I came to an interesting conclusion today.
I don't know if I would ever feel entirely right teaching in a school division where there weren't SMART Boards. Have I ever talked about how awesome SMART Boards are and how much I want one in my personal residence? I feel like this is a potential blog topic that has not been delved into much before, and I don't really care to troll through my archives and discover the truth of it.
I first encountered SMART Boards here at Brandon University in my first term of classes here and thought they were intimidating as all heck. I was extremely wary to try it out at first. I tried writing something on it, and it somehow came out even more illegibly than my usual handwriting. Very odd indeed, for anyone who knows what my usual horrid chicken scratch looks like. But I persevered a little and started using it in a basic way in my first placement. Hey, it sure beat an overhead!
But I wasn't using it all that deeply.
In my second placement, I was placed with a teacher who was the 'tech expert' at his school, a man who could actually teach me things about using technology, as opposed to looking mildly apologetic as they asked me for help. SMART Boards were used quite heavily in that class, both for teacher presentation and student work. I got to run SMART Board quizzes, which were fun, even if they were a little technically demanding (and sometimes fussy as to whether they worked or not).
In my third placement, not all the software options that were present in the first class were actually there, but I still found plenty of uses for the SMART Board. There was actually one little tool that hadn't been present in my second placement, a document camera, which I found a pretty handy little device. Sometimes it's just nice to directly interface with an print document and the document camera filled that need quite nicely.
I've got very used to SMART Boards in my educational life.
Would I work in a teaching job without one? Well, yes. Of course. But you bet that I'd be pushing for it when budget time came around each year ...
"What's Mr. Keen want in his classroom this year?"
"A SMART Board, Mr. Chalmers*."
"Ughhh. Not again. Give him some more of those weird dice. Maybe that'll keep him quiet for another term."
I'm sorry, Mr. Chalmers, but I want my SMART Board, and I want it now.
*= Not a real person.
Thursday, 30 January 2014
Tuesday, 28 January 2014
Big Hairy Questions
In his presentation to us on Thursday, Dean Shareski asked us three Big Hairy Questions:
1.) If your entire class can be captured and delivered online, why should anyone come?
2.) What changes with ubiquitous access?
3.) What are we going to ask on our tests, with all students having Google in their pockets? Are they going to be better questions than we ask today?
I'd like to offer a few thoughts in response to these questions.
In response to the first question, while it is entirely possible to capture a class and deliver it online, the interactivity of the experience is diminished. This showed for me with the discussion with Dean himself, while Skype is a useful medium for many things, there is no substitute for face-to-face experience. Additionally, it is important for teachers to be able to see and directly interact with students in real time.
It's true that if your class is largely composed of lectures, you could deliver it online with fairly minimal loss. But then again, if your class in 2013 is mostly lectures, you could stay at home and catch up on Game of Thrones (the new season begins in April, can't wait) and your students wouldn't miss much for watching an empty room for an hour. This is not the 19th century and very few people have the ability to actually get a substantial amount out of a straight lecture. This is not a good or a bad thing directly, it is simply a fact. We live in a digital, interactive world. Class needs to be interactive.
What about question two? What changes with ubiquitous access? I think we need to have a stricter definition of ubiquitous access here. If it means access to technology, we're not there yet, even though it must seem so for people who teach in primarily middle-class or wealthy districts. It isn't yet realistic for school divisions to provide every student with a device (the closest are experiments in mandating devices for particular grade groups) and a large number of students don't possess devices of their own. In fact, I'd argue that it's not appropriate for young children to have their own personal devices in any case.
But were we to achieve it, what would change? I think there would have to be a very serious effort to shape a classroom culture where appropriate technology use is encouraged and inappropriate use discouraged- not just by teachers but by students themselves. I think it also requires, though, a sense of proportion in classroom management- the student who traditionally zoned out by sitting with their head down might be playing Candy Crush today. It's not a positive behaviour, but if they're not being disruptive, is it really any worse? And could it be a symptom of insufficiently engaging instruction on the part of the teacher more than any fault of the student?
It would become more and more difficult to convince students of the benefit of learning a lot of the 'by hand' skills, such as handwriting (print or cursive), mental mathematics and learning any sort of content by memory. We've become essentially a 'flashdrive' rather than a 'hard drive' culture- we keep most of our memory in external sources. Memory is much like a muscle, the failure to use it can result in a loss of ability. It's worth remembering that in traditional Muslim societies, imams memorize the entire Quran by heart and that illiterate hunter-gatherers in Papua New Guinea can memorize and distinguish between thousands of different plant types. Memory is a powerful thing. Convincing students of its value will be harder and harder in the future, though. It already is.
