Leading From The Heart

by Tracy Rosen, teaching & consulting since 1996, blogging about it here since 2007. All views are my own and you should take them with a grain of salt, I do.

Category: Pedagogy

Looking Back: An Essential Question for EdTech

As part of my Looking Back series, this post remains as relevant for me and my teaching today as it was when it was written on July 4, 2008. Click on the title below for a link to the original post and comments.

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An Essential Question for EdTech

Integration by me: I realized this painting was ‘done’ when I had integrated colours from the daffodil’s cup into the petals.

Recently I wrote a post on digital literacy within the wider context of literacy and, in writing, touched on what I realize is central to my own teaching:

an essential question for educators today is how do we integrate literacies in our students? and in ourselves?

It is not enough – it really, really isn’t – to advocate for technology in the classroom because it looks good and because others say it is important. A reflective school leader – administrator, teacher, support staff, consultant – will start digging deeper for essential questions around student learning in relation to the use of technology, as well as apply those questions to their own learning.

I use technology in my teaching because literacy is the central focus for me at all times. “Literacy is about being able to make sense of the world we live in” (Dennis Harter, in comment to my post) and my deepest desire as a teacher is that I help students to begin to achieve this, that I give them the tools with which they can make sense of their/our world.

I use a mashup of communication tools in my teaching, from word processing, to podcasting, to text readers, to visual editors, to blogging, to wikis, to debate, to improv, to (perhaps the most important) simple conversation. I do this because each of these tools can help different students make sense of the vast amount of information that is available to them in different ways. This is essential because each of my students need the opportunity to discover the tools that work best for them and I recognize that these are not necessarily the tools that work best for me.

If I did not use technology in my teaching I would be going against all that I stand for as a teacher.

That being said, if I return to my essential question from above, I need to stress that using tech to improve literacy is only part of the picture, part of the system. Literacy is a complex system made up of many and diverse components.

I am moving more toward thinking about how my job is really to assist students in integrating their literate selves. In doing so, I need to recognize and honour the role(s) played by different technologies in their learning and in my own. That is essential for me.

(this post was inspired by this one)

July 17, 2011
Social Networking and Life-Balance, do we even know what that is? Responding to Angela Stockman

A long while ago (we’re talking 3 months people!), Angela left a meaty, thought-provoking comment on my post Why are we arguing that social networking does not have neg. effect on school & learning?. I apologize for not having acknowledged it, let alone responded to it, when it was made! The past few months have been a whirlwind of pre-baby/post-partum/new life changes :) At least Laura replied to some of what Angela said in her comment on the original post – thanks Laura!

The whole issue is a mammoth woolly elephant in the chat room, trolling in the background but not allowed to participate. Angela highlighted some key points that I’d like to further underline here.

She asked: Who is teaching kids about this? (social networking and mind/body/spirit balance)

Some people are thinking about this. If I do a quick Google search I find resources like:
Social networking sites: Finding a balance between their risks and benefits from Internet Solutions for Kids.

Minding MySpace: Balancing the benefits and risks of kids’ online social networks from California Schools Magazine

Generation text: Raising well-adjusted kids in an age of instant everything by Michael Osit

Parents: Instead of Banning Your Kids from Social Networks, Consider Teaching Responsible Usage from Managing Communities.

But none of these really address the issue of explicitly teaching kids life balance in an age of social networking. So I refined my search to responsible social networking lesson plan and found a few more things, including:

Responsible social networking – Secondary which has a lesson plan you can download

I’ve been talking about this myself for a while. Here’s a post from 2007, Facing up to Facebook where I wrote,

We need to be teaching kids about the realities of online social networks like facebook, and we need to be helping parents to do the same.

And one from 2008, Implications of Facebook Use. I used the story targeted in this post in my grade 11 classroom that year. I felt that since social networking is part of my teaching and such a huge part of my students’ lives it was essential that I teach about it.

But I didn’t find any explicit examples of teachers addressing the issue of how to balance our lives in an age of such public, 24 hour, social networking as we have now. Perhaps I didn’t look in the right places and perhaps such teaching is happening but isn’t being documented (such as in my example above, where I used something in my classroom but did not write about how I did so). I’d love to see some examples. I don’t mean examples of sites that offer tools to teach responsible and balanced social networking, but examples of teachers actually doing it in their classrooms.

Angela reflected: …it used to be that when social drama fired up at school, kids could find solace at home and experience a bit of a cooling-off period where they were away from the tension.

This begs me to ask, are we providing kids with access to tension-free environments in a time when the social sphere has no boundaries?

