Take Another Look Around You- Learning to Learn in a New World

Will Richardson said:

If you are not feeling a little bit uncomfortable about being a teacher or being in education right now, then you are not paying attention

Working in schools and in education tends to put us in a “bubble” sometimes. We have our own micro-organisms of the way things work.  The way our school world works has not changed as fast as the world around us. We still hold on to models that are outdated outside the world of education.

I am asking every teacher to TAKE ANOTHER LOOK AROUND.

The sense of urgency is real and PERSONAL to me (as it should be to most of you!).

You will mostly see my own granddaughter as the model in the presentation slides below! She is just a little over a year old and has all of  her “formal” schooling ahead of her. She will go through pre-school, elementary, middle and high school and hopefully, possibly, maybe to (a traditional) university (???).  She will have good teachers and not so good teachers along the way. Teachers, who will care about her and her learning and teachers who will only care about test scores.

• Will they prepare her for the year 2030 and the way the world beyond will look like?
• Will she be learning from textbooks only?
• Will her learning inside the physical classroom be unrecognizably different from her learning outside of school?
• Will her teachers allow her to use devices/tools to demonstrate evidence of learning instead of traditional methods of assessment?

It is PERSONAL… when I look at my own three children. Below is a picture of my youngest daughter on her first day of school (with a traditional German school cone in her arms) and then again on her LAST day of high school. Notice the big, heavy textbook in her arms on the last day. Time past in a blink of an eye..

She went to a so called all “A” schools (Schools in our State are classified with a grade according to the results of the standardized tests). Her classes sported Smartboards in the rooms and her teachers were given iPads to use for their teaching. It did not change how she was prepared for life outside of school. It did not change how she was taught in order to pass tests, instead of learning how to learn in HER world. There was no collaboration beyond working with her classmates. There was never an authentic task beyond “getting the grade”. There was no strategic intent to embed skills to expose, support and strength literacies beyond traditional reading and writing  (One of the teachers tried “blogging” with her English class once, but abandoned it quickly, since it was too much work to monitor all the students’ writing).

If you have children in school…blink once and they will too graduate in no time. There is no time for baby steps in order to think about trying this or that. There is an urgency to take a good hard look around and take action.

Responsible Use Guidelines of School E-mails for Elementary Students

Writing appropriate emails is part of being a good digital citizen! Students (even digital natives) are not born with knowing the rules and responsibilities. Just as they need to learn to answer and talk on the phone, they need to learn about e-mail writing in an academic setting (to their teachers, Skype partners, project collaborators, administration or their classmates regarding school business).

Our third graders have been given access to their school email addresses.

My colleague, Andrea Hernandez (@edtechworkshop) was working with students on formulating a Responsible Use Policy.

From their discussion the following guide emerged.

In the spirit of sharing and calling attention to ongoing,  embedded digital citizenship exposure, opportunities and discussions (rules, rights, privileges and responsibilities), take a moment to review these guidelines as an example and create you own guide with your students for their use of their SCHOOL email addresses.

Download the guide as a pdf file

Amplification of a Transportation Unit & a Survey

In a unit on Transportation, our Kindergarteners read a large picture book “On the Move!” by Donna Latham

Students got so interested into learning about different ways people around the globe got around. They were even ready to take a trip to Venice, Italy to ride in a Vaporetto.

Since our 5 & 6 year olds have gotten pretty good at using PicCollage on the iPads, their teacher Arlene Yegelwel, wanted to personalize another collaborative classroom eBook.

She took the time to find over 20 public domain images of transportation methods they had discussed in class on Wikimedia Commons and sent them in one email to each iPad.

Student’s workflow fluency looked like this:

• opened the PicCollage app
• chose one image of the different transportation methods
• decided how they could best place an image of themselves onto the picture
• asked a buddy to take an image of them acting out a particular position on the iPad
• edited the image by clipping the background
• resized the image to make it fit the ration of the transportation image
• rotated the image
• saved the image
• emailed the image to their teacher

Mrs. Yegelwel, downloaded the images from the e-mail and then  imported them into the BookCreator App. She sat with each students to document their comment for the image.

As a class, they also reviewed all the different parts of a book, such as title page, dedication page and credit page. We also had a short, age appropriate discussion about copyright and how we cannot just TAKE (steal) any images we find on the web. We talked to them about some photographers who release their images into public domain, which meant we could use them. So there was a special Thank You crafted to thank these photographers

We could have stopped here, but the global component (transportation AROUND THE WORLD) begged to amplify what had largely taken place in the classroom only.

We decided to involve students in crafting their own survey. Below you will find our collaborative efforts in formulating the title, description, questions and different checkboxes.

Please take a moment to fill out the form for them. We will continue to accept responses until next Friday (May 24, 2013) to then tabulate and interpret the results.

We also discussed how would we let people know about our survey? What if we stood in our school’s parking lot and shouted it out? How many people would hear us? Where would these people be geographically be from?

I showed them my Twitter account and demonstrated how I was going to give a “shout out” for our survey.

We then sat back and literally watched the first responses to our survey “fall into” the spread sheet.  Please imagine the wows, the oohs and the aahhs for each one, especially when the first ones from Europe started falling in. Mrs. Yegelwel pulled in the globe and showed location. We also explained why most of our responses seemed to come from the US and Canada. We quickly looked up what time it was in Australia and they “shockingly” realized that Australians were deep asleep while they were in school.

I am asking myself the following questions.

What are students learning BEYOND the reading of the original book in their classroom? How did we amplify skills and literacies, because we took “the extra step” of connecting the students to a global network? What transformative (not possible without the amplification) teaching & learning took place?

• Geography skills (We are looking up each location  on a globe. We are learning about states, countries, continents, urban, suburban, etc.)
• Math skills (We are using real authentic data. The results will be counted, sorted, organized and graphed)
• Thinking skills (Why are most people in the US using a car/van to get to work? Why do most people in Japan use scooters?)
• Global skills (They realize that we can talk TO the world, not just ABOUT the world)
• Network skills (What are networks? How does Twitter work?)