Copyright

I definitely like the idea of creative commons.  It allows individuals to share publications on the Internet according to agreed upon uses.  Some Internet resources can be shared for viewing only.  Other resources can be viewed and also modified for purposes that are not commercial.  There are several advantages to using creative commons.  One is the improvement of education.  Books, science journals, newspapers, music, TV channels are all available online now, all over the world.  If schools, all over the world have a limited library,  only having access to the a computer with Internet allows for an exponential access to education, from online resources to online university courses, free of charge.  Second, resources are used to be shared all over the world, to make other people aware of the life conditions of others.  Many times, people are just not aware of how their business decisions, their environmental actions or non-actions are affecting others.  By being able to access freely journalistic texts from all over the world, people become increasingly aware of their impact all over the world.  It is a form of growing global citizenship, an awareness that we all belong on the same unique and fragile planet. Creative commons is also used for business.  Newspapers, television stations share some of their contents online, free of charge and some of their content can only be viewed through subscription.  Last of all, political parties from countries all over the world, use creative commons items to share their goals, ideologies, business strategies with others by trying to influence others to adopt their business, views or vote.

Creative commons also allows for collaboration between businesses, educational institutions, news agencies, non-profit organizations and political parties to organize themselves to create a better environment.

 

 

Why not use technology that our students love to teach more effectively?

I know that students love to use technology.  I do not need to quote big names for that.  Many of my students told me, in the most challenging schools I taught at, that they like learning French because I take them to the computer lab to do French projects.  I am one of the teachers who always spend the most time in the computer lab.  For me personally, the idea of using technology to motivate students is not new, far from it.  What I need perhaps are more effective strategies to use technology, given the little time we have with computers.  Technology is always changing.  The tools available are always becoming better and easier to use.  More people are using them and the variety of tools is increasing exponentially. From using blogs, wikis, podcasts, Google Earth, Videos, virtual tours etc.

In my first career, I was a professional programmer/analyst programming airplanes, nuclear reactors, and databases of various kind.  I spent a good ten years of my life doing that.   I feel quite comfortable with computers.  As a teacher, I used computers with my students but this year, it was a big wake up call for me when I read on twitter that “coders” are the rock stars of the future.  What?  It was a very moving wake up call.  Of course I knew that, but isolated that I am in my teaching, it did not occur to me that I could teach my students how to code in my French Immersion class.  I have done it as a club but in class?  Students who came to my club are starting to use SCRATCH for their projects.  One built a map on Scratch and had a ship travel on the map as the explorer he investigated did.  It was amazing.  I had asked students to comment on pictures from the ROM using Voicethread.  At the club, one of my students did the same thing using SCRATCH.  She proceeded to write about the ROM pictures in a story format using SCRATCH.  The robot I purchased for them.  It took some grade 6 boys 10 minutes to figure it out.  Way too easy.  Perhaps it needs to be done in the younger grades.  I need better robots for grade 6.  I knew of no other teachers who have done this.  As I was saying,  it was a wake up call.  I have these skills and my students crave it.  I do not need to be convinced but to know I could do it teaching French was BIG news to me.

Building a professional network using twitter becomes more important.  It becomes the tool where we can get ideas from other teachers, see what the academia is doing, learn about experiences of teachers in other boards of education, in other provinces, in other countries.  It becomes the place where we can have meaningful interactions.

With regards to problem-based learning, it is a wonderful way to learn.  We need to think about what are the big problems of the world and start solving them right now.  guiding our students in that direction.  For example, global warming is a problem and we need to teach students not only that it is a problem but what they can do to solve it.  It is an integral part of the science curriculum relate science to the world and the environment (STSE) but even better is leading them towards real solutions.  One project I will do this year, is to have my students create a photobioreactor, with the idea of creating “green” petrolium.

https://www.smore.com/azfw-la-classe-invers-e

It is on the french channel now but I first heard of this on AlJazeera, of all places.  Having those online resources is such a help to improve practice, to make teaching more relevant, more individualized, more meaningful for every student.

 

 

Twitter

I started using twitter because I was curious about what people were doing there.   I did not know anyone on twitter so I started following newspapers and journalists of the news channels I found interesting.  I ended up adding very many channels and newspapers.  I also followed how twitter was used during the Arab Spring to organize people for democracy in Egypt for example or when big news event occur.  We can find out many times faster on twitter than on the radio or television.