And finally, Angela writes: It’s hard to find conversations like these (that look at the positives and negatives of social networking) inside of my network though, and when I start them, most people disengage pretty quickly. Why do you think this is the case?

I think that the implications of the social networking debate is that it has created 2 camps – for or against. As educators and parents we may not understand how to balance our own thoughts and actions to do with social networking. We may also think ‘if I am for social networking, how can I speak out against it?’

Before we can teach about life-balance and social networking we need to know what it is and as long as we don’t allow it to participate in our conversations we won’t, will we?

February 20, 2011
Digitally native? What about humanly native?

If you’ve read some of my older posts regarding the notion of ‘digital literacy’ or, gasp, ‘digital literacies‘ you may have an inkling as to where my mind may go when it reads the trendy, robot evoking, term ‘digital native’. It goes along the same path as Deven Black’s did in Where Are All the Digital Natives?

Note: this post was edited in 2019 to replace an image with this YouTube video.

Digital Natives. I imagine little robots with faces on computer screens gathered in a classroom, little beings educators have created in order to justify their own love of technology, and with the uncanny result of (sometimes) stripping learners of their humanness as labeling often does.

Personally, I’ve had enough of this talk of ‘digital natives’ and ‘digital literacies’ and ‘essential 21st century skills’ (I’ve had enough for a couple of years, even!). Lately and instead, I find myself rereading and remembering the words of Haim Ginott, Nel Noddings, and others and try to focus on curriculum within a framework of care and kindness as I teach my students both with and without technological tools, as I work with colleagues with different skill sets and comfort levels regarding technological tools as well.

October 24, 2010
What does learning in a techy world look like in your classroom?

I can’t think of a different way to put it. For some reason I hate the phrases ‘learning with technology, learning with tech, technology based learning, even learning in a techy world’ and any other statement that puts an emphasis on the technology, as if it is something different from the tools of learning to begin with. In mine, it isn’t something added on but it’s pretty much the functioning of the class, tools that we have come used to using as we learn. I wrote about this one day last year, when I was late to class and the kids knew to hit up the blog and began doing their work – some at their tables, some in a quiet area so they could do video responses on their laptops, some alone, some talking together.

[Aha. laptops. We were very fortunate. We had a private donor give us 10 000 $ last year, a good sum of which was used to buy mini-laptops. (this leads to a whole other story about the validity of conversations on tech integration when we know there are many, many schools, students who have no tech to integrate into their learning across not only the world but North America as well.)]

That kind of integration did not happen over night. That scene happened about a month into the school year. It was a result of daily lessons on different ways to respond to query (conversation, video response, written response…), on how to read a blog entry (the whole thing, not just skimming through and then asking – so what do we do?), and on how to work independently. Oh, and I had taught English to the same group of students the previous year as well.

What does learning look like in your classroom? Do you use techy tools? Is it any different than any other kind of student-directed learning, just using different tools?

August 29, 2010
Thanks for your help: learning more about tech (digital storytelling) in secondary classrooms

I’ve received quite a bit of response from my plea for help in organizing a workshop I’ve been asked to give on integrating technology into secondary classrooms (2 workshops, one in English one in French) – Thank you :)

I’ll be using Teaching is a Verb – Enseigner, C’est Agir to share information with the workshop participants. The workshops will mainly be centred around digital storytelling in the content areas – I figured this was the easiest way to address the task I was given, “Can you put together a workshop on integrating technology in the High School Language Arts, History, and Science classes? Oh, and can you do a second one for French teachers? Thanks.”

At this point I have a whole slew of online resources to offer the teachers and to help organize my thoughts on the matter. I found a great Firefox add-on called Send Tab URLs that helped me to make a list of the resources I’ve collected so far.

There are a few examples of teaching and student practice among these links so far. I’d love to find more! The more I can show my teachers the better. The teachers who will be participating are already interested in the topic so theory will be kept to a bare minimum, though I’ll be able to direct anyone who is interested to the blog I am creating for any theory they want (I love theory :)

What they want is to see what it looks like in a classroom. I can show them final products, I can show them where to go to find different applications, but what I need to show them is what it looks like. If anyone has any resources for that, I’ll love you forever :)

From Send Tab URLs (38 links)

– The View From Here: Teaching the New Writing – Book

http://kentmanning.blogspot.com/2009/07/teaching-new-writing-book.html

– Confessions of an Aca/Fan: Archives: How New Media is Transforming Storytelling: A New Video Series

http://henryjenkins.org/2010/08/how_new_media_is_transforming.html

– How to create …. – Digital Storytelling – Resources for assignments at University of Wollongong Library

http://uow.libguides.com/content.php?pid=82573&sid=612645

– Secondary Cycle Two

http://www.mels.gouv.qc.ca/sections/programmeFormation/secondaire2/index_en.asp?page=math

