective classrooms. We thought about how we gather news and information, ideas and inspiration for our teaching and personal lives and realized that we have adapted to the incredible abundance in the digital world by using a combination of browsing, repeat exploration and deep research. I, for example, regularly browse the headlines of about a dozen online news and information sources from four countries and in two languages. I regularly undertake more slow-paced exploration of a few stories/events/ideas each week. Finally, I research probably one or two things in depth per week. Some are of personal interest and some of professional interest.

One site I love is Slate because of its analysis of important issues and quirky topics and the links it provides for further research and investigation. There is a tremendous diversity of thought and topics represented on Slate and following the threads of related stories is often like letting one's imagination wander. It takes you surprising places.

This brings me to our project...

Like the larger world we live in, ISB is full of more ideas and activities than I can absorb at any one time. There are aspects of ISB life that I want to know about in detail and aspects for which a quick update is sufficient. Imagining that this is true for most in the community, Robin and I imagined a Slate-like site for our school. It would provide access to the life of the school and, most importantly, the intellectual life of the school.

We saw this as a key tool for community members to keep abreast of the richness of school life and as a powerful window for those 'outside' it. Much of the thinking from our students and teachers deserves an audience. Whether it is for prospective students and families or people seeking signs of intellectual life on the planet, we imagined a site that would allow people to set foot 'inside' the school.

Sports, pedagogy, literature, dance, theatre...they all have a place at ISB and we want people to be able to find them, explore them and realize how much is going on here. We also want them to feel inspired and believe that there is a place for all of the creative and intellectual energy they have.

Where do we stand now? We are planning to make it happen. I couldn't ask for more.

Obama and the trustees say, "Fire 'em all!"

2010-03-06T16:44:00.000-08:00

The Central Falls' school board's recent decision to fire all the teachers at Central Falls High School (in Rhode Island, USA) in order to turn the school around may make quite a few people happy. [Check out the reaction from the folks at Newsbusters.] It smacks of dramatic, even heroic, action to save a community from a chronically underperforming school. If all the efforts, all the training, all the money that pours (so the thinking goes) into this school hasn't fixed things, it must be the teachers.

But there is something wrong, something fundamentally twisted about the approach. Before I get to my outrage, let me back up a few steps.

I am in my 19th year as a teacher. I work in a very successful (overseas) school (by almost all measures), but I have worked in some institutions that failed on every professional level I can imagine. I have seen bad teachers teach, I have gritted my teeth as I sat across from them in faculty meetings and I have sought refuge in my classroom work to avoid the many adults who ran the school.

Now a little about the firings...The federal government in the United States has tied federal funding to four possible options for the lowest performing five percent of schools. As described in the Christian Science Monitor,

[Secretary of Education, Arne Duncan] is forcing states to identify the bottom 5 percent of their schools and take one of four actions with each one: closure; takeover by an independent organization; transformation; or turnaround, which calls for firing all the teachers and rehiring no more than half of them in the fall.

Central Falls obviously chose the latter option. We all know the apparent reason why. The school was by most measures not working. But it is still a twisted approach to fixing schools.

But both the architects and the implementers of this policy forget one thing. I would be willing to bet that in almost every case, those fired teachers put more time and energy into the success of the students at that failing school than anyone else (aside from their families) in their lives. They engaged in a seemingly Sisyphean task working within a system they did not make.

The school, the trustees, the Department of Education and President Obama ignore this completely. They do not try to find a solution to the problem of a bad teacher or some bad teachers. Instead they slap in the face every single member of the faculty. They didn't set the funding rate, they didn't build the building, they didn't build the housing, they didn't create a job policy, they didn't establish policing procedures, they didn't create poverty programs. But almost every one of them came to classrooms that reflected those policies, or lack of them, made over many years by many layers of government. Most of them gave everything they could to help fix a bad situation.

And in return, they got fired. Publicly.

Why? Because it's easier to fire 'em all than it is to make a real change and fix a bad tenure system. Because itLOOKS like someone is doing something to a public that wants better schools. Because they don't know how to fix schools that don't work for a lot of reasons that have nothing to do with what happens inside the building.

The kind folks at Newsbusters (who also happen to be quite pleased that Starbucks doesn't mind letting gun owners in some areas openly carry their weapons while they sip a latté) may blame teacher unions for tenure rules, but we know they negotiated for those rules with districts and trustees (i.e. they didn't make them).

Get rid of bad teachers - I don't mind. Fix bad schools - I'll be thrilled. Just remember who has been on the front lines while you have been coming up with your plans. Not just the new plan but every other plan that has or hasn't addressed the problems that all end up inside the walls of a school.

I could use a set of those

2010-01-26T18:42:00.000-08:00

While we are thinking about going 1:1, maybe we could get them to throw in a set of Touches too.

Tech and Talk in the Classroom

2010-01-23T22:46:00.000-08:00

Holidays are always fabulous. This holiday, however, offered a unique professional opportunity. We saw about 65 former students, all of whom have started university or are finishing high school. This provided us with a chance to do some informal yet invaluable field research on education and on technology in education.

Before detailing our findings, it’s important to describe the ‘subject group’. They actually form two groups. The first is made up of my grade four/five students from an urban charter school in Los Angeles. This school is a successful public school in a neighbourhood and district of many unsuccessful schools. Students at the school do not have to pass any kind of entrance exam but do have to maintain a decent academic and attendance record to stay in the school. Some of these students were part of an accelerated program so that they enrolled in university as second year students. These students are all in university now, most of them in large public universities in California.

The other group of students is from the small private school in Pasadena where we were first middle school teachers and later heads of the middle and high schools. This school is small in both total numbers and in class sizes and would be characterized by most people as a liberal institution. Its methods aren’t radical, but the politics and attitudes of most students and families would be considered liberal. There is no entrance exam at the school and, compared to most private schools in the area, it takes a very wide range of students of different abilities. The students we reunited with from this school are either finishing high school or have started university. They attend a wide range of schools including community colleges, public universities and small liberal arts schools.

Both groups of students would likely be considered quite technologically literate. In most cases, much of what they do using computers grew out of their own interests and mastery occurred through practice on their own. Some of the teachers they had through high school embraced digital tools in education and some had little interest in them.

In discussing what school is like for them now, we asked our students many questions about technology use in the classroom. We were very surprised by the strength of their reactions against digital tools being used in the classroom. In almost every case, students lamented situations in which they could not engage in discussion (as is the case for those at University of California schools where introductory classes are large). In the case of those students in small schools with small classes, students heaped scorn upon the idea that they should be using computers in class. They were overwhelming in their desire to talk.

They saw talk as an essential underpinning of their understanding and as an essential way of working with their peers. They embraced classes in which teachers lead good discussions and complained about those in which their means of expression of ideas was primarily electronic.

We described images of university classrooms that we had discussed in our courses in which students were all sitting with their laptops open. Virtually unanimously, their reactions were negative and included the following points:

· They know they would not pay attention in such a situation.

· They want to talk and discuss.

· They want to hear what their professors/teachers have to say.

· Multi-tasking meant incomplete attention to each task.

Though I have to confess that I am happy to hear their responses since they reflect some of my own beliefs, I also have to admit that I was quite surprised at the forcefulness of their reactions. Some students were actually quite passionate about the need to talk as a group in class. Others found some of the uses of digital tools to be needless intermediate steps that postponed important discussion.

I know that for me, this reinvigorates my commitment to discussion and talk in the classroom.

Texting: Another Reason not to Call

2010-01-20T01:43:00.000-08:00

I have always hated talking on the phone. Well. actually that's not quite true. There was a short period in Grade 7 when I was on the phone for hours at a time. Aside from that, approximately, six month period, I have avoided talking on the phone. Email was a dream come true but had its limits as everyone started to carry cell phones.

Then I discovered SMS. A dream come true. Instant communication but no chatting. Well it turns out that there is an unexpected benefit to texting for our students - better spelling! According to a study frequent texting requires a strong awareness of spelling rules even when non-standard spelling is used. So as long as our students can figure out that we don't want them writing that way for academic purposes, there is no harm in texting the hmwrk assignment.

c u l8r

30 November: Peripherals in the Classroom

2009-11-29T02:01:00.000-08:00

Peripherals, like laptops, are a tool in the classroom. As such, there isn't anything radically different about their use in my classroom. So, I think I'll write about the special challenges of computer use in a beginning language classroom.

Digital tools have a special place in a language class in that they allow students to express their ideas and creativity in the target language in new and different ways. They also allow the teacher to bring language into the classroom through different media (music, video, text you name it). In addition, their are tons of new tools to extend language learning online through sites such as livemocha, learnspanish and even university level coursework such as MIT.

