My August LeaderTalk — Gearing Up — post is up. Enjoy!
LeaderTalk: Gearing Up
My August LeaderTalk — Gearing Up — post is up. Enjoy!
A View From the Schoolhouse
My August LeaderTalk — Gearing Up — post is up. Enjoy!
Things influencing this post: Christian Long — Getting Back to Basics
Re-reading Understanding by Design
The conversations about Twitter and Second Life, such as Will Richardson’s What the Tweet? and Sylvia Martinez’ Second Thoughts on Second Life
So interestingly, Christian is asking "What if the tech tools went away, would we have still changed our teaching?"
For me, that’s one of those questions that I don’t quite know how to answer because I’ve spent my entire career in progressive schools. Beacon was an amazing place to be a tech coordinator because the pedagogy was in place, and it was a question of how to marry the tech to it. In fact, early on in my careerI had the problem of teachers who already grasped many of the things that we, in the ed-blogger world, are talking about now, but they didn’t see the need to use the net to do it. (And remember, this was mid-90s when the tools were not what they are today.)
And it’s interesting in today’s context, because I’m in Buffalo today working with the administrative team from a school that is moving into a 1:1 laptop, inquiry-driven, project-based model. I wasn’t there to show them how to use technology to achieve this, I wasn’t there to show them how to use wikis or RSS or blogs. I was there to talk about pedagogy and how this idea of schooling is totally different. We talked about curriculum design (thank you UbD!), we talked about student schedules, we talked about professional development, we talked about supervision of teachers, we essential questions and supporting / scaffolding student inquiry. (Thank you, Konrad for the incredibly timely blog post.)
And yes, in that context, we talked about technology. We used a wiki to tease out our ideas. I started the day by showing them Did You Know 2.0 and Ken Robinson’s TEDTalk, and in both the discussions that came out of those short films, we talked about the ramifications of technology and information access on our schools. We did use Did You Know to talk about the impetus for change, and how technological advancement is creating a need for a new citizenry and therefore new schools, but that is lens for change, not a tech workshop. (In fact, can we all agree to use Did You Know instead of The World Is Flat from now on? Can I get an amen? Thank you.) And I showed them our Moodle site when we talked about supporting teacher development and supporting student discussions.
But the fun thing was that the discussion of the technology only happened when it made sense within the framework of the school reform we were talking about. "How do you support teacher development with limited common planning time?" "Well, let me show you our staff planning site…" "How do you encourage students to continue to develop answers to their questions…" "Let me show you how our teachers use the discussion forums…"
I think that’s really important because it puts the horse before the cart. How can we create engaging schools? How can we teach students toward wisdom? How can we move beyond facts and skills and into enduring understandings and deep, connected learning? Those are the questions we need to be asking, and then we need to find the tools that support that vision, not the other way around.
In Understanding by Design (really a must read for folks thinking about curriculum / school reform), Wiggins and McTigue talk about "activity-based teacher" and how it’s a bad thing. The kids are engaged, the classroom looks fun, kids are enjoying their work, often there are great examples of student work on the walls, but if you dig deeper and ask students and teachers why they are doing the activity they are doing, the answers often are shallow or non-existant. It’s a half-way step to the kind of teaching we want and need to be doing, which is working toward deep, complex and thoughtful understanding.
My fear with the excitement over all the new tools at our disposal is that we are rushing head-long into "activity-driven" teaching and not toward understanding. In our rush to talk about Second Life or wikis or laptops or twitter, we need to stop and question how the tool will enhance deep understanding on the part of our students. We need to stop teachers who say, "I want to do a wiki project…" and say, "What do you want your students to learn, what is the project you want to do, and how will a wiki enhance your student learning?"
The tools are amazing, I use them every day. I even, in personal usage, use the tools just for the sake of the tools (hellllooooo Twitter), but our greatest limiting factor in our schools is still time, and we owe it to ourselves and our kids to step back and ask ourselves questions like:
In the end, what I’m hoping these tools do is help us to define a language… a process… for changing our lens from "What’s new?" to "What’s good?" and for the continued process of grounding our new literacy, our new tools, our new schools in strong, deep veins of pedagogy and process.
