Reflections from a
Digital Immigrant
There comes a point
in every educator's career where the technology surpasses their
training, and they must learn to dive in and sink or swim. Teaching
Methods classes included a unit on managing an overhead projector and
running a VCR, and a Blockbuster car was a teacher's best friend.
Today, we are awash in programs and applications, blogs, wikis,
twitter-feeds, digital movies, and the limitations in our classroom
come not from the standards, or the test driven culture, which is
beginning to be cast aside for more effective measure of student
learning and achievement, but from our own reluctance of implementing
the new, or taking time to wade in and get our feet wet with our
students, learning along side them how to navigate wave after wave of
new technology that will simply wash over our students and become
tools for their twenty-first century lives. (Cennamo, Ross, &
Ertmer, 2009, 295) Abrams makes clear that teachers must adapt to
the “generation M” student by employing digital content to
develop visual and textual literacy, using authentic problem based
learning that encourages student communication, collaboration, and
critical thinking in creative ways. (Abrams, 2011)
Not a difficult
course, but one that required us to step outside out technological
comfort zone, to jump into the deep end, and not simply read about
infusing technology, this course asked us to use the very technology
we all think might make for a great lesson or unit or project or
product. Our students will enter a world where borders are
meaningless, where collaboration is not done in the same room at the
same time, although it can be, where communication happens in a
variety of forms for a variety of audiences. To deprive students of
the opportunity to be as creative as possible while transforming
facts and concepts and big ideas into their every day reality is to
deprive them of the ability to think critically about the images and
texts they call up on their screens, whether TV, Wii, a desk top, a
lap top,a tablet or net book , or even a smart phone. Dr. Abrams
reminds us if the technology is out there, they are already using it.
I hesitated at
timelines—does everything have to be done on line, in a techno way?
Then I stumbled on
http://www.xtimeline.com/timeline/Martin-Luther-King
through a edutopia discussion page. Then the one on Bob Dylan. Then
the one on Roman Civilizations. There are many, many avenues to
learning, and in 7th grade, the all lead to Rome.
Collaborative timelines on their peek into the history and culture of
Rome, any of the other Ancient Civilizations will allow them to
explore why China built a wall, or why Rome crumbled, or causes and
effects of Jim Crow and Juan Crow laws then and now. Pairing visual
with scripted narratives allows students to form teams that work well
together to produce something they are interested in learning.
(Eagelton and Dobler's QUEST strategies for Internet Inquiry come to
mind here, not just the rationale, but the terrific hand outs to
guide students inquiry ability. (2009)
For most language
arts projects connected to novels or genres, students can easily
create digital stories. At first, in the lower grades, students can
begin with power point frames and story boards to plot their tales,
and as they develop more sophisticated skills, they can easily learn
to manipulate images and write scripts to practice both first person
narrative along with third person storytelling. The possibilities
within social studies and Language Arts together, as a core, are
limitless: List some and be inventive, then check the book and cite
it.) In middles schools which function in families of teams,
students sharing the same four core teachers, cross curricular units
allow teachers to support each other dividing up some of the
responsibility to lighten the load on the English teacher, by shift
responsibility for the research paper to the Social Studies
department. Even more liberating are the possibilities within Google
Documents. Allowing other students real time access to documents for
collaborative writing gives them an audience from the start, and the
writing that's produced is far more genuine than pencil and paper
essays.
I've been trying to
infuse lessons from the AmericanMemory Collection for ten years,
looking to it as a starting point for exploration of history and for
context and visceral attention- getters in To Kill a Mockingbird or a
unit on Out of the Dust. Moving from Monterey and the Land of
Steinbeck to Western Carolina and the Upstate area,and its
Appalachian, mountain culture, developing oral history, looking to
the example set by Rocky Gap High School—maintaining township and
county historical archives. As I look to start a career in middle
school in North Carolina, I'd love to bring this kind of partnership
to the area schools and historical centers and library media centers.
I look forward to becoming involved in the Blue Ridge or Upstate
Writing projects to help “meld students prior knowledge, personal
interests,technology and history of place at the community level”
and perhaps also develop “an ongoing, evolving local history
project.” (Cennamo, Ross, & Ertmer, 2009, 293).
Having worked in
schools deemed average and below by the metrics of testing, high in
ELL students and low in socioeconomic status, I see the effects of
the digital divide. We are reminded that 40% of students don't have
access to the internet. For the schools to embrace the future of
learning, they must all go wireless, and have enough laptops or
tablets for them to be regular member of a class, not just once in a
while library add ons. Longer term projects, with regular check in
(How We Doing Wednesdays?) and scheduled work time built into the
unit will let student have control over their learning in a way that
the content and he technological literacy are blended. Using tech to
talk about plot, character, setting, theme, conflict &
resolution, or character development, is a demonstration of
understanding that cannot be captured in forced choice multiple
selection testing that is so inexpensive to evaluate, which measures,
by and large, income levels of various zip codes. Evaluate children
on what they do well, with pieces and project they select, that best
demonstrates their growth and achievement, that thy must justify in
writing. That’s a portfolio. That's an assessment of student work
that takes into consideration day to day learnings rather than rote
memorization of fact in isolation.
SO, to revisit my
own GAME PLAN:
Goal: To
bring 21st Century learning tools into the classroom
seamlessly. Wherever I land, the schools will have a plan in place.
It is incumbent upon me to familiarize myself with the over arching
plan, and then look for ways to actively bring technology in to
support the learning in my classroom. Until the Computer or laptop
or tablet is seen as nothing more than a pencil or a pen,a tool with
which to complete a job, then we are not adequately preparing our
students.
Actions:
Here, I underestimated the number of actions I might have to take,a d
the number of mistakes I might have to make, to implement blogs and
wikis and RRS feeds and aggregators. Each of these tools, even
something as seemingly self explanatory as Google, requires a
specific skill set, where we have to set a goal, take action to
achieve it, monitor the attempts, then evaluate the results against
goals, which creates a recursive process for learning, and
establishes a mindset, complete with neurological pathways that gears
one for successful academic achievement.
Monitor: Where
the GAME plan is more adaptable is with non academic subjects. Once
the realizations settles in that we all do this in order to self
direct our own learning, be it for school, for learning to spin a
basketball on a finger, or how to play the latest version of Angry
Birds, metacognitive awareness of learning becomes then, the guide.
Evaluate: It
doesn't matter what we learn, so long as we've laid down a basic
foundation for how to learn that can be carried from childhood
classroom inquiry to deeply personal and authentic what do I do now
for my mother inquiry. Equally as important CREDE's belief that we
are all teaching the super-curriculum of language, it follows then,
that we are also teaching the meta-curriculum of metacognition, to
allow our students to learn how to learn, so they can learn for
themselves when their fuse is lit and they need to learn it now.
How does that
translate into my teaching?
A Wish List...
- Quest in each unit---looking for parts to a puzzle.
- Self directed learning timelines and check lists
- blogs on novel discussions 1 plus two more
- learn more about wikis and how to navigate successfully
- Google Docs and Google Notebooks
- Digital story process. Abrams site.
- Need for a way to manage bookmarks, and learn to use stumble-on, digg etc. as a way to pre-approve search sites and limit wasted time in lab.
- Grant writing for C.O.W. Cart—36 MacBooks.
- Partnering with Blue Ridge Writing project.
1.Post hole lesson,
to dig a hole for them to fill
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