Tag Archives: Education

Using Twitter in Education

Education, technology, , ,

From today’s ASCD SmartBrief, a link to an interesting piece on using Twitter in education by Ron Jones in Search Engine Watch.  It provides several examples of how Twitter was used to support teaching and learning, from fostering classroom discussion to writing collaborative books.   He links to several good blog entries and articles, including Educause’s 7 Things You Should Know About Twitter and a list of possible uses of Twitter in academia by David Parry that could easily be adapted to K-12.  If you’re considering the potential for Twitter in education, this is a good starting point.

I do get a little queasy when I hear someone say they gave a “Twitter” assignment since it takes a techno-centric approach, something with which I struggle myself.  The point isn’t to start with technology but to think about our instructional strategies and learning goals and then determining a tool that might help support them.  However, the techy part of me wonders that if we don’t occassionally start with the tool, we may never have an opportunity to explore its use.  And, for someone whose job is to help student teachers figure out how to use the tools in the classroom, I am constantly trying to balance concerns with technology, pedagogy and content.  Part of having my pre-service teachers becoming part of VSTE’s ning community is to give them a place to discuss these issues with practicing educators.

I have not included Twitter as part of my course and probably won’t any time soon.  But I’m interested in what others discover as they do incorporate this tool to support teaching and learning in their classrooms.

A Pragmatist In a Progressive World

Education, technology, testing, thinking out loud, tinkering, , , ,

This year, I have the opportunity to be part of an online professional learning community.  While I will be taking on the role of facilitator, I believe this will be as much a learning experience for me as well as for the other participants.  And, the opportunity has already gotten me thinking about where I fit into the sometimes confusing but always intriguing world of “educational technology.”

Here’s what I know:

Educational technology is about much more than just technology.  In a way, technology is the easy part.  It’s easy for me to show you how to use a flip camera to capture video or a digital microscope to find Abraham Lincoln on a penny.  It’s easy for me to post a link to a wonderful interactive website.  And while all these things may be cool, most teachers want more than just cool.  They want to know that the time and energy it is going to take them to set up microscopes or plug in projectors or to have them or their students create videos will have some positive influence on their students and their learning.  That’s the hard part: helping teachers figure out how to use these technologies in powerful ways in their classrooms.  So, while I may like to explore new technologies myself, my focus with others is on the educational part.  How/why/when to use those computers and gadgets and websites to improve teaching and learning.  This might seem like an elementary idea, but I still go to lots of “educational technology” presentations at conferences where the heavy emphasis is on the technology rather than the education.

Here’s what else I know:

I have a deeply held bias. I believe that technology offers ways to improve teaching and learning.  Even if it’s only because it engages the kids in ways that textbooks and lectures and worksheets do not.  And, most of the educators I talk to seem to share this two-part belief with me.  Part one: technology engages kids.  Part two: engaged kids are better learners.  But they also share a concern about doing it the right way.  They don’t want to just use technology for technology’s sake.  And, I find myself working with them in very practical ways.  Have you thought about using a smartboard to let your kids interact with a sentence?  Do you know that you can put a video in a powerpoint presentation to show to your kids?  Have you accessed the data from the student response system to better differentiate instruction? Have you considered having your students create a digital video or multimedia presentation as an alternative assessment?

I also use this practical approach when I work with technology coaches and school administrators in helping them to encourage technology use.  I’ve created a presentation called Strategies for the Non-Choir.  It draws from Rogers’ work in diffusions of innovations as well as Mishra and Koehler’s Technological Pedagogical Content Knowledge (TPACK) model to provide coaches with ideas for how to approach the early and late majority adopters who, according to Rogers, make up some 68% of the population.  I talk to the coaches about the need to consider the relative advantage of a technology as well as how compatible it is with what the strategies already used by a teacher.  In addition, as part of the workshop, we play the TPACK game where we match technologies, pedagogies, and content areas to come up with ideas for using technology in the classroom.

So, I am very much a pragmatist, trying to work with teachers where I find them, helping them use technologies in ways that support what they are doing in their classrooms.  This is a viewpoint that is often in direct opposition to the visionaries in the educational technology blogosphere.  They tend to be progressives who are looking past the current times to a different world where powerful technologies support student-centered, constructivist learning.  One of my favorites, Tim over at Assorted Stuff, summarizes the viewpoint quite nicely, I think:

The powerful tools we now have available make it possible to go way beyond simple reinforcing what we’re already doing. They provide communications links that enable teachers and students to connect with and learn from the world.

