Reading Kelly Gallagher’s Readicide. Interesting stat: in a survey, he found that his HS students read for an average of 17 minutes a day.
It made me dust of an art project that’s been sitting on my shelf: Habitat Loss. I have the feeling of being squeezed by video, ear buds, endless canned music (so few make music anymore), multimedia and so on. There seems so little room and, especially, so little quiet in which to read. The two pieces are 11 x 17 each and are meant to be read side-by-side, on a wall, not on a computer screen.
I have two goals for the new term: 1.) to get a better feel for new technologies and 2.) the way each will best add to my teaching–if they can add anything at all. Here’s my list.
Expand collaborative note-taking using wikis. I liked the way the Frankenstein wiki worked out; I just need to solidify the practice and open it up to my other grades.
Trial: I’ll open this up to the other three grades, 6 to 8. I’ll also spend a few classes–more with the Grade 6s, fewer with the 8s–working over revising and editing posts.
Biggest problem: The Grade 6 class. They don’t quite have the maturity to be self-policing when working online. 2.) After 5 years of schooling they are so competitive for marks it’s frightening; getting them to work collaboratively will take considerable coaching.
Try Twitter. (from John Dumbrille & Bob Cotter). Why would I want to do that? My students have been intrigued byt the way IM and wikis capture and store conversations and ideas. Twitter seems to bridge the immediate and fleeting conversations of IM and the permanent record of notes in a wiki. Maybe we can capture those. But, I’ll ask again, why would we want to do that? What sort of conversation takes place in that space? That I’ll have to see.
Trial: I think this will have to be linked to the WikiEducator project somehow. That means I’d run it with just a small group of eight students. We’ll ow what we’re Twittering about once we settle on content for wikiEducator.
Biggest problem: It won’t do to set up a private microblogging network because that is a closed space and takes away any advantage of Twittering. (For that reason, Edmodo seems like a dud.) So, we’ll need a parent-education program to go along.
Bring parents into the 2.0 converstation. When I set up Google Apps in the school I gave families–not students–the accounts with the understanding that the students are the primary users. First of all, I think the students’ edcuation comes from a collaboration between students, their families and their teachers, so everyone needs to be using the same tools. Secondly, and more to the point here, if students are going to be properly equipped to work in a socially networked world, they need to actually work in a socially networked world. We can’t hamstring their experience with security controls so tight that they actual change the experience. This means that parents will need to be on board and helping students to use social networking tools responsibly and safely. I’m reminded here of the work of Gever Tulley, founder of the Tinkering School and author of In a a great video on TED, he talks about our drive to overprotect our children.
Trial: Host a couple parent information nights. We did this very successfully when we launched a new assessment practice for the school. That gave us great buy in from families.
Biggest problem: Managing the risks, or perceived risks, that come with working on the open web.
Try blogging.Posterous now offers group blogging and that looks like it will get us around one of our security concerns, namely having to create new IDs for students every time we set up a new service. But, as with Twittering, my question is, What will we blog about?
Trial: I think we have to set up a blogging project with another group of kids outside our school. We may explore this in our WikiEducator project. I’d really like to set up a joint project with First Nations students from the Squamish and Lil’wat nations here in Howe Sound as part of my Master’s thesis. More on this later, but the idea would be to mashup Google maps etc. to rename, redraw, retell the Howe Sound story so it reflects a collective understanding of both cultures.
Biggest problem: I like the idea of having my students engage with people from all over the planet, but getting enough people outside the school actually to engage with them to make blogging significantly different from a classroom conversation will not be easy. Building a blog and driving traffic to it is a lot of work, work that I think takes away from the business of middle school education.
Experiment with tagging web content. The work that Peter Rawsthorne and John Dumbrille
are doing on tagging web content has tweaked my interest as a teacher. I really like the way this is not platform dependent and would be easily transferred to work on a cell phone–which is where I think things are going to go in the classroom. This may transcend things such as Delicious and Diigo.
Trial: The WikiEducator project.
Biggest problem: Tagging needs Twitter.
