Reflections on Teaching & Learning in a Networked Classroom

Here are some final thoughts on my learnings from Jeff Utecht's Teaching and Learning in a Networked Classroom. Jeff has designed a very useful and engaging class. Of all the courses I have taken in the past few years this one definitely bubbles itself to the top. I have felt challenged by the overwhelming amount of information there is to try to decipher and decide what makes sense for me to integrate into my own work with students. I was excited to be able to take a class from someone who is clearly a leader in the field. This certainly is the first time I have taken a course from someone on the opposite side of the world…but a “flat world “ is certainly a little closer! One of my planned reads for the summer is Tom Frieman's The World is Flat. I always go into the summer with more reading then summer to read
it in. But the Frieman's book is already on the self.
In the past ten years I have come to see myself as an educator who views learning as a constructivism, during this class I have begun to learn what it means to consider connectivism. The idea of social learning (other than my knowledge of collaborative learning and students working in lab groups) was not really on my radar screen. I see this becoming important in my thinking about student learning within the classroom as well as my work as an educational leader in my building and my work with fellow teachers. I see a lack of time for collaboration as a real weakness in traditional brick and mortar schoolhouse, this class has given me new ways of collaborating. I hope to do some real thinking about this idea of cyber connections, even within my school. I hope to build a learning community with both face to face meeting as well as a web presence. I am excited about this summer when I can get a chance to come up for air and wrap my head around how this might work.
This course has been filled with many valuable experiences. Instead of thinking about blogging…I had to blog and blog often, a great thing and one I hope to continue even after I get my final grade! RSS feed something I had never even heard of and that has become an efficient and important way I stay connected and up to date. I am also very glad I was pushed to make a podcast, though I was not thrilled with my effort…I’m glad I did it an hope to get a more meaningful podcast posted soon.
On additional aspect of the class that I found particularly valuable was all potential connections I saw for future work with other staff members, the value of teachers collaborating is immense. The difficulty finding time within the school day is also also immense. So anything we can do to increase collaboration using web 2.0 tools will be a very good thing. As I worked through the materials for this class I often thought of tools and ideas that could be used to increase professional learning communities with in my high school.
There is much more I write...but for now I'll be done. I anticipate continuing the use this blog as a place to place my ponderings on learning & teaching!

Social Bookmarking

Social Bookmarking is just one of the aspects of web 2.0 that my T & L in the Networked Classroom course has introduced me to. This is something I had no knowledge and immediately saw the value of this aspect of the technology. Another aspect picked up through my learnings in this course ..is the use of mini youtube clips as teaching tools. Like this one explaining how to use social book marks. I used a few of these common craft videos to introduce both social bookmarking and wiki creation to my Bio II course. My original journey into social bookmarking was using using Delicious. I found the whole idea of social bookmarking very useful. I have often been frustrated, looking for bookmarks that end up being on my school computer while I'm working at home or the other way around. My thinking quickly went to the social end of the bookmarking, scheming ways to use this tool to increase the amount of collaboration that is possible among staff at my school. As I continued to read my RSS I came across information on Diigo, another social bookmarking site. I choose to use this site with my class. I was very excited about the shared research my students might be able to do using this tool. As I introduced this to my students everything went fairly smoothly. Kids were able to log on, share book marks, highlight article and add sticky notes. Life was great! Kids were researching, sharing information, maybe even thinking... then our network changed the rules; kids were no longer able to down load mini tool bar! ARGH!!!! very frustrating...but I'll try again next year.
The take way ... this is a very useful tool, that I have only begun to learn to use. I will continue to push as hard as I can to make sure resources are used to increase the speed and usefulness of our district network. At this point too often decisions are made without consulting educational specialists.

RSS one more thing to do!

A couple of months ago, as part of a graduate course I am taking (T & L in the Networked Classroom), I ventured into the world of RSS. I'll admit at first I doubted I would find much use for this aspect of the technology. I am happy to report that I was absolutely wrong! Use of a RSS is absolutely one of the take aways from this course.

Learning in the moment! ...I know I have posted about RSS feeds already... so I spent five minutes looking for my prior posts to find it...no luck. Here is the learning...I SHOULD OF TAGGED MY ENTRY!