The challenge with digital tools is the temptation they offer students to 'express' their ideas so easily. Online translation sites abound, and for a sophisticated grade 8 student who has only basic language structures and vocabulary at his/her disposal they seem like the perfect way to say what you want to say. This can undermine language learning in various ways.

Most importantly, students don't use the target language structures and vocabulary that they need to as the essential scaffolding for developing fluency. In a sense, it allows them to run before they can walk. This actually slows their mastery of core curricula. To the teacher, it is always glaringly obvious when something has been been translated by google; it contains language way beyond the student's level and/or it is a mishmash of non-sensical phrases.

Initially I dealt with this simply by explaining to my students the scoring/rubric criteria for assignments and the necessity of focusing on the core language structures related to the task. I emphasized how easy it is to recognize the results of a translation site and how I valued their experimentation with language much more than perfect phrasing. Though it worked to an extent, students continued to use the sites.

Ironically, the only thing that really worked was to go old school. With a project oriented classroom, I now generally have my students write by hand using good old paper and pen. When that step is complete, students incorporate their (and this way it truly is theirs) language into video, digital stories, slideshows etc. In some cases there are more mistakes; in some cases there are fewer. Either way, student are authentically using the target language in real ways that truly reflect their language development.

Laptop Use: 23 November 09

2009-11-22T19:24:00.001-08:00

I have not found laptops to be problematic in class. Classroom management is classroom management, which, by its very nature, evolves with the circumstances. Laptops are another circumstance to which we, students and teachers, adjust.

Things that work for me...

1. Give time to play and explore when introducing a new tool.

2. Talk about expectations.

I try to be clear with my classes about what I want them doing/not doing during work times. This extends to work on computers. If time has expired for personalizing a blog, for example, I let my students know that they can continue on their own time. I also know that at some point, someone will use their laptop in a way that I don't want, so I explain in advance that there will be consequences for doing so.

3. I ask students to close the laptops during discussions.

I know from my own experience that it is very difficult to engage in a discussion with the temptations offered by the laptops. Often I will ask them to find what they need to participate fully in the discussion and then close the cover.

We often alternate between discussion, research, reading, writing etc. During discussion my goal is for students to focus on what other people are saying; minimizing distractions is essential. The key difference between discussion and answering a question is listening to what others say. This is the only thing that creates an opportunity for participants to build upon what others say. Part of teaching is moving students out of the paradigm of simply asking questions and getting a teacher response. It is not an easy transition because of years of practice simply answering questions.

Online discussions (using any of the tools at our disposal) is very different and really has no place in class. There is too much simultaneous input for students to 'listen' to each other and maintain the momentum of discussion. This is an excellent format for continuing discussion outside of class or for fostering discussion in students involved in distance learning.

4. It's impossible to answer every question. A teacher can quickly be run ragged trying to respond to different students' questions about HOW to do something in class. I usually insist that students ask people at their table first before asking me. This reduces the questions I am asked to the more essential ones. Also, to be brutally honest, there are certain questions that, after a few requests, I refuse to answer. I will direct students attention to the board, my blog, an online resource or to a peer if I have told the class as a whole several times. I find that for some, this is the only way to encourage technological independence.

NETs and Good Teaching (week of 15 Nov)

2009-11-17T21:12:00.000-08:00

The NETs on teaching and administration set admirable goals and describe good teaching. There is no question of that. Congratulations to the authors.

Subtract the 'digital tools' from them (or any permutation of the term) and you are still left with good teaching. That leaves us with two big questions: 1. Do we need NETs?; and 2. Can you be a good teacher without using digital tools?

The answer to number 1? No. I have known great teachers who do not use computers etc. in their classes. Nonetheless, their classrooms resemble in every respect the environment that the NETs evoke (minus the digital tools). Creativity, originality and collaboration do not begin with any particular tools or format. Good teachers find good ways to use good tools. They find ways for students to express themselves and to work together.

I have also known lousy teachers where little of value takes place with or without a digital tool. Their students' work does not reflect analysis, collaboration or introspection. Once again, but in a not so positive way, the tool does not matter.

The NETs serve as guidelines for the kind of work students and teachers should be doing. Of that there is no question. Good teachers will find ways to work with digital tools in great ways whether or not the NETs were ever written. If the NETs serve a purpose it is to guide people to the good pedagogy WITH DIGITAL TOOLS. Shouldn't we just guide people towards good pedagogy? PERIOD - NO QUALIFIERS.

Can you be a good teacher without digital tools? Duh. Do I want to use them in my classroom? Sí. Am I constantly looking for new ways to use them? Definitivamente. Could I go to another school that didn't have a wide array of digital tools available for classroom use? Claro. I would be sad at first, but I know that, just as it always has, my pedagogical practice would adjust to the demands of my environment.

A homework precedent

2009-11-17T21:11:00.000-08:00

An interesting article from Calgary...

Ensuring Students Learn What They Need?

2009-11-06T22:31:00.000-08:00

Hmmm, isn't that what we always do? I thought that was my biggest source of anxiety for the last 18 years.

I don't think we can ensure (as in, make certain that (something) shall occur or be the case) that our students ever learn everything we think they need to learn. In regards to technology, that is also the case. We can, however, get as close as we possibly can to that goal with a two-pronged strategy.

With a vision for how technology is best used, we approach a point at which the majority of teachers are ready to buy in. Some teachers will always be hesitant to embrace new methods, be they technological or philosophical (or both), because of the many competing demands on time. When we develop a vision for the ways in which technology should be part of our academic lives, teachers are more more willing to jump in and take the time to integrate and master digital tools.

I emphasize the word ways to differentiate between that and specific tools. I have a(n evolving) vision of the place technology should occupy in my pedagogy. In addition to being a hugely powerful source of information, I see it as a means of expression and collaboration first and foremost and, secondarily, as a an archive/portfolio of student work. I believe the tools allow my students to express ideas in new ways to broader audiences and to collaborate with people beyond the confines of the classroom. They can and should now apply what they learn to more realistic problems and situations. Because I have a vision, I am comfortable bringing different digital tools into my pedagogy.

The second 'prong' to ensuring our students learn what they need re technology and information literacy is to weave technology into the fabric of a school. Across grade levels and across the different curricular areas, technology needs to be diffused throughout an institution rather than compartmentalized.

This is my personal philosophy, and it informs all that I do in my teaching. That said, I know that the the most important thing our students NEED to learn is HOW TO LEARN. Technology and information literacy are only part of learning how to learn. Good teaching leads to learning - content, skills and the habits of mind that create real learners. Computers, hand-helds, whatever device that may come our way are not pre-requisites for learning or success.

Irony

2009-11-06T20:55:00.000-08:00

As we watch the very idea of political debate in the United States devolve into theatrics and anarchy, we work patiently to develop the skill here at ISB. As teachers we search out appropriate research texts, and we guide students to find additional information independently. We create opportunities for our students to work collaboratively to identify key information and synthesize that into cogent arguments. We help them develop the confidence and poise to give voice to those arguments in a reasonable but impassioned way.

Simultaneously, in the world's most influential country (whether I like it or not, it is), in the country which the largest number of our students identify as home, the Super Bowl of Freedom shapes the 'debate' on one of the most important pieces of legislation in the country's history. For the first time, I hope my students don't watch/read the news.

NETs and AASLs

2009-11-04T00:37:00.000-08:00

Just as reading is woven into every strand of a students' education, so should the skills related to digital literacy. In our Humanities team TOG, for example, we decided to focus on developing student skills in reading non-fiction. We found, through data and observation, that our students often had difficulty identifying key information, limiting their comprehension of non-fiction texts.

In our student-led conferences Grade 6 core teachers are together. My math and science counterpart and I shared many of the same insights into student progress/future growth because the skills we discussed were not limited to our specific curricular area; they run through the curricula of each subject area.

The NETs and AASLs are similar. The standards they set out cannot become the responsibility of a specific department or grade level. They need to be interwoven not because they are specific skills but because they are means of expression of ideas and tools for analysis. We cannot compartmentalize expression of ideas as the responsibility of any particular teacher.

As a starting point for discussion, however, the question of who's job it should be does not seem to be a good starting point for discussion. We are all doing this already. The issue for all of is how we effectively teach those standards.

Final Project Reflection: 18 October 2009

2009-10-18T02:28:00.000-07:00

My final project grew out of our (coetail) work doing digital storytelling and the Grade 6 Archaeology unit. As part of the unit, we do a week long dig in the classroom. With the help of ISB support staff, we turn the Humanities classrooms into dig sites. We bury a diverse range of artifacts in two giant sand boxes in the classrooms to re-create two villages or homes.