Buy a cell phone. No kidding–I don’t have one; I worry that if I do, people will start calling me. But, I love some of the things Rob De Lorenzo is doing over at his blog, The Mobile Learner:
When I taught grades 7 and 8, we [...] kept running into the problem of students not using their agendas. This may have been due to the fact that it is not always convenient or practical to walk around with ones school agenda everywhere one went and the agenda is really useless if one doesn’t constantly look at it. Paper agendas are static devices that don’t actively work with individuals to remember to get things done. Cell phones, however, are different. Kids keep their phones with them all the time and keeping an agenda within their phone’s calendar is not asking kids to change their habits too much as they already use their phones for many other things other than for voice communication. However, the most important benefit in my eyes is the ability to allow kids to set reminders when things are due. This common feature has the powerful ability communicate back to students in a way that is impossible with a paper agenda.
Then there are the calculators built into cell phones. Why do we encourage students, especially those in elementary, to spend money on purchasing a calculator when they already have them built in to their phones?
In addition, to be able to take notes on a cell phones is very powerful. While on any sort of excursion, students can record their observation right from a device that they carry with them and easily collect those digital notes and make them accessible on a computer. [...] Many cell phones that kids are carrying around have bluetooth and cameras as well. Using these devices, students can take photographs of observations on a field trip or science experiment, and collaborate with other students by sharing their content (photographs and notes) by sending them to group partners via bluetooth.
Toni Twiss has a great paper, Ubiquitous Information: An eFellow report on the use of mobile phones
in classrooms to foster information literacy skills, she’ll send to you if you email her at toni.twiss@gmail.com
Trial: I’ll try calendaring with the Grade 8s or Grade 9s, assuming they all have cells with SMS. Even if some don’t, I may do it anyway as a way of building a case for a bigger trial either in the last term or next year.
Biggest problem: Cost. Data plans in Canada are not cheap–about $70 month.
I am trying really hard to find the leverage promised by things 2.0. Here’s the starting list of things I can do with emerging technologies that I couldn’t (easily) do otherwise. You’ll notice there’s nothing revolutionary here, but I nevertheless count these as very valuable:
Have students take notes collaboratively. Of course, students have always been able collaborate, but wikis and platforms such as Google Apps or Zoho, among others, make this a whole lot easier. And easier is an important advantage in the classrrom. Wikis seem best here because they make organizing and referencing a collection of notes simple.
case: During our study of Shelley’s Frankenstein, I asked each Grade 9 student to make an oral presentation on key elements in a chapter of the book and then lead a follow up discussion. The rest of the class took notes and I filled in philosophical and historical background when needed. Afterwards, the presenter posted his or her notes to the class wiki. Then, every other student in the class was asked to make edits and revisions so that as a class we had the best possible set of notes. The point here was not to teach note-taking, but to create the best understanding of the novel. I see now that I should have spent more time coaching the kids on revising the notes–most material went up verbatim. But the practice nevertheless made a huge difference for the students. Because they were collectively responsible for note-taking, the students were individually relieved of the worry of missing something important in their own notes. That let them all be more focussed on the class discussion.
Use IM to hold brainstorming sessions. Students are masters at handling multiple simultaneous conversations online. I’ve found IM to be a clunky tool for working through linear problems–walking students through a procedure like setting up a wiki page. But in a freewheeling session the medium seems to encourage playfulness and greater intellectual risk-taking. But, most importantly, any IM tool keeps a transcript that can be review, searched and mined for data and ideas.
case: Eight of my Grade 8 and 9 students are working on a project for WikiEducator, as I reported in my blog post IM-mediate Observations. In three, three-hour online sessions. The students found it frustrating to have to figure out complex problems such as uploading and linking images to a WikiEducator page (this may not be a bad thing in the long run, as they ahd to learn patience and perseverance). But they were impressed that they could go back and look over the things they said when we were brainstorming ideas. I ran another experiment with a whole class of English students in IM and found the same results.
In the words of one of the students: “Instant Messaging for classes I find is a good way to share each other’s ideas because everyone can speak up whenever they want; it is very flowing. I like that people comment on each others opinions. Whether they disagree or agree it all adds something to the conversation that is not recognized very much in class. It would be good idea to have an order people speak in and you would say pass if you had nothing to say. [But] this eliminates the idea of flowing comments. If you have to say something you are forced to remember all your comments until it is your turn. It is very limiting. Obviously IM won’t work for all classes but we can experiment with it. I think IM will work best for discussions.”