As a result of that process, I started using more ideas from current events in my classes.  I started looking at children’s newspapers as well.  I started the first year I thought French Immersion.  Using current events in reading and science engaged my students.  The first topic I used in class was the disappearance of the bees with articles from Radio-Canada. The gifted students found this fascinating since it was related to the real world and was authentic. They were eager to learn and I told my struggling grade 6 students that they were reading with my help what French adults were reading.  They felt that they had progressed significantly in learning French with me since I was their first teacher who had used this approach before with them and that their level of French was very high.  The subject of the reading became the topic of the French Speech Competition.  That first attempt was a complete success.

I am now starting to use twitter to connect with other professionals who have similar interests.  It is a good way to link to other professionals that we may never meet otherwise.  We can talk to people all over the world and find people ready to share leading edge instruction.

Reading Fisher and Frey in their article Preparing Students for Mastery of 21st century skills, it strikes me that it is not the students who need to understand technology, it is more the teachers and academics.  They mention that to unstress teachers, Marc Prensky discuss that we need to stop thinking about technology in terms of nouns (PowerPoint, Youtube, twitter) and use it in terms of verbs (presenting, sharing, and communicating).  I find it quite striking that this needs to be mentioned in a conference and in an academic paper.  I do not share this fear, but this tells me very many teachers may be lost, and overwhelmed in using twitter.  The role of the leader in technology education would be first, to make teachers comfortable with using technology.

Leading edge teachers have used twitter for guided instruction (Fisher & Frey).  Biology teachers and history teachers have used twitter to send messages to students who need scaffolding ( I am assuming here in high school).  More recently, I have read about grade 5 and 6 students having silent debates on twitter in their second language (French).  When dealing with such young students we need to think about the nature of twitter.  When a message is written, it is written for eternity. Although the idea is fascinating, being able to tweet in a second language to people in other cities and other countries, the thought of having students so young, talking publicly like that, even if supervised, can be quite frightening.  We do not want to create a situation where what they say may haunt them later.  A more controlled environment is quite necessary for younger students.  As well, the volume of information on twitter is becoming quite large and the quality varies.  The critical skills needed when using a search engine are needed when using twitter.

 

 

Changing Educational Practices: From Positivism to Constructivism

Positivism is defined as: ”Learning can be “transmitted” to students from texts and teachers. It is linear and predictable. Students “lack” knowledge and get filled with it in the classroom.”

Constructivism is defined as: “Students come into classrooms with prior knowledge. They “construct” meaning based on their knowledge and experiences, and on interactions with texts and people. Learning is active, non-linear, and acquired at an uneven pace.”

I think that the change from positivism to constructivism is more about teachers and students’ beliefs and expectations than about how students learn.  Whether the teacher is using a positivist way of teaching or a constructivist way of teaching, the student will learn in a constructive manner because this is how students learn.  No one can claim to knowing anything unless they understand.  The students can use natural abilities to do so, whether the teacher allows it or not.  To have a way of teaching that is more in line with students’ learning will definitely engage more students and allow them to be more successful.   Students are naturally very capable and can, many times, do a lot more than we think. By providing a better environment, students will enquire, will experiment, will interact in positive ways, will rise to a challenge if they see the purpose and if they are engaged.

Constructivism recognize that learning may not occur the first time, it may take many attempts at mastering what needs to be done.  Even though I may have explained what was expected, I may have showed an example, students may not master the first time around.  Students may only put a video and no text.  Students may need to learn to search in the French language thinking there is nothing on the internet in French.  Students may write only one paragraph instead of two.  They may need to use a spell checker to check for typos.  Students may copy and paste instead of using their own words.  Students may understand that blogs need to be interesting in order to be read and start to be disrespectful to get the attention they crave.  Students may have well researched ideas the first time around.  In all those cases, the students will need more than one time to learn how to master the idea of blogging and will need feedback to improve.  The first attempt may not be entirely what is expected but if they receive timely feedback will improve and showing what they know.  Once they figured it out, it does not matter how many trials they needed, they reached their destination successfully and students can show their best work for the final assessment.

The criteria for success needs to be discussed before starting a project and the rubric can be done in collaboration between students and teachers.  Jim Knight gives an interesting example of formative assessment in his book High Impact Instruction.  He talks about how video games are so successful  is that the player have clear goals, he knows what he needs to do at all times and received constant feedback on how they are doing while the score tells him how close he is to the goal.  The constant assessment is what makes the task engaging.  Teachers could engage students like that, by providing more frequent feedback with the goal in mind.  When the student reached the goal, then the student have mastered the task.  It does not matter if it was the first time or the 10th time.  The students could have several opportunities to show what he has learned.  Having a routine for quick assessment is important for that purpose.  He provides several examples:  Exit tickets, clickers, thumbs up & down,  paraphrasing, think-pair-share, graphic organizers, four corners and many others.  One last important point he makes.  Not all learning needs to be fun but if the formative assessment is fun and meaningful students will be more engaged and motivated.