Each site contains a variety of 'domestic' artifacts relating to cooking, hunting/defence, religion, commerce and art. Students participate in the dig in rotating jobs, including digging, sifting, cataloguing and recording. Each day's dig is preceded and followed by a discussion and analysis of the finds. Emphasis is on forming a cohesive theory about the previous 'inhabitants' of the site, their way of life and culture. The theory must be based on the evidence and teachers frequently ask, "Why do you think that?" in order to force students to explain their rationale for their opinion.

This habit of mind (0f using evidence to support an opinion) is one of the primary goals of the grade 6 curriculum and the dig provides a unique opportunity to make 'discoveries' and articulate a point of view based upon them. Students often have differing points of view, but, despite that, often see commonalities in their interpretations of individual artifacts. As they discuss, they find out where they differ and endeavour to explain why they, personally, are right.

The dig traditionally culminates with a common assignment/assessment of a magazine-style article about an aspect of the dig. Students choose from a variety of article formats that tell the story of the people who inhabited the site and/or the story of the dig itself. During the dig, students take still photos and (this year I asked them to include) video to document the progress and process of the dig. During the digital storytelling part of our course I realized I could combine the video and stills to articulate many of the same ideas and complement the article.

The digital storytelling/film-making assignment allows students to collaborate with each other to meet many of the same goals as the magazine assignment. The collaborative aspect is particularly appealing because it puts students in a situation in which they once again have to discuss and defend their opinions. As they write their scripts for the project, they refine their opinions and learn to express them concisely. Most importantly they automatically use evidence to support their viewpoint in the form of the audiovisual images from the dig. This step reinforces their thinking process. My final project is a sample/model assignment for students.

Screencast It!

2009-10-09T23:42:00.000-07:00

Screen casts lend themselves to any 'procedural' instructions for computer use in the classroom. As a language teacher whose goal is to use the target language as much as possible in during class time, this is particularly appealing. Demonstrating how to do something on the computer while using Spanish is incredibly difficult for students to follow. Even with the smartboard and a physical demonstration, it is very rare that more than half the class remembers the steps necessary to complete a task. A screen cast, however, allows students to view instructions at their own pace multiple times. This is an incalculably huge advantage.

Even without the language aspect of the Spanish classroom, I can't begin to count the number of times of times I have been pulled away from, for example, helping a student improve their writing in order to help a student upload a photo/save to the server/record audio etc. With a library of clips (time to compile one) explaining the common 'hows' on my blog, I would be able to focus on core learning.

The best part of this would be increased independence on the part of students. There are already many questions I don't answer but instead direct students to answer themselves by reading classroom text. Referring them to screen casts would be another step on the same path to independent resolution of simple problems. There is nothing so gratifying as watching a student figure out how to answer his/her own questions.

Finally, at many points in the K-12 curricula, we ask students to engage in procedural writing. Screen casting is an excellent opportunity to integrate procedural writing and technology use. Throw in a video camera and a student could do a screen cast of just about anything. The visual aspect of a screen cast would ensure that students do not leave out key steps in their explanations (something they inevitably do when they write).

7 October 2009: The Explosion of Video

2009-10-06T22:59:00.000-07:00

The availability of video has indeed exploded. Just the venues of finding videos are hard to keep track of, let alone the videos themselves.

It seems that, with a bit of patience, one can find just about anything needed for the classroom. A perfect example is an old resource the Grade 6 team has used in the past - The Voyage of the Mimi. Originally an old PBS show (Ben Affleck way back in the 1980s) about archaeology, the school purchased a copy on VHS back in the day. As VHS players became scarce, the tapes were transferred to disc but with poor quality. When we discussed it in our team meeting I looked it up on youtube and, not surprisingly, someone has uploaded just about every episode.

Because of the web, the Mimi (and tons of other potential resources) are available world wide. What's more, with a bit of effort I can get my very own copy of the video by kicking or zamzaring. This is usually the case for just about any curricular idea. The challenge may be coming up with the perfect search query (or wading through tons of annoying video) but the material is out there.

Perhaps most importantly, as teachers we can easily capture moments, speeches, events etc. for classroom discussion and analysis. We can view them repeatedly without a whole other intermediary device other than the one already on our desks. Most importantly we can USE those same things to create something new. Converted to .mov format, students can import video clips, add audio tracks, additional footage, subtitles to become story-tellers or documentarians.

The web also gives the opportunity to share work with a global audience. It can be shared for evaluation, for an audience or for collaboration. The biggest obstacle to this kind of work is time and tools. Working with video is, to my mind, still the most cumbersome technology related task in education. Anyone who can streamline that process will be a hero to millions.

Digital Storytelling: Reflections (Week of 28 September)

2009-09-28T05:58:00.000-07:00

I have been using digital storytelling since coming to ISB. As a language teacher (previously in the ES and now in the MS) it offers excellent opportunities for students to put vocabulary and language structures to use in realistic and creative ways. Students can demonstrate mastery and, even more importantly, to extend their use of language in new and creative ways. As a teacher, I can create many opportunities for language use, but a truly open-ended activity (such as digital story-telling) allows students to combine language in truly original ways. This is the heart of language development.

In my Humanities class, digital storytelling offers similar opportunities for language development. With many English language learners in the classroom, this type of project provides a different kind of challenge for students learning to express their ideas. For all students, a digital story about an artifact or about looting is a different but valuable opportunity to build on one of our core Grade 6 skills - the support of an argument with evidence.

The precision of language necessary to both be convincing and entertaining is essential for all students and transfers well to written work. Though digital storytelling does not replace academic writing, there is great value in linking ideas and images. It shows a students interpretations of the connections between concepts in a multiplicity of ways.

Digital Literacy and My Presentations

2009-09-27T03:01:00.001-07:00

Two images: guess which one is the 'before'.

For this week's class I reviewed my Back to School Night presentation. I chose this one because of the challenge of making a thought-provoking presentation with powerful imagery while at the same time having to impart some basic straight-forward information.

During Back to School Night, for example, I always try to give the parents an introduction to the goals of the curriculum. I find that most parents are not particularly interested in the nuts and bolts of the curriculum (and tend to forget them when you tell them) but want to know about what their children will be striving to achieve throughout the year.

In Grade 6 this is a particularly interesting topic since it involves a very large transition from more literal to more abstract thought. We are constantly asking students, for example, "What does this represent?" "How could this idea be represented symbolically?" "What does this artifact possibly tell you about the people who inhabited this region?'' Etc. etc. etc. This often initially confounds students who have been very successful in the past, so I like to give parents an idea of what their children might be struggling with at the start of the year. Essays and discussion about books, for example, throw many students who are powerfully drawn to re-telling the plot. It can be frustrating at first but leads to an explosion of new ideas and WAYS of thinking about things.

In addition, the evening provides a great opportunity to talk to parents about some of the difficulties they are already facing at home (children who are suddenly uncommunicative, who see their friends as increasingly important, who want to be independent but are sometimes not ready etc.). In a sense, both students and parents are going through tremendous changes and I want parents to know that communication with me is an essential part of managing the change.

These ideas are easy to represent visually with powerful and interesting imagery. This year, my images were generally of classroom activity and, though they provided me with a suitable springboard for my questions and comments, they were not in and of themselves thought-provoking. Saturday gave me a chance to revamp much of my presentation for next year and to find many 'symbolic' images. For example, I chose a shot of an empty, desolate-looking bus shelter to represent the idea that students and parents are not alone in the changes they are experiencing. Next year, I have no doubt that the image will stay with parents long after they have forgotten my name.

It also allowed me time to figure out how to include basic information such as website URLs (parent portal, student portal, my blog) that I want parents to have. I settled on showing parents the sites (by embedding the link in my powerpoint) and then emailing them the links themselves. Since I don't expect many of them to be taking notes, this seemed like a good compromise.

Digital Storytelling and Final Project

2009-09-27T02:54:00.000-07:00

This is both my digital story telling example from 26 September and my final course project integrating several digital tools. This will serve as a sample for my students as they create a final project for our Archaeology Dig Project.

Powerful Images

2009-09-19T03:53:00.000-07:00

Instead of choosing an image from creativecommons.org, I used a photo that I took this summer in South Africa. As we are studying archaeology and working with our students to develop analytical and interpretive skills, I placed this image on my blog.

I asked students to look at the image (actually several images) of the rock carving and the surrounding environment and to, without any context of geography or time period, try to interpret what this image could tell us about the people who did the carving.