One of the first thing I noticed after I created my GOGGLE reader account was the RSS logo on websites ...it was everywhere. It reminded me of how when I meet a new student, all the sudden I see them everywhere, when I would of said I had never seen them before.

I have learned how to set up and how to make changes to my account. I have learned to read or skim based on both the content I find and the time I have. Word from my instructor, Jeff Utecht,
was to not get overwhelmed. It still is hard for me to mark all read...when I know have have not read...but I have done it.

My students are currently reading a novel as a way to show them one of they many possible connections they will find to keep the biology they have learned active in their future years. Setting up a blog as a way to reflect on their reading is one of the options I have for the kids. As a district, we are very much struggling with our network connectivity, I had hoped to have all kids blogging, but with limited conductivity and not every student connected at home this was not possible. Using a RSS feed to organize and connect with all my students will make connecting and monitoring student blogs more doable.

Online saftey

As a high school teacher as well as a parent of a ten year old online safety is certainly something I am concerned about. Teenagers think they are pretty much untouchable, live in the moment and have all the answers! A recipe for trouble. My own daughter has a web presence, and sees the web as a place to play, socialize and learn. There is reason for concern, but I think we deal with that concern with education and communication not by banning or blocking! Kids use of Facebook and MySpace has created a level of comfort around sharing personal information that may very well be dangerous. As a educator and a parent it is my job to help keep these kids safe.
Filtering....ARGH!!!!!!!!!!!! The district in which I work has recently added a whole new level of filtering and it is driving many of us CRAZY. As discussed in our reading the need for filters are a necessary evil linked to federal funds linked to CIPA. I think the thing that has made me the craziest is that there does not seem to be any (or at least not enough) consideration to the educational purpose of desired content. It may be unique to our district and our network, but what is allowed changes form one day to the next as well as one computer to the next. This unpredictability is very difficult for even a seasoned teacher like myself to deal with!
Interesting side note... In my mind I pictured a filter like the one posted above as an image for this entry... so I did a quick google image search for "filter" thinking I would see mostly traditional filters..but most of the images went right to the computer filter connection!

Update on my Journey into Web 2.0

Over the past week and a half I have jumped into the web 2.0 world. More accurately I guess the new news is not my involvement, but rather the fact that I have pulled my students in as well. So how did it go? That very much depends on the day. On Tuesday of last week I brought one of my classes into one of the building's computer labs; our goals were to assure all students were members of both our Diigo group as well as our class wiki on wikispaces , continue the research process and begin to post information. On the first goal I was very successful, I was able to get all class members, even my technophobes, on and active. The students were able to start to see the value of using the collaborative research tools available through Diigo. I found myself fighting a unforeseen battle on the wiki front. The class I am working on with on this project is a group of second semester seniors, I thought they knew enough (could be mature enough) to handle knowing what was appropriate to post. I asked them all to simply experiment with the tool, putting up, editing and giving feedback..They quickly showed they were still little kids, placing inappropriate (even hurtful) material. We had a talk and I think they got the message, we will see. The good news from that day was that the technology seemed to work well, Diigo had added a new feature to their toolbar and I was able to work through the change within our school network. I was feeling pretty good about making this move in to the 21st century.
On Wednesday I planned to do essentially the same thing with my second Bio II class. This is class engaged more during the introductory session and I anticipated a great day. Well....that is not what happened, what had work perfectly 24 hours before no longer worked. Students were not able to down load the "diglet" tool bar and therefore not able to highlight and add sticky notes on the articles they were researching. I attempted through, email and phone, to contact our technology team and was unsuccessful (today four days later...I still have not heard back!!). We struggled through and were able to add bookmarks to share with the group, but were not able to fully take advantage of the tool. To say I was frustrated, is an understatement...but I have not given up! The students know how the tool can work and also know they can probably access their diigo account from home. I worry about asking kids to use only their home access, because although most have access at home not all do and I worry about the inequities of the haves vs the have nots.
We continued to work on the project during class on Thursday and Friday, both classes did a nice job planning what they wanted to use as an audience as well as a focus for their wikis. The overall theme for the work is global climate change, but I have left the choice of audience, focus and organization to the individual classes. My plan for tomorrow in both classes is to work on the rubric I will use to assess their work.