Use IM to include students who are absent. Mostly my students want to come to school and hate missing classes. IM can hook them up when they’re away. Says one student, IM “is also very useful for people that are not at school. Whether they’re sick or on vacation they can participate in the class.”
case: The student quoted above was home sick but online when I started a class in IM. She jumped in on her own accord. A second student, also home sick for several days, was careful ahead to get the times for an upcoming WikiEducator session so she could participate from home.
Use IM to answer homework questions. This requires setting something like office hours so students know when they can get answers. The phone would also work, but it only allows the teacher to talk to one student at a time. IM lets a teacher have multiple conversations simultaneously or to hold group chats around the same problem.
case: Our math teacher uses IM extensively to answer simple questions outside of school hours. He finds he’s able to turn around what would otherwise be a frustrating homework session for some students. I’ve done the same, but I’ve been more jealous of my time than he.
Use Skype to hold parent-teacher conferences. You could also use Google Chat.
case: We’ve used Skype to run several parent-teacher conferences. In each case, the parents said it gave them a greater sense of being in the meeting than they could have had from a telephone conference.
Use Diigo collaboratively to build bookmark libraries. Diigo is a great tool; and the developers are sympathetic to the security concerns of schools. In the same way wikis help groups build pools of notes, Diigo helps them build pools of references. The annotating feature is outstanding and it’s easy to build topic-specific groups for organizing bookmarks.
case: I set up my Grade 9 students with Diigo accounts. We first built a library of references for Frankenstein. Later I set up my grade 8 students with accounts. Now, any time I need to send my students a url, I add it to one of our Diigo groups. I can also highlight key points on a web page, annotate it, leave directions on the page in a sticky note etc. The Grade 9 students took off on their own, collecting and annotating web pages for their Masterworks projects. (In Grade 9, the graduating year at IPS, each student takes on a project of his or her own choosing. We give them each committee of one faculty and two external advisors who meet with them six times over the year. n June the students publicly present and defend their work, which is typically a 25- to 35-page paper or equivalent creative project, such as a play.)
@mrmayo Twittered that he loves the sound of “a classroom full of students madly typing away.” We teachers all love the sound of happily engaged students. But this was music to my old-fashioned ears:
After reading Beowulf and selections from the Exeter Book of Riddles, my grade 8 students tried their hand at writing their own riddles, as a way of exploring metaphor. Then, working by candlelight, they transcribed their verses into Carolingian miniscule while listening to Gregorian chant.
The low light and contemplative singing gave enormous space for thinking–the classroom seemed twice as big. The kids worked, happily, in silence for an hour!
There’s some interesting data, something we’re short on in the discussion of Learning 2.0, on Paul Bogush’s nearly eponymously-named blog, Blogush. Bogush, an 8th grade teacher in Connecticut, asked his students to comment on how blogging for a world-wide audience over the past two months has changed the way they write. Most of the students, whose responses Bogush has faithfully recorded for us, said something like this one did:
Knowing that the whole world is able to see what I’m writing makes me think twice about putting something up there. It makes me check my work more carefully and it motivates me to do my best work.
Or these ones:
It makes me want to do my very best.
I realize that some of our cutoms are much different than in other parts of the world, so i try not to be blunt when i am explaining things.
Bogush clearly has his kids motivated; they rock, as he says.
But, as I commented on his site, I wonder what does it say about schools that students don’t care about how well they write until they know they’re writing for a blog-sized audience? Could it be that students think that school is not the real world, so to speak, and so they say–maybe rightly–who cares? Does connecting and collaborating make learning real? I know my own students are fired up by their WikiEducator project, which is similar insofar as they are writing for a world-wide audience.