Students used the image of the carving, the medium of stone and the background (arid, desert-like conditions) to come up with reasonable arguments about the people who created this work.

Students theorized that:
the creators of this work hunted animals;
the creators of this work worshipped animals;
the creators of this work carved these images in honour of the animals they hunted;
the creators of this work had 'primitive tools';
the creators of this work did not have many vegetables to eat;
the creators of this work followed the animals they hunted over large distances;
and the creators of this work left these images as a map to find animals later.

Several aspects of their predictions are/were accurate. Most importantly what they said allowed us to talk about the perspective of archaeologists and historians. As these carvings were made by San/Bushmen hunters between 2000-5000 years ago, the investigation into their origins offers many clues as to how/why we interpret images.

Early researchers saw these carvings as 'primitive' art. They believed that the San people made simple images because these animals were important to them in some way. Subsequent research found that the carvings were made as tracking and teaching tools. The animals were depicted to help teach young hunters how to identify and find food sources.

The use of this (and the other) images provided a powerful starting point to a discussion about archaeology and our (human) penchant for bringing our own perspectives and biases into our interpretations. Without this image, our discussion would have been both more forced (in our search for context) and less related to their own interpretations of historical artifacts.

Course 3, Post 1 Evolution of Teaching

2009-09-13T01:34:00.000-07:00

Digital tools have allowed me to embrace new media to both initiate and extend classroom dialogue. They have strengthened the quality of student discussion and encouraged further examination of ideas.

The examples are endless, but two recent examples include shelfari and good old fashioned student blogs. In the first example, my team and I decided to use shelfari as a core medium for our students' independent reading work. As students read, they share their ideas and opinions about what they have read. While this basic concept is in no way new, shelfari allows students to extend their discussion beyond the classroom. For those who are interested, and there are quite a few, the medium allows them to 'talk' about books (and, I hope, eventually literature) outside of what school requires of them. The quality of their dialogue and comments increases and allows us to start our classroom discussion in a more sophisticated place.

I use shelfari in class and for homework and see room for students to pursue a new direction in their reading and greater depth in their understanding of what they read. Without the guidance of the classroom, few would use the site for anything other than a social gathering around books, but it complements well our academic goals for our students as critical readers.

Regular blogging offers some similar advantages. My students have a ready record of their work, and especially their writing. The ability to easily see growth (or lack of it) is a hugely powerful tool. When compared to a folder hanging on a rack in the corner that students occasionally shuffle through, there is no comparison.

Perhaps most importantly, students have much greater opportunity to view and evaluate the work of their peers. With one simple homework assignment, I can have students reading the ideas and opinions of other students. This informs their own opinions, whether through agreement or disagreement, and encourages more independent reflection.

Sta. Panamá o porque todavía necesitamos profesores en un mundo digital

2009-05-13T21:57:00.000-07:00

No hay ni porqué explicar.

Reflection on Final Project

2009-05-09T19:17:00.000-07:00

Once again the need to collaborate around a course project showed how effective it is to create specific times for teachers to work together on curriculum. It would be really useful to build these times into professional development days as they allow time for teachers from different sections and, potentially, different subject areas to develop projects together. The digital tools at our disposal have opened the door to significant opportunities for multi-disciplinary and multi-age collaboration. Scheduling conflicts matter much less when students do not have to be in the same place in order to work together.

I know, I know...it is tempting to say the same for teacher collaboration, but we need the time to sit down and TALK in order to discover the points at which we can bring our different interests, disciplines and curricula together. Professional development days could give us the time to find the points around which ideas can coalesce. They could be the catalyst for innovation.

In this case, Gabi and I had already used voicethread separately in our respective classes and we had already done some collaborative work between our classes. Thanks to Robin's chat with Jeff, we were able to adapt the final project and use our experience as a tool for others. For both of us, voicethread opens up myriad possibilities for students to use language authentically. That may sound kind of obvious (it is called voicethread, after all), but it is genuine challenge for language teachers to create the opportunities to make language truly their own. Students learn vocabulary and language strucutures but they only truly internalize them - that is make them a tool for their own REAL communication - when they start to use them independently. For both of us, voicethread is one of doing just that.

I often feel a twinge of guilt when I see the writing and analysis that some teachers are drawing out of their students using these tools I love. I have to remind myself that our students' most basic tool, language. is just in its earliest stages of development. Analysis of historical and current events is a few steps away but it is incredible to see our students' language development. Digital tools like voicethread provide a platform that both showcases student growth and encourages them to push their own boundaries of vocabulary and structure. I remind myself that our students were, not very long ago, learning how to introduce themselves. Now they are recording recipes, instructions and explanations of their personalities.

¡Viva la colaboración!

Mass Collaboration

2009-04-25T19:28:00.000-07:00

The good old essential questions...Are we preparing students for a world of mass collaboration? How do we prepare students for a world of mass collaboration?

Short answer 1: It depends on your definition of 'we'.
Short answer 2: Collaborate early and often, connecting with others in an ever larger and more substantive ways..

The more pressing issue is: how do we get students to see the power of mass collaboration? I always come back to this point - call me Johnny One Note - but there is no inherent power in the internet/digital tools. Like an atom waiting to be split, there is huge potential power in a digitally connected world. If all our students use facebook, youtube and flickr they aren't necessarily harnessing the power of anything. They may just be entertaining themselves in a modern format.

Robin unearthed some amazing examples of the real power of a digitally connected populace. These are the things we need to model for our students. These are the examples they need to see. Let's face it, we live on one tremendously despoiled planet with social problems on a scale that, it would seem, defies the possibility of solution. Mass collaboration can unleash the potential energy of human beings acting in concert.

I don't mean those facebook groups to save Darfur...I mean the potential to actually participate through your voice and your words. Mass collaboration is in its infancy but if our students see examples like those Robin found (taking part in a governmental budgeting process, running a complex organization, protesting) they will begin to see that they have the ability to join/lead/change.

Without this kind of education, students will be what the corporations who dominate the digital world want them to be - consumers and, occasionally, creators of content that can be marketed to others.

The Web...Powerful?

2009-04-19T03:01:00.000-07:00

The web is potentially powerful because it constantly changes. It seems to do everything we want AND there seems to be an army of people out there inventing new things we didn't yet know we wanted it to do. Once they are there, though, we can't imagine life without them. To talk old school, most people never thought there was anything wrong with music stores, but now we don't need them and don't really want them. To be a little more modern, I don't personally know anyone who had an overwhelming desire for facebook, but now that it's here I know quite a few people who can't imagine life without it.

I stressed potentially above because it all depends on how it is used. Cheap video cameras had the potential to be hugely powerful because they enabled people of all ages and classes around the world to tell their own stories. In the end, most people made boring home movies that no one ever wanted to watch. Facebook isn't powerful just because people use it to communicate with their friends. The last US presidential campaign, however, showed that, harnessed with a goal and a vision, it can be HUGE. When giant corporations own the major digital tools, you know they don't have societal change in mind for their offerings. They see a market and a profit.

To continue the above example, displacing video stores and music stores isn't powerul in and of itself - it's disruptive. It changes the way people shop but it isn't necessarily a societal change. Of course I am playing devil's advocate to some extent here, but the real power of the web is in the change it can generate - not in modifications to people's habits. People spend a lot of time sitting watching videos on youtube but that's really a modification to how people spend time. Creating videos for youtube, however, begins to unlock the power of the web.

My reason for embracing technology in the classroom, is to help students figure out how to use the power of the web. As I mentioned in a previous post, I want our students to go beyond the Cumbio's of the world.

We have to see the web the way some people have seen the printed word. If the ultimate achievement of printing presses had been Archie comics, it wouldn't have been much of a force for change. But we have seen great literature, drama, political treatises, speeches and ideas immortalized in print. Most of the words out there may be long forgotten memories (or drivel) but the others have sparked debate and change. The web can go far beyond that because it can harness almost every media form.

That's why technology needs to be in schools.

Media Behaviour/Online Safety

2009-04-07T21:59:00.000-07:00

This one is a pretty straight forward answer for me.

If we encourage students to use technology that connects them to people electronically, we have a responsibility to teach them both about online safety and appropriate behaviour. We also have a responsibility to create rules and policies that clearly explain to students and parents what our expectations. As an institution we need to have clear and consistent consequences for behaviour that does not meet our expectations. As the media for communication are in flux, we need to regularly revisit our policies to ensure that they are relevant.

