I finished my final work on my online course through Harvard Education. It was great to be back doing a class but as the class drew to a close, I began to realize that there was something that was missing from what I was doing. As I began to wrap up my work which I was doing with my own class and then recording in the class, I realized that it was really Teaching for Understanding as much as it was Learning for Understanding. Yes, I was the teacher, but I’m really do a whole bunch of learning as we work on this project. I also realized that the students only need my permission to go find things and, to some degree, some of the skills that I have found work when doing a search. But once they begin to use them themselves, they then need critical reading and analytic skills to assess what they have found.
Another thing that I have been working on is having students view the internet as more than a cool place to chat and hang out, play games and watch videos. It is a place of interesting thoughts, ideas and perspectives that has the potential to bring us in touch with many different things that can help us to build whatever it is we are building. (Pipe bombs excluded) We have an opportunity now, with many of our students still keen about the internet and learning, to really get them involved in this process and have them share and work together with all kinds of people while we provide the parameters by which they will need to demonstrate proficiencies, knowledge being one of them.
My CPT class is working on creating a review/interview using audacity on a topic of their choice. They have to create a proposal and then, using that proposal, begin to craft a 6 minute review of their topic which must include an interview of another person. We discussed this and brainstormed topics. My greatest problem is getting them to get down to work on the assignment. If you check out the link, I’ve given them places to look for sounds and ideas for their reviews. I thought that this would motivate them. I then added the incentive that these would be posted and reviewed by other students. Still like pulling teeth on a charging rhinoceros. For them, they log on and go straight to the games/music videos. I then must get them to close these windows throughout the class as they try to not let me see them on them. So there is still a long way to go. Having said that, if we can work with students who are younger and get them to view these tools as more than an entertainment area, we then have a real opportunity to drive education in a new direction. For a vast majority of our senior students, the opportunity has been lost. This is where, I think, we need to be work at having young students encounter the technology and get messy learning with it. Kathy Cassidy’s class blog is a perfect example of this. Thanks Dean for sharing!
As I mentioned in my last blog, we need to begin somewhere so let’s put some foundation down for future years. I’m not saying don’t show this to the older kids or the senior students won’t benefit or run with it but, with young learners, they’re excited about school and willing to try things and work at things. They don’t yet have the “entertain me” perspective that I am encountering more and more. These tools will really move us away from the entertainment and into the realm of authentic learning. The catch is figuring out how to assess this, where it fits in our present system, how do we begin to shift the paradigm and what takes place in the mean time? These are things, as an administrator, I must think about as we have provincial and division initiatives that we must also work towards implementing. Part of my role is to assist teachers in finding the resources to bring the two together and one of those resources is time. Any ideas for this one? I know it was one thing that Will Richardson says he hears all the time and it is valid.
I read a new blog today from an administrator who has begun blogging. His sentiments are very true.
Okay, I have always thought of myself as fairly forward thinking and progressive educator. In the last two days I have come to feel as if I have been asleep for the past decade. I’m 40 next year and I have an mp3 player, frequent the Internet - my friends and family get me to burn disks for them and are amazed at how quickly I can do that. I buy stuff on Ebay. I, therefore am technologically literate . . . right?!?
Ah, no.
Web 2.0 or the multimedia, read-write-post-video-audio-voip thingy has set up camp in my nice little familiar world and I just don’t know how it happened. I have been here the whole time - I am a pioneer. First teacher to have Internet access in my school! Ahhhhhhhhhh. How do you keep up?!!
But there is hope, I think, in that we are seeing a rise in the number of educators who are becoming aware of this move to using the tools around us for more than just posting assignments and schedules. There is an opportunity to build a foundation with people who are willing to again become the pioneers. Only we don’t have years and years. We have only a few years, if that, to make these tools part of our everyday life of school. (FCOL, we still don’t have any electronic method of doing announcements 
) There is a will for things to change, we need to stop the quick response of “On top of all this?” by being ready to suggest things that can be given up in order for this to become a reality. I really think that some program of purchasing laptops would be a big step towards making this a reality. Teachers need the tools and need to be able to work with them, get messy and have things blow up (figuratively) so they aren’t freaked out when it happens to a student. Independent learners are important. We need to create them in our teachers and then create them in our students. As an administrator, I guess this becomes part of my mission, one teacher at a time.
Kelly
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