Investments in Teaching

Every time we theorise, there’s almost always a reality check. I think we need it, to keep our theories accurate and relevant. Walking into the classroom is quite effective, I find, for testing the reality of my theories - or, as is more appropriate for this blog, walking into the computer room. Today, I made the decision to book a computer room for my ever-challenging Year 8 class so that they could work on typing up the scripts for a radio program that they are working on. Here are some observations:

1. Some students responded much better to having a computer in front of them than a piece of paper - students with handwriting difficulties, for example.

2. Most students worked productively, and were able to follow the clear instructions of having “nothing but Microsoft Word” open in front of them.

3. There are always technical problems, and these result in behaviour problems. A number of students - probably about four - could not log into the computers. Their reason was that, because they had played games on the computers in the past, their usernames had been removed. Well, you’d wish they’d actually tell you this a bit earlier - say at the start of the lesson - but never mind. They, however, roamed around the room unable to do anything particularly meaningful or productive, and generally disrupted others. It was what I’d call low level disruption, but that can be a real nuisance to manage.

4. It’s much harder to get the attention of students in a space like a computer room. The computers become an instant distraction. When working with laptops, you can get them to put the screens. Down. When working with PCs? There’s little option besides saying, “Okay Year 8, I’m waiting for everyone to turn and face me.” Which means waiting for a good two to three minutes sometimes - in my Year 8 class, at least. It’d probably be quicker in other classes, but still annoying.

5. Technology still does not fix the problems with some students. There are still some who, for whatever reason, are a unique issue, whether in their behaviour or their learning. Technology may help them if they let themselves be engaged - I know I’ve raised that possibility already on this blog - but there may be a completely different problem that no amount of technology will hope to address.

It’s difficult, I’ve got to say. The advantages of working in a space like that are clear, but so are the negatives. I know I’m not a hurry to do it again with that class. In fact, I’m not sure I’m in a hurry to do it with any class. So far, three out of three computer-room experiences have been negative - but for varying reasons. But isn’t that one of the ultimate paradoxes of teaching? You work out what the problem was with one class, but that won’t necessarily solve the problem for another class. Oh well. It’s definitely worth keeping trying, but I’m aware that students still associate computers too much with play and not enough with work. If they could see it as a bit of both, that might help. The question is, how do we help them make that connection? Some of my students today saw it quite clearly, but others…well, for a few others, I think there’s still a lot of room for learning on my part.

In his classic song “Where Do The Children Play”, Cat Stevens talked about the impact of technology on the world around him - the world of the 1960s: “I know we’ve come a long way/We’re changing day to day/But tell me, where do the children play?”

In 2007, it seems like the answer is quite clear: on MySpace and MSN, and, when they grow up a bit, Facebook.

The world seemed to Cat to be changing quite rapidly, and it was, but it’s changing so much more rapidly than ever before, and it isn’t easy for us as teachers to engage with it, because we tend to be several steps behind the students at the best of times. I’m trying to catch up, and I know that, by virtue of my age, I’m doing okay, and yet, while “I know I’ve come a long way”, I’ve got a long way to go. This means that, at the moment, I’m spending a lot of time musing about these issues, and not developing any clear thoughts.

That said, it does occur to me that the element of “play” which is so important in education, particularly boys’ education (or so the research shows), is something that we can use technology for. Get students playfully engaged in their subject.

How do we do this? I’m not sure, but I do feel, as I’ve expressed before, that we need to work with the technology, not against it.

These days, the children spend a lot of their time “playing” on the web. There are issues that arise from this - a lack of physical exercise, for one! - but also positives. Students are very adept at a variety of technological tasks that baffle their parents, even their older brothers and sisters, and demonstrate a very positive trial-and-error approach in solving technological problems. They also share ideas, collaborate, discuss, write and rewrite, and access information rapidly. Yes, we do need to overcome issues of security, plagiarism, and the general immaturity that, sadly, some students display when put in front of a computer. But there’s a chance here to use computer play more in education, and I know I’m not the first to suggest it.

Too often, there’s been a divide between the classroom and the playground. Some of that is healthy. Students need a break from school, and go out into the schoolyard at recess and lunch to rest. But they could be learning all the time, and would probably be more eager to do so if learning was fun.

Technology is where most kids go for fun these days. Isn’t that something we should respond to?

A phrase that some of us are trying to come to grips with in teaching right now is “Web 2.0″, which seems to encompass all those collaborative forms of online communication - blogs, wikis, MySpace, etc. I’m relatively new to the whole idea, just as I’m very new to teaching, and there are both advantages and disadvantages to this. One advantage is that, kind of like a child discovering the wonders of the world for the first time, I have this naive fascination with everything I’m finding. I’m also becoming very ambitious in some of my ideas. The recently established Online Classroom for my Year 11s is an example of this. But something that I’m starting to consider now is a way of responding to the Web 2.0 revolution in creative writing.

I’m not exactly sure what it would look like at this stage. Really, I just have a variety of half-baked ideas circulating around in my head. However, I do feel that the web is something that writers and teachers of English need to respond to, because it’s not going anywhere. The debate over e-books is an example of where establishment attitudes to English and the technological revolution are currently at loggerheads. Is it matter of being either for or against print texts? Probably not, but it does seem a little redundant to me to shift entirely to non-print reading styles purely because the technology is there.