If parents make computers or text messaging available to their children, they have the same responsibility. If they send their child to a school that makes use these media, they have the same responsibility. Parents also have a responsibility to attempt to monitor their children's online behaviour, just as they would with their real-world actions.

Most importantly, education about media behaviour needs to be an ongoing aspect of students' lives. At school it cannot be confined to a single class or meeting. At home, parents cannot expect that one conversation will be sufficient. We would not expect a one-off conversation to be enough to teach students about sharing or listening to others. As digital media become a larger part of students' lives, we must view media behaviour as being analagous to other very basic concepts of socialization.

Copyright...

2009-04-02T19:43:00.000-07:00

Copyright in society

No matter what we teach our students, we must know that many of them will download, copy and distribute copyrighted work. Do we need to rethink copyright? We definitely need to rethink how copyright is applied. The proliferation of technology that allows copying and sharing means that millions instead of dozens may violate copyright.

Having laws that cannot be enforced, or, conversely, laws that are broken frequently and openly by people who very few would deem criminal is not good for society. Few people question the right of an individual to own his/her work. Few question that if it is worth seeing/watching/reading/listening that person should reap the rewards of its popularity. The contradiction is that so many of us will download music or films we like because we can get them easily and cheaply. Maybe it's because we don't see it as the product of an individual but of a corporation. Or maybe it's because we are unethical, thieving hypocrites. Maybe we will only stop if we get caught.

Sweden's internet traffic dropped by almost a third after it's new piracy law went into effect. Sweden's law still goes after sharers, however, and not those who facilitate the sharing. It seems that they only real way to stop massive violation of copyright (and it is the massive violations that copyright holders really worry about) is to pursue the companies that facilitate violation. The prosecution of sites like the pirate bay and the lawsuits against google (for the videos that become available through youtube) may be the only effective ways to curb copyright violation.

But back to the key question - do we need to rethink copyright? Can we? We know how much people will do for attention/popularity/fame for FREE. But we also know that our society is richer when people have the opportunity to have a career creating and entertaining. If we undermine copyright we undermine that possibility.

Should we return to a dying doctrine? Should those who entertain and create be employees of the state? They would be guaranteed an income and the fruits of their labour can then be shared by anyone and everyone without fear of reprisal and without guilt.

Copyright in school

Since we now work so often with our students on the process of creating work that could be accessed by potentially HUGE audiences, we need to teach our students about copyright. We need to teach them in order to help them protect/nurture their own creations and to help them create safely. By safely, I mean that they should learn how to create truly original work that both honours the creativity of others and does not run afoul of any legal statutes.

Many of our students may create through sampling of images, sound and ideas, but for them to be respected as creators, they need to be original (not derivative). Learning the difference is a process that we have the luxury of being part of. In all the disciplines of school life, art/music/language/analysis you name it, our students will be encouraged to follow models or emulate styles as they find their own voices and styles.

In school we have a responsibility to set a good example of how copyrights can and should be respected while also creating original work. There is fairly wide latitude for us as individuals and as educators to make use of copyrighted material while fostering creativity and learning.

Such a Thing as Privacy

2009-03-30T00:35:00.000-07:00

In our tremendously public lives, it seems impossible to assume that anything can really be totally private. There is such a thing as privacy (but no guarantee of it), but we have ceded much of it through active and passive choices.

I am most shocked by the active choices of so many people, of all ages, to share anything and everything they do, think and say. This occurs in almost every form of media we now have and the trend seems to be increasing. From reality television to blogs, more and more people display what would have been considered private a generation ago with the world. Actually, I take that back, some of it would have been considered shameful.

A less active choice that affects privacy is our desire to partake of the conveniences of modern society. I want to be able to use an ATM (but when and where I take money out is now collectible information), I want to use a credit card (but all my purchases are now recorded and the patterns of what and when I buy is now interpretable information), I want to collect airline miles (but now my travel patterns are further analyzed), I want to bank online (but now there is a possibility that someone on another continent could access my information), I want to share photos with friends and family in North America (but now candid photos of me could be accessed) and I want to communicate by email (but this could also be accessed and my private communication shared). I take many steps to protect my very valued privacy but I am not willing at this point to forgo any of the above.

We also live in a society that has tacitly accepted a world in which almost anything we do in a public space could be watched and recorded. Surveillance cameras exist in almost every country to varying degrees. Satellites take images of what we do. Google drives around taking pictures of streetscapes. Anything I may be doing in these public spaces (or in front of the window when google drives by) may be captured for posterity. We could protest these potential intrusions into our privacy but as a society we have accepted that they are part and parcel of the modern world. In some cases we believe that our security is worth the loss of privacy and make the passive choice to go along with it.

To guarantee our privacy we would have to remove ourselves from the modern world and live a very circumscribed existence. As educators I believe we need to start early with our students to talk about the concept of privacy and the potential risks of losing it. We need to be particularly clear about what happens when one throws privacy out the window and shares it all. The consequences can be damaging to our mental/physical health, our academic and professional careers and to our relationships. If we engage in this dialogue with our students they will, if we are lucky, have a plan or intent about what they share online. They will avoid the oh-but-i-didn't-think-EVERYONE-would-see-that at least some of the repercussions of sharing.

For the apocalyptic view of privacy's future, check out this article from our very own Canadian Broadcasting Corporation. This kind of surveillance seems straight out of the classic Sandra Bullock film, The Net.

Digital footprints in an age of very large feet

2009-03-19T15:55:00.001-07:00

As educators we have generally accepted a great deal of responsibility for the education of our young people in areas that have little to do directly with academia. We teach our youngest how to actually function as part of a group. It has little to do with math or reading but we accept that without our contribution to their socialization none of that would be much good anyway.

With older students we have taken a huge share of the responsibility for teaching about sex, how to use them responsibly and safely, what substances are good and bad for health and welfare, legal rights and responsibilities and, in many cases, how to drive. None of this is meant to be an exhaustive list; it's just intended to show that as a profession we have realized that it is to everyone's benefit (our students' and our society's) to help guide the young people under our care in areas that, strictly speaking, aren't academic.

Digital footprints and all they entail may be a relatively new concept but their (growing) importance is sufficient that we should both teach about it and teach it well.

To teach effectively we need to keep many things in mind, including:
1. how we present ourselves
2. who can read about us
3. how information about ourselves can be used
4. who can use that information
5. the responsibilities we have as participants in a digital society (I hate the term netizen because it somehow differentiates between being a citizen of a 'regular' world and online world. That digital world is integrated enough into society that we can think of them as one.)
6. the potential of what we can do online (making our footprint have weight and meaning)
7. what really counts online (is it how many people looked at site or what I actually have to say)

We are in the best position to teach young people about this so-called digital footprint. Technology is part of our daily lives (both individually and as teachers), we have the opportunity to engage in ongoing dialogue with our students (as the technology evolves and because this needs to be a continuing conversation). Most of us teach because we believe in a bigger picture that goes beyond just learning some skills. We want to participate in the development of people who will contribute something to society - digital tools fit in perfectly.

Cumbio, or why we need to teach about digital tools

2009-03-16T23:05:00.000-07:00

Reading a New York Times article recently, I discovered the fascinating case of Cumbio, a young flogger from Argentina. She has become a major web celebrity in Argentina as the face of a very large group of young people who flog (photo blog) their lives.

There are wonderful elements to her story - she is an 'out' lesbian teen (and therefore an inspiring symbol to many), she is normal sized (in a culture that values being rail thing) and she is articulate about what and who she represents. She has commercialized her 36 million flog comments and views into mall appearances and advertising endorsements.

But the real reason this article rings a bell for me and reminds me why we need to teach about digital tools lies in one small quote about the movement/phenomenon.

Floggers are not “like hippies or punks, who had ideals of fighting to change the world,” said María José Hooft, who wrote a book, “Tribus Urbanas,” on youth subcultures in Argentina. “Floggers don’t want to change the world. They want to survive, and they want to have the best possible time they can.”

There is obviously a lot more potential for a tool like this and as a teacher, I would like to be part of helping my students find it.

Whoa

2009-03-11T19:20:00.000-07:00

My dad recently sent me this video. I think this is the single most amazing piece of technology I have encountered. It's almost like the replicator on Star Trek.

In case you don't feel like watching the video, here is a teaser that will get you interested.

Combine a 3D scanner that takes 50,000 measurements per second with a 'printer' that 'prints' a 3D model of the scanned image using plastic filament. The result is a perfect replication of the original (in plastic) even if there are moving parts. The result can be used to cast a mold to manufacture unlimited numbers.

Allies

2009-03-10T03:04:00.000-07:00

Let me say this to start: I am not a parent.