The third question ties into the memory question somewhat. In some subjects, it is completely appropriate to occasionally mandate that all devices be off and students rely on their memory and learned skills. In mathematics, it is imperative that students have an idea of how to do things in their head, if for no other reason, than to recognize an input error when they use a calculator in future life. Memorization gets a bad rap in our culture, but it's necessary for some things.
Another element is the ability to take data and make meaningful context out of it. In a history test, should I decide to have one, I might not be overly concerned about whether students have memorized dates and places, but I want them to be able to create a context or a narrative for historical events. If we are doing a unit on human rights and social development, I'm not particularly worried if they've memorized which countries have the death penalty and which countries have not, I'm far more interested in their ability to integrate knowledge into a worldview. It is certainly possible, of course, to plagarize if students have access to technology. But teachers have a pretty good sense of what students 'sound' like in their writing after a few months, and if they are suspicious, they can always Google material from a test and see what comes up.
The third and final question in this vein is about the necessity of tests at all. I think tests are useful in some contexts- especially in subjects like math, but product-based learning is a far more substantial means of achieving engagement than tests. Most students who do well on tests are only demonstrating strategic compliance at best. Tests are not engaging. I'm not saying we should never have tests, but I'm saying that they should not be the mainstay of assessment in any subject today.
It's certainly a lot of material to think about, and I'll keep it in mind as I move on into active practice. For now, however, I'll huddle desperately for warmth and go read some other people's blogs.
Kris
1.) If your entire class can be captured and delivered online, why should anyone come?
2.) What changes with ubiquitous access?
3.) What are we going to ask on our tests, with all students having Google in their pockets? Are they going to be better questions than we ask today?
I'd like to offer a few thoughts in response to these questions.
In response to the first question, while it is entirely possible to capture a class and deliver it online, the interactivity of the experience is diminished. This showed for me with the discussion with Dean himself, while Skype is a useful medium for many things, there is no substitute for face-to-face experience. Additionally, it is important for teachers to be able to see and directly interact with students in real time.
It's true that if your class is largely composed of lectures, you could deliver it online with fairly minimal loss. But then again, if your class in 2013 is mostly lectures, you could stay at home and catch up on Game of Thrones (the new season begins in April, can't wait) and your students wouldn't miss much for watching an empty room for an hour. This is not the 19th century and very few people have the ability to actually get a substantial amount out of a straight lecture. This is not a good or a bad thing directly, it is simply a fact. We live in a digital, interactive world. Class needs to be interactive.
What about question two? What changes with ubiquitous access? I think we need to have a stricter definition of ubiquitous access here. If it means access to technology, we're not there yet, even though it must seem so for people who teach in primarily middle-class or wealthy districts. It isn't yet realistic for school divisions to provide every student with a device (the closest are experiments in mandating devices for particular grade groups) and a large number of students don't possess devices of their own. In fact, I'd argue that it's not appropriate for young children to have their own personal devices in any case.
But were we to achieve it, what would change? I think there would have to be a very serious effort to shape a classroom culture where appropriate technology use is encouraged and inappropriate use discouraged- not just by teachers but by students themselves. I think it also requires, though, a sense of proportion in classroom management- the student who traditionally zoned out by sitting with their head down might be playing Candy Crush today. It's not a positive behaviour, but if they're not being disruptive, is it really any worse? And could it be a symptom of insufficiently engaging instruction on the part of the teacher more than any fault of the student?
It would become more and more difficult to convince students of the benefit of learning a lot of the 'by hand' skills, such as handwriting (print or cursive), mental mathematics and learning any sort of content by memory. We've become essentially a 'flashdrive' rather than a 'hard drive' culture- we keep most of our memory in external sources. Memory is much like a muscle, the failure to use it can result in a loss of ability. It's worth remembering that in traditional Muslim societies, imams memorize the entire Quran by heart and that illiterate hunter-gatherers in Papua New Guinea can memorize and distinguish between thousands of different plant types. Memory is a powerful thing. Convincing students of its value will be harder and harder in the future, though. It already is.
The third question ties into the memory question somewhat. In some subjects, it is completely appropriate to occasionally mandate that all devices be off and students rely on their memory and learned skills. In mathematics, it is imperative that students have an idea of how to do things in their head, if for no other reason, than to recognize an input error when they use a calculator in future life. Memorization gets a bad rap in our culture, but it's necessary for some things.
