Socratic Monologue
I’m early into my Easter Break from school right now so I’ve been getting back in touch with some of my online world – a bit of twitter and taking time to read some of the info in my Google Reader account. The last month has been crazy busy with family stuff so between that and work I’ve had almost no time to have some virtual me time. I think the time away has been good for letting me think about some things from a different perspective.
Whenever I head back to the twitter-stream, I am amazed and overwhelmed by the number of amazing tools there are for teachers to use. More than I can possibly keep track of, partially because of the rapid pace of development and widespread familiarity with them and partially because my attention span is becoming more ferret-like as I get older. I remember (yeah, whenever you start a sentence with “I remember …” you are definitely becoming old) when there were two web-based tools that I could make use of for or with students – blogs and wikis. Then came RSS readers (like Bloglines – remember good old bloglines?) and podcasts. That pretty much summed up the contents of the educational technology utility belt in 1995. I was pretty adept at using all of these and occasionally gave conference presentations or worked with staff at my school to encourage them to start using some of these tools. I led a PD session with Donna DesRoches entitled How to Drink Water from a Fire Hose (slowly being migrated over to a wikispaces version), which I considered to be a pretty good overview of the state of the art tools available in ed-tech at that time.
There are now a cornucopia of tools available for teachers to use. Most often when I hear about them (or I’m talking about them) the conversation starts with “Here’s a tool you can use to …”. Use cases have their value when describing a new tool, but I think I need to look at the tools in a larger context. The use case describes problems/situations that are addressed by the tool, but it’s easy, for me at least, to let the use case shape my perceptions of the situations I need addressed. I think it’s far more effective for my students if I have a clear idea of the learning objectives I have for them then find the tools that do the best job of meeting them. Basically, this is just good instructional design like Rick Schwier taught me back in my M.Ed. days. In current educational lingo, it’s called Understanding by Design. Whatever label you want to attach to it, the goal is the same. Develop clearly expressed objectives first, then develop the methods that will achieve those objectives. The pedagogical horse needs to be in front of the cart full of resources, leading down the learning road to the whatever the destination might be. (Crappy metaphor, I know, but cut me some slack since it is getting close to 1 a.m. as I write this).
If I want to clearly keep that horse in front, I need to be very clear about where I want it to go. Another way to put it is that I need to have distinct objectives for travelling that path. So what is the final destination I’m heading to, the destination that our schools are heading to? The horse is going to wander all over the place if I let it. I think that schools can only give a good answer to that question if there is some deep introspection about what our institutional goals are. I’m hoping to have the chance for some introspection of reasonable depth for my own benefit. As time allows, I want to get some of those thoughts down here just to help fix my ideas in place so they don’t wander all over the place. If you have any answers to my questions, or some other questions I might need to consider, I encourage (plead?) you to put some of them in the comments as I muse aloud.
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I teach at a 1-1 school, but would not consider myself a techie. I was “aware” of the flood of tools trying to sneak in under my classroom door, but until the last few years, they often seemed gimmicky with little value added. Within the last three years, though, I find the web 2.0 tools (especially social networking) to truly enhance my ability to meet the learner objectives. That in combination with the plethora of quality resources in the form of podcasts, Tedtalks, youtube videos, interactive websites, etc. has begun to transform my teaching. I, too, start many sentences with “I remember” – I am just feeling lucky to still be able to say that (most of the time).