I was listening to the children at the pool in my (teacher) apartment building. Several teachers/parents were also in the water with both their own children and the children of colleagues. Inevitably a small dispute arose between the children playing and a teacher/parent calmly, humourously, and authoritatively (in the sense of "able to be trusted" and "likely to be respected" from the built-in OSX dictionary) resolved it.

My first thoughts were about the potential difficulties of being both parent and teacher in the situation. I wondered about the friction it could cause when one steps in to resolve the conflicts between the children of colleagues and your own. So many parents I have known hate to see the misbehaviour of other people's children precisely because they feel no right to say anything. They worry about the response from the child - "you're not my mum/dad" - and from the parent - "I don't need you telling my son/daughter how to behave" - so that in the end they say nothing.

As I thought about it, I realized that there has been something of a generational shift. Parents used to tend to see each other as allies and trusted each other when it came to settling a dispute between children or correcting inappropriate behaviour. Don't think I have an idealized view of how things used to be; I am not waxing nostalgic.

Somewhere along the line, however, it seems that many parents started to see themselves as allies only of their own children. It seems to have narrowed down so that parents often feel hesitant to intervene with other people's children and many children feel comfortable with the you-aren't-my-dad attitude.

In the odd intersection of school and home that is teacher housing, however, that trust seems to remain (unless I am out of the loop because I am not a parent). Things run smoothly at the pool and at the playground. Children feel (and act) supervised (but not under surveillance) whether their own parents are there or not. Parents look out for their own children and the children of their peers to protect and to guide them.

For any teacher out there who happens to read this, I am curious about your thoughts - especially if you live in any kind of teacher housing situation.

Reflection on Final Project

2009-02-27T20:22:00.000-08:00

Working on this project with Carole and Gaby was an excellent opportunity for collaboration. As language teachers (of different languages and levels) we face certain challenges regarding technology. Philosophically it is important for each of us to maximize the use of the target language (both for teachers and students), so it is important to use digital tools that both facilitate that use AND don't require a huge amount of teaching about the tool(s) itself.

With this shared perspective we were able to both agree on the kind of language that fit our students' level of development and on the appropriate tools (voicethread). The collaboration allowed us to focus on the types of language we wanted our students to master, how to use digital tools most effectively and how to maximize student interaction in the target language (both with their in-class and digitally connected peers).

Speaking more generally, today's session gave the opportunity to both develop a useful project and to evaluate the tools at our disposal. As educators, these moments are invaluable because they help to deepen our understanding of tools and to reflect on our pedagogical practice. We discover new applications for the familiar (or learn about a new tool) and refine our own understanding of our role as educators.

Given the proliferation of new tools at my disposal I believe I have a responsibility to help my students find both their own potential and the potential of tools 2.0 and to evaluate how their adoption should affect my place in the classroom. Working with Carole and Gaby was an excellent opportunity to do all of that simultaneously.

Mobile phones in schools

2009-02-26T18:19:00.001-08:00

I couldn't get there until my group was almost finished, but...here is our video.

Handwriting as Signpost

2009-02-26T03:05:00.000-08:00

Today I read an interesting article about handwriting and its possible future (or lack of it).

The most fascinating aspect of handwriting to me is the suddenness with which it has lost its centrality as a means of communication for so many of us. I rarely even print, except to jot down vocabulary as students ask for help or to update my lists of things to do. Cursive handwriting is obviously even more rarely used. The saddest thing about this change is connection we will lose to our past (as noted by the article as well).

If we don't learn to write in cursive, it's likely we won't learn to read it either. The huge amount of history recorded with pen and ink in cursive will be inaccessible to most of the population. Ironically, it's at the very same time that millions of original documents are now available and distributed online.

There is precedent for this type of fundamental shift in communication and it would be interesting to see how societies have coped (or not) with these transitions. Were hundreds or thousands of years worth of history rendered illegible to subsequent generations? The French replaced Chinese characters in Vietnam, Ataturk replaced Arabic script with a brand new Latin-derived alphabet in 1928 and the list could go on. In part, the new Turkish state sought to accommodate the revolutionary technology of the typewriter, seeing the new alphabet as more suitable to a keyboard than Arabic.

I wonder if the many societies that have made such changes planned on how to deal with their history.

2009-02-19T03:25:00.000-08:00

For this post, I refuse to get cantankerous.

Now that I have put that out there, I am wondering how to work the science of all the technology our students find at their fingertips into school. This does not mean that they all become engineering students before they leave elementary school. I am thinking more along the lines of the CONCEPTS of how things work. By grade 5 almost all the kids have cell phones, for example, but I would be willing to bet a delicious som tam dinner that perhaps 2 know how they work.

In the 1800's meetings were organized all over Britain to explain the remarkable advances in science and technology to anyone who wanted to listen. Evolution, steam power, industrial production - they were all revolutionary in their way and leading scientists came out to explain them. Today, we are surrounded by things that are essentially a mystery to us but we use them habitually.

When 4 million transistors can fit on Intel's newest chip which just happens to be the size of the period at the end of the sentence (see my earlier post and link), it's a pretty awe inspiring concept. Our students could and should have the opportunities to talk about how things work. At the very least, it might inspire some of them to first "mess around" and then "geek out" (thank you MacArthur Foundation - I don't know where I would have found equivalent words to describe what I am talking about) with their techno toys. As it is, I find it hard to imagine that any of our students will ever get to the point where they are designing new technologies if they don't start talking about and taking apart the devices all around them.

How I Came to Feel Like a Reactionary AKA Adopt and Adapt, Living and Learning

2009-02-17T18:14:00.000-08:00

In reading Adopt and Adapt I realized that I find myself in an odd position. I have embraced technology in my professional and personal life. I use technology extensively to further my students' language learning and in doing so I help them develop their ability to collaborate and to use technology effectively. Yet, in reading the articles I often find myself feeling like some kind of arch conservative because of the flaws I find in the readings.

I have been teaching since 1991 and have seen different trends and programs come and go. Each time one has come, it may have taken some convincing to get adopted, but once adopted, there has been an orthodoxy that accompanies it that does not leave a lot of room for questioning. Programs like ours in which teachers have ample time to 'play' with digital tools and to talk about them provide the necessary opportunity to evaluate how to implement technology effectively.

Much of the language we use in schools today is adopted not from academia/research/psychology but instead from business. Let's not forget that Presky is founder and CEO of a for-profit corporation. We are educators and follow a long line of educators. Some are good and some are not (as always) but it makes sense that we take a critical eye when adopting and integrating new tools. In way too many cases our teaching and our curricula became slaves to the corporate publishers created texts that were purchased by far-removed administrators. Now we are entering a period of potentially disruptive technologies, but they likely will not disrupt the increasingly powerful paradigm of corporate profit from the education of our youth. Nor will they disrupt the increasing influence of business over what we do in school.

I believe strongly that we should expand the range of tools we use in the classroom, we should adapt/reinvent our curricula to reflect what we can now do, we should embed the skills that go with the tools into our newly adapted curricula, but I do not buy into the orthodoxy that to not do so is to fail as a teacher. As David Healy mentioned in class and in his blog, what about the rest of the world that doesn't have the digital tools at their disposal? Will they not be educated? What about ISB? We often don't have enough computers to implement this kind of curriculum. Do I think we should? YES. Do I think our students can't get a good education because teachers can't book computers every class? NO.

Prewsky makes no reference as to why schools might ban email, cell phones and instant messaging. Is it because teachers don't know how to understand them? Hello, we're not idiots. It's because students aren't using them as tools for school. They are using them, at best, to socialize during learning times (I wonder why we didn't encourage the passing of notes) and at worst creating an environment in which the social aspect of students' lives becomes a 24 hour onslaught. I seem to remember from my own experience and know from all the students I have supported over the years that the social aspect of our students' lives, even for the most popular among them, isn't always that much fun.

Most importantly (back to the, hello, we're not idiots point), some teachers want the tools in place to make cell phones, email, instant messaging etc. work for the classroom. A great example is facebook. I would never use it in my classroom because there is no control over what gets posted and who joins. Aside from the productive use of time aspect, the social trauma that could ensue is enormous. Ning, however, allows me to create a social/academic/collaborative network in which students can't post harmful writing or images and I can control who joins. This is a tool developed for the kind of things we do in school.

The City of Toronto, the world capital of facebook use, banned facebook from city government offices. Was it because they did not understand this emerging technology? Did they not see the incredible potential for collaboration it presents? No, they banned it because no one was doing any work. Keep in mind that this was with educated adults with important jobs to do. Is it any surprise that schools are struggling to create policies that will ensure students learn in school?

