Find my degree now! Please!
I am looking ahead to 14 months or so remaining in my master’s program. The action research piece starts this Fall. I have wrestled my question into focus (I think) and now comes the reading, the designing, the writing, the thinking and doing. And as Lady Diana was so fond of saying, “It’s all rather daunting.”
But who knew?
Apparently I can bypass all this and Find my degree now. Just a drop down box away. Yippee! Technology rocks!
I have been pondering the ingredients of School 2.0. The School 2.0 Manifesto wiki has me considering what makes a nutritious, hearty, and inviting mix for learners.
One of the elements of the learning stew I have been serving up in class is drama. I am really excited by the enthusiasm and deep learning that comes from enactment (drama) strategies. Jeff Wilhelm’s book Action Strategies for Deepening Comprehension got me going. All of his books do. The strategies he describes, like role plays, tableaux, and mantle of the expert, hook kids and connect them to content in an active and personal way; they play with the language, the ideas, the images. They explore the possibilities of what if? and get closer to the answers of how come?
In examining the question “Is Web 2.0 going to lead to School 2.0?”, David Warlick says in one of my favourite posts,
Students stop being mirrors, and instead become amplifiers. Their job is not merely to reflect what they encounter, but to add value to it. Content and skills are no longer the end product, but they become raw materials, with which students learn to work and play and share. Information is captured by the learner, processed, added to, remixed, and then shared back, to be captured by another learner/teacher and reprocessed. Each exchange and improvement not only runs on the energy of students (learner/teacher) curiosity and intrinsic need to play, work, and communicate information, but it also generates energy, which the teacher (teacher/learner) channels.
Warlick is not talking about drama strategies at all, but he could be. I find it powerful how neatly his ideas transfer from technology to other active, engaging methods that don’t necessarily involve or require a tech element. Project-based learning, inquiry, and math explorations come to mind.
So here is where my [limited] stew metaphor takes me, for now at least:
Technology is not the carrot that students chew own (technology as enticing add-in), nor is it the bowl that contains the learning (technology as sole vehicle for learning). Technology is one of the spoons that stirs the mix and lets learners serve understanding and experience to themselves and others.
Hmmm. Metaphors have a habit of getting away on me. Better get out while the gettin’s good.
I remember the sinking feeling (OK, panic) I felt the first time I saw the Go2Web20.net meta list of web apps. There are, according to their site, 2587 applications and services in their directory as of today. The page just scrolls on and on….
I know not every tool of value is listed there. VoiceThread is missing, so is FlikrStorm. And some of these tools just leave me scratching my head: Plol- the Pablic Library or Law (hmm, help with praking tickuts?) and Foamy which asks, “Do you owe someone a beer?”.
I am really curious about what drives the creativity behind these apps. Are people inventing tools to create a need or do these tools meet real needs that can’t be addressed any other way? And does this matter? Maybe the true creativity comes after the fact when people find uses for applications that the inventor hadn’t imagined.
Dan Meyer blogged about Animoto and Wordle, suggesting that beyond the cool factor, which shouldn’t be a factor, they have little value in education:
…for classroom purposes we need to stop judging these tools on the quality of their output rather on the rigor of their input and the interpretation of their output.
(Dan did recant his complete rejection of Wordle when a reader named Rich used it to calculate the mode of a set of numbers.)
To Dan’s criteria, I would add that using a tool should create a positive change–in the way a person (user or viewer) thinks, feels, or perceives. And the quality of change determines the value of that tool. In this context, change = learning.
Recently, Sue Waters presented a workshop on personal learning networks, and shared reader responses about their most important tools in creating and sustaining their networks. I said that RSS, Diigo, Nings like Classroom 2.0, and blogging conversations were my lifeline tools. She created the diagram here to show reader responses. Sue, Elaine Talbert, and other contributors may have convinced me of the value of Twitter, and I may take it up before the summer is over.
I am going to use Wordle with my Gr. 6 students: in math for demonstrating mode and the birthday paradox (suggested by Jason Dyer), and in language arts using this clever idea for puzzles from Winston Breen. And maybe, just maybe my students will find another purpose for the tool that no one has thought of yet. That would be cool.
This video is why we should read blogs beyond teaching and technology: just for the joy of finding something like this.
I learned about Baman and Piderman through Drawn! The Illustration and Cartoon Blog. It is a multi-authored blog, and is rich with content of the eye-candy sort. The material is not always young student appropriate, but Drawn! often includes videos, cartoons, and illustrations that are perfect for classroom use. The blog won a best Canadian blog award in 2007.
The maker of this magical animation is Alex Butera, is a 22-year-old talent about to graduate from the Massachusetts College of Art. The charm of this video is the characterization of these two superheroes. The table slouching, the looking under the bed, and the sticky feet are so six-year-old boy, and their friendship is just plain sweet. The best part is the last few seconds with sandwich. Pure genius. I wonder how he made the sound of the meat flopping out and the bread hitting the bed.
I imagine Alex put hours upon hours into this 22 second gem. I am sure he is getting raves. I would love to know how his talent was encouraged in school and out.
Betcha can’t watch this only once.
By now, Sue Waters is getting ready for Day 2 of her presentation on the importance of personal learning networks and how networks are forged using online tools.
I am about three months into building my online PLN. I have many wonderful colleagues at school and in my master’s cohort, and I love face-to-face learning with them. In person connection is my first choice always.
What the online community provides me with is bizarre combination of the random and the specific. It’s really non-linear. Some things I trip over, and other things I seek out. Both processes give me A-ha! moments. Because I am in charge of my learning (choosing to engage, observe, ponder, reject), I am the do-it-yourselfer–I am my own cognitive plumber and electrician. My best tools at this point are RSS, Diigo, Nings like Classroom 2.0 , and the blogging conversations I’ve joined. What helps my learning most is feedback.
I listened to a ustream of Clarence Fisher’s presentation at the Building Learning Communities conference in Boston, and an idea that sticks in my colander is teacher as network administrator. This is not to be confused with the tech support job. We can help our students build their own learning networks by helping them access the tools and learn the strategies to use them wisely and effectively. We can point them at the resources and content that might resonate for them so they can create their own PLNs.
I would love to have a better PLN close to home, but for now there isn’t a good venue to ask the question, “Is anyone trying X? How’s it working? Can we experiment together?”. That would move my DIY to DIT–do it together.
Hmm. Something to aspire to.
Image: sky blues by Saffana Creative Commons license
