Digital Language Arts

I went to a session at the ASCD conference entitled "Digital Language Arts". It was a Grade 5 teacher sharing a novel study she had done with her students. What I really liked about it was her understanding of what she was trying to get her students to understand and practice. She used technology to support their reflections and challenged them to think at a higher level. She then built into the structure a system for small group guided instruction, small group independent work, and small group collaborative work. She used ThinkQuest as a major support platform for her class. Here is the link to the site they created for the presentation. The multimedia button contains the powerpoint that gives an overview. http://digitallanguagearts.net/

Conference Exhibitions

I've have just returned from Orlando where I attended the ASCD Conference "Learning Without Boundaries". One of the most interesting things (I saw the space shuttle!) was the exhibition room. There were hundreds of booths, all trying very hard to sell their product. But here's what was interesting, I would say that a good 80% were computer focused. The products were either hardware (SMARTboards, etc.) online resources (Pearson PD) or software. It was a rare thing to see a booth with only books. Even though the delivery method has changed, we still have the challenge of what is based on solid practice and research or just a nicely packaged drill sheet.

More Information Literacy

You know, I thought I knew how to search and analyze websites. After working through Adventure 1 I realize I am on the right track, but am not efficient. The skill that I need to learn is to be more specific in my search and use the Boolean tools more.
I think that I have been relying on my experience and knowledge base to decide the validity of actual websites as well as the information given in a snippet without knowing what I am doing. Now that I recognize what I am doing, it makes me realize that not everyone will do that, especially kids. It the same with reading. Some kids just read the words, but don't think about what they are reading. With all the information and choices so readily avialable on the web, it sure is something necessary for students to develop the skill of evaluating information. It's pretty scary when they accept everything they see.
If I relate back to Glogowski's posting on education moving towards being interest base, learning from and with others who are like minded, students will need to be aware of who they are gaining information from and what kind of a filter that infomation needs to be put through. Opinions, ideas and facts are all part of learning together, but they need to be taken through different lenses. So the skills of Information Literacy become ever more crucial.

Information Literacy

I just read the resources regarding the importance of Information Literacy. I agree with the powerpoint and article that this should be a focus. We have so many students who accept what they read or hear as the gospel truth. Our system of education and traditional way of teaching reinforces students to give the expert or teacher what they want to hear. That also encourages them to accept what they are told. So challenging and verifying information is a foreign concept. If we want to move our students towards creating their own learning network they had better know how to discern the validity of their sources. I need to become more adept at it also.

Disruptive innovation

This is an interesting discussion that keeps coming up. Will techology and its tools change the way we teach, or just put a more modern twist on it? Our technology (Who's title is really Learnign rEsources Consultant) challenges the excitement over SMART boards. She is excited by them and what she sees many teachers doing with them, but she is afraid that they also influencing us back to teach directed instruction. The teacher is at the front directing students learning, rather than encouraging them to pursue their own self-selected goals. Reminds of Richardson's and Glogowski's thoughts on assigned blogging in a previous post.

Glogowski and assessment

Okay, I don't know if I missed something significant or not, but I don't really get what Glogowski is saying about assessment. I get what he means when he talks of being a co-learner and more experienced peer alongside the student learner. He advocates replacing traditional assesment with the the practice of journeying alongside each individual student as they pursue knowledge. I see that as an exciting dynamic with great possibilities for both teacher and student, but I don't see that as full well-rounded assessment. Certainly, when you journey with someone closely, you would encourage all kinds of assessment AS learning, and maybe even some assessment FOR learning, but in the real world, no matter how much we talk about assessment, somebody asks the question about grading and marks. Even though I don't fully see his point, I most certainly appreciate and support his call to rethink what assessment should look like when we change the way we teach and learn.