When Marc Prensky says that students "are far ahead of their educators in terms of taking advantage of digital technology and using it to their advantage," I have to wonder which students and teachers he is talking about. The students I know don't really know how to take advantage of the technologies available to them. Similarly, many of the teachers I know are remarkably comfortable with digital tools. The students I have known as digital tools have become widespread have learned only to scratch the surface of what technology has to offer. Yes, they can make calls, send texts, update their status on facebook and make lists of their top friends, but so what? Is that using technology to their advantage?

Most of my students' (past and present) use of technology is for social purposes. In many cases, that use has really become a new way to make people feel bad about themselves. Oh the tales of woe I have heard because of facebook posts, cell phone three ways, texts. And then of course there is sexting. I'm not naive enough to believe all the nighmare stories about teenage online behaviour, but I also have enough experience with students to be critical of blanket statements about young people's technological prowess.

The MacArthur Foundation Report

"Rather than seeing social¬izing and play as hostile to learning, educational programs could be positioned to step in and support moments when youth are motivated to move from friendship-driven to more interest-driven forms of new media use. (p.35)"

This has nothing whatsoever to do with technology. Take out the words new media use, substitute activity and you have what good teachers have always done. This is where I once again feel like a cranky reactionary old man, but I can't get over the tunnel vision of the authors of some of our readings. They seem to have forgotten all that has come before them and much of the context in which we function.

"Adult lack of appreciation for youth participation in popular culture has created an additional barrier to access for kids who do not have Internet access at home. We are concerned about the lack of a public agenda that recognizes the value of youth participation in social communication and popular culture. When kids lack access to the Internet at home, and public libraries and schools block sites that are central to their social communication, youth are doubly handicapped in their efforts to participate in common culture and sociability. (p.36)"

Ironically, on the day that I read this article, it was reported that there are potentially major health risks associated with this type of social communication. This is not a Tipper Gore, our kids our going to be monsters because of rap music report; this is in the journal Biologist, the journal of of the Institute of Biology. Then of course there are all the reports of increasing obesity and health problems associated with inactivty.

Oy!!!! Once again, I feel like the cranky old man when in fact I support both philosophically, and in my practice, these ideas. Yet some of the conclusions are so facile and so clearly the result of orthodoxy that I am compelled to say, "Sorry, I can't agree."

"And rather than assuming that education is primarily about preparing for jobs and careers, what would it mean to think of education as a process of guiding kids’ participation in public life more generally, a public life that includes social, recreational, and civic engagement? (p.39)"

So many arguments for the adoption/inclusion of digital tools actually mention the absolute necessity of developing skills precisely for students' future jobs and careers. Good education has always been about guiding students' positive participation in society. That goes all the week back to Plato, but once again, someone has tunnel vision.

Now if you'll excuse me, I'm going to watch some Lonely Island on youtube so I can stop feeling like an irascible old fart.

PL Sketch

2009-02-15T04:25:00.000-08:00

Developing this project is much more complex than it would seem for I am tortured by the desire to make something that piques my students' intellectual curiosity but driven by the need to develop the most basic of language skills. You see, a hugely successful student could, at the end of this upcoming unit, say, "I make a sandwich with tomatoes, cheese, mustard and bread." I am exaggerating slightly but we are developing (truly) basic vocabulary and language structures for daily communication.

My students cannot do research in Spanish without very specific guidance or they will be overwhelmed by what they find (or they will try and find information in English). I struggle to balance technology use because communicating about the tool often ends up being in English instead of Spanish. In short, coming up with the idea for a project is not difficult; balancing the ideas with the realities of what my students can do and what they need to learn how to do as we scaffold the tools for increasingly complex communication is the challenge.

This project sketch will surely change, but here it is.

Project Learning Sketch

Project Learning Sketch

Objectives/Outcomes:
1. Students will acquire core vocabulary relating to the market (mercado), shopping for food (including numbers between 0-1000) and preparing food.
2. Students will first recognize the words (oral and reading comprehension).
3. Students will make these words part of their active vocabulary (i.e. they can use the words independently and relatively spontaneously).

NETs
1. Creativity and Innovation: Students will create original works.
2. Communication and Collaboration: Students will collaborate and publish with peers; communicate information effectively using various tools; and contribute to project teams.

Learning Disposition
The primary learning disposition I seek to foster with this project, consistent with the primary goal of the class, is willingness to use and experiment with language. Students will apply previously learned vocabulary and integrate it with new vocabulary while making a consistent effort to use Spanish exclusively.

Evaluation
Students will narrate a voicethread individually or in pairs outlining the steps for preparing food or for ordering food in a restaurant. Using photographs of food, for example, they will have to describe the steps for making a sandwich, identifying which ingredients they do and don't want. This will demonstrate their mastery of vocabulary and basic language structures as they respond to images corresponding to core vocabulary.
Students will complete the project (described below) and present it either to the class in person or through a voicethread of their own.

The Project

Students will be organized into teams of 2-3 students with assigned roles (writer, researcher, vocabulary specialist).
Students make a list (English or Spanish) of the ingredients to prepare a basic meal of their choice.
Students review a voicethread prepared by me of many basic food items and match that to their list of ingredients.
For additional items, students will find the vocabulary they need by using dictionaries (online and/or print).
Using a set of links prepared by me, students will look up the cost of the ingredients they need and calculate the cost to prepare.
Using either a wiki or a voicethread, students will compile images and text/audio to demonstrate their ability to both understand and use core vocabulary.
As a culminating assignment, students will present a cooking show, demonstrating how to prepare the meal they have chosen.

Intro
Slideshow of foods that most students like
Menus from restaurants in Spanish
Cooking show video

32 nanometer

2009-02-10T19:09:00.000-08:00

So intel is going to start shipping transistors 32 nanometers in size, or, as the story described so small "that 4 million of them would fit on the period at the end of this sentence." Conceptually that is a pretty staggering thought and I wonder how we convey that to our students. I am curious how we teach, just conceptually, about the 'working' of a computer.

Maybe we should have some kind of club to take apart computers and rebuild them.

9 February

2009-02-09T21:52:00.000-08:00

The Planning reading provides useful guidelines for integrating technology into classroom activities. I feel, for example, a pressure (pretty much entirely internal) to use tech tools in my classroom activities. With the number of students I have, however, sometimes using those tools will drag me away from more important issues of curriculum or learning outcomes. The reading both suggests types of projects and a framework for evaluating their efficacy.

That said, I am really torn in my interests in the course. On one hand I am intrigued by the ideas raised by the Connectivism reading. What is knowledge? What is the role of content when facts are so readily obtainable? What implications does that have for our roles as teachers and learners. These are huge intellectual issues to grapple with as we come to understand the role of new communication tools in our teaching. At times I think that is what we need to really grapple with during class time since it forms the underpinnings of any new directions we take.

Fundamentally it is the ease of communication and the ease of finding information that are driving change. The two help to generate the big questions and inform all aspects of the day to day questions.

Aaaaaa, that four hour log-in thing at housing just made me lose my last paragraphs!!!!! I was writing about the other side that I feel we/I need to explore and that is the actual implementation of these types of learning strategies.

Anyway, to try and re-create, the practical side of it is harnessing the tools productively both for students and for me. The reading on Planning helps to provide a useful framework for evaluating both tools and plans. Careful planning helps one focus on the desired result, but these guidelines also help to evaluate the tools involved. To paraphrase a previous reading (and Marshall McLuhan) the pipe is the message, so choosing the right one merits some thought and consideration. With collaboration as a given for a desired goal, choosing the most appropriate tool is important. At the same time, if content is important or conceptual understandings, planning appropriately to make the most effective use of time must be balanced.

I often find that in my desire to achieve authentic assessments. With performance tasks and video I have a great opportunity to capture students' real language acquisition progress. I would also like to have them work with the video more and have more personal involvement in the editing and posting process. As an archive of their progress there are obvious benefits if they are doing the archiving. The reality, however, is that the need to be using language as much as possible overshadows that and I often prepare and upload video for this purpose. It's a worthwhile endeavour but given that I see my students approximately 90 times per year for 40-45 minutes at a time, I often take on that step to enable more language oriented activities.

As I said, the Planning article provides helpful guidelines but I would also be interested in creating a companion to the ISTE standards that charts a progression of important skills and concepts for our students. It could start with basic skills such as logging on (the early grades), progress to choosing appropriate collaborative tools (middle elementary?) and evaluation of content (upper elementary). Along with skills, there would be important concepts as well ('where' is a webpage, what place do facts have, what is knowledge).