21st century learning definitely fits within the constructivist paradigm.  Our current curriculum nor our current provincial forms of assessment do not reflect those skills.  New ways of thinking about learning needs to be developed and new forms of assessment need to be devised.  Mark Prenski in the Educational leadership  March 2013 | Volume 70 | Number 6 Technology-Rich Learning Pages 22-27  asks if we could think about curriculum all over again, without preconceived notions, what should we use?  The need for 21st century skills look quite different than what we have now.  He mentions effective thinking, effective action, effective relationships and effective accomplishment as culminating work.  Just to elaborate on one of those:  teaching about the dangerous flaws in human thinking is so crucially important.  There would not be so many wars, so much discrimination, so much damage to the environment if every teacher was doing just this.  It can be done at an early age with fables for example.   There are so many versions of Cinderella or the three little pigs.  Comparing the tales from different perspective can be quite enlightening.   Resources to do that can be for example the traditional Disney, the version of the wolf

http://www.amazon.ca/Three-Little-Pigs-Golden-Books/dp/0736423125/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1365976173&sr=8-1&keywords=three+little+pigs

http://www.amazon.ca/True-Story-Three-Little-Pigs/dp/0140544518/ref=sr_1_3?ie=UTF8&qid=1365976173&sr=8-3&keywords=three+little+pigs

and also quite interestingly from the guardian newspaper:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vDGrfhJH1P4

Our students are worth it and we owe it to them.   Sometimes we may not be aware of what is missing in education and taking the time to reflect, interact and try new things is necessary.  I have been inspired by Gunter Pauli who was thinking his practices were very green and in line with the best environmental practices, just to find out there were a serious flaw in his practice.  This can happen to anyone of us.  Just have a look.  This demonstrates quite clearly, even with the best of intentions, that he had a flaw in his thinking and what he did about it when he found out.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C13KuSzOYOo

 

Profile for Technology (ICT) Literate Students, 2007 ISTE

https://www.iste.org/docs/pdfs/nets-s-2007-student-profiles-en.pdf?sfvrsn=4

I like the profile; it is outstanding.  It gives clear guidance to the teacher about what each student could do in each age group. The categories are: 1. Creativity and Innovation; 2. Communication and Collaboration; 3. Research and Information Fluency; 4. Critical thinking, problem solving, and Decision Making; 5. Digital Citizenship; 6. Technology Operations and Concepts

It seems manageable to do.  Let’s see what each suggestion could look like in grades 3-5.  Producing a media-rich digital story about a significant local event based on first-person interviews could take the form of filming or photographing a theater company at the school and having some students asking a few questions to the performers.   Students can write a story about their encounter, either commenting on VoiceThread, or MovieMaker, or Frames 4.  Recognizing bias, in grade 3 could be done by simply asking what is missing from the document they are looking at.  Recognizing bias could also be done by comparing two articles about the same topic, written from different perspective.  Using digital-imaging technology to modify or create work of arts.  I can see coloring of existing drawings of historical characters as being very empowering for a grade 3 child, or creating your own art work using Pixie as quite interesting. Students could easily take 1 picture everyday to see changes of the seasons, changes in the growth of plants, or see how ice melt or take pictures using digital microscopes to test their theories about how mold looks like over time.  In grade 3, a global issues like poverty, or child labor and creating publicity poster or podcast to communicate the problem to others and/or do fundraising to help.  Science experiments could be conducted with digital thermometers or maybe digital rulers on calibrated pictures.  Students could plan stories or brainstorm ideas using collaborative graphic organizers as digital planning tools.

I am concerned that the document, as it is written, could lead someone to think that they have to do the examples and forget that they are only examples of the larger categories.   There are a lot of examples that come first on the page and a little except at the bottom of the page about each category each example is from.  This has happened with the French curriculum in Ontario where many teachers think grammar rules are expectations and spent a lot of time teaching the grammar rule while they were only examples and not part of the curriculum at all.  The big idea should be highlighted first, with specific example of each category. Someone could help me here, but I cannot possibly imagine how a grade 3 child could debate the effect of existing technology on individuals, society and the global community.  I currently have no idea on how to do that.   I see also that programming and robotics could much more easily be done by a young child and it has been left out of the examples.  Using the SCRATCH commands “motor on” and “motor off” is so easy to do and so valuable to imagine the power of programming robots.  Each person has a unique talent and perspective on technology, and each person should feel empowered to use their own talent with technology.