Blog Junkie

Crawford Kilian states in his post here on “The Tyee”:

… we faculty still think of teaching and learning as a face-to-face encounter between a standing instructor and a bunch of seated students, making notes of what the instructor says and writes on the chalkboard.  This is simply not what our students are doing anymore.

This reminded me of a conversation I had with two fellow educators of the techno-geek crowd. I teach elementary school and these gents teach high school.  We were discussing the use of technology in the classroom.  The gist of the conversation was that if we, as educators, do not follow along with the technology our students are using we will find connecting with our students difficult and they will begin to disconnect with us and the subject.  We need to meet them on their turf, where they’re at so we are using Web 2.0 tools such as podcasting, blogging, wikis and along with  paper reports we are having students create PowerPoints, imovies, slideshows etc to demonstrate their knowledge of a subject area.  As teachers we are creating lessons using the same software tools to make our teaching relevant to our webhead students.  It was inspiring to find there were other teachers out there, especially post-secondary teachers, realizing the same thing.  If the conservative post-secondary institutions of higher learning are moving forward, there should be hope the those below them.  Or should there?

Kilian goes on to say,

…We might wish they were dutiful note-takers, scrawling with ballpoint pens in their binders the way we did.  But they’re not.  We don’t do them, or ourselves, any good by trying to give them a first-rate 1960’s education.

There would be the key, “a first-rate 1960’s education.”  This isn’t the 60’s or 80’s.  We are in the 21st Century and our teaching needs to be there too.  What amazes and discourages me is how many teachers simply refuse to learn how to use the technology that is relevant to education using the stupid adage, “can’t teach an old dog new tricks” as their excuse. These teachers have entrenched themselves. They have forgotten how to learn and the importance of continuing to learn through-out their teaching careers.  If you stop learning what the hell do you think your students will do?

…From Kindergarten to high school, educators are going to have to get serious about that old cliche, “learning how to learn.”  And we ourselves will have to learn how to learn, or get out of the business.

Bravo!

Needing data for my field study I have given both my classes a “pop quiz”.  Results appear to be very interesting, but I haven’t finished with comparisons etc…yet.  I need to move on to a new subtopic in our study of Nepal, but my data shows improvement is needed with student note-taking and transferring those notes to Inspiration.  What to do?

I have decided to use World Book On-line as it had more information on this particular subtopic than the previous on-line encyclopedia.  I have my “keener” class in the lab.  I pretested everything and it works fine.  Here we go with the assumptions again.

Some students end up with different home pages than I have and we take forever to get to the information required.  When I do finally get everyone on the correct page I find my “keeners” are way off-task!  This is starting to rattle my confidence.  What happened?  I forget how to teach every time I set foot in the computer lab?

It’s been a bad day, I need to read.  I am currently reading Writing for the Web 3.0 by Crawford Kilian, a communications teacher at Capilano College in North Vancouver.  I am reading his book to improve my blogging, hoping to write for an audience that currently does not exist!  In the book Kilian talks about reading on the computer.  How the low resolution of the computer screen affects reading.  The bells go off in this wee head.  I swear I think at glacial speed sometimes!

The next class is with the “hell-cats” and at the last minute I change plans which is always a risky move.  New plan is to print the section of the World Book Encyclopedia on-line, use it as a paper copy, use the overhead and the specialized note-taking paper. Problem: The print is waaaaay too tiny.  Solution:  Blow it up on the photocopier.  Still too small, but out of time to retype.  Went ahead anyway.  Cannot believe I can have so much trouble adding technology into my teaching!  Could anything go right the first time?  Oh yeah, that overhead.  It was the first one produced after the mimeograph machines went extinct! It was prehistoric!  Why use an overhead and not the computer/projector?  Can’t use a highlighter on the projector to demo the note-taking.

What happens?  They co-operate!  They actually listen!  We work through the first paragraph together and they manage to hold it together and almost finish the entire assignment even though you practically need a magnifying glass to read the thing!

What did I learn?  That Kilian was right, reading on the computer is hard.  These kids are not able to sit with a computer screen at arms length away.  They find the sentences too long, they cannot highlight the key words in the text.  They need to read on paper.  I am astonished at the difference.

Now to improve how to transfer the information from the notes to the Inspiration web.  Still grinding the glacier on that.

It’s crunch time and I have to read more research papers for my action research project before my final paper is due.  Seeing as that is still some weeks away, well, it’s too early for all that stress yet.  I’ll read them 2 days before the final paper is due – works for me.

While cruising for research I decided to go back and visit Dan Willingham’s site and what did I find there?  This interesting discussion on the “Mozart Effect”.

