Reasons for Learning

Bud Hunt, who teaches high school language arts and journalism, made an excellent point in his K-12 Online Conference 2006 presentation Journey through the Week as I Journey Up (or Down) the Road . Bud stated “I guess one of my concerns about technology in the classroom is that it (the discussion) quickly becomes about the computers. ‘What are we going to do with the computers?’ We teach the processes of communication rather then the reasons for the communication...What I think they should learn first is why they should be connected to anyone else first…. Then they have a real reason to know (how to use the technology).”

In the same vein, David Jakes in a Techlearning blog answered the question “What factors contribute to the sustainability of an innovation in the classroom?” David suggests that one factor is “The innovation clearly adds value to an instructional process, and extends student learning to a new place that could not be achieved unless the innovation was present.” Another factor is “There are visible and tangible results as a result of the innovation. Teachers need to see that the innovation improves what he or she does and makes a difference for student learning.”

Teachers are pragmatic. The philosophy of a new teacher quickly becomes “If it helps me to do my job better by helping my student learn better, I’m for it”. People who don’t take this path can’t distinguish the wanted from the unwanted, relatively valueless material in the blizzard of pedagogic material hurled at teachers and get snowed under fast.

Therefore, once teachers see a value in trying something different in the way they help kids learn, they are much more willing to try it. Whenever I work as a consultant with individual teachers, I try to ask “What are you teaching?” This begins a discussion within the framework of what teachers feel they need. Sometimes the situation is obvious, such as when a class went on a field trip and the teachers was very happy to learn how to use our school’s digital camera, download and manipulate the images. Another situation was when our school got a subscription to United Streaming downloadable videos and teachers discovered that they could improve reading comprehension by giving students a conceptual framework by first showing a movie relating to the reading topic. In this case teachers were demanding tutelage on downloading and using streaming videos as well as a discussion on best teaching practices in using the videos. A third situation was when a teacher was looking for a way to have her students mentored by others who were outside of the classroom and couldn’t be physically in the class. In this case, she was excited about the potential of using a blog (Blogmeister) and is presently working on it.

If a need is felt for the communication and publishing by both teachers and students, and if the structure and guidelines of the learning exercise are optimally planned for, the activities can be wonderful learning events. Then the required technology will be felt as a necessary component (just in time learning), and not as an unwanted add-on to be resisted or ignored by teachers.

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Small Steps

Today I worked with an elementary school teacher as she created her first blog ever using David Warlick’s ClassBlogmeister. She would like to use blogging as a way to have her students be mentored by historians. In her “break time”, while her students were with the art teacher, she managed to register and choose a template for the blog. Then she had to leave to get her students. She asked for another session a few days from now to learn more.

Another teacher wanted help with Excel. She needed to work with (enter grades into) the school’s sports eligibility list, but she couldn’t find the zoom button in order to make the size of the sheet manageable to work with. What had happened is that Standard and Formatting toolbars had somehow gotten side by side instead of one under the other and the zoom button wasn’t to be seen. After showing her how to fix the problem, she worked on it for about half the time her students were in music class (another “break time”), and then left to refill her coffee cup and treasure those few precious minutes of solitude (those who have been elementary teachers will understand the feeling) before she too had to round up her cherubs.

A third teacher need help logging in to her email account (the new principal uses email a lot for communications with the staff, and teachers are accordingly using it a great deal).

In one sense you might say that little was accomplished today: only three small things. And yet that’s the way that most people learn, when they want to. It applies to adults as well as students.

Some people refer to these as teachable moments. The trick is to encourage the creation of these teachable moments and have the necessary support available when they arrive. Call it professional development if you will. I like to visualize this process as taking small steps in the path towards proficiency. It is really the small steps that get us there, wherever we envision taking ourselves and our students.

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Proposal for the Read/Write Web 2.0 in a New High School


A local school district recently put out a request to the general public. It requested input concerning the focus of a proposed new academy for the district’s newest high school.

As background, each of the four major high schools in the district already has a distinct academy, a sort of school within a school, incorporated in its curricular framework. According to School District U-46’s web site, the “focus areas for the academies are: Science, Engineering and Technology; Gifted and Talented; Visual and Performing Arts and World Language and International Studies. Students enrolled in the academies are immersed four or five periods daily in classes related to the academy's focus. The remainder of their studies is in the comprehensive programs where they take classes with students outside of the academies.”

