NextGenTeachers

I love reading about all the successes other edubloggers are having. I love reading posts that confirm what I have been thinking and that discuss issues that have been on my mind. But how do we take the momentum and the successes of the education blogosphere and bring it to the institution where we spend most of our time?

And more importantly, how do we do this when so many of our colleagues are so resistant to change? Is it fair to our students to have one teacher that allows natural and authentic use of technology in their classroom and 7 others that do not? How do we implement this change when we are so entrenched in our system of standards and standardized assessments already?

For example, I was recently in a portfolio “de-briefing” session with a few middle school faculty members. We were discussing the effectiveness and success of our portfolio process. When the time came to share ideas for improvement, I was not alone in the desire to incorporate more relevant and authentic methods of presentation for our portfolios. However, we were definitely the minority. Even though we’ve all just been through extensive IT integration training, several members of the faculty were adamant that the only way to do portfolios is to put paper in a binder - how else will we include all our tests?

I tried to explain, a la Ian Jukes (via Chrissy Hellyer), that the process is not relevant to our students, that they’re not thinking like we’re thinking. I shared ideas for 21st century skills, I described the digital native concept, and I discussed authentic assessment, but in the end it’s just too much, prompted by too few, that has to change too quickly. After all, we have years and years of experience giving tests and putting them in binders. It’s just so much easier to keep doing things the way we’ve always done them.

I know the reason they are so resistant, I know they are trapped by fear: fear of technology, fear of knowing less than their students, fear of losing control… But how can we help these teachers get over the fear and just try something new?

How do you do it?

A very wise colleague of mine and I have been working towards creating an Information Technology/Literacy curriculum for our school that can stand the test of time. The funny thing is we don’t talk about technology. The conversation always seems shifts elsewhere. In one of the recent versions of our ever developing vision statements he wrote these words:

” It is our goal in developing an integrated curriculum to ensure that the way students learn with technology agrees with the way they live with technology.”

Sometimes words in the right order ring so true.

Much is being written at the moment about how schools need to shift their paradigm and move away from TECHNOLOGY SKILLS and move towards THINKING SKILLS.

So what technology skills do students NEED to know?

You ask 10 educators this question and they will give out 10 different answers.

Terms like Power Point,Word, Dream Weaver, Web Search often appear in them.

Should they not be replaced with with words like: Communicate, Write, Evaluate, and Think?

How can a curriculum or technology scope and sequence hope to keep up and remain relevant when software, hardware, and information change daily. All too often these elaborate documents that track and chronicle how technology is integrated and are used across the curriculum become dead the moment they are written. They exist because they are written in the traditional educational framework of : document, track and CONTROL.

The problem is the way we live with technology does not agree with this framework. We have to relinquish CONTROL and think BIGGER!

I learn new skills when I need to learn them.

I learn new skills when they are relevant to me and what I am doing.

I learn new skills when they contribute to my understanding of something.

Not before.

If we wish our students to be successful in the 21st Century, they will need to know how to:

• Find and access information efficiently
• Evaluate the quality of information including both accuracy and bias
• Communicate effectively using all means of media
• Tap into the collective intelligence of many by collaborating both in person and electronically
• Keep themselves and others safe through responsible use and awareness of the dangers of a connected world

The tools used to meet these learning outcomes can vary widely but if you know the fundamentals behind how to communicate, evaluate, access, find, and share information then it does not matter what tool you use. You will be prepared.

Today technology has become an important part of meeting these fundamentals but it should never be the reason for learning to use it.

But what about the skills??

Who will teach them?

The answer is: You embed them right along side what you are doing. When you are doing it.

If I am having students present in Geography class and I want the students to present using a digital medium then I teach them how to use the tool properly and effectively right along side the content and purpose for doing the presentation in the first place. They need to learn the skills because they have been given a purpose.

Curriculum should always drive this purpose.

Math should drive it.

Science should drive it.

Social Studies should drive it.

