"Innovation is the process of altering existing practice in order to achieve more effectively certain desired learning outcomes" (Fullan, 1985). You can read a summary of his book here. Without these three dimensions of change in ICT, these desired outcomes are not likely:
Teaching materials
Teaching strategies
Teaching beliefs
These days we are extremely fortunate in that materials for teaching are readily available online. Our biggest challenge in the classroom is implementing our known strategies in new ways, and adjusting our beliefs to accommodate the new set of skills our 21st Century Learners need.
To help you in your quest to be a 'change agent' the George Lucas Foundation has posted a handy booklet, Ten Top Tips for Teaching with New Media, on it's website. You can download it for free, and it's choc-a-block full of tips for integrating ICT in the classroom: What's Inside:
Break the Digital Ice
Find Your Classroom Experts
Get Off to a Good Start
Think Globally
Find What You Need
Make Meaning from Word Clouds
Work Better, Together
Open a Back Channel
Make It Visual
Use the Buddy System
I've been using some of these strategies and tools in my classroom, and they certainly do make integrating ICT into the daily program much easier. There are also heaps of ideas and websites, that I'm looking forward to trying out!
The next challenge of course, is getting the school to let me try out all these new and exciting disruptive innovations (Clayton, 1995)....!
My classes' recent AsTTle results once more showed that my students' comprehension skills are greatly lacking. Two of the areas which they need to focus on are Finding and Processing Information, and also Making connections.
I found this excellent thought provoking video, in which Professor Daniel Willingham describes why content knowledge is so essential when learning to reading with comprehension, and why teaching reading strategies alone is not sufficient. He makes the point that the more a student knows about the subject content, the better he will score in a reading comprehension test.
As one of the commentors said, 'student's actually have to learn stuff' and not just rely on Google to get their instant knowledge! I think in our quest to move towards 21st Century Learning, we tend to forget that our students still need to know 'stuff' to have better understanding of the world around them! What do other educators think?
I'm at home in bed today. I have two complaints: 1) I've lost my voice. 2) Every muscle in my body is protesting.
Now, it may be the lingering flu / lung infection that I've been battling since last week, or... and this is more likely ... it may be that I've taught my kids a Hip Hop dance for our upcoming production.
This is how it happened: I was in bed all last week, so we weren't able to practice the more traditional dance that I had chosen. (Our theme is 'The ebb and flow of the Waikato River'). When we eventually got around to it on Monday, I realized that the dance just wasn't working. The kids were NOT INTERESTED. So I asked them (like a good 21st Century Teacher should) "What kind of dance do you want to do?" "HIP HOP!" was the answer.
I already knew what Hip Hop was, as two of my boys had done their speeches on that subject. (See my previous post on Speeches.) I also do have extensive dance experience, having been a ballet dancer myself (way back when) and also having been part of a dance troupe as a student (many moons ago). But.... that was then and now I'm fat, frumpy and forty-plus. And recovering from a lung infection. And... I had one day to do it!
This is where the marvel of 21st Century Education comes in. I hit YouTube. There are loads of lessons - online and free - on how to Hip Hop. First, I found music I liked. I chose "The World's Greatest" by RD Kelly. It has loads of images which we could translate into dance moves, and a really strong motivational message. It empowered me to learn to Hip Hop!
My daughter helped me work out some 'moves'. My three teenage sons stood around making appropriate comments. (At their age 2 grunts means 'Cool' and 1 grunt means 'Not cool'.) One of them did say "Gee, Ma, I didn't know you could Hip Hop!" and the other one grumbled: "That's too hard for eight year olds." (Which actually means 'Wow, Mum, that's pretty impressive footwork'.)
Yesterday in class we pushed back the tables, got into rows, and learned the dance. We ripped up our flowing river fabric, and made them into bandannas and hand-scarves. We even added some glitter paint. My students' comments? "Mrs T, this is SOOO COOOL!" Praise indeed!
I will keep you all posted on the success of the production next week!Here's my class and our last practice before the final dress rehearsal!
I've been trying to find a way to share my student's work in KnowledgeNet in their ePortfolio's. In my quest, I came across One True Media. What fun! Check it out!
We all know that effective learning occurs when...
Student autonomy and initiative is accepted and encouraged
Teacher asks open-ended questions and allows wait time for responses
Higher level thinking is encouraged
Students engage in dialogue with teacher and each other
Students engaged in experiences that challenge hypotheses
Class uses raw data primary sources, physical and interactive materials
Knowledge and ideas emerge only from a situation in which learners have to draw them out of experiences that have meaning and importance to them
Derek writes: "In my experience these are exactly the sorts of learning experiences that many of these emerging social web applications enable and encourage."
This brand-new state-of-the-art 21st Century pedagogy was first written about in.... 1915 by John Dewey in his "Constructivist Pedagogy". Makes you think about how much progress we've made in the last 100 years in education, doesn't it?
These are my top ideas for using Web 2.0 tools in class, to encourage the type of learning experience John Dewey was dreaming of:
Tip #1 Class Blog: Use blogging software such as Edublogs or Blogger to create your class blog. In a Primary class, it works well to have one student log on username and password, and let them publish their best writing and pictures. I let my class look at our blog every morning just after we've done the roll, and the excitement is always great if we have a comment. The clustermap also lends itself to a quick Atlas search to find out who our readers are!
Tip #2 Class Wiki: I like to use Wetpaint. (You can ask for the ads to be removed, if it is an educational wiki. You can also use PBWiki. For me a wiki is the ideal showcase for students' work. You can create a page for each project, and students can add a page for themselves, on which to add their notes, links and work. Students can edit and comment on each other's pages, and you can have a discussion thread going. This is also something parents can access (but not edit, unless you let them.) My class wiki is still under construction, but it will be used as a sort of filing cabinet to store our work digitally.
Tip #3 Voicethread: This is something I've just learnt about, and I can't wait to try it out in class!
This video was created to inspire teachers to use technology in engaging ways to help students develop higher level thinking skills. Equally important, it serves to motivate school leaders to provide teachers with the tools and training to do so.
