Teaching to reach every single student

Will Richardson (who is single-handedly responsible for nudging me into this world of blogs, wikis, and podcasts) has an article in the October issue of Edutopia. It is called “The New Face of Learning,” and in it does a terrific job explicating the possibilities and challenges for educators of the web as we now know and use it.

Here are some quotes from the piece. First, on learning:

In this new interactive Webworld, I have become a nomadic learner; I graze on knowledge. I find what I need when I need it. There is no linear curriculum to my learning, no formal structure other than the tools I use to connect to the people and sources that point me to what I need to know and learn, the same tools I use to then give back what I have discovered. I have become, at long last, that lifelong learner my teachers always hoped I would become. Unfortunately, it’s about thirty years too late for them to see it.The good news for all of us is that today, anyone can become a lifelong learner. (Yes, even you.) These technologies are user friendly in a way that technologies have not been in the past. You can be up and bloggingin minutes, editing wikis in seconds, making podcasts in, well, less time than you’d think. It’s not difficult at all to be an active contributor in this society of authorship we are building.

Second, on educators using these technologies in their classrooms:

When you read this, blogs and wikis and podcasts (and much more) may be things that students (and teachers) can access and create only from off-campus. And so they might never learn to podcast like the third and fourth graders creating the podcasts in Bob Sprankle’s class at Wells Elementary School, in Wells, Maine. They might therefore never publish a local museum tour, an interview with a local celebrity, or an oral history about their town that a billion people could listen to. Nor will they ever get the chance to collaborate in a blog with U.S. soldiers in Iraq, like April Chamberlain’s students at Paine Intermediate School, in Trussville, Alabama, and learn firsthand what it’s like to be a Screaming Eagle. Or share stories about the places they live at Wikiville.org.uk, where hundreds of kids from around the world have started writing and connecting. Or teach calculus to thousands of interested readers from around the world, as do the Canadian students in Darren Kuropatwa’s math class at Daniel McIntyre Collegiate Institute, in Winnipeg, Manitoba.

And, lastly, for the big picture:

But I wonder whether, twenty-five or fifty years from now, when four or five billion people are connecting online, the real story of these times won’t be the more global tests and transformations these technologies offered. How, as educators and learners, did we respond? Did we embrace the potentials of a connected, collaborative world and put our creative imaginations to work to reenvision our classrooms? Did we use these new tools to develop passionate, fearless, lifelong learners? Did we ourselves become those learners? Or did we cling to old ideas, old models, and old habits and drift more fully into irrelevance in our students’ eyes?

The New Face of Learning

Yesterday’s New York Times had a review of a new book by Fred Turner, From Counterculture to Cyberculture. The book apparently traces the impact between  counterculture (as typified by The Whole Earth Catalog) and the development of the internet.

The reviewer, Edward Rothstein makes a terrific point:

It might be argued that so prevalent was the counterculture, and so experimental and energetic were its most vocal proponents, that it would have been surprising had many of them not found their way to the computer revolution.

But Mr. Turner demonstrates something more essential in the continuity.First, he suggests, we are mistaken in thinking that the postwar technological world was dominated by hierarchies and rigid categories. Under the influence of the mathematician Norbert Wiener, it became increasingly common to think of humans and machines as interacting elements of “cybernetic systems” — organisms through which information flowed. This also led to a different way of thinking about living organisms and their networks of interaction.

This struck me as so right in line with what some of us are hoping for by using the Read/Write web in our classrooms.

Fred Turner - From Counterculture to Cyberculture: Stewart Brand, the Whole Earth Network, and the Rise of Digital Utopianism - - New York Times

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I have been working for the past couple of months to get myself set up to use blogs and wikis with my 7th and 8th grade science students.

First, I tried to get clear about what my objectives were. Ultimately, I decided they were teaching literacy and fostering collaboration. To open up the conversation beyond that of a one-to-one teacher-student exchange. Fine.

Then, I worked on the technical pieces. I started my own blog (this one). I experimented with various blogs for use with students, especially edublogs, learnerblogs, and classblogmeister. I set up wiki spaces with PBWiki and JotSpot. Etc., etc..

I have received enthusiastic support from my administrators and fellow teachers.

It never even occurred to me to include the students before I was “ready for prime-time.”

This week, however, I realized I had gone as far as I could without really involving students, so I arranged to meet with a couple of small groups of students during lunch a couple of times this week. I walked them through my goals and plans and asked for (and really wanted) their feedback. Their enthusiasm was immediate; their suggestions valuable.

Shame on me for trying to teach collaboration in somewhat of a vacuum.

The first class blog will go live this week.

B minus 5 days…

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This blog is used by Crystal, a computer science teacher. She is using her blog as a place where students can have access to assignments; as a place for their responses to various class readings; and as a place where they can register progress or questions about projects.