Assigned blogging

Glogowski uses Richardson's term assigned blogging to make a point that technology itself does not ensure collaboartive, creative learning. Instead of developing and nurturing student interest and talent, assigning topics regularly ends up being just another prompt driven exercise. That's not to say that we should never assign specific tasks or prompts but rather begs the question of what is the balance between assignments that do open new doors and those that encourage students to pursue their own passions? I believe that we need to always struggle to find that balance. In order for students to know what their true passions are and to be tolerant and even excited about others' interests, they do need a wide exposure to new ideas and information. It is our job to expand their horizons, just as it is our job to strengthen their skills and talents and help them develop those skills by encouraging contact with like-minded people.
We were having a similar discussion at our differentiation table around the topic of teaching to the multi-intelligence model. As we try to get to know our students well and teach to their styles and strengths, should we not also be exposing them to other ways of learning so they develop a repertoire or some amount of facility when in different situations that require different set of skills?
Funny, I just realized that even though I titled this post about a technology tool - a blog, I really didn't deal with it, but instead talked about what we do with the tool. I think I'm coming to like that term 'tool'. It does imply that you have to do something with the tool for it to be useful. A hammer is just a hammer until it's used to pound a nail to connect something together. A technology tool should be used in education to enhance and stimulate the learning process. The challenge, as Glogowski points out, is that technology can and should be used to encourage a different kind of learning than what occurs in a contained classroom. Most tools do allow us to be creative and analytical if we don't constrict them all the time.

Safety of the Self-contained classroom

Konrad Glogowski describes a kind of learning that is interest based, where students learn from and with people who share the same passion. He uses the phrase "cocooning in protected classrooms." It made me think of several different things.
We have a constant debate in our division about whether to block and control the websites available in schools. It seems to bring out strong opinions. I do think the debate comes from two different origins. One is that often it is the techie support people who argue for blocking, both for security reasons, but also because they are not into thinking about student capacity and thinking int he same way teachers do. Another reason I think there are different points of view is that this judgement call would be strongly influenced by a deep philosophical belief of how we run our classroom and what we believe about the student teacher relationship. Are teachers and students co-learners, facilitator and learner, teacher as information giver, etc.? How much we want to allow students to explore the world depends on what we believe.

Tikatok

Kids always like to see their stories published. Tikatok is a way to do that. Books can be shared online for others to read, and they can be published into a hard copy, but the cost would be substantial for a whole class, around $11.00 /per softcover. Nonetheless, the process of creation is there and they can read their work online and it looks very professional. They also can email and share it with others.
As always, the preparing for the writing is the crucial aspect of the wiritng process. Learning how to transfer their story into the tikatok format would be hard work at first for young elementary students, but it would be exciting.
I practiced by starting a simple book. http://www.tikatok.com/view/book/learning-about-tikatok I do think it has possiblities.

Voice thread is a tool that I am playing with and talking to teachers about. I was introduced to it by my colleague, the Learning Resources consultant. I made a couple of my own, just to get the practice, but we have used vociethread in workshops with teachers. They are a great way to synthesize learning around a particular topic.
It is interesting to see that not all people understand the many skills involved. First the thoughts that you want to express need to be synthesized. Then you have to find a visual that represents the idea you are trying to express. Finally, the words need to spoken clearly and succintly. The thing I do like about this is that for a good voicethread to be created, it is really the thinking skills that are needed, not the technical ones.
The technical skills about finding an image that is free or creating a visual and then uploading it is another thing to master. In my experience, the most difficult skills for some people is to realize that before you choose an image, you need to know what you want it to represent. That leads me to make the point that sometimes the 'fun' of technology gets in the way of thinking. We get so excited about the cool pictures we can use that we are not careful about what they are really saying. Cool tools are great, but they should be there to support and stimulate thinking.
These links are for an inquiry group we are working with and if you scroll down there are 2 voicethreads created by the teachers after our first day of learning together. http://imaginethis.wikispaces.com/understandingthequest http://imaginethis.wikispaces.com/Inquiry+Learning
This link shows how a teacher used voicethread to collect his students background kjnoweldge about Shakespeare. http://voicethread.com/share/326561

In talking to teachers, they either really like voicethread, or they get frustrated with it. It seems that it does not always running smoothly and then students can get frustrated. Like most technology, problem-solving is a major necessity.

