next-ed

I am thinking that the major impediment to the creative use of ICT in the classroom is neither the technology, nor the capacity of teachers, which is growing daily.  The major obstacle is actually teacher self-concept.  How we conceive of ourselves and our role in our classroom will determine the limits of our creativity.

So, if we finally decide that we are not required to master the technology, and only master the teaching, we can be liberated to be the best teachers we can be.  I don’t know about you, but I did not sign up to be a computer programmer: I am a teacher.

Well that is what some teachers at St Mary Star of the Sea College are given every year.

They will head in to the new year with the resources to study, measure, design and implement a plan to improve student engagement and learning outcomes.  Using the principles which underpin the NSW Quality Teacher Framework, these leaders and their teams will create a cycle of action learning as courageous and innovative as their imaginations will allow.

Most importantly, they will listen to what students have to tell them about their learning.

What would your students say if you asked them, say, at the end of a lesson:

• what point in the lesson was the most exciting?
• what did you learn today that was valuable?
• how would I know you succeeded in this topic?
• what would you tell next year’s students about this lesson?

Practitioner enquiry - an ethical approach to student learning.

What should we be asking?

In a recent article in Teacher magazine, Joanne Pace reflects on the learning taking place in her junior environmental science class.  What she discovers is that the students are not engaged in anything deeper than the strict instructions and single learning path she has been offering them.  Things must and do change when she asks “What should we do to make our school more environmentally friendly”? Suddenly, an open ended conversation leads to new learning.

It takes some courage, but Pace begins to plan for her students’ learning based on their emerging understanding.

People who know me know I am passionate about learning how student voice can be used to improve practice.  This ethical practitioner enquiry model holds great power for shaping the learning environment.  How could it work in your classroom?

Mark Pesce has offered us a deeply thoughtful and sometimes disturbing look at how the Internet is evolving to meet the needs and expectations of the mob, at the expense of the hierarchy.  As he says: “The net regards hierarchy as a failure, and routes around it.”  By asserting that the mobis larger, smarter and stronger than any institution, Pesece describes a net that is organic and which actively works against censorship, control and order. Cool, but…

where does that leave schools (as we understand them).  Can you name a more highly centralised, controlled and censored environment on the planet (short of prison)?  While knowledge and content is being happily democratised in the online world, and while young people create, distribute and consume media of all sorts without so much as a thought about who controls it, schools continue to package knowledge into pre-prepared, bite sized and tasteless peices of knowledge-lite.

Our struggle therefore, is two-fold:

1. We must use the net to our own advatage by providing opportunities to create, publish, solve and share in real and meaningful ways; even if this means confronting the chaos.
2. We must ensure that the world of the school does not recede from the world view of our netizen students.

As Pesce says:

“We live in increasingly interesting times.  Half of humanity has suddenly dropped in – uninvited and unannounced – crashing our private party, eager to participate in an exploration of the possibilities of human communication.  Whatever they want, they’re going to get.  That’s the way things work now… Things are going to change.”

Many of us would have heard students complain that the sites they want access to are blocked by ‘big brother’.  Content filtering is managed by systems, and, to date, most emergent stage of connectove technologies, teachers themselves are the source of the risk, due to their lack of development in this area.  How can we unblock content and tools if the teachers responsible for the care of kids don’t understand their duty in this environment.  Many teachers would have a greater sense of the risks from the shock jocks than from informed and participative investigation.  If you were to ask a garden-variety teacher what strategies she would use in a classroom to manage the risks of online social networking what would her response be? 

Teachers of this ilk will give tacit support to sytemic blocking if they remain disengaged fromt the tools that are making kids and systems vulnerable.  Hysteria is no excuse for remaining ignorant.  If there is no challenge, or alternative view, beaurocrats will make decisions to protect themselves, without regard for the effect on learning.  We need to develop a professional, evidence based-response to these technologies (and the risks) so that we will not join the chorus of “the sky is falling!”.

Hands up if you have a Facebook account…

I had the great pleasure of attending the second annual Coalition of Knowledge Building Schools conference, held at Taronga Zoo on the banks of Sydney Harbour last Friday.  The Coalition is a cooperative association of member schools and institutions from across New South Wales and across sectors of education.  At times it was difficult to concentrate as Cotton Top Tamarin monkeys played on the other side of the glass wall.

The small conference was energetic and the atmosphere was very open and trusting.  People from divergent fields, inlcuding zoo educators and museum curators shared their experiences with primary and secondary schools of vastly different cultures.  Two prevailing themes emerged from our discussions: 

1. That the ubiquity of technology takes it beyond being ‘just another tool’.  Its pervasiveness in the lives of our students, and its seamless integration into social organisation and cultural expression elevates technology to a status which has more in common with a cultural paradigm rather than merely a learning tool.  The implications of this are profound, starting with our moral and ethical obligation, as teachers, to study and understand how learning and knowing can be enhanced and mediated in a culturally powerful way.
2. One of the most authentic and effective ways of keeping learning fresh is to engage in action research as a practitioner.  By asking rich questions and endeavouring to answer them by listening to the voices of those we teach, we can come a long way down the path towards that elusive destination: best practice.