Here is what she has said elsewhere about her vision:

My goal is to teach computer science, and for my students to have a place to share ideas on problem solving techniques. Part of problem solving is doing a little research, and I’ve made them lazy about this research. They have just turned to me to “fill them up”. Now, I’m asking them to fill eachother up with ideas.
G-Town talks » Why are we using blogging in the classroom?

I have been trying to make this whole process less complicated. She has helped me do this.
JCC CSC 1590 Computing Fundamentals I

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This is a recent post from Kim in her really good blog, G-Town Talks. She is a principal and someone dedicated to empowering her staff and students by using blogging in the classroom.

This post discusses the work that 2 teachers are doing have their students work with blogs. One thing in particular caught my eye:

And as both teachers and the students they touch move forward, they routinely handle the “techie” stuff that comes up, no big deal.

I will be launching a test class of students into the blogosphere next week and am hopeful to have the same experience Kim describes.

G-Town talks » Teachers giving it a go in G-Town

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There will be plenty for me to say soon about using technology in my classroom. I am in the process of setting up the blogs and wikis (at last).

For now, though, I saw this article in Saturday’s New York Times. It has nothing to do with technology, but would make a great lesson anyway.

Thirty-five years ago this month, Mr. Geller joined other men in holding up a Herald Square bank and making off with $63,535. Three of the robbers were quickly nabbed, as they used to say, including at least one with a gun. But a fourth man, Gerry Geller from Brooklyn, melted into the blur of a metropolis he knew so well.

Save for a law enforcement official or two, no one cared about the loose ends of a flubbed bank robbery that was quickly fading from the city’s collective memory. Out there somewhere, though, was a man who could not forget, and so was assiduously working at being forgotten.

He kept changing his name, his home and his job in a state-trotting whirl of deceit that eventually landed him back in the great hiding place called New York. He soon found that in wanting to keep his true background to himself, he was not alone.“I was no different than any illegal alien,’’ Mr. Geller said after his court appearance.He began working in diners as a waiter and a cook, and moved into an old S.R.O. on the Bowery called the Andrews House. “They’re very small cubicles, but it’s a roof, and there’s hot water,’’ he said. “It’s still a Bowery S.R.O., but the people are more than kind.’’Perhaps one day he would have died under the assumed identity of George Cook, his actual name a casualty of an old crime.

But Mr. Geller’s failing heart led to a change of heart.

The story is about this change of heart and how Mr. Geller turned himself in decades after the crime.

Should we celebrate criminality with our students? Of course not. But should we celebrate the intregrity and courage of this man? Definitely.

Time Tempers Fugitive’s Day of Reckoning - New York Times

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I just read this article on Salon written by computer scientist and
novelist David Brin. He talks about his 14-year old son who was
confronted with a dilemma in his math textbooks. Apparently, after
teaching the concepts and then presenting practice problems, there were
instructions to test out the concept in BASIC, the now ancient (but to
many of us warmly regarded) computer programming language.

As an aside, when I took my first biological modeling course in
1981, I was able to model the respiratory system (very superficially)
using BASIC. I was even able to generate graphs of simulated data to
demonstrate the principles I was trying to understand. And, coolest of
all, I handed in my project on a floppy disk!

Brin is frustrated because while the instructions
to test this all out was in the textbooks, he and his son could find no
way to work in BASIC since machines do not use it anymore and there
were no adequate software emulators.

Here is what they ended up doing:

Instead (for various reasons) we bought a Commodore 64 (in original box) for $25. It arrived in good shape. It took us maybe three minutes to attach an old TV. We flicked the power switch … and up came a command line. In BASIC.Uh. Problem solved?I guess. At least far better than any other thing we’ve tried!We are now typing in programs from books, having fun making dots move (and thus knowing why the dots move, at the command of math, and not magic). There are still problems, like getting an operating system to make the 5141c disk drive work right. Most of the old floppies are unreadable. But who cares? (Ben thinks that loading programs to and from tape is so cool. I gurgle and choke remembering my old Sinclair … but whatever.)

Responding to input that the problem he and his son faced is with the textbooks, which should not be publishing “outdated” BASIC teaching tools, Brin says:

The textbook writers and publishers aren’t the ones who are obsolete,out-of-touch and wrong. It is people who have yanked the rug out from under teachers and students all across the land.

Let me reiterate. Kids are not doing “something else” other than BASIC. Not millions of them. Not hundreds or tens of thousands of them. Hardly any of them, in fact. It is not their fault. Because some of them, like my son, really want to. But they can’t. Not without turning into time travelers, the way we did, by giving up (briefly) on the present and diving into the past. (I also plan to teach him how to change the oil and fix a tire!) By using the tools of a bygone era to learn more about tomorrow.

My point is this: isn’t this exactly what we are talking about with using the Read/Write web with our students? Aren’t we trying to use technology to learn “ancient” skills like reading critically and writing competently and collaborating?

Why Johnny can’t code | Salon Technology

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