Bill Strickland

I recently viewed an inspiring video about Bill Strickland and his work. The biggest message I got from the video is the importance to treat ALL students with respect and honor. The work done by Mr. Strickland and his corporation is very successful and very inspiring. I liked one of his lines in the video "the only thing wrong with poor people is they don't have any money". There is hope for the first time in years that we (as a country) might be moving closer to a place where all children are indeed treated with honor and dignity. Strickland's model shows what can be done with a great deal of very targeted money. The bigger and more important question is how do we get to all kids not just the few lucky enough to find their way into Mr. Strickland's schools.

Project Based learning

I worry about any movement in education that comes with a cute name. If teaching for 25 years has taught me anything, it is that these “named” movements come and go. That being said I definitely see the value in much of the thinking behind “Project-based learning”. One of the real values I have seen in PBL is in the amount of engagement that often emerges from the realness of such learning. I remember a movement when I first started teaching called “learning by solving real world problems” (it had some cute acronym that I have forgotten). Based on my experience with that technique I have often tried to incorporate ideas of project based and real world applications into my teaching when ever possible. As defined by California’s Buck Institute for learning, PBL is "a systematic teaching method that engages students in learning knowledge and skills through an extended inquiry process structured around complex, authentic questions and carefully designed products and tasks." I can not imagine that there are many thinking educators who would not see the value in teaching using this approach. Science teachers have long seen the value of an inquiry approach, movement toward PBL shows the value for all disciplines moving in this direction.
One of the difficulties I have seen implementing PBL at the high school level is our lack of ability to work in a multidisciplinary manner. I can certainly see how applying the thinking behind PBL would work much better in a elementary classroom. The esN article on PBL Project-based learning; engages students, garners results, reinforced my understanding of the importance of implementing projects in a multidisciplinary approach. I would argue that rather than moving away from PBL at the high school level, traditional high school should find ways to work in interdisciplinary teams. These interdisciplinary teams should be designed and maintained around a function of engaging kids in learning, PBL is certainly one of the ways this could be done. I worry in move to increase test scores we may move away from this type of approach to teaching, make teaching and learning less engaging and in the long run end up with even lower performing students! I was excited to read about Adaptive Curriculum and then disappointed to see there was not high school level material.
In the Edutopia article “Put to the Test: Confronting Concerns about Project Learning” Yeung argues that there are ways to keep standards in focus as you move to better engage students in their learning. The article does a nice job backing up the idea that there are clear connections make to the standards. Yeung goes on to counter the argument that students are not ready for the collaborative nature of the work. It is the job of teachers to teach these collaborative skills, I would argue that these skills are probably more valuable in the long run than many of the content standards we address. Finally PBL requires teachers to improve their abilities to serve as facilitators in the classroom rather than as actors or presenters of material. This may be a big change for some traditional teachers, but I would definitely argue that this is a change that needs to take place.
The interview of Howard Gardner provides the learning theory that supports the move to including PBL in the classroom. Gardner raises the concern that we try to teach too many subjects or topics and that this causes us to not go deep enough in what we do teach. He speaks very clearly about what we do not do well in education and suggests the direction we should be moving.
In closing Howard Gardner makes a suggestion to move from teacher centered learning to child centered learning. This reminds me of something I often think of as I am leaving the school at 5:30, are any of my students as tired as I am? The tired ones are the ones doing the work, doing the thinking, doing the learning…I need to get to a place where the kids are as tired as I am!

Day One Successful

Day one of making this stuff real was very successful! In two 45 minute periods I was able to get most of the students in each of my two Bio II classes logged into both Diigo and the class wiki. A few kids did a bit of whining about having to use the technology, but just as many said (aloud!) ..."this is cool". Not one of the kids had ever even heard of social bookmarking. Our head librarian sat in and helped me help the kids through the login process. Next class I will show some how to videos as well as getting into the content of climate change. Exciting stuff!

Making it Real

This is the week when I will attempt to make my learning real. To me making it real means making it part of my work with students. It is somewhat intimidating because I know there will be multiple issues with the assignments; everything from the computer cliches caused by the districts aging network connections to seniors ready to be done with school. The final unit in my senior science elective, Bio II, will be on climate change. My goal is to increase my students understanding of the very complex issues involved with global climate change. I will role it out to the kids tomorrow...wish me luck. The secret to success will be flexibility..so I'll eat a good breakfast and head into school with a smile on my face! Here is a link to my school website on it you will find a link to the assignment.