:emergent learning

My experience teaching has this year included instant messaging as a way to communicate with students and fellow teachers.  I use a Google Site wiki to communicate assignments and other information.  It didn’t take long for students to figure out that the email address for the google site connected to my IM client.  Google Chat is part of GMail.  It is common for a student or two a week to pop up a message asking about assignments or deadlines.  I don’t mind until they start chatting it up like we are friends, I just ask them if they have any more questions and politely say goodbye.  I think this is a new best practice for a teacher.  I treat instant messaging the same as the phone.  If a student called and wanted to know about an assignment I would just want to talk about that and then get on with my life because I don’t want to take work home!  I teach a course at IPFW and using Google Chat was very helpful to my students there also.  They are other teachers with varying familiarity to instant messaging.  The ones that were ok with it would send messages regarding assignments and I was more than happy to help.  I tried to be as straightforward and clear as possible in class to cut down on anything that would be confusing and cause IM’s to pop up all evening!  So using an instant messaging client like Skype or Google Chat can be helpful to students if common sense and professionalism is applied.  It can be even more helpful in terms of professional development.  I am waiting to hear the result of a grant application I helped write that will fund training on low cost collaboration tools.  The two cornerstones of this are wikis and instant messaging.  Sitting down at lunch and sending an IM to a colleague at another school regarding the solution to a problem and having a quick discussion about it can really maximize results and be helpful.

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I agree with the argument made at the pro-connectivism wiki regarding connectivism and supporting our students.  The author writes” The student doesn’t just look toward the teacher as the sole possessor and disseminator of knowledge anymore. The student must instead look his peers and the wide array of technological sources of knowledge. Knowledge in the technological era that we live in is far too fluid and changing to be able to possess all of it at once.”  I agree with this.  Why do students need to be full to the brin with content knowledge they could easily access?  Why not be full to the brin with critical thinking skills like evaluation and synthesis?  This country has a 1 out of 3 dropout rate.  Why?  Isn’t learning supposed to be enjoyable?  I know this is a complex problem.  I also believe that design can solve problems, especially simple design.  What if teachers started a school year with a simple design of sharing the standards with students and having them use sound critical thinking skills and connected learning to build the course for the year with the teacher?  Schools, like many social institutions, are generally security oriented not challenge oriented.  This is what is appealing about connectivism.  It is challenge oriented.  It challenges teachers to think deeply about what they are doing.  It challenges me to think critically about the things I am not doing well in terms of allowing students to connect with modern fluid sources of knwledge and research regarding my subject as guided by standards.  Connectivism is risky, kids might stumble thru it for a while but the payoff is worth it.  Students truly connecting with the content and skills needed to be successful and connecting with themselves as they gain confidence and make the learning their own.  Thanks to the Pro-Connectivism wiki for sharing this vodcast.  I love Common Craft videos so this was a real treat!

watch?v=XwM4ieFOotA

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I found an interesting podcast from the folks at HowStuffWorks called Stuff You Missed in History Class. It is a selection of interesting podcasts about popular history topics.  I like these for a few reasons.  The topics are diverse so it would be easy for a student to find something of interest.  These are simply stories.  Good history is really just telling compelling stories we can all relate to.  It’s not about the dates and battles and leaders.  What students find interesting are the stories.  When I find a good story in history I tell it and I have no problem keeping their attention for the ten minutes I use.  The podcast Stuff You Missed in History Class fits in very nicely with what I am doing in U.S. history and world history.  They ask questions like “How did Rasputin really die?” or “Why is there an underground city beneath Beijing?”.  I like questions because it really is mystery that draws us to history.  We ask questions and the questions get answered.

I plan on using this podcast series in my classroom by having students subscribe to the podcast, listen to the podcast and then answer the writing prompts I put on my class wiki.  The second use of the podcast is by encouraging students to use one of the topics as a launch point for other projects in class, like expert reports or multimedia group projects.

I currently use many TED talks (video podcasting) in my psychology and sociology classes because they are great discussion starters that lead us into deeper learning of content.  This week we used the Siftables talk.

In the course I found a couple of resources that have been helpful.  The first is the Education Podcast Network and the second is Apple itself.  I found a lesson plan for creating your own oral history as a student.

I will be collaborating much more with a friend of mine in South Carolina who wrote a grant for an ipod lab and actually uses ipods caily in his world history classroom.  I am increasingly interested in podcasting since the tools are free and cost of the hardware keeps coming down.