If all we do with the computers and networks put in our schools over the past decade is multiply the status quo, then we’ve wasted a lot of money, time and effort.

I know much of the crap I write is very idealistic, maybe even unrealistic. But while we are making small incremental changes, it would be nice to keep a vision of what education could and should be in the viewfinders.

I don’t disagree with Tim.  And I admire his idealism. I am also always inspired by Sheryl Nussbaum Beach. One of Sheryl’s most recent posts over at 21st Century Learning gives some great examples of how are kids are learning to learn on their own, and she calls to us to roll up our sleeves and get to work on creating a learning environment for them.  I try to keep her vision in my mind and for awhile I move into that progressive world.

But then I go to a school or talk to a teacher and hear about the sorts of barriers–time, access, not to mention high-stakes testing–that they face and how excited they get when someone gives them an interactive whiteboard or even just a projector and the pragmatist returns.   To borrow a phrase from Tyack and Cuban, we are “tinkering toward utopia.”  I think I’m more the tinkerer, standing with a wrench in my hand, rather than the utopian, envisioning the future.

Does the Chalkboard Still Have a Role to Play?

Education, technology, writing, , ,

As part of a course I am taking this semester, I’m exploring the Horizon Project, mostly focusing on their process for coming up with their technologies.  I’ve been having lots of fun exploring the wiki, checking out some of the examples they provide for each of their technologies.  One example of collaboration webs–a technology that will be mainstream in a year or less–is a very cool use of Pageflakes by the Writing Program at the University of Southern California.  It’s an interesting mix of old and new.  The content is old: the “topoi” are lenses for viewing an issue and they originated with Aristotle.  The pageflakes site is very new and incorporates video, RSS, text and images.  It would be a useful site for beginning writers outside USC.

I watched the classroom discussion video related to the topoi and laughed out loud as the camera panned outward:

Pageflakes - Mark's The Topoi Flakes
Uploaded with plasq‘s Skitch!

It’s a chalkboard! A good, old-fashioned chalkboard! The writing prompt scribbled on the chalkboard is about comparing the coverage of news stories through the web and the mainstream media. But it’s scribbled on a chalkboard.  I guess it’s a good lesson about using the technology that is available but it just struck me as an odd juxtaposition to the very 21st century technology being used to display the video. Here I sit in Virginia watching a video of a USC professor pointing to a chalkboard.  Really a sign of the times in which we live where old and new exist side by side.

In Just 45 Minutes…

21st Century Skills, Education, New Media, teaching, technology, , ,

I head to campus to begin another semester.  I am teaching a course called Designs for Technology Enhanced Learning.  I have taught some version of this course to pre-service teachers for the past five years.  It began as a one-credit class that focused on technical skills, but as the students have become more familiar with the tools, the course has morphed into a two-credit class that focuses more on how to use the tools in the classroom.  I am more excited about teaching the course this semester because I really feel like I have hit my stride with it.

The one area where I am a little concerned is with the additional of a online personal learning network component.  This is clearly something that others are thinking about as well since my first look at Twitter this morning led me to Will Richardson’s post on the subject. I am going to have my students join a the VSTE Ning network and participate for the whole semester.  This assignment replaces the blogging they used to do as I grew discouraged with that assignment over time.  It became increasingly quantitative (x number of posts and x number of comments) and few students seemed to ever realize the potential power of blogs to support their own learning and reflection.  The Ning assignment is much more open ended: get involved in the community on a regular basis.  I have invited Sheryl Nussbaum Beach to come in as a guest speaker since she’s my hero when it comes to these communities.  I’m hoping she can provide some motivation for them to get involved AND stay involved even after the course is over.

The other part of this assignment is that I am hoping it will motivate my own learning and involvement in an online community.  I tend to live on the peripherals of these groups.  I was never much of a “joiner” in the real world and that habit has remained in the virtual one as well.   Like Will, I am very much in the midst of examining my own practices and also looking towards life after my degree is completed.  So, while I am nervous about this assignment, I am also excited to have an opportunity to really engage in an authentic activity with my students.  I’m just hoping they will feel the same way!