…it began when a scientific paper reported that college students showed a short-lived increase in spatial reasoning (e.g., ability to mentally rotate objects) after listening to a Mozart piano sonata, compared to other students who experienced silence or instructions to relax (Rauscher, Shaw, and Ky, 1993). There were many subsequent efforts to reproduce the effect. Some were successful, most were not (see Chabris, 1999, for a review), and it appears most likely that when the effect is observed, it’s not due to hearing Mozart or classical music per se, but rather to a boost in mood and arousal (Thompson, Schellenberg, and Husain, 2001). At their best, the data on listening to Mozart supported a very short-lived boost in spatial ability for college students. Somehow, that transmogrified into the idea that playing classical music for babies would make them smarter for life…

And what is it that our fair city does with classical music, Mozart included?  Why our local 711s pipe it outside to help get rid of the “teenage cluster effect” and the “riff-raff effect”.  Our local upscale hotel pipes it outside to get rid of the local, not so upscale, “downtown colourful streetwalker effect”.  There is a lot of people getting smarter here.

I appreciate the people like Dan Willingham who take educational theories and make them look like what many of them are:  fashion fad’s from Paris Hilton!

Thank you, Dan, for making me look beyond the “fad” to see if the proof is really in the puddin’.

This Field Study is not actually a research project for a Master’s Degree.  It is an action study into my own teaching practices that investigates how I can use technology to improve my teaching and the learning of my students which is a requirement for my post-grad diploma.  All self-directed I might add.  Hmm…… Yep, I do get a diploma out of the deal.

What program am I investigating?  Inspiration Software.   I teach research skills and this seemed like a good idea as our school district has this software in its schools.  It seemed reasonable to find out if Inspiration’s claims that its software webbing program improved student ability to retain factual information.

I chose a research project based on a country as most kids enjoy learning about other cultures, but I needed a country they would know the least about so I could measure their “factual improvement”.  I picked Nepal.  The most they knew, as per a post-test, was that Mt. Everest was in Nepal.  So far, so good.

We began by using the note-taking system I was under the impression everyone was using in the school.  I’m the newbie to the school and as usual assuming things is where the first of a series of woes began.  I used Britannica On-line for our research information.  Good stuff, involved technology, how cool was that.  Kids liked the idea of an encyclopedia on-line…and then I discovered that a third of the kids couldn’t seem to follow either written or oral directions on logging onto the data-base, didn’t understand what “case-sensitive” meant, and only one of my two research skills classes was competent with the note-taking system SOME of the teachers were using!  I know better than to assume anything!

Ok, teach the note-taking system to the class that was not so familiar with it, no big deal.  With lesson plan in place, computer set up on the projector complete with the Britannica On-line page up, I begin.  That is when I discovered I had landed in HELL!  I had a class of 30, 25 boys and 5 girls and those 25 boys can put the fear of hell into its creator Himself!   Never in my teaching career have I had a class fly south like this one did and I could NOT get it back!  Next class I tried my faithful standby for problem kiddies:  intimidation.  I can imtidate Martha Stewart herself!  Hah!  They threw that back at me as fast as a rapid-fire paintball gun!  Good God, what to do?  How about panic! Actually, thinking back on it, it was rather funny! I felt like a lion-tamer, after it had been attacked by the lion!

After thinking about the problem for a week, I did what should have been done in the first place, provide structure. Must be a novel teaching strategy!  I put in place a seating plan, I do not respond to questions where the answer is already know, and I refuse to argue.  You’d think I’d know better, huh!

What happened?  Peace.  Cool.  I enjoy these holy terrors immensely.  They are full of creative high jinks.  They like the computer and technology.

Class under control, all is well.  Notes are being taken, not the best, but we’re getting there.  I don’t have the time to teach the note-taking as properly as I would like due to time constraints on this field study.  We move to Inspiration and create webs. I put up my demo version which is on my jump drive to discover it will not open!  Go figure! (Teaching with technology is starting to loose its glamour.)  It seems I have version 8 at home and my school has version 7.5.  Lucky me. But the  kids pick it up quickly, I reinforce the use of separate colours for sub-topics, repeatedly remind to put in the details for the 3 geographic landforms….blah, blah.  Then we save.  What does this amazing networked PC lab do?  It saves in the French Inspiration rather than the English!  How this is happening has yet to be determined.  Have to ask my darling techie man, who thank you very much, speaks in Non-techie English.  Maybe re-imaging the lab will solve the problem.  I am no IT Tech so hell if I know.  But the kid’s work is in English so all is well.  Then we discover that when we re-open the saved Inspiration document, it opens in the English version.  And I want to add technology to my teaching – definitely losing its initial thrill!

What exactly have I learned so far?  Well, as mentioned in a previous post – technology doesn’t solve a boring topic,  kids pick up computer technology at an amazingly rapid rate, and these kids can create the most amazing PowerPoints.  Some of them should give seminars to educators in how NOT to create boring presentations!  I now know what NOT to do for my final project presentation to my cohort group and I know exactly which gr. 7 I am going  to enlist to help me with my presentation! I’ve learned how to have the kids hand in digital work to my folder, with the help of Techie Man who just happened to be in the lab at the very moment I needed said help! He so earned those brownies I brided him with!  I now need to figure out if I can copy that hand in file to my jump drive and have it open properly at home.  I think I should turn that into a math probability lesson:  chances of success:  100 to 1???  Chances of Inspiration Software improving factual recall….????  Stay tuned!