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I spent several years training teachers in the 4MAT method of teaching.  4MAT emphasizes a concept that the lesson builds around.  The concept was often cemented in the lesson with the use of what was called the Visual Explorer.  This is a box of large post card sized pictures that are quite striking and compelling.  The student is asked to find a picture that they think represents the concept well.  Since students are different they choose different pictures and explain why they think it represents the concept.  This is a great informal assessment to see if students are “getting it”.  What does this have to do with Flickr?  Simple, you don’t have to purchase large volumes of pictures to do concept work with students.  They are available digitally at Flickr!  I searched “using Flickr in the classroom” and one of the first sites that came up was JakesOnline! where I found a pdf document on the ways a teacher could use Flickr in the classroom.  I don’t know if I can add to his list but I would focus on a few things.  Geotagging for virtual field trips was the first to jump out at me.  I teach in Auburn Indiana which has the world’s greatest classic car auction.  When I was walking up to the gate last year I heard Joseph Stalin’s car that was a gift from FDR getting auctioned off for like 20 million.  Auburn is a small city/large town north of Fort Wayne that has some impressive museums students can go to.  Another geotagging option is geocaching the Indiana Spirit Quest of historically significant hoosiers.  This is especially interesting since we are north of Fort Wayne with such rich history including Chief Little Turtle, “Mad” Anthony Wayne, etc.

Before a teacher starts using Flickr they should be both competent online and have an understanding of social networking, RSS and probably the Creative Commons system of licensing for digital photos.

I would sum up using Flickr in the classroom as the concept of insight.

Visuals give us insight into what we are percieving at the moment.  We all perceive something a little different, it doesn’t mean the thing we percieve is different for everyone, just that we are different and visuals are an effective way to describe our experience or perspective of something.

This picture shows this concept in my opinion.  It’s a picture of ocean bacteria.  To get the picture the photographer had to put some effort into to it.  It required the correct focus and zoom.  The effort paid off because it gave the photographer great insight into what was going on everyday but seldom seen.

Image Citation:
ES. (2007, March 15). Diversity in the Ecological Soup. jurvetsons.’s Photostream. Retrieved February 18, 2009, from http://www.flickr.com/photos/jurvetson/422234138/

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Going thru the process of creating content as part of group 3 in our MOD 4 assignment I learned that I need to  be more fully involved and helpful.  I found myself doing what my students do which is stop in and check things out but not really take the lead in creating the architecture and content of the site. I think I could have been a better group member in terms of more communication with the other members.  OK, enough beating myself up let’s talk about what I learned.  I have wiki assignments in my sociology class right now.  Some students get on early and add content and value and answer questions and some just don’t.  Here are some keys to getting full and successful participation I learned in my experience that I am going to transfer to my own class.

• What gets measured gets done.
• Require students to bring their own interests in so that they are more interested and connected to the final product.
• Students should be presented with specific problems to solve.
• The final product should be shared and celebrated.

watch?v=PQvLRXpGbzk

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I once heard a person say that a teacher should work at the edge of their incompetence. I took that to mean great teachers stretch themselves to try and do new things that are challenging in the classroom to create a learning experience that sticks. 

So how have you taken some risk and tried something new?

Have you tried something creative to solve an instructional issue?

A call to creating creative schools can be seen with Ken Robinson’s TED talks.

An example of taking some risk and being creative can be seen with Dave Eggers at TED also.

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One thing I learned early on in teaching was that teachers were like royalty in their own fiefdom.  Sometimes royalty got together and spoke about those darn peasants and the awful things the king made them do.  Rarely did we get together and talk about how to do things better.  This was my own experience working both in juvenile justice and in public education at a high school.  It seemed like in our district the way things worked was the principal gave us our new demands, teachers complained and did what they had to do for the principal in the classroom while working around the spirit of the new ways of doing things and focusing on the law of the new demands.

So what does this have to do with social bookmarking?

Social bookmarking, along with blogging and using RSS, expands our professional development exponentially and can relieve us from the burden of working with a negative staff that doesn’t want to grow and learn.  You no longer have to rely on the administration, other teachers, or paying for a ton of workshops or grad credits to get great techniques and encouraging results!  I worked with a lot of great people over the years but a staff, like a classroom, often learns and grows at the rate of the most belligerent.  Online tools frees us from all that and allows us to investigate and learn what other teachers are doing because other teachers are looking for the same answers and bookmarking them for everyone else.  It’s a human search engine.  Sites like delicious and edutagger provide a great way to see what people like you and I are successfully doing with students.  My personal plan includes using Google reader alongside delicious to create encouraging, productive feeds that are tuned to my needs as a teacher.  I can also use delicious to find other teacher’s blogs to connect with other teachers.  This makes my teacher break-room national and international.  I will specifically look for information regarding online, experiential, constructivist learning and places where teachers are having success with marginal students, both with learning disabilities and the gifted and talented.

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I like Pageflakes!  Here is my site

I just updated the link so it should work correctly now.

I just added six feeds to demonstrate I know how to do it.  Thanks!

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RSS can be a powerful tool for a teacher.  If student’s are blogging or using wikis an RSS reader can be the one place to see all student activity.  RSS is vital because going to 100 different blogs a day or a week is simply overwhelming.  RSS can allow a teacher to give immediate feedback to students and monitor who is contributing and who isn’t.  RSS can be a professional development tool also.  Using a site like edutagger or delicious a teacher can find blogs or websites with RSS feeds of interest and drop them into the reader.  An RSS reader like Google Reader can be a helpful search engine to find things in other people’s online work by using the search function.  These are immediate ways RSS can enhance my learning and instructional strategies.

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