Or does Bogush make writing real, if that is indeed the reason his students have taken up the pen? A teacher’s job is make an education real or relevant for students. I don’t mean relevant in the sense that the thing in question will secure a job, or entrance into univeristy or help balance a checkbook. I mean that students, especially young adolescents like Bogush’s grade 8s, are full of questions about the nature of knowledge, justice, ethics, society and themselves. “Who am I?” and “What I am I supposed to be doing here?” are the sorts of questions my students are asking. A good teacher, like Bogush maybe, will show them how being a careful writer–or careful reader, speaker, mathematician and so on–will help them explore possible answers in a meaningful way.
The two statements in the slide ought to be obvious; and it ought to be obvious that they have been forever true. This is because technology is always new, which is the same thing as saying it’s nothing new. James Pillans’ blackboard and chalk were cutting edge educational tech when he introduced those in the classroom in the early 19th century. “The inventor of [this] system,” one Josiah Bumstead said, “deserves to be ranked among the best contributors to learning and science, if not the greatest benefactors of mankind.”
The more interesting thing raised here is that no one has said enough yet about what “effective” means, (or about why we would want students to connect and collaborate online). My hunch is that it doesn’t mean anything different than it did in Pillans’ day.
You may have seen this video, but the last 30 or 40 seconds makes a point relevant here and is worth another look if you have:
Learning systems architect, Peter Rawsthorne, and I have now run three, three-hour online WikiEducator sessions with me in the room with them and peter working online, often from a cafe. We had a lot of fun together while working through the business of making wiki pages and pondering some far-ranging discussions about ownership of content and Creative Commons licensing. In January, we’ll start building content for WikiEducator.
Along the way, we’ve gathered some data about how 13- and 14-year olds interact with technology and about what they think of socially constructed knowledge.
Our immediate observations:
the students are quick to get any new technology to work and they are old hands at IM; but using IM for something other than idle chat was a novel idea for them.
the students focus on the last one or two things said in an online conversation so the threads easily unravel
the students can’t resist being funny in IM, especially in group chats, although they do settle down: by the third session, they were focused and kibbitzing no more than you’d find in a good round table meeting
that said, the students generally gave more good quality comments than they usually do in the classroom (this, however, may be because they were working in a small group)
the level of participation by each student parallelled their level of participation in class: some were prolific, some hardly typed a word
the students were impatient when instructions for the mechanical tasks they handle so easily, such as set up their profiles in WikiEducator, come via IM; it would have been faster to have the instructor in the room
making students work through complex ideas and instructions without a teacher over their shoulder had them working to help each other: once one student figured out how to upload a picture to a wiki page, he or she was happy to spread the wisdom
the students liked the idea that the conversation was recorded and that they could review it later at their leisure
the students are excited by the project and by the prospect of working with international students
they are really excited and motivated by the idea of collaborative constructing knowledge
Our lessons learned:
the students see IM as a toy, not a tool
they need to work more using IM so they begin to see it as a useful tool
so, teachers need to work more with IM
all this points to the need to develop the art of online conversation, or online critical discourse, which flows differently than face to face or phone conversations
IM in even modest-sized groups seems to be good for brainstorming ideas, not least of all because the students have a searchable transcript of their conversation to mine for ideas long after the discussion is over
completing mechanical tasks using IM is frustrating because the students work faster than an instructor can type; it helps to have a reference page with detailed instructions/video explaining what to do
big screens are good as you need to keep a chat window open while working on whatever project is at hand; otherwise you’re flipping back and forth between windows too much
I agree with Alan November that students need to develop a new kind of literacy to be able to work intelligently online. But–surely–that’s only a means to some other end. Yet, most of the conversations about technology I hear, on Twitter for example, but in staff rooms, too, are about working with new technologies, rather than working with ideas. I worry that we are putting the cart before the horse. A lot of technology is just inverse vandalism, says Alan Kay in a 1994 interview called A Bicyle for the Mind, Redux. Teachers, he says
…have to learn how to ask extremely hard questions about whether there’s any content there. A lot of technology is just what I call inverse vandalism, which is people making machinery just because they can. When educating, the first thing you need is ideas that you want to have the student learn. There has to be some resetting of what content actually is. If you have the ideas, you can do a lot without machinery. Once you have those ideas, the machinery starts working for you. Paradoxically, the most profound ideas I know about computers are easily done on an Apple II. Most ideas you can do pretty darn well with a stick in the sand.