As a document it would have to be fluid in order to accommodate changing technology adoptions (e.g. will ISB use fingerprints in future?) but it would chart a course for our expectations of students' ability to understand and use technology.

In the end, I suppose I hope that we get time to dabble in the theoretical while we try to put all of this into play.

A question

2009-02-08T03:57:00.001-08:00

So many times people trot out statistics (in the vein of) "x% of what we know now will be obsolete in x years." What does that mean. What does it mean that knowledge is obsolete?

Is anything in chemistry obsolete? Is it merely added to? Is an assumption/fact that was held as true suddenly obsolete? Or is there something to be learned from something that was proven false? Even if something is proven false, isn't there something to be learned from both how the new facts came to light and the erroneous process that took us to the wrong conclusion originally?

I can imagine obsolete technologies, programming languages. But what do those pithy quotes and statistics mean? What are they based on?

My choice - the liberal arts education

2009-02-08T03:46:00.000-08:00

As the product of a liberal arts education I am biased but I think all the developments we are seeing mean that what we have to work towards is a liberal arts education for all our students. Where liberal arts have traditionally meant a four year degree (and a pricey one), we need to extend (and fully develop) that idea so that it extends into our institutions for children and young adults.

A liberal arts education is about learning how to think, to analyze and HOW TO LEARN. With the skills garnered in a true liberal arts tradition all the things we are talking about - career change, shifting knowledge bases, communications skills, cooperation and networking - are part and parcel. Someone with a good liberal arts education can adapt, learn new skills, tackle new projects, work with new people, use new tools...because they can learn.

We live in a world in which business more and more drives education. The terminology we use from best practice to outcomes all come from the business world. Business has also been a driving force in the development of university programs that have no place in a traditional view of a university's role. Hotel management? Hello?

Business has driven education into odd specialization when in reality a good education would mean you don't need a university to TRAIN people. You just need the university to help people learn how to learn. Then they can acquire the specific skills they need when they move into the job/the project/the task of the moment/the year/the job.

Of course this means that we must incorporate new technologies into our curricula so that students develop their skills/knowledge base while using the tools that facilitate communication, cooperation and collaboration.

Changing Thoughts

2009-02-08T03:20:00.000-08:00

The updated taxonomy and Messing Around did not provoke any shift in my thinking. The updated taxonomy is deeply flawed in my view. Creating as a higher order thinking skill, for example, is blown out of the water by one look at youtube. I rest my very short case on Batman and Robin, a poignant (not) video on my a favourite website of my nephew. Any of us who posit creating as representative of mastery and integration of skills/knowledge did not imagine most of the creations online.

That said, I agree that we need to re-examine what higher and lower order thinking skills are. The tools available to us/our students today change the dynamic between mastery of facts, analysis and knowledge. Re-reading that, my thinking may not have shifted because of the taxonomy but it is prompting a lot of thinking and discussion, especially between Robin and I.

Messing Around, similarly, overstates the case for what most of our students are doing as some sort of radical shift. Messing around for most of our students/most online users is still a passive enterprise. They are viewers, searching out content (audio, video, gaming etc.). This is a step beyond channel surfing not in the intellectual/cognitive/evolutionary sense, but in the sense of media and technological innovation.

Our challenge remains to help our students go beyond the passive and to use tools to reshape society. They have the potential, and always have had the potential, to shape the world. New media and technology magnify that potential because of the reach they allow any and all of us. Our role as teacher/learning coach evolves because we have new things to teach with, new tools to teach about and new forms of participation in the societal dialogue to encourage.

And now the best reading for last...

Connectivism was the best thing I have read in YEARS. It challenged my thinking about what knowledge is and provided fodder for some great discussions with Robin. I am looking forward to discussing with (and reading about posts by) my peers. Knowing where to find information, especially as the 'where' is constantly evolving is both impossible to master and essential to teach. Evaluating the where (the source) is invaluable and I think developing the tools to teach/learn that is an exciting prospect. The last face-to-face provided a good starting point for that but there is so much to do in that area that it could become a unit/discipline/specialty in and of itself.

A challenge for teaching at all levels will be making expertise available and conversely finding relevant expertise. Knowledge through the experience of others when other people's experience is readily available opens up vast opportunity and possibility.

I hope we can follow these threads throughout the course and the program. The questions and issues raised by this article are the ones that will shape the future of our profession. I plan to refer back often to Siemen's website so I thank you for bringing it into the course and into my intellectual reflection on my profession.

Addition to web bias and credibility

2009-01-30T23:17:00.000-08:00

Authority - Currency - Content/Purpose - Audience - Structure/Workability

5 Factors for Evaluating Websites

View more presentations from Chris Betcher. (tags: website evaluation)

These five criteria are very useful and would provide good guidance in working with students to analyze information from a website. At the same time it reinforces my belief that teaching content in the classroom remains important. With a basic grasp of content, taught by the teacher using vetted sources, students have a built in filter for the information they encounter online. With a basic understanding of geology and human's efforts to drill into the earth, it would be pretty easy to recognize that a 14.4 km deep hole drilled to find oil automatically disqualifies the site as a legitimate source of information.

The exercise that Chris mentioned of creating a believable but false site is a great one. It would put students in the position of presenting information that either seems plausible OR presenting information in a way that seems plausible.

Hoping to...

2009-01-30T20:15:00.000-08:00

ISB is the first school in which I have had regular access to all the new collaborative tools of our wonderful modern age. Being a Spanish teacher, I have made them a regular part of my classroom teaching because I believe that they afford students unique opportunities to use language in multiple contexts.

Being the only fluent Spanish speaker in the room, I am always searching for new ways to foster Spanish communication between students. I seek to break down the triangle dynamic in which a student only uses Spanish with me. Through blogs, video (embedded in a blog), wikis, ning etc. I have found that students use target language more AND deepen their understanding of language structures.

All that said, many of the potential applications of these tools are not applicable to my students because of their language level. They cannot read/research using most sites in Spanish and spontaneous communication in Spanish is somewhat difficult. Next year, however, I will be teaching humanities and am THRILLED THRILLED THRILLED at the prospect/possibilities of collaboration, research etc. I hope that this course deepens my understanding of those possibilities and connects me to additional collaborative partners.

26 Jan-1 Feb Learning Networks and Bias

2009-01-27T20:34:00.001-08:00

Learning Networks

Personal learning networks have the potential to be revolutionary tools both in how we teach and in terms of the opportunities/potential students see in them. In and of themselves, personal networks are not revolutionary. Millions of people around the world saying, "What's up?" and "Nice photo," are just new ways to communicate about the mundane parts of our lives. The amount of electricity required (and the resulting environmental consequences) to power the servers and computers necessary to enable all of these comments is worth far more than the 'communication' it enables.

The potential, however, for this type of network is tremendous. The ability to share information and ideas to organize projects, tasks, political campaigns, rallies etc. has changed and will continue to change with way people take part in their own educations and in their societies.

As teachers, we have both a tremendous opportunity and a responsibility to explore the limits of personal networks with our students. We value collaboration and have a whole new way in which we can encourage students to share and work together. Almost any task in which we would ask students to work together has potential to be enhanced by a learning network.

Our responsibility is to help students see the potential of this new form of education. For every student who, like the student from the reading, organizes community service projects through Facebook, there are millions who trade variations on what's up and post photos of themselves in glamour shot poses. We can't fully anticipate the direction of the technologies or all their future uses, but if we can get students to see that there is a lot more to Facebook than poking people, we are unleashing the creative potential both of students and technology itself.

The video camera was seen as a way for people to tell their own stories and up-end the traditional dominance of film studios (and profit) as the tellers of stories. Instead, the world got even more porn. If we incorporate tools like learning networks into the routines of school, students are bound to both see that they can be used in an academic context and discover new applications for them.

Personally, I think learning networks are best when there is a greater ability to control access. Ning, for example, allows me to decide who can participate and to see if communication is taking place around a class related topic. Facebook is too open to ensure that only students or participants are taking part in the 'conversation'.

BIAS
Discovering or recognizing bias has to be one of the primary analytical skills we teach. It has always been an important skill, but with so many sources of information available today, it is an essential skill.

Too many of our students believe that research is a google search followed by a few minutes of cutting and pasting. Sifting through information, sources of information and recognizing points of view are even more important within this context. If students actually look for bias they will be more likely to read/research and understand their topic. Content is important; understanding perspective and recognizing points of view buried in the content is a significant intellectual leap. All our students will be better off for taking this step.

COETAIL

2009-01-21T00:04:00.000-08:00

My coetail blog exists.