And now it’s time to get ready…I’m walking to campus this morning to benefit myself and the environment but that means an early start.  Class begins at 11 and if you want a sample of what we’re doing, here’s my agenda.

Vacationing With A To Do List

21st Century Skills, Education, technology, ,

After a long month of travel and training, I am home for the whole week.  It is a bit of a vacation..or, actually, a staycation, since I’m not leaving home except to go berry and peach picking and meet with the church secretary to help her with a website.  But, despite telling everyone I was going on vacation, the first thing I did on Monday morning was write a to do list.  Hmm…certainly doesn’t look like a traditional vacation, does it?  And, I probably could afford to take the whole week off.  Turn off the computer, crumple up the list, and just vegetate.  But the fact is, I don’t want to.  For one thing, I would be absolutely bored by Wednesday.  For another, I would have trouble relaxing completely knowing that I have two presentations on August 14th and a course to teach come August 27th.  Instead, it’s easier and less stressful for me to find a spot along the work/play continuum that falls closer to play with still a bit of work.  (As opposed to where I’ve been sitting…very close to the work end…for the past month.)

The problem with the continuum idea, though, is that it still gets at a division between work and play.  But, a lot of what I do for work blends pretty seamlessy into what I do for play.  Even as I surf the web locating materials to share with my pre-service teachers, I am earning points for PMOG, the online game I play.  And, frankly, I find it a lot of fun crafting presentations about teaching and learning in the 21st century.  It is a rare day that I don’t do something that someone would classify as “work,” yet I don’t feel like a workaholic who needs some counseling.  Instead, I feel blessed to have found something I love to do enough to want to do it all the time.

Before you shake your head at my blindness to my own situation, I should point out that I do plenty of stuff offline as well.  Today is “squash bread” day at my house; I’m filling up the freezer with loaves of homemade bread.  Loaves 6 and 7 just came out of the oven, and I’m planning for at least two more but maybe four before the end of the day.  I’ll also be curling up with my current book–Hannah Coulter by Wendell Berry–and if yesterday is any indication, I’ll probably end up taking a nap as well.   Then, there’s the bathroom painting project:  we’ve stripped all the wallpaper and are now waiting for primer to dry before we put on the first coat.  Finally, I’ll be freezing and drying blueberries and canning peaches on Thursday and Friday.

So, what’s the point of this little window on my world?  If the World Congress on the Future of Work is to be believed, I represent the future of work.  Unlike my father, who worked 46 years for the same company before retiring, or even my older sister, who has been with her firm for nearly 30 years, I’m a freelancer who has had 6 or 7 different jobs and now run my own business.  In their summary (pdf) of the 2005 World Congress, these are the relevant paragraphs:

In the “old world” of work we went to a corporate office because that’s where our file were, that’s where the company resources (including support staff) were, and that’s where we would meet with colleagues, bosses, suppliers, and even customers. Now, of course, we can do that work anywhere, anytime, and we meet all those fellow workers wherever it’s most convenient. And all too often we blur the boundaries between our professional and our personal lives. We have a tendency to take our laptops, cell phones, PDA’s, and other “tools of the trade” with us just about everywhere we go (including the beach, the golf course, the living room, and the car) because we can – not always because we “have to.”

Many knowledge workers also mix and match their “work day” and their personal time, to the extent that they run personal errands mid-day and make up for it by working late at night. That’s a real benefit of the information economy, but a major complication as well.

That describes me perfectly.  And, learning how to navigate that world is going to be an important skill for us and for our students:

We believe that learning how to choose, and how to set limits on when and where they “work,” will be one of the biggest tasks facing knowledge workers over next few years as they finally begin to take charge of their work, and their lives.

These are not skills I got at school, where someone else usually determined the timetable for completing work, and there was a clear distinction between work time and play time.  I had to learn the hard way that there is a limit to how much work I can do after I spent one really long summer doing workshops every day and prepping for them at night.  By the end of August, I was exhausted, and it certainly wasn’t fun any more.  Now, I know how to block out preparation time on my calendar, and I have a much better sense of how long it takes me to do different tasks.  As we consider the skills that our students will need in the future, perhaps we need to concentrate on the literacy of work, giving students the opportunity to take charge of their own work and, thus, their own lives.