People have always developed technology to aid them in doing something that would otherwise be too difficult or laborious. Reading a physical book is not really any harder than reading online, although maybe some books are more readily accessible online than in book form. From a teaching perspective, I was initially attracted to the online library Bartleby.com for this exact reason, because it gave people immediate access to a whole variety of classics that would otherwise be much harder to get hold of. It also seemed to me that soft-copy books would make it easier for students to copy and paste sections that interested them for convenient online discussion. Obviously, though, plagiarism is an issue that would come out of this, and no-one has really come up with a satisfactory solution to copyright problems (although sites like Bartleby.com avoid the issue by specialising in classics which are naturally out of copyright). There are so many other issues related to student and teacher use of the internet, including the growing problem of cyberbullying. Certainly, while the technology is enticing, it’s emerged quite quickly, and we probably haven’t adjusted adequately to it, at a society level or a school level (see educational blog “Teaching Better with Web 2.0” for a good discussion of these issues).

A class that I took in my DipEd year on “Computers in the Classroom” was largely useless for anyone who already knew about computers. However, one thing that my lecturer said that stayed with me was that we need to be more inventive in our use of technology for it to really serve its purpose. Yes, you can use a computer as a word processor, but it won’t get you any further than that. Too often, we treat “use of technology” as a box to tick. So we type up a document instead of handwriting. This can make the document look neater, but are we really taking full advantage of the technology? Currently, my school is trying to cut down on photocopying, meaning that a lot of us are considering using Powerpoint and other programs like it to communicate information quickly that we would otherwise photocopy 25 times. And yes, it’ll be helpful in allowing us to save paper, so in that case technology has enabled something that would otherwise be needlessly complicated or laborious, but the photocopier probably seemed like it was achieving that aim in the first place. What we want is a form of technology that can be more than an efficient, paper-free photocopier.

Certainly Web 2.0 offers great opportunities for collaboration, and that lends itself wonderfully to creating learning communities, as I’ve found through my Online Classroom. But I can’t help feeling that there are also opportunities there for us to take students’ reading and writing to a new level - which brings us back to e-books. If all we do is simply move books out of libraries and bookshops and onto the web, we’ve saved paper, and perhaps money, but have we done much else? We’ve lost the touch-and-feel element of books which remains very important, and maybe e-readers are developing in a way that will overcome this, but it seems to me that we should be able to use the technology in a way that achieves more something unique, not just replicating what already exists.

How this can be done I haven’t figured out yet, and I’d value any suggestions.

(Edited version of “2 sir W lov”, originally posted at ideasfromthenorth.blogspot.com)

Well, it’s been a little while since I last posted here, and this is partly because I’ve been busy…well…teaching, and partly because one of my colleagues recently went to an Edublogs.org PD and reported back to me on it, only to break to me the very upsetting news that Edublogs was not really created to be simply a personal journalling device. Pity, because personal journalling is extremely useful in teaching.

Having recovered from the shock, I have been spending the last couple of weeks developing a new Edublogs experiment, apparently the very kind of experiment that the site was set up for: a blog that my students, and other students at the same year level, can use. The theory behind it as that the web has a magical power over our students, that some who are completely unwilling to talk in class will happily talk online for hours. Is this something we can harness for educational effect? Quite probably. Is it easy to do? Yes and no.

Setting up the blog itself was a breeze. It took a mere five minutes on learnerblogs.org to set myself up with a username, password and blog. Getting the site functioning as something more than a personal vanity project was a bit trickier. Initially I planned on making it something that all students had to register for, to avoid any unwanted e-traffic. However, given how few people actually have the site’s URL, I doubt it will get out of hand. If it does…well, we’ll cross that bridge when we come to it. Ultimately, it was too much of a hassle to register other teachers, let alone students, so in the end I gave up. This shouldn’t be a problem, unless we start getting e-stalked by someone particularly unsavoury, but the main shortcoming is that students can’t write posts. They can only respond to the posts that we’ve written.

Neverthless, as far as student-centred learning goes, the site’s doing pretty well now. Students are chatting enthusiastically about Arthur Miller’s “The Crucible”, using punctuation and grammar that would make Miller cringe, but they would have done that in their essays anyway.

The one dampener has been the handful of students that have just HAD to be immature about it - the kind, of course, who would have been immature about most things we did, but it’s still a nuisance, particularly when their immaturity is now theoretically open for the world to see. It’s also just a bit sad when some of the students who this was most designed for - kids who are into computers but not brilliant at English - treat it as a joke or a waste of time. And, of course, there’s the kids who haven’t even got a copy of “The Crucible” yet, and no amount of technology is going to help them write intelligent comments on a book they haven’t read. It’s a sad reminder that, no matter how much effort we put into being engaging, there’s still a need for students to try being engaged.

But on the whole, it’s been a roaring success, at least for its first two days of active existence. Certainly the number of intelligent and useful comments being made far outweigh the idiocy of some other comments, and, at the end of the day, I’m the site administrator, and can block any comment that I deem inappropriate. On the plus side, students from different classes are communicating readily with each other, and with a range of different teachers - a real community of learning.

Pity some kids still have to be idiots, but you can’t succeed with everyone. Technology’s not the all-purposes answer, but it’s certainly helping