– Technology Tools

http://livebinders.com/play/play_or_edit?id=22880

– ecole

http://www.robertbibeau.ca/ecole.html

– Tutoriel pour créer un montage vidéo avec Windows Movie Maker – TIC@le: TIC, langues et formation des enseignant(e)s

http://ticale.canalblog.com/archives/2010/03/27/17379912.html

– Inuktic

http://inuktic.qc.ca/

– Carrefour éducation

http://carrefour-education.qc.ca/accueil_secondaire

– Voicethread – FrankTechCamp2010

http://sites.google.com/a/franklinvillecsd.org/franktechcamp2010/voicethread

– Web 2.0 @ School – DigitalStorytelling

http://mcneice.wikispaces.com/DigitalStorytelling

– CogDogRoo – 50 Ways

http://cogdogroo.wikispaces.com/50+Ways

– USTREAM, You’re On. Free LIVE VIDEO Streaming, Online Broadcasts. Create webcasts, video chat, stream videos on the Internet. Live streaming videos, TV shows

http://www.ustream.tv/

– Your Brain on Computers – Studying the Brain Off the Grid, Professors Find Clarity – NYTimes.com

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/16/technology/16brain.html?_r=2&pagewanted=1&ref=general&src=me

– Professional blog | davidwees.com

http://davidwees.com/content/using-google-forms-choose-your-own-adventure-style-story

– Digital_storytelling_Kirsty_McGeoch_IATEFL_2009.pdf (application/pdf Object)

http://iatefl.britishcouncil.org/2009/sites/iatefl/files/session/documents/Digital_storytelling_Kirsty_McGeoch_IATEFL_2009.pdf

– Center for Digital Storytelling

http://www.storycenter.org/index1.html

– Technology integration

http://www.learnnc.org/lp/pages/6673

– What motivates us to do good?

https://leadingfromtheheart.org/2010/01/18/what-motivates-us-to-do-good/

– edbuzz.org » Teacher Resources

http://edbuzz.org/teacher-resources/

– Aberth Digital Storytelling — digital storytelling, participatory media and easing access to mass media for public expression

http://www.aberth.com/blog/

– Seven things to Avoid when making a digital story

http://www.aberth.com/blog/seven-things-to-avoid-when-making-a-digital-story.html

– YouTube – spmath’s Channel

http://www.youtube.com/user/spmath#g/a

– What does exemplary technology infused Math instruction look like? (Middle & High School) | Welcome to NCS-Tech!

http://www.ncs-tech.org/?p=5850&cpage=1#comment-27740

– Alternative Assessment with VoiceThread

http://alalearning.org/2010/08/26/alternative-assessment-with-voicethread/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed:%20ALALearning%20(ALA%20Learning%20Round%20Table)

– Google Forms for Assessment, Evaluation, and Reflection

http://alalearning.org/2010/05/17/google-forms-for-assessment-evaluation-and-reflection/

– Technology

http://alalearning.org/category/technology/

– VoiceThread as a Digital Portfolio « TeachingSagittarian

http://teachingsagittarian.com/2009/03/voicethread-as-a-digital-portfolio/

– Lightning Bug – Storyboarding

http://www.lightningbug.com.au/storyboarding/storyboarding.htm

– The Digital Narrative – Find your story

http://www.thedigitalnarrative.com/communityhp.htm

– N°482 – Le Web 2.0 et l’école – Le Cercle de Recherche et d’Action Pédagogiques et les Cahiers pédagogiques

http://www.cahiers-pedagogiques.com/spip.php?page=numero&id_article=6882

– Free Technology for Teachers: 140 New Things Being Tried In Classrooms This Fall

http://www.freetech4teachers.com/2010/08/140-new-things-being-tried-in.html

– Free Technology for Teachers: Free Downloads

http://www.freetech4teachers.com/p/free-downloads.html

– Edmodo | Secure Social Learning Network for Teachers and Students

http://www.edmodo.com/

– Storytelling — It’s News!

http://www.storynet-advocacy.org/news/

– digitalstorytelling – home

http://digitalstorytelling.iste.wikispaces.net/

– digitalstoryca’s Bookmarks on Delicious

http://www.delicious.com/digitalstoryca

– monarchlibrary – digitalstorytelling

http://monarchlibrary.wikispaces.com/digitalstorytelling

August 27, 2010