Wordle Tool

This is a quick cool tool http://www.wordle.net/ that highlights word use. The most frequently used words are the largest. I made this one using my blog posts. It is very easy!
A teacher librarian had students do it with a portion of different well-known books. The students then had to try to identify which books they were. Here's link with a sample. http://www.wordle.net/gallery/wrdl/342382/fellowship_of_the_ring This is an article the teacher librarian wrote. http://ssla.ca/medium_articles/submissions/pdf/winter2009_pdf/Wordle_mobertos_winter09.pdf
As I created the above wordle, it highlights the concepts that I've been reflecting on. I think the tool has many possibilities, both for my work with teachers as they do their own reflections, but also with students. Students can use it to summarize their journals, a response to a book, a description of a book, etc. It could be taken even a step further to critique the wordle and see if it really does show the main concepts and ideas that you were intending to get across. Many possibilities!

Siemens 1

In his article Connectivism:A Learning Theory for the Digital Age Siemans makes the statement, "We derive our competence from our connections." It causes me to ponder what makes me feel competent. Is it my interactions with others, what others think of me, how competent I am at a task? What role do my emotions have. What does he really mean by competence? As I write this, I think that's the crux of the unsettledness I have with his statement. If comeptence refers only to competence in knowlewdge or skill I have, I possibly can agree. If competence refers to who I am as person, I have more problems with it. I know that I always need to learn more and more about everything, but sometimes in life, we just have to be happy with who we are. That doesn't stop the learning, but it it allows us to feel like we are worthy, despite our weaknesses. I will never be an athelete, my house needs to be cleaner, I'm uncomfortable in a crowd, etc., but I can counter act those deficits by knowing I also excel in some areas. Getting back to Siemens' comments, is it only through connecting with others and with knowledge that I grow? If we are continually growing, when do we ever reach competency?

Sticky Sand

I am thinking of the sandbox metaphor for this class and relating it to an episode of Ellen that I just watched. She was interviewing the model who made the cover of the swimsuit edition of a magazine. During the photo shoot she had to roll in the sand. Ellen's comment was that it must have been uncomfortable because the sand gets into all kinds of annoying places and just sticks there. The model went on to talk about weeks later finding a piece of sand in her hair while on a flight and how it was embarrassing because she had to scratch it out of her hair and then examine it. Rather a meaningless conversation, in true Ellen style, but that's what I'm feeling right now. Sticky sand is making me uncomfortable and I know that what I really need to do is take one grain at a time and examine it.

New curricula

As mentioned in Block 4, the province is bringing out a new set of curricula. It has become a major focus of my job to understand the ELA curriculum and support its implementation. It is a shift in the way it asks us to look at the learner. I started teaching in the 1980's, when instruction was teacher focused with the learner being viewed as an empty vessel to be filled with knowledge transmitted by the teacher. The 1992 curriculum asked us to move to focus on the student as a learner. The instruction was to be activity based and led by the student. The 2000 curriculum brought with it specific objectives. Instruction was to be purposeful and objective driven. It moved from student-focus to learning focus. Now this curriculum challenges us with outcomes, which are supposed to be measurable, and asks us to move towards higher level thinking and social responsibility. We no longer learn knowledge and facts, but also need to understand what to do with that knoweldge and how to find our own knowledge and understandings. Its focus is on deep understanding rather than obtaining knowledge, skills and facts.
I reflect on where I have been lead by the curriculum throughout my career, because I am being challenged to understand my own views. The content of Block 4 also challenges me. I accept constructivist premises wholeheartedly, but do find that belief challenged. I am working with 2 consultant colleagues and a group of teachers to write inquiry units. This is the second project we have worked on. It seems that true inquiry learning requires teachers to move towards a contructivist approach. They are eager and willing to engage in that process until we get to the actual writing. It is hard for them not to write lessons that move students towards knowledge and ideas that the teachers hold. So we are then challenged as facillitators to reflect on both the learning process and the product. Do we allow them to make sense of the underpinnings of inquiry leanring in their own way and express that within their units, or do have a predetermined diea of what it is, with the expectation that the units should meet that critieria? Interesting food for thought.

Growing with Blogs

The last 2 years have been a great time of learning for me. I've been privileged to work with someone who is a leader in the area of technology and instruction. Because of her, blogs and wikis are not new to me. However, I personally have not been an active blogger and do not 'follow' blogs other than to read an occasional post that I come across. I am unsure why I don't engage fully. I always enjoy a good conversation with others, but there is comething about posting and commenting that I don't get. I know it has to do with time, and energy, but I also think it has something to do with the public space. I'll need to reflect more on that.