How to we blend learning skills with higher order thinking? Do we teach kids PowerPoint or do we teach them how to make fantastic presentations using digital tools? If you say obviously the latter, can you do that without a digital slideshow tool like PowerPoint? And if you do, don’t you need to teach them that tool? While someone above argued that we are using overkill tools to teach our kids (which I agree with), I don’t think we are going to find a totally intuitive software package for creating digital presentations. I’m not willing to leave teaching to go design it, are you? So in the mean time, let’s do both, teach skills and context – just don’t pick only one; it’s not fair to the kids. Or you.
This is one of the questions which one of the debates that I am in the midst of having at our school. With time being the limiting factor, do we focus our time on making sure that our middle school and high school kids gain skills, or use the tech skills to answer essential questions which demand the critical thinking skills (data gathering, analysis, synthesis of new idea)? I am leaning on the later, but then it comes around to accountability and how do we make sure that students acquire the skills in order to get to be able to use. We do not have a technology/computer science/applications course in our middle school or upper school which is required of all students nor is there one currently in discussion for the upcoming academic year.
I will agree that if you want to talk about accountability and measuring student progress, that a skills based curriculum is easier to manage and maintain. There are checklists which are easy to go through and then assign remediation for those skills not meet. But in the absence of a regular class which facilitates learning those skills, how is the student going to be held accountable for meeting those measures? It also makes coordination difficult, as you make sure that every student has an opportunity to learn all of the skills integrated into the various other curricular pieces.
Or should the learning be structured so that students learn the skills as they need to answer and communicate their answers to well constructed questions. The technology coordinators job changes significantly, making sure that there is a good question and one or several solutions so that students can answer the question. This is the approach that we took for our US History trailer project. Students were shown, in 20 minute blocks, some essential skills that they could use to construct a film trailer. Not every student used the software and techniques demonstrated in class, some used Windows Movie Maker or Pinnacle Studio, which were more appropriate for the story that they were trying to create. Do the students lose something if they use different software packages?
I know my learning style with technology is one which I best learn a new application as the result of learning it while doing an authentic project which requires that skill. In my 22+ years of working on professional development with teachers, it typically has been the same story, if you do a general project, teachers will learn at that moment, but if they don’t apply those skills and repeat them for something that they are going to use within 48 hours, they don’t internalize the project. This is why I believe that Personal Learning Plans are one of the best methods of professional development, since they are developed with specific goals that are teacher (as student) created. This does not mean that we don’t share examples to a whole group, for this is sometimes the only way to make individuals aware of what it possible.
Thank you Arvind, for bringing getting me to think about this once again.
At our school, a junior must take either US History or AP US History during the junior year. Because of the demands of the AP curriculum and the emphasis on writing, students in this class often do not get a chance to utilize alternative ways to develop their narrative voice. Because of the success of our Vietnam project, Kevin Randolph and I have been trying to find the right time and the right project to allow these students to create a digital story using pictures and sound.
Because of the timing of their coverage of the AP material and our vacation schedule, we found ourselves with the opportunity to schedule a three day mini-project before our mid-Winter break next week. The students have been studying the Civil Rights movement and so they will be creating 2-3 minute movies around the metaphor of water. Martin Luther King once stated, “No, no, we are not satisfied and will not be satisfied until justice rolls down like water and righteousness like a mighty stream.”
You can take a look at project definition and a week from now, the final projects of the students at the wiki site we have developed for this project. The students face a daunting task, to develop a story, find supporting images, and putting it all together in four days/three class periods. I look forward to see what they will create.
[my note - This posting is being created as a draft of an email that I will be sending to my faculty and staff, those not currently involved using web 2.0 tools.]
Yesterday, during an all-school faculty meeting, Kevin Randolph, our History Department chair, presented one of the videos that students created for a project that asked the question, what did Vietnam mean? The example of student work and the process of collaboration between students and teachers used reminds us about what can be accomplished using visual imagery to illustrate and communicate complex ideas. This is a realm that we know that students are gravitating to more and more. He was kind enough to acknowledge and thank me for collaborating and partnering with him to develop the enhancements to his curriculum. As he has shared with me this year, “working on a project in isolation is just that. There is a real excitement when you begin to collaborate and develop an idea with someone else. The sum of the individuals far exceeds their individual efforts.”
On January 31st, Michael Wesch, Assistant Professor of Cultural Anthropology at Kansas State University posted a video on YouTube which defines and explains Web 2.0 very simply (in slightly over4 minutes)–using just a computer screen and little clever editing. As a good friend of mine whom I never have met face to face, Vicki Davis, entitled her blog post on this video, If a picture is worth a thousand words, this one’s a book. This example is one of the best that I have seen in explaining what Web 2.0, the Read/Write Web is and the power that can be harnessed by using these new tools. In this video, Michael begins to show what can happen when your collaborations begin to emerge beyond just the physical realm, but extend to others who bring the perspective and insights of the entire world.
I want to share two personal stories which demonstrate the power of Web 2.0 and how small, or flat, the world is becoming. The first relates the Service Learning project that the Juniors did for the Kilimanjaro English Nursery School. I posted a reflective post on my blog about the project in early December. Over the Winter Holiday, a comment appeared that post which seemed to be from Greg Mortenson, the author of the book. Being skeptical, I didn’t rush to share the news, not knowing if someone had impersonated him. A few weeks later, I got an email from Greg’s sister, who had found out about the posting from Greg. I am excited to meet Greg this weekend (he is scheduled to appear at the Barnes and Noble in Evanston on Sunday, at 7:00 p.m.) and add him to my list of new global acquaintances.