Another element is the ability to take data and make meaningful context out of it. In a history test, should I decide to have one, I might not be overly concerned about whether students have memorized dates and places, but I want them to be able to create a context or a narrative for historical events. If we are doing a unit on human rights and social development, I'm not particularly worried if they've memorized which countries have the death penalty and which countries have not, I'm far more interested in their ability to integrate knowledge into a worldview. It is certainly possible, of course, to plagarize if students have access to technology. But teachers have a pretty good sense of what students 'sound' like in their writing after a few months, and if they are suspicious, they can always Google material from a test and see what comes up.
The third and final question in this vein is about the necessity of tests at all. I think tests are useful in some contexts- especially in subjects like math, but product-based learning is a far more substantial means of achieving engagement than tests. Most students who do well on tests are only demonstrating strategic compliance at best. Tests are not engaging. I'm not saying we should never have tests, but I'm saying that they should not be the mainstay of assessment in any subject today.
It's certainly a lot of material to think about, and I'll keep it in mind as I move on into active practice. For now, however, I'll huddle desperately for warmth and go read some other people's blogs.
Kris
Monday, 20 January 2014
Revenge of the Wiki?
There was a time when I had essentially sworn never to do another wiki. My first experience with making a wiki was kind of awful. Crowded together in class as we were, it was virtually impossible to meaningfully juggle edits from different people. Unlike the simple, useful Google Doc, it was incredibly frustrating to do even the simplest task.
Naturally, this is when I signed up for an optional course dealing with the Internet. And of course, a wiki would be a mandatory part of the course.
Naturally.
What was a surprise this time was that the wiki was actually manageable. Since it was foisted upon us during an asynchronous class period, there was not the same pressure of having multiple people working together. Freed from that headache, I had only to contend with the actual wiki interface itself in order to create a page.
It's not bad, actually. I still think it could be more user friendly than it is, but it's certainly something that would be manageable for a lot of our older students and is certainly within the realm of potential for we teacher candidates. Provided that one does not have everyone trying to edit the same page all at once, it turns out that wikis aren't that hard. And indeed, one even gets a glimpse of their potential value.
I could see myself creating a wiki in a classroom context. Imagine a one-stop compendium of information, sources and solutions for my middle/high-school students. Assignments could become wiki articles. Eventually, a valuable resource is being created, not just for the students themselves but future generations of student and possibly students from other schools. It is sometimes difficult to find quality sources of research information for students on the Internet.
Why not create one instead?
My second go at wikis has been a lot more valuable than the first one. Instead of something I kind of despise, it's something I can genuinely see the merit of in the classroom.
Well played, Mike. Well played ...
Naturally, this is when I signed up for an optional course dealing with the Internet. And of course, a wiki would be a mandatory part of the course.
Naturally.
What was a surprise this time was that the wiki was actually manageable. Since it was foisted upon us during an asynchronous class period, there was not the same pressure of having multiple people working together. Freed from that headache, I had only to contend with the actual wiki interface itself in order to create a page.
It's not bad, actually. I still think it could be more user friendly than it is, but it's certainly something that would be manageable for a lot of our older students and is certainly within the realm of potential for we teacher candidates. Provided that one does not have everyone trying to edit the same page all at once, it turns out that wikis aren't that hard. And indeed, one even gets a glimpse of their potential value.
I could see myself creating a wiki in a classroom context. Imagine a one-stop compendium of information, sources and solutions for my middle/high-school students. Assignments could become wiki articles. Eventually, a valuable resource is being created, not just for the students themselves but future generations of student and possibly students from other schools. It is sometimes difficult to find quality sources of research information for students on the Internet.
Why not create one instead?
My second go at wikis has been a lot more valuable than the first one. Instead of something I kind of despise, it's something I can genuinely see the merit of in the classroom.
Well played, Mike. Well played ...
Sunday, 12 January 2014
Internet for Educators: Some Opening Thoughts
The Revolution is Here:
I entered into the public education system in September 1989. It's safe to say, then, that the bulk of my educational years were spent in the 1990s, with my high school graduation happening in 2002. I can safely say that in the ten years between the time that I left the public education system and the time that I reentered it as a teacher candidate, a revolution has happened in the use of technology in the classroom.
In 2002, teachers were still primarily using chalkboards in order to interface with students, though a handful of whiteboards had started cropping up. Most classrooms did have a computer or two, but these are almost entirely for the use of the teacher. Computers in the school were usually clustered in a 'computer lab' or a library. Crocus Plains, where I went to school, had two computer labs and about six computers in the library. They were used primarily for the computer science classes or in the case of the library, for research purposes.