Thoughts?
Over on David Warlick’s blog, there’s a fascinating conversation on the First Year Teachers post going on about use of the term Web 2.0, the "newness" of these tools and how we talk about the change we see around us.
David writes:
Back to my question I think that Web 2.0 is real, we need to be able to label it, and to talk about it, to deconstruct it, lay it out, and apply its parts. It is changing how we use information, and this affects what and how our children learn. Its OK that these beginning teachers cant do this as long as doing it, taking part in this conversation, becomes part of teaching.
This has led to a fascinating conversation with folks like David Thornburg, Andy Carvin, Mark Wagner and others (like me) chiming in.
I had originally had a bunch of the comments posted in here, but go read the whole conversation because it’s worth it… then come back. I’ll wait.
For those who didn’t read the whole thing (and why didn’t you?) here are my comments:
Certainly, the points you make that the ability to do these things have been around for a while, and yes, I was doing cyber-mentoring in the classroom with kids posting their work and emailing mentors (using Pine as their email client) back in 1997, and I, too, had my photo gallery and favorite links on my web page back in 1994. But thats not what makes right now so exciting.
There are a few differences between Flickr and a good ol [img] tag, between blogger and my old static web page. One, the ease of use matters. As long as I had to write [img src = /images/meandmykid.jpg], upload the files, etc then there was always a barrier to entry. (To say nothing of having a server space, etc ) These tools have democratized content creation in powerful ways.
Two, commenting / the development of more and more dynamic pages have meant that there have been more and more communities developing. And yes, USENET did a wonderful job of creating communities back in the day, but the explosion of people taking part in these communities does suggest something new and powerful.
Three, I think RSS and by extension, networking matters. The idea of a client-side content update vehicle that makes it easy for me to find new blog posts, see when my favorite photographers have posted new photos or what links my friends find interesting is powerful and makes it possible to take part more deeply.
Finally, yes, that was the birth of the term Web 2.0, however, as Postman writes, rarely is the inventor of a tool the best judge of its use. The term has had a life long beyond what OReilly thought of. (See the recent dust-up over their attempts to stop others from using it.) Its short-hand for the Read/Write Web or whatever else we want to call it.
In the end, theres no question that the web of today stands on the shoulders of giants who developed the tools that launched it. Theres no question that it is an evolutionary process, but as someone who remembers his Cleveland FreeNet password, I dont think we can deny the power and energy around what is being done now. And I think Davids idea that we should examine what is going on now and try to find out how we use it powerfully in education is a noble goal, whatever we call it.
I want to add to them a bit because I think it’s important.
Yes, everything that Dr. Thornburg mentioned is true… most of the tools we’ve seen before have come before in other forms, and I admit that sometimes it can get a little frustrating when you see folks discovering things that have been do-able for a long time. There needs to be a sense of history about what we’re doing now, so that we can learn from the past and move forward intelligently.
But there also has to be a recognition that the stuff that was going on in 1996 and 1997 was small and grew far too slowly. We are now seeing a revolution because the ideas are spreading so much more quickly. Does that discount what has come before? No, absolutely not, but it doesn’t change the power of now. After all, Marx was nowhere without the ideas of Hegel, right?
In the end, I do worry about the hype-factor with a lot of these tools… and that’s why I do think it is incredibly important to keep asking "What’s good" instead of "What’s new?" It’s also why it’s so important to talk in terms of what we want to do, rather than the tools we want to use. Steve Dembo talked about this recently in his post: Shiny Happy Tools when he wrote:
So what does this mean for educators? Simply this: Dont get married to the tools in your toolbox. A hammer is a hammer is a hammer. So what if you really like the steel one with the yellow handle? At some point that one might disappear and you better be ready to pick up a new one. Need to cut a board but cant find a saw? Time to get creative my friend. If you are willing to concentrate on what your actual needs are, youll find plenty of tools at hand for about every project.
We have incredible tools at our disposal. They are fun to use, but what we need to now do is start asking ourselves the harder question — "What is that we want our students to do and be and what are the tools — Web 2.0 and traditional — that we need to help our students achieve their and our goals?"