I had suggested to the concerned committee that the focus of the new academy be Connectivity and Communications, in which students will research and apply connectivity tools, as well as investigate various forms of communication media to express their learnings. The Connectivity and Communications Academy allows students to:
--Investigate tools which allow us to increase our connectivity and communications, such as wikis, blogs, and podcasts.
--Investigate and develop learning communities both within the academy and with appropriate groups outside the academy in order to not only expand sources of inquiry but also to share learning beyond the classroom wall.
--Apply these tools and skills to learning in all subject matter disciplines where safe and practicable.
--Use the ideas of connectivity and communications learned to increase post-secondary options for graduates.

The rationale for this focus is based on recent evidence of how connectivity and communications is changing the way people relate to each other, a way of learning subject disciplines using these tools will tend to change the nature of teaching in the academy to one that is engaged, project based, collaborative, research centered, and mentor based. Notice that most of the other academies focus on what students should learn (Sciences, Arts, Languages and such). This academy would focus on how students learn. Students would learn from others in powerful new ways. Students would use wikis, blogs, RSS, telecasts and podcasts and other features of the Read /Write Web 2.0 while superseding classroom walls as they expand their sources of learning and mentoring as well as having new venues for publishing their work. Research has shown that motivation increases dramatically when work is done for others besides the teacher.

David Warlick wrote “What is especially powerful about blogging and wikis is that the technology has, to a greater extent than ever before, gotten out of the way. The tech is so simple and so intuitive, that it's almost entirely about the communication, about the conversation. I think that it's what makes this so compelling to students. It's no longer a writing assignment. It's a communication assignment.” Please go to David Warlick keynote address for the K12Online2006 Conference for more thoughts on this (note: after downloading the file, access it using QuickTime player).

Thomas Friedman’s The World is Flat (reviewed by Kathy Connolly) contends that workers will survive in the flattened world by becoming one of four types of “Untouchables:”
--“Special” – extraordinary at what they do, such as world class physicists or athletes.
--“Specialized” – their work is not easily digitized or substituted
--“Anchored” – the work must be done in a certain place, such as plumbing or electrical work
--“Really adaptable" – ready and willing to learn a new job when the old one goes away

If students learn how to be flexible, how to locate and validate information, how to work with others, whether in person or through connectivity tools, in order to revise information in creating a useable product and how to communicate their results effectively, then our students will be on their way to being “Really Adaptable” or “Specialized”.

I feel it isn’t really the blogs, wikis, aggregators, or whatever technology tools are presently in fashion that’s most important. Instead it’s the human thinking processes that really count. As Stephen Fink wrote “ Maybe blogs and wikis are code words that stand for those good things--student involvement, participation, critical thinking, responsibility for one's education, finding one's voice, sharing power with students, new roles for teachers, collaboration ....When students communicate with an audience they are usually at their best. Therefore, blogs and wikis are tools that help to unleash the power of individuals and create an environment characterized by creativity, student involvement, participation, critical thinking, responsibility for one's education, finding one's voice, sharing power with students, new roles for teachers, collaboration.” Will Richardson said "I wonder if maybe, and it’s a big MAYBE, we’re nearing another level in the conversation. It’s one where we talk about how the realities of the ways in which our kids are already starting to learn outside of school need to be leveraged inside of school. One where we really start to take a look at teachers as learners modeling learning first. And it’s one where people start to recognize that this isn’t about technology as much as it’s about assembling a new vision for their own practice and for their students’ education." Will Richardson also wrote "Last week, George Siemens put up .pdf’s of his new book Knowing Knowledge, and I’ve been reading through it on and off for the last couple of days. It’s been pushing my thinking even more about what connectivism and connected learning really is, and I’m amazed at how much it resonates with my own experience.---The idea that knowledge is not only a product but is also a process.---That know where and know who are much more important today than know what or how.---That learning is all about network creation and attending to that network.---That the learner is the teacher is the learner."

The human product we would expect from such an academy and the learning processes that are involved in producing them would be inexorably intertwined.

References:

Educational Weblogs by Michael Lackner
http://www.mustangblog.typepad.com/educationalweblogs/
The Blogvangelist, Teacher Magazine October 2006 p.22-9
Introduction and background: Towards Social Constructivism and Community in Online Teaching and Learning (educational basis for on-line conncectivity learning) by James Farmer http://incsub.org/blog/2004/communication-dynamics-discussion-boards-weblogs-and-the-development-of-communities-of-inquiry-in-online-learning-environments
Research Links for Engaged Learning http://www.coollessons.org/researchsummary.html
Derailing Education: Taking Sidetrips for Learning David Warlick http://k12online.wm.edu/k12online2006_optz.mp4 (use Quicktime player to open the movie file)
K-12Online Conference 2006 http://k12onlineconference.org/

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