I remember designing a wretched website in Grade 10 computer science using something called FrontPage, as well as doing basic programming in a few different languages. This was all in an era where the average website could be measured in kilobytes, where the definition of cutting-edge were animated .gifs or the odd grainy 10-second video. The Internet primarily existed for surfing or e-mail. Few people bought anything online and hardly anyone used the Internet as a primary interface tool.
In 2012, we have students who do most of their schoolwork and social interaction online, who are already purchasing many of the items they want or need online. The computer labs have largely been dismantled and are now replaced with laptops or iPads, though most rooms now have 4-5 desktop computers as well. The SmartBoard is rapidly replacing many of the traditional uses of the chalkboard or whiteboard, as well as adding functionality that would be impossible with the older technology. Students are now not only browsing websites for research, but they are making their own websites, blogs and SmartBoard presentations for classroom purposes. It is possible for students in a class to make content viewable by millions, or only by a small invited circle if they so choose.
Whether we like technology or not, it has come into the classroom and not giving students the tools- both the technical skills required to navigate and use technology, but also the ethical and moral tools needed to deal with a rapidly changing culture, would be a serious abrogation of our responsibility as teachers. Most of the technological changes that we hail, unfortuantely, have their dark sides. Social media has led to cyberbullying, the Web offers the same free access to hate literature and pornography as it does to cutting-edge research and up-to-date information.
Teachers are not simple technicians and even in the use of technology, we cannot limit ourselves to this technical approach. We must also be philosophers and guardians. The revolution is here and we can't turn the clock back, but we can prepare students for the new technological age.
It's a pretty heavy responsibility, yes, but it's also potentially a lot of fun. Technology is exciting and we need to demonstrate that to students.
I'm looking forward to seeing what tools this class provides me to help do just that.
Sincerely,
Mr. Keen
I entered into the public education system in September 1989. It's safe to say, then, that the bulk of my educational years were spent in the 1990s, with my high school graduation happening in 2002. I can safely say that in the ten years between the time that I left the public education system and the time that I reentered it as a teacher candidate, a revolution has happened in the use of technology in the classroom.
In 2002, teachers were still primarily using chalkboards in order to interface with students, though a handful of whiteboards had started cropping up. Most classrooms did have a computer or two, but these are almost entirely for the use of the teacher. Computers in the school were usually clustered in a 'computer lab' or a library. Crocus Plains, where I went to school, had two computer labs and about six computers in the library. They were used primarily for the computer science classes or in the case of the library, for research purposes.
I remember designing a wretched website in Grade 10 computer science using something called FrontPage, as well as doing basic programming in a few different languages. This was all in an era where the average website could be measured in kilobytes, where the definition of cutting-edge were animated .gifs or the odd grainy 10-second video. The Internet primarily existed for surfing or e-mail. Few people bought anything online and hardly anyone used the Internet as a primary interface tool.
In 2012, we have students who do most of their schoolwork and social interaction online, who are already purchasing many of the items they want or need online. The computer labs have largely been dismantled and are now replaced with laptops or iPads, though most rooms now have 4-5 desktop computers as well. The SmartBoard is rapidly replacing many of the traditional uses of the chalkboard or whiteboard, as well as adding functionality that would be impossible with the older technology. Students are now not only browsing websites for research, but they are making their own websites, blogs and SmartBoard presentations for classroom purposes. It is possible for students in a class to make content viewable by millions, or only by a small invited circle if they so choose.
Whether we like technology or not, it has come into the classroom and not giving students the tools- both the technical skills required to navigate and use technology, but also the ethical and moral tools needed to deal with a rapidly changing culture, would be a serious abrogation of our responsibility as teachers. Most of the technological changes that we hail, unfortuantely, have their dark sides. Social media has led to cyberbullying, the Web offers the same free access to hate literature and pornography as it does to cutting-edge research and up-to-date information.
Teachers are not simple technicians and even in the use of technology, we cannot limit ourselves to this technical approach. We must also be philosophers and guardians. The revolution is here and we can't turn the clock back, but we can prepare students for the new technological age.
It's a pretty heavy responsibility, yes, but it's also potentially a lot of fun. Technology is exciting and we need to demonstrate that to students.
I'm looking forward to seeing what tools this class provides me to help do just that.
Sincerely,
Mr. Keen
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