The second experience occurred this week. My second semester class is a course which teaches structured programming skills and logical thinking. Because my hard drive failed this fall, I hadn’t installed the software necessary to teach this course. Since I have last investigated the software choices, a newer program has been developed that people have been raving about and the new features seemed to be ones which would benefit the teaching and learning of these concepts. So I began to try to install the tool. I experienced nothing but frustrations trying to get it loaded and working not only on my computer, but those that the students needed to use for the class. I posted a blog entry describing my frustrations, failures, and successes on Tuesday. Less than 36 hours later, I received comment and an email from one of the professor and developers at Deakin University in Australia, who pointed me towards solutions to the problems that I was having.
How Greg Mortenson or Bruce Quig found my blog posts or what they were looking for, I do not know. What is important is that we connected. As noted by the head of our school it is important to learn technology skills and to use technology tools to connect and collaborate, to begin to share with others across the hall, in another department, in another division, in the city of Chicago, or with others around the world so that we can gain a more diverse perspective. We will all be richer for the experience.
This semester, I am teaching a course in Computer Programming. This course is an introduction to Java which serves as a prerequisite to the AP Computer Science class that I also teach.
Earlier this year, my old 40 Gb hard drive it the dust right around the time that my 80 Gb upgraded drive arrived. Instead of just porting all of the data and applications, I decided to rebuild my drive one application at a time. Since I was not teaching a programming course, I did not install a compiler. My programming course started on Tuesday. I did an introduction and then wanted to get students to help install the compiler that we were going to use. In the past, I have used JCreator because that was what I learned with. However, many people have been using BlueJ and raving about it. Having read the documentation, I decided that it was time to switch, since I had to do a new install.
Dave Wittry (apcomputerscience.com) has put together a great set of instructions on how to install the program. After following the instructions, I could not get it to work. Ok, I thought, I instead will have the students follow the instructions to install on their workstations at school. This would be a great experience and I would be able to see who can follow instructions and who couldn’t. I have done this in the past and it has been a great experience.
Not this year. Everything that could go wrong did so. After two days, we were unable to get a working version up and running. I finally uninstalled everything and reinstalled. I got mine to finally work. I still do not know what the problem was. I went and loaded it onto the student workstations, untangling their messes. After two hours, I finally got it to work so that tomorrow, we can begin to delve into code. So, we are ready to work tomorrow, but time has been lost. Live and learn, I guess.
Teaching and Learning, as we are well aware, does not always take place within the classroom or during school hours. Sometimes it occurs in areas which are outside of your primary responsibilities. And this is what I experienced today, many times over.
Being at an independent school, we are asked to take part in many activities and wear many hats. One of the hats which I love to wear is being a Science Olympiad coach. This is the ninth year that I have been the co-director, along with the person who has become my best friend, and we are fortunate enough to run a successful program in both our Middle Schools and High Schools. This year, I am coaching fewer events as I am focusing more of my time on technology integration and professional development, but the two - three hours that I spend with the students on the events is challenging and rewarding.
Today, we hosted an invitational tournament. This event is one which we focus the students so that we can teach and they can learn from other students and teachers, and parent volunteers. This is an essential part of the competition, before it gets more serious for schools who challenge at the regional, state, and national levels. This year, I was responsible for helping to organize the event in which we had 22 teams of students from 14 schools. We ran a full event, which means scheduling 23 events over a six hour period. We have over 275 students, plus another 100+ coaches, volunteers, and parents experiencing the event on our campus. The competition was tough, as 6 of the top 10 Middle Schools in the state of Illinois were competing today. (Yes, we were one of the top 10).
Utilizing my strength in being able to organize and schedule time, I was responsible for developing the day. And I must say that it ran without a hiccup, that we were able to get all events run and judged and everyone home in a reasonable amount of time. This in addition to guiding the students in the three events that I co-coach.
What I love about this is that student have to learn to think and adapt, accept the device that may have run perfectly 99 times in practice only to fail during the 1 time in competition. Two years ago, we were at our regional event when our plane was not heavy enough. A student took a piece of gum that he was chewing and stuck it to the plane to make the weight. The gum was placed forward in a way that made the plane immediately dive, so that it only had an 8 second flight. Adjusting the gum before the second flight, the student made the weight more balanced and was able to achieve a 30 second flight good enough for a 3rd place finish. Today, one of the events I coach is Wheeled Vehicle. In this event, you build a car which is powered by a non-metalic elastic device (rubber bands and fiber glass poles rather than springs) Our students were using a fishing rod. As they were preparing for the first of their two run and winding the string which would propel the device, the fishing rod snapped. They completed their first run in which the vehicle only went half of the target distance. Rather than be dejected, the team plugged in the glue gun and attempted a repair in the 8 minutes that they had before they had to start their second run. When the glue gun was not heating up quick enough, the tried to make adjustments to do the best that they could under the circumstances. We did not earn a medal in the event, but the experience and what the students learned was invaluable. I am proud of the way that they did not get dejected, they continued to try to make adjustments, and do the best that they could.
We will have five weeks before the regional and what we learned was invaluable, including having a backup fishing rod. Without the experience, they would have never understood the need for redundancy. But they were resilient and walked away from the experience wiser.
This is why I continue to be involved in this program, because it supports math, science, and engineering. Now, it is time to shift priorities and get ready for to put on another of my hats, that of yearbook advisor, so that we can finish our project of documenting the year in print.
Hence, the multi-faceted refractions, ideas and experiences angling through the medium of my brain.