P.E should drive it.

Purpose should drive it.

Of course expectations look different at all different age levels but that is what being an “expert of your students” is all about. Knowing what your students are capable of and structuring and creating a learning environments to meet their needs and push their boundries is what it

We are just getting started.

But it’s not just us.

Some great thinking going on here, and here and all over.

A few weeks ago, Kelly Christopherson posted an interesting thread, Walking the Talk, on the Classroom 2.0 Ning forums asking whether the teachers who promote web 2.0 tools are actually using the tools themselves. My response was:

Absolutely! Doing these type of things myself is the only way that I can truly understand how they will impact my classroom. It is time consuming, and sometimes I think I should just shut-down for a few days, but there is so much emerging every single day that I don’t have time to take a break.

What has really helped me this year is to keep a personal blog. Of course, I have my professional blog, my wiki, my twitter, del.icio.us, ning, facebook, yackpack, skype, etc accounts that I use every day on a professional basis. But, bringing these tools into my personal life has completely changed my perspective.

I know how the students feel when they are asked to write a blog post for school - the pressure of writing something academic and relevant to what you’re learning - the pressure of a professional blog. But, I also know the fun and excitement of experimenting with these tools for my personal enjoyment. I can honestly say that these tools have changed the way I learn, create, and communicate in every aspect of my life.

The only problem I’m facing is how to keep up. There are so many new tools emerging every day, how can we keep track of them all? Or at least, how do we pick the useful from the superfluous? How do you do it?

Which web 2.0 tools are your favorites and how have they helped you - either in your classroom or in your personal life?

Image: http://users.ox.ac.uk/~juggsoc/images/large/other_17.jpg

That’s The Way We’ve Always Done It

I was hit this week with a TTWWADI right in my own teaching. It’s the end of the semester and so in TTWWADI fashion the students are creating web sites using Dreamweaver.

The project includes everything we’ve been talking about this past semester. The only difference is the students have had a blog all semester and that is a web site.

The students have been excited to learn how to use Dreamweaver but I keep coming back to: Is this a skill I should be teaching in 6 and 7th grade?

Maybe…before Web 2.0 tools made it so easy to publish content to the web learning how to build a web page in Dreamweaver was a skill we needed to be teaching. But is it a relevant skill in a Web 2.0 world?

I would argue we should be teaching how to hack css scripts. All of my students have a blog through our school site. Most have at least one other site, either on facebook, myspace, or some other social-network. All of these places are created using .php and the users can hack their themes by changing values in the css script. I would have done this on our blogging system that is running wordpress mu but users can’t hack into individual themes using this program.

This would concern me more if this wasn’t the last year we will have “technology class” as starting next year we move to an embedded model where we will be supporting and teaching technology within content areas.

However..there are still many technology classes out there that are teaching web design via Dreamweaver. I’m not against web design…I could use a lesson myself, but we need to make sure that we are teaching students web design for a new web and not web design because TTWWADI.

Just something I’ve been thinking about.

Technorati Tags: css, dreamweaver, ttwwadi

CALL FOR PROPOSALS:
This call encourages all, experienced and novice, to submit proposals to present at this conference via this link. Take this opportunity to share your successes, strategies, and tips in “playing with boundaries” in one of the four strands as described above.

Deadline for proposal submissions is June 18, 2007. You will be contacted no later than June 30, 2007 regarding your status.

Presentations may be delivered in any web-based medium that is downloadable (including but not limited to podcasts, screencasts, slide shows) and is due one week prior to the date it is published.

Please note that all presentations will be licensed Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported.

QUESTIONS?
If you have any questions about any part of this, email one of the conveners:

• Darren Kuropatwa: dkuropatwa {at} gmail {dot} com
• Sheryl Nusbaum-Beach: snbeach {at} cox {dot} net
• Lani Ritter Hall: lanihall {at} alltel {dot} net
• Wesley Fryer: wesfryer {at} pobox {dot} com