In a four-part video series for GETideas I travelled the world in 24 hours and asked four educators I admire what their "two stars and a wish" for learning would be for 2011. I'll blog the films here over the next week.
Juliette Heppell, a high school teacher from the West End of London, UK, is seeing so much that is right with learning and technology, but the last crucial step is taking technology to where our students already hang out - to cell phones and social networks:
"Social networking in our school has been vital in engaging students in seeing the connection between learning in school and learning at home.
"Persuading teachers to use Skype in the classroom has resulted in some interesting projects, although the first stage involved teaching them how to use it at home as a form of professional development.
"We need to use what the students have already much more: it might be skills, or it might be equipment that they can bring into the classroom. Handhelds, consoles, mobile phones, research skills, enquiry skills… We're getting there, but we're not quite there yet."
Juliette's site features in this popular post from last month: "Please, Miss, Can I Friend You On Facebook?".
In a four-part video series for GETideas I travelled the world in 24 hours and asked four educators I admire what their "two stars and a wish" for learning would be for 2011. I'll blog the films here over the next week.
In our second film this week, Brian Lockwood, Technology Director and Nanjing International School, China, is proud of the technology integration his teachers, students and even parents have managed to achieve. But it all comes down to people at the end of the day:
"Every Friday, a group of us gather to show and tell. This Sharing Group, where teachers show how their students have created digital media or technology-based products as part of their learning, has become one of my favourite parts of the week, particularly for those kinds of moments where you want to share something with people really quickly, informally.
"Technology integration at Nanjing is astounding, with one person dealing with helping staff in the integration of technology in the classroom. However, the connection to parents is a strong idea: once a month parents are invited to get involved in a show and tell, where they see how technology has been used in the classroom.
"We need to share more of the great things that do go on in every school. A tweet or blog post might be enough to get the word out, and get people involved, but shooting video, capturing in video, is so much more powerful."
In a four-part video series for GETideas I travelled the world in 24 hours and asked four educators I admire what their "two stars and a wish" for learning would be for 2011. I'll blog the films here over the next week.
Oliver Quinlan, a primary school teacher in his first year of teaching in Birmingham, UK, blew people away at the BETT 2011 TeachMeet with his stories of how he gave up the inherent need of the teacher to know what's going to happen next in a lesson, and let students follow their interests. He expands on that in this short video:
"Children coming in and following what they're interested in has resulted in some of the most powerful learning experiences in my classroom. When a child chooses to understand more about the rocks they've brought in, the learning is deep. It takes time, we need to set that time aside.
I've also enjoyed spending longer on some texts, and haven't been afraid to revisit the same texts further down the line. What kids produce after a second chance at a topic, later on in the school year, is so much better than what is learnt and produced in the timetabled time.
"And that is my wish - I wish we could find more flexible, alternative timetabling methods that allow students to do these kinds of things. We need longer periods of time, the ability to not finish a topic, but to revisit it months later."
Good use of social networking and other social media in schools doesn't change that much with the changes in tools and platforms, but it's still useful to have a reminder of what works, and what doesn't.
Scotland's Bryan Kerr asks a great question tonight about whether a teacher should friend a student on Facebook, especially when his school district has banned teachers from being on Facebook:
First things first: should teaching staff be on Facebook in the first place?
Answer: Yes.
No employer has the right to tell a member of staff that they cannot interact on social networks or publish their work and thoughts freely on the web - this is the right to express oneself, a fundamental if ever there was one. For any school district to claim that a member of staff is bringing their employer into disrepute simply by sharing online through a particular platform, Facebook or otherwise, would result in the kind of court case that wouldn't make it past the corporate lawyer's intray.
Should a teacher take care about what they publish on their social network, or other sharing space on the web?
Answer: Yes.
Teachers, priests and doctors, for example, are the kinds of groups we trust to vouch for one's identity on a passport application. They are thought of differently than any other profession, and rightly so. They deal in the highly personal, and therefore the room for indiscretion offline or online for a teacher is much more constrained than those working in other professions. If a teacher was ever in any doubt as to what is accpetable, simply read the existing guidance in your jurisdiction for the acceptable attitudes and practices for educators in general, and make sure you keep to that code online, regardless of whether you're sharing and 'socialising' on school time or not.