I want to leave you with a a short (4min) video summarising some of the most important characteristics of students today - how they learn, what they need to learn, their goals, hopes, dreams, what their lives will be like, and what kinds of changes they will experience in their lifetime

Well, what am I going to do with 40 brand new, shiny iPods?  I have some ideas but the most exciting is that I am going to give them to kids.  That’s all: just give them to kids and see what happens.  But its not just any kids I’m going to give them to.  Its dyslexic kids, autistic kids, mild to moderate intellectually disabled kids.  And then, I’m going to sit back and watch what happens when I say “How are you going to use these to make school a better place for you?”.

 I hope that Frances will say “I hate noisy classrooms.  I’m going tio use the iPod to zone out when it all gets too much and I can’t concentrate on my work.”  I hope Sarah will say “I’m going to ask the teacher’s aide to put my novel on the iPod so I don’t have to read it all by myself”.  I hope Sarah says “Maybe we could record our speeches” or “Can we use these to record our voices and put them together with pictures and music?”.

 I am starting to understand Alan November’s mantra More Them - Less Us.  This whole notion that we must control even a Web 2.0 learning experience is fallacious and fraught.  So I am going to let go a little and see what happens. Having worked only a little with special kids, I know I need to be prepared for anything, but what better way to appreciate what is developmentally appropriate for a kid with a disability than to ask them and to watch them.  If you have any ideas for what the students might create or ask for then please let me know.

I am a teacher of Religious Education and one of the most engaging topics for Year 10 students is Working for Social Justice.  Quite soon into the topic it became apparent that these 15 year old girls living in Wollongong, Australia receive a highly filtered view of the world and the issues being faced by people in it.  Their consumption of media is extremely prejudicial with a bias towards commercial news of very low intellectual value and news which is actually thinly veiled advertising and cross promotion. 

When we began discussing topics like Dafour or Burma, there was a pervading level of ignorance from even the most talented of students. 

How, in this digitally connected world, can my students remain untouched by news that touches the very root of what it means to be a human in community?  I found it porfessionally and personally distressing, cosnidering my belief that it is to students like these that we must look to help solve the inequities and imbalances in the world.

Pageflakes is a web based  RSS and XML aggregator.  It is highly customisable and adds elements of social networking to the idea of news aggregation.  I thought “If my students won’t seek out the news, then I will pushthe news to them!”.  They all signed up for a Pageflakes account and grabbed hold of a Pagecast I had prepared called “My Conscience”. This page drew together news feeds from Amnesty Internaltional, The United Nations, blogs from intellectuals and activists in Africa, news headlines, Flickr images for poverty etc.  The students then worked with this as a starting point and customised the page to suit themselves.  This then became their homepage for the browser.  If they were proud of a page they had created, they would pagecast it and email me an invitation to come and look.

I am hoping that the next time I ask “What do you think about the junta’s crackdown in Burma?” I will not be met with 28 blank expressions.

I spent today working with the advisory group preparing for the DEST teacher Summer Schools for January 2008.  My committee is looking at Literacy and Numeracy, to be presented by a Consortium made up of Wollongong University, Edith Cowan University and ALEA.  It was energising to be with diverse people all passionate about teacher professional learning, and we spent a good portion of the day wrestling with ideas about how to sustain the learning after the summer school is over.

There was a diverse array of scholars gathered for this conversation about literacy and numeracy, including Len Unsworth, one of Australia’s pre-eminent advocates for digital and emerging literacies.  His work in the area of eFiction taps into the reading culture of young people and would be extremely relevant for teachers trying to engage a generation of students who have exposure to such a vast range of texts in such a broad choice of media.

So the summer schools will offer learning based on cutting edge research.  My other hope (the one I will be working on with the Advisory Group) is that the summer schools will also be taught using cutting edge pedagogy.  How can we hope to teach writing for an online audience, if we don’t write online?  How can we teach numeracy as a life skill for a digital age if we don’t engage with digital media?  How can we teach contemporary communication as a literacy, if we are fearful of social networking. 

I was a little embarassed by the silence that followed my suggestion that participants should engage in an online social network before, during and after the summer school.  I might as well have suggested that all participants dress up in silly loud shirts and pose for a group photo.  Ridiculous!

One of my favourite films is the Matrix.  Education is now at the point of choosing between the blue pill and the red pill: the red pill allows us to continue with the status quo, oblivious to the possibilities of a new reality.  The blue pill would see us to leave behind that version of the world which no longer relevant or meaningful.  Sadly, so many of the teachers I work with don’t even realise there is a choice to be made.  For them, our students are fading into a world they don’t recongise or want to engage with. 

Let’s not let the kids get too far down the rabbit hole without us!