Should a teacher accept a friend request from a current student on their personal profile?
Answer: No.
Facebook is primarily a space where we find personal profiles. No matter what your personal rules are for engaging people as 'friends' on Facebook (mine involves in depth work or conversation offline, and invariably a pint) you cannot guarantee that your students' habits are as thought-through. Private, personal, almost public and public are four different gradients of privacy that are hard enough for adults to comprehend, let alone a teen acting, probably, on impulse as (s)he befriends you.
Facebook and other communities have provided ample opportunity to create a more public space where the people you invite on board might not be classified as 'friends' in the more traditional sense of the word. Facebook Pages are a great way to create a purely professional profile, whereby you can invite and approve selected or self-selected members to join your Facebook 'community' on that page, without becoming personal friends and seeing what you get up to on a Friday night - or vice versa.
This way, when students want to talk about 'work'-related issues, or learning, they can do so through that page, knowing that everyone there will get the messages appearing on their wall, but their personal messages will not appear on the group wall.
Can we not just say that Facebook is personal, and not a place where learning should be discussed? Full Stop?
Answer: Are you serious?
It's not just today's young people that are hanging out on Facebook for 200+ minutes a day. The largest group on Facebook is over-35s, and in Britain the fastest growing group is the over 75s. If you want to remind students about great resources to help them with their homework, when they've fallen off-task or are seeking help, then Facebook is the only window that you know will always be open on their browser. Likewise, if you want parents to have a wider appreciation of what learning is actually going on, they're on Facebook downstairs in the living room at the same time your students are online upstairs.
This sounds like extra work - working in the evening when I should be marking/preparing/having a life.
Answer: It's a bit extra. But it's worth it.
Train hard, fight easy. That's what the SAS say. In teaching it might be "get to help your students when they really need it, in the place where they need it, and in-class is going to be easier, more effective and more personable."
Where do we go to dive into detail?
Juliette Heppell as a page of great advice on the dos and don'ts of using Facebook for learning. It's worth updating that, since the beginning of this week, you needn't worry about creating a second 'you' for working with students. Instead, new Facebook pages allow you to allocate 'friend requests' to a particular page or list, thus rendering your Friday night shenanigans invisible to Johnny, Jamie, Kelly-anne and Kaylee.
If you've followed the development of education blogging platform eduBuzz, you'll know I'm passionate about social media's promise for connecting learning and parents. Facebook is great for that, too, so consider setting up class pages which parents join. See how one school has done it for its six-year-old First Graders.
For a host of other resources on Facebook, in general, follow up on my library of Facebook links.
Will Richardson, at EduCon in Philly's Science Leadership Academy, led a discussion around (yet again) finding out what the story should be, a story we present in order to stimulate a sensible, researched, passionate and open discussion around learning that doesn't resort to the extremes, and which really has students' learning at its core.
As part of this call to thinking, he's proposed getting 10,000 parents involved in discussions at some point later this day, based on a stimulus presentation, and leading to... well, something yet to be decided. It's a lobbying effort, and a valiant, worthwhile one, too. It's got some incredibly clever people working hard on it already.
But 10,000 parents? That's too easy. That's not telling me, or any other parent, that this conversation is important enough to be happening. So I'd like to make a contribution to the branding effort, and to the ambition of this. If it's worth doing it's worth doing globally, and at scale.
111111 for 111111 is an international campaign to get 111,111 parents into schools all around the world on 11 November, 2011, to talk about what learning means for them now, and what it could mean in the future.
There is no 'standard' presentation - learning is not the same the world over, however 'flat' you think the world might be. But there will be tools, discussion frameworks, starters for ten, video that presents both sides of most arguments, points of view and inspirational ideas from countries you've not been to.
Can you help get some of those 111,111 parents into your school on 11 November, 2011? I'm sure you can. Coming soon, we need a site to input how many parents have 'pledged' their support, and what they'd like to discuss. I've got the site infrastructure almost in place through another project I'm working on, and I'm happy to bank roll the costs of supporting that platform through the rest of the year.
Are you in? Leave a comment, or tag your discussion #111111 on twitter.
